09/04/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is our good friend Sheldon Richman, vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
He's the editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom, which you can subscribe to.
Sheldon, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Always good to be with you, Scott.
Good deal.
Very happy to have you here.
Recently, there was this article, and it caught a lot of interest, including my own.
It's by our friend Daniel McCarthy of the American Conservative Magazine, and I believe it's the title is, Why Liberalism Means Empire.
That's the subtitle of it.
Sorry.
I don't have it right in front of me.
Anyway, the point is, I'm clicking on the link.
Yeah, Why Liberalism Means Empire.
Democracy isn't the end of history.
It's a product of power, he writes.
This is the American Conservative Magazine, for those who aren't familiar, was founded in opposition to the Iraq War back in 2002, and is a bastion of the paleo-conservative, anti-imperialist right.
Here's their editor, has said ...
I don't know if he described it as a change of heart or anything, but he sort of said, listen, our system of freedom can't exist without our world empire.
Do I understand that right, Daniel?
I mean, Sheldon?
Yeah.
About Daniel?
Yeah, I think you do.
I mean, he doesn't outright say I've changed my mind, but it strikes me as some change.
I mean, I've read Dan, I've talked to Dan, I've read the magazine, so I was surprised by this.
Well, you know, I was happy to have you on to talk about it, because I didn't want to do a whole debate about it and that kind of thing, but I think that you very fairly characterize his essay before you criticize it.
So I thought it's good enough to go ahead and let you describe it.
You're good enough in that way.
Yeah.
Well, I'm writing a response to it that I'll post tomorrow at fff.org, which I've let you get a sneak peek at.
And so I do try to fairly describe what he's arguing.
He says, and I believe he's arguing from history now, but I guess he also thinks that philosophically it's defensible that that liberalism, and by that he does mean classical liberalism, you know, free markets, liberal democracy, you know, what we sort of think of as Western style government.
He doesn't get too specific about that, but, you know, generally market oriented society where people vote for their political leadership, but government, you know, doesn't attempt to run the economy.
So his argument there that that idea and in that practice grew up under the umbrella of the British empire, which kept other powers at bay, prevented the rise of, you know, global tyranny that would be projecting its power around the world and jeopardizing others.
And that under that protective umbrella, which the British empire provided, American liberalism was able to, you know, grow and American society was able to become prosperous.
And then he and then he says that the American empire picked up where the British empire left off, basically after World War II when the British empire was sort of running out of gas.
So he distinguishes.
So he thinks that's necessary.
I mean, he calls it a bitter truth.
So he may not be happy.
He seems like he's saying, I'm not happy about this fact, but let's we need to face the facts.
So if we want a liberal democracy, there's going to need to be a global liberal hegemon, which will keep trade lanes open and prevent some global tyranny from rising that will then project its power into other societies and affect other societies, domestic affairs.
So he distinguishes his position from the neocons.
He's not a Wilsonian.
He doesn't think that this this hegemon should go around trying to turn illiberal societies into liberal societies.
He's not for that.
So, you know, let's give him credit where credit's due.
You know, like I said, he's not Wolfowitz.
He's not Rumsfeld or George Bush or Kent Cheney.
He just thinks you need sort of this global cop to keep the peace, to keep the trade going.
And otherwise, if some tyranny were to arise in place of this this benevolent hegemon, then that would affect internally, it would affect societies that want to remain liberal.
And he's, of course, putting the U.S. in that category.
We would be affected by that, he says.
We couldn't help but be affected by that.
He thinks liberalism is not natural, but rather is the product of power, and he points that out, that it's not it doesn't come from our benevolence or from our mutual interest.
It's not natural.
And here it departs from Adam Smith and the whole, I think, libertarian, liberal tradition that's sort of natural, sort of rooted in human nature.
But he disagrees with that and says, no, it's like it only grows in sort of a hothouse and a hothouse is provided by a hegemon, a global hegemon, but one that's one that's liberal.
So he has good things to say about the British Empire, and he doesn't talk about when things went wrong.
