and right through the year after the iraq war and into libya there's been a kind of growth of a kind of right wing anti military intervention feeling among military families and so on in the tea party including that is also against military spending so and as well as on the left so i think it's interesting that we've got this kind of union occurring at this particular time so it's a very interesting development and we need to wait a little bit longer to see exactly what the the principles are and how they're going to be put into practice but to say that you're against endless walls which has been a big complaint of most americans really for the last 25 years or so i think that is a very progressive principle but we need to see the perhaps a little bit let me let me go to ted it could be a very conservative principle as well there's a lot of conservatives like me that are against these foreign interventions and i've been making a living on this for 10 years on this program fighting against the senseless wars ted what is your reaction to the quincy institute because i mean it on the face of

it yeah this is a good idea but i'm just a little worried about the fund the funding of it go ahead ted in oxford. i'm not particularly worried about the sources of funding i find it interesting that 2 such disparate sources have both decided this is a good idea but that doesn't stop me from thinking that it's a good idea too and looking at the contributors i see in andrew bass of each and there who's very much along my lines of sort of conservative libertarian on a lot of international issues i see parsi from georgetown with whom i agree on almost nothing but the whole idea i would think is to have people of various points of view coming together to discuss these issues and get people outside of their echo chambers that's one to please put don ok i'm going to start throwing some cold war or water on it here ok you have george soros in his relationship with the atlantic council a very you know that is the mouthpiece of nato its star in chile anti. russian if

you look at the koch brothers they have been supporting this illegal who and venezuela i could go on and on ok and so i'm just happy i'm left but willed and by all of this because are they going to separate themselves from their business interests and and this is going to be an intellectual process i find that hard to believe go had done well the question is is this is 13 chick change or a tactical one and i'd argue clearly it's the latter their interests as you mentioned haven't really changed the playing field has changed the rules of the game have changed we've seen expressions of this certainly and that's when the 16 election when you saw trump who wasn't even a republican really rise on to the top of 16 candidates in the republican party essentially because people said as they told me at the r n c he said he's going to get me a job that's how desperate people were these saw sanders rise in the democratic

party the same way and you saw up and over the same issues a sensually and use of people who streets every time something happened when it when a kid got killed or some other event happened people had one foot out the door were already the institutions in the west have not been responsive to the needs of working people for at least one generation now 30 years 40 years you've seen a steady erosion of people's purchasing power and wealth their equity so that now people who used to own their homes or have a very secure rental place to live our home and secure their food and secure they have massive debt for education they have health care is security and there's no solution in sight the thing that really got me at the r n c when people said to me well trump said is going to get me a job and i said look he's a politician what does that mean they said no one else is even so. a. good point

that i mean let me go back to london interviewee i mean you know if we look at in the past few weeks here and i don't want to micromanage management too much but it seems quite obvious that donald trump is looking for advice outside of his inner circle because i would argue and argue strenuously that he's getting very bad advice from his inner circle and you're doing a lot of she do a lot of firing i would say and i think everyone knows who i'm talking about with the quincy institute here that could be a news source for trump do you know you guys kind of talk about both sides here i think they see themselves as an issue and i think they would find themselves they could get closer to power and that's exactly what think tanks want to do they want to get their ideas in front of people who have power and i think this is a very good gambit as long as it's a good idea that they're putting go ahead in london. i think you're right i think when we look at some of the scholars and what they've been saying about american foreign policy and it's overstretch overreach in the last 2025 years they come from

both the right and from the liberal kind of. part of the spectrum so steve alter harvard johnny smith a tough for example a very representative and what each of them is saying is that they basically fundamentally agree that america has been trying to do good in the world but they are dog you that there's been a lot of hubris involved too and overstretch and they're both urging restraint and one of the key things that steve walt has it in book the hell of good intentions for example is that there is no if you like set of the cagers or trained people from a kind of more realist perspective that the administration be administration in washington can really choose from and in his book or towards get deeper has virtually put forward a manifesto which would suggest how that cadence set of cages might be might be generated and and we know that in that book hell of good intentions steve actually acknowledges the support that. until support of the foundation in any case i think

