All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys on the line, I've got the great Doug Bondo.
He is a regular contributor for us at antiwar.com and of course, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
How are you?
Happy to be on.
Happy to have you here.
And man, you write so much.
I can't keep track and I really try, and actually it's my job too, but I still can't keep up.
But can we start with the lost opportunities of the Donald Trump administration that you wrote for us here at antiwar.com?
Oh, there's so many.
Where do you want to start?
Oh, I don't know.
I mean, Afghanistan maybe because that's, he's talking about maybe trying to rush that through before he leaves.
Of course, he had four years to do it.
Now he's trying to get it done in two months.
What do you think's going to happen there, man?
That's a very good question that, I mean, he apparently has hired Doug McGregor, which is great.
I mean, while Ruger's involved, was named as a ambassador, unfortunately, won't get that ambassadorship.
It would have been fabulous for the job.
Is Ruger now acting ambassador or do you know, how does that work?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, I think, I suppose they could have done that, but the last time we talked, they hadn't.
That was before the election.
We wondered if he lost, if they would do anything to kind of try to give some status.
I mean, it's hard with an ambassador.
You don't really control policy.
Now if they could do it, if they decided to try to pull troops out, it would make some sense to have your ambassador over there.
But if they're not going to do anything, you know, kind of, I doubt they'll, I mean, the problem is this is an administration that has had trouble doing anything right.
So having a coordinated plan is probably beyond them, but I'd love to see it happen.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what, I had this whole conversation with Mark Perry, who's probably the journalist who knows McGregor best.
And from what I know of him, he does inspire a lot of confidence in the sense that if anybody could see this through in a couple of months, I guess he'd be the guy, right?
No, I think that's right.
McGregor.
I mean, the nice thing about McGregor is he doesn't care what people think.
So he'll say what he wants and he'll say what he believes and he'll, you know, tell him to get it done.
And I think he probably could get it done.
I'd love to see it.
I mean, it'd be nice to have at least one endless war over.
But that's certainly one of our great lost opportunities.
I mean, presidents said a lot of right things on Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and we're still in all of them.
Yeah.
I know.
The whole thing is nuts.
And, you know, even though he didn't make all of you guys at Cato and the national interest in whatever his national security cabinet all along, God, you know, the fact he's doing this now.
I mean, not all of y'all or whatever, but at least with McGregor up there, it goes to show that he knew that this was a thing.
He just didn't want to pull the trigger before the election.
He thought it would hurt him to do this before the election.
I mean, this would have been the greatest thing in the world to have had this fight all summer long and and force Joe Biden to take the side of more war.
I mean, man, that would have been the best electoral judo in the world.
He should have done it then, man.
Yeah, I mean, I think the problem is he he doesn't have much of an attention span.
He doesn't have a strategy.
He has impulses.
And some of those impulses, like on this, are very, very good.
But I mean, he doesn't have a strategy and he surrounded himself with people who had no interest in doing the right thing, which is the big problem.
I mean, if he'd had you know, if Will Ruger had been the original ambassador that he nominated, we would have been out of there.
Yeah.
I mean, if Doug McGregor had been national security adviser, we'd have been out of there.
But he nominated this.
I mean, McMaster is out there.
I mean, he's comparing getting out of Afghanistan to Munich.
I know.
And he was national security adviser.
I mean, John Bolton.
I mean, if you want to destroy your effort to make peace with North Korea, what better choice than John Bolton?
It's that's what we just that's what we can't understand is the president had some very good impulses and then he undermined them all.
Yeah.
And I'm part of it.
I keep accusing him of this and it sucks to be so redundant, but it's just because he's lazy and stupid.
That's all because he couldn't be bothered to even read a thing on his phone.
In fact, he only even follows a handful of people on Twitter.
He spends all day on Twitter, but he doesn't want to know.
He like follows Chachi and a couple other.
You know, he doesn't want to know what's going on out there at all.
He might have found there were people who were leaning right who really wanted to help him in wars.
He just didn't know any of y'all's names.
But I think part of the problem is that he thinks he knows everything.
Yeah.
But he doesn't have to learn anything.
