02/08/17 – Daniel Lazare on the senior aides sabotaging Trump’s best foreign policy ideas – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Daniel Lazar.
Yeah, sorry, I was saying his name wrong all this time.
Daniel Lazar, again, writing for Consortium News, steering Trump back to endless war.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel, how are you doing?
I'm fine, how are you, Scott?
I'm doing good, I appreciate you joining us here today, and, yeah, well, the E on the end, it threw me off, man, I don't know.
It's okay.
Well, that didn't take long, did it, Daniel?
No, no, no, what, well, we're not, you know, this guy Trump is really quite a character, but he is so over the map, all over the map, but what happened last week is that Nikki Haley, his new UN ambassador, gave a speech at the UN Security Council that was really worthy of Susan Power at her worst.
She castigated Russia for the latest upsurge of violence in the Eastern Ukraine, said it was consistent with its past behavior, and that normal relations were not possible until Russia quit the Crimea and the Eastern Ukraine, where it really isn't even there, to begin with.
And finally, well, that was really about it, but the point is she sort of essentially announced that the Trump administration would pursue the same policy toward the Ukraine that the Obama administration has.
This is contrary to what Trump himself has been saying, or hinting at, at least.
So no one knows what's up, but presumably her words stand, so as far as we can tell, she's the one calling the shots.
Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting, right?
Like you say, this guy, he's all over the map, it's sort of the Nixonian madman theory kind of a thing, where he's such a basket case, you don't really know exactly what he means.
But, you know, I can hear my friend Ernie Hancock, he's always kind of giving him the benefit of the doubt, he says, it's the art of the deal, man, it's the art of the deal.
It's the Trumpian dialectic, right?
First you have a hard sell, and then you compromise, but you have to have a hard sell to dial down from.
It's possible, it's possible, you know, this guy is crazy.
So, you know, trying to read the mind of a crazy man is not easy.
But nonetheless, he has surrounded himself by neocons of the most bellicose type.
So he's kind of set a trap for himself.
And I don't know how he can possibly get himself out.
Well, yeah, that's the thing, too.
When you say she's calling the shots on this, I really wonder about that.
I mean, who told her to say that?
Did they have a meeting?
You know, it doesn't actually sound right to me that she got those marching orders directly from the president.
But who told her to take such a hard line there?
Mattis?
Or Bannon?
Or what?
Well, I mean, the administration is filled with anti-Russian hardliners.
I mean, Trump is the Trump and Bannon are the two exceptions.
So, but nonetheless, they have surrounded themselves with all these anti-Putin types.
So I don't know what's happening.
But it seems that the anti-Putin forces are in control.
Yeah, you know, because there's all kinds of, you know, leaks and reporting out of the administration that he got really mad at the press secretary for pronouncing something wrong or something like that.
But I didn't hear anything about he was mad at the UN ambassador for laying down this bellicose line.
I mean, after all, Russia has to get out of Crimea.
Talk about a deal killer.
I mean, that's going nowhere.
That's the most poison pill in the world.
It's pure arsenic.
They're never going to make that deal.
Of course.
And Putin couldn't get out of Crimea if he wanted to.
I mean, he made a pledge.
He can't go back on that pledge.
So Trump is adhering to a very hard U.S. line.
Now, on the other hand, there was that really very funny comment he made to O'Reilly about, you think this country is so innocent?
That was pretty remarkable statement.
So we just don't know.
Well, you know, I wonder what all you think about that.
That's chaos reigns.
That's chaos reigns in the White House.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
I mean, there's one of these stories that was just about the inauguration crowds and the debate about that.
But it had I think it was a Washington Post story where they said we have 12 different sources for this story from the highest levels of the White House talking about his temper tantrum here.
So it's absolutely chaos reigning if they got, you know, that level of leaking and backstabbing and finger pointing and blaming and whatever already happening up there.
So, yeah, it's a real free for all.
Well, and, you know, I mean, that's the whole thing, right, is we've known this about this guy all along.
He doesn't read.
He doesn't know anything.
So, you know, if he wanted to take the kind of right wing antiwar position that he sort of hinted at a few times, then, you know, if he knew his ass from a hole in the ground, he would have at least known to go hire Bandao and them from Cato and Pillar and them from the national interest, something like that.
So he'd have some kind of right wing antiwar advisers.
Right.
But no, he doesn't even know.
