Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/5/25 Brad Pearce on the Venezuela Escalation and What’s Happening in Sudan

Episode Date: December 7, 2025

Scott interviews Brad Pearce about the actual reasons the Trump administration is moving towards an utterly stupid war with Venezuela. Then, Pearce explains what’s really going on in Sudan. Discuss...ed on the show: “Florida Man Occupied Government vs Venezuela” (The Wayward Rabbler - Substack) “The UAE’s Neo-Venetian Empire” (The Wayward Rabbler - Substack) “Africa’s Forthcoming AI Drone Nightmare” (The Libertarian Institute) Brad Pearce is a writer focused on international relations and politics. He writes at The Wayward Rabbler. Follow him on Twitter @WaywardRabbler Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app:  https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott’s work: Check out The Libertarian Institute:  https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott’s other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott’s books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 You ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people what's going on in this country. Because the babies are making this. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.
Starting point is 00:00:29 Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, you guys, introducing Brad Pierce. He writes for us at the Libertarian Institute, and he's got a great blog on Substack called The Wayward Rabler, which is also his handler on X2. Welcome back to the show. How you do, Brad?
Starting point is 00:00:54 Oh, I'm doing well. Thank you for having me on again. Very happy to have you here. I only regret that you write about so much stuff and such smart stuff about such a wide array of topics. We can only begin to scratch the surface of some of them today, but we have to start with Venezuela. You have this very important piece, the Florida man occupied government versus Venezuela. And so, well, I've been wondering what the hell really is going on with Venezuela. and I know oil always means a lot of things to a lot of people, so I was reading about how Chevron has longstanding, ongoing ties with Venezuela,
Starting point is 00:01:36 and then I read a piece intact by Harrison Berger that say, hey, look, you got an Exxon-funded think tank, is pushing out war propaganda. But then a friend said to me, he said, not at these prices, man, that Venezuela crude is nasty, and Exxon and Chevron don't fight like that, and that's not what this is about. swing and a miss there, and everybody hates dirty commies. So that's like an easy answer, but, and then, of course, there's the Zinus and the new
Starting point is 00:02:06 Isaac Accords. Oh, I get it. The Abraham Accords and the Isaac Accords, there's something I obviously definitely need to learn a lot more about. I have some tabs open here. But then, Brad, you're talking about, man, the Cubans. And now the Venezuelan exiles in Florida, they are extremely anti-communist for good and self-interested reasons.
Starting point is 00:02:28 And you have the same sort of anti-Cuban group in Florida that also has a lot of sway over Venezuela and policies Venezuela, essentially in the same way that they see America's ongoing conflict with Cuba. Is that somewhere near an approximation of what you said? Yeah, I mean, in America, I don't know how we haven't learned this lesson yet, but there's a tendency to think that people, you know, oh, they're from this country.
Starting point is 00:02:55 that means they know a lot about it. You know, we should have learned this from Iraq, the Bay of Pigs. You can name any number of things that the China lobby over Taiwan, et cetera. And I mean, you know, there's a lot of things wrong with this. For one thing, anyone that's going to like risk death to flee a country obviously hates the regime
Starting point is 00:03:12 more than the average person in that country. This, you know, should have been obvious. And, you know, also like they're talking to a limited number of people. It's, you know, as Machiavelli says, because he has a specific section about this. It's like, you know, they will do anything to get their homeland return to them. So, you know, they'll betray you if, you know, if they find someone else who can help them, they are going to both lie to you and they're going to believe things that aren't true.
