Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/24/22 Chas Freeman on America’s Messy Taiwan Policy

Episode Date: May 28, 2022

Scott is joined by Chas Freeman to discuss the history of U.S. policy concerning Taiwan. And they talk about President Biden’s recent press conference where he misstated the official U.S. policy on Taiwan for the fourth time as president.  Discussed on the show: “Not So Deft On Taiwan” (Washington Post) Chas W. Freeman was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs from 1993-94 and served as U. S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Follow him at his website, chasfreeman.net. 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

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 scothorton.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, you guys, on the line I've got Choss Freeman, a former U.S. diplomat and businessman.

He chairs Projects International Incorporated and was Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security affairs from 93 to 94. And as we've discussed before, he was the principal U.S. interpreter during Nixon's landmark trip to China 50 years ago in 1972. Welcome back to the show. Chas, how you doing, sir? Glad to be back. Very happy to have you here. And obviously, huge news going on all around the world, particularly in regards to your speciality, great power competition with Russia and China here. and Biden, who is elderly, for the fourth time in a year, has misstated, or has he, America's strategic ambiguity policy toward China.

This is something W. Bush and Donald Trump also got wrong. It's a little bit complicated. In fact, we're running on anti-war.com today. an article by Joe Biden from 2001 attacking W. Bush for getting this wrong. So my question to you is, I guess, is whether you think that maybe this is deliberate, it's not a gaffe, but that they actually are changing the policy toward Taiwan and China. Well, the policy has been seriously eroded over the course of years. It's almost everybody's forgotten that in order to normalize relations with Beijing to enlisted in the containment of the Soviet Union, beginning in 1971 with Kissinger's secret visit to Beijing, and continuing over the course of the 70s, culminating in Jimmy Carter's normalization of relations with Beijing, the United States agreed to three conditions with respect to Taiwan, which was the central.

obstacle to any dialogue or cooperation with China. And those three conditions were, first, that we would cease to recognize Taiwan and break diplomatic relations with it and not have any official relationship with it. And second, that we would remove all forces and installations from the island and not reintroduce them. And third, that we would end the mutual defense treaty we had with Tai Bay on its terms, thus voiding the defense commitment. So where are we now? We have a $230 million building in Tai Bay that flies an American flag and has Marine Guards and in all but name as an embassy. We sent cabinet officers to Tai Bay for official discussions. It's very hard to argue that the agreement to remain on an unofficial basis has been observed by the United States.

Apparently, there are U.S. troops back in Taiwan, training the Taiwanese, and now President Biden has apparently reinstated a defense commitment. I'll just make one comment on that, which I think is important, and that is he has absolutely no constitutional authority. to authorize a war with China over Taiwan for two reasons. First, the Constitution reserves that authority to the Congress, not to the President, even though the Congress in recent years has rubber-stamped presidential wars. The Constitution has not changed. And second, there is the Taiwan Relations Act, which authorizes and directs that Taiwan's,

be, Taiwan be able to acquire from the United States, the weaponry it needs to defend itself. It does not authorize an American military intervention. So, Mr. Biden's comments basically stripped the last residue of the diplomatic understandings that ended artillery bombardments between the mainland and Taiwan, on January 1, 1979, and took China to adopt a policy of settling the issues with Taiwan arising from its civil war, unfinished civil war, peacefully, this is all gone. And I think there's been a misunderstanding on the part of the public, probably, maybe reflecting the basic militarism that now pervades our first.

foreign policy, that somehow rather military deterrence has kept the peace in the Taiwan straight. No, that is not correct. What has kept the peace in the Taiwan straight is that the United States took steps to assure Beijing that there was a possible, peaceful outcome of the Chinese civil war, which, and now there is no such possibility. So Beijing is faced with a choice. It can give up the objectives of both revolutions in China in the 20th century, which were to reunite the country and bring it under a single authority and end foreign spheres of influence on Chinese territory, or it can use force. And I think that's where we're headed. So this is not a minor gaffe. This is giving China a reason to go to war

over Taiwan well and so do you think that it's possible that this is accidentally on purpose or this really is just a gaffe but you can you only get three free ones and on the fourth one it becomes across his belly uh well if you keep saying the same thing and it keeps getting walked back you know maybe the first time you can claim you misspoke the second time it's a little less credible and by now it's totally not credible. And the White House has been trying to walk back what the President said on each of the occasions in which he has stated this.

