 You'll be speaking on, you better listen carefully, it took me a little while to get the exact title of what we're going to be covering here. The Reagan foreign policy, it's causes and consequences. Roy is the Libertarian Review Editor and Frequent Writer for Inquiry Magazine and he's got a current article that will be published next June, I believe, covering the new right. And of course he's the Foreign Policy Analyst for Kato Institute. Do we have a hand for Roy Childs, please? Take me a few seconds to set up my life here. I'm told I have something under a half an hour to speak. I've never spoken for less than half an hour in my life, I don't know what it means. You almost came for the real first because originally I was invited to give something called a breakfast talk and I sent back a very kind letter saying that I understood that there were such things and that there was something called breakfast but I wasn't at all clear what it was and I certainly had no intention of being a part of it whatsoever. I'm going to talk rather informally and probably a little too quickly for you on Reagan Foreign Policy but I would like to sort of lead into it with a different kind of slant and that's to talk about the budget deficits and their consequences. It is now expected by many economists that the official Reagan deficit may be as high as $150 to $160 billion. The Reagan administration itself admits that its deficits will be somewhere on the order of $103 to $105 billion. This I must hasten to add is only the on-budget deficit items. There is something called off-budget items which are also going to be in deficit and fiscal 83 by something on the order of magnitude of $30 to $40 billion. Now there are also state and local government deficits which are predicted or projected to be something on the order of $30 to $50 billion this year. If you add these together the total amount for government deficits in the United States and fiscal year 1983 is going to be something on the order of some $200 billion. Now that's a scary figure but let me scare you a little more with it. The government has essentially two ways of financing a deficit. It can print money or it can go into the bond market and sell bonds and get people to invest their savings in it. Well the interesting thing about this deficit item is that it happens to be some $20 billion more than the total pool of net private savings last year. This means either that there is going to be a total and complete crowding out of private borrowing in fiscal 1983 which means people particularly private industry will not be able to borrow money that it needs for investment and for economic recovery or else the money spickets are going to start flowing and you're going to see a massive increase in the money supply in this country over the next year or two. The other alternative would be for Reagan to go the route of Gerald Ford with his $60 billion deficit and somehow trick the Arabs into recycling their petrol dollars in the form of government bonds. This is not likely to happen for a lot of reasons including renewed strains in a relationship with Arab nations and the whole problem with the coming down of the price of oil and the fact that their anticipated revenues are lower than they expected. So how does this have anything to do with foreign policy? Well, we know obviously that the Reagan administration is going to have the largest defense budget in this country's history. The increase from $129 billion which was an early Carter figure to an authorized spending for the defense budget of some $256 to $58 billion in a matter of less than four years is simply an enormous, enormous increase and I want to maintain that this increase in defense spending is not only unnecessary and monstrous and evil but that it is largely responsible for the deficit. There are only two things really in that budget big enough to affect this, the size of the deficit and that's defense spending and entitlements. Obviously you know me, you know my record in history, you know that I'm against the entitlement programs and I want to see them smashed and reduced all for getting rid of the increase in social security spending and finding some way to disengage from that but I want to concentrate on foreign policy because that is an astonishing area. The reason that's astonishing is that as Ed Clark said during his presidential campaign and Earl Ravanaugh has estimated some 70 to 73 percent of this $258 billion defense authorization is money which is being spent by the United States government to defend and to intervene in the affairs of other nations. Now this breaks down roughly as follows. These calculations are taken from a policy analysis that Earl Ravanaugh has done for the Cato Institute which is just about to be released and his calculations are a little idiosyncratic, ordinary establishment people don't agree with him because Earl insists on looking at the breakdown of our foreign policy according to the principle of what the spending is for. In other words, for Ravanaugh and for myself, the defense budget is the price of our foreign policy. It's for something, to achieve something. And of the $256-258 billion defense budget, about $129 billion directly and indirectly is targeted to go for the defense of, I use that word