Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/19/22 Peter Van Buren’s “Neopracticalist” Take on Taiwan

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Scott interviews writer and State Department veteran Peter Van Buren about Taiwan. Van Buren is sticking with his assessment that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan will not happen because there’s too much money to be lost if trade between China, Taiwan and the U.S. takes a hit. However, he does fault the American government for doing its best to escalate the conflict. In this interview, he talks with Scott about Pelosi’s visit, the early history of the Taiwan conflict, China’s current navy, the narrative that China is already waging economic war on the U.S. and more.  Discussed on the show: “How Does Asia Feel About Nancy Pelosi?” (The American Conservative) “Nancy's Pointless Trip to Taiwan” (The American Conservative) “Strategic Ambiguity Works” (The American Conservative) China’s White Paper on Taiwan American Factory (IMDb) “Why Bombs Made in America Have Been Killing Civilians in Yemen” (New York Times) “China: From Death Camp to Civilization” (LewRockwell.com) Peter Van Buren worked for 24 years at the Department of State including a year in Iraq. He is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and the novel Hooper’s War. He is now a contributing editor at The American Conservative magazine. 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; and Thc Hemp Spot. 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 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 aren't you guys on the line i got peter van buren again he used to work for the state department and he wrote this great book about his time in a rock war two we meant well how I help lose the battle

for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people also Hooper's War a novel of World War II Japan, we meantwell.com as its website but also he writes regularly at the American Conservative magazine the American Conservative.com Welcome back to the show, how you know?

I'm happy to be here. It's always a pleasure to talk with you, Scott. Yeah, man. You know, I wanted to say and he's a regular writer at the Libertarian Institute, but I think that only happened the one time. I hurt your feeling somehow. You don't want no not at all you're welcome to reprint stuff so why don't you oh i don't know i write me originals i'll pay you for me okay i can do that too yeah yeah we only did one original together

and the others were reprints off of the american conservative and i hasten to add for any new listeners the american conservative is actually a libertarian uh i don't know why they they haven't given some thought to to you know a better title or a more discreetly title. Oh, I don't think that's right. They're very libertarian leaning on some things, but I think they're a conservative magazine. Okay. I don't want to get into this because I know I watch you guys fight on Twitter about doctrine. And the last thing I want to do is be in the middle of any doctrine wars. Well, listen, we need lots of good anti-war conservatives. They can't all be libertarians. No, anti-war I'm completely set with, and there's no, there's no, there's no doctrine to

discussed there. But I see sometimes you guys get into these doctrinal discussions about what is libertarian and who is libertarian and stuff like that. Well, you know, I think, well, I don't want that. I'm just going to stay on the sideline and let you let the adults handle that. Well, I mean, your writing is all, certainly the writing in question today about China is all, you know, could have been written by libertarian. I think if there's a difference that I could, you know, easily jumped to, it would be that I think that overall the consensus attack is against free trade with China, for example, where libertarians, of course, are always for free trade. So, and that's a pretty big difference in economic nationalism versus libertarian. No, and I'm fascinated by this because basically

I was a rescue dog. You know, I had been thrown out. I had been in the State Department where we sort of prided ourselves of having no opinion about most things. I mean, you know, personal opinion about most things and i had that was sort of my philosophy for for many years and then i kicked out of the state department and i thought then that i was kind of a liberal and i thought progressive sounded like a good word and then i found out that it turns out i supported Nazis and because i i supported the first amendment and that some of these wars were justified because they were fought by people who were friends of our friends of our enemies or something like that and the whole thing got so confusing and I was left by the side of the road in a box to, you know,

to wither and die. And luckily people like the American conservative and you found me and gave me a new, a new home and a new purpose. So, um, thank you for that. I'll try not to bite you if I get angry next time the moon is full. Yeah. Well, hey, that's kind of you. And man, we always love you. I know the audience loves you. And we always love what you write at antiwar.com and all that stuff. And yeah, we don't have to agree about every little thing. But, well, I mean, here's something that you probably know a lot about. I'm interested in your opinion on. How about trade with China? I mean, obviously, we're going to be talking about Taiwan today. You got a bunch of great articles about this attack. Sure. And so, you know, I want to know everything you know and think about

America's trade relationship with China and the way it's gone in the last few years since the advent of Trumpism and or even before that, if you want, Obama's pivot or wherever you. you want to start. But there's a lot more to this relationship than just Taiwan. In fact, it's mostly about money. And I guess my bias is I want to hear that the non-military industrial complex companies would like to see our relationship stay stable and friendly. And maybe that they're even willing to put their money where their mouth is and try to support, you know, more restrained voices and people, you know, in the, uh, in the, uh, in the circuit. the establishment on China policy because it seems like the arms industry supports all the

hawks and they just dominate the discussion here but I don't know well it's a it's an interesting question because 99% of our relationship with China has nothing to do with Taiwan I mean Taiwan is this weird appendage vestigial limb that that grew you know it was like one of those it's like that thing on the back you're on your back that you can't quite get to but your friend tells you every time he sees it you better get that checked out and you know it's like that it's like it's this thing grew during the cold war and taiwan became this massive massive cold war issue between the united states and china and we did get very close to to sophisticuffs here and there over it but never never close enough i mean we never smelled the other guy's breath that that close

but the point is is that it was a major issue and it never really went on way and even as trade with China, even cultural exchange with China, politics with China, China as our buddy against the Soviet Union, even as all those things became very important, we still hung on to this Taiwan thing. Now, the thing is, is there are an awful lot of people, as you've pointed out, who profit from this, not only here, but of course also on Taiwan. It helps an awful lot to have this enemy so that you can point all your anger and blame all your bad stuff on China. And the Taiwan authorities, the people, you know, the government of Taiwan loves to have this big bad bruiser in the neighborhood that they can point to whenever they need to rally

the troops or get everybody behind something or when elections come around, they can all take turns seeming tougher than the other party. So it serves a great purpose over there for them. on the American side recently it's been reborn as the new arms race up until late Trump the late Trump administration we kind of were in a kind of a happy doldrums with Taiwan we would certainly sell them lots of weapons particularly expensive stuff like f-16s but we did it kind of because we always had done it there hadn't been a lot of drive behind it.

And I think some people woke up and realized, hey, we can create some trouble over here and use that as a new excuse to sell lots of stuff, big expensive stuff, not rifles and bullets and things like that. But nuclear submarines, at the end of the Trump administration, the United States pulled a real fast one on the French. The French had, the Australian government had wanted to buy, I think, four or five nuclear submarines, four or five submarines, I should say, in order to increase their presence in the Pacific Ocean and patrol out a little further from the homeland.

