01/20/17 – Kelley Vlahos on the loss of civilian control of the military – and if it even matters – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, Scott Horton Show.
Check out all the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
I'm happy to welcome Kelly Vlahos back to the show.
She's a regular writer at the American Conservative Magazine and I got a couple important articles of hers I want to talk with her about.
Is civilian control of the military in jeopardy?
And is it really any better?
Well, that's a question.
And Trump and Israel as well, both at theamericanconservative.com.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here and to talk about these important subjects.
Civilian control of the military.
And this is, I guess, your premise here.
You talk about seven days in May.
I hope everybody's seen that.
And I get, if I remember right, you kind of question here whether we even need a coup anymore.
We got an entire cabinet full of generals.
What do you think?
Well, you know, I think there are arguments on both sides of the issue.
I've talked to people who are not readily Clinton supporters or Democrats or progressives or even anti-war advocates at all, who are still concerned with the number of generals that Trump has.
They're not generals, but retired generals who have retired recently.
The number of them who he's tapped since he won the election.
Their concern is that when you're reaching out to only military people, they're only looking at problems and solutions through a military lens.
And with military training, the mission is either to win, subdue, or kill.
Whereas maybe outside the military scope, civilians are more trained in negotiation and different strategies for building alliances and resolving problems.
So their concern was, on a number of levels, that ideological level and also a constitutional level.
Should we be giving waivers to retired generals like General Mattis, who was more recently retired, just to have him serve?
Will it create a crisis at some point where you have generals who might have, I would say, more control, more influence at the levers of power over their civilian counterparts and at some point become more of an arm of the president, of the executive power, where he can be able to use them and use their influence in terms of getting his particular agenda pushed through.
This is what the founding fathers had been concerned about when the Constitution was drafted, that you have the separation so that you don't have a military junta, so to speak, take over.
And go through history in terms of why those concerns were apparent at the time.
But a lot of these things were raised when I started asking military people, historians, conservatives, the question of whether Trump was going in the right direction.
And there seemed to be some skepticism and concern.
Yeah.
All right.
So already a lot to talk about there.
First of all, you mentioned the waiver.
Talk about that waiver.
What waiver do you mean there for General Mattis?
Well, with General Mattis, currently the law is that a retired military person has to be out of the military for at least seven years before they can serve as a member of the Cabinet.
So he retired, I believe, only two, three years ago.
So he had to get a waiver from Congress before he could be confirmed.
He hasn't been confirmed yet, but he had to get the waiver first.
Now the Senate Armed Services Committee has given him – they voted for the waiver, but I believe that the Senate or the entire Congress has to vote to give him the waiver.
Now it looks like he has a lot of support on Capitol Hill because he is not a controversial figure, according to many lawmakers and the people who have the influence on the Hill to whip the others in shape or into approval.
So there's a very good chance he'll get that waiver.
And there's several reasons why.
I mean, people like him.
They trust him.
They see him as sort of a comforting figure at a time when Trump's foreign policy is such a question mark, and to have somebody with his level of experience come in would be sort of a tempering influence on what could be an uncertain or unstable situation in the national security team of the new Trump administration.
Well, you know, you've been really out in front writing about this subject for a long time, about how these generals and their failures basically have no bearing on their careers.
In fact, as part of my book, I was writing about how Michelle Flournoy, after the massive failure – she's not general, but former Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy – after the complete failure of the Afghan surge, she went and resigned to spend more time with her family, you know, like you hear from politicians.
But then almost in no time, she seemed to realize that actually her name didn't even really need to be rehabilitated.
She wasn't in any trouble at all.
Yeah.
Right.
And then as Darja Mail wrote, he's the one who led the slaughter of Fallujah in 2004, in the spring and in the fall of 2004, the two different attacks there that left thousands of innocent civilians dead, where he had, you know, rules of engagement looser than Ruby Ridge over there.
Go ahead and, you know, Vietnam style, kill anything that moves kind of thing.
