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All right, introducing our friend Con Hallinan from Foreign Policy in Focus.
This one is called U.S. Diplomacy, a Dangerous Proposal.
How are you doing?
Welcome back.
Glad to be here, Scott.
Very happy to have you here, as always.
And well, as always, you got your eyes peeled and pointed toward topics that most people ignore, including me.
I missed it, but you caught it for me.
In the New York Review of Books, Samantha Power, Barack Obama's America's ambassador to the United Nations, wrote an essay arguing, I guess, the kind of ongoing fight within the foreign policy establishment between, well, there's the neocons.
They're not necessarily part of this, but we can get to that.
But there's the realists, supposedly, in the center, and the liberal internationalists, as represented by Power, and Hillary Clinton, and those who say, you know, who promote humanitarian intervention here.
And I thought it was, well, as you pointed out, the first thing she does is, as you put it, hijack the term national interest, because that's the realist argument, is no, we should only, if we're going to fight at all, it should be for our national interests, and not for humanitarian things.
And so she just decides she's going to have her way with the English language before she gets any further.
She does.
And I think the thing is that it's also the selectivity.
In other words, the argument is humanitarian intervention, in this case it's responsibility to protect, what they call R2P.
But you have a responsibility to protect if you're talking about Russia or you're talking about Syria or Libya, something like that, but you don't have a responsibility to protect if you're talking about Yemen or you're talking about Honduras, etc.
In other words, what she does is she says that this responsibility to protect is really in our national security, but then what she does is that she, the only example she gives are all of the countries out there that are currently sort of in our crosshairs, and that's Venezuela, China, and Russia.
The fact that the United States is making possible the war in Yemen, which is just a horrendous war in which the vast majority of victims have been civilians, the whole country is facing a situation of starvation, there's no mention of that whatsoever.
That war could not take place were it not for the United States.
The United States fixes the airplanes on the ground, it supplies the weapons for the airplanes, it supplies the airplanes, it supplies in-air fueling.
We've stopped supplying targeting information, we say, and the U.S. Navy is helping to blockade Yemen.
Since Yemen imports 70 percent of its food, it means that there's widespread famine.
Now, Samantha Power doesn't bother to mention Yemen.
Well, because it's in our national interest to support the Saudis in Yemen.
And the thing that I'm trying to say in this column is that she has developed this kind of definition of responsibility to protect, which is that if other countries don't emulate essentially what we're doing in this country, well, then we ought to engage those countries, we ought to intervene in those countries.
And it's sort of this idea, it's a very missionary kind of idea of spreading the American system everywhere in the world.
And as we were talking beforehand, Scott, you watched the debate last night.
Should we spread that to the rest of the world?
I don't think so.
I don't think the rest of the world wants it.
Yeah.
Well, I never even mind that.
I mean, look at the results of Iraq War Two, for example.
I don't think anybody in the world would say, bring me a regime change like that.
And Libya is the perfect, you know.
And Libya was very much Hillary's thing.
She pushed very, very hard for Libya.
It's just a, you know, it's a total disaster.
It's now a completely failed state.
And we're responsible.
That was responsibility to protect.
We intervened and we intervened and arranged for a regime change.
And, you know, the United States is the most powerful country in the world when it comes to military force.
And there really isn't any real competition out there unless you get into nuclear war, in which case it doesn't make any difference.
That's the end of the world anyhow.
But essentially, the United States is the most powerful military country on the planet.
But it's no longer powerful enough to arrange for peace afterwards.
In other words, you can overthrow Qaddafi, but it can't put anything in its place.
It can help us in the war against the Assad regime, but it can't resolve the Syrian civil war.
You mentioned yourself Iraq.
Here, sure, they could overthrow Saddam Hussein.
So is Iraq a good place nowadays?
It's just an unmitigated disaster.
And that's, I think, what power in which these humanitarian interventionists refuse to do.
They refuse to look at their failures.
They kind of talk about it in this abstract kind of way.
I mean, who's against humanitarianism?
You know, who's against intervening to stop mass murder?
I mean, nobody's really against that.
But that isn't the way it's used.
Qaddafi had no intention of committing genocide.