Starting point is 00:03:38 And, you know, there's basically just this myth in the Cuban community in Florida and now in the Venezuelan community about this golden age before communism in these countries, which, you know, was not true for the general public of either place. And, I mean, don't get me wrong. like Venezuela's been drastically mismanaged, you know, since Chavez took over. But at the same time, like, it already had these problems where oil was always distorting the economy, where the cost of living was really high. So, you know, once you block its exports and access to capital, it was going to run into all
Starting point is 00:04:13 of these problems. But really, it's just the Cuban lobby has just been drastically successful in general because it's concentrated in one place, so it gets its own. Congress people, it's such an important part of the Republican coalition in Florida that is now, you know, not a swing state anymore. It's now a Republican state. So, you know, before they got a lot of attention because both sides needed it and now they're just on the winning side and they're a key part of it. Really, even, you know, you take like Matt Gates, who's been pretty good on most foreign policy issues, has been fairly terrible on Latin America. And I'm sure it is either because
Starting point is 00:04:49 he was just raised around this so he believes it, but more likely just because he wants to have a future in Florida politics, and there's just simply no future in Republican politics in Florida if you don't go along with this specific lobby that is one of the most concentrated and powerful ethnic lobbies in America. Yeah. Now, so, I mean, look, this is the question on my mind and everybody else's mind, and I don't know if you know, but is the United States of America about to go to war with Venezuela, Brad?
Starting point is 00:05:21 And if so, why? What the hell is going to wonder? I really don't know. Like, I was a teenager when the invasion of Iraq happened, and, you know, I followed it very, very closely at the time. And I didn't think it was going to happen just because it was so overwhelmingly stupid. And I really learned my lesson there.
Starting point is 00:05:41 So I don't think how dumb this is is going to save us from it. But at the same time, I really don't know if they're going to do it. But, you know, like Venezuela's general military doctrine is basically to run into the jungle in the mountains and then have a guerrilla war against the United States. So trying to occupy that country would be disastrous, though, you know, toppling the regime would probably only take a few weeks like Iraq.
Starting point is 00:06:04 The question is what you do after that. And, you know, there's really no strategy here that leads to anything good. Yeah, it's a huge country. I mean, I know the maps are distorted and things like that, but it seems like it. it's even bigger than Iraq, at least it's the same size. I think it's even bigger than Iraq, sort of misshaping thing, hard to compare offhand.
Starting point is 00:06:30 I believe it's a lot bigger than a rock, but I don't remember the actual size right now. Yeah. Well, and it's jungle and hard fighting, so. And Trump is crazy enough to send the whole third infantry division in there like W. Bush, but. He might be. I mean, you never really want to bet on Trump not being crazy enough to do something. thing so well it's sort of like with Obama like sometimes you can bet on his cowardice keeping him out of the worst things like a full scale invasion of Syria um or even putting a lot of troops
Starting point is 00:07:06 on the ground in Libya other than CIA and special operations guys to help al Qaeda there um where here I could see Trump doing something crazy and launching air strikes or something like that but I mean actually putting the army on the ground there to just I could see him changing his mind before he went that far. I mean, I'm just making up speculations about I mean, it still seems unlikely to me. But once again, like, I didn't think the invasion of Iraq was going to happen due to its overwhelming stupidity. And I mean, the lesson that I've learned is that something being stupid is never going to stop America from doing it. I mean, look at just how incredibly reckless the Russia policy has been for the last 10 plus years. And, you know, that's a
Starting point is 00:07:47 contrary. Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, on the other hand, though, Biden's very poor diplomacy with Russia and Bush and Cheney's decision to launch that war was pretty clear to some of us. You know what I mean? Like at that time, I knew Cheney had said, listen, the object here is regime change. That's why we're going to Iraq, because we want a different government to run that country now, run by a different guy. Whatever excuse we got to come up. up with to start the war will be good enough for you. But that was made very clear. And so whereas here, yes, this is what Rubio wants and some Florida men.
Starting point is 00:08:32 But then so, and as you address in your article, just how much influence do they have over the national government right now? And I guess the answer is a whole hell of a lot. Although I guess you also say that there's mixed signals in here about Rubio and how much progress he's made or not as well, right? Yeah, I mean, it's very hard to say, but, you know, and really all of us that are, you know, more anti-war type of people had hated Rubio long, long before he was in this position. And he did seem to be doing a little bit better when he first started.
