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 hacked.
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, you guys.
Introducing the great Sheldon Richman, editor of the Libertarian Institute.
Welcome to the show.
Sheldon, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Great to be back with you.
Great.
You wrote an article.
It's Friday.
TGIF, the goal is freedom.
Right.
And this one is about Ukraine.
But first, let's talk about the great dictator, Franklin Roosevelt's high treason at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 77 years ago today.
And you are heavily quoted in an article that we're running today on the Institute's site by Adam Graham, FDR's Pearl Harbor fabrication, a rebuttal where he's going through the Declaration of War speech.
And you're highly cited in there from your previous work on Pearl Harbor.
So maybe you can tell us a bit about that.
I've written a few articles over the years.
I'm hardly an expert on that, of course.
My work is secondary or tertiary from people who have done a lot of the groundwork.
There's a lot of good stuff out there.
So I have written a few articles over the years, but I wouldn't regard myself an expert on it.
I think what's interesting about it is we don't know everything.
And I think people should not assume we know everything there is to know about what was in Roosevelt's mind or anybody's mind at the time.
And we know some things, but we don't know everything.
I had the honor of working with Bettina Graves on the editing of her late husband, Percy Graves' big, big book on Pearl Harbor.
It actually started out as two volumes and then got edited down to a single volume because nobody wanted to publish two volumes.
And Graves had a personal hand in a lot of this stuff because he was the Republican staff member, head of staff.
It was a very small staff, I believe, on the post-war committee of Congress that investigated Pearl Harbor.
So he was intimately familiar with the transcript of that hearing, which had all the major people, the military people and other people, testifying.
So I recommend that people look at that book if they're interested in the subject.
He never saw a smoking gun.
In other words, Roosevelt knew when and where the attack was going to be.
Now, of course, you don't want to set too high a standard.
You wouldn't need to have that precise information to still be guilty of wrongdoing.
So that would not get Roosevelt off the hook.
You know, we have lots of indications that, number one, they wanted to go with Japan into attacking.
After all, the U.S. was unable to get into the war through Germany.
They tried provoking Hitler and he wouldn't take the bait.
And so then they turned to the idea of getting Japan to make the first strike.
And there's famously, I think it's the November 25th, 1941, diary entry of Henry Stimson, Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
He says, regarding a meeting he just was in, that they discussed how to maneuver Japan into firing the first shot.
And that was late November.
Don't forget, this is December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day is December 7th.
So we're talking about a little more than a week, less than two weeks before Pearl Harbor.
They are discussing how to maneuver Japan into firing the first shot.
And before that point, of course, they waged economic warfare.
The administration waged economic warfare on Japan by cutting off oil and shipments of scrap steel and things that it needed.
This is no defense of Japan.
Japan was doing rotten things in lots of places we know.
China, Korea.
This is no defense of the Japanese empire.
The question is, kind of the question I deal with today in today's article about Ukraine, which I guess we'll get to.
Should it have been the U.S. business?
Should the U.S. have been going into Asia to stop the Japanese from what they were doing?
And there are always unintended consequences from doing such things, which we can also talk about if you want.
So anyway, they were looking to get into the war.
They were talking to England and other European countries that had imperial interests in Asia, because this was an imperial rivalry, what it was, about an invisible line in the Pacific that if Japan crossed it, that would be grounds for war.
This is an invisible line, which means Japan wasn't told about it.
It wasn't exactly a line in the sand, because if the other side can't see it, it's not exactly a line in the sand.
It was an invisible line.
And then they had other indications.
There were intercepts of diplomatic code-breaking.
What's the famous code line?
East wind, rain, or something, which means something's going to come down in Pearl Harbor.
There are also very interesting questions, which Percy Graves gets into in his book, about why Roosevelt put the fleet in Pearl Harbor.
What was it doing there?
Why was it concentrated?
There have been lots of talk about—there have been books, I think, since the 20s, since the end of World War I, about possible war between Japan and the United States.
And one of the things that was kind of in the air was, if Japan were to start a war with the United States, it would be an attack on Pearl Harbor.
So that wasn't just some crazy idea that really nobody thought of.
It was in the conversation by how people today write about, oh, the coming war with China, the coming war with whoever, Russia.
Books of those types were being written back then, and Japan was one of the prime candidates.
And the idea of an attack on Pearl Harbor as an opening move in a war was, like I say, in the air.
