All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, check it out, you guys.
I got Matt Welch on the line, Editor at Reason Magazine.
And welcome to the show, Matt, how you doing?
Thank you very, very much for having me on.
I appreciate the invite.
Yeah, yeah.
Good to talk to you.
I just finished talking with your buddy Jacob Sullivan about the case against Joe Biden.
And then here you have the case against Trump.
Donald Trump is an enemy of freedom.
And I got to say, I really like the fact that this article is not about his orange face paint or his treasonous ties to Russia or his, you know, crude demeanor, but actually things of substance.
And especially as you say here, when it comes to limiting the size and scope of government and protecting individual liberties, America's 45th president has been actively malign, which is actually a polite way of putting it.
So I'm trying to be nice.
No, I mean, so we have this exercise and basically an assignment.
As Jacob may have pointed out to you, and he certainly said publicly, we could have easily switched assignments on this.
I'm happy to make a case against Joe Biden as well.
I, when I think in 2012, when Barack Obama was running for reelection, I wrote a much smaller piece for, I believe, the New York Post back then making the case against him.
And I did the same thing in 2004 against George W. Bush in the Orange County Register.
And in both cases, especially the Orange County Register piece, it's a, you know, a famously conservative slash libertarian newspaper, had the audience in mind, right?
So like, OK, the readership is going to want to vote for Trump in the case or not Trump, but Bush in the case of the Orange County Register reason it's a little bit different.
Libertarians have, you know, conflicting feelings about Donald Trump.
I won't pretend to represent the planet libertarian when I say that.
But it's the people who are reading this are doing it, want to do it from a perspective of the issues that they have traditionally cared about, which is really about limiting the size and scope of government and getting on with our lives.
And so it was written with that in mind.
It's not necessarily like my overall global assessments of the man and the president.
I have other thoughts about that.
We'll probably get into a couple of them.
But it was written with this thing in mind.
And also, I mean, in terms of the orange man and the personality and all that, it's just that's what we hear every day.
That's if God help us, if any of us still watch even a second of cable news per day, that's all it is.
It's people shaking their damn heads at it.
And to be sure, there's plenty to shake your damn heads about.
That is true.
But also, like you want to just as an intellectual exercise, remove that and say, OK, can we figure out a way to judge on the merits?
And so my gimmick of this piece was not only just to take that out, but also to pretend like coronavirus never existed and say, let's cut let's cut him off until February 29th of this year.
And it's shocking to to assess this president who had for the majority of his term Republican majority in Congress has increased annual expenditures of the federal government signed under his name by more in three years than Barack Obama did in eight.
And Obama had a bit of a financial crisis on his hands when he inherited it.
So it's a pretty amazing record.
And I think Republicans need to be reminded that the stuff that they spent generations expressing concern about, he has been objectively terrible on very, very many of them.
Yeah.
Which, by the way, where did all that money go?
I remember Bush added Medicare Part D and all of this.
What did Trump add that was so expensive than just what?
Increase of Pentagon spending by a couple hundred percent, Pentagon spending quite a lot.
It's it's.
Well, but just by a couple hundred billion.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, they're the annual spending on entitlements, old age entitlements spiked up, which is the most the world's most predictable cost increase, to be clear.
But there was also an increase in emergency spending on on various things.
And in the even in the the tax cut deal, which he crows about, most people forget.
But the to clear the way to do that, Congress had to pass a 10 year budget blueprint.
And there were a whole lot of Republican senators saying, I won't you know, Bob Corker, who was leaving at the time, I won't approve a deal that, you know, increases the deficit by even one penny.
Well, the 10 year budget deal that they agreed to as a precursor, as a palate cleanser, increased the budget, the deficit by like one point five trillion dollars at least.
And of course, that's all based on fiction anyways.
So they that's that was their price of passing the thing that they want besides judges, which is a tax cut is like, OK, we can agree to increase spending.
So it's kind of across the board cuts people always because they're not sophisticated or they're dishonest.
You know, they pretend that a president's budget blueprint that he or she puts out every, you know, early spring is an actual declaration of priorities.
It's not.
There are many opportunities for President Trump to insert himself into the budgetary process because he's got to sign off on those.
And the only two times that he ever did significantly, it was to protest.
They weren't spending enough money, particularly on border enforcement.
So he ran as a guy who was, you know, he was defending the little people's entitlements against the evil Paul Ryan's of the world.