Starting point is 00:09:05 I mean, the other thing is that, like, Biden and Blinken were just so overwhelmingly stupid that someone that can say a sentence without falling over himself did seem like a big improvement when this administration started. But, I mean, there's a lot of indications that he's really made himself well-liked by Trump, though other times you see him talking. And yeah, like, he gave that one speech about it, or well, answering questions about it where he did look really deflated. So it's really hard to say just how much influence he's going to have, but we know very well what he wants. Like I said, I had kind of hoped that in the position of Secretary of State that he wasn't going to be as enthralled by this lobby because he wouldn't need to play Florida politics
Starting point is 00:09:47 anymore. That was obviously dumb because he is a son of this community. This has been instilled in him from the earliest age and he is surely a true believer and not really acting cynically. I mean, plenty of what he's doing is like cynically to get people to go along with him. But I'm sure that he sincerely wants to change the regime in Venezuela and that he sincerely thinks that that's going to, you know, lead to the fall of the communist regime in Cuba, which I don't see any reason to believe that. I mean, you know, the other thing that is ridiculous about this is like, we made up with Vietnam. Now they love us and they produce a bunch of stuff that we use. People go on vacation there all the time. It's a popular place with expatriates, et cetera. We could have done all of that
Starting point is 00:10:30 with Cuba 50 years ago and it would have been, you know, it would be completely fine. It would be this kind of like authoritarian country near us, but one that we get, you know, that we get along with, that we vacationed to, that we buy products from. And they just, have chosen to not go that route and instead have followed the same failed policy for what, 70 years now. Yeah, and look, like, on one hand, that would have made it easier for the CIA or NED
Starting point is 00:10:53 to go in there and overthrow that regime for good or for ill. But even without that, and I don't know if you can have, you know, an opening of relations without that being part of it, you know. But even just, you know, having an opening up Cuba's not been not Vietnam and you know you might think especially with both Castro's dead and gone now that maybe they're ready to if not have a full overthrow of
Starting point is 00:11:25 their government that they would at least want to reform it and be less commie and open up and and have a less tyrannical state there so um that all to me is lost operas Right? They never try. It's just like with North Korea. We could have killed them with kindness way back when and didn't take the opportunity to. And now they're sitting on a bunch of nukes and threatening us. Yeah, it's really in almost all of these situations, it really is consistently America that is the antagonist and the one that like refuses good relations as well. Like there's um, I mean, you know, a run as well. Like there's pretty much every time it's us escalating things with, you know, with them, um, diplomatically or, you know, breaking. agreements or keeping the situation where they're isolated, et cetera. And in all of these situations, there's like every indication that these, you know, these countries are always saying, like, we're not the ones to go around sanctioning people. We have like a policy of not behaving this way. And I don't know.
Starting point is 00:12:27 It's just the foreign policy interests in the U.S. are generally always very anti-peace. And so then what we get is all of these random states that we are in conflict with for really no good reason, certainly no reason that helps the American people and nothing that helps the people of those countries. Yeah. Now, look, it's been all over the papers that the DEA says that the fentanyl is not coming out of Venezuela, right?
Starting point is 00:12:55 Like, chemicals come out of China, and then it's all processed in Mexico and transported over land and doesn't have anything to do with the east coast of South America. And yet, my facetious theory is that it's an. infinity d chess move to try to teach the public that socialism is so inefficient the venezuelans can't even figure out how to make fentanyl yeah exactly so now the counter argument is that well some cocaine comes through there which like so what i mean it's all like the political class of the ones who snort cocaine in the first place man so i don't really want to hear a bunch of crying about that regular people well it's also like mexican cartels that are trafficking through venezuela and
Starting point is 00:13:39 Colombians and whatnot. That doesn't really have that much to do with the Venezuelan government. And yeah, you know, I mean, the economic situation there surely makes it easy enough to bribe their officials and, you know, to operate in the country, et cetera. But, you know, we are not able to stop those cartels from operating in our country. Like, we can't actually put this expectation on other people. Hey, guys, Scott here. You know, you've probably noticed when I'm interviewing somebody or somebody's interviewing me that I've got this great bust of Dr. Ron Paul in the background on my bookshelf here. Well, you can get one like that, too.
