Richard Falk, Princeton International Law Professor Emeritus, returns to Truth Jihad Radio to discuss his recent article on Biden's worldview (and competence or lack thereof), and the Gaza genocide.
Memorable quote: "The Netanyahu invitation (to once again address a Joint Session of Congress) is an edifying metaphor that confirms the dark foreboding of skeptics like myself critical of the US global role since the end of the Cold War and deeply pessimistic about the future of the country."
Richard Falk has been repeatedly and ineptly attacked for daring to come on my show and discuss third-rail topics. He has positively reviewed David Ray Griffin's work on 9/11, served as UN Special Rapporteur to Palestine, and earned a reputation as an accomplished American academician of rare courage and integrity.
Rough transcript:
I am overjoyed to welcome back to the show a guest who's been on several other times and has been attacked by the usual suspects for even having the temerity, nay, the unmitigated audacity to talk to me. And that is Princeton International Law Professor Emeritus Richard Falk, one of the heroes of the American Academy, a truth seeker, truth speaker, and a man of integrity…so welcome, Richard Falk. It's great to have you back.
Good to be with you, Kevin. You've been doing a good job for a long time.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And that quote will undoubtedly be used against you by the New York Sun.
They can have it.
Okay. So...I'm not quite sure where to start, but I guess we could mention that you've been continually publishing very good, balanced, accurate commentaries on various topics. And most recently, you have a piece on Biden's worldview, the elections, the fact that Netanyahu is coming back to address a joint session of Congress, and that all this bodes ill for America and the world, and that you're feeling rather pessimistic. And I'm pretty sure you're not the only one. So maybe you could tell us how that feels.
Well, it doesn't feel as lonely as it might have felt a year or so ago. I think there's a lot of skepticism about how the Democrats are running their campaign, (with) a mentally challenged president who won't step aside, even for the benefit of the country, of having a candidate that has a good chance against Trump.
And a Democratic Party that doesn't want to talk about what the U.S. is doing in the world. It wants to proclaim, with some justification, what the Biden presidency has done in the United States by way of social programs and basically a liberal agenda. But that's not the whole story, given the futile and destructive war in Ukraine and the genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza, and the spillover to the West Bank.
Do you think that what there is of democracy in America has gotten disconnected from these global issues, almost as if there's a deep state running these global issues in a profoundly mendacious and almost psychopathic way, and that the democratic process such as it is, and the official institutions under the constitutional arrangements, don't really have a whole lot of effect?
Yes, I think there is a considerable element of seeking to exclude the citizenry from the conduct of foreign policy. And you notice, especially in the Gaza-Israel context, that if you repeated the views of citizens, policy would be much different and more balanced. I had highlighted the invitation to Netanyahu as a way of illustrating the extremity of the alienation of the government from the public. And it's correlated with a Supreme Court that has violated some of the most fundamental principles of what was thought to be a constitutional republic, placing the head of state above the law and freeing private sector interests from substantial regulation.
So you have a kind of new new hidden plutocracy of the wealthy that extends to the private sector and is very well represented, overrepresented in bureaucracy and drives the country toward exaggerating foreign threats and trying to maintain through militarist policies, the world as it was after the collapse of the Soviet Union, back in 1991. And putting in effect, the US as in charge of managing global power, and excluding any shared management of the sort that existed during the Cold War. The US wants to have sole authority to act outside its borders with impunity while holding Russia and China fully accountable to the supposed principles of international law. So it's an imperial foreign policy that is sustained by the weakness of the UN and the fact that the UN was actually designed to be weak. The most powerful countries being givena veto power, which in effect tells them they don't have to obey international law or the UN Charter. The primacy of geopolitics, in other words, when strategic interests get in the way, has made it possible but not tenable for the US and the other liberal democracies to support genocide in Gaza and to at the same time condemn Russia for a very provoked attack on Ukraine, and a continuation of war without any kind of diplomatic receptivity to some sort of political compromise. The result being that NATO powers are showing their willingness to continue the war until the last Ukrainian. And it's basically a geopolitical war against Russia and a warning to China that it will confront a similar reaction from the West if it dares to pursue its interests within its own region.
