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June 4, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:20
WWIII: NATO Moves Closer To Direct Conflict With Russia.

As Russia continues to advance in eastern Ukraine, NATO continues to escalate toward direct conflict. F-16 trainers from Greece arrive in Kiev, Netherlands and Denmark green-light Ukraine F-16 attacks deep inside Russia. No one is asking the central question: why? Is Ukraine worth WWIII? Also today: New York City is turning into a third world migrant encampment. A good business model for success?

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Putin's Ambitions Escalate 00:15:06
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
You have any good news today?
Are we going to look for good news?
Or are we going to keep telling you the truth?
It's not all good news.
I don't think we have a good news story today.
Every once in a while, we find something.
Trends are what we're looking for.
At least prove a little bit, pick up a little action, even though the real results aren't going to be on the horizon yet.
But we're going to talk about this perpetual war going on and this insanity of the obsession with trying to get a big hot war going on in Europe.
And it's sort of bewildering, you know, how they can get away with it.
You take a little so-called country that amounts to not a whole lot, Ukraine, and all of a sudden it turns into the centerpiece of some people would claim, you know, the centerpiece of the next world war going on.
And the ducks are lining up.
I can't believe that they have the Europeans, you know, were very reluctant.
They were holding back.
And of course, they don't put up as much money.
But they must have been tempted by something that we, through NATO, offered them, because there's at least 11 or 12 countries that are in Eastern Europe and in Europe that are quite ready to expand the war.
And the issue, of course, is striking Russia.
All of a sudden, you know, Russia is the most, I shouldn't say all of a sudden, traditionally so.
Well, we have to have an enemy in Russia we can attack.
And of course, every time this is mentioned by the media, they always preface it by saying, you know, this whole thing started when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Well, Russia went into Ukraine, reclaiming some territory they believe was their own and could have been a border dispute, but they went ahead and responded to what NATO was doing.
NATO was bending the rules and the promises they made over the last several decades, even since the Cold War was over, that we would just leave the Russians alone and they were going to give up certain things.
But that didn't happen.
I think NATO was serious and the West was serious, but once they started moving their missiles and their targets and building up their coalition and building more weapons than ever and then actively participating in the Ukraine war and the killing that's going on there.
They do this and they do it with a lot of killing in all.
And they're still wanting to avoid thinking, well, this is involving too many countries.
It's going to expand.
And that has been our warring generally.
Is this going to escalate?
And I guess what we're going to talk a little bit about today, about the significance.
Right now, most of the news is about politics in the States, and the election coming up and people getting tried for crazy reasons.
We have the Trump trial going on and then the Hunter Try, which is a whitewash too.
But that's getting a lot of attention now.
And I don't imagine the majors are talking much about the danger of what NATO is doing.
But I think that's one of our responsibilities, try to show that the people in this country ought to wake up.
And I'm always arguing the case, there's no reason why we can't stop some of these wars with a little bit of common sense rather than waiting like 20 years after Afghanistan pretending, oh, we're not at war, we're not at war.
We kill people, we give them weapons, and we do all these things, but that's not war.
I don't know how their description of war is, but it smells like war to me.
Yeah, I mean, the fundamental aspect of this conflict between Russia and Ukraine is that Russia views it as an existential threat to its existence, having NATO on its borders.
You know, it views it as an existential threat.
Whereas Russia's conflict with Ukraine, Russia's invasion, if you will, of Ukraine, is not an existential threat to the United States.
It doesn't matter who runs Ukraine fundamentally to the United States.
It doesn't matter to the Europeans who runs Ukraine in a fundamental way.
So all of this is about an issue that really doesn't matter that much to the U.S.
But they say, oh, they started out by saying, oh, well, there's a democracy.
If we don't defend democracies, we'll be ruled by tyrants.
And then Zelensky canceled elections.
He canceled all of the opposition parties.
He shut down all the opposition media.
He shut down the churches.
