INTERVIEW: Daniel McAdams

Stop the Nuclear Chicken Game, Create a New Alliance for Peace

Sept. 28—Daniel McAdams is the Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and hosts the Ron Paul Liberty Report with former Congressman Ron Paul every week. Tim Rush of EIR conducted the interview on the sidelines of the Rage Against the War Machine rally on Sept. 28 at the Washington Monument, where McAdams was a speaker. The event featured over a dozen individuals from both the so-called left and so-called right to warn about the growing danger of global war.

Tim Rush: We are at the Rage Against the War Machine rally here, next to the Washington Monument, and I’m speaking to Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute. I’d like to start by asking you what thoughts you have in terms of what you’re doing right now. What’s foremost in your mind right now that the public needs to know?

Daniel McAdams: Well, what’s at the forefront of my mind right now is World War III that looks like it’s about to break out, you know? So that’s what concerns me the most.

Rush: Absolutely, and I think Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement last Wednesday that Russia is changing its nuclear doctrine, obviously needs to resonate more. People really have to confront this nuclear chicken-game dynamic that the NATO policy has set into motion. Do you have any thoughts on how to expand that discussion in the course of these elections?

McAdams: Well, unfortunately, I don’t think foreign policy has gotten enough attention this time. I’m going to preface this by saying I don’t vote, so I don’t support any candidate. But I think [Republican presidential candidate] Donald Trump has at least given us some hope that, if he is elected, he will change course, even a slight change of course, which would be beneficial.

And I think we saw with this meeting with [Ukrainian acting President Volodymyr] Zelensky yesterday in New York—looking at the body language, looking at how Trump approached Zelensky—he’s not in love with this guy like the rest of the Western leaders in the past three years. And so that gives us a glimmer of hope, I think.

Rush: The question of what will occur at the BRICS meeting that’s coming up in Kazan, Russia at the end of October—what’s your estimate of what might emerge from that? And is there any prospect of more realist elements in the United States policy circles who will try to move toward cooperation with that kind of thinking, as opposed to viewing it as a hostile formation that needs to be confronted?

McAdams: I think it’s going to be viewed as a hostile organization that needs to be confronted by the U.S., because the U.S.—I mean, we’re still operating under the Wolfowitz Plan, you know, that we have to completely eliminate the possibility of any rival. But ironically, what’s happened, is, our foreign policy has given an incentive for rivals to emerge. So, it’s had the exact opposite effect.

You know, the idea that Russia, China, and India would become very closely cooperating trading partners—particularly China and India—where there’s been decades of enmity between the two of them, but they found a way to put these issues aside. The way that China has been behaving in the world, i.e., not the way Americans say, but in fact negotiating peace—peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example; that was a Chinese endeavor.

So, I think they’re going to continue to view BRICS as a rival, and they’re going to do everything they can to pick countries away [from it]. I think that’s why— I was just talking about [former Soviet Republic of] Georgia. One of the reasons why Georgia is a hot spot, is because it’s considered the weak underbelly of Russia, so they want to have a “regime change.” So, they’re never going to accept BRICS as a friendly rival, because that’s just not how the empire works.

Rush: There’s some of that same dynamic in Armenia right now.

McAdams: It’s lost. I mean, Armenia’s lost.

Rush: Which is a very big shift. But, in addition to the diplomacy you mentioned, of China with Iran and Saudi Arabia, they also were pulling various factions of the Palestinians into a more unified voice. But obviously, the way that the Israelis have been targeting and eliminating some of that leadership, and now this latest in going after Hezbollah—

There’s the question of how to evaluate this [Israeli] attack [on Lebanon] yesterday that knocked out [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah and others. What do you see as the next developments in this situation?

McAdams: Well, I don’t know, and I wonder. I thought that Iran would have responded a while ago after the hit on one of their top people [Hamas Political Bureau chairman Ismail Haniyeh]. I would have thought they would have taken advantage to send a stronger message than they sent in April, with the one bomb that got through—maybe more, that’s the only one that’s been reported—but they didn’t, and now I think they’ve lost that window where they could be seen as legitimately responding. So, I think they’re playing a very conservative game right now. I don’t think Iran’s going to jump in, even with the assassination of Nasrallah. I could be wrong, I don’t know; it’s just a guess based on what’s happened in the past.

Rush: Well, there’s certainly no question that the Israelis are baiting Iran in every conceivable way.

McAdams: Who was it—was it the head of the [Israel] Defense Force that said something about, “this war with Lebanon is something we’ve been hoping for, waiting for, for a long time?” I forget how he put it, but essentially his statement basically belies this argument that this war is something that just came up after Oct. 7. They’ve thought: “This is an opportunity we’ve been waiting for for a long time.”

Which makes you wonder about the October 7th [terror raid on Israel by Hamas]. I actually posted on Twitter/X that, “Hey, you can’t help but be impressed by Israeli intelligence. They have taken out a lot of top people in Hezbollah this past couple of weeks. So, it shows that your intelligence was pretty damn good. So how did October 7th happen?” I mean, it just boggles the mind.

Rush: Yeah, certainly it was something that, much as the follow up to 9/11, involved predisposition to move toward emergency rules in various domains and so forth, and now the “forever wars” really sprouted from that disposition.

