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I'm Ryan McMacken, senior editor at Mises dot org.
That of course is the Ludwig von Mises Institute re Austrian school economics.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ryan?
Hi.
It's great to be with you.
Great to have you on here.
I like this article a lot.
Weapons of mass destruction.
The last refuge of the global interventionist.
Are they running out of excuses?
Is that the problem?
Yeah, I think that is a problem that they face.
And right.
The old well, those guys, they did something to us 800 years ago.
So we got to invade this country to to recover our honor and that sort of thing that maybe works in some parts of the country or the world still, but doesn't seem to resonate much with Americans at the moment.
And so they seem to have been reduced to two topics, really humanitarianism and keeping weapons of mass destruction of various types from proliferating.
But even humanitarianism isn't getting as much traction as it used to.
As we saw, I don't know, what was it, 10 years ago or so, eight years ago, when we all decided we were going to have boots on the ground in Syria and they were revving up for a full blown invasion and the public seemed completely uninterested, which was a nice change of pace.
And so I think the one thing, though, that does definitely resonate is this idea that this country is going to get nukes soon or some other thing like giant chemical bombs.
And so we have to invade this country to stop them.
And I think a lot of people, a lot of ordinary Americans still think that's a pretty compelling reason.
Yeah.
Well, you know, they found this out.
It's in the new book.
In fact, I think it was in the first book, too.
I plagiarized myself a little bit.
During Iraq War One in the fall of 1990, they, you know, kept doing all this polling and they figured out that the only thing that could really get Americans animated to support the war was the threat that Saddam Hussein could get his hands on the atom bomb.
Then what are we going to do?
And then once the poll results showed that that's the thing, then that became the major talking point.
And then, of course, the irony was they found out after the war that actually Saddam did have a secret nuclear weapons program that the Israelis had driven underground when they bombed their open and declared facility at Osirak in 1981.
And so then that became the basis of the whole new myth for the rest of the 90s and into leading into Iraq War Two that, hey, just because the CIA says they can't find Saddam Hussein's hidden Manhattan project doesn't mean they don't have one.
Remember 1990?
Not that he was really that close to a bomb anyway, but that became the narrative then.
But then as you talk about in here, America didn't invade China to prevent Mao Zedong, probably the most violent person who ever lived, from getting his hands on a nuke.
So what's the discrepancy there?
Just fear of Russia intervening?
Well, yes, I think it was the fact that it's a lot harder to intervene in China, especially under those circumstances that were existing and at the time where you had really a communist bloc.
Yeah, the Soviets and Chinese didn't get along that well, but still, you would have encountered some significant blowback.
Plus back then, there was still talk among both the Soviets and the Americans about using tactical warheads, not even as a last resort.
And then in those discussions, it would always be something along the lines of, well, if we invade this major country and it gets the Soviets particularly worked up, then we might start with some small nukes, but then that might move on to bigger nukes, and then we don't know where that whole thing ends up.
And so there was real concern when dealing with a country that either had nukes itself or could enjoy the protection of a country with nukes, that the Americans became very unenthusiastic about that.
So as anybody who's paying attention can see, what America focuses on are these little tiny poor countries that can't possibly fight back.
And if there was any real possibility that they already had acquired these weapons of mass destruction, you would have never seen the U.S. fight the wars in the fashion they did where, hey, let's go put, let's go mass a bunch of Americans right on this country's border and they'll sit there for a while until the invasion and so on.
It was clear that they didn't actually think these countries had weapons that they could use.
And so clearly the focus is on these countries that are small enough that you could easily invade them, take them over.
But as you've said, they'll just throw at the wall whatever reason they think will work.
Because 20 years ago it was, we're going to turn all these countries into liberal democracies.
And by 2010, Afghanistan's going to be, it's going to be like England with a functioning parliament and multi-party elections and all that stuff.
Same with Iraq.
It's going to be great.
And of course, that all obviously failed horribly.
So the number of things that they can use to justify continues going down.
And yes.
So these other countries, we've got China, we had India, we had Pakistan.
There didn't seem to be much concern there.
And these are much larger countries.
And I think that maybe that's the key is that these are larger, more important countries that are harder to boss around.
And it just doesn't seem as feasible then to launch a war, say, in India in the name of preventing them from getting nuclear bombs.
Whereas it's a pretty easy proposition when you're talking about some country like Iraq or Iran or some even smaller country.
Well, of course, the irony of all of this, especially in the Middle East, is that our ally Israel is the nuclear hegemon.
Everybody's supposed to not say that, even though Mordecai Venunu, the whistleblower, told the Sunday Times of London all about it in 1986, I think it was, 89th, the latest, I think 86, that they have 200 atom bombs.
And everybody knows that.
And Netanyahu himself accidentally said it one time, at least.
Yeah, isn't it kind of weird this is still considered controversial?
I just thought this was established fact.
Of course.
But the problem is, is if it's admitted, then American policy or law, I think, insists that we have to insist that they join the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
They don't want to do that.
They don't want to submit to any kind of inspections or verifications or anything else.
