Hey you guys, Scott here.
It's fundraising time again at the Libertarian Institute.
And I say again very loosely because we haven't even held a fund drive since the summer of 2019.
And the reason for that is because you guys were so generous in the great book and institute fundraiser of summer 19 that I felt terrible coming back to you again until the book was finished.
But now the book is finished and the institute is out of money and I got to be able to pay my guys and pay my vendors and keep this thing going.
So I need help from you.
It's myself, the legendary Sheldon Richman, the firebrand Pete Quinonez, the brilliant Kyle Anzalone, who also works for antiwar.com.
And of course we got Keith Knight, Tommy Salmons, Patrick McFarlane, and all your great podcast hosts there, plus all the best writers in the libertarian movement.
And very proud about the six books that we've published so far.
Three of mine, two of Sheldon's and one posthumous book of the great William Norman Grigg.
And we've got more great book projects coming up this year.
We're going to publish one by the great Brad Hoff about Syria and Richard Booth, the best journalist in America on the Oklahoma City bombing, is writing a book all about it for the Libertarian Institute as well.
And not only that, but now that enough already is done, we're going to try to make part of this fun drive an effort to raise money to buy extra copies of wholesale books so that we can send these to, I don't know, the few best congressmen and their staff, the best people in media, all the middle-ranked newspapers, and you know, a stash I'd like to send five or ten books to all the best peace groups so they have them for all their people and whatever.
Of course the advantage of publishing these books at the Libertarian Institute is we get to do them however we want, but the disadvantage is we don't have a big marketing team and a big budget.
And that's where you guys come in.
We need your help to promote this book in a very grassroots way from the ground up and we need your support so that we can buy wholesale copies to send out to the people who need to get their eyes on it.
So check out Libertarian Institute dot org slash donate.
We got all kinds of great kickbacks for you there for your donors.
We got lifetime subscriptions to listen and think audio.
We've got copper, Ron Paul coins, and all kinds of great stuff there.
So check it all out at Libertarian Institute dot org slash donate and thank you all very much.
All right, you guys, you know me.
What I like to do is interview Peter Van Buren.
He wrote, We meant well, how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and Hooper's War, a novel of World War Two, Japan.
And of course, his website is we meant well dot com and he writes regularly at the American Conservative Magazine.
This one is called Give Deal Making Another Try.
And the other one, I don't know what it's called yet because I just got the preview version, but it's all about bombing Syria and what all of that means.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Peter?
Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
And I just want to mention before we get started that I'm wearing a mask.
So, okay, good.
If any of your listeners or you are concerned about me transmitting any viruses, I'm fully masked up out of an abundance of caution.
As you know, very little study has been done on whether the virus can be transmitted electronically and we have to assume that it can.
And until we know for sure, abundance of caution really says that we have to assume that it can.
So I just want you to know I'm fully masked up and I'm also not sober.
But that's a different problem.
That's great.
You know what?
If you started drinking any later in the day, I'd be disappointed.
Yeah.
You know, the old rule of thumb is really if you can't handle drinking all day, don't start so early.
You know what?
I think I should try, man.
I was thinking this actually while I was reading your article.
I was thinking, you know, if, oh, the second one too, the bombing Syria one, because I wrote an article about bombing Syria too.
And I was thinking, you know, if you want a guy who can remember names and dates of things and can regurgitate the same chronology of things that happened over and over again, I'm your guy.
But if you want to read something by someone who's actually intelligent and has thoughtful things to put down in writing about things that he thinks, Peter Van Buren is your man.
I just don't have anything like your level of intellect or anything.
But I was thinking that maybe if I got trashed, that that might put me in a little bit of a different frame of mind and I could kind of maybe find that creative spark and get a little bit more creative with my writing instead of just explaining the redirection again.
Yeah.
No, my work has driven many people to alcohol and drugs.
So I mean, you would be joining a long parade.
That's right.
I'm feeling that peer pressure.
And you know what?
All of my guys, not all, many of my Twitter friends, I'm back on Twitter because I got a hawk, the new book, you know, and they're all posting up their different brands of whiskey that they like to drink while they read my book.
And I'm thinking maybe I'll skip the beers and go straight to the good stuff.
You know, it's really important to know your audience, um, as a writer.
And if yours is drunkards, then, you know, there you go, that, that, you know, you're automatically knowing simpler words, no complicated pronunciations, um, you know, make it work.
I was hoping that was when the talent would kick in if I got nice and drunk, but maybe not.
I guess if, as long as I have a good editor, right?
No, I think the key is, is for your audience to be drunk.
Yeah.
There you go.
That's what comedians always tell me.
They always want to go on later at night because the crowd has had a chance to put down a few before the jokes.
There you go.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Uh, listen, I would like for you to say lots of things about, uh, the Iran nuclear deal that we no longer have, but Mike could have again, but maybe not.
What do you think about that?
Well, I, I don't know if this is a term that I should introduce or people already know it.
OBE.
Is that something familiar to people?
I don't know.
Overcome by events.
Ah, that was a real, that's a, that's not what I want to be the beginning of this discussion, but I'm willing to listen.
It's a, it's a real state department term and we would use it in, in the sense that you, you've just spent six weeks writing up, uh, talking points on why the president should not go along with a particular trade deal.
And when you're finally, finally getting ready to your, for your boss to sign off, you see in the newspaper that the president just signed it because he needed to have good news at a factory appearance in Wisconsin.
And it comes back from your boss with the letters OBE written on it.
Overcome by events.
It doesn't matter anymore because since you wrote that things have, things have changed.
And I feel that I feel that way about what I wrote.
The article that appeared a week and a half or so ago on the American conservative said, let's give deal making another chance.
And it basically said that of all the stuff, uh, Joe Biden is reviving from the Obama administration.
The one thing that really needs to be revived is the Iran nuclear accord.
This was a deal, uh, that was made at the end of the Obama administration that people may recall that basically had the Iranians agree to back away from the atomic threshold.
Everybody in the world, every country in the world exists in what's known as a, a breakouts time.
It's basically the time between where they are now technologically and when they will have a working nuclear weapon.
For most, for most developed countries, that's, it's a matter of choice.
We're not talking about Burkina Faso here.
We're saying that if Japan or South Korea or Canada or Germany wanted a nuclear weapon, they have the technology to advance very quickly, perhaps a handful of months to a working weapon.
That's their breakout time.
And what the nuclear accord did was get the Iranians to agree to lengthen theirs from months to a year or so, which meant that we buy a big buffer of peace as tensions ramp up.
