Boots on the Ground in Iran, Major Scandal in Ukraine | Guest: Tom Woods | 3/30/26

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Hey, everybody.

How's it going?

Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

I've got a great stream of the great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy before we get started.

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All right.

Well, once a great man told me that no matter who you vote for, you end up with John McCain's foreign policy.

And despite voting really hard, very directly against the explicit repudiation of John McCain's foreign policy.

I'm worried that I might be getting John McCain's foreign policy.

Tom Woods.

Thanks for coming on the show, man.

Glad to be here orange.

Appreciate it.

So we've been watching this thing go exactly the way we told everybody was going to go.

And this isn't a let's pat ourselves on the back because we have the ideological keys to the kingdom thing here.

We were right, you were wrong.

But it's just extremely frustrating.

And I'm sure you who have been doing this much longer than I have are even more frustrated to sit here and watch the beats play out almost exactly as they have previously.

Well, it's just going to be a bombing.

Well, it's just going to be a few days, a few weeks, a few months.

It's just the midterm.

It's just some book boots on the ground.

It's just the 2028 election.

It seems like no matter what we say or what we do, it's hard to be able to recognize that the pattern of foreign intervention in the Middle East just leads us to a reliable outcome.

So we just got the news that there are going to be boots on the ground very likely in the American deployment, something we were promised would never happen in this scenario by all the people who were trusting the plan on this.

But to be fair, something that the administration never cut out from the very beginning of this, this incursion as a possibility.

And a lot of people seem confused about that outcome, but isn't this just kind of the most predictable thing in the world.

Well, I just saw, maybe it was on X, a clip from Ben Shapiro from the end of 2024 in which he called it scourulous that somebody would accuse him of favoring a war with Iran.

And now not only does he favor the war with Iran, even though absolutely nothing in the interim has changed, he is all in favor of this, you know, quote unquote boots on the ground, dimension of it.

And, you know, I don't think it's that people like, you know, like you and me, like we were, we were naive, or I think it, I think it was reasonable to think that there was a genuine possibility that we might crack through and finally have an opportunity to be a normal country again.

I mean, not just based on Trump's rhetoric, but some of the people around him kind of talked like us, kind of sounded like us, sympathized with us, came from our neck of the woods, so to speak.

So it is an end not to mention there's a reason that the never Trumpers were never Trumpers, you know, it wasn't because they didn't like his agriculture policy, you know, it wasn't because they they weren't sure where he stood on milk subsidies.

The point was that they thought he was unreliable on the one thing that matters to them, which is foreign policy, and particularly the question of Israel.

And because he, now he wasn't an ideologue down the line on questions of war and foreign intervention, but in a way that made it even worse, because now he's just completely unpredictable, he could do or say anything.

And that, you know, that's a good and a bad thing with Trump, you never know what he might do or say, which in a way could help in this situation, because he could say next week, I think the thing is all done, although the Iranians might have a word to say about that.

But now to see it turn around quite so much and to have the never Trumpers suddenly be whispering in his ear, not whispering in his ear, actually, bellowing into his ear that he's the greatest president ever, Ben Shapiro gives him an a plus, they know that that currency works with him that he wants to be told these things.

And the people who do tell him, well, he tends to go back to the well quite a bit. But on the other hand, we hear people saying that behind closed doors, he fully recognizes the, shall we say, strategic difficulties of the current position that the US is in with regard to Iran.

So who really know, we're all speculating, we're all trying to figure out who's where and saying what and, you know, we've heard rumors that even Marco Rubio, who had other, I mean, he has no love for the Iranian regime, but he had other priorities, you know, he has his various ethnic missions he wants to carry carry out south of here.

And we also hear that JD Vance was not sympathetic, but again, I mean, I don't know, probably he wasn't, but how much of this is also an attempt to try to salvage something for himself in 2028 is Trump winking at these leaks about JD Vance to because they know that this thing might in fact hurt his political prospects.

I don't know how to put it all together, what's what's really going on, but I will say that it is deeply demoralizing that even when you get a guy who in Jeb Bush's face says right to Jeb Bush's face says your brother lied us into a war over non-existent weapons of mass destruction that even that guy comes, you know, and again, I know people will say to me, you shouldn't have been naive, that's the way politicians are, that's not actually true. Some politicians get in office, they do exactly what they say they're going to do.

But as Scott Horton says, what tends to happen is they keep all the bad promises they made and they break all the good ones. And I think some of us thought, well, maybe there's a chance here this might defy Horton's law, but unfortunately not quite.

Well, Tom, there's a people in the audience, despite our best efforts of trying to get your audio set before we got starters, still saying it's very hard to hear you. So pretend like the guy behind you, it supports the Fed and just really, all right, I will do that. I apologize. I don't know what's the matter with the setup, but I'm speaking as if I'm really, really outraged, which I am.

Yes, yes, give the full projection as if someone is letting you know that an expansionist for in policy somehow wise.

But look, I'm one of these people, like I was a classic talk radio listener before I ran into Donald Trump's presidency. I'm like, well, I'm not a huge Ted Cruz fan, but maybe he's the best choice in this field.

And then he got up in front of that field, an embarrassed Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and all of these people, specifically on foreign policy.

I am a foreign policy restrictionist because Donald Trump sold me on the idea. And then I went back and I started reading guys like Pat Buchanan and others and realized, oh, no, this isn't just Donald Trump.

There's a long running like conservative, right leaning, understanding of why this is the correct way to approach foreign policy. So it was good to know that while Donald Trump was saying something that was effective and persuasive and true.

But there was also like an intellectual genealogy reaching back into my own belief system that also showed this to be the case.

So when you have a guy who goes out there and gives exactly the argument that sways you into this position, it's quite the whiplash to then be told that you are insufficiently loyal to the guy for continuing to hold the position.

