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Sept. 10, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:51
Will Trump And Kamala Come Out Swinging? With Guest Jim Jatras.

Former US Foreign Service Officer and Senior Senate Policy Advisor Jim Jatras joins today's Liberty Report to preview tonight's presidential debate and ake a look at what may be the final stages of the disastrous Ukraine war.

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Time Text
Spirit of Inquiry 00:04:59
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?
I'm doing well, and we're lucky today.
Yes.
We have somebody that's going to give us a lecture on good foreign policy.
We're delighted to have Jim Jatris here today, friend of ours.
We even knew him back when we were doing duty at Washington, D.C.
So, Jim, it's great to have you here.
And you've helped us out a lot on a real pet project of Daniel's, you know, talking to young people when we have our annual conference.
And you didn't come once or twice.
You've come a good many times, and you do a great job, and you have a good reputation.
You've come out with a book on a summary.
Now, you know, I kid about myself, but I'm serious.
Some people write books, and some people do I, what I do.
We just dawd down things and pretend to give speeches.
But he has a book out, and we'll be talking about that in a little bit.
But it's about your history, Jim.
And I just want to introduce you to the audience and just say welcome to our program.
It's great to see you today.
Well, Dr. Paul, it's an honor to be down here with you and Daniel.
I mean, as you pointed out, we've known each other for a long time when I was working at the Republican leadership in the Senate.
You were still in Congress, and, you know, among the few friendly ears anywhere around the place on things like war and peace, especially all the nonsense that was going on in the Balkans and the Middle East.
I mean, you could count on one hand who people were that you could rely on.
You didn't even need your thumb.
So it's a pleasure to be with you.
And also, talking to the young people at the Ron Paul at the conference, I mean, we all just saw each other a week ago up at Dulles Airport.
And I know everyone come back, talk to the young people.
I sort of wonder, I might get a cup of hemlock for corrupting the you if you're aware of it.
But I think it's very encouraging to see the kind of young people you attract to this movement, to the Liberty platform.
And some of them have gone on to do great things where they're actually making a difference in the world.
And I think it's a tribute to you, Dr. Paul.
One thing I noticed that I learned having been in Washington, more so when I got involved in some of the national campaigns, you go into the college campuses, and you've had a lot of experience, more than a couple years, several years.
We won't tell them how long you've really been doing this.
But I changed my attitude because when I first started thinking about this, I was pretty average conservative, you know, wealthier.
It was just those bad people who needed food stamps.
And I never thought, well, maybe they need food stamps because some stupid government policy.
It is something that crossed my mind a short time after I went to Washington that the young people sometimes get a bad rap.
Yeah, there's a lot of clowns out there, and there will always be.
But I've been impressed, and you've did this over the years.
Do you think you've seen any changes?
Do you think you have a little bit more optimism about what the young people are reading and the access to some of our liberty philosophy than it was when you first started this?
Yes, definitely.
I mean, look, just as in my own life, I've seen evolution from when I was just a standard conservative, anti-communist, and all that.
And you saw what happened after the end of the Cold War and the way basically these neoconservatives want to turn us into the new ideological Soviet Union.
I think a lot of these young people are less likely to be, well, frankly, they're less trusting and less naive of what they're being told by their bettors they have to believe and do.
They're skeptical, they're inquiring.
That's a good thing, you know, ask questions, you know, question more.
And I think that's something they're doing.
Yes, Daniel.
Yeah, well, the program that Dr. Paul is talking about is our Ron Paul Scholars Seminar.
We always do that the day before.
And actually, we have a dinner the night before, before that.
You know, this is before our annual conference.
And one of the great things, I think you've spoken to all four of them, haven't you?
Maybe just a few of them.
No, All four of them.
I was there with the first one.
I'm addressed from all three of them.
And then this time we did the lunchtime discussion with John Sharp and Phil Giraldo.
Yeah.
But one of the things about it on Thursday nights, because I'm usually my head is full of all the things we have to do.
