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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, 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, on the line, I've got the great Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow for Defense and Foreign Policy at the Cato Institute.
And he's got this very important piece here in the national interest.
The Obama administration destroyed Libya.
Could Trump make it worse?
Of course, the answer to that is yes.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ted?
Thanks very much, Scott.
Yeah, man.
What's it going to do?
Make it better?
I don't know.
I should have mentioned that your latest book is NATO, The Dangerous Dinosaur.
When did that come out?
That is out this past week.
It is brand new.
Oh, brand spanking new.
And we'll be having a book forum to celebrate the publication on October the 18th at Cato.
Okay, great.
I was hoping you were going to say here in Austin, but no, I guess not.
Well, hopefully I'll be able to have a speaking engagement of some sort in Austin, since that's my base of operations and my favorite city in the United States by a long shot.
Yeah, man.
Well, make sure I know that that's happening when it happens.
I'll introduce you.
Well, very good.
I appreciate that, Scott.
Yeah, man.
And hey, NATO, The Dangerous Dinosaur.
Forget Libya.
Let's talk about Eastern Europe for a minute.
Tell me all about your book, man.
Well, this looks at the expansion of NATO eastward to the borders of Russia, one of many provocations that the United States and its NATO allies made, as well as the military interventions in the Balkans against a longtime Russian ally, Serbia.
And just the breakdown of relations between the West and Russia, mainly caused by provocative actions that the U.S. and its allies took.
In addition, I look at the dangerous new obligations that the United States took.
It was risky enough to promise to protect the major powers of Western Europe during the Cold War, but now we're committed to defending some unpredictable regimes in Russia's immediate neighborhood.
So the possible rewards of maintaining that kind of protection over allies, those rewards have really, really declined in even theoretical importance, and the risks have skyrocketed.
So that's why NATO is a totally obsolete institution.
President Trump was actually right about that when he made that statement.
And at the same time, it is a very dangerous institution for the United States, given all of its new obligations.
Yeah.
All right.
So a few things right there.
I've been meaning to ask somebody smart like you about this for quite a while now, and I keep forgetting when I have the chance.
But just now I wrote down the notes, so I wouldn't forget.
George Kennan, when he was complaining about NATO expansion, the father of the original containment policy, when he was an old, old man in the 90s, when he was warning against this NATO expansion, as we've talked about before, you were part of that same coalition of people in the 90s trying to oppose it.
One of the things that he had said to Thomas Friedman in that famous piece, and now a word from X, was he says, we have no intention of defending these countries anyway.
You know, in other words, and I think I've read Pat Buchanan talk about this before, too, where, let's get real, if the Russians roll into the Baltic states, we're not going to have an H-bomb war with them over that.
And so I wonder if that's really right.
I mean, on one hand, it would be absolutely crazy to, but on the other hand, it would also be crazy to give war guarantees to countries that we don't really mean to defend.
Yeah, that's a choice between a bad option and a terrible one.
Either we're making promises that we have no intention of keeping, and that is just unwise diplomacy to the highest extent, or US leaders are actually serious about fulfilling those commitments, which would be suicidal for the American people.
So talk about a dreadful policy, a choice between a bad option and a horrible one.
The way government seems to work, like, say, for example, in Syria, they have a meeting where they go, well, we don't want to back any extremists, but we'll back the moderates.
And then a couple of weeks go by, and it's clear that al-Qaeda in Iraq has taken the lead in this entire thing, and all the money and guns that we send over there end up in their hands, and that this is really bad.
And yet, I'm sorry, we had a meeting a couple of weeks ago where we decided that backing moderates is perfectly great, and nobody's going to argue with Secretary Clinton about that, not right now.
And so, we just go on anyway, even though it's clear that this is going to end up leading to a very bad place, it's just sort of written in stone.
Maybe another analogy would be the zero-tolerance laws in school, where the valedictorian gets thrown out for having a butter knife in the backseat of her car in the parking lot, and they have a no-knife rule.
In other words, there's no human intelligence in the chain of command here.
It's just some stupid thing written on paper by some committee at some previous time.
And so, if they do this, we do this.
It's all the Schieffen Plan, right?
You know, in World War I, where if they do this, we do this, and if this happens, then we do that.
And it's all kind of written in stone in a way where you don't have some smart guy to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, or you can't count on that, that someone's going to just use their humanity to intervene and countermand the process.
And I'm thinking of that because I'm sure you saw this visual demonstration put together by some people at Princeton University last week about what it would look like for there to be a full-scale hydrogen bomb war between the United States and Russia.
