No Evidence of Massive Russian Hack – Larry Wilkerson

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While corporate media is drumming up anti-Russia hysteria about an alleged hack that “threatens national security”, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson says so far it looks like the phony claims about WMD in Iraq. On theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay, welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Please don’t forget we’re near the end of the year and there’s a matching grant campaign going on. Every dollar you donate gets matched, if you get a monthly that gets matched times 12, if you raise your existing monthly that gets matched, just go to the website theAnalysis.news and you’ll get all the details.

President Trump seems to be in his death throes, flailing around, searching for a last-minute reprieve from returning to his far from normal life and a possible legal quagmire in the midst of raging COVID.

We’re also told now that a hack of massive proportions threatens America’s national security. Pompeo blames Russia, Trump blames China, but one presumes they’re looking at the same intelligence.

That doesn’t stop the media from jumping on the anti-Russia hysteria train without, from what I can find, at least any evidence in the public domain, about who is responsible.

NBC News has a screeching headline, “Why the Russian Hack is So Significant and why it’s close to a worst case scenario, “. “Experts say it’s potentially the largest spying operation against the U.S. in history and it ran without being noticed for nine months,”. Of course, all this plays into the Democratic and Republican Party’s neocons playbook who are licking their lips at setting the new Cold War with Russia on fire, again. I’m not saying it wasn’t the Russians, I don’t know, but are we going to trust all this without any real evidence, again?

In the midst of all this, the Republican Party seems caught between Trump and some semblance of rationality, I think therationality is losing, but their push towards austerity and a weak stimulus is actually the real threat, as it will not only exacerbate the COVIDcrisis, it will push the U.S. into a much deeper and painful recession.

So far, there’s very little to suggest that Biden is building an administration that will stand up to either Wall Street or the Republicans. Now, joining us to talk about all this and more is Larry Wilkerson.

Thanks for joining us, Larry.

Larry Wilkerson

Good to be with you, Paul.

Paul Jay

So where should we start? Well, why don’t we start with the hacking thing? Let me ask you, I mean, you may have access to some information we don’t have, but have you seen anything in the public domain that

actually says they have evidence that Russia did all this hacking or as Trump says China did? Or I mean, it could be some third party hacking collective, anonymous or whoever. But the degree of certainty the media is portraying here seems completely out of whack with what we know about this.

Larry Wilkerson

Paul, it sort of reminds me of when we said we knew that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or for that matter, when we said there was a missile gap between the U.S. and the Soviet Union as [John F. Kennedy] Kennedy was running to beat Nixon for the first time as president…and we found out that there was a missile gap, it just worked the other way. We were so far ahead of the Soviets that they had to try a very dangerous gamble of getting missiles into Cuba to kind of give them a little strategic balance. I’m always a suspect of these sorts of things. I will say this, I think I have enough inside information that General Nakasone at the NSA did a marvelous job of thwarting Russian attempts to interfere once again with U.S. presidentialelections in November, and that if there is anything going on, it might be a little payback signal that Putin and his cronies are trying to send, but I don’t know that. And I agree with you, there’s absolutely nothing in the public domain, nor that I’ve heard in the back channels, that would indicate that the gravity of this situation is such that the press, including The Guardian today, is making of it.

Paul Jay

And I can’t understand the motivation for it. I mean, Putin is not insane. You can’t think that you would do this to the United States, not get figured out, even if they got away with it for nine months. He’s got to know that eventually it comes out and there’s got to be retribution and they start this cyber arms race of attacking each other’s infrastructures and such. I mean, I can never underestimate, again, the role of irrationality in history, because I always figured the United States wouldn’t invade Iraq. I said it doesn’t make any sense, it’s crazy shit. If the United States invades Iraq, all it’s going to do is strengthen Iran’s position in the Middle East. It’s just not rational, there’s no evidence they have weapons of mass destruction and they’re not going to do it because that’s not even in the empire’s interests. Well, they did it. So irrationality has its own role to play here. So who the hell knows what? But you agree with me in the public domain, at least we don’t know if it’s Russia, China, or somebody else?

Larry Wilkerson

We don’t even know if it happened, in my view.

Paul Jay

Right.

Larry Wilkerson

I do think that we’re looking at a future where we’re going to continue to test these waters, as it were, and we’re going to do more and more offensively as well as defensively, and the offense is what bothers me, to open this, Pandora’s box into a new realm of, shall we call it, warfare. And I think that is exceedingly

dangerous, principally because we are so vulnerable. We would have to have far more complex, expensive, and difficult to be assured of, defenses because we probably have the most vulnerable society on the face of the Earth to this kind of warfare. And that what makes me think we ought to be very circumspect about how we open up this realm of warfare.

