National Security Expert Elbridge Colby’s Advice to Trump on How to Avoid WWIII & Handle the CIA

Elbridge Colby is one of the very few experienced national security officials who actually agrees with Donald Trump. He’s likely to play a big role in the new administration. (00:00) The Steps Trump Needs to Take To Avoid WWIII (09:10) The Dangers of War With Iran (18:10) Why Is The Blob Pro-War? (24:52) We Need to Hold the CIA Accountable (32:49) What Should Trump Do About Russia and Ukraine? (48:50) The Pentagon’s Support for Foreign Wars Paid partnerships with: PreBorn Save babies and souls https://PreBorn.com/Tucker PureTalk https://PureTalk.com/Tucker Get 50% off first month Get the Hallow prayer app 3 months free https://Hallow.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:40Tucker Carlson?

  Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else, and they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers, here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.com. Here's the episode. We are now three days out from the election. There's a mad scramble, of course, in Washington for people to get positions of power in the new administration. Some of them are good people, some of them are not. You are being widely discussed as potentially the next National Security Advisor or Secretary of Defense, taking over DOD. I don't know what's going to happen.

• 1:21Tucker Carlson?

  I'm fairly confident you'll play a large and meaningful role in this administration. You're never going to say any of that, but I just thought that the audience might like some context for while we're having this conversation. I think you're one of the very few people with deep experience in national security who shares the president's priorities on national security, which is amazing, there aren't too many. You're, I would say, the leader of them. There's the context. What does this next administration need to do in order to remain true to the president-elect's articulated positions on war and peace?

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Well, thank you, Tucker, and thank you very much, first off, for your confidence in me. It means a great deal. I don't make any... It's heartfelt. Well, I know, and that's why I'm deeply grateful and honored. And I clearly don't make any presumptions about any role for myself, but 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. I 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

• 2:43Speaker 02

  in multiple theaters, and we could lose them. And I really want peace. And more importantly, President Trump ran, to his historic credit, on an agenda, as he said of, you know, in his victory speech, "I don't start wars, I end them." Now, 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, and 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, and in a sense, my book is a response to that question. And I think you do need strength, you do. Well, of course.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  And 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. But 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. Yes. Nixon, Eisenhower, as Bob Dole used to put it, "These are Democrat wars, it used to be Democrats that started wars and Republicans that ended or avoided them." Eisenhower didn't go into Vietnam in 1954, he did not intervene in Hungary in 1956. Again, nobody thought he was a weak guy. So what needs to happen right now?

• 4:01Tucker Carlson?

  Before 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.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:14Tucker Carlson?

  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. Just will you tell us where we are?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Well, I think for the first time in basically 150 years, we are not clearly the world's largest economy. We compete for that with China, and they are far larger industrial power. Russia, in purchasing power parity terms, is a very large economy with enormous industrial production capacity. So, North Korea advancing its nuclear missile program.

• 4:41Tucker Carlson?

  Russia is a larger manufacturing economy than a lot of us appreciated, I think.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, despite a lot of boasting, they're still out producing the North Atlantic Alliance, including the United States, in artillery production, which is old technology, by like a factor of two or three. Iran's two weeks from a nuclear weapon, according to Tony Blinken. And worse, these actors have come together. Now, you will hear from the sort of primacists and liberals that that means that we have to fight them all at the same time. No, to the contrary, it means they are collaborating together precisely to tie us down and deplete us. And 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. At the same time, our defense industrial base has wildly atrophied from where it was 30 years ago. And this is why the agenda for reindustrialization is so

• 5:26Speaker 02

  important. But that's going to take a long time, as Senator Vance has pointed out. Meantime, China.

• 5:31Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, 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 reestablish America's

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Didn't happen.

• 5:44Tucker Carlson?

  Industrial base.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  In 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. Actually, more or less, the reverse has happened. The Russian military is larger, and this is, you know, General Cavoli, the SACUer, has admitted this, the Russian military is larger. It's battle-hardened. I mean, our military has not fought a peer adversary, well, I mean, really since World War II, but certainly since Vietnam and Korea. The Russians have gone toe-to-toe with Ukrainians who are capable, and they have a revved-up defense industry at the same time. So, in a sense, we're worse. Meantime, the Europeans have basically been asleep at the switch, not going through with their defense buildup, with a few noble exceptions like Poland.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  So, and then you look at China, which is by far the most formidable challenger, 10 times the GDP of Russia. This administration, Tony Blinken, has said Xi Jinping has given the instructions to their military to be ready for a war over Taiwan by 2027. Frank 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. We have to be ready for this. My view is, we desperately want peace. The Chinese are going to look at us, both in terms of our strength, but also in terms of our political commitments. And 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

• 7:10Speaker 02

  and others unnecessarily, not supporting things like Taiwan independence, and at the same time, being prepared to be strong. And 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 it's often the same people, it will be far more catastrophic. Tucker, I don't think this is an exaggeration. I think we stand on the precipice of losing a major power war for the first time in our history. So people need to know what time it is, and 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, we're not going to go over the line like Eisenhower did in 1950.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  He's not going to go into Hungary, we're not going to go to Czechoslovakia in 1968, but don't come across our line because you'll see it's not going to succeed for you. So I think we really stand at a crossroads, and I think President Trump has a mandate for peace. So 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 afford to do so and they're not in the interest of the American people.

• 8:20Tucker Carlson?

  From 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. Zelensky immediately comes out upon Trump's election and says, actually, I'm for peace. That does maybe seem like it's winding down. Who knows?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  I hope.

• 8:41Tucker Carlson?

  But the noises are consistent with winding down. So, but at the same time, the very people who are pushing that war, all of a sudden, like, very excited about a war with Iran.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:49Tucker Carlson?

  It's like they just seamlessly, it's like, oh, Ukraine, whatever. Actually, the real problem is Iran and telling us that Iran's trying to murder President Trump, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know what's true. I don't. But how would the United, what would happen if we went to war with Iran?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think, you know, look, Iran's a bad regime. We don't want to have a nuclear weapon.

• 9:09Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  We don't want to support Israel. We don't want to be able to support groups attacking Israel, et cetera, et cetera. But 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? Like, haven't we been, like, didn't we run this experiment a couple of times? And it's often the, like, the exact same people calling for war with Iran who were involved in the past. And it's like, shouldn't there be some degree of accountability? Moreover.

• 9:39Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  It's like a bad idea in itself. I mean, you know, like, I was criticized in the bulwark by Eric Adelman, who was Dick Cheney's advisor and number three at the Pentagon under Bush. He said, "My ideas were iconoclastic." And I was like, "Thank you. I'm delighted that you think my ideas are iconoclastic."

• 9:54Tucker Carlson?

  How could Eric Adelman be writing with any credibility at all on foreign policy questions after being intimately involved in the Iraq war and then never apologizing? I don't, there should be some international authority that requires contrition, like a moral UN where you don't get to say another word until you don ashes and sackcloth and apologize.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Who among us is, I'm certainly not inerrant, I'm certainly not infallible, but like, at least show some, you know, it's like Paul Gagot of the Wall Street Journal, a couple, like, a year ago, gave a speech to A I, treated the Iraq war as like a mulligan. You know, it's like, ah, I think that's like a big deal. And, you know, obviously, a lot of people got, you know, had different views, et cetera. But it's like, it's kind of show the contrition, show the penance, show the, show the learning. And 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, recognizing it's dependent on Taiwan, or getting in a war with China, or attacking North Korea. It'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.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  So even if you did want to. Getting in multiple fights with people at the same time is just like foolhardy. And I mean, but, 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. So it's really important right now. And it seems to me that you're 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. It's really important not to get enmeshed all over the place and, and either bleed ourselves out or catastrophic multi-front loss.

