Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznickļ¼ War Profiteering, Nuclear Tech, NATO v. Russia, & War With Iran
Summary
On this episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, host Tucker Carlson sits down with Oliver Cohen and Peter Bergen to discuss the possibility of nuclear war and why we should all be worried about it. Guest: Oliver Cohen, co-author of The Untold History of the U.S. and co-host of the podcast "The Enemy Within" joins the show.
Transcript
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Thank you both very much. Oliver, you first, how close do you think we are to nuclear war right now?
00:00:38.220
That's why I came up here. Yes. Or down here. Yes.
00:00:56.540
We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else.
00:01:00.740
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00:01:03.980
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00:01:09.240
Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.com. Here's the episode.
00:01:13.400
I've been talking about it off and on since 2014 when the Ukraine thing happened.
00:01:18.320
I was saying this is, frankly, like there's a lot of elements of World War I, the alliances, the NATO alliance, and the United States' involvement.
00:01:29.560
And its hatred for Russia is astonishing to me, considering the recent history, the last 20 years before that, there was no reason for us to pick on Russia and go back to this cold war, neo-cold war that we have.
00:01:47.180
That's what I don't understand. And I've been talking to Peter about it.
00:01:51.940
It defies logic because he says it's the neocons in Washington that started, and they never left.
00:02:06.200
I heard them with my father, who was a conservative, relatively conservative, in New York City back in 1950, that the Russians were going to invade us.
00:02:14.880
And this was very much the feeling that McCarthy was saying they're in the schools, they're in the churches, they're in the...
00:02:32.260
Well, I am conservative on many things, but I see no reason to be at war with Russia, and I don't know why Russia would be an enemy.
00:02:42.780
It's shocking to me because what Biden did, and I voted for him in 2018, he never talked about changing the Russia policy.
00:02:51.040
He never did, and he never gave us any kind of knowledge of education about what he was thinking.
00:03:00.680
Everything he's done has been to antagonize him.
00:03:03.860
In fact, he called the president of Russia a thug and a murderer before he got elected.
00:03:15.280
It must be strange for you to have grown up in the Democratic Party.
00:03:21.460
Right, but I mean, as an adult, to see the party that was the party of peace and reconciliation become the war party.
00:03:30.800
With Peter, we were talking last night, and Peter is my co-author on Untold History of the United States.
00:03:36.340
And we've been talking, he taught me a lot of this history because he specializes in it for many years.
00:03:42.900
But here we are with this situation where Democrats want war, they push war, they're pushing the strategy of weakening Russia.
00:04:06.180
And what has Ukraine to do with that distance for us to do this involvement with NATO?
00:04:13.060
This NATO, also, for me as a half European, my mother is French, I spent time in Europe as a kid.
00:04:26.080
The people don't want war, but the EU, which is this political overrider, seems to want war.
00:04:34.480
And because the leadership in the EU is very elite.
00:04:38.860
People who seem to come from the same school, factory, or whatever they're produced by.
00:04:44.660
They seem to think the same way, that Russia is going to invade Europe again.
00:04:49.320
We're back to that World War II argument, which was nonsense in the first place.
00:04:53.720
So, here, Russia wants Ukraine, and then they're going to go for Poland.
00:05:01.760
That's the stupidest statement I've ever heard, I think, from a political leader.
00:05:09.100
What do you think accounts for, big picture, the hostility of NATO and Europe to Russia?
00:05:23.200
The woman who runs the EU, Ursula, she constantly says these things that are ignorant, ignorant of what's happened in the last 20, 30 years.
00:05:33.000
Ignorant of what happened in the 90s in Russia.
00:05:35.780
She's just, they're not taking this into account.
00:05:38.240
I talked to Macron at one point, and he was a very reasonable man.
00:05:42.160
And I thought he was saying things like, we need more nuclear energy in France.
00:05:47.480
And now he turns around, and he's saying that Putin was, he's ready to send French troops into Ukraine.
00:05:55.500
Starmer, this new prime minister, labor prime minister, you know who he is?