And the French had worked out a deal with the Australians, and at the very last minute, the United States swooped in and said, buy ours instead, because they come along with all these fabulous prizes and one of the things they included was a new pack called the quad pack where the Australians, the Indians, and that's coming up soon, we're going to be selling them all sorts of goodies, the Indians and the Japanese and the United States all get decided they were going to gang up against this new threat from China. Now the new threat and the old threat were the same threat, but that doesn't mean you can't everyone. It's like soap powder, is or anything in Fritos or Cheetos or something.

Every once in a while, they have to have a new product out there. And it's basically the same old stuff. But they put it out with the word new one and everybody goes out and buys it. And so the Australians get talked into buying nuclear submarines from the United States at the cost of trillions of dollars. Now, if you're in the industrial, military industrial complex, this is the big time. You know, like I said, it's not rifles or bullets or tanks or even F-16s. It's trillion dollars, trillions of dollars worth of submarines, spare parts, training, simulators, just about anything that you could possibly want that you could use to enhance your budget.

And all you have to do is kind of gin up the Chinese threat. Yeah. And there you go. You know, I was talking with Colonel McGregor about Ukraine. And I'm like, yeah, but strategic this and tactics that. And he's like, listen, there's a lot of money at stake here. and just this is a guy who's a strategic planner that was his job yeah and he's like strategy what's a strategy that doesn't have anything to do with this this is all just a rip off man

you know but it's it's like going to Vegas and spending spending two weeks staying up all night counting cards versus walking into the casino putting it all on you know red number seven and walking out a millionaire uh you know 10 minutes later that's the difference between Colonel McGregor's selling artillery and shells, and God bless them for that, but when you're talking about selling submarines and submarine technology, that's the big time. And it started under the late Trump administration and continued with great enthusiasm with Joe Biden. And it basically envisions a new Cold War where the Chinese are going to be our enemy. And with the exception of kind of see the ukraine was just bad timing on everybody's part we had this whole

thing sort of worked out where china was going to be the new enemy and we were going to blame them for a little bit of everything and they were chinese like to play along with this stuff pretty good because they've got their own domestic propaganda to worry about so if you need them to fire off a provocative statement here or there they're usually pretty good about being able to do that particularly if you time it with one of their political holidays, most of which are clustered in the fall, October in particular, keep an eye out for the rhetoric to rise coming up next month

or two months from now in October. And so the Chinese are just great about it, plus the fact that unlike the real Cold War, where there was a threat of actual fighting at different points along the way, the chances of us actually fighting a war with China over Taiwan or anything else are near approaching zero. And that makes it the perfect Cold War

because there's no actual danger involved in it other than the occasional incident or two, which can easily be bandaged over. Well, yeah, I hope that's right. Although, I mean, the thing is about incidents on the high seas is you can lose a lot of sailors at once. And then things get real emotional very quickly. Sure, but there's ways to make sure that doesn't happen.

I mean, if you look at the problems that have happened between the incidents that have happened, they've been over single airplanes and things like that. And even this time around when the United States decided that it needed to send an aircraft carrier, quote, closer to Taiwan, unquote, you know, it was way the heck out in the Pacific Ocean. It was nowhere near where the Chinese were conducting their own drills and exercise. and so the chances of an incident happening were again largely approaching zero the planes can fly real far but planes usually only have one or two or a couple of guys inside and can easily be sorted out about who did you know mistakes were made and and things like that yeah so both sides

are very very cautious i think the thing to really focus on though is not so much the mechanics of how to prevent incidents though both sides again are pretty good at that but is is the bigger And that is this business about what the other 99% of the relationship is about, and that's trade. China and the United States are among each other's biggest trading partners. You know, you've got to go down into the pennies to start to figure out who's biggest and who's smallest. But we don't need to worry about that. There's massive, massive trade that goes on. And if anybody was unsure about that, look back just at some of the days of COVID where the supply chains got gunked up.

and all of a sudden, you know, your iPhone wasn't available. You can't buy a car because the chips aren't coming over. Hell of a lot of computer chips fit on one ship. So there must have been some real gunk in the system in order to prevent all that from happening. The point being that there's massive amounts of trade between among, I should say, China, Taiwan and the United States. Taiwan, China is Taiwan's largest single. trading partner. Um, and that's, that's a real good reason for them not to go to war with one another. Right. And yeah, I mean, in terms of America and China, it's either Canada or China in their

neck and neck. I think sometimes it's Canada, but sometimes it's China is our biggest trading partner. Can you tell me how much Trump's tariffs and all that really changed that? I mean, I know it's billions a year, but so now it's only half a bazillion or I mean, how much different did it really make? I'm not that good with numbers. After since I had that fall and I bumped my head there that one time. I ran right into Dick Cheney and as I was falling, I tried to switch to a headbut and I kind of hit the ground the wrong way. But good to see. It's okay. Dick got his comeuppance this week when his daughter got voted out of the out of the island for a while. So that's nice to see. Every time he comes to his faces on TV watching the

I start to scream and curse, and my wife looks at me like, I'm, you know, did I marry a guy with Tourette's or are you just working on it? It's like, no, I'm just working on here. But nonetheless, I don't have the numbers. And, but I can tell you that the tariffs against China were workable. And, you know, it's important that. In other words, they weren't going to break our major relationship. I don't think so. I mean, I stand ready to be told that that's completely wrong. And I would quickly respond by saying, but the relationship isn't broken. And I don't hear the Chinese saying what they've got to do to get out from underneath those sanctions.

I hear them working around the sanctions. If they need to launder money, they hire Hunter Biden. If they need to build factories in third countries, they build factories in third countries. They just don't seem to be acting like a country that is under. vicious sanctions and needs to find a way out. Parenthetically, the same thing with Russia. If you take a look, all these sanctions that were supposedly imposed post-Ukrainian invasion, the Russian economy is doing quite well.

You remember idiots like Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman talking about how Putin was going to be driven out of office by these sanctions, yada, yada, yada. And all that's really happened is the price of gasoline in the United States has gone up and things like that. Shout out to all my brothers here in Hawaii. We're going to be paying 15% more for electricity because we're going to be switching off of Russian oil. So I may not be able to do any more interviews in the future unless we get the steam engine running. I appreciate you on an exercise bike with a little copper wire brush thing.

Scott, ask more interesting questions. I'm starting to flag here, man. I'm getting tired. Get me fired up again. and ask me how the State Department's treating me these days. And, you know, get me fired up so I can cycle us through the last 10 minutes of the show. Here, I'll write that in my notes, man, for in a minute. Yeah, program notes.

