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May 14, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
26:41
The Neocon Era Finally Over

n his first trip abroad, President Trump spoke in Saudi Arabia about the foolish destructiveness of the neocons and nation-builders and proclaimed a new era of respect for national sovereignty and economic development. Does this mean that non-interventionism has finally arrived?

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Time Text
Trump's Middle East Deal 00:14:47
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
You did not see my studio and you did not see Ron Paul today because I have a special guest.
Dr. Paul is out of town and Chris Rossini, Mr. Friday, is with us today.
Chris, welcome to the program.
It's great to be with you today.
Thanks.
Yeah, that's great.
Long distance.
We're going to talk a little bit about President Trump's historic visit to the Middle East.
This is his first foreign visit since his 2.0 presidency began in January.
And as customary, you know, he would go to Europe or maybe Mexico or something, but he actually decided to go to the Middle East.
And it's been a consequential visit thus far.
I mean, he was greeted very warmly both in Saudi Arabia yesterday and in Qatar today.
I don't know if you caught this, Chris, but they sent a motorcade of Elon Musk's cyber trucks to bring him into town.
And then they had some camels in Qatar, and that was pretty neat.
But it's a consequential visit, not only for where he's going and what he brought with him, Chris, but as you know, for the speech that he gave yesterday that everybody's talking about.
So I'm going to toss it over to you and have you give some of your first impressions on that, if that's okay.
Yeah, I mean, President Trump, like we said in the beginning, before he even took office, he's a very mixed bag.
And, you know, that's how he is as a president.
He's hard to actually pin down or even trust, unfortunately, because he will say great things at times and then awful things at times.
You really have to judge by his actions.
I mean, we're seeing Doge just completely fall apart, unfortunately.
And in this visit to the Middle East, he made a great speech that we're going to cover today.
But again, is it just a speech?
You know, we'll praise what he said that was good.
But then we have to take the other side.
Is any of this going to happen?
And can we even take it seriously?
Yeah.
And it's also served up in the backdrop of literally just about a week ago bombing the heck out of Yemen for two months.
So when he talks about non-intervention, he talks about a lot of things that we agree with.
You got to remember that we just spent a billion dollars bombing a bunch of poor people in the desert.
But let's get into a couple of the quotes that he said.
And I think it's important because for a number of reasons, Chris, and one of them, I think, is that there is a recognition, maybe not from him, but perhaps from the speechwriter, whoever that may be.
And I'd love to meet the person, the drafter of the speech.
There is a recognition that these are bad things, that neocons are bad things, that nation builders are bad things, that interventionism is a bad thing.
That in and of itself is an achievement, because if they thought it was a winning, if they thought it was a winning idea, they would say it in a positive way.
So just the fact that President Trump has to say, we're not going to do that anymore, you know, is recognizing that people don't want it.
But here's one of the interesting points that he made.
And this was in front of MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
And he's looking around the place, you know, and he says, it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your affairs.
No, the gleaming marbles of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were created by the so-called, were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, and so many other cities.
Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.
The people that are right here, the people who have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies in your own way.
Pretty powerful.
I think probably either one of us or anyone that we're close to could have written that exact paragraph.
What do you think, Chris?
No, I think it was great.
But again, we have to come back.
Is this just a speech?
We hope not.
This would be great.
I mean, Western interventionists, I hate to say it, but the U.S. is still a Western interventionist, including President Trump.
Now, he's pointing to the neocons and the globalists that fly around that he's talking about, who want to intervene, perhaps micromanage other nations.
But now, if Trump doesn't want to do that, that's wonderful.
But does he still want to intervene?
I mean, we still have bases peppered all over the world.
No troops are coming home.
No bases are being closed.
Foreign aid is still being showered.
Weapons are still being showered.
So he's talking about Western interventionists, but he himself is a Western interventionist.
He threatens nations and bomb them into the stone age like nobody's ever seen ever before in the history of mankind.
So, you know, we have to take his actions along with his very good words here.
