All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Doug Bondo.
When you pronounce it correctly, it's Bondo, I found out.
Allies are supposed to help the U.S., but Americans always do the paying, ain't that the way?
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
How you doing?
Happy to be on.
Well, you know what?
I'm happy to have you here, but even more than that, I am so happy that you are writing for antiwar.com again.
It is just great to have you right there in our lineup as a regular columnist.
So am I.
Luckily, things worked out, so it was nice to reconnect.
Yeah, man, and it's always such great stuff, man.
So yeah, including this one.
Allies are supposed to help the U.S., but I don't know.
It seems like, as Justin Romano used to like to quote Garrett Garett, saying, in the American empire, everything goes out, nothing comes back.
And I guess we do get to export our inflation, so there's a bit of an advantage there.
But mostly, the whole empire is at the expense of the American people for the benefit of, I guess, narrow interests, but never really the national interest, right?
It is very strange.
Past empires, you'd think they did it because they wanted to get rich by stealing from everybody else.
We pay everybody else.
So Americans pay basically to get them to be our allies, then we pay to protect them.
It's a constant payout on the America's part, which makes no sense if you really want to be an empire.
Yeah.
Which, I don't think you're recommending just loot everybody for their gold.
At least that would make sense.
No, that's the point is, if you want to be an emperor, I'd want to have fun.
I'd want to use my power as opposed to, I'm going to be an emperor and then pay everybody else for the privilege.
That doesn't strike me as being a very good deal.
All right.
Well, so I was talking with your buddy, Ted Carpenter, earlier on the show about Russia, and one of the things we were talking about is whether or not they are intent on dominating Eastern Europe, maybe even literally invading and occupying it, and whether America needs to rally our NATO alliance in order to keep them at bay, or whether all that's all a bunch of nonsense.
What do you think?
Well, I don't see any evidence that Putin is a fool.
If you invade Eastern Europe, number one, he'd have a very hard time swallowing it, and he'd be starting a real war.
I've seen nothing to suggest that he has any interest in that.
I think they have fairly limited ambitions.
I call them pre-1914 great powers, like Imperial Russia.
Respect our borders.
Treat us with respect.
Don't screw with us.
But yeah, the guy's been in power longer than Adolf Hitler, and his empire, if you want to call it that, is what, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, the Donbass?
This is a guy who wants to prevent us from going after him, and I think that's far more his concern.
Yeah.
The expansion of NATO, everything else that's been going on.
He's trying to keep us at bay.
Yeah.
That's funny.
In fact, even the Donbass begged to be absorbed into Russia, and he said no.
He helped them keep the Kiev government out, but he refused their referendum to join the Russian Federation.
See, I think he has a sense of what you want to swallow and what you don't want to swallow.
Crimea was historically part of Russia.
No surprise about that.
He didn't want to lose the base in Sebastopol.
Majority of people there wanted to be back in Russia.
This is a nice way to kind of slap back at the US and Europe.
The idea of the Donbass, I mean, this is a mess.
A lot of people there don't want to go with Russia.
I mean, it's got a mix of folks.
Why would you want to take that on?
You help people out, cause a little trouble, but the last thing he wants to do is bring it all inside his own.
Yeah.
And, you know, Eric Margulies, back when the war was breaking out in the first place back in 2014, even in fact, maybe in 2013 before the coup, was pointing out about how much the East had to lose with a trade deal with the EU.
They had these old decrepit industries that only survived through this massive protection of unfree trade with the rest of Europe and how they were just certain to be absolutely against the new order here and would be insistent on rejecting it.
But that's the same reason that Russia didn't want them, is because they were going to cost a lot more than they were going to gain from absorbing those areas with the industries that that dated back to the Soviet era.
Now, it's a very strange situation where the difficulty, I think, the big difficulty is for Americans to be able to put themselves in anybody else's shoes.