But then meanwhile, they're the biggest force, including in the United States, in pushing for a preemptive type war against Iran in order to prevent them from being able to obtain nuclear weapons, or at least in the name of preventing them from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Yeah, and I noted in my article, I was quoting Kenneth Waltz in there, and he was saying, boy, this is, you know, 25 years ago or so, or maybe it was even as far back as the 80s, right, where, look, it's actually Israel that's the destabilizing force in the Middle East, because it's the nuclear hegemon there.
And so all that produces then the same effect that you have with the U.S. on a global scale.
You got this one country that you're worried might invade you or bomb you or do something very bad to you, and they have nuclear weapons.
So you're highly motivated to get something in your toolbox that can be used as a serious deterrent.
And so on the regional level, that's the situation between Israel and everyone nearby, is they're afraid of Israel, and they want something that they can use to deter Israel from advocating for more regime change or just bombing the country for whatever reason Israel might conclude is necessary.
And then the same effect works at the global level with the U.S. as well.
You've got a variety of countries that have been declared axes of evil countries.
Some of them get invaded.
If you think you're next on the list, well, clearly you're going to become highly motivated to get yourself a deterrent as well.
And the only thing that seems to work at an affordable price is nuclear arms, because building up a conventional military that could possibly rival that of the United States is cost prohibitive to virtually everybody.
Right.
And especially when you look at how Hussein was a member of the Nonproliferation Treaty, and Gaddafi went even further than that and gave up every last centrifuge that was sitting in a box in a warehouse that he'd bought from the Pakistanis, but that he presumably could have done something with.
And in both cases, the Americans bombed them and killed them and overthrew their governments.
And the Iranians have said, hey, hands up, man.
Don't shoot.
Our books are wide open.
We're a member of the Nonproliferation Treaty.
We're not enriching up to weapons grade.
And yet America's been threatening them with preemptive war in the name of their nuclear program in spite of all of that for 20 years straight.
The North Koreans said, you know what, we're going to go ahead and withdraw from the treaty and start making nukes and keep you all out.
And they've been the safest from us this whole time.
Yeah, I think really every time the Americans invaded another country post-Cold War and started to make it clear that nobody was safe from this sort of thing, I think there was a certain sense of the U.S. was, during the Cold War, there was a certain sense the U.S. was going to be a little bit more reserved about that, lest they create a serious incident with the Soviets.
But once the Soviets were out of the way, hey, look at all these countries, we can do whatever we want with now.
And I think that was a big motivator then in really ratcheting up the drive for proliferation.
But before that, a lot of these countries, like Iraq, were content, I think, to just live with the notion that the status quo of the great powers will keep to themselves and keep each other in check.
And we can use maybe the prospect of getting nukes as a bargaining chip to get us some aid, to get some attention.
That could all work very well.
And so I don't think there was a big motivation to actually acquire nuclear weapons in these cases.
And as we can know, there are countries that just gave up their programs and just seemed uninterested.
South Africa, Sweden, you might even, they weren't near building a bomb, but you might even point, say, to the Swiss program, where these countries are like, eh, what's the point?
It's expensive.
Uzbekistan gave theirs back, too, at the end of the Cold War.
They gave them to Russia.
Well, okay, that's good.
We should note, right, the Soviet, the post-Soviet situation with the Ukrainians and the Belarusians as well, where there were nukes in these countries, and they gave them back.
And so this was totally different sort of thinking then in the early 1990s.
But I think by the time you got to the late 90s and 2003 with the Iraq situation and so on, I think these countries started to get way more panicky about having some sort of deterrent in place.
It was mostly reactive, I think, to what the United States was doing.
They feared the U.S. and wanted, therefore, to get a deterrent in place.
And I think that same sort of thing is actually what's motivating China now, that they're spending more money on modernizing their nuclear arsenal.
I think they have plenty in terms of obtaining minimum deterrence.
But they're looking around and they're seeing Trump's increasing, or at least when he was in there, I don't know what the Biden administration has planned, was increasing spending on updating the U.S. nuclear arsenal and so on.
Well, then China decides it's got to do the same thing.
Yeah.
And, you know, as you say, they already had a deterrent, two or three hundred nukes is enough to keep America from attack, and it's got to be, right?
They couldn't possibly fantasize that they could shoot down anywhere near half of those, right?
Well, that's the thing, right?
You got to have an insane amount of confidence that you have completely destroyed their second strike capability.
And boy, a president only has to have a tiny miscalculation on that.
And they have enough then to get two nukes back to North America.
So they do L.A. and, I don't know, Phoenix.
And so then what?
You look like just the worst president ever, if that's the situation that came around.
Because of course, China was never using its conventional military, was never going to invade North America or anything.
It's a ridiculous pipe dream.
And so the only way you can imagine it unraveling is if China decided it was undergoing some sort of existential threat on the part of Americans.
The U.S., in order to preempt this, then lets the nukes fly to China.
But of course, you're going to miss a few of those several hundred.
