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Oct. 23, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
32:37
It s Trump s War Now President Flip Flops Again Sanctions Russian Oil

Another day, another Trump position on the Ukraine war. After saying just Monday that it is unlikely that Ukraine would win the war with Russia, President Trump today announced that the US is sanctioning Russia's two oil giants until Russia agrees to a ceasefire along current conflict lines. Not coincidentally, NATO uber-hawk Mark Rutte was in town yesterday bending Trump's ear.

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Enough Wars 00:14:05
Into 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 doing doing?
Well good well, you know, I want to talk about foreign policy and we've talked to him about a war recently, you know, trying to stop a war down there in Venezuela, and that's still a mess.
And uh, we were told that uh, with the, during the last election, that we were going to have less wars, we're going to stop wars and not start any new ones, and that we would put America first.
Now I am confused because uh, I don't know whose definition i'm going to use for explaining what America first means.
So uh, I like to think uh, the American citizens should be first and that individual's liberty should be protected, but it doesn't seem to be the concentration on that, but the principle of liberty.
If somebody on principle defends it and follows the constitution, I could see why America should be, and could be, and has been, first.
But now there's a lot of confusion because uh, we just wonder who benefits from this.
You know, it's 11 years.
Nobody could ever believe and nobody will understand what i'm going to say.
It's been 11 years since NATO started this war between Ukraine and Russia.
What are you talking about?
They'll say, what?
How does NATO start wars?
They stop wars, don't you know?
Well, that was when CATO or NATO?
NATO conspired and got together with the U.s.
Uh uh uh uh you you, U.s.
Dignitaries and planned a coup.
The evidence is so strong, it's powerful, but it's still going on.
And now uh, we've warned that it would accelerate and it's starting to.
It's been steadily accelerating.
But the probably the most ridiculous thing of the whole thing is how much money's been spent, how many people have died and uh, how complacent the American people are although, waking up, they're starting to see that the American people are going broke, and we're still sending money.
There was a negotiation this week in a vote in the Senate dealing with the dod budget, and guess what?
They added more money.
They're planning on giving more money to uh Ukraine, Joe Salin to Zelensky, and that that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
But uh well our, our diplomats are getting a little frustrated with this.
They say well, we're just not tough enough with Russia.
Of course, they don't understand what happened in 2014, the promises made before that, but anyway uh they, they argued our case.
The warmongers want to get tougher with Russia, so they don't have much left.
Uh, we're running out of money and running out of weapons, so what they're going to do is put sanctions on Russia.
We'll punish those people and so far, you know, the uh trade war is not Going well for our side.
But they want to put these treasures on the biggest companies and deal with it.
And, you know, the thought, Daniel, that came to me on this was that was one of the key things that came to, you know, some peace efforts in 1945 or 1940, 39, and 40 is trying to stay out of war with Japan.
And that is, we froze assets.
We were still in charge of a lot of banking.
And that was the climactic thing that made the Japanese.
See, that's a very dangerous thing to say.
You mean Japanese had justification now?
That's stretching it a bit.
But it also explains what was going on and that sanctions don't work and leads to a lot of trouble.
And right now we're facing trouble because, quite frankly, Daniel, I don't think that all of a sudden is going to solve the mess that we tried to prevent, you know, from 2014 on and before that, matter of fact, because it's the overall policy that has led us to this position.
But this is ongoing, and right now it's a mess, and nobody quite knows where it's going to stop because tomorrow there might be a change in policy.
Because I could understand if you were a diplomat on either side, there could be confusion.
And we mentioned yesterday there were about three positions in the administration, you know, about our position and the various wars going on.
So I see it a mess.
I don't think putting sanctions on two huge oil companies that cancels out the answer to so many problems, and that is let people trade and let them depend on each other and pick out and choose what they want to do.
And this is the opposite.
This is restraint of trade.
And the old saying was, that is, you know, if you can't see goods and services crossing borders, you'll see troops crossing borders.
And it looks like troops are crossing borders.