I think he is effectively articulating a consensus of the brain-dead strategists within the Beltway. That is to say, I don't think the American people have signed up for a war with China, which would almost inevitably, escalate to the nuclear level, but the military industrial complex has. Okay, now, so to go back to ancient history, as Jimmy Carter would call it, here, even if it was only 26 years, but let's go back to, you know, 43, 44 years ago there. In the Carter years, there was an

update to America's posture toward China and Taiwan. Supposedly that was the status quo that was holding up until now, I think, but can you describe a little bit about the evolution from the Nixon policy to the Carter policy? Sure. This situation, of course, began long before Nixon. You remember in the late 1940s after the end of World War II, there was a civil war between the then Chinese government headed by John Kaj Sheck. and the Chinese Communist Party added by Mao Zedong, and Mao Wan, and Jan fled to the newly recovered province of Taiwan. Taiwan had been seated to Japan in 1895 under duress, and it was recovered in 1945. So Taiwan became the bastion of what remained of the original government of China. The mainland fell under the Communist Party control. The US backed Jiang, including backing his threats to reconquer the mainland from Taiwan.

And for 23 years, we insisted that the government of China was in Taipei. It wasn't a government in Excel because Taiwan was part of China. And the regime in Beijing was bogus and should be banned from any international contacts. And we vigorously enforced that. I was part of that for a while. We were pretty good. We got away with that for more than two decades. And then President Nixon decided, I think quite realistically, that the fact that China had fallen

out with the Soviet Union offered an opportunity. And instead of trying to contain China by cooperating with Taiwan, he enlisted China to contain the Soviet Union with us. And that began a new phase. Now that was in 1972. In February, 1972, I was there. And Nixon promised that in his second term, 1972 was an election year, he would do what Jimmy Carter eventually did.

But of course, Watergate intervened and he was not there to do it. successor Gerald Ford lacked the political moxie to take such a daring step, and it was left to Carter. And Carter basically followed the script that Nixon and Kissinger had outlined. And in the end of 1978, agreed with Zheng Xiaoping on the three conditions I mentioned. No official relations with Taiwan, no military presence there. and no defense commitment. The Taiwan Relations Act enshrined that policy, along with the American continuing interest in making this a peaceful, keeping the settlement of this issue between the Chinese peaceful.

And that worked for 40 years, and I think it's now pretty much collapsed. So, we are down to a purely military confrontation with no diplomacy to moderate Chinese objectives. The formula we had in place had deprived China of any incentive to regard the Taiwan issue as urgent or requiring a military intervention, that's now gone. So this is a very dangerous situation, and I don't know what the Chinese are going to do. They are patient people. They are not going to emulate Vladimir Putin with an impetuous, poorly prepared military move.

They will wait until they're ready. And of course, as you know, the military balance in the Western Pacific, that is China's near abroad in the maritime realm, including Taiwan, has been shifting dramatically against the United States. There's no reason to expect that trend to end, which means that the military confrontation when it comes is going to be extraordinarily difficult for us, if not impossible. All right. Now, Gareth Porter had this great piece about a year or so ago about a project or policy, that have been called mutual deterrence,

where on one hand the Americans would stress to the Chinese that, listen, we really don't want to see a violent resolution to this problem. But at the same time, they would deter the Taiwanese as well and say, you hotheads

pipe down, and we don't want to hear the word independence, and we don't want to hear you guys picking a fight that we're not promising we're going to back you up in. And that the problem, was that America had to abandon that policy of deterring, especially deterring the Taiwanese from, you know, some of their more outlandish statements and more provocative statements, I guess. And he was saying then that the current president or prime minister, whichever it is, was on her

way out and that her obvious successor was more of a hothead than her. And that there was a real danger that Taiwan could go ahead and declare full-scale independence and national sovereignty, would almost certainly provoke a war from China, I believe was his take. So what do you think of that? Well, in effect, he accurately described the policy that, oddly enough, George W. Bush came around to. Taiwan elected a president, Chen Shre Bien, who was very firmly in favor of Taiwan independence and claimed a separate sovereignty from China. This was very provocative. and when the then Chinese Prime Minister, Premier, Wen Xiaobal, came to Washington during the Bush administration. The Bush administration said, well, publicly, we have a common interest with Beijing.

