10/4/21 Scott’s Debate with Bill Kristol

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
The voting is now closed, and Bill Kristol, you have 17 and a half minutes to defend the resolution, a willingness to intervene and to seek regime change is key to an American foreign policy that benefits America.
Take it away, Bill.
Thanks, Gene.
It's good to be here back on the Upper West Side, not in Soho, even though it's misleadingly called the Soho Forum, I guess, or maybe it once was in Soho.
I grew up less than a mile from here, at 81st and Riverside, so I remember this, this is where we were, 95th and Broadway, I remember 96th and Broadway, I used to come and play pool and ping-pong in some now-destroyed, kind of old-fashioned Guys and Dolls type place that made me think I was really in touch with America there, I was an Upper West Side kid, so I have fond memories of this corner, fond memories of the Upper West Side, but in any case, apart from being back in New York, thank you for having us for this discussion, I think it's an important time to have a discussion about foreign policy, it hasn't been front of mind, honestly, since people like me who are concerned about democracy around the world found ourselves more concerned about democracy at home for the last four or five years and still concerned about it, I think they are connected, however.
I do want to thank all of you for coming, who are here, and those of you who are watching at home, I apologize, but I was going to say I feel bad that you all have to wear masks, but it's prudent, I suppose, and it's good that you're vaccinated, so it's nice that we don't have to, while we're speaking up here, do so, I've got to say.
So the resolution, as Gene said, I'll just cut to the chase here, since I know you want to have a substantive discussion, and I do too, willingness to intervene to seek regime change is key to an American foreign policy that benefits America.
I think this is correct, I think I would notice that it says a willingness to intervene, doesn't mean you have to intervene everywhere, doesn't mean there haven't been ill-advised interventions, but a willingness to intervene, which implies defense treaties, commitments to allies, forward basing of troops, probably, all the characteristics of the post-1945 post-war order, I do think is key to a safer world, key to a freer and more prosperous world, and a willingness to seek regime change, mostly peacefully, obviously, is key to a more democratic world, countries with democracies, with self-government, and with political and civil liberties.
How to do that gets complicated, and I'll talk about that a bit too, but I think the fundamental point, the willingness to stand with allies, the willingness to intervene if necessary, usually that willingness provides a deterrence, occasionally it has to happen, a willingness to articulate that people deserve to live in freedom, and that we should do our best to help them, and occasionally, if they're being oppressed sufficiently, or if they're being invaded by others, we'll even act to help them, I think is key, and I think such a policy benefits America directly, but it also benefits the world, which in turn benefits America.
So that's my core argument, it's a pretty straightforward argument, I honestly think it's a pretty, I think it's correct, obviously, I mean, the key judgment people have to make is what do you think of the post-1945 world order?
If you think, as I do, that on the whole, it has been a good thing, that if you compare with the preceding 45 years, it's undoubtedly produced a world more peaceful, more prosperous, more free, greater social liberties for all of the terrible problems, but compared to the preceding half century, I think you have to say this has been a good half century, a good 70 years or so, by comparison, all these things are by comparison, and the key to the success, economic successes, successes in life expectancy, successes in political freedoms, success in just keeping the peace, success in not having another use of nuclear weapons, in anger since 1945, those successes really depended on this American-led world order, which in turn depended on a core defense structure, foreign policy structure, national security structure, of which the U.S. was the keystone.
I think it's actually a great achievement, historians will look back on the post-1945 first Cold War order, and then post-Cold War, even post-911 for the last 20 years, and say underappreciated at the time, lots of challenges at the time, lots of mistakes at the time, but compared to what?
Compared to what?
One of the most important things in life, but especially in foreign policy, is not taking for granted that bad things, very bad things sometimes, did not happen.
So it's pretty easy to look at the world and see particular instances of failure, particular places things could be better, particular things that one wishes one had done differently in retrospect.
But if you step back and say, all in all, what does one think of this post-World War II liberal order, global order, that we have undergirded?
I think one has to say, as I say, peace, prosperity, but also think of the things that didn't go wrong, the things that didn't happen.
And the Soviet Union did not prevail in the Cold War, liberal democracy spread intermittently and with some setbacks in the last 15 years, but to countries where it hadn't been before, prosperity was expanded massively.
I mean, the achievement of helping hundreds of millions, I guess billions of people come out of poverty, especially in East Asia, obviously, and Southeast Asia, and China and India and surrounding countries, that does not happen without the undergirding of this American-led liberal global order.
It's their achievement.
It's mostly an economic achievement, but their achievement depends, I think, on a general world in which they are not fighting wars every 10 or 20 years, as they certainly were before that in East Asia and elsewhere.
It depends on a free trade and free movement of capital and ability to learn lessons in terms of international economics, which in turn is undergirded by that liberal world order.
So we take that for granted as if, well, it was obviously the case that India, China, all these places were just going to develop in the way they have.
It was not obviously the case.
It hadn't happened before.
And I don't think we can count on it having happened if we had withdrawn from the world as we had done in 1918 or as we had done prior to 1914 in certain ways.
We certainly couldn't count on it being sustained.
We had a pretty good liberal world order until 1913, 1914, but it turned out not to be reliably enough undergirded.
I think we have provided a kind of ability to sustain that kind of liberal world order that didn't exist before and that is really not something to be taken for granted and not something whose importance can be slighted.
Intervention is messy.
There have been good interventions, in my opinion.
There have been obviously ones that didn't go well, that were problematic, and I think the verdict will be mixed.
There have been ones that have been mistaken.
The earliest ones, Korea and Vietnam, were by far the most costly for us.
Korea may be necessary, certainly part of the outcome of that, a very successful, booming free country, but not so happy story, obviously, in North Korea at all.
Vietnam, a much less successful, obviously, intervention.
The subsequent ones, one could go through them and try to weigh them.
I'm sure everyone's interested in Iraq, which I was a strong supporter of and remain a qualified, I would say, supporter of.
Obviously, we were wrong about weapons of mass destruction, so we would not have gone to war if we had known they weren't there, but still, I would say that the light in which we went to war in Iraq was, for me at least personally, I won't speak for everyone else, the experience after the Cold War of Saddam invading Kuwait and killing literally hundreds of thousands of his own people in the years before that, and after the intervention when we didn't go and remove him and insist on regime change, we let him hold power, kill people, redevelop some weapons of mass destruction, and it turns out we destroyed a lot of those in 1998, and then in the Balkans, we did nothing as Milosevic engaged in ethnic cleansing in Europe.
We finally intervened there, and reasonably successfully, I would argue, and since then in 20 years, since 98, 99, after the second intervention in Kosovo, we have not had that kind of slaughter in Europe, and we in fact achieved an awful lot in Central and Eastern Europe where there hadn't been too much history of liberal democracy and freedom, some backsliding unfortunately in the last few years, especially in Hungary and in Poland, and that just for me makes the case, though, why it's so important that we stay engaged and stay active, and NATO puts a lot of pressure on these countries, incidentally, to maintain their democracies, a lot of incentives for them not to slide back.
The fact that we have enemies like Putin who've – or opponents like Putin who've grown up, again, for me makes the case for that fundamental willingness to assume our role in the world, not to try to pull back.
I mean, I would just say this about interventions without, you know, trying to escape from the difficulty of them.
When I was very – much younger, someone made the point that if the Allies had intervened, if the UK and France had intervened in 1936 when Hitler went into the Sudetenland, it would have been a total mess, and if they'd insist on a regime change, it would have been very difficult in Germany.
And people will be looking at that two years later or maybe 15 years later as, gee, was that really necessary?
And that – you know, you've got to be careful when you intervene, you've got to step back, let things play – let things take their course, let things play out.
You don't know what would have happened if we hadn't done certain things.
We do know what happened in Syria when we did not intervene in 2011 and then in 2013 with the Red Line.
And we know that 500,000 people have been killed and millions of people driven from their homes, a migration crisis, which then destabilized Europe, incidentally, and probably helped the rise of authoritarian populism elsewhere in the world.
So the intervention can have bad consequences.
The war in Iraq was fought terribly for the first three years, and I think we did stabilize it by the end of 2008 with the surge, but I'm perfectly open to the argument that all in all it would have been better if we hadn't gone in.
I think it's hard to know.
You can't rewrite – rerun history backwards.
What would it have looked like if Saddam or his kids were in charge and they were developing weapons of mass destruction, as they had tried to in the past?
We don't know.
But I certainly will acknowledge it was not a well-run intervention and maybe not a well-thought-through intervention.
