Episode 5190: Focus Needs To Be Not Just On Iran But On CCP And Russia
Pete Hegseth’s March 2026 Miami speech launched Operation Epic Fury, a U.S. aerial strike on Iran’s navy, framed as defensive after six service members died—including Sergeant Declan—amid unconfirmed Israeli backchannel talks to block negotiations. Analysts like Kurt Mills warn of escalating regional strikes and an "elite MAGA revolt" over prolonged combat, while Stephen K. Bannon dismisses ground troop risks but criticizes neoconservatives for prioritizing vengeance over U.S. interests. Brian Kennedy counters that Trump’s preemptive action targets Iran’s nuclear threat—citing 9/11 ties and EMP risks—while tying Tehran to China’s expansion, urging full decoupling from Beijing amid PLA incursions near Taiwan. The episode frames the conflict as a clash of pragmatism versus ideological intervention, with nuclear deterrence hanging in the balance. [Automatically generated summary]
Patrick Weaver, Phil Hegseth, who I happen to know, and Ricky Berea, my chief, for doing a great job putting this together.
Tony Salisbury, thank you.
So many folks that every single day in Washington, I hope you know, are working hard to run as fast as you are, to stand alongside you in this mission.
This is not a conference with flags so we can pat ourselves on the back.
I can tell you that, if I sold that to President Trump as the objective, he'd kick me out of his office.
This is an operational conference to bring our countries more closely together to achieve a shared objective and do so aggressively.
This is not a one-way street.
Every partner in this region has to do more and invest more in your security as well.
We, like you, want a hemisphere of sovereign, secure, and prosperous nations.
We, like you, want what another great American president, Teddy Roosevelt, called the permanent peace on this hemisphere, and it will require action from all of us.
You know, our schools used to teach American school children about our blessed history.
Every child in grade school grew up knowing the remarkable story of this country.
They knew that President James Monroe was once an orphan, that at a mere 16 years old, he had to look after his siblings.
I've got an almost 16-year-old.
He could have looked after anything.
It's remarkable.
Well, that orphan grew to be not just one of the greatest presidents, but one of our greatest Americans.
After his presidency, when his wife died and he became frail and ill with heart failure, but he still spoke about what he called our shared cause of liberty, still talked about the toils and the perils of our war for independence.
James Monroe, our seventh president, died on July 4th, the 4th of July, Independence Day, 1831, 50 years after 1776.
What I like to say is, here at the Department of War, we're in the 1775 business, which is when Americans took up arms before they even declared independence.
All of you are also in the 1775 business.
Without the force of arms, without our militaries, we cannot keep our country safe.
That's my responsibility, and it is yours.
With Donald Trump in the Oval Office and with all of you here, we can still realize that long ago dream of James Monroe in our time.
Our military in the Middle East is undertaking an unprecedented operation to eliminate Iran's ability to threaten Americans, as they've been doing for nearly half a century.
We are also sinking the Iranian Navy, the entire Navy.
I'm sure everybody started waking up that morning and you heard at the time that four people had been killed and many injured.
And I think we talked with our son in Italy at the time and said he had talked to Declan and Declan just was checking in with him.
The reason being is Declan was nine hours ahead of us.
He was two hours ahead of his brother.
So he called his brother.
So Declan had been sending us updates every one to two hours like, hey, everything's still good.
I'm good.
Which goes to show you, you know, he was thinking about us.
Like, don't worry about me and so forth.
So he had checked in with his brother.
And kind of based off of timing, you know, and what we know so far, we don't know specifics, but we're just making an assumption based off of timing that it was shortly after that phone call that he had gotten off with his brother, that this is when that happened and his operations center got hit.
It's Thursday, March 5th in the year of our Lord 2026.
That first video that we played, that is a compilation that CENTCOM put out of the first 100 hours, which I guess we have now passed, of I guess the non-war war.
Depends who you ask, what's going down in Iran.
Wonderful execution.
Of course, our thoughts and prayers are with the United States.
Military, just a tragic video of one of the, I believe now, six U.S. service members who have been killed tragically, just absolutely horrifically in this, as President Trump, I think, describes, ongoing combat operation.
We're going to go through all of it.
I think there's a lot of signal, a lot of noise in this news cycle, but we're going to give you just the signal, though.
Like I said, there's a lot of it to sort through.
