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.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Doug Bondo.
He is, of course, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, and he writes for us at antiwar.com, and so does Ted Carpenter, which is two really great things about antiwar.com right now.
I have to say, so thrilled to have you, Doug, and back on the show, and I don't know if you know the late breaking news, top story breaking at the Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness.
Uh-oh.
No, I don't know.
Russia hasn't just hacked our computer systems, it's hacked our minds.
Oh, my.
Yes, opinion by Fareed Zakaria.
So I think we've got to start launching H-bombs or something to protect ourselves.
You want to start with this hysteria over this so-called computer hacking crisis, dilemma, problem, declaration of war by the Russkies on us here?
Well, you know, we're sanctioning them on everything, so if they did this, it wouldn't surprise me, and look, I presume that we do our best to hack people.
We launched Stuxnet, or thought to, anyway, in Iran.
The challenge here is that we do things and they get upset if other people do the same things to us, so it gets a little tiresome to find out that everything everybody else does is a threat to world civilization, but we can do anything that we want against them and it's no big deal.
Right.
It's not like they blew up our centrifuges here or anything like that.
No, no.
It's not like we've assassinated their people or that we've bombed one of their people in another country and taken out some of that other country's people, too.
It is quite extraordinary.
Yeah.
And now, as far as I know, and I have to admit, I've been writing this book, I'm trying so hard to get this thing knocked out, and so I am really behind on the news cycle stuff, but are there any accusations that this hack thing actually destroyed anything or broke anything or took over anything of consequence or seized bodily fluids from somebody, somewhere, or anything?
Well, I've also actually been trying to get some writing done.
These sorts of allegations get kind of tiresome because they come very frequently.
My assumption is that it's an issue of stealing data, which isn't good, but let's face it, this is the world we live in and it's hardly ...
The Russians are hardly the only people who do that.
The Chinese do.
We know the North Koreans do, and as I indicated, I assume that the U.S. does, and I'd be shocked if the Israelis didn't.
So the point is that data, cyber conflict, is something that everybody seems to do, which means you've got to be ready for it, you've got to be prepared to fight it, and you shouldn't be overly shocked if somebody does it to you.
Yeah.
And it's funny because I guess there's this nightmare scenario, right, that they're going to turn all the traffic lights green and turn off the electricity to all the hospitals and it'll be like a real war, but it'll be ...
You know, Die Hard 5, I think, was the big cyber attack, right?
They bring everything down to year zero again, like Pol Pot.
We all suffer, sort of like Frank Gaffney's, you know, one good nuke can shut off all lights in America forever and all of that stuff.
But meanwhile, like you're saying, all the lights are still on, doesn't look like anything happened here other than maybe they, what, stole somebody's credit card number or what, or stole the military's secrets about deployment somewhere or something, maybe.
Yeah, well, it strikes me that what this tells us is that we have problems and we better fix those problems.
It also suggests that we need a better relationship with Russia, but that means we've got to be prepared to make concessions too.
I mean, it's basically the US demands that the Russians do what we want, and if the Russians don't, then we put more sanctions on, and if they still don't do what we want, we complain.
Well, you can either negotiate or you can make a permanent enemy.
At the moment, we seem convinced and determined to make an enemy.
Doesn't strike me that's a very good policy for us, but that certainly is the position so far.
Yeah.
Well, and so speaking of which, you've got this great piece that you wrote for us, Joe Biden Confronts Russia, The Problem of Diplomacy Without Compromise, and one of the good things about being a libertarian is, hey, default, you're against government programs like empires, stuff like that.
But also, you're just not a partisan, right?
So you're not invested somehow in all of the faithful arguments you've made for either side on any of these things.
So you can just be a fair-minded and hopefully overly critical critic, and you're not really sacrificing anything.
You're not being a hypocrite, because that is what you said about the last guy, and it is what you'll say about the next guy too, because it's the issue and the principle that counts.
And of course, you've been all around the world a hundred times and know all this stuff for real in a way that most of us don't.
So you always bring a real clear eye to Russia questions, and so the Russiagate hoax aside and the current hacking aside, how would you explain or kind of summarize how Russia looks to you or how it ought to look to the average American citizen right now?
