← The Focus Group Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
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- [02:55]
B
Good to be with you, Sarah, for the first time. Let's see what happens today.
- [02:59]
A
Let's see what happens. Well, you know, we use the focus group POD as kind of a hazing ritual for new people at the Bulwark. We like, oh, you're here now. You've got to listen to voters and we inflict them on you as part of your initiation process. So you have been talking and writing about civilian military relations for years. I used to watch you all the time on cnn. It's actually like a real fun thing that you are now here at the Bulwark because I am used to having watched you on the TV for so many years. But you specifically often talk about the gaps between civilian knowledge about the military versus somebody who might know a lot about the internal workings. So what do you think people get wrong most often? Like when you're thinking just in a broad sense, how do I try to explain this to people who don't actually know how this works? What do you think people really don't understand about the military and what's happening right now?
- [03:51]
B
Yeah, well, you know, first I ought to state that only about a little less than 1% of America serves in uniform today in the professional force. So that's very different from the time when we had a draft army. So there is that large gap between the civilian population and the military. What I think most get wrong is the culture and understanding of the kinds of training they go through, the detail and precision preparation for their various jobs, the number of jobs they have, the chain of command structure, the ethos and the values they abide by. And just truly the professionalism of the force. It is very different than most Americans see in any war movie because even in the more modern war movies, the producers get it wrong. There's military nerds that go to the theater and pick out the problems with the uniforms and the vehicles and how soldiers talk to sergeants and sergeants talk to lieutenants. So all of those things, unless you've experienced time in the military, you're going to get some of it wrong.
- [04:57]
A
Ooh, that's a fun thing. So wait in the movies, what movie do you think gets it the most right, is the most accurate reflection of the way the military really is.
- [05:06]
B
Saving Private Ryan, one of the better movies ever made that really reflects the emotions of combat, how soldiers do things, how irreverent soldiers are in terms of knowing that they could be facing death. So they have at times a very morbid sense of humor, but at other times there is the collection of teams that are usually very tight and they know what they're doing and they know what they're facing.
- [05:33]
A
They.
- [05:33]
B
So Saving Private Ryan is a good one. I think. We Were Soldiers Once, which was a film about Vietnam, is very good by General Hal Moore. You know what's interesting too, is some of the older movies, the old World War II movies, really get it right because that generation, even the people who were producing the films, had served in the military and they understood it. So they were on the battlefields and got it. Whereas today, not so much. The Hurt Locker, I think, is not a good reflection of what the military is. I won't go into some of the other ones, but it's the reality versus the Hollywood of it.
- [06:13]
A
I mean, I should really let Sonny Bunch, our culture guy, do this, but I like war movies a great deal, so it's interesting. The Hurt Locker, you think gets it wrong. That's Kathryn Bigelow. Is it when you think they frame. I'm thinking of sort of Oliver Stone types where they kind of frame it negatively. Like, you can tell that where they're coming from is a sense of like, the American military is a place that commits a lot of war crimes. And is it the negativity that you think they're getting wrong or is it they're just kind of missing stuff?
- [06:44]
B
Overall, yeah, I think it's just a fact that they mix things up. They want to think that they know exactly what happens. And there's this draconian approach from the. The general down to the private, and a lack of understanding of how the elements of leadership play a role in any organization. When I retired and started working and teaching leadership to a bunch of doctors, I remember a doctor once told me, you can't teach us how to do things because you were a general and everything a general says they have to be done. And what I just reminded him the fact that, yeah, I may have been a general when I retired, but I was a lieutenant at one time and even before that lower than a lieutenant. And you have to understand, an 18 year old doesn't necessarily want to throw themselves into harm's way. So there is quite a bit of leadership involved in influencing and inspiring people to do the things as part of a team that they need to do in order to execute a mission on behalf of the country. But speaking of that, too, there is also a misunderstanding of, of what the military does in our culture and the requirements of a civil military relationship. When we swear our oath to the Constitution, it is an oath to a piece of paper with ideas and ideologies, but it's also an oath that doesn't necessarily say you're going to do anything illegal, which is the current debate going on with the message from the six members of Congress. And the. The other thing is, we have to do the things that civilian leaders ask us to do in the best way possible, even if we don't believe in them, because that's the civil military relationship. Until a military leader is asked to do something illegal, there's the other falsity. Sarah, of in today's world, how come the military doesn't come save us? How come the military doesn't fix everything that's going wrong with the current administration? That's not what we do. We swear an oath to defend the Constitution. And if the American public elect a new leader, we do our very best to follow the orders that that new leader gives. And in this case, sometimes they're very difficult to follow.