So I want to start with Kurt Mills.
And Kurt, I want to have you also got Brian Kennedy.
We're going to start with Kurt.
There's a really interesting Axios story, I think, as we sort of try to really understand the clear objectives.
I know the White House has put out their press releases and their statements, but I think in order to understand where this conflict is going, it's best to understand the source of it.
There's some interesting reporting talking about how the Israelis have been making outreach to the White House trying to understand if there are talks or negotiations going on at the moment with the Iranians.
Can you sort of walk us through this reporting, this piece, and then we'll get into where we stand in the broader, the broader region?
Yeah, so obviously the start of the war has not gone great for the administration.
And so the best chance at this point for them is to seek an off-ramp.
There is some reporting from Axios a day or two ago that the Israelis actually phoned around the United States, the Netanyahu administration, that is to ensure that the U.S. was actually not negotiating again with the Iranians.
I have nothing to report about whether or not there are back channels.
There's probably deep back channels at this point between the U.S. and Iran, although not positive on that.
But of course, the restarting of negotiations, the idea that the administration might just call it, they've assassinated Khamenei, they have destroyed some of the Iranian military capabilities and might just call it a victory, I think is the best chance at this point to stop a war, which of course the Israelis very much do not want.
The U.S. has now instructed U.S. citizens to evacuate upwards of over 15 countries.
The Iranians have internationalized or regionalized the conflict.
They have thrown Shahad drones and missiles throughout the Gulf region and in Israel.
These are places that, you know, I mean, Doha Airport, you know, Dubai Airport, these are major thoroughfares for anyone who's ever traveled internationally outside of Europe.
These are places that Americans know well.
They're closed.
They are not safe.
The Gulf is not safe for people to visit, as the State Department has instructed.
And the Iranians have held.
It is not entirely clear that the assassination of Khamenei really changes the political calculus there.
In fact, they're poised to just appoint another Ayatollah Amenhey, his son, Moshtaba.
So at this point, the Iranians have shown themselves far more plucky and adversarial in resisting the U.S. and Israeli assault than, say, Hamas was in Gaza or Hezbollah certainly was in Lebanon, or even the Houthis or the Houthis in Yemen.
The Iranians are not Venezuela.
As much as the president is seeking a Venezuelan option here, the Iranians are a much more fearsome state.
And additionally, Hamene was a different leader than Maduro.
It's a much more complex and decentralized bureaucracy.
The Iranians are going to hold on.
On the politics, it's very clear.
There's an elite MAGA revolt.
People like Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, and others have sounded the alarm.
The sort of high-information Republican voters, and especially the independence that President Trump brought to the polls in 2016 and 2024.
You know, the approval for this war is very, very low.
This is essentially a factional war of traditional Republican hawks and neocons, his allies on the Hill, and many of the hawkish think tanks and magazines, frankly, that oppose Trump's initial rise to power.
I mean, just take a look at the National Review Against Trump issue from winter 2016.
That is a littling of people who are today supporting this Iran war.
I think they're obviously moving the Overton window both on depth and width or depth and breadth of this campaign.
Number one, they've already moved the Overton window to potentially having ground troops.
They're not ruling it out.
The senators on both parties, from everyone from Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut to Josh Hawley of Missouri, hardly a liberal, have seemed spooked after the Hill briefing earlier this week about how long this campaign may be.
And Hegseth Keith, the Secretary of War, keeps moving the goalpost on how long it may be.
Additionally, there was reporting out in Politico this morning that fascists of the administration are considering a war that is as long as 100 days, even stretching into the autumn.
Obviously, the president himself has castigated the idea that he couldn't fight a forever war.
Of course, President Trump ran against tribal wars when he won in 16 and 24.
And the fact that he is sort of reading from the Neocon script is obviously disheartening for those who voted for him that requirements.
If there are boots on the ground, I hope they're not on the ground any longer than the boots on the ground were in Venezuela.
But I think that that's something the president knows that members of Congress certainly hope doesn't happen, but sometimes that's unavoidable in a situation like this.
And you mentioned six troops had lost their lives.
Some had been from Fort Knox in Kentucky, my home state.
So, you know, we're devastated, and obviously our thoughts and prayers are with the families of anyone that's been lost or wounded thus far.
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Go ahead.
Carolyn, could you tell us about the president's current thinking about ground troops and whether they could be used if they were to be sent into Iran?