Are they really the greatest danger to our life and liberty in the world here, Doug?
No, I find that extraordinary.
The vice presidents seem to be president suggested that they are, which is kind of a singularly bad judgment.
I mean, it strikes me as a very good reason why nobody serious wants to vote for him.
But of course, if the alternative is Donald Trump, they understand why nobody should want to vote for him either.
Look, I mean, if you look around the world, if you're worried about a country, it's obviously China.
China has much greater economic strength.
China is on the rise.
China has an economy that's a multitude bigger than Russia.
It strikes me that Russia is a kind of a pre-1914 great power.
It's a regional power with some international reach.
I mean, it has nuclear weapons.
It has an ability to get involved in the Middle East.
But this is a country that primarily is concerned about defending itself.
It doesn't want the U.S. up against its border.
It wants secure borders.
It wants to be taken seriously.
Putin's a nasty guy, but since when has that stopped the U.S. from dealing with people?
I mean, the Trump administration, you know, he kind of sucked up to Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, didn't care one whit about human rights with him.
But then everybody suddenly gets all exercised about Russia, and you know, Russia's bad, but so are a lot of other countries, and we don't care about them.
Russia's not going to attack us.
Putin has no interest in going after the U.S.
What's fundamentally interesting, I think, here is, what's really fundamental is that there is no ideological war now.
You know, Putin's a cynic, he's not a communist ideologue.
There's no territory that we both want.
There is no kind of contest over, I mean, anything important that I can think of.
All of our arguments, we're mad at the Russians because they're involved in Syria, but they've been involved in Syria for 70 years, you know, so it's kind of strange that we would assume that they would move out of the way because we feel like taking over.
I mean, you look at this and you say, well, what's the big issue?
And then it comes down to Georgia and Ukraine.
Look, they're in a bad neighborhood, that's unfortunate, but these are not countries the U.S. has any reason to defend, and U.S. involvement there is perceived by the Russians as anti-their security.
So we shouldn't be surprised they respond badly, and I just tell people, imagine if the U.S., you know, helped push a street putsch against the president of Mexico and invited Mexico to join the Warsaw Pact.
People in Washington would be freaked out.
Well, that's essentially how the Russians viewed the U.S.
It's the reality.
I don't like what they did, but that's very different from acting as if you're surprised they did it and acting as if the U.S. didn't have something to do with it.
Right.
Well, and this is the thing.
In Washington, D.C., they really are breathing in their own smoke they're blowing about the Russian threat and convincing themselves.
In the most truth, they're kind of a fashion, right?
They're like, hey, everybody in this room, we all agree that Russia is a big problem, right?
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, me too.
And we all agree.
And so nobody's really making a case.
Nobody's really explaining it and how they could falsify it and how they're sure that this is right and how, you know, they're definitely going to roll into Lithuania sometime soon if we don't do X or Y.
Instead, it's all just much more kind of amorphous and just more of there's just enough of an undefined threat for us to sell planes against or something like that.
But there's not really a policy to confront.
Yeah, it strikes me.
I mean, what was once said of the city of Oakland, there's no there there.
I mean, this idea of this threat.
What is the threat?
Does anyone expect Russia to attack America with weapons?
The answer is no.
You know, does anyone really believe Russia is going to take over Europe?
I think the answer to that is no.
It's really not the Europeans, given what they're spending.
They're certainly not worried.
Does one imagine that Russia is going to dominate Eurasia?
Well, the answer to that is clearly no.
I mean, you know, does one believe that Russia is going to take over the Middle East?
Well, I think the answer has to that has to be no.
I mean, you go down all these things, you can say, what's the threat?
OK, there were there behaving badly in Ukraine.
I got that.
But that's not a threat to the U.S.
I mean, if you want the U.S. involved, it's a matter of charity.
It's not a matter of security.
I mean, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and part of the Russian empire.
Never bothered the U.S.
There was never a fear in the U.S. that somehow Ukraine would be the lodestar threat to America or something.
Yeah, so I think it comes down to that.
The Democrats, for the most part, saw this as a mechanism to hurt Trump.
Didn't matter if there was anything there.
