Scott Horton and James Smith argue the U.S. illegally overthrew Ukraine's 2014 government to remove Russia's Sevastopol naval base, falsely labeling Russia an aggressor while expanding NATO as a provocation akin to Pearl Harbor. They contend Biden is de-escalating by promising Ukraine no NATO membership for a decade and potential autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk, yet criticize the "empire mentality" that justifies surveillance and nuclear threats despite Russia's GDP being smaller than New York City's. Ultimately, the hosts assert that forward deterrence strategies have dangerously moved the line of conflict toward Russia's borders, challenging traditional narratives of aggression. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Government Too Big00:15:04
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
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If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I hope everyone's having a good one.
I hope everyone's getting ready for a nice holiday season.
I'm looking forward to tonight's episode.
The war drums are beating.
And when war drums are beating, the only reasonable thing you can do is pour yourself a glass of whiskey, get Scott Horton on the line, and figure out what the hell is going on in the world.
So I'm very happy to be joined once again, as always, my favorite guest to have on, the incredible Scott Horton, author of Fool's Errand, author of Enough Already.
He runs the Libertarian Institute, runs anti-war.com.
And also, in addition to the Scott Horton show, has a new podcast, The End of the Empire, him and Pete Quinonez are co-hosting, which I was just on the other day.
So go check that out.
That's up on YouTube and maybe other places too.
I don't know.
But anyway, what's up, Scott?
How are you, brother?
Mr. President, good to see you again.
All right.
Let's not get crazy here right off the bat.
Well, listen, I wanted to talk to you because there's this kind of, okay, so there seems to be some type of mini escalation, I would say, in the dispute between Ukraine and Russia.
If you listen to the hysteria of the corporate press, you would think there's like some major escalation and all hell has broken loose, but that doesn't really seem to be the case.
But there is a border dispute going on there.
There's been an uptick in some of the rhetoric from particularly out of the State Department.
And so I wanted to talk to you about what's going on.
Of course, you know, it's not as if there hasn't over the last, let's say, five years, been some pretty insane, some might say hyperbolic rhetoric of, you know, the Russians interfered in our election and are trying to overthrow our democracy and all this.
But Blinker, his, I think, whatever his official liar is, I don't think they call it a press secretary at the State Department.
I think it's like the communications director or whatever, came out and said that, you know, if Russia does not de-escalate the situation and they violate the territorial integrity of Ukraine, then we'll have to have swift action.
Because if there's one thing that the United States State Department cares about, it is territorial integrity.
You know, they would never, never violate anyone else's.
Anyway, everybody knows that.
Yes, right.
So what's going on?
Let's start with the latest.
What's happening right now with them?
And then maybe we could zoom out to the bigger picture.
What's going on right now?
Sure.
Yeah.
Well, the latest is the good news, which is Biden's already climbing down.
So as we're recording this, it's Thursday night and they had a talk on the phone yesterday, I guess it was.
And so was it Tuesday?
I think it was actually may have been Tuesday.
And then the news came out yesterday that they're beginning to climb down.
And because Biden was asked if, you know, you guys keep talking about consequences and ironclad support.
And, you know, the general secretary of NATO said we stand with Ukraine and all these things.
So the question is, do you mean militarily, Mr. President?
Are you going to actually send troops to Ukraine?
And he said, no, we're not.
And so I don't think I didn't actually check.
I should check the White House website, but I read reports that referred to like limited segments of the conversation that were released by the Russian side and by the American side.
But I don't think there's a readout of the entire conversation.
I maybe should check on that.
But it seems likely to me that Biden said to Putin, essentially, here's your guarantee, but I didn't give you a guarantee.
You know what I mean?
But like just you between you and me, yes, we're not going to let Ukraine into NATO.
Because in fact, that's another thing that they said.
It was in the Associated Press.
They said that, well, you know, we might not be able to really look at Ukrainian membership in NATO for another decade, which is, in other words, forget it, you know, at least for now, but you could take it for more than that, probably.
And then, hang on, I have it here.
I'm sorry, there's one more thing in the Associated Press I wanted to show you, if I could find it here.
It was, oh, that was what it was, that American officials told the Associated Press that they would pressure Kiev to grant more autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk, the sort of renegade provinces.
Yeah, I saw you tweeted.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So in other words, this is actually part of the agreement of the Minsk II so-called peace deal that more or less, but not entirely ended the fighting in eastern Ukraine back in 2015 that Kiev has never lived up to, which is that these, the Donbass region, it's called, Donetsk and Luhansk, are to be given a level of autonomy sufficient to essentially satisfy their concerns to stay inside Ukraine.
And so, you know, the very worst statements on this, Dave, came from Republican, a Republican senator, I guess, one particularly, Senator Wicker, I believe it is from Oklahoma, was on, was it Cavuto?
I think it was Neil Cavuto on Fox News show and said that absolutely we are, you know, need 100% commitment to Ukraine.
And if the Russians invade, we should send troops and we should even, you know, contemplate using nuclear weapons if we have to.
Which is just because look, once you buy the premise that Ukraine is America's eastern frontier and we got to stop them there, you know, then yeah, I guess, sure.
In fact, Ted Carpenter, the great Ted Carpenter, who's from Cato, but writes for us at antiwar.com too, he framed this as this misconception that the Americans have of forward deterrence, where it's all still just deterrence, no matter how far we move the line, right?
So like, I'm afraid of Dave, so I'd buy a rifle, okay?
But then I'm afraid of Dave, so I buy the houses on either side of Dave, and I buy a bunch of rifles and hire a bunch of goons, and now we're all standing around all the time.
And then I say, well, look, I'm just deterring Dave from violence against me, but it looks a lot more like I'm the aggressor expanding militarily into your zone, you know, which is exactly what's going on here.
But the Americans, as always, Dave, and I think this is at the root of a lot of America's problems, not just in foreign policy, but in everything, is that the so-called leadership up there, they just believe all of their own BS all the time.
And, you know, just like you could spend an entire lifetime listening to poor little Israel responding and retaliating against aggressive strikes by the terrorists in Gaza or whatever.
That's the same way that the Americans are, where they won't even admit to themselves, like even when they're drunk late at night, they're like, well, we did kind of start it last week when we did this or did that that set off the recent chain of events.
It's always Russian aggression, even when in fact, I scored a laugh in my debate with Bill Crystal about quoting Hillary Clinton, you know, meaningfully, you know, demonizing Russia for moving troops inside Russia.
Yeah.
In her words, on NATO's doorstep, right?
But it was inside Russia.
There's moving them from base to base inside Russia.
So, yeah, that's well, you know, Hillary Clinton, listen, she, that one wasn't her best, but have you heard her acceptance speech that she never got to give?
I mean, it was really beautiful.
Even she got choked up.
Even she got choked up giving her own acceptance.
Anyway, whatever.
Dude, that was just too goddamn funny.
I really stood watching.
I just hate her voice so much, Dave.
I just can't bear to do it, dude.
It is unbelievable that Hillary Clinton doesn't have one friend who just goes, don't do this.
Right.
Because it, oh my God, it looks so bad.
Anyway, whatever.
That's neither here nor there.
You know, it's funny because so, so this is a lot.
I remember me and you talking about this.
And I think you were the one who put it this way, or maybe I was, but we went on a whole riff about this a while back.
This might be a few years ago when we were doing like an episode.
And we were talking about how like there's almost this thing that if you, if you were to concede, if you were to concede the government's premise, then almost like their arguments would follow from that.
Like in a sense that like, okay, if you were to concede the idea that the government, the United States federal government owns all of us and all of our stuff, well, then taxation isn't theft, right?
That's just completely eminent domain.
That's what it means.
They own it first.
But like, look, they own it.
It's not imminent domain.
Like, hey, this road is coming through here imminently and you're going to have to get out of the way.
No, it's eminent domain as though the state is God, the collective will of the people owns all the property before anyone owns it.
So if that premise was true, then really they're never the aggressors.
I mean, really, they're like, oh, this is completely reasonable.
I mean, like, yeah, we let you use our, like, right now we're talking or whatever.
It's like, well, we let you use our computers and our microphones and our internet and our all this.
So of course we deserve a little bit of the cut.
I mean, come on.
You know, so it's like, now the premise is insane, but if you buy the premise, but in the same time, you almost go like when they go like, you know, well, Hezbollah is a threat to the United States of America.
It's like, well, okay, yes, the way me and you think about it are like, wait, what?
