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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, he died.
We ain't killing their 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 you guys, introducing the great Ted Galen Carpenter.
My favorite guy at Cato.
Also Doug Bandow and Trevor Thrall and John Glazer and everybody over there in the foreign policy department at Cato, but especially Ted Galen Carpenter.
Welcome back to the show, Ted.
How are you doing?
Oh, thanks, Scott.
Great to be back.
Great to have you here.
You do such great stuff.
Here's one at Cato.org and this originally appeared at the National Interest.
Will Trump revert to gunboat diplomacy in Latin America?
And it's a really great piece because it starts off, of course, with Donald Trump's threats against Venezuela, but also it's got a lot of great history to talk about and all kinds of things in there.
First of all, on Venezuela, as you say here, it was reported that Trump asked his National Security Council to look into a contingency plan for invading Venezuela.
Now, is that just the art of the deal or what's going on with that?
It's hard to tell, of course, with Trump how much is bluff on anything and how much is real substance, but in this case, I think there probably is substance.
It's not just Trump who is concerned, it's his entire foreign policy team who is concerned about the growing disorder in Venezuela and the increasing authoritarianism of President Maduro.
So, I would assume that the Pentagon has been involved in doing some contingency planning even before Trump apparently gave that explicit instruction.
And by the way, you and I are libertarians and we get it about how you can only print so much money, dummy.
And so, what would you expect from a socialist economy like Venezuela?
But on the other hand, I'm very suspicious, Ted, about the American empire here and the CIA, the NED, for that matter, our central bank or anyone else who has influence over the economy of a smaller nation like Venezuela.
And I wonder whether you think there are any dirty tricks being played by the U.S., so-called soft power or smart power, as Hillary Clinton would say, being used against Venezuela to destabilize their economy and their government there.
Well, certainly that's one of the charges that the Venezuelan government is making, and it's really hard to have even the slightest sympathy for the so-called democratic socialist government in Venezuela.
They have not only thoroughly messed up the economy, I mean, you have to be unbelievably incompetent to end up with a 1 million percent inflation rate.
And beyond the economic incompetence, of course, is the growing authoritarianism, the suppression of demonstrations, of the independent press, the jailing of political opponents, and apparently the torture of political opponents.
That being said, the United States has an awfully ugly history of intervening either with direct military forces or with CIA operations in Latin America.
And it certainly would not be a surprise if those agencies are up to their usual tricks with regard to Venezuela and another country to watch, Nicaragua, which is melting down in much the same way that Venezuela has under the leftist government of Daniel Ortega.
Ortega is a long-time adversary of the United States, so it would not come as a surprise if the CIA and its associates were involved in trying to undermine that government as well.
Well, now, so what exactly could they do to disrupt their economy?
I mean, when you talk about a million percent inflation rate, obviously the lion's share of that responsibility has got to be on their own government, you know, monetizing debt or whatever it is that they're doing to expand their monetary base so greatly.
But what about the effect of American sanctions?
It doesn't really make sense that the Americans would be counterfeiting to dilute their currency, right?
They have other avenues of helping problems like that along.
Yeah.
Now, keep in mind, President Obama declared that Venezuela was a national security threat.
So that authorizes a number of actions that can be taken, not only direct sanctions, but the indirect pressure, for example, on foreign banks, do not lend the Maduro government or Venezuelan businesses, for that matter.
Don't lend them money.
That can have an adverse effect on the economy.
But I agree with you.
I think the overwhelming lion's share of the blame for the economic meltdown in Venezuela is the responsibility of the socialist government there and the utterly idiotic policies it has pursued for years.
You know, it seems kind of strange to me, Ted, that, you know, here's this country and I guess this is sort of the cliché, that here's this country awash in oil wealth.
As Greg Palast, he's a progressive, but he studied under Milton Friedman, so he may be no Austrian, but he understands economics from different points of view.
And he's pointed out that in Venezuela, the oil was always owned by the government there.
It's not that Chavez nationalized the oil.
It was always owned by the government, the same way it is in Alaska, kind of thing.
