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Feb. 18, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:54
Successful US/Russia Talks Leave EU & Zelensky Pounding Sand!

While the "adults" met yesterday in Saudi Arabia to discuss repairing US/Russia relations and ending the disastrous Ukraine war, European officials and Ukraine's (former) president Zelensky are in full panic mode, demanding that the war continue and vowing that Ukraine can still "win." Also today: DOGE finds...$4.7 TRILLION in "untraceable" US government payments!

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Foreign Policy Talks 00:14:21
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?
Very well.
Thank you.
Yes, good.
Good.
And we have a little bit of foreign policy talking today.
Yes.
Are we moving toward peace or are we moving toward war?
Just what?
But we can find a few hopeful things.
I mean, as hard as it is for me to figure out exactly what the administration is planning and why and all this, I know he has said some wonderful things.
His intent is not to start wars and to end some.
And so there were some talks in Saudi Arabia.
Well, I didn't even know they were, oh, I know they were fighting somebody.
But anyway, the Russians and the United States got together in Saudi Arabia, had a little talk, a peace talk.
And the big question, Zero Hedge had an article, and they said successful U.S.-Russia talks, but they put the successful in a quote.
I guess that means, wait and see.
We want it to be good.
It is good, but we still want it to be ironclad.
After, and it was ended shortly, four hours or so.
But what are they talking about?
We talked about Ukraine.
Oh, so the Ukrainians, Yuma Zelensky, gets to come to these two big shots and ask for more money?
I don't think he's going to get any money for Russia.
The American people are tired of it.
But they decided, the American government, Trump, decided Ukraine is not to be invited.
And also, the people who are sort of next door to Ukraine, the Europeans, which participated with NATO in aggravating this whole situation, they weren't there either.
So the top aggravators, you know, and the people that have been involved weren't there, but two powerhouses were there.
So you can imagine how the world would change if real close relationships developed with Russia and had a different policy.
And even if it's, I'd like to see just, you know, softening some of this rhetoric on trade or something like that.
But anyway, I'm sure it remains to be seen on how successful and which way this is going.
But I think we see some hints that, you know, the people who got invited and the ones who were excluded means the ducks are lining up.
And let's just hope they have some positive talk.
For myself, I just assume I just wish we weren't that involved.
I mean, Ukraine's a long way off, and we're going to be dividing up, and we were involved, and it wasn't the Trump administration.
We were there in aggravating that whole situation by getting rid of a leader that was sympathetic to Russia in 2014.
And we're still suffering from this.
And of course, the foreign policy has all the policies of Biden.
They weren't very successful.
And I guess I would say that Trump looks like he's trying to make an honest method, honest approach effort to bring some sense out of it.
Yeah, you know, it's often misattributed to Churchill to jaw-jaw is better than to war-war.
And I think that's the case here.
The fact that they got together, and I think these are certainly the highest-level talks since Trump met Putin in Trump's first administration.
I don't know how many years ago that was.
So what it essentially, I mean, this was not necessarily about Ukraine.
This was about restoring relations between two of the largest powers in the world, sitting down and having talks, and it was held at the highest level.
The Foreign Minister Lavrov sat down with the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also the National Security Advisor Waltz, and the equivalent essentially on the Russian side sat down for four hours to discuss the state of Russia-U.S. relations. predominantly.
Now, Ukraine obviously was a part of it because Ukraine is in between the relations.
But as we have been talking over the last almost three years now, there have been points where the U.S. and Russia were literally a hair's breadth from a nuclear conflict.
And all that time, all of those incidents, the firing of rockets deep into Russian territory, American rockets with American intelligence and American targeting, all of these things, and all of this getting close to the war, and Biden wouldn't sit down, wouldn't talk to him, wouldn't even utter his name without saying thug or any of these other things.
So simply the fact, regardless of everything else, Dr. Paul, simply the fact that the two of these sides have opened negotiations cools down the possibility of a world-ending nuclear war.
Whatever else comes out of this, that's a positive development.
Right.
And, you know, the difficulties that we have come from the fact that both parties have, to some degree, been involved in interventionism around the world.
We have troops around the world.
We're in 120 countries.
And we get involved.
And one party, political party, may be interventionist and go and mess things up as the previous administration did.
And then another one comes along with a different attitude and understanding about what intervention should be all about.