So like, you mean the geographical region between Canada and Mexico, the United States of America?
Like, that's insane.
And that is insane.
But Hezbollah is legitimately, very legitimately, a threat to Israel's ability to occupy southern Lebanon.
Like they really are.
And so if you think about it that way, you're like, oh, yeah, if you have the empire mentality, you're like, oh, yeah, they really are a threat.
Iran really is a threat to our ability to control Iran.
Like they really are.
And so it's almost like when you spin these things, like you realize, like, oh, okay, they just, they take these insane, like this insane premise, and then they follow that to its logical conclusion.
But what's a little bit different in the case of Russia is that you would think, I mean, typically we pick on these puny countries that don't have nuclear weapons.
And in many ways, Russia kind of is a puny country, but they do have a lot of nuclear weapons.
And you would think that at least in the situation with Ukraine, when someone's going, I mean, you know, if Russia aggresses toward Ukraine, let's even say the story was Russia aggressing toward Ukraine, which is not exactly the story, but let's say it was.
You go, well, if they do that, then we might have to nuke.
Like, no options are off the table.
And you're right.
So you're telling me, like, just take a deep breath and really think about this.
You're telling me right now, someone sitting in America that if Ukraine were to become part of Russia once again, that that is worth risking humanity.
Like that that is worth having the two countries with like something like 90% of the world's nuclear arsenal going to nuclear war.
It's worth it to keep Ukraine out of being Russia, which like Dave, you don't understand.
You can't even tell the difference between.
If we just make that threat, then it'll never happen.
You won't have to worry about it, bro.
We gamed this out.
We have an algorithm.
It's totally cool.
It's a dangerous game.
It is a dangerous game to play.
Yeah, no, it is.
It's completely nuts.
And look, so they appoint themselves since World War II, the guarantors of the world law and the world order and the rules-based liberal this and that.
Bill Crystal said, right, this isn't an empire.
We're just trying to make the world safe for everybody to do everything and keep the peace everywhere.
And yet, just like a cop running a red light or killing a guy and getting away with it in front of everybody, America is immune from the law.
And so are our partners.
So, like, take your example, Iran, where the prime minister of Israel says we reserve the right to start an aggressive war with Iran and bomb all their nuclear facilities if we feel like that's in our interest to do.
And then America's Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is asked about that.
Israel's threatening to launch a war against Iran.
And Blinken says, listen, America always will stand by Israel's right to defend itself.
Right?
But so, according to the United Nations Charter, you can't do that, man.
That's an aggressive war.
You can't start an aggressive war unless you get a vote on the UN Security Council, and then you can start an aggressive war.
That's the law.
But so, Israel unilaterally attacking a civilian safeguarded nuclear program in a third country somewhere is completely illegal.
It would be a war crime on its face.
No question about it.
And America announced this beforehand that, yes, of course they can do whatever they want.
And America, the biggest kid on the block, will always make sure that they can too.
And what are you going to do about it?
And also, by the way, we're here to enforce the rules-based liberal world order.
We're here to tell Russia and China that you are too authoritarian in your dealings with your neighbors and this and that, while we're standing on a pile of a million Iraqi and Syrian and Yemeni and Afghan and Somali skulls.
And they're saying, really, you guys killed something on the order of 2 million people in the last 20 years alone.
And you sit here and talk to us about the rules-based world order?
You want to zoom out?
Why are we even in this controversy at all?
America Enforces Rules00:04:05
Because America completely, illegally, overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014.
Right, but what about territorial integrity?
Well, that doesn't mean anything when it's America.
And democracy doesn't mean anything either.
If we can do a right-wing street putsch and get rid of a democratically elected leader who leans towards a country we don't favor, like Russia, then screw democracy.
I mean, right now, this week we have the democracy summit going on, where Biden is really like quite deliberately in a way that Obama and Trump didn't quite do is really, you know, drawing starker lines of this new Cold War and deliberately putting Russia and China on the other side of it and declaring it's the democracies versus the autocracies.
But that's just a joke.
America in alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Kujunta in Kiev and whatever other, you know, various and sundry tyrants across the Middle East and Africa and Asia that, and who will overthrow a democratic government at the drop of a ad if it suits their interests, that we are leading the alliance of democracies?
Why?
Because we're friends with Spain and France and Germany and England.
And never mind any of the rest of the band.
And throw Israel in there too.
I mean, I don't care how much they claim it.
You don't get to call yourself a democracy.
If you're saying someday we'll have a two-state solution, we support that.
Well, then right now there aren't two states.
And that would mean that all those other people are kind of part of your state.
They don't have no vote.
So that ain't a democracy either.
Like, unless you want to say, unless you want to go down the road of like where you could say, like, whatever that like only white male, you know, landowners voting was also a democracy.
Like, I mean, okay, I don't know exactly how you define democracy, but if you could say only the people who agree with us get to vote, okay, we have a democracy, fine, but not really.
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Might Makes Right00:09:35
For your listeners who get upset about that, you know, there are people who say when a Palestinian says from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
They say that's terrible, anti-Semitic, because it means that it won't be Israel anymore.
It'll be Palestine.
If it's free, it won't be Israel.
Is right there in the confession right there.
But then the Palestinians say, no, it'll be fine.
You guys can all stay.
It's just also, we'll also have our human rights respected.
And the Israelis say, nope, that's anti-Semitic for you to say one day that from the river to the sea, it'll be one regime of any kind, you know, free or not.
But then again, that's what Benjamin Netanyahu says.
In his words, everything west of the Jordan River from the river to the sea will always have one security force and it will be ruled by Israel, period.
That's what he said.
That's Likou doctrine.
And that's the ruling doctrine of that state.
It certainly has not changed under Bennett, who, you know, if anything is to the right of Netanyahu on, you know, his intent on keeping the West Bank, Judea, and Samaria, as they say.
So, in fact, Amondo Weiss just had a quote from the former Israeli attorney general saying, don't just call it apartheid in the West Bank.
It's apartheid everywhere.
And this whole, you know, inside and outside Israel proper, you know, is that vicious?
You know, what kind of anti-Semite is he?
The former attorney general of Israel.
Yeah.
You know, and Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, both former prime ministers, have said the same thing, that at least they put it in the future tense.
Like, if we don't give up the West Bank and Gaza Strip, then it will be apartheid.
Well, they didn't, and it is.
So, yeah.
And again, those are, that's the words of two former prime ministers of Israel itself.
And of course, if you want to, and as you mentioned, you know, just to make it, even if anyone is going to push back against that, well, okay, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and like all these other examples, like no one's, no one's going to make me an argument that these are like liberal democracies or something, right?
Or other, otherwise the words mean literally nothing if you're going to get into that.
So yeah, it's, it's like, it's, it's such a joke.
And it's as much of a joke as like, dude, I remember there was one, if you ever watch in the, okay, dear God, let me disclaim this before I even say this.
The Nazis were very, very bad.
I'm a Jew.
My family can't wait to hear what's happening.
Well, no, but there was a funny moment in the Nuremberg trial where one of the hilarious moments in that.
There were.
And there was one of the moments where one of the guys, I can't remember who it was, but it was one of the guys who was like reading off the charges and like who was it?
And it was something like where they go, oh, well, we're being charged for, you know, annexing foreign lands by France and crimes against humanity by Britain.
You know, and like, right.
It's really something like, this was in his defense.
And you're like, okay, fuck the Nazis.
They're really, really bad people.
But you kind of got to admit there's a point to that that, man, that hypocrisy is just like outrageous.
And you realize that it's like, yeah, dude, when it comes to like geopolitical battles, it's just might makes right.
And who's who wins the war gets to say, yep, well, we won.
And we decide that England and France decides that you guys were annexing foreign territories.
And so we're going to come down on you for that.
And we're going to come down on you for crimes against humanity, which the point here, one more time for the people who are trying to make a soundbite out of this, is not that the Germans weren't guilty of crimes against humanity, but that the other ones were as well.
Right.
That's my point.
Anyway, anyway, in the game I'm in now, Scott, I have to really make sure people understand what I'm saying there.
But it's okay.
America talking about these things is just, it's bonkers.
Yeah.
I mean, look at what Harry Truman did to Japan and then, you know, held a bunch of war crimes trials for those guys too.
And Lord knows the Japanese were guilty of war crimes during that period.
No question about that.
Still doesn't change the fact of who Terry Truman was and what he had done, you know?
Yeah.
But yeah.