He was pretty open about this.
It's very congruent to a lot of European parties like the National Front or Fidesz National Front in France and Fidesz in Hungary.
You wouldn't call these small government parties at all by any metric.
They are.
They believe in a robust welfare state.
They're just also very nationalist and they want to make sure that the right people get those payouts.
And that's the Trump approach.
And it's against where conservatism was supposed to have been all this long time, despite its own hypocrisy.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think that's the thing, right, is conservatism and liberalism, which was really conservatism was conserving liberalism, right?
The sort of Bush Clinton centrist consensus.
That's over.
I mean, Biden may pull this out somehow, but, you know, just over Trump's personality.
But, you know, essentially the right has abandoned conservatism for this populist nationalism and the left is abandoning liberalism for socialism and totalitarian speech controls and all the rest of the stuff you guys cover at Reason Daily, right?
But I think there's there's some there are some good reconsiderations that happen as part of this process.
Sure.
Near and dear to your heart.
I mean, it is a significant thing that Donald Trump won a Republican primary in 2015 and 2016 by shouting down the Iraq war, by saying, you know, Bush interventionism is terrible and saying that in South Carolina, it is a significant thing that he came to office and one of his first interviews, even before he was sworn in, said, what are we doing in Afghanistan?
I don't get it.
One of the best things that ever happened to the right in terms of just overall the opinion of the right about foreign policy that, yeah, Trump says these wars are dumb.
Like, oh, thank you.
But the thing is, he's also the commander.
He's got a little he's got some decision property rights here.
And he was even in one of his tweet storms recently, maybe at Walter Reed.
It was like, you know, bring the troops home.
Great.
That's kind of your job.
You can do that.
It's significant.
I've been watching the anti-Trump kind of or the never Trump action for a long time.
And I've always found it to have basically three wings of people, many of whom are in natural tension with each other.
One of them are libertarians, Justin Amash is the world who have a principled case against Trump.
I would probably put myself there, but I wasn't a Republican to begin with.
And I don't attach never to my name, except never vote for people who win.
But another wing are definitely neocons and interventionists.
I mean, there's several key points in this administration, whether it was, you know, a resignation or the moment that John Kelly knew that Donald Trump was bad or whatever.
And those points tend to be when Trump is saying, no, really, let's get the troops out of Afghanistan.
Then suddenly we get the scoop of what just a moral monster he is talking about, gold star families or whatever.
We get that then.
And that to me is significant.
And, you know, if I certainly if I was a Democrat, I would maybe have a little bit of pause before jumping into bed with Bill Kristol and everybody else right now who's so enthusiastically anti-Trump, because part of like a fundamental part of their objection to the man, in addition to all the orange man, you know, behaviors is they don't like a U.S. foreign policy that doesn't, as a default, assume that America is going to solve problems with its military everywhere, everybody's problems with the military everywhere.
I'm happy that the rise of Trump has caused a reconsideration of that or, you know, maybe accelerated the trend where American public opinion had been going for a long time, as you well know, and that American elites have been out of step with.
Unfortunately, I don't see a lot of actual reconsideration among the people who created the the mess and the sense of disillusionment and alienation through their support for open ended interventions forever.
I would like to see them say, you know what, I was wrong about this.
I contributed to the rise of a populism that I disagree with, but it's caused me to reconsider my own stuff.
I don't see hardly any of that.
And that kind of fills me with a sense of foreboding about whatever new kind of politics arises in the wake of a presumed, to me, Trump defeat.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's exactly right.
You have the entire so-called blob as the Obama government termed the foreign policy establishment all moving in mass to support Biden.
And the Biden team is nothing but proud of it.
Look how many Republican hawks support us.
That proves how bipartisan and centrist and reasonable we are, which I don't know if they realize is the same thing as telling their own base to go to hell.
But it sure is.
And it remains to be seen how much that hurts them.
I mean, I think that Biden's been happy to tell his base to go to hell with everything with the exception of court packing, which he apparently can't bring himself to say.
But like, you know, he said in front of Trump, like I, I'm the one who beat the socialists.
I am the party.
The one note of of semi-interest I would add about Biden.
And this is, you know, for me, the the basic explanation of Biden's political career is that he's a rusty weather vane.
Right.
So he will creak slowly, belatedly in the wind, in the direction of where the prevailing kind of political winds are blowing nationally and then within the Democratic Party enough to enough to keep him in power pretty much uninterrupted for a half century.
