Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/31/22 Doug Bandow on the New 'New World Order'

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

Cato Institute Senior Fellow and Antiwar.com columnist Doug Bandow joins Scott to discuss his recent trip to Qatar. Bandow attended the annual Doha Forum and observed a shift in tone away from “Pax Americana.” Scott and Bandow talk about how the severe U.S. sanctions on Russia’s central bank are accelerating the fall of the dollar as governments around the world realize the financial leverage the status quo gives the U.S. government.   Discussed on the show: Doha Forum Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a regular contributor at Forbes Magazine, the National Interest, Antiwar.com, and elsewhere. He’s on Twitter @Doug_Bandow. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. 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

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Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. Thanks very much, y'all. 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 Pools Aaron, time to end the war and after. Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more of the 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy

and all available for you at Scott Horton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, to you guys online, I've got Cato Institute, senior fellow, and an anti-war.com contributing editor, Doug Bondo. Welcome back to the show. Doug, how are you, man? A little tired, but happy to be on. Well, I'm happy to have you here, and very grateful that you come on, no matter how tired you are,

as you always do. And also, I think it's interesting that you're tired because you've been flying all around the world, as you always do. And how many of my guests been in North Korea twice? I'm pretty sure just you. This time, though, you were over there visiting at least one of the day. GCC states over there in the Arabian Gulf, as they pretend to call it now, Doug. So tell us about your great adventure over there.

Well, I was in the country of Qatar. You know, I mean, the Gulf states are all a little odd, you know, in the sense the relatively small populations, lots of money, lots of oil, lots of, you know, kind of expatriates hired to do all the hard work. You know, the Doha Forum was a big conference that they held annually. the last two years, they didn't hold it because of COVID, so it came back. So a lot of big names there, you know, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of people attending. You know, so it was quite a shindig.

You know, some of the sessions were reasonable. Some of the sessions were kind of just, you know, having some government official talk. But a lot of folks to meet, a lot of interesting people there, some of whom I work with in the U.S., and then some new folks that I met. Oh, that's cool. And so people gave speeches where they said reasonable things or only insane things? No, I mean, there are some reasonable folks in there. Listen, the, you know, the emir, you know, I mean, Qatar gets up.

And, I mean, he says some things to say about, you know, the question of, say, treatment of Palestinians. He's no firebrand, but he points out they're not being treated well. You know, it's a standard talking point for his government, but one that deserved to be repeated. And you had a lot of that, that, you know, folks who generally they invited people who were pretty sensible, you know, but they didn't stray terribly far from the received wisdom. You know, I mean, they're all trying to figure up the impact. of Ukraine on them and the question of

how does America's relationship but they were all dealing with I mean the nice part of it was they all kind of acknowledge you know there were reasons why the Gulf states aren't doing everything that we tell them to do and that maybe we better get used to that and so it was good to hear that and

get a sense of what they are thinking and recognizing the world is changing and the idea of Pax Americana and America in charge of any everything that really is starting to fall even by some of the people who really enjoyed it. Yeah. Well, you know, people made a big deal about Biden used the phrase New World Order. And I don't know the whole quote, but I think what he was complaining about

was that now the New World Order is over and now we have a New World Order. And that I think the New World Order meant the era of America gets to do whatever America wants and force everyone else to go our way. And the New World Order is when they don't have to listen to us as much anymore. We don't really see the world government that the birchers were afraid of, but we just see more people. In fact, maybe while you were over there,

the Saudi Crown Prince refused to accept Joe Biden's phone call when he called to ask him to please increase oil production. And that's a pretty dang big signal right there. No, and I mean, we shouldn't be surprised. Look, they want to earn more money. I mean,

they're enjoying these high oil prices. You know, so, and to that should be a wake-up call to U.S. policymakers, that they're no longer willing to listen to us. So let's not have this illusion then that we gain all this influence and clout. You know, what we should do is say, that's fine. But then you guys shouldn't, you know, they shouldn't expect us to defend them. Why are we helping them kill people in Yemen? You know, why are we part of this kind of sectarian war fighting on their side against Iran?