Okay.
So, so, so, as you said, now, kind of like zooming out here and looking at the bigger picture.
What is what's really, what do you think is really going on here with this dispute?
Forget the American response, because as you said, there are already some positive signs that we're walking this back.
I think a lot of this is just bluster.
I don't, I will grant Tucker Carlson said the other night, he had a very good segment on this.
And, and he's, he's great on opposing the kind of like the regime wars that have been going on over the last decade or so.
Um, but he did say, which I thought was funny when he opened it, he goes, Listen, no matter what, if something is proposed and you go, oh, this is just too stupid and destructive and against American interests, goes, don't worry, the American government might actually do it.
And there's, there's something to that, especially right now, where we are as a country.
Never, when, when powerful people are talking about this shit, never underestimate the fact that, like, this maybe they're saying it.
Who the hell knows?
They could.
Yeah.
So, uh, you might have seen in the American Conservative magazine earlier this week, they ran a piece by Colonel Douglas McGregor.
And so, this is the guy who was the hero of the big tank battle of Iraq War I and was General McMaster's commander, although he ended up being political enough that he rose to general and McGregor never did.
Um, but um, you know, there's this great piece.
You should read this piece from a few years ago by the late, great Mark Perry in Politico magazine.
And it's about McGregor versus McMaster for who has the superior war plan for how to fight Russia in Eastern Europe if we ever engage in a conventional land war against the Russians in Eastern Europe.
And then, so, in other words, I don't know, I think probably they ended up adopting McMaster's plan for political reasons or whatever, but let's just say McGregor wrote one of the top competing army war plans for how to fight a war with Russia in Eastern Europe.
Um, and he wrote, so, in other words, he knows a bit about this and the context.
He's the guy that uh Trump tried to make ambassador to Germany and uh and then later made the senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense after losing the after he lost, yeah, and and then ordered troops out of Afghanistan and Somalia and then rescinded those orders and all of those things.
That was you know, McGregor was trying his best then, anyway.
By the way, if you if you haven't seen it, please uh don't don't lose this train of thought because I want to hear what you have to say.
But uh, if you haven't seen McGregor has been on Tucker Carlson a whole bunch and he's done like and he's just excellent, like he's just he's just completely opposes all of these stupid wars and not from the Scott Horton or Dave Smith perspective of like, oh my God, these innocent people were killing, just from like a pure American military.
This is suicide perspective.
Like, what are we doing here?
We have no national interests in any of these wars.
It's really great too that he is this gruff old Buchananite and is by far the toughest and smartest guy in the room.
Um, and I mean that, you know, they go, oh, Stanley McChrystal reads books, he's a warrior monk and all this stuff.
Yeah, I don't, I'm not so impressed by Stanley McChrystal.
McGregor is the smartest guy in the room.
He's a really impressive guy.
And he's the kind of guy that if Trump had just made him Secretary of Defense from the very beginning, then the job would be this should have been Mattis's job interview in the first place, but Trump didn't have his act together to say this.
But if he chose McGregor in the first place, The narrative would have been you stand on my right flank and be, you know, break out a cigar, even if you have to, and be the toughest guy in the room and tell everybody that it's okay that I'm bringing all of our troops home from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
That's your job all right.
And McGregor would have done that because he's told me, I know personally from him that his point of view is Russia's not our enemy at all.
And in any sense, and that China, they're our economic competitor at worst.
But there's no reason in the world why we ought to have any kind of cold war or hostile relations with them or any other power on the planet.
There's just, we could be fine.
We could be a normal country in a normal time.
According to this guy, he spent his whole career being an army colonel, preparing to kick the whole world's ass if he has to.
He's just saying, I don't have to.
I just wish Donald Trump could have been Donald Trump without being Donald Trump.
Like, I just wish, you know, like, I wish he could have been the one package deal with him, man.
Yeah, I know.
I wish he could have just been some of the good things he said, but just known enough, like, actually believed the good things he said, and maybe just had like read one more article.
Like, if he had just made McGregor, I actually think McGregor would have turned him around if he had just nominated McGregor, would have like kept him honest and not let him be like influenced by the last guy he talked to.
Like Jim's like, but I just talked to Lindsey Graham and the Gulf Coast and you know, he, you know, whatever.
Strategic National Interest00:05:51
Like, it's like, no, like just to be like, no, no, no, your instincts were correct.
You're right.
And we're doing this.
I actually think like he would have been the guy on his right flank, like elbowing Trump, being like, yep, say it.
That's right.
We're doing what you thought.
Anyway, all right.
Neither here.
No, that's good.
It's important.
You know, his character is an important part of the story here, which is that he wrote this thing in the American Conservative, where it's, you know, a letter to President Biden.
Do you remember Pearl Harbor?
And look at what happened there.
And, you know, never mind, and I don't think he gets into this in the article, but never even mind FDR's like prior knowledge that it was coming imminently and all of that turning a blind eye, which is an important part of the story.
But for these purposes, it's neither, you know, here nor there, as they say.
But the point being that, as he puts it, the U.S. Navy practiced fighting Japan every year.
They would hold these massive war games and then the fleet would return to San Diego.
But in 1941, they didn't return to San Diego.
They left them out at Pearl Harbor.
And when they were criticized for this, they said, no, this is deterrence.
We're letting the Japanese know that we're really serious and we're going to keep our ships halfway to your house, man, in order to keep you good and deterred.
Well, then what happened was they also levied the embargo on oil, which meant that the Japanese had no choice from their point of view.
Anyway, I'm not saying from our morality point of view, from the Japanese Empire's point of view, they had no choice but to invade the Indies and Singapore and to expand the war.
And then eventually, as they considered it, they had to take out as much of the American fleet as possible because they figured that, in other words, instead of deterring them, we provoked them into a first strike.
And they were hoping they would get lucky and sink enough of our Navy that it would take America long enough to recover from the strike at Pearl Harbor, that they would be able to consolidate their position further in the South Pacific and all of that, which didn't work out too well for them because the Americans, the carriers were coincidentally, Dave, out to sea that day.
And so it was mostly old World War I era ships that got sank.
So, and the American industrial capacity was able to crank out ships at an incredible pace during that time, you know, after that time.
So, anyway, didn't work out too well for the Japanese there.
But McGregor's saying, yeah, it didn't work out too well for those sailors at Pearl Harbor either.
And if you believe the idea that America was trying to deter Japan, then you have to admit that they failed at that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that, you know, all of their forward deterrence ended up actually just being a provocation.
And then so he makes the comparison in Ukraine and Russia and Taiwan and China and saying that we're essentially making the same mistake again, that we're putting the Russians and the Chinese in the position of maybe having to fight for what they consider to be their highest vital interest that because we are intervening where we shouldn't be.
Whereas then we would have to fight for two things, two countries or you know, areas, Ukraine and Taiwan, neither of which are our vital interests whatsoever.
And both of which are on the far side of the planet from here.
Like, if you look at it like this, right?
If you just think about, and I haven't read this piece, but I love this argument.
If you think about it, it's like, okay, what does Russia stand to lose theoretically from, say, Ukraine being absorbed by NATO?
Well, a lot.
Right.
I mean, that's a big deal for them.
What do we stand to gain from Ukraine not being absorbed by Russia?
If those were the, you know, the, if that was the binary.
I mean, we get to limit Russia more.
Yeah, like, really.
That's what we almost nothing, almost nothing.
And same with Taiwan.
And listen, I don't like, listen, Taiwan, I will say, at least in that situation, I root for Taiwan because I really do think it's a more free place than the rest of China.
And I don't want, but I'm just saying, if you're just thinking about it from our strategic, like national interest.
And I think the point that if I'm understanding what you're saying, like, I think what McGregor at Colonel McGregor is saying here is that like the what is called containment, you know, can often be actually a provocation.
And like, if you're blowing on a fire, you're not exactly containing it.
You might actually be like igniting it.
You might be like making this whole situation much worse.
And what exactly like the, and I guess really what gets down, what's at the crux of this, what's really important to understand.
And China, this is true for China as well, but with Russia, it's so much more of an obvious case is that Russia is no threat to the United States of America or any of our Eastern interests or even any of like our allied countries.
There's just no threat to them.
Now, would like Georgia or Ukraine, where exactly like they'd end up being might be, I suppose, somewhat in doubt.
But, you know, one thing, Russia, if you look at the country of Russia, they have, they have a lot of nukes, you know, compared to the world's, not really compared to us, but compared to other countries.
