Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/16/22 Kyle Anzalone on All the Bad News in American Foreign Policy

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Kyle Anzalone joins Scott to run through all the biggest foreign policy news of the day. They discuss the $858 billion NDAA that just passed the Senate, the ridiculous claims that Biden is in China’s pocket, the Ukrainian clamp down on the Russian Orthodox Church, the latest weapons sent to Kyiv, the Ukrainian strikes deep in Russian territory, the state of the fertilizer trade and the possibility Biden warms up to Cuba.  Discussed on the show: “Sen. Hawley Tells Blinken to Prioritize Arming Taiwan Over Ukraine” (Antiwar.com) Ray McGovern’s writing at Antiwar.com Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scott horton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube dot com slash scott horton's show okay you guys on the line i've got the great kyle an zelone he's news editor at the libertarian institute and opinion editor at antiwar dot com welcome back to the show how you

doing kyle doing great scott thanks for having me back on happy to have you here tell me the bad news Senate passes massive $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act, huh? Yeah, only 11 no votes to, 83 Ford, so overwhelming majority of everyone in both parties votes for the thing. It's an 8% increase over the 2022 budget, and I think this is going to end up going to Biden's stats. Now, this is the compromise bill. So, you know, the House passes one, the Senate passes one, and then the leadership of both

parties get together and both houses get together and then just decide what they're going to put in the bill anyway. So usually through that process, anything that, you know, the anti-interventionist groups work to get into this legislation, then get stripped out. And they throw a few more billion dollars in it for the, you know, arms makers and things like that. And so one of the, you know, few people to get an increase with the rate of inflation this year will be the Pentagon and the arm's maker, Scott. Yeah. Not that they have anything to do with the reason that price inflation is so bad with all of the money printing that their entire operation depends on. But anyway, good to know that they're free to do whatever they want and that they get their cost of

living increase, even if we're not free and we don't get ours. But okay. And now that doesn't count the VA and that doesn't count the energy department's nukes, right? So we're well over a trillion dollars. Yeah, I think this does count the energy department's nudes, but I don't think counts the VA and some other like intelligence spending and things like that. I guess one little piece of good news, Scott, is maybe the worst part of this, naming Taiwan, a major non-NATO U.S. ally, was taken out of the bill. Oh, yeah? Although they're now going to give Taiwan $3 billion in military aid every year through this. And they're going to pass separately, I think, $37.7 billion for Ukraine to give them an emergency fund. So some that will be just draft financial assistance and

not military aid, but I'm sure we'll be tens of billions of dollars in military aid. And that's going to be included in the omnibus, which Congress is going to pass pretty soon. Yeah. But now, do you know who stripped out the non-NATO major ally thing? Because that was a pretty big deal, huh? I mean, I guess I hear what you're saying that we're giving them all these weapons anyway, but I mean, they were talking about. I don't think the White House wanted it was my understanding. And so somewhere in conference committee, I think is where that came out. Yeah, that was a pretty big one because it was supposed to like change the language in all official documents to where we start talking. talking about, you know, the U.S. government essentially talks about Taiwan as its own sovereign nation and really changing the way that they treat them compared to how it had been since 79. So pretty good deal that they backed down on that, I guess.

Just a little bit. I mean, it's kind of consistent with what the White House wants, where they want to treat Taiwan as an independent nation. They want to arm Taiwan as much as they possibly can. But at the same time, they want to be able to tell Beijing, Well, you can't get mad about it because, you know, it's just the status quo situation. Right. Yeah. Which, I mean, I guess that makes sense for them in their own minds to say that. But it's not like Beijing can only think about these things in the way that they're instructed by the Americans.