So usually kind of take over the dinner because you're interacting and talking with them.
What kinds of impressions have you gotten over the years of these young people?
You know, they're a really mixed crowd in terms of their backgrounds, where they come from.
But I think as we were saying earlier, there's that spirit of inquiry, of questioning, that I think is really going to serve them well, especially as we move into very, very uncertain times in this country and the world.
Yeah.
Well, you know, politically, there's always a subject.
We don't see our program as being a political program.
But it sort of drifted into, you know, coming up and commenting on major issues.
And a lot of them are political.
Debates and Gaffes 00:02:12
And right now, there's a political event.
I think that's tomorrow or something.
No, don't.
Maybe it's tonight.
Yeah, something's coming up.
I think some people are coming together and they're going to have this argument.
But all the rules are, don't say a nasty word to anybody.
So anyway, I'm talking about the debates.
I think there are some debates.
And I imagine you've given that a little bit of thought.
What do you think's good?
Can you think of very many good things that will come from the debate?
Or how do you assess this debate?
Well, you know, Americans like to be infotained with it by these things.
And I think when people watch it, they're not really listening so much about where do you stand on the issues?
What are you going to do if you're president?
But rather, it's more like has somebody made a gaffe.
Did they offend some group or something of this sort?
Did he look bad?
Did she look bad?
Was he disrespectful to her?
You know, all this kind of thing.
And then, of course, the media will then spin it any way they want and say, oh, he said something dumb.
She lied or whatever it might be.
And, you know, it's basically almost like a sports event for a lot of people.
I mean, as I see it, this is going to be a very different debate than when Trump debated Hillary.
That was very different.
Now, that was very entertaining.
That was Trump letting loose.
That was Trump winning over a lot of people who didn't like Hillary.
I mean, people don't like her.
She's not likable.
And he was able to build on that.
Now, I think this is going to have to be a different debate.
So what would you do if Kamala called Jim?
She said, Jim, you've been around DC a lot.
You're in the legislative branch.
You're in the executive branch.
You were a lobbyist.
What can I do?
What can I do against this guy, this orange beast?
Give me some advice.
What would you tell her?
I would try to find some way to get to provoke him to say something disrespectful that had sexual or racial implications because that is going to offend some group of promoters that she's going to want to need.
Look, I have to confess to you, I'm a little skeptical about the integrity of our elections anyway.
So I'm not entirely sure that it's necessarily about winning votes, but rather positioning a narrative for however things are going to be managed when the election day comes.
Ukraine, Russia, and Big Sanctions 00:15:28
You know, the most recent foreign policy event of major proportions that we've dealt with, and you've talked about, and that has to do with Ukraine.
And we've been talking about it since 2014.
Every once in a while, people say, how did you start talking about that?
Well, I had a good advisor.
I read your stuff.
Daniel McAdams kept me up to date.
And it is very revealing.
You know, we look at this that NATO had something to do with it, starting this thing.
But eternally, even today, we see constantly, I imagine, I think even yesterday, when Russia invaded Ukraine and started this war, and they never look at it objectively.
And have you sensed that?
I'm sure you've sensed this is happening.
But is that something that you address or you try to ignore because it's so crazy?
Well, you know, of course, the standard phrase is Russia's full-scale unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
And of course, it was neither full-scale nor unprovoked.
I mean, for reasons that we all know only too well, whether we're talking about the Balkan Wars, the expansion of NATO, or the militarization of Ukraine, the shelling of the Donbass, that Russia tried in many, many ways to engage with us to find a peaceful solution to this.
And we basically told them to get lost.
And they finally reluctantly did something.
Look, you could argue that maybe they should have done something else or not done this at all.
But, you know, this is a regional power, maybe still a world power, right on its own doorstep.
Look at our interventions in other countries.
Iraq is a direct national interest in the United States.
Libya, I mean, these are countries halfway across the world that are not vital to our national security in the way that Ukraine is to Russia's.
