Welcome to the Libertarian Institute.
My name is Keith Knight. I am Managing Editor at the
Libertarian Institute. I'm joined by the Director,
Scott Horton, author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on
Terrorism and Hotter Than the Sun Time to Abolish Nuclear
Weapons. Here we are going to 1st mention
the fact that we do have a fundraiser going on.
Now, I know it's tempting you want to send more money to the
band of rights in Ukraine and the IDF, but if you would rather
make a tax deductible donation to the Libertarian Institute
championing the principles of liberty, check out the link in
the description below. Scott Horton When people go to
the Libertarian Institute, there's so much it's so
overwhelming. Where should they start?
On libertarianinstitute.org. All right.
Well, it depends exactly what you're into.
We got a ton of podcasts. We got a bunch of great opinion
writers. And then of course we have Kyle
Anzalone, our great news editor, who's just on top of everything
going on in the world all day every day, right there in the
right hand margin there for you. But yeah, we've got just the
best team. And I think maybe one way I
think of it is there's sort of these two generations.
I think Laurie's my same age. But then there's this other kind
of group of guys that are older. Not that they're all exactly the
same age or anything, but there's Sheldon Richmond, our my
founding partner in the thing and our executive editor.
And then there's the great James Bovard.
And I'm not calling you old, Jim.
I'm just saying older than me a little.
You know, the great Jim Bovard and then Ted Carpenter and Ted
Snyder. I think Price Snyder's probably
my same age, too. I don't know.
And I did mention Laurie Calhoun, one of our senior
editors there. She's my same age, but we have,
you know, Richmond and Bovard and Carpenter especially are
sort of our real senior fellows. And then we got this whole giant
group of you 27 year olds who for some reason are all 27 at
the same time. And I used to be 27.
It's a great year and if I could go back in time 20 years then I
would be 27 with you boys. But unfortunately in the future
now and that's too late for that.
But so that the the 27 year olds are you of course our managing
editor and then our editor, editor Hunter Durensis, our news
editor Kyle Angela, our assistant news editor Connor
Freeman and then? Patrick McFarlane is actually
like 31 or something, but whatever.
He counts the same crew with you guys.
Oh, and Will Porter of course is also 27.
And then of course Tommy Salmons.
I don't know, he's my age, mid 40s or something, but he's at
one of our great podcasters and a great guy as well.
But. Obviously there's some Gray
areas there, but basically I think I like we got these kind
of old stir libertarian leaders. I mean, Jim Bovard is one of the
most accomplished and important libertarians who's ever lived or
ever will. He's published 15 books.
He's written for all the most important newspapers in America,
writes for the New York Post. Now he's on the Board of
Contributors at the USA TODAY. In the past, it's written for
the Wall Street Journal and and Christian Science Monitor and
has sold, I mean, 10s of thousands of books. 10s and 10s
and 10s, maybe hundreds of thousands of books over the
years. He's really and and you know
what He is too. There's there's a special breed
of American journalist, the opinion journalist, who does
real research, real breaking news, sometimes sources, but
also digging through documents, investigative research, opinion
pieces. So in that way he can let him
have it too. And nobody does better than Jim
at that. Either.
You know what I mean. But so to me, Keith, the bottom
line here is just what an institute to brag about, Man, we
are doing so great. And I don't mean to leave
everybody off. If people go to
libertarianinstitute.org/about, there's a whole group of
everybody there. We're going to talk about our
authors and these kinds of things.
Of whom we have. So many are great writers, not
all of whom are one kind of fellow or another.
Some of them are, some of them aren't.
And I can't keep track of it all but.
But really, like men, I'm proud. I think we got the best team
going in libertarianism right now at the Libertarian
Institute. And I said no compunction
whatsoever, Certainly check it all out at
libertarianinstitute.org. So, Scott, I guess today is the
60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
When it comes to things we can learn from the Kennedy
assassination, the Cuban missile crisis really sticks out in my
mind. What are the major lessons you
think that we can really embrace from the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Wow, that's interesting. Well, look, I mean, I think Ivan
Eland at antiwar.com in the past has done some great work on
this. And the bottom line is, it was
all Jack Kennedy's fault. He had.
Well, it's very interesting. You know, this is in Daniel
Ellsberg's book The Doomsday Machine.
It was all Daniel Ellsberg's fault, and he takes
responsibility for it. Daniel Ellsberg thought it would
be smart. To have the deputy assistant
Secretary of Defense for being a jerk or whatever exactly.
The office was to have him go out and give a speech where he
said, hey Khrushchev, we know how weak you are and we know how
few nuclear missiles you have and we know what we can get away
with that you cannot stop and how.
That was a huge mistake because it put Khrushchev they thought,
I guess. That it would make him realize
how overmatched he was and that he would have to cool out or
something. I forgot exactly what Ellsberg
said. His reasoning was there, but
what happened was Khrushchev panicked.
Public choice theory, right? His power is on the line.
He looks too weak in front of the boys.
He's going to lose out, and so he's got to do something tough.
And Kennedy had also put the Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
Which look at the map is right there, Jason.
These medium range missiles are just a very short flight time
from Moscow at that point. And so Khrushchev escalated on
his side by stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba and they were
discovered they were already operational and they didn't.
