00:01:46.560In Turkey this week, everyone's seen President Trump there doing what President Trump does best, which is dominating the debate.
00:01:53.720And I wanted to ask David Pine, who has a background in U.S. forces, former advisor to Senator Mike Lee as well.
00:02:06.600I wanted to ask him what he thinks the dynamic poses to the United States' long-term relationship with America's European NATO allies and with the European Union as well with a newly dominant Turkey.
00:02:32.760That I think is a hinge factor. Turkey, I think President Erdogan for a number of years has sought very hard to leverage his geopolitical advantages being there on the Bosphorus.
00:02:57.880And he's trying to play a number of spheres off one another.
00:03:02.760It's got continental Europe and the long-term strategic interests of Turkey
00:03:08.440joining the European Union, which would be the first Islamic nation to do so.
00:03:17.920And you might remember, folks, 15, 20 years ago,
00:03:21.200Angela Merkel and Pope Benedict XVI were pushing very hard
00:03:25.260on the christian democrat elements apart the the largest group in the european parliament the
00:03:33.200largest political force in the european parliament in those days they were both pushing very hard to
00:03:38.660let turkey in so you have on the one hand erdogan's desires to bring turkey into the european union
00:03:49.420You also have his relationship with the Islamic countries in the Middle East.
00:04:00.760And you also got the fact that he's a NATO member.
00:04:03.980And I think he has done really very well.
00:04:06.540I thought he'd done very well to balance all of these rival blocs against one another before this NATO conference.
00:04:15.420conference david pine we've all seen just how well i think he's probably the only leader in
00:04:21.500there apart from president trump to have escaped from president trump's lashing of nato the only
00:04:29.680person to escape to that conference i think with a greater authority than when he went in tell me
00:04:37.760you're an astute observer of these things where what do you how do you appraise
00:04:44.800Erdogan's handling of these geopolitical dynamics and what's it mean for the United States
00:04:51.620to come back to my question it's long-term relationship with Europe predicated around
00:04:59.000a newly dominant Turkey hey Ben it's great to be with you thanks so much for having me on your show
00:05:05.080Yeah, I think there was a lot of news that came out at the NATO summit. Turkey, as you mentioned, is led by President Erdogan, who's essentially an autocratic leader, who's suppressed his opposition and stayed in power for over two decades, really almost as long as Russian President Putin.
00:05:28.880I think he came to power around 2002 or so. And he's been an Islamist leader. He's the only Islamist leader of NATO. Turkey used to be led by moderate, you know, Muslim leaders. And Erdogan is not that.0.83
00:05:48.620He has one of the biggest militaries in NATO, probably the second biggest military in NATO.
00:05:54.340So I think President Trump respects that.
00:05:56.500He knows that, you know, Turkey has a huge army.
00:06:00.160Obviously, Turkey is a non-nuclear power.
00:06:03.400So it's a medium power, but it's one of the strongest medium powers in the region.
00:06:06.760and one that he views as successful in, of course, helping overthrow Assad and, you know,
00:06:17.540put Syria in the hands of al-Shara, who is a very controversial figure. I personally have trouble
00:06:24.260stomaching him, but many in U.S. foreign policy circles think that he's an improvement over Assad.
00:06:31.620I would say that's not the case. But Turkey is, because Turkey does have this strong conventional
00:06:38.640military, President Trump is talking about selling Turkey about five F-35s. That's something that
00:06:45.560Israel, obviously Netanyahu, opposes. But Turkey is, you know, under Erdogan, it has been probably
00:06:53.040more successful than ever before since the Ottoman days when it controlled, you know, areas from
00:07:00.080Palestine and Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and part of Syria, much of Syria, that's never going to
00:07:10.560happen again, obviously. But Turkey is more powerful, I think, today than any time that0.75
00:07:17.960it has been since 1918. Well, let's go back to Kamal Ataturk, the founder of modern, secular
00:07:25.440Turkey and a very, a very convinced secularist.
00:07:38.540Would you suggest that Erdogan now has brought, over the last 20 years, Turkey to a greater regional influence than it had in the days of Ototürk himself?
00:08:03.380I think so. Yeah, Ataturk obviously was a hero in Turkey because he was able to regain control of modern-day Turkey, which was carved up at the end of World War I.
