Bill Kristol and Scott Horton Debate U.S. Interventionism

on october 4th 2021 bill crystal an editor-at-large of the bulwark went up against scott horton of the libertarian institute in an oxford style debate on u.s foreign policy at symphony space in new york city crystal was a leading proponent of the invasion of iraq the founding editor of the weekly standard a foreign policy advisor to john mccain's 2008 presidential campaign and chief of staff to vice president dan quayle scott horton is the author of enough already time to end the war on terrorism and fool's errand time to end the war in afghanistan he's the editorial director of antiwar.com and the host of anti-war radio and the scott horton podcast the debate was hosted by the soho forum with jean epstein moderating well uh now for a major event of the evening the resolution again reads a willingness to intervene and to seek regime change is key to an american foreign policy that benefits america here to defend the resolution bill crystal bill please come to the stage [Applause] um here to oppose the resolution scott horton scott please come to the stage [Applause] [Applause] connor please close the voting the voting is now closed and bill crystal uh there'll be a timer in front giving you signals you have 17 and a half minutes to defend the resolution a willingness to intervene and to seek regime change is key to an american foreign policy that benefits america take it away bill yeah yeah thanks gene it's good to be uh good to be here back on the upper west side not in soho even though it's misleadingly called the soho forum i guess or maybe it once wasn't for soho i grew up less than a mile from here at 81st riverside so i remember this this is where 95th and broadway remember 96th and broadway i used to come and play pool and ping-pong in some now destroyed uh kind of kind of old-fashioned guys and dolls type place that made me think i was really in touch with america there i was an upper west side kid so i have fond memories of this corner fond memories of the upper west side but in any case apart from being back in new york thank you for having us for this discussion i think it's an important time to have a discussion about foreign policy it hasn't been front of mind honestly since people like me who were concerned about democracy around the world found ourselves more concerned about democracy at home for the last four or five years and still concerned about it i think they are connected however i do want to thank all of you for coming who are here and those of you who are watching it at home um i don't apologize but i was gonna say i feel bad that you all have to wear max masks but it's prudent i suppose and it's good that you're vaccinated so it's nice that we don't have to well we're speaking up here do so i've got to say so the resolution as gene said i'll just cut to the chase here since i know you want to have a substantive discussion and i do too uh willingness intervene to seek regime change is key to an american foreign policy that benefits america um i think this is correct i think i would notice that it says a willingness to intervene doesn't mean you have to intervene everywhere it doesn't mean there haven't been ill-advised interventions but a willingness to intervene which implies defense treaties commitments with two allies uh forward basing of troops probably all the characteristics of the post-1945 uh post-war order uh i do think is key to a safer world uh key to a freer and more prosperous world and a willingness to seek regime change mostly peacefully obviously is key to a more democratic world countries with democracies with self-government and with political and civil liberties how to do that gets complicated and i i'll talk about that a bit too but i think the fundamental point the willingness to stand with allies the willingness to intervene if necessary usually that willingness is provides a deterrence occasionally it has to happen a willingness to articulate that people deserve to live in freedom and that we should do our best to help them and occasionally if they're being oppressed sufficiently or if they're being invaded by others we'll even act to help them i think is key and i think such a policy benefits america directly but it also benefits the world which in turn benefits america so that's my core argument it's a pretty straightforward argument i honestly think it's a pretty um i think it's correct obviously i mean the key judgment people have to make is what do you think of the post 1945 world order if you think as i do that on the whole it has been a good thing that if you compare with the preceding 45 years it's undoubtedly produced a world more peaceful more prosperous more free greater social liberties for all the terrible problems but compared to the preceding half century i think you have to say this has been a good half century a good 70 years or so by comparison all these things are by comparison and that key to the success economic successes successes and life expectancies successes and political freedoms success and just keeping the peace success in not having another use of nuclear weapons in anger since 1945 those successes really depended on this american-led world order which in turn depended on a core defense structure the foreign policy structure national security structure of which the u.s was the keystone um i think it's actually a great achievement historians will look back on the post-1945 first cold war order and then post cold post 9 11 for the last 20 years and say under-appreciated at the time lots of challenges at the time lots of mistakes at the time but compared to what compared to what one of the most important things in life but i say especially in foreign policy is not taking for granted that bad things very bad things sometimes did not happen so it's pretty easy to look at the world and see particular instances of failure particular places things could be better particular things that one wishes wouldn't have done differently in retrospect but if you step back and say all in all what does one think of this post-world war ii liberal order global order that we have undergirded i think one has to say as i say peace prosperity but also think of the things that didn't go wrong the things that didn't happen and you know the soviet union did not prevail in the cold war liberal democracy spread intermittently and with some setbacks in the last 15 years but to countries where it hadn't been before prosperity was expanded massively i mean the achievement of helping hundreds of millions i guess uh billions of people come out of poverty especially in east asia obviously in southeast asia and china and india and surrounding countries that does not happen without the undergirding of this american-led liberal global order it's their achievement it's mostly an economic achievement but their achievement depends i think on a general world in which they are not fighting wars every 10 or 20 years as they certainly were before that in in east asia and elsewhere it depends on a free trade and free movement of capital uh and the ability to learn lessons in terms of international economics which in turn is undergirded by that liberal world order so we take that for granted as if well it was obviously the case that you know india china all these places were just going to develop in the way they have it was not obviously the case it hadn't happened before and i don't think we can count on it having happened if we if we had withdrawn from the world as we had done uh in 1918 or as we had done uh uh prior to 1914 in certain ways we certainly couldn't count on its being sustained we had a pretty good liberal world order until 1913 1914 but it turned out not to be reliably enough uh undergirded i think we have provided a kind of ability to sustain that kind of liberal world order that didn't exist before and that is really nothing to be not something to be taken for granted and not something to be whose importance can be slighted intervention uh is messy they've been good interventions in my opinion they've been obviously ones that didn't go well that were problematic and i think they're vertically mixed they've been ones that have been mistaken the most uh the earliest ones korean vietnam were by far the most costly for us korea may be necessary certainly part of the outcome of that a very successful booming free country but not so happy a story obviously in north korea at all vietnam a much less successful obviously intervention the subsequent ones one could go through them and try to weigh them i'm sure everyone's interested in iraq which i was was a strong supporter of and um remained a qualified i would say supporter of obviously we were wrong about weapons of mass destruction so that's we would not have gone to war if we had known they weren't there but still i would say the the the light in which we went to war in iraq was for me at least personally i won't speak to everyone else the experience after the cold war of said i'm invading kuwait and and just you know killing really hundreds of thousands of his own people uh in the in the years before that and and after the intervention when we didn't go and remove him and insist on regime change we let him hold power kill people redevelop some weapons of mass destruction it turns out we destroyed a lot of those in 1998 and then in the balkans we did nothing as milosevic engaged in ethnic cleansing in europe we finally intervened there and reasonably successfully i would argue and since then and 20 years for 20 years since 98 99 after the second intervention in kosovo we have not had that kind of slaughter in europe and we in fact achieved an awful lot in central and eastern europe where there hadn't been much history too much history of liberal democracy and freedom some backsliding unfortunately in the last few years and especially in hungary and a little and poland and that just for me makes the case though why it's so important that we stay engaged and stay active and nato puts a lot of pressure on these countries incidentally to maintain their democracies a lot of incentives for them not to slide back uh the fact that we have enemies like putin who've their opponents like putin who've grown up again for me makes the case for that fundamental willingness to assume our role in the world uh not to try to pull back i mean i would just say this about interventions without you know trying to escape from the um difficulty of them when i was very much younger someone made the point that if the allies had intervened if the uk and france had intervened in 1936 when hitler went into the sudetenland um it would have been a total mess and if they'd insist on a regime change it would have been very difficult in germany and people would be looking at