The Americans didn't know this at the time.
By the time the Americans discovered them, they already
had some of the short range nukes operational.
And the command authority had already been passed from Moscow
to local commanders on the scene.
Although I don't think, Keith, that the Cubans had authority.
I think only Soviet officers on the scene had the authority to
launch, but they didn't have to call home to get permission and
the Americans did not know that they had operational missiles.
So from the point of view of Washington, DC, we have a window
of time here where maybe we want to do a massive air campaign and
even send in the Marines and we're going to destroy all these
missiles before they can use them.
Now, as crazy as it sounds to leave a bunch of nukes sitting
in Cuba right offshore in Florida, it doesn't make any
difference compared to having a bunch of Soviet missiles come
over the North Pole. Have a little bit more time, but
everybody's still dead if there's a nuclear war with the
Soviet Union and there were people, I believe even McNamara
said originally at the time he was the Secretary of Defense,
said that hey, look, it doesn't make a difference strategically
anyway, so we shouldn't overreact.
But again, public choice theory, How do you look?
You can't be soft on the commies.
You're already a Democrat and all this stuff, right?
Like JFK's Barack Obama. Right.
He's got to look like a tough guy or they're just going to run
him right out of there. Right.
So he's got to escalate. He's got to be tough.
And so he does. And he declares A quarantine so
he doesn't have to call it a blockade.
But he sends the Navy out there to block Soviet ships and to say
you are no, you are not going to let you go to Cuba to deliver
more nuclear missiles. And there are ships with nuclear
missiles on their way to Cuba. So this becomes a showdown on
the high seas and. What we know now, and I'm sorry,
'cause I don't think he wanted an answer this long, but he
asked me a history question. So we know now that we all
almost died, our parents all almost died.
Because what happened was the Americans were dropping depth
charges on Soviet Subs, and the Americans thought that, look,
we're only dropping the crackerjack depth charges at a
medium depth. And that means the Soviets know
we're not really trying to sink them, we're just shaking them up
a little bit, right? But meanwhile, the Soviets
below, all they know is somebody setting off depth charges.
They're not getting the subtlety of the depth of the explosion
and the message it's intended to send here.
All they know is somebody's trying to kill them and they're
freaking out because they're already locked in a little tube
under the ocean, right? Which is already a precarious
place to meet so. I believe the way it plays out
is the 2 military officers on board said let's turn the key
and fire and add them on. They had them and it was a
civilian Communist Party official who happened to be on
board that ship and it was the only sub that he that had one.
But that sub had one where if it had been the other Subs in the
area, it would have been a different call maybe.
But in this case, the civilian Communist Party official said,
we're not firing the first shot in a nuclear war.
You and you and me, we're going to die here today before we pull
the trigger on 1st nuke until we already know that nukes are
going off. No man.
And they said, all right, you're right.
And cooler heads prevailed. That could have been World War 3
thermonuclear full scale general nuclear war right there.
And even and we, as we know now, even if the Americans had A and
they did have absolute overwhelming advantage against
Russia, they and and the Soviet Union, they would have
completely obliterated the Soviet Union with thousands of
nuclear weapons which would have caused nuclear winter and the
starvation of billions and radiation fallout.
You know, poisoning all over North America anyway.
Prevailing winds, Just that jet stream blows east.
So all that stuff would have crossed Siberia and the Bering
Strait and would have come right down into the continental United
States. We'd have been nuking ourselves
to death anyway. It would have been the absolute
catastrophe and and the Russians would have got some shots off.
They had Subs and they had Icbms, at least in some measure
at that time. I forget the real numbers, but
they were much lower than people supposed at the time.
But then what happened? Kennedy was under severe
pressure from the military to attack Cuba, and he was
legitimately worried that they were going to overthrow him.
And it was. He later allowed the director of
Seven Days in May to film the movie in the White House because
he's like, yeah, that almost happened and I'm worried about
that. And they told the Soviets in
their back channel communications, listen, we're
worried that the military will overthrow the president.
If he doesn't go at least this far or act at least this tough,
etcetera like this, you have to understand the position he's in
which I think is legitimate and obviously raises real questions
about what happened a year later.
OK, he he really was concerned they were going to overthrow him
and but then what he did was he sent his brother, his younger
brother, the attorney general. Totally outside the chain of
command to talk to a journalist who knew a Russian.
And they set up this back channel.
And somehow, I don't know if they truly did or not, but at
least ostensibly, they kept this channel secret from the State
Department and the CIA and Kennedy, through his brother
made a deal with it through the back channel with Khrushchev.
And then what happened was Khrushchev.
They answered with a letter. They said, OK, I accept your
offer and it'll be great and we'll do this and that.
I'll get to the details in just one moment.
It's pretty simple. But then another second letter
arrived that had all this threatening stuff in it and was
refusing to, you know, be generous in in the negotiation.
And so they didn't know what to do.
And I don't know whose idea it was, but somebody said, look,
let's just answer the 1st letter and ignore the second one.
And so they did. And they said, oh great, you
accept our terms, then we accept your terms.
And these are the terms we accept.
And good deal, shake hands deal. And that stuck.
And they did it. And the deal was America swears
to God and for some reason really means it this time.
