Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/24/26 Ted Galen Carpenter on the Remarkable Stupidity of the Iran War

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Scott interviews author and writer Ted Galen Carpenter about the Iran war, Israel’s tensions with Turkey, the Saudi Nuclear deal, North Korea and more. Discussed on the show: “Washington’s Two Rogue Allies in the Middle East Face Off” (Libertarian Institute) “North Korea’s Nuclear Status Requires Urgent Negotiation” (Libertarian Institute) Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute. Carpenter has written 10 books including America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan and most recently Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative Magazine and the National Interest. Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; Expat Money https://expatmoney.com/scott; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, guys, let me take a second to tell you about expat money at expatmoney.com slash Scott. It's a guy named Mikkel Thorup. He's a great guy. I've met him. And he's been an expat for many years and knows the rules and regulations all around the world about buying property and or other investments, how to protect your neck, even get citizenship and passports from other countries and everything you need to know

to be an expat, whether you're afraid of the coming collapse or just fighting. modern day price inflation, find out what you need to know about how to protect your neck at expatmoney.com slash Scott. Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest, reporting to the American people what's going on in this country? We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton show, libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president doesn't, that means that it is not only...

We're going to take out seven countries. They don't know what the fuck. Stay a doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, you guys, introducing Ted Galen Carpenter. He's the author of most of the books in the world, particularly on the issues of American foreign policy.

He told you so, Ted. Galen Carpenter is what we call them here. As you can see, NATO enlargement, illusions in reality, the fire next door, all about Mexico, NATO, the dangerous dinosaur, America's coming war with China, the unreliable watchdog about the media, betrayers, and on and on like that. I mean, there's probably 20 more or something. And, of course, he was a different libertarian organization, but now he writes for us at the Libertarian Institute and at anti-war.com. So welcome back to the show, Ted.

How are you doing? Thanks very much, Scott. It's great to be on your show. Well, it's great to have you on, and I have so much to ask you about. And we're going to start with something that you haven't written about because it's just a breaking story. But it leads to a broader question, obviously, here, and that is new in the Wall Street Journal.

Trump is losing patience over the Iran War with no clear end in sight. And sources say that he's, Cussing and screaming, mad, not just in front of the microphone, but in private, he says, they're liars, they're cheats, they're killers, they're bad guys. And Ted, tell me, stop me, if you've heard this one before. They only understand one thing, force. And so now he's preparing a major escalation. Well, we'll see what kind of escalation he has in mind for this week.

I think next week there should be another peace initiative. of it so on. It seems to be an alternate weeks at this point. It is bizarre. The United States has managed to stumble into yet another endless war over stakes that are simply not worth even the most minimal level of risk or expense. But here we are in a war with Iran. And supposedly, Trump had promised to end unnecessary wars that the United States was involved in, not start new ones. Well, we can see what his promise was worth.

We're now involved in a particularly nasty war against an opponent, I think, that has been underestimated a lot by so-called experts in this country. How much of this is really just public choice theory in regards to the man himself and his position in that chair. He's the one who made what he calls a foolish choice to start this war. But now he's still the same guy responsible for trying to figure out a way to end it

that makes him still look good. And he's the only one who gets to make those calls between now and two and a half years from now still. And so everybody, including him, knows that we lost, that he cannot impose his will here and that he has to climb down, but it seems like he just can't find a way to do so in a way that makes him look good at all

because he doesn't. I mean, on the most basic level, they're not giving up their support for their allies in the region and they're not giving up control of the Gulf to the pre-war status quo. They're going to keep their control of the Gulf and Trump has to just take it. And in the MOU, it seemed like he's willing to climb all the way down because what choice does he have?

But then he just can't implement the dang thing and close the deal because he has to eat too much bad word, you know? Yeah, it's reminiscent of Richard Nixon in 1968. And Nixon and most of the people around him knew perfectly well that the Vietnam War was a hopelessly. venture, it had been a disaster, but they lacked the courage to just end it and cut their losses. Instead, they persisted for another four years, sacrificing thousands and thousands of lives, spending tens of billions of dollars. And I know billions of dollars, that's kind of jump change now. who were talking trillions as the norm for Washington spending. But that was a lot of money back then.

And the cost financially and more importantly in terms of lives for the Iran war continuing could be very, very high indeed. And I hope that Trump, especially as a lame duck president, finally has the courage and integrity to just terminate this venture and really convey the lesson that we are not going to be able to police and stabilize the Middle East, that that is a mission impossible. That needs to be the real lesson of this war. But I don't see it happening.

