Welcome to Keith knight. Don't tread on anyone, any libertarian institute. Today I am joined by Kyle Anzalone, the news editor at the Libertarian Institute. Check out his show conflicts of interest. Links will be in the description below. Kyle, you have such a terrific archive of work. You not only publish news items, you have articles, you have podcast videos. If someone wants to get an introduction to your work, is there a podcast, an article, a video that you recommend them to?
I would just say, like, you probably won't listen to a couple episodes of my show cause I do like a news based show. And so it's all like, you know, it's just what's happening in the world today. So it's hard to like point to an episode where I really talk about libertarian foreign policy because that's not what I do. I just want to talk about the news. I'm a libertarian and so everything is through the perspective of libertarianantiwar.com and everything like that.
But yeah, cover news. So if you want to check out why I do, just check out a couple of articles once you start to read. Then you'll you'll pick out what's happening in the world real quick, and hopefully you like it. So when I watch the news, I get a lot of hubris from the political class. It's a lot of, you know, hey, we might have to take on China and we also might have to take on Russia. So she and Putin better watch out. So I came across this article.
This goes back to right after the Afghanistan pull out. This is in mid 2021, the articles titled Our Greatest Strength is Liberty, not force. By a guy named Jeffrey Warnick. Linked to the description linked to the article will be in the description below. Kyle, I wanna walk through this article almost a a couple of sentences at a time.
I will start us off. Let me know what you would like to expand on and what people really need to understand if they really want to get a grip on having a proper understanding of foreign policy articles. I mean, the most important science is the first one, so go ahead. Our failure in foreign policy is bipartisan. Yeah. So this is, this is the most important like lens, I think to look through US foreign policy through is that it's not that the Democrats are weak or the
Republicans are mean. They don't care about human life or the racist or things like this. The foreign policy is 100% bipartisan and the only consistency with foreign policy is that every time the Presidency changes hands, the new president seems to get more hawkish. And so, you know, they of course like when Barack Obama. Was running for president. He was running against George Bush's at least. The war in Iraq and was, you know, sounded pretty good.
And there were a lot of people within the anti war community who jumped on the Barack Obama bandwagon because, you know, it, it sounded good. But once he took office, he opened up the drone office and just let. Bush's torture Ogre, John Brennan, decided to bomb who, what? Whoever he wanted from some troll office in the bottom of the White House. They had these meetings called Terror Tuesdays.
You know, he went if Bush had wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Middle East, and that was bad. But by the time Obama leaves office, it's Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia. I I mean the drone war and just the US interventions across the Middle East, hugely in Spain and then. When we look at the, you know, Donald Trump, of course you know he ran on, ohh maybe I could get along with Donald Trump or not Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin. And of course the narrative around him was 100%.
Ohh Putin or Trump is Putin's puppet and everything like this. Well the the reality is, is that Trump took several steps that by Obama refused to take. When it came to how much support he was willing to give the government in Ukraine providing them weapons, he really escalated. You know, Obama started the pivot to Asia. It's not like Obama was weak on China. He started a massive military buildup in the Asia Pacific targeting trying to encircle China.
Trump just ramped that up and turned the speed up to 100. And now Biden has gone completely off of even the the, you know, the time Tom was 3 by 5 card of allowable opinion while on China policy. Joe Biden's kind of ripping that up and moving completely away from the like 5 decade. One census of 1 China and you know we're going to maintain a relationship with Taiwan, will sell Taiwan some weapons.
But you know, Taiwan isn't supposed to be a major non NATO ally, which is what the US is moving towards. We're not supposed to recognize or even support Taiwanese independence. We're supposed to recognize that China and Taiwan are part of a single political entity. This is enshrined law, U.S. policy, and Biden is routinely pledging that he will go to war and put U.S. troops. On the ground in Taiwan to to go to war with China and if you look at the the votes on a lot of this.
I mean, now that Biden's in office, of course, it's pretty much just Rand Paul and Thomas Massey. Maybe you get some of these right wing populists. Matt Gates, Nancy Mace, Josh Hawley. I'm sure I'm leaving off a couple like Marjorie Taylor Green, even Laura Bobert isn't always bad, but for the most part, you know, you know, everybody on the Republican side and the Democrat side is bad. It when Trump was in office, I
think there was a little bit. More interest from the the squad types and Barbara Lee and actually trying to rein in the president. But but now we have none of that at all. So the the foreign policy of always escalating every situation, demanding complete dominance over every sector of the world is 100% bipartisan foreign policy. And I mean, I mean good thing.
This article is short, Keith. I just tell the people to read this first sentence, but it's a very short, punchy article, so I recommend reading the whole thing. This is fantastic. Article goes on. It fails to recognize that the use of military force doesn't work. It fails to recognize there is no American empire. The conversation of good versus evil is no longer effective. Countries will preserve relationships with Russia and China. Our economy is no longer the strongest in the world.
It has competition, and we no longer have a strong currency. Before getting into the currency aspect, what do people need to know? About the war with Russia, a potential war with Russia and what are some bullet points about a potential war with China? Well, I, you know, I just wanna mention here too, Keith. This was written over a year ago, right. And so he accurately predicts that when the US tries to isolate Russia from the rest of the world.
