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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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Ted Carpenter.
Man, I'm so happy that we got Doug and Ted from the Cato Institute writing for us at antiwar.com now, too.
I am just so proud of that.
That's the best thing we got going right now.
We got a lot of great things going right now at antiwar.com, because all the bad news, you know.
Welcome back to the show, Ted.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm great, and it's great to be back, and it's also great to be on board with antiwar.com as one of the writers, one of the columnists.
Yeah, man.
Right there, check that right-hand margin, everybody.
And writing every week now, right?
It was every two weeks, but now it's every week, right?
It will be every week come February 1.
Oh, gotcha.
Great, great.
And man, it's always, you know, it's not just that I like you guys so much, which I do, but it's the quality of the stuff that you continually put out right on everything and all this time, and going way back to, and know everything about it, too.
Not just good positions, but all the details, all the history, just mastered.
You're the best guys we've got.
You and Doug.
Well, thank you very much for that.
I certainly appreciate that compliment.
We try to do our best, and we try to do good, rigorous work.
And that, I think, is reflected in our writings.
We're determined to do the very best we can.
Yep, absolutely right.
All right, and speaking of which, this one is called The Futility and Cruelty of Washington's Economic Sanctions.
They are way-of-life sanctions.
I remember Ron Paul in, I forgot, 2008 or 2012 had a great crack about, oh yeah, no, I'm the isolationist, but you guys got sanctions on, you know, more than half the countries in the world.
You make it a crime for people to trade.
I want everyone to be able to get along with everyone.
I just want to bring our wars to an end and our troops home, and that makes me an isolationist?
You guys are the ones engaged in this war of all against all with the rest of mankind.
Okay, he didn't say it exactly like that, but pretty close.
And of course, they were left speechless, because he was right and they were wrong.
Well, there's no question that economic sanctions, especially, are an extraordinarily unfriendly act against not just other countries, but the innocent populations in those countries.
And that's one of the things I really wanted to emphasize in that article, which is reflected in the title.
The sanctions as a tactic are both ineffectual and cruel.
They're tremendously cruel to innocent people in the target country, people who, in the overwhelming majority of cases, have no ability to affect the decisions of their government at all.
And yet, they are the ones who suffer from the sanctions the United States and its allies impose.
And that would be bad enough if sanctions, on a routine basis at least, managed to achieve their stated objective to get the regime in the target country to comply with US demands.
But the record shows that's not even the case.
Sanctions are an ineffective tactic.
So that's really unique, a tactic that is both ineffectual and cruel.
That takes some doing to come up with that as a tool of foreign policy.
Yeah, it seems like it makes good politics to say, oh, yeah, well, I'm gonna fight this country without actually fighting them, because they can hit me back, or, you know, they could actually cost our interests severely somewhere if we really went after them.
But we can do this when, kind of on the face of it, it's counterproductive, right?
I mean, the case of Iraq War one and a half there in the Clinton years is the most obvious thing, right?
We're gonna starve the Iraqis into rising up and overthrowing Saddam.
And yet, day by day by day, he is getting more and more powerful relative to his population, because they are getting weaker and weaker and weaker, and have less and less ability to overthrow him all the time.
Where the opposite of that, lifting all sanctions, encouraging massive amounts of investment and trade and normalization of every part of humanity's relationship with the people of Iraq would be the best way to undermine Saddam and his sons.
By letting the Iraqi people build up a civil society, and build up the kind of institutions that they could use as an alternative to a military dictatorship, you know?
But that wasn't what they wanted.
You know, they wanted another war.
Well, again, that's also been part of the problem, that sanctions, in a good many cases, end up being a prelude to military action, not permanently a substitute for it.
And I think we need to worry about that in a number of cases today, certainly with respect to North Korea, with respect to Iran, that the use of sanctions as the only tactic will not necessarily endure.
There's always that temptation on the part of our global meddlers in our government to escalate matters eventually, and resort to military force, as we did with Iraq.
Right.
Yeah, we've tried everything.
Our sanctions that never work also didn't work this time.
So now we have no choice but to bomb.
That's usually the argument, yeah.
We've tried everything.
We've been patient.
We've been engaged in genteel bullying.
That hasn't worked.
Well, now we have to take the gloves off and use military force.
Has this ever worked?
