Obama’s Assistant Defense Secretary Farkas Swears the Rules-Based Order Is Worth Risking Nuclear War

May 9, 2022 (EIRNS)—It almost seems as if neither the Pentagon nor NATO nor the Armed Services Committees have a position which, Barack Obama’s neo-con Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Evelyn Farkas has not held at one time or another in the past 30 years, not to mention her Farkas Global Strategies Corp. consultancy. This woman thinks a great deal about war.

In an PBS NewsHour joint interview with University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer on May 5, hosted by anchor Judy Woodruff, Farkas showed just how dangerous to human life war-hawks of the Madeleine Albright line become, when they make a career of thinking about NATO “winning” wars all over the world.

Whereas on May 12, 1996 Lesley Stahl challenged Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on “60 Minutes,” that the sanctions against Iraq which she was overseeing had cost the lives of 500,000 Iraqi children. Albright infamously countered: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”

Likewise, here is what Farkas said to Mearsheimer’s contention that the Biden administration policy of “crushing” Russia, either via Ukraine on the battlefield or by vicious economic sanctions, can trigger nuclear war:

“I don't think we should be deterred by this fear that [Vladimir Putin] is going to reach for nuclear weapons. We cannot rule it out. I'm not dismissing it. But I also think that the objective that we have right now, the stakes are so high. It's nothing less—it's not just about Ukraine. It's about the international order.

“And we’re fighting here to stop Vladimir Putin from turning after Ukraine to Georgia and Moldova, to destroying NATO, to essentially reasserting a sphere of influence system, which is what we put to bed after the end of World War II, when we set up the United Nations and the rules-based order.”

So the price would be worth it—a possible nuclear war for NATO’s international order.

Mearsheimer responded: “When Professor Farkas talks about the consequences of this for the world order, I’m more worried about the consequences if we ended up getting hit with nuclear weapons. I mean, we want to remember what President Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was in a similar situation. What he did was, he tried to dampen the conflict. He tried to work out some sort of deal with Khrushchev, so we could both avoid getting vaporized.