Keith, you tell me. I don't know the magic trick
here. They really, really mean it.
We're not going to invade Cuba. We haven't since.
They've done some covert action over there, some assassination
attempts and whatever. But you know, even that ended
pretty quickly after that, I think.
And then which may have been part of what got him killed as
part of the lore, you know, at least.
And then also they promised to remove the Jupiter missiles from
Turkey, but they kept that secret.
You got to get all your missiles out of Cuba.
And we get to crow about our great victory, and we're going
to pull our missiles out of Turkey, but we're going to pull
them out of there in a few months.
And we're not going to say anything about it, and neither
are you. And Khrushchev agreed to that.
And so that was how that ended. And so in the history as it's
told, Kennedy, you know, stared down the beast and won.
And what a great hero and all of that, when the reality is that,
you know, he's he had gotten himself into this mess, gotten
the world into this mess, and then luckily was able to squirm
his way out of it by by look. As Ron Paul said over and over
again, he goes, listen, we negotiated with Stalin, with
Mao, with Khrushchev, and what that means is we can negotiate
with anyone. It doesn't mean that anyone is
always negotiating in good faith with us that we're supposed to
be suckers. When Ronald Reagan said trust
but verify, he was being polite. That means don't trust.
That's what that means. Trust the verify.
We love you. Soviets.
Seriously. Show us the missiles you
dismantled. You know what I mean?
Come on. So.
So, you know, being willing to engage in diplomacy doesn't mean
become a sucker and give away the store.
Remember when Trump decided he wanted to negotiate with the
North Koreans and he went over to Vietnam to negotiate with
them. And the narrative on TV was?
Trump is going to give away everything.
Kim is going to walk all over him.
Kim is going to be the most wily and and experienced and
sophisticated negotiator in the world, and he's just going to
walk all over Donald Trump, who's probably, what, going to
completely normalize relations and probably, like, sell them?
Nuclear fuel and not require them to do a single thing And
like, come on, man, none of that was right.
They were acting like it was this absolutely unpardonable,
you know, deadly sin to talk to Kim at all, right?
Like and look what happened. Trump brought Bolton with him,
who let it, who refused to let him achieve anything there.
Much less was going to allow him to give away the whole store.
Tell you what, we'll recognize you and and give you a billion
dollars and you don't have to give up any of your nukes or
anything. And we're just whatever, Give me
a pat on the head and I'll do whatever you say.
Come on. But that was the way that they
spun it, right? And Dick Cheney said we can't
talk to North Korea at all, 'cause if you dignify evil, you
legitimize it. Well, guess what?
That was this guy's father. Who had inherited the power from
his father. And nobody was challenging their
legitimacy and power in North Korea anyway.
And nobody really cared what the opinion of the North Americans
was, whether their power was legitimate or not.
Their people called them the Great Leader and Dear Leader and
whatever this one is. Superman, whatever they call
him, the best one of us is his official title, right?
Like they don't care whether Dick Cheney allows Colin Powell
to talk with the guy or not. Give me a break.
And it's just an excuse not to talk, right?
Look at what's going on today. Right now.
We got. I don't know if it ever happened
yet. Did it happen yet?
They're trading hostages in Israel, Palestine right now.
And Michael Tracy had a great bunch of tweets about this.
You're supposed to conceive of Hamas.
Like gorillas from the World War One propaganda poster of the
Huns, Right? That these are beasts, They're
not real men, and they cannot be negotiated with.
They only understand one thing for us.
Oh, yeah? Well, how come you guys have
been talking on the phone for three weeks straight until you
got some hostages changed, then? Sounds like.
Yeah, they must be human men just like you and me and all
that stuff about. What?
What aliens they are, What orcs. They are, what crazy different
others they are from. Everyone else is, of course, a
bunch of nonsense. And so then what's the lesson?
If they can negotiate over hostages, they can negotiate
over anything. Get to work.
Exactly. When it comes to other examples
of restraint, you will frequently get like, well, maybe
Barack Obama's like one of these pansies and he wouldn't go to
war. But you know, tough guys like
conservatives, you know, like Ronald Reagan, a very tough man.
There was an incident in 1983 Beirut barracks bombings, when
according to this source here, I believe there were 241 U.S.
military personnel killed in this.
What can you tell us about this and what happened?
Did we have to declare war on Lebanon after this happened?
How were we able to get out of it without being Neville
Chamberlain appeasers who just want to give the world away?
Yeah, great question. Yes, you're right.
It was 241 American Marines were killed.
Along with I think it was 37 French soldiers also were
killed. They were killed in their sleep
by the suicide truck bomb, crashed through the front of
their barracks and detonated. By, I guess what you could call
like a proto Hezbollah. It wasn't exactly Hezbollah or
the Amal militia. I'm told it was, you know, some
sort of unnamed group of Shiites who did it, but along the lines
of, you know, what became Hezbollah a couple of years or
maybe the next year after that 84.
But you know, first of all, this is important.
I guess it's not absolute proven fact, but I think it's a very
credibly claimed fact. Viktor Ostrovsky, the former
Mossad spy, wrote in his book By Way of Deception, that the
Israelis had an informant that warned them that there was a big
Mercedes truck that was being packed full of explosives, and
that the Israelis immediately knew that there were only a
couple of targets that would possibly require that.