You were argued into by exactly this political actor. And to your point, people can say, oh, well, that's naive or foolish to hear what a politician says and believe it.

Fair enough. But then what are we doing with democracy? Let's just stop the whole thing, right? Like if I can never believe a single thing any politician ever says for any reason or their, you know, positions on it.

Well, then there is certainly legitimately no reason to continue to engage in this political system in any way.

That said, I do think that the factions that you are looting to inside the administration are real.

And one of the things that makes me believe that are the stories coming out. Like you said, we've seen for a while, people who are very clearly neo con adjacent guys like Max Abrams, others are have been arguing to get rid of J.D.

Vance. They obviously don't like the fact that Trump was in any way inconsistent on their understanding of foreign policy.

They do not want the MAGA nationalist understanding of foreign policy to continue in any new administration.

And I'm noticing who's being targeted by the media. So this like last news cycle about this last week, we've seen two different attempts to dislodge anti war or more nationalist voices inside the right.

So the first one I want to talk about, which is part of the headline of this episode is Tulsi Gabbard.

Now, I know Tulsi Gabbard has suddenly lost credibility with a lot of kind of anti war folks because of her own willingness to step out in this moment and do kind of what Joe Kent is doing.

I do understand. And I think Joe Kent is also said he understands why people stay in the administration to write you use the level of influence they have in that scenario.

And it's very clear that other people are worried about that because literally two days before Tulsi Gabbard, Gabbard issued a very important report on possible manipulation of war funding through Ukraine to subvert the American elections.

We got guys like Josh Hammer running out and setting up these conspiracy theories about Islamic fifth columns run by Tulsi Gabbard trying to undermine the war in Iran.

And so when I see all the wrong people targeting people like Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance, Steven Miller is starting to get a bunch of stories about how the White House has suddenly lost confidence in him and, you know, maybe he's impossible to work with and, you know, JD Vance is using mean words towards Benjamin Netanyahu when they're in discussions and, you know, the Iranians want to talk to him because they think he's more reasonable in these discussions.

When I see all of this stuff getting run out there, I know some people are like, oh, well, it's a hedge against him. I see the opposite. I in the last Trump administration, we watched this movement from

Original MAGA people slowly transforming into the John Bolton's administration, right? Like that. That was the transition we saw over time.

I feel like we're seeing something similar here where the president hits a policy wall, pivots to something like foreign policy instead because he feels like he can get something done.

Gets frustrated starts replacing a bunch of people who were there with the original idea of the original message of the administration and we end up something more like the Neocon establishment.

Am I reading this wrong? Do you see any possible version of this that could go that way?

Well, I have heard a lot of people say that in foreign policy, he has a lot more free reign because of what we've kind of all more or less

implicitly agreed over time. The president's power is on foreign policy ought to be now. I disagree with that.

I think the president has way too much power in foreign policy, but the point is given the status quo, I think he felt like I can get more wins on the foreign stage than I can with federal judges blocking me all the time.

Obviously, that's going to take a whole lot of work and we do need to focus on that too.

So I think there is something to that. The thing is you can't, as you were saying, you can't do this much of a 180.

Like, for example, if you wanted to focus on foreign policy wins, you could have focused on what he said apparently quite recently, which is maybe we can get troops out of Germany.

Yeah, for heaven's sake, maybe we can.

Something like that that's so obvious, so obviously a waste of money that's so obviously a relic of the Cold War past and yet it's so obvious, but no one can talk about it. It's not ever on the table.

But if he did it, it would show things that have been off the table are now on the table. I would consider that a win.

We save a lot of money. We go after an expensive relic of the Cold War. You could have done things like that. Big, big money saving things.

If I can't get these people to cut spending, here's where I'll cut it. A policy that outlived its usefulness 35 plus years ago. How about we get into that?

So he could have done that. But also you can't go around talking about the cost of housing as cavalierly as Trump has because he did say.

Again, I know we're supposed to be naive for taking him at his word, but I think if if Ron Paul said I'm going to do certain things about housing, whether you like Ron Paul or not, you know darn well, he would do those things. I mean, that's just a fact.

You know, he would not have launched this war in Iran. I mean, that's a fact. I can take his word for things because he's being honest with me, but all the same.

We have Trump saying we're going to cut housing prices. I don't remember the exact percentage, but it was a big percentage. And he said a lot of it has to do with regulation. And we're going to get in there and cut those prices. And now it's, well, who really, you know, everybody's bored by housing prices.

And I don't want to cut them too much because the boomers are using their houses at like ATMs and they feel wealthy because of the value of their houses.

So I can't cut them too much. What I can do is make it easier for you to borrow so you can be paying for your house the rest of your life. I can try and do that. I mean, this is you can't do that. You can't be so in their face.

That yes, I'm focused on Iran. And by the way, I'm also not listening to your domestic concerns. It seems like people keep saying, well, you can walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes, but he's walking and like drinking sulfuric acid at the same time. You know, don't do that.

I mean, I don't think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. That's been my point the entire time. If we don't seem to be able to walk or chew gum, show me you can do either show me you can do one of these.

We don't successfully regime change people. We never do it. It never works. And it certainly never works as some aerial bombardment. So we can't walk.

We also don't seem to be able to reduce housing prices. So we can't chew gum. So don't tell me we can't do that. We can do them both at the same time.

Because if you can't demonstrate an ability to do one of the things, then maybe trying to multitask is not the play. Now, as I said many times, I think that Donald Trump is still critical because of what has happened on immigration.

It's not sufficient. It's not what I want. We need more. However, I simply cannot deny that January 6th, you know, guys would still be in jail and the borders would still be open.

