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Nov. 7, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
32:33
Biden Mideast Policy In Shambles After Blinken's Disaster Trip

Coming off a disastrous Middle East trip, at which he was shunned at every stop, Biden's Secretary of State Tony Blinken returned to a "dissent" memo signed by numerous State Department officials opposing current US policy. With poll numbers sagging for Biden - and even worse for Kamala - what's Team Biden's next move? All out war?

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Time Text
Chaos In The Middle East 00:15:15
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our favorite co-hosts.
Uh-oh, I'll be in trouble.
Monday through Thursday.
Yeah.
Very good.
We're all set to go.
And we're going to talk about, you know, in general, we're talking about foreign policy in a specific manner, the chaos created in the Middle East, the Middle East.
Of course, we've been there before.
Remember, after 9-11, we're going to remake the Middle East.
It was because they had taken over Iraq.
So the first thing we have to do is invade Iraq and Afghanistan and all that nonsense.
So the foreign policy problems have been around for a long time.
And yet, right now, we have a real mess.
It seems to be more messy than ever and more dangerous than generally speaking.
They haven't pointed the nukes yet, but they're capable of it.
At least the threat is out there.
We have submarines floating around Iran and telling them you better behave because we can take care of you.
And so there's been a lot of that, but the big thing is the fight between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
And that's been going on for a long time.
I think the mess basically, and we'll be talking about this, is the main reason that this has happened and why we're involved is not the fault of the Palestinians, not the fault of Israeli.
It's the fault of the people who have managed our foreign policy and pretended that our moral responsibility was to maintain an empire.
And we've been doing that, especially since World War II.
And they say, well, we haven't had another world war.
Well, they keep working on it, and they've killed a lot of people in the meantime.
And right now, I think more people have lost confidence.
It used to be that there was confidence about bipartisanship would actually be helpful.
In the old days, that's what they used to do, at least for symbolism.
If there was a major crisis, a lot of times the president, if it was a Democrat, would have a consultation with a former president that might be Republican just to say, we're together on this.
And that occurred.
But this is not what's happening today.
It's just the building of this.
And they have bipartisanship, but it's always bipartisanship to undermine an American foreign policy.
And this has led to a lot of problems.
It's encouraged the military industrial complex to grow in power.
And it has taught generations now that interventionism is a moral issue.
And the morality is on the sides of us assuming responsibility for intervening and being the policeman of the world.
And that it is noble to have an empire that is dedicated to good and justice.
And it's out of control, and it's reflecting what's here at home.
And I'll tell you what, there's a lot of chaos right here, but it is definitely related to the principle of interventionism.
And in this case, we're going to be talking about interventionism overseas.
How long are we doing it?
When are we going to quit?
When are we even going to identify it?
And that's where the real struggle is.
And of course, we cannot accept or expect our universities to straighten things out, especially when so much harm has come from the wisdom of the great universities and the conflict there.
So I would say that we have to do our best because we're dedicated to trying to sort this out and suggest to people that there's a different way of doing this.
And it's not expensive.
What's expensive is this crazy stuff going on now, just this foreign policy.
So we want to talk more specifically, though, what's going on.
It doesn't look like there's much encouragement.
It looks like there's more friction than ever.
But why don't we start off with this issue that was in Politico?
U.S. diplomats slam Israel's policy in leaked memo.
And I was asking you later, what do you think?
Is this a leaked memo on purpose?
Or is it a memo that is pretend the secret and the information getting out?
But it does give us information and some of it you can rely on because it's just introducing the floundering.
They have no goals and they don't know what's happening.
And no wonder things are getting worse.
And the worse it gets over there, the deeper we get involved militarily, financially, and the whole mess.
So it will come to an end.
Let's just hope we can get and contribute to something positive about what the substitute has to be.
And it's not the principle of interventionism and empire.
Yeah, I mean, I think this, you're right, this does show that it's not a wise idea to tie U.S. foreign policy too closely with a foreign country.
