 Our guest this weekend is my old friend Daniel McAdams. Daniel is executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and someone I've known for many, many years having worked with him in Congressman Ron Paul's office. So as you might guess, we are talking about foreign policy this weekend. Daniel will get us up to date on what's happening in Syria, what's happening with ISIS. We will talk a little bit about Capitol Hill and the corrupting influence of the establishment and neocon lobbies on young and new members of Congress, and we will also talk a bit about the really phony distinction between economic policy, trade policy, and foreign policy, which if you believe our founding fathers are all interrelated. So stay tuned for a great interview with Daniel McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute. Daniel McAdams, welcome to Meesa's weekends. Thanks so much for joining us. Hey Jeff, thanks for having me. Great to be with you. Well I mentioned in the intro that you and I are old friends. We've known each other for a long time and I wanted to ask you this. We both spent plenty of time on Capitol Hill. We saw how committees work, how lobbyists work, how the foreign policy establishment works, but even so, does it still amaze you the extent to which money, I mean just pure funding is available for the foreign policy establishment and especially the neoconservative think tanks in DC? Oh absolutely. I mean and it's not, they don't even try to hide it if you go to the Institute for the Study of War for example, which is run by Bob Kagan's wife, Big Neocon. They have it right there on their donation page. We're supported by Lockheed Martin and all the other guys, all the other warmongers. So they don't even try to hide it. And you know it's funny, Jeff, because I know I got a hint that we're going to talk about Saudi Arabia later. So I can say this to preview. When I first got back to DC from living overseas for a number of years, I was working for another organization, not Ron Paul, and one of the first things that I went to, actually maybe when I first went to work for Ron Paul, but it was very early on, but it was a black tie event and wow it was so exciting being new to DC and I went there and it was just so lavish. You wouldn't believe it. All those personalities, all the, I think, sting was there and some of these other actors, it was all put on by the Saudis, the Saudi Arabian Embassy. And you talk about a spread. You talk about money put down. And this is sort of, I guess, soft power and soft lobbying, but it was a real eye-opener. There's a lot of money in DC, if you say the right things. Well, it's interesting how DC is such a foreign policy bubble. I mean, out in the hinterlands, out in the world, I can't find any ordinary people who actually support expanding our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, increasing or beginning a presence, a physical presence in Syria, potentially having an armed conflict or a bombing conflict with Iran. In other words, these positions seem to be held nowhere outside of DC. And I mean that literally. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think there are some diehard Fox News-loving neocons that think, yeah, we got to get in there and take care of business. But I think actually something else that's even perhaps somewhat more insidious has taken place though. And that's the idea that all of this can easily be replaced by drone warfare. So you'll have a guy who would never think of having US troops go to some of these places, but he has no problems at all with some guy in Arizona or Nevada sending bombs from an anonymous drone and killing a bunch of people. So unfortunately, it's not that they're against getting involved in wars there. They just don't want to put US troops in. You mentioned Ron Paul earlier, and obviously Ron has retired from Congress. Explain to our listeners, you know, what happens? Let's say a bright idealistic young congressman or congresswoman shows up in Washington, DC, with no particular interest or thoughts or expertise in world affairs or foreign policy. How does the war lobby and the war party go about getting their hooks into him? How does that happen? Well, I think it's an intoxication process that happens pretty quickly with new members. And from all the time we've been there, Jeff, I think there are maybe a couple that were partially immune to it. And I know Ron was totally immune to it. That's a whole different story. But when you get there and you see that you can do things like park your car anywhere, be called served by anyone, you know, and just be the king of the hill, especially if you come from some place where there isn't this kind of treatment. Say you're a lowly businessman actually doing something useful. When you get to DC, you're treated like a king, and that can really start to make you think, hey, I'm really somebody. And then the leadership will come to you and say, hey, you're a bright young guy, you know, you have got a lot of potential. We've got good ideas for you. You know, and they'll and they'll also when you first get there, don't forget, they will give you staffers. And you and I know this, Jeff, staffers went from member to member, you know, they change staffers like to change their underwear. These guys went back and forth. And if