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Dec. 10, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
34:19
Desperation? US Sends Fighters Deep Into Gulf of Venezuela

The US military sent two US Navy F/A-18 fighters deeper into Venezuela's area of influence than ever before. They lingered near the coast for nearly an hour - tempting Venezuela to react and get the escalation? Meanwhile, US public support for military action is cratering and the Administration lacks the troops in the region for a ground invasion - even as President Trump ramps up the threats. What's the endgame?

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Time Text
Head Them Off Early 00:03:18
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?
Doing well, thank you.
Doing well, ready and raring to go to solve all the problems that we have.
Let's do it.
Because there's a few left, but we like to head them off before they start them, before they start the wars, is where the action should be.
Not after 40 years or 20 years.
Then they say, oh, this is a bad war because the knowledge is there.
And I'm hoping this next generation, the generation that's coming into it, will be smarter than the other generations that didn't pay any attention.
And I think we see a little bit of signs of that.
People getting sick and tired of it all.
So anyway, I want to talk a little bit about, you know, Venezuela.
There's some news there.
Here are zero hedge.
F-18 fire jets flew deep inside the Gulf of Venezuela in the closest approach yet.
I think that's sort of looking for trouble.
I'll bet that's against some law someplace.
Some law someplace pretends that you shouldn't do that to your neighbors.
You should get, you know, you should get permission to do that.
But anyway, it looks like, you know, the provocation is continuing.
I think it looks to me, like others, I think, agree, that we'll provoke them and then they'll shoot down something.
That's how they got the Vietnam War started.
You know, we were up there.
Then all of a sudden it was years before they decided, oh, you know, that was all a lie.
It was all a lie.
Well, so far, it's not a lie that these people are over there.
But if a plane gets shot down, they might come up with an idea.
Oh, yes, you know who they shot us.
Yeah, we were over there buzzing their capital and threatening their leaders.
And therefore, it's their fault.
Therefore, they're the aggressors, not us.
But right now, we don't have a very good record of remaining peaceful with the people we don't like.
So these fighter jets are deep inside, very capable of doing a lot of harm.
But also, it's mentioned in the fact that it can't be coordinated right now as if we had the 500,000 troops.
It doesn't look like the United States is preparing, but you can't tell.
Sometimes governments and sometimes our governments do things that we consider totally irrational.
But right now, it looks like it's just strength, intimidation, and trying to scare people and give them trouble, and they'll do what we say.
So, you know, my argument is that we have a foreign policy that says we go around telling people what to do.
And if they do it, we give them a lot of money.
And if they don't do it, we drop bombs on them.
And sometimes we do both to the same people.
You know, we both drop the bombs on them and give them money, and then we repair everything.
But it's good for business.
So I guess a little bit of that goes on.
Neocons And Bombing Business 00:14:17
Well, this is what happens when you listen to neocons, and this is what Trump did.
He has Marco Rubio, whose life's goal has been to overthrow the Venezuelan government and the Cuban government.
He puts him in a very powerful position.
He puts him as a Kissinger, you know, both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.
Well, of course, he's going to use that as his hobby horse.
And so Marco Rubio talks him into a corner where he says, don't worry, Mr. President.
Just send a couple ships down there and Maduro will have an accident in his pants and run screaming, begging for mercy.
Well, it didn't happen.
And so now Trump is in a situation where he can't back down.
Otherwise, he's going to be made to look weak.
And we know he doesn't like that.
But if he launches a war, A, it's extremely unpopular.
And B, the U.S. is in no position to invade Venezuela.
And if we start bombing them, the rest of what's left of his coalition, his anti-war coalition, the American First Coalition is going to be split at best.
So he's in a bind.
He's in a bind because once again, as with hiring people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, he has hired neocons.
Neocons can't help doing neocon things.
So put this first one up.
This is a big deal.
F-18A jet fighters.
Now, they've flown B-52s in mock bombing runs in the area several times, but this is the most clear provocation, Dr. Paul, deep into the Gulf of Venezuela.
And they were circling in that Gulf for some 40 minutes, just circling around, getting ready.