You know, whether it's Ukraine, it's been Israel for many decades.
It's not such a great idea.
You know, you have this question, well, is the U.S. Israel's proxy or is Israel the U.S.'s proxy?
But whatever the case, one thing we know is that Biden has been botching everything since the attacks of October 7th because his team's, it probably wasn't his idea, but his team's initial great idea was, I'm going to go over there.
Of course, I'm going to meet with Netanyahu first.
I'm going to give them my condolences after that horrific attack.
I'm going to give them the green light to do whatever they think it needs.
And then, to balance it out, I'm going to meet with all these Arab countries.
We're going to have a summit.
We're going to have a nice time.
You're going to look like I'm the equal person here.
Well, it didn't turn out that way.
You know, you had the bombing of the hospital that was blamed on Israel.
And the Arab countries said, we don't want to meet with you.
We don't want to have a summit with you.
You're not welcome here.
Go home.
And so you had Biden going home empty-handed, having only met with Netanyahu and giving him a green light.
So it gave the impression that it's even more one-sided than it actually is.
And so that is botching it from square one.
And if you put on this first clip, as you point out, Politico has an article today or yesterday about how U.S. diplomats slam Israel policy in leaked memo.
So State Department, now the State Department has a back channel for a dissent channel, and it's nothing unusual.
It happens a lot.
You have a lot of analysts who are, you have political appointees, and you have analysts who are there on the GS scale, right?
And some of those tend to be more experts.
I don't want to bore everyone with too many details, but a lot of these people work on these issues for a lifetime.
And so if you dissent against the policy of your administration, you have the ability to write a dissent memo without any retribution, or at least theoretically, without any retribution, saying, hey, I don't think this is the best policy.
And then you'll have colleagues sign on to it.
It's a very normal thing, and it happens a lot.
But this one was leaked, as you suggest.
And it says a few things.
Let's just look at a couple of things that it says, Dr. Paul.
So in the next one, and I call it a blistering critique.
We haven't seen the memo, so I don't know what that means.
But it's a critique of the Biden administration's handling of the Israel-Hamas war in a dissent memo, arguing that the U.S. should be willing to publicly criticize the Israelis.
Go to the next one.
Now, here are the two key requests of the memo.
The U.S. support a ceasefire and that it balances private and public messaging toward Israel, including airing criticisms of Israeli military tactics and treatment of Palestinians that the U.S. generally prefers to keep private.
The gap between America's private and public messaging, quote, contributes to regional public perceptions that the U.S. is a biased and dishonest actor, which at best does not advance and at worst harms U.S. interests worldwide.
So that's what you have in this memo.
And they go on to concede that, of course, Israel has a legitimate right and obligation to seek justice against Hamas for the 1,400 dead.
But, and here's that next clip, it argues the extent of human lives lost thus far is unacceptable.
I mean, the disproportionality is so massive, Dr. Paul, when you have 1,400, that's a terrible tragedy.
But then you kill over 10,000 and 4,000 of them are children, you've got this disproportionality.
So I think what the State Department experts are saying is, look, you're not going to be able to do foreign policy because you're not perceived as an actor who can bring people together like the U.S. has been in the past.
You're considered to be a cheerleader for one side, and it makes you ineffective.
And I think that's a pretty solid message.
You know, the conflict has been going on for a long time, many decades.
And we've been intervening, pretending that we are the arbiter and we can settle this.
But the thing is, what we do, we end up pretending that we can satisfy both sides.
And you can't do that.
All that does is antagonize and make things much worse.
And they might one day start to think, well, maybe this is an impossible foreign policy.
Maybe we can't satisfy both sides.
Maybe, matter of fact, why don't we satisfy the people in this country that are now waking up to the fact too many wars?
I mean, it isn't just Israel that confuses people.
Look how long they went a couple years spending all the hundred billions of dollars in Ukraine, and then they finally wake up.
But that's where the real tragedy is.
It just keeps going on and on, and they don't look back at that.
And we send over diplomats, and they're supposed to do this.
