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Dec. 1, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:00:19
Paul Craig Roberts and Mike Adams reveal the huge MISTAKE US officials are making...
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Welcome to today's interview on Brighteon.com.
This is, of course, an uncensored platform, and today we're joined by, I think, one of the most important voices in America today, and that's not an exaggeration.
It's Mr.
Paul Craig Roberts, who served as the Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury with a specific domestic economic focus under the Reagan administration.
His website is paulcraigroberts.org, and his articles, I think, are one of the most important, critical articles Examples of voices of our time to help bring sanity and peace to an administration that is currently in power, which is, in my opinion, completely out of control and run by warmongering idiot zealots.
Those are my words, but let's find out what Paul Craig Roberts might add to that.
Welcome, Mr.
Roberts, to the show today.
And I understand that you prefer to just go by Craig, so if that's okay, I'll call you Craig for the remainder of the interview, but welcome.
Thank you very much, Mark.
It's a pleasure to be on your show.
I've admired you for a long time.
Well, likewise, I've been reading your work for decades, literally, and I continue to come back to your words as reasoned, filled with wisdom, and right now we need wisdom, I think, more than ever.
So let me ask you, sir, just to begin, how would you characterize the current U.S. State Department and Biden administration Well, let's start with Israel.
I think it developed quite differently from what they thought.
I'm convinced, Mike, that the entire Hamas invasion There was a very strong hand in that by the American neoconservatives and also by Netanyahu.
And the view was, from Netanyahu's standpoint, number one, he can use the Hamas attack to end the existence of Palestine.
And that then would make him a hero and get him out of his legal and political problems.
You know, politically, he's a minority, and illegally, he's been indicted.
And if he wasn't in office, he might be facing a prison sentence.
So Netanyahu saw this as a chance to terminate the existence of Palestine, not have to listen to any more two-state solutions And become a hero.
Now, I think there was a wider agenda, but first let's talk about what the neoconservatives say.
They listened to all of the talk by Hezbollah and Iran that if Israel invaded Gaza, they were coming in.
So, the American New Conservatives said, well look, finally we've got the opportunity to attack Iran.
Right.
Well, once they go in, we can attack Iran in order to save Israel, and no one in the American media or the Western media, no Western leader, no American leader, Republican or Democrat, will complain, and so we can finally get rid of Iran and Syria.
Well, with the wider agenda, I'm convinced, is Greater Israel.
Because the only reason we've had 20 years of war in the Middle East is to clear out the countries that are in the way of Israeli expansion.
Israel is twice going into southern Lebanon.
They need the water resources there.
They tried to occupy it twice and they were driven out by Hezbollah twice, defeated by a militia.
And so they're not willing to risk that a third time because their military reputation could collapse.
So they have used us, I think it's all came out of 9-11, the whole purpose of 9-11, Was to give us an excuse to go in and destroy Iraq, Syria, and Iran, because these are the suppliers of money and weapons to the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, which stands in the way of Israeli expansion.
So that's what those wars were about.
There wasn't any war on terror.
There wasn't any terror.
What was the one terror event?
They say 9-11.
Well, that's That's debatable, but still it's only one event.
So it was an excuse to clear out the countries in the Middle East that are in the way of greater Israel.
You know, the Zionists claim that Israel is from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Wow.
So it's from part of Egypt through Syria, Lebanon, the half of Saudi Arabia, of Iraq.
So this was the program.
But it seems to me, if I may interject here, that what the U.S. is doing in the Middle East with Israel is very much the same as what they're doing in Eastern Europe with Ukraine, which is, of course, having a puppet proxy nation, although you might argue that America is the puppet of Israel at this point.
But...
It's designed to provoke, right?
In the case of Russia, to provoke Russia to attack and then have a justification for more sanctions against Russia.
Or in this case, to provoke Hezbollah or to provoke Iran to attack in order to have the justification.
I mean, when you sail the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier through the Strait of Hormuz, you're just begging.
It's like saying we dare you to attack us, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
You're correct to make that observation, though I think the two cases are quite different in their motives.
I think the motive of the Ukrainian conflict is different from this motive.
And this motive, I think, is to clear out the Hezbollah militia.
And now, why didn't this happen?
Well, First thing, Putin leaned on the Arabs and leaned on the Persians, the Iranians.
He said, no, don't go in.
Don't go in.
