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Due to popular demand, we are making available the transcript of our two-part debate with Glenn Greenwald on Ukraine and the future of American power. We see conversations such as these as a model of what we are trying to do at Wisdom of Crowds: encouraging spirited but civil disagreements about fundamental questions. We hope you find it useful for your own thinking on the Russian invasion and what it means for the United States.

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Without further ado, our conversation with Glenn Greenwald, lightly edited for clarity.

Shadi Hamid: So Glenn, welcome. I'm excited about this episode because we're doing something we haven't quite done before. It's part of the Wisdom of Crowds ethos that we encourage disagreement and we don't try to paper over those disagreements, but I think this might actually be the first time, where we're discussing something where our guests might be on the "opposite side." I'm not sure if that's fair to say, we'll find out. But I'm excited to dive into these issues. Obviously, we're going to be talking about Russia and Ukraine and how we as Americans should be responding to it. So, maybe just to start, so we're all on the same page, we're two weeks into the invasion, a lot has already happened obviously. What would you say you're most worried about at this very moment, what is keeping you up and obviously, we'll include some of your recent pieces on Substack, in the show notes, so readers will have an idea about what you've been arguing. But maybe just, what's consuming you right now?

Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, well, first of all, it's great to be back on the show. I'm glad you guys invited me, particularly since as you said, we definitely have different perspectives, to say the least on the war itself, although not necessarily every component of it. And I think asking that question, what is concerning me is a good way to isolate what those differences are. Obviously, when you look at a war that involves one country invading another, bombing it, shelling it, flattening buildings and neighborhoods, it's horrific to watch. And nobody that's a decent person would say, they're happy to see Russia do it, they think it's justified for Russia to invade, or anything like that. We can all kind of agree that the war is horrific and devastating to watch emotionally, morally, and in every other way. But for me that just doesn't get us very far any more than it got us very far to say, the 9/11 attack was a moral atrocity. It was, but a lot of people who joined in with that correct moral evaluation nonetheless ended up endorsing a variety of false claims and a variety of misguided policies in response.

And that's the first thing that is my primary concern is what is the role of my own government, what is the role of my own country in this war going to be, and what has it been thus far? I am relieved that Joe Biden and other Western leaders like Boris Johnson and NATO allies seem continuously steady on their insistence that say a no-fly zone or anything that would put American troops directly in a military confrontation with the Russians, is ill-advised and not even something that's on the table. I nonetheless worry, that the US is already so heavily involved in Ukraine and has been for so many years and that the emotions around this were building so rapidly that clearly there's a lot more pressure than there was two weeks ago on the US government to do more, and I'm concerned about what that might be. That's the first thing.

The second thing is, this is kind of prohibition, on putting this war into context, by which I mean, asking why it happened? Who was at fault for bringing about the conditions where it took place? Whether or not we can focus on similar acts that our own government has done? All of this is prohibited. We're only allowed to say, it's Putin's fault, Russia is to blame, this war is hideous and morally atrocious, and that's it. And the concern that I have about that kind of discourse is, I do think it creates this kind of revitalized faith in American militarism, American power, which Shadi you wrote, I think a very eloquent case for, in the Atlantic. I've seen other people like, Ian Bremmer saying the same thing, that this war is going to have the opposite effect of the Iraq war which brought a lot of skepticism about American power, American intelligence community, American claims, this is almost like the opposite. Convincing everybody no, this time we're on the right side, this shows why American militarism is for the good, why it's so needed, and I'm worried about the long-term enduring effects of how people are reacting.

Shadi Hamid: For context of how we got here, on the question of who's at fault, what would you say to that, just so we're clear?

Glenn Greenwald: Well, who's at fault? I guess I could use the September 11th analogy to talk about this. You can say, what Al-Qaeda did on September 11th is inexcusable and immoral and nothing justifies it, and that is my view. I nonetheless believed and still believe, that it's important to look at what their grievances were, what actually motivated people to fly planes into buildings and to look at the policies that we had engaged in prior to that that created so much animus and hatred and perception of threat, in that part of the world. Things that they said, like, placing our military on Saudi soil, the sanctions regime that killed 500,000 Iraqis, our kind of unflinching support for Israel, no matter how abusive they are toward Palestinian rights, this constant interference in that part of the world, propping up dictators, and removing democratically elected leaders. It's important to understand that that set the conditions that created this climate where hatred levels were so high, that people would want to come and do that to our shores, so that we can understand our enemy, but also to prevent this kind of continuous provocation on our part of increasing anti-American sentiment to that level.