loosely, in quotes so to speak, Western Europe, NATO. About another $29 to $33 billion is targeted for the defense of or intervention in, whichever you prefer, areas in Asia like Japan and South Korea. The final figure is about $23 to $27 billion targeted to intervene in the Middle East, Africa and places like that. I'm also against intervention in Latin America but that doesn't cost very much. A few billion dollars mostly in economic and military aid to places like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina. I'm going to be resisting anything about the Falklands, it's so ridiculous. I figure if Ayn Rand can get away with refusing to talk about Watergate, which he did until it was over, I can at least, being much more of a shrimp compared to her, I can at least refuse to talk about the Falklands. It's so ridiculous. Old-fashioned, colonialist and imperialist against old-fashioned gangsters and pirates. You have two governments there, which are in trouble economically. Argentina in the worst shape since the 19th century. Britain under this non-thatcherite program of Margaret Thatcher, by which I mean it's not really what she said she was going to do any more than Reagan's is, in deep trouble. And what they're fighting over essentially is that offshore oil, which a study came out in January which precipitated a whole thing that said it's going to be producing about two million barrels a day within three to five years. Two million barrels a day at $30 a barrel, well $60 million a day is not bad if you need something to prop up your government. And that's what the conflict is over. The rest of it is all garbage. And nobody should have to say anything about it. Reagan is sort of charming, taking the side of the old fashioned colonialist, wearing his polo clothes as he prances out to the plane to go off someplace and ride a horse or something. He's a charming figure, I think, if rather obsolete. Unfortunately, not obsolete enough. So I want to talk, since I have about 20, 25 minutes, to give you just sort of an overview of where the Reagan forum policy came out of and where it's going and what its consequences are likely to be. Now there is, as you well know, in this country and throughout Eastern Europe a growing nuclear disarmament movement, a nuclear freeze movement. Ground Zero Week, which took place here the week of April 18th. The massive demonstrations in Europe, the millions of people that have demonstrated in Bonn and in London and Rome and other European capitals, to protest the American deployment of some 576 Pershing II and ground launch cruise missiles to be deployed in Europe in 1983, which in turn is a response to the Soviet deployment of SS20s capable of knocking out most of the major cities in Western Europe, has caused quite an outcry there because in part of Reagan's little pronouncements about limited nuclear war or nuclear war limited to Europe, well, if you lived in Europe, you'd be sort of scared too. The idea that the signals being sent by Russia and the United States are well sort of that maybe the United States and Soviet Union could have a little nuclear war, not a big one, but a little one. And maybe they could just limit it to Europe. I mean, it's only Europe. We wouldn't have to worry about New York City and about Moscow and all those subways and the Empire State building and stuff like that. Just maybe just Europe. We could get away with that. And there's a lot of people in the foreign policy establishments of both nations who sort of exist in a symbiotic relationship, I think, who began talking about this. Well, the Europeans in the meantime, of course, are hearing this because they read The New York Times or whatever. They pick up on CBS News on their radios or whatever. And they hear that this is being discussed. And, of course, they're going a little bonkers. I mean, one 15-megaton nuclear bomb set off by the Russians is going to flatten about three German Hamlets, little towns. It's how condensed Europe is. It's not as spread out as Binghamton is from. I mean, if somebody knew Binghamton might be an outcry, but it would be a small outcry. If you're talking about London or Paris, I mean, the idea of melting the Eiffel Tower, it scares the Europeans. And there have been quite an outcry. 11 members of the European Nuclear Disarmament Movement, as it's called itself, a tour of the United States trying to get some solidarity with Americans, and has been a significant contact with libertarians. At a recent reception for them held in Washington, there were some 18 libertarians out of about 75, 78 people. The upshot of this whole talk, on the bottom line, so to speak, is going to tell you to buy this book, The Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan Schell. It's simply fantastic. It'll grab you from the first page. Its title is lived up to in the book itself, on the threats of nuclear war. And to convince you that you must become active in this. You must become active in the campaign for nuclear freeze and for nuclear disarmament on both sides. The interesting thing about the current nuclear disarmament movement in Europe is that it's a phenomenon in both East and Western Europe. There have been protests and demonstrations in Eastern Europe, recently in Dresden in East Germany, some 