March 29, 2014 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
And final hour of the Political Cesspool Radio Program, I'm your host, James Edwards.
It's been a vast and varied show tonight, as they typically all are.
I had a guest in from New York City who drove all the way down to Memphis just to sit in with us in the studio tonight.
A couple of great guests.
We're going to round it out tonight with Mark Weber.
Mark Weber, of course, is the director of the Institute for Historical Review.
He is a lecturer, a historian, a current affairs analyst, and an author.
Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Mark was educated in the United States and Europe and holds a master's degree in modern European history from Indiana University.
He's going to offer us his expert opinions tonight on Russia, Ukraine, and Crimea.
Mark, thank you so much for rejoining us here on the Political Cesspool.
Thank you very much, James, for having me on.
It's a pleasure to be on with you.
I was just noting it's been, I think, seven years since I was first your guest on a show, and I'm happy to be with you again.
Time does fly, doesn't it?
No, it is.
Seven years.
Yes, we've been on the air for 10, so let's make it a far more frequent occurrence.
Well, we're really going to sink our teeth into the issue tonight of Russia.
My co-host, Eddie Miller, and I have really taken a shine to this for no shortage of reasons.
But, well, you know, certainly everyone should have an opinion, and we do, and we use our platform here to share ours with the world.
But, you know, one thing we haven't done in the last month or so that we've been talking about the goings-on in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, is have an expert on.
And I figured we would nip that in the bud tonight by welcoming you.
Again, the master's degree in modern European history will come in handy tonight.
Basically, Mark, break down, in your opinion, what's really going on with this very heated.
I think the important thing to take away from the events in Crimea is, above all, that these events are a very powerful, striking refutation of the ideology of the United States that says that diversity is a strength.
This is a mantra, a slogan that our leaders promote here in the United States and promote around the world.
And the events in Ukraine are largely a result of the fact that the societies are too diverse.
To put it another way, Ukraine would be better off, and this problem with Crimea would not have emerged if the boundaries of Ukraine matched the actual ethnic realities on the ground.
In other words, nations are far more stable, far more prosperous, far better when they are ethnically cohesive.
And the big problem in that part of the world is that the boundaries of these countries, in many cases, were drawn in the Soviet period and do not match the reality on the ground.
I'll put it another way, James.
Our country pushes a foreign policy and a policy in the United States that says that ethnicity, race, culture, religion are meaningless or should be meaningless.
They shouldn't be important.
The reality is very different.
Ethnicity, nation, race, culture, religion are important in the lives of people and in the lives of nations.
And America, again, is caught with its path down, so to speak, because it's pushing an agenda that's not based on the reality, not only in that part of the world, but around the world and here in our own country.
That was very well stated, Mark.
And I cringe to an extent as I hear you offer that because the differences between Ukrainians and Russia isn't nearly as dire as those.
And the grievances between those two distinct and unique peoples is not nearly as severe as what we find ourselves faced with here in this country.
And when things go bad, they're going to go real bad here, and they're going to go bad for all of us.
But you're right, of course.
It's just common sense.
People want to be among those with whom they share a common culture, a common language, common religion, common heroes, common holidays, so on and so forth.
It's just makes sense.
And so go ahead and expound upon that, and then I'll continue.
Well, that's right.
People want to be ruled and have leaders who are like themselves.
And because naturally people feel and understand that people who are like themselves are going to be more concerned about their interests than people who are different.
It's part of what makes us human beings.
But our government here domestically and in foreign affairs pushes policies that completely ignore these realities of life, of history, and of what makes us human beings.
And we're seeing this here again in Crimea and in Ukraine and Russia.
But this is happening all over the world.
That's why American foreign policy is in such shambles, because it's based in large measure, not always, but in large measure, on an ideological premise about life that doesn't correspond to reality.
Oh, man, amen.
I mean, what can you say to that?
That we could end the interview right there and it would be on a high note.
But that was, I mean, that's just, you know, what passes for common sense to thinking people is, you know, outside the box for, unfortunately, our ruling elite.