And it used to be that only the very richest and whitest people were the beneficiaries of the socialism there.
In other words, it was a fascist state.
And then Chavez came and said, well, look, I want to spread this same wealth around and build some hospitals and build some schools and build some low-income housing for the Mayans and this kind of thing, which, you know, is not free market paradise as you and I would have it.
But it doesn't sound like it's literally more commie than the previous system.
It's just, who is benefiting from this wealth?
So why is it that it's worked out so badly, when after all, they're still selling us oil all day long and refining it at the Koch Brothers factory down there in Corpus Christi?
I think there are two reasons for why it became so much worse over the last two decades.
And keep in mind, on a per capita basis, Venezuela was the wealthiest country in South America at the beginning of this century.
The collapse has been absolutely breathtaking.
And I think for two reasons.
One is that the level of corruption, and this is kind of hard to believe, given the history of Venezuela, has gotten even worse under the socialist government.
Secondly, because of the policies to promote greater egalitarianism, at least that was the cover story, the tax burdens have gone up massively, particularly on middle-class and upper-class families.
What you've had is a massive exodus of wealth from that country, where people who had the ability to stash their earnings in foreign banks did so.
And you've had an exodus of people.
Some of the most talented people in Venezuela found the situation increasingly unbearable, and went to the U.S. or to other destinations.
So it's a loss of human capital, a loss of financial capital, and that has caused the downward economic spiral.
And then, so, now, you mentioned the million percent inflation rate.
I mean, we hear all these stories about people eating pets and eating zoo animals and riots everywhere and this and that.
Is it all coming to a head, or are they just going to keep coming on?
I guess there was an assassination attempt against Maduro last week, a few days ago.
Supposedly.
I don't know whether that was a genuine attempt.
If so, who was behind it?
Maduro initially blamed neighboring Colombia, because Venezuelan and Colombia have had some nasty tensions over the past few years.
It's possible a rebel organization made an assassination attempt.
It's also possible this could be the Venezuelan version of the Reichstag fire to justify even more repressive measures, and this whole thing was staged by Maduro himself.
We simply don't know at this point.
But the situation is getting dramatically worse.
Demonstrations are becoming larger and more angry against the government, and the government crackdown is getting much, much worse.
More and more and more political opponents being jailed.
One would think at some point this explodes.
Either the military overthrows Maduro, quite possibly with U.S. encouragement, if not active assistance, or the country degenerates into civil war.
Now, either way, the Trump administration, if it wants to seize the opportunity, certainly has the option of a direct U.S. military intervention.
My guess is the administration would prefer indirect means, probably working through the CIA, working through allied elements inside Venezuela.
The direct military intervention would likely be a last resort, if those other options prove insufficient.
Well, so here's the thing, though, is, and I guess they find themselves between a rock and a hard place in all this, geez, prices keep rising, we better print more money so we can afford how expensive everything is now, or whatever.
But when you get to a certain point, even a commie like Maduro has got to recognize that they have to stop printing money.
They have to let these bad debts liquidate.
They have to lick inflation, or they're just digging themselves a deeper and deeper pit.
How could they possibly let it get to such Zimbabwe-type levels, and especially, again, when they still have oil to sell in exchange for real wealth?
Well, you, I think, put your finger on the problem itself.
Zimbabwe did the same thing, the same self-destructive approach.
There have been other governments throughout history that have done the same thing, even though rational analysis would seem to dictate that they would have to stop just for political survival, if nothing else.
But they feel that leaders like Maduro feel that they're riding the back of a tiger.
They can't let go.
If they adopt policies that deflate what has been going on, the risk of revolution actually increases in the short term.
They're not willing to take that chance.
So I'm afraid they're going to go down the rabbit hole of total economic destruction before they have the wisdom to try to reverse policies.
I hope I'm wrong, because the suffering that the people of Venezuela are experiencing now is truly, truly awful.
And to imagine that getting worse is something that I really don't want to contemplate.
Yeah.
All right, well, so now, in your article here, again, it's called, Will Trump Revert to Gumboat Diplomacy in Latin America?
