The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage： The Fall of the West

00:00:00.000 Hey, Michael Knowles here. The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, The Fall of the West,

00:00:04.220 is right around the corner. Don't miss me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh,

00:00:08.420 and the God King Jeremy Boring as we discuss the unmitigated disaster that is Biden's handling

00:00:13.840 of the Afghanistan withdrawal and what that means for the West as a whole. Take a listen.

00:00:18.980 Some days you can't even muster up a good fake laugh. Welcome to The Daily Wire Backstage,

00:00:23.440 The Fall of the West. I'm Jeremy Boring, joined today, of course, by Michael Knowles,

00:00:27.680 Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and Ben Shapiro. Our show today is sponsored by ExpressVPN. It's time

00:00:33.100 to stand up to big tech, protect your data at expressvpn.com slash backstage. Let's get right

00:00:39.340 to the show. For tonight's show, Daily Wire members can enter your questions into the chat box over

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00:01:55.300 Reader's Pass today. Guys, only a short time ago, the President of the United States came out and spoke

00:02:01.440 about the horrific bombing which happened today in Kabul. We don't know, of course, the exact death

00:02:07.320 toll at the moment, but it seems like already 13 American servicemen killed. And the President's

00:02:14.160 speech I thought was one of the more bizarre speeches I've ever seen by a President, and I'm saying

00:02:18.760 this in the year 2021, so I want to get a quick reaction. I'm assuming everyone had the opportunity to

00:02:23.540 review the President's speech, Ben. He is not sentient. He is not capable. He is not competent.

00:02:29.280 He came out. He looked like a mental patient. I mean, he really did. He looked like he was barely

00:02:34.600 awake. He stumbled his way through a bizarre seven or eight-minute speech that contradicted itself about

00:02:41.200 seven different times. He tried to rely very heavily on the I'm empathetic Joe routine, but the

00:02:46.260 minute that the questions began, all of that went out the window and he became combative Joe.

00:02:49.420 He had nothing of merit to say. He has no defense for his policies because his policies are garbage.

00:02:55.780 And most of all, if you're an American enemy watching the President of the United States on

00:02:59.200 the same day that 13 American soldiers are killed, 12 of the Marines, and you're watching as the United

00:03:06.040 States turns tail and runs, leaving a thousand plus American citizens behind in Kabul, plus an

00:03:12.000 unspecified number of thousands of American green card holders, plus hundreds of thousands of people who

00:03:16.460 will immediately be slaughtered by the Taliban. And as it turns out, the United States government

00:03:20.420 handed a list to the Taliban of all the people we wanted to evacuate so they know precisely who

00:03:24.180 to kill. By the way, this is just in Kabul. There are Americans all throughout the country we

00:03:27.100 aren't even talking about. Yeah, that's right. If you're watching this as an enemy of the United

00:03:30.540 States and then you watch this addled, old, feeble-minded man walk out and barely make it through a

00:03:36.600 sentence, you're thinking, you're like Homer Simpson with a hamburger right now. Now, Osama bin Laden said

00:03:40.960 in 98, 99, after bombing Kenya and Tanzania, the embassy's there, and after the mild response from the

00:03:45.960 Clinton administration, he said, America's a paper tiger. I don't know how, if you're an enemy of

00:03:49.040 the United States, watching what has happened over the course of the last month, you can't look at

00:03:52.840 the United States and say, that is a nation that I can do anything I want to. This is a nation that

00:03:57.620 is ripe for a fall, and this president is ready to let it happen. Drew, not unfair what Ben's saying.

00:04:01.640 I mean, the president literally said twice, at least in the speech, that some Americans would be left

00:04:07.040 behind after the August 31st. You know, I've been struck. All of this, I agree with everything Ben just

00:04:11.200 said. I mean, the absolute disability of the guy. The guy's a walking dementia, you know, case, and

00:04:17.280 it's very painful. It's painful to watch. I can't, I wish I could even feel some schadenfreude because

00:04:22.400 he's in the opposite party to mine, but I don't. No, he's still our president. He's still our

00:04:25.920 president, and that really is disturbing me. But all throughout this, I have been deeply struck by his

00:04:31.520 emotional detachment from the tragedy that he has, and he alone, has brought upon this country,

00:04:38.420 because it doesn't matter what you think of the foreign policy, where you think we should stay,

00:04:42.380 where you think we should go. This was a, one of the deepest active, I can't even use the word

00:04:48.360 incompetent. That's too, too kind. It was a criminally. Cavalier. Cavalier and incompetent,

00:04:54.660 and the, and the detachment from responsibility that he evokes, the jokes that he makes when people

00:05:00.280 say, how are you going to get other people out? And he says, well, you'll be the first person I call

00:05:04.100 ha ha ha. And what really bothers me about this more than anything is, is not what it says about

00:05:09.940 him. I feel that he actually represents a large swath of the democratic political class, uh, that

00:05:16.420 they don't care about what's happening in overseas. They don't care about our foreign policy. They don't

00:05:21.060 care about the way we look to other people. They are so deeply concerned with transforming us

00:05:25.880 into a woke, uh, socialist, uh, you know, uh, European style democracy that they really don't

00:05:34.540 think that we should be meddling anywhere in the world because meddling in the world is what great

00:05:38.760 nations do. Uh, war is what great nations do. Imperial, uh, placements in various places is what

00:05:44.680 great nations do. They have to do it. They have to do it because they become responsible for the rest of

00:05:48.840 the world and they just don't care. And I think that in that sense, at least he is the head of his

00:05:54.540 party. He does represent what his party thinks. When you have Nancy Pelosi making speeches about

00:05:58.960 how proud she is of a budget busting $3.5 trillion plan to transform our economy. Uh, and she's making

00:06:07.280 those speeches while people are throwing their babies over the barbed wire. And she's saying,

00:06:11.280 this is a proud day for America while they're throwing the babies. I have to say that the one

00:06:15.320 thing you have to say about Joe Biden is he does represent the party that he leads. Yeah. I think,

00:06:20.000 uh, as far as Joe Biden himself goes, I thought the most, the most profound moment of that

00:06:24.480 press conference profound in all the wrong ways, uh, was the visual. A lot of times with Joe Biden,

00:06:28.740 now there's the visual first, it's just not to make too much of the, of the, of the body language

00:06:33.260 part of it, but just looking into his eyes, you see a sort of emptiness there. Like he doesn't

00:06:36.600 exactly know what's going on, but there was one moment where he's clutching onto his folder and

00:06:42.200 then he ducks his head down in just exasperation. Like he's giving up in the middle of the press

00:06:46.260 conference, uh, because he's getting a little bit of pushback from Peter Doocy. And I thought that was,

00:06:50.020 that perfectly exemplifies Joe Biden's presidency. And then in the broader question, not to jump

00:06:55.540 right into a, to a debate here, but pick it up. What drew said that these are, you know,

00:07:00.160 our leaders are woke and leftist and that's why they don't want to meddle in the world.

00:07:04.780 I also think I agree with you, but that's also why it's one of the big reasons why I don't want

00:07:09.340 them to be meddling in the world. It's one of the big reasons why I actually think that leaving

00:07:13.300 Afghanistan was the right thing to do, although executed in a horribly incompetent way. But when I think

00:07:18.560 about, you know, a pride flag hanging in Kabul, these, these are people who, even if I agreed that

00:07:23.640 having an empire overseas and being an empire and pursuing our imperial ambitions was a good idea in

00:07:29.260 principle, what I know is that these people are not capable of doing it. And, and what they want to

00:07:35.140 export is not what I want to see exported by the United States of America. I find it shameful and

00:07:39.680 embarrassing. I have been, I think, as charitable as I can be to Joe Biden. I think I've been as

00:07:46.580 charitable as anybody on the center or the right of the political aisle. I haven't, I have not blamed

00:07:52.000 him for problems that I think were many years in the making that were not his. I have not even blamed

00:07:56.640 him that there was some chaos or that there would even be some violence in, in a withdrawal from

00:08:01.380 Afghanistan that both parties have been campaigning on for a long time now. However, there needs to be

00:08:09.200 a basic level of competence. There needs to be a basic level of engagement. It is simply if, I think,

00:08:16.040 even if you're a leftist, even if you're a Democrat, you have to acknowledge that there were really basic

00:08:21.060 things that Biden could have done that would have greatly mitigated the risk, that would have greatly

00:08:25.780 mitigated the violence. And what is happening now in Afghanistan is largely on him. I am sympathetic,

00:08:33.420 as Matt says, I am sympathetic to the arguments for withdrawing. And actually, I'm sympathetic to those

00:08:38.040 specific arguments, as I outlined in a long column, which I thought was fair-minded about this whole

00:08:43.340 thing. Watching that speech tonight, I think it may have been the worst presidential address I've ever

00:08:49.040 seen. He just wasn't there. He was cavalier. He was showing the world that America is inviting

00:08:57.740 aggression from everyone else. It was pathetic.

00:09:02.320 It was pathetic. We should note that the president didn't come on stage for almost 25 minutes late,

00:09:11.220 which this isn't an appointment you want to miss, right? When the president of the United States

00:09:14.920 addresses the nation about the loss of our service members overseas in the middle of a crisis. He was

00:09:20.160 boastful about the size of the airlifts and how many Americans have been withdrawn, which is a classic

00:09:27.520 thing that happens with incompetence. It's that they create crises, and then they want credit for

00:09:33.120 the heroic actions that they take to mitigate the crisis that they themselves created.

00:09:38.420 The dynamite below the waterline of the Titanic blew it open. And then he's like, look how many people

00:09:41.600 we put on the lifeboats. Guinness Book of World Records. Unbelievable. And then the president had

00:09:47.200 this bizarre moment, which I think we can play.

00:09:49.920 Basically, you said you squarely stand by your decision to pull out.

00:09:54.960 Yes, I do. Because look at it this way, folks. And I'm going to, I have another meeting for real.

00:10:00.840 The president had another meeting.

00:10:02.560 For real.

00:10:03.060 For real.

00:10:03.520 He's not lying this time.

00:10:04.480 No, no, no.

00:10:05.060 Not like all the other times when he says that he's lying, but this time.

00:10:07.340 I looked at a timeline of what this administration has been saying since April.

00:10:10.360 Yeah.

00:10:10.700 And they have not said a true word since April.

00:10:13.320 No, of course.

00:10:13.620 In April, the president of the United States said that we would pull out in a considered fashion,

00:10:16.660 that we would do so in a rational fashion that would not pose a danger to the Afghan people

00:10:21.900 or to the United States. That was a lie. In July, he said this would not be like South Vietnam

00:10:28.020 or like Saigon. That was not only a lie, it was a lie by multiples. Because when we pulled out,

00:10:33.940 you can at least say that the Viet Cong, for all of their evils, and there were many of them,

00:10:37.420 had not actually attacked the United States homeland and killed 3,000 Americans in the process.

00:10:41.780 He said on the 18th that nobody had died, knock on wood. He said that the airport was safe.

00:10:48.680 He said that the Taliban were working with us. He's just a damned liar. They have lied all the

00:10:52.860 way through this process. And so when I look at the failures here, I think there's three levels

00:10:56.820 of failure. I think that most of us in the room will agree on two of them, and we'll probably

00:10:59.760 disagree on the third. The first level of failure is the tactical. I think it is impossible

00:11:03.620 to disagree that the tactical failure here is epic and immense. And the fact here is that every

00:11:08.620 single person in the no-no's, you do not evacuate the troops before you evacuate the citizenry.

00:11:13.900 You cannot do that. That is idiotic. That is defund the police, except on a global scale,

00:11:18.280 right? That's getting, that's leaving the place to the criminals.

00:11:20.320 You don't give up the air base before the airline.

00:11:22.280 Right. You don't evacuate Bagram Air Base and restrict yourself to Kabul International Airport,

00:11:25.880 which is one runway with no actual buffer zone. Like, you have to be a complete and utter ass to do

00:11:31.260 this. Joe Biden doesn't care, so he doesn't care. I mean, that's really what this comes down to.

00:11:34.900 There's no empathy from Joe Biden, and his empathy extends to he does not care about what happens

00:11:39.300 here. He's made his decision and damned the consequences. So the tactical nature of this

00:11:42.820 is idiotic. The notion that the Afghan military collapsed because they were all cowards, they

00:11:46.180 took on 50,000 casualties, 50,000 dead between 2015 and 2021. The United States in that same period

00:11:53.020 took on less than 100 dead. So they were shouldering the burden. The reason they collapsed is because

00:11:58.540 Joe Biden decided that not only were we going to withdraw our troops, which you can make an argument

00:12:02.200 about, we were also going to withdraw our close air support. We were going to withdraw all of the

00:12:06.500 civilian contractors who maintained their own air force. So they could not even fly missions in

00:12:10.860 the air, which was their chief tactical advantage against the Taliban in outlying areas. So

00:12:14.920 immediately, the U.S. says, we're gone. We're taking everything with us. And they disband. They're

00:12:17.880 gone. OK, so all the tactical failures, I think, are pretty obvious and easy to spot.

00:12:22.180 Then there's the moral failure. When you make promises to people and then you botch the promises,

00:12:26.740 no ally in the future has any business trusting us. I do not know why our allies would trust us.

00:12:31.300 I don't know why. If you make promises to people, we screwed the Kurds. We've screwed

00:12:34.900 the people of Hong Kong. We've screwed the people of Afghanistan. Like we've screwed the

00:12:38.500 people of Vietnam. Like how many more people can we screw before all of our allies start

00:12:42.260 to look at us and say, you know what? I think I'm going to triangulate a little bit here and

00:12:44.880 see what I can get out of Russia and China. And you left out the one lie you left out,

00:12:48.020 by the way, is the lie that this that somehow our allies are all on board. Oh, yeah.

00:12:52.080 I mean, the parliament of Britain, of Great Britain, our only real friend in the world,

00:12:55.800 besides maybe Israel, they're they're actually holding our president in contempt.

00:13:00.060 And then and then on the same moral level, Joe Biden keeps saying that we went there to

00:13:04.880 stop al Qaeda and prevent this from becoming a terror haven. I've noticed a few terrorists

00:13:08.600 in Kabul lately. I don't know about you guys, but I've noticed like a few like the Haqqani

00:13:11.800 network that's actually running security in Kabul, which is al Qaeda and ISIS, which is there

00:13:16.320 and the Taliban who like last time we trusted the Taliban to stop terror. It ended with a couple

00:13:20.960 of buildings falling down in New York, you may recall. So like on that level, it's just asinine.