Paul Jay

The other thing, again, this is me trying to be logical in a sometimes illogical sphere, but why would the NSA let it be known that they knew? Why would you go public with something like that?

Larry Wilkerson

Yeah, I think in this regard it was an attempt to, shall we say, attract the new administration, which they at that time were fairly convinced was going to be the new administration, and to build a set of bona fides with them and a comfortable relationship with them that would allow them to not evade supervision so much as continue to march in the direction that they’re marching in.

Paul Jay

Now, you’re talking about the ballot box stuff, not the recent stuff?

Larry Wilkerson

Yeah, I’m talking about the ballot box.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I misspoke, I think, when I said the NSA, because we don’t know the NSA has anything to do with the recent stuff, but somebody supposedly tells Pompeo that it happened and it’s the Russians, and then Trump says it’s the Chinese. But who is telling Pompeo, it must be American intelligence services? But why would they want it to go public?

Larry Wilkerson

Well, one wonders.

Pompeo is a former director of the CIA. Pompeo, no doubt, still has some contacts at that agency. And I wouldn’t say they were the most trustworthy or reputable contacts either, knowing Pompeo’s character. And he has other reasons for saying what he’s saying. I should have not been so naive with George Bush and Dick Cheney, my deputy, Richard [Lee] Armitage, was already calling them the Gestapo, the Nazis. I should have been a lot more alert to the fact that the war was being pulled over my boss’s eyes with regard to Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction and so forth. There are a lot of other things impacting him at that time. And it was true what he was saying, that the war never ended and that we needed to end it we just didn’t need to end it when we did because it was not opportune to do so. But there

are a lot of other things, a lot more complex things than people like to say about those circumstances. And I suspect there’s a lot more complexity about what’s happening today.

But there’s a reason one would go after China and another would go after Russia because we need them both. Russia is not enough. Russia simply not enough to keep the military-industrial complex and all of its spinoffs, from universities to think tanks, you name it. Eisenhower was right, it’s in every office building, it’s in every state, it’s in every home, and he was right. That’s where this influence is now. So to keep this alive, you’ve got to have a lot more than the Russians.

That’s the reason you see now this competition between Beijing and Moscow, not amongst their players, but us to make either or both of them, preferably the latter, our new threat because that’s the only way we can justify a trillion and a half dollars every year for national security.

Paul Jay

And a new trillion dollars to modernize the nuclear weapons fleet.

Larry Wilkerson

I would say 1.2 to a couple of really read in people the other day, 1.2 trillion for the next 10 to 15 years to modernize, securitize, the modern nuclear weapons complex. They looked at me and said, “Are you kidding? You’re behind. It’s two now. It’s working on two and a half,”. I said, “Are these cost overruns or what?” “No, it’s just low balling the original estimate,”.

Paul Jay

And on February 5th, if I remember the date correctly, is the date they have to renew the START Nuclear Arms Treaty, which Biden says they’re going to do. But is Biden going to be able to do it in the midst of, a supposed, Russian attack on American national infrastructure? I mean, I wonder, is this a game to undo the nuclear treaty.

You may have thrown out another instrument of change here that says, “Oh, man, got to have Russia really looking tough because we don’t want this nuclear weapons treaty renewed,”. You’re looking at a multi-billion dollar waste program, another multibillion-dollar, it’s out at Hansford, it’s in Utah making billionaires every day people who dispose of the detritus of the nuclear weapons industry, if you will. Yes, it’s a niche part of the complex, but it’s a very lucrative niche, part of the complex for key people. I’ll give you an example of how key and how lucrative part of the complex it is. We’ve not added a statutory member to the National Security Council in years and then in the late 70s because of the senator from New Mexico. Does this ring a bell with you, New Mexico? We got a new statutory member on the National Security Council, the secretary of energy, the secretary of Treasury is not even a statutory member for the council, but the secretary of energy is that’s the power of this niche. Moneyed complex, very, very talented people involved with it, an industry that if it were to disperse, as they did when the

Soviet Union collapsed, it would contaminate the world as it did when the Soviet Union collapsed. This is something we got to keep, it’s sacrosanct and it’s in there and it’s powerful.

