The War on Terror's Only Gift Was Better Luke Skywalker Hands

Lex Fridman opens with Brown University’s Costs of War project and a pile of numbers that Horton will spend the rest of the night explaining rather than disputing. The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen, Fridman recites, produced an estimated 900,000 to 940,000 direct deaths and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths, at a dollar cost of about $8 trillion — $2.2 trillion for Afghanistan and $2.9 trillion for Iraq and Syria. Food insecurity among Afghans rose from 62 percent to 92 percent; acute malnutrition in children under five from 9 percent to 50 percent; poverty from 80 percent to 97 percent. Horton adds the figure Fridman left out: 37 million people displaced from their homes.

Official U.S. deaths, Horton notes, were about 4,500 in Iraq and 2,500 in Afghanistan, plus contractors. The same Brown research group, he says, had earlier estimated that 30,000 American service members had killed themselves since the wars began, “one way or the other, deliberately crashing their motorcycle or whatever it is.” Fridman mentions a recent New York Times or Wall Street Journal piece listing fifteen psychoactive drugs stacked on depressed soldiers, each tempering the side effects of the others. Horton’s black joke is that some of those men might have lived “if the government health care system hadn’t helped them in the end.”

Fridman says the wars accomplished none of their stated purposes. Horton agrees, then compresses the American social return into one image. Other than dividend checks from Lockheed, which he refuses to count as a benefit to society, “the only thing we did get out of it like literally was advancements in prosthetic limbs.” He is half in jest and completely serious: “We have better Luke Skywalker hands than before. That’s it.” Fridman calls it the clearest illustration of the military-industrial complex’s failure and asks how the country got there. Horton warns that the “fast version” is a kiss of death, and Fridman tells him to take the slow one.

Horton starts at the end of Vietnam. Richard Nixon, he says, felt he had to bribe the military-industrial complex some other way, so he turned to Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran and asked him to buy more American arms. The CIA had helped restore the Shah in the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh; twenty years later Nixon wanted fighter-jet orders. Iran still flies F-4s and F-14s from the Nixon and Ford push. The Shah, Horton says, was obsessed with a first-world army he could not really afford, and the shopping helped destabilize his regime.

By 1979 the Shah was secretly dying of cancer, the CIA knew, and a mass revolution was in the streets. Carter’s critics, Horton notes, wanted the Iranian military to massacre the crowds. Instead the CIA and State Department told Jimmy Carter that Ayatollah Khomeini was “not so bad”: he had been among Shiite clergy who agitated against Mossadegh in 1953, so Washington thought it could deal with him. Fridman asks whether they actually believed that. Horton thinks they did.

William Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador, called Khomeini “the Iranian Gandhi.” Horton’s retort is that Khomeini was not a pacifist, and Gandhi had kicked the British Empire out of India. “You’re deliberately putting in a guy who’s going to limit your influence there,” he says. America then allowed Khomeini to board a plane in Paris and fly home. Horton remembers wondering as a child why the French, U.S. allies, had not checked first. He later found Peter Jennings interviewing the returning ayatollah with, roughly, how it felt to come home in triumph. The adults, Horton says, turned out not to be so smart.

Fridman wants a mechanism: how does a government keep installing people who create more instability, then use that instability to justify the next war? Horton points to public choice theory, a branch of libertarian political economy. Its major claim, as he uses it, is that there really is no national interest of the kind two citizens might debate across a table. What becomes “the national interest” is the interest of the people in charge of deciding for the nation. Those choices are private. Telling all your bosses they are wrong is not good for you now.

Daniel Ellsberg, Horton’s friend of some fifteen years, described the job of a deputy as making his boss look good whether he agreed or not, in the hope of inheriting the chair next year. Truth gets washed out. David Hardy, the lawyer who wrote what Horton calls the best book on the Waco massacre, put it more bluntly: in ordinary life there is truth and falsity; in government work there is a third category, “our position.” Our position is what a room of people agreed to say. Reversing it means disgracing the people who led the decision. In business, Horton says, a boss still has to look at the books or go bankrupt. In government, “the worse they do the better off they are.”

