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Jan. 31, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:15
How Can Trump End The Russia/Ukraine War?

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to end the Russia/Ukraine war on day one. Then, as President, we were told that he had given his special envoy Keith Kellog 100 days to wind the war down. Former State Department and US Senate official Jim Jatras joins today's Liberty Report to discuss where Trump is getting it wrong...and how to fix it. Also today: Tulsi exposes one of the greatest national security scandals of all time.

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Trump's Illusory Deal With Xi 00:15:09
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Happy Friday.
I'm glad you're joining us this morning.
Dr. Paul, again, is away.
He will be back next week.
It takes some time off, personal time off.
But you will not have to just listen to me because I've got my great friend and friends of this program, I'm sure, are very familiar with him, former U.S. State Department official, former U.S. Senate foreign policy official, Jim Jatris.
Jim, thanks for joining us today.
Daniel, it's always an honor, a pleasure, both with you and with Dr. Paul.
And always great to be an old friend getting older and older all the time.
I guess I should add an esteemed instructor at the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar.
You've done it many times, and you've been such an addition to that.
So we're always happy to have you there helping encourage these young people as you do so well.
But let's dive into the topic because, Jim, I know you follow this very, very closely.
And, you know, we've gone through this routine.
You know, when Donald Trump was a candidate, he said, I'm going to solve the war, the Ukraine-Russia war, in 24 hours.
No problem.
A couple of phone calls.
It'll be done.
Well, that didn't happen.
Nobody really expected it to happen that's been following it.
And then, as we were informed, he tasked Keith Kellogg, retired Lieutenant General, who's a special envoy to Ukraine.
He tasked him with getting it solved in 100 days.
And in the meantime, President Trump has released on his Truth Social a lengthy post about Russia that many people who follow it closely, my guess is yourself included, have recognized many factual errors in, which makes you worry about the old garbage in, garbage out saying.
And let's not forget that Keith Kellogg himself seems to be very, very woefully ill-informed about the origins of the war and how the war is progressing.
Now, off-camera, we were talking about several different schools of thought on what Trump might be up to, what he might be trying, and what's going on.
And you had mentioned some that I hadn't thought of.
So I thought maybe as an exercise, we could go through a few of these schools of thought.
Now, we both read Alistair Crook's piece earlier, which was an interesting one.
We could talk about that.
Scott Ritter had an interesting piece in Consortium News with a slightly different perspective.
What other perspectives are you hearing, Jim?
Well, you know, again, these are all people that I follow very closely and whom I know whose opinion I respect, people like Alexander Mercouris, Ray McGovern.
I'm trying to think of somebody else, Gilbert Doctorow, are taking a very optimistic view of this, that Trump is coming in to make a realistic deal based on developments on the ground, despite all this bluster and the nonsense from General Kellogg, that he's, you know, he's woke it up and spelled the coffee, and he knows that the Russians have won this war and they're going to settle on something like Istanbul Plus, which frankly, in my opinion, is a big mistake on the Russians' part.
That draft agreement that supposedly was released from the Trump administration, but it's rather uncertain what its real prominence is, is very, very close to what I outlined on the Ron Paul Institute site about a month ago, which to my mind would simply be a deception.
And then you flip over to somebody like Brian Berletik, who says nothing has changed under Trump.
This is all just smoke and mirrors designed to double down on the policies that have brought us to where we are.
There's a lot of discussion about to what extent any of the aid to Ukraine has been cut off.
It appears maybe that some of the money's been cut off, but the weapons are still continued flowing.
I think there's one fundamental problem.
Actually, two fundamental problems here.
One is Trump still seems to have this mindset that he's the guy in charge, that the United States is not really a participant in this war.
It's just these, well, the Ukrainians and the Russians are fussing over here.
Let's knock some heads together and see if we can get them to talk nice.
He doesn't seem to understand that the United States is the other party in this conflict with the Russians.
The Ukrainians are just a cat's paw.
They're just the venue that's being where this war is being fought and they're being destroyed.