It's simply partisanship.
And Republicans desperately wanted another enemy.
That, you know, they were the traditional anti-Soviet party.
So the Russians seem to be as good as anything, I guess.
I mean, it's very hard to understand why people sit around imagining that Moscow is somehow this terrible.
You know, and again, if you put sanctions on a country, well, you can't be surprised if they actually do nasty things to you in return.
And so many of the charges strike me as just silly.
I mean, supposedly they're paying like the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan.
Well, it doesn't make any sense.
The Taliban is negotiating with the U.S. and wants America to go away.
And even if this was true, how does that differ from the U.S. providing Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen to shoot down Soviet airplanes or the U.S. providing Javelin missiles to the Ukrainians to blow up tanks, presumably with Russians or Russian allies, Russian speakers from Ukraine, the Donbass?
You know, so Americans, you know, happily provide weapons to kill Russians and then claim to be shocked, shocked at the thought the Russians might be helping somebody who wants to kill Americans.
I mean, there's just no I mean, there's absolutely no sense there of any reality and any responsibility on America's part.
Everything's a Russian fault without any any any concern about what America does.
And, you know, what?
There's no reason again.
There's no reason to like the Putin government or like what Russia does.
But it strikes me one needs to realize this is a great power that has interest.
If the U.S. are going to threaten those interests, we shouldn't be surprised if they respond in ways we don't like.
And my point of this recent piece you cited is we need to respond to that.
And that requires diplomacy.
And diplomacy means you have to be prepared to give and take.
For example, don't expand NATO anymore.
Just stop.
Stop.
It's not protecting us.
It's not helping us.
It's threatening the Russians.
If you want to better deal with the Russians, don't do that.
That kind of a thing.
Yeah, sounds reasonable.
You know, you mentioned Georgia there, which they've mentioned in the in the Bush and Obama years about wanting to bring into NATO.
And that was I don't know if it was so much put on ice by Trump as it was put on ice eventually by Obama, but could be, you know, revived again.
Oh, Biden in his foreign affairs piece from January 2020 talked about our sacred commitment to NATO, quote unquote, and this kind of deal.
But it's funny that when we talk about Georgia, we always have to say former Soviet Georgia so that people don't think that we're talking about the one between Florida and South Carolina, the one that actually, you know, under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government is bound to protect something a little stronger than the NATO treaty, you know, member of the union there, Georgia.
No, we're talking about the one between Chechnya and Azerbaijan, between the Black and Caspian Sea, where if you dug a hole through the planet, you might come up over there on the other side.
Yeah, I mean, we want to make their Georgia our Georgia for no obvious reason.
I mean, yes, when people got excited about, you know, in Armenia, you know, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, this is a tragedy.
But you look at you think, what does it have to do with America?
I mean, what on earth?
And people seem to think, you know, they complained about the U.S. being absent from, you know, the fight over Nagorno-Karabakh.
And you just have to look at this as insanity of, well, what do you want us to do, right?
Should we bomb the Armenians?
Or do we bomb the Azerbaijanis?
Or we bomb them all?
Or, I mean, how crazy can it get that everywhere on earth is America's problem?
Everywhere on earth is America's responsibility.
What I've compared it to is that the U.S. believes in the Monroe Doctrine, not just in the Western Hemisphere, but worldwide.
You know, we get to determine everything up to every other country's borders.
And, you know, we don't, you know, nobody else has any right to do anything.
I mean, so we should, of course, be in Syria.
And, of course, we should be in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Of course, we should be in Georgia.
And you ask people why, what interest is at stake?
And, well, this is just, this is a sacred duty.
I mean, where do you come up with a sacred duty to expand NATO to Georgia?
I don't know.
Yeah, you know, I don't know if you saw this last week, Doug, but the New York Times ran a piece about how, and, in fact, even the headline is a news story.
The headline was Report, NATO Must Find Reason to Exist.
I'm barely, barely paraphrasing, I'm sorry.
That's not exactly what it was.
It was very close to that.
And it was about how they did a big study.
They, like, appointed a study group, and the study group did a big report.
And they said, we have to find a reason to exist.