So you may need to adapt and overcome. But no, the price of... I'm going to be shocked if you tell me that they're jerks. Listen, wait, I want to ask you about this white paper that the Chinese put out when Nancy Pelosi went over there. I want to ask you about Nancy Pelosi going over there some more. She went over there. apparently it was the lobbyist from Taiwan who got her to do it and led by former Democratic senators like Dick Gephardt and people like that. So she went over there. And I guess Biden was like, hey, I wish you wouldn't. But she said, I want to. And then he said, okay. And then so the question obviously is, what difference does it make? And then one of the differences, it seemed like, was the Chinese went ahead and put out an official position paper on here's our position on Taiwan. and it was basically

re-announcing their same position inside what you know America's strategic ambiguity doctrine which was yeah it's part of China Taiwan's part of China but we're not going to retake it by force unless you convince us to

and then leaving it at that which is where it's been since 79 right this is the thing that frustrates sort of we're talking about doctrine let's call myself a neopracticalist you know when something works i like that that's good when something yeah keep keep that in mind for the treadmill thing tweets going out right now yeah okay so the idea would be that that when you've got something that works why not just keep doing that until you need to do something else and that's

certainly what's happened some of the most brilliant diplomacy ever done and i Henry Kissinger may have had a hand in it, and I like to apologize for using the word brilliant in that context. But let's pretend he didn't really do the good stuff. And, you know, the idea that they created this situation where big China could continue to act like a major country. Taiwan could continue to exist in the state that it chooses to exist in. And keep in mind, by the way, that when China and Taiwan, when the United States moved its diplomatic relationship from Taiwan to Big China back in the 70s, Taiwan was a military dictatorship. They were still locking up political opponents and torturing them and things like that. So we were not exactly siding with the good, good guys.

There was no love on the mainland for freedoms like that either, but neither was there in the United. Taiwan, though it was presented to us as the Republic of China on Taiwan and things like that. Nonetheless, they created a brilliant structure that said there is really only one China and darn it, Taiwan really is a part of it and we're not saying another word. And that little bit of silence at the end of that sentence allowed both sides sort of fill it in the way they wanted to in any given situation. And it's a false. back position that is absolutely bulletproof. There is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it. And both sides can quote that to death and say wink, wink, and it means that we're going to win in the end, wink, wink. And they can both say that.

And they can either mean it or not mean it, depending on the context. You know, I had a story, I think I may have shared at one point. When I was working in Taiwan for the State Department, I spent two lovely years there. and then went back for some other opportunities some guy comes into the office one day with a world war two uh war bond with uh franklin roosevelt's photo a drawing of his face on there and it was a bond that said it was a purchase for one u.s dollar during world war two and at the allied victory the bond would be worth a million dollars and he wanted to know if we could cash it for him and you know he understood he was being a little bit cheeky about the whole thing but as best we could tell it was a legitimate document it had all the engraving features and everything in it and so just for fun we decided to call up the taiwan authorities at the treasury there and say so we got this guy and he wants to be paid off this million dollars by the republic of china so where should we send him and they very carefully thought about it and they said well once as soon as we have the full treasury on the mainland under our control, we'll be happy to pay him off. So please just have him keep hold of that thing for a little bit longer.

And it was a brilliant answer, and it was exactly the same answer that you would get when you're talking about potential violence across the Taiwan Straits. Once this thing is settled, then it'll be settled. And until it's settled, then everything is in flux, and we can make up dumb answers, like tell the guy to hold his million dollar bearer bond for another. few years, just in case we, the authorities on Taiwan, happen to recapture the mainland through some freakish thing. And it's a system that absolutely works. It's a system that allows both sides to feel they've won that win-win. That is always the goal of diplomacy

that's going to last more than an administration. Now, Nancy Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi is the turd in the soup of all this, because she's got a couple of games that she's playing. Primarily, she's interested in appealing to her home constituency every once in a while. A third of her voters, the people who vote for her in her home district, a third of them are Chinese-American, Taiwan sympathetic, not mainland sympathetic, and she always has to throw them something every election cycle, and there's, of course, one coming up. So she's got that. Second, she's got to keep her relationship with the Taiwan lobby intact.

Now, if you make jokes about how powerful the Israelis are, in the end of the day, they look like amateurs compared to what Taiwan is capable of doing much more quietly and much more subtly. The Taiwan authorities have think tanks, they have institutes, they have organizations, they hire advertising agencies, They put out scholarships. They donate, of course, to lots and lots and lots of politicians. They are brilliant at roping in folks, and they are brilliant at kind of pitching the argument depending on who they're talking to. So they're either the good China that wants to give out scholarships and doesn't impose any academic restrictions on the students, or they're the democracy, China, albeit

a fairly recent democracy. They only democratized about 1990. Prior to that, as I said, they were a military dictatorship just as much as so-called red China. But the Taiwan authorities are happy to sell you Taiwan in whatever form you wanted in. Nancy is buying the, we're the only democracy in the China world that is willing to work with you side of it. It's kind of the argument the Israelis do. We're your only friend in the neighborhood. Now, we do have lots of friends in East Asia.

That's not quite as unique as the Middle East. But, you know, Taiwan wants to be your best friend in East Asia. And she buys all that. Just being the cynic that I am, if I'm a neopracticalist, I'm a neopracticic. And the answer there is that Nancy is going to be kind of looking for work sometime soon. She'll get reelected to her seat, of course, but she very well may not be Speaker of the House for very much longer. And in which case, the Taiwan lobby loves to hire former ambassadors, former directors of the American Institute in Taiwan,

former Congresspeople, what have you. So Nancy may be looking ahead at what could be a very lucrative post-elected official career for herself. So we'll give her credit for being personally selfish as well as mucking up international politics. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audio book of my book, Enough Already. Time to End the War on Terrorism is finally done. Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books,

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Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Yeah, exactly. Like I was saying, it was Tom Dajel and Dick Gephardt and Bob Dole's groups that came and lobbied all these politicians for Taiwan. So that sounds like the proper path for her. And a lot of lesser people, too. like ex-governors, you know, because Taiwan wants you to, they like to lobby at the state levels as well. They realize that they can only go so far nationally without bumping into Big China, but they can pretty much control the lobbying at the state levels. Big China has not

been very successful in doing that. They're still a little bit clumsy. Taiwan, and this is just an aside, Taiwan has done something. that I've seen very, very, very few foreign countries do as successfully, and that is understand how important domestic politics are to the U.S. foreign relations. Now, you and I, as Americans, know that and know that oftentimes, you know, the Defense Department taking all the pieces that need to go together for an airplane and spreading it among 30 different states, so they have 30 different supporters in Congress's old news. And we also know, for example, the power of the Israeli lobby in local politics when it matters,

in states that have large Jewish populations or large evangelical Christian populations. But many foreign countries don't understand that, particularly countries where they don't vote for people very often. When I was in Iran, I kept saying that over and over again. And they had guys who would come up and try to, you know, people would interview us either alleged media or alleged foreign ministry of foreign relations people. And they were always sort of looking around, what's the secret, you know, how do we break through to the Americans? What are you guys hiding from us? What is it we don't know? And I kept saying over and over again, pay attention to domestic politics and get to know that part of it.