And we'd probably be looking at 8 million new illegals this year. And you know, some discussion of amnesty if we had gotten a Kamala Harris presidency. That's just the case.

And it doesn't mean I liked Donald Trump's current position, especially on foreign policy, but I'm not going to lie to myself that there's just no difference or it doesn't matter all of Trump's in office.

But that said, that doesn't mean I'm going to let him off on the things that we were promised that are not occurring. And when I've been told repeatedly that involving ourselves in long, sustained operations in the Middle East is a mistake.

And every day we get another indication that this thing's going to go longer. I'm saying, okay, we get it. You tried this. It didn't work at the very least.

Can we cut our losses and back out? But the problem now is just straight up for moves because obviously before this, I ran had pseudo control over it.

But they were not exercising the control. They were not taxing people to go in and out of there. They were not blowing up ships for trying to move through this area.

And now, because their position has been pressed and they are in an existential war with Israel with America backing it, they recognize that if they take their thumb off the dead man switch, they're going to get blown up like Israel's not going to call off and neither is the United States if they see this.

And so they're just going to sit on that straight and lock it down in perpetuity, even if we walk out of there. So now we've got Scott the set and others saying, well, we're just going to escort.

You know, these these oil carriers through here, we're just going to have this permit basically pseudo permanent military presence in order to make this happen, which I don't even know if we can do at the moment, like we're not even willing to go in there and alleviate the situation.

But we're starting to see other world leaders people in South Korea talking about the energy crisis that this is generating.

And now just again, as we guys like you and I have warmed so many times, you had a situation that was not ideal, but was workable. And now we've gone in and create a scenario where we have to stay in the Middle East possibly for years to generate the exact scenario we had before we even stepped in there.

Yeah, exactly. So going back to your point about domestic policy, particularly immigration, it's particularly if you favor those policies that you should not want this happening because this is so unpopular, even if we just look at it from a purely Machiavellian standpoint, this is so unpopular that it's going to mean you're not going to get the closing of the border for very long, because it's going to lead to a backlash that's going to lead to the worst people in the world.

Now there's a these days there's a huge competition for that title, but the worst people in the world coming back into power and they're going to be energized and ready to give as good as they got and then some because they didn't get nearly as much as some of us thought they should.

So that's the thing is that even if you thought, well, at some point we have to confront this Iranian regime. I mean, I view the Iranian regime as at most an occasional nuisance.

I don't go for this whole day, but a war with us for 47 years when you get out of here, you know, another thing about neocons that they're always so over the top with the with the rhetoric, you know, and if you read like the old right, the conservatives of the fifties, if you read people like Felix Morley, who was the editor of human events for quite some time, but also, I guess not just Felix Morley and then the people of pap you can and descends from.

But if you look at like Garrett Garrett or John T Flynn, or you look at some of these people from from those days, or in particular Richard Weaver, Richard Weaver would say, you know, left wingers, he wasn't thinking of neocons is left wingers come up with these big grandiose schemes where they're going to they're going to transform society, or they're going to abolish ignorance from the world, or they're going to rid the world of evil.

This is the way the neocons talk, you know, we have to rid the world of evil, whereas the conservative realizes, you know, that's something that sounded nice in third grade, but the fact is, all you can do with evil is hematin and the attempt to abolish evil from the world is going to be so misplaced and over the top, all you're going to do is make it worse, the best you can do is manage it, you know, so there are vices in America that we all wish people didn't have.

But, but they've been around since the beginning of time, usually the best you can do is manage them, keep them in the bad part of town away from the normal people, but going around trying to abolish everything, be happy if you have a country that's prosperous, that functions in which there are families that are flourishing, in which there are schools that you dare to send your kids to be happy with that.

Instead of this thought that I have to be concerned about some regime on the other side of the world, or that somebody's not living in a democracy, be happy with what you have, because that is about all you can expect in a fallen world.

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Well, it's hard not to notice where the priorities are in this moment, because I'm sure you've been aware there's a conservative civil war going on in that portion of the right over what Maggie is and what we should be doing and what foreign policy should look like.

Now this existed to be fair before the war, largely over the issue of Israel. And then we got a war where literally the Secretary of State walked out and said, yeah, we did it because Israel made us do it.

And that did not help the situation. Now don't get me wrong. I think there would have been a problem beforehand. But when I'm getting now, despite all of this, as people running around and still telling me that it's conspiracy theories on podcasts that are driving away the voters, that's what's going to lose us stuff.

This is so delusional that when I appear on shows, I have people ask me, well, why do you think the president's numbers are going down and none of the options they provide me are he started an unpopular war on behalf of a foreign country.

That's how incredible the silo is in the middle is this thing. And I have a lot of sympathy for people who are telling me that the way that Candace Owens or Ian Carroll conduct themselves is irresponsible.

I love Tucker Carlson, but I even disagree with him when I had him on on certain positions or attitudes he's taking in different scenarios.

So I understand that disagreement. But I what I cannot abide is people telling me that Ian Carroll or Candace Owens is somehow making the Republican party less popular than hiding the Epstein files and starting a war in Iran.

It's just absolutely delusional. You have to cut these people out. You have to remove them from the right.

If you don't, we will never get anything done. I want to focus on domestic policy. I want that to be the only thing we care about.

We have way too much going on the United States and it all needs to get fixed. I want to avoid talking about any other foreign country, including Israel.

But apparently it is literally impossible for me to get a domestic agenda done because we're too busy chasing the foreign policy aims of a foreign nation.

So I can't shut up about this anymore. And I hate it because I really do not want to talk about this stupid country in the Middle East ever again.

But I seem to have no other option because it's literally the domestic agenda being held hostage. And I'm told that noticing that is the real problem.

Not the fact that neocons have once again driven us into a disaster for domestic policy by going on the offense in foreign policy.

