Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/11/24 Patrick Macfarlane: The US Is on the Path to War with China

Episode Date: April 13, 2024

Patrick Macfarlane joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss America’s march to war with China. They talk about the provocative US maneuvers off of China’s coast and Washington’s ongoing effort to bring India into this new Cold War. Discussed on the show: “‘Integrated Deterrence’ Means Provoking China” (Libertarian Institute) Hotter Than The Sun: Time To Abolish Nuclear Weapons by Scott Horton Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam by Gareth Porter “US, Philippines, Japan, and Australia Conduct First Joint Military Exercise in South China Sea” (Antiwar.com) Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. Follow him on Twitter @patmacfarlane_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. 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: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, April 11th, 2024, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com and author of the book, Enough Already. Time to end the war on terrorism, among others, and you can find my full interview archive, more than 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Wharton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Wharton Show. All right, you guys, and next up on the show today is Patrick McFarlane. He is the Justin Romando Fellow at the Institute and also the host of the great podcast, Vital Descent. Welcome back to the show. Patrick, how you doing? Hey, Scott. Thanks for having me back.

Yeah, good to have you here. Great articles about China. The first one is called integrated deterrence means provoking China. You're referring to the latest national security strategy of the Biden administration and what they call integrated deterrence, but that's government and even worse, military, newspeak. So what does it really mean? Well, I think it really, you can draw parallels between the lead up to the war in Ukraine and what's going on currently in the South China Sea and with Taiwan. And I think the purpose of this article was just to do kind of like a, I don't know, this is what's going on, weave all these threads together. There's so many different places that the U.S. has taken on these territorial disputes on behalf of their partners, their alliances and partnerships here. And each one has the potential to turn into a real kinetic conflict with China.

And there's no benefit to the United States, especially to the average American. Average Americans don't know about these disputes. They don't care and does nothing to keep us safer or any valid U.S. national security interest. You know, Gareth Porter's book about Vietnam is called The Perils of Dominance. And it's about how the real problem there was that, The guys that ran the U.S. national security state, they knew the reality of how much more powerful America was than the Soviet Union and China combined, even. And then so the idea was we can do whatever we want. And there's nobody to stop us when, in fact, they found out the hard way that even little Ho Chi Min had a red line, no pun intended, that they would rather fight than give in.

and then here we got that same kind of attitude only we're dealing with china and they did have a measly 200 h bombs pointed at us and now it's more like five and counting so if you put she in the place of ho we're in real trouble here yeah and there's i think you've talked about um in hotter than the sun these mirv nuclear delivery devices that drop multiple nuclear warheads at one time And China has those, right? I mean, so. Yes, thanks to Bill Clinton. That's right. So I think the main thing I focused on in this article was just these disputes over the Spratly Islands and the South China Sea and the disputes between China and the Philippines and kind of tried to illustrate exactly how it's our involvement has empowered the Philippines to become more aggressive in this tiny territorial dispute over, you know, these rocks and reefs in the South China Sea. that, again, Americans don't know about, they don't necessarily care at all. And then, you know, between Japan and China, the Sankaku Islands is another, you know,

set of tiny little rocks in the South China Sea or kind of in that general area. And then there's this other dispute between India and China, kind of in the Himalaya regions, just really far away from, I mean, I don't know if you could get much further away from the United States than the Himalayas got. you've had Lyle Goldstein on the show and he, you know, he has a much better grasp of the military situation. And he says that, you know, all these, all these drills that they do in these simulations they do and badly for the United States very badly. But I think the entire strategy makes the false presupposition that the only way forward is to be confrontational with China. And that, of course, in there, we've seen into cheese heart and the heart of all these, you know, dirty red.

commie CCP people, and we know that they're bent on world domination. And the only way to deal with that is to, you know, get a gang of all of our kids on the block, fellow kids on the block and whip them up into a frenzy, hand them guns, and point them at the bad guys. Okay. So can you explain a little bit about these islands and do we know, is there a clear-cut history in some of these cases? You know, I'm not intimately familiar with the international claims. And, you know, I've seen anecdotally things on Twitter about how, you know, legal historians, even in France and kind of in the West, have agreed that, yeah, China has a legitimate claim to these reefs and rocks and islands. I think the most charitably speaking, I mean,

the reason why they're important, I guess, isn't because they're rocks and reefs and islands necessarily. I think it has more to do with the fishing territory and kind of those economic interests. I know that China's been accused of building these, like, expanding and creating islands in the South China Sea, but I don't know exactly how it's related to these particular Senkaku and the Spratly Islands. All right. Now, obviously, the big one is Taiwan. The American right is always warning that China is about to attack and invade Taiwan. In fact, Loud Goldstein thinks so, too, on the basis of, well, they sure are building up a big enough Navy to do it, that's for sure. So what do you know about that? And I'm not asking you to predict the

future, but just can you tell us what you know about where the sides are? And by the way, I mean, it makes sense for people to be biased toward the poor Taiwanese who want to keep their pseudo-independence as they have it. But what's it worked to us is the real question. Yeah, I think that in the grand scheme of things, you know, we have these national defense strategies coming out talking about forming these alliances. And I think that's really progressing. But I think the overall thought within the U.S. national security circles is that since the U.S. is kind of the waning power and China is the rising power, we need to provoke some kind of like force the issue. Because the longer that we wait, the more powerful China is going to become.

And perhaps it's not certain that our power is going to continue to extend, you know, a decade, 15 years, two decades into the future. And so if that's true, we can definitely see that being borne out in what's actually happening. Dave wrote up, Dave DeCamp at antiwar.com wrote up a piece on April 7th talking about this actual U.S., Philippines, Japan, and, Australia conducting their first joint military exercises in the South China Sea. So that kind of axis has been forming. We have those, you know, these transitions through the Taiwan Strait of U.S. warships. We have, you know, a detachment of U.S. military advisors being deployed to the Kinmen Islands, which is directly off the coast of China.