It makes sense that they would say that, I mean, I don't know this, but it would make sense if they said that a certain amount of weapons is too many. and that they'll invade then that the more weapons we pour in just like in Ukraine. Oh no, we're carefully calibrating the amount of weapons in order to deter attack rather than provoke one. But then, like some of the CIA guys told

Zach Dorfman at Yahoo, see, we told them that they're calibrating it wrong and that the weapons were guaranteed to provoke an invasion rather than deter one, but they wouldn't listen to us. Right? So here we are at war in Ukraine and same thing absolutely could happen here, regardless of what they call it. Although, the name change would be a pretty unnecessary provocation, but still, it's still just a word, you know.

Right. Well, I guess it's not surprised the policy doesn't make sense because the people Biden has put in charge, like the Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Del Toro, and the Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, openly admit they're paranoid about China. One says that China keeps them up at night. other one said their main focus is going to be China, China, China. So whenever you had that level of paranoia within like your upper level ranks of your government, this is the kind of policy that you get where it's not going to make sense. It's going to provoke China. But at the same time, they're going to think they're doing the right thing because they're

not sleeping at night just thinking about President Xi or something. Right. Well, then isn't it right in the national security strategy, they still say that China is the biggest threat, even though they're in the middle of this proxy war with Russia. that they say this is the center of their attention is the Pacific. Yep, absolutely. You know, Kyle, there's this kind of strange narrative going around on the right about how Biden is in China's pockets on the laptop, something like that,

like that time that John Wong completely poned Bill Clinton back in 1996. And so, you know, red flag. And so the Democrats have got to be soft on the commies because they're kind of commies and whatever. It doesn't matter that this is Hillary Clinton's pivot. to Asia. And it doesn't matter that Joe Biden has doubled down on Trump's doubling down of Obama and Hillary's pivot to Asia. And there's been massive escalations under the Biden administration, regardless of these narratives, right? Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is everybody's

concerned about China. I think the Democrats think they have to take Russia down in order to be able to deal with China. And then you had this group of American first Republicans who I think are a little bit closer to accurate in identifying that, you know, if you're trying to deal with Russia, it's actually going to make it harder to confront China. And so you have, I think Dave DeCamp wrote this week that Josh Hawley, but it was definitely an American first Republican in Congress who introduced some bill or who is pushing some legislation that would require any weapons that both are needed by Kiev and Taipei, that they have to go to Taiwan first, you know, to fill those orders first.

And that should be the priority of the U.S. government. So, yeah, you're right that there is this really, you know, weird idea that we have to do something. And also that, that again, that Biden is, you know, confronting Russia, but not confronting China because he's somehow in the pocket of China. When in reality, I think they view it as like a longer strategy that they have to confront Russia and Ukraine first to then confront China over Taiwan probably. Yeah, which is completely stupid You know, I'll never forget when Donald Trump

Told the story of how he went and met Henry Kissinger And he said, hey, Henry Kissinger I think we should cozy up to Russia To break him off from China What do you think about that? And then the way he told the story, I'm pretty sure it was something like And then Henry Kissinger said to me You're the tallest, handsomest, most successful

skyscraper tycoon I've ever met in my life And you're the smartest person who ever lived And you're a greater president than Abraham Lincoln and yeah, that's right. That's what we should do. And that's all it was. It was never loyalty to Russia. It was always, we're up against these two major powers. And back in the 70s, China was the weaker power. So Kissinger split them off from the Soviet Union. Now China's the stronger power. Now we should split Russia off from them. Assuming you believe in these great power competition type politics, this 19th century mercantilist take, on

the powers of the earth and American dominance in Eurasia and all these things, this is all in the game. This has nothing to do with loyalty to some foreign power or their interests. It was always a question of what's the right way to make the American world empire last longer and achieve more in terms of exerting its power and influence on the world? As simple as that. Right. Well, any chance there was a doing that is now gone And as Ray McGovern has been writing for anti-war.com for about a year now, and, you know, he rightly points out that he's, you know, the White House still doesn't get this, that the U.S. has gone so far and pushing Russia, you know, over all their red lines in Ukraine and NATO expansion, and then

the U.S. now doing essentially the same thing, although, you know, there's different nuances and everything. And the Indo-Pacific, with their military buildups, they're carrying out operations through. waters claimed by China. Every month now, at least a U.S. warship is going through the Taiwan Strait. And increasingly, they're bringing British, Canadian, and other countries, you know, Western countries' warships with them. And, you know, increasing military games and bilateral war games conducted with, you know,