It's a trap.
And so he has calmed them down.
So I said that would likely happen.
And so the neoconservatives would have a false flag that they blamed.
On Hezbollah or Iran, and they would use that to go in.
And why hasn't that happened?
I think it's because both Washington and Israel have been totally surprised By the pushback against this operation in Gaza, the whole world is coming out against them.
You have countries withdrawing their ambassadors from Israel.
The situation now is so severe that former Israeli security chiefs and several former Israeli prime ministers are calling for Netanyahu's removal from office.
They say the man is mad, he's crazy, he's endangering Israel's existence, and he has to go.
And so, this is a serious halt in the larger agenda, which was to get rid of Hezbollah, because now they can't really act because there's not the support.
You see, the TV and videos and all the rest, they're recording the slaughter of women and children.
That's a war crime.
You know, if you're at war, you're fighting the enemy's soldiers.
You're not supposed to be targeting civilian infrastructure.
You're not supposed to be bombing hospitals, machine gunning kids and women.
And this is really a cult The New Conservatives off guard, and it's called Netanyahu off guard, and so now we see they don't know what to do.
And these truces, these two-day or three-day or four-day, they keep continuing.
They keep continuing.
They keep continuing, and Israel said they would never do one.
So I think that the hopes that the neoconservatives had that this would now, either through the actions of Iran and Hezbollah or through their own false flag, give them a chance finally to attack Iran, I think that's been stopped.
And I think that the Israeli confidence that they would defeat Hamas, which they have not done, what they're doing is destroying The buildings in Gaza and driving the people, you know, their plan is to drive them out into the Sinai Desert and put them in tent cities.
Right.
It seems that the horrific aspects of this are too much in the news.
And there's too much opposition.
So at the moment, I don't know how it's going to end, but I don't think it's going to end the way it was intended.
Well, that's a really important analysis, and I find in your words also a lot of wisdom in That the State Department and the Biden administration or whoever's controlling the Biden administration needs to really rethink and that leads to my next question to you which is about the overconfidence of the West both in Ukraine and now with Israel.
It seems like For the longest time, Western media was saying that the counteroffensive in Ukraine was going to succeed.
Russia had run out of ammo.
They were being defeated.
Their morale was broken.
All of those claims actually apply to Ukraine, not to Russia.
Russia's munitions manufacturing is achieving record levels.
Russia's domestic economy is stronger than it was before the sanctions.
Russia's energy exports are larger than before the sanctions.
And Russia's military capabilities are now extremely well-practiced and well-performed.
And on top of that, I know you're aware of this, but just for our audience, Russia has vastly superior weaponry in terms of hypersonic missiles, anti-air defense systems, And then getting to Israel, it seems like Israel brought up 300,000 reservists, and they're just driving around tanks in rubble, and their tanks are getting blown up by clever Hamas fighters who are going in and out of tunnels.
And they've lost hundreds of armored vehicles.
I think in both cases, and I guess this is my question to you, didn't the U.S. and now Israel...
Sort of express overconfidence in their capabilities and a reality check has been handed to them in a very ugly way.
Well, when you have an agenda, Mike, which the neoconservatives have and Netanyahu have, you get carried away with the agenda.
Particularly if you've been frustrated with it and all of a sudden it seems you have an opportunity to achieve it.
And so you're not careful.
You're just swept away by your own enthusiasm for your agenda.
And so I suppose it does result in mistakes, and you can call it overconfidence.
For the State Department now, you know, its own staff is split.
They can't get any unity.
Internally in the United States Department of State.
Good point.
Yeah.
And it's partly due to all the immigrants, which the Democrats appointed the government positions.
Right.
So you have now the Jewish elements in the State Department.
They're facing counterforce from the Muslims who are in the State Department.
The Secretary of State himself is Jewish.
He can't actually have a unified department.
And, you know, from my experience in government, governments are run by assistant secretaries because they control the information.
All the information flows through assistant secretaries.
Nobody else has any information except what the assistant secretary has given them.
So, Lincoln is sitting up there, and the other one, the maiden woman who handed out cookies, she's an under-secretary, but they don't have the staffs.
They're dependent on what they hear.
They're getting so much conflicting information that it undermines their ability to act.
So you see now the Secretary of State is trying to calm this down.
He's over there all the time now.
He's trying to say, stop, don't do this.
It's hurting our reputation.