We don't want to see a provocative move toward independence by Taiwan, and we're going to manage this. And we basically slapped down Mr. Chun. His successor as candidate for the pro-independence party is now the president of in Taipei. And she lost that election back then, in part because the United States made it clear we did not support independence for Taiwan. But all that's gone. If you ask, you look at the Senate of the United States or the House or look at statements by American politicians, The domestic politics in the United States are very now clearly aligned with the idea of Taiwan's self-determination and independence. Presidents have been, you know, have a choice.

They can lead the country in accord with its national interests or they can pander to public opinion, even when that opinion is mistaken. And I'm afraid, I'm sorry to say that the current tendency in Washington is to pander to public opinion. opinion, not consider the consequences for the nation if we get into a war that we probably can't win. Yeah, well, we're going to talk about that aspect here in a minute. But let me ask you this. I have a couple of expert guest advisors that I talk to sometimes about this. Peter Van Buren, a longtime State Department official who was stationed over there in Korea,

Japan and I think Taiwan as well or mainland China, Hong Kong, something. Anyway, some experience over there. In fact, I think he spent most of his career in the East. And then you got Lyle Goldstein, formerly at the Naval War College and now defense priorities and a real expert on this. And their arguments are opposite, but they're kind of on two different wavelengths entirely. So in other words, Peter Van Buren's take is much more political. and it's about how there's so many disincentives for Beijing to launch this war and so many consequences that they would suffer if they did. And that, as you said about the patience there, they get all the time in the world.

And, you know, getting Taiwan back will happen someday, and so they will be happy to leave it at that, essentially. And then Lyle Goldstein's argument is not really political as much. as it's simply that, well, they sure are building up their naval forces. And right around now, they're getting to the point where they have the capability to take Taiwan. And they'll probably, you know, build up a little bit more from there. But sure looks to him, like, that's what they're building up their naval forces for is exactly that. And so from his point of view, it's just a matter of time before they pull the trigger on the thing. So I wonder where you come down and all of that, sir.

Well, actually, both Lyle and Peter make a very good points. Let me start with Peter. I think he was absolutely correct. That was the situation. That is to say the Chinese had no sense of urgency, precisely because of the diplomatic understandings that I mentioned. Time seemed to be on their side. That, however, is not the case now.

In Taiwan, which is a robust democracy with a very high standard of civil liberties, a very admirable society in many ways, a large percentage of the population is now firmly opposed to any kind of resolution of Taiwan's relationship with the mainland that puts Taiwan in some sense in jeopardy of a form. coming under Beijing's control. So you have a large number of people who are adamantly opposed to any kind of reunification. And this changes the equation in Taiwan. But more importantly, we have here in the United States a couple of elections coming up, one in one this year in November for the House and Senate, in which I think, the universal expectation is that the Democrats are going to get walloped, and the people opposing the Democrats for the most part are a very hard line on these issues, which I have to say

I don't think they understand very well, but it's easy to posture in favor of tough policies. Peter Van Buren's argument might well have applied to Ukraine. There was absolutely no reason for Vladimir Putin to make the mistake that he did. I think that was the worst strategic blunder made by any leader in Moscow since Nicholas the second decided to go to war with Japan and as a result, set up. in motion events that led to the Soviet Revolution 15 years later. Then again, rolling right down the highway is a lot easier than an amphibious assault, right? Well, we'll come to that later because Lyle is very effective in analyzing that.

But you made a point, Lyle makes a point, which is very important. In the past, there have been occasional crises over Taiwan. Taiwan independence, 1995-96, there was a crisis which led to Chinese shows of force and eventually the deployment of an aircraft carrier too near Taiwan in the Philippine Sea, not in the Taiwan Strait by the U.S. But those were shows of force, and one of the reasons they were was that China did not then have the capability to take Taiwan by force. so all it could do was posture, but now it does.

So it's a very different situation politically in China if people say, look, this is intolerable and we need to do something. And this time you can't say, well, actually we can't do it. You don't have an excuse if you're the People's Liberation Army. So the other factor here, As I said, you know, I know our military have been talking about 2027 as a Chinese target date for ending the confrontation with Taiwan by taking it. I don't think that's very serious.

