Pompeo Promises New Liberal World Order - New Wine In Old Bottles?
In a major speech yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promised that the Trump Administration was creating a "new liberal international order," with the US re-asserting its "leadership." This sounds a lot like the old "new world order" promised by recently departed President George HW Bush. Is going back to the future really a good US grand strategy?
In a major speech yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promised that the Trump Administration was creating a "new liberal international order," with the US re-asserting its "leadership." This sounds a lot like the old "new world order" promised by recently departed President George HW Bush. Is going back to the future really a good US grand strategy?
In a major speech yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promised that the Trump Administration was creating a "new liberal international order," with the US re-asserting its "leadership." This sounds a lot like the old "new world order" promised by recently departed President George HW Bush. Is going back to the future really a good US grand strategy?
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
I'm doing very well, and I understand you have a little bit of a cold today, but I am convinced you will do well.
We'll see.
We'll see.
We have a very tolerant audience, but we keep working at it.
Let's hope so.
And we're going to work on a subject we worked on.
Matter of fact, we mentioned this yesterday, and that has to do with how much money we expect to spend in DOD this next year, because it was always automatic.
It is really always automatic.
But what isn't automatic is what our president says he wants to spend.
And, you know, as his campaign, he ran.
He was going to be the biggest banner ever.
And he has been, and he is spending.
But something got him worrying a little bit.
He says, maybe we're spending too much.
And maybe he's right.
But his only problem isn't the Democrats, even though they might pretend to be opposed to that spending.
The only problem he has, if he thinks he's going to cut back a little on DOD, is his own administration, you know, the Secretary of State and the Defense Secretary, because they need the money.
And guess what?
They tend to be influenced by the military-industrial complex and a few other people and a few allies that want us to spend forever and ever.
So the big thing is, is that they want $770 billion, and Trump said, well, maybe we can do with $700.
Well, can you believe they're going to cut what the proposal is by that much?
I predict there's going to be no proposal.
But I might make one prediction, which predictions sometimes aren't worth a whole lot.
But generally, we noticed over the years, when they get ready and they get into these arguments, there's usually an incident someplace.
You know, some military confrontation, always a little bit, but just enough to scare the people and say, well, you know, what we need are more submarines.
And right now, of course, they're talking about more weapons.
And that's why they're challenging Russia on a treaty to pretend we're following all the rules because we want to build more weapons because the Chinese are ready to come and get us.
So it's a big squabble.
It's going to happen.
It's routine.
And the other prediction that we can safely make, it'll probably be more than last year.
Yeah, that's for sure.
And remember, last year, the Trump administration put in a request to Congress.
Congress said, no, that's not enough.
And they bumped it up by 50 billion, which actually is the entire Russian military budget, the equivalent of just our bump-up, just our upgrade.
But as we've talked about on the show so many times, Dr. Paul, you know, the issue, it's great that he woke up and said, good golly, that's a lot of money.
However, it's not the spending, it's the strategy.
It doesn't matter how much we spend.
There will never be enough if your strategy is to be the policeman of the world, to occupy the world, to maintain wars for two decades it's going into now.
So the strategy is the issue, not the budget.
You know, it reminds me of the 60s when they argued about this.
And Johnson assured everybody after he took over the presidency that, yes, he has to fight the Vietnam War.
He has to expand to the Vietnam War.
But does that mean he has to curtail domestic spending?
And he convinced himself, no, we can handle it.
Guns and butter.
And if you look at what happened in the 60s, especially in the 70s when we had to start paying for that, this is a guns and butter argument.
And I think even a weaker argument, nobody's really talking about cutting.
The only thing that gets one's attention is the fact that Trump sort of changes his position.
I think he likes to get in the category.
He has to throw a bone to the people who are conservatives.
You know, we shouldn't be spending.
And he also knows there's trouble coming.
He can't pretend there's no problems with the budget.
So he's getting on the side of who's going to get blamed for this.
So he's sort of taking one step away from this: that when the problems come in spending and in a recession, revenues go down.