It's hurting our ability to support you.
We've got protests in the streets.
Even the media, even the media that we own and control is exposing the inhumanity of what Israel is doing.
So I think now it's basically Blinken and of course Biden, I don't think, knows too much about what's going on.
But Blinken has his hands full trying to keep this from blowing up in some way that it's a huge defeat for Israel and the United States.
Well, isn't there also, if I may interrupt, what Blinken is facing is a very different world and a very different reaction to the United States compared to when you served.
Because, you know, the moral righteousness of the United States has been all but obliterated by the actions of Biden.
I think the world knows that the U.S. State Department signed off on the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline.
I think Victoria Nuland is a racist, ethnic-cleansing, genocidal lunatic.
That's my opinion.
And she has no business touching any department in the United States government.
And even if she had the best information in the world, her own decision process is dangerous and extremist, actually.
She has, in my view, a terrorist mindset that has no place being in the U.S. State Department.
But Blinken, when he visited many of these Arab countries, he was mistreated in a way that never would have happened during the Reagan administration or even the Clinton administration.
What are your thoughts on that?
Well, that's what I said in the beginning.
Washington and Netanyahu did not expect this pushback.
They've gotten away with everything always before.
And all of a sudden, The images, the constant images, videos of the slaughter of thousands and thousands of people who are not combatants.
You know, it's not like they're killing Hamas troops in a battle.
They're killing civilians, women and children and bombing hospitals and And destroying homes and the whole infrastructure.
The images are everywhere now.
It's not kept from people.
The effect is bigger.
Do you remember back during the Vietnam War, the famous photograph of the little girl naked fleeing down the road in advance of the napalm?
Well, that had a huge effect here.
It really affected Well, I think the effect of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza is even greater.
And it's caused the world to be less accepting.
So this is a constraint that Netanyahu didn't expect and that the Biden administration did not expect.
Certainly the neoconservatives didn't expect it.
And I didn't either, initially.
Of course, I was pleased to see it.
And this, I think, may cause this to lose what looked to me like almost a surefire development into a much wider and larger war.
What is your knowledge about...
Well, first of all, I agree with your assessment there, and it shows that the establishment really can no longer dictate the narrative.
The information has become so decentralized.
Right, right.
And even, for example, we're on brighttown.com right now, and we're having a discussion that would not be allowed on mainstream media, and there's also many other platforms.
There's Rumble, and there's social media platforms, and so on, and Telegram.
So information has become decentralized.
Unlike during the Reagan administration or the Clinton administration, during which information sources were very limited, you know, it was three news networks on TV and plus CNN, and they could just be told exactly what to say on any given day.
The internet didn't even really exist.
Well, I mean, it did during the Clinton administration, but it was very early.
Most people weren't using it.
But now it's all decentralized.
So now, I've also noticed for the first time People learning about the history of Israel, and it's damn shocking.
I mean, this wasn't even on my radar.
And I've never considered myself, I've never taken a side, I've never been, oh, I'm pro-Palestine or sympathetic to the Palestinian people.
I'm pro-humanity, I think, like you are.
We want all people to prosper and be healthy and do well.
But learning the history of Israel's Ethnic cleansing and dislocation and kinetic war and coercion and enslavement of the Palestinian people has been very psychologically traumatizing to a lot of people, including myself.
I think this has changed the narrative.
Yes.
Yes.
Of course, it's changed the narrative.
I don't think that the Internet is as...
Useful, as you put it, because we have the effect of what happened to Twitter, for example.
The government has enormous programs and energy operating to control the internet and to control what can be said, you know, and the Twitter files showed that.
It's quite frightening.
For the first time, See, there was much more freedom back during the print and TV era of information than there is now, because now they can cancel you, they can turn you off,
they can ban you, and they can even, as they did with the Twitter files, and as they are doing with other social media, force you to support only the narrative and to block Any alternative explanation.
And look at all the trouble Musk is in, because when he took over, he said, well, that stops now.
And he gave the Twitter files to Tayabi, and the story started getting out about how the United States government was using social media to control the narrative, to spread lies, to suppress truth.
They're doing this across the board.
They attack individual sites.
For example, Videre, an immigration site.
There's a huge effort to close them down.
There are all kinds of fake lawsuits against them brought by New York, just like the ones against Trump.
And so the government now is active in suppressing information in a way it never was.