So, yeah, good thing he's there.
It's just like they said about Dick Cheney.
Well, George Bush Jr. might be an idiot, but at least he has his father's men like Dick Cheney there, and they're the grown adults.
They know what to do.
We can rely on them.
That's what it sounds like to me.
The people we got to fall back on are not people I want to fall back on at all.
Yeah.
Well, and I think what you're experiencing here is that General Mattis was never the face of any of these battles.
He was never the face of the policy, like David Petraeus.
So he wasn't the guy that was going before Congress to push counterinsurgency or to push for more troops or to defend the policy.
So he, like you said, he followed orders, executed the war on the ground.
But it's much more difficult to make him the sort of fall guy for the policy that got us there.
And I think that's what you're seeing now and what your frustration is stemming from is that people aren't linking him directly with the failures of the war.
They're saying, hey, he was a good soldier.
He was doing what he had to do.
That was his job.
Whereas somebody like Petraeus or Michel Flournoy or any of these other architects, we attribute the failures to them.
So rightly or wrongly, he is not going to be in the hot seat at these confirmation hearings about the failures of the Iraq war, like others might be.
And let's face it.
We're talking about a Congress that supported the war in Iraq and it supported counterinsurgency, supported the surge, supported more troops.
So they're part of the failure.
They're part of the problem.
So relitigating the war is probably not in the cards for this Congress, which is frustrating to you and I.
I'd like to see some accountability, but I just don't think it's going to happen.
What about the conflict, do you think, between Mike Flynn and James Mattis here, a former Army three-star and a former Marine four-star?
Flynn is the National Security Advisor now, or will be, and Mattis the Secretary of Defense.
How do you think that's going to shake out?
I'm not sure.
I'm sorry, I read one more thing.
I read it's Dunford is a Marine General, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He's staying, right?
And then you have John Kelly, who's also a former Marine General from South Com, who is now the Director of the Department of Homeland Security.
Well, I think conventional wisdom, at least here in Washington, is that Flynn is the outlier here.
I think that Mattis and Kelly have support within the military community, period.
And then they have the support among members of Congress for the reasons that I stated, that they feel like they're experienced hands going into an administration where there's just so many questions and uncertainty, whereas Flynn is a whole different ballgame.
I mean, from what I understand, there's people within the military ranks who are concerned about his appointment.
Maybe you can just Google him up, the many instances where he has been purportedly behind circulating fake news stories and wild conspiracies, some of his troubling behavior while in the field, while in service, when it came to when he was heading the intelligence in Afghanistan.
So I think there's some concern, the fact that he doesn't have to be confirmed, and that he, as someone who has been more on the side of the sort of GWAT, you know, us against them, and the fight against radical Islam, is going to be more of the wild card in this situation.
And so bringing him in as a former general is a lot more concerning to the people I talk to.
And from what I understand, there's not a lot of love between him and Mattis and him and Kelly.
And so that there might be some loggerheads there in terms of policy.
Flynn was, you know, in Syria when he was the head of DIA, he was the one really, I have to go back and read it, but wasn't in Seymour Hersh's article, Military to Military, about the insubordination of the military guys, where they were leaking information to Assad through the Germans to target the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
And that was really Flynn being insubordinate to Barack Obama, when Obama was ordering the CIA to back those guys that Assad was bombing.
And I kind of wonder how much of this is...
I remember reading about that, but like you, I have to go back and look at the details.
I mean, you're right that Flynn is a nut.
I mean, I think that's an objective truth when you...
I mean, assuming the stories are right, that it's really true that he tried to pin Benghazi on Iran, because that's what Michael Ledeen told him to believe, this kind of nonsense.
I mean, this is completely off-the-wall crazy stuff.
But if he's against backing al-Qaeda in Syria, that's a wingnut position.
It happens to be perfectly correct, as opposed to the insanity that has been reigning for the last five years on this question.
Yeah.