You go through and give us a little bit of a refresher course on previous American intervention down there.
I guess going back to the days of Smedley Butler.
So can you give us a little bit of a history lesson here about, you know, because this is important for us to learn, but also to understand the perspective of people in countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, et cetera, about what it means to have this American superpower looming over them from the North in this way.
Well, it always amuses me when U.S. officials speak of the illegitimacy of other countries interfering in their neighbors' affairs and so on.
Of course, we get that more most recently with regard to allegations about Russian interference in Ukraine and so on.
The United States has a long history of either direct military intervention, which was the norm really between the Spanish-American War in 1898 and Franklin Roosevelt's declaration of the so-called good neighbor policy in 1933.
But except for a brief pause during the 1930s and 1940s, all that really changed was that the U.S. used direct military intervention less frequently.
We didn't abandon it, but it became less frequent and relied more on CIA subversion.
So you get the CIA overthrowing the government of Guatemala in 1954.
You have mischief with regard to Haiti and other countries.
Certainly evidence of CIA efforts to overthrow Chile's leftist government under Salvador Allende.
But the direct military intervention has never disappeared.
I mean, we had U.S. troops going ashore in the Dominican Republic in 1965, in Grenada in 1983.
We threatened to do that in Haiti in 1994.
And this policy has not really changed, the overthrow of the government of Panama in 1989.
So this isn't just ancient history.
This is an option that remains available to U.S. policymakers even now.
And the idea of interfering in the internal affairs of Latin American countries does not really seem to have disappeared at all.
I think the underlying motive is still there.
The underlying willingness is still there.
The only question seems to be which tactic to use.
Yeah.
You know, I'll tell you an anecdote here.
I like telling sometimes.
I knew a guy who right after September 11th, I saw him and he told me that he was down in Brazil.
I forget if he was in Sao Paulo or in Rio de Janeiro, but he described the scene as sort of like an old movie where there's breaking news and everybody gathers around on the sidewalk to watch the TV in the department store window kind of thing.
And so there they all were gathered around on the sidewalk watching the towers be attacked on television.
And he said no one was really cheering or clapping or anything, but they were doing that sort of quiet little close to the chest little fist pump and muttering things to themselves like, yeah, take that you sons of bitches.
Now you know what it's like.
And I just thought, you know, that was so instructive because, you know, I've read my Chomsky so I knew what he was talking about.
I bet you 99.999% of Americans would just be appalled by that and would say, what could the Brazilians possibly have against the United States?
What have we ever done to them?
Prop up a fascist murderous dictatorship over them for decades or something like that?
Yeah, something like that.
And a series of such dictatorships in a lot of Latin American countries.
I think one of the more shameful episodes occurred during the Reagan administration when Jimmy Carter and his people, at least to their credit, officially raised the human rights issue and that they were willing to criticize authoritarian allies of the United States.
When Reagan was elected, Secretary of State Alexander Haig held a meeting just like a week or so after taking office with leaders of the Argentine Junta.
This is a group that committed massive human rights violations.
But he assured them, hey, you have heard your last lecture from the United States on human rights.
That was like giving them a green light, go ahead and treat your people any way you like, no matter how brutal.
This was the prevailing U.S. attitude for decades with regard to Latin America, and for that matter, many other areas of the world.
Lou Innocent and I published a book a couple years ago called Perilous Partners, and it dealt with America's alliances with authoritarian rulers, pretty much from the Second World War forward, and the unbelievably ugly associations with people like the dictators of South Korea, with Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, with Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zaire, and so many, many others around the world.
And that policy, unfortunately, has not faded very much.
Consider the relationship of the United States with the Saudi royal family.
That gives you an idea of how committed U.S. leaders are to promoting freedom and democracy and respecting those values, only when it's convenient for U.S. policy.
Right.
All right, so now talk to us a little bit about what's going on in Nicaragua.
You mentioned Daniel Ortega, which brings up the Sandinistas and Ronald Reagan's dirty wars down in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s.
So Ortega, he was actually elected in the beginning of this century, right?
Yeah, I think most... he came back into power.