That's right.
Before.
What would happen, for example, the Reagan administration, the CIA would hand a story or a leak to the Washington Post.
And then the Washington Post would print the story.
And that would be the way the CIA was trying to control or influence the narrative.
But today, it's much worse.
And I think that if it continues, they'll simply close down everything.
I mean, they'll close down Rumble.
They'll close everything down.
So I think the truth is it's more vulnerable today, not less vulnerable.
Though, for now, you're right.
We have alternative ways of getting information out.
Well, I would just add to that, Craig, that there are some really interesting innovations in decentralized information distribution that I think may surprise all of us in how effective they are.
I've interviewed many of those pioneers here where they are peer-to-peer information systems, such as Bastion, for example, or Cordal, which have no central servers, can't be seized, can't be shut down, and don't require domain names.
That's fine.
That's good news.
I'm glad to hear it.
Yeah, I mean, there are some really clever people working on solutions to keep information free.
But you're right.
The government is doing everything it can to control the Internet right now and also to label any questions disinformation.
So or anti-Semitism, as the case is now.
Right.
So if you say, wow, Israel shouldn't bomb children to death.
Oh, you're an anti-Semite.
Really?
How did that leap get made?
Well, I think they're wearing out the term anti-Semite.
What it really means is somebody who hates Jews.
It doesn't mean that you criticize a government policy.
Right.
I mean, you can criticize the American government policy without being called anti-American, but you can't do that in Israel or to Israel.
Now, you raised the question earlier of Ukraine and Russia and the neocons and I said I thought something different was going on there.
Do you want to go back to that?
Yes, please.
All right.
Well, you have to remember that the United States government, in fact, the whole world was surprised by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It was a total surprise.
No one expected it, least of all the CIA. And despite the popular conservative opinion, it was never the aim of the Reagan administration to defeat the Soviet Union or to collapse it.
The only aim we had was to end the Cold War.
Reagan said over and over, our intent is not to win it, it's to end it.
We don't want these nuclear weapons hanging over our heads the rest of our life.
It's just not sensible.
And so what collapsed the Soviet Union, we had nothing to do with.
People don't even know this because the conservatives were anxious to make a claim that they had won.
What collapsed the Soviet Union was that the Politburo, the hardline elements in the Soviet government, that placed President Gorbachev under house arrest.
They arrested the President of the Soviet Union, and this is what led to the uproar and Yeltsin climbing on the tank and the collapse of the Soviet government.
So, it was a huge surprise.
Well, The neoconservatives instantly seized on it.
They said, well, finally, the only check on American unilateralism has removed itself.
So instantly, Wolfowitz penned this doctrine.
It's called the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
Oh boy, yeah, here we go.
And he says that the principal goal Of American foreign policy is to prevent the rise of any country that can serve as a check on American unilateralism.
So, this was the policy.
Now, when he announced that, Yeltsin was in power and Yeltsin was an American puppet.
Essentially, the United States had control of Russia.
Now, when Yeltsin retired, he picked Putin.
And everyone in the United States and the government assumed that this was a continuation of Yeltsin.
And the neoconservatives were focused in the Middle East on their wars.
You know, they had Iraq, they had Afghanistan and Libya, they were preparing to go into Syria until the Russians stopped them, and they weren't paying any attention, and the whole world was surprised again in 2007 when Putin announced at the Munich Security Conference the end Of American unilateralism.
He says, no more.
It's no longer a unipolar world.
We're here, and we represent our interests, and it has to be respected.
And this was a huge shock.
And the neoconservatives said, oh my God, we weren't paying attention.
How are we going to get this country back on the reservation?
And that's when they started pouring money into Ukraine.
You may remember Victoria Nuland was on It was at a conference, and it was televised, and she said, we put $5 billion in Ukraine to prepare the situation for us.
And then in 2014, we had the coup.
Well, the purpose of this was to create difficulties for Putin at home.
And maybe undermine or use it to encourage opposition.
You see, the Russian government was kind of gullible and insouciate, and it thought that since communism was gone, we would all work together now and be friends and get along, more or less.
And they weren't prepared for Washington to come at them the way they did.
And of course, Ukraine is a hodgepodge.
The Donbass region, where all the fighting has been, and that's what the fighting is about, Donbass, this is former territory of the Russian province of the Soviet Union.
It was stuck there by communists for various reasons.