- [09:01]
A
That's, to me, kind of the nub of what I'm trying to get at is that how do people not really understanding the way the military works, how is that influencing the way that they're watching what Trump is doing? For example, I see a lot of people in my Twitter engagement when I talk about the fact that they appear to have murdered these survivors of the boat strikes, and it is very dubious as to whether or not they're legal. I get a lot of people saying, sarah, you just want to side with the narco terrorists. Incidentally, I have no love for narco terrorists. That's also a kind of a new word that seems to have been invented to fit the moment and create a maximalist sense of who these people might be. I just want America to do things the way American standards for our engagement has always been. But what is it about the misunderstandings that people have, whether it's from popular culture or anything else, that lead them to not understand this moment in the way that Trump is utilizing the military?
- [10:01]
B
You know, you just triggered something in me, which is one of the things that military commanders do is is they control violence. And that's kind of a strange thing to say, but we also know, as we're trying to control violence and live by a certain order of magnitude within combat situations, that these young 18 and 19 year olds who are part of the force, the men and women who actually pull the triggers, they are being asked to do something that isn't in line with human nature. They're being asked, in some cases to kill other people or throw themselves in harm's way where they might be killed. That's not a normal thing for a human being to do. So one of the things that a commander learns, especially as they go through the ranks to higher levels, is you have to control the violence. And you do that through rules, we call them rules of engagement, so that these young people who are being asked to do inhuman things don't suffer the kind of moral injury that we sometimes see with soldiers who have returned from battle and who are suffering post traumatic stress disorder. The kinds of things that evolve from facing something that the human spirit is not meant to face, this extreme sense of violence and explosions and gunshots and dangers, and those are things that we have to prepare our people for. And at the same time, when we pull them out of that battle, we hope to return them to normal civilian life or normal citizenry. If you just don't have those rules and you tell them why they're doing things on behalf of the nation, to kill the enemy or whatever, then if they go beyond those, they're going to take away some inhuman acts from that, and it could damage them for the rest of their lives.
- [11:55]
A
That makes a ton of sense. And I'm glad you referenced the video that several of the Democratic leaders did recently where they were telling service members that they didn't have to follow illegal orders. Actually, I had Senator Slotkin on the show and we talked a bit about it, but we hadn't really heard at the time from voters on this issue of what's happening. And so we showed the video that the congressional leaders and the Senate leaders who have military backgrounds did, and we showed it to Biden, to Trump voters. And I want to grapple with how they responded to that video.
- [12:33]
B
I know there's been debates on Seneca.
- [12:35]
A
National Guard to different places that have gone to courts and bounced around in either direction, but it just seems so uncalled for. And, you know, I actually respect Mark Kelly. I've had for a while just because of, you know, he really had a solid approach. And then to come in with this, I'm like, I just don't understand it. I mean, Trump's overreaction And maybe that's what they were going for. Whether it's seditious or not. Debate, you know, they need to be killed. Okay, let's, you know, let's not get too extreme here. But I will say, you know, calling for, hey, don't listen to orders is.
- [13:09]
B
What I imply from that.
- [13:11]
A
I didn't take it as they were trying to say not to follow orders. That's not how I took that at all. I took it like they were saying, if they're telling you to do something that is against the Constitution, that's illegal, like, you do not need to do that. Like, you could say, no, that's how I took that. I didn't take it as they were just saying, don't follow orders, don't do what you're supposed to be doing. Like, I didn't take it that way. I took it where there's so much chaos right now, especially with ice and different things of that nature, of them doing things that are not in the Constitution and doing things that are illegal, that have been shown, that have been proven, where they're telling them, you know, you do not have to do those things even if you're ordered. That's like saying if someone orders you and tells you go out and steal a car, you're not going to go and do it because it's illegal. I feel like they need to be a little bit more detailed about what are illegal orders, because somebody can miscommunicate that and especially younger people can miscommunicate that and take that and not end up not doing their job and end up having a mishap. So I feel like they should be more way more detailed and be more, you know, be more specific about what exactly illegal laws they're trying to get across. I just see it as political theater. I don't know what order they're talking about. Are you just talking, like, vague? Like, any order? Like, I have no idea what they're talking about. Also, isn't it illegal to go against the President, the Commander in chief? Isn't that technically illegal? Like, if you're doing a legal order, aren't you technically avoidant of doing the law? Like, I feel like it's a double negative. It doesn't make any sense. And they're just doing this for no reason. I don't, I don't see what Trump did that requires military members to, to not listen to orders. I don't know what order they're talking about. It's just vague, empty. It does nothing for the American people. This Makes everybody confused. I'm like, what the hell are they talking about? I don't know what the hell they're talking about. They're just so desperate for that Trump derangement syndrome. As I said, I feel like the video was really pointless. I mean, that's like common sense.