that two years later or maybe 15 years later as gee was that really necessary and that you know it's you've got to be careful when you intervene you got to step back let things play let things take their course let things play out you don't know what would have happened if we hadn't done certain things we do know what happened in syria when we did not intervene in 2011 and then in 2013 with the red line and we know that 500 000 people have been killed and millions of people uh uh driven from their homes a migration crisis which then destabilized europe incidentally and probably helped the rise of authoritarian populism elsewhere in the world so the intervention can have bad consequences the war in iraq was fought terribly for the first three years and i i think we did stabilize it by the end of 2008 with the surge but i'm perfectly open to the argument that all in all it would have been better if we hadn't gone in i think it's a it's hard to know you can't rerun history backwards what would it look like if saddam or his kids were in charge and they were developing weapons of mass destruction as they had tried to in the past we don't know but but i certainly will acknowledge it was not a well-run intervention and maybe not a well-thought-through intervention still you know syria is the counter-argument of a non-intervention and i think one has to take that counter-argument at least seriously people like me were very influenced by the experience of the balkans and i would say also by the experience of rwanda in 94 where at that point we were kind of exhausted we had intervened in somalia in 93 that went badly with mogadishu and we just really neither party and almost no one in the u.s said oh my god we can't just sit back and watch what happened in rwanda happened and a million people got slaughtered and that was preventable that was preventable by us and by others and we didn't prevent it and i remember six years later watching al gore and george bush debate in 2000 on foreign policy and the the anti-interventionist move was still in the ascendancy uh bush was chastising clinton for too uh too aggressive a foreign policy he was promising a more humble foreign policy and one of the moderator jim lehrer said well would you have intervened over what a million people died there wouldn't have taken that much to stop that or at least to stop some of that and uh bush said no no we can't just solve everyone else's problems and gore who certainly didn't agree with that i think gore felt very bad that we hadn't intervened said oh no we can't intervene his political advisors have said there was no support for intervention 911 changed that we went into afghanistan i think correctly maybe we should have maybe we should have left earlier maybe we should at least sort of could have done some things differently we they went to iraq those are the two post-9 11 interventions really and again we don't know what the world looks like if we pull out of afghanistan earlier i hope it doesn't go too terribly there now i worry about what happens there in terms of the people of afghanistan i also worry what happens in terms of regional destabilization in pakistan uh and elsewhere pakistan's nuclear power i come back to the nuclear question very few people predicted in 1945 after hiroshima and nagasaki that there would be no use of nuclear weapons for what what is it now 75 years except for our tests and that's an achievement and who knows whether we could have been less forward leaning and stopped other nations from getting nuclear weapons but the reason japan is not a nuclear power is that we there's a u.s japan defense pact and defense pact means willingness to intervene that's literally what a defense pact means and the reason south korea is not a nuclear power is probably that we have troops there as well as having a pact with them and if they both were looking at china and there were no us troops in the region and no u.s commitments they would be nuclear and you have to then say what does the world look like india and pakistan nuclear weapons china does that's dangerous enough south korea japan do others decide i think we just underestimate the cost that would be paid if the u.s stepped back from its global commitments a couple of quick points in in closing can we afford to be the global superpower yes it costs i don't know what our defense budget is now about i think three and a half four percent of gdp let's just add a percent or two for intelligence state department all the other costs of being a global power five six percent it's just not it's worth it in my opinion if other people think it's doing harm to the world you can make that argument but it's not it's not that we can't afford it that is just not a real a really important argument i think so we should argue it on the merits i think rather than this kind of notion that we're going bankrupt because of the defense budget um is is the national security state been terrible for us at home uh has it you know eroded civil liberties it's because it's sort of a cliche that the national security state the war is the health of the state and and and you know it's very dangerous to civil liberties uh to freedom to uh civil rights it can be and there's certainly instances of that at the end of world war one and that of course the japanese internment for example in world war ii but really the story from 45 to 2015 in the u.s has been one of expanding equality expanding civil liberties certainly on core civil rights issues for example partly spurred in some respects by the fact that we were telling the world they had to be democratic and then people correctly i mean the communists so that said what about you look at the way uh african-americans are treated in the u.s and that was actually a bit of a spur to improving our country it's not a reason obviously to have the global responsibilities but i think if you just step back and say is there less you know freedom of speech not a ton of issues we care about freedom of religion it has not been the case that at least the post-1945 american global presence has led to some kind of erosion of liberty in the us we can argue about the size of government in the u.s and all kinds of issues but it's not just not empirically true that we've become some kind of garrison state hostile to to freedom hostile to social progress and so forth and finally i just think for those who say well but all this is nice for the world but what about america american democracy american freedom is not solid is not i think ultimately you can't count on it in a world that's entirely hostile we have a big interest in having other democracies in the world for the sake of those people but also for the sake of our own confidence in ourselves and that we don't become a garrison state constantly thinking that all over the world there are countries that might attack us so i think even from the point of view of democracy at home not even but including not just from the point of view of people living abroad but from the point of view of americans at home we have a big interest in democracy around the world thank you bill [Applause] for the negative scott horton take it away scott all right thank you gene and hello to mr crystal as some of you know mr crystal was chief of staff to dan quayle who i consider to be the best vice president of my lifetime and think about who the other ones were for a second i will respond about hitler and world war ii more in a later segment there america is in real trouble for the last few years my opponent has been at the forefront of those warning against the death of modern liberalism and that far-right populist trumpism is taking this country in a very dangerous direction towards authoritarianism even dictatorship but mr crystal you and david brooks promised us national greatness you said america needed to be called to their quote grand destiny quote nationalism we needed quote national strength and moral assertiveness abroad advancing the cause of freedom around the world we needed a big project we could all do together as brooke's friend christopher beam wrote invading iraq what suited his quest and yours for this greatness in his 1996 article toward a neo-reaganite foreign policy arguing for benevolent global hegemony my opponent wrote that john quincy adams was wrong that the u.s should not go abroad seeking monsters to destroy why not he asked for the exact reasons that quincy adams delineated our principles would turn from liberty to force we would become the dicatrists of the world but no longer the ruler of our own spirit he said adams was right the wars did not make america great the wars three thousand people were killed on september 11 2001. as paul wolfowitz admitted the main reason osama bin laden cited for attacking america was the u.s military bases left in saudi arabia for the so-called dual containment policy against iraq and iran in the 1990s after iraq war one the persian gulf war bin laden's plan was to provoke the united states into invading afghanistan so he could replicate the mujahideen's earlier success against the ussr with u.s support in the 1980s this time against us to bog us down bleed us to bankruptcy and create a choking life for the american people under the tyranny of our security state and after the last 20 years of war in afghanistan and across the middle east we have less influence there than ever before a 30 trillion dollar national debt an increasingly invasive surveillance state and militarized police state almost seven thousand dead troops thirty seven 000 if you count those who killed themselves in the aftermath and the worst partisan political racial and other social division of my lifetime anyway i'm 45. so much of this crisis is directly due to the costs financial and otherwise of america's middle east regime change wars let's review some recent regime changes and their consequences note that in neoconservative doctrine democracy absolutely must be spread to afghanistan iran iraq libya and syria but not saudi arabia bahrain qatar kuwait uae oman egypt or pakistan and if there's a democratically elected government that our government doesn't like the us won't hesitate to try to overthrow it like in algeria 1993 gaza in 2007 egypt in 2013 and ukraine in 2004 and 2014. now to the regime changes i'm sorry i have to skip kosovo and somalia for time first on our list is president carter and reagan's support for the mujahideen in afghanistan in the 1980s to overthrow the communist regime there this led directly to the rise of haqqani hekmatyar the taliban and al-qaeda carter and reagan's support for saddam hussein's iraq and its 1980s war to overthrow the ayatollah in iran also backfired it solidified the mullah's power in persia and led directly to the so-called gulf war after iraq invaded