This is our sacred obligation to this organization that it, if you ask it, doesn't even know why it is a thing.
And then, so they studied it, and they came up with it, and their answer was, of course, that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is here to protect the West from China.
Well, as I remember, that report said that NATO is now more important than ever.
Oh, good.
And my comment was, well, how could it come to any other conclusion?
When has any organization ever admitted that it no longer is needed?
I mean, when the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union disappeared, they were really very nervous.
They were talking about doing student exchanges and fighting the drug war, because they understood that this put their future in doubt.
But of course, they managed to, you know, NATO expansion and other things suddenly became the new schtick.
They talk about Afghanistan like that, too.
This is a team-building exercise for the NATO alliance.
Something for us to do together, all right.
Sorry, posh toons, you're gonna get exploded.
Well, Libya became one as well, of course.
That was kind of our, they came with us in Afghanistan and we came with them to Libya.
I mean, again, this utterly insane conflict, which turned into a complete catastrophe.
Now, especially for the people living there.
I mean, these people are the US completely, and allies completely ignore.
We don't care what happens to those people.
You know, all we care about is kind of how does it affect us and NATO.
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So what do you think about, I don't know how much you know about domestic Russian politics, but are there, you know, they call Putin such a strong man, but is there any kind of really developed civil society and political parties in a way where, like, say this guy did have a stroke and kill over that, you know, somebody other than just a general is gonna take charge and it's gonna be someone who's more or less a moderate chosen by the center and through their system sort of a deal-dugger, anything like that?
Some scary right-wing lunatic who wants to take back East Germany?
Well, what I say is the problem, as far as I can tell, of Russian politics is that there are very few liberals in, you know, the sense of kind of a libertarian sense, the classical, excuse me, liberal sense, which is how they would say it.
I mean, the liberals who emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union were pretty much discredited by the whole economic stuff under Yeltsin.
So there's very little sense that there are people there who are our people.
I mean, Navalny gets a lot of attention, and I mean, I know at least one person who worked with him years ago who believes that he's basically as authoritarian as Putin.
I mean, it's a question of who should rule, not how they should rule.
And I'm not aware of any, have any of the people in the West who love him so know anything about him other than the fact that he's an opposition figure.
You know, being in opposition does not mean you're a liberal, doesn't mean you're pro-Western, doesn't mean you're friendly to the values that we espouse.
And I think a lot of people recognize that Putin is representative of a lot of people, and he is by no means the roughest, most nationalist, most anti-Western person there.
So we shouldn't assume that, I mean, everyone seems to assume that, put pressure on them, you know, destroy them, wreck their economy, and what will emerge will be Western-style democracy.
And my reaction is, what planet are you living in?
I mean, we've seen places we blow up.
I mean, remember Iraq, that was a very pretty picture.
Blow up the Soviet Union with 150 or whatever million people.
I mean, do you really expect the outcome of that will be Jeffersonian democracy?
I wouldn't expect that.
I think it's a very, we're playing with fire if that's the expectation.
Yeah, well, okay, so let me ask you this.
You have this whole competition over the Nord Stream pipeline and all these sanctions and whatever, because they're building this pipeline.
As far as I know, it's still on.
They're putting together this pipeline between Russia and Germany.
Does America have anything to lose in that in terms of how many billions of dollars are at stake there?
And is it, I mean, what's obvious to me is that having a peaceful and stable relationship between Russia and Germany is priceless.
I don't know how much gas we'd have to sell to override a value like that, but I must be missing something.
Well, there is certainly a lot of German suspicion that the reason that we are doing what we are doing there is because we want to sell liquefied natural gas.
I mean, it's certainly possible.
I mean, Ted Cruz from Texas is one of the people.
I think that in practice, this is much more an anti-Russian thing.
I mean, it's part of the Jihad.
I mean, we know better than the Germans that the Germans should not be dependent on the Russians for natural gas.
So we will stop this.
I mean, obviously the Germans aren't very pleased with this.
I mean, it's pretty extraordinary when you penalize your nominal allies and tell them, we will, you know, the port, they're going after the port, they're going after the company.
The port is actually owned, state-owned, you know, by German states.