The Taiwan authorities are great. They lobby governors. They want to put a language school at the state university. They want to see if one of the Taiwan manufacturers would build an auxiliary plant in Arkansas rather than in Xinjiang and places like that. And the Taiwan authorities are really good. The mainland China people are not very skillful at this yet. They're still learning their way around it.

There was an interesting documentary on Netflix about a, year and a half ago that got smeared because Obama was the executive producer. But his name was just tagged on to it at the very end. And it was about the Chinese building a, the mainland Chinese building a factory in rural Ohio and how poorly the whole process went off because the two sides just couldn't find a way to talk to each other. People like Nancy Pelosi will fit right into that Taiwan strategy. It wouldn't surprise me at all that after she,

she gets booted as Speaker of the House that she finds her way retirement and then working for the Taiwan authorities. But until then, she's going to keep messing things up for us in East Asia. Yeah. Now, so

Gareth Porter about a year ago or something had a thing. We talked about the policy of dual deterrence. The Americans would tell the Chinese politely, hey, don't invade, don't attack Taiwan. You guys know that that that would be bad for everyone right but then also they would tell the taiwanese and you shut up

we don't want to hear a bunch of hawkish stuff out of you about how you're going to declare independence and you're going to pick a fight for us to fight for you and gareth said that then they abandoned that policy dual deterrence and old what's his name whose name that he named in the article um and in the interview that he had given a speech or a statement or whatever and announce that we're not doing that anymore now we're encouraging the Taiwanese to be a student stupid and belligerent as they can. And as you wrote about here, there's a big argument that we should just abandon strategic ambiguity altogether and make ourselves very clear to the Chinese that you better not attack Taiwan or we're going to beat your ass good, which, as you argue in the

piece, would only encourage the Taiwanese to declare independence, and which then would essentially mandate a Chinese attack on Taiwan, something like that. Is that about right? It's about right. First of all, my hat's off to Gareth, because I don't think he's kind of have a China guy. I think he's Gareth knows everything. But he apparently knows everything because that idea that we talk to the Taiwan authorities to constantly

try to tap them down a little bit is not a secret but certainly not widely publicized or widely known or widely discussed. So all right, Gareth now officially knows everything. I knew it.

And you knew it. And you had that ahead of the time. The thing is is that the Taiwan authorities have this sort of their own little nuclear weapon, which is proclaiming independence. The Chinese authority, the big Chinese, big China, Beijing has said without a doubt that if they declare independence on Taiwan, they're going to have to invade them. That's the red line. You cannot cross that.

You cannot mess with all that. And everyone has respected that as something that just isn't to be talked about. And even when, for example, when I was there in the 1980s, there was the beginnings of democracy and there was the creation of the Taiwan Independence Party. And even that was considered a big deal that they were naming themselves, the Taiwan Independence Party. And occasionally they had to make some speech about, well, it's not necessarily independence from China because we already controlled. There is only one China.

But independence from old ways of thinking or something. vague along those lines. But one of the many reasons why China would never invade Taiwan is because they might lose. It might not work. Invations are tricky things. They get bumbled up on logistics and stuff you can never really anticipate. And all of a sudden, you find yourself with Taiwan in the lead and then announcing their independence as a way of provoking China at a point where China has already finished itself

and spent itself failing to invade. So that process of dual deterrence, I've never really heard it called that, but I think it's very, very true, and I think it's very, very much part of it. People like Nancy Pelosi seemed treated as kind of a bit of entertainment, almost a sport, to see how close to the line they can actually walk these things without stepping on the line. Wasn't there a kid in your high school wood shop class who kept trying to see how close he could get his finger to the saw?

It was a kid in my class like that. Every high school wood shop class has that. It wasn't you, though. It wasn't me, and I hope it wasn't you, nine-fingered Scott. But, I mean, the idea is that the kid who does that eventually gets his thumb nipped. And that's the whole problem with people like Nancy Pelosi, the occasional minor congressperson or senator. They're usually a minor congressperson or senator who you haven't heard too much,

who probably wasn't briefed correctly and probably says something like we have to defend Taiwan the only independent democracy in the Chinese world or something like that. He'll say something probably out of ignorance or naivety and stir up the pot once again. And everyone will just have to go around and say, well, he'd probably set it out of ignorance. or naivity. It's not really what our policy is, and then he'll get talked back down. But the idea that we have this dual deterrence is very much, I think, a fairly, I'm jotting this down. This is a fairly brilliant way of phrasing something that has been in existence for a long time. A lot of people also don't know that in the early years of the relationship,

we're going back now to the 1950s and early 1960s. The United States, actually had to talk Taiwan out of invading the mainland more than a few times. China, Big China, in its early formation days, was not a very organized or very powerful place. Yeah, they were starving to death. They were starving to, they were literally starving to death. Beijing was struggling to exert control in the countryside. The people's army, such as it was, was more of a juiced up police force. that was being used for internal dissent,

it would not have been that difficult for Taiwan with a more organized conventional military to start grabbing some pieces of territory here and there and pulling the United States in with them. Taiwan actually had a strategy that assumed the United States would be kind of forced into supporting them if they invaded the mainland rather than watching them fail. And we were slinging nuclear weapons,

around fairly casually back in those days. This was in the Korean, the late phases of the Korean War, where the United States was openly talking about using nuclear weapons. And people like Curtis LeMay were still in government. Eisenhower was not opposed to these things, except that he didn't use them. But, I mean, Truman himself was a big fan of the atomic bomb. And so you actually had a period of history that's long forgotten

where the United States was telling, Taiwan to sit on its hands and not invade the mainland, please. And then now, of course, the deterrence factor has shifted to where we're sort of standing in the background, making sure Beijing understands that we might just possibly step in if they decided to invade Taiwan. That's an interesting point, by the way, speaking of Pelosi, walking to see how close she can get her finger to the buzzsaw. Our president, whose name I'm told is Joseph Biden, Joe Biden has said three times that the United States will support Taiwan militarily if Beijing invades. Now, if you say it once, it's a gaffe, twice it's a mistake. I mean, after you've said it three times, you start to wonder if it's not a way of introducing a new policy. Although the White House did walk it back as an error all three times, right?