4,000 protesters meant to protest the East German and Russian defense policies. In Romania, the president of the country has called for cutting drastically Warsaw Pact military spending. These are little signs and symbols, because they obviously can't be as open and scream like they can in Western Europe. But it's a phenomenon. East German Communist Party tried to affect West German public opinion by pushing the slogan, make peace without weapons. But since it's in German, and there's sort of beaming broadcasts into West Germany, the thing they didn't expect really is that the development of a West European disarmament movement might also become an East European disarmament movement. And it has. And these people are very interesting, because they are calling for the first time for both the United States and Russia to get their troops and their nuclear weapons out of Europe. They want Europe to become what they call a nuclear-free zone. So no longer do we have this talk about, ah, a little nuke here, a little nuke there, it won't hurt much. They want this talk ended. And they want both the Soviet Union and the United States, in effect, to get out of Europe and to leave them alone and to knock off this business of Europe being the center of an east-west superpower struggle. In the United States, I think this is beginning to grow too. We saw tens of thousands of people meeting in college campuses and churches during Ground Zero Week in order to educate themselves, much like the early Vietnam teachings, about the possible or probable effects of a so-called limited or unlimited nuclear war. And I think this is going to be getting to spread, and I want you to get involved in it, as well as me, because I don't want this movement to be a left-wing movement in this country. First, that will kill it. Secondly, I've wondered this ever since I was in high school. I've been politically active since I was nine, so I had early ideas of this. Why the hell? Why the hell is it that every good and decent cause, humane cause, a cause of peace, are picked up and run by the damn left-wing in this country? I'm sick of that. I'm just sick. I'm reposted at these damn Marxist, Trotskyist, LaRoucheite, even sex. These people like the Spartacist League, whose slogan during the marches and things after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was Hail Red Army. Hail Red Army, big banners, Hail Red Army. I mocked them once when I was publicly debating Michael Harrington and Barry Comner. I said, hold that banner up, and they held it up. And I said, now, there's a great slogan to take to the American people to found a peace movement, Hail Red Army. So I'm sick of that, and I think that libertarians have to get involved in a big and important way in this growing effort to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, which is threatening all, not just of human existence, but of virtually all life on this planet. The first part of Jonathan Shell's book, which I repeat, you buy and read it. It's only $12. It's a great book. The first chapter in it is called A Republic of Insects and Grass. Let it sink in that what we're talking about is the fate of the earth, of the human race, of our civilization, of the things we take for granted. I mean movies and music and art and buildings and relationships and love and families and all these little things, LP conventions, all the little things of life that make life worth living. It's a very important issue. My criticism of the disarmament movement is that it's superficial. Because all right, we all think that nuclear war would be a terrible thing, would be a monstrous thing. But saying that nuclear war is bad and is to be avoided is simply not enough. It just isn't. We have to also consider, in addition, I mean, suppose we did freeze all the nukes, that would still leave us with about 10 times the number of warheads that we had in 1970. And that's not that great of progress, is it? That's not that great of progress. You know how many nuclear warheads we have now in terms of explosive power? Crane gave you some figures yesterday, but we have something on the order of one million times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb in the world today, one million times. Now, Hiroshima just flattened 80,000 people like that in a whole city, induced incredible radioactive damage to the whole area, genetic damage, cancers, things like that over the years to come. If we were to explode on this planet a million times that, I mean, it was leaked. Supposedly both sides have stopped this mad strategy, a mutual assured destruction. And now they're supposed to be targeting each other's military targets. But it was leaked last year, probably from the CIA, that our best information is that the Soviets, in the event of a limited attack, have some 62 bombs targeted on New York City alone, New York City area. And we have a similar amount targeted for Moscow. If that's limited, I would hate to see what the hell an unlimited nuclear exchange would be. I mean, to flatten all that is represented by the people, by the culture, the civilization, the buildings of Manhattan in a matter of seconds. And to think this is, well, maybe acceptable, it's acceptable loss is what they talk about. I think it's a little ludicrous. And