To me, this is the good moment where you say, well, that's right. Yeah, you don't have to listen to us, but we don't have to defend you. so you know we both can step back and let's make a like let's make a new arrangement here that is better for us and if you think it's better for you it's that's fine by me well now so just how different is this world order anyway like let's presume that the war in ukraine wraps up within you know the next month if not sooner i don't know something some kind of negotiated type of a settlement but then so how much has everything changed like from one point of view they just kicked Russia right out of Europe.

Maybe Russia kicked themselves right out of Europe, if you like it that way. But now there's, you know, oh, yeah, well, you can't buy our hydrocarbons unless you pay in rubles. And we're going to go be friends with the Chinese instead. And the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany is now canceled indefinitely, if not permanently, if those aren't the same thing. And all these kinds of things, the massive sanctions regime and all that. how much difference does that make is

is you think the overall the plan is to sort of kind of reintegrate later or this is a major divorce going on right now well i think there are two things going on this is a process one is there's an awful lot of talk certainly pushed by ukraine but also a lot of

american hawks that this is the chance to basically punish russia yeah so there's talk of taking their central bank reserves we'll use that as reparations operations, you know, these kinds of things. Well, if you do that, what you're guaranteeing essentially is a new Cold War, that what you're doing is you're going to be treating, you know, Russia as outside of the system. So, you know, that in and of itself, if that's the way they go, that's not reintegration.

You know, I mean, you know, and one should certainly remember World War I in reparations, that when you treat defeated countries badly, you very often pay a price later on. But, you know, this, and this flows into a much larger trend. end, which is, you know, even the Europeans have tired of American arrogance and using the financial system and basically forcing everyone else on earth to follow American dictates, you know, else we will destroy your economy or will destroy your banking system or what have you. And I think that this is going to be accelerated. Now, the fact that we froze roughly half of Russia's central bank reserves, now that was

quite a coup. I mean, they didn't expect it. Nobody saw that one coming. But what it tells every country out there, you can't trust leaving your money in a place where America or its allies can reach it. So I think we're going to see a lot of countries changing what they do. It looks like India and Russia, you know, India is supposed to be our friend against China. India and Russia are arranging trade in rupees versus rubles. You know, they don't want to use the dollar. So basically they want to, you know, get out of the American dominated financial accounts. That way the U.S. financial sanctions won't apply to either of them. So these are things that were already going on, but we constantly accelerate them.

I mean, the Europeans set up this instax, this facility. It didn't work terribly well, but they tried to have something to trade with Iran outside of American sanctions. Lots of people are doing this. People are talking about using cyber currencies. They're talking about using gold. I mean, all sorts of things. So I think that we're going to, I think we may have had the high point of globalization where, you know, you're going to see a lot of countries trying to figure out how to avoid the U.S. And the U.S. is going to lose. And eventually the U.S. dollar may no longer be the

world's reserve currency. And then we're going to be paying a lot more. Americans will understand what a huge advantage they had, you know, with the reserve currency being the dollar. Once that's gone, it's going to be a free-for-all. What exactly does that mean? We're going to have hyperinflation here as all those dollars come home and we've got to chop zeros off the end and start all over and have a bloody revolution. I mean, we're going to be paying a lot more for things that we're going to see interest rates rise. You know, what we're going to find is, I mean, look, the current debt to, you know, GDP ratio for the federal government, that is the debt owned, you know, by people as opposed to

intergovernmental, intergovernmental transfers. You know, Social Security nominally lends money to the Treasury Department. It's kind of a fake transaction. Right. But the real debt is about 100% of GDP. I mean, that's almost the record. That was set after World War II. You know, Congressional Budget Office warns we could be at 200% by mid-century.

I mean, those numbers are crushing. At that point, investors don't believe they'll get paid back. Interest rates rise dramatically. So suddenly, you not only have higher levels of debt, but your interest rates are rising. I mean, you know, you can't afford to service the debt. That's where Greece was at. You know, and that's where everything starts falling apart. So that's for the U.S. looking ahead.

You know, we want to spend on everything. We want to defend the world. We want, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you know, we're not going to be able to afford it. Yeah. Give me just a minute here. Listen, I don't know about you guys, but part of running the Libertarian Institute is sending out tons of books and other things to our donors.