00:05:59.360
He's quite, he said, yes, two days ago, he said, we have to punish Putin to the maximum because he's relentless.
00:06:13.240
So there's an aspect, a personal thing about Putin, like Biden made it personal, saying he's a thug and a murderer, and Starmer saying he has to be punished.
00:06:28.200
We didn't talk like this back when we were mature, back in the 50s, 60s, when we talked about Russia as an enemy because we thought it was adversarial.
00:06:36.280
I disagree with that, but we thought so, and we acted as such, but we didn't personally insult Khrushchev or Brezhnev.
00:06:48.400
So Biden, I think, is, some people say Blinken has taken control of his mind.
00:06:55.500
I don't know, but Anthony Blinken is trained in the Hillary Clinton diplomatic school.
00:07:01.680
He was, for many years, he's been under her wing.
00:07:09.200
By diplomacy, it's just, you know, regime change.
00:07:13.480
Diplomacy is a dirty word now in the United States.
00:07:17.020
So, but, Peter, I'm interested in your perspective.
00:07:19.140
Like, why do you think the entire United States, from a position of greater weakness, has, with Europe, pivoted against Russia, of all the potential enemies?
00:07:32.180
I mean, we've been going after Russia since 1917.
00:07:38.260
Well, in World War I, Lenin and Trotsky pulled Russia out of the alliance and had the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where they gave away a massive amount of Russia to Germany in order to get peace at that point.
00:07:55.580
And what does the United States do with the Brits and the Japanese and others?
00:08:06.520
And Churchill wanted to overthrow the new Soviet government.
00:08:11.740
He said, we should strangle Bolshevism in the cradle.
00:08:16.760
We didn't even recognize the Soviet Union until Roosevelt was in power in 1933.
00:08:23.220
So, and then during the war, they became our ally.
00:08:26.840
And in fact, they were the ones who won the war in Europe.
00:08:29.760
But I asked my students, who won the war in Europe?
00:08:32.360
You know, people grew up believing that the Americans won the war in Europe.
00:08:38.960
We certainly contributed a lot during World War II.
00:08:41.840
But the Soviets, throughout most of World War II, the U.S. and the Britain were confronting 10 German divisions between the two of us, while the Soviets were confronting more than 200 German divisions on their own.
00:08:56.600
That's why everybody understood what Kennedy says in his great 1963 American University commencement address.
00:09:07.140
What the Soviets suffered in World War II is the equivalent of the entire United States east of Chicago having been wiped out.
00:09:15.900
You know, so you would think that we would be friendly with them afterwards.
00:09:22.660
In fact, Roosevelt promised Stalin in May of 1942 that we would open up the second front before the end of 1942.
00:09:31.260
He asked Stalin to send over Molotov and a trusted general for that meeting in the White House in 1942.
00:09:39.920
We don't open up the second front until June of 44.
00:09:43.100
And by that point, we had lost all the diplomatic initiative.
00:09:47.060
The Soviets were defeating Germany largely on their own with the support of U.S. materiel.
00:09:52.720
And so they were pushing back the Germans over Central Europe and Eastern Europe.
00:09:58.720
And so the idea that Roosevelt gave away anything at Yalta that the Soviets didn't already have is nonsense.
00:10:14.240
And even more unfortunately, Truman became president instead of Henry Wallace,
00:10:18.860
which is another story I hope we can get into, because Oliver and I do a lot about that in Untold History.
00:10:25.520
And we argue that had Wallace become president on April 12, 1945, instead of Truman,
00:10:32.720
there would have not only been no atomic bombings in World War II, there would have likely been no Cold War.
00:10:41.280
But instead, we developed this enmity toward the Soviet Union.
00:10:45.220
And instead of seeing our allies who suffered so greatly and showing some largesse and generosity,
00:10:54.060
And the crackdown that happens in Eastern Europe doesn't happen immediately.
00:10:58.920
That takes place over the next couple of years.
00:11:03.040
They allowed a good degree of democracy in most of Eastern Europe
00:11:07.040
till really the Truman Doctrine in 1947, really.