And so part of that is, you know, it's not like the Afghanistan war is any more popular than it ever was.
But it's interesting to read, for instance, Samantha Power's memoir of a White House Biden who, you know, in the 90s was standard issue Democrat third way interventionist.
I mean, he was just he was an Al Gore type.
He's a Bill Clinton type.
He was, you know, constantly sounding the alarm, bragging about how tough he was against Iraq and other places.
He appears to have some actual change of heart based on that, to the extent he has a heart, which is open to question.
And he's portrayed in the kind of Obama era memoirs as being the most reluctant person in the room to go to Libya, for example.
And I think even in the Osama bin Laden takeout, he's he just he and the Afghan surge, too.
Importantly, yeah.
And the Afghan surge.
So do is that enough to bet on?
Absolutely not.
And, you know, he did not, unlike Trump, campaign strongly on let's let's get our troops the hell out of there.
Although I think that is his actual Afghanistan strategy.
I'm not you know better than I do, probably.
But I recall being surprised during the Democratic debates of how kind of, you know, strongly he was positing enough is enough in Afghanistan, which is which is good to my ears.
I don't trust any of it.
And, you know, and you're right, the blob is there.
One of the disappointments of the Trump era, besides the fact that he just didn't follow through on some of his instincts.
But like it exposed that there isn't a big infrastructure of intervention skeptic like think tank work and just ideas, generation and personnel management that the I'm blanking on the same as Will Ruger.
Right.
Yeah.
Who is just just who's a great guy and an intervention skeptic associated the Cato Institute's written some pieces for reason over the over the years.
He was appointed by Trump recently as the ambassador to Afghanistan.
That filled me with delight just because I know, well, he's an honorable guy, but just like there needs to be personnel who are who come in from a default position of skepticism and and hopefully there will begin to be kind of more kind of a thorough intellectual work done by, you know, anti interventionist camps out there to, you know, get a bench going.
I mean, Trump talked this great game.
And who did he appoint to all the jobs, you know, and and then those people, you know, will become his his most high dutch and defectors at a moment's notice when they decide that that he's beyond the pale, oftentimes about foreign policy at the John Bolton, John Kelly, et cetera, et cetera.
So I, you know, I would hope that there's more of an infrastructure that Biden can draw from.
I don't have any expectation of that, but at the very least, he appears to have been at least somewhat burned by his past enthusiasm for it.
So maybe we will continue to have a Trump era kind of muddling along, but a muddling along that doesn't include new regime change wars.
So which to me is the possibly the single greatest achievement.
And it's a negative achievement, if you think about it.
But like of the Trump era is that he didn't go and topple a regime.
That's what every president does.
It's still endless.
And that means, though, under Trump or under Biden, it means endless war on terrorism, special operations and drone wars.
Hopefully it doesn't mean hopefully, yeah, it doesn't imply any more wars for terrorism like we had in Libya and Syria.
But it seems like wherever there's a Sunni with a rifle, they can fly a Reaper and keep it hovering and stay that way.
And it seems like that's their plan, you know, outside of any comments aside from principled anti interventionists such as yourself saying, hey, look, why are we doing this in Yemen?
Why are we increasing drone activity in Somalia or wherever the hell else?
That's like how much is foreign policy shown up in the debates so far?
Does it exist?
Is it a thing?
Like, actually, you know, Kelly Vlahos had a piece about the vice presidential debate.
And the only quotes are just horrifying.
You know, Kamala Harris saying, yeah, you guys got us out of the JCPOA.
Now, for all we know, Iran might be amassing a nuclear weapons arsenal like you just can't win with these people at all, you know?
Yeah.
So at a time when, like, our politics is so incendiary, it's polarized and yet kind of malleable of what people decide to be excited about at a given point.
You know, you you mentioned, I think you're right.
It's heartening to see conservatism be more embracing of an anti interventionism, really skepticism about it.
But do you trust it when the next guy or gal when it's Nikki Haley, you know, leading conservatism next time around?
I think that people are are more kind of team based than they are ideas based.
And that's kind of putting it mildly.
And I don't see a lot of work being done on the Democratic side.
And I went I've gone looking for this at all the major party conventions up until this year, obviously.
But like, you know, even the Obama conventions, I spent most of my time hanging out with Madeleine Albright and other people and saying, OK, he says no dumb wars.
