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, lucky me and you.
I got Ted Snyder on the line.
Welcome back to the show.
Ted, how you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Great, man.
Happy to have you here.
You guys know Ted writes regularly for us at antiwar.com.
This one is called Donald Trump and the Art of Betrayal.
And I admit that sometimes I get so distracted hating the Democrats, I forget to hate the Republicans in equal measure for a couple of days.
I got to catch back up again and even things out.
Donald Trump's a really lousy president, especially in terms of foreign policy, isn't he?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But Joe Biden is really bad.
So people, a lot of people want to think, hey, but you know, I don't know, at least he's not as bad as Biden or somebody.
Yeah, that ain't really right.
I think it'll be interesting to see which foreign policies to which countries change and which foreign policies to which countries don't.
There might be some change in some and very little change in most.
The one, the thing that really interested me in the foreign policy ones that I focus on in my article wasn't just like the bad foreign policy, like America's done a lot of bad things to different countries over the last four years.
The ones that I singled out on this were ones where it wasn't just the bad things that had done to countries, but it was countries that specific promises had been made to and those specific promises got betrayed.
So like there was a coup in Bolivia, but Trump never promised there wouldn't be a coup in Bolivia.
Right.
And there was like attempted coup in Venezuela, but no one had promised there wouldn't be attempted coup in Venezuela.
But in the foreign policy countries that I focused on, there were promises made.
And that's why I chose the words are to betrayal that weren't just bad foreign policy.
They were specifically betrayals.
Right.
And especially, let's start with Iran, just like you do in this article here.
I mean, this is the biggest, dumbest, worst thing this president has done in four years, I think.
Yeah.
And in some ways, the other betrayals I talked about are all linked back to this one.
So it's not only the biggest one, it's kind of the focal one.
But yeah, here, here you get a situation where, where Trump comes into power after the previous administration had, you know, worked to deal with Iran, the JCPOA, you know, nuclear agreement.
And it's all done.
And it's really pretty simple.
I mean, it's a really complicated, long agreement, but it's really pretty simple.
Iran had to honor its agreements to restrain its civilian nuclear program.
And as long as they did, America would relieve sanctions, and America could only snap back sanctions if Iran was out of compliance.
So all, all Trump had to do is, is honor that deal.
Because Iran was in compliance.
11 straight assessments had shown that they were completely in compliance.
And yet Trump broke America's word.
And even though Iran was in compliance, he pulled out of the treaty, put the world back into, you know, this dangerous situation.
And that was, that was a huge betrayal.
The hardliners in Iran had, had warned that it was naive to trust America.
They'd said that it was a betrayal.
Iran completely kept its word.
America didn't keep its word.
So the Iranian hardliners were right.
Trump betrayed them.
That was a huge one.
Right?
Well, and the thing of it is, we've got to mention here that they weren't making nukes in the first place.
And this whole thing was essentially, it's not that it was irrelevant.
It was essentially superfluous.
But it had a real purpose, because they were already members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, of course, and the safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
But what it did was it took the fake threat that maybe Iran is making nukes because somehow the world has never, the Americans and the media have never heard of the Non-Proliferation Treaty before.
So they were pretending that, oh no, Iran might make nuclear weapons.
And this, as superfluous as it was from, from my point of view, and possibly from yours, what it did do is take that fake narrative off the table.
And now there's no way to pretend that they might be making nukes, because we double extra verified they're not.
And so now they're already, they're leaking again.
Well, geez, we think they might have a secret nuclear program.
Oh, really?
Huh?
No, Scott, I think that's right.
And I think, I think the second thing it took off the table, the other consequence it had is that it had reached the point where the choice was nuclear treaty or war.
And so although it's completely superfluous, because Iran didn't have a nuclear program, it also avoided a war with Iran.
So it was a huge deal.
To be specific there, they didn't have a nuclear weapons program.
I just want to make sure nobody's confused about what you meant there.