And that that's that's a real problem.
And look, we've all had bosses like that.
Right.
I've had three or four bosses like that.
You couldn't tell him nothing, man.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, that's a bigger problem when it's the president of the United States.
Right.
And with all the people who are trying to set him straight are all trying to set him crooked and are all trying to make him worse.
You know, that's I mean, I assume you saw the story of Jim Jeffrey.
I mean, Syria is another lost opportunity.
Jeffrey said they intentionally misled the president to keep troops there, intentionally misled him.
As you know, how many troops were over there and Esper also Esper gave an exit interview to Military Times where he said he would just ignore the president's orders.
The president would say something out loud.
That's not our policy.
The president would tweet something.
That's not our policy.
Show me a document in writing with a signature at the bottom.
That's a direct order.
OK, then we'll talk something like that.
Wow.
But, you know, but again, the president brought him on itself.
I mean, the first time that happened, the president should have called Esper up and said, I'm the president.
I make the policy.
Here's what we're doing.
But when Esper found out he could get away with it.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Great.
But it's so funny to see, because, you know, I really think that I don't know enough about this guy, Christopher Miller, the actual secretary of defense, but presuming that he gets along with McGregor and that they all really decided, like, oh, yeah, we're going to not just do this, but have fun doing it over the next 10 weeks.
I mean, which is assuming a lot.
I'm not a hope and change guy, but I do respect McGregor.
And it sure would be something else to see them with lame duck on elected status.
Right.
Not even just, you know, second term is up, but unelected after one term, lame duck trying to do something.
You know, did you see the CNN?
I love this.
The CNN article had a quote from a defense official saying he wants to get out of Afghanistan.
He wants to get out of Somalia.
These are dictator moves.
Oh, geez.
So I mean, they want to fight.
They want to be insubordinate and not go along.
Right.
This could be a real thing to see.
Look, I have to say, I'm already missing him because I'm just listening to, you know, Biden said, of course, we have to defend the Senkaku Islands.
And I listen to some of these webinars with these foreign policy analysts and journalists.
They're all lefties.
They're all mine.
All the Europeans.
What was us?
They're so, you know, they're so horrified at how we behaved.
Now they love us.
They're going to love Biden.
Biden's going to show up.
And he just said, you know, everything's going to go back.
I mean, we just have to do everything.
I mean, he's assured the South Koreans we would never think of pulling our troops out and just thinking, I mean, this is just mindless stuff.
And, you know, they just stated without ever making any argument, of course, we have to do.
Well, the question is why?
Right.
I mean, at least the president.
I mean, for all the frustrations, I mean, the president recognized we didn't have to do all that.
And the fact that foreigners all got upset that, oh, my, they might have to do a little more in their own defense.
You're thinking, well, thank you.
Bravo.
Gee, it is your defense, right?
Yeah.
Tell me, what's a Senkaku Island?
The Senkakus, they're like, I don't know, three or four pieces of rock that the Japanese call the Senkakus, the Chinese call them the Dayayus.
Both of them claim them.
Chinese actually don't have a bad claim here.
I think their claims elsewhere, I think, are less good.
The problem is, you know, China went through that period where it was this failing imperial power and everybody just chopped them up and took everything they want.
So now, of course, China's passed that and it wants all this stuff that it claims it really should own.
So the Japanese own them and run them.
The Japanese will not negotiate because in the Japanese view, they own them.
So screw you.
They're not going to talk about them.
But the Chinese don't like that answer.
But of course, you know, when it comes down to it, if there's a war between them, well, what do we do?
Well, the logical thing would be to say, well, you know, I mean, if the Chinese would be dumb enough to actually attack Japan, maybe we'd feel we have to do something.
But you know, if you want these little, these stupid rocks, I mean, come on, we don't really care about that.
We're not going to go to war with China over that.
But of course, no, no, we're going to defend even though we don't have a claim, even though we haven't made any assessment, the Japanese deserve to have it.
You know, we are willing to go to war over it.
It's mindless.
I mean, the Philippines has the same sort of thing.
There are a couple of things there.
