【講演】“Peace and Democracy in the Nuclear Age: What the War in Ukraine Should Teach
the American and Japanese People"「核時代における平和と民主主義：日米の市民はウクライナ戦争から何を学び取るべ
きか」Peter Kuznick（ピーター・カズニック／アメリカン大学教授）

OHAYO-GOZAIMASU, thank you for inviting me. Normally, before COVID19, I
would be packing my suitcase tonight in order to leave tomorrow morning to join
Professor Takahara and my students on our peace tour in Yokohama, Hiroshima andNagasaki. But this year, unfortunately, we won’t be able to do that. What I do wanna
do is talk to you about the world situation with special focus on the war in Ukraine.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said that “in individuals, insanity israre; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” That is how I see theworld today. As a species, we are on a suicide path to extinction.
If we look at the present crisis, it’s almost a cliché by now to say that this is theclosest the world has been to world war three and nuclear annihilation than in any
time since the Cuban missile crisis.
It feels like we’re watching one of the 20th century nuclear war movies like The Day

After, a 1982 American film, or the British film Threads. With the news of the global
crisis plays in the background while people go about their daily routines uninterrupted
thinking that the leaders are reasonable and responsible and nothing terrible is goingto happen and then, all of a sudden, the unthinkable does happen and people aretotally unprepared.
Just like the people in those movies, we’ve had plenty of warnings, and we still go on
blindly as if this can’t happen. It was in 2018 that the United States security strategy
said that the main threat to US national security was no longer global terrorism, it was
now Russia and China.
It was also in 2018 in the aftermath of the near-war between the United States andNorth Korea that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the1doomsday clock to two minutes before midnight. The closest it had been since the early
1950s after the United States and Soviet Union tested their hydrogen bombs.
Then in 2020, the experts of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands ofthe doomsday clock to 100 seconds before midnight. The closest it had ever been since
they started the doomsday clock back in 1947.
Now, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Biden’s hawkish policies towards
China, we should be even closer than 100 seconds to midnight because the world is far
more dangerous now then it’s been, certainly since the Cuban missile crisis, andpossibly the closest it’s ever been to this kind of precarious and dangerous, lifethreatening situation.
We could begin our discussion today of the current crisis back in August 1945 with the
US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which was a major factor in promoting
the cold war because the real target was not just Japan but was also the Soviet Union,
which was exactly the way the Soviet leaders interpreted it at the time
But I’m going to begin tonight with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of theSoviet Union. I want to start in 1990 when the leading neo-Conservative thinker
Charles Krauthammer wrote an article saying this is the unipolar moment. The UnitedStates is the dominant force in the world and nobody can challenge us and this is goingto last for thirty to forty years.
It was also in 1990 that Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to the unification of Germany andwas promised in return that NATO would not expand one inch, one thumb’s width tothe East. He was promised by President Bush, by Baker, by the leaders in the UnitedStates and Germany and Britain.
Then with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia became a basket case. Boris
Yeltsin foolishly allowed US economists to convince the Russians to undergo shock
therapy. Male life expectancy dropped from 66 to 57. The economy shrank to the size of
the Netherlands. Russia was in terrible condition in the 1990s under Yeltsin.

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It was also during this time during the early 1990s that the American neo-cons, theneo-conservatives, began asserting themselves. In 1992, they proposed what was called
the “defense planning guidance”.
It was overseen by neo-conservative thinker Paul Wolfowitz and it especiallyestablished that the US was strong enough now that no nation would be allowed toemerge anywhere that could challenge the United States in any region of the world.
But there was such a strong reaction from people like Senator Joseph Biden who
called this a Pax Americana. He said this is an old notion of the United States as theworld’s policeman and so they rejected this and the neo-conservatives were forced toretreat.
But then in 1997 they formed the Project for the New American Century.
In 2000, George W. Bush, along with the support of the supreme court, staged apolitical coup in the United States, and he came to power, and he put the members of
the Project for the New American Century into key positions throughout his
administration.
Then the United States was hit on 9-11 and everything changed after that.
It began with the invasion of Afghanistan.
Charles Krauthammer who in 1990 had said this is a unipolar moment wrote anotherpiece in which he said “I was wrong in 1990”. He said nothing has ever existed like thisdisparity of power. Nothing. He said this is not the unipolar moment: it’s the unipolarera. And it’s gonna last indefinitely.
The neo-conservatives began to celebrate the American empire. The New York Times,on January 5th, 2003, headlined its Sunday magazine section “American Empire: Get
Used to it”.
And the neo-conservatives came up with a list of countries where there was gonna be
regime change. It included Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Lebanon, Somalia
and Sudan.
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Then in 2003 the US invaded Iraq, pretty soon the US special forces were deployed allover the globe. By 2013, they were in 134 countries.
But things went to hell in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by 2006 even Charles
Krauthammer acknowledged that the unipolar era was over, and the US was past thehigh point of its power and influence.
Meanwhile, despite the promise given to Gorbachev, NATO was expanding.
The first expansion occurred with three countries in 1999, then more countries in
2004, and that was just the beginning.
American statesmen warned that this was a terrible mistake. Even George Kennan,
the architect of the cold war, said this was an enormous and historic strategic error.
But George W. Bush wanted to expand further, and in 2008 he announced that NATOwas going to expand to include Ukraine and Georgia.
The US ambassador to Russia at the time was William Burns, the same William
Burns who was now the director of the CIA. And Burns wrote a secret memo back to
Washington titled “Nyet Means Nyet”. Don’t cross Russia’s red lines. Don’t talk about
expanding to Ukraine.
But American policymakers understood the importance of Ukraine. Zbigniew

