 Welcome back to War Economy and State. This is the Mises Institute's foreign policy podcast. I'm Ryan MacMacon, executive editor with the Mises Institute. And joining me as always for this podcast is Zachary Yoast, one of our preferred foreign policy writers and just general experts, especially on Eastern Asia, which is why I bring them in because I know so little about Eastern Asia. So we're trying to give you a good, well-informed, well-rounded view of a variety of different regions through this podcast. But this time we're going to look a bit more at domestic politics. And I think we're just going to start off with talking about the debate from last week, the GOP debate up in Wisconsin. And, you know, I hate debates, actually. I think they are mostly for performance. It's really about candidates saying all the things they'll do. And so you get more points from being an activist politician than from saying, well, I'm going to stop that stupid idea. That never seems to get applause. And also the people in the audience are always like big time GOP donors and activists. And there's absolutely nothing normal about the people who sit in that audience. So all the applause is always BS. And I'm always reminded of how Ron Paul once, when he was being criticized for his anti-war positions, noted that Jesus, one of his titles was the Prince of Peace, for which he was soundly booed by the Republican audience. So that's the quality of people that go to these things. But nevertheless, the debate can be useful for drawing out some of the opinions of some of these candidates. And so I think we're just going to go through and and rank these candidates on less bad to absolutely horrendous. I think maybe we'll be the scale we will use. And Trump wasn't here, of course, at that debate. So we'll kind of have to talk about him a little bit separately. But just looking at my general impressions of the debate, I'll just come right out and say I thought that the least bad was Vivek Ramaswamy. And then behind him, not as good was Ron DeSantis. And then everyone else was was terrible. And probably the most despicable of all was Mike Pence, who's just horrible on every level. I mean, the guy just oozes slime. That was my general idea of these candidates. And three topics really came up during the debate, which was Ukraine and US support for Ukraine, monetary and military. The general attitude toward China came up. There weren't a lot of specifics about Taiwan policy discussed. But nevertheless, you get an idea from the candidates as to how much do they think the United States should antagonize China. And then the other issue was and this often isn't regarded as foreign policy, but it is was the the topic of military action in Mexico, where DeSantis, for example, was saying, yep, now we're going to launch missiles into Mexico. We're going to do all sorts of military intervention to to cut back on immigration and drug imports and all that sort of thing. And so that I think is an important issue as well. Yet again, the the American tradition of humanitarian interventions, which is, as I'm sure how that would be phrased, another stunning success, I'm sure it will be the latest humanitarian intervention. If that is pursued, so we'll just talk out generally here. And then I think we'll we'll we'll go into some of the details about why we rank these people this way. And so, Zach, what were what were your general impressions of these candidates and like, you know, from least bad to horrendous? Yeah, I was exactly the same as you, Vivek DeSantis. I'm not sure if I'd say Pence was the worst or Nikki Haley. They were both quite horrible, but that's the only area I differ. Yeah, that was my general impression. I'm I'm actually quite stunned at the stances Vivek has taken publicly, not only in the debate, but before that at his big foreign policy speech at the Nixon Library about the I think it was the Thursday before the debate where I had not to pay attention to him at all until someone I know said, Oh, Vivek is giving this speech on the Newman Road doctrine, which is the audience might recall, we did a episode on and I wrote a paper for the Libertarian Scholars Conference. So I was like, Oh, well, this could be good. And at the at that talk, he was I mean, he was on fire. I couldn't believe it. I mean, with politicians, it's always pandering. I mean, when people express, you know, I mean, Vivek, I can understand why some people don't like him and his attitude. But the way I frame it is you don't need the prostitute to love you. You just need the prostitute to be good at pretending that they love you. And that's how I view politicians. And it's nice to be pandered to for once, you know. And and I think Vivek is doing a lot of pandering on Ron Paul's birthday. He was like, happy birthday, Ron Paul, we need to complete your revolution. I don't know to what degree he's a true Ron Paul fan, but it's encouraging when politicians think they need to say those sorts of things to you. So I'm excited to see what happens there. And there are some other changes in the GOP. I'm sure we'll talk about that, I think, his rhetoric reflects. Well, speaking more generally on these, just who are you going to pander to and when and why, though Bishop had an article last week, right, on as a follow up to the debate and looking at, OK, well, knowing that the Trump wing of the rank and file in the party is not