This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 18th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zilinski is calling for what he terms a humanitarian no-fly

zone to, in his words, closed the skies over Ukraine.

Cato's Eric Gomez details how U.S. imposed no-fly zones have worked in the past, and why that's

given many lawmakers a false sense of how this no-fly zone would work in practice.

The most notable example to me that sticks out of my mind of discussions of no-fly zones was a Democratic primary debate in 2016.

Where you had then candidate and I believe recent former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she might have been

present, current Secretary of State at the time, and Jim Webb, who decorated a veteran who understood who

understood a thing or two about war,

basically poo-poohing the notion that Hillary Clinton was expressing with respect to

support of no-fly zones and I immediately thought to myself well I got to go

with the guy who's spent a lot of time in war having being fairly

skeptical about no-fly zones.

How has the US used no fly zones in the past and what made those experiences

different from what we would be looking at in Ukraine?

I think most Americans when they think of the term or they hear the term,

what comes to mind for me is the U.S. experience in Libya,

where Ma Mark Gaddafi was fighting a civil war and pushing towards a city,

I believe Benghazi, and the U.S. imposed a no-fly zone to protect civilians via, I believe, NATO.

And it worked in the sense that Gaddafi didn't make it there,

but then that also turned into a regime change operation

...