Brzeziński, former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, laid it out clearly in his
book Grand Chessboard in 1997.
He said if we can wrest Ukraine away from Russia then Russia will never be a major
Eurasian power again that can threaten the United States. The same thing was said byHadley and Libby and other neocons throughout the 1990s.
The neoconservatives began planning to break Russia away from Ukraine. They did sothrough a number of means. The National Endowment for Democracy supported sixtyfive pro-democracy projects. The US spent 5 billion dollars creating this pro-democracyor anti-Russian movement in Ukraine.
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In 2013, when Ukraine signed the economic deal with the EU, the British Financial
Times journal said this is the culmination of years and years of US effort to win
Ukraine away from Russia.
The Financial Times made it clear that the deal that the West had secured with
Ukraine was going to be exclusive and was not going to include Russia. That theywould have to sign on to all these agreements with the EU, but Putin responded withan alternative economic deal that was actually better for Ukraine, and it was at thatpoint that the uprising began.
I won’t go into all the details about the [Ph: roleplay] by Victoria Nuland and Bidenhimself, but there was the coup inside of Ukraine in early 2014. Yanukovych wasousted; he fled from Ukraine and then anti-Russian government was set up.
The thing to understand is that this American vision of this global hegemony meantthat any power that could threaten US interests in any part of the world had to beeliminated. By taking Ukraine away from Russia, they thought they had
fundamentally weakened Russia, so it could no longer pose a real threat to theAmerican empire.
And then the civil war in Ukraine began. First the Russians took back Crimea.
Crimea had always been part of Russia, but in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev decided he wasgoing to give Crimea to Ukraine as a gift. Well, now the Russians took that gift back,and they also supported the independence movements in the Donbas, Luhansk andDonetsk.
And in 2015, France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine signed the Minsk II agreement to
try to stop the fighting. That would call for an armistice in the Donbas, and would
recognize the independence, or create a federal system in which Luhansk and Donetsk
had autonomy as part of Ukraine.
That would effectively give them veto power, making sure that Ukraine would neverjoin NATO.

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When Biden was elected in 2020, most Americans were relieved that Donald Trump,
who was philosophically a fascist and a militarist was no longer in power.
Biden came to power committed to restoring American leadership in the world. He
believed in American exceptionalism and he said the United States was gonna leadagain.
And he put in power, in top positions in the administration, [Ph: 18] members fromthe CNAS, the Center for New American Security.
These included people like Campbell in charge of Asia policy, people like Sullivan, thenational security advisor who was one of the ones who crafted Hillary Clinton’s Asia
pivot in 2011.
Antony Blinken became secretary of state. Who was Blinken? Blinken supported theinvasion of Afghanistan, supported the invasion of Iraq, supported the invasion of
Libya, supported the bombing of Syria. These are the kind of people Biden surrounded
himself with.
But the world was changing. Biden might have thought in terms of the old cold war.
Biden may have thought in terms of American exceptionalism and American
hegemony. But the rest of the world was not thinking in those terms.
The world had changed. Russia was back as a military power with more nuclear
weapons than the United States. China’s economy was booming. Fastest growth in thehistory of any economy, now second only to the United States. And China was alsobuilding its military.
The change was obvious in March of 2021 when Sullivan and Blinken met with Wang
Yi and Yang Jiechi in Anchorage Alaska.
At that meeting the Americans spoke for two and a half minutes and went throughtheir list of all their criticisms of China.

