Scott Horton critiques the failing American empire, arguing that US foreign policy has backfired by draining national debt and empowering adversaries like Iran in the Persian Gulf. He contrasts Donald Trump's hollow rhetoric with historical precedents, noting how interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan inadvertently fueled groups like ISIS while Russia and China resist dominance. Horton suggests Netanyahu may unintentionally serve Tehran's interests and promotes his book on the new Cold War, concluding that a shift from military coercion to free trade is essential for survival. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, MahmoudAshraf/mms-300m-1130-forced-aligner, sat-12l-sm, script v0.9, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Austin with Scott00:02:45
With Donald Trump, he got up there and beat his chest like Godzilla, or I mean, pardon me, King Kong hanging off the side of the Empire State Building.
Going, I am the greatest peacemaker in the history of anyone who ever ended conflicts anywhere.
I ended eight wars, nine.
I'm ending 10 wars.
I end wars all day.
That's all I do is end wars.
It's pretty hard for a regular person to not notice the discrepancy at that point.
Welcome to today's interview on brightvideos.com.
I'm Mike Adams, and welcome.
We have a first time guest here, but somebody who've Who I have followed online and just a brilliant mind, and someone who's got, I think, a very important message for our time.
It's Scott Horton.
He is a libertarian.
He's with the Libertarian Institute and also with antiwar.com.
And he's got ScottHortonAcademy.com, where he is the director there.
So, welcome, Mr. Horton, to the show today.
It's an honor to have you on.
Thank you very much for having me.
I like your background.
It looks like the schematics of the Death Star.
Oh, yeah, that's funny.
We do use this background.
To indicate basically war and collapse of civilization.
So, but we can do it in different colors.
Today it's green because we have a matrix theme.
You know, we're living in a fantasy land in Trump's head, it seems like very often.
But give us a quick introduction of you and your work for our audience, please.
Oh, well, you know, I'm just a Ron Paul guy.
I'm an anti war libertarian from Austin, Texas.
And I've written some books about the Middle East wars and about the Conflict with Russia and Ukraine, and the background to that, you see behind me, provoked is the big one there about the war in Eastern Europe.
And basically, my job is debunking war propaganda.
Yes.
In the interests of advancing a non interventionist foreign policy.
I love it.
That's exactly what we need right now.
And by the way, my studio is just outside of Austin, Texas, as well.
Okay.
So, probably not physically that separated here.
But tell us, you know, most people fall for the war propaganda, or at least they did, but.
The propaganda fantasy level of Hegseth and Trump now has reached a whole new breaking point that defies rationality.
Are you finding that more people are seeing through it today than perhaps in previous administrations?
Yes.
I mean, I think the thing about Trump is he's so hyperbolic, right?
If you compare him to, say, W. Bush in the election of 2000, he had mumbled a couple of things about, well, I think we should have a more humble foreign policy.
In fact, the end of the sentence was that way they'll accept us more easily when we intervene in their countries.
The Propaganda of War00:03:23
It's actually all he ever meant by that.
But anyway, he mumbled something about being humble.
And people liked that.
And they preferred that to the adventurism of the mad bomber Bill Clinton and his successor, Al Gore, or, you know, designated successor, Al Gore.
It was one of the reasons people voted for Bush.
But then September 11th happened and then he changed his whole doctrine around.
Oh, we cannot let dangers gather.
Oh, great.
So now he can do whatever he wants on that.
With Donald Trump, he got up there and beat his chest like Godzilla, or I mean, pardon me, King Kong hanging off the side of the Empire State Building, going, I am the greatest peacemaker in the history of anyone who ever ended conflicts anywhere.
And he just cannot help but talk about him in that way.
In his interview on Fox yesterday, he's saying, I ended eight wars, nine, I'm ending 10 wars, I end wars all day.
That's all I do is end wars.
And then it's pretty hard for a regular person to not notice the discrepancy at that point.
You know what I mean?
When we did not have a pretext like a September 11th type trauma to justify a pretended new policy, you know, or new strategic doctrine or whatever.
He just decided to do this.
Netanyahu convinced him, now's the time.
Let's get away with it.
And he hardly did a thing to prepare people for it.
And it's just so obvious he's lying.
He says, Oh, well, they were going to have a bomb within two weeks.
No, the hell, they were not either.
And no one in the world believes that who knows the first thing about it at all.
So, it, you know, it's there are reasons why W. Bush didn't do this war back then.
There have been reasons, including we had no good reason to do it.
It's just too dangerous to allow them to have a civilian nuclear program because it could become a weapons program someday.
Well, still, you run right up against the question what are you going to do about it, really?
Because it's the same question that, frankly, Eisenhower and even Truman faced with the Soviet Union.
I mean, they were detonating an atom bomb by the end of 1946.
And we could have invaded the USSR to prevent that from happening, but that was completely out of the question at the time.
And the same thing with Lyndon Johnson in the 60s.
They knew that Mao Zedong was working on nukes.
They said, we're not going to invade China or even do airstrikes to try to degrade their nuclear program or set them back.
We're just going to have to live in a world where actually the most violent man in the history of mankind, Mao Zedong, is going to have A bombs and even H bombs.
And that sucks, but it is what it is.
And Mao had even said, hey, even if I lose a few 10 million people, I got 100 million more.
And still, we didn't launch a preemptive war to prevent that from happening here.
And in this case, it's a country the size of two Texas and change with two giant mountain ranges and just an extremely limited set of options for ending the war.
I mean, I hate to quote Hillary Clinton, but she was Secretary of State during Obama.
And she said in an interview a couple of days ago, I guess, I was getting quoted on Twitter yesterday, that look, Netanyahu tried to convince us to do it too.
But the problem was, right, she doesn't say it's wrong to start a war or anything like that.
Taiwan and the Bluff Called00:11:12
She says, we had no end state, we didn't know how we could.
Finish or that we start?
So then the answer was no.
And it's just too big of a bite to chew.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, that makes perfect sense.
But it strikes me as extraordinary the way that Trump and Rubio and JD Vance and Hegseth talk to us about these wars.
They talk to us from a point of view that the United States of America has this God given exceptionalism where we alone have the right to dictate to the world who is allowed to ship and sell and buy what.
To whom and who, which banks are allowed to function, which sea routes are allowed to be used, which nations are allowed to exist, who's allowed to have nuclear weapons.
But there's always this presumption that we alone have this right to dictate all the rules of the world.
And they just state these things without any self reflection whatsoever.
But that's becoming so obvious as well at this point.
Everybody's kind of seeing it, like you were hinting at.
But go ahead.
What's your response to that?
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, look.
America is the world government, right?
The United Nations Security Council, whatever its edicts are, they have no real enforcement powers.
America is the world empire.
America is the dominant military force.
And so it's what makes those edicts stick when we can get the UN Security Council to go along with what our government wants.
And then when they don't want to go along, then it's just the US enforces their own edicts on their own terms.
Who needs the UN Security Council when you have the National Security Council?
So then.
If Bill Clinton wants to go around the UN to launch a war against Serbia, he can, and Bush in Iraq, and Obama in Libya, and wherever they want.
International law be damned.
The cops, just like in your town, the cops can run a red light.
They can rape a hooker.
They can even get away with shooting a kid in the back.
As long as they claim he was reaching for his waistband, then the law does not apply to law enforcement.
It's the same thing with the US government as the enforcer of the world law.
In fact, they even adopted this slogan and Don't anyone misunderstand what I'm saying?
Like, I'm arguing for the UN or these international institutions at all.
I'm just saying that's the position that America's in.
And we're the enforcer of those institutions, but then also immune from them and can go around them and do whatever we want to.
And so, but then, like right now, we're in this crazy situation where maybe I'm going to get my dream come truth.