00:11:17.240
But Kennedy was the one who saw it differently.
00:11:21.960
Anyway, I'm giving you a lot of history very, very quickly.
00:11:24.920
None of that is surprising, but none of it, I would say,
00:11:28.780
accounts for the shift after the one that Oliver referred to after 2014 at Maidan.
00:11:34.220
But it actually starts earlier because when the Soviet Union collapsed, 1989, 1990, 1991,
00:11:42.500
during that period, we had a chance to actually reach out in a more positive way.
00:11:49.200
But it's in 1990 that Charles Krauthammer, the neocon theorist, says the Soviet Union has collapsed,
00:12:01.140
He says we're the only force in the world that can dictate world events.
00:12:07.000
And he said the unipolar moment is likely the last 30 or 40 years.
00:12:12.120
It was in 1992 that we've come out with the defense planning guidance,
00:12:17.320
which is a much more elaborate plan of how we're going to dominate the world.
00:12:21.120
And then in 1997, the Project for a New American Century takes shape,
00:12:30.640
And they say in that 2000 report that we're not able to rebuild our defenses as quickly as we want
00:12:49.520
Do you think the people who said that we needed new Pearl Harbor in order to rebuild,
00:12:58.380
I think they saw it as a tragedy and an opportunity.
00:13:13.780
Because all the events of 9-11 have not come out.
00:13:19.340
I would have to really study this, but it's just so many questions I have.
00:13:27.460
It leads to this feeling that there's a cabal or something in Washington
00:13:33.480
that has been there, kind of, a strange ghost-like cabal
00:13:37.440
that goes back to the 60s with Kennedy's murder.
00:13:40.600
That continues in some strange embodiment today.
00:13:52.180
Well, we can't assess it because the files are still classified 23 years later.
00:13:57.820
I mean, a lot of the lunatics have come out of the asylum, no doubt.
00:14:02.640
But there's a lot out there in the public that really should be examined
00:14:08.140
And that's what the establishment's freaking out
00:14:29.320
I mean, I'd love to see Kennedy understood better by the mass
00:14:51.980
It's a bigger story because now it's the world that's at stake.
00:14:56.860
He had a vision, as Peter said, of humanizing Russia,
00:15:07.000
And Khrushchev fell shortly thereafter, the premier of Russia.
00:15:11.740
He fell, too, because he wasn't sufficiently strong with the United States.
00:15:19.820
So his hawks wanted to get rid of him for being too weak.
00:15:26.960
because in October of 1962, right after the missile crisis,
00:15:32.120
two weeks later, Khrushchev writes an incredible letter to Kennedy
00:15:39.320
Our people have both felt the burning flames of thermonuclear war.
00:15:43.300
We have to use this now to eliminate every conflict between us
00:15:51.180
And Kennedy and Khrushchev slowly, on Kennedy's part,
00:16:06.300
really did want to have a peaceful reconciliation.
00:16:11.740
I mean, his AU commencement address that I mentioned
00:16:14.860
is, I think, the most important presidential address
00:16:20.600
It was the last big speech he gave before he was murdered.
00:16:29.040
Khrushchev needs some obvious signal that you're serious.
00:16:32.800
And Norman Cousins actually wrote the first draft.
00:16:55.180
is that the relation between the U.S. and Soviets is tragic.
00:17:04.780
is see the world through the eyes of America's adversaries.
00:17:08.920
When was the last time we had a leader who could do that?
00:17:38.420
which is exactly what Biden is doing at this point.
00:17:50.920
Oh, I would think a lot of people didn't like it
00:17:53.920
because they saw him as some kind of idealistic fruitcake.
00:18:09.180
because there were changes in the economics of the play.
00:18:20.040
And they had a third term possibility with Robert Kennedy
00:18:23.020
and a fourth term possibility with Teddy Kennedy.
00:18:27.580
That was what's terrifying to the Republicans, I think.