- [15:21]
B
I mean, that's already being instilled in you, especially if you're a trained soldier. I mean, you should already know you.
- [15:28]
A
Have morality and know what's right and wrong.
- [15:30]
B
I mean, you know, not to open.
- [15:32]
A
Fire on unarmed people or. I mean, we don't need a video.
- [15:36]
B
To tell you that. I just think that if it was done by Republicans, just the optics would be, oh, you're trying to do a coup. And I think the fact that just because the Democrats, it comes off as like a. We're trying to command the army when we're not.
- [15:50]
A
That's not our position.
- [15:51]
B
That's. They're not in the army anymore or the military.
- [15:56]
A
To me, civilian who. I didn't think it would be that controversial to say you can refuse illegal orders. That didn't seem that controversial. But what do you think? What's the case for and against a video like this? Or what did you think about it when you saw it? Did you think, oh, that's not a good thing for them to be doing? Or did you think, I'm glad someone's saying something?
- [16:14]
B
It's a tough thing to describe because, you know, I truthfully, I didn't put that much stock into it when I first saw the video. It's like, how come these congressmen are doing this? I didn't quite understand it, but it seemed appropriate based on some of the things we were seeing. And at the time they did the video, it was before all the contention about the boat strike. But from my perspective, the films of the boat strike had already been shown on the air. And there was a sense, in my view as a former commander, that there was some illegality there, that this was an act of war against criminals that should be arrested and detained as opposed to killed. And so there was that issue. But there was also the issue of many things having already happened on the streets of our city. You know, the first time I saw a Marine in Los Angeles flex cuffing a citizen, I thought to myself, ooh, he's gone over the top. That's against the law. You can't do that. There is a law that says active military personnel or National Guard personnel cannot conduct police functions within our population. And there's reasons for that. I mean, you know the military is a security force for the country writ large. And until the President calls the Insurrection act, when there's all kinds of insurrection going on, the military should not be required to face off with force against their fellow citizens. That's against the law. That's for police to do. So when the videos came out, I just thought, truthfully, maybe I'm simplistic and naive, and I just thought it was a reminder that. That these various congressional leaders were saying, don't obey unlawful or illegal orders. And as several of the people said on your tape just then, this is something that soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, coast guardsmen are taught literally in the first week of basic training. And they're reminded of it every time they go into action or every time they're deployed through the rules of engagement. But what I'd suggest is that even the rules of engagement by the Secretary of Defense have been surrounded by a cloud of smoke. Now, openly, Secretary Hegseth has said many times, don't worry about those rules of engagement. We're not going to let them impede on your actions. Well, as a guy who's been a commander in combat for more than three years, what I'll tell you is rules of engagement are very important, going back to that moral injury piece we were talking about earlier. So you can debate one way or the other whether or not the congressmen and the senators were right in producing that tape. But the important thing is they were just reminding people, as drill sergeants and commanders and captains and lieutenants remind soldiers every day, you don't obey illegal or unlawful orders. Period. So was it appropriate? I don't know. I don't want to say one way or another. Was it necessary? I don't know that either. But it sure seems that there are instances of us being on a very slippery slope for the military being asked to potentially commit unlawful acts. And we're seeing an exhibition of that in the boat strikes.