And then it's just about impossible to satisfy both sides.
This political argument article says the Biden team has increasingly shifted, who would have guessed, its public messaging to emphasize the importance of safeguarding civilians and following international law.
You know, we care about that.
But it has largely avoided direct criticism of Israeli actions.
So, you know, they have a bundle there.
And you might say, well, you know, this is all they have to work with.
And there's probably some decent people there hoping that they can contribute to working out peace.
But I think it's one of these situations that you can't stop a fire with gasoline.
You know, it gets worse, especially under the circumstances that have existed in the Middle East.
And that hasn't been, a lot of times I date things from having gotten worse after the UN got involved after World War II.
But there's been struggles in that area for religious and political, all kinds of reasons for a long time.
So this idea that we can balance it out by our diplomats and we'll send our Secretary of State over there and he'll make everything right.
Well, our preference would be non-interventionism, which is what we don't tell them what to do.
We don't tell them what their messaging should be.
We don't give them any money.
And I know that you probably would say this, that if we had not, if we had followed a non-interventionist foreign policy, we would not be having this war in the Middle East right now.
I think that's pretty obvious.
But if you do take on, if you do decide, hey, we're going to be the referee, we're going to be out there, we're going to bring everyone together, you can't do that and at the same time be so completely one-sided that nobody with a half a brain can't see transparently through you that you're on this guy's side.
So how can you be a referee?
I mean, so you have a completely ineffective foreign policy.
And in fact, you start becoming the laughing stock of the region and you become disrespected.
And that's, if you go on the next clip, that's exactly what's happened with Blinken.
He just took a trip over there and literally at every stop, he was treated so badly, disrespected so much, laughably.
So here's one meeting.
We talked about this yesterday.
He went and he sat and he met with the Iraqi prime minister.
Now, we thought that we fixed that country and liberated it and they love us and they'd do whatever we said.
Well, it didn't happen that way.
This is from the Daily Caller.
Go back once, please.
Iraqi prime minister meets with Iranian leadership and praises Hamas one day after meeting with Blinken.
So go to the next one.
So Blinken rolls into town.
He has a little visit with the Iraqi prime minister and says, hey, here's what we need you guys to do.
You've got to crack down on these people shooting rockets into our bases.
You've got to don't be so one-sided toward Iran.
You've got to do all these things.
And Al-Sudani says, sure, sure.
The Iraqi prime minister says, sure, sure, whatever.
As soon as Blinken leaves, he calls up his buddies over in Iran and says, hey, let's get together.
You're not going to believe what Blinken was trying to tell me to do.
I mean, it's just, it's almost comical.
Yeah, the big question is, do they have a strategy?
And if they do, where's their brain?
Which goes on and on.
But the tragedy is, is the world has gone through this type of thing many, many times.
And it always ends badly most of the time.
And that is that they just run out of people to kill, and they run out of ammunition.
But, you know, now it's unique.
They run out of ammunition, so they use up ours, and then we have to replenish our weapons.
At the same time, we're out of money.
But it's the age of fiat.
The biggest con job in the history of mankind has been the fiat ability of our dollar running the empire, which is coming to an end.
And that's another thing that's thrown in there.
But it's also helping to wake up the American people.
They're saying, why are we doing this?
And we have more and more of the conservative progressives saying, how many more dollars do we have to send into Ukraine?
And now we have resistance even to sending money to Israel for various reasons.
There will be a limit, but it won't be because people have become more moral.
I think they're running out of the ability.
They're running out of soldiers and they're running out of money to buy weapons.
And that doesn't guarantee peace, but it gives an opportunity.
If that's what's happening and they can't afford this war, we better start talking a lot more about understanding what non-intervention is.
United Nations' Invisible Hand 00:02:15
And they say, oh, that could lead to chaos.
I think we have a little bit of chaos here now with interventionism.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, continuing on the Blinken SmackDown tour was his trip to Israel because he goes over there, he meets with Netanyahu.