I think you can say the same thing here. There's nothing that justifies an invasion of Ukraine the way that Russia did it. But it's still worth asking whether America and NATO expansion up to the Russian border, and then kind of insinuating that Ukraine, the most sensitive area of the Russian border, could actually become part of that NATO expansion, was provocative. It’s something that for 20 years, not Noam Chomsky only, but US officials, very mainstream ones, including the current director of the CIA said would be highly provocative not just to Putin but to any Russian leader. There has been constant interference in Ukraine since 2014 at least, we played some role in the change of government. No one can doubt that the Ukrainians did too, but we were there helping push it and financing it and engineering it and then since 2014, there has been lots of American involvement right on the Russian border in ways that if they were doing it to us in Mexico or Canada or Cuba or Venezuela, we would obviously find it very threatening. And I think it's worth asking that, not to suggest the Russians were justified, but to understand what role we've been playing in increasing the tensions that caused Russia to feel threatened and encircled and have their national security at risk.

Damir Marusic: So Glenn, we can get into this at length. I share a lot of that criticism. And I've warned about that myself in my own writing and research and stuff that we published in various places. I've always looked for pieces that have warned about us getting into this situation. Even in my last piece, I had an argument against the no-fly zone, incidentally, here on Wisdom of Crowds. I pointed to the fact that, in so far as we led on the Ukrainians, and perhaps I should have included the Russians, to believe that we had a security commitment or commitment to their territorial integrity that was going to hold. We do have blood on our hands in that regard because you know, I think the way we got here was a lot of wishful thinking on the parts of government, and Ukrainians themselves. The whole story of NATO enlargement is often told from the American perspective, and the kind of policy activists that really wanted this. But the other history is that a lot of these countries really wanted it.

Glenn Greenwald: For sure.

Damir Marusic: Most of the countries that came out, they were asking for it. Part of the tragedy of all this is that Ukraine and Georgia felt incredibly threatened and worried about this sort of stuff. Yes, we did do democracy promotion, we were doing that. That's something that America does. It's part of its DNA. And we were leading up to this point. It's important though that of course, we didn't extend those guarantees to Georgia and Ukraine. And while the NATO expansion argument goes back and forth, I think that's important for listeners to understand that. Certainly there's been a tussle within US policy circles about whether or not to extend those guarantees. And we've ended up in a particularly nasty place as a result of this, and I think it's terrible.

Damir Marusic: But something I note sometimes in your writing and I want to sort of push you on, from my perspective the horror of this is that we walked into this. I sometimes get a sense when you write about it that you're almost saying that the United States caused it, that there was a plan of some sort. And that this war then emanates from this kind of American drive, almost that it's willed. Taking everything I just said, I'm not saying we're not responsible. This to me has been like a slow-moving car wreck and the cars have finally collided and there's blood everywhere. And from my perspective, that doesn't absolve anything in policy mistakes in getting here, but it's not quite... I always feel like, when I'm reading you, that you're angry about it as if we are really causing it in a way. Does that make sense or can you react to that a little bit?

Glenn Greenwald: Yeah. We might have even talked about this the first time I was on your show. The way that I try and do journalism comes from how I started to do journalism. I didn't go work for the New York Times, the Washington Post, or NBC News. In 2005, I felt there were these grave attacks on civil liberties that very few people were talking about and the climate in the mainstream media was still very much where it was difficult to raise serious criticisms about George Bush and Dick Cheney. There was this kind of still ongoing sense of patriotism. So, I just created a blog and started writing based on my perception that there were a lot of things not being talked about that I wanted to shine a light on. And oftentimes, I still view that as my role. Some people say, "Why don't you criticize Trump more?" And my argument has always been, well, there's 90% of the media every day, you wake up and you can read criticisms of Trump. No one needs me to go and echo that. I'm trying to show things that are being overlooked, not things that are being echoed by everybody.

I don't think that does much good, I don't think it's a good use of my journalistic platform. So, people say, "Well, why don't you criticize Russia more? Why don't you talk about Putin's attacks on civil liberties?" Or, "Why don't you condemn with greater vehemence the assault on Ukraine?" I look around and I see basically everybody doing that. It's a complete consensus, with very little to dissent. And so, I try and use my platform to raise questions that I think are being just run roughshod over, that people don't want to ask. So, if your suggestion is that I harbor a view that the United States had this grand master plan, this kind of dastardly, sinister, conspiratorial plan to lure Russia into an invasion of Ukraine, I don't. Maybe I used to think of the government that way, 10 or 15 years ago when I kind of really started delving into the work of the CIA and the Pentagon and during the War on Terror, but I've come to see that the US government is nowhere near that competent.