00:13:25.500 I would have to I agree with most of what you said. But when it comes to the Afghan army,

00:13:31.040 and this is really almost irrelevant to what happened today, because as you point out, I mean,

00:13:35.320 this is just a total tactical failure in terms of getting people out. And I mean, the fact that we

00:13:39.860 have our troops there facilitating the evacuation of just masses of Afghans, many of them citizens,

00:13:45.540 and we don't know if they helped us or not. I mean, it's hard to believe that they're all

00:13:48.660 interpreters or whatever. So there's there's just no plan in place, which is disgraceful and insane.

00:13:53.180 But as far as the Afghan army goes, I mean, I understand the point that the air support was

00:13:58.740 taken away. I mean, the Taliban didn't have any air support. What we're told anyway, is that the

00:14:04.060 Afghan troops outnumbered the Taliban by three to one. They supposedly had 300,000 strong versus

00:14:08.320 less than 100,000. Now, I can understand when they're training to have the air support,

00:14:14.180 they don't have it, that that's a huge disadvantage that they have to accommodate. But you would think

00:14:18.400 that as a military defending your nation, you would try to accommodate it rather than just

00:14:22.940 give up in two days, which is exactly what they seem to do. I don't I don't think we could put

00:14:28.820 all the blame on the Afghan army like Joe Biden wants to do. But to absolve them of all blame,

00:14:33.780 I think, isn't fair. It's pretty hard to think. The one thing the Afghanis are good at is fighting.

00:14:38.680 And I really don't think that this is a failure of the Afghan army. I think it's a failure. You have

00:14:43.480 to remember the Taliban blend in with the people. They terrify the people. The warlords who the

00:14:49.340 armies were hoping would fight for them in the villages immediately surrendered because their

00:14:54.120 people are, you know, basically in the villages, the people are afraid of the Taliban. They will

00:14:59.220 welcome them back. They're also fighting Pakistan. Pakistan's secret service, which is mostly Islamist,

00:15:04.600 is backing them as and has been backing them to the hilt. I don't really believe I've never seen

00:15:10.100 the Afghan, the Afghani fighters give up on anything. They're a tough bunch.

00:15:14.460 If you talk to the people that have been over there in our military training, the Afghan army,

00:15:20.020 almost everything I've heard from people that have been in that position, and I've heard,

00:15:25.880 I'm sure we all have talked to quite a few, they'll tell you that it's very difficult because,

00:15:31.120 you know, very often they're there sort of on a mercenary basis. If they don't get paid,

00:15:34.880 they don't want to show up. There's a big problem with drugs, huge problem. And it just,

00:15:40.920 talking to people that have been in the position of training, what I've been told is that a lot of

00:15:46.340 the soldiers they're training just don't seem all that interesting. Radical religiously based

00:15:51.160 guerrilla armies tend to do pretty well in organizations, against organizations that don't

00:15:55.980 have a great hierarchical structure, for sure. No question about that. The question is to whether

00:16:00.040 they just sort of gave up and ran away when you structure an entire military around a certain style

00:16:04.400 of warfare, and then you just remove that style of warfare, and you say we're leaving.

00:16:07.720 I agree with this, but the second point is also very important, which is the one thing that they

00:16:12.120 understand in cultures like this is power dynamics. And it's not short-term power dynamics. It's long-term

00:16:18.580 power dynamics. People who I know who were there in 2015 when Barack Obama first gave his we're

00:16:24.280 leaving speech said that almost to the day, within 24 hours, all of the green on blue, the friendly

00:16:32.180 fire attacks started happening. Immediately, all the village elders in any rural part of Afghanistan

00:16:37.600 stopped cooperating with the United States military. And when they would say, you know,

00:16:40.860 we've given you money, we've been fighting on your behalf for years, why now? You won't even talk to

00:16:46.320 us. You won't take our money. You won't say anything. You know, some of the soldiers have

00:16:49.560 started shooting at us. Why? And the Afghan answer was, because you're leaving. And when you are gone,

00:16:57.240 it is only a matter of time before the long-term power dynamics of Iran on our border, of Pakistan

00:17:03.120 on our border. There's no question where this goes once you're gone. And if you're not going

00:17:07.640 to be the power center, the people who are going to be the power center are people who will chop our

00:17:12.640 heads off and rape our daughters. Like, you can't leave us in a position of a power vacuum that we

00:17:19.920 cannot ourselves fill. The Afghan army, of course, it's not a westernized army. Of course, it's not a

00:17:26.120 sophisticated army. Of course, it's not a tremendously lethal army apart from American

00:17:31.100 close air support, American logistics, American intelligence, which is a huge part of it. Of

00:17:36.560 course, that's all true. Since it's true, since we're not talking about people who only kill

00:17:42.000 combatants, since if you're an Afghan soldier fighting the Taliban and your village falls, you may

00:17:47.460 be fine, but they're going to rape your daughters and kill your sons. In that situation, you've left them

00:17:52.780 very little. Given the realities of the society in which they live, you've given them very few

00:17:57.420 options. The point that they're a mercenary force is fair enough, but it is part of the failure

00:18:03.020 of our strategy there. It's not the Afghani army's failure. And I don't mean, listen, I'm not a big

00:18:09.300 fan of the Afghan culture, but still, we created a mercenary force because they had to be loyal to us

00:18:17.100 instead of loyal to what they have been loyal to their tribal identities. Right. And there is no

00:18:22.780 real national identity. Right. And which brings us to the sort of geostrategic point, which is where

00:18:27.100 I think the real conversation lies, which is what were we doing there? And I think there are points

00:18:30.940 of agreement here, too. Well, let's get back to why we were there. What were we doing there? Because

00:18:35.420 that's a pretty big question. Before we do it, I owe our friends over at ExpressVPN a little bit of

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00:20:03.660 Go to expressvpn.com slash backstage right now and learn more. Ben, you were just about to open a can of

00:20:09.560 one. I was. So on the geostrategic point, I feel like there's places where we're all going to agree

00:20:13.020 here, too. And that is, number one, it's not the job of the United States to build democracies out

00:20:18.040 of places that are not right for democracy. Like, I think we're all on the same page there. And I

00:20:21.600 think that if you are going to seek to build regime stability, that is a very, very long-term

00:20:26.580 process. I mean, we currently have 26,000 troops in South Korea still. And were we to pull our troops,

00:20:30.760 they would immediately be, that country would immediately be under threat from North Korea and China

00:20:34.020 sponsoring it. We still have some 30, 34,000 troops, 32,000 troops in Japan. We still have

00:20:40.880 some 10,000 troops in Italy so that we can have air power over Northern Africa. In fact, by the time

00:20:47.180 we left Afghanistan, the number of troops that we had on the ground officially was 2,500. That ranked

00:20:51.060 at number nine in places on earth where we had troops. So the question is, what exactly were we

00:20:55.380 there for? And if the answer, which I think we all agree, was to kill terrorists and make sure this

00:20:59.280 doesn't become another haven for terrorists. Then the question becomes, so what was the dramatic

00:21:04.920 urgency in pulling out, considering that we had been experiencing year on year fewer than 20 combat

00:21:09.500 casualties and zero since February of 2020? Well, I think the question of why we were there,

00:21:14.800 we all might agree on why we would like to have been there or what we wish the reason were. But I

00:21:19.900 don't think that America was clear on that because the argument that we were given in the early days

00:21:24.380 of that war was we're going in there to kill Osama bin Laden and the people who were harboring the

00:21:28.540 terrorists that took down the towers. Then in 2005 at George Bush's second inaugural, the mission was

00:21:34.000 redefined. That was the freedom speech. The word liberty or freedom or liberal was used 49 times in

00:21:40.880 that speech. And he made an audacious claim and I think a ridiculous claim, which is that tyranny

00:21:47.020 anywhere on earth is an existential threat to the American homeland. This was a radical extreme of ways

00:21:56.300 that we've thought of adventurism and spreading our ideas abroad. It was obviously untrue, by the way,

00:22:00.600 because not only do we tolerate certain authoritarian regimes, we've actually installed many

00:22:04.400 authoritarian regimes that have never threatened us with so much as an insulting look. This redefines

00:22:09.900 the mission as building not only a Madisonian democracy in Afghanistan, but talk about a forever

00:22:15.920 war. Now he said, we will abolish tyranny on earth, which so long as man's nature has fallen,

00:22:22.180 I don't think is going to happen and it will commit us to war forever. So he redefined that.

00:22:26.880 Then I think the American people got pretty sick of that in the years that followed.

00:22:30.460 Barack Obama famously campaigned actually to beef up troops in Afghanistan and to take troops out of

00:22:35.440 Iraq to sort of restart the war there. But then he wanted to pull the troops out there as well.

00:22:39.420 Then the mission Donald Trump runs on pulling the troops home, which was popular in both parties at

00:22:43.660 the time. Then Joe Biden obviously maintains that view. Now we're told we have to stay there for the

00:22:49.760 Afghan women who suffer a terrible plight. Nobody is denying that, but women suffer a terrible plight

00:22:54.080 in Pakistan as well.

00:22:55.900 This is not fair. Saying that women suffer in other parts of the world is true enough.

00:23:01.040 The women suffering today in Afghanistan are suffering specifically because of an action

00:23:05.720 that we've taken to withdraw our troops.

00:23:07.560 I think that's off his point though. His point, which is really fair, is that we live in a place

00:23:13.620 where people vote and part of running a war is political. You are dealing with people who have

00:23:19.100 other things to do, like raise their children, do their jobs, and you have to be able to convince

00:23:22.520 them that you're there for a reason. And the reason in Afghanistan has repeatedly changed.

00:23:27.320 It has grown. It's shrunk. It's been different than it was when we first went in there. And then

00:23:32.200 to turn to the people and say, how dare you abandon this mission? They didn't know what the mission was.

00:23:37.380 First of all, I agree with the political failures of our leadership class and of the media

00:23:40.960 in redefining the mission. I mean, again, I think we all mainly agree on the idea that we didn't go

00:23:46.300 into Afghanistan to create a thriving democracy and originally protect women. That was a good

00:23:50.200 byproduct of the fact that wherever the United States boot steps, things tend to get better.

00:23:53.620 But that wasn't the original mission. We didn't go in there because we were going to free women.

00:23:56.680 We freed women as a consequence of going in there, right? So, and as Joe Biden correctly,

00:24:01.400 but oddly in non-sequitur fashion pointed out, if the attack had been launched from Yemen,

00:24:05.700 we wouldn't have been in Afghanistan for women. Of course, that's true. The problem is this.

00:24:10.800 Whether or not the American people are properly informed about what they think the mission is,

00:24:16.300 the rest of life exists. Just because we create a vacuum does not mean that no one is going to fill

00:24:21.660 it. Just because people in the United States and in our leadership class misunderstand what the

00:24:25.460 mission is does not mean that when we remove troops, that does not become a terror hotbed again.

00:24:30.460 And China doesn't take advantage of that terror hotbed to grab, for example, all of the $85

00:24:33.940 billion in military technology we just left there, including high-tech crap, including drone

00:24:38.240 technology, which they're going to immediately reverse engineer. None of that means that China doesn't look

00:24:42.140 at what we just did to the Afghans and say, okay, well, Taiwan's right there. And all we have to do

00:24:46.880 is just move right across this strait and you ain't going to do nothing, right? I mean, it doesn't

00:24:50.560 take much of a mind to discover this. All the terrorist groups on earth look at this and they

00:24:54.660 think that we are weak. So regardless of how this was pitched, and this is my problem with how the

00:25:00.060 Afghan war has been pitched, I think, for the past several years, the first pitch that was wrong was

00:25:05.040 this is about a war for establishing democracy in Afghanistan. You're right.

00:25:08.860 Then there was a second pitch and it was equally stupid. And the pitch was the war of 2017 is

00:25:13.880 exactly the same as the war of 2010, which is a lie. It is not true. The United States had taken

00:25:17.920 down its true presence in Afghanistan from six figures down to about 10,000 by the time Trump

00:25:21.840 left office down to 2,500. And so when people said this is an endless war, and I said, what war do you

00:25:26.840 have 2,500 people stationed in a place with zero casualties for 18 months? You were safer up until

00:25:32.500 Barack, until Joe Biden took office. You were safer being a soldier in Afghanistan than you were being a cop

00:25:38.220 in Chicago, and it wasn't particularly close. The notion that this was an endless war that had to

00:25:43.420 end right now, it had to end right now. And if we don't end it right now, we're going to be putting

00:25:46.140 thousands of troops back in. It is a lie. It is untrue. Again, we've been losing on average before

00:25:51.640 the supposed wonderful deal that Trump made with the Taliban, which I opposed. And I was clear about

00:25:55.800 this. When Trump was in office, I'm perfectly consistent on this. Before that deal, we were losing

00:25:59.680 10, 12 guys a year. That is horrible. Every soldier lost is terrible. That does not constitute a full-scale

00:26:05.760 war. A full-scale war is what was happening in the beginning of the war. We were losing hundreds

00:26:08.540 of guys per year, thousands of guys in some cases. But I think you have to grant, I agree with your

00:26:12.500 point on the losses and the difference in the nature of the war. But it would still be endless.

00:26:17.520 And that is what the Americans... So should you remove all of our troops from South Korea? Is that

00:26:20.860 an endless war? Well, I mean, there is an active civil war going on right now in Afghanistan while our

00:26:25.660 troops were there. And as we learned today, or as many people learned... The civil war in Afghanistan is

00:26:29.800 between the people we went there to depose and the people who we've been supporting for the last 20 years.

00:26:34.080 No, it's also between ISIS, right? As Joe Biden actually rightly said, the Taliban are bad guys,

00:26:40.940 but right now they are our allies against ISIS in this particular battle that we had to deal with

00:26:45.720 today. So all I'm saying is it's complicated. It's not just the Taliban versus the good guy Afghans

00:26:50.660 and us. It's ISIS. It's other Islamic groups. It's unaffiliated group, right? So...