So if they're already predicting a trillion dollars a year deficit, you can imagine what it's going to be like if there's no hesitation on increasing the spending at the same time revenues are going down.
And with that rough estimate, there's no reason why it would be an absurd prediction that in not the too distant future you'll see deficits of $2 trillion if the system holds together long enough because they cannot maintain it and they're not going to cut the spending.
And you know, the part of our title where we're talking about really the discrepancy between Trump waking up one morning and seeing a lot of zeros after that 700 and what the U.S. views itself.
You know, the U.S. still has not developed a cohesive, coherent post-Cold War strategy.
U.S. Policy and Global Influence00:12:43
The neocons have certainly asserted that we have this messianic, we have this messianic obligation, you know, this messianic utopianism that we have to push.
And no one has really challenged that.
And in fact, when you talk about philosophy, when you talk about strategy bumping up against those zeros after the sevens, we have Pompeo, Mike Pompeo, just yesterday, he was at the German Marshall Fund in Belgium giving a speech on the new U.S. strategy, when it was going to be.
It sounded a little bit like the old strategy, didn't it, Dr. Paul?
Yes, and it reminds me of the history in the French Revolution of the Jacobins, because they were never out to cause a vicious, violent revolution.
They had a good idea, and by golly, they were going to accept it, and it turned into violence, and they used violence to do it, and it ended up to be a catastrophe.
So, in a way, that's what we do.
We promote it with our American goodness.
I want to read a couple short quotes from Pompeo.
He was in Brussels.
He said they had his headquarters when he was calling on the international organizations that he wanted to cut and not even be in, except for NATO.
Now, NATO is good, as long as he has something to say about how the money is spent.
But let me just go with these two short quotes.
And this is, quote, in the finest traditions of our great democracy, we are rallying the noble nations to build a new liberal order that prevents war and achieves greater prosperity.
Well, that's pretty good to me.
He's watching the showman.
Okay, and then there's another one he adds on, we are acting to preserve, protect, and advance an open society, just transparent, and a free world of sovereign nations.
This project will require actual, not pretend, restoration of liberal order among nations.
It will require an assertive American leadership, not only from my country, but of the democracies around the world.
You know, this may be unfair, but when I hear this business about open society, it scares the business out of me.
Even libertarians are probably as for the most open society conceivable.
But when the politicians start talking about it, I immediately think Soros, that's what they keep saying.
I'm sure Pompeo is not a buddy of Soros, but maybe that basic principle, you think he could be a buddy of Soros?
Well, they both have a messianic view of the world.
Yeah, in that way, obligations around the world.
But, you know, what he says sounds to me a lot like war is peace.
He's saying we are going to pursue peace and prosperity through extended U.S. military engagement overseas.
Well, we know for the last 20 years or 30 years since the end of the Cold War that U.S. military adventures overseas produced the opposite.
So it really is sort of a 1984 kind of moment.
Yeah, and you know, during Bush number two, when he was in it, he gave a well-known speech about the evil empire.
And that was to drumbeat the need for more militarism and more spending, even though we're spending more than everybody else put together practically.
But his definition of the evil empire then was Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.
And they were the bad guys.
But we must be making progress.
We don't have Iraq involved.
That's a very stable, democratic country right now, so we don't have to worry.
And North Korea, matter of fact, keep your fingers crossed, maybe there's been some real progress in Korea.
But now the three nations that are attacked, and pretty systematically, this might be one, even though they might argue over the money, but I think within the administration, they generally agree we have to go after Russia.
Russia is dangerous.
We can't let them get away with breaking that nuclear treaty, which raises questions.
And of course, Iran is still, they're still an evil nation, but they're going to be there for a long time.
They were put there in 1953, especially in 1979.
And of course, China.
And there was one commentary from this that somebody in the administration, I said, China doesn't have the right to make all this money.
And they're not following the rules, and that's why they're making their money.
It would never dawn on that maybe on occasion they follow a capitalistic policy rather than a communist policy.
And I think it was so appropriate in an ironic way that Pompeo chose the German Marshall Fund as the venue for his speech.
Because as you know, the German Marshall Fund, it's not funded by Germany.
