Dave DeCamp (AntiWar.com): Will 2026 Be a Year of Peace or War?
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Just over the years, the war in Syria and like U.S. intervention, it was clear for a long time that the U.S. was on the side of Al-Qaeda.
That's something that Jake Sullivan told.
But the fact that this war ended with the literal leader of Al-Qaeda taking over, he's claimed that he cut ties with Al-Qaeda and that he's changed.
And then being welcomed in the Oval Office in the White House.
And Trump, like the way he was fraying cologne on him, and he says, oh, he's great.
He's had a strong past.
You know, he's a good-looking guy.
Like, the way it's just, man, does he not realize what kind of company he's keeping here?
Welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams.
And as we are into now 2026, straight ahead, is it going to be the year of war or the year of peace?
And of course, here at Brighteon, we are always praying for peace.
And yet we are faced with a reality that our leaders and other leaders around the world, especially European leaders, in Europe, they're praying for war.
I mean, clearly.
I mean, the leaders, not the people, but the leaders.
And I couldn't think of a better guest to have on today than the news editor of anti-war.com, Dave DeCamp, who is an extraordinary voice for peace and reason.
And he's got a lot to share with us here today.
It's the first time he's been on the show.
Hopefully not the last, because I really appreciate his work.
Welcome, Dave DeCamp, here.
It's an honor to have you on today.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Well, thank you for taking the time.
You're a busy man.
You do a lot of work.
But start with that big question about 2026.
Do you think it's going to be a year of escalating conflicts, or will there be some resolution of the current conflicts or maybe a combination?
Unfortunately, right now, all signs point to escalation, especially with everything the U.S. is involved in.
I mean, at the end of the year here, we've seen new U.S. missile strikes in Nigeria now.
And there's this report, and Trump claims that the CIA launched a drone strike inside Venezuela.
And now we have the Russia-Ukraine negotiations.
But the things that Ukraine is asking for and the things that the U.S. is apparently willing to give them, like a NATO-style security guarantee, and apparently they're talking about deploying troops to Ukraine.
I mean, Russia is never going to go for these things.
So unfortunately, that war seems like it's going to continue.
And then it looks like we're in store for more escalation in the Middle East, another potential war with Iran.
So unfortunately, I wish I had a better answer, but to me, everything just looks like it's going to really heat up.
Well, you are a keen observer of these issues, and I think your assessment is correct, but this is very disturbing to a lot of the Trump-supporting base in America because Trump campaigned on peace.
In fact, at one point during his campaigning, he said that he would end the Russia-Ukraine conflict in one day.
That was 300-plus days ago, I think, or something in that neighborhood.
So what do you make of this?
And there seems to be almost a civil war inside the conservative movement about pro-war versus anti-war.
Yeah, it's an issue that's that's not going away either.
I mean, it seems like the big split, you know, that we see among kind of media personalities.
It's really between the Israel first, you know, people who put Israel essentially over the U.S. against people who are starting to become critical of Israel.
I mean, you see people like with Tucker Carlson.
I mean, even Steve Bannon now has been critical of Israel.
He was always very pro-Israel.
And the fact is that they're dealing kind of with the reality.
I know in Tucker's case, it seems like he has, you know, he was awakened to the evil that Israel is committing, especially in Gaza.
So that's an issue, you know, the conservative movement in the U.S., the Republican Party is really going to have to deal with because if you look at the polls, it's really a generational split.
Like Republican, I forget the numbers, but there was a poll recently, like the majority of Republican voters under 40, you know, don't want anything to do with Israel at this point.
And then the Democrats are like 80% against continued support for Israel, correct?
Or something in that neighborhood?
Yeah, yeah.
On the Democrat side, the numbers are way up there.
And, you know, we saw Kamala Harris didn't face that reality when she attempted to run for president.
You know, she just doubled down on being pro-Israel.
And I think that was a big part of her defeat, obviously other reasons.
So this is something, yeah, and will the Democrats face this as well?
I think we kind of see the narrative on that side.
You know, they kind of focus all their criticism on Netanyahu and his government rather than kind of the whole U.S.-Israel relationship.
But, you know, this is one thing that is concerning because, you know, B.B. Netanyahu, he pays very close attention to politics in the U.S. He's very involved.
He reads American media every day.
You know, he probably sees this Trump administration as his last chance to get his big war, you know, with Iran to continue expanding in the region.
And, you know, and we talk about these divisions on the right, unfortunately, with Trump.
I mean, the display that he put on yesterday with Netanyahu shows that, you know, he's not changing his position on Israel.
So it's going to be a long time before this translates into like change at the policy level, you know, both in Congress and in the administration.
I do think, though, this election cycle, we're starting to see already some people trying to run for office as Republicans and are running on an anti-aid to Israel platform, which is significant.
That's what Netanyahu sees all these developments.
And, you know, I think it might make him try to move quicker on some of his designs.
Well, that brings up an interesting question for you.
How much of a liability in the midterms, less than a year away now, how much of a liability will Trump's loyalty to Netanyahu and Israel's ongoing war machine, how much of a liability will that be to GOP candidates in the midterms, in your opinion?
I mean, I think it's going to be a factor.
You know, I think we're probably going to see the GOP get beat up pretty bad in these midterms, which, you know, generally happens when the ruling party, you know, they have the election.
They usually don't do too well because then they get kind of blamed for everybody's economic conditions and everything.
But there's something else happening here.
Like, you know, because I know a lot of people who voted for Trump who weren't really like MAGA people or Trump people, but when faced with the two candidates, Trump did seem like the more reasonable one and the one less likely to get us involved in more conflicts and everything.
But we've seen the opposite with him.
I mean, he's really escalating things everywhere.
And so I think a lot of people that would vote Republican or did vote Republican when they voted for Trump are either going to stay home.