00:26:55.980 But our goal was not to... But our goal was to destroy all of those associated terror groups that you just

00:27:00.860 mentioned. They do have a common interest against us. Now the Taliban have a common interest to a certain

00:27:06.300 extent. To a certain extent. By the way, I'm still not convinced that the Taliban didn't let these guys through

00:27:10.540 to bomb them. No, it could have been, of course not. I mean, even the head of CENTCOM said that today. He was asked

00:27:15.400 directly, did the Taliban just let these people through? They were the ones screening everybody at the

00:27:18.860 outpost. But I think this is the bigger political problem here. So sure, you say, well, we have endless

00:27:23.640 troop presence in Korea or... Literally everywhere. Or wherever. We have troops in dozens and dozens and dozens.

00:27:28.420 Sure. And I do think they're a bit different than Afghanistan, but I grant the point entirely...

00:27:31.440 You have 900 troops on the ground in Syria.

00:27:32.700 But I think this is... And I think the same people who want to pull out of Afghanistan want to pull

00:27:36.400 out of Syria. My point is this. Our founding fathers warned repeatedly against continual warfare.

00:27:44.100 James Madison said, there's no greater threat to liberty than continual warfare.

00:27:48.220 Washington, Jefferson reiterates Washington, and many other founding fathers too. And you might say,

00:27:53.480 well, things are different now than they were then. Fair enough. My point is this, and it's to the

00:27:57.780 political point. The American people are looking at this war in Afghanistan. They're not seeing any

00:28:02.600 particular reason to stay there. They're even looking at the argument that you have to prevent

00:28:06.320 another 9-11 and saying, yes, Saudi nationals were welcomed into Afghanistan, but they then came to

00:28:10.900 America. They trained in America. They were welcomed onto airplanes with tools that were not even illegal

00:28:16.080 to bring on airplanes at the time. Why do we have a Department of Homeland Security? Why can't we deal

00:28:20.160 with these things without having an on-the-ground presence in Afghanistan? And all I'm saying is,

00:28:24.340 whether that is true or not, they have the founding fathers on their side, and so I think we need to

00:28:29.160 answer that question. They don't. The founding fathers went and killed all the Barbary pirates.

00:28:33.200 No, no, no. Knowles is right about this part. The thing is, this was before the invention of the

00:28:37.480 airplane. The world was a very different place. They were talking about a country that was protected by

00:28:41.160 two oceans, and they really did. If you take this- That's why I use the example of Barbary pirates.

00:28:45.000 But still, Barbary pirates were a threat to our trade and our commerce.

00:28:49.720 There is a tradition in America of isolationism, and as far as I'm concerned, I would be okay with

00:28:57.860 either being an isolationist nation or being an imperial nation. What I can't stand is doing both.

00:29:03.020 I cannot stand the promises. I can't stand the changing motivations. I cannot stand an uninformed

00:29:09.400 public, a public who doesn't know. Rightly, rightly, they do not know who we are. They do not know what

00:29:14.960 kind of country we're supposed to be in the world. Personally, I think that empire is unavoidable,

00:29:22.520 and I think the Chinese are about to prove this to us by taking Taiwan, and then we're going to have

00:29:27.160 a much easier time defining who we are. But just remember, just remember that these wars were never

00:29:32.280 paid for. When George W. Bush was asked by the leftist press, what sacrifices are you demanding of

00:29:37.880 America? His answer was essentially, oh, we don't have to sacrifice to pay for it. Well, no, wars are

00:29:41.940 expensive. You do have to pay for them. We never paid for this war in the same way we never pay for

00:29:46.120 the kinds of things that the Democrats buy. We never paid for anything. So we never paid for

00:29:49.700 anything. So the question becomes, where are we going to put our treasure? And I think that that's

00:29:56.260 the argument that we have. And the problem that we have is the Democrats know. They know where they

00:30:01.140 want to put our treasure. And we, on the Republican side or the conservative side, are really confused

00:30:06.320 about this. Having an argument about this that I think we have to settle before the next presidential

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00:31:17.900 If you need more convincing, you can find out more about BCM and their awesome products and the amazing

00:31:22.640 people who make those products at youtube.com slash bravocompanyusa. A couple of points here. First of all,

00:31:29.540 on the, uh, this idea that Afghanistan turns into a hotbed of terror if we're not there. Well,

00:31:33.920 I don't find that terribly persuasive because the entire Middle East, much of Africa, I mean,

00:31:39.540 there are many places that become hotbeds of terror, currently are. So are we supposed to invade and

00:31:44.640 occupy all of those places? I would also say, well, you have to, I'm going to, I'm going to, let me,

00:31:48.600 what are the, no, no, no, this, but I'll let you, this argument of bad things happen everywhere. Are we

00:31:53.660 supposed to go invade and occupy those places is revisionist. No one's making an argument here that we

00:31:58.200 need to go invade Afghanistan and occupy it. We went to Afghanistan and we did occupy it.

00:32:04.740 You can't, it's the equivalent of saying, uh, you know, I shouldn't have had sex with Maggie

00:32:10.340 Johnson back in junior year. Uh, and, uh, so therefore now on my child's 10th birthday,

00:32:17.000 I'm going to walk away from my child and Maggie whom I married and the mortgage, which we took out

00:32:21.500 together because I've realized I never should have gone there. And when you say, Hey, but no, no,

00:32:24.780 no. Did you marry Afghanistan? You actually went there. You actually did something. There

00:32:28.000 are consequences. That goes to my, that goes to my next point. And actually that analogy I think

00:32:31.860 is, is important because, uh, I don't, in a marriage, you make an undying eternal commitment

00:32:38.000 to a person at an altar before God. Um, I, I don't believe that the United States of America has made

00:32:43.940 that kind of commitment to any foreign nation or can. And in fact, if, if any government, if any,

00:32:48.400 if any politician tries to make that kind of commitment to another foreign nation, it's not

00:32:52.200 legitimate and there's no reason why it should be respected. I mean, you, you, you talk about,

00:32:55.420 you talk about a million people don't get killed and raped. Well, but you, you talk about, uh, well,

00:32:58.680 we're in South Korea. We're in, we're in, uh, Japan and Germany and Italy. We're in all these

00:33:02.440 places. Well, well, there's an obvious response to that is maybe we shouldn't be there either. I

00:33:06.940 mean, it's their country and the idea. So let's, can I take that for a second? I just want to ask you a

00:33:10.540 question on that specific point. So it's 1953. We signed the, I mean, since we're doing

00:33:15.880 original history now, it's 1953, we signed the, the armistice agreement off on the 49th parallel

00:33:21.320 in Korea. And we say, now you're president of the United States is the answer. Okay. We're done

00:33:28.580 out. We have no interest here. Well, that is how you lose cold wars. Yeah. No, because it's,

00:33:33.200 but it's not 1953 I'm talking about in the year. I know. And I'm talking about 2021. Do you sign an

00:33:37.300 agreement to say the Taliban gets to take over this country and bring in exactly the same people who

00:33:40.580 did nine 11, which is exactly what's happening right now. Yeah. And in 2021, I would take our

00:33:45.420 troops out of Afghanistan. I would do it a lot different than Joe Biden did. I wouldn't

00:33:48.140 shut down our airports. What strategic interest is served by pulling our troops from Afghanistan?

00:33:52.500 Well, it's, first of all, it's not only a strategic interest. But what is the strategic

00:33:56.080 interest? There's, there's, there's two points here. Okay. I mean, this is a strategic point,

00:34:00.100 I guess as well. The idea that the United States of America should be perpetually holding nations,

00:34:08.120 foreign nations into existence, which cannot exist on their own without our help. I just reject that

00:34:14.820 strategically and I reject it philosophically. And I just don't think that that should be our role

00:34:20.420 unless as Drew says, we're going to embrace it and say, you know what? We are an empire and this

00:34:26.940 is what we do. We build empires. We take over, you know what? We're going to take over Afghanistan.

00:34:30.680 It's ours now. It's our property. And if, if that's the argument, then okay, let's make that

00:34:34.360 argument. But our empire is a uniquely American empire. So West Germany could not have survived as a

00:34:41.780 nation if America hadn't left its troops there. It would have fallen to the Soviet Union in minutes

00:34:46.020 if the Americans had pulled out. We, we think that like Berlin is in West Germany, by the way,

00:34:51.560 it's in East Germany. And we had, you know, we were cut off from access. We flew the Berlin airlifts

00:34:56.640 to keep that city free. And it's not just that if we had left the next day, if we had left five years

00:35:03.460 later, if we left 10 years later, if we had left 20 years later, similarly back to the South Korea

00:35:08.120 example, it took, first of all, a world war to drive the Japanese empire out of South Korea,

00:35:14.360 then a Korean war to keep the North and the Chinese and Russians from taking South Korea,

00:35:19.080 33,000 American dead just in that war. And then occupation by our troops, not, not in the old

00:35:24.540 imperial sense, because we didn't run their government just like we didn't in Afghanistan,

00:35:27.840 but in this uniquely American way where our troops provide the, the, the opportunity for that

00:35:33.260 nation to form. We had to do that for 42 years before South Korea became a functioning democracy.

00:35:40.320 And after they became a functioning democracy, we've continued to have our troops there for 35

00:35:45.360 more years so that that democracy could learn to thrive. Do you, do you think that it is America's

00:35:52.280 duty to actually perpetually hold other countries into existence, to keep them in existence? Is that

00:35:58.800 if we're, if we're the ones who broke the country in the case of Afghanistan, whatever, whatever the

00:36:03.960 political argument for why we went there, we went, should we have stayed for a week and then left?

00:36:09.280 That's a conversation that we can prescriptively apply some of those lessons to future problems

00:36:14.920 that you can't retroactively. Would you really say we broke Afghanistan? It wasn't exactly a thriving

00:36:18.760 place when we got in. It was not a thriving place, but the, the problems faced by the current,

00:36:22.240 listen, the, the, the median age in Afghanistan is like 18 years. We've been there 20. The people in,

00:36:27.380 especially urban Kabul, the people in these cities that are falling right now, they're not like the

00:36:32.540 guys who were there when we went in. This isn't people who ever lived under the Taliban. This

00:36:36.720 isn't people, this isn't women. Hold on. This isn't women who ever wore Perkins.

00:36:40.040 These arguments, these arguments do not, the reason these arguments don't hold water is because

00:36:43.820 they're all really about the cold war and the cold war was in a fight between two.

00:36:47.760 No, my argument is about Afghanistan. I'm saying we went into Afghanistan. No, we went into Afghanistan.

00:36:54.040 We went into Afghanistan, wherever you think we should have, hold on.

00:36:56.860 The second part of your argument, that's the second part of your argument.

00:36:59.160 We held it for 20 years. We held it for 20 years. And now in leaving, we are the cause

00:37:04.980 of the terrible things that are happening there right now. I don't agree with it. I don't agree

00:37:07.540 with this at all. Knowles was right about this. It was, the place is a mess. It was, it's going

00:37:11.120 to be a mess unless we stay. And it was a mess before we got there. But the thing about

00:37:14.840 Korea, the thing about Germany, the thing about Italy is all of these places were places we

00:37:20.260 occupied to keep the Soviets and the Chinese out. Right. And the thing is, no, what I'm,

00:37:24.860 and what I'm, what I'm saying is we are about to be, enter a new cold war that I think there's

00:37:30.400 no question about it. We're already halfway in it. However, however, that the Taliban never,

00:37:37.100 and even Islamism never constituted the existential threat to our way of life that we basically

00:37:43.100 sold it as having. And that's, that's the key thing here. That's the key difference. And

00:37:46.860 so in other words, if, if now you're going back 20 years and saying that the arguments were wrong,

00:37:50.680 I'm saying right now, today, as we speak, an actual thing is occurring. I'm sorry. I, you,

00:37:55.840 we, we do not have a responsibility to every country, even, even if this thing, we broke it.

00:38:00.140 I didn't say we have a responsibility to every country. We have a responsibility to the country

00:38:03.220 we are in and have occupied for the last 20 years. So let's put aside for a second,

00:38:07.080 the quote unquote. We have a responsibility to Puerto Rico. That doesn't mean that we also

00:38:10.760 have a responsibility to Costa Rica. Puerto Rico is our protectorate. No, no, I don't agree with

00:38:15.800 Well, I mean, here's the real. Hold on one. So we're not responsible. This is a legitimate

00:38:21.040 question. We're not responsible for what's happening right now. Well, wait a minute. Wait

00:38:24.400 a minute. So, so much of what's happened. This is what's a little confusing about the conversation

00:38:27.820 is so much of what's happening is a matter of this incredible, I mean, this is criminal

00:38:32.660 incompetence we're talking about. This is not just like, Ooh, I left my shirt at home. You know,

00:38:36.780 I forgot to bring my tie to work. This is an. Because Biden's argument is it had to happen like

00:38:41.380 this. Yeah. That's completely insane. Yeah. So there are a few things that I think

00:38:45.540 were also conflating. One is the, the morality of the situation, whether we owe it to the people

00:38:50.260 of Afghanistan to stay there forever because they're the people of Afghanistan and they came

00:38:54.060 to rely upon us. And I think there, there's an argument to say that the answer is no, not in

00:38:58.120 perpetuity. We're still America. We have our own interests. Then there's the question that I

00:39:02.420 actually want to ask, which is why is it in our interest to turn this back over to the Taliban,

00:39:07.060 have it be a terrorist hotbed, incentivize China to go and get all the rare earth's minerals,

00:39:10.560 incentivize China to invade Taiwan. And why is all of that worth it to take 2,500 troops

00:39:15.180 out of a position where no one was dying? That's the thing. Nobody seems to be able to answer.

00:39:19.060 I think we're not talking about a hundred thousand troops there. Yeah. I'm not talking

00:39:22.160 about tens of that. So Joe Biden's excuse for this is that if we didn't, then tomorrow there'd

00:39:26.660 be a vast wall of Taliban fighters coming over that wall. There is zero evidence of this. None.

00:39:31.320 Okay. We'd had a stasis situation in Afghanistan effectively since 2014. That's pretty much nothing

00:39:36.980 had changed. So what we are talking about, we talk about ending endless wars. I think that that,

00:39:40.760 I think that's a bumper sticker slogan because it does not count as an endless war. When you station

00:39:44.040 a baseline force of 2,500 people there with zero casualties for a year and a half.

00:39:48.120 Is there any reason to think that that would maintain though, given that?

00:39:50.500 Yes.

00:39:50.700 Given that Afghanistan is not South Korea.

