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April 13, 2017 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
15:24
Does Anybody Know What Our Russia Policy Is?

From "what's so bad about getting along with Russia" to "Russia helped Syria gas civilians" and back, this Administration's Russia policy is all over the place. How can we explain such inconsistencies? From "what's so bad about getting along with Russia" to "Russia helped Syria gas civilians" and back, this Administration's Russia policy is all over the place. How can we explain such inconsistencies?

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Time Text
Trump's Russia Policy Shift 00:13:25
What?
And then they wanted me to denounce Putin.
Why would I denounce him?
For what?
For what?
You know, it's sort of interesting.
Wouldn't it be nice if we actually got along with Russia and China and all these countries?
Wouldn't it be nice?
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel Mick Adams.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Well, very good.
You know, this program that we have, our channel, deals a lot in foreign policy.
Other things too, because we promote the cause of liberty, but we spend a lot of time on foreign policy.
A lot of people are coming to our program to get some answers and figure some things out, and that's very nice.
And sometimes we have real crystal clear answers.
There's one, though, that I'm working on because people want to know, and that is, what is our policy with Russia?
What is the foreign policy with Russia?
And that's a good question, and I'm not sure we can answer it because we can't quite look into the mind of our president.
Because it doesn't take a long memory to remember not too long ago in the campaign, that was one of the most positive things that we heard from the candidate Trump was that he talked about better relationships with Russia and no nation building.
And it was obviously less intervention, never exactly non-intervention, but critical of NATO and this sort of thing.
But all of a sudden, and he was following that, and he had a few people that he appointed into the administration, and the left went nuts because they actually were friends or maybe traveled to Russia and knew people in Russia, and that was the crime of the century.
So it looked like maybe there would be a change.
And all of a sudden, there were some appointments that weren't quite so friendly.
But there was an amazing shift in policy.
It was almost like overnight there was the news reporting, misreporting of gases being released in Syria, and all the blame being put on Assad and Russia.
And therefore, on a dime, the policy seemed to shift.
And whether it's for real or for demonstration or whatnot, then the missiles flew.
50 missiles, 59 missiles, I guess, tomahawked missiles, went into an air base that we warned about.
We didn't surprise them.
We warned about it.
Minimize the number of people being killed.
Make sure we didn't hit any Russian planes.
And they were told it was coming.
So it might have been a demonstration.
But it was a shift.
He wasn't talking about sending off demonstrations during the campaign.
All of a sudden, it looks a lot more hawkish.
And it's going to be hard.
It's hard for me to figure out and say to our audience, this is what our policy is today, because it seems like there's some ambivalence on our policy.
There's some shifting.
And sometimes ambivalence and lack of clarity is about as dangerous as one that's explicit, even if you disagreed with it.
And that's exactly what the Russian foreign minister said during his press conference with Secretary of State Tillerson yesterday.
He said the Trump administration has, quote, an ambiguous and contradictory foreign policy.
So it's very hard for other countries to follow.
There's usually some sort of consistency, but you're right.
We started with the clip of Candidate Trump.
And I think, frankly, there were a lot of libertarians who said, okay, I don't like everything Trump is saying, but this issue is so important.
The idea of avoiding World War III, we're going to hold our nose.
And if it at least does this right, then everything else will just kind of have to look the other way.
And then, as you point out, this big shift on Russia comes.
His administration starts blaming Russia for the gassing, even without any evidence.
And things have completely soured now.
You know, there's a recent new member of the cabinet replacing General Flynn.
General McMaster's replaced him at the National Security Agency.
And he has, it was found there was a story in Zero Hedge today of his ties to a Soros-sponsored think tank raises questions.
And all of a sudden, he was associated with this think tank, which has different views than Trump's views in the campaign.
And if you look at the sponsors in this think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, it's been around, but their opinion is quite a bit different.
You know, Soros sends some money there, so that gives you some suspicion.
And some of our big military industries sends money there.
That raises suspicions.
My guess is that they probably have oil money, too.
Maybe they're interested in a pipeline.
Who knows what?
But all of a sudden, there's difference.
And then Trump changes, has a different policy, and has led to some confusion and maybe some disappointments among the grassroots and his base.
