11/29/07 – Jim Powell – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos Radio 959 in Austin, Texas.
And for those of you who saw the debate last night, you might have noticed that Senator John McCain accused Ron Paul and American isolationists, even though I think Ron Paul was a little kid at the time, of being responsible for World War II and the rise of Nazi Germany.
Let's listen.
Congressman Paul, I've heard him now in many debates talking about bringing our troops home and about the war in Iraq and how it's failed.
And I want to tell you that that kind of isolationism, sir, is what caused World War II.
And I want to tell you something, sir.
I just finished having Thanksgiving with the troops, and their message to you is, the message of these brave men and women who are serving over there is, let us win.
Let us win.
Let me just remind everyone that these people did take a lot of time to ask these questions, and so we do want direct questions to the answers.
We will get to Iraq later, but I do have to allow Congressman Paul 30 seconds to respond.
Absolutely.
The real question you have to ask is, why do I get the most money from active duty military personnel?
So what John is saying is just totally distorted.
He doesn't even understand the difference between non-intervention and isolationism.
I'm not an isolationist.
I want to trade with people, talk with people, travel, but I don't want to send our troops overseas using force to tell them how to live.
We would object to it here, and they're going to object to us over there.
All right.
We will have a lot more on Iraq coming up.
All right, my friend.
So there you have it.
It is the question of our time, I think.
Is war caused by a lack of America going to war, or is war caused by America going to war?
It seems a pretty simple question, but apparently it needs a really complicated answer.
I have on the phone Jim Powell from the Cato Institute.
He's a senior fellow there.
He's the author of the books, Triumph of Liberty, Wilson's War, FDR's Folly about the Great Depression, and Bully Boy, the Truth about Theodore Roosevelt's legacy.
Welcome to the show, Jim.
Thank you.
Glad to be aboard.
We really appreciate you making time for us today.
So let's get right to the question then.
Is it true, smear aside Ron Paul as enabler of Hitler somehow aside, is it the case that American isolationism caused World War II and allowed the Nazis to conquer Europe and so forth?
No, the Nazis and other dictators caused World War II.
Actually, World War II was actually a consequence of American intervention in the First World War.
Yeah, but doesn't history begin in 1939?
Well, you ask how did we get to the point that we were in 1939?
That requires looking back to see, well, where did these people come from?
I mean, Hitler came out of World War I.
The Germans were motivated by intense bitterness and nationalism that provided the political support for Hitler because of what happened in World War I.
What happened in World War I was there was a three-year war, a three-year stalemate that started in 1914.
Neither the Germans on the one hand nor the British, the French on the other hand, were able to defeat the other.
Once the trenches were dug in 1914, all they did was slaughter each other as they came out of the trenches.
And if the United States had stayed out of it, there probably would have been a negotiated settlement, neither side able to dictate terms to the other.
But what happened was the United States intervened, Wilson intervened on the side of the British and French, which enabled the British and French to win a decisive victory over the Germans and the Austrian allies.
Having done that, Wilson thought that everybody would have a nice time together sitting around a peace table, but he had no understanding of the situation he intervened in because of the millions of people who were killed and all the destruction, the mindless destruction that occurred during World War I.
Both sides, the French and the British and the Germans and Austrians, had a tremendous amount of bitterness.
Whichever side won a decisive victory was going to take it out on the other with indirect consequences that were likely to follow.
So because we intervened, we put the British and the French in a position to dictate the harshest possible terms on the losers.
The Germans would have done the same thing.
In fact, they did dictate a harsh settlement when they had basically humiliated the Russians in the east.
So whoever was going to come out on top was going to take it out on the opponents, so the British and French had a decisive victory because we were on their side.
They would not have been in that position if we had stayed out, kept our boys home and saved our national defense for defending the United States because we were not attacked in World War I.