The other one is, and again, this is where I think people like Mercurus and Doctorow are a little too optimistic.
They seem to think it's a done deal that Trump is going to pull back from the American global empire into kind of a fortress America that would fit into a multipolar world.
I frankly don't see that at all.
I could see the consolidation, all this talk about Greenland and Panama Canal and whatnot.
I don't see any indication that we're ready to concede to Russia, to China, to Iran, to any other power, that they have a sphere of influence where the American writ does not carry.
I don't see any evidence for that at all.
So at this point, I think that Trump was sort of muddling forward based on very, very bad information and where his own intentions are themselves unclear, maybe even to himself.
Yeah, I mean, disaster is almost already baked into the cake if you think about it, because if he just tried to withdraw into Fortress America, which I would say a very reasonable chunk of his voters voted for, that's what they want to see.
And certainly all the polls indicate that.
They're sick of Russia and Ukraine war.
They're sick of propping up Israel and this Gaza nonsense.
All the polls, I think, are suggestive of that.
But then he will set himself up for something he doesn't want, which is that he will have the neocons on the left and the right in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party going full bore.
You'll have the newly minted war party, which is the mainstream of the Democratic Party, saying, see, Trump was even worse than Biden on this war.
He's hoisting the white flag of retreat.
And it doesn't, perhaps I'm wrong.
It doesn't seem like Trump will be able to withstand such negative scrutiny.
How do you see that?
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, that's the thing that dogged this first administration, too.
Whatever sound impulses he might have had, for example, like wanting to pull out of Syria, pulling out of Afghanistan, he couldn't do it because he couldn't get the machinery of government to do what supposedly he wanted to do.
I'm not sure that's going to be any better this time.
I just heard a little clip from Megan Kelly's interview with Marco Rubio, and he seemed to want to inject a little bit of America first, a little bit of realism into it.
But basically, it was, well, we need to remain the hegemon in Europe.
We need to get the Europeans to pay more.
We need to have more effective allies.
They need to spend more money like the Finns or the Balts or the Poles or whatever.
It's still this mindset that we are the king of always survey.
And that starts with Europe as well as in the Middle East.
And I just don't see that as a path forward.
You know, if Trump were, you know, somebody like Colonel McGregor, a good, good friend of the Ron Paul Institute, has said very adroitly that, look, Trump needs to just realize that the Russians have won and pull our forces out of there.
And essentially, we're going to ratify the fact that the Russians have won this.
If they do that, of course, that means the end of NATO.
That means NATO collapses, probably the European Union along with it.
I can't think of a better outcome, to tell the truth, because both of those organizations are horrible and should have been disbanded a long time ago.
I don't know that he can actually deliver on that, even if he wanted to.
So, you know, the most optimistic thing I can think of is that he's throwing out a lot of bluster here, a lot of noise and threats and whatnot to cover up the fact that he's intending to make that strategic retreat.
I just don't see that that's what really is happening.
I think he still thinks he's a position where he can dictate the term, and then that puts the ball back in the Russians' court.
Are there going to be Charlie Brown kicking the football again that Lucy's holding because they've been lied to so many times in the past?
You know, obviously the Minsk agreements that the West never intended to uphold.
I don't know that a stable negotiated settlement is in the cards here at all, even if that's what Trump intends.
And even if that's what Mr. Putin is hoping for.
Yeah, I've often contended, and maybe you agree with me, Jim, is that it would be the end of Putin himself if he agreed to such a thing, if he goes back and kicks the football one more time and falls on his rear end.
You know, I mean, he's got a lot of internal opposition and they're not peacenicks.
But the other thing that I would say, you know, you mentioned several different options.
And this is a friend of ours as well, Alex Christoforo, and I listened to his program.
But I like his tactic, which is to simply say, hey, this is Biden's war.
I didn't start it.
I inherited it from him.
I don't want it.
I don't want to deal with it.
And I'm getting us out of it.