kuwait in a dispute over debts from the war against iran as mentioned america's first iraq war launched to restore the kuwaiti monarchy in 1991 led directly to the dual containment policy against iraq and iran from military bases in saudi arabia and al qaeda's war against the united states since 2001 after failing to deploy enough reinforcements to capture or kill bin laden at tora bora or allow the delta force to produ to pursue him into pakistan the bush administration instead sought regime change against the taliban in kabul who bill clinton had supported just a few years before in their own regime change against the mujahideen warlords whom presidents carter and reagan had supported against the communists in the 1980s this led to 20 years of war including a massive so-called surge escalation halfway through for absolutely nothing and leading to the taliban walking right back into power as the u.s withdrew in the summer of 2021. saddam hussein in iraq war ii when david wormser wrote his clean break plan for israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu's first government in 1996 he acknowledged that targeting secularist dictators hussein and assad for regime change in iraq and syria could further fan the flames of islamist anti-american terrorism but he said the solution to that problem would just have to wait until the war against them was over maybe in 1996 this was somehow understandable from a hawks perspective at least according to richard schultz in the weekly standard in the 1990s the pentagon joint staff would repeat as cliche that quote terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower but after the african embassy bombings of 1998 the uss cole attack in 2000 and september 11th which killed nearly 3 000 people in new york and at the pentagon it was less understandable yet the neoconservatives led by mr crystal persisted the neocons best laid plans to empower jordan and compliant shiites to take over iraq failed the american invasion of 2003 empowered iran's favored factions among the shiites the supreme islamic council and dawa party in fact it was king abdullah of jordan who coined the phrase shiite crescent to describe iran's newly enhanced power just after the invasion clean break nothing this american shiite alliance pushed their sunni arab enemies out of baghdad and into the arms of al-qaeda in iraq which did not even exist before the war adding thousands of hardened fighters to osama bin laden's movement including thousands of foreign fighters who traveled there to fight against the u.s shiite alliance many of these men later went home to libya syria and yemen to get ready for the next wars there the u.s took their side in all three in libya the hawks said they had to intervene to overthrow secular dictator gaddafi to protect the poor civilians but at the very least tens of thousands of people have been killed in endless fighting in that country in the decades since bin ladenite groups veterans of the second iraq war led that revolt and have thrived in the meantime as civil war has raged for years some warlords brought back literal chattel slavery of sub-saharan africans thousands of refugees drown in the mediterranean the war spread from libya into mali chad niger sierra leone burkina faso and nigeria obama's an allied support for the bin ladenite revolt against the secular government in syria an attempt to weaken their ally iran after the iraq war had done so much to empower them led to the rise of the islamic state so-called caliphate in eastern syria and western iraq and then the third iraq war from 2014 to 2018 to then destroy it on behalf of those same iranian-backed shiite groups the hawks wish they hadn't fought the second iraq war for no the u.s should not back these dictators like so-called president sisi in egypt that's part of what got us attacked in the first place but we sure as hell should not be supporting bin ladenite insurgencies against them either hillary clinton and saudi arabia's installation of mansur hadi when they co-opted the arab spring revolt in yemen in 2011 and 12 led straight to the next phase of the war which broke out in 2015. for the last six and a half years the us has backed saudi arabia and uae in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and also strengthened al qaeda in the arabian peninsula beyond belief there are now something like thirty thousand bin laden night fighters in the world and iran and russia who intervened to save assad from al-qaeda and isis are more influential in the region than ever this is not how it was supposed to be speaking of russia it isn't just the mideast wars in georgia the u.s supported the rose revolution of 2003 and the installation of mikhail shakashvili who almost got us into a war with russia when he attacked their peacekeeping forces in south ossetia just five years later and vice president cheney urged george bush to strike russian forces coming across the caucasus mountains the u.s also helped to overthrow the government of ukraine twice in 2004 and 2014. in 2014 they used actual nazis in a street push against the elected government it was supposed to be easy to get away with while putin was distracted with the sochi olympics but instead the new ukraine ku junta lost crimea to russia and started a brutal war in the east which has killed more than ten thousand people and unnecessarily ratcheted up tensions with the other most powerful nuclear weapons state on the planet then national endowment for democracy head carl gershman even threatened regime change in moscow itself in the washington post in october 2013. secretary of state hillary clinton famously blessed the honduran coup of 2009 leading directly to the rise of murderous drug cartels in that country and a massive child refugee crisis at our southern border the american establishment had its so-called unipolar moment at the high water mark of us influence to lead the world into the brave new future at the turn of the millennium and they blew it the u.s government has spread not liberty but the tyranny of the majority not free markets but corrupt crony contracting not peace and security but mass sectarian violence and destabilization this has led to increased support for left and right wing socialism around the world in reaction liberalism and democracy in the broadest sense have been discredited as meaning nothing more than supplication to american demands or cheap excuses for our violent intervention the economic crisis and refugee crisis resulting from our middle east wars has led to the rise of the populist right in europe where they are ascendant in the european parliament the uk has left the eu and the unraveling of the entire so-called liberal international order even in the west has begun in your 1997 national greatness piece in the wall street journal you wrote that the universal principle at the heart of the american ideal is a mandate to quote advance freedom and quote around the world apparently by any means necessary for the world's own good but means determine ends and even if somehow waging violent coups and regime change wars across the planet could guarantee freedom for those people it would necessarily come at the expense of those whose lives and liberty our government is actually sworn to protect ours no wonder that here in america as well people are moving to the socialist left and nationalist right since the disastrous consequences of militarism and regime change are what passes for liberalism in the center the backlash from bush's disastrous wars and the devastating economic crash of 2008 a direct result of the fed's militarism-friendly easy money policy in the preceding decade led to the disruptive and destabilizing presidency of barack obama his disastrous wars and the so-called k-shaped economic recovery of his time in office meaning bankers and think tankers paid by defense contractors did great while the people on the bottom three quarters of the economic ladder remained stuck in 2009 led directly to the election of donald j trump running as an economic populist and war skeptic over w bush's brother and barack obama's secretary of state his election was a reaction against the military and economic legacy of the preceding 15 years and its central liberal liberal establishment champions including the neoconservatives and who a guy who built his political capital proclaiming on talk radio that obama was a secret pro-terrorist muslim from kenya in other words your nemesis trump was exploiting your movement's previous cultivation of this sort of ill-liberal sentiment among republican voters back when it was still useful to your ends building support for the wars now that the anti-muslim chauvinism of the american right is no longer useful you claim the right itself is now the greatest threat to democracy if so this is the nationalist movement the neoconservatives have done so much to cultivate and promote for bin laden and his friends were few but would-be enemies who happened to be muslim were many so bush and the neocons supported the worst sort of right-wing populist nationalism in america especially with their wink and not approach to the muslim-hating hacks on am talk radio it was central to karl rove's plan for his permanent republican majority that was a big part of why my opponent was so determined to bring sarah palin on board with john mccain in 2008 she could get the rubes excited and and afraid and keep them and contin and convince them to continue to support the mccainian neoconservative doctrines behind the long war in the middle east it's why your friend frank gaffney pretended to believe that a small sufi mosque in a building down the street from the old world trade center site was supposed to represent the muslim enemy's triumph over america or that the 50 states needed to pass emergency legislation to protect us all from enslavement under sharia law this deliberately deceptive campaign did much to make the right worse now the centrists are terrified of the populist right accusing them all being neo-nazi white supremacists including many tens or hundreds of thousands of men and women who are resentful veterans of the wars you lied them into and in turn the populist right is terrified that the war on terrorism is now being turned against them as the department of homeland security redefines violent extremism to mean almost any political activity outside of the two major parties the people in return resent the power of the establishment which so despises them even more and now the average guy is supposed to believe that the last quarter century's greatest proponents of american empire such as mr crystal and dick cheney's daughter liz herself an avowed hawk and promoter of torture are the last principal defenders of the old republic they destroyed who's buying that