Well, they're not part of the plan for this operation at this time, but I certainly will never take away military options on behalf of the President of the United States or the Commander-in-Chief.
And he wisely does not do the same for himself.
I know there's many leaders in the past who like to take options off of the table without having a full understanding of how things could develop.
So again, it's not part of the current plan, but I'm not going to remove an option for the president that is on the table.
We still got Kurt Mills, Brian Kennedy going to be joining us after.
I would just say I think this boots on the ground discussion is obviously kind of the thing itself, or at least one of the most determining and determinative factors into how this war, not war, whatever you want to call it, shakes out.
But I do think it's important to note that the second, third, and fourth order, fifth, the list goes on, order effects of, you know, invading Iran, even if it's not actual kinetic, traditional boots on the ground type style conflict, are still very real, whether that's, you know, refugee influxes, refugee mass flows, terrorist attacks, sleeper cells.
I thought it was quite interesting that Lindsey Graham is just like, oh, well, I guess there's going to be a terrorist attack in the United States.
Oops.
That is, I guess your America last is showing, but I guess that's always on display.
But there's still orders of magnitude of impacts, I think, significantly higher than the American people would like that come with any sort of kinetic engagement with an adversary like Iran.
I want to bring Kurt on, though, because I am a little confused.
I mean, I would posit, I think in the next week or so, you're going to start seeing some iteration, whether it's JSOC, OCOM, kind of a limited hangout version of boots on the ground, maybe turning out into a fuller force toward more traditional boots on the ground when colloquially you hear that.
But I'm curious your thoughts, both through a historic lens, but also just with what you're hearing from the admin.
Is this sort of laying the groundwork for a more traditional kinetic insurgency, or do you think there is a chance that they get out now?
Okay, well, first, I think you're right to flag the Lindsey Graham comment.
I think it was unbelievable that he told Secretary Noam yesterday, just casually, that the danger of, quote, Islamic terrorism is up, quote, because we hit Iran.
I mean, it's not even clear that if it's cynicism or imbecility, frankly.
Like, does it even occur to him the causality here?
It's really not clear if he doesn't care or he doesn't know.
And at a certain point, it doesn't matter, but it just shows you how casual these foreign policy mistakes are in sort of compounding America's problems.
America's problem with terrorism is related to its force posture overseas.
And I think he just conceded it casually.
To your actual question, my apologies.
As to boots on the ground, like, look, the president is now allied with the faction of neoconservatives who are giving him poor counsel.
And there are all the hallmarks of neoconservative foreign policy mistakes in the making right now.
I would flag this sort of Kurdish ferago that the administration seems to be flirting with.
You can't say for sure, but that very well could be a stalking horse for special operations that are already on the ground.
And I would flag, the administration has not been extremely forthcoming about how all six servicemen or service people were killed.
And I think it's very possible that the U.S. already has ground operations.
I don't have evidence, but the administration hasn't really ruled it out that they already have some personnel on the ground.
And of course, as the Secretary of State and the former CIA director Mike Pompeo said into the new year, when the Iran protest kicked off, he highly implied that CIA and Mossad were, you know, we had assets on the ground that were involved in spurring these protests in Iran.
Not denying the organic frustrations of the Iranian people with this government, but they were obviously used as a tinder and a casus belly for U.S. intervention at this point.
Yeah, that Lindsey Graham clip, I think, sort of gets to the heart of it.
The, you know, flippancy with which the homeland is treated in comparison to this like extremely steel manned, ideologically aspirational version of what could maybe potentially, if 9 million things go right in an order that we've never seen happen before.
And history makes us believe exactly the opposite.
If that happens or materializes in Iran, it's just sort of a very interesting cost-benefit analysis.
And I think what I would say to that mindset is, I just wish, Lindsey Graham, that you cared about the American people, like one one-hundredth of how much you cared about the Iranian people, which it seems to me that there's this idea that there's this organic uprising going on there.
Then I'd ask why the CIA is so busy arming, you know, supposed rebellious forces, whether it's the Kurds or whatnot.
I don't know if that was bad intel, if we thought we were going to go in there and the people would sort of take it over in this populist-style revolt.
I don't necessarily think that we're seeing that happen.
But even if you take away what is going on in Iran, I just think the premise, right, people like Lindsey Graham, you know what, Lindsey Graham?