I think we're just going to continue stumbling down the same. path that we have been on for decades in that part of the world. So one of the major results of the war was it seems like Trump called his own bluff or America's bluff about our conventional military power. And I guess as exquisite as our weapon systems are, as they say, they do not exist in quantities enough to fight real wars even against mid or lower ranked power. hours. And so it seems like obviously geography has a lot to do with it. Our bluff is completely called in the Gulf. They've hit every single one of our bases in the region and many of them

multiple times and including in Jordan and everything. But then what do you think that that means looking from the eyes of the Russians or the Chinese or any other power that has to worry about the United States or has to consider what they're going to do about a problem like the United States. Did Trump just call the whole empire's bluff? Where, I mean, everybody knows an H-bomb's an H-bomb, but short of that, for all of our, you know, 11 Star Destroyers, you know, in orbit at all times, you know, our aircraft carriers that were willing to, you know, threaten your country with, apparently they are obsolete, like the critics said. And you can take them out with some drones. so they got to stay too far away to fight

and all of these things. I just wonder like, you're a great experience in these larger geopolitical questions of balances of power around the world. You think that this blunder in the Gulf really marks kind of a sea change or a signpost in the path of the empire

and its decline? I hope that it does but we have a vested class of policymakers who have a tremendous amount personally at stake in persisting with the existing policy. And you have what has been called the military industrial complex but should be called

the military industrial congressional intelligence lobbyist complex. It's that complex that benefits to the tune of many, many tens of billions of dollars. The rest of the country doesn't. The rest of the country pays a terrible price

in both blood and treasure, but do you have some vested interests who do very well indeed and they will continue to lobby for the continuation of this policy that we've had for decades, regardless of how ruinous it is for the country and for the ordinary people of the country. So I don't see a radical change coming,

but the U.S. cannot enforce its empire the way that it could back in the 1950s, 1960s, even with its second wind, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the so-called unipolar world in the 1990s of the first decade of the 21st century, that world is gone. And I think that however much U.S. policymakers starting with Trump don't want to face that reality, that reality is going to continue to intrude not just in the Middle East, but we're going to find it out in other parts of the world. I worry so much that we are trying to persist in humiliating the Russian Federation

by supporting Ukraine, that that is NATO's new crusade. and even if the United States is not leading that, that some of the European countries are pushing harder than Washington is for the support for Ukraine, that war going to continue going on indefinitely, despite a lack of meaningful success. That one really worries me because the opponent in that case, of course, does have a rather large nuclear arsenal

and an error in judgment on either side could produce an absolute catastrophe. Yeah. All right, you guys, let's talk about crowdhealth at join crowdhealth.com slash Horton and or use the promo code Horton there to join crowdhealth, join crowdhealth.com. Essentially, the gangsters have priced us all out of health insurance.

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You're going to turn into some. Well, look, it's true. Now I'm a coffee. Scott Horton's show flavored coffee. It tastes just like my show. It's great. Sort of. Well, no, it's Ethiopian and Sumatran coffees blended for your mornings. It's the first thing I do when I get up is for myself a pot of coffee and then I drink it. See, that's why this mug is almost empty. And the deal is it's so good.

You never go back to your grocery store coffee again. and it's Moondos artisan coffees get it because they hate Starbucks because Starbucks supports the war party, but Moondos artisan coffees, like they support peace. And all you got to do to get some is go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee. That's Scotthorton.org slash coffee. Well, and you of all people get to make these remarks after you've been warning literally since the fall of the Soviet Union that we better not take advantage of this. It's going to blow up in our face if we do.

and you got the track record to prove it for sure going all the way back to at least the Clinton years. I'm sure if I had to take a while guess, the Bush senior years as well. But Scott, I would recommend if anyone really wants to understand the deterioration of U.S. relations with post-S. Russia. Your book provoked, and especially the discussion of the Ukraine issue. It's a must reading. Anyone who presumes to talk about the deterioration of U.S. Russian relations and the centrality of the Ukraine issue and hasn't read and read carefully provoked. doesn't really understand that set of issues. It's not one.

Thank you very much. We're going to write that one down for the second edition. Thank you, Ted. I appreciate that. Wait, but let's stick with the Middle East here for a minute. I got a big Ukraine show coming up, a couple, actually, today. But I wanted to ask you about this piece that you wrote, about the absurdity of America's alliance with Turkey and Israel.

