02/27/17 – Conn Hallinan on the Trump administration’s belligerent and unpredictable foreign policy – The Scott Horton Show

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All right y'all, Scott Horton Show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Check out the archives at ScottHorton.org, 4,000 and something interviews going back to 2003, 40 there, almost all anti-war stuff, ScottHorton.org.
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All right, introducing our friend Con Hallinan.
He writes at Foreign Policy in Focus, and we have a couple important articles to discuss here.
Is Trump moderating on foreign policy?
Not in the least.
And I'm not sure which is worse.
I guess this one's worse.
How Trump could blunder into war with China.
Welcome back to the show, Con.
How are you?
Glad to be back, Scott.
How are you?
Well, I'm doing good.
And yeah, you know, the word blunder really makes your headline credible there.
I think anybody could picture it, a miscalculation, a misjudgment, a misunderstanding, a lack of context or information or wisdom about what should be done in terms of America's relationship with China.
You go down the list, crisis breaks out.
You got General McMaster and General Dunford and General Mattis and General Kelly, all to assemble on the war cabinet to advise Trump, here's what we should do.
The only civilian at all is Rex Tillerson, and apparently he's a China hawk, too, Con.
Yes, yes, indeed.
It is.
It's a little, it's disquieting, as I'd like to say.
Mainly because I think that people don't, and the press doesn't really give the background for this.
And this is not something that just started up.
The current tensions in the South China Sea, many of which China has earned on its own just by being, kind of throwing its weight around in the South China Sea.
But what happened is that in 1996, the end of 1996, early 1997, there was a crisis, a tension between Taiwan and mainland China.
And Taiwan at that time had a president who talked about independence for Taiwan, didn't consider itself part of China.
And of course, the U.S. has had since the Nixon administration, we've had what they call a one-China policy, which is that we recognize that Taiwan is a part of China.
At the same time, we oppose any effort by China to physically, you know, to war or pressure or anything like that, seize Taiwan.
So it's this kind of tension, Cold War sort of thing.
Anyhow, what happened was that the president of Taiwan was given a visa by the United States to come to Princeton and give a speech, which is his alma mater.
And the Chinese got their backs up about it, and they moved some military forces up to the Taiwan Straits, and they fired some rockets near Taiwan, that kind of thing.
Now, everybody knew at the time, the Taiwanese, the Americans, the Chinese knew that China could not, didn't have the capabilities, still doesn't have the capabilities of actually invading Taiwan.
They just, they don't have those kinds of forces at their disposal.
If everybody had just kind of taken a big deep breath and let it calm down, it would have gone away.
But the Clinton administration escalated it by taking two aircraft carrier battle groups and moving them into the area and taking one of the battle groups and sailing it through the Taiwan Strait.
Well, it not only angered the Chinese, it scared them, because they realized there wasn't anything they could do about that.
They were not really in control of their own coasts.
I mean, imagine, if you will, the Chinese Navy maneuvering off San Diego or Chesapeake Bay, something like that.
You know, Americans were very, very upset about this.
And the Chinese are sensitive to it, about it too, because that particular section of coastline, the South China Sea and the Yellow Sea, had been the two major invasion routes for invasions of China in the 19th century, twice by Britain, also by Germany, and of course, by the Japanese before World War II broke out.
So the Chinese are very sensitive about this.
And what it did was it convinced them that they were threatened.
Now, the U.S. was a military threat, and they changed their whole military posture from having big, huge land armies to having much more high-tech things and having a big navy to control access to their coasts.
It's what they called area denial.
Keep the United States or any other particular military force, Japanese, etc., from being able to control the Chinese coasts.
So you've got this area denial on one hand, and then you've got the Americans responding to that with a strategy that calls for denying the Chinese the right to have area denial.
And what that means is that suddenly, you've sort of cocked the hammer in the South China Sea, and everybody is sort of on hair-trigger alert.
And these are two nuclear powers.
These are two countries that are capable of doing a stunning amount of damage, possibly ending civilization as we know it.
And nobody seems to be talking about it.
