We are the wannabe British Empire. And what the British Empire understood in 1853, with Lord Palmerston, is that you surround Russia in the Black Sea, and you deny Russia access to the Eastern Mediterranean.

U.S. Foreign Policy & NATO Expansion

That’s the only model of foreign policy we ever hear from our government and mass media. The mass media repeats it entirely because it’s completely suborned by the U.S. government.

Ukraine: The Maidan Revolution & Aftermath

Following that, I had an hour-long call with [National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan in the White House, begging, “Jake, avoid the war. You can avoid the war. All the U.S. has to do is say, ‘NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine.’” And he said to me, “Oh, NATO’s not going to enlarge to Ukraine. Don’t worry about it.”

I said, “Jake, say it publicly.”

“No. No. No. We can’t say it publicly.”

I said, “Jake, you’re going to have a war over something that isn’t even going to happen?”

He said, “Don’t worry, Jeff. There will be no war.”

These are not very bright people. I’m telling you, if I can give you my honest view, they’re not very bright people. They talk to themselves. They don’t talk to anybody else. They play game theory. In noncooperative game theory, you don’t talk to the other side. You just make your strategy. This is the essence of non-cooperative game theory. It’s not negotiation theory. It’s not peacemaking theory. It is unilateral, noncooperative theory, if you know formal game theory.

Incredibly, the paper, in the public domain, asks how the U.S. should annoy, antagonize, and weaken Russia. That’s literally the strategy. We’re trying to provoke Russia, trying to make Russia break apart, perhaps have regime change, maybe unrest, maybe an economic crisis.

That’s what you in Europe call your ally. So, there I was with my frustrating phone call with Sullivan, standing out in the freezing cold. I happened to be trying to have a ski day.

“Oh, there’ll be no war, Jeff.”

We know what happened next: the Biden administration refused to negotiate over NATO enlargement. The stupidest idea of NATO is the so-called open-door policy, based on Article 10 of the NATO Treaty (1949). NATO reserves the right to go where it wants, as long as the host government agrees, without any neighbor – such as Russia — having any say whatsoever.

Well, I tell the Mexicans and the Canadians, “Don’t try it.” You know, Trump may want to take over Canada. So, the Canadian government could say to China, “Why don’t you build a military base in Ontario?” I wouldn’t advise it. The U.S. would not say, “Well, it’s an open door. That’s Canada’s and China’s business, not ours.” The U.S. would invade Canada.

Yet grownups, including in Europe, in this Parliament, in NATO, in the European Commission, repeat the absurd mantra that Russia has no say in NATO enlargement. This is nonsense stuff. This is not even baby geopolitics. This is just not thinking at all. So, the Ukraine War escalated in February 2022 when the Biden Administration refused any serious negotiations.

The Ukraine War & Nuclear Arms Control

What was Putin’s intention in the war? I can tell you what his intention was. It was to force Zelensky to negotiate neutrality. This happened within days of the start of the invasion. You should understand this basic point, not the propaganda that’s written about the invasion claiming that Russia’s aim was to conquer Ukraine with a few tens of thousands of troops.

Come on, ladies and gentlemen. Please understand something basic. The idea of Russia’s invasion was to keep NATO out of Ukraine. And what is NATO, really? It is the U.S. military, with its missiles, its C.I.A. deployments, and all the rest. Russia’s goal was to keep the U.S. away from its border.

Why is Russia so interested in this? Consider if China or Russia decided to have a military base on the Rio Grande or in the Canadian border, not only would the United States freak out; we’d have war within about ten minutes. When the Soviet Union tried this in Cuba in 1962, the world nearly ended in nuclear Armageddon.

All of this is gravely amplified because the United States unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and ended the relative stability nuclear arms control framework by doing so.

This is extremely important to understand. The nuclear arms control framework is based, in large part, on trying to deter a first [decapitation] strike. The ABM Treaty was a critical component of that stability.

The U.S. unilaterally walked out of the ABM Treaty in 2002. This blew a Russian gasket. So, everything I’ve been describing about NATO enlargement has occurred in the context of the U.S. destruction of the nuclear framework. Starting in 2010, the U.S. began to put in Aegis anti-ballistic missile systems in Poland and then later in Romania. Russia doesn’t like that.

One of the issues on the table in December and January, December 2021, January 2022, was whether the United States claimed the right to put missile systems in Ukraine. According to former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern, Blinken told Lavrov in January 2022 that the United States reserves the right to put missile systems in Ukraine.

That, my dear friends, is your putative ally. And now the U.S. wants to put intermediate missile systems in Germany. Remember that the United States walked out of the INF treaty in 2019. There is no nuclear arms framework right now. Essentially, none.

