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July 24, 2021 - The Charlie Kirk Show
26:25
A Journey Around the World with Sec. Mike Pompeo
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Freedom and the American Flag 00:14:59
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Mike Pompeo and I do a journey across the world of how Biden has screwed things up in just a couple of months.
And I'd love to hear your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
If Trump doesn't run, what would you think about a Pompeo presidency or a Pompeo presidential candidate run?
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We like all sorts of different candidates, obviously.
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Here we go.
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We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us today, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Welcome.
Charlie, it's great to be with you.
You just gave a barn burner speech at our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, and students seem pretty fired up.
Yeah, they're fired up.
My speech was fun, and we had a good time, and they are on fire for America and for Freedom.
It's great.
I had a chance to meet a bunch of them out there in the cross hallways today and shake their hand and thank them for what they're doing.
This is a generation that is going to fundamentally grab hold of the conservative tradition and drive it forward.
That's awesome.
And you are a true conservative, and you were in Congress.
And I want to talk a little bit about your biography, then get into kind of your role as Secretary of State, which I think you were phenomenal.
You graduated first of your class at West Point.
Is that right?
That's true.
Long time ago.
That's very impressive, though, I have to say.
Very impressive.
And then you ran for a lot of in-between, ran for Congress in Kansas.
In Kansas in 2000, in the 2010 election.
And then served in Congress, and then you ran the CIA under Trump and then Secretary of State.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Two things that are worth thinking about that really were formative for me.
One is I ran two manufacturing businesses in Kansas before I went to Congress.
They made airplane parts and then oil and gas equipment reel, no BS, American manufacturing.
It was a lot of fun.
And at that same time, I was a fifth-grade Sunday school teacher.
And that shaped my capacity to run the State Department.
Oh, really?
So are you Protestant, Catholic?
So we attend Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Wichita, Kansas.
With a name like Pompeo.
I code if you're a Roman Catholic.
No, I'm an evangelical Christian.
My wife and I co-taught the class, and it was a lot of fun.
We hope we helped a group of kids understand how to read the Bible and love the Lord.
Well, praise God.
So I want to go through the different theaters around the world and how much they've been screwed up over the last six months.
But I first just want to get one comment: your thoughts on this idea of our embassies flying the Black Lives Matter flag.
Could you imagine if, under your direction, something like that happened?
I mean, how is this even allowed under State Department protocol?
So there's a bit of history there.
When I was a member of Congress, I traveled to an embassy and saw the gay pride flag flying from the embassy, and I was infuriated.
And so I wrote a letter at that point in time, but that's all I could really do.
But then I became Secretary of State.
And when I became Secretary of State, when those embassies worked for me, I made very clear we were going to fly one flag from the flagpole at an American embassy.
That was going to be the American flag.
Charlie, you thought I'd have taken away their last nickel.
The consternation, the lawsuits, the threats were staggering.
And so it was truly disheartening to see at the main State Department facility in Washington, the main flagpole that is the center point for American diplomacy, that the whole world would see the picture and they would know what they were looking at there in Foggy Bottom.
To watch the BLM flight fly from that flagpole was just tragic.
This is an organization that is deeply against America.
It's a Marxist organization.
There are people who don't believe in the very things our diplomats are supposed to be doing around the world.
And for this administration to have permitted that to fly from an American flagpole, I'm not sure I have an adjective that can accurately describe how disheartening it was to see and how un-American it felt to me to have been.
And overtly political, too.
I mean, they say it's not political, but of course it is.
No, it's deeply political.
This is an organization of the left.
Yes.
And this is an organization to which many in the Democrat Party have pledged falty.
So, yeah, no, this was not only a, it was not only political, but it was deeply inconsistent with the value set of America.
The equivalent that we used on our show is what if every State Department flag flew an NRA flag that says gun rights are human rights.
Something.
No, look, I made those arguments.
You should know when I was under attack, simply making the case that this was an American facility.
It should have an American flag.
And I was right, and they're wrong.