Yeah, and it's sort of similar to what happened with the foreign aid.
I'm glad that you brought that up, Chris, because when the USAID stuff came out, we learned that the stuff that they were doing is so horrible.
Unfortunately, among Trump and especially the sort of the cult, the manga cult, it became that the narrative became, well, look where all this money is going to all these liberal and woke causes overseas.
So it wasn't based on the philosophy that we shouldn't be spending money anywhere.
And that the problem with that is that the whole interventionist system through the use of these USAID and National Endowment for Democracy is set up to appease both sides and both sides like it.
That's why the National Endowment for Democracy contains the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute.
That ensures that both sides are going to vote for it.
So couching these terms, this anti-interventionist terminology, as you well point out, Chris, is great.
However, he may not think things are interventionists that actually are interventionists, like, you know, like bombing Yemen, like preparing to bomb Iran, possibly.
So there is a problem with terminology, I think.
But here's another good quote, Chris.
He says, in the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built.
And the interventionists were intervening in complex societies they did not even understand themselves.
And I thought that is the most important part of what he said.
And if he actually has taken that on board, that's important because the idea that you can go, I mean, this is the whole reason why interventionism failed: you can't know foreign societies.
You can't even know neighboring cities.
Everything has a character unto itself.
And so the recognition that they were intervening in complex societies they didn't even understand, you know, that should be enshrined.
That should be enshrined somewhere, I think.
Right.
And that's why nations need to defend themselves.
We should be defending the United States of America and nobody else.
You know, they are responsible for their own defense.
Now, to most people, this is a revolutionary idea, but it's very simple.
And that's the way it should be done.
That's how you don't bankrupt yourself.
We are bankrupt by being the busy body of the world, believing that you were created to manage the world, and it all just falls apart.
I worry that he just wants to change the interventionism from the very destructive neocon liberals.
Is it preferable to neocons?
Of course.
Is President Trump preferable to Kamala Harris?
Of course.
But we need better than just taking the lowest bar and being slightly better than it.
And he's right about societies being far too complex.
But Mr. President, it's the same here at home.
The interest rates are far too complex for you to say that interest rates need to be lower.
You have no idea what interest rates should be.
Nobody does.
You have no idea what the price of prescription drugs should be.
So it's more of a, you know, those people are interventionists in their bed, but I know how to intervene.
This is what both parties do with the Constitution.
They want to make the other party accountable to it.
And that's the only time they'll bring it up.
But they can violate the Constitution all they want themselves.
So we need President Trump to live these words, not just brand them correctly on his opponents, but to also, you know, embody these ideas himself.
And there also has to be a new approach to the idea of American exceptionalism.
You know, and that term needs to be redefined.
And now you can keep the term.
We can keep the term, I think.
It's a fine term if you want to think that way.
But we're not exceptional because we know exactly how your business should be run, how your country should be run, what churches you should have and should not have in your country.
We're exceptional because we lead by example.
I mean, that's was, you know, to an extent, that was Reagan's legacy, the shining city on the hill.
That is exceptional.
And if the U.S. were to start thinking of itself in that way, you could keep all the raw, raw, raw exceptionalism.
That's fine.
But you have to channel it in a different way, I think.
Yeah, that's excellent.
Daniel, if you don't mind, I'll go on to another quote about it.
And it deals with Iran.
And here he goes again, President Trump.
I want to make a deal with Iran.
But then he covers this with a threat.
If Iran doesn't go along or if they support terror or the U.S. just accuses them of it, we will have no choice but to inflict massive maximum pressure, drive Iranian exports to zero like I did before.
Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.
Now, this is a very complex subject.
Actually, you could start off, Daniel.
Yeah, I mean, isn't it interventionist to say who can and who cannot have weapons?
Who made you the one who could decide?
Why are some countries in the Middle East allowed to have them and others aren't?
Now, if you were to approach it correctly, it would be, we don't want you to, you shouldn't be aggressive towards your neighbors, all those sorts of things.
But the idea that they can't have one, why not?