That's not the case at all. You know, Americans completely missed this. But there was a a conference of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This is a Chinese. LED trade block and now I think has 14 countries that make up 43% of the world's population, 1/4 of the world world's economy. And Turkey, a NATO member is applying to be the 15th member in this President Putin attended the Conference for this group. He met with Chinese President Xi, India's President Modi.
And so we could see that like Russia is clearly not isolated, they are meeting with major. Asian powers and, you know, they've maintained a relationship with Turkey and NATO partner throughout this. You know, Mexico hasn't condemned Russia here. You know, if we look at the trend in Latin America, Russia's partner Venezuela is only
expanding its relationships. As you know, there's been new governments in Peru and Colombia who are no longer interested in just, you know, being subservient to Washington but want to go their own way and develop their own.
Relationships with countries in their neighborhood and and so, yeah I mean I think that like that right there is really important also you know, this being written right in the middle of the downfall of the the government of Afghanistan, it is, you know, a really great thing to say, of course, because it says, you know, we can't dictate the world by force. And that's exactly what we learned in Afghanistan.
If there was a, if there was a military and if there were a people that you would be able to force, right. It's the most advanced. Military in the world and one of the like least developed people in the world, right. You would assume with that you would be able to get subservience and we we obviously didn't get that. 20 years later we we come, we go. The Taliban are still in Kabul, what do you know so. That's a lot.
Now what Russia and China like what what were you asking for, Keith, when it comes to Russia give us a couple bullet points. There was a coup in 2014. Walk us through how we got from there to today. If you just had to narrow it down in summarize, yeah. So they're Ukraine has always been very corrupt state. So there's a lot of people who are you know upset with the government in Kiev and this starts to boil over in 2013 and 2014.
But. In 2014, one of the things that happens is very militant neo-Nazi elements get very involved in essentially hijacked the protest. There's the leader of the C-14 gang and the C-14 stands for the 14 words of the white supremacist creed. Like these people are a bow. Neo Nazis, not, you know, I'm labeling some guy who votes right to me a neo Nazi like this. These people like, you know, believe in white supremacy, that the Hitler message and all that ugly, ugly stuff. Right.
And so he's saying that, look, these would have turned into a gay pride protest if it wasn't for us. We overthrew the government. Yeah. You're only 10%. But if you're the most militant, 10%, you could, you know, change the country. And so with that group taking power, you know, they're they're white supremacists, they're Ukrainian ethno nationalist and a good portion of Ukraine is made-up of people who are ethnically Russian. And so this is set apart in this
the. The biggest event here was, I think it's in 2015, the burning of the Odessa trade building where there is a bunch of Russian citizens in there and these neo-Nazi elements set fire to it. And so then you have the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbass republics, a Don Esque and Luhansk. These are regions of Ukraine. The Donbass borders Russia. The Crimean Peninsula is the most southern region of Ukraine and Crimea votes to join Russia is Annette. Russia takes over the Crimean peninsula.
There's not like battles or anything like that. 50% of the Ukrainian military, they're just defense and joins Russia and the Donbass. Civil war breaks out. Ukraine tries to take it back. They say they're, you know, engaging in this terror war largely as these Neo Nazi aligned groups, the Azov Battalion, which is absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard, that that begin to fight in the Donbass. And this ends up being a 8 year
long kind of frozen conflict. And this brings us to 20. 22022 in February, when the the general ceasefire that had not ceasefire agreement, the Minsk Accords that had kept the fighting on on a pretty low simmer, was completely abandoned by Ukraine and its Western allies, as Ted Galen Carpenter pointed out, and I believe in Cato, and the article was definitely published on September 30th. I remember the date he said that, you know, we have made
Ukraine a de facto NATO member. And so with those two things going on Russia let's to invade Ukraine and we had now had the seven month long fight and I guess the base development Keith really in the whole world happened just this week with Russia and had seen four regions of of Ukraine, the Donbass Republics I referred to earlier Donetsk and Luhansk and then two southern republics and you know they they did this with the vote but of course you can't hold an accurate vote during wartime.
So that part is kind of a. You know, it's military tactic. Thinly guised in democracy is I think what Russia did there. But anyways, Russia I think took about another 15% of the Ukrainian territory with that move. And then when it comes to the China Taiwan issue, I'm in America. I might be looking at this and say I hate to see some big bully bully a someone in a vulnerable situation. So therefore the US should pledge their allegiance to Taiwan.
In case of a Chinese invasion, what what is that mindset missing? What what does that person need to know about the situation? So China has a very long policy and a policy geared towards peaceful reunification with Taiwan. They do want to have more control over what happens in Taiwan, but the more America says that we're going to. Defend Taiwan, the more America says that we're going to supply Taiwan to military equipment.
And from at least the perspective of the Chinese government, encourages Taiwan to declare independence and secede, the more China is going to lead towards a military solution. And if we're just being realistic here, Keith, the Pacific Ocean is really, really big and China's on one side of it, and Taiwan is right next to China. And you know, America is on the exact opposite side of it.