At the same time, there's some people who weren't too close to him, some people in the media, some people who consider themselves liberal Democrats and moderates.
Neocons haven't yelled and screamed.
Maybe the only complaint that a guy like McCain might have is you didn't drop enough.
We want regime change now.
So it's up in the air and it's not going to be easy.
I think maybe only time is going to tell exactly what the policy is with Russia.
And look at someone like Nikki Haley, his ambassador to the UN.
She's an absolute neocon, no foreign policy experience.
She's making a fool of herself and making an embarrassment of the country, but she's extremely hawkish.
But you're right about McMaster and Flynn.
You know, we had problems with Flynn too.
He was a rabbit hawk when it comes to Iran and lots of other things.
But his greatest sin is that he maybe happened to meet with the Russian ambassador and said, hey, guys, in the next administration, we're not going to be so hawkish.
What is wrong with that?
We're going to end sanctions.
What is wrong with that?
And then you have someone like McMaster, who you point out, is tied with this think tank.
And they're all in these think tanks.
They're all funded by the military-industrial complex.
This one happens to be funded by the Gulf states, which I'm sure they're just doing out of the goodness of their heart.
But he gets involved with these, and it's not even a controversy that he's being funded by groups that want regime change in Syria.
Yeah, and, you know, Trump during the campaign said some good things, challenging the American people about our affinity to going along with whatever NATO wants as long as we controlled it.
And yet he's flip-flopped on that.
You know, he wanted to get rid of it and get out of NATO.
They were worthless.
Now he's best of friends with NATO and making all this.
Oh, maybe they'll send us some money and pay some of our bills.
But that, again, is a flip-flop to a more interventionist policy.
I've argued quite frequently on this program that appointments are important.
You know, if you're really in charge, you were in Congress for a little while.
You happen to have worked in my office.
And I think you realize that it was varied in the sense that people have different personalities and all.
But really, the people in my office, I knew what they believed in.
I knew what to expect from them.
They knew what to expect from me.
And yet, the appointments, I think, are very important, but maybe not for other people.
But I think it was important to know what the beliefs were of somebody that If you have the opportunity to pick the vice presidential candidate to be vice president who has sort of the head start of becoming president someday, that would be significant.
It turns out that our vice president was not representing Donald Trump's foreign policy as we heard it in the campaign.
And he even admitted it when Pence came out hawkish on Russia.
Trump just said, well, that's just not my view, so I don't, you know.
But it says your own vice president.
But, you know, there's a good point about staff.
And I remember, we remember some members who even complained and said, hey, I don't trust my staff, Ron.
Can you tell me what really is on this bill?
Can you imagine that?
But, you know, members are busy people, and they need to understand the whole gamut of legislation.
They're not experts in most of these things.
So they rely on their staff to provide them with a certain amount of information on this.
And that gives staff a lot of leeway if they have an agenda.
And the one thing about Washington that you know that well is, aside from your office and maybe a couple of others, staff is not loyal to the member.
They're loyal to the institution.
So if you can frame your boss's view in one way or the other, it's going to look good for you later on.
Well, I don't think we can finally answer exactly what he's thinking and what he's doing and why, but we do know the policy has changed.
And the question is, what is he saying?
Why did he do it?
He gave, you know, he gave a reason.
To me, it might have been an excuse.
Because if he had already made a decision, he needed an excuse, the excuse was, oh, Assad has gassed his own people again, and therefore that is the problem.
Should we investigate it?
Oh, no, we don't want any investigation.
We might find out that the charges aren't true.
So that was the reason to go in.
But you'd think, well, we can't expect any help from mainstream media.
They're not going to help us out on this.
But history has been already forgotten.
Haley doesn't realize that, you know, there was never proof that Assad used gas, you know, three, four years ago.
And right now, again, they're saying that, and they're saying that once again, that Assad did this.
So, and Trump says, I saw it on TV, you know, and there were kids dying from the gas, which I don't even think they have absolute proof of that.
But even if there was some gas released, could it have been released in a different way than Assad gassing his own people?
Nobody really, I've never heard anybody say, I wonder why he gases his own people.