And we, of course, made mention that hopefully the troops don't literally cross the border in Venezuela.
But my suspicion is this already happened to some degree.
Well, in a sense, I mean, I think Trump has crossed the Rubicon with this.
Now, he flip-flops every other day, it seems like.
And that's just become, that's just undermined his credibility because nobody knows what he's going to say the next morning.
But when he announced yesterday afternoon, his Secretary of the Treasury, Besant, and then him both announced that they're going to place sanctions on Russia's two largest oil companies.
Put that next to this is from Politico.
This is Besant down there making the announcement.
And if you go to the next one, this marks the day that this literally becomes Trump's war, because this is the first time that the Trump administration has put sanctions on Russia.
You cannot be a neutral mediator in a conflict or pretend to be and then sanction one side.
You obviously are on the other side.
Now, Trump hasn't given a big tranche of new weapons to Ukraine.
He's restrained from doing that, even though you could sort of nitpick about it.
Nevertheless, this is a huge jump in the water of the war.
Now, Trump said, here's what Politico writes: the Trump administration sanctioned Russia's two largest oil companies Wednesday, taking such a move against Moscow for the first time in a market shift in its approach to ending the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The U.S. blacklisted Rosneft and Luke Oil and issued other sanctions because Russia failed to commit seriously to the peace process.
Treasury Secretary Besant said in a statement.
He urged Russia to stop the killing and called for an immediate ceasefire.
Now, I have a clip of Besson saying this, and it's worth listening.
That first clip is worth listening to what Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, has to say.
And while watching this, if you do follow this conflict closely, see if you think he has a good grip, a good grasp.
No, the first one should be the first video.
Yeah, here we go.
Is this the first one?
As you know, and the world can see President Trump is their president of peace.
He's done peace deals, trade deals, tax deals.
And part of the peace deal, the real remaining final conflict in the world, this would be the ninth one that he has found a solution to, would be between Russia and Ukraine.
President Putin has not come to the table in an honest and forthright manner, as we'd hoped.
There were talks in Alaska.
President Trump walked away when he realized that things were not moving forward.
There have been behind-the-scenes talk, but I believe that the president is disappointed at where we are in these talks.
So either this evening or first thing tomorrow morning, we are going to be announcing a substantial increase in Russia's sanctions.
I'm not going to give you the exact sanctions, but I can tell you that this will be one of the largest sanctions that we have done against the Russian Federation.
So he is announcing because Putin won't come to the table, which I don't know where they get that from.
He's already been at the table, but nevertheless, and actually, if we can do that first one, just listen to this is Trump's rationale for putting these sanctions in.
We've heard Besson speak.
Now, Trump was with Ruta.
I suspect that's what happens because every time Trump meets with Ruta or with Zelensky or with Kellogg or with the neocons, he flips back on the other way.
Now, Ruta was in town, the Secretary General of NATO, and they sat down.
Now, let's listen to Trump's explanation of why you are crossing the Rubicon, you are putting sanctions on Russia, and you are entering the war.
Let's listen to this part.
Mr. President, can you tell us a little bit about why you're elevating sanctions against Russia right now?
I just felt it was time.
I waited a long time.
I thought that we'd go long before the Middle East.
And Mark, as you know, we did the Middle East plus seven.
So we did seven different wars from Pakistan and India to so many.
I suppose on a media.
Which they said was impossible to do.
All these wars I did.
And the one that we have left, we have one left.
It'll be nine.
We have one left, and I think we'll get that done too.
I think we're actually.
And again, we're getting this, I did eight wars, I solved eight wars, I did this and that.
But the key point to me was, why did you do it now?
Why did you announce this?
He said, I just felt it was time.
I just felt it was time.
It's just remarkable, Dr. Paul, but this is a huge step.
Medvedev, the former president, who's now the deputy secretary of the Security Council, said, this is a U.S. declaration of war on Russia, which is true because sanctions are an act of war.
You know, this should be a big lesson.
As we were listening to this, this excuse and this explanation, it made me, you know, angry.
Why did I do this sort of thing?