Perils of Dominance00:15:15
In fact, they might have a few more than us.
It's about 7,000 each, right around 7,000.
All right.
So, so there you go.
They have a lot of nukes and they have certainly besides us, more than anybody else in the world, right?
But their economy is nothing.
I mean, literally nothing.
Russia's GDP is smaller than Brazil.
Substantially.
It's New York City.
It's equivalent to New York City.
Right.
It's New York City.
It's New York City or Italy, maybe, or like smaller than Brazil, probably smaller than Italy.
They have, just to keep this in perspective, and I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but it's something like one and a half trillion dollars is Russia's GDP.
I forget all the numbers, but I listen, everybody go to anti-war.com and look at David Stockman's articles.
Yeah, his recent articles has got a two-part, a great two-part on this, and he breaks down all of the numbers.
But I mean, just yeah, right.
David Stockman, who was Reagan's budget director, who's just a fucking genius and incredible.
And all, and by the way, you should, if you can, if you can handle it, read all of his stuff and all of his books that are incredible.
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Just to like give some perspective on this here, right?
Like Russia's GDP, and I think I'm ballpark right, like around one and a half trillion dollars is our federal government spent like six trillion dollars in 2020.
Like our just our $1 trillion on the military.
Yes, yes, yeah.
And like, like our government spending is more than their entire economy.
Yeah, that military budget is equivalent to it.
Our military budget is like very close to their entire GDP.
The idea that this is even like plausible, that they could pose some threat, that like, oh my God, we better dominate the world because if we don't, Russia will dominate the world.
Like we're going bankrupt.
We're going bankrupt.
Here's the rub, though, Dave: is this is what Gareth Porter wrote his book about Vietnam.
It's called The Perils of Dominance.
Right.
And it's about the problem in Vietnam: America was too strong and they thought they could do whatever they want, but then that'll cause problems.
Because guess what?
At some point, Ho Chi Minh would rather fight than give in.
That's just sorry for rhyming there, but that's just true how it is.
And same thing for, you know, the Politburo in Beijing.
And same thing for Vladimir Putin and his interests in Russia.
There are red lines from their point of view.
That was his words the other day.
He said if America were to start introducing troops or significantly increasing their arms transfers to Ukraine, that that would be a red line.
And I think I've quoted this to you before where years ago, our current director of the CIA, William Burns, had written, it's in the WikiLeaks, Julian Assange sitting in solitary confinement at Joe Biden's behest at Belmarsh terror prison there in the UK right now over this.
But Burns wrote home after a meeting with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister.
And the WikiLeaks document is called Niet Means Niet.
And Lavrov is very polite, but he says in no uncertain terms that if you guys try to bring Ukraine into NATO, we will do something to prevent that from happening.
We would do anything to prevent that from happening.
So that's as nice as a diplomat can threaten war right there, essentially.
And then not long after that, Vladimir Putin, I don't know if this was a hot mic moment or if it was meant to be or if it really was an accident or exactly.
It might have just been, it might have just been that the guy later told the story, Dave, now that I think about it, I forget.
But it was an Italian diplomat, some kind of like, you know, their ambassador to the EU or some kind of thing like that, some weird title, but it's this Italian diplomat.
And Putin told him that, you know, we could be in Kiev in two weeks.
In other words, this is a red line.
And yeah, we might get into a nuclear war with the Americans if they're going to be that stubborn about it and get into a war with us about it.
Then I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
But are we going to let Ukraine be absorbed into America's military alliance and have them station their best weapons and including their, you know, medium-range missiles and all of these things, you know, a couple hundred miles from Moscow?
No, we're not going to allow that to happen.
We're just not going to do that.
And, you know, they're already, of course, threatened by American weapons in the Baltic states, although I'm not exactly, I don't think they have the mid-range missile launchers there, but they do have them in Poland.
I think we talked about this before.
It's the, I'm sorry, I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget the MK-41 missile launchers.
These are the anti-ballistic missile missile launchers, Dave.
Oh, but you can also fire a Tomahawk, nuclear-armed cruise missile from the very same missile launcher.
It's a perfectly dual-use piece of equipment.
So they say it's just defensive.
And really, if you bring a lot of defense that close to your enemy's place at some point, again, it's a provocation and offense.
But here, it actually literally has this very easy dual-use switch kind of a deal where you could drop a tomahawk in the same launcher and use it.
So, you know, they already have that essentially in Poland, and they already have American forces in the Baltic states as well.
And they're just saying they're drawing the line at Ukraine and America's pushing their luck where they shouldn't.
Oh, here I get to quote Pat Buchanan.
I like this quote.
It's really important.
In fact, people should read Pat about this because he knows a lot about this.
He's been writing about this for a very long time.
We run him at antiwar.com/slash Pat if people want to catch up.
In fact, he sent us a new one today about it, I think.
But he says, listen.
Oh, really?
Did he?
Oh, I got to check that out.
Yeah.
So he was Nixon's guy, right?
That's where he got his big start.
He was Nixon and then Reagan's speechwriter.
But so he was there during détente and the war in Vietnam and all these things.
He was always a Cold War hawk.
Probably he was one of the most right-wing members in Nixon's cabinet when it came to him.
But he went to the meeting with Mao Zedong, too.
Like he was there for, yeah.
I could have forgotten if I knew that.
He went to China with them and he said it made his stomach sick.
Yeah, I bet he was like, Yeah, he was and and Nixon was like saying nice things about Mao, and like he was like just furious.
And he had to write him, I bet.
I mean, I don't know if that I don't know if that part's true, but I bet he did.
I bet he had to write like it was like, Hey, write me some nice things about Mao.
It's like, heaven's sake, what I know.
So, Chas Freeman, who's now, you know, the great China dove, um, was there, he was the translator for Nixon and Mao.
And so, you know, people can really do a lot worse than to read Chas Freeman on this stuff for sure as well.
But, you know, as anti-interventionist as Pat is now famously, you know, among us and our friends, he's still a hawk as hell when it comes to the old Cold War.
If you bring up the old Cold War, well, that was the commies.
That was the Reds.
That's just different, you know, and he's been great since 1991.
But, you know, on the Cold War stuff, still a hawk to this day, totally unapologetic.
By the way, for people who know about for people who know about this history, which is really so fascinating, and because Pat Buchanan, of course, was like the leader of the kind of paleoconservative movement that really challenged the neocons and lost, really lost to them.
He ran, you know, in 1992, I guess, for president, challenge George H.W. Bush in the primaries.
He opposed the first Persian Gulf War in Iraq and was completely against, after the Soviet Union fell, completely against the idea.
He kind of critique of libertarianism that was like, listen, we should be non-interventionists.
You're absolutely right.
But we got this Soviet Union.
And so we can't be.
And he's like, absolutely right.
And then when the Soviet Union fell, he was like, oh, great.
Now we get to go back to being non-interventionist.
And all the bucklets were like, whoa, slow down, Brad.
Like, that's not actually, we were just saying that.
But, you know, actually, I'm a CIA man and we're going to keep it.
Anyway, but there's this one interview you have, and you have a lot of interviews with Pat Buchanan, but there was this one where he's just so great about everything.
And then at the end of it, I don't know if you remember this, but you go, Pat, next time we get you on, we're going to have to convince you that the whole Cold War was terrible too.
And he's like, well, I don't know about that, Scott.
It was just so great.
I wish I'd remembered that.
I'd have tried to follow up.
Maybe I should now.
I think you did interview him again, but nah, you're never going to convince him of that.
Tom came close one time when he had him on his show.
Tom came close to convincing him that you go, you know, the war in Vietnam was a disaster.
I mean, you have to admit, Pat, that like, you know, look, for all the things you care about, about the culture back home, what did the war in Vietnam do for you?
It totally undermined your conservative traditional culture and led to the up, you know, the rising of the hippies and the anti-war movement and all this.
And what did we get for it at the end?
And Tom kind of pushed him on it, but Tom is such a nice guy that he pushed him gently.
And he got almost like a half, you know, all right, well, there is something to that kind of thing.
And you're like, all right, well, that's something.
And come on, Ho won the war anyway.
Yeah.
He didn't even win the war.
You didn't even get it.
He spent 15 years of killing people and he still lost and knocked over the domino in Cambodia, leading right to the rise of Pol Pot, for God's sake.
But even by Pat Buchanan, to attack Pat Buchanan from the Pat Buchanan, you're like, what you really care about is a conservative culture here at home in America.