It's going to take them a lot longer to become a nuclear power.
And that's generally a good thing, particularly in an area as all as the Middle East.
And in return for extending that breakout time, the Iranians, the Western Europe, the Russians and us, we're going to back off some sanctions.
And there was a whole complicated schedule.
You do this, we do that, you do this, we do that.
And of course, somebody would find some way to cheat if they wanted to, but the concept was there.
Let's back off the accelerator just a little bit here and see if that isn't a good idea.
And it was a good idea.
And I, without reservation, was pleased that the Obama administration and even people I don't like, like John Kerry, got credit for that because they did.
And they did the right thing.
Donald Trump, of course, pulled out of that agreement.
And the Iranians now have an expectation that Biden is going to want to go back in on it.
Unfortunately, OBE, overcome by events.
I wrote that Biden has bombed Syria and, of course, he didn't actually bomb Syria.
He bombed people in Syria who were associated with Iranian militias because Iraqis, Iraqis associated with Iranian Iraqis.
Did we figure did they pick up enough pieces to figure out where they were from?
Well, that was that was I think I'm fairly certain that was the claim.
Yeah, that it was Hezbollah.
And I forgot the name of the other one.
OK.
Well, Biden killed 22 people in Syria associated with Iran because some other group of people in Iraq associated with Iran killed an American contractor who was not a soldier, but acting like one.
Right.
So anyway, so Biden did this and this angered everybody.
And now the Iranians are saying, you know, this isn't really a way to start into a revised version of the nuclear accord.
And, I mean, look, I ain't no apologist for Biden, but the reason he bombed him in Syria was to try to say, like, look, I have to do something, but I still want to sign this nuclear deal with you.
Right.
Isn't that what that meant?
That's what Biden feels it meant.
I guess it's that have to do something part.
Yeah.
If it was somebody in Erbil who killed your American contractor, find that guy and shoot him.
I mean, that seems to be the more direct route to all this.
But of course, that's the real rub.
They don't know who did it.
And I think that ISIS, what's left of them, al-Qaeda in Iraq, they would be nuts to not be doing this all the time, knowing that there's such a vested interest in blaming it on their enemies, the Shiites, to try to drive a wedge between America and the Iraqi government that America and Iran both support against them.
We've created that system where basically anybody who wants to throw a match into the puddle of gasoline has so many opportunities to do it.
Our reactions to these things are so predictable that, as you pointed out, anybody who wants to stir up the pot is more than capable of doing it.
The idea that one guy with one rifle can force the United States to bomb Syria and muck up any future with the Iranians, see, I would see that as a problem if I was still involved in foreign policy work.
But hey, overcome by events.
So I don't see, at this point, either side, the US or the Iranians, having a lot of interest in going forward.
And so that's why I said that article, while it sounded good when I wrote it, is now largely overcome by events.
I'll hang on to it.
I'll probably try to rerun it in a year or something.
God, I hope you're wrong, man.
I think that you're not.
I hope so, too.
I mean, these are not predictions I relish.
And the problem is these Democrats are just horrible.
You know, I don't know what you think of this.
Just on the surface, it seems to me like Sullivan is probably the most dangerous one of them, right?
He was Hillary Clinton's right hand man.
AQ is on our side in Syria.
You know, he seems worse than Blinken on at least a couple of things.
I forget the whole list.
But he seems like, but he helped to get this thing going.
He did the secret meetings in Oman to break the ice, even under Hillary, before Kerry came in.
I'm amazed she let him do it, to go and even get these talks started toward this deal.
And then Blinken, and what's her name?
The white haired lady that is getting confirmed there?
Wendy Sherman.
Wendy Sherman.
Which, did you see Rand Paul questioning her?
Rand at his best there.
Yeah, yeah.
I love that.
All of these people, this is their baby.
And even, you know, the director of environmental policy, John Kerry, whatever.
They did this deal.
They don't have the stones to just get back in their own damn deal, to do what it takes to do that.
Which, and by the way, correct me if I'm wrong here, but Javad Zarif had said like, hey guys, we already have a process here.
What we do is we hire the Germans and the French to sit at the top of a little committee commission thing.
And then we go along with their plan for reintegrating into the deal.
That way we're not conceding to each other.
We're conceding only to our mutual friends, the French and the Germans.
We already have it set up to do that.
They had lots of clever stuff like that that was built into it.
Not the least of which were all these regular plans to have regularly scheduled sort of update meetings, which would have provided the forum that everybody needs to talk about other things.
I mean, the idea is to say, hey, well, as long as we're all sitting in this hotel room in Geneva, we might as well bring up this other problem that's not related, but between our two countries.
Because what you wanted was the ongoing engagement.
You wanted a forum other than Israeli targeting to address the nuclear proliferation in the Gulf.
You had all that.
You had the Europeans involved, and yet Trump tossed that all away for no apparent gain on our side.
I don't know what we got for backing out of it.
And Biden, who had a chance to really do something anti-Trump, and if there's any Biden staffers listening in, boy, this would be your chance to say, look, we did something Trump wouldn't do, guys.
This is it.
But instead, what Biden did was resort to the old playbook, which is when in doubt, bomb somewhere.
How much of this do you think is about looking weak and being accused of looking weak and selling out to the Iranians by the Israelis and their partisans?
Almost all of it.
The draft of the article that I sent you, which will come out on the American Conservative hopefully March 8th or 9th, basically said all of American war making is driven by Neville Chamberlain and Munich in 1938.
That essentially, for those who are still in ninth grade, Neville Chamberlain, the old time British prime minister, went to Munich in 1938, and he got bamboozled by Hitler.
And Hitler said, we're not going to do anything bad, and he believed it.
And since then, he's been basically the poster child for weakness in foreign affairs.
And an enormous amount of American foreign policy is driven by the desire of presidents not to want to look like Neville Chamberlain.
The thing about the Iranian accord was kind of multi-headed.
First, as you pointed out, it was a multilateral thing.
So if things didn't go well, we could blame the French, and it wasn't our fault.
The other was that Obama was a lame duck, and he had already secured his reputation as the greatest president of all time.
And so he had a little more flexibility to do something kind of towards the end of his administration, where if it went wrong, the next guy could sort of blame Obama.
So there was cover to pull this thing off, and they did.
And I'm very pleased and proud, and that's what diplomacy is all about.
It's about concessions and deals and a little here, a little there.
This is all the stuff that people said was lacking under Donald Trump.
And the first thing that Biden does is poops the foreign policy bed 40 days into his administration by bombing someplace that hadn't needed to be bombed, apparently, in the last couple of years.