00:39:52.880 It has maintained for the last, it's maintained for the last six to seven years. I think that there

00:39:56.340 is, I think that there is very little evidence that the Taliban were on the verge of radically

00:40:00.520 overrunning the country. I've yet to see Joe Biden present any of that intelligence evidence.

00:40:03.720 Do you think if we stayed exactly as we were 10 years from now, do you think we've now gone 16 years

00:40:09.640 without, without it? I think that what, I think what you would see is what we have typically seen

00:40:13.960 in situations like this. When it gets a little hotter, we put in a few more troops. When it

00:40:16.820 gets a little colder, we take out a lot more troops. I don't think there's a situation in

00:40:19.480 Afghanistan where we're dumping another hundred thousand troops in there because we had forces

00:40:22.980 on the ground constantly, constantly degrading the Taliban.

00:40:26.960 Because the Afghan army at the cost of thousands and thousands of lives a year,

00:40:32.180 we're going and killing the Taliban.

00:40:33.260 So this is, so my question again is not, we can go back to the fundamental principles of,

00:40:36.700 you know, when do we owe things to people? I think also, but, but I think that, you know,

00:40:40.800 Drew, you mentioned the Cold War. The world is filled with threats on a consistent basis.

00:40:44.460 This is where you and I agree.

00:40:45.820 The notion that the Defense Department exists mainly as a make work program for people to sit

00:40:50.240 on a base in Alabama is silly. Okay. This has become the democratic talking point,

00:40:53.760 which is that our soldiers should never be put in the line of combat in favor of American

00:40:57.760 interests, unless those interests are existential to the United States. This has never been the

00:41:01.540 perspective of any nation that has been worth its salt.

00:41:03.780 Well, this is the part where you and I agree. I mean, this is, this is the thing.

00:41:06.180 So, and what I'm saying is it seems like a fairly cheap deal to me to have been stationing

00:41:11.760 2,500 troops in country, providing air support, close air support with some military contractors

00:41:17.900 at the cost of like 0.5% of the United States budget every year to keep the Taliban from taking

00:41:23.800 back over the country and re-bringing in Al-Qaeda and re-bringing in ISIS and turning,

00:41:28.380 I mean, we spent, you know how much money we had to spend and how many troops we had to put

00:41:30.700 back into Iraq just to quell ISIS. And I remember you being in favor of that.

00:41:34.080 This is all, this is all based on the assumption that the situation right now would maintain in

00:41:38.840 this tribalistic hellhole country in the middle of a civil war between all these various different

00:41:43.520 factions. I just, I don't think, first of all, there's any reason to think that that's true.

00:41:46.800 We're going through six to seven years in the grand scheme of history is nothing at all. So

00:41:50.260 we're going through a period of relative...

00:41:51.660 20 years in the grand scheme of history is hardly anything at all.

00:41:55.240 Agreed. But so we're, they're going through a period of relative calm,

00:41:58.320 if we can call it that in Afghanistan. I don't think there's any reason to think that it would,

00:42:01.100 that it would maintain that way. And there was always this threat when you send our,

00:42:03.860 our guys over to Afghanistan, they're still at least at a serious threat of being killed in

00:42:09.280 service to this relatively...

00:42:11.040 No, they really were not. They really were not. You have 2,500 troops there and zero combat

00:42:15.540 deaths since February of 2020.

00:42:16.940 Well, but that...

00:42:17.640 And seven years prior.

00:42:18.520 But I'm saying that could change at any moment. There's no reason to think that could...

00:42:21.120 That's true at any moment.

00:42:21.780 Matt, that's true. That's true literally anywhere on earth. That's true literally anywhere on earth.

00:42:25.340 No.

00:42:25.520 I don't think it'll turn into a hotbed.

00:42:28.280 Yeah, it's not true in Japan. I mean, Japan, I think...

00:42:31.380 If China decides to get militaristic with Japan and they have fired some missiles into the Sea

00:42:34.220 of Japan, you could get militaristic pretty there. And everyone knows in South, South Korea is the

00:42:38.240 biggest hot spot, right? We've got 26,000 troops there as a trip wire.

00:42:40.940 But you would agree that Japan and Germany are not nearly as volatile as Afghanistan.

00:42:46.760 Right.

00:42:47.160 The volatility is the reason to keep the American presence. The volatility is the reason to have...

00:42:51.520 When we invaded Afghanistan, we had to use hand-drawn Russian-era maps. We had no intelligence.

00:42:57.220 We knew nothing about Afghanistan. We knew very little about border Pakistan. We had very little

00:43:02.460 eyes into Iran. Pakistan, by the way, a nuclear power with 75 nuclear weapons, who already their

00:43:09.660 intelligence service for this whole time has been sympathetic to the Taliban. And now they have

00:43:15.280 ejected all Americans since Biden's withdrawal in the last two weeks.

00:43:18.780 Are you guys making two different arguments? Because you're saying, on one hand, we should

00:43:21.060 stay there because it's peaceful and nobody's dying. On the other hand, we should stay there

00:43:23.520 because it's volatile.

00:43:25.320 I'm saying that America's strategic...

00:43:26.480 We're making the same argument. We're keeping a lid on it. And we were keeping a lid on it.

00:43:28.880 And now you remove the lid and they get a shit show.

00:43:30.660 And it's in America's strategic interest to have...

00:43:33.120 Not have a shit show there.

00:43:33.980 Not have a shit show there.

00:43:34.400 But this goes back to the political failure. And it's a political failure that has gone on since

00:43:38.680 the Bush administration. You can't say to people, we're going in there to get

00:43:43.140 bin Laden. I mean, this is still a democracy of some sort. You can't say, we're going in there to get

00:43:47.640 bin Laden. Oh no, we're going in there to build a civilized country. Oh no, we're going in there

00:43:54.040 because we need Bagram in order to fight the Chinese interests. No, you can't do that and

00:44:00.820 succeed unless, unless we understand ourselves to be in a conflict of great powers. And this is

00:44:08.300 where you and I agree. I think this great, the conflict of great powers is inevitable.

00:44:12.220 And we should start...

00:44:12.640 It's here. We're already in a conflict of great powers.

00:44:13.840 It's always here. It's always here. And we should start to talk like that. I never want

00:44:19.680 to fight a selfless war ever again. I never want to hear you broke it, you fix it ever again. I

00:44:24.720 want to be... When my fellow Americans send their sons and daughters into harm's way, I want to know

00:44:31.420 that they are there for this country and for our interests. And part of our interests is fending

00:44:37.780 off China. I wish most of our major corporations knew this.

00:44:41.520 I will say, you better have a damned compelling reason for pulling out 2,500 troops from a place

00:44:46.900 where they're the lid and they're the cork in the bottle, especially when that is now going to

00:44:50.940 subject 19 million women to rape. You better have a very good reason and better not be a slogan like

00:44:55.400 no endless war. That is not good enough.

00:44:57.200 You know, you guys keep saying these things, slogans. All of democratic politics are slogans.

00:45:03.380 Don't be a deconstructionist.

00:45:04.300 No, I'm not being a deconstructionist. I'm talking about the reality of political...

00:45:08.640 I have a question. When did this become about whether... Just because the American people

00:45:13.440 like a thing does not mean that they are correct to like the thing.

00:45:16.220 But it doesn't have a right to set their nation's course, doesn't it? I mean, I think they still...

00:45:20.200 I know that, especially for recent decades, there is this idea that...

00:45:24.860 On foreign policy, they 100% do not. What's the last congressionally approved war?

00:45:29.100 What's the last congressionally approved war?

00:45:30.920 Well, this wasn't a war. I mean, that's the other problem. Was this a war? Was this an occupation?

00:45:34.560 I understand. Michael, if we're talking about the realities on the ground, when was the last time

00:45:38.320 the American people approved a war?

00:45:39.600 But this gets to Jeremy's point. I actually think Jeremy made a very good point here, which is when

00:45:44.000 you said, yes, America's an empire, but it's a special kind of empire. And I jokingly, but not so

00:45:48.920 jokingly, said, yeah, it's special because we don't admit that we're an empire.

00:45:51.980 And the reason that we don't admit it, by the way, is because our nation is founded not

00:45:57.480 to be an empire. And all of our most revered founding fathers said, don't do this. Don't

00:46:01.680 have perpetual war. Don't have entangling alliances. Don't go overseas.

00:46:04.480 And then they proceeded to move directly from one coast all the way across to the other coast,

00:46:07.940 all the way down to the coast, fighting the whole way.

00:46:10.060 But they didn't occupy it as some imperial territory. They would bring it into the nation.

00:46:13.620 Wait, wait, hold up. They didn't ask that as an imperial territory?

00:46:15.780 No, you know, they would annex it into the nation.

00:46:16.420 They were literally federal territories until they became states.

00:46:18.440 Until they became states. Are we going to make Afghanistan a state? I don't think so.

00:46:21.200 If you go to the...

00:46:22.280 Nobody's talking about making Afghanistan a state, but the notion that there was...

00:46:24.420 Hold on. You're talking about empire and the nation.

00:46:26.000 Wait, wait. So you're saying that it is not imperialistic. You're saying it's less imperialistic

00:46:30.060 to make a thing a state...

00:46:31.700 Yes, by definition, because it becomes a nation.

00:46:33.500 Yeah, because it's part of the nation. But if you hold it as an...

00:46:36.220 Take a place over and you... That's ridiculous.

00:46:38.000 I'm sorry. It's ridiculous.

00:46:38.840 The British Empire... Hold on. The British Empire turned us into British citizens.

00:46:42.620 If you go to the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C., it says,

00:46:46.900 we came to liberate, not to conquer. And that's been basically our idea with all...

00:46:52.120 That's why our troops have been there for seven years.

00:46:53.480 With everywhere else. Well, okay, then what Knowles is saying is right,

00:46:56.820 that the problem with our empire is we don't admit it's an empire.

00:46:59.680 Now, Ferguson makes this argument all the time. And I think he's got a point.

00:47:04.180 And I think if you don't make the argument, if you don't tell the truth, the American people who

00:47:08.500 still do vote for the president of the United States, who still is the guy who runs most of

00:47:12.820 our foreign policy, are not going to be convinced. And you can't accuse them of bumper sticker

00:47:18.020 slogans when you're basically selling them...

00:47:20.420 Yes, I do pretty much everything else politically.

00:47:21.440 You're basically selling them a bumper sticker slogan themselves.

00:47:23.520 I still think just we're operating with this assumption that because the situation was a certain

00:47:29.080 way, it's going to maintain that way. And that denies the risk that our military was in,

00:47:34.080 over there. I know that it's been a certain way for a few years, but I don't think we can do that.

00:47:37.980 I don't think it's fair to do because part of this is we're sending, you know, our sons and

00:47:42.000 daughters are actually going over there. And there is, many of them have died in the last few years,

00:47:46.960 not as many, but there's always that threat of something terrible happening to them, as we've

00:47:50.460 just discovered. And on top of that as well, I mean, there are other things too that we haven't

00:47:54.980 brought up. Like one of them, again, talking to the veterans that served over there,

00:47:58.520 even in the peacetime, they'll talk about things like, you know, I don't know,

00:48:02.980 they have to come home traumatized because they have to overlook child rape, which is utterly

00:48:06.760 widespread in the Afghan army and in the Afghan leadership. And they're just over there and

00:48:11.960 they have to just deal with it. And they're told, not to mention the threat of being killed by our

00:48:16.080 supposed allies. But even that alone, like just that piece alone, to me means send our guys home

00:48:23.660 because I'm not, they got to go over there and look the other way while children are raped left and

00:48:28.460 right. And it was as widespread as that. Wait, hold on. Are you going to be a realist

00:48:32.580 or are you going to be a moralist here? I mean, I'm going to need one or the other.

00:48:34.900 Well, you're answering, you're answering the moralism with a sort of moralistic argument

00:48:38.540 on the other. It's not a moral, it's not a moral answer though, to say X people do bad

00:48:43.540 things. Therefore, let's create a vacuum in which people who didn't do those things suffer

00:48:47.560 horrible moral consequences. I'm trying to, I'm trying to bring it back around to focusing

00:48:50.800 on the actual human beings, our countrymen and our service members who we are sending into

00:48:55.400 these situations. So when we say that there hasn't been a combat death in six or seven

00:48:59.680 years, I think that that overlooks. In 18 months. In 18 months. And few for, you know, relatively.

00:49:05.320 There has been relatively few for six or seven years. When we say that, that overlooks some

00:49:09.440 realities that they were living with that I think we have to at least contend with if we're going

00:49:13.500 to have this conversation. No, look, putting the military in places always is a question of

00:49:17.600 cost versus benefit. And so you're lining up costs. And I'm saying that there were actual benefits.

00:49:23.820 And I think one of the things that's happened here is that what has happened in the wake of

00:49:28.200 the United States pulling out is being labeled a potential cost to the United States when it is

00:49:33.240 an actual cost to the United States. Meaning that what Joe Biden has done is in the aftermath of

00:49:37.140 us pulling out and as they bomb American troops and as the Taliban takes over the country again,

00:49:41.720 and as ISIS comes back in, as Al Qaeda comes back in, my argument is pretty simple. If we hadn't left,

00:49:46.600 this wouldn't have happened. And my evidence for this is that if we hadn't have left,

00:49:49.540 this wouldn't have happened. Joe Biden's argument is if we had stayed, this would have happened.

00:49:54.800 He's going to have to prove that case stronger than I think this would have happened because

00:49:58.920 the counterfactual is already here. It's happening. It's happened. The Taliban have taken over the

00:50:03.840 country. So I already know that if A, then B. He is saying if not A, then B. He's going to,

00:50:09.920 that doesn't exist. That's an alternative history. And the last data point that I had was that it

00:50:13.980 wasn't happening until he pulled out the troops. So unless he can show me, which he has not done,

00:50:17.780 extremely compelling data, that leaving 2,500 troops in place was going to result in this

00:50:22.800 straw man argument where we have 50,000 troops back in there fighting close hand-to-hand combat

00:50:26.920 in Mazar-i-Sharif, I'm going to need some actual evidence of that, not some bullshit from Joe Biden

00:50:30.980 to justify the fact that he wanted to pull out in 2010 and can't get his head out of his ass.

00:50:34.560 This is also why that I don't want any more selfless wars. I don't want any more selfless wars.

