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Sept. 20, 2017 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
18:27
Trump's UN Speech: A Neocon Dream?

President Trump's speech yesterday at the United Nations got rave reviews from neocons like John Bolton and Elliot Abrams. The US president threatened North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Are the neocons on a roll? ***Note: Due to technical difficulties, today's program is audio only***

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Time Text
Good to See You 00:15:21
The United States has great strength and patience.
But if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.
Rocketman is on a suicide.
Hello, everybody.
Thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
Congratulations on your program this week.
You did two programs.
Your fans missed you.
Oh, I don't know.
You said you did well.
You did well.
Glad you're back, sir.
But good to see you.
I'm glad to be back also.
And I think that we will talk a little bit, as our introduction indicated, a little bit about that major speech.
It was too bad I wasn't around.
I might have tweeted during that speech.
I'd have been motivated, I'll tell you, with some of the things that went on.
But you have to really search for something really good in it.
So we won't pretend to put lipstick on, you know what.
No, we can't do that.
But, you know, it's to me a shame because, you know, we, in the libertarian camp, it shouldn't be too difficult to be critical of this aggressive nature of this speech and an aggressive nature of the foreign policy.
I think all libertarians should be concerned about a speech like this.
Good constitutional conservatives should be.
But I would think there'd be more support coming from the traditional anti-war left, the progressives.
But we don't hear a whole lot.
We'd get some and we get them on our program, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards yet.
But there's lots to talk about in this speech, but I don't think there's much reassurance that we're going to be moving in the right direction.
You know, Fire and Fury, it reminds me of Shock and all.
And Shock and all was going to be, you know, wonderful mission accomplished and all these wonderful things.
And it turned into be a nightmare.
So if Trump has his way and he feels compelled to live up to his promises, even if it doesn't make any sense, how's he going to be turning that?
You know, in a way, you could make the case for saying if he does that, if he destroys North Korea, it isn't like getting rid of a regime or something, you know, a little bit more modest, destroys the whole country.
This could end up a lot worse than the mission unaccomplished in Iraq and that unaccomplished mission in Iraq and the Middle East.
That's still ongoing, and that's been 16 years.
But this has potential greater harm, even though if we weren't following this confrontational foreign policy and trying to provoke this goofy guy into doing something, we probably wouldn't have a problem.
This seems, always bothers me.
It seems to be so artificial and so unnecessary.
Yeah, and if it's just talk, if he's just trying to go up there and sound like a tough guy, it's extremely irresponsible for a world leader to talk that way.
But if he's actually serious and he's talking about utterly destroying North Korea, i.e. the country, he's talking about killing 25 million people.
And we know the Chinese said just a week or so ago that they will not allow an attack on North Korea unless North Korea attacks someone else first.
So if they're true to their word, which they have been so far, they're not going to allow the U.S. to attack.
So we're talking about orders of magnitude more than 25 million people.
So what exactly does he mean by this?
Well, he can't possibly mean it.
I have to confess, I made a wrong assumption or a hope that I thought the speech would be much more toned down, more in the spirit of what he did at the State of the Union message, because Even some of his enemies say, hey, that's at least a little bit better tone.
I thought he would take advantage of this, but it seems like he thrives in this, this, you know, provoking.
I think that if he doesn't provoke somebody, he's not satisfied.
I think this is a personality quirk that he has, that he needs this for some reason.
And he gets a sense of power from this if he can provoke you.
If he doesn't provoke you.
Just think of the very first night of the first debate with Megan Kelly.
It was provoked, provoked, provoked.
And it was so successful, you know, that he gets all the attention.
So this had a lot of that spirit in there.
It's provoking.
And he throws in a few words.
You know, this is national sovereignty.
We're for national sovereignty.
Of course, I'd like the national sovereignty to be there to protect individual sovereignty and individual responsibility.
He talks about it, but then he mixes it in with the nation-state.
And that makes me a little bit nervous about the power of the nation-state where you combine the state itself with the cultural and ethnic portions of a country.
And I think that approach is almost a theocracy.
And also some of the bad regimes around the world over the centuries have been those who called himself a nation-state.
And his argument is that the nation's responsibility is to enhance the quality of the people.
And yet, for me and so many, you know, the people, the human condition he talked about can only be enhanced by the people.
That's why I find a limitation on what I advocate, you know, with limited government.
Because ultimately, if the people aren't mature enough and understanding enough and assume responsibility of themselves, you know, no matter what you do in government, you can't make people do that.
So people have to understand what liberty is and respond in a positive way.
So I have that was sort of buried in his speech about the human condition, but it just once again fits into the category of using an authoritarian approach to improve the human condition.
Of course, we could argue we wanted to do that too, but we want to do it with freedom, you know, free markets and sound money and limited government and staying out of war.
