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00:02:54.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:03:02.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:47.000And you are a true conservative, and you were in Congress.
00:03:50.000And I want to talk a little bit about your biography, then get into kind of your role as Secretary of State, which I think you were phenomenal.
00:03:58.000You graduated first of your class at West Point.
00:05:43.000And when I became Secretary of State, when those embassies worked for me, I made very clear we were going to fly one flag from the flagpole at an American embassy.
00:05:52.000That was going to be the American flag.
00:05:54.000Charlie, you thought I'd have taken away their last nickel.
00:05:58.000The consternation, the lawsuits, the threats were staggering.
00:06:01.000And so it was truly disheartening to see at the main State Department facility in Washington, the main flagpole that is the center point for American diplomacy, that the whole world would see the picture and they would know what they were looking at there in Foggy Bottom.
00:06:14.000To watch the BLM flight fly from that flagpole was just tragic.
00:06:21.000This is an organization that is deeply against America.
00:06:25.000There are people who don't believe in the very things our diplomats are supposed to be doing around the world.
00:06:30.000And for this administration to have permitted that to fly from an American flagpole, I'm not sure I have an adjective that can accurately describe how disheartening it was to see and how un-American it felt to me to have been.
00:07:22.000And it seems like social activism has become one of the same in the federal government.
00:07:26.000Okay, let's start closest to home, and then we'll go all the way around the world.
00:07:29.000So I want to just kind of get your opinion and your diagnosis of where the most messed up theaters of conflict are and then kind of talk about what you guys did.
00:07:39.000So Cuba's kind of been in the news lately.
00:07:41.000It seems that this administration has just been caught flat-footed, unable to really denounce communism, unprepared for that, I guess you could say.
00:07:51.000You guys did a wonderful job with Cuba, which was at first under the Obama administration, they were eating hot dogs and go to baseball games together with the Castro dictators.
00:07:59.000You guys kind of put Cuba in its proper place.
00:08:36.000Had the uprising taken place seven months ago, it would have taken two seconds for the State Department to issue a statement saying that these are people that are loving freedom.
00:08:46.000The communist dictatorship is evil, and we're with the people of Cuba.
00:09:36.000Anybody who's met any of the folks who have lived in Cuba and then come to the United States knows that the United States has a responsibility to help the Cuban people be successful and free.
00:09:45.000And this really is the window to liberate the Cuban people from this repressive government.
00:09:50.000I mean, in the 70s and 80s, there was somewhat of a Soviet kind of actor at play.
00:09:56.000And right now, this is basically an opportunity where the younger generation is ready to rise up.
00:10:01.000At the very least, we could provide internet service through satellites.
00:10:07.000There are lots of ideas, certainly given them the ability to connect and communicate.
00:10:11.000Remember, that's what we did in Poland, what Reagan did in Poland, right?
00:10:15.000He'd helped the solidarity movement with printing presses and the capabilities a different time, but the capacity for them to communicate with them.
00:10:32.000You guys did a wonderful job of totally changing the way that European negotiations are done.
00:10:37.000I think you gave, I think it was NATO, the most beautiful building I've ever seen in the history of the world, but we didn't only pay for it as taxpayers.
00:11:30.000We created the environment where they knew it was in their best interest to do it.
00:11:34.000So some $440 billion of European taxpayer money now to support our efforts.
00:11:40.000The Secretary General there, a fellow named Jens Stoltenberg, an amazing person, thanks us for saving NATO in that sense, of building out a NATO that now was common, right?
00:12:07.000If you don't have any skin in the game, you're less likely to be to be there when it matters most at the moment with that.
00:12:12.000It's fairpunk when the challenge comes, right?
00:12:15.000When that moment comes, if you don't have any skin in the game, it's pretty easy to walk away.
00:12:19.000And the Europeans were in a place where they could have easily walked away.
00:12:22.000Now they've got a lot more investment there.
00:12:23.000So one more thing I want to focus just on the European theater is the stunning reversal from the media that they're perfectly okay with Russian pipelines going into Germany.
00:12:32.000They're perfectly okay with meetings with Vladimir Putin in secrecy.
00:12:37.000And I mean, the position of your administration is that Russian is an enemy and an adversary.
00:12:41.000If there's places of collaboration we can work on, then so be it, but we don't trust them generally.
00:12:46.000It doesn't seem that this administration is even close to as harsh on Russia as you guys were.
