Glenn Greenwald this week on “Piers Morgan Uncensored.”

PIERS MORGAN: I’m much more cynical about Putin than I think you are. I don’t dispute for a moment that, when you say that’s what most people in Russia think, I think they’ve absolutely been conditioned to think that. That’s why this has all been done-this military operation, which was clearly just an illegal invasion of a sovereign European country-was done because they believed there was this existential threat, and so on. But there’s a far more cynical interpretation you could put on it, which is that Putin, former KGB guy, didn’t think the Soviet Union should ever be broken up. He had a go at Crimea-he won, he took Crimea. He had a pop at Georgia. He’s now invaded Ukraine itself. He’s likely to end up-whatever happens-with the territory that he currently occupies in Ukraine. I would think most military experts think that. But why would he stop there, is what I think. This is a guy that has shown increasing, over the last 20 years, aggressive intent with his neighbors. And there is a belief that this is all a smokescreen-that actually, what he would love to do is restore the power of the Soviet Union. And if he gets away with it in Ukraine, he’ll move into other countries. GLENN GREENWALD: I think one of the worst problems in Western discourse-and it probably is a problem in discourse of every kind, including non-Western ones-is that we love to imply or suggest that we follow certain rules that we’re going to impose on other countries, when in fact we constantly violate those rules all the time. It’s one of the reasons why there’s so much resentment against American hegemony in the world. They’re seeking alternatives, like BRICS. Just to give you an example-I heard from Emily, Oh, this is a war about confronting brutal dictators, and that brutal dictators are the ones who often start wars. The United States’ closest allies in the Middle East-and increasingly Israel’s, as well-are all brutal dictatorships: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emiratis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Bahrainis, etc. We love to embrace and prop up dictatorships. We’re not against dictatorships-we love dictators, as long as they serve our interests. The second thing is this idea that we’re going to just sanction Russia. We’ve been sanctioning Cuba, a tiny little island in the middle of the Caribbean, for 65 years to try and change their government. It hasn’t worked. Venezuela-it hasn’t worked. Iran-it hasn’t worked. And the idea that we’re going to choke Russia as a way for them to finally leave this war, I think, is preposterous. The third issue I think is really worth noting is-Piers, you just talked about Crimea, Georgia, etc. When the United States went into what was then Yugoslavia and broke up-The United States broke Kosovo off from Serbia on the grounds that the people of Kosovo didn’t want to be part of Serbia. And at the time, the Russians and a lot of other people in the world-including Putin-were saying: this is a really bad precedent. Europe is pieced together by all these little provinces, and a lot of people in those provinces don’t have loyalty to the central government. The people of Crimea-you can dispute the referendum all you want-anyone who knows Crimea understands that overwhelmingly they identify as Russian, not Ukrainian. Same with people in the eastern provinces in Ukraine. Same with those two breakaway provinces in Georgia. So we’re the ones who go around the world demanding sovereignty for various provinces and breaking them off of countries on the grounds that they don’t want to be part of those central governments anymore-and then turn around and act like when Putin invokes the same precedent, somehow that is an act of evil. Even though it’s the same mentality. And the last thing I want to say is-I’ve been hearing from Ukrainians for four years now, Oh, just give us more, just give us more. We’re going to go, we’re going to expel… The problem with this war is that Russia is a gigantic country, and Ukraine is a relatively small country. The Russians can keep sending people to fight and to the front lines, whereas the Ukrainians are running out of people. They’re expanding the age of people who go. The people with sicknesses and disabilities-they’re not very well trained. They get dragged off the streets. They don’t want to go. They’re fleeing. They’re deserting, because they know they’re being used as cannon fodder. Meanwhile, Russia, Europe, and the United States have been drowning Ukraine in billions and billions and billions of dollars of weapons into the fourth year now, and Russia continues to expand how much of Ukraine it controls. It has 23%, and the front line continues to move-not toward the east, back to Russia-but toward the west, as they take more and more cities, more and more strategic territory. And huge numbers of people are dying. This is what President Trump was saying. The idea that if we just pour in some more weapons, at some point the Ukrainians are going to be able to vanquish Russia is a complete pipe dream, no matter how much people wish that were true. And at the same time, we’re going more into debt-the United States is-and depleting our own stockpiles. Feeding Israel, feeding Ukraine, all these foreign countries and their wars. And the United States can’t really afford to do that any longer. That was the promise of the Trump movement: we’re going to focus on our own people instead.

Here’s the full show:
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