German Foreign Minister: 'We Are At War With Russia...'
With the sudden about-face of the US and Germany on sending heavy tanks to Ukraine, the world finds itself bizarrely transported back in time to WWI or WWII. German tanks with iron crosses returning to the very ground they were expelled from in 1945. History repeats itself. First as tragedy, then as farce. Also today: GOP kicks two Dems off of Intelligence Committee - do they have a point? And...does anyone in government NOT have classified documents at home?
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
With us today is Dan McAdams, Don Daniel.
Good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I'm doing fine, thank you.
Good.
There you go.
Good, yes.
Absolutely.
Okay, we're going to start off with, you know, Woodrow Wilson.
I didn't tell you that.
My favorite president.
Your favorite president.
Now, Woodrow Wilson was making the world safe for democracy, and he pumped the country up, and he went into a war.
But as time went on, more and more people understood that whole situation.
Totally unnecessary.
The war was essentially over.
And he just wanted to get in at the end of the war and remake the Middle East and whatnot, and also set the stage for World War II.
But it looks like we're in something similar to this.
Not right now.
We're worrying about tanks going into a very dangerous spot in Ukraine up against the Russian government and Russian territory, just looking for trouble.
Well, the last one didn't work out so bad.
And we use this analogy because they're still worrying about World War I tanks.
But this one's probably more dangerous because if things go out of hand and gets out of control, then the weaponry is much greater than it was in World War I.
We were barely using fighter airplanes at that time.
But this is so unnecessary, but now it looks like there's an agreement.
The Germans had a good reason not to do it.
You'd think they'd be independent enough to not get, do exactly as we tell them.
And what?
And finally, we've gone along with it, even though there's a little bit of discussion here.
Pentagon isn't rolling over because they have to get, you know, practical-minded every once in a while.
And they're saying that it might not be the smartest thing in the world to send these tanks.
But I think this might be a demonstration that national defense and war isn't the issue as much as money and making tanks.
You know, we're getting low on our weapons.
We have to refurbish.
And we need to spend more money.
Now, the argument is not for maybe we ought to back off on Ukraine, giving it all away, even though this is what we're doing here.
But we're low on weaponry for ourselves.
So the military industrial complex, I'm sure, are feeling very pleased.
They're not upset about this little debate going on about how many more weapons we can send and how long this is going to last.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
In fact, it's interesting that you mentioned Wilson because I was listening to a really interesting interview that Judge Napolitano did with Colonel McGregor yesterday.
And McGregor, who, of course, is an historian among many other things, a military expert, he went down the list of all the things that FDR did to provoke Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor.
I mean, in a very objective way, including leaving the Pacific Fleet there when it should have gone back to the Puget Sound where it was located.
All sorts of things that his staff was telling him, you shouldn't do this.
And he said, never mind, keep doing it.
Never mind.
Keep doing it.
It was very clear he wanted to provoke a Japanese reaction so that he could justify the war that he wanted.
And it really does seem like history is repeating itself with this announcement yesterday.
And it's kind of a farce in a way because The Germans said, okay, well, we'll send some leopard tanks, but America needs to send some of its Abrams tanks first.
And that's when the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said, Michael McColl said, well, why don't we just send one?
And then the Germans will be on the hook for sending the leopards in.
So the whole thing is a farce.
So it turns out everything broke down yesterday.
Germany announced it would send the leopards.
The U.S. announced it would send the Abrams.
But the optics of this are obviously very similar, I think, to what FDR did, and you say what Wilson did, which is imagine what it would look, what it looks like to see German leopard tanks with the iron crosses on them barreling through the exact same territory that they barreled through in the Second World War.
It's such, we don't realize it because it didn't happen on our soil.
But I would imagine for the residents of the former USSR, this image in their mind of German tanks again rolling through our territory must be just unreal.
You know, we are all often saying that the American people have short memories.
They go through episodes and they forget about what the Vietnam War was like.
They don't do much to stay out.
And they have these short memories.
But the military people, the people who are really in charge of all these very, very dangerous weapons, they have short memories too.
Either they're short or they know exactly what they're doing and they don't care.
And unfortunately, that's possible, even though I guess I have to give them a break.