It's interesting, isn't it, that what we used to call the war party in various historical contexts—there's a group of people who are pushing for a more militaristic policy and for war, and then the rest of the society is not particularly interested in that—it seems that the neoconservative war party in the United States has taken over.
There used to be a distinction between the “crazies in the basement,” Wolfowitz and his friends, and the establishment including a lot of realist thinkers. But today whether they present themselves as liberals or progressives, etc., it seems that all of the relevant players are essentially neocons on board with the radical Wolfowitz doctrine, and willing to roll over for the most outrageous acceleration of the genocide in Palestine. How did the neocons take over the country when they made such a botch of it after 9/11—which you, being a David Ray Griffin reader, know very well was likely arranged by the neocons. That doesn't really reflect very well to their credit. And then the wars that they orchestrated through that false flag event went south and turned into disasters. And one would think that the neocons would be ridden out of town on a proverbial rail. And yet somehow the opposite happened, and they're completely in charge. Now there's nobody but the neocons. How did that happen?
It's a very good and difficult question. I think the media certainly played a role in validating this kind of post-Cold War military, the opportunity that both political parties saw to essentially create the first global state, not a territorial state, but a dominant political presence throughout the world which required a continuous over-investment in the military and was tied to the emergence of this absurdly one-sided distribution of wealth and income, what we talk about mainly in terms of inequality, which has never existed to this degree. A middle-class family could live a very comfortable life when I was a child. But now it's pressed by increasing costs of ordinary living, despite the fact that the economy has expanded maybe 10 or 12 times. That hasn't reached the people. And it hasn't reached the people because of this insidious relationship between private sector wealth and militarism and the deep state bureaucracy that has been so influential with both parties in the last three decades.
So you see inequality of wealth as very much tied in to this neocon takeover in foreign policy. That raises the issue of why Biden is taking credit for supposedly improving that problem on the domestic front while at the same time pursuing neocon policies abroad. That seems like a contradiction, doesn't it?
You can think of it as a contradiction, but you can also think of it as mystifying the citizenry, that you tell them one thing, but you actually do quite a different thing. And Biden, of all recent presidents, including Trump, exaggerates the security threats to the US throughout the world and engages in wars that don't have any legitimate national security foundation. But the defense industry and related sectors of the economy flourish under conditions of exaggerated threats. And the beauty of this kind of militarist foreign policy is that it doesn't produce many American casualties. The thing that they learned in Vietnam was not to stop intervening around the world, but to stop sacrificing American lives in these very costly and, in the end, unsuccessful interventions.
And so this, in a way, is a kind of dream come true for the military industrial interests sustained by the media, of having the profitability of a wartime economy, without having the political backlash and cost.
And when you say you're pessimistic about the direction this is taking, and I think many of us have to agree, then the alternative would be coming presumably not so much from within the United States and the West. I'm going to talk with Philip Kraske in the second hour about RFK Jr.'s prospects, which Phil argues may not be quite as completely hopeless as they would appear. That does seem to be a bit of a long shot. But maybe a less of a long shot, in terms of what's actually going to change this situation in reality, is that the United States is eventually going to be defeated in war, or strategically defeated in a Sun Tzu-style war without a shot being fired. People like Andrei Martinov are well known for writing about the US military being a bit of a paper tiger, precisely because, as you said, it's all about profiteering for the military-industrial complex. And that means that a slightly leaner and meaner machine like the Russian and Chinese military production folks have can actually beat the US. That's Martinov's thesis anyway.
So there's this one school of thought that says the US empire is heading down. My former colleague at University of Wisconsin, Alfred McCoy, wrote a book predicting that the US empire would lose a war with China in based on Chinese superiority in quantum computing, which would allow them to take out the satellites and blind America, take down America's command control communications. Do you think that Martinov and the others who think that the U.S. empire has doomed itself to lose militarily are right?