But I do think if we have a presidential election and the sort that is entirely possible in 2024 and a president is inaugurated in 2025, who doubles down on Mr. Biden's threats to go to war with China over Taiwan. I do think that would very likely provoke the Chinese to take action. And I think there are lots of actions they could take that haven't really been envisaged American war games, which I've taken part of, taken part in, I should say, have a tendency to mirror. image, American military thinking, not Chinese. And so I think we're quite likely, if this happens, we're going to have a surprise. And I don't think it's going to be at all like Mr. Putin's blunder into Ukraine, which he clearly hadn't prepared. He hadn't told his own generals he was going to do

it. He hadn't rallied to troops or given them a feasible mission. And there was no effective war plan and no logistics to support a war plan had been marshaled. And that, That's not going to be the case in the Taiwan Strait. 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. Easeyship.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 Knight 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 Wagonin and Brad Hoff and his co-author

Zachary Wingard that's Libertarian Institute.org slash books All right and now so what about America's blunder when Joe Biden sends the Navy to go rescue Taiwan it's not going to make it there i mean the chinese have been very innovative and they now have the ability to strike carriers at 2,500 miles away from their coast so um where you know this is a problem this is a basic equation that has to be recognized uh Taiwan is at most 100 miles off the

mainland coast. It is within range of half of the Chinese Air Force. That is a thousand modern aircraft. It is totally bracketed by Chinese air defense. Every part of the area over Taiwan is within range of Chinese anti-aircraft missiles. China is building a huge helicopter-borne force, which would mean that it didn't have to reenact saving private Ryan on the beaches of western Taiwan, but could leap over. I don't, you know, I think they're probably learning lessons from the Russian incompetence in Ukraine, and they're not going to repeat that. But, no, it's a hell of a difficult task to go across 100 miles of water, but it's a lot

harder to go over 6,000 miles of water. This is in China's orbit. We have to project power across the entire Pacific, which will not be uncontested. So the danger, of course, is, and this is where there is a parallel with Ukraine, if the Chinese see themselves losing, then you have the possibility of nuclear escalation and it's not just that they've built up the forces to take Taiwan they are now building a huge new set of internet continental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads why told the US at bay if there is a war over Taiwan and this gets to the final point The Chinese care very, very deeply about their own sovereignty, territorial integrity and prestige and dignity, if you will. And Taiwan, the existence of Taiwan as a U.S. supported sphere of influence on what they regard as Chinese territory is a terrible challenge.

So they care deeply. I think we care about Taiwan, but in a much shallower and less convincing way. And going back to Peter Van Buren's arguments, you know, we're in a situation, in some ways this is comparable to in the U.S. Civil War, you know, someone saying, well, you know, we agree that there should only be one in the United States. there should, and there should be no secession by the south, but it's just going too far to attack Georgia. You know, I don't think that would have carried the day with Ulysses S. Grand or William Tecumseus Sherman. Yeah, well, there are a lot of people who say that

China's on its way to world empire, that Taiwan is just a stepping stone. You can see the way they're building up all these atolls and little mini islands. in the region and this kind of thing, and that once they're done take in Taiwan, they'll move on to, I guess, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia

and Japan and the Koreas and then America's West Coast. What do you think? This is the most amazing nonsense. It's based on applying to China the ideology of the Nazi party in Germany for Leibenzholm,

living room expansion or the Japanese Empire. The Chinese in every respect are in a defensive mode. Those islands in the South China Sea that they claim, everybody else took the rest of them and they got left with a seven that they managed to turn into some kind of early warning and possible sea control posts. But they have one base abroad.

We have 800. You know, we're an empire. They're not. And I don't think there's any evidence that China plans to expand beyond its traditional borders. And if they do try to take on Vietnam, I think they will find, as we did, that the Vietnamese will have something to say about that. And it won't be welcome. So I just don't buy this. I think this is all a combination of a misreading of China in terms of other countries' history and our own mirror imaging.

We're the ones with 800 bases around the world. We're the ones with all kinds of commitments to defend all sorts of countries that are very, very far away from us. China doesn't have a single ally. Why? Why? Because it regards allies as liabilities. They can get you into wars that you don't want to be in. And so they have a reason to protect North Korea as a buffer state against U.S. and forces

in South Korea. They have a reason to want to deny the U.S. unchallenged control of the South China Sea, from which they were historically invaded by Western countries. They have a reason to garrison their borders. They have a reason to respond to the over 2,000 yearly U.S. challenges to their borders with aggressive patrolling from the air and sea. But to say that they are expansionist is to make an assertion on the basis of no evidence at all.