We know that now.
And we knew that at the time.
And yet that was what was used to go in.
And now you really have horrible things going on.
So this is a dangerous kind of proposal.
And you mentioned early on, it's not quite the same as the neocons.
You're correct.
It isn't quite the same as the neoconservatives.
But the neoconservatives support this.
And one of the things I find interesting is that some of the people who helped design the Bush war in Iraq are now backing Hillary, because they say, well, we can live with this with this approach in foreign policy.
That keeps me up at night.
Well, of course, part of the neocon argument against the realists and against, you know, detente with the Soviet Union and everything else was, no, we should have a morality-based foreign policy.
The amorality of Henry Kissinger turns out to be profoundly immoral.
So what we need to do is we need to do the right thing all the time.
But then, as you say, just the same back in the 70s as it is now, the right thing means whatever they want and backing whichever monsters they feel like backing at whatever particular times.
Well, you know, one of the things that I think is an example in this article, she talks about Venezuela.
And so there are two things about it.
One is she talks about, well, you know, there's this lack of democracy in Venezuela.
And she never mentions the fact that during the period of Hugo Chavez's reign in Venezuela, Venezuela managed to go from the worst gap between rich and poor in the South American continent to the best, to the Gini coefficient is what they call it, to the best Gini coefficient relationship.
And they bought, you know, millions and millions of people out of poverty and raised them up, created a real lifting up of poor people, health, education, etc.
And there is certainly a lot of tension going on right now in Venezuela.
And several opponents of the regime have been imprisoned and there have been tear gassings and fighting with the police and all that kind of stuff.
So she talks about this.
She doesn't know about Honduras.
Well, because in Honduras, the Obama administration, particularly Hillary Clinton, supported, ended up supporting the coup against a progressive government in Honduras and the establishment, first of a military dictatorship and then of a civilian government, which is essentially their politics are dictated by the military, and leaned on the rest of South American countries to recognize this coup regime.
Honduras now has the highest murder rate in the world.
And a lot of the targeting of that are agricultural organizers, agricultural workers, organizers, labor union organizers, also gay and lesbian activists, which have been particularly subject to death squads, etc.
Well, there's not a word about that.
So we have this responsibility to protect in Venezuela, where actually a large number of poor people have been lifted out of poverty.
We don't have a responsibility to protect in Honduras because we didn't like the government that was in there.
And the guys that are in there now are our people.
And therefore, we don't have a responsibility to protect.
In fact, Hondurans need us to protect them far more than Venezuelans need us to protect them.
Well, and, you know, looking at the reality, there are plenty of economic problems in Venezuela now.
I mean, the benefits that you described were mostly back when oil prices were at an all time high.
And now they're printing money and they've got price controls and major shortages and problems all over the place.
It doesn't mean it's anyone in Texas's damn business or Washington, D.C.'s.
And that's the thing.
In fact, you really look at the so-called national interest.
Well, the Houston and Corpus Christi, especially oil refiners, they have a perfectly good relationship with Venezuela.
And they don't have any real problem or need for regime change there unless they just want more power beyond the good deals they already have.
But Hugo Chavez, he was always willing to play ball with American business, just not with the American government.
Exactly, exactly.
And anyway, wait, let's talk about Samantha Power some more, because when you mentioned Libya there, this reminded me of Michael Hastings piece in Rolling Stone about the decision making for the Libya war.
And it really goes to the question of Power's honesty here.
I know none of us can read her mind or anything like that.
But she is known as the true believer who all night long, every night she dreams about how we could have saved the poor Tutsis or the poor who, yeah, the Tutsis of Rwanda back in 94.
And all she ever wants to do is save people from being killed.
And isn't that what American power is for?
And all that kind of thing.
But in Michael Hastings piece, part of the reason she started the Libya war is because she wanted a promotion and she wanted some attention from Barack Obama.
And she said basically this fits her Rwanda template, supposedly, as you said, that's already was at the time and has since been thoroughly debunked that Gaddafi ever said or meant to say that he would or meant to kill every man, woman and child in Benghazi like in the claims.