Still, you know, Syria is the counterargument of a non-intervention, and I think one has to take that counterargument, at least, seriously.
People like me were very influenced by the experience of the Balkans, and I would say also by the experience of Rwanda in 94, where at that point we were kind of exhausted.
We had intervened in Somalia in 93.
That went badly with Mogadishu, and we just – really neither party and almost no one in the U.S. said, oh, my God, we can't just sit back and watch what happened in Rwanda.
It happened, and a million people got slaughtered, and that was preventable.
That was preventable by us and by others, and we didn't prevent it.
And I remember six years later watching Al Gore and George Bush debate in 2000 on foreign policy, and the anti-interventionist mood was still in the ascendancy.
Bush was chastising Clinton for too aggressive a foreign policy.
He was promising a more humble foreign policy.
And one of the – the moderator, Jim Lehrer, said, well, would you have intervened in Rwanda?
A million people died there.
It wouldn't have taken that much to stop that, or at least to stop some of that.
And Bush said, no, no, we can't just solve everyone else's problems.
And Gore, who certainly didn't agree with that – I think Gore felt very bad that we hadn't intervened – said, oh, no, we can't intervene.
His political advisors had said there was no support for intervention.
9-11 changed that.
We went into Afghanistan, I think, correctly.
Maybe we should have – maybe we should have left earlier.
Maybe we shouldn't – we should have – could have done some things differently.
We then went into Iraq.
Those are the two post-9-11 interventions, really.
And again, we don't know what the world looks like if we pull out of Afghanistan earlier.
I hope it doesn't go too terribly there now.
I worry about what happens there in terms of the people of Afghanistan.
I also worry what happens in terms of regional destabilization in Pakistan and elsewhere.
Pakistan's a nuclear power.
I come back to the nuclear question.
Very few people predicted in 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that there would be no use of nuclear weapons for what – what is it now, 75 years, except for our tests?
And that's an achievement.
And who knows whether we could have been less forward-leaning and stopped other nations from getting nuclear weapons.
The reason Japan is not a nuclear power is that we – there's a U.S.-Japan defense pact.
And defense pact means willingness to intervene.
That's literally what a defense pact means.
And the reason South Korea is not a nuclear power is probably that we have troops there, as well as having a pact with them.
And if they both were looking at China and there were no U.S. troops in the region and no U.S. commitments, they would be nuclear.
And you have to then say, what does the world look like?
India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons.
China does.
That's dangerous enough.
South Korea, Japan.
Do others decide?
I think we just underestimate the cost that would be paid if the U.S. stepped back from its global commitments.
A couple of quick points in closing.
Can we afford to be the global superpower?
Yes.
It costs – I don't know what our defense budget is now, about I think 3.5, 4 percent of GDP.
Let's just add a percent or two for intelligence, State Department, all the other costs of being a global power, 5, 6 percent.
It's just not – it's worth it, in my opinion.
If other people think it's doing harm to the world, you can make that argument.
But it's not that we can't afford it.
That is just not a really important argument, I think.
So we should argue it on the merits, I think, rather than this kind of notion that we're going bankrupt because of the defense budget.
Is the national security state been terrible for us at home?
Has it eroded civil liberties?
It's sort of a cliche that the national security state – that war is the health of the state and it's very dangerous to civil liberties, to freedom, to civil rights.
It can be, and there's certainly instances of that at the end of World War I and then of course with Japanese internment, for example, in World War II.
But really the story from 45 to 2015 in the U.S. has been one of expanding equality, expanding civil liberties, certainly on core civil rights issues, for example, partly spurred in some respects by the fact that we were telling the world they had to be democratic and then people correctly – I mean, the communists, Soviets said, what about you?
Look at the way African Americans are treated in the U.S.
And that was actually a bit of a spur to improving our country.
It's not a reason, obviously, to have the global responsibilities.
But I think if you just step back and say, is there less freedom of speech, not a ton of issues we care about, freedom of religion, it has not been the case that at least the post-1945 American global presence has led to some kind of erosion of liberty in the U.S.
We can argue about the size of government in the U.S. and all kinds of issues, but it's just not empirically true that we've become some kind of garrison state, hostile to freedom, hostile to social progress, and so forth.
And finally, I just think for those who say, well, but all this is nice for the world, but what about America?
American democracy, American freedom is not solid, is not, I think, ultimately, you can't count on it in a world that's entirely hostile.
We have a big interest in having other democracies in the world for the sake of those people, but also for the sake of our own confidence in ourselves, and that we don't become a garrison state constantly thinking that all over the world there are countries that might attack us.
So I think even from the point of view of democracy at home, not even, but including, not just from the point of view of people living abroad, but from the point of view of Americans at home, we have a big interest in democracy around the world.
Thank you, Bill.
For the negative, Scott Horton.
Take it away, Scott.
All right.
Thank you, Gene.
And hello to Mr. Kristol.
As some of you know, Mr. Kristol was chief of staff to Dan Quayle, who I consider to be the best vice president of my lifetime.
And think about who the other ones were for a second there.
I will respond about Hitler and World War II more in a later segment there.
America is in real trouble.
For the last few years, my opponent has been at the forefront of those warning against the death of modern liberalism and that far right populist Trumpism is taking this country in a very dangerous direction towards authoritarianism, even dictatorship.
But Mr. Kristol, you and David Brooks promised us national greatness.
You said America needed to be called to their, quote, grand destiny, quote, nationalism.
We needed, quote, national strength and moral assertiveness abroad, advancing the cause of freedom around the world.
We needed a big project we could all do together.
As Brooks' friend Christopher Beam wrote, invading Iraq, quote, suited his quest and yours for this greatness.
In his 1996 article toward a neo-Reaganite foreign policy, arguing for benevolent global hegemony, my opponent wrote that John Quincy Adams was wrong that the U.S. should not go abroad seeking monsters to destroy.
Why not?
He asked.
For the exact reasons that Quincy Adams delineated.
Our principles would turn from liberty to force.
We would become the dicatrice of the world, but no longer the ruler of our own spirit, he said.
Adams was right.
The wars did not make America great.
The wars.
Three thousand people were killed on September 11th, 2001.
As Paul Wolfowitz admitted, the main reason Osama bin Laden cited for attacking America was the U.S. military bases left in Saudi Arabia for the so-called dual containment policy against Iraq and Iran in the 1990s after Iraq War I, the Persian Gulf War.
Bin Laden's plan was to provoke the United States into invading Afghanistan so he could replicate the Mujahideen's earlier success against the U.S.S.R. with U.S. support in the 1980s, this time against us, to bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy, and create a choking life for the American people under the tyranny of our security state.
And after the last 20 years of war in Afghanistan and across the Middle East, we have less influence there than ever before.
A 30 trillion dollar national debt, an increasingly invasive surveillance state and militarized police state, almost 7,000 dead troops, 37,000 if you count those who killed themselves in the aftermath, and the worst partisan, political, racial, and other social division of my lifetime anyway.
I'm 45.
So much of this crisis is directly due to the costs, financial and otherwise, of America's Middle East regime change wars.
Let's review some recent regime changes and their consequences.
Note that in neoconservative doctrine, democracy absolutely must be spread to Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, but not Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Egypt, or Pakistan.
And if there's a democratically elected government that our government doesn't like, the U.S. won't hesitate to try to overthrow it.
Like in Algeria in 1993, Gaza in 2007, Egypt in 2013, and Ukraine in 2004 and 2014.
Now to the regime changes, I'm sorry I have to skip Kosovo and Somalia for time.
First on our list is President Carter and Reagan's support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s to overthrow the communist regime there.
This led directly to the rise of Haqqani, Hekmatyar, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda.
Carter and Reagan's support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its 1980s war to overthrow the Ayatollah in Iran also backfired.
It solidified the Mullahs' power in Persia and led directly to the so-called Gulf War after Iraq invaded Kuwait in a dispute over debts from the war against Iran.
As mentioned, America's first Iraq war, launched to restore the Kuwaiti monarchy in 1991, led directly to the dual containment policy against Iraq and Iran from military bases in Saudi Arabia and Al-Qaeda's war against the United States.
Since 2001, after failing to deploy enough reinforcements to capture or kill bin Laden at Tora Bora or allow the Delta Force to pursue him into Pakistan, the Bush administration instead sought regime change against the Taliban in Kabul, who Bill Clinton had supported just a few years before in their own regime change against the Mujahideen warlords whom Presidents Carter and Reagan had supported against the communists in the 1980s.