So, you know, we're going after the German government, you know, with the sanctions there.
I mean, it's extraordinary.
And, you know, if the US eventually loses, you know, the dollar being the reserve currency, it'll be because of things like this, where the Europeans are as angry as the Russians and Chinese and Iranians over, you know, US sanctions policy.
Yeah.
So let's see, because I had this other article by you here about Trump's policy in the Middle East, but I'm so torn because I also want to ask you about China, because China does come up in your Russia article.
Yeah, let's go with that.
Oh, here's our segue.
Russia's terrified that the Chinese are going to transplant a quarter of their population up into Siberia, and they're not going to be able to do anything about it.
Sounds like maybe if we just leave well enough alone, the rest of the world has enough problems that they're never going to be a threat to us, huh?
Well, that's the thing, is that, you know, we complain about the Russians and Chinese working together, and the question is, why are they doing that?
Well, they're doing it because the US is hostile to both of them.
And, you know, that's perfectly defensible if that's your policy, but you need to understand that's the natural consequence.
You know, Americans act as if somehow this is mystifying.
You know, these evil people are working against us.
Why are they doing that?
Well, it's because, you know, we're going after both of them.
I mean, and, of course, it reverses the Richard Nixon opening to China.
I mean, Nixon's strategic brilliance was you want to split the Chinese and Russians.
It weakens especially the Soviets, who you're most worried about, and, indeed, it did.
It was a geopolitical, you know, stroke that was very important and very useful.
And, you know, we're allowing them to do the same against us.
I mean, you know, the Chinese just have to sit there and say, hey, Russia, why don't you come work with us?
When Russia looks at what it gets from the United States, it says, yeah, that sounds pretty good.
You know, and that's really stupid.
If you're scared of Russia and if you're scared of China, the last thing you want to do is push them together, and, of course, the U.S. has.
To my mind, if that worries you, this is another reason why you want to work with the Russians.
I don't expect the Russians would ally with us.
They're not interested in a conflict with China.
But, certainly, if they had a better response from the U.S. and Europe, they would be much less interested in working with the Chinese against America and against Europe.
Yeah.
So, listen, I had this conversation with Ray McGovern earlier, and famously, he's the former head analyst at their Soviet division and all of that.
And from his point of view, and I tend to agree, and I know you've written along these lines in the past before as well, that this is essentially our policy is captured.
There's no reason the world of America has to be at war with anyone.
We have a few battleships to protect our coasts, and we could be a normal country in a normal time from here on out.
Soviet Union's gone 30 years now.
And that the only problem is you have this military-industrial-media-think-tank complex of vested interests that just have this iron lock on the government that keep the policy this way.
But then, you know, I don't know.
I try not to be too married to my own point of view either.
And then I wonder, so, like, is there a happy middle ground or some kind of gray area between we really don't need this at all and, oh, no, we really face these severe challenges from countries like North Korea and Iran and Russia and China, challenges that I'm just not really picking up on here, Doug, or it really is all just ginned up so that the national security state has something to do other than getting a real job?
Well, I think it's more than just ginned up in that, look, the military-industrial complex is influential, but it couldn't achieve this if it didn't convince people that there was some case behind it.
You know, that is, if you simply came in and said, we want more bombs because it makes us money, I just don't think politically, ultimately, that could succeed.
But then again, they lie about everything, so they do have to convince, yeah.
But that's, look, but that's the point is that they have to come up with a narrative, and I think there are people who believe the narrative.
And it's for various reasons.
I mean, I think neoconservatives believe in what we call primacy.
America should run the world because America will make it all wonderful.
I mean, America will drain the swamp and will bring human rights and will promote democracy and will kill all the bad guys.
And, you know, I mean, yada, yada.
It doesn't matter how often we fail at that.
That is just, we need somebody better who understands this a little better.
And I think as a liberal interventionist, I think are very Samantha Power types.
You know, I mean, it doesn't matter if the murder and mayhem we create is horrible because, well, that was just a slight error.
Next time we'll do better.
I think that, you know, that's a real desire on their part.
And then you have, you know, people who are focused on particular countries.
I mean, if you came from Lithuania, you wanted them in NATO.