- [19:47]
A
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- [22:36]
C
I don't agree with the military being used against civilians at all. I'm former military, I was in the army and I didn't sign up for that. I signed up to fight enemies of the United States and my fellow Americans are not my enemy. There's no way I could agree with that on any level, whether it's gang members or whatnot. That's why we have police forces in all of these Cities and that's where we have to start at, get proper training for our police forces, sheriffs and all of them, get them proper training and hire more of them to be able to deal with what's happening all over the country. Putting the military out there. A lot of these people, they have family and all of that. I mean it's just a recipe for disaster in my eyes. And, and I've actually had the opportunity to travel for my job. So I go to different places and last place I went to was South Texas, McAllen, Texas, close to the border. And they actually have a National Guard down there, just all over the place in the city. And I talked to some of those guys, you know, ask them, hey, where are you from there? Some of them from Austin, some of them from San Antonio, they're being given these orders to go down to secure the border. But it's more about they're actually acting like police in the city. I went through one of the checkpoints while I was there and of course they stopped, they asked you these questions just to basically get an idea of what you're doing and where you're headed and if you're in the country illegally, but they don't actually ask you that. It's a weird thing and I don't agree with it.
- [24:33]
A
I feel like the people are scared to do anything you even affecting the legal residents. Right. You know, because people might like not be used to military being around and all that. So I believe that the police need more funding and then they need to hide more hands on the police force so they can help. But bringing in the military, I don't think that is helping. If they did have more structure with police, more police training and having more of a stronger police force that we wouldn't need a National Guard. I do believe that in Washington D.C. the National Guard creates chaos. I mean, I'm right in the middle of it, so I can see it all the time. It's constant protesting, constant violence.
- [25:17]
B
I'm just kind of confused like what's really going on. And I think he's opening the door to something that could lead to further down the road to where they have more of a chokehold on the area or region that they're looking over.
- [25:34]
A
So in a second we're going to jump to voters that are much more MAGA type voters. These are kind of swingy voters who went for Trump. But what's your reaction to how they're talking about it?
- [25:46]
B
Well, a couple of reactions. There were some great comments in there. First of all that. The military is not trained to do this. And I'm going to put it very bluntly. The military is trained to seize terrain, take ground and kill the enemy. You know, that's not what is being asked of them when they're deployed to the streets of these cities. They're asked to do policing work. And that's not what they do. They haven't been trained as policemen. So you're going to get infantrymen, real tough infantrymen or tankers like me going into some scenario they know nothing about. They haven't received the police training. Now, there is an accurate military mission called the military support to civilian authorities. So if someone from another department says, hey, we need military folks to help us do this, to secure buildings, to put up barbed wire, to put up fences, or, or in some cases, like President Reagan did, pull all of the air traffic controllers out of the military or all of the truck drivers to drive trucks, okay, that's considered a national emergency. But when you're pitting soldiers against their fellow citizens, that's where it turns bad, real bad, very quickly. The other thing, I'd point out that several of the people that just talked talked about the return on investment. If someone were to do a cost benefit analysis of how much it's costing to send National Guard to the streets of the city, you could probably fund the required police officers you need for years in some of these cities because you take National Guard soldiers or active soldiers in some cases, away from their other environment. National Guard particularly employers get mad because they no longer have their employees, or the National Guard member is a student at some school so he or she misses classes, they're away from their families, they're being paid more than a normal soldier when they're getting deployed because they are National Guard. And it's just, it's ridiculous to do something like that unless there is a true mission. And a true mission, as we saw a couple of weeks ago in Washington, D.C. is not just presence patrols. As a commander in Iraq, I outline presence patrols by my soldiers in the streets of Iraq because it only leads to trouble, it only sets them up for ambushes. And that's exactly what we saw. If you're just wandering around the city at a Metro stop in D.C. someone is eventually going to target you. And that's exactly what happened. So I think some of the comments we just heard were very good in an understanding and rightfully so, because a couple of them said they had been in the army or in the National Guard before.
- [28:33]
A
Yeah, I'll just say One thing that I don't know, it's going to be the mom and me coming out, I guess, but we were doing a bulwark thing at a hotel, and it was after the young soldier, Sarah, had been shot, and so they had brought in, I don't know, reinforcements or there was a new batch of kids, and they were all there with their duffel bags, and they were children. They were so young. Like, we were just all there at the same time while they were, like, loading up their bags and hanging out, and they were just so young. And I've said hello, and I see them around the city, but I also keep having to remind myself that they did not choose this, that it is not their fault that they are here and that they're just kids being sent here for no reason. And, I don't know, does it make you angry to see the way these young people are being used, or do you think this is, like, just their duty? Or how do you think about what's happening?