He probably doesn't even know that there's such a thing as the national interest magazine or Cato or that there are somebody like Bandao is there to, you know, share his same sort of perspective on the obsolescence of America's alliance system, stuff like that.
You know, I totally agree.
I mean, the guys are really an unguided missile.
I mean, he his his wife has left him, it seems he or she at least she's staying in New York, leaving him alone for six or six days out of seven in Washington.
You know, he prowls the White House at night.
He's all by himself.
He tweets in the early morning hours.
He's just an unpredictable, somewhat unhinged individual.
And we have no idea where he's leading, but it can't be anywhere good.
Yeah.
Well, now.
So on the statement to O'Reilly, sorry, I went off on a tangent and forgot what I was going to say there.
I wanted to ask you what you thought about that, because there's a few different spins on that.
Right.
Like what there's I think Pat Buchanan actually made the most sense about this, where he said, you know, it's not that Trump was really trying to admit anything about America so much.
He was just trying to deflect and figure out a way to not confirm O'Reilly, because after all, and then Pat Buchanan, because, you know, he knows the history, he says, you know, Nixon didn't lecture Mao Zedong on all the people who were dying in China under communism at that time.
And they didn't, you know, Reagan, when he met with Andropov, didn't call him the butcher of Budapest or whatever for helping put down the uprising in Hungary, because, hey, man, yeah, those things are true, but we're trying to make a deal here.
This is statecraft here.
You're not supposed to.
And in fact, you know, I don't know, I'm too young.
But Pat says that even during the whole Cold War, maybe at least after Stalin, American leaders never talked about the dictators of the Soviet Union in the kind of terms that the Americans talk about Putin.
Now, he's vile.
He's scum.
He's a murderer.
He's a killer.
He's they didn't talk that way about Khrushchev.
They tried to keep it on a higher level than that, even though Khrushchev was a butcher, of course.
Well, whether he was or not, that's another question.
But he certainly had his bad moments.
But in any case, he's absolutely correct.
I mean, that this has been this whole thing has been personalized to an amazing degree.
But what's remarkable about Trump's statement is simply where he said there are a lot of killers.
You think our country is so innocent.
That is amazing.
The theme of American innocence goes back to the 19th century, to Mark Twain and earlier, you know, to have a president, you know, and no modern president has dared to quarrel with the idea of America as the eternal innocent.
But to have Trump say that is an amazing departure from from past practice.
It's still a gog.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Robert Perry and his article today on on Consortium News talks about how, you know, really just that, like you're saying, this is the consensus in D.C.
It's the perfect kind of double think.
Everybody knows that it's not true.
They all know that they're basically waiting in pools of blood.
But anyway, no, we're great.
And as Bill O'Reilly said, Iraq, well, that was just a mistake.
You know, this kind of thing.
And but what's great is they all know the truth, right?
They're just deeply in denial.
So that's why they're lashing out so bad.
I don't know if you saw this ridiculous thing by Joe Scarborough in The Washington Post where he decides to go all the way back to 1917 and count up everybody Stalin ever killed in the purges in order to say, how dare Trump compare America to Russia, even though the Soviet Union, that government fell in 1991.
We're talking about the government of Russia, not the government of the USSR here.
But Scarborough knows that America's killed 100 times as many people as the Russians have since 1991.
So there's no way to make that comparison.
So he has to go all the way back to the Communist Revolution.
Yes, yes.
I mean, it's really pretty amazing.
But I mean, the ideology of postwar America is America is eternally innocent.
It's childlike.
It's a one child in a world full of vicious adults.
And it's incapable of doing wrong.
Whenever it does do wrong, it's either due to error or to some kind of excess of goodwill.
You know, America occasionally overreaches and causes harm because it's just too good for the world.
But you know, but this is the Trump statement is the first time that in in recent memory that any president has dared to depart from this dogma.
It's amazing.
Yeah, well, and, you know, we really see that a lot in the arguments right now in the in the change of power and people talking about Rex Tillerson, the oil man, as opposed to the neoconservative ideologue, although apparently he favors Elliott Abrams to be his deputy.
So who knows?
But in all that talk, they say, Yeah, you know, the real question, it's between the real politic of the foreign policy realists who only care about the national interest versus the morality based foreign policy of the liberal internationalists and the neoconservatives who care so deeply about the world that they're willing to wage a world revolution and overthrow every government they don't like to just try to help the people so bad.
