Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Supreme Neocon Warmonger Anne Applebaum Awarded Peace Prize
July 05, 2024
Guest contributors: HarryBerger
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As we take a break for the Fourth of July holidays, find below an article by Harrison Berger, one of the producers on our team, about the extreme and telling irony that one of America’s most relentless warmongers, neocon pundit Anne Applebaum, was just awarded a peace prize. We will be back with our regularly-scheduled show on Monday, July 8th.


By Harrison Berger

It is not unusual for a warmonger to be awarded a prestigious peace prize - in fact it’s become something of a tradition. Back in 2009, for instance, Barack Obama collected his Nobel Peace Prize while greenlighting a 30,000 troop surge for the US War in Afghanistan - one of the many wars he escalated despite his 2008 campaign promise that he would not. Henry Kissinger was famously given the same award. Though not as prestigious as that award, the academic and columnist Anne Applebaum received her own peace prize last week. 

"At a time when democratic values and achievements are increasingly being caricatured and attacked, her work embodies an eminent and indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy and peace," the award description said of Applebaum.

Anne Applebaum winning awards for peace is like fast food companies winning awards for promoting weight loss. Pick any major US war of the past 20 years and she’s supported it. 

Her career trajectory is a gateway to understanding not only the hollowness behind these establishment awards but more importantly how corporate media functions to propel people like Anne Applebaum upward. 

Starting at The Economist and later moving upward to the editorial board of The Washington Post, Applebaum currently writes for The Atlantic, a paper owned by Steve Jobs’ widow and managed by Jeffrey Goldberg, famous for his award winning 2003 propaganda, which claimed to have linked Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein. Fellow byliners at Applebaum’s magazine include Russia hawk Tom Nichols, Bush speechwriter David Frum, and Bush state department alumni Eliot A. Cohen, producing a neocon editorial line that is indistinguishable from that of The Weekly Standard in its heyday. And the function of both papers - The Atlantic and The Weekly Standard - is the same: to cheerlead and drum up support for America’s foreign conflicts. 

Perhaps no magazine has done more than Goldberg’s and Applebaum’s to support America’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, despite the fact that the war is killing a generation of men who are being conscripted against their will, in a country that has suspended elections, banned media, and begun rounding up its own citizens off the streets. 

Back in May of 2023, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne Applebaum were the leading voices along with people like Max Boot and David Petreus at The Washington Post to insist that Ukraine was well prepared for its vaunted counteroffensive and that the United States should dump money into supporting it.

Uniquely, the United States has the power to determine how, and how quickly, the war of attrition turns into something quite different. Over the next few months, as the Ukrainians take their best shot at winning the war, the democratic world will have to decide whether to help them do so. The fate of NATO, of America’s position in Europe, indeed of America’s position in the world are all at stake.”

That counteroffensive was a sluggish battle of attrition which quickly turned into a slaughter. There was no reason to believe that the campaign would be successful - the Russians were completely dug in. And yet from such a far distance from the front lines, Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg definitively pronounced to readers of The Atlantic that the counteroffensive would succeed and that it was worth sending off a generation of young Ukrainian men for. 

Looking through her bibliography, it becomes apparent why a paper like Jeffrey Goldberg’s The Atlantic is the perfect home for Anne Applebaum and all the fabulous foreign policy ideas she’s proposed over the years.

In 2002, Israel pummeled Gaza with bombs (a good reminder that the current conflict did not begin on October 7), targeting dense civilian centers. One of the targets of that campaign - much like the targets of Israel’s current campaign - was the press, and in January of 2002, Israel destroyed Gaza’s main radio station, Voice of Palestine. While free press groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the destruction of the radio stations, Anne Applebaum offered her passionate endorsement of the attack in an article for Slate titled “Kill the Messenger: Why Palestine radio and TV studios are fair targets in the Palestine/Israeli war.” This is what she said:

—the official Palestinian media is the right place for Israel to focus its ire. In fact, in the reporting of the Middle East conflict, which almost always focuses on yesterday’s violence and today’s body count, the crucial role of the Voice of Palestine—the official broadcasting arm of the Palestinian Authority—has often been overlooked. Nor is the problem just radio and television. If you want to understand why the Oslo peace process failed, or where suicide martyrs come from, it is worth taking a closer look at all the Palestinian Authority’s official media….