And it only takes a few is the point that guys like Waltz would make and probably Mearsheimer too, is that, yep, you don't need that many.
It probably numbers in the tens in order to create enough doubt with your opponent in terms of your second strike capability.
And so this idea that we need 6,000 warheads in the United States seems like overkill, to say the least.
Now, they were saying just recently, like a couple of years ago, oh, well, they're kind of old and we need to update the arsenal and only a few hundred of those warheads are really battle-ready and all that sort of thing.
I mean, yeah, that's plenty.
That's sufficient.
China's not going to start a war under those conditions.
And but that's, of course, all highly debatable amongst IR people, right, is, well, I think Waltz is wrong because what you've got are these people who are, they're crazed ideologically and they don't even care if their whole country's wiped out.
But Waltz always pointed out is that in every case where you see proliferation, those countries immediately change their behavior and start acting much more conservatively in terms of foreign policy.
They get the nukes and now they're much more afraid of antagonizing neighbors or other great powers.
And that's instructive.
Right.
Well, back a couple of points, because that's an important one.
But hang on a second.
You know, the scenario there where, OK, we decide we're going to take advantage, but they get off a couple.
I mean, at this point, and I don't I haven't read all the different colored binders about the different methods for waging general nuclear war.
But it seems like one strategic size nuke start going off, hydrogen bombs, then and maybe even just a couple of atom bombs, then that's it.
All bets are off.
And it does nothing but escalate because even if it is D.C.'s fault, they lose two cities.
They're not going to say, OK, well, geez, right.
They're going to make sure they're going to lose the rest of them, too.
They're going to go ahead and launch everything they've got.
And then the Chinese will have to launch the last of theirs and, you know, lose at least a few more and destroy our civilization forever, because at that point you have all this public choice theory stuff.
Right.
We're like, as president, I can't afford to look like I'm willing to take a nuke on the chin and not even if he started it and not, you know, hit back, double, triple the neck.
Can't let anyone have the last word.
It's him and his own crew.
And then he's got the threat of the military hanging over his head that they could just cross the river and depose him if he doesn't do whatever they say anyway.
And how are the Chinese supposed to feel once they start losing cities?
They're supposed to remain cool, calm and collected and rational and also go by what it says in their Red Binder instead of screaming obscenities as loud as they can and smashing red buttons down.
You know?
Yeah.
Well, here's a good place to make it crystal clear that I think that it's immoral under all circumstances to use strategic nuclear weapons.
Right.
Destroying entire cities of men, women and children is never morally legitimate.
And so when we're talking about all these scenarios, right, we're really just trying to anticipate about how people, the sorts of terrible people who run regimes are likely to act.
Right.
Sure.
Yeah.
And all I'm saying is once you launch this rocket car, you're not going to be able to get to the brake pedal.
You know, you're going to be pinned back in your seat so hard that it's all bets are off and nobody knows what's going to happen.
But nobody's really in charge anymore.
Once H-bombs start flying, you have a lot of people making crazy decisions of who knows what.
You know?
Right.
So I think there's a benefit of really scaling back and changing your posture of, well, we got 6000 nukes and we're not afraid to use them to making it more clear that, OK, well, we're not going to completely disarm, but we're just just to make sure that no one tries to invade.
We're going to keep enough here for deterrent purposes.
But that's not the United States posture.
They may say they may kind of hint, oh, yes, we're only trying to defend ourselves.
So when you look at the sheer size and volume and the fact this is accompanied by a huge conventional military, there's nothing defensive about the posture.
And so you've got other countries around the world that are reacting to that for the most part, because in spite of all the stuff about how China is building a blue water navy and all the stuff, they're not competitive with the U.S. in terms of conventional military and the ability to just suddenly start invading, say, Chile and asserting dominance in the Western Hemisphere and that sort of thing.
This is not a realistic scenario.
And the worst scenario they can usually paint is, oh, China will start throwing its weight around in East Asia.
OK, well, that's not an existential problem for America and it's not really a threat to Americans.
So fine, you go ahead, make a case that the U.S. has to protect half a dozen countries in East Asia from China.
And we're not even talking, of course, about like invasion.
We're just talking about China establishing itself as a dominant power in the region, which the U.S. doesn't want to let happen.
But I'm willing to have that debate.
How long should Americans be paying all the bills and be risking their lives in order to maintain or prevent the Chinese from establishing themselves as a dominant power in the region, especially when the U.S. basically reigns supreme in the Western Hemisphere and no one threatens it?
So, OK, I just really don't think that maintaining 6,000 nukes in order to provide some sort of disincentive against the Chinese dominating their neighbors is really a wise posture, precisely because of the reasons you just noted, right?
If you think it's a realistic plan that you can have a minor nuclear war, well, that just doesn't strike me as a very good idea.
Yeah.
You know, it's so funny that it's just, as you're kind of pointing out there, you know, the region, meaning somewhere else in the world, this is the new world.
Nobody ever says that.
This is the new world.
That's Eurasia.
And we're supposed to be the dominant force there, as you put it.