And it starts out with limited tactical battlefield nuclear weapons being deployed in Europe, and it escalates to general nuclear war, and we lose every major city in North America.
An entire northern civilization of humanity is completely destroyed, and maybe the south, too.
And I just, you know, is that really a concern, or I'm just some kooky libertarian foreign policy guy over here, or what do you think?
Well, Peter Van Buren is a very smart guy, and he is absolutely right.
If everybody in authority acts rationally, nuclear war is not a possibility.
But not everyone acts rationally.
Emotions come into play, and miscalculations occur.
I don't think any rational person, any sane person, would deliberately initiate a nuclear war.
The people who ran the various countries leading up to World War I did not intend to trigger a four-year-long catastrophic bloodbath that ended up with several of the incumbent regimes being overthrown.
Nobody intended that.
That fact did not prevent that horrifying bloodbath from taking place.
And we face a similar situation today with NATO and its commitment to collective defense on behalf of all members.
No sane person wants a war with Russia, much less one waged with nuclear weapons.
But elements of pride, emotions, sheer miscalculations can trigger what no one really wants to have happen.
And we have set up a system that makes that danger very, very acute.
It seems like, you know, in Daniel Ellsberg's book, The Doomsday Machine, and this is something that I guess I've encountered reading about this subject for a long time, that, you know, for the guys in charge of these policies in particular, it seems like so much is riding on their assumptions about what the other side will assume.
If we do this, they'll know that what we mean by that is this, in that, you know, the language of action kind of a deal.
And yet, that those really aren't safe bets, right?
That on any one of those, there's probably a 60-40 chance that they'll understand it the way you want them to understand it, but maybe not.
You know, they talk about using nukes, escalate to de-escalate.
Aha, see, we're willing to use a nuke or two.
You better back down.
And so, don't worry, they'll back down.
And that could be the Russians thinking toward us, or our thinking toward them, or our assumed thinking about what they think we think, and this kind of thing.
When instead, somebody sets off an H-bomb, and the other side says, no, no, you don't, and starts setting off H-bombs back.
They don't back down, they escalate to, and this kind of deal, you know?
No, that's exactly the problem.
That kind of hubris, that kind of assumption that we can read the minds of policymakers on the other side.
And it's really a blueprint for a tragic miscalculation.
There's also this kind of macho element, if we stand strong, they will back down.
I've always asked the question, when people talk about peace through strength, first of all, I point out that the United States has, over the decades, had the strongest military in the world, by far.
And yet, where's our peace?
We've had nothing but an endless series of wars over the last several decades.
So, it's a faulty model to begin with.
But this notion, if we just stand strong, meaning the United States stands strong, any opponent will back down.
That is a very, very dangerous assumption.
And I always ask people who maintain that position, what happens if they don't?
What is plan B?
And usually, I get dumb stares.
It's like, well, you're not supposed to ask that question.
That just will never arise.
That's a pointless question.
Well, no, it's not.
This is Gareth Porter's book about Vietnam.
It's titled, The Perils of Dominance.
And it's about how, that title meaning, when you're so strong, then you get full of this ridiculous idea that everyone will just bend to your will.
When, in fact, they all have red lines just like you do.
And if any combination of nations, let's say Europe and Russia and China all ganged up and started telling us what to do.
No one doubts for a minute that America would fight before we gave in.
Simple as that.
So, why would anyone else see the world any differently?
And look at the Vietnamese.
They lost something like 3 million people resisting American domination and said, keep bringing it.
What?
We're going to keep fighting until you leave.
Well, that's an excellent point.
And I'm amazed at the number of policymakers in the United States in particular who seem to assume that other societies, other governments won't react the way we would react.
For instance, how would Americans feel?
How would American leaders feel if Russia or some other major power had expanded a powerful military alliance right up to the borders of the United States?
All the while assuring us, no, no, this isn't directed against you.
But that's exactly what NATO has done with Russia.
And yet, even though we know that people in the United States would be going ballistic about this kind of provocation, this kind of threat, we assume that Russian leaders and the Russian people won't react that way when the United States is moving NATO right up to the borders of the Russian Federation.
Again, this kind of arrogance, this belief that somehow we're unique and other people don't react to threats and provocations in the way that we would, that can lead to a tragedy.
And it's a very risky notion to make that kind of assumption.
Hey guys, Scott here.
I've got some books you should read.
The War State by Mike Swanson, a great history of the early Cold War.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
How to Run Your Computer Business Like a Good Libertarian.