 

Establishing a credible media will be, for the Palestinians, part of what it takes to establish a credible state. Until then, the Voice of Palestine will remain what it has become: a combatant—and therefore a legitimate target—in a painful, never-ending, low-intensity war."

Anne Applebaum advised that Israel treat journalists as “combatants” and “legitimate targets,” and ultimately, Israel agreed, and has been routinely targeting the press in all of its wars through its current one, which CPJ notes is the deadliest conflict for journalists on record. But advocating that militaries target the press is just one of Anne Applebaum’s many “indispensable contributions to the preservation of democracy and peace” (to quote her prize description). Another “contribution” can be found 10 months later in October of 2002 when, notably much earlier than most liberals at the time, Applebaum called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Iraq.

Although I dislike the modern tendency to compare every mad dictator to Hitler, in this narrow sense, the comparison to Saddam might be apt. Are you sure Saddam would not risk the destruction of his country, if he thought, for some reason, that he or his regime was in danger? Do you want to wait and find out?...We really don’t know whether deterrence will work in the case of Iraq. Megalomaniacal tyrants do not always behave in the way rational people do, and to assume otherwise is folly.

 

If I have any real qualms about the potential war in Iraq, they are not so much about the central issue—should we fight or should we not (I think, with caveats, that we should be prepared to do so)—but about the peculiar way in which the administration has until now gone about making its case for the war."

To reiterate, Anne Applebaum had no opposition to the question of “should we fight or not,” but rather, “about the way in which the administration” had presented the case for war. Presumably, if she were Bush, she simply would have made a better power point presentation to argue for that war which, let’s remember, killed over a million people, spilled over into neighboring countries, and spawned ISIS.

In 2016, the by that point established peace activist Anne Applebaum took to The Washington Post to mourn what she called “The disastrous nonintervention in Syria.” 

Maybe a U.S.-British-French intervention would have ended in disaster. If so, we would today be mourning the consequences. But sometimes it’s important to mourn the consequences of nonintervention too. Three years on, we do know, after all, exactly what nonintervention has produced: 

 

Estimates of war casualties range from about 155,000 to 400,000, depending on who is counted…According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there were 4.8 million registered Syrian refugees as of Aug. 16…the country has been destroyed. Schools and hospitals have been leveled."

Notably, the casualty range she provides for the Syrian conflict is roughly half of the total of those killed in the Iraq War, which as we just saw, she proudly stood with hardline neocons like Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney to support. But more importantly, the account of events that Applebaum provides here, is pure fiction. When she uses the conditional tense to say things like “intervention would have ended,” like x, or uses phrases such as “our disastrous nonintervention,” I honestly do not know what she is talking about. Her article takes place in a universe so far from our own that I’m convinced this may be Applebaum’s attempt at science fiction.

Despite her misleading headline, the US government did intervene in Syria - that has been thoroughly documented by every mainstream outlet. The New York Times for instance, reported 7 months before Applebaum’s column in an article titled “U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels” that “Obama secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to begin arming Syria’s embattled rebels in 2013,” and that 

Mr. Obama gave his approval for the C.I.A. to begin directly arming and training the rebels from a base in Jordan, amending the Timber Sycamore program to allow lethal assistance. Under the new arrangement, the C.I.A. took the lead in training, while Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, provided money and weapons, including TOW anti-tank missiles.”

That Anne Applebaum wields Syrian conflict casualty statistics as an argument for more war, while deliberately concealing the US role in producing those statistics, shows just how desperate Applebaum is to send other people’s children to fight in foreign conflicts.  

Really, the thing that stood out most when reading through the backlog of Applebaum’s articles is the bizarre blindspot she has for much of recent history. At first glance her approach appeared to be deliberately cherry picking events in order to downplay the role of the US in shaping much of the suffering in the world. But reading even more of Applebaum , it becomes clear that what she writes is a reflection of a much more serious mental pathology - one shared by many elites. It has become a common tactic of establishment elites to project the blame of domestic failures on foreign governments. That was the whole point of Russiagate conspiracy theories in 2016, of which Applebaum was a fanatical supporter. This elite pathology is maybe best represented in one of Applebaum’s latest articles for The Atlantic where she explains her theory for who is to blame for a decline in America's global standing and popularity, (Spoiler alert: it’s Russia and China!)