Starting point is 00:14:09 They're available again from the great artist, Rick Casali. Just go to my website, Scott Horton.org, and look in the right-hand margin. Click the link through there and use promo code Horton. You'll save $25 and get free shipping, at least in the lower 48 states. And he does custom work as well. Hey, you guys know I got a new show? Yeah, it's called Provoked. And it's me and the great Daryl Cooper, Martyr Made.
Starting point is 00:14:31 And we come on live every Friday night at 8 o'clock Eastern Time, 7 o'clock, Texas. And, you know, we talk about things. I think you really like it. So check us out over on the YouTube and at provoked dot show. You know, they always said, Scott, you keep drinking that much coffee. You're going to turn into a cup of coffee and then it finally happened. I am coffee now. And if you go to scothorton.org slash coffee, you two can get Scott Horton show flavored coffee.
Starting point is 00:15:00 Branded coffee there. It's Ethiopian mixed with Sumatran blended coffee. It's so good. and I have some of it right here. In fact, I'm drinking my Libertarian Institute mug, you can see. This is how I wake up in the morning, and this is how I stay awake in the afternoon. And if I was a drunk, it would be how I get home from the bar at night. So I sound advice to you guys there, you know, take an Uber.
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Starting point is 00:17:00 in your article though is that it seems that trump has has been convinced convinced by Rubio that this is a thing, that he's, you know, and I'm not sure exactly if I'm paraphrasing you right or what indications we have about who's lying to who, whether Trump really buys this crap or what. But, you know, when you see him talking about, I saw Tom Cotton with the Pentagon line, which was, hey, listen, they,
Starting point is 00:17:30 when they bomb this boat and the two guys survived, Apparently they're confirming the Washington Post story here. And the two guys survived and they're clinging to the boat. Well, they were trying to get back into the fight. And so by clinging on to the wreckage and so that's what makes. So here we're conflating. And they're invoking the AUNF of 2001 against whoever helped do the September 11th attack. And because we know that they just pretended that the words associated forces are in there,
Starting point is 00:18:02 which they're not. And then we know that they've long pretended that the words associated forces means anyone in the world, no matter if they have any association by 12 parsecs with the guys that did the September 11th attack. And so in this case, what they're saying is essentially,
Starting point is 00:18:19 this is a war zone because we say it is. They're narco-terrorists as though they're selling drugs has anything to do with trying to terrorize the American people into changing foreign policy and this or that other way. or whatever. No, it has nothing to do with that.
Starting point is 00:18:35 But they just call them that. And now it's like, presto, magic wish, abercadabra, now you can kill them. And now you're going to flots them that's getting back into the fight and therefore a license to kill. And I don't even know if these are drug boats at all. But if they are, I think it's clear, right,
Starting point is 00:18:53 that they're not on their way to Florida. They're traveling between islands down there and the Caribbean. None of these boats have the range to, they'd have to stop in Cuba to fill up, you know, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, you know, I first wrote about this all the way back in March of 2023 when they were first starting talking about, you know, wanting to bomb Mexico over this. And I didn't expect at the time that they would move on to Venezuela,
Starting point is 00:19:19 but of course it's the same general rhetoric about all of this. And, you know, what I said at the time is, like, some of what the cartels do in Mexico could fairly be described as terrorism because they're trying to, you know, terrify the people and the public, like, out of opposing them. And there are situations where, you know, there are, like, high casualty incidents, et cetera. But none of these cartels want that level of confrontation with the United States government. Like, they'll do that in regions of Mexico where they have, like, a huge amount of power.