Nobody seems to be kind of pulling back and saying, OK, what can we work out here?
Instead, the Secretary of State Tillerson said, well, we're going to deny the Chinese the right to supply these bases that they put up in the South China Sea.
Now, he's walked himself back from that statement, but only by saying that they weren't going to use military force to deny that.
But it's still out there on the table.
So it's a little scary.
I think this new U.S. strategy is one that calls for deep missile strikes into China.
And the problem is China doesn't have that large a nuclear force.
They probably have about 100, maybe a little bit more, nuclear weapons.
And one of the rules in nuclear war is that if you see missiles headed your way, you need to get your missiles out of the silos because you either use them or you lose them.
And so if we're using conventional missiles to attack deep into China, the Chinese may conclude those things are headed for their missiles and launch them.
And that almost happened on two occasions in the 1980s between Russia and the United States.
It's only because sort of sane commanders said it's unlikely that the Russians or the Americans are launching massive missile strikes right now because there's no political context for it.
So they didn't respond.
But that's down to one person making a decision.
Should civilization continue as we currently know it?
Because if they had launched those nuclear weapons, civilization would have ended and not simply in Russia and the United States, but worldwide.
Yeah, but Con, I don't know.
I mean, sure, nuclear war with Russia.
Now that threatens the species.
But the Chinese, we can take them.
As you said, they've only got, what, a few dozen, a few score hydrogen bombs.
And we have this whole new air sea battle plan.
We've got the most powerful Navy and Air Force in world history.
And what are we going to let?
What are we going to let happen?
China rise and dominate the planet with their billion people and their hegemonic designs.
We've got to stand up to them now.
Yeah, maybe we'll lose a few cities on the West Coast, but...
That's a lot of thinking that goes on.
And it's also why it's a little dangerous, Scott, because if the Chinese don't have many nuclear weapons, and those nuclear weapons may be vulnerable, and they don't have a lot of submarine nuclear weapons, which are generally the nuclear weapons that you really use as your deterrence, because it's hard to find submarines.
Well, the U.S. has been figuring out ways to find those submarines.
You remember this incident that happened when the Chinese seized that underwater drone, U.S. Navy underwater drone.
I think it was a remarkably provocative thing to do.
But the reason why they did it is because that drone was mapping out seabottoms so that they could locate at all times missile firing Chinese submarines and Chinese submarines in general.
So, you know, it's a sort of Cold War chess game that we all saw in the 60s and 70s and early 80s between the Russians and the United States.
And I think also people don't, you know, we think of nuclear war.
It's been a long time since we had a nuclear war, right?
I mean, it's been 70 years, over 70 years.
And the two weapons that were used in that nuclear war were the equivalent of, you know, hand grenades with attitude, you know, 20 kilotons, 15 kilotons.
I mean, that would be considered nowadays a battlefields tactical nuclear weapon.
You know, the average warhead in the United States arsenal runs from 125 kilotons to 475 kilotons.
And we have warheads with up to 1.2 megatons.
You know, if you dropped a 1.2 megaton weapon in San Francisco, since I live in the Bay Area, really hope this doesn't happen.
You wouldn't destroy San Francisco, you would destroy, you know, basically the entire Bay Area from San Jose South, you know, to Petaluma and the wine country north to, you know, to even parts of the Sacramento Valley East.
I'm a Texan, so let's call it Dallas or Houston.
Some of the biggest cities in the world.
You drop one megaton nuke on Houston, it's gone.
Yeah, it's gone.
And not just Houston, a substantial area around Houston, not to mention, and these are the things that people don't point out about nuclear weapons and which, you know, if someone asked me what's the major danger of nuclear war right now, I would say the major danger of nuclear war right now is being in India and Pakistan.
And that's where you have the real actual active shooting going on between both countries.
And both of them are armed with nuclear weapons.
If there was an exchange of nuclear weapons between India and Pakistan, say 100 were used that were Hiroshima size, 15, 20 kiloton things, it would destroy up to four fifths of 45 percent of the ozone layer in the northern hemisphere.