• 11:35Tucker Carlson?

  I, I think that's the last thing Donald Trump wants.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  It really seems that way.

• 11:40Tucker Carlson?

  Right. I mean, the, the arc of his life is just, is so remarkable, the redemption that we just saw on Tuesday.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  It's amazing.

• 11:47Tucker Carlson?

  Without precedent really in American history. And so if you wanted to destroy his presidency, his second presidency, what's, you know, what's the one foolproof way to destroy it?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  No, no president has ever lost a great power war. Donald Trump has run to his enormous historic credit. He has been shot. He 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, et cetera, to stand up for these principles that the United States desperately needs. Putting Americans' interests first, peace, prosperity, et cetera, re-industrialization. Now is the time to put that into practice, whoever it is. I, I just, I can't stress how, how important that is. And if you're thinking about a historical legacy, Joe Biden's going to leave a legacy that's terrible. I mean, we're the, you know, for all the things, you know, you mentioned the war in Ukraine.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Two and a half years in, Julian Barnes, New York Times, just reported that the intelligence community is reporting that the Ukrainians are losing, that it's not a stalemate. So after all that, after all the preaching, after all the moralism, the Ukrainians are losing the war and the Russians are making enormous progress. And we're unprepared. We're unprepared for a war with China. The Middle East is in the worst situation in years. We can't even stop the, the Houthis, like a third or fourth rate power. And we're not prepared. So they've left us on the precipice. They've put us on a, you know, the Titanic is, is directing towards the iceberg. It's going to take a sharp turn. And the way I think about this, and when I worked at, had the Brown Under worked for President Trump in his, in his first term, when we worked on the defense strategy to

• 13:23Speaker 02

  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. That was like, you know, we were a couple of miles from the iceberg back then. Now we're like, right up, you know, we're a few thousand yards and it's not easy to turn the Titanic. And if you turn the Titanic 90 degrees, people are going to fall out of their bunks. Chandeliers and beautiful, you know, plates are going to get broken. But that's where we are. But that is the fault of what I call the liberal primacist alliance. That 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.

• 13:59Tucker Carlson?

  Then 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? And I, you know, I know them all and I like some of them, a couple of sitting US senators who I think are really nice guys. But they're, they're, they're tools of the people you described, like completely. There's kind of no doubt about it. How, 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?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  So 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?

• 14:42Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly. That's right.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  And yet, so few people do it. And why is that? It's so weird. And honestly, so much of your insights 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. I 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. Like, there's something wrong with the establishment and the way the establishment. Now, I believe there's always an establishment. There's an establishment in Mao's China, but we need a better establishment.

• 15:12Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's it.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  You know, you're a friend of, you're a fan of Teddy Roosevelt, too. Like, the idea that like the establishment just does what it used to do is like, no, the point is the establishment is supposed to serve the people, right?

• 15:23Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  But 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. I think it's this psychic kind of like network benefit of being part of like, essentially functionally an imperial capital.

• 15:36Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  And everybody comes to, you know this, right? They come to the capitalist. You're so wise. We need your leadership. You're so you're so moral and your vision. And it happens in Congress where people come, they probably not thought about foreign policy that much. There are all these structures set up to kind of acculturate them. And again, like, I don't want to sound too new left, but like, you know, this is kind of what happens. And so you need, I think, a clear eyed view of how to change and frankly, a willingness to buck the system. And this to me is like, and I'm certainly far from the only person to make this point, and I think you have as well, is like, President Trump ran against the system. And that is so important because it's the system, the liberal primacist alliance in other things like trade and economics, etc., that need to be a fundamental change. And already,

• 16:21Speaker 02

  he's paid the price, literally, and shown the bravery and commitment to go through that. And so now it's about like, capitalizing. And frankly, my hope is if that happened, a lot of these people, especially in the younger generations, would follow. And I forgive me for a little bit of patting myself on the back, but I think it's an apropos comment. I was out at a thing a few months ago, and this young guy came up, you know, strong guy, whatever. And he said, hey, you know, Mr. Colby, I'm going in the Marines, and I just want to say, all the young Republicans love what you're saying. And I said to him, I was like, well, that's good, because all the old Republicans hate it. And he's like, yeah, that's the point.

• 16:54Tucker Carlson?

  Boy, do they. Boy, do they.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  They do that. And that's like, to me, I always, I think of myself, I'm like the first lot, not to, if this is, although, you know, there are people out there you wonder about, but like, this is, this is not like, actually getting shot. But it's like, I'm trying to think about, how do we protect Americans from not getting shot?

• 17:10Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Right? And so, and so I think the young people can see it, you know, the young people who are like, you know, who were not bought in to, you know, who have not been kind of acculturated, worked for ex-senator on this committee for 10 years, and then went to that think tank, and blah, blah, blah. I think, I think they, if you build it, they will come. But it's like, the first echelon, we take a lot of, we take a lot of metaphorical flack, hopefully metaphorical.

• 17:37Tucker Carlson?

  I just, and I won't go on about this, but I am a little bit distressed by it, very distressed by it. But like someone like Mike Pompeo, I'll just say the name, who I don't think is going to get a job in this administration. I would pray that he's not. I think he's a criminal. I've said that. Plotted to murder someone who hadn't even been charged with a crime. That's a criminal act. Should be arrested for that. That's my view. But even if you don't believe that, he's been anti-Trump for eight years, worked against Trump, and he's a crazed neocon. And he's still being talked about and promoted. Again, I don't think he's going to get the job, but promoted to run the national security establishment in the United States. How can that even happen?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Well, look, I mean, I think it's, if I were advising President Trump, I would say, especially now that the mandate has happened.

• 18:29Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Why pick some, anybody who's not aligned with what you're trying to do? I mean, I saw the last ad that President Trump ran. I mean, it was a stirring ad, like, and it won. Who was in that ad? You, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek, and Vice President -elect Vance. That is the mandate, you know? So, so like, my, my hope is that he will own that. And that is the way for, that's the way for peace. And there's going to be debates about various policies and how to emphasize this or that. But 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

• 19:15Speaker 02

  it is. And he's right. I mean, the way that President Trump, again, has commendably talked about the risk of nuclear war. I worked on nuclear issues a lot. My kind of starting point a lot was like working on nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy and arms control. I worked on arms control with the Russians. We should be afraid of these things. You know, salutary fear, not like an, you know, un-manning fear, if you will.

• 19:34Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  But like, a salutary fear, you know, the beginning of wisdom is fear, or whatever the Bible says to that effect. I should, I should know that, but.

• 19:40Tucker Carlson?

  But it's true.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  It's true, right? Is understanding and calibrating. And 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 in, over Ukraine, and intervening against the Russians, and escalating and allowing US weapons to be overtly used to attack Moscow and Russian strategic, you know, forces sites, like. That is, that is obviously crazy. It's like, timeout. Like, that is obviously-

• 20:05Tucker Carlson?

  There are many Republicans.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. In fact, some of the, that's why I think that the arguments within the Republican Party in some ways are fiercer, because 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. Like, where is the left? Where are the people who are like, anti-war? Where are the people who say the CIA is not above reproach, or the FBI is not above reproach? Who are the people, you know, right mills, or whatever, the power elite, and all this stuff? Those people, those movements have to come back. And, and, and 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, you know, and

• 20:51Speaker 02

  others are saying they're out of position. My 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.

• 21:00Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Or 30 years ago, or 40 years ago. Hey, we need, we've got to be able to talk to our opponents. We have to have a strong military, but not get into unnecessary wars. That's just common sense.

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• 24:42Tucker Carlson?