And if China wants to, I, and this is even admitted by American military officials, there's not a lot that the US could do if China surrounds the island. And so rather than provoking China till, seek a military solution. You know, just encourage as much diplomacy as possible that gives the Taiwanese as much freedom as possible. Now look, if Taiwan wants to fight China like that's on the the Taiwanese and that's up to
them. Like how, you know, much they want to fight for their independence. That, you know, we're libertarians, Keith. We don't believe in liberating the world. And, you know, the the Taiwanese are no more special than the people of Afghanistan. And, you know, we've see that us trying to create a more free society anywhere in the world doesn't lead to that. The article goes on. He says we refuse to recognize the state of the world as it is.
This is no longer the Cold War, America versus Russia, good versus evil, where America was by far the biggest economy in the world and the dollar reigned supreme. We need to be honest with ourselves and recognize we are no longer a superpower. The era of military hegemony and dollar hegemony no longer exists. We abused both for two. Long the day of reckoning is here. We need to accept this. And it was a bipartisan failure that got us here. So imagine that you are a an advisor.
You get George Kennan's place talking to Harry Truman and everyone since Kissinger's place. What would you have advised the American Government to do once it had the empire to make sure either they didn't abuse it or they didn't lose it? What path should they have taken? Yeah, I mean, retrenchment and just, you know, bringing everything home that we can, scaling back the military as much as possible and just being
an economic giant, right. You know, if every country is trading with us, then our culture is, you know, being traded to every country. And that's how we're going to impact influence and everything like and look, if there's a country that doesn't want to like, trade with the America and like maintain their own backwards.
Culture, there's nothing the people of the America could really do about that and we've seen that with Afghanistan or Cuba and these other countries where we've tried everything possible. We we've used all of our empire might on these you know various small weak countries and have been unable to change them for decades either. You know, trying to use all of our economic power or all of our military might. It just simply doesn't work. And keep it. I guess if there's one thing I I
would just. They had, like, a little bit of nuance in this article. It it would just be to say that America is still a superpower. It's just. And in the first paragraph, he says America is an Empire, America is an Empire, America is a superpower. We're just not a global superpower, right? We can't determine what happens in eastern Ukraine.
But that doesn't mean that the majority of Europe isn't taking American marching orders under NATO or, you know, just because we can't prevent China from taking Taiwan. Doesn't mean that almost every country in the Asia Pacific is an ally and would do whatever the US wants. And so we we still are a superpower, I guess.
And the only reason I add that little bit of nuance is because, yeah, I think it makes the right wing or sometimes a little bit apprehensive when they're like, oh, no, we're gonna lose our military might. Now people are going to treat America like America has treated Iraq and America still isn't a rock, right, Keith? Like, we have our nuclear arsenal. We are a major world economy. We produce things here in, in ways that no other country can. And look at the rule of law here.
I'm a libertarian. It's not great, but there there's, there's pretty good property rights here most of the time. You know what I mean? Like, it's not like if you go out of town for a couple of months, Keith, you're gonna come back and somebody somehow has a title for your house and has moved in, which, you know, there's a lot of places in the world where that's kind of how life is sometimes. Yeah.
Definitely familiar with that. The people who would oppose this and they say something like, well, if Russia goes one inch into Ukraine, we gotta threaten a nuclear exchange with Russia. If China goes into Taiwan, we gotta defend them. First of all, one of my favorite quotes ever is he who attempts to defend the world in the end defends no one. He who tries to be a friend to all ends up being a friend to none. And it's so vitally important. He said like 300 years ago. But it comes with.
A lot of wisdom even to military generals. Dwight D Eisenhower in 1956. The Soviets went into Hungary to crush the rebellion, and Eisenhower did not have a large scale military response. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure he invited Nikita Khrushchev to Camp David in response to that Lyndon Johnson. After the mass murder in Czechoslovakia that the Soviets committed in 1968, Lyndon Johnson did not respond militarily. And then in 1983 when Ronald Reagan.
Was president and the Soviets shot down an American aircraft with a congressman on it, and they killed him, a guy named Larry McDonald. There was no military response, and the Soviet Union came crumbling down eventually. So we don't have to say, look, there's this new libertarian idea. It's so we're like dumb hippies who just live in our heads and just want this utopian world to work out. We have actual examples of people with a lot of military experience being on our side and
threatening. The danger of this? John J Mearsheimer wasn't in the military. But the point is, even so-called realists who follow the George Kennan philosophy were saying the US is pushing Ukraine to be tough with Russia, giving them almost a war guarantee much like the British gave to Poland in 1939, or that Russia gave to
Serbia if it was. Playing tough with Austria in the First World War. So this is no small feat that, you know, we're threatening nuclear exchange over Taiwan or the Donbass region because we don't like that they even democratically voted years ago. This was long before this military occupation took place. So it it's absolutely unbelievable. Are there any other times you could think of where we didn't have this Neo con response of
you know what that that nation. Cross the line, therefore we have to go to war. Are there are there any other historical examples you use that you'd like to convince people with and say, look, we don't always have to respond to what the military and it can work out? No. And in fact, this is like one of my has big, one of my big frustrations under the Biden administration. It just doesn't make any sense.
