03/25/16 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at wallstreetwindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself, wallstreetwindow.com.
All right, y'all.
Scott Horton's show, introducing Doug Bandow, formerly with antiwar.com, now at Cato, and also a regular writer for Forbes, and he's got a brand new one at Forbes.com, Busted Fantasies in Kiev, America and Europe Won't Save Ukrainian Maiden in Distress.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
How are you?
Happy to be on.
Very happy to talk with you here.
Now, we're a couple of years out from the Maiden Revolution, of course, and all is not well.
Although, I guess, first and foremost, would you characterize the ceasefire as more or less holding at this point?
Yeah, I think it has surprised an awful lot of people, but fighting definitely is down, and that's certainly good news that it turns out that, in this case at least, it seems like a deal with the Russians has been working out.
Okay, and now, I mean, and there is still fighting somewhat, but it's just not as organized from the top as before, or how do you characterize that, do you think?
Well, I mean, it's hard to say.
Of course, trying to figure out exactly, you know, the relationships here, you know, and how much control and how much influence Russia has, I mean, I think this is one of those things where, you know, nobody really quite knows, but in general, you don't have the same kind of organized fighting.
You don't seem to see kind of organized campaigns.
No one today is talking about a massive Russian offensive to take over, you know, territory.
It appears to be kind of sporadic, you know, and regional stuff.
It's bad, but it's certainly nothing like it was before.
Right.
Then again, as you point out in your article, that was always mythology anyway, that the Russians were coming with their infantry.
Exactly.
All right, and so, now, the question that you're really tackling in the piece is just what does Ukraine mean to the U.S.?
And, you know, obviously, your point is not very much, but I wonder if that's just from your wise perspective or you're speaking for what you think is the consensus on the National Security Council at this point.
What about two years ago?
I mean, some of these people still talk about bringing Ukraine into NATO, Doug.
Oh, yeah.
Look, I think there are a lot of folks out there, you know, if your vision is America has to run the world, then obviously Ukraine matters, even if in no obvious way does it matter.
I mean, it's that weird sense.
I mean, the point I make in the article is that for the last 200 years, you know, Russian empire or the Soviet Union, you know, controlled Ukraine and nobody in America cared.
I mean, it's not as if anybody here thought that was a problem.
It's hard to say that what happens to Ukraine today is a security threat.
I mean, it's a human tragedy, but, you know, the world is filled with human tragedy.
So it's very hard to make a security argument.
But I think folks look at this, you know, they believe in NATO, you know, they're committed to this globalist view, so they still try to push it, even though they can't point to anything in particular.
Well, now, what about Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Grand Chess Board and the theory that without Crimea, the Russians are merely a regional power?
We got to take that warm water port.
Is that really the bottom line of this thinking behind, say, for example, the support for the revolution or, well, whatever it was, the coup of 2014?
Well, look, he's one of the, you know, this is a man who kind of cut his policy teeth during the Cold War.
You know, he knows he doesn't like the Soviet Union, which is, of course, dominated by Russia.
I mean, you know, no surprise, you know, whether or not Russia has Sebastopol, they're going to have nuclear weapons.
I mean, the point is, they're always going to have some international interests, you know, to take away Sebastopol makes it harder for them to get the fleet out of, say, the Black Sea, but it doesn't change the fact that they have a pretty significant conventional force.
They border Europe and they have nukes, so they're going to matter.
I mean, you can't just dismiss them and throw them away.
Yeah.
I've really worried that so much of this has to do with who drinks cocktails with who at the little NATO party and stuff like that, and very little to do with the kind of thinking that you write about here.
Well, you see the reaction to Donald Trump's comments on NATO.
I mean, people were just horrified, because, you know, they don't bother making arguments.
I mean, it's simply, we all know NATO is wonderful, fantastic, you know, invaluable, you know, critical.
Anybody who questions that, obviously, is a boob.
Well, you need to press them on it, and of course, there's not much there.
I mean, you know, last year NATO tells us they're happy now, because last year the other NATO countries only barely reduced their spending.