That is why Vietnam soldiers called the army a self-licking ice cream cone. It causes chaos, then chaos is the job. Horton’s example from the end of the Afghanistan war: officers high enough to be quoted said that now that it was over they would pivot to Africa and find some Islamists, because they needed ways to stay “globally engaged.” Whether that was good for Africa or for Americans was a separate question they were not really dealing with. Classified access makes the circle smaller still. Ellsberg noted that once you have secrets, you stop listening to anyone who does not. Horton interviewed CIA analyst Cynthia Storer, a senior figure in the terror war, and asked if she read Patrick Cockburn. She said, “Who’s Patrick Coburn?” Cockburn, Horton told her, was the most important Anglo writing on Iraq, publishing for free in *The Independent*. She still did not know who he was. Secret knowledge without Cockburn’s open-source picture, Horton insists, is not understanding.

Fridman asks why whistleblowers matter. Horton calls Ellsberg a brilliant nuclear-war planner whose father had built the first assembly line for the atom bomb and refused, on moral grounds, to do the same for the hydrogen bomb. At RAND, Ellsberg helped force the Pentagon to show John F. Kennedy the actual SIOP: if war came with the Soviet Union, the United States would nuke every city in the USSR and China, on the logic that if America, Russia, and Europe were destroyed, Earth should not be left to “those dirty chicoms.” Kennedy made Ellsberg get the plan narrowed. Ellsberg later hid nuclear documents with his brother, who lost them; he wrote *The Doomsday Machine* from memory.

The Pentagon Papers were a top-secret history of Indochina since World War II, commissioned by Robert McNamara, written by Ellsberg and Leslie Gelb for the secretary’s eyes only. Ellsberg leaked it after the Senate would not take it; Mike Gravel read some into the record; the *New York Times* finally published. It showed they knew they could not win: the Saigon government lacked popular consent, and the southern insurgency was an indigenous revolution against foreign intervention, not merely a northern plot. McNamara later claimed it never occurred to them that Vietnamese might not want to be ruled by “foreign white devils.” Horton’s reply is “come on,” citing Noam Chomsky: America invaded South Vietnam, and the government inviting U.S. troops to stay was the one Washington had installed — no different from Hamid Karzai later inviting Americans to stay in Afghanistan.

Ellsberg’s memoir *Secrets* begins on his first day, when the teletype reported ships attacked in the Tonkin Gulf, then said never mind, it was a mistake — and he watched the president run with it anyway. Historian Gareth Porter, whom Horton calls “Gareth the Great,” argues McNamara lied to Lyndon Johnson knowing it was a false alarm. Horton’s theme for the whole night: take a little piece of information and run with it to justify war. Johnson told a Republican senator he could not be the first president to lose a war, so he retired and made it Nixon’s problem. George W. Bush later said the end of Iraq would be up to other presidents. Short terms, Horton says, produce high time preference: who finances the next election crowds out what mankind looks like in a hundred years. Yoda and Palpatine agree that all who have power fear losing it. “Fundamentally that’s cowardly.” A leader who understood the full cost of a war, and how it would have to end, would not start it.

Between the February 1979 revolution and the November hostage crisis, Horton stresses, Americans were still trying to work with Khomeini, warning him about Saddam Hussein, who had just taken Iraq in a bloody stadium purge. Saddam, Horton adds, had been groomed on and off by the CIA since the 1950s. The huge irony of the 1980s is that Washington then backed Saddam and his Soviet-armed army against Iran. Why the Soviet warning? Because on July 3, 1979, Carter signed a finding ordering the CIA to support the Afghan mujahideen, unilaterally or through third countries. Horton posts the document at scotthorton.org. Brzezinski and Walter Slocombe, he says, citing Robert Gates’s first memoir, wanted to bait the Soviets into overexpansion. Afghans were expendable; West Germans were not. “Vietnam” by then meant a stupid, no-win quagmire. They wanted to do that to the Reds.

Horton’s experts, including Eric Margolis and Andrei Sakharov, say U.S. aid was not what actually provoked the December 1979 invasion: the Soviet puppet was falling apart, and the first thing Moscow did was shoot him. The intent still matters. Brzezinski’s December 26 memo already floated a “Soviet Vietnam.” The same memo worried hawks would demand action on Iran and risk a head-to-head with Moscow. Carter then announced the Carter Doctrine: the Persian Gulf was an American lake. Gareth Porter later found a document in which Brzezinski admitted to the Saudi foreign minister that they did not really think there was a Soviet threat to Iran. The hostage crisis, Horton says, was triggered when David Rockefeller convinced Carter to let the Shah in for cancer treatment; Iranians remembered the 1953 coup run from that same embassy and feared a restoration.

