Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, I got John Pfeffer on the line.
John Pfeffer, he's from Foreign Policy in Focus.
He wrote the book Splinterlands.
JohnPfeffer.com is his own website.
ForeignPolicyInFocus is fpif.org and you're the editor, right?
You're the boss of the thing there.
And also, oh yeah, he's got articles about Korea.
I lost my career.
Oh here, a Nobel for Donald Trump, funny.
We're going to talk about that and also the banality of Haspel.
I don't know, you choose which first.
I guess I would rather talk about Korea first, but you choose, John.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Good to talk to you.
Korea first sounds good to me.
All right, Korea.
So the Nobel Peace Prize for Donald Trump, it has been proposed, although I don't know exactly by who, but I guess I saw that being passed around in the media somewhere about whether he would get a Nobel Peace Prize for the deal that's not quite done yet, but I guess the theory would be on the condition that they actually succeed in finalizing a big peace deal with the North Koreans.
Would that really be so bad?
To give Donald Trump a Nobel Prize or to have a peace treaty between two Koreas?
I'm pretty sure I know how you think about the latter there.
But yeah, no, go ahead and give this creep credit for doing the right thing.
Maybe incentivize him to keep doing that.
It didn't work on Obama, but that kind of flattery might really work on him.
A gold medal, you know?
There's no question that flattery works with Donald Trump.
However, you know, I think there is an expectation somehow that Donald Trump would somehow be committed to following up on Korean peace, Korean reunification if he were to be given a Nobel Peace Prize.
And I think that's naive.
Donald Trump only does things when it behooves him to do so.
And he certainly turns on the dime when he feels like doing so as well.
Yeah.
So personally, I think it demeans the Nobel Peace Prize to give it to someone like Donald Trump, though the caveat being that it has been demeaned in the past by having been given to people like Henry Kissinger.
But nonetheless, we always strive to improve, to make institutions better.
And I don't think giving Donald Trump a Nobel Peace Prize is a step in the right direction, either for peace or for the Nobel.
As for whether he deserves it, I mean, as you point out, nothing actually has happened yet on his watch in terms of U.S.-North Korean relations.
Certainly, North Korea has done a number of things.
North and South Korea have done a number of things.
But so far, the only thing that Donald Trump has done is made a kind of instinctive decision to meet with Kim Jong-un of North Korea.
And that is a good thing.
Don't get me wrong.
I think that's a fantastic move on his part.
But it hasn't actually led to anything specifically.
Certainly, the United States hasn't made any moves toward greater peace between the two countries or in the region.
Yeah, no, I mean, and you make a good point in the article that here he's been such a bully about North Korea all this time that maybe this would reinforce that real bad behavior there, that, yeah, he got a deal, but only after raising the stakes so high and putting all these lives in jeopardy unnecessarily, when he could have just made peace in the first place.
It's not like he's going about this in the very best way.
So, I mean, and the prize itself is beside the point.
The real point here is peace in Korea.
And, you know, I don't know.
I kind of like when Rand Paul said, yeah, let's do a military parade.
I'm totally with you.
You want to do a parade?
Let's bring them home from Afghanistan, and then we'll do a parade.
And we'll call it Afghan Good Enough, just like the Obama guys, right?
We'll just say, you know what?
We're calling this one a victory.
At least it's over now.
Who cares what you call it?
Let's pretend it never happened and just move on with our lives somehow.
Get them the hell out of there.
Who cares what you call it, right?
So, you know, they gave a Nobel to Obama because he gave half of a good speech about nukes.
If anybody listened to the second half of his nuke speech there in Prague, it was actually horrible.
And then he lived that way for eight years.
But he said some nice stuff about one day giving up the nukes, like in the Nonproliferation Treaty we signed generations ago.
And so, you know, they gave him a peace prize over that.
And then he went on to kill hundreds of thousands of people all across the globe.
So, you know, as you say, it was already cheap and enough by Henry Kissinger before.
I don't know.
Seems like maybe hit him on the head with it and then hang it around his neck.
I don't know.
But you make a good point, which is that, you know, Trump believes that his strategy has worked with respect to North Korea.
In other words, Hey, that was your good point that I noticed.