You couldn't say to the Roosevelt administration, oh, you couldn't defend them by saying, well, who would have thought of that?
The point is, lots of people thought about that as a realistic way that a war would begin.
So they can't plead ignorance on that count.
So the question then is, why concentrate the fleet there in Pearl Harbor?
And they did other odd things that Percy Graves' book goes into, which I learned a lot just by editing this book and helping to cut it down a bit.
Washington told the commanders at Pearl Harbor to prepare the planes for a possible attack of some kind, get them ready.
So what the guys in charge did was to put the planes in a circle, nose in circle, because they thought that meant a terrorist attack.
Somebody on the ground doing something, and that way you keep them concentrated and you can watch things better.
And they radioed back, or they messaged back, this is what we did.
We put them in a circle, nose in.
And they never heard back.
Now, if they'd done the wrong thing, that's not what you would do if you were afraid of an air attack, right?
Because you want to scramble.
It's very hard to scramble if they're all pointed at each other in a big circle.
You'd have them pointed outward and maybe scattered around so you could scramble them and get them up in the air.
So the commanders reacted to the order as if they were being warned about a possible on-the-ground terrorist attack.
And they wrote and they messaged back, this is what we did, and they didn't hear back.
They did not hear from Washington saying, no, stupid, that's not what we meant.
Put them the other way because you may need to scramble them.
We're talking about an air attack.
And apparently, according to the rules, the protocol, if you don't hear back, it means you're okay.
You did the right thing.
They didn't come back and say, no, you did the wrong thing, so that means you did the right thing.
So the question is, why'd they do that?
Now, were they truly believing the only threat was from the ground and not Japanese planes flying over?
Who knows?
But there's all these suspicions, and there should be suspicions.
Why was the fleet there?
Why was George Marshall playing golf?
There's all kinds of questions about these things that make extremely interesting reading.
And it's hard not to believe the Roosevelt administration had dirty hands, and it's very hard to believe they were totally surprised.
They knew something was coming down, and they had plenty of indications.
Did they know the precise hour, and did they know for sure it was Pearl Harbor?
I don't think there's that smoking gun.
I know there's been work by a guy you've interviewed many times, Robert Stinnett, about having broken the military code.
Everybody agrees they broke the diplomatic code.
I think he's one of the only people who say they also broke this other code, and that the Japanese broke radio silence.
The approaching forces on Pearl Harbor broke radio silence, which gave them away.
I am not an expert.
I don't know what to make of that, and so I'm going to not say anything about that because I can't say anything well informed.
Hey guys, Scott Horton here.
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So the book that you're talking about here, it's funny because when I Googled the name Percy Graves, it's G-R-E-A-V-E-S, and I found this article at the Hickory Record.
About a 92-year-old widow publishes her husband's Pearl Harbor book, and it says here, Pearl Harbor, The Seeds and the Fruits of Infamy, and published by the Mises Institute.
So that's cool, man, that you were the one that edited that and helped her get that out.
How long after he died were y'all able to put it out there?
Yeah, and so the editing went on after me, too.
She worked on it.
Her husband, Billy Percy, died in the 80s sometime, I think that's right.
He once ran for vice president on, which party was it, the American Constitutional Party or something?
And all he did was go around the country talking about Mises.
He attended the Mises seminar, and he was a great devotee of Mises, long associated with the Foundation for Economic Education.
I got to meet him once or twice, and I knew Tina, because she was still at the foundation when I came to the foundation.
So he was long gone, and one of the purposes of her life after that was to get this book ready for publication.
There was a lot of work left.
It was a big project, and Percy didn't finish it when he died.
And like I said, he had firsthand knowledge in the sense that he sat through all these hearings, it was very substantial, and knew that transcript as well as anybody.
So he was well positioned to write a book about it, and what it revealed and things that got overlooked in the statements made by all the various military and diplomatic political people.
Like I said, she had two big volumes, and it didn't look like anybody wanted to publish two full volumes.
And so I think I might have been the first to take a crack at cutting it down, which I did.
It was a lot of fun to work with her and to read through the book.
It gave me an opportunity to read through it.
Then it went on, and then the Mises Institute eventually published it.
I think it's probably a thick volume, but one tidy volume rather than two heavy books.
I think that's right.
My memory may be wrong about that part.
Well, yeah, it says here he died in 1984, actually.
84, okay.
I guess he ran for vice president in 80, I suppose.
