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Feb. 29, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
24:42
Are All The Foreign Policy 'Experts' Secretly Putin Puppets?

What do the foreign policy "experts" do when their policies aren't working? They demand MOAR! of the same, of course. So it is that two failed years of Western sanctions are met with demands to do more of what is not working. Also today, Rep. Massie warns us about the upcoming stopgap budget deal. Finally...let's check in on how that war on the Houthis is going...

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Time Text
Why I Hate My Profession 00:14:28
Happy Thursday, lovers of liberty and peace.
I'm Daniel McAdams, and I will be hosting the Liberty Report today.
Dr. Paul will be back very soon in his usual chair.
But I want to just go over a couple of things today that I think are interesting.
My first segment, I think I would subtitle it, Why I Hate My Profession.
I've spent a lot of years as a foreign policy analyst with Dr. Paul on the Hill in Congress and even before as a journalist.
And we've done it at the Ron Paul Institute for at least 10 years.
The thing that's most frustrating about this career choice of mine is that the people who are my colleagues, quote unquote, are terrible.
And the worst thing about it is the more wrong they are, the more often they're wrong, the more they're rewarded.
The more they get articles in newspapers, articles online, the more they get very fancy sinecures in the beltway, the more they get named to be in administrations.
The dumber and the most wrong you are, well, the better your career goes.
Imagine, as I've said before, what other professions would be like that?
Imagine if your doctor kept hacking off the wrong limb when you went in for a transplant or something.
Imagine if your plumber actually caused sewage to leak rather than solving the sewage leak.
There really is no other profession that you can be so successful by being so stupid and so wrong.
And I'm going to give an exhibit A, and we're going to go through an article that came up in Politico today.
It's an opinion piece.
And it demonstrates exactly what I'm saying.
If you have a mantra, it doesn't matter if it works or not.
This is sort of the opposite of the scientific method, right?
The scientific method is you have a thesis, you test a thesis.
If it works, then it proves itself out.
Well, this is the opposite.
This is you have a thesis, you test it, it doesn't work, you test it again, you do it again, you say it works over and over and over.
Let's put up this first clip and I'll tell you what I mean.
And I'm just using this as an example, but I think it's a good example.
Came out on Politico today.
It's an opinion piece.
Opinion, Putin needs to feel the pain.
And the subtitle or the intro article says, sanctions are a good start.
So here we go again.
We have had not just the past two years of sanctions with the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, but we've had decades probably of U.S. sanctions on Russia, certainly at least a decade or so of U.S. sanctions on Russia.
They have not had the result that was suggested, which is that, of course, either there would be a regime change in Russia, a color revolution in Russia, or Putin would ring up begging, saying, you got me, you know, crying, uncle, please stop.
We'll do whatever you say.
It hasn't happened.
So who are these experts that have written this article saying, let's do more stupid things because they haven't worked and we need to keep doing them?
Well, put it up the next one because here it is.
Edward Fishman, never heard of him.
He's a senior research scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy.
Sounds like a very prestigious post.
I'm sure he feels very important.
Well, during the Obama administration, he served as Russia and Europe sanctions lead at the U.S. State Department and a member of the Secretary of State's policy planning staff.
So this guy is the author of all the sanctions during the Obama administration that failed so miserably, that had no success, and here he's gone on to Columbia University.
Used to be a prestigious school.
Maybe it still is, and has been very successful.
So, political asks him: hey, write an article.
Do you want to write an article for us?
They never ask people like me to write articles telling how sanctions are dumb.
No, they only ask the experts who are wrong all the time.
Well, let's go and look a little bit into this article because it is pretty fascinating to look at.
So, here's the opening arguments: you know, in the wake of Navalny's suspicious death in an Arctic prison.
Well, even the head of Ukrainian intelligence said, I hate to say this, guys, but the truth is he died from a blood clot.
He wasn't poisoned.
They would actually have a lot more incentive to say Putin did it.