And then, of course, he'll have other people vote Democrat.
So I think it's going to be, you know, it's tough to rank it like on the list of issues, but I think it's up there.
I mean, especially just what people have seen over the past two years in Gaza, you know, the atrocities committed for all the world to see and to just see Trump, I mean, he's hosted Netanyahu five times this year.
That's extraordinary.
Yeah.
And again, yesterday, if you watched that press conference, just heaping praise on him, he said, oh, that Israel's helping the people of Gaza.
I mean, you see that stuff.
It's just really sad.
I want America to do well, and I want our president, whoever he or she is, to succeed.
But I can't help but notice that Trump loved to surround himself with some of the worst criminals against humanity.
And he bring like the more people you've slaughtered, the closer you get to the Oval Office.
You know, it's crazy to me.
This is, but those are my opinions, obviously.
But what do you make of it?
I mean, can't Trump see that the American people don't want him to cozy up with people like Bill Gates or Andrew Burla from Pfizer or Netanyahu at the top of that list?
Why can't he see that?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, he also hosted Ahmed Al-Shara at the Oval Office, who formerly known as Mohammed Abu Al-Jalani, which was his al-Qaeda name, because he was literally the founder of Al-Qaeda in Syria.
He fought against the U.S. in Iraq.
I mean, this is, and he, you know, just over the years, the war in Syria and like U.S. intervention, it was clear for a long time that the U.S. was on the side of Al-Qaeda.
That's something that Jake Sullivan told Hillary Clinton back in an email, I think, in 2012 that was released by Wikileaks.
But the fact that this war ended with the literal leader of Al-Qaeda taking over, he's claimed that he cut ties with Al-Qaeda and that he's changed.
And then being welcomed in the Oval Office in the White House, I mean, it's really kind of surreal to see.
And Trump, like the way he, he was spraying cologne on him.
You know, he wrote him a nice, like a handwritten note.
And he says, oh, he's great.
He's had a strong past.
You know, he's a good looking guy.
Like the way it's just, man.
So, you know, I don't know what it is, you know, about those other people you mentioned too.
Like, does he not realize what kind of company he's keeping here?
Yeah, and same thing.
And he calls Peter Schiff a jerk for pointing out that there's inflation.
It's like, no, you know, you should listen to Peter Schiff on economic policy.
And that's just my opinion on economics, et cetera.
But this is disturbing for a lot of people to watch.
And I think you're correct to point out that the GOP could be in trouble in the midterms.
But that leads me to my next question, which is about Iran.
So Trump is now talking tough about striking Iran again, even though six months ago, he told us that we completely destroyed Iran's nuclear enrichment capabilities by bombing Fordot facility, et cetera, with those, you know, the cluster, the super bombs, whatever they were called.
So were we lied to then?
Or how does Iran now suddenly pose a new nuclear threat in just six months?
Yeah, well, we were lied to about the reason for that war.
It wasn't about their nuclear program.
Israel's goal was to either collapse the regime or basically take out their ability to hit Israel, to pose any kind of threat to Israel.
And that war ended in 12 days because Iran's missiles were able to make it through and strike Israel in a way that we've never really seen Israel get hit before.
And Trump ended it by bombing the nuclear facilities.
But they're always going to find another reason, another excuse to go to war here.
And now the new one is, and what Trump said yesterday is, oh, yeah, if they continue their missile program, then we're going to hit, you know, we're going to hit them.
We're going to knock the hell out of them.
And that's never been the pretext for a potential U.S. war with Iran.
You know, the idea that Iran's going to get rid of their missiles is just absurd.
I mean, it's their only way to defend or deter Israel and the U.S.
And if there is another war, you know, there's a, you know, we could see some real American casualties because if you remember during that 12-day war, it started with Israel's big attack, which happened while the U.S. and Israel and Iran were supposed to be holding nuclear negotiations.
But Israel launched this major attack.
It involved airstrikes, sabotage, you know, covert attacks on the ground.
The Mossad has a lot of assets in Iran and really heavy airstrikes throughout the whole 12 days.
And they killed over a thousand Iranians.
And then the U.S. came in and bombed the nuclear facilities.
And then Iran responded to that by telling the U.S. that they were going to fire missiles at their base in Qatar.
So the U.S. was able to get troops out of there and respond with Patriot missiles and basically intercept all of them.
It looks like one radar was destroyed or something.
Well, if Iran doesn't, you know, if there's another war, there's a very good chance Iran's not going to do that, that they're going to try to really hit American bases.
And we could really see some Americans get hurt or killed.
And then, you know, the attitude in DC now is if any American gets hurt or killed in the Middle East, the answer isn't what Reagan did back in the 1980s when hundreds of U.S. Marines were killed in Beirut.
He got them out of there.
He pulled them out.
The answer is, oh, we got to escalate.
It's always like, okay, now we're going to increase our, you know, send more troops and drop more bombs.
Yeah.
Well, I'm sorry to interrupt.
I share your concern.
And from my point of view, it seems like Israel or Netanyahu is managing to wrangle the U.S. into another conflict in the Middle East to defeat another enemy of Israel, in this case, Iran, which is, I think, number seven on that famous list of seven.
I believe it is.
But I want to bring people's attention to this map of the Arabian Sea here.
And David, love your commentary.
Let me just set it up here.
But folks, notice the geography because this determines so many things.
The narrow point at the southern portion of Iran there, that's the Strait of Hormuz, through which a significant portion of the world's energy supply, including LNG, flows.
And Iran's missiles that you were just talking about, Dave, Iran's missiles are developing new capabilities in terms of long-range strike capability of U.S. naval vessels in the Arabian Sea, potentially, right?
So we're not talking about just threatening Israel, but also threatening U.S. naval power and projection of power through this area, which affects ultimately the Suez Canal through the Red Sea as well.
So can you give us your interpretation of why all that matters?