But what are his ideas about smart wars?
And you see that the intellectual work being done is kind of indistinguishable.
You know, it's it's the Samantha Power worldview of, you know, we have a duty to protect vulnerable populations everywhere.
And so if we can, we'll do it.
And and I, I see nothing to suggest that that still won't be kind of a default approach from them.
And these are all the authors of the pivot to Asia, as well as, you know, going back through the days, including, you know, Biden himself all through the 90s, at the beginning of NATO expansion.
I mean, this is so they're hawks on everything.
I guess a little bit less worse on Iran.
It seems like they would want to go back to the Iran nuclear deal.
I presume I remember now that you mentioned Asia, like, do you remember in 2008 season where John McCain, Republican nominee, said, you know, we're all Georgians now, right?
Because Putin had gone into Georgia again.
And I saw and wrote about Biden talking about this either at the convention or at a, you know, a side event.
And he's like, well, you know, what's really the truth is that we're not gonna allow anything like that to happen.
We're not gonna allow Putin to do anything like that on our watch.
And it's like that, first of all, you did.
And second of all, what a what an expanse.
And I say this as a Putin hater.
I lived in Central Europe.
I covered the expansion of NATO and was personally in favor of it.
And you can roast me for that if you'd like.
But I saw the in the in the initial round of Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic as I saw it from their point of view, which is that they're frequently overrun by their neighbors and didn't have any money to have their own security.
But in those early days, NATO expansion was tethered to you had to jump through a whole hell of a lot of hoops.
Most of them were good hoops.
A couple of them were bad hoops.
Bad hoops is like you got to buy from Boeing, dude.
That's no good.
The good hoops was solve remaining disputes, territorial disputes that you have with your immediate neighbors.
Do this, do that, do the other kind of good government things that has been morphed way out of recognition.
Oh, my God.
Who's the last, you know, tin pot, whoever the hell who's been invited into NATO?
And I wonder where Biden I mean, where is Biden on like getting Montenegro into NATO?
I'm I'm afraid that he might still be in that camp of like, let's just, you know, any single human being within a stone's throw of the Russian border should be allowed to get into NATO.
And that's that's against even the principles of NATO expansion.
Yeah.
What's funny is we're supposed to be trashing Trump here.
I was just going to say, you know, Biden, as as Woodward puts it in the new book, held the Ukraine brief in the Obama government when they supported the coup of February 2014 that led to the seizure of Crimea by the Russians and led to the war in the Donbass that got ten thousand people killed.
And, you know, if there was one good thing about Trump coming in, it was that he knew that Crook Manafort, who had been working for American interests in trying to get the Russia leaning leader to lean more toward the West, but knew a little something about it.
And from certainly a more objective point of view than Biden's point of view on the issue.
So having the president come in, looking at the mess that he caused in Ukraine as another example of the giant Russian aggressive threat that Eastern Europe must be defended from is probably the most dangerous thing of all.
And how's he supposed to back down from that?
You know?
Yeah.
I mean, the probably the only silver lining in all of it is that Russia has mostly vanished from the discourse after after having been central to all of the things that are happening in in all of our lives and like manipulating the election and all these charges that I think are ludicrous.
Suddenly that vanished because impeachment didn't work.
And now we're talking about other stuff.
And but I but I'm afraid that the default remains this sort of like soft and sometimes hard to support for people as opposed to moral and rhetorical support.
And this is a longstanding complaint that I have a lot with a lot of my anti interventionist friends of left, right, libertarian, whatever.
Is that, you know, in thinking about like Ronald Reagan, for example, there's a lot of a lot of flaws.
And there's you know, I arose I'm 52 years old.
So, you know, I was around and lived in Santa Barbara, right when I went to college.
So that was Reagan's White House.
And I did not like the guy then I've since come to appreciate some aspects of him.
But one thing that he did that I think is good, that I think I don't see coming from a lot of people anymore, anywhere.
And I understand kind of why.
But that is identifying yourself morally and rhetorically without like getting the CIA involved with people who are battling authoritarianism.
Right.
Like, you know, our moral of vocal support for the solidarity movement in Poland in 1980 and 1981 was the right thing to do.
And it was also the right thing to do as Eisenhower, I think, got right for the most part in 1956 over the same damn question is like, OK, but we're like, we're seriously not going to go to war with this.
We're not going to agree with you about that.
I totally agree with you about that.
