Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/11/24 Joseph Solis-Mullen on Washington’s Dangerous and Unnecessary Hostility Towards China

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Scott is joined by Joseph Solis-Mullen to talk about China. They start with two articles Solis-Mullen published recently that examine the state of the economic war Washington is trying and failing to wage on Beijing along with the march towards a very real conventional war. They also take a step back and look at the precarious global situation we’re in, drawing connections to the outbreak of World War I and insights from libertarian theory. Discussed on the show: “Washington Takes Another ‘L’ in China Policy” (Libertarian Institute) “Washington is Sprinting (Not Sleepwalking) Into War With China” (Libertarian Institute) “The Outbreak of World War I: A Libertarian Realist Rebuttal” (Mises.org) Wilson's War by Jim Powell Joseph Solis-Mullen is a political scientist and author of The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Danger. Follow all his work at his website.  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

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 dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show hey man on the line i've got joseph solace mullen and he wrote a great book that we published at the institute called the fake china threat and it's very real danger and he's some kind of fellow or another i can't keep him straight anymore but um he writes all this great stuff at the uh libertarian institute including this one is called washington takes another l in china policy welcome back to the show joe how are you

doing hi scott i'm doing well how are you i'm doing great man appreciate you joining us here hey um and also i appreciate you keeping up with the china stuff for me because not only am i behind on the middle east i'm like not even trying on the east at all so um it's very important you're doing this work and giving me a chance to publish it so I can take a tenth of a percent of the credit for your work here. So please do tell us about this article. It's about, I don't even know how to say it. The Chinese telephone company there? Huawei. Okay, well, you say it more. Huawei. So America's been waging an economic war against them. Got to keep them from having the best microchips, which I thought that was mostly about cruise missiles and stuff. Anyway, I really don't know nothing.

So you tell me all about the chip war and how well it's going, please. Well, this all kind of ties into the broader economic war against China, as you pointed out. But what the original policy was aimed at preventing Huawei, getting 5G network contracts, that essentially this is going to be the backbone of the future communications architecture and Huawei, which was offering very, very competitive. competitive, advanced equipment in competition was scoring all these contracts all over the world. And so Washington, in order to prevent this Chinese firm from getting to lay this architecture for the future of communications around the globe, tried to kneecap it. This started under the Trump administration. And initially, the Hawks were very, very bullish.

They always are, though, aren't they? They're always very bullish when it first. I thought, this is going to be great. It's going to be easy. Great. We're sure to win. And, you know, I quote Chris Miller, whose book Chip War is a favorite of the Hawks, writing in the New York Times how, oh, Washington's going to decapitate Huawei and isn't it going to be grand? And like I said, initially, they did struggle because they got a large amount of their supply chain shut down pretty much overnight. And it took a while for them to retool, almost two full years. But late in third quarter last year, They started posting huge gains in revenue. And then earlier this year, they started releasing all this new tech, including an in-house operating system to run their software.

And it's just the latest example of, you know, forcing China to be more dependent on itself, just blowing up in Washington's face. Like, we should be wanting to be more interdependent, especially because China is making such tremendous leaps in things like battery technology. for example. China has a virtual monopoly on rare earth metals. These are all things that, you know, could very much benefit consumers in China and in the United States working more closely together. But instead, what's happening is Washington is attempting these foolish policies that aren't working and that are raising costs across the board and increasing the likelihood of, of conflict long term. You know, I was just reading an article in the Financial Times the other day. The CEO of Raytheon, he was saying, saying, look, we can't decouple from China. We have thousands of suppliers tied into China. We can't do it.