there's a new upcoming member, you'd get new staffers, but it all came from the centralized party. And that's why they were all vetted, especially the foreign affairs types. They were all vetted by these people to to reflect the prevailing view, which is an interventionist world view. And so that protected them. That protected the members and the leadership from having any challenges. Yeah, that's so true. I think people understand that it is as administrations come and go in Washington. Most of the people who work at the administrative agencies remain. But what they don't understand so clearly is that as members of Congress and the Senate come and go, there's sort of a cadre of staffers that remain, especially in committees where the bill writing takes place. It's a it's a huge problem. It's an industry unto itself. Let me ask you this, looking at the Bernie and Trump phenomenons, there is, you know, some glimmer of daylight of a populist anti-war sentiment, perhaps in both those camps in America first or bring our troops home sentiment. And I know Ron and Paul is far too humble to ever say this, but do you ever think that Ron feels like, you know, he really started that and that a lot of this populist anti-war sentiment that's out there, he's responsible for? I think you're right. He would not jump up and say it. But I think he knows that it's certainly true. But I also think he knows that as soon as there was some traction under what he was doing, the establishment came in and pulled the rug out from under his feet immediately and look at something like the Tea Party, which was the Ron Paul event. No question about it. Started by Ron Paul started by Ron Paul supporters. This great idea to do this. And the at that time, the frustration with Washington, the anger, the populism, the establishment moved in very, very quickly to try to harness that and move it in a more quote positive direction. So you had a bunch of Washington insiders coming up with organizations I probably shouldn't name, but to divert all that energy into them. And pretty soon, what did you see some of the real the core of what Ron Paul is about was just simply gone. It was completely sent to the gulag. No more talk about ending the Fed. No more talk about a non-interventionist foreign policy and end to foreign aid. No, it just became, you know, waste, fraud and abuse and this kind of general too much, you know, too much taxes and things. So they were able to do that. But I don't think the sentiment change. People still had it. And I think that, you know, Trump and Sanders to a degree are tapping into that. They understand that that's out there and they're tapping into it, unfortunately, without adhering to, you know, some of the to the views that Ron had when he ran. Let me give you an example of what I mean. It seems to me that a significant percentage of Americans now view the Iraq war and our invasion and occupation of Iraq as a mistake, as a blunder. By contrast, it took decades. It took many decades for Americans, I think, to be dishonest with themselves about Vietnam. It took a long time for us to admit that was a mistake. I just wonder if you think this is healthy if we have, despite all the raw raw stuff that was going on when W first invaded Iraq, I wonder if we're becoming a little more introspective about these terrible wars that we're starting. Well, Jeff, you and I both have relatively young children and, you know, we probably go through this on a, I know I do on a daily basis that a child does something wrong. You tell them it's a mistake. You explain why and in two minutes later they do it again. So, I mean, we have that to a degree, you're right. There is, there is a realization that it was a mistake. However, nobody learned from the mistake. The same media that lied us into the war in Iraq lied to us about all of the things leading up to Syria. And they, and nobody, it wasn't questioned. And they lied to us about why the US had to start bombing in Syria. Remember, at the time, there was this new mysterious Corazon group that was even scarier than ISIS. And if we didn't get in there right now, they would take over the world. And that was presented as, and everyone said, yeah, Ron, okay, you know, we get it, but this is too bad and too evil and too dangerous. We can't ignore this. So to a degree, they didn't learn from the mistakes. They didn't understand that they're manipulated by the media and by the politicians and the neocons. And the other thing I would say that's maybe at least as disturbing as I think there's a long, an ongoing rehabilitation process for the Iraq war. And you already will hear a lot of the neocons say, okay, yeah, it didn't work out well. But that's because that feckless Obama pulled our troops out. If you'd only stayed in there and kept all the troops there, things would be going well right now. So and you have a lot of that revisionism over Vietnam as well. But so yes, it's good that people more quickly have decided that it's a disaster. But there are some concerning factors that I would consider mitigating. Yeah, it's interesting. Neocons always blame the prosecution of the war rather than going to war itself as the problem. A prosecution, I will add that they never involve themselves in by joining up. So when Ron retires, he creates the Ron Paul Institute to