I mean, I just like to use the example, imagine if the Soviets showed up, deposed the elected president of Mexico, you know, demanded that Mexico reoriented all of its economic trade to let to Russia and Russia supported states in Latin America and also to join the Warsaw Pact.
I mean, Americans would go nuts.
So, I mean, I don't justify what Putin did.
He's a nasty guy, but that isn't the point.
This is not a guy who has any going to pose as any threat to the U.S.
He's not going to attack America.
I mean, again, he's not a fool.
They'd lose the war and they'd lose it dramatically.
Yeah.
You know, they always demonizing by talking about what a sociopath he is, but I think that's great.
Sorry, audience.
I'm sure I'm repeating myself from some other interview or something, but isn't it wonderful that this guy doesn't have emotions?
What if he had emotions?
We might be in real trouble right now for all of the smack that America's been talking, all the things that America's been doing to essentially, you know, repay them with unkindness for everything they've done for us in this century so far.
Which is a lot, right?
From the Afghan war to twisting the Ayatollah's arm for us, to preventing war in Syria, you know, full war in Syria, all that.
That's one of the great ironies, of course, is that Russia alone was helpful for us in Afghanistan, providing logistic support and other stuff.
I mean, it's not like they like Islamic radicals, but the whole question about are they paying bounties in terms of American soldiers there?
Well, the U.S. is providing javelin anti-tank missiles for Ukraine, which are going to be used to kill either Russians or ethnic Russians supported by Russia.
And of course, the U.S. provided lots of weapons during the war when the Soviet Union was there.
So this is what governments do to one another.
We did it.
And I presume Americans would be horrified to think if Russia said, well, that's an act of war, we're going to attack you.
But now if we think somebody else has done it to us, we're outraged.
It's this kind of sanctimony that I find extraordinary.
Yeah.
And now, I guess, I'm not sure if you live right in D.C., but I know you live somewhere near it.
I wonder if- I'm in Virginia, south of D.C.
So I mean, you can sort of take the temperature.
Are these people completely crazy?
It's just what they call the information bubble from being in power and having only a few people who agree with you around and this kind of thing.
Because it seems like they're so bad at taking over the world, and yet they don't know that.
It doesn't seem, you know?
The problem is that when it comes to international issues, there really is a group think.
I think part of it's self-selection.
Part of it's like you don't get appointed to high position.
You're not going to get a big academic position if you don't essentially say what everybody says.
So when you come in, I mean, we have a few academics out there, not an awful lot of them, and they get attacked an awful lot, who are willing to talk differently.
But so many folks, especially if you want to be in government, you've got to believe that America is kind of an international virgin.
You've got to believe America, the exceptionalism.
I mean, all of these things that everything the U.S. does, of course, is wonderful and for the good, and everything everybody else does is evil.
And that's just the way it's framed.
And no one ever steps back and tries to flip it around.
And that obviously is a big problem, because we assume, why don't the Russians love us?
They must be evil.
It's like, well, no, maybe what we're doing causes the Russians some real problems.
But we just have trouble trying to figure that out.
Yeah.
It's like even the most obvious and terrible, horrible thing, like Iraq War II, they go, well, you know, we made a mistake, I guess.
But never really would they question the premise of, should America dominate the Middle East or shouldn't it?
And they wouldn't even question that.
Especially because none of them were ever held accountable.
So you come up with this policy that gets hundreds of thousands of people killed, and you say, oh, well, that's too bad.
Well, next time we'll do better.
I mean, Samantha Power gave an interview for the Financial Times and complained, all these people are throwing Iraq in our face, you know, but we might not, that'll prevent us from doing some important things.
I mean, you just want to say stop.
I mean, have you ever admitted you were wrong?
Have you ever admitted the horror that you created?
I mean, we have ISIS because of the invasion.
Iran has greater authority because of the invasion.
Religious minorities were decimated because of the invasion.
I mean, hundreds of thousands of people died because of the invasion.
And you're just kind of dismissing it as well.
You shouldn't take it that seriously.
Right.