00:12:52.000If I remember correctly, you expelled diplomats, sanctions.
00:12:56.000The ultimate irony is that for two and a half years, they asserted that President Trump was a Russian asset.
00:13:03.000And for four years, this administration did more to put pressure on Vladimir Putin than the previous one did in eight.
00:13:10.000It started with a big buildup in our security posture.
00:13:13.000If you think there's one thing that Vladimir Putin is afraid of, it is a strong, capable U.S. military.
00:13:18.000We then expelled some diplomats, but we got out of a treaty.
00:13:22.000There was a treaty that just two countries in it.
00:13:25.000And we said, hmm, that's interesting, but we got to get away from this.
00:13:29.000And so we walked away from a treaty that made no sense, that was constraining the United States, but not the Russians.
00:13:34.000And we made clear to Vladimir Putin there were a set of things that we just weren't going to permit to happen, and they didn't happen.
00:13:40.000And sadly, it appears that President Biden's told them that there's about 16 industries they can't attack.
00:13:45.000And I don't exactly know what they are, but I feel bad for the 17th.
00:13:49.000Yeah, I mean, ransomware attacks to the pipelines being built.
00:13:53.000And the media is just perfectly, I guess, okay with it or just uninterested when they're not able to caricature a Republican as a Russian agent.
00:14:01.000If we step up just one more level, the whole world understood for four years that President Trump was serious about protecting America.
00:14:08.000That's a model we know from the Reagan years, right?
00:14:11.000This is a model that the world understood, that there was a leader in America who wasn't going to go put 40,000 soldiers anyplace, but was going to defend the things that mattered, our interests, and was going to have that as a priority.
00:14:22.000And so I think of that in the context of the Russian.
00:14:26.000Vladimir Putin knows that he was able to take a fifth of Ukraine under President Obama.
00:14:30.000Do you think he believes there's any reason that President Biden would react any differently if he decided to take a chunk of Syria or take another chunk in Ukraine or whatever it may be or conduct ransomware campaigns?
00:14:42.000I don't think he views them as being prepared to do the hard work of defending America.
00:14:48.000Yes, and Assad is basically consolidated power now, just kind of to a glide path to dictatorship thanks to this kind of new geopolitical world we're living in.
00:15:00.000Now to the Middle East, it's kind of a segue.
00:15:02.000You did a wonderful job with Israel and defending the state of Israel against attacks.
00:15:07.000Back in May, we saw probably a more heated conflict than I think you saw in four years at the Trump administration.
00:15:18.000There was a proxy force called Hamas in the Gaza Strip, but in the end, these were Iranian rockets launching down on Israel.
00:15:23.000Iran continues to say that Israel doesn't have the right to exist and want to wipe the little Satan, Israel, and the big Satan off the face of the earth.
00:15:33.000We also just were very good at just saying, walk me through the facts on the ground.
00:15:38.000And when we came to the Middle East, every Secretary of State before had done shuttle diplomacy between Ramallah and Jerusalem to no effect.
00:15:46.000We said we're happy if the Palestinians have better lives.
00:15:49.000We want good things for them, but we're not going to let that get in the way of creating peace in the Middle East.
00:15:54.000And so we built out a set of security understandings that allowed remarkable leaders in Bahrain, in Sudan, Morocco, and in the United Emirates, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, as well as two great leaders, Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump, who all were able to come together to say, look, we're going to fundamentally rewrite history in the Middle East.
00:16:12.000We're going to acknowledge Israel's right to exist.
00:16:15.000And it took a strong America who was prepared to move our embassy to Jerusalem, to have the Secretary of State acknowledge that Israel is not an occupying force every place that the Israeli people live.
00:16:26.000Those things brought together under the Abraham Accords truly delivered some lasting peace for the people of the Middle East.
00:16:35.000I think that the Abraham Accords will, but this administration is about to hand the Iranians a whole bunch of money, and that'll be to the detriment of the United States.
00:16:42.000When your administration got no credit at all whatsoever for that negotiation, right, which was beyond historic and really was a unified peace against Iran, do you think Iran's going to get a nuclear weapon in this administration?
00:16:56.000I don't know that they'll get it on their watch, but they'll make real progress.
00:16:59.000They're going to have the what do you need to build a nuclear weapon?
00:17:02.000You need to make sure that you can do it in hidden places so there's no one comes after it.
