03/15/17 – Ron Paul on North Korea and the larger global war on terror – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing our friend Dr. Ron Paul, the greatest congressman in American history.
A man whose name is on most of my shirts, including the one I'm wearing right now.
And the guy who, well, he's the author of Swords into Plowshares and a lot of other great books.
You can check out his whole record there on Amazon.
The latest is Swords into Plowshares, of course.
He runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity with Daniel McAdams, and he also co-hosts the Liberty Report every day with Daniel McAdams, too, at ronpaullibertyreport.com, which is a really great show.
I hope you guys watch it daily like I do.
Welcome back to the show, Ron.
How are you, sir?
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you.
Good to talk to you again.
Listen, so there's so much going on, and you guys do such a great job covering foreign policy on the Liberty Report.
So I really feel privileged to talk with you again to cover a little bit of this stuff.
First of all, North Korea.
It looks to be worse and worse of a crisis there, and I know you're something of an expert on the issue.
What do you think Trump should do in the face of Kim Jong-un firing off these missiles towards Japan and these other provocative moves?
Well, you know, I think it was yesterday we mentioned it on the show, and I believe I concluded at the time was just come home.
We don't need to be over there.
And if he's a problem, there's no doubt about it, the neighbors shouldn't be too happy with him.
But I think for us to go over there and have these big military buildups, you know, the operation that they're practicing right now, 300,000 troops are involved, 10,000 of our troops and then South Koreans.
And to go over there and do that and put some missile defenses that even China does not like, you know, it doesn't make any sense.
And I remember so clearly, you know, when this particular Korean War started, because it's still the same war, it was back when I was in high school, and the war was going great until all of a sudden the Chinese entered into it, and the whole picture was changed.
And we're still there.
And even in the presidential campaigns, I kept saying, just bring the troops over.
And that's sort of still my position.
If he is a threat to their neighbors, they have to deal with it.
But I think that for us to go over there, and then with Trump, you know, actually threatening, you know, we may just go in there and kill them, or use a drone missile or whatnot, that's just stirring up a lot more trouble than we need, because many times, you know, it gets out of hand, and because there are a lot of...and the Navy is involved with what we're doing in that area, that there could be another incident.
The more we're involved, the more likely it is that either somebody can create a false flag or it'll be done deliberately.
The Vietnam War was expanded by us deliberately lying, you know, about something that was happening.
But there are others that can do it, and there are accidents that can happen, unintended consequences, so it's sort of a mess.
You know, I kind of don't understand, why have all the troops there?
I mean, if we wanted to float our whole Navy offshore and say, don't you ever mess with the South, that would be one thing.
But why have tens of thousands of American infantry on the ground when the South Koreans have a big enough army to do all that part of the dying in the war themselves?
Yeah, well, interventionism generally doesn't make much sense if you look at it, you know, in a sensible way.
So, no, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever, then you have to think, well, why is that?
Well, we have to, you know, fortify these guys and the equipment to the military industrial complex involved.
We have the neocons who are always looking for another war to fight.
So I think it's part of that, and they just believe in intervention.
They believe in this moral responsibility that we have, but I think your question is more of a tactical question that you could almost still say, we're gonna be there, we're gonna take care of things, but why do we have to be right on your property?
And it's probably some finances, but, you know, generally speaking, most of the people finally get tired of our occupation.
You know, whether it's in the Philippines or in Japan, they get tired of us from being there and want us to leave.
But there are a lot of financial benefits to the government.
You know, sometimes the militarism benefits the government in charge because the government's used that to make sure there's no overthrow of their own government.
That certainly has been the case in the Middle East.
We generally don't give weapons just because they're going to fight on our side against our enemies.
It's sometimes just to maintain, you know, the power that they have established in their own government.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that, you know, Clinton had a deal with the North Koreans and George Bush at the end of his term in 2008 could have had one before, you know, he started to get another deal before he sabotaged it himself again.
But then Obama never really tried to deal with the North Koreans at all, it doesn't seem like.
He just seemed like, well, we'll just leave everything running at idle for eight years and pass this problem off to someone else.
But I guess I don't understand what's so difficult about, I mean, as you say, you know, there are obviously these vested interests in the status quo, but we've seen politicians, you know, be able to overrule things like that before, you know, like Nixon going to China or something like that.
George H.W. Bush reduced, pulled all the nukes out of Korea and reduced the number of overall nukes by a couple of ten thousand, I think, that kind of thing.
So these kind of changes can be made, I just don't see what's so hard about shaking hands and at least not being best friends, but dropping all the tension.
Well, it makes a lot of sense, but that doesn't mean the governments are going to follow, you know, any common sense.
And I use as an example of when it gets really serious about it and that it's best to talk to somebody, that we should follow the lead of Kennedy when the Cuban crisis was on.
You know, he and Khrushchev talked because it was a very dangerous situation.
So I think people don't want to, out of just sort of a strategy, the Korean leader wants to look tough for his people, we have to look tough for our people, and we're not going to get pushed around, and we have this moral responsibility.