But in the Hastings piece, she was tired of doing, quote, do good or rinky dink stuff like get this working on Sunni and Shia reconciliation in Iraq, which, you know, was some boring old, you know, nobody, nothing work by 2011.
What could be important about Sunni Shia reconciliation in Iraq in 2011?
Gone.
Can you think of anything?
Me neither.
So anyway, she wanted and she'd been marginalized because she called Hillary Clinton a monster and Hillary Clinton got the secretary of state job.
So she was only like a low position on the NSC.
And this was her chance.
And it was her chance to make up with Hillary Clinton and to get a promotion and some attention from Barack Obama.
And so Libya had to die.
And it's been dying ever since then.
That is absolutely accurate.
And, you know, at this point, I never believe in predicting elections because every time I do, the gods punish me for hubris.
And so I don't predict elections.
But if Hillary Clinton wins this election, Samantha Power is going to play a major role in the next administration.
And if you listen to that debate last night and also the vice presidential debates, you notice that one of the things that in both of those debates they talked about in which there was agreement was the necessity to intervene in Syria.
You know, this is something that people really need to think about it.
Patrick Cockburn has an analogy of Syria.
He's the Middle East correspondent for the Independent, British Independent.
And he says it's a three-dimensional chess game with nine players and no rules.
And that's exactly what Syria is at this point.
I really don't know what the solution is going to be there.
There has to be a political solution.
I agree, but I don't know what it's going to be.
But we're talking about setting up no-fly zones, which will essentially means that we would shoot down Syrian airplanes.
I don't think they would shoot down Russian airplanes.
And the Russian airplanes are capable of shooting back.
But the Russians have very powerful anti-aircraft systems now in Syria.
What happens when a Russian anti-aircraft missile knocks down an American airplane that is trying to shoot down a Syrian airplane?
It is not inconceivable that we could have two nuclear powers shooting at one another.
That hasn't happened.
That didn't even happen in the middle of the depths of the Cold War.
William Perry, former Secretary of Defense, 1997, I think it was.
So that would be in the Clinton administration.
He's just written a book on nuclear weapons.
And Perry is a guy who was in on the ground floor of not only nuclear strategy, but actually a lot of the nuclear weapons themselves.
He's really an expert on this stuff.
And he was a Republican, even though he was appointed.
He was working in the Clinton administration.
He was a Republican.
He still is a Republican.
And he's just written a book in which he says, in his opinion, the current situation in relationship to nuclear weapons and the possibility of nuclear war is more dangerous today than it was in the depths of the Cold War.
Now, some of that is not just the United States and Russia and China and those big nuclear powers.
The other thing he talks about is India and Pakistan, which is a very dangerous situation.
And if there was the possibility of a nuclear war between Pakistan and India, it would have a worldwide effect.
It would not be a local effect.
It would have a profound effect on the entire world and certainly the northern hemisphere.
So I think one of the things that scares me is that people are talking about something like a no-fly zone, and then they don't take that next step or they don't see me taking that next step, which is, OK, where do you go with this?
Let's come up with the worst case scenario.
Well, that's the thing, right, is they're just committed to this thing, this premise.
Assad must go.
I can tell even, you know, and man, I follow all these liberal hawks and neocons on Twitter all day, and there just is no critical thinking about it.
They have their party line and they're sticking to it.
Assad must go.
Iran and Assad and Russia are the problem in the region, the Shiite axis of the crescent of evil.
It must be rolled back.
And they just refuse to ever mention or concede.
You know they know it, but they just ignore constantly, you know, at all times that the beneficiaries of any war regime change against Assad are going to be al-Qaeda first.
I'm in al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City, and the people who are sworn by it loyal to him.
And they just won't say it.
And the reason is because, well, really, they put Israel first, most of them.
And they're, you know, the others are bought off because their think tanks are bought and paid for by the Qataris and the Saudis.
And they're just hell-bent that America's strategy must be to back the American people's enemies, al-Qaeda, against Israel's enemies and Turkey's enemies and Saudi's enemies, the Shiites.
Even though America's record of the 21st century is we've done more for Iran than anyone ever could have by invading Iraq and handing Baghdad to the Dawa party and the Bata brigade.
Absolutely.