It's the Scarborough Shoal and Mischief Reef, and that's a very good name for the second one.
But these are contested pieces of rocks that basically the Chinese grabbed from the Filipinos.
The Philippines doesn't have a real Navy.
So I mean, where are they going to get a real Navy?
They have to borrow ours.
I mean, Duterte was quoted last year that the Chinese rammed a fishing boat and sank it.
And he wanted us to send in the fleet and he said he'd join it and he'd join it when they started bombing.
And I'm thinking, you know, hey, dude, you know, we don't actually give you our fleet to start bombing the Chinese.
You know, that's really not in our interest.
I mean, it's crazy stuff.
Yeah, man.
You know, these liberal hawks, it really is just like the I can feel it already, the kind of atmosphere, just like when Obama came in, where after all the bungling and incompetence of Bush, they just couldn't wait to prove how competent they were at doing all of the exact same stupid and horrible things as him.
And so the idea that they would say, hey, we're the Democrats, which means we're the ones who are less worse on this stuff.
Watch us stop doing things would never even cross their mind.
No, because they're true believers.
Now, I mean, this the one hope, of course, is that progressives tend to be less enamored of all this.
Yeah.
The problem is when they were doing the negotiations between Sanders and Biden, you know, basically Biden was willing to give in on domestic stuff, but on the foreign policy stuff, they did very little.
You know, part of the problem here is that Biden views himself as being a really smart guy on foreign policy.
I mean, he was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Of course, he's an idiot on it.
I mean, that's the problem.
I mean, his view is that Russia is the greatest threat that faces the U.S.
I mean, you just look at this.
I mean, you get that all the time.
Cori Schalk, who's the A.I., was on one of these webinars I listened to, and she was so happy that the Congress kept, you know, imposing new sanctions.
I mean, you just, you sit here and just wonder, well, what's the purpose?
I mean, they state this stuff without ever making an argument.
They never explain, now, how is Russia threatening us?
Could you please explain that to me?
I mean, it's just, it's just taken for granted.
Of course, we have to keep sanctioning them and, you know, for what purpose?
They don't say.
And these people are going to be in charge of policy under Biden.
Yeah, man, just, yeah.
Talk about a wasted opportunity, because even if he had only four years, I mean, think of this, all the compromises he made in order to stay on the right side of the Israelis and the Saudis.
And he lost anyway.
That's right.
So he could have ended the Yemen war and just said, screw you guys, you can hire as many PR firms against me as you want, I don't care.
You know, he could.
The thing is, I mean, as you pointed out, I mean, people would have loved this.
Right.
American people aren't in favor of bombing Yemen.
Right.
I mean, they're not interested in staying in Afghanistan forever.
I mean, why?
Now, why are we in Syria again or why are we still in Iraq?
I mean, there's no support.
I mean, the only people who support that, it's the war party in Washington.
Right.
And the only reason you need money is to buy votes.
But at the end of the day, it's the votes you need.
You could buy more votes with doing the right thing than with Sheldon Adelson's $75 million, you know.
He almost won the election and he was outspent dramatically by Biden.
Yeah.
I mean, he, you know, gives you a certain amount, but frankly, you know, it is not dominant.
So no, I mean, people would have loved him for that.
He would have fulfilled his promises that helped get him elected.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny that people like you and I who were never, you know, enamored of this stuff or believers in him through any of this time, I think, you know, you've been absolutely realistic about who Donald Trump is and what he's about all this time.
We still can't help but talk about him the way the liberals talk about Obama.
Like there's a secret Obama.
That's what we used to make fun of him, right?
There's a secret Obama who's going to finally start doing the right thing here someday or whatever.
There never was a secret Trump who really cared enough about this stuff to do the right thing.
He just knew that the American people wish that they'd never done that George W. Bush thing and that he could use W against Jeb.
You know, that's all.
Yeah.
And he might.
I don't know.
I get more credit.
He didn't really believe in all this mystical world leadership stuff, but it was never enough to amount to real opposition to it either.
You know, it's just a show.
I mean, Trump, I think has a few things that he really believed in.
I think one of them is that allies are taking advantage of us.