Sorry, go ahead.
But in fact, you know, the truth of the matter is that Donald Trump's actions is both his rhetorical, you know, apocalyptic tone toward North Korea, but also, you know, ratcheting up sanctions, etc.has had, of course, some effect.
Obviously, it would be ridiculous to say it has had no effect.
But the more important changes have taken place both within North Korea and in South Korea that have brought about the current changes.
So, you know, the reason Kim Jong-un is coming to the table is because he feels relatively confident about his nuclear program and also because he feels considerably more confident about the control he wields politically in Pyongyang.
But of course, the most important thing is the change in leadership in South Korea that took place last year, and the emergence of Moon Jae-in.
And, you know, the idea that somehow this hardline policy toward North Korea has produced the current results is extraordinarily dangerous position because of course, what very well may happen if the meeting doesn't go particularly well between Trump and Kim in Singapore in June, is that Trump will simply go back to the earlier position and say, look, this is what brought North Korea to the table.
And obviously, we need to go up a notch in order to get a successful resolution of this crisis.
And that's the worst kind of outcome that could happen.
Yeah.
Well, so, yeah, I mean, that's the thing about this.
And, you know, I'm kind of mad at all the skeptics, you know, even Robert Kelly, who I really like for debunking lies about certainly Iran and I think North Korea.
Oh, he debunked lies about the Syria reactor, a really great guy, very useful guy so far.
But he and a lot of others, you know, kind of North Korea wonks just kind of, you know, as the Brits say, taking the piss out of the whole idea that we could have a deal like this because the stakes are way too high for either side to ever agree to.
And they're just completely doomsaying it.
But I don't know.
I'm really hopeful just because it seems like the attitude of the new-ish young dictator in the North there, you know, really seems positive.
You know, they may say the hell out of it and say, oh, he's just playing you and it's all a scam and it's a brilliant chess game and this kind of thing.
But I don't know.
It seems like, you know, Moon and Kim both are pretty determined to go ahead and really move forward here, not just in ceremonies, but in actual process, right?
Absolutely.
I mean, it is easy to be skeptical.
I mean, after all, it's not a particularly easy task to achieve complete nuclear disarmament in North Korea.
I mean, North Korea has a nuclear program, a nuclear weapons program for very good reasons from its point of view.
And that is it wants to prevent an attack from the outside.
And it wants, you know, greater legitimacy on the world stage and believes that nuclear weapons provide it with that legitimacy.
So why on earth would they give up that bargaining chip, especially since it's really the only bargaining chip they have?
And, you know, they even gave back the, uh, return the three American, Korean American hostages, um, or detainees.
Uh, so, you know, they're basically saying, look, the, the one thing we have is our nuclear program.
Um, so it's difficult to imagine North Korea just saying, okay, we'll accept some kind of a peace guarantee, either in the form of a peace treaty that finally ends the Korean war or some kind of other security guarantee that the United States or some other country, set of countries won't attack North Korea.
It's hard to imagine that North Korea will accept simply words on paper, uh, and, and then get rid of its nukes accordingly.
My guess is that they're in it for, uh, the long haul.
In other words, they imagine that nuclear disarmament could take place, uh, but won't take place tomorrow.
It'll take place over a longer period of time, perhaps a decade or more.
Um, and you know, from South Korea's point of view, that's fine because, you know, the idea that reunification, which is in some sense, uh, connected to disarmament, the idea that reunification would happen tomorrow, uh, would be incredibly destabilizing for South Korean society.
Uh, in, in the case of a large number of North Koreans coming to South Korea or the economic disruption of trying to, um, accommodate a country, which is, uh, you know, considerably poor than South Korea.
So the idea that reunification would take place over the long term is perfectly acceptable.
I think for the Moon Jae-in government, it's really just the United States, which has a different kind of timeline in, in, in its, in its head or the Trump administration.
And that is, you know, disarmament tomorrow.
So, uh, I don't think that, uh, uh, that is a likely outcome from the Singapore meeting or even for any meetings that take place over the next six to 12 months.
It's a question of how the Trump administration spins that and how the U S media and the Korea watching community, uh, analyze that.
Hey, y'all Scott here.