It's funded by the United States government.
It's funded by NATO, and it's funded by the military-industrial complex.
And what do they do?
Well, it's the home of Bill Crystal's Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is chock full of neocons, Mike Chertov, McCain's old right-hand man.
Also the home of Hamilton 68, which if you remember, that's the tool that they use to get alternative voices banned from the social media as Russian bots.
So he's giving a speech about a new liberal order in a place that actually is engaged in doing the opposite, a closed illiberal order of silencing all alternative voices.
Yeah, so from our viewport, my viewpoint personally is that overall the policies don't change.
I mean, the message is put out in a different way.
But as far as it goes, you talk about the policy.
If the policies don't change, they still need the money.
And right now, my argument has always been this is limited.
This can't go on forever.
It has to end.
But it's not going to end with common sense and saying, you know, how can we promote peace and prosperity?
The very words that Pompeo used, if we took that one phrase out, they say, oh, we like that idea too.
We want peace and prosperity.
But it's always on their terms.
And I think that NATO is okay.
And Pompeo argues that this is not unilateralism.
This is working together.
But there is an argument of who's the boss.
And there is no doubt.
And I think it's natural or not unusual for the American citizens to be tempted to say, well, what do you mean?
This is our money.
And we've got to protect our interests.
And we need to be the boss.
We can't let them run over, roughshod over us and all these things.
So that incentivizes the support from the American people to go along with the militarism and also the military approach to trade.
And these things are a detriment to the prosperity of the American people.
But it's couched in words of patriotism, and that is not exactly easy to dispel.
The patriotism associated with militarism, that's been well known.
It doesn't take a heck of a lot.
You're under attack, and if you don't recognize that and do something about that, you're un-American and you're unpatriotic, and then you have to capitulate.
But we have a, I think of this trade policy, you know, this say it's up for grabs and they should argue and debate, you know, the trade policy and decide which one.
But I do not believe for a minute the founders ever intended for a single person to have much so much authority to say, well, today I'm going to put on tariffs here and tariffs there and threaten.
If they don't do it, they'll be put on a list and they'll be sanctioned.
I mean, that's authoritarianism and economic policy, and that's not free market.
But we still get a lot of people writing into it and say, you know, you're good on freedom and free markets are okay, but there is a limit.
And one place where I think there's a lot of misunderstanding when they challenge on this is that tariffs are good when we need them.
But the whole thing is, if we could substitute the word tariff for a tax on the American people, they might not be so confident that us placing tariffs on somebody is beneficial.
But that is money that is passed on to the consumer.
The consumer prices go up, and it's not helpful and absolutely not necessary.
And you talked a little bit ago about how the U.S. population is propagandized to believe that, hey, you know, we got to be number one.
It doesn't matter if it costs us money, we've got to be number one.
But in fact, asserting ourselves everywhere with this neocon messianism, you know, in fact, it weakens us.
And believe it or not, I don't usually read Liz Sly of the Washington Post with the smile on my face, but I think she inadvertently had a very good piece today in the Washington Post where she points out that very simply world leaders that would normally be flocking to Washington are now flocking to Moscow.
And it has nothing to do with all of a sudden them falling for Putin's bots and his lies and all of these things they claim.
It's simply that Russia is managing its Middle East policies much better than the U.S.
It's not going around like a bull in a china shop controlling everything.
Here's a couple of good quotes from Liz's article.
She quotes Riyadh Khawaiji of the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis.
He says, Russia has managed to create the perception in the Middle East that it is more powerful, more capable, and more relevant than the United States.
This is a good one.
It's not how much power you have.
It's how you use it.
The United States has all these troops and bases.
Russia has a fraction of that.
But Russia uses its power more effectively.
And I think that's what we've seen from Syria.
You know, that's a very pragmatic analysis, and I think a good one is how you use things.
I mean, that's almost in anything.
If you go back to the average household budget, it's how you spend your money and how you budget things and what you do and how much waste there is.
But the problem I have either with the economic intervention or the military, it demands that you use force.
And yes, we want to be a great nation and we want to impose some values.