Well, I think one of the characteristics of declining empires historically has first been to exaggerate their own capabilities to conquer, to reach out and control things that are beyond their control. In other words, an overreaching. And I think we, as an American state, have been doing this at least since the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War should have taught us that in the age of decolonization, you can have military superiority and yet lose the war. And in that context, that should have been the lesson, that the resilience of a mobilized nationalism has more sustaining power than does an intervening imperial act. And this was proved true in the other anti-colonial wars, where the colonial powers had the battlefield superiority, but lost all the war. And that was not a lesson that could be learned if the overriding goal was to keep this meretricious relationship between the state and the private sector in terms of escalating militarism all over the world. And this has been the, you can call it a kind of infernal social contract between the state and society that is only understood by a very small sector of the society. And it persists. It doesn't even mind so much losing these wars or being unsuccessful because it continues to to require weaponry and to emphasize the importance of military approaches to foreign policy and to negate diplomatic cooperative relationships in international society. So it's a win-win for the militarists and their ideological infrastructure.
And then that, in the Gaza context, that's reinforced by a civilizational encounter between the racist Western liberal democracies, the former European colonial powers, and the breakaway British colonies of US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Those developments are what I've called the second coming of Samuel Huntington and the clash of civilizations. You notice that all the supporters of Israel come from this supposedly liberal democratic West, and all the militant opposition comes from mobilized movements in the Islamic world. And so you do have this civilizational confrontation, which is part of the wider struggle going on in the world. And Ukraine fits into that because it's part of the white seen as part of the White West and needs to be defended, just as Israel needs to be helped to become victorious.
Do you think that there's a chance that the cracks opening up, the fissures in public opinion and in political leadership in the West will change any of this, specifically Gaza? We've just seen some governments quite unsympathetic to Israel here in Europe, where I am right now. The Spanish government—I'm actually in Tarragona, Spain right now—the Spanish government is much less sympathetic to Israel than the American government, of course, and somewhat pro-Palestinian. The Irish government likewise. And now we have Mélenchon threatening to become the Prime Minister of France. Mélenchon and his people, are significantly more pro-Palestine than Macron.
Plus the Labour Party in the UK, which is now back in power. It isn't the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn, but they have to appease some of the people in that party who are less pro-genocide than many of the others. So given all of this, we've seen a kind of a shift in European politics towards the pro-Palestine position. So maybe it isn't just the Islamic world versus the White West here. Maybe that the fissures are opening up in the White West and that might actually bode well in the long term, at least, for Palestine.
Yes, but of course Palestine can't afford the long term. The rate and degree of destruction is so severe that Palestinians themselves are saying “we can't last much longer.” And so whether these development translate into genuine fissures or are just internally significant political developments…See, Ireland is a special case because it identifies as an anti-colonial power in Europe. It was victimized by British imperialism and colonialism. Spain is an interesting case that no one anticipated. And the French elections, I think you have to wait to see how that plays out, because it was a juggling of positions partly based on giving priority to defeating the far right, and whether it really represents a significant turn to the left is something that has to be shown rather than assumed. But I would add to what you said, the strengthening of the BRICS, and the degree to which the global south is beginning to challenge the dollarization of international trade and the way economic order is sustained, could have quite dire effects on the whole stability of this arrangement in the US, where a fragile balance is maintained between what is done in domestic society and what's done in the world.
And as I said earlier, it's really quite astonishing that given the prominence of these engagements in Ukraine and Gaza that the Democratic Party has run away from defending or justifying these such initiatives. Somehow it thinks it can defeat Trump by looking at the domestic political scene and the threats he poses to constitutional democracy.
I actually don't find that all that surprising, given that the Democrats are pretty much locked in to the neocon line on foreign policy. And Trump, is a little harder to pin down. But I think he articulates much better than any of the competition, except arguably RFK Jr., who's too smart for the room, this sort of “America first” vision that resonates with ordinary people and that sort of hints at things like, why do we even have NATO anymore? We won the Cold War. What's the point of NATO? We should be getting out of all these places. And Trump's always saying, “hey, if I were in charge, we would solve all these problems. There would be peace everywhere. I would be friends with all of these leaders. And I'd solve these problems in a heartbeat. We don't need to have wars in any of these places. Let's bring our troops home.”