- [29:30]
B
Yeah, it does make me angry. It is their duty. They're doing what they're being told to do. But in my view, having commanded missions, I know what they're being told to do is not a viable mission. I'm going to say it this way, Sarah. It's a dumb mission. They don't have to be there. This is performative politics. Soldiers are being placed on the streets to just kind of wander around. Allegedly, there are some people who think this is a deterrent, but as we've seen, it's not a deterrent. You know, if you put a bunch of them on a street corner that has bad crime, you know, it may stop a criminal from doing something. But are you really willing to do that with our nation's soldiers who. One more point I'll make. Did not sign up to do these kinds of missions. They didn't sign up for this. From the standpoint of a commander. If I'm the National Guard commander in Maryland and I'm told, send my troops, I'll send them, and I'll make sure they're as prepared as they can be. But in my mind, I have to explain to them, first of all, why we're doing it. And truthfully, it requires me to hedge the truth a little bit, because in my view now, as a retired guy, looking at it, it's a dumb mission.
- [30:45]
A
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- [33:07]
D
Positive things about 15 miles from Charlotte and, you know, they moved the National Guard in there. We've had a murder on the light rail. We had a stabbing on the light rail over the weekend. Now live near Asheville and Asheville's had two murders over the weekend. And I'm like, somebody do something. And it gets so frustrating because the local authorities just sort of, yeah, we're not going to do anything attitude. And it forces him to take a step that we really don't like it, but we do like it.
- [33:37]
A
I feel like Trump has said, listen, our citizens deserve to live in a safe community, in a safe country. Fix your problems. He's given them those warnings and then finally it is like dad putting his foot down and saying, enough is enough. Your citizens deserve to be safe. They're also my citizens as a federal level. So I'm going to step in and I'm going to do these things that have to be done to protect them, because that's a right that you have living here. Here in Washington state and Oregon, I'm not too far away from Portland. The police just, their hands are completely tied and it's been very frustrating to see they have to have probable cause for anything. A woman actually was raped at our local famous footwear in the parking lot. The officer showed up, the person was running away, she's yelling, screaming, that's the person that just did this to her. And they did not have probable cause to go after that individual. Our military, our National Guard or whatever. I mean, if that's not what it's for, what is it for? To protect the United States, the people. So I think he's doing exactly what he should be doing. So I would say from sort of the Trump faithful, this is a pretty common strain of answer. Trump is constantly in mind meld with a lot of people like this, where he seems to be like, yeah, it's because of the crime and because these cities won't handle their crime and local officials aren't doing enough. That's why we're sending in the National Guard. There is a strain of people who are like, well, things are so bad and the local officials won't do anything about it. And so this is why we need them. So how do you respond to people who have this view of, well, it's so bad we have to use the National Guard.
- [35:19]
B
I don't know the details of Asheville or Charlotte or all the places that were named, but if things are that bad in your area, then you need to do something about your local politicians, perhaps, number one. Secondly, I would suggest that each one of those individuals is giving an anecdotal response of something that they heard from somebody else. A murder or I'm getting calls and now my children can go out on the Street. You know, Sarah, what I like to do is combine, as Aristotle once told us, the emotion with the facts and the logic. And sometimes we as an American society are leaning a little bit too much on the emotion and the opinion as opposed to the facts and the logic. You know, I've been to Portland before. I was stationed on the west coast of the United States.
- [36:09]
A
And.
- [36:10]
B
And it's kind of an interesting city. I mean, they've got some unique personalities there, but I didn't see a whole lot of crime, I mean, more so than any other city. And I've been in some really bad cities. I was in Chicago the week that the National Guard was sent to Chicago, and I saw a bunch of them, as you did in some of your locations, and they were just walking along the streets, and I talked to a couple of them and I asked them what their mission was, and they said just to walk and to be out here. Well, again, that's a real bad use of those who sign up to serve our country, just to have them walk through the streets of a major city that happens to be controlled by the other party. And President Trump doesn't like. So I don't know, I listened to all of the commentary. I especially like the one woman who said they didn't have probable cause to arrest. Well, probable cause is sort of a tenet of our legal system. And did that individual have the rest of the story? I don't know. A cop chasing someone, but they don't have cause to arrest them means that they don't have cause to arrest them. You know, there's no either complaint or radio call that calls them in. So, again, in each one of these things, there's more to the story, and it's just a reaction to wanting to feel safer. And the people who are meant to make you feel safer are the police, not the military. The military goes elsewhere or helps you during a humanitarian crisis. They're not there because your local law enforcement isn't working. Maybe we need a little bit more people voting for their local sheriffs, and they're making sure their town halls are taking care of their police that allegedly aren't acting that well. But all of this also comes, Sarah, as you know this, the factual data says that our crime rates in most cities across the country are declining, especially in the places that these guardsmen are being sent, whereas other areas that may be under the control of the other party with higher crime rates are not receiving the National Guard. It just doesn't make any sense to.
