Consequential Actions Podcast

Piece 1 of a three-part feature on libertarianism and the 2026 Libertarian National Convention. The episode separates the libertarian idea — the lowercase-l, a tradition reaching back roughly twenty-five centuries — from the Libertarian Party — the capital-L, a coalition organized in a Westminster, Colorado, living room on December 11, 1971. It walks through the foundational commitments of the libertarian tradition, sketches its intellectual lineage from Cicero through the present, surveys five live conversations within the tradition, narrates the founding of the party in the wake of the Nixon Shock and its institutional history across five decades, and lands on the standard against which the next two pieces — and Grand Rapids itself — will be measured. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

This contemporary application episode examines the doctrine of comprehensive economic sanctions as the operating instrument of post-Church Committee American regime-change policy. Opening with the May 12, 1996 60 Minutes exchange between Lesley Stahl and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright — and the structural surprise of Albright’s unanimous Senate confirmation as Secretary of State eight months later — the episode traces the substitution thesis (paramilitary instruments replaced by economic instruments after 1975), the explicit regime-change language in the statutory record (Cuban Democracy Act, Helms-Burton, maximum pressure), and the honesty test of when sitting officials state the doctrine openly versus when they launder it through human rights or nonproliferation framing. Five case studies follow: Iraq as the moral foundation (engaging the Dyson/Cetorelli 2017 methodological revision honestly while preserving the moral indictment); Cuba as the doctrine in real time (the live ratcheting through Executive Order 14404 and May 8, 2026 designations); Iran as the medical case (butterfly children, MAHAK leukemia patients, hemophilia); Venezuela as the continuum exposed (sanctions failed for nine years, kinetic phase began January 3, 2026); and Russia as the closed loop (Maidan substrate, sanctions regime failing as realism predicted, strategic overextension at the level of the global monetary order). The episode closes with the constitutional argument that comprehensive sanctions are blockades and blockades are acts of war, with a principled libertarian rejection of sanctions as an illegitimate exercise of state authority over foreign actors not convicted of crimes against Americans — distinguishing that rigorous position from the reformist position the episode declines to endorse — and with a forward pivot to Episode 19, which examines what happens when the policy moves from the laundered to the unlaundered version of regime change. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

Episode 18 traces the monetary architecture that finances the American empire — from the founders’ gold-and-silver Constitution through the 1910 Jekyll Island meeting that produced the Federal Reserve, the 1933 gold confiscation, the 1971 Nixon Shock, the multi-pillar dollar hegemony system, the 2022 weaponization against Russia, and the April 2026 debt trajectory of thirty-nine trillion dollars and over one trillion in annual interest. Building on Episode 13B’s coverage of the 1974 Kissinger-Simon-Saudi petrodollar negotiations, this episode expands outward to examine the other pillars of dollar power, the structural de-dollarization response that has accelerated since 2022, and the arithmetic that will eventually force strategic retrenchment — whether by policy choice or by external crisis. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

This contemporary application episode examines the Russo-Ukrainian peace negotiations from the perspective of how the Iran war, launched on February twenty-eighth, 2026, materially altered the negotiating landscape in Russia’s favor. Tracing the peace process from the November 2025 leak of the Trump twenty-eight-point plan through the European twenty-eight-point counterproposal, the December Berlin “NATO-like Article Five” offer, the December twenty-third revised twenty-point framework, the January sixth Paris Declaration, and the three trilateral rounds in Abu Dhabi and Geneva, the episode documents an operational negotiating process that was crystallizing as of mid-February 2026. The Iran war’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, beginning March fourth, forced the United States Treasury Department to issue General Licenses 133 and 134, which substantially suspended the October 2025 sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft and produced an estimated one hundred and fifty million dollars per day in additional Russian oil revenue. Simultaneously, the war drained American munitions stockpiles — particularly Patriot interceptor missiles — and forced the Pentagon to divert seven hundred and fifty million dollars in PURL-program funding from Ukraine to American inventories. The episode connects this strategic overextension to John Mearsheimer’s long-standing realist warning that simultaneous confrontation with Russia, China, and Iran would consolidate an anti-American coalition; documents the operational evidence of that consolidation in Foreign Minister Lavrov’s April fifteenth Beijing visit and the April seventh UN Security Council vote in which Russia and China jointly vetoed a Bahrain-led Hormuz resolution; and examines the constitutional vacuum represented by six failed Senate war powers resolutions, one House vote that failed by a single vote, and the lapse of the sixty-day War Powers Resolution deadline on May first. The episode closes with an extended analysis of security guarantee design, drawing on the lesson of 1914 to argue that any final Ukraine settlement guarantees must contain explicit sunset clauses and mandatory reassessment provisions to avoid replicating the architecture that cascaded into the First World War. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com

Episode 17 examines the Ukraine war as the predictable result of three decades of American policy choices. Following the argument of Article 17, the episode traces NATO expansion from Baker’s 1990 “not one inch eastward” assurance to the present, through the 2014 Maidan events, the Minsk agreements signed in bad faith, the failed December 2021 diplomacy, and the collapse of the Istanbul peace negotiations in April 2022. The episode handles the nuclear dimension with measured gravity, documents the vindication of realist critics including Kennan, Mearsheimer, Matlock, and Perry, and evaluates the April 2026 state of the war against the settlement that was available three years and one million casualties earlier. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeffkellick.substack.com