So all over the article, that's why I consistently say that they had to have limitations on their civilian nuclear program.
Iran never had a nuclear program.
They have no intent in a nuclear program.
This was, this was Israeli and American propaganda to keep Iran isolated, to try to force regime change in Iran.
Although there was no nuclear program, there was no danger of nuclear war, it had escalated to a dangerous situation where there could be a war.
And that treaty took that war off the table.
It's not only that Iran didn't have a nuclear program, and it's not only that Iran was already signatory to the Nonproliferation Treaty, you know, Iran was also signatory to agreements to make the Middle East nuclear free zones.
In a way, the fastest way to solve the problem would have been to declare the whole place a nuclear free zone and Iran signatory to that.
And Obama and Kerry and others had worked out this agreement, relations between Iran and the States were probably the best they've been since the 79 revolution.
And Trump was the inheritor of this really enviable position.
And all he had to do was keep America's word.
And Iran kept their word, and Trump broke America's word.
And that was the sort of first really huge act of betrayal during the Trump administration.
Hey, let me pretend to be ignorant and ask you, what could possibly be the problem with just declaring a nuclear free zone in the Middle East?
Well, the problem with declaring a nuclear free zone in the Middle East is that the United States has to sign on to that.
But that would mean making Israel a nuclear free zone, and the United States is never going to allow the Middle East to make any kind of treaty that threatens Israel's nuclear program.
So the real threat to nuclear crisis in the Middle East is not Iran, who's willing to sign this.
It's the United States and Israel.
The whole reason to do this is to protect Israel's nuclear program.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then, of course, you know, I don't know, man, how common this is.
I don't think this is very common at all that you would have, I mean, I guess you had junior repudiating Reagan and his father's treaties with Russia.
But it's pretty rare, right, that you have a president get elected and immediately repudiated treaty was sort of a pseudo treaty that had been negotiated by your predecessor that way.
And I guess he had run on he hated it, and it was the worst deal that had ever been signed in history and all these things.
So yeah, he hadn't quite sworn to get out of it.
But there were strong indications he was going to in the in the campaign.
In a way, you know, he's really breaking America's word there that Obama, not just Obama, but in the name of the United States government, made a deal with the Ayatollah that, look, man, you pour concrete into the Iraq reactor, you expand all your inspections and lower the amount of low enriched uranium in your stockpile.
And we got a deal, OK?
And then Trump comes in and he ruins that for no good reason at all.
As you said, the Iranians were in compliance.
But it isn't just that.
It's that there was no other compelling reason to do this at all other than Netanyahu didn't like it.
Because, again, because it made it clear that you can't even lie on the Iranians that they're making nuclear bombs now because no one will believe you, not even The Washington Times will pretend to believe that they're making nukes under the JCPOA.
And nobody will believe you when you sign a treaty from now on either.
And and that's part of the consequence of the breaking the word is, you know, all of a sudden you've got North Korea saying, well, what happens if we give up our nukes and give everything to the states and they didn't keep the word to Iran, why would they keep the word to us?
You get you get all of Europe questioning.
Can we join into partnerships?
Can we trust the states?
Can we rely on the states?
And and that's that's a foreign policy nightmare.
I mean, I mean, this is a whole other topic.
But but one of the central pieces of American foreign policy since World War Two has been to keep Europe sort of aligned with America through NATO and not aligned with Russia.
And now all of a sudden you get this situation where Europe's saying we can't enter treaties with the states.
We can't trust America to defend us.
And you get you get situations in the Middle East now where you get, you know, the Europeans partnering with Russia in negotiations, not with America.
So the consequences of America breaking its word and this happened when, you know, that the Kurdish one that we'll probably talk about soon, too, is that the consequences of America breaking its word was this massive international distrust about whether you can deal with America, whether you can make contracts with America.
So now no one thinks Iran had a nuclear bomb.