They're sometimes just pure politicians and profit-mongering, and they don't know any better and they don't care, and they don't have a conscience to worry about what might happen as long as they have the money in the bank.
Yeah, that's true.
And just to cap this whole thing off, there's an amazing clip of the German foreign minister, a young woman, Annalina Baerbach, was quoted.
Let's put this clip up.
Let's watch this clip of her basically essentially saying, using these exact words, we are at war with Russia.
It's pretty amazing to listen to.
And therefore, I've said already in the last days, yes, we have to do more to defend Ukraine.
Yes, we have to do more also on tanks.
But the most important and the crucial part is that we do it together and that we do not do the blame game in Europe because we are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other.
Thank you.
Pretty remarkable.
She's very young.
I wonder if she studied any history.
Yeah, that's it.
Well, I'm afraid they're going to make this step.
You know, they're still saying, well, I think it was one statement.
This isn't going to be next week.
They can't get the tanks ready next week.
It's going to take a while.
Who knows what it's going to be like when the tanks finally get shipped on the ships to go over there?
Or they, of course, if they need to speed things up, they're always capable of doing that too.
And that would be more dangerous because the weaponry that is available, if they were convinced that this is now a real war.
And of course, I don't think they can predict exactly how the Russians are going to respond unless they listen to what they're saying because so far they haven't hedged on what they said would happen.
They drew the red line and they lived up to it.
But we on our side, NATO, they don't talk much about that.
They don't talk much about it.
Well, let's look at some of the details.
This is from the Wall Street Journal.
Put up that first clip.
And this is the article we're talking about.
And it was, of course, written about on anti-war.com, as usual, doing a great job.
U.S. leans toward providing Abrams tanks to Ukraine.
We've heard now that they are going to do that.
Delivers would be part of a deal to enable provision of German-built leopard tanks to Ukraine.
Let's put on the next one.
This is from the article on anti-war.com explaining it.
So they know this will be part of a broader diplomatic understanding with Germany in which Berlin would agree to send a smaller number of its own Leopard 2 tanks and would approve the delivery of other German-made tanks by Poland and other nations.
Let's go to the next one, please, because this explains how many leopards are going to be going there.
Der Spiegel reported that Germany is ready to send Ukraine 14 Leopard 2S from its military stocks and will sign off from delivery from Poland and an ally in Scandinavia.
So we're talking about 14 tanks from Germany to Ukraine, and they're probably Poland will put a few in there.
They'll throw a few tanks here and there.
How many the U.S. will send?
We don't know.
It looks like 30 to 50 is the number that the U.S. will send.
And so on one hand, yes, it's an escalation.
These are heavy tanks.
They're heavy weapons.
But on the other hand, we're talking about maybe a total of 100 or even 200 tanks.
I don't think most Americans who watch the mainstream media understand that Ukraine started this war with about 1,500 tanks.
And they were given an additional 700 tanks by the West.
So we're talking about, you know, anywhere close to 2,000 tanks.
They've all been blown up.
So sending another 100 or 200 is not really going to make a difference.
And as you pointed out, there's the whole issue of how are they going to run these tanks?
You don't just, it's not like, you know, my car outside, you basically turn the key and you go driving.
These are pretty sophisticated pieces of equipment.
We're talking about months, maybe years.
And in fact, the U.S. says it'll be probably at least a year before we get these tanks in here.
You know, back in the 70s, we had debates in the Congress and more money for more tanks.
And I kept asking, why are we building these tanks?
Are we going to have a tank war?
Because the only enemy we had were the Soviets.
I said, are they going to come across Alaska or someplace?
But that's a whole thing that they seem to be prepared for what's going on.
But I was just wondering, and I've talked to you about this a little bit because I'd like to do a program a little bit different.
We do real good updates, I believe, especially since not very many people have from the very beginning talked about 2014.
We talked about 2014 when it was happening, when we were involved in a coup, setting the stage up for this.
But I think it's still important for the American people, those who are curious about this, to understand more of what was going on in Ukraine between the end of World War II up until 2014.
Because that was setting the stage for it.
And who were the culprits?
I think there's a few times that we implied or made promises and led them to believe that we would do certain things.