Paul Jay

So just while we’re here to talk about why that treaty is important, because it just occurred to me, as I’m sitting here, that there’s a lot of machinations going on here. When you’ve got all the weird stuff going on about Iran Elliot, Abrams goes to the Middle East and then Pompeo goes there, and then the Iranian scientist is assassinated after Netanyahu apparently went to Riyadh and met with the Saudis, and after that, the Iranian scientists gets killed.

Now, you got this whole thing going about the hacking, and it’s Russia. There’s a lot of last-minute crap going on in this administration.

Larry Wilkerson

Right. And there’s a lot of crap that’s going on in order to create the new world, we need in order for this massive complex we’ve created to survive and prosper. I was just mentioning to you earlier before we went on air that you look at this COVID-19 stimulus package and you find F-35 acquisition in it. You also find dollars going out to defense contractors to, “Help them with their coronavirus affected employees,”.

This is typical Congress, but it’s also a typical empire. We’re fueling the complex that we’ve created since the 1947 National Security Act, and that complex is eating our lunch. It’s eating our lunch literally in the fact that it’s going to take so much of the federal budget that there will be no discretionary spending left in another seven or eight years.

Paul Jay

If the Russians did what, NBC and almost the entire mainstream media is saying they did, isn’t that an act of war?

It is. I mean, we forget about this, the things that we’re doing when sanctions fall with Venezuela, with Russia, with Iran, are acts of war. In the traditional sense, in the 20th-century sense, even in the late 19th century, they were acts of war. I don’t know what they are in the 21st century because we seem to have rewritten the book in the 21st century, starting with 9/11, but they are acts of war. And you could, under international law, respond to these things with other acts of war that would be more traditional, if that’s what you decided to do.

Paul Jay

So what do you make of the media? What are the depths to which this media has descended? I mean, the way they played this,”Russia story”, previously came to be known as Russia-gate, and now they’re doing it again, in some ways even much moredangerously.

Larry Wilkerson

In today’s world, you do not have to worry about Citizen Kane being wrong when he said, ” Find me the paper and the ink and I’ll get you your war, “, and that’s the media’s purpose today. I sit back sometimes and I watch them even now, after the election has been decided, decisively decided after the safe-haven date has passed, after the slates are done and approved. All we need now is for the action in Congress to transpire, and it’s all a done deal. And that’s just pro forma, really. Even Mike Pence, his role in it is pro forma. But we’re looking at a situation where the media is still giving this man the ability to speak to his 80 million morons.

Paul Jay

Right.

Larry Wilkerson

And that’s the media. The media does it every day. It’s not just Fox either. They are enabling him, but at the same time, they’re criticizing him and almost calling him a phantasmagoric idiot. They are enabling him and they know they’re doing that.

Paul Jay

To my mind, this is all part of the decay, not just of the empire, but the extent to which the political powers are so beholden to the politicians, Congress, Presidency, to finance and finance itself has become so decayed, so parasitical, and where the bulk of what they do with their money is now gambling and speculation that–I keep going after BlackRock all the time, because not only is it the biggest of the asset managers and one of the biggest gorilla on Wall Street now. But it also was able to use its power in Congress to be kept out of the, too big to fail legislation–some of the legislation in Dodd-Frank that gave some oversight, not much, but some oversight in the banks, BlackRock wasn’t affected by it. These people who have such power and are so parasitical in the way they make their living, mostly, it’s a reflection of that, that we’re getting such criminality at the level of, certainly federal politics and many elsewise, and from there I jump to–by no means am I suggesting the Democratic Party isn’t part of this, but the story I want to pick up on is, it’s not just that the Trump and the Trump family are essentially like a crime family that we’re able to maneuver themselves, but the Republican Party has just become like this adjunct to this crime family.

Where does this go? Like I said in the opening, you’ve got the Republican Party caught between Trump and some semblance of rationality, even Wall Street. Are they not losing some confidence in the craziness of these people?

Larry Wilkerson

I think they’d have to be morons not to, but I will say that, I think the most one of the most important movements right now, I don’t know if I can classify it as even potentially successful, is a movement in the states to develop an amendment to the Constitution that would, and there are 23 states that have already successfully passed it, and that would essentially obviate Citizens United and thereby get money out of politics in the sense that now corporate money and big money and secret money influences politics like it never has before in our country. I think that’s the first step. I think that would be a movement that ought to be supported by everyone.

Obviously, if you look at this in the past when we’ve done this. The states have built it up to a point where you get to 26 or 27 states and then the Congress gets really concerned and leaps in and takes over the process, because, as you probably know, there are two ways you can amend the Constitution, one is through the states, the other through the Congress.

