YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Horton

lines on the record: 802
first: 2025-08-24
most recent: 2025-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think I proved my point and I give you the ability to find the proof for yourself to track these things down further. If I say these people essentially made this claim in this piece, you can track that down and double check and see if I'm lying or not or see if I understood right or whatever as you go through there. People will falsely assume that I don't have Ukrainian and Russian sources in there, but I do. But the thing is I just don't use Cyrillic at all because nobody can read that. So I use Google Translate on the titles. So a lot of times you don't realize that it's, you know, unless you look closely, you won't realize that these are, there are plenty of foreign sources that I cite in there, but I just give them their English headlines through Google Translate or whatever so that people know what they're looking at. But again, I have the links.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look, I think it's written to be a page Turner all the way through. And I am outraged and the book is written from this point of view and it's engaging enough. And as I say, it's so long because there's so many subtopics. I do not belabor and beat the dead horse and force you to read a bunch about things that you're not interested inmore. We do the Litvinenko chapter, then it's over. We do the Belarus chapter, then we're done and move on to the next subject as fast as I can take you through it. It's the same way I wrote the previous books to. This is what I need to tell you before I let you off the hook and change the channel, right? Just like in enough already, I gave you four pages on small ya. I know you're not going to read six. You might not get to Libya if I try to make you read six on Somalia. So I only gave you four. You know what I mean? I wrote it that way in the first place.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've been messing around a lot in building up this Cold War. That's why that book is so long, because it is 475,000 words. And I don't think wasted. And that does include the footnotes, which by the way, likes when I took the URLs out and the footnotes are font size nine, I believe. When I took the URLs out, that saved me 77 pages. That's how many articles are in there. But if people go to scotthorton.org slash provoked slash notes, I have a PDF file there of all the notes with their links. I only took the links out at the very last moment, so there's a PDF file where you can take anything in here and I'll have a working link to it at scotthorton.org slash provoke slash notes and people can download the whole PDF of the whole thing. And it's 375 pages of notes in regular font.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, every topic that I could think of outstanding between America and Ukraine that's happened this entire time. I do not spin for the Russians the whole time. I accuse them of plenty of things in there that they actually did, and I defend the truth from false accusations rather than defending the Russians,'cause screw them and they don't need my help. And this book is not for them, it's for us. But I tried not to leave out anything. I mentioned sort of the epitome the Montenegro weird, phony coup of sixteen, but we tried to overthrow the government of Belarus three times oh one oh five and twenty.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, let me just emphasize here we're skipping a lot to the end, and I know it's late, so it's okay. But there are a lot of other things besides NATO expansion, including tearing up the treaties, installing anti-ballistic missile systems in Romanian Poland that are fired from dual-use launchers, the MK forty one or Mark forty one missile launcher, that can also hold Tomahawk cruise missiles. And while all the while refusing an inspection regime, there's also, of course, overthrowing the government twice in 10 years in Ukraine, all the other color coded revolutions in Georgia and in Kyrgyzstan and the rest. And, of course, support for the Maidan Revolution of 14 and the war that broke out after that. And as I said, I beat...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Straightened the chest, Russia right out of Europe, and into the arms of the Chinese. When, of course, Russia is the eastern frontier of European civilization. And we're doing everything we can to change that. Joe Biden himself said no Russian leader in all history has ever thrown in as hard with the West as Vladimir Putin. As Joe Biden himself who kicked him right back out again.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without America to run the whole thing for him anyway. If you wanted to really whip the Russians and drive them out of the Donbass and Zaproja and Kerson and Crimea, you need to send in the Marines. You need to send in the Air Force and the Navy. And we're not going to do that, Lex, and Joe Biden said explicitly, we're not doing that. That's World War III. We'll give the Ukrainians everything they need to fight. As you said, zoom all the way in, here's some hero making the ultimate sacrifice. Zoom all the way out. Here's some damned fool using these people as cannon fodder on some fool's errand. They can't possibly win to deliver a strategic defeat against the Russians that they have completely failed to deliver. If anything they delivered a strategic victory to China by kicking front kicks.