Carter, Horton continues, also gave Saddam a green light to invade Iran. Saddam feared the Shiite revolution would spread into majority-Shiite Iraq; his answer was to conscript those Shiites and march them east. The result was nine years of World War I-style slaughter, with the United States almost entirely backing Saddam except during Iran-Contra, when Reagan sold missiles to Iran via Israel and diverted proceeds to the Nicaraguan Contras. Horton credits Gary Webb’s *Dark Alliance*: CIA-linked networks flew cocaine into the United States to fund the Contras, including through Bill Clinton’s Arkansas, run out of Vice President George H. W. Bush’s office. Webb was driven to suicide, Horton says, after being professionally destroyed. Taxpayers also bought the precursors for Saddam’s chemical weapons, used against Iranians and Kurds at Halabja. When the war ended, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE called in debts Saddam could not pay at twelve-dollar oil. Ambassador April Glaspie told him the United States had “no position” on the border dispute. Stephen Walt later called that at least a flashing yellow light. After Iraq rolled into Kuwait, Margaret Thatcher gave Bush a “backbone transplant.” Brent Scowcroft’s circle wanted a short, sweet war to kick Vietnam Syndrome. They claimed armored divisions were massed on the Saudi border; the *St. Petersburg Times* published Soviet satellite photos of empty desert. The Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter posed as a nurse in the incubator hoax. Bush still said, “By God, we’ve kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

The Afghan war of the 1980s, Horton reminds Fridman, did not only arm local mujahideen such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani. It built what became international Islamic brigades, including Egyptian Islamic Jihad and a Saudi-intelligence-linked group, with dollar-for-dollar U.S.–Saudi matching and even Special Forces training in the United States. Those networks later merged, after Ayman al-Zawahiri’s generation, into what Americans call al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden’s main grievance, Horton says, was that King Fahd let white Christian combat forces occupy the land of the two holy places and then did not leave. Cheney later told Bill Kristol he had promised the king the troops would go home when the war was over. They stayed to enforce no-fly zones and a sanctions regime Horton estimates caused at least 300,000 excess Iraqi deaths.

Michael Scheuer’s *Imperial Hubris*, Horton says, lists six reasons bin Laden cited: occupation of the two holy places; U.S. help for Israel against Palestinians and Lebanese; support for dictators, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt; pressure to keep oil cheap; and a (false, Horton notes) claim that America turned a blind eye to the persecution of Muslims elsewhere. Khomeini’s cultural complaints about Hollywood could not recruit suicide bombers. Policy could. Horton stipulates that bin Laden was a mass murderer whose word is worth little; the point is what volunteers found important enough to die for. In 1996, during Israel’s Operation Grapes of Wrath, artillery that Horton attributes to Naftali Bennett’s unit killed 106 people in a UN shelter at Qana. Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Egyptian engineering students in Hamburg, signed their last wills. Bin Laden’s first declaration of war lingered on Qana. “On September 11th,” Horton says, “you had Egyptians volunteered for a Saudi sheikh to slaughter Americans by the thousands as revenge for American support for Israel, killing people in Lebanon.” That, he argues, is why Bush said they hate your freedom: he could not tell you about those 106 people.

Fridman remembers the weeks after 9/11 as a scramble of improvised villains: Saddam, al-Qaeda, the Taliban. On Afghanistan, Horton cites Bob Woodward’s *Bush at War* transcripts: Condoleezza Rice and the CIA advised dividing the Taliban from al-Qaeda. The Taliban had tried to warn of an attack, Horton says, and Mullah Omar had told the *Washington Times* that bin Laden was “a chicken bone stuck in my throat.” Milton Bearden, who had run the 1980s CIA program, told the *Washington Post* that Omar wanted bin Laden gone after the Africa embassy bombings and would hint when he was “falconing” outside Taliban protection. Bush demanded handover with no evidence and no Muslim third country. When bombing started, the Taliban dropped conditions; Bush said too little, too late. Donald Rumsfeld overruled Rice: take the fight to the Taliban so Americans would understand the war was bigger than bin Laden, and even floated bombing Baghdad so the war would not look over if bin Laden died.

At Tora Bora, Horton argues from Thomas Greer (Dalton Fury) and Gary Berntsen that Delta and CIA had bin Laden cornered on three sides, with the Pakistani border the fourth, and were denied reinforcements Bush himself refused. Rangers, Marines under James Mattis, and a block-and-sweep plan existed; they were not used. Once fighters “slipped across the border,” Delta was not allowed to chase them into allied Pakistan, even though CIA station chief Robert Grenier had already deconflicted pursuit with Pakistani forces. Berntsen later told Michael Hirsh it could all have been “over by Christmas.” Horton’s circumstantial case is Orwellian: they preferred Emmanuel Goldstein still at large, so they would have a year and a half to scare the country into Baghdad. In March 2002 Justin Raimondo wrote at Antiwar.com that the neocons had hijacked policy and Baghdad was next.