- [38:20]
A
Me to invert a Saying by Ben Shapiro, their feelings do not care about your facts. So is something that I see with voters across a lot of different issues. Speaking of which, we asked the same group of voters, so the Trump, first, Republican Party second, about the recent strikes on the drug boats in the Caribbean. And I want to listen to how they talked about that.
- [38:45]
D
I heard one of the poor congressmen talk about, oh, what about those mothers that are having to bury those people that we killed in those boats? And my response to that is, okay, what about those mothers who haven't. We're having to bury their children from fentanyl, cocaine, and all these drugs that are coming into our country. This is our country that they're bringing it into. It's our kids they're killing with these drugs and stuff. So when you start in the crime field, your chances of survival go down dramatically. And to me, it's not a war crime. It's another media hype term.
- [39:22]
B
I'm actually loving it that we're actually being proactive rather than reactive. Any drugs that come into the United States illegally is only to do one thing for the country. It's all negative. So I have. I'm actually applauding the administration for being proactive.
- [39:37]
A
I feel like the Democrats completely forget what the government's first responsibility is, and that's the safety of its citizens. And they just. It's like they don't even care about that. And you can see that in the big blue cities, they take, you know, the side of a illegal over a citizen, you know, and so, you know, stopping these boats and they know where they're going. I don't know if you saw it on the news when they claimed they were sailors that were left in the water. It was meanwhile, like two drug lords. But they were. But the media calls them sailors.
- [40:12]
B
So it's.
- [40:13]
A
Anything the media can say or do. So any term they use is usually incorrect. So this sort of goes to the point that I was talking about before, which is there's just a real like, oh, yeah, we should do that. This is about keeping people safe. Nobody's for the drug dealers. Like, that is a false choice. The question is, is how does America handle things? What do we expect of ourselves? Like, when do we kill people and when do we capture people and put people on trial or whatever? What do you think is happening in the culture where people don't think the thing that you said before, where they seem to have lost, that there's a line between what the police are supposed to do and what the military is supposed to do. They've sort of lost the idea that just killing people, even if they were going to do a bad thing, but, like, also, we don't know, like, we're not sure what they were doing, that they're just like, yeah, let's go ahead and bomb them. What do you think's happening to us?
- [41:05]
B
It's a loss of moral grounding to not understand that you're killing another human being. This isn't a war, this is a crime. The person that said, why don't we just kill them to keep them from coming to the United States? Okay, how about if we start killing all the individuals that use cocaine, that'll stop the problem, too. There is a supply side and a demand side. And I would suggest that we've got problems in the United States with people wanting to use drugs that these individuals are supplying. And if you understand the implications of drug running, you know that there's nobody on those boats who is a drug lord. They are at most a trafficker and at least probably a mule who's just trying to make money for his family because he doesn't have another job in Venezuela. So if we as a people are so cavalier as to say we just need to kill all these people, that's not going to solve a whole lot of problems. I heard a congressman earlier today talk about, or he was asked the question, well, does this mean if we're killing the folks on drug boats that are a couple of thousand miles away whose boats will never reach the shore of the United States, instead of arresting truck drivers coming through the border with drugs on board their trucks, who are trying to smuggle them into El Paso, should we just kill them too and bomb their trucks at the same time? I mean, what is the differentiation between a criminal act and a true act of war where they're attempting to either damage, destroy or take over the American government? And if it's an individual act, that's a criminal act that we've determined is a crime, the transfer of drugs, then we need to treat them as a criminal. We should not be waging war on another nation unless we have some kind of campaign plan and political and state objectives. And in terms of what's been going on with Venezuela, I have heard it's to deter, it's to interfere with the narco traffickers, none of which are on these boats, or it's to conduct regime change because Maduro is a drug runner or a drug cartel leader. And all of those things are happening at the same time that our government is Releasing a president of Honduras who was convicted of being a major drug cartel leader. And it doesn't make sense to me.