And the result was the bitter nationalist reaction in Germany that proved catastrophic because Hitler served in World War I. The runaway inflation that was a result of the war spending and the printing of German marks and so on, that propelled Hitler into the limelight.
It was in the 1923 runaway inflation that the Germans were printing marks to pay the reparations demanded by the British and the French, among other things.
That's when Hitler tried his so-called Beer Hall pooch, a completely inept attempt to seize power.
But it was during this period that Hitler gathered around him his key associates who were to be with him when he came to power during the next big crisis, which was the Great Depression.
So then we had to deal with Hitler.
So people are saying, people, McCain and so many others, the neo-cons, they're saying, well, we had to intervene to protect the world against some terrible person overseas.
And there are a lot of terrible people overseas, and Hitler was one of them, and Stalin, and I mean, there were so many others.
But the point is that our intervention often backfires, and it's not just the United States.
The Russians ran into trouble when they were in Afghanistan in the 70s and 80s, as we know.
The point is that there's a theory that it's better to fight a war someplace else than to fight on our own shore.
That's true.
But the idea that we can minimize the risk of fighting at home if we fight someplace else first has resulted in the United States getting involved in all kinds of wars and civil wars and things in Africa and Asia and Europe.
And the most obvious thing they do is dissipate our resources.
You know, we kill American men and women and do a lot of destruction and spend a lot of money that we probably don't have.
And nobody's attacked us directly or even had an imminent threat to attack us.
So we basically degrade our defensive capability.
There's now a lot of discussion about that right now in Iraq, now that we've got the Taliban to deal with again in Afghanistan.
Well, you know, we've pulled a lot of resources out.
It's hard to put them back.
And now we're demoralizing American soldiers because a lot of these people volunteered for the National Guard and figured they would get some easy benefits.
And then they ended up getting, in effect, drafted or called to go to Iraq.
And then when their term is up, they're told that it's going to be extended unilaterally.
I mean, the fine print in the contract, but that's not what people thought they were getting into.
And the administration, of course, doesn't dare to go to military conscription because that would almost instantly spread the discontent.
And people who aren't paying much attention to what's happening would suddenly have a very direct reason to pay attention.
And the protests would escalate, as they did during the Vietnam War, which would make it more complicated.
Anyway, that's probably a longer answer than you wanted to.
No, it's all very interesting and lots of great stuff to follow up on there.
Thanks for it.
Let's start with the story of Iraq.
They criticized Dr. Paul for wanting to withdraw the troops and end the war.
And implicit in their argument is we can't leave because there will be blowback if we do.
I mean, everyone knows that Osama never had a base in Iraq.
Here we've invaded the country and occupied it.
And they're telling us, the Republicans who denied there's such a thing as blowback and deny that any of this terrorist action has consequences for American policy, are telling us that, no, if we go, then there will be blowback.
We can't go.
I guess their theory is we have to stay forever and that will prevent the consequences from ever coming or something.
Right.
Well, again, you mentioned my book, Wilson's War.
As you might know, the crisis and the war in Iraq goes back to World War I and Woodrow Wilson.
If we had stayed out of World War I, we would not be trying to redraw the map of the world.
And what happened as part of the Versailles Treaty settlement that was inflicted on the Germans because of American intervention on the French and British side, Winston, the British and in particular Winston Churchill, was given the authority to redraw the map of Mesopotamia as Iraq was then known.
And it was Winston Churchill who cobbled together the nation of Iraq in the years after World War I.
And he appointed a Hashemite who was a Sunni and seemed to have direct ancestral ties with Mohammed himself, supposedly, to run the country.
So it was the result of the World War I settlement, a consequence of American intervention in a foreign war that led to the effort to draw the map of Iraq to put a Sunni in power.
So the Sunnis right up through Saddam Hussein had been running the country and oppressing the Shiites.
Under the aegis of British-slash-American imperialism, they were our puppet dictators over there.
Right.