When Zelensky said a few days after Russia’s invasion that Ukraine was ready for neutrality, a peace agreement was in reach. I know the details of this because I talked to key negotiators and mediators in detail and have learned much from public pronouncements of others. Shortly after the start of negotiations in March 2022, a document was exchanged between the parties that President Putin had approved, and that Lavrov had presented. This was being managed by the Turkish mediators. I flew to Ankara in the spring of 2022 to hear first-hand and in detail what happened in the mediation.

The bottom-line is this: Ukraine walked away, unilaterally, from a near agreement.

End of the Ukraine War

Why did Ukraine walk away from the negotiations? Because the United States told them to and because the U.K. added icing to the cake by having BoJo [Boris Johnson, the former U.K. prime minister] go to Kyiv in early April to Ukraine to make the same point.

[U.K Prime Minister] Keir Starmer turns out to be even worse, even more of a warmonger. It’s unimaginable, but it is true. Boris Johnson explained, and you can find it on the web, that what’s at stake here is nothing less than Western hegemony! Not Ukraine but Western hegemony.

Michael von der Schulenberg and I met at the Vatican with a group of experts in Spring 2022, and we wrote a document explaining that nothing good can come out of continued war.

Our group argued strenuously, but to no avail, that Ukraine should negotiate immediately, because delays will mean massive deaths, risk of nuclear escalation, and possibly an outright loss of the war.

I wouldn’t want to change one word from what we wrote then. Nothing was wrong in that document. Since the U.S. talked Ukraine out of the negotiations, perhaps one million Ukrainians have died or been severely wounded.

And American senators who are as nasty and cynical as imaginable say this is a wonderful expenditure of U.S. money because no Americans are dying. It’s the pure proxy war. One of our senators nearby New York State, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, said this out loud. Mitt Romney said this out loud. It’s the best money America can spend. No Americans are dying. It’s unreal.

Now, just to bring us up to yesterday, the U.S. Ukraine Project has failed. The core idea of the project all along was that Russia would fold its hand. The core idea all along was Russia can’t resist, just as Zbigniew Brzezinski argued in 1997. The Americans thought the U.S. surely has the upper hand.

The U.S. will win because we’re going to bluff them. The Russians are not really going to fight. The Russians are really going to mobilize. We’ll deploy the economic “nuclear option” of cutting Russia out of SWIFT. That will destroy the economy. Our sanctions will bring Russia to their knees. The HIMARS will do them in. The ATACMS, the F-16s, will do them in.

Honestly, I’ve listened to this kind of talk for more than 50 years. Our national security leaders have spoken nonsense for decades.

I begged the Ukrainians: stay neutral. Don’t listen to the Americans. I repeated to them the famous adage of Henry Kissinger, that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. Let me repeat that for Europe:

To be an enemy of the United States is dangerous,
but to be a friend is fatal.

The Trump Administration

On the Middle East, incidentally, the U.S. completely handed over foreign policy to Netanyahu 30 years ago. The Israel lobby dominates American politics. Please, have no doubt about it. I could explain for hours how it works. It’s very dangerous. I’m hoping that Trump will not destroy his administration, and far worse, the Palestinian people, because of Netanyahu, whom I regard as a war criminal who has been properly indicted by the ICC.

The only way for Europe to have peace on your borders with the Middle East is the two-state solution. There is only one obstacle to it, and that is the veto of the United States in the U.N. Security Council, at the behest of the Israel Lobby. So, if you want the EU to have some influence, tell the United States to drop the veto. In this the European Union would be together with around 160 other countries in the world. The only ones that oppose a Palestinian state are basically the United States, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Argentina, and Paraguay.

The Middle East is a place where the European Union could have a big geopolitical influence. Yet, Europe has gone silent about the JCPOA and Iran and around half of Europe has gone silent over Israel’s war crimes and blockage of the two-state solution.

Netanyahu’s greatest dream in life is the war between the United States and Iran. And he’s not given up. It’s not impossible that a U.S.-Iran War will also come. Yet Europe could stop it — if Europe has its own foreign policy. I’m hoping that Trump will end Netanyahu’s grip on American politics. Even if not, the EU can work with the rest of the world to bring peace to the Middle East.

***

Finally, let me just say with respect to China, China is not an enemy. China is merely a great success story. That’s why it is viewed by the United States as an enemy, because China has a bigger economy than the United States (measured in international prices). The U.S. resists reality. Europe should not do so. Let me repeat, China is no enemy and no threat. It is a natural partner with Europe in trade and in saving the global environment.

That’s all. Many thanks.