And what did you do for that?
For not even a victory abroad.
Right.
You got this huge loss of stay glowing LSD, man.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Anyway, so he said this smart stuff about Russia one time.
He says, in the Cold War, we drew the line at the Elbe River, which is halfway across Germany.
And we told the Russians, if you roll into West Germany and try to conquer West Germany and/or Spain and our friends, Denmark and Belgium, we'll fight you and we'll use nukes if we have to to fight you to keep you in Eastern Europe.
But that's it.
Now, during that time, we had the uprising in Hungary.
And I'm sorry, I was getting this wrong.
I think it's 56.
Where Ike Eisenhower, I think the CIA had helped been responsible for encouraging that.
But then when the tanks came, they said, hey, come on, what are we going to do, man?
You're in Hungary.
You're way east of the Elbe River, my friend, and you're just behind the Iron Curtain and there's nothing that we can do for you.
Same thing happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Prague Spring.
And again, the Soviets sent in the tanks to crush the uprising.
And Lyndon Johnson said, tough, man.
We're not going to war for Czechoslovakia.
You know, you can call me Neville Chamberlain if you want.
But, you know, call it Munich if you want.
We're not going to war for Czechoslovakia.
So then in the 80s, they had solidarity and the uprising in Poland.
And I don't think the Soviet, I don't know if they violently crushed it.
Maybe they just kind of arrested everybody rather than like using military force.
I forgot exactly, but they essentially suppressed the uprising.
And Ronald Reagan said, well, shame on you, but he didn't do anything about it.
You know, what was he going to do?
And that was Neville Chamberlain's next mistake.
You know, that was the real mistake, was giving a war guarantee to Poland when England didn't have the ability to guarantee Poland's independence from anybody, Hitler, Stalin, or anybody else.
And neither did Ronald Reagan.
Well, Reagan didn't make Chamberlain's mistake.
He didn't give him a war guarantee.
He said, you know, it's really sad what's happening to the Poles right now.
And the whole world should condemn the Soviet Union for it.
And good for him for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, look at what we've done.
We took the line and we moved it a thousand miles east, 1,200 miles east, right to Russia's border.
So now, again, we call it deterrence.
We call it our umbrella.
All we have to say is we will protect any country in Europe and then no one will ever mess with them because of how powerful we are.
So far, this has seemingly worked, but we're talking about an absolute blink of a moment in time.
And we're talking about a policy which, again, as you're saying, you're talking about threatening all of mankind with this.
And again, with the idea that, come on, at the end of the day, what's Putin going to do?
He'll give in.
But why would he give in?
Why would he say he has a red line if he doesn't mean it?
And maybe we should take that seriously.
Again, Ho Chi Minh took on the greatest empire that ever existed.
Cuban Missile Crisis00:06:41
Same for the Sunni insurgency in Iraq and the Taliban and Afghanistan.
They just said, we'd rather fight you than not.
What?
And they died trying too, and they won too at the end.
So the idea that, again, Gareth Porter calls it the perils of dominance.
Joe Biden looks at his order of battle and says, I can order the world around.
But it's just a presumption that doesn't hold true.
And in fact, I think Joe Biden is old enough, as dumb as he is, he's old enough to finally have the wisdom rub off on him that this is not really worth fighting for.
You know, it's crazy.
I mean, if you asked Americans, go up, you know, that one guy on YouTube always picks on people on the beach in San Diego.
That might not be a fair random sample, but go downtown and ask people, point me at Ukraine and show me which border is in dispute and whether we should have a nuclear war over it or not.
And you couldn't find anyone in your town anywhere who could give the right and proper answers and take that position that, yes, that's worth fighting for.
And if you just look at one more thing, is Garrett Garrett, that was Justin Raimondo's hero or Garrett Garrett that wrote Defend America First and the People's Pottage.
So in Defend America First is a collection of his essays from the Saturday Evening Post opposing entry into World War II, at least before Pearl Harbor.
I think he gave it up after that.
But he's saying, you know, what is this argument that France is our eastern border?
It's our eastern frontier.
It's just a turn of phrase, right?
It doesn't mean anything because it's just not true, you know?
And if we don't, and you know, he's arguing if we don't give war guarantees to France, maybe they'll be less likely to get into a war and stuff like that.
But anyway.
No, those old right guys made some points.
Yeah, they sure did.
And then, but look at the map and look at the northern coast of the Black Sea and try to conjure how that's America's vital interest.
And imagine if you had the Russians sailing their destroyers, not just like to Venezuela or something, but all around, you know, riding in circles and flying their jets in our Gulf of Mexico.
Imagine the absolute waves of panic or in the Chesapeake Bay or whatever.
People be absolutely losing their threatening war over it.
So I was tweeting about this on Twitter, like how insane it is for us to get involved in the Ukraine, you know, Russia border dispute or whatever, and the idea of war between America.
You know, I was just tweeting about how insane any politician who talks about this is in response directly to that congressman you were referring to earlier.
But someone responded to me and they said, they said, like, they were like, oh, yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, you sound like Jimmy Carter or something like that.
You go, you're a Peisman strategy.
They go, I bet you wouldn't have done anything about the Cuban missile crisis either.
And I'm like, but don't you realize here it's their Cuban missile crisis.
Right.
It's not ours.
Like, no, actually, I think the Cuban missile crisis is like, look, in the scale of statism, somewhat reasonable.
It's somewhat reasonable to be like, hey, no, We cannot take like warheads in Cuba.
Sorry.
Well, yes, I agree.
And we were right to, and we were right to.
In fact, even the Cuban missile crisis was their Cuban missile crisis days.
They were just responding to the Cuban, the Turkey missile crisis.
You're right.
But from what Americans know about the Cuban Missile Crisis, they have a fair point.
And the deal that was made under the table of like us removing all that shit from Poland and all that, that was a reasonable response.
That was like all of that was fair.
And like, but you know, you're from what is known and taught to Americans, yes, it's reasonable to say, whoa, hey, that's a different thing.
I mean, that's a different thing to like come have, you know, if me and you, like, because if you think about it, you really can, and this is part of libertarianism, I think, really part of the essence of libertarian philosophy.
As Murray Rothbard said, like in economics, the distinction between macro and micro is bullshit.
And that there's there shouldn't be any of this.
And like things don't, principles don't change just because you extrapolate them out, right?
And that really the non-aggression principle and believing in peace is the same thing.
It's just believing in peace on an individual level or believing in peace on a level between nations or, you know, non-interventionism and the non-aggression principle.
It's all the same thing.
It's just the scale.
And so if in the same sense that if me and you had some feud and you were to say to me, and you had a bunch of guns and I had some guns and you go, hey, if you fucking come in my house, I'll kill you.
It's like, okay, that's kind of a reasonable thing for you to say if we're having a feud.
And then if you go, hey, if you come on my block, I'll kill you.
I might go, oh, all right, fine, I'll avoid your block.
But if you go, I'm stationed outside your door and if you leave your house, I'll kill you.
You're like, well, now that's, that's a whole different act of aggression.
Like the closer and closer you get toward me is like more like, well, it's like, well, now I have to shoot out the window.
I don't know.
I can't be told I can't leave my house.
I can't like, you can't completely encroach on somebody.
So I get the point of like from the American perspective of the Cuban Missile Crisis to go, no, this is a little bit too close.
But look at the situation we're talking about.
How could you bring that up when we're talking about a dispute between Ukraine and Russia?
Yes, this is on their doorstep.
They have every right to say like, look, we are going to, and the same thing in the example I was using is that even if, say, you outgun me, I mean, how close can you get to my house and my family before it's like, well, I'm going to start shooting?
Yeah.
That was what McGregor was saying.
Yeah.
That was what McGregor was saying.
You call it deterrence and you call it deterrence up to the point where you provoke an attack.
And then, you know, yeah, okay, maybe they'll hit first, but that means we lose ships in the Black Sea or we lose ships in the Taiwan Straits because you're talking tough.
And back to the Cuba metaphor and all that.
Crimea Belongs to Russia00:02:34
Cuba wasn't an American military base, but the Sevestopol base on the Crimean Peninsula is everything to Russia.
And it's been part of the Russian, you know, Federation now, but, you know, the Russian Empire then, since the 1780s, when America was under the Articles of Confederation, 1783, when we're signing the peace with the British at the end of the Revolutionary War.
So Crimea belongs to Russia like New York State or New Jersey belonged to the United States of America.