And this is a real fight about whether those cynical, amoral old oil men types are going to win out or whether the the real bleeding hearts like Elliott Abrams and Samantha Power will continue to wage America's Superman mission around the world.
Right?
I mean, if you have to bear in mind that essentially, we have two right wing parties with Republicans and Democrats and Democrats are sounding this war theme like there's no tomorrow.
It's very, it's a very dangerous game they're playing.
And it's kind of progressive, though, too, is I mean, Samantha Power is not a right winger in sheep's clothing.
She's a true believer in liberal humanitarian intervention, right?
Her and her friends, too.
Yes, but if that requires killing a country in order to save it, she's all for it.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, well, her name is Power.
How appropriate.
But she's perfectly willing to destroy a society in the name of somehow morality.
It's just completely bonkers.
Yeah.
Well, you're right that it's the consensus.
And I think you're right that it's really meaningful, whether, you know, obviously, Trump, whatever his motive for saying that, or however he blurted that out, that that really this could signify a real change, because, you know, the American people, by and large, they're just not used to hearing talk like that, you know, moral equivalence.
It's pretty amazing.
But the question is whether it signifies real change.
That's a more complicated question.
And I'm really actually not quite sure.
I'd love to be able to give you a good a good, Pat, strong answer, but I'm really not sure what's going on.
I mean, on one hand, the the the imperial structure is clearly collapsing.
It's the the internationalists have plainly overreached and they're forced to pull back.
And Trump's isolationism, his America first ism, is in many ways a logical reaction to that overreach.
But on the other hand, he has surrounded himself with, you know, with neocons, Elliott Abrams being the most dramatic recent example.
So so I'm not really sure where he wants to go.
And I'm beginning to think that they know that really meant what really is important are the is the structure rather than any one individual.
I mean, the America is an imperialist country and it is determined to act on, you know, to carry that program out.
And I think that Trump is just too crazy and too lone and individual to really counteract those impulses.
Yeah.
So that's where that's my seat of the pants analysis at this point.
I hear you.
Well, you know, there's this NBC story and they just have one source, but I believe it because it just rings so true, confirms my bias so bad.
And it sounded like the source came from the Pentagon side of this, where Mattis and Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that they told Trump about the Yemen raid, that, you know, Barack Obama just wasn't bold enough to try something like this and that it was that easy to just bait him into saying, OK, do it.
Yeah, that sounds totally plausible to me.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, that really means Mattis is is the boss at the end of the day, right?
Well, yes, except that they really screwed up.
So so so so so so so Trump is left holding the bag and Trump is no doubt really pissed.
So therefore, Trump will have to exercise a bit more control the next time they act.
They they want to go off on some kind of like, you know, idiotic adventure like this.
That's an interesting point.
It's sort of like a little mini kind of Bay of Pigs, right, where the new president trusts the professionals.
Go ahead, guys, if you say it's going to be it's going to work out OK, and then it doesn't.
And then he feels really burned and holds a grudge.
We can hope.
Yeah.
But, you know, Trump is Trump is just, you know, you know, lashing out in any number of different directions.
He's lashing out at Iran doesn't quite understand that Iran that Iran and Russia are allied in the fight against ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
He he's talking about safe zones in in Syria and in Yemen and Yemen, just like that's completely bonkers.
Eighty four percent of the civilian casualties in Yemen are due to Saudi backed ground forces or Saudi backed air forces.
And the U.S. enables those Saudi backed air forces by providing them with targeting data and mid air refueling and weapons.
So what's the U.S. going to do?
It's going to it's going to create a safe zone and in Yemen against Saudi air attacks that it itself enables.
So it's a U.S. safe zone against the U.S. I mean, this is just the mind reels.
Yeah.
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Well, you know, this is a real problem, too, man, not just fighting on both sides of the war, because we had that under Obama.
Right.
This is what Obama has left Trump.
But at least we knew you and me that at least Obama, you know, is aware of his treason.
You know, whereas Trump.
I mean, I don't really believe that if you had the opportunity, Daniel, to explain to him what is Yemen policy was here.
Look, you're fighting for and against al Qaeda at the same time.
And here's how I don't think he could understand you.
I think his eyes would glaze over and he'd space out and start thinking about his shoelaces or whatever it is instead before you were done.
Very possibly correct.
I mean, I think I think I think you're very possibly right.
The man does not seem to have a working brain.
