National Security Expert Elbridge Colby’s Advice to Trump on How to Avoid WWIII & Handle the CIA

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Here's the episode.

Speaker 1 We are now three days out from the election. There's a mad scramble,

Speaker 1 of course, in Washington for people to get positions of power in the new administration. Some of them are good people.
Some of them are not.

Speaker 1 You are being widely discussed as potentially the next national security advisor or Secretary of Defense taking over DOD.

Speaker 1 I don't know what's going to happen.

Speaker 1 fairly confident you'll play a large and meaningful role in this administration.

Speaker 1 You're never going to say any of that, but I just

Speaker 3 thought that the audience might like some context for why we're having this conversation.

Speaker 1 I think you're one of the very few people with deep experience in national security who shares the president's priorities on national security, which is amazing. There aren't too many.

Speaker 1 You're, I would say, the leader of them.

Speaker 1 There's the context. What does this next administration need to do in order to remain true to the president-elect's articulated positions on war and peace?

Speaker 3 Well, thank you, Tucker, and thank you very much. First off, for your confidence in me.
It means a great deal. I don't make anything.
Well, I know, and that's why I'm deeply grateful and honored.

Speaker 3 And I clearly don't make any presumptions about any role for myself.

Speaker 3 But what I would say, and I mean this with all sincerity, is that I think the President of the United States, the President-elect is exactly right that we stand on the possible precipice of World War III, and we need a fundamental change before we ram right into the iceberg.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think the election is over, but this remains absolutely true, is that what I call the liberal primacist alliance, basically the kind of policies of President Biden and Vice President Harris aligned with the primacists, I call them, we could have called them the neoconservatives, have led us to a situation in which we're overextended.

Speaker 3 We're on the brink of war in multiple theaters and we could lose them. And I really want peace.
And more importantly, President Trump ran to his

Speaker 3 historic credit on an agenda, as he said

Speaker 3 in his sort of victory speech. I don't start wars, I end them.
Now, I think my view is that we have to have how you actually get to peace is a difficult question.

Speaker 3 And I had the honor of being on your show a few years ago when my book came out.

Speaker 3 And I remember, I don't recall, but I said, I was thinking about your question to President Trump about why is it worth defending allies? And I gave that a lot of thought.

Speaker 3 And that, in a sense, my book is a response to that question. And I think you do need strength.
You do. But

Speaker 3 you need peace through strength. But that term has become cheapened and distorted to become basically an excuse for an aggressive expansionist approach to foreign policy.

Speaker 3 But I think you do, you know, its real meaning.

Speaker 3 And President Trump is, in a sense, going back to the great tradition of the Republican Party, the Weinberger Doctrine, the Powell Doctrine, Nixon, Eisenhower, as Bob Dole used to put it, these are Democrat wars.

Speaker 3 It used to be Democrats that started wars and Republicans that ended or avoided them. Eisenhower didn't go into Vietnam in 1954.
He did not intervene in Hungary in 1956.

Speaker 3 Again, nobody thought he was a weak guy. So what needs needs to happen right now?

Speaker 1 Before you get into that, I just think it might be helpful to describe where we are now because a lot of Americans, I'm in this category, were so absorbed in the election that we may have lost touch with what you opened your remarks by noting, which is we're on the brink of war in multiple theaters.

Speaker 1 Just will you tell us where we are?

Speaker 3 Absolutely. Well, I think for the first time in basically 150 years, we are not clearly the world's largest economy.
We compete for that with China, and they are a far larger industrial power.

Speaker 3 Russia, in purchasing power parity terms, is a very large economy with enormous industrial production capacity. So North Korea advancing its nuclear missile program.

Speaker 1 Russia is a larger manufacturing economy than a lot of us appreciated, I think.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, despite a lot of boasting, they're still out-producing the North Atlantic Alliance, including the United States, in artillery production, which is old technology, by like a factor of two or three.

Speaker 3 Iran's two weeks from a nuclear weapon, according to Tony Blinken. And worse,

Speaker 3 these actors have come together. Now, you will hear from the sort of primacists and liberals that that means that we have to fight them all at the same time.

Speaker 3 No, to the contrary, it means they are collaborating together precisely to tie us down and deplete us.

Speaker 3 And that's what's happened in the war in Ukraine, where we have expended a tremendous amount of weapons, ditto in places like attacking the Houthis and so forth.

Speaker 3 At the same time, our defense industrial base has wildly atrophied from where it was 30 years ago. And this is why the agenda for reindustrialization is so important.

Speaker 3 But that's going to take a long time, as Senator Vance has pointed out. Meantime, China.

Speaker 1 Wait, so can I say it's not,

Speaker 1 I mean, I thought one of the justifications, the main justification for this wildly inflated Ukraine funding was that it was going to help reestablish America's

Speaker 1 industrial base.

Speaker 3 And in fact, one of the most kind of oft-used arguments by a lot of the advocates for the war in Ukraine was that we would sort of degrade the Russian military for a song and restore our defense industrial base at the same time.

Speaker 3 Actually, more or less,

Speaker 3 the reverse has happened. The Russian military is larger.
And this is, you know, General Kovoli, the Sakura, has admitted this. The Russian military is larger.
It's battle-hardened.

Speaker 3 I mean, our military has not fought a peer adversary. Well, I mean, really, since World War II, but certainly since Vietnam and Korea.

Speaker 3 The Russians have gone toe-to-toe with the Ukrainians, who are capable, and they have a revved-up defense industry at the same time. So in a sense, we're worse.

Speaker 3 Meantime, the Europeans have basically been asleep at the switch, not going through with their defense buildup with a few noble exceptions like Poland.

Speaker 3 So, and then you look at at China, which is by far the most formidable challenger, 10 times the GDP of Russia.

Speaker 3 This administration, Tony Blinken, has said Xi Jinping has given the instructions to their military to be ready for a war over Taiwan by 2027.

Speaker 3 Frank Kendall, the Secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration, said the other day that he thinks the Chinese military will say they're ready. We have to be ready for this.

Speaker 3 My view is we desperately want peace. The Chinese are going to look at us both in terms of our strength, but also in terms of our political commitments.

Speaker 3 And this is where I think President Trump has been exactly right, which is being willing to talk to President Xi Jinping, not insulting President Xi Jinping and President Putin and others unnecessarily, not supporting things like Taiwan independence, and at the same time, being prepared to be strong.

Speaker 3 And this is where I think if we appoint

Speaker 3 or if people are put into positions of power who think that we can walk in Shugum and do everything and start wars in three different theaters at the same time, not only will that be bad like it was in the Iraq War, and often the same people, it will be far more catastrophic.

Speaker 3 Tucker, I don't think this is an exaggeration. I think we stand on the precipice of losing a major power war for the first time in our history.
So people need to know what time it is.

Speaker 3 And that really requires focusing on China with the purpose of peace, like we did in the Cold War, which was to say, we're going to be strong.

Speaker 3 We're not going to go over the line like Eisenhower did in 1950. He's not going to go into Hungary.

Speaker 3 We're not going to go to Czechoslovakia in 1968, but don't come across our line because you see it's not going to succeed for you. So I think we really stand at a crossroads.

Speaker 3 And I think President Trump has a mandate for peace.

Speaker 3 So don't, I, I, I, I, I, just, as an American, whatever happens to me, I so hope that we don't end up with the, the same failed recipe of starting wars all over the place or getting enmeshed in conflicts when we can't, we can't afford to do so.

Speaker 3 And they're not in the interest of the American people.

Speaker 1 From a non-expert position, which is my position, just as someone who's watching kind of,

Speaker 1 there does seem to be broad recognition that whatever our objectives in Ukraine were,

Speaker 1 we didn't achieve them and we can't. Zelensky immediately comes out upon Trump's election and says, actually, I'm for peace.
That does maybe seem like it's winding down.

Speaker 1 Who knows? I hope. But the noises are consistent with winding down.

Speaker 1 So, but at the same time, the very people who are pushing that war all of a sudden like very excited about a war with Iran. Yeah.
It's like they just seamlessly move. It's like, oh, Ukraine, whatever.

Speaker 1 Actually, the real problem is Iran and telling us that Iran's trying to murder President Trump, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know what's true.
I don't.

Speaker 1 But how would the United States, what would happen if we went to war with Iran?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, I think, you know, look, Iran's a bad regime. We don't want to have a nuclear weapon.
We don't want to

Speaker 3 support Israel. We don't want to be able to support groups attacking Israel, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 3 But like, haven't we learned the lesson over the last 25 years about the ill-advised nature of very significant conflicts in the Middle East that don't have clear goals and clear connection to American interests?