You know, North Korea got one and we stopped bothering them.
You know, the lesson of U.S. foreign policy, interventionist U.S. foreign policy is you better get those weapons.
You better get them quick because as soon as you get them, they'll stop trying to overthrow you.
And that's, look what happened to Gaddafi in Libya.
And this is explicitly what Mike Waltz was talking about, that he wanted for Iran, the Libya solution.
I think it was Netanyahu who mentioned the Libya solution.
They gave up all their weapons and they got overthrown and destroyed anyway.
So the lesson, again, it is, you're right, it is interventionist itself to talk that way about Iran.
I do get the sense that he does want a deal with Iran.
And I don't think it's because, well, partly it's for his ego.
Wants to be viewed as a, as a great dealmaker.
fine.
That's what floats your boat.
But I think also there is a recognition that Iran is a formidable military power.
And I showed a couple of times on the show, Chris, as you know, the second Iranian response on October 1st of last year, when you saw the missiles easily penetrating the Iron Dome and all of the U.S. missile defense systems that we put into.
Israel at The cost of billions of dollars, easily penetrating those and destroying Israeli military bases, and these were supposedly not even their most sophisticated weapons.
I think I hope that he understands uh, what a disaster this war would be, and I think maybe that's an indication, maybe that's indicated by The fact that he got rid of Mike Waltz, who was secretly colluding with Netanyahu to put to put Trump in a trap uh, so that he would have no other option but to attack Iran um, but whatever the case may be, the deal is there.
It's not that hard, um that the outlines are very, very simple.
The problem is is that this is what the neocons did with Iraq, as you remember, Chris.
They want to put maximalist demands uh that there's no way Iran could say yes to, you can't have any missiles at all.
No, they're not going to go.
They're not going to do that.
They've already seen what happens if you give up your, your defensive weapons.
Uh, so that's what they're trying to do is to wrong foot him on this um.
But the deal is pretty simple.
There are only a couple of points, there's only a couple of reasons why Trump pulled out of the Jcpoa in 2008 in The first place, and I think they were dumb reasons, but I think they're surmountable, um.
So, as you'd say, you know talk, talk to talk.
Well, you need to walk the walk.
Then let's make the deal happen uh, and and and get toward um, a more prosperous Middle East, as he said in his speech.
Yeah very, very good points and uh, i'll echo some of them.
Yeah, it's, who is the?
U.s to tell other nations that they can't have nuclear weapons?
Now, I personally don't want any nation to have nuclear weapons, exactly.
Uh, my own nation is the only one to ever use them.
So you think that we would be like we'll have to sit this one out instead of uh telling others that they can't have them because they might use them?
Uh, and that's what we're told.
Now, these Mullahs, they're all crazy and they'll they'll use it in two seconds.
Well, nobody knows that for sure.
And again, we're the only ones that did it and we didn't even have to do it.
So uh, we're not the ones in a position to tell others.
And they do it in for preservation, because they know if they have them, that changes the game board.
You can.
Now you're gonna have to deal with them differently uh, and and look at other nations in the area that have nukes, Israel, look at what they do to Gaza.
Yeah you, does this look like a nation that should have nuclear weapons?
God no yeah, absolutely not so.
And we're going to tell them that, that they can't have them.
And again, I don't want any nation to have them.
So I got to reiterate that again.
Uh, but they do it for preservation.
War With Iran: Suicide 00:05:42
Like you said, a war with Iran would be an absolute disaster.
Iran is an ancient, Ancient, ancient civilization.
It wasn't created by Westerners drawing lines on a map and saying, okay, now this is Iraq.
This is all the other nations in the area that were just drawn up after the world wars by people sitting on a table.
This is Iran.
They are a force to be reckoned with, and we should not be reckoning with them.
And we have to do everything we can to speak out against any possible war against Iran.
And ironically, one of the reasons why Iran is so militarily formidable is the maximum pressure policy that Trump himself put on Iran, right?
It made them realize that they need to be strong.
And the same thing is true with Russia.