I'm going to surprise you on this one, Ted. I'm for backing both sides in this war. No, I'm just kidding. But, no, I'm against backing either side in any war. But these are old allies from the days of the periphery doctrine, but I guess those days have changed. And I think the real crux of the turning of the issue, because they've had their tensions, right,

even going back to Obama years or whatever. But it seems to me like the real crux of the thing is that America and Turkey and Israel all were finally successful in helping al-Qaeda take over Syria. And once they did so, then Israel and Turkey both moved in to carve out their new spheres of power inside the former state of Syria or I don't know, whatever they're calling it now. So is that what this is really about? Is who gets to keep more of this country that they both helped America destroy? That was the main trigger, and there were many of us who warned that the overthrow of the Assad secular dictatorship would lead to all sorts of unpleasant results, including the al-Qaeda

alumni association that basically runs what's left of the Syrian government, but that this would trigger long-standing ambitions by both Turkey and Israel. Each of them wants to be the regional hegemonic power. And obviously those agendas are conflict. They're not in a position to have both of them as the regional hegemon. Only one is going to succeed with that. And it is a major power struggle now. And the United States, of course, is in the difficult and embarrassing position of trying to satisfy both client states. And I think ultimately, for a variety of reasons, the U.S. will tilt toward Israel. And Turkey will become the necessary sacrifice to to constrain its ambitions

and allow Israel to really be the dominant player in that part of the world. But Turkey will not go quietly on this. Ancara has major ambitions of its own. And so that is going to produce even more tensions than it has already. And the tensions have been quite severe to this point, not getting a lot of attention by the media in the United States because other issues have dominated.

But it is something that is lurking in the background constantly, and I think will become much more troublesome over the next year or two. I mean, both sides, but especially the Israelis, have been making a lot of open threats. You know, they first started talking about this. Tucker Carlson made these remarks the other day. that when they first started talking about this, people started noticing and saying,

oh my God, look, the Israelis are threatening our NATO allies, the Turks next. What in the hell? And then Zionist Hawks said, oh, shut up, you're a conspiracy theorist.

You don't know what you're talking about. But then Naftali Bennett came out and says, yeah, we're going to Turkey next, you know, at the top of his lungs. They're not playing this down at all. This isn't in the background.

This is apparently, you know, forefront on the agenda, the Israeli right. Yeah, absolutely. The is sending all sorts of signals to Ankara to back off at this point. And the leaders in Ankara are not showing any real inclination to do that. And so the U.S. could face that wonderful situation of having two of its allies, really client states, going at a tooth and claw.

That, if you think Washington's had enough troubles now, you imagine it if that kind of fight breaks out. This could... Isn't it about rules-based world order of global cooperation and governance and everything? Is that they really suck at it, right? Like, they're...

They just did nothing but turn the world upside down this whole time. I mean, if the American Empire was... or whatever, the liberal hegemony of the Western international community, if it was anything like it was cracked up to be, you and I would be having a completely different conversation here, which would be centered on the obvious role of the United States in mediating this conflict and making sure that our two friends don't fight

because we can't have that. But instead, we're not even talking about that at all, Ted, because apparently America is not going to play that role. Marco Rubio is not going to sit here and do shuttle, diplomacy and settle the issue, if anything, they're going to foment a problem. Scott, one of the great ironies of policy over the last couple of decades is that the People's Republic of China has positioned itself and now has the global image of being the primary mediator, the primary peacemaker, that the United States is maybe the leading,

disruptive force in world affairs. And if you could imagine U.S. leaders 30 or 40 years ago having to face that reality, that that would be Washington's widespread global reputation of being a disruptive element and communist China would be hailed as the principle, stabilizing, mediating force. in world affairs. People would have thought anyone saying that was totally insane, but that's pretty much the reality at this point. Hey, everybody looks, Scott Horton Academy and Scott Horton show Shwag.

It's available now. I got to do is go to YouTube of one of these interviews and then just look beneath it there and there's a link to the Shwag store. All right, you guys, me here for tax attorney Matt Sersley at agoristaxadvice.com. and he is just a real hawk. He serves small businesses and high-income professionals who are on the run from the revenues. And his job is making sure that you don't have to pay those sons of bitches one penny

more than you absolutely have to. That's Matt Sersley, your new tax lawyer. He's at agoristtaxadvice.com. All right, guys, let me take a second to tell you about expat money at expatmoney.com slash Scott. It's a guy named Mikkel Thorup. He's a great guy. I've met him. And he's been an expat for many years and knows the rules and regulations all around the world about buying property and or other investments, how to protect your neck, even get citizenships and passports from other countries and everything you need to know to be an expat. Whether you're afraid of the coming collapse or just fighting modern day price inflation, find out what you need to know about how to protect your neck at expatmoney.com slash Scott.