Is there a case where, I don't know, in Latin America or something, anywhere, where the Americans said, listen, we're putting all these sanctions on you until you change your government, hold some new elections, or turn over a quarter of your property to an American company that wants to steal your water, or any specific thing where it actually came through the way it was supposed to, at least claim to work?
We can find a couple of cases, the most famous one being the multilateral sanctions against South Africa, which eventually did cause the apartheid regime to capitulate and agree to a transition to a multiracial government.
Then a couple of other cases, too.
For instance, sanctions by the United States and its allies induced Muammar Gaddafi to give up his embryonic nuclear program and foreswear that he would never, ever pursue that objective again.
Well, of course, that worked fine until about six or seven years later, when the United States and its allies then stabbed Gaddafi in the back.
Once he had given up his nuclear ambitions, the United States and its NATO allies helped rebels overthrow Gaddafi's regime.
In fact, without the NATO intervention, it's highly unlikely that the rebels would have succeeded in ousting him from power.
Of course, that's one of the great achievements of US foreign policy over the past couple of decades, turning Libya into an utterly violent, chaotic country, what I've described as Somalia on the Mediterranean, in terms of the total chaos, the bloodshed, the extreme poverty, and the reintroduction of slave markets, a true achievement for American foreign policy.
Yeah, man, isn't it something else, that Libya war?
You know what, though?
Let me ask you, was it really the sanctions that even brought Gaddafi?
I know W. Bush at the time said, well, it's because I invaded Iraq, and that scared him into compliance because he was trying to spin it like the Iraq war had accomplished anything.
But from my reading, Gaddafi had been sucking up to the Americans and trying to beg to come back in from the cold since at least 1996, according to Gary Hart, who wrote a thing in, I guess it would have been the New York Times Magazine, back in like, say, 2005 or something, about how the Libyans approached him at a hotel in Athens and said, man, we just want to be friends, please.
Yeah, it's hard to tell how much of an impact sanctions had.
I think it played a role.
I mean, one of the reasons Gaddafi and his people wanted to get back into the good graces of the U.S. and the major Western powers was because the sanctions were biting.
They were causing discomfort.
But was that the decisive factor?
I don't think there's any way of knowing for sure.
I'm just saying that's a case where at least one could make the argument.
Right.
And they weren't saying we're going to starve you Libyans until you overthrow this guy for us.
That never would have worked.
Yeah, exactly.
That where sanctions have appeared to have worked or at least played a role is when the objective is limited, when it's massive, when it's basically demanding a regime's capitulation of capitulation, especially on a very high priority policy, then sanctions almost never work.
When the objective is much more limited, you can, again, find cases where arguably.
That that approach has worked, but again, even in those cases.
Sanctions cause very serious suffering for the innocent populations in those target countries.
The regime elites do not suffer.
They will take whatever is available.
If the total pool of benefits and resources shrinks for that country, the elites still grab what they regard as their fair share.
Right.
And it's just the people getting weaker.
You know, here's a fun thought experiment.
What if Europe and Russia and China and the rest of the world followed suit and they all put sanctions on the United States of America and said that we better overthrow our government and install whoever the French or the Chinese have picked for us to be our new leadership, or they're going to keep us under blockade and and, you know, halt all international trade and try to bankrupt us and starve us into submission to their goals?
What would Americans do in a situation like that?
Do you think?
I have a wild hunch that they might regard that as an unfriendly act.
I suspect that our elites would regard that as an act of war.
And I think they might very well resort to military force in response.
However, we the U.S. government seems to assume that when the United States imposes sanctions on other countries, the the government and populations of those countries are just supposed to slink away with their tails between their legs and not really oppose those sanctions.
And or they or they're supposed to blame their own government for getting them into this situation rather than blame the foreign interests.
Absolutely.
And U.S. officials are actually surprised when they get pushback from the population in those target countries.
They're actually they actually seem surprised that the populations don't rise up against the the evil regime governing that country.
But they instead attribute their triumph to the government.
But they instead attribute their trials and tribulations to actions by the United States.
It would seem to be a perfectly rational reaction, but U.S. officials are habitually puzzled and surprised at that kind of reaction.
Yeah.
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All right.
So let's go through the cases here like you do in your piece here.
I'm glad that you talk about Yemen because Yemen really is this same policy only also with carpet bombing.