So now you've had the Sunnis run the country and oppress their Shiite brethren for 80 years, so now we get involved in the Iraqi war and as a result the Shiites are in power.
So what's going on in Iraq is the Sunnis are desperately trying to get their power back and the Shiites want to get even and certainly hold on at the very least to protect themselves.
So when you understand that this is basically a civil war that's going on, what are the prospects for success by sending, by anybody, us or anybody else, sending soldiers and money to the country when they have a civil war to resolve?
No, let me stop you.
Let me get back to, let's talk more about the Middle East in a second.
I want to get back to John McCain and Adolf Hitler here.
John McCain's argument is that history begins after the conclusion of World War I, and just like we all learn in school...
No, history began in 1939.
Yeah, well, at least.
Well, no, because he seemed to imply that there was a time period in which America should have waged a preemptive war against Germany in order to prevent World War II from happening.
So apparently there was some 30s there for a minute to John McCain, but in any case, I guess his argument is, as we all learn in government school as children, well, the darn right-wing reactionary U.S. Senate refused to ratify the wonderful, far-sighted League of Nations treaty, and because of the, not because of World War I, or even if you take into account World War I as a given, it was because America was isolationist between the World Wars, and refused to go and, I guess, wage that preemptive war against Germany is why it got so bad.
How do you address that?
Well, the fact that the Senate turned down Wilson's treaty had nothing to do with the consequences of American entry as they were playing out in Germany and Russia.
The damage was done because of, we enabled one side to win a decisive victory, and as I noted, that had terrible unintended consequences that played out in Germany.
The treaty was, you know, the instrument of imposing the harsh terms on the Germans.
But, Jim, they say that, you know, my fifth grade teacher, and I believe this is pretty much what everybody gets in school, seems to be the common understanding, like capitalism caused the Great Depression kind of a theory, that the League of Nations, if it had been strong, and if America had participated in it, would have prevented the war from breaking out.
That's what I'm trying to get at here.
Oh, well, the League of Nations was just an alliance.
There's nothing magical about the League of Nations.
The League of Nations said that if, in the event that one of the members is attacked, then all the other members will come to their defense.
So, essentially, it's just another alliance, and as a matter of fact, the Germans and the Russians were excluded.
So, you know, they were not made part of it, so they didn't have any stake in it, but it was just an alliance.
So, if one country is attacked, that means every other country is going to get involved in the war.
And these guys all had a de facto League of Nations anyway, off the books.
I mean, that's exactly how it played out in World War II anyway, right?
You were right.
We had the Germans and the Japanese who really had not much to do with each other, but they were both engaged in wars and found themselves opposing the same people.
But, as I said, what's happening in Iraq is a civil war, and I think the question needs to be asked.
Suppose we stayed there for five years, and suppose we were successful in curbing terrorism, because if we have soldiers over there, we're going to be closer to it, and we can stamp it out.
Suppose we leave after having been there for five years, and, as is likely to happen, they're going to go back to doing what they were doing before.
The Shiites still have to get even further suffering against the Sunnis, so the minute we leave, they're going to go back to trying to get their power back, and they're going to use whatever tactics are available to them, which includes suicide bombers and all the rest.
So what are we going to do?
I mean, at some point, you have to say, you know what, this is not our country, and people don't like you trying to build their country, even when they're making the worst mess of it.
And the larger story is the exact same one, too, in the sense that, as you've shown this endless stream of American interventionism from Woodrow Wilson all the way through the present day in the Middle East, at some point, not just Iraq, at some point, we have to kick the intervention habit, because each intervention simply causes the next one, or contributes to the excuse for the next one anyway, and, you know, like you said, here we are fighting the Mujahideen that we used to help us bog down the Russians and give them their own Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Now, they're our enemies because we bombed Iraq, who we used to prop up to contain the Iranians who had overthrown their dictator that we overthrew because the guy looked like he might be leaning a little bit left toward the Soviet Union that we had saved from the Nazis and created in the first place by our intervention in World War I.