And I'm trying to compare him to George W. Bush because he was a certain kind of stupid, too.
Hmm.
I don't know.
Yeah, I could see it being really bad, though, where where like you brought up Iran there and how he's surrounded by these coops.
He already has his own problems with Iran.
And then Mattis and Flynn and Dunford and all of these guys are complete nuts when it comes to Iran.
And for that matter, Bannon, too, apparently.
Yeah.
And but Flynn is really the worst.
I mean, Flynn is really completely off the wall.
And but he seems to be calling the shots.
I mean, blaming Iran for that hoothy attack on that Saudi ship.
That's just bonkers.
Just bonkers.
When you know.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
But, you know, yes, Iran is is supporting the Houthis in some in some fashion.
But the Houthis are quite independent minded.
They are from a different religious sect.
They they really are.
They don't take orders from Iran.
So, you know, so if they get that, they fire a missile at the ship, you know, to sort of hold Iran responsible, just just makes no sense at all.
It's a needless escalation and a needless, you know, further involvement by the U.S. in that conflict.
And it's just it's it's mind boggling.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I had heard the story that he had tried to or that he thought, assumed and couldn't be, you know, talked out of the idea that Iran somehow was behind the Benghazi attack in Libya in 2012.
But then only recently did I realize from some other reporting that, yeah, no, that was remember when he was the head of the DIA at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency.
And he instructed his staff to pin it on Iran.
It wasn't just he thought so.
It was he really tried to have the government officially blame Iran for the Benghazi attack.
You know, this is a man who believes that that Iran, North Korea, Russia, narco traffic, traffic contests and Latin America are all in league against the United States.
This is this is this is this man.
Flynn does not have a proper working brain either.
Well, I mean, the dean clearly wrote all that nutso stuff and he signed on to it.
But I certainly agree with you that I don't know where the dean ends and Flynn begins.
I mean, if you co-wrote a book with Michael Ledeen, I'd write you off, Dan.
Sorry.
So, yeah, I got to say, man, I'm not going to believe.
Maybe we'll do the first half of what Ledeen thinks and then Daniel corrects him.
But yeah, no, I mean, this is absolutely nuts when when what you have in Benghazi on the face of it is, you know, America.
And in fact, Flynn could tell you this right.
Flynn and the DIA could tell you that, no, this is Obama's plan, working with the Saudis to back Al-Qaeda in Libya and in Syria.
And they're the ones.
No wonder that they, whatever, stung the American ambassador there in Benghazi.
He was stationed in the middle of their hornet's nest.
Just because we're friends with our enemies doesn't mean they're friends with us.
Yeah, no, it makes no sense.
And also Trump recently called Iran the world's leading sponsor of terrorism.
So he doesn't really seem to even understand who is backing ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
It's not Iran.
It's Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.
So he just seems to have doesn't seem to have a clue as to even who is on who is on which side.
And as I said, so the man is really an unguided missile.
He has a few dim ideas.
He wants to have some kind of rapprochement with Russia, but he has little idea of how to achieve that.
Yeah.
And, you know, yeah, I don't know.
On the Russia thing, like, that was this one real saving grace here, right, was, hey, at least he's good on Russia.
And that happens to be the single most important issue in the whole wide world by a factor of a million billion, because the entire species is at stake.
So that's it.
Nothing else matters compared to that.
And yet then he's flopping all around and screwing that up from the very beginning here.
And we got eight years of this.
So four years.
Yeah, well, we'll see who the Democrats can come up with, man.
But anyway, I mean, I'm assuming the worst.
I don't know that he's going to be friends with Putin that whole time.
I mean, this thing could turn really bad.
In fact, he he said that when they buzz the American ships in the Baltic Sea that we should have shot him down, that Obama should have shot him down.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, Obama, Obama allowed himself to be maneuvered into a confrontation along a 1500 mile front stretching from from the Black Sea to the to the the Baltic Sea.
And and this is extremely dangerous.
And what's happened is the US finds itself hostage.
It's a classic case of the of the tail wagging the dog.
The US finds itself hostage to extreme nationalists from the Baltics to the Ukraine.
And instead of the US calling the shots, these nationalists are the US essentially has agreed to back them up whatever they do.
So it has itself, you know, it's backing neo-Nazis in the Ukraine.