We're going to work to do it. It's going to take years, though. And so, you know, in the meantime, we can de-risk. Well, what de-risk means is it means duplicating your supply chains. That just means raising the cost, which in the case of Raytheon is cost directly footed by the taxpayers. So it's just, it's all totally self-defeating and pointless. But that was the latest on the, on the, on the Huawei,

front um the other one that i had written and that connor had reached out to me about was the one from uh last week about washington seemingly trying to provoke uh china into a war while gaslighting us all like it's some sort of accident like we're like sleep walking into it or something so uh over the last week i've been kind of mulling it over because i know your your new book is going to be called provoked um i'm thinking about just already starting because you didn't start working on that book correct me from wrong you didn't start working on that book until like after the invasion it started. right like on a on a russia book uh yeah um it had been a speech that i'd given and then i made

it twice as long i gave the speech originally 2020 and then i made it about twice as long for 2022 and then i basically started embellishing it out from there yeah i think i'm just going to start writing provoked china edition like right now i think i'm just going to start it right now do i'll just be ready yeah um because it just seems like that's where we're going all the same forces are in play yeah well and just on that last point and we'll figure out a title but on the thing about oh sleepwalking into war and blundering into war they always do that there's this communist writer that i like uh named adam johnson and he's a good dude you know and um i'm not saying i appreciate his economics all that much but he talks about how they just

always get away with that oh we're blundering into war we're sleepwalking into war like what are you talking about all of you people get up in the morning wide awake take your Adderall go to work and make these decisions right what are you talking about sleepwalking you're doing it you know that's what it is

damn it and somehow they always do that and like yeah these wars just sneak up upon our world empire Joe like the Indians ambushing the white guys in every Western that was ever made

Yeah, it's, and it's one of the reasons I think, too, that if you look at the books that come out, they talk about these forces, these material and historical forces and they're just, what can you do, Scott? They're these immaterial forces. You can't grab onto them. You can't do anything. You're just, you're a victim of these currents, these flows, these forces. That's one of the reasons I think that libertarian critical theory is so important is because someone like Murray Rothbard said, hold on, we can actually point to the person, making these decisions. We can point to the incentive structures that they created within these institutions that allowed these things to happen. I actually wrote an article back at the Mises Institute a critical perspective on the outbreak of World War I, which World War I, there's a great book, a popular history called by Chris Clark called Sleepwalkers, and it's about the outbreak of World War I. And I said, look, if you look at the actual decision architecture facing each of those leaders. The only one of them that didn't go to war for domestic political reasons was Great Britain. Like all of the other ones were primarily focused on their domestic political circumstances.

So isn't that interesting? And that goes really, that was Justin Romando's theory of libertarian realism was that all foreign politics are ultimately determined by domestic concerns. And especially like on that most simple George Lucas level. start a war to extend your term in power you know yeah and that was that was exactly the line that got me thing i was like i wonder if this applies even to world war one the war that everyone just agrees is like oh my goodness no the causes go all the way back into the 1860s 1870s and it was these it was tens of different forces all combining together uh no in the final analysis it was deliberate decisions made to avoid possible negative domestic political consequences

both in Russia, in Austria, and in Germany. And in France. Well, and just look at our era. I mean, our whole millennium here, our new century, was kicked off by George Bush, making this huge unforced error on the part of the Ayatollah and Bin Laden on the other side. I guess Israel got to save a nickel on a barrel of oil, but otherwise, only America's adversaries benefited from that. And it didn't have to happen at all.

Yeah. And I was actually thinking about that. All right. On your market set, go on a completely unprovoked aggressive invasion. So how do you like that? I was thinking about that this morning because I was just reviewing a congressional studies report on U.S. treaty commitments to Japan and the Philippines. So there's an institute whose job it is to provide Congress with research. It's called the Congressional Research Institute.

And so I was just reviewing these things and looking at some of the discussions that were going on in the 1990s. And it really does look like things were going to heat up in Southeast Asia between the U.S. and China in the 1990s before George W. Bush just grabbed the wheel and like yanked it off into the Middle East. And things were just kind of allowed to just go on autopilot over there. But I do wonder whether or not we would have been having these sorts of very confrontational moments with China. much earlier, basically, and what that would have looked like. Because obviously now, there's a very high degree of parity in that immediate theater, in all the types of weapons platforms that matter to a conflict over like Taiwan or over something in the east or South China seas, which is really concerning, obviously, especially with the Philippines