That would improve the human condition.
I don't think he's quite with us on our approach on how to improve the human condition.
And the roadmap to that is subsidiarity, which is the opposite of what he's talking about.
I think a good argument could be made that the human condition was probably better off when there were hundreds of little mini kingdoms around Europe, you know, when the person who you were responsible to was right there in your village or something like this rather than some faraway Washington, D.C.
But you know, with a couple of things really stood out and almost, I would say didn't pass the laugh test, but I didn't laugh because it wasn't funny.
But you talk about the U.S. with a global military empire with thousands of military bases in 100 and some countries involved in so many wars and conflicts, regime changes, overthrows.
And how do you put that side by side with what he said here?
Strong sovereign nations let diverse countries with different values, different cultures, and different dreams not just coexist, but work side by side on the basis of mutual respect.
It's almost as if he's deranged.
Yeah, and of course, his opposition to the UN supposedly really is a facade too, because I think all our presidents for a long time have used the UN.
And it's not like they run roughshod over us.
There was a time when I believed that was the case, that we were paying for everything and they were always picking on us.
But I don't believe that anymore.
I think we've used the UN.
We want to put on sanctions.
We rush to the UN and we badger and we get the vote.
Almost always.
If we want support for an invasion, I remember so clearly the Persian Gulf War when H.W. Bush said that, well, we need to go in.
And they said, well, you don't have authority from the Congress.
He was pretty arrogant about this, and that was unusual for his demeanor.
He said, no, I don't need that.
I have a UN resolution.
But he then, then the Congress, you know, for political reasons, he said, well, if they want to give me permission, let them have a resolution.
So everybody was happy.
The Congress got to participate in it, and they got the authority, but it didn't really serve as a declaration of war and didn't find out who the enemy was and never had an end stage to the fighting that went on.
This, you know, came home to me when you were doing 1146 to get the U.S. out of the U.N.
And we got a lot of surprising.
I thought, I guess I was naive, I thought that the conservatives would be on board.
You know, the liberals, the left hated it because they liked the idea of world government, this sort of thing.
But remember how the conservatives resisted, and they said, no, no, we don't want to get out of the UN.
We want to control the UN and force them to do what we want.
What was funny is they gave me support when we didn't have control of the House.
And then once we got control of the House, he said, Ron, we don't need you now.
We were just pretending.
He says, don't bring that resolution up.
The foreign aid was the same thing.
All the Republicans would vote against the foreign aid.
And then when they were in charge, they had to get this passed.
But that's tradition.
That fits into the argument I make that there's only about one party there.
Yeah, exactly.
Here's another thing that I picked out.
And again, it's not a laugh test.
It's a disgust test, I guess.
But here's what he said.
In America, we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to watch.
And then in the same speech, he went on to say, the United States has taken important steps to hold the Venezuelan regime accountable.
We're prepared to take further action.
It's time for the entire world to join us in deciding that it demanding that Iran's government end its pursuit of death and destruction and so on and so on.
So he said, we don't push people around.
Then he goes ahead and starts pushing everyone around.
Originally it was the axis of evil and they had the three country, but Iraq is not part of that anymore because we have total control of liberty.
But now the axis has expanded to include other countries.
And that, of course, is the problem.
But you know, people who opposed the United Nations from the very beginning understood what could happen.
And I became very much aware of it very early on because, and I remember it clearly.
It was just five years after World War II ended and the war was starting up.
And I remember the conversation or heard my mother speaking.
I was all, well, at that time, I'd probably be about 15.
I heard her speaking, I don't know whether this country can stand just another war.
She was just lamenting the fact that there'd be another war without going into the details at all.
But there it was.
And where did that come from?
The authority came from the United Nations.
So in many ways, the seeds of all this mess lay at the doorstep of world government because they went along with this and the UN was set up to bring peace to the world.
The first thing they did was start a war.
And they planted a lot of bad seeds in the Middle East as well.
So they're not a peacekeeping nation at all.
They endorse the issue of sanctions, they endorse the war, they get the resolutions, and they go on and on.
Every once in a while, they throw out a resolution.
But how often do they pass a resolution against Saudi Arabia?
Have they done much of that?
I don't think so.
No, and you know, in addition, remember we talked about before in 2006 when they adopted the concept of responsibility to protect R2P, which means if the nations get together and decide that one country is not doing enough to protect its people or he's a rogue leader, then they feel like they have the authority.
Whereas it was for all of its faults, it was at least imagined as a collection of sovereign nations who retain their sovereignty.
That was about the only good thing about it.
Yeah, and I think we're at a time, and this is an issue we've talked about before, is that we will and are in the process of overstepping our bounds.
You know, although we're still the kingpin, and although it's our empire, and although we have the reserve currency of the world, and although we can spend endless money, and whether we have $5 trillion, double to $10 trillion, double to $20 trillion in a short period of time, getting ready to double to $40 trillion, there's a limit.
