Guest
Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com and the host of Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp.
Links
- AntiWar.com
- Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine by Scott Horton (book)
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
No rational person wants another world war, but it seems that the powers that be, particularly the United States, are doing everything they can to start one. How is this happening? That’s what I’m going to talk about today on Crisis Point. Hello, I’m Eric Stammer, your host, Editor and Chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to smash that like button, like the United States wants to smash every country in the world. Also, you can follow us on social media at crisismag.
Also, I just want to make sure I mention we’re doing our fundraiser. We only do two a year. So go to crisismagazine.com and we’ll have a pop-up asking for money. We only run that twice a year. We’re running it right now. So please donate. We have a huge donor who’s giving us $75,000 in matching grants if we can raise that much money. So please donate and we really do appreciate that.
Okay, so our guest today is David DeCamp. He is the news editor of antiwar.com and also the host of Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp, which are both excellent resources. But what I think he’s most famous for, at least here, is he’s my first guest, I believe, who’s ever been mentioned on the Joe Rogan podcast. So welcome to the program, Dave.
Dave DeCamp:
Thanks for having me, Eric. I’m a big fan.
Eric Sammons:
Thanks. Was that a little surreal for you, when all of a sudden, it was Dave Smith and he mentioned he was on Joe Rogan the day after the election, so this is a huge one, right? And all of a sudden he just mentions you, puts out your X address, tells everybody to follow you. What was that like for that to happen?
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah, it was surreal. I just happened to be on X that day they were recorded and I just saw, “Joe Rogan follows you,” and I was like, “What?” And I knew it was Dave, because I know Dave and he’s the only person I know that gets on that show. Then I messaged him later telling him and he’s like, “Yeah, he did it on the show.” And I doubled, my Twitter followers went from 30,000 to 60,000. And it was surreal. It’s one of those shows, I know Dave, I know Dave pretty well, but still, Joe Rogan, to me, because that’s something I used to listen to when I was in my early 20s. I used to listen to Joe Rogan all the time. And I heard from all my friends from home and people I used to work with. So yeah, it was pretty cool. So it was definitely-
Eric Sammons:
When you tweeted out that you were mentioned, honestly, I just started following your page to see the follower count go up, because it’s just fascinating to watch. Because, like you said, you’re in the 30s or something like that and all of a sudden you’re in the 40s, then you’re in the 50s, then you’re in the 60s. I’m just like, “Holy cow.” And that was in a couple of days too. It shows what kind of reach Joe Rogan has.
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah, it was pretty amazing. I’ve noticed, I’ve been shedding some followers lately. Some of them might not like what I have to say. But yeah, it’s really cool.
Eric Sammons:
It always is funny when you pick up followers from some media appearance you do, and then you notice that some of them go away because they’re like, “Oh, this guy actually isn’t what I thought he was. He actually thinks some things I don’t really agree with.” So that’s always fun. Okay, so I wanted to have you on the podcast because I love the work you’re doing at antiwar.com and I think, obviously, what’s going on in the world right now in Ukraine particularly and the Middle East and Gaza are very important and frankly a bit frightening. Before, though, I wanted to get into those details, I know I found out not that long ago that you’re Catholic. Why don’t you tell us a little bit, because most of our audience, not all, but most of our audience is Catholic. Tell us, did you grow up Catholic? Did you convert? Did you just become Catholic? What’s your story?
Dave DeCamp:
I was raised Catholic, I’m a cradle Catholic. I went away from the faith for most of my life when I was in high school. My mom’s very, very faithful. She brought me to church every Sunday, but I was a very bad Catholic in high school. And when I went into college in my 20s, I completely went away from it. I always believed in God. I always ultimately believed in God, believed in Jesus. I always knew that in my heart. So I returned to the church last year for a few years. There was times before where I started, I would go to mass once in a while, or I would go to other denominations. And as a kid, I was so ignorant. I go there and I’m like, “Where’s the Eucharist?” Where I grew up, I grew up on Long Island in New York with a lot of Italian Irish family, so everybody was Catholic.
So I took for granted the gift that I was given by my family, the Catholic faith. And then last year, we live down in Virginia now, and I started going back to church and got my kids baptized. My wife and I had to get married in the church. And I’ve had a big reversion. It’s been pretty major. It’s been an incredible year. So it’s one of those things, I’m sure the feeling as a convert, when I think about it… Actually, it hasn’t even been a full year since I officially rejoined the church. It was in March that we got married. But it feels like so long and it’s been great.
We’ve talked about this before. I agree with your stance that people should wait a few years before talking about Catholicism publicly. And I try not to talk about it too much, besides just I’ll Tweet something like, “Hey, praying the rosaries help me.” Really, one thing I love to see on Twitter is Catholics who will post some beautiful Catholic art for whatever feast day it is. Once in a while, I talked a little smack lately about Israel and Christians, but that’s related to my work. So I’m not ready yet to get in the fray of arguing with Orthodox Christians or Protestants and everything. But, again, my life has been completely transformed in the past year.
Eric Sammons:
That’s awesome. I love it, because I was following you before I even knew you were Catholic or anything like that, and I just think it’s great when you post those little things, like you said, praying the rosary or something like that, I just think it’s so great. Because I would guess, unlike me, the majority of my followers are probably Catholic, and I would guess that the vast majority of yours are not.
So it’s a great thing just to say, and like I’ve said this before on the podcast and you talked about it, that I do think people, when they convert or come back to faith, they should wait a while before they try to opine about internal Catholic matters, just to get a feel for what it’s like to be Catholic and live as a Catholic, stuff like that. But that of course doesn’t mean people who are recent converts can’t talk about anything, because you have an area expertise here, which is foreign policy, war, things of that nature. So why don’t you tell us, I know you’ve been with antiwar.com for a while, how did you get involved with the anti-war movement?
Dave DeCamp:
My background, I went to college for something completely different. I went to Maritime College in New York in the Bronx to get my merchant marine license to work on ships, and I ended up working on ferries in New York on Long Island, and then I worked on the Staten Island ferry. It was a nice cushy city job. So I had a lot of time off. And I was never very politically active, but I was always anti-war. I was in high school when… Actually, I was in middle school when the invasion happened, but I grew up in a suburb of New York. 9/11 was really impacted where I lived.
I remember, even as a kid, I was 13 when we invaded Iraq, and even at that time I knew it was wrong. I just had that gut feeling about it. So I was always anti-war through high school during the Bush years. And it was really during the 2016 election that I became more, I had this passion about it and I became more angry about it. Because the worst thing about Hillary Clinton really was her warmongering, one of the worst things.
Eric Sammons:
A lot bad there. But, yes, that was definitely one of the worst.
Dave DeCamp:
And that wasn’t really even, most people just didn’t really seem to care about that. And then, when it came to Trump, he said some good things on the campaign trail about the Iraq war, but he also said he was going to kill terrorists and their families. And when he came into office in 2017, he ramped up all the wars, all the drone campaigns, airstrikes in Afghanistan, in Yemen, and nobody noticed. It was all these fake scandals about Russiagate, Stormy Daniels. Really, it was just not on anybody’s minds, these wars that the US was involved in.
A big one at the time was the war in Yemen, that the US was backing the Saudis and the UAE in this brutal war. So many children killed and starved to death. And that was the one that really drove me. I started getting involved in anti-war activism and protests and stuff, but that didn’t… People need to be aware of the war. If you see someone protesting the war in Yemen on the streets of New York, most people don’t even understand how that connects to the US. So I started writing and just submitting articles to antiwar.com. Then they started publishing them and I got to know my boss, Eric Garris, who founded the site, and Scott Horton, who’s our editorial director. He’s our most well-known guy at this point. He just wrote a great book on Ukraine called Provoked.