We finally leave the NATO alliance, but then only so we can help Israel launch an aggressive war against Turkey because we're mad because American, Israel, and Turkey all work together to help Al Qaeda overthrow the Baathists in Syria.
But now the Israelis don't like their Turkish rivals in Syria.
So now we got to go to the next stage of that.
I mean, boy, at some point, it seems like the American people have got to come to a consensus that.
And I think this is happening, right?
That none of this is in the American people's interest.
We don't want to do any of this stuff anymore.
And you can't point to, as Colonel McGregor says, time wins more arguments than reason.
That's a great quote.
It ain't that everybody said Horton's smart.
It's just that they went, you know what?
We haven't gotten a single thing that we could identify or articulate as a benefit of these policies whatsoever.
Crisis after crisis.
We've empowered the Iranians on one side.
We've empowered the bin Ladenites on the other side.
And what do the American people have to show for it other than a national debt?
Where yesterday was tax day.
Everybody listen to this all those taxes you paid, all that income tax, you just went to pay interest on the national debt to some sovereign foreign government's central bank.
Yeah, yeah.
So all of what they confiscated from you, what a third of what you actually worked for last year, that they just take and destroy.
And that national debt that was built up to build this world empire.
To voice this control that you very accurately describe on the world.
And by the way, completely unnecessarily, right?
As Bill Hicks, the great comedian, explained back 35 years ago when the Soviet Union fell apart, that you get it now.
There's no one else out there.
There is no danger out there.
Spin the whole globe.
We're friends with every power in Europe.
There is no power in Africa.
The only country that matters in Africa is Egypt, and they're completely pwned by the United States of America.
Same thing for the Middle East.
Everybody there is friends.
Not Saudi, not Iraq, not Iran are in danger of invading all of their neighbors and becoming the total dominant force there, and much less at our expense or even at each other's expense.
India is not a world power.
They're, you know, a third rank power, not even second.
China, we ended the Cold War with them in the Nixon years, right?
In the 1973, 74, we ironed things out even with Mao.
Again, the most violent and dangerous person who ever existed, but we were able to get along somehow with him 17 years.
Before the Soviet Union fell apart, we were able to end the Cold War with the Chinese.
And then there's again no power in Latin America.
Brazil's the biggest country in South America.
They don't have anything like an ambition to create a navy and challenge anyone.
And then that's it spin the globe.
You're out of land masses to find enemies on here.
So we just don't have to do this at all.
In fact, as Donald Trump said a year ago when he first came into power, remember he was doing those marathon press conferences in the Oval Office, just sitting at his desk musing to the reporters for hours on end sometimes.
When he was first inaugurated again for his second term.
And at one point he said, You know what?
I don't want to pivot from the Middle East to great power conflict with Russia and China.
I don't want to have conflict with anyone.
Why can't we just be friends with everyone and just be prosperous and make money and trade and get rich for the rest of the century?
Well, that didn't last very long, though, did it?
Exactly.
Exactly.
But you have to abolish the empire.
We don't need the empire to have free trade.
We don't need the empire to be able to get along with the rest of the world.
Nobody accuses Brazil of being an Isolationist country because they don't have a world empire.
We could just be the USA and let the rest of the world go.
So, what's your prognosis on the outcome of this American empire?
Because it strikes me that over the last five years or so, we now have Russia has stood up against NATO, which is a proxy for the United States.
Successfully, Russia wasn't destroyed.
Russia wasn't overthrown.
Russia wasn't pillaged.
In fact, in many ways, they became stronger.
And now we have Iran in the same way saying no, refusing to capitulate.
So, these are two examples, and clearly also two.
China is not going to bow down to Trump's demands on much of anything.
So, what's your prognosis?
Is the American empire, does it have much time left?
Hey, your lips, God's ears, man.
I mean, it looks to me like the bluff has been called, right?
What regular nation state anywhere in the world would believe that American conventional military power will protect them?
Nobody.