And still, we have an establishment in Washington that's willing to kill basically every young man in Ukraine, and maybe starting other women too, and risk a real war between NATO and Russia that could be the end of all of us.
And they don't seem to care.
And most Americans don't seem to care.
Right.
And you know, there's another issue going on right now, foreign policy, which is dangerous.
That is, of course, the Middle East.
That's been around for a long time.
And I don't think there's any way we can list them, say, this one is a lot worse than the other one.
But just talk about the two together.
For me, how we think about this, this is all part of one philosophy that we're engaged in doing things we shouldn't have, and it shouldn't surprise us.
But both are dangerous, but is there any way that you sort of lean towards saying, you know, yes, they're both very dangerous, but I worry more about A rather than B.
I think for the shorter term, the possibility of a wider conflagration is greater in the Middle East than is Ukraine.
But I think Ukraine is still the bigger point of combustion.
The prospects of an early expansion of the conflict are greater in the Middle East.
And of course, you could put China-Taiwan further back on the menu for something in the future.
But in a way, there's a very strong parallel between Zelensky and Ukraine and Netanyahu in Israel.
Each of them want to drag us into a war.
Zelensky wants to drag us into a direct war between NATO and Russia.
Netanyahu wants to drag us into a direct war between the United States and Iran.
And of course, for better or worse, probably worse, Netanyahu has a lot more influence in Washington than Zelensky does.
Zelensky's star has kind of faded.
Whereas, let's face it, I mean, most of your former colleagues up there, you know, Netanyahu has more influence in Washington than Joe Biden does, or whoever is standing behind working as a bombardment.
One other group that's, I wanted to drag us into American citizens that worked for the military-industrial complex.
That's a big one.
Yeah, absolutely.
And look, let's face it, you know, Eisenhower's military-industrial complex was a horse and buggy compared to the Formula One racer that is the deep state today, because not just the traditional things, the intelligence, the military, the arms manufacturers, it's the financial system, it's Hollywood, it's IT, it's the big pharma.
You go down the list, there's this huge nomenclature of power that are all pointing in that direction.
Daniel?
The one thing that's interesting is when you look at time, because I tend to agree with you that the Middle East is possibly a more dangerous situation.
But when you factor in the fact that we are only a few weeks from an election, an election that could go either way, as you say, there's some questions about the veracity of our system.
Let's just say.
No, no, we're the envy of the world when it comes to the honesty of our elections because we have machines.
That's right.
We have good machines.
But the fact of the matter is, the people who have done so well on Project Ukraine, $200 billion, none of it went to Ukraine.
It all went to the Beltway bandits.
You know how it works.
You know how that system works very well.
That's true.
The system of getting that money.
But they're looking now at the potential end of that gravy train.
Trump has said, bombastically, as usual, I will end it in 24 hours.
I don't think that's going to happen.
We talked last night when we had dinner together about the Fleits Kellogg plan.
I don't think that's going to end it in 24 hours.
No, no.
But nevertheless, you have this sense that the end game is coming.
The gravy train may run out.
And so that may be why you're seeing things like the Kursk incursion, all of these sort of seemingly fake PR things.
Well, as I say, Zochki needs to find a way to escalate and get us directly into the conflict more than we are now.
And as far as Trump, look, even if he does win, I hope he learns something for the first time around.
But remember, the militarization of Ukraine mostly took place under Trump, not under Obama.
Obama wouldn't do it.
No.
And just like, for example, how many times?
Three times did he order U.S. troops out of Syria and that didn't happen?
I'm not convinced that whatever Trump's drothers are or even Vance's, that they would really be able to turn that ship around and keep the machine from just operating the way it has been over the last few years.
I almost get the sense that all someone would have to say to Trump is, well, this is making you look weak and making America look weak.
Yes, right.
He's unpatriotic.
Yeah, and that seems to have been his approach, too.
I'll just bluster and threaten people, and they'll all fall on the line.
Well, what if they don't?
I have an article here in Politico.
