00:00:00.000Hey everybody, war with Russia would be a really bad idea.
00:00:04.000Seems obvious, but unfortunately, Joe Biden seems like he is getting closer and closer to move American troops to the eastern border of Ukraine.
00:00:14.000If you want to email us your questions, you could do so as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:19.000And if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, the nation's largest movement of young people, people of all ages actually, that are focused on passing down American values to future generations, go to tpusa.com.
00:01:13.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:03.000What is the biggest problem facing America?
00:02:05.000Now, if you went around to a normal American city like Kansas City, and yes, I will talk about Kansas City and one of the most extraordinary football games I think ever played.
00:02:15.000I still got hate mail, even though I did the NFL picks on Friday.
00:02:32.000I think they're a bunch of scum rats that run the NFL, Roger Goodell and the BLM.
00:02:37.000But boy, am I glad that I watched the beauty of football this last weekend.
00:02:40.000But if you went to Kansas City, besides their greatest concern being Joe Burrow, what do you think would be the greatest concern for an average citizen of Kansas City?
00:02:56.000The deterioration of American schools?
00:02:58.000The lack of representation that they feel in their constitutional government.
00:03:04.000What do you think would be their argument for, or what do you think would be their concern for the greatest case, the greatest issues facing America?
00:03:15.000Do you think it would be a border dispute in Ukraine?
00:03:19.000Do you think that people in Oklahoma, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, wherever, do you think that they're waiting up at night and they say, yeah, you know, it's okay that things cost 25% more.
00:03:35.000I have to go into debt just to be able to feed my family.
00:03:39.000But what really bothers me is the fact that Russia might want to try and reclaim some of the territory they think is theirs in a border dispute 5,000 miles away.
00:03:53.000I'd say this is probably a 99-1 issue.
00:05:23.000They go after opposing political opponents.
00:05:26.000Yeah, it's not like the Democrats aren't currently trying to target the guy playing golf at Mar-a-Lago right now, who might be the opposing leader.
00:05:37.000And look, I'm not defending the Russian government.
00:06:11.000The border of Ukraine, by some people that really know their Russian history, was drawn erroneously.
00:06:19.000It was drawn in a way where, kind of arbitrarily, if you look at a map of Ukraine and you divide it by actual ethnic and cultural and linguistic heritage, the eastern part of Ukraine is a dominant Russian-speaking culture, is a dominant Russian historical connection, where the western part is much more Ukrainian, Romanian,
00:06:47.000Slovakian, Hungarian, Belarusian, and Polish.
00:06:53.000Now, it's easy if you are some kind of neoconservative national policy analyst in Washington, D.C., to look at the border of Ukraine and ask, act as if it's some sort of game of risk.
00:07:05.000Like, oh, yeah, we're going to appropriate troops and we're going to prevent Putin from coming in.
00:07:11.000First of all, this is how immature our foreign policy leaders are.
00:07:17.000First, we need to take a step back and say, what does success look like?
00:07:21.000You would do that if you were opening a car wash, if you were trying to start a baseball team, start a family.
00:07:30.000You start with the question: what does success look like?
00:07:33.000And can any apparatchik in Washington, D.C., in either political party, you're welcome to come on our show, by the way, tell me what does success look like in Ukraine right now?
00:07:43.000Here's what they'll say: they'll say it's deterrence.
00:07:47.000We're going to deter Vladimir Putin from not getting into Ukraine.
00:07:53.000Shouldn't success be building a coalition against China?
00:07:58.000Wouldn't that be more important than deterring Vladimir Putin from trying to get a part of eastern Ukraine that he obviously wants?
00:08:07.000Now, the consensus amongst the foreign policy intelligence in the West is that we should tell Vladimir Putin whether or not he can go into Ukraine and whether or not he should be able to colonize that country.
00:08:21.000Some would say reunify, some would say colonize.
00:08:24.000I'm not saying we have to support it, obviously.
