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, we're 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 Doug Bando from the American Conservative Magazine, The National Interest, and especially the Cato Institute where he is a senior fellow in their foreign policy department there.
How are you doing, Doug?
Doing okay.
How about yourself?
Very good.
Appreciate you joining me here.
Good thing.
Man, you're a productive writer all the time.
Here are some of the articles that Doug has written in the past week or so.
The fateful arrest that could poison America's relationship with China.
A massive, awesome, incredible study here.
It's time for a policy change on Cuba.
Why Trump is right to withdraw troops.
It's time to end US support for the Saudi war on Yemen.
My greatest difficulty as the editor of antiwar.com is figuring out in which order to run all my Bando articles.
I'm so grateful for the great work that you do.
Let's talk first about the most important breaking news.
Withdrawing from Syria and Afghanistan.
Go ahead and say things.
This is fantastic.
The critical thing is the president has to hold firm.
He's under attack by the bipartisan war party.
Everyone in Washington is shrieking.
It's actually quite amazing to watch.
There's really almost a mental meltdown among all the kind of neocons and interventionists and what have you at the thought that a president might actually decide we've had too much war.
I am hoping that he proceeds and that we finally close a couple of these down.
All right.
Well, Syria and Afghanistan, both.
If we leave, then bad things will happen after that.
What about that?
Oh my goodness.
No bad things ever happen in the world while we're there.
I mean, it's the arguments they make are amazing.
In Afghanistan, we've been there more than 17 years.
This is a tragedy.
But the idea that it's going to get any better, of course, is a fantasy.
And we've seen that all the metrics are bad, all the studies, inspector general reports.
You know, the Afghans have to decide on their future.
It's an ugly thing.
I've been there a couple of times.
There are a lot of good people there, but America can't solve that.
Syria is a multi-sided civil war.
And the good news is it really doesn't matter to America.
I mean, it's a humanitarian tragedy, but we can't stop that.
But you know, if the Russians and the Iranians and the Turks and all these people want to fight over it, we should say, fine guys, go for it.
I mean, why do we want to be in the middle of that?
It's the idea that every war on earth is also our war.
I mean, how does that promote the common defense of America?
That's not what the federal government's supposed to do.
It's putting Americans at risk for no obvious interest of their own.
But might Russian power and influence in the world overall increase on net as the result of this?
You know, you look at the Middle East and the U.S. is allied with Israel, the Gulf States, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and oh my, the Russians might be able to maintain an alliance they had throughout the Cold War.
Syria is a wreck.
I mean, it's been through seven years of war.
Oh my, the Russians are going to be influential.
I mean, it's a very strange assessment of the world that if the U.S. kind of has 90% of the allies, 90% of the bases, that it's still at risk if somewhere on earth, some other country has a relationship with somebody else.
You know, the Russians don't threaten us.
They're not the Syrians.
These are bad regimes.
I don't like them.
But what on earth do we expect is going to come out of that?
It's not going to hurt the United States.
Man, so what about this?
What about the idea that Trump could get some positive reinforcement here from some corners, I hope, and that then he might, I don't know, withdraw from more wars, like in Yemen and Somalia and Libya?
Well, that's certainly the hope.
And I think the critical thing here might be the fact that he's doing two of them suggests to me that something very significant might be going on, that he may very well have come to the conclusion that his appointees are playing him, that they're stringing him along.
He says, oh, look, I want to do this for only a little bit more time, then I want us out.
And they, of course, completely ignore that.
And then they give talks about how we're going to be there forever.
And our objective now in Syria, it's to, oh, I don't know, deal with the Turks, deal with the Russians, deal with the Iranians.
And if he listens to that, he realizes, you know, this is all Obama.
I mean, this is not him.
And my hope is that he's finally gotten tired of it.
And this is where he kind of said, you know, no, no, guys, you don't get it.
I'm president.
I want out.
If that's happened, then my hope is maybe we'll see some changes of personnel, maybe kind of the neocons who want to go to war all the time will leave the administration.
And the president will assert himself more because he'll look around and say, these same people who put us into these other places, you know, have us in a lot of other crazy things, too.
Let's go home.
Yeah.
