Welcome to Keith's night. Don't tread on anyone and the libertarian Institute. Usually, when I have my colleague from the libertarian Institute Scott, Horton on to discuss foreign policy will discuss. One of his two books Fool's errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan or enough already time to end the war on
terrorism. And usually we will take the libertarian approach to war war is on just because it usually involves initiating violence against peaceful people to fund the war and usually ends up killing. Displacing millions of people in the war. However, there is a second anti-war stance that many conservatives have that, they'll say yes. I want America to be the number one Global influence on the planet. And in order to do that. We must have an anti-war pro-peace stance.
I believe this is best Illustrated in the book. Churchill Hitler, and the unnecessary War by Patrick J. Buchanan here was the final chapter of that book. Chapter 15, America inherits. The Empire one, may pick up something useful from among the most. Fatal errors, James Wolfe, 1757 hero of Quebec in the Twin catastrophes of Western Civilization World Wars 1 & 2. Britain was the indispensable nation and Churchill and
indispensable. Man. It was Britain secret commitment to fight for France of which the Germans were left unaware that. To the world war with a Kaiser who never wanted to fight his mother's country. It was Britain's declaration of war on August, 4th 1914, that led, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India to declare war in solidarity with the mother country, and Drew Britain's Ally Japan. And to the conflict.
It was Britain's bribery of Italy with Promises of Habsburg and ottoman lands in the secret treaty of London in 1915 that brought Italy. Lie in had Britain, not gone in America would have stayed out. It was Britain that converted a
franco-german. Russian war into a world war of four years that brought down the German Russian Ottoman, and austro-hungarian Empires and gave the world Lenin Stalin Mussolini and Hitler. It was Britain who's capitulation to us, pressure and disillusion of her 20-year pact with Japan in 1922 insulted. Isolated and raged that
faithful. Ally leading directly to Japanese militarism aggression and World War Two in the Pacific. It was Britain's lead in imposing the League of Nations sanctions on Italy. Over abyssinia. That destroyed the stress of front isolated, Italy and drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler had the British stood firm and back to Paris.
The French army could have chased Hitler's battalions out of the Rhineland and 1936 and reoccupied, it had the British not gone to Munich. Hitler would have had to fight for the sudetenland and Europe might have United against him.
Had Britain not issued the war guarantee to Poland and declared war over Poland. There might have been no war in Western Europe and no World War. Two Britain was, thus the indispensable nation in turning to European Wars, in two world wars and as is written in the opening pages of this book. A role in both Wars was heroic, but was it wise indispensable, man? Churchill had played a crucial role in plunging his nation into the War of 1914.
Britain then brought in the dominions Italy, Japan and the United States asked with gray, Churchill and haldane had planned to make any war with Germany, a World War. They succeeded, and Britain emerged, triumphant her greatest. Rival since Napoleon saw its high, seas Fleet scuttled its overseas trade. Ravaged, its colonies, confiscated.
Germany had been destroyed disgraced divided dismembered disarmed and driven into unpayable debt, but the cost had been seven hundred thousand British dead. A national debt 14 times what it had been in 1914 rebellions across the Empire and Britain's inevitable Eclipse as the First Nation on Earth. The British century was over, the American Century had begun. The cost of Western civilization was perhaps 10 million, dead soldiers, and millions of civilians dead from starvation and disease.
The Great War began at Versailles and Versailles begat. The second world war to stop Hitler. Britain gave a war guarantee to Poland to honor. It. Britain declared war. Both decisions were victories for Churchill this War lasted six years. Years and ended in the ruin of Europe, Stalin ization of 11 Nations, and collapse of the British and French empires in the two phases of the great
civil. War of the West 100 million Europeans perished as victims of war or the monsters bread by War, nor did The Killing stop with Hitler's suicide in his bunker from the Baltic to the Balkans Stalin's, murders went on and on and triumphant communism conquered China and North Korea leading to the mass murder of tens of millions of Asian friends of the West. Looking back at the fruits of these two world wars in 1950. George Kennan wrote today.
