Foreign Policy Expert Jeff Nyquist Warns: Do Not Fall For Russian Propaganda (Exclusive Interview)

RAIR Foundation USA is honored to present an exclusive interview with noted foreign policy and Russian expert Jeff Nyquist, author of the “Origins of the Fourth World War.” Nyquist discusses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and warns viewers to guard against Russian propaganda being disseminated in Western media. 

Watch the powerful interview below,

Interview Transcript

RAIR 

This exclusive interview is brought to you by RAIR Foundation USA.

This is Vlad for RAIR Foundation USA and we are talking with Jeff Nyquist. Jeff, before we get into it, do you want to tell us a little bit about your own background?

Jeff Nyquist:

I’m a defunct political scientist who went off on his own. And I’ve ended up writing for publications like World Net Daily, Newsmax, and Epoch Times. And I wrote a long time for financial sense online. And I’ve got my own website now. And I do research, write, and I’m a big picture guy; I’m very interested in the great game, and the major powers and how they play. And that would be a rundown on me.

RAIR:

Fair enough. And, you know, I guess the reason we’re having this conversation is because, well, the conservative, I would say that some of the most reputable and consistent conservative publications recently,  has been really overly generous to the Russian side of the equation in terms of Russia and, and Ukraine. So with that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you think people are getting wrong and what it is that they need to know?

Jeff Nyquist:

The first casualty of war, of course, is the truth. And the side that ought to win the war, the side that has the most justice on its side, also tells lies. And it’s in nature; if you’re going to be killing people, you’re going to be justifying it in your own mind, and you’re going to lose your perspective a bit. And so a certain amount of demonization takes place that’s natural. And by the way, that’s how the state works. People have to draw a distinction between what a state does and what the people do and are. This is what people aren’t doing. They’re trying to blame the Ukrainian people. And they’re saying that because the Ukrainian state is corrupt? Well, then, America deserves to be wiped out. Because we have a corrupt state. You know you can’t; every state is corrupt. Every state, you know, politicians lie. How do you know? their lips are moving. Right? So does that mean that everybody deserves to die then? Oh, that wouldn’t be a very good formula. No, we got to be smarter than that. And we’ve got to dissect things and look at what’s really happening. And very few people have that kind of objectivity anymore.

RAIR:

So I guess the first problem is that Russia appears to have a Casus Belli in terms of his incursion into Ukraine if you accept that these bioweapons labs were there, which seems to be no longer in dispute, and that they shouldn’t be there. And also that the people of the Donbas, which voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia some years ago, have been brutalized by the Government of Ukraine. So this would be the Casus Belli for Russia to do what it’s doing. But it looks like Russia may have greater ambitions, which are very dangerous to the rest of the world. So it may go beyond that issue. Is that what you’re feeling is?

Jeff Nyquist:

Yeah, I would not give too much credit to the propaganda about Donbas that the Russians artificially created. We know Russian soldiers came into those territories and caused the trouble. So it’s not, that’s a very complicated story. But I think people have to be very cautious about, you know, obviously, both sides are exaggerating their causes’ wrongs. But what’s really interesting is that the big Casus Belli that the strategy people are talking about is that, oh, Ukraine was going to become NATO, and that would have really threatened Russia. Well, Ukraine entering the EU or NATO, they’re not even qualified. And that’s not on the table. Now, that would be years away, even if it were possible to happen. And I think that the Russians had plenty of chance to diplomatically deal with this in the future. But for them to be going in and invading the whole of Ukraine now, and to be knocking down cities and using such indiscriminate violence that this is active military aggression. It’s against international law. They’re threatening us with nuclear war. How are the Ukrainian people to blame?

RAIR:

Right, fair enough. But there are rumors of Russia going for Poland. What do you see? any credibility to those rumors?

Jeff Nyquist:

Yeah, I, you know, look, if you look at the evidence of what’s in the Russian media and what you know, the little map that Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, left out, it looks like they’re going for the Baltic states in Moldova afterward, not Poland. However, in Poland, this could be to intimidate Poland. I don’t know. The thing is, here, when Putin before he went in, you got to listen to what Putin says very carefully. Before he went into Ukraine, he said, the breakup of the Soviet Union was illegal. Now, that’s very from the head of government. And the head of state, actually, the head of state of the Russian Federation saying the breakup of the Soviet Union was illegal, he is saying that his country is the Soviet Union, and that he’s not invading Ukraine, because Ukraine, Ukraine is part of the Soviet Union, and that he is doing what he called a special operation, not an invasion. Because remember, this is also via territory; this is a civil war within the Soviet Union. I mean, if you dissect what he said, That’s what he said. And you got all these western analysts saying, Oh, he’s just trying to put together the Russian Empire. No, no, that isn’t what Putin said; why can’t they ever listen to what the man actually said?

RAIR:

You know, I don’t find that Western media ever does that with anybody. I mean, I can give you a lot of examples where I mean, even [former Iranian President] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once said that they don’t have gay people in their country the way we do in the West. And it got turned into we don’t have gay people in Iran. So we don’t really listen to what they say, which is a problem.