…the story of how Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans—have come to spout Russian propaganda about Ukraine is not primarily a story of European colonial history, Western policy, or the Cold War. Rather, it involves China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language."

Anne Applebaum’s writing should not be studied by political scientists, it should be studied by psychiatrists; the level of delusion on display here is remarkable. This is a royal member of the US foreign policy elite, whose signature policy has been intervention around the world and support for despised and outcast governments like Israel. I just showed you all the wars she’s advocated for in just a 20 year period. And when confronted with bubbling anger and bitterness toward her country from the rest of the world, Anne Appplebaum is incapable of making a cause and effect connection between that resentment and the US foreign policy she has successfully cheerled. Rather, Applebaum insists that the  “Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans” are the victims of “Russian propaganda campaigns,” and “China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence” them. In other words, implies Applebaum, Africans, Latin Americans, Asians, and some Westerners don’t really harbor any resentment for American foreign policy at all, they only feel that way because of a Russian and Chinese propaganda campaign which, apparently, they are too stupid to notice, unlike the wise and educated Anne Applebaum, who sees the propaganda campaign with clear eyes and benevolently offers to unshackle the minds of people in the third world. 

That such a deranged and delusional person has advocated so many terrible and destructive policies only to move upward in corporate media is not surprising (advocating destructive policies and success are directly correlated in Washington). That she wins awards for peace should make you disregard these sorts of establishment awards completely.

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System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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There was another aspect of that Bukele meeting that hasn't gotten enough coverage: Trump was asked about the Iran negotiations that are sensibly underway between the United States and Iran. It's the first known senior-level contact between American senior leadership and Iranian senior leadership since the Obama administration – infamously, Donald Trump decided to withdraw, after the Obama administration, from Obama's signature foreign policy diplomatic achievement. 

You can criticize that achievement or herald it, but it was his signature achievement, I think it would be hard to dispute, which was the Iran nuclear deal, or the JCPOA. 

Trump campaigned for president in 2016, denouncing that deal. I vividly recall him appearing at a Tea Party Patriots protest in September 2015, alongside Ted Cruz, that was devoted to denouncing the JCPOA, with Trump saying he had never seen a worse negotiated deal in his entire life. 

Anyway, direct negotiations, or at least direct contacts, we don't really know the full extent of what's been discussed yet, have begun between the United States and Iran as of this past weekend. And Trump was asked about those negotiations. 

So, let's hear what he had to say. 

Video. Donald Trump, Nayib Bukele. April 14, 2025.

 That's Trump being asked if he is contemplating, or does the outcome envisioned here include a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, and Trump says, “Of course it does.”

Trump has been becoming more and more brazen with these overt threats against Iran, particularly since March 30, when he decided to place a phone call to Kristen Welker, of NBC News, the host of “Meet the Press.” “There will be bombings the likes of which they have never seen before.” That's what Trump called up Kristen Welker of NBC News and told her in a phone interview. 

There could be an extent to which people are inured by this because Trump says a million things every day, some are deliberately incendiary, some are sarcastic, some are trolling, some may be earnest. Who knows? We can never quite settle on what the proportion is here in terms of how we're supposed to interpret the endless cacophony of Trump’s remarks on a given day, but it is really worth noting that presidents hadn't tended to come out and publicly threaten Iran that they will be bombed in a time-bound period if they don't capitulate to U.S. demands. 

You have had previous presidents, including Obama, say stuff to the effect of all options are on the table with respect to Iran. But it was seen as so obviously bellicose and so obviously impermissible diplomatically to come out and just blatantly threaten to bomb Iran. Why? Because, in the case of Obama, if there was some potential diplomatic arrangement in the offing, which Obama subsequently did attain in 2015, then running around threatening to bomb Iran might be an impediment to achieving that because it could cast aspersion, grave aspersions on the intentions of the United States and its attempt to interact with Iran. 

So, I actually went and asked a handful of people who are the wrong kind of policy experts, who are involved with Iran policy professionally and know the history of Iran and U.S. relations really well. I asked them: Is there a precedent of a U.S. president cavalierly coming out and just saying there will be bombing of Iran if X, Y and Z don't happen? And they say, “No, no, this is unique to Trump,” except for Trump's first term, when he did threaten, after the Soleimani assassination, in January 2020, to bomb Iranian cultural sites. But other than that, it's really not customary for presidents to be so bombastic in their public utterances with respect to Iran. 