For how long exactly, please?
It's crazy to whoever came up with this thing.
And it's it's all structured in a way where we can never back down.
Lord knows if we pulled out of Asia, all hell would break loose with all the power vacuums and who knows how the Koreas and Japan and China would all react against each other if we weren't there to keep a lid on it all.
The presumption goes.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine if China treated Korea the way we treat Mexico or Central America.
Yeah.
That'd be horrible.
We have to stop that.
Yes.
And the idea that Americans are then responsible for that.
And yeah, it does not compute with me.
I don't see why this needs to be the justifying narrative behind American foreign policy for the next hundred years, 200.
I'm not sure what the plan is there.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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So I want to go back to what you were saying about, you know, getting nukes, it's kind of like, you know, assuming the kid's not a complete nut.
You give a young man a gun and he becomes a bit more responsible with a good understanding of just how much power he has at his fingertips there that actually now his temper becomes a little cool because he knows what kind of situation he's in and same kind of thing here with the nukes.
And I was reminded when I was reading your article of statements by Benjamin Netanyahu and then who is still, you know, now is still and was then prime minister of Israel and then defense minister, the former prime minister, Ehud Barak, both gave this interview to Jeffrey Goldberg in, I'm almost certain it was 2010 in the Atlantic magazine where they admit that, yeah, nah, I mean all that stuff about we're afraid that Iran would attack Israel with a nuclear weapon if they had one.
That's crazy.
They would never do that.
We might tell the idiots that on AM radio or whatever, but we don't believe that.
Our real fear is one, there might be a brain drain from Israel as talented young Israelis go and study in the U.S. and decide to stay because they lose their monopoly.
This is just projecting fear onto people's kind of silly, kind of meaningless.
And then the other thing was really the point.
Well, it would limit our freedom of action to hit Lebanon or, you know, Hezbollah in Lebanon and hit the Syrians whenever we feel like it.
And in fact, Jamie Rubin, who is Hillary Clinton's advisor, said the same thing, that this is the problem that Israel faces is that they won't be able to launch attacks at will if Syria and Hezbollah's allies in Iran are holding on to nukes.
And so, but meanwhile, they're telling the American people that the Iranians are going to get atom bombs and then they're going to commit total genocide and kill all of the Israeli Jews.
And that's why Mao Zedong was reasonable compared to the Ayatollah.
And there are so few Israelis that we just can't afford to take that risk.
And so we should be ready to wage a preemptive war against Iran that's, by the way, never made nuclear weapons or tried this whole time and are still inside the nonproliferation treaty.
At worst, you could say they have a latent deterrent like Japan, right?
We know how to enrich uranium.
That doesn't mean we're making bombs right now, though, but just don't provoke us kind of a situation.
But so in other words, we have a great status quo or a stable status quo as far as the actual situation is.
But then we have this entire narrative of falsehood about the danger of Iran.
And then we have the sanctions regime and the threat of war that's based on this false narrative rather than the real one.
Yeah, it would.
And you would think that you would want an Iran that wasn't dirt poor, that didn't feel like a international pariah, that had a lot of trade networks with the whole world, including the United States.
But for some reason, the U.S. just continues pushing Iran down this road of isolation and economic ruin.
And that really isn't helping with the proliferation situation.
All that does is reduce your tools then in preventing proliferation.
Because, of course, yes, if you have a country that has good ties with you, then they're likely to not even bother, as was the case, say, in Sweden, where, what do I need nukes for?
I get along fine with most of the rest of the world.
And I have allies that I can count on to help me in case some other country becomes especially belligerent.
But a part of it, as you note, stems right from the fact that Israel just doesn't really want any other power to arise in the region that could limit Israel's action.
And of course, this isn't just Israel.
We could point to the Saudi regime also, right?
The Saudis hate the Iranians.
And they want to make sure that Iran stays weak compared to the Saudi kingdom.
And that was one of the horrible things about the Trump administration, was just the kowtowing to the Saudis.
It was just really disgusting to see.
I mean, this is just such a terrible, bloodthirsty regime, and he's out there and just, we're acting like these are great, wonderful people, but not like those horrible Iranians who we know are just way worse than the Saudis.
I mean, there's no basis in this whatsoever.
It's just the Americans picked one side in this, and now routinely and repeatedly intervene to push that side.
But there isn't any rhyme or reason.
There isn't a real humanitarian reason here.
As long as you're siding with the Saudis, you can't claim to be on the side of humanitarianism.
And it's just balancing powers in the region.
And so we decided we're not on Iran's side, so we're just going to do whatever's necessary to intervene there.
But then, of course, they frame it in terms of, well, they'll just get new jukes, and then they'll attach them to the ICBMs, and then goodbye Minneapolis is basically the notion.
But anyone who's paying attention should know just how extreme that view is.
Yeah, but you're totally dishonest because we already know that you're the isolationist because that's what they say on TV.
People like you want isolation for America, and here you're accusing the war party of isolating other people's countries.
But we all know that they're the brave internationalists.
So what's the deal?