Well, there's not a very deep bench of guys who can credibly take that spot as Secretary of Defense that James Mattis is leaving now, and especially one who's going to, I mean, we hope this would be the litmus test for the job, that you're into implementing what I just said about Syria and Afghanistan, right?
Kind of a thing.
We would hope so.
If not, then the decision's already been countermanded, you know, as soon as he names his nominee, I guess.
Well, he desperately needs somebody who recognizes the president as commander in chief.
He makes the decision.
If the president says, I want out, they can certainly talk about how best to do it, but their injunction is to get us out, as opposed to what's happened so far over almost two years, which is to resist the president at every moment, trying to stop him, persuade him, change him.
He needs people around him who actually share this idea that maybe constant war is not a good thing.
Yeah, I was just interviewed by Breitbart, and I meant to say, and I didn't, about how people really ought to call talk radio and really ought to contact the White House website and say that they support this if they do.
The more right-wing the audience, the better when it comes to saying that DC may hate you for this, but this is why people voted for you.
In fact, you know, I think that's critically important is that if you just sit in Washington, you would think that the world is against him.
I mean, this city, I mean, I've joked that we should set up suicide watches, you know, some of the right-wing think tanks, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, which defends your democracies like Saudi Arabia.
I mean, this is a place, you know, these people are probably ready to jump out of windows.
They're horrified.
My goodness, one fewer wars, can you imagine?
But the point is that what the president is doing is what people want.
I mean, it's not like there's a groundswell of support across the country.
We want to stay in Syria.
It's such a wonderful war.
You know, we love civil wars in the Middle East.
We've done so well.
I mean, the point is Americans want out of this stuff, explain to them why we're in Afghanistan more than 17 years later.
It's pretty hard to make a case why Americans are dying there.
You know, there's simply no good argument.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Just one second.
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All right.
So let's move on.
You know, I saw on the same day as these two just great announcements, just almost unreal.
And I mean, assuming that he follows through, but he really seems to have made some pretty big announcements here by way of the Wall Street Journal and this kind of thing that it'd be pretty hard for him to climb down from now.
So let's hope so.
Then at the same time, I saw where the U.S. scotched a resolution in the security council to implement the recommendations from the negotiations over Yemen, where they're going to have a UN peace force was supposed to, you know, peacekeeping group was supposed to administer the ports at Hodeidah and that America got in the way of that.
And this is the worst war of all of them.
No, that's right.
And I think this is one of those.
It's hard to understand it.
I think that this is one of those areas where the problem is, he thinks primarily in kind of, excuse me, cash.
The Saudis are buying things from us.
We should help them.
You know, it's helpful for us.
That's great.
We're getting money out of it.
You know, but I mean, he needs to understand that it has to go so much further than that.
I mean, he criticized the Saudis during the campaign.
So he seemed to have taken their measure then and realized that this is a really crappy alliance.
And it's the only way you can be allies is to be slaughtering civilians.
I mean, what's going on in Yemen is horrendous.
It's unbelievable.
It's outrageous.
So my hope is that he sees that, that the same people who've played him on Syria and who played him on Afghanistan, frankly, are playing him on Yemen.
This is a war we should be out of.
All right.
Well, so let me take their side for a second here.
Are you saying, Doug Bando, that we could just completely abandon Saudi Arabia as our most important ally in the Middle East after the greatest democracy in the world, Israel?
It's a shocking thought, isn't it?
That a bunch of, you know, kind of a rich, absolute monarchy, maybe it should take care of itself.
You know, trying to understand how, you know, America's future is dependent upon, you know, this place.
I mean, the good news is that their oil isn't nearly as important anymore.
I mean, what are they going to do?
Stop selling their oil?
I mean, if they do that, they have no cash.
Then the poor crown prince couldn't buy himself another yacht.
I mean, that'd be a great tragedy.
They're going to sell the oil.
And frankly, they're going to buy our weapons because they have so many already.
Once you've got that, you want interoperability, you need spare parts.
And if they want to develop economically, who are they going to deal with?
American companies are naturally going to be on the list.
So, I mean, all of those sorts of things, U.S. government doesn't have to do anything on that.
And we have to recognize they're dragging us into conflicts.
You know, to support them, we got dragged into Yemen.
This is an outrage.
And the crown prince is a nutcase.
This is a guy who kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister.
He started a war in Yemen.