We went into Iraq and basically turned it over to the Iranians.
I mean, that's essentially what happened.
And the, you know, Robert Perry, journalist Robert Perry, he calls this groupthink.
And there's groupthink around Putin, around Iran, around Assad, around China, for that matter.
And I think the thing that I find disturbing is one of the things you have to do in diplomacy is that you have to try and see what your opponent's point of view is.
Doesn't mean you have to end up agreeing with them, but you have to try and understand what it is, because if you don't understand what it is, then what you can do is you can elevate something which is really not a strategic issue to a strategic issue.
For instance, the Obama administration says that the Russians are trying to reestablish their empire because they have troops on the borders of the Baltic countries.
Well, that's the Russian border.
The Russians are not in Canada and Mexico.
The NATO is on the Russian border.
They're in Poland.
They're in Latvia, Lithuania.
Yeah.
Hillary, in her San Diego speech, said the Russians are doing maneuvers right on NATO's doorstep.
Right, right, right.
Now, you have to go back.
I mean, again, there's no history.
You know, God willing that the press should tell people what history is.
You know, this goes back to the original kind of the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
And what happened was that the Americans sat down with the Russians, Gorbachev and Bush, and Gorbachev said, look, we will withdraw our troops from Eastern Europe.
Essentially, we would give up, you know, all these buffer states on one condition, and that is that you don't attempt to recruit any of our former allies in the Warsaw Pact, which was dissolving at that point, into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
And we agreed to that.
Now, it was Bill Clinton that broke it.
Bill Clinton went into the Yugoslav Civil War.
And then they began recruiting all of these countries to be part of NATO.
So from the Russian point of view, NATO's marching eastward.
They're not attempting, the Russians are not attempting to establish an empire.
And you remember, they lost 25 million people, 22 million people, whatever, in World War II, the last time their borders were violated.
So it's necessary.
You don't have to agree with the Russian system or the kind of oligarchy that currently runs Russia.
You don't have to agree with them to come to the conclusion that this is not an attempt to set up an empire.
It's people paranoid about their borders.
They're concerned about their own national security.
Well, yeah, and above all, it's essential.
It's the overthrow of Ukraine's government twice in 10 years.
The same guy that they overthrew.
Exactly.
And, you know, there was an agreement between the European Union, Russia, and the United States for a peaceful transition with the situation in the Ukraine.
That's when they pulled off the coup, when these right-wing elements in Maidan, you know, started this, you know, started attacking the police and started, and at that point the president of Ukraine fled, etc.
We then could have stopped it right there.
We could have said, no, no, we need to go back to the agreement that we all agreed to.
Instead, what do we do?
We recognize the coup.
So if you're from the Russia, you're the Russians, and you watch this and you say, OK, these people are after us.
They're headed for us.
They would like to have a regime change in Russia.
Now, they may be wrong, but it's a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw from our actions.
Well, actually, listen, you mentioned Robert Perry before, and his site ConsortiumNews.com, especially for anybody new at this, and you really say, you know, I really do want to learn about America's relationship with Russia right now.
Just go to ConsortiumNews.com and read until your eyes bleed, and you will be up to date.
And he's got a ton of great, you know, other writers there, but Robert Perry's most recent article here, Con, is Key Neocon calls on U.S. to oust Putin, and it's Carl Gershman, the same guy who wrote the article in The Washington Post in November 2013, saying, yeah, we're working with the Maiden guys to overthrow the government in Ukraine, and if you don't look out, maybe you'll be next Putin, back then, right before the coup in Kiev took place just two months later.
Well, here he is threatening Vladimir Putin himself, as though he, and this is what's really fun to me, you know, is that, hey, I know, let's just pretend to not know that Russia has H-bombs, and that if you try to do a coup in Moscow, that it might come to H-bomb war, just the same as if Russia truly tried to overthrow the government in the United States.
And you can tell they're lying when they accuse Putin of trying to rig this election, because if they really meant it, they'd be on a hell of a lot higher alert than they are right now.
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And again, I think this inability to try and see how other people are viewing us is just really dangerous.
I mean, you know, this is not something that's brand new.
I mean, Americans have always had a kind of a missionary approach to the rest of the world when it comes to their system.