Or people who argue that case, why would he gas his own people?
He has, you know, somebody made the point that he has stayed in power over very difficult circumstances, which means that maybe some people there still will depend on him rather than looking to al-Qaeda, you know, and ISIS to take over.
You know, and that might be one of the big fights over there.
He's a secularist, and he doesn't want the radicals in there.
So there's some people that would support him, you know, in this fight.
But then all of a sudden, you know, they do this and they use it as an excuse to go ahead and demonstrate.
So he changes his mind.
He doesn't want to have anybody killed, you know, but we'll just go ahead and drop some bombs as a demonstration.
A couple dollars, you know, costs a little bit to shoot off tomahawks.
Yeah, $100 million.
But, you know, this is the other thing.
You know, the media just lies and so do politicians.
And Tillerson may just be ill-informed, but he said that Assad has used gas 50 times on his people.
Well, it's never been proven.
It doesn't mean we're cheerleaders for Assad, but the fact of the matter is anyone can go and look at the 2013 investigation by the United Nations.
They did not point the finger at Assad.
They said, we cannot determine that he was responsible for it.
So he didn't do the Ghouta attack, or they don't think he did the Ghouta attack.
So therefore, there's no precedent.
You know, and the whole story now is falling apart, which is the dangers of shooting first and asking questions later.
You know, there's this MIT professor that is an expert in ballistics, and he came out with a report.
He looked at what the White House was saying, and he's saying, from my experience, and I've worked with the intelligence community, MIT professor, he says, it's absolutely impossible that it happened the way that the Trump administration is saying.
So there you have it.
You know, it reminds me, of course, of the agonizing debates and speeches I gave trying to prevent the war starting, you know, in Iraq.
Back then, there was an investigator for the United Nations.
He was a nuclear expert, and he was on site.
He was in Iraq.
And he was influential, although from the beliefs I have of non-intervention, I mean, we shouldn't be there.
But he was also fortifying the argument that we shouldn't be panicked into this war.
And this is Scott Ritter.
And he spoke out then, and nobody would listen to him.
The media ridiculed him and did all kinds of things to him.
But he's been rather quiet since then.
But he must have felt compelled to speak out again because he was probably having a deja vu.
You know, again, here's another war coming and a shift, and we're accelerating this, and it has to do with weapons of mass distraction.
So he writes, there's no way, there's no way that Assad was doing this.
Yeah, it says a lot that he comes, he's come back out, and he was, you know, he turns out he was right about Iraq.
Nobody says that for whatever else they say about him, he was right.
He was correct.
He got it right.
They didn't have him, and he was demonized for it.
And now I think it's significant that he's come back out.
Yes, and the old thing about the false flag business, to get the excuse, rather than reason, they get an excuse.
Can't Afford This Foreign Policy 00:01:48
So we start off with talking about the change in foreign policy or what is our foreign policy with Russia.
Do you care to make a comment of what is our policy with Russia?
Well, what I wish our policy was is something you talked about quite a number of years ago, a wise consistency.
You know, if Trump were operating under a general philosophy of the role of the U.S. in the world that includes the idea, the things that he said in his campaign, don't go abroad seeking monsters to slay, essentially, then we'd be in much better shape than we are.
Yes, and it would be much better if we had a foreign policy of non-interventionism and then we could predict what we should do and what we can do and how we can defend this country and what our responsibilities are.
But unfortunately, the foreign policy is still very bipartisan.
It's very much endorsed by both liberal Democrats, moderate Democrats, conservative Republicans.
We were hoping for it to be better.
Right now, I think it's the same old stuff again.
Same old intervention antagonism, and there are so many people, whether it's the military-industrial complex or the special interests in the Middle East, the different countries that support this, the oil companies, it's still there, so foreign policy has remained the same.
Someday, though, our failure will demonstrate that we can't afford this type of foreign policy.
That's why the empire came down for the Soviets.
It ended because they no longer could afford it.
A typical way how empires end, they overextend themselves overseas.
That is what's happening.
And one of these days, we're going to have a chance to restore a non-intervention, a sensible foreign policy to this country.
If you're interested in promoting peace and prosperity, that is the policy that you would pursue.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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