Wolfowitz had wanted Baghdad in 1990; Bush Senior said no. Through the 1990s came dual containment, sanctions, no-fly-zone bombing, and two failed CIA coups involving Ahmed Chalabi, the Jordanian-exile banker the CIA eventually burned. Horton’s through-line to 2003 runs through Israel’s “strategy of the periphery” — friendship with Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia to divide Arab attention — which Yitzhak Rabin reversed in 1993, turning on Iran as “new glue” for the U.S. alliance after the Soviet Union vanished. Trita Parsi’s *Treacherous Alliance* is Horton’s guide. A Netanyahu admirer murdered Rabin; Shimon Peres launched Grapes of Wrath; Netanyahu took power in 1996. David Wurmser and Richard Perle then wrote *A Clean Break* for him: overthrow Saddam, install a pliant regime, peel Hezbollah from Iran, and, Chalabi promised, build a pipeline from northern Iraq to Haifa to replace lost Iranian oil. Horton’s verdict: “4,500 Americans and a million Iraqis died in Iraq War II” in part “so Israel could save a nickel a barrel.”

John Dizard’s 2004 Salon piece “How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons” is Horton’s exhibit. Chalabi promised a secular democracy close to Israel, then cozying up to Iran. Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans, under Abram Shulsky, laundered INC exile claims into the intelligence stream; Wurmser’s Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group dug for a Saddam–bin Laden link the CIA had discarded. Colin Powell called them the JINSA crowd, a “separate government” run like a cell by Dick Cheney. Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Newt Gingrich made repeated trips to CIA headquarters demanding more. Thomas Friedman told *Haaretz* it was a very small group of guys; Seymour Hersh said about nine. Philip Zelikow, not a neocon, said a hard motive was Saddam’s bounties to families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Andrew Cockburn told Horton the shortest definition of the movement: the cross between the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex. Lockheed’s Bruce Jackson funded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and NATO-expansion vehicles while the *Weekly Standard* led the charge.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s *The Israel Lobby*, Horton stresses, still puts the trigger on George W. Bush: he sat in the chair. Ariel Sharon, then prime minister, preferred Iran to Iraq but went along and, Horton says, citing Julian Borger, Robert Dreyfuss, and James Bamford, ran his own English-language “office of special plans” to stove-pipe claims. Justin Raimondo had warned in 2002 that SCIRI, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, would take power. That is what happened: Bush delivered Baghdad to SCIRI, Dawa, and Moqtada al-Sadr. Soldiers who still do not know why they fought, Horton says, fought on the Shiite side of a civil war to replace a Sunni dictatorship with something like an Islamist pseudo-republic. Chalabi, in Dizard’s telling, needed “these Jews” until he got his war, then would stab them in the back. Perle, Horton says, was “as stupid as he is evil.”

Horton’s picture of the contractors is concrete. Boeing and Lockheed, he says, scatter one small part of every weapon system across as many factories as possible so that any budget cut threatens “600 jobs in your district.” They claim to supply what Congress demands; they are rigging the game. Fridman then asks the biographical question: how does a skateboarder cab driver become this kind of specialist? Horton says he learned Reagan was “a dope pusher” as a child, watched Waco at sixteen, and watched the Oklahoma City bombing get pinned on one man while undercover informants walked. Reason magazine, he thought then, existed to debunk Gulf War illness and Iraqi child deaths. He preferred militia-adjacent “patriot” circles in Austin because they at least cared about Waco and the sanctions. Ron Paul, speaking to an empty House on C-SPAN about Bush selling chemicals to Saddam, was the conversion: one congressman telling the truth on the record.

He printed Paul speeches for cab passengers, modeled his show on pirate radio and the front-porch AM of San Antonio, and never claimed Ivy League authority. “The burden of proof is really on me,” he says: a skater from Austin telling you everybody else is wrong had better demonstrate it. *Enough Already* was raced out for the end of the Bush–Obama–Trump I terror-war era; *Provoked*, on the new cold war with Russia, is “7,000 note cards,” a third of them to the other side, footnotes on the page. He hunts a single citation for days because he once lost a Waco argument to a federal cop’s son in his cab and decided that would never happen again. He does not write for Senate hearing rooms. “The Cato Institute wants an audience with the Senate. The Mises Institute and the Libertarian Institute and Antiwar.com, we want an audience with the population of this country.”