But he thinks that the U.S. he thinks Britain was right to get involved in World War One because it had to keep Germany from not rising and becoming a an illiberal hegemon.
And he thought the U.S. was, well, the U.S. shouldn't have gotten involved in World War One.
He says it was right to get involved in World War Two.
It was right to prosecute the Cold War.
But he thinks, you know, it should not have gone into Iraq.
So he, you know, he says that a benevolent hegemon requires judgment about what's essential, what conflicts are essential to enter into, what are not essential, and what are ambiguous.
So it's, you know, it's a it's a nuanced article and very interestingly written, challenging and something that we libertarian non-interventionists and anti-imperialists, you know, need to examine.
And I try to do that and I make some effort to answer him, which, like I say, we post it tomorrow.
Right now.
So one of the one of the things I keep thinking of as you're talking is this Navy ad that runs every day, at least on CNN, where it's a bird's eye view of an aircraft carrier driving by and their radio signals squawking.
And the point is that this is the global 9-1-1 answer center.
And we keep the sea lanes free and we keep the coup d'etat at bay.
I don't know.
We make sure that, you know, if we have to, we'll kick open Japan's damn door so that we can have trade with them, because that's how much we love peace and trade and this kind of thing.
They play it every day.
And I got to admit, it's plausible on its face.
If not the U.S. Navy, who, Sheldon?
For one argument.
Well, if we look at in terms of a truly free society, whether you're thinking of the United States or just some hypothetical society, the the the the merchants and the manufacturers that are interested in in global markets would be exploring the feasibility of of of providing goods and services globally.
And a free society, a truly free society would be a very prosperous society, would be a technologically advanced society.
I don't know why it's impossible to think that the merchants themselves would not get together and have a way to protect their ships on the seas.
I mean, we sort of take it for granted that no, only the U.S. Navy can do this.
And and that, you know, that rules out the whole idea of entrepreneurship and ingenuity and discovery and and but see, I go beyond that in my piece and talk about, you know, the dangers that this you know, he assumes away the dangers, I think, that the that any empire would would oppose to a to a liberal society.
He acts as if, no, it's the empire that's going to protect internal liberalism, domestic liberalism by keeping tyranny at bay.
But if you look at what, you know, the public choice school argues and just the dynamics of politics, there's no reason to be confident that this empire is going to protect liberalism.
It's going to need a lot of taxes.
And when people don't want to pay the taxes, it's going to turn to deficit finance, which means it's going to turn to central banking, which means it's going to there'll be crises.
There'll be there'll be, you know, long term unemployment from booms and busts.
And all that makes the people open to political promises for programs to, you know, take care of them in the economic uncertainty, you get the end up getting the whole welfare state out of empire, I think.
Yeah, I think you're describing America in 2014 right now, Sheldon.
All right.
Hold still.
We'll be right back with Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF.org.
Just a minute.
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All right.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott.
This is my show.
I'm Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation.
You know, this argument, I guess, comes from a different place than McCarthy's arguments or yours, Sheldon.
But that is what the commies always say, that empire is just, you know, the last or the second to last stage of capitalism.
Of course, you let a bunch of entrepreneurs get rich.
The first thing they're going to do is buy up a bunch of statists and use that government power to enforce, you know, some degree of fascism, mercantilism in order to protect themselves from their up and coming competition here or abroad or anywhere else.
And so then, you know what that means in practice is when Dick Cheney's the head of Halliburton, he wants to drop sanctions and do business.
When he's the vice president, he wants war.
So, you know, you have that whole quasi free market, as they call it, mixed economy, where where empire is just kind of part and parcel of doing business.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Well, it's been called by by left wing thinkers, free trade imperialism.
And that at first sounds like a contradiction.
I mean, strictly speaking, it's a contradiction.
But but if you look at American history, trade policy was always a government policy, right?
It was not no one.
Hardly anybody was calling for laissez faire.
Merchants certainly weren't.