00:50:39.060 Okay. You can prescriptively take that wisdom into the future. This wasn't a selfless war.

00:50:45.220 It is a selfish... There was unanimity going in by that.

00:50:48.080 It is a selfish... Oh yeah, but we went into a very specific reason.

00:50:50.720 It is a selfish withdrawal. We actually do bear... We don't bear... America is not responsible for

00:50:56.180 every humanitarian crisis in the world. We're just responsible for the ones that we create.

00:51:01.140 We are creating this crisis. If we had gone in, tried to kill bin Laden and left, if we had used

00:51:06.080 airstrikes and left... I don't buy the Colin Powell if you break it. We bought it.

00:51:10.360 But if you break it, create it, hold it, let a generation of people come of age under

00:51:17.040 American protection, and then just decide on a whim for no strategic upside, that you're

00:51:22.520 just going to bail on them and leave them all to the slaughter, you do have a moral responsibility.

00:51:26.500 That's the last part about no strategic upside just for a minute. I think that argument is

00:51:31.440 basically saying we have to throw good money after bad. If we go into a place and we have

00:51:35.520 a American interest and we cannot find... We cannot serve that American interest and we

00:51:41.140 withdraw because we can't serve that American interest and there is... And the country reverts

00:51:45.800 to what it was before we got there. You know, I'm not sure I can hold us responsible for that.

00:51:50.860 We're responsible for the two million people who died in Southeast Asia after we abandoned

00:51:54.660 the South Vietnamese. Of course we... Of course we bear... We bear responsibility. We are not

00:52:00.720 wholly responsible. I mean... We bear responsibility.

00:52:02.860 Domestic context. The question is, are the people who are pushing defund the police responsible

00:52:05.960 for an increase in crime? To my mind, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Okay. Well, this is the exact

00:52:10.420 same thing internationally. If you remove the cops, and then people go around killing other

00:52:13.560 people. Yeah, but... But as soon as you were the cops... Then you're embracing us as the world

00:52:16.180 police... But we are the cops. We went over and took over that country. We were in the position of being

00:52:20.720 the cops. In fact, we didn't just take over that country. We created that. By the way, you can make the case.

00:52:23.820 So you can make the case that if you had to redeploy the people, like, to take the domestic

00:52:28.180 context. If you had the police in one area, right? When you had to make the decision, we

00:52:31.860 need to redeploy the police from here to here. Because it's more important to have them over

00:52:34.840 here. Or the cost that we are undergoing in this city, you know, for the police, too many

00:52:38.580 cops are dying. We're removing them and we're putting them here. You're still responsible for

00:52:42.640 what comes next over here. Because you've removed the police. But at least you can say the costs

00:52:46.720 here were worth the benefits here. The point that we're having in Afghanistan right now is

00:52:50.780 that the costs here are accruing not only no benefit, but negative benefits.

00:52:54.660 So I think the question that is coming up is what changed? Not only what changed in the

00:52:58.860 last 10, 20 years, but what changed since 1950? What changed since our establishment of a sort

00:53:05.440 of empire overseas? And I think we should define the terms because we're using different terms

00:53:10.960 for imperialism and nationalism. When I say that Texas, the acquisition of Texas is not imperialism,

00:53:18.060 I mean, of course, it's imperialism when you go and you... And Lincoln thought it was imperialism.

00:53:21.380 But when you make it part of the nation, that is a very different thing. Or even Hawaii,

00:53:25.460 for that matter, making it part of the nation. That is a very different thing than the British

00:53:28.220 nation. I don't know what they're talking about. I don't know what they're talking about.

00:53:29.280 The point, well, I'll show you the distinction. When Great Britain holds India as an imperial

00:53:35.380 territory, it is not holding it as a part of the British nation. It is recognizing this is a distinct

00:53:40.940 culture, a distinct country, part of its own thing, but we are holding it. We are the British empire.

00:53:45.700 We don't really do that with Texas, as distinct as Texas is. We say it's all part of the American

00:53:50.800 nation. Now, we hold imperial territories like Puerto Rico. We've held other imperial territories

00:53:54.800 that because of our national origin, we gave up and we have always felt uncomfortable with in the

00:53:59.740 19th and 20th century. But this brings us then to the question, what changed between 1950 and today?

00:54:05.600 And it gets back to your point, Drew, and it gets to your point also, Matt, which is we in the

00:54:11.540 middle of the 20th century, we're a strong superpower with a lot of national cohesion that knew who we

00:54:17.360 were. We knew what it meant to send truth, justice, and the American way overseas. We can't even put

00:54:21.420 that in Superman movies anymore. They actually cut that line out. To your point, Matt, you say,

00:54:26.260 what are we there for? Are we going to raise the pride flag on the embassy in Kabul, which we

00:54:29.540 actually did? I don't think a lot of Americans are going to get behind that. That has become a sort of

00:54:33.760 imperial flag, but a lot of people don't support it. And so I think it's very important if you want

00:54:37.680 to choose. Are we just a nation or are we just an empire? Or is it inevitable to become an empire,

00:54:42.260 which I think probably it is for great nations? What is the empire? What is it? And I just think

00:54:47.520 if you're in a situation where we can't agree on anything, in this country, we can't even agree on

00:54:51.920 the definition of man and woman at this point. You've got major political activists with the

00:54:56.160 support of the Democratic Party burning down the country for 2020. I'm just not sure that we have

00:55:00.680 the ability to project that overseas. I'm not sure what we're projecting.

00:55:03.540 This, I think, is an enormous, enormous strategic and ideological mistake. If the notion is that

00:55:09.320 the weaknesses and internal failures of the United States do not allow us to either pursue a strategic

00:55:14.460 interest overseas or to say to the Taliban, sorry, whatever it is that we are pursuing is better

00:55:20.140 than what you are pursuing, then I think that there are failures on the right as well. I'm not a fan of

00:55:24.940 the problem. I just want to make this one point. I'm not making even a prescriptive argument here.

00:55:30.400 It's a descriptive argument?

00:55:31.540 And the descriptive argument is this. 70% of Americans want it out of Afghanistan and the

00:55:36.220 majority of Americans, both parties, have wanted out for a long time. I'm not saying that's a good

00:55:41.040 thing. I'm just saying I think the reason for that is the collapse of our cohesion and we had a lot

00:55:45.680 more of it.

00:55:46.060 I don't think that.

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00:57:04.700 So I wanted to make a quick point on this, which is that I totally, listen, you don't have to argue

00:57:08.760 to me about the lack of cohesion and the moral decline of the United States, right? I think that as a

00:57:12.840 nation, one of the symptoms that we are so eager to get out of Afghanistan, I think that is a symptom of

00:57:16.740 the fact that we are a nation that is ready to climb into a warm bath, get fat, and slit our wrists.

00:57:20.660 I think that is where we are as a country. I think that's why Joe Biden is president right now,

00:57:24.140 because he's effectively a senile president presiding over a nation in a tragic state of decay.

00:57:31.640 I think that seems like what it is unless there's some sort of dramatic resurgence.

00:57:35.160 With that said, I think what happened in American foreign policy is pretty obvious. We had a mission

00:57:38.960 when the Soviet Union was around because we recognized there were existential threats to the United States

00:57:42.560 in the form of the Soviet Union. Then the Soviet Union fell, and we figured we have no idea what

00:57:46.840 the hell we're doing, right? Are we doing this for capitalism? Are we doing this for liberalism?

00:57:50.160 Are we doing this for nothing? Should we do Pat Buchanan retrenchment? Should we instead try and

00:57:54.400 spread the message of the IMF? Like, what exactly are we doing here? What we failed to recognize is that

00:58:00.180 once again, nature and foreign policy abhor a vacuum. And the notion that the United States was

00:58:05.040 forever and always, that we'd reached the Francis Fukuyama end of history, which of course is slightly

00:58:08.860 misinterpreted, but that we had reached that end of history where the United States was destined to

00:58:12.740 be the everlasting hegemon, created the sense of, so what do we do with all this stuff? What do we do

00:58:17.700 with all this power? And what that failed to recognize is that there are always powers on

00:58:21.800 the move. And that is what you're seeing in Afghanistan right now. And the fact is that when

00:58:25.500 we leave, it is not as though everything just goes back to a tribal state of warfare with no

00:58:28.720 externalities. By the way, the Taliban was in charge for a grand total of five years in

00:58:32.720 Afghanistan. Everybody acts like the Taliban was in charge since forever. They were in a state of

00:58:35.900 constant civil war with serious externalities, particularly the Soviets and for surrounding

00:58:39.680 republics, for quite a long time. And the United States was deeply involved in Afghanistan all

00:58:43.480 the way back in the 50s, right? Eisenhower actually flew into Kabul airport in 1959. So the United

00:58:48.340 States has always been involved all over the world. The question is always one of costs and

00:58:52.580 benefits, which I keep coming back to this because I think that's a hard-headed way of doing foreign

00:58:55.720 policy. And so I ask, again, I don't see the benefit in pulling out other than the fulfillment

00:59:00.500 of this muddle-headed idea that we have somehow sinned in being in Afghanistan or to continuing

00:59:06.300 sin to remain in Afghanistan at extraordinarily low cost to keep a lid on what was going on there,

00:59:10.720 and especially in the face of Chinese aggression. The notion in American foreign policy,

00:59:15.320 we were able to keep an empire effectively during the Cold War because we were doing so as an

00:59:20.220 anti-communist empire. Not because we were doing so as an American empire, but because we were able

00:59:23.840 to do all the stuff saying we were opposing the Soviets, right? And the reality is nature is going to

00:59:28.180 force us back into that. You can say we're out of Afghanistan. Not for long. We ain't.

00:59:31.480 That's right. We were out of Iraq, and then we were back in Iraq.

00:59:34.140 What you just said is far more in keeping with my tragic view of these things than anything else

00:59:38.520 that anybody's talking about. But in the interim, during this end of history phase, we did fall

00:59:43.920 apart. And Knowles is right about this. It is very hard to project power without a... It's very hard to

00:59:50.240 project the kind of power that is American power without an American set of values. And we no longer have

00:59:55.840 an American set of values. And I think, listen, it's a tragic... It is a truly tragic thing that

01:00:01.240 it is China that is about to force us back into the great game. But in forcing us back into the

01:00:05.900 great game, it will help us redefine who we are. Because it's not true that everything we did

01:00:09.700 against the Soviets was simply against the Soviets. We were against the Soviets because they stood for

01:00:14.580 something that we didn't stand for. And it was only in my horrific, cursed generation that we lost

01:00:20.680 the plot of what we stood for against the Soviets.

01:00:23.020 No, I agree. I agree with everything you just said. And by the way, just one more thing.

01:00:26.960 You know, Vietnam gets a bad rap and in some ways it deserves a bad rap. But the Chinese looked at

01:00:31.260 us in Vietnam and thought, those people are crazy. And it kept them in line for 50 years. And they

01:00:36.180 didn't really start to stretch out their imperial tentacles because they saw we were going to fight

01:00:41.940 them on every level. And they just didn't want any part of that.

01:00:44.540 Yeah. So I agree with what you just said. And I agree with what you just said. The reason to remain

01:00:49.200 in Afghanistan is America's strategic interest. I do think that we're abstracting our way out of

01:00:54.200 the urgent moral question. There is a moral question about whether or not, in addition to

01:00:59.220 pursuing our strategic interests, we also create moral obligation along the way. I agree that you

01:01:05.180 don't have a moral obligation to go into every place that something bad happens. I agree that you

01:01:09.040 don't have a moral obligation to occupy every country that you drop some bombs on or send special

01:01:15.360 operators into. I agree that you don't have a moral responsibility to build governments in

01:01:21.980 countries even if you do occupy them for a brief amount of time. Those are philosophical, political

01:01:29.020 questions. They are abstract questions. They're questions that can deeply inform our view of the

01:01:33.800 world. They can deeply inform the actions that we will take in the future. The urgent question

01:01:40.600 today, the moral question today, is do we have an obligation to the people who for 20 years

01:01:47.320 lived under whatever drove us there, whatever took us there, whatever mistakes we made along

01:01:52.840 the way, whatever things we should or shouldn't have done, whichever things we hope to do in

01:01:56.420 the future or hope not to do in the future, we did do something in Afghanistan. And because

01:02:01.380 of what we did for the last 20 years, we keep using the word women, the people being raped

01:02:05.680 and murdered are women. They're not women. They're small girls. They're 13. Girls who

01:02:10.460 were going to school, girls who were not wearing burqas, girls who were not Westerners. They did not

01:02:16.420 have our values, but they had something far better than the values of the generation that preceded them

01:02:21.700 in Afghanistan. And they had them as the direct result of actions that we ourselves took. So while we

01:02:27.180 are, I believe, betraying our strategic interests, I think we're emboldening China. I think we're

01:02:32.220 emboldening Russia. I think we're going to see the fall of Pakistan to the Taliban. And now the

01:02:37.360 Taliban will be one of the six nuclear powers on the earth. I think we're emboldening Iran. I think

01:02:43.300 we're emboldening ISIS and al-Qaeda, just like when we pulled our troops wrongly out of Iraq under

01:02:48.540 Barack Obama. And suddenly we lost half the country that we had fought and bled to win. And we lost Syria

01:02:54.280 and ISIS formed. And Europeans started getting bombed and getting their heads chopped off. And now we had to

01:02:59.160 fight yet another war in Iraq and yet another war in Syria. I think we're going to see the

01:03:03.600 same thing. For all the reasons, I think it's horrible for the interest of the United States

01:03:07.620 of America to withdraw our troops. I also think there is a moral question about our withdrawal of

01:03:13.240 our troops. But let me address that one moral question, which is in order to answer that moral

01:03:20.220 question, you have to imagine the counterfactual that Joe Biden did not screw this up beyond the

01:03:26.240 imagination of man. You have to be able to say that there was an orderly withdrawal.

01:03:31.060 We left. We left the place intact. We left the government intact. We left the army intact.

01:03:35.080 And we withdrew slowly in an orderly manner. We got our people out. We got our allies out.

01:03:41.540 All of those things you have to imagine first, right? Because the immoral thing that's happening

01:03:44.940 is happening because of this incredible act, almost mind-boggling act of incompetence.