keep alive his non-interventionist views. So give us an example. What's, for example, in brief, what's the Washington line on Syria versus what's the Ron Paul Institute truth on Syria is just one example. Well, the Washington line on Syria is particularly deceptive because on the one hand, they're selling to the American people. We have got to go after ISIS. We've got to go after ISIS. And they've terrified the American people enough that the American people have agreed by and large to this plan. But they're not going after ISIS because they're much more concerned. And they have been since 2006 at least. They're much more concerned with going after ISIS's chief enemy, which is the Assad government in Syria. And that's been ongoing. You know, back in 2006, there was a US embassy cable back to the State Department in Washington, outlining the different ways that the US could undermine and overthrow the Syrian government. And one of them was to help ramp up the threat of Islamic extremism to show that the Assad regime is not as powerful as Syrian citizens think, and thereby undermine confidence in the government and hasten the fall of the government. So the US has been in this game for a long time. They've been pushing regime change for a long time in Syria. And they're not fighting ISIS. You know, you're damned to hell for saying this. But the Russians went in in September of 15. And in six months, they achieved much more than the US did. And US went in in June, I think of 14. So over a year and a half longer, they achieved much more in that short time because they focused not only on ISIS, but they focused on Al-Qaeda's franchise in Syria, which is the news forefront, which the US has been suspiciously ambivalent about. As a matter of fact, David Petraeus, the hero of Iraq, openly wrote an article saying we should ally ourselves with Al-Qaeda in Syria. So that's the line that the government is the line that the Ron Paul Institute is adhering to is the same old same old. It's the boring old thing, which is don't do it, don't intervene. It won't turn out well. It won't end well. We can't reorder Syrian society. The problems that have created ISIS are much deeper than that can be solved at the end of a drone or at the end of a bomb. So it's the same message. Simply don't intervene. You know, I'm curious, whatever happened to the Taliban, whatever happened to Al-Qaeda, it seems like ISIS is the new boogeyman and they keep being replaced. And everyone's well, we get one of these press missives that the number two guy has been captured. But there's always a new boogeyman, isn't there? It's just relentless. Absolutely. And it captures the attention there. They do they do even worse things. Remember the babies from the incubator back in 1990 in Iraq and they think of other things. Remember Gaddafi was feeding his troops Viagra and turning them into rape robots. Totally untrue. Total lie. It was all lies. It's always lies to get people to sign on to the war, unfortunately. And this does continue. But as to what happened to the Taliban, well, the Taliban is actually winning in Afghanistan. They've started their spring offensive. And as a result, Obama has decided to leave U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the longest U.S. war in history, to leave them through the end of his presidency. He can't afford to pull them out because there's no way that Afghanistan could have been a success in the way that the U.S. envisioned it. It was always going to fail. It's now just kind of a slow motion failure that's draining the drain draining us in in our in our economy and draining Afghanis in their lives. But the end is inevitable. It was written before it was started. You simply can't do what they wanted to do. What's the real war budget annually? In other words, if we consider the State Department and foreign aid and sanctioning bodies, all this meddling in the U.N. And then, of course, the DOD, the Pentagon, the three branches. What do you think the U.S. government, the U.S. taxpayer, actually spends every year on what we might call the war budget? And you'd have to add to that the care of veterans who have been wounded in previous wars and that percentage of the debt that of the national debt that's for the for the military as well. So that those are two sort of hidden areas. But but it's certainly much more than the, you know, roughly six hundred billion dollars that is advertised. It has to be much closer to a trillion dollars and you would add in things like the Department of Energy because they're in in charge of the enormous the expensive nuclear weapons program. So there's there's a little bit of this in in almost every part of the government. But when you add it together, it's well over a trillion dollars a year. I wanted to bring up something that we used to talk about back in Ron's office. You know, this this term foreign policy is actually not something that existed until I believe perhaps even into the 20th century. In other words, in the earlier period of America, there wasn't this distinction between foreign and domestic policy. And I would argue that as an organization here, the Mises Institute that focuses on economics, that there shouldn't be a distinction between economic policy and trade policy and foreign policy and wars. In other words, these things are