It's been there since the days of Catherine the Great.
And that only changed.
And this is in Stockman's great piece at antiwar.com.
He really gets into the details of the politics of this with the block quotes and everything about how Khrushchev needed the support of, he names the names of the guys in the Communist Party in Ukraine.
And Khrushchev needed their support to succeed Stalin after he died, because what's his name was going to come to power instead.
And so there was this power struggle.
And so as a payoff to Kiev, Khrushchev gifted them the Crimean Peninsula.
And the point is they were all answerable only to Moscow anyway, under the USSR.
So it didn't make really make any difference.
Then at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, the very last republics, Belarus and Ukraine, and I guess Tajikistan or one of those was the last, they all finally broke away from Russia and including Georgia up to, but not including Dagestan and Chechnya in the North Caucasus, but in the South Caucasus, they broke away.
And when Ukraine broke away, they signed a deal with Russia that said that the Russians get to keep their naval base at Sevastopol.
And by the way, the population of Crimea is more than 80% ethnic Russians, you know, unlike the rest of Ukraine, where it's a heavy concentration of ethnic and Russian speakers.
They're all Slavs, except the Jews, but I don't know exactly.
Even the Jews are Slavs, like ethnically, I think, you know, but I'm not exactly sure how they differentiate between Ukrainians and Russians other than language.
But and the heavy prevalence of the Russian speakers in the East is not in Crimea, that goes back further, but in the Donbass region, that comes from Stalin's ethnic cleansing, essentially, where like pushing out Tatars and bringing in Russian speakers back, like I think in the 1930s, back that far in the days of the old USSR.
Proud Descendants of Nazis00:04:37
So, anyway, but then when America used a bunch of Hitler-loving Nazis, the proud descendants of the Galatian SS who had perpetrated the Holocaust against Poles and Jews in World War II and sided with Hitler and are to this day the proud supporters of Stepan Bandera, who's like their mascot or whatever, who had served, actually served Stalin and Hitler, but Hitler with gusto, apparently.
And they do their, you know, remember the dorks in the Donald Trump outfits?
People didn't understand the khakis and the white shirts.
That's Donald Trump's golf outfit that they were all wearing when they did their little tiki torch parade there at the University of Virginia.
Well, these guys are real ass Nazis, man.
They don't have teachers.
Yeah, it's not.
They got real torches.
And when they march at night, people are afraid of them for real, you know?
And these are the guys.
The craziness, right?
And there's something, so how you say that, right?
Like it's like in Charlottesville, you had these guys who have no idea about any of this shit, who are just a bunch of idiots.
You know what I mean?
I mean, maybe a couple like little groups there who are like real hardcore neo-Nazis and stuff, but just idiots almost kind of like, yeah, we're going to do like this badass thing and be exactly what the regime is opposed to.
And everyone in America loses their fucking mind.
Meanwhile, the previous president had supported real deal Nazis.
Like, like, or I mean, I don't know.
They weren't members of the, you know, National Socialist Germans Workers' Party.
I don't know, because that's been gone for fucking decades.
They call it the Social Nationalist Party.
That's literally what they call themselves.
So for all of this outrage, it's unbelievable to me.
Unbelievable to me.
And I'll say this.
This is a critique of the anti-fascist left in America.
It's a critique of the right wing in America for not being smart enough to realize this is the way to like attack the side that's calling you all Nazis, the right wing who's not Nazis.
And even the woke libertarians and like all these people, it's like, dude, you run around making these Nazi accusations all day long.
Here's a group where it really applies really well.
Like it's actually, it's not that much of a stretch at all to call them Nazis.
Like, look at these guys.
They're just the descendants of Nazis.
They identify as Nazis.
They're acting like Nazis.
Is that enough?
Is that enough to get called a neo-Nazi?
And here you have Barack Obama.
And wait, they're also blood descended from Nazis.
I mean, they are the greatest.
Well, I said the descendants, yes.
Real Nazis.
Yes.
No, they're like, right, exactly.
The descendants, the attitude, the identity, and the behavior.
If ever there was an argument that someone is like a real Nazi in modern time in 2000, whatever, 14 or whatever it is, okay, this is the argument.
And here you have Barack Obama, who's, you know, whatever, the hero of the progressives and all of this, who's leading a coup by supporting them.
And where is the, like, I don't know, give me a little bit more of the outrage for them than you have for Christopher Cantwell or something like that.
And have outrage for Christopher Cantwell.
I don't care.
But like, how about that?
That's like, that's a much bigger deal.
Yeah.
Hey, look, I mean, there was a time when the intercept, which was, you know, is owned by Pierre Omedyar, who had helped to contribute to the civil society groups that supported the coup in Ukraine.
And they were pretty silent on that.
They were pretty silent on Syria as well.
But they ran one good report about how all these Chechens had gone to Syria to fight against Assad on the side of the CIA and Al-Qaeda.
And that then a whole group of them had come from Syria to Ukraine to help the Nazis fight against the Russians.
So that's what they all have in common.
What they like the most is killing Russians.
So here, again, just like the whole theme of the book and just like all of this, as though September 11th never happened, as though the Sunni-based insurgency being the, you know, the Al-Qaeda guys being the worst edge of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq War II that killed 4,000 of our guys.
Daily Job Hunt00:02:26
None of that ever happened.
We use the Mujahideen just like the old days in Libya, in Syria, and, you know, even in Ukraine, where they're, don't you love it?
Like these crazy Islamist jihadists fighting side by side with these avowed white supremacists at the behest of a coup that was done by the American Zionist neoconservatives against the Russians because they all hate Russia more, Dave, for why, I don't know, really, honestly, other than it's good for business if you're in the arms sales business.
And for the Hunter Biden, the first black president in American history into the mix.
Yeah, he backs the Ku Klux Klan in Libya and he backs the neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
God, it's just ridiculous.
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Hunter Biden Gas Company00:15:40
All right, let's get back into the show.
Yeah.
So Hunter Biden, why was Hunter Biden offered a job at this gas company?
It was because his, the gas company was in bed with the government that Biden had overthrown.
So they were like, uh-oh, we might be in trouble with the new regime.
So we better ingratiate ourselves with the new regime.
So, how do we do that?
We hire the American vice president's son.
And, you know, anybody can Google this up if you haven't heard it.
It was extra fun in real time because the audio came out two weeks before the coup.
But even now, it's fun in retrospect as well.
As you just type in Victoria Newland, Jeffrey Pyatt, Ukraine coup, and you can listen to the audio there on YouTube.
Presumably, the Russians intercepted and posted it.
Hey, if there's any more, Putin, by the way, if you're listening, there's 30,000 still missing Hillary Clinton emails out there that we all would like to read.
But thank you for meeting Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria Newland, plotting this coup.
But if any of those emails contain Hillary Clinton reading her acceptance speech, we've already heard that.
So don't keep that.
You can keep that one, but the other 29,999, we'd like those.
Absolutely right.
And what was my point?
Something about Victoria Newland is on tape plotting the coup with Jeffrey Pyatt.
And I don't remember what I was going to say.
So I'll say this.
And that was that they're so overconfident in the thing.
Well, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to make Yatsunuk the new prime minister, which is exactly what happened two weeks later after the coup, of course.
We're going to keep Klitschko.
He's the boxer.
We don't want him in the government, Newland says.
We want to keep him on the outside of the government just as an advisor.
But we want to support Tanny Bach, who everybody can just, if you put Tanny Bach in Google images, the first thing you'll see is him in front of lightning bolts giving a Hitler salute.
He was the former leader of the Social Nationalist Party that renamed themselves the Svoboda Party.
And then there was, oh man, it's on the tip of my tongue.
The guy they made him, Andre Perubi from right sector, who became the speaker of the parliament and stayed there for like five or seven years or something like that after that, who's, you know, another avowed Nazi.
And these were all the guys that took power in the coup two weeks later, just like she described, just like they had leaked.
And then, but part of the story is she's saying, you know, we have to glue this thing.
We have to mid-wife it.
We got to get it to sale.
We got to get this done before Putin can react while he's distracted by the Sochi Olympics.
He won't be able to do anything about it.
And then, oh, I love recommending this too.
And by the way, if anyone can figure out how to download this audio correctly, because I could only ever find it on the Comedy Central website and I couldn't figure out how to download the video.
But if anybody can figure out how to download and save this video, that would probably be a really good idea because it's precious.