01:03:49.380 In that case, if we left Afghanistan in an orderly manner and Afghanistan still could not

01:03:56.880 maintain its government and still could not maintain its system, then I would say, no,

01:04:01.520 we don't actually have an obligation. And I suppose what I would answer to that is we had

01:04:04.920 essentially withdrawn from Afghanistan. We had the lightest touch. We were using the lightest touch.

01:04:11.540 But now you're changing the question. I mean, the question is, do we have an eternal moral

01:04:16.340 obligation? And no, eventually another country, unless we're an empire, eventually other countries

01:04:21.580 have to be able to... Was it moral to pull out of the Philippines? I don't think it's unreasonable

01:04:26.340 if we had any moral obligation to the people of Afghanistan. And frankly, I don't think we did

01:04:30.200 or do. But if we did, then I think 20 years is a pretty good amount of time to give them to figure

01:04:37.280 out how to run their own country. And honestly, we all agree that the way that we pulled out was

01:04:42.320 terrible and incompetent and all that. But no matter how we pulled out, I just think you're

01:04:46.880 the military of Afghanistan. This is your job. You should be able to do this no matter how America

01:04:53.900 leaves. And if they can't, then I think the moral failures fall on the Afghan army more so than on

01:05:01.600 the American army.

01:05:02.520 You think that 20 years means 20 years was enough. Like, the longer you're there, the more you need

01:05:10.940 to leave. And I think what I'm suggesting is the longer you're there, the more responsibilities you

01:05:15.140 begin to incur.

01:05:16.220 Just that.

01:05:16.860 Yes. If you go into a country and bomb them and get out, if it's shock and awe and leave,

01:05:21.680 if you shoot some cruise missiles into the Sudan, you have very little obligation to the Sudan or the

01:05:25.760 people of the Sudan that you incur as a result. If you were there for a year until Tora Bora, we realized

01:05:31.120 that Bin Laden's probably out of Afghanistan and we're going to have to take our fight elsewhere.

01:05:35.080 You've incurred more moral obligation, but certainly far, far less than if you've been.

01:05:39.240 We have been there.

01:05:40.100 What happens if you withdraw your support for a tyrant like the Shah of Iran and another tyrant,

01:05:48.040 an Islamist tyrant, comes in and takes over like the Ayatollah Khomeini?

01:05:51.920 Essentially, do you have an obligation there? Do you think like, oh, gee, we should have kept

01:05:54.800 supporting the Shah?

01:05:56.320 Certainly, 100% we should have kept supporting.

01:05:59.460 Yes. For political reasons, but not for moral reasons.

01:06:02.940 I think that even when it comes to foreign policy, morality is a currency. That is just a reality

01:06:11.140 of the situation. This is why the United States ought to win the Cold War, for example. Morality

01:06:14.800 is a currency. One of the ways that morality is used as a currency is via incentivizing people

01:06:21.700 to join your fight.

01:06:23.500 I actually don't understand what you're saying.

01:06:25.380 So in Afghanistan, it is not merely that we went there and out of the kindness of our heart,

01:06:30.420 we were like, here's some liberalism and we're here to save you. We went in there with a particular

01:06:34.700 purpose. As we all discussed, the political leadership botched the explanation of that

01:06:37.800 purpose. All that's true. We then made a bunch of promises to all the people who work with us,

01:06:42.860 hundreds of thousands of people who work with us, that if you work with us, you will have these

01:06:47.680 things. Your women will be able to go to school. Your women will be able to walk out in the street.

01:06:51.900 And women helped us. Many women helped us. You will be able to live a different life.

01:06:56.120 And they lived that life. And many of them kept those obligations. And so now the question becomes,

01:07:01.860 if you make a promise and then you withdraw the promise, is that a problem? And I think the answer

01:07:07.260 is yes. And then the question becomes, okay, so how do we deal with that promise? So for example,

01:07:11.540 if we were talking right now, because these are now the alternatives. Now we're to the real world

01:07:15.120 alternatives, right? The alternative number one, we pull out of the country, we made promises to

01:07:19.440 literally hundreds of thousands of people. Joe Biden says this all the time, that we were going

01:07:23.180 to help them get out, if not to the United States, then someplace else, right? That if we leave and

01:07:27.600 if this thing collapse, you're going to get out. And by the way, we did the same with the Vietnamese

01:07:31.280 boat people, or we should have in the aftermath. Many of those people are unbelievably good American

01:07:35.160 citizens. We do this for people who are trying to escape Cuba from a bad life to a good life.

01:07:39.580 You know, so if the alternatives are, figure out where 250,000 people who actively work with the

01:07:45.300 United States are going to live, or keep a baseline truth presence there and nobody has to leave.

01:07:50.160 Which one of those is better? Now, again, I think that you can, in the end, everything in foreign

01:07:56.100 policy, just like in politics generally, comes down to transactional cost. It comes down to cost and

01:08:00.760 benefit. When you're making a calculation as to the promises that you made to people on a moral level,

01:08:05.940 do we bear any responsibility for those people? So for example, forget about keeping the troops

01:08:10.140 there. Do we bear any responsibility to the people we made promises to, that we were going to

01:08:14.160 evacuate them, to help them evacuate? Or should we have just said, you know what? Screw it. We

01:08:18.260 helped you for 20 years. You're on your own. If the Taliban slaughtered you, you're wrong.

01:08:20.500 I think we'd all agree that we had responsibilities to the people we promised to evacuate.

01:08:23.960 Right.

01:08:24.220 If our government made those...

01:08:25.140 And we evacuated a lot of them, by the way.

01:08:26.100 Right. And they did.

01:08:27.300 Okay, so we agree on that. So then the question is just whether, with regard to the keeping of the

01:08:32.220 skeleton force, whether that would have been better, or is it better to try and airlift out

01:08:35.500 hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds more thousands, by the way, are still going to get left and

01:08:38.360 slaughtered. And do we own a moral obligation to not just the girls who are about to get

01:08:43.200 raped, but to their fathers who worked with us, and to their parents who worked with us? And I

01:08:47.380 think the answer is yes. When you incur a mutual obligation in order to get a thing done, you owe

01:08:50.820 something to somebody who...

01:08:51.200 Do you think that's an everlasting moral obligation, I guess, is the question?

01:08:55.140 I mean, I think that it is a moral obligation that if you promise someone... We didn't promise

01:08:59.140 the people who fought with us that... Here's the deal. You fight with us today. In 20 years,

01:09:03.980 we're out. Right? And if the Taliban take over, that's it. We'll fight with you today. In 20 years,

01:09:09.240 we're gone. And that's not how you promise in foreign policy. No one promises that way in

01:09:13.380 foreign policy, because then nobody does it. So we promised we'd be there forever?

01:09:16.400 No. We promised that they were going to have a particular kind of life. This is what happens

01:09:19.920 in foreign policy. Which would entail us to be there forever.

01:09:21.980 Not necessarily. Or we fly them over here. Not necessarily. Or we fly them over here. Or

01:09:24.780 maybe there's the possibility that if we withdraw in more orderly fashion and don't completely

01:09:29.140 collapse their air force from within... Did the Afghan government and military have any obligation of its

01:09:34.780 own to its own citizens? Of course they had an obligation of its own. And by the way,

01:09:39.540 they undertook that obligation to the tune of 50,000 dead over the course of the last six years.

01:09:43.960 And 67,000 dead in the 20 years we've got. And that's... That is an awful lot of human beings.

01:09:48.700 That is an awful lot. But that's also... That's more American troops than we've lost in all

01:09:52.120 wars combined since Vietnam. But that's the way the ratio should be, at least. I mean,

01:09:56.000 they are defending their own country. I agree with you. They should take the lion's share of the

01:09:59.220 casualties. So I agree with you. So the idea that we're supposed to, you know,

01:10:02.000 admire the Afghan military for being the ones to take the brunt of the casualties.

01:10:06.780 Of course, it's your country. I mean, who else is going to do it? We shouldn't be the ones.

01:10:09.560 But my question is, I just... I suppose I just don't understand the tremendous urgency that was

01:10:15.220 felt by so many people. We must get this tiny, bare-bones force out of Afghanistan, forthwith,

01:10:22.500 and even the consequences are world's historical. And they are. Okay, when you turn over a country of

01:10:27.200 38 million people to the Taliban, welcome in all these terrorist groups, give China an open running

01:10:31.180 field, give Russia an open running field, and then, yes, create the moral hazard of... And this does

01:10:36.500 make a difference in the world. When our allies look at us, and yes, this goes back to the political

01:10:41.420 leadership point, maybe we should never talk in moral terms. But I do happen to think that it was

01:10:44.860 kind of a good thing that we stopped mass rape in Afghanistan. So if George W. Bush said in a couple

01:10:48.680 of speeches, we stopped terrorism, and by the way, we also stopped the mass rape of 12-year-old

01:10:52.180 girls in Afghanistan, I don't think that's the end of the world. But if people in the world...

01:10:55.540 We were looking the other way on the rape of boys, though. I mean, that's...

01:10:57.920 I mean, so he should have said that, too. And he should have moved on that. Okay, like,

01:11:02.500 we can all agree, I'm not in favor of the rape of boys. I think we're all on the same page on this

01:11:05.820 one. But there is the painting of the Afghan allies, and I'm very grateful for the allies

01:11:11.580 who helped us, but there's the painting of them as these pure as the driven snow charitable people

01:11:16.720 who didn't commit... But what Matt is saying is, they committed some of the same atrocities that

01:11:20.520 we're all focusing on here. Sure, the South Koreans did, too, during that 42 years that we occupied

01:11:25.200 South Korea. And so did the South Vietnamese, and so did Pinochet, and so did... That's the nature

01:11:28.980 of foreign policy. The question is, is it more moral? Was the United States presence... Did we

01:11:34.220 make Afghanistan in the period of our dominance better than it had been under the Taliban?

01:11:38.840 Sure, but if we're making... If we're now having the moral discussion, then I think it's important

01:11:42.920 to remember that when we went in there, the people who helped us in Afghanistan, I don't think they

01:11:47.780 did so on the suggestion that we were going to stay there forever and claim it as an imperial

01:11:51.040 territory. That was not the argument we made when we went in. And I don't... I'm sorry?

01:11:56.040 Who claimed it as an imperial territory? Well, I think we're saying now we should have stayed

01:11:59.100 there for many, many more years, if not for... I still don't think that makes it an imperial

01:12:02.180 territory. Yeah, it does. I think it does, but we'll get back... But Germany is not an imperial

01:12:06.580 territory. I think both of you are wrong about that.

01:12:08.140 What would you say if China tried to build a base... What if some other country tried to build

01:12:12.520 one military base in our country? We would say, you're trying to claim us as your own,

01:12:16.740 right? And I just... Just to get back to this moral point... Well, yeah, but so isn't it the same

01:12:19.860 thing if we do that in another country, we're claiming it as our own?

01:12:21.740 Just on this moral point, you know, Ben brought up transaction and foreign policy is decided

01:12:26.500 by transaction. And I just think that it's worth remembering, I'm grateful for the support

01:12:31.240 of our Afghan allies. They were doing so because they had an interest. And I don't... I actually

01:12:35.200 don't believe that they thought the United States was going to stay there forever. I don't

01:12:38.360 think we said we were going to stay there forever. And I think they thought we were the

01:12:40.940 best... I think when you look at America's victories in the last century, any place where

01:12:45.600 we fought and won, we still have troops. Before 1975. Anywhere... I'm sorry, in the

01:12:50.520 last... No, but I mean, I just mean... Until... Until... Until... Literally, every place that

01:12:54.160 we fought and won, we still have troops. Any place that we fought and suffered humiliating

01:12:59.220 defeat, we don't still have troops. If I can... If I can just inject one more time my morbidly

01:13:03.480 tragic life here. One thing we should also keep in mind, that the thing that we're actually

01:13:08.880 noticing is that a democracy is a very bad system for running an empire. And the reason

01:13:14.300 it's a bad system for running an empire is because one day you've got George W. Bush

01:13:18.480 running the place, and the next day you've got Joe Biden or Obama running the place. Don't

01:13:21.920 agree. And they pull out our troops, and they put our troops back in, and our promises are

01:13:25.120 broken. And our promises are broken for democratic reasons, because we voted for somebody who was

01:13:28.460 going to break the promise of the last guy we voted for. Right. That... This is one of the

01:13:32.260 reasons that as great... As free nations become strong, and free nations become strong, they

01:13:37.120 become empires, and they stop being free nations. And this is one of the prices I believe

01:13:41.220 we're going to have to pay. There's a reason the Roman Republic fell. There's a reason this

01:13:44.800 republic will fall. And I think that we have to understand that what you guys are talking

01:13:48.580 about, keeping your promises, is going to be a drain on the democratic process.

01:13:53.700 I'm also curious what... Foreign policy has been... I mean, I just... Again, I'm going to point

01:13:57.900 out that every president since Barack Obama pledged to get the troops out, and nobody did

01:14:04.440 it. Because it turns out that foreign policy is not a democratic process. We voted...

01:14:07.680 Not at the moment. It is not. It's not what it is, you know. It has not been since World

01:14:13.380 War II. Joe Biden did not get out, because the people of the United States were rabidly

01:14:17.360 demanding that Joe Biden get out. That's right. You looked at the list of American priorities,

01:14:20.600 getting out of Afghanistan... But they voted for somebody who was going to get us out.

01:14:23.300 Okay, but that... Okay, now you're actually justifying the idea that they voted for somebody

01:14:26.460 who pledged that he was going to go to universal health care. I mean, like, that doesn't work.

01:14:29.120 That's not right. No, it is. But it's true. It's not... I'm not saying it's right. I'm

01:14:32.640 saying it's true. And George Bush was right in 2005, when he said, you voted for a guy who's

01:14:35.400 going to privatize Social Security, except that's not the way this works. Okay, just

01:14:38.620 because you vote for a president of the United States, and because that president wins, does

01:14:42.240 not mean that he has a referendum on every single issue down the line, or that his calculus...

01:14:46.320 But I'm already talking about the reality of it. I'm not arguing the morality. I'm

01:14:49.080 talking about the reality of it, and this is one of the reasons why great nations lose

01:14:53.240 their republic. Elections have consequences. This is true. Of course. It is also true that

01:14:57.600 the American people have a piss-poor understanding of foreign policy, because our leadership class

01:15:00.620 is garbage when it comes to this stuff. And it has been since the Cold War. And during

01:15:04.320 half the Cold War, we had a piss-poor...