And there's a limit to our foreign policy.
There's a limit to us pushing people around.
And I think there will not be an invasion of the United States.
I think the fact that they can beat the war drums and build up enough fear in the American people.
Right now, more than half the people think that we should attack North Korea.
You know, like they were going to come here.
And it makes no more sense than the lies they told us about Iraq.
So they push this and they build up the fear.
But we build up a lot of enemies.
And I think the attack on us will be on the dollar.
And people are starting to prepare for this.
You know, it's a very fragile system.
And there's a tremendous contribution to that.
There's a lot of other factors too.
The number one culprit being the Federal Reserve.
But they work in collusion for this anyway.
This is how this gets financed.
We couldn't have these deficits if you didn't have the Federal Reserve financing it.
But I think it's coming to an end and we're overstepping our bounds.
And this type of speech we just heard is an example of bombast.
You know, just saying that we are the exceptional Americans.
We know what is best.
And put out a few phrases there that we are so kind and considerate and we can worry about your sovereignty.
And we want peace and prosperity.
And I think that the majority of the American people, when you do some polling, you find out that the people are disgusted and they are very distrustful of our government.
And rightfully so.
And you say bombast, and that's right.
It almost smacks of desperation, too, you know, because look, here's the United States that essentially lost every war it's been in since World War II.
It just lost Syria.
Unfortunately, many thousands of others lost more than just a war.
They lost their lives.
Lost Syria, lost Afghanistan.
It's lost Iraq.
It's lost Libya.
Here's a country that can't defeat a bunch of tribesmen in mountains in Afghanistan.
It really does almost smack of desperation, rattling the guns and threatening everyone.
Well, in reality, it looks more like a paper tiger.
Right.
And I think that people will realize that, but there'll be a lot of people who will love this speech.
You know, the neocons are loving it.
John Bolton was giddy.
Alien Abrams was thrilled.
I'm very excited.
So how would you like to summarize this?
And what do you expect good to come of it?
Or is this just another burden for us to bear?
Well, I think his true colors have shown.
I don't think anyone that even had some small hopes, myself included, that he might come around, are feeling pretty desperate.
But, you know, like in a good movie, they always have a bonus reel of things.
And so I thought I would bring out a bonus reel.
And here's Nikki Haley, the greatest diplomat in the history of the universe.
Here's what she tweeted after the speech.
You know, if you remember, Saudi Arabia was on the Human Rights Commission, and there was some, here's what she said.
Human rights are too important to let some of the worst abusers sit on the Human Rights Commission, UN Human Rights Commission.
Last Chance for Liberty 00:03:02
And I think Saudi Arabia is involved in a war with us against the Yemenis.
At the same time, the last time the Iranians, who are the monsters also, the last time they were involved in a war was in 1980, and they were fighting Iraq when we promoted that war and supported Iraq.
And when we essentially, well, That was left as a stalemate, but certainly it wasn't a victory for our side.
And the bigger picture here is something we've talked about.
It is also important.
We talk about the individual things, Korea and Ukraine, and all these other areas.
But the big picture to me is us determined to be involved in the big fight between the Saudi faction and the Iranian faction.
And I think, and that's Sunni, Shia, and the West and the East, and the Soviets in the U.S.
And I think you can line up the ducks, a bunch of countries on one side and on the other.
And it's almost like what happens if they have a fight over there and we're not there.
And we almost feel like we have to help get it started, you know, and provoke it.
That to me is the sad part, but that's not going to go away.
But it would be quieted down if we had a bit of a different attitude and a different approach.
So I was hopeful that the tone would be different and that our president would be a little more calm about this situation because I think that his presentation is not what we need.
And some are critical of it, rightfully so, but others will love it.
And I think that, yes, once again, we're being threatened.
We need a strong president.
We want to be safe.
We don't want the North Koreans to come and invade us and take away our liberties.
Well, what you ought to really worry about is our own government taking away our liberties.
Just think of what happened in the early part of this century, the Patriot Act and the NDAA and all the usurpation of our civil liberties.
That's where the real concern is.
The invasion by a foreign power to destroy our liberty is not going to come in our lifetime.
It's going to be the lack of confidence and desire to live in a free country and put the pressure on our own government to stay out of this entangling alliances, these useless wars that make no sense whatsoever, and paying for them with printing press money, which is going to undermine the prosperity of this country.
So stick with us because we're going to continue to support peace and prosperity.
It's conceivable, it's understandable.
I think the American people want it.
I think the people of the world want it if they aren't influenced by the propagandists who promote war and conflict.
Please look at it carefully because there is an answer to this mess that we're in, and it's found in something that traditionally was very much in the American spirit.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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