Of course, when he was president, he massively increased the military budget and kept arming the Nazis in Ukraine and practically started World War III by killing General Soleimani. But in any case, Trump, for all of the incoherence of his actions and his words, does seem to articulate this kind of common sense position of ordinary Americans on foreign policy. So I don't think the Democrats can beat that unless they want to be truthful. And we all know you're not allowed to be truthful in politics.
Yes. I sort of made the same point, that Trump at least opposes so-called forever wars and is fearful of policies that will lead to what he calls World War III. And Biden is silent about all those kinds of issues. And the Democratic Party is silent, and the congressional candidates are silent. And so you have this peculiar situation that I can't recall a precedent where the party in power doesn't defend its most controversial policies, but sort of hopes that no one will notice. No one will see that the elephant is in the room, and it's so far well-behaved in the room, so it doesn't have to be in any way addressed as a present. And I can't remember any situation comparable to that.
And there's also this uniqueness of the situation that U.S. inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union and mishandled from the point of view of human interests. It could have pushed at that point for nuclear disarmament, for a really viable multilateral system at the UN, and even a constrained veto. It could have done a lot of things that would have made the world safer and better and more cooperative, more able to address challenges like climate change, migration.
And the question is, why was that not done or even seriously proposed? And I would go back to the analysis that I think we share of the neocon distorted ideology becoming the national bipartisan ideology. And therefore, there was no occasion to discuss it because everyone was in agreement that this was the way to take advantage of what Krauthammer called the unipolar moment, by which he meant that the U.S. could dominate the world without having to address geopolitical rivals.
The Ukraine War, in addition to its civilizational dimension, was the first major challenge to this unipolarity. And it was, in my view, a geopolitical war to keep others out of the geopolitical game and keep it as a way of perpetuating Western dominance in a post-colonial world.
But was it really effective? There's one analysis according to which the real purpose of provoking this Russian war in Ukraine was to try to bleed the Russian economy and thereby eventually or even fairly quickly cause economic collapse, political collapse and break up Russia. And then the US could move in and surround China and stop China's meteoric rise. And that has obviously failed. The Russian economy is as strong or stronger than ever. And they're not doing too badly militarily either, although they're not getting any quick victories. But the question would be, is this a failure from the American perspective, or are they happy to have a long war, imagining that they're somehow bleeding Russia, even though the Russian economy is doing fine? There's no real evidence that they are going to defeat Russia and then be able to stop China. So I actually lean towards the analysis that says this isn't going so well for the American empire. But what say you?
In some ways, I share that view, but I think it is in other ways going rather well because it's sustaining this militarism without casualties. And I think that's the foundation of this post-Vietnam adjustment. And it's also a technological adjustment using drones and missiles rather than boots on the ground. It represents an effort to wage war in a way that is helpful to the inequality-oriented domestic economy and has the grudging but consistent support of the mainstream media. which pacifies the American public and sort of broke down in the last couple of months because the government was so out of keeping with the conscience of America, especially youth in America, including Jewish (youth)m and which had been very patient about a staging protest in the first month of the Gaza event. But when it saw the all the branches of government supportive of a set of policies that invited a fascist takeover, combined with this open complicity with an ongoing transparent genocide, that became too much and produced this popular surge, which is completely rejected by the formal government with its calls of deporting any foreign student who takes part in this, ending lots of vulnerable faculty appointments, compelling university presidents and other high officials to resign because they're “too soft on anti-Semitism.” A whole bunch of policies that were an affront to people of conscience who had been quiet for a long time, but somehow rose up in view of the sustained horror that was shown to them every night on TV, especially if they had access to Al Jazeera.
And so it's a different kind of political...that we've never known before, where the global south is more actively challenging the dominance of the global north, where China has its own network of institutions, its own style of exerting influence, and where Russia wants to get back in the game of geopolitics. And we should remember that the Cold War, for all its problematic aspects, respected spheres of influence of the Soviet Union as a way of defusing the sort of encounters that could have led to World War III. In other words, there was no interventions, counter-interventions in Eastern Europe when there were uprisings, and no efforts to offset the CIA role in destroying Communist Party influence in Western Europe. In other words, there were these spheres of influence that really acted as buffer zones between these geopolitical actors and contributed at any rate to maintaining a kind of hot-cold war.