Starting point is 00:19:45 But yeah, absolutely none of them want to escalate things to that level with the U.S. And there's really no reason to believe that, you know, you can bomb your way out of a drug problem. It's like crazy that we're even having this conversation. You know, it didn't really work that well with any other thing. but, you know, the amount of money in it, the amount of people they have, the poverty of the countries that they're operating in, like they'll continue to find new people.
Starting point is 00:20:08 And, you know, there's really, like, actually an excess of cocaine in Colombia currently, like the monies, the production's gone up a lot, so they're trying to get it all out of the country. And once again, they're not even claiming any of this is about cocaine. They're claiming it's about fentanyl, which once again, simply does not come out of Venezuela or from these smuggling routes.
Starting point is 00:20:29 So, I mean, the whole thing, thing is just, even by the standards of American foreign policy where they lie to us all the time and make up idiotic narratives that no reasonable person would believe, this particular thing is just absolute nonsense. And I mean, one thing we do have going for us is that the polling, such as it is, shows that there's very little support for these policies. And, you know, Iraq, they really did in the mania after 9-11 and whatnot. They really did sell a lot of the public on what they were doing. So if they're trying to generate public support for this, they're really far away from it.
Starting point is 00:21:04 But at the same time, there's a huge segment of the American electorate that just needs to be killing someone all the time. It's so ingrained in American political life that, oh, we're bombing this or that enemy. And the public just relishes in it at this point. It's like our version of like the gladiators of Reno or whatever is like, oh, look at this video of these random people
Starting point is 00:21:21 that we killed in a third world country. I know. It's crazy. And it's all just built with the, hey, you know, our leaders wouldn't be doing this if they didn't have to. And like, and at the same time, too, on a, on a religious type basis, because I remember this from being a kid from a Rock War I. If the president says that we're doing this, then hell yeah, all the other morality and thou shalt not kill from God and all of that other stuff is suspended.
Starting point is 00:21:55 Now it's all of green. The enemy's always Hitler and the Wehramock. and you're always justified in killing them. And cool, explosions, air power, man, it's neat. It is. Every red-blooded American boy wonders whether he wants to join the Air Force and become a fighter pilot. Because, man, would I drop a bomb on a guy to be able to fly an F-16
Starting point is 00:22:18 and would they let me in? And am I colorblind or not? Or what? Because, man, it's high-octane excitement. and it's a it's license if George Bush senior says that we're going to unleash mass violence and yes including civilians in Baghdad will be killed in the rest well then hell yeah like you're never allowed to indulge in that kind of bloodlust but now you are okay I remember his invasion of Panama was really brutal too yeah I'm sorry his invasion of Panama was really brutal too and that's like
Starting point is 00:22:56 not well remembered. That's true. That's true. Not even well remembered by me. I knew it happened at the time, but I wasn't paying close enough attention then. But for Desert Shield and Desert Storm and all that, I sure was. And that was my thinking at the time was I wasn't a Republican and I wasn't all,
Starting point is 00:23:12 oh, we got to go save the poor Kuwaitis or whatever. I just want to see some explosions, man. George Bush said, and he was on 24 hours a day. Yeah. That was what George Carlin said. It was the first four that was on every channel plus cable. It was awesome.
Starting point is 00:23:27 Bill Hicks called it the Persian Gulf distraction from everything else. All right. Speaking of which, I'm distracting from, I want to ask you all about Sudan. And you have a great piece at the Wayward Rabler. No, at the Institute about this is all UAE. They're colonizing, in a sense, through politics and business, major parts of Africa.
Starting point is 00:23:51 and they're at the forefront of new drone, new strategies and tactics for using drones to expand their power and influence. And then this includes helping you characterize them for me, please, the fighters in Western Sudan who are doing most of the horrific killing right now, I believe. And with that, you got, I don't know, eight minutes. Okay.