I mean, when we look at some of the radical figures of the right wing over the last 10 years, and you can put Michael Ledeen in that category, and a lot of these Islamophobic types, these messianic, Islamophobic, you know, whatever you want to call them, who have been the spear point of this war against Islam, you know, Mike Flynn is right there within that coterie.
So, putting him in a position where he's going to have the president's ear on a daily basis, you know, what I'm concerned about is that his propensity to, you know, believe in and spread conspiracy theories, you know, via Twitter and social media, and it just doesn't seem like he is a serious, thoughtful person when it comes to assessing national security threats and formulating a strategy.
And so now he's going to be in this top position advising a president who doesn't seem to have a real good grasp of the national security or the global security situation.
I think that's what's making people nervous.
My gut is that's making people more nervous than the fact that there may be some, you know, constitutional concerns about whether generals are, you know, are serving, you know, in the upper echelon of the government.
I mean, yeah, I talked to people who are, they generally have an issue with Trump turning so quickly to military people for his closest, you know, confidants and advisors, when there are so many people, you know, within, not just academia and government, but just who have been studying, working on national security and diplomacy issues for years, who remain untapped, so the fact that he's got to turn to combat veterans, you know, only.
That, I think that struck a nerve with some people because they believe that, you know, what does that say about, you know, the rest of our intellectual or, you know, establishment.
Yeah, they're horrible, yeah.
I mean, that's the whole thing of it, right?
Is that everyone that he's disregarded all deserve to be disregarded.
It's just, now who's he got left?
It's just a bunch of generals.
There's no one else to tell them and they come with their own baked in problems.
I mean, their view apparently has been superior to the CIA view on what to do about Syria this whole time.
And, you know, possibly even some of the, I mean, I don't know, like Gareth Porter always said, the Air Force was kind of for a bomb in Iran, but the Marines and the Army didn't want to do it because they knew they'd have to really clean up the mess and do all the dying in the thing.
The Navy and the Air Force are a lot easier to get to go along with that because they don't risk nearly as much.
Yeah, this is a very narrow discussion at that point when those are the only views being debated because there's no one else to chime in at all.
And it's sad for the people, you know, I always turn to Andy Bacevich as an example.
It's sad for the people like him who were never tapped during the Bush administration because they disagreed with the war policy.
They were never tapped in the Obama administration because they didn't fit, you know, the progressive, you know, liberal interventionist view.
And now they're not being tapped.
Why?
We don't, you know, because Trump seems to just, his inclination is to jump right to military guys.
And, you know, there might be a very interesting explanation for that.
You know, someone has suggested to me, you know, Trump feels, you know, insecure about his own grasp of military issues, his own credibility on military and defense.
And so he is tapping into these guys to give him that credibility, you know, to make him feel like, you know, he can move forward on this and, you know, and to give him some sort of buffer, you know, in what's going to be some really tough, you know, conflict with Congress, Armed Services Committee.
You know, the Pentagon is a real, you know, hardscrabble place.
So that's probably why he's turning to these guys or he's just got this, you know, he's got this thing, you know, like hero worshiping for military guys.
I don't know, but it's just...
Well, and everybody else really came out against him so quickly that they burned all their own bridges.
I mean, all the different think tanks.
He burned a lot of opportunities.
I mean, they did too.
I mean, all the neocons who would love to suck up to him now have all denounced him in no uncertain terms.
They burned the bridges a while ago.
But the third, you know, explanation or just, you know, going along with the other two is that he knows these guys are going to get through confirmation because everybody loves the military.
Right.
Yeah, it does.
He puts Mattis up there, Mad Dog Mattis.
Yeah.
For all the talk of people trying to stop him from even taking power in the Electoral College or doing a riot or shooting him or all this, he's picking people who are from, you know, outside of the traditional group of people picked, but it's not like they're from outside of power.
It's been since James Baker, since we had somebody who directly represented Exxon in the State Department.
But just since James Baker, that's not that long.