I mean, I think that would be a way for him to say face and to put all the blame on Biden for starting a stupid war.
I mean, he does that with Iraq all the time, and it's very effective.
People are happy to hear it, I think, and it certainly doesn't hurt him in the polls.
So I think that could be one way to do it.
But the Kellogg plan that we've seen, what we've seen of it, and what Trump has said, is putting more sanctions on Russia if they don't come to the table and do what they're told.
I don't see now after, I would say, four years of intense sanctions, but you could go back probably decades before that.
I think there's some sort of a notion that President Trump will somehow pull Premier Xi out of Putin's alliance and get them to sort of, you know, separate the two.
And I can imagine the neocons, and I'm sure you could hear it in your brain, Jim, the neocons singing into Trump's ears, we're going to separate Russia and China and India, and the two of them will go against Russia, and we will win this thing still.
I think that's probably what he's being told.
Exactly right.
And I agree with Christopher Foru.
Again, this is the same thing McGregor is saying, that he can wash his hands of this thing.
This was Biden's war.
He lost it.
We're walking away.
You notice he's not saying that yet.
He's taking the opposite tack in terms of his public comments.
And I don't know that he could actually do that if he wanted to do that.
In other words, I don't know that he actually has the control over the American government to make that happen.
And also, if there were any kind of deal, what good is that deal?
You know, a treaty, a Security Council resolution?
What kind of deal could the Russians actually rely on that the United States would honor, even under the Trump administration, much less after Trump has left office?
So I just don't see that happening.
And if he wants to double down into this thing and wade in, he'll be basically doing, as some people have pointed out, what Nixon did when he took over.
Instead of washing his hands of it and saying that was Johnson's war, he tried to solve it himself, peace with honor, et cetera, et cetera.
And then the disaster took place on his watch.
Well, I guess immediately after he was removed under Gerald Ford.
So I think this is a real severe danger with Trump.
But I think what underlies it, though, is the notion that he is not giving up on the American global empire.
He's simply trying to shift its priorities away from Europe and toward the Middle East, specifically toward Iran, and then eventually toward a big showdown with China.
And again, If his priority is make America great again and restore our national integrity, our industry, secure our borders and all that sort of thing, those two things are incompatible.
The empire must die for America to become great again.
I'm not sure he quite understands that.
Sir, can you hear me now?
Can you hear me better?
Yeah, I'll hear you now.
I'm sorry.
Where you lost track of me?
I had a little technical problem on my side.
But no, what I was saying is I think, you know, as you mentioned earlier, that people like Rubio are trying to put lipstick on the pig.
They're trying to put forth the same old neocon policies and say, oh, no, no, these are America first.
Trust us.
They're America first.
So I think there's a real danger in this.
But I think what we have seen over the past week, if press articles are to be believed, and I would have liked that Trump to have been able to see it for himself, that as soon as the slightest problem with Project Ukraine is made evident, you start seeing that it was a house built on sand.
If some of this development money that went to all of these independent newspapers in Ukraine has been lifted, and now they're screaming for money because they can't continue publishing lies and propaganda, well, that shows you how weak this artificial house that we built on the sand is.
And the same would obviously be true with the weapons.
You know, if the weapons stopped very, even very briefly, we would see how weak this partner that we've put everything into has become.
And it seems very evident to any of us who watch what's happening.
But then again, I don't know where the CIA gets his numbers from to brief President Trump.
Surely there must be people there.
There must be people in the Pentagon who understand the real figures.
For example, the KIAs on both sides.
And Trump says something like a million Russians have died, which nobody who even follows this, probably even on the Ukrainian side, believe that's true.
Throwing out bogus numbers, but somebody certainly in government has to understand and has to see things the way they are.
I think so.
And that actually brings us to Tulsi Gabbard.
I mean, if you look at the people in the administration, like Marco Rubio, Sebastian Gorka, Mike Waltz, Kellogg, of course, these are all people who want to put lipstick on that pig, and they're going to Trump the mushroom treatment.