He was out of power from the election in 1990 until, I believe it was 2004, I could be wrong about that date, but that's close.
Somewhere around there, anyway.
And then he has been reelected twice, again, with elections that probably would not meet standards of being free and fair.
But he has been reelected, again, typical socialist policies that have caused highly unpleasant economic effects, rising domestic opposition, some huge demonstrations against the government, and the security forces cracking down on those demonstrators, with most recently several dozen people being killed in one of the demonstrations.
So it's a very volatile situation.
Again, the Trump administration has made it known that it does not like Mr. Ortega, does not like its policies.
And again, this would be another potential arena for either CIA subversion to get rid of that government, or conceivably a direct military intervention to overthrow the government.
That's another one where we need to be watching.
Did you see the recent report by Max Blumenthal, where he went down there and talked to Ortega, and he said this is all CIA plot against him and all that?
I thought, eh, he may be right.
It's possible, but again, there is genuine domestic opposition against Ortega, just as there is in Venezuela against Maduro.
Is the CIA exploiting that?
I would think very likely.
As the CIA creating that out of whole cloth?
No.
Again, incompetent and often brutal policies by the incumbent government is generating plenty of opposition on their own.
Yeah.
Yeah, I sure wouldn't doubt it.
I guess the claim there was that the death count had been overblown, and that there was kind of a whole coordinated push here for a push.
But it didn't work, apparently, if there was such a thing there.
Yeah, and the death toll has been verified by a number of reasonably independent sources.
So I think we are talking about several dozen people who died.
The exact number, we may never know.
But it certainly wasn't a trivial incident.
Yeah.
All right.
Let me change the subject on you now, Ted.
You wrote this great thing in The National Interest called, Russia is not the Soviet Union.
Really?
I think we need to tell people that, because they're constantly confusing.
And I'm amazed at the number of news stories in which people will cite Russian aggression from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, meddling in the affairs of other countries.
And I keep saying, well, that wasn't the same country.
It was a totally different political system, messianic communism, not kind of a conservative semi-autocracy, which is what you have under Vladimir Putin.
Russia's a lot weaker economically and even militarily than the Soviet Union was.
And whereas the Soviet Union really did have an expansionist agenda, Russia's actions seem much more defensive, trying to protect a sphere of influence and a security sphere along its borders.
We're dealing with a different set of issues.
But within the American foreign policy establishment, within the American news media, you would swear we're back into the 1950s and we're confronting the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin.
And that's just dangerously narrow-minded and short-sighted.
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You know, George Kennan, back when he was advising Bill Clinton to not expand NATO, said, hey, listen, these are the guys that overthrew the communists for us.
Let's get it straight.
These people are not our enemies.
They're our heroes, man.
Why are we doing this?
Why would we pick a fight with them?
Well, that was one of the saddest things, and I was very much involved in that public policy debate in the 1990s.
And Kennan and a lot of other people, and I am among them, warned U.S. officials not to expand NATO, that this would, first of all, undermine pro-Western elements in Russia.
And by any definition, expanding a powerful military alliance to the borders of another major power is a hostile act.
It is a provocative act.
You can't interpret it any other way, although the NATO expansionists tried.
I mean, they literally argued that Russia should not object to this because it was going to stabilize the nations on Russia's border and make conflict less likely.
We were actually doing Russia a favor, according to those kinds of arguments.
And I have to give those people credit, because they actually made those arguments with a straight face.
I think that must have taken a major effort to control the facial muscles.
But it was a terribly provocative act to engage, to expand NATO in that fashion, undermining longtime allies of Moscow and the Balkans with the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo certainly did the same thing.
It humiliated Russia.
So when you look at the onset of the new Cold War, and really that is what we have now, and you try to assess which side was to blame for this, you can point to things like the Russian military interventions in Georgia and Ukraine as contributing to East-West tensions.
But the bulk of the blame goes on the United States and its allies for NATO expansion, for the Balkan interventions, and for the meddling in Ukraine to overthrow a pro-Russian elected government basically through mob action that we winked at and openly encouraged.