Right.
I wish I could paint, because it seems like it would be a nice kind of mosaic of American intervention, how all these things flow together.
Well, the idea that we should start preemptive wars, obviously there are a number of important issues there.
The first, of course, is the power to start preemptive wars almost inevitably is going to unleash enormous centralization, much more centralization than we have now, simply because centralization is one of the things that always happens in a war.
And beyond that, if you just take a national security argument, are we going to be more secure by going around the country and going around the world and sending soldiers and ships and everything, whenever we perceive that there's some threat to the United States?
Well, that inevitably is going to make a lot of unnecessary enemies.
We're going to be wrong in some places.
We're going to be killing civilians, because war is a blunt instrument.
So even with the best of intentions, we're going to be killing a lot of women and babies and innocent men.
We're going to be doing a lot of destruction.
We're going to be dropping bombs, and we're hoping to hit the terrorist tight ass, but we're going to hit a lot of hospitals and schools and other things as well.
And even though people, local people, may hate the terrorists, we're not going to be making any friends because we wrecked their houses.
We did it by accident.
But, you know, we killed people, and what are you going to say to somebody's wife?
I'm sorry, you know, your husband was in the way someplace.
You know, we had no way of knowing he was going to cross the street at that time when the bomb hit.
You're going to be making a lot of enemies.
But as I think we ought to have learned from a number of our interventions, the illusion that because we may be able to bring to bear more soldiers, more weapons, more military technology, that we're going to have an easy win.
There have been so many cases involving the United States, involving the British before, not least the American Revolution, that the best equipped, best trained side is not necessarily going to have an easy win.
That's because the side that does the intervention is, you know, in this case, the United States.
We're going to a terrain that we don't know very well.
The people that we are opposing, especially in the case of the guerrilla war, don't wear uniforms.
They're very hard to distinguish friends from enemies when we're in these foreign places.
We don't know the hideouts like the Osama knows them in Afghanistan and so on.
I remember when the Iraq war started, a lot of people were saying, oh, this is not like Vietnam.
I know Vietnam had jungles.
So it's very hard to find the enemy in the jungles.
But what's a rock but a big desert?
That will be easy.
And of course...
Well, they have houses to hide in.
They have houses to hide in.
And again, if you want to say, well, the hell with them all, just knock them all down.
Well, there are a lot of people who are living there who are terrified by all the suicide bombers and the terrorists and everything.
They're as scared of them as our soldiers probably are.
Well, I think...
Pardon me, Jim.
But, you know, we're the ones who destroyed their houses.
So we're just multiplying the number of enemies.
And then we find that we are at a disadvantage.
And everybody knows that a foreign invader, especially one from a completely different culture, that, you know, the United States, we're thousands of miles away.
I mean, nobody expects that we want to make Iraq a part of the United States.
So we're ultimately going to go home.
So if they can just hang on, we're going to get frustrated and, you know, we've decided that we've had enough people killed and so on.
We're going to go home.
And they're going to, you know, start the struggle all over again.
So we've accomplished nothing except make some enemies.
And we can degrade our defensive capability for when there really is a threat.
I mean, this is like, you know, crying wolf.
By the time you've done intervening and doing these preemptive wars, when a real threat comes, are you weaker or stronger for it?
You know, you're weaker.
You've had a lot of people killed, demoralized, frustrated.
You've spent a lot of, you know, you're economically not as capable of sustaining a major military defense when it really counts.
So those are serious problems that all these naïve neo-cons seem to have overlooked.
They figure we're going to have an easy pass, and they have completely ignored the consequences, the explosive consequences, the hatreds and so on that are unleashed when you go around hither and young.
You know, and I don't blame Bush for, you know, for not finding weapons of mass destruction.
I mean, if there was fraudulent misrepresentation, that's one thing.