Eric Sammons:
I got it sitting right over there.
Dave DeCamp:
Nice.
Eric Sammons:
I just started it. Boy, it would be a long time before I say I’m finished with it, probably, because that thing is, that’s huge.
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah, I’m still working on it, and I had an advanced copy. So I got to know them, and it felt good, it felt sane. Same thing now I feel like if I meet a Catholic out in the wild or talk to a Catholic, that feeling of there’s this great evil thing happening that nobody’s really aware of, and then we just build a relationship. So I do news coverage there. I write short news articles every day, sift through the news and try to figure out what’s important from our perspective, what Americans should be aware of that their government is involved in. And our perspective is a non-interventionist one, that we don’t think our government should be involved in these wars. We’re libertarian leaning. Austrian economics and gold and Bitcoin are things that we like.
So that’s our perspective. But then, again, we have columnists from all over the political spectrum. So you’ll see things from a left-wing perspective, things from a conservative perspective. That’s something I actually really like about it. So that’s what I do, I do the news every day. Five days a week I work and sift through these stories and write this stuff. I actually credit it, how I ended up in this, why I cared about kids in Yemen with being raised Catholic, because my grandparents that I remember and my mom were always giving to charities in Africa and these other parts of the world. I had that instinct to care about innocent people in these other parts of the world I think from being raised Catholic.
Eric Sammons:
Right. I’ve been basically anti-war for about… Ron Paul was, the Giuliani moment from 2008 campaign started it, and then probably around 2011, 2012 is when I realized, “Okay, I’m starting to see, this is just ridiculous.” I was a big booster in the ’90s of the first Iraq war. And 9/11, I was like, “Yeah…” Actually, that’s right, the second Iraq war, the invasion after 9/11, that was the first time I was squeamish about American foreign policy. Because I was like, “I don’t really think the story they’re telling is true.” And for somebody like me who grew up very conservative, neocon, that’s a big moment. And then when Ron Paul kicked in, I was like, that’s why I started listening to him, because I was like, “Okay.”
But here’s the thing, I resisted the label for a very long time of anti-war, because in my mind, as a Catholic, I don’t think that, at least my perspective is that we shouldn’t be a pacifist, strictly speaking. So we can’t really be anti-war in the sense that war sometimes happens and you have to defend yourself and you’re in a war, stuff like that. But then recently, in the last few years, I’ve realized, “Okay, that’s just stupid semantics, because ultimately, I don’t know of a war that exists in our modern world today that I’m for. So I’m going to be anti-war.” If all of a sudden one comes up that I feel is morally justified, then I’ll say, “Okay, I’m okay with us fighting in this one.” But I just am not able to say that about any modern wars. Do you have the same feelings or are you a pacifist? I don’t really know. Where do you fall on that spectrum?
Dave DeCamp:
I used to be more of a pacifist, and some people that work for the site are involved in the site are pacifists, but more so, again, our perspective is more libertarian like the American Revolution I think was a just war. And since I’ve become Catholic, things have changed. I’m still figuring it out now, my political views on a lot of things. It’s strengthened my anti-war views, but it’s a big change for me. Being Catholic is my identity now, more so than being a libertarian. And there are Catholic libertarians, there’s a lot of great ones, but there are things that clash there. So I’m trying to figure it out. But just war theory, what the Catholic Church teaches, I’m pretty much completely on board with that.
Eric Sammons:
And that’s why I’m against all the wars today, because I don’t think a single one of them qualify under just war theory.
Dave DeCamp:
That’s absolutely right. Yeah. All the conflicts that the US is involved in right now-
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Dave DeCamp:
… definitely do not fit with that.
Eric Sammons:
That’s something I don’t understand. Because I remember I actually did an article a few years ago about just war theory and about how it was being abused. I went back and found articles by Catholics justifying the second Iraq invasion war by just war theory. When reading it, it sounds so ludicrous now. It should’ve sounded ludicrous at the time to me, it didn’t as much, but now it’s just so ridiculous. And it all comes back to, “Okay, let’s just compare this leader that we don’t like the Hitler, and now it’s a just war.” That seems to be the neocon talking point.
Well, let’s talk about specifically now today. I think that, obviously, I don’t want to act like there aren’t more conflicts. Yemen is a good example. Nobody knows about it. It’s horrible what’s going on. But the two big ones, of course, are what’s happening in Ukraine, what’s happening in Gaza. So first, why don’t we talk about Ukraine. We mentioned Scott Horton’s book, for those who don’t know what we’re talking about, a book called Provoked by Scott Horton. It just came out literally a week or so ago. You can get it at Amazon. There it is. I’ll show the side first, see how big it is. What is it? A third of its footnotes where he’s backing up everything that he’s saying, basically. What’s the subtitle of that book?
Dave DeCamp:
How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine?
Eric Sammons:
Right. So the basic point is, is that there’s this big debate about whether or not Russia was provoked, and people think that means they’re justified, something like that. Why don’t you give a 64,000-foot view of the US involvement that led to where we are today with Ukraine and Russia?
Dave DeCamp:
There’s a lot to it and Scott’s book goes back to the end of the Cold War. One of the biggest things that strained relations between the US and Russia post-Cold War was NATO expansion. He makes a very strong case, and the first part of the book is about how the US was telling the Soviet Union that, “If you get out of East Germany, we’re not going to move NATO east.” They were saying at one point that they weren’t going to move it into East Germany, but they were saying, “We’re not going to march East with the alliance.” There was not a formal treaty written out that says that. And you’ll see now all these articles saying, “Oh, that’s a Russian talking point, Putin propaganda.” But Scott makes a very strong case that what’s really interesting about it is not only is that what the US was telling these Soviet and Russian officials during meetings, that was also what the US was saying publicly. There’s State Department press briefings and stuff and statements where that’s what they’re saying.
So NATO expansion was the first big march in the direction of what we have today in Ukraine. And also the wars in the Balkans, Bosnia, Kosovo, the US. That’s another thing. There’s a lot to get into with the different ethnic conflicts and everything. But, again, the case that Scott makes very strongly is a big part of that intervention, this is when the humanitarian intervention really started, that narrative. NATO, their biggest enemy was gone. Their reason for existing was gone. The Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact was gone. So they needed work, they needed something to do. So they got involved in the Balkans. They broke up Yugoslavia.
You hear all this talk about you have to respect a country’s sovereignty and their borders, like these borders that were drawn post World War II and then post collapse of the Soviet Union are completely sacred, and they cannot be moved in any way. Well, look at what the US and NATO did in Yugoslavia to break those borders up. And the view from Russia, Russia seeing what they do in Yugoslavia, giving Russia a reason to see NATO still as an enemy, to see the West as an enemy. And then the expansion when that started, the most famous example of this is George Kennan, who is a cold warrior who is credited with coming up with containment theory. There’s an interview with him when they started expanding NATO East, and it’s really something. I forget exactly what he said, but it’s something like, there’s absolutely no reason to do this. This is going to be the biggest mistake ever. It’s a complete tragedy.
So fast-forward a few years in 2008 at the Bucharest Summit, the US, well, NATO, which is the US, gave both Ukraine and Georgia, a promise that eventually you’ll be able to join the alliance. And at the time, there was a guy named William Burns, who was the US ambassador to Russia, who’s currently the head of the CIA, and he wrote up this whole email to Condoleezza Rice saying that NATO expansion into Ukraine is the brightest of all red lines for Russia. They’re worried that it’s going to spark a civil war and then they’re going to have to intervene.