Yeah, well, that's the problem with liberalism in international relations, right?
And of course, not to be confused with laissez-faire liberalism, right?
This idea that, yep, if we turn all these countries into democracies, at least by that what we mean are countries that agree with America on everything, whether they're actually democratic or not is kind of irrelevant.
And we'll just get friendly regimes in place in all these places, and then the world will be a friendly place for America, and we can reform the whole world through threats of foreign policy, and then everything will be fine.
But of course, how much bloodshed does this require in the meantime?
And that was a good article John Mueller had for the Cato Institute a couple of years ago, was looking at it, how A, all the assumptions about massive amounts of proliferation taking place have never actually come true, and that proliferation has actually occurred at a much, much slower pace than was assumed, and that most countries don't seem particularly interested in it.
And then the other question is, at what cost?
If your whole plan then to create the long-term solution to proliferation is that, well, we just basically reform every country by force through some sort of regime change, then boy, how many people are going to have to die for that?
That's a pretty weird and big and bloody endgame that you got in place there, where we're just going to change every regime in the world that doesn't fit into our little notion of what every other regime in the world should be doing.
And that seems like a pretty bloody thing that they want to do.
And so it's pretty odd and disingenuous to accuse those of us who would just rather err on the side of not war, that we're the ones who are really courting some sort of widespread violation of human rights.
Yeah, but maybe if we just completely boycotted the Soviet Union all along, they'd have fallen sooner.
And maybe if they hadn't have sent Milton Friedman over there to teach Deng Xiaoping about capitalism, then maybe the communists would have finished starving the Chinese so badly that their whole system would have fallen, and they wouldn't have a communist dictatorship there at all anymore.
And maybe if we lift all the sanctions against the Ayatollah, then he's going to start buying all these vitamins and grow to 18 feet tall and decide to invade Russia and Afghanistan and Iraq and Israel.
And so that's why we've got to keep them down and under sanctions and lockdown so we don't have to fight them then.
Well that's the functioning philosophy, right?
Is that you should always... the burden of proof is on you.
I'm bucking for a fellowship at WNEP, you see.
Right.
Hey, you peacemonger, the burden of proof is on you to prove that Iranians are not a race of super soldiers who will overrun us if we don't carpet bomb them next week.
The burden of proof is on you to prove that the Soviet economy is not actually 10 times more powerful than the American economy.
And since you haven't proven that, I guess we just have to spend another trillion dollars on both conventional and nuclear arms, because otherwise that would be irresponsible.
And as I point out to conservatives, who take this position, is you realize your position is basically identical to both the global warming position of either you need to adopt total state control of the economy, or the entire world will die in an apocalyptic fire caused by environmental change.
And they're also really taking the same position as people who think that, well, you should never leave your house, because if you do, you're killing granny.
And of course, they, oh, no, no, no, I'm very reasonable.
This is a real threat, not like global warming or COVID-19.
But of course, they haven't proven anything.
They're just taking the regular old position of agree with me or we all die in an apocalypse.
And I just don't find that position very convincing.
I think the burden of proof is on them.
Anytime the government wants to spend another trillion dollars on something, I think they should maybe put up some evidence to really show that this is necessary.
And they don't even bother.
It's just, we just got to say that China is a growing threat.
And if we don't spend a whole lot more money on it, we're all going to be speaking Chinese soon.
Yeah.
You know, it's one of the very first things I knew that I liked about the Mises Institute when I first started learning about Austrian school economics.
I was already libertarian, you know, since like the mid-90s, at least, when I learned the word and, you know, learned about Harry Brown and read his book and stuff like that.
But I didn't start really reading Mises until the early 21st century, 2001 and two, and I guess 2002 and three in the run up to the Iraq war.
And this whole thing about like, oh, yeah, China, yeah, there's still a dictatorship.
But what we should do is we should kill them with kindness and trade and capitalism and freedom and see what that can do is a very appealing message to me.
I like the way Harry Brown put it, too.
Like, well, what's wrong with the Chinese dictatorship?
They won't let people trade with each other.
Right.
So you're saying the U.S. government should adopt communism and prevent Americans from trading with Chinese people in order to somehow, you know, thwart or impoverish or destroy or destabilize the government there when there's really no such thing as China, just Chinese people.
And and look at what's happened for them.
Right.
I mean, teaching Deng Xiaoping about markets was the greatest thing that ever happened to humanity per capita in the shortest amount of time ever by any measure.
Right.
So coming from as as Lew Rockwell put it, from death camp to civilization, all the civilization in the world raised all the way to the ground to where people are eating each other and then blam.
Now they have like 15 Dallas's in the space of twenty five years.
Yeah.
Isn't that amazing?
It is.
It's the greatest thing that ever happened.
Right.
But we're supposed to be.
Oh, no.
Now what?
The rising yellow peril.
Ryan.
And you know what?
And it's also supposed to be that if you're like somehow a liberal or some kind of left leaning thing, then you just don't buy that.
And if you're right wing, then you know that this is a real problem.