They'll feed him whatever false numbers that serves their purpose.
Now, if somebody like Tulsi Gabbard gets in as director of national intelligence, and she evidently would be the one preparing his daily briefing, can she get the true facts to him and maybe make him take a more realistic approach on this?
Obviously, there are a lot of people on Capitol Hill that don't like hearing the truth about Ukraine or the Middle East or any other thing and would not like her in that job.
So I think it's going to be a touch and go for her on her confirmation.
I hope she gets through and I hope she can make a difference.
Yeah.
And as we mentioned on yesterday's show, obviously she's not perfect.
There are some things that we would disagree with her on.
However, what I find interesting, and I don't know if you can explain this, but I was surprised to see some of the people in the main stream of conservatism, especially in the Washington area, coming in behind Tulsi and supporting her.
Suspect Would Surprisingly Support 00:03:21
You know, people that I wouldn't necessarily suspect would, who I would suspect would be more hawkish.
Did that strike you at all?
And what is your explanation for it, do you think?
You know, I don't think I have a good explanation for it.
I mean, you know, part of it may simply have to do with being loyal to Trump.
I mean, there are some people who are, you know, I might say mega enthusiasts whose own thinking on various policy issues may not necessarily align with what you and I would hope that would entail.
But nonetheless, because he wants her and she's an enthusiastic supporter of what they perceive to be the goals of his administration, I'm going to support her, even if they don't necessarily agree with her on everything.
I mean, just like you were saying.
So I can see that aspect of it.
And maybe there.
There are some of them who do perceive beyond whatever the immediate policy questions are, that the entire apparatus of our government, especially in the national security area, is so corrupt and so unreliable that you need to get somebody in there who's going to take a contrary point of view.
I think some of the same people are supporting RFK Jr. for the same reason that the establishment has become so incestuous that it needs to have some new thinking, some new blood brought in.
I hope that's part of it.
Yeah, I mentioned on the show yesterday, disruptors, and both of them, I think, are disruptors.
There are a few other ones.
But I would, I mean, we know Tulsi.
She's been on our program.
We met her in D.C. Dr. Paul had a very long conversation with her back in 23 in D.C., which was very fascinating.
I won't reveal much of it here.
But a very, very intelligent woman.
There's absolutely no question about it.
But I would hate to be here because you can imagine.
Can you imagine if she is confirmed?
I wonder if she already has people around her to insulate her from the knives that are going to be literally and metaphorically out for her, taking over an apparatus that does not want to be reformed at all.
I mean, how do you think?
I mean, you've been sort of in that milieu yourself.
What do you think she can do to insulate herself from people who are going to be trying to wrongfoot her at every step?
You know, I really don't know.
A lot of that's going to depend on Trump himself and the immediate people in the White House that are going to hopefully provide some protection for her in the way, for example, they did not do for General Flynn during the first Trump administration.
I also do have to wonder, as DNI, I mean, as I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, she has less to do with the day-to-day operation of the various intelligence agencies in the community, whether they hold bake sales or something, in the intelligence community than she does with coordinating among the various intelligence bodies.
In other words, who is it, Mr. Radcliffe, I guess, over at the CIA?
He's going to be running the CIA, not her.
And I don't know that she can actually dig down into the depths of these agencies and root out the corruption that is clearly in them.
So, you know, that's a big question.
I don't know to what extent she'll be a glorified figurehead over the top of these agencies and be able to maybe inject an element of realism into it, but won't actually be able to change the way these agencies operate.
I don't know the answer to that question.
Yeah, that's a very good point, Jim.
And I've never, to be honest, understood this reorganization.
Arming ISIS? 00:08:48
And, you know, it's always the case.
The same thing with Homeland Security.
If you screw up, you just build another government agency on top of it, you know, and somehow, you know, it's just like a sarcophagus, you know, like Chernobyl or something, just kind of put something else on top.
So she may not be.
No, the one thing that's encouraging is that she's no shrinking violet.
She's not going to stand for having the wool being pulled over her eyes.