Shadi Hamid: Yeah.

Glenn Greenwald: So, I don't think that that's what it is. I do though think that a lot of these actions were designed to be provocative toward Russia. And it was more just an indifference about what the results would be. And I think, now that Russia is in Ukraine, I absolutely think that American military planners see an opportunity which is to prolong the war, to arm an insurgency, to trap Russia there, to turn Ukraine into Syria or Afghanistan, which is very much contrary to the claim that we're there to help Ukrainians. Obviously, a prolonged insurgency war, in Ukraine, like in Afghanistan or Syria, would have the opposite effect.

The thing that I guess concerns me the most is we were warned about this war for weeks if not months before it was coming. The Russians signaled that they were intent on doing something serious. They had amassed 200,000 troops on the Ukrainian border. I think there were things that the US could have done, that the US government could have done and should have done to try and negotiate a way of averting this war, including just saying, “We're not going to put Ukraine in NATO.” And have the Ukrainians say, “We're going to be neutral, we're not going to be on one side or the other given how sensitive this part of the border is.” It seemed like there was no interest in doing that. Even at the beginning of the war when Zelenskyy wanted to negotiate after seeing what was going to happen to his country, there were lots of reports saying that the Americans were against it. They were telling him they thought it was futile, that it would reward aggression, that he shouldn't do it. So I do think there's a kind of a sense that, whether it was by design or just now seized on opportunistically, I think American military planners and NATO leaders are quite happy to see the situation Russia finds itself in.

Shadi Hamid: So, you're saying that one possibility was that Biden could have put pressure on the Ukrainians to declare some kind of neutrality. But the issue here is that Ukraine is a democratic country, and Ukrainians themselves have preferences and it seems that they've had a preference for some time to lean towards the West. Who are we to go in and tell them that they have to take a national position on something that is dear to them, that is contrary to their own desires and interests? I think that ultimately we're talking about sovereign nations that should be able to choose. They're not just part of Russia's sphere of influence. And just because Russia has cared historically about Ukraine, that shouldn’t mean it has veto power over what the Ukrainian government does. That would be in a sense, imperialist, and anti-democratic. It would be negating the will of the Ukrainian people. So what's wrong if a majority of Ukrainians say, "No, we want to lean towards the West. We don't want to be officially neutral. This is our will."?

Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, first of all, there were things the US could have done independent of Ukraine. Ukraine may want to be in a military alliance where 30 big powerful Western countries for protection, in the event that it would be attacked. I don't blame them for that, I can assure you that here in Latin America where I live, given the history of most of these countries having been attacked and assaulted in various ways in terms of their sovereignty over the years by the United States, including recently with Honduras and Bolivia, and lots of other countries. Every one of these countries would love if China or Russia came and said “Hey, we're willing to give you a guarantee that if the United States in any way starts attacking you, or interfering in your politics, we'll consider that an attack on ourselves.” Who wouldn't want that? That's fantastic.

But that doesn't mean that the US and NATO have to give that to everybody who asks. There's a lot of calculations and self-interest involved, which is why Ukraine is not yet in NATO. Let's set that aside for the moment. Let’s assume the position of the Ukrainians was, “We want to be in NATO, we want to lean toward the EU, we want to be in your sphere of influence and not theirs.” That still leaves the United States and NATO with a lot of room to negotiate and say we're not going to put them in NATO because we know how provocative that is. We're not willing to go to fight a war with Russia over Ukraine. Which I think is the position of most Western powers and there was no attempt to formalize that as a way of averting this war.

The other thing is, I mean look, yes, in the ideal world, in this nice perfect world where everybody's sovereignty and democracy are respected and everybody gets to decide for themselves what kind of country they want to be, theoretically it's true that the Ukrainians should have the right to say whatever they want for themselves and the US shouldn't pressure them. The reality as you all know is completely the opposite. We pressure countries all the time, using our power and our leverage, to do what it is that we want, whether it's contrary to or in line with what the citizens of those countries want. Including in Ukraine, you can go listen to you know the audio of Victoria Nuland, and the ambassador to Ukraine, where they basically all but chose the Ukrainian president for the Ukrainians.