You know, manufacturers weren't there might have been some, you know, ideologues on our side who who were for that.
But that was not the dominant thinking from the very start of the country.
Trade was identified with government opening up markets or, you know, signing deals with other with other countries or, you know, and using a gunboat diplomacy, if necessary, the open door, you know, all those things were government programs that they were they were to benefit particular industries and maybe industry generally.
But it wasn't laissez faire.
So, you know, I think I think what you're saying has has merit.
It's open to criticism that this is just a not this is the you know, this is this is capitalism's method of using coercion to get people to be to be like us or to do things the way we like it.
You know, and we know what happens with with bilateral trade agreements and multilateral agreements these days.
It means that we impose a very strict intellectual property regimens on on those societies, whether they want them or not, or else they don't have access to U.S. markets.
This is hardly, you know, free trade.
This is hardly social cooperation and laissez faire and, you know, live and let live.
It's the it's the it's it's gunboat diplomacy just in a new guise.
Well, so how do we have liberalism without empire then?
I mean, the commies say, well, this is just, you know, all the empire and IE, the bloodletting.
Hey, that's just part of having capitalism.
And Dan McCarthy said we can't even have capitalism without all that bloodletting.
In a sense, the commies are right from that point of view.
But I guess good enough then, as you said, you know, he didn't want to invade Iraq or anything horrible like that, but still.
But so now how are you advocating for a free economy without empire at all?
Well, let me back up a second.
Dan does distinguish his position from Pat Buchanan, who, of course, has been a presence at the American conservative from the very start, one of the founding people at the American conservative.
But he he says the position that Buchanan makes and he also that takes and he also identifies this with George Kennan, the late George Kennan, is one of anti-imperialism and anti-liberalism.
And he said those two things can go together.
As he points out, Buchanan sees America, an ideal America would be like Sparta, right?
It would it would be self-sufficient.
It wouldn't be engaged in world trade.
It wouldn't bother other people.
It would simply be ready to defend itself.
But it wouldn't it wouldn't need C lanes because it wouldn't be open to trade or immigration.
So it doesn't need those things.
And therefore, in his in Dan's view, it can coherently be both anti-imperial and anti-liberal.
He thinks the problem is if you want to be embedded in world trade, then you're going to have to be an imperialist.
So he thinks anti-imperial liberalism is incoherent.
I disagree.
I mean, I already indicated how how people that wanted to ship their goods might might protect themselves.
I think a free society can protect itself without engaging in empire, which doesn't necessarily mean you need the state to do it.
I my piece is going to discuss a little bit of paper by Jeff Jeffrey Rogers Hummel about how free people could defend themselves, which doesn't even require the state.
So I don't see the problem.
I mean, I'm not saying there are any guarantee there are any guarantees.
It doesn't mean that a free society could never possibly be conquered, but plenty of unfree societies have been conquered and plenty of plenty of societies with big governments have been conquered.
So there are no guarantees in the world.
My my issue with Dan, which I spent a great deal of time in the article on, is that the empire itself will pose a threat.
You like to always quote who's our friend, Chalmers Johnson, right?
The empire eventually comes home.
And that's kind of what I try to lay out in some detail in my piece.
It's the very elements of empire that will that will be illiberal domestically.
See, I guess for a while you could possibly have and this might have applied to Britain in the 19th century, a strong degree of liberalism at home with a brutal empire abroad.
I mean, a lot of brutality in Africa and Asia and India.
And yet that didn't immediately come home.
But eventually, I think it will come home.
I don't see how it can affect it.
First of all, we have all the fiscal burdens that I already talked about before the break.
And that will lead to problems when you're making enemies, especially in this day of easy transportation and and global terrorism.
Then you have to have homeland homeland security.
So if you're going to make enemies, you're going to need a homeland security system and NSA and all that stuff that we're now laboring under because the U.S. has has poked all these hornets hornets nests and made enemies.
So I don't see how liberalism can survive if your foreign policy is one of imperialism.
Yet, in fact, you know, like before you're you're speaking kind of in the abstract.