I think that we should be a little bit angry about it. But I don't think that that anger and that sense of irony about the whole thing is enough. We also have to think about the broader questions of what kinds of conflicts might escalate into a nuclear war. And if we look at it that way, I think that without a doubt, we have to think very considerably about a whole system of alliances, mutual defense treaties, if you will, with so many dozens of other countries around the globe. And the most significant of these, as I have said, is NATO. It's probably a fact that we wouldn't have a nuclear war over Japan or South Korea. I don't think American policymakers would, in their heart of hearts, maybe for racism, maybe for other reasons, think that it would be worth wiping out American civilization to save Japan or South Korea from a communist takeover or something. I don't even think secretly that we would have a nuclear war over the Middle East. I think a push came to shove the United States without Israel go down the drain. And I certainly think that dwindling, and now it's about 11 percent, I think, of our oil that we get from the Middle East, is not that significant in order to risk a nuclear war. Europe, I think, is a different matter because of the cultural and emotional ties, I think American policymakers and Russian policymakers might consider a limited nuclear exchange in the event of a conventional war, which would then escalate into an all-out war. So what I'm proposing is that we disengage from NATO. At disengagement, Earl Ravenl has figured, from NATO and from Asia, would save us about half of our projected military spending over the next 10 years. That projected military spending now looks like it's going to be about four and a half trillion dollars. So we're talking about a savings of two and a quarter trillion dollars, which might go toward partially retiring some of the huge burden of government debt. It might go towards huge tax credits and sort of a private sector free market reindustrialization to rebuild our capital and industrial base so that once again we're surrounded by economic growth rather than by economic stagnation in this country. Now, oddly enough, this takes me full circle to the origins of the Reagan form policy because the views that I'm presenting really echo those of the original old right in this country. The post-World War II anti-New Deal welfare warfare state right led by such figures as the slightly pink Senator Robert Taft, who Murray Rothbard once said, sold us out to the socialists through his acceptance of things like government housing programs, but was pretty good. He came close to supporting a free market and an non-interventionist foreign policy. He opposed entry into World War II. He opposed the beginning of the Cold War later on with the Marshall Plan and with the war on Korea and with NATO. And I think in many ways this whole old right position had a lot to do with the origins of the Reagan form policy because the old right did not have the gumption really to hold to a stern non-interventionist foreign policy when push came to shove. The old right split over Korea. And what happened was that the best people in the old right who were getting old, John T. Flynn and others, were either about ready to retire or die out. They were placed by a new group of leaders in the right wing in this country that I'll just simply call the Buckley Right. The Buckley Right founded National Review. The people of that persuasion took over human events which had been an organ of the old isolationist right wing and they began to build a modern conservative movement. Conservative movements sort of came alive during the early Goldwater candidacy of 1960 when Nixon had that famous Park Avenue meeting with Nelson Rockefeller to sell out and effect to the Liberals. Conservatives wanted to bolt the party and Goldwater convinced them to stay in. To stay in and to work to take control of the Republican Party which is what they did in 1964. Goldwater replaced Robert Taft as wearing the title of Mr. Conservative. But the interesting thing is that Goldwater was not a Taft delegate in 1952 from Arizona. He was a Nixon delegate. He was a supporter of the Cold War and he was sort of symbolic of the change from Taft to Goldwater from that old right isolationism to the new right or Buckley Right interventionism warmongering to put the United States in a position of being a world policeman. Goldwater of course got smashed in 1964 and in 68 Nixon came to power but the right wing began to build and consolidate its influence. The career of Ronald Reagan was kicked off with that incredible campaign speech for Goldwater in October of 1964. It's not remembered how powerful that speech was. Many people call it the most simply the most powerful post-World War II political speech Americans have ever heard. It was played on prime time television, it was heard by millions of people and shown just the first time raised five million dollars for the Goldwater campaign. Five million dollars in 1964. You know it's like 10 or 15 million today. From one speech that's how hungry the American people were to hear someone speak clearly and speak what they saw as the truth. It was a pretty libertarian speech too but Reagan like Goldwater were part