Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, you guys, introducing the great Ron Paul, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the author of a great collection of speeches, A Foreign Policy of Freedom, and of course, The Revolution, A Manifesto, Liberty Defined.
Have I ever talked to you guys about how much I like that book?
Liberty Defined, A to Z.
Ron Paul, and man, he gets every single thing right in there, as far as I can remember.
Pretty sure.
And he hosts the Liberty Report with Dan McAdams, four days a week, which is the best foreign policy show information you can find anywhere, at the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
And of course, Dan McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity that Ron founded.
And then on Fridays, he talks economics with Chris Rossini, so you never want to miss the Liberty Report.
And I could go on and on like that, but anyway, one of my very favorite guests, if not my very favorite, Dr. Paul, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Nice to be with you, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you on the show.
And, you know, so I have a very broad question for you, if I can formulate it right.
I just kind of want to know what you think about American politics right now, and particularly in regards to Donald Trump's foreign policy.
And I am amused, actually, watching the Liberty Report and seeing just how bemused you are by all of this.
And it's fun to imagine what you must really think about, what all is going on with this chaos here.
And so I'd just like to hear it.
Well, evaluating Trump is difficult for everybody because it vacillates a bit.
But, you know, if I looked at it in very, very general terms, and one way you can look at it is how much suffering goes on with our military personnel and how many people are out there shooting and killing somebody that we don't need to be shooting at.
And if you look at his two years compared to, say, even Obama or Bush or any of these, I mean, it's been relatively better, you know.
But the policies are still there, very much interventions.
We're in too many places.
There's lots of threats.
And then yesterday was how tough we're going to be to build all these huge weapons in space because there's a lot of danger out there.
At the same time, you know, a couple of weeks ago, he says, we're coming home from Syria.
I made the neocons go nuts.
And I think there's a problem that goes on in our foreign policy.
I think his instincts are better than his ability to carry them out because he's up against, you know, great odds when you come to the media.
And the organized Democrats and Republicans, you know, and this whole shift just due to, you know, a philosophy of economics and foreign policy, but just the fact that they hate Trump.
So all the Democrats now are pro-war, and they put pressure on him.
It should be, you know, if he had the right coalition under these conditions, he could even do better and get the troops out of Syria and get the troops out of Afghanistan.
But then when you look at it and analyze this, he's up against, you know, the people who support the Israeli position, the Saudi position, and it's very difficult to do it.
It's just too bad that the American people don't shout a little bit louder because, you know, when I campaigned, I did get a favorable reaction to stating as clearly as I could, enough is enough, we don't need this, it drains us, it makes us poor, people die.
And they received it well.
But right now, I think the noise is all coming from the control by the neocons.
Of course, they control the media quite strongly.
Well, it really is interesting, though, to see, isn't it, how he is effectively, Donald Trump is effectively leading the right on this issue and they're willing to, and maybe they already really did agree with him.
He did win the primaries against all of his interventionist opponents while promising to crack down on terrorist groups.
He promised to stop with the regime changes and end the permanent occupations and pacification campaigns and these kinds of things.
And they responded very well to that.
The recent poll showed, and this got most of the attention, how bad the Democrats are now on this.
But it showed that the American right is really moving much further to a non-interventionist position in support of him.
Yeah, I think that is the case.
But you might not hear that on the evening news because a certain group of conservatives are noisy enough to, especially when it comes to passing some resolution to Congress, they go along with it with the Democrats and they get some of these things done.
But no, I think there's a big opportunity.
I think the Democrats are actually going to split on this because there's a lot of traditional progressive Democrats that aren't all that happy about this warmongering.
And I think you're right that there are people speaking out on the Republican side, but we still have a long way to go because when you look at the Trump administration, the top leaders in the Republican Party and in the Senate, a good many of them, if you look at a Mitt Romney type, you know they're closer to the establishment Democrats.
So the establishment Republicans and the Democrats are pro-war and that's where our big problem is.
Well, so your son, Senator Rand Paul, said the other day, I guess he had met with Trump or spoken with Trump and said that he had promised he's really serious about, at least on Syria and Afghanistan.
He reiterated that we really are getting out of there.