in Japan, because those are actual treaty allies. Right. Yeah, you know, and it was. was in the first year or first eight months or nine months of W. Bush there was all about the Pacific because that's where you get to sell your missile defense systems and Navy ships and long range bombers and all of this. And that was in their interest right away. That was the initial project, even of the neocons, was, you know, we'll get to Baghdad, but first we got to make sure to get these missile defense systems going. And it was they say, let's see, I think it was Norman. Solomon's movie War Made Easy, I think that does the best job of showing how Colin Powell's last stand was in the spring of 01 when they were brand new in there and the spy plane crashed with the Chinese plane. It was forced down and they had to negotiate to get it back and Colin Powell said instead of grandstanding and playing tough guy

we're going to play it real cool and we're going to negotiate this the right way and he had to kind of face down Cheney and the right inside the cabinet to do that. But then that was like every last bit of his political capital. He never won another fight against the Hawks or at least, yeah, I guess not. Well, they wound up getting crushed for that. They wound up getting crushed for that in the media. Oh, yeah. I'm sure they did.

They're weak. Oh, bowing and scraping to the Chinese, you know, as our spy plane, our spy plane, their spy plane, Washington's spy plane is just chilling out over like Hainon Island, right? Which like, point to that on a map for me, any American police. Oh, and they'll say cynically, Joe, that. Yeah, because, you know, this guy, Powell, he had economic interests in mind. But, like, yeah, I know. That's the whole point.

It's because what, being a sellout is bad, but being dead in a war is worse. That's why. Like, we don't want to compromise our rights with them. We don't have to compromise our political system with theirs. But to make our trade interdependent with theirs, whatever sacrifices supposedly come from that. I mean, we do lose jobs. but then again we get lower prices to beat inflation and whatever i don't know how it balances out but i know there's a lot of government intervention on both sides of or all sides of those equations

but overall you know this is the thing the theory of world war one that i thought was so compelling and i don't know nothing about it but i read one great book about no i read a few but um wilson's war in the which you know blames all of history ever since then on woodrow wilson uh quite aptly I think he says in there I it might be in the introduction it's a James Powell and he says the countries that were the central powers and the allied powers in world war one had previously been the massive trade blocks they were sort of free trade zones they had divided but they weren't free trade zones with each other they were only you know they were these multinational sort of you know pseudo articles of confederation type situation

And those were the dividing lines that went to war. His point being, geez, if they had only had free trade between those two blocks, then they wouldn't have fought. But instead, it was like, we want the metal in that mine, which is on the wrong side of the line. So we're going to kill you and take that mine from you is what we're going to do, where they could have just been trading over it, you know? Yeah. And as you said, it's a complicated situation in terms of who lose. loses out, who gains what. Yes, it is political because these free trade agreements are not actually free, quote unquote, libertarian free trade agreements. Because of course, you could write

an actual libertarian free trade agreement on a bar napkin, right? It would say no subsidies, no tariffs, no quotas, just trade. That's not what happened. That's why these agreements are thousands of pages long. It's because it's carving out all sorts of exceptions and exemptions and creating all these regulations to favor one corporation instead of another. Even efforts like the EU, the EU has an agricultural policy because France wouldn't go along with it unless they could protect their own farmers, right? Because they're an important political bloc. So yeah, but generally speaking, even with all that said, yes, it's true. The United States would have lost jobs eventually to some country just because of the comparative advantage of lower labor costs in other countries. Like,

that just would have happened anyway. Maybe it happened faster because of certain government policies. I've argued that in an article I wrote at the Institute actually last year, trading the rust belt for military bases where I said, look, what Washington did is they set up asymmetrical free trade. They opened up the American market to Japan in exchange for more favorable basing agreements in exchange for payments to offset that stuff. And in exchange opened up the market in the United States for Japan to you know dump product into um so there was stuff like that going on but certainly we would be better off uh if there was more trade like I said the rate Raytheon Raytheon you know a step one of the critical aspects of one of the critical players in the

military industrial complex they can't function without China right like they need Chinese suppliers they can't do it out it will take years they said years and think about that everything to build your you build your national defense structure to be reliant on your supposed adversary in the world, the competing power in the world? I mean, I'm all for free trade, but that doesn't seem to make much sense. In fact, I guess I'm for that more than anything. Like, well, I guess we can't fight them if our planes don't fly without them.