It's Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs Magazine on the old Colbert show.
And he's essentially spilling the whole beans.
What we're doing is this coup in Ukraine.
And what the deal is, Ukraine is Russia's girlfriend and we're stealing her away.
Ukraine is robbing to Russia's Batman.
And we're here to break up the team.
We're going to run away with Ukraine.
And Putin is distracted by the Sochi Olympics and he won't be able to do anything about it.
Right.
And then what happened was they did the coup.
And the first thing that the kujunta did was outlaw Russian and as an official language and declare that they were going to kick the Russians out of the naval base at Sevastopol.
And in fact, it was, I think, four different Ukrainian presidents had signed a letter demanding that the Russians be kicked out of the naval base.
So it was only then.
Oh, see, I'm off my train of thought, but I'm back on my previous train of thought that I was on.
Only then did Putin's little green men leave their naval base at Sevestopol in a coup de Maine and just take over the Crimean Peninsula.
And he had joked, I think it was, oh, it was after that.
I'm pretty sure he, yeah, yeah, he joked after that with Oliver Stone that, you know, we like NATO and we like cooperating with NATO.
We don't have anything against our NATO friends and partners, but we just thought that we would rather that they come and visit us at our naval base for the holidays instead of us going to visit them.
It's like he's trying to make light of it and be nice about it, but he's just saying, again, this is the red line of ours.
And are we going to lose?
And people need to understand that, especially from the point of view of the American Hawks, they're extremely explicit about this.
Sevestopol is Russia's only warmwater port all year round.
Everything they have on their eastern coast and on their northern coast freezes in the wintertime.
And so this is their only port in warmwater port.
And in the American Hawks' view, I think in Zbign Brzezinski's words, and Barack Obama's, I think, framing of it as well, that without Sevestopol, they're not really even a regional power.
They get taken down a notch in stature on the world stage entirely without this direct access to the Black Sea for their Navy.
And so that was why they were trying to take it away.
And that was why Putin wouldn't have that.
And, oh, I know what it was.
I'm sorry.
On the on the Newland call, she refers to Joe Biden and says the vice president, the Germans are taking too long.
People remember the phrase, this is what got all the attention is our diplomat, Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria Newland, used the F word and said, F the EU.
Well, what was the context to that?
Oh, she had to apologize, Dave, for using bad language.
What's the context?
She was saying the Germans are taking too long to do this coup d'état for us.
So we're going to go ahead and take over the operation and do it our damn selves and F the EU because they're taking too long.
So we're going to get Robert Seri from the UN and he's going to work with the vice president, Joe Biden, and we are going to glue this thing and midwife this thing and force this thing through and have this coup.
And so that was why they hired Hunter Biden is because they knew that Joe Biden was, as they put it, holding the Ukraine brief in the Obama White House, that that was his priority.
And he was the point man there.
So, you know, he was in great measure responsible for this crisis in the first place.
And speaking of Victoria Newland, she was briefing the Senate last week on here's what's going on with the crisis and why we got to do something horrible about it.
And of course, the senators are all a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about this story, who don't remember 2014, who, if anything, they remember F the EU, but they don't remember why.
They don't remember what was going on there or what had happened there at all.
And but I would just, you know, to try to wrap up that point, I would emphasize the Russians were perfectly happy to pay their lease for 30 years, 25 years.
They paid their lease and they had their naval base and the status quo held and it was fine.
It was only after America overthrew the government, in fact, twice in 10 years, in the Orange Revolution of 2004 and in the Nazi street putsch of 2014, and then a direct threat of the new Ukrainian Nazi back to overthrow and kick them out of Crimea.
Only then did they seize the Crimean Peninsula.
And I know we're over time, so let me just sum up here too about the war in the East broke out because, again, the government that was overthrown was a democratically elected government.
The EU and independent European monitors had verified that it was a free and fair election in 2010 when the pro-Russian leading guy Yanukovych had won.
And so when he was overthrown, the people of the far eastern Donbass region who had supported him said, Well, if you guys can occupy government buildings and refuse to recognize government authority and all these things, and in fact, overthrow the government, create a new, as we see it, completely illegitimate government, then we'll just occupy all the government buildings around here and we'll refuse to recognize your authority until we get to hold some new elections that we say are free and fair and what have you, right?
So then what happened?
Kiev launched a war on terrorism and invaded the east of their own country.
And so then they held elections, yeah, free and fair ones, where none of the pro-Russian speakers were included.
And then, you know, yo, yeah, it's a democracy now.
And it's not true that it's like all Nazi officials holding the highest posts, but they're part of the coalition and they're sure as hell part of the armed forces, the National Guard and the army divisions that are fighting that war in the east.
And they have been this whole time.
And then all during the war, and the worst part of the fighting was in 2014 and 15.
And during that whole time, they just pretended, especially in 2014, they just pretended that Russia was invading Ukraine.
Russia invades Ukraine.
Top story above the fold, New York Times, front page, not true.
Never happened.
All that happened was they sent deniable special operations forces across the border to help the people of the Donbass keep the Kiev government out.
But they could have rolled 500,000 men in there if they wanted to.
They didn't do anything like that.
They never sent in armored divisions and infantry divisions.
They sent in special operations forces and equipment.
And then, so the Minsk II pseudo-peace deal, which has more or less hold, pardon me, held since was in February of 2015.
And then I'm pretty sure it was shortly after that in March that they held a plebiscite in, you know, a referendum, essentially, in the Donbass voting to join the Russian Federation.
And Putin told them no.
So I don't want, like, essentially, the Donbass is like a decrepit old industrial region that can't compete, you know, that's a money pit, essentially.
It's got an elderly population that are another liability in terms of all the pension costs and everything.
There's really nothing strategic for Russia to gain from absorbing the Donbass.
Like if they went all the way to Odessa, maybe there'd be some profit in that, but they sure have a hell of a lot to lose over that.
And it goes to show that Putin has no interest in trying to take over Ukraine.
It's essentially fair to take him at his word, that what he wants to know for a fact is that we are not bringing Ukraine into NATO.
We're not going to deploy our forces there.
And it'd be nice if the Americans would back off on all of their training with their nuclear bombers and their ships in the Black and Baltic and Oshtock seas, where, you know, our long-range bombers are constantly testing their radar defenses and all of these things, essentially threatening first-strike nuclear war against them for no good reason at all.
And that's the real bottom line here, Dave, is that when it comes to Russia and China, let's pretend that you really thought they're such a problem.
Well, let's just talk with them and deal with it.
But why would there be any militarism to this at all?
The Soviet Union is dead and gone.
And say what you want about the Chinese dictatorship.
It ain't Mao starving people to death by the tens of millions anymore.
You know, it is what it is.
And yes, they're independent from our empire, but I can live with that.
And Taiwan, it's been American policy and American law for 50 years that Taiwan is part of China.
So even if China did take it by force, which I hope they don't do, and I hope if they do, that America stays the hell out of it.
That still doesn't mean that they're going to roll into outer Mongolia and then they're going to invade across the water into Japan and sack Tokyo.
And then they're going to move into North and South Korea.
And next will be Australia and all of this stuff.
Come on.
There's no reason in the world to think that's true.
It's the most implausible guess ever that that would be the, you know, like the series of events.
Even just the first one doesn't seem that likely.
Like if they wanted to just take Taiwan, they probably would have done it already.
And, you know, with the stuff with, and obviously you're right about both of these, but if with China and Russia, but with the stuff with Russia, you're like, it really is.
I mean, I don't know, whatever.
I could keep going with analogies and all of this, but it's like this fucking bully is bullying me.
And that's why I've hired thugs to wait for him outside his like fucking, you know, like apartment.
You're like, well, who's the, who's bullying who really right now?
And why?
And this was one of the best things that Donald Trump said.
And we'll wrap up after this and you can have the final word.
But one of the best things that Donald Trump ever said, which was so funny because it threw the whole corporate press for such a loop and they had no idea how to respond.
And so they just responded with hysteria, which is always funny when someone makes a good point and the only response is hysteria.
But he was like, what even is the point of NATO anymore?
It's like no one's asked this question since the fucking, like the beginning of the 1990s.
But this idea, like, look, okay, me and you aren't statists.
We don't believe in any of this shit.
But you can understand coming out of World War II, what the justification for NATO would be.
And then it's like, hey, half of Europe belongs to this fucking madman, Stalin, who was every bit as bad as just about anyone who's ever.