This led to 20 years of war, including a massive so-called surge escalation halfway through for absolutely nothing, and leading to the Taliban walking right back into power as the U.S. withdrew in the summer of 2021.
Saddam Hussein in Iraq War II.
When David Wormser wrote his clean break plan for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's first government in 1996, he acknowledged that targeting secularist dictators, Hussein and Assad, for regime change in Iraq and Syria could further fan the flames of Islamist anti-American terrorism.
But he said the solution to that problem would just have to wait until the war against them was over.
Maybe in 1996 this was somehow understandable, from a hawks perspective at least.
According to Richard Schultz in the Weekly Standard, in the 1990s the Pentagon Joint Staff would repeat as cliche that, quote, terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower.
But after the African embassy bombings of 1998, the USS Cole attack in 2000, and September 11th, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and at the Pentagon, it was less understandable.
Yet the neoconservatives, led by Mr. Crystal, persisted.
The neocons best laid plans to empower Jordan and compliant Shiites to take over Iraq failed.
The American invasion of 2003 empowered Iran's favored factions among the Shiites, the Supreme Islamic Council and Dawah Party.
In fact, it was King Abdullah of Jordan who coined the phrase Shiite Crescent to describe Iran's newly enhanced power just after the invasion.
Clean break, nothing.
This American Shiite alliance pushed their Sunni Arab enemies out of Baghdad and into the arms of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which did not even exist before the war, adding thousands of hardened fighters to Osama bin Laden's movement, including thousands of foreign fighters who traveled there to fight against the U.S. Shiite alliance.
Many of these men later went home to Libya, Syria and Yemen to get ready for the next wars there.
The U.S. took their side in all three.
In Libya, the Hawks said they had to intervene to overthrow secular dictator Gaddafi to protect the poor civilians.
But at the very least, tens of thousands of people have been killed in endless fighting in that country in the decades since.
Bin Ladenite groups, veterans of the second Iraq war, led that revolt and have thrived in the meantime as civil war has raged for years.
Some warlords brought back literal chattel slavery of sub-Saharan Africans.
Thousands of refugees drowned in the Mediterranean.
The war spread from Libya into Mali, Chad, Niger, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso and Nigeria.
Obama's and allied support for the bin Ladenite revolt against the secular government in Syria, an attempt to weaken their ally Iran after the Iraq war had done so much to empower them, led to the rise of the Islamic State so-called caliphate in Eastern Syria and Western Iraq.
And then the third Iraq war from 2014 to 2018 to then destroy it on behalf of those same Iranian-backed Shiite groups the Hawks wish they hadn't fought the second Iraq war for.
No, the U.S. should not back these dictators like so-called President Sisi in Egypt.
That's part of what got us attacked in the first place.
But we sure as hell should not be supporting bin Ladenite insurgencies against them either.
Hillary Clinton and Saudi Arabia's installation of Mansour Hadi when they co-opted the Arab Spring Revolt in Yemen in 2011 and 12 led straight to the next phase of the war, which broke out in 2015.
For the last six and a half years, the U.S. has backed Saudi Arabia and UAE in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and also strengthened al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula beyond belief.
There are now something like 30,000 bin Ladenite fighters in the world.
And Iran and Russia, who intervened to save Assad from al-Qaeda and ISIS, are more influential in the region than ever.
This is not how it was supposed to be.
Speaking of Russia, it isn't just the Mideast wars.
In Georgia, the U.S. supported the Rose Revolution of 2003 and the installation of Mikhail Shakhashvili, who almost got us into a war with Russia when he attacked their peacekeeping forces in South Ossetia just five years later.
And Vice President Cheney urged George Bush to strike Russian forces coming across the Caucasus Mountains.
The U.S. also helped to overthrow the government of Ukraine twice, in 2004 and 2014.
In 2014, they used actual Nazis in a street putsch against the elected government.
It was supposed to be easy to get away with while Putin was distracted with the Sochi Olympics.
But instead, the new Ukraine coup junta lost Crimea to Russia and started a brutal war in the East, which has killed more than 10,000 people and unnecessarily ratcheted up tensions with the other most powerful nuclear weapons state on the planet.
Then National Endowment for Democracy head Carl Gershman even threatened regime change in Moscow itself in the Washington Post in October 2013.
Another state, Hillary Clinton famously blessed the Honduran coup of 2009, leading directly to the rise of murderous drug cartels in that country and a massive child refugee crisis at our southern border.
The American establishment had its so-called unipolar moment at the high-water mark of U.S. influence to lead the world into the brave new future at the turn of the millennium, and they blew it.
The U.S. government has spread not liberty, but the tyranny of the majority.
Not free markets, but corrupt crony contracting.
Not peace and security, but mass sectarian violence and destabilization.
This has led to increased support for left and right-wing socialism around the world in reaction.
Liberalism and democracy in the broadest sense have been discredited as meaning nothing more than supplication to American demands or cheap excuses for our violent intervention.
The economic crisis and refugee crisis resulting from our Middle East wars has led to the rise of the populist right in Europe, where they are ascendant in the European Parliament.
The U.K. has left the EU, and the unraveling of the entire so-called liberal international order, even in the West, has begun.
In your 1997 national greatness piece in the Wall Street Journal, you wrote that the universal principle at the heart of the American ideal is a mandate to, quote, advance freedom, end quote, around the world, apparently by any means necessary for the world's own good.
But means determine ends.
And even if somehow waging violent coups and regime change wars across the planet could guarantee freedom for those people, it would necessarily come at the expense of those whose lives and liberty our government is actually sworn to protect, ours.
No wonder that here in America as well, people are moving to the socialist left and nationalist right, since the disastrous consequences of militarism and regime change are what passes for liberalism in the center.
The backlash from Bush's disastrous wars and the devastating economic crash of 2008, a direct result of the Fed's militarism-friendly easy money policy in the preceding decade, led to the disruptive and destabilizing presidency of Barack Obama.
His disastrous wars and the so-called K-shaped economic recovery of his time in office, meaning bankers and think tankers paid by defense contractors did great, while the people on the bottom three-quarters of the economic ladder remained stuck in 2009, led directly to the election of Donald J. Trump, running as an economic populist and war skeptic over W. Bush's brother and Barack Obama's Secretary of State.
His election was a reaction against the military and economic legacy of the preceding 15 years and its central liberal establishment champions, including the neoconservatives.
And who?
A guy who built his political capital proclaiming on talk radio that Obama was a secret pro-terrorist Muslim from Kenya.
In other words, your nemesis, Trump, was exploiting your movement's previous cultivation of this sort of illiberal sentiment among Republican voters back when it was still useful to your ends, building support for the wars.
Now that the anti-Muslim chauvinism of the American right is no longer useful, you claim the right itself is now the greatest threat to democracy.
If so, this is the nationalist movement the neoconservatives have done so much to cultivate and promote.
For bin Laden and his friends were few, but would-be enemies who happened to be Muslim were many.
So Bush and the neocons supported the worst sort of right-wing populist nationalism in America, especially with their wink-and-nod approach to the Muslim-hating hacks on AM talk radio.
It was central to Karl Rove's plan for his permanent Republican majority.
That was a big part of why my opponent was so determined to bring Sarah Palin on board with John McCain in 2008.
She could get the Rubes excited and afraid and convince them to continue to support the McCainian neoconservative doctrines behind the long war in the Middle East.
It's why your friend Frank Gaffney pretended to believe that a small Sufi mosque in a building down the street from the old World Trade Center site was supposed to represent the Muslim enemy's triumph over America, or that the 50 states needed to pass emergency legislation to protect us all from enslavement under Sharia law.
This deliberately deceptive campaign did much to make the right worse.
Now the centrists are terrified of the populist right, accusing them all of being neo-Nazi white supremacists, including many tens or hundreds of thousands of men and women who are resentful veterans of the wars you lied them into.
And in turn, the populist right is terrified that the war on terrorism is now being turned against them, as the Department of Homeland Security redefines violent extremism to mean almost any political activity outside of the two major parties.
The people, in return, resent the power of the establishment, which so despises them even more.
And now the average guy is supposed to believe that the last quarter century's greatest proponents of American empire, such as Mr. Crystal and Dick Cheney's daughter Liz, herself an avowed hawk and promoter of torture, are the last principal defenders of the old republic they destroyed.
Who's buying that?
Engagement, leadership, primacy, preeminence, hegemony.
These are just euphemisms for world empire, with the USA in the position of the hated British that our forebears had led the world in overthrowing.
