War is the improvement of investment climates by other means, Clausewitz, for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today I authorize the Armed Forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
All right, you guys, introducing Jeff Larson from the Foreign Policy Alliance, foreignpolicyalliance.org.
He's part of the Republican Liberty Caucus here in Texas, and he used to work at NASA, Mission Control back when.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, Jeff?
Hey, doing great.
Cool.
Well, very happy to have you here on the show today.
We met at my talk in Corpus Christi for the RLC convention there a couple weeks ago, or yeah, a week or so ago.
And that was really cool, because you told me about this great project that you're working on.
It seems like it could be, maybe it already is, a real big deal, the Foreign Policy Alliance.
Please tell us all about it.
Okay, well, this is, you know, just to go into the history a little bit.
There were a group of local peace activists in the Houston area, and, you know, one of them read one of the recent Ralph Nader books and was inspired by that to reach out to people from other political backgrounds to make change happen.
And so they, that person reached out to several of their friends and eventually got a hold of a friend of mine, Barry Klein, who is an activist mostly for conservative causes, but for all kinds of things, mostly property rights and things like that in the Houston area.
And both Barry and I were recruited to put together a conference in Houston to take a look at war and peace issues, and, you know, is our military growing too large, and that sort of thing.
And so we came together, we put on this conference, we had several speakers from across the nation, and after it was over, we all kind of asked ourselves, okay, well that was great, what next?
And so we all decided to, you know, create a foundation and to, you know, explore our collective beliefs and try to find out what we could all agree on together that would move the cause of affecting U.S. foreign policy in a positive direction as we saw it.
And so our resolution, which is really kind of the core of what we've managed to, what has come out of this process, is multi-partisan.
And when I say multi-partisan, it is Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and Green.
All contributed to this and all agreed to the wording.
So we thought that was quite an accomplishment, you know, that we could find some ground in it.
That was a rather rough process.
We spent around six months pulling that thing together.
And it's on our website, and I'd certainly invite anyone to take a look at it.
All right.
So it seems like, first of all, when you're doing something like this, you're trying then to strike a balance between good enough that it's worthwhile to pursue it and yet broad enough that you can get people to agree to it, which is just about impossible.
You must have some natural born talent for organizing or something that you're able to get four different party groups to sign on like this, or members of them anyway.
But so how did you strike that balance?
And just how radical is the call here?
Well, it's a call to reform U.S. foreign policy, and it really wasn't that difficult.
It was tedious.
It took a lot of work.
And it took us, like I say, about six months to pull it together.
But really what made it happen was a commitment that we would all work together.
And when we found something that truly was common ground, you know, we would agree to that.
And we all put our egos aside.
And, you know, I mean, everybody, each one of the four parties had something they wanted to put on that agenda.
But when the others simply couldn't agree to it, you know, we all agreed that, well, gee, I really like this, but it's not going to please the other factions, at least one of the other factions, and it's got to go.
And I'll give you an example.
One of the things that I know Barry and I couldn't abide was there was a push to put the effect of the military on global warming, you know, climate change into this.
And we just said flat out, you know, you can get a goodly portion of Republicans and conservatives to agree with what we've got there.
You won't get everyone, of course.
But if you put climate change in, that's just going to drive practically everybody from our faction away.
And so you don't see a word in there about climate change.
And there were other things, you know, that one faction or another would try to put in there.
And we just simply hashed out each little detail, literally every single word of this thing, you know, we spent time on, many hours of working on this.
And what we were left with was the bare bones of, you know, what hadn't been boiled away or sandblasted away by that process.
Hey, y'all, buy my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and sign up for the RSS feeds at scotthorton.org and donate to the show at scotthorton.org slash donate.
$50 will get you a signed copy of Fool's Errand.
$100 will get you a silver QR code commodity disc.
Any $200 donation at scotthorton.org will get you a lifetime subscription to listen and think Libertarian audiobooks.
And I accept all different kinds of digital currencies, too.
All the addresses are there at scotthorton.org slash donate.
You can do single or monthly donations by way of PayPal.
And also sign up at patreon.com if you want to donate per interview.
That's patreon.com slash scotthorton show.
And anybody who donates a dollar or more per interview, you get two free audiobooks from Listen and Think Audio.
All the information is there at scotthorton.org slash donate.
Also shop amazon.com by way of my link.
And give me a good review on iTunes or Stitcher or amazon.com if you've read the book and liked it.
Thanks.
Well, and so, but I mean, that could leave you with almost nothing, but it looks like a pretty good resolution here.
So what does it say?
Well, what it does say, you know, and I don't know if we have time to read the thing.
It's only a page.
You know, our, you know, resolutions are in the form of whereas, you know, this and this and this, and therefore do that and that and that.
And so we've got seven whereas statements to kind of explain the background of where we're coming from.