Iran comes off looking like the completely trustworthy international player.
And America is the rogue state that that breaks agreements.
And so the consequences were actually, I think, enormous.
Well, and, you know, look, before we get to the Kurdish question, which is an important one here to address, and you do a great job of addressing it in your article.
But I want to stick with Korea that you mentioned there for a minute, because he really betrayed Kim Jong-un, too.
He promised Kim that, look, we are going to negotiate a peace here.
We're going to do this.
Here's a photo up.
I'll shake your hand.
I'll cross the border, the barrier into North Korea and do all this.
And at the beginning, it was clear and his own State Department guy, highest level negotiator, Stephen Biegun, gave a speech explaining about how this is going to work.
The only way this is going to work is we've got to make peace first and we have to put denuclearization not last, but lower on the list.
We know we've got to give the North Koreans a reason to really believe, because it's true that we're friends now and they don't need nukes to keep us at bay because our relationship just isn't like that.
It's like South Korea doesn't need nukes to keep us out because they're not afraid of us either because we're friends.
And then they went back on that.
And in fact, the national security adviser, John Bolton, invoked Obama's betrayal of Bush's deal with Qaddafi and said, yeah, what we're looking for is something along the lines of the Libyan model where Qaddafi gave up all of his nuclear equipment.
Not that he really had a program up and running, but his rudimentary program.
And then he got just with the next president.
Not only did he get his deal broken, he got lynched, raped with a bayonet.
And shot in the side of the head on the side of the road, like a Saigon spy.
Yeah, it was totally clear what needed to be done in the North Korean agreement.
And as you said, they needed to make peace first.
And the North Koreans had said all along and with really good reason that they do feel a threat from America, that the nuclear program is only a deterrent against that threat, that they need security guarantees from the states and they would happily give up the nuclear program.
And all they wanted was, you know, as they give up a bit, America has to give up a bit.
It had to be sort of proportional.
But when Trump went in after all the early talk and just said, you've got to give up the whole thing before we negotiate, then there's North Korea.
Why would we give up our only defense against a belligerent enemy before we have any guarantees it won't be a belligerent enemy?
And then you put the Qaddafi thing on that and you put in that they had just broken their word to Iran.
So we give up our nuclear program and then you betray us.
We're vulnerable.
It was it was it was it was a mess.
And it was something that that probably could have been done and wasn't.
And you're right.
I could have I could have included that on my list to betrayals as well.
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All right.
So tell us all about the Kurds here.
This is a complicated one, but I know that you got the right wisdom on it.
So so the the Kurdish situation was was nasty.
And, you know, there's a there's a there's a long history of this.
And, you know, the Kurds are historically aware and they think what what happened is in the in the very complicated war in Syria, which I just can never keep track of who's fighting who because everybody seems to be fighting everybody.
And and America couldn't find any sort of reliable ally to to fight in Syria until they found the Kurds.
So so they find the Kurds who make this really solid alliance with the states over a five year period of the Syrian war.
Kurdish fighters lose Syrian, just Syrian Kurdish fighters lose.
I think it's about eleven thousand people are killed in the war.
So they they make a massive sacrifice helping the states fight.
And they knew that there would come a time when their value to America would run out.
They knew the war would end and that the states would not need the Kurds.
And they'd be nervous about siding with the Kurds against the Turks.
And what the Kurds fully expected, because they've been told this by the Americans, what they fully expected is, is, yeah, we're going to leave Syria.
Of course, you leave Syria, you should leave Syria, never should have been in Syria.
But we're not going to leave Syria until we've negotiated a diplomatic environment in which your security within the Syrian political system is guaranteed.
So this was not a dichotomy.
People phrase those questions dichotomy.
It was like, do you leave Syria or do you protect the Kurds?
And the answer is both.
You leave Syria and you protect the Kurds by leaving Syria in a state where the Kurds are protected.
And that could have been done.
It could have been easily.