Starting point is 00:24:15 So, yeah, I wrote a really enormous article about the UAE's role like in Africa back in June, which was the hardest thing I've ever written because their economic and military interests are so complex. It's probably the most thorough piece that there is on it. It's called the UAE's Neo-Venician Empire. So only one small part of that is Sudan because they have economic interests all over the continent
Starting point is 00:24:38 and they have a whole what Andreas Craig calls an axis of secessionists that they're supporting in different countries. But so, and then, yeah, I wrote the one for the Institute that is about the growth in their drone technology and Trump giving them, you know, he's exporting these special chips to them.
Starting point is 00:24:56 I'm not a tech guy, but they're not usually allowed for export for national security reasons, and they're building the largest AI campus outside of the United States in the UAE. And all of this, yeah, what it comes down to is that I'm sure in not that long, they're going to be protecting their economic interests
Starting point is 00:25:14 with autonomous, deadly drones, and they'll probably lie about it. And I mean, more than anything, you know, once this technology has tried in the remote parts of Africa, there's almost no chance of it not spreading. And you go somewhere like, you know, like Chad or, yeah, Western Sudan or something, these are like the best places you could possibly try something like that away from the eyes of the world. Anyway, largely what is, it's not as clear to me as it is to some other people, exactly what their interest is in the rapid support forces, the militia that they're backing in
Starting point is 00:25:50 Sudan, and I don't think that their support is as important to this as most people believe that it is. In Sudan, kind of the original sin of the Sudanese state is that it's always been based on plundering the frontiers to support Khartoum, which went untouched in all of their conflicts until this one when Khartoum got almost completely destroyed. And so, you know, there's all of these minorities outside around the perimeter of Sudan, less so now that South Sudan is separate. And Hamedi, as they call in the leader of the RSF, is what's known as a Bagheera Arab. I'm probably not pronouncing that right, or what they would call Chadian tribes sometimes.
Starting point is 00:26:29 And they make up 7% of Sudan's population, but they've used this narrative that they're not really, that he's not really Sudanese. He speaks, you know, a desert dialect or whatever. It's kind of like a hundred years ago of, I don't know, a Texas oil man rolled into D.C. And with all of his buddies and took power, that's how he's viewed by the elites in cartoon. And so they need this narrative that this is a foreign army, this is a foreign-backed army, because it allows them to deny the real problems in the Sudanese state that have led to this uprising that have made so many people willing to go to war against them.
Starting point is 00:27:05 And so, I mean, I'm really skeptical of all of the narratives about this. I mean, that said, the RSF are basically desert marauders. They're extremely brutal. I do not downplay their crimes or anything. But, I mean, at the same time, like, you know, they're being accused of genocide, but usually when someone commits genocide, there's some reason they give you. You know, like you'll hear them explaining, like, why they need to get rid of these people, why whatever problems those people are causing, they perceive those people are causing in society.
Starting point is 00:27:34 They construct a whole narrative. And the RSF is doing the exact opposite. They have a messaging strategy very similar to the UAE, where no matter how guilty they are, they just speak in kind of like language of internationalism, of, oh, we're doing this to help everyone. We want to give everyone equal rights in Sudan, et cetera. So it's really hard to know what exactly their goal is. And some of this, also when you see reporting of this, like the word allied militias does a lot
Starting point is 00:28:07 of heavy lifting when they're discussing. violence in Sudan. And a lot of it is honestly just seems to be like farmer versus herder violence, which is still common in Africa as opposed to genocide, as we would understand it. But one way or another, their brutality is enormous. They are absolutely backed by the UAE. But you know, they have their own gold. That's the UAE's main interest there is in the gold that is being smuggled out of Sudan. Hametti is one of the richest men in the country, or at least was before this war began. It's presumably made him rich or not poorer, though I don't know that for a fact.