But it does have this economic blockade and attack against civilian infrastructure and, you know, against farms and and all distribution methods of food and everything in order to wage this kind of war against the population to make them turn against their government.
And how's that working out so far?
Huh.
It has been a massive tragedy.
This this has to be one of the most shameful policies the U.S. government has pursued in the last half century.
Not only has the United States imposed sanctions on Yemen, but both the Obama and Trump administrations actively assisted the Saudi led military coalition in its campaign against Yemen, against the the Houthi faction in Yemen and aided and abetted, actively aided and abetted war crimes committed by the Saudi coalition.
There's no question that those war crimes have taken place.
There's no question the United States has been actively involved in them.
We have provided refueling operations for Saudi coalition warplanes.
We've provided intelligence to the Saudi led military coalition and its actions, among other things.
The war in Yemen has resulted in a cholera epidemic, in mass starvation.
It is, again, one of the most shameful episodes in a rather shameful record of U.S. foreign policy over the past half century.
Yeah, we're right at the six year anniversary of the beginning of Operation Decisive Storm.
And they're no closer, you know, I was just talking with Mark Perry and Mark Perry is talking about General Lloyd Austin, who he knows a thing or two about.
And Austin was the guy, of course, who started this war.
He was the head of CENTCOM at the time, but he was against it.
He clicked his heels and obeyed anyway, but he was the guy that was back in the Houthis working with the Houthis to kill Al-Qaeda guys in the very early part of 2015.
And like, hey, the new regime hates Al-Qaeda.
Let's work with them.
And then two months later, Obama says, no, actually, we're going to take Al-Qaeda's side against the Houthis.
And according to Mark Perry, Austin was really mad and even wanted to go to Obama and have Obama denounce the Saudis war or something like that.
And then his fellow generals talked him out of it.
But anyway, Mark Perry is actually hopeful that because this guy knows the difference between the shirts and the skins in Yemen, that maybe he'll end the war.
Maybe he will tell Joe Biden and Biden had mentioned this in the campaign.
So I guess that means he's not going to do it.
But that's the kind of deal he'd be buying the great for at least his his first or second day in office if he would just call the Saudis on the phone and tell them that the war is over.
And he could do that on his first day on January 20.
He could indeed.
But again, when you think of the power of the Saudi lobby and the Israeli lobby, very few things get done in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
If even one of those lobbies opposes a certain U.S. action.
That's the blunt truth.
Yeah.
On the other hand, though, there's so many even establishment types who have opposed the war and even supporters of it who have changed their mind and turned against it because it is, as you describe, it's absolutely a nightmare.
It's at least as bad as Iraq, war two or Syria.
It's an absolute catastrophe over there.
And even some of the most heinous senators, people who are just the worst people in the world, are for some reason good on this.
Like Chris Murphy, for example, they seem to really want an end to this.
And not just because, you know, I don't know why.
Honestly, I really don't know why.
But they do seem to really be animated about this.
And so there is a constituency for ending this war, even though, of course, Yemen has no lobby in this country.
It's only people who care for good reasons, not self-interested reasons, who are lobbying against this thing.
And we also have to determine just how much the merchants of death, our defense contractors, will weigh in to continue this war.
Right.
Because obviously they're profiting handsomely from it and they have no desire to bring it to an end.
You know what?
I had thought about that and I totally spaced out and forgot to mention that in the Mark Perry interview, that that's where Lloyd Austin has been sitting this whole time since he left central command, is at Raytheon, where they make three billion dollars a year selling weapons to Saudi to use against the Yemenis.
But you have to admit, we've really made some progress.
We went with Mark Esper from having Raytheon's chief lobbyist as the secretary of defense.
To Lloyd Austin, who was just a member of the board of directors.
Right.
We're making real headway toward peace here.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
OK, so.
All right.
Yeah, let's go ahead.
Skip from Yemen.
I could stay on Yemen all afternoon.
Let's talk about North Korea.
Here's a country where if no one had sanctions against them, they'd still all be living in poverty, if not starving.
But what's it really look like in North Korea now?
Do you know?
Well, you know, that's a very good point, Scott.
It is true to a lesser extent, but still basically true with Cuba.
I mean, you've got crummy, collectivist economics.
And that means you're going to have dysfunctional economic systems and poverty in a particular country.
So all we've done with our sanctions is make a bad situation for the people, even worse.
