00:00:22.000Folks are looking at the grocery bill and their rent and they're thinking, why on earth are we spending blood and treasure halfway around the world and not even getting to the end point?
00:00:30.000But this is why it's actually imperative that America wins and wins quickly.
00:00:33.000See, There are three options on offer here.
00:01:04.000So last night, Laura Ingram, the Fox News host, I like Laura, but Laura put up a post on X that was referring back to an article by a writer for National Review named Michael Brennan Doherty.
00:01:15.000And the article is basically a celebration of the fact that the Iran war has been, quote unquote, restrained by the people.
00:01:21.000And Michael Brennan Doherty writes Trump's ambitions are being checked by the American voter.
00:01:24.000The war is now unpopular and hemmed in, not by Congress or constitutional checks, but by the people themselves.
00:01:31.000When Trump tells us that his favorite option is to take out Karg Island, but that he's not sure America has the stomach for it, He's admitting the sovereign he fears most is not Iran's supreme leader, but the American voter.
00:01:39.000The Iran war is restrained not by Congress, but by an American people who will tolerate a quick punitive spectacle, not an attempt to land Marines on a foreign oil depot while under fire.
00:01:48.000And Laura Ingram followed that up with a tweet that's not really a quote from the piece.
00:01:52.000It's kind of posed that way, but she says, quote, key point.
00:01:56.000The American people are done with war.
00:02:26.000The idea we'll never fund, we'll never fight, we'll never allow anyone to declare a war, we'll never get into a war.
00:02:32.000You may as well say that you will never allow the sun to rise because the reality is that the world will come to you.
00:02:39.000But I want to get more into the sentiment that's feeding this foolish point of view because, again, I get it.
00:02:44.000The American people right now are looking at the situation in the Middle East and they don't know what's going on.
00:02:48.000And I mean, frankly, kind of why should they?
00:02:52.000And some parts of the administration say the Strait of Hormuz is already open.
00:02:55.000We keep hearing that, that it's open already, which is not true.
00:02:58.000We know that the flow out of the Strait of Hormuz is not consistent.
00:03:01.000We know there are a lot of ships that are still waiting in the Strait.
00:03:04.000Other parts of the administration are going on podcasts and saying that the Strait can't be opened under any circumstances because there are too many IRGC associated goat farmers who can hide behind a rock and fire drones at shipping.
00:03:15.000So we can never open it under any circumstances.
00:03:17.000Again, part of the same administration.
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00:06:14.000So, yesterday, the Houthis, who are the terrorist group in Yemen, Yemen is located along the Red Sea and the Babamandib Strait, they decided that they were going to get active in this conflict.
00:06:28.000According to the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, the Saudi Arabian state news agency SPA, saying an official source at the General Transport Authority said an attack caused a fire on the bow of the tanker and Cilia, but all crew members were safe.
00:06:40.000SPA did not say who had targeted the vessel.
00:06:43.000The Houthis put out a statement saying that they had attacked two Saudi tankers, the Ancilia and the Leila, saying that the vessels had violated a naval blockade imposed by the Houthis on Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.
00:06:54.000The Houthis said they had targeted the tankers with a number of ballistic and cruise missiles as well as drones.
00:06:58.000Now, again, you'll remember a few years ago, the president wanted to go hard after the Houthis, and he was talked out of going harder after the Houthis by other members of his administration.
00:07:06.000Well, now the president is putting out a statement A year ago, the United States of America attacked very powerfully the Houthis.
00:07:13.000for their interference with commerce and trade by shooting at ships.
00:07:16.000Since that time and during our conflict with Iran, they've acted very responsibly.
00:07:22.000I mean, they've been firing the occasional missile at Israel and then Israel's been pounding them.
00:07:26.000Unfortunately, now they are starting up again, shooting at two Saudi Arabian ships last night.
00:07:30.000Please let this truth serve to represent that if they do this again, the United States will hold Iran responsible in that the Houthis are a surrogate and or proxy of Iran and major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran and of course the Houthis themselves.
00:07:40.000I'm very disappointed with in that they have until now acted very professionally and smart.