00:08:22.500It was supposed to be carved up and into a much smaller state than it is today.
00:08:30.040And, you know, he was able to reverse that through a successful war against the Greeks and other powers in the region.
00:08:38.700So I would say that Erdogan is more successful and Turkey is more influential today than it has been, again, for over 100 years.
00:08:48.460Let me ask you, because Erdogan was actually imprisoned, I think, in his younger days for his agitation in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, if I remember that correctly.
00:09:05.640And a lot of people were suggesting that his convinced desire to take Turkey out of the secular fold and take it back into a more explicitly religiously Islamic mold was only going to last for Erdogan's duration in power,
00:09:31.880and that it would revert to its secularist setting
00:09:37.240that had pretty much governed the country
00:09:58.380or do you think it's pretty much this is its new setting now as a quite a convinced islamic
00:10:06.020country not of the same degree perhaps as the islamic countries in the middle east but at least
00:10:11.800from the european perspective well i would argue turkey is part of the middle east of course
00:10:18.680but yeah you're absolutely correct it's not as islamist as syria or iraq or uh or iran um
00:10:26.940because it does have a secular tradition. I think that Erdogan's Islamist party has a pretty secure
00:10:36.140hold on Turkey today. So my default prediction would be that that continues for the foreseeable
00:10:43.760future. But of course, once he dies, it's certainly possible that maybe a US-backed
00:10:49.480secular party could regain control. Obviously, Turkey was led by secular generals and
00:10:56.800other autocratic leaders, but they were much more pro-Western. Erdogan has kind of, you know,
00:11:04.120he's kind of hedged his bets. He's made very clear that he's enthusiastic about Turkey joining the
00:11:10.380Sino-Russian military alliance and having its foot on both sides, essentially part of the NATO
00:11:16.060alliance, which is led by the US, and the Sino-Russian alliance, which is the Shanghai
00:11:20.740cooperation organization. So Turkey is a observer state, I believe. So it's kind of two runs down
00:11:29.140the ladder to SEO membership. So that's something that's concerned in the US, that he has pretty
00:11:37.020warm relations with Russia and Ukraine, I'm sorry, Russia and China, although he has sold
00:11:42.420some kind of drone, I think, drones and kind of some level of weapon systems to Ukraine.
00:11:49.060So, you know, obviously not super pro-Russian, but certainly much more pro-Russian than most NATO countries.
00:11:59.080But, yeah, in terms of Turkey's post-Erdogan course, you know, it's hard to know for sure.0.66
00:12:05.720But I would anticipate that he would designate a successor and that Islamist successor would continue to rule Turkey in his absence.
00:12:13.980I want to move on to the wider situation in NATO generally after this conference this week in Ankara.0.60
00:12:23.420However, on this point, 15, 20 years ago, when it was quite a more realistic proposition that Turkey was going to join the European Union.
00:12:33.340And as I mentioned before, figures like Angela Merkel and Benedict XVI were quite heavily pushing in that direction.
00:12:43.980And there was a lot of political pressure from the European Union and indeed the United States around that time on Turkey and on the Turkish military specifically to withdraw from power on the basis that the military's presence either actively ruling Turkey or the potential that it might intervene.
00:13:18.660And there were criticisms made at the time
00:13:21.700that that was a somewhat naive intervention
00:13:24.980for the United States and for Europe to be making,
00:13:28.160because it was the very military that was underwriting
00:13:31.380the secularist political power structure of Turkey,
00:13:39.040and that too much democracy would allow exactly
00:13:42.420what erdogan has done to happen just before we move on to the wider nato considerations do you
00:13:51.640think with the benefit of hindsight the european unions and america's intervention there to
00:13:59.200basically act in such a way that the turkish military was definitively castrated as a political
00:14:05.900power in turkey was ill-advised absolutely ill-advised uh you know we kind of did the
00:14:12.380same thing in iran by you know withdrawing our support from the shah when it was uh he was being
00:14:17.600overthrown by uh the islamist currently islamist virginia the ayatollah khamenei um but um yeah i
00:14:23.640think that was that was uh definitely ill-advised uh you know president bush kind of had a
00:14:28.540democratization drive in the middle east and we saw the results of that uh one of the first
00:14:34.320casualties was with the Turkish secular parties, which had governed Turkey, as you mentioned,
00:14:40.560for some 84 to 86 years. And that was a big mistake because now Turkey is not firmly in
00:14:50.960the Western camp. It's got relations with Islamist regimes that we are not super supportive of.0.78
00:15:00.180So, yeah, I mean, the question is, do you support, you know, Democrats wherever they are, you know, or do you support folks that are pro-U.S. and pro-Western?0.75
00:15:11.640And I would always go with the pro-Western regimes.