The doctrine that the middle part of North America should be or could be the dominant military and political power in Eurasia, and indefinitely, is crazy on its face.
And plus, the whole thing is really just a racket, as the soldiers call it, a self-licking ice cream cone.
In other words, a government program creating its own disasters it must then attempt to solve.
No nation on earth threatens the United States.
As Ron Paul once told the Washington Post, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.
The U.S. Constitution does not authorize this posture of global dominance.
The people of the world do not want it.
The American people's costs are in the trillions, and our gain is nonexistent.
We suffer the terribly destructive inflation-generated boom-bust cycle and endlessly rising prices.
The feds rifle through our internet and phone records.
Our sheriff's deputies act like special operations forces at war in our neighborhoods.
Your time's up, Scott.
Good.
Yeah.
Good.
Can I?
One more second.
Go again.
One more second.
Sorry.
I'm almost done.
Oh, go on.
Our sheriff's deputies act like special operations forces at war in our neighborhoods.
Our soldiers and Marines come home maimed physically and mentally, and more and more terrorists are motivated to attack the United States.
There is a widespread feeling in America that liberty, justice, fairness under law, and cooperation and compromise through little-d democracy is now untenable.
Hatreds between sectors of society have become much more solidified.
More people speak of secession and separation.
The people are finding out the hard way that you cannot have it both ways.
There is no such thing as a limited constitutional world empire.
There cannot be a balanced budget, a free and prosperous economy, independent major media, or a rule of law in a state of permanent war.
We Americans...
I'm almost done.
Give me just a second.
We Americans are losing our freedom in the name of forcibly spreading it to the rest of the world.
Enough already.
Let's defend America first and all aggressive wars and covert interventions in other nations.
Abandon our empire and put the protection of liberty in our own country at the top of our political priorities.
Then shed of all this violent hypocrisy, we will be able to lead the world in the only legitimate way we can, by the benign sympathy of our example.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay.
And sorry for going over.
Hey, y'all, check out our great stuff at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
First of all, we've published no quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg.
Our Institute's late and great co-founder.
He was the very best one of us, our whole movement, I mean.
And no quarter will leave his mark on you, no question.
Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richman.
We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
Both are instant classics.
I'm proud to say that Coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians.
And Social Animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics, and everything else.
You'll absolutely love it.
Then there's me.
I've written two books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy.
It's called The Great Ron Paul.
You can find all of these at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
Bill Krisler, you get an extra two minutes for your rebuttal.
But you can take this podium for your rebuttal, maybe best.
Yeah, okay.
Take it away, Bill.
Okay, well, kind of a lot to rebut there, but I will...
That's two minutes, Bill.
No, that's okay.
I think I'll just let the two minutes go.
You know, the Middle East is a very difficult part of the world, and we've obviously made many mistakes there.
I think one of the mistakes we made was not pushing democracy hard enough when we had real leverage.
I'm not a defender of the Saudi regime.
I was kind of mocked in 2002 when I said that I thought a consistent policy for freedom in that part of the world would anticipate and even work towards the end of the dominance of the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia.
And I continue to think, and I'm solely critical of both the Trump and Biden administration for being too soft on MBS, for example, for arranging for the killing of an American resident, Jamal Khashoggi.
So I've been...
Same with Sisi, same with Pakistan.
I would be...
If anything, I think in the Middle East, which is so difficult, though, and which we look at and then get, understandably, shrink from the consequences of really a kind of even liberal imperial world.
And so we tend to pull back, and we tend to, for understandable reasons, prioritize short-term security, peace, anti-terror, which is awfully important.
You know, it's not nothing that we haven't had another 9-11 in 20 years.
And we probably don't do enough to promote liberty and democracy.
Mr. Horton didn't seem to acknowledge the importance of the U.S. commitments in Europe and in Asia to defending democracies where they exist, to creating them where they didn't exist, to expanding them where they exist, and to the general peace and prosperity of both regions, which is not something that had marked them historically for the preceding part of the 20th century when we weren't involved much.
We have...
It's not as if we've never not been involved in the world.
We've not been involved in the world and very conspicuously chose not to be involved in the world after 1918, and we saw how that worked out.
Now maybe that's not...
It's not the same, and we could have done things differently, and it wasn't inevitable that what happened in both Asia and Europe were to happen.
But I think one at least has to somehow sketch out how our withdrawal from the world would not invite much greater aggression on the part of autocrats, much greater oppression at home on the part of dictators totally unfettered by any fear of U.S. pressure, U.S. sanctions, U.S. soft power, let alone U.S. hard power.
So I really think that's a very...
That would be a very bad world.
At the end, Mr. Horton tried to sort of say, well, he's sort of vaguely for liberty around the world too, but actually it wouldn't be good for liberty around the world, and I don't believe it would be good for liberty here.
For the reasons I briefly indicated, I do believe that it's not...
Well, I'll put it this way.
The people who care a lot about liberty in the U.S. really care about liberty, seem to me mostly to be people who also care about liberty around the world.
They could differ somewhat on how much we can do, whether it's Joe Biden thinks we should withdraw from Afghanistan and use more diplomacy and hopefully not have to fight Middle East-type wars.
I'm uncertain about that future.
I agree with him, on the other hand, in maintaining the alliances in Europe and Asia, but I would make this point.
Talk to actual liberals, small-l liberals, people who believe in liberty around the world.
Talk to actual Democrats around the world.
How many of them want the U.S. to withdraw?
Even the ones who think the U.S. has been unwise in their countries, and I've discussed this with many such people, often in the Middle East, in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia, don't think the answer is, well, if you just left, things would really get better.
Quite the contrary.
It's that we're not doing the right thing.
We're not doing things carefully enough.
We're not being intelligent enough in the way in which we promote liberty.
Those are all fair points.
But the idea that somehow any people, real people around the world, whether it's, and I thought it was unfortunate that Mr. Horton repeated, in effect, pro-Putin talking points about Ukraine, I sympathize with the Ukrainian people who were invaded by Putin's Russia, and the idea that Putin wouldn't do more if the NATO, and the fact that Ukraine was kept outside the NATO guarantees, gave up its weapons, its nuclear weapons in 1994, great victory, incidentally, for nuclear nonproliferation, because we and Britain kind of guaranteed Ukraine they wouldn't pay a price for giving up those weapons.
They were nervous about Russia even then.
We didn't do much when Russia invaded.
We at least were able to contain it to a part of Ukraine.
But again, the evidence for me is that it's U.S. retreat that invites aggression, not excessive U.S. intervention that invites aggression or that makes life more miserable for more people.
Again, interventions individually, we can debate how to do it.
We can debate wars haven't gone away because of the U.S. maintained global order, the Middle East in particular is a very difficult part of the world where the transition to modernity has been very problematic in so many ways, and maybe we should have been more cautious in the Middle East about what we could do, though again, I would just point out the places where we have – there's been an unbelievable amount of slaughter in the Middle East that we weren't involved in one way or the other.
One thinks of the Iran-Iraq war where the sophisticated establishment types in Washington were sort of, well, let them just kill each other.
That actually didn't work out well, and also hundreds of thousands of people died.
And Syria, the refugee crisis is a product of non-intervention in Syria, of not doing what Obama said we would do, the abuse of chemical weapons against the Syrian people has not been – Assad has paid no price for that, and he's still in power, and that's a horrible signal to send, a horrible precedent to allow to be set in the 21st century.
So I'm unapologetic in defending – I'll leave aside my – I guess I could defend my 1997 piece, but I don't really remember it that well, except the national greatness we were for was a greatness in defending and promoting freedom, and I am for that kind of national greatness.
I am for a healthy debate in our free democracy about how to do that.
I am not for Trump-type national greatness, which cares not at all about political and civil liberties.
Thank you, Bill.
Five minutes of rebuttal from you, Scott.
Take it away.
Okay.
And sorry for going over before.
When I practiced, I read it fast, I guess.
All right, a few things here in no particular order.
But first of all, the Second World War obviously hangs over all of this.
America defeated the Nazis and the Japanese, and then created this post-war order that Mr. Kristol is referring to here.
But the thing of that is, as you guys all know – oh, I'm sorry.
As I think everybody knows, as even Winston Churchill himself said, it was Theodore Roosevelt and especially Woodrow Wilson's intervention in World War I that caused World War II.
World War I was ending as a stalemate before America got involved and tilted the powers so far in favor of the Allies and against the central powers that, first of all, they prolonged the war long enough for Lenin and Trotsky – no offense – to seize power in Russia and create the Soviet Union.