00:07:44.000Thank you for their attention to this matter.
00:07:46.000So that's the president seeming to Tell the Houthis, warning them off of this, you know, kind of wheedling them to stop.
00:07:51.000Now, again, I get why people are confused and upset.
00:07:55.000It feels like things are stalemated, that they're getting broader and more difficult.
00:08:28.000We do understand that war does come along with casualties, and we are willing to undergo those casualties in pursuit of an end and a victory for America.
00:08:37.000But as far as the idea that, for example, America, we can't hit Karga Island because the Iranian people would then be deprived of oil resources.
00:08:45.000The American people are, I should say, not particularly concerned about that.
00:08:50.000We are far more concerned with why we're there not winning, right?
00:10:14.000War is the infliction of pain on the enemy to the point where they no longer want to undergo that pain while you are able to withstand pain.
00:10:22.000That's what war is it is a test of willpower and a test of pain willingness.
00:10:28.000But war is also and forever a necessary tool in the American arsenal.
00:11:44.000That is the way you win in the middle.
00:11:45.000By the way, that's the way you win generally.
00:11:48.000It is not proportionate in a statistical sense.
00:11:51.000It is proportionate to the goal you seek to achieve, which is the Strait of Hormuz open, no nuclear program, no ballistic missile development, and no support of terror abroad.
00:12:13.000This is, we have to be as clean as possible.
00:12:15.000It's the strategy of an eye for an eye or tit for tat, or you hit a ship and we hit a bridge.
00:12:20.000The president put out a statement that was kind of along these lines the other day when he suggested that any time Iran shoots a ship, we are going to hit one bridge or power plant, including those located next to or in the capital city of Tehran.
00:12:32.000What we actually should do, and then we should do it, is if you hit a ship or shoot at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, all of them go away.
00:12:38.000Because here's the thing about the Iranians they're perfectly willing to put out their own eye if it means you lose an eye.
00:12:45.000An eye for an eye is a thing they like to do.
00:12:49.000He put out a tweet suggesting it's time to evacuate Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and probably Oman.
00:13:15.000And it turns out that antiseptic and proportional, in the statistical sense, is very, very bad and foolish foreign policy.
00:13:24.000What you're relegated to if you end up with this sort of tit for tat strategy is a hope that eventually they just sort of collapse randomly from within.
00:13:33.000Listen, I never thought the administration would end up with this option.
00:13:57.000In Iran, and then let's leave in Operation Midnight Hammer last year.
00:14:01.000But it seems as though one of the things that happened here is that the president wanted originally to go very hard, and he was talked out of it by Turkey and Saudi Arabia and by some of his own advisors.
00:14:10.000And then he kind of got stuck in this let's tit for tat, gradual escalation, gradual de escalation routine.
00:15:05.000Speaking of things that don't go well, if you do not actually keep control of your time, things go extremely poorly for you.
00:15:12.000Now, I have a very tight schedule between prepping for the show and writing speeches and writing books and traveling and handling the business and all the rest of it, and then actually being present for the kids.
00:15:21.000I have to keep every hour basically allotted.
00:15:24.000My assistant, Kelly, Caitlin, also, they've been helping out and they basically make my life run on time.
00:16:44.000But there is no question that if France had stood up to Germany, if the Brits had stood up to Germany, if America had stood up to Germany in the interwar period, World War II never happened.
00:16:55.000Instead, Great Britain, France, and the United States all attempted to pursue a pacifist and isolationist strategy.
00:17:02.000And this led to only the worst and most costly war in all of human history.
00:17:07.000And again, you don't have to speculate that this is what they were trying to do.
00:17:10.000They openly said they were trying to do this.
00:17:11.000In 1928, The United States Secretary of State and the French Foreign Minister designed the so called Kellogg Briand Pact.
00:17:18.000It outlawed war as an instrument of policy.
00:17:21.000The other signatories to that agreement, again, outlawing war France, the US, the UK, also Germany, Italy, and Japan.
00:17:30.000You may notice that it didn't work out well.
00:17:34.000And again, it was not unique to the United States.
