00:00:50.440If you have not liked, subscribed, left a five-star review, we would really appreciate that as we ramp up again, get ready for our fall tour, all while we've got this crazy news from Washington, D.C., from Kabul.
00:01:06.380It seems as though the American foreign policy is just collapsing around us.
00:01:15.400It is heartbreaking to see the disaster that's unfolding in Afghanistan.
00:01:20.880And no matter how low of expectations you had for the Biden administration, what has unfolded in the last two weeks, I think, has been even worse than anyone anticipated.
00:01:34.460It's a really dangerous combination of radical ideology and manifest incompetence.
00:01:43.420And I got to say it, it reminds me of the border crisis.
00:01:47.460The two are really quite similar in that both are catastrophes under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
00:01:53.780And they're both catastrophes because they embrace left-wing ideologies that are disconnected from reality, what they believe is wrong, and they combine that with a really stunning inability to execute with any effectiveness, and that produces disasters.
00:02:12.680It's reminiscent of Jimmy Carter in the 1970s of naive leftist ideology and blatant incompetence.
00:02:23.820Well, so, Senator, I think it's important to note there are these two sides of it.
00:02:28.160We're all debating what happened in Afghanistan, what is currently happening.
00:02:31.520But they're really two separate questions.
00:02:33.760The strategy, should we pull out, should we stay in, some middle ground in between them.
00:02:38.160And then also just the basic questions of, as you say, competence.
00:02:46.940People might disagree on what should have happened in Afghanistan, but I don't think anyone disagrees that the way in which it happened could have been much, much better.
00:02:55.600So let's break down each of those pieces because I have a lot of thoughts on what the overall strategy should be.
00:03:00.500But let's focus on what's happening right now first.
00:03:02.960When I talk about radical ideology, a couple of days ago, I was on a conference call with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
00:03:15.060And they were giving an update on Afghanistan and what was happening, and it was really stunning.
00:03:19.680They were laying out the steps that they believed the Taliban needs to take to be accepted and welcomed into the community of civilized nations.
00:03:44.840They don't want to be accepted into the community of civilized nations.
00:03:50.400And the entire Biden foreign policy is like you're at an Ivy League college faculty lounge and you're sitting there musing about, well, don't the Taliban want to be loved by all the enlightened liberals like us?
00:04:05.840It's like, no, they want to murder you.
00:04:08.740You know, you used to see this, Senator, out of the Obama administration.
00:04:12.500Barack Obama famously would say the reason that they are trying to attack us is because they don't have enough iPhones or because they don't have enough jobs in the streets of Kabul.
00:04:21.780As if nothing else beyond mere financial motivations can actually impel someone to action.
00:04:27.940This Biden administration does not understand that our enemies are, in fact, enemies.
00:04:35.480The Pentagon spokesperson was asked, is the Taliban our enemy?
00:04:39.160And he refused to say, it's like, it ain't complicated.
00:04:42.380You know, you fly planes into buildings in the United States and kill 3,000 Americans, you're our enemy.
00:04:48.740And we should not be deluded otherwise.
00:04:51.640But they combine that, look, the people yabbering in a faculty lounge are pretty harmless.
00:04:58.400But the problem is these guys actually have operational responsibility.
00:05:03.600Joe Biden is, in fact, the commander in chief.
00:05:06.620Our military is obliged to follow his orders.
00:05:09.740And what is stunning about this withdrawal is it doesn't seem anybody asked even basic questions about how it would go about.
00:05:18.460It doesn't seem like they had any plan to evacuate the thousands of Americans that were there.
00:05:24.540It doesn't seem they had any plan to evacuate Afghans who assisted the U.S. military.
00:05:31.100It doesn't seem they had any plan to vet those Afghans.
00:05:34.160And it was almost like they were surprised.
00:05:36.180Wait, wait, you mean the Taliban are bad guys?
00:05:38.840And I'll tell you, Michael, I think the most indefensible decision of all the decisions in the past month or so concerning Afghanistan was the decision to abandon the Bagram airfield.
00:08:51.580We don't know for sure which one it is.
00:08:53.680Now, we have seen – it's interesting, the State Department and the Defense Department are both leaking like crazy trying to say it's door number two.
00:09:03.480They're trying to cover their own rear end and said, no, no, no, we had this figured out, and the political hacks at the White House disregarded us.