It's exactly the same situation. I mean, I'm not primarily a foreign policy guy in terms of my knowledge background.

So it's not what, you know, what would be my preferred thing to talk about. But it's like during COVID, you know, well, I don't really like talking about infectious disease.

But I guess I have to because it's remaking our entire society. And likewise, I mean, my gosh, if you look at my X feed these days, particularly the replies, it's like that's all I'm talking about.

And then you get accused of your obsessed with Israel. I wouldn't be quote obsessed with Israel. If you weren't obsessed with it in the first place, look at my feed a year ago, there was none of this.

This is entirely in reaction to what's going on. And yes, as you say, this has nothing to do with me one way or the other.

I wish Israel well the way I abstractly wish well every country in the world. But I have a million things that concern me.

And the ethnic hatreds of one country or another in the Middle East are not among them.

But you're right. It's gotten to the point. And of course, we all know that the routine now. And it's embarrassing.

The everybody's an anti-Semite or if you look at Mark Levin, I think somebody actually compiled all the times he has replied to somebody and simply said Nazi.

That's his entire reply is Nazi. That's that's Rachel Maddow level. And this guy can't talk on any other level. He can't imagine that there's any argument against him.

And I mean, I think at this point, the magic words, we all know the magic words, white supremacist, racist, racist is passé. They don't use that anymore.

Yeah, they had to semi up the volume on that one. It was not getting the job done.

Yeah, no, exactly. And so likewise, anti-Semite was not getting the job done. So now it's Jew-hater. I mean, that really sounds pretty terrible. Jew-hater.

The way they throw these terms around thinking, well, this will shut down discussion just as it did when Jesse Jackson called everybody a racist.

Well, that did actually shut people down at that time because there was a time in American history when I think the average person thought that words like that were being used in good faith and that they were being used to point out truly revolting behavior that we should all oppose.

And then they got a little wise to the racket and realized, no, this is actually just an attempt to silence people.

There's never an argument and make an argument. If you think I'm a bad person, tell me what's wrong with my argument. Don't just call me a name.

So now they've gotten to the point where, yeah, I suppose it still has some force. I mean, in your professional life, you probably don't want it coming up that you posted X or Y on X and you shouldn't have done this and you should have said this instead of that.

But more and more among people who can be honest, nobody cares about these names. You get called a racist, quote unquote, nobody thinks that means anything. You can call an anti-Semite these days.

Everybody just knows that means you're against the war in Iran. Basically, everybody knows that. And yes, you can find some people who are truly, you know, they would like to just murder all bunch of people.

Well, obviously I have nothing to do with that, but that is a vanishingly small number of people. It's overwhelmingly just people who say there's, I have criticisms of this particular government.

And because you have criticism of that particular government, they say, well, why are you singling it out? There are a lot of governments in the world. Why are you singling it out? Well, I'll tell you why.

Because I see my politicians going over there hundreds of them at a time and posing with the leader of that country, you know, like idiots, I see a thousand Christian pastors going over there to be propagandized into a false theology so they can come home and propagandize their congregations to take a particular position in foreign policy.

I don't see Qatar doing that. I don't see Oman doing that. I don't see Nigeria doing that. And I haven't even gotten to the funding. You know, so that's why we feel this way. And they have to realize this on some level.

But what have they got to send me because they have to realize that of course a patriot would oppose all those things. So what have they got except to call you a Jew hater? I mean, come on. That's the best you can do. Get out of here.

Well, and I think that's the big problem, Tom. Like you said, obviously there are people who truly do just have ethnic hatred in their hearts and whatever. I don't want to be associated with that. That's not my game.

If I had any inclination towards that, I certainly would just say it, but that's simply not the case. What we do see over and over again, however, is the attempt to conflate that with anyone else who has problems with our current foreign policy or current relationship.

And I'm sorry, but when you let guys like Josh Hammer run around and say, oh, well, anti-Semitism is genetic to European people when he's literally talking about like race science and how we can't help ourselves from being evil because we're genetically programmed.

And he doesn't get anything. He's running around spreading conspiracy theories. He's lying about your Americans of European descent in the most absolutely bigoted way possible.

And the people there never get linked to him. He does. He can appear on every major television program with his like absolute like feverish ethnic hatred, you know, and his complete ability to spin conspiracy theories.

But we get no push back there. But then when it comes to the other side, oh, well, you're all just one thing. You all just believe this. Everyone's a Nazi.

And like that rhetoric is only going to work until the boomers are gone. And I say that sadly because losing the boomers is not going to be a good thing overall.

I know a lot of people think that that transition is going to be great because all of a sudden these boomer ideas go out. Well, so does a large percentage of the American population that still remembers what America was.

You're going to pay a cost when the boomers are out the door as well. But ultimately one of the truth truth is that whether you like it or not through just historical erosion and demographic shifts.

The idea of this eternal world war true to guilt that has been stapled onto the American mindset since 1945 is just going to be gone.

It's not going to appeal to anybody dispensational theology is on its way out. I am an evangelical. I talk to people under 50 all the time. Nobody's buying this anymore.

All of this stuff is fading. This is the last gas of it. And they know that, which is why I think that Israel and Neocons are going hard in the paint on this because this is the very last time they're going to be able to pump that well for anything.

And without it, they simply cannot get the job done.

And this is where the key question comes up about what are the difference the different interests of Israel in the United States because of course the standard claim is that we are politically coordinate Israel in the United States.

We have the same goals. Well, you know, as with any two countries, sometimes you have the same goals, but other times you don't.

And the Ted Cruzes of the world seem to think it's a metaphysical impossibility that our interests could be discordant. And so one example of that is this war in Iran where you do hear voices coming out of the White House, one of them being Trump's own voice saying, well, we're going to attempt to do this or talk to this person or whoever it is they're talking to who knows.