It's an incredible attitude.
And I mean, think of the year 2011, where we still got American GIs in Iraq allied with the Shia, fighting the remnants of the very last of what had been al-Qaeda in Iraq there.
But in the beginning of that year, Obama started backing the Libyan and Syrian veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq in their revolutions in their country at the very same time.
So if there was one lesson of Iraq, if there was only one, it was, boy, these Bin Ladenite type militias can be pretty dangerous.
If there was two, then you got to include that, oops, gave the east to Iran too.
And really that helped radicalize the Sunni population even worse, this kind of thing.
But for them to turn around and back the Bin Ladenites in Libya and Syria just at the time they're killing Osama, they're taking his side in two wars when, you know, George Bush had only been out of power just a couple of years at that point.
And that's the kind of thing you would think at some point that there would be some kind of maybe not self-criticism, but finger pointing and blaming of each other by these people for the kind of chaos that they've wrought pursuing these kinds of policies, you know.
And the problem is that they all understand that to get ahead, they have to hold this position.
So, you know, they can argue over, you know, some issues, so you can actually argue against going into Iraq at the start and probably get away with it.
But if you attack people too heavily for the result, you know, they're going to say, obviously you're an isolationist and everything else.
And so many of them backed it, you know, who, it's very hard to criticize it when in fact you were for it as well.
So you're reduced to saying, well, I figured it out earlier than somebody else.
Well, no, it's far better to say nothing, right.
Or to say, oh, that was a tragic mistake, but let's just move on.
You know, nothing to see here.
Move on.
Right.
In fact, I read something by Andrew McCarthy in the National Review where he says, I've been against the Iraq war since 2004.
Yeah.
OK.
And it did read exactly like you're saying.
Yeah.
It would have been better if you just we all know that you're guilty for supporting that thing, man.
Just leave it at that.
Yeah.
That's nothing to boast about.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Although, in fact, grading on a curve, maybe it is if it's even true, which I doubt, but assuming it's true, actually, that does make him less worse than a lot on that issue if he wised up even that late compared to you and me.
But look, I think if he took a public stand against it early.
Right.
That would be different.
Then that's you get some credit.
I mean, Bill Buckley did that.
I mean, at a time when his acolytes and the people who took over the National Review from him still supported it.
He wrote a column that basically said, you know, if we were a parliamentary system, Bush would be out of office.
This is a disaster.
And it was great because it caused some real discomfort among all these people who were kind of his, you know, his followers, because he was saying what the rest of us knew.
I mean, this had been a catastrophe.
Of course, it had no impact.
And the guy stays in office and all the people around him, you know, I mean, Wolfowitz goes to the World Bank.
I mean, you fail and you get promoted.
I mean, you know, this is the rest of us.
We'd be held accountable, but not them.
Hey, I'll check it out.
The Libertarian Institute, that's me and my friends, have published three great books this year.
First is No Quarter, the ravings of William Norman Grigg.
He was the best one of us.
Now he's gone, but this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom.
I know you'll love it.
Then there's Coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richman.
It's a collection of 40 important essays he's written over the years about the truth behind the Israel-Palestine conflict.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
And last but not least is The Great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton Show Interviews, 2004-2019.
Interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state, and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
Find them all at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
Hey, you guys may know I'm involved in some Libertarian Party politics this year, but you can't hear or read about that at the Libertarian Institute due to 501c3 rules and such.
So make sure to sign up for the interviews feed at scotthorton.org and keep an eye on my blog at scotthorton.org slash stress.
Hey y'all, Scott here.
If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school, but should have.
Follow through from the link in the margin at scotthorton.org for Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
All right, so now what about China?
Because this is one, unlike Iran or Iraq or Libya or Syria or North Korea, this is a country that actually is really big and makes a lot of money.
I mean, Iran's GDP is comparable to like New Jersey or something, right?
But China, they are a plausible global competitor to the United States, if you yell it at me loud enough.
Maybe I'd be scared, Doug.
So maybe what's going on there is not Washington's fault.
Maybe it's just Beijing's fault.
They are, you know, the communist totalitarian dictatorship, after all.
Well, look, I think it's important to essentially say two different things.
One is this is an evil regime.
And I mean, it's particularly because of Xi Jinping.
You know, there are differences among communist rulers.
The guys that preceded him weren't people we'd view as very nice, but it was a much looser kind of authoritarian system.
I mean, there really were.
I mean, the Cato Institute worked with a group called the Unirule Institute.
We gave them the Friedman Prize back like 2012 or something.
I mean, it was headed by actually the guy's name was Mao, not related to the evil Mao, but Mao Yuxi, but very good in promoting free markets, pushing for economic reform.
And they're always very careful.
They never attack the Communist Party.
That was always the red line you couldn't get away with.
But we can openly hold conferences with them.
And they got closed down last year.
I was actually in China.
I went by what was their last office.
They were pushed out of the first two.
They were off in an apartment way out in the suburbs.
And the government shut down their license.
And they actually refused to let the executive director travel to America.
Yeah, I mean, and that just showed the current regime allows no, I mean, absolutely no criticism, no independent thought.
And we see this in many areas.
I mean, the religious persecution is very, very harsh, much tighter Internet controls.
And what we're seeing in Hong Kong and they basically are going to turn Hong Kong into any other Chinese city.
This national security law is worse than anyone expected.
It's very ambiguous.
It can be applied to anybody.
You can be dragged to China, thrown in jail there.
They technically apply it around the world.
I mean, my my criticism of China technically could violate the law.
So if I travel through Hong Kong or Beijing, I could be arrested.
Probably won't happen.
But so I think we want to criticize the regime and say, you know, this is the ultimate of nasty regimes.
On the other hand, number one, war would be really, really stupid.
We don't want that.
Number two, the future is not certain.
I mean, this is a country that has huge economic problems, massive demographic problems, an aging population, an overhang of property bubble, bad loans.
I mean, this is a place that really could go through a wrenching, wrenching problems.
So it's not the 800 pound gorilla.
And it doesn't want war.
And the future also, it's uncertain in the sense that Xi Jinping will die.
He's a human being and things could change rapidly.
He's a very different guy than the person before him in 2012.
You know, once he's gone, we could see a rapid change.
Mao Zedong, the bad guy, died.
And Deng Xiaoping, not a liberal when it came to politics, but radically changed everything else.
Economic reform.
I mean, personal autonomy.
I mean, there's a time you'd have to get government permission to get married.
You know, all of that swept away.
So I think we want to we want to play the long game and we have to be very careful.
I think it's the other areas we're going to want to push back on.
But we want to make sure we don't inflame nationalism.
We don't personally insult them.
We don't try to humiliate them.
Young people that I've spoken at universities, they're a lot young Chinese want to be free, but they're nationalists.
So if in effect you tell them they have to choose between the U.S. government, the Chinese government, they choose the Chinese government.
So you don't want to kind of attack China as an entity for them.
What you want to do is empower them to the extent you can get information to them, engage them.
The idea of refusing to have students come to America is the most monumentally dumb thing this administration could do.
I mean, what better can you do that?
You immerse students in America, not just Chinese, but around the world.
I mean, I've met Arab students.
They come to America.
They love it.
They tell me how much they love American beer.
And I say, oh, is that, you know, kind of a beer without alcohol?
This is special Islamic beer.
The point is, we want to recognize China is very difficult to deal with because it's so powerful and big, but it's also very delicate.
If we want a good outcome, we have to be careful what we do.
And, you know, the administration wants to use it for political purposes.
Well, that's the worst thing you can do.
Yeah.
It's going to be a race to the bottom.
Right.
Yeah, it seems like they could just find some other issue to exploit than the yellow peril.
Oh, man, it can be really hard to climb down from that kind of thing, you know, just as we're seeing with the Democrats I do into Russia.