The Iranians, we sure can H bomb your country all the way to death.
Nobody doubts.
The ultimate power of America, and particularly to deter any attacker from attempting any kind of existential threat against this country.
But can we protect your country with anything other than nuclear threats?
Apparently not.
If you're in Taiwan right now, you could just completely forget about the idea of America coming for you, which, by the way, they should have known and probably did already know has been null and void for many years now.
Our Navy just cannot get anywhere near Taiwan to defend it.
In the event of a real war with China, there it is 7,000 miles from San Diego, and just forget it anyway.
We already knew that, but now the whole world knows it.
All those countries, all up and down the Persian Gulf.
I mean, look, the status quo as of January, as of you know, February was that the Persian Gulf is an American lake and is international waters, not technically, but doesn't matter.
At least some of it is, but whatever, not the straight.
It's all protected by American dominance, right?
From Irbil in northern Iraq all the way down to, you know, Muscat in Oman.
We got military bases all up and down the Gulf.
In Kuwait, Qatar had our massive air base there, Bahrain, our massive naval base, and then army and air force bases in Kuwait, Saudi, UAE, and Oman.
The Iranians have reached out and touched every single one of them from Irbil to, you know, in Iraqi Kurdistan all the way down to Oman and have.
Taking them all offline, essentially.
I think there's maybe flying some air missions out of Saudi, but mostly they're flying out of Jordan or Israel, even.
And so America's military commitment.
To defend the Gulf states, the GCC Arab monarchies, all those sultanates and emir ships and monarchies, there is completely canceled, bluff totally called.
And the Persian Gulf is, again, a Persian lake and not an American lake.
It's the end of the Carter Doctrine for sure.
I mean, it's just absolutely bluff called.
Well, that's absolutely true.
How that translates to the Baltic Sea, how that translates to Japan's interests and South Korea's interests in East Asia, everyone has to reassess.
All of this stuff.
And hell, especially look at South Korea.
We pulled all our defensive missiles out of South Korea to send them to Israel.
Yeah.
So now you're the government of South Korea.
You're like, oh, yeah, these Americans would love to get us into a fight with China and then not even defend us at all.
So who wants a friend like that?
Well, you know, the leader of the Kuomintang in Taiwan, a woman, just met with Xi in China and had a very public meeting talking about unification, peaceful unification as being the only path.
And at this point, you really can't blame Taiwan because the US isn't going to give them any protection, like you said.
The US isn't going to provide any energy that they need.
The US is only going to basically extort Taiwan and try to force Taiwan Semiconductor to open chip factories in America that will be money losers from day one for a number of reasons.
But it's like you said, Taiwan is going to shift.
Japan has to be recalibrating its understanding right now.
And also, why are we hosting all these US military bases here?
South Korea, like you said, is not going to be protected by the West.
But my next question to you, Scott, is why hasn't reality set in in the minds of people like Heg Seth and Marco Rubio and Trump?
Because they're all talking like it's still the 1980s and we still have the strongest military dominance in the world.
Extorting Chip Factories in America00:11:24
I mean, every day, Heg Seth, especially, you know, frat boy, drunk frat boy guy, every day he's like, we are the most dominant.
We're going to bomb you.
We control everything.
You are nothing.
And like, what world are you living in?
None of the things that he says are true.
Why don't they realize it?
Well, look, I mean, it's an optional conclusion, right?
It looks like America's really dang strong, right?
Like, who could deny the might of the big green machine?
And they can blow up anything they want.
If Pete Hegseth says to his generals and his admirals, make that thing explode, they say, can do, sir, and they do explode that thing, right?
So it's a question of like, you know, mistaking the forest for the trees or not being able to see the forest because of the trees, kind of thing, right?
This is, um, I was actually raised on this as one of the major lessons of Vietnam was the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was actually a very brilliant guy.
But he had been the CEO of Ford Motor Company and he was, you know, an engineer and a mathematician.