The problem is he doesn't have an ideological sense that the obvious answer to that is to let them defend themselves.
His view is we should make them pay for it.
So what he wants to do is turn American soldiers into mercenaries.
Well, I mean, this is, you know, I mean, this is a really dumb way to go.
Right.
Yeah.
We're losing money in Syria.
We should steal that oil so we can make a profit.
Right.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, but at least he's thinking, I mean, everybody else.
Well, of course.
I mean, why do we have to be in Syria?
Well, if we're not in Syria, then the Russians and the Iranians will be.
And the answer is.
And and you're not answering my question.
Why?
Why?
Why do we have to be there?
I mean, that's a standard assumption.
He at least doesn't have that as a standard assumption, which is why everybody else freaked out about him.
And of course, a lot about him is just so awful.
And I mean, he brought so much of this on himself.
I mean, he would have won the election if he'd just done one or two things better.
You know, that first debate, he hadn't skipped the second debate and he lost four states by less than one percent.
He won three of those.
He would have been reelected president.
But the thing is, he did get that.
I mean, this whole foreign policy is nonsense.
I mean, why do I mean, I was on I had actually I I meet with the Korean and other diplomats fairly regularly.
And, you know, and they all know my my position on this.
We were talking yesterday.
I said, you just have to realize it's not just Korea.
Every week in Washington, there are a flurry of webinars and conferences these days, primarily webinars online.
But, you know, in the past conferences, every region of the world is represented.
And it everyone I mean, you know, we have the Middle Eastern conferences, we have the European conferences, we have the Asian conferences.
And then there are there are there are a few for South Africa, South America and Africa.
But at every conference, the mantra is the same.
The U.S. has vital interests at stake in then fill in the blank.
I mean, it could be Chad, it could be Nagorno-Karabakh, it could be, you know, Ukraine, it can be North Korea, South Korea, Japan.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, fill in the blank.
We have vital interests there.
The U.S. must strengthen relationships, improve the alliances and deploy more troops.
That's what everybody says.
And they say it about everywhere.
They said, how are we supposed to afford this?
We're bankrupt.
I mean, you know, we're over 100 percent of GDP, you know, in terms of debt.
The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, says there's a good chance we'll be at 200 percent by 2050.
You know, well, Greece fell apart at 140 percent of GDP.
I mean, that's when the euro crisis hit.
I mean, this is insane.
I mean, is it really true that every place on Earth is vital to America and we have to defend it?
I mean, this is but everybody says that they just they act as if that's I mean, everybody knows that.
You don't even question it.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
You know, seriously, this is why I was a conspiracy kook when I was a kid is because I thought, look, everybody knows that all empires fall.
So the Birchers must be right that the empire itself is a conspiracy to destroy America.
It's a long con, but it's the only way to destroy America is to overextend our dollar and our military across the world until the whole thing comes crashing down and then the real U.N. world order thing comes.
Now, I don't think that anymore.
I was assuming that the people in charge were as smart as my stupid skateboarding, cab driving pirate radio ass at the time, and that they must know at least as much as I know about how this works.
And so it must all be deliberate.
But then, no, come to find out that as a 20 year old, I was thinking deeper about all this stuff than all these guys, or at least they make enough of a living building this crumbling empire that it's worth it for them to not object and to continue to go along with this.
But it was pretty obvious from 2000 from 2000, you know, the beginning of the Bush years.
This is it.
Right.
This invasion of Iraq before it even happened.
This is America finally blow in its last wad in the sands of Iraq.
This will be the height of the American empire.
And it's all downhill from here because you just can't extend yourself that far without repercussions.
No, that's right.
I mean, it should be obvious, but these I mean, they all like Samantha Power gave an interview to the Financial Times a few years back and said, it's just terrible.
All these people are focused on Iraq.
You know, it means I mean, we're not doing stuff we need to do.
And you're thinking, I mean, it's so typical of, oh, don't blame me for the fact that Iraq was an utter disaster.
Don't expect me not to want to do everything that we do.
You know, we'll do it better next time.
Trust us.
Everything will be fine.
I mean, it's no responsibility.