And one of the obvious ones would be the American Marine
barracks out there at forgot if it was a hotel or wherever they
had stationed up there. And then the decision was made
to not warn the Americans and to not tell them.
And in fact, let me, let me read you.
I have the quote here, dude, no, we're not there to protect
Americans. They're a big country.
That was what he was told. Why not to warn the Americans?
CIA, that's their job, not us. To warn them.
And then after it happened, quote hey, they wanted to stick
their nose into this Lebanon thing.
Let them pay the price. Is this from his book?
By way of deception? Right, Which is the slogan of
Mossad? So that's you know how the what
the Israelis think of us refuse to warn us when a truck bomb is
coming to kill hundreds of our guys and give a damn about that.
And then? And then?
So what is Reagan's response to this?
Well, so here's the thing about it.
A better story even than what Ostrovsky adds here is about our
hero Ron Paul. And you can read this Keith in
his great book A Foreign Policy of Freedom, which is collection
of his foreign policy speeches. And the speeches go, Mr. Reagan,
don't listen to the Hawks, whatever you do.
Oh by the way, people know Ron Paul went to Congress in 97, but
he also went in like 77 or somewhere around there and and
stayed in Congress until he ran and then lost for Senate.
And I think 84, possibly 88. No, no, no, because 88 he ran as
a libertarian, so he was in 84, he ran for Senate in Texas and
lost to Phil Graham in the primary.
Phil Graham. But anyway, before that Ron had
been in the Senate. Then Doctor Paul had been in
the, pardon me, in the House before and so anyway, he gives a
speech and he says, Mr. Reagan, don't listen to the Hawks.
Do not put our guys in Lebanon. You do not want to intervene in
this war. It's such a crazy situation.
All the different factions over there and the Israelis
intervening now the way they are and all these things.
And if you do, it's just going to lead to conflict.
And then worst conflict from there, just don't do it, please.
And then the next speech. This is again Foreign Policy of
Freedom by Doctor Paul. The next speech in line, you
know, in his House speeches. Oh, Mr. Reagan, you didn't
listen to me and you did the wrong thing.
And you put our guys on the ground in Lebanon.
Please get him out of there before it's too late.
Don't kill anybody. Don't escalate.
Don't give him a mission. Don't do nothing.
Just turn around and go before it's too late, man, Let's get
the hell out of there now. Next speech I told you.
Now 241 Marines are dead and what do we get out of it?
Why are we in Lebanon, Mr. Reagan, for God's sake, listen
to reason. Get our boys out of Lebanon now.
And then the next speech, Thank God you finally listened to
reason and you did the right thing, Mr. Reagan.
And you got our guys out now, at least while we're only this far
behind instead of much worse. So thank goodness for that.
Because imagine if we decided to go to war against the Shiites
there, now allied with Israel in that mess in Lebanon.
We'd never get out again and on and on like that.
And it's just the brilliance of Doctor Paul and you know,
finally, at least too late, the at least the wisdom of Ronald
Reagan to listen to that sort of advice.
I don't know if he listened to Doctor Paul or not, but he
decided that he wanted to get out of there.
There's no way it was worth it for America to get involved
there. And he shouldn't have been
involved there at all. And I I don't know.
He must have given the orders for the battleship New Jersey to
join Israel and shelling Shiite neighborhoods at some point.
But I forget exactly when that was.
But I know that later on there was a hijacking of a airplane.
Or was it a ship? It may have been the Achille
Laurel ship. I think it was an airplane.
And then in the terrorists were running up and down the aisle
going New Jersey, NJ and they were looking for Americans to
kill, you know, and they're going New Jersey, NJ And the
people on the plane were like, what the hell is he talking
about? Why are they saying that?
Well, that was the name of the battleship that had been
shelling the neighborhoods, the suburbs of Beirut.
And so that was what the terrorist attack was, was
backdraft terrorism, as we would call it, direct blowback from
from that, you know, atrocity. They're bombing neighbor.
They don't, they don't know who they're killing, shelling
neighborhoods. They're killing innocent people,
obviously. And then, you know, Reagan did
get sick of all of this stuff. And I have the quote I I tweet
this from time to time, A quote from Ronald Reagan from 1982,
where I guess was previous to that, where he had called the
knock and bag and told him, you got to cut this out, 'cause
there was a massive Israeli bombing campaign against a
neighborhood in East Beirut, I believe it was.
And and Reagan said in his diary he wrote, I told beggin that I
advisably used, I deliberately used the word Holocaust.
And I told him this has to stop. The symbol of this war is going
to be a 7 month old girl with her arms blown off.
And that was Reagan said that. And then it's a different
anecdote from it's the same anecdote but from a different
source. And I need to go back and find
this one, but I know that this had happened.
Where then the bombing stopped in 15 minutes and Reagan said,
whoa, I didn't realize I could do that.
And that was it. Which is another huge lesson for
our current situation, that Joe Biden could pick up the phone
right now and in this war he absolutely could.
But he doesn't have anything like the integrity of Ronald
Reagan, unfortunately. One more incident.