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chicago, and they looked at her like lady. We know that Russia and Ukraine are in Europe. We know that Russia's a bigger country than all other countries. Tell us something that we don't know And she didn't know anything that they didn't know, so she could not tell them. But she could tell them that Russia is bigger than Ukraine. She might have been able to extrapolate that they have a hell of a lot more available fighting aged males to complete this war than Ukraine, and they always will, and there's nothing anybody can do about it, other than if Joe Biden would be willing to send the United States Army in there. Fight them. Even the Germans and the French and the British and the Poles combined couldn't do it without America to help them do it.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When they said, We're going to give you all the weapons it needs as much as it takes, as long as it takes, they knew they were lying. Even Kamala Harris can tell you Russia is a bigger country. By the way, that's a real quote. I don't know if you know that, but she sounds like she's talking to a four-year-old. And I'm sure she was simply parroting her own advisors from what they told her, knowing what they told her to say, but what they told her. Ukraine is a country in Europe. Russia is a bigger country in Europe. Russia is next door to Ukraine, and Russia has invaded Ukraine, and that's bad, and we are against it. When I heard that, I thought it was fake, or I thought, come on, she was talking to elementary school kids, and you guys are taking out of context. No, she said that on the Black Eye Morning Show on the radio.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you have Ukraine, you know, Kiev versus Moscow. But then you also have Lviv versus Donetsk, right? And these nationalists from outwest trying to force their version of what Ukraine is supposed to be on the people of the East, who of course are ethnically and culturally Russian. And I'm not saying that means everyone who is so wants to join the Russian Federation, but I'm just saying there's a severe culture work going on for dominance in the country. And all of these wars are playing out at the same time. But then so anybody who says, hey, I'm defending my land, my neighborhood, my community, give me a rifle and I'll go do brave things like, hey, that is what it is. Overall, what's really happened here is the United States of America has gotten their weak friend in a fight with their stronger, tougher neighbor when we had no ability or intention whatsoever to bail them out of it.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking through the thing. You know, it's not quite as bad as Gaza because it, and look, they're conscripts, so it's very unfair, but in essence, they're wearing green and are fair game out there fighting on the field. Most of the civilians have been able to flee. The civilian deaths are counted in the single thousands, I believe, low thousands, which is absolutely horrific for those people, but at least that's like the silver lining is that it's essentially combatants fighting, but it's still absolute horror show. And you're right that look, you know, I can't deny the bravery anybody out there risking their balls for, you know, any of this stuff. But the thing is, our different wars going on, right? There's a war between the United States and Russia going on with a proxy war. Hell, there's a war with America and China going on with using Ukraine and Russia as our proxies. Then there's America and Russia using their proxies in Ukraine.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in absolute hellish worst escape, man. I mean, it's World War One plus drones, right? Muddy trenches and tank rounds and artillery, airdrop dumb bombs, and drones hunting ya. It's an absolute nightmare out there, man. Anybody with telegram that's going Jesus Christ.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The war is getting worse and worse for Ukraine all the time, so he has to say, uh, you know what? The Ukrainians believe hard, and you just need to believe hard like them. That's the level of argument that I got out of General Wesley Clark, the former four star general, supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe who served Bill Clinton launching the aggressive war against Kosovo based on lies in nineteen ninety nine, based on a false claim that the Serbs had murdered a hundred thousand Kosovar Albanians when that was a lie in their fighting for bin Laden, a bunch of heroin dealers and organ smugglers, and bin Ladenite terrorists in that war of treason. But anyway, that's General Wesley Clerk for you. But that's basically all they got. It's a bunch of believe hard and a bunch of World War II metaphors and playground metaphors because they can't talk about the actual war themselves.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're dorks, and they now have all this power and think that they know what they're doing and the best thing they can do is relive their third grade trauma getting bullied by me? My friends on the playground, you know, and they get to pretend like what they're the star of the baseball team that came and stuck up for the bullied kid. Nuh. No, they're not. That's their little fantasy that they're playing out, and they would say things like that over and over again. It's Chamberlain at Munich and the bully on the playground, but nobody can just talk about what about the ongoing war in the Donbass. Can we get off your analogies? I got an argument again for the third time I debated General Wesley Clark about Ukraine on the Pierce-Morgan show. And again, he immediately retreats to World War II fantasies. Well, that's like saying that Stalin should have given in to Hitler and because he can't talk about the war. They're losing Provost right now.