And just like in economics, we have defaulted on so many times in our promises.
We default all the time when it comes to monetary issues.
And I would say that we have defaulted on our promises on foreign policy as well.
And if we were looking for them, we probably could find a few other ones.
But I think this one is very important to understand how we have gotten to this point where we're on the verge of a war with Russia.
And once again, you mentioned about how they ignored the problems And the efforts by FDR going into Japan.
And that was just horrible.
I didn't believe that for a decade or two because I didn't want to.
That's impossible.
Nobody would deliberately set the stage for a bigger war.
But sadly, I believe that was going on.
Only a monster or a demon would do that.
And I think we got our answer.
You know, it's funny you mentioned the history of the Ukraine thing because I think over the weekend I was looking for some articles to put up on the Rumpo Institute website.
And I went back and I looked at some of your statements from around 2004.
And there was a great piece that I put up, 2004, about the U.S. meddling in the Ukrainian elections.
I can't believe that.
You were on the mark.
You were on the mark.
So you're right.
It didn't start last February.
It didn't start in 2014.
It started way before that.
But let's look, speaking of the tanks, let's look at this next clip.
This is from the same article from antiwar.com.
And this is a very, very important point to make, if we can put that up, that next clip.
So military, and this is interesting.
This is an important thing, Dr. Paul, in my opinion.
Military officials have argued publicly that the Abrams tanks require a substantial amount of training and logistics support and therefore aren't appropriate for this conflict, for this moment in the conflict.
In a contentious meeting last week at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the U.S. and its allies failed to persuade Germany to allow other nations to send the German-made tanks, exposing the first RIGRIT.
And then it says, previously the Pentagon had ruled out providing the tanks to Ukraine, saying they're too complicated for Ukrainians to maintain and operate.
But the White House and the State Department officials were described as being more open to providing the Abrams to break the diplomatic log jam.
So here you have our military, and there are people in the military who are very smart and they know these things very well saying this is not an appropriate tool.
It will not change things.
There's a huge downside.
And then you have the political people in the State Department and the White House saying, we don't care.
We don't care what you say.
We don't care about your military expertise.
We want the tanks there for political reasons and they're going to go there.
And that's really interesting to hear that being overruled.
And in fact, in the same podcast I was listening to with the judge and Colonel McGregor, the colonel who actually is a tanker, he drove his tank into Baghdad in the first Gulf War.
He knows what he's talking about.
He said himself, the Abrams are not appropriate because of their gas turbine engine.
They essentially use like a jet engine and they can go very fast.
But the problem is, as he said, I'm not an expert, but he is.
They pull up a lot of debris from under the ground and that means they break down all the time and they suck up an enormous amount of fuel, which is the one thing they don't have there.
So interestingly enough, the political minds say this is a ridiculous, stupid thing to do.
But the politicians, that's another story.
And that sort of explains this whole thing about what Roosevelt was doing.
Political Minds vs. Goals00:02:20
They have ulterior motives.
It makes no sense.
And a lot of people realize it's wrong, and then it turns out that way, and nobody seems to get punished for it.
But the goals are important.
So maybe their goals aren't anywhere close to what our goals may be, or some of the military people who are a little smarter and a little bit more honorable arguing the downside of this.
And it's sort of like the street chaos, the chaos on the street.
When we look at Antifa and Black Lives Matter and the way the police are handled, and nobody's punished, and they just go and tear up the cities.
And why would they do this?
Why don't they crack down on it?
And then the only thing that can explain it is they want it to happen.
There is a goal.
There's a benefit from that.
So somewhere in here, exactly, and that gets unfortunately in understanding it, but gets into the subjective area.
Why do people do it?
Are they stupid or do they have another plan?
And as time goes on, I search more for the plan because I think common sense would tell them that they're looking for trouble.
But it's probably a mixture of things, but it's just too bad because to me, to sort it out and find the perfect group of people to manage affairs like this and manage intervention, whether it's intervention in economics or intervention overseas, it's impossible to do it.
There's too many variables.
That's why the position is much easier to defend morally and as a practicality is just stay out of those troubles.
You know, you shouldn't.
How do you manage a fiat currency?