We were involved so much in the governance of Ukraine over the course of many years. There's a reason why Burisma paid Joe Biden's son $50,000 a month and not the son of some Ukrainian official. It was a recognition of where the power was inside Ukraine, who could actually do the favors for Burisma, who wielded the real power in there. The other point is, the idea that the United States is governed by a view that it wants to respect the sovereignty and democratic values of other countries while at the same time, our closest allies in the world, are some of the worst despots. You know, we arm and prop up, and support the Egyptians and the Saudis and the Emiratis and Qataris, and throughout history have done the same. I don't think it's very credible to say that the goal of the United States is to ensure that the sovereignty and democratic will of a small country are protected because so many of our actions run counter to that claim.

Shadi Hamid: But, I'm saying that...

Glenn Greenwald: That's the pretext, but that's not the reality.

Shadi Hamid: But I'm saying that it should be a goal. We should aspire to be better on that front. As you know, Glenn, I'm a pretty outspoken critic of our support for repressive regimes in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and so forth. But it's precisely because of that position of mine that makes me sensitive to this idea that the US goes in and coerces or pressures democratically elected governments. Just because we've been really bad in the Middle East on this doesn't mean we can't be better in Ukraine. But I do want to just touch on I think a bigger...

Glenn Greenwald: Oh, wait, before you go on, just let me just add one quick point about that. This is a part of the narrative that has been bothering me.

If Ukraine was this independent democratic country that we kind of just observe from a distance, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere Russia invaded and started bombing it and making demands of it, and we could credibly say, "Hey, there's this democracy over there that deserves to be respected. It shouldn't have big powers interfering and dominating." But the reality again is, at least since 2014, with whatever you want to call it, a revolution or coup, whatever you want to label it, there's no doubt that the United States played an important role. Which doesn't mean that Ukrainians didn't also, but the United States was heavily involved in that change of government in 2014. And with so much other micro-managing of their governance since then, that it's just not the case that Ukraine is this democratic sovereign independent country that isn't controlled by or has interference of other great powers.

The United States has been operating in there in all sorts of ways, and the Russians know that and perceive that. And I think that especially with Russiagate over the last five years where hostility between the United States and Russia was deliberately intensified, where it almost became inherently suspect if not criminal for an American official to even talk to a Russian official or a diplomat, this hostility emerged between these two nuclear powers that a lot of us were concerned about with Russiagate and were worrying about. I think that caused a lot of what the United States was doing in Ukraine to be perceived as even more threatening than it otherwise would have been to Russia absent that scandal that constantly hyped up hostility toward Moscow.

Shadi Hamid: Point taken, but I think there's also an alternative reading of the last 15 years of history. I touched on this in my Atlantic piece, that Russia saw weakness. There were times when we were deferential towards Russia in key conflict. First in 2008, with Russia's attack on Georgia, and that was when George W. Bush was president, and we didn't respond as I think many Georgians may have liked. Then a few years passed, and we have Crimea in 2014. And the Syrian intervention where Russia came in and backed Assad's regime in a rather brutal way. Again, there were opportunities for the US to push back.

We don't have to go into whether or not we should have done more on Syria and all of that, but I just want to say that at different points successive American presidents decided not to escalate with Russia. They decided not to be overly confrontational. So when I hear the discourse of the US being provocative towards Russia, maybe parts of it are true, but there are also other parts which suggest that we've been trying to avoid an over-confrontation for quite some time, and perhaps we've been maybe too... I don't want to say nice to the Russians, but we've invited them to view us as weak. Not to use a cliché here, but I think it is fair to say that Putin senses weakness, he senses fecklessness, and his interpretation was that the US was on the decline and we didn't have our shit together, and he could get away with a lot of things he wanted to do.

Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, I think you're right about that, although I wouldn't necessarily define it as fecklessness. I pointed this out before, in 2016, Obama, and this was after Crimea and after Georgia—he was in the last year of his presidency, and he gave this long really in-depth interview to Jeffrey Goldberg about what are the underpinnings of his foreign policy, and Jeffrey Goldberg was voicing what a lot of people in both parties felt. This frustration toward Obama for not having confronted Russia more in Syria, but including in Ukraine, where people wanted Obama to authorize way greater amounts of lethal arms to be sent to the Ukrainians, and Obama wasn't willing to do so. And Jeffrey Goldberg was pressing him on this.