Russia, you know, 20 years ago or so, 25 years ago, when Putin took over, was very weak militarily.
Its economy was in tatters, as they say.
And it really was U.S. sanctions and U.S. maximum pressure on Iran and Russia that forced them both to realize they need to militarize themselves.
And in the future, the other talk that I had, Chris, is in the future, there will be new weapons that may make nuclear weapons obsolete.
We saw the Arezniks in Russia that were developed a new type of weapon.
And not that we cheer new types of weapons, because I completely concur with your statement that it would be nice to be in a world without any nuclear weapons.
So there are other ways.
But I think also Trump has to understand that an attack on Iran would have led to hundreds, probably thousands of American casualties.
There are 50,000 American troops within range of Iran right now.
And can you imagine being a president and all of a sudden there are 10,000 casualties, 10,000 U.S. soldiers that were taken out instantly?
It doesn't matter if Iran was flattened and made into a parking lot because the headlines would only be these tens of thousands of Americans who were injured or killed.
So he must understand that even someone like him, Chris, who was so, what's the word, obsequious toward Israel, would have to understand that you can only go so far.
And the downside would be so huge to this.
And let's hope he keeps that in mind.
Right.
And our nation is not the nation that it was after the World Wars.
We are in financial bankruptcy.
Everybody knows it.
I just read that a record-breaking number of Americans are just paying the minimums on their credit cards, record-breaking numbers.
So the people are a mere reflection of our government, which is totally bankrupt.
So to think that we are in some kind of position to go into a war against Iran and Russia and China would be suicide.
And hopefully President Trump, I think he does, understand this and look for better ways, get along with the people in the area.
You know, there have been presidents, including JFK, that wanted just peaceful and friendly trade and relations in the Middle East with the Arab nations, with Iran.
And that is possible if you want it.
We have not wanted it for a very long time now.
And people, even in America today, that would be totally foreign to them.
What do you mean, just trade with Iran and travel and be friendly and not threaten with nukes?
Yeah, it's possible to do that.
It was done before.
Iran used to be a big ally with the Shah.
So that is the road we should head towards because a major war with these superpowers will be deadmeat.
And there will be no more United States of America in its current form.
Yeah, your credit card would be the least of your concerns.
Well, there's one other little segment that I wanted to mention, Chris, and I think it's really interesting because I think this section, in my opinion, is kind of an indictment on Trump's predecessors in the office of the presidency.
He said, as president of the United States, my preference will always be for peace and partnership whenever those outcomes can be achieved.
Always.
It's always going to be that way.
Only a fool would think otherwise.
Now, here's the part that's interesting.
In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.
They love using our very powerful military.
And here's what he says: I believe it is God's job to sit in judgment.
My job to defend America and promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.
That's what I really want to do.
And I think that is a kind of a swipe at, remember, President George W. Bush, who looked into the soul of Vladimir Putin.
So I think that's a great idea.
I mean, if this is what he believes, I think that's great.
We don't need to be the moralizer.
We let God do his judgment.
It's not my job.
I'm just the president.
I thought that was a really clever couple of lines.
Yeah, I agree.
And I want to believe that this is something he would do.
Unfortunately, we can't because he acts the opposite.
He acts still as if he has to have his thumb around the world.
Trump's Meeting with Jolani 00:04:29
You can't do both.
You can't say one thing and do another and then expect people to believe you.
Now, if he starts doing what you just said, then boy, we'll praise him night and day.
But we have to, with caution, say, these are very nice words.
We're glad you're saying it, but we want to see the actions.
Yeah.
I think one of the, if we can just switch over because we're getting toward the end, but I just wanted to mention one thing, Chris.
I think probably the most bizarre aspect, and everyone is talking about it now on social media, the most bizarre aspect, and I just wonder if he was briefed on this, was this meeting between President Trump and Jolani, who's self-proclaimed leader of president of Syria with no elections scheduled in the near future.
There's this iconic picture, not iconic for in the good way, in my opinion, of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince.