You just need smart people doing that.
You can't do it.
It's that problem.
Foreign interventionism is a problem.
And you will have these arguments, thank goodness, there's a few people speaking up.
And I've been trying to review what was going on with the Kennedy assassination and the extent to which our CIA went and all the people that were killed afterwards, anybody who had the slightest bit of information.
I mean, they are obsessed with these policy things, and that is where the problem is.
Battlefield PR Matters00:02:44
We need more people to get out of government schools.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Well, here's an interesting aspect of it.
It's almost a comical aspect because, as you know, the Baltic states are the most aggressive toward Russia.
And yeah, they were sucked into the USSR and they're still bitter about that.
Understandable.
But they also have some weird ambitions for territory.
And Radek Sikorsky, who was the Polish foreign minister back at the time of the Majdan coup in 2014, he actually leaked something out that was interesting, which is he's claiming that the Polish government at the beginning of this conflict early last year, almost a year ago, they had designs on part of western Ukraine because it used to be part of Poland.
Lvov was part of Poland.
And of course, before that, it's part of Prussia as Lemberg.
And Lithuania is also interested in part of Ukraine that it used to have.
And here's the next, this is almost comical if you look at this next clip.
Here's a Lithuanian Ministry of Defense.
Lithuania's Ministry of Defense on Military Support to Kiev.
We don't have tanks, but we have options.
So they want to, they would give us some tanks if they had them, but they don't have them.
So too bad about that.
Let's do this.
Just finish this one out really quick.
If we can look at this next one, just a couple of updates so people will understand that tanks will not be arriving tomorrow.
And this is from Russia Prime Vera International News.
The total Ukraine was promised 113 Leopard 2s, 14 Challenger 2s, those are from the UK, and 30 to 50 Abrams tanks.
The delivery timeline may stretch out for more than a year.
And again, we're talking about maximum 200 tanks.
They started with over 1,000.
They've all been blown up.
And let's do one more.
This is just to underscore this point about the timeline.
This is an ABC News article.
The U.S. promised Ukraine Abrams tanks, but Kiev will be able to receive them not earlier than in a year.
And that was reported by the ABC.
So you have to ask yourself: the military says they're useless in this conflict.
They won't get there for over a year.
And we see that Russian is making advances right now toward Bakhmut.
So the question is on the battlefield, and the Colonel has underscored this many, many times, on the battlefield they mean nothing, but on the soft battlefield of PR, I think that's what this is all about.
Yeah, my comment was, how does anybody know what it's going to be like in one year from now?
They might, oh, I don't think we need these tanks anymore.
We need bigger bombers or we need more missiles and that sort of thing, and the whole situation would change.
Political Revelations00:12:59
Yeah, well, that was the thing, too.
You know, it was, oh, the Javelins are going to win the war.
They didn't.
The High Mars are going to win the war.
They didn't win the war.
Now it's the tanks.
What's going to be next?
You know, F-16s, whatever.
B-52s, who knows?
But let's move on to the next one, Dr. Paul, because this is kind of interesting, I think.
If we can put on that next clip, McCarthy has formally rejected the appeal of the Senate of the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, to have Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell on the House Intel.
They have been on that committee, and McCarthy says, no way.
These guys are off the committee.
Yeah, you'd think that somebody would have a memory on how the Republicans were treated about the commission, the study.
No, no, no, that's January 6th.
January 6th.
I mean, they weren't even allowed to have the material as a defense lawyer would have to be.
And they put non-Republicans on it.
Yeah, the pretense it might be a label.
But it was the principle was the same.
They struck them off.
And, yeah, it's a different committee.
Oh, no, this is different this time.
But the whole thing is it's politics.
And that's what's going on.
But it's, I don't follow McCarthy for this.
I mean, matter of fact, the more of that that they do, because it's, and they ought to show, and I think McCarthy did make an effort to show exactly why he was doing this and made it a little bit more diplomatic than, I think, how they treated the Republicans.
Yeah, he went out of his way to say, look, we know that we were kept off the January 6th committee for political reasons.
I don't want to do that.
I have some very practical reasons.
He said these two members can sit on other committees, but not on the House Intel Committee.