Maybe intervention should have a flavor of working for peace and striving for that.
But it's still interventionism.
So I think that one of our problems has been, you know, from really the beginning of our history.
We can't say we had purity from every single day.
But right now, the intervention, especially someday somebody's going to study the interventionism of the U.S. government since World War II, and it hasn't been good.
A lot of people have died over that.
And the American people have the responsibility.
And they are finally waking up.
They're sick and tired of it.
They all of a sudden found out, you mean that money we're spending in Ukraine, it didn't do any good?
You mean it caused some of the inflation?
Yes, that's a possibility.
So they're unhappy with this.
And I think Trump was pretty shrewd because I don't think he gets overly rigid at times.
And he found that talking about foreign policy is very attractive to people who were more disgusted with what was going on in Ukraine than the Democrats realized.
And I think that attitude has to exist.
And the president has to get support for continuing to work in a line and sticking to his announcement.
My policy will be I want less war and I want to stop wars.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, let's go through a couple of clips that I've assembled to kind of describe what we're talking about.
Now, the first one, you referenced already, this is the Zero Hedge article that kind of lays it out.
Successful U.S.-Russia talks conclude after four plus hours with no Ukraine or EU representatives.
The day of a high-level and much anticipated U.S.-Russia meeting toward achieving the end of the war in Ukraine was held in Saudi Arabia, healed by Yuri Ushakov, Putin's foreign policy advisor, as successful after about four and a half hours of talks.
However, Ukraine's president Zelensky was sidelined, as were the European allies.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov led the Dussian delegation, meeting U.S. officials, including Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.
Now, go to the next one.
Now, Witkoff was there as well.
He's the one that negotiated the ceasefire in Gaza.
He was there, and Kellogg was not there, Dr. Paul, which is very interesting.
Kellogg with a history of very pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia statements.
Witkoff with developing reputation as being someone who can solve problems.
So here is a post on X from Sprinter Observer, Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, on the results of the talks in Riyadh.
Quote, we were all focused on getting a good result.
We couldn't have imagined a better outcome for these talks.
That's extremely positive, Dr. Paul, particularly in the context of this closeness of nuko-conflict.
Now, this is the State Department readout.
If you do the third one, this is the State Department's, and I'm just going to read the four points, the major four points that were discussed and agreed upon.
Establish a consultation mechanism to address irritants to our bilateral relationship.
I summarize them.
Appoint respective high-level teams to begin working out a path to ending the conflict in Ukraine in a way that's enduring, sustainable, and acceptable to all sides.
Lay the groundwork for future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities, which will emerge from a successful end to the conflict in Ukraine.
And the fourth one here is the parties in today's meeting pledge to remain engaged and make sure the process moves forward in a timely and productive manner.
And that is a good sort of general.
And the last thing I want to point out, and this is a post from RT, this is fascinating.
Now, this is one of the other great successes, is the realization.
Put this next one up.
The realization.
American delegation in Riyadh was surprised to learn that U.S. companies lost $300 billion from leaving Russia.
That's the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
So all of these ridiculous sanctions, they hurt the U.S.
They hurt our businessmen.
They hurt our economy.
And it's great that they were there and they were able to see this is what you guys missed out on.
You know, if there's talk of an election, you know, part of the deal, we'll have an election to find out who's going to run Ukraine.
But I keep thinking, what if they do come up with an election?
It was an election that started this whole mess if you don't know who's running the election.
So that's why it remains to be seen.
I would think Zelensky has to be smart enough.
I think he is.
He's starting to realize that his leadership is not as secure as he had a couple years ago.
He could come and speak before the House of Representatives and practically demand more money.
So we become too complacent and go along with that.
But as I say these things, people, I think, are realizing that there's a mixture because both parties are interventionists.
But in this regard, I think most people know, and you've mentioned it already, that somebody messed up in the previous four-year presidency of Biden.
And it's the whole difference between continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results.
That's the Biden approach.
And that's the European approach, the EU approach, and looking for something different.
Why are we not talking?
Now, we're not saying this is perfect or that Trump is perfect or that this is a perfect policy or that Russia may get a good deal out of this and may have to walk away from the table.
Nevertheless, sitting down doing something different is better than doing the same thing.
So the Europeans were furious.
They weren't invited.
And they think they have a right to sit at the same table as we do and pound their fists on the table.