And who wants to stand in line all day at the post office? But stamps.com? Sorry, but their website is a total disaster. I couldn't spend another minute on it. But I don't have to either, because there's easyship.com. Easyship.com is like stamps.com, but their website isn't terrible. Go to Scott Horton.org slash Easy Ship. Hey, y'all Scott here.

You know, the Libertarian Institute has published a few great books. Mine, fools errand, enough already, and the great Ron Paul. Two by our executive editor, Sheldon Richmond, coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other. And of course, no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our late-great co-founder and managing editor at the Institute. Coming very soon in the new year will be the excellent voluntarious handbook, edited by Keith night, a new collection of my interviews about nuclear weapons, one more collection of essays

by Will Grigg, and two new books about Syria by the great William Van Wagonen and Brad and his co-author, Zachary Wingard. That's Libertarian Institute.org slash books. And I can never find this quote again, but there was a quote from when they were doing the sequestration there, Rand Paul and some of the Democrats in the early Obama years. They were restricting the Pentagon budget a little bit. And one of these generations, generals said, look, to be very frank, Senator, when it comes to defending this country, I mean, we can do that for a couple of hundred billion dollars, you know, but you guys want us to be able to fight a war on a moment's notice in every hot spot around the world.

And that's going to cost you. And that's why we're going to have to have, you know what I mean? And the thing is, he wasn't, there was no moral lesson in it, right? This was simply being counting. And he was just saying, here's what we can afford. This other stuff, we're going to need for you to tack on some extra appropriations here. We're just not going to be able to show up where you want us to show up all the time, you know? No, that's exactly right.

Projection of power is what's so expensive. You know, the U.S. is the most secure, great power probably in human history. I mean, big oceans, east and west, and, you know, weak Pacific neighbors north and south. China is surrounded by 14 countries by land. And then you could also argue that it's kind of, you know, by ocean. is contiguous with some other ones. I mean, how do you defend those borders? I mean, that's huge.

It's extraordinary. You know, the U.S. has nothing like that. You know, so we can, I mean, who's going to threaten us? I mean, other than the ability to, you know, shoot some missiles at us, you know, which we can deter. Beyond that, I mean, nobody's, there's no invasion force that's going to show up, you know, on the California coast. You know, so we can defend against that real easy.

The problem is if we want to go and basically browbeat China on its coast, and we want to go to Europe and protect all the Europeans because why should we expect them to spend any money on their defense? So that'd be a tragedy. I mean, that's what costs Mark. I go to the Middle East and try, you know, I mean, blow up countries like, you know, Iraq and spend 20 years in Afghanistan. Well, that's what costs money. Well, you know, they have this narrative now and there ain't nothing to it, but it's sort of a poor substitute for the threat of Soviet communism, if you ask me. But it's the democracies versus is the autocracy.

Not that America is the most democratic type country, if you mean that, in a positive sense of that term. But, hey, compared to the Communist Party dictatorship in China, or compared to old strong man, Putin, who might as well be a czar, even though he calls himself

El Presente, like, you know, he's America's sock puppet in Egypt or something like that, you know? That, you know, we and our El Presentees got to face down those guys. because that's really the dividing line between the West and everybody else

is that we got these regular elections and stuff, Doug, I don't know. Well, of course, the irony is some of our best friends like the Saudis don't have very many elections. You know, I mean, there's no doubt. I'll have you know that LCC was elected with 97% of the vote just a few years ago. It's great to see that,

just like they love the old Soviet leaders and they love Kim Jong-un. yeah listen it's totally legit when he's our guy everybody knows absolutely absolutely um well but so um and it really is just a poor kind of public relations thing right like i i can't remember you may know all these quotes better than me from back then um from the older history of uh at the dawn of the cold war not that you were a foreign policy analyst then or anything but just far better studied than me, but I know that some of them said that, listen, if we were just talking about Tsarist Russia pushing around people in the far east of Europe, then we wouldn't

care about that. But this is Joe Stalin. And this is the ideology of world communism. And for that, we must send American troops to occupy Germany forever to help. to contain this menace. This is a special occasion, right? But so now the menace is Russian, I guess, conservatism. It's not quite the scariest Stalin and world revolution and all of that. But that's basically it, right? They've got to come up with some kind of story.