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so like, no, we, and man, this is the worst Joe Biden. And Joe Biden has always been the worst since nineteen seventy three, but this is him that is absolute most dim witted. So he can't really think hard about any of these things. He mostly would just speak in historical analogies about World War II. He's Churchill facing down Hitler. And so you gonna talk him out of that? You're going to tell him that he ought to be Neville Chamberlain and appease Hitler at Munich? Of course not. You know what you got to do to a bully? You got to punch him in the nose. And I'm sure you must have heard this a hundred times in the lead up to this war. They'd all say this All these dorks We talk about yeah, you know how you face down a bully you punch him in the nose. Well how would they know? They never punched a bully in the nose before Right”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially when the Russians, and this is pointed out by Stephen Walt and by Samuel Cherrup at Rand, pointed out that, yeah, it's hard because once the Russians are demanding that we do these reasonable things? Well, now doing them seems unreasonable because we don't want to give in to their demands.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In other words, this is sticking with what they call the open door policy, which says that any country that wants to join NATO can join NATO if we say so, and no third country can say otherwise, and no third country's security interests will be taken into account. And you see how they do this in committee? They go, well, is anybody at the table here think that Russia ought to have veto power over who we allow into our military alliance? And of course, nobody raises their hand when you put it that way. So then that's it. We dismiss that forever. Now we have an open door. Now, of course, there is no door. It's just jargon. It's just meaningless garbage basically thought up by a bunch of bureaucrats. They could change it just as easy. But instead they say nope.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The consensus of all eight billion of us would be you can't have a hot war on Russia's southern western border. This could go nuclear. We have to cease fire immediately. General Strike, call it off. Somebody go to Geneva and figure this out. That's what everybody thought was happening. And so the reporters asked Ned Price, man, what are we doing to do the thing to end the thing? And Ned Price goes, well, you know, there are larger principles at stake here about independence and sovereignty and the right of a nation to direct its gaze in whichever direction that it wishes to direct its gaze.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Niall Ferguson, whose Wi-Fi humiliated in front of all those people in Las Vegas at that time, he wrote an article in Bloomberg News. Where he says, Look, everybody who's anybody in Washington and London knows that the policy is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. We're not trying to dissuade them from invading, and you could just see where right after the start of the war, somebody asked Ned Price the State Department spokesman, man, what are we doing to negotiate an end to this thing? I mean,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The media too from the era of especially December of 21 and into January and February 22, you'll find a lot of references to Afghanistan. Not our recent absolutely humiliating, disgraceful failure and ultimate withdrawal after twenty years just three months before. In the end of the summer of twenty twenty one, just three months later, they had the word Afghanistan in their mouths. We want to replicate the Afghan war. You know Rambo three. What we did to the Soviet Union in the nineteen eighties, not our Afghan war, their Afghan war, but we're going to do it this time with the Ukrainian Nazi right as the Mujahideen. And we're going to lure the Russians in, bog them down, and bleed them to bankruptcy, inflict on them a strategic defeat.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, there's a quote in there of Putin where he says, you know, I think they're trying to provoke me into invading. That's not the exact quote, forgive me, but he acknowledges that this could be a trap, but I really don't know what else to do. And quite frankly, I think that's right, Lex, and I think, and my excuse is always too damn busy recording the audiobook of the last war, enough already in the Middle East. I'm one of those generals always behind. And so I was outsourcing too much of my primary reading to my opinion pieces that I was reading from smart people and people that I was interviewing at the time, but I wasn't reading just enough of hate to say it, but just the post the times in the journal, that's who the US government talks to. So you got to read the post the times in the journal. And if you read the post in the times in the journal very carefully, and a lot of the rest.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“State, told the post and the times that we think these are reasonable treaties and that they should be negotiated, but then they did not do that. They refused to negotiate those treaties. They refused to negotiate NATO expansion. They refused to negotiate the emplacement of missiles, the potential emplacement of missiles in Ukraine, and they refused to implement Minsk II or do anything to end the civil war. And in fact, help to increase it according to the OSCE. Kiev was escalating artillery attacks on the other side of the line into the third week of February of twenty twenty two.