But if they thought the best intelligence they had indicated that there was a risk over there, and it turned out there's not a risk, well, that illustrates the risks and the folly of intervention itself.
We're never going to likely to have perfect information about what's going on in a completely different culture and all of this.
Well, you know, we can make big mistakes.
The big mistakes are going to have political consequences.
Well, actually, the thing is, Bush knew he was lying.
He knew that they had a source right inside the top of Saddam Hussein's government who was on the CIA payroll who told them that they didn't have anything, and he was fired.
I mean, you know, we all know that they knew they were lying.
But I still understand, you know, your larger point is, how's North America supposed to rule the world?
That doesn't make any sense at all.
Right, well, I'm saying that the point is not did this particular president have, you know, how accurate the information is, and if it was inaccurate, well, you know, he's a bad guy, and a better man could have done a better job intervening in Iraq.
I'm saying, no, the risk is the intervention itself.
And actually, that gets to a larger point.
The, you know, is Bush a bad guy?
Could somebody else have done better?
And the point is the extraordinary expansion of government power politically, especially federal power in the United States and in the presidency itself, because there's all the people who have been pushing the progressives going back 100 years and pushing for the expansion of federal power, their implicit assumption is that, you know, they're good guys are going to be coming in to run this thing.
But in fact, we're expanding the power generally, more taxes, more spending, less restraint on the president to get the country involved in foreign wars.
Well, we're all assuming not only that, you know, these guys are going to have good information, they're going to have reliable intelligence, but we're assuming that these are all good guys and they're not going to be starting gratuitous wars, and the only things they're going to do is make successful efforts to defend the United States overseas.
But in fact, as we well know, there is no sure way to keep bad or incompetent people out of power.
And that right there, that indisputable fact right there ought to be a stopper for any of this.
You're expanding power, but you have no idea who's going to come into office in the future.
There can be demagogues, there can be people that are trying to get even for some aggrieved group or another, who knows, or just, you know, just some look at what Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, I mean, pick, you know, Bill Clinton, pick the president you hate the most.
And, you know, as soon as one acknowledges that there are presidents you really don't like, well, that's essentially an acknowledgement that there's no way to keep these types of people out of power.
And if that's the case, then you really don't want to be giving any president all of this authority, because you don't know how it's going to be used.
Yeah, well, that's what Ron Paul says about the whole federal government and the Congress, too, that it's the power to abuse, as long as Congress and the president at this point have unlimited authority, well, they're going to be subject to corruption and bribes and payoffs and so forth, right?
Yeah, there are no perfect people.
And, you know, another thing about power is that it magnifies the harm done by human error.
The more power, the more people that a particular politician can affect, whether it's the federal level, state level, the more power to affect the money supply, to affect foreign policy, to determine who can use which drugs, you know, whatever power you're talking about, the wider the extent of the jurisdiction or the power, the more it's going to magnify the harm done by human error.
Because all these people think when they want the government to do this and we need the power to do that and there ought to be a law for something else, all they think about is the good that can be done if good people who have perfect knowledge are in power.
And, of course, the problem is that if you're looking about the Federal Reserve, they don't have any magic box, they're always looking like everybody else at conflicting information.
You know, the farm sector is strong, the housing sector is weak, these states are doing great, those states are beginning to show unemployment going up, this is up, this is down.
So they're making their best guess and often they're wrong, like everybody else, except that the Fed, when they're wrong, it affects not just the town or a city or a region, it affects the whole country.
It, of course, has effects beyond our borders as well.
The same thing is even more dramatically the case with foreign policy.
You go around trying to do these preemptive wars because, well, you really know what's going on there and you can count on these turkeys to give you the truth next time around.
And either your information was wrong or the strategy turns out not to be right or who knows what.
You see, these are complex situations and people are not perfect, and even if they have the best of intentions and they're really smart, they're going to screw up and the screw up is going to be big time.
And, you know, our intervention just seems to be going from bad to worse in the Middle East.