If one more offered the chance of having back again, the Germany of 1913 a Germany run by conservative, but relatively moderate people no Nazis and no communist a vigorous Germany United and unoccupied full of energy and confidence able to play a part again, in the balancing off of Russian power in Europe. Well, there would be objections. Which from many quarters and it wouldn't make everybody happy. But in many ways it wouldn't sound so bad in comparison with
our problems today. Now, think of what that means when you total up the score of the two world wars, in terms of their ostensible objective, you find that if there had been any gain at all. It is pretty hard to discern. The price of Britain's victory in 1945 was 400,000 more dead, the fall of the Empire and an end to the days of Hope and
glory. And bankruptcy of the nation Britain face socialism at home and your absolute dependency on the United States and the displacement of National Socialist Germany as dominant power in Europe by a stalinist, Russia with a revolutionary agenda that posed a far, greater menace to British interests and western civilization. All the British dominions and colonies. Now, turn to America for their defense and Leadership for coming. Belatedly to the rescue of the
mother country. America had demanded and taken title to her estate. Britannia was allotted a Cottage By the Sea to live out her declining years, but the great man was given his own statue. In Parliament Square. How America triumphed in negotiating with Stalin, Churchill as we have seen made far greater blunders than had Chamberlain and With Hitler. He had put his trust in Stalin
believing that. If Britain gave him all, he demanded Stalin would cooperate in building a lasting Peace by March 1946. When Churchill gave his Iron Curtain Speech, it was apparent to all. But the incurably gullible that Churchill had been had that the Soviet Union was and always had been a mortal enemy of the West. The Americans had watched the initial crisis from afar on, September 3rd. 18:39 the same day, Britain and France, declared war. FDR had assured the nation and a
fireside chat. There will be no blackout on peace in the United States. This war was not America's for FDR told his countrymen in 1940 the year of Churchill's Norwegian debacle Dunkirk and the fall of France, FDR won re-election on a pledge while I'm talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I said this before but I shall say it again and again and again, your boys are not going to be sent into any Foreign
Wars, FDR was lying. But in the election of 1940, he had to Echo America First for even after Hitler had occupied Europe from the Atlantic to the Vistula America was saying this is not our war though. Derided as isolationist, the America First Patriots, kept the United States out of the war until six months after Hitler had faded Russia.
Thus the Red Army bore the brunt of bloody combat to bring Hitler down as would seem only right for Stalin had colluded with Hitler in the rape of Poland and had launched Wars of aggression against as many nations as his Partners in Berlin. Not until four years after France had fallen and three years. After the Soviet Union had been invaded did u.s. Troops land on the Normandy beaches to open the second front.
They are the Americans and British faced, a German Army 1/4, the size of the German armies, on the Eastern Front because we stayed out of the war. Until after the Soviet Union had been invaded America. Lost 400,000 men while Soviet combat losses are estimated. Rated at 10 times that how many more US military cemeteries
would there be in Europe? Had we had to face a German army of three million instead of seven hundred thousand troops under Rommel and Vaughn Road instead on D-Day America is the last superpower, because she stayed out of the world wars until their final acts and because she stayed out of the alliances and the world wars longer than any. Great power, America, avoided the fate of the seven other
nations. That entered the 20th century, as great Powers, the British French, German, austro-hungarian Russian, Ottoman, and Japanese Empires are all gone. We alone remain because we had men who recalled the wisdom of Washington Jefferson and John. Quincy Adams about avoiding entangling alliances staying out of European Wars, and not going
abroad in search of monsters. Monsters to destroy The Road Less Traveled by after America emerged, as the Undisputed leader of the West in 1945. However, the shocks reversals and humiliations at the hands of Stalin were greater than those that had caused Britain to declare war in 1939 America. However, chose a different course embracing the wisdom of George Kennan. America pursued a policy of containment and conscious avoidance of a third world war.
When Stalin trashed, the Yalta agreement, terrorizing the peoples of Poland and Eastern Europe for whom Britain had gone to war. America was stunned and second but issued, no, ultimate a when Moscow blockaded Berlin in violation of Allied rights Truman responded. With an airlift, not armored divisions or atom bombs. When Stalin's agents carried out, the Prague coup in 1948.