Yeah, and that's the thing is, I mean, just realistically, and you know, I've written a lot about this, like China is going to be a powerful regional player over there. They are not going to take over the world. Even the stuff we're talking about with the South China Sea, like, there are so many different claimants there. Like, this is why Washington needs to be much more, needs to take a step back and be more perspicacious and be more sagacious about what it's doing here because this thing could blow up in a heartbeat.

I mean, there are so many different competing claims there. And, you know, all it takes is one little incident. You know, that's why everyone points to, oh, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, that did it. No, there was just a ton of gasoline and gunpowder that they had been filling this room up with. And then someone was lighting a cigarette and accident only dropped a match. That was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdin. And that's what we have going on here now. We have the United States, you know, putting soldiers on, on Chinman Island, you know, within sight of the mainland. We have the United States saying that we will absolutely defend any claim that the Philippines has to any

speck of rock in the South China Sea, you know, it's, it's just crazy stuff here, engaging in more and more arms sales to Taiwan, you know, and she was it two months ago when he was meeting with Ursula Vanda Leyen, he said, it feels like America is trying to provoke us into doing something, you know, and, you know, the Chinese general who was speaking at ASEAN, he was saying, you know, these are red lines for us. And it's just like, are you guys not listening to this? Like, didn't we just have this happen in Eastern Europe? You know, but then what's going to happen is going to happen and they're going to come out and gaslight the American people like, oh, my God, this unprovoked.

How did it happen? You know, and if you come forward and you know this better than anyone, if you come out and try and explain this stuff, it's not because you're apologizing and defending an invasion of one country by another. It's simply explaining why this happened and how it was very preventable. Yeah. Um, yeah, and if a conflict happens in this area, I mean, it's not going to be like, uh, what happened in Ukraine, with Ukraine and Russia. Like, those are fairly, in the case of Ukraine, a totally negligible economic player in, in, in the world. You know, Russia is important for, for raw materials and stuff. But really, I mean, China, Japan, the United States, I mean, we're talking about the largest economies in the world. They're, they're so interdependent on each other. If there were a conflict, you're like, oh, man, there would be so much. suffering around the world and we even we in the you know advanced industrial economics we would be so much worse off so much poorer um people say to me scott how do you get so much work done all the time coffee it helps keep me from falling asleep and it tastes really good because i get it from

moondose artisan coffee at moondose artisan coffee.com moon doze is kind of the anti-starbucks in that their coffee tastes real good they have lots of great choices representing all kinds of regions blends and flavors. I'm drinking the Ethiopian presently. Hey, wait. Also, do you like saving money on good tasting coffee? Right now, you can get 10% off and help support this show if you just go to Moondoseartisancoffee.com slash Horton. Find the link and the QR code in the margin at Scotthorton.org. That's Moondoseartisan coffee.com slash Horton. 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 assault reservoir and bar safety.

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Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Sur. 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. Yeah, when it comes to Russia, I mean, their natural resources are important for Europe, which we're in competition with Russia. for those markets, right? So you see, as Rand Paul pointed out in a great article, that it ain't no coincidence that my buddy Ted Cruz from the natural gas state of Texas is such a big hawk on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline here. You know, this is mercantilism, he said. Senator Paul said

about his buddy. Yeah, and he was right. Yeah, so. But in other words, though, losing Russia to the world economy isolating them containing them in this way at least in the mines in dc is beneficial you know and at least i guess we could concede that it doesn't cost us much you know what i mean other than the prospects for peace um yeah but in the sense that you're talking about economically it doesn't hurt us really but as you're saying here a major disruption never mind nuclear war and all that but just any real major disruption and shutdown of trade between America and China could be really bad for a lot of people. Although, I don't know. I guess the Chinese is just trade with everybody else, the same as the Russians are doing now.

You want to kick us out of the world? Let's make our own world. They happen to represent two-thirds or three-quarters of the population of the planet when it comes to, you know, the bricks and the global south and all of that. The West calls themselves the world international community, but they're really not. No, you're right about that. So first of all, what you were saying in terms of like, yes, this is one of the problems with these permanent military alliance structures. Like you can temporarily have the interests of different states, you know, so called align temporarily. But eventually they very quickly diverge.

