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Dec. 4, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
15:44
Desperate For An Enemy, NATO Turns To China

The celebration in London of NATO's 70th year has ended with a renewed purpose: the "challenges" posed by China. NATO is a military alliance, but the attendees were careful to point out that they do not view China as an enemy. So what is the point?

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Time Text
China's Military Buildup 00:14:33
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Good.
Good.
Okay.
We want to follow up on yesterday.
We talked a lot about NATO and some of the things going on there.
But it's continuing, but it's sort of coming to a climactic end, not with good feelings for everybody.
It looks like there were bad feelings all around.
But one thing that they discovered was the hot mic.
And Trump blasts everybody, but the hot and mic revealing what's really going on.
And the hot mic was with Trudeau and Macron and George Johnson.
So they were ridiculing the president.
That didn't sit well with the president.
But I'm sure they were giggling over the whole thing.
And it's on evidence, just infuriated Trump is what it looks like it did.
So the reports say that he just, you know, pretty darn annoyed, got up and says, I'm leaving this place and gets out of town.
And he says, if they keep doing this, I'll get them with sanctions.
I'll give them, I'll put on tariffs on their country.
They ought to behave themselves.
So the fact that there's no real purpose to keep these people together, because the real purpose, like we talked about yesterday, they even admitted it was dead.
I mean, there was no purpose for NATO anymore.
So they're still searching for it.
So in the meantime, it looks like they're going to do some fighting.
Yeah, and I think the media is overplaying the hot and mic thing because they want to ridicule Trump.
They want to make him look stupid.
Oh, look, he's not respected by the European leaders.
But I listened to it and I watched what they said, and I think sort of the opposite is true.
They were upset because he put them in their place.
He didn't play according to their timelines.
He didn't bow down like Obama did to all these guys.
I'll be accused of being a Trump supporter, which I'm not, but he put them on the wrong foot.
He wasn't allowed to let himself be bullied around.
And I think that's important.
I think the media tries to overplay it, but they completely miss the point.
I mean, the one big issue for Trump is that he doesn't let them get away with business as usual.
And that's what infuriates them, his NATO partners.
He says, you need to pay up.
You've got to pay your full percent.
You know, and of course, we don't agree with that, you know, the need to spend more on military because this is not money that goes to NATO.
This whole thing, NATO is not funded that way.
This is the individual countries having to have their military spending increase.
But obviously, the fact that they don't, they haven't improved, they haven't reached that 2% minimum.
It shows one thing.
They don't feel threatened.
If Germany felt threatened, it would have no problem spending tons of money to protect itself.
So that unmasks the whole lie that's NATO, which is none of these European countries, even Poland, who's constantly screaming about Russia, barely makes the 2% threshold.
You know, we did mention the fact yesterday that they aren't very optimistic about NATO.
It's on suicide watch right now.
But they're not going to give up.
They need another enemy.
And they did talk about this.
And this has significance because even if it's not successful the way they think it should be, it's going to be significant.
And that is, let's look eastward.
I mean, if we don't have enough problems in Europe right now, what we need to do are distract from the problems they have in Europe, that we will go and bash China along with that, the Russians.
And if we don't have enough on our table with that, then we will make sure there's no terrorism, which is a subject we covered yesterday.
That's probably the dumbest thing that they can do because they can't even define it.
They can't even define terrorism in the true sense of the word any better than they can define a role for NATO.
But just think of how NATO started.
Now they're worried about China and driving the alliance between China and Russia closer together.
And they're involved all around the world.
And because Russia might invade Europe and this sort of thing, and we help create all the problems in Ukraine and also in the Crimea area.
So that was all our doing when we got involved in the coup in Ukraine.
But that gets involved in our domestic elections.
You think it's a mess.
And who said what, when?
And who, did Ukraine control our election more than the Russians?
Or do you think it was the Russians?
Well, now, maybe it was the Chinese, for all we know.
They were involved in controlling the election.
So it's just they really run out of steam.
