Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Hunter DeRentis from the National Interest.
And he's written some stuff for the Libertarian Institute as well.
And including the dangerous foreign policy at the National Conservatism Conference.
A very important piece.
And also we're going to talk about nukes later.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Hunter?
Hey, Scott.
Great to be here.
Cool, man.
Happy to have you here.
So the National Conservatism Conference.
This was kind of supposed to be sort of the inauguration of a new kind of Trumpian, Tucker Carlson-ian kind of nationalist conservatism as different from, I don't know, Jonah Goldberg and the National Review.
Something like that.
Is that right?
Yes.
So this is sort of trying to create a new intellectual background to Trump's victory.
In the article I compare it to what they did in the 1930s because there's a lot of association between FDR's victory in 1932 and the start of the New Deal.
And the new economics put forth by John Maynard Keynes.
But what too many people forget about is that FDR was elected in 1932.
The New Deal started in 1933.
But Keynes didn't write the general theory, writing a justification for FDR's economic policies until 1936.
It's retroactively adding logic, arguments and, like I said, intellectual background to a political victory that already happened.
I think this is very similar.
Nice analogy.
I like that.
Thank you.
Trump defeated the GOP establishment in 2016.
He overthrew the whole Bushite program and he's instituted his own program, which is familiar to some people based on immigration restrictionism, fighting harder in the culture war, economic protectionism and backing away from democracy promotion abroad.
The purpose of the National Conservatism Conference and I think its creator, the Edmund Burke Foundation as a whole, its purpose is now to create intellectual justification for Trumpism, so to speak.
And who's behind that foundation?
So the foundation was made in just January of this year.
It's run by Yoram Hazony, who's Israeli.
He's a dual citizen with the US, and his 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, was a huge hit across the conservative movement, either because people liked it or at the very least people found it interesting.
And if listeners are really interested in getting to know Hazony and his work, he did a great interview with Jeff Deist over at the Mises Institute that they can look up.
And the other person involved in the institute is – sorry, in the foundation is David Braug, who's the former chairman, former director of Christians United for Israel.
And he's also cousins with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.
So you have these two either – a hardcore Zionist and an Israeli running this foundation, putting on a conference, and I'll tell you, speaking … For American nationalism.
Exactly.
Having attended the conference and speaking to people there, the strangeness of two Zionists slash Israeli nationalists hosting a conference on American nationalism, the oddness of that was not lost on attendees.
Yeah.
Who, I guess, were mostly – I mean, what did they think of the presentation then, those same attendees?
So, most of the attendees and some of the speakers who I … Which, I'm sorry, I've got to say, that is so funny that Ehud Barak's cousin is the former director of Christians United for Israel.
Oh, yeah.
Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
No, no.
I was shocked when I found that out too, but it's a small world after all, at least in these circles.
Yeah.
But most of the attendees and some of the speakers I even spoke with, they were generally happy with the presentation of the conference because the conference hit on a lot of the things that they wanted to focus on.
It focused on engaging in the culture war more and promoting social conservatism and fighting liberal institutions.
It focused very much on immigration.
It focused on building a nationalism that's away from the whole American exceptionalism and idealism that was previously promoted in American politics.
It was doing all that.
What it didn't do was emphasize what you and I care about, and that is pulling back the American empire, focusing more at home, and sort of focusing on the nicer aspects of what Trump talked about in 2016.
But most of the attendees who agree with us on that point and found the foreign policy wanting, they were still happy with other parts of the program, and unfortunately most of them were willing to put aside the foreign policy as, oh, it could have been better, but everything else was great.
So it's funny, it sounds like you're saying that they're kind of tilting away from the pseudo morality based foreign policy of Paul Wolfowitz from the George W. Bush years and moving more toward a hard line John Bolton from the George W. Bush years type of a foreign policy, right?
So in other words, no more pretenses.
We're just outright bullies now.
Yes, their basic logic is we should be able to – America should be able to be a power in the world and we should be able to do things just unilaterally without the need for the UN.
We don't want a new world order.
We are the new world order.
Why do we need any other institution?
And, oh, we don't want to invade and occupy countries and nation build.
That's just a waste.
We just want to bomb them to hell and leave.
Right.
Makes perfect sense.
Of course.
That really very much is in the tradition of Donald Trump.
And a lot of people take his rebellion against the trappings of the liberal world order as an attempt to dismantle the whole empire.
But that's really not it.
He just doesn't want to look like he's soft.
He just would rather emphasize the kick-butt portion, which makes him, I don't know, what, more of a Jacksonian than a Hamiltonian or something?
But that is still a million miles from Ron Paul.
I know that.
It's a million miles from Ron Paul.