Yeah. The refusal to allow Ukraine to be neutral and to be still something of a buffer zone really seems to be the key factor behind that conflict. Getting back to the students protesting the genocide of Gaza, that's been a very interesting development. You find it strange that the censoring of voices coming from America's campuses is so lopsidedly always about Israel, this little country of 15 million people. And somehow that's the thing that you're not allowed to talk about. When I was chased out of the University of Wisconsin and my career was basically ended because I was championing David Ray Griffin's work on 9/11, like you did, I was being attacked mainly, most viciously, by pro-Israel partisans who just kind of assumed that I was I hated Jews, was anti-Semitic and anti-Israel, because I was blaming 9/11 on Cheney and Rumsfeld. Which struck me as very bizarre: somebody doth protest too much here. And the more I discovered that I was being mobbed by Zionists for talking about the American government doing 9/11 the more curious I got about what was really going on behind the scenes. That eventually led me to this view I have today, that the Israel lobby, which is largely a function of Jewish ethnic tribalism and massive ethnic nepotism that's coalesced around Israel as the project, has a death grip on America. That's why Netanyahu is being brought to address joint sessions of Congress. This is the third time. He’s now tied with uh with Winston Churchill in that regard. But he's way ahead of Winston Churchill in standing ovations. The congress, American congresspeople, are falling all over themselves to scream hallelujah to this guy. And American professors and college people are being shut down and brutally beat up by police on the orders of Jewish Zionist billionaires. And you can't talk about this. Why is there such a lopsided attack on American democracy and free speech and it’s all about this one little country over there occupying Palestine?
Well, I think it's the fact that the Zionist diaspora is very well organized and funded by wealthy Jews living outside of Israel and by Israel itself. And it has learned from the South African collapse of the apartheid regime, that it's extremely important to control the public discourse around a conflict of this sort that has a moral core. It still is surprising the degree of specific vindictive influence that is exercised and effective in the most respected universities in America that you would have thought would be able to stand their ground in support of academic freedom and not give way as often as they have ,with very few examples of courageous independence being demonstrated. So this kind of Zionist network has to be seen as a way of shaping anti-democratic policies in a supposedly democratic country.
The other factor I think that's very important is that the Palestinians, despite having law and morality basically on their side, have not been able to organize in a way that's politically relevant in the U.S. and European context. So politicians have nothing to gain by taking even a balanced position. And they have a lot to lose because AIPAC and kindred organizations spend lots of money to make their campaigns fail. So it's a mixture of pragmatic politics and very sophisticated control of the discourse and the atmosphere, weaponizing anti-Semitism, all kinds of tactics that I've been victimized by.
Exactly. Yeah, just for talking to me, they witch hunted you—pretty ineptly, in my opinion.
So another interesting thing about this current election is that RFK Jr. is running. I actually voted for him, wrote him in for president, as a protest vote, in 2020. Here's a guy who's on record saying that the CIA killed his father and his uncle. He's a total enemy of the deep state. He makes Trump's ramblings about the deep state seem stupid. RFK Jr. is actually speaking relatively accurately about it and attacking it very openly. And so I thought that was a good protest vote in 2020.
And then suddenly here he is 2024 actually running for president. In the second hour of his show, Philip Kraske is going to come on and say “it's not quite as hopeless for him as it might seem.” And so I'll see how Phil manages to defend that position.
But my question, Richard, is that RFK Jr. seems to be pretty well informed and relatively intelligent and articulate, certainly compared to the competition. And yet, despite his seeming rather intelligent and sensible on a long list of positions, when it comes to Israel and Zionism, he's to the right of Trump. Miriam Adelson doesn't even need to give him $100 million. Rabbi Schmuley just holds his hand for free. How do you explain that? I mean, the Zionist very likely killed his father. Who's going to hypnotize a Palestinian patsy to take the blame for a political assassination? I wonder! Three guesses. So, how can he not know that? Is he faking it? Is he going to try and take power and bite them back? Or is he crazy? What's wrong with RFK Jr. on Palestine?