that is exactly what is happening here and i think that will kind of possibly bolster some of the advice of president trump may get to back up some of his his own instincts. bill kristol came out. with a very solid criticism a very pretty good one as usual coming from bill kristol it kikuyus is the idea of quincy and stupid is a promoting isolationism it is so i mean i find that just absolutely absurd rethinking a failed foreign policy is not isolationism it's always the 1930 s. for bill kristol go ahead in oxford in oxford. here it's a case of same stuff different day from crystal i'm sorry to say look this is a necessary point of view being put forward and it has been put forward individually by a number of people and when you find people as disparate as rand paul and bernie

sanders agreeing on american military foreign policy needed to take a backseat to american diplomatic foreign policy and i say that as a diplomat of 26 years experience with the u.s. foreign service then i think something good is blossoming here now if we're still worried about the koch brothers and show us you know half a 1000000 each that's that's a rounding error on their petty cash account sure they they're not deeply invested here but they're certainly making a point of investing and i think there's a difference ok don you seem to be more of the skeptic on the program react to that . well 1st you know the objective conditions are such that imperial retreat is you know on the agenda of the ceci and trump represents that certainly the policy that he espoused as and that he muttered out loud to out all the heresies that he spoke that provoke such a massive response from from the elites here had to do with imperial retreating

does nato obsolete can't japan defend itself that we have to have military bases all over the world do we need to have of war games around korea all the time they're so expensive you know that he's looking at it or any of that whoever is making policy around are looking at the overhead of you know of empire and seeing it as a drag on an economy that is out trying to compete with china that has no such drag . so you have that objective condition now you have people like soros and the koch brothers and others who resist very strongly trump articulating this you know soros wrote almost the same things back in 2003 in december he wrote a piece in 2003 called the bubble of american power or exceptionalism or or some such thing but you know what criticize the war in iraq

and similar water yeah but don but at the same time to. have solid evidence that he was funding n.g.o.s in ukraine and georgia i mean and that is and that's part of the furthering an agenda and it's a it's a nato agenda ok so i mean i could i could really care less about his op ed i care about how he spends his money and that's perhaps brought up the money because i happen 1000000 is not a lot to him but it can be a lot for people in ukraine and georgia going to 10 right seconds go ahead go ahead up bed and so that's what that's exactly my point right now we're talking about another op ed let's see what kind of policy comes out. you know where he stands ok gentlemen i'm going to jump in here we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on strange bedfellows staying with our city.

if you will not obey the voice of the lord your god will be careful to do all the long months and. then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. and then the white people the stolen property and must pretend to. get rid of whites only problems will go away. within the. presence of the physical the. people being tortured to death expression the elderly people in the. company. not been the case why of course will find themselves affected by. means and dreams oh it's all swept and. what are you

going to have for dinner today we don't have anything i'm asking for a name i mean. civil war in south africa. brother frederick was there and he chong not be in the code of your and to the. financial survival guide. to your. yanks this is what happens to pensions in britain. you watch kaiser report. my 7 years doing drugs my nephew was still in drugs my sister just with doing drugs

it was like an epidemic of drug abuse america. public enemy number one in the united states is drug abuse sort of going after the users in the prison population who are we started treating sick people people who are addicted to these drugs like criminals while i was on the hill. the war on drugs. there are countless numbers. in prison for. sins for owner minor offenders in the drug trade it's a lot watching your children grow up in issue in way and say by day as you're walking out of this it's just it doesn't get easier. magic mushrooms use down some contacts used in the wrong way carry carry potential like any any psychoactive substance. used in the right way they seem to have quite. profound

therapy to potential and quite a good safety profile as well. welcome back to cross talk we're all things considered i'm peter lavelle remind you we're discussing strange bedfellows. ok let's go back to london and one of the problems here is i think we have all described. the current situation with think tanks and how they enter influence policy but that's for a good reason because the military industrial complex really likes it here i mean don was absolutely right about the condition of the american public ok over the last 40 years or so i don't there's no i have no disagreement with it whatsoever on the flip side here there's some people a small group of people that are become fabulously rich off of this gambit and the