Speaker 3 Like, haven't we been averted? Like, didn't we run this experiment a couple of times? And it's often the exact same people calling for war with Iran who were involved in the past.

Speaker 3 And it's like, shouldn't there be some degree of accountability? Moreover,

Speaker 3 it's like a bad idea in itself. I mean, you know, like I was criticized in the bulwark by Eric Edelman, who was Dick Cheney's advisor and number three at the Pentagon under Bush.

Speaker 3 He said my ideas were iconoclastic. And I was like, thank you.
I'm delighted that you think my ideas are iconoclastic.

Speaker 1 How could Eric Edelman be writing with any credibility at all on foreign policy questions after being,

Speaker 1 intimately involved in the Iraq war and then never apologizing. I don't know.

Speaker 1 There should be some international authority that requires contrition, like a moral UN where you don't get to say another word until you don ashes and sackcloth and apologize.

Speaker 3 Who among us isn't? I'm certainly not inerrant.

Speaker 3 I'm certainly not infallible, but like at least show some, you know, it's like Paul Jagot of the Wall Street Journal, a couple of, like a year ago, gave a speech to AI, treated the Iraq war as like a mulligan.

Speaker 3 You know, it's like, I think that's like a big deal. And obviously a lot of people got it, you know, had different views, et cetera.
But it's like, it's kind of show the contrition, show the penance,

Speaker 3 show the learning. And so that I think is, you know, the other thing though, Tucker is like, it's the same people who are calling for attacking Iran who are also calling for.

Speaker 3 escalating the war in Ukraine or even a no-fly zone, recognizing an independent Taiwan or getting in a war with China or attacking North Korea.

Speaker 3 It's like if we do all those things, we know objectively as a fact that our military is not capable of fighting more than one major war at a time.

Speaker 3 So even if you did want to, getting in multiple fights with people at the same time is just like foolhardy.

Speaker 3 And I mean, but the way I think about it is the Washington blob establishment can get us into wars and crises, but they can't fix the problem.

Speaker 1 So it's really important right now.

Speaker 3 And it seems to me that just listening to President Trump and his historic victory, the decisive mandate he got, his leadership, his mandate, his agenda for peace from a position of strength, use the military sparingly, but have it be strong.

Speaker 3 It's really important not to get enmeshed all over the place and either bleed ourselves out or in a catastrophic multi-front loss.

Speaker 1 I think that's the last thing Donald Trump wants.

Speaker 1 Certainly seems that way. Right.
I mean, the arc of his life is just so remarkable. The redemption that we just saw on Tuesday

Speaker 1 without precedent really in American history. And so if you wanted to destroy his presidency, his second presidency,

Speaker 1 what's the one foolproof way to destroy it?

Speaker 3 No, no president has ever lost a great power war. Donald Trump has run to his enormous historic credit.
He has been shot. He has been had lawfare conducted against him.

Speaker 3 And he has had the bravery and the vision and the persistence and the commitment at great personal physical cost, but also to his reputation, his family, et cetera, to stand up for these principles that the United States desperately needs, putting Americans' interests first, peace.

Speaker 3 prosperity, et cetera, reindustrialization. Now is the time to put that into practice, whoever it is.
I just, I can't stress how important that is.

Speaker 3 And if you're thinking about a historical legacy, Joe Biden's going to leave a legacy that's terrible. I mean, where the, you know, for all the things, you know, you mentioned the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 3 Two and a half years in,

Speaker 3 Jillian Barnes, New York Times just reported that the intelligence community is reporting that the Ukrainians are losing, that it's not a stalemate.

Speaker 3 So after all that, after all the preaching, after all the moralism, the Ukrainians are losing the war and the Russians are making enormous progress. And we're unprepared.

Speaker 3 We're unprepared for a war with China. The Middle East is in the worst situation in years.
We can't even stop the Houthis, like a third or fourth rate power. And we're not prepared.

Speaker 3 So they've left us on the precipice. They've put us on a, you know, the Titanic is directing towards the iceberg.
It's going to take... a sharp turn.

Speaker 3 And the way I think about this, and when I worked at the brown honor to work for President Trump in his first term, when we worked on the defense strategy to try to get us to prioritize, again, in my view with the same logic, very consistent with what President Trump, I think, was trying to lay out.

Speaker 3 That was like, you know, we were a couple miles from the iceberg back then. Now we're like right up, you know, we're a few thousand yards.
And it's not easy to turn the Titanic.

Speaker 3 And if you turn the Titanic 90 degrees, people are going to fall out of their bunks. Chandeliers and beautiful plates are going to get broken.
But that's where we are.

Speaker 3 But that is the fault of what I call the liberal primacist alliance. That is the fault of Joe Biden, Vamala Harris, and the primacist

Speaker 3 sort of old school Republicans who, if they pursued that policy further, would lead us to catastrophe.

Speaker 1 Then how is it that from what I can tell, pretty much every person in the running for the big national security jobs other than you is part of that alliance?

Speaker 1 And I, you know, I know them all and I like some of them, a couple sitting U.S. senators who I think are really nice guys,

Speaker 1 but they're, they're, they're tools of the people you describe, like completely. There's kind of no doubt about it.

Speaker 3 Uh

Speaker 1 how, how is it that there are so few people on the Republican side in national security with experience who agree with the president-elect who leads the party.

Speaker 3 So I've thought a lot about this because I've been fighting, as you kindly gesture, in a sort of lonely battle within the sort of blob to put us on like, to me, what is common sense.

Speaker 3 Exactly. That's right.
And yet so few people do it. And why is that? It's so weird.

Speaker 3 And honestly, so much of your insight and commentaries, both on this show and your other podcast interviews and your shows, et cetera, because I think it's like, I think there's a human sociological element.

Speaker 3 I mean, not to get, and one of the things that's kind of bizarre is that I think like today, people like us, we can learn a lot from the new left of the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 3 Like there's something wrong with the establishment and the way the establishment, now, I believe there's always an establishment.

Speaker 3 There's an establishment in Mao's China, but we need a better establishment. Well, that's it.
You know, you're a friend of, you're a fan of Teddy Roosevelt too.

Speaker 3 Like the idea that like the establishment just does what it used to do is like, no, the point is the establishment is supposed to serve the people, right? Of course.

Speaker 3 But I think there's an element, and I try to give credit because like, yeah, there's money and stuff, but there's other ways of making money.

Speaker 3 I think it's this psychic kind of like network benefit of being part of like essentially functionally an imperial capital. Yeah.
And everybody comes to, you know, this, right?

Speaker 3 They come to the capital and say, you're so wise. We need your leadership.
You're so, you're so moral and your vision.

Speaker 3 And it happens in Congress where people come, they probably not thought about foreign policy that much. There are all these structures set up to kind of acculturate them.

Speaker 3 And again, like, I don't want to sound too new left, but like, you know, this is kind of what happens. And so you need, I think, a clear-eyed view of how to change.

Speaker 3 And frankly, a willingness to buck the system. And this to me is like, and I'm certainly far from the only person to make this point.
And I think you have as well.

Speaker 3 It's like President Trump ran against the system. And that is so important because it's the system, the liberal primacist alliance in other things like trade and economics, et cetera,

Speaker 3 that need to be a fundamental. change.
And already he's paid the price, literally, and shown the bravery and commitment to go through that. And so now it's about like capitalizing.

Speaker 3 And frankly, my hope is if that happened, a lot of these people, especially in the younger generations, would follow.

Speaker 3 And I, forgive me for a little bit of patting myself on the back, but I think it's an apropos comment.

Speaker 3 I was out at a thing a few months ago and this young guy came up, you know, strong guy, whatever, and he said, hey, you know, Mr. Colby, I'm going in the, I'm going into the Marines.

Speaker 3 And I just want to say all the young Republicans love what you're saying. And I said to him, I was like, well, that's good because all the old Republicans hate it.

Speaker 3 And he's like, yeah, that's the point.

Speaker 1 Boy, do they?

Speaker 3 Boy, do they? They do they. And that's like, to me, I always, I think of myself, I'm like the first line, not sir.

Speaker 3 This is, although, you know, there are people out there you wonder about, but like, this is, this is not like actually getting shot.

Speaker 3 But it's like, I'm trying to think about how do we protect Americans from not getting shot? Of course. Right.
And so, and so I think the young people can see it.