I mean, if you who do you invite if you want to have a retrospective on Iraq, we invite Bill Kristol.
You don't invite somebody who got the issue right.
Right.
You invite the guy who got it all wrong.
I mean, it's, you know, this.
Yep.
It's so frustrating.
You know, Samantha Power, she actually was the one who remember in the campaign of 08, she had called Hillary Clinton a monster and sided with Obama.
So she was punished for that correct assessment by being banished to the lower ranks of the National Security Council in the White House instead of a nice position at state.
So then when the Libya war came, this was Michael Hastings reporting for Rolling Stone.
She was tired of being stuck with these assignments of do-gooder rinky dink stuff like helping reconciliation and protecting Christians in Iraq.
She wanted to do something exciting, get some attention from the boss and a promotion.
And so she mongered the Libya war and it worked.
And that was a story.
She went to Susan Rice and then they went to Hillary Clinton and the three of them went to Obama and said, you've got to let us do this thing.
And he did it because she was tired of do-gooder rinky dink stuff like reconciliation in Iraq in the year 2011, when you might think they need a little bit of that.
Well, Obama was another one who surrounded himself by people who wanted to do a lot more than he did.
I mean, John Kerry.
I mean, I think that Obama had a certain kind of coolness in terms of evaluating stuff.
And he has people like Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton and others who are desperate to go show their credentials and go to war.
And again, you wonder, well, why do you do this?
I mean, if you actually have some skepticism, why do you choose the people who don't share your skepticism?
I mean, what sense does that make as a president?
I have no explanation.
I mean, I just don't get it.
Well, you know what?
I mean, it makes sense.
I'm sure you saw on the WikiLeaks or maybe not, but everyone should look at the WikiLeaks.
It sounds like funny conspiracy stuff, but it's totally legit.
Some executive vice president at Citigroup in Chicago sends an email to, not directly to Obama, but to his staff or whatever it is.
And he's saying, here's who I'd like to see as your cabinet.
You're going to keep Gates at defense and you're going to make Hillary Secretary of State and you're going to name Goldman Sachs to be Secretary of Treasury and on down the list there.
And that was it.
The most minor variations, that was the original Obama cabinet, was chosen by an executive vice president at Citigroup.
That's how the world really works.
No Freemasons or like goofy, eyes wide shut stuff necessary.
It's just politics and power, you know?
Yeah, that is the way the world works, isn't it?
And can you imagine that, Doug?
You get elected president and they tell you, you're going to have to keep W. Bush as Secretary of Defense.
And you go, okay, if you say so.
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Okay, let's talk about Korea.
You know, ever since George W. Bush, things with North Korea have been terrible.
Bill Clinton had a pretty decent deal that he never abided by, but the North Koreans stayed in their side of it and he didn't violate it egregiously enough that they would quit it or anything like that.
And George W. Bush, as we all know, ruined everything and pushed them right into nuclear weapons.
And ever since then, the policy has been that the Cold War against them stays forever and maybe even a hot one if their technology gets good enough.
But we can never be friends with them unless they denuclearize first.
And Trump at least started to say that that's not so.
Maybe we can make some progress here, but then it seems like it didn't really work out at all.
What happened with that?
Well, I think the problem is that the president was convinced that he could get the deal of the century in Korea, but from his standpoint, the deal of the century means that the North would give up all of its nukes.
So he figured we can do this big deal.
They get sanctions relief, we get the nukes, and I'm the hero.
And it was never realistic to assume that they would give up the nukes.
And he surrounded himself by people who would feed that.
Bolton was one, but I suspect Pompeo too.
These are hawks who, their view was the only way you deal with North Korea is you demand the nukes.
The idea of some intermediate deal from their standpoint was just wrong.
So he didn't have people around him who would say, Mr. President, this might work, but what you're going to have to do is this.
You need to make an offer to them that if they give up X, Y, and Z, they can get this and that and the other.
That's the ultimate way to make a deal here.
I don't think he had anybody around him to tell him that.
So in Hanoi, the argument was, and I think with some seriousness, that the North probably asked for more than it could ever really expect given what it wanted in sanctions relief.