By the same time, you're defining the United States of America right now.
Booms and busts and dislocations and discontent and domestic police state and all these consequences the way you describe them in your article.
It's doctrine, public choice theory, Hayek's scum of the earth rise to the top of bureaucracies theory.
Randolph Bourne's war is the health of the state theory.
And Thomas Jefferson's or James Madison's the instruments of war become the instruments of tyranny theory.
And then look at the terror war.
Look at exactly what we've been going through for a decade straight.
It's like they, you know, took this stuff as their script of what to do wrong and how to deliberately destroy America purpose, you know.
So I I actually have been kind of dishonest with you guys.
I come from an alternate universe where Harry Brown and Ron Paul are really wrong policy.
I blew it.
I was going to say Ron Paul won the election in 1988 and oversaw the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union, as well as the American empire.
And then after his eight years in office came Harry Brown was elected in 1996, and they spent that whole time basically just selling people on the idea of American style little liberalism there.
And everybody was a lot better off.
No terror war at all.
And none of this madness.
So, I mean, it's pretty easy for me to see how it's so easy for me to imagine, again, not perfection, but how how easily it could be different than it is right now.
You know?
Yeah, I think it's important.
And again, harking back to the Hummel article I will link to, it's important to denationalize defense.
I mean, that's a whole other subject.
But what you don't want to do is have a central state that's easily conquered.
Because when the central state is conquered, then you got the whole, you know, you got that whole territory or that whole society.
What you want is decentralization and no one station to conquer.
You basically have to go house to house.
And that makes it a lot tougher.
And there are historical examples of this.
I mean, there's England's conquest of India versus England's conquest of Ireland.
Took it much longer to control Ireland.
Because Ireland was so, was basically stateless.
It was decentralized.
Talking about in the Middle Ages.
The other thing that I challenged Dan on is that he doesn't really tell us so much about this liberalism he has in mind.
I mean, he uses the word liberal democracy, the term liberal democracy, and we kind of know what he's thinking.
But history doesn't seem to show that liberalism by the way I mean it, radical liberalism, right?
The liberalism of, you know, Bastiaud and J.B. Say and Smith to a large extent.
And, you know, the radical liberals.
That kind of liberalism didn't last under the umbrella of these empires, right?
It faded in England and it faded in the United States.
It faded in England before 1910 and it faded in the United States.
You know, it never was in anywhere near its pure form in the 19th century America.
But, you know, we had the progressive era and we had, as a result of the Civil War, a huge amount of statism and corporatism.
So where's this liberalism that thrived under the umbrella of a liberal empire?
I don't see it.
And so I'm not even sure.
Well, it's sort of that golden age 1950s.
Never mind all the bad stuff.
Leave it to Beaver era of, you know, 50s, early 60s, unlimited growth kind of.
But I don't want to call that liberalism.
And as I say, the intervention, the economic intervention that's required to have to maintain an empire, because it's, you know, as I like to say, it's bloody.
Empires are bloody expensive, will then lead to domestic disruption that will then lead to welfare state type measures because the politicians will be able to promise goodies, right, to people.
Crisis Leviathan.
We're talking about, you know, combine Randolph Bourne, Wars to the Health of the State, and Robert Higgs, Crisis Leviathan, and you have the refutation.
You're not going to get liberalism by a global hegemon.
It's not going to happen.
Yeah, that ratchet effect.
I left that one out.
But yeah, you're absolutely right.
And these libertarian insights just keep proving themselves true over and over again.
And it seems obvious enough.
Go back.
First Red Scare.
Second Red Scare.
Palmer raids and clampdowns and brown scares.
They had a brown scare in the middle there somewhere.
And of course, all the terrorism, you know, Jeff Tucker wrote a thing that was really interesting the other day where he pointed out about the effect of the Oklahoma City bombing in kind of solidifying that whole them versus us view of the American people by the American government.
And of course, that was blowback from the first Gulf War and from, you know, the militarization of the federal police and what had happened at Waco.