I saw him.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
I saw him at a little campaign event outside of Washington, D.C., and that would have been 1980.
Well, that's pretty cool.
And again, now I'm paging back up again.
Pearl Harbor, The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy is the title of that.
Originally, the two volumes, the first one was The Seeds and the second volume was The Fruits.
Oh, I got you.
You have all the buildup to the attack.
That's The Seeds.
There were several congressional investigations, even while the war was still on.
It's all about that stuff, culminating in this big select committee that was, I believe, impaneled after the war was over.
All right.
And then you mentioned Day of Deceit by Robert Stinnett.
And of course, John Toland had an early take on it with Infamy.
And there's a guy named George Victor.
And I have the book, but I'm lazy and stupid and I haven't read it yet.
But it's Days of Infamy, I think it's called.
And it's very highly reviewed.
People are interested in that kind of thing.
But Stinnett, he's the guy that found the codes, found the proof.
They had broken the military codes.
And that's Day of Deceit, the truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor.
And interestingly, as I guess you know, because you've heard the interviews, still to this day, he agrees with FDR's decision to provoke the attack and then to turn a blind eye and allow it to happen.
Because he says, on one hand, Hitler, we had to attack the Germans before they attacked us.
And also, we couldn't get the Germans to attack us.
And so we had to get the Japanese to do it.
So we'd have an excuse to go to war against the Germans before they attacked us.
Which, it sounds pretty silly, but not to him, I guess.
Well, and the interesting thing is, what if we declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, like we did, and Hitler didn't honor his treaty with Japan and declare war on the United States?
Then what would the U.S. have done?
That's an interesting question.
I don't know.
But you're right, that is an interesting question.
I guess Roosevelt could have declared war on Germany just because it was an ally of Japan, but Germany hadn't done anything against the U.S.
And of course, you know, you talk about the unintended consequences of all of this.
And, you know, I have relatives who suffered under Japanese imprisonment in that war and were treated horribly.
I think not at Bataan, but somewhere else.
But anyway, you know, their war crimes were just absolutely scarlet, including to Western prisoners.
But as you mentioned, the Chinese, the rape of Nanking and all of this stuff.
And Lord knows the Chinese, the Koreans, they absolutely had the right to independence and they needed it dearly.
And yet what they got instead was Mao Zedong in China, and then the American-Korean war in Korea, then later the war in Vietnam.
So those two wars were, you know, seven million dead, something like that.
And then Mao Zedong turned out to be, you know, judging by actual dead bodies, I think was hands down the winner for single worst human ever to live and exercise power, who killed, what, 40 million people or something, were essentially deliberately starved to death by him.
And, you know, which was like Genghis Khan plus Tamerlane combined or something like that.
So it seems like actually Japanese occupation would have been preferable to the rise of communism in East Asia.
I have to kind of admit, maybe Woodrow Wilson shouldn't have helped create the USSR in the first place with his previous blunders, but man, the spread of the Reds into Asia led to such catastrophe.
That's the law of unintended consequences.
Brian Kaplan has written quite a bit about this on his blog, on EconLib, is it?
Or EconLog, I guess, about what he calls, I think he calls it practical pacifism.
The idea that the chances are far greater that you're going to create, you know, worse consequences from your intervention than if you did nothing at all.
And there's plenty of historical evidence for this.
And you just gave one of the biggest reasons of all.
People might say, well, the vicious Japanese empire shouldn't have been allowed to do what it was doing to innocent people in Asia, but you're right, look what succeeded it.
And who knows whether that could have been foreseen?
You know, I don't know.
But if you use the Kaplan standard, you'd say the chances are we're going to get something worse.
So don't assume, don't just go running into intervening in some place.
Same is true in Europe, of course.
Same certainly happened with World War I.
The story's been told many times, including on your show, about all the consequences of World War I.
Bolshevism, the fascists and the Nazis.
It would have been a very different world if Woodrow Wilson had never been born.
Man, I'm telling you what.
Although then I would have never been born.
Most of us are products of these wars one way or the other, aren't we?
That's where my relatives got together was in the aftermath of one or the other U.S. federal catastrophe.
That's where me and my wife got together is over George Bush and his genocide in Iraq.
It just created a great deal of difficulty for me.
Because up until this point I've had no hesitation in saying I wish Woodrow Wilson had never been born.
And now you've created this difficulty for me.
Maybe none of us would have been born.