00:15:15.860You know, that's I think in terms of U.S. national security interests, that would be the smart thing to do.0.87
00:15:20.780We'd rather have the shah, you know, an autocratic shah in charge instead of the illiberal regime of the Islamists in Iran.0.89
00:15:30.480And certainly that's the case in Turkey as well.0.61
00:15:33.860If the price of democracy is a less pro-Western, a less pro-West, pro-U.S. government of another country, I'll typically side with the pro-Westerners against the quote-unquote Democrats.
00:15:48.000that's a perfect point uh just to pause on david bear with me i'm just going to give a quick shout
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00:18:51.420slash bannon all right back with david pine david um so back to the nato conference president trump
00:19:12.140that NATO members need to hoik up their defence spending to 5%.
00:19:20.320How serious do you think this goal is for the US administration?
00:19:27.140Because I have a follow-on question about this.
00:19:31.180Well, I think that President Trump has an outstanding national security strategy that he issued in December and a national defense strategy in January.
00:19:40.300And essentially what that document says is that the preeminent focus of U.S. national security strategy will be on securing the Western Hemisphere against foreign superpowers, encroaching superpowers like Russia and China.
00:19:55.600Obviously, a secondary focus on the Western Pacific to deter Chinese aggression against our allies, including non-treaty allies like Taiwan.
00:20:05.660But then in terms of Europe and the Middle East, it essentially says that we will outsource primary responsibility for the conventional defense and deterrence of the regions to European NATO allies and Israel, respectively.
00:20:21.600So what that means in terms of NATO is that President Trump wants to see our NATO allies step up in terms of military spending to provide the bulk, if not perhaps even all of the ground forces, certainly, but also most of the air forces.
00:20:41.300So the U.S., essentially what President Trump's overall vision is, and it's unclear if this will ever be fully implemented, is that by the end of, reportedly by the end of next year, he wants this transformation to take place.
00:20:55.600And so we're envisioning the withdrawal of perhaps 20,000, perhaps a lot more U.S. troops, ground forces from Europe, air assets.
00:21:07.400We've already started withdrawing some air assets from NATO.
00:21:11.060And President Trump has made some, you know, and not just Trump, but also Secretary of War Hagsath and Vice President J.D. Vance have kind of made clear that the U.S., you know, the U.S. security guarantees for our European allies are not ironclad as they were under the Biden administration.
00:21:30.000But they're essentially conditional on what's in the U.S. national security interest, meaning that if Eastern European NATO member states provoke Russia to attack them, perhaps by hosting Ukrainian drone attacks and strikes on Russia, that the U.S. will not necessarily come to their aid.
00:21:52.400Certainly we will in terms of armed shipments, but in terms of actual ground fighting forces or, you know, defending them against any Russian incursions or invasions, that's not 100%.
00:22:06.920And so I think that's very useful because that kind of encourages our European allies to realize that if the U.S., you know, certainly our nuclear brellis is still there for the most part, but in terms of conventional defenses, they need to rely on their own forces.
00:22:24.400And so Germany obviously is saying that they're going to step up to the plate. They're talking about having the largest military outside of Turkey in the United States within Europe, talking about having the French maybe have a nuclear umbrella over Germany.
00:22:41.300Poland has also expressed interest in the French extending their nuclear umbrella over Poland as kind of a backstop against the U.S. perhaps not coming to their aid in the event of some kind of war with Russia.
00:22:55.100But another thing being talked about is that Whitaker, Ambassador Whitaker has stated, is that the U.S. is actually very interested in seeing Germany replace the U.S. as the supreme ally commander of Europe.