And I'll go through them.
Whereas American military personnel are being killed and wounded and civilian casualties inflicted in wars fought for purposes unrelated to America's vital security interests, which the US government defines too broadly.
And that was a big conversation.
You know, certainly, you know, people shouldn't fight and kill and die for something that isn't a vital national security interest.
But everything seems to become a national security interest.
And that becomes sort of like a code word for whatever the politician of the day decides he wants to fight a war over.
So we're calling for a national dialogue on that.
We define this too broadly.
We get into too many areas of conflict.
And so that's where that whereas comes from.
The next one is whereas America's military interventions in other countries have led to costly blowback and unintended consequences.
And this was a really easy sell.
You know, there's, of course, the book blowback that many of our members referenced.
And especially, you know, those of us who came from the Republican background, we're familiar with, you know, Ron Paul and his use of blowback and unintended consequences.
And it's pretty easy to trace a lot of what's happening, what happened on 9-11, directly back to things we did in the Middle East.
And that's kind of a, you know, a hidden narrative, you know, almost trivializing it to say that they hate us for our freedom.
Well, no, specifically, Osama bin Laden had posted sort of a manifest as to why he was doing what he was doing.
And he very specifically mentioned certain interventions in Saudi Arabia in support of the conflict against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War that he was upset about.
And you can trace a line there from we did this and he did that and then we did this and then he did that.
And eventually you get to 9-11.
And that's just one of many examples.
That's just the most salient example.
So the third one was, whereas outdated Cold War alliances create tripwires that could compel the use of U.S. military force to resolve conflicts.
And here we're kind of taking a swipe at things like NATO that really create more tension and pressure in Europe for very little gain.
I mean, it's gotten to the point where some of these alliances now, instead of providing a bulwark against enemy aggression, now they sort of provide a sore point that keeps rubbing and rubbing and irritating people and are more of a cause of conflict instead of a bulwark against it.
So kind of outlive their – pass their sell-by date.
Whereas, fourth one, whereas escalating tensions between the U.S. and other nuclear powers are moving our nations toward military confrontation and potential nuclear war.
Now we wrote this two years ago.
And at that time, we could see this and we could see how our policies really weren't moving.
You had Barack Obama who made a promise of moving in that direction.
And really, after the first couple of years of administration, nothing really happened.
And you could see tensions escalating between the U.S. and Russia, and it just didn't seem healthy.
But now you look at that in 2018, it almost seems prescient with that and the whole situation with Kim Jong-un and everything.
It doesn't seem like we're really handling this very well.
So number five, whereas erosion of civil liberties long held dear by Americans, including freedom from warrantless surveillance, searches and seizures, has accelerated with passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, the National Defense Authorization Act, the NDAA of 2012, and the USA Freedom Act of 2015.
This was easy to get everybody on board with, because this is something that I'd say maybe a third of the Republican Party has been harping on.
By that I mean a third of the voters have been harping on for years.
This has really been a sore spot.
We feel like we're losing our civil liberties, and it was pretty easy to get the other three factions on board with that.
They were already halfway there to start with.
You can go all the way back.
We conservative types often go all the way back to the Founding Fathers and their fear of a standing army.
This is exactly what they feared, that if you can just keep declaring war over and over and over again, you can always create a sort of a climate of crisis that justifies, at least on paper justifies, taking away civil liberties, which is really just a tool of a tyrant and is really just intended to maintain control over a population.
That's really not consistent with a free people and a free country, and we're just trying to draw attention to that there.
The sixth one, whereas in a Cold War era, the U.S. can safely reduce its security budget by developing a new and more relevant strategy for right-sizing the military to better deal with 21st century needs.
Now in that one, we were trying to address the huge size of the military budget, and this is one of the things that brought me to it as a Republican and as a conservative, and as a conservative who I would call myself a classical liberal in that sense.
What brought me to it is I really began to see the U.S., the deficit and the soaring debt and all that, as an existential threat to the United States.
Everyone wants to be secure.
It's generally conceded to be, perhaps even the primary justification for having a state is to protect the population from external threats.
Well, you can't do that.
You can't have a military that protects you if you can't pay them.
I could really see at some point where we would be getting into a situation where you could either afford to pay Social Security recipients or you could pay the troops, and you had to make a decision between the two.
In a shockingly short period of time, back in say 2008 when we had all the stimulus spending and all that, you could just project out that within about 10, 15 years we would run out of money, no matter how much we borrowed from China.
It just doesn't seem to make sense to any of us, from any of the four factions, that we have to borrow money from China, borrow money from Japan, borrow money from Brazil to fund our basic security.
So reducing the budget, reducing bloat in the security budget as well as other places is very important to me.
And finally, number seven, whereas a healthy U.S. economy is critical to an effective security program, but is now put at risk by the trillion-dollar annual national security budget that contributes to, well, back then it was $18 trillion national debt, and now it's a $20 trillion national debt.