And Exxon is still the biggest corporation in the world, right?
I mean, it's not like he's the CEO of a chain of department stores in the Midwest nobody ever heard of or something.
Right, right, right.
These are people.
You can't overthrow me.
You'd be overthrowing all of them too.
And they all deserve to be here.
I can see that, you know, that that would even be a real worry of his, especially with the degree to which the CIA has come out against him over the last months, which has been really something to behold.
And that's going to be the most interesting part to me is seeing how that faction fight shakes out, whether he's going to come to terms with them or the other way around.
Right.
I mean, they've been really acting like a co-equal branch of government, even in terms of the way they dealt with Dianne Feinstein's committee.
You know, they treated her like they're equal to her instead of their job being, yes, ma'am, you're the chair of the committee and we're just the CIA, which is how it's supposed to be, at least, you know, according to the play that they've written for us here.
But anyway, yes.
So it'll definitely be interesting to see that.
You know, sidebar topic, because, you know, I watched those hearings on the Russia hack.
And one Democratic senator after the other is sitting there talking about how the intelligence community, they put their lives on the line every day for our democracy.
And I'm thinking these are the same guys who you were attacking.
Not what two years ago, you know, for spying on your committee, for promulgating torture, for hiding for secrets from the committee.
You know, they were like they were lower than dirt a couple of years ago.
Now, when it's politically convenient, they're heroes.
No question.
They're risking their lives.
So you're going to tell me the tens of thousands of analysts out in, you know, Maryland in these cubicles who are mining all of our personal data every day are putting their lives on the line.
Yeah, they're all front line infantry.
I don't think so.
Right.
Hey, y'all, check it out.
Me, Sheldon Richman, and Jarrah LaBelle, three-fourths of the Libertarian Institute.
We're all going to the Students for Liberty thing in Washington, D.C., February the 17th through 19th.
So I guess that's Friday through Sunday there.
And it's a whole big thing.
I gave a talk there about three years ago, I guess, at the Future Freedom Foundation thing.
We may or may not have our own kind of breakout session to give talks and all that, but we're definitely going to have a table and we're definitely going to be around.
So if you guys are going to be anywhere near D.C., then me and the boys from the Libertarian Institute would love to meet you.
So come on out.
And by the way, if you'd like to help support this expensive effort to get the three of us to Washington, D.C., in order to make this appearance at this conference, well, then, you know, your help is always welcome at libertarianinstitute.org.
Thanks very much.
Yeah, well, partisanship always rules on questions like that.
But for those of us who aren't partisans, for me, it's pretty easy.
For me, it's almost the exact kind of equation.
The way that they stood up to Feinstein is pretty reminiscent or I'm reminded of that when I see how they're standing up to Trump.
When the CIA's job is much lower, supposedly, on the chain of command around here than the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the president elect of the United States of America.
And they treat him like, yeah, welcome to D.C., pal, in a way that I thought was supposed to be more subtle.
You know what I mean?
They're really acting like they're just as powerful as the court or the Congress itself.
Well, what would be interesting is, you know, you might want to think of having Phil Giraldi on your show one time, because if you really want to get the scoop on, you know, the intelligence community, CIA, you know, how it works and what they're really saying.
He says the CIA all voted for Trump, except for their leaders who are all a bunch of Obama-ites.
Yeah, I mean, I was talking to him the other day and he said basically the same thing.
You know, we're talking about the executives at the very top who have their political pissing contest, but the rank and file, they just do their jobs.
You know, they're not part of this sort of us versus them political gamemanship that you're seeing, you know, on C-SPAN right now.
But, you know, he has his finger on the pulse of what's going on.
He'd be a good guest, because, you know, I'm not privy to, you know, what's going on behind the scenes, but you're right.
There's been just this interesting, you know, back and forth going on, and I don't know how this relates to their own turf wars with the Justice Department and the FBI, which, you know, has been seen in political ways as supporting President Trump by going after Hillary right before the election.