In 1983 there was a flight that was going from Alaska, I believe
it was Anchorage, AK to Seoul, South Korea and it was shot down
by the Soviets. It was a civilian airline
killing 269 passengers. It the sources I have say 62 of
them were Americans and Reagan did not declare war over this.
And the Soviet Union came crumbling down within a decade.
What was the response to this in general, 'cause there was a
sitting Congressman, Larry McDonald, on this flight who
happened to be the head of the John Birch Society at the time,
which caused a lot of conspiracy and scandal.
And the idea that the plane had been forced down and that they
all lived, which I think is not credible, unfortunately.
But I think what happened there, Keith, and this may have had a
lot to do. I mean, depending on what they
told him, I don't know. This may have a lot to do with
his lack of response was it was the Air Force's fault.
They had been on a spy mission inside the Soviet Union.
And then when they were getting the hell out of there, when they
were being pursued, they hid in the shadow of this civilian
airliner and then bugged out. So in other words, on the radar,
they conflated their dot with the Korean Airline Double O 7
flight. And then they dove out of there.
And then when the Soviets caught up to him, they didn't catch up
to them. They caught up to the Double O 7
flight and blew it out of the sky.
So it was the Air Force who had put him in that situation and
got him killed. So it could be that they told
Reagan that. And Reagan was like, Oh, well,
hell, it's kind of hard to crack down on them that bad over what
was really, you know, a situation we put them in.
I don't know whether that's. And I, and honestly, I was a
boy, very young boy at the time, 81.
I was in, you know, preschool. So I don't have any memory of
that. I do remember the day Reagan was
inaugurated when I was 4, but I don't remember you know exactly
how that was handled then. Well, it it's just incredible.
They didn't kill the world over it when they could have
escalated. He could have just started
pounding his first on the table and made everything worse.
You know, I don't know enough about this guy.
I should probably read this guy's autobiography or whatever
the hell if there is one. But his Secretary of State was
George Schultz, who was apparently not the most psycho
out of all these guys, although he was a war profiteer and and
did have his problems. I don't want to go on a whole
tangent about him. He apparently at the time was
one of the least worst of Reagan's advisers and would
preach caution when some of the other guys were going off half
cocked and that kind of thing. Well, it's just incredible
because we get all this hawkish talk because of a fake Russian
interference event in 2016. We get more hawkish talk when we
hear that Putin has put bounties on the head of soldiers in
Afghanistan. So all these fake things are
getting people so hawkish, but these were real things that took
place. And Ronald Reagan?
Mr. Conservative didn't declare war, and the Soviet empire came
crumbling down after it's It's just unbelievable that we have.
We have real examples, yeah. And and look, let's go further
than that. What ended the Cold War?
It wasn't America just defeated the Soviet Union, drove them
into bankruptcy. Just simple as that.
Something like that. That's not what happened.
What happened was Gorbachev ended the Soviet Union, ended
the Cold War, and he actually did try to hold on to the last
vestiges of the Soviet Union, but by then it was too late.
But the only reason that any of the was, in hindsight,
especially like this virtually magical transformation of the
the Velvet Revolution throughout Eastern Europe in 1988 through
91, in the fall of the Soviet Union and the freedom of Eastern
Europe and the rest of the Soviet Empire, too.
That that all happened because Reagan treated Gorbachev with
respect. That all happened because they
were partners working to build trust and end the Cold War
together. And Reagan said, look, all the
old guys who'd fought in World War 2 and had worked for Stalin
and all that, all those guys were finally gone.
Gorbachev was the first guy who was 45.
And Reagan walked right up to him, shook his hand and said,
you know, if the aliens attack, you and us are going to have to
team up and fight them off. And Gorbachev's like, what?
What? And.
But you know, Reagan's like a foot and a half taller than him
and he's wearing his cowboy hat and his big trench coat and
whatever. And he just pulls alpha dog.
Hey there young man shakes his hand and is like you're my guy
now And and the and the dictator of the Soviet Union is like I
guess I'm your guy now like he just did so he just that was how
he did it and again trust but verify never meant trust.
Trust but verify meant hey I really like you.
Let's get along very politely here in our diplomacy and sign a
deal on what we can agree on. And as part of that deal, we are
going to have a vast and intrusive inspection regime to
guarantee that it all comes true, right?
That that's what trust. But verify means.
Means no. Trust means be polite during
diplomacy and call it trust because it's polite to call it
trust. That's it, right?
Ronald Reagan was not a pushover, you know, called him a
pushover. Norman Podhoretz and the
neoconservatives said he was Neville Chamberlain selling out
to Hitler at Munich. But he was Ronald Reagan and he
didn't make a deal with the devil.
He made a deal with a bureaucrat and it paid off, man.
He destroyed the Soviet empire through goodwill, Not through
covert action. Through.
Hey, man, come on. There ain't no reason we got to
keep doing this. Isn't that what you think too?
And then look, it's right as the election of 88 is taking place,
right as Reagan is on his very last lame duck months, The wall
starts coming down. Immigrants start breaking out.
I believe someone corrected me on this.
And then I didn't go back and check.
The way I remember it was the first border that broke open was
from Hungary into Austria, and Austria was neutral and free,
not aligned with the West, but neutral and not occupied by the
Soviets. And when people started escaping
from communist Hungary into Austria, the border guards
didn't machine gun them all the death.