But instead of doing that, Trump redeployed troops from northeast Syria.
He stepped out of the way and green lighted a Turkish invasion because the Turks don't want a Kurdish state on their border because they're worried about their own Kurdish problem in Turkey.
So Trump pulls back the troops.
He greenlights a Turkish invasion and he greenlights a Turkish invasion that he knows full well will lead to ethnic cleansing.
So he greenlights an ethnic cleansing of the Turks, sorry, of the Kurds.
The Kurds knew that Trump would leave.
They knew they'd betray him.
But they were stunned by the rapidity of the withdrawal and by the brutality withdrawal where they just stepped aside and allowed this Turkish ethnic cleansing.
And I don't want to make this like more ambiguous as it is.
It's not that Trump redeployed the troops and then, uh-oh, this collateral, this unexpected thing is an ethnic cleansing.
You know, Trump said we fought with the alongside the Kurds for like four years.
He said we never agreed to stay there.
There's no agreement.
We have to protect them.
He knew he wasn't protecting them.
He knew there was going to be a cleansing.
And then I guess the most sort of stunning piece of evidence on this.
And it's one of those things that when I came across it, I was, I was, it's a shock because it's one of those so stunning things is that there is an American diplomat in northeast Syria.
He's a State Department official.
His name is William Roebuck.
I don't know if I'm saying his name right.
I think it's Roebuck, William Roebuck.
And he writes a secret memo to the State Department.
So this is from Syria, right to Washington.
And it's one of those ones, it reminds me of some of the Latin American coups where there's like papers that were sent back.
There's called like, you know, the coup unfolding, you know, is there any ambiguity?
So his paper to the State Department is called, this is the title.
It's called present at the catastrophe standing by as Turks cleanse Kurds in Northern Syria.
So, so he's telling them there's going to be an ethnic cleansing.
And in the memo, and I'm actually quoting the memo now because I'm prepared.
I've been sitting here.
He says, he says, Turkey, Turkey's military operation, northeast Syria spearheaded by armed Islamist groups on this payroll represents an effort at ethnic cleansing.
So he's telling the White House that what you're doing right now is greenlighting, not an invasion.
You're greenlighting an ethnic cleansing.
And the other interesting thing in there, Scott, is notice his words spearheaded by armed Islamist groups, because when the Turkish army came in.
In front of the Turkish army was a twenty five thousand strong Syrian army made up of former ISIS and Al-Qaeda fighters who hated the Kurds.
Because the Kurds are moderate rebels to you, sir.
No, I'm sorry.
No, you're right.
There are a bunch of bin Laden night suicide bomber murderers sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher in New York City.
Right.
Yeah.
The CIA's men, Obama's men.
And they're not sympathetic to Al-Qaeda.
They're actually former ISIS, Al-Qaeda fighters who have been retrained by the Turks to come in and cleanse the Kurds.
And in Roebuck's memo, he really clearly says that he knows these Syrian National Army fighters.
He says they're former ISIS and Al-Qaeda fighters.
So this wasn't an accident.
Trump, Trump opened the door to a Turkish force that included Al-Qaeda and ISIS fighters who had the declared intention of moving out one hundred and ninety thousand Kurds and relocating them.
And we talked about this.
I'm pretty sure you and I talked about this on the show at the time, too.
And every, you know, antiwar person was saying the same thing, which is that hell, yes, we got to get out of there yesterday.
Not not very carefully and slowly after a good victory like Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi talking about Afghanistan.
We need to get the hell out of there right now.
But that doesn't mean you tell Erdogan, by all means, please go ahead.
And especially when the alternative was obvious right there.
And that is to go ahead and admit.
And look, Obama's gone.
It was his stupid policy.
Go ahead and admit Obama failed.
Assad won the war.
And the solution here is to let Assad's Syrian Arab army come in and occupy the border area between Turkey and the Kurds, too.