00:17:07.000Second, you need to have the money, tools, and resources to build out the infrastructure to do that.
00:17:13.000And then you need the political cover that gives you the space to do it.
00:17:16.000The Biden administration is going to provide them each of those three things.
00:17:22.000They're on their last $4 billion in foreign exchange reserves.
00:17:26.000It took us two and a half years to put that much pressure on them.
00:17:30.000It saddens me because the people in the Gulf, the partners and friends that we have in Israel and America will be more at risk as Iran continues to move close to a nuclear weapon.
00:17:41.000Charlie, even as they get close, even when they don't have the completed cycle, their capacity to coerce increases.
00:17:48.000Their capacity to say that if you don't do what it is we'd like you to do, Israel, if you don't do what you'd like us to do to the Saudis, then those countries will feel under the thumb because they know Iran is even, even if Iran is only on the cusp of getting those weapon systems.
00:18:02.000Yeah, and they will have much more leverage and proxies to do so.
00:18:06.000So now I want to kind of end, but it's going to be a long end on the most important of all of them, which is China.
00:18:11.000And that is, of course, the one that is the greatest threat, I think, to our way of life here in the West in a variety of different reasons.
00:18:19.000The Trump administration, led by you, was kind of the first effort to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable.
00:18:26.000There's a lot that I want to ask you about this, but let's just start with the virus.
00:18:50.000Yeah, this almost certainly came from the lab.
00:18:52.000Every stick of evidence that we've seen today suggests that they were working on a virus, that they were conducting this research that amps up the virus, makes it certainly more contagious, likely more lethal as well.
00:19:04.000And they were doing so for a purpose that's not clear, but we know this.
00:19:07.000We know when they learned that the virus was out on the street that they didn't do the right thing.
00:19:13.000They knew they had people who were infected.
00:19:15.000They knew they had people who were highly contagious.
00:19:18.000They knew the virus was lethal and they sent them across the globe.
00:19:21.000Charlie, I always compare it to someone who gets behind the wheel when they're drunk.
00:19:25.000They may not intend to run over someone, but when they do, they're charged with felony murder.
00:19:30.000Whether the Chinese intended the results that have flowed, the results of their reckless activities have now resulted in the death of millions of people all across the world.
00:19:43.000So the China issue in general, and I want to ask you about Taiwan because I think that actually might be the thing in play.
00:19:51.000What would we, if you were still in power, what would we do to hold them accountable for such a reckless act like that that killed millions of people, that shut down the world economy, lied about it, and they transported their own citizens to almost help spread it.
00:21:18.000Even at a place that, think about Wichita State, the flagship university in my hometown of Wichita, Kansas, has an enormous capacity for Chinese grants that impact the school's ability to do engineering research and a whole lot of Chinese students.
00:22:12.000They're trading on an American market and not having to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, the compliance rules that American companies, frankly, and European and African and Vietnamese companies, China has this big space where we let them get away with the absence of accountability.
00:22:26.000We have pension funds, American pension funds investing in Chinese companies that are tied to the Chinese military apparatus.
00:22:35.000And these are just a handful of ideas that one could, an administration could do very quickly and would communicate to the Chinese Communist Party that we're no longer going to be your lapdog.
00:22:45.000We're no longer going to turn the other cheek.
00:22:47.000We're going to impose enormous costs on your economy until such time as you conform to the set of understandings that are acceptable in the global space.
00:22:57.000Run your country the way you want to, but we're going to make sure that everything that you do that impacts us, we're going to hold you accountable.
00:23:03.000What would the longer term projects be for that?
00:23:06.000The longer terms are confronting the global footprint that Xi Jinping, the leader in China, Belton Road, their increasing growth in their military, their ever-expanding nuclear capability.
00:23:19.000And then lastly, we have to make sure that the whole world understands when China comes knocking on your door with a commercial offer that looks good, it's too good to be true.
00:23:47.000Those with Western values who value free markets and democracy are going to work together to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party doesn't destroy the world in the way Xi Jinping wants to to create global hegemony for the Chinese Communist Party.
00:24:01.000It is the single biggest risk outside of the United States to the next generation of Americans.
00:24:53.000We made soldiers told the Taiwanese F-16s.
00:24:56.000We made clear that we were going to do all the things that were going to provide the Taiwanese people with the space and resources they need to defend themselves.
00:25:04.000And then we made clear that we were going to have a Pacific fleet that was fully capable.