But suddenly, America had to kill some people overseas once again.
That's shameful, and it has allowed the debate to reopen about looking tough with the Iranians and everything else like that.
And so now both sides are basically finding ways to say, we're never going to make this work.
The United States is saying things like, we want to renegotiate it, and the goal has to be denuclearization.
And the Iranians are saying, we don't plan to negotiate this thing again.
We did that once.
We want to go back to the terms that were already agreed on.
And that's basically a recipe for not getting anything done.
All right.
Well, I mean, the good news is we didn't even need this deal in the first place, assuming the premise that you've got to keep Iran from getting nukes because they were already members of the nonproliferation treaty.
So if they leave this deal and if the deal is just dead and they say, fine, as long as the Americans aren't in it, sorry to the rest of the UN Security Council powers, we're out to, then really all that means is that now they're not going to abide by the additional protocol to their safeguards agreement.
But otherwise it's essentially status quo.
I mean, there's a couple additional protocols that expanded inspections, but they already poured concrete into their Iraq reactor.
That's not reversible.
I guess they could limit the, I guess they could go ahead and leave the NPT, but you don't anticipate that, do you?
No, I don't think so.
Because the Iranians, well, first of all, they're a lot smarter about keeping up appearances on these things.
But more importantly, they understand that they are never going to be allowed to have a working nuclear weapon.
Their nuclear program has to be the most monitored and penetrated and surveilled one on earth.
And the Israelis have demonstrated time and time again, with and without America's help, that they are going to be the only nuclear power in the Middle East.
And if it requires the US to invade Libya and get rid of Gaddafi, or if it involves the Israelis blowing up your reactor, as they did with the Iraqis and as they did with Syria, one way or the other, you're not going to have a nuclear weapon.
When the Iranians got close a couple of years ago, the Israelis threw a brushback pitch, the cyber attack that destroyed the Iranian centrifuges.
And it was like a, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're standing too close to the fire.
And the Iranians know that.
They know that they can't deter, they can't stop the Israelis from bombing them, precision bombing them, nevermind all the sneaky stuff that is going on.
So the Iranians know they cannot have a working nuclear weapon.
What they can do is kind of advance their breakout time, move forward a little bit, get a little closer to the fire, see what happens, and use that as a bargaining chip.
That's this.
The North Koreans used to be in that position, but the United States completely took their eye off the ball to fight the global war on terror.
And while we were busy doing that, the North Koreans just said, meh, might as well.
I don't think that's going to be the case with Iran.
They're very much on, our eye is on the ball there.
So this reminds me of Trita Parsi's thesis, which I think is pretty much indisputable that, despite all the hype from the Democrats, it was not the crippling sanctions that brought Iran to the table.
It was Iran's advances in their civilian nuclear program that brought the Democrats to the table.
The Iranians had tried to negotiate with, you know, in the Bush years, Bush wouldn't talk with them, but the E3 would, our European friends, France, Germany, and Britain, talk with them.
And those talks ended up failing because they were not in good faith on the Western side.
But they were always trying to negotiate, and it seemed like the Americans thought, boy, that pile of low enriched uranium is getting pretty big.
And they're able to produce it in less and less time because they're making more and more advances in their centrifuge technology and moving up in further generations and stuff.
And so, boy, I think maybe we better nip this thing in the bud now that it's really starting to grow.
And then they said, yeah, see, we made the Iranians bend to our will by suffocating and sanctioning their economy the way that we did.
And it seems like maybe they believe their own hype about that now.
See, I'm yelling.
I forgot I took the compressor out of the chain.
I'm probably way up in the red.
They forgot that they believe, you know, that this is a lie and believe it now, I think.
But they're going to remember again in a few months when the Iranians start really cranking up uranium production and say, sure, you don't want to come back to the table with us again now, right?
Or not?
I agree with with about 90 percent.
I think the sanctions have had an effect in Iran.
I don't know that that's part of what's driven them to talk and things like that.
If the Democrats want to believe it, let them believe it.
I mean, if that's what they if they have to kind of adhere to their own little, little wet dreams on these things, let them do so.
I know that when I was in Iran, there's a lot of old stuff there.
There's a lot of stuff that that needs to be fixed and replaced.
And there's a lot of interest in using money to buy stuff to fix to raise standards of living and things like that.
They have a lot of old planes that probably could use a lot more spare parts than they're able to to legally obtain right now and things like that.
So I don't think that that the sanctions are a non-issue.
I don't know that they're, you know, 100 percent of it all, but I think it's part of it.
I think the question they are, the people of Iran are suffering under them, the economy is suffering, whether it's weakening the regime is a separate question, I guess.
Well, yeah.
I mean, the other thing is, I think everybody in Iran would like to be able to sell their oil legally.
And that would be the sort of sanction, the Uber sanction that would just enable so many other things, positive things to happen.
Now, they're selling it illegally in great quantity.
But I mean, that adds to the cost and things like that.
The idea would be that that if you want to lower tensions in the Middle East, these are all ways to do that.
And they're not ways that require the people whose only foreign policy issue is Israel's security to give much up.
They're not going to they're not going to endanger Israel's security.
Israel will always be in a position to denuclearize Iran, kinetically, as we like to say.
And that's never going to go away and never going to change.
And I think the Iranians at a practical level understand that the United States will ensure that there is only one nuclear armed Middle Eastern country.
And that's just the fact of life there.
And I think everybody can can work with that.
We have I mean, everyone has worked with that.
So I don't know that anybody's given much up here.
There's a lot to gain.
And I think, as I pointed out in that article, one of the great gains is to create this forum for Iran to start reengaging with us on a regular, formal, not such a big deal to get together basis.
You don't have to do all these meetings in secret at high levels.
You can start to do working level discussions on a routine basis to resolve problems and issues.
And that's that's always a very, very good thing.
That was because you can't you can't talk about Iran, of course, without talking about the the other Iran, which is basically North Korea.
And that was, again, one of the things that I saw as a huge possibility when Trump was trying his diplomatic moves with North Korea, not that something gigantic was going to happen overnight, like denuclearization or whatever, but that the doors were going to open.
We were going to be talking to each other.
We were going to have a way to solve problems and move ahead.
We were going to have a way to kickstart some of the small stuff of diplomacy that often can lead to bigger things.
Not always.
I mean, sports exchanges and scholars and things like that.
I mean, sometimes that stuff goes nowhere, but sometimes it provides an avenue to build trust in relationships that can be taken advantage of a little bit later.