00:23:10.940So a German general would replace us. That makes a lot of sense. Germany and Turkey are the two
00:23:17.840largest NATO members in Europe outside of, obviously, the US. Turkey actually has more
00:23:26.040people than Germany at this point. But Germany makes more sense because they're an entirely1.00
00:23:32.360European country, whereas Turkey is primarily a Middle Eastern country. And so I think that
00:23:38.420would be very useful. And then probably the most important for me is that there have been
00:23:43.380discussions, limited discussions within the White House that we could also pull out of NATO's
00:23:49.500military command structure. So that makes a lot of sense if we're going to give up the NATO
00:23:55.040Supreme Commander position. Would you like to see that? Would you like to see the United States
00:24:01.920withdraw from the military command structure of NATO? Yes, I think that would be an excellent
00:24:09.980decision that would put America first. I think that what I've been advocating since at least
00:24:16.2402019 is the Europization of NATO, meaning that NATO would be transformed into a primarily European-led
00:24:24.140alliance led by France, the U.K., and Germany primarily. And that would give, you know, the U.S.
00:24:31.980could still come to NATO's defense in the event of war, but we wouldn't be bound, really bound to
00:24:38.360do so if we're outside the military command structure. And this precedent occurred with
00:24:43.320France, of course, from 1966 to 1991. You know, there were no NATO military bases in France because
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00:33:57.680um so coming back to my question to you is how serious do you think america is
00:34:04.140about the europeans getting to five percent in order to get to that europeanization of nato
00:34:11.980i would think if america is serious it really needs to be a little bit more engaged
00:34:19.600on what the europeans are doing with look no one does dodgy accounting
00:34:24.240better than europeans they are world experts at this um and my general if i could feed this
00:34:32.760back over to you before we move on to the emp thing um it would be this they are going to run
00:34:40.080the wily europeans are going to run rings around you unless you actually hold their feet to the0.76
00:34:46.220fire and work out what they're doing with their um their expenses because they can get to five
00:34:51.800percent just through dodgy account no through through um fiddling the books right um it doesn't
00:34:59.640mean that they're gonna really seriously take in their own hands their own responsibilities
00:35:06.440responsibilities to defend themselves when they think that america being a military industrial
00:35:12.960complex will hop over the atlantic at the drop of a handkerchief and bail them out again
00:35:21.260Give me your thoughts and analysis on that, if you wouldn't mind, please.
00:35:25.740Great question. Well, I first want to talk about what Trump envisioned for U.S. military spending when he came to power.
00:35:33.280In March of 2025, he talked about cutting the U.S. military budget by 50 percent.
00:35:38.780He envisioned these grand bargains, peace treaties with Russia and China.
00:35:43.400He was going to end the war in Ukraine, obviously, within the first 24 hours of his presidency.
00:35:50.080And obviously, it's almost 18 months. It'll be 18 months, I think, on the 24th of July.
00:35:56.660And there's no end to that war in sight. But essentially, what you mentioned in the last
00:36:02.040segment at the end was, I think, very insightful. And that is that President Biden made the
00:36:06.560deliberate decision to provoke Russia to invade Ukraine. He was given the option on December 7th
00:36:12.440of 2021 by President Putin, all you have to do is hand me a written guarantee that Ukraine will
00:36:19.160never join NATO. NATO will never be expanded eastward. And he vetoed that with the full
00:36:25.480knowledge that that would result in a Russian invasion. So what we have today is, as you
00:36:30.180mentioned, you know, NATO leaders are trying to justify NATO's existence by provoking, you know,
00:36:36.760war and military confrontation with the Russian Federation, which is the mightiest
00:36:42.520nuclear superpower on the planet, despite the fact that Putin, just a month before0.67
00:36:49.460he invaded, actually it was two months, I think it was December 17th of 2021, he provided NATO
00:36:56.060and the US with mutual security treaties, which would help to ensure peace between Russia and
00:37:04.700NATO for many decades to come. And Biden told him to pound sand. Trump, I think, if he were
00:37:13.100president at that time, he would have negotiated some kind of peace deal with Russia that would
00:37:18.400have ensured that Russia never felt the need to invade Ukraine. And so I think more importantly
00:37:25.260than 5% military spending is that we reduce our confrontation level with the Russian Federation
00:37:33.200as a NATO alliance. And the way to do that, of course, President Trump had at one point,
00:37:39.640he had, I think, a 28-point peace plan, which was pretty reasonable. Only three of those points
00:37:45.900were probably unacceptable on their face to Russia. And then that got watered down into
00:37:52.020the Zelensky plan. And then there was the Anchorage summit, and that went pretty well.