  You mentioned CIA. Now is probably a good time to address it. Your last name is Colby. That is familiar. That's a familiar name. Anyone knows the history of the Central Intelligence Agency your grandfather ran at, William Colby. And so there are two interesting things. One is, I'm sure this will set off just explosions of theorizing on the internet. So what is your view of CIA? How is, that's why, I think that's why your family's in Washington, because you're-

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, actually, my, my great grandfather was a career Army officer. So I come from a kind of a national security, you know, background. I mean, my dad, not, not so much. But, but, you know, look, my view on the intelligence community, and I worked on this stuff myself when I was kind of early in my career, although on the commission that looked at why Iraq intelligence is wrong. I didn't agree with my, my grandfather for everything, with everything. I didn't know him super well. I mean, I know a lot about how he approached things and how he, you know, his, his record and so forth. One thing where I do really agree with him, and where his legal training, and the fact that actually, as Jim Selzinger said, he was the first liberal to become Director of Central Intelligence, was that he thought, and I agree with him, that you need a CIA. You need a national security establishment, but it's

• 25:50Speaker 02

  not above reproach, and it needs to be accountable. And that's what he, you know, the interesting thing about him, and, you know, just to stress that I don't take any credit for it, like, I'm just telling, just because you asked me. But, you know, he was in World War II, he was then a field guy, he was in Europe, and then he was in Vietnam for a long time. And then he kind of ended up as Director by happenstance, as these things sometimes do during Watergate. And so, and he had not been really involved. He wasn't one of the inside club of like, you know, I see you got Dick Helms' book, the man who kept the secrets. He was the kind of ultimate insider, Washington operator, kind of. My grandfather was out, unlike me, I'm more of a, you know, DC, DC type, policy type. But, but I think he came in and he said- There's a chance that, I mean, remember this, the Democrats at the time, the congressional class of 1974, very left wing, a lot of them were thinking, let's just get rid of this

• 26:35Speaker 02

  place, let's get rid of the intelligence community. And his view is like, that's not good for our country, but it's not good that they're spying on Americans. You know, I've gotten debates on some of these, on Twitter sometimes about like whether the American government is funding some of the stuff, you know, in Europe or whatever, NATO, blah, blah, blah, that's reverberating back into the American political system. It's like, uh, yeah, it's happened before, you know, right? For a long time. For a long time. So it's like, it's not unreasonable. And by the way, sunlight is the best disinfectant. And by the way, who are some of the people who were opposed at that time? Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, you know, they were opposed to any kind of Henry Kissinger, any kind of accountability for the intelligence community. And so that's how I look at it. I think there's a real need for accountability, also in the professional

• 27:17Speaker 02

  military. What is this going on with four-star officers, recently retired, who have no political vetting, they haven't been elected dog catcher, weighing in on extremely sensitive points on American, calling one of the presidential candidates a fascist. That is wildly inappropriate. There needs to be a fundamental change. First of all, it's wrong. Second of all, it's not consistent with our constitutional order. Remember that our founding fathers who had gone through the revolution, who had fought a war against a great power and won, they were like, the nasty politics is a feature. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson talking about each other's mother, fine. Standing military, uh-uh. We only built

• 28:00Speaker 02

  a serious standing military. American military officers wore civilian clothes into the Pentagon as late as World War II, maybe even after. So we have come, this is since 1947, or since World War II, basically. And I think we need it, given what's happening, but it needs to be accountable. The third point I would make about this group is like, Where do they get off? Like, has our military been successful? Have our political military goals been achieved over the last 25 years?

• 28:25Tucker Carlson?

  Call me when you win a war.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're like, if you're Dwight D. Iser. And by the way, that's most of that guilt goes towards the liberal primacist alliance, the politicians who did it, yes. But also the war leaders who, you know, for instance, H.R. McMaster wrote a book called Dereliction of Duty about how the generals in Vietnam did not tell Lyndon Johnson they couldn't successfully prosecute that war. Okay, I agree with you. How is the senior military done? So I think some humility, getting back to basics and staying out of politics is really needed.

• 28:54Tucker Carlson?

  It's infuriating. It does challenge like the idea of our constitutional order. I agree completely, but it's also ominous. So when you read that the Pentagon now has a new policy where at the direction of civilian leadership, they can kill Americans in the United States? What is that?

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Look, there's a lot of things that need to be taken a look at where like we have gotten, especially after 9/11, where it's just metastasized, right? Where we need to ask ourselves, what is the right? And I think you've done this like commendably where you're saying, look, you know, I was here on this position here and I'm same thing where like, you know, but look at, look at the cost and people like, you know, who were, we would say on the old new left would have said, oh my God, this is going to be abused. And people like us were like, ah, don't worry about it. And now they were right. So let's take a new look at that. Again, I think we need to have the capabilities, but I also think this is where this group, I mean, practically speaking, not only former CIA leaders implying that President Trump was a Russian agent is a wild abuse of the trust because it's a special trust with classified

• 29:56Speaker 02

  information and special authorities. And it's almost like a religious obligation where there needs to be a self-discipline and an understanding that there's certain things you can't do, you know? And that's been deeply violated. And I think frankly, Republicans agree that a lot of Democrats or independents or whatever voted for President Trump, they've delivered a verdict on this issue. So I think you need people who have that balance, which to me is the American way is to say, look, the people have spoken. This stuff got out of hand and we need to have a balance, but we need to preserve what we need for our security.

• 30:30Tucker Carlson?

  What do you do in Ukraine?

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Well, one is I hope the president is successful and leans forward on his plan to end the war. And I just say, I don't know what that is, but nobody knew what Dwight Eisenhower was talking about in 1952. Nobody knew what Richard Nixon was talking about in 1968, and nobody knew what Ronald Reagan was talking about in 1980. You already see indications that players, including President Putin, might be changing, and the Ukrainians for that matter. So I hope there's a basis, what exactly that looks like. I don't think, you know, you're not going to like liberate Crimea, right? That's obvious. And the war's not going well. I think that's step one. And I think the Europeans need to, I mean, this is something I've been banging on. It's just so common sense. And by the way, you want to talk about who's helping? Biden and Harris, you know, would go to Europe and

• 31:15Speaker 02

  say, you don't need to worry about anything. But so would kind of primacist type Republicans. They would go to Europe and say, don't worry, we can do everything. We're leading. They didn't do the Europeans any favors. They didn't do the Ukrainians any favors, let alone, you know, anybody else, let alone the American people, because they promised things they couldn't deliver. And this is something where, you know, and I said this, I was, Ross Douthat, we had an interview right before the election in the New York Times, you know, where I'd go, oh, isn't it, Ross didn't say this, but it was sort of like questioning the morality of what President Trump's saying. I don't think there's been a stronger case, a more important time for foreign policy that is more moral than what you see, which is the moralism, which is all intention. You see it on the left from Tony Blinken, just saying, oh, the Ukrainians are fighting for freedom, so we need to do X, Y, Z, and then failing. The way I think about it is like, no, we

• 31:59Speaker 02

  need a foreign policy that's more like, how does a parent think about the responsibility of the child?

• 32:02Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Or, let's say you're on the board of an orphanage. You know, you might have a really good guy, he goes to church every Sunday, he's like, you know, but never cheats at cards or whatever, but he sucks at handling the money. You know, you're going to hire a guy who's actually going to take care of the orphans.

• 32:16Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  And that is, and to me-

• 32:18Tucker Carlson?

  Well, by the way, if all the orphans die, it doesn't matter how much you love them-

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 32:22Tucker Carlson?

  Or claim that you do-

• 32:23Speaker 02

  You don't actually love them.

• 32:24Tucker Carlson?

  Well, of course you don't, because the purpose of a system is its effect. And what's the effect of the war in Ukraine is to depopulate Ukraine, and now to allow foreigners, including many Americans, including BlackRock, to buy the soil of Ukraine.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  I mean, it's certainly not, whatever this has happened has definitely not been beneficial.