If you want to try to isolate Russia from the rest of the world, then you re enter the Iran nuclear deal and allow the Iranian energy back on the market.
Or at the very least you start to relieve some sanctions on Venezuela. Where what, you don't like Maduro because he's a socialist and kind of bad to his people that it, you know, the only historical example I could think of here, Keith, is it it seems like Tony Montana at the end of Scarface, just doing as much blow as possible and and thinking that they're going to be able to take on the entire world. You know, Kamala Harris is at the DMZ, provoking the North Koreans.
What are we going to do with North Korea? Tests another nuclear weapons? Put more sanctions on Pyongyang. They're they're sanctioned by everyone. Who's willing to implement American sanctions already? It's not going to make a difference. And yet they continue to provoke the North Koreans, continue to provoke the Chinese, they want to isolate the Russians.
And as the Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi recently said, the more countries America sanctions, the stronger the sanctioned, the network of the sanction countries get. And so, you know, it's one thing if you want to just try to isolate Russia and then you don't have Venezuela, Iran, China, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, North Korea and a dozen other countries under sanctions, then it's much easier to isolate Russia. But now all these other countries are already sanctioned.
So there's no downside to them at all to doing business with Russia. And and, you know, like you basically have the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in a large countries that I know this is a lefty.
Term. But the global S does generally pretty well defined what countries we're talking about here that are willing to do business with the Russia and ignore U.S. sanctions and and there's just no possible way that they could really expect that they could you know win the win all these economic and agile military wars at the same exact time and yet they there seems to be no recognition of that and it's full speed ahead. Keith pedaled to the metal.
Again, it's hard to think of like why the the White House is acting this way. Exactly. And, and I love what the author mentions the discussing economic growth and the importance of having a strong domestic economy. I love Thomas Sowell's take on this, he said. The very same people who say that government has no right to interfere with sexual activity between consenting adults believe that the government has every right to interfere with economic activity between
consenting adults. So the more freedom people have, the more chances they have to make mutually beneficial. Voluntary exchanges, and that is what that that is really one way that we could influence the world. First of all, leading by example. And if countries aren't trading with us, well, I don't know. Make them jealous, become really rich, become really wealthy, produce a lot of good things that they'll want to have so bad that it'll create a black market incentive for them to go around
to their governments embargo. There's so many things, yet the psychopath class jumps us right to nuclear exchange with Vladimir Putin, who asked to join NATO in 1999. Reaching his hand out after they're no longer communists, they're moving towards an Eastern Orthodox path. But of course they have to spit in their face and humiliate them, just like Germany in Versailles. And of course the dollar hegemony no longer exists.
Well, it's very classic. A lot of economists will explicitly say monopolies are bad because they provide worse quality and higher prices than would otherwise exist under competition. Also, the Federal Reserve should have a monopoly. On the currency, well, what do you think? The same exact economic laws or general terms apply. So if we really want this strength, I think we have to embrace both domestic and foreign policy freedom principles.
Anything else before we read the last two paragraphs, just to expand on your point there about Putin wanting to join NATO in 1999 and, you know, the how the West is slapped his hand away. It's almost like Biden doesn't remember the past 30 years, my entire lifetime. You know, I remember. In the movie Terminator 2, the Kid actually asked, like, why would we get into nuclear war with Russia? I thought they were our friends now.
And I, you know, distinctly remember from my childhood, my impression of Russia growing up was Vladimir Putin was the first person to call George Bush and offer assistance on killing terrorists. Real assistance. Not like, hey, you know, man, if I could help out, let me know. But you know, I'll, I'll see what I could do. They were offering to allow the Americans to use.
All the old Soviet bases in Central Asia to move military equipment into Afghanistan, they were they were willing to help the Americans fight the terrorists after 911 and somehow 20 years after that, they're now the unthinkable enemy. I mean, I I love the independent media. This past week has been doing a great job of back when, like, Putin and all these people had a little bit more hair. You got like, Putin and Biden standing together on all these world event stages. Now he's Hitler.
Are you serious? Like 20 years ago, like these, these guys were your best friends. So you know what's changed. And it's the American military industrial complex. Needs an enemy. Of course, of course. And in almost every example, and this was even after Putin had accused the West of arming terrorists in the caucus mountains. So he was even willing to what turned a but blind eye to that? Did you, well, see him make that accusation in the Putin
interviews with Oliver Stone? Yeah. Yeah. I there's old episodes of my foreign Policy Focus podcast. They were probably in like the first hundred episodes where I broke down all four of those interviews by. Alverstone, absolutely, absolutely. If anybody really wants to understand like kind of how Putin thinks and and how he likes to at least present himself that I think that's very helpful to understand, like how him and the Kremlin communicating what's going on in Ukraine today.
Me too. Yeah, I thought Oliver Stone did a phenomenal job. I know it costs money to watch on YouTube, go to the Libertarian Institute. I have provided a summary analysis and lessons learned of all four episodes. So yes, I I think you're
definitely right about this. I don't love that the US, you know, is palling around with Joseph Stalin in the Second World War. I don't even like that they talked to Mohammed bin Solomon today, but it is a heck of a lot better than the alternative where civilians end up having to bear. The cost of these conflicts, I mean, Pat Buchanan's great point was always yeah, we've sanctioned all these places. But I look at Saddam Hussein, I look at Milosevic, I look at Fidel Castro.