something you can ignore, are you going to pander to it or not? And so it's clear that Vivek wants to capture that part of the party rank and file and he's better than Trump on foreign policy. And clearly he's trying to hit all of those same positions in one way or another. And that's what, though, noted in this article in that those top candidates are people who at least have something Trumpian about them. Ron DeSantis is the same way. And Ramaswamy is actually better than DeSantis, I think it had kind of hidden those those Trump positions and doing so in a convincing way. And that may just be due to the fact that Ramaswamy doesn't have really a political history and he doesn't have loyalties to any existing power structure and things like that. I mean, don't forget that Ron DeSantis was a Guantanamo prosecutor, basically, and so the guy's certainly not guilt free in terms of his involvement in the police state and the spy state and the war on terror and all of that. But looking at that, then, yeah, you can see how some people are seeing there is real value toward positioning themselves as the Trump type candidate and you're really seeing that, I think, in terms of foreign policy and Glenn Greenwald a few days ago had some similar comments on when he was on a podcast talking about, hey, look, all the top candidates, there are these people who are expressing anti imperial views for the most part. And they're, of course, then being horribly attacked by the mainstream GOP establishment on that, which is again, who is mostly actually at the debate. And so it is just very interesting to see the positions that they're taking, that there is actually a debate within the party. Now, how much of an honest debate it is? I mean, how would that translate into real changes? If someone took office, it does make a bit of a difference, I think. As you said, right, if you have someone who's going into office and he has decided that the governing coalition he wants to have, that is, where is he going to draw his support from? And he's going to have to draw support from then people who he promised to have less crazed and aggressive foreign policy. If that's what you have decided is going to be part of your message, it's going to be difficult to completely abandon that. That doesn't mean he wouldn't then the CIA comes in and sits him down and says, well, you can't just leave Ukraine. You have to do X, Y, Z. I could see, obviously, Ramaswamy caving on that to some extent. But he would come back and say, well, I can't totally cave. I have to give my constituents that I promised something in this side of the bargain. So then you've got a slight scale back then in Ukraine aggression. Whereas if you had Mike Pence or Nikki Haley in there, they'd be like, yep, I always promise to just escalate the war in Ukraine. Thank goodness the CIA is here to give me additional reason to do so. And then you're going in entirely the opposite direction. There's no sort of compromise on the part of the national security state whatsoever that they're being forced into. So yeah, you do want a candidate that you force into a box who feels like he's got to make some concessions and promises in a more anti-imperialist direction. And so that's good. It's always important to not declare any of these candidates to be your friend and trustworthy or anything like that. The whole point is to make them afraid to double cross you and make it clear that, OK, we'll give you our support, but we expect you to actually do something. And that's that's the whole. That's how a democratic public is supposed to function. It's supposed to punish politicians who don't do what they say does a very bad job of that. But nevertheless, that's the dynamic we should be hoping for is that we can force some of these people to actually embrace slightly more sane foreign policy just because they're afraid that they would lose their support and money because of it, whereas some people decided, oh, screw Trump, hate him, don't want to have that as any part of my governing coalition. So there's your Haley and your Pence and probably your Christy candidates there. And that's that's how it's going to go moving forward. And we didn't really say where Trump was in our rankings, by the way. But I should note that I think Ramiswamy is way better than Trump in terms of he's far less ambiguous about the sorts of things he's willing to say about foreign policy, whereas Trump. I don't know if Ramiswamy said anything about Iran, but Trump, of course, so bad on Iran and on China and just likes aggressiveness in general, as long as that's his stance. And then, of course, Trump was just embarrassing himself with the way he was slobbering all over the dictators of Saudi Arabia when he went there. So he's got lots of bad stuff in terms of his foreign policy. Whereas if you could if you could really get Ramiswamy repeatedly on the record, making the source of promises, I think that would that would be good. But DeSantis isn't going to go as far in that direction, but he would certainly be an improvement over Biden or any of the Republicans other than maybe Trump or Ramiswamy. Right. So two two points. One is that your spot on on whoever gets in the White House is going to have a huge bureaucratic machine working against them if they want to change foreign policy. And that's what I loved about Vivek's rhetoric so far in foreign policy is he has