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the ongoing war in the Donbass. And if William Burns had the mandate to figure this out, dude, then he could have. And I know that he could have, and I know that they did not try to do that. They never negotiated either of those proposed treaties. One was for the US, one was for NATO, and they were reasonable. And Lex, I have in the book not just Choss Freeman, the brilliant genius, you know, career diplomat who went to China with Nixon and was the former ambassador to Saudi and all these things who told me personally that like absolutely this is a reasonable treaty to negotiate. Am I saying we should sign on the dotted line? Hell, no. We don't do that for anyone. But is this reasonable to sit at a table and negotiate? Absolutely, and I show in the book Joe Biden Administration White House officials, possibly State Department, but at least high level officials.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was stationed in the embassy over there since the 1990s had been Bush's ambassador to Russia, and was like, if there's one guy who can work this out with Sergei Lavrov, it's William Burns. And I idiotically thought and God how stupid could I have been that I thought that of course I had William Burns' mandate from Biden will be see us through this. Prevent this war from happening, and I knew the war was preventable because the issues on the table were not just some front, some excuse. The issues on the table were deadly serious issues of NATO expansion, the potential for missile emplacements in Ukraine, especially after Trump tore up the intermediate nuclear forces treaty of 1987, which would have made it legal for America to station nuclear missiles in Europe again.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invade and saying, well, this is very coercive diplomacy, essentially. But like, come on, just give in, which I think he did offer treaties, and we're jumping way ahead in the story, I think Biden could have negotiated his way out of it if he'd been trying to. I think he was not trying to. So when Biden was president, you were saying that he did not do enough. Right, to negotiating good faith. In fact, this is why I thought there wouldn't be a war. It's not because I didn't think Putin had it in him. I'd been warning for years. He had been warning for years and I noticed. He had told an Italian diplomat in 2014, you know I could be in Kiev in two weeks. And so this was always the threat that this could get, you know, much worse. But I thought it wouldn't happen because William Burns, who is the author of the Net Means Net memo and was, I don't know if he was ever CIA, but”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rubber stamped and that the UN Security Council rubber stamped, and that America and Kiev had always refused to implement. He also, and maybe as part of enforcing that, he could have Vowed to obstruct all UN Security Council business. He's got veto power. He can vote no on anything and just grind the UN Security Council to a halt. That's a hell of a lever of pressure. He could have also cut off all gas to Western Europe through the Nord Stream he had already shut off Nord Stream one. I forgot exactly the offense that caused him to do that. It's in the book. But he had already shut down Nord Stream 1. He could have shut down Nord Stream 2 and he could have shut off all the gas pipelines running through Ukraine as well. This is in the winter of 21 we're talking about. In November, December of 21 into January, February 22. It's cold as hell. Europe is up at Canada type latitudes, man. Where it's cold in the winter up there and he could have played hardball like that. And as I complain in the book as well, he also could have been just not so damn coy about the thing, and where he kept denying that he was going to.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Putin could have done other things, like, for example, he could have again, like in 2018, demanded only this time really seriously and loudly and with the world paying close attention in a way that they weren't in eighteen, that I want baby blue helmet UN peacekeepers from a third non interested country to go stand on the border of the gray zone in the Donbass on what's supposed to be the ceasefire line in eastern Ukraine. And I demand it and I'm serious and I'm going to come up with ways to force you all to give into this. In other words, to ratchet up the tension not to start the war, but to find a creative way to force the West, to implement the Minsk II deal that the West signed along with Ukraine and Russia in twenty fifteen, and that Obama”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're so anti American Empire they start seeing, or maybe too sympathetic instead of just empathetic with the other side right and sort of maybe rationalize a bit of the Russian point of view or whatever in a way that doesn't appeal to me. I don't think you have to like honestly, I don't see anything. Well, I have in the book. It's a Bill Hicks quote, there's options. He's talking about pro-life people ought to be blocking cemeteries and preventing funerals. But he says, there's options. So I just like little tiny little Easter eggs like that.