Well, they're supposed to be faced by this terrible threat of, you know, Vladimir Putin taking over Europe, and they're still reducing spending.
I mean, how does this work?
You know, it makes no sense at all.
Well, and as you point out in this piece and other pieces, the comment is made most often, I guess, about Israel and their socialist or somewhat socialist economy, which is subsidized by the U.S., dollars being fungible as they are, and you point out, hey, that's the same thing in Europe, too.
All the free education and all the free health care and all the kind of programs that Americans don't want, and in great part, you know, simply not for principled reasons, but just because we can't afford it, it's because we're subsidizing all those programs for the European Union.
That's right.
I mean, Europe's a lovely place to visit.
You know, if they want to have a welfare state, that's up to them, but they have a larger collective GDP and population than us, so it's hard to understand why we have to pay for their defense while they're taking a lot of their money off for social spending.
You know, they need to bear the cost of their own defense.
Why does this get cost on to us, who face extraordinary economic problems and the financial challenges of the future, of course, are going to be huge.
All right.
Well, now, and so you mentioned Trump and all the attacks against him for NATO and what have you, and I've seen, I'm sure you're recognizing this phrase more and more.
Not that it's brand new, but everybody is kind of, there's an echo chamber here that Donald Trump wants to threaten, and nothing I say is in any way an endorsement of him, in case anyone's confused, but they say, oh, he wants to threaten the liberal world order.
But so what about that literally?
That, you know what?
Yes, we're subsidizing, if you zoom in, we're subsidizing Germany's defense or whatever, but in a larger sense, hey, we're keeping the Germans from having a big independent foreign policy, which saves us money in the long run, believe me, and because we're leading the world and we have major powers, the European powers, the Japanese, and whoever else, under our umbrella, operating in concert with our empire's interests, that makes everything better for everyone.
Open, free sea lanes and liberal trading relationships and all these wonderful things, and that if it wasn't for our leadership, we'd spend a lot more money putting out World War III in Europe.
Doug?
Well, I'd like to know who they think in Europe is interested in World War III.
I mean, I visited there.
These are countries that, you know, many of them are, as I mentioned, reducing their militaries.
I mean, they're obviously not looking forward to the next chance to take over the place.
I mean, a country like both Germany and Japan, the debates within, you know, people have no interest in war.
They've gone through it.
These people, I mean, in contrast, frankly, to America, where people are triumphant.
Isn't that wonderful?
You know, we've beaten up on some small country.
It shows how great we are.
You know, the Germans and the Japanese went through it horrifically and understand that war is a pretty stupid thing.
And the liberal international order is a wonderful thing, but why shouldn't the people who use it pay for it?
I mean, it's very strange to argue that only we have to pay for everything, when in fact, you know, who's going to threaten this international order?
Who's threatening the sea lanes?
I don't know who that is, and I don't understand why the Japanese and, you know, the Germans and the French and the British shouldn't do more to protect them, since they're all trading nations.
They are all invested in this.
Yeah, it's almost like there's Atlantis or some other continent with some other countries on it that we've never heard of that are arming up for our ass.
Because if we look at any of the globes that we have, the whole Earth's been pretty much explored by now, except, you know, every last little bit of the ocean floor.
But we can pretty much count up all the countries and which ones are a threat to the middle part of North America, and it's about zero.
Maybe the Islamic State, if you really want to, you know, question whether they have motivation to attack us to draw us back into war in Iraq.
No, I mean, you know, terrorism is really the one security threat that we face.
And while it's an evil, nasty thing, you know, it's not an existential threat.
I mean, we worried in the Cold War about nuclear war, nuclear winter, you know, human holocaust.
I mean, that is not what we're talking about, and nobody has a conventional force to threaten America.
You know, we're in a very good position.
Most of our money in the military goes to basically intervening.
That is, we want to be able to bomb everybody else.
That is very expensive, and other countries understand that they don't have to spend a lot to stop us.
I mean, that's what Russia has done.
That's what China has done.
They have some nukes.
They have some conventional forces.
You know, and we don't want to get involved in a war with them, even if we would win if we went all in.
It's not worth it.
Right.
So, now, back to Ukraine.