staked out of you so far in my direction that even if he only got a quarter of it done, it would be a huge improvement is my sort of view. So he's he's so far in what I view as my direction that he can't wiggle out of it unless he's just, you know, going to lie. On DeSantis, just to be clear, why I was displeased with his performance when they finally got around to talking about Ukraine, which is right around the hour mark, they said, raise your hand if you want to stop sending aid to Ukraine. Vivek raised his hand and DeSantis sort of waved his hand around and talked and then Brett Bear was like, so to be clear, what are you saying, basically? Do you want to stop the aid? And DeSantis did not say I want to stop the aid. He said our aid has to be contingent on Europe stepping up. So that's a very different position. And we have a perfect track record of letting the Europeans free ride all over us. And I have, I mean, I think so has mentioned this in the past. And, like, people like Dan McCarthy have come out and said that DeSantis behind closed doors is more in favor of restraint. But his rhetoric in public and how he was, he took a strong stance against Ukraine, then he walked it back. That is not going to fly, given the institutional problems in the national security state. You need someone who's unambiguously has a clear vision to fight against this bureaucracy. And I don't even, I mean, it's not like that would be an easy fight. So that's why I was very disappointed in DeSantis on that. Yeah, yeah, that's an important distinction to make. And yeah, he clearly your interpretation. I mean, I don't think you're like exaggerating anything, right? He literally just kind of like sort of tenuously put his hand up when asked if they were opposed to further aid to Ukraine, or as Vivek just threw his hand up, basically. And and then this whole that's very Trumpian, this whole, oh, well, I suppose we keep giving aid to Ukraine if the Europeans give more money because that I mean, Trump in many ways phrased the problem as the real problem with the Ukraine situations that the Europeans are ripping us off, not that giving aid to Ukraine is stupid and pointless and has nothing to do with the defense of North America. And so Vivek again is better than Trump on that, just simply by saying, what are we doing here? It doesn't serve our purposes. Yes, he explicitly said Ukraine is not a priority for the U.S. Yeah, I was a true statement. Yes. And yeah, to go back to Trump, Trump appointed Nikki Haley to the U.N. Nikki Haley, who during this debate said that, quote, the U.S. needs Israel more than Israel needs the U.S. And of course, he also appointed John Bolton to his administration. So Trump has a horrible track record when it comes to personnel. I mean, literally there is that low level administration staffer writing anonymous op-eds in the New York Times saying, you know, we're working to undermine Trump from within the administration. So Trump has horrible judgment when it comes to staffing. And I mean, right at the end, it seemed that someone woke up to this fact and they started making better decisions that the Colonel Douglas McGregor, they're like, get us out of Afghanistan. And they nominated my former boss, Will Ruger, very good strainer realist to be ambassador to Afghanistan. For the purpose of getting us out. And but that was too little, too late. And Trump has now in an interview said basically has like three ideas for his VP. One is Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota. One is Henry McMaster, the governor of South Carolina. And the other is Vivek. Vivek is very different from Kristi Noem and McMaster, who are sort of run-of-the-mill status quo neocons. So again, it's like, where is Trump coming from? What is he doing? You know, it seems entirely possible were he to be reelected that, you know, the establishment would walk all over him on this issue again. And I mean, things he says like, how in the Ukraine war in a day? Nonsense. Not going to happen. I mean, no matter how good of a deal maker you are, there's not really much of a deal that can be cut currently. So, yeah, I now when it gets into the actual practical politics, I'm not too optimistic. Vivek can win the primary. But I mean, people have said from the beginning, it almost seems that he's running for a spot in the Trump administration, whether that's VP or something else. And VP could be great, because who knows where Trump's going to be. But also Treasury Secretary, the Secretary of the Treasury is automatically on the National Security Council. So that could be potentially encouraging as well. Yeah. And I think another, as you talked about with those fees, just this shift in the GOP, where there is this constituent, someone feels the need to talk to. And I think one of the most sort of groundbreaking shifts in this is that heritage has been lost to the Neocons, the Heritage Foundation, which was always Neocon Central. The former head of foreign policy at heritage is now at the Hudson Institute, which as some restrainers say, is just a front for laundering foreign money into the United States. See, he's now at Hudson, and I mean, he wrote this like white paper, basically saying we need to break Russia up. And this is crazy. Also, he's British. I don't know if he's an American citizen or not either. But I would say there's this ground shift and their new president, Kevin