And it would create a nuclear winter that would make growing wheat, for instance, basically impossible in most areas of Canada and Russia.
That would be a war-like famine, not to mention, of course, nuclear radiation.
So when people talk about nuclear war, they kind of think of these things as weapons.
And I don't think of nuclear weapons as weapons.
They're another category, you know, they're like talking about the difference between Newtonian physics and relativity or string theory or something.
They're kind of out of the grasp of most people as to how destructive they are.
And that's why when we talk about a nuclear war, we're not just talking about destroying Houston and Beijing and, you know, New Delhi or Islamabad.
We're talking about essentially destroying a significant section of the ecology of the northern hemisphere.
And that's something that people need to think about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I think it's important.
People have never seen the Nuclear Cafe or any of those things.
Just watch any one documentary about nuclear weapons on YouTube.
Just look at some H-bombs.
Nuclear Cafe, that's a good one, too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or I mean, there's probably 10 or 20 good ones.
And just look at, you know, Daniel Ellsberg likes to say that the Nagasaki bomb, which was an implosion plutonium fission bomb, that's what they use now as a blasting cap.
Yeah.
In order to set off.
Yeah.
The hydrogen fusion bombs that are the modern day city killers.
And I think, you know, these are simply tools, as you say, they're tools of genocide.
And this is possibly even species side suicide of all of humanity.
Except for the Australian outback somewhere, you know, some aborigines living in a cave somewhere might survive.
But the rest of us would be dead in one of these full scale events.
I mean, that's where the living envy the dead.
You know, when I was teaching at UC Santa Cruz, I taught a basic writing course at one point.
And each of the writing courses have to have a theme.
And so I chose nuclear weapons or nuclear war as the theme.
The thing that I found so interesting was how few things there were written on it.
We used Hiroshima by John Hersey, you know, which was written in 1945.
And we used canonical for Leibowitz, which was about 19, I guess it was about 1965 or something like that.
And we used on the beach, which was 1956, 1957.
Those were the only kind of books that were available on nuclear war and the possibility of nuclear war.
And I think that's largely the case thing.
People show a tremendous ignorance about what these weapons are.
And it's why it is so critically important at this time to really do something about this.
I mean, most of the countries in the world have signed a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and it's actually been fairly effective.
It didn't stop India or Pakistan or North Korea or Israel from getting nuclear weapons.
But those are only four countries since that treaty was signed.
And the treaty was signed in the early went into effect in the early 70s.
However, one of the things about that treaty was the idea was not just to build a kind of nuclear apartheid where the big countries, China, Russia, France, Britain, the United States, had nuclear weapons, had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and they were supposed to get rid of those nuclear weapons.
And Article 6 very explicitly says that there should be immediate talks about eliminating nuclear weapons and then general disarmament.
Because part of the argument was that countries like the United States don't need nuclear weapons to beat up on other countries.
I mean, we have such enormous conventional power that we can smash up a country like Iraq or Afghanistan, etc.
And there's nothing they can't really do much about it.
So what's happened instead is rather than having discussions about eliminating nuclear weapons, each one of those countries, and I am including in this Israel and North Korea and Pakistan and India, are accelerating their building of nuclear weapons and are modernizing them.
And we're in the process of a one trillion dollar modernization program for our nuclear weapons as well.
So what you've had is, after a while, countries start to say, aha, we signed this agreement and agreed not to build nuclear weapons, but it didn't apply to you guys?
You didn't get rid of your nuclear weapons?
You're not talking about general disarmament?
You know, maybe I'll go back to thinking about building nuclear weapons.
Well, and then they look at Iraq and Libya and they say, oh, and the more I abide by the strictures, the more you're going to attack me because I'm defenseless, too.
That's the real lesson of North Korea.
Yeah, exactly.
One of the things that North Korea did right after Libya and also Iraq, for that matter, too, was that the North Koreans pointed out that Iraq and Libya gave up their nuclear weapons program.
And Iraq, the country was invaded and the leader was executed.