00:09:10.380So we know, for example, that there was a dissenting report from a number of folks at the State Department laying out their view that the Taliban would take over Afghanistan incredibly quickly if we pulled out.
00:09:24.820And we know the political operatives in the Biden administration disregarded that.
00:09:29.860You know, my instinct is the same as yours, that our military is usually very, very competent.
00:09:35.640It's not difficult to think about why are we giving away the airfield before we evacuate people.
00:09:41.360This is not subtle national security or military strategy.
00:09:46.340Nor is, well, gosh, maybe we shouldn't leave multimillion-dollar helicopters with advanced weapon systems for crazy lunatic terrorists who want to kill us.
00:09:55.620Listen, if we have to bomb them now to prevent them from having those weapon systems, yes, we should do it.
00:10:02.320Bombing them is better than letting the Taliban have them.
00:10:06.480And, by the way, letting the Taliban allow the Russians and the Chinese to get in them and learn all about them, that's a bad outcome, too.
00:10:15.320But how the hell did it come to this point?
00:10:18.460What idiot said, well, you know, let's just leave our helicopters there?
00:10:26.800And right now, the Biden admin doesn't seem to want to answer those questions.
00:10:31.080I joined with a number of senators in writing a letter to the administration calling for a specific itemization of what military hardware was left there, what was abandoned specifically, and why.
00:10:56.940You know, to quote a leaked reported phrase from former President Barack Obama, you should never underestimate the amount of effing things up that Joe Biden is capable of.
00:11:10.180If this was reported during the campaign, I don't know, it seems seems accurate to me.
00:11:14.380But regardless of him bungling it a little bit more, what do you make of his excuse that, look, it was always going to be this way?
00:11:26.740Well, it wasn't foreordained that it would be done incompetently.
00:11:30.080On the question of Afghanistan and what should we do, I am someone who believes it makes sense for us to exit Afghanistan, for us to leave, bring our troops home, and end the war.
00:11:43.560And this is probably a good time to sort of step back a little bit and think about foreign policy and approaches to foreign policy.
00:11:51.520For a long time in the Republican Party, there were two polls.
00:11:55.420On the one side, you had the interventionists, also called the neocons, people like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton.
00:12:07.860You know, sometimes it seems they've never seen a country they didn't want to invade.
00:12:11.720On the other side, you have the isolationists, most notably Rand Paul, who are extremely reluctant to engage with our military abroad.
00:12:25.420I actually think most Americans disagree with both of those views.
00:12:48.280I think the vital, the touchstone for any military action and the touchstone for our foreign policy should be protecting and defending the vital national security interests of the United States.
00:12:59.900That we should not be engaged in nation building.
00:13:02.460We should not be trying to transform distant lands into democratic utopias.
00:14:12.340And listen, I will readily concede Bashar Assad is a monster who's murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens.
00:14:19.140But the question I asked is, okay, if you topple his regime, how do you stop the chemical weapons from falling into the hands of radical Islamic terrorists like al-Qaeda and ISIS and al-Nustra?
00:14:29.440And that would be a much worse outcome.
00:14:32.020That would make America less safe than it was before.
00:14:35.480And the Obama administration had no coherent answer to that question.
00:14:40.060So I opposed military action in Syria because it wasn't furthering our national security.
00:14:45.120And in that way, Rand Paul and I were both agreed on that, although for very, very different reasons.
00:14:50.640On the other hand, when it concerns Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei is a theocratic zealot who wants to kill us.
00:14:59.460And I believe we should do everything necessary to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
00:15:09.620And it means if they are on the verge of getting a nuke, using military force to take out those facilities.
00:15:16.200It doesn't mean invade Iran and try to turn it into Switzerland.
00:15:20.660It means bomb the hell out of them to stop them from getting weapons they could use to murder millions of Americans.
00:15:27.340Now, in that regard, I agreed with some of the more interventionist folks.
00:15:32.080But it was keyed to are we protecting our national security?
00:15:36.160Donald Trump's views, if you look at the foreign policy of the Trump administration, I think we're very, very consistent with my views as a non-interventionist talk, which is he wanted to get us out of endless wars.
00:15:49.460But he was also willing to act vigorously, for example, taking out General Soleimani, the leading state sponsor of terrorists in the world.