She's had a baptism of fire, certainly in this confirmation hearing.
But even before then, when she's taken some unpopular positions, that have actually proven to be true.
And in fact, we want to talk a little bit about one of these exchanges yesterday that we did not put on the show yesterday, but that is fascinating.
And this is the one of Senator Kelly, I believe from Arizona, who's a really nasty neocon, a really nasty piece of work.
And I won't prejudice this clip by characterizing it first, but let's watch.
I think I wrote down two minutes.
This is a longer clip than I'd like to.
Sir Kelly.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Colonel Gabbard, when Russia was denying us use of chemical weapons, they accused the U.S. of supporting terrorists.
This is a line that Putin used frequently during the Syrian civil war as he supported Assad.
Syrian officials made similar comments.
They did it repeatedly.
They did it in public.
They did it at the United Nations.
In 2016, you gave an interview in which you said, and this is a quote, the U.S. is providing direct and indirect support to terrorist groups in order to overthrow the Syrian government.
And in 2019, on the Democratic presidential debate stage, you said of President Trump, this is a quote, this current president is continuing to betray us.
We were supposed to be going after Al-Qaeda, but over years now, not only have we not gone after Al-Qaeda, our president is supporting al-Qaeda.
So I'm interested to hear what was your goal in saying these things, and did you consider, before saying them, the motives of Iran and Russia, what their motives might have been before making these claims?
Senator, as someone who enlisted in the military specifically because of Al-Qaeda's terrorist attack on 9-11 and committing myself and my life to doing what I could to defeat these terrorists, it was shocking and a betrayal to me and every person who was killed on 9-11, their families and my brothers and sisters in uniform.
When as a member of Congress, I learned about President Obama's dual programs that he had begun really to overthrow the regime of Syria and being willing to, through the CIA's timber sycamore program that has now been made public, of working with and arming and equipping al-Qaeda in an effort to overthrow that regime, starting yet another regime change war in the Middle East.
Now, what's astonishing to me, Jim, and I'm sure you agree, is that Senator Kelly was not upset that what she said was wrong.
He was more upset that she said something that Putin had also said.
That would seem to me the main, his main objection to Tulsi Gabbard having said, now we know correctly that the U.S. was arming al-Qaeda in Syria.
He's not mad about that.
What the heck is going on?
Why are we arming al-Qaeda?
She's saying, well, Putin said that too.
How dare you say that?
I mean, isn't that astonishing?
Bizarre.
I mean, one of the things to tell you in law school is don't ever ask a witness in a trial a question you don't know the answer to or you won't like the answer to and i guess nobody told senator kelly that uh and it is just bizarre so if putin or the iranians or the Syrians say the sky is blue, I better not say the sky is blue, even though it's perfectly true because they said it and that discredits it.
The fact is, it's true, whether the Russians or the Iranians or any bail said it.
And as Tulsi Gabbard pointed out, we were supporting these groups.
Remember, she was the House sponsor of a bill Stop Arming Terrorism Act, Terrorists Act.
I believe Rand Paul's the sponsor in the Senate.
And you'd think that would be like falling off a log.
We shouldn't be sending weapons to al-Qaeda.
Yeah, that's a great, that thing we should have gone through with 535 votes.
Of course, they couldn't get it through.
They did have a watered-down version of it that ended up in the National Defense Authorization Act, but only applied to DOD, as far as I could tell, so that the CIA was perfectly free to keep arming these groups that are all basically al-Qaeda offshoots.
You know, remember back in the whole episode with the mess at Benghazi, where the ambassador was killed.
You notice the Republicans didn't want to spell out actually what was happening there, that this was a CIA station that was arming terrorists, al-Qaeda-linked terrorists, to ship their weapons off through Turkey to get to their comrades in Syria.
The Republicans wanted to make partisan hay out of the mess at Benghazi, but they didn't want to lit on themselves what was actually happening.
So this has been a dirty, open secret to anybody who cared to know.