And in North Korea's case, the U.S. demand has been focused on North Korea's nuclear weapons program and the demand for a complete, irreversible and verifiable end to that program.
Now, the U.S. has pushed that objective for roughly better than two and a half decades now.
Without any sign of success, the North has continued to develop its nuclear weapons, adding numbers and getting greater sophistication to its weapons, developed delivery systems, missile systems for it.
So again, definitive evidence that this strategy of imposing sanctions and browbeating other countries to impose sanctions on North Korea, that the strategy hasn't worked.
But we have administrations, Republican and Democrat, continuing that strategy.
Meanwhile, the North Korean people who would have suffered under a Marxist system in any case, end up suffering even more.
And that's the result of our North Korean policy now for close to three decades.
And for that matter, we've had sanctions on the North even before that, but they've intensified because of the nuclear issue.
And again, it's...
Don't worry, they'll fall any day now, Ted.
Yeah, it's, let's see, we're in year 29, year 30 should be the charm, I guess.
And it's amazing because you get experts in this field who admit that the strategy has not worked, that it's extremely unlikely that Kim Jong-un or any other North Korean leader will give up a small nuclear deterrent because they feel that's the one thing that can guarantee the U.S. won't engage in forcible regime change.
That's their best bet.
They're ace in the hole and they're not going to give it up.
And given the U.S. track record of, shall we say, using force against non-nuclear adversaries like Iraq, like Libya, like Serbia, their conclusion is not an irrational one.
If they want to stay in power, that's probably their best bet.
So again, we can inflict great suffering on the North Korean people and have, but it's not going to give Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons.
Right.
And I mean, you know what?
Who would care if they had nukes if we were friends?
Again, a normalized relation, even if we're not friends, just a normal relationship.
Minimizing the danger.
Absolutely.
And you know what?
In a way, this doesn't really matter either way, but in a way it kind of does matter, you know, just depending on how you look at it.
But this is all the U.S. government's fault.
The George W.
Bush government, and I'll try to keep it short because it's redundant from the Tim Shorrock interview the other day, but Bush and Bolton deliberately took four major steps in a row to force the North Koreans to go ahead and quit the nonproliferation treaty, kick the inspectors out of the country and then begin to start harvesting plutonium out of their old Soviet reactor to make nuclear bombs.
And so, you know, when Bush came into power, they had the agreed framework.
And I believe Colin Powell had said, yeah, we're going to, you know, start with we're going to pick up where the previous administration left off and figure out what we're going to do here.
And then was quickly overruled by the rest of the Bush government who then completely blew it.
And so the fact that they pushed the North Koreans into nukes when they were in the middle of refraining.
Is extremely relevant to the position that we're in now saying you have to give up your nukes and all of this stuff, it seems to really take the oomph out of it all, you know, to any.
Well, to me, I don't know if I'm disinterested to any third party.
It seems hypocritical and kind of ridiculous.
And then, as you said, it's too late now.
They got a couple of dozen bombs and they're just going to hand them over to you when they see what happens, you know, come on.
We just talked about what happened to Muammar Gaddafi and they shot him in the side of the head on the side of the road a couple of minutes ago.
Yeah, that episode especially really conveyed to the North Korean leadership that they could not even think about giving up the the nuclear arsenal they were building.
I personally suspect they wouldn't have given it up in any case because they simply don't trust Washington.
But that one, that episode just confirmed to the entire North Korean leadership that there was no way they could give up a nuclear capability and hope to remain in power, that sooner or later the United States would pursue forcible regime change.
So it was a very, very important episode.
Yeah.
And that's why John Bolton, as even Donald Trump accused him on Twitter.
That's why Bolton brought up the Libyan model for how we're going to resolve this issue with the Koreans.
It was to make them react against that.
And well, yeah, I mean, set diplomacy back.
That was jaw dropping.
People speculated at the time, why in the world would he bring up that example?
But I think you're right.
I think that was quite deliberate.
He didn't think for one moment that the North Koreans would think that the Libyan model would be an appealing thing.
Quite the contrary.
That would be the reaffirmation of the warning.
Don't even think about going down that road.
Yeah.
You know what?
I'm going to pretend I don't understand because in a way I kind of don't.
I mean, I think I do.
But why don't they just change their stupid North Korea policy and let the South make friends, if not reunify, drop the sanctions, kill them with kindness.