engagement leadership primacy preeminence hegemony these are just euphemisms for world empire with the usa and the position of the hated british that our forebears had led the world in overthrowing the doctrine that the middle part of north america should be or could be the dominant military and political power in eurasia and indefinitely is crazy on its face and plus the whole thing is really just a racket as the soldiers call it a self-licking ice cream cone in other words a government program creating its own disasters it must then attempt to solve no nation on earth threatens the united states as ron paul once told the washington post we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines the u.s constitution does not authorize this posture of global dominance the people of the world do not want it the american people's costs are in the trillions and our gain is non-existent we suffer the terribly destructive inflation generated boom bust cycle and endlessly rising prices the feds rifle through our internet and phone records our sheriff's deputies act like special operations forces at war in our neighborhoods time's up scott good yeah good night one more second go again one more second sorry i'm almost done oh well um our sheriff's deputies act like special operations forces at war in our neighborhoods our soldiers and marines come home maimed physically and mentally and more and more terrorists are motivated to attack the united states there's a widespread feeling in america that liberty justice fairness under law and cooperation and compromise through little d democracy is now untenable hatreds between sectors of society have become much more solidified more people speak of secession and separation the people are finding out the hard way that you cannot have it both ways there is no such thing as a limited constitutional world empire there cannot be a balanced budget a free and prosperous economy independent major media or rule of law in a state of permanent war we americans i'm almost done give me just a sec we americans are losing our freedom in the name of forcibly spreading it to the rest of the world enough already let's defend america first and all aggressive wars and covert interventions in other nations abandon our empire and put the protection of liberty in our own country at the top of our political priorities then shed of all this violent hypocrisy we will be able to lead the world in the only legitimate way we can by the benign sympathy of our example thank you um okay and sorry for going over here [Applause] uh bill crystal you get an extra two minutes for your rebuttal um but you want you you can take this podium for your rebuttal maybe best yeah okay take it away bill kind of a lot to rub out there but i will uh that's okay i think i'll just i'll just let the two minutes go um i you know the middle east is a very difficult part of the world and we've obviously made many mistakes there i think one of the mistakes we made was not pushing democracy hard enough when we had real leverage i'm not a defender of the saudi regime i was kind of mocked in 2002 when i said that i thought a consistent policy for freedom in that part of the world would would anticipate and even work towards the end of the dominance of the house of saud in in saudi arabia and i continue to think and i was certainly critical of both the trump and biden administration for being too soft on mbs for example for arranging for the killing of an american resident jamal khashoggi so i've been same with sisi same with pakistan i i would be if anything i think in the middle east which is so difficult though and which we look at and then get understandably uh shrink from the consequences of really a kind of even liberal imperial world and so we tend to pull back and we tend to for understandable reasons prioritize short-term security uh peace anti-terror which is awfully important you know it's not nothing that we haven't had another 9 11 in 20 years um and uh and we probably don't do enough to promote liberty and democracy mr horton didn't seem to acknowledge the importance of the u.s uh commitments in europe and in asia to defending democracies where they exist or creating them where they didn't exist to expanding them where they exist and to the general peace and prosperity of both regions which is not something that had marked them historically for the preceding part of the 20th century when we weren't involved much we have it's not as if we've never not been involved in the world we've not been involved in the world and very conspicuously chose not to be involved in the world after 1918 and we saw how that worked out now maybe that's not it's not the same and we could have done things differently and it wasn't inevitable that what happened in both asia and europe were to happen but i think one at least has to somehow sketch out how our withdrawal from the world would not invite a much greater aggression on the part of autocrats much greater oppression at home on the part of dictators totally unfettered by any fear of u.s pressure u.s sanctions u.s soft power let alone u.s hard power um so i i really think that's a very that would be a very bad world uh at the end mr horton tried to sort of say well he's sort of vaguely for liberty around the world too but actually this it wouldn't be good for liberty around the world i don't believe would be good for liberty here i know for the reasons i i briefly indicated this i do believe that it's not well i'll put it this way the people who care a lot about liberty in the us really care about liberty uh seem to be mostly to be people who also care about liberty around the world they could differ somewhat on how much we can do whether as joe biden thinks we should withdraw from afghanistan and use more diplomacy and hopefully not have to fight middle east type wars i'm uncertain about that future uh i agree with him on the other hand to maintaining the alliances in europe and asia but i would make this point talk to actual liberals small liberals people who believe in liberty around the world talk to actual democrats around the world how many of them want the u.s to withdraw even the ones who think the u.s has been unwise in their countries and i've discussed this with many such people often in the middle east in pakistan and saudi arabia don't think the answer is well if you just left things would really get better quite the contrary it's that we're not doing the right thing we're not doing things carefully enough we're not being uh intelligent enough in the way in which we promote liberty those are all fair points and we'll but the idea that somehow any people real people around the world whether it's and i was i thought it was unfortunate that mr horton repeated in effect pro putin talking points about ukraine um i sympathize with the ukrainian people who were invaded by putin's russia and and the idea that putin wouldn't do more if the nato and the fact ukraine was kept outside the nato guarantees gave up its weapons as nuclear weapons in 94 great victory incidentally for nuclear non-proliferation because we in the britain and britain kind of guaranteed ukraine they wouldn't pay a price for giving up those weapons they were nervous about russia even then we didn't do much when russia invaded we at least were able to contain it to a little to a part of ukraine but again the the evidence for me is that it's u.s retreat that invites aggression not excessive u.s intervention that invites aggression or that makes life more miserable for more people again interventions individually we can debate how to do what we can debate wars haven't gone away because of the us maintain global order the middle east in particular is a very difficult part of the world where the transition to modernity has been very problematic in so many ways uh and maybe we should have been more cautious in the middle east about what we could do though again i would just point out the places where we have there's been a unbelievable amount of slaughter in the middle east that we weren't involved in one way or the other uh when thanks to the iran iraq war where the sophisticated establishment types in washington were sort of let them just kill each other that actually didn't work out well and also hundreds of thousands of people died and syria the refugee crisis is a product of non-intervention in syria not doing what obama said would do the use of chemical weapons against the syrian people has not been assad has paid no price for that and he's still in power and that's a horrible signal to send a horrible precedent to allow to be set in the 21st century so i i unapologetic and defending uh leave aside my i guess i could defend my 1997 piece but i don't really remember it that well except the national greatness we were for was a greatness in defending and promoting freedom and i am for that kind of national greatness i am for a healthy debate in our free democracy about how to do that i am not for trump type national greatness which cares not at all about political and civil liberties [Applause] five minutes everybody from you scott take it away okay and sorry for going over before when i practiced i read it fast i guess uh all right few things here in no particular order but you know first of all the second world war obviously hangs over all of this america defeated uh the nazis and the japanese and then you know created this post-war order uh that uh mr crystal's referring to here uh but the thing of that is as you guys all i'm sorry as i think everybody knows as even winston churchill himself said it was theodore roosevelt and especially woodrow wilson's intervention in world war one that caused world war ii world war one was ending as a stalemate before america got involved and tilted the powers so far in favor of the allies and against the central powers that first of all they prolonged the world long enough for lenin and trotsky no offense to uh cease power in russia and create the soviet union and they empowered the british and the french to inflict the versailles treaty on the germans which stripped them of all of their territories and demanded all these reparations that destroyed the economy and led to the rise of the nazi power uh the nazi party uh on the promise of getting revenge for what had been done to the germans at the end of world war one if america had just stayed out there would have been no soviet union and no nazi germany to fight world war ii at all okay um then uh as far as what happened in ukraine in 2014 america sponsored real nazis not just neo-nazis but the proud grandsons of the galatian ss who had perpetrated the holocaust in ukraine against jews and pulse there the right sector this faboda party formerly called the social nationalist party and the azov battalion all of