And an interesting thing, and I didn't make a clip of this, but it's really important, is that they used these EA-18G electronic warfare jets.
And this is from the article, The War Zone writes that the pairing of the F-18s with the EA-18Gs position at a distance is precisely the configuration expected in real strike operations against targets in Venezuela.
And I think that is critical.
They lined up the jets with the electronic warfare support in the exact formation they would be if they were going to launch an attack.
And they flew right into right next to the coastline and lingered there for 40 minutes.
What were they looking for?
They were looking for a trigger finger in Venezuela to shoot something down so they could have a massive retaliation.
Yeah, this statement says a lot.
And this comes from that same article.
U.S. defense official confirmed to the Associated Press that the jets entered the Gulf of Venezuela.
No big deal.
Dubbing the maneuver a quote, routine training mission.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, isn't that something?
Well, we've been to the USS Maine.
If anybody else did that, you know, they'd be annoyed.
But that's the trouble.
People who have these other goals, you know, want to annoy them.
They're looking for a good excuse, you know, to see some action.
And their goal might be, you know, just getting rid of Maduro.
We don't like him, but we're going to get rid of him.
And we, of course, end up making things much worse, very expensive and very dangerous.
And the consequences are never totally known and understood.
Everybody pretends they're experts, but they have no idea.
Their plans, you know, like it's a kind of, the argument they gave us, it's a cakewalk.
We don't have, you know, Iraq, we can deal with them in a month and then declare war victory.
And all of a sudden, there was no victory at all.
It was lasting.
We're still in Iraq, pestering people over there.
So it's no easy solution.
Yeah, could you imagine a Chinese carrier group in the Gulf of America and they start launching their fighters or literally right off the coast of Florida?
And we get annoyed and they say, what?
It's just a training.
It's routine.
What are you guys so annoyed about?
I mean, take a chill pill, relax.
And that's exactly what's happening.
Now, put up that next clip, though, because this is actually dovetails with what you're saying.
According to the Military Times, public tribe flight tracking websites showed a pair of F-18s.
The Navy fighters were accompanied by electronic warfare jets, and the group were broadcasting their positions.
And I highlighted this, they were intended to be seen.
This was not a covert mission.
Was that, hey guys, look at us.
Look at us.
We're right here in your backyard.
And if anyone questions how close they were, look at this flight tracker.
Look at this next thing.
Look at the photo.
And those of you that are only listening can't see it.
But they are deep, deep, deep into the Gulf of Venezuela, very, very near Venezuelan territory.
And they remain there for that little tiny area.
They remain there for 40 minutes.
So clearly, Dr. Paul, this was an attempted provocation because the blustering didn't work.
The shooting, the blowing up of boats didn't work.
The bringing in the carrier groups didn't work.
The circling the B-52s didn't work.
And they're getting desperate.
And they're trying to get, like you say, they're trying to get a reaction from Venezuela to justify the launch of missiles into the country.
There's been some people, more the media that leads left, have made the point that it contradicts everything the administration ran on when they were campaigning.
You know, we were going to stop wars and we were not going to provoke.
But they would still argue, well, we're just being very cautious and we're trying to teach people a lesson.
And we have to conform.
Besides, their bombs are the drugs that are coming up here.
As if we have no responsibility for ourselves on who takes what, who drinks what, who eats too much.
So all of a sudden, that's the whole emphasis.
That's how I think they get a lot of Americans on that.
But also, so you think there was a statistic in there that showed that young people aren't supportive of what's going on in Venezuela.
But some of the polling has supported our position that overdone, you know, even in Ukraine.
And it looks like the administration is, who knows where they are right now today, is we're bosom buddies with the Russians.
We're going to come up with a peace deal.
Well, it's like the looking glass.
You know, a word means what I say it means.
And we say we aren't starting any new wars.
Well, this isn't a new war.
This is an attack against terrorists.
This is an old war.
This is the extension of 2001 authorization for military force.
We're going to call these people narco-terrorists, and they fall under that blanket, you know, authorization to fight terrorism.
So that's exactly what they're doing.
They're changing language, and it's working on a lot of people.