It's a million miles from, say, Thomas Jefferson.
Brogg, during his speech opening the conference, talked about how national conservatives, our heroes should be Alexander Hamilton and Theodore Roosevelt and not small government conservatives.
They want a national big government conservatism, embracing that with big government at home and abroad working for what they view as, quote-unquote, conservative values.
Which this is just, as Max Boot called it, hard Wilsonianism.
This is just neoconservatism with a little bit harder trappings.
But other than that, that's what Fred Barnes wrote about in The Weekly Standard back then, was national greatness conservatism.
And what we need is a big war, a big project that we can all do together to – which is Teddy Roosevelt, John McCain, Richard Perle thinking all the way down.
John Bolton too.
I'll disagree with you slightly.
John Bolton gave a talk here, right?
What was that?
And John Bolton gave a talk here, right?
Yes.
Yes, and that actually feeds in – I'll disagree with you slightly.
I don't think it is just rehashed neoconservatism, and John Bolton certainly emphasized that enough during his speech, and I do take his word for it that he is not a neoconservative.
He is a right-wing hawk.
He does not believe in democracy promotion, nation-building, that we can turn Iraq or other countries in the Middle East into modern liberal democracies, and he doesn't believe in the big existentialism of all of it.
He's not a Paul Wolfowitz.
He just believes in American power, American supremacy unilaterally, and thinks we should be able to act around the world.
He even compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt as opposed to Woodrow Wilson, and while as libertarians we might see that as just a minor degrees away, I do take him at his word that there are differences in the policies even if we don't find the differences worthwhile.
I do think this is a rejection of neoconservatism at this conference.
He's just not in favor of anything we like instead.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know, and even then it still depends on how you approach it.
Of course, he's not a neoconservative just because he was never a communist.
He was always a right-wing Barry Goldwater guy, a right-wing nationalist, and at times more of an Israeli nationalist than an American one, but people confuse him for a neocon because he has always agreed with them about everything, even if, for example, he emphasized democracy less or anything like that.
He's always exactly in line with the American Enterprise Institute, the weekly standard Bill Kristol line on every conflict.
In other words, when you're that far to the right on hawkish issues of intervention here, there, or anywhere, there's really not room for daylight between John Bolton and the neocons.
They agree on everything because they agree on everything.
He doesn't necessarily have to be one of them.
Everyone's to the left of them, essentially.
You know what I mean?
I agree.
When it comes to implementation, there's very little difference between them.
And even Richard Perle said- But I think if we're being intellectually honest, we should recognize the difference.
That's my only point.
Well, I'm with you, but Richard Perle said that we should go in, get rid of Saddam Hussein, and then leave, not occupy the place and rebuild it.
And so how does that make him different than John Bolton?
Other than he used to be a Democrat, and now he's not.
Or actually, I guess he still is.
But anyway.
Richard Perle's kind of faded into the shadows, as is appropriate.
Yeah.
But, I mean, at the time, I mean, that's for real that he was certainly one of them.
But he just wanted to leave Chalabi, parachute Chalabi in there and go, and then blamed staying and all the consequences of staying on the State Department and the CIA for having it their way.
And that kind of deal, which there was some truth in that, in a way.
You know what I mean?
But anyway, I'm just saying.
No, absolutely.
It's true that- See, you know what it is, Hunter, is that neoconservatism sometimes is an ideological description, and sometimes it's a biographical one.
And we're sort of using the terms interchangeably or confusedly, maybe, here.
You know what I mean?
Where that's the reason people always confuse him for one is because he's just like one, except for without the biography.
Yes, absolutely.
And it is true what you're saying, too, about he de-emphasizes the high idealism in favor of just the toughness.
But that doesn't make him really any different in kind than any of his colleagues from the AEI or any – he's from the FDD after all.
And even in practice, it's not much different.
Just look at Venezuela, which Bolton also talked about during the conference.
He emphasized a lot of different things.
But you're correct.
Bolton was one of the keynote speakers.
He was there, basically gave a Q&A, and I was quite disappointed in how he was received by the audience.
When he first came on, he received a standing ovation.
He received another standing ovation as he left.
He described the crowd as, quote, the friendliest audience I've had in a long time.
And the applause itself was not as loud as, say, for Tucker Carlson when he came on.
But the way I phrased it in my original article at The National Interest and the way I took it as, they might – everyone there loves Tucker, but most of the people there respect Bolton.
Even if they don't agree with every minutia of his ideas, they respect that he is in the Trump administration working and getting things done because he's an excellent bureaucrat.
He's excellent at implementing those ideas, and I think they just respect his skill at the game and to too much of an extent agree with it.