of the new Buckley Right and the origins of the Reagan form policy really are in this roots. They have their roots in this tradition of anti- Cold War global interventionism that sees American form policy as a way of defeating communism, that sees American form policy as a way of asserting our national will and asserting our national interests in every corner of the globe. It's sort of a amalgam of the old new deal with the new right because if you look at Reagan's policies overall as we've heard over the last day, they obviously imply an acceptance of the whole welfare state warfare state alliance that has been represented since the coming to power of FDR in 1932. Reagan is in the tradition of FDR. That's why he quotes him all the time. He quotes his early speeches where he attacked big government but then he goes on TV and says I'm not cutting government, what are you bugging me for? I'm just slowing down the rate of increase a little bit. So since coming to power in 1980, Reagan has really attempted to put it into effect. People say he doesn't have a form policy, he does too. His form policy is to put in effect what the right wing has always believed. But in sort of a modified or cut rate form. You see to really police the world, to really tell Iran where to go, to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan to make sure that the Cambodians or the Vietnamese are taken care of and be able to take care of Argentina and El Salvador and Guatemala would take probably twice as much spending as we are now. So they're increasing the spending as quickly as they can get away with to some as I say, 258 billion. Instantly by the end of the next 10 years, if you project up current rates of growth or even modify them, you're talking about maybe having a defense budget in the mid-1990s of three quarters of a trillion dollars. But again, this is the price of our form policy. It's the price of a form policy that Reagan upholds in order to implement the old Buckley Wright agenda in World Affairs. Ravinal says, and I agree with him, that if the defense budget is the price of our form policy, then we cannot afford that form policy any longer. And I think that's true, and I think it's a message. If the American people knew that about $170 billion every year was being spent on the defense of other nations or to intervene in their affairs, I think you'd hear a pretty quick outcry. I think the most potent quark advertisement was the one that mentioned the extent to which we're subsidizing defense of wealthy nations. This is sort of a one-handed way of putting it. Because, you know, we're not just defending them, we're pushing them around and making them conform to certain interests of ours all over the world too. But consider then the case for non-interventionist form policy. This engagement from NATO, this engagement from the Far East and from Asia and the Middle East. What would probably happen? I don't think it would mean, as many people have said, the thinlinization of Western Europe. It would become like Finland sort of appeasing the Soviet Union and sort of a little bit of self-censorship so they didn't attack the Soviet Union. What it would mean is that probably they would be developed European leaders who are more focused on European attitudes toward world affairs rather than European leaders who had to think constantly about relationships with the United States. I think those who think that a non-interventionist American form policy would lead to the thinlinization of Europe greatly underestimate the innate strength of those societies. They're strong societies. They wouldn't necessarily be thinlized. But if the United States got out, there might be an interesting consequence. It might mean, in effect, the thinlinization of Eastern Europe. The whole justification for the Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe has been, since the Second World War, the threat of sort of Western invasions. If you take the United States out of the picture, there's no question but that no European nation is gonna invade the Soviet Union through Eastern Europe. What this would do, I think, is put a great card on the table, first of all, for people like the President of Romania and those Eastern German protesters. Secondly, it would be an American card played that would help the next generation of Soviet leaders. Now think about this for a second. Brezhnev is dying, right? But then probably a few weeks or a few months he's gonna be gone. The Kremlin then has to pick a new set of political leaders. Now, if you were the Kremlin, how would you pick them? You'd look over at America and the United States in this very belligerent, haig, Reagan, Weinberger business and you'd think we need a strong leader to secede Brezhnev, who can stand up to the Americans. In other words, as an unintended consequence of its foreign policy, the Reagan administration is right now playing a card which supports the hawkish element in the Kremlin and may see a saddle for the next 20 or 30 years with a new generation of Soviet leaders who are put in power mostly because of Reagan's belligerent attitude. Now, flip your mind a bit. If we were to get out of NATO, disengage and move toward a detente less hawkish position, sort of an America first position, this would be a card