It's backing countries like Estonia and Latvia, where they hope where where they host annual parades by SS veterans, recalling the glory days of the glorious SS fight for freedom against the Soviets.
And so so and Poland, which is a key US ally, is in the grips of xenophobes, fierce xenophobes.
They they in late 2015, Polish nationalists burnt a Jew in an effigy in the town of in the town of Wroclaw in western Poland.
The country is just being swept by xenophobic, ultra Catholic, ultra right wing paranoia.
And this is the this is the society the US finds itself obliged to protect and is allowing it to call the shots.
This is very dangerous.
And you're you're talking about, Daniel, not just the population of Poland is moving to the right, but the government of Poland is moving far to the right.
Of course, of course, it's against the government.
I mean, I hardly know a thing about Poland.
So, yeah, any anything you can elaborate, please do.
Well, I mean, I want to one must always distinguish between the government and the people beneath it.
But but yes, but Poland is in the grips of a far right wing government, a government which is xenophobic, anti Semitic and fiercely anti Russian and and ultra Catholic as well.
So but the but what Obama did, the mistake Obama has made consistently is that rather than trying to rein these nationalist forces in, he has given them free reign and thus is allowing them to call the shots, which means that the US winds up being hostage to these extreme right forces who are eager, who are who are who are who behave in the most provocative fashion with Russia and believe they can do so without any fear of the consequences, because the US will always back them up.
That's that's not the way you want to run things.
I mean, if you know if there's any danger of a war, you know, getting a bit being drawn to an armed conflict, you have to make sure that you know what you're doing.
You can't let others decide for you.
Yeah, well, that's what that's what Obama has done.
And this is a situation that that Trump has inherited.
And he seems to have a glimmer of an idea that he's got to get himself out of this trap somehow.
But he doesn't have the faintest clue as to how to do it.
Sorry, go over to you, Scott.
Yeah, no, that's fine.
I was just gonna say that.
This is how the British got into World War Two is they outsource their decision making about whether they were going to have a war with Germany or not to a bunch of right wing Polish colonels who basically were Nazis themselves and got them into a war with Germany and NATO membership.
It seems like in Washington, D.C., they think of NATO membership as a way to invite new and more interesting people to their cocktail parties or something when it's a war guarantee.
I mean, I don't know anything about the government in Latvia, but I bet our government doesn't know anything about the government in Latvia either.
And what you're saying is if they're a bunch of right wing reactionary kooks, they could pick a fight with Russia.
And we have a war guarantee that if the Russians do anything to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, that it's on and that we will fight them the same as if they were taken Berlin or London or D.C.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure what you're referring what you're referring to about Poland in 1939, because as bad as that regime was, they were fairly innocent in that conflict.
But you're right about the Baltic states.
The Baltic states essentially were on the side of the Third Reich during World War Two.
And they all have they all inherited large or at least two of the three large Russian speaking minorities whom they have treated terribly.
And that has been a source of friction between them and Russia.
Now, by giving them an open ended guarantee and not trying to apply any restraints, essentially, the U.S. becomes hostage to their increasingly provocative nationalistic behavior.
So they can they can behave as outrageously as they wish without fear of the consequences.
But, you know, but this is a dangerous game they're playing and the U.S. is being lured into a trap.
So I said, like, you know, Trump seems to dimly sense this, but he has no idea how to respond.
Yeah.
Well, you know, in double standards in Washington, D.C. this week, you have the case of Tulsi Gabbard, who went to Syria on a fact finding mission to say we should stop backing you know, Osama and Zawahiri's men there, which, you know, kind of seems to make sense.
And boy, does she just get raked over the coals for that and accused by Josh Rogin of all kinds of treason in The Washington Post and this kind of thing.
But meanwhile, Senator McCain and Senator Graham, and I guess the video just came out, but it was from January, from early January, they went to the Ukraine.
And there's video of them now with President Poroshenko and with a bunch of Ukrainian troops saying, we're with you and we'll back you.
And as Graham says, 2017 is the year of offense.
Go get them, boys.
Yes, this is this is really, really bad.
This is really dangerous.
I mean, I mean, everyone's playing a very complicated game here.
So essentially, Graham and McCain, what happens is that they visited the front lines in the eastern Ukraine on December 28th at what was and essentially urged them to mount an offensive against Russia.
So the flare up and fighting as even Radio Free Europe has admitted, there's been a recent flare up and fighting in the eastern Ukraine, but it's plainly initiated by the Ukraine with a dual purpose.