And then, of course, there's a more complicated story than that.
But anyway, about how that really changed the way that government, federal government employees, especially federal police, think of the American people, you know, like everybody is just a McVeigh, you know, waiting to do something like that at any moment.
And so it's a giant change in the thinking.
And of course, 9-11 and everything since overshadows the Oklahoma bombing so much, people don't even remember that anymore.
That really, I think he correctly identified it as something that really changed the mindset of American government employees about, you know, the way that they view us.
Just another one of these same consequences that you're talking about.
Yeah, I mean, they call it collateral damage because that was what his army captain called it.
If you have the apparatus of empire, global empire, you're going to attract people who like running that sort of apparatus.
So it's Hayek's why the worst get on top.
You're going to get people who think a war is manly and creates national greatness and national honor.
You're going to attract, you know, Teddy Roosevelt types and worse.
Not Ron Paul.
Ron Paul's not going to be interested in running, you know, in running a, you know, else you can name in that along those lines, that sort of person's not going to want to run a global empire.
If the person should get a chance, he would dismantle it, but he's not going to want to run it and maintain it.
So I just don't see where Dan has made the case that liberalism and he makes, you know, he makes strong statements.
Liberalism depends on this global power, this global empire.
It depends on it because what can happen on the other side of the world, some tyranny rising on the other side of the world and maybe spreading will will change the liberal nature of your own society.
And so therefore, it can't be sustained in his view without this empire.
But I don't I'm saying it can't be sustained with the empire.
So maybe the most pessimistic view is it can't be sustained under any circumstances.
That's too bad.
That would be too bad if that were true.
I'm willing to take my chances with liberal anti imperialism.
Yeah, me too.
I mean, come on.
Walmart can't afford their own security force when they, you know, drive a ship from China here full of plastic crap.
Let them pay for their own security at a market rate.
If the only way to protect C lanes is the state, which means coercion of us as well as foreigners, then then then we won't have C lanes.
So then we won't have a trade for some period of time.
We won't have world trade.
We'll still trade among ourselves and and contiguous areas.
So maybe we won't be as rich, but a big deal.
A lot of people argue today, well, if we didn't have government roads and government infrastructure and government science, basic science research, we won't be as rich.
Well, my answer is, if you're right, then OK, so we won't be as rich.
I don't want the government doing that stuff.
That's coercion.
And I think I think we would be as rich, I think would be richer.
But if I if it turned out we wouldn't be as rich, I'll take freedom.
Yeah.
It's just like some projects are only funded because of a bubble and then they turn out to be pretty damn good projects.
And so you could say, oh, well, if it wasn't for the bubble economy, they would have never been.
Maybe not in that exact circumstance.
But then again, if they're really good projects, they probably would have figured out a way, right?
You know, assuming sound money.
Look, everything the government is spending money on has an opportunity cost and we don't know what we have to forego because the government is diverting the resources.
To the project that politicians choose, which which don't have market feedback.
Right.
People can't.
The taxpayers are not investors.
They always talk about government investment.
Taxpayers aren't investors.
They can't pull the plug on a project if they think it's a losing project like an investor can.
He could take his money elsewhere.
A taxpayer can't.
So it's not investment.
We should throw that word out when we're talking about the political realm.
It's not investment.
It's government.
It's politicians consuming our resources.
That's that's consumption, not investment.
Leave it in private hands without any privilege whatsoever.
And then you get true investment.
But Dan's, unfortunately, Dan's project, and I know he may not be happy about this, but Dan's project would, you know, vacuum up huge amounts of scarce resources and the objectives that those resources would be put toward would be picked by politicians.
I don't see how we could be cheerful about that.
Right.
All right.
Now, I've already kept you away over time and through the break and into the next segment.
Do I need to let you go or can I ask you about your piece that's on FFF today about NATO here?
Oh, I can speak for a few minutes more about NATO.
But of course, you've had you've had guests on who know a lot more about that than I do.