So they were very aware of how Russia felt about this. Then, for a while, Yanukovych was elected who was more pro-Russia. So for a while, the idea of Ukraine joining NATO wasn’t really in the cards. But then in 2013, 2014, the Euromaidan, the uprising in Ukraine, which the US was very involved in that. A whole other aspect that a lot of people don’t understand is that there’s all these NGOs that operate in different countries that are funded by the US government, mostly through the National Endowment for Democracy, which is this big NGO that they fund, these pro-democracy activists. Basically, they fund the political opposition in countries where the US doesn’t like the government. So a lot of those NGOs were involved in these protests. And there was also this far-right element to it, which the word far-right has kind of lost its meaning lately. But these were nationalist groups, pro-Nazi.
The history of Ukraine is complicated. They were under the yoke of the Soviet Union and the Nazis. But that’s what these groups were, openly in favor… The descendants essentially of Stepan Bandera, these Ukrainian nationalists that worked with the Nazis. They use Nazi iconography. You see this all over, even today. So that was part of it. They were kind of the street team. And this ended up with Yanukovych being thrown out. The US, again, was very involved. You had John McCain going over there, Chris Murphy. These American senators going to the protests and saying, “We’re on your side.” You imagine something like that happening in Canada or with Russian senators going over there. So there’s a lot to this. And there’s an infamous phone call between Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to the Ukraine at the time, just a few weeks before Yanukovych was thrown out saying who should be in the next government, the US trying to determine that.
And then Yanukovych fled. At one point, he made a deal with the opposition that the EU was behind, but then the far right element said no, and they’re attacking government buildings. So then Yanukovych fled and then the new government took over. And that government wanted NATO membership. So this sparked all sorts of other crises across Ukraine. Russia taking Crimea, it was a reaction to that, to this new government coming in. Also, the war in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine that sparked. There’s ethnic Russians, the Russian-speaking population, were worried about this new government that, again, included the… That’s a whole ‘nother thing. There’s a lot of ethnic tensions between Ukrainians and Russians. One of the first things that the new government did was get rid of Russian as an official language. So they seceded basically, and it sparked this civil war in the East.
Eric Sammons:
Did that fighting start in 2014 in Donbas, or was that 2015? When did that-
Dave DeCamp:
It started in 2014.
Eric Sammons:
So right after. Because it was February when the government was overthrown, of 2014?
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Okay. And then Crimea was taken right after that, right? Right in February, or something like that?
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. And, of course, that was taken, taken is probably the best word, because didn’t only one person die or something like that, in that?
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah, and I think it was an accident or something. They didn’t have to fire a shot. And that is something. There was the referendum that said 90%-something people wanted to join Russia. And you always question the numbers in the ’90s, but if you look at polling, both before and after, the majority overwhelmingly favored being part of Russia.
Eric Sammons:
I was going to say, one thing about this that you mentioned how, in 2008, the United States basically made a promise, I know it’s NATO, but we all know who runs NATO, to have Ukraine join NATO at some point. And Russia was adamantly opposed to that. So my question is actually twofold. First is, why is Ukraine different? Because, obviously, they didn’t invade any of the other countries that joined NATO in the East, but Ukraine, when that was in danger of joining NATO. So why Ukraine? And also, is this just directed by Putin, or is it more of a widespread belief in Russia among Russian leadership about the role of Ukraine being in NATO?
Dave DeCamp:
This is a widespread belief among the Russian elite, among Russian officials. That’s something Burns said in that memo. And actually the criticism and a lot of the opposition to Putin in Russia is that he didn’t act soon enough in Ukraine. They think he should have went in completely in 2014, because then they say he gave him all this time to get armed up by NATO and everything. But Ukraine, historically, Kiev was the capital of Russia for a long time. I think the historic reasons, and also just the fact that it is right there, right on the border, and they don’t want NATO putting missiles there, that’s one thing that’s been happening in these other countries, the US building these missile systems that they say are like anti-ballistic missile systems, but they can also fit Tomahawk missiles. It’s this buildup of NATO infrastructure, and they don’t want NATO missiles on their border.
You could say Putin miscalculated by invading Ukraine, because now Ukraine is much more close to NATO and much more armed up by NATO, but this was what he reacted to. So the US, they basically supported the Ukrainians in the Civil War. Obama didn’t give them what they call lethal aid now, that’s kind of the new name for actual weapons that you fire. And it was actually Trump in 2018. The US sent its first shipment of javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, which was a big escalation. So these are all parts of it. And then we could get into what happened really under the Biden administration, because their complete failure of diplomacy or even really attempting to do diplomacy is a big reason why the invasion happened.
Eric Sammons:
But everybody involved is going to be pardoned, so it doesn’t matter, right?
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah, that’s right.
Eric Sammons:
I know we could go on for hours and hours about this one, about just talking about Ukraine and Russia and the history behind it, but I think a fundamental question is, and this is what I think, I’ve only started Scott’s book, but I feel like he’s going to be addressing this, is why did the United States decide to treat Russia as an enemy in how it… After Soviet Union collapsed, Russia itself, as a country, what was left of it, was not a threat really. Of course, they still had the nukes and things like that, but it was in shambles in the ’90s, but yet, it seems like, even from the beginning, I always thought it was more, that’s something I’ve already learned from Scott’s book, is I thought that United States started looking at Russia as an enemy, restarted looking as an enemy, more under Obama and things like that.
But it seems to me like they treated them as an enemy from the get-go. As soon as the Soviet Union fell, they kept their attitude. Is there any reason for that other than just like, “Okay, they’ve always been the enemy. We’ll just continue to have them be the enemy.” Or was there something more to it than that?
Dave DeCamp:
I think that, at that point, in the ’90s and early 2000s, again, when it comes to NATO, I think it really was, you got this big military alliance and you don’t want to end it. They didn’t want to get rid of it, so they looked for work to do, and they needed Russia as the enemy. I really think that that is a big part of it. It’s also the control of our government that the military industrial complex has. That’s a really big part of this current war in Ukraine, is just the payday.
And when it comes to Russia, one of the things, there is also the neoconservatives who really influenced US foreign policy in the ’90s and early 2000s. Their worldview is essentially one of world domination. They want to control the whole world. And they saw Russia, even if it just has its influence in Eastern Ukraine and the Balkans, in Georgia, in these places very close to Russia, they didn’t like that. They didn’t want something pushing back against this new post-Cold War world order.
Eric Sammons:
They don’t seem to want any country to have a sphere of influence outside of their country, like we do. Like China, they treat that way. Russia, they treat that way. Basically, a country that tries to go beyond their borders have an influence. Although, of course, the entire Western Hemisphere is under our sphere of influence.
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah, exactly. And this is something, Scott’s book is great at this, the US officials discussing this and being well aware of what they were doing to Russia and how they might react. Again, it was very clear.
Eric Sammons:
I think that’s good point.
Dave DeCamp:
That’s why I love the title Provoked, because that was the talking point when they invaded, the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Again, the word provoked doesn’t mean justified. Scott is not a supporter of the Russian invasion. It’s a tragedy what’s happened. There’s been so much death and destruction. Our argument is that this didn’t need to happen. The US could have easily stopped this. And then a whole ‘nother thing to get into is how the US ensured that the war would continue and sabotage negotiations right after the Russian invasion. This has been confirmed by all sides.
Eric Sammons:
What did Putin say he wanted before the invasion? What exactly were his demands going into the invasion?
Dave DeCamp:
His main demand that he was trying to negotiate with the US, he wanted a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO. And there was also other specific arms control things, like I mentioned, those anti-ballistic missile systems, that they just activated one in Poland. Again, they fit these missiles that used to violate the INF Treaty, which was an arms control treaty that ended during the Trump administration. So they had specific things they wanted to address that. But the main thing was Ukrainian neutrality.