00:17:36.000This was the sentiment across the West.
00:17:38.000It is the theme of Churchill's Gathering Storm, the first volume of his World War II history.
00:17:43.000In 1933, the students at Oxford University famously voted in favor of the so called King and Country Resolution.
00:17:49.000That resolution said that the students would, quote, under no circumstances fight for King and Country.
00:18:22.000One of the reasons that World War II took so long and killed so many people is that once the United States even got involved after December 7th, 1941, it took us fully three years to rearm and then four years to win.
00:18:37.000If we had had that weaponry at the ready, would Pearl Harbor ever have happened?
00:18:41.000Isolationism and pacifism is a deadly combination because it turns out the world is a deadly place.
00:18:45.000Our enemies are not going to do any of that stuff.
00:18:48.000There's also this very ahistorical notion that American foreign policy was once truly isolationist and pacifist.
00:18:55.000If you look at the history of America's wars, America has been involved in conflict all over the globe almost since its founding.
00:19:03.000We were fighting wars with the Barbary pirates under Thomas Jefferson.
00:19:07.000And if you're talking about wars outside America's exact borders, that was happening since the founding, since we were fighting the Indian wars west of the Appalachians immediately.
00:19:18.000Remember, America wasn't always the United States of America, it wasn't always the entire continent.
00:19:22.000It was a relatively narrow strip of land along the eastern seaboard.
00:19:27.000American interests, our national interests, have always extended beyond pure physical threat.
00:19:32.000I know there are people who are like, well, unless we get physically hit, we cannot get involved in conflict.
00:20:07.000But our interests include everything from trade routes to resource access, they include everything from the foreign occupation of allied countries to military buildups among our enemies.
00:20:18.000We have lots of interests all over the world.
00:20:22.000Under the rubric that Laura set out in that tweet, America has literally never fought a justifiable war, including the revolution.
00:20:30.000And here's the thing there's this bizarre counterfactual that's promoted by isolationists and pacifists.
00:20:35.000The bizarre counterfactual is that America would still be a global power.
00:20:38.000You'd still be living the same lifestyle in the same country today without all the history intervening.
00:20:43.000If we'd never fought the revolution or the Civil War or World War I or World War II or Vietnam or the Iraq War or any of this stuff, America would still look exactly the same.
00:20:52.000That is literally the least likely counterfactual.
00:20:57.000The reality is that if America had taken up the cause of the isolationist clique, America would likely be an economic backwater or even a colony of Europe.
00:21:08.000Because why would we have fought a revolution?
00:21:10.000I want to hear from the isolationists and pacifists why the American Revolution was justified.
00:21:15.000Truly, we are citizens of the British Empire at the time.
00:21:20.000In just one second, we're going to get into the actual text of the bill.
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00:22:28.000America is great and powerful because we pursue our interests and we know that our interests are paramount.
00:22:33.000That doesn't mean war is always first resort, it should always be last resort.
00:22:36.000But sometimes war is both necessary and justified.
00:22:40.000So saying we can have no more war ever, that's not even a foreign policy, it's just childish.
00:22:44.000And more than childish, it's just a form of surrender.
00:22:46.000No more war ever is about as realistic as the socialists who say no more work ever.
00:23:34.000America has fought legitimately dozens of conflicts since the revolution with military capacity that wasn't up to snuff.
00:23:44.000And in some cases, almost zero odds in our favor.
00:23:46.000And we did it because it was in our national interest.
00:23:49.000So, the idea that America right now is supposed to lose or surrender to a third rate regime that is shooting drones at ships is not a victory.
00:24:02.000And by the way, it opens the door to actual significantly larger threats.
00:24:06.000Money will pour into Iran from China and Russia, they'll rearm stronger than they ever were.
00:24:11.000China and Russia themselves will flex their muscle if you choose this path.
00:24:21.000We don't like to lose, which is why I'm critical of the discombobulated messages that have been coming out from the White House and why we actually need to win.
00:24:28.000And I think that President Trump gets this in his gut.
00:24:29.000He feels the same way that you do or I do on this sort of stuff.