Here's how to support the show.
Uh, patreon.com slash Scott Horton show.
If you want to donate per interview, um, and also scotthorton.org slash donate, uh, anyone who donates $20 gets a copy of the audio book of fool's errand.
Anyone who donates $50, that'll get you a signed copy of the paperback in the mail there.
And anyone who donates a hundred dollars gets either a QR code commodity disc or a lifetime subscription.
Now only for $100, not to a lifetime subscription to listen and think audio books, uh, libertarian audio books, listen and think.com there.
So check out all that stuff.
And of course we take all your different digital currencies, especially Zen cash and all the different kinds of Bitcoins and whatever's, uh, are all there at scotthorton.org slash donate and, um, uh, get the book fool's errand, uh, and give it a good review on Amazon.
If you read it and you liked it and review the show on, uh, you know, iTunes and Stitcher and that kind of thing if you want.
All right.
Thanks.
Well, and, and how much the North sticks with the narrative that yeah, denuclearization, you know, at some point as we continue to progress along this thing and not just because they've raised it themselves, they've, and they've even dropped the condition that they want to see us troops out.
But yeah, you know, it's funny cause, uh, you know, I have friend, uh, who's not that political of a guy, but just kind of a little bit aware who back before the invasion of Iraq was saying, you see how it is here.
We're setting the precedent that if you don't have nukes, we will invade you.
And we're, you know, uh, and here they have a deal with the IAEA and the, and the, um, you know, international inspectors and all of that to make sure they don't have a nuclear weapons program and we're messing all of that up.
And so look at all the deals.
I mean, they broke the nuclear deal with North Korea in 2002.
Uh, then they broke their nuclear deal.
They really had one already.
They pretended they didn't, but they had one already with Saddam Hussein.
Then they broke that, killed him.
Then they did the same thing in Libya.
And now they just broke the perfectly awesome nuclear deal with Iran, which we've talked about a million times on this show, I guess.
Um, and, uh, so now all of that, you know, doing that just on the eve of trying to hash this one out with the Koreans, it's really almost impossible to expect that they will really say, yeah, we'll give up every last nuke to you guys based on the word of one administration and the other.
And, you know, people, you know, rightly say Donald Trump is a winger on a lot of issues, but this has been a government of Clinton's and Bush's and this is how they do it.
You know, that's correct.
I mean, it is remarkable that, uh, the Trump administration somehow believes that canceling the Iran agreement or at least us participation in the Iran agreement will somehow even strengthen its hands going into a negotiation.
Yeah, exactly.
See, we play hard ball.
You better do what we say, but I could see how they would get an opposite take.
Uh, yeah, I mean, North Korea, of course, you know, there are two positions on this one that North Korea believes itself unique and therefore it doesn't really pay much attention to these other agreements.
The other position is in North Korea pays a lot of attention to these other agreements because it has looked at, uh, international precedents in order to kind of figure out what the U S position or us strategy is.
I think there's truth to both of those.
Uh, but it's impossible to, to, to make the argument that somehow, um, North Korea is going to ignore completely us, or I should say Trump administration's position on the Iran agreement.
Now, again, you know, uh, North Korea is smart enough to realize that the Trump administration is not, uh, the Chinese government.
It's not Xi Jinping.
It's not, you know, basically government for life.
Trump is not going to be there forever.
Um, they're going to be dealing with a different administration.
They perhaps imagine in two years, but at some point in the future.
So, you know, they're, they're negotiating with Trump because there is an opportunity.
Now they realize that Donald Trump is an unpredictable fellow when it comes to foreign policy.
He often goes against the foreign policy consensus.
This was a tremendous window of opportunity.
Uh, they seized it and they will go as far as they think they can go with this current administration, but they know they're for better or for worse.
They're going to have to deal with another crowd in Washington.
Um, and so they want to see what they can do now, put in place what they can put in place now, and then negotiate with the successor government later on.
Yeah.
Now, so even from the point of view of the empire, John, what does America have to lose if we ratchet down tensions, sign a real peace treaty, promise not to invade and stop practicing invading their country in this kind of thing, drop the hostile policy.
We lose nothing.