All right. Well, um, so if you were back in the national security bureaucracy somewhere, you had a chance to advise the president, what would you tell them to do and say now? Obviously, you know, there's all kinds of metaphors about, uh, going too far and now you can only take things back so far and all those kinds of things. But, uh, there's got to be something we can do other than, um, all dying a nuclear war. Well, the other day, Henry Kissinger, who was about it during 99, spoke to the Davos Forum,

and he said something which I think many people found a bit puzzling. He said, we should not allow the Taiwan issue to become the center of U.S.-China relations. Why would he say that? And that is because the main obstacle for the 23 years from 1949 to 1972, when we reached an understanding about Taiwan with the Chinese, the obstacle to communication, dialogue, and cooperation was the unfinished Chinese civil war and the Taiwan issue as a product of that. And it was only when we found a way to remove that from the center of the relationship. that it became possible to cooperate against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and otherwise.

And China was able to join the American-designed world order and become basically a capitalist economy. So removing the Taiwan issue from the center of the relationship was Kissinger and Nixon's major achievement. And he's now arguing that if we put the Taiwan issue back at the center of the relationship, we will be unable to cooperate with the Chinese on many things that we want to cooperate with them on, including climate change, nuclear non-proliferation, the Korea problem, the issues in the Middle East with Iran, and cooperation to produce global prosperity. And so putting Taiwan at the center of Iran, relationship guarantees both an antagonistic and unproductive relationship between the United

States and China, and that is unwise. So what should be done? The first thing to do is to restore a measure of civility to this relationship. At Anchorage, when the Biden administration came in, there was a meeting between Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan on the one hand. Chinese counterparts on the other. And essentially, our side went into that meeting and said to the Chinese, you are moral reprobates. We don't like you. We're going to try to hold you down. If we can, we're going to push you back. We're going to do everything we can to wreck your economic progress

and prevent your technological advance. But there are a couple of things we need your help on. Would you like to help us? No, that is not a problem. persuasive pitch. So we need to go back to, you know, instead of saying we're going to confront you, we're going to compete with you, and then maybe in a few things we might cooperate with you, we need to flip that around. We have an interest in cooperating with the Chinese. Let's put that first. Of course we're going to compete with them. And, you know, that's natural and entirely appropriate. And on some issues, we will confront them. But let's emphasize the positive

if we want to have positive results and if we have a decent dialogue arguably we could restore some sense on the Chinese part that waiting to deal with the Taiwan issue is in their interest much as

Peter Van Buren argued and that they should not have to use the forces that they have built that Lyle Goldstein has as described.

That is the path away from war and towards some kind of mutual accommodation across this trade that should be worked out by people in Taiwan with people on the mainland. And, of course, we should be prepared to strengthen Taiwan's hand in any such negotiations. But not to put it in a position where there are no negotiations, which is the situation at present, and where the only

path to an outcome is through war. Can I keep you one more minute here? You've got to go. No, it's fun. Okay, great. I wanted to ask you about a couple things that you mentioned there. One, America's world empire. And two, the rules-based liberal international order, which seems like the latter is mostly

a euphemism for the former, but also you could look at it in a way that they are very kind of contradictory things. Or, you know, there seems to be a problem with the lawlessness of the law enforcer here, obviously. But I just wonder what you think about all of that and especially where we're headed with all of that as American power in Eurasia simply wanes due to the horrible results of its last 20 and 30 years worth of policy over there. Well, for the first 150 years of our republic, we followed the advice of our founding fathers and avoided entangling alliances. We put America first. Sometimes that was disappointing to people.

We didn't join World War II until we were actually attacked, despite the eloquent pleas of Winston Churchill for us to come to Britain's aid against the Nazis. Since World War II, in World War II, we acquired a position of supremacy in much of the world. That was the outcome of the war. And the war ended up dividing the world into two great camps. One organized around the Soviet Union, one organized around us. That was the Cold War. That ended three decades ago. And yet the institutions that we built to manage the Cold War militarily and diplomatically, NATO, for example, not only didn't go away, we expanded them.