I guess you can look at this as fecklessness, or you can look at this as just realism. Obama said, "Look, the reality is, Ukraine is and always has been and always will be a vital interest to Russia, and it has never been and never will be a vital interest to the United States. We will never go to war with Russia over Ukraine, and therefore, there's just not anything that we can really do to prevent Russia if they perceive a threat in Ukraine from acting. Just like for example, if we perceived a threat in Venezuela or Peru or a Caribbean nation like Grenada, Russia wouldn't go to war with the United States in what everyone considers to be our region of influence.” And I don't know. I guess the question I have is, do you think Obama was wrong about that? Do you think we should consider Ukraine to be in our sphere of vital interest to American security such that we're willing to fight a war with Russia over it?

Damir Marusic: Can I jump in here? Because I know that Shadi hated that interview a lot or hated Obama in that interview more than perhaps Jeffrey Goldberg. So I'll let Shadi get into that. But I just wanted to jump in on two points and then I think this could maybe get us talking about this in terms that I want to talk through with Shadi as well. It's something we go back and forth a lot on. First point, I don't want to lose this, but to your point that what the United States could have done in the run-up to the war about declaring that Ukraine is not welcomed in NATO, basically officially shutting the open door policy of NATO.

The main problem was, and actually continues to be, you saw it in Biden's speech where he doubled down now on NATO's existing borders. The problem with these half promises to Ukraine is that first, they set up expectations. But the logic  of NATO is that the alliance itself feels incredibly vulnerable, or the front line states feel very vulnerable. Stepping down in front of that kind of build-up of forces, I think would have had actual impacts on all of NATO. And I'd argue to you that while we focus on Russian imperial ambitions, the arguments you put forth that it's a question of threat, the other I think pretty clear ambition of Putin's was in fact he perceived that NATO itself was fragile. He wanted to show, especially front line states, that it was not reliable.

So again, from talking to government officials and just the background of it, I'm fairly sure that that was a large part of the calculus why Biden went out of his way to meet and constantly talk to the Russians, but they were not willing to take that step. The interesting question is, and you're seeing it now with the Israelis going in to actually mediate between the Ukrainians and the Russians, the deal is more or less the same that Putin is offering. He has backed off. It looks like Zelenskyy may be able to stay in power as long as he basically neutralizes the country and renounces its claims to NATO. What my argument was always, ultimately, Putin doesn't trust us at all anymore, he thinks we're weak or that the whole alliance is overstretched and weak. He's probably changed his calculus since the invasion, but at that point, what he really needed was the Ukrainians to renounce it themselves.

And that gets back to that question of agency that Shadi was pushing you on. I think it is an important question we'll be thinking about in the aftermath of this, however it ends up. Zelenskyy himself, I think, didn't believe it could happen, or if it did, it wouldn't be quite as big, even though everyone was giving him the intel that it was. They were going to drive for Kyiv, it was going to be a decapitation strike. He didn't believe it. I personally didn't think Putin would actually go for the whole thing like this. That's one thing I didn't count on, but still, it really was on the Ukrainians themselves to make that choice. It was the only credible one, quite frankly, that they could have made. Now, one can say that Zelenskyy himself would have been assassinated by Ukrainian hardliners on this if he had done that. That's plausible.

So there were all sorts of pressures, which again leads to that question of, I think it's a really tragic situation we got ourselves into rather than a nefarious one. Even if I grant you most of the stuff that's saying all the mistakes we made leading up to it. But this gets to the other part of my notes here. Listening to you talk, you bring up Burisma, you talk about the corruption that's endemic there, the very imperfect nature of Ukrainian democracy. And I would be the last person to deny that the United States was not involved there. The way you characterize it though is where I get uncomfortable because I generally am uncomfortable with the whole democracy promotion project, the whole overarching bureaucracy that we have surrounding it, but at the same time, I recognize it's also part and parcel of what America is.

I think Shadi's much more comfortable with it, but really the more benign, and again, in my frame—walking into a buzzsaw in slow motion—this is just what we do. And yeah, sure Victoria Nuland was going around running her mouth. She likes running her mouth, she's loud. And yes, of course, we were working with civil society and helping political powers get in. And of course, it was in our interest to promote democracy, and the democracy that we stood up was absolutely imperfect. Before the war, Ukraine had a lot of problems, obviously. I think the way I would characterize America is, it blunders into this kind of empire, but it's a different kind of empire. It's an empire based on this kind of bureaucratic apparatus that is all about spreading democracy and instilling it and building it.