Then I ended up thinking, this is so sad.
It's so sad.
But nevertheless, there is a falling down on this because as a great nation and one that had great wealth and a great document to follow, why are we getting into so much trouble?
Not just these last years, but on and on.
We continue to do the same thing.
We don't prevent it.
I mean, here we are trying to help guide people away from this, and yet it continues to expand.
At the same time, how did we get into this?
And that again was maneuvering.
You know, they say it's Trump's deal.
And I understand your comment about this.
It's Trump's war, even more so.
But it's a bipartisan thing.
And I think that what has happened is not so much that human nature is misled and they get involved in this, and that the resistance has disappeared.
And it has disappeared because there's always an excuse for political reasons to be patriotic and also money to be made.
So, and the people fail to be galvanized to resist this and say, don't vote for this, though.
Don't vote for this money.
And so much suffering has to occur.
And I mentioned this all the time.
We have to wait until it's 22 years.
And then the people wake up and say, enough is enough.
Well, why isn't enough enough before the shooting begins?
So we have the people's failures.
The corporations, you know, are profiteering out of it.
So it's the failure of the corporation system.
Some people say, well, that's what freedom does.
It has nothing to do with it.
It has to do with corporatism and the use of people who buddy up with the government.
And I think we see more of that in this administration, where our government is buying equities in numerous companies.
And I think that's a bad trend.
And who else is necessary in this outfit?
It's people, where does the money come?
We don't have any money in the bank.
And the deficit keeps going up.
The debt is my wife, $38 trillion, and it doesn't even phase them.
They said, well, should we cut?
So the DODA budget was debated this week, and they increased money to Ukraine.
It's just hard to believe.
And then there's these philosophic hawks that just, I don't know what their goal is because they don't necessarily have a million dollars or billions of dollars, but they must be enthralled with that type of activity because they love the negotiation and pushing and making these deals.
And so it leads me to say, well, who is really America first?
It seems like the people who should get first dibs on living in a free country are the people.
And right now, the people, the defense coming up on these spontaneous groups, it just doesn't exist.
And that to me is a rather sad situation, but it looks like it's going to be there for a while.
Last Friday's Meeting 00:03:22
All we can do is our best to dig out the information to show why we shouldn't be doing this.
And Daniel, you and I have talked about it.
We think there's a growing number of people who would sympathize.
And if you had a real honest poll of, you know, the whole nation, I think you'd find out that, yeah, we like peace and you guys make sense and we're for that.
But then again, when it comes down to the wire of voting in Congress, even the people who are pretty darn good, they go along with this.
You know, do you think the DOD budget is going to be a close call?
Not likely.
Yeah.
You know, I think it's important to think about the timeline of what's happened.
You know, we talked about this last week.
It was announced that last Friday, just over a week ago, just under a week ago, that President Trump was going to meet Zelensky in the Oval Office.
But he said, President Trump surprised the world by putting in a call to Trump the day before.
They had a long conversation.
I think they said two and a half hours.
Trump put on his social media.
It was a very productive call, and everyone freaked out.
He wasn't supposed to talk to Trump beforehand.
He was supposed to talk to Zelensky and give him the okay for the tomahawks and to use the tomahawks inside Russia.
Well, something shifted.
He talked to Putin and he came out with a very, very different view.
So when Zelensky came on Friday, if you remember, he left with his hat in his hand.
He got a stern lecture from Trump and he left with his hat in his hand, nothing to show for it.
So what happens?
Well, Europe freaks out.
How dare he do this?
And he also announces after his phone call with Putin: hey, let's get together in a couple weeks in Budapest and talk this over.
So it looked like a real breakthrough was coming.
Then Zelensky comes for the meeting, and then Europe freaks out.
How dare he have a meeting with Putin?
He can't do that.
He has to invite us.
He has to invite Zelensky.
We've got to do everything we can to undermine it, which they did.
And so you have, go to that next clip.
This is just a few days after that talk with Putin and this move, the move against the call for the meeting in Budapest.