00:15:57.940And if you go back before Trump, Ronald Reagan, when he talked about peace through strength, in eight years, the biggest country Reagan ever invaded was Grenada.
00:16:10.520But he was strong enough that our enemies didn't mess with us.
00:16:14.220So what does that mean for Afghanistan?
00:16:16.320For Afghanistan, I think 20 years was long enough.
00:16:18.960I think we should not be engaged in a permanent war there.
00:16:21.740We shouldn't be trying to turn it into a beautiful Athenian democracy.
00:16:27.820We should focus on keeping Americans safe.
00:16:32.140That means we don't have the naive view of the Biden administration that the Taliban are nice guys who love us.
00:16:38.120We understand they're crazy terrorists who want to kill us.
00:16:42.160That means we understand that when we leave, we need to evacuate the Americans.
00:16:45.960That means we understand that our enemies will try to stop us from evacuating the Americans.
00:16:51.900That means we need to have a plan with a secure perimeter that uses Bagram Air Force Base, air base that protects our black ops and our equipment, and that anticipates it's a dangerous world.
00:17:06.580What Biden did is their naive ideology was married with this utter incompetence and failure to ask when we leave, what happens, and how do we get out in a way that we don't effectively blow ourselves up?
00:17:26.960Well, and so this actually does clarify thinking because certainly for me, I'm not a Rand or Ron Paul non-interventionist isolationist.
00:17:36.640I'm not a John McCain bombing country that looks at us the wrong way.
00:17:41.920So there has to be some kind of third option.
00:17:44.580But it has – I think it remains a very serious debate throughout the country and especially on the right.
00:17:49.460Are we a nation modeled after James Madison saying that continual warfare is the greatest threat to liberty, Washington, Jefferson saying to avoid entangling alliances, or are we an empire much as we were in the late 19th and 20th centuries where we're going to go into countries and we're going to stay there for decade upon decade and we're going to rebuild Korea and Japan and Germany and we're just – we're going to be everywhere all the time.
00:18:18.340And in some places, we are still there.
00:18:20.200So what do you make for the hawkish people, the interventionist types, the neocons who are today saying, look, Afghanistan, we didn't have a whole lot of soldiers there.
00:18:31.900We were just trying to keep a strategic location, maybe fend off Russia and China.
00:18:38.200If we stay there forever, it's no big deal.
00:19:00.440I think the American people – I've talked to too many soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines, including stationed in Afghanistan when I went there to visit them, who were ready to come home.
00:19:10.020And keeping them in harm's way in perpetuity.
00:19:13.440I think the threshold for sending our sons and daughters into harm's way should be very, very high.
00:19:20.500But where I differ from the isolationist, where I differ from the naive liberals of the Obama administration or the Biden-Harris administration, is I understand our enemies are evil bastards who want to kill us.
00:19:37.760And the way to avoid military conflict is strength.
00:19:43.860You know, Reagan talked about peace through strength, and it's a very important insight.
00:19:48.520When you are strong, the bad guys don't want to mess with you.
00:19:52.100When you're weak, you end up getting in many, many more fights because they do not fear you.
00:19:58.700And in many ways, the worst consequence of what's happening in Afghanistan is not even the aftermath of what's playing out today, but what's going to come in six months or a year.
00:20:09.400Because every enemy of America is watching this.
00:20:15.500And one of the consequences of Biden's cluster in Afghanistan is the chances of a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan have just increased dramatically.
00:20:30.400There was actually a tweet from Chinese state media that was directed ostensibly at Taiwan, but it was obviously really directed at America.
00:20:38.140And it said, look, look at what the Americans will do.
00:20:41.660They're not going to come running when we invade you, and you'll give up pretty quickly.
00:20:45.400Because of that weakness, China is emboldened.
00:20:49.840Because of Biden and Harris's weakness, Russia is emboldened.
00:20:54.320Because of Biden and Harris's weakness, North Korea is emboldened.
00:20:57.680Because of Biden and Harris's weakness, Iran is emboldened, as is Hamas and Hezbollah.
00:21:02.500Every enemy of America is celebrating right now because they see the president as weak.
00:24:49.600And so I would emphatically support military force to take out nuclear capacity.
00:24:55.680I also supported military force to take out General Soleimani, which Trump, it was the most significant use of military force under President Trump.