You know, he was threatening to invade Qatar, which, you know, another American Gulf ally.
I mean, you know, this guy is dangerous.
He's reckless.
You know, this is not a good ally for America, and the president should be able to see that.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, talk to us about this great article that you wrote for the National Interest.
It's time for a policy change on Cuba.
You went and spent how much time there?
It was about a week.
Great.
So tell me everything about your trip and about your arguments and all these things.
Well, I mean, you know, Cuba, I've been there before.
I was there like in 2003, and it was a very different place.
I mean, the Cuban government's a bad government.
I mean, Raul Castro is no longer president, but he's around.
Look, there are thugs.
You know, the commies run the place.
They've run it into the ground.
But the Cuban people are extraordinary.
And one of the wonderful things that has been happening is because the government is a complete failure when it comes to the economy, is you've had the growth of a private economy.
I mean, some of the estimates now are that about as many as 40 percent of the jobs are private.
This is something the U.S. should want.
I mean, what it's doing is it's pulling people who are no longer dependent on the state.
And now that's all black market, or that's the government is adapting and allowing that to take place?
Most of that the government is adapting.
Now, it's complicated.
I mean, it's one of those where a lot of the stuff is supposed to be only family.
So you suddenly find out that it seems like everybody working at the restaurant is a cousin, in quotes.
So clearly, and the Cuban government has complained at different times, oh, my goodness, they're cheating.
They've got too many licenses, you know, or they aren't paying their taxes.
But once they started to open that door, everybody wants through it.
I mean, I met an anesthesiologist who's washing dishes.
He makes more money washing dishes at a restaurant than he does as an anesthesiologist.
This is not a system that works.
I met a government employee, you know, where three of his four grandkids are living overseas.
One of them's in the U.S. because young people don't have any options there.
Their only option is the private sector.
So this is all good.
These people, they don't like government rules.
They're not communist.
They love America.
You know, we want to expand this.
And indeed, President Obama did much of what he could.
He's limited by the law.
But he really did start to open things up.
And frankly, they love him down there because they saw him as challenging the communist establishment.
And the communist establishment understood that.
The foreign minister gave a kind of a speech.
He was outraged and angry about the kind of threats from America, you know, and whatnot.
It wasn't talking about military.
It was talking about ideas, free enterprise, these kinds of things.
And now the president has come along, and he hasn't closed the door, but he kind of closed it somewhat.
And that's been devastating for these entrepreneurs.
People invested.
They're hoping for more Americans.
And suddenly, people have kind of created cab companies.
They've created Airbnbs.
I stayed in an Airbnb while I was down there.
I met somebody who does kind of parties and decorating and stuff.
And she works with a lot of entrepreneurs.
So these people don't have money.
She doesn't have money.
If she doesn't have money, she can't hire anybody.
You know, these kinds of things.
And they're all desperate to, you know, they're trying to say, we try to tell people in Washington, like Marco Rubio, how he's hurting us, not the Cuban government.
They can't even get meetings with him.
You know, it's a real tragedy.
Well, so it's very interesting what you say.
And I'd like you to kind of, you know, reiterate that or elaborate a little bit about how they saw Obama's policy as not just being beneficial for them, that now they can make a little bit more money.
Standard of living goes up a little bit, that kind of thing.
But they saw him as a revolutionary device against the crusty old conservative communist government there.
Yeah, when Obama went down there and visited, and they had massive crowds, absolutely massive crowds.
I mean, these people came, and I think certain ways it was, say, Poland with Pope John Paul II.
You know, as the Soviet Union and the communism is starting to fall apart in Europe, you know, whether or not people were Catholic in Poland, this guy became the symbol.
And Obama was that.
Obama started to open the door.
He represented America.
You know, they could see, this is different, this guy is different.
I saw, I mean, on a car, there were people who had Obama stickers on their car.
You know, and I mean, these things clearly dated back a few years to his visit.
You know, I mean, I was walking on the street, and some guy was walking into a restaurant, you know, probably mid-20s.
And he turned to me, and he said, where are you from?
And I said, oh, America.
And he said, oh, I love America.
Then he walked into the restaurant.
He's almost certainly was one of the workers there.
I mean, this is a guy who sees America as a symbol of freedom, of economic opportunity.