played that would help the dovish element in the Kremlin and might see a successive Brezhnev come to power, you see, who is more inclined to sort of say, okay, the Cold War in Europe is over, let's retrench. They might become adventuresome in the Middle East, but hell, they've been in Afghanistan for two years and where have they gotten? And in fact, been in there since December of 79, so it's two and a half years. They still have not taken Afghanistan, which is a country of 18 million people. All right, so let them go to Iran, which has 35 or 45 million people. Let them go into Pakistan. Let them go into India, four or 500 million people. I think the result, in other words, of an American pullout from this region might be a Soviet expansionism, but not in Europe. It'll probably be in those less developed regions of Asia or in Africa. I say, let those MFs get bogged down there. And they will see what we did in Vietnam that there are limits to military power in this pluralistic world of today. They will see that there are limits to it and there is only a limited number of things they can achieve. And we'd save the American taxpayers two and a quarter trillion dollars over the next 10 years. A huge tax cut we could have. We could wipe out the deficit. We could wipe out the federal government on and off budget deficit this year with a stroke, disengaging from these things. This, I think, is a powerful message. A powerful message with which we can reach the American people. It strikes that sort of isolationist cord in them, the feeling of frustration that they're being pushed around constantly by the Commies or by Western Europe or whatever. And a great many people in Congress are beginning to see this. Representative Ron Paul, of course, at our National Convention last year called for getting out of NATO. John Rhodes, a hawkish former minority leader, has made a series of major speeches where he's called for disengaging and getting American troops out of Europe. We have about 350,000 troops in the Reagan administration in Europe. The Reagan administration wants to increase that by 24,000 over the next 18 months. Why are they there? They're there explicitly as a tripwire because the view is that if there's a Convention of War in Europe and the Americans watch on primetime TV, they turn on NBC with this Brokaw mud team or whatever, and they see a third of a million Americans being slaughtered by the Commies, that they'll demand that the President push the button and nuke the Russians. This is the view. This is why they're there. They're there to give the Europeans confidence in our nuclear umbrella. I said that when we get to the point of talking about wiping out of a third of a million Americans as a means of wiping out of getting the President and the Russians to wipe out tens of millions of more, you realize the best case scenario for a nuclear war says that 10 to 20 million will die. It's the smallest nuclear war, that 10 to 20 million Americans. A bigger scenario say 90 to 140 million, sometimes more, because we don't know the effects on things like growing crops and our industrial capacity and how much of land would be usable or livable. Would there be any transportation? Would there be any means of refrigerating food? These are important things. I think it's time that libertarians take up these issues and take them up in a serious way and begin to consider the consequences of our current foreign policy and its likely consequences. I like to end by getting you interested in this book. And so I'm going to read you just part of the first paragraph. It's Jonathan Shells, The Fate of the Earth. Since July 16th, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity test site in New Mexico, mankind has lived with nuclear weapons in its midst. Each year the number of bombs has grown until now there's some 50,000 warheads in the world possessing the explosive yield of roughly 20 billion tons of TNT or 1,600,000 times the yield of the bomb that was dropped by the United States on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Less than a month after the Trinity explosion, these bombs were built as weapons for war, but the significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and consequences. They grew out of history, yet they threatened to end history. They were made by men, yet they threatened to annihilate men. They are a pit into which the whole world can fall, a nemesis of all human intentions, actions, and hopes. Ladies and gentlemen, let no one posture as a friend of liberty who is not a friend of peace in the world today, and let no one posture as a friend of peace who is not an opponent of American intervention and the affairs of all the nations of the globe. If we are for liberty, we must be for peace and we must be opposed to this madness that is going on in the world today, both in the Kremlin and in Washington, D.C. And we must rise up and with the rest of the American people, we must put a stop to this madness. We must put a stop to it, we the people, because there is no longer any alternative to us taking charge of our own lives and of our own future. And so I ask you to join me and join the American people in a movement for peace and for progress and for hope. Ladies and gentlemen, let's get to work. Thank you.