And that's what I saw as the the possible outcome.
Of course, the Democrats and the deep state killed that because they didn't want any of that to happen by insisting that it was denuclearization or nothing with North Korea.
And they they killed it and it didn't happen.
And it's never going to happen under under Biden.
And that's that's that.
But you hate to see people talking about, well, with Iran, it's got to be denuclearization or nothing.
You don't I mean, if you think that strategy works, I encourage you to go to a car dealership and say, I'm giving you five bucks for that car or nothing and see how many cars you go home with.
Yeah, boy.
And, you know, the Korea example is a great one for the larger point of just how it really doesn't have to be this way at all.
Right.
And America just had a policy of electing Ron Paul types and decides, you know, we're going to do to you North Koreans, we're going to kill you with kindness, you dirty SOB.
Watch us lift all our sanctions and send all of our basketball stars and all these things.
We'd be living in a whole different world.
And the consequences of this naivete would be nonexistent, really.
It's all all our threats are essentially drummed up on this side of the fight.
It's because we need to have enemies.
You know, the article that's coming out next week talks about how the United States has 800 bases overseas and that we sort of brag that our special forces have been, we'll just say, present in 72 percent of the world's nations last year.
Now, what country needs people killed in all those places?
You know, American troops were in combat in 13 different African nations the other year.
And you just got to ask yourself, wait a minute, why do we need to do all that?
Why do we have so many enemies?
Why do we want so many enemies?
Why do we need so many enemies?
And that's the whole thing with with North Korea, Iran or wherever.
We just have a system here that requires us to be at war with lots of people all the time.
And the reasons for that, of course, to go go deep, it could it's mostly just as easy as well.
There's an awful lot of people who make an awful lot of money off of all that.
And that's they're not willing to go out of business.
I mean, it really can be just as simple as that.
But you can get into the geopolitics and the philosophy.
But bottom line is the United States needs enemies.
We badly need North Korea to be the ultimate boogeyman out there.
And if for some reason North Korea went away, we'd have to go out and find a new one.
Which, by the way, tried you're not just some guy with a computer keyboard and what have you.
You were a foreign service officer for how many years?
And I know that you were in South Korea.
This was your job was Korean relations at a very high level for a very long time.
Right.
It bothered the United States a lot.
I was there during some of the so-called sunshine period.
If listeners remember, there was a period of increasingly warming relations.
Groups, tour groups were coming back.
Relatives were allowed to meet at the border.
There were there was the South Koreans establish a factory in North Korea.
There was a lot of a lot of steps being taken.
And any time the South Korean government came to us and said, you know, could you make a gesture alongside of us back some troops off, send some fighter planes to Guam instead of here?
You know, something that we can point to to show the North Koreans we mean peace and that we're not simply your puppets.
You know, the answer was always, you know, gee, we'd love to, but we're not going to.
It was never something that the United States was excited to support.
We the best we offered was kind of a we'll just stay to the side and let you kids do what you want.
But in terms of actually driving that process, doing what we could to encourage it, it was no no interest whatsoever.
And that crossed administrations that was under Bush and it was under Obama.
And I can't see it being any different now, having watched the State Department's pathetic non-performance as Trump tried his diplomacy a couple of years ago.
It's not in our interest to to not have a boogeyman in Asia.
That North Korean thing drives the show.
Now, good news is that there's a lot of people working really, really hard to make China the Asian boogeyman.
And if they take over the job, well, then, you know, the North Koreans really aren't needed anymore and they can do whatever they want.
I mean, who cares that?
Well, you know, a few years ago they remade Red Dawn and it was going to be about China.
But then they got a big Chinese market and the Chinese producers didn't like that.
So they made about North Korea and that was the dumbest movie in the whole world.
North Korea takes over America.
This is an actual Norm Macdonald joke.
They keep telling me I'm supposed to be afraid of North Korea, but geez, I'm really not feeling it.
But China, you know, it's big.
I got a map right here.
I'm looking at it.
It's well, it's way bigger than North Korea and they abandoned communism to a much greater extent than North Korea has.
What?
Back almost 50 years ago now, 47 years ago, something like that.
They started adopting markets and producing things and making money instead of just starving all their own people to death.
And whenever I turn on TV, in fact, Peter, whenever I read an article that says we should get out of Afghanistan at the bottom, it says so that we can pivot to China because that's the real threat that we've taken our eye off the ball as the growing Chinese world empire behemoth is aggressing against everything and everyone.
And we must defend humanity and contain their rise.
Now, you know, this is kind of another one of the explanations for why America is at war everywhere all the time.
And that's sort of the sports metaphor that, you know, we're the U.S. and they're the other team, you know, Wolverines.
You see how the Red Dawn reference work there?
Gotcha.
That's one of my favorite movies when I was a kid.
The first one is one of my favorite movies.
I have to watch that thing so many times.
You know, there's a great Murray Rothbard review of it.
You should read.
It's all about how.
Yeah, it's great.
We like it because in this one, we're the ones defending ourselves instead of being the evil world empire.
Yeah.
Oh, that's so cool.
And then I don't know how many times I sat in high school staring out the window, hoping something would happen to end this class and they get Soviet paratroopers, you know, and you get all that great language, all that great over the top language.
Sean Milius wrote for that, you know, the dialogue he gave the Cuban.
Oh, yeah.
Uh-huh.
That's just brilliant stuff.
I mean, for anybody who's too young, who hasn't seen that the 1980, what, four or five version of Red Dawn with Patrick Swayze?
Cold War.
Oh, it's just a Wolverines.
They were learned to shoot straight.
Your army pukes.
Oh, gosh, it's just too good.
So the idea is, is that we have this sports metaphor that, you know, we have to have an opposing team.
We can't play by ourselves.
And, you know, so the Chinese have been nominated, whether they like it or not.
Damn it.
They're going to be the opposing team.
Now, wait, Scott, you're better with facts and figures than I am.
When was the last time the Chinese shot at us or conquered us or invaded American somethings?
You know what I have to say?
I noticed that you were correct in your article when you said that they didn't do anything when we bombed their embassy in Serbia.
Yeah, they didn't do a thing.
Talk about Wolverines.
We freaking bombed it and then we blamed it on bad maps, which is not even a good excuse.
I mean, it's like it's like a suck on this kind of excuse.
Right.
By the way, do you know what was the real reason that they did it?
I had heard somewhere.
I forget the timeline.
If this checks out that they had gotten scraps of a shot down F-117.
I could only, you know, repeat rumors and stories.
