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- [00:00]
A
We've all seen the terrible images coming out of Afghanistan. Bagram Air Base abandoned. The Kabul Embassy evacuated. Now everyone just at the airport. With Taliban all around, the rest of the country having already fallen, Biden doesn't seem to have many answers for any of this. Biden's Secretary of State can't even guarantee that the president knows what's going on. Things have gotten so bad that even the media are beginning to ask questions. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz. Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz. I'm Michael Knowles. So glad to be back with all of you. Thank you so much. If 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 or all while we've got this crazy news from Washington D.C. from Kabul, it seems as though the American foreign policy is just collapsing around us. Senator, what's going on?
- [01:10]
B
Well, it's an absolute mess. It is heartbreaking to see the disaster that's unfolding in Afghanistan. And 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. It's a really dangerous combination of radical ideology and manifest incompetence. And I gotta say it reminds me of the border crisis. The two are really quite similar in that both are catastrophes under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And 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. It's reminiscent of Jimmy Carter in the 1970s of naive leftist ideology and blatant, blatant incompetence.
- [02:19]
A
Well, so Senator, I think it's important to note there are these two sides of it and we're all debating what happened in Afghanistan, what is currently happening. But there are really two separate questions. The strategy, should we pull out? Should we stay in some middle ground in between them? And then also just the basic questions of as you say, competence. How is this being done? Could this have been done better? People might disagree on what should have happened in Afghanistan. But, but I don't think anyone disagrees that the way in which it happened could have been much, much better.
- [02:51]
B
So let's break down each of those pieces cuz I have a lot of thoughts on what the overall strategy should be. But let's focus on what's happening right now. First, when 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, and they were giving an update on Afghanistan and what was happening, and it was really stunning. They were laying out the steps that they believed the Taliban needs to take to be accepted and welcomed into the community of civilized nations. And it was truly absurd. I was staring at my phone in disbelief. These folks are incredibly naive. They don't understand that the Taliban are theocratic thugs. They are terrorists, they are murderers. They don't want to be accepted into the community of civilized nations. And 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? It's like, no, they want to murder you.
- [04:05]
A
You know, you used to see this senator out of the Obama administration. Barack Obama famously would say, the reason that they are trying to attack us is because they don't have. Because they don't have enough jobs in the streets of Kabul. As if nothing else beyond mere financial motivations can actually impel someone to action.
- [04:24]
B
This Biden administration does not understand that our enemies are, in fact, enemies. And in fact, it was striking. The Pentagon spokesperson was asked, is the Taliban our enemy? And he refused to say. It's like, it ain't complicated. You know, you fly planes into buildings in the United states and kill 3,000Americans. You're our enemy, and we should not be deluded otherwise. But they combine that. Look, the people yabbering in a faculty lounge are pretty harmless. But the problem is these guys actually have operational responsibility. Joe Biden is, in fact, the commander in chief. Our military is obliged to follow his orders. And what is stunning about this withdrawal is it doesn't seem anybody asked even basic questions, questions about how it would go about. It doesn't seem like they had any plan to evacuate the thousands of Americans that were there. It doesn't seem they had any plan to evacuate Afghans who assisted the US Military. Doesn't seem they had any plan to vet those Afghans. And it was almost like they were surprised. Wait, wait. You mean the Taliban are bad guys? And 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. Bagram is a secure base. We've invested over a billion dollars into building Bagram. It has an airfield, a secure perimeter, I've been to Bagram. I visited the troops there in Afghanistan, and we just gave it away. About a month ago, the Biden administration, in anticipation of leaving the theater, decided to just leave. And it's bizarre. They did it in the dead of night. They literally just one night disappeared. The Afghans woke up. They look around. Where are the Americans? They just disappeared. We abandoned Bagram, and of course, the Taliban comes in. So now the Taliban controls Bagram. Now, the Taliban has a secure airfield close to Kabul. Now, the Taliban has the military hardware that the Biden administration apparently abandoned there. And there are conflicting reports, but it appears they've got a significant number of black op helicopters that we, for reasons that defy any understanding or articulation, gave to the Taliban. And that was just dumb. Whatever your ideology, if you've got to evacuate tens of thousands of Americans, having a secure airfield with a secure perimeter would really help, rather than relying on a commercial airport in the center of a big city surrounded by and controlled by the Taliban.
- [07:18]
A
Now, well, there's a report out now that the Biden administration is considering launching targeted strikes to destroy the very expensive military equipment that we left at Bagram and elsewhere, which raises this question again, whether or not you think we should have left, whether or not you think that it was always going to kind of turn out in a tough way. Shouldn't you think about that before you leave the airfield? Isn't that just, to your point, a question of basic competency? And so what I don't understand, I don't just want to dunk on Biden. I don't just want to. It just doesn't make sense to me that after 20 years in this intervention, whatever you want to call it, after years and years of planning to leave, they bungle it this bad.