Truman did not see in Czechoslovakia and issue that justified War as Churchill had, When the checks were forced to give up the sudetenland, America's answer was NATO drawing a red line across Europe that the West could defend as Britain should have done in that March of 1939. Instead of handing out an insane War guarantee to Poland and where the British had failed to line up a Russian Alliance
before giving its War guarantee. America enlisted, ten European allies before committing herself to defend West Germany. Unlike Churchill in the 1930s, American leaders of the late 1940s and 1950s believe that, while the fate of Poland and Czechoslovakia was tragic. Both were Beyond, u.s. Vital interest from 1949 to 1989. The American Army, never crossed the Yalta line. When East Germans Rose in 1953 and hungarians in 1956.
Eisenhower declined to act in 1959 Ike welcomed The Butcher of Budapest to Camp David. When Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, Kennedy called up the reserves then sent them home after a year in the missile crisis of 1962. Kennedy cut a secret deal to take u.s. Missiles out of turkey for Cruz chefs. Taking Russian missiles, out of Cuba. When the Prague spring was crushed in 1968. LBJ did nothing. U.s.
And action was not due to cowardice but cold calculation, as to what was worth risking war with a nuclear arms. In Soviet Union and but was not worth risking War. When the Polish workers movement solidarity was crushed in 1981. Ronald Reagan, denounced the repression, but he neither broke diplomatic relations with Warsaw nor imposed economic sanctions. Eisenhower and Reagan were not Chamberlain's, but neither were they Churchill's. Who ruled the capitals east of
the elbe was not to them. A vital us interest worth a war they believed in Defending. What? We had not risking War to retake what? Roosevelt and Churchill had given up at Tehran and Yalta, Reagan believed America, and freedom were the future. That communism was headed for the ash heap of history that we need. Not indeed must not blunder into a war to hasten. Its inevitable and patience and perseverance were required. The use of proxies to bedevil.
The Soviet Empire and its outposts in Afghanistan Angola. And Nicaragua and carrying a bigger stick. That was the Reagan way. For half a century. The United States confronted stalinist enemies as evil as Hitler, but more powerful and more dedicated to our destruction. Yet America never went to war with the Soviet Union. We won the Cold War by avoiding the blunders Britain made that plunged.
Her into two world wars, unlike the Brits of 1914 and 1939 Americans did not feel the need to pull the bully down, if it meant war with a great power. Such as the Soviet Union of Stalin Khrushchev and Brezhnev our way was not as glorious as Churchill's way. But Reagan won the Cold War and World leadership without firing a shot. When Churchill who had inherited a world Empire left behind a
small dependency to win a war. Without fighting is the greatest victory said Sun Tzu, that was Reagan's achievement replicating churchillian Folly with the end of the Cold War. Or in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
America was at her apogee. All the great European nations, Britain, France, Germany. Italy Were Us allies as were turkey Israel. Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and the Middle East and Australia, South Korea and Japan in the Far East in the Reagan Era. Russia was converted from an evil empire of the early 1980s into a nation where he could walk Red Square, Armand. I'm with Gorbachev with Russians, straining to Pat him on the back. 400 million people in Europe and the USSR had been set free.
The Red Army had begun to pack up and go home. The captive Nations looked on Reagan's America as their Liberator with all the territory and security any country could ask for the first economic political cultural and military power on Earth. America ought to have adopted a policy to protect and preserve what she had for. She had everything. Instead we started out on
Familiar road. We were now going to create our own New World Order after 9/11 the project took on urgency, when George w-- Bush. A president, disinterested and untutored in foreign policy was converted to a wilsonian ideology of democratic fundamentalism. Only by making the whole world Democratic.
Can we make America secure? Marxism is a religion, Joseph schumpeter said in 1942 and as James, Jose montagnier, an economist and student of schumpeter has written to the believer Democratic fundamentalism, like Marxism presents. First a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and our absolute standards by which to judge events and actions.
And secondly, a guide to those ends which implies A Plan of Salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind or a chosen section of mankind is to be saved. It belongs to that subgroup of isms, which promises Paradise. This side of the Grave Democratic fundamentalism added. Montagne is akin to the religious fervor of old Bush professes. His faith.
In the ideology of democratic fundamentalism in, his Neil biblical rhetoric as Christ said, he who is not with me, is against me, Bush declared either, you are with us or you are with the terrorists. This war is a struggle between good and evil, the evil ones. Have no country.