If Iran is such an imminent threat, which I learned apparently something can be an imminent threat if it's been around for 47 years, I don't really think that makes sense, but I digress because that's all we've been hearing from the neocons that I voted to get away from as a party.
But shouldn't have all these senators then been, I don't know, absolutely apoplectic, breaking down, crying down, trying to secure the border under Joe Biden because all these Iranian sleeper cells would be embedding in the country?
Like you would think they would have cared a little bit more about border security enough to like, I don't know, go on Fox News and call for us now invading basically every country in the region and outside the region because apparently we're getting involved in Cuba too now, or at least the Cuban diaspora is lobbying the Trump administration.
You know what, I'll say, and then I'll toss it to you, Kurt.
I'm a little tired of these, you know, ethnic diasporas here in the United States that we take in out of the goodness of our hearts, then demanding that American blood and treasure and the lives of the best and brightest Americans,
like Sergeant Cody that you just saw, 20 years old from Iowa, have to die so these communities that are like vaguely American can somehow fulfill their vengeance against regimes in the countries they no longer have allegiance to.
That's just not the point of what the United States of America is.
And I wish why people like Lindsey Graham, that neocon ideology pisses me off so much and really makes me mad.
It is the flippancy with which they treat American lives in the American homeland, yet the way that they speak about these foreign countries, the people there, it's as if they have the revolutionary spirit and the American people.
Well, sorry, you just have to sit down and accept a terrorist attack because Raytheon wants to make a little bit more money despite being years behind on all their drone orders that we should be able to have actual weapons stockpiles.
But apparently we don't because defense primes are the way the Pentagon wants to go.
Kurt, I know there's a lot of debate going on right now back and forth.
And MAG, I'm sure some of the comments section, probably get her is lighting me up for that.
But I think the difference between our side and the left is that we can have disagreements and you don't have to hate the people who are sharing these viewpoints.
I think that's what makes our side really unique.
What would your pitch to people who are listening to you and are wanting to pull their hair out saying you're skeptical, you're a Trump doomer, you don't know what you're talking about.
I'm sure they'd say we're probably both too young.
We don't know.
We're too anti-war.
What would your pitch be saying that you represent actually real MAGA?
Well, just first, I mean, the people who are dying, the service people are young people.
So I feel like they get a vote.
And I think their perspective matters.
And I mean, the sergeant, the late sergeant that you flagged, his life was tragically bookmarked by, I mean, he was born after 9-11 and he died fighting a global war on terror that is arguably still going that hasn't ended even with the exhaustion of his life.
And so it's just awful.
And I think it's not in the American national interest to be fighting this war or really to particularly care about what happens one way or the other in the Middle East.
As to the point that you make about the right having a robust conversation right now, yeah, I think it's a good thing.
And I think it is something that makes the right better than the left.
I remember, and people well remember, the Ukraine debate four years ago.
The left shut down the conversation.
They excised any left-wing critics of the Ukraine war.
They tried to cancel the Congressional Progressive Caucus from even writing a strongly worded letter about the Ukraine war ahead of the midterms.
And the right's not doing that.
The right is having a small D, democratic, robust, vibrant conversation.
And I think that's a good thing.
I think that is the milieu in which Trump came to power in 2016 and rose back in 2024.
And I think it will be the key to enduring conservative and Republican victories in the future.
There's this idea that there shouldn't be a fight, there's an idea that there shouldn't be a contest.
I don't remember the 2016 primary or the 2024 primary or the Trump era in general being polite or closed-minded.
And so I think we should welcome this discussion.
As to the age point that you're making, I mean, yeah, I mean, I guess maybe we're too young, but I'm not that young.
I mean, I'm pretty much aged out on, not that I'm applying, but I would pretty much aged out to be in the special forces.
The special forces were going to be people who are pretty much younger than me, who potentially would die in this Iran war.
So I think it is relevant what millennials and Gen Z think.
And it is the future.
And I think if you turn your back on the future, we run the risk of running an increasingly, you know, it already is, but an even more laughably gerotocratic society.
And tens of thousands of war room listeners agree.
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You're back in the war room.
I want to bring on Brian Kennedy.
Look, I'm all for open discussion and debate.
I know the comment section, you guys like to get heated.
I'm all for it.
That's passionate citizenship.
It's your patriotic duty.
