In this episode, former Vice President Joe Biden joins the show to discuss his new role as a potential replacement for Donald Trump as the next National Security Adviser and Defense Secretary, and to talk about his new book, Why is it worth defending allies? and why should the next administration adhere to the president s priorities on war and peace? And why is it important to have a strategy to deal with the growing threat of nuclear proliferation from North Korea and the rise of China? And what role does he see for himself in the new administration, and what role should he play in the next one? All that and much more on this episode of The Tucker Carlson Show with Tucker Carlson on the campaign trail on Nov. 6, 2020. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.net/thetruckeynow and listen to the full show wherever you get your podcasts. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. Use the promo code "tuckercrane" to receive $5 and receive 10% off your first purchase when you enter the offer ends on November 6th. We're not gatekeepers, we're just brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Thank you for listening to the show and doing it honestly! -Tucker Carlson and his team at tucker.co/tuckercarlson Logo by Courtney DeKorte and our theme music by my team at the show is . Music by my label, by my band, . We are not a gatekeeper. by our logo by my logo is not censored, we are not gatekeeper, we do not own the rights to the music is not the copyright of the song by my song is by my record company, my logo by any other artist is not my logo? by anyone else's song is not copyrighted by my client is not allowed to do so. - Thank you, I am not in any other than my song by the song I use this is my logo, no other than the song is my song written by my ad is my own? - thank you, thank you? -- copyright by ? thanks to my good friend, my band is or the guy who wrote this song by me, my ad
00:01:06.960I'm fairly confident you'll play a large and meaningful role in this administration.
00:01:11.880You're never going to say any of that, but I thought that the audience might like some context for why we're having this conversation.
00:01:17.440I think you're one of the very few people with deep experience in national security who shares the president's priorities in national security, which is amazing.
00:01:49.780Well, I know, and that's why I'm deeply grateful and honored.
00:01:54.400And I clearly don't make any presumptions about any role for myself.
00:01:57.220But what I would say, and I mean this with all sincerity, is that I think the president of the United States, the president-elect, is exactly right that we stand on the possible precipice of World War III, and we need a fundamental change before we ram right into the iceberg.
00:02:10.400I mean, I think the election is over, but this remains absolutely true, is that what I call the liberal-primacist alliance, basically the kind of policies of President Biden and Vice President Harris aligned with the primacists, I call them, we could call them the neoconservatives, have led us to a situation in which we're overextended, we're on the brink of war in multiple theaters, and we could lose them.
00:02:30.420And I really want peace, and more importantly, President Trump ran to his historic credit on an agenda, as he said in his sort of victory speech, I don't start wars, I end them.
00:02:44.900Now, I think my view is that we have to have- how you actually get to peace is a difficult question, and I had the honor of being on your show a few years ago when my book came out.
00:02:54.980And I remember, I don't know if you recall, but I said, I was thinking about your question to President Trump about why is it worth defending allies, and I gave that a lot of thought.
00:03:03.260And in a sense, my book is a response to that question, and I think you do need strength, you do.
00:03:09.020And you need peace through strength, but that term has become cheapened and distorted to become basically an excuse for an aggressive expansionist approach to foreign policy.
00:03:20.620But I think you do, you know, it's real meaning, and President Trump is, in a sense, going back to the great tradition of the Republican Party, the Weinberger Doctrine, the Powell Doctrine, Nixon, Eisenhower, as Bob Dole used to put it.
00:03:46.520Before you get into that, I just think it might be helpful to describe where we are now, because a lot of Americans, I'm in this category, were so absorbed in the election that we may have lost touch with what you opened your remarks by noting, which is we're on the brink of war in multiple theaters.
00:04:30.340I mean, despite a lot of boasting, they're still outproducing the North Atlantic Alliance, including the United States, in artillery production, which is old technology, by like a factor of two or three.
00:04:39.040Iran's two weeks from a nuclear weapon, according to Tony Blinken, and worse, these actors have come together.
00:04:45.860Now, you will hear from the sort of primacists and liberals that that means that we have to fight them all at the same time.
00:04:50.840No, to the contrary, it means they are collaborating together precisely to tie us down and deplete us.
00:04:56.280And that's what's happened in the war in Ukraine, where we have expended a tremendous amount of weapons, ditto in places like attacking the Houthis and so forth.
00:05:03.780At the same time, our defense industrial base has wildly atrophied from where it was 30 years ago.
00:05:08.800And this is why the agenda for re-industrialization is so important.
00:05:11.660But that's going to take a long time, as Senator Vance has pointed out.
00:05:17.200Wait, so can I say it's not—I mean, I thought one of the justifications, the main justification for this wildly inflated Ukraine funding was that it was going to help re-establish America's industrial base.
