USA Dumping Ukraine War & Rogue State Politics | Amb. Chas Freeman

## Introduction The conversation lays bare a stark diagnosis: the West proclaims a rules-based international order while simultaneously eroding the very legal and moral norms it claims to defend. That contradiction — manifest in the US military posture, its interventions in Latin America, its uncritical backing of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and the European strategy on Ukraine — signals not just tactical failures but a broader ideological collapse. Amb. Chas Freeman, drawing on a lifetime in diplomacy and defense, contends that these developments have fractured Western credibility and opened space for a “Global Majority” of states intent on conserving the principles the West now abandons. The crisis is not merely geopolitical; it is civilizational, testing whether international law and reciprocity can survive when selectively applied. ## From Department of Defense back to Department of War? The notion of renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War is more than semantic. It signals a political nostalgia for an age of overt American militarism — the McKinley-Roosevelt era — and a willingness to embrace force as first resort. Freeman frames this impulse as part of a larger strategic revisionism: an attempt to revive the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine and reassert hemispheric hegemony. That history, he reminds us, was born of opportunism and collusion between rising American power and a receding British empire. The present echo, however, lands in a far different world, where the U.S. can no longer assume uncontested global dominance and where militarized posturing risks confronting more complex, multipolar realities. The rebranding also reveals an ideological pivot within the American establishment. When the highest levels of policy debate valorize conquest and coercion, diplomacy shrinks in influence. Freeman suggests that strategists in the current administration favor a compact of control over a commitment to norms. But the irony is thick: invoking a “Department of War” suggests confidence in unilateral force that the U.S. does not, in fact, possess anymore. The result is a rhetorical hardening that outstrips strategic capacity, leaving policy brittle and prone to miscalculation. ## US-Venezuela tensions & the fear of regime change The Caribbean military buildup and recent incidents at sea must be read against a long American obsession with Venezuela. Freeman traces the pattern from 19th-century boundary disputes through the 20th-century interventions to the contemporary campaign to isolate and delegitimize Nicolás Maduro. The historical continuity is revealing: Venezuela’s resources and its anti-American alignment make it a perennial target of pressure, sanctions, and covert effort to destabilize its government. That pressure now wears the language of law enforcement and democracy promotion, but Freeman warns of the darker undertow: open talk of bounties, public delegitimization, and the persistent effort to produce regime change by non-electoral means. There is a real fear — and not an irrational one — that decapitation or covert takeover strategies could be contemplated as part of a toolkit that has been used elsewhere. Yet Freeman judges the likelihood of successful American-engineered displacement to be low, in part because the Venezuelan regime retains popular and paramilitary levers of power, and because external coercion underestimates complex domestic dynamics. The deeper lesson: American policy toward Caracas reflects the same contradiction as elsewhere — a claim to defend norms while practicing selective interventionism. ## Israel's strategy in Gaza & the role of Zionism Perhaps the most morally jarring theme in the discussion concerns Israel’s operations in Gaza. Freeman characterizes the move to occupy Gaza City not as a narrowly tactical military necessity but as the fulfillment of a long-standing ethnonationalist vision. He locates that vision in the intellectual roots of modern Zionism: a nationalist project that, in its most exclusionary forms, aimed to remake a living, inhabited landscape into a state designed primarily for one people. From Freeman’s perspective, the current policies represent an ethical and spiritual perversion of Judaism’s core commitments to justice and compassion. This analysis goes beyond mere geopolitical critique to a moral indictment. The invocation of God’s grant of land and the reduction of Palestinian lives to obstacles or demographic challenges, he argues, mirror other forms of violent ethno-nationalism. That moral distortion is compounded by the political dynamics in external capitals, where domestic lobbies and evangelical alliances prop up policies that would otherwise face clearer scrutiny. Freeman is unambiguous: when a state weaponizes religion or ethnic destiny to justify massive civilian suffering, it is not a defensive democracy preserving itself but an occupying