And so an Erdogan can be instructed that, look, no matter how much you don't like Assad, he will keep the Kurds.
He promises to keep the Kurds from backing the PKK or giving PKK fighters safe haven or anything like that with guess what?
The army of the nation state of Syria.
And then that was the solution right there.
It didn't have to be Turkish fighters and Al-Qaeda terrorists to come in there.
It could have been the Syrian GD army, which we had no business supporting the terrorists against in the first place.
That's right.
And there would have been there would have been powerful help available to the Syrians.
Russia was on board with this.
The states had promised to be on board with this.
America had all kinds of leverage over Turkey to ensure this happened, including billions of dollars of arms to Turkey.
Intelligence cooperation with Turkey.
I mean, there was all kinds of ways the states could have could have made Turkey.
And they're still in Syria anyway.
They didn't even leave Syria.
They just went south, occupied the oil fields, redeployed.
Yeah.
And when Trump tried to order them out, his orders were countermanded twice.
Look, look, Scott, the only thing Trump was probably right about in this whole situation is that he needed to get the troops out of Syria.
And not as I point this out in my article, it's not just on moral or foreign policy grounds.
Really good people have argued that the decision to get out just on facts on the ground grounds was that you needed to get out that that that the situation was really being controlled by Russia and Iran.
Now that the states had a small force surrounded by a really powerful armies that they'd already lost.
And in order to stay in Syria, Trump would have had to have deployed massive new trumps into Syria.
So maybe the only right decision he made was we need to get out.
That wasn't the question at all.
The question was, are you going to get out and get out in a way that keeps your promise to the Kurds and doesn't betray them?
And he didn't.
And one hundred ninety thousand Kurds were displaced.
The Turkish air force bombed them as they were leaving.
Al Qaeda and ISIS fighters were were threatening to massacre them unless they converted.
He greenlighted this nightmare was just it was just an it was an utter betrayal of the Kurds that has nothing to do with the question of should America leave Syria?
All right.
Now, spend 10 minutes saying horrible things about Trump's Palestine policy, please, Ted.
OK, so where do you want to start?
You tell me.
This is OK.
So so that, you know, the sort of big news in the last few days, the the, quote, huge breakthrough was this normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirate.
And this this was this is a this was it was packaged.
It was presented to the world in an utterly deceptive way.
So what you get is this agreement that that's that's quietly ironed out between the Americans, Israelis and the United Arab Emirate with no input by the Palestinians.
And it's a deal that has tremendous benefits to America and tremendous benefits for Israel and tremendous benefits for the United Arab Emirate and nothing for the Palestinians.
So so the way you package it is you say this is really a peace plan for the Palestinians, because what we're going to do, the United Arab Emirate says is we're only going to sign this deal if Israel promises to stop the annexation of the 30 percent of the West Bank that Trump's deal of the century said that Israel could do.
So the problem with that is that the packaging was entirely a deception.
There was no promise to stop the annexation.
What what you really got is Israel got to create a precedent that they can sign a treaty with an Arab country without addressing the Palestinian situation.
And you got Israel who could now go on occupying the West Bank, but now with a powerful Arab country approving of it.
Israel, so that's what Israel gets.
The United Arab Emirate gets to normalize economic trade with Israel, get greater access to Israel's tech and security, you know, communities and contracts.
The United States gets to secure an alliance between two really powerful anti-Iran countries and sort of secure that that anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East.
And, of course, the other thing is that is that Trump, who has four years of no foreign policy successes on a promised Middle East plan that never happened, can now go to the Republican Convention and say, you know, that, you know, like, like, you know, like Carter, I just signed a Middle East peace treaty.
But the problem is that those those three countries got those things and the Palestinians, in fact, got nothing because, well, the United Arab Emirate crown prince is telling his people because that's how he can sell it to his people.
Israel's agreed to stop the annexation of the West Bank.
Netanyahu is telling his people that we're still completely committed to the annexation of the West Bank.