And they empowered the British and the French to inflict the Versailles Treaty on the Germans, which stripped them of all of their territories and demanded all these reparations that destroyed the economy and led to the rise of the Nazi power, the Nazi party, on the promise of getting revenge for what had been done to the Germans at the end of World War I.
If America had just stayed out, there would have been no Soviet Union and no Nazi Germany to fight World War II at all.
Then, as far as what happened in Ukraine in 2014, America sponsored real Nazis – not just neo-Nazis, but the proud grandsons of the Galatian SS who had perpetrated the Holocaust in Ukraine against Jews and Poles there, the Right Sector, the Svoboda Party – formerly called the Social Nationalist Party – and the Azov Battalion, all of whom proudly fly swastikas and commit crimes against minorities in Ukraine.
And it was Ukraine that attacked the East.
Once they overthrew the government, the Donbass region in the east of the country, Donetsk and Luhansk, they decided, well, if you guys are going to overthrow the government we elected in a free and fair election in 2010, then we're just going to occupy all the government buildings and refuse to recognize the new government.
Then the Kiev regime attacked them.
They called it the War on Terrorism.
And they invaded the eastern part of their own country.
And yes, it's true that the Russians did send special operations forces across the border to help them, but they never did invade the country at all with regular infantry.
And when in, I think, late 2014 or early 2015, the people of the Donbass region voted in a plebiscite to join the Russian Federation, Putin told them no.
He had no interest in absorbing their territory whatsoever.
He would only provide them enough help that they needed to keep the Kiev regime out.
And that was it.
You also heard, and this goes back to his original statement at the beginning here, that the U.S. has kept the peace in the world for 75 years.
And he did mention Korea and Vietnam, and that's all, but he didn't mention that we killed 2 million Koreans, somewhere between 3 and 5 million.
Nobody really knows how many Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians were killed.
And then, of course, the domino fell.
It was knocked over by America and spread communism to Cambodia and led directly to the rise of Pol Pot and another 2 million dead there.
He didn't count the million dead Iraqis or the million dead and, oh, I've got to talk about Obama's intervention in Syria, he didn't talk about the million dead Iraqis, the half a million dead Syrians, and Pakistanis, and Afghans, and Libyans, and now Yemenis, where at the very minimum, a quarter of a million people have been killed, you know, certainly in the war in Somalia, which helped lead to the famine of 2011 through 13.
Something like 250,000 people died in that famine, most of them children under the age of 5, just like who's dying of cholera in the war in Yemen, inflicted by the Americans and their allies who bombed the hospitals, bombed the water, and the sewage, and the electricity, and all of the means of civilian support there in that country.
And now, it's just not true, and I don't know who told you this, but you might know that Edward Snowden leaked the black budget to the Washington Post and they published it.
Obama spent a billion dollars a year on the war in Syria, and he admitted it.
Jeffrey Goldberg asked him in March of 2012, he said, don't you think that if we got rid of Assad in Syria, that'd be a good way to bring Iran down a peg?
And Obama said, absolutely.
And Goldberg said, well, is there anything more that you could be doing to speed this process along?
And Obama said, well, I can't tell you, Jeffrey, because your classified clearance isn't high enough.
And we all know, because even the Washington Post and the New York Times admitted it over and over.
America, Saudi, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, and Israel all supported al-Nusra, which, and their allies, Jaysh al-Islam, and the other bin Ladenite groups there.
These were the Syrian veterans of Iraq War II, and America took their side because the government that they were fighting was friends with Iran, which had no role in knocking our towers down.
Time's up.
Yeah.
Well, thank you for both.
We now go to the Q&A portion of the evening.
We have two mics over there.
You can line up to ask your questions.
And we have questions from the streamers.
I want to take my moderator's prerogative to ask a question of Scott.
I believe Bill Kristol has basically asked you for a counterfactual.
And of course, you guys are sometimes talking about more than a century's worth of military foreign policy.
I'm wondering, Scott, if you could take it from 9-11.
Like there was a question, 9-11 happened.
Let's assume that everything up through 9-11 also happened.
You didn't change that part of history.
But now from 9-11 on, Bill is really challenging you to say, what is your alternative to what went on?
What could have happened from 9-11 on?
What?
Well, I'll cite the great Harry Brown, the former libertarian presidential candidate and great libertarian activist.
I asked him on my show, Harry Brown.
Did you hear me in the first part?
Yeah.
Yeah, go ahead.
The great Harry Brown.
I asked him, well, what would you have done?
And he would have called off the policies that caused the attack in the first place.
But assuming the attack, what he would have done was he would have negotiated in good faith with the Taliban, who hated bin Laden and al-Qaeda and wanted rid of him, instead of refusing the Taliban's offers to negotiate, as George Bush did for almost a solid month in the lead up to the start of the war.
And barring that, barring success on negotiating extradition, he would have sent special operations forces to capture or kill bin Laden and his few hundreds, no more than 400 members of al-Qaeda there hiding with bin Laden at Tora Bora in Afghanistan.
And then he would have called the whole thing off and especially including the entire policy of American dominance in the Middle East.
That was the cause of the problem in the first place.
Our bases in Saudi, our support for Israel and their unending violence against the people of Palestine and at that time of Lebanon.
And if we had just called all of that off and proved to the world that we are what the Statue of Liberty says that we are, and that was Harry Brown's thing, the Statue of Liberty.
And if we had, you know, really worked hard to perfect liberty in our own country and to spread it by example, and in fact, Harry Brown wasn't an evangelical libertarian.
He was determined to see liberty spread around the world.
And he was determined to give his Statue of Liberty speech, he would have given it every day if he'd been the president, about how we are doing everything we can to perfect the application of the Bill of Rights in our society.
And your societies out there in the world, your bills of rights aren't good enough.
And you need to try at least as hard as we are trying to create a free society for our own people here.
And then instead of waiting in a swimming pool of the blood of innocent people looking like the world's worst hypocrite, it would have been great.
And it would have sounded great to the people of the world.
Remember on September 12th, they held a million-man candlelight vigil in downtown Tehran on behalf of the people of the United States.
We had the entire world ready to listen to America, ready to join up in our cause.
But it wasn't the right cause.
It was, hey, you know what we could do?
We could get a bonus war.
If we could just lie to these people, and we'll just publish in the Weekly Standard over and over and over again that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are friends and Saddam's going to give weapons of mass destruction to Osama bin Laden to kill you and your mama and your hometown if we don't preempt them and stop them from attacking us first.
Let's do that.
We could get away with that.
People are so upset about the 3,000 dead New Yorkers.
We could exploit that grief and fear, and we could overthrow whoever we want now.
On to Baghdad against who?
The guy in the French beret and the clean-shaven chin and the olive green military uniform who they could have just sent Colin Powell.
The Secretary of State at the time was a four-star general, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I think he was tough enough to handle Saddam.
And if not him, how about mean old Donald Rumsfeld?
They were old friends from when he helped arm Iraq in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
They couldn't have just gone over there and read the Riot Act of Saddam and put him in line?
No.
Remember Dick Cheney said, we can't talk to evil because that will, you know, justify it.
And that will, you know, Saddam Hussein, like he wasn't already the dictator of Iraq since 1979.
That will give him legitimacy and credibility if we talk to him.
We have only one choice, to attack Iraq before they attack us first.
Yeah.
Bill, please take the mic up.
And do you want to comment on Scott's reply?
Our policies did not cause 9-11.
Our policies did not cause Assad to use poison gas against his own people and kill 500,000 of them.
Our policies did not cause Putin to kill journalists and to crush freedom in Russia.
I mean, Mr. Horton may believe that the U.S. is the source and cause of evil in the world.
I disagree.
Okay.
Do you, well, I don't know if you want to have another dialogue about that briefly.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
The men who did 9-11 were responsible for 9-11, but they were motivated by American foreign policy.
And, you know, I actually just went back and watched the CNN interview of bin Laden from 1998 or 96.
And the whole story is, well, they hate our bases in Saudi Arabia and our support for Israel.
Back to you in the studio, Jimmy.
Because nobody said they hate us for our freedom.
They hate us because their radical Islamic beliefs make them hate those who are good and innocent and beautiful and love their mama.
No one had told that lie yet.
So it was just plain and simple.
You think the Taliban are doing what they're doing right now in Afghanistan because they hate, what do they hate?
We got out of Afghanistan.
Well, the Taliban aren't attacking us.
I don't know what you're talking about.
They were attacking us until we left and then they stopped.