00:05:30.100In fact, one of the most kind of oft-used arguments by a lot of the advocates for the war in Ukraine was that we would sort of degrade the Russian military for a song and restore our defense industrial base at the same time.
00:05:41.960Actually, more or less, the reverse has happened.
00:05:44.520The Russian military is larger, and this is, you know, General Cavoli, the SACUR, has admitted this.
00:06:07.620Meantime, the Europeans have basically been asleep at the switch, not going through with their defense buildup, with a few noble exceptions like Poland.
00:06:14.780So—and then you look at China, which is by far the most formidable challenger, 10 times the GDP of Russia.
00:06:20.580This administration, Tony Blinken, has said Xi Jinping has given the instructions to their military to be ready for a war over Taiwan by 2027.
00:06:28.680Frank Kendall, the Secretary of the Air Force in the Biden administration, said the other day that he thinks the Chinese military will say they're ready.
00:06:40.860The Chinese are going to look at us both in terms of our strength but also in terms of our political commitments.
00:06:46.000And this is where I think President Trump has been exactly right, which is being willing to talk to President Xi Jinping, not insulting President Xi Jinping and President Putin and others unnecessarily, not supporting things like Taiwan independence, and at the same time being prepared to be strong.
00:07:02.080And this is where I think if we appoint or if people are put into positions of power who think that we can walk and chew gum and do everything and start wars in three different theaters at the same time, not only will that be bad like it was in the Iraq War and often the same people, it will be far more catastrophic.
00:07:19.260Tucker, I don't think this is an exaggeration.
00:07:20.920I think we stand on the precipice of losing a major power war for the first time in our history.
00:07:26.200So people need to know what time it is.
00:07:28.060And that really requires focusing on China with the purpose of peace like we did in the Cold War, which was to say, we're going to be strong.
00:07:35.480We're not going to go over the line like Eisenhower did in 1950.
00:07:39.360We're not going to go to Czechoslovakia in 1968.
00:07:40.920But don't come across our line because you see it's not going to succeed for you.
00:07:44.500So I think we really stand at a crossroads.
00:07:46.540And I think President Trump has a mandate for peace.
00:07:49.460So don't I just as an American, whatever happens to me, I so hope that we don't end up with the same failed recipe of starting wars all over the place or getting enmeshed in conflicts when we can't we can't afford to do so.
00:08:04.080And they're not in the interest of the American people.
00:08:05.060From a non-expert position, which is my position, just as someone who's watching, kind of, there does seem to be broad recognition that whatever our objectives in Ukraine were, we didn't achieve them and we can't.
00:08:17.040Zelensky immediately comes out upon Trump's election and says, actually, I'm for peace.
00:08:21.660That does maybe seem like it's winding down.
00:08:56.520We don't want to be able to support groups attacking Israel, et cetera, et cetera.
00:08:59.720But like, haven't we learned the lesson over the last 25 years about the ill-advised nature of very significant conflicts in the Middle East that don't have clear goals and clear connection to American interests?
00:09:11.760Like, didn't we run this experiment a couple of times?
00:09:13.620And it's often like the exact same people calling for war with Iran who were involved in the past.
00:09:21.200And it's like, shouldn't there be some degree of accountability?
00:09:23.300Moreover, it's like a bad idea in itself.
00:09:26.760I mean, you know, like I was criticized in the bulwark by Eric Edelman, who is Dick Cheney's advisor and number three at the Pentagon under Bush.
00:09:37.180I'm delighted that you think my ideas are iconoclastic.
00:09:39.380How could Eric Edelman be writing with any credibility at all on foreign policy questions after being, you know, intimately involved in the Iraq war and then never apologizing?
00:09:49.080I don't know. There should be some international authority that requires contrition, like a like a moral UN where you don't get to say another word until you don ashes and sackcloth and apologize.
00:09:59.780Who among us isn't? I'm certainly not inerrant.
00:10:02.500I'm certainly not infallible, but like at least show some, you know, it's like Paul Jago of the Wall Street Journal a couple like a year ago gave a speech.
00:10:08.160I treated the Iraq war as like a mulligan. You know, it's like, ah, I think that's like a big deal.
00:10:13.340And, you know, obviously a lot of people got it, you know, had different views, etc.
00:10:16.500But it's like it's kind of show the contrition, show the penance, show the show the learning.
00:10:20.920And so that I think is the other thing, though, Tucker, is like it's the same people who are calling for attacking Iran, who are also calling for escalating the war in Ukraine or even a no fly zone,
00:10:32.400recognizing an independent Taiwan or getting in a war with China or attacking North Korea.
00:10:37.720It's like if we do all those things, we know objectively as a fact that our military is not capable of fighting more than one major war at a time.
00:10:44.600So even if you did want to, getting in multiple fights with people at the same time is just like foolhardy.
00:10:51.040And I mean, but the way I think about it is the Washington blob establishment can get us into wars and crises, but they can't fix the problem.