Every three times, yes, that's correct. You know, you're correct. And we are talking about a senile old man, so we're left to wonder whether he meant it or not or what. And so it may have... Back to ambiguity, I guess. Back to... Maybe Joe is like playing nine-dimensional chess with us here. But it's important for listeners to understand that the United States has no treaty that obligates it to defend Taiwan.

The Taiwan Relations Act, the base document that controls relations, and where all this, there is only one China. and Taiwan is a part of its stuff comes from. That document only obligates the United States, A, to supply Taiwan with weapons all along, which we're greedily doing, and in the event of hostilities to, and the exact wording escapes me, but something along the lines of consider strongly intervening in the war.

But it doesn't say we're going to do it, the way we have treaties with Japan, with Korea, that absolutely say, if you shoot at them we're going to shoot at you by the way could you clarify for me about what's the difference between the policies from the nixon ears to jimmy carter so obviously you know nixon and kissinger went over there and shook hands and they were the ones who first said that okay we're no long we're now officially switching from the r o k to Beijing kind of thing but then something much more was established in 1979 the the magical year in 1979 by jimmy

Carter, right? That's right. And Carter did two things, I think, that are noteworthy. One is he formalized this relationship in 1979 with the Taiwan Relations Act. And this was a bit of paper that formally said, as we've been over many times in this discussion, that there is only one China, Taiwan is a part of it. And laid out some details of all that. But now, but how is that different than what Nixon had said. It just hadn't been in a law passed by Congress. I don't think it had not been put into law, and I think it had been very much something that Nixon and Mao and Joe Inlai and Henry Kissinger, among the four of them, kind of had worked out. I see. And I don't think they, I think everyone understood the concerns about

these things, not these agreements not living past the people who made the deals. which is often a problem, unless you do formalize all this. You can ask Barack Obama about that with his Iranian nuclear deal. It didn't live past his administration because he never managed to formalize it. It was just basically an agreement between him and the people in Iran. So I think the first thing that Carter did was formalized the agreement in a way that all three sides could live with. And that's also very important because if you force through an agreement, agreement where one side is feeling left out. In this case, it would have been Taiwan. It would have

been easy to basically say to Taiwan, you don't count anymore. We're in love with Beijing. Sorry, here's the ring back. We'll never talk to you again. And you can keep everything. The idea is, is that Carter through the Taiwan Relations Act, and you're going to have to look it up whether I think it was largely in preparation before Carter took office and just came to fruition under his political guidance. I can't promise you that it was created under the Carter administration. I'm going to have to look that one up myself. But nonetheless, it was shepherded certainly by the Carter administration. I think the second thing that happened, which was less, less, well, I won't put a word on it because it's a fighting word. You know, it was Carter started.

recognizing the human rights side of the relationship between the United States and China. And that has been kind of a funny thing. That's almost like a fourth wall to the whole relationship. You've got trade, you've got defense, you've got Taiwan, and then the relationship as dealing with human freedoms and things like that seems to kind of swell up every once in a while and become a big deal and then go away every once in a while. it seems handy for the United States to kind of cite these things. Nancy Pelosi ran through the whole litany of freedoms for the people of Hong Kong

and freedom for the Uyghurs and everything else like that. And the United States seems to take it seriously at times, and the United States seems to kind of back away and just kind of put it back in the back pocket for a while and other times. But it was Jimmy Carter who did this famously. he was trying to get China to open up to travel. And in particular, he wanted the Chinese people to have the ability to travel freely to the United States and that to be issued passports when they wanted them.

And Mao famously supposedly said to Jimmy Carter, I agree with you, how many million would you like next week? Yeah. Which was funnier in the original English, but nonetheless, I'll leave it, leave it right there. Sorry, I just blew the punchline because my mic was off so that you couldn't hear me smoking. No, I, hey, I heard another non-China joke. It's real fast. Yeah, go ahead.

I got bad news and worse news. What's that? The bad news is you're going to die in 24 hours. The worst news is, I was trying to call you yesterday. There we go. It's humor. It's national politics. It's everything here. All right. What time yesterday were you trying to call me? Immediately, very concerned.

This was in the morning? Yeah, you don't get these jokes, do you? Okay, that's all right, that's all right. It's all right. I mean, you know, only, only Garth knows everything. You and I have to suffer down here in the bottoms. Try my best here. I want to bring up one more point about Nancy Pelosi's visit.

And it was revealed to us by the Koreans. Got almost no press coverage in the United States. But the Koreans didn't. even meet her at the airport when she landed in Seoul. They actually didn't even send a high-level delegation or any official high-level people out there to do the whole handshaking welcome to Korea thing at all. And Korea's prime minister wouldn't didn't meet with her. He said he was too busy. He was on vacation and he didn't actually even hold a meeting with her. In the end, they pressured him into taking a phone call.

South Korean President, I'm sorry, I said Prime Minister, South Korean President Yun, actually skipped in-person meetings with Pelosi in lieu of a phone call due to his being on summer vacation right in the same city. He actually was at an opera the night she landed

and wasn't going to be taken away from that to go shake her hand at the airport. And Pelosi, for her part, managed to keep the entire discussion and the entire public statements that she made in Korea to herself and largely not talk about anything to do with China. She talked about the usual bland piece on the peninsula denuclearized North Korea, blah, blah, blah, blah, the standard stump speech stuff.

But she did not mention China officially at all. And she brought home the point, and the South Koreans had no problem making this point, that they have to live in this neighborhood. Right. That long after Nancy Pelosi goes home and works on domestic issues or turns her attention to abortion questions or things like that, they have got to figure out a way to exist, coexist with China and preferably to do that independent of whatever goofy foreign policy ideas the United States may come up with. And it's not just South Korea. Singapore and Malaysia kind of flirted with this, so they were polite a little more polite than the South Koreans. the end of the day, South Korea realizes that its relationship with North Korea depends on its relationship with China. And a bellicose relationship with China, the way Nancy Pelosi wants it, is not going to calm

relations on the Korean Peninsula, which is ultimately what Seoul is mostly worried about. So there's a massive, massive complex amount of things swirling around China that just get overlooked, and it just, the military industrial complex people and the media who just wants to simplify everything are really trying to kind of push it back and store it again in a big box called the New Cold War. But in fact, it's a very complex relationship that involves trade, that involves defense, that it brings in North Korea, brings in our allies in Singapore and South Korea, and talks about the domestic problems in the United States trying to recognize.

those with our foreign policy, never mind a senile president of the United States who can't even quote his own official government documents. So it's a wonderful topic to pay attention to, and I would encourage you to ask Gareth more questions about it because he seems to have it together. Yeah. Well, he's right now writing a book about the origins of the last Cold War. Oh, wow. It's going to be the groundbreaking volume, I'm certain, but we're not to wait for that. But now, so, I mean, this is kind of a common theme right around the Pacific, is that America's trying to rally everyone against China, and they're mostly saying that they don't see the mileage in that. They figure that that's going to make them, you know, cause them more problems with China rather than protect them from a menace that they otherwise don't see coming, correct? Exactly correct.