Who knows what's true?
I've written two books of fiction, so consider this fiction.
But essentially, that was the first stealth planes were being used in former Yugoslavia.
And the Chinese, story goes, found out that if you were kind of more or less underneath them at the right time in the right way with the right radar, you could pick one out of the sky.
You could identify one.
You could also knew about how fast it was going.
And so that would allow you to know when it was going to be kind of near your anti-aircraft battery, even if that was far away, which would allow you if you shot enough stuff up into the air that you probably could hit something.
In other words, you hear that, everybody?
It's not stealthy.
You just need an old school long wave radar from World War Two.
It's it's pretty stealthy.
But I mean, the idea would be that nothing's perfect.
And the story is that they found a kind of a workaround that would make it more easy to figure out where it was.
And the Chinese desperately wanted to get their hands on some of that material that makes it more stealthy.
And that material after the because there was a stealth plane that was shot down.
And story goes that some of that material was in the embassy waiting to be transported out.
And the United States said over your dead bodies.
And, you know, kind of was a country of its word.
And I guess the thinking was at the time in Bill Clinton's Oval Office, what the hell are they going to do about it?
There won't be any consequences for this.
Right.
Go ahead.
What are they going to do about it?
And the idea would be that anything that they did do about it was worth it if we prevented them from getting a hold of these incredibly important materials.
If they had it in their hand, they could back engineer it and make a huge leap forward in stealth technology.
And any collateral damage, if you will, was was worth it if that was what you got out of the deal.
But who knows?
It probably was just an accident.
And they were using the wrong maps.
And the GPS was was fluey that day.
And, you know, our pilots aren't really that good about finding things in the dark.
But in other words, the answer to your question is China never did anything to us.
China did not retaliate.
Basically, last thing China did to us was be our allies against the Japanese in the Second World War.
You know, you really have to go way, way back to try to figure out.
I can't really figure out any time the Chinese actually sort of shot at us.
There was a little kerfuffle over one of our surveillance planes getting too close and stuff, but no, they gave it back.
Right.
They didn't even steal all the stuff out of it.
Well, they looked at the stuff, which was probably, you know, all they needed to do.
But nonetheless, in terms of global muscle tussle, that's that's pretty, pretty weak stuff.
Other countries have done a lot worse to us.
And so how China got nominated into this global hegemon role by the United States, I really don't quite get.
They don't seem to be really playing the part.
I mean, the Cold War Russians actually played the part, right?
We've got missiles aimed at everything and you're going to world communism will succeed and you'll be in the dustbin of history.
They had all that good stuff.
But the Chinese don't seem to be doing that.
They just seem to buy more of our treasury bonds and make more products for our Apple stores.
And they're really bad at this.
Yeah.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
So you're constantly buying things from Amazon dot com.
Well, that makes sense.
They bring it right to your house.
So what you do, though, is click through from the link in the right hand margin at Scott Horton dot org and I'll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
Won't cost you a thing.
Nice little way to help support the show.
Again, that's right there in the margin at Scott Horton dot org.
Hey, you want to know what industry is recession proof?
Yes, you're right.
Of course, pot.
Scott Horton here to tell you about Green Mill supercritical extractors.
The SFE pro and super producing parallel pro can be calibrated to produce all different types and qualities of cannabis crude oils for all different purposes.
These extractors are the most important part of your cannabis oil business for precision, versatility and efficiency.
Green Mill supercritical dot com.
Hey, I'll Scott here to tell you about Zipix toothpicks.
They're full of nicotine is the thing about it.
Personally, I miss the stuff terribly and I'm really looking forward to getting back on it.
Seems like they'd be perfect for smokers and vapors who can't afford to stop work and go outside for a break all the time or for those traveling in planes, trains and buses and ferries and such.
It's the most affordable way to get your nicotine on the market and they taste great and come in all different flavors.
Use promo code Scott Horton and get 10 percent off Zipix toothpicks at Zipix toothpicks dot com.
You know, I got to tell you, man, this narrative is so powerful now.
I had I was talking to my friend yesterday.
Sorry, Dan, I'm calling you out, buddy.
I even named you, but I won't tell him your last name.
My friend Dan was telling me, well, I was going to get a Jeep, but then I found out Jeep's half owned by Chinese government connected corporations.
Now I'm not going to screw the China thing.
And I says, man, this narrative is so powerful.
But, bro, it's just 2002 all over again, man.
Don't ever let them do this to you.
Like, look, I mean, Peter Van Buren, is their flag red or is it not red?
Right.
We know that this is not a free country, but that doesn't mean that they're an aggressive threat to us.
That doesn't mean that we're supposed to buy into every narrative that a bunch of long range bomber salesmen hand to us.
And yet it's just it's so effective.
It's so easy.
They do it over and over again.
And well, that's that's the part that that that bugs me is is that over and over again, if you've, you know, if you've passed your 20th birthday, you've seen this all played out a couple of times already.
You've seen the transition from when it was the Russians to when it became the terrorists, to when it became the Iraqis, the Panamanians were in there for a very brief period of time.
If you're really sharp on these things, you know, it's just the fact that it always is somebody.
And when one group sort of uses itself up or runs itself out or whatever, we just simply put a new boogeyman in there.
And as I said, it's it's easy to imagine North Korea sort of becoming the Burkina Faso of Asia because we don't care anymore because we don't need them.
We've got the Chinese there.
Oh, you know, and when you see it done time and again and when the script doesn't change, they just search and replace one name for another.
It starts to sort of become obvious and.
You slide into that that cynicism that that certainly hasn't captured me as a thinker and a writer, but I encourage people to to just read back a couple of pages, a chapter or two, and see how the same lines have been used time and time again.
All right.
Well, look, man, I dropped out of community college, but I know there's smart guys at the Kennedy School of the smart guy thing where they know stuff would say, no, see, but this is like in the textbook.
It says that you'll have like one declining power and then a new rising power.
And then you got to figure out how to handle it.
And probably we should act like the British did in handling the rise of Germany in the last century.
Right.
Or something like that.
And so, you know, there's all these sophisticated models that all these book reading folk have that say that, look, we can't just tolerate China becoming more powerful compared to us without doing something about it or else we're not doing something about it.
And OK, you know what?
Maybe the Taliban really weren't a big deal, but I mean, hey, China, at least you can find their caliphate on the map.
You know what I mean?
Well, it's because China and China is just a good one because it satisfies some of the all the other requirements, too.
I mean, for example, the need to build really expensive things like aircraft carriers, new jets and stuff.