I just always say asking for clarity from the administration.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But I want to bring on some different perspectives.
We got Brian Kennedy.
Brian, I want to get into the also kind of implications on other regions, particularly with the Chinese and Taiwan and all that.
But before we pivot to, you know, my favorite topic to discuss, your sort of thoughts on the, you know, Kurt Mills, AMCON worldview, the assessment of where we stand now.
So the president wouldn't have done this, President Trump, if he didn't think something was really serious here.
He himself tried diplomacy, didn't want to go to war.
He moved a third of the Navy over there for sure because he thought there was something imminent going on.
And he was concerned about that.
But he would prefer not to go to war.
This is a very risky thing he's done.
But war is a risky business.
And so he did it because he thought that the benefits of doing it would outweigh those risks.
And I would humbly say that it's an unfortunate, you know, byproduct of war that young men die.
You know, Sergeant Cody, who you showed earlier, he died for the United States of America and its national security, for the people of the country.
And we should be very proud of him.
But we also have to remember, as we remember him, that it's very difficult to fight wars trying to pull on the heartstrings of Americans every day by showing the young dead.
It's an unfortunate thing.
It's the most unfortunate thing.
But these things happen.
And they only happen because war is a very deadly business.
And the president wouldn't have put us on this path unless he thought it was absolutely necessary.
And, you know, you said earlier that this wasn't an imminent threat or for 47 years, you know, we've been arguing with Iran and this is not an imminent threat.
Well, how do we know that?
Well, we don't.
We can surmise what's going on, but Iran was working on nuclear weapons.
They had the option of foregoing their work on nuclear weapons.
They wouldn't do it.
What does that tell us?
Well, it tells us that Iran is serious about being a regional power with nuclear weapons.
Everyone says, well, this is just carrying out Israeli foreign policy.
Well, it may be.
Certainly, the Israelis have an interest in this, but so do the Saudis, so do the Qataris, so do the other Emirate states.
No one wants Iran to have nuclear weapons.
And I would say when it comes to those nuclear weapons, the purpose of those was, you know, first and foremost, the United States.
They're not going to use their nuclear weapons if they acquire them.
And I've said before on the show, I think they already do.
But they wouldn't use those against Israel.
They knew if they used them against Israel, that would be meant with nuclear retaliation against Iran.
So it wasn't really in the equation that they were going to attack Israel.
Who could they attack?
Well, they could attack the United States, and they weren't going to do it from the territory of Iran.
Their own Iranian nuclear strategic doctrine is to be able to launch a nuclear ballistic missile from a ship, presumably off the coast of the United States, in order to attack either an American city or to use it as an EMP weapon against the United States.
Now, the mere fact that that hasn't happened before now is not at all indicative of what could happen in the future.
And President Trump had certain intelligence, he must have, to lead him to believe that that was going to happen sometime in the future and that he wasn't going to let that progress any further, hence where we are today.
So for all the folks who think this is a neocon project, President Trump's not a neocon.
And I don't even think the people around him are necessarily neocons.
They're people who are looking at the hard facts of the Iranian nuclear program and discerning that they cannot have nuclear weapons, which they will use first and foremost against the United States.
I'm curious because Senator, I believe it was Senator Cotton was on Fox, I think, a day or two ago, and why I brought up the word imminent.
It was, I think, actually quite an interesting community note on X where the senator was talking about the reason why we went in is that Iran has been an imminent threat for 47 years, which I do think is sort of an oxymoronic sentence.
Of course, I understand and I agree with your assessment.
I don't think the president is a neocon either.
But I'm curious then how you square this idea of imminent threat with the other rhetoric and documents that we've seen from the administration, whether it was the national defense strategy, the national security strategy, or even a lot of the press post-Midnight Hammer saying that Iran was as weak, as vulnerable, as degraded.
In some cases, they even used the word, you know, obliterated as we've ever seen, which for me makes it a little hard to square that positioning of Iran with then, you know, this was going to be the time that they would attack.
And I would also tack on there.
I'll ask you a couple questions and you just engage how you'd like.
But who's to say, too, that going in like this when a clear successor, it's clearly not, you know, a Venezuela type operation.
I also do think the fact that it's an Islamic theocracy complicates the Venezuela template a bit, at least from like a sleeper cell perspective.
But who's to say that changing the regime there even necessarily results in a non-nuclear or nuclear-seeking state?