South Korea and Japan, which is mainly, I think, a threat to Pyongyang. But I'm sure Beijing also is very uncomfortable with the U.S. the U.S. tying all these countries together, like the Philippines, Japan, South Korea. We have the quadlateral dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan with the U.S. being the fourth country there. So, you know, there's a lot going on in both of these things confronting both countries. And it's really pushed Beijing and Moscow together as Ray McGovern has written. And unfortunately, the U.S. just hasn't seen it.

And, you know, as late as I think, like, June 2021, Biden was, like, trying to push this line with Putin, and Putin just wasn't buying it at all. Yeah. Hey, tell me about this move against the Russian Orthodox Church. I know they split back years ago, the Ukrainian-backed and the Russian-backed Orthodox Church there. But there's been some pretty severe recent developments. Yeah. So in recent weeks, the Ukrainian government has started to crack down on the Russian Orthodox Church. Basically, Ukraine, President Zelensky claims that they carried out a series of raids in Russian Orthodox parishes.

And that showed that the clerics in these parishes were taking orders from Moscow to push a pro-Russian narrative in Ukraine. And, you know, they've, in Kiev, they've compared this to, like, you know, destroying the cultural fabric of Ukraine. They've said that Ukrainians who continue to attend these Orthodox churches that, again, follow the Moscow, you know, direction are, you know, giving into the temptations of evil. And so initially, they announced this campaign, and then about a week later, they sanctioned 10 top clerates of the Russian Orthodox Church, although I think, think almost all of them were operating either in Russia or in territory firmly held by Russia in Ukraine. So the Dombas, Crimea, things like that. But then they issued another round of sanctions. I think this one's going to have a little bit more of a bite and this seized assets of seven clerics of the Russian Orthodox Church and additionally placed travel bans

on them so they can't enter or leave Ukraine or carry out any kind of legal business in Ukraine. So, you know, this is pretty serious what they're doing. And a lot of the rhetoric around it is what seems particularly disturbing to me, you know, calling this church evil, saying that, you know, people who attend these churches are undermining the cultural fabric and attacking, like, the heart of Ukraine and things like this, you know, seems to be saying us for, you know, potentially retribution against people who attend these churches and things like that. And additionally, Scott, you know, they say that only four. percent of Ukrainians attend these parishes now, Eastern Orthodox parishes that take direction from Moscow. But I think that number is actually much higher because they've only done a few rounds of polling and both of the polls were conducted by Kiev-based organizations. So there may be a bias there. But then you also have all the polling was only conducted in regions that

were held by the Ukrainian government. So if Ukraine retates more territory, then, you know, up to, I think, 20, 30% of the Ukrainian population will be subject to, like, essentially having the religion banned by the Ukrainian government. Yeah. Sorry. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good.

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Casali is C-A-S-A-L-I, Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping, too. Well, I'll tell you what, this war sure is a government program. I mean, Vladimir Putin, in the summer of 2021, gave this speech about how there's no difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian. And they were artificially split away from us anyway. And they all want to come home and all this stuff, or at least, you know, the people of the east was, I guess, the importance. application and and boy there's just you know the consequences of this attack for russia and the backlash that they're going to have to live with from here on i mean ukrainian nationalism

has just gotten the biggest boost it could have ever gotten under you know a hundred years of propaganda and just american money and what have you so you know when you talk about you know splits in churches like this these are the kinds of things that people remember for hundreds of years and that stick you know for hundreds and hundreds of years the great schism of this and that you know separation in the churches and there's no climbing back down from this I don't think for Kiev unless somehow the Russians got an absolute regime change there but looks like the country is going to be split and this church is going to be split and not much going no way really to go back from that i guess so i don't know yeah i'm the ukrainian