And in fact, we do have a little clip from him, that second tweet, if we can put it up.
It's a video clip, so you'll want to listen in, Dr. Paul, of McCarthy explaining his rationale for keeping them off the committee.
If we can find that.
So here we go.
Okay, thanks.
What did Adam Schiff do as the chairman of the Intel Committee?
What Adam Schiff did, use his power as a chairman and lie to the American public.
Even the Inspector General said it.
When Devin Nunes put out a memo, he said it was false.
When we had a laptop, he used it before an election to be politics and say that it was false and said it was the Russians.
When he knew different, when he knew the Intel, if you've talked to John Radcliffe, DNI, he came out ahead of time and says there's no Intel to prove that.
And he used his position as chairman, knowing he has information the rest of America does not, and lied to the American public.
When a whistleblower came forward, he said he did not know the individual, even though his staff had met with him and set it up.
So no, he does not have a right to sit on that.
But I will not be like Democrats and play politics with these, where they removed Republicans from committees and all committees.
So yes, he can serve on a committee, but he will not serve on Intel because it goes to the national security of America.
And I will always say that.
That's a good point that he makes Dr. Paul.
I guess well done.
I think it's well done.
Adam Schiff used his position on the committee pretending to have intel about RussiaGate and Trump's collusion with the Russians.
And he knew it was a lie, but he pushed it and pushed it and pushed it.
I think it does disqualify me.
And I'm not a fan of Kevin McCarthy.
I know you aren't either, but I think it does certainly make sense from this perspective.
That's for sure.
And I imagine that will go on for a while before that is settled.
But if that tone remains and has documents and try to avoid some of that rhetoric stuff, but I'm sure it'll be at times fun to watch.
Yeah, and fun to watch.
Of course, they're using it for some China bashing because Swalwell apparently was friendly with the Chinese gal who had some due to the colours.
We can't cheer some of that stuff off.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, you know, that's how it goes.
So we'll keep an eye on it.
I think it's probably a smart move to do that.
I mean, just for national security, the guy's a total liar.
And you called for him to be kicked out of Congress a couple weeks ago.
You are awfully mean.
But I guess we'll move on to the next one if you're ready.
Okay, our last little story.
And it's similar in a way.
And it kind of this is the category of who doesn't have classified documents at home.
Well, I don't, and I know you don't, but Michael Pence does.
Let's put this up real quick because this came out yesterday that classified documents found at Mike Pence's house.
Oh my gosh, Mike, we hardly knew you.
Let's put on the next one.
Here's what it's about.
On January 18th, Pence's team notified the National Archives that documents were inadvertently boxed and transported.
It doesn't work that way.
And here's a quote from them.
The findings at Pence's residence comes as President Biden is facing mounting criticism, which also had come from Pence over the discovery of classified materials.
So it's kind of interesting timing.
I don't know how you feel, Dr. Paul.
Maybe I'm feeling conspiratorial this morning.
But just when the heat is turned up on Biden, Mike Pence comes up and says, I've got some too.
I've got some too.
It's pretty weird.
A little bit of attention.
Yeah, I guess so.
No, it's running a systematic expectation of how this has come about.
First, it was Trump.
He was the bad guy.
And the Democrats were really, really piling on.
But lo and behold, this thing on Mike Pence comes, and it probably wasn't inactive.
I think there is a conspiracy by Democrats against Biden to take him out of the 2024 election.
And so they're out to get him.
So now it became Trump versus Biden.
Which one was the worst?
And then the Democrats, you know, some of the loyal Democrats are saying, oh, this is completely different.
Completely different, which is a bit of a stretch.
But then Biden gets into trouble as a vice president.
And then there's an argument about that.
Is the vice president different than the president?
I happen to think there are.
So there is a difference, in my view, and the difference is that a vice president and the president has different authorities to manage these documents.
And then we have Mike Pence.
But, you know, in all of this, if you add up all the nonsense, all the paper they're finding, everything, if the president had Trump and Biden and also Pence, I would say that's minuscule to the number of pages and the corruption of the Hillary system.
Yeah.
And when have we heard very much about it?
And the last time I read something, they said, oh, she destroyed everything, so we can't do much about it.