And I'm not calling you right wing because we're libertarians and that's different.
But so but but a libertarian can talk to a right winger about markets and about national powers and what it all means.
So what does it all mean?
Seriously?
Well, I think the real danger is that the U.S. is just going to really push for another Cold War with China.
I mean, obviously, as they've been revving it up for years at this point, at least for 20 years.
But I see there's real danger here of it becoming worse because even among the populists who were pretty good on the Middle East, the Trump populist types were pretty good on.
Let's withdraw some troops from Afghanistan and Iraq and so on.
There seems to be a huge preoccupation with China.
And looking at some of these polls about what are your top five concerning things that you think are going on that need to be addressed and so on.
China's often in the top five, number five, number six and so on.
And so even in the antiwar articles, get out of Afghanistan so we can focus on China.
It always says at the end, it's driving me crazy.
Yes.
And so that's which, of course, is just a terrible idea.
And so someone who's done some good work on this is a IR scholar named Michael Beckley.
And I've used him a bit in some recent articles noting that, look, yes, China's so much better off than it was 30 years ago, but they're still so far behind the United States and not really catching up.
And also point out that China is a country of geriatrics and heading even more so in that in that direction.
This is a country that employs all sorts of wasteful economic policies.
This is where conservatives often are incoherent is they point out that in America, expansive monetary policy, Keynesian economic policy, central planning of the economy.
That's that's terrible.
That's impoverishing.
That won't work.
Oh, but in China it works fine.
They use that in China and that's making China rich and powerful.
So there's this bizarre double standard on economic policy, whereas this time around the Chinese are going to use their socialistic aspects to get rich and overpower us.
Oh, yeah, that didn't work in the Soviet Union, but I guess it will work in China.
So they'll be overtaking us any day now.
So there's all sorts of just incoherence around it.
And I get it.
I see there's another powerful country and they look like they could have a big army and that sort of thing.
But starting an arms race with China just ends up impoverishing Americans.
And it's not going to, in the end, prevent China from becoming a major force in East Asia either.
And that's just going to be lost.
And so you might as well get on friendly terms now and just have some principles about it.
Just as you pointed out with Harry Brown, right?
Limiting trade with people isn't going to improve anybody's life.
And that whole argument about how, oh, well, if you trade with China, you're yeah, you might be enriching the regular people somewhat, but you're really enriching the Chinese regime.
OK, well, the Chinese regime will get better off no matter what, as long as it becomes a wealthier and happier country, even if you're not trading with it, because then they'll have a higher tax base.
This is what Beckley pointed out, right?
Is that if you have a country filled with rich people, you have all sorts of net wealth that you can then use to last in a war longer and to build better weapons and so on.
So is the policy, it would seem that under those conditions, the only meaningful policy is to impoverish China as much as possible.
And that seems that strikes me as a ghoulish policy where let's impoverish these million people as much as we can.
Otherwise, they'll get too rich and too big for their britches and they'll get uppity.
Well, I'm not prepared to sign on for that policy.
Plus, impoverishing a billion people just seems like you're asking more for trouble.
Sure.
Rather than encouraging a peaceful future.
Yeah.
And by the way, I mean, they're just would turn to the their West and trade more with the people of, I mean, not that there's that much wealth in Central Asia.
There's resources and they can sell to the Europeans and to the Russians and to everybody else.
So, I mean, it would be a hell of an adjustment if somehow they were cut off from trade with the middle part of North America.
But it's not like they're all just going to lay down and die anyway.
And it's not like the rest of the world is going to go along because we say so and build a great wall around and and forget, you know, refuse to allow them to trade with anybody.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that Germany has no problem with trading with China and Europe in general is much more open to the idea than the Americans and that Europe's just not paranoid about the notion the way the Americans are.
You know, I know he's such a hate figure now and maybe for a lot of good reasons and whatever.
But I remember seeing Bill Gates do a thing talking with kids on MTV back, say, 25 years ago and somebody in, you know, Bill Clinton years and a kid says, you know, ah, China and the scary rise in the thing.
And he's like, oh, yeah, no, see, you're totally wrong.
What it is is all this new wealth, which is great for them to have so they can live on it and have a higher standard of living.
And also they're creating all this new wealth for the whole world to share.
And the richer they are, the richer we are.
And the more we trade with them, the more they trade with us and the more everything is great.
It just makes perfect sense.
And as we were talking about earlier in the show, the major alternative is an unthinkable war, right?
A war that absolutely can never happen.
So what are you going to do?
But, OK, I know right wingers, if they got this far, though, are saying, but President Xi is this tyrant.
He wants to take over the thing.
When you hear about the Belt and Road Initiative to build this giant system of trade, quote unquote, across Asia, Ryan, you're not afraid that that's where the Red Army is going to march and take over all Eurasian slave mankind and all these things.
It's a secret plot right in front of your eyes.
Don't you know it?
How could you be so naive?
Look at this guy.
You can't even understand the things he says.
They're probably really bad.
And after all, it is a dictatorship.
I shouldn't play it down too much.