• 32:44Tucker Carlson?

  Well, the Ukrainians just lost Ukraine, but not to the Russians, but through the encouragement of the Biden administration. That's my view of it. But how close do you think we have come to a nuclear exchange with Russia during the last 25 years?

• 32:55Speaker 02

  I think it's close. I mean, and Woodward, for, you know, I mean, I'm not sure how reliable he is on everything, but I, I think the reporting that the Biden administration, which was against interest, was very worried about Russian nuclear employment in later 2022 is very, very concerning. I think it was, it was quite real. And the people who were blithe and insouciant about it, I think is a incredibly irresponsible and should not be near serious decisions.

• 33:18Tucker Carlson?

  Who are those people?

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Well, I think you see this kind of liberal premises. There was a lot of people who, who signed the no-fly zone or who made comments on Twitter or otherwise around that time and have said since, have said, oh, you know, lift all the restrictions on the employment of US forces. And by the way, what's very clear is a lot of these people, if given the opportunity, if they thought the political environment would bear it, would support direct intervention, which if we go to war with the Russians directly, the Russians are very prepared to use nuclear weapons, so we have to be realistic about what that entails.

• 33:48Tucker Carlson?

  What does that entail?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think the Russians, one thing about Putin that's, that's important, and again, like, you don't have to like the person to understand that we need to take this guy seriously, right? Is he, you know, as he was, as he assumed power and took over from Yeltsin, which in the Russian mind was a catastrophically disastrous period, one of the first things Putin invested in was the recapitalization of the Russian nuclear forces. And the way Putin talks about Russian nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy indicates that he has a quite sophisticated understanding of nuclear strategy. And of course, you know, a lot of it is speculation because thank God they've only been used once or twice. But it says to me, this guy's credible and he has an idea of how to use him. You don't start by blowing up Washington DC.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  You start potentially with something like battlefield use, selective strikes against things like places in Europe or more peripheral targets, but it can go up there and then you manipulate risk. And if, if weapons are used in that way, you can see millions of people, I mean, and we have almost no defense against, that's why I think President Trump, for instance, like having a better shield would be great, but right now, we're pretty much denuded.

• 34:55Tucker Carlson?

  I just don't understand. I mean, I guess it's kind of late in the game to whine about it, but we provided, you know, a missile defense shield to another country, but we don't have one. Like, how did that happen?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, I think, I think that's something that we can work on. I mean, it's technically very difficult, but I think having something better than what we have now.

• 35:15Tucker Carlson?

  But we're always bragging about, you know, the use of, the sophisticated use of our defensive missile technology abroad. Like, did it occur to nobody that the purpose of the US military is to defend the United States?

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Well, it is. And by the way, up until the ABM treaty was signed in the late 60s, you would go around American cities and there would be Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules, nuclear tipped missile defense interceptors and other kinds, NORAD and all these kinds of things. So I think having a stronger defense of the American homeland makes sense. And also, like, you know, people talk about the American military being used, you know, in relation to Mexico. It's like, well, I think Mexico is like, you know, and the immigration issue is very, very complicated and everything, but like, you know, the American military is to defend the United States, right? So like, that should be, you know, so to me, the core missions of the American military that really need to be focused on is defense of the homeland, preventing China from becoming the hegemonic power in Asia, because I think we'll never re-industrialize, we'll never be autonomous, and be what America needs

• 36:08Speaker 02

  to be if China dominates Asia. But I hope and think we can do that without a war, working with others that pull their own weight. And then, and then having an ability to make sure that we don't have a replication of 9/11. Now, some of that is like being smarter about how we use our own military. But, but I think some of it is, you know, you got to keep tabs out there. And then I think it's like about supporting, you know, people say Trump is anti-allies. I think that's totally wrong. It's just a different model of allies that's obviously, A, is much closer to the Cold War model, and B, is common sense, is like, partisan.

• 36:39Tucker Carlson?

  They say Trump is anti-allies, who are, of course, most important ally in Europe is Germany.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Yes, which is totally.

• 36:45Tucker Carlson?

  And we just destroyed, and so, but by the way, we had a direct hand, this is not speculation, I'm willing to say it's fact, in blowing up Nord Stream. So, I know we're blaming the Ukrainians, but like, we did that. I was gonna say that. No, that's not true. It is true. So how exactly do we get to launch an act of industrial terrorism against our closest NATO ally? How is that allyship?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Well, the thing that's weird, and this gets, I think, also into the context of like, who benefits, you know, Kuwibono, right? Is like, so since the Ukraine war broke out, the European economy, and particularly the German economy, has been like in freefall. So there's this kind of cute argument for a while that we had somehow like benefited from Europe sucking air after the Ukraine war.

• 37:30Tucker Carlson?

  I've heard many people say that.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  And it's like, well, no, no, wait, hold on. Our point, if you go back to like Dwight Eisenhower and like common sense, is like, no, we want them to stand on their two feet. Like, I don't get a rise out of lording it over the Europeans. This is sort of this mindset that like...

• 37:44Tucker Carlson?

  Well, this is still fundamentally a European country. This was a European colony. So Europe is basically allied with the United States on a very fundamental level, or certainly has been for 250 years. So destroying Europe, well, right, with some exceptions, but in general...

• 37:58Speaker 02

  You fight with the people closest to you.

• 38:00Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's right. But I mean, like, Christian Europe, right? It's basically our ally. And destroying Western Europe, which I think we've done, how does that help us? I don't understand.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  I don't think that it's... I mean, the interesting thing about that is, I mean, you know, obviously, we're, you know, settled, you know, originally by Europeans, now we have people coming from all over the world, et cetera. But the thing is, actually, if you look back at our early history, we stayed out of Europe.

• 38:23Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I know.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  And we were actually more involved in the Western Hemisphere, particularly, you know, Caribbean and Asia, actually. So people say, oh, you know, you're never, we're never going to get focused on Asia. I don't think that's true. Who opened the black, who opened the black ships, opened Japan?

• 38:35Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  People were trading a lot of the early American fortunes, you know, the P. Buddy Essex Museum in Salem. That was China, right? People trading in Canton, sometimes with opium, you know, and then like Samoa, Hawaii, et cetera. So I'm not saying, like, we have a, we have a strong interest in Europe.

• 38:50Tucker Carlson?

  Philippines.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  The Philippines, of course, thank you. In 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, but you know, that we were, we were present. So what that, what I think that means to me is a couple of things. One, um... If you actually go back to American history at our best and really kind of, you know, the first got, really until 1989, we did pretty well with the exception, I think, of things like Vietnam and stuff like that, but it was pretty hard-nosed. Like, you go back to Washington's farewell address, Hamilton, et cetera, it's like, we're looking after number one. So 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? Like, that's

• 39:35Speaker 02

  the definition. So when people say Trump is transactional or whatever, I'm like, good, right? We need, he's like the, you know, the CEO of America and the board is saying, hey, look after our interests, right? That's actually what you want. And then on Europe, it's like, we don't actually benefit. I mean, it's been a disaster. I think objectively, the policy over the last two and a half years in particular, has been a total disaster. Germany is in real economic straits, the Ukrainians are losing the war, they haven't built up their military, but, you know, hey, Joe Biden got a medal from Olaf Scholz, who's probably going to be out of a job as well.

• 40:06Tucker Carlson?