If you're a Lithuanian, you want to protect your homeland.
I mean, that matters to you.
And we see that, I mean, you look at, I mean, the US, the Turks and the Greeks constantly fight each other out in Congress.
You know, Israel has, of course, an extraordinarily powerful following because it's not really Jewish Americans.
It's evangelical Christians in particular with a unique theological view who are very focused on the atheistic nation state of Israel.
It's a very strange thing, but it's very powerful.
So you have all these cross currents that come together.
And then what happens is if you support, you know, going to war on behalf of all these other countries, you like the people who believe in primacy because they're giving you the military that allows you to kind of go out there and help all of the countries you love.
And if you believe in primacy, then you realize how important it is to have everybody, all these political allies who recognize how you can help them.
So you, of course, make it very clear to them, you will help them.
You know, you will go out and protect the countries they love.
So, I mean, I think this stuff all melds together, which is what makes it so powerful.
And there's a conventional wisdom in Washington.
There is a sense, you know, if you're part of essentially an internationalist establishment, and Ben Rhodes called it the blob, but it's a shared worldview.
And you typically, I think you get that people who believe America's role is beneficent.
America should be involved.
America should help other countries, you know, and it just fits.
I mean, so it's very hard to fight all this stuff.
And it doesn't matter what the costs are.
The costs are typically felt by other people.
Washington, you know, Washingtonians typically don't go to war.
They send other people to war.
And unfortunately, those are the people who bear the biggest casualties.
Yeah.
All right.
And so now let's talk about, in just the last few minutes here, I wanna give you a chance to talk about Trump and his relationship with the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Israelis, and his horrible Middle East policy.
Here's a guy who came to power making the most sweeping statements about the horrors of American Middle East policy under Bush and Obama.
And then what'd he do about it, Doug?
No, I mean, the tragedy here, of course, is he even at one point talked about balance in the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.
I think in many ways, it's for two things, one of which he's surrounded by people like David Friedman, his ambassador to Israel, who are very radical supporters.
I mean, they are supporters of a very radical vision for Israel.
It's not just, we want the Israeli state, we believe it has a right to exist, but it's the most extreme stance.
I mean, you support Netanyahu, you support the settlements, you support essentially a colonial policy, you support the idea of essentially crushing Palestinians underfoot.
So that is what he surrounded himself with.
And I think the second point is that he became very, I mean, focused on Iran.
I mean, it's the strangest thing.
You know, act as if somehow Iran is this great threat to America.
I mean, Iran is extraordinarily weak, it's surrounded by countries that hate it, and the US has vastly more power, but he basically decided that the US had to try to crush Iran, and then, of course, to do that, it allied itself with everybody else in the Middle East who hated Iran.
And that meant that he turned policy effectively over to Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who's just an awful, awful person.
I mean, the crown prince of the Emirates, as well as the Israeli government.
So in essence, American foreign policy became their policy, not America's policy.
Yeah, Israel first as always.
And you know, it's funny because, I mean, obviously, Jared Kushner grew up, his family is close to Netanyahu, he used to stay at his house when he was younger, and this kind of thing.
They say he used to sleep in Kushner's bed when he came to town.
So you have that kind of connection, but also, of course, you have, obviously, to a guy like Trump, too, this very transactional thing where this is how you get Sheldon Adelson to donate money to the Republican Party, this is how to help guarantee that evangelical Christians turn out to vote, is for doing all of this.
Part of his re-election campaign was to essentially just completely turn over Middle East policy to these interests that you cite.
And then he lost anyway.
So he could have gone in there and said, you know what, I'm a real estate guy, and seems to me like you let the Palestinians have their measly stinking 22% of what's left of Palestine on the West Bank there, and you have the Israelis pull out of there, and then you call that peace, because that would be just, at least, or close to just compared to where we are now, something like that.
And then he would have lost anyway, Doug, but he'd have done the right thing.
No, that's right.
I mean, look, the problem is this president is very transactional.
And he really, he tends to look at things through a personal lens.
He showed up in Saudi Arabia and seemed captured by MBS for whatever reason.
They sucked up to him, they played up to him.
I mean, other countries learned how easy it is to kind of play the president.