That is what led to the Russian seizure of Crimea and the Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine.
So if one's assessing blame, kind of as we would with, let's say, an auto accident, as to who caused the Cold War, I think about 80% of the blame would have to go on the United States and its allies.
Yeah.
You know, there's an article in the Jewish Daily Forward today about the New York Times whitewashing the Obama's Ukrainian Nazis, the guys that helped overthrow that government and have been waging that war in the East there.
But according to the New York Times, eh, you know, the Roma, the victims of the pogroms, they have a point, but you know, the Nazis have a point too, and you know, they're just nationalists just because they call themselves C14, as in the 14 words of preserving the white race and all that Nazi stuff.
But anyway, yeah, no big deal.
Yeah, and unfortunately that's pretty much been the attitude of the Western press generally.
Putin overstates matters when he says this was a coup run by the Nazis.
The Maidan revolutionaries were this coalition of genuine Democrats, people who were simply trying to ingratiate themselves with the West to gain economic benefits for Ukraine and outright ultra-nationalists and Nazis.
And the Western press has really downplayed those latter two factions, even though they were from the beginning and they remain a very significant faction within the new government in Ukraine.
Yeah, as in the speaker of the parliament is one of them.
I'm sorry?
As in the speaker of the parliament himself, Andre Peruby is one of them.
Yeah, and one of the chief military formations in the East battling the secessionists, if you will, in Eastern Ukraine is the Azov battalion.
And that outfit is openly pro-Nazi.
They're not subtle about it, not in the slightest.
Well, it's an important point to make too, right, that when you have a bunch of rednecks out in the woods in Alabama calling themselves Nazis, that's one thing.
But these are literally the grandsons of the perpetrators of the Holocaust in Ukraine in World War II, who are the proud sons and grandsons of the Galatian SS, who murdered tens of thousands or more of Poles and Jews in World War II.
And you have the effort, even by the more moderate official leadership of the Ukrainian government headed by Petro Poroshenko, rehabilitating one of the pro-Nazi leaders in Ukraine during World War II, Stepan Bandera.
And that's a very disturbing aspect.
That is something that I think ought to worry Ukraine's Western supporters.
Why are they elevating such an obnoxious, ugly, genocidal nationalist, if not outright Nazi?
Why do that?
Why stir that up?
There's no rational reason to do that if they're not sympathetic to the overall views of that individual.
Well, I think maybe part of it is they're scared of these guys.
The right sector has said, we overthrew the last government, we'll overthrow you too.
What are you going to do about it?
You're as powerful as your Kiev police force, at least, and help run it.
And they've conducted some rather nasty demonstrations against the Poroshenko government whenever they feel that government is not sufficiently nationalist and chauvinist.
So the government officials are always looking over their shoulder to make sure that constituency is at least placated, if not empowered.
And to a disturbing extent, it's even empowered.
You know what?
Did you see this article a few months ago in the New York Times about the Russia hands?
Maybe it was their weekend magazine or something.
I vaguely recall it, but I don't, I'm not focused on it.
So there's this great quote in there from Strobe Talbot, who was the perpetrator of this NATO expansion in the Clinton years, above all, over the objections of yourself and even the sitting Secretary of Defense, William Perry, and so forth.
And he's Bill Clinton's former roommate at Oxford when they were Rhodes Scholars together.
And he's the one who convinced Clinton to do it.
But he's admitting now that maybe it was a mistake.
And I just love this quote.
He says, should we have had a higher, wiser concept of our real interests that would require us to hold back on what many people would say is our own current interest?
In other words, should we have thought about our long-term interests instead of our short-term political ones?
Like we could use some Polish votes to help make sure to get Bill Clinton re-elected in Illinois, get those Electoral College numbers going, get some Lockheed sales for Bruce Jackson and the Committee for NATO Expansion and all of that.
And then, are we maybe risking a H-bomb war in the year 2019?
I guess so.
But geez, should we have taken that into account back when Ted Carpenter told us to?
Maybe.
Yeah.
There is some reflection among a few of the pro-NATO expansionists.
But Talbot is really, I think, in the minority.