Impose is not a good word, but share some values.
And of course, what we should be doing is talking about the message of liberty and to talk about the message of private property and volunteerism.
And that's the best export we could ever conceive of.
And it wouldn't cost nearly as much.
Matter of fact, it would be just say, you know, come visit with us.
You know, come visit with us.
There's enough institutes around in this country now that teach us the right things.
Rather than listening to the propaganda or listening to our government, our own government's managed news overseas.
We spend a few dollars a year on that.
And that has nothing to do with liberty.
That's forcibly taking money out of the hands of the American people, passing along to propagandize foreigners.
They propagandize us all the time, but we propagandize others.
But I don't know if I've never seen an analysis of that.
But my guess is that it was a radio broadcast.
Probably don't accomplish all that much.
Jobs program.
Well, Lydia, if you don't mind if I finish out with a couple more quotes, because really, I mean, Pompeo is really a piece of work here.
I mean, he's one of the most duplicitous secretaries of state I've seen since I've been watching things.
Here's another quote from his speech: Bad actors have exploded our lack of leadership for their own gain.
This is the poisoned fruit of American retreat.
Where have we retreated anywhere since the end of the Cold War?
It's just on its face.
And here's another one.
He said, Russia has embraced Western, hasn't embraced Western values of freedom and international cooperation.
Rather, it has suppressed opposition voices and invaded the sovereign nations of Georgia and Ukraine.
Ironically, he's giving the speech at the German Marshall Fund, which is in the business of suppressing opposition voices in the U.S., shutting us down, calling us Russian bots because we disagree with their neocolonial order.
And Russia invading Ukraine and Georgia, we've talked about this before.
But what about the U.S. invasions?
What about Iraq?
What about Libya?
What about Syria, where we legally, illegally occupy a good chunk of that country?
It just doesn't pass the smell test.
That's right.
And I want to mention that the and I mentioned early on, and that is, under these conditions, what I fear a lot is there will be an incident.
Incident To Galvanize00:02:50
There will be something to galvanize people, you know, a little war here, a little war there, to scare the people and get this passed.
Ordinarily, it's not as confusing as it is today.
Usually, the president is in sync with the administration and his people, but it seems like they're disjointed.
Matter of fact, we even find that the CIA is disjointed when you look at Haskell coming in and taking one position and then sending other reports and they have to keep her from talking to the Congress.
And by the way, there's a few people pretty annoyed that they have to do some voting, including my son.
You have to do some voting, but you're not allowed to know what you're voting on and what they're doing.
So that is a real problem.
So I think the only thing that we can do is present the case for liberty and fiscal sanity and not to buy into all the propaganda about why there's an evil empire out there.
And look at what they're doing and look at how much they're spending.
The tanks aren't lined up.
The other day, Russia was accused that they're getting ready to have a tank attack on Kiev and march in.
And I just don't think they're getting ready to do that.
I think they're securing their borders mainly because they've been provoked by NATO and the Europeans moving up all the weapons.
And then what do we do?
We turn around and say, oh, the Russians are defending themselves against the weapons we're putting on their borders.
And we've got to get them out of this treaty because if we get them out of the intermediate nuclear treaty, then we can go ahead and build more and more weapons because we've got to contend with the Chinese.
So it's on and on again that it has to fit into this attitude of who's kingpin.
And there's a lot of people in this country that think that the person with the most power, the most military power, is the most important nation, and we want to be on that side.
Of course we do, but we want to be on the side of righteousness too.
And the one thing is, is ultimately it isn't the money and the size of your army that counts.
Just think, how long and how many dollars and how many lives have been lost in Afghanistan?
And we're not winning.
We haven't won.
And how was it that the colonists were able to defeat the most powerful army ever up until that time, the British Empire, and win?
It has a lot to do.
What are you fighting for?
And if you're fighting for liberty and you're fighting for your homeland, believe me, all the money and aggression and force in the world is only going to finally destroy that nation that is initiating it.
It did it to the Soviet Empire.
And believe me, there's a lot of cracks in our system right now.
So we ought to be cautious.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.