Oh yeah, and don't forget Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan by me.
Hey y'all, here's the thing.
Donate $100 to the Scott Horton Show and you can get a QR code commodity disc as my gift to you.
It's a one ounce silver disc with a QR code on the back.
You take a picture of it with your phone and it gives you the instant spot price and lets you know what that silver, that ounce of silver is worth on the market in Federal Reserve notes in real time.
It's the future of currency in the past too.
CommodityDiscs.com or just go to ScottHorton.org slash donate.
Hey guys, you know you probably need a new website.
A lot of people do.
What you need to do then is go to expanddesigns.com.
The great Harley Abbott and his team over at expanddesigns.com.
They'll hook you up with a great new website for 2019.
And in fact, what you really should do is type in expanddesigns.com slash Scott and you'll save $500.
You know, we're in this really weird situation too now with Russia and NATO and all these things that to me is very kind of reminiscent of the days before Iraq War II where the people who had built up the Iraq threat supposedly, there was no way for them to back down from all of that.
The counterfactual that actually Saddam is now a harmless old man writing a romance novel who's perfectly willing to shake hands with Donald Rumsfeld again and accept whatever American dictates.
As Naji Sabri told Richard Perle, we'll do whatever you want.
Please don't attack.
We give in.
We surrender.
Here's everything.
And Perle said, we'll see you in Baghdad.
Not good enough.
There was no way that they could admit what the real reality was at the time.
And it's the same kind of thing here where this whole second Cold War is essentially all America's fault.
And that doesn't mean that Vladimir Putin is some angel any more than Saddam Hussein was.
It doesn't mean that the Russians are heroes or anything like that just because the Americans are the aggressors.
But there's just no question that, as you said, we expanded our military alliance right up to their border.
Now, we've done coup d'etats in something like five to seven countries just in the last 20 years, overthrowing governments that were friendly to them in order to install anti-Russian governments.
And then with the pseudo regime change that didn't quite take in Syria that ended up reviving al-Qaeda in Iraq and turning it into the Islamic State, for Christ's sake.
And they didn't even start intervening there until ISIS and Nusra and the other groups were about ready to march on Damascus there in the fall of 2015.
And so, there's no question that the Russians have bombed the hell out of Syria and killed a lot of innocent people.
Just the same as they did send special operations forces to help the separatists in the east of Ukraine to resist the new Nazi-backed U.S. coup d'etat junta that had been installed there in February 2014.
But, again, and so none of that's heroic or great, but it's all absolutely, their very worst actions they've taken have been in reaction to what America's done, the position that America's put them in.
Now, how are you and me supposed to convince Washington, D.C. that, oh, no, listen, it's just that you people are wrong about everything, and this is all your fault, and this is everything you've done, and your consensus is stupid, and you have no idea what you're doing.
No ability to see yourself and your decisions from the outside, and the whole lot of you ought to go and get real jobs instead of putting the American people in danger like this.
When these people all think that they're the heroes saving you and me from Russian aggression and the rise of the new czar, whatever fantasy that they're hooked on.
Again, like with Saddam Hussein.
You're saying, Saddam?
But there's no way that they can back down from what they had built him up to be, right?
Well, you're getting into the issue of self-identity with these people.
It is very difficult for them to admit that they've made any kind of mistakes, much less catastrophic ones.
But if you look at the record, there's no question that the provocations that led to the new Cold War, that the vast majority of them came from the United States and its allies, and many of them, many of them came before Vladimir Putin became president of Russia.
When the people who talk about Putin's aggressiveness bring up specific examples, they all pretty much start with the war between Russia and Georgia in 2008, leaving aside the fact that Georgia initiated the fighting.
Even if you say that, yeah, Russia was baiting them, that's the first instance in which Russia began to assert itself militarily against Western policy.
Take a look at all the steps that were taken with NATO expansion, with the wars in the Balkans, with the deployment of U.S. forces into Eastern Europe, granting Kosovo independence by bypassing the U.N. Security Council and the Russian veto, arming Georgia to the teeth, arming Ukraine to the teeth.
All of these measures took place before Russia took any significant countermeasures.
So to me, there's, in any fair assessment, there's little doubt that the United States and its allies were the ones that triggered the new Cold War with Russia.
And unfortunately, despite President Trump's rhetoric, there's little sign that the U.S. and NATO are backing down.
Indeed, President Trump has approved two major weapons deals to Ukraine, something even that Barack Obama was not willing to do.