They sat there and left. And the Soviet Union kids, for
real, the border guards were there to keep you in, and they
would murder you if you try to escape the country.
That's very real. Not just the Berlin Wall
situation in West Berlin, but the entire border of the
communist world with the free world at that time.
You can't exaggerate or make that up.
That's for real. You try to escape with your
family. They will murder you all in cold
blood. And that was what that was for.
And all that just fell apart. And it was an atmosphere of
trust and decency. And this world, in fact, is big
enough for both of us. So let's figure it out.
They figured it out, Keith. I was reading Kyle Anzalone's
research and he claimed that in on September 11th 2001, George
Bush's first phone call from a Prime Minister was from Vladimir
Putin, saying that you and I are in this together in fighting
terrorism. It's amazing how this guy has
been driven into the arms of Beijing, as Pat Buchanan likes
to say, when it seemed like Putin wanted to be nothing but a
friend. The idea that this guy is so bad
after we had a formal alliance with Stalin in the Second World
War that we can't work with him it that's just unbelievable.
Did you see XI Jinping's speech in San Francisco?
No, I didn't. In fact, why don't you update
me? Well, actually, hold that
thought one second. So let me talk about what you
just said, because Vladimir Putin has been explicit about
this for 20 more than 20 years. Just as he's coming into power.
He released a book of, you know, a friendly interview of him
about his entire life story and this that the other thing.
And he makes it very clear, look, we're Europeans, dude.
Look at us like, hey, out in Siberia, some of those guys are
more Asiatic looking and whatever.
But over here, we're white Christians, we are part of the
European family. What do we what?
What other choice do we have to we got to figure it out and work
with these people. And of course Russia is Russia.
It's weird. They ain't the Germans or
something else. And they're further E than on
the other side of Poland and Lithuania and everything.
So, you know, and they were ruled by the Golden Horde for
all those years. And there's there's different
circumstances of things. But ultimately, who are we
ultimately? We are part of the European
family period. We have to be.
And that was what Gorbachev believed as well.
That was what Yeltsin believed, and that was what Putin believed
when he came in. And I believe it was a quote
that he told Madeleine Albright. They're like, come on, it's fun
to dress up in silk and eat with chopsticks and stuff sometimes.
But that's, you know, Thursday night, going out to dinner,
whatever. That's not the way.
That's not who we are. We're Europeans with you.
And of course, that's our destiny.
That's obviously what we have to do and what we want.
He had asked the Clinton government if they could join
NATO, and Clinton just ignored him.
And he had asked Colin Powell in July of 2001.
And again, was just completely ignored.
Like, we're not even going to dignify that because if we bring
Russia into NATO, we got to listen to them and we don't want
to do that. We can Lord it over everybody
else in NATO. They'll do whatever we say.
But the Russians, we have to really share power.
And then who are we going to fight?
We would rather point NATO at them.
Then what? Bring them to war with us
against Iraq. Then we got to share the oil
with them. And you know, this, that.
Why do that? Why?
Why allow them in on our empire if we don't have to, was the
American attitude, and we'll just build the empire up at
their expense. And then what are they going to
do about it? You know, they knew all along
they were provoking Russia. They were worn by their
brightest minds all along that expanding NATO into Russia's
territory is sure to provoke a terrible reaction.
And then the quotes I got them collect them like Hot Wheels,
man, over and over and over again.
They say, yeah, well, what are they going to do about it?
They used to be a superpower. Now they're not.
And only we are. And that means we can do
whatever they want, what whatever we want, and they can't
do anything about it. Simple as that.
They say it over and over and over again and sometimes they
even confess. This was our attitude.
What are they going to do about it?
Like the worst bullies. Exactly what your bully said.
He in, in junior high or whatever, right?
It's like this is exactly how they talk.
So when it comes to. War guarantees.
It seems like people are very generous and very kind.
They say, I really care about the people in Taiwan.
We should have, we should give them a war guarantee.
Poroshenko went to the Council on Foreign Relations recently
and said what Ukraine really needs is NATO membership.
And all the everyone in the crowd saying I'm a nice person,
we should give NATO, we should give Ukraine somewhat of a war
guarantee. The amazing thing I have come
across is that Poland was actually given a war guarantee
by the British Empire. As a causal result of this,
Britain declares war on Germany after invading Poland on
September 1st, 1939. And as a result, 8 million Poles
were left dead because of this very kind, generous offer.
Even in the First World War, Sir Edward Gray had in agreement
with the French Empire. We will be on your side if
Germany ever declares war against you.
France loses 1.3 million people. And the whole place is
completely trashed. That so much so that they were
willing to, you know, easily give in to the National
Socialist 20 years later. So it turns out, historically,
these war guarantees do not do much for the country you're
doing this huge favor for. When it comes to giving war
guarantees to Ukraine and Taiwan, what do people need to
know? Yeah, well, and like in the
Polish example, according to Churchill, the book by Pat
Buchanan, this really was a moral hazard.
And so the colonels who ran Poland at the time, they were a
bunch of anti-Semitic fascists themselves.
They were called the colonels who ran the place.