Yeah, well, one of the things that Iran threatened to do during the war, which they didn't end up doing, was closing the Strait of Hormuz, which would really impact kind of the global energy market.
I mean, in a really big way.
But if you look at that map, you see all those Gulf countries, the Gulf Arab countries, where, you know, Qatar is right there, Bahrain, which is the home of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet.
There's also U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.
You know, these are all U.S. bases and there's U.S. bases in Iraq still and Syria.
And these are all potential targets.
I mean, there's at least, you know, 10,000 American troops in range of these missiles.
And, you know, the U.S. has good air defenses, but they can't intercept every missile as we saw during the 12-day war.
And so, you know, there's a real risk here.
And of course, U.S. naval assets in the region, as you said as well, could be hit.
So in your assessment, what kind of attack on Iran is Trump likely to pursue?
Will it be another wave of a few stealth bombers and then just a declaration of success?
Because that worked last summer.
Yeah, I mean, it's tough to say, you know, because he's talking about their missiles now.
He also said if they do anything to rebuild their nuclear program, then we're going to take them out immediately.
You know, I would guess we would probably see it start with Israel taking the lead.
But the thing that's important for people to understand is, you know, throughout the whole 12 days, the U.S. was involved in the war directly by intercepting missiles.
You know, that is direct military involvement and also refueling Israeli jets and probably providing some sort of intelligence.
So I would guess it would kind of start something like that, like, you know, Israeli jets doing most of the bombing and maybe they would find some targets that they would want the U.S. to hit eventually.
But Trump would try to kind of keep like a degree of separation maybe from it.
You know, I don't know.
Even though Trump is, you know, really seems to be willing to go along with this, I do still think he wouldn't want like a long drawn out war.
Right.
And, you know, from Iran's perspective, that's the thing here is that like Trump seems to think, oh, we could hit Iran really hard and they're not really going to do anything about it.
So we could go in and out.
So Iran's going to have to kind of dispel, you know, from their perspective, they're going to want to dispel that notion that they can launch these wars every six months, every year or whatever.
Right.
So that's, you know, the real risk.
Well, my perception, and I'd love your commentary on this, is that Israel can't survive another 12 days of Iranian missiles, especially those missiles have been restored and in some cases upgraded.
I've seen releases of enhanced missile payload capacities as well as range.
And the other thing is, I'm explaining this just for our audience.
I know you know this, Dave, but when Israel is striking Iran from its aircraft, those on board missiles launched from the aircraft are much smaller in terms of payload capabilities or warhead capabilities compared to Iran's land based missiles that are carrying much more aggressive payloads.
And clearly have, you know, hypersonic reentry capabilities with evasive maneuvers that are largely.
nullifying the so-called Iron Dome.
We saw that already.
So isn't Israel just begging to be damaged even worse if they initiate something again?
Yeah, I think they're hoping that, I mean, I don't know if they would want to get hit, but I think they're banking on U.S. support and that if they do start to get hit hard like that, then they believe that the U.S. would directly intervene.
Because I mean, if the U.S. really, I mean, did some kind of like carpet bombing or something in Iran, they could do some serious damage, you know, using the heavy B-2 bombers that Israel doesn't have.
So I think that's probably part of their, not part of their, I think their whole idea here is to get the U.S. to do like most of the bombing here in Iran.
I see.
But Iran, it's a vast, you know, geographically vast nation, right?
With dispersed missile launchers, lots and lots of decoys, probably tens of thousands of decoy launchers, mountainous terrain around three sides of the country, I believe.
I mean, it seems like you can bomb it till the cows come home and it's not going to stop them.
That's my perception.
But you know more.
What do you say?
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that.
You know, the thing is, is that we don't know how many missiles Iran has.
Because that was kind of the question as the 12-day war was happening.
You know, the question was who's going to run out of missiles or interceptors first?
Nobody really knew.
But, you know, we saw an example of what you're talking about.
When the U.S. was bombing Yemen earlier this year, starting in March, Trump started this bombing campaign to protect Israel.
They claimed that it was to protect U.S. ships, but the Houthis weren't attacking U.S. ships at the time.
They started bombing them because they said they were going to start enforcing a blockade on Israeli ships again because they were violating the Gaza ceasefire deal.
But anyway, the U.S. bombed them very heavily for about a month and a half, killed over 250 civilians.
I remember that.
And they didn't stop.
And they rolled their missiles right back out and kept going.
Yeah.
But even during the bombing campaign, they were firing missiles at Israel.
They were firing missiles and drones at U.S. warships in the Red Sea.
And that's Yemen.
That's the Houthis.
Iran is a much more powerful force.
So, yeah, I think you're right.
And again, I really don't know.
Maybe there is more information about this than I know, like the number of Iran's missiles.
And I do believe that they have more of the shorter-range ones that could hit U.S. bases right across the Gulf than they have the longer-range ones that they need for Israel.
So I think they could really do some damage to U.S. bases.
Do you see?
I'm sorry.
I was just going to say, you know, everything Iran has done has shown that they don't want a direct war with the U.S. because like last time, you know, there was the risk that they would respond to an Israeli attack that's supported by the U.S. by also attacking U.S. bases, but we didn't see that last time.
Maybe we would see that the next time.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think there was an organized de-escalation between Iran and the U.S. at that time.
Probably back-channeled, is my guess, right?
But do you think there's a risk of Trump deciding to put boots on the ground with an attempted invasion of Iran?
I know it sounds insane, but we live in insane times.
So what do you think?
I really don't think so.
Like, because as you mentioned, I mean, Iran is a huge country and they would need to really build up a force.
I mean, they would need hundreds of thousands of troops, I would think.
And so I don't really think that that's on the table.
And I don't think that's what Israel even wants.
You know, what they like, what they want to see is kind of regime collapse.
They don't care so much about regime change.
