Daniel Ellsberg, the former RAND Corporation analyst who leaked the now-famous Pentagon Papers, has said that treating China and Russia as a joint target is “insanity”.

In a recent interview with Democracy Now!, the onetime military analyst claimed that the escalating conflicts in Ukraine and Taiwan constitute an “insanity that has taken over the public”. “It is as insane as QAnon or as the belief that Trump is currently the president of the United States,” Ellsberg said, before adding that there was now a “real possibility of a nuclear war”:

Ellsberg said recently leaked intelligence documents demonstrate that, much like the war in Vietnam, the situation in Ukraine has become a bloody stalemate. He added that the alleged decision of Boris Johnson and other Western leaders to dissuade Volodymyr Zelenskyy from signing a peace deal in April 2022 was a “crime against humanity”:

Ellsberg attributes part of his motivation to speak about the war in Ukraine to his recent diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer, and has claimed he is “living this month as though it is my last”. As one of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s leading military analysts, Ellsberg rose to fame when he came to work on a top-secret report, US Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1945–68, now known as the Pentagon Papers. 

The report, which Ellsberg leaked to the press following the expansion of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia, revealed that four US presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson) had subsequently misled the the public by hiding the extent of American involvement in Vietnam in the lead-up to official war on the ground. 

In the decades since being cleared of all charges brought against him by the US Government, Ellsberg has continued to advocate against the use of nuclear weapons in ongoing military conflicts. When asked about what troubles him in the time that remains, Ellsberg replied, “At this point I’m much more aware of […] how little has changed in these critical aspects of the danger of nuclear war, and how limited the effectiveness has been to curtail what we’ve done.”

The former military analyst argued that the current conflict in Ukraine, and the question of increased US involvement, is “not in the hands of people who have our interests or the interests of survival, of human survival, high in their priorities[…] It’s an awakening that’s in many ways painful.”

Ellsberg suggested that officials and members of the public from both the United States and Russia have placed geopolitical advantage above “human survival”:

Ellsberg emphasised that the responsibility to look after “human survival” now lies with a younger generation, who must take action through “the withdrawal of [their] support” for the continuation of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.