whom proudly fly swastikas and commit crimes against minorities in ukraine and it was ukraine that attacked the east once they overthrew the government the donbass region in the east of the country donetsk and luhansk they decided well if you guys are going to overthrow the government we elected in a free and fair election in 2010 then we're just going to occupy all the government buildings and refused to recognize the new government then the kiev regime attacked them they called it the war on terrorism and they invaded the eastern part of their own country and yes it's true that the russians did send special operations forces across the border to help them but they never did invade the country at all with regular infantry and when in 2000 and i think late 14 or early 2015 the people of the donbass region voted in a plebiscite to join the russian federation putin told them no he had no interest in absorbing their territory whatsoever he would only provide them enough help that they needed to keep the kiev regime out and that was it you also heard and this goes back to his original statement at the beginning here that the u.s has kept the peace in the world for 75 years and he did mention korea and vietnam and that's all but he didn't mention that we killed two million koreans somewhere between three and five million nobody really knows how many vietnamese laotians and cambodians were killed and then of course the domino fell it was knocked over by america and spread communism to cambodia and led directly to the rise of pol pot and another 2 million dead there he didn't count the million dead iraqis or the million dead and oh i got to talk about obama's intervention in syria he didn't talk about the million dead iraqis the half a million dead syrians and and pakistanis and afghans and libyans and now yemenis where at the very minimum a quarter of a million people have been killed uh you know certainly in the war in somalia which helped lead to the famine of 2011 through 13 something like 250 000 people died in that famine muslim children under the age of five just like who's dying of cholera in the war in yemen inflicted by the americans and their allies who bombed the hospitals bombed the water and the sewage and the electricity and all of the means of civilian support there in that country and now it's just not true and i don't know who told you this but you might know that edward snowden leads the black budget to the washington post and they published it obama spent a billion dollars a year on the war in syria and he admitted it jeffrey goldberg asked him in march of 2012. he said don't you think that if we got rid of assad in syria that'd be a good way to bring iran down a peg and obama said absolutely and goldberg said well is there anything more that you could be doing to speed this process along and obama said well i can't tell you jeffrey because your classified clearance isn't high enough and we all know because even the washington post and the new york times admitted it over and over america saudi qatar uh turkey jordan and israel all supported al-nusrah which and their uh allies jaishol islam and the other bin ladenite groups there these were the syrian veterans of iraq war ii and america took their side because the government that they were fighting was friends with iran which had no role in knocking our towers down time's up well thank you for both we now go to the q and a portion of the evening we have two mikes over there you can line up to ask your questions and we have questions uh from the streamers uh i wanna take my moderator's prerogative to ask a question uh of scott uh i believe a bill crystal has basically asked you for a counter factual and and of course you guys are sometimes talking about more than a century's worth of military foreign policy i'm wondering scott if you could take it from 9 11. like there was a question 9 11 happened let's assume that everything up through 9 11 also happened you didn't change that part of history but now from 9 11 on bill is really challenging you to say what is your alternative to what went on what what could have happened from 9 11 on what well i'll cite the great harry brown the former libertarian presidential candidate and great libertarian activist i i asked him on my show harry brown did you hear me the first part yeah the great harry brown i asked him well what would you have done and he would have called off the policies that called the cause the attack in the first place but assuming the attack what he would have done was he would have negotiated in good faith with the taliban who hated bin laden and al-qaeda and wanted rid of him instead of refusing the taliban's offers to negotiate as george bush did for almost a solid month in the lead-up to the start of the war and barring that uh barring success on negotiating extradition he would have sent special operations forces to capture or kill bin laden and his few hundreds no more than 400 members of al qaeda they're hiding with bin laden at tora bora in afghanistan and then he would have called the whole thing off and especially including the entire policy of american dominance in the middle east that was the cause of the problem in the first place our bases in saudi our support for israel and their unending violence against the people of palestine and at that time of lebanon and if we had just called all of that off and proved to the world that we are what the statue of liberty says that we are and that was harry brown's thing the statue of liberty and if we had you know really worked hard to perfect liberty in our own country and to spread it by example and in fact harry brown was an evangelical uh libertarian he was determined to see liberty spread around the world and he was determined to give his statue a liberty speech he would have given it every day if he'd been the president about how we are doing everything we can to perfect the application of the bill of rights in our society and your societies out there in the world your bills of rights aren't good enough and you need to try at least as hard as we are trying to create a free society for our own people here and then instead of waiting in a swimming pool of the blood of innocent people looking like the world's worst hypocrite it would have been great and it would have sounded great to the people of the world remember on september 12th they held a million-man candlelight vigil in downtown tehran on behalf of the people of the united states we had the entire world ready to listen to america ready to join up in our cause but it wasn't the right cause it was hey you know what we could do we could get a bonus war if we could just lie to these people and we'll just publish in the weekly standard over and over and over again that osama bin laden and saddam hussein are friends and saddam's going to give weapons of mass destruction to osama bin laden to kill you and your mama and your hometown if we don't pre-empt them and stop them from attacking us first let's do that we could get away with that people are so upset about the 3 000 dead new yorkers we could exploit that grief and fear we could overthrow whoever we want now on to baghdad against who the guy in the french beret and the clean shaven chin and the olive green military uniform who they could have just sent colin powell the secretary of state at the time was a four-star general former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff i think he was tough enough to handle saddam and if not him how about mean old donald rumsfeld they were old friends from when he helped arm iraq in the 1980s under ronald reagan they couldn't have just gone over there and read the riot act to saddam and put him in line no remember dick cheney said we can't talk to evil because that will you know justify it and that will you know saddam hussein like he wasn't already the dictator of iraq since 1979 that will give him legitimacy and credibility if we talk to him we have only one choice to attack iraq before they attack us first see aha bill uh please take the mic up and um do you want to comment on scott swiss reply our policies did not cause 911 our policies did not cause assad to use poison gas against his own people and kill 500 000 of them our policies did not cause putin to kill journalists and to crush freedom in russia i mean mr horton may believe that the u.s is the source and cause of evil in the world i disagree um okay um do you well i know if you want to have another dialogue about that briefly go ahead yeah and then well the men who did 911 were responsible for 9 11 but they were motivated by american foreign policy and you know i actually just went back and watched the cnn interview of bin laden from 1998 or 96 and the whole story is well they hate our bases in saudi arabia and our support for israel back to you in the studio jimmy because nobody said they hate us for our freedom they hate us because their radical islamic beliefs make them hate those who are good and innocent and beautiful and love their mama no one had told that lie yet something simple you think the taliban are doing what they're doing right now in in afghanistan because they hate what do they hate we got out of afghanistan well the taliban aren't attacking us i don't know what you're talking about they were attacking us until we left and then they stopped i'm saying do you think that there's going to be liberty and freedom that young girls in afghanistan will have opportunities and the like no okay i don't know what the point is well the point of that is that liberty matters around the world that bin laden was not provoked by i don't believe our having some bases in saudi arabia that we'd had for an awful long time or by our supporting israel which had been there for an awful lot you don't believe that because you don't know anything about it i guess why don't you read the declaration of war from 1996 and 1998 or you know what better yet read perfect soldiers by terry mcdermott it's the biography of the hamburg cell 911 hijackers don't interrupt yet hang on a second mohammed atta the lead hijacker on september 11th he joined al qaeda decided to join al-qaeda and attack the united states when israel invaded lebanon in 1996 in operation grapes of wrath and a couple of months later osama bin laden put out his declaration of war declaring war against the united states and ranting on and on about the kana massacre of a hundred and six dead civilians killed by the israelis hiding in a u.n shelter and that was when muhammad atta and his friend ramsay bin al-sheeb decided they wanted to join al qaeda they then went and traveled to afghanistan met bin laden joined the group and were recruited to carry out the planes operation against the united states of america so even if you want to pretend to believe