He says, We talked about it yesterday.
Listen, Bibi, I need you to take humanitarian pause on this bombing.
You're killing way too many civilians.
It's looking bad for us.
Can you just kind of wait for a few minutes?
And Netanyahu says, no, forget it.
Take a hike.
And so then Blinken comes back and says, well, in action you can put up this next clip if you get over there.
So then he says, well, he also says, well, we also know that Israel cannot reassume control and responsibility for Gaza.
It's important to note that Israel has made it clear that it has no intention or desire to do that.
And if you go forward, and then literally the next day he says, Netanyahu says, we're going to control it indefinitely.
So Blinken goes over there and says, Israel has no intention of controlling Gaza.
Don't worry.
The next day, Netanyahu says, we're going to control Gaza.
So he's literally, he's literally almost invisible of these places.
Yeah, and well, at least the clout of the United States is practically invisible.
It's being diminished.
And that's a heck of a way to get a plus.
But no, I think since we don't believe in empire, we don't believe in force and violence in order to bring about one's idea about what the world should be like.
And if there is a struggle, it should be dealt with the people most involved.
So if there's a struggle, matter of fact, in a way, it was much more independent under the Levant, where every country and the Jews and nobody wants to talk about it.
But when it was government, because a lot of people lived in four or five different countries, the Jews lived there.
There were Muslims living there.
And people describe, it was so different.
There wasn't this antagonism.
It's the globalist approach to government.
Globalist Approach in Turkey 00:03:31
And this was attempted and introduced.
This whole thing was introduced way back in 1917.
But then after World War II, oh, we finally got our United Nations going.
The United Nations accelerated the conflict in the Middle East.
It said, oh, we'll teach those Americans.
And Truman says, yeah, this whole idea about declaring war, we don't need to do that.
But the globalist approach to this and the invitation to get control of the international organization has led to this.
But because we had the seeds of an empire, we jumped at the opportunity.
And you know what?
If you ever said what I just said in public, what you are is, you're un-American.
You don't care.
You don't care about real freedom.
Because you guys would just lead to a lot of chaos and anarchy.
Well, if you want to see anarchy, go visit San Francisco and L.A. and a couple other cities.
Well, Blinken also went to Turkey.
And we did talk about that as well yesterday.
But it's interesting.
So he went to Turkey.
He wanted to meet with Erdogan.
Put this next clip up.
He wanted to meet with Erdogan.
Go forward one.
And this is SprinterX on Twitter posted this from the Figaro, the big French conservative newspaper.
Erdogan has closed his door on Blinken.
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Anthony Blinken, had hoped in vain for a meeting with President Rechep Tajib Erdogan.
As a result, he had to be content with communicating with Foreign Minister Fidon and fly away a few hours.
So he rolls in.
No one meets him at the airport.
We talked about that yesterday.
It's like, you know, the third in command of the public works services or whatever comes to meet him.
He gets there.
He wants to meet with President Erdogan.
He says, no.
Erdogan is up there in Ankara hanging out.
Doesn't want to meet with him.
And in fact, Craig Murray, who was the British ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, I believe it was, he had a tweet on it.
If you go to the next one about what happened, he recognized, he says, in terms of diplomatic practice, Turkey's decision not to greet Blinken at the airport and not to see him off there is a very strong rebuke.
In 22 years as a diplomat, I never saw such a precedent.
So that is incredible.
I won't read the last part.
Sort of funny, but go to the next one.
And here's it.
While he was there, they were actively trolling him.
Now, here's a picture of him sitting with the foreign minister.
Diplomatic insult.
Turkey trolling U.S. Secretary Blinken during the visit.
Ankara placed a replica of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the table next to Blinken during his meeting with the Turkish foreign minister, forcing Blinken to have his photo taken next to it for all the world to see.
That is so clearly symbolic, and you can see how awkward Blinken is looking sitting next to a replica of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
And so anyway, that kind of takes care of his trip to the Middle East.
That doesn't bode well for a good outcome at the end.
