Last week John Kerry traveled to Moscow and after meeting with Russian foreign minister Lavrov and president Putin he appeared to shift US policy away from regime change in Syria. Shortly afterward, President Obama re-affirmed that regime change in Syria was the goal. What exactly is US policy toward Syria? Does Washington have a clue?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Last week John Kerry traveled to Moscow and after meeting with Russian foreign minister Lavrov and president Putin he appeared to shift US policy away from regime change in Syria. Shortly afterward, President Obama re-affirmed that regime change in Syria was the goal. What exactly is US policy toward Syria? Does Washington have a clue?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Last week John Kerry traveled to Moscow and after meeting with Russian foreign minister Lavrov and president Putin he appeared to shift US policy away from regime change in Syria. Shortly afterward, President Obama re-affirmed that regime change in Syria was the goal. What exactly is US policy toward Syria? Does Washington have a clue?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Daniel McAdams is with me today and it's good to see you Daniel.
Good morning Dr. Paul.
Good.
You know last week Kerry, our great Secretary of State, went to see Putin and they're going to solve the problems.
You know a couple years ago somebody helped create a problem.
It was 19 or 2011.
Our policy became Putin or Assad has to go.
That was our policy.
And we wondered why it hasn't happened and Syria is still a mess.
But there's some headlines.
You know, we always advocate, you know, diplomacy.
Sometimes diplomacy seems to be ridiculous and I can imagine at times it would be.
But I've always thought that certainly if we could have talked to the Soviets during the Cuban crisis, we ought to certainly be able to talk to them now over Ukraine and Syria.
But it looks like Putin might be in the driver's seat because he's sort of getting attention of American politicians.
But there's a couple articles about their meeting last week.
And one was, Kerry backs down on ousting Assad.
Well, that sounds like that could be meaningful.
And that other one says, Assad can stay.
For now, Kerry accepts Russians' stance.
So are we moving in the direction of seeing this stalemate breaking and maybe peace coming to Syria?
Or what do you think is going to happen here?
It would be nice.
And like you say, diplomacy is always to be welcomed.
This is the second high-level meeting between senior Russian and American officials in very, very recent times.
So I think it's encouraging that the two of them met.
Perhaps I'm a little cynical, but I don't believe U.S. foreign policy will change on a dime.
He traveled together with Victoria Newland and Celeste Wallander, who are two extremely anti-Russian personalities.
And the ambassador there, Ambassador Teft, is still very strongly anti-Russian.
So I don't know that it changes on a dime.
It is encouraging.
I'm wondering if it's not perhaps more of a tactical retreat on the U.S.'s part because things haven't gone in Syria like they've hoped.
And the facts on the ground have changed since Russia became involved at the end of September.
The U.S. no longer controls the skies.
It can't control who flies and who doesn't fly.
It can't control who's on the ground necessarily.
And so I think that might have pushed Washington a bit into a corner and forced them to rethink some of the tactics.
Yeah, and I saw one term, I don't know if they use these words, but they were going to work with Russia for now, except their position for now.
And it just might be a very practical thing, which means that Russia is in a stronger position than the United States.
And they have more justification, of course, for being involved there.
They've been invited.
It's their neighbor, and they have a naval base on there.
It's sort of like us protecting, you know, Guantanamo or something, you know, because it's over there.
But it certainly indicates that it was not smooth sailing.
Here we have this president that was supposed to end wars, has started a few, and of course aggravated things in Ukraine, and Libya's a mess, and the other countries are.
But here, he certainly has been, our current president is certainly responsible for a lot of the mess we have in Syria.
But it really is a serious problem because, you know, there's so much potential things that could go wrong.
And so many different factions are involved.
And we have, you know, the various terrorist groups and whose side they're on.
But this is at the higher level.
And it seems to me like at least for now, things are a little bit safer than they were a month ago, but it could change like that.
I want to dive in another confrontation between Russia and Turkey, for example.
What's the U.S.'s position in the Turkey shootdown of the plane?
And there are various confrontations on sea.
But I think the other matter that the two of them had to discuss is this issue of, you know, there are these peace talks going on with the opposition.
And it's really the issue of which of the opposition groups will be accepted as legitimate moderates.
And the U.S. has pushed for a couple of groups, a couple of factions to be included as moderates that have been fighting alongside al-Qaeda for a while.
And the Russians have rejected that.
The Russians have actually worked with the Free Syrian Army a bit against ISIS.
So it's also an issue of who is going to be acceptable at the table.
And I'm sure that came up as well.