And also, I can't I can't understand a word they're saying.
You know what I mean?
It's all in Chinese, man.
I don't know to you, but I think to the rest of us, it's it's easier to make them seem this such an alien culture where they're really not.
They're just human men and women just like us.
Well, actually, the nominee, what's Xavier Bacara, what's he nominated for, like housing and urban development or something like that?
He's Biden's nominee for one of those things.
And that's different, though.
He's like probably a Californian or something.
Yeah, but he actually said that they asked him because he's going to be like secretary of housing or something.
They asked him about the the state of the Uyghurs in in China.
And he answered, well, we can't really say what's right or wrong, given the cultural differences.
So, yeah, it's a it's a weird place over there.
Well, and that's great fodder for the hawks, too, that see Biden is just going to this is this is Russiagate all over.
But it's the other way, as you and I talked about, at least there's a lick of truth here where you got Hunter Biden involved in all these millions of dollars of corruption with these Chinese firms and all these things.
And so they say, you know, this is the right wing attack on Biden is not that he's an interventionist in a America first kind of a way, but that he's going to sell us out to the yellow peril.
Well, that's the other thing, too, is that there's such a wonderful racist background on yellow peril and all this that we can draw from.
We have a very rich history here of of hating the Chinese.
So there's that to draw from.
The thing that that kind of gives me hope is that, you know, the Chinese did spend millions of dollars currying favor with Hunter Biden.
And if they actually are that lame that they actually thought spending money on a guy like Hunter Biden was going to get them anything, then they're not going to be real hard to to have their butt kicked if that's the state of their thinking.
You know, this is this is like going after one of the illegitimate Trump bastards out there someplace and thinking that's going to buy you entree to the boss.
You know, no, no, no.
I forget if it was.
Was it Douglas Adams or I can't remember which funny it might have been the hitchhiker's guide or I can't remember anymore, man, is so long guy, right?
There's some funny thing about how because everything was so locked down in communist China and you couldn't get really any news about what was going on there, that then the assumption was they were breeding all these super soldiers and they figured out how to feed everybody on just a few calories a day.
And then they they made them they made them all smaller so they'd be more efficient fighting machines and all this stuff where they're just projecting kind of all this fantasy about the the the unstoppable, unendingly growing strength of the communist China.
And this is like right at the time where Mao is starving 30 million people to death, you know, minimum something like that.
But this is like the assumption of all this.
And I remind I was reminded that the other day when I was talking with Ryan McMac and he was going, you know, this is an aging population that has massive political intervention in the economy, a.k.a.to a libertarian, massive distortions in the economy that demand severe corrections sooner or later.
And their power is what it is.
But it's not what you imagine in your imagination.
If you like feeling afraid of stuff, it's actually nothing like that at all.
It's it'd be sort of like trying to demonize Japan in the same way right now that this is not an expansionist power.
Sure, they're making money, but that doesn't mean they're coming for you.
You know, you know, when I was studying Chinese and I was struggling with my characters, my teacher said something that that's kind of stuck with me in a couple of ways.
And I was discouraged.
And she said, you realize at this point you still read more than about 30 percent of the Chinese people who are completely illiterate.
And now they've done they've made huge progress and I haven't.
So, I mean, there's that.
But the idea would be that large swaths of China are rural, are not fully engaged in the 21st century, certainly not part of the global competition, except that they may labor in factories that produce stuff.
You know, we sort of forget that we're not dealing with a nation that's at the European level of development.
They have they're not certainly not a third world country, but they have third world patches.
Let's let's be generous and say that these are not the global competitors you seek.
I mean, it's it's that simple.
The other thing is that China has not demonstrated a whole lot of territorial ambition other than, of course, this semi made up fuss over who owns floating rocks in certain part of the Pacific.
You know, they've they've kind of had their borders where they are for a while, and they certainly haven't challenged the United States or the Western powers for any any place, any territory or things like that there.
If they're competing, they're competing in a very different way.
It's not it's not risk anymore.
This is a different level of competition, more economic, more mind space than than than physical space.
That might be something to talk about, but this idea that we're going to dig trenches and face off against each other at some point in the near future is just very hard to get one's one's head around.
So here's the thing, too, right, is that it goes without saying.
So it goes on, said both sides have H bombs.
So that means that no matter what happens, we can't fight them.
In fact, like if they nuked Los Angeles, they started it and just nuked L.A., we would have to not hit back.
You can't do anything without killing massive numbers of civilians and provoking even first, even worse retaliation.
We'd have to still figure out a way to get along on the planet Earth, America with China minus L.A. and still not fight.
We can't fight.
This is why it's so popular, Scott.
I mean, you're kind of just working down the list here.
You know, the United States, we'd like to fight in places where we where we where we win all the time.
We don't want to fight in places where it might not go well.
Afghanistan was kind of a mistake in that sense, where we should have just done what we usually do, go in there, break everything and then leave it.
The Cold War was such a gift to the industrial military industrial complex, because, as you said, the fact that everybody had mutually assured destruction meant that we didn't have to actually have any big fights.
We could have little ones.
Those are fun.
And we can do stuff like invade Panama or Grenada, you know, little countries.
But we don't want to have a big fight.
Those are messy and people get killed.
And one of the things that makes these this constant state of war acceptable to the American people is that we don't create lots of body bags.
We kill very few Americans.
I mean, never mind.
The other side's a little different.
But with our technology and the fact that we bully these little countries, we don't kill lots of Americans.
It's not like World War Two or even Vietnam.
I mean, that was one of the big mistakes in Vietnam was we killed way too many Americans and people started finally to notice.
And that was that was bad.
So we're much, much better about that right now.
Well, I said the problem is the risk.
So you look at how many times we almost had a nuclear war with Russia and you look at kind of, you know, all the myths and disincentives and misunderstandings, especially the ways that people in bureaucracies seem to just never be willing to admit that they were wrong ever.
And so would be willing to further a mistake, even knowing that it's a mistake, rather than admit that it was one, even if it meant general nuclear war.
Yeah, you know, though, I think some of those stories are just kind of have been made into good stories.
I mean, you're talking about, I think, a lot of these ones where it's like one guy who refused to push the button because he had like during the Cuban missile crisis, the political officer on the submarine when the other two officers wanted to launch a nuke.
And he said, no, wait a minute.
Yeah.
And I think what that I mean, they're great stories.
And we like to think of it that way.
But it also, to me, in a way, it shows you that the people who were in a position to exercise common sense, first of all, they did.