Same.
That's right.
But now.
So what about this?
Right.
It seems to me like if China didn't exist, the American empire is still falling apart anyway.
And, you know, the high point was Iraq 2003 and everything has fallen apart after that.
And so now you have like a real emotional problem on the part, those same D.C. people who only believe each other's agreements and stuff that this has got to be somebody's fault other than theirs.
Of course, it can't be because of their Middle East wars and all the chaos they created there.
So and then here now is China, which, you know, regardless of America's policies in the Middle East is certainly rising.
As you say, they have their Ponzi problems and everything else.
But they're certainly rising in relative power compared to themselves 10 and 20 and 30 years ago.
It's unbelievable the amount of economic growth and therefore power that they've gained there.
And so I guess the question is, how much of this is just an emotional problem on the part of the individual kind of members of the Washington blob that they just sort of project this giant threat onto China that as we're falling, this rising great power is going to take our place and dominate the world if we don't stop them.
We have to make this last ditch effort to hem them in before it's too late.
Doug, that kind of thing.
Right.
Well, I think the basic problem is the starting point.
I like to joke that American foreign policy basically is we apply the Monroe Doctrine to the entire world.
You know, the original Monroe Doctrine said America dominates the Western Hemisphere, Europeans stay out.
But basically, our position now is we get to dominate every continent and we should be able to defeat every country on its border.
If that's your perspective, then China is a big problem because China doesn't have to have 10 or 11 carrier groups like we do.
China just has to be able to sink our carriers.
And that's a lot easier.
I mean, it's still not easy.
I mean, carriers are kind of phenomenal creatures.
They have a lot of ships around them.
Nevertheless, you look at it, we have to steam our carriers thousands of miles away to the Chinese coast.
Well, they're pretty vulnerable.
So it costs a lot to do that.
We're used to doing that.
So we've spent the last, you know, however many years, certainly the last quarter century after the destruction of the Soviet Union, the unipower, you know, I mean, all the hype that went into that.
So I think there's a big problem.
Folks are sitting in Washington saying, wait a minute, weren't we supposed to determine whether Russia, you know, could have a war with Georgia?
And aren't we supposed to determine whether, you know, who owns what island and, you know, little atoll and rock piece of rock in the Asia-Pacific?
And so I think that's causing almost a mental breakdown in Washington because their view is we're supposed to do all that stuff.
They're used to it.
That's that's the order.
And China's going to destroy that.
So it's not that China's threat.
I tell people China's not going to attack Hawaii.
I mean, the issue is, are we prepared to go to war to make sure we dominate East Asia, that we dominate the Asia-Pacific, that we dominate the territorial waters right off China?
That is a big ask.
I mean, and imagine how the Chinese feel.
Imagine if the Chinese sent their ships up and down the eastern seaboard into the Caribbean and they told us what we could do towards Cuba.
And, you know, Beijing had a lot of discussion about the potential of war with America.
I mean, Americans wouldn't just sit there and say, oh, that's OK.
The Chinese are nice people.
Americans will say, well, maybe we better build some stuff.
We can make sure they can't do that.
So I think that's really animating people.
I mean, you know, they're not fools, but it's your starting point.
If your worldview is we should dominate the world, anything that undermines that is seen as a threat.
And then now people talk about vital interests as if it's vital that we decide whether or not the Philippines or China controlled Scarborough Reef.
Quite honestly, it doesn't matter.
Right.
Probably nicer from our standpoint if it's the Philippines, which is kind of a half-failed state, but generally friendly towards us.
But certainly no reason for us to go to war or get terribly excited.
Well, and, you know, again, to back to sort of the denial on the part of the people in D.C. running the empire here and back to the Iraq War, too, that if they're going to if the USA is going to be the world government to enforce the liberal world order, as they call it, it's a big planet.
They need the consent of the governed.