It's a Taiwanese kind of controlled enclave there, but it's right off the Chinese coast. and we have more detachments of U.S. soldiers being deployed to Taiwan. So if the plan is to provoke China into taking action sooner than later, it looks like that's being borne out by U.S. actions and the actions of our partners. Hey, guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the shorthy.

show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug of salt or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen. All of them. But now you can get the e-book All the War Lies by me for free. Just sign up the email list

at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. I'm talking with Patrick McFarlane from the Institute here.

Elaborate if you could about the situation there in Kinman Island. And then what you say about the special forces being deployed there, I guess you could imagine that's a message to the Chinese that, boy, we really are serious, or the other explanation is, like you say, it's a deliberate provocation, but it sounds like a provocation either way. It is a curious kind of situation there with, you know, the history of the Chinese civil war and the Kuomintang, the nationalists fleeing to Taiwan with some kind of losing the civil war, but still after that being supported by the United States. And you have this little enclave right off the coast of people who, you know, they're right in the path on the doorstep of China, but they're still part of, you know, these are people who are identify as Taiwanese people. And so they have been attacked by the mainland, you know, back in decades ago.

And is it a heavily militarized island already? Yeah, in a sense, I mean, there's, there's like defense, there's, you know, what are the hedgehogs on the, beaches and there's bunkers and things like that. I don't know exactly how heavily militarized. I believe that there's Taiwanese soldiers that are there. You know, the great Ron Paul, what he always talks about is putting the shoe on the other foot. And I think it's really like if China put soldiers on Alcatraz or something, it's not a

Alcatraz doesn't have the history. Well, I mean, Catalina Island is 22 miles off the coast of California. Here we're talking about, we're talking, yeah, like Alcatraz right there in the bay. Right. It's unbelievable to think, I mean, whatever quirky situation where you still have Taiwanese forces based there, that's one thing. But putting American special forces on the ground there? Yeah, it's insane. You mentioned Gareth Porter and the war in Vietnam.

I mean, it's directly the same kind of thing that got us involved in Vietnam is the deployment of these military advisors. Now, to be fair, I think the number is around 10 or less than 10. something so it's not a huge detachment but it's still a large provocation i mean just the the geography and the history in that location there it's insane and uh you know i read this thing in the asia times where they were talking about the chinese at least claim and i don't know why to disbelieve them that they've got the automated machine tools to just crank out cruise missiles that they can just produce these things by the thousands and thousands of Do you know, Scott, what's this whole deal with the hypersonic missiles?

I actually don't know if, is the United States. Well, the Russians have been using them in Ukraine. Okay, but is the United States capable of producing them? And do we have some? No, the Americans have not figured it out. Yeah, that's my understanding. That's what they see. And I think, believably, or else they'd be boasting.

Yeah. So I think from what I've read the ones that the Russians are using or going Mach 5, which is not Mach 9 or 10, as Putin claimed in his speeches, but still pretty fast. And what's the point? It just reduces warning time, reduces decision-making time. And, of course, as we've seen, you can put a conventional warhead on them. So somebody in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean shoots a hypersonic missile at you, Mr. President, it may or may not have an H-bomb on it. What do you do? Launch on warning, you know, and with five minutes to decide instead of 20.

Exactly. Smoke them if you got them. All right. And now finally, would you get back to India a minute there? You mentioned how America's bringing them in to help him in the Chinese, which is interesting because they sure are closer and closer economic partners with America's rival Russia right now. But I guess they're putting that aside. they have their use here, but there have been clashes in the Himalayas in just the past couple of

years. And I think one of them, some officer, I think I got this right, ordered the men to drop their rifles and they just went out there and had a giant fist fight like infantry in the mountains. But that could turn thermonuclear right there too. Yeah, I don't know if India has H-bombs, but China sure does. Kind of reminds me of like the gangs of New York. I don't know. It just seems so absurd to be true, but, you know, truth is stranger than fiction, but whatever. Yeah, it's a really interesting situation. You know, the former head of NATO, James, I believe his name is James Stavarides, he wrote a fiction book about war between the U.S. and China. And I did an article about that a couple years ago.

Maybe we talked about it on your show, Scott. But he, the big question mark was in that conflict, what role does India play? And I think in the last few years, we've kind of had more of an answer because that was kind of the linchpin of the whole book, is that India intervened kind of as a neutral third party. But it seems that the United States has been working on turning them not neutral. You know, of course, there are these conflicts between India and China. But it kind of had its impetus most recently in 2020 when, yeah, there was a melee that ensued up there. And it's all about this.

It's, again, it's a territorial dispute that China and India have overlapping claims to this territory. And, you know, since then we've been getting more on board with India, helping them in this dispute by giving them satellite data to track Chinese troop movements in the area. And it seems like, you know, DeCamp again wrote up a piece saying that India definitely used that intelligence in a more recent clash in 2022. So again, flipping India more to our side, trying to integrate their military with ours in the same way that we're doing with the Philippines and Australia and Japan. Yeah.

As you say in your piece here, deterrence works until it fails. And you have a war like we have in Ukraine right now. Only in this case, with both sides armed with nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. All right. Well, we're out of time for the show today. But that is Patrick McFarlane. He is the Justin Romando fellow at the Institute, and he has this great podcast called Vidal Descent at VitalDissent.com and that we feature at the Institute as well. Thank you very much for your time, Patrick.

Thank you, Scott. And that's it for Anti-War Radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. I'm going to be able to be.