Ron Paul Institute Executive Director Daniel McAdams sat down with his old Ron Paul Congressional Office colleague, Mises Institute President Jeff Deist, to discuss the real costs of our massive yearly military spending bill. How does the new nuclear weapons “modernization” program fit in? How big is the US military budget — how does it compare to the budgets of Washington’s rivals? What should the role of the US be in the world?

President Trump called for much more military spending in last night’s State of the Union speech. He also called to keep Guantanamo open and to even add new prisoners. More money for nuclear weapons “modernization.” And he wants $1.5 trillion to spend on infrastructure projects. He takes credit for a booming economy, but will he take blame when the Fed’s bubbles begin to burst? Today’s Liberty Report looks at the policy behind last night’s “feel good” speech…

Tonight’s State of the Union speech will be in equal measure gloating and glumness depending on which political party you ask. As usual there will be plenty of mugging for the cameras with the artificial idea that there really any fundamental differences between the two. The warfare state will get its big boost as will the welfare state. Plenty for everyone in the dreamland that is the US global empire. But what is the real state of the United States? How about our security? Our prosperity? Our liberty? Today’s Liberty Report is completely uninterested in political parties or making bumper-sticker points. We’re digging down to the real state of the union. Please join us…

Neocon-dominated US foreign policy is despised throughout the world, bestselling Scandinavian writer Hanne Herland tells the Liberty Report today. At a time when European and Western values are under attack by cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School, where can we turn to fight back? And the globalists who control the vast majority of the world’s wealth — what are the dangers? Join today’s very unique Liberty Report:

Though dead-enders can’t let go, the fact is “Russia-gate” is on the wane for lack of any kind of evidence. But what has emerged to take its place looks more like “FBI-gate,” with senior officials seemingly plotting to prevent Donald Trump from taking office and then plotting to depose him once in the White House. RPI’s Daniel McAdams joins RT’s Crosstalk to point out that the FBI has always been a political organization and that the United States would be far better without such a national police force and without agents who do things that would land the rest of us in jail. And wasn’t the Mueller investigation supposed to be all about Russia? Why are we only hearing about “obstruction of justice” and other unrelated avenues of investigation?

The Pentagon has just released its 2018 National Defense Strategy for the United States. After at least 18 years of being told that international terrorism is the number one threat to the United States and that we must spend enormous amounts of money ($11 trillion since 2001) fighting it, we are now told that terrorism is no longer a big threat. The new biggest threat that we must spend more mountains of money defeating? Russia and China! Who benefits from this official return to the Cold War? The military-industrial complex. Who loses? The rest of us. More on the Pentagon’s “Orwell moment” in today’s Liberty Report:

Relations between North and South Korea have taken a surprisingly positive turn this year. Bilateral negotiations between the North and South began the thaw just after the New Year, and then an announcement of unprecedented North/South joint participation in the coming Olympic games leaves us wondering how far this cooperation might go. Meanwhile, Washington casts a skeptical eye on the big thaw. The Trump Administration has bet the bank that the only way to handle North Korea is with sanctions and threats. That has not worked. With North/South rapprochement become the big story at the Olympics? Our take in today’s Liberty Report:

Are we supposed to believe that a critical five months of text messages between two plotting (and illicitly connected) anti-Trump FBI agents have disappeared due to technical errors? Much more likely — and more commonly, as Jim Bovard points out in a recent Hill article — it is the FBI manipulating evidence and destroying evidence to keep the public from knowing what they really are up to. In this case, it appears FBI agents were colluding with others in the US intelligence community to: 1) prevent Donald Trump from being elected president; and then 2) when that didn’t work, to undermine him with baseless charges of foreign collusion in the hopes he would be removed from office. The story continues to unfold, but as it does the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory seems to be melting into a “FBI-gate” reality. More in today’s Liberty Report:

With Ankara’s recent military incursion into Syria to fight Afrin-based Kurdish forces, the US finds itself in a bizarre proxy war with its longtime NATO ally, Turkey. Turkish airplanes are literally taking off from the same airbase to bomb the Kurds as American planes are taking off from to arm the Kurds. US policy in Syria to create an autonomous Kurdish region to facilitate the continued (illegal) US military presence in the country is reckless and unsustainable. It is also absurd. For more on this strange state of affairs, tune in to today’s Liberty Report:

Defense Secretary James Mattis unveiled the new US National Defense Strategy which has shifted the focus away from terrorism as the main threat to looking at Russia and China as the main threat to the US. It is a move back to the neocon “Wolfowitz Doctrine” of the 1990s, RPI Director Daniel McAdams tells RT, which stated that the US will use everything in its power to prevent a rival from rising to challenge it. Our hyper-interventionist foreign policy consistently creates outcomes opposite of our stated goals and this new strategy only continues this process:

Why are the rich getting richer? Are they just smarter than the rest of us? Or do the “too big to fail” connected corporations have a hotline to Washington for government assistance? And what about the US involvement in the Middle East? Will it increase or decrease this year? And why? Internationally-renowned trends forecaster Gerald Celente joins today’s Liberty Report to tell us what we can expect for 2018:

While ISIS has been defeated in Syria, the US military has no plans to leave the country. In fact, the Pentagon is building new, permanent military bases on Syrian soil. But the Syrians don’t want American troops on their soil and it’s pretty illegal to put your troops into another country without permission. So why stay? To “counter Iranian influence in the region.” But how did Iran get so much influence in the region? The US invasion of Iraq and the US destabilization of Syria were a shot in the arm to Iran’s influence in the region. So if US interventionism in the Middle East keeps making Iran stronger and the US claims to want Iran to be weaker, why does Washington keep intervening in the region? We try to sort it out in today’s Liberty Report: