Jack Matlock Interview

Jack Matlock: The Cuban Missile Crisis & NATO's War in Ukraine - On Glenn Diesen's Eurasia podcast.

Jack F. Matlock, Jr, was the U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1987-1991, and had a key role in negotiating an end to the Cold War. Ambassador Matlock also served at the US embassy in Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ambassador Matlock discusses the lessons of the past to end the Ukraine War and avoid nuclear war with Russia. Amb. Matlock was at the Embassy desk in dealing with the messages over the Cuban missile crisis, they couldn't send Russian characters, and the President needed the translation, so he wrote the translations and sent the communiqué.

In the first part of the interview, he gives first-hand viewpoints on the Cuban missile crisis. It was more dangerous than commonly reported. In the end, Russia was required to remove the missiles from Cuba, and Khrushchev had to announce that, while the U.S. agreed to remove missiles from Turkey, but they could keep it quiet without announcement. America The Good never ever can be seen to make concessions. Not in the past, not now, and not in the future. Furthermore, those missiles in Turkey were scheduled to be removed anyway, from being too old.

Amb. Matlock is getting quite old and shaky, but makes it through this long interview. You might want to see what he has to say while he is still with us. Here are the parts about Ukraine-

JACK: We have, in the case of Ukraine - those borders which Ukraine is defined were created by Hitler and Stalin. They were created for the purpose of controlling that area. But those in Ukraine that were not historically part of Ukraine are not or are not historically part of the Russian Empire.

They were in the Austro-Hungarian Empire are now virtually controlled by neo-Nazis and as this becomes more apparent it's very clear that given what happened internally in Ukraine when the original guarantee to Russian language and other nationalities were guaranteed. This was taken away and so that the internal problems in Ukraine were very great and to sacrifice lives and property and everything over borders that were created by the two greatest dictators of the new 20th century is absolutely absurd. But I think most people simply do not understand how those borders were there or what happened internally into Ukraine which brought this on. And let me also add that unfortunately the United States has set a precedent for attacking countries which have not attacked them.

This was certainly true in the attack on Iraq, a total attack which occupied it which at the time not only Russia but also Germany and France opposed, they were correct to do so. But another issue is the expansion of NATO - once NATO started expanding after the end of the Cold War, it turned what had been a defense alliance into an offensive alliance and one which obviously countries that were not in it like Russia would oppose.

So that it seems to me today people have totally misunderstood the history of these, they are in a very dangerous situation.

And now when we get into these conflicts like Ukraine and also now Iran we tend to forget how they originated and how actually they're not going to be solved by military action and they're bringing the whole world I think into a catastrophic...

GLENN: One of the things I find I guess extraordinary is if you go back to the 1990s, there appears to have been a very vigorous debate. I remember that especially in the United States of expanding NATO. It seemed like there was a lot of opposition by leading diplomats such as such as yourself recognizing that this could put us essentially, well, in another Cuban missile crisis as we now see with Ukraine, however slowly it just it seemed to go away, not right away in 2008 of course when NATO promised future membership to Ukraine you had huge opposition then as well. So you had the former CIA director making the point that this would trigger war. You had Angela Merkel saying this would be seen by Moscow as a declaration of war. But why has it become so controversial to recognize that NATO expansion, that is expansion of an anti-Russian military alliance would provoke conflict?
Because it appears that even the discourse seems to admit this thing.

JACK: Well, unfortunately, I think that the American governments from, you might say the 1990s on, adopted a foreign policy which it seemed to me ideologically was similar to the Soviet policy of what they called the version of doctrine which was that if a country once became "socialist" and I'll put that in quotes because these were countries ruled by the communist party and that once they became socialist one had to defend socialism if there was a challenge to it and this meant that for example the Soviet Union intervened in Czechoslovakia and in in Hungary first and then in Czechoslovakia in order to preserve socialism. We talked about spreading democracy.

Well, first of all, we didn't define democracy very carefully. I mean, but the idea that an outside power particularly using economic sanctions or military force can create a democracy in another country is simply absurd. It can't happen. Interference from the outside in internal politics is usually resisted almost everywhere at one point. And so it seems to me that that was a false doctrine. And we have called what we called a liberal world order which was coupled with a military doctrine that said we had to dominate everything. Full spectrum dominance was part of the military doctrine which was proclaimed during the second Bush administration.

Well, I think the only solution is going to be redrawing those borders. These are not, you might say, longstanding traditional borders of Ukraine. All that territory up until the end of the Cold War had been parts of other countries, other sovereign countries.

And at first I would say Russia not only observed respect for the territorial integrity, actually, but the conditions for that I think were pretty clear that Ukraine not become part of a hostile military alliance. So that to retain that, Ukraine had to stay out of NATO and NATO had to avoid trying to bring them in. And I think that was very clear to all of us when the whole question of NATO expansion came up in the late 1990s. I testified before the Congress of the United States to the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate headed at that time by Joseph Biden.

And I testified that it was a huge mistake to begin to expand NATO because if that was continued it could bring us to a very serious crisis. Well the fact was that the argument for expanding NATO was that some would say out of [our] area or out of business. In other words, we had to use it as an offensive alliance.

And in effect, it was. And although Russia accepted some of the early additions, those in central Europe and then of the Baltic countries, I was in New York when Vladimir Putin then sort of a new president of Russia came on and he gave a talk at Columbia University and I asked him directly during that about if the three Baltic countries join NATO, he said he didn't think that was necessary, but that in effect he would tolerate it as long as there were no bases there. And this is another thing that we began to put military bases in these countries in Eastern Europe even before the question of Ukraine membership came up. And this was very much opposed and I think for good reason because although the systems that we were putting in Poland and Romania were anti-ballistic missile systems.

Nevertheless, those systems could be used offensively with a change of software. So it was clear why any Russian leader would have opposed that and yet you know issue after issue we began to treat Russia different from others. We had sanctions which prevented them being part of the World Trade Organization over immigration practices which had ended actually in the last year of the Soviet Union and had never been an issue in Russia but we kept them on for other reasons, bringing China into the World Trade Organization more than a decade before we allowed Russia in and then we carried out sanctions over a so-called human rights violations when such violations were also occurring in the United States and this whole issue of sanctioning other countries for things they do at home I think has been totally misplaced and yet this is something that the Europeans are now carrying even further than the United States.

And yet, you know, obviously much of German industry is not going to be competitive without say Russian gas. And to tolerate such things as the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline just to deprive Russia of a market I think it violates sort of not only traditional international law it violates in my word simply basic decency and so this idea that Russia is the only aggressor and has to be sanctioned when the other countries are also carrying out arguably even more serious aggressions.

Really baffles me how anyone who really understands the history of these issues and what is involved can go this course.

The only way. And you know, as these wars go on, they become more and more difficult to settle and you get more and more damage on all sides.

And the point is that if miraculously the original borders of Ukraine could be restored, Ukraine could not rule those areas. It would be a tremendous instability.

And anyone who knows this issue, you know I'm one, I happen to know both the Russian and Ukrainian languages and I'm familiar with the history of that area.

It is something that right now the politicians totally ignore and totally distort.

So, and this is to the damage of everybody involved.

So the only way it's going to be solved is by Ukraine now relinquishing some of those territories and you know how much may be subject to negotiation but emotions are so hard on the side and both sides have been so dug in in trying to achieve something which is not achievable by the methods. Meanwhile, we see the Europeans putting more and more money into defense. They would not be threatened by Russia in any sense if they weren't interfering in Ukraine.

And this idea. And of course, my own country is bankrupting us with all of this emphasis on the military.

And as we see as we see further developments, we are seeing more and more means of destruction and of course which if continued is simply not sustainable.

Take a break and watch a bit of this video, of a ride up the highway heading north toward Moscow, with Stanislav Krapivnik on a fine sunny day in Russia. Yes, it can be sunny there, it's no longer Communist. Watch to see how the Ukr propaganda is demonstrated by the closed gas stations, the massive lineups for fuel, and no cars on the road. (ha, ha)

Leave a comment! This is a re-direct to my Substack page.

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