I think they're intellectually bankrupt, which allows the political system to deteriorate into such a mess as this.
So they have to look for justification.
And the best they can do is, you know, how do we get back on Trump and have a giggle session?
And I don't think that's going to make too many people happy.
No, and you know, the big news, again, coming out is we need a new enemy.
What's the enemy?
So they added China not to their list of enemies because they don't do that.
It's their list of challenges.
You know, NATO is a military alliance.
If you look at any of the mainstream media coverage, the most powerful military alliance on earth.
It's a military alliance, but it doesn't face enemies.
It faces challenges.
What does that mean for an organization whose specialty is tanks and nuclear weapons?
And so China is one of its challenges now, and this is because of, quote, China's growing capabilities.
And that has to do with the Chinese military buildup.
But why are the Chinese building up their military?
It's because of saber-rattling in the South China Sea.
It's because of haranguing China.
It's because of causing problems, trade wars, and these sorts of things.
So China feels threatened by NATO.
It builds up its military, and then NATO says, aha, you're building up your military.
Therefore, we have a new enemy.
Oh, see, Turkey is playing them as well because, you know, the NATO leaders want to build up the defense and spend more money on the Baltics because they're the most vulnerable, even though we contributed to that mess there.
And what they're saying, what the Turks are saying, and they're playing on the role of terrorism, they say, well, yeah, we're not going to give you support.
We're going to veto everything you want to do in the Baltics unless you declare the Kurds terrorists.
You know, I think that's an on-again, off-again.
Whatever pleases us or others, you know, whether the Kurds are friends and foes and allies or whether they're the enemies.
And of course, for right now, for the benefit of the Turks, the Kurds are the enemy.
And this is supposed to solve all the problems.
But use of the word terrorism is not an accident.
Yeah, and this is the France and the UK to a large degree created the problem, the terrorist problem there in the first place by signing on to the regime change in Syria.
But, you know, this is an example, Dr. Paul, of how the mainstream media operates.
So China is the new challenge for NATO, you know, and the rest of us think it's absurd.
But here's what CNN says.
A challenge from China could be just the thing to pull NATO together.
Yeah, you know, thrill.
But of course, Esper, our defense secretary, he's a little worried.
He doesn't want China to be viewed as the enemy.
Esper said, that doesn't mean China is now an enemy, but we need to help shape that together as an alliance.
We need to be prepared in case things do turn out in a way we prefer they not, whatever that means.
You know, the Russians and the Chinese have had on-again, off-again relationship.
But if anything, as a consequence of this, if NATO decides they're taking on China now, and they've already taken on Russia, you know, that's the whole reason right now that we can spend all that money on Eastern Europe because the Russians might invade it.
But one thing, financially and militarily, strategically, this is putting China and Russia much closer together.
And of course, their threat isn't putting on sanctions.
Their threat is, you know, we might just come down with a currency that will be used as a reserve currency of the world.
So that is all mixed in there.
But right now, they're going to be much closer aligned and motivated to do that.
Not so much that they are loving each other better, but they're hating us more.
And we antagonize them both, which really doesn't make any sense.
But a lot of the foreign intervention doesn't make much sense to us anyway.
So this is just another strategy that doesn't seem to help what we're interested in, and that is national security and protecting our liberties and having a sensible economic system.
But nevertheless, we are looking for enemies.
And I think the enemies we create are always going to be more numerous and more dangerous than they think.
They think, well, we'll just make a token enemy and pretend.
And that's sort of justified, and they got the authority or token authority to go in and go into war against Iraq because Saddam Hussein was Hitler and this sort of thing.
But long term, what does it lead to?
We're still there.
We're still fighting a war in Afghanistan always because there's a terrorist out there.
Now it's terrorism.
And terrorism they can find in any country whatsoever, even here in this country, which is really the scary part, not only because we have violence coming to our country, but because it is going to be used for the continuation of the deterioration of our privacy and our liberties here at home.
Yeah, and you know, if there's one person who should be looking for a job, that's Jen Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General.
But no, he's chugging along, pulling that big salary.