This move comes less than a week, the move being the sanctions, less than a week after Trump announced that he'd be meeting with Vladimir Putin in Budapest and declared that the Russian leader was ready for peace.
This is him last week, early this week.
Trump and his team have at various points said they saw sanctions as closing the door to diplomacy, even as Ukraine and Europe have argued that financial pressure would force Putin to the table.
As an aside, they just introduced their 19th sanctions package.
So I'm sure one more package will do it.
But anyway, and here's Trump's rationale.
I just felt it was time.
So here's something that I'm sure caught your attention, Dr. Paul.
Immediately after Besett said, hey, we are going to slap sanctions on Russia, big-time sanctions.
Here's what the markets did.
Here's what the crude futures market did.
Put on that next clip, that chart.
This is your oil, guys.
You're going to pay this at the pump.
What do you think about that market reaction to the announcement?
Yeah, you know what?
Markets React to Sanctions 00:03:28
They're spending all this money and they think they can get away with it.
And then they do a budget, and everybody knows it's not going to hold.
There'll be more.
But just think of when you see prices going up like that, and then they're going to print more money.
By the time they get around to spending that money, because it'll take them a couple of weeks to print all that money, you know, prices go up, but it stays ahead of them.
So they never catch up with it, but they continue to do the same thing.
And the sanctions, I don't see any way they're going to work.
But I think the whole thing moves us closer to corporatism.
You know, the buddy-buddy system between corporations.
We talk about that, but the confusion comes because the far left talks about it.
You know, if you have a communist running for mayor, oh, I'm against all that stuff to a corporation.
But they're against people who make money honestly, and they're voted in a positive way because they're producing a product.
But when the corporations, you know, corporatism exists when you have these buddy-buddy systems with the military and the arms manufacturers.
You know, when they're in the military, they build up a good relationship.
Then you see them on TV and they're making a lot of money.
And now we have an administration which really worries me, and that is the buying up of equities of companies.
And they're doing more of that.
They're on the quantum stocks, which I don't fully understand that, but they're very important.
And the Trump administration is discussing equity stakes in companies.
Now, there's a hold on that.
There's a little bit of discussion, but it's this whole idea because we've already done it.
I don't think that's going to quit.
I think it's going to get worse.
This whole idea that they're going to, sometimes it's not 2%.
Sometimes it's a big percent.
And it'll be to the people to do the opposite thing.
If you're given a good product and you're making honest profits, you should be rewarded.
But here, if you're rewarded and you have money, well, we better buy these kids, buy some stock on there and have some influence and tell them how they're going to distribute that money.
So it works backwards.
The market's not allowed to work.
And then that is just a fodder for the people who want to condemn free markets and capitalism, all corporation.
But corporatism is quite different.
And quite frankly, some very famous, well-known free market economists have said, watch out, because this is the underpinning of fascism.
Not this nonsense you hear by Antifa and all this other stuff.
We're going to get these people that believe in personal liberty.
And they just get it totally twisted on purpose.
And this is a big thing for me to see this combination because I think indeed it does lead to a system where we are going to have some type of terrible type of socialism, fascism, or whatever you want to call it, but not free markets.
And you can't have free markets if you continue the military, the foreign policy that we've had, domestic policy.
Terrible Consequences Ahead 00:11:41
And we are continuing.
And we see no signs in this episode with how we're going to curtail Russia and hold Russia to its feet.
And that is not good.
And I'm afraid that it's going to continue unless people really get alert before all the mess starts.
Now, Daniel's been very clear on what he thinks is going to happen.
This is going to escalate.
And I certainly agree with that.
Well, thank you, Georges, for chipping in $25 on the super chat.
He's basically saying we're all going to flip out if we keep listening to Trump for a few more months.
And that's probably true.
But, you know, coming back to the sanctions thing and the whole issue with Russia, we said it so many times on this program.
It goes back to literally the zombie plan that would not die, which is the Kellogg plan.
This is like two years old.
General Kellogg wrote a article in one of those journals, a think tank, saying, here's a way to end the war.
Russia stops fighting.