Right.
It's a brutal country if you live on the inside and you step out of line.
Yeah, I don't want to live in China and I don't approve of China's political system, to say the least, and their concentration camps and their social credit system and all of that.
No, thanks.
I don't plan to go there anytime soon.
But this, of course, is true about a great many countries.
And there are also I could also name quite a few countries without or I'd rather not live in even more so than in China.
And so the question is then what's in it for China to invade all of Eurasia?
And first of all, I think Russia would have something to say about that with its nuclear arsenal.
And it's just this it's back to the whole, well, you need to provide some evidence that China isn't going to take over the entire eastern hemisphere.
But again, what is the evidence of that?
And that goes back to the issue of China is not a rich country and rich countries will have say something to say about it.
And it doesn't have to be the United States.
So this idea that the United States is this thin blue line of sorts, I don't know what color you would call it, that stands between China, this yellow peril and peace and prosperity.
It's a pretty fanciful narrative, but it's one that seems to work pretty well.
And obviously it's just with the names and dates changed from the old Cold War narrative that we had with the Soviets.
And you remember guys like Whitaker Chambers, right, who were just convinced that not only were the Soviets so much more powerful than the Americans and so much more motivated, but also they were kind of superhuman, right, whereas Americans were these lazy people who were they just wanted to go home at the end of the day and relax with their families.
Soviets weren't like that.
They would work all day building iron structures and then they would go home and they'd go to a communist rally and then they'd work in a communist cell converting Americans to the Soviet cause.
There was no rest for them.
They would never stop.
They had no interest in buying TVs and chill it out.
This was just nonstop, 24 hour Soviet activism on their part.
This is, of course, totally absurd and was never true.
If anything, we found that the Soviets were more concerned with sitting at home and doing nothing than Americans.
And we hear similar things about the Chinese, that every Chinese person you meet in America is a spy and that every Chinese person is hopelessly just in love with the regime and that everywhere their tentacles are spreading throughout the Western hemisphere and so on.
Boy, I recall reading for a research project, not for fun, for reading books like this that said all the same things about the Soviet Union.
And now here we are back again, just having the exact same conversations.
But the fact is, is that, yes, while China was wise enough to introduce a big component of capitalism into their economy and that created that transformation from widespread death to prosperous cities for the most part, this is they're so far behind the United States yet.
And it's it's really they're not really a competitive country.
The most they can do is because of their huge population, which, of course, is will soon be very elderly and in fact going into decline is throw the weight around in Asia.
And so we need to have a talk with Japan and Korea about what that's going to look like for the United States.
But it shouldn't involve the U.S. sending over aircraft carriers to provoke China every five minutes is apparently seems to be the strategy.
Right.
And which Biden has picked up right where Trump left it for him, you know, sailing ships through the all the different straits in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait and the rest of this doing their shows of force there.
But, you know, I really we should you know, at the Mises Institute, I bet you guys have some kind of like Chinese affiliate or or a group of Chinese Americans that are really like hardcore Austrians or something like that.
Right.
No.
Well, we do have some scholars who can translate books into Chinese.
A lot of them, though, are based in Taiwan.
And so they're converting many of those books into Taiwanese Chinese.
I'm just really interested in, like, getting, you know, one of our guys, but who's really fluent to explain what their media really says about us.
It can't be that, you know, based on the success of the American empire recently, as soon as they're out of the way, for some reason, despite their great success, we're going to do the same thing.
We're going to launch a bunch of wars in the Middle East and we're going to conquer wherever try to steal their oil and do whatever the Israelis want and all of these things and try to replace us.
What could they possibly get out of that?
And how could they possibly be looking at the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump era and say that this is the model for building the future of Chinese power in the world?
I mean, they're just not an expansionist power.
They haven't been for 2000 years or unless I'm missing something big here.
Yeah, the question has to be asked of what's in it for the Chinese to conquer Kazakhstan and then maintain it as a colony.
And I mean, even the British, who have always for more than 100 years been significantly more wealthy than the Chinese, they gave up their empire not because they were really forced to through any sort of invasion or military means, but just because these are expensive ventures that don't really pay off in terms of geopolitics in the modern world.
And so the question is, why would China want to do that other than pursuing similar sorts of strategies that the U.S. and other great powers have pursued in terms of building a network of allies and building up wealth through trade?
It's it's not 1851.
I just I have yet to see a compelling reason about why this is going to happen.
And is it an armed doctrine, the way that Russell Kirk always referred to Soviet communism is that, well, because of their ideology, they feel they feel this need to march across the globe, the globe and conquer every country.
Well, that hasn't been established to be true about China at all.
And Rothbard's position was quickly his position was that in the Soviet Union, it quickly became a status quo power and that they were just interested in maintaining their own power, developing a nuclear arsenal to maintain the status quo because they were afraid of the Americans.
And that turned out to all be true because they were too poor to do what the Americans were predicting they were going to do.
And of course, the CIA was completely wrong about the Soviets' economic power and so on.