And also Crimea.
Crimea was stuck there by Khrushchev.
Basically, administrative reasons.
And these are all Russian people.
They're not Ukrainian.
And so...
But this...
Yes?
I'm sorry to interrupt, but...
Putin's observations in 2007 were absolutely correct.
I would say that the unipolar worldview is a delusion.
I mean, it did exist since post-World War II. No one could compete with America's manufacturing dominance and its world reserve currency status.
As you well know, I know you've written about this as well, but just yesterday the United Arab Emirates announced that they were no longer selling oil in dollars.
And China is outproducing the U.S. Navy by a factor, I think, 200 to 1 in terms of its naval production capability right now because of the number of port facilities that China has.
You know, it's producing aircraft carriers.
Now, they're not as technologically advanced, not even close to the USS Ford-class carriers, but they are larger in numbers.
And so the unipolarism is dead, I would say, but I'm curious what you think about that.
Well, it doesn't matter what you and I think.
It's what the neoconservatives think.
Yeah.
Because they're in charge of the foreign policy.
Right.
And they haven't given up on it.
And they still think that they can undermine Russia and that they can undermine China.
And they are doing their best.
They're trying to do both.
And so that's what the Ukrainian situation was all about.
And that's what Taiwan is all about now.
It's a way of creating frictions.
And in a way of, they hope, making Asian countries afraid of these frictions and they might spill over onto them and thereby cooperate less or less rapidly with China and its Silk Road and all of its other schemes.
So, it's not given up and this is the real danger because I've criticized, or not really criticized, I've just pointed out that Putin, being a statesman, tries to avoid conflict.
And that's highly admirable.
But the neoconservatives see that as irresolution.
Lack of confidence.
Fear, maybe.
They misinterpret his stance.
And so they keep upping the provocations.
Right.
See?
And I keep saying, look, in the end, you're going to cause the conflict you're trying to avoid.
And that before it reaches that point, the Russians and the Chinese need to put their foot down really hard.
So that people see they're not irresolute, they're not scared, they're not hesitant in order to stop these provocations because at some point they reach a point where it just explodes.
So I think that remains a bad danger.
I think the danger of nuclear war remains.
Because both the Chinese—I mean, the Chinese are more outspoken about it, but they don't do things.
And Putin hardly says anything and does nothing.
So that, I think, encourages the neoconservatives and encourages more provocations.
You see, what would have stopped this in 2014?
Putin should have simply occupied Kyiv and just stopped it right there.
Well, he may have said, well, if I do that, he'll say I'm rebuilding the Soviet Empire and that'll work against us diplomatically.
All of Europe will fall for it.
Other countries will fall for it.
Central Asia may get worried we're coming after Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and China may get worried, and so I better not do that.
I can see that's the way you would think.
But the minute the Ukrainians started attacking the Russian areas in Donbass, he should have intervened.
Instead, he waited eight years while he built the Ukrainian army.
And he didn't intervene until we were on the verge of unleashing this army on the two independent republics, you know, Luhansk and Donatsk.
They were the two independent republics that declared themselves.
It took Russia forever to recognize them.
He did it at the last minute and sent in the troops.
Well, he never intended to invade Ukraine.
He's never made any effort to conquer Ukraine.
The effort was to drive the Ukrainians out of the Russian areas.
That's all he's ever tried to do.
And so that's what led up to February 22nd, then 2022, as you're saying, when the, what's it called, the Duma in Russia voted for the recognition of Luhansk and Donetsk and then unleashed a special military operation.
I'm glad you provided that context.
It's really critical to understand.
But what I want to ask you that's related to all of this I like how you explain that the de-escalation posture of Russia may be misinterpreted by the West.
And I agree with that assessment, but the West has also traditionally, since post-World War II, it has used economic sanctions as a very effective weapon.
The Treasury Department, where you served, has of course been a big part of this, and with the Department of State, but using sanctions effectively to coerce nations or to influence nations.
And those sanctions now, what Russia has proven is that the sanctions now have tremendously less And the more the world moves away from the dollar and embraces BRICS currencies, these economic sanctions become increasingly irrelevant.
So I'd like your thoughts on, is America losing the power it once had to wield economic sanctions as a weapon of geopolitical influence?
Yes, it's losing power.
Let me first say, though, I don't think these sanctions were ever effective, and certainly never against Russia.