Most pro-expansion types still say that was a great idea.
It was necessary.
But I think you put your finger on something.
There is a mixture of motives why that was done.
Some of it within the permanent national security bureaucracy was, Russia is weak, let's step on that country's neck, not let Moscow revive its power.
Take advantage while Russia is weak.
So you had the geo-strategic motive.
You point to the political motive, and that was not trivial.
You also have the vast economic motive.
You mentioned Bruce Jackson, head of the committee that supported the expansion of NATO.
This guy was a high-level executive in one of the biggest defense firms in the United States.
That's not coincidental.
There was a recent news article that pointed out just how much NATO expansion has been a cash cow for corporations like Lockheed, Raytheon, and so on.
There's no question there was a multi-billion dollar economic motive for expanding NATO.
So what if that, in the long term, increased the danger of a very hostile relationship, and perhaps even war with Russia?
There were all of these wonderful short- and medium-term advantages for America's political and economic elite.
And that certainly overruled any objections at the time.
Now, help me understand this a little bit, because in the 1990s, I was a New World Order kook, and one of the main reasons that I was, in fact, was an essay that Strobe Talbott himself had written for Time magazine in 1992, called The Birth of the Global Nation, where he said that ultimately, the game here is to empower the United Nations to be the federal government of the planet, and to bring Russia into NATO.
And soon, the U.S. and Russia and the rest of our allies will all answer to a single global state.
And so, I always thought, there it is, the thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
The former enemies come together.
As Vladimir Zirinovsky said, we're going to join NATO.
They had the NATO-Russia Council and all this, that the Russians would join NATO, and then we would ally with them against Islamist allies in South Asia, against China, hopefully not in a hot war, but in a new kind of cold war against the Chinese, or some kind of thing.
And it seems like that was on the table, that was part of the discussion.
But then, not so much.
So can you help me understand, what was the reality of those arguments and discussions in the 1990s?
Well, I think Talbot's view is still very much a minority view within the pro-NATO expansion community.
Many of the people I talk to, especially if you get them to make private comments, admitted Russia would never be invited to join NATO, that this expansion was, in fact, directed against the possibility of Russian expansionism in the future.
And Russia was being treated as an enemy.
Part of this, I think, is the emotional and intellectual legacy of the Cold War.
Most of the policymakers in the 1990s, and frankly, up to the present day, during their formative years, viewed the Soviet Union as this existential threat to America and everything America supposedly stood for.
And they could not adjust their mental gears when the Soviet Union collapsed, and you ended up with, at least initially, a democratic Russia as a successor, a much weaker successor state.
They still viewed everything through the prism of the old Cold War.
So they couldn't mentally regard Russia as anything other than an adversary.
It's kind of the same way that US naval officers had trouble viewing Japan as anything other than an enemy in the 1950s and 1960s, even though Japan had officially become a US ally.
The old tapes, the old mental tapes, kept running, and they're still running to this day.
There are so many people who view Russia as this great threat to the United States, and they're citing examples all the way back to the 1960s and 1950s, again, talking about the Soviet Union, but acting as though they're talking about Russia.
Right.
Well, this is the real problem, right?
Is as you said, at least, I'm going to go higher, but at least 80% of this is America's fault in the first place, and they can never admit that, right?
Strobe Talbot here, as you said, he's one of the most self-aware here.
Ah, jeez, maybe we did kind of overplay our hand here.
But you can't get anybody else in DC to admit that.
Overthrew the government of Ukraine twice in 10 years, meh.
Backed al-Qaeda forces in Syria for five years, meh.
This is all Putin.
He's the new czar.
He's the new Stalin.
I hear he's, you know, as Hillary Clinton said, he's Adolf Hitler for seizing Crimea.
He's ready to invade and occupy the Baltic states at any moment.
And they're all, all they do is tell each other this all day long in order so that nobody interrupts to say, no, this is because of you, you, and you, and your husband, and your national security advisor, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, it seems extraordinarily difficult for members of the American political and policy elites ever to admit that the United States has been responsible for any kind of needless conflict or needless confrontation.