So, you know, it's interesting to see, you know, the little fiefdoms and how they react to one another.
I think the FBI have always hated the Clintons since the 90s, you know.
I think that's maybe more personal than institutional there at this point, but yeah.
So, okay, now here's another thing, though.
Let's talk about this other article that you wrote.
Trump and Israel.
Will he actively pursue Israel's interests or merely let both sides of the conflict do their thing?
Which, that may be the same thing.
I'm not sure at this point, since all the power really is on one side of that equation.
But, you know, there are a lot of people, Kelly, who got their hopes up, and people really do like having hope for change, don't they?
They hear one little thing about, oh, yeah, I'd like to make a deal in Israel.
And all of a sudden, Trump is the great peacemaker who's going to finally do what a lot of other presidents had claimed they were going to do and never did do, which is figure out some sort of two-state solution so that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip can be independent from Israel.
Is that what you think is going to happen here?
Well, this is what I observed.
Several months ago, Trump made what I think was an off-the-cuff remark about Israel and Palestine, and he said that I'm going to be the neutral guy, and I'm going to help make a deal.
And there seemed to be a sigh of relief among those who had been concerned and wary of the past administrations and their failed attempts or failed efforts at peacemaking because of this sort of dance that they do with Netanyahu and the ruling government over there.
So there seemed to be like, oh, maybe he won't be as cozy with Israel and Netanyahu as these other presidents have been.
But all of his moves beyond that one statement have signaled that he is going to be probably more right of the issue than Obama or even Bush.
He has nominated David Friedman, who is even further right of Netanyahu in terms of pro-Israeli, pro-Zionist approaches.
He doesn't believe in a two-state solution.
He's nominated him to be U.S. ambassador to Israel.
He has surrounded himself with Jason Greenblatt, who was one of the guys who headed up the Israel community or the Jewish community campaign faction, and now he's made him an international business advisor.
He's another very conservative, hard-right American Jew.
He has brought Ivanka Trump's husband, his son-in-law, another conservative, orthodox, right-leaning Jewish American into the fold.
He has promised Israel that he will be hard on the U.N. after that U.N. resolution.
He had tweeted a couple times, you know, hang on Israel, I'm coming.
So he has praised Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to AIPAC.
He was pretty clear.
He did not deny, you know, that he would, you know, a two-state solution or negotiations.
But, you know, he has all but said he would help move the embassy, the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which is a super-controversial issue.
And after which, you know, in recent weeks, you know, both Jordan and Abbas in the Palestinian territories have said, please don't do that.
It's going to cause a major, you know, conflict, conflagration in the Middle East.
You know, Jordan called it a red line if they move the embassy.
So, you know, I think some of the hopes by the moderate groups like J Street, who I interviewed for my story, are somewhat, I wouldn't say dashed, but they scaled back any confidence that, you know, Trump might be a more neutral influence, or he might not see, you know, sort of like this relationship with Israel as so one-sided as in the past.
So, I mean, he could turn around and say, you know, a lot of it could be all, you know, blowing smoke, but we don't know.
But when you do surround yourself with people who have one agenda, and in this case, their agenda is not a two-state solution, that's not good news for those who have been fighting for that for years now.
Yeah.
Although, you know, I talked with Ramzi Baroud, and I hope I'm not putting words in his mouth.
I talked with Stanley Cohen, too.
I hope I'm not mixing up who said what.
But I think they both actually somewhat had the attitude that, oh, well, you know, it's going to be harder to pretend it's not a fascist apartheid state now.
They might as well go ahead and take the mask off.
And as Ramzi Baroud said, the two-state solution has been dead this whole time.
It's been really nothing but a scam, a smokescreen as they establish facts on the ground.
It is one state.
Go ahead and annex the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
And now you're in a situation where it's some men, one vote and not the rest.
And without the fiction that there is a peace process and an eventual two-state solution ahead.