There's no question about it.
But let's, so we have that.
The provocation is very, very clear.
But if you go to the next clip, this is a political piece that came out today.
The problem is there's really nothing to back up the bluster.
Trump lacks support or logistics for Venezuela ground invasion.
Go to the next one.
President Donald Trump has amassed an unprecedented naval force in the Caribbean, threatened a ground invasion in Venezuela, and warned nearby countries that they could get pulled into this operation against drug smugglers.
But the president's options in the region are limited at best.
And I highlighted that part.
Again, it's bluster.
He doesn't have a lot of options in the region.
There's not much that he can do except threaten and send the ships in.
Now, one of the things they say, there's no sizable, go to the next one, there's no sizable ground force in the region, Dr. Paul.
And it would take a significant visible logistic effort to move thousands of troops into a friendly country or U.S. territory nearby, even though President Trump said in an interview yesterday, Maduro's days are numbered.
More bluster, more threats.
But we would know, and that's a point, that we would know, just as we had a sense when the U.S. was about to attack Iran, that we could see the movement of forces in the region.
So they don't have the ability.
They don't have many options.
And in the article, I didn't clip this though, Dr. Paul, but it said, in the current configuration, the only thing they can do is lob 200 Tomahawk missiles into Venezuela.
And you say, well, that wouldn't be a walk in the park.
That wouldn't be very fun to have 200 Tomahawks hit your country.
But the question is, hopefully someone is asking in the Pentagon, Mr. President, then what?
You know, because Venezuela is the size of France and Germany put together.
It's a big country.
Even 200 Tomahawks is not going to win the war against Venezuela with a sizable standing army and an even much more enormous militia that will be willing to fight from the jungles if that's what it takes.
So I would be asking if I were in the Pentagon, now what?
Then what?
We launch the missiles and what?
We go home?
It's over.
But you know, the people who aren't in favor of this, even Republicans, are using previous policy, current policy, and what Trump has done so far.
And in that article you cite, it says interviews with six Republican lawmakers, Pentagon officials, and White House advisors underscore the extreme challenges of a ground invasion and collective believe that Trump's rhetoric, bolstered by his sudden bombing of the Iranian nuclear program this summer, could be enough to convince Maduro.
That's what they're hoping.
But about all that does is hopefully it wakes up more Americans.
You know, most people forgot about us bombing Iran.
And then they say, I wonder why the Iranians don't like us.
You know, since back to this idea that if they started dropping bombs on Dallas, Texas, I wonder what people would think.
They'd be ready to do a little fighting.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the other thing, and you mentioned this, if you put on that next clip, and this is important because this has been consistent from the beginning, the idea of attacking Iraq is very unpopular in the United States.
And obviously, if I'm a Republican and I'm looking toward the midterms, the last thing I want to see is a country bogged down in war.
You basically are writing the script for the Democrats wanting to take over the House and Senate.
Now, here is from that same political article.
The public does not appear to support such measures.
A recent CBS news poll found that 70% of the American public is opposed to Trump taking military action in Venezuela.
Now, here's a former defense official who says the Trump administration was hoping to scare Maduro into departing Venezuela.
But if that doesn't work, the remaining military options are unappealing.
And if Maduro does indeed depart by choice or by force, then it leaves open the question of whether U.S. forces will be needed to secure the country and for how long.
In other words, the briar patch is exactly, that's the best case scenario, is a briar patch.
Maduro says, okay, I'm out of here.
I'm Audi 5,000.
And then they say, well, what are we going to do now?
Because the country descends into chaos.
You know, the boss of all this is even getting a little skittish about it.
And the boss I'm referring to, I think he's from South Carolina.
I think his last name is Graham.
And he says that I don't think we need this right now.
So if he's getting skittish about it, but he's still using the terms of narco-terrorists.
And, you know, when that term was Publicize and popularize over Iraq.
There was a request: why don't you define terrorism?
What is terrorism?
Can it be verbal?
And really, they start wars and kill people, but there's not a precise definition of that.
But if there's an act of aggression and there's a clear evidence of somebody committing that act of aggression, that's a different story.
