Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/16/22 Michael Tracey on America First, NATO Expansion and the Shortage of Dissent in American Foreign Policy

Episode Date: September 18, 2022

Scott talks with journalist Michael Tracey about the politics behind America’s foreign policy. Tracey recently attended a conference put on by the America First Policy Institute. Many Trump-friendly right-wing populists have defined their foreign policy philosophy as being “America First” with mixed understandings of the historical context behind that phrase. In many ways, this camp has represented a shift away from foreign interventionism within the American Right, at least concerning the Middle East and Europe. However, at the conference, Tracey found mostly establishment Republicans spewing hawkish nonsense. He talks with Scott about how, in many ways, the Trump Presidency brought about all the downsides of having a President willing to stand up to the war machine but with none of the upsides.  Discussed on the show: “America First Hawks Admit US Weapons in Ukraine are Plunging Down a Black Hole” (Substack) “Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views” (New York Times) Reclaiming the American Right by Justin Raimondo  America First Policy Institute “Guided by British special forces, Ukraine is escalating the 'deep battlespace' fight against Russia” (Washington Examiner) “Newt Gingrich's "outsider" act” (Salon) “Tea Party welcomes Newt to New York” (Salon) “Democrats and Republicans Pretend They Have Massive, Unbridgeable Differences So They Can Unite Seamlessly on War” (Substack) “A Review of NATO’s War over Kosovo” (Chomsky.info) Michael Tracey is a New York-based journalist. You can find his writing on Substack and follow him on Twitter @mtracey 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

Hey, you guys, on Monday, September the 19th, Gene Epstein is hosting another great edition of the Soho Forum debates in New York. No mask or vaccine mandates required anymore. And it's at the Sheen Center featuring Ward Wilson and Peter Husey arguing the question. It is imperative to eliminate nuclear weapons. Now, Ward Wilson is a real expert, worked on nuclear weapons policy. for 35 years. And Peter Husey is present of Geostrategic analysis and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute

and visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council. So that is going to be great. Again, it's Monday, September the 19th, at the Sheen Center. That's 18 Bleaker Street in New York. Doors open at 6 o'clock. And so for all you, Yankees and anybody else with a travel budget,

Go and check it out. You can read all about it at the Soho Forum website, which is thesohoforum.org. The Soho Forum.org or just type in Gene Epstein and the Soho Forum. It'll come right up for you there. Again, Monday, September the 19th, Ward Wilson versus Peter Husey on nuclear weapons. 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 the 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at Scotthorton.orgon.4. You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, introducing Michael Tracy, rabble-rousing mut-raker type over there on the substack and the Twitter, of course. And this one is called America First, and pretty sure those are ironic quotes there, America First Hawks admit U.S. weapons in Ukraine are plunging down a black hole. what a headline welcome back to the show michael how you doing good how are you actually you know what that really wasn't meant to be sarcastic in the headline anyway because i was just conveying what

people who hold the positions that i outlined in that article describe themselves as you know that article was a result of my attending in over the summer this so-called summit of the America First Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., which is, you know, this government-in-waiting organization slash think tank slash, you know, Dan of Thieves or whatever, that was basically started by alum of the Trump administration and would presumably play an outsized role in staffing any forthcoming Trump administration should he run again or really should any Republican win the presidency again. So yeah, I mean, at times I do use the term America first a bit sarcastically, but there may be somewhat ominously. It was actually just literal.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing of it. It's not your fault. If they're the ones using it ironically all the time, I want to rewind a couple of years back to 2016. I don't know how many people caught this at the time. I kind of maybe had forgotten about it for a little while. Then I remembered again. But right here is where Donald Trump got the term America first. And it's from an interview with David Sanger in the New York Times, the guy who's been accusing Iran to making nuclear weapons for the last 25 years with Netanyahu. This is how much an obsessive I am. Was this the interview in July of 2016 about NATO and such? No, it's March actually of 16. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, the headline, I hope I don't lose my place here. The headline is

transcript, Donald Trump expounds on his foreign policy views. Okay? And here's what happened. Obviously, well, I got my spin on it, but here's what literally happened. Sanger says to Trump, well, you're describing to us, I think, as something of a third category, but tell me if I have this right, which is much more of a, if not isolationist, then at least something of an America first kind of approach, a mistrust of many foreigners, both our adversaries and some of our allies, a sense that they've been free-loading off of us for many years. Trump says, correct, okay, that's fine.

And Sanger says, okay, am I describing this correctly here? That's fine. And Trump says, I'll tell you, you're getting close. Not isolationist. I'm not isolationist, but I am America first. So I like that expression. I'm America first. And then he goes on and on.

We've been disrespected and mocked and ripped off, et cetera, et cetera, and now we're going to make America great again. And so you see what's going on there. I mean, this is just my interpretation, but it's pretty obvious to me. What David Sanger was doing was David Sanger was trying to hang this term around Trump's neck, counting on his ignorance of the history behind that term, but counting on the fact that all of the rest of America would know

that that means like Charles Lindberg, the evil Nazi who loved Hitler and opposed saving the world in the Second World War. But the problem was, The rest of America didn't know that any more than Trump did. And so what Sanger was doing was he was trying to hand Trump some rope to hang himself with. And Trump took the rope and then used it like a lasso. And it worked great. And American said, yeah, America first.

I mean, what the hell is this, Canada? I mean, of course America first. And so it was meant as a sabotage against him in the first place. But also, more to our real point here, he never knew what that meant. He never heard of the America First Committee and the old right conservatives who opposed entry into World War II and all of this, you know, Republic, not Empire, old right type argument. He didn't know the first thing about that. This is where he got it was simply Sanger trying to sabotage him. And then he just kind of went and ran with it from there.

But it never really meant anything. you know that's amazing i had i know i read that interview at the time but i had completely forgotten about singer apparently being the first one to introduce the concept of america first to don't trump i mean do you know for sure i would have to look into it and i'm going to look into it once we're all done with this well that's certainly the way i remember it i don't remember any other any other raising of that term before this this was the first of it i'm almost virtually certain of it yeah i mean the way that the way that the exchange plays out it does seem like it was probably probably was the first uh and i think you know

clearly i'm just speculating but it it seems pretty obvious to me that sanger was trying to trap him you know no you're right i think i think before the march of 2016 it was always make america great again right and then you know america first basically sounds interchangeable with make america great again so why wouldn't trump just say oh yeah sure america first i mean it's almost is innocuous as saying, like, God bless the USA. Right. So, yeah, of course, Trump was not this learned student of American political intellectual history, not that you'd have to be particularly learned to be familiar with the ideological

orientation of the America First Committee from the pre-World War II era. Well, I mean, in fact, you do, right? Like, it was led by John T. Flynn and a bunch of really great individualist libertarians and classical liberals and a lot of great people. And it was just Charles Lindbergh used the J-word three. or four times and ended up setting a time bomb or, you know, sabotaging the whole effort, essentially by making everybody look like such jerks when the organization itself included Jack Kennedy and all kinds of people at the time. Well, Kennedy's father, right? Joe Kennedy.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, no, that's right. Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, now that you're reminding me of this, it seems almost unmistakable, That what Sanger is trying to do is to tether Trump to this term which he knows, meaning Sanger knows, can now be used to extrapolate that Trump has this, you know, fascistic lineage or this incredibly nefarious, even potentially anti-Semitic lineage that sort of undergirds whatever his, like, inchoic political philosophy is. right um and you know it's amazing there as well that trump actually goes out of his way to clarify that he's not isolationist now i mean everybody gets accused of being an isolationist pretty much says they're not isolationist even if they do favor you know quote unquote isolation of some sort because it's just a pejorative um it doesn't actually i mean ron paul always got accused to being an isolationist and i even remember what his retort would generally be which is that you

know, he has actually probably more in favor of, you know, even-handed, level-headed international exchange and dialogue than even some of his critics were. Of course. So he's not an isolationist. Right. They're the ones with the sanctions on everybody all around the world, sanctions that he would lift immediately. Yeah. They want to isolate every country that diverges from, like, whatever the quote-unquote Western consensus at any given time.

But that's not an isolationist policy. Right. for some reason. That's just, I don't know, good liberalism or conservatism or something. But yeah, I mean, that's a really good reminder and is directly pertinent to the article that I wrote over the summer. And that's even relevant now. I don't know if you've seen what I've been tweeting about, but like I keep getting provoked into like historical debates around actually the America First Committee pre, No, I haven't seen it. The extent of the non-interventionist movement in, you know, the lead up to the Pearl Harbor and such. And it's actually the, that's actually playing a similar function right now as far as I can see.