Congress is not going to want the states to do it because it is not going to have a hand in the way it ultimately reads. And so they’re going to jump in when the state total gets to 26 or 27, approaching the 30 plus that is necessary for passage. So it’s going to be interesting to see. I think it’s going to happen the next five or six years, to see what the Congress does when it suddenly becomes alerted to this, sees the potential that it might pass through the state ratification process, takes it over, and then tries toride it with all of these influences. As I’ve said, they are a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street and the complex and so forth. So it’s going to be interesting to see how Congress deals with this, to try and keep some of the things that have made their power more easily held onto, made their life easier. At the same time, they’re trying to deal with what the people from the states have said they want to do with Citizens United, which is to trash it, get rid of it.

Worst decision the Supreme Court has made since Cheney’s court, and I think that’s right. And I think that’s the first step we’ve got to do, we’ve got to get the money out of politics, the big corporate money, in particular, out of politics. Otherwise, I don’t think we’ve got any future, really.

Paul Jay

Then you have to look at the success of the Republicans at the state level in this last election.

Larry Wilkerson

And yet we’ve got 23 states, this movement’s got 23 states.

So it’s not something that they’re not awarded to being inimical to our democracy and inimical even to their interests, and in that case, I mean state interests, which has always been a mantra for my party, the Republican Party, but seems to always get discarded as soon as the federal power is needed to fulfill something they want badly.

Paul Jay

So what do you make of your party? You still call it my party?

Larry Wilkerson

Now, I tried to. There are a lot of people out there, a lot of young people out there who are frankly, a lot of them are telling me now they voted for Biden. They watched the Lincoln Project or they even, in some cases, like in Ohio, participated in the Lincoln Project and they voted for Biden and they didn’t necessarily hold their nose. And they aren’t expecting great things from the Democrats, they’re expecting the same feckless leadership that the Democrats have provided in the past. But what they are expecting is a return to some sort of calm, some sort of relationship with our allies that’s not antagonistic and some sort of international feeling of, “the United States is back and can lead again,”. That’s what they’re welcoming. And then, of course, they want to see their man take over after that.

But these young people are very, very disinterested in and even angry with the Republican Party, and I’m not just talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz and a host of other Republicans, and mostly I’m talking about local Republicans in places like Boise, Idaho, in places like Atlanta, Georgia that people were disgusted with, Republicans are getting disgusted with. So that movement is going to change the Republican Party, whether it be positive or inthe middle or negative, I don’t know. I hope it’ll be positive, but it is going to change the Republican Party and I’m going to hang with it until the grave comes and try to help them.

Paul Jay

I think the problem here is that the substance of what Trump stood for policy-wise kind of worked for them electorally and they did get 80 million votes. They won did well at state levels and these, you know, what they call dog whistles that worked for Reagan. It’s essentially Reagan.

I was talking to Larry off-camera about watching this Showtime series called, The Reagans, which I think is really worth watching, and I’m going to be interviewing the director in the New Year.

But it’s very clear that the Trump campaign is a carbon copy of the Reagan campaign and the Reagan politics worked really well. The real difference is Reagan and Reagan’s people were able to manage him in a way that he always more or less looked presidential and Trump never really did. But the substance has actually worked for them right from the Reagan years on. And I don’t see why they would change that except try to get someone to be their federal standard-bearer who’s not a crazy man.

Larry Wilkerson

Let me tell you what most of these young people will tell me. Male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual, what most of them will tell me, they are sick and tired of refighting the Civil War, they’re

sick and tired of the racism in their party, they’re sick and tired of the prejudice and the bias in their party, they’re disgusted with a lot of these people and they’re disgusted, even more so with the exploitation of these things by the Republican leadership. They want that gone. They know that it will take a decade or two to get it gone, but they are dedicated to getting rid of it, eradicating it. And that, I think, is the biggest motivation. Now, you confront them with the fact that they’re, I won’t say 80 million because some of these people are there for other reasons than being bigots or prejudiced or racist or whatever, but a lot of them are. And the Republican leadership, like McConnell and Cotton and Cruz, they know that the core of that is that, and that’s why they stay with it because, without that core, they could never win another election in this country, ever. And so the young people want to get rid of that, too. They hold no truck with this current leadership, Tea Party, libertarian, Republican, mainstream, or whatever. They want it gone, they want it gone and done away with.

Paul Jay

Aren’t they a real minority, and why are they even in that party?

Larry Wilkerson

Well, the minority that is 40 and under. You know, they will be 50 in another decade.