What exactly do we need to understand, do you think, about, you know, where we are now?
I guess, your article, you're saying they have some very important choices to make, and they need to understand, you know, that we're not coming.
They need to not act as though we have their back, because we really don't.
We're willing to get them into a mess, but we're not really willing, or help them, anyway, but we're not willing to really back them up.
So, what is it that, you know, you think they need to be advised to do now?
I mean, aren't they making an American their prime minister at this point?
I don't know what's going on.
Oh, look, I mean, you know, there are an awful lot of Ukrainian expats who have gone back there, including in political office.
It's really an extraordinary situation.
Look, Ukraine is in a difficult situation.
I mean, they've been beaten badly by Russia.
You know, Putin's not a friendly guy, but Ukrainians are living an illusion if they think they're going to be saved by America and Europe, and that's the point of my article.
You know, and they all, America should do this or do that.
Well, it won't.
I mean, I just try to tell them, the U.S. isn't going to have economic war, it's certainly not going to go into a real military war, so it makes a lot more sense to come up with a deal that allows Ukraine to operate pretty freely, as opposed to maintain a conflict in this illusion that some day from now, America will swoop in and, I don't know, get Crimea back for them.
Very unlikely.
You know, they can sit around and hope for it and kind of go through this tortured existence, or we can all try to work something out where the Russians feel comfortable, you know, Ukraine gets more freedom back and we don't have to be thinking about war with Russia.
Well, you know, I think in the past you've said the same thing about the other actual NATO allied states, that we don't even really mean it.
If Putin, you know, or whoever replaces him decides they're invading the Baltic states, we're not going to go to nuclear war over that.
The line used to be halfway across Germany, and it's, I guess, believable that, you know, Ronald Reagan or whoever else would have actually had a nuclear war to keep the Soviet Union from moving further west into Europe.
But we're going to go to nuclear war, we're going to give up Houston and Denver and L.A. and D.C. over, you know, as you always put it, you name these cities and I don't even know how to pronounce, you know?
No, I think that, I think the Europeans understand that.
That, of course, you know, is why the Baltic countries are so nervous and they naturally want American troops there.
Because at the end of the, what happened after the end of the Cold War was nobody, frankly, took NATO seriously.
They all treated it kind of as a social club.
Wouldn't it be nice to bring all these countries in?
Never imagining that they might actually have to defend them.
So after the thing with Ukraine, all of a sudden the Baltic countries are saying, hey, you might have to defend us.
And it's not just the U.S.
I mean, basically all of the Europeans are going nutso, because they're utterly horrified at the thought that they might be expected to go to war with Russia over, you know, Estonia?
And they feel the same way about Ukraine.
It just won't happen.
So, again, it makes more sense to be realistic going into this than to have illusions create lines and then not back them up if there's a problem.
Yep.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for your time today, Doug.
I really appreciate it.
I know you're always in a hurry whenever I talk to you.
Hey, happy to be on.
Take care of yourself.
I really appreciate it.
Sure thing.
All right.
So that is the great Doug Bandow.
He is at Cato and a regular writer for Forbes.
Forbes.com.
We'll be running this one over the weekend at antiwar.com.
Busted fantasies in Kiev.
America and Europe won't save Ukrainian maiden in distress.
Hey, I'll check out the audio book of Lew Rockwell's Fascism vs.
Capitalism, narrated by me, Scott Horton, at audible.com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty.
From medieval history to the Ron Paul revolution, Rockwell blasts our status enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes, and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism vs.
Capitalism by Lew Rockwell for audio book.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes, or just click in the right margin of my website at scotthorton.org.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the great libertarian social network.
They've got all the social media bells and whistles, plus you get your own publishing site and there are classes, shows, books, and resources of all kinds.
And I host two shows on Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire with Liberty.me's chief liberty officer Jeffrey Tucker every other Tuesday, and The Future of Freedom with FFF founder and president Jacob Hornberger every Thursday night, both at 8 Eastern.
When you sign up, add me as a friend on there, scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free, liberty.me.
So you're a libertarian, and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at scotthorton.org, we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.