I guess the question to you Glenn, also to Shadi is: Is that something we should think about going forward? Is that bureaucracy that creates these situations a liability? I'm not sure we can do anything about it. I think it's just so built into the American psyche that this is just how we do things, and then we end up with messes at the limit here. But again, I wanted to push back on this idea that Ukraine was an American puppet state. Obviously, there was a desire for economic reasons. We represent prosperity in a lot of ways. The European Union represents prosperity as well. They blunder into all sorts of stuff with their idealism about these things also. In 2014 they did as well. Because let's not forget that wasn't about NATO, that was about signing an association agreement with the European Union. And it's this idea that history is moving this way and we nudge it forward. Sure, perceptions are different on the other side, and sure, it's reckless. But do you know what I mean? Where I really want to push back on is this idea that perceptions for whatever reason—and I'm happy to talk about Russian perceptions and the scheme of Putin's rise and fall and how we get there—it's just a lot less nefarious, than you just laid it out Glenn in some of your exposition, to the last questions.

Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, there's a lot to dig into there. And there are several points I want to address, but before I do, I want to clarify your position. Your argument and this word blunders always bothers me, because it always is seemingly designed to suggest that, when the United States goes places and blows things up and kills civilians, invades countries, and bombs all kinds of structures, it's doing it almost like it’s kind of like a hapless, well-intentioned giant, that just steps on its own toes sometimes and kind of falls down, but there's no morally sanctionable motive behind it. It's just kind of like a happy-go-lucky error, that we make, like, "Oh we just blundered.” And this kind of language of moral evils is reserved for the countries that are adverse to us, and I guess the question I have for you is: When you look at what the Russians are doing in Ukraine, do you think there are things that they're doing that are different in kind or worse in kind than what the United States did in say, Iraq?

Damir Marusic: Look, this is where I feel like I'm insulated from this because I really avoid moral language and a lot of this stuff. And this is where Shadi and I really have been arguing back and forth. That's why I think the two of you arguing on the moral part is more interesting. I can give you a many-layered analysis of how the Russians have found themselves in this situation. They blundered into it themselves.

It’s not like this is any kind of brilliant move by Putin. It looks like it's potentially quite a catastrophic move for Putin at this point. And I think there's plenty to talk about how we have reacted to this right now, whether we're boxing ourselves into a really nasty situation. I think there's plenty to unpack there. But from my perspective, I fall back on this question of trying to do analysis once removed on this, and really having more of an appreciation of the tragic nature, the tragic recurring nature of all of this. I feel sometimes you shade into this idea that even the United States has a plan around it. And again, we can unpack individual things, but that's where I fall back on that. I think I can very comfortably say that, what the Russians are doing in Ukraine is completely barbarous, and we have waged some very barbarous wars, and I don't feel any compunction about saying that.

And I don't think that traps me in a kind of equivalence, largely because at the limits, there are all these other qualifying things like what I was saying. That the United States basically blunders into a lot of this stuff. And I'll leave the Middle East to you and Shadi. I do a lot on Russia and on Ukraine and Europe. To me, a lot of the European stuff, that post Cold War stuff, is more based on a kind of idealism run grossly amuck. Idealism that doesn't appreciate the role of potential violence and conflict, that really believes in a kind of better world that's possible out there. And it's quite frankly, not worried enough about it and is not cynical enough about how the world works. That's where I come from this. And that's how I criticize the United States: that we're idiots in a lot of ways on this, largely because we believe in things that we get carried away with. So that's my criticism.

Shadi Hamid: So, I disagree with Damir there. I'll just offer up a different perspective on equivalency. And I know, Glenn, that you'll disagree quite strongly with what I'm about to say, but I think it will be interesting. The Iraq War, I think that we all agree here, was a disaster. It was one of the worst moments in American foreign policy. My early days being political, post 9-11, were spent participating in the anti-war movement and seeing this as an incredibly stupid and dangerous thing it happened. But there is a key difference in the sense that, first of all, Russia is an authoritarian regime. The US is not. And then the target, Saddam: authoritarian. Ukraine: somewhat democratic. There are important differences that don't excuse anything the US does, I want to be clear on that. But to put them side by side and say, "One equals one, and they're both equally bad," misses some really important nuances. I don't think American policymakers, as bad as they are and have been in various instances, wake up in the morning and think "Oh, we want to eliminate the Iraqi people." Intent matters.

Outcomes can be similar in terms of lives lost, and one might argue that those on the receiving end of American bombs don't care about intent. I care about intent for a variety of reasons, one of them is that morality doesn't really exist without intentions, we have to know why people do what they do and what motivates them and that does matter. So I just don't see anything comparable where we invade a country and try to conquer it, and then basically try to perhaps occupy it indefinitely. Now, there was an occupation in Iraq of course, but we did then pass on control to a democratically elected government that became pretty anti-American in some ways, pro-Iran in other ways. So clearly, the idea that Iraq was a solid member of an American empire, and they were just a puppet state that we used to do whatever we wanted to do, I just don't think that holds.