Right, it's already grown two trillion since then, and then that's the other half of the same point you're making.
Well, so I have to say, before you go on to the resolutions here, that this is all really good.
In fact, I'll go ahead and set you up on the resolution part about policemen of the world, and that is obviously set to appeal to the language of right-wingers instead of calling it an empire, this kind of thing.
You say, we're going around policing the world, and to a real conservative that should sound like too big of a big government project when you consider just how big the old world is.
And so that's definitely a good start there, and I'm glad that the two left factions that you had on board didn't object to that.
I don't know why they would, but it's a good way to appeal to the right, I think.
No, I want to address that, because it's fascinating.
We spent at least two, almost three whole sessions, about six hours I would say, just discussing that one phrase, policeman of the world.
And all the conservative, the right-wing elements on the panel were all for it.
And the other three parts were, to various degrees, looking at that and saying, do you really want to say that?
Is that term even used anymore?
And they were kind of amazed at it, and we kept fighting to put it in.
And as we kept talking about it and explaining how the perceptions of different groups went, it became obvious to the other three factions that, yeah, that's a great phrase, and that it does explain what we're trying to do.
So let me read that one to you.
It's the longest of all seven resolutions.
And it's therefore be it resolved we do this.
Number one, rejecting the role of policeman of the world, ceasing military and covert intervention in the affairs of foreign countries, and using military force only when absolutely necessary to protect U.S. sovereignty, territory, and vital interests narrowly defined.
And that really, that answers our first whereas.
Let's narrowly define U.S. interests.
Let's not try to do everything.
And that alone, I think, would do a tremendous amount to just kind of reduce our military footprint on the world and make our own approach to our own security a lot more manageable.
Yeah.
All right.
And then you go on here, you talk about the global bases, and you want to reduce the budget, reduce the nuclear arsenal.
Very important point that you have included there.
Protect the Bill of Rights from the 21st century encroachments and all this.
It's really great.
But now, what exactly is the point?
And I'll break that down in two ways.
You have who all signing on to this thing, and then it's a push exactly to do what.
Who are you petitioning here, and what is it you're trying to get them to do?
We're trying to move the needle on national foreign policy, and we understand that doesn't happen until you get legislators at a high level looking at this and thinking about it.
So ultimately, our target is the U.S. Congress.
And we've had a little luck of at least flipping a copy underneath the door, so to speak.
But we've got a long way to go on that.
And the idea behind getting all the signatures we've got is just to build credibility for it, really.
When you get heavy hitters from both sides of the aisle, people who are very respected in the foreign policy community signing on to this, that gives credibility.
And really what we want to try to do is distill everything that we felt was worth a hard push on trying to move the needle.
We wanted to distill that into one document, get as many people as we could at all levels, whether they had a big reputation behind their name or not, but especially if they did, to sign on to it and to get a national dialogue going on all this.
Yeah.
Well, now, so you do have some great ones.
You have Andrew Bacevich and Jacob Hornberger, Ivan Ehlen and David Vine.
I'm a big David Vine fan.
Colonel Wilkerson on here and some others.
But, you know, this is the really hard part, right, is how do you make this thing the one that all the different anti-war forces, which there are, you know, anti-war groups and think tanks and, you know, the libertarian groups on the different coasts and, you know, in Alabama and wherever, a lot of liberals and leftists, well, especially leftists who are really anti-war.
But how do you get all of those groups to form together into one group to support one big policy, one big intervention, to put it that way, against the Congress to get them to focus on this thing?
Because you got a great start, right?
You started from the very beginning as saying, what can we get these different factions to agree on at the core?
But now, so how do we grow it?
Well, you know, take a look at our list of endorsements and you'll see that we have made a very hard effort to not let us go down the path of getting endorsements for one group at the expense of another.
We've really tried to get a balanced set of endorsements across the field.
If you look at political endorsements, we've gotten factions of all four parties to sign on to this.
If you look at, you know, candidates we've sent this to, we've got a number of candidates for the Senate and for Congress, you know, both in the last cycle and now we're starting to get a few from this cycle, who have signed on to this.
And we don't discriminate in the least.
We send this out to everyone, Republican, Libertarian, Green and Democrat alike.
And that's, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day, but we're working on this one step at a time, one organization at a time, one endorser at a time.
And like I say, we'll take that to any level.
If anyone who's listening to this wants to endorse it, there's a link on our page to do that.
Hey, people keep telling me, man, you've got great show notes on your show nowadays.
And that's all thanks to Damon, who's doing the great editing and posting of the interviews.
So everybody make sure and check out, even if you're just signed up to the podcast feed, make sure and check out the entries at libertarianinstitute.org and at scotthorton.org for all the great show notes.