Paul Jay

There are a lot of young, enthusiastic Trump people out there.

Larry Wilkerson

Oh, yeah, there are, but they’re not as many as we think. Even with this spectacular election we just had with something like 66%-67% voting, there’s still a 30% plus that didn’t vote. There are still people that aren’t even interested in going to the ballot box when provoked to the extent that they were in this last election, they’re not even interested in going to the box. Some of those people have given up.

The Republican Party needs to be a bigger tent. It needs to attract these younger people. It needs to build for the future. That might mean it can’t win another White House election for another 10 or 15 or 20 years even, but it’s got to be for the future and the bill for that future. It’s got to have a much bigger tent and it’s got to accept the demographic change that’s coming to this country. I think that’s one of the biggest motivations for Trump’s base. They do not want to surrender the lily-white, mostly male with females following along behind and dutiful obedience, country that they perceive to have been in existence since 1775. They don’t want to lose that. And so they’ll take anybody, even a narcissistic, lying, cheating, womanizing asshole as their president to get that. They’ll do anything. They’ll make a bargain with that devil to get that. And a lot of it has to do with the Evangelicals, too. Who now, I was shocked when I saw this, the new census, preliminary results, one hundred million, that’s one-third of this country, is involved in the third Great Awakening.

And there are people like Pence whom I think would sacrifice his soul to get the rapture to come. He would sacrifice Israel, certainly, to get the rapture to come. Remember Tom DeLay when Max Blumenthal interviewed him and said, “What’s going to happen to all those Jews when Christ kills all the unbelievers?”. And he said, “Oh”, after a moment of thought, “they’ll convert the last minute, right, Tom?” Yeah, that’s the conundrum these people were presented with, but it’s not a conundrum for them because God is in charge.

Paul Jay

See, I think the danger is that these younger voices, the way you’re describing them, more rational voices in the Republican Party, one, are much in the minority, they’re not in that 80 million group. And they’re still voting at the state level for these state legislatures, whose policies are every bit as bad or worse than what Trump did.

But what I’m concerned about is that the Biden administration is going to be, the way it’s shaping up, a repeat of Obama to a large extent and use the Republicans as the excuse again for not having a real serious transformation of the economy, dealing with climate inequality and so on, which sets the table in 2024 for a less crazy Evangelical-supported Republican Party that can win again.

Larry Wilkerson

That’s going to be a real stretch and it’ll be a stretch that’s made only if the Democrats fall all over themselves. And I don’t say that that can’t be, it could be easily. For example, I don’t see anybody out there right now, including Kamala Harris, who is a real contender in 2024 from the Democratic Party. Don’t see anybody, zero. That’s a real problem for them, in my mind, a real problem, getting that kind of name recognition, visibility, and so forth in a short period of time is extremely difficult.

Now, Obama showed it could be done, as you and I were talking about before we went on air, but it takes a really dedicated team and a very sophisticated program to do that. I don’t see that being put together right now. What I see is a Democratic Party that has some young people and some extraordinarily old people and nobody in between. That’s a problem for them. And so you might be right that the Republicans come back, but I’ll make a prediction here that the Republicans who come back are not going to look like the “Trumpers”. They look very different.

Paul Jay

Well, then you might have a third party.

Larry Wilkerson

Trump thinks he’s going to run again, of course. I got news for him, I don’t think the country is going to want to touch him with a ten-foot pole.

Paul Jay

I suspect that’s true.

Well, in the introduction, I talked about going back to the geopolitical picture that the neocons in both parties, and they certainly exist in both parties, are licking their lips at the possibility of heating up the Cold War with Russia. Biden’s already had quite inflammatory rhetoric when it comes to China. In the Democratic Party, for sure, Chuck Schumer’s and others, and certainly the Republican Party want to find ways to block the renewal of the deal with Iran.

What do you make of where we’re headed in terms of this geopolitical rivalry, because it looks like it’s going to get more dangerous with Biden and who he’s picked around him?