You know, so he wants more of America, not less.
You know, the U.S. administration is saying less.
And, you know, that helps the government, because it makes people more dependent on the state.
The only way you get jobs is if you can't get it in these, you know, private enterprises.
You're going to have to go work for some government firm for no money.
Or, you know, you have to try to find some desperate way to get away overseas.
When in fact, you'd prefer to stay in your country, be with your family, create a business, and change the country.
Yeah, but maybe, and I'm obviously being facetious, but I sort of kind of mean it as a real argument, because it certainly is one in politics and power, the prevailing one, in fact, that we obviously just haven't embargoed them enough and sanctioned them enough to cause economic pain to the population of Cuba enough that they will risk everything to finally get rid of the communist regime for us.
So maybe we should just triple down, forget Obama's sunshine policy.
Let's really get a regime change down there, huh?
Well, of course, that's obviously easy if you're living in America.
Yes, we should force the Cubans to risk their lives in doing what we want, of course.
Why not?
And I think it really shows how kind of the interventionist agenda is not a pro-people agenda.
It's not really a pro-liberty agenda.
I mean, you don't do that.
You don't sit there and say, we're going to try to force you into this situation.
The reality is that embargoes rarely hurt the people at the top.
The regime controls the system.
People at the top are going to eat and get what they want.
I mean, at the bottom, it's very hard.
People need to feed themselves and whatnot.
They have to find ways.
You know, theft from the state is routine.
People come up to you on the street and want to sell you cigars.
Well, how'd they get them?
They're working at cigar factories and stuff's walking out the door.
You know, this is a police state.
It's a bad place.
So expecting revolution from below as opposed to giving them kind of these opportunities, expanding the system, opening up, creating pressure, all of these things may take longer, but this is a way that people can make it happen without, you know, kind of those threats.
The second point is very simple.
It's one thing to say, we're going to try this in 1960.
You know, but you know, 60 years later to say, well, if only we do it a little more tougher.
I mean, this is crazy.
At some point, you've got to admit it failed.
I remember back after the Soviet Union disappeared, it cut off all of its aid to Cuba.
It was a huge shock to the Cuban state.
You know, the GDP, you know, dropped by like a third.
I mean, it was extraordinary hardship.
And there were people in America, I remember a Heritage Foundation speech from some guy who predicted like in six months, the Castro regime will be gone.
Well, guess what?
You know, we are now, you know, that was 1989, 1990, you know, we're 30 years on, and guess what?
It's still around.
It might've been true if they had opened up relations with Cuba the same way they were opening up relations with Kazakhstan, and treat him as a former member of the Warsaw Pact, more or less and said, okay, now everybody come in from the cold.
Yeah.
And the point here is, it's fine to hate the government.
It's a bad regime.
You know, Raul Castro should rot in hell.
I'll be happy when he's dead.
But that's the point is that doesn't help the Cuban people.
We need a policy that helps the Cuban people.
And what the Cuban people tell us is they want to be able to come to America.
They want Americans to go there.
They want economic relations.
You know, one of the great things has changed between my first and second trips is the internet is relatively open.
It's expensive.
But at this stage, the censorship is relatively small.
That is, they won't allow some websites that say the US supports or which, you know, go after the government directly.
But for the most part, you can get pretty much anything you want.
It's far more open than China.
I mean, I had to pay for it, but I get on and this is, you know, I get a private home.
She could get on it.
I mean, they even have some parks where Wi-Fi is out there.
You see people hanging out there using their phones and stuff.
They hand around, you know, information packets on the flash drives.
I mean, this is a place where people, it's opening.
It's slow.
It's tough.
They've been trying to crack down on some of the opposition people.
But the point is there's hope there and the US could spur that hope, you know, by opening up.
We want more Americans there.
We want more journalists there.
We want more people to kind of cause trouble, talk to Cubans, give them opportunities.
That's what the government fears.
Well, what about the argument from the other side that says, I don't know, though, because we're not talking about Doug Bando's libertarian America, we're talking about the empire.
And once the embargo is lifted, it's going to be replaced by America gangsterizing all that property and taking it from multinational corporations and all of the worst kind of thing in the other direction.
But the critical thing for them is to kind of have this process occur.