  I hope so.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  In a few months. For their sake. I mean, I don't believe in like, in intervening, apparently the Europeans, Scholz himself, feel free to intervene in our politics. Scholz endorsed Biden. Do your job. I was, I was at the Republican convention, as you were a couple of months ago, and I was getting lectured by a few members of the Bundestag, the German congress equivalent, conservatives, putative conservatives. And they were like, why can't you do what Reagan did? And I said, you know what, there's some problems with that, et cetera, like great debt to GDP, our military. So how about you start out by spending as much on defense as the American people do? Like, why don't our, like, that to me is like what President Trump, and against the whole foreign policy establishment. Why? Because the foreign policy establishment likes the dependency model.

• 40:45Tucker Carlson?

  Of course. They like the welfare model in the United States. They want people in public housing.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Right. And that's what I've said to the Europeans. And it's part of my message to Europeans is like, hey, it's not just your fault. I'm not just castigating you as responsible you are. It's also our fault, especially our establishment. But if you look at the message from the American people, it's, we don't want more of that establishment. And that's, again, why it's so important to have the right policies and vision. Well, we've got the vision, the question now is implementation.

• 41:10Tucker Carlson?

  So the problems for the presidential act are the same as they were in the first administration, I would say. How do you staff this thing with people who are aligned with you? And 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?

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the thing that's different is that the international situation that he's being left with is truly dire. And so there's no room for, you know, kind of like, you know, sort of delay or-

• 41:44Tucker Carlson?

  There's no, I'm sorry, I don't want to, I don't want to start attacking people, but I just know everybody as I know you do.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Well-

• 41:50Tucker Carlson?

  They have, no, no, I mean, the people who want these jobs in the Trump, the second Trump administration, and there's no, they act like it's 1985, like-

• 42:01Speaker 02

  That's the thing-

• 42:01Tucker Carlson?

  They have not updated their file, these are the dumbest people I think I've ever-

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Vivek has been great on this, like, in the debate when he said to Pence-

• 42:07Tucker Carlson?

  Why shouldn't he be Secretary of State, by the way?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  I think Vivek would be an amazing, amazing, I mean, he's there, he was out hustling for the president, you know, he's, he's, I mean, we all say, you know, what time it is, but he like delivered these memorable lines against Pence in the, in that debate, and then he debated John Bolton, I think at VMI, and it was just like, it was a very human point, I saw the segment, where he's just like, "You grew up," and this is being generous, honestly, to John Bolton, frankly, but, um, which I admired Vivek on that point, but, is, is said, "You grew up in the era of Apollo 11." You know, and I grew up in the era, and he's younger than I am, the global financial crisis, Iraq, failed wars, you know, increasingly fractious society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's like, you know, nobody, there's a friend of mine, uh, who was interviewed in one of these stories about the new right and so forth, and he said, "Nobody under the

• 42:51Speaker 02

  age of 30 I know who's a conservative treats the neoconservative idea with anything but derision and scorn," something like that. And it was just like, I'm confident where things are heading, but we don't have time, because if, like, and, and I'm not a fanatic on China, right? Like, my view on China is, and I think the Chinese understand this, my view is, we need to be strong, but we also need, like in the Cold War, there's like a line, and there's we don't cross it, and we need to be able to decouple the thing, you know, get, re-industrialize things Lighthizer and Navarro instead of are talking about, which is, bring back industry, have more autonomy, but at the same time, you know, there's a line, but we're not going to go in regime change. There are people who served in the first Trump administration who are talking about regime change in China, who are talking about primacy over China, like dominating China,

• 43:35Speaker 02

  like, that is so dangerous, and often they're the same people who are supporting, you know, total support of Ukraine, which is like, makes zero sense, like, zero sense, right? So my view is- You've got to do the things you're talking about, but you've also got to say, we got to, and you know, Senator Vance has made, as President-elect, Vance has made these points very well. Reindustrialization is critical, but it's going to take some time. In the meantime, given that the Biden team has used up so much of our weaponry and so forth, we got to husband what we have. And again, to me, that is with the purpose of not getting into wars.

• 44:07Tucker Carlson?

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• 47:15Tucker Carlson?

  How could 4 stars, how could the leadership of the Pentagon support this?

• 47:22Speaker 02

  So, you know, it's interesting. I think, again, maybe I'm too optimistic, but like, you know, I deal with, you know, I was, I dealt with a lot of 4 stars when I was there.

• 47:30Tucker Carlson?

  When you worked at the Pentagon?

• 47:31Speaker 02

  When I worked at the Pentagon, because the thing about my job, I was like a sort of, my formal title was a little bit kind of middle, upper-middle tier, but basically I was running the strategy. So I had a lot of exposure. I was kind of operating above my, the sort of normal level. So I had, I got a lot of experience and I've stayed in touch with these people. I watch, I watch them. Here's the thing, and, you know, there's a good, Kissinger, I don't think was that great of a statesman, but I think he was a brilliant writer and sort of observer. He said something like, "Big strategic shifts don't take place just by acts of virtuosity. They reflect underlying trends." And I think you talk to people in the military, and I keep in touch with a lot of them, they know, what I'm saying is like common sense for military people. They know our readiness is down. They know our defense industrial basis and They know the Chinese are moving like gangbusters. They know the Russians aren't a joke. They know we can't afford to get into another big Middle Eastern war. So if

• 48:16Speaker 02

  you show at the top level clarity and courage as President Trump has in charting the direction and he has people under him who are genuinely trying to put that into place, I think if you build it, they will come. And here's the other thing, bear in mind that since 2008, the Democrats have been in control almost the whole time. And under, before that, it was the Iraq War group. So a lot of the people who've made it to the top of a very flat pyramid, they know, they know how to, like, here's the thing about the military. And you look at people like John Kelly being out there, you know, moralizing and calling President Trump a fascist, which is like absurd and inappropriate and terrible on its face. But it's also like, the military, we should respect military service. I certainly do. Especially, you know, people in combat and so forth. But, you know, the military, there's careerism, there's promotion, people are looking after their own interests, et

• 49:01Speaker 02

  cetera. The people at the top of the pyramid often are people who have satisfied the criteria for promotion and selection. That's fine. You know, people respond to incentives, but it's the, it is, it is the most ruthless selection process. And bear in mind, talk about the republic, the army, the Navy and the Marine Corps predate the Constitution. So these are very deeply embedded institutions. People live their entire adult lives in them if they get to be a four star. So you just got like, again, going to like a new left thing. You look at it sociologically, you're like, this is gonna have some pathologies. Obviously, it's a really important institution, but you gotta like, but I think at the end of the day-

• 49:36Tucker Carlson?

  This is gonna have some pathologies.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Nicely put. Nicely put. There are people in there who want to do the right thing, you know, or they can be motivated to do the right thing. That's fantastic people in the military. And if they're rewarded for it, they will go, they will get, because a lot of the guys who would have wanted to do that, they cash out as a Colonel or a Navy Captain or a one star, you know. But if we, if we, if we put the, the, President Trump and his team, I should say, they, they put the right incentives, I think, I think, I think it'll get better.

• 50:04Tucker Carlson?

  I must say, it's just having spent my life in DC and just running into them a lot or living near them, it was always so noticeable. I met so many bright, energetic, wise, I would say, Colonels. But far, you know, I can think of one Marine, two star, I knew Marine general who I thought was so impressive, I'll even say his name, Vinnie Colonies, wonderful man, but, you know, didn't meet a lot of other flag officers that I thought were anything other than politicians.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  I think, I think.

• 50:34Tucker Carlson?

  I'm sure they exist, I mean.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  I think, I think real, I'll put it this way, most of the real, there's some brilliant defense guys, I'll mention a Democrat I have a lot of respect for, Bob Wark, who served in the Pentagon, he's a great guy, was a Marine Colonel, retired, Andrew Krepinovich, who was another brilliant guy, an Army guy, retired Colonel, often the guys who are really the highest horsepower, real strategic thinkers, they cash out at that level, because that's what the selection is for, it's not to say that other people aren't, aren't smart, but like the people that, you know, there's.