Predicting Conflict Resolution 00:06:20
How are they going to get together now?
And who's going to run Gaza?
Why don't they let the people who live there decide how to do it?
Something odd like that, rather than thinking that everybody gets their axe to ground, they go out there, and they're going to organize, and we'll get our authority from the global organization, and the UN can sort it out.
And the military-industrial complex can make sure that everybody has a job, that kind of thing.
So finding out exactly who's going to run it, I don't think it's going to be very easy to decide because it's going to be up for grabs.
We already see the argument between our government and Netanyahu.
But somebody said, well, Netanyahu doesn't seem to be very cooperative.
Somebody said, well, why don't we just say, you either do it or your allowance is kind of, you don't get any more allowance.
You don't get any more of your $4 billion a year.
Or that $14 billion they're trying to give them.
Well, that's the other thing that happened to Blinken, by the way, I almost forgot, is he met with a group of Arab leaders, the Jordanians and the UAE and a few others.
And he said, okay, guys, I've got a great idea.
After this, what we need to do is you guys need to put some peacekeepers into Gaza.
And they said, are you crazy?
We're not going to do that.
You know, that's the stupidest idea we've ever heard of.
We want to ceasefire.
People are getting killed.
And you're talking about something four or five steps away.
Just get out of here.
I mean, he's not thinking about what anyone is thinking about.
And I think that reflects a little bit on some of the polls we've been talking about about Biden not looking that great in the polls.
And actually, you can put that next one up because this is a new YouGov poll.
Yeah, here we go, Dr. Paul.
So for President Trump is up three, 51% to 48% in Biden.
Among independents, very important.
He's up by 10 percentage points, 54 to 44.
And he's so far ahead of DeSantis on the GOP race that you can basically put a fork in that race, despite the surging Haley, right?
Surging Nikki Athens.
But anyway, look, so I think it's reflected here in these polls that Biden is not getting good marks on his foreign policy.
Well, you know, the big crowds that are getting out and demonstrating, they have impressed me because I was surprised.
I wouldn't have predicted it would be so big.
I would have predicted and said, you know, you don't take on Israel like this.
And that to me indicates that there has been a lot of smoldering resentment that has been building, and it's just not by a few Palestinians because it's been there.
But it's a mixed bag because you can take some radical progressives who wouldn't be, maybe rarely they would be on our side, but you take that group and they might identify with the Palestinians, but it's very narrow.
And then there's the others that would do it from a more constitutional and a libertarian viewpoint.
They say, you know, we just shouldn't be doing this.
But the demonstrations are huge.
I mean, it isn't like a couple hundred people here.
And that is to me very, very strange.
I thought the resentment would be there.
Matter of fact, I have a lot of mixed feelings about that.
Maybe there is going to be more balance, but I'm afraid that might be just a sign of the acceleration, what's been there, and the resentment is coming out, and maybe the hostility is going to get much worse.
Because the big thing that would be to really accelerate this mess would be if more countries get involved, you know, Lebanon and Iran and all these other countries that get involved.
And that is likely.
But we're messed up in all those countries.
Very often we have to be on both sides of everything.
And then we wonder why there's chaos arguing and fighting over who gets the food stamps.
Well, on the demonstrations, I think there was 100,000 in D.C. That's a big demonstration for Palestine.
And the pro-Israel people will say, oh, a bunch of people came out and demonstrated for Hamas.
Well, that's not true.
I didn't see any signs for Hamas.
But what we would say is not interventionists.
They'd say, well, you're going to demonstrate for Israel or demonstrate for Palestine.
I want to demonstrate for America.
Neither.
I'm on neither side.
And that's not like one of the options we can check off in the US.
Yeah, what's so complicated or mean or nasty about looking after ourselves, which means that we don't steal from the American people and send money to the arms industry to send weapons all around the world and cause these wars.
And yet it isn't like, no, you can't stand up for Israel.
Sure, of course you can.