And then also, Saddam... Not to go into the whole Saddam thing, but the fact that Saddam was a brutal dictator is different than what Ukraine is, as I mentioned earlier. Anyway, those are just maybe a couple of points I would raise. I think you'll disagree, but I'm curious how you would respond to that.

Glenn Greenwald: Look, motives are very difficult to discern. They are things you could never prove with certainty. We have a hard enough time, at least in my experience, discerning our own motives when we do certain things. Generally, our motives are very mixed. We often deceive ourselves about what our real motives are. We make them more noble. Trying to discern what other people's motives are is even more difficult. And then trying to characterize the motives of an entire government or an institution, is even more difficult still.

What I think is that, first of all, we all are tribal beings, no matter how rational we try to be. This tribalism was embedded with us over millennia. It's just naturally how we see the world. And so I think we all have a tendency to believe that our side, that our tribe, is better. We're just taught that. We're taught to see the world through the prism of our side. And so I think it's just natural to assume that when we see our government using the same weapons, cluster bombs and thermobaric bombs, and killings of civilians, and calling our attack on Iraq, shock and awe —designed to just unleash so much firepower that it terrorizes not just the military, but the entire country into submission so there wouldn't be an insurgency—I think it's very easy to get ourselves to believe that even though it looks like what the Russians are doing, we have good motives, and their motives are somehow more malicious. I have no doubt that the Russians believe the opposite about what their government is doing, at least a lot of them. Obviously, there's descent on both sides. They believe what's really going on in Ukraine is there are genuinely right-wing extremists, Nazis, people who are brutalizing the Russian-speaking minorities in eastern Ukraine.

They believe that the US is there building chemical labs and threatening them and that it's actually just a war of self-defense in a way that nobody could say the war in Iraq was. No one could say that Iraq was ever threatening the United States. So I think you could make that case the other way. But there's a huge difference, a huge difference between attacking a country right on your border, where the world's greatest superpower is involved in all kinds of ways, versus packing up an entire army, and going all the way across the world, and invading and attacking a country that no one can credibly suggest was actually threatening to you.

You could make the opposite case that if anything, there's a greater self-defense argument for what Russia is doing in Ukraine, than what the US did in Iraq, or Yemen with the Saudis, or Libya with NATO, or what happened in Afghanistan.

So I think ultimately, you just have to look at the actions. And this is part of what's bothering me is, if you look at all the reasons we're supposed to be so aghast at what the Russians are doing; They use cluster bombs. They use these radiation bombs. The bombs that vaporize people. They're killing civilians. These are all things the United States has done. And that's not what-about-ism, or it's not a way of justifying what Russia has done.

It's a way of saying, the discourse to the extent that it convinces Americans to believe that what Russia is doing is so uniquely and unprecedented-ly evil, that we should be enraged like no other war should enrage us, I think is a form of dangerous propaganda, because it lets us believe that we are superior to what the Russians are doing. And I think it's a very hard case to make. At least in many of those cases, we have done the same.

And then the other issue I alluded to before. Yes, it's true that in the case of Iraq, we went to war against a government that was savage and brutal, in Saddam Hussein. Again, motives are difficult, but if you want to make an assertion about what motivates somebody in a particular case, you'd look at their other actions and see whether it's consistent with that motivation.

The United States has supported some of the most wretched murderous despots ever to plague the 20th century and the 21st century. Just General Suharto alone in Indonesia, that was one of the United State's closest allies for decades, that the United States helped install and build up. And throughout Latin America and obviously in the Middle East, if you look at who the United States supports and what the United States is willing not just to tolerate, but root for and build up and empower, then it's incredibly difficult to make the argument that when we say that we're motivated in our wars by a desire to spread freedom and democracy that is actually our real motive. I don't think our actions permit any conclusion other than we don't care if a country is democratic or autocratic, as long as they're serving our interests.

Shadi Hamid: But you and I can care though. So putting aside the US government, when we make our own moral calculus, you and I, that should matter to us.

Glenn Greenwald: I don't think that it's morally justifiable for the United States to go and invade and destroy a country of 26 million people—or 70 million people in the case of Iran, if we were to do that—because the government is autocratic. I don't think that makes it any more justifiable. I don't see that as a just cause for war. And I don't think the UN Charter, or international law, or the principles of Nuremberg do either.