In fact, they were a great godsend to Russia.
See, what the sanctions did, it destroyed globalism.
So we should be very thankful for the sanctions.
Interesting, yeah.
It just completely destroyed globalism.
And, of course, it gave the United States a high rate of inflation that we're still suffering under.
But the reason sanctions were effective on other small countries, Latin American countries, or wherever they might, African or whatever they may have done, Is it denied access to credit, to loans.
They couldn't go and get an IMF loan or a World Bank loan or a loan from Chase Manhattan or Barclays Bank in England.
It constrained them financially because they couldn't get their hands on hard currencies through loans.
And that's why they were effective.
Well, the Russians didn't need the loans.
They could advance their own development by expanding their own credit.
And they didn't know that at first, but they discovered it.
I told them that.
Michael Hudson told them that.
And they finally said, oh, yeah, we're right.
We don't need foreign loans.
We don't have to peg the ruble to the dollar?
Yeah.
But you see, they had been schooled by the American neoliberal economists that I regard as junk economists.
That's what Michael Hudson calls them.
He actually wrote a book called Junk Economists.
They're all junk economists.
American neoliberal economists haven't a clue about anything.
And they had schooled the Russians, and the Russians were thereby captive of false ideas.
Well, the sanctions...
Got rid of that.
It made them realize that globalism was a technique that the United States used to control other countries.
And they realized that they could finance their own development and that they realized they needed to be self-dependent.
They need to be independent of reliance on foreign trade.
So the sanctions is one of the main sources of the growing strength of Russia, of the Russian Federation, because it wised them up in all the ways they needed to be wised up.
Wow.
And so this helps explain the fact that they have now very high output of military munitions and the military industry strength of Russia surpasses all of Western Europe at this point.
That's right.
That's right.
Not just in quality, but in quantity.
Yes, and I mean in the aggregate of Western Europe.
At the moment, this present moment, if Russia came across the border, NATO would collapse.
They have any ammunition, no weapons, the troops are no good.
They simply couldn't function as a fighting force.
That's extraordinary.
Yeah, it's really extraordinary.
You know, the Germans have said over and over, we haven't got anything to arm our own army with.
Not that they have much of an army.
And so...
The same is true in the United Kingdom.
I mean, they're out of ammo, out of men, hardly have any navy.
I mean...
And so are we.
We don't have any ammo either.
And we can't recruit.
Right.
None of the services can meet their quotas.
It's ridiculous.
And this is why I'm concerned about the provocations of Russia and China, because the only way we can fight effectively is with nuclear weapons.
Right, and yet that is what's projected by the Western media onto Putin, saying that Putin might become desperate and launch nukes.
But you're saying, and I agree with you, that that's actually what the West is likely to do at some point.
That's what, yeah.
You see, all of this talk about, you know, during the so-called Ukrainian-Russian conflict, the British press was the worst.
Russia will be defeated in the morning.
It'll be defeated this afternoon.
It's lost to the war.
This went on for two years.
I'm sitting thinking, who in hell could write such stupid things?
Well, the whole conflict was presented as a Russian invasion of Ukraine that had been stopped.
Well, it was never an invasion of Ukraine.
Putin calls it a limited military intervention.
It's only in the Russian areas.
If Russia wanted to, they could take Ukraine by Monday morning.
They don't want it.
What do they want it for?
It's busted.
It's broke.
It's good for nothing.
They don't need it.
They're just not going to let it be in NATO. It won't be.
And now even the European countries are saying that.
And you know, Kissinger made that point over and over.
They mustn't put it in NATO. And so I think that the notion that this is a stalemate, which I hear every day, oh, it's a stalemate now.
Oh, I hear that too.
It's absurd.
It failed.
It's a stalemate.
It's not a stalemate.
It's not Putin's intention to conquer Ukraine.
It's to evict them from Donbas, from the Russian areas.
But now, Craig, there's something else really important to address in this.
I'd like your response, which is the fact that the economic devastation of Western European countries, Germany in particular, The cost of that, because the United States wants to defeat Russia or perhaps, you know, exploit it, pillage it for its resources and is using Ukraine as a proxy nation and the U.S. Navy destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline, cutting off Germany from Gazprom gas.
But the Western Europeans are paying the price for America's failed geopolitical policies.
Is that not true?
Yes, of course.