They need for even, you know, states like, say, India that are big enough to be independent from us or in China and Russia, for that matter, to figure that more or less going along with what America wants is in their interest and certainly more than trying to come up with another world order to replace the American one.
And yet.
It's not really liberal in the good sense, this world order, is it?
I mean, it's capitalism is completely corrupt and it's, you know, democracy just means aggressive war against tyrants who have fallen out of favor as opposed to tyrants who are loyal clients and this kind of thing.
So why would any why would they expect that anyone else would go along with it at this point?
It ain't like it played out the way that they thought it was all going to.
Iraq was going to be a shining city on the hill for the rest of the Middle East to follow that.
Boy, doing what America says is definitely the way to go.
But it just didn't play out that way.
Right.
They still don't know that, though.
Well, they keep saying, don't worry, this time we'll get it right.
I mean, that's the kind of fun, fun aspect of is it really doesn't matter how bad they do because trust us next time.
I mean, that's kind of I mentioned Samantha Power.
I mean, this idea that why are you blaming us for Iraq?
Why would you look at Iraq and say we shouldn't be able to do it again?
Right.
You know, all these great things we've we've just got to do.
Don't you understand that?
Right.
So they don't see this as undermining their purpose.
That was just a glitch.
Right.
We all know they're all social engineers.
I mean, it's Madeleine Albright.
I mean, Madeleine Albright is the epitome of this.
You know, we she once said we stand taller.
We see further.
And she believes that despite the disaster, you know, we look at the last 20 years in the Middle East and you want to run screaming from the room.
But she says, you know, America is so smart.
You know, and then, you know, how about the death of a half million Iraqi babies?
Well, we think the price is worth it.
And then to Colin Powell, she says, what's the use of having this great military if we don't use it?
I mean, his next line in his autobiography was I almost had an aneurysm.
I mean, this is a guy who, you know, whether you like him or not, I mean, you know, he had soldiers under him in Vietnam and they died.
He understands what war is.
Yeah.
So I think I think that kind of attitude permeates Washington.
So people don't even understand that the positions they take are ridiculous because everybody they deal with shares those visions.
And, you know, as much as I complained about it, I never thought of it from China's point of view, looking at the way that George W.
Bush pushed North Korea to nuclear weapons, that that must have been like the absolute slowest motion crazy train wreck taking place in their eyes, right in front of their face, that here's a country that we had a perfectly good deal with.
And Bush abrogates the deal, threatens them in their nuclear posture of view and adds all these sanctions and threatens them with John Bolton, hires John Bolton to threaten them until they finally decide, OK, fine, I guess we'll make atom bombs then.
And I've always complained about that, but I never thought about how bad that must have looked from Beijing, that you guys are the world police, right?
You know, you guys are the ones that we're supposed to cede the world orders diktats to because you see you stand so much taller and see so much further.
Huh?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's definitely that's the great irony is that, you know, we criticize the Chinese for not helping us on China, you know, but they criticize what we do.
And frankly, if you look at it honestly, you have to say there's an awful lot to be said for their criticisms.
I mean, they look at this and saying, you guys have any conception of what you're going to result in?
And the answer was, well, no, actually, American officials just never imagined this.
I mean, obviously, if we order the North what to do, everything will work out fine, right?
Because everybody's supposed to do what we told them.
Yeah, everybody knows that somebody should dig up that Kim Jong Il and tell him to do what he stole.
Exactly.
That's supposed to work.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry I've already kept you over time, but I just love to talk to you so much.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show, Doug.
Always great to talk to you, Scott.
And again, it's really great to have you back around at Antiwar.com, too.
Hey, thanks.
I appreciate that.
I'm really glad to be there.
All right, you guys, that is the great Doug Bondo.
He is a whatever, senior fellow or something or other like that at the Cato Institute.
And again, writing for us at original.antiwar.com slash Doug dash Banda Bondo.
Spell it like Banda.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio Dotcom, Antiwar Dotcom, Scott Horton Dotorg and Libertarian Institute Dotorg.