Because what happened post-2016 is that, you know, David Sanger gave a prompt for all these, you know, pop historians. to rattle off their takes, you know, reminding everyone what America First was and who Charles Limburg was and who Henry Ford was and now how Trump is saying supposedly that he's a descendant of these people. And so this had created like a little, a cottage industry of like a revived interest around the America First Committee. And the whole point of that revival was to make it intrinsically appear to people who maybe weren't as familiar with the con with the, with the organization as like inherently sort of viciously right wing or nefarious or fascistic or pro-Hittler or whatever. And then to tie that to Trump for political purposes in the 2016

election and then into his presidency. And even if it had nothing to do at all with Trump's actual policy preferences or much less what he actually did when he was in office foreign policy wise, which really bore no relation to any kind of isolationism or whatever people thought was America first. What's happening today is, with regard to Ukraine, anyone who stakes out any kind of non-interventionist position is in turn also being tethered to America first because they'll get accused of like Trump following in the footsteps of, you know, these supremely disreputable characters like Lindberg and Ford.

And to make this point, like which that has political currency now, to kind of stifle any kind of criticism or dissent from the current foreign policy consensus, what they'll do is try to create this image or this perception that any non-interventionism that existed pre-World War two, or at least pre-U.S. entry into World War II, was exclusively hardcore right-wing or anti-Semitic or Lindbergian, if I can coin a term. Maybe that's a term, I don't know. So, you know, one thing, you know, of course, there was a high-profile contingent of non-interventionists pre-Purl Harbor who were, in a sense, right, old right, what have you. Lindberg and Ford being two prominent examples, but the people making this point now

are trying to enforce current consensus by saying that the non-interventionism of that period was exclusively Ford and Lindberg types, meaning that there was no one who could have been in any way like moral or have consistent principles or not have been like secretly pro Third Reich, who could have been a non-interventionist at that period. So, you know, they go out of their way to, for example, erase the legacy of Norman Thomas, who actually did, on occasion, coordinate with the America First Committee, but he founded his own more socialist-driven or, you know, left-wing-driven anti-war group, keep America out of war, Congress, which, you know, could operate in tantum to some extent with the America

First Committee, but it was more of a, you know, a left-wing group, more kind of where there wouldn't have to be this sort of underlying ideological tension. Well, and remember, John T. Flynn wrote for the nation. He was a classical liberal. He just hated FDR for good liberal reasons. The same way a guy like you would have hated Obama for not ever being the real thing as far as, you know, measuring up to what you would consider him to be, something like that. So, Yeah. Even the America First Committee itself was the furthest thing from a right-wing thing. It was the whole point of it was it was this massive coalition of all kinds of religious groups and everybody else. And by the way, I just emailed you a link to Justin Romando's articles about that, especially they fought the good fight, which I know you'll get a good kick out of.

Yeah, I read that years ago, but I just reread that recently. Oh, okay, cool, yeah. Good stuff there. I wish he was around now to shake things up a bit. Man, you got that right. And for people who are really interested, I'm pretty sure he covers some of this, too, in his book, Reclaiming the American Right from 1993 as well. Yeah, yeah. So basically, the people who say, oh, anyone who's a non-interventionist vis-à-Ukraine is just as sorted as the non-interventionist pre-1941, because those non-interventionists pre-1941 were just these Henry Ford and Lindberg types. And what they do is they, in order to make that case, you have to consciously obfuscate the extent of left-wing's support for the non-interventionist physician at that time as well.

Now, it doesn't even really matter if anyone's left or right-wing in terms of their non-interventioners, because the whole point of forcing these broad church organizations around foreign policy is that you put aside whatever differences you might have on certain, you know, domestic policy issues or what have you. That's why Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul were always co-sponsoring legislation together and why Kucinich is on the board of the Ron Paul Institute, right, or at least was at some point. And so, you know, they could, so they always bang on about Lindberg and Ford, but they could just as easily say, oh, the non-interventionist position pre-World War II is actually typified by some of the leading lights of the American left, which, remember, was also split between the pro-Stalinist forces who were much more interventionist and the anti-Stolomist forces who are much less so. And, you know, you had, you know, the Communist Party attacking socialist for being pro-Nazi.

I mean, it's like this Orwell thing where, you know, everybody gets accused of being a fascist across the entire political spectrum from like liberal to conservative. It never, never means anything. But like, you could just as easily say, okay, not just for Ford and Limburg, but the most prominent socialist party figure in the country, Norman Thomas, was one of the most stout adamant and unrepent proponents of the non-interventionist position at that time, ran for president four times, including in 1940, when the war armament process had been ramping up under Roosevelt, specifically on a non-interventionist platform. So Norman Thomas, John L. Lewis, who was one of the most

prominent left-wing labor union leaders of that era, you know, as the president of the United Mine Workers. And then also, you know, I just, I dug up an example of the Oswald Garrison Villard, who was an editor of the Nation magazine, or I actually worked when I first started, who was the most, who was the editor of those prominent left-wing journal in the United States. So I'm naming some pretty prominent typifying. figures of the American left from that period, but somehow they don't count, right? They get a race because right now it's politically convenient for people who don't want any kind of challenge to orthodoxy around Ukraine or even maybe Taiwan to some extent. They need to be stigmatized

and ostracized. And the best way to do that in progressive, quote unquote, liberal circles now is to say, look, they're just these, they're just continuing this. They're just continuing this. horrible quasi-fascistic legacy from that period that's embodied not just like by a limburg but also a trump and you know of course you can't make common cause with trump now in remaining good standing in those circles so yeah that's that's sort of a you know it's funny about all that to me is that if you go back to that era as you just said you had american Stalinists who absolutely were loyal to the soviet union and you had it was much smaller than the america first committee but you had the German-American Bund, who were essentially, you know, pro-Hitlerites or certainly pro-German

and wanted to stay out for that reason and that kind of. But in this day and age, show me a faction anywhere in America that actually liked Saddam Hussein and was sticking up for him for any other reason than they were being like John Adams, the lawyer, the way that Jude Waniski did it. You know, Jude Winisky had no favor for Saddam. He was just saying, look, man, We need an adversarial argument here. So here's his side of the story, which, of course, completely blew theirs out of the water at the time. But there was no faction, no pro-Iraq government faction. Even, you know, Iraqi expats were the kind of people who had fled Saddam Hussein's tyranny, that kind of thing.

Same thing here. You had communists back then who really were loyal to the USSR. Now, who do you have that's loyal to Putin? Some kids on 4chan? There's no ideological movement in a... America that favors their red, white, and blue flag over our own? It's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, the threat of the communist, I think, was in general overstated during that.

Agreed. But at least they existed, right? Yeah, I mean, you could, like, point to real-life examples of those people. You know, since the Ukraine war started in February, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've been called a Putin, pro-Putin, Putin lover, Putin, a Putin. apologist, et cetera. I mean, I've been called variations of that since 2016 at, you know, varying intensity. But, I mean, the intensity increased just astronomically to more than I've ever received any time in doing public media stuff for now, you know, 12, 13 years in February. And it kind has ebbed and flowed somewhat in the six, seven months since the war started, but, you know,

definitely is, I would say, somehow increased in maybe the past two months. But one thing I did was sort of fun, was funny at the time in sort of a morbid way, was I asked the people, I would ask the people making this accusation of me, you know, a Putin apologist to just cite one example of me ever saying anything that could be reasonably described as apologia for Putin, meaning a defense of something Putin has done. That's what apologetics are, right? Like, that's, and there, you know, you could imagine somebody actually putting forth apologetics on behalf of Putin. It's not a position I would take, but you could imagine it existing somewhere. And, you know, of course, nobody could do it. But then, you know,

And I think eventually, this is maybe in March, I did get one person who contacted me. I think this is just a random person. I don't know who the hell it is. It seemed like a legitimate person who I think might have been vaguely leftish, but, you know, not representative of any major faction who actually did say that they were willing to declare themselves an apologize for Putin and that they were apologizing affirmatively for why Putin's launching of the war was defensible. But that's one person. That's one person I found throughout this entire six, seven month experience who actually could be reasonably classified as an apologist for Putin. Whereas in, oh, you know what? Actually, scratched that.