Speaker 3 You know, the young people who are like, you know, who are not bought in to, you know, who have not been kind of acculturated, worked for ex-senator on this committee for 10 years and then went to that think tank and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3 I think, I think they, they, if you build it, they will come. But it's like the first echelon.

Speaker 3 We take a lot of, we take a lot of metaphorical flack, hopefully metaphorical.

Speaker 1 I, I just, and I won't go on about this, but I'm a little bit distressed by it, very distressed by it.

Speaker 1 But like someone like Mike Pompeo, I'll just say the name, who I don't think is going to get a job in this administration.

Speaker 1 I would pray that he's not. I think he's a criminal.
I've said that. plotted to murder someone who hadn't even been charged with the crime.
That's a criminal act, should be arrested for that.

Speaker 1 That's my view.

Speaker 1 But even if you don't believe that, he's been anti-Trump for eight years, worked against Trump, and he's a crazed neocon.

Speaker 1 And he's still being talked about and promoted. Again, I don't think he's going to get the job, but promoted to run the national security establishment in the United States.

Speaker 3 How can that even happen?

Speaker 3 Well, look, I mean, I think it's

Speaker 3 if I were advising President Trump, I would say,

Speaker 3 especially now that the mandate has happened,

Speaker 3 why pick anybody who's not aligned with what you're trying to do? I mean, I saw the last ad that President Trump ran. I mean, it was a stirring ad, like, and it won.
Who is in that ad?

Speaker 3 You, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek, and Vice President-elect Vance.
That is the mandate, you know? So, so like,

Speaker 3 my hope is that he will own that. And that is the way for, that's the way for peace.

Speaker 3 And there's going to be debates about various policies and how to emphasize this or that but why go back in especially in a situation where as successful as the first term is the situation that joe biden and kamala harris are leaving president trump in january is i cannot stress how dangerous it is and he's right i mean the way that president trump again has commendably talked about the risk of nuclear war i worked on nuclear issues a lot my kind of starting point a lot was like working on nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy and arms control i worked on arms control with the russians we should be afraid of these things you You know, a salutary fear, not like an

Speaker 3 unmanning fear, if you will, but like a salutary fear. You know, the beginning of wisdom is fear or whatever the Bible says to that effect.
I should know that, but it's true. It's true, right?

Speaker 3 Is understanding and calibrating.

Speaker 3 And to me, one of the like touch grass kind of things about a lot of the people who are calling for like no-fly zones in over Ukraine and intervening against the Russians and escalating and allowing U.S.

Speaker 3 weapons to be overtly used to attack Moscow and Russian strategic forces sites. Like

Speaker 3 that is obviously crazy. It's like, time out.
Like, that is obviously.

Speaker 1 There are many Republicans.

Speaker 3 Yes. In fact, some of the Republican.
That's why I think that the arguments within the Republican Party in some ways are fiercer, because my hope, Tucker, and I think this is something you've been

Speaker 3 on for a while, but it's like the Democrats are like, they're sort of inherently out of position right now. Like, where is the left?

Speaker 3 Where are the people who are like anti-war? Where are the people who say the CIA is not above reproach or the FBI is not above reproach? Who are the people, you know,

Speaker 3 Wright Mills or whatever, the power elite and all this stuff? Those people have, those movements have to come back.

Speaker 3 And I think that that's something where, especially given the mandate that President Trump has been, has won, that hope, I mean, you know, whatever you think of Bernie Sanders, the fact that he said, like, we're out of, we're out of position, you know, and others are saying they're out of position.

Speaker 3 My hope is that Democrats will go back in a sense to the kind of arguments that I'm making that I think you could have heard a Democrat make 10 minutes ago or 30 years ago or 40 years ago hey we need we've got to be able to talk to our opponents we have to have a strong military but not get into unnecessary wars that's just common sense that's for sure

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Speaker 3 You mentioned CIA.

Speaker 1 Now is probably a good time to address it. Your last name is Colby.
That is familiar. That's a familiar name to anyone knows the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Speaker 1 Your grandfather ran it, William Colby.

Speaker 1 And so there are two interesting things. One is, I'm sure this will set off just explosions of theorizing on the internet.

Speaker 1 So what is your view of CIA? How is that's why I think that's why your family's in Washington because you're yeah, well, actually,

Speaker 3 my great-grandfather was a career army officer. So I come from a kind of a national security, you know, background.
I mean, my dad, not so much.

Speaker 3 But, you know, look, my view on the intelligence community, and I worked on this stuff myself when I was kind of early in my career, although on the commission that looked at why Iraq intelligence is wrong.

Speaker 3 I didn't agree with my grandfather for everything with everything. I didn't know him super well.
I mean, I know a lot about how he approached things and how he, you know,

Speaker 3 his record and so forth.

Speaker 3 One thing where I do really agree with him and where his legal training and the fact that actually, as Jim Schlesinger said, he was the first liberal to become director of central intelligence was that he thought, and I agree with him, that you need a CIA.

Speaker 3 You need a national security establishment, but it's not above reproach and it needs to be accountable. And that's what he was, you know, the interesting thing about him,

Speaker 3 and just to stress that I don't take any credit for it, like I'm just telling just because you asked me, but you know, he was in World War II. He was then a field guy.

Speaker 3 He was in Europe and then he was in Vietnam for a long time. And then he kind of ended up as director by happenstance, as these things sometimes do during Watergate.

Speaker 3 And so, and he had not been really involved. He wasn't one of the inside club of like the, you know, I see you got Dick Helm's book, The Man Who Kept the Secrets.

Speaker 3 He was the kind of ultimate insider, Washington operator. Kind of, my grandfather was out.
Unlike me, I'm more of a, you know, DC, DC type policy type.

Speaker 3 But, but I think he came in and he said, there's a chance that, I mean, remember this, the Democrats at the time, the congressional class of 1974, very left-wing, a lot of them were thinking, let's just get rid of this place.

Speaker 3 Let's get rid of the intelligence community. And his view is like, that's not good for our country, but it's not good that they're spying on Americans.

Speaker 3 You know, I gotten debates on some of these on Twitter sometimes about like whether the American government is funding some of the stuff, you know, in Europe or whatever, NATO, blah, blah, blah, that's reverberating back into the American political system.

Speaker 3 It's like, yeah, it's happened before, you know, right? For a long time. For a long time.
So it's like, it's not unreasonable. And by the way, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Speaker 3 And so, and by the way, who were some of the people who were opposed at that time? Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld?

Speaker 3 You know, they were opposed to any kind of Henry Kissinger, any kind of accountability for the intelligence community. And so that's how I look at it.

Speaker 3 I think there's a real need for accountability, also in the professional military.

Speaker 3 What is this going on with four-star officers recently retired who have no political vetting?

Speaker 3 They haven't been elected dog catcher, weighing in on extremely sensitive points on American political, calling one of the presidential candidates a fascist. That is wildly inappropriate.

Speaker 3 There needs to be a fundamental change. First of all, it's wrong.
Second of all, it's not consistent with our constitutional order.

Speaker 3 Remember that our founding fathers who had gone through the revolution, who had fought a war against a great power and won, they were like, the nasty politics is a feature.

Speaker 3 Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson talking about each other's mother, fine. Standing military, uh-uh.
We only built a serious standing military.

Speaker 3 American military officers wore civilian clothes into the Pentagon as late as World War II, maybe even after. So we have come, this is since 1947 or since World War II, basically.

Speaker 3 And I think we need it given what's happening, but it needs to be accountable. The third point I would make about this group is like, where do they get off? Like, has our military been successful?

Speaker 3 Have our political military goals been achieved over the last 25 years?

Speaker 1 Call me when you win a war.

Speaker 3 No, if you're like, if you're joyizer, and by the way, that's most of that guilt goes towards the liberal primacist alliance, the politicians who did it, yes.

Speaker 3 But also the war leaders who, you know, for instance, H.R. McMaster wrote a book called Dereliction of Duty about how

Speaker 3 the generals in Vietnam did not tell Lyndon Johnson they couldn't successfully prosecute that war. Okay, I agree with you.

Speaker 3 How is the senior military done? So I think some humility, getting back to basics and staying out of politics is really needed.

Speaker 1 It's infuriating. It does challenge like the idea of our constitutional order.
I agree completely, but it's also ominous.

Speaker 1 So when you read that the Pentagon now has a new policy where at the direction of civilian leadership, they can kill Americans in the United States.

Speaker 3 What is that?