Starting point is 00:28:44 And, you know, it's just a lot of people want to look at this as like something where you can stop the war if you stop weapons from coming in. But almost every country that borders Sudan, particularly that borders Western Sudan, has conflicts of various sorts within them. I mean, you look at a travel map and everywhere there is do not go, you know, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:29:06 So given that they have physical gold and that they mostly fight with like Toyotas and, you know, AKs and whatnot and some like mortars and drones that are cheaper and everything now. I just, I don't see any way to stop weapons from entering this conflict. So I've thought from the beginning of this, that's kind of a dead end. But, you know, it's like the first thing people go to when they see something like this is, oh, well, we need a weapons embargo and then the fighting will stop. And there's just really no reason to believe that's true.
Starting point is 00:29:36 Yeah, it's a whole new era now. with the drone tech and I don't know. It's talking about Wild West. Nobody knows really what's going to happen. Yeah, and the UAE uses these modular drones that they ship taken apart and not weaponized. So they either send to them saying that they're civilian products or they send them with like humanitarian aid sometimes
Starting point is 00:29:56 and other things like that. And then, you know, it's the people that get them then add weapons to them. And so it's built in plausible deniability and it's very hard to track. it's very hard to stop. And so that did help them ultimately taking Elfashir, which fell after a very long siege.
Starting point is 00:30:16 But it was going that direction one way or another as much as it seems to be the case that it was some UAE exports that got them, you know, over the top or what have you. Can you address real quickly the miss and reality of the casualties there? It's very difficult. a lot of people have died in that conflict.
Starting point is 00:30:39 It's very hard to track. There are longtime humanitarian organizations that operate there, you know, that have been there since the Darfur Genocide. I haven't looked into it yet. They're now saying the headline that is out today is that like the RSF killed 60,000 people in Elfashir.
Starting point is 00:30:55 I don't know if that's true. I didn't find the satellite footage at all compelling that they're like, oh, you can see the blood from space. And it's like, I don't know, I see kind of a stain on the ground that could be anything. People were all sharing it like it was a, extreme brutality and it's also like that would be the blood of one person you know i don't know regardless um i i they definitely have killed plenty of people there have a degree of blood lust
Starting point is 00:31:19 and uh that is just what happens when a city is taken after it's been under siege for so long but i don't know of any good way to get an accurate um you know body count from sudan but the public has certainly suffered terribly both sides have done a horrible job of minimizing civilian casualties I don't know that either side has really tried. And so it will be, I would say, years before we get a number, we can possibly trust out of this. But the civilians have suffered terribly. I will just leave it at that.
Starting point is 00:31:49 Are there any neighboring or outside powers that are pushing for and into the fighting? Or it's just... Well, there's this, what they call the group of four name they have for it, which is the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. the Sudanese government, the SAF, refuses to speak to the UAE because they view them as a combatant in the fight. They won't let them work as a mediator.
Starting point is 00:32:15 And the only way this does ends is if you let the UAE take credit for brokering a peace in a conflict that it had a huge amount to do with. But, I mean, the other countries, Saudi Arabia and Egypt support the government, as do Turkey and Iran and a few other places. is so like, it's not as if the other countries in the group of four are not also sending weapons into this conflict and supporting one of the combatants in various ways. But those are the main ones that are kind of seen as like stakeholders
Starting point is 00:32:46 trying to negotiate a peace, but it's not going anywhere. The SAF and its supporters are way more against making peace than the RSF is and the UAE are actually. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time on the show, Brad. It's great to talk to you again. Thank you for all your great writing, too.
Starting point is 00:33:04 Yeah, thank you for having me on. All right, you guys, that is Brad Pierce. He is the Wayward Rabbler on X and on Substack. Also, check out his podcast dispatches from Clown World. I'm sure you're familiar with the world, the clown world. And he writes for us at the Institute. That's where all his best stuff is, Libertarian Institute.org. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom,
Starting point is 00:33:29 Roberts & Roberts Brokridge, Inc. Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, fools errand, enough already, and my latest, Provote,
Starting point is 00:33:43 how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provote at Scott Horton Show.com and Patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music
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