And so the way that he looked at Vietnam, which, if I say the name Vietnam War to you, you immediately think of mud and rain and jungles and snipers and snakes and danger.
He looked at Vietnam as a piece of graph paper.
Right, where all we have to do is we have to put these sensors here and we have to drop this quantity of bombs there, and it's all somehow like a trigonometry program.
And if you just tweak the algorithm just right and put the right amount of firepower in the right place and just the right amount of urine sensors on where you think the Ho Chi Minh Trail is right now, and these kinds of things, that somehow this will work out to some sort of what they would call success.
They never dare use the word victory anymore, right?
But that was completely stupid and wrong.
No, Vietnam is a muddy, muddy place, not a piece of graph paper, and it's this, these.
Are not just questions of quantity, but they're questions of quality and a question of values.
Maybe these barefoot peasants would rather die than give in to you.
And so now price doesn't matter as much.
We're talking about something else, right?
And so that's the same mistake that Pete Hegseth is making here, right?
Every day he feels powerful ordering things destroyed, but he's looking at the tactics and the operations, but he's not looking at the strategy.
And you can see this every day, and this is a mix between public relations and self deception here, too.
When they go, We bomb their air force, we bomb their navy, we destroy.
Well, those weren't even goals of the war, y'all.
Nobody thought that Iran's air force and navy were even more than the slightest component you wouldn't even say minor, they were the slightest component of Iran's military force.
They have a million man army that stays home to prevent anyone from trying to invade them, and then they focus everything else on their mid range missiles.
Everybody knows that.
It was always about the mid range missiles and now on top of that, the drones.
And now, does anyone think that we've actually destroyed their missile capability?
No.
And the military themselves told the Wall Street Journal that they still have more than half of everything, or at least half of everything left.
And it's probably much more than that.
And because their entire strategy was all centered around being able to survive long term.
And so, you know, it's a massive country, again, full of mountains where they have the ability to hide these launchers and hide these rocket stores in many.
Small and mostly invulnerable type locations, you know, protected by granite.
And so America's ability to knock out their strategic intermediate range nuclear, pardon me, intermediate range conventional missile force is null and void.
We cannot stop it, right?
And so he can get up there and crow about all of the damage that he's caused, but he cannot claim that he has really changed the strategic balance.
Between the United States and Iran in the region, in any other way than empowering them.
Again, by attempting to call their bluff, the Americans called their own bluff and revealed that our military empire in the Middle East is essentially worthless.
That's a really valid point, right there.
And by the way, I want to encourage people to follow you on X. What's your X handle?
I'm Scott Horton Show.
Scott Horton Show.
Okay.
And then your main website is scotthortonacademy.com.
And I just want to show people your site here.
But also, what's your most recent book?
That, and do you have a copy there?
Can you show us?
Yeah.
So, this one right behind me here, the thick one there, is provoked how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine.
Before that was enough already, time to end the war on terrorism.
And before that was fool's errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan.
And so, essentially, my argument is more or less born out of a libertarian analysis of.
Of American public policy, you know, government policy of any kind.
That if you ask a libertarian whether we think that the government should do something, we'll always say no.
And then we'll say, don't you know that this is all the government's fault in the first place?
And then we'll explain.
If you just go back two or three steps, you'll see how they intervened and they made things worse.
And then they had to fix that.
And now everything's even worse, you know, way worse than it was in the first place.
And it's the same thing when it comes to, well, And really, we always will trace it back to inflationary money and the government's ability to counterfeit money and license their friends to counterfeit money at everybody else's expense.
And then all the consequences that come from that.
And you can include the empire in that.
And then, say, for example, in our Middle East wars, the original sin, as everyone knows, is at the creation of the world empire after World War II, America overthrew the government in Tehran and supported the dictator there for 25 years.
And that blew back into the Iranian revolution.
And then that blew back in the form of American support for Saddam Hussein and his war against Iran, the Iran Iraq War in the 80s.