Speaker 3 Look, there's a lot of things that need to be taken a look at where like we have gotten, especially after 9-11, where it's just metastasized, right? Where we need to ask ourselves, what is the right.

Speaker 3 And I think you've done this commendably, where you're saying, look, I was here on this position here, and I'm same thing. Where like, you know, but look at the costs.

Speaker 3 And people like, you know, who were, we would say, on the old new left would have said, oh my God, this is going to be abused. And people like us were like, ah, don't worry about it.

Speaker 3 And now they were right. So let's take a new look at that.
Again, I think we need to have the capabilities.

Speaker 3 But I also think this is where this group, I mean, practically speaking, not only former, I mean, former CIA leaders implying that President Trump was a Russian agent is a wild abuse of the trust because it's a special trust with classified information and special authorities.

Speaker 3 And it's almost like a religious obligation where there needs to be a self-discipline and an understanding that there's certain things you can't do, you know, and that, and that's been deeply violated.

Speaker 3 And I think, frankly, Republicans agree that a lot of Democrats or independents or whatever voted for President Trump. They've delivered a verdict on this issue.

Speaker 3 So I think you need people who have that balance, which to me is the American way is to say, look, the people have spoken. This stuff

Speaker 3 got out of of hand. And we need to have a balance, but we need to preserve what we need for our security.

Speaker 1 What do you do in Ukraine?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 one is I hope the president is successful and leans forward on his plan to end the war. And I just say, I don't know what that is, but nobody knew what Dwight Eisenhower was talking about in 1952.

Speaker 3 Nobody knew what Richard Nixon was talking about in 1968. And nobody knew what Ronald Reagan was talking about in 1988.
You already see indications that players, including President Putin,

Speaker 3 might be changing and the Ukrainians for that matter. So I hope there's a basis what exactly that looks like.
I don't think it, you know, you're not going to like liberate Crimea, right?

Speaker 3 That's obvious. And the war's not going well.
I think that's step one. And I think the Europeans need to, I mean, this is something I've been banging on.
It's just so common sense.

Speaker 3 And by the way, you want to talk about who's helping.

Speaker 3 Biden and Harris will go to Europe and say, you don't need to worry about anything. But so would kind of primacist type Republicans.
They would go to Europe and say, don't worry, we can do everything.

Speaker 3 We're leading. They didn't do the Europeans any favors.

Speaker 3 They didn't do the Ukrainians any favors, let alone anybody else, let alone the American people, because they promised things they couldn't deliver.

Speaker 3 And this is something where, you know, and I said this, I was Ross Doubt.

Speaker 3 We had an interview right before the election in the New York Times, you know, where I'd get, oh, isn't it, and Ross didn't say this, but it was sort of like questioning the morality of what President Trump's saying.

Speaker 3 I don't think there's been a stronger case, a more important time for foreign policy that is more moral than what you see, which is the moralism, which is all intention.

Speaker 3 You see it on the left from Tony Blinken just saying, oh, the Ukrainians are fighting for freedom, so we need to do XYZ, and then failing.

Speaker 3 The way I think about it is like, no, we need a foreign policy that's more like, how does a parent think about the responsibility of their child? Exactly.

Speaker 3 Or let's say you're on the board of an orphanage. You know, you might have a really good guy.
He goes to church every Sunday.

Speaker 3 He's like, you know, never cheats at cards or whatever, but he sucks at handling the money. You know, you're going to hire a guy who's actually going to take care of the orphans.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 And that is the, and I, well, by the way, if all the orphans die, it doesn't matter how much you love them.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Or claim that you do.

Speaker 3 You don't actually love them.

Speaker 1 Well, of course you don't, because the purpose of a system is its effect.

Speaker 1 And what's the effect of the war in Ukraine is to depopulate Ukraine and now to allow foreigners, including many Americans, including BlackRock, to buy the soil of Ukraine.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's certainly not. Whatever this has happened has definitely not been beneficial.

Speaker 1 Well, the Ukrainians just lost Ukraine, but not to the Russians, but through the encouragement of the Biden administration. That's my...
view of it.

Speaker 1 But how close do you think we have come to a nuclear exchange with Russia during the last? I think it's close.

Speaker 3 I mean, and Woodward, for, you know, I mean, I'm not sure how reliable he is on everything, but I think the reporting that the Biden administration, which was against interest, was very worried about Russian nuclear employment in later 2022 is very, very concerning.

Speaker 3 I think it was quite real. And the people who were blithe and insistent about it, I think is

Speaker 3 incredibly irresponsible and should not be near serious decisions.

Speaker 1 Who are those people?

Speaker 3 Well, I think you see this kind of liberal premises.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of people who signed the no-fly zone or who made comments on Twitter or otherwise around that time and have said since, have said, oh, you know, lift all the restrictions on the employment of U.S.

Speaker 3 forces.

Speaker 3 And by the way, what's very clear is a lot of these people, if given the opportunity, if they thought the political environment would bear it, would support direct intervention, which if we go to war with the Russians directly, the Russians are very prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Speaker 3 So we have to be realistic about what that entails.

Speaker 1 What does that entail?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, I think the Russians, one thing about Putin that's important, and again, like, you don't have to like the person to understand that we need to take this guy seriously, right?

Speaker 3 Is he, you know, as he was, as he assumed power and took over from Yeltsin, which in the Russian mind was a catastrophically disastrous period, one of the first things Putin invested in was the recapitalization of the Russian nuclear forces.

Speaker 3 And the way Putin talks about Russian nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy indicates that he has a quite sophisticated understanding of nuclear strategy.

Speaker 3 And of course, you know, a lot of it is speculation because thank God they've only been used once or twice.

Speaker 3 But it says to me, this guy's credible and he has an idea of how to use him. You don't start by blowing up Washington, D.C.

Speaker 3 You start potentially with something like battlefield use, selective strikes against things like places in Europe or more peripheral targets, but it can go up there and then you manipulate risk.

Speaker 3 And if weapons are used in that way, you could see millions of people. I mean, and we have almost no defense against.

Speaker 3 That's why I think President Trump, for instance, like having a better shield would be great. But right now, we're pretty much denuded.

Speaker 1 I just don't understand. I mean, I guess it's kind of late in the game to whine about it, but we provided

Speaker 1 a missile defense shield to another country, but we don't have one.

Speaker 1 How did that happen?

Speaker 3 I don't know. I mean,

Speaker 3 I think that's something that we can work on. I mean, it's technically very difficult, but I think having something better than what we have now.

Speaker 1 We're always bragging about

Speaker 1 the sophisticated use of our defensive. missile technology abroad.
Like, did it occur to nobody that the purpose of the U.S. military is to defend defend the United States?

Speaker 3 Well, it is. And by the way, up until the ABM treaty was signed in the late 60s, you would go around American cities and there would be Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules nuclear-tipped missile defense

Speaker 3 interceptors and other kinds of NORAD and all these kinds of things. So I think having a stronger defense of the American homeland makes sense.

Speaker 3 And also, like, you know, people talk about the American military being used, you know, in relation to Mexico.

Speaker 3 It's like, well, I think Mexico is like a, you know, and the immigration issue is very, very complicated and everything.

Speaker 3 But like, you know, the American military is to defend the United States, right?

Speaker 3 So like that should be, you know, so to me, the core missions of the American military that really need to be focused on is defense the homeland, preventing China from becoming the hegemonic power in Asia, because I think we'll never re-industrialize, we'll never be autonomous and be what America needs to be if China dominates Asia.

Speaker 3 But I hope and think we can do that without a war, working with others that pull their own weight.

Speaker 3 And then having an ability to make sure that we

Speaker 3 don't have a replication of 9-11. Some of that is like being smarter about how we use our military.

Speaker 3 But I think some of it is, you know, you got to keep tabs out there. And then I think it's like about supporting allies.
You know, people say Trump is anti-ally. I think that's totally wrong.

Speaker 3 It's just a different model of allies that's obviously, A, is much closer to the Cold War model. And B, is common sense.
It's like part of the...

Speaker 1 Trump is anti-ally. So our, of course, most important ally in Europe is Germany.

Speaker 3 Yes, which is totally.

Speaker 3 And we just destroyed.

Speaker 1 And so, but by the way, we had a direct hand. This is not speculation.
I'm willing to say it's fact in blowing up Nordstream. So I know we're blaming the Ukrainians, but like we did that.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to say that.

Speaker 3 Well, that's not true. It is true.

Speaker 1 So how exactly do we get to launch an act of industrial terrorism against our closest NATO ally? How is that allyship?