Another thing that was happening was the war in the Donbas was a frozen conflict for a while, but that was really starting to ramp up again. But the main thing was they wanted Ukrainian neutrality. And the US actually did, they were involved in negotiations with Russia, but they weren’t addressing that main demand. Even though, Biden said publicly, “Ukraine’s not going to join NATO anytime soon. It’s not a big deal.” But they wouldn’t give Russia any kind of guarantee like that. And that was something acknowledged by the State Department after the invasion, that they didn’t even entertain the idea. So it really is that main thing, it’s the neutrality.
Eric Sammons:
Why does America care if Ukraine is in NATO or not?
Dave DeCamp:
I think a big part of it is the money, the corruption in the government. You have Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, who’s overseen this policy. He came straight from the board of Raytheon. And this has been the biggest payday for those companies in a long time. Some of the things like the Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that they started giving Ukraine after the invasion, they’re made by Lockheed Martin. They stopped making them. They were becoming obsolete. Now they got all these new contracts to build them.
So I think it could be as simple as that. Obviously, there’s other factors and people want to think of more conspiratorial. But I think, you look at the corruption, the way our government is run is a big part of it. Also, again, that ideology, this ideology that you have the neocons, which is a specific type of ideology, and that was represented in the Biden administration with Victoria Nuland, whose husband is Robert Kagan, who was one of the main neocons who crafted all these plans for the US to follow in the early 2000s.
They really hate Russia. Victoria Nuland hates Putin, hates Russia. Hillary Clinton had that same attitude. Anthony Blinken has that attitude, Jake Sullivan. It’s like imperial hubris in a way. They think they’re liberal rules-based order that they call it, is the only game and should be the only game in town, and that there shouldn’t be any kind of illiberal forces pushing against it. But then that all goes out the window with Israel. They’ve really been exposed as hypocrites there, because they’ve tried to use all this international law against Russia, but then they don’t apply it to Israel.
So they’ve been hypocritical the whole time, but now it’s more in your face. But I think that’s a big part of it. And Russia intervening in Syria too, just to make sure Assad wasn’t thrown out. That’s another reason why they really turned up the heat on Russia after that.
Eric Sammons:
So really it’s just a matter of we’re going to do everything we can to pressure Russia to try to isolate them, to try to reduce their influence, reduce their power in the world. And the idea is the closer we get, the more we surround Russia with NATO countries as allies, the weaker it becomes. Is that essentially the neocon strategy here?
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah, I think so. And the weaker their influence becomes.
Eric Sammons:
Which is interesting, because I feel like since the Russian invasion, Russia’s influence in the world has actually increased, not decreased.
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah. Well, that’s why I said it’s like hubris, because in a way they’re really incompetent, because the US… China and Russia are facing very similar pressure and they’ve really increased their trade, and Russia’s able to really ramp up its manufacturing and can sustain this war for a long time. And time is on Russia’s side right now. And then you have all the BRICS countries and creating this alternate economic system. And that is a result of the US trying to sanction all these countries and driving them together.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, so any type of discussion like this, you’re automatically going to get people say we’re Putin apologists, because Putin is Hitler. He basically is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Well, actually probably like Joseph Stalin, of Adolf Hitler. And then you also will hear some people in the more traditional world at times defend Putin as a Christian leader who is going against the woke west and defending Christian values. Where do you stand on Putin as an actual leader of Russia and as a person?
Dave DeCamp:
This is something Scott always says. He’s basically a bureaucrat. He’s a right-wing leaning bureaucrat, strong man. He’s not this big great defender of Christian values and of the West. He’s very critical of the west and everything. I think people can fall into that trap that they lionize Putin. I could see how the framing is like that, because you see the US is exporting the views they have here, all the gay stuff and everything too. That’s a big part of us foreign policy now, is exporting that view. And you see it in Ukraine and you see it in Ukraine supporters and everything, and you see Zelensky cracking down on the Orthodox church there. But I’m not pro-Putin in any sense.
One thing about Putin is that he’s predictable. There’s this narrative that he’s this completely unhinged madman, which doesn’t really go well with constantly poking him and trying to escalate, but you can kind of know what Putin’s going to do. One thing that I do think he believes is that he is acting in the interest of his country and his people. Again, you look at what’s happening in Russia, the war has been brought to Russia, Ukraine has invaded. It’s a small part, but there’s been all these drone attacks. It hasn’t been good for the Russian people for these past few years. So I don’t support the war, and it’s foolish, I think, to even support a war of a foreign country.
Eric Sammons:
One thing I realized in the interview we had with Tucker Carlson, Putin did, when he was asked the question about Orthodox Christianity and stuff, his answer struck me as exactly how a non-practicing Catholic American politician would answer a question about Catholicism, the exact same way of you give this lip service and you don’t say anything bad about it, but it’s clear you don’t actually really believe. I could be wrong, but it was funny how I thought he sounded, and kind of like what you’re saying about him being like a bureaucrat. He’s a politician. He’s got his views. And I do think also though he does…
The one thing I don’t get is people who criticize him for doing everything what he thinks is best for his country. Because isn’t that what every leader is supposed to do with their country? We might not like it, but I do think he does seem to be doing what he thinks is best for Russia, which I’d want my president to do that for America, and I think the Canadian Prime Minister should do that and all that. So I think that’s a silly critique of Putin, that he’s doing that.
Now when it comes to Ukraine, now we have Trump coming in. If Biden, the Biden administration, we can’t say Biden, who knows what he’s doing, but if the Biden administration doesn’t completely screw it up, what do you think is the best path forward for the Trump administration to bring about resolution of this conflict?
Dave DeCamp:
With everything that the Biden administration is up to now, things are really getting tense. Again, one of the biggest escalations, I know you mentioned it on your show, was the long range strikes in Russia now. So the US and NATO, these missiles that they use, they need intelligence from the US, from the countries that they get the missiles from. So the US is directly supporting these missile strikes on Russian territory.
So I think, when the Trump administration comes in, I think it should be a day one phone call. You call Zelensky and tell him, “Look, we got to negotiate. We’re going to leverage any aid to you on a condition that you’re going to talk.” And then call Putin and tell him the same thing and try to freeze, try to ceasefire just right away, because of the stakes right now and just because of all the killing and the situation for Ukrainians. Their energy infrastructure is being completely destroyed and everything.
So that’s what I think, that ceasefire then negotiations. You got to stop the killing. And that’s something Trump said that I really liked a few times. So I really hope that he does that. I think there’s a chance. I think that is his instinct. Some of the people, his foreign policy team is not very good so far. When he picked JD Vance, I thought that was a really good sign. Because Vance, unlike Trump, Trump hasn’t really spelled out how he’s going to end anything, but the… Sorry, my phone’s ringing. It’s just making a noise. Do you hear that?
Eric Sammons:
No, we’re good.
Dave DeCamp:
Okay. Sorry, just distracted me. But Vance has spelled it out and basically said that, it’s like we got to freeze the lines and work out some kind of deal, Ukrainian neutrality and Russia. Essentially, what he talks about is turning it into a frozen conflict, which I think there’s a problem with that. And I don’t think Russia’s really going to go for that, because, again, time, they have the advantage right now.
But I think with some of these people he’s put in charge, he nominated this guy, Keith. Well, he didn’t nominate him, because he doesn’t need to be approved by the Senate. This guy Keith Kellogg, who is a Russia hawk, but he’s drawn up some plans to end the war. Some of the things he’s put forward, I don’t think Russia’s going to go for, but, again, I hope that the approach that they take is ceasefire and then negotiations.
Eric Sammons:
Right. And I think it’s just a matter of… Usually, negotiations happen, it’s a matter of everybody’s saving face. Everybody has to walk away and be able to tell their people, “Okay, we got what we wanted,” even if you didn’t get what you want. You need Putin to be able to say that. You need Zelensky to be able to say that. And you need Trump to be able to say that. And that’s the key. One of the things that makes me the most angry about this whole situation is I think Zelensky seems like a deeply corrupt politician, and I don’t trust him at all, but it does seem like right after the invasion in March, he wanted to negotiate, and he was basically told not to by Boris Johnson, which is basically by America then. And that just makes me so angry.