Seymour Hersh’s 2007 *New Yorker* “The Redirection,” Horton says, is the decoder ring. Oops: Iraq War II was fought for the Shiites. To make it up to Israel and Saudi Arabia, Washington would take Iran down a peg in Damascus. That meant tilting toward “Osama bin Laden and the suicide bomber brigades,” including Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon and Elizabeth Cheney’s work with the Muslim Brotherhood on a Syrian government-in-exile. Wurmser’s 1996 *Coping with Crumbling States* had already urged expediting Syria’s “chaotic collapse.” After 9/11 and the Iraqi insurgency, Horton asks, you are still telling Americans that Bashar al-Assad is worse than bin Laden because Assad is friends with the ayatollah? Barack Obama’s Syria policy, in this telling, was not secret Islamism; it was secret George W. Bush, including a Jamie Rubin memo to Hillary Clinton that the real reason to intervene was Israel — cutting Iran’s link to the Mediterranean.

Horton denies the “moderate rebels” story. From 2011, he says, citing journalists including Sharmine Narwani and William Van Wagenen, peaceful protests were seeded with sniping of police, Kosovo-style, to force a crackdown. Prince Bandar emptied Saudi jails into the jihad. The fighters who did not mind dying were Jabhat al-Nusra — al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria. The “Free Syrian Army” received U.S. aid and passed it on. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Abu Mohammad al-Jolani split in 2013; Baghdadi declared ISIS in eastern Syria, then the black flag over Fallujah. Western Iraq, Patrick Cockburn had warned, was wide open. Obama’s Iraq War III, launched in 2014 after squeezing Nouri al-Maliki, put Iranian Quds Force-run militias on the ground with American air cover. John McCain complained the U.S. was “Iran’s air force in Iraq” — after, Horton says, McCain had helped build the caliphate. Michael Horton (no relation) noted that in Yemen the U.S. was meanwhile al-Qaeda’s air force, until Obama switched and backed Mohammed bin Salman’s war on the Houthis.

Somalia, Horton adds, is America’s longest war: CIA and JSOC since December 2001, never left, originally on the excuse of three al-Qaeda suspects. A relatively peaceful, accidental stateless order — ports open, cell phones spreading — was smashed. Ethiopia was hired to crush the Islamic Courts Union; al-Shabaab, “the boys,” rose as the insurgency. Only in 2012 did they take Saudi money and declare themselves al-Qaeda. Obama’s drones and cruise missiles made it worse; Trump said he wanted out, then told Mattis to do everything within the law, recategorized the theater, and escalated in Afghanistan too while negotiating with the Taliban. Horton’s numbering: Desert Storm is Iraq War I; Clinton’s every-other-day bombing is 1.5; 2003–2011 is II; 2014–2017/18 is III; today’s hunt alongside Shiite PMUs is 3.5. The danger of Iraq War IV is turning around again to fight the Shiites America just fought two wars for, this time with Israel against Iran.

Israel’s Iran obsession, Horton argues, began as Rabin’s domestic distraction, then became Netanyahu’s doctrine: demonize Iran without trading land for peace. For a time a live Iranian enemy helped rally Gulf monarchs; after Gaza, a crippled Hezbollah, Nasrallah dead, and Assad replaced by Jolani, the last major player is Tehran. Horton describes the Oded Yinon article of 1982 as a fantasy of smashing Arab states into warring tribes. He thinks something like that may have been the hope for Iran: parachute in a Pahlavi, threaten generals’ families, hit police stations, and wait for collapse. Air dominance is not occupation. Trump claimed the nuclear program was obliterated; Horton says the Isfahan conversion facility was an important hit, but enrichment capacity was not erased, inspectors were kicked out, and the IAEA’s chain of custody is broken. Bombing, he has said for two decades, makes a breakout more likely, not less. Diplomacy is the remaining off-ramp, including recognizing a right to enrich that is in the NPT Bush and Obama had already had to live with.