The only people who see that differently are the Australians. Under their current government, the Australians have taken a much more aggressive stance. against China, and among other things, have signed this quad pack with the United States, which is a quasi-defensive arrangement, and they have purchased nuclear submarines. Now, nuclear submarines up the ante. The Australians prior to this had the old-style diesel subs, which still make up most of what the Chinese have fielded, and the Australians had basically kept to their home waters. But in the last couple of years, the Australians have acquired their first real aircraft carrier.

It's arguably more of a helicopter carrier, but it's capable of blue water operations, and it's capable of force projection. And if they go ahead and buy the F-35s, it's going to be capable of fielding offensive jets. They've got that in the water already and very likely to upgrade it. And now they've got nuclear submarines on order that are going to be operating with the United States in the Pacific. ocean. Australia is also participated very vigorously in the recent RIMPAC exercises, which were the largest defense live fire exercises in the Pacific every year.

It's called RIMPAC. And they just participated very aggressively in that. Their ships are still in the, actually, it was done off the waters of Hawaii, and I saw their ships out here just not recently. So they're still in the water playing around and practicing and things. It makes it easy to keep it safe to come all the way to Hawaii to do these things rather than do them in their home waters or do them in the neutral Pacific where the Chinese are going to be potentially present.

But nonetheless, Australia is an exception. The rest of Asia, I think, well, I guess you've got to count Japan because Japan does what it's told. And so if the United States tells it to become more aggressive to China, toward China, the Japanese will simply do it. And they're rearming themselves quite aggressively as well. And they'll have blue water capabilities, if not, if they don't have them already very, very soon. And all of that is amazingly threatening to the safety and security of East Asia.

And all of that is disturbing to status quo, which have otherwise kept the piece for 70-some years. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at the hemp spot.com. The Hemp spot specializes in Delta 8 tetrahydro-canabinol instead of Delta 9, so they can send it straight to you anywhere in America. Recently, a friend moved and didn't have a guy in his new town. But then he heard about the Hempspot.com on my show and was saved, figuratively, and literally. Because if you use the promo code, Scott, you get 15% off every order,

and free shipping on any order over $100. Legal jams, bud, gummies, and the rest in your state. The Hempspot.com. Spell the, T-H-C. You guys, my friend Mike Swanson has written such a great revisionist take on the early history of the post-World War II national security state and military industrial complex in the Truman Eisenhower in Kennedy years. It's called the war state.

I have to say, it's the most convincing case I've read that Kennedy had truly decided to end the Cold War before he was killed. In any case, I know you'll love it. the war state by Mike Swanson Well now When it comes to China's increased Navy here They say just in raw numbers They got the biggest Navy in the world now

And the idea certainly from the right wing hawks And the media is, yeah, obviously they're trying to supplant The American Navy as the rulers of the world And otherwise, why would they be doing this? And I keep reading You know, so-called restrainers and realists and more reasonable types. I don't know if they're all neopracticalists or not saying that.

Nah, they're just building that up as mainly a deterrent force against the United States and potentially an attack force against Taiwan, but not against anybody else or no attempt to replace our Navy, you know, on the seven seas around the planet, that kind of thing. But that seems like a lot. What do you mean? They have more ships than we have now. They must be preparing for something or something.

something. So how do we understand that from your point of view? Yeah, size still matters. And so be careful when you just count the number of holes in the water because a lot of what the Chinese are fielding are probably more equivalent to, they call them, they call it Navy, but it's probably more equivalent to what a Coast Guard would be equipped for and equipped to do. Second, a lot of their stuff is growing and in growing in sophistication and growing in technology, but it's still not there yet. The United States Navy is still the most powerful maritime force ever to exist. And the Chinese have a long, long way to go. If you just look at the United States has, I think, 13 full-sized carrier battle groups. The Chinese have one active aircraft carrier.

They're building two more. And that'll be three versus 13. And theirs are nowhere close to what we are able to yield in terms of the aircraft that they put on them. And then when you get into things like force projection, our ability to land Marines around the world and things like that, it's just really no competition. The Chinese are building and the getting better at it. The Chinese are enlarging their Navy both in quantity and quality. But ask yourself, if you were a country that was fully dependent on international shipping for your economic survival, wouldn't you have a Navy? and that's the case with China it's not so much why are they building a navy now it's why hadn't they built a navy in the past well that answer's obvious right is they're looking at our empire

collapsing and they're not sure whether america is going to be able to pick up the fees for their security services indefinitely they've got they've got oil that flows through the middle east they've got stuff that goes through the straits of malacca these are places that have real live active pirates, you know, guys with eyepatches and our. Trump was totally right about that. I mean, Trump said, why are we, we have this massive naval presence in the Middle East, and we hardly buy any Middle Eastern oil at all. We're exporting oil.

And meanwhile, all that oil is going to China. It's going to China. And how come we are paying for the security services there? And I can't remember who it was. Hell, it might have been you told me that they had a big public discussion in China, that maybe Trump is right. And in fact, the fact that he's even talking this way means maybe we need to look at whether we need to expand our naval presence in the Middle East to protect our own oil instead of relying on American taxpayers to pick up the cost of all of our security services here. And they decided, nah, as long as Uncle Sucker is willing to pick up the tap for it all, then that'll be fine.

And so just like the Germans, the Chinese, our supposed worst adversaries are on American welfare. well this was this was the whole deal breton woods yada yada yada you know after world war two the united states was going to become the guaranteeer of the global liberal economic system and that meant that the united states navy was going to ensure that people had freedom of navigation around the world and so we sort of you know chose that role for ourselves and how it's played out is is a great discussion for another time but i mean the idea being that if you were china and you had your economy is based on exporting stuff by sea, which is what they do, then you're going to have a Navy. And you didn't have it until recently because you couldn't afford to build it until

recently. And you didn't have the technologies available until recently. And now you've got the money, you've got the technology, and you still have the need, whether the United States Navy is out there or not. The Chinese also were well aware that the United States Navy can be turned against them at any moment, and they would have to be prepared to defend themselves in order to ensure freedom of navigation. It's very, very easy to imagine the United States block, sort of calling a blockade of Taiwan, a protective barrier or something like that. But heck, if China couldn't sail its ships to Taiwan, they would be in really, really, really bad

shape economically. Taiwan is such an important part of that. The same thing with Taiwan being China's, China being Taiwan's largest trading partner. The joke is that if the Chinese were going to decide to blockade Taiwan economically and put the pressure on them, they'd end up mining Shanghai, Hong Kong, and half of their own ports, because that's where the commerce comes from, not from outside of the area. So I think there's a lot of justification for China to have a large, powerful Navy. and I think that the threat from their Navy to ours is relatively small. We can, if you want to twist my arm and make me say growing, all right, we'll admit to some of that.