The leader of the country that’s being invaded wants to negotiate and he’s basically told by his puppet masters, I guess, “No, you cannot do that.” Why? Because we hate Russia. We don’t want to negotiate with them. But he’s actually the one who’s responsible for the lives of his people and all that. And he actually wants to. In this case, he’s got the right instinct doing the right thing, and we just shut him down. And now he becomes somebody who just comes to us for another $1 billion here and there every few months. So that’s unforgivable in my mind, that they did that. And that has been verified that, that actually happened. What I’ve seen is that Boris Johnson was involved and it really happened right after the invasion.
Dave DeCamp:
I think that should be one of the biggest scandals of the Biden administration. That has been confirmed by all sides, that there were these talks in March and April 2022, and publicly, Ukrainians were saying that they could take NATO membership off the table. Russia, the deal that was on the table was Russia would withdraw from the territory that they controlled. Ukraine would be neutral. There were some vague things about demilitarized. They wanted to put certain limits on Ukraine’s military. And then the denazification is another vague Russian talking point. But last year, the Ukrainian official who led the negotiations came out and said that all of that was secondary. The main thing was neutrality. Russia wanted neutrality, that they wanted to end the war. And Boris Johnson came over and said, “We don’t want to sign any deals. We want to keep fighting.”
So this is completely verified. And now that Ukrainian officials said there were other reasons they didn’t want to sign a deal, that they didn’t trust Russia, which, of course, they have reasons not to trust Russia, but they would have been a lot more likely to sign a deal if they didn’t have the US and NATO whispering in their ear and saying, “No, we’re going to give you everything you need. Fight.” So, again, that should be the biggest scandal here. And if you look at the timeline, we were talking about why are they funding this war? Another thing that they’ve said is that they want to weaken Russia, basically confirming that it’s a proxy war. And that’s something that Boris Johnson actually just said last week. He was doing some interview and he said, “It is a proxy war, but the problem is we’re not giving our proxies enough weapons,” or something.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, geez.
Dave DeCamp:
But you look at the timeline, it’s like negotiations foiled. Lloyd Austin goes over to Ukraine. He comes back and says, “One of our goals is to weaken Russia.” Then they pass this $40 billion Ukraine bill. Turkey, which is a NATO member, but they’re not aligned with most of NATO, they said they thought the war was going to end. They hosted the peace talks. Then they went to a NATO summit, and then they got the feeling, this is from Turkey’s foreign minister at the time, they got the feeling that there were some countries in NATO that wanted the war to continue. And there’s all other sources saying this, that they wanted the war to continue. And now Ukraine, if there is a peace deal, they’re going to lose all this territory that they wouldn’t have lost if they made a deal. Hey, it wouldn’t have been the best deal, Russia would’ve got some things they wanted, but they would have their territory intact and all these people wouldn’t be dead.
Eric Sammons:
But Lindsey Graham stays happy and can continue to beat the war drums over here and act like he’s a big hawk. It’s awful. I think that, one of the two big ones going on in the Middle East and Ukraine, that Ukraine’s the one most likely that could lead to a World War III type situation, because it’s Russia involved and they’re the biggest nuclear power. It’s all of Europe involved and things like that. Then you could potentially get China involved. You just never know.
Honestly, at this point, I’m just praying that we can make it the January 20th and Trump can… Because I think Trump himself knows, from a political standpoint… If there’s one thing we know about Trump is he’s very good at knowing the best way to promote himself and to, I don’t even mean that in the worst way, but just get the best press and things like that. If he got a ceasefire over there early in office, in the first couple of weeks, that would be huge. And hopefully that would then lead to a negotiated peace that would actually be more permanent.
But let’s move over now to the Middle East, which is also a disaster area. Now, I’ll just make the statement right here. If you’re listening and you think criticism of Israel’s government means you’re an anti-Semite, you probably should just stop the podcast now, go somewhere else, and do whatever. Because we both think that’s ridiculous. Obviously, that’s not the case. So I just wanted to throw that out there, because somebody in the comments will probably say something about being anti-Semitic. So we’re not going to listen to you.
This is another case. With Ukraine and Russia, everybody just looks at, with Ukraine, with one date, February 25th, 2022, with the invasion of Russia. History started at that point. Therefore, Russia is completely to blame. The United States had nothing to do with it, whatever. But we just talked about, and Scott Horton wrote about it in his book, there’s decades of history there. It seems like we’re doing the same thing here. History began on October 7th, 2023 with the Hamas attack in Israel. Therefore, everything after that is read and is viewed in light of that.
I’m not going to ask you the whole history of the Middle East conflict, because we don’t have… Martyr Made, how long was his podcast on that? But give us just a general feel of what was the situation in Gaza with Syria and Lebanon and Israel and Hamas and all that over the past few decades. What was the status quo that we were dealing with that led to… Because it’s not like it just happened out of thin air. What led to October 7th, in other words? Good luck.
Dave DeCamp:
There is a lot to that. The thing really to focus on is the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, after the 1967 war. Israel captured that territory from Jordan and Egypt, and then they kept the Palestinians under a military occupation and settlements started to expand. This is something that happened later on, but it was very clear that they didn’t want to give up that land, but they also didn’t want to give the people who live there equal rights. They didn’t want to give them the fundamental natural rights. And we could get into the Oslo Accords, and there was a chance at peace there, but keeping a population under military occupation for that long, the violence that happened in that conflict from both sides, you get a group like Hamas, you get extremists, again, on both sides. And you can go back to the Irgun to before the modern state of Israel was founded.
You mentioned the Martyr Made podcast. That’s a great place to learn about this, that the Zionist militias were conducting terrorist attacks against the British, against the Arabs, to get the British to leave. The bombing of the King David Hotel was pretty much the biggest terrorist attack in the conflict since October 7th, if you consider that a terrorist attack. So you get a group like Hamas, you get the occupation. And a big point was 2006 when there was the elections and Hamas won, and then there was kind of a civil war between them and Fatah, the other main faction. And Hamas took over Gaza. By the way, the US, the Bush administration encouraged that civil war to happen. They helped funnel arms to Fatah. So there was a military takeover of Gaza. And then Israel imposed the blockade on Gaza. A blockade is a state of war.
People always like to say, “Oh, Egypt also blockades Gaza.” I don’t really get how that’s an argument. Egypt is very much in cahoots with the US and Israel on all of this. The reason why they get so much military aid from the US is for signing a peace deal with Israel and cooperating with them. But anyway, so you have the blockade on Gaza, and over the years there’s been wars. The 2014 war was a very violent war where lots of civilians and children are killed in these bombings and everything. One statistic I always like to point to when we talk about the blockade in Gaza is the unemployment rate there was about 50%. And among the youth, it was about 70%. So you have a lot of young men, unemployed, no prospects. They can’t go anywhere, other than this place where, really, they don’t have anything. And then you have these occasional wars, these bombing campaigns, and then over in the West Bank, the expansion of settlements.
So you had this brewing problem. Then the extremists on the Israeli side, the people that we see in the current government now, in the Netanyahu government, gained more power and influence. And this was a big part of the year before October 7th. This Netanyahu government came in. And Netanyahu, he was the prime minister for so long, and then he really lost his popularity. So he allied with these very extremist factions, these guys like Itamar Ben-Gvir, he’s the National Security Minister now, Bezalel Smotrich. These guys are settlers themselves, and they’re openly in favor of expelling all the Palestinians from the West Bank, from Gaza, taking over the land, building settlements.