We get along with the Chinese.
Richard Nixon went over there and shook hands with Mao Zedong, quantifiably the single worst human who ever existed and good.
And we're all grateful for that because the starvation ended pretty much right after that.
They said as soon as Nixon got back, he sent Milton Friedman over there.
You know, he's no Rothbard, but close enough.
And why can't we just do that?
Why?
What do we really have to lose, Ted?
And by we, I mean the evil American empire and its interests in Asia.
What did they have to lose?
A loss of control.
If you allow the South Korean government to take the lead in dealing with North Korea, have the United States stand back and defer to South Korea, to China, to Japan, to Russia, to North Korea's neighbors, the ones who really have to deal with that government, then the United States does not dominate the affairs of East Asia anymore.
And that means the U.S. political elite does not have a dominant position in an important region of the world.
So empires don't give up power willingly.
Even though the cost is a perpetual nuclear standoff that could get millions of people killed in a day.
I think these advocates of the status quo policy in many ways are unrealistic optimists.
They actually believe their own propaganda that if the United States just stands firm, stands tall, no one will ever challenge the U.S. militarily.
They might make noises.
They might try to achieve objectives on the periphery, undermining U.S. economic power in the world and so on, undermining U.S. diplomatic influence.
But nobody is going to be crazy enough to challenge the United States directly on a military level.
I think that's unduly optimistic, but members of our political and policy elite show signs of actually believing that, that they can pursue foreign policy as one great bluff and no one will ever call it.
Yeah.
You know, so Gareth Porter, his book about Vietnam is titled The Perils of Dominance.
And it's about how America's biggest problem is the people that run our national security state.
They know how much more powerful physically the United States government is compared to the other governments of the world.
And but then they presume that that means that they will have to do what we say when the reality is there are lots of things that people would rather kill and die for than give in to you, no matter how much bigger and stronger you are.
And every country has their red lines.
Every society has their red lines where they by far would rather fight.
The Vietnamese, three million of them were killed by LBJ and Richard Nixon and they didn't give in.
And they knew that they were going to keep getting bombed, too.
They didn't give up and negotiate because they had their red line and their red line was white men are not going to rule this nation anymore.
Get out.
And that was it.
And so, yeah, same kind of thing here, you'd think.
Unfortunately, that's a realization that members of our elite don't want to face.
And add to that that Washington's relative military advantage over potential challengers is fading, certainly with respect to China, but you can see it elsewhere as well.
And the idea that we can just impose our will at least has some plausibility when there's an overwhelming military advantage, when that advantage is much narrower as it is becoming, then the likelihood of the dominance being challenged at some point when the U.S. just gets too pushy, that chance rises dramatically.
And I think we're already in that situation.
One of the things I fear, for example, is a war over Taiwan.
I think that the U.S. protection for Taiwan may have been very credible 40, 50, 60 years ago.
It is much less credible now as China's military power has risen.
And the U.S. would have to try to defend an entity that China insists is part of its homeland.
And we would have to wage that fight on China's front porch.
I don't like our odds on that.
Yeah, and everybody knows they have supersonic sea skimming missiles.
So, you know, how many people they staff one of those Star Destroyers with, the American aircraft carriers?
This is about 7000 men running one of those.
Yeah, you're looking at a potential terrible tragedy in that case where, again, imagine the reaction in this country if two or three aircraft carriers go to the bottom of the Western Pacific.
Will it be nuclear war?
Unfortunately, I think you're probably right.
But even if we somehow manage to avoid that, the total shock to the American political system would be enormous.
That's just we don't lose wars like that.
And yet I think that's one of those realizations that some very shortsighted members of our political elite may have to face at some point in their future.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Back to the sanctions thing and just the unreality of all of this stuff where, you know, you may be familiar with this where it's a great clip of Oliver Stone interviewing Vladimir Putin and Oliver Stone says, listen, you know that the military industrial complex in America is a racket and you know that we know that Russia is not really a threat.
They're just pretending because they're selling weapons, but they don't really mean you harm.
They don't really threaten Russia.
You know, this is a game in a sense, you know, for the money.
And Putin says, yeah, of course, everybody knows that.
But still, what am I going to do, man?
You're surrounding my country with anti-missile missiles.
I have to make better missiles.
I mean, that's it.
You don't give me a choice.