Roberts, has been quite active on Twitter on the Ukraine issue. And they've had some faux pas, some sort of cringe things, like comparing the Hawaii wildfires to Kiev and things like that. I mean, who knows who's running their social media. But Kevin Roberts's Twitter, which he now follows me, by the way, after I dropped a piece I wrote that came out in the in Lon Liberty, which is Liberty Fund's publication. Someone there had wrote a piece saying that all of the arguments against further aid to Ukraine are feeble. And I wrote a 2000 word essay arguing, you know, that's not the case. And here's why. So I think it's good that Roberts thought my argument apparently was good enough to follow me back on Twitter. I mean, I'm not exactly in any way a neocon. So I think that's an encouraging sign. And there was also, I don't remember if it was in Politico or where it was, but basically talking about how Heritage has been working super closely with DeSantis to the extent that the DeSantis campaign has like heritage people like gives them access to like speeches that DeSantis is going to give. And he they are apparently the ones pushing him on Ukraine to be more, you know, in the vexed direction. So and I did not see it, but I read that it would be happening. During the debate, this Bill Kristol aligned group put out this ad of all these sort of people, the youngest of which was not below 55, saying how they support continued aid to Ukraine. And Heritage, I didn't see the ad. I don't know if I missed it or if it didn't play on what I was watching. But arguing against that. So I think that's so encouraging. And it's also there's on the subject of this divide. I mean, I'm, you know, a white collar nerd who spends my day writing about, you know, nerdy things, but I live in a very blue collar world. And I was quite astounded when I learned that some blue collar people I know loved Vivek Irene. I mean, Vivek is not a Christian. He is a Hindu and he is brown. And, you know, I was quite surprised that people I know were saying he is the spoke the most sense. I mean, these are very pro-Trump people. And Vivek is very says pro things about Trump. But they said he was speaking the most sense of anyone up there. So I think that's encouraging because I've seen people say, oh, Vivek, he's brown and not Christian. He there's no way he's going to get anywhere. And I was like, I've seen it firsthand. That's not the case. So I think that Vivek's position is the future. And actually, one of the clearest parts in the divide where that divide became clear was when Pence was like, everything's fine in America. All the American people are great and virtuous. It's just a government that's bad. Everything else is great. And Vivek is like, we're living in a dark time. We need major reforms. Things are not all hunky-dory. That is entirely how I suspect everyone under 55 views the current situation, whereas Pence and Nikki Haley and Chris Christie are living in like 2003 neocon fever dreamland. Also, this is just too good to pass up. Chris Christie did go to Kiev and meet with Zelensky. And it didn't get brought up in the debate, but Chris Christie literally gave Zelensky a handwritten copy of the lyrics of shoot, what's it called? Keep on believing or whatever it is by Bon Jovi. That's, you know, we've talked so much about how the U.S. arsenals are depleted. That's what we're reduced to aiding Ukraine with is handwritten Bon Jovi lyrics, so. Well, of course, that whole everything is fine in America thing. That's so the old tired kind of Reagan era. America is the greatest country in the world. And how dare you criticize it? And we should just be making America greater. And this sort of like pro status quo thing, which is really weird and which I can't imagine resonates, as you say, with anyone under the age of 55 in the United States. I'm sure things look great if you have lots of money and you're retired and you golf all day and you're like, yeah, America's fine. There's a lot of people not doing so great. So of course, Pence was wealthy. Things things are fine. And this is an old tactic to like in debates is you're up there just criticizing America. I, for one, think America is a great country. And you're just sitting up here trying to demoralize people and tell people that America is bad. Just a nonsensical sort of thing that often gets brought up, especially if you criticize the economy. I've had that leveled at me in my last job when I would give presentations as an economist and I would note problems with the economy. And then there'd always be some like local government, Republican hack talking about how, well, I love America and I think the economy is fine. So it's some sort of delusional thing that they engage in. It's quite Soviet, actually. You're a wrecker, you know. You're undermining the people's morale, you Western, you know, agent. Right, well, that was a formal Nazi crime, was demoralizing the troops by criticizing any military action. So yeah, you got to accentuate the positive at all times, which by the way, as some research about World War II has shown, was basically a de facto slogan during World War II, was you weren't allowed to criticize the war effort at all. You had to accentuate the positive. So the old timers on the debate side of this clearly think that's a thing. And all that needs to be done is like some minor chipping around the edges. And you notice this