Larry Wilkerson

I don’t disagree with your assessment. My hope is that Biden’s 29 years or so in the Senate and the man that I saw from time to time as [Colin] Powell would deal with him on serious issues, the man who had his head in the right place most of the time on those serious issues, and his experience will lead him to do three things, internationally, immediately. One is, and we’ll take the lesser one first and the more serious one last, to do what he said he was going to do during the campaign, and that is without any preliminary conditions to speak of, renew the JCPA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) with Iran. Now, Pompeo andothers are doing everything they can possibly do, Netanyahu, Bin Salman, and others to preclude that. But if Biden is smart and moves swiftly, I think he can do it. That’s the number one thing he has to do that will calm the Levant to a certain extent. The second thing he needs to do is to go after a February renewal for at least a time period specified in the treaty, which I think is another year, maybe longer than that, a new start. We have to do that. And in doing that, we also need to–and Putin has said publicly that he’s receptive to this. We need to start an entirely new dialogue and that dialogue needs to eventually invite in China, of course, most prominently, and eventually North Korea, Israel, and everyone else who possesses these weapons over the decade or so that follows. And a new and very successful arms control regime must be set up. The third thing he needs to do is clarify this strategic clarity business that Richard Haass, in the utterly stupidest moment of his life, has said needs to be with China. We do not need clarity now with regard to Taiwan, when if we had to go to war over Taiwan, we would lose and it would be catastrophic because it would go nuclear. That is not a time to have strategic clarity. That is a time to understand what Charles W. Freeman said the other night on a webinar, a man who probably knows China better than anyone in this country. He said, “We need to agree to disagree exactly as we have for the last 45- 50 years, and China needs to be allowed to work it out with Taipei and Taipei, with China, and there needs to be no confrontation whatsoever because Taipei and Taiwan and 23 million people will lose catastrophically rather than slowly and carefully and maybe with a lot of the deal written by themselves,”. So these are the three things Biden has to get his hands on internationally at the same time, and you know this as well as I do. He’s going to be enveloped as he’s trying to do these necessary international things, he’s going to be enveloped with domestic issues, not least of which is COVID-19, the economy, people out of work, people starving. This stimulus bill is a joke. It buys more F-35’s, it gives money to defense contractors to, “help their COVID-19 affected entities,”. Oh, please,Lockheed Martin,

run out and protect your entities. This is crazy. Pelosi was right in the sense that it needs to be two trillion. And it needs to be rewritten so that it actually helps people and helps the states and so forth. These are the problems Joe Biden is going to wrestle with. And I’m sad to say, I think the domestic ones may eat his lunch.

Paul Jay

Just to go back to Taiwan, just for people that don’t follow this story closely. If I understand correctly, the current position of the United States is a bit ambiguous. If there actually was a military confrontation or Chinese incursion into Taiwan, it’s ambiguous what the American response would be. And there’s a lot of rhetoric about supporting Taiwan, but there’s no definitive commitment to it, right?

Larry Wilkerson

Actually, Pompeo tried to take that away. Several days after the November election, Pompeo made a public remark that Taiwan is not a part of China. That’s a refutation of everything Nixon, Zhou Enlai, and Mao Zedong, Ambassador Freeman, who is their translator, Kissinger, everything that they did that Jimmy Carter later on codified in a communique, it’s a refutation of the whole thing, “Taiwan is not a part of China.”

Paul Jay

Yeah, it’s past strategic clarity. But Haass, if I understand, the head of the Council on Foreign Relations and who was an adviser to Bush, he’s influential in the Democratic Party, so it’s not like he’s just a “nutter” out there. But the thing that’s so stupid about that is, it’s almost like Khrushchev sending missiles to Cuba, and this is why China and Albania criticize Khrushchev. They said, “Well, you had to know the Americans were going to call you on that and you would have to back down. There’s no way the United States is going to go to nuclear war over Taiwan, which is undoubtedly where it would head.

Larry Wilkerson

I wish that were true. I know history speaks, and that you were probably speaking rationally, but history doesn’t always do that. And what troubles me is the Congress in this regard. If you look at the Taiwan Relations Act and you interpret it the way Ambassador Freeman had. At the time he actually was asked to write that act and he almost single-handedly wrote that act, and he did it because he had been there at the creation, if you will, with Nixon and Kissinger and Mao and Zhou Enlai, and so forth. And Charles probably knew the situation better than anyone else. And that act was very carefully constructed so it would not be a commitment to war, but it would be a palliative for the right-wing of the Republican Party who were furious with Nixon. So furious, I think they set up Watergate. They were furious with him, and so they had to have something. And so that TRA, that act, now looks as if it’ll be the thing that the Congress uses, if it decides, for the first time in an eon, to use its constitutional power to declare war on somebody. And this is not good.

Paul Jay

All right, well, let’s hope somebody around Biden’s listening to you, because those three things you talked about are rather critical.

Thanks for joining us, Larry.

Larry Wilkerson

Take care. Stay healthy.

Paul Jay

Thanks. And thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news podcast, and please check out the website and the matching grant campaign, and thanks for watching or listening.