power pursuing a form of demographic and territorial finality. ## Ukraine: The "Coalition of the Deluded" Europe’s posture on Ukraine earns one of the sharper formulations in the exchange: a “coalition of the deluded.” The phrase captures three overlapping failures. First, Europe’s military and industrial base lacks the wherewithal to deliver a strategic victory for Kyiv; second, much of the Western effort is motivated less by a genuine desire to restore Ukrainian sovereignty than by an urge to punish or contain Russia; third, policymakers in capitals north of the conflict have not offered credible peace proposals, instead routing every initiative toward prolonging or escalating the fighting. Freeman points to a troubling hand-off: the United States has, deliberately or not, passed the Ukraine problem to its European partners. This transfer is not simply bureaucratic; it is a political abdication. Europe, flush with rhetoric, provides arms and money that sustain combat but insufficient support for a durable political settlement. The consequence is a grinding war of attrition that serves neither Ukrainian reconstruction nor long-term stability in Europe. If strategic sense were the only criterion, restraint and an actively brokered cessation — not perpetual armament — would be the priority. But national politics, punitive sentiments, and alliance dynamics have made that harder to imagine. ## The decline of US and European diplomacy Underpinning all these conflicts is a single institutional collapse: the marginalization of diplomacy. Freeman laments how American foreign policy has shifted resources, prestige, and imagination from negotiation to force. That is not only a matter of budgets; it is also a question of intellectual habit. When diplomats are sidelined, conflicts are managed by military logics that interpret power as positional rather than relational. The result is an escalation-prone system that confuses short-term tactical gains with durable security. Europe shares this malaise. Across capitals, the reflex to arm, sanction, and isolate has replaced patient statecraft. Peace proposals are conspicuously absent or framed as conditionalities for victory rather than instruments of compromise. The practical effect is to create openings for non-Western actors to assert alternative orders. Freeman highlights the paradox that rising powers — the so-called Global Majority — are now positioning themselves as guardians of international norms that the West has abandoned. Rather than join a United Nations orchestration dominated by Western preferences, these states advocate for reciprocity, legal equality, and negotiated settlements. The irony is palpable: the Western project of global order risks being upended by the very countries it once treated as second-tier participants. The decline of diplomacy has broader civic consequences, too. Domestic politics in Western countries have become intolerant of restraint. Voices calling for compromise or caution are branded as soft or unpatriotic. That rhet

USA Dumping Ukraine War & Rogue State Politics The West champions a 'rules-based order' while supporting a genocide in Gaza and fueling a proxy war in Ukraine. Has this hypocrisy shattered its global moral standing for good? And are rising powers actually trying to restore the international law the West has abandoned? To discuss this and more, today I’m talking again to Ambassador Chas Freeman, a former US diplomat, and Assistant Secretary of Defense. We explore the alarming rebranding of the US Department of Defense to the "Department of War" and its historical roots in the Monroe Doctrine. We also break down the escalating tensions with Venezuela, the moral bankruptcy of Western policy on Israel-Palestine, and why Ambassador Freeman calls Europe's approach to Ukraine the "coalition of the deluded." Finally, we discuss the collapse of US diplomacy and the rise of a 'Global Majority' seeking to conserve the very international order the West now undermines. Links: Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Goods Store: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:44 Introduction 00:01:05 From Department of Defense back to Department of War? 00:09:11 US-Venezuela tensions & the fear of regime change 00:18:01 Israel's strategy in Gaza & the role of Zionism 00:27:49 Ukraine: The "Coalition of the Deluded" 00:38:43 The decline of US and European diplomacy #M3 On Ukraine, Europeans, in my view, constitute what I call the coalition of the deluded. That is to say, they have no wherewithal with which to actually enable Ukraine to even defend itself effectively, let alone take back the territories it's lost. Their motive is anti-Russian, not pro-Ukrainian. They have put forward absolutely no peace proposal at all. Every proposal they put forward is a proposal to continue the war or escalate it. And now the United States has very cleverly handed off the Ukraine war to the Europeans. #M2 Hello, everybody. This is Pascal from Neutrality Studies. Today, I'm