Who's to say that we don't get a more radicalized Iran?
Look, when we think of Venezuela, we didn't change the regime in Venezuela.
We changed the mind of the regime in Venezuela.
So when the president says a Venezuela-type operation or Venezuela-type regime change, it's changing the mind of the regime that they're going to believe that attacking the United States is a good thing.
Look, in Iran, there is very, very little, what you would call in American terms, civil society, meaning people who form public groups, who can understand the public good, who can work towards civil engagement and the production of a government that has the interests of the people at heart.
That's not going to happen in Iran.
And the failure of the neocons was believing that they could create that in the Middle East, in Iraq and elsewhere.
That was a gross failure.
So I can see why many young folks think that the use of American military power and engagement is a bad idea because our past history, prior, I will say, to President Trump, has been to use American military force and American military power in a most ineffective and frankly stupid way.
Thinking we were going to democratize Iraq was a very stupid idea.
We're not going to democratize Iran.
We're not going to create in Iran any kind of free society.
That's not our job.
That is the job of the Iranian people.
But even then, that's not likely to happen because they don't have a civil society from whence this will come.
So you're going to get some kind of Islamic theocracy, probably, or a Islamic military dictatorship, quite likely.
That is the quite likely outcome.
But it will be a dictatorship that has the interests of Iran at heart.
And that interest in Iran will be not to attack the United States, not to build nuclear weapons, and to keep to themselves.
And so we should have, and I don't think the president has any illusions that we're going to create a free society in Iran.
He does have the very clear objective of making sure that in Iran, you have a regime that believes nuclear weapons are a very bad idea and that trying to kill Americans is an even worse idea.
And so from that point of view, this seems perfectly consistent with the America-first approach of MAGA and actually a rejection of neocon ideology.
And look, Lindsey Graham is a ridiculous human being.
And so the fact that the people who are for the war, many of them, are ridiculous human beings, doesn't make the objectives of this military engagement in Iran wrong or in any way discount what it is President Trump's trying to achieve here.
I'm curious your perspective, both the kind of, you know, du jour de facto, actually what the admin is pursuing, but then your opinion too.
When you talk about these sort of security guarantees, you know, maybe accepting some sort of Islamic theocratic regime, but as long as they're not explicitly seeking to attack the United States, there's some form of compromise there.
Do you think that the kind of calculus for that also includes Israel and our allies and partners in the region?
Or do you think that that is something that President Trump is negotiating purely from it's only about America?
Or do you think our partners, junior partners, everyone to call them in the region are also part of that too?
I think President Trump is doing first and foremost what is good for America.
And the fact that you hear these stories of Israel not knowing what these back channel deals are or potential negotiations are is a sign that the president's going to do what he thinks is best.
It may benefit Israel in the long run and it may benefit Saudi Arabia in the long run.
But his first and only interest here is what's good for the United States.
And I really, I can't, I can't, I'm a little, you know, the young folks within the MACA movement who don't understand that, I think, simply don't have enough.
I would encourage them to look deeper into what the president's objectives are and not have a reflective sort of dislike of military engagements because they think it will lead to a broader war.
And let me say this may lead to a broader war, and I hope it doesn't.
But, you know, we've been talking on this, on War Room for some time about us being in World War III.
And this is one front in World War III.
And you simply can't dismiss this notion that the president sees it that way and that he wants to take Iran off the table because Iran is a proxy of communist China.
And so the communist Chinese interest here has to be first and foremost.
And frankly, I'm worried about Islamic terrorism in the United States.
I'm also worried about the 200,000 Chinese men of military age who look like special forces who came over during the Biden administration and what they could be doing in our country and what they are doing in our country, as you've pointed out in your own investigative reporting.
And so Brian, we're going to have to jump to break shortly.
I want to hold you through because you're just ahead of me.
I want to get to the China angle on all this.
I will say, I was recently on the campus of Stanford, and I actually saw a Chinese national jogging there wearing a PLA t-shirt.
So that doesn't tell you the threat that we face, then I don't know.
I don't know what it does.
Brian, if you can hang with us, I love asking questions like this.
I agree.
Young people maybe have a bit of a reflexive kind of trigger point on this, but I think it's important to ask these questions and get the information out there so everyone in the audience can hear some different viewpoints.