That's basically it.
Ceasefire.
Russia stops fighting.
And this has been the only game in town, even though Russia has said no 300 times.
We're winning the war.
Why would we stop fighting?
We've already done this in Minsk one, in Minsk II.
Every time we stop, you arm the other side, and then they come back and get us again.
We're not idiots.
We're not going to do it this time.
But it won't die.
The plan won't die.
And you can see it here in Scott Bessant's rationale for the sanctions.
If you go to the next clip, this is his post.
Here he is bringing up Kellogg.
Scott Besson said, now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate ceasefire.
Given President Putin's refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning blah, Immediate ceasefire.
Well, this is something when Trump met with Putin in August in Alaska, Trump himself rejected the idea.
Go to the next one.
This is just August, guys.
This is Trump's post after his Alaska meeting.
And so remember, Besson, you heard this to yourself, Dr. Paul.
Besson said, oh, the Alaska went terrible.
Trump walked out of the room.
Well, that's not what Trump said right afterward.
It's right here in front of you, his own post.
He said, a great and successful, a very successful day in Alaska.
The meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia went very well, as did a late-night phone call between Zelensky and various European leaders.
It was determined.
Now, listen to this, Dr. Paul.
It was determined by all that the best way to end this horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a peace agreement, which would end the war and not a mere ceasefire agreement.
Trump himself saying, no ceasefire agreement.
That's not going to work.
Let's go to peace talks first and then end the war, which is not unusual.
We did it in World War II.
We did it with Vietnam.
We sat down, as you know, there was no ceasefire before we started the negotiations to end it.
So here, in a matter of just a few weeks, you go from ceasefire to nope, that won't work to now ceasefire and sanctions.
They can't get it straight.
This is a gang that can't shoot straight.
And the result is the people, there may be a few in there being very sincere and trying to work it out, but the whole system, especially on our side, loses all credibility.
You know, especially what's going on now, the credibility is totally dropped.
Well, why should anybody say, oh, that sounds like a good idea?
Let's do that.
But boy, I'll tell you, they're intimidated to such a degree.
And now they say, you know, if those Russians will just quit firing those guns.
Quit fighting.
But then when you look at it, you have NATO conspiring with the United States and all of the Europeans.
And they've so easily given up some of their economic advantages.
They were able to buy oil and gas from Russia.
And that was quickly ended.
And Russia didn't decide, well, we're going to blow up the gas lines because we don't want to sell it to them.
And if you look at the maps, it's sort of like the map around Iran.
You know, who's surrounding Iran?
But in many ways, the Russians feel the same way because it's been more than just a short period of time.
But that's not to excuse them for the bad stuff that they've done over the years when they were much more adherent to radical communism.
But this is something that people have to realize.
It's preventable and it can be done, but it's not going to work.
The spending is going to continue.
And this whole thing, the chaos that they're producing in a political sense is going to be combined with the economic things.
So the best symbolism I could think of today was, you know, the National Debt goes up to, what, $38 trillion.
And they're voting more money for a Ukraine war, which was started by the NATO.
So I'm not all that optimistic that the current events are going to sort the sort of things out.
Yeah, it was started by NATO and by the U.S. government under Barack Obama.
When we had Senator John McCain, we had other senators down in the middle of this coup saying, guys, overthrow your government.
Can you imagine?
If the Russians were over here on January 6th saying, overthrow, turn it down, everything, turn over everything.
You know, but that's okay.
But the other thing with Trump, okay, he has said this many times recently.
And I just picked up this next one.
This is just one example.
But he has indicated his view that Russia is winning the war several times.
Put that next one up.
Trump says Ukraine is unlikely to win the war against Russia.
He said this just a couple of days ago, the 20th, yeah, literally two days ago.
So he understands, or at least on that moment, he understood that Russia is winning the war.
Where in history has a country that's winning the war put their weapons down and said, okay, guys, let's just quit fighting.
We'll go back to the status quo ante, which is what Europeans want, what NATO wants.