And second, they were not believing the garbage that their political leaders were shoveling out, because if they had believed it, they wouldn't have thought at all.
They would have just pressed the button when when that time came.
And I think it shows that a lot of folks at the operational level, if you will, had not stopped thinking and had less faith in their machines and their and their leaders than we like to imagine they did.
Don't get me wrong.
I mean, in game theory terms, it makes sense that, hey, we can't fight because we got nukes.
But it means that whatever, let's say it's a very low risk that something gets started.
The level of devastation involved, if it does, makes it a very high risk in another sense.
No, that's a good point.
That's that's a particularly good point.
And luckily, we didn't have any accidents or things.
I mean, that's one of the things that's my that's my my theory on what's going to happen eventually in North Korea.
And that is that they are going to have on their own a Chernobyl like nuclear accident.
Yeah.
And I mean, you got to kind of assume that industrial safety isn't their biggest priority.
And that Yongbyong reactor was built by the Soviets in like, what, 78 or 83 or something.
Yeah.
And it's like, well, we don't have enough bolts to really secure it.
So we'll just put some gum under there.
Yeah.
So the idea is, is that you imagine a Chernobyl like event in North Korea that either sparks some kind of uprising or just basically complete chaos.
I mean, masses of North Koreans running for their borders or getting into little boats and trying to get across to Japan.
And essentially the government, they are collapsing because there's nobody left to carry out the orders or follow the orders or or they're running they're running away themselves and taking everything they can.
And the only way to to not have the whole country disappear in a big radioactive hole is to let the South Koreans get in there and do the technological things that the North Koreans aren't capable of doing in terms of shutting it down and safing it and all that good stuff.
And essentially at that point, you have no more North Korea.
But at a cost, an extraordinary cost of human life, if the cloud drifts the wrong way into Japan or something like that.
So the potential for destruction with these weapons is such that, as you said, even a small accident is kind of a keeper.
And man, I'm sorry, I don't want to divert the whole conversation this way.
And we're like already a little over time, but I don't care.
I know we're not almost.
But but I mean, part of this is I'm just terrified.
I'm terrified of Joe Biden right now.
It just, you know, like even if he's kind of has coherence and understands the importance of a thing and is really, you know, his his he's had a good cup of coffee and he's thinking straight.
I just don't think he has the balls at all to stand up against the Pentagon, the CIA, the hawks on his own National Security Council.
I mean, I I mean, I'm not trying to give the guy credit, but I just think after getting his own he's clearly learned some kind of reluctance to do these things.
I don't know if you can believe a word Charlie Savage says, but Charlie Savage says in The New York Times that he's ordered a review of the entire terror war, not just regime changes and things, but even the drone wars and special ops wars against bin Laden night fighters everywhere and has ordered like a pause in action against them until he kind of can.
But I mean, to me, that's like the best I could ever hope for out of him.
But I can't see him just being strong, really.
Personality wise, at this age, Syria last week would stand as a counterpoint to Charlie Savage's theory there.
But well, I mean, that doesn't really count as a terror war, right?
That's the war for Al-Qaeda against their Shiite enemies.
I don't.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
But I I do agree with you about your concerns that that Biden is not strong enough.
You know, may lightning not strike me for saying nice things about Obama twice in one interview with you, but I think he managed to salvage Ukraine and Syria kind of as best as he could have given the politics of it.
In other words, a weaker president would have given in to Victoria Nuland and the others and gotten into the war in Ukraine up to their hips.
Right.
And a weaker president would have invaded Syria and gone in in a massive, massive way.
And I got to give Obama a little credit for resisting within the political boundaries he had to operate in.
That said, I don't see any of that in Biden.
Also, of course, that was second term Obama, which meant that he had a little more political leeway.
I mean, and they say that Biden usually counseled toward restraint, which I believe, you know, but but that, yeah, it doesn't mean that he's going to say no to his own hawks, though, at all.
No, I don't think so.
I mean, these are the people who tried in 2016 to have full on wars in places like Ukraine and Syria and they're back.
And can you imagine what that what could have happened in Ukraine if they had listened, if Obama had gone along with the real hawks on it?
I mean, they did.
The coup was bad enough.
Yeah, but I'm just saying I don't see that Biden has the personal strength at his age and his health or the political strength, how he got elected, you know, the deals that were made to put him in that seat.
I don't see it.
And so I worry that these people, this what we'll just handily call the deep state, will simply roll over him and we'll continue.
We'll pick up where we left off in 2016 in some of these instances.
And, you know, by the way, I don't think either of us really audience either.
I was really mean to presume that he's less worse than his staff on any of this stuff necessarily.
Just he certainly can't be counted on being strong against them when they are worse than him.
I guess one thing I think is like possibly Blinken is personally loyal enough to him that at least he would tell him the truth and not just totally steer him around.
Something like that.
I have no idea.
I don't know.
And if that's true, you hope that Blinken would win the interagency fight about who gets to brief the president or, you know, whose whose opinion goes to the president's desk for action.
You got Sullivan as his national security adviser.
Sullivan there.
You've got Wendy Sherman, Victoria Nuland, Susan, the bloody help me out.
Right.
Peter, what is Victoria Nuland's exact job now?
She I believe and I have to click on the Internet while we're while we're stalling here.
Go ahead.
I'll stall Victoria Nuland, everybody.
That's Robert Kagan's wife.
You can read this great article by Jim Loeb called All in the Neocon Family about these horrible, horrible people.
And she was the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, which I gather, Peter, something like the ambassador to the EU who helped well, you know, who helped plot the coup in Ukraine in 2014 and was caught red handed and even saying in that audio that we're getting the vice president to help marry this thing and get it to go.
She was as assistant secretary for you.
She was sort of on top of the pyramid of.
European stuff in the State Department.
It was more than, say, ambassador to the EU, which which was kind of a pseudo role.
But essentially, when the people at the German desk said, let's do this and the people at the French desk said, no, let's do something else, that was that's where she came in is make those calls.
She's now bumped herself up a couple of notches to deputy secretary of state, which essentially is the number two person.
And I thought she was undersecretary for something, something.
She's now number two at state.
She's sort of number two.
And again, depending on how things are organized in practice, some secretaries of state, you know, we'll see that we'll put that deputy.
They really kind of split the job.
You know, their their emphasis is on one part of the world or one task based on what the president wants.
And the deputy secretary sort of covers everything else.
So she may have substantially more power than she.
She will have substantially more power.
But there may be yet another level there.
If Blinken finds himself focusing on something on Biden's behalf, that leaves her the political space to kind of claim ownership somewhere else.