00:37:59.280And then he had a confrontation with Zelensky in the White House in October, in which he told him to accept Russia's peace terms.
00:38:07.860But I think that's really the key to NATO's ultimate security in avoiding World War III.
00:38:12.700And I think Steve Bannon has been pretty much a leader on that, hammering home that point as well.
00:38:20.680But in terms of the 5%, it is very important to the Trump administration, the White House, that European countries meet that goal.
00:38:28.020I think that there's very little chance of that being done.
00:38:32.080Certainly, as you mentioned, Italy is having some creative accounting to try to pretend that it's doing that, but it's still likely to fall short.
00:38:41.420And I think that's pretty it's a pretty unrealistic objective.
00:38:44.540The U.S., obviously, with one point five trillion, if we we do pass that budget for the Department of War, then we will get in kind of the five percent range.
00:38:54.480My initial complaint is that we can't demand from our allies to do something that we're not willing to do.
00:39:01.240And Trump is actually, to his credit, he's put his money where his mouth is, and he's trying to get us to 5% GDP defense spending as well.
00:39:11.080Just to go back a bit, when you were talking about the origins of the war in Ukraine,
00:39:18.320um some analysts think that the origins of that war more fundamentally took was about was about
00:39:27.940six months before the before um putin was provoked into invading because of statements that you might
00:39:35.020remember that emmanuel macron that the french president had said that nato was dead and on
00:39:40.340life support basically because he didn't have a reason for existing anymore and lo and behold
00:39:46.120Lo and behold, in the manufactured-provoked crisis, NATO is now front and center.
00:39:56.480Is that crazy conspiracy theory stuff?
00:39:59.200Would you actually draw the dots between that, David Pine?
00:40:05.620Well, President Trump himself stated, according to John Bolton twice, he told his top cabinet members he wanted the U.S. to pull out of NATO.
00:41:47.340withdraw the United States from NATO. And the
00:41:51.240primary sponsor of that legislation was
00:41:55.140Marco Rubio, the present Secretary of State.
00:41:58.760so i will just leave that i'll just leave that parked there come back to that at a later date
00:42:07.520but i think president trump's original position was the superior one look we've got you on this
00:42:12.360show not only to pick your brains on the geopolitics but also to talk about your day
00:42:17.720job which we'll do in just a quick moment after the uh quick shout out once again to the show
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00:44:09.200Okay, back to David Pine. Now, David, your day job, for many, many years, you've been working in Congress, in the then Department for Defense, in the Missile Defense Agency.
00:44:26.260your area of specialization is preparing America for the threat of an electromagnetic pulse in the
00:44:35.800MP. Tell us a bit about that. And do you still think after the years, because you are basically,
00:44:43.480you are, I would quite comfortably say, one of America's leading experts on this issue,
00:44:47.860national expert on this issue, with all that you've been doing over many, many years,
00:44:52.820Do you think America is still slightly complacent about the risks posed by an EMP? And just perhaps say a few words to your fellow Americans, how such a thing might arise, what it would take, and what would the devastation arising out of that be?
00:45:19.360Yeah, another great question. So, yeah, as you mentioned, I'm the deputy executive director of the Task Force on National Homeland Security. We've been in existence for 15 years as a congressional authorized,
00:45:30.860Aggressionally Authorized Board to warn Americans and policymakers about the existential threat
00:45:37.980posed by electromagnetic pulse attack by our enemies. Electromechanic pulse is, we found
00:45:46.660out at the Starfish Prime Test in 1963 in the Pacific that it can take out, you know, electronic
00:45:54.480systems, electrical systems from a great distance, 800 miles in that instance, and as few as one
00:46:04.480super EMP warhead, which is essentially a nuclear warhead that's been specially designed to maximize
00:46:10.260its EMP effects, which again are capable of taking out critical infrastructure in the United States
00:46:16.980and other countries that they might be used against. Just one warhead could potentially
00:46:21.940turn out the lights uh and shut down all of our electronic systems throughout the continental
00:46:27.260united states so there are um you know we assess that up to four different countries have that
00:46:33.360capability russia obviously foremost they developed that capability in the 1990s just
00:46:38.900just just just wind that back a little bit right one nuclear warhead with a range of 800 miles
00:46:49.600That's atmospheric. It doesn't need to be a direct attack on New York City.