A lot of it, you know, is money and power, but a lot of people get sold on this.
You know, now that we're the superpower, we have this moral responsibility to maintain peace and spread the American goodness and the American message, which some people believe, but other people believe that's just an excuse.
But the combination of all, the American people on the whole aren't all that annoyed by us going over there.
But then if you looked at it, maybe conservatives would be more responsive, you know, with the spending.
So far, they haven't been.
You know, how many dollars, how many billions of dollars have we spent, you know, keeping troops on the land over there, whether it's in Korea or in Germany or all these other places, and then the Middle East?
I mean, just so much, but the conservatives aren't conservative when it comes to militarism.
They never vote against anything, hardly, but military.
And I think that's a big problem, too.
Many of them are just military Keynesianism.
They might say, you know, we don't really want to fight them, but we've got to be strong, and that's how you have peace through strength.
But when you talk about building major weapons systems, like the F-35, you get all the congressmen involved.
You get every state gets to make, you know, a piece of the pie.
So then the members of Congress think, well, you may be right, this is a dumb weapon, we don't need it, but I'm not going to have to, I don't want to go home and explain that to the people who say, hey, my job is at stake, and it's good for our economy, it's good for our state.
And they don't understand the principle of instead of what, what would happen if we didn't spend that money on these weapons that don't work or are getting involved overseas?
It's sort of a theoretical, you know, position where you can't quite visualize it.
What might have happened if you don't waste it in this militarism?
And of course, then they also are able to use the being patriotic and being pro military.
If you don't support it, you don't support the military, if you don't, if you don't support it, you're not patriotic, you're not a good American.
And I've heard that for a good many years.
All right, well, now, so 15 years into the terror war in the Middle East, we've got Al Qaeda and ISIS type groups, kind of in quite a few different places, obviously, Iraq and Syria.
And then there's Yemen and North Africa.
And there's always still Afghanistan.
And it seems like all indications are I saw you and Dan talking about this on your show too, that basically, he's telling the military and the CIA both gloves off, you know, this whole Al Qaeda thing, you guys, go ahead and take care of it.
Knock the hell out of him, as he said, in the campaign.
And and yet you wrote this article about Syria saying this isn't going to work.
But you know, I don't know, on the face of it, Dr. Paul, it might seem to people that wimpy old Obama, with all his rules and regulations wasn't letting the military get the work done.
But now if James Mattis and his Marine Corps want to finally go ahead and take care of this problem for us once and for all, surely they could, right?
Yeah, not only does it not work, these interventions, I would say us getting involved in the Korean War was a bad thing.
It's still going on.
And we did it under authority from the United Nations.
It was a bad thing.
It didn't work well when we got involved in Vietnam.
Things are much better in Vietnam since we left.
So it doesn't work.
But many times, it's not only it doesn't work, it causes a lot of harm.
Because I think, you know, the blowing up of the Middle East and the creation of a lot of homeless people, you know, I make the assumption that most people that are marching out of the Middle East and looking for a place, I know who's behind the encouragement of it.
But there's a lot of people, the migrants are just trying to get, you know, out of the way.
So that's a consequence of what we've been doing.
So not only do these efforts not work, they create new problems.
So right now, Trump was over there talking or yesterday talking with the defense minister of Saudi Arabia.
And they both agree that we have to have these safe zones and, you know, keep the people over there so that they don't have the incentive to migrate to Europe.
But then you have the cultural Marxists who that is exactly what they want them to do.
So it is significant.
It's still, as far as I'm concerned, to try to sort all this out, it's still much better to accept the notion of what it would be like if you had a non-interventionist foreign policy, willingness to talk to people like you indicate we should be, trade with people, and recognize that everybody has shortcomings.
And I am convinced the founders were right.
The more you trade with people and the more voluntary travel there is, the less likely you are to have wars.
And of course, that's what has been one of my goals ever since I've been in politics.
Yeah.
And you know, I really encourage people to to read your book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom, a collection of foreign policy speeches going back, I believe, to the late 70s, at least the very early 80s.
And there's just so much great history in there in that great book.
And then, of course, there's swords and plowshares.
And you know, truly, Dr. Paul, I say this every time, but it's only because I'm so grateful that I have the opportunity to.
I really do believe, I don't think it's really in question, that you have done more to spread the philosophy of natural rights theory, of sound economic theory, and of peace and of the normalcy of peace and the insistence that war must only be the gravest exception in defense of our rights and this kind of thing.
And you've done more to to push this stuff and to change the world, to orient the world that way, really, than anyone, I think, in world history, and certainly for the rest of all of our lifetimes.
And so I feel very privileged to have a chance to talk with you again.
Thank you.
Very good.
Nice to be with you today.
All right, y'all.
That is the heroic Ron Paul.
He wrote a ton of great books, and especially, of course, A Foreign Policy of Freedom and Swords and Plowshares for our purposes.
Check him out at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, of course, and at ronpaullibertyreport.com.
That's the Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org, for all the Archive's 4,000-something interviews there, going back to 2003.
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