So they couldn't talk about democracy anymore.
So they're looking for other things to do.
And they continue to escalate.
And that's why it's so important.
They put up this first article.
And this is a pattern of things that have been going on over the past week.
Now, this just happens to be from Zero Heads.
Netherlands joins Denmark in saying Ukraine can use F-16s to strike inside of Russia.
So now you have two countries in the EU saying to Ukraine, we're going to give you F-16s.
And hey, if you want to go and fight and strike inside of pre-19, or pre-2014 Russia, that's just fine.
Well, obviously, that's not going to be very popular with Russia or with its president.
Go to the next one.
This is from the article.
So President Putin has warned of serious consequences after the Kremlin previously warned that NATO bases from which these jets are deployed could come under attack.
But on Friday, NATO Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg shrugged off Moscow's warnings by saying, this is nothing new.
It's been a case for a long time.
Every time NATO allies are providing support to Ukraine, President Putin is trying to threaten us not do it.
And an escalation, well, Russia has escalated by invading another country.
That's his response.
It's no big deal.
He's always saying that he's always complaining, but it doesn't matter.
Well, there's a serious factor here because these planes are pretty capable of carrying big bombs.
Yeah, nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons.
And the Dutch foreign minister said, trying to justify this, he said, if you have the right to self-defense, and who doesn't have the right to self-defense?
We believe in that.
There are, but he said, if there are, if you do have the right, there are no borders for the use of weapons.
So they can go anywhere they want.
And they use the term self-defense, which is just a little bit of lying propaganda is what they're doing to justify this.
But the steady movement in that direction and the support building for NATO, I thought, you know, like six months, a year ago, NATO wasn't gaining on credibility.
But right now, it looks like the Europeans think, well, we better get with NATO.
We want them to take care of us.
And of course they talk about drafts and everything else, but the American people should wake up and say, who pays for these wars?
Who ends up doing it?
So, oh, yeah, well, we're not going to have boots on the drown.
Well, we have the boots on the ground.
We just change the color of their boots, and we participate in it, and we train the pilots and give them the airplanes, and the whole works.
And that's why we have a tremendous, there would be, how much do you think there would be?
I think I know your answer.
How much would be there if we were totally neutral on there?
I mean, what would be going on with Ukraine?
Your opening statement made that point.
You know, what is the big issue for us?
But right now, every single day is a bigger issue.
And this is significant.
Yeah, and even if everything the other side says about what Russia did to Ukraine is true, which is not, but if one day Putin got up and said, you know what, Russia, the largest country on earth, isn't quite large enough.
We need to get bigger.
So let's invade Ukraine and take it over.
Even if that were true, it would still not mean a thing to the United States and certainly would not be risking a nuclear war over.
If Russia ran Ukraine, it doesn't matter.
It wouldn't matter to the U.S.
But do you have these escalations now?
You have the, as we talked about before, the saying F-16s can be used to strike inside Russia.
Also, apparently, according to Anthony Blinken, the Biden White House has lifted restrictions on using weapons, longer-range missiles on Russian territory, on pre-2014 Russia territory.
I don't believe they're going to let them use the ATACMS yet.
However, the other, the HIMARS and the others have already been.
They've gone into Belgorod yesterday, the U.S. HIMARS.
So they're allowing those attacks inside Russia.
And go to the next one.
And now here's the other escalation.
This is a three-part escalation this past week.
NATO country sends Air Force instructor to Ukraine ahead of F-16 arrival.
So a NATO country, this being the Greeks, the Greeks have sent their first foreign flight instructor deployed to Ukraine.
Zerohead says this means that for the first time, a NATO instructor has arrived in Kiev as part of preparations to receive F-16s from NATO allies and deploy Ukrainian pilots, the first publicly disclosed instance, at least.
So now you're seeing, I mean, we talked about, I think you wrote a couple weeks ago about Vietnamization.
You're seeing now the trainers are literally now in Kiev.