So, anyway, regardless, you have to start it with this, you know, because that is the opener, that is the calling card for more sanctions.
Novalny died, we need new sanctions.
You know, the sun comes up, we need new sanctions.
So, anyway, Biden revealed a new round of sanctions on Russia that included more than 500 targets.
It sounds incredible.
I didn't realize there would be 500 things left in Russia to sanction after all these years.
Nevertheless, you go on, they make the rationale, and here's what they say at the bottom: impressive as the penalties seem, when it comes to sanctions, quantity does not equal quality.
Despite some valuable steps in the right direction, steps that could do serious damage to Russia's military supply chain, the sanctions need to go much further to check Putin's full-on war economy.
So, this is always what the neocons say, and this guy is a neocon.
I don't care if he worked for Obama or not, he's a total neocon.
What they always say when the stuff they say to do fails, well, you didn't do it hard enough, you didn't do it fast enough, you didn't do it enough, you didn't spend enough, you didn't spill enough blood.
We were right all along, it's your fault, not ours.
And that's essentially what he's saying.
So, he's saying that a little bit more of the sanctions are gonna do the trick.
Well, let's take a look at what the sanctions have done so far to Russia: crippling sanctions.
Remember what Biden said: the ruble will be rubble.
Well, here's Business Insider.
I just pulled a few headlines to prove my point.
I don't know, this is from this year.
Russia has never been richer after selling 37 billion in oil to India last year.
They've never been richer.
The sanctions weren't supposed to do that.
Let's do the next one.
This is from Business Insider as well.
He says, Yeah, this is from January.
Russian banks made a record $36.8 billion in profit last year, and even the central bank is surprised by it.
Do the next one.
And of course, the obligatory Putin clapping.
Now, here's from Reuters: Russia's third quarter GDP growth confirmed at 5.5%.
Now, that's according to the Russian Statistics Agency, but nevertheless, serious economic growth.
Even the U.S. propaganda mouthpiece, Voice of America, had to admit it, put on the next one.
Here is Voice of America's headline saying, Russia's economy grew in 2023 despite war and sanctions.
So, again, we have this argument that the things that we are doing that are making Russia richer and more successful and having a more global export-oriented economy, we need to keep doing those because it will hurt Russia.
It's literally insanity.
The point is that people like eggheads, like this fisherman guy, they don't understand that the U.S. doesn't run the world like they think it does.
That if we say to Russia, you can no longer use dollars.
Now, it hurt for a while.
You can no longer access the SWIFT system.
It hurt for a while.
But just like, you know, when you have a, I don't know, some sort of a brain issue, you know, Things start growing back in new synapses form and you develop the ability to do things.
This is what happens.
This is what happened with sanctions.
Russia was happy to sell gas to the Europeans, to Germany.
They were happy to trade with the U.S.
The systems were in place.
They were efficient.
They ran well.
But when Biden and his people decided, let's just cut that in half and let them die, well, they didn't die.
They simply developed new synapses.
They started selling, as we see, oil to India, gas to India.
Ironically, Russia sells the oil to India.
India refines it into gasoline and sells it back to Germany and the Europeans at a much higher price and a huge profit.
So it's a win-win now.
So what you thought was going to be cutting the head off of the Russian economy is actually force them to create new trading partners to further develop relations with China, becoming much closer to China.
So much for the idea by the Kissinger wing of U.S. foreign policy to peel away China from Russia because U.S. foreign policy has actually pushed them much closer together.
So even the Russia-hating economists, the globalist publication, they have even had to come out and say, this is not working, guys.
Just put on the next one.
This is a recent article, I think.
But even they admitted, sanctions are not the way to fight Vladimir Putin.
And actually, as icing on the cake, even Politico, the publication in which the original article appeared, if you put this next one on, they even admit it.
They say, this is an article a few weeks ago, I think, the West tried to crush Russia's economy.
Why hasn't it worked?
