If Russia Didn’t Exist, Would We Have to Invent It?

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In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeff Schechtman talks with Dan Kovalik, the author of The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia. (Skyhorse Publishing, June 2017)

Kovalik argues that Russia is not and should not be our enemy. That the vilification of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin only serves the purposes of both the Pentagon and Congress. He talks about the recent rush to sanctions, the push for more military spending, and the degree to which President Donald Trump’s one and only uptick in the polls came as he was cheered on for the bombings in Syria.

Even though he is a critic of Trump, Kovalik views the president’s desire to reset relations with Russia as a positive. Nonetheless, he argues that both the media and the intelligence communities seem committed to preventing a rapprochement at all costs. He is most surprised by how aggressive liberals have been in helping with the demonization.

Even if Trump’s business dealings have been with corrupt and unsavory Russians, Kovalik wonders if this justifies the kind of relentless hostility that could lead to war.

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Full Text Transcript:

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Jeff Schechtman:

Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman. Not since duck and cover drills, Sputnik, the U2, the Berlin Wall, the missiles in Cuba, has Russia been so much a part of the everyday dialog of the United States. What happened? The Soviet Union fell. We were supposed to see the end of history, certainly the end of conflict with Russia. They were thought to be a natural ally after the Cold War ended, just as Germany and Japan became allies after the second World War. The Russian economy is still smaller than that of California, yet our fear, obsession, and vilification of Russia has never been greater.

Yes, Russia’s guilty of many things, Syria, Chechnya, hacking US elections, Ukraine, are all true, but we actively and currently support many governments that have done worse. It all begs the question as to whether some are singling out Russia in order to have a national enemy, and/or is Russia simply the best way to get at Trump given what certainly seems like a career of unethical and corrupt business dealings with unsavory Russians. To try and put all of this in perspective, I’m joined by Dan Kovalik. He teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, and he’s the author of a new book The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia. Dan Kovalik, thanks so much for joining us.

Dan Kovalik:

Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Jeff Schechtman:

Great to have you here. I want to go back a little bit to the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union, and a little bit about what the perception was at the time about what was going to happen vis-a-vis our relationship with Russia.

Dan Kovalik:

Well, as you hinted at in your opening remarks, I think the view was certainly from both sides that we would be friends, that Russia would be re-admitted to the community of nations, and more specifically, we know that an agreement was made between Secretary of State James Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev that if the Berlin Wall came down, and Germany was reunified, that NATO would not move, and the agreement was one inch east of Germany. As we know, that changed very quickly, but in any case, the idea was that we were going to have peace between nations. It is very clear that Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev firmly believed that, and obviously things did not turn out that way.

Jeff Schechtman:

Then we go to 2012, in the election in 2012, long before we got to the current situation, and you have Mitt Romney in 2012 talking about Russia being the greatest existential threat to the United States.

Dan Kovalik:

Yes. Even before that, so again, this promise was made that NATO would not move east of Germany, and even under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and then George W. Bush, NATO began to creep farther and farther east to the point where now, of course, NATO is on the border of Russia, which they see is very threatening and very aggressive on NATO’s part. Yes, as the years have gone by, you’ve had various periods in which the US began to not only, again, violate that agreement about NATO, but to start to paint Russia as somehow a revived enemy of the United States. There seemed to be a bit of a honeymoon period in terms of that under Boris Yeltsin, and even under Putin, because you’ll recall, in fact, that shortly before 9/11, George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin for the first time, and he said, “I looked into his eyes and saw his soul.” You might recall that.

Jeff Schechtman:

Yes.

Dan Kovalik:

Then after 9/11, he called George W. Bush, the first leader to call George W. Bush, offer his condolences, offered to help in Afghanistan. Initially, there’s this honeymoon period even with Putin, but as you say, as the years go by Mitt Romney and even Obama, of course Hillary Clinton began to say that Russia was this threat to the United States. 

Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at 2017 G20 summit (President of Russia – CC BY 4.0).