00:18:39.900
but I go back to my father who was a stockbroker,
00:18:54.380
The international, the rules-based order was changed
00:18:58.160
because now not only did they break the treaty,
00:19:00.900
no secret treaties was one of the first things they did.
00:19:03.760
And all these treaties from World War I came out.
00:19:26.760
And there was a worldwide sentiment for revolution
00:19:44.480
So that was the most scary thing to Woodrow Wilson.
00:19:51.980
And Churchill was right there and he wasn't a leader,
00:20:04.380
That's why the Starmer's recent comment the other day
00:20:12.180
The British have led the charge against Russia forever.
00:20:31.340
And what Brzezinski says in The Grand Chessboard
00:20:33.980
is that if you can separate Ukraine from Russia,
00:20:38.340
then Russia will never be a Eurasian superpower again.
00:20:43.200
They had a strategy for doing exactly what they did
00:20:49.420
This is not something that they've just thought up in 2014.
00:20:53.180
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00:21:12.880
instead of letting you know what's actually going on.
00:21:16.760
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00:23:00.920
So, Oliver, you know Putin as well as any American,
00:23:20.560
I just feel the economics are crucial to understand
00:23:23.600
in the sense that the fear of the Russian Revolution
00:23:31.640
Workers started to emigrate to Russia in the 1920s
00:23:39.000
And America was moving away from the capitalist ideal
00:23:45.840
I think that plays a huge role coming after World War II,
00:23:52.780
Of course, World War I leads to World War II in my mind.
00:24:01.060
The Republicans were terrified that the Depression would return.
00:24:13.380
So the whole concept started up in the Congress of 45
00:24:30.260
What are we going to do with all these men coming back?
00:24:36.900
So we're going to get into this military business.
00:24:42.060
We did it through the era up to where Eisenhower says in 1960,
00:24:46.780
you know, he's built the greatest nuclear force
00:24:59.100
Yeah, but I'm talking about in 1960 when Kennedy comes in.
00:25:04.320
And the Joint Chiefs, the Air Force wanted 10,000.
00:25:11.480
And McNamara said the lowest number we can get away with is 1,000.
00:25:21.600
between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 in every category.
00:25:31.700
was preparing for a first strike against the Soviet Union,
00:25:35.160
which is part of the reason why they put the missiles into Cuba
00:25:38.180
to try to offset that, at least to some degree.
00:25:41.960
But again, you know, and Kennedy got a briefing on July 20th, 1961,
00:25:55.800
And Kennedy walked out of that midway through the briefing,
00:26:05.080
Lemnister gave it, and one of the people there said,
00:26:10.240
says he gave it as if he was talking to kindergartners,
00:26:18.080
that we were going to have a preemptive surprise nuclear strike
00:26:24.700
But there were military people who were thinking that way,
00:26:40.040
saying that the United States is preparing to fight
00:26:43.220
a three-front nuclear war against Russia, China, and North Korea,
00:26:49.320
And the same day, the Bulletin Atomic Scientists
00:26:51.420
came out with an article saying that there are still planners
00:26:55.100
in the Pentagon who believe that we can win a nuclear war
00:27:23.160
The names, all the names of all the systems we have
00:27:34.300
We don't have a fail-safe, is what I'm trying to say.
00:27:38.060
So what does it look like once the chain reaction begins?
00:27:41.400
Oh, she describes it beautifully, minute by minute.
00:27:45.420
She talks about what's going to happen to you, me,
00:28:06.060
And then nuclear winter is something we discovered in what year?
00:28:14.540
But if anything, and then he got attacked by the Wall Street Journal
00:28:21.940
But the latest scientific findings are that Sagan and company
00:28:27.000
actually downplayed the effects of nuclear winter.
00:28:34.060
the latest studies show that a limited nuclear war
00:28:39.280
in which 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons would be used,
00:28:45.280
would push 5 million tons of smoke, soot, and debris
00:28:52.020
It would encircle the stratosphere within two weeks,
00:28:55.200
block the sun's rays from getting to the Earth.
00:28:57.640
Earth, temperatures would plummet to freezing on the Earth.