that all bin laden cared about was that we didn't all want to convert to his religion or something else his recruitment shtick was these people are hurting our people simple as that there have always been injustices in the world which allow evil men to recruit others to work to serve them i mean obviously hitler took advantage of versailles i think again that was us stepping back incidentally in 1919 not imposing something on as much as maybe we should have to make sure there was more just peace the fact that evil men take advantage of past injustices grievances uh insoluble conflicts does not mean that we then what withdraw and hope that those evil men do nothing evil it means we should stop doing evil and terrible things that provoke them we did well that's ridiculous that's where i'm just okay fine i'm just gonna say i do not believe that we did evil things that provoked 9 11. okay uh thank you both that was a good and lively exchange and and now we are going to put it over to questions please please don't identify yourself just ask your question as a question if you want to address it to one of the other party say so but otherwise ask the question please take it away sir uh my question is for mr bill crystal um clearly american foreign policy is in the great pivot to china you know we have two major fighter jets being designed right now with china in mind we have aircraft carriers being designed with china in mind right now we sail pretty often our nimitz class carrier into area that china considers their their waters and there's six thousand souls on board those nimitz-class carriers and china has missiles that can strike them if we were to lose one carrier that'd be six thousand dead that's that's two nine elevens in one afternoon what would be our response if if in in current american foreign policy and wouldn't that response wouldn't one of the things on the table be a nuclear exchange and at that point aren't we you know playing rolling the dice on the great sword of damocles over us thank you for your question bill yeah i mean china is a big challenge to the u.s it's very unfortunate that the bet on liberalization in china which was not a crazy bet that economic involvement would encourage political liberalization may have worked for a while has now been reversed by xi we have defense obligations obviously to japan taiwan and elsewhere and i do think in general those aircraft carriers have maintained the peace and i mean just empirically they have maintained the peace i would argue in an area of the world where there are deep enmities and where there have been terrible terrible wars in not quite in our memory but in the memory of our parents and grandparents if we were to withdraw out of fear and it's an understandable concern obviously that let's say there would be a chinese missile attack on on one of our carriers um i mean i think we can deter that without using nuclear weapons or even threatening the use of nuclear weapons but if we were to withdraw we would have i mean japan would certainly go nuclear other countries in the region south korea i think even taiwan if they had a chance would decide there's no u.s defense australia the u.s defense commitments have no credibility and that creates a much more dangerous and much more unstable world i mean if you want to create a world that has the conditions that then leads to an endless cycle of violence i would say the u.s can just withdraw from asia we can withdraw from europe we can give up on our efforts in the middle east and we will have endless cycles of violence as we've had in so many in those parts of the world before over the in the 21st century comment scott well it doesn't make any difference one way or the other to the american people who rules taiwan nobody wants to see violence it would be terrible if china invaded and people were killed there no one wants that but if the chinese rolled into outer mongolia does anybody in here think that america should intervene start a war to protect mongolia from chinese aggression or there's some things that are just out of our purview and out of our jurisdiction and cost too much and by the way you know back to the cost mr crystal has said repeatedly just how affordable all of this is but our national debt is 30 trillion dollars right now we spend something like a trillion dollars a year on militarism if you count the va and the care and feeding of the nukes at the energy department and the rest of that we absolutely cannot afford it and if you ask the people who lost uh you know uh people in the wars or in the terrorist attacks against this country in the meantime their costs are a lot higher now you know if you have a think tank that's financed by arms manufacturers then these are good times and you don't probably understand what anybody else has to worry about but there is severe as they call it economic anxiety in this country mostly caused by the boom and bust crash cycle that we have the they call it the business cycle it's the inflationary money cycle and the reason they keep expanding the money supply is to make the world empire seemed free for all those checks he was cashing they never raised his taxes once in the highest bracket because they just borrowed the money from china and printed it instead so then regular people are blowing their brains out because they're forced to carry this economy on their back okay next question over there please no no my question goes to mr crystal recently you wrote in an article at the bulwark commenting on some of biden's comments around afghanistan recently quote biden concludes his anti-war discussion by reminding us that there's nothing low grade or low risk or low cost about any war but this isn't true hard-hearted though it may sound to say this some wars are much more low grade or low risk or low cost than others so first mr crystal could you define a little more specifically what you view as low grade low risk and low cost and then point to a specific intervention say in the last couple or few decades that you view as meeting that criteria and having been successful yeah i think the balkans intervention i would say and obviously i mean look i am anti-war i hate the idea that we would send and most americans do the idea that americans are yearning to send young men and women abroad to fight that's not the case if anything it's the opposite we're large commercial country we we we enjoy and as we should pursuing happiness here in the united states we're cerrets we have oceans protecting us we don't have a long historical tradition uh as maybe we have some tradition of course of fighting on this continent um not always justly obviously but we don't have the kind of european type history and so americans i think on the whole refrain from wars and it is good to have an american president honestly and i think almost every american president falls into this category who is reluctant to send young americans off to war but if you think as i do that's occasionally the threat of war and even more occasionally less occasionally i guess i should say war actually engaging war is necessary then you have to obviously try to confine them to less uh costly wars both economically and much more importantly in terms of the human cost and importantly also in terms of the after effects the the sort of what what what messages get sent so i would say the balkans would be one case of a war that was uh worth it and that i think had pretty good consequences uh in europe and i would compare it to the convention in a place like rwanda or syria scott comment yeah uh you know as yugoslavia was breaking up they actually had struck a deal where the bosnian muslims and the croats would have a coalition and they would be the majority and the serbs would be the minority partner in the coalition and they signed on to that and accepted that it wasn't until american ambassador zimmerman intervened and told the croats to not take the deal to ruin the deal they'd already accepted and instead go to war you can have more and that was what turned the you know disas what was already a disaster in the balkans into the absolute catastrophe um that you know he's claiming that america solved it was the american ambassador who helped to cause that thing in the first place and and you know i'm sorry i meant to mention earlier real quick here when i was talking about the 2 million dead in korea and the 3 million in vietnam and the million and a half or two killed in america's middle east wars just in the last 20 years the people who always get left out of that are the people of indonesia and east timor and bangladesh and guatemala of course 500 000 dead in the civil war caused by the american coup in guatemala and of course el salvador and nicaragua all throughout the middle east and these are essentially massacres and and you know pseudogenocides uh even in some cases perpetrated by american puppets american compliant governments and governments protected by the united states of america for example gerald ford gave the green light for the massacre of the east timorese in indonesia in 1975. richard nixon gave the green light for the pakistanis to carry out their atrocities in bangladesh and etc etc he always says not just tonight but always america has kept the peace for 75 years our only white lives important does it only matter that russia hasn't fought germany again and these other people's lives just don't count the usa has killed a holocaust worth of civilians okay let's summarize it there's got five years let's summarize it there uh next question yeah oh uh sorry a hypothetical question for you mr horton let's say you are the resident of a totalitarian nation like australia and let's say let's say 10 20 years pass they're still locked down the rest of the world is back to normal they'll they're they are still under lockdowns you live in australia would you want american would you like america to intervene to come say you save you in totalitarian australia no absolutely i would not want that and especially looking at the consequences of american intervention there but you know i think there's going to be a very strong reaction in australia and they are under an absolutely authoritarian lockdown system right now but they still have regular elections and at least for now i guess we'll see but uh i am predicting the resounding defeat of everybody in charge of that country now after they have pushed uh things so far and but one more thing too if americans individual citizens want to go overseas and participate in somebody else's conflict like the spanish civil war or you want to go and help liberate uh the people and you know the iraqis enslaved under the dhaba party now then you're free to go and do that just leave me out of it thank you bill do you have a comment on australia