Somebody else entirely would have been in our place.
Oh well.
That's what time machines are for.
Doesn't matter.
So we can test this out.
Speaking of blowback and consequences, intended and otherwise, we've got a real problem in far eastern Europe right now.
With these Ukrainian kooks that Obama put in power in the coup of 2014.
Since then we've had a horrible war of attempted secession, so to speak, in far eastern Ukraine.
Which is now at a ceasefire, although there's still people being killed from what I read.
But not nearly as bad as it was in 2014 and 2015.
Maybe in 2016.
So now we have recent events in the Kerch Strait, which is the opening to the Sea of Azov between Crimea and Russia.
But there's also still Ukrainian coastline there between Crimea and the rest of Russia.
So it's an open trading zone through there.
But we had a couple weeks ago now this confrontation there between Ukrainian boats and Russian ones.
And provoking this fight.
And so you've got a take on that on our website, the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org today.
And it's called, I just have to click on it, War Over Ukraine.
Which is not the best title ever.
But yeah, okay, interesting enough.
I would rather not have a war over Ukraine.
So what is your position, sir?
Yeah, well I was putting it as a question to Americans really.
I wanted to step back where I think of it as sort of viewing from 30,000 feet the situation.
So I don't try to get into the weeds of who did what and who's at fault and all this.
Although I do quickly go over recent history.
But I wanted to put the question to Americans.
Why is there an assumption that, certainly in the media and among most politicians and bureaucrats and the national security apparatus, there's this automatic assumption, unquestioned assumption that this should matter to us.
I mean, just that basic question, you know, should I be on the edge of my seat about this and should we be ready to get into the fight?
And I just want to be one of the people that helps to change that focus.
That we shouldn't be thinking in those terms.
That's an imperial world policeman attitude and we want to work to break that attitude.
So that people are non-interventionists who may think, well, you know, they can think, well, yeah, I'm sorry, there's problems over there and people got hurt.
You know, some Ukrainian sailors got hurt, some ships have been taken.
Too bad, I hope they work things out.
I mean, that seems like the proper attitude.
But not like, oh, I guess we need to get ready to get into this.
And, you know, there was news overnight that the State Department announced that they had participated with allies in a flight over Ukraine as a sign.
A sign of what?
A sign of resolve to what?
Defend Ukraine.
And let's remember Ukraine, while people want Ukraine in NATO, Ukraine ain't in NATO yet.
So we don't even have, they can't even play that card and say, well, we have the treaty obligation, Article 5 of NATO.
We have to go, we have to go to war to help Ukraine if it ends up fighting Russia.
They're not in NATO yet.
And so what are we flying?
Why are we flying, you know, military aircraft over Ukraine?
I don't know how close they got to the Kerch Strait, but, you know, why are we doing that?
And also what happened to Trump's, why can't we get along better with Russia?
I mean, is he being just goaded by all these new Cold Warriors who want to make him look like, you know, nothing but a lackey or a puppet?
And he doesn't like that image?
I mean, I don't know what's going on with him.
He's such a putz, Donald Trump.
We already all knew he was a putz our whole lives long, but God, he's just so horrible, you know?
It's terrible.
I mean, hey, let's get along with Russia.
Those are like the single most reasonable things that could come out of any man's mouth, right?
Like, yeah, OK, I'm with that.
But then he won't do it.
It's about the only decent thing he said in the whole, yeah, during the whole campaign.
But then he's failed test after test.
I mean, you know, sanctions and various things arming, arming the Ukrainians, which Obama didn't want to do.
And as I point out in the article, and others have pointed this out many times, when people make their case against Trump that he's just a Putin puppet, they like to point out that during the convention, the Republican convention, and it was in August of 2016, the Trump people kept language out of the platform endorsing lethal aid.
In other words, weapons.
U.S. sending weapons to the Ukrainian, to the new, you know, post-coup Ukrainian government.
That was considered evidence that he was a puppet of Putin's.
But of course, Obama was against it and never did it.
I didn't hear him being accused of being a puppet.
Now they've been doing it and they plan to keep doing it.
I don't hear them saying, the critics of Trump saying, oh, sorry about that.
I guess he's not a puppet.
In other words, nothing will affect their attempt to smear him.
But my fear is it in some ways may goad him into making further anti-Russian moves like he has.
Meanwhile, which is completely contrary to the art of the deal, which is I'll show you, you know, Putin's puppet.