Go back, pull your troops, go home, and pay reparations, and then we'll call the quits.
There's no country in the world that would do that.
Matter of fact, they do the opposite when it's realizing this war is winding down.
Both countries are exhausted.
The people are saying we don't have any more money.
And they say, okay, what we need to do is get the last piece of land.
Can we get 10 more miles?
So with the settlement that's coming.
So they do the opposite.
They don't just lay their weapons down.
So it's a ridiculous understanding to think that that's going to happen.
But I guess there's nothing new here.
But I do think that we've had periods of time in our history that we acted a little bit better.
I think the founders had a better grasp, at least in a theoretical way, to try to prevent this.
And they made a sincere effort to do it.
And yet, yet you can get ridiculed if you ask your congressman, don't vote for any of this money for a war, unless you have a war.
You can't just go, you know, oh, well, we're going to have a war with Korea.
We'll call it a police action.
Nobody will notice except those 30,000 more people who died in the war or more than that when you had up both sides.
Well, I want to thank Downing Thomas for kicking in 25 on the super chat.
And he said, matching Georgia's for speaking out.
We like that.
Keep matching it.
We love that very much.
But I think we need to contemplate, Dr. Paul, is a very, very frightening scenario, which is a president is completely out of his league on this and is making decisions that, on the one hand, could lead to a nuclear war.
On the other hand, they could have meant peace, but they're not now because the U.S. has jumped into this and basically declared or committed an act of war, which is sanctions against the country.
The president fundamentally does not understand what's happening.
We don't know why.
We knew with Biden what the problem is.
We don't know exactly with Trump.
Maybe his ego is getting in the way.
Maybe he has terrible advisors.
We know that he has terrible advisors.
He's not listening to anyone that's making any sense.
He's not listening to Doug McGregor, people like that who make sense.
So we have a president that's hopelessly out of his league.
So what does he do?
He thrashes about in the water.
He flips flops here, there, today, tomorrow.
If I talk to you, this is my position.
If I talk to you, that's my position.
This is a dangerous situation and the stakes are high.
And I don't know what is going to come of it.
Nothing good, I think.
But I'm going to close out with that statement and just thank everyone for watching the show and ask you again to pass it around.
And I'll turn it over to you, Dr. Paul.
You know, one thing that the people who promote this type of a foreign policy and all the shenanigans that go on is they can't stand, you know, truth.
If somebody's speaking the truth and saying, why are you doing this?
This is a bad news.
And if you happen to be in Congress, you become the arch enemy.
Just look at the few that are in Congress and how it stirs the emotions and not logic at all.
Matter of fact, they disintegrate.
They look worse by just screaming and hollering about people who are talking about, well, what about the Constitution?
What about peace?
And what about fair trade and this sort of thing?
And they cannot stand it.
And because the saying is, truth is treason and an empire lies.
And because if you allow the lies to continue, you lose power.
And that's what they're afraid of.
So they have to call it treasonous.
You're a terrorist.
You're joining the terrorists.
You're part of the problem, and you want the bad guys to win, that sort of thing.
So, unfortunately, human nature is there with us.
We have to recognize that, but we also have to recognize and encourage and work with the people who do know what's going on.
Because quite frankly, I think if you just talk about numbers, most people, not most people, but the large percentage of people will endorse the principles that we're talking about.
It's just that they're overwhelmed by the opposition and also weakened by short-term benefit.
So, it's easy to vote for these programs that give more stuff to people and say, Well, we have to do that because they've messed this up, but we have to take help from the government.
But it usually ends up, especially the foreign policy in combination with economic policy and monetary policy in particular, it ends up as a mess and it comes down.
It's happened so many times throughout history, all the way back to the Roman Empire.
And it's happening to us right now.
So, the big question is: who's going to pick up the pieces and reinstitute the principles that the founders talked about and tried to get into our minds and hearts by writing a constitution?
So, the evidence is here, the enthusiasm is here, but we need to get a message out that is stronger where people could stand together and say liberty is much better than authoritarianism.
It's no more complicated than that.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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