Well, and that's the thing too is he really can't – one of my first articles I wrote for antiwar.com back 15 years ago was actually called Who's Afraid of John Bolton?
And it was about how he sounds a lot like me and the way he talks about how much he hates the United Nations and everything.
Just I want to be unilaterally at peace, and he wants to be unilaterally at war all the time and keep all these guys out of his way.
Just in the opening of his comments, he's really kissing up to Edmund Burke and everything.
He said he enjoyed Burke because like him, Burke tried for, quote-unquote, prudence and statecraft.
That really is what he thinks he's trying to do.
It's ridiculous.
Which, by the way, I got to mention this just because I'm reminded of it too that back in 2003, and this is really important in my understanding and developing my understanding of what was happening at the time.
Right after the war would have been April, I guess, possibly May of 2003, and Richard Perle wrote a thing for The Guardian called Thank God for the Death of the United Nations.
And I was like, what?
One of the ringleaders of the whole war was saying that.
And then the first paragraph is brutal, where he's mocking what he calls the liberal conceit of these something do-gooders and their belief in international law providing international security.
And how, as you said, we don't need the UN Security Council.
We have the National Security Council.
Who needs your new world order when we have our own so you guys can just lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way kind of a thing?
And I, at that time… Still another quote from Bolton's presentation, quote, we don't need the rest of the world second-guessing us.
Right.
So, in other words, the international law is for America to enforce on the rest of the world, but it never applies to us.
He would never really get us out of the UN.
He just would never let it get in our way.
That's all.
Precisely.
Yeah.
And that does make sense for a right-winger to say.
What's funny about this, though, is the traditional right-wing conservative critique of the UN was that it was causing us trouble and getting us into trouble and providing all these new mandates for us to intervene in other people's problems.
But they can turn that resentment right around and just say, yeah, they're getting in our way when we want to do things.
And why won't they cooperate?
And they should be more compliant.
And it's just as good, apparently.
It's not letting us get into enough trouble.
Yeah, exactly.
We all witnessed that in spades back in 2003, that's for sure.
Anyway, so, all right, what am I missing?
Tell me some other interesting things that happened there.
Oh, Michael Duran was there, Al-Qaeda's friend.
Did he talk about how we got to save all the suicide bombers in Syria so that they can complete their suicide bombings?
The things that were mostly talked about with Syria and the Middle East and Iraq was basically a lot of revisionist history, including that Obama was a quote-unquote non-interventionist, that he pulled away from American affairs overseas, just an absolutely ridiculous statement.
It's hard to imagine anyone claiming to be a foreign policy expert making that claim when we re-entered Iraq, when we funded rebels in Syria, when we brutalized Libya, when we started the Saudi intervention in Yemen.
I mean it's a lot of revisionist history and it's a lot of even revisionism going back into recent times.
Specifically during the Q&A, the foreign policy panel that they put together, which was just a bunch of hawks.
It was May from FDD, the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, several people from the Hudson Institute.
An audience member actually asked about our policies in Iraq and Syria when it was due in sizable part from Shia militias supported by Iran and Russian actions and Hezbollah and other forces on the ground fighting that were responsible for taking out the Islamic State.
And the panel just completely brushed this aside and made the claim that it was – no, it was overwhelmingly US air power that destroyed ISIS.
The people on the ground actually fighting the soldiers and taking and holding land, oh, they had barely anything to do with it.
It was just US power from the air.
So it was just completely overriding what actually happened.
It was putting forth this American-centric view that it was just our power that took care of it and ignoring the years that preceded that where it was the US government that was supporting al-Qaeda in Syria and supporting the Islamists.
They live in their own little world.
Yeah, for sure.
It's good that someone in the audience remembers that what they liked about Trump was that he was supposedly less of a hawk than these guys.
And that was supposed to be the charm of the whole thing was that he had his ridiculous, overly fake macho posturing and that he could bring troops home while talking all tough and in an only Nixon can go to China kind of a way.
And here was this great opportunity and he hadn't done it all.
He's escalated every one of his wars.
It looks like he is really trying to get us out of Afghanistan.
But otherwise, he's escalated all of them and reduced none of them.
And that includes Yemen and Somalia and Libya and everywhere.
And I guess with the right, and we've seen this before, just as well as with the Democrats when they're guys in power, that, hey, whatever the policy is, we'll bend our thinking around it.
As you said, was the idea for this kind of whole new institution anyway up there.
But they could have framed it around retrenchment and peace in Korea and getting out of Afghanistan and hopefully out of Syria soon too or something.
But no, they take the hawkish stance and I mean, I guess I'd like to think that the audience would have been pretty jaded and would have recognized that and been alienated by that.
But it sounds like you're saying that was a smaller part of the response.