Speaker 3 Well, the thing that's, that's weird, and this gets, I think, also into the context of like who benefits, you know, Kui bono, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Is like, so since the Ukraine war broke out, the European economy and particularly the German economy has been like in free fall.

Speaker 3 So there was this kind of cute argument for a while that we had somehow like benefited from Europe sucking air after the Ukraine. I've heard many people say that.

Speaker 3 And it's like, well, no, no, wait, hold on. Our point, if you go back to like Dwight Eisenhower and like common sense, is like, no, we want them to stand on our two feet.

Speaker 3 Like I don't get a rise out of lording it over the Europeans. This is sort of this mindset that like well, this is still fundamentally a European country.

Speaker 1 This was a European colony. So Europe is basically allied with the United States on a very fundamental level, or certainly has been for 250 years.
So

Speaker 3 destroying Europe. Well, right, with some exceptions.
But in general, you fight them with the people closest to you to you. Well, that's right.
But I mean, like

Speaker 3 Christian Europe, right?

Speaker 1 It's basically our ally. And destroying Western Europe, which I think we've done, how does that help us? I don't understand.

Speaker 3 I don't think that it's, I mean, the interesting thing about that is, I mean, you know, obviously we're, you know, settled, you know, originally by Europeans.

Speaker 3 Now we have people coming from all over the world, et cetera. But the thing is, actually, if you look back at our early history, we stayed out of Europe.
Oh, I know.

Speaker 3 And we were actually more involved in the the Western Hemisphere, particularly the Caribbean, and Asia, actually. So people say, oh,

Speaker 3 we're never going to get focused on Asia. I don't think that's true.
Who opened the black ship? Who opened the black ships opened Japan? Exactly.

Speaker 3 People were trading in a lot of the early American fortunes, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. That was China, right? People trading in Canton, sometimes with opium,

Speaker 3 and then like Samoa, Hawaii, et cetera. So I'm not saying like we have a, we have a strong interest in Europe.
The Philippines. The Philippines, of course, thank you.

Speaker 3 In fact, my great-grandfather, we were talking about our families, like I,

Speaker 3 he was an army officer in the interwar period and he was stationed at the American, there was like a concession in China, not China's proudest period. But, you know, we were, we were present.

Speaker 3 So what that, what I think that means to me is a couple of things. One,

Speaker 3 if you actually go back to American history at our best and really kind of, you know, the first kind of really until 1989, we did pretty well with the exception, I think, things like Vietnam and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 But it was pretty hard-nosed. Like you go back to Washington's farewell address, Hamilton, et cetera, it's like, we're looking after number one.

Speaker 3 So this idea that America first is somehow inconsistent. It's like, by the way, a republic is supposed to be in the interests of everybody, right? Like that's the definition.

Speaker 3 So when people say Trump is transactional or whatever, I'm like, good, right? We need

Speaker 3 he's like the, you know, the CEO of America and the board is saying, hey, look after our interests, right? That's actually what you want. And then on Europe, it's like, we don't actually benefit.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's been a disaster. I think objectively, the policy over the last two and a half years in particular has been a total disaster.
Germany is in real economic straits.

Speaker 3 The Ukrainians are losing the war. They haven't built up their military.
But, you know, hey, Joe Biden got a medal from Olaf Schultz, who's probably going to be out of a job as well

Speaker 3 in a few months.

Speaker 3 For their sake, I mean, I don't believe in like

Speaker 3 intervening. Apparently, the Europeans, Schultz himself, feel free to intervene in our politics.
Schultz endorsed Biden. Do your job.

Speaker 3 I was at the Republican convention, as you were a couple months ago, and I was getting lectured by a few members of the Bundestag, the German Congress equivalent, conservatives, putative conservatives.

Speaker 3 And they were like, why can't you do what Reagan did? And I said, you know what? There's some problems with that, et cetera, like great debt to GDP, our military.

Speaker 3 How about you start out by spending as much on defense as the American people do?

Speaker 3 Like, why don't our, like, that, that to me is like what President Trump, and against the whole foreign policy establishment. Why? Because the foreign policy establishment likes the dependency model.

Speaker 3 Of course.

Speaker 1 They like the welfare model in the United States. They want people in public housing.

Speaker 3 Right. And that's what I've said to the Europeans.
And it's part of my message to the Europeans is like, hey, it's not just your fault. I'm not just castigating you as responsible you are.

Speaker 3 It's also our fault, especially our establishment. But if you look at the message from the American people, it's we don't want more of that establishment.

Speaker 3 And that's, again, why it's so important to have the right policies and vision. Well, we've got the vision.
The question now is implementation.

Speaker 1 So the problems for the president-elect are the same as they were in the first administration, I would say. How do you staff this thing with people who are aligned with you?

Speaker 1 And how do you keep the people who presently occupy every position of power, who operate the levers of power? How do you keep them from wrecking the project secretly? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And the thing that's different is that the international situation that he's being left with is truly dire. And so there's no room for, you know, kind of like,

Speaker 3 you know, sort of a delay or there's no sense.

Speaker 1 Look, I'm sorry. I don't want to, I don't want to start attacking people, but I just know everybody as I know you do.

Speaker 1 Well, they have, no, no, I mean, the people who want these jobs in the Trump, the second Trump administration, and there's no, they act like it's 1985. Like,

Speaker 3 they have not updated their files. These are the dumbest people I think I've ever made on this.
Yes. In the debate, when he said to Pence,

Speaker 1 he's Secretary of State.

Speaker 3 I think Vik would be an amazing, amazing. I mean, he's there.
He was out hustling for the president.

Speaker 3 You know, he's, he, he's, I mean, we all say, you know what time it is, but he like delivered these memorable lines against Pence in the, in that debate.

Speaker 3 And then he debated John Bolton, I think at VMI. And it was just like, it was a very human point.

Speaker 3 I saw this segment where he's just like, you grew up, and that's being generous, honestly, to John Bolton, frankly, but which so I admired Vivek on that point, but is said, you grew up in the era of Apollo 11.

Speaker 3 You know, and I grew up in the era, and he's younger than I am, the global financial crisis,

Speaker 3 Iraq, failed wars, you know, increasingly fractious society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's like, you know, nobody, there's a friend of mine

Speaker 3 who was interviewed in one of these stories about the new right and so forth.

Speaker 3 And he said, nobody under the age of 30, I know, is a conservative treats the neoconservative idea with anything but derision and scorn, something like that.

Speaker 3 And it was just like, I'm confident where things are heading, but we don't have time because if China, like, and I'm not a fanatic on China, right?

Speaker 3 Like my view on China is, and I think the Chinese understand this.

Speaker 3 My view is we need to be strong, but we also need, like in the Cold War, there's like a line and there's, we don't cross it.

Speaker 3 And we need to be able to decouple the thing, you know, get reindustrialize the things Lighthizer and Navarro and stuff are talking about, which is bring back industry, have more autonomy.

Speaker 3 But at the same time, you know there's a line but we're not going to go and regime change there are people who served in the first trump administration who are talking about regime change in china who are talking about primacy over china like dominating china like that is so dangerous and often they're the same people who are supporting you know total support of ukraine which like makes zero sense like zero sense right so my view is

Speaker 3 you got to do the things you're talking about, but you've also got to say, we got to, and, you know, Senator Vance has made, Vice President-elect Vance has made these points very well.

Speaker 3 Reindustrialization is critical, but it's going to take some time. In the meantime, given that the Biden team has used up so much of our weaponry and so forth, we got to husband what we have.

Speaker 3 And again, to me, that is with the purpose of not getting into wars.

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Speaker 1 We definitely put good-looking, I will say.

Speaker 3 How, how could

Speaker 1 four stars, how could the leadership of the Pentagon support this?

Speaker 3 So, my, you know, it's interesting. I think, again, maybe I'm too optimistic, but like, you know, I deal with, you know, I was, I dealt with a lot of four stars when I was there.

Speaker 3 When you worked at the Pentagon.

Speaker 3 When I worked at the Pentagon, because the thing about my job, I was like a sort of, my formal title was a little bit kind of middle, upper middle tier, but basically I was running the strategy.

Speaker 3 So I had a lot of exposure. I was kind of operating above my the sort of normal level.
So I had, I got a lot of experience. And I've stayed in touch with these people.

Speaker 3 I watch them. Here's the thing.
And, you know, there's a good, Kissinger, I don't think, was that great of a statesman, but I think he was a brilliant writer and sort of observer.

Speaker 3 He said something like, Big strategic shifts don't take place just by acts of virtuosity. They reflect underlying trends.