status quo is just jim dandy with them. that's why when trump says he's going to pull out of syria washington went into a meltdown i mean absurdly so it that was patently obvious there's a lot of money at stake here and they don't want that to go away because they need a threat they need a threat to stay in business i don't think they necessarily want to go to war but they want to have a threat they have to have multiple threats here how can a think tank like the quincy institute fight against that because that is really the beast you have to slay and you're and it's a david and goliath situation you can have these and wonderful man steps manifestos and good people like ourselves in our audience will read it but will it have any impact go ahead. well i think the 1st thing i would say to that peter is that i don't think we should dichotomize the new think tank from the military industrial complex i suspect that this is

a readjustment or recalibration of elements of that and the fact is that there's a self-perpetuating character to the to kind of the existing think tank community and its relations with big corporations and so on and that has actually led america down a kind of a dead end when you look at around the world the united states despite having spent so much money on so many wars is actually has lost positions whereas other countries which have not wage wars on anything like that kind of scale of actually improving their position so i think what is going on here is really a kind of self criticism from groups which are slightly outside of the mainstream establishment which are arguing that actually america stands to lose even more position unless there's a recalibration so the likes of steve walter and others whose work i know well who are arguing for a new position is not that the u.s. retreats away from the world but what basically argues is that basically you park

your aircraft carriers in 3 spaces. which are all at sea which is the east asia regarding china that is a threat in the persian gulf in regard to iran and other countries and in north western europe in regard to russia so it's not like that there are people in this new can go conglomeration who are not arguing about the existing these threats they're just saying that there are different ways in which we can conceive of stretch threats and deal with them and thereby maintain american global power through a policy of a bit more restraint than liberal head germany has been has been doing over the past 25 to 30 years so i don't think it's a kind of fundamental challenge i think it's a recalibration but politically they will have a lot of problems because there's an entrenched elite which has got great levels of power and that is what this this is a titanic battle i think beginning within 10 you were nodding your head in agreement were you agreeing with go ahead. pretty much all of the above but i'm

thinking that what's called for here is not a realignment it's not a retrenchment it's actually a massive paradigm shift because it's going to take that to get people out of that old way of thinking and frankly a think tank which is dedicated to demilitarizing and bringing diplomacy up is pretty much an ideal bench to start doing experiments in paradigm shifting now what i'm thinking is we have to get away from what i call the para bellum paradigm which is this idea that's been with us for at least a century and a half that it's necessary to continually prepare for war to achieve peace and the classic quote there is probably j.f.k. saying we dare not tempt them with weakness but what no one ever seems to focus on is the other side of that same coin which is we dare not terrify them into attacking us preemptively and god knows that's happened before this is been a bad idea ever since the crimean war and it's still a bad idea that saber rattling is somehow going to improve diplomacy and what we

need instead is a new way of looking at things and i actually think that as a businessman donald trump is ideally suited to be sort of benevolently in the background running things while these new ideas are coming forward because he'd much rather be trading with moscow than pointing this is at them it's a very good point john i mean some people have argued this quincy institute it's a trojan horse i mean it will say one thing but really what it wants is to be able to walk the corridors of power what do you say to that. well you have to consider both the intent of the parties and then the actual role that it's going to play in events that are still unfolding regardless of the intent of the parties. you know again it's a reaction to the reality of rising multiple arity of you know this system sort of collapsing under the weight of its own history with military budgets with you know placement of troops and materiel and $800.00 bases around the world the

expense of maintaining empire you know it's big big made empire almost not profitable and so what they're trying to do in my opinion at least some small part of some part of the elite is looking to either. not just 3 evaluate the tactical mode of attaining global hegemony but the question of whether or not the gemini should be the goal and rather if there can be a more collegial way of managing the affairs of the planet and so you know i see the united states for example going to sit at the table with a dozen other players you know that are major players you have a don that would be him that would be the paradigm shift that ted is talking about and looking at it looking at your interlocutor as some kind of equal appear that it's a dip every difficult thing for american foreign policy i mean republican or democratic

that that is the paradigm shift i think that needs to be overcome and accepted because you know essentially you have people like bolton in palm peo is that with their idea of negotiating is you surrender and then we talk that's what needs to change here go ahead and so what is their intent basically is that the intent of soros and koch you know every else is involved in this to use this to facilitate their way through this moment to attain a gemini in other words is it just the faint to. you know knowledge the existing situation and it's change it or is this basically what like like i've heard others say here and it's you know there was a lab but let's see if we can't come up with some things that will help us accommodate ourselves to a new paradigm and you know it's go back to an intraday one of the things that's very interesting that i think that the people that are so in we've mentioned some of the people associated with this quincy institute is that they have their pulse their finger on the pulse of public opinion public opinion repeatedly is that there