- [43:39]
A
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- [45:19]
B
I had a chance to read the new National Security Strategy and it was confounding at best. Right now, Sarah, there's a lot of theories about what exactly is going on, and it was outlined in the very first section of International affairs on the National Security strategy of making the Western Hemisphere our sphere of influence. Now, there are some threats certainly in the Western Hemisphere that we need to address, but they are not the top 10 threats that the United States is facing coming from other places in the world. So it's a shift of priorities to the Western Hemisphere, in my view, that is not based on any kind of strategic thinking in terms of the health and welfare of our country. So if it is a desire to turn our hemisphere into an American hegemony, Just like China has done in the South China Sea and in Japan or Iran has attempted to do in the Middle east or Russia has attempted to do in Europe where they control an area or we control an area. That is a theory. I don't know if it's the correct one, but I've heard that thrown out there if it is the correct one. If that is our strategy to only worry about the Western Hemisphere as opposed to exhibiting our values and our ideology to other like minded democratic countries around the world, I think it's flawed and it's going to get us in trouble.
- [46:48]
A
Yeah. This idea is what? That China and Russia then control the other spheres? That we are going to somehow separate the world into three parts and we are no longer the superpower. We are one of three superpowers. And what we're going to try to power share with Russia and China and therefore only focus on these people in the Western Hemisphere. I have also read this, but I keep thinking like, where does it come from? I've never heard this theory of foreign policy. It's not Marco Rubio's and maybe this is an unfair question because maybe it just came out of nowhere. But I don't know where the intellectual undergirding is for this particular foreign policy.
- [47:27]
B
And again, strategy is based on what you want your end state to be, what you want things to look like. It's your vision of the world. It correlates to your ways and means to get there. If this is the strategy, then I don't see any huge shifting of ways and means to obtain this strategy that are valid or have been sold to other branches of government or in fact to the American people. When we were involved in the Great Cold War, most of America was behind us. I don't think America is behind a western hemisphere Monroe Doctrine approach to the world today.
- [48:09]
A
Yeah, well, I know that's right because I'm going to get to this sound here because this is a crowd that we're listening to. It votes Republican but has more of an America first isolationist foreign policy ethos than the party obviously used to have. We asked how their thinking has evolved and how they see America's role in the world now. So let's listen to that.
- [48:31]
D
We have an attitude. We have to get involved in everybody's things. You know, I was in college and had to come home and register for the draft for Vietnam and everything in you're scared to death. You're seeing your buddies dying, you're seeing come home pieces of their bodies shot off and everything like that for what? That's what my question is. My thing is, you raise the bar. American blood is worth a lot, in my opinion. You raise the bar pretty darn high for somebody to piss me off to go to war. Excuse my French, but when we're ready to go to war, we're going to war. And it's shocking. Oh, it's not going to be the work.
- [49:06]
A
I think the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. But it's unfortunate because if we had done it right and really gone after, you know, who right away. Who? Like, it took us 12 years to find bin Laden, but if we had had made that the target right away, there would be a different, you know, opinion about the United States now. But it's like we're damned if we do, damned if we don't. We went into places and we destabilized them when we should have left them alone. So I'm all for less involvement around the world. I do believe there was instances where we were definitely needed, but I think the majority of them we weren't.
- [49:45]
D
The other thing too is stay out of our wallet. All these countries, NATO is a perfect example of it. And, you know, we're paying, in my opinion, a disproportionate part of the funding. Not that we shouldn't, because we don't want to put bodies over there. We don't want to put bodies in harm's way. But some of those countries need to step up and take some of the money load off of us.
- [50:11]
A
So having listened to voters now for so many years and also having come up in the conservative movement at the time when sort of neoconservatism was like kind of a dominant foreign policy ethos. I know that part of what has happened is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the exhaustion from voters, like Super Maga voters today, sounds like listening to people who are in Code pink half the time or some of the vocal sort of anti Iraq opponents, and I'm always kind of shaking my head at how fast it moved, or maybe 20 years isn't that fast. But it feels like just a total sea change, if you ask me. The biggest change in the Republican Party as I've experienced it over the last 25 years, it is both the character counts, just absolutely going away as a thing that mattered. And the second would be our foreign policy. And obviously then there's a whole bunch of other things around. I don't know, it doesn't care that much about the Constitution anymore. Other things that used to be pretty Central, but specifically on the foreign policy, you've seen a lot of different sort of ethos of foreign policy come and go. Like, why do you think we are where we are right now? I know it's a big question to end on, but you can talk for as long as you want to. Cause I'm interested in what you think.
