HARVEY: Now look at the similarity here between what happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Khrushchev was mad as hell because the United States was putting missiles
right up against its border. Putin is mad as hell because NATO is coming right up to his border.
And NATO is not (in Putin's experience) a defensive organization, it's an offensive
organization, and it takes offense as it did, for example, in the Balkan Wars. And you see
what NATO did in the bombing of Serbia, and you'll see that NATO is an interventionist. It is about
trying to restructure the world in certain ways. Furthermore, NATO now controls all of Central
Europe. And here we come to a crazy geopolitical argument. You know there's a crazy-- Well,
he wasn't crazy, unfortunately, he was a professor of geography at Oxford University. There's a man
called Halford Mackinder. And Halford Mackinder back in the early [1900s] right up to about 1942
was writing things about geopolitical strategy on a global level. And his thesis was whoever
controls Central Europe controls The World-Island, i.e the whole Eurasian sphere. And whoever
controls The World-Island controls the world. In other words, control of the world depends upon who
is controlling the heartland of the system, and the heartland is in Central Europe.
Now, the Soviets controlled the heartland throughout the whole period. Now it is the
West that controls the heartland, and the US backed NATO which is controlling the heartland.
And the heartland is threatening the whole control of the Eurasian mass. That is the way
in which people think. That's the way in which. you know. Lloyd Austin and the military folks
think. This this sort of stuff. Now, I actually held a professorship in Oxford which was called
the Halford Mackinder Professorship of Geography. And, I mean on the one hand I thought that Halford
Mackinder would be turning in his grave think that I held the professorship in his name. But
I was also extremely embarrassed to have a title of the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography,
because there's this guy who's giving this kind of geopolitical nonsense and this is terribly
important because if people believe it, and work on it, then that creates the problem. Actually
in the 1920s the German politicians, a man called [Karl] Haushofer really did believe in this,
and much of the expansion of Germany into Eastern Europe and into the Central European
area was precisely on Mackinder-type policies. And in the 1920's General Haushofer was writing about
Lebensraum, that is the living space of the German state and [that] it needed Lebensraum and it
needed to actually control all of Central Europe. And from that control of Central Europe it could
actually organize the world and its strategy of world domination. And Hitler
seems to have believed some of this. So part of this was what was going on at that time.
My point about all of this is this: we are on the edge of a conflict between
NATO and Russia. In fact, a proxy war is being fought in Ukraine.
And the United States believes and likes to present itself as somehow or other it is a good
country which is simply responding to the desire of the Ukrainians to control their own space,
and have their own nation, and have their own culture, and all the rest of it, and that noble,
worthy aim is what the United States is about. I demur [object]. I think the United States is using
the Ukraine and is using the Ukraine for the nefarious reason of trying to degrade Russian
military capacity, to be able to actually, if you like, forward the kind of mission
of western domination of much of the rest of the world. Of course, now the situation is such
that fooling with [this], you're not only fooling with Russia and all of its missiles,
but you're also fooling with China with its major military capacity. And you can see why
China-- and in China they think geopolitically too along the lines I've mentioned--
China is actually moving geopolitically, through its Belt and Road Initiative and all the rest of
it, to try to regain some sort of control of what Mackinder called The World-Island. This is where
we are headed at, and the path dependency of this is making me very, very, very nervous. There is
danger [of nuclear war], and it's clear danger, and some compromise has to be come to. Some sort
of, you know, point when which you fold rather continue. At what point do you kind of say "Well,
this has gone too far. It's too dangerous." At what point are we going to actually recognize
that Putin has actually a genuine-- You might not like it, but he has a genuine reason to fear what
NATO has been doing, what NATO has been about. And that therefore one of the answers which I think
should should be on the calendar is the complete demilitarization and denuclearization of the whole
of Central Europe. That it seems to me is about the only thing that could actually bring Putin
to the table. Offer something like that. Say we will actually accept the denuclearization the
demilitarization of the whole of Central Europe and we will turn it into a neutral zone so nobody
can develop, you know dominate The World-Island and do all those kinds of things. This is the
kind of thinking which needs to be there, and this is the kind of thinking that got us through
the missile crisis in Cuba. The missile crisis in Cuba was a very close thing, a very close thing.
And a lot of people were making some very bad decisions around it. I think we are closer to that
kind of thing in Ukraine, and a lot of people are making some very bad decisions about it, including
the Secretary of Defense who should have known better than to say that, although I'm glad he did
say it because it gives us an insight into what the true motivations of the United States is.