also, we've talked about this in the past about how when you're a true foreign policy hawk, you never have to prioritize anything that there's always room for another war, always room for more military spending. And that was a point that Pence made in his comments with Tucker Carlson, where he's like, well, we can also, we can both fix all the cities and fix drug problems and make everybody's life better and also wage more war in Eurasia. We don't need to choose. And Nikki Haley said the exact same thing here too, is that, yep, we can do all these wonderful domestic things and then also fight a huge war in Ukraine. And so it's just never ever suggest to me that there are priorities and that there are limits to the power of the American state. We can always do both and everything all at once, all the time, and cost is no object. So that's clearly the neocon, the financial position on things. And as you note about some of the debate going on inside the party, going back to Kevin Roberts there at the Heritage Foundation, this was discussed a bit in Foreign Policy Magazine in a recent article talking about this divide in the party. And he noted that there was actually something of a divide within the Heritage Foundation itself between its foreign policy people and the top leadership, specifically Kevin Roberts. And he noted that Roberts had written an article and op-ed in The Hill, as he phrased it, Roberts blasted members of Congress for prioritizing Ukraine's aid over the hurricane disaster relief, unquote. And I mean, it wasn't that terribly that specific. What he was saying was that this obsession with Ukraine is just really betrays the ruling classes disregard for the American domestic situation, which several people have made that point. And it seems like a plausible point. But the way the author of the foreign policy piece phrased it is that he comes back and he says, well, more mainstream conservative voices believe that Roberts is wrong. And Ramaswami, of course, is completely wrong. Well, it's kind of a weird thing to say is that the head of the Heritage Foundation isn't the mainstream, doesn't count as the mainstream. Yeah. I mean, it's the definition of the establishment. Exactly. On the right, and do you see? And so then this reporter then goes and he quotes a former admiral named Mark Montgomery with this hardcore neocon organization called Foundation for Defensive Democracies. And so then he quotes Montgomery several times saying then, well, really, anybody can see that democracy is under threat and this is the red line that we have to establish in Ukraine, blah, blah, blah. So even this supposed reporter who I looked up his bio and he didn't have any particular background and GOP foreign policy or anything like that. But he's choosing a side here and saying, oh, yeah, well, the warmonger position is the mainstream GOP position and anyone like Roberts or Ramaswami who questions it is clearly the fringe position. Now I would agree Ramaswami's clearly a fringe position when you're looking at the last 25 years of US foreign policy but it's a fringe position that clearly resonates as you've noted with a large portion of the rank and file. If it didn't resonate, then Trump wouldn't have been doing perfectly fine with that constituency while having a restrictionist, a restraint based foreign policy. At least in rhetoric. Yes, and I mean you could always point out that it could have been worse all along but as some people have pointed out, Biden is actually just carrying forward Trump's foreign policy that there haven't actually been any major changes there. So apparently the Dems are okay with Trumpian foreign policy. So I agree, anything in the direction of what Ramaswami is saying would be a significant departure from the status quo and you're gonna see huge pushback from people like Montgomery and just the huge network of neocon foundations in Washington. But the fact that someone from the Heritage Foundation would even venture the idea of criticizing about Ukraine spending at all and then you've got two guys up there taking a better position compared to of course what has been the traditional Bushian position for the last 25 years. I mean, that's a little bit of progress but I think I would only allow myself some actual optimism if Ramaswami actually got the nomination and did quite well or managed to show some real popularity. So I'm gonna wait and see if Nikki Haley's poll numbers get worse and worse, they actually took a slight, like a two point bump or something after this which really doesn't mean anything. But if she fades into the background as I expect Pence to do then it could really be to end up with three or four guys who are realizing that they can't just be total hawks all the time and expect the nomination. So we'll see how that goes. Right, yeah. I've already, I mean, it's unfortunate but I've already seen Vivek doing a little back peddling on the issue of China and Taiwan. I was static during his Nixon library speech because he basically was like, we're gonna retrench from Asia. And I mean, some of the specifics of his various plans, I'm not sure how feasible they are but this is an election where people say crazy things. But he was like, we're going to get rid of strategic ambiguity and we're going to say, we're going to defend Taiwan until 2029 after which all of the chips will be manufactured in America. And then we're going to