Well, the reason they weren't invited is because they want to continue the war.
And these are peace talks.
Very, very simple.
And I put up this next clip.
So they went to Paris.
They were furious.
They sat down.
I'm sure they had some fine...
I'll go to the next one.
We're going to skip Scott Ritter.
It's a great quote, but we'll skip it.
Here they are, a bunch of clowns.
And there's Mark Rutte there, the head of NATO.
Now, the head of NATO, very curious that he showed up there in a sort of an anti-America meeting in Paris.
Bad move, I think, politically on his part, Dr. Paul, to be honest with you.
But there's von der Leyen sitting there.
The other thing about the European leadership here is that certainly with von der Leyen and her deputies, none of these people are elected.
They have no democratic mandate.
And neither does Zelensky.
He canceled the elections.
His mandate expired last May.
So that's another difference between the Russians and the Americans meeting.
All of them were elected.
They represent elected governments.
These do not represent elected governments and therefore lack legitimacy.
So they had their little party.
And von der Leyen came out and tried to make some lemonade out of the lemons they've been dull.
And if you do the next one, Dr. Paul, here's what von der Leyen said.
Today in Paris, we reaffirmed that Ukraine deserves peace through strength.
That's all she can do is bumper stickers.
It's so absurd.
Peace respectful of its independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, with strong security guarantees.
Europe carries a full share of the military assistance to Ukraine.
At the same time, we need a surge in defense in Europe.
It reminds me of my cat, Dr. Paul, a small cat, and I have a big dog that dominates it.
Sometimes the cat likes to come and do this, and the dog turns around and slaps the board.
This is von der Leyen.
She's a little kitty cat thinking that she's somehow at the table.
You know, with these ridiculous slogans, Ukraine needs peace through strength.
It's getting slaughtered in a war.
What are you talking about?
Well, you know, in a way, I think this is a victory for those of us who aren't impressed, nor do we like to expose and expand the power of international organizations like NATO.
The Europeans said, oh, the Americans will come to our rescue.
They're doing well, and we can make these demands.
So they participate in NATO, and they depend on NATO.
And all of a sudden, NATO hasn't rescued them.
And it may be just the fact that they went along and thought that NATO was going to do that.
That's going to lead to the disintegration of the current government of Ukraine.
Disagreeing With NATO's War Strategy 00:05:00
I think that's what's coming.
So we'll see.
Close to the end.
The other benefit, I think, of this meeting, Dr. Paul, is sitting down, the two of them.
And this is what I hope happened.
I don't know.
Maybe it'll come in subsequent meetings.
But, you know, Kellogg has been putting out, Trump's special envoy for Ukraine.
And a few of the warmongers in D.C. have been putting out a lot of false information, which is that Russia has lost a million people.
Russia is losing the war.
Russia's economy is destroyed.
My hope is, and Lavrov has proved himself to be a pretty astute diplomat.
My hope is that they went to this meeting with a lot of intel, with a lot of information, said, look, you guys are getting bad input.
You're getting bad information.
This is the truth.
Don't trust us.
Look it up for yourself.
And that is so important to get past the propaganda and get to the truth.
And then, based on that truth, start moving ahead.
And I hope that happens.
You know, I don't think of Trump as somebody who has tremendous patience, but who very characteristically knows exactly where he's going.
So one thing is said in that article, sorry, Minister of France.
He said that Trump is determined to move very quickly on securing a permanent settlement in Ukraine.
So this is not going to linger.
This is not going to be two years from now.
And say, oh, well, let's give more, more different approach on our sanctions.
And that'll bring them to their knees.
The same thing.
But then they'll have to put sanctions on every country in Europe or something.
Now, cynics would say that he wants to solve this problem so he can continue his ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
He wants to confront China.
He wants to pull China and Russia apart.
All of that may be true, but it's irrelevant at this point because for us, stopping this war, stopping our involvement, as you pointed out earlier, this endless financial gravy train into Ukraine, stopping this in the immediacy is important.
We can't wait for everything to line up perfectly to move ahead a little bit.
Now, if he starts going to the other things that we disagree with, then we're going to have to disagree with him both.
But you're right on that.
And at the present point, that's where we are.
But I keep going back one step.
And I said, how did Ukraine get blown up and millions of people killed?
This whole mess we have.
But what if you take a look at the pictures of Gaza and the potential plans there?