Speaker 3 And I think you talk to people in the military, and I keep in touch with a lot of them. They know what I'm saying is like common sense for military people.
They know our readiness is down.

Speaker 3 They know our defense industrial base is in trouble. They know the Chinese are moving like gangbusters.
They know the Russians aren't a joke.

Speaker 3 They know we can't afford to get into another big Middle Eastern war.

Speaker 3 So if you show at the top level clarity and courage, as President Trump has, in charting the direction, and he has people under him who are genuinely trying to put that into place, I think if you build it, they will come.

Speaker 3 And here's the other thing. Bear in mind that since 2008, the Democrats have been in control almost the whole time.
And under, before that, it was the Iraq War group.

Speaker 3 So a lot of the people who've made it to the top of a very flat pyramid, they know how to, like, here's the thing about the military.

Speaker 3 And you look at people like John Kelly being out there, you know, moralizing and calling President Trump a fascist, which is like absurd and inappropriate and terrible on its face.

Speaker 3 But it's also like the military.

Speaker 3 We should respect military service. I certainly do, especially people in combat and so forth.

Speaker 3 But the military, there's careerism, there is promotion, people looking after their own interests, et cetera.

Speaker 3 The people at the top of the pyramid often often are people who have satisfied the criteria for promotion and selection. That's fine.
You know, people respond to incentives, but

Speaker 3 it is the most ruthless selection process. And bear in mind, talk about the Republic.
The Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps predate the Constitution. So these are very deeply embedded institutions.

Speaker 3 People live their entire adult lives in them if they get to be a four-star. So you just got, again, going to like a new left thing.

Speaker 3 You look at it sociologically, you're like, this is going to have some pathologies.

Speaker 3 Obviously, it's a really important institution, but you got to like but i think at the end of the day this is going to have some pathologies nicely put nicely put there there are people in there who want to do the right thing you know or or or they can be motivated to do the right thing that's fantastic people in the military and if they're rewarded for it they will go they will get because a lot of the guys who would have wanted to do that they cash out as a colonel or a navy captain or a one star you know but if we if we if we put the the

Speaker 3 president trump and his team i should say they they put the right incentives i think i think I think it'll get better.

Speaker 1 I must say, it's just having spent my life in D.C. and just running into them a lot or living near them, it was always so noticeable.
I met so many bright, energetic, wise, I would say, colonels.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But far a few. You know, I can think of one Marine, two-star I knew, Marine general who I thought was so impressive.

Speaker 1 I'll even say his name, Vinnie Colones,

Speaker 1 wonderful man. But, you know, didn't meet a lot of other flag officers that I thought were anything other than politicians.

Speaker 3 I think, I think, I'm sure they exist. I mean,

Speaker 3 I think real, I'll put it this way, most of the real,

Speaker 3 there's some brilliant defense guys. I'll mention a Democrat I have a lot of respect for, Bob Work, who served in the Pentagon.
He's a great guy. He was a Marine colonel, retired.

Speaker 3 Andrew Krepanovich, who is another brilliant guy, an army guy,

Speaker 3 retired colonel. Often the guys who are really the highest horsepower, real strategic thinkers, they cash out at that level because that's what the selection is for.

Speaker 3 It's not to say that the other people aren't smart, smart, but like the people that, you know, there's so noticeable. And there's a mismatch between how people think like, oh,

Speaker 3 you know, he has four stars, Ergo, he's like a strategic genius. No, no, that's not how the selection process works.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Like they, they're promoted for like running a large, a corps, an army corps, you know, or a fleet. That's different than it's, that's fine, but let's, let's understand what we're dealing with.

Speaker 1 But shouldn't the process, isn't the point of promotion to, you know, winnow out the less capable and elevated.

Speaker 3 Well, it depends on what you're selecting for. Well, but I think that's it.
But I think, hey, how about selecting for winning?

Speaker 3 You know, hey, like, how about that? As opposed to like, you know, kind of like playing the game and saying the right things.

Speaker 3 And, you know, we don't know. That's the other thing about like, you know, I love the meme of Mark Milley.
and Eisenhower and their chests. Like, I just, it's so perfect.
Incredible.

Speaker 3 You know, it's just, it's just, you could speak for 10 hours and when I watched it.

Speaker 1 Mark Mille in that famous, now famous hearing talking about white rage, I thought, this is a guy who doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. He's saying words he thinks he's supposed to say.

Speaker 1 Doesn't seem terribly bright. He seems weak above all.
He seems like the product of a bureaucracy to me, which probably shouldn't surprise me.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I think there's, and again, to this pathology point,

Speaker 3 you know, like if you read McMaster's memoirs, for instance, He's almost kind of lecturing the American people about their need to like double defense spending and stay in Afghanistan until the second coming.

Speaker 3 And it's like, it's that touch grass kind of thing where like you don't have political accountability, like direct, I mean, for instance, not only they're not elected, but people who are civilian appointees go through political vetting.

Speaker 3 So they have a kind of indirect political accountability, you know, where they're elected, you have to demonstrate loyalty and, you know, you're on the team, et cetera. You have to be aware of that.

Speaker 3 The military, they really don't have that. ostensibly, although I wonder about the left

Speaker 3 through the back door importing some of those things.

Speaker 3 But so you get to this point where you think that you're like, well, I'm speaking in front of a large group of people because I'm a four-star general.

Speaker 3 And it's like, actually, you really have no standing to talk about that issue at all, you know, because

Speaker 3 that's a domestic issue that you like don't have any political finger feel for. And you're supposed to be much more careful and modest about that.

Speaker 1 But they have no moral authority right to speak about anything like that because they have no authority apart from that granted them by the president.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Because we have civilian control and the president's authority comes from voters. Right.

Speaker 3 And by the way, and if somebody has authority, it's like the Audi Murphy guy, the guys that you're talking to who are like out there in the field in Fallujah or whatever, they have authority.

Speaker 3 You know, but I'm always like, you know, another guy, Frank McKenzie, who's out there a lot, who's constantly hammering, you know, these points.

Speaker 3 And I was like, well, he was the CENTCOM commander when the Afghanistan withdrawal happened.

Speaker 3 And he didn't put his stars on the, you know, if he thought there was a better way, why didn't he put his stars on the table?

Speaker 3 So like, why are, you know, like, okay, I mean, I personally supported the Afghanistan withdrawal. I believe President Trump still does, but it said that it's done terribly, which I think is clear.

Speaker 3 But it's like,

Speaker 3 you know, you could say Dwight Eisenhower had a kind of moral authority. But the other thing about Dwight Eisenhower, I mean, he was actually a smart guy.

Speaker 3 But if you look at like his Guild Hall speech, I don't know if you remember this, but like

Speaker 3 unlike MacArthur, for instance, he had a real feel for the American people, a civilian army. You know,

Speaker 3 like they were

Speaker 3 offering the

Speaker 3 award of the city of London. He said, I can't accept this.

Speaker 3 I accept this only on behalf of the great great human forces, he said, you know, which is like, yeah, it's like regular guys, you know, and that's, to me, that's, I try to have that mindset about like, I don't want people to get torn limb from limb in a war with China that we could avoid, let alone another, like, or, or eviscer, evapor, vaporized in a nuclear explosion with Russia.

Speaker 3 Of course, that means you don't just like do whatever they want, duh, but you've got to like calibrate that balance, always thinking about, as President Trump has said, going back to like, what's in the concrete interest of the American American people?

Speaker 1 You've referred repeatedly to a potential war with China. I assume that would be over Taiwan.

Speaker 3 I think, yes, I think Taiwan would be the focal point.

Speaker 3 But what I think is very scary about the Chinese, and I don't think the Chinese are behaving in it, frankly, if you apply the way, like you were in Washington from the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, right?

Speaker 3 Or a little bit after it, right?

Speaker 1 But like... No, I was there.
I was there that day. You were there today?

Speaker 3 Okay. Oh, right.
Exactly. I know you've talked about this.

Speaker 3 If you apply the same kind of behavior that we exhibited over the 25, should I say 20 years after that, and you apply that model to a China that is not constrained, that's very scary. Right.

Speaker 3 Like, so we just have to apply the same model to them. Because again, to me, as like a conservative, and I don't think that's a good idea.

Speaker 1 I know exactly what you're saying, but maybe that's too subtle. Yeah, we explained precisely what you're saying.

Speaker 3 We went from being in the 1980s, you had the Weinberger doctrine under President Reagan and Reagan almost getting impeached because he was trying to help just a proxy group with the Contras because people were so afraid of getting in another Vietnam.