And I mean, even the Chinese did that when he visited over there, they kind of, how they welcomed him.
Europeans had a lot of discussions about that, convincing him that military spending increases they started back in 2014 were due to him.
Oh, Mr. President, you're so incredible, that kind of a thing.
You know, it's a tragedy.
He had some real opportunities, and he's different from the usual war party types of right and left.
But he lost us those opportunities.
He could have taken us out of Afghanistan, he could have brought troops home from Iraq and Syria.
He didn't.
And my guess is that Biden will not do so, that we'll still be stuck there because Biden will decide that it's irresponsible to leave.
And you know, who knows where those things will go.
Yeah.
It's so ironic, but it is kind of perfectly fitting, right?
That the practical joke of the Donald Trump government, where as you say, he really wasn't one of them, you know?
Exactly.
My wife keeps saying he's a fascist.
I'm like, well, name one industrialist he's tied to then.
I mean, here's a guy who essentially, he just came from TV.
He came from being famous and tall and mean, friends with Roger Stone, and willing to shiv Jeb Bush, and that's about it.
And so he could have done anything.
And then, but he didn't do anything much different than what James Mattis would have had him do from beginning to end there anyway.
And I think a part of that is just his personality.
He doesn't have an attention span.
He's not interested in policy.
He's not focused.
So it was easy for people to do that.
And some of it was dishonesty.
I mean, Jim Jeffrey, the Syria emissary who admitted that basically he played the president, lied about numbers of troops and stuff to try to prevent Trump from bringing the troops home.
So part of it is really very dishonest behavior by people within government as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, they talked about just taking pieces of paper off his desk.
Oh, we don't want him to see that follow up on his order to get us out of Afghanistan.
So we'll just take it out of there and hope he'll forget about it, which he does.
So, hey, you know, the fact that that kind of stuff worked is still his responsibility, of course.
But yeah, it really is a shame when you think about, I think this about Obama too, because he's smart enough to be self-aware enough about this to think, wow, eight years.
And what did I do other than get a bunch of people killed and take the bad guy's side in three major wars.
And like Trump, he appointed the wrong people.
People into power who didn't agree with his vision.
Right.
People who wanted us to go to war.
I mean, Hillary Clinton.
I mean, Libya, that was kind of her war.
What a disaster.
Yep.
And that was why he did it, right?
It was like a personal favor for her.
You're pretty sure this is gonna help you get elected in 2016, huh, Hillary?
Okay.
I mean, the Europeans wanted it.
I mean, I think it was one of those easy things, you know, do this for me, do this for, you know, I think it's the right thing.
Do it for the Europeans.
And, you know, and he gave in.
Yep.
And although, you know, I would buy Robert Gates' interpretation that she was what pushed him over the line.
As they put it, Gates quotes Obama saying Libya, that the decision there was 51 to 49.
And Gates says Hillary definitely was what pushed him over the line.
Oh, I'm sure.
Even then, I mean, what is that except the admission of a war crime straight out of Obama's mouth?
If it was only 51, then that might as well be zero.
You don't take us to war unless it's 100.
What are you talking about?
No, that's right.
I mean, it should be viewed as a tough decision.
You don't do it unless you have really strong reasons to do so.
You don't do it as just kind of another policy choice.
Yeah, which by the way, I don't wanna help Gates whitewash his history there.
Like he was innocent in all this.
He recommended against it.
Then he clicked his heels and killed 10,000 people.
So it wasn't Hillary that was pulling the trigger.
He was the secretary of war, not her.
Yeah, if he'd resigned, that would have had a major impact.
But unfortunately, they never do.
All right, well, listen, guys, there's a reason why everybody reads the great Doug Bondo at the American Conservative Magazine, at the Cato Institute and at antiwar.com.
And he writes as much as Danny Sherson.
I think they're in some kind of metaphysical contest for most antiwar articles published over whatever period of time.
If you wanna break it down by week, by month, by year, just absolutely killing it at all times there.
And we sure do appreciate it, Doug.
Well, I'm happy to do it.
Good to work with you.
All right, you guys, great Doug Bondo.
Check him out again at antiwar.com.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