Jeff Nyquist:

Yeah, it is a problem because we want to, you know, you don’t, look, I know we have enemies, but you don’t demonize your enemy. You know you don’t do that. Because in the other thing, you don’t assassinate your enemy leaders. And I got a lot of flack because they said, you know, what, are we doing assassinating? General Soleimani? Yeah, he’s a bad guy. But he’s an Iranian general; he could have ended up being the leader of that country. You don’t assassinate him? People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Remember Jack Kennedy? Remember, Oswald, remember Kennedy’s, the Kennedy brother’s attempt to assassinate Castro? Are we going to have to play this all over again? Look, there are certain rules that are there to protect us, not the bad guys. You know, chivalry is a very real thing that we’ve abandoned. And we’ve abandoned a lot of common sense rules about right and wrong. And so one of the rules is, look, if you demonize somebody, how are you going to make peace with them? Well, that’s because what do you want in a nuclear war? Is that what you really want?

RAIR:

I would say at the moment; all indications are Russia has a tremendous advantage. If it was an, it was to come to nuclear war.

Jeff Nyquist:

Absolutely right. 100%.

RAIR:

What they’re also, it seems that despite the noises that are being made in the West, there is an effort to stop NATO from engaging. Is that your impression? Or do you feel like this is something that NATO could find itself in? Because I’ve heard stories of massive military buildup, even in parts of Canada.

Jeff Nyquist:

Oh, yeah.  NATO’s is mobilizing troops. Yeah, that’s true. Of course, you would be too if the Russian if you knew that as soon as the ground dries in Ukraine, all those Ukrainian brigades that are holding down roads because basically, only paved roads are the axes of attack when the ground is soft. And in a, you know, a 45-ton tank is going to sink up to its axles if it leaves the road. As soon as the Russians can leave the roads, all those Ukrainian brigades are going to be flanked, and their front is going to collapse. And that’s going to be in May or June when the ground finally permanently dries. And when that happens, Ukraine is going to collapse.

I mean, all these people saying the Ukrainians are beating the Russians, I’m sorry, to burst your Disneyland fantasy. It’s not true. The Russians are going to crush Ukraine unless NATO intervenes. And by the way, you know, you got all these people run around saying, oh, NATO wants a war. You know, look, all these NATO warmongers will just be somebody talking about how terrible what Russia is doing is not warmongering. It’s like, it’s like horror at what Putin has done. Because NATO is not intervening. There is no chance immediately that I can see that NATO would, I mean, these people in NATO aren’t stupid. They don’t want a nuclear war. And they know if NATO directly intervenes. That’s a war between NATO and Russia, which will end up in a nuclear conflict. I mean, that’s just every sensible military mind knows this.

RAIR:

What message would you have for the conservative media that may have found itself, I mean, there’s certainly a credible case to question our own side on this again because we’ve lied to our own people about so many important issues, but What would your message be too conservative media that may have allowed itself to fall in line with Russian propaganda on this issue?

Jeff Nyquist:

Yeah. Yeah. Look, you’re in a war. Okay. You’re all shocked that your government, you know, lies during wartime. You know, as I said before, the first casualty of war is the truth. Well, what you’re going to now be for the other side, don’t you know what side you’re on? You’re on your side, you know, and if you’re not for America, then who’s going to be if the Americans aren’t for America? You have to be on your own side. Because when your side gets skewered, guess what you get skewered along with it. So you can’t be adopting the propaganda of a country run by run by a ruthless dictator who wants to bring the Soviet Union back. You can’t, and he’s aligned with China which also hates our guts, who are also working against us. The first rule in politics is to know who your friends are and know who your enemies are. It’s the first rule, and you’re sunk if you can’t do that.

RAIR: 

Yeah, fair enough. So, do you see this escalating?

Jeff Nyquist:

I am having a hard time seeing how it doesn’t. Unless Zelinskyy and Putin can make an agreement here in the short term. I think Zelenskyy is right, maybe not for the same reasons that I think so that this will be the beginning of World War Three. Because when the Russians are going to finish Ukraine off the look at the demonization of this thing that democracy does that our media does it, it will lead to a kind of hysteria, like remember the [USS Maine (1889)]. Then they found the battleship that supposedly, without the Spanish it, blew up, blown up. And it turns out the Spanish Spaniards never blew it up. So we went to war with Spain, thinking they had done us wrong, and they didn’t. They hadn’t. Right. So you get this hysteria, and you end up in a war. And by the way, really dumb a war that we probably are going to lose because we haven’t been preparing. And the Russians and their allies, the Chinese and the Iranians and the Cubans and the Venezuelans, all the rest of those little communist countries have been preparing.

RAIR:

That’s pretty much all they’ve been doing, especially China…

Jeff Nyquist:

Absolutely. China has a bigger Navy than we do now. You know, let alone the Russian Navy and then the nuclear and hypersonic missile area, our nuclear arsenal is rotted away. It’s literally we’ve left it to rot. We’re not going to have a new nuclear weapon until 2029. Well, I think that’s a little bit too late.

RAIR:

As I recall, that’s, as I recall, Obama actually shut down the last plutonium-producing reactor. And nobody objected; it was shocking.

Jeff Nyquist:

Yeah, I mean, Obama wanted, remember, the zero nuclear option. Let’s get rid of our nuclear weapons in America. We’ll set an example. Look, we’ll get rid of ours first.

RAIR

Yeah, that always works. 

Jeff Nyquist:

Every time. 

RAIR

Jeff Nyquist, I cannot thank you enough for taking this time out. I think these are very difficult. It’s very difficult times and is difficult even in media to understand exactly how to represent the truth, what truth is, and what the consequences of that are either difficult time, so I appreciate you talking to us.

Jeff Nyquist:

Thank you for having me.