i'm going to have a comment on a discourse that you know trivializes the holocaust by saying the united states has conducted holocaust that attacks that demeans the united states in really grotesque way if we made mistakes did we give as you say green lights or yellow lights when we shouldn't have that could quite well that could be talk to people from east team war though talk to people from bangladesh do they want the u.s to just withdraw and leave them leave them to the mercies of their neighbors or would they prefer for the u.s to have done more and to be doing more and as we have done more since incidentally uh the pakistan bangladesh split off from pakistan doing more to keep the peace there talk to people who care about liberty around the world they understand that for all the mistakes we make and that we are important to them to their peace to their prosperity to their liberty people of all colors i would say all that's the cities all religions of course our dimension of the balkans was on behalf of muslims our intervention in iraq and afghanistan was on behalf of muslims and our departure from afghanistan has unfortunately left many decent people in afghanistan who worked with us but more importantly worked for themselves and enjoyed the relative freedom of the last 20 years now worrying that they may never have a chance at that again i hope we can do it diplomatically help get decent people out who work with us that's our moral obligation and i also hope we can diplomatically perhaps help work for an outcome there that's less bad than unfortunately the outcome looks like it might be but that's again where i think our intervention both diplomatic economic as well as if need be occasionally military is so important around the world but just again the the notion that you know austria i may have foolish uh uh covet protocols now and people can chortle about how that's like totalitarianism but that's ludicrous honestly and a discourse that can talk about a u.s holocaust and about authoritarian i'm not sure what term was used so i don't want to characterize it but talk about australia even in a semi-joking way in the same way one talks about genuine genuine dictatorships that kill dissidents and really oppress minorities in horrible ways uh people who can talk heavily about that i don't know what to say next question i don't get to answer oh well jimmy what yeah on trivializing the holocaust our government led by the neoconservative hawks call every opponent of the american government hitler noriega's hitler david koresh is hitler saddam hussein is hitler the ayatollah khomeini and comedy or hitler in fact just what six weeks ago h.r mcmaster said that for trump to have negotiated with the taliban that's just like neville chamberlain negotiating with hitler well that to me sounds like it's trivializing the holocaust either hitler was a unique danger or he wasn't and i would say that he was and i would say that when they bring up adolf hitler the exception that proves the rule in every single case where america has to intervene oh oh muammar gaddafi the guy from the naked gun 2 yeah no we got to get him too he's hitler too they're all hitler speaking of trivializing the holocaust uh comment bill no you want to pass you want to know you want to pass okay you want to pass uh question historically it seems that empires don't last question yes so the question is um do you think world civilization has changed that the united states would be exempt or do we end like end up like rome england spain which one of them where do you see us going look historically republics don't last either unfortunately and um so i don't because they turn into empires oh okay let him finish bill uh scott yeah so what is the implication of that that i mean we need to keep a republic we need to keep we don't have an empire we have a i call the benevolent hegemony to be provocative but we have a liberal world order which our power does undergird i'm not willing i'm not backing away from that i'm not you know glossing over that um are we overstretched were we overstretched were we over ambitious and what we tried to do in the middle east perhaps i as i said earlier those are tough calls but again the problem then i think was a little bit too much ambition in promoting liberty not that we should not promote and defend liberty where it is and there is a lot of there are a lot of i mean to look at this world and to say that it's the you know a site of u.s holocaust and i guess and of liberty being crushed everywhere in the u.s rampaging around again ask people who like liberty whether they're in europe or in asia or in latin america if they just want the u.s to leave or if they think that the u.s should play a more active role in helping them secure the freedoms which are universal freedoms they are universal freedoms it doesn't mean we can make them make them universal and we need to protect them here obviously so we can be a republic but also i would say if you want to use a provocative term we can be at once a republican and a liberal empire that's what the founders thought honestly and i think we have done a decent job of it for 250 years and i think we can keep on doing it hopefully for another children 50 years may i take moderator's prerogative to uh to pick up on bill's point made a few times uh to throw it at you scott bill is basically saying that that that a jury of people who live in many of these countries they support american presence and that so that's his challenge to you what do you say to the idea that people in east timor and elsewhere want the u.s to be involved what's your response i've never heard of someone from east timor wanting the u.s to be involved i'm sure that i'm sure that when mr crystal travels around to european capitals he meets with people who like the american presence there but the idea that that means uh i mean i don't know somebody showed me the opinion polls in bangladesh and for that matter you know in eastern europe that say that they want the americans there and if let's say they hold another plebiscite this one that american respects in ukraine uh and 99 of the people in ukraine want the united states military there but that increases the chance of a war with russia then who cares what they think this is our country and you know what if i lived in probably any country in the old world just the same as i live in this one i would want to improve it but that's on them and i do agree that liberty is a universal principle of course it's a universal principle but it must be locally enforced because you see what happens when the usa if you want to say america is the best at it out of anybody when the usa acts as the world government they kill millions of people in the name of doing good bill do you want to respond to that point you want to waive okay uh so let's see uh yeah we have this side uh uh we i think this is going to have to be our last question go ahead i'm sorry sure this is for mr crystal um so there have been um you claim there have been successes and failures um of the the post 1945 world order how much worse would the failures have to be or how meager the successes would they have to be for you to say it wasn't worth it we would have been better off um keeping ourselves isolated i mean it's a good question and obviously when kent we run we run history for 75 years no i think you know nuclear weapons being used several times europe's descending back into war as it had twice in the preceding half century in the subsequent half century the cold war ending with nuclear exchange or massive uh conflicts of ground troops in europe instead of the collapse of the soviet union thanks to our partly partly thanks to our pressure partly thanks to gorbachev seeing that the soviet system wasn't working and the power of example mr horton cited also working but the power of example doesn't go away because we have troops in germany making sure that the soviet union can't foolishly decide one day to try to expand the balance of the warsaw pact you know if east europe hadn't become central eastern europe hadn't become free if we hadn't achieved the goal of europe peaceful if we have taiwan and south korea hadn't become democratic nations i think all if japan weren't still a democratic nation 75 years after so i think if yeah if all those things had gone south or some of those things obviously the balance would look very would look very different the middle east is the toughest place i will grant i think we i don't think we made things worse there i don't think we've made things as much better as i would hope though i am still hopeful the arab spring which for various reasons didn't work so to speak we didn't do as much to help as i think we could have uh maybe we were exhausted after iraq and and couldn't have done much much more but it shows that people there do uh yearn for freedom and um i do think there's much more we could do diplomatically and in other ways civil society to help to help even in the middle east which is probably the toughest part of the world for for my case uh coming from you scott on that question yeah well it's nato expansion in the post-cold war era is the greatest threat to peace in europe now and we now share you know the nato military empire hillary clinton said the russians are doing exercises right on nato's doorstep she meant inside russia because nato has moved their doorstep all the way to the baltic states right on their border and in the trump years they actually had military exercises within just a couple of hundred yards of the russian border that's not keeping the peace that's putting the entire species at risk thank you uh scott uh that closes the q a uh and um uh bill crystal uh seven and a half minutes of summation you want to take the podium again yeah it's okay i can do it for you i think okay i'm going to be brief partly because i do have to actually catch a plane as gene knows and i don't want it therefore and i apologize if i seem to rush out and not mix and mingle um since there might be friends here from the upper west side and elsewhere i mean we have a fundamentally such a fundamentally different view of the world i'm not sure that we've been able to convince each other i'm sure we've not convinced each other anything and i'm not sure we've convinced many of you uh in this kind of debate i guess my one i'll take this i'll just say this you know what it's better to make one's arguments assuming good faith on the part of one's the people with one whom differs once opponents and assuming that maybe they're wrong maybe i'm wrong i mean that last question i think was a very fair question and one could elaborate on it in ways that i probably haven't thought of and make more of a case that we made more mistakes than i realize and that things