00:11:01.020And it seems to me that, you know, just listening to President Trump and his historic victory, the decisive mandate he got, his leadership, his mandate, his agenda for peace from a position of strength, use the military sparingly, but have it be strong.
00:11:13.640It's really important not to get enmeshed all over the place and either bleed ourselves out or a catastrophic multi-front loss.
00:11:21.540I think that's the last thing Donald Trump wants.
00:11:48.260He has been had lawfare conducted against him and he has had the bravery and the vision and the persistence and the commitment at great personal physical cost, but also to his reputation, his family, etc.
00:11:59.960To stand up for these principles that the United States desperately needs, putting Americans interests first, peace, prosperity, etc.
00:12:10.120Now is the time to put that into practice, whoever it is.
00:12:13.040I just I can't stress how how important that is.
00:12:15.780And if you're thinking about a historical legacy, Joe Biden's going to leave a legacy that's terrible.
00:12:20.000I mean, where, you know, for all the things you mentioned, the war in Ukraine, two and a half years in, Jillian Barnes, New York Times just reported that the intelligence community is reporting that the Ukrainians are losing, that it's not a stalemate.
00:12:32.800So after all that, after all the preaching, after all the moralism, the Ukrainians are losing the war and the Russians are making enormous progress.
00:13:01.860And the way I think about this, and when I worked at the Brown Order working for President Trump in his in his first term, when we worked on the defense strategy to try to get us to prioritize again, in my view, with the same logic, very consistent with what President Trump, I think, was trying to lay out.
00:13:14.980That was like, you know, we were a couple miles from the iceberg back then.
00:13:18.760Now we're like right up, you know, we're a few thousand yards and it's not easy to turn the Titanic.
00:13:23.560And if you turn the Titanic 90 degrees, people are going to fall out of their bunks.
00:13:28.000Chandeliers and beautiful, you know, plates are going to get broken.
00:13:31.740But that is the fault of what I call the liberal primacist alliance.
00:13:34.300That is the fault of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the primacist sort of old school Republicans who, if they pursued that policy further, would lead us to catastrophe.
00:13:43.940Then how is it that, from what I can tell, pretty much every person in the running for the big national security jobs other than you is part of that alliance?
00:13:53.400And, you know, I know them all and I like some of them, a couple sitting U.S. senators who I think are really nice guys.
00:14:00.840But they're tools of the people you described, like completely.
00:14:05.880But how is it that there are so few people on the Republican side in national security with experience who agree with the presidential act who leads the party?
00:14:17.700So I've thought a lot about this because I've been fighting, as you kindly gesture, and a sort of lonely battle within the sort of blob to put us on, like, to me, what is common sense?
00:14:31.940And honestly, so much of your insight and commentaries, both on this show and your other podcast interviews and your shows, et cetera, because I think it's like, I think there's a human sociological element.
00:14:42.480I mean, not to get, and one of the things that's kind of bizarre is that I think, like, today, people like us, we can learn a lot from the new left of the 60s and 70s.
00:14:49.300Like, there's something wrong with the establishment and the way the establishment.
00:14:53.400Now, I believe there's always an establishment.
00:14:54.700There's an establishment in Mao's China.
00:15:08.840But I think there's an element, and I try to give credit because, like, yeah, there's money and stuff, but there's other ways of making money.
00:15:14.480I think it's this psychic kind of, like, network benefit of being part of, like, essentially functionally an imperial capital.
00:15:52.680It's like, President Trump ran against the system.
00:15:55.880And that is so important because it's the system, the liberal primacist alliance in other things like trade and economics, et cetera, that need to be a fundamental change.
00:16:05.440And already he's paid the price, literally, and shown the bravery and commitment to go through that.
00:16:10.500And so now it's about, like, capitalizing.
00:16:13.560And, frankly, my hope is if that happened, a lot of these people, especially in the younger generations, would follow.
00:16:20.540And forgive me for a little bit of patting myself on the back, but I think it's an apropos comment.
00:16:24.460I was out at a thing a few months ago and this young guy came up, you know, strong guy, whatever.
00:16:29.020And he said, hey, you know, Mr. Colby, I'm going in the Marines.
00:16:32.780And I just want to say all the young Republicans love what you're saying.
00:16:35.680And I said to him, I was like, well, that's good because all the old Republicans hate it.
00:16:38.660And he's like, yeah, that's the point.
00:16:41.720And that's like, to me, I always, I think of myself, I'm like the first line, not to, if this is, although, you know, there are people out there you wonder about.
00:16:48.500But, like, this is, this is not, like, actually getting shot.
00:16:51.300But it's like, I'm trying to think about how do we protect Americans from not getting shot?