I mean, even if we were to withdraw 28,000 or so troops from South Korea, it's not a lot of, uh, firepower.
Um, it's not like we're going to do that.
But that of course was the fear that, that, uh, some have articulated that Trump is somehow going to make a deal with Kim Jong-un to withdraw us troops.
But even if we were to do that, it would, it's just a drop in the bucket in terms of our military presence in the region.
Um, you know, in, in terms of, you know, larger us footprint in Asia, I mean, we've been losing influence, uh, kind of progressively for several decades.
And in fact, the Pacific pivot that the Obama administration launched was an effort to reinsert the United States into the kind of geopolitical life of Asia, both economically and militarily.
Um, and of course, Donald Trump has basically reversed that first of all, by pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the grand free trade agreement that the Obama administration worked so hard to put in place along with a dozen other countries, but also militarily in terms of just not really paying much attention to this grand realignment of US forces in Asia.
I mean, the Trump administration hasn't really paid much attention to, for instance, South China Sea, uh, conflict hasn't really paid much attention to, um, issues further South involving Malaysia, Thailand, and so forth.
I mean, basically Donald Trump is focused on, uh, the Middle East.
He's focused on his friends, uh, his, his kind of powerful friends, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, uh, and so forth.
The rest has gone by the wayside.
So all of which is to say that a agreement between the United States and North Korea, peace treaty that would end the Korean war, uh, steps of reconciliation between North and South Korea, it would have absolutely or very little effect on the overall US, um, economic and military presence in the region.
If anything, the United States is ill-equipped to kind of take advantage of, you know, uh, of, uh, rapprochement in the region.
In other words, if there is an opportunity for investment in North Korea, if there's an opportunity for, uh, infrastructure development in North Korea, if there's an opportunity for greater regional integration because of greater North South cooperation in terms of rail connections, communication connections, et cetera, the United States is poorly placed to take advantage of that because basically, uh, the United States has been focused on other parts of the world, has been disproportionately putting its resources into military rather than economic issues.
And other countries, primarily China, are much better placed to take advantage of the new opportunities.
All right.
So, uh, the libertarian economist David Henderson, uh, did this study for Cato back, I think in, I think before the first Iraq war.
And then he did it again in the mid-1990s.
And there have been other follow-ups.
And with the bottom line basically being that we spend far more on supposedly securing Middle Eastern oil resources than we spend on Middle Eastern oil resources.
And it's just completely crazy.
And that the oil will come to market one way or the other anyway.
Even Bin Laden had joked to Abdel Barri Atwan that we can't drink it.
It'll be for sale on the open market, you know, and that was even if he was the King of Saudi Arabia, you know.
Um, but so same question for East Asia.
Seriously, who cares?
I mean, if, if the question really is securing the sea lanes, which the wide open Pacific ocean basically between here and China so that we can get all of our junk.
I mean, that just takes a couple of battleships, right?
So, uh, other than keeping admirals in their jabs, what's even the point of this, John, seriously?
Well, I guess, you know, speaking not from my perspective, but from say the Pentagon's perspective, uh, they are concerned about two things.
One would be choke points, not the, not the kind of wide open Pacific, uh, space, but choke points like the, um, Straits of Malaysia, Straits in Malaysia, um, which through which much of the oil that fuels the Chinese economy, the South Korean economy, the Japanese economy flows.
Um, these are countries that don't really have oil and therefore they're, they remain highly dependent on Middle East oil.
Um, and, uh, so that's, that's the concern from the Pentagon.
If, you know, the Chinese were to somehow seize control of that, then they would be able to ransom, um, or hold hostage, uh, our allies.
And so that's one Pentagon perspective.
Now, what they really mean is they want to be able to close those Straits and cut off the Chinese.
Well, there, that is a perspective.
I mean, you know, the, the kind of containment of China, not just at the choke points, but throughout the so-called East Asian literal has been uppermost in the Pentagon's mind for decades.
Um, but yes, as you know, as we look at the, you know, China, although, you know, to be honest with you, frankly, it's too late for the Pentagon to do something like that because, you know, China is a global economy, uh, that rivals, uh, and certainly will soon out rival the United States.
Um, but more specifically, it is dominant in, in Asia.