But let's look at the vote there.
Now, the people spoke there.
And we have established this in previous episodes prior to your appearance tonight.
Vladimir Putin was sanctioned by parliament to make those moves he made in Russia, unlike the illegal and unconstitutional wars that America, you know, the hypocrisy here is so staggering.
You can draw so many reasons why it's staggering.
But that was sanctioned.
Those people were allowed to vote.
If I understand correctly, Mark, and correct me at any time if I'm misstating the facts, but I believe that there were monitors from other countries to take a look at those votes to make sure that when the people voted Sunday before last, that everything was kosher, if we may borrow that term.
And it appeared to be.
96, what was it?
80 or 90% of the people turned out to vote.
That many people voted for secession.
It seems as though everything was done legally and by the book.
Am I misinterpreting anything?
Even if it wasn't, even if the percentage was lower, even if there's no monitors, the fact is that Crimea was added to Ukraine by Khrushchev when it didn't matter much.
It was all part of the Soviet Union.
It's really a larger – this is not a world contest in which everybody has to live up to some standard of what democracy – Remember, in 2008, George W. Bush became president, even though he actually got fewer votes than Al Gore, because we've got a peculiar electoral college system of democracy in this country.
But nobody around the world started lecturing the United States and saying, oh, wait a minute here.
George Bush shouldn't be president.
This whole idea that there's some sort of international standard of what democracy is supposed to be is arrogance, really.
And there's so many examples of this.
Of course, it's not necessary to repeat, as I think your listeners know, everyone knows, the just amazing hypocrisy of the United States to be lecturing other countries about Nash international law or even in the case of Ukraine about the Ukrainian Constitution is just incredible.
John Kerry very seriously and pontificated that the referendum in Ukraine was not in keeping with the Ukrainian Constitution.
Yeah, because Kerry and his ilk really care about constitutional law.
You see with how much reverence they show our own.
We got to take a break there, Mark.
I can't wait to continue this interview.
We're just getting started, folks.
Best is yet to come.
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And now, back to tonight's show.
Before that last commercial break, Mark Weber, our esteemed guest this evening, commented on John Kerry's assertion that he's just horrified that they're violating the Ukrainian Constitution.
I mean, you have to laugh at that.
I saw that, Mark, and when I read that, I just, very few things after all these years in radio make me just dumbfounded and dumbstruck.
But that did it.
Increasingly, James, it's not just for you, but around the world, people regard these kind of pronouncements from Kerry, Obama, and so forth as laughable.
Laughable.
I mean, it's a clownish kind of administration.
Not just this one, of course, but the previous one, George Bush and so forth.
This has been true for many years.
These pronouncements by American leaders are not taken seriously.
That's good to know.
Yeah.
Of course, Putin can hardly take the United States seriously either in this regard.
Well, and you can see that.
I mean, you know, listen, is it just me?
Now, I certainly sympathize, I think, with the Russian cause here to some extent with regard, and certainly we compare it against the abominable Obama administration and what American foreign policy has come to stand for.
But is it just me?
Am I letting my pro-Putin bias in this regard cloud my judgment?
Does he not just manhandle the United States and diplomatically?
Well, he's not Superman either, but increasingly he's shown himself a leader of statesmanship compared to the United States.
You know, it's an ironic thing.
The United States now is condemning Putin in these very extravagant ways.
This is from a man, Obama, who actually got the Nobel Peace Prize, not for anything he did, not for anything he did, but for the expectation of the hope of what he would do.
But it was Obama, I mean, excuse me, it was Putin who Obama should be grateful to for saving Obama from his own stupidity with regard to Syria.
The Russians gave a way out for Obama, who had drawn what he called these red lines that would have pushed the United States in there, or else he would have had a humiliating step down on that matter.
But no, I mean, one of the remarkable things about the Crimea situation is it's taken place without any real bloodshed.
It's taken place essentially peacefully.
And everybody should be grateful for that.