But everything is, you know, terrorism.
Oh, well, we have to deal with that.
So now they're using it for Venezuela.
And I don't know how many actual terrorist attacks the Venezuelans have used against us.
They can't even pin the label on them as producing any of these drugs.
You know, oh, but sometimes it passes through their country, that kind of stuff.
But even that, they say, that doesn't really happen.
It passes through Mexico.
You know, they don't produce it.
And this whole cartel of the sun was made up.
It doesn't even exist.
You know, it's totally fine.
But the other thing, and this isn't rocket science.
This whole operation is counterproductive because what does it do?
It makes Maduro actually more popular.
If we wanted to weaken support for Maduro, making him into the big hero that stands up to the Yankee imperialists is not the way to do it.
So he looks stronger.
He doesn't look like a guy who's not managing the economy very well, whatever the point is.
He looks like a big, tough guy standing up.
And the other thing is, he will have, he'll have open season to crack down on political opposition.
Because if you oppose him in any way, shape, or form, well, you must be in league with the Yankee imperialists.
We're going to put you in jail.
So he has carte blanche to crack down politically, and he looks like a big national hero to his own people.
Counterproductive Interventions 00:14:58
Talk about being counterproductive.
Why would you leave in this situation?
All this supports our positions.
Stay out of these areas.
Yes.
There wouldn't be perfect peace and prosperity there, but there'd be a better chance than going through this on again, off against friends here, threaten him, send him money, and think that's going to bring, I don't even know what their ultimate looking for.
I mean, a couple months ago, it was hardly a mention of Venezuela.
Nobody was losing any sleep over it.
Now the young people ought to start one, you know, worrying about this because when there's rumbles about drafting of kills, you know, what's behind that?
So I just, I think that's one of the reasons some people are getting very, very concerned about this overall foreign policy.
Now, that's a great segue, Dr. Paul, to our next story.
Young people should be worried about this because of an article we saw on anti-war.com, 30yearsofantiwar.com, by the way.
Congratulations.
Great article in the Orange County Register about that.
I did send some emergency clips over there in the back.
I see smoke coming out.
I see heads exploding, but I forgot to send it.
I messed up.
Oh, there we go.
A big round of applause for our friends in the back, for Ash back there.
This is what was in anti-war.com.
House and Senate agree to make draft registration automatic.
Whoa, hang on a minute.
Yes, this is in the NDAA, Dr. Paul, the notorious NDAA.
And this is something actually from the conference committee.
This was in the, apparently, this was in the House version, but the Senate bill did not contain it.
And when they met in conference, which is what they do to reconcile the two different bills, at least according to our most recent reading of it, they agreed to retain the House position of automatically registering Americans.
Now, I'm not sure.
I don't remember if it's clear if it's for male and female or not, or if they are, I'm not quite sure.
I don't know how that works, but the point is you no longer have to make that physical move to register.
They've got it covered for you.
You're registered.
You're ready to go to Venezuela.
That was because nobody was registering.
So that was a mission of defeat.
But this has been going on for a bit because the draft's been on and off all the way back to the Civil War and World War I.
And yet the fiasco in Vietnam prompted a cancellation of the draft.
And that was a big deal.
And I remember Milton Friedman being involved in that because he didn't like the draft.
But others were, they got rid of it.
But in 1980, I was involved in a big discussion of the return of the draft.
And there was a big vote, and we who were working on it, and there was a good coalition between Republican and Democrats.
We thought we had taken care of this, but, you know, conference report or something else, we did not, you know, make it that there would be no draft.
So the draft has been here, but it's been ineffective, thank goodness.
But it's an issue that is fascinating how it comes about because it really hinges on the 13th Amendment.
And the 13th Amendment, it's one of our short amendments, and it's right to the point.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereas the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place in their jurisdiction.
So that's very clear.
But, you know, an interesting side effect on one of this is they said this was too weak because it wasn't inclusive.
And they made this exception that if you're a convicted criminal, you can't force them to work.
I don't know whether I'd lay awake at night worrying about that, but that was one of the things they pee, but they got.