They look well fed to me. So it's like it's always these civilians that have to pay the price for these horrible leaders. It's it's really tragic. Article continues. At the end of Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood says that a man has to know his limitations. We need to learn and accept ours as a nation. We debased our military, we debased our money. We were reckless with all the power we had.
We treated both with disrespect. And now here we are no longer a superpower in a very competitive world where we have limited to no influence. Again, we need to turn to the wisdom of George Washington. Avoid foreign entanglements. Our relationship with the world should be based upon commerce trade. Any thoughts on that?
Beautifully written. And the only thing I would say is that there's no indication in the year since this was written that the White House is and anyway turning this direction. And as I said, I think rather than Dirty Harry, we're getting Tony Montana. And it's not something horribly that distant. A very common thing is people advocate a principle of my body, my choice, for example. For instance, if I don't have the right to my body, well, then
who the heck else does? They own not only their body, but mine too, if we extend that to the economic realm and realize that economic decisions are simply people expressing their preferences with how they choose to allocate their scarce. Time and their scarce money on this earth. Then we could embrace that policy in principle of unilateral free trade, open discussion, and we wouldn't constantly be vilified. I don't know if you've seen it.
I remember especially, like probably 10-10 years ago, there were a lot of people in the comment sections of YouTube, a lot of people confidently on social media saying that they thought things like 911 were needed to.
To humble the American Empire, which is not too crazy, if you can imagine people support Hiroshima because, well, we had to do that to Japan. There are some people across the world who say, well, I think America needed 911 to to to really get a grip on the reality of things. It's amazing that that they never assume that there are downsides to any of this. They go, yeah, well, we might have to go to war with this person or that person.
They almost never talk about the downsides of, first of all, the deaths. And the financial costs and the roaning of the currency, as Warnick has mentioned here. But they never talk about the reputational cost. It's like there's no downside. There's only upside.
We might have to defend Taiwan. We might have to send some more money to the Poroshenko government and the Azov Battalion. How is it that such a blatant scam is able to continue, with all these intellectuals on the same side and the people not being able to see through it? Do you have any thesis there? Yeah, because they they like, take it even further. And so it's not just that, you know, everybody has to agree, but you cannot dissent, right.
Because if you are not in line with going to war with Saddam, even if it keep, even if you have nothing positive, ever a positive to say about Saddam Hussein and your entire life. But other than I really don't see proof that he was making weapons of mass destruction. You're a terrorist if you say, look, I don't want to. Even China's communist
governments are oppressive. We all know this, but they're not committing a genocide against the Uighurs, and they use, you know, data with a decimal point in the wrong place to try to prove that the genocide was going on. Oh, look, now I'm a communist. Or if I say boy. In 2008, William Burns, then ambassador to Russia, now director of the CIA, wrote a memo to the State Department
saying that. For Russia, the brightest of all red lines was Ukraine joining NATO and was seen as a security threat not just by the hardliners in Russia, but by every single person in the Kremlin. And this was going to provoke a serious response, just saying, like, hey, I'm not saying that that Russia was right to invade Ukraine. I'm saying that you all knew that if you admitted a NATO Ukraine into NATO, Russia was going to invade Ukraine and you, you know, made them de facto.
Members anyways, and so this was a predictable consequence of your edges. Well, now I'm a Putin propagandist. This is this is how they keep everybody in line established a narrative is that you you can't descend or else you're no longer an American. You're hurting your country, Keith. You're making your fellow countrymen more vulnerable by articulating factual dissent to the the, the common narrative.
It it's the classic guilt tactic that, you know, Meghan McCain will use this saying, ohh, I hope Julian Assange burns in hell. He's a cyber terrorist. As if just like, putting these, like sticky notes on this hero that like tugging on Superman's Cape like as as if she has any credentials. But I think you're totally right. You hit the nail on the head there, almost like a stroking, this fear of people are just terrified of social disapproval. It's like that old Jerry
Seinfeld joke he goes. People's number one fear is speaking in front of an audience. Second is death, meaning if you're at a funeral, you'd rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy. People are so terrified of social disapproval that if you just align them with not just, of course, you know, you're you love Mussolini, you love Adolf Hitler, you love Vladimir Putin. Even saying like you're Neville Chamberlain. Like an ally of America Chamberlain's the one who
declared war September 3rd. Of 39, the fact that it it war wasn't his first move. That's enough that they need to write to, to write you off and look at the example you used of that. These two are in like a major position of of who knows what. These people are really in a position to know what they're talking about. William Burns, the current head of the CIA. This was in 2008. What was his role?
He was a ambassador to Russia's ambassador, ambassador to Russia under Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. And then the guy he's quoting is Sergey Lavrov. Isn't it the foreign minister since 2005? Isn't that he's referring? He's, yes, in the memo he's referencing a conversation with Lavrov, but he's just articulating that this is the policy in the Kremlin. I don't think that part was necessarily quoting Lavrov.