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like this guy has a sense of honor and duty in doing his job in a way that nobody else here does. Everybody else here is a Mexican cop. Going kicked out, you know what I mean? Everybody. And where he wasn't. So now I'm not saying that makes him a moral guy or whatever, but I'm saying that makes him very much like a business sort of a dude who has his priorities like in that way. He's a head of state and a powerful state and you have to be in practice a psychopath to run a country like that. That goes for Obama and the rest of'em too, man. All of these guys, it's a psychopathic job to kill people, and especially in the kind of large numbers, especially that the Americans do, but Putin's been responsible for a bit of violence himself up until even this time. And I don't think anybody underestimates. I don't, you know, there's some people, I guess, who kind of.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, he wasn't a spy, he was a clerk. Like he was, you know, he was a colonel, but like, I've never seen anything that said he's out, slit in throats and bribin' people and blackmailing people and turning spies. He was an operations guy back at headquarters. I know a lady named Susan Tennyson. You ever heard of her? She's an American who was doing outreach to the Soviet Union in the nineteen eighties, spent her whole life time. I think she's still alive. Little old lady, sweet old lady. Spent her whole lifetime trying to make friends with Russia. And she told me the story about meeting Putin when he was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and how he wouldn't take a bribe. He just wanted to get the job done, whatever the job was. She needs some bureaucratic hurdles taken. He said, well, check this box. And sign here and thank you very much and didn't want her money, which she thought was a really big deal at the time.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The guys are gangsters. How he got a job in the first place. He was part of the Yeltsin family, and he had been the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, where he worked for a criminal named Sobchek, who was part of the Yelson family. And we say family like the Italian mob in New York families. That's exactly in this exact same meaning of that term. That's what they called it at the time. And that was where he came from in the first place. And his first job really was protecting all the Yeltsin and his guys and getting them out of the country with all their money safely and then, you know, taking control of the thing. So we're ahead of the story a little bit. But the guys in SOB, you know, people say, oh, he's a KGB and he's a commi. Well, he's not a comi. He sided with the reformers against the coup plotters in August of 1991 when it counted.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What he did was he escalated the war in Ukraine by about 100,000 percent. But the war had been going on for a very long time, right? And that's very important. You know, it's not just the backstory, but it really is the start of the war was when John Brennan came to town on April the 12th and thirteenth of 2014 and demanded that the acting president Turchniov launch the war. And he did on the 14th. It was all John Brennan's fault, like a lot of things.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We promise not to expand NATO, okay? Can we reunite now? Yes, you can, shake on it. That's a deal. And the Americans lied and broke it, and they knew they're lying and breaking it. And when the Russians started complaining to the Clinton people, One Christopher launched the internal investigation at the State Department to find out if it was true or not, and they decided it was true, but that, oh well, screw them, we're going to go ahead anyway”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said at the time, yeah, Jack Kenney just faced him down. No, he made this secret deal, and it held, and it has held this whole time. They kept the missiles they've never put missiles back in Turkey we do have airdropped and hydrogen bombs and airplane station at the Inserlick base there, but we have not stationed missiles in Turkey ever since or in Italy ever since then and lived up to that deal, nor have we invaded Cuba, although they did try to murder Castro more times after that, but we haven't invaded. So that was an informal deal. It was not only a handshake deal, it was a secret and completely deniable. And yet they abided by it anyway because sometimes you got to do that. And that's the way these things go. When it comes to this, you have Peter Baker in the New York Times saying, nah, come on, if it's not in a treaty, then it's not anything at all. But that's not true. As Ted Snyder said, this wasn't just a promise. This was an agreement.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Khrushchev secretly with his brother, the attorney general, over the heads of and around the CIA and the State Department, and made a secret deal with Khrushchev that if you get your missiles out of Cuba, we will remove our mid-range missiles from Turkey. And they didn't even say this, but just implicitly also Italy, where we had stationed these same Jupiter mid-range missiles. And we promise never to invade Cuba again. That informal secret deal that wasn't revealed until the end of the Cold War.