And then he no sooner does he say that then Israel goes and knocks out some bit of civilian infrastructure somewhere that totally undermines him.

I mean, at one point, Trump even had to put in all caps. Israel will not do any more bombing of this place. He had to be reduced to that.

But to getting to your point, the reason I raised this is that the more Israel does that, the more of a quagmire it creates, the harder it makes it for the US to get out.

And so the longer we wind up staying there. Now, you know, so I think the thinking is, if you can get the US in at the beginning, we can keep them in through various means. We can make it strategically impossible for them to withdraw.

And so even as the political support for the mission falls and even as support for Israel falls over time as it has been, what are they going to do to clear they've lost and try and get out. They're going to have to stay around and and and keep slogging it out, I guess.

And so that is definitely a case where the interest diverge. I have no interest in seeing this happen. And I've no interest in seeing Americans taking the brunt of it.

We just heard, I don't know if it was today or the other day from Israel that in any proposed ground invasion, there won't be any Israeli forces. I mean, could you try to make it a little less obvious?

I mean, you're just handing material to people now.

Tom, I'm trying not to rave like a lunatic, but it's getting harder and harder when I have a country who clearly, clearly went out of their way to drive us into this war.

And announced just a day or two ago, as you say, not only are they not going to send any ground troops to help us in the war that they wanted to start that they want us to fight, but they are expanding their control of Lebanon right now.

They're expanding because of course, Israel is not fighting one war. They're fighting several war simultaneously because that's what sane rational, you know, western countries do. They open up nine fronts all at the same time.

And then they demand that you go in and fight a ground war in a place that they can't bother to put their troops in while they expand on an entirely different front.

Let's also not forget the Israel, you know, encouraged us to help topple the government of Syria and then just a few months later started a war with the new government of Syria that they helped to install because they decided they no longer liked it.

This is our partner in this conflict.

Again, I have no particular desire to ever think about Israel again.

If they want to go and try to conquer the entire Middle East, Godspeed, I don't care.

What I don't want is my blood, my treasure, my people, my country being pulled into this over and over again because these people cannot control themselves.

It is very clear that whatever you feel about Israel's current position or their possible divine right to any given land, that they are not someone who puts the priorities of the United States before their own.

And I don't blame that. I don't blame them for that. They're not supposed to. My leaders are supposed to.

So I'm very, very tired of my leaders telling me that I am somehow anti-American or hate some disparate group of people somewhere because I can see the obvious that this is an unreliable ally that is not putting our interests first and is costing us far too much.

This story about Ukraine should be a massive national scandal if we really saw government agents in the Biden administration coordinate with the Ukrainians in order to funnel or to funnel foreign aid and war funding back into the US to manipulate the election.

That should be a nation shattering scandal that should be dominating the news, but we're not talking about it because gas is two more bucks a gallon.

But at the same time, I think we're probably talking about it more now than we ever have.

When we think back to 2002 and three now in 2002, the Iraq war hadn't started yet, but you could tell it was coming from all the chatter and it seemed like inevitable.

And it didn't matter that the enthusiasm really wasn't there for it. I mean, there's more enthusiasm for this for the Iraq war than there is for the present one.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

But still, they had to come up with phony, baloney reasons in order to get people on board.

But at that time, it was very difficult actually to be a Pat Buchanan because pretty much everybody on the right had been raised on neo-con radio and they thought that, well, I guess I have to support the military because that's what I as a conservative do because the liberals are weak and as a conservative therefore I must be strong.

And being strong means deploying the military.

And I always remind people, actually, if you look at the mainstream left, like the Hillary Clinton left, these people favored, they favored the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, most of the Cold War, Vietnam, for most of the time until people turned against it.

They favored the Balkan intervention.

They favored Kosovo in 1999. I mean, they favored obviously funding Ukraine.

These people have no shortage of wanting to get involved in war. So if you're thinking you're sticking it to the Libs, I think you're misunderstanding who the Libs are for one thing.

But today, I think it's actually easier because I think Buchanan was ahead of his time.

And at the time, nobody could quite understand it. It was like Pat, we really like what you have to say on so many other things.

And that's what they said about Ron Paul. I love Ron Paul except for his foreign policy. I don't even say the foreign policy is the best thing about him.

So now, like that has had a lasting impact. And today, you and I can have this conversation. And it might seem a little cheeky, but on the other hand, it's not exactly completely out of left field.

Now people expect there to be this kind of dissent within the ranks of the right.

And that is that is absolutely only going to grow. And of course, the more sour this thing turns out to be, I mean, first of all, I was about to say, the more sour it turns, the less likely we are to get into future ones. But I don't know, I would have thought that the past would have prevented us from getting into this one.

It really is amazing. Like, obviously, while the reasons for the Iraq war were fabricated, at least they took the time to fabricate them, at least they took the time to sell us this, they went to the UN.

There was a months long discussion on why it was so important to get involved again, like not true, but at least we understood there was a process you needed to go through to convince the American people.

Right after 9, 11 and so there was this understandable concern and national tragedy again exploited, but at least the context made sense, at least there was an effort you went through the motions.

This time it was so clear that we were just kind of moving ships to the Middle East.

Remember covering the state of the Union and Trump didn't mention Iran, basically at all in the entire speech, even though we were going to war in a few days, he didn't make an argument as to why we needed to go, why they were dangerous, what was going on.

It was literally just, we seem to be moving the entire American military into this area. Oh, wait, we're fighting a war. Oh, wait, Israel was going to go, so we had to go the end.

That's a lot of sense to me, honestly, because all of a sudden a rather nationalist administration who had been using the language of America first suddenly started using neocon language out of nowhere, we need freedom for the Iranians.