A smaller part, but – and it's great that you bring up Nixon's trip to China.
Another audience member did bring that up during the foreign policy Q&A.
He did ask why we weren't creating that and using that as a strategic matter to separate Russia from China.
Why aren't we trying – because all of these conservatives believe that China is the great geopolitical threat to America, which taking as a separate issue, at the very least, they do believe that there's no outstanding issues that cannot be resolved peacefully.
Between Russia and the United States, the two major nuclear powers.
And one of the audience members asked the panel, why aren't we making outreaches to Russia in the same way Nixon made outreaches to China?
And when he made that question, he got applause from a significant part of the audience who were glad to hear some sensible talk on foreign policy even if it came from a random audience member.
But the panel completely shot this down.
They said thinking of Putin as any kind of quote-unquote strategic partner was delusional, that making any kind of outreach to him was dead on arrival.
And the response from the audience to those statements was, again, pretty general applause that I considered about equal to the initial applause to the question.
So I do think the audience was at least kind of split between leaning more towards us and leaning more towards the experts that they had on the panel.
But certainly it was much more of a mixed result than I wanted, and it was far too positive to both the panel and to John Bolton than I was initially hoping for.
Yeah.
Well, dealing with the right, it is what it is, and especially when, hey, Bolton's the national security advisor.
If there was some kind of right-wing dove up there, some kind of paleo-conservative, then they'd all be working harder to find a way to agree with him, I guess, partisanship being what it is and all.
It is a problem with dealing with the right, and I wanted to bring up – the very first article I wrote for the institute was a piece called Righter Than Right, and it was making the case that a lot of Donald Trump's statements and positions on foreign policy could be utilized by libertarians to achieve better foreign policy goals, more peaceful goals.
And after this conference and seeing the general reaction from the people who are trying to set up an intellectual class behind Trumpism and trying to make what – his policy programs into part of general American politics, I think that libertarians have to be a lot more cautious than I initially was about possible alliances with national conservatives.
Because the thing is, these people absolutely do not believe in shrinking government whatsoever.
They have taken the view that the left has had for decades at least, that the state is here to stay, that the bureaucratic government we have is here to stay.
The best thing to do is to take hold of the government and use it as a weapon against your political enemies, what the left has used and what conservatives have used but have put over the veneer of small government.
Oh, we want to get back to the founders, which was never true, but they at least made the statements, and I'm sure regular people, regular Americans who voted conservative, voted republican thought that they wanted that.
But these people reject any of that.
They openly want to use the state for their own means, and considering that and considering overwhelmingly the people at the conference reject any kind of economic theory whatsoever.
If you have any sense that there are economic rules, that there are logic to economics, that it is part of logical universal rules for how markets function and supply and demand, they think you are an elitist airhead who has no sense of the real world or what's happening, which is – they do think protectionism and trade barriers will make America rich.
And then when you add on the foreign policy where if their foreign policy is, sure, rejecting nation-building, but if it's just more of American unilateralism abroad and just about American power and they are not interested at all in pulling back the empire or reconsidering our strategic interests, then libertarians have no residing interests in this alliance.
There's nothing for us here, and I think libertarians – if this continues in this direction, we should jump ship because I – for one, I'm a libertarian and I do believe in strategic alliances.
I'm one who believes that peace in foreign relations is the most important issue, that there's no more important thing for a libertarian to focus on than the question of war and peace.
And because of that, I believe in alliances with the right and the left and that for imminent strategic goals, we should ignore some of the other policies we disagree with as long as we can find common ground.
But as long as national conservatism goes in this direction where they're outsourcing their foreign policy to former neoconservatives who – or current neoconservatives who have wormed their way into the Trump administration, as long as they're doing that, I don't think libertarians should look at them as allies or as really a positive contribution to American politics.
RON PAUL is the great example on this, and that is just stick to the issues and stick to the explanations and stick to teaching about liberty and let people figure it out.
The people who realize how bogus all that is, they're going to go looking around for what's the right answer, and then we got to be there for them.
And I've seen this before over and over back and forth, too.
In the 1990s, boy was the right wing anti-government.
But then it turned out that, yeah, no, they weren't.
They were just anti-Bill Clinton, if that's what the Republicans switched the narrative to.
And then all of a sudden, all we need is the son of a Bush and everything is great and they love him.
And in fact, they'll divorce their family members over defending his torture policy, anything, everything.
And then the same thing with the liberals.
I mean, this will go down in history forever about how the Democrats all shut their mouths.
All the centrists and liberals and most of the progressives, not the real leftists, but the rest of them, just absolutely rolled over and played dead for Barack Obama for eight years.