00:08:26.000We can condemn it, kind of like Russia always does everything in the United Nations Security Council.
00:08:32.000Instead, we could take a maybe a hundred-year viewpoint, and myself at 28 years old could say, huh, 40 years from now, do I think that Russian-Ukrainian border disputes is going to be the bigger threat to worldwide global hegemony?
00:08:49.000Or the 1.3 billion-person nation that launched the virus either intentionally or unintentionally has lied about it, covered it up, smeared any sort of dissidents, building one of the largest militaries in the world, and also owns the American ruling class.
00:09:06.000Outside of petro reserves, what is the Russian competitive advantage?
00:09:11.000They have a fine military, they also have a declining population.
00:09:16.000So, Russia is seeing the signal from Biden.
00:09:18.000They're seeing the signal from the West.
00:09:23.000Instead of Biden back channeling with Putin, trying to come to some sort of agreement, some sort of temporary partnership against China, here's where Biden is going: Biden weighs deploying thousands of troops to Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
00:09:38.000President Biden is considering deploying warships and aircraft to NATO allies in what would be a major shift in restrained stance on Ukraine.
00:09:49.000So, basically, let's get ourselves more involved in the region.
00:09:52.000We just got out of Afghanistan, which was a total catastrophe.
00:09:55.000We invaded Iraq, which had zero geopolitical advantage for America at all.
00:10:03.000The Iraq War was a total disaster, thousands of lives lost.
00:10:06.000That's not to say that the veterans and the military service members who sacrificed their lives or their time in Iraq are anything but heroes because they are, but the Iraq War was one of the greatest failures in political foreign policy strategy in the history of the human species.
00:10:22.000The Iraq War was a disaster, every single part of it.
00:10:27.000Look, everybody, I know you love freedom and you want to defend it, and I know you love the Constitution.
00:10:32.000It's a beautiful document, and so do I.
00:10:34.000And it's the same with Hillsdale College, the best liberal arts college in America.
00:10:38.000Hillsdale's mission is pursuing truth and defending liberty.
00:10:42.000It gives its undergraduate and graduate students the best education and is working to make this education available to all, from offering free online courses to helping support K through 12 schools.
00:10:52.000But today, I want to tell you about Hillsdale's amazing free monthly digest of liberty.
00:12:00.000Basically, it means that if there might be a military action, a superfluous military action, in order to distract from some sort of domestic scandal.
00:12:12.000So, Wag the Dog actually came all the way back from a play called Our American Cousin in 1858.
00:12:19.000But Wag the Dog is a phrase that is used in kind of journalist circles or communication circles when you see things that are not going well domestically, where you try to create some sort of international distraction.
00:14:07.000Because the whole idea of NATO should have been member countries that were contributing, not were just joining so that we could do the work for them.
00:14:15.000Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States.
00:14:34.000NATO partner countries, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia, Finland, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Georgia, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Malta, the Republic of Moldova, Russia, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
00:14:54.000They literally list Russia as a NATO partner country on the NATO website.
00:15:26.000I think Putin knows a lot better than that, obviously.
00:15:31.000But wouldn't it be long past time for some of these other European countries to start to defend themselves?
00:15:36.000We pay all the money for their defense budgets.
00:15:40.000Now, the neoconservative project in Washington, D.C. says we must send troops there immediately.
00:15:44.000And that's exactly what Joe Biden is contemplating doing.
00:15:48.000In a meeting on Saturday at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, senior Pentagon officials presented Biden with several options that would shift American military assets much closer to Putin's doorstep.
00:16:04.000The administration officials said the options including sending 1,000 to 5,000 troops to Eastern Europe, countries with the potential to increase that number tenfold if things deteriorate.
00:16:15.000We could be sending 50,000 troops to Eastern Europe to go find, to go fight a kinetic war in a country that most people can't recognize 5,000 miles away.