And so there's so much about China that's never brought up in terms of its demographic and economic weakness and this idea that it's somehow motivated to conquer the entire world.
The United States, even if it were to break up into smaller pieces or create some sort of general economic union with Europe or the rest of North America or so on, would continue to be a huge impediment to Chinese expansion and be a standing threat in terms of this huge economic power that's not going to broke a brook being dominated by China, even without 6,000 nukes aimed and ready to go at China.
Economic power in the modern world matters a lot.
And there's a whole lot of that in Europe and North America.
And it's not going to just sit around and just sit back as China just takes over the world.
And the way to plan for that isn't to just keep threatening war with China.
The way to plan for that is to, as Mises might have suggested, expand your economic position, become wealthier.
Wealth is really the way to be a military power and continue down that path, pursue peace with all of these countries.
Trying to provoke China into a war just is not the strategy, no matter how many old guys you parade up to a podium and who tell us about the Peloponnesian War and about how now we have to start a preemptive war with China.
OK, that would be a very bloody and economically disastrous decision.
And in the end, it wouldn't accomplish any better outcome than the position of pursuing peace.
You know, we got the problem of American politics, though, right, is that only Nixon can go to China.
Only Republicans can say, look, everybody knows me.
I'm a right winger, but we got to get along with these guys with the red flag because me and my national security advisors say that it's real smart that we do this kind of thing.
And then hope to get the support of the liberals.
China, you know, Nixon and Kissinger did have the support of the Democrats and The New York Times and everybody when they did that.
Thank goodness.
But our last Republican president was a right wing nationalist protectionist and didn't want to really provoke a war, but certainly was building up militarism and expanding and strengthening America's alliance with Japan and trying to even form Pompeo is trying to form a new kind of South Asian NATO and all these things, of course, then all the tariffs and all that.
And then so that was our Republican.
And now we got the Democrats and the Democrats, of course, being a bunch of weak, lily-livered little wimps are terrified that someone is going to call them weak and lily-livered.
And so they go, yeah, well, we'll show you battleships.
And if Trump says the Senkaku Islands that we're willing to die in a nuclear war over them, then hell, yeah, we think that to find us some more islands.
And we'll declare that those are a part of our sacred pact with Japan, too.
And because that's where all of the pressure is on them is that somehow they're all Jane Fonda and they all got to pretend they're not.
And none of them are man enough to just say, actually, that's stupid and we're just going to do the right thing instead.
That's right, because there's always going to be someone there in Washington who's going to say, well, I refuse to allow Americans to be pushed around by the Chinese.
And so there's always going to be this element of the Washington establishment.
And I don't think the general public is nearly to that point.
They just tend to nod and politely defer to whatever they're told by the Pentagon and so on, because they wrongly think that these people have a lot of extremely valuable information and are good at anticipating the future and so on.
This has never actually been borne out in real life.
But I think it's easy for them to browbeat both non-interventionist politicians and average Americans into this idea that, well, if you don't build up a huge military presence, if you don't spend another trillion dollars, well, you're just going to look like you're asleep at the switch and then you're going to basically be voted out of office or your name will forever live in infamy as basically a collaborator with the enemy.
I mean, in the minds of these people, it's always the late 1930s in Europe, right?
Everybody's Hitler.
And we're always just like Neville Chamberlain if we don't posture ourselves to show that we are willing to start World War III at a moment's notice.
And I think that still has a lot of resonance with a lot of people.
Now, I think that will go down in time.
I think as that sort of thing recedes into the past, as the 20th century ceases to be attractive to people as a potential model for foreign policy, that will go away.
And also, as the U.S. becomes more weak in terms of its relative economic power, the U.S. doesn't have to go into some sort of precipitous decline, right?
But all it has to do is have a few monetary crises.
All it has to do is realize that there's a lot of other economic centers in the world that are rising up and will start to rival the United States.
Once the realities of economic power in other parts of the world become more and more clear, the U.S. won't be able to basically have a delusional idea toward the relative weakness of the rest of the world.
Because the way it is now, I think even if you don't truly believe it, I think you can still claim that the U.S. can do whatever it wants.
And that still seems like a plausible interpretation and a claim to a lot of people.
But I think 20 years from now, that's not going to seem very plausible at all.
And so it'll just start to seem increasingly out to lunch, this idea that, well, we have to be able to maintain an ability to fight wars on three fronts and basically conquer the Middle East, East Asia, and I suppose, I don't know, North, Northeastern Europe as well, all at the same time.
Maybe we'll add Africa to that list, too.
So maybe four fronts at once.
And there you go.
Yeah, the Americas, of course, we must continue to dominate.
So at any time this could happen.
But obviously, that's not going to seem like it's something that can be maintained here in the future.
It seems that way, I think, to many for now.
But just give it time.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, I love talking with you.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show, Ryan.
Thank you very much.
All right, you guys.
That's Ryan McMacken.
He is the senior editor at Mises.org.
That's the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian School Economics there.
The article is called Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Last Refuge of the Global Interventionist.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APS Radio.com, Antiwar.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.