So as you start getting reforms to stuff, people can, you know, they can do whatever they want in terms of how they want to welcome, you know, Americans in, how they want to deal with Cuban Americans.
I mean, you know, the point is the Cuban American community can play a very important role there.
But Cubans who've lived there, obviously, it's their country.
They're going to have to make the ultimate decisions.
The embargo doesn't help them with that.
I mean, the embargo actually is going to make it much more shocking.
Imagine if at some point in the future, the whole system falls, as opposed to if over time, they've seen changes, they know they need foreign investment.
Well, they have to start to adapt to it.
You know, you have more people coming in, you see a growth.
I mean, one of the great things is the Airbnbs and I mean, taxicab companies, you know, they have these 1950s cars, they fix them up, you know, and they really cater to Americans because Americans love those cars.
You know, these are things if you're having a growing economy, this stuff is all occurring.
It's building a native, you know, kind of Cuban, a local Cuban industry, a local Cuban business sector, before there's a wide opening and kind of lots of, you know, Cuban Americans are showing up from Miami.
That's the best thing for them.
They can kind of start growing into this, have experience in it and be settled, as opposed to the whirlwind that happens if essentially you don't have much and suddenly everything comes down.
All right, hold it right there.
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All right, now, we have almost no time for this, but I'm still going to ask you about it anyway.
This is a huge story, but I don't know how huge it is.
The busting of the lady whose name I'll even let you pronounce is how little I know about it from this major Chinese cell phone company here.
Well, you know, Huawei is one of their big companies.
I mean, look, the Chinese don't play fair.
It's a bad regime.
They've really been cracking down on things.
The problem is the Huawei thing is an outgrowth of Iran sanctions.
And the point is, this fixation on Iran, which is, you know, it's a wreck of a country, it's poor, the idea that it has some kind of empire is so silly.
I mean, boy, you know, my empire is the wrecked country of, oh, I don't know, Yemen, the wrecked country of Syria.
I mean, kind of what passes for a country in Lebanon.
Wow.
I mean, this is a new empire.
The point is, we make them into being some huge, you know, threat, where basically the Saudis want hegemony.
The Saudis are the dangerous ones.
And we're putting these sanctions on, not only does it mess up the possibility of change in Iran, but what we're finding is it kind of messes up relations with everybody else.
China is a hugely important country, so we're going to kind of muck up relations there.
I mean, the Chinese have been grabbing Canadians to punish Canada.
We're setting all of this off as yet another attempt to try to impose on other countries our sanctions on Iran.
It's not enough that we're not going to trade with Iran.
We must force the entire world not to do so.
I mean, that arrogance, you know, is very, very damaging for the United States.
Yeah, but maybe it's just another thing that happened, or maybe it really matters that this is the daughter of the founder of this major corporation, and that the Chinese now have to have some kind of nationalist reaction to this, etc.
They arrested a couple Canadians so far in response, right?
That's right.
Actually, we're up to three, though the Canadians think one of those might have just been for other reasons.
And it's a very obvious way to do it.
I mean, they don't admit they're doing it.
They do it on the weak party, which is Canada, which is now caught in the middle.
You know, the point is, if you do this stuff, you need to realize what you're going to get out of it.
You're going to get nationalist reactions.
It's going to make it harder to get the things we theoretically want on economics and other things.
Because, you know, the Chinese are weaker than the U.S. economically, but they're also very nationalistic.
And the last thing they want to do is give in to Uncle Sam, as is trying to, you know, force them to do what Americans want.
It's funny, you know, I try to think from the point of view of the grand strategists and all that kind of thing, where some of the same precepts that you and I have are the same ones that they must be operating on, such as that North America and China.
These things are going to be here for a long time, and we're going to have to figure out something about how we can cooperate for the long term.
Doesn't have to be one plan from now on, but let's be best friends so there's nothing to shoot H-bombs at each other over.
Seems like the only rational policy we could possibly have.
And instead, you know, they talk as though we could have a conventional war with China and beat them, and the H-bombs aren't an issue somehow.
And I don't know if they're just trying to sell boats or whether, you know, buy their own boat for the weekend, or whether they really think that, that they could just design a doctrine that just, oh, well, you know, all things being equal without nuclear weapons, this is how the battle would go.
And that's their plan, that they're really operating under those kind of ideas about the near medium-term future of our relationship with China and Russia, for that matter?