So the year before October 7th was the violent year in the West Bank since the early 2000s. Again, the West Bank’s under military occupation. You can’t keep people like that. You have Gaza in the blockade. People say Israel wasn’t occupying it, because there weren’t actually soldiers in Gaza. But technically a blockade is occupation. But in the West Bank, you have people who’ve lived there, including Christians, it’s a whole nother aspect of it, who, it’s their land, but they don’t have property rights. They don’t have any sort of rights. Settlers go in there, they terrorize them, they push them off their land. They’re backed by the Israeli military, maybe not officially. But you can’t treat people like this and not expect a very nasty reaction. And that reaction, again, from Hamas, they called it the Al-Aqsa Flood, which is named after the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which of course, when we talk about the religious aspect of this, that’s where they want to build the third temple. And these guys like Ben-Gvir, they’re those kinds of guys. They stoked the tensions around Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The reason why they called it that, they said they started planning this since, I think it was 2022, when there was the Israeli Forces Police, they stormed Al-Aqsa and they beat worshipers. Then Hamas fired some rockets, and then Israel launched very heavy airstrikes that killed a few hundred Palestinians. So all these things build up. And October 7th was the reaction to that. I would never, ever justify any kind of attacks on civilians, but you got to understand the cause of this. There’s also the question of how could Israel have let that happen when Gaza is one of the most heavily surveilled places in the world? And Netanyahu, they had all these warnings, and somehow all these Hamas fighters broke out of Gaza and were able to kill all these people. It was just horrific, but-
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, it does make you ask some questions about also, wouldn’t Hamas realize that the reaction would be what it was to something like this? That they are in the position of weakness in this relationship with Israel, for lack of a better term. They know Israel has the more power, they have the backing of the United States, in a lot of the world, but especially United States, that’s all that really matters. It’s not that unpredictable that the reaction of Israel would be what it was to this. We can’t know, but do you think it might boil down to just simply the frustrations of decades and just, “What else are we going to do,” that led to that?
Dave DeCamp:
Well, yeah, and it’s also part of their strategy, is getting the sympathy of the world, which they have. They’ve lost the war. It’s tough to call it a war now, because it’s not really what’s happening, but when it comes to the PR war, the Palestinians have won. The whole world is against what’s happening in Gaza except for the United States and the UK.
Eric Sammons:
A lot of Americans don’t realize that.
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah, we’re very out on our own on this. So I don’t know if they think that Israel would go this big and this hard, and that the US would completely back them to the hilt the way that they have.
Eric Sammons:
I just want to make sure this is clear, because what you often hear is when you try to push back on the United States based narrative that Israel is justified in what they’re doing, because, look, they were attacked by Hamas, they’re in danger, they’re surrounded by all the Muslim countries. All this. And what I’m trying to say is, okay, there has to be some limit. Everybody has to agree, maybe not Ben Shapiro, but everybody else has to agree that there’s some limit to a response. Obviously, as Catholics, we know just worth theory. There definitely has to be a proportional response.
But even those who aren’t Catholic and don’t subscribe to that, you wouldn’t say, “Okay, Hamas did that. So now United States can nuke every Muslim-run country.” I think most people would be like, “Oh, of course, they can’t do that.” But give us a sense of what Israel is actually doing in Gaza, in Lebanon, and in these places. So people understand that this is not just a matter of, okay, you got some soldiers finding Hamas fighters and killing them, and maybe incidentally killing a few civilians along the way. I think most people would understand that and be sympathetic to that issue, but give some examples maybe or something to say how that’s not what’s going on here.
Dave DeCamp:
There was some reporting that came out last year from a magazine called +972 Magazine. The Israeli left-wing publication that cited all these Israeli sources, who essentially confirmed that part of the Israeli strategy is to bomb civilian targets that they call power targets, and it’s part of a strategy to put pressure on the civilians, hoping that they’ll rise up against Hamas. But that strategy has never worked in the history of warfare, basically, if you terrorize people like that.
But, anyway, so another thing that report revealed, and you see this, this is clear in what Israel’s strategy is. If there’s one Hamas guy in a building and there’s 100 children, if there’s 100 kids in that building, they’ll blow up the building to kill the one Hamas guy. There was actually an interview, this was a really revealing moment, and I know people that it turned their view on this. Wolf Blitzer was interviewing a Israeli military spokesman, and Israel just bombed the Chabalia refugee camp, these apartment buildings that are very densely populated, and they just dropped these huge bombs on it, and it was clear hundreds of people were killed. And he asked the military spokesman and he said, “Well, there was a Hamas commander there.”
So we’ve seen the public confirmation that, that is their strategy. Those reports said something like, “Oh, 300 people are killed, and when we get one Hamas guy, that’s enough.” Then, again, also the power targets. We have seen them, something like 60% to 70% of all the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. And now we’ve also seen in certain parts of Gaza, the IDF is bulldozing every building in sight. They control about 16% of the territory in Gaza where they’ve completely gotten rid of all the buildings and they have Jewish settlers coming in to scout these locations. That’s clearly part of this, is that they want to just conquer it and they want to get all the Palestinians out, but while they’re there, they’re going to make it as miserable as possible for them and kill and starve as many as they want.
So I know if people, hearing all that, you look at what they’re doing day in and day out right now. There’s always airstrikes. Dozens of people killed every day. They’ll bomb these schools sheltering civilians, and they say, “Oh, it was a Hamas command and control center.” No evidence for that claim. What do you see? You see women and children killed. Again, this is every day. The other big claim about Hamas is that they use civilian shields, which is true to an extent, that during previous conflicts, they would fire rockets from civilian areas, but they have attacked every hospital in Gaza at one point. Some of them have been completely destroyed. They claim that they were Hamas command and control centers.
I interviewed one of these doctors. There’s been this group of American healthcare workers who have volunteered in Gaza and have been at all the different hospitals. They signed an open letter to Biden telling him to end aid to Israel and they said not a single one of them saw any militant activity at the hospitals. Why would you target a hospital? Just today there was airstrikes on a hospital in Kamal Adwan in Northern Gaza, and a kid in a wheelchair was killed. This is stuff happening every day and people want to say it’s fake, but it’s not. And I’ve spent a lot of time looking at horrific pictures and images that I’ve seen people claim were fake, that were not. They don’t need to fake anything at this point. These atrocities are happening every day.
There’s a lot more to it to get into it, but one story I always think of at one of these hospitals, the Israeli military told them to evacuate it. There was premature babies in an incubator and the director of the hospital told the IDF that they were there. The IDF said that they were going to do something. And this has been reported in the Washington Post, CNN. It’s not some fringe story. And then when the IDF left the hospital and everybody went back, the kids were in there decomposing. So it shows they have a hatred. They treat the Palestinians in Gaza like they’re animals. And they’ve said this. Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister, when they started the blockade, they said, “We’re fighting human animals.” So they view them as animals, as subhuman, and they’re treating them as such.
Eric Sammons:
I know you hesitate to speak for Catholicism, being a newly brought back Catholic, but I don’t hesitate. I’ve been around long enough. I’ll go ahead and do it. But I just want to be clear to the audience. If there’s a Hamas commander in a building and there’s say 100 kids in there, it’s actually immoral to bomb that building, because you’re not in a direct threat. If the Hamas leader’s pointing a gun out the window and firing, he’s got some kids with him and you shoot at him to stop him and some kids die, that can be justified. But that’s not what’s happening here. It’s literally they’re just trying to wipe it out and they don’t care about any of what’s happening as well as that. And I just think that’s horrific.
Now what about, though, what’s going on in Lebanon with Hezbollah and things like that? Because, obviously, that’s not the same situation here, but yet there is fighting going on there. What’s going on? I’m actually, to be honest, I’m a little bit confused by it. And that’s why I think other people probably are too.