Well, and we can see the next dominoes to fall down are just right in front of us.
You have, as a consequence of the invasion of Iraq at the end of this long script of interventions is we have the empowering of Iran and all the people in the administration in both parties who insist that something has to be done about the fact that we've just basically helped them gain control over the south of Iraq, or at least to some degree.
You have the same problem that Wilson and those guys were debating back in 1919 about the independence of the Kurds under the former Ottoman Empire and now Turkey and, of course, populations in Iran and Syria and what will be the fate of independent Kurdistan.
Plenty of opportunity for more war and crisis to break out there.
You have all the political problems in Pakistan.
As you said, interventions in Africa all along and, you know, to this day, wars in Somalia.
Soon we'll have a war in Sudan, which is exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.
Well, that's another civil war.
Yeah, what are we going to do there?
Well, what we're going to do is we're going to take what's absolutely none of America's national interests at all and we're going to turn it into part of the global war on Islamic extremism and we're going to radicalize the Sunni population there and that country that's never had a suicide bombing will soon be rife with them.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think the fact that there is as much talk as there is about a preemptive strike in Iran essentially acknowledges the catastrophe of the war in Iraq.
Absolutely.
You know, because everybody was saying, oh, we've got to get Saddam Hussein.
He's the corrupt mass murderer.
Well, of course, that was true.
He deserved to die many times.
He was a brutal mass murderer, gassed his own people and all that, had all those palaces, as we know.
That's why Reagan backed him, to use that gas to contain the Iranian Revolution.
Right.
So then we say, well, okay, we go in there and we defeat the Iraqi army, which is pretty easy.
Finding any particular individual like Saddam turned out to be, you know, it was always going to be more difficult, but we found him and he's dead.
And then now only after having done all of this, it occurs to the Smarties in Washington that we've created a vacuum and the Iranians are perfectly positioned to move into it.
Now what are we going to do about that?
Well, if they were so smart to give us advice and tell us what to do, why didn't they think of that?
So now we're saying, well, we've got to start a war with Iran.
It's a bigger country, more oil, more millions of enemies we're going to make.
So, I mean, I think their credibility is zero.
And I believe it is true that if we just withdrew quickly, you know, there would be chaos.
I'm sure there would be chaos.
I mean, for obvious reasons.
Yeah, but you've got to quit sometime.
What are you going to do?
Well, yeah.
All right, now let me ask you this.
Let me turn the conversation a different way.
I know that, I mean, obviously from the way you talk, even when you speak about foreigners, they seem to be individuals to you, people with families and houses and stuff like that.
That's not the kind of language you usually hear from people.
And I know you're libertarian and I am too.
And we put a high degree of emphasis on individual responsibility.
And there are people who make a case, not that I buy it, but it is, I think, an argument that is worth entertaining.
That when you or I say that American intervention in World War I caused or set the stage for or somehow helped enable Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany or the October re-revolution in Russia that created the Soviet Union or that our bases in Saudi Arabia created the blowback that led to the Al Qaeda war against the far enemy, us, and so forth.
That really what you're doing is you're taking responsibility away from murderers.
That you're saying, you know, it's Lenin isn't Lenin's fault.
Lenin is Wilson's fault.
Osama is not Osama's fault.
Osama is Bill Clinton's fault.
Or that kind of argument that you are either excusing or somehow rationalizing their behavior or at the very least you're diminishing these individuals for the responsibility for their own behavior regardless of what circumstances led them to it.
Well, the world is full of evil people.
And Hitler and Lenin and Stalin are obviously right at the top of the list.
Chairman Mao would be in that same class.
What you don't want to do is, I mean, what intervention tends to do in many cases is create circumstances where people like this can find a large following and get themselves into power.
If we had stayed out of World War II and there had been some kind of negotiated settlement and there would have been, you know, heads of government would have been toppled and so on because everybody would be frustrated.