And so in that way, to make it more likely that there will be a one-state solution with equal rights for everybody, no matter what their religion is.
But I'm not so sure how it might play out.
But it seems like more and more people are deciding that at least in effect, the two-state solution was only ever a ruse.
And maybe it was meant to simply be a ruse, to placate people with a peace that will never come.
Yeah, I think you put your finger on it there because that's exactly what other people have said to me.
One of the things that Jay Street had said was, and Jay Street being a more democratic, moderate Jewish pro-Israel group here in the United States, you know, they're for a two-state solution, they're against the settlement, they're actually for the Iranian nuke agreement.
They said, you know, it's concerning, but it's also clarifying.
Because like you said, it rips the mask off of, you know, the issue and we know where everybody stands.
Whether they're against two-state or for-state, two-state solutions or for settlements.
You know, that's a huge issue and you have David Friedman, you know, ambassador to Israel now.
You have, you know, Jason Greenblatt, another close advisor.
You have the sort of bringing into the fold the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer.
You know, all have expressed support for the settlements.
You know, Friedman actually, you know, financially supports the settlement, you know, in the West Bank.
John Bolton had just given a speech, you know, to the Bet-El settlement to which Friedman is a financial supporter.
I read a thing where he was saying, hey, who knows how many Palestinians really even live there?
Oh man, really?
Yeah.
So, I mean, Jay Street's like, okay, well, let's just take the mask off.
You know, let's see where everybody stands on this issue, you know.
You know what?
I'd be willing to bet you that Donald Trump doesn't understand, even in the most elementary way, that the neighboring states lost the 1967 war.
The West Bank is still full of Palestinians, but now they're under a foreign countries martial law all this time.
And that's what everybody is so concerned about is where the state's going to be is under Israeli occupation now.
Kind of even just basic thing.
I bet he doesn't understand that.
I don't think the average American understands that, and I don't think he does either.
So, it would be interesting to see if somebody ever explains it to him, and he has to, you know, follow the logic through to its conclusion.
Well, what are we going to do with them?
Push them all into the Jordan River or something?
Well, and if he's surrounding himself with really, you know, arch conservatives on this issue, that's where he's getting all of his information.
That's where he's getting his history.
So, yeah, I guess we'll see.
You know, after doing that story, I don't really have a lot of confidence that we're going to see a big difference in our approach to Israel.
I guess the worry would be if we put our finger, you know, even further, our thumb on the scale of Israel, and that sparks a violent reaction from those neighboring states there.
I mean, obviously, things are tenuous as they are in terms of our relationship with these Arab states in that region for a whole host of reasons.
I don't know how Trump is going to make that any better if he hasn't paid any attention.
Well, that's an important point.
You know, Yaakov Hirsch was saying that, listen, you know, the concepts of let's try to sow stability instead of more instability in the region, which is sort of an overarching theme of Trump's, comes into direct conflict with Israel, do whatever the hell you want.
Because Israel, do whatever the hell you want means reactions all over the region and things getting out of hand.
This is why even Mattis and even Petraeus have testified before Congress that, yeah, you know, the Israeli's policy can really be a thorn in our side here.
Because it causes, it makes it more difficult for us to deal with everybody else in the region, because we're the country that backs Israel and doing the thing they're doing.
And it never seems to end.
So, I don't know.
I'm just, I am, I'm just, I'm in a wait and see mode.
I have no desire, I'll be honest with you, I'm not headed to the protest today or tomorrow.
I am, I mean, I'm happy to see the establishment, you know, upended the way it's been.
I am happy to see a lot of the old guard packing their bags and leaving town this weekend.
I'm happy to see people who thought they were in line for an administration job, particularly in a defense, you know, community, packing their bags and leaving town or going into some other direction.
Because, as you know, the last 10 years, the last 15 years have been all about war and bleeding of blood and treasure.
Now, are we on the precipice of even worse times?
I don't know.
I'm just happy to see some sort of shakeup.