Those are aggressive wars that don't become any better because the government that happens to be one that we want to overthrow is less democratic than others. It's not a reason to go to war at all. And I don't think it makes it more justifiable morally. Also, just on the question of Ukrainian agency and all of that: in war, I think we can all agree, it's almost impossible to know what has really happened, especially when we're three weeks in. It takes months, if not years to figure it out fully.

So if it's true that we wanted the Ukrainians to agree to neutralize themselves—and to vow that they would not be in NATO, that they would not be in the EU, that they would be a neutralized country as a way of averting war—and the Ukrainians were adamant that they wouldn't want that, they weren't willing to do that, and they'd rather risk war with Russia than give those concessions, that's one world you can talk about. But I'm not convinced that was true. Like I said, there are stories, and there is reporting from major Western outlets that Zelenskyy was eager to sit down and make concessions with the Russians early on, and the United States was adamant that he not do so. Of course, if you're Zelenskyy, you're going to not necessarily mindlessly obey, but certainly take into account what the country most important to your self-defense is urging you to do. We of course have a lot of influence over Zelenskyy that we've been using forever. And so, I don't know that that's what happened. It could very well be the case that they were actually willing to do that, and it was our pressure that prevented that agreement from being reached, I don't think we showed much of an interest in forging a diplomatic agreement that could have averted the war, and that's one of the things that worries me the most when we talk about US motives.

And then just on the question of Ukrainian democracy, Damar was saying, "Look, it's corrupt and it's an imperfect democracy," Of course, that's true, but no democracy is perfect. American democracy is full of all kinds of corruption. Scholars call into question how much of a democracy we really are. Every four years we go in and vote, but in terms of who actually wields power, obviously, oligarchal wealth and billionaires and large corporations wield enormous amounts of power in Washington, calling into question how democratic our processes is. It's not that Ukrainian democracy is imperfect, to me the issue is—and why I brought up the payments of Burisma to Hunter Biden and Victoria Nuland—I'm not sure it was just talk. It sounded a lot like they were picking the Ukrainian President and the person they settled on became the Ukrainian president. And obviously, if you're a country that's sending huge amounts of lethal weapons into a country and all kinds of financial aid, of course, you have all kinds of influence in that country. It's not that Ukrainian democracy is imperfect, it's that the United States is playing a major role in pushing and shaping and molding and influencing and to some extent dictating what was happening inside Ukraine, on to the level of Joe Biden demanding that a particular prosecutor be fired.

When you're picking prosecutors for another country based on the money that you're giving them and the weapons you're providing and the influence that you wield, it's very hard to say that that country is this kind of sovereign independent state, free of external influence. I think the Russians looked over their border and saw how much the United States was involved in Ukraine and saw it the same way as if we looked over the border and saw the Russians inside Mexico, flooding Mexico with lethal arms to fight us, and forming a military alliance, and vowing to put Mexico in it, and micro-managing Mexico. Of course, Washington would view that as deeply threatening and provocative. We almost had a nuclear war with Russia because Cuba. The sovereign government of Cuba, invited Russia or requested Russia place nuclear weapons on Cuban soil to deter another attack.

Glenn Greenwald: And we didn't say, "Oh look, Cuba is a sovereign country, they can invite another sovereign country to put weapons on their soil if they want." We said, "We won't tolerate that, That's too close to our borders. We have the right to be very aggressive because that's such a threat to us," And I think it may not be the same as putting nuclear weapons on the soil right outside of your border, but yesterday Victoria Nuland acknowledged bizarrely in that Senate testimony that Ukraine does have what she called biological research facilities, which are, in her words, dangerous enough to be very worried that they would fall into Russian hands. So, when you combine all these different ways that we're operating in Ukraine—NATO is right around it, we're deploying anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe at first claiming it was to protect Eastern Europe against Iran, when of course, it was aimed at Russia as well—I think that there's a lot of reasons to say not that Ukrainian democracy is imperfect, but it in some sense, it's kind of illusory.

Damir Marusic: Shadi, do you want to go or do you want me to go my amoral way? Do you want more moral arguments here?

Shadi Hamid: Okay, well, there's just... I don't know if this is moral or not, so we can find out then you can jump in Damir.

Part 2

Shadi Hamid: So, I'm trying to get my head around where some of the fundamental divides are, not on some of the specifics or some of the policy options, but on our respective world views.