is a good exhaustion when it comes to these foreign adventures that never and are never successful are terribly expensive and there is a reminder what is said i've heard conflicting numbers. numerous that trains every single day commit suicide every single day and that is a legacy that is left at home for an tear so it seems to me and i want to be hopeful here an optimistic but these people that are involved slightly the left slightly to the right they understand that the american people have had enough of this and they don't need the boltons in the pompei or people like that whispering in the presidency or going for another conflict that nobody in the heartland really wants and they certainly doesn't create jobs for them in a meaningful sense go ahead in london. you know i think a broadly i would agree but i would just. note that a caution on president trump president trump has been the president who has called

for a withdrawal of troops from syria as well as afghanistan did hold the attack on iran he claims with 10 minutes within 10 minutes of it being launched but on the other hand president trump has boosted the military spending by the democrats very heavily yet he has also broadened the range of tools american power uses in order to try to bring other powers to heel whether they are. allies or associated or they are seen as strategic rivals so i don't think this this grouping necessarily thinks very differently fundamentally from that that is to say well that there is a growing sort of a shift in world distribution of power there are new rising powers and so on but at the same time i think the idea is that military intervention hasn't really worked and what you really need is a large amount of power a variety of powers which include diplomatic but also commercial financial dollar

another in order to effectively try to subordinate the other powers in a system which looks a little bit more multi-polar but actually will remain the kind of us remains a 1st among so-called equals so i would think that president trump is actually actively trying to do that in his own incoherent way and that is what i think many people who are critics of him from the right suggest that he is that he's unable to see anything through to the end because he's got a number of other personal and other kinds of issues going on as well so i would suggest that this grouping is not going to lead to any kind of idea of endless war but i think they're going to be much more selective about military engagement on what should her leave me i believe that they're going to be spending a lot of money on american military going forward it's not going to be easy to reverse this or as ted said the there's a paradigm shift here can't jump in and finish it finish out the program for us go

ahead. well i tend to be more optimistic including about president trump who's entirely coherent if you look at him from a business business perspective he's not terribly good about this world domination through military saying if he's exceeded to requests from his own government then frankly he's still surrounded by quite a bit of the deep state and he hasn't managed to purge all of that from his own department of energy from his own department of defense from his own intelligence community and he's going to be some time finishing that protect. their job as the you know the still the rumors floating around that d.o.j. and f.b.i. are still after him for some unknown reason at this point so that paradigm shift can take place with the right intentions with a bit of backing and that's why i'm glad there's some finance behind this but we have to back away from the idea that it's just going to be an endless you know red tooth and claw ascendancy as the next generation of you know. overlords comes along

i don't think that's going to be the paradigm that any of us will be dealing with 50 years from now i they we're going to be trading with each other i think we're going to lift african farmers out of poverty by stopping agricultural subsidies in europe and other places i think we're actually going to start acting like this is the 21st century and that we don't need nato and other relics of dead empire to spend all of our mine i'm so glad for us well we'll end on those beautiful words that you just uttered thank you gentlemen river i'm out of time many thanks to my guests in new york london and in oxford and thanks to our viewers for watching us here at r.t.c. you next time remember. during the great depression which i'm old enough to remember there was most of my family were unemployed working. there wasn't it was bed you know much worse objectively

day but there was an expectation of the things were going to get better. there was a real sense of hopefulness there isn't today today's america was shaped by the 10 principles of concentration of wealth and power. reduced democracy at tax. engineer elections manufacture consent and other principles according to no on. one set of rules for the rich opposite set of rules for. that's what happens when you put her into the. narrow sector of will switch will is dedicated to increasing power for just as you'd expect one of the most influential intellectuals of our time speaks about the modern civilization of america.

when lawmakers manufacture consent instead of public wealth. when the ruling classes are project themselves. the financial merry go round certainly the one percent told. to ignore middle of the room signal. is really low.

key.

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