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Specifically for a trust building measure. And if we don't put it in writing and both sides just have to live up to it based on what's the right thing to do in the circumstance, then that'll help build our relationship for the better. And that's really because Roosevelt was a stalinist comedy dictator himself, but don't get me off on that tangent. But anyway, speaking of One World Communism. There was no formal arrangement over West Berlin. Then same thing when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon split Mausay Tongue off from the Soviet Union in the Cold War and made them really our allies in the war. We didn't have a war guarantee, but we had a deep relationship that they crafted at that time, all handshake deals, nothing official, no treaties how they handled it. When in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy negotiated with”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the Senate, but that's not true. Anderson especially goes through and shows some examples, and there are plenty of others, but you have the entire arrangement around West Berlin, for example, which your younger viewers may not know, that West Berlin, the western half of Berlin, was a free city wholly within Kami East Germany, was still occupied by the US as a remnant of the Second World War. And so it's a very complicated situation there. But America's entire arrangement with the Soviets about how to treat West Berlin, checkpoint Charlie and all these things, was purely handshake agreements. They had no treaty at all. And Roosevelt, in fact, when he was still alive, they were already working on this and said that the agreement that we were already working out over Vienna, Austria should also apply to Berlin, and he did not want it on a piece of paper because he wanted it specifically.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helmut Cole went and met with Gorbachev, and he knew that H.W. Bush wanted to reconsider this and thought that Baker was being too conciliatory, but Helmut Cole went ahead and stuck with the day before yesterday's interpretation, or was it just yesterday's interpretation instead of the new one, because he knew that that's what he wanted Gorbachev to hear, that this is how it's going to be. And it was based on that promise from Helmut Kohl that Gorbachev said, okay, fine, you can do it. And Helmut Kohl said, can I quote you on that right now? And he goes, yeah. And Helmut Kohl went right outside and held a press conference. So Gorbachev just said that Germany can reunite. Blam, got it. Now, was that in a treaty like right there? It was just a spoken word, but they moved to reunite right then based on it. The treaty came later, right? So same kind of thing here. They try to argue that words don't mean things only when it's a treaty.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hans Dietrich Gentr made the most of this, but so did the Chancellor Helmut Kohl. And this is the part a Mary Elise Surratt wrote a whole book about this called Not One Inch, and she has a whole hell of a lot on this, as her and Schiffranson are probably the two best on it, although I think he's probably got the edge. But she shows where”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The promise, they're kind of revising it because they have to because the first in the first sense the promise doesn't actually make rational sense you can't really bring you can't reunite Germany but only leave the first half inside the military alliance okay but they said okay but we're not going to build new bases and station forces further east and we're not going to put nuclear weapons there okay so they're still respecting that promise and that part ended up in the final Washington final treaty that they signed.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anybody ever meant by that was Baker said in a weird way that if you allow Germany to reunite, we won't spread NATO one inch inside Germany. That's where the phrase not one inch comes from. That doesn't make any sense. It's not like the East German government is going to be the government of the New Germany, right? Bonn is going to move to Berlin, and West Germany is going to be the regime that rules the new reunited Germany, right? No question about that. So how is it that only the western half of the country is in NATO? That doesn't make sense. So then they had to walk that back and go, okay, well, you know what we'll do, though, is Yes, obviously the whole country will be in NATO, but we promise not to move any substantial military forces into the then GDR, East Germany. That was short for German Democratic Republic, which was commi enslaved East Germany. We promise not to move our forces in there or nuclear weapons into the eastern part. So they're still respected.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the deal is, and as I show in the book, it's not just that James Baker said this one time on February the ninth, nineteen ninety. He said it six times on february ninth, nineteen ninety, and on many other, in fact, on that same day, Robert Gates, who was then the Deputy Secretary of Deputy Director of the CIA, told the same thing to the director of the KGB in a meeting on that same day in Moscow. And then the German foreign minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher, said this over and over and over again, including in public at public press conferences right in front of James Baker, who only nodded in assent and never said anything against it, that we promise not only not to expand NATO, but that includes in, because here's the rub, and this is what makes it a little complicated. And maybe people's eyes glaze over or party tries to say this is all.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just promises, but it was an agreement that we promise not to expand the NATO alliance if you'll allow the reunification of Germany. And that was what convinced me. Gorbachev to say, okay, fine. We'll agree to withdraw and allow Germany to reunify under NATO.