Although he only ever said he was ordering half a withdrawal from Afghanistan so far.
But that sounds like maybe he's implying, you know, a further and maybe a complete withdrawal sooner rather than later.
But what do you think?
Yeah, well, I'm hopeful.
I keep my fingers crossed.
And I think he's sincere, but measuring the opposition is the tough thing.
How much noise can he put up with and how much beating up by the media can he stand without caving in?
The other thing, Scott, that really bothers me is some of the times when things don't go as well as they should for Trump, it's his own people that he appointed.
That's a real tough thing to figure out.
You know, he has some neocons in places where they shouldn't be.
When you look at Bolton from Pompeo, he's hard.
They're going to be difficult to handle.
And they might give some token support to the president.
But, you know, behind the scenes, I don't think we can trust them.
Well, that's one thing that I guess we all wonder if he's even aware of.
You know, we all know that we don't have that deep of a bench of non-interventionists who, you know, have the credentials to really serve in the White House or something like that.
But we do have one good bench worth, right?
They talk about Jim Webb and there's Colonel McGregor and, of course, Doug Bandow and Ted Carpenter from Cato and a few others there.
I mean, these are enough to really.
And, you know, I think obviously Senator Paul could fit as Secretary of State and they could make a great Republican non-interventionist team right there.
Oh, it's there.
It's whether or not they can pull it off because of the resistance by the smaller group of special interests.
They're in positions of power when they control the evening news incessantly.
You know, it makes it very difficult.
And I think the groundwork is there and there's some good people there and it'd be much better.
But I'd feel better if they would have been quiet and quietly appointed, you know, two years ago.
Hey, a big shout out and a thank you from me and Sheldon Richman to the guys and girls in the Tom Woods Facebook group who recently made a very generous donation to the Libertarian Institute.
We sure appreciate it.
Thanks, guys.
Well, so now what do you make about the actual withdrawal from Syria?
Does it seem like they've really succeeded in putting that off or do you think that...
Well, they definitely succeeded in slowing it down.
The attitude has changed.
There may be, you know, if you want to give them a little bit of room for it, you might argue, well, it might take a little bit of time because Trump made it sound, you know, immediate.
And, you know, if we had an immediate need to send in thousands of troops someplace, which was justified, we could move troops pretty darn fast.
But all of a sudden, moving them out is more difficult.
So I think that they've been slowed up.
I think that when he has an interview and talks with Senator Graham and the other neocons, he listens to them.
And I think it's been slowed up.
I don't think it's totally dead because he's going to try to live up to it.
But I don't know.
You know, a good question would be, has there been any literal evacuation yet?
And I think I read, and you may know the number, but I read and I was even shocked because I didn't know the number, how many military bases or units that we have in Syria.
You know, it's not like five or 10.
They're all over the place.
And they have to close them down.
I would say, forget it, you know, just get out and change your policy.
But that's, you know, that's opposed by a lot of people.
They're going to really object.
I know Israel wouldn't like that, and Saudi Arabia wouldn't like that.
And I don't know what's going on, but I don't think they're going to get them out of there real fast.
But we have to give them support, and that's what you do.
You try to get as many people thinking along the lines of, you know, giving the support to the president.
And since you watch my program, you know that every chance we get, we give support.
But when we get worried about him or he's changing his position, we try to boost his confidence.
Yeah, of course, just like under Barack Obama, he signs a nuclear deal with Iran.
He's Obama the Great for a day anyway, because it's the policy that counts.
And certainly if he's going to do the right thing, you may have seen, I don't know if anybody really covered this very much, and I'm sorry because I don't catch every show, but there was an NBC report that the White House was talking about getting out of Somalia, too.
And that was a story from about a year and a half ago as well that he was questioning, well, why are we even in Somalia?
Where's Somalia, right?
Like, you can imagine Trump being frustrated about that.
Are guys getting shot in Somalia?
At the same time, he ordered an escalation there.
And then in one report, the military was really digging in their heels and said, well, we haven't heard anything about that.
We're not leaving Somalia.
But it's just another one.
I guess I'm grateful that he even knows we're there and is mad about it.
You know, on all these interventions, the simplest and clearest message that we can send is, show us where we got involved and things got better.