I'd like you to make a comment on it.
The title is opinion.
The forever wars were a mistake.
Supporting Ukraine is not.
And they were referencing JD Vance.
And he has gone to different positions, but he's under the attack now because he looks like he might be drifting in our direction.
And I think that is bigger than we, I'm hoping it's bigger than we've imagined, but we've encouraged it.
And that is that maybe there is still a coalition out there.
Maybe we can split the Republican Party from the warmongering positions.
So I imagine you got a peek at that.
Well, you know, I think there is a reservoir of opinion out there that wants to move in a more realistic direction on these things.
Look, I remember even in 2016 when Trump denounced the Iraq war in front of a primary crowd in South Carolina, a very military state.
People loved it.
Well, I mean, you wouldn't expect that to work, but it did work, you know.
And so I think that I hope Vance is sincere about this.
I hope Trump is sincere about moving this direction.
Whether they can actually do it or not is a whole other story.
And as far as this article goes, it's amazing to me how you can peddle this sort of thing.
Oh, those other wars in the back.
Well, those were mistakes.
But this one, they're telling the truth this time, you know?
And of course, what are we going to wait for?
When this war is in the back rearview mirror, we'll say, yeah, Ukraine was a mistake, but X, the current war, that's one we really got to win.
Trust us this time.
Trust us this time.
But, you know, this is written by Matt Gallagher, who was in the Iraq war.
And it does smack a little bit of desperation because he's saying, hey, you know, I went in there.
I hooked line and sink or I bought the whole thing.
I went in there looking for the weapons of mass destruction.
We were duped.
We were lied to.
But by golly, JD Vance, you're wrong.
This is the good war.
We finally found a good war.
Otherwise, if when Obama was elected, the Iraq war is a bad war.
Afghanistan is a good war.
And it's almost out of desperation.
Here's a little quote from this article, Dr. Paul, that I know if our good friend Jimmy Duncan was sitting here, he'd be perfect.
And our good friend Walter Jones, who sadly is no longer with us.
So here's from Matt Gallagher, who was duped into fighting the Iraq war and is now trying to pull something out.
He says, Vance has emerged as a face of a new movement in the GOP led by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I love this part that stands against more traditional conservative support for aggressive foreign policy interventions.
Is that really the traditional conservative position?
Has he ever heard of Taft?
When you think we're winning and we can let up a little bit, we better read that.
We still have a job.
Yeah, I think aggressive foreign policy, wasn't that in George Washington's parallel?
CIC.
I've always had trouble separating foreign policy and economic policy because they mesh.
And of course, the founders and many others throughout our history have said that the principle is that if you don't trade with people, get along with people, you're more likely to fight with people.
And right now, Trump is pretty clear on many of his beliefs.
And as you say, he said something about foreign policy.
We hope he sticks to it.
But he says something that I think he's going to stick to it.
And I'm not happy about it because I like free trade and free travel because I do believe that people should mingle and they're less likely to fight with each other.
But there was an article this morning that Trump's demanding, anybody messes with us, we're going to put 100% terrorist on there.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
And that can override some of these other positions.
You know, this is a big issue.
Yeah.
And of course, you know, Washington is addicted to sanctions.
They love to slap sanctions on people.
And they seem to be unwilling to face the fact that they don't always work.
And they're becoming less and less effective because we don't have the same throw weight in the international system as we used to have when it comes to finance.
We're basically cutting out the legs from what had been our supremacy in the past.
That's going to come back to haunt us here, especially when the dollar is not the center for the coalition against it.
Exactly right.
And of course, the big fear I have back to the Middle East is that Trump, for whatever reason, has decided he's going to become more Catholic than the Pope when it comes to being pro-Israel in the Middle East and doubling down on support for Israel and threatening Iran.
Now, he backed away from attacking Iran a couple times when he was in office the first time.
Will he deliver this time as the neocons want?
That's a big question, Mark.
Yeah.
Well, the funny thing about the sanctions, though, and I just saw this on TwitterX earlier today.
