This is the edited transcript of an interview with U.S.-China diplomat and scholar Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, ret.) conducted Oct. 9, 2023, by Mike Billington. Freeman is a visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Subheads and embedded links to sources have been added.
Mike Billington: This is Mike Billington with the Schiller Institute and Executive Intelligence Review. Joining with me today is Chas Freeman, well-known for his role as the interpreter for President Richard Nixon during his groundbreaking visit to China in 1972. He then served in several positions in both the Defense Department and the State Department and then as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first war with Iraq. He was also appointed Director of the National Intelligence Council in 2009, but the appointment was undermined.
The Israeli War on Hamas
Billington: I have two areas of questions that I want to bring up. One, on the war danger between Russia and the U.S. and NATO; and the other on the situation in Asia. I’ll begin, however, with a question regarding the situation in Southwest Asia. The Schiller Institute is sponsoring a rally at the U.S. Congress Oct. 11, to demand: “No Funding for Ukraine! No War on Russia! We have learned that the neocons are sponsoring a counter rally demanding funding for two wars! So let’s begin by asking your view on the new Israeli war on Hamas, and perhaps also with Iran.
Amb. Freeman: We are seeing a disturbing tendency in our press to invent Iranian direction of this war; that somehow Iran put Hamas up to the attacks it has carried out. I think that is completely wrong and is very dangerous because it could be used to justify an Israeli or an American attack on Iran, as indeed we have threatened for years.
Palestinians have come to the point where many of them feel they have nothing to lose. This attack was an act of desperation and it came out of the blue. I analogize it to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which achieved objectives that no one had imagined. Namely, it convinced the public at large that the existing policies toward Vietnam were doomed to fail. And it ultimately produced a withdrawal from Vietnam by the United States.
I think Hamas will lose decisively on the battlefield, but it may win the war, especially if Israel carries out its threat to reduce Gaza to the dimensions of the German city of Dresden in World War Two. I think that genocidal act would mobilize a lot of people against Israel who’ve been sitting on the fence.
So this is a very important moment in the history of the Middle East and in U.S. policy toward it. It’s quite clear that neither Israel nor the United States have any answer to the resistance by the Palestinians to their humiliation, eviction from their homes, and the attempted erasure of their presence from their homeland.
I might add that, unfortunately, this war in the Middle East probably greatly increases the risk of Donald Trump winning the 2024 election because it is yet another evidence of the ineptitude of the Biden administration in foreign affairs. It will also probably increase the prospects for an end to U.S. support for Ukraine. And while you may applaud the notion that that war would then end, it will end in a way that parallels the end of the war in Vietnam, where we basically encouraged a fight to the death and then walked away from it, leaving the Vietnamese to their fate. Not an act of great responsibility on our part. No accountability whatsoever for our withdrawal, as more recently, there has been none for our actions in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The difference in the third decade of the 21st Century is that during the Cold War, countries, allies, friends, faced a choice between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Soviet system with all its brutality was so unattractive that that really was no choice at all. And now the world is not organized that way. It’s not bipolar. Countries do have the option of distancing themselves from Washington and they may well do so. In fact, they’re already doing it.
But it may be that this accelerates the process. So many political implications yet unexamined. I think it will play into the partisan divisions in the United States in such a way as to increase the prospect that aid to Ukraine will end, which of course is a very real prospect given the turmoil in the Congress and Republican opposition to that aid, which will probably strengthen now.
How to Assure Peace in Europe
Billington: In your presentation at Brown University last month, you noted that NATO no longer has any purpose based on its original creation as a buffer against the military threat from the Soviets. What do you think it will take for NATO to disband as the Warsaw Pact did? And for that matter, is there any reason for the European Union to continue existing?
Amb. Freeman: Your question gets to the question that we should all be discussing, but we aren’t, and that is: How to assure peace in Europe? The EU, in part, had its origins in an effort to reconcile historic enemies in Europe, that is, to reconcile the French-German divide, among other things, and produce a management system for Europe in the economic realm, ultimately in the political realm, that would ensure peace, stability, and prosperity.