government has seized control and banned all opposition media banned all opposition political parties and so in any territory that's held by you know forces that operate under Kiev's direction uh you know the the Ukrainian nationalists have more authority and more sway there than they ever had before yeah all right so talk about the American side of this thing. We keep pouring in. The U.S. government keeps pouring in more and more weapons. And I guess the fear is that the Russians are going to launch their winter offensive any minute now or something. I don't know what's going on with that. But I'm a bit confused, I admit, about how they plan to transfer these J-DAM bombs. I mean, a J-DAM kit is essentially a

satellite guidance kit for a dumb bomb that you drop out of a plane, a 500-pound bomb, 2,000-pound bomb, something like that. What do the Ukrainians have that can even fire something like that? They're going to drop them from a helicopter or something? You're going to push them out the window? I read one quote where somebody suggested that they could be fired from ground launcher. I suppose that's possible. I'm really not entirely sure.

I know they talked about transferring another set of MIG-29, so some old Soviet warplanes to Ukraine. Maybe they could put upgrades on those planes or somehow retrofit the J-Dam upgrade kits themselves to attach onto those Soviet airplanes. One interesting part you kind of bring up there is that these are satellite-guided munitions. And with a couple of the recent attacks deep inside Russian territory, you know, Russia has suggested that U.S. satellite infrastructure could become a legitimate target in this war if U.S. satellites are guiding the Ukrainian bombs to their target.

So, you know, that's something to consider when we're transferring these weapons as well. Those attacks deep in Russia, like 200-something miles in, Russia said, were that American satellites are, I guess Western satellites had to be involved in that attack. Although I'm not so sure that's the case. You know, the Houthis have carried out of that it's pretty deep in Saudi territory. And so they don't have access to American satellites, obviously. So there are other ways, I'm sure, to carry out these attacks. Well, and anybody can just tap into civilian GPS.

Yeah. And satellites are constantly broadcasting to the Earth, you know? Yeah. And I think a lot of times what happens is. they have, like, forces on the ground. So somehow there's Ukrainians inside Russia that are marking the targets for the drones or something like that. And I think that's what the Houthis, at least what they claim to have did in Saudi Arabia. And now, so talk a little bit more about those strikes inside Russia, because this is really the biggest news.

Yeah, I think that was Monday and Tuesday this week. There were two on, or it could have been Sunday and Monday. There were two the first day and then one on the second day, hundreds of miles and you. Ukraine. One of the bases houses strategic assets of Russia. And so obviously that creates a little bit more concerned of what the Russian response is going to be. But, you know, one of the really crazy things about this, Scott, is the lesson learned from Washington is that this can be done. And, you know, maybe we have been too strict with, you know, telling Ukraine not to carry out of tats within Russian territory. And there was a report in the Times of London saying that the Pentagon

had given its tacit support for carrying out these kind of strides and what was not concerned about Moscow's escalation. All right. Well, so talk about the, well, well, I want to hold that one. Let's do one more here on Ukraine, which is about the fertilizer sanctions and all the gas. gas caps and all of that. I don't know if you saw this clip where this guy from Rebel News, I'd never heard of. He was on the Tucker Carlson show because he went to Moscow and just checked out the grocery stores and said everything's fine. The Americans, he quoted the New York Times and the Washington Post talking about the absolute crisis that we've reduced their economy to over there. And he says, well, that's funny because I'm looking with my eyeballs and they don't seem to

confirm that story at all. And so I just wonder about the economic war. It seems like, well, it's a government program it's got to be backfiring right yeah and uh gilbert dotro has written some of the same kind of stuff when he was uh has taken trips and vacations to uh i think like st peterberg's area more northern russia uh but definitely not reporting any of the thing that you things you hear in the west about uh you know russians fleeing russians hating the war where russian people generally suffering economically. But we have this basically a blockade on Russia at this point by the West. They won't import and don't allow anybody who has to bank with the West to import essentially