I was in London in April, right? And I went to a Chinese restaurant and talked to the waiter, who was the proprietor of the restaurant, which I noticed was wearing a Chinese flag pin. And I asked him about his views on the war because he was very, I know, he struck me as potentially being quite nationalistic, you know, in a Chinese context. And he actually also made it a pro-Ukraine war argument. So I correct myself. I had encountered two examples. I'll say I was interviewed by one person who said, come on, you make the case for America's provocation so strong. How can you say that Putin was not justified to invade?

And I said, well, because I think he had other options. He was certainly provoked, but it wasn't quite self-defense. Let's get it real. But that's just one person that I've talked to this whole time. Whereas in 1941, I mean, it wouldn't have been difficult to go to a meeting of a chapter of the U.S. Communist Party. In fact, they probably would be stuffing leaflets in your face to try to coerce you into attending their meetings. But that's it. Today there's nobody doing that, and yet they make it seem like, meaning defenders of the current foreign policy consensus, they make it seem like there's this vast network of pro-putin, you know, operators out there, even Trump, of course, who they've, you know, to the point of absolute tedium tried to call a Putin lover for years, even he, I mean, I don't know, this didn't get picked up for some

reason very much in the media. Well, I know the reason because it was sort of contradictory to certain narratives that people have become invested in. But even Trump agreed with Biden, I think this was in April as well, that Putin was committing genocide. Trump came out and said that. I think I've been on the Hannity show. So Trump, who was supposedly enthralled to Putin, accused Putin of committing genocide.

Okay. So is Trump pro Putin? Can you be pro a world leader and also accuse them of committing genocide? I guess you could, but I don't know if Trump has the mental gymnastics capacity to make a coherent argument to that effect. I'm pretty sure if you accuse someone of committing genocide, it means you're not in favor of that person most of the time. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. It's, I mean, you would almost think that the, that the, uh, whatever, Stalinist faction there actually was in the United States in that interwar period, you would think that whatever influence they wielded has now been like increased tenfold in 2022 with regard to Putin. I mean, it's just a just a farce. And I would have no problem. I mean, if that contingent actually did exist in the United States today, I would have no problem reporting it. I mean, I would think it would be worth reporting. There would be something worth scrutinizing. But, you know, unfortunately for the people who are so zealous about this,

fake narrative, what they're talking about just doesn't happen to exist. That's what I'm saying. Simple as that. Look, and on the basic level, I mean, what ideology does he represent? Center-right conservatism. You know what I mean? So we already have that. We already have Republicans in America. Billionaire oligarchs and conservative Christian businessmen and all this kind of thing. We call them Republicans. So why would we need to look to any overseas leader when that's what we already got, right? Americans look to the communist because they were stuck with the Democrats, and so they were looking for inspiration from overseas somewhere or something.

It's hard to put myself in their shoes, but, you know, there's at least something to that. In this case, we got them on half the channels already, so no need to look overseas for any of that. Now, so back to this group, because we talked about how, you know, Trump really never knew what this term meant in the first place was all just set up a booby trap form in the first place kind of sounds good but it's a surface level thing as you pointed out avowedly not uh so-called isolationist or uh you know non-interventionist but something sort of along those lines now it sounds like i like the way you introduce the thing where it's like a government awaiting like this is

penac or cnass only for the trump people this is their you know uh future national security council for the next Trump government, they hope, kind of thing. And then, so this is who they're putting together, and they're calling it, the America First Policy Institute, which is hell a lot better than Senator for a New American Security, if you ask me, but go ahead. Sorry to interrupt. But Trump, and Trump also addressed the summit meeting.

I mean, I was there. Oh, he did give a speech there. Yeah, yeah. He was there. It was the first time he had been back in D.C. since leaving office in January of 2021. So, I mean, Trump is also, it's not just like his, like a faction of his former administration officials trying to like appropriate the nomenclature of the Trump movement or what have you. You know, Trump actually is personally, to the extent that one can reasonably infer anything to be an endorsement, endorse the group.

And he also funded its formation. He transferred, what was it, I think a million dollars. I have it in the article to the, to when the group was founded. So, yeah, I mean, it's not, it's not even just this far, a field, sort of opportunistic, latching on to the Trump branding or anything. It's actually tied to Trump himself. And, you know, the thing that I noticed at this summit, first of all, it was sort of interesting because it wasn't, like a CPAC or something where it's like a public convention where everybody can get in and like there are a bunch of you know weirdos running around you know selling choshkis um it was a professional sort of networking event more or less for like the republican elites or the republican professional class in dc and then from also around the country people flew in so you had like sheriffs from Tennessee and what have you who are you know be running for office and

want to fortify their trump brand for a republican primary or something um and on the foreign policy to the when foreign policy was discussed at this event um and when you looked at the people who were brought to the event to discuss foreign policy it wasn't even like the marginal but somewhat existent faction within the GOP, who are maybe slightly more non-interventionist than the norm, and who would probably be more popularly characterized as something resembling America First? No, the America First policy group that Trump gave his blessing to, they brought all those ardent foreign policy hawks in the Republican Party to this event.

and then put them under the banner of America First. So it was Lindsey Graham. It was Joni Ernst. It was this guy, Mike Waltz from Florida, who I talked to, congressman, who is poised to be the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the House of Republicans win the midterms. He's supposedly an America first guy, according to this group. And he at this conference on his panel that he was on unveiled his proposal because he had just gotten back from Ukraine, of course, done the pilgrimage for, I don't know, the fourth or fifth time in the past couple months or something, and declared that what the U.S. ought to do is emulate what the British are doing, which bizarrely gets almost no attention in British media. I mean, I've been screaming because I go to Britain fairly frequently for personal and professional stuff. And I've been trying to lobby, like, journalists or people in the political world to follow up on the story, but they just don't.

And the story is that in April, the Times of London reported that there was a special forces deployment, a British special forces deployment on the ground. in Ukraine. So boots on the ground of a NATO country in Ukraine, not training from afar, actually in the country physically. And there was a follow-up on that, you know, the information is very scamp, but there was one brief follow-up on that, actually in the Washington Examiner, with this guy, Tom Rogan, who's British itself, reported that they were operating at least as of August, very close to the front line. And apparently, they're also coordinating this counteroffensive, you know, in conjunction with the U.S.

So anyway, Waltz, the Republican Congressman, who's apparently carrying the fourth, the America First mantle, his big proposal at this conference was that the U.S. should emulate the U.K. and deploy its own boots-on-the-ground operation. in part because Walt said otherwise the U.S. cannot track the proliferation of the weaponry, you know, the mass arms provision that it's dumping into Ukraine. Tracy, you worry too much. Wait, what? They're dumping weapons and then they don't know where they're going?

That actually does sound kind of important now that I repeat it back. to you like that? Well, and it's doubly important when people admit people who support the provision of weaponry, right, who are in favor of it and want it to intensify. When they admit that the weapons are going down a, quote, black hole, that's actually an even more important admission because it, you know, enhances the verifiability of that statement. And now, so I also like it as important, I think, the way you write it, that it was John Ratcliffe, who was, you know, this is absolutely what Donald Trump should have done. The moment he became, you know, in that transition is he should have plucked all loyal house freshmen to come and be his administration, right? People like this guy Ratcliffe, who is just going to do whatever he said and who did do a couple of great things. Like he made him Director of National Intelligence and then he released some things on Russiagate. that, you know, help clarify some truths that we had suspected all along and stuff like that.

So here's a guy who's like really a Trump guy, and he's the one who introduced this Cooke Waltz that you're talking about, who's this ridiculous hawk who also admits that he doesn't even know where the weapons he bought with your money have gone. Yeah, yeah, and it was Rackcliffe who introduced Waltz by, you know, expressing hope that Waltz would be setting, the future direction of the Republican Party in Congress. And so, yeah, I mean, you're right that Rackcliffe did do some stuff you might consider good in that he, you know, pried out some Russiagate-related documents that were revelatory enough. But, you know, at a certain point, I mean, all the biggest hawks in the Republican Party were anti-Russiagate.

I mean, anti-Russia gate in the maybe narrow partisan sense that they thought it was this attack on Trump, which it was. Yeah. But they weren't coming from it, coming at it from the perspective that maybe I had in my skepticism of the narrative as this, you know, outgrowth of a national security estate establishment that was trying to ward off any challenges to its primacy. Totally true. So that wasn't, that wasn't where Iraq. Yeah, I mean, you had more establishment Republicans, whether they were. the type who put out the report saying, no, it's all true that gets cited by the Democrats and that kind of thing, where this guy was really much more of a Trump type, but just the point being what differences make to us. In fact, to go back, and I don't know if you're too young

for this exactly or what, but, you know, George W. Bush, he wasn't Ronald Reagan's son. He was George Bush's son. Right. And he wasn't from Texas. He was from Connecticut. And they bought that pig farm and dressed it up like a ranch. They brought in a rusted old tractor from somewhere else for like a TV set and called it Bush's ranch and put a cowboy hat on him and that made him Trump enough for every right winger in America. You know? Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, talking about the fluidity or even the unintelligibility of the term America first and who identifies with it now and who doesn't or what people think it means. You know, Rackcliffe was You know, he was appointed by Bush as a U.S. attorney in 2004, I think.