And in the case of Europe and Washington, it was very obvious that Washington, you know, know, provoking this war and getting Russia kicked out of Europe, like, that only made Europe more dependent on Washington. It only made things more difficult for the Europeans. And the same thing I think would be true in East Asia. And that might be the calculation with trying to provoke a war right now, which is, look, this would just make Japan and South Korea and the Philippines and Indonesia more dependent on us. And in terms of China being able to trade with the rest of the world, Yes, it's true, except that their major consumer markets are all in the United States and Europe. That's where the major developed consumer markets are.

So, yes, China could start trying to, and China does obviously trade with the rest of world, but in terms of dollar value, like in terms of just how much is going where, there's just no substitute for the consumer markets in the United States and in Europe. And that's why it gets so difficult to imagine a common. conflict between them because we couldn't stop importing things from China, and they couldn't really afford to stop exporting things to us. And so it's just, it becomes a very weird mental exercise. Well, help me understand this. This is something that's hard for me to imagine.

The degree of trade before compared to now. I know that Biden hadn't done, hadn't undone a single thing that Trump did. with the tariffs and Trump is now promising even more boasting about that and promising even more and sometimes his people talk about completely shutting off trade between the two countries of this kind of thing but like on a scale of one to ten if ten is where we were on full scale trade where are we now we're at like a nine or a ten i mean it's just absolutely crazy how really hasn't changed much at all not it no i mean it's absolutely incredible i mean we'll see what this latest round of incredible

protection that they're throwing up will do in terms of EV components. But no, it has done absolutely nothing. And there's every once in a while a story will appear in the economist or in the Wall Street Journal about how these sanctions are, about how this economic

warfare is not working, about how number one it's just raising prices. And number two, the goods are still coming into the country anyway. One of the ways this is happening is that only shipping containers they don't really get searched, and only ones over a certain amount of weight will get unpacked and looked at.

And so basically they're just breaking up these deliveries into smaller parcels and then just shipping them over anyway. They've been bringing things in through Mexico. There was actually just something yesterday an attempt to slow down the smuggling of this stuff in through Mexico. And then going the opposite way. There was just a story last week in the Wall Street Journal

about this like cottage industry of smuggling chips into China like nevidia processors so again like if you all that happens when you put up sanctions like this is you raise the price which attracts people into that black market and then the the trade just keeps happening anyway yeah um and in the united states it's just yeah go ahead well joe so like there's this guy john rob that i like and and he writes interesting stuff and he seems to have a point. I think you write about this in the book about how Milton Friedman and these others who had gone and taught Deng Xiaoping about prices and markets and stuff like that, that they had succeeded to a great degree, but that essentially they had placed a bet. This was the Clinton administration's bet in the

90s. If we bring them into the World Trade Organization, we ship all our manufacturing over there, we make good capitalists out of them and property rights holders out of them, then eventually they'll adopt the rest of Liberty too. And, you know, abandon communism and become a limited republic of some kind or something. But that didn't work out. Instead, they switched from communism to fascism, basically, still a tyranny, only with, you know, highly regulated capitalism under their control. And so, but it's a tyranny, and it's a horrible one. And so the gamble didn't work off.

And I'm not sure, like, where that leaves us. That means we should have an economic war instead. But I guess it does mean that, I mean, I guess his point is just that Washington is in effect really subsidized through the WTO. If you look at it that way by ending all protection that America really built up this massive tyranny, like this gave them this massive economy to tax and build a giant government out of like a more powerful government than ever before. And I know it's not exactly one-to-one equivalent, but they've got this. biggest navy in the world now so far they're not using it for any like uh you know far flung missions but you see what i mean uh that's the argument that this whole thing was a mistake we should have said yeah oh they're communists good the more they're communists the less they're ever going to be

a threat because they're going to be too busy trying to figure out to feed each other um and they won't be able to build up you know so well it was it was again it's part of the temptation especially among the academy, which is weird because, you know, I'm a historian. And so a lot of times I'm going back and reading books from like the 50s, 60s, 70s, et cetera, older too, but, you know, just to give you an example. And there was just this, this reading of history that just saw the trajectory of the West as universally applicable to all places. And development theory is what grew out of this. And this goes all the way back to, you know, Hegelian, Marxian type stuff that found its way into the social sciences.