Dave DeCamp:
Lebanon, there was a ceasefire deal that was supposed to go into effect last week. There’s been some Israeli airstrikes since then, but for the most part it’s holding. So essentially what happened was Hezbollah started firing rockets at Northern Israel on October 8th, the day after October 7th.
Eric Sammons:
Wait, in 2023 or 2024 did they start firing? Right after-
Dave DeCamp:
In 2023.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, so the day after… Okay.
Dave DeCamp:
So they fired some rockets and Israel hit back with airstrikes. Then there was kind of this tit-for-tat for almost a year. And there were some very heavy Israeli airstrikes. Israel killed a few hundred people in Lebanon, a few dozen were killed in Israel. Israel has the advantage over Hezbollah and Lebanon. They have an air force and they don’t. So that was the status quo for the year, was these back-and-forth strikes. And Hezbollah was saying they weren’t going to stop until there was a ceasefire in Gaza. That’s what they said would’ve stopped their attacks.
Then we saw things start to escalate. At certain points, Israel would launch an airstrike in Beirut, in the capitol, and they haven’t done that since the 2006 war against the Hezbollah guy. There was all these escalations and then they basically decided, Israel decided to really ramp up and try to take out Hezbollah. Then we saw the pager attack was really the start of that, when they blew up these pagers and the walkie-talkies. Then, on September 23rd, Israel launched one of the heaviest bombing days of bombing in modern warfare. They leveled all these buildings in southern Lebanon, killed like 500 people. And this is another thing, they’re bombing residential buildings, claiming there’s Hezbollah weapons there. Another thing that they do with Hezbollah and Hamas, if they’re home with their family, sleeping in their bed, they bomb them, and they consider that justified. So we saw a lot of that, a lot of civilians killed in Lebanon as well.
So from September 23rd until recently, it was just very heavy Israeli airstrikes. Israel invaded southern Lebanon. And Hezbollah is a pretty formidable fighting force. Even with all these strikes, Israel took out their leader, Nasrallah. They still put up a fight. So then there’s been the ceasefire deal. But basically Hezbollah has always been a big problem for Israel, because they react to what they do in Gaza and what they do in the West Bank, and they’re supported by Iran. So they saw the opportunity to take Hezbollah out completely. I think there’s been the ceasefire, but I think they’re probably going to go back, restart it again.
Eric Sammons:
And the ceasefire only applies to Hezbollah, right? And Israel. Not Gaza and Hamas or anything like that, correct?
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah. And the ceasefire only applies to Hezbollah in the sense that Israel’s been bombing Lebanon for the past week and Hezbollah fired two rockets back. So Hezbollah is in pretty rough shape, because they agreed to this deal where basically Israel has freedom of action in southern Lebanon. But there is a chance, I think, of that ramping up again.
Eric Sammons:
So Israel, still under the ceasefire, still can bomb south Lebanon?
Dave DeCamp:
Not actually, not under the deal that Israel signed with Lebanon, but the US gave Israel a letter of assurance that if they felt the ceasefire was being violated, then they can take action. And that’s the problem. The US acts like it’s a neutral mediator, they help broker the deal, but they clearly favor one side way over the other. So it’s just a mess. And Lebanon’s a really small country, so it’s been completely devastating to that country.
Eric Sammons:
It has a lot of Christians there as well, in Lebanon. I think it’s the most Christian of the countries in that area, somebody can fact check me on that, but I believe it’s-
Dave DeCamp:
You’re right, yeah.
Eric Sammons:
And the Christians have a lot of authority and they actually have a say-
Dave DeCamp:
They have a Christian president.
Eric Sammons:
Right. So they have a say in the politics and the leadership and everything like that. Now my question then is, we can criticize Israel for what they’re doing, we can criticize Hamas and Hezbollah, whatever. But, again, my question goes back to Ukraine. What’s the US interest here? What does US have to do with this? Why does it matter to the US about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza and things like that? What’s our strategic interest here?
Dave DeCamp:
There is none.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, moving on.
Dave DeCamp:
This is where people are going to accuse me of being anti-Semitic, probably. A big part of this is the lobby. It’s the Israel lobby. It’s the influence that they have over our politicians. I’m joking about saying the anti-Semitism thing, and this is something, plenty of Jews will tell you this, there’s plenty of American Jews who are opposed to what’s happening and this arrangement. But I would recommend everybody read The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer. That really lays a lot of it out. But it’s kind of the way our political system is set up, that these lobbying groups can have such great influence. And you see it kind of cracking a bit and young people overall are much more skeptical of the relationship between the US and Israel, whether they’re on the left or the right. It’s always been more of a left-wing thing to be critical of Israel.
But overall, you see all of the politicians, even the ones, they’ll sound so great on Ukraine, say, “We shouldn’t be funding these other wars overseas.” But it all goes out the window with Israel. And the reason why I said there’s no strategic interest, one of the talking points is, “Oh, they’re our aircraft carrier in the Middle East. They’re our greatest ally against all the Arab hordes that they’re surrounded by.” But the US has all of its bases in the Arab countries. All of the Gulf Arab countries are ready to play ball with the US. They want to do business. They want to make money. And if anything, our relationship with Israel is a strain on those relationships. Even Jordan, I mean Egypt, they’re completely in the pocket of the US. So that just doesn’t fly, this idea that we need Israel to have a military footprint there. I also don’t think we should have a military footprint there. We don’t need it.
Eric Sammons:
We don’t need Israel to have one. In fact, it probably hurts it. I had a guest on a few months ago when we talked about the theological implications, we don’t need to go over that, but I do think that it cannot be understated how much, particularly evangelical Protestants, but unfortunately a lot of Catholics, how they’ve bought into this idea of the modern State of Israel as the continuation of the biblical country of Israel from the Old Testament. Was it just this week or last week, Shapiro and the other guy from Daily Wire, do you remember his name?
Dave DeCamp:
Andrew Klavan.
Eric Sammons:
Andrew Klavan, right.
Dave DeCamp:
It was really something what he said. He said, “You know, Ben, everybody gives you a hard time for dual loyalty for being loyal to Israel, but all Christians should be loyal to Israel, because Christ was born there.”
Eric Sammons:
Which is just ludicrous, the idea. It’s like, 200 years ago, would you have said all Christians have to be loyal to the Ottoman Empire? Because that’s who controlled it at the time, where Christ was born. So are we now, we all had to be Ottomans?
Dave DeCamp:
Actually, Bethlehem, should we all be loyal to the Palestinian authority? Because Bethlehem is in the West Bank.
Eric Sammons:
Well, there you go. So just unbelievable. But I do think that, that gives a super charge to the Israeli lobby in America, is that evangelical backing, because evangelical Christians in this country are very powerful. And like I said, a lot of Catholics go along with it as well. And I think that’s part of it. But it really is hard to understand why we think there’s strategic interest for us. Now there is the argument that people say, “Oh, we’re defending the one democracy in the Middle East.” What would you say to that argument?
Dave DeCamp:
Lebanon’s also a democracy. I would say that first. But, again, that gets into the ideological liberal interventionism that is what drives a lot of our foreign policy. So I think that is part of it, that the US, they feel like we’re more ideological compatible with Israel than the Arab states. So maybe that’s the case, but at the same time, it is a Jewish state. It’s essentially an ethno-state. If you have Jewish heritage, you can move there. If you don’t, you can’t. And occupation, that’s not democratic. Keeping people under military occupation.
Eric Sammons:
Now, one of the things, I feel like people don’t take a step back when they talk about this conflict, because they just think, “Okay, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. Israel’s responding.” Is the basic argument as it goes. But the fact is, Israel… Every country has a right to defend itself. Because that’s what people say, “Oh, Israel’s right to defend itself.” That’s true. But at least for Catholics discussing this under just war theory, it has to be a proportional response. Isn’t there an argument that Israel, it could basically just defend itself and it could prevent the loss of further life without destroying Gaza and things like that. In fact, it’s probably causing more problems.