Now, as Putin himself has pointed out and other people have pointed out, the breaking apart of the Kosovo province from Serbia some years ago was carried out with a bombing of Belgrade, with the capital city.
The United States bombed Belgrade to force Serbia to give up a province that had been part of their country for centuries.
And now in this case, of course, the United States is yelling and screaming at Russia because it's restored a province that for a century had been part of Russia and the population is Russian and so forth.
In the long run, we do not have a foreign policy that is based on what's motivated by what's best for America and the world.
We have a policy that's driven by two major things.
One, a kind of screwball ideology that imagines the whole world is going to be some idea of American society that Obama and liberals have, that's one thing.
And in the Middle East, as our leaders have said explicitly time and time again, it's motivated and driven by what's good for Israel.
Of course, that's a contradiction also.
But it's a really ironic thing that now it's the United States that has a foreign policy driven by a kind of unrealistic, unrooted ideology.
And it's Russia which has a foreign policy that's based on a much on a sober idea and notion of what their real interests are and what the real reality of the world is.
I mean, this is exactly the opposite, 180 degrees from the situation when I was young, when the United States claimed, anyway, that its policy was based on a realistic assessment of the world, and the Soviet Union was driven by ideology, an unworkable ideology.
It's now the United States which carries out policies both internally and in the world that are not rooted in reality, in how people really are and how history really is.
You presented so much information there.
It's hard for me to even know where to begin, and it was all great and hard-hitting information.
Certainly the situation in Kosovo is just one of many examples upon which we can draw historical precedent with the United States foreign policy with regard to the right of people to secede is found to be hypocritical.
Shortage of those examples, and you lifted a couple there.
But you mentioned the Israeli lobby, too.
Yes.
The Israel lobby.
Yes.
Is it wholly or only partly responsible for the Obama administration's take on Putin and Russia?
Because honestly, Mark, what is it about what happened in Russia and what's been going on there for the last few weeks that has made this such an interesting topic for American leaders?
Why are they so immersed in, you know, this is a very minor event in the history of Europe, which countries breaking apart and doing these things.
It just happens all the time.
It will continue to happen.
It's always happened.
Why is America taking such a big interest in this?
Right.
Well, your point is well taken.
That is, whether Crimea is part of Ukraine or Russia, for many years it was part of the Soviet Union, this was never considered an issue for the United States to make a major thing of and to scream and yell about.
Crimea had been part of the Soviet Union.
We didn't threaten and try to make sanctions against Russia or the Soviet Union over that or over any other aspect of what the Soviet Union was doing for many, many years.
In fact, during the Second World War, the Soviet Union was a big ally.
So people ask, well, why is this such a big issue now?
The reason it's such a big issue is that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States carried out a policy and pushed a policy for years of trying to hem in Russia.
And it helped the disintegration of the old Soviet Union.
And the U.S. set up military bases in three Central Asian republics that are now independent but were one time a part of the Soviet Union.
It set up military bases in other countries that were part of the Soviet Empire, Poland, for example.
And it's all part of an effort to hem in and isolate or contain Russia.
But all that was carried out at a time when Russia was weak, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was in chaos and disorder.
I won't go into great detail about that.
But as Putin said, when you press on a spring, it's going to spring back.
And the United States took advantage of the, you might say, temporary weakness of Russia.
And Russia is now stronger.
It's now more ablely led, more focused than it was in the cataclysmic, chaotic days of Yeltsin in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's fall.
And in all these actions that we see this country, and that was a great answer, by the way, but these actions that we see America taking, we were about to come up on a break, so we'll have to make this answer quick.
Is it in any way America's best interest to drive Russia into the arms of China?
Which I guess is what we're doing here.
No, I mean, it's very difficult for America to have a America-interested policy because our leaders don't have a very clear idea of what America is.
Increasingly, this country, no, I mean, really, increasingly, the country is defined not by actual interests, but by ideology.
And that's a very dangerous thing because it's open-ended.