But, you know, I think in the end, when you see this division between realists and, you know, humanitarian intervention, really, in a sense, they both come together at the end because what they're both doing is that they're following what their definition of national interests are.
And one of the things I'm always uncomfortable about is, you know, people say to me, well, are you then a realist?
And I think, wait a minute, Henry Kissinger's a realist.
You know, he's a serial killer extraordinaire.
You know, he overthrew the government, the Salvador Allende government in Chile, backed the massacre of the left in Indonesia.
Not only backed it, the American embassy handed out names and addresses that their intelligence had identified as communists and organizers and stuff and gave them to the Indonesian military, went out, took all these people, butchered them, killed them, put them in prison, you know, whatever.
So I'm not putting myself in the same category as Henry Kissinger.
But what I am doing, what I'm trying to say in this article is that this idea that you intervene for humanitarian purposes, when you really look at it carefully, really what it is, as it says, when people disagree with us and they don't along with what we want, we have the right to overthrow them.
And that's just not, that's too dangerous.
You know what it is?
It's feel good left wing dressing for imperialist regime change.
That's all it is.
It's neoconservatism.
But how do you get a bunch of softies is you say, oh, look at the poor baby that died in the explosion and just leave out all the context, which is exactly what they do.
Like when the Kurdish boy died on the beach and it was because he was fleeing American backed jihadis.
And they said, oh, look at the boy on the beach.
We should we should triple the size of that war right now so that that never happens again.
It doesn't matter what the context is, because they can just, you know, if you go back, if you go back to the Biafran war in Nigeria again, what they did was that they very selectively had pictures of starving children of Biafrans.
And so everybody said, well, this is just about saving, you know, children.
Well, that wasn't what the war was about.
And and the United States ended up making that situation a whole lot worse.
And in fact, the divisions in Nigeria today still go back to the to that Biafran civil war.
The way that we portray things, what gets portrayed in in in the media and things, you know, has an enormous impact on on what Americans think they ought to do and where they ought to intervene, et cetera.
So, you know, here, you know, the Russians or the Assyrians, you know, bomb hospitals.
And that's why it is horrible.
OK, well, the Americans bombed hospitals in Kunduz and in Afghanistan.
And the Saudis, who are our allies, are bombing hospitals in in Yemen and also funerals and all sorts of things.
But as you said, with our help the whole time.
Yeah, those don't get pictured.
Right.
All right.
Now, so one last thing here is is back to Trump and Clinton from the second debate last night.
And believe me, I ain't siding with anybody because I don't vote and I hate them both more than each other and all that.
However, I have to sort of kind of concede that the two what I think most important issues and I don't know, I mean, there's a lot of ugliness that Trump's that Trump brings.
It's hard to draw all the equivalencies.
But on Syria and Russia, it seems like there really is a difference between the two positions.
And Trump's is horrible.
Trump's is we should continue killing people in eastern Syria in attacking the Islamic state with or without some kind of alliance with Russia.
But he he does seem, at least for now, to really be opposed to regime change in Damascus.
And he said about Russia, wouldn't it be nice if we got along with Russia?
And it was hilarious to see the liberal media people on Twitter last night quoting that as though it was the highest of treason to say that we should be getting along with Russia 25 years after the destruction of the communist Soviet Union.
And I'm saying, you know, my God, look how scandalous this is that he wants to get along with them.
And Hillary's take, on the other hand, was Russian aggression.
We must move to limit them and all this stuff.
The group think that you describe she is all in on it.
And I sort of think, man, you know what?
If Trump puts all the Mexicans in concentration camps, is that really worse than if Hillary gets us all killed in hydrogen bomb fusion?
Because I'm not certain that it is really if it comes down to it.
Trump has said some sensible things about about the Russians and also even about the Syrian civil war.
The man I you have no idea what because he's a reality star.
So, you know, I really know what he means or what he would do, though.
He's been pretty consistent on these two things, I think.
And yeah, and and and I think you're absolutely correct on the fact that Hillary is consistent also in a way that is very scary.
I mean, she's called she's compared Putin to Hitler.
They have to think about that for a minute.