But that's what you have negotiations for, where you say, okay, Jong-un, now, hey dude, I think you've got a good approach here, but we need to rejigger it a little bit.
We can give you a little less, you need to give us a little more or something, instead of kind of stalking out.
And the president may have thought that that would give him credibility, would show he's willing to turn down a deal, that he's not going to make a deal no matter what, if that may have been going through his mind.
It's hard to know, really, what he was thinking.
But realize the people who were around him were not fans of a deal.
I mean, that's the problem, is if you have Mike Pompeo and John Bolton advising you on foreign policy, even if you have the right instinct on North Korea, you're not getting help actually putting it into effect.
That's why you need diplomats.
They do the hard negotiation.
The president and the supreme leader don't do the negotiation.
Somebody else does the negotiation, in concert with and talking to the policymakers.
And that's how you come up with a deal.
Then you put together the summit, and they sign something, and off you go.
Well, he had that guy, Stephen Biegun, who gave that speech.
Yeah, and Biegun came in late.
And Biegun started out as a special representative or something.
I mean, it was a while before he became deputy.
Biegun's a good guy, I think.
He was the one who said that, look, we don't have to put nukes first.
We could have a peace deal to officially end the Korean War of the 50s.
That's still, we only have a temporary ceasefire armistice.
Not even an armistice, but a ceasefire arrangement.
And we could drop some sanctions and reduce some exercises.
Trump went ahead and reduced some exercises, right?
They could have kept along that path.
I mean, after all, right, and you and I talked about this the whole time, that if you really mean it, that you really want to see North Korea get rid of their nukes, you're not just going through motions here, but you really think that at the end of the day they're going to be A-bomb-less.
Well, the only way to do that is to absolutely murder them with kindness.
There's no other way to do it.
You got to make them feel like there really is no danger, and that actually having nukes is more of a problem because in whatever way it interferes with their relationship with China or some other type thing.
But the Americans are not coming.
But if you don't make them feel that way, then you know what, A-bombs will keep the Americans at bay.
You know?
Yep.
No, that's right.
So, yeah, they sure blew that, man.
That's too bad, too, because it was really something to see them doing the photo ops at the DMZ, blowing up all those border outposts and all these things.
And I guess that's the other thing, right, is the South Korean president really wanted to do this.
They could have just let him drive, and it would have been fine.
No, the U.S. is taking control, and of course it matters a lot more to the South.
They're the battleground if there's a war.
Yeah.
I mean, good old Lindsey Graham, well, a nuclear war over there wouldn't be so bad because the war would be, as he put it, over there, it wouldn't be over here.
Right.
And the South Koreans still refer to that.
I was at a recent webinar, somebody talked about that.
I mean, they all heard that, and they didn't like it.
Not very reassuring, right?
No, exactly.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, so, let's see, oh, and this was the other piece I want to talk to you about.
Donald Trump's North Korea strategy must survive.
In other words, he has broken the glass here, and he has made some progress, and the Democrats, they just better not take us back to Obama years of refusing to talk with these guys.
In fact, so this is the rub I mentioned there, Cold War may be hot war, but that's because they've drawn this red line, they call it, that if the DPRK can really marry a nuke to a missile that can reach D.C., that LBJ didn't invade China over this, but that was just because he was afraid of Russia, I guess, that in this case, just like with Iran, we will attack them before we let them get that far.
With Iran, I guess we wouldn't let them get a nuke at all.
But with North Korea, if they get to the point where they really, we think they miniaturize their nukes, we might just go ahead and start a war.
In fact, in the recent Woodward book, Mattis says he considered killing, quote, a couple million people.
He said, no one has the right, but that's what I have to confront, which isn't that something?
That in the event of an attempt to take out Korea's nukes, we'd have to nuke Pyongyang and kill two million civilians?
What?
No, it's absolute madness.
And it's hard for me to imagine that Mattis himself would want to do that.
I think that was a question of whether, that's when the president was talking fire and fury.
And it sounded like that he was getting advice from people like- On the contrary.
No, I mean, in the book, he's not saying, oh no, this was the crazy position that Trump was putting me in.