And then he was also a law partner of John Ashcroft. And, you know, his buddy Mike Waltz, who he was so optimistic about as, you know, dictating Republican policy, he worked in the Pentagon as a defense policy, as like a policy direction. director for drum roll please donald rumsfeld so i mean those guys now who were like actually connected to some of them to the push administration officials most responsible i guess not ashcroft would have been responsible for foreign policy stuff although he actually did no although you know i guess maybe he was in terms of like giving legal authority for various um you know torture initiatives and whatever. But if even those people now can be waving the flag of America first after having been

like the heart of the Bush pro-war policymaking apparatus, then it shows you like there's just no like limiting principle for who's America first and who isn't. It's just I think the way I put it in that piece is like, you know, America first now, at least in 2022, basically in popular parliance just means any Republican who has a favorable view of the previous Republican administration. I mean, that's it. Yeah. It's really a shame. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them. You need to put some, at least, into precious metals. Well, Roberts and Roberts

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It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexsavers.com. X eye exam. I exams provided by independent optometrists. So, but now tell me the good news, right? Because there must have been some people there who said, well, what the hell is this?

We hate Lindsey Graham. Isn't there a difference between us and them? Or were you the only one, the leftist reporter there, who was noticing the difference here? I didn't hear anyone raising any of these points. I really didn't. God dang a Bobby. In part, you know what, I think if it were a public conference, like if it were something like a CPAC or like, whatever.

any kind of conference where the general public can attend, you probably would have heard a bit more dissension. But because this was a fundamentally a professional class event where you had to have a connection to get invited, that filters out, I think, anybody who would take the risk of, like challenging the consensus that's on display. So maybe there were whispers about, whispers of discontent that I didn't happen to hear. But what I did hear was when Joni Ernst, who really is underrated for how deranged of a hawk she is,

when she capped off her speech by declaring that, quote, we absolutely annihilate the Russian forces and get them to crawl back into Russia so bloody and bruised that they can't come back. Basically, I don't know, longing for nuclear war. I don't know, she didn't say that, but that seems to be the logical implication of what she's advocating there. What I did see was rousing applause. And I've been working on a separate piece that's sort of longer for a while on that's not published yet. But I also talked to Newt Gingrich there. Of course, you know, so Newt Gingrich is just like this main, I don't have to tell you.

He's just a Washington fixture of the D.C. establishment. And he said that, you know, this America First Policy Institute was going to be playing the same influential role as the Heritage Foundation did in the run-up to Reagan taking office, where Reagan essentially, as Gingrich recounted it, basically just took all the policy papers that had been produced by the Heritage Foundation, which was the government and waiting at the time, and turned it into policy and staffed the administration with the Heritage Foundation officials. That's what Gingrich hopes is going to be done with his America First policy. And he was there. And the one thing that I saw him do,

or like the one example of sentiment that I was able to glean in physically being there, was that, you know, this was late July. So this is a week or two after it was announced that Pelosi was going to be making her Taiwan trip, right? But she hadn't arrived yet. And what Gingrich did was, say, you know, in this faux-cutzy way, you know, I'm not, I can't say that I agree with Nancy Pelosi on all that much,

although I seem to recall them doing a commercial together where they were promoting some kind of climate initiative and they, you know, were sitting together friendly on camera and then Gingrich's actually attacked for that in the 2012 Republican primaries, if memory served. But anyway, Gingrich did this whole routine that lots of Republicans did during that period where they would say, you know, Pelosi and I, you know, don't agree on anything, but she's absolutely right to go to Taiwan. So Gingrich did a version of that little statement, and he elicited a big round of applause for Nancy Pelosi

at the America First Policy Institute among the attendees. So that's what I saw. Man, and I'll tell you what, for people not familiar, of course, Newt Gingrich was the former Speaker of the House in the 1990s, but also he had a very important but mostly unacknowledged role as a de facto neoconservative. Of course, that's a very small sect. And Gingrich was never a leftist, but he was very close with them.

And like John Bolton is another example of just a conservative, but very, very tight with the neoconservatives. And I don't know if you, you might be too young for this, too, Michael. I'm sure there are many in the audience who just won't believe me. But I swear to God it's true that they used to run things of value at salon.com. There's a long, long time ago. But this one, including they ran. I would forget that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, no, it sounds crazy.

I see you recall, that's where Glenn Greenwald first started blogging. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, his first blog was Unclaimed Territory, but yeah, he did right there for a very long time. Oh, yeah, I mean, the first media outlet, that's... Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, wait, wait, I just want to say there's this really important article. It's called Newt Gingrich's Outsider Act, and it's by Alex Koppelman from December 22nd, 2006. And it's a very important article about his role on the defense policy. board with Richard Pearl and Jinkirk Patrick and oh, what's his name, Ken Edelman and some of these other extremely important neocons in the run-up to a Rock War II 20 years ago. And, you know,

Mr. Outsider was actually right in there in Cheney's, you know, separate government, as Powell called it, you know, primarily dominated by the neoconservatives spread throughout the Bush administration there and in fact legendarily Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney went to CIA headquarters to kind of intimidate them and tell them come on with the dirt on Iraq

and Gingrich played into that game as well too going out to CIA headquarters to basically pressure them and closely was advising Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld all during that time and of course advising war and writing articles about how we shouldn't even have weapons and

inspections. That's just a delay. They're trying to prove they don't have weapons so that we can't invade and we can't let him get away with that. And so, yeah, he's as bad as any Republican breathing on this planet right now. Yeah, I got to read that. You know, it's funny. I come to think of it. I actually wrote an article for Salon on Gingrich. Oh, really? In 2012, I just pulled it up briefly. Especially, I just went to one of his campaign events in the primaries that year, well, actually it was 2011 when he suddenly became the frontrunner for the nomination for like a week. I don't know if you recall that. And then he won the South Carolina primary, but I just pulled up the article. And I was reminded that at this particular event,

one of the things touted was his role in being an architect of Plan Colombia. Does that ring a bell? Oh, yeah. Based on the drunk, the spectacular. failed drug interdiction initiative of the U.S. government. That Biden was the greatest champion. Rather glorious bipartisan initiative from Gingrich. Yeah, and him, by the way, you know, so it was Biden in the Senate and Gingrich in the House that were the biggest leaders on that. Yeah, and by the way, I always like to mention this, that Ron Paul gave a speech back in

2008 where he just kind of mentioned the anecdote. I love Ron Paul anecdotes, man. You got to listen close. And he'll be like, yeah, during the Planned Columbia debate, the only lobbyist on Capitol Hill, there's no like mothers against cocaine abuse or some kind of thing. The only lobbyists up there represent Bell Helicopter. And they're here to support Plan Colombia because they care so much about drug abuse, you see. Yeah.

Yeah. And oh, by the way, after they eventually got rid of that U.S. interdiction initiative, they were able to, in Colombia, you know, forge a historic peace agreement ending the, armed insurgency that had lasted for how long, like 50-something years? And, oh, also, by the way, Colombia, just for the first time, elected a left-wing president. So, yeah, I'm not sure Gingrich would was well advised to be bragging about the proud legacy of his role in that policy at the time. Yep. They all want to pretend that didn't happen. Now, I don't know much about Linda McMahon.