So, you know, the whole big thing now is the Biden administration.
I mean, you can't even say Biden administration, the Blank administration, is now their big thing is Iran is providing missiles to Russia.
We're the only ones that are allowed to provide weapons to other countries.
This isn't right.
And so Blinken made the big announcement.
We are announcing a couple of new sanctions on Iran.
Oh, well, that'll do it.
That'll show up.
Everything is a nail when you only have a hammer, it seems like.
But I was going to ask you one thing.
Forgive me because we haven't discussed this before.
But do you have any sense?
Because it's all speculation now.
Any sense of how Trump's foreign policy team might be taking shape?
Is there any names that you've been looking at that may give us some encouragement or discouragement?
Do I have any sense?
That's a good question.
Or dollars.
Well, you mentioned the flights in Kellogg.
They were the ones who wrote that ridiculous peace plan a few weeks ago.
It's the dumbest thing I've ever read.
And as I understand it, and I could be wrong, as I understand it, when Victor Orban went to see Trump in Mar-a-Lago, they were somehow in that orbit.
I don't know if you met with him personally, but apparently they do have Trump's ear.
I don't know if Mike Pompeo is still around in that orbit.
General Flynn is, but I don't know.
I think that's actually a more positive influence as far as I can tell.
Except for China.
Except for China, except for China.
So I don't know.
I don't want to presume anything, but the indications I've gotten is that he really hasn't learned the lesson from his first time around in office in terms of his personnel selections.
I hope he does somewhat better, but I'm not convinced.
You know, I got my draft notice in 1962.
There were a few missiles down in Cuba, and there was a war going on in Vietnam.
But it still persists.
I think my attitude is to change definitely about Russia because it was missiles of Cuba.
So you shouldn't be able to just totally ignore that.
But there's now they're keeping this ball rolling because we're supposed to still fear Russia, and they almost paint it like it's still the Soviet Union, and they have to do this.
And some of their policies that the neocons push is the basic goal is somehow or another, we have to weaken Russia's sanctions and, you know, start a war with them.
So will they be successful doing this or are they going to strengthen Russia eventually?
Well, they keep strengthening Russia, but first off, 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis, we're in a much more dangerous situation today because the orders for one to launch or launch on warning and so forth are far more hair-trigger now than they were in 1962.
So that's one problem.
The other thing, you know, I think there are some people, especially some older conservatives, who still think, oh, Russia is still the Soviet Union.
That's not the major problem.
When I was at the State Department, I served on the Soviet desk.
My dad was the Air Force attaché in Moscow.
And back then, there was a lot of not necessarily pro-Soviet, but not anti-Soviet opinion, because after all, they're godless, they're secular, they're progressive, they're kind of like us, you know.
And then when that ended, all the people I used to work there with, whether they were not particularly anti-Soviet, became very anti-Russian because now it's a national state.
It's got a kind of a Christian ethos to it.
That's really, really bad.
We don't want that sort of thing.
So there's actually, you know, think about it.
Was Khrushchev, Brezhnev, even Stalin ever demonized the way Vladimir Putin is?
No, he doesn't say that.
It's this hostility of Russia is something that's not just a continuation of the Cold War legacy of the Soviet Union.
It's something new and qualitatively different, I think.
It's convenient to motivate people to spend more money here in this country fighting the potential war.
And it also dovetails with some of the domestic pathologies having to do with sexual and racial and ethnic issues that somehow, you know, the Russians are bad people because they're the kind of people like those deplorables that we've got to get rid of in this country.
You know, Putin is the leader of this right-wing conservative movement around the world, and we've got to kill that because those are bad people in the United States, too.
Why Russia Is Different 00:04:59
Yeah, exactly.
Well, let's segue and talk a little bit about your book because your book just came out.
I'm going to hold up a cover of it.
I'm trying to get it without gleaming.
But before we talk a little bit about the book, I have to share the back cover picture.