It doesn't matter whether it's a racket or not.
You know, this is a dangerous situation and it's escalating.
And yes, I'm living up to my half of the escalation, too.
And it was, you know, I guess a year later or so that he gave that big speech where he announced all their new nuclear missiles that they have and their nuclear powered cruise missile and all of these things.
It's one of the things, too, that even if it's meant to be a game, a racket, miscalculations can occur very easily.
Accidents can occur.
And suddenly we're in a huge crisis, if not an outright war with nuclear implications.
So, you know, this is this is a game that's much too dangerous to play.
So what about Cuba?
I think America just put some sanctions on them a couple of months ago to see if we could rouse their communist regime out of power there.
And don't you want to give that a chance to work?
You know, that's, again, one of those situations.
Barack Obama's administration did a lot of things wrong.
Libya, Syria, Yemen, to name the top three on the international front, terrible, terrible policies.
But one where Obama was at least moving in the right direction was Cuba beginning to lift the sanctions, beginning to move toward something resembling a normal relationship.
Unfortunately, President Trump has largely reversed that course, including, as you said, just a few weeks ago, imposing a new round of economic sanctions against Cuba, going back to the strategy that we have pursued for six decades and again, a strategy that has utterly failed to achieve any meaningful result.
All it's done is, again, made the lives of the Cuban people even more miserable than they would have been under a Marxist economic system.
So that's our great accomplishment.
And handed Castro and his brother and his successor all these years the talking point that everybody knows this is Uncle Sam's fault, whatever's wrong in Cuba, this would be paradise if it wasn't for them picking on us all the time.
And again, imagine if they didn't have that excuse, if the U.S. had maintained normal diplomatic and economic relations.
Who would the regime blame then?
And again, the Cuban people, I think their attention would have been focused a lot more on the deficiencies of that regime.
There are a lot of Cubans, I'm sure, who see through that argument, that excuse and blame the regime as they as they should.
But there are others who at least partially believe the propaganda that it is all the fault of the United States.
Again, we have pursued a policy that is both ineffectual and cruel, that really takes some doing to come up with a policy that has both of those qualities.
Well, you know, I got to wonder how much of the Cuban people's resistance to this is really not because they favor communism or because they blame the U.S. embargo necessarily for all of their economic troubles.
But just out of economic nationalism, right?
Just like the fight in Vietnam was not really for Marxism.
It was anti-American occupation and intervention there.
And it seems like you don't have to be a communist to be a Cuban who might be worried that if there's a real change of regime there and pro-American types were to come to power, that then American business interests would come in and try to take over.
And quote, unquote, buy up all of their property from people who don't really own it.
Right.
The new government warlords.
And they'd just be going back to the bad old days of feudal fascism under the American empire rather than independence and poverty and communism.
I think it may even be a little broader than that.
There seems to be a something close to a universal human characteristic that transcends cultures, that people in one culture resent foreign overlords.
They just do, even if in some cases the foreign rulers may be somewhat more benevolent than the people in their own country that run things.
But there's still that resentment of the other running their affairs.
And again, Washington has been largely oblivious to the to the role that that attitude plays.
Right.
And, you know, we can just order people around and they shouldn't resent it.
Right.
Well, I mean, this is the most extreme case.
But in Robert Pape's study of suicide terrorism, he says that the greater the racial and ethnic and religious difference between the occupied and the occupiers, the greater propensity for the most extreme sorts of violence, which just makes sense.
So, in other words, if the USA had all been colonized by the Spanish, just like all of Latin America and was lording it over the Cubans, that would be different than the Anglos doing it.
I think there's certainly a point to that.
I would agree.
And it makes sense, too.
I mean, look at the way Americans react against Mexican civilians just moving to the neighborhood to live and not trying to exercise power over them at all, you know?
Yeah, there is that resentment against the other.
Yeah, that's one would hope that as a society we could all move beyond that.
But that still is a factor and you ignore it at your peril.
Yeah.
Well, and when it comes to being neighbors, it should be fine.
But when it comes to, you know, political power, then you see what people are fighting about.
You know, Jacob Warnberger always makes the joke about like, yeah, what if the terrorists took over our country and created an IRS and an FBI and all these horrible institutions, a Department of Homeland Security to harass our people and eat out their substance?
Why, that would be horrible.
Well, fortunately, we would never do a thing like that to ourselves.