It is the dominant trade partner for even our allies.
And they can just buy all their hydrocarbons from Russia.
We can't cut them off at that border.
It would be tough, difficult.
And of course they've been putting enormous resources into sustainable energy, wind power, solar, and so forth.
So they're doing a much better job, for instance, than we are, uh, or Japan or South Korea in weaning itself from, uh, dependency on oil.
So, uh, so that's absolutely true.
And, you know, if they, as you said, if they, they needed to, they prepared their relationship sufficiently with Russia to, uh, to get natural gas or oil from that part of the world.
Um, so that's one thing.
The second thing from the Pentagon's perspective is, uh, addressing, um, the asymmetrical threats in the region.
Uh, and so it's asymmetrical threats from their point of view has been, have been North Korea, number one, not just the possibility of North Korea, say attacking South Korea, which is less and less likely, but, uh, the possibility of North Korea collapsing and, uh, there being a bunch of loose nukes floating around that have to be secured.
So that has been a rationale, for instance, for US military presence in Okinawa, uh, close enough to be able to respond to a contingency as they call it on the Korean peninsula.
Um, and, but other kind of asymmetrical threats, whether it be, um, cyber threats from China or terrorism threats from the Southern part of, of East Asia, uh, from the Philippines or Thailand or Malaysia.
Um, so that's the Pentagon's perspective, um, less and less focused on what had been the kind of cold war concerns.
And that is some kind of a, um, conventional attack across the DMZ in which North Korea tries to invade South Korea.
And that certainly was the foremost consideration of the Pentagon for much of the cold war, but that kind of a threat is no longer the one that, that motivates or shapes, uh, the Pentagon's thinking in the region.
All right.
So let's talk about the new CIA director.
Probably.
I mean, I guess there's a chance that she'll be stopped, but it doesn't look like it.
So, uh, Gina Haspel, the banality of Haspel, uh, she's just a, a work a day Eichmann up there getting her job done, huh?
Her jab.
My argument for in this piece was, you know, of course, uh, I'm unhappy with, uh, with her positions during the George W. Bush administration and her involvement in the torture policy or, you know, heading up a black site in Thailand, uh, involved in these, uh, enhanced interrogation techniques as they were euphemistically called during those years, as well as, uh, her involvement in destroying the evidence of, uh, the use of torture at that black site.
Um, of course I'm upset with that, but, um, my larger concern is that, you know, she is basically a company woman.
She's, you know, very experienced, et cetera, et cetera.
And therein lies, uh, the, the reason to, to oppose her.
What we need at the CIA is someone like Ben Carson, Scott through it.
Someone in other words, who is kind of antithetically opposed to the mission of the organization.
How about me?
I'll do it.
Or you Scott, you would be calling the Marines, the airstrike on Langley on my own headquarters.
So there you go.
Someone like you follow the laser designator boys.
Okay.
And you know, this is what, to a certain extent we were led to expect by, uh, Donald Trump that he would across the board, uh, be hiring people who go up against the foreign policy consensus, the domestic consensus, um, who are unafraid to take their agencies in completely different directions, even U-turns.
Uh, but of course there's a national security exception on this, on this issue.
So we don't see in the CIA or the Pentagon, um, or the national security advisor at the NSC.
Uh, we don't see people who are antithetical, uh, in their perspective to the organization they're heading up.
Rather you see, uh, people who are kind of, have been committed to the mission of those organizations, the CIA, the Pentagon for their entire professional career.
So what's the problem?
They know what they're doing.
Do they Scott?
Well, I'm afraid that they do, but you know, we're, you know, best case scenario, they don't know what they're doing.
Yes.
Well, I mean, it's interesting.
There was a, there was a, I think it was in the post, I forget which op-ed columnist said, thank God for Gina Haspel because the alternative would have been Tom Cotton.
And yeah, I mean, you know what?
Yeah.
Hey, I'm not, I'm no big fan of Tom Cotton.
This is a McMaster Bolton question here too.
Yeah.
Same thing.
Essentially Tillerson Pompeo is from bad to worse.
Frying pan fire three in a row.
That is the, those are the choices that are being put before us.
And Cotton would be sure to be confirmed.
He's in the Senate himself right now.