I mean, I guess Adolf Hitler and Mao Zetong could give him a run for his money.
But aside from them, he's about the worst guy that there is, right?
And so, okay, so the other half of Europe wants to get together and have this fucking military agreement with the United States of America.
Hey, you can't come over here.
We're all together.
We'll fight you.
Okay.
Whatever problems we might have with that, it's reasonable enough.
Soviet Union is gone.
It's been gone for a long time.
30 years this month, Dave.
Yes.
30 years.
I remember, see, you're too young, maybe.
I remember Christmas Day, 1991, when they brought that red flag down for the last time.
We're two weeks away from the anniversary here.
For whatever reason, I have a vivid memory of I was at my grandparents' house and they were watching it on the TV and I couldn't watch TV because they were like, no, shut up.
This is really huge and we're watching this.
And they watched like the thing as it was happening.
And all I could think at the time was I was like, this is boring, man.
Like, what are we talking about?
But I mean, I was born in 83, so I'm eight or something or whatever, you know, my mouth right?
Something like that.
So, but I do remember that.
I do remember it in all these like Russian speeches and stuff.
And like my, my grandfather spoke Russian and he like knew all like this shit.
People can watch that on YouTube, by the way.
I actually showed it to somebody recently where you can see, I guess it's Peter Jennings ABC News coverage of the last day that day.
Blame America First00:04:14
And they're like, man, this just in, they're bringing the flag.
Can we go to the foot?
We got the food.
Let's do it.
And there they are.
They're bringing the red flag down and the red, white, and blue goes up.
And who was it?
And it's incredible.
You know, they had to rewrite Terminator, right?
So Terminator 2 came out and Arnold Schwarzenegger's like, yeah, I'm here to prevent nuclear war with Russia.
And the kid is like, but I thought we were friends with them now.
And he goes, yeah, well, but still, they got a bunch of nukes and Skynet figured it was good enough to start a war.
You know what I mean?
Like it really threw a wrench in the whole narrative there because the evil empire was gone.
That's right.
Gone.
Well, it's almost like if you, it's like if you would go like, hey, look, we really need to start an organization to box in the Nazi Germans.
Like, you'd say, well, okay.
I don't know where you've been, but just to let you know, the Nazis haven't been in control of Germany since fucking 1945.
Like, I don't know where you've been, but this is not.
So, okay, it's not since 1945, but it's since 1991.
And like the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore.
And so at a certain point, you're like, okay, now NATO has ceased to have its, I hesitate to say legitimate, but even if you could say legitimate reason at the time to exist, and now it's just encroaching further and further and further east when there's no longer the threat that justified it from exit justified it to exist.
And you're like, does anyone have an answer to this, by the way?
And when Donald Trump brought this up, I mean, he didn't bring it up exactly like that, but he goes, what exactly is the reason that we're financing like the entire defense of Europe?
And everyone's response was like, well, you're just, that is outrageous.
That's blasphemy.
Yeah.
But no one ever really had an answer.
Right.
And you know, look, Doug Bandau points out constantly in his articles at antiwar.com, as Stockman points out in his new one, Ted Carpenter too, that Germany spends like 1.3% of their GDP on weapons.
I think Stockman says they have 20 tanks.
They're not arming up.
Germany is not militarizing.
And the reason they're not militarizing is because Russia ain't coming.
The same thing is true for Poland.
The same thing is true for the Baltic states.
They're not on a crash course to militarize and dig concrete bunkers everywhere and to hold out like North Koreans when the inevitable Russian juggernaut comes.
They're not coming.
They're not coming.
It's America that's expanded our empire to their doorstep, not the other way around.
It's just as simple as that.
And people can say, oh, you want to blame, you know, there's like the right-wing response are like, oh, you want to blame America for everything or blame America first or all this stuff.
Hey, I'm just blaming Barack Obama, man.
Yeah.
You know what?
No, I'm sorry.
I'm not, I'm not blaming like some married couple in their family in Arkansas or in Texas or in Kansas or something like that.
I'm just saying.
That's Obama, what did it?
Yes.
Yeah.
I'm right.
No, I'm blaming the fucking blood-soaked lawyers in Washington, D.C. I'm blaming the Bushes and the Obamas and the Clintons and fucking.
And Trump was bad too.
Look, Obama overthrew the government with a bunch of Nazis, but he was afraid to arm them.
But Donald Trump sent them humbies, not just humbies, but he sent them javelin anti-tank missiles and sent them RPGs and rifles and war training.
And then got impeached for not doing it quick enough.
Right.
That's right.
He got impeached for holding up an arms deal with Ukraine temporarily before giving them more weapons than Obama ever would.
That he eventually gave into.
Oh, man, life is a fucking comedy.
God damn.
I gotta admit it.
And then he got impeached for a weapons deal that he gave more to than even the previous guy just for not giving it quick enough for for a second.
Saying, yeah, can I get a little bit more for this deal?
No?
All right, whatever.
Have it anyway.
Antiwar.com Background00:02:52
You know, like that's that was the listen.
If people want a little bit more background about this, I wrote a thing.
It was a speech I gave in February 2020 called The New Cold War with Russia is all America's Fault.
And you can find it in my archive at antiwar.com.
And that's the background there, going back to H.W. Bush and the end of the Cold War.
And then I give you, you know, it's pretty brief on just going through the presidencies of what Bush did, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump, you know, to lead us to this and, you know, debunk Russia Gate for you and all of that stuff.
And all that's in there.
And we'll put it in the, we'll put it in the show notes in the comments.
Oh, yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
But yeah, man, I forgot what I was going to say because there was a point in there that went with what you just said, but I can't remember anymore.
Well, you know what?
That's okay.
You've remembered a whole lot of shit for us today.
So we appreciate it.
All right.
We got to wrap up there.
But Scott, thank you so much, as always, for coming and blessing us with a bunch of knowledge about all this stuff.
And of course, you got your new podcast with Pete, with my buddy and your buddy, Pete Crononez, The End of the Empire.
You got your show, The Scott Horton Show, antiwar.com.
Which, by the way, let me let me say, Dave, antiwar.com ain't just me.
I'm the editorial director.
Eric Garris is the boss.
Kyle Anzalone is our excellent opinion editor there.
And Dave DeCamp and Jason Ditts are the news editors at news.antiwar.com.
And go and click any one thing about Ukraine and then click that Ukraine tab there, you know, or the tag, I mean to say.
And you will get, you know, all of their recent coverage of this stuff.
And they are just excellent day in and day out, seven days a week at antiwar.com for you there.
Yeah, look, antiwar.com is like, at this point, for me, it's the website.
It's the like people ask me all the time, they're like, how do you know all this stuff about like foreign policy?
And it's really, that really is the answer.
It's like, I just go to antiwar.com every day and I read like what the latest article is.
And they just, they tell you what's going on in the world.
And there's people like you can really trust what you read there.
It's the best information and it's the shit that no one else is telling you.
And then, you know, when you, once you know that, and then you go see how like CNN or the Washington Post is spinning it, it's really easy to go, oh, okay.
But I see the crucial detail you left out right there.
Okay.
So that's why, that's why you're getting people to think this.
And of course, the Libertarian Institute, which is really just incredible and has really, in a very short period of time, I think become, you know, one of the most important organizations in the liberty world.
And so congratulations for everything you guys have accomplished there.
It really is.
Start New Institute00:01:20
Yep.
We're celebrating five years there now at the Libertarian Institute.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Time goes quick because I really remember when you were like, hey, we got this plan.
We're going to do this thing.
We're going to start an institute.
And look at it now.
It's fucking killing it.
So by anyway, and if you're out there and if you want to donate to a good cause, maybe this during the holiday season, you're thinking about any of this, any of those are a really good cause.
Anti-war.
Especially anti-war.com and the Libertarian Institute.
You can write off on your taxes.
And everybody, sign up for my podcast feed at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com/slash Scott Horton show.
I got 5,600 and something interviews for you there.
Yeah.
If you really want, like, if you enjoy this episode and you want to like really deep dive into any one of these conflicts, that's the place to go for that and hear interviews with like the experts on the ground and the people who really know what's going on in all of these different conflicts.
So, all right, we'll wrap there.
And yeah, if, yeah, if I we don't have you on till uh till then, Merry Christmas, happy holidays, happy new year, and all that.
Hell yeah, best to you too, bud.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just saying that publicly.
I know I'm going to talk to you on the phone 65 more times before any of that stuff happens, but yeah.