No, I'm saying, do you think that there's going to be liberty and freedom that young girls in Afghanistan will have opportunities and the like?
No.
Okay.
I don't know what the point of that was.
The point of that is that liberty matters around the world.
That bin Laden was not provoked by, I don't believe, our having some bases in Saudi Arabia that we had had for an awful long time or by our supporting Israel, which had been there for an awful long time.
Okay.
You don't believe that because you don't know anything about it, I guess.
Why don't you read the declaration of war from 1996 and 1998 or, you know, better yet, The Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott.
It's the biography of the Hamburg cell of 9-11 hijackers.
Don't interrupt yet.
Hang on a second.
Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on September 11th, he joined al-Qaeda, decided to join al-Qaeda and attack the United States when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1996 in Operation Grapes of Wrath.
And a couple of months later, Osama bin Laden put out his declaration of war, declaring war against the United States and ranting on and on about the Kana massacre of 106 dead civilians killed by the Israelis hiding in a UN shelter.
And that was when Mohammed Atta and his friend, Ramzi bin al-Shib, decided they wanted to join al-Qaeda.
They then went and traveled to Afghanistan, met bin Laden, joined the group and were recruited to carry out the planes operation against the United States of America.
So even if you want to pretend to believe that all bin Laden cared about was that we didn't all want to convert to his religion or something else, his recruitment schtick was these people are hurting our people.
Simple as that.
Bill?
There have always been injustices in the world which allow evil men to recruit others to work to serve them.
I mean, obviously Hitler took advantage of Versailles.
I think, again, that was us stepping back, incidentally, in 1919, not imposing something on as much as maybe we should have to make sure there was a more just peace.
The fact that evil men take advantage of past injustices, grievances, insoluble conflicts does not mean that we then, what, withdraw and hope that those evil men do nothing evil?
It means we should stop doing evil and terrible things that provoke them.
We did.
Well, that's ridiculous.
That's where I'm just...
I do not believe that we did evil things that provoked 9-11.
Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things, like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck and to give to your friends too that say Libertarian Institute on them so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
So here's what you do.
Go to LibertasBella.com and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Any ad in the right-hand margin at LibertarianInstitute.org, LibertasBella.com.
You guys check it out.
This is so cool.
The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out.
He's been working on this thing for years and I admit I haven't read it yet.
I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it.
It's called Why the Vietnam War, Nuclear Bombs and Nation Building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61.
And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in say 1964 through 1974.
But how did we get there?
Why is this all Harry Truman's fault?
Find out in Why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson, available now.
Okay, thank you both.
That was a good and lively exchange.
And now we are going to put it over to questions.
Please, please don't identify yourself.
Just ask your question as a question.
If you want to address it to one of the other party, say so, but otherwise ask the question.
Please take it away, sir.
My question is for Mr. Bill Kristol.
Clearly American foreign policy is in the great pivot to China.
We have two major fighter jets being designed right now with China in mind.
We have aircraft carriers being designed with China in mind.
Right now we sail pretty often our Nimitz class carrier into area that China considers their waters.
And there's 6,000 souls on board those Nimitz class carriers.
And China has missiles that can strike them.
If we were to lose one carrier, that'd be 6,000 dead.
That's two 9-11s in one afternoon.
What would be our response in current American foreign policy?
And wouldn't that response – wouldn't one of the things on the table be a nuclear exchange?
And at that point, aren't we, you know, rolling the dice on the great sword of Damocles over us?
Thank you for your question.
Bill.
Yeah.
I mean, China is a big challenge to the U.S.
It's very unfortunate that the bet on liberalization in China, which was not a crazy bet that economic involvement would encourage political liberalization, may have worked for a while, has now been reversed by Xi.
We have defense obligations, obviously, to Japan and Taiwan and elsewhere.
And I do think in general, those aircraft carriers have maintained the peace.
And I mean, just empirically, they have maintained the peace, I would argue, in an area of the world where there are deep enmities and where there have been terrible, terrible wars in – not quite in our memory, but in the memory of our parents and grandparents.
If we were to withdraw out of fear – and it's an understandable concern, obviously, that let's say there would be a Chinese missile attack on one of our carriers.
I mean, I think we can deter that without using nuclear weapons or even threatening the use of nuclear weapons.
But if we were to withdraw, we would – I mean, Japan would certainly go nuclear.
Other countries in the region, South Korea, I think even Taiwan, if they had a chance, would decide there's no U.S. defense – Australia.
The U.S. defense commitments have no credibility, and that creates a much more dangerous and much more unstable world.
I mean, if you want to create a world that has the conditions that then leads to an endless cycle of violence, I would say the U.S. can just withdraw from Asia, we can withdraw from Europe, we can give up on our efforts in the Middle East, and we will have endless cycles of violence, as we have had in so many – in those parts of the world before over the – in the 21st century.
MR.
KINGTON Well, it doesn't make any difference one way or the other to the American people who rules Taiwan.
Nobody wants to see violence.
It would be terrible if China invaded and people were killed there.
No one wants that.
But if the Chinese rolled into outer Mongolia, does anybody in here think that America should intervene, start a war to protect Mongolia from Chinese aggression?
Or are there some things that are just out of our purview and out of our jurisdiction and cost too much?
And by the way, you know, back to the cost, Mr. Kristol has said repeatedly just how affordable all of this is.
But our national debt is $30 trillion right now.
We spend something like a trillion dollars a year on militarism, if you count the VA and the care and feeding of the nukes at the Energy Department and the rest of that.
We absolutely cannot afford it.
And if you ask the people who lost, you know, people in the wars or in the terrorist attacks against this country, in the meantime, their costs are a lot higher.
Now, you know, if you have a think tank that's financed by arms manufacturers, then these are good times.
And you don't probably understand what anybody else has to worry about.
But there is severe, as they call it, economic anxiety in this country, mostly caused by the boom and bust crash cycle that we have.
They call it the business cycle.
It's the inflationary money cycle.
And the reason they keep expanding the money supply is to make the world empire seem free.
For all those checks he was cashing, they never raised his taxes once in the highest bracket because they just borrowed the money from China and printed it instead.
And so then regular people are blowing their brains out because they're forced to carry this economy on their back.
Okay.
Next question over there, please.
Go, go.
My question goes to Mr. Kristol.
Recently you wrote in an article at the Bulwark commenting on some of Biden's comments around Afghanistan recently, quote, Biden concludes his anti-war discussion by reminding us that there's nothing low-grade or low-risk or low-cost about any war.
But this isn't true.
Hard-hearted, though it may sound to say this, some wars are much more low-grade or low-risk or low-cost than others.
So first, Mr. Kristol, could you define a little more specifically what you view as low-grade, low-risk, and low-cost, and then point to a specific intervention, say in the last couple or few decades, that you view as meeting that criteria and having been successful?
Yeah, I think the Balkans intervention, I would say.
And obviously, I mean, look, I am anti-war.
I hate the idea that we would send, and most Americans do, the idea that Americans are yearning to send young men and women abroad to fight.
That's not the case.
If anything, it's the opposite.
We're a large commercial country.
We enjoy, as we should, pursuing happiness here in the United States.
We have oceans protecting us.
We don't have a long historical tradition, as maybe we have some tradition, of course, of fighting on this continent, not always justly, obviously, but we don't have the kind of European-type history.
And so Americans, I think, on the whole, refrain from wars.
And it is good to have an American president, honestly, and I think almost every American president falls into this category, who is reluctant to send young Americans off to war.
But if you think, as I do, that occasionally the threat of war, and even more occasionally, less occasionally, I guess I should say, war, actually engaging in war, is necessary, then you have to, obviously, try to confine them to less costly wars, both economically and much more importantly in terms of the human cost, and importantly also in terms of the after effects, the sort of what messages get sent.
So I would say the Balkans would be one case of a war that was worth it, and that I think had pretty good consequences in Europe, and I would compare it to the non-intervention in a place like Rwanda or Syria.
Scott, comment?
Yeah.
You know, as Yugoslavia was breaking up, they actually had struck a deal where the Bosnian Muslims and the Croats would have a coalition, and they would be the majority, and the Serbs would be the minority partner in the coalition.
And they signed on to that and accepted that.
It wasn't until American Ambassador Zimmerman intervened and told the Croats to not take the deal, to ruin the deal they'd already accepted and instead go to war, you can have more.
And that was what turned what was already a disaster in the Balkans into the absolute catastrophe that he's claiming that America solved.
It was the American Ambassador who helped to cause that thing in the first place.