all interrelated. Can you talk about this concept of foreign policy and how that somehow should be distinct from congressional squabbling about social security, something in other words, R's and D's are supposed to agree on foreign policy. Yeah, well, I think a lot of it has to be, I mean, just in terms of education, I think you have to lay some of the blame at the universities, you know, who've churned out, and I hate to say this, but they've churned out so many people that have been in the arts, but arts that have masqueraded as sciences. We've seen this a lot with economics, and you certainly know a lot more about this than I do. But I, you know, my before I discovered the joys of Austrian economics, I went through the horrors of keen economics in college. And, you know, and then when I made the mistake, we go into grad school to study international relations. I had a goofy professor who was involved in creating math problems to decide when wars might happen, you know, using probabilities and math and things. So it's a pseudoscience that wants to be a science. And I think it attracts a lot of people who probably couldn't cut it in science or what have you to get PhDs. So it defines itself. And then you have special interests that feed this idea that there are the experts who've studied these things. And they always, going back to what you started with saying, they always have economic interests at heart. You know, it's, it's, it's not devoid at all. It's not that detached from from economics whatsoever. So you do have the rise of this as an idea. But at the same time, it's, it's considered, you know, the, the, the experts in Washington are those that have been able to please their masters, their economic masters, not the ones who are right. Can you imagine in if you're an investment advisor in every single investment, you advise your client is wrong or if you're an attorney and you've and you lose every single time your reputation suffers. But if you're Bill Crystal and everything you predict turns out the opposite, you're still on ABC, you're still an expert on Fox News, you're still there all the time. So it's, it's hard to figure out, you don't have to be right. You just have to say the right things. When we look at the 20th century, especially the second half of the 20th century, it was very much a period of globalization and centralization and some of these world bodies came out. Obviously the League of Nations gave birth to the UN. But now we have things like the IMF. Of course, we have NATO. We have the Eurozone and the EU. We have various trade agreements like NAFTA. The irony is that we've been told, Daniel, that democracy was going to lead to less conflict and fewer wars. And it hasn't turned out that way, has it? In other words, centralization and globalization hasn't made us more peace. No, it hasn't. And I think it's because of the attraction of empire, you know, the U.S. Well, I mean, I would go back even to the rise of the so called conservative movement. And this was, I think the, you know, it decimated the last chance in America for a non-globalist, non-interventionist foreign policy, you know, the rise of the of the progressives in the in the late teens and twenties, you know, presented, you know, with certainly with Wilson, the idea that the U.S. had a duty to remake the world in a certain way. And, you know, they had the reaction among the old right and certainly up, you know, the Taftian Republicans. And I think the rise of the national review Republicans and the very Stalinist idea of the purge, those who thought differently from from the from the globalist conservative movement were purged from the from the movement. That was incredibly destructive in terms of intellectually, you know, people people were sent to the to the intellectual gulag for breaking these rules. We all know people like Joe sober and you can't even mention his name anymore without going to some camp somewhere. But, you know, this is the it's the problem with the destruction of the idea of an America first or of a of a non-interventionist foreign policy. And and unfortunately, I mean, fortunately, we are seeing, you know, with the Ron Paul campaigns was in and even to a degree with what we're seeing with the populist uprisings. Now, we're seeing a return to that, but we're not seeing a real a credible leader who can could put it all into a sort of a neat intellectual package for people. Well, Daniel, I want to thank you for your time and ladies and gentlemen, if you're interested in foreign policy and what's going on in the world, I really have to recommend the RPI website Ron Paul Institute.org. Not only will you find viewpoints that you won't get in the mainstream media, but you also find a lot of facts and information and almost reporting that you won't find anywhere else. And I have to say, Daniel, I really enjoyed Neocon watch. I think it's it's a fascinating take on a very vital subject. And I commend you and Adam Dick and Chris Rossini and of course Ron Paul and others who were involved in keeping the Ron Paul Institute alive because there's really nobody else out there in this huge global world of ours doing and saying what you guys are doing and saying. So again, thanks for your time and we'll get you on the program again. Ladies and gentlemen, you have a great weekend.