- [08:02]
B
And I think there need to be serious congressional investigations. There needs to be a public inquiry into what happened. And there are two alternatives. Number one, the intelligence was horribly flawed, and the military planning and execution was horribly flawed. That's one possibility. The second possibility is the intelligence accurately predicted what was gonna happen. And the military planning laid out a reasonable approach to mitigate the damage, including not handing Bagram over, including getting our Black Hawks and other equipment and weapon systems out of there. And the Biden administration disregarded that intelligence and that planning. They ignored what was put forth. We don't know for sure which one it is. Now, 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. They're trying to cover their own rear ends. No, no, no. We had this figured out, and the political hacks at the White House disregarded us. So 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. And we know the political operatives in the Biden administration disregarded that. You know, my instinct is the same as yours, that our military is usually very, very competent. It's not difficult to think about, why are we giving away the airfield before we evacuate people. This is not subtle national security or military strategy, nor is, well, gosh, maybe we shouldn't leave multimillion dollar helicopters with advanced weapon systems for crazy, lunatic terrorists who want to kill us. Listen, if we have to bomb them now to prevent them from having those weapons systems, yes, we should do it. Bombing them is better than letting the Taliban have them. And 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. But how the hell did it come to this point? What idiot said, well, you know, let's just leave our helicopters there? That needs to be answered. And right now, the Biden admin doesn't seem to want to answer those questions. I 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. We haven't got an answer yet.
- [10:42]
A
Now, Senator, what do you make of President Biden's excuse, such as it is, that any exit from Afghanistan was gonna be chaotic? Oh, yeah, sure. You 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. This was. It was reported during the campaign. I don't know, it seems accurate to me. But regardless of him bungling it a little bit more, what do you make of his excuse that. Look, it was always gonna be this way. Trump campaigned on getting out. Biden campaigned on getting out. The Taliban were always gonna come in, so you just gotta deal with it.
- [11:22]
B
Well, it wasn't foreordained that it would be done incompetently. On 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. And this is probably a good time to sort of step back a little bit and think about foreign policy and Approaches to foreign policy. For a long time in the Republican Party, there were two poles. On the one side, you had the interventionists, also called the neocons, people like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton. You know, sometimes it seems they've never seen a country they didn't want to invade. On the other side you have the isolationists, most notably Rand Paul, who are extremely reluctant to engage with our military abroad. I actually think most Americans disagree with both of those views. I certainly do. And I have long described my views as a third point on the triangle. The way I describe my views is that I am a non interventionist hawk. What that means is the following. I 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 interest of the United States. That we should not be engaged in nation building. We should not be trying to transform distant lands into democratic utopias. We should be protecting America. What does that mean in practice? Because that's all theoretical. So let's break it down in practice and let me give a couple of examples from the past. And then let's fast forward to Afghanistan. In the past, Barack Obama was president, and Obama proposed attacking Syria because they crossed the red line of using chemical weapons. He'd drawn a red line. Bashar Assad used chemical weapons. He said, all right, let's launch an attack. I initially, Michael, kept an open mind to that. And I said, okay, let me hear the commander in chief articulate how this is in our national security interests, articulate how it makes America safer. And had there been a clear defined mission that was defending our national security interest, I might have supported that. What ended up happening is the Obama administration was utterly incoherent. At one point, John Kerry said, we're gonna launch an unbelievably small attack. And it's like, well, okay, well then what's the point of it? Like, what exactly are you trying to accomplish? And it was basically a.
- [14:02]
A
That'll show you Bashar. You'll barely even notice it. It's gonna be so small.
- [14:06]
B
That was their defense of it. And listen, I will readily concede Bashar Assad is a monster who's murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens. But 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 Nusra? And that would be a much worse outcome that would make America less safe than it was before. And the Obama administration had no coherent answer to that question. So I opposed military action in Syria because it wasn't furthering our national security. And in that way, Rand Paul and I were both agreed on that, although for very, very different reasons. On the other hand, when it concerns Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei is a theocratic zealot who wants to kill us. And I believe we should do everything necessary to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That means sanctions, that means diplomatic pressure, that means cutting them off on cash. And it means if they are on the verge of getting a nuke, using military force to take out those facilities, it doesn't mean invade Iran and try to turn it into Switzerland. It means bomb the hell out of them to stop them from getting weapons they could use to murder millions of Americans. Now, in that regard, I agreed with some of the more interventionist folks, but it was keyed to are we protecting our national security? Donald 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, but he was also willing to act vigorously. For example, taking out General Soleimani, the leading state sponsor of terrorists in the world. And 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. But he was strong enough to that our enemies didn't mess with us. So what does that mean for Afghanistan? For Afghanistan, I think 20 years was long enough. I think we should not be engaged in a permanent war there. We shouldn't be trying to turn it into a beautiful Athenian democracy. We should focus on keeping Americans safe. That means we don't have the naive view of the Biden administration that the Taliban are nice guys who love us. We understand they're crazy terrorists who want to kill us. That means we understand that when we leave, we need to evacuate the Americans. That means we understand that our enemies will try to stop us from evacuating the Americans. That 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. What 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?