And it sucks because we're in the position now where you can't really fairly criticize Saddam Hussein or the Ayatollah or the communists in China or anybody else without carrying in water for the American empire, which, you know, likes to use that kind of rhetoric, libertarian rhetoric as an excuse to start wars and kill people and destroy liberty.
Yeah, I think I think it's it's possible and necessary.
We had a long talk about this with Glenn Greenwald on the Fifth Column podcast, and he was talking about some of his reluctance to criticize.
I believe it was China and Hong Kong.
It could have been something else.
And it was along those lines.
He feels anxiety about lending seeming intellectual support for people who are going to engage policy in his name in an imperial fashion that he disagrees with.
I get that.
I guess I feel and it's very much, you know, a possible product of of being in Central Europe, which is a you know, it's so different than the way that U.S. power and influence played out almost everywhere else and in the generation of people who, like, got involved in geopolitics based in 1990s Central Europe or Yugoslavia and Samantha Power's chief among them.
I mean, her her biography and mine are very similar, except that she gets successful and I get a Steve Bannon haircut.
And yet, but don't you regret spending 2002 demonizing Saddam Hussein when he should have been demonizing George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz?
But I, I regret not coming out against the Iraq war before it started.
I declared myself and it's a mistake and I've and I have thought about it and have actually, you know, altered my approach towards definitely the foreign policy, but also to kind of intellectual engagement, right there.
I was focused in 2001 because I was mad.
I was mad as as as all hell.
I come from a long exposure to the 60s progressive left.
Robert Scheer is a dear, dear old friend of mine.
I just had a long exposure to that.
And that is for good and for ill.
And I had I covered the Nader campaign in 2000 and I was about the only reporter to do so.
And so I've been exposed mostly with lefts, uh, anti interventionist arguments.
And after nine 11, I saw some commentary from left, uh, uh, anti interventionist that filled me with a, with a type of fury, um, that was misplaced, um, but also not necessarily all misplaced.
Like I, because someone agrees with, or he's even right when I'm wrong about a policy prescription, I think it's, it's worth, uh, uh, going after arguments on their own sake, um, cause that is the culture of argument that we live in.
And then I was at that time surrounded by, um, but I do regret, uh, spending too much time in 2002, um, making fun of people who are antiwar, who were making bad antiwar arguments and not good antiwar arguments.
And I would say the bad antiwar argument is when it slips over into apology for bad people, um, which does happen, it always happens.
Uh, and I understand where it comes from and I have more empathy for it.
Um, but, uh, that governs how I think about Trump as well.
And that was part of the reason why I went through the exercise of let's take his personality out of it because it's very easy and we've all seen it, uh, for people to say, yeah, you know, Trump's a clown and he's bad and he's rude and whatever, but God, these, this media especially, um, but the anti Trump people are, I can't believe all this crap that they're saying.
And they're, you know, calling everything fascism when, when it's not, I'm doing this during that.
Um, and it's an, uh, you know, an ongoing argument I have, uh, with my co-podcaster Camille Foster about this, which is like, you can and should point out all of these bad arguments that are happening, but do it in the atmosphere of never losing focus on who has power right now, um, and who's wielding power and what that power looks like.
Yeah.
I think that that was my attempt in the Trump piece is to say, look, he has wielded influence and a lot of that influence, um, we're only going to really start feeling, especially on immigration, um, in the future.
Like a lot of that stuff just happened this year, really, because it takes a while to get the machinery in, in progress.
Um, and that's concrete, that's human lives.
Um, uh, it is also concrete in human lives, looking back of, you know, changing regimes and destabilizing whole regions of the world.
Um, and the people who engaged and supported all of that absolutely need to never, um, be let off the hook about that.
And that includes Trump, right?
I mean, the, the word that he's best on is Afghanistan, where he really did have Khalil Zod go over there and strike a deal to get us out of there, but he escalated the war before that killed a few tens of thousands of people in airstrikes, drone strikes and airplane raids and sent the Marines back to Helmand and sent the Green Berets to Nangarhar and did what Madison McMaster asked for, even though he didn't believe in it, just like Obama didn't want to do it and gave into them and did it anyway and got all these people killed for nothing.
And then we're still lost anyway.
I would say that, uh, to be even harder on Obama is that Obama campaigned on Iraq was the dumb war, but the real smart one was still waiting for us in Afghanistan.
Like he did campaign on the surge and, and he really did.