Well, because sanctions don't work.
And there you have it.
So in this article, because the sanctions, as they have prescribed them, have not worked, they want to do some additional things.
They say if you just do it a little harder and be a little bit more serious about it, it'll work this time.
So I want to try to explain what they really mean by this.
And if you put on that next clip, and this is from the original Politico article, the sanctions reveal, now these are the new round of sanctions, the 500 new sanctions because Navalny died of a blood clot, right, in a Siberian prison.
We've got to put 500 new sanctions on anyway.
The sanctions reveal that the White House is committed to enforcing existing sanctions, but still reluctant to embrace the risks required to meaningfully tighten the screws on the Kremlin, such as penalties that would sequester Russia's oil revenues or secondary sanctions.
Now, I think they are looking at this as the holy grail.
Secondary sanctions.
Now, what does that mean?
That means not only do we sanction Russia, but we sanction any country that trades with Russia.
Now, you talk about opening a can of worms.
This is a can of worms.
Just leave it up if you don't mind.
This is a can of worms that is essentially a declaration of war on the entire rest of the world on the economic system of the world.
They say, well, this is what you finally have to do.
So back to the article.
This is a problem because as Russia makes gains in the battlefield and desperately needed military aid for Ukraine remains stuck in Congress, Putin needs to understand that the cost to his economy will rise as long as his brutal war continues.
The cost of his economy, what are they talking about?
We just got done talking about the benefits to the economy.
Now, obviously, I'm not going to turn my back on the correctness of the Austrian and the pro-trade view of economy, of economics.
You know, war economy is responsible for part of Russia's growth.
It's not a miracle.
And destroying trade is not beneficial to any party.
So I'm not suggesting in any way that this is some sort of a Russian miracle, but only that when they talk about the costs to the Russian economy, that is absolutely contradicted by the fact of GDP growth, of growth in profits to the exporting of oil and natural gas and other resources.
So they're not even grounded in reality when they make this argument.
Nevertheless, go to the next clip, and I will show you what they are suggesting.
Here's what we have to do.
Now, this is incredible.
The U.S. has stuck with this narrow conception of the price cap for fear.
This is the oil price cap, which totally didn't work.
It's another story.
So here's what he says.
Here's what they say.
The Biden administration could, for example, threaten secondary sanctions, there we have it, against any company that participates in a transaction for Russian oil that exceeds the cap, whether it be an Emirati trading firm or an Indian refinery.
So here we have it.
India has been treading a very fine line throughout the special military operation.
They have very, very consciously not gone in full bore on the Russia-China side for a lot of reasons, including some historic reasons.
Nevertheless, they have not jumped in headfirst and turned their back on the West.
On the contrary, they've made great efforts to maintain good relations with both sides.
And in fact, there was a recent interview.
I don't remember the details exactly, but it was the Indian foreign minister who was asked about why are you guys being friends with the Russians and the Chinese as well as us?
And he said, well, I think that makes us pretty smart.
And I'm paraphrasing what he said, but I agree with that.
So they've tread a very fine line, which has benefited the U.S. to maintain, keep it up if you don't mind, to maintain good relations with India.
It's benefited the U.S. Trade benefits everyone who's a part of it.
Nevertheless, these neocons in Politico say, why don't we start sanctioning Indian refineries?
How do they think India will react if the U.S. essentially declares economic war on the Indian economy?
Sanctions are acts of war, we know that, and this will harm India.
Do they think that that's going to make India more amenable to trade and good relations with the U.S.?
Apparently they do.
And it's sort of this, it's the same idea that the neocons have, that the foreign policy establishment has, which is that we are omnipotent.
We can do everything.
The sun doesn't rise until the U.S. government says it should rise.
That's their view.
Well, the last two years, if they've done anything, I have shown that that is not the case.
So let's go to the next one.
Here's a few more of their brainiac ideas.
Clamping Down on Russia 00:06:08
To clamp down on Russia's military-industrial complex.