- [17:22]
A
Right. Well, and so this actually does clarify thinking because Certainly for me, I'm not a Rand or Ron Paul, non interventionist, isolationist. I'm not a John McCain. Bomb any country that looks at us the wrong way. So there has to be some kind of third option. But I think it remains a very serious debate throughout the country and especially on the right. Are 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 gonna go into countries and we're gonna stay there for decade upon decade and we're gonna rebuild Korea and Japan and Germany and we're just. We're gonna be everywhere all the time. And in some places, we are still there. So what do you make for the hawkish people, you know, the interventionist types, the neocons who, who are today saying, look, Afghanistan, we didn't have a whole lot of soldiers there. We were just trying to keep a strategic location, maybe fend off Russia and China. If we stay there forever, it's no big deal. Why would we leave?
- [18:38]
B
Yeah, look, I don't agree with him. And to be honest, it's. Most of the Republicans in the Senate fall into that camp. And so the arguments that are being made directed at Biden are very much directed at why did you leave? You should stay there forever. And a lot of the Senate Republicans believe that. I don't. I don't think that makes sense. I 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 and keeping them in harm's way in perpetuity. I think the threshold for sending our sons and daughters into harm's way should be very, very high. But 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. And the way to avoid military conflict is strength. You know, Reagan talked about peace through strength. And it's a very important insight. When you are strong, the bad guys don't want to mess with you. When you're weak, you end up getting in many, many more fights because they do not fear you. And 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, because every enemy of America is Watching this. Xi in China is watching this. And one of the consequences of Biden's cluster in Afghanistan is the chances of a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan have just increased dramatically.
- [20:24]
A
They already told us that it would. Yes, there was actually a tweet from Chinese state media that was directed ostensibly at Taiwan, but it was obviously really directed at America. And it said, look. Look at what the Americans will do. They're not going to come running when we invade you, and you'll give up.
- [20:40]
B
Pretty quickly because of that weakness. China is emboldened because of Biden and Harris's weakness. Russia is emboldened because of Biden and Harris's weakness. North Korea is emboldened because of Biden and Harris's weakness. Iran is emboldened, as is Hamas and Hezbollah. Every enemy of America is celebrating right now because they see the President as weak. And that is very, very dangerous. And it's what the left doesn't understand. Weakness is provocative. Weakness invites attacks. There's a reason, Michael, that nobody goes to study and get a degree from the Neville Chamberlain School of Foreign Policy. Appeasement is a really bad idea.
- [21:24]
A
Yep.
- [21:25]
B
You don't have to go all the way to the other side of let's always invade. We have lots of tools. Look at how Reagan took on the Soviet Union. He didn't shy away from engaging, from calling them out, from calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, from saying Marxism, Leninism would end up on the ash heap of history. They asked, what's your strategy in the Cold War? He said, very simple. We win, they lose. And people were horrified. The enlightened Left, like, no, no, no, you can't win. You need detente. You need a sophisticated solution that never does anything. Reagan used the bully pulpit of America's leadership, but he didn't send American troops in to fight the Soviets. He didn't roll our tanks in. He stood in front of the Brandenburg gate and said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. And our economic pressure, our military buildup, although we didn't use our strength, our strength and our clear, moral leadership caused the Soviet Union to collapse. Biden is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter. He's making the same mistakes, the same weakness. And when I look at Afghanistan, I fear the most where we will be in a year, whether it is China invading Taiwan or Iran announcing they have a nuclear weapon or some other or horrific example of our enemies being emboldened because our president is weak.