Brian, I want to sort of let you pick up where you left off, but I just want to pose sort of the broader question.
Obviously, how does this implicate the PRC?
I think the Taiwan question, I'll give you this to start you off for, what is it?
I think every day for the past, I don't know how many years, the Chinese Air Force, they've done their military kind of air incursions over Taiwan, I think in Tainan, every day, multiple times a day.
And I think for the last three days, at least open source intelligence is showing us that they've stopped.
I'm curious how you interpret that more broadly, the paradigm.
Do you think America's actions, whether it's Iran or Venezuela, emboldens the PRC to be more aggressive with Taiwan?
Or do you think it shows them that the United States is not going to mess around and put up with any of their kind of attempts to meddle there?
I think what that shows is that the Chinese don't want to escalate things right now, that this is a very dangerous time in world history.
We have a lot of our military over in that part of the world.
We're doing very serious things in Iran, and the Chinese do not want to do the kind of things to provoke us right now.
And so let us hope that cooler heads prevail, as they say, and that China sees this as something that's being done in America's interest, and that they're not going to do the kind of things to provoke us, especially vis-a-vis Taiwan.
But, you know, I want to underscore the fact that these things are not desirable to have done.
But the president did it because he thought he had to do it.
And so there's something bigger going on here.
This is a much bigger war.
And him going after Maduro and Venezuela is, in my mind, designed to take a Chinese proxy off the table.
If he does go after Cuba or encourage regime change in Cuba, that won't be a neocon expeditionary kind of engagement.
That will be because the president believes China can't have a proxy or the Russians can't have a proxy in Cuba.
And that's American interest being defined and operated on rather than some kind of neocon democratizing the world kind of approach.
But I'm curious how you square the idea of using kinetic action to take Chinese proxies off the map with then the administration also, for instance, you know, canceling arm sales or arm transfers to Taiwan or green lighting the H-200 chips, kind of giving them some of our most sensitive and high-value tech transfers.
How do you see that kind of squaring with this more kinetic force to take out Chinese proxies?
The administration should not be selling our advanced chips to communist China.
I'm for decoupling, a systematic decoupling with communist China entirely, as you know.
And I'm for selling arms to Taiwan and doing it at a rapid pace.
And our so-called military-industrial complex needs to be more industrial and industrious in producing munitions for us so that we can sell them to whatever country that is in our interest to sell them to.
And so, yes, the administration should be more consistent when it comes to that.
They should be making sure that Communist China does not have access to U.S. capital markets.
They shouldn't have Communist China being able to buy up U.S. farmland.
They should be buying back from Communist China the farmland they've already bought.
We need to get much more serious about communist China.
And in the meantime, we have to use kinetic action to make sure that Communist China's proxies around the world are defanged, as Captain Finnell said yesterday, from being able to harm the United States.
And look, we talk about nuclear war and nuclear weapons were the cause for President Trump going into Iran.
And because we've not had a nuclear war doesn't mean there won't be one someday.
And President Trump is trying to avoid that.
And he only would have done that if he believed that whatever track Iran was on would have led to that eventuality, or that they already had them and he wanted to degrade their capability of ever being able to use them.
And so as undesirable as many of these things are, they were done for a reason and a very serious reason.
And he wouldn't have done it unless that reason was very serious.
I want you just to sort of sketch what you think the contours of both a politically positive, but also geopolitically safe kind of off-ramp or timeline would look like, specifically in Iran, what that kind of level of escalation would be.
What is the kind of crescendo?
Are we there yet?
Are you expecting more action there?
Or when do you think the administration, or by when, do you think they need to, you know, colloquially, we would call it get out?
The administration has certain objectives when it comes to degrading their military capability.
I would say that we should leave when the Iranian regime, whoever that is, believes they've been defeated.
Not only defeated, but that they know they've been defeated and that they believe deep within them that it is a bad idea to think about attacking the United States in whatever way, whatever way they can.
Look, for 47 years, they've committed textbooked acts of war against the United States, whether it was taking our embassy or using surrogates to kill our men in Beirut or, you know, the final pre-flight training of the 9-11 hijackers was in Iran.
After September 11th, Osama bin Laden's family lived in Iran.
Osama bin Laden diaries have, you know, a lot of correspondence with his colleagues about we don't like the Iranians, but they provide us money and intelligence.
And then they provide them munitions in Iraq to kill Americans.