There's no end to the conflicts we'll be involved in for that reason.
Well, Mark, I want you to let this simmer for a moment as we head into the next commercial break.
And when we come back, I want to talk about the one voice with which the media speaks when it comes to Russia.
Everyone from NPR and what's the most radical left-wing cable news?
MSNBC.
NPR, MSNBC, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh, they are all in agreement on this issue.
And when all of those people are in agreement on an issue, you know they're backing the wrong horse.
That's right.
Well, we'll get it back to that after the break then.
Yes.
Yeah, it's coming right up, folks.
Be sure to check out Mark Weber's impeccable website with the Institute for Historical Review, IHR.org.
We have a segment remaining with Mr. Weber, and we're going to talk about the media's reaction to the situation in Russia and Ukraine and Crimea right after this.
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Welcome back.
To get on the show, call us on James's Dime at 1-866-986-6397.
Welcome back to the show.
Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, our guest this evening.
And before the break, Mark, we commented that when we return, we're going to ask you to offer your opinions on the fact that the media is speaking with one voice.
From NPR and MSNBC to Hannity and Limbaugh, they all have one opinion and it's anti-Russia, anti-Putin.
Your thoughts?
Right.
Well, exactly.
I think you can make the same parallel when the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic Party are in agreement on something, you know, that's going to be bad, too, for the American people.
That's right.
That's right.
Another way to put it, too, is when looking at the Russia-Crimea situation, if Pat Buchanan's on one side and Hannity and Combs and McCain and Obama are all on the other, I think we know which side we're going to go with here.
But the real problem is that the leaders of our country are people really who are unprincipled.
They don't really have who call themselves conservative.
You wonder what they're trying to conserve exactly, except power or something or symbolic things.
They don't really have a sense of nation, ethnicity, culture, except in this very free-floating sort of way.
And that's why the demonization of Putin is part of the continual demonization that comes with each passing decade.
There's a new demon that they're holding up as the person Americans ought to hate and get excited about.
You know, you said that there's a kind of unanimity across the board on that.
That's true.
However, you'll find some voices of sanity and reason, not only in the paleoconservative circles, but also in some leftist circles who are at least principled in their views.
I mean, Ralph Nader, for example, is on track about this as well.
I think anyone who's really rooted in an understanding of history and reality and how the world really works can understand that and is just as appalled at the hypocritical character of American foreign policy, whether he calls himself left or right.
But no, your basic point is completely valid.
I mean, part of the problem Is American foreign policy lurches in the way it does because it seems to be ever on the search for bad guys that the public is supposed to be jumped up about and get excited about?
And right now it's Putin, it'll be somebody else in a few years.
There's no consistent principle to the thing.
There's no real, sober, reasonable idea of, well, what is it we really want?
What are our interests there?
It's a kind of a continual game where you're supposed to identify or go along with whoever the bad guy is and then act accordingly.
But no, that's one of the problems is that our leaders don't have a firm sense of direction because they have not a real sense of even who we are.
What is America?
A country that appreciates its own culture, its own heritage, will have some understanding for leaders and people in other countries that value their heritage and their culture and their ethnicity.
But people like Obama or McCain or so forth or Hannity, since they don't have that mentality themselves, they're perplexed by a man like Putin.
They say he's backward.
He's backward-looking.
Well, he's a man who cares about Russia.
He cares about his country.
He cares about his people.
Now, there will be conflicts between countries like that, but at least we should have an understanding of the way that Putin and other leaders think because it corresponds to the way human beings normally think and the way Americans used to think.
Well, let me ask you this, Mark.
You brought up something that I wanted to touch on before we run out of time, and that is Putin.
Now, I would consider myself to be, if you had to ask me to describe myself in one word, I would probably say paleo-conservative.
But let's just say right-thinking people.
Now, I know a lot of right-thinking people that are very supportive of Putin for his stands on marriage and some of the other things in the news and then this.
Is he to be supported?
Because it's supported in terms of you sympathize with him.