If we can zoom in on that at all, I know it's a little bit tricky to see.
There we go.
Who's that?
That is a fascinating picture.
It caught my attention immediately.
You have Pat Buchanan on the right, Ron Paul on the left, and Jim Jatris in the middle.
Tell us a little bit about that.
He was a handsome fellow with a short dark beard.
Yeah, that was a Christmas party at Pat Buchanan's house in 1996.
Wow.
And, you know, it was great.
I mean, all the best people were there.
What could I say?
Well, tell us about the book a little bit now.
Well, by the way, the cigarette I'm smoking there, that was in 1962, the same year.
It was seven years old.
It was a hotel room in Paris.
And I didn't smoke another one until 2023.
So I'm going to pace myself and not smoke another one until 2084.
But it's a collection of my writings over the last five decades.
You know, we were talking about this before the show.
You need to do the same, collect your writings because it would be 10 times, you know, volumes like that.
Because, you know, I guess as I'm getting older, I just didn't like the idea that anything I've written will just sort of disappear along with me when the time comes.
So I kind of figure, well, there's something kind of a legacy thing, an epitaph, if you will.
And so it basically, it's just, I've written on any number of topics from, you know, domestic politics, international relations, a lot of that, religion, many, many other things.
I just wanted to have a kind of a compendium of it.
Well, for me, I mean, it's kind of personal because a lot of this harkens back to that late 90s era where I started reading Justin Raimondo.
I discovered anti-war.com.
I discovered Jim Jatris.
I discovered your mother, Stella Jatris, who was a firebrand, and I discovered Ron Paul and Lou Rockwell.
So you start reading these five people and you suddenly get a real sense of foreign policy and non-interventionism.
And this makes sense.
It becomes kind of a unified theory, not whether that, so if this war is not good, that war is okay.
You just start understanding the whole concept of it.
So a lot of these early essays, I can't wait to read it.
I just got it when we were at the conference, but a lot of those early essays were really formative when I really started thinking seriously about foreign policy.
Yeah, and it really does reflect an evolution of my thinking because I was a very conventional conservative anti-communist then.
But I think as people get, if you will, you know, red-pilled about what's really going on in this country and the world, it does tend to assume a kind of a unified coherence that we underestimate.
You know, when you were, Mark, making comments about individuals that you knew, that means ideas do have consequences.
They do, exactly.
They change lives.
And they're pretty, they don't realize it's more powerful than those guns.
Well, I think it's about time we, this has been great that you've been here.
You came all the way to Lake Texas.
I know you were in Texas, but you made the effort to become CS.
So that is really great.
People say, have you seen beautiful downtown Clute?
And I just saw it, so I just got to see it.
There's a lot of jokes about Clute.
Their celebration each year is a mosquito.
Festival, yeah, yeah.
Festival.
I think about that.
Oh, no, man, they still have that.
They do, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Mosquito Festival.
Did they round them up and brand them or whatever?
So, well, I just want to thank you, Jim, for coming out.
We spent some time together chatting, and thanks for all your participation in the work we do at RPI.
And thanks for coming to the studio.
Hey, Jim, do you have an address to tell our audience that they're looking to find out what you're going to do next week?
The only place I'm ex-Twitter is at Jim Jatris.
That's my only online presence.
And I'm very reachable.
You know, as we say in Spanish, I am disposable.
So if you want to, I'm happy to go on other people's programs.
And so, and what kind of say, and buy the book.
Yeah, buy the book.
Still this book.
I want to thank our audience today for tuning in today.
This has been an excellent program as far as I'm concerned.
I thank Jim very much for taking the time to time to come over.
And if you're ready to read and get a summary of what Jim's been thinking about, he tells me 50 years, but I don't know.
I think you're fibbing a little bit on that.
50 years?
What was my earliest essay?
You were about eight years old when you started or something.
Anyway, thank you very much.
And I want to thank our audience for tuning in today.
Please come back, sir, to the liberty report.
I don't think it's not working at all.
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