But the whole thing is we shouldn't even be dealing with this kind of thing, you know, about forced labor.
And the draft, the draft is so bad.
But just think of the silly stuff that's going to come up now.
We're arguing between whether the men, other than the men, women being drafted.
And they're, you know, the people who want equal rights are in a bind for this.
So some of them, some of them want to really help women's rights.
Oh, we want to send them off.
You know, at the time we talked about this was Vietnam was going on.
Yeah, we need to send a bunch of women over there.
You got to take them away from their kids.
Really destroy the family.
And that to me makes no sense.
Now, we have Supreme Court justices that if you ask them, well, define a woman.
I don't know.
And they can't even tell him to define a woman.
And yet they're now arguing over whether they can draft those undefinable creatures that are created, you know, for who knows what reason.
I remember when this, the 1980 debate happened.
I was a teenager.
So I was facing the whole idea of the draft.
And I supported Reagan.
I voted for him twice.
That's back when I was voting.
And I loved Reagan.
But this whole thing, with his faults, but this whole thing, if you remember, was really wrapped in the flag.
This is a patriotism.
This is Reagan's patriotism.
And it was only a few people like you.
And actually, that's one of your early left-right coalitions that you built who said, hang on a minute, being a slave is not patriotic at all.
I think he worked with Representative Pat Schrader on this.
So the draft makes no sense whatsoever.
But I'm going to tell a short personal story about the draft because I remember World War II, friends, neighbors, and relatives going off to World War II.
Several didn't come back.
And then when I was in high school, it was Korea.
A teacher was taken out of our school, sent back.
He had been in World War II, taken back and forced into Korea, and he died over there.
So war has been, has been on my mind.
And the draft, so I always was concerned about that.
And when I was making a decision on my career, I didn't early on decide, well, I want to be a doctor.
I want to be a doctor.
And I was in a dilemma what to do.
But the thing, the thought that came to my mind is, you know, I know I can't shoot people, especially the ones I don't know and all the tragedy.
So I, but I wasn't on the verge of saying I will always, you know, resist the draft.
But what I did was it helped me make a decision sort of accidentally or just because that was one of my motivations.
I thought, you know, an MD isn't dedicated to carry the rifles.
And so it motivated me to go into medicine.
And lo and behold, 1962, I received the draft notice.
And, you know, and I ended up five years in the military.
But it was, it does alter people's lives, but that's sort of a minor thing.
And it was no tragedy for me because I just were going to make the best of it.
But it is a tragedy for the people who come back.
And one of the ads paper on the television that just bothers me the most, when you see the people who come back from these wars with loss of limbs, I just have a trouble tolerating that.
But the one thing is, we should stop these stupid wars.
And so far, they continue.
They change its nature.
It used to be that they'd have two lines of people who lined up with rifles like they did in the Civil War and just march and kill thousands of people.
Or we ended up dropping nuclear weapons on tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.
So it just baffles me on what human nature has done and the human being has done in developing technology.
We can go, we can put stuff on Mars and we can make a trip to the moon and yet we do some of these dumb things that literally destroys people's lives because there's not enough emphasis and understanding of what true freedom means that we should be protecting.
And, you know, the draft is a function of empire because if we actually were invaded, you wouldn't have to draft people.
First of all, we've got enough guns here already to take care of business, especially down here in Texas.
But you wouldn't have to convince people to defend their country, I think.
I mean, I'd like to believe that.
But the women would too.
Women would too.
I mean, look with the Soviets when they resisted the Nazi invasion.
The women were out there too.
Everyone was doing it.
So you wouldn't have to draft just because people don't want to fight for Venezuela.
You know, they don't want to fight for Israel.
They don't want to fight for Ukraine.
You know.
Our founders were really old-fashioned.
They said that wars could only be started with a lot of deliberation by the people and through their members of Congress and the House and Senate would make these declarations.
But I wonder how many times we have participated in acts of war, especially since 1945, and had no declaration of war.
Well, there hasn't been any since 1945.
But how many people died in wars?
How many people have we killed because we were in wars?