And in good standing, apparently he's no Chuck Hagel who they hated for being slightly less worse than the rest of them.
Well, he's, he's very, very much unliked in the Senate apparently because of his abrasive conduct.
But anyway.
Oh really?
Well, that's good.
I mean, does it limit his power very much?
Well, he is somewhat of an outsider, but of course, you know, depending on what happens in the midterm elections and if you get enough from beast is in there, he may no longer be an outlier politically.
But in any case, the challenge, yes.
I mean, at a time like this, people will argue that we have enough unpredictability in the White House.
It's good to have people who are adults who can provide adult supervision for the infant in the Oval Office.
But in general, I'm not particularly persuaded by that.
We certainly did not see Rex Tillerson exert adult supervision.
Well, on some things, but not others, right?
It's funny the rhyme and reason to it, where he was worse than Trump on Syria.
Trump says, we're there just for ISIS.
And Tillerson comes out and says, nah, we're there for Hezbollah and Iran and Assad and Vladimir Putin.
And what?
But then he's the same guy that wanted to stay in the nuclear deal.
Well, that's true.
It's when the issue is the same issue, right?
The problem is the Ayatollah, whatever their problem is with him.
Well, the problem was that it wasn't the positions he took.
It was the amount of influence he had.
So, yes, he took a position to stay within the Iran nuclear deal, but ultimately he lost out on that, as did Mattis, who supported staying in.
So where the adults have provided supervision in ways that I or you would agree with, fundamentally they failed.
Hey, let me tell you about the sponsors of this show.
First of all, Mike Swanson.
He is the author of the great book, The War State, about the permanence of America's World War II military empire through the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the rise of the new right military industrial complex after World War II.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
And also, get his great investment advice to protect your financial future there at WallStreetWindow.com.
He has a great understanding of what the hell is going on in these financial markets.
WallStreetWindow.com.
Unless I know he'll tell you, you have to have at least some of your savings.
You must know.
Some of your savings, however much it is, you have to have metals.
So what you do is, you go to Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Gold, Silver, Platinum, Palladium.
They have a very small brokerage fee in order to process for you and get you the very best deal.
And if you buy with Bitcoin, there's no premium at all for your purchases of Gold, Silver, Platinum, Palladium.
So check those guys out.
Roberts and Brokerage, Inc. at rrbi.co.
You ever play baseball?
rrbi.co.
And as I mentioned, Zencash is a great new digital currency.
It's also an encrypted method of internet messaging and document transfer and all kinds of things for your business, for your secret conspiracies.
Zencash.com.
Check that out at zensystem.io.
You can read all about how it works, every last detail, of course, at zensystem.io.
And then there's this book about how to run your technology business like a libertarian.
It's called No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
And each of those is one word, three words.
Get it?
Yeah.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
It's by Hussain Badakhshani, and it's about how to run your business right in a libertarian way.
Libertystickers.com and Tom Woods Liberty Classroom.
If you like learning things, I'll get a commission if you sign up by way of the link on my website.
And listen, if you want a new... and the reason my website is down is my own broken servers.
But if you want a new good-looking website like the one I do have when it's up and running at scotthorton.org, then check out expanddesigns.com slash scott.
Expanddesigns.com slash scott, and you will save 500 bucks on your new website.
Yeah, well, I mean, they succeed only in the worst ways, right?
Like keeping us in Syria and expanding the mission there.
Correct.
But in none of the good ones.
That's Horton's Law.
Well, it's a it's a corollary to it.
Horton's Law is the politicians keep all of their bad promises and none of their good ones.
Right.
But this is the corollary to that.
Anyway, so listen, well, speaking of which, you have a prediction for Syria in terms of like, if I could narrow it down, America's occupation of Syrian Kurdistan in partnership with the Syrian Kurdish forces there.
Is this from now on?
That would not be my prediction.
I mean, my prediction would be escalation in this, these proxy wars.
And I mean, they're already ongoing, obviously, and have been in Syria, but the involvement or the greater conflict between Israel and Iran, that is the scarier development as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, the United States basically decided to stay in Syria in order to combat Iranian influence, partnering Netanyahu to push back the Iranians.