So the notion of Trump having a soft policy, an appeasement policy toward Russia is the biggest piece of nonsense that has circulated in the American press or in the foreign policy community.
The U.S. is waging a very hard-line policy toward Russia.
And so far, fortunately, Putin has been relatively restrained in his responses.
But things could get out of hand very, very easily.
Yeah, I think that's a really important point right there that, you know what, despite all the propaganda, they have been incredibly restrained.
And I think of all of the, you know, if you can't have Yeltsin, the drunken puppet that you can push around, you're going to have a real independent Russia in the world.
Having it led by a guy who essentially is a pretty stable and sane conservative Republican type is not the worst case scenario.
Right.
It could be a lot worse than that.
And by the way, on the Trump weapons thing, there was even a thing a few weeks ago where they announced that they were going to suspend it.
And then I guess the Pentagon or whoever in the National Security Council just said belay that order.
That's not true.
We are going ahead with those weapons sales still.
Right.
So, yeah, that again, Trump's policies, and I'm being charitable here, tend to be erratic.
And that's not just with regard to Ukraine.
It's not just with regard to policy toward Russia.
Whatever he says on any given day could easily be reversed a few weeks or a few days later.
Well, as the FBI told CNN, their job was to rein him in.
If they couldn't remove him from power through some 25th Amendment coup or something, their job was to make it impossible for him to normalize American relations with Russia.
Because that's the job of the FBI counterintelligence division and the CIA in America, is to rein in the choices of the elected president of the United States, who ran on the platform, by the way, of wanting to get along with Russia out loud in front of the American people over and over again.
It very well could be argued that was part of what got him elected in the first place.
Well, again, the creation of a vast national security apparatus over the past several decades has created a very, very powerful secretive institution that now clearly has its own policy agenda and is willing to push it to the max.
And to a large extent, it seems to be even a partisan agenda now.
So talk about creating a very dangerous component within an ostensibly democratic system.
You couldn't do anything worse than that.
Hey, I'll check it out.
My new book is out.
The Great Ron Paul.
The Scott Horton Show interviews 2004 through 2019.
It's the transcripts of all 38 interviews I've done with the heroic Dr. Paul.
And then some.
Central banking, the terror war, Iran, Korea, the police state and its whistleblowers.
It's America's greatest hero at his best.
I know you'll love it.
The Great Ron Paul.
Get it at LibertarianInstitute.org and Amazon.com.
All right.
Now let's do a whole other interview about Libya for a minute.
You got some time?
Yes.
Great.
So this is such an important piece that you wrote here.
The Obama administration destroyed Libya.
Could Trump make it worse is the title.
And so there's so much important stuff in here.
But I guess, first of all, can you give us just sort of this thumbnail of the civil war that you describe and which side the U.S. is on?
Well, for the first point, the United States government doesn't seem to have decided what side it wants to be on.
President Trump seems to be reasonably friendly to General Khalifa Haftar, who the U.S. government officially opposes his bid to take power in Libya.
The U.S. officially supports the U.N.-recognized, U.N.-backed government in Tripoli that seems to control Tripoli and some of its suburbs and not much else in the country.
Haftar, interestingly enough, used to be a CIA asset back in the 1980s and 1990s.
In fact, he lived in the United States, lived just a few miles from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
But for whatever reason, the Obama administration, when all the chaos broke out after the U.S. overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, they decided not to back Haftar.
They decided to back some competing figures in the Libyan postwar struggle for power.
Haftar did not accept that verdict, obviously.
With the help of Egypt and some other powers, he built his own army in Libya.
That army has been steadily expanding, and over about the past four or five months has been laying siege to the nominal capital, Tripoli.
So here we have, amidst the rest of the chaos that the United States unleashed in 2011 by overthrowing Gaddafi, we now have two powerful factions trying finally to achieve dominance and control of the country.
That's the situation we're in at this point, and the Trump administration can't seem to decide what stance it wants to take.
I have questions.
First of all, this unity government, the U.N. and U.S.-backed government, at the time that they created it, what, like a year ago?
It was the third government that was being added, but at that time it was Haftar in Benghazi and the more Islamist government that was, I think, previously was the internationally recognized government in Tripoli.
But so, if there's only two now, does that mean that the one that the U.S. and the U.N. had created on a ship out there in the port, that they successfully kind of transplanted that regime into an alliance with the Tripoli government, and that much is settled?
Now it's just those two versus Haftar?