If Putin is Hitler, then Russia is like Nazi Germany in 1939 and Nazi Germany in 1939 really was a serious national security threat.
But think about that for a minute.
Putin is Hitler.
Russia is Nazi Germany.
Russia has the 11th largest economy in the world.
France, Britain, Brazil, Italy has higher, bigger economies.
They they're the Turkish army is bigger than the Russian army.
They have nuclear weapons.
But the idea of comparing the 11th largest economy with a small army to 1939, Hitler, Germany, the most powerful economy in Europe, a massive, huge army to compare those two is to take the kind of liberties with history that are very dangerous.
And and when when I see people like Hillary Clinton comparing Putin to to Hitler, I just say, you know, I don't I don't you don't read history or is it just, you know, they know that that's going to resonate with an audience.
Well, people who say things like that just to resonate with an audience, they scare me as well.
Well, you know, I think that's her public position and her private position.
It's so easy for me to picture her saying, right, Robert Kagan, isn't that what we all think, everybody?
And and all these people telling her, that's right, Hillary Clinton, that's what we all think.
I do.
You know, certainly Robert Kagan is here's the guy who, you know, created really, you know, the new American century, which started off saying the first thing they have to do is to target Saddam Hussein.
This was back in the late 90s.
Target Saddam Hussein would overthrow the regime in in Iraq and get rid of Assad.
And that was always a target of the new American century people.
That was Assad was always on the road to Damascus, runs through Baghdad.
Right.
And, you know, this is what what's happening.
And it scares me.
And I think the problem is, is that most Americans don't pay attention to foreign policy.
And then, you know, suddenly it rises up and invites us.
And we certainly are in a position where now, you know, we're talking about, you know, confronting the Chinese in in the South China Sea.
That's not really a good idea.
And this is not to say that I think that the Chinese are not acting like bullies.
I think they are acting like bullies.
But again, walk in their shoes.
You know, the Chinese have been invaded time and time again by the West, by the Japanese, etc.
And they're freaked out about their home waters.
They ought to be.
I mean, we would be, too.
And so the question is, are the Chinese acting this way because they want to establish a Chinese empire?
Are they're acting this way because they're nervous about the Asia pivot and the fact that the United States is putting nuclear forces into into the Pacific, is Marines into Australia, you know, building alliance systems with Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, putting anti-missile systems in South Korea and in Japan?
I mean, those are legitimate concerns of national security for the Chinese.
So you have to try and understand that point of view, because if they're attempting to establish an empire, OK, maybe they are.
Maybe we need to confront them because that's not in the interest of our national security.
But if they're trying to defend themselves, why is that a threat to our national security?
And that's what people like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power just seem incapable of doing, of taking a minute, suspending their view of the world, sitting in Beijing for a minute and say, OK, what does this look like if I'm sitting in Beijing, sitting in Beijing?
It looks like somebody, you know, is encircling you with hostile bases and allies of the United States.
And if you've been invaded as many times as the Chinese have been, you went through the horrible situation in the Second World War, the Sino-Japanese War, 1895, all of those things, you're going to be very nervous by your national security.
Well, you know, it's actually pretty well reported.
You know, I read this pretty much all the time at The National Interest, for example, that kind of everybody knows that the Chinese doctrine went from five miles an hour up to 10 and then up to 20 after that because of the first Gulf War and because of Bill Clinton sailing the Fifth Fleet, I guess it was, in between Taiwan and China in 1997 during some exercises.
When the Chinese, they were no threat to really invade Taiwan.
It was a little bit of flexing muscles.
But when Bill Clinton went and sailed the fleet in there, they decided on a whole new doctrine that they better build up their coastal defenses and their navy, et cetera, like that in reaction to American provocations.
And also a reaction to the fact that the Americans put together a military strategy for Asia called Air-Sea, and it calls for deep strikes into China.
It calls for eliminating the Chinese navy.
It's a very aggressive military strategy.
And the Chinese read it.
This wasn't a secret.
I mean, they looked at it and they said, guess what?
They're coming for us.
They're going to go for regime change in China.
One of the effects is when you say that, the Chinese get paranoid and then they put the clamps on their own internal dissenters, et cetera.