01:15:05.660 It was... America's leaders have been piss-poor on foreign policy way before the Cold War.

01:15:11.540 Piss-poor on everything also, but I am curious what you guys say about this issue on the moral

01:15:18.440 question of our country right now, when we talk about exerting our influence, and we think

01:15:26.020 about what that influence actually is. Now, I think about one of the most powerful videos

01:15:30.320 that I've seen recently was... And it was a small group, but still, it was in Jamaica. And I don't

01:15:35.180 know if everyone's seen this video. But our embassy in Jamaica was flying a pride flag. And the Jamaican

01:15:42.480 people got together and protested it and said, we don't want that here. That's your values. It's not

01:15:49.660 ours. We don't want it here. And I look at that, and I side against our embassy. I'm on their side,

01:15:55.440 100%. And so... And I don't like that. I mean, when someone's protesting our embassy and I have

01:15:59.820 to be on the side of the protest... It's not a good place to be. It's not a good place to be.

01:16:03.220 It's also tragic and sad that I have to say that.

01:16:07.580 Why are we flying that flag?

01:16:08.700 Right. So what about that problem as well? I'm just curious what you guys think about that.

01:16:13.460 I mean, I don't disagree with any of that. I do think that it is better for... I think that if the

01:16:18.400 package deal... And I wish there weren't a package deal. I wish that we weren't flying the pride

01:16:22.540 flag. I think it's absurd to fly anything but the American flag, period, at the United States

01:16:25.880 embassy. The American flag is now more controversial in the United States than the

01:16:29.760 pride progress flag. Much more so. Significantly more so. Because the pride progress flag is,

01:16:33.840 in my view, my humble view, the imperial flag. It's universal, and we put it at our embassies

01:16:38.540 all over the world. But putting aside the... So then the question is, okay, so here's the package

01:16:44.660 deal. I disagree with flying the pride progress flag in Kabul. I definitely agree with preventing

01:16:50.160 the mass rape of 18 million women. So if I have to balance those out, that's not that

01:16:55.260 tough a balance. America may suck in a lot of ways, but we don't suck in that big, giant

01:17:00.040 way. And so I have generalized moral objections to the conflation of America, again. And you

01:17:06.080 see this a lot, actually, with the kind of left-wing approach to the United States. We

01:17:10.680 can't criticize this country over here because look at all the problems we're having over

01:17:13.380 here. And I do see it mirrored sometimes on the right, which is, look at all the bad stuff

01:17:16.900 we're pushing over here, you know, gender ideology and critical race theory. And that

01:17:22.120 makes it inappropriate for us to, quote-unquote, spread our values anywhere else. And all I

01:17:25.440 would say is, yes, those values should not be spread even at home. But it's a fallacy

01:17:29.060 to say that because there are people in the United States spreading that at home, it is

01:17:33.360 therefore bad for other countries for us to export the parts where we kill the guys who

01:17:36.960 are the rapists abroad.

01:17:38.360 The pride flag here is just sort of symbolic in a lot of ways, but it represents the overall

01:17:43.040 problem. Obviously, if you're going to weigh the rape of thousands of girls,

01:17:46.880 against the pride flag hanging on an embassy, the rape of thousands of girls is obviously

01:17:50.580 a lot worse, clearly. But what we are exporting in general, and the pride flag is only one

01:17:56.480 small symbol of it, is just, I think, utter, total moral confusion. And I do think that

01:18:02.520 people in Jamaica and across the world see that. And what they're saying is, we don't

01:18:07.040 want any part of that. We don't want that here. You guys are falling apart morally.

01:18:10.880 Well, on a broad scale. I mean, we weren't flying the pride progress flag in 2005, and

01:18:17.640 the Taliban didn't seem to waver in their determination to overthrow the...

01:18:21.620 Michael Warren, you know, Macron, the leader of France, came out, this was about a month

01:18:26.940 or so ago, and he addressed woke ideology. You know, political correctness, whatever

01:18:32.060 you want to call it. He said, this is bad stuff. We don't have that in France. This is

01:18:35.780 France. This is one of the most liberal nations on earth. He goes, we don't have that here.

01:18:39.480 It is a poison. We are going to prevent it from coming into our schools and our institutions.

01:18:43.840 And I think that's kind of what Matt is getting at here is, yes, we historically have exported

01:18:48.740 wonderful things and ideas and values around the world. That is changing. That has changed.

01:18:54.820 And even Western, enlightened, wonderful leaders are recognizing that. And I think that causes

01:18:59.980 some of the lack of cohesion at home.

01:19:01.980 It has absolutely changed. Our values today, in many ways, are worse. Some of our values are

01:19:07.540 a lot better, though. And I think one of the mistakes that we make on the right, because

01:19:10.580 we're definitionally reactionary, that's what the right is, is that we, because we point

01:19:17.120 at all the bad things that are beginning to happen, we wind up, and even Donald Trump did

01:19:22.940 this, you know, when he basically said, oh, we do bad things too. The Russians do bad things.

01:19:26.080 We do bad things. That's a horrible line, because it is 90% true and 100% wrong, right?

01:19:32.660 Yes, we do. Of course, it's true that we do bad things. There is no comparison. America

01:19:37.320 is, like, we still live in a great time. We still have, fundamentally, compared to most

01:19:44.360 people in most places at most times, a great way of life, a great value system, a better

01:19:48.940 value system in some ways than we've ever had, a worse value system in some very important

01:19:53.740 ways, and a worsening value system in some very particular ways that we need to fight.

01:19:58.760 But when you see, like, Nicky Fuentes, little Nicky Fuentes, saying, on the only social channels

01:20:05.040 he's still welcome on, which, of course, he should not have been banned from Twitter.

01:20:07.620 Well, this actually kind of gets to the point, doesn't it?

01:20:08.560 I still also like to rub a little salt in his mouth. But he said, you know, Afghanistan is

01:20:14.000 falling to a regime that makes women cover their faces, and some little clever little list

01:20:21.160 of, ha ha, I made you think, because really, America is just as bad. And you go, no, America

01:20:26.320 isn't just as bad. The fact that America has gay marriage does not make it as bad as the

01:20:31.120 Taliban. The fact that America has transgenderism confusion, which is a horrible moral sin that

01:20:36.160 needs to be combated, doesn't make us as bad as Afghanistan. Honestly, even the fact that

01:20:39.700 America has abortion, which I think is the grave sin, far worse than gay rights, far worse than

01:20:44.380 even the trans ideology, a blight that will, if God permits the earth to continue, a blight

01:20:50.960 that future generations will look back on, not the way we look at slavery, the way we

01:20:55.540 would look at slavery if slavery involved murdering every black person. Nevertheless, we live in

01:21:02.840 this broken and fallen world, and America is still better. Our way of life is still better,

01:21:07.300 and our values are still better than in most of these places.

01:21:10.520 I think it's, I'll take America over the Taliban any day of the week. I mean, that's why I'm living

01:21:14.920 here, and I don't want to move to Afghanistan. But broadly speaking, can I say that I recommend

01:21:21.460 the American way of life as it stands right now? And the answer is no. It's not something that

01:21:25.940 broadly to the entire world I want to broadcast and try to bring people into. I think the abortion

01:21:30.180 thing, you know, that, if we really take that seriously, just homing in on that for a second,

01:21:37.600 if we really take seriously the idea that a million, 800, 900,000 human beings are being slaughtered

01:21:44.180 every single year. But you can make the argument. It's actually hard to find something worse than

01:21:49.660 that. That's about 60 million human beings we've killed in about 40 years since Roe v. Wade.

01:21:53.640 Yeah. So, do we believe that or not? Do we actually take that seriously as a real death

01:21:59.420 toll or not? And if we do, then we're in a pretty bad shape against almost anybody, actually.

01:22:04.400 Well, not against almost anybody, because abortion is legal in many other Western, in almost every

01:22:10.520 other Western nation, because for most of our lives, abortion was mandatory in our only true

01:22:15.780 rival superpower. So, when you're still talking globally about the values that are being imported

01:22:22.020 or exported around the world, then, yeah, America is still better than China, even with those grievous

01:22:26.720 sins, because China has all of, well, not all of the exact same, they have abortion, certainly the same

01:22:32.660 grievous sins, and more additional grievous sins. That's an okay argument, but it's not that great

01:22:39.960 an argument. I think what Matt's saying is it does have a lot of weight. There's also a bit into the

01:22:43.980 weight. No, wait a minute. I think this idea that we are slaughtering this many babies, what is it,

01:22:49.440 like 3,000 a day? 3,000 a day.

01:22:51.020 You know, I think this should weigh on us a lot more heavily than it does. One of the great

01:22:57.000 triumphs of the left is because we can't see the babies who are being killed. They've convinced us

01:23:01.800 that they have no humanity, and if we could see them, what was happening, it would be on a parallel

01:23:07.880 with raping the young women of Afghanistan. It really would. And if we were going to Afghanistan

01:23:12.840 and then immediately forcing abortion on all the women there, I think that that would be a far

01:23:16.700 graver. Oh, yeah. No, I'm not. I think that the big question in politics that people

01:23:22.580 generally fail to ask is compared to whom or compared. That's right. I agree. I agree.

01:23:26.840 But this is a great country if you survive birth. Listen, you don't have to preach to me about

01:23:33.340 abortion, but when it comes to the question of whether the United States has the right and or

01:23:39.320 obligation to push our values when we are so confused and discombobulated and screwed up at home,

01:23:45.080 I think the answer is compared to what? Because I think in certain circumstances,

01:23:49.220 the answer would probably be no, right? I mean, we would look at, like, if you were saying,

01:23:52.660 do we need to pursue cultural imperialism with regard to a Western European country that happens

01:23:58.920 to be stricter on abortion, say, Ireland four years ago? Or France. Right. Or France. Like,

01:24:04.480 not really. I don't see a need for us to be culturally imperialist on that. I don't see our need to be

01:24:08.600 culturally imperialist with regard to wokeness. And so I think it's almost a non sequitur to say

01:24:12.920 something like, you know, the problems that we have at home are the problems that we are

01:24:16.620 exporting abroad, when in large measure, that is not true. The problems that we are having at home

01:24:20.820 are problems that we are screwing ourselves up with at home and a symptom of our failure to have

01:24:26.780 any sort of heart for the fight for our own values that we have no values. So what I would say is that

01:24:30.680 our withdrawal from these places, our attempt to go isolationist, is a symptom of our interior

01:24:35.880 weakness, not a reconsolidation. It's almost as though, like, you hear a lot of people on the right

01:24:39.980 make the argument, well, you're spending all this money over here. Let's bring that money home and

01:24:42.860 let's spend it on the border. It's like, well, yes, but that's not where any of that money is

01:24:45.920 going to go. Joe Biden is not going to take one dollar of that or one soldier there and put that

01:24:49.360 person on the border. It's not going to happen. So you're just doing a non sequitur now. You're

01:24:52.340 just saying, I would like more security on the border. And also, I don't want troops in Afghanistan.

01:24:56.680 And that's not the same thing. You're going to have to show the connection between those two

01:24:59.480 things. I can say it once. I hate wokeness. I think all of the stuff the left is pushing is serious

01:25:03.380 garbage. And also, I don't understand how that is of any comfort at all to anybody who is still

01:25:09.320 trapped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. But it is true. It is true that within living

01:25:12.840 memory, at least my living memory, it wasn't always so that this was a great country as

01:25:17.600 compared to what? Yeah. You know, that's a new phenomenon. I don't think that's true. I

01:25:21.320 mean, I think that, no, because I think that, I mean, and this is where you're going to get

01:25:24.560 the argument. I mean, pick a period. Michael, which period are we talking about? I think the

01:25:29.400 period after World War II, this country actually entered a period of great... Missing segregation

01:25:34.200 there. Yeah, I think if you're black in the South... No, I know. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I didn't say

01:25:37.420 I didn't say that it was perfect. I didn't say that it was... No, but then it is compared

01:25:40.140 to what? Wow. The Soviet Union made this exact argument. I know they did. This exact

01:25:44.420 argument. No, that was what aboutism, but abortion is different. And also to Matt and

01:25:49.680 Drew's point here, you know, a lot of the way that we spread our imperial reach is through

01:25:54.740 non-governmental channels or NGOs, literally, right? And we actually do spread abortion through

01:25:59.480 NGOs, and this is something we've gotten a lot of pushback from Africa. So one of the values

01:26:03.160 we're spreading, I'm sorry to report, is abortion. And I think, you know, Jeremy, well, you bring

01:26:07.280 up this point about this guy, Fuentes, who, you know, but it's not just him, right? It's

01:26:10.960 other people, too, who will make this argument and say, are we so much better than the Taliban?

01:26:16.000 And the reason that some people can make that argument with more credibility is because

01:26:20.500 they have, as we joked, been kicked off of social media. They have been taken out of

01:26:24.220 financial institutions. They've been put on the no-fly list without being accused of crime.

01:26:27.760 Yeah, we've got some problems.

01:26:28.880 So I'm, but I'm just, I guess my point, again, is descriptive, which is, I understand why some

01:26:34.640 people would make even that semi-joking comparison when perhaps we would not.

01:26:39.680 I think that it's disingenuous to have this particular group of people devolve into some

01:26:47.080 sort of tacit accusations that maybe we're not pure enough on the abortion issue.

01:26:51.220 No, no, no. Nobody's saying that. Come on.

01:26:52.860 I reject that.

01:26:53.160 That's not true.

01:26:53.920 The abortion is likened to slavery in two ways and wholly different than slavery in most ways.

01:26:59.360 It's likened to slavery in two ways. One, that it is culturally in broad swaths of the culture

01:27:05.360 considered moral, even though it is wholly unrighteous. And it is likened to abortion in

01:27:10.980 that it is somewhat ubiquitous. Slavery was ubiquitous in all of the world. Abortion is ubiquitous in all

01:27:18.420 developed nations, really, on earth. And that does not get out of jail free card for us where

01:27:23.560 abortion is concerned. But it is to talk about the scope of the problem of abortion. That abortion

01:27:28.080 does not make America unique. America is a grievous evil. Abortion is a grievous evil.

01:27:34.780 And we're worse on it than most of the time.

01:27:35.920 It's not a unique evil.