Well, The Western Europeans are puppets.
They're puppets of the United States.
You remember the book, the German editor, the biggest newspaper in Germany.
His name was something like Udo Ulfaki, something like that.
He wrote this book called Baut or Purchased Journalism.
And he said that he himself was purchased by the CIA and that there was not a significant journalist in Europe that was not on the CIA's payroll.
And years ago, it so happened, I was a young man and it was the Nixon administration and my My economics PhD dissertation chairman was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.
And one day he sent for me.
And they took me up to his office in the Pentagon.
The office was about the size of a football field.
And he said, I want you to go to Vietnam and take over the aid programs.
Well, this was right at the end, and you could see it was all over with.
He said that the aid's not effective because they steal it all, and so our efforts to We help them that way and fail.
So we need somebody honest we can trust to go there and you take over.
And I got to thinking, I said, if I go there and they're stealing it and I try to stop it, they're going to kill me.
And I also thought it was too late to be able to do anything.
And so I turned it down.
But I used the opportunity.
I asked him, I said, how is it?
We get all of Europe to always do exactly what we want.
He said, money.
I said, oh, you mean foreign aid?
No.
No.
We give the leaders bagfuls of money.
Right.
They belong to us.
They report to us.
That's what he said.
And he didn't approve of this, but there was nothing he could do about it.
It was just the way it was before he got there.
It would be the way while he was there.
It would be the way when he's gone.
He couldn't do anything about it.
But he was very honest.
And he told me, he said, they are not independent countries.
We own them.
Well, that was in the 70s.
Now imagine how much more owned they are now.
They even submit to having the economies wiped out.
You know, what's going to happen to German industry where they can't get any fuel?
Think about the magnificent cars, the BMWs, the Porsches, the Mercedes.
All kinds of Americans have these cars because they're highly dependable.
Many of them are enjoying the drive and all of a sudden you can't get parts.
Well, there was a video of Joe Biden standing right next to Chancellor Schultz of Germany, where Biden says, we promise we're going to make sure Nord Stream is completely destroyed.
And Schultz just stood there like a puppet, Yeah.
Sacrificing his domestic economy and the German people for the aims of the West to destroy their pipeline of affordable energy?
I couldn't believe it.
And everything else.
You know, we run the education system.
We control the textbooks they're allowed to use.
This is why they're all indoctrinated and feel so guilty.
Wow.
Still being indoctrinated.
The kids grow up Being indoctrinated.
It's an amazing thing, but it's true all over Europe.
And it's true in France.
Look, what did we do?
Remember, the French had a shipping contract to build helicopter carriers for the Russians.
And we forced them to void the contract.
So they had to pay the Russians billions of dollars, close the shipyards, throw huge numbers of people out of work.
Do you remember that?
No, I don't recall that.
Yeah, we did that to them.
Also, the big French bank.
I forget the name of it, but the big French bank, our banks wanted its business.
So they got together with Washington and they said, look, we can make a case that they are violating the sanctions on Iran.
And so you can damage them with Punishments and fines, and then we can encroach in their business areas, because it'll weaken them.
And sure enough, that's exactly what we did.
We brought some kind of fake sanctions case against the big French bank, and the French government didn't defend it.
And so the bank had to pay a fine equal to its annual profits.
So then the big New York banks got the business they wanted away from the French and they had financed somebody who was dealing with Iran.
I'm sorry to interrupt, Craig, but we're almost out of time.
And I don't want to give you time to mention your website and how your donors support it as well.
But just one final comment based on what you just said.
This whole idea that America runs around the world with a baseball bat kneecapping all the other nations and then calls it free market competition.
And this has got to stop.
I mean, we've got to succeed based on merit, not how much we can destroy everybody else.
You know, we have destroyed Western Europe's economy by taking out Nord Stream, and we have enhanced exports of liquid natural gas from U.S. exporters.
Of course, what a coincidence.
Well, of course, we're no longer based on merit.
You know, all of the big corporations have announced they won't hire white people.
That's right.
Admission to special schools or elite universities no longer depend on merit.
They depend on racial corners.
That's right.
So there's no longer merit.
Now what's doing us, I know we're out of time, but what's doing us in will be the loss of the dollar as a reserve currency.
Briefly, the American power since World War II has been based on the fact That the dollar being the reserve currency means the entire world is anxious to hold our debt because our debt, our dollar-denominated treasury bonds, are the reserves of the banking system.