So, I mean, if we're concerned about internal dissenters in China, the first thing we ought to do is stop threatening the Chinese so that they stop cracking down on their own internal opponents.
But that's not what we do.
And so I wrote this article because I felt that this is one of these things that sometimes it just passes by.
Nobody seems to notice it.
But then in the end, we end up doing it.
And then you end up someplace like Libya or Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan.
How long have we been in Afghanistan now?
Fifteen years?
Oh, yeah.
The anniversary is just over.
Fifteen years.
And by the way, is the situation better there, Scott?
Oh, no.
Well, you know, what's funny is China isn't China.
The ultimate example of all this R2P stuff is a bunch of bunk because nobody's gonna nobody ever did in the at the height of the Cold War.
Before they had nuclear weapons, we could have started a war and overthrew Mao Zedong, invaded China in order to save the people.
He was starving them to death with all his crazy, you know, leads forward and backward and upside down and all this crazy crap.
People started death by the tens of millions.
We could have had a responsibility to protect them.
But they said, no, actually, we're going to not do that.
And partially to stay out of a nuclear war with the Russians by then, I guess.
But still, I mean, you know, Pat Buchanan has said before.
I thought this one was a worthy one.
Well, OK, so what if the Chinese roll into outer Mongolia and say, this is ours now?
What are we going to do about that, huh?
And then the answer, of course, is nothing, because they got H-bombs and they can erase L.A.
And so at the end of the day, you know, we hope they don't.
But outer Mongolia is really not America's job.
And if you read the Constitution, you know, they're sworn to protect the state of Georgia, but not outer Mongolia.
That's basically the deal around here, supposedly.
You're right.
You're absolutely right.
But when it comes to Iraq or it comes to Syria or it comes to something that they think is a little bit easier, maybe a little more fun, or maybe Samantha Power can get some attention, then a whole new ballgame at that point, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, I don't know.
I'm all for, you know, and again, great example of like, so what should Americans do about China and the not really communists, but still the dictatorship, the all-powerful dictatorship in China?
Well, you know, best we could do, I think, would be propagandize them about individual liberty if that's what they want to believe in.
If we think we can sell it to them, then that's fine.
But otherwise, as a what should our government do about it?
I mean, just to ask it is to answer it, right?
Yeah, it is.
You're right.
You're right.
But then, of course, they bring up Taiwan, I guess, would be the big flaw in my argument is, yeah, but what about protecting Taiwan and protecting Japan?
The Chinese do not have the capacity to invade Taiwan, and we know this.
And for one of the, when the Pentagon came up with the strategy of the air-sea strategy here, they looked at that possibility and they said, no, the Chinese do not have the capabilities of invading Taiwan.
Why would they want to invade Taiwan?
It's one of their biggest markets.
I mean, do they consider Taiwan part of China?
Yes, they do consider Taiwan part of China.
But then again, so do we.
That's American policy.
Are the Chinese going to invade Taiwan?
They're not going to invade Taiwan.
I mean, it would be, they couldn't do it and it would be a disaster.
You know, the last time they did a major military, you know, in invasions when they attacked Vietnam, it was a disaster for the Chinese.
It absolutely derailed their economy.
You know, moral of the story, don't pick a fight with the Vietnamese.
Generally a bad idea.
They learned a lesson from that.
And the lesson from that is that you do not engage in war.
What they're doing is they're, from their point of view, they're defending themselves.
Does that mean that I support everything the Chinese do?
Absolutely not.
They have no right to claim the Paracels.
They have no right to claim the Scarborough Shoal.
They have no right to those things.
The law of the sea settles those things.
And the Chinese are going to have to back away from that.
But I think if they didn't feel threatened, they'd be in a much better position to do that.
That's what we have to stop doing.
Have to stop threatening people.
All right.
Well, listen, I kept you way over time here, but thank you very much for giving us some of your time today.
Good to talk to you again.
All right.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That is Con Hallinan.
He's at Foreign Policy in Focus.
Jon Pfeffer and the crew there, a bunch of great guys, FP and gals, fpif.org, fpif.org.
U.S. diplomacy, a dangerous proposal.
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