Really?
He was saying, this was the crazy position we were in because North Korea was making progress on their nukes and their missiles.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just so striking.
I mean, I keep trying to tell people, the only reason North Korea has an interest in attacking us, it's because we're there.
I mean, North Korea doesn't threaten to attack Moscow or Beijing or Brussels or Nairobi or Johannesburg or Brasilia or Rio de Janeiro.
I mean, it threatens us because we threaten them.
I mean, North Koreans aren't suicidal.
It's not like Kim Jong-un wants to go out of this world in a radioactive funeral pyre.
They want this for deterrence.
We threaten to bomb them all the time.
I mean, it's so strange, if you don't want to worry about the North bombing us, well, we could just leave.
Then you don't have to worry about it.
I mean, they don't get that.
I mean, it's just, I mean, that to me is the amazing thing is that you give the obvious solution.
Well, no, of course we can't do that.
Well, why not?
You know, I don't know.
We have to defend the South.
Why can't they defend themselves?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, it's bizarre.
The answer is obvious in front of them, but they just can't see it.
Hey, I got one.
How about send McGregor to Korea to make a deal at the last minute here?
Well, that'd be fun.
I'll go and advise him.
Yeah.
Oh, that would freak everybody out, wouldn't it?
Yeah.
Bring Peter Van Buren along.
He speaks the language well.
I guess you know Korean, right?
Or not?
No, no.
But I know you've been there.
I mean, the problem is that I just do too many issues.
I mean, it's to try to learn.
And those are hard languages.
I mean, I admire people who can learn the Asian languages.
These days you can almost, I mean, the interpreters are there and in some of the countries, all the young people are learning English.
So I figure I can be lazy.
Yeah.
There you go.
Well, man, I sure envy you.
I know you've been to, I don't know, what percentage of the nations in the world have you been to, Doug?
Oh, a lot of them.
I've never sat down to try to figure it.
I mean, I haven't been to a huge percentage in either South America or Africa, but I've done quite well in Europe, Middle East and Asia.
That's really something.
I know you've been in North Korea twice, right?
Yeah.
And I've been to Afghanistan twice.
South Sudan.
I've been to Cyprus, both north and south.
So interesting places like that.
Burma.
I've been to, actually, the battleground in Burma, in the eastern Burma, back when the guerrilla war was going on.
Man, I love your polemics, but you should be in the background here writing a great memoir too.
Yeah, that could be fun.
It takes work.
I mean, I've gotten lazy in my old age.
Nah, that's just not true.
I'm sorry.
I must dispute that characterization of your work ethic.
It's just, it ain't right.
You write as much or more than Danny Sherson.
You guys are in a contest for most prolific anti-war guys in the world history, probably.
Danny's great, and he has a great background for what he writes.
I'm so glad you have him.
Oh yeah.
Nah, I mean, we've got a pretty good crew going now.
Hey, listen, before I let you go, let me let you have a few more words about Mike Pompeo here, Trump's Secretary of State.
You got this great piece, it's at the American Conservative, asking and answering, is Mike Pompeo the worst Secretary of State in history?
Well, come on.
I mean, Henry Kissinger's just off the top of my ...
Madeleine Albright, John Kerry ...
Wait, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
You answer.
Look, I mean, obviously it's kind of hard to compare over time.
You need to go back to a point when America didn't have much of a foreign policy.
Those people might've been awful, but they didn't have much consequences.
I still think Madeleine Albright ...
I mean, Madeleine Albright has said so many stupid things.
You know, we think the price is worth it at the thought of a half million Iraqi babies dying.
You know, telling Colin Powell, you know, what's the use of having this wonderful military you keep talking about if we don't use it?
I mean, the story that came from, I forget the member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff where they were talking about, I think it was talking about, was it Serbia or Iran, of couldn't we arrange to have an SR-51, one of the spy planes, shot down over, so that would give us an excuse to go to war?
Yeah, I think it was Iraq, actually, during the no-fly zones.
That's right, that's right.
Because it was Saddam Hussein.
Yeah.
And then it was ...