In the middle is Donald Trump, and on the right is Al-Jolani.
And the Iranian official website captioned it this way from the left, and this is MBS.
The man who created Al-Qaeda carried out 9-11 and supplied ISIS.
In the middle, Trump, the one who killed the commander who defeated ISIS, and that would be Soleimani.
And on the right, Jolani, ISIS itself.
That's pretty much sums it up.
I mean, Trump praised Jolani as a good-looking, tough guy with a strong past.
This is the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria.
This is the guy who created Al-Qaeda in Syria, who ran Idlib as a, and it's still run under Sharia law.
And it's a he's literally six months ago, he was riding into Damascus on the back of a motorcycle that's dressed as a jihadi.
He is the man who masterminded when he was in charge of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who masterminded the torture and murder of many Americans.
Now, we could argue that they shouldn't have been there.
Nevertheless, this is al-Qaeda.
And all of a sudden, now to see President Trump meeting with Al-Qaeda.
Now he has a suit on and he wears expensive watches, but he is the same Jolani who's killed a lot of Americans and who right now is presiding over the mass slaughter of plenty of Druze, Alawites, Christians in Syria itself.
It's happening as we speak.
So I just find this is one of the most bizarre photos, one of the most bizarre events I've ever heard of.
Not only bizarre, I mean, it's President Trump contributed to this.
I believe, Daniel, correct me if I'm wrong, that he, in his first term, bombed Syria at one point.
He kept troops there instead of bringing them home.
The whole process of getting Assad out of office, President Trump contributed to.
And now all of these people that are dying, Christians, we're Christians, and we hate to see Christians, we hate to see anybody persecuted, but being Christians ourselves, we hate to see Christians persecuted.
President Trump helped to bring this about.
And now he's meeting with, instead of Assad, the leader of Al-Qaeda.
The whole thing is just disgusting to the core.
And, you know, they're now eating the fruits, the rotten fruits that they planted themselves.
And, you know, I have very little positive to say about it.
Yeah, I could not have expressed it better, Chris.
That's exactly right.
And, you know, Assad was, was he authoritarian?
Yeah, I'm sure he was.
So was Putin or a lot of leaders.
Xi Jinping is authoritarian.
But for whatever faults he may have in that respect, he did protect racial and religious minorities.
There was not the kind of sectarianism.
I've been reading over the past few days, Chris, extremely disturbing accounts of young girls being kidnapped by these jihadists who are affiliated with Jolani.
They kidnap these young gals, teenagers, and they take them to be their wives.
And it's happened.
I've read dozens of stories so far about young Alawite girls being taken and forced into, let's be honest, sex slavery to these radical jihadists.
Why Enthusiasm Fades 00:01:42
And this is it.
You know, Assad must go, okay, well, look what you get afterward.
This is the poster child for why you don't want interventionism.
So I'm very disappointed in Trump for having given it some credibility because this should have been the biggest whoops for U.S. foreign policy for the last 20 years.
Very good, Daniel.
I'll finish up closing out saying, yeah, President Trump says good things.
I hope this is not four years of this.
That, boy, they really said some good stuff.
And, you know, the actions do not mimic what was said.
Now, perhaps it could go the other way.
You know, I don't know the future any better than anyone else, but we do have to call it as we say it.
We were talking about Doge almost every day when the first few weeks of the administration.
And now the Republicans aren't even voting to cut a penny of anything.
So that's the way it can go.
You know, when enthusiasm wanes and the politicians are experts at waiting everything out.
They know that the public will, after a certain amount of time, forget.
They'll lose their enthusiasm.
And then you can just go back to robbing everybody blind as always.
So while we love the words that are being said in the Middle East, we want to see good actions follow up.
And then we'll have some positive things to say about the Trump administration.
All right, Chris, thanks very much.
I want to also thank the audience for watching us today and your patience with us of being in a different locale.
Let's mix things up a little bit.
Chris, I want to wish you a good day.
I want to wish a good day to all of our viewers.
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