They just want to destroy, like, break up the country.
So it could be another Syria or Lebanon where they could bomb them without any, you know, facing any repercussions.
You know, the regime change wars that Americans view as disasters, like Libya, Iraq, Syria, Israel views them as a success because they took out Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, these Arab leaders who were hostile to Israel's goals and commanded a country.
But now they're broken up and very weak.
So that's a success.
So I think Israel's hoping that they could do all this from the air.
Yeah, I think your assessment is correct.
That's what they hope.
And I think history shows us that that's not very successful to achieve.
I mean, doesn't it tend to just harden the domestic support for the current leaders?
Those kinds of campaigns.
That's what we saw with the last war.
Yeah.
But, and, you know, I mentioned Libya.
Libya was a different situation because he had all these kind of insurgents on the ground.
You know, we don't really have that in Iran.
So once they took out Qaddafi, then, you know, all hell broke loose.
So yeah, it is kind of a different situation in Iran.
You know, and another thing always to keep in mind here is that Iran, sorry, not Iran.
Israel has nuclear weapons.
Correct.
Right.
And, you know, we've seen, there was apparently it was during the war back in, I think, 73, maybe it was before that.
But Israel was looking for U.S. support.
And they essentially said, well, if you don't help us, we're going to use our nuclear weapons.
And then the U.S. said, okay, all right, we'll send you some stuff.
So that could be a threat here from Israel to the, like, if you don't help us, we're going to drop our nukes.
And that could be, you know, I wouldn't, at this point, what we've seen in Gaza, I would not put it past Israel to use a nuclear weapon.
Good point.
I mean, yeah, they've dropped more conventional explosives on Gaza than all the nuclear weapons ever dropped in war in history, which wasn't that many, but still, you know, if you add up the kilotons, right?
It's more than Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined by far.
Multiples of it that's been dropped on Gaza.
Do you want to comment on that?
Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, and I wouldn't think that they would want to drop a nuclear weapon so close to them, you know, but Iran is a different story.
Good point.
You know.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I want to ask you about antiwar.com, the website, and now the importance of your site and your message.
You know, in times of peace, it's easy for people to forget how important it is to stand for peace.
But since, well, especially, I would say, what, February of 2022, Russia's special military operation, and then after October 7th of 2023 with Israel and Gaza, the voice of you and your colleagues at your site has become really, really, really critical.
Can you talk to our audience about the importance and the mission of anti-war.com and what you hope to achieve?
Yeah, well, I appreciate that.
And so antiwar.com, just a quick history of it.
It was founded back in 1995.
So it's been around for a long time by my boss who still works on it today, Eric Garris, and his friend Justin Raimondo, who unfortunately we lost back in 2019, but he was our columnist and kind of the voice of the site.
And they were like lifelong libertarian political activists.
And, you know, at the end of the Cold War, they supported guys like Pat Buchanan, people on the right who wanted to, you know, end the empire after the Cold War, bring close, you know, who wanted to believed in the peace dividend and things like that.
So, but what antiwar.com has essentially become a news source, you know, a source for people, whether they're, you know, anti-war activists who need information or just ordinary Americans who want to be educated, who want to be aware of what their government is doing.
You know, a lot of the stuff we cover gets zero attention from mainstream media, especially the bombing campaign in Somalia.
This is something that the U.S. has bombed Somalia at least 127 times this year.
Wow.
And this is unprecedented.
This is a huge, this is the biggest year ever.
According to the official numbers that have been tracked, it's more than George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden bombed Somalia combined in all their time in office.
And it gets literally zero coverage.
A lot of times, most of the time, it is just me writing it up.
And I'm not working with much information, just what U.S. Africa Command says in a press release and what I can find in Somali media.
So, you know, it's something I think Americans need to be kind of, need to be aware of this, you know, what their government's doing overseas, because it's very easy to be fooled into supporting something like the war in Ukraine.
You know, if you weren't paying attention to what was happening in Ukraine from 2014 and the years following, you know, I see how people kind of fell for the propaganda there that, oh, the U.S. is helping Ukraine when it was doing the furthest thing from that.
So I think it's good for people to just be aware.
And then when it comes to activism and, you know, it's good to be kind of armed with this knowledge.
If you know Dan McAdams, who works with Ron Paul, I think it was him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think I've met him.
Yeah, he's a, he's the co-host of the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
But he worked for Ron Paul when he was in Congress.
And I think it was him who said this, but I know he used to print out anti-war.com articles and give them to Ron Paul.
It was kind of like his morning briefing.
And he's kind of described us as like the intelligence wing of the anti-war movement.
Like we prepare your daily briefing so you can stay on top of things.
You know, I think we need real, like our country, especially the conservative movement, you know, like we were talking about before we started recording.
I consider myself on the right, even though much of my audience is on the left.
We have a very diverse readership, which is really cool.
But like, I feel very out of step with the mainstream conservative movement, though things are changing.
You know, like this whole idea that we need to be waging these wars overseas, that it's somehow necessary and it's something that we just have to be doing when it's really a detriment to our country and the well-being of Americans, especially, you know, when you get into the monetary aspect of it and everything and what it takes to maintain this world empire and the, you know, printing all the money and everything.
So yeah, that's what we're, that's the message we're trying to, you know, put, get out there.
Okay, that's, that's great.
And I do want to ask you about those things, about what I believe we're in the last chapter of this empire.
And there's a lashing out phase happening, you know, to try to force enforcement around the world.
But I just want to mention again, the website is antiwar.com.
It's a great domain name, very easy to spell.
Everybody can spell it, antiwar.com.
And, you know, we talked about the political right quite a bit here.
I want to talk about the political left for a moment because one of the things that's really important to me, and I was, I was at Ron Paul's birthday party a few months ago when he was in Houston and had a birthday party.