I think that was like William Burns's position on it, which I think makes it even more important and powerful. You know what I'm saying? Like, Burns is assessing that this is the position of. Everybody in the Kremlin and and then he has like the quote from Sergey Lavrov, that means net like, you know, like this is absolutely like, no, this will not happen. And just before they had put both the Georgia and Ukraine on the path to NATO membership.
Yeah, and that was under George Bush, all right, the article continues. And unfortunately, we refused to recognize that coercion is a bad policy always and everywhere. Alright, Kyle, this is gonna be rough, but I want us to go through these quickly. I'm. I'm one who named an intervention since the start of the War on Terror. Give me the primary results that occurred and the downsides you mentioned. In Afghanistan, we replaced the Taliban with the Taliban after
20 years. In Iraq, what were the downsides of going into Iraq and kindly liberating them from Saddam's rule? Well over a million dead, a civil war that really hasn't officially worked itself out all the way in Iraq. The government there is a complete train wreck. They held elections like two years ago and still haven't elected a Prime Minister. It it it takes months and months to even count a vote. There's violence all the time in Iraq still, and I mean from the
position. You know of successive white houses, like every White House wants to like disempower Iran in the Middle East. And nothing has built up around more and allowed them to have more ties in the Middle East than the United States. Overthrowing Saddam and putting a democratically elected government in Baghdad which senses a majority Shia country ends up being a Shia government which is friendly with Iran. Downsides of intervention into Libya? So Libya still a failed state.
I think they estimate like 250,000 people died during that war. The stories that you read from Libya since the fall of the Gaddafi government are insanely horrific people, refugees from other African countries try to go through Libya and basically what would happen time after time, you hear these stories where that, you know, the people would call home, they're being tortured by some group and they demand money from the family. The family sends the money and
then they sell that. Person to another group who tortures that person. Or there was a regularly used mass rape in the Libyan prisons to try to take fighters off the battlefield so they would like just rape large groups of men with broomsticks and things like that and then film it and then use that as blackmail to try to keep people from the battlefield. Hundreds of thousands of people died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea after the, you
know, Gaddafi died. Not only Libyans, but people from across northern Africa and the Sahel. And if you wanna look at what's going on in like Northern Africa today, like the the top of the ice cream cone there, it's, you know, coup after coup after coup. And a lot of it's because AFRICOM, the US African command, is involved in waging different military games. And we pick out our favorite generals from Bikina Faso or Mali, and then we train them up real good and then they end up
pulling off a coup. But a lot of it is because after Gaddafi fell. The jihadist elements that helped to overthrow Gaddafi with the support of the United States went bad to other countries in the region and supported different groups and inflamed all of these different ethnic rivalries. And so you'll read a story and Molly, about how 150 people died because this one group attacked this other group because, you know, this group's now allied
with jihadists. I think there was just another coup this past week in Burkino Faso. I mean, it's a complete train wreck, and it's all because of Obama's. Uh, war in overthrowing Gaddafi? And then they had this bizarre lie that Wolf Blitzer on CNN said that Gaddafi was giving his troops Viagra as a tool of mass rape. I mean, just the propaganda that came out of that one. And Obama wrote a book and, like, pinned the whole thing on Sarkozy.
That was actually funny results to the US involvement in Pakistan. So I guess the the big thing now point out here is the US drone war in Pakistan. Push this group that shrink E Taliban over the border of Pakistan into Afghanistan to get away from the Pakistani army there. They adopted the Black Flag of the Islamic State and are now what's known as the Islamic
State course on fashion. And so if we look at, you know, the the disasters during the US pull out of Afghanistan and the near weekly or so suicide bombings around Afghanistan since the US pullout by the Islamic State. Of course, on group that's just a a direct repercussion from Obama's drone war in that country. When it comes to Yemen, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was, from what I understand, responsible for the USS Cole
bombing. This was October of the year 2000. Well, what are the results of this conflict in Yemen? So there there's tons of things going on in Yemen, Keith. There's the drone war against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has been going on for years and years and years. But more recently, in 2015, the United States Bad Saudi Arabia, waging mostly an air war but also like some proxy ground conflicts, they use a lot of
Sudanese military militants. They have the UAE backing different forces, but largely, particularly the UAE. Assumed all of the jihadist groups under their their banners and and they now fight with the UAE.
And so we've essentially flipped in that war from what we are doing under Bush and Obama to the the late Obama years in 2015. And rather than fighting a war against AQ AP we're fighting a war against this group, Ansar Al Ria or otherwise known as the Houthis that control the majority of the the population of Yemen. If you look at a map you're like, oh, they barely control like 1/4 of the country. But that's where like 2/3 of the population lives, like mostly yemens and empty desert.
And so they they control, like most of the populations, the capital and everything like that. Well, they're opposed to AQ AP and yet we're concerned about bombing the Houthis right now because we have to back Saudi Arabia and the UAE's ambitions in Yemen, which I think are mostly like just stealing their oil and their ports and any wealth they could squeeze out of Yemen. When it comes to al Shabaab in Somalia, what's happening there?