And not only that, but then allowed the CIA and the FBI to turn them into these crazy national security hawks who are for every kind of spying and every kind of criminalization of their political enemies and all of these insane things this whole time.
As you said about the right a minute ago, then it's their turn and they get to try to use the power against their enemies their way instead.
And whatever, that's all anybody wants to see.
And there's really no principle there at all.
And then the few people who are principle, they'll have access to us and we'll teach them what causes the boom-bust cycle.
I hope we can teach them soon.
It was agonizing sitting in that conference listening to them try to explain how tariffs made America rich and how we have to take over the tech companies to fight China.
It was exhausting, Scott, I can assure you.
Oh, man.
Well, rest assured again, like you said, some significant portion of the audience was sitting there shaking their head with you.
Absolutely.
And Tucker Carlson was a keynote alongside John Bolton.
And he's bad on a lot of things.
Immigration and protectionism and China and all that stuff.
He's just good on Middle East stuff because he knows the difference between a Sunni and a Shia, which makes him a brilliant genius in all of TV news.
Tucker is fantastic on foreign policy and it was a shame that he used his hour-long speech at the conference to talk about why he loved Elizabeth Warren's economics instead of talking foreign policy.
But he is still good on foreign policy and I hope we can see more of it from him.
That was what his speech was about?
Oh, yes.
It was about how big business is a threat to the family structure in America and how Elizabeth Warren's early 2000 books on the two-income trap was the greatest economics book he has ever read and how she was a tragic figure because she was terrible on all the other issues.
But she really knew what she needed to do on economics and on trade.
Crazy.
All right.
Well, I guess I could say for that that at times I've heard her mention – I don't know if this is in her book or whatever.
She talked about accountability for real crooks on Wall Street, something like that.
That ought to appeal to anybody, but anything beyond that, yeah, no.
Yeah, that's a small part of it, but yeah.
It was painful to hear, but I mean, again, he's good on foreign policy and really that's all we can ask for in this world.
Man.
That's true, and in fact, the worse he is on everything else, the better for us because we don't want – you shouldn't have to be good on everything to be good on the war.
Anti-war is for everyone, and that should be always our most important point of all, so that's fine.
Yeah, let me ask you about nukes exploding.
I like this quote you have of Con Hallinan, friend of the show here, in this piece about how – was it the Nagasaki bomb or the Hiroshima bomb?
He says it was a hand grenade with a bad attitude compared to the kind of nukes that we have now, referencing H-bombs, thermonuclear weapons that detonate sometimes into the tens of megatons that can kill entire cities, even massive cities in a single shot.
And the thing is you have all these quotes from not just Con Hallinan but these other important people here talking about how nuclear war is a real risk and that something has got to be done.
And we've just been whistling past the graveyard since the end of the Soviet Union.
I don't know what percentage of people don't even know that we have nuclear weapons anymore or have thought about it at all in the last 20 years or what the stats are, but this is – regardless of what anyone else thinks of it, this is the most important issue in the world, particularly the relationship between America and Russia and the state of our H-bombs.
And so I was happy to see you write this great piece here at The National Interest.
The danger of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than during the Cold War.
So I want to get to that point in a second, but I also wanted to mention that we could have a war between India and Pakistan.
They fought four wars over Kashmir in the past, but none since they've gotten nuclear weapons and the Indians have H-bombs.
Apparently the Pakistanis only have smaller A-bombs for battlefield use, whereas India is stockpiling strategic weapons as a deterrent against China but also to possibly use against the Pakistanis.
And that's probably the greatest risk of nuclear war in the world right now.
And so this is not nothing.
This is really a thing.
So why don't you tell us about this piece you wrote here?
Well, thank you, Scott.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, and I will say for listeners that you – I have to give you partial credit for this article as well because a lot of the people who – when I write articles, a lot of the experts I go to to interview, a lot of the people I like to use as sources, I often just go, oh, who's Scott interviewed before?
And I just look through the list.
Happy to be poached by you.
So you've played a big help.
That's great.
But yes, for this piece, it's specifically talking about the no first use policy, which was discussed last week at the first Democratic debate where Jake Tapper asked why we – the United States should abandon its unilateral ability to nuke any country in the world, asking Elizabeth Warren why should the US tie its own hands with that policy?
And Elizabeth Warren saying why basically nuking people is bad and why the United States needs to move to a no first use pledge where the United States swears and promises that it is no longer going to use nuclear weapons as a threat against other countries.
It is not going to use nuclear weapons in war unless it itself is first attacked using nuclear weapons and that that should be added into our nuclear posture and our national policy and her basically laying out why that is better for peaceful relations around the world, why that's better for nonproliferation and why that will make America safer.