And in Libya, the country was bombed and invaded and the leader was murdered.
So, you know, the North Koreans' attitude is, you guys just want us not to have nuclear weapons so that you can invade us and overthrow us.
No, I'm not suggesting we're going to invade North Korea and overthrow it.
But every year, Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and this is the first year that Japan has been involved in it, have a series of war games in the U.S. and in Korea that are modeled to an invasion and overthrowing of the North Korean regime and establishment of a unified Korean peninsula under South Korea.
So, you know, I think that the North Koreans are pretty weird.
And I think they're pretty paranoid, but paranoids do have enemies.
Well, we all know, we should, everyone should know that that was all George W.
Bush's fault in the first place.
Bill Clinton had a perfectly good deal with North Korea and George Bush broke it.
Yeah, yeah.
And absolutely didn't have to.
I mean, when he took office, they had no nukes at all.
They were still within the Nonproliferation Treaty and their safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
And everybody wants to just forget that part of it.
You're absolutely right about that.
There was a proposal on the table in the Clinton administration, it was a reasonable proposal that the North Koreans are very interested in it.
A key part of it and a key part of any kind of discussions with North Korea is that you've got to have a non-aggression pact.
And it's not just a non-aggression pact with the United States, it's also with Japan and South Korea.
And in the agreed framework, I mean, they were already abiding by it for years, even though America never lived up to our end of the deal, which was to pay them welfare, fuel, oil, and to build them a light water reactor as Donald Rumsfeld's company was supposed to build them a light water reactor.
The Americans never lived up to our side of the deal.
They stayed within their side of the deal anyway, until Bush basically, you know, beat them over the head until they finally quit.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, they did this thing of where part of the deal was they said, well, OK, you have to give us all of your, you know, your paperwork on the nuclear weapons program.
So they gave them 18,000 pages of paperwork.
It's a lot of pages when you think about it.
And that's the way the Americans weren't satisfied.
So, you know, it was this feeling that nothing was going to please the Americans.
And even though, you know, the North Korean regime is, wow, you know, this latest thing with VX, the assassination of the leader's half brother, and the fact that the North Koreans do things a little differently than other people.
But at this at that point, I have to say that the North Koreans were doing their best to try to get an agreement that would guarantee that nobody was going to try and overthrow them.
And they didn't get it.
And so now we've got, I don't know, they got somewhere between 12 and 15 nuclear weapons.
They're working on an intercontinental ballistic missile.
They don't have it yet.
I don't think they're going to start a nuclear war with anybody because starting it with the United States would be national suicide.
But at the same time, as you said, when you introduced this program, somebody makes a mistake.
You know, somebody does the wrong thing.
And the next thing you know, we're in deep, deep trouble.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, what's funny, too, is that the permanent counterfactual is Hillary Clinton, virtually just as bad on everything, right?
Putting Iran on notice, attacking Yemen, a pivot to Asia.
I mean, this is her baby.
This entire policy of containing...
And Libya was very, absolutely her policy.
Yeah, yeah.
Libya, absolutely.
Well, one of the things that I'm working on a piece right now that looks at the, quote, reasonable people in foreign policy.
And what you find is, is that in many ways, there's as many illusions and delusions on the part of people like Robert Kagan or Max Boot, Hillary Clinton, what you think of as sort of the adults in foreign policy.
In many ways, you know, they have the same kind of policy and sometimes, in fact, worse.
I mean, I think that the problem of what we call American exceptionalism, in other words, the United States is a country that stands above all other countries and that we have the right to kind of remodel, reshape the world in our image because we're a shining city on a hill.
And that American exceptionalism, which has been around for a long time.
I mean, it was on the Native Americans and the original kind of internal colonialism in the United States.
And then the Spanish, you know, American war really came out as, you know, this is our white, this is white man's burden.
I mean, most people don't realize that the line, a white man's burden by Richard Kipling was written about the American occupation of the Philippines.
And the Spanish-American war.
So that kind of concept that Americans know best what to do for other people and have the right to do it.