So, al Shabaab. I think being informed till 2009 but you know where there are 2006 me but they're lumped into the the terror war but this is really a whole separate thing. I'll Shabaab did swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden but their emergence in Somalia really rude spat to the the time that Somalia became like the somewhat anarchist state that they're you know wasn't a a foremost strong government in Mogadishu. And so then there's a lot of
tribal groups that emerged. When these tribal groups started to stabilize Somalia a little bit, and Scott Horton, our boss at the Libertarian Institute, has a fantastical, fantastic article that goes through all of this. A lot more detail and a lot more eloquently than I'm going to do
here. But essentially the US tried to overthrow the this, you know, loose system of like tribal councils that was holding some stability in Somalia with the Ethiopian army, and in that the group that emerged in Somalia. As one of the most powerful was al Shabaab, and so it was, you know, the US inviting The Ethiopians and that really led to the rise of al Shabaab. Now they control the bottom, I don't know, third quarter, maybe 20% of Somalia. the US has waged
a years long drone campaign. Every time a drone strike gets dropped, they say, ohh boy, well, that's because, you know, or that's because there's Al Shabab there and we killed 10 al Shabaab and then some American journalists ends up going to that village. Talking to the people there, and they're like, what? That was a minibus and there was three kids going to school and one old man that walked with a cane. So none of them were al Shabaab. And it turns out the US just kills militants.
Also, the US calls the largest terrorist attack in African history in Somalia. Over 600 people died in this bombing. And what happened was the US was trying to wage a counterinsurgency operation. And there's this key town in southern Somalia that produces a lot of bananas, and there's a lot of wealth there. And so the US tried to come in and establish themselves as a security force, and then they allied themselves with this fashion and the Somali military that went in and massacred 10
people in this village. And then a couple weeks later, some guy from that village goes and he's trying to get into, I think, the Green Zone of Mogadishu, where all the international compound and everything like that is and has this massive, massive. I'm in a dump truck and doesn't get there, detonates on the way. We're all like all these refugees live and just, I mean, wiped hundreds of people off the face of the earth and this was like chopped up to al Shabaab.
But it there's like no real contact between this guy and al Shabaab. And it's pretty clear that there's a lot of hostility from the people in that region over the the massacre that occurred by the Somali forces. There were no guns in that village, by the way. Like this was 100% verified that. There were no guns in the village and some guy from that village tried three times, like went to a Somali general and was like, we see an American drone flying overhead.
Please, for the love of God, tell the Americans we're just farmers and don't have guns. And the lazy ass general, the Somali general, I think it sounds like was just negligent and said OK, but didn't bother to pick up the phone and call somebody because that's not what they do in Somalia and, you know, then then the Americans. Helping the village with the Somalis and forces and they killed 10 people and yeah.
Incredible. What do people need to know about the results of US intervention into Syria? Ohh wow, I forgot about this one. So this is this is terrible. Keith, in the Arab Spring springs up. There's protests, legitimate protests against the the al-Assad government, the Obama White House, and particularly I think Hillary Clinton and John Brennan. I think Brennan was CIA by then and Hillary Clinton's in the State Department.
But Brian. Might just been like an advisor or something like that at that point really push to get the US to step up the the support for the resistance to Bashar al-Assad. That resistance becomes violent, ultimately morphed into the Islamic State. Who knows how many people have died in Iraq and Syria because of this war. the US now occupies the third of Syria backing an illegitimate Turkish government where we pretend that they're better than the Assad government.
But from all indication, they're really not. They have 10s of thousands of people. In this all Hall prison camp in US occupied Syria, Keith and they just live in squalor. They're a bunch of former ISIS wives who have raised all these children that were, you know, from, you know, the the, the sons of ISIS fighters. And it's it's just it's a terrible, terrible situation.
US occupied Syria, the US is opposed to what our NATO ally Turkey is trying to do in Syria. Our allies in Syria are they're absolute enemies. And now we've implemented. Sanctions on Syria that deliberately keep the country from rebuilding after this war. And so, you know, there's people all over Syria right now, Diana. Cholera, right. There are people dying in Syria because they had so much diarrhea that they dehydrate and it died.
Like that's unthinkable to happen to anybody in this country who isn't either, like, you know, some degenerate, you know, drug user on the street or somebody in like, you know, the most advanced, highest Hospice residential type care. Right. But this is like what normal people have are dying of right now in Syria. You know, babies freezing to death in the winter in that country. And it's all because of U.S.
sanctions intentionally. So, you know, Rudy Giuliani, this clip clip is going around, was bragging about how U.S. sanctions and Iran led Iranians to trying to sell their organs for $500.00 he, like he was saying that these are the conditions that we want to create in these countries, so the people rise up. And overthrow their governments, which of course never happens, right?