And then that blew back into Iraq War I, when there was a dispute over the war debts from the last war.
And so we went for Iraq War I.
And then that led to the Shiite uprising.
And then, oops, that led to America permanently occupying Saudi Arabia for 10 years.
But that then led to America's Al Qaeda mercenary terrorists turning on the United States and killing Americans.
And then that led to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which, of course, obviously.
Led immediately to the wars in Libya and Syria and the rise of the caliphate, which led to help to motivate America's war in Yemen and in increasing and empowering Iran in four out of five of those cases this whole time,
and then driving the Americans to ultimate frustration that every time they try to spite the Iranians, they end up empowering them to the point where now we've even attempted a regime change and instead only empowered, according to the journal today.
Harder hardliners led by the Ayatollah's son are in power now, and where we have no ability whatsoever to roll their influence back.
And I was joking recently that you can see what's obviously going on here Netanyahu is an Iranian spy.
And he's the one who has really been one of the major influences in pushing the United States into pursuing all of these policies that have only served to empower Iran all along.
And of course, the Ayatollah himself didn't mind dying.
They want to be martyrs in their Shiite culture and faith.
There ain't nothing wrong with getting killed by a foreign power to them.
So when you say Netanyahu has just been playing into their hands this whole time.
Okay, but I got to ask for more information.
Oh, and I'm sorry.
I was going to say about Ukraine too, but go ahead.
Well, you said Netanyahu is an Iranian spy.
I mean, are you saying that tongue in cheek?
Yes, yes.
I mean, yeah, of course.
I'm just saying, yeah, everything he does serves their interest, you know?
Right, but not intentionally.
I mean, No, He's really bad at being a dictator.
And then, yeah, in other words, what I'm really saying is all of these policies always are meant to solve the last problem, but they end up creating new problems that then require more intervention to resolve those problems.
And a lot of it is unintended consequences.
Like, for example, especially George W. Bush's Iraq War II in 2003 through 8 there.
That was essentially fought, the whole thing was fought for Iran's friends.
That whole time, all those suicide bombings, all those head choppings, all of that horrific civil war, and 4,500 Americans killed, and plus all the contractors, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands probably a million Iraqis killed in the civil war and the results of it all and everything.
And all of it was fought as an own goal, as they say in soccer, right?
To empower Iran at the expense of all of America's Sunni friends in the region in the most idiotic type move.
And then so much of American policy since then.
Can be best understood as trying to correct for that fact.
So you might have wondered why is Barack Obama backing Osama bin Laden's suicide bomber friends in Syria?
And the answer was because they hate the Shiites.
And America is tilting back toward the Sunnis since after we did such a great job of empowering the Shiites in Iraq War II, which they regretted doing.
So they were trying to make up for that error.
And so that's what I mean about, you know, everybody knows Netanyahu and the neoconservatives in America were very close to Netanyahu.
And these were the guys who pushed us into that war.
Yeah.
And you would not be faulted for concluding that, you know, they hired him to do it.
In fact, what they did was Iran supported the Iraqi National Congress that sold all the lies to Netanyahu and to the neoconservatives about how the new Saddam Hussein less Iraq would be a good friend of Israel and would force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and all this other nonsense.
Yeah, it is all nonsense.
And I'm glad that you're helping our audience make sense of it.
I want to give out your website again, Scott.
Hortonacademy.com is where you can follow our guest's work.
And Scott, we're going to wrap up part one of this interview right here, but please stand by.
And I want to encourage those of you watching to follow Scott on X and help support his work because I think it's critically important that we rationally argue for the benefits of peace and trade above war and coercion, which will thrust Americans into mass poverty.
And in fact, that's going to be the topic of part two of this interview.
And if you want to find part two, it's also on brightvideos.com.
So thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams of brightvideos.com.
And check out that website for more interviews and commentary.
Wrap Up: Peace Over Coercion00:00:15
Thank you.
Take care.
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