01:27:37.280 That also, what you're talking about also, I think, could potentially mitigate, to a certain

01:27:40.980 extent, the personal moral culpability of some individuals who choose abortion because they're

01:27:46.780 in this environment where they're told by everybody that's okay. But in terms of the point that I was

01:27:51.340 making anyway, it's not about any individual here. It's actually all of us. I had this thought just

01:27:55.360 the other day when we were going out to eat or something, and we passed by a Planned Parenthood,

01:27:59.980 which we all do all the time. We passed by Planned Parenthood. And I didn't even think much of it. I just

01:28:05.080 went to eat. And only later did I stop and reflect. I'm like, I just passed by a building where they're

01:28:10.080 killing babies. And it didn't even register fully on me as pro-life as I am and as we all are. So

01:28:16.780 this is, like Drew pointed out, this is a success the left has had. This is something unique about

01:28:22.040 abortion that we don't see the victims. And so that prevents us all from fully confronting it.

01:28:26.720 I think that if these were, and I'm sure we all, I know we all agree, if these were two-year-old

01:28:31.440 children who were being, and we could see them being carted in by their parents to have their

01:28:35.240 brain sucked out of their head, I wouldn't have been able to go eat. I mean, I would have had to

01:28:39.840 charge in there and stop it. And we don't, none of us really have that.

01:28:43.240 Abortion is the Lord's of the ring sin. It's the sin that God can't see, right? It's the,

01:28:50.620 if you had the ring of power and you could turn yourself invisible, 100% of all men would go into

01:28:54.680 the women's locker room. Like your very first thought, it'd be like, yep, women's locker room,

01:28:58.720 right? Just instantly, because God couldn't see you. Because, and when I say God, I really mean

01:29:03.700 man, because God knows the heart of it. God sees all, but we reduce God down to us. We think,

01:29:08.800 so abortion is what it is in particular, because people don't see, not only they don't see the

01:29:14.520 crime, they don't see the criminal. And in that way, I mean, I will confess in various moments in

01:29:22.020 my life, always thinking that abortion was a grievous crime, I've been confronted with the

01:29:28.000 part of myself that could have snuck around and done it. Because I know what I would do if I,

01:29:33.960 I know what I could do if I could get away with it. It's that Matthew's, that passage of Jesus in

01:29:40.060 the book of Matthew about, you know, adultery. If you lust after, you're an adulterer. If you

01:29:44.840 have hate, you're a murderer. You're kind of like them, or you're on the path to being one.

01:29:48.880 You are one, because you've revealed what you actually would be if no one was watching.

01:29:53.760 Abortion just happens to be the one that actually no one is watching. We've actually run out of time,

01:29:59.180 but rather than ending the show, I'm going to prolong the suffering, because we promised that we

01:30:03.860 would take some questions from our Daily Wire subscribers. They make it possible for us to

01:30:08.160 conduct this crap show. We have a, I would argue that the longer the show goes, the more moral

01:30:15.000 obligation we incur to our subscribers. Now I even more strongly disagree. Exactly. We should just

01:30:21.440 withdraw. The first question for the group, how will the reduction in American might and reputation

01:30:28.920 have ramifications on other world events, namely China moving on Taiwan and Russia flexing

01:30:33.800 its muscles in Eastern Europe? That's the question, Ben. I mean, I think it's going to

01:30:38.080 have dramatic ramifications. I think everybody who follows foreign policy can see that people are

01:30:41.820 talking openly in China about moving on Taiwan. Frankly, I think they'd be fools not to move on

01:30:45.620 Taiwan before Joe Biden is out of office, because while the getting is good, I think you're going to

01:30:52.080 start to, they may try to pursue the Hong Kong model of trying to pressure the government there into

01:30:56.040 moving more pro-China because they feel like they're not going to get American support. So just basically

01:30:59.500 softly take them over the way that they did Hong Kong before they marched in the troops.

01:31:02.340 But look, China's on the march. They're taking advantage. Russia's on the march. They're

01:31:06.560 taking advantage. We're not going to have any bases now, not only in Afghanistan, but also in

01:31:10.000 Pakistan. So we have no ability. When Joe Biden talks about how we're going to have over the horizon

01:31:13.220 capacity, we absolutely will not. In order to do that, you have to have people on the ground who

01:31:16.740 actually know where to spot the actual bad guys so that you can actually put a laser on it so that

01:31:20.240 our guys can hit it. So it's a disaster area and a wide array of foreign policy issues is the really

01:31:27.740 short answer. And again, I think our enemies are looking at this and they are just drooling.

01:31:34.080 Yeah. To Drew's point, America is about to have to actually face the question of what is our role

01:31:38.380 in the world. Do you think Biden is going to be impeached or is going to be forced to step down?

01:31:43.280 And is that even a good thing? Because Kamala is just as bad and also should be impeached. Kamala,

01:31:48.400 too, because she obviously had a part of this plan. Also, in fact, she right before it all went to crap,

01:31:53.760 she made a major point of saying that she was very involved. How incompetent do you have to be

01:31:58.020 where you're like, OK, this thing is going to be just, but I need to be on that bandwagon.

01:32:01.400 Well, don't forget, at that first speech, she wasn't there. I think she had to have her arm

01:32:05.360 twisted a little. But to this point, I think as just, I'll defer to the lawyer in the room, but

01:32:09.600 as a simple matter of impeachment, maladministration is not a basis for impeachment. High crimes and

01:32:16.880 misdemeanors is a basis. There's also nobody who's going to impeach him. Right, exactly.

01:32:20.360 I think the question of whether he will have to step down is unanswerable because he is such a,

01:32:26.420 we just don't know how bad off he is. And it's possible at some point they won't be able to

01:32:31.240 hide it. If he looks the way he looked tonight, I cannot imagine him running for re-election,

01:32:34.680 but at the same time, they can't let Kamala Harris run. I think he runs for re-election.

01:32:39.180 I don't think either of them will run. Did you just see, so the Yahoo headline just came out about

01:32:45.240 his poll numbers and they said, this is really hurting Biden-Harris. Harris is only leading

01:32:50.540 Trump by two percent. That was the headline. Wait, is she running? I didn't, I didn't know

01:32:55.700 that was part of the patch. I just, I'm kind of with Ben. I think that they will,

01:32:59.400 it'll be weekend at Bernie's. They, they are terrified. I mean, Kamala couldn't win a primary.

01:33:04.560 She certainly isn't going to win. And you know, the idea that both the president and the vice

01:33:09.100 president would not seek a second term against a Republican. I don't know if we've ever seen that.

01:33:13.960 I think that's going to happen. I, I, I, we don't know the future, but I think that's going to

01:33:18.000 happen. And I think it's very hard to know. It really is impossible to know what's going to

01:33:22.180 happen with Biden because he may just be, it may just be impossible to prop him up.

01:33:26.100 That's true. Do you believe the Biden administration will pay a ransom for remaining

01:33:30.140 Americans who are left in Afghanistan before using military force? For sure.

01:33:34.360 Yeah, exactly. There are going to be pallets of cash that are shipped over there that we're never

01:33:38.480 going to see. There already are. A hundred percent. By the way, that actually is an impeachable

01:33:42.700 offense. So you're not right. I mean, that actually is. So if we start shipping money

01:33:45.580 over there without any sort of congressional approval to a terrorist group, then that

01:33:49.340 actually isn't. But who's going to do it? Right. But I mean, just to the legal question,

01:33:52.640 by the way, to the legal question, the real answer is it doesn't matter because impeachment

01:33:55.620 is a political question, right? So it doesn't really matter. But. Right.

01:33:59.280 What are the chances that China decides it's time to go after Taiwan? I mean, we, we basically

01:34:03.780 100 percent. Yeah. And I and if I if I were China, I'd certainly do it in the next three

01:34:09.080 years because we don't know what's coming. And by the way, who exactly is going to oppose

01:34:11.860 them? I mean, to speak of like the West and its restrictions on freedom, it makes more

01:34:15.280 sense to have that conversation less in the in the guise of the Taliban than it does with

01:34:18.160 regard to China, considering Chinese social credit system, considering how Australia is

01:34:22.660 currently locking its citizens down. Like, I mean, like, did you see the video from

01:34:26.440 nine news? Yes. And it was like I was just waiting for the end. There was the guy who's

01:34:30.080 coming down the elevator and the anchors like his name is. And I was like, I'm waiting for

01:34:32.920 them to release the hound on Montag. Right. I agree. You're the only person who got the

01:34:36.580 reference. But I was like, this is the end of Fahrenheit 450 water. He's running for the

01:34:39.860 river. And you've got the hound following him because he might have covid and he's asymptomatic.

01:34:44.620 It's unbelievable. It is the fall of the West right now. And it is the Chinese moment.

01:34:48.000 I mean, you wrote your book, The Authoritarian Moment. And really what you mean in some ways

01:34:51.700 is that this is the Chinese moment. There have been for the last 25 years, there have

01:34:55.920 been two models that were sort of dominant. There's the Western model, basically the

01:34:59.820 American model. Now, in Europe, it's further left and it has more a parliamentary system

01:35:05.060 and it has, you know, bigger social space. It's essentially the post-war American order.

01:35:11.100 And what we're seeing to some degree, even domestically, which is very concerning, is that

01:35:15.620 in some ways, both left and right are looking at China now and saying, you know, this system

01:35:20.340 of strong authoritarian regimes with liberal economics may be scalable in a way

01:35:29.420 that this isn't.

01:35:31.340 This happened before World War II, too. You know, there are plenty of people in America

01:35:34.480 who are going like, Hitler isn't such a bad guy.

01:35:36.660 Yeah, Mussolini. He's got a point.

01:35:38.140 Yeah, he's got a point.

01:35:39.480 Do you believe that this is a combination of idiocy, incompetence, naivety, or intentional?

01:35:45.400 In other words, are they trying to inflame the American populace and thereby increase military

01:35:49.460 operations overseas?

01:35:50.320 I think it's A. I really, I've heard the conspiracy, if you want to call it that, the conspiracy

01:35:56.040 theory that this is a purposeful attempt to debilitate us and demoralize us. I just don't

01:36:01.740 think they're that smart, to be honest with you.

01:36:03.160 Joe Biden is a moron.

01:36:04.780 He's a moron.

01:36:05.220 I suppose the only moron.

01:36:06.400 And he always was, even before this.

01:36:07.860 Correct. So put my tinfoil hat on, though, if I could stand up for the question. To Ben's

01:36:12.960 point, the people do not control foreign policy, or at least have not in many years, many

01:36:17.940 decades. And we know that the bureaucracy and the foreign policy establishment did not

01:36:22.780 want to pull out of Afghanistan. And we know that Joe Biden is not running the show. And

01:36:26.860 so there is the question. I don't want to ascribe to malice that which is explained by stupidity

01:36:31.680 and incompetence, and there was a lot of that. We left a lot of stuff behind at Bagram. We

01:36:35.960 left a lot of stuff behind in the country. 75,000 vehicles, over 200 aircraft, 600,000 firearms.

01:36:44.320 10 million rounds of ammo.

01:36:45.440 I mean, we're missing an army's worth of stuff. That is either historic incompetence or there

01:36:54.320 were competing.

01:36:54.880 I think we're missing an option, though, which is indifference. I think part of it, the problem

01:36:59.140 is the people that run our country don't really care that much about Americans or our country

01:37:03.620 at all. So I think there's also...

01:37:05.280 Joe Biden's always been committed to his peculiarly stupid idea of the moment, right? I mean, it's

01:37:09.220 like, what if we just took this country and we sliced it in three? You're like, well,

01:37:11.780 there are no natural resources in one third of that country. And he's like, I don't care,

01:37:15.300 man. Come on, man. And it's that here, too, right? Like, didn't his press conference tonight

01:37:20.540 where he's like, all my generals agreed on this? He kept saying this over and over, right?

01:37:23.960 Not all my generals. All the higher ups in the military.

01:37:28.200 Right.

01:37:28.520 Which actually extends even beyond... Like, one person has to say, but I mean, I didn't.

01:37:32.660 Right.

01:37:32.800 By the way, it's not true. We have many, many stories of all his guys going, you can't pull

01:37:37.300 out this way. And he's like, we're doing it. And then he's like, but they also agreed

01:37:40.300 that we should not defend Bagram. It's like, oh, you mean once you said we could have two

01:37:43.440 troops and you could put the two troops in one place? They said, let's do Kabul instead

01:37:46.560 of Bagram. Wow. Big agreement there. But it is amazing.

01:37:49.340 I do think that we can't talk about it on this show because we got to go home. This is ridiculous.

01:37:53.660 But I do think that there is a case to be made that our intelligence services are infiltrated

01:37:59.140 by our enemies. I think that there is a case.

01:38:00.780 Of course. Of course.

01:38:02.020 Yeah. And, you know, the thing, we talk about the big things.

01:38:05.460 I'm not committing suicide. If I die, that's why.

01:38:08.580 You wrote a McAfee-esque letter.

01:38:10.120 You did just give up the whole plot. Biden's not going to run. Kamala's not going to run.

01:38:14.740 Hillary's going to be president. You're in real trouble, buddy.

01:38:18.060 We talk about the big things, Humvees, armored vehicles, airplanes, and helicopters. It's the

01:38:24.420 16,000 pairs of night vision goggles that I'm the most worried about. Our special operators

01:38:28.600 have ruled Afghanistan truly for the last 20 years. They're the most lethal fighting men

01:38:34.900 that have ever existed in all of human history. And their superpower is that they can see in the

01:38:39.840 dark. That's their superpower. And we just gave the enemy the superpower. The good news is,

01:38:43.880 where are they going to buy batteries? That's all the time we have for tonight. We want to

01:38:47.820 especially thank our DailyWire.com subscribers for being patient with us tonight. It took us a

01:38:51.940 minute to get to your questions, but we're grateful that you are with us. Thank you all for

01:38:56.640 tuning in. As always, happy to have you join us. We would love for you to become a subscriber. Go

01:39:00.540 over to DailyWire.com slash subscribe. Get a Reader's Pass trial. You can do it for just $4. You'll

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01:39:16.700 Daily Wire Backstage is produced by Mathis Glover. Executive producer is me, Jeremy Boring. Our

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The Michael Knowles Show - August 26, 2021

Daily Wire Backstage： The Fall of the West

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