And I'm sorry, I meant to mention earlier real quick here, when I was talking about the two million dead in Korea, and the three million in Vietnam, and the million and a half or two killed in America's Middle East wars just in the last 20 years, the people who always get left out of that are the people of Indonesia, and East Timor, and Bangladesh, and Guatemala, of course, 500,000 dead in the civil war caused by the American coup in Guatemala.
And of course, El Salvador and Nicaragua, all throughout the Middle East.
These are essentially massacres and pseudo genocides, even in some cases, perpetrated by American puppets, American compliant governments, and governments protected by the United States of America.
For example, Gerald Ford gave the green light for the massacre of the East Timorese in Indonesia in 1975.
Richard Nixon gave the green light for the Pakistanis to carry out their atrocities in Bangladesh, and et cetera, et cetera.
He always says, not just tonight, but always, America has kept the peace for 75 years.
Are only white lives important?
Does it only matter that Russia hasn't fought Germany again?
And these other people's lives just don't count?
The USA has killed a holocaust worth of civilians in the last 75 years.
Let's summarize it there.
Next question.
Yeah.
Oh, sorry.
A hypothetical question for you, Mr. Horton.
Let's say you are the resident of a totalitarian nation like Australia.
And let's say 10, 20 years pass.
They're still locked down.
The rest of the world is back to normal.
They are still under lockdowns.
You live in Australia.
Would you like America to intervene to come save you in totalitarian Australia?
No, absolutely.
I would not want that, and especially looking at the consequences of American intervention there.
But, you know, I think there's going to be a very strong reaction in Australia.
And they are under an absolutely authoritarian lockdown system right now.
But they still have regular elections.
And at least for now, I guess we'll see.
But I am predicting the resounding defeat of everybody in charge of that country now after they have pushed things so far.
But one more thing, too.
If Americans, individual citizens, want to go overseas and participate in somebody else's conflict, like the Spanish Civil War, or you want to go and help liberate the people, you know, the Iraqis enslaved under the Dawa Party now, then you're free to go and do that.
Just leave me out of it.
Thank you.
Bill, do you have a comment on Australia?
I'm going to have a comment on a discourse that, you know, trivializes the Holocaust by saying the United States has conducted a Holocaust that attacks, that demeans the United States in really a grotesque way.
If we made mistakes, did we give, as you say, green lights or yellow lights when we shouldn't have?
That could be.
Talk to people from East Timor, though.
Talk to people from Bangladesh.
Do they want the U.S. to just withdraw and leave them to the mercies of their neighbors?
Or would they prefer for the U.S. to have done more and to be doing more, and as we have done more since, incidentally, the Pakistan-Bangladesh split off from Pakistan, doing more to keep the peace there?
Talk to people who care about liberty around the world.
They understand that for all the mistakes we make, and that we are important to them, to their peace, to their prosperity, to their liberty.
People of all colors, I would say, all ethnicities, all religions.
Of course, our intervention in the Balkans was on behalf of Muslims.
Our intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan was on behalf of Muslims.
And our departure from Afghanistan has unfortunately left many decent people in Afghanistan who worked with us, but more importantly, worked for themselves and enjoyed the relative freedom of the last 20 years, now worrying that they may never have a chance at that again.
I hope we can do it diplomatically, help get decent people out who've worked with us.
That's our moral obligation.
And I also hope we can diplomatically, perhaps, help work for an outcome there that's less bad than, unfortunately, the outcome looks like it might be.
But that's, again, where I think our intervention, both diplomatic, economic, as well as, if need be, occasionally military, is so important around the world.
But just again, the notion that, you know, Austria may have foolish COVID protocols now, and people can chortle about how that's like totalitarianism, but that's ludicrous, honestly.
And a discourse that can talk about a U.S. Holocaust and about authoritarian, I'm not sure what term was used, so I don't want to characterize it, but talk about Australia even in a semi-joking way, in the same way one talks about genuine, genuine dictatorships that kill dissidents and really oppress minorities in horrible ways.
People who can talk cavalierly about that, I don't know what to say.
Next question.
I don't get to answer?
Oh, well, Jimmy?
What?
On trivializing the Holocaust, our government, led by the neoconservative hawks, call every opponent of the American government Hitler.
Noriega's Hitler, David Koresh is Hitler, Saddam Hussein is Hitler, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Khamenei are Hitler.
In fact, just, what, six weeks ago, H.R. McMaster said that for Trump to have negotiated with the Taliban, that's just like Neville Chamberlain negotiating with Hitler.
Well, that to me sounds like it's trivializing the Holocaust.
Either Hitler was a unique danger, or he wasn't.
And I would say that he was.
And I would say that when they bring up Adolf Hitler, the exception that proves the rule, in every single case where America has to intervene, oh, oh, Muammar Gaddafi, the guy from the naked gun too?
Yeah, no, we got to get him too, he's Hitler too.
They're all Hitler, speaking of trivializing the Holocaust.
Come in, Bill?
No?
Want to pass?
No?
You want to pass?
No.
Okay, you want to pass.
Question.
Historically, it seems that empires don't last.
Question.
Yes.
So the question is, do you think world civilization has changed, that the United States would be exempt, or do we end up like Rome, England, Spain?
Which one of them?
Where do you see us going?
Look, historically, republics don't last either, unfortunately.
And so I don't know.
Because they turn into empires.
Oh, okay.
Let him finish, Bill.
Scott.
Yeah.
So what is the implication of that?
That, I mean, we need to keep a republic.
We need to keep, we don't have an empire.
I called it benevolent hegemony to be provocative, but we have a liberal world order, which our power does undergird.
I'm not backing away from that.
I'm not glossing over that.
Are we overstretched?
Were we overstretched?
Were we overambitious in what we tried to do in the Middle East?
Perhaps.
As I said earlier, those are tough calls.
But again, the problem then, I think, was a little bit too much ambition in promoting liberty.
Not that we should not promote and defend liberty where it is.
And there is a lot of, there are a lot of, I mean, to look at this world and to say that it's the, you know, a site of U.S. Holocaust and, I guess, and of liberty being crushed everywhere and the U.S. rampaging around.
Again, ask people who like liberty, whether they're in Europe or in Asia or in Latin America, if they just want the U.S. to leave, or if they think that the U.S. should play a more active role in helping them secure the freedoms, which are universal freedoms.
They are universal freedoms.
It doesn't mean we can make them universal.
And we need to protect them here, obviously.
So we can be a republic, but also, I would say, if you want to use a provocative term, we can be at once a republic and a liberal empire.
That's what the founders thought, honestly.
And I think we have done a decent job of it for 250 years, and I think we can keep on doing it, hopefully, for another 250 years.
May I take moderator's prerogative to pick up on Bill's point made a few times, to throw it at you, Scott.
Bill is basically saying that a jury of people who live in many of these countries, they support American presence, and so that's his challenge to you.
What do you say to the idea that people in East Timor and elsewhere want the U.S. to be involved?
What's your response?
I've never heard of someone from East Timor wanting the U.S. to be involved.
I'm sure that when Mr. Crystal travels around to European capitals, he meets with people who like the American presence there.
But the idea that that means, I mean, I don't know, somebody show me the opinion polls in Bangladesh, and for that matter, you know, in Eastern Europe, that say that they want the Americans there.
And if, let's say, they hold another plebiscite, this one that American respects, in Ukraine, and 99% of the people in Ukraine want the United States military there, but that increases the chance of a war with Russia, then who cares what they think?
This is our country.
And you know what, if I lived in probably any country in the old world, just the same as I live in this one, I would want to improve it.
But that's on them.
And I do agree that liberty is a universal principle.
Of course it's a universal principle, but it must be locally enforced.
Because you see what happens when the USA, if you want to say that America is the best at it, out of anybody, when the USA acts as the world government, they kill millions of people in the name of doing good.
Bill, do you want to respond to that, or do you want to wait?
Okay.
So let's see.
We have this side.
I think this is going to have to be our last question.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Sure.
This is for Mr. Kristol.
So there have been, you claim there have been successes and failures of the post-1945 world order.
How much worse would the failures have to be, or how meager the successes would they have to be for you to say, it wasn't worth it, we would have been better off keeping ourselves isolated?
I mean, it's a good question, and obviously one can't rerun history for 75 years.
No, I think, you know, nuclear weapons being used several times, Europe descending back into war, as it had twice in the preceding half century, in the subsequent half century.