There are certain ways in which Trump really does defy foreign policy convention in a salutary way. One hallmark example from the first term is when, after some initial bluster, he did initiate direct diplomatic relations with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. The negotiations with North Korea didn't ultimately result in a settlement because, for one thing, Trump and his administration at the time insisted on maximalist demands around denuclearization that North Korea, as a matter of national pride or even personal pride on the part of Kim, was never going to agree to but it did break a significant taboo for those direct talks to even happen in the first place. It likewise breaks a taboo for Trump to be threatening to bomb Iran so openly, pursuant to some cobbled-together negotiations, which it's not even clear are in particular good faith. 

So, that just is an indication of how it can be a double-edged sword meaning defying foreign policy convention can at times be salutary because foreign policy consensus is rife with failure, rife insular clique type thinking, and often revolves around people who have a demonstrable track record of myopia and “inhospitability” to criticism or contrary ways of thinking. So, Trump has at times the ability to disrupt that. But the double-edged sword is he could also say he's defying foreign policy convention because it hadn't previously been conventional to just be openly threatened to bomb Iran as he's doing now repeatedly in hopes, presumably, that it could result in some diplomatic settlement because Iran is just going to be so bludgeoned into submission that they're going to agree to maximalist demands imposed by Trump. But who knows? It could also be a pretext for war. Trump could say, “Look, we made every effort to negotiate with Iran. We even defied some convention by resuming high-level contacts between the U.S. and Iranian senior leadership, but they were so obstinate that we had no choice but to launch this bombing campaign with Israel that we've been threatening for weeks. And actually, even in the 2024 campaign, Trump threatened it publicly then. 

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Video. Steve Witkoff, Sean Hannity. April 14, 2025.

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Trump Meets with El Salvador's Bukele: A Tyrant or a Model to Copy? Plus: Trump's Proposal to Deport Citizens There
System Update #439

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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There is actually a lot to cover. I want to focus specifically on the meeting that President Trump had in the Oval Office with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, because there was a great deal of things said that I think weren't a lot of analysis, a lot of breakdowns, a lot of understanding of very consequential claims that were made, claims that in some senses were untrue, other claims seemed to be quite radical. 

It's always hard to know exactly when Trump says something, whether he really means it, whether he's doing it to be a little bit trolling, whether he's going to provoke some sort of response. But it nonetheless is our responsibility if the president of the United States says he intends to do something – and he didn't just say it once, he said it repeatedly throughout the week – obviously then it's important to discuss what it is that he said in the case of a radical idea like deporting American citizens convicted of crimes to El Salvador to serve in an El Salvadoran dungeon that is notorious around the world for human rights abuses.

I think it's very important to take that at least seriously enough to talk about it. If you object, that's your right as a citizen, you could say your duty, certainly a duty as a journalist. So, there's certainly a lot to break down. We will do our best to do that for you.

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El Salvador is a small country; the U.S. had been at war with it, involved in dirty wars there throughout the 1980s. It is generally considered an underdeveloped country – still is – but President Bukele has gained global attention in part because the government under him just rounded up thousands and thousands of people who were not convicted of crimes but were “suspects in gang violence.” 

No question, a lot of them have been swept up who are innocent, many of them guilty, and they're put into not ordinary prisons, but prisons that are some of the cruelest, most dehumanizing and exploitative in the world, purposely meant to dehumanize. Bukele talks openly about the fact that the prisons pay for themselves because they force the prisoners, basically, to engage in slave labor. They love to take videos and photos and make all kinds of films showing the dehumanization process. 

Rights have been run roughshod over in El Salvador. There's no free speech; you can't criticize Bukele. If you're a journalist, you get attacked by the government if you do so. There's certainly no right to due process. People who go into this prison are meant to stay there for life. There's violence in this prison, not from the prisoners, but from the guards. It's a place that you're intended never to leave. 

A lot of people in El Salvador, as often happens with authoritarianism, love their leader. They love their authoritarian leader because it has had results. It has significantly lowered crime in a place once plagued by a lot of violence, it has now become significantly safer. 