But, like you, I don't have a crystal ball.
Well, a lot of people are feeling that.
I mean, can you imagine if it was the sorrow?
If Hillary Clinton was being inaugurated right now?
Yeah.
I'm just picturing a prison door slamming, cell door slamming shut, you know?
What's been avoided here is pretty bad.
Yeah, I think that people like us would be in a much greater state of alarm right now.
Maybe not, but I know people that I've worked with over the last several years in frustrating fashion about the war policy and the wrongheadedness of things and the budgets and the cronyism and all that.
I mean, to see that continued under another Clinton administration would have been really difficult to stomach.
It's going to continue under Trump, though.
I mean, what's going to change is he's not going to overthrow the secular dictators anymore, but he's going to keep fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS for the next eight years straight.
Yeah.
And he's going to let the Air Force and the Navy pivot to their whole China containment policy in Asia and maybe even double that.
He's either going to abolish nukes or he's going to triple them, depending on whether you ask him on Monday or Tuesday.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, it's a really good point, and he made it.
He talked about that in his speech today.
He said, we will wipe ISIS off.
I don't know if he said off the face of the earth, but something to that effect.
So this obviously is not the end of our intervention.
There's a distinct lack of neoconservatives here, though.
I mean, they're still trying to get ISIL out of Mosul after all this time, after almost a year.
And nobody talks about the fact that we're supposed to be over there helping the Iraqis get ISIS out of Mosul, and we can't even get them out of that one city.
How are we going to wipe them off the face of the earth?
Well, sending the entire Marine Corps is what they're going to do, I'm afraid.
Well, that's what you and I have to keep our eye on.
The next few months are going to be critical to see what kind of movement, particularly in Iraq and Syria.
The thing of it is, here's worth recognizing, I think, Kelly, is that if he wanted to pull a Ron Paul and be right-wing tough guy for peace, he could totally pull it off.
I mean, Ron isn't a tough guy.
If he wanted to pull a Nixon and go shake hands with Mao kind of a thing, next week he could go to Tehran and go to Pyongyang, go to Moscow, go to Beijing, and just say, dude, we're all friends, and let's all trade and make money, and who cares about all this old stuff?
Pentagon, you're fired, we don't really need you, Cold War's over, bye.
He could do that.
I mean, he'd have to walk around in Kevlar all day every day, but he could do it.
But I don't think he will.
I don't think he's got that level of vision of just how he could outflank the right on peace like that and bring back the return to normalcy or whatever they called it back when.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It'll be interesting.
What he said in his speech today, and you can interpret this any way you want, but he talked about we're going to focus on America first.
Now, that could mean so many different things, but maybe there was a kernel of truth in what he said along the campaign trail that he just felt like we had spread ourselves too thin in getting involved in all of these situations overseas.
So I don't know.
I'm just throwing that out there.
I'm blowing smoke because I really have no idea which way it's going to go.
All that said, I just don't have it in me to start hopping up and down because I don't have a clear idea of what his foreign policy is going to be.
Yeah.
Well, I don't think he does either.
As you said, he's going in here kind of half blind.
He's sort of got some instincts and about a third of an education.
And who knows?
But yeah, at least it ain't Hillary.
Cheers.
Yeah.
And to bring it full circle, yes, where we can be concerned is if somebody like Mike Flynn is at his elbow giving him the advice, that's when we start getting concerned.
Because he does want to continue the global war on terror.
And that's exactly what he's all about.
So if he's filling in any learning gaps there, that could be a problem.
So we'll see.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks again for all your great writing and for coming back on the show, Kelly.
I sure like talking with you.
Oh, thanks, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on.
All right.
Happy new era to you here.
You too.
All right, y'all.
That's Kelly B. Vlejos from The American Conservative.
The American Conservative dot com.
The articles are is civilian control of the military in jeopardy and Trump and Israel.
Thanks, y'all.
Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton show.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for Wall Street Window dot com.
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