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people keep trying to debunk this, but they can't. I have rebunked it and they cannot at all challenge the facts, as I marshal in my book, and it's overkill. This is one of the two sections where I have probably far more than I need to demonstrate my case because I tried to simply on, I think I already said this earlier in our review, I'm sorry, on the case of the promises against NATO expansion and on the subject of the Ukrainian Nazis, I went for absolute overkill on the citation and the development of the idea and the story and the proof and what it all means because I feel like those are the two most controversial stances that I'm taking in the book as being factually true and I want the skeptical reader to say oh boy I didn't really realize it was like that when they're done.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In all of this. And I give credit to Joshua Schiffrinson, is the great academic. I believe he's now at Cato. He was at Texas A&M University, and I'm not sure where else he has written, but he wrote a bunch of great journal articles that I learned a hell of a lot from and cite in my book where he shows explicitly it's beyond argument that they knew that they were lying. They were planning one thing and they were doing something else. And he's very polite and says that they were knowingly misleading, I think. But I call him damn liars, as pretty clear that they were. And so that's a huge part of it, just to get us started off here in the 1990s. What are we going to do? Oh, and I'm sorry. Yes, we're going to expand NATO. But first, it's important to emphasize that, yes, in fact, they did promise not to.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they said we were cool and we're doing what we promised we wouldn't while they were telling everybody else don't worry about the Americans we can trust them it's all good and this and that right so they knew this was going to destroy Yeltsin politically so they promised that no Boris no no man don't worry we're not gonna do it until after you're safely re-elected in'96 they absolutely understood all of them, understood the depth of how destructive that would be to him because of how the entire consensus inside Russia at that time and their entire political and foreign policy establishment was absolutely opposed to NATO expansion and were of course terrified by it and this is all before Putin or W. Bush ever come to town. This is just HW Bush and Bill Clinton ears and dealing with Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are expanding NATO after all because, man, they knew that this is going to destroy Yeltsin. This is going to cause such pressure against him. In fact, when Clinton gave his speech announcing that he had been lying and that he really does mean to expand NATO in nineteen ninety four, Yeltsin freaked out because he misunderstood that Bill Clinton was saying that we're going to start doing it next year in ninety five, which was Clinton had promised him that they definitely would not do that. Yelson had to stand for reelection in'96, and this would absolutely destroy him, and they all knew at Lex, was that me? That means that every pro American moderate English speaking liberal in Moscow Would be implicated”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were lying, man. They never meant to do that. The plan always was to expand NATO, of course, to keep it a military alliance and to keep it the center of American power in Europe and to use the CSCE and then later the Clinton administration's version of this same scam was called the Partnership for Peace, where Warren Christopher knowingly the Secretary of State knowingly lied directly to Gorbachev's face and tried to make him believe that we're doing the partnership for peace instead of NATO expansion and or again reiterating that NATO's just going to be this political thing and we're not really doing much with it anyway right now at all when they knew that wasn't true. They had already decided that they were going to expand NATO for certain the decision had been made like in stone by then and they were just shining them on and trying to get them to go along with their further agendas as much as they could get away with as long as they could get away with it before breaking the bad news to them.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Matter because what we're really talking about is something that's sort of like the EU plus the United States. But it's going to be relegated to a political organization and it's going to be replaced by the CSCE. Because who needs an alliance? There's no enemy. And we want to be partners with you. And since Russia and all the Middle States in Central and Eastern Europe and far eastern Europe, if you want to call it that, right, the Baltics and Ukraine and Belarus are all members of the CSCE already since the Helsinki Accords of nineteen seventy five. Well, then cool. Everybody's neutrality is baked in, and we're all in it together”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to ask yourself how does that look from Russia's side? And how it looks from Russia's side is an explicitly anti Russian military alliance encroaching steadily toward their borders. And obviously regards that as a threat. And when I say obviously, I mean the George HW Bush administration understood that that would be a result of NATO expansion. That's why they lied and said what we're going to do is we're going to empower what was then called the CSCE, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is now called the OSCE for Organization. We're going to empower them and we're going to have a security partnership. And so what's going to happen is NATO is going to become irrelevant. We're going to marginalize. NATO is essentially going to become a political organization. So even if it expands, it doesn't really...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source