And if you look carefully at the agreement, it's because it never used the word that they would stop it.
The agreement was merely that they would suspend it.
And as has been very made very, very clear, for example, by David Friedman, the ambassador to Israel, when American ambassador, when he was asked if it said stop or suspend, Friedman said the word suspend was chosen very carefully.
He says, look it up by definition.
It's a temporary halt.
He says it's off the table now, but it's not off the table permanently.
So, Scott, what does that mean that the Palestinians got?
It means that the Palestinians got a promise to stop an annexation that had already been stopped and a promise that and a really just a promise that it would be an option in the future, which it already was.
Nothing changed for Israel because the annexation was already off the table.
In fact, the day after I wrote this article, Yisrael Katz, a member of Netanyahu's cabinet, confirmed on Israeli media that we'd already suspended the annexation.
The European Union had made it clear that if Israel annexes, it would seriously affect relations with the European Union.
The United Nations had made the same point.
France and Germany independently at the same point that the annexation was already completely suspended.
So the agreement promised a suspension of an annexation that was already suspended and that it would be something that was available to Israel in the near future.
It's already available in the near future.
And which is also just the difference between de facto and de jure anyway.
It's not like they didn't seize the West Bank back in 1967 and it's not like they're ever going to give it up.
So what difference does it make?
So the only difference is the danger of international recognition that you can keep property and move people into property you conquer by war.
It doesn't make any difference on the ground for the Palestinians because they're already occupied.
So even if you don't annex, it keeps being occupation.
It also gives the Palestinians, it says, we're going to make it illegal for Israel to annex.
It's already illegal by international law.
So again, it only gave them what was already there.
It's already occupied.
It's already illegal.
It's already suspended.
It's already on the table for the future.
So it actually gave the Palestinians nothing.
And why is that a betrayal?
It's a betrayal because Trump came into power promising this deal a century that would be an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty.
And when he moved, when he recognized an American embassy in Jerusalem, you know, he said after there'll be something for the Palestinians coming.
I mean, there's this great promise to the Palestinians that we're going to get you a peace plan.
What they got the Palestinians was an Arab country who had formerly said, we'll never negotiate with Israel unless you deal with the Palestinians.
Who's who's now making a deal with Israel, the Palestinians.
So all the Palestinians got was nothing.
Cessation of an annexation that was already ceased that will happen again at a future date.
And maybe most importantly, it means that they can go on with the occupation.
Nothing changes.
But now it's with approval of Arab state and really stunningly with an American administration that's now saying we can negotiate peace treaties in the Middle East without Israel having to deal with the Palestinians, which is a huge coup for Netanyahu, because the assumption had always been in the past that that any sort of peace treaty in the Middle East would necessarily include some sort of, you know, consideration of the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
So, by the way, Scott, one other thing, it's not a peace treaty.
The United Arab Emirates have never been at war with Israel.
And it's not even a normalization of agreement of relations, because we know that going back at least to 2007, the United Arab Emirates had already had relations with Israel, exchange of officials, all kinds of ties.
And the IT community and security community.
So this new deal, it's not a new normalization.
It was already normal.
Well, maybe not normalized, but the relation was already there.
It's not a cessation of the annexation.
It's just the same suspension was already there.
There's actually nothing here.
It's all smoke and mirrors to make it look like Trump had a foreign policy coup and to make, you know, Israel and the United Arab Emirates position a lot better at the expense of betraying the Palestinians who had this promise from Trump that they were going to get a deal.
They got nothing.
And also a massive transfer of billions of dollars from the UAE to Raytheon and Lockheed.
Yeah.
So that's two other things, Scott, is that is that the United Arab Emirates already has its anti-missile system, its defense system from Raytheon, which is technically an American country, but they're made in Israel.
So so they were already doing military deals with Israel.