Like if you if if the Iranians were starving you to death, Keith, would you be like, I wanna kill the, you know, my leader? No, you would want to kill the leader of the person that's starving your family to death. Of course. Is is just unreal. And then this again, is the classic lie about, well, what? We're gonna go there and we're gonna defeat the terrorists and we're gonna fight for our freedom, never recognizing that there's a second side to this equation, the potential
downsides. Today's blog post at the Libertarian Institute titled Marco Rubio is a liar. What I did was I used a number of quotes to respond to his
initial claim. And this is a quote directly from Osama. Bin Laden talking about the potential downsides of foreign policy, bin Laden briefly says their leader, that idiot they obey, was claiming that we envied their lifestyle when the truth which this pharaoh would like to hide is that we are attacking them because of their injustice toward the Muslim world and especially Palestine and Iraq, as well as their occupation of the land of the
two sanctuaries. So I mean the the the warnings were there, the the warnings were there for the war in. Russia with the William Burns memo you mentioned previously. The warnings are there with China. President Xi is telling Biden about the potential downsides of Pelosi, you know, flying these jets and landing into Taiwan.
But they're just so psychotic. They don't care to look at the the the cost that everyone else is going to have to bear for their belligerence, just as John F Kennedy was not about to allow the the Soviets to have missiles. In Cuba, these countries are not gonna want Taiwan to be a de facto NATO member, nor will Ukraine be allowed to have their time to do the exact same thing. Article continues. Our founding was predicated upon our own fight to be free on our
own terms. It had nothing to do with conquering others. We have a legal principle that force is only legitimate when the threat is direct and imminent. We perverted that principle in the world stage. The reason I think this is important is because you don't want to just strip people of their identity. I know a lot of people who say America's job is to liberate the world. This was the guy. Who was talking to Roger Waters
on CNN? He goes, what about our role as liberators and waters like, had to pick himself up off the floor just because it's such a joke at this point. But that mindset is real, so you don't want to just say actually this thing you love is total trash. Say no, this thing you love. I think you have to change the your start date and maybe look at the Declaration of Independence. We hold truths to be self-evident. There is an objective truth.
People have the right to life. Liberty the right to pursue their happiness so long as they don't initiate violence against peaceful people. You have the the state does not have the right to monopolize weaponry because then that would give them a complete monopoly on force and that would be absolute government supremacy. There's all these things in our heritage that we can look to. I mean America goes a little existed a little before Dick Cheney was alive to the issue.
All these ridiculous things when when it comes to we only got two more sentences. Thank you for. Your time today, when it comes to making sure we attack the right from the right, so to speak, or make sure that people don't think we're hating on the country, America, we live here. And of course I love it here. I wouldn't want to live anywhere
else. Do you have anything that you say to people that makes them really understand your position so they realize we're attacking a subset of people who have occupied the regime as opposed to attacking all of America? So, especially if I'm talking to the right, I'll just go into like look, look, look where America is located strategically on the map and then think about the Americans. You know, they're very proud people.
They're gun wielding people. They are, you know, wealthy and, you know, like have the ability and the time to defend themselves if needed. You know, we don't need to be meddling in Iraq to keep Americans safe. Americans can't keep themselves safe. Washington. Tends to put targets on the bats of Americans. And So what we need to do is take the targets off of our bats. We'll, you know, we live in a country where, fortunately, we could defend ourselves if we need to.
And look, the the US government spends, what, 10 times more than what Russia does on probably much more than that now, but you know, 5 1 what China does on its military what 1215 times more than Russia does on its military either. We're really, really, really bad. At doing military things, or we don't need to spend that much on
our military, right? Like what, you're telling me the Chinese are five times better at building battleships than the Americans and and things like that, that we had to spend five times more? And then I feel like those arguments, like particularly on the right, tend to diffuse it, although sometimes I have to articulate them just a little bit better. Exactly. And but wars of aggression are constantly what bring these
other empires down. Whether it's the Romanov regime or the Soviet regime, the Ottoman Empire, the French Empire, the German empires, the British Empire, Wars are constantly bringing down these, the Japanese Empire wars are constantly bringing down these places, and the American Empire, just that keeps on provoking the wars because they directly reap a large amount of benefits from provoking the wars.
They get all the votes. Marco Rubio gets all the cheers from the morons and the crowd when he talks about blowing up Chinese aircrafts. And they never have to bear the consequences that they're seen as heroes because they're the ones who we look to to defend us article and saying we used it not to defend ourselves, but rather in attempt to bend the world to our will and have used the dollar as a weapon in the
same capacity hegemony. We are an even greater nation when we reject the concept of hegemony and embrace voluntarism, liberty and freedom. Kyle Anzalone, where is the best place for people to find your work? The Libertarian institute? Keith Knight, where I think you're the managing editor. I'm the news editor, so I write multiple news stories almost every day for the institute. If not, I'm writing them an antiwar.com and reporting them at the institute.
I want to tell everybody. I am speaking this weekend in Denver, October 8th at noon at the Capitol on behalf of Julian Assange. If we wanna keep doing this, if we want real journalism, we have to fight for Julian Assange. There's a huge event going on in DC my colleague Dave Decamp from antiwar.com is speaking there. So if you're in the DC area, I pretty sure they're at the Department of Justice, so head down there. But if you're in the Denver area, please come out. Support, check it out.
I think the like the Colorado LP is involved in the event so there will be some great people there to hang out with and everything but please come check that out. You can follow me on Twitter at Kyle Anzalone, under score and. Antiwar.com. Thanks to everyone for watching Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone and the Libertarian Institute. Kyle, thank you for your time, brother. Thank you, Keith.