And but as soon as they got the war guarantee, they started, you
know, raising their voice and telling Hitler to go straight to
hell for all of his demands about the corridor to Danzig.
And we don't know what they would have done otherwise, but
we know what they did when they got a shot of liquid courage
from the Brits, you know, a pint, I guess, would be a better
way to say it. And so then they went and
talked, you know, more tough and got into a battle that they
could not win. And of course, even at the end
of the war, when their enemies, the Germans, were defeated, they
were still conquered by their other enemies, the Soviets, and
and enslaved for decades after that.
So very important lesson there as well.
And this is the same lesson for Taiwan is as long as America
says, hey, Taiwan, we've got your back.
Well, that makes them braver than they otherwise would be.
And you might say, well, jeez, it would be unjust for mainland
China just have their way with them and take their sovereignty
away. But then you might also say,
well, that's just tough. It's a tiny little island 90
miles off the coast of China, 7000 miles West of San Diego,
dude. So what do you think you're
going to do about it, you know? And So what happens is America
set up the system back when the Chinese were powerless to do
anything about it. Right.
And and you know, Nixon was willing to trade away American
protection of Taiwan for normalization deal with Mao
Zedong and mainland China in 1974.
Because Taiwan doesn't really matter to us, but it matters
very much to them. So why would we let that be such
a big sticking point, right. And then.
But you have had a course like the Nationalist right.
Were the ones on Taiwan as opposed to the commies in
Beijing. And of course during the worst
of the horror show of the starvation campaign and and the
consequences of communism on the mainland in Taiwan they still
lived in a right wing military dictatorship and they had really
badly oppressed the natives. But at least the Han Chinese
that had taken over the place ended up creating a a more
prosperous society there. So it certainly made a lot of
sense that they did not want to bow down to Mao and they didn't
have to 'cause he didn't have any ability to invade their
island and dominate it anyway, and especially now with the
American Salem back and forth in the straits right?
So that was the status quo, made perfect sense.
The problem is America kept pouring weapons into Taiwan, F
sixteens and other like big ticket items.
And while at the same time the Chinese are building up a
massive first world naval power. And you know, including if they
militarize their merchant marine, which of course they can
with a snap of my fingers, they got 20,000 ships or something,
man, they got a huge fleet to invade that island with now if
you do it like that. So they've been building up the
capability to do it. Now America used to have a
policy called dual deterrence and there's a great article by
Gareth Porter about this where America would tell the
Taiwanese, hey, you pipe down, OK.
And then they would tell Mainland China, hey man, don't
mess with them. I'm not promising I would fight
you if you attacked them, but I might so don't.
OK And that's the strategic ambiguity.
It's not a severe it's not a a real war guarantee to Taiwan but
it's a heavily implied one And this is the the Nixon slash
Carter doctrine for Taiwan and China is that they will be we
America recognizes it's one China and they will be reunited
one day. We hope peacefully, but we
recognize that they will be reunited under one sovereignty
as one nation at some point instead of negotiating toward
that and being trying to deal with the thing in a way that
puts peace at the premium instead, the idea is how much
advantage can we get against China at all costs, right.
And so it's a whole different game.
And they end up building up all these massive microchip firms
and factories and all these things on Taiwan that then we're
terribly dependent on. And then they go, oh, we'll see,
we have all these massive strategic interests in Taiwan
that we can't forsake when who put them there when they're 90
miles off the shore of the giant kami mainland that you don't
control and don't want to ever have the possibility of
controlling that thing. It's kind of a tripwire for war
and a war that we can't really win.
That's way too far away from here, and that they now do
certainly have the capability to sink our ships and splash our
planes out of the sky if we really went for it.
And so the lesson for Taiwan should be right back to dual
deterrence. Hey, you guys should know like
we're not coming. So you should stop talking all
tough, and you should stop voting for right wingers with
big mouths about independence 'cause there's probably nothing
that will provoke a Chinese invasion other than a
Declaration of Independence or America building up their
military force so powerfully, or embarking on a project too, that
the Chinese feel like, oh man, just like calibrating the
weapons we're dumping into Ukraine, that we're giving them
no choice they if they it's absolutely now or later, but
harder. We'll just do it now.
You know what I mean? Exactly.
One final question, because the Middle East is back in the news
constantly. We I just had Ukraine completely
monopolizing my television, and now it's like Zelensky's totally
gone. Netanyahu is back.
In one of the footnotes you use in your excellent book Fool's
Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, you cite the work
of Robert Pape. What are the lessons you learned
from the work of Robert Pape? Yeah, so Pape is a political
science professor from the University of Chicago.
So he is more famous, I think, for his studies of air power and
how effective it is. Conclusion being, it's not
effective at all unless it's combined with ground force that
knows what the hell it's doing, etcetera.
And then he wrote two books about Terrorism, Dying to Win,
The Strategic Logic of Suicide, Terrorism and Cutting the Fuse.
I forgot exactly how the subtitle goes, something about
how to stop suicide Terrorism in our eras.
So anyway, Cutting the Fuse and Dying to win.
And basically what happened was he thought, man, I really want
to study Islam to find out what's so crazy about this
religion that it makes people hate us and want to kill us all
the time. And he started looking into who
does terrorism, and it turned out it mostly wasn't Muslims.