00:29:03.120
And a limited nuclear war of 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons
00:29:17.280
Many of them are 7 to 70 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
00:29:25.200
the cities would burn and would send up so much soot
00:29:34.840
The likelihood is that all large life forms would probably die off.
00:29:39.960
Some people might be able to get under the ground,
00:29:43.080
you know, would have a mine shaft gap like a strange love.
00:29:47.560
Kubrick didn't know anything about nuclear winter
00:29:49.420
when he did the movie, but he had the underground system
00:29:52.740
being described by the Dr. Strangelove, remember?
00:29:58.500
I showed Strangelove to Putin, Dr. Strangelove.
00:30:08.980
And he sat through it with me, and it's on film.
00:30:24.740
we were actually building bigger nuclear weapons
00:30:34.100
and it could have been 100 megatons if they'd wanted to.
00:30:41.540
So what do you think Putin's view of nuclear war is?
00:30:56.820
Our language is a little more rhetorical than his.
00:31:14.980
Donbass and Lugansk were the issues at that time.
00:31:26.800
they promised to respect the autonomy of those people.
00:31:42.580
because they had a lot of zealots in the government.
00:32:08.660
That was a violation of the neutrality of Ukraine,
00:32:12.220
which had existed since the end of the Cold War.
00:33:04.160
And that was clearly crossing Russia's red line.
00:33:15.140
Burns writes a secret memo back to the White House
00:33:20.360
Don't cross Russia's red lines about Ukraine in NATO.
00:33:32.180
and had been reaching out to the U.S. since 9-11.
00:33:58.840
And so then the relations begin to deteriorate.
00:34:05.020
in 2002, he revisits his idea of the unipolar moment.
00:34:39.480
to have regime change in seven different countries.
00:34:54.500
What's happening now in Syria was part of a game plan-
00:35:34.400
The Russians were furious about what happened in Serbia.
00:35:38.460
but what was the point of the intervention in Serbia,
00:35:44.780
We announced it as we were catching the butchers,
00:36:00.520
destabilization of, we bombed a city in Europe.
00:36:16.480
But essentially, we wanted to balkanize Yugoslavia,
00:36:21.260
The same way we're going to balkanize Syria now.
00:36:36.140
They had a referendum that was a little bit shady.
00:36:56.520
What's interesting, though, is as that was happening
00:36:59.400
and Wes Clark was becoming famous and all that,
00:37:04.600
in the United States over why we were doing this.
00:37:09.360
But in Russia, you would have heard it very, very different.
00:37:13.920
thought that what was going on there was a war crime.
00:37:17.860
I mean, the Russians were a totally opposite view.
00:37:23.660
which meant instead of going through the United Nations,
00:37:31.660
And don't forget, in Iraq, when we went in there,
00:37:40.480
It's important because what's happened now is the opposite.
00:38:17.700
So that's why these people are appealing to people
00:38:19.800
because they're saying there has to be some peace.
00:38:28.980
And they're very, very critical of people who differ.
00:38:54.740
The Putin interviews didn't help me in Hollywood.
00:38:57.160
But you'd been cut off before then, I think, hadn't you?
00:38:59.340
No, my ability to make films was choked a little.
00:39:05.640
After 2000, things changed in the United States
00:39:11.500
We were suddenly the patriotism of the soldiers.
00:39:32.300
Why are we doing these military expeditions overseas?
00:39:53.260
like back in William Jennings Bryan's back in 1898.
00:40:02.640
Let me give a different timeline on Oliver's history
00:40:08.400
I mean, Oliver was walking on water in Hollywood
00:40:23.120
seven, eight months before the film was produced.
00:40:40.280
And, you know, and it's a very controversial movie,
00:40:50.180
and make people think about some of these issues.
00:41:04.100
But why do you think that film and that topic, I mean...
00:41:17.200
thought, didn't think that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
00:41:50.900
He was so sad because he really was like Kennedy
00:42:25.740
But you saw the budgets grew and grew and grew.
00:42:54.400
Personally, I believe there's an invasion coming up.