No ideology. They're motivated by hate America's. Ultimate goal is ending tyranny in our world after seven years of a foreign policy rooted in such moral Clarity, the world of 1989 has disappeared and America has begun to resemble the Britain of Salisbury and Balfour. A superpower past, her Prime with enemies Rising everywhere in Latin America. Castro has found a successor in Hugo, Chavez across the Middle East, Islamic people's seek to expel us.
We are mired in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and defined by the surviving partner of the axis of Evil Iran. China may be about to become for us. What Wilhelm in Germany, became for Britain. Notwithstanding all the neoconservative blather about our being in Omni power in a unipolar world. We are bedeviled on every continent what happened rather than follow the wisdom of conservative men. Like Kenan Eisenhower and Reagan.
We began to emulate every Folly of Imperial Britain in her plunge from Power. With all our braying about being the indispensable nation and bring them on braggadocio. We exhibited an imperial. Hubris.
The whole world came to detest. There was hardly a blunder of the British Empire. We have not replicated as grey and Churchill seized on Vaughn clocks violation of Belgian neutrality to put her precook plans for war into effect the neoconservatives seized on 9/11 to persuade, our untutored president, that he had a historic mission to bring down.
Saddam Hussein liberate Iraq, establish a strategic position, flanking, Iran, and Syria democratize, the Middle East, and the Islamic world, and make himself The Churchill of his generation as Chamberlain gave Awards. Guaranteed a Poland. He could not honor the United States began to hand out. NATO War guarantees 26 Warsaw Pact Nations, the three Baltic republics and soon Ukraine and Georgia should a hostile regime come to power in Moscow and
reoccupied these nations. We would have to declare war yet. No matter how much we treasure. The newly, free Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Their independence is not a vital us interest and never has been and the threatened loss of their independence cannot justify War. With a nuclear-armed, Russia.
As Britain had a balance of power policy, not to permit Any Nation to become dominant in Europe, the 2002 National Security strategy of the United States, declares Our intention not to permit, Any Nation, to rise to a position to challenge us dominance on any continent and attempt to freeze in place America's transient moment of global Supremacy, but time does not stand still new powers arise old Powers fade.
No power can for long dominate, the whole world look again at the graveyard of Empires the 20th century. Even we Americans cannot stop the march of history as Britain through over Japan and drove Italy. Into the arms of Hitler Bush pushes. Russia's Putin into the arms of China by meddling in the politics of Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus planting us bases in Central, Asia and hectoring him for running an autocratic state. That does not pass muster with the National Endowment.
For democracy. Ours is a peculiarly American blindness under the Monroe Doctrine. Foreign powers are to stay out of our hemisphere yet. No other great power is permitted to have its own sphere
of influence. We below self-righteously when foreigners funnel cash into our elections, yet intrude massively with taxes, dollars in the elections of other nations to promote our religion of See as the British launched, an imperial war in Iraq, after their victory over the Ottoman Empire. We launched a war in Iraq. After our victory over the Soviet Empire, never before have our commitments been. So numerous or extensive yet. Our active duty forces have been reduced to 1/2 of 1% of our
population. 1/9. The number under arms in May 1945. We are approaching what Walter Lippmann called foreign. Policy bankruptcy, our strategic assets armaments and allies cannot cover our strategic
liabilities. Our commitments, to go to war on behalf of scores, of Nations, from Central and South America, to the Baltic, and the Balkans, to the Middle East, the gulf, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines Australia and Taiwan like the British. Before us, America has reached Imperial over stretch, either we double or treble. Our air sea and land forces or we start.
Writing commitments or we are headed in examiner oblique for an American DN Bien Phu. For if the US Army and Marine Corps are stretched to their limit by insurgencies in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan. How can we police the rest of the planet? We cannot if two or three of the iou's we have handed out are called in the bankruptcy of u.s. Foreign policy will be exposed to the world.
America is Is as overextended as the British Empire of 1939, we have commitments to fight on behalf of scores of Nations that have nothing to do with our Vital interest commitments. We could not honor were several to be called in at once. We have declared it to be US policy to democratize the planet to hold Every Nation to our standards of social justice and human rights. And to end tyranny in the world.
And to show the world. He meant business, President Bush had Placed in his Oval Office. A bust of Winston Churchill. Thank you for watching Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone and the libertarian Institute.