And it seems like social activism has become one of the same in the federal government.
Okay, let's start closest to home, and then we'll go all the way around the world.
So I want to just kind of get your opinion and your diagnosis of where the most messed up theaters of conflict are and then kind of talk about what you guys did.
Let's start with Cuba.
So Cuba's kind of been in the news lately.
It seems that this administration has just been caught flat-footed, unable to really denounce communism, unprepared for that, I guess you could say.
You guys did a wonderful job with Cuba, which was at first under the Obama administration, they were eating hot dogs and go to baseball games together with the Castro dictators.
You guys kind of put Cuba in its proper place.
Can you talk about that?
So we took a fundamentally different view.
We flipped the switch on Cuba 180 degrees.
It began, right?
It always begins at the beginning.
It begins with the Cuban people.
These are people who love freedom.
They want nothing more than out from under the tyranny that was brought to them by Castro and now his successor crony.
And so we were going to do everything we could to help them.
That always begins with taking away money and power from the people who are the oppressors.
And so we began to put a sanctions regime in place.
I made the declaration when I became secretary that they were a state sponsor of terror.
They've sponsored terror around the world.
All of this putting pressure on the regime.
And I can promise you this.
Had the uprising taken place seven months ago, it would have taken two seconds for the State Department to issue a statement saying that these are people that are loving freedom.
The communist dictatorship is evil, and we're with the people of Cuba.
It took them several days.
And frankly, I think the president had to read from a three by five card.
He keeps doing this.
I can't explain it.
I can't explain it.
But you're just saying, and it's a little bit, it's like this narrow thing.
Have you ever seen this?
You know what I'm talking about?
I do, exactly.
It's like a weird piece of paper.
I can't figure it out.
They're custom-made?
I can't figure it out, but I can tell you the advice he's getting from those little things.
And what's written on now is like, talk, breathe.
Right?
You are president.
You know what I mean?
It is remarkable.
Look, I wish they'd go back and just adopt the same model.
If they did, I'm convinced the Cuban people would have the space they need to ultimately change the nature of what's going on there.
It doesn't appear that's the path they're headed down.
They're going to placate the regime.
They'll still send money to them.
This is absolutely tragic.
Anybody who's met any of the folks who have lived in Cuba and then come to the United States knows that the United States has a responsibility to help the Cuban people be successful and free.
And this really is the window to liberate the Cuban people from this repressive government.
I mean, in the 70s and 80s, there was somewhat of a Soviet kind of actor at play.
And right now, this is basically an opportunity where the younger generation is ready to rise up.
At the very least, we could provide internet service through satellites.
Yes.
There's all sorts of creative ideas.
There are lots of ideas, certainly given them the ability to connect and communicate.
Remember, that's what we did in Poland, what Reagan did in Poland, right?
He'd helped the solidarity movement with printing presses and the capabilities a different time, but the capacity for them to communicate with them.
And it's lighter than the sword.
And this is something we could do.
We could do it rather easily.
I suspect this administration is going to walk away from that opportunity.
Unfortunately, I think Cuba is going to kind of just be forgotten.
So let's go to Europe.
You guys did a wonderful job of totally changing the way that European negotiations are done.
I think you gave, I think it was NATO, the most beautiful building I've ever seen in the history of the world, but we didn't only pay for it as taxpayers.
Is that right?
That's right.
We have great friends in Europe.
They're an ally and partner in our security apparatus, but for an awful long time, we let them just walk all over us.
That ended when President Trump and I came into the capacity to influence it.
We only asked of them that they do as much as we did.
If they needed security, great.
We'd be happy to be partners in that security arrangement and push back against the threats, but they needed to step up.
And it was remarkable to be there on the very first trip that I took with the president when we went to the NATO summit.
And he simply said, you all made some promises about the money you're going to spend.
Could you just make good on them?
That's right.
And it was as if we'd have walked in as a skunk in the garden party, but we were right.
In the end, we made them do it.
We created the environment where they knew it was in their best interest to do it.