They're going to greet us as liberators will arm the moderate Kurds to take it out and we're just playing the hits and it's just so clear that they didn't have any rhetoric prepared prepared.

There was no, and so that makes sense. I see a lot of people saying, well, of course we have a plan in Iran. No, brother, I don't think we do. I think Israel said go and we said, okay, and we didn't have any way to sell it to people and we didn't have any plan about how to get it done.

I think we just went because if we didn't, they were going to start it anyway and trap us and more soldiers were going to die. That is not a reason to go to war. That's a reason to stop having an ally. That's the end of an ally ship right there.

The minute that an ally tells you we're going to go to war and get your guys killed to drag in this war. So you better go whether you're ready or not, whether you have a justification for not whether you've had this conversation in your country or not, whether or not you have a plan or not.

That's the end of my relationship with that country forever. Like I don't understand how anyone cannot see this, but I'm still told that it's podcasters, Tom podcasters are destroying the conservative movement.

And if we could just shut up those stupid podcasters, the same one that the left told us we're winning the election on behalf of Donald Trump with people who had never voted Republican before in their lives, as long as you get rid of those people, then we'll have saved America.

Yeah, it's I mean, it's it is a ridiculous and absurd and you're fooling yourself to fall for that kind of a miscalculation. Then in terms of the war, given how how low the approval level has been for this thing since it started, the idea that if there's a ground invasion and their American casualties, this will rally the American public to the war is certainly false.

It will rally them further against it. Like we didn't want this to begin with. So why do you think, you know, whereas if 90% of people had favored a righteous invasion and then we hit some trouble, that might lead to people rallying to it, but not in this situation.

So it's it's and the other thing is I just talked to Andrew Day, who's senior editor at the American conservative, the American conservative was founded as a magazine back in 2002.

As I said, when when there was a lead up to the Iraq war, but it hadn't happened yet, and Pat Buchanan was one of the three founders of that magazine.

And so Andrew day kind of keeps that tradition going. And he said that in order to get out of this, it's going to be trickier than you think.

And now this is not original to him, but it's going to be trickier than you think because Iran is not an adversary that can just be stepped all over and then you leave and say it's over.

They have a say in this matter and they can continue the status quo for a while. They can continue raining down missiles on Israel. They can keep the straight of hormones closed.

It's going to be hard to just declare victory and leave. And it's also going to be hard to negotiate because who would trust the US regime as a negotiating part at this point.

So Andrew Day says what it might take is for Trump to say we are divorced from Israel. So you don't have to worry that this is going to happen again.

And I said, well, you know, there are a lot of things I'd like to hear that happen. And I can almost guarantee you that while we're praying for miracles, we'll put that one on the list.

Yeah, that is not on the list. I have a very short list that that is definitely not on it.

Yeah, it really is a scenario, as you say, that was designed from the beginning to ensure we couldn't back out of.

I mean, if you don't see that as plain as day, I can't help you. Like you just probably shouldn't be in the political analysis game, strategy isn't for you.

You know, find, find something else accounting, you know, they're plenty of great professions that don't involve you making a mistake of this magnitude.

But we're in this scenario either way now, right? And so this is the huge problem.

A lot of people are talking about alternative runs, you know, well, we'll have maybe a libertarian candidate, Rand Paul will step in or Thomas Massey will step in and you know, they'll be able to run against the Trump administration's war record

while also still providing some kind of right-wing alternative. Now, I give libertarians a lot of guff, which I'm sure you get in return for talking to me.

But I do think that well, and again, libertarians, I'll give you the credit where it's due, and I agreed with you this time so you can't be mean to me about it.

You were right about the war, right? We were all right about the war, right? But it's not about being right. It's about having our country win.

So the question is, what do we do next? Now, I understand why people like positions taken by Rand Paul and Thomas Massey, especially given the current scenario.

But I just don't see either of these guys as winning national elections. Massey just doesn't have, I think, the charisma necessary. And while I think Rand Paul has more time in the spotlight and probably probably has a little bit more ability on his feet in certain scenarios.

I've noticed that immediately his campaign possibly that he seems to be floating is about like balanced budgets and things.

We're not hearing a lot on immigration. And this is what always worries me. I look, I know that there is different strains of libertarianism.

And so the open borders libertarians are not the only ones. However, even when I get libertarians that kind of admit we probably need border security, they never seem to take it very seriously.

It's like the 19th issue on the table. I think if you want to win a populist right coalition, you have to put immigration first.

So if someone like Ron Paul or Thomas Massey was to go ahead and outflank Trump on the right, it would have to be with stricter immigration policies would have to be with more aggressive immigration agendas along with more aggressive anti war agendas and other things.

I see either of them making that move. Is that my misconception? Is there any validity to that?

I think Massey has a better, I don't have the data off the top of my head. I apologize, but I think Massey has a better voting record on immigration than people give him credit for, but I hear you on on this.

In particular, just yesterday, I posted in response to a post Rand had put up on X and I like I like Rand. I he has many good qualities. And I will say, even though I know he frustrates a lot of people, it is hard to be Rand and it's hard to be Thomas Massey.

You have no idea the pressure these people are under to conform. It is extremely lonely and difficult to be them. And so we at least owe them the respect for that.

But I responded, so he said we need to make sure that there remains, you know, a free market, forget what the second one was, but we're relating to free market, anti war voice on the right.

And I said, Rand, you got to put anti war number one on that list because, oh, it was free trade. There was a second one.

And I said, you know, free trade is great, but you know, you know, I put a bunch of z's there. No one's going to rally to that. I mean, we already know that like why are we going to why are we going to launch something that we know no one's going to have any interest in.