In general, though, we in the United States, our founding values, our founding as based in the values of the Enlightenment, don't believe that we should sacrifice rights for safety. The whole Constitution, in fact, is intended to elevate the rights of people, even if it means impeding our ability to catch criminals. The founders understood, because they were waging a war against the British crown, that all the rights that the British crown routinely invaded in the name of stopping crime – invading people's homes with no search warrant, just rushing them through a trial with no rights if they thought they were guilty – those were the things that had to be avoided if America was really going to be free and democratic. These are the things in the Constitution that you can go and read, none of which are available in El Salvador. 

So, there is a little bit of an oddity that the person most responsible for this authoritarianism – you can even call it tyranny – in El Salvador, although with positive results that many of the people in El Salvador seem to like – again, it's not uncommon for people to love their authoritarian leader. People crave security, crave, crave protection. If you promise them that in exchange for something they fear, they'd be happy to give up rights. We've seen that in American history. That's what the War on Terror was. It's what all sorts of wars in the United States have entailed, including the Cold War. It's a very common formula that the American founders set out to avoid most. 

So, it's a little strange, to put that mildly, to see a political faction – what do you call it? MAGA movement or nationalists, whose primary objective or aspiration is to preserve American values – venerating a tinpot dictator, at this point, of a small Central American country as someone who is not just a close ally of the United States who we pay to imprison people even though they've never been convicted of crimes, we just send them there when their only crime is having entered the United States illegally – although some people have been sent there who haven't entered illegally, who are in the United States legally, seeking asylum, who came through a legal port on the border, the port of entry, as people are told to do. But in any event, it's not just that we're allied with him, but a lot of people seem to really admire Bukele, almost suggesting that we in the U.S. need to use him as a model, to use El Salvador as a model for how our own country should be – in part to fight crime, in part to fight the obvious problem that most people agree is a real problem of people pouring into the country illegally. 

So, the question becomes how much liberty are we going to sacrifice? How many constitutional rights are we to repudiate in the name of these other goals, whether, oh, we have to fight crime as though crime is rampant, worser than usual, or because of the problem of people in the country illegally? 

The laws of the United States make it very easy to deport someone who's in the United States illegally. You don't even have to go to a real court. You just issue a removal order, you go to a special deportation court that's not even part of the Article III Judiciary, it's just inside the Department of Justice, and they just rubber-stamp it. All they want to know is: Is the person in the United States here legally? If the person can't show they are – and it's very easy, it's just, here's my green card, here is my visa – if they don't have that, it means they've entered the country illegally and the court approves their deportation. 

But deportation means sending them back to their country of origin and what has been so controversial is not that. President Trump ran three times on a pledge of sending people in the country illegally to deport them back to their country of origin, people voted for him in the last election based on that promise of mass deportations. Most people involved in these debates have no problem with the legal deportation of people in the country illegally. That's what Trump pledged to do, he had a democratic mandate for that and polls show that's what people want. That's not the issue. 

What's happening is much, much different: people aren't being sent back to their country of origin. They're being sent to El Salvador, a country they've never been to, they have nothing to do with, they're not citizens of, never have been and they're being imprisoned in one of the worst prisons on the planet while the United States pays for their imprisonment and they're being imprisoned for life based on allegations of criminal activity.

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Week in Review: Trump's Tariffs, Ukraine Negotiations, Possibility of War with Iran, and More with Glenn Greenwald, Lee Fang, & Michael Tracey
System Update #438

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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As a program that covers only two or at the most three issues per night – because we prefer in-depth coverage to sort of cable-style quick five-minute hits of each different news event possible – sometimes, especially these days, it is difficult to keep up with all the news, given how fast and furious things are always happening with this new administration. 

As a result, we're going to try to devote one show per week or so to a sort of “Week in Review,” where we're able to cover more topics than we normally would cover on a typical program by inviting friends of the show on to talk with us about those. 

To help us do that tonight, we are joined by the independent Journalist Lee Fang and the always delightful and agreeable Michael Tracey. 

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Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He covers political and corporate wrongdoing on Substack at leefang.com. He previously wrote and reported for The Intercept where he was my colleague for many years; he has also written at The Nation and reported for Vice. He is an intrepid investigative journalist, always breaking lots of stories, working by himself or with an independent team. We are always happy to welcome him to the show. 

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