In fact, my article was drawing on one of your previous guests recently, namely John Mearsheimer and his very good article in Foreign Policy magazine.
But anyway, go ahead.
I can take a few more minutes.
All right.
Well, yeah, we still got a couple here.
The article I mostly I just want people to read it.
It's Let's Have Candor from the NATO Summit, the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF.org.
And this is, you know, kind of one specific point is something that's.
Well, it's always the part that bothers me the most about any of these things is just what liars they are, the Americans and their allies and and, you know, about virtually everything that they do.
And it seems really important that we have at least a modicum of honesty about, you know, who's who and who holds how many H-bombs and and, you know, just what situation we're actually in in order to get it resolved.
Right.
And, you know, I can't they're not doing the closed caption.
So I don't know what he said, but Fogg Rasmussen has been giving his speech up there, the head of NATO, you know, pointing his finger in the air and saying Ukraine is the greatest crisis and NATO stands by Ukraine is the banner right now on CNN.
So apparently, yeah, not so much on the candor, Sheldon.
But anyway, go ahead.
What do you think about this NATO meeting here?
Well, my tongue was deeply in the cheek because I knew we know we're not going to get candor.
The whole point of the meeting, besides talking about ISIS, I guess, is to is to bad mouth Russia and and its aggression in Ukraine.
Now, I'm no fan of the Russian government.
I'm no fan of Putin, but I do agree with Mearsheimer, although I'm not I don't consider myself a foreign policy realist.
I'm not of that school.
But he's right in in thinking that governments tend to act in their own security interest and tend to be rational actors.
They're not just sort of mostly not mad men rushing around without any rhyme or reason.
They have objectives and they they calculate what means will gain their ends.
And that seems to be certainly true of Putin.
And so I agree with Mearsheimer that this was a provocation begun and engineered by the US and by the EU, but mostly by the US and that he agrees it was a coup that that drove Yanukovych from power, even when he was trying to show some accommodation and maybe try to to be more evenhanded between Russia and the EU.
But he ended up leaving the country.
And the demonstrations that preceded that were stimulated by the US and by by US officials.
He also talks about how members of this current government are are neo-fascist.
Some of them are, four of them at least.
I mean, he makes no bones about that.
And he says Russia was just predictably acting like states will act, especially a big power like Russia is defensively, not not offensively.
And of course, that's been the opposite of the narrative that we've gotten from the Obama administration and from the the slavish media, which, you know, was talking about this meeting saying, you know, I heard just on CNN an hour ago, maybe that, you know, chief on the agenda is Russian aggression in Ukraine.
They don't say alleged Russian aggression.
They don't say what the you know, what NATO claims is Russian aggression.
Yeah, they just take that as a fact and pass that along to the viewer who just naturally assumes, well, I guess Russia is engaging in aggression.
And I'm not approving of everything Russia did.
I don't I don't I don't know what they send troops in the eastern Ukraine.
I do know that there are separatists.
There are a lot of Russian ethnic types in eastern Ukraine who are not happy with what Kiev started doing the moment Yanukovych was gone.
I mean, at one point, didn't even outlaw Russia Russian as an official language.
I think they backed away from that quickly.
But that was some handwriting on the wall.
Maybe that will come back.
And so they're they're worried.
And now we know that more people are now dying in eastern eastern Ukraine than died in Gaza.
Right.
But with the assault by the Kiev, the Kiev forces on the people in Luhansk and Donetsk and one or two other areas there, it's a it's a very bloody thing.
CNN actually did a report from from, I think, Luhansk, where they actually talked to residents who talked about how terrible it was that the Kiev government was bombarding.
I mean, I didn't really expect to see that on CNN, but he did.
So, you know, you're not going to hear anything like that out of the meeting.
Of course, not.
We know that.
And I was just using that as a device to to give some publicity to Mirsham is very good article.
And, you know, like I said, he's not a fringe character.
This is a major magazine.
And, you know, if he can think it, maybe maybe others, other people can think.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it really is just an amazing thing that just time and time again for, you know, and I know it's not just foreign policy.