You know, when I go when I go to the polling place, I'm motivated by cheaper flat screen TVs, not not my ability to get a home or take care of my children. It's flat screen TVs I care about.

But I mean, I can have a populist view on immigration and on lower prices simultaneously. I mean, I certainly make that case. But my point was what the times call for now is not really what the times might have called for 25 years ago.

I think it's different. I think first of all, there's a racket going on involving the military industrial complex and the making of foreign policy.

There's a racket here, and it involves Israel and APAC and a whole bunch of other people. And if you're not going to make that at least a major plank of what you're doing, or it's just an afterthought, and you don't talk about it unless people ask you, that's not what the times call for.

That is just not. So whatever your opinions on tariffs are, that's not the primary thing people are thinking about. I think messy. I used to think is initially when he was elected, he was very quiet, very soft spoken.

You know, he voted the way I liked, but you know, you wouldn't think of him as being a national figure. But I think he's gotten a bit more fire under him after he's, you know, observed years and years and years of being that, you know, there are these memes of, you know, here's Thomas Massey at the beginning of his term, and he's all bright and smiley.

Then here he is today, he's like a wreck, you know, so I've had effect on, but they're not the only two, I mean, they're the only two who could plausibly be called libertarians who would be in the mix.

Because of course there's JD Vance, even now, even with the Iran albatross, he still has good numbers, you know, the political prediction markets still have him, you know, in the lead.

But I also wonder, I also wonder, I know he said, no, I wouldn't do it. But you know, here's where you're talking about, can you trust politicians? Sometimes what people say, no, I'm not going to run for office. They're not being entirely sincere.

And by that, I'm thinking about Tucker Carlson, because he is, I know he doesn't have political experience, doesn't matter. He is a fantastic communicator.

You know, I am very critical of people in terms of public speaking and stuff like that.

And yet with Tucker, I listen to his monologues, and I think I wouldn't change one syllable of that.

Because the things, part of the reason they hate him, it's not simply that he's had second thoughts about the US-Israeli relationship, it's that he's effective.

Those monologues do not make him sound crazy, just the opposite. They make him sound reasonable. And the fact that everybody thinks he's crazy seems crazy.

So honestly, if he just wanted to get some ideas out there, he on that debate stage would be the best one, because he would be fully unrehearsed.

Unrehearsed, it wouldn't be slogans, it wouldn't be bumper stickers. And he would be saying things nobody wants him to say.

And they'd all have to respond with their slogans, you know, anti-Semite or whatever. And we could watch it all play out.

So I don't know, I secretly want to see that happen. I don't know how you feel about that possibility. I know it's probably very, very slim.

But I think that would be, I frankly think that would be the best option.

Well, I mean, I love Tucker, and I do think that you're right about one thing for sure. He has that that Trump-esque quality of very charismatic in front of the camera, excellent delivery, able to steal the stage, knows how to deliver.

So he would have those things that people liked about the Trump movement, plus more anti-war, more skeptical of the Israeli relationship, those kind of things.

There's a couple stumbling blocks to that. First, he's going to be persona non grotto with most of the GOP at this point, that which way is not a bad trait necessarily, but means it's going to be hard for him to gain.

Excuse me, momentum.

Well, especially those primaries.

You have Republican to vote.

Right. And also, obviously he's friends with JD Vance.

So it seems unlikely that if Vance is a leading candidate in that scenario, unless that friendship has somehow completely imploded, which I don't think it has.

That's probably unlikely.

So I hear you, and I think that there is a reasonable case to be made for that, but I would not put him in the calculus, probably as a candidate in 2020.

I would say he has everything I want.

And I really don't want, quote, experience. I really don't. I want him to have people around him who know how the system works so that he can navigate it.

But apart from that, at this point, who would want somebody with, I mean, and with Trump, he had no political experience either. And even he, you know, got, got pulled down into the muck.

I feel I would be, well, I don't want to make any predictions. I would be shocked if that happened to Tucker, but.

No, I think that your point about him having, he has the same things that appealed to the popular space that Trump had.

So in that, in that argument, if nothing else, I think he would be a very unique candidate for that reason.

But like I said, I just doubt he would challenge Vance in 2028. I think if you were going to see anyone try to do it, it would be one of the more libertarian leaning candidates. And so that's why I brought those up.

But, you know, I still think Vance is probably the best choice. But, you know, tell him if they're going to hit, you know, from anywhere along with, yes, you have to make the discussion of war and, you know, Israeli influence a big part of it, but also immigration.

They have to have better positions or at least better rhetoric on immigration. You have to start making me believe that you take it seriously.

You want to win my vote away from the current administration, even though I have the level of problems I have there that if you anti war and, you know, immigration restriction.

These are the one to punch a populism in the United States, I think, along with cost of living, like that's the three issues right now that would have the biggest impact that anyone needs to be talking about.

I wish Trump was talking about them, but here we are.

I liked your post from the other day. I, you know, I have to restrain myself. I want to repost or retweet everything you put there. But then I feel like, well, a lot of my people already follow you.

You know, what am I doing here? But, but, but, but, but one of them that I liked was what you posted about this, this interesting relationship between Japan and the US involving respect for each other's cultures.

And some of these these exchanges have been quite heartwarming and you were saying, this is what a normal person means by diversity that Japan has Japanese culture and America has American culture.

And we have it because there were enough of us that we could develop our own culture, you know, and that if if Japan had no more Japanese people and we just imported Haitians into Japan, that wouldn't really be Japan anymore except, you know, it's have the same topography that it had before.

But by no reasonable definition, would it be Japan? And there's that is so obvious to any reasonable person. And speaking of Nazi, as we talked about earlier, it's like you're a Nazi.

If you even say, when I travel to Japan, I think I'd like to see Japanese people.