I think what they're doing, these are people who live in a world in which to what the U.S. says goes.
It's very hard for them to realize that that world is ending.
You know, that other countries are not willing to do so.
I mean, we now find because of Iran sanctions, the Europeans want an alternative payment system.
So we may very well find that China and Russia not only work together against the U.S., but China and Russia work along with the Europeans against the U.S. And apparently no one in Washington has thought about that.
It has not occurred to them that U.S. policy might be pushing people that way.
And I think they have that imagination on China, if only we have to buy enough weapons and we have to talk tough, you know, and that they'll do what we want.
And the problem, of course, is even if you think that will work today, the more you do that, the more the Chinese are going to make sure it won't work tomorrow.
And it becomes much more dangerous.
Nationalism is very powerful, even among students.
Students who don't like censorship, students who don't like, that is in China, Chinese students who don't like repression also are rabid nationalists.
They believe China should control Taiwan.
They believe all the South China Sea belongs to China.
I mean, I go over there a lot.
I talk to the students.
You know, they're very liberal in certain ways, but they're hyper nationalistic in others.
The U.S. should have no illusions here.
You know, and we should flip it around.
What would the U.S. do if the Chinese Navy was going up the eastern seaboard into the Caribbean?
The U.S. was telling, you know, China was telling the U.S. about its relations with Cuba.
Beijing were having debates about going to war with America.
How would Americans react?
Probably not positively.
Probably they'd say, let's build a lot of weapons and make sure these jerks never do that.
Well, it really has seemed all along that from the, you know, that what the Chinese are mostly doing in their buildup is in reaction to America's policies and stated pivots and all of these things as they do, and in reaction, even going back to Iraq war one and to Bill Clinton's sale in the seventh fleet between China and Taiwan during some exercises there, that all of these things have resulted only in Chinese buildups on the other hand.
But so my utopian view, Doug, is that if America just posed no military threat to China whatsoever, then their own hawks would have a lot harder time justifying this.
But that sounds like weakness and appeasement to the right who say that, oh no, wherever America withdraws from a dominant position, particularly in East Asia, China will fill it and we'll end up enslaving our Japanese allies and God knows what.
Well, I think what's critical is to never forget that there are a lot of other countries that have a lot of interests here, most of which are anti-Chinese.
I mean, China's surrounded by countries with which it's been at war.
I mean, Russia, Japan, India, Vietnam, and Korea.
I mean, countries like Vietnam are now working with India.
You know, Philippines wants Japan to do more.
What the US should want is allied countries to do more for themselves and to take over those interests.
You know, it's hard to see how it's in America's interest to be in the middle of territorial disputes on behalf of allies who can't defend it themselves.
They want to borrow the US military.
That is very dangerous.
Filipinos can't defend the Scarborough Reef, so they want the US Navy to show up.
How is that good from an American standpoint?
You know, we should have no illusions.
The Chinese government's a bad government.
Xi, I think, is a really bad guy.
I mean, there have been a lot of crackdowns.
But the point is, there's nothing more important than maintaining peace between our two countries.
These are the two powers in the 21st century.
These are the countries who want to make sure, get along.
Nobody benefits from conflict.
So what we don't want to do is treat them as an enemy.
We're much more likely to turn them into one.
Yeah.
And we're having this conversation all these years, what, 45-something-plus years since Richard Nixon went over there and shook hands with Mao Zedong, the worst Chinese man who ever lived, the worst dictator in all of world history, in fact, if you count by skulls, and ended the Cold War with them back before I was born, Doug.
That's exactly right.
This seems kind of foolish.
I mean, I guess what the narrative on the right is, or among the hawks, I guess I should say, because it ain't just the right, but their narrative is that, well, you know, Nixon and Kissinger thought that if we just expand, you know, capitalism and trade and all of that, and kind of short circuit communism, communist economics in China, that communist government will follow and eventually turn into some kind of parliamentary system.
And with more and more liberty, it'll be much more of a culture like ours in that sense.
And they say, yeah, but that part didn't happen.
Instead, you have this evil militarist state who's just taken, you know, the blessings of what Milton Friedman taught them and have used it to build up this horrible, you know, potential coming soon, you know, regional hegemon and who knows, maybe they'll march west and conquer all of Eurasia.