• 51:05Tucker Carlson?

  It's so noticeable.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  And there's a mismatch between how people think, like, oh, you know, he has four stars, ergo, he's like a strategic genius, no, no, that's not how the selection process works, you know what I mean, like, they, they're promoted for like, running a large, a corps, an Army Corps, you know, or a fleet, that's different than, that's fine, but let's, let's understand what we're dealing with.

• 51:26Tucker Carlson?

  But shouldn't the process, isn't the point of promotion to, you know, winnow out the, the less capable and elevate?

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on what you're selecting for.

• 51:35Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I guess that's it.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  But I think, hey, how about selecting for winning?

• 51:39Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, hey.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Like, I think that, as opposed to like, you know, kind of like, playing the game and saying the right things, and, you know, we don't know, that's the other thing about, like, you know, I love the meme of Mark Milley and Eisenhower and their chests, like, I just, it's so perfect.

• 51:58Tucker Carlson?

  Incredible.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  You know, it's just, it's just, you could speak for 10 hours and you're not.

• 52:01Tucker Carlson?

  Well, when I watched. Milley, in that famous, now famous hearing, talking about white rage, I thought, this is a guy who doesn't have any idea what he's talking about, he's saying words he thinks he's supposed to say, doesn't seem terribly bright, he seems weak, above all, he seems like the product of a bureaucracy to me, which probably shouldn't surprise me.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  And I think there's, and again, to this pathology point, that.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  You know, like if you read McMaster's memoirs, for instance, he's almost kind of lecturing the American people about their need to like double defense spending and stay in Afghanistan until the second coming. And it's like, it's that touch grass kind of thing where like you don't have political accountability, like direct, I mean, for instance, they not only they're not elected, but people who are civilian appointees go through political vetting. So they have a kind of indirect political accountability, you know, where they elect, you have to demonstrate loyalty and, you know, you're on the team, etc. You have to be aware of that. The military, they, they really don't have that ostensibly, although I wonder about the left and kind of through the back door importing some of those things. But so that, so you get to this point where you think that you're like, well, I'm speaking in front of a large group of people because I'm a four-star general. And it's like, actually, you really have no standing to talk about

• 53:10Speaker 02

  that issue at all, you know, because that's a, that's a, that's a domestic issue that you like, don't have any political finger feel for. And you're supposed to be much more careful and modest about that anyway.

• 53:21Tucker Carlson?

  But they have no moral authority, right, to speak about anything like that because they have no authority apart from that granted them by the president.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:29Tucker Carlson?

  Because we have civilian control and the president's authority comes from voters.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Right. And by the way, and if somebody has authority, and it's like the Audie Murphy guy, the guy, the guys that you're talking to, who are like out there in the field, Fallujah or whatever, they have authority, you know, but I'm always like, you know, another guy, Frank McKenzie, who's out there a lot, who's constantly hammering, you know, these points. And I was like, well, he was the CENTCOM commander when the Afghanistan withdrawal happened. And he didn't put his stars on the, you know, if he thought there was a better way, why didn't he put his stars on the table? So like, why, you know, like, okay, I mean, I personally support the Afghanistan withdrawal. I believe President Trump still does, but it said that it's done terribly, and that, which I think is clear. But it's like, you know, you could, you could say Dwight Eisenhower had a kind of moral authority. But the other thing about Dwight Eisenhower, I mean, he was actually a smart guy. But if you look at like his Guildhall speech, I don't know if you remember this, but like,

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Unlike MacArthur, for instance, he had a real feel for the American people, civilian army, you know, like they were offering the award of the city of London, he said, "I can't accept this. I accept this only on behalf of the great human forces," he said, you know, which is like, yeah, it's like regular guys, you know, and that's, to me, that's, I try to have that mindset about like, I don't want people to get torn limb from limb in a war with China that we could avoid, let alone another, like, or vaporized in a nuclear explosion with Russia. Of course, that means you don't just like, do whatever they want, duh, but you've got to like, calibrate that balance, always thinking about, as President Trump has said, going back to like, what's in the concrete interest of the American

• 55:03Speaker 02

  people?

• 55:07Tucker Carlson?

  You've referred repeatedly to a potential war with China. I assume that would be over Taiwan.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  I think, yes, I think Taiwan would be the focal point, but what I think is very scary about the Chinese, and I don't think the Chinese are behaving in, frankly, if you apply the way, like, you were in Washington from the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, right, or a little bit after, right, but like-

• 55:26Tucker Carlson?

  No, I was there, I was there that day.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  You were there that day? Okay, oh, right, exactly. I know you've talked about this. If you apply the same kind of behavior that we exhibited over the 25, say, 20 years after that, and you apply that model to a China that is not constrained, that's very scary, right? Like, so we just have to apply the same model to them, because, again, to me, as like, a conservative and I don't think-

• 55:51Tucker Carlson?

  So, I know exactly what you're saying, but maybe that's too subtle. Yeah, we've explained precisely what you're saying.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  I mean, we went from being, in the 1980s, you had the Weinberger Doctrine of President Reagan, and Reagan almost getting impeached because he was trying to help just a proxy group with the Contras, because people were so afraid of getting in another Vietnam. And the biggest thing that he would do would have meetings with the Soviet premier on nuclear weapons, because people were like, "This could happen, and I really don't want it to happen," right? Fast forward 15 years and we're invading Iraq. And as you recall, the people who were biggest fans of invading Iraq, the plan was also to go after probably Syria and Iran and so forth, informally or not.

• 56:34Tucker Carlson?

  I worked for those people at the time.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so you know, so I mean, that was not, that was just the starting point.

• 56:39Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I'm aware, yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  So, and the way-

• 56:41Tucker Carlson?

  That was the new American century.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  The way I interpret that is you're going to have people like that because we're human beings and that's how we socialize or whatever. And if there's no constraint, no, you would have been like sent to the looney bin in 1982. If you're like, oh, let's invade Iraq. 2003, if you said we shouldn't invade Iraq, you were like, even if you were Brent Skroger, you were castigated.

• 57:00Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  So-

• 57:02Tucker Carlson?

  And never rehabilitated, by the way.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  Interesting. Well, I have, I mean, I don't agree with them on everything, but I, I mean, that's sort of mindset.

• 57:09Tucker Carlson?

  I agree, but I'm just saying like-

• 57:10Speaker 02

  No, exactly, yeah.

• 57:11Tucker Carlson?

  It wasn't like, you know, Brent Skroger got rich or-

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:16Tucker Carlson?

  More respect. I mean, he said those things, you know, to his own detriment.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, just on the China thing, what I would say is they care a lot about Taiwan, but I think it's very clear they're building a military to go beyond Taiwan. They're building a basing architecture to go well beyond Taiwan. I think that's, in a sense, almost indisputable. And I think they have interests to go beyond Taiwan. This is what worries me is I actually fear ironically that China is living out the Leninist theory of imperialism, which is they need captive export markets for their overproduction. And of course, they need natural resources and other things to import. And so they have a rational incentive to what the Japanese created, the Greater East Asia Co-Prestoia. Every empire, formal or informal, is, not everyone, but like a lot of them start out as basically commercial zones.