Therefore, the Biden administration will need to get much more comfortable wielding, there we go, secondary sanctions, including against firms based in allied countries.
So not just India, which is roughly allied but not completely in the U.S. camp, but actually allied countries, actually our closest allies, if you go to the next ones.
Here's what the neocons are saying in this article.
Here's what we need to do.
Put on that next one if you can.
Here's what they're saying we need to do.
Additionally, the United States needs to step in and enforce the export controls when its allies fail to do so.
Industrial firms in places such as Germany and Poland are making a lot of money selling motor vehicles and machinery that ultimately end up in Russia.
And they seem happy to turn a blind eye when big new orders come in.
So the U.S. proxy, the U.S. neocon proxy war against Russia through Ukraine has already devastated the European economy.
Germany's in recession.
The U.K. is in recession.
Germany has been supplanted as the number one economy in Europe by Russia.
So this is all the U.S. is doing.
And the U.S. blew up their pipeline.
They blew up the Nord Stream to deprive them of cheap natural gas.
But that's not enough for the neocons.
Now they want to destroy what's left of the German economy to tighten the screws on Russia, or so they claim.
This, my friends, is a definition of insanity.
And if you are basically insane in a padded room somewhere in a straitjacket or heavily medicated, well, it's a sad thing, but at least it's just you.
Unfortunately, these insane people that run foreign policy, they want all of us to look at their insanity and say how wonderful it is and say how smart they are.
So, and I'm not singling out the person who wrote this article, because guess what?
There are hundreds and hundreds more like him, and they'll all be invited to write another article about how all the stuff that hasn't worked will continue to work.
You know, so it's ironic the title that I put on today's show is, Are all of these guys secretly Putin's puppets?
Because they're helping Russia an awful lot with the policies that they suggest.
So, anyway, I want to go through a couple of quick things.
This week, looks like they're going to be voting on the supplemental budget.
If you remember, around the first of the year, they said, okay, we'll put in a stopgap.
It'll last us a few weeks.
Let's get these appropriations bills out.
Let's do our actual job in Congress, and then we'll move on.
Well, guess what?
They didn't do that.
They had to kick Santos out.
They had to pass about a thousand resolutions saying how wonderful Israel is.
They had to do all sorts of things, but accept their job.
And so now they're back in the bind again.
They're saying, we got to do a stopgap.
We've got to keep things going.
We don't want to shut down.
No one wants a government shutdown.
Well, a lot of us do, actually.
So here's Thomas Massey, our great friend, a great friend, a great friend of Liberty.
He is on the board of the Ron Paul Institute.
He put out a tweet yesterday, and it says, the first installment of the omnibus is allegedly coming up for a vote next week.
They've been writing this behemoth behind closed doors for weeks.
If just one-third of U.S. representatives will oppose it, we can stop this monstrosity.
So it's ready.
It's coming.
They've been writing it in secret.
This is something that they're doing more and more of.
And Senator Mike Lee says this a lot.
And I had a tweet.
I should have clipped it.
But he's complaining.
He's saying the next GOP leader in the Senate should stop doing this stuff in secret.
And that's, I think, a very, very good argument.
So now here's an article from, I think it is Politico.
I could be wrong.
I didn't clip it.
So this is what's going to happen.
Both chambers, yeah, it is Politico.
Both chambers only have a couple of days to pass this stopgap before a partial government shutdown kicks in on Saturday.
I think they may be actually voting on it today.
And there's still a few hiccups on that point.
Now, Speaker Johnson will almost certainly need help from Democrats to pass the measure in the House.
Now, we will remember that Speaker McCarthy was defenestrated for his threat to use Democrats to help pass more aid bills.
It looks like Johnson's going to have to do that which McCarthy was so robustly denounced for doing.
So if you go to the next one, here's why he's going to have to need help.
And here's Massey giving us some hope.