It's always somebody else's fault.
And think of the wrath that came down on Barack Obama for his limited apologies about some of the outrageous U.S. behavior in the Middle East over the decades, including the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government in 1953.
And immediately he was blasted for conducting an apology tour, people like Mitt Romney just utterly condemning him.
And the attitude seems to be the United States never should apologize, ever, no matter what it's done, no matter what reprehensible actions Washington has taken in the past.
Apologies are not in order.
And that's a refusal to accept responsibility for egregiously bad and often counterproductive behavior.
Well, it's too bad about this big phony Russiagate scandal too, because if anybody could make a break from this past, it would be Donald Trump.
Look, Hillary Clinton's husband is the one who got us into this mess.
And that idiot George Bush and that weakling Barack Obama, it's all their fault, not me.
Right?
Like, he's not a governor, he's not a senator.
He doesn't have his hands in any of this.
This is all their fault.
And he could make a clean break, but instead he's bogged down by all these fake accusations that he's the Manchurian candidate under Vladimir Putin's control, the secret pee tape, and all this garbage.
Well, Donald Trump's foreign policy instincts are a mixture.
On some issues, like Russia, like North Korea, after a bad start, they're sound, they're constructive.
On others, like Iran and Cuba, they're quite bad, as bad as any of his predecessors.
But the problem in both cases is that it's seldom more than instincts on his part.
They're never thoroughly developed.
He can't respond effectively when people criticize even his beneficial initiatives.
And he also tends to overreact to protect his sense of self and his own reputation.
So if you look at the actual policies that Trump has pursued toward Russia, they are at least as confrontational, and one could argue more confrontational, than they were under Barack Obama.
Part of that, I think, is Trump's effort to protect his flanks from the constant attacks that he has soft on Russia.
He has overreacted to that and tried to establish his credentials, well, no I'm not, I'm ultra tough on Russia.
Unfortunately, the objective effect is to deepen the already troublesome Cold War between the two countries.
Yeah, there was even the Atlantic Council, quite against interest, ran a piece a few weeks ago where they admitted that in fact, yeah, he's armed the Ukrainian government where Barack Obama wouldn't.
And he's put more troops in Poland, more troops in the Baltic states, right on Russia's border.
He bombed Assad's government twice, which Obama backed down and refused to do, only by proxy supporting suicide bombers there, but that's different.
This is pretty bad.
Yeah.
I mean, if you actually look at Trump's actions, particularly with respect to Russia, they represent an escalation of the confrontation and the hardline tactics.
They do not represent a retreat from those tactics, which makes the allegations that he is Vladimir Putin's puppet, even more bizarre than they would be under normal circumstances.
Yeah.
It's really strange, right?
I think there were people who, well, let's go ahead and pick on Justin Raimondo.
Donald Trump would take both sides of every issue, whether Social Security or war or anything else.
He would say something this way and that way, and then you pick and choose what you like.
And so there were people who were kind of on our side.
And for that matter, I think, you know, including rank and file Republican voters who really liked the message of, I'm not Jeb Bush, George Bush's brother, and I don't want to do any more of these foolish, stupid wars in the Middle East and this kind of thing.
And we're really hopeful about that.
He said, let's get along with Russia.
And people said, yeah, let's get along with Russia.
As Ted Carpenter says, the Soviet Union is long gone.
And yet that was, you know, basically bluster, basically just a bunch of words, as you say, not really a developed, coherent policy point of view or anything like that.
But then on the other side of that, oh, he also once said, yeah, we should have an even hand in Palestine or something like that.
And so for the same reason that people like Justin wanted so terribly to believe in the guy, you had absolute panic by the centrist establishment who said, oh, my God, he's going to turn over all the nukes to Putin.
Oh, my God, an even hand in Palestine.
Well, that'll hurt Israel really bad.
We can't have fairness over there.
That's crazy.
And so they've gone, you know, led by Bill Kristol and David Frum and these guys.
They went on pure jihad against him for the same reason that, you know, Justin wanted to be hopeful.
They're terrified of him when, of course, he never meant to give away the whole store to Russia.