say, we want to defend Taiwan basically. I was like, oh, this is great news. I definitely take that deal. We're gonna retrench from Asia. I mean, this sounds amazing. And you use the, everyone over there needs to step up to contain China. Well, then on Twitter, he was like, we'll go back to strategic ambiguity after 2029. I'm like, well, that's not as good but all of his rhetoric of, you know, Taiwan needs to defend itself. I mean, that's entirely in line with my views. I mean, I wrote a white paper on how that could happen. And he also got some flack in the media for like, we need to open an NRA office in Taiwan. And people are like, oh, this is so dumb and so ridiculous. But I think that's actually entirely, I mean, it's not exactly the cornerstone of what American policy should be but I think it's quite true. We can look at sort of three different examples of countries in history resisting invasion and or deterring invasion via sort of the armed people's movement, basically. We have Switzerland and World War II, which we've talked about, which I mean, they were psychotic in their level of arming the people. I mean, the blind people were, you know, drafted into, you know, being an aircraft listeners. I mean, it was just like, there was such a lobby within the country of like, the government needs to distribute more arms and ammunition so that grandmas can run out and shoot paratroopers. And it worked. Switzerland successfully deterred the Nazis, the Axis invading. The other example is the home army in the UK during World War II, which was an entirely sort of self. It was a groundswell movement of the basically, old people too old to fight and people too young to fight, basically wanting to arm themselves in preparation for the Germans invading. It went, I think it was like over 1.4 million people strong and Churchill sort of embraced it for political reasons of like, look at all these people, we better, you know, make them happy. I mean, there was a huge sort of popular led movement. And then we can contrast that with the Volkssturm, I think it was called, which was the Nazi movements to arm the people to resist the Soviets. And you'll keep in mind the Nazis an active strict gun control. There's a book on that by a blanking on his name, but he's done that the independent Institute, he's done a whole bunch of work on gun control in Nazi Germany, gun control and occupied France, all sorts of stuff. But I mean, there's mass gun control in Nazi Germany. Then it's like, oh shoot, we're being crushed by this ginormous Soviet army. So they were just arming the Volkssturm. It was sort of, they were forcing people to, you know, fight with, you know, weapons with which they had no familiarity was all crap anyway. I mean, I think it's actually, I'm unknown how many casualties the Volkssturm had, but it was enormous, especially in places like Prussia, where, I mean, those were Germans who lived there for hundreds and hundreds of years. And, you know, the Soviets were just, I mean, ethnically cleansing them basically. So I think we can see, where's Taiwan look like? Taiwan does not look like Switzerland. And it certainly doesn't look like the UK in terms of having this mass popular support to resist the invasion. I mean, in polls they say they want to, but in reality, their draft is a joke. There's this Wall Street Journal piece, I think in 2021, where they were like, people were interviewed in their reservists in their tiny amount of training. They're like, I spent all day moving tires around raking leaves or watching American war movies, you know? So I think the vague spot on to point that out, that culturally, is Taiwan prepared to defend itself? I'm increasingly doubtful. Yeah, I don't see why that's such a crazy idea is to do. If, how has this not always been a typical instrument of foreign policy is, well, in exchange for all the money and freebies we give you, we're also going to try and influence you in terms of your own views. And use our own soft power or maybe to get you to be more like us. It's now, of course, being a non-interventionist, I'm just generally against spending money on Taiwan. However, I just don't see how it's any worse to try and convince them that they should arm themselves. It's just anything that's just out of the norm is just condemned by the GOP establishment is just crazy. And that's the other thing. Taiwan, at least until now, has been buying weapons. I mean, we give away tens of billions of dollars in military aid every year. But including to Egypt, we give them like $4 billion a year and they're like trying to sell 40,000 rockets to Russia. But Taiwan at least buys its weapons. And I mean, there's dispute about like, oh, you want to sell weapons to Taiwan? What are you, a neocon? I think it's good to sell weapons to Taiwan. And much, it's definitely at least an improvement over just handing out pallets of cash. So people can, I mean, really it's like credits. Here's a Northrop Grumman credit to buy stuff from our lobbyists who are entirely captured us. That was another great line from Vivek when he told Nikki Haley, oh, you're going to be on the board of Northrop Grumman or whoever. Which also apparently she was like next to bankrupt like in like 2018 or so. And after she left the Trump administration, now she's declared millions and millions of dollars in assets giving, you know, $100,000 speeches or whatever to these interest