I do know who Larry Kudlow is and he ain't no Ron Paulian, but can you tell me a little bit more about her and him and, you know, other important leaders of this group, this America First Policy Institute? Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't think Linda McMahon has a whole lot of noteworthy ideological content to her. It's just that she was a Trump administration official, I think small business administration, head of the small business administration, something like that, who remained in relatively good standing with Trump, whereas other cabinet officials famously did not. And as did Larry Kudlow, you know, who's just this, you know, boilerplate Republican supply side, economics, you know, laugh or curve, uh, economic advisor who did a radio show that I'm sure Trump appeared on. That's how they met or TV show or whatever. And then, of course, Trump brings

him into the government. Um, and, uh, notwithstanding anything that might have happened with, uh, January 6th or whatever is also, has remained in relatively good standing with Trump. Actually at the, uh, speech in the speech that Trump gave at the summit, he, uh, said that he, is always even today is always calling up Cudlow for his latest advice or whatever counsel. He's such a bully

even to his friends. I love it. They're the ones who deserve the most. Might as well. Yeah, so Cudlow and McMahon are only... Well, second most. Yeah, so Cuddle and McMahon are only notable in that actually I would have

loved to ask Linda McMahon about Vince, but I didn't get an opportunity. Anyway, Anyway, Cudlow and McMahon are only notable in that they're just generic exemplars of Trump administration alum who aren't at the extreme of like a Bolton or, you know, Mattis or someone who had a public feud with Trump and are still in his good standing with him and like trying to carry on, carry on his legacy, maybe even staff of future government. And they're the ones running, they're the ones who founded this, this policy institute. So, yeah. Otherwise, it wouldn't really be remarkable to talk about them as any kind of notable ideological entrepreneurs or something, other than just, again, generic Republican. And again, so their involvement exemplifies like the subsumation of America First into just the generic Republican. Yeah.

Umbrella, but also, actually, I didn't put this in the article. Maybe I should have. Actually, I definitely should have. But I definitely, I noted it. Stephen Miller was also there. So Stephen Miller, you know, would be regarded by, so even like the maga, self-proclaimed MAGA people who would furiously insist that, like, a Linda McBand or a Cudlow or the, or a Lindsey Graham or whoever,

they don't possibly, they can't, they're not, they're just, grifters or frauds or you know scam artists who are trying to just misappropriate the mantra of America First for their own self-interested reasons those people tend to would would tend to be more in favor of a guy like tend to be more genuinely positively disposed to a Steve Miller type right because they think that he you know was trying to push the Jeffs sessions policy around immigration and I guess maybe would have foreign policy views that they would find amenable as well. But he was there as well floating around.

I actually don't think he spoke, interestingly, but he was there just sort of floating as attendee. So, you know, that's somebody who, whose presence at the summit suggested to me that however much certain self-proclaimed adherence to America First might want to, like, distance themselves from a group like this particular institute and say that it's like a not a faithful representation of what America First actually is, insofar as they do view Stephen Miller as a faithful representation of what America First actually is. And if they don't view Miller that way, I'm not sure what Trump administration official

they would. But even he, apparently, was eager to acquiesce to this institute as being genuine in a genuine continuation of the America First policy. It's so easy to do this, right? To go from, oh, the government is bad to Bill Clinton is bad. To go from intervention is bad to, you know, the real problem is when you have somebody like Barack Obama or Joe Biden trying to lead it. They don't do a good job. That's why we need big, tough guys like us.

You see how long that took? That took 10 seconds for me to go, oh, yeah, all those objections, rationalized away. Done. No problem. I've seen it happen over and over again, you know? Well, that was one of the things that was so mad. about the Trump experience. It was so heavily personalized around Trump as a personage, right?

And, you know, he in part encouraged that by just being an incredibly brash and a typical personality type in the Oval Office. But just such a massive percentage of the commentary and the consternation and the speculation around what was going on in the Trump era was basically down to Trump's own individual like mannerisms and rhetorical style and such, which is why you have people who to this day are just simply not aware that the actual policy legacy, policy record of the Trump administration, vis-a-vis something like Russia, an issue like Russia, Russia was more hawkish or classically, you know, quote-unquote interventionist than Obama's. And, you know, for all the faults of the current administration, one thing that's at least mildly refreshing is that it's a little harder to be like obsessed 24-7 with the personage of Joe Biden. Like it's just not, there's just not enough content there for anyone to get nearly as worked up about. Yeah. Now, you know, one of the tragedies of the Trump administration before and probably the next time, I don't know how things are going now. We'll see what happens. But there are plenty of right wingers who are good on foreign policy. I use the term broadly speaking, but, you know, libertarian leaning and restraint-minded type conservatives. And with credentials too, right? I'm not saying he has to, you know, scrape the blog at anti-war.com. There are plenty of people who, in fact, we came up with an entire America first type cabinet

form and National Security Council and the rest. So he could do it if he read things and knew who his favorite writers were who had this sort of bent, but he's not even that familiar with his own way of thinking, you know, as far as it goes anyway. He just watches TV and would scroll Twitter. Like you could, I don't think, I mean, even people who like him and who recount their experience with them, they acknowledged that, like, you couldn't get them

to read a document. It had to be distilled into, like, bullet points. Which I'm not even necessarily mocking. I mean, somebody with maybe a limited attention span or isn't a huge reader, I mean, they could still have sound moral convictions, even if they can't really

articulate them in a highly intellectual ways. So, like, the... You've got to be interested, though, you know? But you have to be... But if you're, if you're talking about how you're going to, like, fundamentally change the foreign policy status quo of the most powerful government in world history. You got to be a little invested in the minutia and like the theory of how to go about doing something like that and just sitting around watching Fox News and then hiring John Bolton

because you like what he says on Fox News. I mean, that's probably not the best approach. I think that's right. And look, I mean, that's how he got John Bolton was he liked him on Fox News because he speaks in declarative sentences. then Sheldon Adelson also insisted, and so you got the job. Yeah. But we don't have a lot of people who lean right and against war.

You know, we got a bunch of, you know, Jack Keane, a guy who's never mongered a war. He didn't then lose, but he still has a regular spot on Fox News every day to say, whatever the problem is, it's that we're not being tough enough in all circumstances. So you're just not going to get too much, you know, different discourse than that on TV. TV, frankly. Yeah. And another guy who was at this summit, who was, you know, Trump administration guy was Keith Kellogg, the retired general,

who, you know, class, just standard Republican talk. And, you know, apparently he's America First, and he's also, you know, TV pundit. So that's, you know, that's just the type of people who, if your information consumption habits are like Trump's apparently are in that, you're just, you know, taking in, you're just mainlining standard, whatever the standard fair punditry is that just sort of bubbles to the top of the media ecosystem. Those are the types of people you're going to be, by and large, exposed to. You know, one thing that, another irony here, you know, we've been pretty a dour on Trump, which, you know, for good reason, I would say, mostly.

But there is an irony in that whatever the failures of Trump, to actually adhere to this, you know, quote unquote, America first agenda that everyone feared he might actually be committed to, but evidently was not. And whatever his capitulations or accommodations to just the Republican establishment, whether that was just because of his intellectual disinterest or a combination of conviction or just laziness, who knows. But even given all that, he's still, like, under full frontal assault, from factions of the national security state apparatus, even today, for supposedly being this enormous threat to American national security. Remember, one of the drivers of Russiagate, it wasn't just cheap democratic partisanship. That was a component of it, obviously.

But I always thought that Trump misrepresented the true nature of, retrogate when he would just reduce it to, you know, like 12 angry Democrats, remember when we would say that about the Mueller investigation or what have you? Of course, everything eventually gets folded into just generic partisan enthusiasms in the U.S. given, you know, the polarization effect. But really, what it was always more fundamentally about I observed was this non-partisan yet still very much ideological belief within the security state establishment and it's like ansel and it's like satellites in the think tank apparatus and stuff that Trump was subverting the rightful American foreign policy status quo and so you know Trump was

actually investigated by the FBI after he fired Comey in 2017 for the alleged crime of being a quote threat national security threat and Andrew McCabe who launched that investigation which was sort of was concurrent with but not the same as like the main Russia gate investigation cross-fired a hurricane this is like a secondary investigation that McCabe launched McCabe in explaining his rationale for why Trump ought to be investigated on counterintelligence grounds for being a potential national security threat while Trump was president, right? Why the incumbent president ought to be investigated for this, according to McCabe, was Trump's just straight up foreign policy views.

That's what McCabe said. So evidence of why Trump ought to need to be investigated on these grounds that McCabe would cite would be stuff like Trump's story. tweets about Russia. And so, I mean, whatever, Trump wasn't a huge deviation from the status quo policy-wise in any meaningful respect. He was a huge deviation rhetorically or temperamentally or in terms of PR. Which, by the way, parentheses here, Michael, he ran on getting along with Russia.

It's not like it was a secret that then he surprised us all with. This was evidently the American people's foreign policy. Yeah, but even given that dearth of genuine deviation, it was still enough to prompt this frothing explosion of frenzy and overreach on the part of the national security state and on the part of the boosters of the national security state in the think tank world and the media world. Look at how little it takes, right? And it's still going on. I mean, he's still, he's as of today. You know, I've sort of tuned out a bit from the ins and outs of this, investigate, this, you know, the aftermath of this raid on Mar-a-Lago and whatnot.