And what's amazing is the political class really doesn't care.
Oh, we're arming al-Qaeda.
We're arming basically what turned into ISIS.
We don't care.
That's part of how we really stick it to the Russians, stick it to the Iranians or whoever.
And I think that's one encouraging thing about Tulsi.
She says, well, I happen to not like Al-Qaeda.
Is that okay?
Is that acceptable now?
But you had something to do with the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, if I remember correctly.
Isn't that right?
Yeah, I was working with a group called Christian Solidarity International.
It's a group that is concerned about Christian persecution around the world.
Something, by the way, that's the last thing on the list of priorities for our government.
If our policy had been designed to root out all the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East, it could not have done a better job.
And maybe it was designed for that purpose.
I don't know, because what we were doing with these terrorist groups, these jihadist groups, was overthrowing secular Arab nationalist governments like in Syria or in Libya to install a bunch of jihadists.
Now, how is that good for Christians in these countries?
It certainly isn't.
So we were trying to help get that bill passed.
And frankly, we ran into a brick wall.
I mean, you think, as I say, not arming al-Qaeda would have been something that everybody would agree on.
Well, you can imagine, since that's what we are doing, we got a lot of resistance.
And it was really a breath of fresh air when Tulsi said yesterday, the person who's now leading Syria, who you were all cheering, she didn't say that exactly, but essentially, who you were all cheering was dancing in the streets on 9-11.
He thought it was a fantastic thing.
And in fact, he went on to kill a bunch of Americans in Iraq.
And somehow he's going to be the, who declared himself president and said no elections will happen for four years, I think at least.
This is the guy you're championing as a, you know, as a bringing democracy to Syria.
This guy's Al-Qaeda.
I mean, she said it on the floor of the Senate.
And I think I do hope she gets confirmed.
But even if she doesn't, that's a moment of triumph for those of us who've been working on this topic for decades.
Exactly.
And I think, Daniel, most Americans just don't know the details of how bad this is.
That, you know, I remember back during the Biden administration, one of the press spokesmen, I forget who it was, was asked a question about a specific group, the Alzinki group, which had been filmed, actually filmed, sawing the head off of a Palestinian kid.
Anyway, these are the worst kinds of head-chopping terrorists.
And he was asked point blank, oh, this group has chemical weapons capability.
If that is confirmed, would we cut off weapons to that group?
He would not answer the question.
The obvious implication of his non-answer was, yes, we will keep funding them because they're useful to us.
Oh, they saw people's heads off.
They've got chemical weapons, but there are bad guys.
And that's the attitude they've had.
You know, this portion, as you know, goes back quite a few years, all the way, frankly, back to Afghanistan.
That's where al-Qaeda came from in the first place.
And we use them in Syria.
We use them in Libya.
We use them in the Balkans and Kosovo and Bosnia.
We like these guys.
They're operational.
They can do stuff for us, even though they're really nasty people.
And then we run up the, you know, the red flag and say, oh, you know, the global war on terrorism, we have to fight al-Qaeda.
And a lot of people swallow it, unfortunately.
As our mutual friend Chuck Spinney would say, a self-licking ice cream cone is exactly what it is.
Why We Support Nasty People 00:00:54
Well, Jim, we're going to have to end it here.
I'm sure we could go on for a couple of more hours about this, but I really appreciate you spending time.
Let our viewers know where they can find you, where they can follow you.
The best place to find me is on X slash winner, whatever they call it now, at Jim Jatris.
And that's where also you can find links to the piece I posted on Ron Paul Institute's site.
Obviously, you can find it on your site as well about the situation in Ukraine and what kind of Charlie Brown kicking the football ploy I think is likely to come out of the administration.
But that's the best place to find me.
And of course, you know, when I was on your program with Dr. Paul a few months ago, if people want to look at my book, I tried to warn you where my collected writings are for the last five decades.
That's great, Jim.
Well, thanks again so much for joining us.
I want to thank the audience for joining us on this Friday Liberty Report.
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