Here's the first.
But, you know, I think they're a little bit too complacent about saying, you know, Russia's, you know, speaking out and they're threatening us because we're going to be tough with them.
And Stoltenberg from NATO made mention of this on Friday when the Secretary General Stoltenberg, he shrugged his shoulders and said, and the warnings by saying, this is nothing new.
It has been the case for a long time.
And every time NATO, allies are providing support to Ukraine, Putin is trying to threaten us not to do that.
And one of these days, you know, it might be over the top and maybe Russia is, because I think people who are honest with themselves, and there are people in this country now that realize that of all the groups of countries there, Russia is the biggest.
NATO is only big because we're NATO.
And we have the weapons and we have the incentive of making a lot of money over this whole deal.
But I think NATO is saying, don't sweat it.
The Russians won't do it.
They're not that tough because, look, we've done certain things and they never retaliate and that sort of thing.
So we'll see.
I mean, that's exactly it.
You know, Caitlin Johnson has a good piece out.
I have it on the RonPaul Institute.org website today.
And she says, you know, that the real danger is not that Biden is going to say, you know what, let's have a nuclear war.
But the real danger, and this is the truth, is a miscalculation.
The U.S., the NATO side, they are so sure of themselves.
Well, we're sure that Russia is going to back down once again.
But what if they don't?
It's a miscalculation that is the big danger.
And in fact, if you go ahead, skip the next one and go to the on Monday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister.
So this is from anti-war.com.
And this is a very clear warning.
This is Sergei Rybakov.
And he warned the U.S. that they need to listen to what Putin is saying about allowing Ukraine to strike in Russian territory.
And this is Rybakov, the deputy foreign minister.
He said, I would like to caution American officials against miscalculations, which may have fatal consequences.
For some unknown reason, they underestimate the seriousness of the rebuff they may receive.
And then he went on by saying, I'm urging these officials who seemingly are not bothered by anything to take some time away from playing computer games, which is apparently what they are doing, given their light-hearted approach to serious issues, and take a closer look at what Putin said, particularly at a press conference following the talks in Tashkent.
He added, referring to a warning Putin issued during a recent visit to Uzbekistan.
So he's saying, you guys aren't taking us seriously.
It's a big problem.
You need to start doing so.
It's a very clear warning.
You know, and they've threatened to do it, and they haven't done the big one, but they're capable of doing it.
But, you know, I was thinking about what have we as a country done in this century, you know, last 24 years.
We've been involved in a lot of wars.
And I was thinking, I wonder how many countries we struck with a bomb over all this time.
And they're talking about, well, Russia, they don't have the right to do that.
They're monsters, and we have to handle that.
But if people say, well, you're un-American if you're pointing out that maybe we're making an error in all the bombs that we drop.
Well, you know, when our empire collapses, our defensive collapses, our financial system collapsed, they will say, how did this all happen?
Well, it shouldn't surprise a lot of people.
More people are starting to be aware of the significant economic consequences.
And the more likely there is a hot war, the greater will be the threat against our civil liberties at home.
Because what do they talk about?
We need a draft, this sort of thing.
We need price controls.
The whole works come with it.
Well, speaking of civil liberties violations, I don't know if you saw this, but Scott Ritter, who spoke in at our conference, he was on a plane.
He was going to go to speak at a conference in Russia.
And the plane was boarded.
They took the customs and border people took him off the plane.
And they said, what are you doing?
They said, the State Department told us to do this.
And they took his passport.
We still don't know.
I think he's going to be on the judge's show today at noon.
We still don't know what the reasoning is.
So, yes, civil liberties are being curtailed.
But, you know, the thing about these escalations are this, this you can shoot inside Russia.
We've been covering this for two years.
Customs Conflicts Border Escalation 00:07:02
And at every point, there's been a new wonder weapon.
Oh, as soon as we send the javelins, they're going to win.
Oh, no one's talking about javelins anymore.
