Tucker Carlson Warns of Danger of ‘Hot War’ Between US and Russia Over Ukraine
18:03 GMT 08.12.2021 (Updated: 18:46 GMT 08.12.2021)
© Sputnik / Mikhail Voskresenskiy
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Tensions between Russia and NATO have escalated precipitously in recent weeks amid claims by Western officials and media that Russia may be preparing to invade Ukraine. Moscow vocally dismissed the allegations, accusing Western media of spreading “propaganda” and warning that Russia cannot rule out provocations as NATO builds up on its frontier.
The “stupidity” and irrational “insanity” of a scenario in which Russia and the US get into a hot war over Ukraine is not sufficient cause to rest assured that such an outcome does not become reality, Fox News host and paleoconservative commentator Tucker Carlson has warned.
The commentator urged his viewers not to discount, “no matter how far-fetched it may seem, a hot war with Russia. Yes, that is a lunatic idea. There is nothing we could possibly gain from a military confrontation with Vladimir Putin and there’s very much we could lose, including of course many thousands of American lives. But that doesn’t mean Joe Biden won’t do it.”
“Just because something seems far-fetched, or it seems crazy, or it seems totally destructive to core American interests doesn’t mean the US government won’t do it. That’s the main less at the moment we’re living in,” Carlson said in a segment on his show Tuesday night.
Carlson pointed to President Biden’s slipping poll numbers, his alleged status as a “pawn” of the “hard-eyed ideologues who surround him,” and the “bipartisan sort of insanity” in Washington in which both neoconservatives and neoliberals seem to support an ever tougher line on Russia while favouring NATO membership for Ukraine.
6 November 2021, 12:26 GMT
The host asked viewers to look at the current confrontation between Russia and NATO through Russian eyes – pointing out that the Western alliance did not disappear despite its reason for being – the USSR, collapsing in 1991.
“The Soviet Union has not existed in more than three decades; it’s part of history now. And yet NATO very much lives on, better funded than ever. It’s an army without a purpose. So at this point, NATO exists primarily to torment Vladimir Putin who, whatever his many faults, has no intention of invading Western Europe. Vladimir Putin does not want Belgium. He just wants to keep his western borders secure,” Carlson suggested.
Pointing to US efforts in support of the aspirations of the US-backed Ukrainian government to join NATO, Carlson asked viewers to imagine how Americans would feel if Mexico or Canada became Chinese client states.
8 December 2021, 14:49 GMT
“In Russia’s case, this is an existential question. A NATO takeover of Ukraine would compromise Russia’s access to its Sevastopol Naval Base – that’s the site of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and one of the country’s only connections to international waters. In the words of Russia scholar Richard Sakwa, if Russia lost the Sevastopol Naval Base, it would be ‘the biggest military geopolitical defeat of Russia in the last thousand years,’” the commentator stressed.
As for the United States, Carlson suggested that the country would “gain precisely nothing from taking over Ukraine,” with the only outcome being “driving Russia…deeper into the arms of the government of China.”
Carlson also took a shot at the White House’s talking points on US support for Ukraine’s “territorial integrity,” quipping that it’s one thing to “secure borders, at least in Eastern Europe where borders are not racist,” and another to support the US’s own southern frontier with Mexico, which has seen a record influx of migrants over the past ten months.
“Open borders are only permitted in Texas, Arizona and California and anywhere else the potential Democratic voters might arrive uninvited from the Third World. But Ukraine? No. Ukraine has a God-given right to territorial integrity and American soldiers will die to defend that territorial integrity. That’s our official position as a country,” Carlson lamented.
As for US justifications of its Ukraine policy in support of “democracy,” the host pointed out that undersecretary of state for political affairs Victoria Nuland, who recently warned the Senate of possible “Russian aggression” against Kiev, was the same official who helped overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government in a coup in February 2014.
13 February 2019, 16:31 GMT
“These people have no shame. So the question is: what is this really about? Of course, it’s not about democracy for which they [the State Department has] zero respect. In part, it’s a hangover from the lunatic Russia hoax that absorbed Washington for three years,” Tucker said, referring to the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin helped elect President Donald Trump in 2016 and controlled him as a puppet during his presidency.
“But there’s also a deeper cause here that’s rarely noted. For years, Ukrainian interests have pumped millions of lobbying dollars into Washington DC to change American foreign policy in the region. At one point, as you may have heard, they employed the president’s own son to repeat their talking points,” Carlson argued, referring to the alleged pay-to-play corruption scandal involving the president’s son Hunter and his no-show job for a Ukrainian energy company between 2014 and 2020.
“So tens of thousands of dollars a month to tell us that Russia is bad and we need to stand with Ukraine because democracy, even as we work to overthrow democracy in Ukraine. So with that in mind, now that you know that, maybe you’re not so surprised when Joe Biden concluded that Vladimir Putin doesn’t possess a soul,” Carlson concluded.