That's very scary on what's happening.
So if you took the same principles and applied them, you would say, well, how did it happen that so much of Gaza got destroyed?
And the American taxpayer are the suckers.
They put people in office that literally believed that stuff and they went along with it.
Most of them didn't pay much attention to it.
They didn't, you know, conscientiously say, oh, this is what we're going to do because I want to support it.
But we end up with leaders like this.
And it's been going on and on, and there's no reason for it.
And it was meant to be controlled, that we shouldn't go into war carelessly.
And you remember when I was in Congress and we worked on trying to make the point of going into the Middle East.
And my colleagues were furious for saying, well, that would curtail our other stuff.
What are we going to do?
And the military-industrial complex.
So they had their reason.
But it has to be done that way.
But I also agree very much with you.
You have to have to play with what you got.
And if this is a success and conceived as a very successful move, this should help Trump in maybe applying that type of principle rather than saying, what I need to do is send more money to this country because they're our friends and they won Obama, people we don't like.
Yeah, exactly.
That's what I don't like.
Exactly.
Well, I want to include one clip of Victor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, because he made a great statement about what's happening.
You know, he all along been saying, I want peace in Ukraine.
I disagree with the EU.
I disagree with pushing this war.
I'm totally against it.
Now, he's been proven right in this.
Now, go to that next clip from Sprinter Observer because he makes a great statement.
He says, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that EU leaders will henceforth be content with a secondary role in determining the future world order and will only be able to learn about the progress of negotiations between Russia and the United States from newspapers and recalled that he had warned them about this.
So it's very, very funny him saying, you guys blew it.
You blew it and you don't have a place at the table anymore.
Yeah, hopefully pay attention.
Why Social Security Matters 00:09:24
Yeah, good for him.
We try to call attention to the things that we consider important.
And to tell you the truth, I think we're reaching more people.
You know, when we got on some big outlets on the internet, and they talk about and passing out and boosting the numbers who are listening to our message, like no more foreign aid.
You know, and then the people like that, even though it gets messy.
Oh, but, you know, Leonard Reed, you better watch out.
We're for that, but.
Yeah, but.
But we have this ABC that we have to take care of.
Yeah, and that was a, I guess we won't get to it today, but that was something that was from the Libertarian Institute.
They cited a study showing that 60% of the people in a survey in the United States believe that foreign aid is wasted.
And you were saying how many decades you were saying, no foreign aid, it's all wasted.
Finally, America wakes up and says, well, golly gee, I guess Ron Paul is.
They're so hilarious.
We shouldn't laugh because they're so dumb and dangerous.
What about how many dead people got Social Security checks?
Millions of people.
They're still dead and they're still getting money.
Well, that's actually our next story a little bit because we're going to do a little doge.
We don't have a lot of time left, but hit that next one.
Skip the Balajorbon one.
We'll talk about him some other time.
Doge finds $4.7 trillion in virtually untraceable Treasury payments.
I think that's why the heads are exploding, Dr. Paul, among the Deep State and the Democrats, because they're actually finding money.
They're finding this isn't a couple hundred thousand dollars for a pool for the kids in the inner city.
This is real money.
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the U.S. Treasury are, quote, almost impossible to trace, thanks to rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using tracking codes when dishing out money.
They just didn't care.
Maybe they'll have to check some of those checking accounts for the right reasons instead of the innocent Americans that hardly made a very big mistake.
But that's where the information is.
And all the secret ways that they pass money, that's one of my beefs about the Federal Reserve.
I think if they ever found out how much credit and money is exchanged secretly through the Federal Reserve and BIS, the Bank of International Settlement, and some of that stuff is barely ever in the news.
But there's been a few seeds planted there, and I'm sure they'll eventually get into that.
They were getting into the, you know, the people who got all that money from Social Security and not living.
And I got to thinking, maybe that's why, what about the people that get to vote when they're dead?
I've been dead for 10 years, but I've been always voting straight Democrat.
Well, you know, we were in a 501c3 and we have to dot every I and cross every T or we're going to have the IRS breathing down our throats.
And here we have the same people who are supposed to be the ones in charge who don't even bother with basic accounting.
Basic accounting.
Just spend it.
Automatic payments, you know?
That's crazy.
Yeah, maybe a good audit would be helpful.
And that's the one thing.