talking again to Ambassador Chas Freeman, a former U.S. diplomat and Assistant Secretary of Defense. Ambassador Freeman, welcome back to the show. Glad to be with you, Pascal. Thank you very much for saying yes. Just before we started, I mentioned that you always help us make sense of where we are in the process of global change. One of the changes we've seen recently is that your former position as Assistant Secretary of Defense is now being referred to as Assistant Secretary of War. What do you make of this idea of changing the Department of Defense's name back to the Department of War? -- 1 of 11 -- #M3 Well, it's an absurd change, of course. And it reflects nostalgia for a bygone age, which wasn't experienced by President Trump, but which he exalts. And that is the age of McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, when the United States was very assertive militarily. And there does seem to be something to this, in the sense that the only serious strategist in the Trump administration, Elbridge Colby, who is the author of the forthcoming National Security Strategy paper, is apparently thinking about removing the American presence outside the Western Hemisphere, or at least de-emphasizing it, and restoring the Monroe Doctrine in its second incarnation. Of course, that was proclaimed in about 1820, when the United States didn't have the capacity to enforce hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. We depended on the British Navy to do that. But at the end of the century, we had become the largest economy on the planet and were unchallenged within the hemisphere. And so the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine kicked in. Interestingly, all of this was catalyzed by a crisis with Venezuela, which seems to be a perpetual obsession of the United States and others. In about 1898, I think, we got into a discussion with the British, who had proposed to intervene in Venezuela for two reasons: one, uncollected debt from the Venezuelans; and second, a dispute over the Venezuelan boundary—the frontier, the border with British Guiana, now Guyana, an independent country. That dispute has not been resolved and is currently alive and well. That is a squabble over natural resources within the disputed border. But basically, the United States warned the British that if they were to do what they proposed to do, we would go to war with them. And that catalyzed a discussion in London of what a war with the United States would mean in 1898, 1899, 1900, and the British military establishment concluded that it would mean the loss of Canada as a dominion and that this was not worth it. And so they then appeased the United States, very skillfully, on two issues. One was abrogating, doing away with, a treaty called the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which prohibited the United States from building a canal across Central America and enabled the British to block what became the Panama Canal. That was replaced. Teddy Roosevelt engineered the secession of what is now Panama from Colombia, and the British responded by developing a new treaty that gave the United States the right to build the canal. Of course, the French—de Lesseps and others—had been the investors in a canal in the Panamanian Isthmus, but they were forced out. The second thing that happened was that the dispute between the United States and Canada over where the border on the Pacific coast of Canada was—with the United States claiming what is now the panhandle of Alaska, and the Canadians claiming, quite reasonably I think, that the area north of Vancouver should be Canadian rather than American—was submitted to an arbitral tribunal: one British representative, one American, and one Canadian. And the Brit was instructed to vote for the United States in order to appease us. That is the explanation for why the capital of the state of Alaska is in Juneau, in a little fringe along the Pacific -- 2 of 11 -- coast, and why the coast north of British Columbia in Canada is American, not Canadian. This all worked very well because appeasement is sometimes a successful diplomatic strategy—that is, if the country being appeased is fairly limited in its ambitions, unlike Hitler, who was unlimited in his ambitions. And it had a lot to do with the United States entering World War I on the side of the British rather than the Germans, because there was no sympathy in the United States then for Great Britain. The British were widely disliked. The main political game of American politicians was "twisting the lion's tail," as it was called. And we actually have, in the United States, more people with German surnames than with English surnames. In my own family, my grandfather—who had run away from his very famous professor father at the University of Chicago and joined the Illinois Cavalry to fight Pancho Villa, a Mexican revolutionary who had crossed the border into the United States—chased Pancho Villa all over northern Mexico. His unit was nationalized