I know there are some other people in our communities that would say, you know what, he's not this.
He still has the hate crimes laws and some things of that nature over there.
Is he somebody that we should invest in emotionally or not?
Right.
Well, I'm reluctant to talk about investing emotionally or supporting any foreign leader.
In other words, what we should be aiming for is not supportive, because ultimately, he's a Russian leader.
But almost any leader around the world, whether he's in Japan or Russia, is going to be more admirable in many ways than American leaders are because they start with different premises about society.
Now, I have a great deal of sympathy for Russia and for Putin, as well as for Ukrainians and for other nationalities.
Let me just interject.
I want to just get away, though, from this idea that there's this good guy, bad guy kind of way of looking at the world or looking at history, because there's some problems with Putin, too.
I don't want to ignore that.
Would you say overall, though, there's more to be I'm trying to word this carefully, as you said, because is it a touchy thing?
Would you say there are more positive attributes or negative?
Just viewing him objectively, dispassionately as a world leader.
I'll put it in two ways.
First of all, I think he has a much more realistic sense of his own country and the world than Obama does.
And second, he has a well, he cares about his own people in a way that the leaders of this country do not.
He has a rootedness.
Now, But having said that, people should not, I think, sort of rush off in the other direction and sort of think that he's sort of answering.
His worldview is much more realistically based.
He's made very good critiques of the policy of the United States, both internally and externally, which is based on these abstract notions of equality and diversity.
He understands, and I think people with any real grounding in history understand, that that doesn't correspond to the reality of the world.
Now, having said that, there's going to be problems with Putin, and I don't want to downplay that, but he cares far more about religion and Christianity, for example, than Obama does.
See, I think that more than anything is something that draws me to him just in terms of the sympathetic factor.
And you're right.
I mean, listen, you've given a very sober assessment.
You've worded it well.
A general rule of thumb, too, is to never fall in love with a politician because they're always going to break your heart.
And at the end of the day, he is that.
But there are some things there that I guess I would say I would like.
But let me ask you this, Mark.
And this is an important question.
How do you see all this playing out?
Is the United States eventually going to relent after they've done enough chest puffing?
Or does this escalate into World War III as some of the doomsdaysayers predict it might, or somewhere in between?
When this crisis first broke, I was interviewed by actually an overseas radio on this.
And I said, without any doubt right away, there won't be a war over this.
And the reason I was so confident about it right away is that the U.S. has no real support for doing anything serious about this matter.
It doesn't have many cards to play.
But immediately I was struck that the initial reaction in Germany and in China was one of moderation.
In other words, the United States isn't going to be able to pull the kind of invasion or attack that it did with Iraq or it's trying to do or has been trying to do with Iran.
And so the whole thing will settle down eventually.
And I think the United States will eventually accept that Crimea is part of Russia and live with it, just as it's lived with a lot of other things that it didn't like at one time.
Remember, there was a time when the United States was absolutely opposed to a united Vietnam and a communist Vietnam.
Well, they won, and now you can go to Walmart and buy shirts and pants made in Vietnam.
Life goes on, and it's going to be like that with Russia.
But to go back, I want to another point you made earlier.
You asked, well, what motivates this policy toward Putin?
Why is Putin being demonized?
Remember, the United States has, at the end of the Cold War, it really had this very hostile attitude toward Russia because it sees it as a rival to the United States.
And more specifically, Russia is a supporter of Syria.
It supports and is on good terms with Iran.
It's on fairly good terms with China and with a lot of other countries.
And the leaders in America regard that as a dangerous thing.
And neocons are very unhappy that Russia is supportive of the Syrian government in the civil war and of Iran.
And now Russia is opening up with Egypt.
More and more Egyptians look to Russia as an alternative to the United States because across the board in a country like Egypt, whether they are supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood or supporters of the new government, they are contemptuous of the United States.
They feel betrayed by the United States.
And the United States doesn't want rivals to its power around the world.