Remember, release the leopards.
As soon as the Ukrainians get some leopard tanks, they're going to win.
No one's talking about leopard tanks anymore.
So as every one of the wonder weapons fails, they come up with a new one.
And now it was F-16s before, but they haven't appeared.
And now it's striking inside of Russia.
If only we let them do this, they'll win.
You know, this is sort of the rationale.
Yes.
But excuse me, but there are a lot of people in our Congress in different places that want to celebrate and praise Zelensky.
So what are they doing?
They brought him to the Congress.
And as it always is so disgusting for me, that they bring, and they're supporting him.
Of course, we're spending all that money on them.
What else can they do?
But it still baffles me on, you know, why they do these things, because they end up so badly.
And they keep doing the same thing over and over again.
But they think that we can fight.
I think what they think about is we can have a cleaner war.
Americans won't be killed.
And we'll make some money on the side.
And we'll bring about peace in the meantime.
Peace will break out if we show them our strength.
But some of them, there's a few in our Senate that are so hawkish about how strong we have to be to penalize people.
So you can imagine if they have more control.
So Ford policy is not a one-party deal.
You have the hawks on both sides and that bipartisanship.
Beware.
Well, I've got a couple of tweets to kind of punctuate what we're trying to say here.
If you could put this first one up.
Now, David Sachs is an entrepreneur and I think a very astute observer of the scene.
He wrote a couple days ago, and this is interesting.
I think you'll relate to this, Dr. Paul.
David Sachs wrote, never once during the Cold War would we have dreamed of striking Russia on its own soil, even through a proxy.
And then he said, I'll take a convicted felon over World War III any day.
To which Senator JD Vance responded, and he said, I just spoke to a friend and I trust what's going on.
I just spoke to a friend who I trust on what's going on in Russia.
I think the risk of nuclear war is higher now than at any point in my lifetime.
Biden is sleepwalking us into World War III.
And the next one is from our good friend Colonel Doug McGregor.
If you can put that next tweet up, he's got an incredible tweet, and I've abbreviated it here.
I would urge people to take a look at the full tweet.
But he says, NATO is now planning to get U.S. troops to the front line to fight Russia.
What are they thinking?
NATO has disclosed its preparation to deploy American troops to the European front lines in the event of a full-scale conflict with Russia.
They're ready to move these troops up to the border with Russia.
Basically, everything that Russia was complaining about, moving your troops up to our border, they say, yeah, we're going to do that.
You know, if we have a big accident, not accident, but a big attack on us like 9-11, that they ought to be reminded that the answer to the question of why did they do that, well, maybe it's because we're over there bombing these people and they decide that they're going to retaliate.
But, you know, the whole thing is this blindness when they talk about patriotism.
There's nothing wrong with patriotism, but patriotism means that you ignore everything a country does, especially annoyed by some of the bad things they're doing.
And if you speak out, then you're unpatriotic.
And if you don't accept every war, oh, you hate the troops, you know, and troops have to be taken care of.
Yes, we'd like to take care of them.
Just think if the libertarians had been in charge of a non-interventionist foreign policy in this century, how many less people would have died?
How much wealthier the world would be and how calmer it would be.
But they would say, oh, no, Russia would own the world.
Yeah.
Well, here's the whole kicker, I think, on this, Dr. Paul, because we're talking about we've got to allow strikes deep in Russia.
We've got to get those F-16s.
We've got to allow them to shoot inside Russia.
Well, here's the thing.
Even if that's the case, even the pro-war Hawks admit, now put on this next clip.
This is from CNN.
They love this war, like they love all wars.
If you put the next clip on, even with all this, here's an article that came out recently.
The U.S. allows Ukraine to use its weapons to strike inside Russia.
And I highlighted this part.
But it's unlikely to be a game changer.
So even the Hawks, now put it up.
Now, this is a guy from the Institute for the Study of War.
I think it's a woman, Katerina.