• 58:03Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  And that's what I worry about. And again, I, the good news is I think we can negotiate with China about that. That's why I think President Trump's, against a lot of criticism, his willingness to be open to negotiating a deal with President Xi is good. Because we don't, we don't have an implacable hostility or rivalry. We don't have to change, I hate communism, but like, that's up to them. And we, the last thing I want is Americans dying trying to impose our form of government on them. Hopefully, that's pretty uncontroversial. But I think, I think if we just, you know, you know, Taiwan's a tough issue because the point I've been making, and I've gotten some flak from, again, good quarters from the Wall Street Journal, last couple of months, is like, I've been saying we should focus on defending Taiwan and they need to

• 58:47Speaker 02

  step up. They haven't done it and we haven't prioritized. So I think Taiwan is on the knife's edge right now. Now, I think we want to avoid a war over that if we possibly can. And President Trump has said, a war, a attack on Taiwan isn't going to happen under my watch. So I think it is absolutely incumbent upon whoever is working for him to make sure that doesn't happen, combining a strong shield with a rational defensive policy and kind of political message to China that convinces them that, look, you're better off with peace.

• 59:15Tucker Carlson?

  The Wall Street Journal attacked you?

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they...

• 59:20Tucker Carlson?

  How long will the Wall Street Journal kind of be considered the preeminent place where, quote, "conservative intellectuals" explain their views?

• 59:28Speaker 02

  I think they're in, I think they're actually in trouble, honestly. I, you know, I read them, but they are so far out of whack. I mean, so on my, on the kind of national security foreign policy issues, they are total premises. They, in the same breath, often, they'll say, our military is in terrible shape, but we need to have aggressive policies in like four different theaters. Makes no sense. It's incoherent, right? On, you know, they're, they're way out of step on the conservative Republican views on like trade, where like Lighthizer and Navarro and the president are. They, they can't stand, you know, they've been repeatedly criticized, people like you, like Vice President Vance, so I feel like I'm honored to be in this company. So it's sort of like, you know, obviously, they reflect a certain part of the, you know, American population, which

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  is sort of, you know, wealthier professionals, who are probably more socially liberal, the Acela corridor in New York, etc. But I think a lot of people read them because they matter, right? But at some point, you get so far out of whack that you actually become a liability. You know, and they were big backers of Nikki Haley and so forth. So, you know, I think we need, but then with the rise of new media, I mean, you've been a pioneer in this, but others, you know, and Elon and what he's done with X and, you know, and David Sacks and these kind of people, I think there's hope that like, not only is it not going to matter as much, but it may become less and less relevant.

• 1:00:43Tucker Carlson?

  It seems like the Drudge Report to me, you know, you have in your mind that this, no, I mean, Drudge went from, well, Drudge was of course sold to left wingers. They've never admitted that, but I believe that's true. But the Wall Street Journal in some sense has been also, I mean, they don't, I don't know, people who imagine the Wall Street Journal is conservative are sort of like, haven't been paying attention.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  It's like the socially liberal fiscal conservative.

• 1:01:07Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  And they were like mocking President Trump in the interview. I thought that was pretty lame and kind of gross.

• 1:01:12Tucker Carlson?

  It's a really dishonest newspaper and I'm rooting for its demise. I just want to say that. I mean that.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  I hope it could get reformed.

• 1:01:19Tucker Carlson?

  You're right. You're totally right. We've seen enough institutions destroyed. I just, I do think it's really a garbage newspaper and, and I wish more people realized that. I can't control myself. All right. Out of control. So, when do you think it'll be clear? Like who's administering Trump's foreign policy?

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  I mean, I just, I honestly don't know. I mean, it's up, obviously up to him. But, you know, what, what I would say is, I hope he makes, you know, picks people who will implement the, the vision that, that he ran on and that, you know, you and others have supported him so ably about, just as sincerely as an American. I mean, even if I'm not part of it, or I'm dog catcher or whatever. I mean that, I think if, honestly, if, if the primus types who could get us into multiple wars get in there, you're going to have to get to a more realistic foreign policy eventually.

• 1:02:18Tucker Carlson?

  Well, they'll destroy Trump. They, just to be clear, people like Pompeo, whom I know personally, hate Trump. They hate Trump. And, you know, I don't care what he says, or Lindsey Graham says, oh, he's so great. You know, they suck up to him on Fox News, but they hate him. And they're working to undermine him, and they did throughout his four years in office, and the four years that followed, they undermined him because they hate him. So I, I just hope that there is a new generation in the Republican Party of people who maybe aren't even ideological, but just put America's

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Exactly, common sense, yeah.

• 1:02:51Tucker Carlson?

  America's interests is the whole point of our government.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  I think there is a new generation, people in their twenties and thirties. I'm very hopeful. I mean, I talked to a lot of them. What I'm worried about is, I don't think there's any, I mean, you, maybe, like, and, and, well, Trump is like an exception. But, you know, you look at a guy like Vice President Vance, he's only, I think, 40.

• 1:03:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  You know, a lot of the best senators, you know, are, are much younger.

• 1:03:13Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  You look at Eric Schmidt.

• 1:03:15Tucker Carlson?

  Eric Schmidt is amazing.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  Jim Banks, you know, younger guys, like, you know. And the problem is, people just naturally like, well, we need somebody who's 65 or whatever. And it's sort of like, but I think it's even worse than, than, than what you're suggesting, because like, you know, let's say we get in a big Middle Eastern war, and you have people who are talking about an independent Taiwan, or regime change in China, or regime change in Russia, and we get bogged down. Why wouldn't the Chinese attack? Like, just, I mean, thinking about, think, apply how we behave, the Project for a New American Century style thinking, and just think that those people will be in the ascendancy in Beijing. The way I think about it, Tucker, is like, we're like a heavyweight boxer, and China's another heavyweight boxer. Russia's like a middleweight, and maybe North Korea and Iran are like, you know, welterweights or featherweights or whatever.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Those guys can, they can tear you out. And China can call us to a match at any time, at any time. And if we're not ready, that is like, terrible. You know? And so, at that point, we would have to put a more realistic foreign policy. But on my view, and this is, I think, a real point to, the kind of people who read the Wall Street Journal on bed page, the point that I would make to them is, If we go down this path of aggressive policies in three or four different theaters of the world without the backing, we will end up bloodied and bruised, we will have catastrophic defeat, lots of Americans will be killed, and the American people may very well say, "I'm done. I'm done. This is, you know, all the rules based on national order? This is what it led to? Forget about it."

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  And that, if you want to save it, if you want to save something, like I think, I think mine is like the, the reform rather than the radical upheaval. Mine is like, "Hey, no, I believe in the post-war. I just don't believe in the post-1989 absurd hubris going around." The people, yeah, we can, the Cold War, and I keep going back to it, but just like, I, I just, because like, you know, Senator McConnell will talk about Eisenhower all the time, and I'm like, "Dude, Eisenhower thought that if there were US troops in Europe at the end of the 1950s, it was a failure. He's the one who came up with the Uncle Sucker line, not President Trump." So you want to talk about the Cold War legacy? We were pretty ruthless. You know, the Germans attacked us, or excuse me, I sound like I'm bullshitting, the, the Japanese attacked us in 1941, and we let the Soviets do the bulk of the fighting, and we put Germany

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  first. Why? Because, and I'm glad, as a descendant of people who are in the European Theater of Operations, I'm glad that the Soviets, but George Shultz, when he went and dealt with his counterpart, he, he visit, he wrote about this very movingly. He went to the cemetery in Leningrad, and he, he offered a somber salute. And I had the honor to meet Shultz a couple of times, and this was not a, you know, he's, he had strong views and so forth, but I think you can respect that, you know, and, and understand that we can be hard-nosed and look at your opponents and say, "We don't want a war."

• 1:05:59Tucker Carlson?

  We've told you before about Hallow. It is a great app that I am proud to say I use, my whole family uses. It's for daily prayer and Christian meditation, and it's transformative. So with everything happening in the world right now, it is essential to ground yourself. This is not some quack cure. This is the oldest and most reliable cure in history. It's prayer. Ground yourself in prayer and scripture every single day. That is a prerequisite for staying sane and healthy and maybe for doing better eternally. So if you're busy on the road, headed to kids' sports, there is always time to pray and reflect alone or as a family, but it's hard to be organized about it.