any Russian products. And this has really created a problem in the agricultural market, particularly with fertilizer, to the point where the White House actually issued letters saying that you will not be sanctioned for buying and importing. Russian fertilizer into the U.S. And so the EU seems to be trying to take a similar stance and move now. There was disagreement among the EU member states. A group of Western states, I think there was about six of them, really wanted to amend

the policy, I think, to make it even more clear that there were no sanctions on fertilizer and I think maybe more general agricultural products as well. and then Poland led a block of Eastern European states who say you can't amend the policy at all. And so they say they came to an agreement and modified the language of the sanctions to clarify that third countries are permitted to import Russian fertilizer. This was all reported by Politico, which note the agreement will take effect on Friday if it faces no opposition from other EU members. but Ukraine was not happy, Scott. The foreign minister of Ukraine said attempts to allow Russian oligards and companies to derogate from the already imposed EU sanctions deal blow to the entire sanctions regime undermines support for Ukraine and our joint effort to stop Putin's war machine. We strongly oppose them and thank the EU who do so too.

And yeah, it's crazy. people need to eat in Africa and other places in the world. There's increasing hunger and things like that. And these Western countries are just trying to make sure that there's not too much suffering. They're fine with some, but they want to ease it some. And Ukraine is really lashing out over this. All right. Now, let's end with some good news here.

I guess Biden figures there ain't no way in the world. He's winning Florida. So possibly begin to. Worm back up to Cuba as it was in the Obama years? Yeah, so I'm actually a little bit more pessimistic about that than when I had wrote that article. But we had three members of the Democrats' congressional and progressive caucus, which I imagine is more or less loyal to the White House. I don't think that they would take a trip to Cuba without having permission, at least to some extent, from the White House. But the White House is actually really concerned about immigration and people coming from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua, in particular to the United States.

And they're actually considering caps on the number of people from Cuba who could claim asylum in the U.S. are to make those caps stricter. And so I guess when the progresses went down there, it doesn't seem like that was on the top of their agenda. But that does seem to be on the top of the White House's agenda here is just stemming the flow of immigrants and not. really in any way trying to really improve relations with Cuba, although there was some easing over the summer of, you know, Trump's policy on Cuba, which was a real deviation from Obama's, but we're nowhere near the Obama closer to detain normalizing relation policy. That's so crazy. And the castros are gone.

You could just kill them with kindness. It would take a couple of months, right, to open up Cuba. instead for some reason they prefer it this way unless they're going to be able to you know turn havana right back over to the mob they won't settle for anything less than that or what you know i don't know this makes no sense yeah and you know in the sky it's one of those things too where you really hope that it's something the administration the white house would do early on so the economic benefits would start to you know come in and there would be business interests and not going back but you know if he waits three years to start even easing the sanctions on cuba and remember

the first year of his administration he was actually adding new sanctions onto cuba then it seems really unlikely that the u.s and cuba will reach a point by 2024 that the net's republican just isn't going to undo whatever uh Biden did just the way trumped it to Obama yeah same old story let's see the Revolution was in 59, right? Okay, just making sure we're on the same page here. You might think that this is enough already, but no. All right, well, listen, I'll let you go. I appreciate you helping us catch up on all the bad news here, Kyle, as always.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me back on, Scott. All right, you guys, that's the great Kyle Anselone. He's news editor at anti-war.com, writing oftentimes with Will Porter and with Connor and with Connor Freeman, but not always, you know. And he's got a ton of stuff. He's got the top news section there on the right. right-hand side of the page at libertarian institute.org and of course he's opinion editor at anti-war.com so check out all of the bad news views there as well. The Scott Horton show,

Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.