So we have the right to invade the Middle East, but nobody has the right to put, say, military forces in Latin America because the Monroe Doctrine said, no, we're in charge of that.
So the world sees, much of the world sees this American exceptionalism as just hypocrisy.
It's sort of the ideological cover for the United States to engage in policies which are in its own interest, economic, political, whatever.
All right.
I want to quibble with you about one little thing there, which is that I think that Boot and Kagan both are card-carrying neoconservatives and that you could argue that they are presumably somehow adults among Gaffneys or something like that.
But really, if you want to distinguish realists from neocons, they belong in the neocon camp, whereas it's really Mearsheimer and others represent that.
And they're also, I'm actually agreeing with your overall point, because I think that the realists are just as much into exceptionalism and so-called collective security, which means American empire, guaranteed by the American empire, as the neocons.
Really, the neocons make them seem reasonable, but they're not.
I'm just saying that Boot and Kagan are with the former group.
I don't entirely disagree with that.
I think we probably agree in this, Scott.
But here, Kagan just had a big piece about, I don't know, two weeks ago, in foreign policy.
And it was about, and he, by the way, denies he's a neocon.
He says he's a liberal interventionist.
I tend to think of him as a neocon.
But whatever, he calls himself a liberal interventionist.
And what's interesting is, is that he lays out this policy of what the United States should do, and why Trump is horrible, and why Trump is going to be a disaster, anything like that.
And of course, all the things he's talking about are incredibly dangerous.
You know, we have to confront Russia.
We have to confront China.
You know, we have to continue our presence in the Middle East.
And I'm thinking, no, no, wait a minute.
You know, how is this going to be better than what existed before?
And I agree with you on a lot of the other names that you mentioned there.
But what I find is, is that even among, you know, the people that we think of as not neocons, and we think of as liberals, there is this sense that Americans know best.
And we will, we will essentially get you to take, you know, to do what we think is the right thing or else.
And I think that that is a, that is a philosophy that is extremely dangerous and has got to change.
All right, so let's get back to China for a second.
They're building islands.
So come on, that's aggression, right?
They're going to, is it international waters, or at least certainly disputed waters?
And they're building what the Americans, I think it was Rex Tillerson, called really artificial stationary aircraft carriers out there.
As technology makes that possible, are we just supposed to lay down and let China control all these important sea corridors and all this stuff, Con?
Well, for one thing, what the Chinese are doing in the South China Sea is just nonsense.
I mean, they have this thing they call the Nine-Dash Line, and it's an old, you know, dynastic map of when China was, you know, when China was an empire, okay?
I mean, under that kind of thinking, the British still own India and Kenya and South Africa and Nigeria and Ireland.
So the Nine-Dash Line has already been ruled against by the International Court of the Hague, and it is certainly a violation of the United Nations Law of the Seas.
So the building of islands is not, that's really not acceptable.
And on top of which, of course, there are a large number of other countries in the region, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, etc., who have claims on the places that China is currently building these islands.
So in no way do I think the Chinese have any legal basis to build those islands.
On the other hand, the fact is, the reason why they're doing it is because of this new strategy of the United States to deny the ability of China to control their own coast.
And what the China calls its first line of defense, which runs from the north and the Kamchatka Peninsula down to the South China Sea and to Malaysia.
And that kind of big arc right there is the territory that they say they need to control access to their coast.
Now, I don't think they should take those islands.
But on the other hand, if we took a less aggressive approach, you wouldn't necessarily have to have those things.
In no way have the Chinese attempted to interdict or, you know, try to trouble international commerce.
And 60 percent, 80 percent, 80 percent of China's energy supplies transit the South China Sea.
And about 60 percent of the world's commerce uses the South China Sea.
There's been no effort by the Chinese to mess with this at all.
But I think that the South China Sea thing is very much a counter move to the fact that to the Asia pivot and to this crisis that happened in 96, 97, 97, 98.
I'm sorry, 97, 98.
And so I think, again, you need a context here.
I don't like what the Chinese are doing there.
And they do not have a basis in international law to do what they what they are doing.