Speaker 3 And the biggest thing that he would do would have meetings with the Soviet premier on nuclear weapons because people were like, this could happen and I really don't want it to happen. Right.

Speaker 3 Fast forward 15 years and we're invading Iraq.

Speaker 3 And as you recall, the people who were biggest fans of invading Iraq, the plan was also to go after probably Syria and Iran and so forth informally or not.

Speaker 1 I worked for those people at the time.

Speaker 3 So, you know. So, I mean, that was not, that was just the starting point.
Oh, I'm, I'm aware. So, and, and that was the new American century.

Speaker 3 The way I interpret that is you're going to have people like that because we're human beings and that's how we socialize or whatever.

Speaker 3 And if there's no constraint, no, you would have been like sent to the loony bin in 1982. If you're like, oh, let's invade Iraq.

Speaker 3 2003, if you said we shouldn't invade Iraq, you were like, even if you were Brent Skillcroft, you were castigated. Oh, right.
So.

Speaker 1 And never rehabilitated, by the way.

Speaker 3 Interesting. Well, I have, I mean, I don't agree with them on everything, but I had, I mean, that's sort of mindset.
Well, I agree, but I'm just saying. No, no, exactly.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It wasn't like, you know, Brent Scowcroft got rich or

Speaker 3 more respect.

Speaker 1 I mean, he said those things, you know, to his own detriment.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And I, just on the China thing, what I would say is they care a lot about Taiwan, but I think it's very clear they're building a military to go beyond Taiwan.

Speaker 3 They're building a basing architecture to go well beyond Taiwan. I think that's, in a sense, almost indisputable.
And I think they have interests to go beyond Taiwan.

Speaker 3 This is what worries me is I actually fear, ironically, that China is living out the Leninist theory of imperialism, which is they need

Speaker 3 captive export markets for their overproduction. And of course, they need natural resources and other things to import.

Speaker 3 And so they have a rational incentive to what the Japanese created, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Speaker 3 Every empire, formal or informal, is not everyone, but like a lot of them start out as basically commercial zones. Of course.
And that's what I worry about.

Speaker 3 And again, the good news is I think we can negotiate with China about that. That's why I think President Trump's,

Speaker 3 against a lot of criticism, his willingness to be open to negotiating a deal with President Xi is good because we don't have an implacable hostility or rivalry. We don't have to change.

Speaker 3 I hate communism, but like that's up to them. And the last thing I want is Americans dying trying to impose our form of government on them.
Hopefully that's pretty uncontroversial.

Speaker 3 But I think if we just, you know, Taiwan's a tough issue because the point I've been making, and I've gotten some flack from, again, good quarters from the Wall Street Journal the last couple of months is like, I've been saying we should focus on defending Taiwan and they need to step up.

Speaker 3 They haven't done it and we haven't prioritized. So I think Taiwan is on the knife's edge right now.
Now, I think we want to avoid a war over that if we possibly can. And President Trump has said.

Speaker 3 a war, an attack on Taiwan isn't going to happen under my watch.

Speaker 3 So I think it is absolutely incumbent upon whoever is working for him to make sure that doesn't happen, combining a strong shield with a rational defensive policy and kind of political message to China that convinces them that, look, you're better off with peace.

Speaker 1 The Wall Street Journal attacked you?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So they.

Speaker 1 How long will the Wall Street Journal kind of be considered the preeminent place where, quote, conservative intellectuals explain their views?

Speaker 3 I think they're actually in trouble, honestly.

Speaker 3 I read them, but they are so far out of whack. I mean, so on my

Speaker 3 national security foreign policy issues, they are total primacists.

Speaker 3 In the same breath, often they'll say, our military is in terrible shape, but we need to have aggressive policies in like four different theaters. It makes no sense.
It's incoherent, right?

Speaker 3 They're way out of step on the conservative Republican views on trade, where like Lighthizer and Navarro and the president are.

Speaker 3 They can't stand, you know, they've been repeatedly criticized people like you, like Vice President Vance. So I feel like I'm an honor to be in this company.

Speaker 3 So it's sort of like, you know, obviously they reflect a certain part of the, you know, American population, which is sort of, you know, wealthier professionals who are probably more socially liberal, the Acela Corridor, New York, et cetera.

Speaker 3 But I think a lot of people read them because they matter, right? But at some point, you get so far out of whack that you actually become a liability.

Speaker 3 You know, and they were big backers of Nikki Haley and so forth.

Speaker 3 So, you know, I think we need, but then with the rise of new media, I mean, you, you've been a pioneer in this, but others, you know, and Elon and what he's done with X and

Speaker 3 David Sachs and these kind of people. I think there's hope that not only does it not matter as much, but it may become less and less relevant.

Speaker 1 It seems like the Drudge report to me, you know, you have in your mind that this, no, I mean, Drudge went from, well, Drudge was, of course, sold to left-wingers.

Speaker 1 They've never admitted that, but I believe that's true.

Speaker 1 But the Wall Street Journal, in some sense, has been also, I mean, they don't,

Speaker 1 I don't know, people who imagine the Wall Street Journal is conservative are sort of like haven't been paying attention.

Speaker 3 It's like the socially liberal fiscal conservative. Yeah,

Speaker 3 and they were like mocking President Trump in the interview.

Speaker 1 I thought that was pretty lame and kind of cool. It's a really dishonest newspaper, and I'm rooting for its demise.
I just want to say that.

Speaker 1 I mean that.

Speaker 3 I hope it could get reformed. But, you know,

Speaker 3 you're right. You're totally right.

Speaker 1 We've seen enough institutions destroyed.

Speaker 3 I just,

Speaker 1 I do think it's really a garbage newspaper. And

Speaker 1 I wish more people realized that.

Speaker 3 I can't control myself. Sorry.
Out of control.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 when do you think it'll be clear, like who's administering Trump's foreign policy?

Speaker 3 I mean, I just, I honestly don't know. I mean, it's up, obviously up to him.

Speaker 3 But,

Speaker 3 you know, what I would say is I hope he makes, you know, picks people who will implement the vision that he ran on and that, you know, you and others have supported him so ably about.

Speaker 3 I, as just as sincerely as an American, I mean, even if I'm not part of it or I'm dog catcher or whatever, I mean that I think if, honestly, if

Speaker 3 the primacist types who could get us into multiple wars get in there, you're going to have to get to a more realistic foreign policy eventually.

Speaker 1 Well, they'll destroy Trump. They think

Speaker 1 they could destroy his administration. People like Pompeo, whom I know personally, hate Trump.
They hate Trump. And, you know, I don't care what he says or Lindsey Graham says, oh, he's so great.

Speaker 1 You know, they suck up to him on Fox News, but they hate him. And they're working working to undermine him.

Speaker 1 And they did throughout his four years in office and the four years that followed, they undermined him because they hate him. So

Speaker 1 I just hope that there is a new generation in the Republican Party of people who maybe aren't even ideological, but just putting America.

Speaker 3 It's not mistakes. Yeah.
America's interest

Speaker 3 is the whole point of our government. I think there is a new generation, people in their 20s and 30s.
I'm very hopeful. I mean, I talked to a lot of them.

Speaker 3 What I'm worried about is I don't think there's any. I mean, you maybe like, and

Speaker 3 Trump is like an exception. But, you know, you look at a guy like Vice President Vance, he's only, I think, 40.
Yes. You know, a lot of the best senators, you know, are, are much younger.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And you look at Eric Schmidt,

Speaker 3 Eric Schmidt,

Speaker 3 Jim Banks, you know, younger guys. Like, you know, and the problem is people just naturally like, well, we need somebody who's 65 or whatever.

Speaker 3 And it's sort of like, but I think it's even worse than, than, than what you're suggesting because like, you know, let's say we get in a big Middle Eastern war and you have people who are talking about an independent Taiwan or regime change in China or regime change in Russia and we get bogged down.

Speaker 3 Why wouldn't the Chinese attack?

Speaker 3 Like just, I mean, thinking about think apply how we behave, the project for a new American century style thinking, and just think that those people will be in the ascendancy in Beijing.

Speaker 3 The way I think about it, Tucker, is like, we're like a heavyweight boxer and China's another heavyweight boxer.

Speaker 3 Russia's like a middleweight and maybe North Korea and Iran are like, you know, welterweights or featherweights or whatever. Those guys can, they can tear you out.