So there's something very hypocritical and wrong and immoral about that system.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to, I know it's time to close, but I do need to, I would like to highlight a couple more things about this specific auto-draft thing.
Now, go to that next clip.
I'll try to get through this really quick, but a couple things are important.
As you mentioned earlier, this will be the largest change in selective service law since 1980, which is when they brought it back, this auto auto register.
Now, the author, who actually I forget his name now, but he, I was looking at his bio.
He actually went to jail for refusing to register back in the 80s, I think it was.
So he's got some street cred here.
He says the provision of the NDAA for automatic draft registration will take effect one year after the bill is signed into law.
So the clock will start running.
We only have a year to get the Military Selective Service Act repealed if we are to avert this new threat of stepped up preparations for military draft.
So there's a call to action.
This is something that people can get involved with.
And I know you've supported this for a long time, repealing the Military Selective Service Act.
But the other part, and this is insidious, I noticed this at the end.
I'm sure you did too.
But this, just like Real ID and everything else the government does when it starts collecting information, put that last clip on.
This is, I think, very important.
Unless I'm misreading this, this jumped out at me like a madman.
The automatic registration law would grant the selective service sweeping authority to require any other federal agency to provide the secret selective service, sorry, selective service with any information the director of the selective service determines necessary to identify or register a person subject to registration under this selection.
So it will turn a whole of government against people and force them to register.
So all of your data that's collected everywhere will be centralized and they'll be able to snatch it up and register you to go to war.
You know, it's the policies that we have that prompt people to worry about this and come up with undeclared wars and drafting people, enslaving them.
And so it starts with the main type of policy that we have and the policy that we resent so much is interventionism, that we're involved in other people's business and they have their problems, but they shouldn't be solved by the United States going 6,000 miles away and trying to pretend that we're sent there and the results will be good.
Most of the time, our interventions have caused a great deal of problem.
But, you know, let's say we do get rid of the draft and there's no draft.
I think there's another type of enslavement that has occurred, will occur, because some people are pretty good on the draft because it's militarism and they're anti-war.
But what if an individual goes and they look into a welfare state and then they become dependent on the government for everything?
Education, medical care, food, and hell, the whole works.
They enslave themselves.
And it says, they have to become dependent.
And then they have, in order to make sure nobody's cheating, they do what you just described, all the information.
So it's an enslavement that a lot of people would probably disagree with me on that.
But I think it's self-enslavement that occurs when people don't say, look, I'm a free person.
I want to be left alone.
And I want to assume the responsibilities of it.
But that's not what they're looking for.
But if they would only realize the difference between a free society and one that enslaves people, either voluntarily or, you know, a military draft, the difference is so dramatic.
The history is so clear that if we have a society that protects individual liberty and property rights, the country is freer and happier and wealthier and more peaceful.
And I cannot imagine.
So I place the blame on our efforts and other people promoting our cause as not having developed techniques well enough to convince people that they have to look at the big picture here.
You know, you can't get rid of the draft, military draft, and then draft them for domestic aid in our own country.
It's the use of force that I'm rejecting, but because I think volunteerism works much better.
I like volunteerism.
Grassroots Shift on COVID 00:01:45
Absolutely.
They say, well, you got to serve your country.
Open a pizza joint.
That serves the country a lot better than sitting around, knocking around wasting two years with a uniform on.
That will serve America a lot better.
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Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I want to thank our viewers for tuning in.
I thank our viewers for participating and spreading this message of liberty.
And right now, this is a big issue because it's working into a foreign policy that is risky.
And we may end up with more.
It's interesting that there's so much emphasis right now on the draft.
They're a little bit confused on who's going to be drafted and who isn't and who's exempt.
But the best thing to do is not have drafts.
Let everything be voluntary.
But anyway, if you have a chance to talk to people and try to explain to people about the draft, I mean, that is the only way that you really reach the grassroots to understand what's going on.
That's how the grassroots shifted their position on COVID and other issues.
And right now, they're in a situation where the people are, especially the young people, are shifting their position about automatically supporting these wars.
And they're talking about coming home from Ukraine and minding our own business in the Middle East, the whole work.
And that, I believe, is a very positive step.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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