Now, if we walked out of there, which would give every neocon a heart attack, if we walked out of there and they say, well, you're just giving it to the Russians and they're going to own it and control it.
But nothing guarantees tranquility if the Russians were running the whole country.
They didn't have any tranquility in Afghanistan, which was a much more difficult task.
But there's, what, how many groups, Beth, we could bring three, four, five different groups who want their own control of the country and their faction.
And then you have the Kurds that are involved too, and the Turks aren't going to walk away peacefully.
So I don't think my argument is it's so messy, this isn't working.
Why do they wise up?
Why don't we leave before it gets much worse?
Let somebody else get bogged down.
Besides, you know, it's costly, and we're not getting any benefits from this, except people who sell weapons.
That's about the only people that I see on the short time seem to get benefits.
I think it's similar with Ukraine.
I'm not sure Russia would want to own a country in such a bad case.
It would be very expensive.
And I mean, how are you going to rebuild this?
What are you going to do to pacify things?
But the other thing we talked about a little bit before we came on camera, the other thing that's fairly disheartening is that if we can accept at face value that the U.S. position is now Assad can stay, that means for the past four years, all of the destruction, all of the death, broken families, sorrow, grieving, it's all really been for nothing.
We're going to go back to square one.
You know, it just shows the insane folly of interventionism.
But can't you say almost the same thing about our losses and our costs in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya?
And conditions aren't just back to where they were.
They're much worse than they were, minus a lot of American lives and minus a lot of dollars that are going to continue.
Even if we came home tomorrow, we have, there's some people who estimate that in the lifetime of some of our injured veterans coming back, it can be a trillion dollars, just taking care of them for 20, 30, 40 years.
And this, you know, and one of the arguments they used to give me in the debates was that if we walked away, that means our men would have died in vain.
And that is tough.
And I remember having to confront somebody at a debate, somebody who had lost somebody, and tried to be as sympathetic as possible, but explaining, you know, having more American lives lost doesn't replace any other lives, you know, the lives that have been lost.
But they say, well, no, they can't die in vain.
But I heard that argument all through the 60s.
Oh, we can't walk away now, you know, out of Vietnam.
But the amazing thing is a neocon would, if they were sitting here, they'd argue with us and say, you make a good point.
We should never let men die in vain.
Well, the best way to prevent men dying in vain is not expose them to know-win, unconstitutional, undeclared wars that have no purpose whatsoever to provide any national security for us.
Think of what a preposterous idea it is that the U.S. can go to a complex, incredibly complex society like in Syria, where you have, as you point out, so many factions, so many different religions and factions of religions, that we have the audacity to think that we can go there and sort the whole thing out, remake their whole society for them, hand it to them on a plate as a gift, and everything will be hunky-dory.
Why We Must Reduce Government Power00:02:35
It's just preposterous.
And they just might have a society that is different than our society.
You know, I happen to still endorse elections, even though they're rigged so often.
But there is something to be said about some of the countries of the world that give them a pass on exactly what kind of government they have.
I don't give them a pass on what kind of economic system they have or what kind of monetary policy they have or what kind of aggressive foreign policy they have.
But, you know, if you have, you know, the central government, say, in Switzerland, is so different than any other central government.
Who would want to go in there and try to change them?
And yet, this is what we do, and there's social and religious and cultural differences, and it's just this intolerance that people have.
And of course, intolerance is one of the things that's the hardest thing for people who are looking at the libertarian message to accept.
Because you do have to tolerate other people and their social habits and their personal habits.
But you only have to give up this idea of act of aggression against people, your neighbors, your friends, or countries.
And it works.
But people do not like to give up an inch to people that they think act differently and doing things that they don't approve of.
And therefore, they have to fight and fume over it.
I see the only answer to moving us toward a more peaceful world is accepting the basic principles of libertarianism, which means nobody has the right to take somebody else's property or interfere with another person's life.
And that is not complex.
Another factor that goes well with this, and it's an economic factor, is agree to everything that you agree to.
Follow through on your promises and pledges.
And those two things, no aggression and live up to your promises.
And believe me, we could move in the right direction.
I think if you talk to a million people in many, many countries, most people, that makes a lot of sense.
But then they get frightened and they're driven by fear.
ISIS is coming and we have to go to war against somebody.
And that's how we got talked in to be complacent.
Assad has to go.
Assad has to go.
Our governments are out of control.
We need to get control of our governments by reducing their power and reducing their ability to take us to war without the full consent of the people.
That would help us a whole lot.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.