would be better if we hadn't done if the u.s had been less ambitious if we spent less on defense if we pull back from the world um or or not but the idea that you know people that that what mr horton calls the neo-conservatives or whatever don't want the right kinds of outcomes is this ridiculous as thinking libertarians or whoever's for you know a republican not an empire and for no american intervention anywhere don't want decent outcomes i think they're naive i think they don't understand the way the world would work and i think they don't learn the lessons from history they might otherwise learn but i understand that most of those people don't go around rooting for dictators to crush dissidents or for countries to remain in terrible poverty or for ethnic minorities to be brutally slaughtered as in xinjiang i don't accuse people who favor a more dovish policies or china of thinking that it's great that china has concentration camps for muslims and in the east but i i think making arguments therefore on the actual substance the actual consequences of policies assuming that the great majority of us on all sides want the right thing is uh is a better way to make arguments [Applause] we usually recommend the podium so uh scott might as well check the podium you have seven and a half minutes scott are we still going to have a chance to ask each other a question too uh no it's over seven and a half minutes of summary take it away scott all right i'll email you bill all right i i think i've made myself pretty clear so this thing is kind of busted um instead of recapping if you'll allow i'd like to just bring up a couple of things that i had to cut for my opening statement for time there um is there any real benefit to the american people from our policy of global domination including regime change perhaps access to oil and minerals certainly not roger stern an economic geographer at princeton university published a study in 2010 which determined the u.s had quote misallocated 8 trillion dollars between 1976 and 2007 protecting the sea lanes in and out of the persian gulf when safe when oil safe transport was never really under threat we spent a few more trillion since then this is far more than americans even spend consuming middle eastern oil even if somehow we could just scoop up all the oil and walk away with it as donald trump seems to believe it could never be worth the cost in blood and grief or the opportunities lost when people turn away from america for acting in such a ruthless manner they are occupying and stealing syrian oil today elon musk celebrated the coup against the popularly elected government in bolivia in 2018 crowing on twitter that it's great because he needs their lithium for his teslas his company may have played zero role in that coup for all i know but the us government moved quickly to support it and that still raises the important question what is america's national interest over the long term and is it good for the rest of us when selfish narrow special interests justify violent intervention in other people's countries for their own good in the short term and let's just presume that the financial gains far outweigh the costs when companies like freeport mcmoran are able to run off with all of west papua's gold even accounting for the taxpayers cost for u s government involved there what shall it profit a nation if they gain the whole world and lose their own soul you know by committing horrible deadly sins against helpless people part of the problem here is that the neoconservatives and their neoliberal counterparts never really understood what liberty was about in the first place it's a great way to finance a pnac but pentagon contracting is not the free market it's corrupt crony capitalism and due to the economic deformations of america's permanent war system the most wealthy counties in the country now are not here in new york city but in the suburbs of washington dc where our supposed public servants live and work and the richest in this city as all americans in the rest of the world know are all market proof due to the so-called greenspan put they get bailed out by congress and the federal reserve system every time they make a few trillion dollars worth of bad bets while regular people are forced to carry their weight on our backs their son our sons come home from war unable to find good work unlike in all the promises and this is another major reason for the current crisis of confidence by the american people and our supposed bettors who rule us so no the nation as a whole doesn't benefit financially or otherwise from acts of violence and coercion by the american government read nsc 68 paul nitza did not understand economics the whole imperial project is a fool's errand and how much time do i have three two okay uh and then i wanted to mention somalia here because i had to skip it for time in my opening statement but it ain't fair that somalia always gets skipped another six weeks or so it'll be america's longest war bush started supporting the warlords a hunt down supposed al-qaeda terrorists in somalia before the end of 2001 including the son of mohammed adid the bad guy from the black hawk down catastrophe of 1993. those warlords made life miserable for everyone until the people came together to form a new government the islamic courts union to force them out bush then supported the ethiopian invasion of 2006 which traded the harmless islamic courts union for the much more dangerous al-shabab insurgency in 2008 secretary of state condoleezza rice decided that icu chief sheikh ahmed sharif could be the leader of the country after all just within the form of the new government the us had created for them never mind the last two years of killing but al-shabab kept fighting and the u.s drone war against them has continued ever since and as soon as us as the u.s ceases support the government it has created in mogadishu will surely fall just like kabul and kosovo in 1999 the war was in favor of secession which is a regime change of sorts this war put bin laden's friends in the kosovo liberation in part in kosovo liberation army in power including hashem these the convicted organ thief and gangster and guilty of prosecuting and cleansing the serb minority there in the inverse of the lies they told to justify starting that war bill clinton in the weekly standard claimed that 100 000 civilians had been killed kosovar albanian civilians by the serbs when the war was over the fbi found a few thousand greys of fighting-aged males and went home after two weeks when the alleged mass graves containing the hundred thousand killed were proven to be non-existent kosovo is now permanently dependent on the united states where we still maintain a massive military base there to this day so there have been no successes in the war on terrorism unless you count winning two iraq wars for the shiites who despise us and continue to insist that our troops leave their country immediately i don't [Applause] please open uh the voting for the final vote but also uh uh vote only now if your last name begins with an a through m so just to segment it pause the moment if you're not a through m pause on the voting but a through m please vote uh and on the resolution uh yes no or undecided a willingness to intervene and to seek regime change is key to an american foreign policy that benefits america thanks to you both thanks to scott thanks to bill crystal for a spirited exchange bill has professional obligations in the morning and has to take a plane scott isn't leaving until wednesday and so he's going to be in the corner at the entrance way and he's going to some local watering hole that a local guy will lead us to bill unfortunately i know you'd probably love to come because this is your own stamping ground but i know you've got promises to keep and so you're going to be taking off but scott is going to be doing book signing for his book enough already at that place so if you want to congregate in the corner there at the entrance way then you can follow scott wherever he leads you to where he will be doing book signing and sales so that's a through m has voted so now uh n through the rest of the alphabet can vote n through z please vote on the resolution and we're going to be compiling a foreign final tally meanwhile i don't want to announce that both of you were invited to our well sorry i don't know to our november 15th event which will be downtown actually legitimately in a seoul venue uh you'll look it up uh that's going to be a debate on intellectual property stephen kinsella versus richard epstein stephen kinsella will defend the resolution all patent and copyright law should be abolished that would be november 15th downtown december 8th we will have a debate on vaccine mandates not held here it will be a the resolution defended will be ilia someone versus angela mcardle ilya silman will defend the resolution while vaccine mandates are an infringement on freedom some are justified due to their big payoff in lives saved that will be ilia simon someone george mason uh law prof versus angela mcardle taking the negative uh we have another debate now definitely scheduled in march this will be garnet wagner versus stephen conan garnet wagner will defend the resolution climate science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that's also scheduled for march you'll find it uh in a couple of days on our website so that's three debates that are definite one that is up in the air because dave rubin was going to debate uh robbie suave dave rubin who's got an enormous following he uh refused to come on principled grounds because of the requirements having to do with masks and and vaccines and so we have to schedule that elsewhere we're looking for a venue for that that will be dave reuben versus robert swaby it's definitely going to happen one way the other but probably not in new york city dave rubin will defend the resolution government must do something about big tech censorship whether we like it or not that will be that resolution and uh where do we stand on the voting we still uh have a minute to go okay we have the results okay yeah okay um yeah um all right the yes votes picked up uh you didn't get but of course it with the vote you get initially accounts against you and so on expert voting you know uh bill crystal had seven percent of the vote and it climbed to nine point four percent congratulations there but now that's the number to beat but uh but then the no votes went from 72 to 85 picking up 12 points so the tootsie roll goes to scott horton but congratulations to you both [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: ReasonTV

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Length: 93min 39sec (5619 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021