I was invited myself and a thousand other people, and we had a blast.
And Ron Paul has always been principled in terms of opposing foreign wars.
And that principle is incredibly rare in politics today.
And speaking about the left, during the Bush years and the Gulf War, we saw the political left in America was vehemently anti-war.
And, you know, Bush was bad and evil because he was a warmonger, which also is true.
But they were all anti-war.
And then when it came to Ukraine under Biden, suddenly most of the left was pro-war.
We support this war.
So where are the principles in either the right or the left when it comes to advocating for peace?
Yeah, when it, you know, it's amazing to me how many people on the left kind of went all in on the Ukraine proxy war.
Yeah.
And, you know, in Congress, I mean, we saw like literally no dissent among the progressives in Congress who are, you know, more on the anti-war side than the mainstream Democrats.
They actually did, if I think it was in 2023 or maybe it was 2022, it was around the time that Mark Milley, who's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, said that there should be negotiations or they should start thinking about negotiations to end the war.
And some progressives in Congress wrote a letter to Biden saying maybe we should pursue diplomacy.
And the backlash they got was so bad that they withdrew the letter.
Wow.
Literally, the letter was saying, hey, maybe we should think about diplomacy instead of just continuing this war.
Incredible.
Yeah.
So that was on the, you know, that in Congress.
And I know, you know, I know plenty of leftists who were opposed to it the whole time, who are, you know, readantiwar.com, people whose work we run as well.
But yeah, I mean, you don't find it at all in Congress, this principle.
It's very rare, as you mentioned, Ron Paul.
You know, today we have some people like that, Thomas Massey, I think, would be the closest to Ron Paul that we currently have.
Yes.
And he maintains principled stances no matter who's in power.
And that's why Trump is so angry with him now.
Yeah, they're trying desperately to get rid of him.
And I think his opponent is being funded by pro-Israel money, actually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's where they, that's why they're getting all this money to fund these campaign against him.
Correct.
But yeah, you know, when it comes to the principle, and there are just regular people who are, you know, partisan-minded and kind of fall for this stuff and oppose wars.
When, you know, I could think of some people on the right critical of Obama's drone wars, but now that Trump is launching all these airstrikes and drone strikes, they don't, they either don't say anything about it or they just line up to support it.
Yeah.
Well, and we've, we've all heard the phrase war is a racket, but I'm not sure that people understand the scale of it.
And I was, I was really struck recently because I'm very active in the AI community.
I'm an AI developer, build language models and apps and so on.
And I was listening to an interview of a former top Google executive named Mo Godat.
And he's since retired from Google, but he writes books about AI and comments on what's happening.
And he said in an interview, I'm paraphrasing, he said, of all the scams you think you know about, there's nothing bigger than money printing for war.
And I'm like, wow, this is coming from a former Google executive, and Google provides technology for war, you know, but he gets it.
He gets it.
It shocked me.
I mean, the message is spreading, is my point here.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I think it is.
And we're like, I mean, Scott Horton, who's our editorial director, and he's written a lot of great books.
His latest book called Provoked is like a textbook on the Ukraine, you know, the lead up to the Ukraine war and what caused it.
But he's on all the big, you know, we're kind of part of the conversation in a way that we haven't been before.
He was recently on with Tucker.
You know, and we're, we're, it does seem like our message is spreading and, you know, becoming more popular.
I do think people, you know, the natural instinct, I think, of any person is to be anti-war.
But the problem is, is that people are so inundated with propaganda in this country.
And, you know, I mean, what you just mentioned, like the biggest racket is money printing for war.
And like the military-industrial complex is so corrupt.
And it's like, it's so obvious and people have kind of accepted it.
And in some cases, I think we look for like more nefarious or other causes for war.
But if you look at the war in Ukraine, obviously there's other causes.
Who oversaw dumping all those weapons into Ukraine?
A guy named Lloyd Austin, who was the Secretary of Defense.
And where did he come from?
Oh, yeah, the defense industry.
He was on the board of Raytheon.
Exactly.
That was his last job.
And then he oversees this policy of dumping all these weapons in.
And Raytheon was one of the top, you know, I forget the exact numbers, but Raytheon and Lockheed Martin were like the biggest beneficiaries of that.
And they were getting contracts for weapons that they stopped making years ago because they're dumping so many into Ukraine.
And then, of course, they pay the think tanks.
They pay the, You know, that write the papers to say why we need to be in war.
They pay the people who go on TV or the analysts and say why we need to continue the war.
And now that's breaking a bit because of independent media and the decentralization kind of of the internet.
But it's still like, you know, it's just, there's so much money to be made for continuing these wars.
So much that that is, you know, one of the biggest driving factors here.
Okay, so this is so fascinating to talk with you.
I really appreciate you taking the time to join me.
I have so many questions for you.
One of them is about the changing nature of warfare.
War has shifted dramatically in the post-World War II era from the, you know, the aircraft carrier battleship kind of naval projection of power model, you know, blue water navy.
That's the U.S. model.
That model is fading away.
We're seeing the rise of, for example, Iran's missile capabilities.
We're seeing Russia having Oreshnik missiles and also the Kinzal hypersonic missiles.
But there's an economic factor I'd like you to speak to.
Bring up my screen to my producers here.
Here's a story.
A private Chinese company rolls out a Mach 7 hypersonic missile at nearly 90% lower cost.
So China is able to mass produce or is on the verge of mass producing very advanced weapon systems that are more advanced than anything the U.S. has fielded because the U.S. still doesn't have a functioning hypersonic missile, to my knowledge.
And yet China is able to do it at a fraction of the cost.
We've also seen Russia, for example, producing artillery shells at a fraction of the cost of the West.
So warfare has become an economic supply chain logistics question, I think, more than ever before.
And I'd love your comments about that topic.