That's, you know, the, as far as I'm concerned, the nightmare scenario, not only for Syria, but for escalation in conflict with Iran more generally.
Yeah, you know, I'm not sure why.
And I'm just going with my gut here, not with what I know.
But it seems like, I mean, and the Iranians, they're just not in any position to really do anything.
They're accused of firing these missiles, but I don't know that.
And, you know, I saw one report where they said, we didn't fire any missiles.
Hell, we're not even in Syria, which, you know, I'm not saying that was honest, but I'm saying that their spin is to play it down and to try to avoid this conflict.
And it seems like the Israelis are trying really hard to pick a fight with them.
But they're in no position to wage a war against Israel in Syria.
So, you know, what are they supposed to do anyway, except lie there and take it, as a former Texas gubernatorial candidate put it once.
Yeah, Iran definitely doesn't want conflict with Israel.
What Israel's motivation is, is another question.
I mean, I think there are obviously some cautious people in the Israeli military that don't want an all out conflict with Iran.
But I think Netanyahu wants some pretext to go in and take out Iran's so-called nuclear weapons program.
I mean, Netanyahu believes there is one, even though there really hasn't been one since 2003.
But I think he wants a pretext to go in and just launch military attacks within Iran itself.
So that is, you know, again, that that's the nightmare scenario.
And you know what, by the time it really came to that Bush was, you know, coming down from that tough guy high and said no to Olmert, no to Dick Cheney.
And then obviously, Obama worked, eventually worked hard to get this nuclear deal to take the big fakest, the fakest but biggest pretext of the threat of their nuclear program off the table there so that to ratchet down the tension for war.
But now with the JCPOA canceled, and I guess they're still at least so far, they're playing it, the Iranians are playing it cool for their side.
They're not leaving the JCPOA, at least not yet.
And I really doubt, don't you, that they would leave the nonproliferation treaty and really try to start making nukes.
But then on the other hand, if Israel went ahead with a pretext or not, and started attacking them anyway, Donald Trump doesn't look like he's got the patient wisdom of George W. Bush at this point on this issue.
So he would really give him the go ahead, huh?
It's a it's a sad day when we are forced to acknowledge the prudence of George W.
Bush.
And you're right.
I mean, if we take that parallel to the current day, Trump has people around him who are perfectly comfortable supporting a war with Iran.
And I'm not rehabilitating Bush, that was sarcasm, everybody, by the way.
But there was that one time Cheney wanted him to fight Russia in the southern Caucasus mountains.
And he was like, nah.
So in those in some circumstances, Bush was less worse than his advisors on some things.
But in this case, you know, with with Bolton and Pompeo egging him on, there's a very good chance that that Trump would would give the OK to God knows what.
You know, I saw this clip of him, I guess it's a week and a half ago or so now or something where he was saying, oh, Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran in Syria, Iran in Iraq, Iran in Yemen.
Everything they do is bad.
They support terrorism everywhere.
Iran, Iran, Iran, that evil Ayatollah, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, I mean, what he really meant to say was, well, I just, you know, was briefed by my advisors.
And these are the facts of life as they read them to me.
It's all I know because he can't read.
He doesn't really know anything.
It used to be he would kind of get it that like, yeah, but wasn't it the Saudis and their guys that attacked us?
You know, I mean, he did.
He knew enough.
And I guess Pompeo went along with this, too, because he was the head of the CIA at the time.
And Trump knew enough to call off the CIA support for the jihadists in Syria, at least.
So he can tell the difference between, you know, Al-Qaeda in Iraq or the Al-Nusra Front on one side and Iran and Hezbollah on the other, at least in some circumstances.
But he just, you know, it's part of him being so stupid is that he's so easy to push around, apparently, that he can just turn right around and say, yeah, if Netanyahu says that Hezbollah, not Al-Qaeda is the enemy, then I guess they are.
Well, I don't I wouldn't say he's necessarily stupid or he doesn't read, although those are very good possibilities, but rather that everything is personalistic for him.
It's a question of who he likes and who he doesn't like.
He gets along with Netanyahu.
And so whatever Netanyahu tells him, they'll accept.
He gets along now with Kim Jong Un, it seems.