6And Yang Jiechi responded with a tirade that went on for 18 minutes, lecturing theAmericans. “You can no longer speak to China from a position of strength. You can nolonger dictate to us.
But the United States was not yet ready to accept a multi-polar world.
Meanwhile in Ukraine, the war fever was building.
The Minsk II agreement, which offered a basis for resolving the crisis, was never put
into effect by Ukraine, and France and Germany and the United States did notpressure Ukraine to go along with that agreement that they had signed.
When Zelensky was elected president in 2019, he promised he was gonna peacefully
resolve the conflict with Russia.
And when he did so, Ukrainian nationalists and right-wingers threatened to hanghim.
The United States and Britain encouraged him not to back down. Not to compromisewith the Russians.
And by 2020, he was pushing for Ukraine to join NATO. Also at that time, NATOarms and trainers were flooding into Ukraine. Ukrainian troops were building up in
the Donbas.
And Russian troops were building up on the border and in Belarus. More than ahundred thousand Russian troops also threatening to invade if Ukraine did notcompromise with them and reach some resolution.
US intelligence said it was certain that Russia was going to invade even though mostof the experts did not believe that that was going to happen.
The interesting questions is why were the Americans so sure the invasion was goingto take place.

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I think they understood that they were going to take certain provocative actions andrefuse to negotiate. That was going to push Russia into a corner where it would haveno alternative, it believed, other than to invade.
Russia recognized the independence of the two break-away states: Luhansk andDonetsk.
Putin made certain demands. that means no, Ukraine not joining NATO. Ukraine
being permanently neutral. Accepting the independence of the Donbas region andCrimea’s recognition and denazification.
But the US ignored Russia’s demands and besides that the Ukrainian troops
drastically increased the missile attacks in the Donbas in the two weeks prior to theinvasion.
The Russian invasion was not justified, but it was very much provoked.
The West did not appreciate that Russia saw what was happening in Ukraine as anexistential threat.
A lot of what Putin said was equally delusional. He said that Ukraine was controlled
by neo-Nazis and drug dealers, which is not true.
But the invasion was very much provoked. And I think it was very consciously
provoked. Because as historians we studied the Russian, the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in 1979 and there are a lot of parallels and lessons.
National security Advisor Zbigniew Brzeziński convinced Carter to send arms to the

Mujahadeen, the Islamic extremists inside Afghanistan.
And he wrote a memo on July 4th of 1979 saying that sending arms and training the

Mujahadeen, the Islamic extremists inside Afghanistan, is gonna provoke the Russian
invasion of Afghanistan.
And on Christmas day 1979, Russia did invade.

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Publicly, Carter and Brzeziński said this is a terrible thing and Russia has to bepunished.
But privately they celebrated, Brzeziński said now we’ve given Russia its own
Vietnam.
Brezhnev said this would take one month and we’ll win the fight in Afghanistan andwe’ll be out of there. The war went on for ten years.
The same thing happened this time. The Russians thought they would have an easy
military victory. That did not happen. Their forces were defeated trying to capture
Kharkiv and Kiev.
The Russians miscalculated. They thought that Europe would be divided. This has, ifanything, unified and strengthened the EU.
The Russians were opposed to NATO expansion and now NATO has beenstrengthened and Sweden and Finland have joined.
Country after country is increasing its defense spending, and the Europeans are
sending lots of arms and aid to Ukraine.
But the global response has been much more mixed. Whereas the Europeans and a
few Asian allies have been supporting the sanctions that the West led by the UnitedStates has been imposing, much of the world refuses to go along with these sanctions
against Russia.
Much of Asia, Africa, Latin America refuses to join the sanctions. Even countries like
China and India, Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis and Israel are refusing to go along withthese sanctions.
We can go into some of the causes of that, but a lot of it has to do with recognizing the
hypocrisy of the United States which itself denounces the Russian invasion, but theworld did not have sanctions against the US for invading Afghanistan, invading Iraq,
invading Libya, or all the damage the United States has done over these decades.