He's not going to get us out of NATO.
They say he badmouthed NATO.
All he said was they're not spending enough on Lockheed products.
He didn't say he was ever going to.
He never even implied he wanted to get us out of NATO.
And obviously he's Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson's little pet when it comes to the annexation of the West Bank.
He doesn't care about the Palestinians.
He couldn't possibly care about the Palestinians.
But people just react.
They hear what they want to hear or what they're terrified to hear and react about that without being realistic about who this guy is and what he's really about at all.
Well, if you consider the national security bureaucracy and the military-industrial-congressional complex that Dwight Eisenhower talked about, that if you took Donald Trump's campaign statement seriously on some of these issues, the criticism of NATO, the pledge that we're not going to be in the nation-building business anymore, that was a massive potential threat to multibillion-dollar vested interests.
What the reality was is that Trump seemed to be using this more just as political rhetoric, not as serious policy.
But they couldn't be sure of that.
So they have reacted as though he had a well-developed strategy to roll back the global interventionist warfare state, and that would have been a huge threat to their interests, to their careers, to their budgets, and in the case of the defense contractors, to their profits.
So they have treated him as an enemy, or at least as somebody they can't trust to protect their interests.
So he managed to get, in some ways, the worst of both worlds.
He stirred up opposition from that complex of interests, but he has not followed through on any meaningful beneficial changes in U.S. foreign policy, with the sole exception of the ongoing dialogue with North Korea, which I think was very much a step in the right direction.
But with that exception, things have pretty well rolled along as they always have.
Well, and a year ago, he called off CIA support for the al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria, too, and the regime change against Assad.
It seemed like he meant that.
He still wants to wage the war on terrorism against the Taliban, al-Shabaab, against AQAP, and for them in Yemen, he's bombed Libya.
So when it comes to al-Qaeda or ISIS targets, he's completely, or their friends at all, associated forces in any way, he's completely ordered the gloves off, but he has backed down from overthrowing any more already established governments in the region, at least.
At least as far as we know.
So far.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Given the extent of the U.S. cooperation with Saudi Arabia and the Saudis' larger regional agenda, I think we could still get entangled very easily in more regime change wars in that part of the world.
You mean against Iran or Qatar, or both, or worse?
Those two to start with, and basically anybody else who is threatening either Saudi or Israeli interests.
Yeah.
And certainly he's doubled down on help for the Saudis in the Yemen war, so that's about as bad as you can get.
Yeah.
Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump deserve the hall of shame honors for U.S. policy with regard to the Saudi war in Yemen, with all of its incredible atrocities against civilians.
There's simply no moral or strategic justification for that policy.
Now I know in the past, at least, the Air Force and the Navy have talked real big, but the Marines and the Army have got to be begging Trump to not start a war with Iran no matter what, right?
One would think, because despite maybe some wishful thinking in ultra-hawkish circles, it's unlikely that the Iranian people are going to rise up against that government to serve U.S. interests.
That's not likely to happen.
And a war against Iran would likely make the war in Iraq look like a minor skirmish.
Iran is a much larger country geographically and in terms of population.
It has far greater power than Saddam Hussein's government ever had.
This would be a nasty war.
If the U.S. wanted to make a maximum effort, there's no question that ultimately it would win the war in the sense of overthrowing the Iranian government and perhaps occupying Iran.
But all the troubles that we had in Iraq would be multiplied three or fourfold in Iran.
So that is a really foolish policy if he's venturing down that road.
All right.
Well, listen, I'll let you go.
I've kept you away over time here, Ted, but I sure appreciate your time on the show as always.
It's my pleasure, Scott.
We need to battle to keep the peace and that's getting to be a harder, harder battle.
Yep.
Definitely afraid so.
Thank goodness for you and the rest of the guys at the Cato Foreign Policy Department.
You do such great work and we really do appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
All right, you guys, that is the great Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow in Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Cato.org.
He's also a contributing editor at The National Interest.
He's written 10 books, including, as he mentioned, their Perilous Partners, co-authored with Malou Innocent.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Join me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