The Chinese are going to have to back off this and they're going to have to sit down with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and work out a whole kind of way they deal with this kind of stuff in a diplomatic kind of way.
On the other hand, I do think that people need to see the context.
Again, we think of this, China's taking this huge area called the South China Sea.
Imagine, if you will, that the Chinese or the Russians or whatever were stationing their navies, missile firing submarines, et cetera, right off our coasts.
I mean, they have the right to do it, but it wouldn't be a great idea.
And it would certainly make us nervous.
I don't know.
Do you see that Trump comment about the Russian spy ship and that he would shoot it?
He could shoot it.
He could blow it out of the water, but he's not going to.
I was thinking, do you know what the cost of blowing that thing out of the water might be?
I mean, you don't make statements like that.
You don't tweak statements that could end civilization.
You got to have a little bit more discipline there.
Yeah, well, we don't.
We don't have more discipline there at all.
All right.
Now, Con, so tell me about this war cabinet.
You know, part of how I introduced the show was the generals in charge.
Rex Tillerson is the only one who's not a general.
He's not a neocon, but he is an oil man.
And that's only probably 1% better than actually being a Likudnik up there.
But what do you make of these guys?
You know, I guess people want to think the best of all situations.
Even I do.
I kind of think, well, geez, I guess if they're all such tough guys with chests full of medals, then they can say no to crazy things and be in positions.
The most common phrase you hear in the military is, yes, sir.
Yeah, well, isn't it?
I mean, keep that in mind.
In other words, you know, they can say no, but that's not the way they got to where they were.
Now, McMaster's is a little bit of an exception on that, because he's the guy who wrote a really seminal book on Vietnam, how the U.S. got involved in Vietnam and how the U.S. got basically overwhelmed.
Where's Admiral Fallon right now?
He's the guy that stopped the war with Iran back in 2007.
Yeah, he's retired, I think, at this point.
We got to find Admiral Fallon.
You know, it's a very odd situation that you have a cabinet which consists of, you know, billionaires and generals.
And, you know, it's not that there's anything wrong with being a billionaire.
Well, I guess it depends on how you became a billionaire or certainly being a general.
But you think you like to think of the cabinet as a body that should be, ought to be reflective of the wider population.
And, you know, for instance, there's no Latinos in the cabinet.
You know, is that a good idea?
You know, I mean, I come from a state which, you know, very soon half the names in this state are going to be of Latino origin and of where, you know, in Texas and New Mexico and Arizona and increasingly Florida, of course, but even increasingly much of the South and in the Midwest, etc.
You know, you say if you don't have someone who represents at least that sense of that community, you wonder what this cabinet is.
The problem I have, Scott, with Trump is people say, well, what's he going to do?
And I have to say, honestly, I really don't know.
Yeah, that's it.
If it was Hillary Clinton, I'd say, yeah, I know what she's going to do.
Yeah, it's all horrible, but it's predictable enough.
Absolutely.
And as you say, you know, you can go back and you can look at her, the positions that she has taken over the years, her role as the secretary of state.
You know that there would be an escalation in Syria.
You know that there would be a confrontation in China.
You know that there would be greater tensions with Russia.
I mean, these are things that she has a track record on.
And you say, well, the likely outcome of electing Hillary Clinton would be this is what would happen in the Middle East.
This is what happened in Eastern Europe.
This is what happened in Asia.
But Trump, I don't know.
And, you know, Tillerson, as you say, he's a guy who has been anti-Chinese, partly because he's very pro-Vietnamese and the Chinese are pushing the Vietnamese around.
But, you know, I don't know what he's going to do.
Maybe he'll say, well, he's very friendly with Russia.
But what does that mean?
So when people ask me, what does this Trump mean in terms of foreign policy?
I think anybody who gives you a blueprint for what it's going to mean is just blowing smoke, because I don't think anybody knows that.
I'm not sure Trump does.
Right.
And as far as we know, him and Rex Tillerson are now the best of friends and are totally of one mind, like Bush Sr. and Scowcroft.