He says, if 145 out of the 220 Republicans vote against it, we can stop it.
They plan to suspend the rules to pass this, which means they need a two-thirds majority.
Now, this you're seeing increasingly happening in the House.
And Johnson did it a couple of weeks ago, if you remember, on aid to Israel.
He suspended the rules, which means you go around the rules committee.
The rules committee is very powerful, and Thomas Massey happens to be on that rules committee.
That's one of the deals he made when he decided to support Speaker McCarthy.
Very smart deal on the part of Massey, and there are a few others.
So they go around the rules committee, they bring it directly to the floor.
This technique was originally, or it is intended for quote-unquote non-controversial bills.
So by going around the rules committee, sneaking around the back, okay, but you have to have a two-thirds majority to pass that, and that's going to be tricky.
So Massey's saying, we got to get 145 Republicans.
So even if all the Democrats jump on board with this stopgap, they need to get 145 Republicans so that will deprive them of the two-thirds majority.
So keep an eye out for that coming up maybe today.
I didn't look this morning.
Maybe today that vote will be coming up and is very important.
I want to do a final update on the war front.
Final Update on War Front 00:03:52
Yesterday, we talked a little bit about Francis Macron saying, hey, let's go in to Ukraine.
Let's send troops.
Well, it didn't go over very well.
And this is an interesting, I would say, shot across the bow, an interesting rebuttal from the German chancellor, Olaf Schultz.
He revealed something that people are not that happy about.
Probably the worst kept secret, but nevertheless, the head of state saying it put on that next one: British soldiers helping fire Ukrainian missiles.
Olaf Schultz reveals the German chancellor is criticized for flagrant abuse of intelligence that could endanger UK personnel on the ground and help the Russians.
So that's how they frame it.
Endanger UK personnel on the ground.
Well, of course, if they are acting in their military capacity in Ukraine, well, of course, their targets.
And it's obvious this shouldn't be a surprise.
Here's another article about, I think this is from the Daily Mail.
Germany is accused of being completely irresponsible after claiming British troops are helping Ukraine fire missiles at Putin's forces.
So stop and sort of breathe that in for a second.
British military personnel, whether they are active duty or quote-unquote retired and retained, are in Ukraine firing missiles at Russia.
And the only concern among the mainstream media is, how dare he reveal this?
Rather than how dare they send troops?
Are they insane?
Do they want World War III?
No, well, there's the media for you.
So the final thing I wanted to do, as you know, the U.S. has been involved in keeping the Red Sea safe and open for international shipping.
We know, we've talked about on the show, that has not gone as well as planned.
It's not Deo's vault.
You can't just will it.
This goes back to the neocons.
You can't just will something to happen and have it happen.
Every now and again in life, you come across a Houthi situation, right?
Where the underdog actually hits you with something asymmetric that you didn't plan for.
So let's take a look.
The Germans, they joined in, and they joined in with us helping clear the Red Sea.
Let's take a look.
How's that operation going?
Just in the German frigate Hessen mistakenly fired at a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Red Sea on Monday.
Both missiles malfunctioned and fell into the seas.
So you have Germany.
They're out there making the Red Sea safe for democracy and freedom.
They see a U.S. drone.
They fire two missiles on it.
Thankfully, both missiles were no good and they fell into the sea.
And here's an update: new problems, according to media reports.
There are no more missiles in German depots for two of the three types this frigate can fire.
So he fired both of his missiles, and there aren't any more in Germany for them to have.
So that is the extent of the German operation in the Red Sea.
I don't know what they're going to do.
They don't have missiles.
Maybe they'll just wave their hands very aggressively and scare the Houthis off.
Who knows?
But anyway, here's the lesson for today.
The experts, at least in the foreign policy area, are dumb, but they keep advancing by being dumb.
And trying to maintain a global military empire is also dumb and dangerous.
So with that said, I want to thank everyone for tuning in.
I promise you, Dr. Paul will be back.
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