00:16:25.000The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about internal deliberations.
00:16:33.000Continues by saying, Biden says, we're actually going to increase troop presence in Poland, in Romania, et cetera, if in fact he moves.
00:16:43.000Wag the dog means that someone has things not going well domestically and they want something internationally to try and boost their declining poll numbers.
00:16:54.000The problem is that this is not wagging the dog with Mohammed Gaddafi or with Bashar al-Assad in Syria or in Iraq.
00:17:02.000This is trying to wag the dog against one of the strongest militaries on the planet.
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00:18:11.000Reuters, NATO strengthens East European flank, while Russia accuses West of hysteria.
00:18:18.000NATO sending reinforcements to Eastern Europe.
00:18:20.000Kremlin says West, not Russia, is escalating tensions.
00:18:26.000Welcoming a series of deployments announced by alliance members, NATO alliance members in recent days, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told NATO that they would continue to take all necessary measures to protect and defend all allies, including by reinforcing the Eastern part of the alliance.
00:18:45.000Continues by saying, Biden weighs deploying thousands of troops to Eastern Europe and Baltics.
00:18:53.000Meanwhile, the United States says that they are going to be evacuating American citizens from Kiev.
00:19:04.000Now, it's really important to realize this.
00:19:09.000President Trump got close to it, but I think he was actually right within the constitutional authority.
00:19:18.000If we're going to go to war with Russia, why don't we have a vote in Congress?
00:19:23.000Well, the War Powers Resolution Act of 1973, also known as the War Powers Act, is a congressional resolution designed to limit the U.S. President's ability to initiate or escalate military actions abroad as part of our system of governmental checks and balances.
00:19:40.000The law aims to check the executive branch's power when committing U.S. military forces to an armed conflict.
00:19:48.000You see, we have separation of powers in our country.
00:20:02.000I think it's Federalist 30-something, you could look it up.
00:20:05.000Where they said, in order to declare war, it should take at least two branches to send us into war.
00:20:11.000Now, we now call it the Department of Defense.
00:20:14.000We used to call it the Department of War.
00:20:17.000I think it's a much more accurate depiction.
00:20:24.000The Constitution divides war powers between Congress and the President.
00:20:28.000Only Congress can declare war and appropriate military funding.
00:20:33.000Yet the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
00:20:36.000Now, despite that, we have been involved in many different skirmishes because under the War Powers Act, it gives you a 30- to 60-day window for you to be able to strike quickly and then go to Congress for funding.
00:20:51.000Now, since the War Powers Resolution Act of 1973, sitting presidents have submitted over 132 reports to Congress.
00:20:59.000These include the airlift and evacuation operations carried out in Cambodia in 1975, committing forces to Beirut, Lebanon in 1983, Persian Gulf War of 1991.
00:21:10.000Challenges to the resolution include Ronald Reagan's deployment of troops to El Salvador in 1981, the continued bombing of Kosovo during Bill Clinton's administration in 1999, and military action initiated against Libya by Barack Obama in 2011.
00:21:27.000The War Powers Resolution has been controversial since its inception.
00:21:31.000Is it Federalist 41 Madison War Powers?
00:22:12.000And the problem is that war, as we know it, does not impact the home front like it used to.
00:22:19.000We can, quote unquote, go to war, and it's 5,000 miles away.
00:22:22.000It's like watching a TV show, it's like cheering for your favorite Netflix series.
00:22:28.000That's how they have basically commercialized war.
00:22:33.000We don't have war bonds anymore, draft rationing.
00:22:37.000A lot of that is because we went to a fiat currency.
00:22:41.000We got off a gold standard so we could just finance any sort of international adventure whenever we want.
00:22:48.000The great Angelo Cotavia, who passed away unexpectedly this last summer, famously used to write, and he had a great book called The Ruling Class.
00:23:45.000Because if you think we can't agree on very simple domestic governance issues, how are we going to agree on troop allocation?