No, that's right. Look, I mean, Stalin was a really bad guy, but he was pretty unique. it's fine to make an argument that there's a moment in time we have to do something special, but then that also suggests the moment in time passes and then you stop doing it. But that's not what we do is we simply keep doing the same thing and keep doing the same thing and keep doing the same thing. And I mean, that, well, that doesn't make sense. That, you know, if you say Stalin was uniquely evil and then when he passed, why didn't we change our policy?

Well, I don't know. I guess we didn't, you know, for whatever reason. And of course, everything is always Hitler. I mean, that's the ultimate one where you announce that whoever the dictator is. I mean, you know, there is kind of these memes showing basically Hitler and Putin. You know, Putin's not a nice guy, but he is no Hitler. I mean, this is just silly that, again, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were uniquely evil for a number of reasons. And, you know, we should recognize that there is, you know, you always want to be watchful in the future,

but it's pretty hard to imagine anybody like them, you know, in the coming years. I mean, Xi Jinping, I don't like, but he is no Mao. I mean, he's kind of trying to, certain ways, have Mao's power, but this is not the same kind of guy. I mean, he wants to use it in ways that I don't like. But, you know, there's no cultural revolution. There's no mass starvation, kind of the lunatic stuff that Mao did. So we have to keep a sense of proportion here.

Well, I mean, the thing is about Hitler is if the enemy's Hitler, then you can't talk to him or else you are Neville Chamberlain at music. Exactly. Right? That's absolutely right. That's exactly right. Here's the problem, though. They do that to Saddam Hussein and you and I can tell that they're just cynically

setting up a straw man and beating the crap out of them and they know there's no threat from Saddam Hussein in the world. That's why they did that war. Paul Wolfowitz said, it's doable. Right? In other words, there's not a thing they could do to resist us. So that's why we're doing. it right but that's exactly right but not the case here right so they call this guy hitler and they go well now that and so now that he's hitler they can never sit down with them again is that

what we're because what is he like early 60s or something i mean this guy could be the president for another 15 years or more well he's about 70 but he you know still he could he could last for a while i mean look the real problem here i mean i think they recognize they do need to talk to i mean that's why this whole, you know, a little kerfuffle over regime change and Biden's remark, even Biden understood that he'd made a mistake because he understood that really you do have to talk to him. So then he just tried the line, it's my personal opinion, you know, not policy, which, you know, I'm sorry, if you're the president of the United States, anything you say suggests policy. I mean, you know, he surely knows better than that. But I think he understood the problem

there. He didn't want to admit he was wrong. So he tried to kind of wipe it away. But that's the problem is we have to be able to talk to them. I mean, it would have been crazy in the Cold War if we had not talked to the Soviets. You know, the fact that we failed to talk to

the Chinese helped get bring them into the Korean War. You know, they didn't want us on the Yalu River. If we had, you know, our own conversations, we may very well, you know, been able to talk about it and we might not have gone as close to the Yalu. They might not have gotten into the war, but we didn't talk to each other. We didn't have diplomatic relations.

We haven't had relations with North Korea. It's actually more important to talk to your enemies than your friends. I don't fear my friends. I worry about the enemies. Well, you need to have contact. And then when you call somebody a war criminal and say he has to leave office, yeah, it's pretty hard to sit down with him, at which point communication ceases. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to elect Dave Smith president, and we're going to have Doug McGregor run the Defense Department, and Doug Bondo is going to be National Security Advisor. Hey, I'm Tand, rested, and ready. That sounds like a good deal to me.

Yeah, that's right. It's going to be great. Listen, I love you. I'm sorry, I got to go. I know you do too, but you're always welcome on this show. You do such a great job. And thank you so much for all the great stuff that you write for us at antivore.com, too. Well, Scott, thanks for everything you do.

It's always fun to be on your show, too. Okay, great. Talk soon. Doug Bondo, everybody. He's at cato.org and antivore.com. The Scott Horton show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK. 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com,

Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.