Look, I mean, I think that we should view China with eyes open.
You know, it has not turned out the way a lot of us hoped.
On the other hand, well, I mean, there's still a lot ahead of us.
I mean, there's a lot of pressure against Xi, a lot of liberals there who are frustrated, but they're still there.
This thing could turn around.
But the American military policy should be based on national security and threats.
You know, the Chinese are not going to attack America.
Nothing that we're talking about has anything to do with direct American security.
It's a question about America's dominance in East Asia.
And the question is, how much are we prepared to spend to maintain that?
You know, it costs a lot to project power.
It's a lot cheaper to deter.
We want to send carrier groups.
All they need are missiles and, you know, torpedoes that can sink carriers.
You know, for us to lose a carrier, it's a lot more expensive than them to shoot off a bunch of missiles.
So the challenge for America is, you know, the Chinese don't have to spend nearly as much as us to make it very costly for us to try to intervene against them.
Well, how important is it that we do so?
Are we going to tell the American people, you know, guess what?
Social Security and Medicare are gone because, well, we have to defend Japan.
My guess is most Americans are going to say, no, no, wait a minute.
That's really not what we were thinking.
So, you know, if we're not willing to make that kind of a commitment, then we have to rethink what we're doing.
And who should defend against China?
Well, frankly, it's India.
You know, it's Japan.
It's all these other countries, including Russia.
We shouldn't be pushing Russia towards the Chinese.
If we're worried about China, we should want a friendlier relationship between the U.S. and Europe and Russia.
Instead, we're pushing the two together.
We're reversing Richard Nixon's initiative.
I mean, this is really stupid strategically.
Well, do you think, again, I mean, I don't know, I'm being naive as devil's advocate, but I guess I really believe this too, right?
Or I don't see any reason to think that Japan has anything to fear from China.
I mean, how costly would it be for China to attack Japan and get into a war, whether without the United States there to back them up, or even if they dominate them?
I mean, in what way are they going to dominate them?
Stop them from trading or something?
I mean, they have every reason to get along, these countries.
I mean, I think military aggression is very unlikely, because it would be extraordinarily expensive.
It's much more a question of, you know, will the Chinese try to force their way taking over your islands?
Will they try to turn essentially international waters into a territorial sea?
You know, will all these other countries feel the need to, in some sense, fall under China's influence?
You know, I mean, none of that directly kind of threatens American liberty.
And the point is, ultimately, the responsibility are these other countries.
I mean, I've long said that maybe we should not object if Japan wants nuclear weapons.
We may not like that.
On the other hand, the Chinese really wouldn't like it if you're worried about China.
Why do you want to have everybody relying on the U.S.?
Wouldn't it be better if other countries had their own deterrence?
And if one doesn't like that answer, then my reaction is, well, then you've got to realize, you know, what are the alternatives?
We need to debate this.
You know, and the hawks all say America has to do everything forever for everybody.
Well, that's very expensive and dangerous.
And it's hardly hard to argue it's in our interest to want to risk Los Angeles to protect Tokyo or something.
I mean, we have to ask these questions.
And I think you're right.
The likelihood of an aggressive China, at least in the foreseeable future, I think is very low.
They're still a poor country.
They still have a lot of economic development to do.
We want to make it clear to allied countries they need to make these decisions and not rely on us.
And I think you'll see them doing a lot more.
Yeah.
It's hard to believe that any administration of any experts and technocrats and Ivy League types could possibly manage just the conflicts we talked about on the show today, much less the rest of what they're doing in the world that we didn't get a chance to talk about here.
Oh, that's right.
I mean, I actually don't trust their expertise on when it comes to these things.
But anyway, hey, at least we do have something to celebrate on Syria and Afghanistan there.
And so it's great to have a chance to talk to you on occasion of that.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, thanks again for your time, Doug.
Sure thing.
Talk to you later.
Take care now.
All right, you guys, you can read Doug on Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, North Korea, on China, on Cuba, this great thing he did on Cuba.
It's like six pages long in national interest page length.
You know, he just went there, as he said, for a week and has all this great stuff to say about that.
So check out most of that is all the national interest.
And of course, he's at TAC and at Cato.org.
Thanks, guys.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find 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.