On the question of the Ukraine escalations, clearly there’s been a little bit of pushback—we have some sources indicating there could be some elements in the Pentagon preventing the deep-strike missile capabilities, either through the [British] Storm Shadow missiles or directly from U.S. hardware. What is your sense of where this effort to try to pull in the horses comes from, and is it strong enough, or is it simply a waiting game, in your view?

McAdams: That’s what I’ve heard as well, that there are some forces in the government that are taking seriously what Putin said, which is that, you know, “these missiles are not going to be fired by Ukrainians. We [Russians] know that they’re going to be fired by NATO, and so we’ll consider ourselves in a state of war with NATO.” I think there are people that have listened to this. But if past is prologue, we know that the trajectory has been, “oh, you can’t do this, or you can’t have this weapon system,” until you can. So, you know, the entire history of this war has been starting with Javelins [missiles], Leopards [tanks], etc. “No, no, no.” Then, “Yes, yes, yes.”

And this whole idea that Putin is bluffing—maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. But if we’re going to take such a huge risk, shouldn’t the payoff be at least equal to that? That was the point of [former presidential candidate] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Donald Trump, Jr. in the piece they penned for The Hill. They made a great point at the end; they said, “We’re risking nuclear war for something that has nothing to do with our interests, we wouldn’t even benefit from it.”

Rush: I’m glad you brought up that op-ed; I thought it was very significant. And obviously there’s a battle inside the Trump camp—you have the [former CIA Director Mike] Pompeo types on one side, who have never seen a war they don’t want to escalate. And on the other side, the fact that Donald Trump, Jr. together with RFK, Jr. together with [former member of Congress and former presidential candidate] Tulsi Gabbard, have been voices that have said this nuclear war issue trumps everything else. And that that’s the reason that we’re working together.

I wanted to ask you if you have a sense from today’s event and others—do you see a way to get a unity around that overarching issue, as against the normal play off of the playbooks that people walk into a campaign with?

McAdams: I think it’s been a brilliant move, seeing the migration of Tulsi and of RFK, Jr. to turn—I don’t want to be overly optimistic—but to turn the Republican Party into the pro-peace party, I think this has been tremendous to view. But I’m not naïve. I know, as you said, there are a lot of warmongers who will flatter Donald Trump, and he’s very interested in being flattered. And we know that Pompeo still has his ear; he just mentioned Pompeo recently. So, he’s not going to look too far outside of this bubble of foreign policy experts.

But the Fleitz-Kellogg plan for ending the war in Ukraine is a disaster, it’s a neocon dream. Essentially, they put out a paper saying, “Okay, here’s the plan to end the war: You tell Ukraine you have to sit down at the table or we’re going to cut off all the money, and you tell Russia you have to sit at the table or we’re going to give Ukraine all the weapons it wants.” It’s a stupid plan, because it won’t work with either of them.

But this has kind of come to form Trump’s approach to this problem—and it won’t work. You guys know, we’ve been through Minsk I, we’ve been through Minsk II. There’s not going to be a Minsk III; it’s not going to happen. Trump still doesn’t get it, because he doesn’t have the principles, doesn’t understand the principles of what this is about.

Rush: Well, I would ask you one question on that. Our sense is the idea of “peace through development;” that underlying all of these various acute theaters of war, the Middle East and Ukraine included, is a fundamental economic breakdown in the West. And rather than rectifying policies to get out of the 50 years of globalization, industrial collapse, and financial speculation, rather than correcting that, the idea is to degrade the ability of other nations to function. What are your thoughts on this?

McAdams: I almost think if you look at the debt burden, if you look at the $1 trillion a year just in interest payments on our debt right now, I almost feel like a crash is going to have to happen. But, you know, you talk about peace through development, well, that’s what the Chinese are doing, and they’re doing it not only in China, but in Africa and elsewhere. And the Russians are doing a similar thing. So, instead of us looking at what they’re doing and how it might work, as you say, we’re trying to undermine it, we’re trying to downgrade it, and we’re trying to screw it up. And I can only conclude here that the people in charge here are lunatics.

Rush: There is a tremendous breakdown in traditional party affiliations right now, with many people becoming politically homeless. There are also many ironies among those who are still clinging to their party affiliations. For example, there are many people who are against the war in Gaza on the left, or progressive side, but who want the war against Russia, while at the same time there are many on the right who don’t want the war against Russia but who have signs that say, “I stand with Israel.” But the instability and breakdown of the parties may be an open field for people to shed some of this brainwashing which has been so central to political control.

In this regard, I wanted to ask you about your evaluation of developments in Germany and France right now.

McAdams: Well, you’re seeing the rise of the AfD [Alternative for Germany] on the right and the [BSW, the] party of Sahra Wagenknecht on the left in Germany. Look what they did in the recent elections around the Berlin district—AfD barely missed beating out the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany], which is [the SPD’s] stronghold. And so, we’re seeing a lot happening; that’s why they’re trying to ban the AfD. That’s why they’ve done everything they could with the Rassemblement National [National Rally party] in France as well. They’re going to try to ban these parties. But as they get more and more popular—how can you be a fringe if you’re getting 31% of the vote in a Parliamentary system? So, it’s encouraging that these parties are rising, but it’s taking too long for my taste.