I'm going to invite him to Washington, D.C.
I'm going to make friends.
We're going to sign a new peace deal over how we're going to get out of Syria.
We're going to get along.
We're going to find 100 things that we can get along about.
And I'm going to throw it right in your face and the American people are going to support me.
How do you like that?
That would be the art of the deal.
That would require some ability to think that he doesn't possess.
I mean, he can't even close a deal rhetorically.
I mean, he'll make a statement about NATO or he did during the campaign.
He'd say, you know, I don't like NATO or something like that.
But he couldn't have a follow up sentence that gave any good reason for that.
You would come up sometimes with a bogus reason.
They're not paying enough or, you know, stuff like that.
But he could never, you know, he talks about like, why can't we get along with Russia?
But he never followed it up by saying, how come for a few decades there, we've been threatening Russia by pushing NATO to the Russian border?
He never said anything like that.
He never acknowledged.
And of course, he's helped to expand NATO now.
I mean, they've added at least one country and are soon to add another country, I guess, since since he took office.
So he can't.
Yeah, he can't even rhetorically close a deal.
In other words, complete an argument.
He can come up with a one liner, which he thinks is so good.
And it upsets.
It may be upset some people.
And he likes that.
But he doesn't have a second line.
Which would give you some reason.
And back, you know, backing to the first line.
So he's just he's just horrible and stuff.
Well, I don't trust him at all.
I mean, I don't know.
He's really he's just George Bush, Jr., right?
I don't know how to think about anything.
I don't know how to read.
I really don't know the history of anything or why one thing matters more than another thing.
But I guess I'll let these hawks tell me what to do.
Shrug.
Why did he?
Well, that's right.
With like he said, with Afghanistan, all the experts, I mean, I want to get out.
But all the experts say if we don't get out, we're going to be fighting him here.
So he's a he's a pushover, which he wasn't supposed to be.
I mean, his fans think, no, he's the opposite of a pushover.
That's why we like him.
He's going to stand up to these establishment types.
Yeah, you're right.
Let me know when it happens.
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You'll see it there.
Well, you know, I can't even prove it because it's on my Twitter thing.
Somewhere back there in the history where I was saying back in 2015 and 2016 that here's the conversation in the Oval Office on January 21st.
Trump, hear your marching orders, sir.
Yes, sir.
Because he doesn't know anything.
He's an empty vessel, so he'll be controlled by the generals who are vouching for him to be the president.
So it'd be as simple as that.
And they'll want to keep fighting.
And so that's all you need to know.
He won't think about Donald Trump versus the CIA.
Yeah, he's a bit overmatched, you know?
Yeah, that's it's it's disappointing.
But more important than that, it's worrying because, you know, if Ukraine, if Poroshenko, the president of Ukraine, who, by the way, you know, we we learn and I link to Ted Yellen Carpenter's article about this, his own political fortunes are not very good.
He's facing an election in which he may not.
It doesn't look like he'll even make the runoff.
Right.
And also he wants to keep the NATO countries agitated about Russia.
So he may well have sent those ships through the strait in order to provoke a reaction from Putin.
And I don't I'm not defending Putin.
I'm not saying Putin did what he ought to have done.
My case doesn't depend on that.
But if if Poroshenko decides to take another step and, you know, fire at Russian forces somehow, somewhere, there could be trouble.
Because what's what's Trump going to do then?
And what's the what's the foreign policy establishment going to do then?
There's going to be a huge chorus for standing up to Putin and not letting Ukraine face it alone.
Sort of what happened with Georgia a few years ago.
Luckily, the U.S. did not get involved when when Georgia instigated a war with Russia over separatist areas.
I mean, it has a lot of similarities to what's going on with Ukraine.
And let's you know, as a reminder to everybody, Ukraine and Georgia are former Soviet republics, both of both of which are candidates for for NATO membership.
I guess one NATO membership.
And yet they have disputes with Russia because there are areas of of Ukraine and Russia that contain separatists who don't want to remain part of Ukraine and and Georgia.
And and so that's possible agitation with with Russia.
And if one of those presidents decides to make some kind of bold move thinking that that Washington has his back, we could see some nasty stuff.
Yeah, well, and I mean, the fact that any of these people and they do talk about it as though nuclear weapons aren't an issue.
They they they never say explicitly that this is what they mean because it would sound crazy.
It would not make any sense.