Yeah, that's right.
This is why we have to fear those foreigners so much, man.
And and yeah, you know, China, China, China, they all keep saying even in the National Security Strategy, Mattis himself or, you know, his people wrote that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Forget the posh tunes.
We're done with the terror war.
We're pivoting to Asia and even Russia.
And even Russia, everybody knows that as as John McCain deridingly call a gas station with borders pretending to be a country or something, it's a weak country with a declining population and a relatively small gross domestic product.
Yeah, it's impressive on a map, but most of that's tundra.
And, you know, I guess as Doug always points out, when the Germans just refuse to raise up a real infantry, that's because the Russians aren't coming.
You know, there's just not a threat there.
And so the Germans aren't going to waste all of their efforts on armored divisions against a non-existent threat.
This whole thing is crazy.
But so then we're out of enemies in the world.
If we're switching from the posh tunes, we got to switch to somebody.
And then, you know, like you mentioned Taiwan there, we can make a huge deal out of all kinds of different conflicts with China.
You know, Biden or his people, I don't know if it was him personally or his people said that, oh, yes, our war guarantee to Japan extends to the Senkaku Islands.
Like, why?
Why not?
Some uninhabited islands and Japan and China's disputed claims over them.
Yes, our war guarantee to Japan extends to that if they get in a fight over that.
And that's, you know, someone ought to call the Logan out on Biden.
He's intervening in our foreign policy while he's a private citizen, Ted.
Well, you know, it's interesting because the explicit extension of the Mutual Defense Treaty to the Senkakus occurred under Barack Obama.
No other president before that had made it explicit that those weird uninhabited little islets, I don't even want to call them islands, were covered by the Mutual Defense Treaty.
He made that change.
Trump, unfortunately, reiterated it.
And it certainly appears that Biden is going down that same path.
So, yeah, the United States is now committed to come to Japan's aid if a fight develops between Japan and China over a collection of uninhabited rocks.
Our foreign policy in action.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so back to that posture of we're so powerful, though, you're not really going to do anything about it kind of thing.
Like, just how powerful is the Chinese Navy getting?
How close are they, in your imagination or their mind's eye, to the idea that, you know what, maybe we could take the Americans and a thing in the Pacific and maybe we'll go ahead and push the Taiwan issue and push these and those islets here and there and see what we can get away with and all of that.
Like, go ahead and be a hawk for a minute.
Just how brave are they, these dastardly communist Chinese there, Ted?
Well, I think it depends a lot on the issue.
Taiwan, I believe, and I've studied this issue for better than two decades, that has become a very high priority issue for the Chinese government.
And I think if the U.S. continues to push its defense of Taiwan, the danger of a collision is very, very high.
Some of the other things in South China Sea, for example, or even the Senkakus, I think China would still be cautious about proceeding to push the United States on those issues.
But I would point out that Pentagon war games over the last several years, as well as war games run by the RAND Corporation, have all reached a similar conclusion.
The United States would now lose in a naval showdown with China in the extreme western Pacific.
So, U.S. policymakers need to take that into account to the point where our policy of bluff, or just assuming at least, that any adversary will back down if the United States has solid military capabilities and makes a firm declaration that we're protecting a certain area, just making it very clear that no country better challenge that.
Is that now a viable policy in the case of China?
I would argue it's not.
Yeah.
Okay, but so the hawks are going to say, but Ted, you sail our Navy home and tell the Chinese that, look, we're not going to defend Taiwan outright like that.
They're going to invade it and there'll be a horrible war and all these people will die and it'll be your fault.
I think it's up to the people in government of Taiwan to decide how they want to proceed.
They're under the impression the United States will defend them and will effectively defend them.
If that factor is removed, they may make a different decision.
But to me, that's up to them to make that calculation.
That should not be up to the United States to make it for them.
Yeah.
And how powerful is their military?
I know we've sold them a lot of F-16s, but I don't know how many is a lot.
And I don't know how effective those planes might be at holding off the Chinese, but better than nothing.
Better than F-35.
It would not be an easy thing for China to take the military out of the country.
For China to take Taiwan militarily.
The People's Liberation Army would pay a heavy price for that.
And China, of course, would then acquire a massively resentful new province.
So that has to enter into the calculations in Beijing, too.
Is that really worth it?
