Stephen Zunes talks about Joe Biden’s shameful history helping to advocate for the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003. These days he claims he was caught up in the aftermath of 9/11 and was simply mistaken about the intelligence, like everyone else who voted for the war. But Zunes reminds us that Biden was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at that time, with a Democratic-majority congress. With his influence, he probably could have stopped the war singlehandedly. If that weren’t...

Scott interviews Andrew Cockburn about Russia’s supposed new hypersonic missiles, which are said to have the ability to elude conventional missile defense systems, potentially making the U.S. a target for a nuclear strike with little that could be done to defend ourselves. The problem? These missiles almost certainly can’t exist. Cockburn explains all the problems that American engineers have faced in trying to design hypersonic weapons, inferring that the Russians must have come up against...

Dave DeCamp discusses a brand new MIT study into the Bolivian presidential election of November 2019 that resulted in the ouster of Evo Morales over claims of election fraud. The new study finds no such evidence, claiming that all the supposed red flags were perfectly consistent with what should be expected from the country’s elections. It’s true that Morales was defying the term limits outlined in the Bolivian constitution, but a court had ruled before the election that his bid was...

Scott interviews Branko Marcetic about his new book, Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden, which explores the arc of Biden’s decades-long political career. Marcetic explains that Biden has never really had serious ideological commitments, and instead has simply wanted power and prestige since he was a kid. This has led to a life of switching positions on major issues when he perceived that it would be to his benefit, as he has done on the wars in the Middle East, the drug wars at...

Dan McKnight of BringOurTroopsHome.us talks about the “Defend the Guard” movement popping up in state legislatures around the country. The legislation on which the movement is based calls for an end to the calling up of states’ national guard troops to federal service without an explicit declaration by congress. McKnight also explains the way conservatives of all stripes are starting to unite around the idea that America cannot keep fighting these endless wars, a growing consensus which is...

Trita Parsi comes back on the show to recap the Quincy Institute’s recent conference in Washington D.C., which put pro-restraint and pro-interventionist figures on panels together to debate the merits of America’s foreign policy status quo. Some from the antiwar movement have been critical of Parsi’s organization for not being radical enough, but Parsi reiterates that an “inside game” is going to look different from an “outside game”, and that while the absolutely pure antiwar position is...

Danny Sjursen discusses the recent deal to withdraw most of the U.S. troops from Afghanistan. He begins by describing the reactions of his military friends to the idea that this deal represents “surrender” to the Taliban, which some on the right would have you believe. On the contrary, says Sjursen, most veterans, including all of his friends, support ending the war, and many say that we should do so as soon as possible. If anything, Sjursen is critical of this deal because it doesn’t go far...

Scott talks to Baltimore lawyer Steven Silverman about a 2009 case involving the alleged illegal cavity search of his client by Baltimore police. Silverman’s client claimed that Officer Shakil Moss stopped him without cause and conducted the cavity search in public in the middle of the day, which was later confirmed through DNA analysis by the department’s internal affairs unit. It was later discovered that a group of officers conducted many such unconstitutional stops, and some of them have...

Scott talks to Peter Van Buren about the resurgence of the narrative that Russia is interfering in American elections, this time in the form of apparent support both for Trump’s reelection and for Bernie Sanders to get the Democratic nomination. Van Buren notes that fortunately voters don’t seem to be buying it this time around—both Trump and Sanders’ approval ratings improved in the days following the stories about supposed Russian interference. But he warns that we should always be wary of...

Scott has Bob Murphy on the show to explain the Austrian School’s view of the boom and bust cycle in the American economy. Murphy explains why the Keynesians are wrong to assert that booms and busts are simply an inherent feature of capitalism. In fact, it is intervention in the free market by central banks—in particular the fact that they control the interest rate, which should be the free-floating price of borrowing money—that contribute to years of misallocation of resources. Eventually,...

Marjorie Cohn discusses the attempted extradition of Julian Assange from Britain to the United States so that he can stand trial for alleged violations of America’s Espionage Act. Cohn outlines the two main grounds on which she believes the British judge should refuse to go along with the extradition: that Assange is being charged with a political crime, and that he is likely to face torture at the hands of the American authorities, much like he has been facing for years now in the form of...

Scott interviews Nasser Arrabyee about the latest on the war in Yemen. The humanitarian situation there is still desperate, with the UN finally updating its estimates to over 200,000 dead—many of these women and young children. But Arrabyee sees reasons for hope. For one thing, the war is very unpopular, both among Americans and for Prince Mohammad Bin Salman, so neither country looks very good for their participation. Arrabyee says that airports may also start to be opened to humanitarian aid...

Scott interviews Matthew Hoh about Joe Biden’s history pushing for the war in Iraq and his subsequent attempt to whitewash this record. When Hillary Clinton faced Barack Obama in the 2008 primary, Hillary’s record in support of the war was a major factor in Obama’s victory—Hoh wishes that this time around the other Democrats would make more out of Biden’s pro-war history instead of mostly letting foreign policy go undiscussed. Even Sanders, who has been sound in his opposition to the war in...

Scott talks to Dave DeCamp about the OPCW’s efforts to discredit a pair of whistleblowers, both of whom are former employees who claim their findings were expunged from the organization’s official reports on the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma in 2018. The OPCW concluded that there was clear evidence of the Assad government attacking its own civilians with chemical weapons, which was used as justification for the U.S. to launch a retaliatory strike. But these two former employees are...

Sheldon Richman discusses what he calls “the nonintervention principle,” a corollary of libertarianism’s nonaggression principle. Richman says that in the face of those who advocate foreign intervention and regime change, libertarians have a tendency to deny the claims that are being used to justify the intervention, rather than categorically opposing intervention qua intervention, no matter how bad the situation is. He acknowledges that many of these arguments are sound, so far as they go—for...