The principle of the audit is something has always been popular.
You know, when I was doing that work on an audit of the Fed, we had all the Republicans and some of the Democrats just because the principle of the audit was acceptable and necessary.
They can't believe that you wouldn't permit the audit.
What about this, you know, the Pentagon?
If you want to really get to the bottom of, I complain about all the weapons around the world.
What about the fact that we don't even get an audit on this?
Some of these times, we literally, I can't remember which war it was.
I guess it was in Iraq.
They delivered trainloads of cash.
Cash, yeah, talents of cash, yeah.
I wish they do that to us.
They're probably still living off it.
Yeah, I probably are.
Well, let's skip that next one and go to the one after it.
Of course, that appears to be exactly, if we can put that clip up, because this is what you alluded to, Dr. Paul.
This is the same article from Zero Hedge.
Of course, that appears to be exactly what's happening.
On Sunday, excuse me, on Sunday night, Musk said that Doge might be on the trail of the biggest fraud in history.
As the Social Security Administration data appears to show that 20.7 million Americans over the age of 100 are collecting Social Security.
That includes 12 million who are reportedly over 120 years old.
And I saw the chart, Dr. Paul.
There were several hundred still getting Social Security at 199 years old.
I want to know what their diet is, what their exercise routine is.
He goes to show that if you got more money from the government, you're going to live longer.
Yeah, exactly.
So expand it.
Everyone should get a check.
Yeah, they have no worries about old age.
That's what the left will say.
Yeah, so that's amazing.
And, you know, they want to frame it like, oh, these evil Doge people want to get rid of Social Security.
Well, how about just starting with getting rid of people who are 200 years old in George Washington's probably still getting a check?
It's amazing.
To me, it really is amazing how long it lasted when Bretton Woods broke down.
That was a big deal.
And it still was and is a big deal because it was an announcement of what was to come.
But it is something just dumbfounding that it lasts that long.
It's this illusion, this trust.
We're powerful and keep on printing.
And they claim, oh, we have to watch the deficit.
But the printing continues.
And the people, there's enough people around the world that will still take a dollar and use it.
So I guess they're going to get away with it for a while.
But there will always be a payback.
And right now, the payback is creeping prices.
Prices are going up.
People don't like that.
So that's the payment coming due.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, let's skip to my last clip because it's on topic, which is the upcoming Ron Paul Institute Conference.
There you see our guests.
We'll have the in-house experts, i.e. Dr. Paul, but these are our guests coming from out of town, Tom Woods, Representative John Duncan, David Stockman.
Now, David's going to talk about something that's relevant to what we were talking about today, Dr. Paul.
His title will be, Bring the Empire Home, Save $500 Billion Dollars Per Year.
Who doesn't want to hear that talk?
I certainly can't wait for it.
And then our good friend Jeff Deist over there on the left, your final chief of staff on Capitol Hill.
Those are our out-of-town guests.
It's going to be an absolutely terrific event, selling a lot of tickets.
I'm very happy to say.
Get yours while we still have the early birth discount.
Save a little bit of money.
I forgot to do it before the show, but I will put a link in the description to snatch those tickets up.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I'm looking forward to our conference.
I'm looking forward to seeing old friends.
And I think every time we have a conference, we get a lot of new people.
And I pay a lot of attention to ages.
You have to be a certain age or you're not allowed in.
You have to be young at heart and open-minded to the benefits of living in a society where the individual is free.
Because that is the system of government where you gain the maximum amount of freedom and prosperity.
And that's what government should be involved.
maximizing our liberties, make sure that we make our decision.
What?
Let the people, they won't take care of themselves, they won't feed themselves, they won't have any retirement.
I wonder how we did it before Social Security and they got by with it.
But I think it's wonderful that this is available to us.
Our history has given us a lot of information.
We do have information now that has been highly refined.
You know, even the economics of Adam Smith, as great as it was, we have the Austrian School of Economics that takes a somewhat different position.
But believe me, the history of sound money goes all the way back to Aristotle.
All of history said you have to have sound money for a society to examine.
And history has shown that who wants to take care of the money?
And it's usually some government agent doing it in secrecy.
And that is one of the reasons why I pay a little attention to it and do want to see someday, and maybe we'll see it now with the recent effort to expose all the nonsense in Washington, that we will truly have an audit of the Federal Reserve System.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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