It's interesting that you say that so many of these countries in Europe and the East are either Netherlands or perhaps even pro-Russia.
You certainly wouldn't know that if you relied on the establishment press here in this country to give you your daily bread.
You would think they all just shout the American line.
Not the case.
We're going to wrap this up with more web of this.
Stay tuned.
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Welcome back.
To get on the show, call us on James's Dime at 1-866-986-6397.
Man, the last hour and a half of this show has come by fast, folks.
One final segment here with Mark Weber, my good friend, director of the Institute for Historical Review.
Mark, we were talking earlier about the media's reaction to this, the Republican and Democratic Duopolis reaction to this.
With few exception, everyone's in the tank.
All right.
And Buchanan has won.
He's written several great pieces on this.
I know you featured him on your website.
We've done the same.
Of course, they don't let Pat on TV much anymore.
We were joking about John Kerry's ridiculous statement as if he concerns himself with the Constitution of Ukraine.
If there was one person, though, in recent history that did sincerely pledge an allegiance to the United States Constitution, it was Ron Paul.
And I have here Ron Paul's statement on the matter.
They say Putin, everything Putin does is illegal, he writes, but actually he has law on his side.
They have contracts and agreements and treaties for a naval base there and the permission to go to that area.
It reminds me a little bit about what would happen if all of a sudden they say that the Americans are occupying Guantanamo illegally and that we've just invaded Guantanamo.
It's such a façade and hiding the truth.
I think the people have a right of self-determination.
It's written into the international law.
It's a moral principle.
And of course, if you believe in limited government, everyone should have the right to minimize their government and there should be a right of secession.
We love secession when we seceded from Great Britain and we love secession when the Soviet Union broke up.
I can't understand how we could argue against this election.
It sounds to me like what they're doing over there is democratic.
That was Ron Paul, Mark.
And I intended to work that in the last segment, but I felt as though we should circle back and, you know, in talking about constitutionalism, get his take on this.
Right.
Increasingly, I make a distinction not between right and left or conservative and liberal or Republican and Democrat.
I make a distinction between principled and unprincipled.
In other words, people who have a core of principles that they really believe in.
Ron Paul, that's characterized as Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, and there are others I could mention.
They may disagree with each other, but at least they have something.
There's something that is a core of principle that they believe in and they're consistent about, and they've taken hits because they're faithful to their own principle.
And that's why there's a unanimity among all those commentators that we've talked about who I regard as principled men, even if they disagree about other things, they're in agreement that U.S. policy with regard to Russia is wrongheaded and even harmful.
You raised an earlier question earlier, James, that I wanted to get back to, and that is where this is going.
I mean, what do we expect in the future?
But the overall point I would make is that this is one more example of one more expression of an overall decline of U.S. power and influence in the world relatively.
I mean, the United States is still the number one economic power and by far the most important military power.
But the trend over the last 40, 50, 60 years has been one of a decline of U.S. power and force in the world.
That's overall.
And in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, there was an assumption for a while by many American leaders that the U.S. was just going to basically be the number one superpower in the world and that there would be no real rival to American power.
Not merely American power, but the American ideology would be triumphant.
There was a very widely read book that came out right after the fall of the Soviet Union by a philosopher, a historian named Francis Fukuyama entitled The End of History.
And he speculated that now with the end of the Soviet Union, the American model of society was going to be triumphant and things were just going to sort of settle along in a straight path from that.
Well, that's really silly.
I mean, history is made up of human beings, and human beings aren't going to stop being human beings.
And we're seeing what's happening now in Ukraine and Russia is a reassertion of the reality of the world that many American leaders wish wasn't true, but is going to be true.
And anyway, but the trend I think is important here is that America's ability to snap its fingers and make things happen in this or that part of the world is less and less with each passing year.
And as Americans, you hate to say it, but that's a good thing.
I mean, as far as America's vital interests, true vital interests are concerned, I can't say, as a paleoconservative, as someone who thinks fondly of the Constitution, that this is a bad thing.