The story there was he really only wanted to send a couple of brigades and they rolled them into escalating this whole gigantic counterinsurgency campaign and everything that he, it's, it's Woodward's book, Obama's wars.
It should just be called Obama's war.
And it's really the bureaucratic war between the military and the new president in 2009.
And they just completely steamrolled him.
And he was just like Trump.
He was against it and went along with it anyway.
I mean, it's, uh, uh, it's striking that we have how many consecutive presidents, uh, who got to the white house by being the least, the lesser interventionist of the two major party candidates.
I mean, it's a pretty consistent track record at this point.
And then they all get there.
And yes, at least, uh, Trump didn't engage in a new regime change war.
But we spend way more money than we ever have on the military.
Uh, we escalated a lot of warfare, uh, elsewhere.
And because he's frankly, uh, uh, not a smart person because he didn't have anything really to replace the existing, uh, kind of Atlanticists point of view with anything new.
And this is true of trade agreements too.
It's like, ah, these are the worst deals ever.
Okay.
What, what's your, what does your future look like?
Uh, you know, kind of silence because of that people who are consistently good countries that are consistently good at playing us politics, uh, and near the top of the list is always going to be Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel, um, are gonna be able to like get whatever they want out of him more or less.
Um, and, uh, and that, and that can't ever be in a good point of view as far as I can tell.
If, if you are, um, you know, if you're happy with, with Saudi Arabia is happy with Washington or with an administration, then I'm going to be unhappy with the reasons for their happiness.
I think 99 times out of a hundred.
And you know, when you have kind of a personality based leader, who's not tethered to particularly strong ideas, that's what you get.
Um, and, uh, and you know, Biden versus Trump, who's, who's the more anti interventionist now?
Uh, you know, I would say probably Trump, but they're not really talking about it.
Um, and, uh, and so even if the, the, the clearly, uh, most intervention skeptic president has won in the general elections going back for a while now, um, and we got nothing out of it in that direction, really.
Um, what does it say that we have Biden whose fingerprints are on almost everything that's bad that's ever happened, uh, is, is, uh, on the verge of winning at, uh, it's a bit depressing.
Yeah, it is.
It's really bad.
It's exactly like you say, he doesn't really believe in all this.
America has to rule the world and save the world all the time and all this stuff.
And at our own expense, but he doesn't have another set of beliefs to replace that.
So he's just kind of lost in the dark.
And I guess I like John Bolton says tough guy stuff on Fox news.
That's impressive.
Why don't we hire him?
Well, you know, he doesn't even know why not hire him.
He doesn't even know.
Cause he doesn't know anything.
So that's a real, uh, that's a real, uh, drawback when you're in charge and don't read anything more than a hundred or 200 words at a time.
And it's important to know that too.
Um, you know, there's a reason why, uh, there are generations or successive waves of neophyte politicians that the bill crystals of the world got excited about supporting, huh?
That's interesting.
Why is Sarah Palin a good vessel for someone who's really interested in foreign policy?
Well, empty vessels need to be filled with something, right?
Um, I mean, it's, uh, it's widely still misunderstood, um, because of the, the blinding love that the media has had historically for John McCain, that, um, George W. Bush ran explicitly as an anti neocon, um, and neocons all lined up, uh, for the most part, uh, for McCain and especially on the intellectual side, we're, we're devastated by it.
We've been thinking about going third party for a while, bull moose party.
We're going to TR all over the place.
Um, but they're always, uh, uh, smart enough, or at least then, I don't know if there's much of a neocon infrastructure anymore to get the staffing done and to have, and to have a theory of, of the, of the game when something big happens and something big always does happen.
Um, and that's the problem of having, you know, George W. Bush was sort of famously kind of, even though his dad was the president, uh, and was the head of the CIA and stuff, uh, didn't seem to have a lot of curiosity and ideas about what was happening in the world.
Um, that is not a good thing, uh, form an anti interventionist point of view, even if those people say anti interventionist things themselves, because if they don't have ideas and knowledge, um, that are based on it, then that means they're going to be susceptible to the most impressive looking person in the room.
And those people, um, still sadly are going to be the interventionist, the military brass, the whoever.
Um, so that's what I'm worried about.
Yep.
And I mean, you have, it's all right there where, wow, we, this guy Pompeo, he wasn't ahead of his class at West point.
That sure is impressive, right?
Not I read this thing by him.