Institute for the Study of War.
They love this war.
They're all neocons.
It's Victoria Newland's sister, sister-in-law and brother-in-law running the show.
Even they say it's not a game changer.
Katerina Stepanyenko, an analyst for the Institute for the Study of War, told CNN the policy change will blunt Russia's offensive in Kharkov, but still preserves the majority of Russia's sanctuary space.
And here's what she said.
The policy still protects Russia's operational and deep rear sufficiently that this change near Kharkiv Oblast is insufficient to bring about a turning point in the war.
So people should take a deep breath and think about that.
We are on the brink of nuclear war with Russia over a policy that even if it were put into place would not change the outcome of this war.
If that's not insanity, I don't know what is.
You know, in my opening statement, I mentioned the fact that the quote from the defense minister, Dutch foreign minister, he says, if you have the right of self-defense, which we all agree to, there are no borders for the use of weapons.
So what if you flip it a little bit and say, well, what does that mean?
Is that apply to Russia?
How many more nukes, if they could have all these F-16s over there and they start buzzing places and all, when would Russia be given an under, at least not a sympathy as much as just an understanding, you know, and but we use it, we use it to say that, yes, we can do anything to Russia, because that was a whole understanding after the Cold War ended,
Hotel Chaos Post-COVID 00:03:14
that the West would move back and they'd stay away from Russian borders.
And the big move was, you know, into Ukraine with the coup in 2014.
That was the big issue that precipitated this chaos, which is escalating right now.
Now they're talking about a lot of planes, more countries involved with nuclear weapons as a potential weapon.
And it's crazy because it's for nothing.
We don't have the USSR.
We don't have global communism staring down our throats, even if you believe the threat sense.
It's all for nothing.
Anyway, let's move on with our theme of insanity today.
Want to take a trip to New York, Dr. Paul?
Well, it's going to have a hard time getting a hotel room.
Let's look at this next one.
This is from Zero Hedge.
It's from Mike Shedlock.
20% of New York City hotels are now migrant shelters.
What do you think about that?
How did that happen?
Oh, there was an invasion, and nobody would admit it that there was an invasion.
And they were capable, because they had influence with some people in this country to throw out good people.
And if we finance the If we finance these hotel rooms and all that they needed, you know, it was a bribe.
The people that own the hotels say, hey, because of 9-11 and other governments.
So COVID, they were having, you know, there were reasons for this.
And so they had to say, well, the hotels were beginning to be too empty.
All of a sudden, there's a boom in the hotel business.
Of course, the price goes up, so anybody who wants to get a hotel room can't do it.
So it is, you know, one of those things that does exactly the opposite, unless your goal is to have chaos.
If you're interested in a little more chaos in our streets, what could be more chaotic than what's happening on the immigration scenario, you know, with the current president?
Because that's where the real chaos is.
And that's where the anger is building, too.
And that to me is so sad because when we talk about what kind of relationships would countries have, you know, in a non-interventionist foreign policy, well, most of the time you can find evidence that it's much better when it's not so aggressive and threatening and taking over and pushing Iran.
That, of course, is a different story.
Yeah, I just don't know what a great strategy this is, really, because if you think about it, you're right.
So the hotels were vacant.
The COVID, they shut down the city, so no one's going there.
So instead of doing something to make it attractive as a tourist destination, they're moving in migrants who've come over to the country illegally.
I mean, are people really going to want to go visit the Big Apple now, knowing that the place has turned into one big migrant camp?
I mean, it seems like it would be a real blow to tourism there.
Yeah, you would think so, but once again, what are the true motives?
Is it stupidity, or do they have evil motives, or is it a mixture of both?
Opportunity and Redistribution 00:04:54
Just you can't tell.
But they don't talk about costs either, you know, of what we're doing now, because I think most Americans are starting to think that if you're, if you're, some of them make fun, but I think there's some truth to it.