You know, each of the countries lost a million men plus the destruction and they didn't really get free but they got nothing.
Back in World War I?
Yeah, World War I.
So if we had stayed out of there, it's far less likely you would have had the bitter nationalist reaction that did happen in Germany because nothing vindictive was being imposed on the Germans.
The French, there was a stalemate.
And so how would Hitler have found the following he did?
You know, he would have been a rabble-rouser, but with a small following.
He would not have been in a political position to come to power.
And the same thing with Lenin.
Nobody's excusing Lenin.
I mean, he's one of the worst mass murderers in history.
But he tried four times, I think, to come to power, the first three times during the summer of 1917.
And even after the incompetent Russian generals and the high inflation they had, the chronic shortages of ammunition, the corruption in the capital with the Tsarina and Rasputin that discredited the government and the Tsar was incompetent.
He was nowhere to be seen because he was traveling with the troops.
Despite all of that, Lenin still couldn't come to power.
But Wilson played a role in pressuring and bribing the Russian provisional government to stay in the war.
And the longer Russia was in the war, the more rapidly the Russian army disintegrated.
It was only in October, November of 1917, after the Russian army had essentially collapsed, that there was no effective resistance to the Communists.
Now, Jim, isn't it the case that, if I remember, it's been, I think, two years or so since I've read your book.
Again, everybody, it's Jim Powell Wilson's war.
Didn't you say in there that the original revolution of Kerensky in March, that he wanted to get out of the war, but that Wilson sent him a bunch of money and intervened in other ways to help convince Kerensky to stay in the war, which basically gave Lenin those four opportunities to finally cease power?
Right.
Well, Wilson wanted the Russians to stay in the war, and that was a condition for the United States to provide money to the provisional Russian government, which was broke.
Wilson wanted the Russians to stay in the war as long as the war in the Western Front was going, because he wanted to tie up as many German divisions as possible on the Eastern Front.
And Wilson's fear, as well as the same fear as Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of England, and Clemenceau, the Premier of France, they all wanted to tie up German divisions on the Eastern Front.
They were afraid that if there were a peace settlement in the East with Russia and Germany, that Germany could transfer a number of its divisions to the Western Front, and the fighting in the West would be even more difficult than it was, because you understand the Germans were outnumbered on the Western Front by the British and French.
They were outnumbered.
The Germans were... generals were not as reckless as the French and British in terms of ordering more men out of their trenches.
They all did that, but the British and the French were more reckless.
Anyway, so that was the reason why Wilson and the... by coming in on the Russian side, as well as the... you know, who were allied with the French and the British, that the Russians had to keep fighting.
They were... you know, they were disintegrating, but Wilson wanted them to stay in so that the Germans were not able to transfer divisions from the Eastern Front to the Western Front.
Right.
Well, and the point is, he got what he wanted.
He gave Kerensky the payoff, and Kerensky stayed in the war, and that was what gave Lenin the opportunity to finally create the USSR.
Right.
Well, if Russia had pulled out of the war and made a settlement, you know, there still would have been a Russian army.
Obviously not as big as it was at the peak of the war, because a lot of those...you know, the Russian army consisted of peasants, and they all wanted to get the free land that the Kerensky government was supposedly going to give them in the summer of 1917.
That's when... that's when the army really collapsed in the summer of 1917.
They were still in the war.
Yeah, and they weren't in Moscow to protect the government.
Right.
Yeah.
All right, well, so there you go, everybody.
It's all Wilson's fault.
The book is Wilson's War, How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, World War II, and I wish we had more time for you to explain how it was government, not capitalism, that caused the Great Depression, but maybe that's an interview we can do another time.
Maybe for another time.
All right, thank you very much, everybody.
Jim Powell, Senior Fellow at Cato.
The books Triumph of Liberty, Wilson's War, FDR's Folly, and Bully Boy.
Thanks very much, sir.
My pleasure.
Thank you very much.