She's she's a nasty person and she's in a position of power.
And if we want to go back to your discussion about small mistakes that have high stakes to them, she's in a position to do stuff like that.
Yeah.
And in particular, if her foreign, the people she interacts with think she has that power, then she does.
I mean, she's a good person.
If she has that power, then she does.
I mean, in other words, if she goes to Country X and says, I've got the president's ear on this and they believe her, it doesn't really matter if she has the president's ear or not.
She's going to act as if she's going to get results as if she does.
It's a sneaky little game, but she's very good at it.
And she will use her superpowers not for good.
Now, I'll tell you what, everybody go listen to that call.
Of course, it's the one that's famous for her saying F the EU, but that was the least of it.
Forget that she used a bad word.
What was she saying?
She's complaining the Germans were taking too long to do the coup and overthrow the government.
So we're just going to screw them.
We're going to do it without them.
And we're going to get Joe Biden and Robert Sarri at the U.N. to help us do it.
And then listen to the arrogance the whole time.
They talk about we're going to glue this thing.
We're going to midwife this thing.
We're going to do this, that, the other.
And we're going to do it before Putin can do anything about it.
He won't be able.
It'll be easy.
Uh-uh.
Not at all.
Turn into a giant war.
More than 10,000 people killed in the loss of the Crimean Peninsula to Russia.
Not that I care, but they sure do.
Counterproductive by their own measure by far.
And of course, blink in the other days.
We will never recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea, which has belonged to them since America was under the Articles of Confederation.
It's part of Russia, like Massachusetts is part of the United States of America.
Give me a break.
And by the way, that was Victoria Nuland who told the EU to F off.
Wendy Sherman is the one we were just talking about, but they're equally bad.
Nuland is going to be undersecretary of state for political affairs, which puts her, you know, number three or four or five in the in the chain of command, depending on how things shake out.
But she's kind of upgraded her ability to do to do damage through that.
I got you.
OK.
And by the way, this is just a fun footnote.
When the State Department at the end of 2012 released their statement that said, yes, it's true that the Jabhat al-Nusra is really just an alias, their words alias for al-Qaeda in Iraq, then going by the name of the Islamic State of Iraq.
That was Victoria Nuland's name on that.
I just thought, yeah, she's a busy woman.
And she admitted a very important truth that one time that we can quote for fun because it's so important.
But let's not talk about that.
Let me ask you one more thing.
We talked about it and this is getting around.
This is not really a counterculture point of view anymore.
This is kind of just common sense.
Call it the deep state called the establishment.
Call it the military industrial complex, the national security bureaucracy or whatever you want to phrase it as.
It was like Eisenhower coined the term about the M.I.C. there and famously so and credibly, most credibly so.
Right.
And then just like you said, well, you see, the thing with China is you can sell really expensive weapons systems like entire navies and, you know, fleets of long range bombers based on a threat like China.
And I think that that's conventional wisdom.
I think you're right.
And I think that, you know what?
Everybody knows that.
Or at least if you pointed out to him once, they'll be like, yeah, that sounds right.
You know.
So then the question obviously is, Peter, what in the hell can we ever do about this?
We have this small group of special interests, as Ross Perot would say, versus the other 330 million of us who are essentially powerless or we're just like along for the ride.
And people are frustrated about it.
And a lot of them lost family in the recent wars here and, you know, have real cause to be upset about this stuff.
And it just seems like we can't do a damn thing, man.
If there's any young kids in the audience, cover your ears, kids, you don't want to hear this.
I'm 62 years old, Scott.
I've lived through the Cold War and all this stuff.
I've been in government for I was in government for two more than two decades of it and got to look at some of the real stuff.
And I have at age 62 convinced myself that I don't know that anything can be done to fix it.
I want to be wrong.
And I want someone in your audience to laugh at me and explain exactly why I'm wrong and go out there and make the change.
But I find it difficult to conceive of that happening, and I hope I'm very wrong about that.
But at this point, having done what I've done, knowing what I know, reading what I've read, I think that.
It's something that is just the way America wants to be in terms of the people who are powerful enough to have their wants realized.
That's how they want to be.
The change of the of the so-called Democrats, liberals, progressives, whatever you want to call them, from an anti-war faction to a pro-war faction, depending on if they're guys in the White House or not, tends to answer the question for you.
There, you know, the guys like Rand Paul or his father or others like them, you know, there seems to be room for one or two at a time.
And if they push a little too hard or they step out of line, something happens to them.
If they're not shot in Dealey Square, they are primaried with massive amounts of outside money or a scandal comes up or someone comes forward to accuse them of something or they're otherwise derailed.
There's room for a jester here and there, you know, just to kind of keep things looking good.
But when push comes to shove, the system resists well.
Yeah, it's true.
Say something funny and this is ridiculous to be at that glum for something like this.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry I screwed up because I meant to ask you earlier when it would have fit in the interview what you think about the threat of Israel now launching a war over the attack on their boat that they blame on Iran in the Persian Gulf and the oil spill off of their coast.
It seems like they're talking tough, but they're just bluffing.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I followed I've been followed at that closely.
I mean, you know, the Israelis are good at this kind of thing.
They spend a lot of time sort of thinking through, you know, if we do this, then they'll do that and then we'll do this and they'll you know, they're really good at that.
And so they have a very limited world out there.
The number of targets that that their target set, if you will, is, you know, numbered.
And so they're really, really good about saying, OK, they did this.
So we're going to do this and that'll end this round.
And they've been pretty good at that kind of thing.
So it wouldn't surprise me that they that they attack something somewhere.
Maybe it's something we know about.
Maybe it's not.
Maybe the wrong guy gets in a car accident in Vienna.
But they're they're they're good at scaling these things.
And I don't think they'll miss an opportunity to take a swat at somebody.
Yeah.
Well, just as long as they don't start shooting cruise missiles at the Natanz facility and bring them.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That's not their that's not their style.
Yeah.
Well, so far so far.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you so much for coming back on the show.
It's always great to talk to you, Peter.
And I know the audience loves it, too, man.
And be careful on mask there in Texas.
Your governor is trying to kill you, right?
Oh, yeah.
Well, actually, that was already true before the mask on or off thing.
All right.
Well, we're hunkered down here, man.
Hunker down.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Bye bye.
All right, you guys.
Check out Peter Van Buren at the.
Oops, I muted the click.
The wrong thing when I meant to hit the other button.
The American Conservative Magazine and we meant well dot com.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com antiwar dot com Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
