Dave Smith: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, no, fuck them. By the way, a lot of people speculate online, but I’m not getting any of these checks, man, and I’d really like them to start coming in. But even when you say China’s asserting the one China policy, but the one China policy is the policy of the United States of America and has been for 50 years now. So I think what’s happening there a lot of times is that essentially, even though officially the one China policy is the policy of the United States of America, all of these American politicians and different figureheads across powerful centers in America are saying that China doesn’t have the right to go into Taiwan. And then China’s in the position of being like, “Well, hey, wait a minute. No, that’s not actually the policy. We maintain this one China policy, but we allow them to kind of do what they want to do.” And the most obvious example of this was when Joe Biden actually said, ” Oh, we wouldn’t allow that and we would militarily intervene if they went into China.” And this was so bizarre, then the White House, whoever that was, came out to correct the President of the United States and say, “No, the policy of the White House is the one China policy.” Which look, I mean, again, I think the whole point of this is that the reason why whoever the hell was able to overrule Joe Biden and his administration, I don’t know who that is, but the whole point is that if you say, and this is why there is some wisdom in America accepting the one China policy is that if you tell China that we recognize Taiwan’s independence and that they’re not a part of China, that might be the type of thing that would make China invade and say, “No, we’re not accepting that.” And so at least right now, it’s like, “Okay.” Look, this is the reality. It’s something that you kind of run up against with the war in Ukraine a lot and with the situation in China and Taiwan is that there are constraints placed on us by reality. It’s not all just how would you like the world to be? How would you like it to work? Obviously, I think we would all like that bigger countries don’t invade smaller countries and bigger countries don’t bully smaller countries around. That is not the way of the world. We are a big country that is the biggest bully in the world, so we’re in no position to let… but we’re kind of in the position is just you’re like, “Hey, we’d sure love if you don’t do that. he world. We are a big country that is the biggest bully in the world, so we’re in no position to let… but we’re kind of in the position is just you’re like, “Hey, we’d sure love if you don’t do that. You can do it and you can get away with it, but we would sure love it if you don’t.” And so the goal would be to do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. When Vladimir Putin starts talking about like, Hey, if you keep pushing the idea of Ukraine joining your military alliance, I’m going to invade that country. The goal there or the move there would be to be like, “Okay, we’ll stop talking about that. Is there something else that we can agree on? ” Is there a way that you will promise you won’t do anything to them and we’ll promise we won’t bring them in our military. That’s the goal. You don’t just go like, “No, fuck you, we’re doing it anyway,” over and over and over again until they do the thing. I think we got to this discussion from the military industrial complex and military intervention, and Ron Paul, before that, if you could rewind a little bit. According to you, and according to various flavors of libertarianism, is there any amount of military intervention that’s justified? That’s okay?…

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