But still, in terms of who can control the seaways right now, I don't think there's a whole lot of contests there. And I don't think that the Chinese are going to ever, in the near term, be in a position. Keep in mind the other naughty little. secret here, and that is the United States military is well-blooded. We've been at war constantly for the last 75 some years. We're getting pretty good at it. And China has not fired a shot in anger on the open seas ever, really. I mean, you have to go back to the age of sales in order to find a time when they actually fought a maritime battle or a major air battle or even something

larger than human waves in Korea. They're not a blooded army. They're not an experienced army. And they're also a military, I should say. And they're also a conscript military, which is generally considered to be weaker than a volunteer force. So I would not be sweating bullets that the Chinese are going to be taking over the role of the U.S. Navy anytime soon. I would also not be worried that these acts are such aggressive acts that

they require some kind of dramatic U.S. pushback. Again, the status quo has worked for 70-some seven-some decades. I don't know why anyone would want to change it, adjust it, or make any mess with it at all when something has worked so well, kept the piece and allow the trade to flow depending on which point of view you come from all that money flowing back and forth is a guaranteeer of peace yeah man is there anywhere where a guy can learn about if there's a fight at the country club at all between the regular businessman and the military industrial complex guys i mean there's so much money at stake here on both sides but i don't hear where walmart is you know rallying the forces against lockheed man no i think i i think i

You know, it's an interesting question, and it would be fun to be at one of those charity dinners and listen in if there was some of that going on. I want to see some blood, man, at least some people beating over the head with a golf club or something. Something like that, yeah, like Caddyshack. And then in the end, Walmart wins, and we all get cheap plastic goods. No, you know, I think there's room for everybody in there. I think that that's kind of how, if I had to take a guess of how these guys kind of sort this all out, it's like, We're not going to attack China. You know, we've got to talk tough here and there, but we're not going to attack China.

We'll have a cold, but not that cold, not frozen solid. We got this. We got this. There's so many reasons for a war not to take place that pretending that a few of those reasons matter enough that we have to spend trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars on weapons is, you know, just one of those wink, wink, nudge, nudge things. Come on, Walmart. You know how to play the game. Well, you know, with me, all roads lead back to Yemen, and there's that great. new york times story about when trump put these tariffs on china yeah that it made so many people

in heavy industry in america angry and so his trade representative pete navarro basically struck up this relationship with raytheon and their leaders as a way you know in their words to make industry happy it's lumping all industry together and saying but obviously correctly that the military is where we're we can directly pour federal government billions into the hands of the people who we've pissed off here and make them happy, or at least, you know, to some of them. And this will help broaden. Yeah, and then it was Raytheon that insisted that Trump veto the war powers resolutions on Yemen. And he did at their direct behest. I mean, it is a New York Times piece, but they talk to Navarro and people can read it for themselves.

I admit it is Charlie Savage's same newspaper. so don't get me wrong but it's pretty solid piece there and you can see they're thinking that like well if we're going to piss them off there we'll try to make them happy here and in the expense of how many manys again that doesn't matter to them nope um but yeah i mean uh speaking of libertarianism and all this stuff frederick bostia the great french libertarian um you know radical economist free market guy from, I don't know, what, the 1850s and the 60s, I think, he said, where goods do not cross border, armies will. And so this is why a guarantee free trade. In fact, that economic interdependence prevents violence from breaking out. You hear all this

whining and complaining now from Hawks that the way that they phrase it is the Germans were fools to ignore Donald Trump's advice that they should buy all their natural gas from Texans instead of being foolishly dependent on the Russians because now the Russians are having this war and blackmail them. But my take on that was entirely different, which was I think the Americans helped to monger this war specifically in order to break the growing German-Russian relationship

as signified by that Nord Stream 2 pipeline and to prevent that economic interdependence, which necessitates, especially once it's really established and the gas is full in one way and the dollars the other, or the euros, I guess, then that necessitates peace

and it incentivizes peace talks rather than pouring more weapons in and prolonging conflicts for the special interests of separate groups of people and that kind of thing. It seemed to me like that was part of why they helped monger that war in the first place.

So this is why we want to keep trade going with China at all cost. I think because we like the Communist Party over there. It's we like that they're not really communist anymore. That's good. It's still a one-party dictatorship. Nobody likes them. But the point is, preventing them and us from trading H-bombs at all costs. That's the only thing that matters in the world, is not having nuclear war between the major powers. Well, I think your situation is set because I just looked up some of the figures. You know, just prior to COVID, Taiwan's investment in China was 188 billion more than the Chinese investment here in the United States. The cross straight trade itself

was $149 billion. It's just a staggering amount of money. The U.S. investment in China just passed over $1 trillion. And the Chinese have $145 billion invested in. in the United States. Awesome. It's an incredible amount of money, and I think I love the phrasing in what you just said there. It necessitates peace.

Right. To keep it stable, to keep it going. By the way, please address this. I don't want to sound patronizing and jerky about this. People are really concerned about this. The Chinese are buying up a bunch of American land. What does that mean, Peter? Does that mean something?

Seriously. It means they still own a lot less of it than the Germans do, than the Japanese do, then the British do and all these other countries. Land in America is one of the greatest investments you can put your money into. If you or I had enough money

that we could go out and buy parcels of land, I mean big chunks of land, then to heck with your stupid 401k and your mutual funds and things like that. Boy, land is just the way to go. They're not making much more of it, and

everybody wants it, and it's valuable stuff. It doesn't fall apart. It doesn't get old. Land is a good thing to own. It's a great investment. The Chinese are also our second largest holder, overseas holder of U.S. Treasury bonds. So they're buying a bunch of those as well. The Japanese are still by most more than the Chinese.