Unfortunately, I think the trend is in the direction of, yes, even that's worth it.
And I think that's very short-sighted on their part.
But if that's what they believe, then at some point in the next few years, they will act on it.
And that's unfortunately for everybody concerned.
But the worst thing would be the United States to be in the middle of that fight.
And that's the danger we have right now.
Right.
All right.
Well, I don't know about you, but I feel like the Biden administration has already been in there for like two years and I'm exhausted already.
It's not even the lame duck Trump period to me.
It's just the pre-Biden era we're gearing up for.
And it's just going to be a nightmare.
I know it.
But I was just talking with Mark Perry and Mark Perry's like, I don't know, I think Biden's less worse than a lot of these guys.
And I think Lloyd Austin is less worse than a lot of these guys.
And he says Austin, he favors strategic patience.
He's not in a hurry to get in any kind of conflict with China.
And he thinks that's what Biden likes about him.
And I sure hope that that's right.
But I don't like and trust these Democrats, Ted.
Well, Biden himself has given mixed signals over the years, too.
He was within the Obama administration adamantly opposed to the Libya intervention.
He was very uneasy about the Syria intervention.
On the other hand, he was an avid supporter of the Iraq war and the Balkan wars in the 1990s.
And he's been very much the standard Democratic Party operative with regard to hostility toward Russia.
So I think on balance, there's more to be worried about with Biden than there is to be reassured.
And some of the people around him are particularly worrisome.
His choice for secretary of state is a disaster.
This is a guy who's been very enthusiastic about humanitarian wars and regime change wars.
His choice for national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, almost as bad.
And the choice for director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, she I've described her as the Democrats, Gina Haspel, an advocate of torture, of covert operations around the world.
And again, having somebody in that kind of position with those values is more than a little worrisome.
Hey, do you know about any role she may have played in the covert op in Syria?
I don't know.
Specifically, indications are that she has been involved, but exactly what way I don't know.
Do you know, like, is she one of Brennan's guys?
She has been endorsed by Brennan, appears to be somebody that he likes a lot.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
I mean, architect of the drone war.
I mean, what can you say?
That means she's a murderer of little babies and grandmothers.
Oh, we don't strike civilians.
You know that, Scott, that that's just a smear directed at the United States.
Lucky me.
I know Chris Woods, the guys that counts them one by one, you know?
Yeah, boy, I tell you what, man.
I don't know what to say.
It sucks.
It even if it had been but a jug or one of these idiot, you know, what's that lady?
Klobuchar, one of these horrible Democrat people.
At least it wouldn't be Joe Biden.
You know, I don't know.
Then again, you know, Mark Perry was saying as bad as some as bad as Blinken is, he's Biden's guy.
So he's only ever as bad as Biden will let him be.
And he agreed.
I mean, he did say that these guys are terrible.
And, you know, I guess his spin on it was Biden is the least worst of them and that he's the one in charge.
And, you know, I keep bringing this up.
I keep going back to he got his own son killed, the good son, not the not crackhead son in Iraq War two with the burn pit brain cancer there.
And he knows it.
And, you know, I don't know.
He's got to feel I don't know what that feels like.
That's got to feel pretty crazy.
You do the wrong thing for the wrong reason.
And then it bites in the ass in that fashion.
I mean, that's pretty profound.
And he's a smart enough guy.
I won't say he's a decent enough guy, but he's, you know, a thinker enough of a guy to see that, to see the irony, to accept the responsibility to be living in a world after he got his son killed and and see it that way.
And that's all we got, because if we're going on his record, oh, man.
And if we're going on his staff, we're doomed.
I mean, the only hope is that he's wrecked psychologically from his major, major error of 2002 and three.
And that that is weighs on him so much.
It's going to prevent Sullivan from back in Al Qaeda in Syria again.
Well, we'll see.
I'm cautiously optimistic about this, but my optimism is very, very, very restrained.
You know what?
That's a great way to put it, a very restrained way to put it.
I feel the same.
But hey, it's Christmas.
We can't just give in to despair.
You know, good point.
All right.
Well, here's something to celebrate.
We got Ted Carpenter, regular writer now again at anti war dot com.
And check out this one, the futility and cruelty of Washington's economic sanctions.
Thanks again, Ted.
OK, my pleasure.
Have a good holiday season.
You too.
APS radio dot com anti war dot com Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