To what extent will the economic sanctions that Obama keeps crowing about have an effect on Russia?
He sanctions them, and then he comes back and he sanctions them a little harder.
Is that just posturing or are they going to feel a pitch poster?
It's absolute posturing because Russia's much more important trade is with Europe and with other countries, and especially with Western Europe.
Russia supplies natural gas and petroleum, and those countries don't want to disrupt that.
I'll say something else.
You know, it's surprising how many people in America who call themselves conservatives will get easily excited when an American president identifies a foreign country as some sort of enemy or adversary.
I mean, the percentage of people who think we ought to do something supposedly about Russia is highest among those who consider themselves Republican or Democrat.
But I would put this.
I mean, if those same people don't trust Obama here in this country, why in heck should they expect Obama or any foreign leader to have any trust in Obama or the United States?
In other words, they should realize that around the world, people are, and foreign leaders are just as distrustful of the United States as Americans increasingly are of our leaders here in this country.
Mark, you said earlier in the last segment that the way this plays out just basically fades to black.
Ukraine will eventually accept it.
The United States will eventually accept it.
And Russia's not going to relent there.
And furthermore, I mean, how could you not accept that new Attorney General that Putin placed in Crimea?
Have you gotten a load of that one yet, Mark?
No, I don't know about that.
Well, I'm being slightly facetious.
It was a 33-year-old woman who had been a top-level prosecutor for Ukraine and had a crisis of conscience and went back home.
Anyway, but you think at the end of the day, and in what manner of time does this all just go away?
Well, the reality is increasingly that China and Russia and other countries are going to have more of a say in what goes on in the world.
And increasingly, the United States is going to have less to say.
One of the big reasons for that, unfortunately, James, is that in contrast to the situation in the 60s or the 50s or the 70s, when we're still getting out from the wreckage of the Second World War around the world, the United States today is no longer looked upon as a model society, as an exemplary society.
We don't have the posture, the position to tell other countries how to live their lives when we have so many problems here at home.
Around the world, people don't look at Houston or Detroit or Los Angeles and say, I want our cities to look like yours.
And so the U.S. place in the world is less, not just in hard terms, that is, relative power economically and military in terms of other countries, but its moral stature, its credibility, its place in the world is less because this is increasingly a society with such huge internal problems that our ability to persuade other countries, tell other countries how to act, is going to be less and less for that reason as well.
Mark, you know we've covered a lot of ground and there was a lot of ground to be covered tonight.
And of course, in an issue as big as this, you only scratch the surface in an hour of commercial radio.
But I do feel satisfied.
I felt as though we covered a lot of the points that I wanted to talk to you about and to have you lend your expertise on.
So my final question, and this is always a rewarding one to be able to ask, final word to you.
We have about two minutes remaining.
Is there anything that we failed to cover that you particularly wanted to share with the audience this evening with regards to this topic?
I would ask people to not get into the minuche of who's supporting this group in Ukraine or the short-term thing, but keep an eye on the overall situation, the overall trends.
And the overall trends are that nationalism, ethnicity, culture are important and powerful forces in the world, and they're going to play a bigger role in the years ahead and that we're seeing a refutation,
a powerful refutation of this illusory worldview that leaders in our country have, both Democrat and Republican, that is causing increased chaos here in this country and is also leading to confusion and chaos in our foreign policy as well.
And this is an overall trend.
This is an overall thing.
And so that we're going to see this play out more and more in the years ahead as America sort of lurches from crisis to crisis without a coherent idea of how to deal with these issues.
Mark, thank you so much for lending us an hour of your Saturday evening to help make sense of this issue, to give a voice and an opinion on an important topic that you're not getting anywhere else, save Buchanan and Paul and a few other places, this network certainly, but not a lot.
Certainly there should be more than one side of a story on an issue of this magnitude.
And I think we covered it well tonight.
Thank you, my friend.
Thank you, James.
Mark Weber, everybody.
Check him out at the Institute of Historical Review, and we'll be back with you next week.