9What makes this so dangerous is that many leading American policymakers are goingalong with what secretary of defense Lloyd Austin said that our goal is to weaken
Russia. Our goal is to make sure Russia can never dop anything like this again. And so
the strategy revolves around everything they can do to economically and militarily
weaken Russia in response to the invasion.
So more and more arms have been flooding into Ukraine. The US has pledged about
24 billion dollars in aid to Ukraine. The Europeans have pledged an additional 12
billion dollars.
But this has not destroyed Russia’s economy the way the West had hoped. According
to the latest report from the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, they initially said
that Russia’s economy would decline by 8.5% this year. Their new estimate is that it’s
only going to decline by 6%. Russia’s central bank’s figures have cut that down tomaybe 4%.
So Russia’s economy is doing better than expected. Ukraine’s economy is projected to
decline by 45% this year. A 45% to 50% drop in Ukraine’s GDP.
The inflation is very high in the United States and in Europe. Europe is very muchdependent on Russian energy, and it’s already having a very big impact as the price offood, the price of fertilizer, the price of oil and gas is skyrocketing.
But the big picture, since we’re running out of time let me cut to the most important
points. The US strategy of weakening Russia economically and defeating Russia
militarily has created a very, very dangerous situation.
From the very beginning of the invasion, Putin has been warning about nuclear war.
He said, I’ll quote him quickly, “whoever tries to impede us, let alone create alone
threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be
immediate and lead to consequences you have never seen in history.”
The West is filled with articles, Europe and the United States, articles saying theRussian invasion has been stalled. That because of all the heavy weapons that they’vebeen sending in there. These HIMARs are the latest, all the artillery and all the tanks
and all the other equipment, that Russia’s advance has stalled.
10That’s partly propaganda to convince the West to keep on sending more arms andmore training, just as Zelensky has been calling for.
The RAND Corporation recently said there are four different scenarios that can leadto World War Three.
The most immediate threat is if Russia is losing on the battlefield, Vladimir Putin is
not going to accept defeat, and he’s not going to accept a stalemate. He needs to win in
his own mind, or at least be able to tell the Russian people that this invasion was
worthwhile, and they’ve achieved their goals.
So if the US succeeds in its strategy of weakening Russia, effectively defeating Russia,
teaching Russia a lesson. That’s going to be a meaningless victory because it would
very likely would lead to World War Three. Russian desperation, full Russian
mobilization and possibly the use of Russian nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile we don’t have time to talk about it. I’ll mention it very briefly, but whatelse is going on that’s posing a threat is the situation over China and especially overTaiwanNancy Pelosi, who’s number three in succession to the presidency, now has just begun
her Asia trip.
It is not yet clear if she will be visiting Taiwan or not.
But the Chinese have made clear that they don’t want her to come there. They will
use some kind of strong response if Pelosi does go there.
China was the real goal of the Biden administration when they came to power. They
said China is the pacing threat, that is dealing with China is the main challenge to
American security. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has gotten them sidetracked, but
the Asia pivot and defeating China is still goal number one in the minds of most of thepeople in the Biden administration.

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US policymakers from the Center for New American Security, including Campbell,
many of them believe the US can win a war with China, and they believe Japan andSouth Korea will play a crucial role in that effort.
NATO just announced its new strategic concept which includes targeting China andRussia as major threats. The first time NATO has talked about the threat posed by
China.
A parliamentary delegation of Japanese leaders from parliament including two former
defense ministers lead by Shigeru Ishiba met with the Taiwanese president andrepresentatives from the Taiwanese defense ministry, I guess two days ago in Japan, todiscuss preparation for the conflict with China.
The pentagon has run 18 war games studying a war between the United States andChina over Taiwan. China has won all 18 war games.
Japan is in a crucial position here. We can talk about that also. We can talk about
Abe’s call for the US to position nuclear weapons in Japan. As you know better than I
do the hawkish sentiment in the Kishida administration is quite extensive.
There is so much more to talk about. Unfortunately, we’re running out of time and I’dlike to leave some time for questions and comments, but the point that I’m trying toemphasize is that we’re in a more dangerous situation now than we’ve ever been on
this planet. And there is no leadership, nobody speaking or thinking for the planet
right now.
Biden wants to make America great again. Putin wants to make Russia great again.
Xi Jinping wants to make China great again. Modi wants to make India great again.
Kishida wants to make Japan great again. We’ve got all of these leaders who are notthinking about what’s good for the planet, and have these narrow, myopic views andsee military solutions as the alternative.
And when it comes to Ukraine, nobody in the United States is talking about
diplomacy. Nobody is talking about negotiations. What they’re talking about is more
weapons, more military aid, defeating Russia, that’s a formula for World War Three.
That is insane. And that’s why I began with that quote from Nietzsche, about
12individuals rarely being insane but nations and periods are insane. And a policy that’s
going to lead to nuclear annihilation, ending life on the planet, is insane. Which is why
we have to build up a peace movement globally. We’ve got to negotiate as quickly as
possible before it’s too late.
So, I’m sorry to be so negative and pessimistic, but I think unless we look clear-eyedand realistically at the situation as it exists, we’re not going to be able to resolve thispeacefully in a way that’s in the interests of everybody, so we can begin to deal with theother problems we face, like global warming. Like the fact that the richest eight people
in the world have more wealth than the poorest four billion people. The fact that the
pandemic and health care is disastrous globally. These are all horrible problems that
we need to face as a global community. But first we have to eliminate this mostimmediate threat to future existence of life on our planet. Thank you for listening.

（Proofreading/校正：Hiroko Takahashi/高橋博子）

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