And he went, oh, well, that's kind of a weird causation,
correlation, sort of a situation there.
Let me look at that. And he found terrorism all over
the world and in fact explicitly found suicide terrorism all over
the world. And at that time in Sri Lanka,
where everybody is either a Buddhist or a commie, atheist
Hindu. So.
And that's who's fighting. There's no Muhammad involved,
and yet there's suicide bombing going on from the occupied
versus the occupier. So what he did, he's a professor
at a college. So what he did was he got all
his grad students and he made them crunch all the numbers.
And they tracked the names and histories of every suicide
bomber on earth from 1980 through 2003.
And they found that 100% of them were suicide bombing against
people that they considered to be illegal occupiers of their
land and usually, you know, foreign powers.
So like, you know again, the Hindus occupying the Buddhists
in Sri Lanka were the. Tamil Tigers, I think the Tamil
Tigers, that's right. And then and then and they were
the leaders in suicide bombing in the world until 2003, when W
Bush turned Iraq into Al Qaeda University, where there had
never been a suicide bombing before.
And Bush turned the entire western half of the country into
bin Laden. Stand there and turn that,
create that disaster. And then so Pape just says,
like, OK, so then when they were going to escalate into
Afghanistan, Pape goes, well, don't do that, 'cause you're
just going to increase all the suicide bombing.
It's like a mathematical program here.
The more you do this, the worse it gets, the more you.
And of course, that was right. And the Taliban had not really
ever done suicide attacks before.
Maybe very few of them. But I mean Obama's surge, they
sure as hell did because they're very effective when it comes
down to it and they really spread terror.
People like standing around you might be strapped under their
gown or whatever, you know. So it's it really is a
disruptive phenomenon and and very effective tactic in war as
the Taliban found and and they were mimicking the battlefield
in Iraq that Bush had created. You know this is the kind of
thing that they had no experience with before.
It was the Americans who had made it that way And anyone can
tell you now any American could be Robert A Pape right now and
tell you that come on would any would anyone say we had to do
Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Somalia and Syria and Yemen.
No, come on. Nobody believes in this anymore.
Donald Trump said going to the Middle East was the worst
decision any American president ever made.
And that goes for Bush and Obama and everything since.
And so you know he's completely right about that.
There was no Al Qaeda in a fight in Afghanistan except 2-3
hundred men. And when they escaped, Bush
called off the hunt and let him go and then he took the battle
to the Taliban instead when it was Al Qaeda that were the
guilty and he did a regime change in Kabul and then he
turned the whole country upside down and Obama tripled the war
and they stayed for 20 years and then lost anyway.
Taliban right back in power where they had been in Iraq,
they turn the West over to Al Qaeda.
They turn the east over to Iran. In Libya, they turn, you know,
much of the country over to Al Qaeda, but then also just all
different warring militias and crime rings of, you know,
innumerable description. In Syria, they supported Al
Qaeda so damn bad. It grew up into the caliphate
that seized eastern Syria in 2013, seized all of western Iraq
in 2014 with Baghdadi, who might as well have been bin Laden
himself, up there on the balcony declaring himself the dictator
in the bin Ladenite caliphate. And all this madness that then
required Obama to launch Iraq War Four again on the side of
the Shiites, to destroy the Sunni bin Ladenite caliphate
that he built to spite the Shiites for Bush, winning the
war for them the last time around?
And who? Who could stand for any of that?
Look at all the soldiers who'd fought in Iraq War Two and then
during Iraq War three, we're like, man, look at ISIS running
riot in Ramadi right now. You know what I mean?
This is crazy. My boys died for that.
And we're giving them freedom and democracy.
And look at this. And it's all because of American
policy in Iraq and in Syria. Bush and Obama both working
together to create that catastrophe for these people.
And so nobody believes in it now 'cause what is there to believe
in now? You know who's shooting missiles
at our guys in Iraq right now, Keith?
Our allies, the Shiite militias that we fought, Iraq War Two and
Iraq War 3/4 are the ones shooting missiles at our guys
stationed in that country as revenge for what Israel's doing
in Gaza right now. Man, who could believe in any of
that? Never had to be this way at all.
Of course, did not have to be this way.
If you want this kind of analysis, check out
libertarianinstitute.org. Just published A terrific book
titled The Fake China Threat by Joe Salas Mullins.
We also have COVID material questioning the COVID company
line. The great thing about Laurie's
work? I'm sorry, It's a fantastic
book. It's Laurie Calhoun's collection
of all of her essays against the COVID regime all along and
proving what a brilliant genius she is.
And Lori's so great because even though it seems like COVID was
35 years ago, every single article she has are able to
extract lessons and apply them to the present.
If you want a collection of the 45 essays that took me from
being a progressive to being a libertarian, you can check out
the Volunteerist Handbook. And of course, we have enough
already. Time to End the War on
Terrorism. Each chapter is very
informative. It goes through one section of
the Terror War at a time, which is very helpful 'cause it allows
you to go back months after and remember specific things about
Pak Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria.
So all of that can be found at libertarianinstitute.org.
Make a tax deductible donation today.
Scott Horton, thank you for your time.
Thank you so much.