All right, and we're going to talk about China and just one more story. But first, what are you going to do? I know they've been talking about this for a long time, David. Looks like they're going to go forward with helping the Saudi monarchy develop a civilian nuclear program. And there's a couple of stipulations here so far as I read. A couple of them are missing. One of them would be the extra deal where they promise. that they won't enrich uranium.

They'll go ahead and buy uranium from previous, you know, preexisting nuclear states, namely us and not develop the fuel cycle on their own. And then secondly, they would sign the additional protocol to their safeguards agreement with the IAEA. That would allow for intrusive inspections

under any suspicions. And apparently over the last few nuclear deals, civilian nuclear deals, America has made around the world, these were important stipulations. But they are absent from this one. But they've been replaced by another stipulation, which is that Saudi has to normalize relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. Your comments, sir?

Yeah, I think that is now the main priority for Washington to get the Saudis to do that. but already this proposed deal is stirring up a lot of trouble. South Korea, for example, just issued a statement extremely critical of this deal and essentially saying, okay, if this is all right for the Saudis, why is it not all right for us to develop our, nuclear program, at least to the point where we're enriching uranium, at least to that point. And of course, the United States is saying, no, no, that would risk creating greater nuclear proliferation. And at the level of weaponry, you can understand why the South Koreans

might see matters differently at this point. I would think Japan probably would see matters differently. And we have to examine just how much of an impact is this going to have overall on nuclear proliferation? I don't think we know at this point. And I don't know if we're certain whether that would be a destabilizing factor in all cases, or that people like Professor Kenneth Walsh

and Professor Christopher Lane are right that a well-armed world in terms of nuclear deterrence would actually be more stable. But we're entering a different world. It's clear the membership in the Global Nuclear Weapons Club, is going to expand. Saudi Arabia is going to become a de facto member, and we're going to see others, I think,

joining that club shortly within the next few years. So we better get used to it. This is going to be the new reality. Well, look, I mean, there's no question that nuclear deterrence works. The problem is it's not fail-safe. The problem is it can all go terribly. wrong. So that's why not to rephrase. It's not like a one-to-one equivalent to

every man shall own a rifle. And we're talking about machines that can kill entire cities worth of people at a time. So they can, as Murray Rothbard wrote back years ago, they're inherently immoral because they can only be used indiscriminately. So, you know, even as you just in a military base with it, all the nearby communities are going to be destroyed to, you know, anything like that. So, yeah nukes

and now so speaking of Korea because you had no that was Taiwan when it no you did have a Korea story here I knew it here we go this is all at the Libertarian Institute by the way the logo is dark

and I have it in dark mode so you can't tell but this is the Libertarian Institute website everyone North Korea's nuclear status requires urgent negotiation you got right you got that right Isn't that interesting, I guess I should ask specifically to start,

and then you take this whichever direction you want? Has America's strategy or policy or state of negotiations or anything changed with the advent of the second Trump administration compared to the Biden years when obviously the sort of warming of relations of the first Trump term were put on hiatus for four years of the Democrats there? At this point, it looks very much like the new Trump administration in terms of North Korea policy is simply a continuation of the Biden administration. And that U.S. policy is nothing more than North Korea is a bad country and we're never going to talk to it. it's about as imaginative as that, about as creative as that.

But the reality is North Korea, again, is a nuclear weapons power at this point. We have to deal with that reality. And it's a bad idea not to have even diplomatic relations, much less any meaningful political and economic relations, with a country that has that capability. But that is U.S. policy at this point. We don't like you, and we're not going to talk to you. I find that policy dangerous and bordering on being insane, but I don't detect much of anything in the way of substantive change

to that policy going forward. Yeah, I'm sorry we're out of time because I have so many more questions along this line And then plus I wanted to talk to Taiwan, but we'll just have to catch up next time. Thank you so much. It's great to talk to you, and Ted. Thank you very much, Scott. Thank you.

All right. That's the great Ted Galen Carpenter. Find him at anti-war.com and Libertarian Institute.org. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Robertson, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos, Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, fools errand, enough already, and my latest Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine.

Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org and I'm serializing the audio book of Provote at Scott Horton Show.com and Patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. Bumpers by Josh Langford for Music, intro and outro videos by dissident media, audio mastering by Potsworth Media. See all next time.