It's everything that they do.
Every politician just lies about everything.
But these lies, they're so big, they seem like they couldn't possibly be a lie.
I mean, how can you just sit here with a straight face and say Russian aggression when actually you're just making stuff up?
And yet here they are again and again.
In fact, that exact phrase was just the banner at the bottom of the screen this morning on MSNBC.
Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Just take it as a given, because that's what a bunch of politicians and their appointed spokespeople said.
How in the world is that the way this still works after all this time and after, you know, nothing that they've said about Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, anything this whole time has been true.
None of it.
But anyway, so then they just go on.
And even for me, I think like in the case of the plane, I thought, well, you know, it's probably the rebels accidentally did it right, thinking they were shooting at a Kiev Air Force jet that was bombing them from the air.
But then, no, even even that one seemed to be a big lie and maybe even a deliberate provocation.
Yeah, you know, I don't know what happened there.
I didn't get into that at all.
Mirsham, you know, didn't get into that either.
He's really talking about how the whole thing got off the ground.
The whole crisis began.
And so I stuck to that.
And yeah, it's very hard to know exactly what happened in these particular.
Well, it's clear that Kerry didn't know what he claimed he knew when he was basically doing giving us the Syria treatment and saying, we know the Russians did it.
We know they gave him this missile and all that stuff that did not pan out.
Anybody that believes anything that Kerry says deserves it, I guess.
Come on.
I admit, though, even after all of this, I'm still surprised that they would pick this kind of fight with Russia.
I mean, the fact of Russian hydrogen bomb backed independence is just a fact of this world.
And the fact that anybody thinks that they're going to do anything about that is just beyond crazy and stupid.
It's unbelievable, you know?
Yeah, I don't know.
Because you're right, Obama doesn't want a war with Russia.
I don't think anybody wants a war with Russia.
Russia doesn't want a war with us.
And so I don't know where this goes, because, you know, who's getting the impression that these sanctions are turning Putin around?
I don't see it.
You know, as this is a subject covered by Mearsheimer, he says that sanctions aren't going to do it because Putin and the people around him, and I guess the public supports him, believe this is really a threat to Russia.
And so they're not going to let some sanctions deter them.
They think they're in danger with this encroachment, especially on Ukraine.
They think Ukraine will end up in NATO along with Georgia.
And they're acting the way, you know, this has nothing to do with the Soviet Union or communism or Marx, right?
This is the way Russia would have acted in the 19th century.
And as Mearsheimer points out, it's the way the United States would be acting today if the similar thing were happening on its borders, right, in Mexico.
Right.
Well, now the good news is today is that they really do seem to be agreeing.
Both sides are saying they're working on the ceasefire agreement.
They plan on implementing it soon.
And that's, you know, on the on the heels of and a result of, as Eric Margulies was saying earlier on the show, of the counteroffensive that has really pushed the Ukrainian military back.
So now Putin, as Margulies put it, is in a very good position to dictate terms that this is how we're going to end this to Poroshenko, who, I guess, you know, as Margulies said, he could try to double down and reinvade here in a little while or something like that.
But it seems like maybe he's decided to go ahead and cut his losses while he's behind.
Well, yeah, I don't know.
I don't think Putin is the reckless person that so many people want to make him out to be.
Again, I'm not a fan of his.
I wouldn't want to live under a Putin administration.
But I don't think he wants a war.
And and I think it's not unreasonable for American policymakers to to, you know, be cognizant of Russia's defensive concerns, security concerns when they're doing stuff like they did this year.
I mean, I, you know, I don't know exactly what they had in mind.
The Americans had in mind when they decided to to push this.
But they certainly didn't do a full analysis of what the likely consequences were going to be.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks.
I kept you over time again, even more so.
I sure appreciate it, Sheldon.
OK.
Thanks, Scott.
I enjoyed it.
Have a great day.
That's the great Sheldon Richman, everybody.
He's at FFF.org, and he's the editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom.
FFF.org subscribe.
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