Golden My Era, the first time she came over here for help after their independence, she came for donations from the people who sympathized.
And they were able to, but it didn't take long for it to shift to be a government thing.
So whether, you know, there's a lot, I don't know what the number is for Palestinians in this country.
They probably outnumber the Jews right now.
If they want to help, send over the help, but at your own risk.
And this to me sounds like it's an easier way to do it.
You don't take away the freedom of people who support.
They can send their dollars or whatever they want.
I have the one exception on that.
If you have a legitimate invasion of this country or a threat to this country, and it was seen that you should have a declaration of war, I can understand strategically you don't say, well, oh, no, if the fascists march in, you can't fight them or something like that.
No, there's ways to draw a line, but the lines they draw today have nothing to do with reality.
Agreeing on Solutions 00:03:40
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to close out.
I think we've exhausted our time limitations.
The Biden administration's policy is in shambles in the Middle East, and it's a danger for all of us, I think.
But I'll just close by thanking all of our viewers.
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I'll turn it back over to you together.
Very good.
And the group, the responsible statescraft, had sort of a summary of what we've been talking here and why there's so much danger.
And their headline to them summating is U.S. is barreling toward another war in the Middle East.
Well, the war is going on.
And I think when you read this, it's a big one, you know, a big war.
And that to me is so unnecessary, but I don't think they even deal with it.
And there's so few in Washington that will entertain the argument and debate and an explanation or look for somebody teaching this.
Sure, there are libertarians and there's constitutionalists and there are progressives who believe in the basic principle of non-intervention, us minding our own business and working hard to get along with people, believing that free trade is a benefit to bringing people together.
And we had a little bit of a boost on that at the end of the Cold War, but I was so disappointed, you know, he eventually just quit because of our policy, because of NATO.
They got involved and created an enemy, you know, with the Russians again, and then also with China.
It just goes on and on.
So that to me is a real tragedy.
But the principle of, you know, the principle that people use is bipartisanship.
But, you know, right now we have a Foreign Affairs Committee in the Senate that Michael McCall and Meeks.
Meeks is the minority leader in that committee.
And they're bosom buddies.
I mean, they don't agree, disagree with anything that I remember of.
So it is bipartisanship.
People think bipartisanship solves the problem.
I think it makes it worse.
I think each side has to give up something they believe in, and there's no principle left.
Each one, when you do that, you give up.
If you take a budget and you're able to reduce it by 10% and call it a victory, well, what are they doing some monstrous thing like fighting a war?
Oh, well, we reduced it by $10 billion because we padded it and made it too big, and it looks like we've cut something.
No, that doesn't work.
And that's what we have to get people to understand.
And when I went to a lot of the universities and talked to a lot of young people of all political factions, they seem to understand it much better than if you go to a town where they build weapons.
There wasn't as much reception there.
But there's no reason in the world that we can't ignore some of the good things happening because I think there are a lot of people who are waking up.
I cite the fact that people did wake up finally after the lockdown on COVID.
But we have a long way to go because there's a lot of people out there that have been brainwashed into believing that you have to have government to solve the problem.
People Waking Up 00:01:14
People say, oh, if you have no government, you have chaos.
Look at the chaos we have already.
The chaos is there.
Well, there'll be no government at all.
No, you have self-government.
You have local government.
of spiritual governance governance.
You don't have the dependency that is required to get your share of the loot by doing exactly what the government tells us.
And that becomes a nation of zombies.
Well, the government says you should take 15 booster shots because the flu is coming.
That nonsense that goes on.
Just propaganda.
And then if you criticize it, then they go after you and you take your medical license away from you just because you want to have a discussion.
So I think the principles of liberty are not difficult to understand.
It's very clear-cut, and the benefits from it is so overwhelming compared to the authoritarianism that comes with the people who say, I know what's best for you.
Well, I think there should be a position that we understand that I don't know what's best for you, but I want you to make up your own mind.
But don't hurt anybody.
Don't steal from anybody.
And mind your own business, and we'll mind our own business.
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