And then debating Montana Governor Steve Bullock on the issue and Bullock just using fearmongering and basically saying, oh, why should Detroit get nuked before we do anything and ridiculousness?
And that led into Twitter debate last week including your favorite congresswoman, Liz Cheney, and Bernie Sanders coming to Elizabeth Warren's defense and agreeing on the issue.
But basically for this article, I interviewed Lawrence Wittner who you just had on the show I think a couple weeks ago.
Colin Hallinan who, like you just mentioned, is a great expert on Pakistan-India relations and both he and the other person I interviewed, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, both of them mentioned regional war between Pakistan and India as a greater threat when it comes to nuclear weapons than the current US-Russia relationship.
Man, I got to get Perry's email from you and I have his book.
I just need to buckle down and knock that thing out in an hour or two and get him on the show because I know he's got some really important things to say and particularly here, he was Secretary of Defense for Bill Clinton and I think resigned over NATO expansion that he warned against actually.
Oh, I didn't know that.
You know what?
That's really nice to find out.
I forget where I learned that so only quote me on that in pencil but not in ink and I'm going to go back and search again.
I think that's right though.
But anyway, tell me what he told you about the nukes here and about the first strike strategy.
You know what, let me say this real quick.
Obama had changed it.
Obama said that under his government he was renouncing the use of a nuclear first strike against any non-nuclear weapon state except Iran.
And so that was at least something and that was pretty controversial at the time but that was still of course only going halfway.
It would be a whole other thing to truly announce a change of posture when it comes to Russia and China and you had a serious talk with Perry about that.
Yes, and Perry who was – he turns 92 soon.
He was born in 1927.
He was an adult from at the start of the Cold War and he saw it to its end.
So he's a great expert on Cold War nuclear strategy and afterwards and in retirement he – And he came up through the Pentagon bureaucracy for decades and was a real expert.
He wasn't just plucked from the Ford Company like McNamara or something like that.
He was – for whatever that's worth, he was a real military expert, a civilian but a real expert in military policy and weapons and the rest of this stuff, right?
Absolutely.
He knows his stuff and the great thing is in his old age, in his retirement, he's currently working on the William Perry Project, which is about bringing awareness about the dangers of nuclear weapons and promoting nuclear nonproliferation.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'll be happy to give you his email but he talked about how the original purpose of the first strike ability that the United States will be the first to use nuclear weapons is due to the situation in Europe during the Cold War where we were worried about a Red Army invasion, invasion from Russia into mainland Europe and we were worried that our conventional forces, much, much smaller than the Russian army, would not be able to stop them.
So having a nuclear umbrella over Europe and having a threat that we would be the first to launch nukes was part of the deterrent against Russia from invading.
And he talks about – and Colin Hallinan echoed this – that our current use of the first use ability is just leftover thinking from the Cold War.
It's because no one has reconsidered what our national interests have since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
No one has reconsidered our alliances where US forces are needed, what is in the strategic interests of the American people.
It's – we simply still have the first use capability because we did before.
There's no other justification for that besides deference to traditional thinking.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, and the thing is, is they keep expanding NATO into Eastern Europe and there have been plenty of those who have advocated for the doctrine of achieving first strike capability and encircling Russia with so many anti-missile missiles, so-called defensive missiles, that we would make their nuclear deterrent null and void.
Which, of course, the Russians came out last year, Putin in his State of the Union address or whatever exactly they call it there, State of the Nation address, came out and explained they have nuclear torpedoes now, thermonuclear torpedoes.
And he claimed that they have ultrasonic, hypersonic nuclear missiles that are impossible to shoot down and even a nuclear powered cruise missile that has the range to navigate around any defensive capability the US has and all these things, which was, of course, the natural result.
What do they expect for getting out of John Bolton, killing the anti-ballistic missile treaty and expanding America's capability there?
And, you know, there's actually – Ray McGovern gave a speech one time where he played this clip.
I'm trying to remember.
I think it was from the Oliver Stone interview where Stone – I think that's what it was.
Stone says to Putin, listen, you know this whole thing is just a welfare scam for these corporations to just steal out of the treasury and that these anti-missile missiles – there's no real doctrine to encircle you with a first strike capability and this kind of thing.
And Putin says, you know what, I'm well aware of that, but look at the position that you put me in.
What am I supposed to do, not take it seriously when you're surrounding my country with these missiles?
I don't know how well they work, but I can see what you're doing and I have to act like you mean it, like it's something more than just cronyism, even though, of course, that's a part of it.
It's like, man, you know what, I wonder who's going to be the next president of Russia after this guy and how bad the Americans are going to miss him, you know?
Anyway.
Or if they're purposely mischaracterizing it because I think we should really be shocked by how the media talks about this.