But the idea was that once societies reach a certain threshold of wealth, that a middle class will be created, that this middle class will militate to be part of the decision-making apparatus, to be able to make laws to protect itself, and that this is where representative government comes from. And that if you just give them the money, if you just make them rich, then that's just what happens. It automatically happens. This is part of development theory. ignoring the very specific, highly particular circumstances that allowed this to slowly, slowly emerge in Western Europe over the course of a thousand years, right? 1,500 years, really. I mean, going back even further than that, if you really want to, like, tie in old Roman law and the traditions and how those fused with different Germanic tribal customs and whatnot, like, this was just

a highly particular historical development. And it's one that you're always having to push back against the temptation of centralizing state power to infringe upon, something that, you know, we've been losing out on in the United States, obviously. But this was something that they just, they kind of ignored and just said no. Like, if you just give them markets, if you give them prices, the economy will flourish, wealth will develop, a middle class will develop, the middle class will demand political rights, because that's how it happened here. And, you know, and that's just how, what will happen in China. And of course, that didn't happen. That didn't happen in China. And so now you are,

you're faced with this conundrum. Well, now we've made, you know, a pure competitor for ourselves. And now what do we do? What really worries me is that the current crop of quote unquote diplomats in the United States policymakers are, they came of age in the 1990s and in the 2000s and they just grew up on that heady intoxicating brew of unipolarity. And they just don't have the wisdom of someone like, say, you know, like a Richard Nixon or something. You know what I mean? Which like not to give Nixon too much credit, but like he was able to sit down and look at someone like Brezhnev and say, look, this is just another world leader, powerful country. We have to find a way to get along. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Our diplomats do not have the ability to treat another country as having legitimate interest. Like Russia has to be the devil. Right. You know, Xi Jinping has to be Satan. Right. I'm sorry. He can't just be the, the conservative leader of a proud, strong country that has some local red lines that they don't want tread upon. Yeah. No, Biden is the perfect avatar for the whole empire. It's just this completely demented, crooked, old, you know, stuck in some previous era thinking crazy thing. But, and I have to go like right now, but I want to ask you one more thing. So please answer as quick as you can. But tell me a bit about, you mentioned previously, this statement that America, by Chairman Xi, that America was trying to trick them into attacking Taiwan there. Yeah, he just, he said it to the, to the, The leader of the European, I think she's the president of the EU right now, Ursula von der Leyen, he just said, look, it feels like America is trying to provoke us into attacking Taiwan with all of their behavior.

Did he say, do you mention specific things that were like? It was in the context of how the United States is trying to turn Europe against China because they had signed this big, like, joint investment agreement. And the United States had put pressure on them to put a hold on it over basically Beijing's retaliation against. some diplomats from some of the smaller, you know, Latvia, Estonia-type countries who are supporting Taiwan in certain ways. And so that was part of the context there. But he was just complaining saying, like, look, we want to have a good relationship with you, but we feel like what's going to happen is we're getting provoked into attacking them.

And then, you know, the U.S. is going to put pressure on you to come after us with them, you know. And Emmanuel Macron, say whatever you want about him. But he literally last year was like, we shouldn't do that. That would be dumb. We need to say no, which is true. They do. Yeah, seriously. All right. Well, listen, we're out of time, but thank you so much for your time. Everybody, that's Joe Solis Mullin. He writes for us at the Institute. He wrote this great book, The Fake China Threat, and it's very real danger.

And you can find him at the Libertarian Institute, Libertarian Institute.org. Washington takes another L, and Washington is sprinting, not sleepwalking into war with China. Thank you. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM. in LA. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org. Hey, Richard. Great to speak to you. Yeah. That moment right there, that's what it feels like to step into a bureau booth. Our soundproof office pods bring deep focus to even the loudest office.

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