- [22:54]
A
This reminds me of a line from my old professor, Donald Kagan, who just died about a week ago, wonderful historian of ancient Greece, good military historian. And he'd be reading Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War. And he'd say, okay, here's how I know Thucydides is right about this point, because it would have happened in the Brooklyn schoolyard, this idea that if you're strong, the bullies are not going to feel emboldened to attack you, and actually, you will have a sort of peace through strength. Now, you raised the point of moral leadership, and I guess that's the question that is on everybody's mind today, because I think your take on where we ought to be on the pole of isolationism or interventionism, I think you are offering one of the few sensible takes I've heard out there, that it's actually a bit more complicated, and we're gonna pursue a strategy that is in the interest of the United States. What you see from Biden is just so a total absence, it seems, of any kind of strategy at all. So then the question for us is, we're out of the Cold War. We're out of the freewheeling 90s. We're now past the Bush years and the kind of war on terror. We're gonna stay in the Middle east forever. So what determines when we intervene? What determines when we stay home? Who are the enemy? We're not fighting the Soviets anymore. Might still be fighting the Russians. But what is that grand strategy that will determine how we react to the rest of the world?
- [24:21]
B
Well, and I think the right answer to that is protecting our vital national security interest. So the example I used of the Ayatollah Khamenei on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon, he's a theocratic zealot who chants, death to America. If he had a nuclear weapon. The risks that he would use a nuclear weapon either against us or our allies, I think are unacceptably high. And so I would emphatically support military force to take out nuclear capacity. I also supported military force to take out General Soleimani, which Trump. It was the most significant use of military force under President Trump. You know, I'll also point out. All right, let's go back to strength. Let's go back to the problems of Biden in Afghanistan and see how they also apply to Obama in Iraq and fighting ISIS. January of 2017, Trump comes into office. Obama's been fighting ISIS for years. Very limited success. Trump comes in. I remember it was spring of 2017. It was like March or April. And I run into General Milley. He's now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. At the time, he was the Army Chief of Staff. And I've known General Milley a number of years, and we're talking about Iraq and the war against isis. And he made a prediction to me then. He said, by this fall, so four or five months from when we were talking, he said, we will have taken every square inch from isis. Their caliphate will have fallen. They had at the time, they controlled land about the size of the state of Indiana. He says, we're going to take every inch of it and they will lose all of their territory. And I asked him at the time, because we're just a few months into administration, and I said, general, what's changed? I mean, why is this different? Is it the rules of engagement? Did they change? And his answer was fascinating because actually they had not changed the rules of engagement. What had changed is that under Obama, decisions of engaging the enemy went all the way up the chain, literally to the White House, to the National Security Council. So when you would encounter the enemy, you would have some bureaucrat at the NSC deciding whether or not to engage. The joke in the Pentagon is they called Susan Rice, the national Security adviser, General Rice, because she was deploying troops and moving them here. And it was like a game of risk sitting in the White House thousands of miles away. And Trump early on made one very simple decision. He delegated decision making down to the war fighters, to the war fighters on the ground, so that under Trump, when you encountered ISIS terrorists, you could just take them out. You didn't need to wait days for White House approval on that specific interaction. If you encountered the enemy, you could take them out. And within months, we defeated isis. That same principle, if you look at a contrast. And by the way, once we defeated isis, Trump I think rightly said, all right, let's get out. That is a balance that makes sense of. Be strong and vigorous when you are defending our nation, but don't leave our soldiers in harm's way permanently. Don't lose sight of their mission. And the weird thing, Michael, I think the overwhelming majority of Americans agree with that. I think it's. I mean, you're looking at 70, 80% of Americans and virtually nobody in the U.S. congress agrees with it. It's one of the oddest disconnects between the voters and our elected representatives. And one final point. One of the challenges of foreign policy is when it's discussed on the news, it's discussed in 15 second soundbites. So everything gets sort of simple and binary. You're either always invade or never invade. And this stuff, frankly, I think these topics are much more suitable for something like a podcast where we can discuss something in a little bit more depth to understand that you don't have to have a choice of 0 or 11, that you can in fact be strong and at the same time judicious about when and where you use your strength.
- [28:49]
A
You would hope that these kind of conversations that parse the nuances, that recognize that different situations will call for different American responses, recognize that all of these situations call for basic confidence. You would hope that if we can discuss them on a podcast, that it would be discussed in that way at the White House, State Department, the Pentagon. But unfortunately, in the past couple of weeks, we have not really seen that and talk about the disconnect. I think the American people, one of the few things that's truly united everyone in the past several years is that this was just completely bungled.
- [29:24]
B
Well, at a minimum, someone at the Pentagon or the White House should have said, hey, maybe we shouldn't give a bunch of Black Hawk helicopters to the Taliban. You would think that would have occurred.
- [29:34]
A
To somebody on that audacious, Metternichian sort of grand strategic idea. Maybe we shouldn't be giving Black Hawks to terrorists. We've got to leave it. There will be much more to talk about in coming weeks, but that's all for right now. I'm Michael Knowles. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
- [30:00]
B
This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security pac, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations and candidates across the country. Jobs, Freedom and Security PAC plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.