The Depravity of US Foreign Policy
Donald Smith on the Ron Paul – Blueprint for Peace Conference 

(August 16, 2025) — Highlights of a wide-ranging discussion with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Col Douglas Macgregor, Max Blumenthal, and Anya Parampil. The moderator is Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Jeffrey Sachs calls the US plans for war with China the “worst idea in the whole planet in all of history” in his eloquent, funny, and well-informed lecture about the recent history of US war-mongering.   “The biggest risk we face is turning Taiwan into Ukraine…. the same thought processes are at work ” in the minds of America’s strategists.

Sachs says that with very few exceptions (and the recent ones involved the war in Korea and Vietnam), China has launched zero overseas military operations in its 2000-year history. Unfortunately, Donald Trump seems to care about what uber-hawkish Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Richard Blumenthal, and their ilk think. Hence Trump said that he would face “heat” (from war hawks) if he goes to Moscow.

Sachs says the biggest mistake the US made in 1947 was to give the CIA responsibility not only for intelligence — which we absolutely need — but also for covert operations, which have done great damage. The crowd applauded that.   “Second, we need to de-politicize the CIA and the intelligence agencies,” as recent events have shown. “Third, we need to close our overseas military bases.” (applause again).

Col. Douglas MacGregor says that there are about 850 overseas military bases (not 750 as Judge Napolitano at first said).  MacGregor also says that the US Pacific fleet would be highly vulnerable because an enemy (China) could destroy fuel depots and other supply installations with precision missiles.   He thinks that the 850 bases could reasonably be decreased to about 150 bases.
Sachs complimented Congressman Duncan (R – S.C), who is perhaps the most conservative congressperson but who has made some antiwar votes. (Perhaps Sachs was just being diplomatic.)

He gives the background of what happened with Eisenhower, JFK, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Clinton.  He talks a lot about Ukraine and how NATO expansion provoked the invasion, as the neocons were fully aware it would, and as the RAND Corporation predicted.

He points out the absurdity of the fact that Victoria Nuland and Hilary Clinton are now teaching diplomacy at universities. (“You can’t make this stuff up.”)

As I say, the US regards its rightful sphere of influence to be the entire globe, and it feels that it has the right to invade, bomb, coup, sanction and meddle worldwide.  Russia and China aren’t even allowed to control their borderlands. In fact, the US deploys bases and overthrows governments along their borders to set up armed client states.  Why? Because the US is “the exceptional nation.”

Sachs says the US hates the idea of a neutral country, because it makes America look weak and shows that other countries can be free (analogous to what Athens did to Milos: saying either you are on side, or we will destroy you).

Max Blumenthal said that Israel has damaged the credibility of the US worldwide, to the point that the US is no longer taken seriously. The US is supporting a genocidal ethnocentric regime.  Blumenthal says that Microsoft is hosting and enabling Israel’s genocide database in its cloud infrastructure.   This represents the collapse of the law-based international order.

Blumenthal says that, long term, to stop Israel from oppressing Palestinians, it will take registering AIPAC as a foreign agent, as Rep. Thomas Massey is pushing. (The audience applauded.)  AIPAC is part of the Zionist movement, which is a bribery network in the US capital. Grant Smith documented that “AIPAC grew out of the American Zionist Council, which was funded by the Jewish Agency, which was an Israeli institution.   In the short-term, recognizing Palestian as a state is useless if Israel succeeds in ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank.     Blumenthal says that CIA chief of counter-intelligence James Engleton had not only handled Lee Harvey Oswald but also set up Mossad and helped Israel acquire nukes.

Blumenthal says that Israel was caught in 2019 planting spying devices near the White House, as reported by Politico. Israel engages in widespread spying, but all we heard about was Russia, Russia. He says that one think stopping people from taking on Israel is fear of assassination. (Wow! Quite an allegation!)   “Look at what the US did in Syria. You want to talk about depravity? Look at the slaughter of the Drues [and] the slaughter of the Alawites. ” Murdered in a week by Al Qaeda bandits.

The US tries to legitimize the Al Qaeda government. “You know who’s next? It’s the Christians. We are signing off on that entire campaign. All because Syria has been neutralized as a potential threat to Israel.”  The US is pushing Lebanon towards a civil war, demanding it disarm Hezbollah.   People in Iran think another invasion from Israel is inevitable, and Israel will try to drag in the US.

Blumenthal tells the libertarian audience that he’s not libertarian — he’s still a card-carrying communist (he later said that’s a joke) — but he agrees with Senator Ron Paul’s foreign policy. The audience still applauds Blumenthal.

Col. MacGregor said that Trump is basically not free to disobey the foreign policy establishment.  He thinks that nothing fundamentally will change until the financial system collapses and we go into a serious crisis [largely caused by endless wars and military preparations].  He hopes the collapse happens first. Otherwise, the war machine may get us all killed.

Judge Napolitano asks Anya Parampil (Blumenthal’s wife) why the Trump administration put a $50 million bounty on popularly elected Venezuelan President Maduro.  She responds by talking about Argentina’s self-styled “libertarian” president Javier Milei.  Parampil says that many people in the audience (Ron Paul supporters) might like Milei, but he’s implementing a rather standard IMF-style privatization and slashing of public spending, while selling control of water resources to an Israeli company.

A significant proportion of Argentina’s gold supply was shipped abroad, but the public hasn’t been told where it went. Milei admits it was sent abroad but won’t say where.  She says that at the same time that the State Department announced the $50 million bounty on Maduro, the administration authorized shipping of crude oil from Chevron there. So the bounty may just be to appease Marco Rubio.       She said that the Bank of England is holding some of Venezuela’s gold and it has refused to release it, because the US and UK don’t totally recognize Maduro as the president.

Napolitano says that his former colleague at Fox News, Pete Hegseth, was in Japan shaking his fist at China and threatening war.  Napolitano asks Sachs why they do that. Sachs says he doesn’t know. But he suggests we need a Peace Party.  A majority of the American people would understand that such a party (and policy) would make us safer.  We can’t afford the wars. We don’t benefit from them. It’s not even hard to stop these conflicts. “These are artificially prolonged conflicts. These are choices, that are terrible choices, that are made for particular reasons and particular interests that don’t serve the American people.”