- [51:27]
B
Why has foreign policy shifted? It's interesting, sir, because I'm a firm believer in who we are as a nation and what we propose are our ideas and our values. And sometimes there are people within our government who don't live by those values, who may dismiss some of them as being as important and are looking more for power or overmatch or control of various areas of the world. But I also think, you know, what we're talking about right now is there is a feeling that we can never get it right. You know, after 20 years of war in Afghanistan and after 12 or 13 years in Iraq, what was it all for? Well, we didn't have that same feeling after Desert Storm. We didn't have that same feeling after World War II or Grenada or some of the other conflicts we've been in. So it seems like when we're successful, it's a good strategy. It gets something done, and it upholds our democratic beliefs and our foundational values of liberal democracies and respect for people and respect for national sovereignty. And it tells me that there have been times when our strategies have failed. And one of the people in the last conversation talked about why we were in war so long. The first guy was talking about Vietnam and what a strategic failure it was. And it was, but it was part of the issue of the Day of containment. Now, was that a flawed national security policy? Possibly. I don't know. Were we able to contain various nations? Some we were, some we were not. But it goes back to my thought that America aspires to be good, not only as a nation, but in terms of our relations with others. And truthfully, just sometimes we get it wrong for a variety of reasons. Bad strategies, bad leaders, misunderstandings between nations, not knowing who the right people are versus the wrong people. You know, over the last two decades, we've linked with some really bad people in both Afghanistan and Iraq who we thought were on our side. And they turned out to not be as great of leaders as we thought they were. And at the same time, the military was continuously either asked to do more things or volunteered to do more things that they shouldn't have been volunteering. And that's the whole understanding of how strategy linked to power, linked to action comes into play. If I'm talking in circles right now, I apologize for that. I'm just kind of rambling a little bit because the question is so important. But I believe it always comes down to number one. What are our national values? Who are we and what are we trying to be? And those things are outlined in documents like our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence and in spirit speeches like the Gettysburg Address and Kennedy's inauguration and FDR's four freedoms and Martin Luther King's I have a Dream. Those are the things that we truly believe in. And when we start moving away from them with different approaches to our character, excusing things that we know are flat out wrong, and that's what we're seeing today. We know that there are politicians ignoring things that are just dead wrong because of your viewers who are saying different sides of the same subject. We just have to relook what our values are and apply them and aspire to be good again. We're not doing that anymore. We have a moral problem with our citizenry not understanding the implications of some of our actions and and just voting for personalities or supporting personalities because they're the tough guy or they're saying what they want to hear. That's not very fulfilling, I don't think. But that's my thoughts on it.
- [55:43]
A
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- [58:26]
B
While they're withdrawing, they're also angry.
- [58:30]
A
Yeah.
- [58:30]
B
And they're angry because the nation is not living up to what they think it should be. But to go to your point that you were making, you know, it's really great. I consider myself very blessed. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. Never left the town until I went off to college at West Point. Never had been on an airplane. And since then, I've been to 119 different countries. And what I see is other countries and how they view us. Until recently, they viewed us as the great savior. And whenever you're viewed as the great savior, the Superman, when kryptonite is thrown at you, you're going to fail, and you're going to fail sometimes. So, yeah, they'll excuse acts that sometimes result in failure. They won't excuse us being angry at them or shutting them out or not being the proverbial shining city on the hill anymore. That's one of the things I think we've lost because we are so withdrawn and so angry. We have lost the opportunity to be that shining city where we show what right looks like to the rest of the world.
- [59:43]
A
General Hertling, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciated the conversation and thanks to all of you for listening to another episode of the Folks Group Podcast. We'll be back next week, but in the meantime, don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. You can subscribe to the Bulwark on YouTube. Become a Bulwark Plus Member all the things. Go get some merch. I've been wearing it lately. It's really good. And we will see you guys next week.