So when our debt goes up, it just means the reserves of the banking system in every country goes up.
So they're delighted to buy our debt, our budget deficit debt and our foreign trade debt.
Now, if you lose this role of reserve currency, they don't have any need for your debt and they don't want it.
That's right.
All of a sudden, your currency collapses.
Inflation goes through the roof.
It's nothing the Fed can do about it.
Right.
And you become poor overnight.
And that's the economic threat that we face.
The sanctions are driving other countries away from using the dollar as reserve currency.
And you see how hard the BRICS are working and the Chinese and the Russians to make transactions without the dollar.
And when Saudi Arabia announced that they were taking other currencies in lieu of the dollar, there went the petrodollar.
That's right.
No, I would describe it as the last chapter of the dollar as the world reserve currency, because there's, you know, again, there's no even moral standing of the United States that we had after World War II. Again,
the U.S. is just kneecapping all the other nations and bribing their leaders in order to commit basically their own national suicide in order to keep America stronger relative to that.
Now, let's save ourselves from the patriots.
When we say the U.S., what we mean is the powerful, material, private interests.
They use the government for their agendas because the government is based on campaign contributions.
So, it's not that we're saying the American government is doing this because it's evil and so on.
It's being made to do this by powerful private interest on whose contributions the government gets elected, and therefore they are responsible to their contributors and not to the American people.
Well stated.
So, you know, people have got to understand that.
We mean the U.S. It's a It's a short-term phrase, but if we keep seeing that, all the conservatives will think we're against America.
Oh, no, no, no, we're not anti-American.
The government can't represent America because these private interests or the Israel lobby or the military security complex or big farmer, somebody is pulling their strings and all these people are pulling strings.
Yes.
So the government has to respond to all of these strings because that's where the campaign money comes from that elects the House, the Senate, and the President.
That's right.
Now, you have an American flag behind you, but what is the other flag that you have behind you with the blue stock?
That's the Treasury flag.
Okay, okay.
I did not recognize that flag.
See, when you're an Assistant Secretary and you leave office, they give you the flags of your office.
Oh, wow.
Okay, great.
Now, as I said, I want to give you a chance to mention your website, paulcraigroberts.org, but you're also donor-supported, correct?
Yes, just donor-supported.
No adverts, no big money, no foundations.
I mean, the foundations wouldn't support me.
So what are the ways that people can donate to support your work?
They can go to the Donate page on my website and use PayPal or Stripe.
It used to be they could send it directly to the bank, but the bank now has stopped this service because they're afraid of money laundering I'm going to have to find a way for people who want to do it by mail.
A lot of people don't like Stripe.
They don't like PayPal.
They don't trust them.
And PayPal certainly has a bad reputation about disapproving of somebody and holding their funds.
Yes, they do.
But right now, it's only two I haven't figured out.
I probably just have to use my personal address for them to send.
But as long as they don't make the check payable to me, and they make it payable to the Institute for Political Economy, then I'll just have to collect up the checks and endorse them and put them in the account.
It used to.
It happened automatically.
You'd go direct it to the bank.
That was stopped about a month ago.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I see your announcement on that.
Okay.
Well, again, the website, folks, is paulcraigroberts.org, and we also republish many of the stories or columns from paulcraigroberts.org.
And I want to thank you, Mr.
Roberts, for all that you do and for taking the time to talk with us today.
It's an honor.
Well, it's a great pleasure to talk to you.
You know, it's not all that many intelligent people to talk to.
Yeah, we've all noticed that.
That is true.
And I think unwinding what's happening in the world today, you know, you can't be just given a list of questions and be some bobble-headed journalist who doesn't know history.
You literally have to spend decades and decades understanding the geopolitical dynamics in order to make sense of what's happening.
No.
And you have to be able to speak the truth, and the journalists can't.
That's right.
They're at risk.
They're editors at risk.
It's not like Reagan.
No.
No.
Reagan is dearly missed these days, that's for sure.
Right.
Well, thank you so much, Mr.
Roberts.
It's always an honor, and have a great day, and we'll talk again soon.
Okay, Mike, I look forward to it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
All right, take care.
Again, that was Paul Craig Roberts, everybody.
Just a real treasure to the United States of America.
Please consider supporting his work.
Visit his website, paulcraigroberts.org.
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