But, you know, I am aware that the affidavit that was eventually released at the acquiescence of the Department of Justice revealed that Trump is, A crime for which Trump is being investigated and that was cited in the application for the warrant to raid Marlago was the Espionage Act, which, you know, puts now Trump in the company of people like Eugene and Debs, you know, and Snowden and Assange as people who have been investigated as, you know, basically a threat to national security in a sense that would be roughly seen as treasonous. And for what exactly? I mean, I'm still unclear what the supposed national security threat was as a result of his possession of these documents. But whatever the specific details, it's a continuation of this very strange trend where someone who's clearly not, whose actions do not suggest a genuine desire. to actually undermine the national security state in any meaningful way, still is provoking this, these unprecedented, you know, punitive actions and, you know, backlashes on the part

of the national security state. I mean, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. Um, you know, I have to say, uh, it certainly is. And, and frankly, like, I think you're right that Trump probably undermine his own case here more than any other person other than, you know, the people attacking him when just like he said, he paraphrased it or, sorry, characterized it all as, you know, oh, just the Democrats are out to get me when

what is the secret police who were out to get him? And even when people like yourself or, you know, Aaron Mote would have like a cover, I don't know the cover, but a major feature in the nation magazine about Trump didn't do it. This is all a hoax.

He would pay no attention No one would even, he didn't even have anyone loyal to him enough, I guess, to say, hey, this major Democratic Party-leaning magazine ran this full feature that you ought to be beating him all over the head with to even tell him, to even bring it to his attention to tweet it out. So the same day that Aramante would be like, okay, the following 17 accusations are now moot and dead, he would say, unfair, witch hunt, you're being mean to me because of what bullies you are. Yeah, great. And so, yeah, then it worked. I mean, they, for three years, they kept that going. And, you know, Ray McGovern said the obvious thing to do would be to declassify. He is the president. He could fire everybody in charge of the investigation, including Mueller and everyone. You're all fired. However, I'm declassifying everything that FBI, CIA, and NSA have on my campaign in Russia. Everything. We're turning it over to the Congress and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Have at it. because I didn't do it and it's all fake and I'm moving on from here and they wouldn't be able

to impeach him for that he turns all the documents over to them he knew he was innocent he told this is in Woodward's book Woodward kept this secret the whole time until he published this book

way late in the game where he said oh yeah by the way Trump told his lawyer Dowd give every scrap of paper to Mueller I don't give a damn because I'm 100% innocent and Dowd said you sure

and he said I'm sure go right ahead and then Dowd gave almost 99% certain was Dowd was his lawyer gave everything over to the Robert Mueller investigation and said, look, we're being fair with you guys, you just be fair with us.

Yeah, and he on his way out of office in January 2020 probably also shot himself in the foot in that he was so obsessed with this election fraud stuff, and I don't even want to get into the merits of that because it's extremely tedious. But he hampered what was another goal of his at the time, which was to declassify Rushagate documents and get them released. I mean, he had Mark Meadows send a memo to, I'm trying to recall the agency now.

I'm going to, Mark Meadows drafted a memo at Trump's direction to order the declassification of a whole swath of Russia Gate-related materials. But because of the bureaucratic roadblocks, they weren't released. And so there's been indication that maybe some of these documents, and I think even Trump himself has said this, or alluded to it anyway, that some of the documents he took that are now supposedly grounds for investigating him criminally as a violator of the Espionage Act, they were Russiagate related. And he took them into his own personal possession because, you know, he couldn't get them released through the ordinary. channels bureaucratically that were set up, even though he, as president, is, you know, universally agreed constitutionally to have the power, to have the sole authority to classify or declassify anything he would like at will without meaning to go through any particular bureaucratic process. But, you know, that's in practice. He's still hampered by it.

So, you know, because he was so mired in these election fraud theories and, you know, talking to Mike Flynn about seizing, you know, voting machines and stuff, I guess it must have been a bit of a distraction from doing something that actually could have had some positive effect, at least in terms of public understanding and knowledge and transparency in getting this stuff out. But, you know, his attention wide elsewhere. Yeah. All right. Now, listen, before I let you go, can you talk to me real quick about this piece you wrote about Democrats and Republicans pretend they have massive unbridgeable differences so they can unite seamlessly on war. You got some really crucial paragraphs in here, Michael.

Yeah, yeah. So this was two or three weeks ago. By the way, people want to just write my substack. I ordinarily would have something published in September by now, but I've been working on a more long-term thing for a little while. So, but if you do subscribe, I'll at least try to get out one or two things a week. But yeah, but this was in August, I was actually in D.C. for the, on the day the Senate ratified the amendment to the North Atlantic Treaty, allowing for the admission of Sweden and Finland into NATO. And as expected, the treaty amendment it was approved 95 to 1. It would have been approved 99 to 1 had, you know, like Pat Leahy, not been, you know, 100

years old and broken a hip and, you know, a couple other just random absences. And, you know, it brought to mind for me that I was aware that when the first round of NATO expansion occurred in the 90s. So this was when Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and... That's the first three. Am I missing one? No, that's the first three right there. Yeah, when they were first admitted to NATO,

you know, it was actually a fairly robust debate that was prompted around that. Now, it was always pretty much assured that NATO expansion would ultimately be approved by the Senate. And the House doesn't actually have a say in it because it's a treaty issue, which is the Senate's sole purview. So even though it was basically conventional wisdom that this would get passed,

given the vehement efforts of Joe Biden, who actually shepherded NATO expansion through the Senate as the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And, you know, say what you will about, Biden in terms of what his genuine convictions are, but I do think a genuine conviction of his that has remained constant throughout the decades is that he actually is ardently in favor of NATO expansion and projecting American military and economic hegemonic by way of NATO.

So he ushered through NATO expansion in 1990. age, right? Or not with it, 97, 98? Well, it was all kind of through there. I mean, the final deal was inked in 99. And by the way, I only learned this recently, or maybe I had known it then, but forgotten that it was just three weeks after the final inauguration of the expansion of those first three nations, that they turned right around and launch an aggressive war against Serbia, an illegal, undeclared and un-congressional authorized war. Yeah, well, the... Oh, and based on the hoax that 100,000 innocent civilians have been killed, which was, a total lie. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's another can of worms.

Actually, I recently read an article by Chomsky, actually, where he, I think a year or two after the U.S. attack on Serbia, or U.S. NATO attack on Serbia, did an extremely comprehensive review of the available evidence as to the war supposedly being launched to stop. genocide and they came away with the conclusion that that was a total farce. You know, I don't know if I've ever read that. Do you remember the title of that? Not the top of my head. I'll

send it to you. Okay, cool. I know John Pilger was there and watched. He reported on the FBI came and started looking for the mass graves and then they left after two weeks because it was just make-belief. There was one mass grave. It had like 3,000 guys in it. They were all fighting age males. Maybe some of them were civilians. But the 100,000? They just didn't exist. It was. Yeah. And Chomsky also concludes that, you know, one of the supposedly humanitarian grounds on which the intervention was launched was that there had been this mass refugee crisis. But what Chomsky ascertains is that there really have been no mass refugee crisis until the bombing started.

Right. Like, so in other words, the cause of the crisis was the bombing. That's right. And look, I mean, it was total hoaxes, too, like they had a photographer climb over. There was like a fence around an electrical, like keep out little electric station thingy. And he climbed over the fence to the inside of it and then said, hey, kids, come here and had some kids come over to the fence. Then he took some pictures of him and said, oh, look at the poor kids locked in the camp somewhere or whatever. This kind of like. And then he had Christian Amunpore from CNN got married to Jamie Rubin, the State Department spokesman, right in the middle of the war. And they're just shoveling shit the whole time, man. It was no different than Iraq War II, like smaller scale, but just as completely bad, you know, to go back and think about how crazy it was. It was. And Chinese officials even just relatively recently, you know, like around the beginning of the Ukraine War this year, they still kept bringing up the instance of the U.S. bombing. Was it a U.S. plane that bombed the Chinese embassy or another NATO?