00:43:14.800
which is still one of the richest countries in the world
00:43:37.160
Sending ships constantly stating our supremacy, right?
00:44:02.500
I don't see why we can't be in business together.
00:44:46.840
Oliver's stressing the economic roots of all this.
00:45:14.400
And we're not going to do it with idealistic slogans.
00:45:27.960
about the threat of nuclear war in his later life.
00:45:46.380
So we were in a meeting here at TCN the other day,
00:45:49.660
and every other person had a kind of ruddy vitality.
00:46:22.420
Almost everybody here uses a new sleep technology
00:46:37.080
You don't need a new bed or anything like that.
00:46:40.740
What it does is adjust the temperature of your bed,
00:46:47.600
And it maintains an ideal sleeping environment all night long.
00:46:52.800
but as you progress through different phases of sleep,
00:47:04.520
It's been proven to increase the quality of your sleep,
00:47:10.740
It improves your recovery time from physical exertion,
00:47:13.240
and it may even improve your cognitive performance
00:47:21.080
So it learns and adapts to your sleep patterns over time
00:47:24.000
and automatically adjusts temperatures throughout the night
00:47:28.380
And it does this independently for each sleeper
00:47:38.940
and be more effective the next morning as we are here.
00:47:52.480
You can try it with zero obligation for a month,
00:48:19.920
But you're arguing that it's more than just economics
00:49:17.940
that was dangerous to the national security, I think.
00:49:21.340
But in the 30s, that's what motivated Roosevelt's turn to the left.
00:49:28.780
The labor movement was huge in the United States in the 30s.
00:49:36.300
I mean, all of the big industries were organizing.
00:49:43.420
You know, there was a reason why they had to shut down
00:49:45.400
the Communist Party during the, quote-unquote, McCarthy period.
00:50:10.800
says it's a choice between republicanism and communism.
00:50:15.600
And so we're beginning this anti-communist hysteria
00:50:48.180
about people who might influence American thinking.
00:51:15.480
these kind of things I'm talking about with you,
00:51:35.040
I can't go to where my imagination wants to go.
00:52:21.120
The big flaw being that Truman is honestly pictured
00:52:34.340
Leslie Groves is one of the most anti-communist generals
00:52:47.540
was created to destroy, to address the Russian Empire.
00:53:03.340
I had treated as if the Soviets were the enemy.
00:53:18.340
But we had to keep going in those crucial few days
00:53:24.820
And Leslie Groves, I mean, Matt Damon played him.
00:53:44.200
I'm sure Oppenheimer got an inkling of it later, no?
00:53:58.420
You know, so Oppenheimer later effectively apologized
00:54:05.620
And that's when he, he really, he was in trouble.
00:54:07.320
And then he opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb.
00:54:42.020
because we were dealing with a man who was exiled,
00:54:44.260
who I thought was a hero and was treated as if he was a traitor.
00:54:49.860
In making that movie, I had to go to Moscow to finish it.
00:54:58.940
And what he said about Snowden, as he says in the movie,
00:55:26.880
You know, we didn't know about the coup at that point.
00:55:31.580
So we set up these interviews and we were talking.
00:55:40.180
And I, as an American, didn't really know the situation.
00:55:43.960
So I was treating it like, you know, Ukraine, okay.
00:55:48.960
I mean, it's another one of the countries like,
00:56:04.900
And he, I understand Ukraine better and better.
00:56:26.620
That underbelly is where the invasions happened.
00:56:29.480
So it seems like we're relying now on Putin's restraint.
00:56:48.920
It's going to stay loyal to what it believes in.
00:56:51.640
There is a, what, they don't have a democratic vote,
00:57:07.940
If the czar didn't work out, they get rid of him,
00:58:11.960
But like he did with every other weapon system,
00:58:16.780
And so Ukraine has struck Russia several times now
00:58:29.620
You got the French missiles, the scout missiles.
00:59:07.020
this brand new hypersonic medium-range missile.
00:59:12.960
because it goes at 10 times the speed of sound,