Yeah, that's a good thing to bring up because as we mentioned, you know, with this military-industrial complex that we have, you know, there's so much corruption.
Certain companies always get the contracts and they inflate the prices of everything.
Once in a while, you see these stories.
Like, I remember one, it was like a coffee cup in an F-16 or something, costs like $80,000.
Sounds right.
Yeah, our whole system is just, there's just this corruption baked into it.
And we're seeing that, you know, that's interesting about China.
I hadn't seen that story, but we're really seeing that with drones.
Other countries can produce drones like at an incredibly cheap rate.
And I forget the numbers, but I remember when the U.S. was bombing Yemen and the Houthis were firing these drones that were like so cheap for them to make and we're using million-dollar missiles to intercept them.
And, you know, that is going to, it's really going to change.
It is changing warfare as we see it in Russia and Ukraine.
You know, nearly 100, Ukraine fires like nearly 100 drones into Russia every day.
Russia sends a few hundred into Ukraine.
And we're seeing the future of war.
Like just today and yesterday, China's doing these major military drills around Taiwan in response to the U.S. selling like 11 announcing this huge arms sale for Taiwan.
And, you know, what is the U.S. kind of strategy for Taiwan?
Like the war strategy, if they're going to try to fight China there, it's like aircraft carriers and warships.
Well, China's like they've been developing a military, those missiles you just mentioned, like with the purpose of blowing those out of the water.
But the U.S. kind of keeps making these big things like this.
And of course, now they're saying, you know, Hag Seth has been big on this, like, you know, advancing the drones and everything.
But you look at the prices.
I saw someone, what's his name from Anderil, Palmer Lucky?
Someone was giving him a hard time on Twitter about how much, about how his drones are so expensive compared to Chinese ones that are basically the same.
So yeah, that's definitely a factor in all of this.
Well, yeah.
And the thing is, the U.S. has to sell treasuries to be able to backstop the printing of more money to pay these inflated prices for weapons.
So the debt market is the thing propping up the war market, right?
Or the war industry.
And you're right.
The U.S. spends multiples overspends on very complicated weapon systems.
But isn't it true that what we saw in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, that a lot of these overpriced weapons just don't work?
And we were promised month after month, oh, this is going to be a game changer.
We're going to send in the high Mars.
We're going to send in the low Mars.
We're going to send in the Abrams.
And every time Russia just blew them all up with Iskanders or whatever.
It's like nothing.
Nothing was a game changer.
None of it worked.
Yeah.
And even some of the things like some of the air defenses would be like successful for a little while and then Russia would adapt and figure out how to get past them.
But yeah, I mean, the U.S. has this very expensive and complicated and large military equipment that could really become obsolete not too far in the future.
I know one thing that the Pentagon has been planning for a war with China is they have developed this idea to create what they call a hellscape of drones in the Taiwan Strait.
The idea would basically be to cover the sky with drones, cover the sea with drones, and send a bunch of underwater drones as well, which is kind of terrifying to think about.
And that's what like a future world war could look like.
It could just be little drones.
I think that's probably what it would end up being.
And they could.
You're right.
Yeah.
But let me bring in this context.
You know, one of the reasons that the U.S. is credited for Allied victory in World War II was because of the strong industrial base that existed in America at that time.
Domestic steel manufacturing, domestic auto manufacturing, conversions to wartime production.
Today, that country is China.
So if this becomes drone warfare, we can't even touch China's output.
Now, I mean, even our naval yards, I know you know this, but our naval yards are less than 1% of China's naval shipyard capacity right now in the U.S.
And our drone manufacturing potential is probably somewhere around 1% of China's.
And then humanoid robots, same story.
China can mass produce.
We cannot mass produce.
We can produce small quantities at very high cost with very late delivery schedules.
Like we sell stuff to Taiwan that's not going to be delivered until 2032.
It's a joke, some of it.
Yeah.
And I mean, I think that's something China with these drills, like as far as I'm aware, I haven't been following the China-Taiwan stuff as much as I used to lately, but I know the Chinese military, they've been putting out footage of them conducting simulated attacks on U.S. high Mars rocket systems because the U.S., we're selling a bunch of them to Taiwan now.
And they've been sending out their bombers with, you know, equipped with their missiles that are designed to take out aircraft carriers.
So they're sending that message like, hey, look at this stuff we have here.
And, you know, I think the idea, and it's interesting, you know, you talk about kind of the left and the right.
The New York Times editorial board, they just put out this like op-ed video where they're saying that the U.S. needs to like double down and invest more in military to get ready for war with China and invest in more advanced equipment.
And, you know, all those things you mentioned, like if we really end up in some kind of war with China, they have so many advantages.
And, you know, how quickly could it turn nuclear as well?
So the fact that they're like preparing for this potential conflict on the face of it is, to me, crazy.
And you see the way that they justified, they say, oh, we have to prepare for war to prevent war.
But we've seen time and time again how that, you know, especially with Ukraine, how that just increases tensions and leads to war.
You look at right now at Taiwan, you have these huge Chinese drills happening, which they said were in direct response to the U.S. selling all these weapons to Taiwan, which they say they need to do for deterrence.
But now we have Chinese missiles being fired.
I don't know if they're actually firing them over Taiwan this time, but I know they did that in some drills recently after Nancy Pelosi went there in 2022.
So you just see the tensions just kind of escalating everywhere.
There's also the issue of the, I want to ask you about the critical mineral resources and China's dominant control over rare earths, which are necessary for industrial or military industry manufacturing.
And I believe January 1st, China is restricting silver exports among other, you know, other rare earths, strongly restricted.
During the tariff wars that Trump was fighting with China earlier in 2025, we saw Ford temporarily shut down its production lines because of a lack of neodymium for the magnet motors completely dependent on China.
But the military production is dependent on a global supply of things like silver or tungsten or what have you.
And China dominates that area too.