Yeah, it was the U.S. right? I know it was obviously NATO, I wasn't sure it was like literally a U.S. plane or not. But yeah, I mean, the Chinese embassy was bombed and, you know, it was totally inimical to what the U.S. claim was supposed to be the justification for the bombing. And, of course, China furiously objected. I mean, can you imagine today what the response would be if China or God forbid Russia bombed a U.S. embassy somewhere? Yeah. Hey, you guys, on October the 15th, I'm doing a Defend the Guard rally in Somerset, New Jersey. Find out all about it at defend the guard.us.

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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. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things comes The Rose. Starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Samburg,

Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. I mean, they claimed it was an accident at the time, but it wasn't. Then the question was just why they did it, and some said it was because they had, I think, the reigning theory is that an F-117 fighter had been shut down previously and that the Chinese had gotten their hands on it. And so the Americans are trying to destroy. Although, I'm sorry, man. I used to be way smarter than I am now. Something tells me that there was a story that just came out in the last couple years that had changed that a little bit, but I'm sorry. I can't

remember quite what it was. Well, you know, something that actually has happened just in the past couple years is that the president of Kosovo, which of course was created as a country because of this intervention and because of, you know, a unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 that the U.S. supported, even though the U.S. prattles about the supposedly, you know, sacrosanct nature of territorial integrity, the president of NATO had to resign in 2000. 2020 because he was being prosecuted, or he was being charged by the Hague for crimes against humanity committed in the late 90s when he was a member of this basically militia group that the U.S. cited as its, you know, a brave humanitarian thing.

foreign, you know, force that it was intervening to save. You know, it's like 25 years later, it's one of these valorous people that supposedly were these freedom fighters that the U.S. needed to intervene to assist. You know, now it's being charged for war crimes of the sort that the U.S. claimed it was intervening to put a stop to. Anyway, but back to the NATO expansion thing. So in 98, the vote that took place in the Senate for the ratification of the fat first round of the NATO expansion was 98. Biden was the lead sort of emissary for the administration and shepherding it through.

And although it was basically a foregone conclusion that it was going to get passed, because if the Washington Post said at the time, and I doubt you'd get such candor today from the Washington Post. But what it said in 1998 was that, quote, approval was virtually assured for NATO expansion in large part due to, quote, pressure from ethnic constituencies and the prospect of new markets for the American defense industry at a time of shrinking U.S. demand. Now, if pressure from ethnic constituencies and or the prospect of new markets for the American defense industry were drivers of U.S. foreign policy action today, especially vis-a-vis Ukraine. I doubt there would be many people in the media who would be willing to state as much

as bluntly as the Washington Post actually did in 1998. But the New York Times was very frank back then about the role of Lockheed and pushing the committee for NATO expansion. Bruce Jackson. I mean, you can read great stuff about that even in the New York Times quite surprisingly. Well, yeah, because, you know, opposition to NATO expansion in that period was obviously cross-cutting ideologically. But it might have even been coded, you know, if you had to pick one or the other, it might have been coded as relatively more left-wing than right-wing. You know, like Bill Bradley, for example, was against it, and then a couple years later ran the Democratic primaries as the progressive challenger to Al Gore in 2000.

You know, plenty of figures like that. Paul Wellstone. Hell, Jerry Brown, too. Yeah, but Paul Wellstone, you know, he was the paramount, you know, so quote unquote progressive in the Senate until he died a plane crash and was in 2002. And he was against NATO expansion. And of course, he had to be canon on all the paleocons too. Well, yeah, yeah, of course.

But now it's coded as exclusively, again, this like Lindberg thing. But in 98, again, notwithstanding the like the certainty of the passage, it is interesting, it was interesting to go back and look in the archive and be reminded that it was one of the rare occasions where there actually was a somewhat thoroughgoing debate. Like Joe Biden would have direct colloquies with colleagues to debate NATO expansion on the Senate floor, which the Senate almost never does. But because senators of such stature like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was the Democratic senator from New York, it was seen as like sort of idiosyncratically, neo-conservative in his domestic views, but a little bit more hard to pin down on foreign stuff, he was gravely opposed to NATO expansion because he said that it was going to eventually down the line, you know, probably. when he's not even around anymore, results in the increased likelihood of a nuclear, you know, apocalypse. But he debated Biden, you know, on the floor of the Senate pretty vigorously. And although the, you know, the bill passed, I mean, the measure passed, I think it was, was it 19 senators who voted against it?

If I have the number right, yeah, 19, yeah, 19 senators, which is, you know, obviously not enough to stop the passage of the treaty amendment, you know, which requires two-thirds of majority. But it was a significant chunk. I mean, it wasn't that far from getting to 33, right? That could have actually blocked it. Again, the point is that there was enough of a constituency with enough of a high, enough high-profile people. I mean, you probably know the whole, like, you know, history of George Kennan, you know,

complaining about, you know, expansion to the New York Times thing was going to be this historic mistake and so forth. But the point is that there was enough dissension that there had to at least be in allowance for some actual debate. Today, Patrick Moynihan. In the New York Times, they have a piece about Dana Patrick Moynihan debating with Joe Biden about this.

And Moynihan's got this great stuff to say. about we're this is like an iron ring around russia's neck and all this stuff and biden the new york times writes is flailing his arms in the air as he rants that essentially i don't understand what you're saying is like more less the the quote of joe biden but they even the new york times couldn't help but add his arms flailing in the air like you know um i guess Kermit the Frog when he's running away. Yeah, and Biden, again, say what you will about him. He does seem to be authentically passionate about this issue.

And in fact, he carried that forth into 2003 when he played the same role as an emissary for the next round of administration, of NATO expansion, this time vis-a-vis Bush for the Baltic states. and and the actually I'm going to I mean to write a full piece about this at some point but if you look at what Biden said at the time this is 03 so the peak of Iraq war invasion hysteria May of 2003 the war had just been launched the patriotic fervor at a fever pitch the Senate rushes through the ratification of NATO expansion for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, I think Bulgaria and Romania, which even if you had gone back to 98, Biden said, look, I mean, I don't think Russia really has any legitimate

complaint about the admission of Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO. But, you know, if it were to come to, for example, the Baltic is going to get admitted to NATO, then you could see them maybe having some more legitimate complaints. That's what I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but Biden said something pretty much to that effect just a few years before. But then 03 happens. Everybody's in a war on terror frenzy. People forget that, you know, Europe exists for a while. And Biden spirits through that round of NATO expansion even more seamlessly, in part because he says these countries that were being admitted to NATO deserve to be credited, deserve, you know, almost a quid pro quo for having joined the U.S. in waging the war on terror.

And Biden said in 2003 that he hoped that someday Ukraine would also be likewise, have been into NATO, in part because Ukraine had that at the time, joined the U.S. in waging the war on terror. Actually, Ukraine was the third largest, Ukraine had the third largest military deployment to the Iraq war, only after the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.K., which is sort of amazing. And Biden thought, and so did Bush that countries who were on board with that post-9-11 agenda need to be rewarded. And so they got NATO expansion. But anyway, the point I was making in the article was that, you know, there was a somewhat more robust. There was something of a debate. Like a debate existed in 98 around the wisdom of NATO expansion. Now in 2022, across the political spectrum, debate has almost vanquished, been vanquished.

And Sweden and Finland joining NATO would have been radically unthinkable. Like, as few as five years ago, definitely 10 years ago, and in 1998, it would have sounded like admitting Mars to NATO. And yet, nobody in the Senate or really even the media thought that it was a matter worth debating. Tell them about Rand Paul, Michael. Well, yeah, yeah. I was at the NATO summit, actually, in Madrid in June. And, yeah, I mean, it's just a, it was like an article of faith that this was like a proposition that was outside the realm of debatability. So everybody from Burney, so like Bernie Sanders, for example, he wasn't in the Senate at the time in 98 when that first round of NATO expansion was being debated.

He was in the House. And so like on his own initiative, he gave a floor speech warning that NATO expansion was an unjustified encroachment onto Russia and was extremely dangerous. And then even recently as this February, so prior to the Ukraine war being launched, Bernie Sanders gave another floor speech where he said, you know, the standard lines about, look, you know, Russia is the aggressor, et cetera. But he said, you know, we have to at least recognize that the backdrop for the creation of this crisis has to do with unwise NATO expansion in the past. It was sort of a tepid, tepidly constructed argument, but at least he mentioned it. And this is on the floor of the Senate. But now, you can't even get him to give a comment explaining why he voted for NATO expansion.

And he votes for everything now. He voted for the Ukraine war funding appropriations bill in May, $40 billion. Every measure that comes up related to the war, NATO now, he votes unflinchingly in favor of. But the thing that strikes me is there's not even pressure. or, like, there's no constituency in his, like, realm, in his orbit of influencers. So staff, the activist movement that he kind of propelled with the two presidential campaigns, sympathetic media figures who were, you know, ardently pro Bernie as a result of the presidential campaigns.