I would never reach that conclusion, because again, there's such factionalism, such vying for power, but basically you do have one power cluster based in Tripoli, allied with a number of militias, some of which are decidedly Islamist.
Haftar's forces are backed by Egypt and some other countries that seem to favor a more secular government.
His movement seems more secular in nature.
But again, you're talking about essentially armed criminal gangs vying for dominance in a totally broken country.
I've described Libya as Somalia on the Mediterranean.
That's what the United States and its NATO allies helped create.
Tens of thousands of people have died in the process, in the period after overthrowing Gaddafi.
Hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have fled, usually in small boats, across the Mediterranean trying to find refuge in Europe.
Thousands of them have perished in that attempt.
So the United States took an unpleasant situation with a nasty dictator in power, with Muammar Gaddafi, and instead they have created an incredibly bloody, chaotic situation with just a tragic number of victims of U.S. policy.
And yet the architects of that policy within the Obama administration, people like Samantha Power, people like Hillary Clinton, people like Ben Rhodes, refused to accept any responsibility for the catastrophe that they created.
Yeah.
Well, I really like that part of the article where you quote Samantha Power from her new memoir where she just writes all this off.
What, we were supposed to have a crystal ball?
Well, no, but that was what all the opponents of the war said, was you don't have a crystal ball.
That may be a direct quote of Ted Carpenter from 2011 right there.
You don't know what's going to happen if you do this, but it's probably going to be not good.
Yeah, that's exactly what opponents of that intervention said.
We don't understand this culture very well at all.
There are numerous potential factions.
This place, if you overthrow Gaddafi, is more likely to blow apart into armed rival factions for power than it is to create any kind of united national government post-Gaddafi, much less a united democratic government.
That is an absolute illusion.
Right.
At that time, Justin Raimondo was saying, well, I know a little bit about it, and I know that Libya was only created not after World War I, but after World War II.
And that the only thing holding it together was the Gaddafi regime, that this is the ancient kingdom of Tripoli and Cicerania or however you say it, and we can expect it to fall apart.
And for then people to fight over who controls what and where the lines are and the rest of it.
So here we are.
One would think, and to me this makes me angrier at the Obama administration for the Libya and Syria interventions than I was even with George W. Bush's administration for the Iraq intervention.
Because the Obama people had the Iraq catastrophe right in front of them as a lesson, and they just ignored that lesson.
They went and adopted the same kind of disruptive policies and ended up, shockingly, with the same kind of disastrous results.
So what does that say about people, supposedly intelligent policymakers, who learn nothing from the mistakes of their predecessors?
Right.
And you know, they said in Iraq, well, the CIA and the State Department, they wanted to stay and build the country and all this, but they should have listened to us neocons.
You said that we should have just installed Chalabi and left real quick and let them work it out.
That would have worked much better.
Well, here we have that model in Libya, where Obama now says, Libya was my greatest mistake.
Not the war, but the fact that I did not invade full scale with infantry and take responsibility for building a new nation.
And that would have worked out at least as well as Iraq.
Yeah, exactly.
These people seem incapable of learning.
They're certainly incapable of admitting mistakes.
Their egos are so inflated that they just will not acknowledge responsibility for any of the consequences of their blunders.
Yeah, Hillary, too, in the debate said, well, that's just because of the Libyans' failure to, you know, take advantage of the great opportunity that we gave them.
Yeah, I mean, the arrogance deserves some kind of prize.
For real, like losing an election.
Hey, so I'm sorry, that's still just the funniest thing that's happened in this century, and I can't get over it.
So, oh, I wanted to ask you about this.
You mentioned the different foreign nations involved here.
And I wanted to see if this is right.
Do I have it straight in my head that Saudi, which supports the anti-Muslim Brotherhood's secular military dictatorship in Egypt, in alliance with that secular military dictatorship in Egypt, that they are supporting the more secular government of Haftar versus our NATO allies, the Turks, and their other allies, the Qataris, who support the Islamists in Tripoli because they are closer to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is supported by both Turkey and Qatar.
Is that right?
That's basically right.
Although, again, all of those regimes are such opportunists they could probably switch sides with a moment's notice.
But yeah, that does appear to be the geopolitical layout, and they're all vying for regional influence and, let's not forget that, control over the oil supplies of Libya.
That's the factor that is there in the background, and it's not a trivial one.
Right.
Well, and of course, at one time, I think this was still back in Obama years, I forget the year now, was it 2015 or so, where they had a major air war against the town of Sirte, which had been taken over completely by guys declaring loyalty to the Islamic State.