Well, you know who else like Nazi or who else who like Japan there?

Oh, that's a good enough.

You just you just revealed you've revealed your ultimate allegiance there. I'm sure James Lindsey will be fiercely typing about your woke right screens and support.

But they're under this for the access power pressure because of demographics to open up to immigration.

And, you know, if if that had she's if that, you know, my three, my three oldest daughters went on a trip to Japan a few months ago. I paid for I thought it'd be a wonderful little adventure for them.

Tokyo's an extremely safe city. I'd nothing to worry about, you know, they're all in their early 20s. And they had the time of their lives, but they came back and said, you know, it's funny.

There really is. It's a different experience from when you go to London. And I'm not talking about because of multiculturalism or when you go to Iceland or some places they've been.

You definitely get the distinct sense that you don't belong like everyone's courteous to you, but you are not going to crack into this.

And they had nothing but respect for that. That's fine. We're not trying to do that. We just want to visit.

That's the actual relationship that you should have with other cultures. You can respect them. You can love them. You can find them beautiful and interesting.

And then you go home. And then you live in your culture and you make it better. And that's how God actually divided the nations. It's actually in the Bible.

It's almost like there's some kind of ordered reality. We have to respect when we organize human civilization because, you know, the divine has made it so.

But whatever, as long as we build this tower, you see Tom to the sky, to God, then we, we can know all the things that we can control the world.

And that's really what it's all about. But that said, we have a few questions from the audience. Do you have time to take those real quick?

Yeah, sure. Why not?

Excellent. Before we do, where can people find your fantastic work?

Well, what I often tell people is I have a site woods history.com. I used to have behind a pay wall to US history courses taught from, you know, let's say our perspective.

And now I took them out from behind the pay wall. And you can just get them at woods history.com. So I'd probably refer people there.

Excellent. A fantastic place to start for all things. Tom Woods. Let's head to Dan. Looks like Dan from the Lotus Seaters here. He says, if this work goes Vietnam or Afghanistan long, how many presidential cycles until one of the candidates offers to sever the relationship with Israel completely and means it.

Well, okay. I will answer the question, but I'll start by saying I don't accept the premise. I can't, I cannot imagine this thing going that long.

Yeah, I mean, Afghanistan got started because of 9-11 and a lot of people supported that. I mean, even Ron Paul voted for the authorization to use military force. So they had that. And then it continued through inertia.

And also because of the sunk cost fallacy. We can't leave now. So I don't see that playing out in this case. But, but so is not to be, you know, unreasonable. You did ask a question. Let's stipulate that it does go that long.

Obviously, I don't know the exact number, but I will say that I'm 53 and I'm in good health. And I expect to be around a while. I hope that's the case. And I expected my lifetime that there will at least be presidential candidates running on this, running on that kind of platform.

I don't know that they get elected because as we've seen a democratic elections don't always translate into you get what you, what you ask for, you know, you go to this, you know, we can, we can make fun of free market economics all we like, but the, and, and flat screen TVs. But when I go to the store and I buy a flat screen TV, I don't bring it home and open it and it's an alligator, you know, at least it's what I thought I was getting. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way with this system.

Well, you know, say what you went about libertarians, at least hop is correct about how democracy works, right? Like he's got that down. You got, you got to give that 100% credit. There is a strand of libertarians that fully understands the democracy problem. If nothing else.

Thank you.

Bram Zwingel says fed post fed post fed post no sir, we will avoid the temptation, the no FBI agents through my door, but thank you very much for your support, understand the impulse, but we are all emotionally continent, responsible actors in this moment.

And why is the speaker says I want our politicians invested in us. I don't want them invested in some conflict between a religious fanatical anti-Western trigger happy Middle Eastern regime and Iran. I see what you did there.

Well, can I say in 2008, the same week that John McCain was being nominated in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, in the other one of the twins. I forget which was Minnesota or many apples are same, but it doesn't matter.

But in the other one of the Twin Cities from where the GOP convention was, Ron Paul held his own convention. And he did not call it a counter convention, but we all knew that's what it was. It was one day long.

And he asked me who's a good anti-war speaker, who's the best anti-war speaker you can come up with. So I came up with a guy most people will not have heard of and that's author Bill Kaufman. He gave the speech of the day by far.

And he focused on exactly this point. He said, you can't have a healthy home and a global empire. He says you can't care about Baghdad and your own backyard.

He says McCain chooses Baghdad, but we choose our front porch, you know, our front porches, our rock and roll clubs, volunteer fire departments, Sandlot, baseball diamonds, and he's listing all these wonderful, beautiful things about our wonderful country, you know, the old America that these people have just just doesn't mean anything to them, but it means everything to us.

And I thought that is that that was the speech of the day. That was the speech of the day. So I'm just I'm just echoing the sentiment of the of the statement here.

Absolutely. It's it's real simple. You can put America first or you can put the empire first.

There's all there is to it. I'm not naive. I understand that empires are a natural formation of human civilization. I agree with the Huntington thesis that you're going to have some level of regional influence that you have to have as a

civilizational cornerstone, which America is, but that empire should go to like Mexico and Canada. It shouldn't be reaching to Afghanistan or Iran or Singapore. Like these are not the natural boundaries of your civilizational block.

If you're thinking of kind of empires in that classical formation, that's the way to understand them. That is this global maintenance that you have to do constantly ignoring the core conditions of the people at home.

That said, Tom, fantastic speaking with you always, as always, everybody should of course make sure that they're watching your show. And if you would like to go ahead and subscribe to this channel because it's your first time watching.

Make sure that you click the subscribe to like the notification bell so you know when we go live. And if you want to get these broadcasts, podcasting to subscribe to the or Mac entire show on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you every week for watching as always. I'll talk to you next time.