That was really smart that I agree with, but just, wow, valedictorian looks like a, look at jawline.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Um, and meanwhile there is probably, you know, you and I could go down the list here and figure it out.
There's probably one good bench worth of anti interventionist right wingers that he could hire from Cato and the national interest foundation and a couple of other places.
But this, he's never heard of him.
He doesn't know anything about him and so he doesn't have access to them and it's just, you know, completely out of reach or it shouldn't be completely out of reach.
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Hey guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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Hey y'all, Scott here.
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Listen, talk to us about the trade deals because he brags that, look, I rewrote NATO and NAFTA and made it way better.
And I got a great new trade deal with China.
And I got to tell you, I don't even know what's the status of the trade deals with the European Union, but I think he was screwing with them a little bit.
Did he make, did he do anything right here or is it all just chaos?
What happened?
So far?
I don't.
And I, I apologize in advance, but I wouldn't have to bounce it about five minutes cause I have to go to the airport.
I know me too, but go ahead.
He basically rewrote NAFTA with just like a couple of extra band-aids on it in this direction, um, making it slightly, uh, more restrictive, but so that he can call it, you know, Trump or something.
And then that's it.
He didn't have a competing idea and vision about what it looks like.
So for example, you know, the world trade organization, which is a, uh, an organization that America had by far the most influence in creating, and it created sort of a dispute resolution mechanism between countries that almost always resolved in, in a, in the way that America would like, um, because, uh, he's against globalists and that's what he knows.
Um, uh, we decided to not appoint people on the dispute resolution board.
And so there isn't any, uh, dispute resolution and anymore.
And you know, the Thomas Massie's of the world say, great, uh, why should we subject ourselves to the authority of some transnational body, even though it isn't technically really that, but, um, fine as a, as a point of view.
But like the, the, uh, the, the next step is supposed to be, well, we're going to do all these great sweet bilateral deals.
Well, none of that has really happened.
In fact, what has happened is the people, like when we pulled out of, what's the trans Pacific partnership, they just basically went ahead with that and wrote us out of it.
And so we therefore have a more difficult time selling our stuff to all the countries involved.
And it's better for China, even though it was originally set up to be a way to kind of route around China, what's happened as a direct result of that is that we are paying more money per year in, um, welfare houndouts to American farmers to compensate for them losing business to China and elsewhere paying much more than that every year than, um, we ever paid in some for bailing out, um, Detroit, which is a cause that conservatives used to really howl and howl about with, uh, with Obama.
My God, you know, we spent $12 billion or $13 billion.
Well, it's like 20 a year billion, uh, just to bail out our farmers for the trade deals that we've done.
And again, it just hasn't been replaced with a new vision.
It's hard to do bilateral trade deals.
It's one of the reasons why you end up doing multilateral ones.
It's kind of easier way to get things done.
Meanwhile, he has used national security, uh, uh, like kind of exemptions to like transparently just to punish people that he's mad at, uh, including Canada and, and, you know, NATO trading partners.
Um, like we have to have a national security tariff on steel, even though we buy steel from Germany, it doesn't make any sense at all.
Um, and so by doing that, he's created an excuse, uh, worldwide for other people with similar inclinations to do it.
So, um, you know, we had a for better and for worse, and I'm on the, I'm on team side team better.
Um, here, uh, since world war two, there has been a kind of steady march towards reducing tariffs worldwide.
Um, I'm afraid that that March kind of stopped or will have seen to have stopped during the Trump administration because America for the first time since the 1930s, um, has decided to go another way on trade.
Um, and people who have a more mercantilist view of the world, um, are, uh, are saying, cool, uh, we'll do it too.
And again, a lot of those effects we're going to see going forward.
Bottom line, we just pay more for stuff, uh, and we are including, and we have to pay a lot more in, uh, you know, handouts to, uh, the people that, uh, are negatively affected.
And we created this huge lobbying infrastructure in Washington for big business to, uh, get carve outs to whatever tariff and trade restrictions there are.
Right.
All right.
Well, with that, I'll let you go.
Please go and look at this great piece over at reason magazine, the case against Trump.
Donald Trump is an enemy of freedom by Matt Welch.
And of course it goes along with this article by Jacob Sullivan, the case against Joe Biden, Joe Biden's politics of panic.
And thank you very much for your time on the show today, Matt.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Scott.
It was great conversation.
Thank you.
Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APS radio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