Isn't that tampering with evidence?
She must be a much more thorough individual in handling this kind of stuff.
And you know, I mentioned it the other day, but Peter Van Buren had a great piece that we had up on our site about why hers was the most damaging.
What you say because what she had on her server was basically openly available to anyone.
The Russians could have hacked it.
The Chinese could have hacked it.
The Cubans could have it.
The Ethiopians could have hacked it.
It was pretty amazing that she had these things wide open.
And the other thing, though, about the Biden papers, which is interesting, and Tucker Carlson did a great monologue.
I watched a little bit of it this morning.
He did it last night, where he was citing Miranda Devine, who is actually one of the last real journalists.
She works for the New York Post.
She's been on the Hunter Biden laptop story from day one.
He talked about something that she wrote about a memo that Hunter Biden wrote to one of his colleagues at Barisma.
That's where he meant that he had an $80,000 a month job.
Not bad work for not having to show up.
All you have to do is sit at home and smoke whatever they're smoking.
But nevertheless, he wrote this memo that looked exactly like something out of the State Department classified document.
And now we know that those classified documents were at the house he was staying.
So the question is: is old Hunter Biden out there leafing through these things and making a Xerox and sending them over to his business partners in Ukraine?
That's the real scandal, I think.
You know, what if all of a sudden we had an administration and a confirmation that, well, we need to reveal this stuff.
Everybody that shouldn't have it has it.
So why don't we make all this available?
Everything that has been involved in this classification, just open it up and put it out there and let the people read it.
My guess is it would be very boring.
They wouldn't know what they're doing and they'd lose interest in it, except for the political stuff.
You didn't have this political stuff, it would have no meaning.
But oh no, it's national security.
We have to protect it.
And yet at the same time, their national security is to use the CIA and the FBI to increase our danger and not help us at all.
And so I think that this is way blown.
It's 98% political.
And maybe there's something in there.
But I just, I don't think there are any real secrets that mean, oh, we just read the Soviets are going to come back and they have this bomb.
So we better build these shelters again.
That's not going to happen.
No, that's a great suggestion, though.
As the Twitter files did to show the government collusion with Twitter, we should have the classified papers files where we actually see what they were and see if they were important at all anyway.
But I'm going to close out.
I think if you're ready, I want to thank all of our viewers and listeners, especially who listen to the show.
We've got a lot of listeners out there who only listen to the audio part, and we don't thank them enough.
But we do notice, Chris gives us the numbers of our listeners, and we really appreciate all of you.
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And again, thanks for tuning in, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
You know, when I was in the presidential campaign, I remember we had a fair number of debates in 07 and 08.
And there was a time when, okay, today we're going to have a debate over economic policy.
Okay, that's good.
We'll do that.
And then the next time they say, well, now we're going to have the next go around, we're going to have a debate on foreign policy.
And I got to think, and I think I did get a chance to express myself.
Well, why is it so different?
How can you have foreign policy issues without dealing with economic policy?
You run up these deficits and you, oh, but that's all done in the name of national security.
Social policy is all done for helping the poor and the unemployed, this sort of thing.
So that is an artificial separation because it shouldn't be that complicated.
Some people think that I make it oversimplified, but I don't think it has to be more than that because the Constitution is available to a lot of people and they don't have to have a PhD to read it and know what it says.
But basically, the theory and the thrust of the Constitution is the government should be non-interventionist.
They should stay out of our houses.
They should give us our privacy.
They should stay out of the economy.
They should stay out of our affairs.
And they should stay out of the affairs of other nations.
And non-interventionism is one thing.
It goes to both areas.
And that is a basic principle.
If you don't understand and know what non-intervention is, and that it means volunteerism and people aren't forced by the government on everything that they do, then we don't live in a free country.
And I think more and more people today are starting to realize, you know, that seems right.
We don't live in a really free country.
But we have to do it.
We have to do it because now we have COVID up.
What are we going to do without the government?
Well, we'd have been a lot better off without the government over COVID or being involved in the coup, which started this thing in 2014 in Ukraine.
So non-intervention and volunteerism is a far cry better than the kind of nonsense that Republicans and Democrats basically promote as a bipartisan agreement.