groups. So, which I mean, it's just really it's open bribery. These have seen- Yeah, it's clear where she comes down on that. And that's who her friends are is the Pentagon, the weapons industry. That's just so much of her career has been based around that. And so it's no surprise then that she's a China hawk. Pence, of course, is Christie. It's all just the same old stuff. We got to fight them over there. We're going to fight them in the streets of San Francisco sort of thing. Well, they say that by Ukraine also. Oh my goodness, yes, I wrote that down. Chris Christie said, we will be next when he's listing off all these Russian war crimes. And Pence said that we have to fight them over there. So we don't have to fight them over here. I mean, the most absurd, clueless. I mean, I can't wait until these dinosaurs are extinct when it comes to running US foreign policy. Cause these are just absurd canards that are so detached from America's security. And I mean, it's so refreshing, even if it's 99% rhetoric to hear someone like Vivek saying, America's Monroe Doctrine, you know, Western Hemisphere, that's what we need to focus on. And I eagerly await the day that happens. Well, you know, if I'd been there, I would have asked, please detail for us how exactly this Russian invasion of North America would take place. Tell me where the boats are that they would use for this. Tell me the airplanes that they would fly to North America to bomb Americans without us noticing that they were approaching by the way. It seems like you would have to, to get that sorts of troops necessary to North America, it would have to be like something like the Dunkirk evacuation in reverse. Right? We're gonna load a bunch of Russians on fishing boats and some cargo vessels and sail them across the Atlantic and, or I guess maybe to Alaska from Northeastern Russia. Shotco. Hey, they conquered the Aleutian Islands. Wow, what a horrible humiliating defeat for America. And part of it is like in the popular imagination, Russia's always invading the US. I mean, there's several popular video games. I can't remember what the one is called. It was fun, but it was basically so absurd. It was the Soviet Union is collapsing in the mid-80s. So they launched this enormous war that would not be feasible at all to try and shore up the collapse and they invade Western Europe. They have an amphibious landing in Southern France and all these cargo ships randomly show up in Seattle Harbor. And it, oh, it turns out they're full of divisions of Soviet troops. And then modern warfare two called duty modern warfare two. They, this spy satellite falls and so they're able to hack into the US spy satellites. And so they don't realize there's this massive Russian armada and there's like an aerial assault on Washington, DC. And it's just like, I mean, these are fun games. Also North Korea invading was the premise of the remake of Red Dawn. And it's just like, these are fun things to imagine. But I think people take them a little too seriously because like being anywhere within the realm of possibility. I mean, imagine this giant armada was created and our Navy was just destroyed. We have nuclear weapons that could be used at the entire multi-thousand mile journey across either ocean. I mean, it's just... That's not a 40 minute voyage across the Pacific Ocean in case anyone was aware of that. Yes, but it resonates with this audience, I guess, with the GOP. It's just astounding the sorts of claims that they make. And I just hope you're right. I mean, I hope that people are just starting to see the ludicrousness of it, just the paranoia of it. But boy, is it not dying a fast enough death for me. Now, of course at some point realities are gonna take over, right? You can't just keep printing up trillions of dollars to fight more wars and just hope that you don't get a huge inflation hit. You can't just keep doing that and hope you have all the personnel that you need and that everything's fine and then commit to wars in Asia, in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East and maybe another expeditionary force meddling somewhere in Latin America all at the same time. And it's all just gonna be fine. I mean, the level of faith you have to have in the ability of the government to execute plans perfectly is just astounding, which is why it's always been so ludicrous that these conservatives who say, well, you know, the government can't do anything right or they can't run health care. I mean, you just don't trust the government. Oh, but they can run three or four wars all at once and it'll all turn out fine. That's just still clearly a prevalent attitude in the GOP and we clearly still have a long way to go. And you can just look at the issue of Mexico too. We'll just mention that. I'm very curious for how serious I've interpreted all this like we're gonna invade Mexico as just being election time rhetoric. I'm curious how serious you think, because I know some people who are like, oh my goodness, this is the biggest threat facing the country as we're gonna invade Mexico. And the border is gonna turn into Fallujah 2.0 and I'm skeptical that anyone would want to be attached their name to such a disastrous mess. Well, and it also invites war with China because another element of it was not only did Haley recommend this? I think this was Haley's point. No, no, it was DeSantis, I believe, where not only are