And then George W. Bush said the exact same thing in the Downing Street memo.
Yeah, we're thinking about getting a UN plane shot down and using that, a rolling start, option B, rolling start.
Well, I love ...
I mean, this is where the military men deserve credit.
I mean, his response to her was, sure, as soon as we qualify you to fly it.
Right.
Yeah, so I've always had a special place in my heart for how awful and terrible she is.
I mean, Pompeo has to be up there.
I mean, because number one, I don't think he believes the peaceful stuff that the president wants to do.
I think he gets in the way.
But you look at it, I mean, he wants war with Iran.
I mean, he realizes the president doesn't want to go to war, but he's done as much as he can to try to start one.
I mean, you look at policy towards Venezuela and Syria, we're going to starve people because we think this will cause dictators to give up power.
I mean, the most nonsensical, idiotic, callous treatment.
People are just objects.
You know, who cares?
You know, I mean, we have to break eggs to make omelets.
You know, who cares if thousands of people die?
You know, no big deal.
Right.
Yeah, and it's the hypocrisy, the sanctimony that really gets me.
Oh, my.
He worries about human rights in Iran, but he goes and sucks up to Mohammed bin Salman.
I mean, what a vile regime.
I mean, the Saudis, you know, on everything.
I mean, the terrible war in Yemen, you know, they kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister.
They go and turn, you know, their consulate into a charnel house and chop up Jamal Khashoggi.
I mean, I knew Khashoggi not well, but we had lunch and were at conference together.
I mean, this is a real guy.
He was trying to be very careful, critical of the Saudi leadership, but careful what he said.
And look what happens to him.
I mean, outrageous.
And we don't care.
You know, the president, you know, in the Woodward memoir talks about how he saved Mohammed bin Salman's ass.
Why would you want to save this guy?
You know, Pompeo is part of that.
Pompeo is always over there.
So Pompeo is just one of the worst, I think, you know, in terms of his policies.
Yeah, you know, when the North Korean fisherman's corpse washed up with his boat on the, I guess the northern sea of Japan there, and Mike Pompeo boasted that that proved how well the sanctions were working.
You know, who needs all this QAnon stuff about child molesters and all this stuff when you have that kind of blatant evil right in front of your face?
Open emitted pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Yeah, they make it very clear that, you know, their job is to make life unpleasant for people.
They don't care that the human cost does not concern them.
It really is extraordinary.
You know, I never could find this, man.
Let me know if you ever found this and maybe I'm wrong about it, but I'm almost certain.
I'm virtually like 99 percent certain that there is some audio or, you know, some transcript at least of Richard Nixon explaining that, listen, you know, when you're a president and you're a government and you're dealing on the level with other governments, then civilian casualties, that's kind of somebody else's problem.
This is a different level of morality where that problem is their problem, not mine.
And whenever I bring this up, people always say, oh, you're talking about the one where he's saying, come on, Henry, let's bomb the dams and the dikes and let's use a bombs.
And Henry's saying, well, I think that maybe we shouldn't.
But it's not that one.
It's not that one.
It's more academic than he's just saying that, listen, as a statesman, I can kill civilians in other people's countries.
And that's just not a thing.
I have a different set of criteria that I go by.
Something like that.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing very poorly here, but it's really something just like that.
And I can never find it.
But that, to me, was like the epitome.
I've never seen that.
It wouldn't surprise me, but I've never seen that.
All right.
Well, if anybody in the audience knows the quote I'm talking about, I would absolutely love to have that.
And I don't even think it's the same conversation where they're talking about bombing the dikes.
I think it's different.
But anyway, I don't know where I got that from.
Maybe that's in the Nixon movie by Oliver Stone and I got my neurons crossed or something.
It's a great movie.
I'll have to watch it again now.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, listen, man, I'm sorry for keeping you so long, but I just like talking to you so much.
I really appreciate it.
No problem.
All right.
Have a good weekend now.
Yeah, man.
You too.
That is the great Doug Bondo.
He is our regular contributor at Antiwar.com and of course, senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
Thanks again, Doug.
Absolutely.
Take care now.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