00:18:04.280Well, look, I mean, I think it's, if I were advising President Trump, I would say, especially now that the mandate has happened, why pick anybody who's not aligned with what you're trying to do?
00:18:20.360I mean, I saw the last ad that President Trump ran.
00:18:23.700I mean, it was a stirring ad, like, and it won.
00:18:37.120So, like, my hope is that he will own that.
00:18:41.040And that is the way for, that's the way for peace.
00:18:43.160And there's going to be debates about various policies and how to emphasize this or that.
00:18:47.240But why go back, especially in a situation where, as successful as the first term is, the situation that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are leaving President Trump in January is, I cannot stress how dangerous it is.
00:19:29.380And to me, one of the, like, touch grass kind of things about a lot of the people who are calling for, like, no-fly zones over Ukraine and intervening against the Russians and escalating and allowing U.S. weapons to be overtly used to attack Moscow and Russian strategic, you know, forces sites.
00:19:52.680That's why I think that the arguments within the Republican Party in some ways are fiercer.
00:19:57.680Because my hope, Tucker, and I think this is something you've been, you know, on for a while, but it's, like, the Democrats are, like, they're sort of inherently out of position right now.
00:20:09.020Where are the people who are, like, anti-war?
00:20:11.500Where are the people who say the CIA is not above reproach or the FBI is not above reproach?
00:20:15.980Who are the people, you know, right mills or whatever, the power elite and all this stuff.
00:20:21.320Those people have, those movements have to come back.
00:20:24.240And I think that that's something where, especially given the mandate that President Trump has been, has won, that hope, I mean, you know, whatever you think of Bernie Sanders, the fact that he said, like, we're out of, we're out of position.
00:20:35.400You know, and others are saying they're out of position.
00:20:37.580My hope is that Democrats will go back, in a sense, to the kind of arguments that I'm making that I think you could have heard a Democrat make 10 minutes ago.
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00:22:19.000The price of ground beef has doubled in recent years, and the average quality has gone down with beef imports hitting over 4 billion pounds just last year.
00:37:38.520Is like, so since the Ukraine war broke out, the European economy and particularly the German economy has been like in freefall.
00:37:44.940So there's this kind of cute argument for a while that we had somehow like benefited from Europe sucking air after the Ukraine war broke out.
00:39:04.520People trading in Canton, sometimes with opium, you know, and then like Samoa, Hawaii, et cetera.
00:39:09.520So I'm not saying, like, we have a strong interest in Europe.
00:39:13.140The Philippines, of course, thank you.
00:39:15.540In fact, my great-grandfather, we were talking about our families, like I, he was an army officer in the interwar period and he was stationed at the American, there was like a concession in China, not China's proudest period.
00:39:25.940But, you know, that we were, we were present.
00:39:28.080So what that, what I think that means to me is a couple of things.
00:39:30.860One, if you actually go back to American history at our best and really kind of, you know, the first kind of, really until 1989, we did pretty well with the exception, I think, to things like Vietnam and stuff like that.
00:39:44.300Like, you go back to Washington's farewell address, Hamilton, et cetera.
00:39:47.860It's like, we're looking after number one.
00:39:49.540So this idea that America first is somehow inconsistent, it's like, by the way, a republic is supposed to be in the interests of everybody, right?
00:40:22.840They haven't built up their military, but, you know, hey, Joe Biden got a medal from Olaf Schultz, who's probably going to be out of a job as well.
00:41:42.820And how do you keep the people who presently occupy every position of power, who operate the levers of power, how do you keep them from wrecking the project secretly?
00:52:37.860he's almost kind of lecturing the American people about their need to like double defense spending and stay in Afghanistan until the second coming.
01:09:41.500And people are going, you know, a lot of them put flags in the ground with the foolish and inappropriate Never Trump letters in 2016.
01:09:48.640And they're kind of, so their hands are a bit tied.
01:09:50.620So I don't know how they would behave in a vacuum.
01:09:52.800I think you see sort of various stages of grief.
01:09:55.800I mean, various people kind of adapting in different ways or not adapting.
01:10:00.180Some people are kind of like unreconstructed.
01:10:02.980Some are kind of like resigned to where things are going.
01:10:06.940You know what's funny about the Bush—I mean, you remember this better than I do, but I remember, like, Bush ran on a more humble foreign policy.
01:10:14.620I mean, actually, what Trump's saying is not that radically different from the kind of Bush vibe, which was against the crusading progressivism of Bill Clinton.
01:10:21.980Now, he ended up totally abandoning that, unfortunately, to his eternal discredit.
01:11:06.060I mean, I'm—not to make anything about myself, but, like, I'm a rare—and I was—I was teetering on the—maybe passing over to the edge of respectability or whatever the mainstream is, you know, for years.
01:11:17.260And, you know, I think—what I find, though, encouraging, Tucker, is I—and this is where—I mean—