And Syria is a typical example.
Obama says, Assad has to go.
And then a few years later, then we started putting troops in there and helping in all sorts of ways.
And the whole mess of it, the reason we can't leave is because of what we've helped create.
And the left, the left is interesting, I call them the left, the warmongers and the neocons are saying, if you leave, Al-Qaeda is going to come in and it's going to be disruptive and we have to stay there because it's a mess.
Yeah, but the mess came from us being there.
But they aren't willing.
But they're not going to listen to us while they're there because they have ulterior motives.
But the American people will listen to that message.
And you make a good point.
They did listen to Trump not endorsing everything we talked about, but he was leading in that direction.
What are we doing over in these places?
And he still won the election.
Yeah.
Well, and you're right again.
Of course, you look at what's going on right now where the obvious solution to, for example, protect the Kurds from a Turkish invasion, if there is a solution at all, it's to allow the Kurds to negotiate with Assad and make a deal to bring the Syrian army back in.
But the Americans still don't want to concede that.
And it's this guy, James Jeffrey, who's telling the Kurds that they're not allowed to.
I guess they're trying to negotiate that anyway.
But as long as America's there, that prevents the Kurds from making the peace with Assad that they need to protect them from Turkey.
It promises itself if we just quit it.
Yeah, they don't want to admit that Assad actually won.
He's representing a country, yes.
It's far from perfection.
But what we've given him for the past 10 years is a heck of a lot worse than it was like when he was maintaining an authoritarian approach to the problems that he had in Syria.
But it's awfully strange that so many people can't see this.
But I think the ulterior motives are the toughest thing, whether it's an oil pipeline here and energy and the Kurds are involved and it's on and on.
And that's why I think our philosophy is so attractive.
People wanting to manage the internal affairs of our next-door neighbors and say, well, you should be doing this.
And that would be insane to go in their house and say, well, we want you to do it.
These are the habits you have to follow.
You'd be shot or thrown out within a few minutes.
But for us to go into these countries and even with good intentions and try to micromanage their countries, that's going to create just more chaos.
And that's what's happening.
But I don't know how many places that they can use as a good example of us restoring good government.
I mean, we can hardly tell them to, well, look to Iraq.
Look how much good we did in Iraq and how much good did we do in Afghanistan after 17 years.
The evidence is so strong, I think that we have to keep plugging along and keep working on improving our arguments because I think we have truth on our side.
Yeah, well, you have a career being right.
I mentioned at the beginning there, your book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom, which is a collection of foreign policy speeches going back to, I guess, the turn of the Carter to the Reagan years there, the late 70s, early 80s, and through those terms in Congress.
And then I think some in your inter-Congress years, a couple.
But then when you went back to Congress in 1997, it's literally decades of you warning, caution, that if we back the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against Russia, that we might have some bad consequences from that.
Or if we get in this war with Saddam Hussein in 1991, that there could be some blowback coming down the line.
And this kind of warning, and not just to say that you told them so, which you did, but that all you had to do was have the proper principle and an honest analysis of it.
And you proved the case.
Anyone or many people could have and did get this right all along.
That really didn't have to be this way at all.
And to me, it's such an easy message.
I mean, we take a principled position of non-interventionism, and it gives us good results.
The others are very difficult when they're interventionists and they're so-called pragmatic and realists.
They have to go in there and dissect out, well, on the one hand, we should help this group.
On the other hand, we should help this group.
And they still believe that if we do the right thing, we're going to be bringing about peace and order.
And that's when they get into trouble.
That's how we end up in Korea and Vietnam and all over the Middle East, the whole works.
The message of non-interventionism and defending that is a lot easier than picking and choosing between the Turks and the Kurds.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, I'll let you go, but thank you so much for your time again on the show, Ron.
It's great to talk to you.
Scott, nice to talk with you again.
Okay, guys, that's Ron Paul.
He's at RonPaulLibertyReport.com and, of course, at the RonPaulInstitute.com for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
And, of course, just check out the channel on YouTube for the Ron Paul Liberty Report as well.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org at ScottHorton.org AntiWar.com and Reddit.com slash ScottHortonShow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fools Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