Or actually, he has no power at all and he's never going to.
And the State Department might as well be exile at this point, because all this stuff is going to be decided on the NSC.
Nobody even knows that.
Nobody knows.
I do think there's one thing that's interesting, though.
I noticed this morning there was a piece in the New York Times about the someone leaked part of the budget, the budget proposals that he's going to make.
Well, two big areas of major cuts, besides domestic programs like food stamps and everything like that, are the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department.
So I think what you're going to see is a downgrading of the State Department.
And this is very much Bannon's approach.
He thinks the executive should be running foreign policy and that the State Department has got too many lifers in there, too many people who are not on board.
That's why I love this whole Trump phenomenon, right?
This is like the ultimate practical joke on America.
This is exactly what we deserve, right?
Because what you just said, of course, in a vacuum is perfectly right.
The entire State Department should be purged, obviously.
And it's wonderful that there are hardly any senators or governors on the cabinet.
We don't want them.
The permanent establishment of this country, they're the worst people in the world.
And for them to be overthrown is the greatest thing ever.
I mean, this guy with one hand stiff arm Bush, I mean, the Bushes and the Clintons out of power and became the president.
And yet he's a complete nitwit and a blowhard and an idiot and an illiterate.
And the only establishment he can count on at all are a bunch of generals who do nothing but think about war all the time and carry around old grudges from all their old battles that previous presidents have put them in.
And, you know, although kind of like you said, I think, you know, hey, in a vacuum, hire some businessmen who aren't necessarily, you know, implicated in all the horrible policies of the recent past in power in Washington, D.C., but are proven capable people to run these departments.
That could be OK, but it's a bunch of guys from Goldman Sachs and the worst freaking corporatist, you know, the most horrible people outside of the American government on the planet.
Drain the slump by turning it over to the crocodiles.
I have to say to everyone, you could have all supported Ron Paul in 2008 and 12 if what you wanted was, you know, a real revolution with peace and freedom at the core of it instead of this madness.
I mean, this is just the most funhouse mirror, ridiculous version of a of an attempted correction by the American electorate.
Same with Obama, right?
Obama was tall and black and Democrat and liberal and seemingly the opposite of Bush.
That was an attempt by the American people to do the check and balance thing, to to say sorry for what George Bush had done and screwed everything up.
And now this is supposedly the correction to Obama is Donald freaking Trump.
Can you believe I know?
I mean, I have when he got elected because I write a foreign policy, so I'm in contact with, you know, people in a lot of different countries and everything like that, who either read my columns or else we email back and forth about stuff that's going on.
And a lot of them are people that particularly in Europe, you know, that I kind of rely on to say, well, what's going on right now in Ireland?
And well, what is it?
What is the defeat of this constitutional amendment in Italy really mean in terms of, you know, the five star movement in terms of the Italian left, where politics is going, et cetera.
And I get all of these emails saying, what happened?
What is going on?
It's just a mistake.
How could Americans elect Donald Trump?
And there's just simply disbelief.
And as you say, I well, the answer, of course, is because he was running against Hillary Clinton.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, the worst candidate.
Of course, they got the worst candidate.
You the idea that the Democrats could not beat Donald Trump is an indication of the absolute bankruptcy of the Democratic Party and and the people who ran that campaign for Hillary Clinton, who, by the way, were the same people who ran that campaign in 2008 against Barack Obama.
And here's this guy who is was really a nobody.
I mean, what was he was he was he was a state senator, right?
And he smoked her.
And the same people they put back in in power.
I mean, classic, the classic definition of insanity, keep doing the same thing and hope for different results.
It just is.
It's not so, Scott.
Well, you know me, I'm a libertarian.
I'm completely, absolutely as capitalist as it gets and no Bernie partisan.
But I don't think there's any question that Bernie would have beat Donald Trump.
I think he would have had a better chance.
It's hard to say what would have happened in the general campaign because, you know, people would have.
That's what about the social on the face of it.
He's a decent guy, no matter no matter what you do.
I disagree with him.