The Cold War ending with nuclear exchange or massive conflicts of ground troops in Europe instead of the collapse of the Soviet Union, partly thanks to our pressure, partly thanks to Gorbachev seeing that the Soviet system wasn't working, and the power of example that Mr. Horton cited also working, but the power of example doesn't go away because we have troops in Germany making sure that the Soviet Union can't foolishly decide one day to try to expand the bounds of the Warsaw Pact.
You know, if East Europe hadn't become, Central and Eastern Europe hadn't become free, if we hadn't achieved the goal of a Europe peaceful and free, if Taiwan and South Korea hadn't become democratic nations, I think if Japan weren't still a democratic nation 75 years after.
So I think if, yeah, if all those things had gone south, or some of those things, obviously the balance would look very different.
The Middle East is the toughest place, I will grant.
I think, I don't think we've made things worse there.
I don't think we've made things as much better as I would hope, though I am still hopeful the Arab Spring, which for various reasons didn't work, so to speak, we didn't do as much to help as I think we could have, maybe we were exhausted after Iraq and couldn't have done much more, but it shows that people there do yearn for freedom, and I do think there's much more we could do diplomatically and in other ways, civil society, to help even in the Middle East, which is probably the toughest part of the world, for my case.
A comment from you, Scott, on that question?
Yeah.
Well, it's NATO expansion in the post-Cold War era is the greatest threat to peace in Europe now, and we now share, you know, the NATO military empire.
Hillary Clinton said the Russians are doing exercises right on NATO's doorstep.
She meant inside Russia, because NATO has moved their doorstep all the way to the Baltic States right on their border, and in the Trump years, they actually had military exercises within just a couple of hundred yards of the Russian border.
That's not keeping the peace.
That's putting the entire species at risk.
Thank you, Scott.
That closes the Q&A, and Bill Kristol, seven and a half minutes of summation.
You want to take the podium again?
Yeah.
No, it's okay.
I can do it for you, I think.
Okay.
I don't want to have to actually catch a plane, as Gene knows, and I don't want to therefore – and I apologize if I seem to rush out and not mix and mingle, since there might be friends here from the Upper West Side and elsewhere.
I mean, we have a fundamentally – such a fundamentally different view of the world.
I'm not sure that we've been able to convince each other – I'm sure we've not convinced each other of anything, and I'm not sure we've convinced many of you in this kind of debate.
I guess my one – I'll take this – I'll just say this.
You know what?
I'll take one's arguments, assuming good faith on the part of one's – the people with one whom differs, one's opponents, and assuming that maybe they're wrong.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I mean, that last question, I think, was a very fair question, and one could elaborate on it in ways that I probably haven't thought of and make more of a case that we made more mistakes than I realize and that things would be better if we hadn't done – if the U.S. had been less ambitious, if we spent less on defense, if we pulled back from the world, or not.
But the idea that, you know, people that – what Mr. Horton calls the neoconservatives or whatever – don't want the right kinds of outcomes is as ridiculous as thinking libertarians or whoever's for, you know, a republican out of an empire and for no American intervention anywhere don't want decent outcomes.
I think they're naive.
I think they don't understand the way the world would work, and I think they don't learn the lessons from history they might otherwise learn.
But I understand that most of those people don't go around rooting for dictators to crush dissidents or for countries to remain in terrible poverty or for ethnic minorities to be brutally slaughtered, as in Xinjiang.
I don't accuse people who favor more dovish policies or China of thinking that it's great that China has concentration camps for Muslims in the east.
But I think making arguments, therefore, on the actual substance, the actual consequences of policies, assuming that the great majority of us on all sides want the right thing, is a better way to make arguments.
We usually recommend the podium, so Scott might as well take the podium.
You have seven and a half minutes, Scott.
Are we still going to have a chance to ask each other a question, too?
No, it's over.
Seven and a half minutes of summary.
Take it away, Scott.
All right.
I'll email you, Bill.
All right.
I think I've made myself pretty clear.
So this thing is kind of busted.
Instead of recapping, if you'll allow, I'd like to just bring up a couple of things that I had to cut from my opening statement for time there.
Is there any real benefit to the American people from our policy of global domination, including regime change, perhaps access to oil and minerals?
Certainly not.
Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University, published a study in 2010 which determined the U.S. had, quote, misallocated $8 trillion between 1976 and 2007, protecting the sea lanes in and out of the Persian Gulf when oil safe transport was never really under threat.
We spent a few more trillion since then.
This is far more than Americans even spend consuming Middle Eastern oil.
Even if somehow we could just scoop up all the oil and walk away with it, as Donald Trump seems to believe, it could never be worth the cost in blood and grief or the opportunities lost when people turn away from America for acting in such a ruthless manner.
They are occupying and stealing Syrian oil today.
Elon Musk celebrated the coup against the popularly elected government in Bolivia in 2018, crowing on Twitter that it's great because he needs their lithium for his Teslas.
This company may have played zero role in that coup, for all I know, but the U.S. government moved quickly to support it.
And it still raises the important question, what is America's national interest over the long term?
And is it good for the rest of us when selfish, narrow special interests justify violent intervention in other people's countries for their own good in the short term?
And let's just presume that the financial gains far outweigh the costs when companies like Freeport-McMoran are able to run off with all of West Papua's gold, even accounting for the taxpayers' cost for U.S. government involved there.
What shall it profit a nation if they gain the whole world and lose their own soul?
You know, by committing horrible, deadly sins against helpless people.
Part of the problem here is that the neoconservatives and their neoliberal counterparts never really understood what liberty was about in the first place.
It's a great way to finance a PNAC, but Pentagon contracting is not the free market.
It's corrupt, crony capitalism.
And due to the economic deformations of America's permanent war system, the most wealthy counties in the country now are not here in New York City, but in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where our supposed public servants live and work.
And the richest in this city, as all Americans in the rest of the world know, are all market proof due to the so-called Greenspan put.
They get bailed out by Congress and the Federal Reserve System every time they make a few trillion dollars worth of bad bets, while regular people are forced to carry their weight on our backs.
Our sons come home from war unable to find good work, unlike in all the promises.
And this is another major reason for the current crisis of confidence by the American people and our supposed bettors who rule us.
So no, the nation as a whole doesn't benefit financially or otherwise from acts of violence and coercion by the American government.
Read NSC 68.
Paul Nitze did not understand economics.
The whole imperial project is a fool's errand.
And how much time do I have?
Three?
Two?
Okay.
And then I wanted to mention Somalia here because I had to skip it for time in my opening statement, but it ain't fair that Somalia always gets skipped.
Another six weeks or so, it'll be America's longest war.
Bush started supporting the warlords to hunt down supposed Al-Qaeda terrorists in Somalia before the end of 2001, including the son of Mohammed Adid, the bad guy from the Black Hawk Down catastrophe of 1993.
Those warlords made life miserable for everyone until the people came together to form a new government, the Islamic Courts Union, to force them out.
Bush then supported the Ethiopian invasion of 2006, which traded the harmless Islamic Courts Union for the much more dangerous Al-Shabaab insurgency.
In 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decided that ICU chief Sheikh Ahmed Sharif could be the leader of the country after all, just within the form of the new government the US had created for them, nevermind the last two years of killing.
But Al-Shabaab kept fighting, and the US drone war against them has continued ever since.
And as soon as the US ceases support, the government it has created in Mogadishu will surely fall, just like Kabul.
And Kosovo in 1999.
The war was in favor of secession, which is a regime change of sorts.
This war put bin Laden's friends in the Kosovo Liberation Army in power, including Hashim Thasi, the convicted organ thief and gangster, and guilty of prosecuting and cleansing the Serb minority there in the inverse of the lies they told to justify starting that war.
Bill Clinton in the Weekly Standard claimed that 100,000 civilians had been killed, Kosovar Albanian civilians, by the Serbs.
When the war was over, the FBI found a few thousand graves of fighting aged males and went home after two weeks, when the alleged mass graves containing the 100,000 killed were proven to be non-existent.
Kosovo is now permanently dependent on the United States, where we still maintain a massive military base there to this day.
So there have been no successes in the war on terrorism, unless you count winning two Iraq wars for the Shiites who despise us and continue to insist that our troops leave their country immediately.
I don't.
All right, the yes votes picked up.
But of course, with the vote you get initially counts against you, and so, I should voting, Bill Kristol had 7% of the vote, and it climbed to 9.4%.
Congratulations, Bill.
But now that's the number to beat.
But then the no votes went from 72% to 85%, picking up 12 points.
So the Tootsie Roll goes to Scott Horton.
Well, congratulations to you both.
And thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The Scott Horton Show on Anti-War Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.kpsradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.