And the other thing, too, that that that we didn't talk about, and it really just kind of came out yesterday, is that this might not even happen now because the United Arab Emirates was under the very strong impression that now that they weren't an enemy of Israel, but normalized with Israel, that would give them access to U.S. arms.
And they thought the states was going to sell them, you know, F-35 stealth fighters, which which Trump says they're going to.
But Netanyahu doesn't want Trump.
He's standing in the way.
The United Arab Emirates already furious that Netanyahu broke his promise that they would have access to F-35s.
And the meeting that was supposed to take place, I think, yesterday for the the diplomats from the United Arab Emirates and Israel and the states to start hammering out this agreement, the United Arab Emirates pulled out.
They already said, we're not meeting and we're not meeting until Netanyahu, you know, fixes this broken promise on access to American arms.
So so the other the other thing about it is that it might not even happen because, you know, Netanyahu kind of got what he wanted and screwed the Palestinians and maybe screwing the UAE also.
So that happened after the article.
But but the whole deal might fall through now anyway.
Right.
Well, there's one more thing here.
And this was surprising to me, but he really did absolutely give Zalmay Khalilzad this extremely important neoconservative Mandarin going back to Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago and all that.
And gave him the authority.
He's the guy that picked Hamid Karzai in the regime change of 2001 to be the first puppet president of Afghanistan.
And Donald Trump gave him the mandate to negotiate a deal with the Taliban that America would withdraw if only they'll keep al-Qaeda and ISIS down.
And that's it.
They don't even have to promise.
I guess they have to promise to begin negotiations with the Afghan government.
They don't have to have a peace deal with them.
So this is light years better than Bush and Obama's policy.
Which always gave Kabul a veto over any negotiations at all.
And they even went all the way through with it and signed a deal that said that the deal says that we got to leave by next May, which is plenty of time for Trump or Biden to ruin it.
But what do you think, man?
You think they're really going to fall through with this one?
Or well, if it's Trump, you think he'll really fall through and get out of Afghanistan?
I don't know.
I don't know if I have enough insight to give any kind of real opinion on the specific one.
I think the general thing I would say is that I kind of do believe that Trump's kind of wanted to get troops out of a lot of countries, out of Iraq and out of Syria and Afghanistan.
And the thing is, though, it never happens because he gets confused or the defense community doesn't want it to happen.
I mean, he could make it happen.
But this is something that we just hear all the time, that troops are coming out of Afghanistan, troops coming out of Iraq, troops coming out of Syria.
He says that all the time.
But something stops it.
Either he gets outmuscled by the Pentagon or someone crosses an imaginary red line, as happened in Syria, and creates a situation where you can't get out because this red line got crossed, even though it never got crossed.
Something I don't know if Trump's actual intentions.
I mean, his instincts may really be that we should be getting out of these places, but he always either gets outmaneuvered or confused and it doesn't happen.
As you said in Syria, when he said he was going to take the troops out of Syria, they didn't come out of Syria.
They redeployed.
And when the situation got impossible for some of them to stay in Syria, they simply crossed two inches over the border so they could still fight into Syria.
Troop withdrawals with Trump always seem to become troop redeployments.
I mean, he just doesn't have the wherewithal.
I mean, that's the whole thing of it, right?
He would have to be able to win an argument with his staff and he just can't.
He can shrug, he cannot believe what they say, but he doesn't have a better explanation for anything.
And so it becomes very difficult to make predictions because it's very difficult to understand what's going to go on in his head or what's going to change his mind.
So so it's just it's just incredibly difficult to say it's incredibly difficult to predict, except that history shows that when Trump says he's going to take troops out, something usually happens to to stop the troops from coming out.
All right, listen, I'm so sorry.
I got to run, man.
But great piece.
And I really appreciate your time on the show today.
As I said, it's great talking to you guys.
That's the great Ted Snyder.
He writes for us at Antiwar.com.
And this one is called Donald Trump and the Art of Betrayal.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