But here's what he said about China as a new threat.
It's not about moving NATO into the South China Sea, but it's about taking into account the fact that China is coming closer to us.
And so I'm thinking, are they building bases in Mexico, you know, in Greece?
What's going on?
No, here's what he said.
He pointed to Chinese activity in the Arctic, Africa, and heavy investments in European infrastructure.
So Stoltenberg and the NATO whites want to use a military alliance to attack China's successful business investing strategy.
That's what it boils down to.
And here's the clicker.
This tells you everything you need to know.
Derek Cholat, he's a former Obama Pentagon official on the news that China was the new focus.
He said, no question, there is an opportunity.
Guess where he works?
The German Marshall Fund.
All of these think tanks financed by NATO, financed by the military-industrial complex.
This is a great opportunity for us.
And, you know, this argument about the danger or the expansion of China in the South China Sea.
I wonder if when we put our nuclear subs and have a submarine base in the Gulf of Mexico, we're a danger to the world.
And of course, the example we use so often is what would we think if we had about 15 Chinese vessels patrolling just on the edge of the international waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
Even though that's international water, we still think it's our pond.
But that doesn't matter.
We have to demonstrate.
And right now, it's not only South Island's chi, but it's also in the Formosa Straits there.
We have to show that we are going to go through there and continue the process.
But right now, I wouldn't give NATO a very good grade because it's for what they've just accomplished.
But it might be moving in the direction that we like, showing how inept and unnecessary they are and how dangerous they can be.
So they're going to be around a while.
They're going to go down fighting, fighting the American taxpayer.
And Trump has it right, and that's why it's appealing.
Why should we pay all the bills?
But we still pay too many because he has a few things that he wants to spend it on.
I'm not much interested in spending on it.
But it is true, the American taxpayer, in spite of all the freebies we get by being able to print the world currency, we're building a mess for ourselves.
And it will come down.
It's going to be both financial and it's going to be our position in the world.
Well, you know, we're not in favor of the government providing all of our services for us, but you have to say at least the Germans are getting something for it.
They're getting the free education.
They get their health care.
The only thing we have is a big program for the military-industrial complex to get rich.
So, you know, welfare is not a great thing, but at least they're getting something out of it.
But I think, you know, NATO is coming out of us looking weaker than ever.
It's a jobs program for failed politicians, and that's about all it is.
It's completely bereft of any really ideological cohesion.
We see it here with the fumbling.
So let's hope that it does go down at some point or at least become more irrelevant than it is.
I just want to close by thanking everybody for participating in Giving Tuesday yesterday and making your donation to the Ron Paul Institute, the Ron Paul Liberty Report, to keep us going.
We had tremendous response.
We're humbled by your support for what we do.
It makes us want to work that much harder to keep bringing you different sorts of news and perspectives.
So thank you very much.
Very good.
And I want to close with saying that our suggestion yesterday that we ought to pull the plug on this very, very sick organization, NATO, the plug is still there.
They're still energized.
They're still being financed, as Trump points out, unfairly by the United States taxpayers.
But also, we have the most power, and we are the ones that control the empire.
So it's a trade-off that is acceptable.
But I think there's no evidence this past week to show that the American taxpayers should be friendlier with NATO and more supportive of it.
There's been controversy with NATO for a long, long time, and I think it's going to continue to get worse.
NATO's Authoritarian Threat 00:00:59
But I would like to ask people to look at this in the larger context, and that is internationalism, international governments.
And when they join, whether it was NAFTA or whether it's the WTO and the United Nations and the IMF, it doesn't serve our purpose because it's the opposite.
The bigger the government and the more governmental levels there are, the less personal liberties we have.
When you look at some of the plans are for what's going to hit us here at home, now it's being proposed by the administration that we have pictures taken of everybody getting on an airplane flying out of the country.
And so it's more authoritarianism, and it goes along with more of these international government agencies.
So we have to, you know, look and key in on one subject, what the real purpose of our government should be, and that is to protect our liberty.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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