The purpose of those dual purposes are to one, push the pro-Russian separatists back.
But number two, to work with McCain and and and Graham in order to box Trump in in Washington.
So, you know, everyone's playing this kind of three dimensional chess at this point.
But the whole goal is to maneuver Trump into a neocon position.
And Trump, you know, maybe he has, you know, in that foggy brain of his, he has a faint glimmer of an idea of what's going on, but he doesn't know how to respond.
Yeah.
And he half agrees, half doesn't agree.
The guy is clearly demented.
So I just, in my personal opinion, I mean, I think the odds favor the neocons prevailing in this context.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is the best hope that we have is not that he's going to figure it out, but it's just that he'll personally resent it.
And so where, you know, they were successful in, quote, jamming Obama and forcing him to, for example, for one example, doubling, tripling the war in Afghanistan, that maybe Trump will be like, hey, you can't push me around and say no, just on that personal kind of basis.
But then again, they could just say, yeah, you're not bold enough or whatever, bait him right back into it again.
But I must I must emphasize that that that Trump is no better alternative.
I mean, his America first ism is very dangerous.
His protectionism is very dangerous.
It's going to lead to a economic decline, just as Smoot-Hawley did in 1931, wasn't it?
I believe.
And it's a very retrograde tendency.
So, I mean, I, you know, even though Trump might be better in a few areas in the world, a few areas of world conflict, I think on the whole, he is equally as retrograde as Graham and McCain.
And I also want to emphasize as well, you know, I mean, about Putin.
I mean, yes, the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine are being swept by these far right nationalist currents.
But, you know, let's not forget that Russia is in the same boat.
Yeah.
Economically, it's it's it's it's doing very badly.
It's its chief asset has fallen in value by by 50 percent over the last two years.
Putin is trying very hard to hold things together.
But there's no doubt that the same nationalist forces, the same Trumpian forces are at work in in in Russia as well.
So the whole world seems to be moving in a Trumpian direction.
Yeah.
And of course, the next the next shoe to fall, if it does fall, will be will be Le Pen in France.
Well, now, I mentioned the the morning Joe piece in The Washington Post here.
And one of the things he says in there is the conventional wisdom that, well, Putin is just trying to recreate the Soviet Union one country at a time, he says.
He doesn't elaborate or demonstrate what he's talking about or anything like that.
But let's say that that's hyperbole, that all he's really trying to do is recreate the old Russian empire, not the Soviet one, but the czarist one.
What do you say to that?
You think that's a real threat?
No, not at all.
Not at all.
I mean, no, Putin, as I said, is trying to hold things together.
His chief asset oil has fallen in value by 50 percent of the last two years.
OK, but like these right wing Trumpian currents that you talk about, might they not include protecting the Russian speaking people of Latvia from the right wing government there that's persecuting them, this kind of crap?
Yes.
Yes, of course.
Of course.
And those there are those forces are real.
But but Putin himself, I mean, he's too he's a realist.
He's not an expansionist.
He's a realist.
I mean, as he's shown in Syria, he doesn't want to.
He knows he can't conquer the world.
He can't recreate the old czarist empire.
He's trying to hold Russia together.
And yes, that requires sometimes taking actions in the eastern Ukraine or or annexing Crimea, where he's absolutely forced to.
He is being forced to speak up for this, for the rights of Russian speakers in the Baltics, for example.
But he is not a man.
He's not an expansionist.
He's not he's not cruising abroad looking for trouble.
That is what the U.S. does.
So I wouldn't I wouldn't know.
That's that's not what Russia does.
But you're right there.
There are forces that are being unleashed there that could upset Putin's apple cart as well.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for coming back on the show, Daniel.
I really appreciate it as always.
OK, thanks so much, Scott.
Real good stuff here.
OK, great.
All right.
So that's Daniel is there.
You can find him at Consortium News dot com.
And, you know, Robert Perry's got a great stable of writers over there at Consortium News dot com.
We run something by them virtually every day at antiwar dot com.
This one is Steering Trump Back to Endless War by Daniel.
Oh, I said it wrong again, didn't I?
Lazar, Daniel Lazar at Consortium News dot com.
And that's the show.
Check out the archives at Scott Horton dot org and at Libertarian Institute dot org.
You can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, Joe.
All right, so Scott Horton here and I got a great deal for you.
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