• 1:06:42Tucker Carlson?

  Building a foundation of prayer is going to be absolutely critical as we head into November, praying that God's will is done in this country and that peace and healing come to us here in the United States and around the world. Christianity obviously is attacked, under attack everywhere. That's not an accident. Why is Christianity, the most peaceful of all religions, under attack globally? Did you see the opening of the Paris Olympics? There's a reason because the battle is not temporal. It's taking place in the unseen world. It's a spiritual battle, obviously. So try Hallow. Get three months completely free at Hallow. That's hallow.com/tucker. If there's ever a time to get spiritually in tune and ground yourself in prayer, it's now.

• 1:07:25Tucker Carlson?

  Hallow will help personally and strongly and totally sincerely recommended. Hallow.com/tucker.

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• 1:09:18Tucker Carlson?

  What happened to all the Bush people? You were here for that.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Tucker Carlson?

  Um, not just the President Bush and his family are pretty clear for Kamala Harris, but, but all the people who staffed that administration, um, do all of them still buy those ideas, those 20-year-old ideas, or have any come around to your position?

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a great question because I know a lot of them is like you. I like a lot of them, you know?

• 1:09:43Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  And some of them, no. I admire some, I don't admire others. Um, and people are going, you know, a lot, a lot of them put flags in the ground with the, the foolish and inappropriate Never Trump letters in 2016. And they're kind of, so their hands are a bit tied. So I don't know how they would behave in a, in a vacuum. I think you see sort of various stages of grief. I mean, various people kind of adapting in different, in different ways or not adapting. Some people are kind of like unreconstructed. Some are kind of like resigned to where things are going. Um, you know what's funny about the Bush? I mean, I don't, I mean, you remember this better than I do, but I remember like Bush ran on a more humble foreign policy.

• 1:10:18Tucker Carlson?

  I know.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  You know? I 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. Now, he ended up totally abandoning that, unfortunately, to his eternal discredit. Um, and in a sense, he be, he was a progressive. He was, he was armed progressivism. Bill Kristol is, let's, let's fight the end of history, you know, basically, which is like, that's not in any way, and, and I mean, conservative, I'm not sat like Angela dancing on the head of a pin. It's not common sense, right? But I think, I think a lot of those people, it's probably... It's gonna be hard to incorporate them. You know, there's sort of two, and sociologically, again, it's, they're invested in the, in the old model.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  And so I think we're gonna need, the, the trouble is that all the credentialing's been on that side.

• 1:11:08Tucker Carlson?

  All of it.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Almost all of it. I mean, I'm, not to make anything 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. And, you know, I think, what I find, though, encouraging, Tucker, is I, and this is where, I mean-

• 1:11:28Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, can I say, you, you went to Groton and Harvard, right?

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:11:33Tucker Carlson?

  Well, so are you the only person in the world who went to Groton and Harvard who voted for Donald Trump?

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  You know, I don't think so. Actually, my Groton and Harvard roommate was indicating, I think there are a few others. I mean, I, you know, but, I mean, okay, so you, you got me. I, I, you know, people say this sometimes, and I think they say it about you too. It's like, oh, you're from the elite background, how can you not support the elite? And I'm always like, the elite is supposed to work for the public interest. And by the way, that was the model, Teddy Roosevelt was behind the founding of Groton School, which I went there, I have very fond memories, a lot of people who are associated with that hate Donald Trump and everything. I proudly support him. But I think the whole point that, that is to, you know, service is perfect freedom. The idea is public service, is putting the interests of the public ahead. And so I, to be honest, I find the current establishment, I look at Morning Joe or something, and I'm like, this is not what America deserves.

• 1:12:19Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, so I have the same perspective, and I would say more broad, the identical perspective, and I would say that nobody reforms, um, the system who doesn't understand the system.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Tucker Carlson?

  And Teddy Roosevelt saved capitalism in the United States by restraining-

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  And he was hated by his peers.

• 1:12:35Tucker Carlson?

  By restraining the monopolies.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:12:37Tucker Carlson?

  And the only reason he was able to do that was because he was pushing back against his own class. He understood them.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:43Tucker Carlson?

  Right. So, no, I'm not attacking you for going to Groton and Harvard. I'm, I'm rather saying, I think it's essential that you understand, J.D. Vance hated Trump.

• 1:12:54Tucker Carlson?

  Went to Yale Law School, started going up to the Aspen Institute to speak in the summer, found the people there so repulsive-

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  He's like, "Oh, he was totally right."

• 1:13:01Tucker Carlson?

  That he has become their nightmare.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:13:02Tucker Carlson?

  Because he knows who they are.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:13:04Tucker Carlson?

  He had dinner with David Brooks many times.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:13:06Tucker Carlson?

  So, anyway.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Totally, totally, and I think like, and I think like that's, you know, I love this, this clip of Maggie Goodlander getting called out by this-

• 1:13:14Tucker Carlson?

  I know.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  You know, it should be challenged if you're, like, anybody should be subject to challenge, and that's what's so great about like X and podcasts-

• 1:13:22Tucker Carlson?

  Did Maggie Goodlander win? I'm embarrassed.

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  I think so, I'm not sure, and I'm like not picking on her particularly, but like, you know, there's a fair point, but I mean, my, my view is, and it's apropos because the other woman I think was in, I think she's, her family's from China, but you know, even under Mao, I mean, the ultimate egalitarian system, there is an establishment, there is an elite.

• 1:13:40Tucker Carlson?

  Well, of course.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  And of course, Xi Jinping is a product of that elite.

• 1:13:42Tucker Carlson?

  Dogs create hierarchies. You're always gonna have a hierarchy, so the question is not, do you have a ruling class?

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  Is it good?

• 1:13:48Tucker Carlson?

  You're getting a ruling class.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Is it good?

• 1:13:49Tucker Carlson?

  Is, is, do you have a good ruling class?

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:13:51Tucker Carlson?

  Or do you have Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken? That's the best we got?

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  And here's the other thing, you know, and I don't want to cry too much over River here, but like, they are the establishment, and they act in like a sociologically conservative way. They're all gonna leave office, and they're all gonna get great jobs on Wall Street, and they're all gonna go to law firms and whatever, and it's the people who are taking on the establishment and are taking the slings and arrows, and hopefully metaphorically alone, but to me, that's the point. That's what, that's what you're supposed to do. If you, if, you know, as the Bible says, "To whom much is given, of whom much is expected."

• 1:14:24Tucker Carlson?

  I strongly agree with that.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  And I think you're a model of that, honestly, and I'm not just saying that-

• 1:14:28Tucker Carlson?

  Well, no, I, but I, I really believe in that, and I'm just, I'm just so offended by, I'm so offended by the mediocrity and selfishness-

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:14:36Tucker Carlson?

  And stupidity of our ruling class that I just can't, and I don't care if they kill me, I will never stop feeling that way.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  I know you don't, and that's, you're incredibly courageous, so.

• 1:14:43Tucker Carlson?

  Um, Bridge Colby, I am rooting for you fervently, I just wanted to make sure everyone knows who you are and what you think this process is taking place privately, as it has to, but I also think that people who voted for Trump because they want a calmer world, they don't want the United States or him to be destroyed in wars, I think they should know what's going on, so I hope this provides a little sunlight.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  Thank you very much, my friend.

• 1:15:06Tucker Carlson?

  Bless you.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:15:07Tucker Carlson?

  Thank you.

• 1:15:10Tucker Carlson?

  Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to TuckerCarlson.com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, TuckerCarlson.com.