Even the way Jake Tapper opened the question, why should the US tie its hands with this policy?
I mean what kind of journalist, honest journalist, asks that kind of leading question?
Who phrases talking about these very important issues in a way that says, well, why should the United States lose a city before we'd be able to strike?
Or you have some of these politicians saying that no first use means we shouldn't use nuclear weapons at all or we shouldn't have any kind of deterrence, and that's not what the pledge is.
And for some of these people, I'm sure they're just ditzes, especially the politicians, who genuinely just don't understand what they're talking about because politicians tend to be very stupid people.
But some of these nuclear experts who have made careers out of this, they're genuinely mischaracterizing it for their own personal reasons, whether that's cronyism, whether that's just dedication to the US empire, whether that's to be purposely misleading and discrediting to nonproliferation arguments.
I don't know but it's something we have to keep in mind and it's terrible that just in – where the democratic debate last week where this was discussed, this question was part of five minutes that was dedicated to US foreign policy in a debate lasting two hours.
The one issue where the president has the most power and the most influence is dedicated to the shortest amount of time.
This is what the media does and this is how it treats the most important issues we face.
Yeah.
And then as you say, when they do bring it up, it's always framed by Jake Tapper in the very worst way.
Mm-hmm.
And boy, he has a gift for making the worst position sound so reasonable and unquestionable.
Why, the premise of my question is obviously the consensus of all intelligent adults.
How dare you be outside it?
And he's great at doing that.
Now tell me this.
Perry told you, I believe the danger of a nuclear catastrophe today, this year and next year is greater than it was during the darkest years of the Cold War.
Did he tell you exactly what he meant by that?
Worse than that, unfortunately it was only his quote that got included.
But all three people I talked to, Hallinan, Whitner and Perry, all said statements similar to it, that they do believe this is as dangerous a time as ever when it comes to nuclear weapons.
And that's mostly because the Trump administration, under John Bolton as security advisor, is dismantling our entire international regime of nonproliferation and agreements trying to limit nuclear weapons.
And that as you deconstruct all of these agreements and you let nuclear weapons now run wild, you risk the start of a new arms race.
And you mentioned previously that Russia last year declared that it had all of these new fancy supersonic weapons.
And I don't know about you, Scott, but I would bet a lot that the U.S. arms industry and the military industrial complex is just drooling at the idea of being able to make new, better and much more expensive missiles for the U.S. government.
The fact that we are now going backwards in time and deconstructing all of the best agreements of the Cold War, whether that's the ABM Treaty from 72 that we got rid of back in 2002 or that's the INF Treaty that we left last week.
We're getting rid of all the barriers to a nuclear exchange that previous presidents worked so hard to implement.
And the fact that we're getting rid of these agreements, the fact that it is so unthinkable that the president should be able to negotiate with the Russian president and the fact that there's such a culture of hostility in the world right now between the United States and Russia that it makes it dangerous.
Because if there is a mistake, if a screen is wrong and it says a missile is launched when it's really just dust on the screen, if there is a problem, there is not the infrastructure needed in between both countries to ensure that both governments can contact each other and say, hey, what's happening right now?
Where there's no mutual trust and there's no way to negotiate or come into contact if there is that kind of crisis situation.
So if that crisis happens, if the mistake happens, it could be – mean the deaths of millions of people and no one is talking about these issues.
Man, I got to tell you, you know, in part just so I can remember this anecdote better for later by repeating it now, Ray McGovern told me the other day, I brought up the Abel Archer exercise in 1983 when NATO was practicing nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
And the Soviets were convinced that the Americans were going to attack them, that this was a pretext for the start of a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.
And two things happened.
One thing was there was a British trader who was inside NATO and who was informing them that please, I swear to God, it's just an exercise.
Don't believe that it's a war.
It's not a war.
I promise.
And they, I guess, partially believed him on that.
And then the other thing was what I learned from Ray McGovern the other day was he said that Melvin Goodman, who is the author of – what is it called again?
Failure of Intelligence, who is a mediocre former CIA officer, writer out there in the world, that Melvin Goodman pushed Robert Gates, who was Bobby Gates, Ray always calls him to diminish him, I guess, as a diminutive type thing there.
He was the number two CIA under William Casey at the time and that Goodman pushed Gates out of the way to insist on, like physically, in order to insist on sending a message to the White House that for God's sake, take the secretary of defense and the vice president out of the war game.
I'm almost positive those were the two officers, the highest level cabinet officers.
He said, take them out so that the Soviets get it, that this really is an exercise and not an attack.
And according to Ray, he thought that was what made the difference.
We could have had a full scale nuclear war right there over the Russians convincing themselves that this training exercise is a pretext for war.