Yes, I've thought about that myself. I think it's partly that he wants to show that on this issue, that he must believe is important to a majority of the people that would potentially support him, that he knows what's going on in the world, that he's not kind of naively critical and that Israel has proved itself a valuable geopolitical ally in the Middle East where the energy dependence exists. I mean, I'm not sure that's much of an explanation, but it seems to me to be there's something there, because it does depart from his general...
Let me question that, because it seems to me that he's very sensible on Ukraine. And it seems to me that the Ukraine conflict is more of a U.S. geopolitical interest. But it seems to me that, on the contrary, U.S. support for Israel is massively counterproductive for U.S. imperial geostrategic interest, given that it's essentially made it really hard for the U.S. to govern that region. So if RFK Jr. were trying to show that he was savvy about U.S. imperial interest, you would expect him to be hawkish on Ukraine and dovish on Palestine. But it's the opposite.
Yes, that's a reasonable point, although I think that a lot of people that thought of themselves as anti-system, as he does, were persuaded that Israel was an important, indispensable ally in the Middle East, and that the Middle East was crucial to the future of the West. And that came with the outcome of the 1967 war, where a lot of people that previously were somewhat ambivalent and not committed, including in the government, were persuaded that Israel was not just a burden for the U.S., but it was really an asset, and particularly after the Shah of Iran had fallen and a hostile Islamic government had replaced the Shah.
So I don't know. It still doesn't make sense to me. I mean, he also is, you know, probably much better than I, a radical anti-vaxxer. And obviously takes positions that most intelligent Americans don't take.
Wait a minute, Richard. I question that. First, I would say he's a moderate anti-vax person, not a radical one. If you read his book, you'll find out why. And secondly, well, we'll have to do a whole new show on that because I... Anyway... That's another issue, but I would argue that most of his work on vaccines is actually correct. I had family tragedies back in the day, did the research and came to the same conclusion. So I actually, my family and I have never been vaccinated. I believe that there has been a systematic overestimation of the benefits of vaccines in general and a systematic willful ignorance of the harms. So I think he's actually got that issue pretty close to exactly right. But then maybe I'm crazy, too. I don't know.
Unless you spend a great deal of time, which I haven't done, these are very hard issues to penetrate and to have an informed point of view one way or the other.
Yeah, I actually did take the time because I had reason to. So more than years ago, I was persuaded of these things long before RFK Jr. actually ever got around to it. That's one of the reasons I wrote him in for president in 2020.
Most people also would think his statements about the CIA killing his father and uncle and many other things are way off the reservation. I happen to think that almost everywhere he's off the reservation he's basically right, or closer to being right than the mainstream is, except his bizarre statements on Palestine. So for you, I suppose it's not that surprising because he's a little goofy. For me, no, I think he's actually shockingly well-informed and intelligent on everything except Palestine, where he's equally shockingly foolish.
I've had people who've worked with him, including Zoey O'Toole, who's edited some of his work, on the show. She might have been involved in his book. She's also, if you're interested in the vaccine issue—and I assume you probably have other things to do—she put out a book by a couple of Israeli scientists who had to be anonymous or they would lose their jobs, called Turtles All the Way Down, which is really the best extant introduction to the other side of the vaccine issue.
In any case, Richard, I know you've made so many contributions in so many areas, I'm not going to ask you to flip on that one. Well, we only have a couple of minutes left. What can ordinary people do to try to stop this genocide in Palestine? What's the first thing we should be doing? Supporting the demonstrators on campuses? What can we do?
Well, I think that's one thing we can do. Strongly supporting the campus protests and protecting faculty who've turned out to be vulnerable. I think we can also support activist initiatives that show solidarity with the Palestinians. I know there's this weekend a People's Tribunal on Gaza out in the Bay Area, organized by Code Pink. And I don't know how well it will be orchestrated and enacted, but I think it's time when the official institutional structure has proven inept or wrongful. So we need people power here and in so many other areas.
Thank you so much, Professor Richard Falk, Princeton Emeritus Professor of International Law. I appreciate your great work over the years on such important issues. And I hope that someday the world will wake up to your approach to things. Keep up the good work and God bless.
Richard Falk Is "Deeply Pessimistic About the Future of the Country"