But they talk as though implicitly somehow we could have a full scale conventional war with the Russians without H-bombs going off, which is not right.
And so, you know, at the end of the day, you kind of hope that somebody on the joint staff or somebody somewhere in the war room is holding up their hand going, well, they do still have H-bombs, right?
So if Russia does roll all the way to Kiev, what really are we going to do about it?
You're going to give up Austin, Texas and Washington, D.C. and Omaha, Nebraska and Denver, Colorado for Kiev, which will probably also get nuked in the exchange, too.
So, yeah, we can't forget that.
That's a very big if, though.
I mean, that's not that's not a likely if.
Why would Putin want to do that?
He doesn't have a there is one reason why.
And it's in the WikiLeaks.
It's in the State Department cables.
And it's as Ray McGovern has pointed out, the title of the State Department cable is yet means yet.
And it was when the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told John Kerry or told the American ambassador to Russia, I guess John Kerry's government, though, told him this stuff about bringing Ukraine into NATO.
If you do that, we will invade.
And I think, you know, that we can be in Kiev in a week.
And don't think that we're bluffing.
This is a red line for us.
If you try to integrate Ukraine into NATO, there will be a war.
We will win it.
I'm not bluffing.
So tell the boss back home.
And so that's it.
And yet means and yet you can't do it or or, you know, and then they do sack Kiev.
And then what's America going to do?
Really go to attempt to go to conventional war in Ukraine against Russian forces there.
And that would necessarily lead to nuclear war.
So I agree with you that I don't think that Putin has, you know, any intention of invading Ukraine or the Baltics or any of that stuff.
I think all that is overblown excuses for American aggression, of course.
But could he be pushed into it?
Yeah.
And by by the things the Americans, as you were saying, say they want to do.
You're right.
You're right.
To expand the alliance here.
That's right, because, you know, we need to do what it seems to me is just common sense.
Look at your policy from the standpoint of the other side.
Because, you know, it's just the old ethical lesson about, you know, stand in somebody's shoes, try to look at things from their point of view before you do something.
That way you won't be surprised by the consequences, at least.
Right.
Especially when they have H-bombs.
The Russians were invaded three times in the 20th century through the West.
And so they there's this they have this.
And then, of course, they had problems before that.
So that so they have this longstanding security concern about the West.
And then you had NATO.
And then you had NATO moving.
Contrary to promises made by George H.W. Bush that NATO wouldn't move one inch eastward if if Gorbachev, you know, would not squawk about Germany being reunified and joining NATO.
And then it was that promise was broken by Clinton.
And then Bush and then Obama.
And now it's been further broken by Trump and all those administrations.
Nations were added include.
And when I say nations are added, let's remember the nations were former members of the Warsaw Pact, which was the Soviet alliance.
It was their NATO and former Soviet republics.
So it's equivalent.
And this question, of course, has been asked many times.
How would the U.S.
How would U.S. policymakers feel and U.S. Hawks feel if Russia was doing the equivalent with the United States?
Right.
Well, I mean, they're interesting American allies.
Canada, Mexico in an alliance.
I mean, come on.
They wouldn't be saying, oh, don't worry.
There's nothing harmful about that.
I'm sure that's just I'm sure that's the intentions are purely peaceful.
Well, we shouldn't expect the Russians to see those see the intentions as purely peaceful.
And we need to look at things from their point of view.
It doesn't mean Putin is a saint.
I certainly don't believe that.
I don't believe that Putin is a saint in Russia.
It doesn't mean he's never done anything bad.
I'm not even defending Crimea.
Or you can see the security concerns with Crimea that traditionally has been part of, like you say, it's a red line.
Crimea was part of Ukraine and and was a very was and is a very important part of the Russian security architecture.
They have an important their Black Sea fleet is is, you know, there in Crimea.
And sorry.
It's right.
It would have been threatened if if Ukraine goes into NATO and especially if Crimea hadn't been annexed.
That would have been a major blow to the Russian security.
You don't need to have bad intentions on Putin's part to see that.
And why?
Keep poking at the guy.
How?
When will we learn the lesson that if you keep poking at a situation, someone arises that you really don't like, that you like less than the previous situation.
How many times does that lesson have to be learned?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'm sorry I'm really late for the next interview because we could really keep going here.
But thanks very much for your time again, Sheldon.
Love talking to you.
OK, great.
Talk to you.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Sheldon Richman.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com and reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