And if China decides to cut us off, we can't make the weapons to fight China.
And China is not dumb enough to not realize that, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think this is something Trump has realized.
You know, especially in recent months, it seems like he's been trying to be very conciliatory toward China and realizing that, you know, we're going to have to work with them in some way.
And, you know, we've seen kind of there's over the recent years a lot of delusional China hawks who say, you know, we need complete decoupling immediately.
We got to cut off China.
Like the American economy or our military industrial abilities can survive just cutting things off with China right away.
Yeah, that's a strategy.
Yeah, yeah, it really is.
You know, for me, it seemed like this administration was going to tone things down with China.
I think in some ways they have, but then we just saw this huge arms sale to Taiwan.
It's like $11 billion that they approved in one day.
But see, my theory on that, and I used to live in Taiwan, by the way, and I speak conversational Mandarin.
And my understanding of that issue from, because I had contacts in the aerospace industry in Taiwan when I lived there because I was teaching them English.
But my understanding is that Taiwan is forced to make these purchases and it's a handout to the U.S. military companies.
So it's a political favor.
Taiwan doesn't necessarily always want to buy these things because they know it's not worth it, but they're kind of forced to do this as a means of paying fealty to the United States leadership.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I think it does.
Yeah, that's interesting to hear, especially with this current administration, because that was kind of the message when they came in.
I don't know if you know who Elbridge Colby is.
He's Trump's policy chief at the Pentagon.
Not familiar.
But he's a real China hawk.
His whole thing is that the U.S. should kind of scale back in the Middle East and in Ukraine and just focus all on Taiwan.
But he's been saying, you know, he was in the first administration and then in between administrations, he published a book and he was really talked about this stuff a lot.
And his whole thing was Taiwan needs to step up, increase its military spending, or it's not going to be worth it.
We're not going to be able to defend them.
And so, and then we saw this Trump administration come in and Joe Biden started giving them military aid for the first time since they cut relations with Taiwan back in when they opened up with China.
And Trump apparently blocked one of those military aid packages because they're trying to get Taiwan to spend their own money.
So it seems to track with that.
And then we see, again, this huge series of arms sales that they just approved.
And I think it's clear that it is like them just trying to keep Trump happy.
Yeah, that's interesting.
And also, there's a very strong geopolitical movement within Taiwan, the people there who I'm in contact with constantly that more and more they feel like, and this is true across both of the major political parties there, that they are hurting in the world through their alliance with the West and that they need access to trading markets as BRICS currencies rise up and as China,
Russia, Iran, Brazil, India, et cetera, that that's the marketplace that Taiwan needs to tap into.
And the only way to do that is to reunify economically with China.
I'm hearing more and more of that.
I didn't hear that a decade ago, but I'm hearing it now a lot.
Yeah, that's interesting.
And maybe it's, you know, they see what happens to a U.S. ally, you know, like Ukraine.
Yeah, I know one thing that, you know, because you hear this, the China hawks talk about, oh, nobody in Taiwan wants reunification.
And I forget the numbers, but I know the polls always show that the people in Taiwan just want to maintain the status quo.
You know, they don't want to rock the boat either way, it seems like, which people, Americans don't seem to understand kind of the situation, like the nuances of the one China policy and everything.
Well, and the people of Taiwan don't want to be sacrificed in a proxy war like the people of Ukraine.
That's yeah, that's the key issue.
You know, the Ukraine lesson has taught Taiwanese what happens when you get wrangled into a war with a major world power.
You get destroyed, and the U.S. just sends your men off to die.
Yeah.
It's disgusting.
And Lindsey Graham says that they'll fight to the last one of you.
Right, exactly.
Exactly.
But, you know, just like Ukraine and Russia, I mean, the eastern half of Ukraine is Russia, you know, historically, culturally, Russia.
They speak Russian.
Taiwan and China, they're all Chinese.
They're exactly the same genetic, ethnic people with the same shared history.
They speak essentially the same language, you know, simplified Chinese versus traditional Chinese written a little differently with the characters.
But it's similar to the Russian situation.
It's the same culture.
They don't want to fight each other.
Yeah.
And I know like the Kuomintang, I mean, their official position is that they are China.
Like, not that they're Taiwan.
You know, you have the DPP now.
They seem to be pretty, you know, independence-minded.
But the other major political party is like, you know, very Chinese and proud to be Chinese.
Obviously, they have different ideas than the ruling power in Beijing.
But, you know, as you said, they're Chinese people.
Right.
Right.
Well, as always, you know, we are praying for a peaceful resolution.
And we're coming up on the hour with you here.
I'd like to get your final thoughts on the, I want you to give us a big picture view of how war causes poverty and suffering globally.
And there would be a global peace dividend if we could get out of this war racket, which only benefits certain specific parties, some of which we've named here in this interview.
But talk to us about the global cost of war and the benefit of peace to everybody on this planet.
Yeah, well, I would say, you know, when it comes to Americans, the biggest thing that's really ripped us off over the past few decades is the fact that we don't have real money and inflation.
And that is necessary for propping up the war machine and continuing the empire, this ability to print unlimited money, bailouts and everything.
But this, you know, now we officially have a trillion dollar military budget.
It's been over, you know, the real cost has been well over a trillion for years, but now it's official 2026.
Trump gets his trillion dollar budget.
And this is how we pay for all this stuff.
And then just in general, I mean, globally, you know, it's interesting what led me kind of into this path of working for anti-war.com.
I kind of chalk it up to, I grew up, I was raised Catholic.
I'm Catholic now.
For many years, I was away from the church, but that's another story.
But I kind of had this idea because we were growing up to kind of support charities and think about people overseas who were suffering and kind of trying to figure out how to alleviate suffering around the world.
I came to the conclusion that our government, the U.S. Empire, is responsible for a lot of this.