Horton does not want Iran, or anyone, to have nuclear weapons. Mutual assured destruction has “worked” for a historical blink of an eye; a 275-year Mexican standoff of hydrogen bombs is not a plan. Reagan at Reykjavik was a hair from abolition until Star Wars wrecked the deal. William Perry, George Shultz, and even late-life Kissinger formed Global Zero because, Perry wrote, you cannot imagine Dallas wiped off the map. On Iran specifically, Horton’s toolkit is almost insultingly simple: send the secretary of state, be cool, stop nursing 1983 Beirut as an eternal grudge while forgetting Reagan sold Tehran missiles afterward. Iran’s recent strikes, he says, were calibrated — fourteen rockets after fourteen American bombs, with a heads-up to Trump. The United States is relying on the “mad mullahs” to stay cool. Fridman was afraid of another forever war. Horton’s reply: it is not over, and a bin Laden-style attack plus a propaganda splice to Iran is how the next occupation gets sold.

Israel-Palestine, when they finally reach it, is for Horton the millstone around the American neck, not a sideshow. He recommends Darryl Cooper’s *Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem* and Sheldon Richman’s *Coming to Palestine*. The 1948 Nakba, he says, expelled about 750,000 people — “the population of greater Austin” — to create an 80–20 Jewish majority. In 1967 Israel took the rest of the people it did not want along with the land it did; combined with Palestinian citizens of Israel, the population under Israeli control is roughly 50–50, with one half holding all the power. Ben-Gurion, Horton notes, warned against keeping millions of unwanted subjects. A secret Netanyahu living-room video, in Horton’s telling, shows him mocking Clinton and calling America “a thing that is easily moved.” On September 12, 2001, Netanyahu told the *New York Times* the attack was “very good,” then edited himself: it would generate sympathy. Horton will not adopt Madeleine Albright’s or bin Laden’s theory that civilians deserve to die for their government’s polls. He will say the Israeli political spectrum, as he sees it, runs “from Dick Cheney to Hitler,” and that anti-Semitism overseas is something Netanyahu cynically treats as good for immigration to Israel.

Horton’s book *Provoked* is organized by presidents. After the Soviet flag came down on Christmas 1991, the question was whether America would stay. The Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance and later PNAC’s *Rebuilding America’s Defenses* said yes: no near-peer competitor, NATO into Eastern Europe, dominance in the Gulf and Asia. Jean Kirkpatrick’s 1990 “A Normal Country in a Normal Time” had urged shedding superpower burdens; Charles Krauthammer answered with the unipolar moment and “nothing short of global domination.” Horton’s most contested empirical claim is the 1990 bargain: James Baker told Gorbachev, six times on February 9, that NATO would not move “one inch” east if Germany reunified; Robert Gates told the KGB the same day; Hans-Dietrich Genscher said it in public. Scholars Joshua Shifrinson and M. E. Sarotte, he says, show Washington knew it was misleading. Clinton’s Partnership for Peace was a stall until after Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection. Informal deals, Horton notes, held over West Berlin, the Nixon–Mao split, and the Cuban Missile Crisis Jupiter trade. This one was broken.

Fridman insists Putin invaded in 2022 and bears chief responsibility. Horton agrees Putin escalated “about 100,000 percent,” calls him a gangster and a psychopath in the way heads of nuclear states are, and lists things Putin could have done instead: UN peacekeepers on the Minsk line, a Security Council freeze, cutting remaining gas. He also says the war in Donbas started on April 14, 2014, after John Brennan’s visit, and that Biden officials told the *Post* and *Times* Russia’s December 2021 draft treaties were reasonable — then refused to negotiate NATO, missiles, or Minsk. Niall Ferguson wrote that the policy in London and Washington was to inflict a strategic defeat, a replay of the 1980s Afghan trap, “this time with the Ukrainian Nazi right as the mujahideen.” Ned Price’s answer to how to end the war was “larger principles” and the open door. The mandated phrase “unprovoked attack,” Horton says, is this war’s weapons of mass destruction: the lie that there is no backstory.

Putin’s declared fear, in the speech Horton quotes, was Tomahawks and hypersonics in Ukraine hitting Moscow in five minutes after the INF Treaty’s death — “a knife to the throat.” Trump, Horton thinks, is sincere about wanting the war over and arrived too late: Russia has annexed oblasts it does not fully control and is fighting a slow artillery war of attrition that Daniel Davis and others say Ukraine is losing. Conscription, desertion, and press-gangs are, in Horton’s reporting, a horror show. His darker forecast is a rump Ukraine dominated by figures such as Andriy Biletsky of Azov, which pushes Moscow toward Odessa, Transnistria, and cleansing further west — a government program that fails upward. Fridman says the whole conversation has been a case against war. Horton points listeners to primary documents on his site, Ellsberg, Costs of War, and a new Scott Horton Academy. Eisenhower’s 1953 “cross of iron” speech is how Fridman signs off: every gun a theft from those who hunger.