If there are long lines now for services, or whether, say, you know, going to the hospital or whatever service you need, that the veterans, they use that as an example, that if you're an American veteran, you might have to go to the back of the line.
If you were an illegal that came in, you get moved up to the front of the line, and people are supposed to smile and say, isn't it wonderful we can help people?
But the thing of it is, I'll say, you guys don't have a heart.
You don't care about you have no humanitarian instincts.
But when you look at it and list, I made a little list of the things that happens when they do that immigration and what they did to New York.
And it doesn't help.
It doesn't do what they said.
It makes things much worse.
There's a lot more costs.
They ruin the schools.
Prices go up in general.
And the chaos continues.
So this is not a solution.
It's the problem.
And I think what is really lacking is an understanding of what property is all about.
If you don't have a basic principle, and it was a very solid principle when this country was started, that people could own property, you could have a detour, and it was your property.
And nobody just came marching in.
As a matter of fact, that was one of the reasons they said that you were also allowed to own a weapon.
And you didn't have to have the UN police force come in to protect you.
So this whole argument that they're doing God's work by taking care of these people.
And if you're not willing to give an illegal who's just begging and pleading, you know, for a little bit of freedom, and there are probably plenty like that, too.
But there's other ways of achieving it.
And that is a free society.
You know, that's when prosperity blooms.
And people didn't have these guarantees when our country was settled for the first 100 years.
So people came because they knew it as an opportunity.
People still come for the opportunity.
But most of the opportunity they see is that the government will redistribute the wealth.
We still have some wealth in this country.
The dollar is still strong enough that we'll take care of anybody that comes in and compound it and we'll bring an end to this system much quicker.
Yeah, and if you really care about these migrants, you should oppose U.S. foreign policy, which bombs the countries that they lived in.
That's why they want to come here.
We keep bombing their homes.
What a shock.
Well, go to that last clip, if you will, and I'm going to close out by reminding our viewers again.
And you're going to hear it a few times from me between now and then, but the Liberty platform is the Ron Paul Institute's summer conference.
The ticket sales are starting up nice.
We're very happy with the progress so far.
I think we're less than a week into this and we've sold about 20% of our tickets.
So that's a pretty good situation for us.
So get those tickets.
Take advantage of that early bird special and save some money.
Get it now.
We'll start to announce some speakers soon.
We want to get things shored up.
But I have a link in the description of today's show where you can get a little bit more information and get those tickets.
And we look forward to seeing you guys in a couple months.
Very good.
And I would say that our program today emphasizes the concern and the worries of which direction we're going in, especially in our foreign policy and how dangerous it is.
The one thing that I can say at the end of this, I hope we're wrong on this because what could happen from here is so serious and so bad.
And the last thing this world could stand is a nuclear exchange.
And yet it's always possible because there are some people that are antagonized.
They don't seem to be the people, oh, I want war, I want war, but their policies are leading us to war at this rate.
And the one thing is that we can be assured of is that the world has been kept together in a relative sense in the last 50, 75 years because we have been very, very wealthy.
We had a strong currency.
And we said debt is not a problem.
We can have all the debt that people need.
And anybody who needs help, we're going to give it to them.
Well, common sense, history, tells us that that doesn't work.
It makes things worse.
And there's always a climactic end to that.
So policy, whether it's economic policy, monetary policy, or foreign policy, we can't go on with this.
And yet people believe that that can.
Difference Between A and B 00:00:49
And it's the difference between A and B, one political party versus another.
And that has a lot of importance.
Yes, you have to pick and choose.
But I tell you what, there's too much support for the welfare state, too much support for the monetary policy, too much support for the deficit finance, too much for our foreign policy of both parties.
And if that isn't addressed, it won't make a whole lot of difference.
And that is, I think, one of our goals is to be a nonpartisan group which wants to deal in issues, the policies of foreign policy, as well as the economic policies that will make a difference.
And it's not complex.
Defend liberty, and we'll all be better off.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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