Yeah, that whole episode, and again, it shows the extent of the factionalism that exists in Libya then and now.
Essentially, you had a fight between two different hyper-Islamist groups to take control of that city.
Again, the idea that there are Democrats of the desert ready to take power in Libya or any of these other countries, if we can just identify them and support them sufficiently, that's maybe the greatest illusion of all underlying US policy.
Yeah, I like that part of the story here with Libya, where Hillary met in a hotel in France with this guy Jabril, who was, I guess, the Libyan Chalabi, and whereas it took Chalabi 10 years of lobbying with all this CIA money and Iranian money to start the war against Saddam Hussein, I mean, man, he had to work for it.
This guy Jabril met with Hillary Clinton for, I guess, a couple of hours in a hotel one night and said, don't worry, lady, it's going to be great.
And she went back and argued, we gotta do it, and won.
Yeah, and even if you're charitable and say Jabril was not a total con artist like Chalabi, and I will adopt that view, he was quickly outmaneuvered and eased out of power as soon as Qaddafi was history.
And again, US officials completely misread the power alignment within the rebel movement.
The handful of pro-Western democratic types, they constitute the weakest faction within that movement.
And yet, again, the arrogance of US policymakers, we assume those would be the future leaders of Libya, future leaders of a united Libya, not one that was inherently going to fragment as soon as the big boss, who is keeping the lid on things, Qaddafi, was out of the picture.
You know, it's the bubble in Washington, DC, inside the consensus of power there is really something to behold from the outside.
It's never surprising, but always shocking.
For example, this quote that the source is the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and it's never been disputed by the former president, Barack Obama, that Obama told Gates, as you cite in this piece here at the National Interest, that his decision to start this war was 51 to 49.
In other words, it was an aggressive war.
He admits it.
What is that other than an admission of a war crime?
But Scott, it wasn't a war.
According to the Obama administration, it was a kinetic military action.
Because if it was a war, under the War Powers Act, they should have at least informed Congress and consulted with Congress before taking action.
So it wasn't a war.
George Orwell would love these people.
His characters in 1984 in Animal Farm are nothing in terms of the duplicitous statements compared to the real officials in various U.S. administrations.
Yeah, it's true.
And again, they're so wrong that there's no way to turn them around.
They could just never admit it.
Occasionally, you hear from the soldiers who go, man, I thought I was Luke Skywalker and Han Solo out there, and then I quickly realized that I'm the stormtrooper in this story.
But in Washington, D.C., they're always the heroes.
They know it, and there's just no question about it.
After all, they're from the U.S.A., and we're exceptional.
We make sins into virtues just by being us.
Well, they're definitely heroes in their own minds.
And that's one of the tragic aspects.
I think in 95% of the cases, it is hopeless to expect them to reverse course, to admit that they've been wrong, to change their policy orientation.
There'll be a few converts now and then.
But the vast majority will go on and on and on as long as they're allowed to do so.
And that's the problem.
Unless you unseat that foreign policy elite, and that's not an easy task, we can expect more of the same year after year after year for an indefinite future.
Yeah, it sure is true.
And you know what?
Whenever I daydream about an America First National Security Cabinet, if Trump ever meant what he said about, you know, getting out of NATO, well, undermining NATO, withdrawing from the Middle East, wrapping up all of Bush and Obama's wars and all these things, we don't have a very deep bench, but we got one good bench of guys to help implement it.
In my version, you and of course, Doug and Chris Prebble and the leaders of the Cato Foreign Policy Department are right there running the national security staff.
And you really could do it.
And all Trump would have to do would just be curious enough to read the national interest from time to time.
You know what I mean?
He doesn't have to read antiwar.com.
Just read the national interest.
We got plenty of guys there.
Paul Pilar could be the Director of National Intelligence.
Rand Paul could be Secretary of State.
Jim Webb at Defense.
McGregor as National Security Advisor.
You and Doug running the National Security Council.
Doug Bandow.
Doug Bondo.
I finally figured out how to pronounce this guy's name right.
He spells it wrong if he wants to pronounce it that way.
Anyway.
I'm not waiting for the telephone call, however.
I'll tell you what, you better say yes when it comes.
All right, guys, I'll let you off the hook here.
Both of y'all, the audience and our guest, Ted Carpenter.
Thank you again for your time.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, no problem, Scott.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's Ted.
He is Senior Fellow in Security Studies at the Cato Institute.
And check out his brand new book, NATO, The Dangerous Dinosaur.
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.