And in fact, I think he's kind of cynical and horrible on Libya and the F-35 and Palestine and some other things.
But on the face of it, he's more or less a decent old grandpa.
I think being a quirky, bald old Jew, like really would have absolutely helped, you know, worked in his favor as being.
I think it might have.
I mean, I tend to agree.
Whereas, I mean, Hillary is just evil and corrupt and self-interested just on the face of it.
You can't get past it.
And Bernie clearly really cares about some things.
You know, he's just different that way.
He's a real human.
Yeah, I mean, in fact, when you when you look at at Hillary's campaign, Hillary's campaign is I'm not Donald Trump.
And that's not how people vote.
They don't vote for someone who you want, right?
You know, here Donald Trump was saying, I'm going to make America great again.
I'm going to have all these jobs.
He's going to do that.
But at least he said he was going to do it.
She didn't say anything.
She said America's great.
Well, America's not great.
And if you go talk to the average person in this society, they're really worried about what's going to happen to their kids.
They're concerned about whether their kids are going to be poorer than they were.
They're concerned about what's happening in this new economy.
They're they're they're freaked out about about, you know, health care.
They're they're you know, they're they're really, really deeply concerned about their lives.
And she never addressed that.
That idiot didn't go to Wisconsin and she went to Arizona and Texas.
I mean, who who would absolutely make that recommendation for her to do something that stupid?
Yeah.
You know what?
Unless Trump gets us all killed in a hydrogen bomb war, I'm going to have to think that, you know what?
Really?
She was the one who was more likely to get us all killed in a hydrogen bomb war.
It's the same reason that I preferred Obama to McCain in a way.
It's not a partisan thing.
He was the Democrat and McCain was the Republican.
I thought he was much more likely to get us into a conflict with Russia.
In this case, the parties are switched.
And typically, you know, usually it's Obama versus Romney or Bush versus Kerry or somewhere.
It doesn't even matter.
Right.
Where there's no difference.
Dimes worth of difference.
But sometimes you have a presidential candidate who's really, really bad on Russia.
And at that point, that's really I think I mean, not that I voted either way, but I kind of think that's the only thing that matters at the end of the day, you know.
And Trump, I love how they try to make this his big scandal is that he wants to get along with Russia.
And I'd like to see the opinion polls, but I don't think it's ever going to work.
You know, the idea that he's a really an agent of a foreign.
I think that the same people that you're just talking about who ran Hillary Clinton are the same people who think that that's a great talking point.
They're idiots.
And of course, the reason why that's such a popular thing is because they don't have to look at themselves and see that they didn't lose that because the Russians stole the election.
They lost it because they ran a stupid campaign with bad politics and a horrible candidate.
So it's much easier to say that Putin won the election.
I mean, it just is.
It's such absolute nonsense.
I also, by the way, agree with you that I think had Hillary Clinton been elected and I, you know, I voted for I'll tell you, I held my nose and voted for her.
I was a Bernie person before, but I because it mainly because of domestic agenda.
But I was much more worried about Hillary Clinton in terms of being of getting us into a war than I was Donald Trump.
And I would still say that the the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party is a particularly dangerous wing when it comes to foreign policy.
And and I, I, I think she would have had a much more aggressive foreign policy.
But as I say, I want to add a caveat here, which is, Scott, I really don't know what this guy's going to do.
Yeah, that's what I was saying.
Unless he gets us into an H-bomb war with Russia, I'm going to go ahead and say she's the one more likely to get us into an H-bomb war.
For the 20 minutes you have between when the rocket takes off and before Houston.
My God, Jesus, I guess I was wrong after all.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, listen, it's been great to talk to you again, Con.
I appreciate it.
Anytime, Scott.
This is a lot of fun.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Con Hallinan.
You can find him at Foreign Policy in Focus.
Read these articles.
Is Trump moderating on foreign policy and how Trump could blunder into war with China?fpif.org.
And we rerun all of it, too, at antiwar.com.
You can find Con there as well.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys.scotthorton.org for the archives 4,300 and something interviews there for you.scotthorton.org.
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