So, you know, Kim Jong Un treated those three detainees excellently, although, you know, there's absolutely no reason to believe that Xi Jinping, you know, the head of a communist government, the largest in the world, great guy.
The fact that he, you know, is now, you know, leader for life in China.
We should look into that here, he says, Donald Trump says.
So all of it is personalistic.
And to a certain extent, again, there lie opportunities.
You know, if you manage to get on his good side, then suddenly there's a geopolitical opening.
But if you are cast forever on the other side, like if he has absolutely no relationship with Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, or Javad Zarif, the foreign minister, then forget about it.
There is no possibility for any kind of rapprochement with Iran.
Right, man.
Well, it seems like it'd be just as easy to send Pompeo to Tehran as it was to send him to Pyongyang for crying out loud, right?
If Obama did that, I was joking the other day on something, the pilots on Air Force One, they might have just left him there and come home, right, if Obama tried to go to Tehran.
But Donald Trump, he could do it.
He could go to Tehran and make peace.
He could go to Beijing, go to Moscow, and just say, look, you know, we don't want to fight with anybody anymore.
I said, he believes that in this military Keynesianism, where there's no better jobs program than making bombers and this kind of crap.
And he completely is convinced of that, for whatever personal reasons, as you say.
So, yeah, that's going to be a pretty hard trap to get us out of, you know, bad, bad economics there.
And it's interesting, right, because that's the business he's in, is not making weapons, but it's a very kind of crony-ite business based on, you know, inflationary money all the time, and a lot of eminent domain, and a lot of graft, especially, I guess, in New York, right?
It's a very statist business that he's in, so he sees business in very political terms always anyway, you know?
Absolutely.
I mean, it doesn't really matter to him so much, you know, what the weapons are produced for, and it just matters that they are produced.
He likes the idea that he is upping the military budget, so he can say, you know, I've increased it by X percent, or we have doubled the number of nuclear weapons we have, or what have you.
I mean, it's not yoked to any particular military or geopolitical strategy.
Nothing he does is connected to what we would call strategy.
So, you know, but that doesn't mean there isn't strategy out there.
I mean, obviously, the Pentagon has it strategizing.
It's just we've never seen quite such a disconnect between the agencies that develop the strategies, both domestically and foreign policy, and the president, who does whatever he feels like doing, and then it's only after the fact that everyone scrambles to kind of insert the president's action into some larger picture.
Greer Right.
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
I'm sure you could find some psychologists who would agree with you.
That's the way that these opinions are formed.
You know, the plugging in of the variables into everybody's preconceived equations.
I guess mine is that I think he wants to do this Korea thing, for example, so he can rub it in the Democrats' face that, you know, Obama basically did nothing or worse on Korea for eight years, and I got peace in just a year and a half, and so how do you like me now?
Which is a really good way to run into the midterms, you know?
Got to say, if he could really sign a substantial peace agreement, he'd beat Trump the great for a day, the way Obama was on the Iran nuclear deal.
I think that he definitely has this perspective that it's important to prove to everyone that he's better than Obama and better than previous presidents as well, especially when you have polls coming out of historians saying that Trump is the worst American president ever.
So this certainly counters that received notion.
Darrell Bock Yeah, I don't know.
He hasn't killed a million people yet.
Are we not going by skull count?
I always have a different standard for presidential greatness than others, but okay.
Yeah, listen, I'm sorry I kept you way too long, John.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
John Feffer Thank you.
I appreciate the opportunity.
Darrell Bock All right, you guys, that's the great John Feffer.
He's over there at foreignpolicyandfocus.org, the banality of Haspel, the career CIA torturer, murderer.
Well, he doesn't call her that.
That was me.
Sorry.
And then, yeah, you can find virtually everything they run over at FPIF.
We reprint at antiwar.com.
They have tons of great stuff and tons of great writers there, so check them out.
And also, check out his books, including Splinterlands and his website, johnfeffer.com.
All right, so you guys know the deal, foolsaron.us for the book, scotthorton.org and youtube.com slash scotthortonshow for all the interviews, 4,500 of them now going back to 2003 for you there.
Read what I want you to read at antiwar.com and at libertarianinstitute.org and follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
