ACURA’s James W. Carden spoke this week with Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the award-winning Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.
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JC: I’d like to start with your thoughts about the new National Security Strategy (NSS). It seems to me that there was some good stuff and some not-so-good stuff in there. I’m curious to get your overall take and then maybe we can drill down a little bit….
PK: The thing about it is that the Trump administration is quite schizophrenic. They’ve got bonafide neocons and then they’ve got the MAGA base, which wants to not only avoid Forever Wars, but wants to avoid overseas involvements.
It is very concerned about what’s going on in the Caribbean now, and very concerned about Trump’s blind support for Israel. But if you look at the NSS, it makes clear that the US is going to remain the world’s hegemonic power. It’s very clear we’re going to be the strongest militarily and economically. If you look at it, a new Monroe doctrine, that’s not what the MAGA base wants. They don’t want a new Monroe doctrine with the US intervening repeatedly Latin America like we used to do.
But where the NSS is somewhat positive is in its criticism of the Europeans for their policies toward Ukraine.
JC: The NSS also talks about the Indo-Pacific, can we talk a bit about that?
PK: The NSS does talk about the US policy in the Indo-Pacific in a more honest way than most American leaders have. Biden said on four occasions that the US would come to Taiwan’s rescue militarily—but as Admiral Davidson said a few years ago, most US forces are 5,000 miles away. It would take the US three weeks to get there. The US depends upon Japan and South Korea to get there first. In the event of war, the US military gets operational control over the South Korean military, so not only are there the 28,500 American troops, there’s a vast South Korean military that can be deployed.
But the overall picture is that the US is going to maintain its hegemony. What it wants is empire on the cheap. So Trump says, we want the Europeans and the Asians to spend 5% of GDP on their militaries so that the US doesn’t have all that responsibility.
Even though the NSS criticizes NATO and criticizes the Europeans over Ukraine. Trump, I think, sincerely, would like to end the war in Ukraine, not only to get the Nobel Peace Prize that he so covets. But Trump does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, no matter what he does in terms of Ukraine or for the other conflicts that he says he settled. We see the fighting going on between Thailand and Cambodia breaking out again, the Middle East is not resolved. The Indians are furious about his claims that he settled that conflict.
JC: Armenians I’ve spoken to are furious about the deal that they’ve made with regard to the Zzi corridor. They’re very unhappy about it.
PK: So the good things are in a sense that he says that he wants to end the war in Ukraine and he is very critical of the Europeans, as am I, as are their own publics. Have you seen the latest approval ratings for the European leaders?
Merz’s approval ratings now are 23%. The second leading hawk, Starmer is at 19%, but Macron’s approval ratings are between 11 and 15%. Meloni’s are at 36%, Zelensky who just a few months ago was at 67% is now down below 20% thanks to the latest negotiations and the corruption scandal. You know that Putin’s approval ratings are over 80%.
JC: So Trump looks pretty good in comparison because last I saw Trump was at 38 or something like that…Anyway, the NSS is a puzzling document because like you say, they’re trying to square a circle: If you start your document off by saying it’s a Jeffersonian policy that we’re after— a predisposition to non-intervention—and then you proclaim a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and you’re basically declaring, as you say, hegemonic ambitions from the Caribbean to the Indo-Pacific. That doesn’t seem to non-interventionist to me….
PK: No, it’s not, but look at it. Vance had foreshadowed some if this already in his speech in Munich last February where he criticized the Europeans for undermining democracy. This new NSS also echoes Vance in that regard, and calls for supporting the patriotic parties, meaning the extreme right-wing parties in Europe.
The European stuff is really bizarre.
He talks about civilizational in Europe, and he talks about the impact that immigration is having in undermining European democracy and Europe’s sense of direction at this point. He’s obsessed. The immigration stuff is such an obsession. I mean, you can understand it in the United States, and you can understand it somewhat in Europe. Yeah, the US policy in Latin America and Central America specifically ensures that desperate people are going to want to come to the United States.
But the US played a part in all this: Back in the eighties, the Reagan policy in Central America supporting all these right-wing governments and death squads destroyed any chance that the Latin Americans would have to rebuild their economies and prosper. I mean, so many Syrians and Afghans and others refugees are largely a result of US policy, whether it’s Timber Sycamore or the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq which drove those refugee flows.
The thing that concerns me is if a million North African or Middle Eastern refugees can create such strong fascist movements in Europe, what’s going to be the effect when we’ve got billions of climate refugees escaping from parts of Africa and Asia later this century? I’m not going to be around to see it, but I am terrified at what the prospect is going to be, and so one of the things that Trump says in this NSS, is that we’re going to get away from dealing with issues like global warming. But the thing about being a pathological narcissist is you not only don’t care about the past, you don’t care about the future. Trump doesn’t see beyond himself and his family, his immediate circle.
JC: The other parts of the NSS that stuck out at me was the reference to the Golden Dome and the references to AI which were sort of like, this is something that we need to harness and encourage. I look at AI and see something on the order of a nuclear danger. In other words, I think our policy towards AI should be non-proliferation, stop feeding this beast. What do you think?