So instead of returning to the American tradition of selective engagement with the world in our own interest, we took on a task of defending. spending everywhere in the world except within our sphere of influence, which went right up to the borders of Russia and China and Iran and North Korea. And we are responsible in our own minds for the defense of everything beyond those realms. That is not only absurd, but it is extraordinarily dangerous. And it's ultimately beyond our capacity. And the contest with China is demonstrating this in a very ironic way. It is said that the reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union was that it could not match

us in terms of military expenditures and modernization. It didn't have a successful economic system to do that. In this contest, we are the ones who don't have the economic capacity. and the Chinese have ample surge ability in the military sphere. They are spending well under 2% of GDP on the military. If they were in NATO, we'd be castigating them for underspending. We're spending 3.7%, which is the defense budget, plus another 2% that we hide in other budgets that is military-related.

And it comes out to well over a trillion dollars. annually, and that happens to be the amount of our normal U.S. budgetary deficit. So basically, we're running on credit rollovers, and we have economic problems at the moment as a result of the mismanagement of the economy. And we have debt that is now 100% of our GDP, and due to go to 113% at the end of the decade. This is basically not sustainable. So we need to be more selective in our definition of our overseas interests. We should not withdraw from the world.

We should not return to isolationism. We can't afford it. But we should be very selective and careful about where we propose to squander our wealth and blood. And I think getting involved again, as we are in the Chinese Civil War is not a good approach to take in this context I think it was one of the last things that he ever wrote

before he died Sabina Brazinski essentially threw in the towel on the whole project and said we should be cozing up to Russia and China now so we can delegate more of the world policing to them because we're so far overextended and have to reach ranch Russia and China are only hope now.

I'm paraphrased in a bit, but that was in there. Well, we have instead followed a policy of forcing them together, and they are now together against us. That's a reality. And that's going to continue as long as we confront both of them and don't make peace with one or the other. You mentioned the so-called rules-based international order. You know, the original order that the United States crafted after World War II

was a work of genius. It involved international law, the Geneva Conventions, that outlawed various obscene practices in war, the United Nations Charter, which codified national sovereignty, and which provided a veto for the United States as well as the other victors in World War II that was very effective. And we, and we developed a system at Bretton Woods that made the dollar supreme internationally. We developed alliances that basically kept the peace against the Soviet threat, which was real. And those are great achievements. But those were the international legal order crafted, yes, by the United States, but subscribed to and

and approved and amended and enforced not just by the United States, but by the entire global community. The rules-based order that we're now talking about is one in which the United States makes the rules, sometimes joined by other former imperialist powers, look at the G7, makes the rules, we make the rules, we decide when and how to enforce them and when and how to exempt ourselves from them. and the rest of the world is supposed to take it. This is not appealing. And the odd thing is that Russia and China, both of which are weaker than the United States in many respects, Russia much more so than China, have both become champions of the United Nations and international law

as the basis of world order and opposed to a country. are unilateralism. And it's hard to argue that they don't have a point. Certainly, if you try to argue that with, let's say India, which is itself a proud, important, rising great nation, you'll find they agree with the Chinese and the Russians and not with us. Same is true of Brazil. same is true of Nigeria same is true of Turkey these are all major powers

in their own right in their regions or globally and we need to sit down with them and recraft an order that is acceptable not just to us but to everyone else and therefore enforceable and sustainable and we're not doing it

well you know they say it's the Thudicity's trap that when your empire falls It has to go to war with everybody else or any other power that's rising and challenging their waning power, and there's nothing you can do about it, I guess? That's Graham Allison's thesis, and I think it's a bit mechanistic, oddly enough, in that case, it was the democracy, Athens, that started the war. So this business of democracy is not going to war, and authoritarian is doing so, doesn't have a lot of historical basis. I think, yes, obviously there are shifts in global power and prestige going on. That's true. Beginning about 1870, the United States became the largest economy in the world.

In the 20th century, we emerged as the dominant power. By the 21st century, this one, however, other countries were resurging or reviving Russia in some ways, certainly China, India, and other countries we don't even think of, like Nigeria, which is a major power now in West Africa, Turkey. So, yes, the rise of the rest requires us to make adjustments. And here, I can do no better than to quote the classic British conservative Edmund Burke, who said that the essence of diplomacy is to yield what you cannot withhold, to adjust, change circumstances. And I'd add my own corollary to that, which is try to make the other side

pay as you do it. All right. Well, thanks so much for your time. I was about to start asking you a bunch of questions about Russia and Ukraine, but I think I should let you go about your day. Okay, well, thanks, Scott. Bye-bye. All right you guys. That is Chos Freeman. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.