00:46:55.400This could be in the middle of the Atlantic or the Pacific or something like that.
00:47:01.380One specially honed nuclear warhead maximized for EMP effects.
00:47:10.480You said would basically take out the whole of the electric communications across the whole of the continental North America, right?
00:47:21.240So there's no electronic banking. That's dead. No internet. That would be dead.
00:47:25.820No cell phone coverage. That would be dead in a single instance.
00:47:29.320um so that would be like massive impact for quite in terms in terms of the ratio between
00:47:37.880cause and effect you'd get massive effect there from very little effort um tell me what can
00:47:45.880because this is always bubbling around and people mention it and then forget about it and assume
00:47:51.840that by forgetting about it it will never happen you know treating hope as a strategy um what should
00:47:58.160america be doing in order to prepare itself for this and is it not the same preparation that would
00:48:04.720eventually serve in any case from a natural electromagnetic pulse from a from a solar flare
00:48:12.200or something like that which is arguably more probable yeah it is so first just to clarify
00:48:18.720it would have to be a super emp warhead detonated about 285 to 300 miles overhead over the center
00:48:25.460of the United States, so maybe Missouri or that region. And there are up to four countries that
00:48:31.640we believe have super EMP satellites or orbital nukes or obviously nuclear intercontinental
00:48:38.260range missiles that could accomplish that. So yeah, you're absolutely right. It could take out
00:48:45.540all of our food distribution system, our power, our water purification and distribution system,
00:48:52.220our internet, our communications. I mean, this is essentially a technology-destroying weapon
00:49:03.260that could blast us back into the pre-electrical age, at which point, you know, in pre-electrical
00:49:10.000age, it's like the 1880s. And the US only was able to sustain a population of about 38 million
00:49:16.500people. So the EMP Commission, the Congressional Commission, determined that up to 90% of Americans
00:49:23.440could die from such an attack. And there's, you know, President Trump has been, he's been the
00:49:28.540best president we've ever had, the only one who's actually done anything to try to protect the U.S.
00:49:33.600against EMP. Unfortunately, what I've assessed needs to be done is a presidential declaration
00:49:39.400of emergency. We've seen the president declare emergencies with regards to the immigration
00:49:43.580threat with regards to the fertilizer shortage and other issues, the border wall, things of that
00:49:51.900nature. And I think maybe tariffs as well. But he also needs to declare a presidential state
00:49:58.800of emergency for EMP attack and nuclear ballistic missile attack. And what that would do, that would
00:50:04.500enable him to repurpose funding, congressionally approved funding that's maybe related, maybe
00:50:12.640for our conventional armed forces or things of that nature to hardening the grid, our electrical
00:50:19.900grid against super EAP and cyber attack, but also against what you mentioned, which is the threat of
00:50:26.240super geomagnetic storms or solar flares that could also have the same and nearly as much of
00:50:34.600an impact in destroying our critical infrastructure. And that's something that's
00:50:38.840guaranteed to happen. You know, it's actually overdue is that we have kind of an 1859 Carrington
00:50:44.980level EMP event that's naturally occurring. I think there was maybe a movie that was made in
00:50:52.100the UK about that in the last decade or so. There's also a great movie called One Second
00:50:58.020After that's coming out, I think, by December that the task force has been promoting.
00:51:03.500shocking these are things that people really don't want to think about um first of all go to
00:51:12.800my patriot supply and and prepare that way that's something that everyone can do right now david
00:51:19.780pine where do people go to learn more about what an emp is what they can do to prepare about it
00:51:26.300domestically and what they can do to help pressure their elected representatives to get their heads