A lot of these problems are caused by U.S. intervention, you know, sometimes trying to do the right thing, other times doing nefarious things in the name of doing good.
And, you know, when it comes to the actions that the U.S. government must take, you see people calling for humanitarian interventions a lot now, especially in Nigeria.
But there's just so many places where the U.S. can scale back, especially when it comes to support for Israel, where we can really improve things for people.
Yeah, I concur with what you just said there.
And I think historically the British Empire caused untold suffering all over the world and continues to do so even right now with Ukraine-Russia.
But the U.S. Empire has been playing that role very prominently since the end of World War II with assassinations, economic hitman scenarios, right?
The bombings.
And now tariff warfare is, you can add that to the list because tariff warfare has real consequences.
Real families are impacted that are laid off in these factories in other countries that were planning on shipping textiles or whatever to the U.S. or even my own company.
We buy turmeric from India, just ground turmeric root because it's a superfood.
And then boom, it's now 50% tariff.
So the turmeric farmers in India who have nothing to do with war, just I'm farming turmeric roots and now all of a sudden I can't pay my family enough money to eat.
You know, these are the impacts and they're real.
Yeah.
No, go ahead.
Your final comments as we wrap this up or anything else you want to add?
Yeah, I was just going to add an economic sanctions.
The U.S. government has this policy that if there's a government in power that they don't like, they'll try to destroy their economy.
And in many cases, they're successful.
And, you know, these are, you talk about this is, again, you could talk about this for a long time, but, you know, I think about when Joe Biden started imposing sanctions on Russia after the invasion, he would go on TV and say, we're turning the ruble into rubble, which of course didn't happen.
But the idea of the sanctions, they say, is to put pressure on the people so they rise up against the government.
So it is designed to hurt the people.
But imagine if you're in Russia and you see the leader of a foreign country bragging about trying to destroy your currency and destroy your economy.
Like you think that's going to make you side with them.
And you see it in Cuba.
I mean, Cuba's been under sanctions for what, 60 years now under an embargo.
Has it changed the government in Cuba?
No.
Has it hurt the people?
Yes.
That's about the only achievement that the sanctions and embargo have had.
And, you know, it's just, it's a thing that needs to be completely done away with this idea that we have the right to destroy another country's economy because we don't like their government.
Well, and adding on to what you just said, which is really important, that, you know, Trump thinks that he can order India to not buy oil from Russia or that he can order China to not buy energy from Russia.
You know, who made Trump God that he gets to determine who can buy and sell what to which other country that has nothing to do with us?
You know, and we hear from Lindsey Graham insane things.
Oh, we're not going to let India fund Russia's war machine.
Well, guess what?
The world's going to build an alternative settlement system, the BRICS system, partially gold-backed settlement of trade, not a currency, but a settlement system, to where the U.S. can't order them around anymore.
And isn't that the cost of abusing that privilege of sanctioning everybody that the rest of the world just says, well, we'll build our own system.
Yeah.
And then they use this to justify more aggression against these countries.
Like you see this with Venezuela right now.
They're really pushing.
And apparently there's been a CIA drone strike there.
But they say, oh, Venezuela has ties with Iran.
It's like, well, why do they have, why are they trading with Iran?
Because they're both under U.S. sanctions.
They actually started trading under the First administration gas for gold.
Iran was sending gas to Venezuela and Venezuela was sending gold.
And then the U.S. stole some of their shipments of gas.
And I think that stopped.
But, you know, this idea, like, and then they act surprised.
They're like shocked that China and Russia are closer now when they're both targeted in this way.
Right.
Right.
Or Trump says, if you participate in BRICS, we're going to punish you with an extra 10% tariff on top of everything else.
Well, that only encourages countries to move to BRICS more quickly.
I mean, a lot of these tactics are not well thought out, in my opinion.
Yeah.
And doesn't it seem so obvious too?
It does.
But I guess we're entering the idiocracy stage of the empire right now, where it's just about whatever sound bites will fly on TV news, but rationality is out the window.
Nevertheless, I really appreciate your time and your conversation and your work at antiwar.com.
Just last chances.
Anything else you want to tell people about the website or how they can follow you and your work?
Oh, your X handle.
Give that out.
Yeah, I'm on X at DeCamp Dave is my handle there.
And I also have a show.
I have a daily podcast, YouTube show where I basically go over the news stories that I write up each day.
It's about 20 to 30 minutes, kind of just an update on the U.S. foreign policy news.
It's called Anti-War News with Dave DeCamp.
You can listen to the podcast or it's on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, other places where I post the video.
That's great.
It's out there.
Okay, anti-war news with Dave DeCamp.
Well, we welcome you on all our platforms and appreciate what you're doing and your voice.
And we hope that you are able to reach more and more people with this message.
And maybe humanity has a future if we could stop all the, you know, all the warmongering.
If this thing goes nuclear, we're all in trouble.
That's for sure.
That's right.
Yeah.
But thanks for joining me today.
It's been a pleasure.
Yeah.
Thanks so much for having me.
I really appreciate it.
You too.
All right.
Take care.
There you go, folks.
Dave DeCamp there with antiwar.com.
Check out the website and also we spiderantiwar.com headlines at censored.news, which is our site that spiders, you know, 80 plus websites, typically sites that are heavily censored, obviously.
But check out antiwar.com directly.
You can follow Dave DeCamp at DecampDave.
That's his handle on X.
And feel free to repost this interview on other channels as well.
And whatever you do in 2026, join us in calling for peace.
And let's get us out of all these international conflicts and bombings and sanctions.
And let's focus on trade as a pathway to peace.
Let's make America great again by making great products and ideas and innovation and then trading with the rest of the world so that everybody benefits instead of everybody dying under the rubble of bombed out buildings.
Okay.
How's that sound for 2026?
Thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams here of Brighteon.com.
Take care.
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