PK: Yes, I agree that we need strict regulation of AI. If you leave this in the hands of the tech bros and the billionaires, it could be a disaster. I mean, one of the things that I’m glad is that there seems to be some recognition to not let AI into the chain of command when it comes to nuclear command and control. As you know, we’ve averted several World War III scenarios because there were human beings in the chain who intervened to stop launching retaliatory strikes based on faulty radar intelligence. (see, for eg., https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/19919-national-security-archive-doc-21-william-odom)
So AI worries me a lot. And the Golden Dome is another loony idea because it’s so much easier to overwhelm these missile defense systems with decoys, you can’t shoot ’em all down. We say it’s hitting a bullet with a bullet, but it’s hitting a bullet and all these decoys too. Also, it is a waste, another waste of more than a couple hundred billion dollars, and then the cost overruns always skyrocket. So it’s a fantasy. It’s an illusion just like it was when Reagan proposed Star Wars, it’s an illusion now.
JC: Over the past couple of weeks, you can see from certain stories published by the mainstream media about Ukraine that reality is now starting to slowly dawn on these people. Ukraine is corrupt. Well, that’s not news to people like you and me. Ukraine is not doing so well on the ground. That’s also not news. Ukraine has a population problem, also not news, but all of the sudden now we’re seeing stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, and amazingly the Telegraph (because Britain has the worst, most irresponsible media in the West) that things aren’t as rosy as the American people have been led to believe. With regard to Ukraine, what is your sense? We’re getting reports now that Russia is making gains slowly in the east, while Ukraine is having trouble fielding and raising an army.
PK: Yeah, I know they’re picking up people off the streets and forcing them to serve. We know that morale is very low and the desertion rates among Ukrainian troops is very, very high. They’re just totally outmanned, outgunned, out-strategized at this point. The New York Times just had a very extensive article about the extent—and also how close to the corruption scandal Zelensky is; how he has intervened to try to dismantle or weaken the agencies that try to monitor corruption. When Yermak resigned, that was a real sign of a significant problem. Even if Zelensky is not personally implicated, everybody around him has been implicated.
Plus, as you say, the support for Ukraine was based on several myths. The first myth is that it was a full scale Russian invasion, which it wasn’t for a long time. The second myth is that it was unprovoked. How many times have we read about an unprovoked invasion? It was the most highly provoked invasion imaginable going back to 2013-14; the third myth was that if we kept on giving enough support, Ukraine could win on the battlefield and claw back the territory that Russia had taken. That hasn’t been possible. We’ve known this for more than two years already, but they repeated it constantly. Then the last huge myth to me is that if Russia succeeds in Ukraine, it’s going to gobble up one piece of Europe after another.
That is not what this is about.
That is not Putin’s mindset. If Putin has this much difficulty gaining more than 20% of Ukraine in four years, does he really want to take on NATO? Even if the US security guarantee is not ironclad, this is not what Russia needs and it’s not what the Russian people want.
I was in Russia in April. I spoke to hundreds of Russian people. And what I heard was that they all wanted the war to end either on principle, because they hated war, or because they were weary of the war. They were not critical of Putin because they thought that Russia was forced into this position, but they were very ready and eager for this to end, even if Russia has to make some compromises that many of the leaders don’t want to see.
But I also know from friends of mine who have spoken to Putin recently that Putin sees himself as a kind of in the middle here. He’s got nationalists and hawks to his right who think he should be much more aggressive. It’s not just Medvedev—there are a lot of others who are putting pressure on Putin to be much more aggressive.
JC: So one last question. How do you see this thing ending? My own guess is that this goes on through the the spring and summer of next year. Russia finally frees the rest of the Donbas and then they call it a day. I don’t foresee any big push to Odessa or anything like that. How do you see this thing wrapping up?
PK: Yesterday was December 7th Pearl Harbor Day. When I look at the world and I see the rearming of Japan and Germany and them being so hawkishly aggressive again, I wanted to cite something that Khrushchev said, something he explained to an American journalist some years ago during the 1960s. He said,
…I can understand how Americans look at Germany somewhat differently than the way we do. We have a much longer history with Germany. We’ve seen how quickly governments in Germany can change and how easy it is for Germany to become an instrument of mass murder. It’s hard for us even to count the number of our people who were killed by Germany in the last war. We have a saying here, give a German a gun, sooner or later he’ll point it at Russians. This is not just my feeling. I don’t think there’s anything the Russian people feel more strongly about than the question of the armament of Germany.
You like to think in the United States that we have no public opinion. Don’t be so sure about this on the matter of Germany. Our people have very strong ideas. I don’t think that any government here could survive if it tried to go against it. I told this to one of your American governors, and he said he was surprised that the Soviet Union, with all his atomic bombs and missiles, would fear Germany. I told your governor that he missed the point. Of course, we could crush Germany in a few minutes, but what we fear is the ability of an armed Germany to commit the United States by its own actions. We fear the ability of Germany to start a world atomic war. What puzzles me more than anything else is that the Americans don’t realize there’s a large group in Germany that is eager to destroy the Soviet Union.”
How many times do you have to be burned by fire before you respect fire? And I think that’s still true. I mean, I look at [German Chancellor] Merz and the things he says and what he’s doing, and it’s frightening to me.
Just a few weeks ago, Sergey Naryshkin who is the head of the Russian SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Agency, said that this is the most fragile moment for international security since World War II. And he’s right.