But there's just, I think the thing is just to say that there's this incredible amount of money that passes back and forth between the United States and China and between China and Taiwan. And as you put it, it necessitates peace. It's the only condition under which everyone can keep making this money. The fascinating thing is in the case of the United States and China, you know, they're one of the few countries we don't sell weapons to. And we're still finding ways to have $145 billion worth of commerce without a single F-16 or howitz are mixed into the mix. it's quite a staggering accomplishment and the number of people who are in positions of power

that would want to maintain that status quo to maintain that flow of money I think is more than enough to guarantee necessitate the peace right and you know back to the whole thing about yeah it ain't because we love them so much or whatever in fact you take the exact opposite way this is how you maintain peace between people who don't like each other very much this is how people get along in the world all the time with people they don't like is, well, I'm to keep my lip zipped because this guy's paying me money today. You know what I mean? Or I'm paying him for the thing that I need. And so we go about our business as we call ourselves gentlemen. That means you don't say everything that's on your mind about the people that you're

doing business with while you're doing business with them. It works at the bar. It works in international diplomacy. It's a good rule of life there. The thing is, is that this is something that has always troubled me is, Neville Chamberlain, you know, goes to Munich and screws up one time with Adolf Hitler and forever after appeasement is label is what diplomacy gets labeled as. And in fact, you do your diplomacy oftentimes with the worst of people. And really is war guaranteed of Poland was far more foolish than his, what, sell out of Czechoslovakia? What was he supposed to do, field and army in Czechoslovakia? The Sudeten land, right?

And so, I mean, the whole point of that, though, is that forever after diplomacy has been, it's diplomacy, comma, appeasement, comma, and that's not the way to do it. It's the same thing that's kept us from negotiating fully, for example, with the Iranians. It's like, well, they're the Iranians. They're the bad guys. They're evil. Well, that's who you sometimes have to talk to in order to get things done. You've got to talk to the people who don't like you in order to make peace treaties.

I heard that in its most extreme and stupid forms during the Trump administration when Trump was trying to find some inroads with North Korea, and people were talking about how, oh, you can't give things to North Korea because they'll never follow through or what have you. It's appeasement. They're just tricking you and things like that. And, of course, that's the stupidest thing you can possibly say. You conduct diplomacy with your enemies, as well as occasionally with your friends.

But your friends don't really need the fine touches that diplomacy with your enemies do. Even James Baker said that, and he killed like 50,000 people. Well, 20. Yeah, there's nothing to slow you down when you need to go out and stir it up a little bit, too. But the idea is that with China, that we've managed to create this kind of economic interdependence. And that's what it is. It's interdependence. It's not just happy business.

They need us. We need them. And we've managed to do it without weapons in the trade mix. We've managed to do it for now seven some decades without a war breaking out. We've managed to manage the conflict. We've managed to find diplomatic language like the Taiwan Relations Act that allows us to fall back on a peaceful kind of safe ground. Like when tensions get too high, everybody retreats to the neutral corner of the Taiwan Relations Act, for example. And when we do have troubles, incidents, what have you, I mean,

the Chinese went to full on war against us in Korea. And we managed to keep that within the boundaries and stay on our side of the yellow line. And as long as those things can be done, you've got a fine relationship there and you've got good people managing it. And boy, would you be lucky to have that with other countries around the world. Yeah, absolutely. All right, just to wrap up here, final point is back to libertarianism at the beginning there. You know, in the 1990s, you know, around that era when I was younger, I always really like the right-wing anti-war stuff.

And I really like left-wing anti-war stuff, too. They'll teach you all about the CIA coup in Guatemala and things you need to know. But the right-wing anti-war stuff always really appealed to me because if it's all God and country and George Washington and American flags, well, it's really easy to just get behind whatever foreign conflict is going on. It's us versus them and USA and God and country and all that simple. So then when you have a guy like that, yeah, when you have a guy like that who's saying, no, these wars are stupid and horrible and wrong, you know, it's not for hippie reasons.

It's something else. And then oftentimes it's because they're smart and they really know what's going on. And it ain't right what we're doing. That kind of. So you have even like the birchers, this is what really got the birchers in trouble. It wasn't, you know, being kind of racist against black people and stuff back then. it was that they were against the war in Vietnam. And that's what got them read out of the right by Buckley and all that kind of thing.

But anyway, my point is that I always kind of like that kind of stuff. But then when, and I never really knew other than Harry Brown, I hadn't even really heard Harry Brown talk about foreign policy that much, I don't think. And the libertarianism I was exposed to wasn't really concerned with this kind of thing. But then finally, in the lead up to Iraq War II, was when I finally started getting getting online regularly in 2002 and started reading anti-war.com and Lou Rockwell.com. And there they had basically the same kind of right-wing anti-war view that's like doesn't look kindly on the United Nations and doesn't like any of this foreign

interventionism and all the inflationary money and all the centralization of power that comes with and all the great libertarian and conservative reasons for opposing a world empire and that kind of thing. But the point is what really impressed me was they They are doves on China, unlike so many of the people on the right who, you know, were sort of left in that Cold War mentality from before. As long as the flag is red, it doesn't matter if it's Mao or if it's Deng Xiaoping or who it is, or his successors, that, you know, we want to boycott them right out of business. We don't want to trade with them. We're terrified of them and communism, communism, whatever. And then I read Lou Rockwell going, no, no, no, dude, that's all wrong.

There's no such thing as China anyway. it's just a billion individual human beings and here's how we're going to treat them as as people and if our government gets in between us and them then it's committing a sin just like if their government does and that's how we ought to look at it and we ought to be friends and this earth is big enough for both of us and it has to be and it is what it is and that kind of deal and so that was just really appealed to me that you know here are people who really were familiar with all these same kind of right leaning arguments against interventionism but they were weren't on board for kind of the typical, when you go that far to the right, like more kind of populace right, outside of D.C. circles, right wing. They just weren't buying in to the anti-China scaremongering stuff. In fact, Lou had an article called From Death Camp to Civilization, and it was about how you shut up with all your stupid anti-China nest, not you, Peter, but everybody. And this was like when there was lead paint on the toys and a couple of bad tubes of toothpaste to whatever it was, and he was saying, hey, hey, hey,

we're talking about the communists reduce this nation down to caveman status. They had to start all over again, and they're doing great. And so you chill out. And coming from a guy like Lou, that really sticks. You know what I mean? Yep. Absolutely. Yeah.

Amen. Oh, yeah, man. Three cheers for libertarianism. Okay. Well, listen, man, I already took up way too much your time, but, well, not by my standards, but probably by yours. But I really appreciate you sharing your afternoon. with us, or I guess it's morning out there in Hawaii, but anyway.

Never a problem. Always a pleasure. Scott, thank you. Thank you, Peter. That's the great Peter Van Buren. Check him out. And by the way, I don't think I read off the name of all these articles. So let me tell you now, everybody. There are three really great ones at the American Conservative magazine. How does Asia feel about Nancy Pelosi? Nancy Pelosi's pointless trip to Taiwan and strategic ambiguity works. And that one's a real charmer. I think you'll like it. Thanks, guys. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.