There's not even any pressure coming in his direction from any constituency, which he would feel the need to be responsive to, even requesting that he simply provided an explanation for why his position has diametrically flipped. And now he's in favor of admitting to NATO a country with, you know, hundreds of miles of direct land border with Russia. So you have, you know, on the quote left, you have the vaporization of any real debate or dissension on this issue. But the And then, yeah, Ram Paul as well. And I actually, I didn't know if I included this in the article, but I found it later, or I was reminded of it later. But in 2017, Ram Paul objected to the admission of Montenegro to NATO, which is, you know, most people hadn't even heard what's happening.

I mean, most people don't even know what a Montenegro is. It's a micro state in southern Europe. that was admitted to NATO ultimately under Trump. The Trump signed off on it. You know, again, Putin's stooge, but presided over two rounds of NATO expansion. In 2017, Ram Paul actually at least procedurally objected to it. And here was his quote in why he was opposed. Our unrestricted, unvoted upon involvement in war everywhere informs by opposition to expanding NATO.

So that was why he opposed expanding NATO just to include a tiny microsignate. in 2017. Now, including two much larger countries, one of which is right on the border with Russia, and both of which had long legacies of military neutrality, with Sweden actually having been neutral since Napoleon, here's what Ram Paul says. In this new world, I am less adamant about preventing NATO's expansion. Huh. Okay, then. Now, look, I mean, I don't think it's inherently untenable for politicians to change their positions on things. But it would be nice if at least, you know, Sanders and Paul could be subjected to some intelligent questioning on why it is that they changed their views.

you know, if I, I, I would love to ask them myself, myself. When I was in D.C. during that vote, I talked to some other senators briefly, but neither of them. And yeah, it's just, so the contrast, I think, is worth noting that of how much debate has been constricted even since 98. And by the way, the one senator who did vote against NATO expansion for Sweden, Finland, Josh Hawley, if you actually, you know, do the really, you know, shocking task of listening to how he actually justified his vote. So he gave a floor speech and he wrote an item for the national interest explaining why he was opposed to who's going to be opposing NATO expansion. he makes it only ambiguous that he was not going to be voting against national expansion on any real principle in that he objected to the expansion of U.S. military hegemony or he thought it was going to be provocative or he thought it was going to be a dangerous step toward some sort of military conflagration with Russia and what have you. He had no principled objection. And his only objection, and he was totally unambiguous about this,

was that he thought that whatever U.S. military resources are going to be deployed now, deployed now to Europe ought to instead be deployed to East Asia to prepare for what Hawley suggests is an inevitable war with China. So the sole opponent of NATO expansion is somebody who says his expansion is predicated on wanting to make sure that the U.S. is able to wage war in a different part of the world. And yeah, so there you have it. It's sort of a telling, I think, reflection of how the discourse, let's say. on these and related issues has depreciated over the years. Yeah. Well, and then, you know, in this time where everybody, no matter what your politics,

is completely caught up and interested in the destruction of the American economy, you know, they tell us in government school from the time we're little kids that war is good for the economy. Well, you spend a trillion dollars a year on war, and we're all broke. So what the hell is that mean? Maybe it's good for some people's economy, but not. not the countries overall. How about that? And so, you know, I mean, everybody has seen the chart, right?

Everybody's mama has seen the chart of the, you know, the bar graph of American military spending outranks the rest of the world times 10 and this kind of thing. It's national suicide, clearly. And, you know, people talk about China taking over the world. I like Dave Smith said this on the Tim Poole show the other day. He's like, you guys might know is we can't afford to take over the world. We're $30 trillion in debt.

And we only rule like two-thirds of it, you know? And that ain't going to last. To think that, what, Russia or China or who else is going to somehow replace our hegemony? That's not a worry. Global conquest is unaffordable from, you know, any one location, clearly. We've proven that. Yeah, like, yeah, you know, one of the articles of faith that I remember personally being taught in, like, history classes that And during World War II got the U.S. out of the Great Depression.

And I'm not, I'm not 100% discounting and stimulating the economy. I mean, I don't want to have a good economy. I don't know if, I mean, I'm not as much of an economics guy, but, well, you know what, when they conscripted 14 million men that brought down the unemployment rate. Right. I mean, so there might be some truth to like the, how stimulating the economy to such a massive extent with state intervention might have had that effect. You know, what it still, it became an article of faith. And, you know, I was, I also recently read a report issued in the 30s by this progressive Republican senator from North Dakota, the name of Gerald Nye, who, you know, was in the tradition of like, you know, a Robert Lafellette, sort of like populace and his Midwestern Great Plains. conservative, not conservative, progressive, rather, although, you know, who knows, these

these ideological descriptors are somewhat meaningless. But he was actually, he was authorized to conduct a year's long investigation in the 30s into what brought the U.S. into World War I. And his committee, you know, the nine committee, ultimately produced a stinging report that basically blamed U.S. entry into World War I on the surreptitious, cynical machinations of, you know, almost entirely unregulated munitions industry or arms industry. And, you know, the report actually had a fairly significant effect. You know, it sort of led to the adoption of the neutrality laws that were supposed to prevent the U.S. from getting involved in another, you know, foreign entanglement that could lead to a world war. in Europe or elsewhere, which of course were eventually abolished.

But, you know, I only bring that up to say or to to wonder if anybody of not a stature of a eye or even less of a stature. Somebody in a position of influence who's like in, you know, roughly in the ideological mainstream who, you know, was maybe a bit independent minded, could. Would they even, you know, begin in this political context to contemplate launching a comparable investigation as to current U.S. foreign policy to see whether the armaments industries is similarly manipulating U.S. policy for its own self-interest? Could they even launch an inquiry into that?

I don't think they could. Definitely not if it was seen, if it would be seen to undermine the fervency of the case for U.S. policy means of Ukraine. Like if it called into question any aspect of current U.S. policy on Ukraine, and I think also probably as well, Taiwan, I don't know if they could politically withstand the heat. So think about that. at least based on that metric it would seem that the there was more of a open intellectual and political and media climate in the period leading up to world war two on these questions than there is today yep no surprise um well i don't know it's shocking but not surprised surprising, I guess. It's been like this for so long now. You know, this whole year long, we're celebrating the 20th anniversary of them lying us into Iraq War II. And to argue that we didn't need to preemptively invade Iraq before they could attack us, like what Osama did on 9-11

or whatever, made you essentially a very bad guy. It wasn't until after Katrina, in the summer of 05, before TV was willing to concede that maybe these aren't the most competent. managers in all of world history and maybe some of this stuff can be questioned now after it was years too late every left wing blog or even liberal blog in that early iraq war period was you know dedicated to just 12 rounds a day about halberton and dick cheney you know in that they were ascribing some sort of self-interested financial motive to why u.s policy was geared in the way it was and you know obviously there was some credence to those points i don't think you could even raise anything like those points today you get shadow banned at least you know yeah i mean

you can't you can't even make so again so again put another way which and and if compounds the shock i mean not i'm not surprised but maybe the shock like you're going to you're more discursively limited today in raising points of skepticism about U.S. foreign policy, then you would have been, even during that early Iraq war period. Because at least during in 2003, right, the war had been authorized by the Senate and the House and such. But, you know, I think in the Senate, what was like 72, 25 or something around there? I mean, you have like a quarter or so of the Senate, all Democrats and one Republican, Lincoln

Chafee, if memory serves, who had voted against the war. So there was some, you know, room within the broad American political spectrum to at least have some debate or to, you know, to sort of cultivate oppositional ideas. Now the conformity has just been so strenuously. entrenched that you don't even have the discursive space that was available in 2003, which again, I don't know, should I think be shocking to some people, or at least the types of people who would in 2003, I think, have rightly objected to how, you know, oppressive the political climate was. But, you know, a lot of those same people now are, you know, they're in favor of the reasons why,

this particular climate is quite oppressive. Yeah, I feel you. All right, well, with that, at least we're able to do interviews and podcast them out and I know people love listening to you, so we do have our silver linings, you know?

Yeah, I'll try to hang on to that. There you go. Well, all right, man, have a good weekend. I appreciate you doing the show. Great to talk to you again. And always love reading you. All right, thanks a lot.

All right, thanks a lot. Everybody, that's Michael Tracy. He's over at Substack and, of course, on Twitter. 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.