Apparently, we're just a couple of hair's breadth away there.
And of course, we know there have been numerous close calls along those lines since that time.
But I remember 1983, and I was just a kid at the time, but I was interested in this stuff.
And I remember the atmosphere of brinksmanship again.
After detente, we went back to brinksmanship with the Soviets.
And people said later that it worked or whatever, but really the Cold War was negotiated away by Reagan and Gorbachev in the second term.
And now we're getting rid of those negotiations.
Yeah, exactly.
To use a little example, sort of connect parts A and B of this interview, back during the National Conservatism Conference, one of the questions asked by – asked to John Bolton by the moderator, he asked about the process of abandoning our international agreements.
And when he asked that, Bolton just got the biggest smile on his face and he said, it's going great.
They're ecstatic about bringing us closer to nuclear annihilation.
They're creating the circumstances where that's more likely.
I'm for that.
Again, with these kind of right-wing nationalists being the Funhaus-Mehr version of libertarians.
I hate the UN, too.
And I like that whole spirit and sentiment, but I don't mean it the way he means it.
When it comes to thermonukes, those are the last treaties to get rid of after we've gotten rid of the nukes, so we don't need the treaties anymore.
This guy is just terrifying.
But one thing, too, I got to add is what Chas Freeman said on the show, or he said in a speech that he printed the transcript of and that I interviewed him about.
He talked about how the real reason for scrapping the Intermediate Range Missile Treaty there, the INF Treaty you mentioned, is so that they can put them in Asia to threaten China.
And that if it's even right that the Russians are technically in violation of the treaty because their new missiles could be classified as mid-range, they're all for deployment against China, not in Europe.
And so here America is cynically abrogating this treaty with the Russians that has kept intermediate-range missiles out of Europe since the 1980s, and it's only doing so so that they can threaten China with them.
And why the INF Treaty is so important, I want to emphasize to the audience, major ICBMs, the missiles that can really fly across the world, if the United States were to launch one of the bigger missiles that was not covered by the INF and launch it towards Russia, that would take about 30 minutes from launch to where it landed.
It's that 30-minute window that Russia has to decide what's happening, how should we respond, can we contact the Americans and ask what's happening, and that 30 minutes is where they can make the decision.
But the smaller mid-range missiles, the intermediate-range that were banned in Europe and banned by the INF Treaty, those can launch and land within a span of 10 to 15 minutes.
You're cutting the decision time in half and you're creating an even more stressful crisis because then if the Russians see that it's a medium-range missile that was launched, they have maybe 10 minutes to decide is this real, what can we do.
There's not enough time to contact the Americans.
If there's something happening, we need to respond now.
It's just making things worse, and I really want to emphasize to the audience that's why these treaties are so important.
They are covers that help prevent a nuclear exchange, and they make diplomacy more likely and more able to happen.
Well, and here's the other thing, too, that I learned was that the anti-missile missiles, supposedly the defensive missile installations, those launchers can be used to launch mid-range nuclear missiles.
And so America was technically in violation of the treaty.
If the Russians are even necessarily in violation of it, if we accept that argument that our government makes with their new missiles that they came out with there, the Americans did it first.
And they did it in the name of defensive missiles.
Yes, I believe that was Bulgaria we put those in.
But yeah, it's mostly the Russians say we violated, we say the Russians violated.
I'm willing to believe both governments have violated the INF Treaty, but that just means you work on the treaty.
You fix it.
You don't ditch it.
Yeah, exactly.
And again, like Chas Freeman said, it's all about China anyway.
So imagine breaking a deal like this with Russia who – the Chinese I think only have a couple of hundred nukes, which is plenty.
But the Russians have thousands and thousands and thousands of H-bombs, like 4,000 deployed, 7,000 total, something like that.
So there's a war you want to never have no matter what.
The Chinese arsenal overwhelmingly is intermediate range missiles.
I believe, if I remember correctly, it's something like 85 to 90 percent of their missiles are intermediate range.
So it's not even that we're ditching the INF Treaty to create a new treaty between all three powers.
You're not going to get that kind of treaty with China.
It's simply ditching the treaty with Russia just to ditch it.
Man.
Well, there you go.
Trump years.
National conservatism in practice.
Thanks very much, Hunter.
Appreciate it.
Absolutely, Scott.
As always, it's an honor and a pleasure.
All right, you guys.
That's Hunter DeRentis.
He's at The National Interest, nationalinterest.org.
This one is called The Danger of a Nuclear Catastrophe is Greater than During the Cold War.
And this one ran at the Institute, libertarianinstitute.org.
Dangerous Foreign Policy at the National Conservatism Conference.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