Like the famous Pat Buchanan quote from 20 years ago when he said, when Israel at that point had killed some people in Gaza, something like that, some young girls, and Pat Buchanan said their brothers, those girls’ brothers are eventually going to be fighting, Hamas fighters one day. And, literally, it was like 15 years later, when he predicted, that’s exactly what they were doing. So isn’t there something be said for the US should be really pushing Israel, “Okay, yes, you can defend yourself, but your work is to just basically defend your borders, make sure you’re not attacked again, not to go and attack and destroy Gaza and Lebanon and other places like that.”
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah. So say October 7th happened, and is there a different approach that Israel could have taken besides these heavy bombings? Of course, there is. And it would’ve been very difficult, but it’s like a counterinsurgency approach where you try to win the hearts and minds of people. And I know that sounds silly, because the US tried to do that in Iraq and Afghanistan and failed pretty badly. But there were successes in certain parts. And I know veterans who were involved in things like that, and they really put themselves at risk to make sure that they didn’t kill civilians. Again, even though overall it was a disaster, but these things have happened on a smaller scale in these American interventions. But you got to try to separate yourselves from the people you’re fighting and not just say, “Oh, they’re all animals and we have to kill all of them, and their children deserve to die,” which is the attitude that they have.
Eric Sammons:
I ask you this on the Ukraine situation. How about on this one with Trump. When the Trump administration takes over… Okay, let’s be honest. The Trump administration, a lot of the people associated with Trump are very good, sounding at least, on Ukraine. RFK, Vance, others. And none of them are good sounding on this, really. But what can they do realistically to try to end this conflict, bring it to a resolution?
Dave DeCamp:
When it comes to the Trump… Just in general, when it comes to ending this conflict and bringing out a resolution, I really am at a loss, when it comes to actually ending the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians at this point. It’s clear this Israeli government is hell-bent on… Right now, they’re focusing on conquering North Gaza. They’re essentially Conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign. And this been acknowledged by Israeli media, where they’re going through these cities, getting people out of there under threat of death, and then they demolish all the buildings so they have nowhere to go back. So they’re going to be going through with this. And judging by Trump’s appointees…
Trump says he wants peace, and I think he is genuine when he says that, but he also says he was the most pro-Israel president of all time, and Biden abandoned Israel, and he’s going to give them whatever they want. And what they want is to conquer Gaza and they want to annex the West Bank. He appointed Mike Huckabee to be the ambassador to Israel. And you talk about the theology, and that is a big part of why the US supports Israel the way it does. I’m glad you mentioned that. There are ways people can be convinced to support Israel other than just political lobbying.
But Huckabee is on record saying Israel has all the rights to the West Bank. He calls it Judea and Samaria. He’s even said, “There’s no such thing as a Palestinian. They’re just Arabs and that they can go to some other Arab country.” So that’s a sign that they’re going to just let Netanyahu continue with what he’s doing. And they might declare some kind of victory when they’re done in North Gaza with what they’re trying to do and pause things or scale things down a bit, but right now, to me, every sign is telling me that they’re going to just give them what they want.
Options for peace, real options for peace is really the only way, which is sad to say as an American, the only way this is going to stop is if America cuts Israel off, like Ronald Reagan did when they invaded Lebanon in the ’80s. Even George Bush put pressure on Israel, threatened military aid. Joe Biden has not done that. There’s been these PR moves that all the Israel supporters get mad about, but realistically, he hasn’t put any real pressure on them. The US does have that pressure. Is Trump going to use it? I hope that he is genuinely distressed by what’s happening in Gaza, but I haven’t seen really anything to tell me that.
Eric Sammons:
I think there’s two things about Trump I’m hopeful for that could work out for the best for this situation. One is I think he genuinely does not like to see killing going on. I think he genuinely wants to stop killing. He might have weird ways to go about it, he might have wrong ways to go about it, but I think the end result he wants, I think, is that, which is good.
The second thing is, Trump very much always considers himself the alpha dog, and I don’t think he’ll want to be seen as somebody who’s the lackey of Netanyahu, the lackey of Israel, and he’ll want to be seen as, “I’m telling you what to do. You’re not telling me what to do,” which could work in the favor of the innocent people, because he’ll tell Netanyahu, “Listen. You do this and not more, because otherwise we’re going to cut you off.” Simply because he wants to be seen as the guy in control, which he should actually in this situation, but I think that’s his natural instinct, is to do that. It’s not like I think he’s going to, all of a sudden, cut them off or turn anti-Israel, but that might work in our favor at the very least.
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah, I think that’s true. I think Trump’s also a wild card.
Eric Sammons:
You actually don’t know what he’s going to do. Okay. So I want to wrap it up here, but I just want to get your general feeling, especially with Trump taking office and what’s happening, what’s going on. Should we have a white pill or a black pill as far as World War III, as far as 2025, where we’re going and things of that nature? Where are you?
Dave DeCamp:
When it comes to Ukraine, I say white pill. When it comes to march toward World War III, overall, I would say black pill. Because a lot of the reasoning behind some of these Trump picks wanting to end the war in Ukraine is because they want to focus more on China. And there’s this whole other thing happening over there with Taiwan and tensions are really high.
Eric Sammons:
You’re right.
Dave DeCamp:
So I think, overall, we’re headed in a very bad direction. The US military is openly planning for a direct war with China in the future, even though they have nuclear weapons. So there’s concerning things. But I think, overall, this election has showed that American people overall don’t want to be involved in these foreign conflicts. Because whatever you say about Trump, he did campaign on ending this war. He campaigned on peace, even though I don’t think he’s really genuine when it comes to Israel, but that was his campaign. And Kamala Harris campaigned on war, and people rejected that. So I think that’s a reason to be optimistic, and we just need to get more people on board with our line of thinking.
Eric Sammons:
And the interesting thing, since at least 2008, the presidential candidate who was the more peace candidate won, as far as their campaign. Obama, he was definitely the anti-war candidate in 2008. McCain was clearly the pro-war candidate. Now, of course, we know what Obama actually did when he was in office, but the point is, the American people seem to have no appetite for war. Yet, we seem to have people in charge who really want to. We can get into the whole reason for that, but we won’t. Okay. Well, we’re going to hope and pray World War III is avoided and these conflicts end. But I really appreciate the work you’re doing. So people go to, I’ll put a link to it, antiwar.com. I’ll also put a link in to Scott Horton’s book, Provoked. Is there anything else you want people to go or anything like that?
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah, that’s it. You find out all my work there. Also, I have the show, it’s called Antiwar News. It’s on YouTube or there’s podcast forum. People could check that out.
Eric Sammons:
Is that also antiwar.com? Will it have a link to the podcast as well there?
Dave DeCamp:
Yeah. If you look at the site, the top corner, you’ll see the YouTube icon there.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. And I’ll put a link to that as well. And how often do you do the podcast?
Dave DeCamp:
It’s five days a week. It’s like a rundown of the news stories that I cover. So it’s like a daily news show. You kind of have to be a foreign policy nerd to like it.
Eric Sammons:
I’ve watched it before. I just didn’t realize it came out every day. YouTube is not telling me that as they should.
Dave DeCamp:
Oh, yeah?
Eric Sammons:
Yeah.
Dave DeCamp:
I don’t think they’re getting any help from the algorithm.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, they’re probably not. You’re not the type of podcaster they’re going to try to promote. Okay. Well, thanks, Dave. I really appreciate you being on the podcast today.
Dave DeCamp:
Thanks for having me, Eric. It was great.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Until next time, everybody. God love you.