we going to use military force against the cartels and shoot dead anyone who tries to come across the border with drugs in their possession, I guess they'll receive a trial on the frontier and be executed right there. I'm not sure exactly what the plan was there, but also it sounded like he was planning to board ships, Chinese flagged ships as they approached Mexico to make sure that they weren't importing chemicals from China into Mexico. And this is just bonkers stuff. And basically what they were saying is, well, will embargo Mexico from the sorts of things that can be used to make fentanyl. And so if that was an actual thing that would be carried out, you're just inviting war with China then. That's another dimension on top of that. So it wasn't just, oh, we're gonna send some Tomahawk missiles into Mexico to kill cartelists. Oh, and by the way, there's women and children, of course, in the general vicinity of all those cartelists at all times because they just live in towns and villages. Just wiping those towns and villages off the map is your policy. But then on top of that, they wanna control trade essentially between Mexico and China and anyone else that they decide Mexico shouldn't be trading with because then it'll come across the border. So would that actually happen? That's so into the realm of just messing up what you've got going within one of your largest trading partners. Yeah. And declaring and destabilizing even more a country that's right next to the United States, they can't control the border now. We're supposed to believe that creating a major refugee situation in Northern Mexico is going to improve that situation. I mean, that's just the level of stupidity if anyone actually thinks that this would improve things is quite amazing. I mean, I have viewed all this talk of literally invading Mexico as being on par with whenever people are like, we're gonna deport all the illegal immigrants in America. Who knows how many there are now, 15 plus million. I mean, that's crazy talk. No one has ever actually even put out a proposal as to how that would be done. I viewed it as just sort of red meat for, you know, people at the bar who are like, oh yeah, deport them. It's like, okay, how? So I'm not too concerned about it. I do not like the rhetoric at all though because as we talked about in our Monroe Doctrine episode, I mean, I think we need to be wooing Mexico. We need to be improving relations with them. I think we should get them back in the real treaty. You know, if we're gonna be Western hemispheric centric, Mexico number two trading partner, you know, not to mention how many people of Mexican ancestry live in the United States, we should be trying more for the Cumbaya approach. And I mean, of course, there's no discussion of how American domestic policy on drugs and immigration is why the cartels are so powerful. I mean, it's a perfect bootleggers and Baptist situation. You know, I mean, we could help undermine the cartels by reforming drug policy by, you know, any number of things, but. Well, and that's one of the, a good comment by Vivek was, well, it was a bad comment by Haley where he was talking about right cutting back support for Ukraine and Israel and all of these far away U.S. allies. And instead, so then Haley comes back and says, oh, don't be so delusional as to think America doesn't need friends. We need to have all of these friends. And yet at the same time, then they turn around and they have no interest in making friends with countries that are right in our backyard and are far more important friends. Mexico is a far more important friend than Israel ever could be because Israel simply doesn't help U.S. interest very much. Whereas Mexico, of course, helps U.S. interest a lot. Being friends with Brazil, Argentina, all those countries having back to the Monroe Doctrine thing, right? Having your close by neighbors be in a very close trade and diplomatic relationship with you is what's important but the Republicans are just more interested for the most part of the establishment in being friends with countries like Saudi Arabia or useless countries like Ukraine. I mean, it's just really amazing. They only define their friends as countries that just happen to support NATO expansion or some other sort of war hawkish position. Actual defense, friends in service of actual defense of North America don't seem to actually be any concern to them. Right, I mean, one of my essential foreign policy motto is like I should get a tattooed or something is states don't have friends, only interests. I mean, I hate this foreign policy by friendship. I mean, it's so ridiculous. And it also, I mean, it flies in the face of a century of U.S. foreign policy. You know, we had the treaty with France thanks to the Revolutionary War. They invoke it, Revolutionary France invokes it and George Washington just tosses it out the window. I mean, of all the friends we've had, you know, France played a huge role in our becoming independent. And we just tossed them out like an old shoe, which is how international politics works. You know, it's just drives me crazy when people are like, oh, we're abandoning our friends and, yeah. All right, well, we'll go ahead and end this episode of that as we're finished expressing our disgust. We'll go and wrap up this episode of War, Economy and State. We'll be back next month with another episode and we'll see you then.