Speaker 3 And China can call call us to a match at any time, at any time. And if we're not ready, that is like terrible, you know? And so at that point, we would have to put a more realistic foreign policy.

Speaker 3 But my view, and this is, I think, a real point to the kind of people who read the Wall Street Journal on bed page, the point that I would make to them is, if we go down this path of aggressive policies in three or four different theaters of the world without the backing, we will end up bloodied and bruised.

Speaker 3 We will have catastrophic defeat. Lots of Americans will be killed.
And the American people may very well say, I'm done. I'm done.
This is, you know, all the rules-based international order.

Speaker 3 This is what it led to. Forget about it.
And that, if you want to save it, if you want to save something, like I think, I think mine is like the reform rather than the radical upheaval.

Speaker 3 Mine is like, hey, no, I believe in the post-war. I just don't believe in the post-1989 absurd hubris going around.

Speaker 3 The people, yeah, we can, the Cold War, and I keep going back to it, but but just like i i just try because like you know senator mcconnell will talk about eisenhower all the time and i'm like dude senator eisenhower thought that if there were u.s troops in europe at the end of the 1950s it was a failure he's the one who came up with the uncle sucker line not president trump so you want to talk about the cold war legacy we were pretty ruthless you know the germans attacked us or excuse me sound like john belushi the the japanese attacked us in 1941 and we let the soviets do the bulk of the fighting exactly and we put germany first why because and i'm glad as a descendant of people who are in the european theater of operations i'm glad that the Soviets, but George Schultz, when he went and dealt with his counterpart,

Speaker 3 he wrote about this very movingly. He went to the cemetery in Leningrad and he offered a somber salute.
And I had the honor to meet Schultz a couple of times.

Speaker 3 And this was not a, you know, he's had strong views and so forth.

Speaker 3 But I think you can respect that, you know, and understand that we can be hard-nosed and look at your opponents and say, we don't want a war.

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Speaker 1 What happened to all the Bush people?

Speaker 1 You were here for that.

Speaker 1 Not just the President Bush and his family, pretty clear we're for Kamal Harris, but all the people who staffed that administration,

Speaker 1 do all of them still buy those ideas, those 20-year-old ideas, or have any come around to your position?

Speaker 3 That's a great question because I know a lot of them. And it's like you, I like a lot of them, you know, and some of them know.
I admire some. I don't admire others.

Speaker 3 And people are going, you know, a lot of them put flags in the ground with the foolish and inappropriate Never Trump letters in 2016. And they kind of, so their hands are a bit tied.

Speaker 3 So I don't know how they would behave in a vacuum. I think you see sort of various stages of grief.
I mean, various people kind of adapting in different ways or not adapting.

Speaker 3 Some people are kind of like unreconstructed. Some are kind of like resigned to where things are going.

Speaker 3 You know what's funny about the Bush, I mean, I don't, I mean, you remember this better than I do, but I remember like Bush ran on a more humble foreign policy. I know.

Speaker 3 You know, I mean, actually, what Trump's saying is not that radically different from the kind of Bush vibe, which was against the crusading progressivism of Bill Clinton.

Speaker 3 Now, he ended up totally abandoning that, unfortunately, to his eternal discredit.

Speaker 3 And in a sense, he was a progressive. He He was armed for progressivism.
Bill Crystal is,

Speaker 3 let's fight the end of history, you know, basically, which is like, that's not in any way. And I mean, conservative, I'm not like Angela dancing on the head of a pin.
It's not common sense, right?

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I think a lot of those people, it's probably,

Speaker 3 it's going to be hard to incorporate them. You know, there's sort of two, and sociologically, again,

Speaker 3 it's, they're invested in the, in the old model. And so I think we're going to need the trouble is that all the credentialing has been on that side.
And so all of it. Almost all of it.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm not to make anything myself, but like I'm a rare, and I was, I was teetering on the, maybe passing over to the edge of respectability or whatever the mainstream is, you know, for years.

Speaker 3 And, you know,

Speaker 3 I think what I find, though, encouraging, Tucker, is I, and this is where I mean.

Speaker 1 Wait, can I say you went to Groton and Harvard, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah. Okay.
Yes.

Speaker 3 Well.

Speaker 1 So are you only person in the world who went to Groton and Harvard who voted for Donald Trump?

Speaker 3 You know, I don't think so. Actually, my Groton and Harvard roommate was indicating.
I think there are a few others. I mean, I, you know, but I mean, okay, so you got me.

Speaker 3 I, I, you know, people say this sometimes, and I think they say it about you, too. It's like, oh, you're from the elite background.
How can you not support the elite?

Speaker 3 And I'm always like, the elite is supposed to work for the public interest. And by the way, that was the model.
Teddy Roosevelt was behind the founding of Groton School, which I went there.

Speaker 3 I have very fond memories. A lot of people who are associated with that hate Donald Trump and everything.
I proudly support him.

Speaker 3 But I think the whole point is to serve, you know, his service is perfect freedom. The idea is public service is putting the interests of the public ahead.

Speaker 3 And so I, to be honest, I find the current establishment, I look at Morning Joe or something and I'm like, this is not what America deserves.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I have the same perspective and I would say more broadly, the identical perspective. And I would say that nobody reforms

Speaker 1 the system who doesn't understand the system.

Speaker 3 Yeah. You're always going to have a lot of people.
Teddy Roosevelt saved capitalism

Speaker 1 in the United States by restraining.

Speaker 3 And he was hated by his peers. By restraining the monopolies.
Exactly. And the only reason he was able to do that was because he was pushing back against his own class.
He understood them.

Speaker 1 Right. Right.
So, no, I'm not attacking you for going to Bride and Harvard. I'm rather saying I think it's essential that you understand.
J.D. Vance hated Trump.

Speaker 1 Went to Yale Law School, started going up to the Aspen Institute to speak in the summer, found the people there so repulsive.

Speaker 3 He's like, oh, he was dumb.

Speaker 1 But he has become their nightmare. Exactly.

Speaker 3 Because he knows who they are.

Speaker 1 He had dinner with David Brooks many times.

Speaker 3 Exactly. So anyway.
Totally. Totally.
And I think like, and I think like that's, you know, I love this, this clip of Maggie Goodlander getting called out by this.

Speaker 3 You know, we should, it should be challenged if you're like anybody should be subject to challenge. And that's what's so great about like X and podcasts.

Speaker 1 Did Maggie Goodlander win? I'm embarrassed.

Speaker 3 I think so. I'm not sure.
And I'm like not picking on her particularly, but like, you know, this is a fair point.

Speaker 3 But I mean, my, my view is, and it's apropos because the other woman I think was in, I think she's, her family's from China.

Speaker 3 But, you know, even under Mao, I mean, the ultimate egalitarian system, there is an establishment. There is an elite.

Speaker 3 And of course, Xi Jinping is a product of that elite. Dogs create hierarchies.
You're always going to have a hierarchy.

Speaker 1 So the question is not, do you have a ruling class?

Speaker 3 Is it getting a ruling class? Is it good? Do you have a good ruling class? Exactly.

Speaker 1 Or do you have Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken? That's the best one.

Speaker 3 And here's the other thing, you know,

Speaker 3 and I don't want to cry too much of a river here, but like they are the establishment and they act in like a sociologically conservative way.

Speaker 3 They're all going going to leave office and they're all going to get great jobs on Wall Street and they're all going to go to law firms and whatever.

Speaker 3 And it's the people who are taking on the establishment and are taking the slings and arrows and hopefully metaphorically alone. But to me, that's the point.

Speaker 3 That's what you're supposed to do.

Speaker 3 As the Bible says, to whom much is given of whom much is expected.

Speaker 1 I strongly agree with that.

Speaker 3 And I think you're a model of that, honestly. And I'm not just saying that at all.
Well, no, but

Speaker 1 I really believe in that. And I'm just so offended by, I'm so offended by the mediocrity and selfishness and stupidity of our ruling class that I just can't.
And I don't care if they kill me.

Speaker 1 I will never stop feeling that way.

Speaker 3 And that's your

Speaker 3 incredibly courageous.

Speaker 1 So Bridge Colby, I am rooting for you fervently. I just wanted to make sure everyone knows who you are and what you think.
This process is taking place privately, as it has to.

Speaker 1 But I also think that people who voted for Trump because they want a calmer world, they don't want the United States or him to be destroyed in wars. I think they should know what's going on.

Speaker 1 So I hope this provides a little sunlight.

Speaker 3 Thank you very much, my friend. Bless you.
Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, tuckercarlson.com.