00:23:52.000And by the way, is national morale high or is it low?
00:23:57.000These are very simple questions that leaders should be asking.
00:24:01.000So let's pretend that my whole argument that America has no role right now in actually regulating the eastern border, let's say that doesn't win over most Americans, which I think it does.
00:24:11.000But let's pretend that the people in D.C. are convinced that it's their role to go play border cop, not of the American southern border, who cares about the Arizona, Texas, or New Mexico border, California border, no, about the Ukrainian border, because they're big into sovereignty, right?
00:24:29.000The argument is that the morale of the country is so low right now, doing big things 5,000 miles away against countries that know how to fight is a really bad idea.
00:24:41.000Cut 12, when asked, not a single participant in the Face the Nations focus group believed America is in a better place.
00:24:50.000National morale is at an all-time low.
00:24:55.000A wise country would say, huh, that's probably the worst time to go to war.
00:25:00.000During the course of the pandemic, we've been listening to Americans through Zoom to get their thoughts on COVID, the economy, and how the government is handling it all.
00:25:09.000On Friday, we checked back in with six of them.
00:25:12.000Who feels like we are in a better place now than we were a year ago?
00:25:21.000No one believes we're in a better spot now.
00:25:24.000Every participant in the Face the Nation panel via Zoom, don't worry, says, nope, we're not.
00:25:31.000So we're in a worse place now than we were a year ago.
00:25:34.000Everyone knows it, including, I think that was a bipartisan panel, is what I was told.
00:25:40.000And somehow now we want to go marshal troops to Ukraine.
00:25:50.000If you have a loved one in the military, they might be deployed to the eastern border of Ukraine to go fight for something that has zero strategic political interest of America.
00:26:02.000Don't let the neoconservatives in Washington, D.C. tell you otherwise.
00:26:05.000Oh, it's very strategically important.
00:26:11.000Because Hunter Biden sat on a corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.
00:26:15.000And by the way, Connor, in the next segment, let's build out just kind of how corrupt this whole thing is about how we forget that Biden and his family made tons of money off of the Ukrainian government.
00:28:14.000If we do not get the war powers resolution back into focus and Congress do their job, Biden might stumble us into a kinetic conflict with Russia.
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00:29:37.000So the talking point in DC is that it's because of Biden's weakness that Vladimir Putin is trying to invade Ukraine.
00:30:16.000I think we have many options for deterrence when it comes to Russia, but we need to impose those now.
00:30:23.000President Putin only understands strength and power.
00:30:27.000They see a very weak administration, and President Putin sees every opportunity to do what he wants to do in Ukraine with very little pushback from the United States.
00:30:41.000I think it's a little bit short-sighted just to try to say that we need to focus strictly and solely on this idea that Putin only channels with strength or only respects strength.
00:31:37.000She says, if Russia can do this, Ukraine wants to stop this from other countries doing this to neighbors.
00:31:43.000So basically, this is the domino theory argument that if Putin doesn't stop going into the border, then forget it.
00:31:50.000Now, I actually am, I'm not defending Putin invading Ukraine.
00:31:55.000What I am saying, though, is that this could be solved with a ruling class and a leadership class that's willing to pick up the phone to Vladimir Putin and say, hey, listen, knock it off, man.
00:33:53.000If there wasn't a 1.3 billion person menace in Asia that might take Taiwan at any time and continue their incursion on all things in the West, going to war is a big deal.
00:34:13.000You should go to war for good reasons.
00:34:16.000You should go to war as a defensive measure, not an offensive measure.
00:34:22.000There's only been a couple times where Congress has actually authorized war in our history.
00:34:26.000I don't think this would be one of them.
00:34:28.000But we should all be very concerned that Joe Biden might want to use American troops to try and save his plummeting poll numbers and try to make himself relevant.
00:34:40.000The Washington, D.C. drums of war are louder than ever before.