He's doing a really great job on that.
Now, here's the sponsors of the show that makes the show possible.
So you should help to make them possible.
That's Zencash, zensystem.io, a great new digital currency.
It's also a secure messaging app and all this great stuff.
You can read all about it, zensystem.io.
And then Mike Swanson is really my best sponsor.
And in two ways here, The War State, first of all, which is a great history of the rise of the military industrial complex after World War II.
And then also his investment advice informed by great libertarian economic theory.
That's all at wallstreetwindow.com.
And now when you follow his investment advice, which I'm sure includes in precious metals.
And so what you want to do is go to Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
That's rrbi.co, rrbi.co for your gold, silver, platinum or palladium.
And if you buy with Bitcoin, there's no premium at all.
That's rrbi.co for Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
And then, of course, get your anti-government propaganda at libertystickers.com.
New art and a brand new website coming soon.
And speaking of brand new websites, if you want a brand new website, a 2018 model, badass new website, then you just go to expanddesigns.com slash scott and you'll save 500 bucks.
Well, you know, it's a funny thing.
You have, I think, probably super majorities if you ask about in the polls, when they ask about Afghanistan or Iraq or any of the particular wars.
People want home.
Left, right and regular town and country and everybody.
All different colors and everyone's pretty much sick of this.
But it's hard to get them to really prioritize it as the most important thing because, you know, as Luke Skywalker says, it's such a long way from here.
But actually, it's really not.
You know, as you're saying, there are a lot of costs to the way we live here and our society here at home as a result of all this destruction that our government wrecks overseas.
So, you know, well, certainly I wish you the best of luck with this and I'll try to help support it too as best I can.
I'll try to put up a blog about it at antiwar.com and that kind of thing too, foreignpolicyalliance.org.
And for everybody listening who, you know somebody, you know somebody who maybe you could get them interested in this and you think they'd be a good addition, maybe do your part.
Professors, politicians, you know, writers, think tank runners and whoever else.
You can certainly put down the Libertarian Institute if you're interested in that.
Absolutely.
And hey, thanks for having me on.
And, you know, really this is just trying to establish a national dialogue on the thing.
You're absolutely right.
This is not something that people talk about every day unless something pops up in the news.
And, you know, you know how the news cycle goes.
You know, whether it's a big foreign thing like the latest thing going on in Korea or the latest domestic thing like this school shooting in Florida, the news cycle fades away after, you know, even a big story fades away after a couple weeks.
And so this is, you know, we're just trying to keep this in the minds of voters and citizens everywhere.
And, you know, that's what it takes to move the needle.
If it doesn't stick in your mind, if it doesn't become part of what you're trying to accomplish, you forget about it after a couple weeks and you talk about it and you feel good about it, but nothing really happens.
Yeah.
Well, listen, it is the most important thing and I really appreciate your effort to put it front and center here.
And it just seems like all the other things everybody wants to fight about, like we could have a great time fighting about all those things.
Once we end the empire first, isn't that the big emergency here?
Bring all the troops home and call off all this mass violence and permanent state of emergency.
And then, you know, we can worry about turning America into a libertarian society second.
First is just a normal society that's not, you know, completely like at PTSD levels of excitement over fake fears and internal hatreds and all this stuff.
It's just crazy what's going on.
So, anyway.
Well, that's part of it, too, because, you know, we don't want – the more informed people are about foreign policy issues, the less likely they are to be distracted by the latest fear-mongering tactics.
And we've seen this from both parties going way back.
You know, I can't help but notice the Cold War ended in 1991, and yet we're, in many respects, we're still kind of living in a fantasy world where it's still going on.
And, you know, just many little things like, why are we still in NATO?
You know, the Cold War ended.
And so, you know, there are other threats, but, again, they're exaggerated in such a way as to perpetuate the whole system that we erected to fight the Cold War.
You know, like building exotic new aircraft is not the way to fight something like ISIS, for example.
So, you know, again, we're just trying to educate people and get people to think about this.
When people think about this kind of issue, these issues, there's more awareness and less distraction.
All right.
Well, thanks again for your time, Jeff.
Appreciate it.
Hey, great to be with you, and I wish you all the best.
All right, you guys, that is Jeff Larson, and he's at ForeignPolicyAlliance.org.
Check out, they've got this great resolution.
They've already got a lot of great people signing it here.
Seems like it really could be the core of something important and new.
And boy, do we need it.
Multipartisan.
ForeignPolicyAlliance.org.
And you guys know me.
I'm at ScottHorton.org, iTunes, and Stitcher, YouTube.com, slash, ScottHortonShow, subscribe there.
AntiWar.com, and LibertarianInstitute.org, for the things I want you to read.
Fool's Errand.us, for my book, Fool's Errand.
Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter, at ScottHortonShow.
Thanks.