and sent to Britain, preparatory to going onto the continent. And there were great squabbles with the British, but they had basically gotten us into the war with an intelligence false flag, which was the so-called Zimmermann Telegram—a telegram which they had concocted, which appeared to be from Berlin, offering Mexico the western part of the United States back if they would join Germany in the war. This is, of course, entirely false, concocted by MI6, but it was sufficient to alarm people and get us into the war. So this is all very complicated, but it's so interesting that the status of Venezuela—its boundaries, its relationship with other countries, and so forth—is once again in the headlines. #M2 Yeah, and we underestimate the impact of these very long-standing feuds over disputed places—I mean, politically disputed. We see it also with how the United States, for 60 years, has been treating Cuba. But when it comes to Venezuela, do you think that currently the military buildup in the Caribbean has to be interpreted as preparation to actually go to war? I mean, the United States just blew up a second ship that they claim was a Venezuelan drug ship. But there's no way we can check on that, right? We have to take the word of the U.S. that that's true. And even if that's true, it would still be a huge breach of maritime law. But what do you think is going on there? #M3 Well, I don't think it's preparatory to an invasion, but I think it is part of a longstanding 21st-century effort to overthrow the government of Venezuela—Nicolás Maduro, the heir to President Chávez, Hugo Chávez Frías, the founder of the Bolivarian idea in the last century. I mean, Simón Bolívar was a remarkable man whose ambition and whose anger at the contempt that Spanish colonial residents of Venezuela and Colombia—which were then called Gran Colombia—his anger at second-class treatment inspired him to lead an effective revolt against Spanish rule in South America. And he's a great figure. And Hugo Chávez Frías, the president earlier, before Nicolás Maduro, appropriated -- 3 of 11 -- Bolívar as a hero and as the inspiration for quite a different ideology, which was left-wing and very much associated with Cuba. So the Bolivarian idea, which inspired a coup d'état—an attempted coup d'état—by Hugo Chávez Frías, which failed, and then an eventual accession to the presidency of Venezuela, was a socialist ideology, and it involved a close association with Cuba. Of course, the United States is home to a large number of Cuban refugees—immigrants from Cuba—one of whom is now our Secretary of State. This Cuban community in the United States, until very recently at least, was united in its desire to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. And by extension, they opposed two other countries in the region, Venezuela and Nicaragua, both of which had close relations with Cuba. Cuba, for a time during the Cold War, was not only allied with the Soviet Union, which inspired American opposition to it on strategic grounds, but it was also exporting revolution. It now exports doctors, which is a much better thing to export. But Venezuela got caught in the anti-Cuban crossfire, in effect, and it became very dependent on Cuba and vice versa. Cuban oil supplies, after the Soviet Union collapsed, came from Venezuela. The Cuban presence—training the Venezuelan armed forces, providing medical care in Venezuela, influencing Venezuelan politics—is very strong. And this is anathema to the United States, and particularly to that special interest that I mentioned, the Cuban-American community. So this has a deep history recently, but as I indicated, our problems with Venezuela and its status and its behavior go back a very long way. #M2 So yesterday, Marco Rubio actually—or the day before yesterday—in a TV announcement, said that Nicolás Maduro was not the president of Venezuela, that 50 or so countries don't recognize him as such, and that he is just the leader of a cartel. And this all sounds as if the ground is being prepared to make a legal argument that this man himself can be taken out, because we have seen recently this decapitation strike strategy by Israel and the United States in West Asia. And there are people who fear that this might now be extended to Venezuela, and that the United States will not put boots on the ground, but will try to lure Maduro to a place where they know where he is and then— boom. And then you have regime change, necessarily. Is that a fear that you also have? #M3 It is a justified apprehension. There's been a $50 million bounty put on Nicolás Maduro's head, dead or alive. So, very clearly, the Trump administration—and I think Marco Rubio in particular—are trying very hard to engineer regime change in Caracas. I don't think there's much evidence this will succeed. I think it is a misreading of Venezuelan politics. I'm not an advocate for Nicolás Maduro or his regime, or an apologist for the chicanery that it has exercised in elections. But the fact is that ther