So some $440 billion of European taxpayer money now to support our efforts.
The Secretary General there, a fellow named Jens Stoltenberg, an amazing person, thanks us for saving NATO in that sense, of building out a NATO that now was common, right?
It was a common defense unit.
Before it had been the American defense unit with a handful of stragglers, it was really important work that President Trump did there.
And I think that one will actually last.
And geopolitically, it's much smarter to try to build partners than just have America just subsidize the entire thing.
You know this, Charlie.
If you don't have any skin in the game, you're less likely to be to be there when it matters most at the moment with that.
It's fairpunk when the challenge comes, right?
When that moment comes, if you don't have any skin in the game, it's pretty easy to walk away.
And the Europeans were in a place where they could have easily walked away.
Now they've got a lot more investment there.
So one more thing I want to focus just on the European theater is the stunning reversal from the media that they're perfectly okay with Russian pipelines going into Germany.
They're perfectly okay with meetings with Vladimir Putin in secrecy.
And I mean, the position of your administration is that Russian is an enemy and an adversary.
If there's places of collaboration we can work on, then so be it, but we don't trust them generally.
It doesn't seem that this administration is even close to as harsh on Russia as you guys were.
If I remember correctly, you expelled diplomats, sanctions.
The ultimate irony is that for two and a half years, they asserted that President Trump was a Russian asset.
And for four years, this administration did more to put pressure on Vladimir Putin than the previous one did in eight.
It started with a big buildup in our security posture.
If you think there's one thing that Vladimir Putin is afraid of, it is a strong, capable U.S. military.
We then expelled some diplomats, but we got out of a treaty.
There was a treaty that just two countries in it.
One of them wasn't complying.
And we said, hmm, that's interesting, but we got to get away from this.
And so we walked away from a treaty that made no sense, that was constraining the United States, but not the Russians.
And we made clear to Vladimir Putin there were a set of things that we just weren't going to permit to happen, and they didn't happen.
And sadly, it appears that President Biden's told them that there's about 16 industries they can't attack.
And I don't exactly know what they are, but I feel bad for the 17th.
Yeah, I mean, ransomware attacks to the pipelines being built.
And the media is just perfectly, I guess, okay with it or just uninterested when they're not able to caricature a Republican as a Russian agent.
If we step up just one more level, the whole world understood for four years that President Trump was serious about protecting America.
That's a model we know from the Reagan years, right?
This idea of peace through strength.
This is a model that the world understood, that there was a leader in America who wasn't going to go put 40,000 soldiers anyplace, but was going to defend the things that mattered, our interests, and was going to have that as a priority.
And so I think of that in the context of the Russian.
Vladimir Putin knows that he was able to take a fifth of Ukraine under President Obama.
Do you think he believes there's any reason that President Biden would react any differently if he decided to take a chunk of Syria or take another chunk in Ukraine or whatever it may be or conduct ransomware campaigns?
I don't think he views them as being prepared to do the hard work of defending America.
Yes, and Assad is basically consolidated power now, just kind of to a glide path to dictatorship thanks to this kind of new geopolitical world we're living in.
Peace Through Strength in Middle East 00:02:02
Now to the Middle East, it's kind of a segue.
You did a wonderful job with Israel and defending the state of Israel against attacks.
Back in May, we saw probably a more heated conflict than I think you saw in four years at the Trump administration.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, absolutely.
That was an Iranian attack.
There was a proxy force called Hamas in the Gaza Strip, but in the end, these were Iranian rockets launching down on Israel.
Iran continues to say that Israel doesn't have the right to exist and want to wipe the little Satan, Israel, and the big Satan off the face of the earth.
We were having none of that.
We also just were very good at just saying, walk me through the facts on the ground.
And when we came to the Middle East, every Secretary of State before had done shuttle diplomacy between Ramallah and Jerusalem to no effect.
We said we're happy if the Palestinians have better lives.
We want good things for them, but we're not going to let that get in the way of creating peace in the Middle East.
And so we built out a set of security understandings that allowed remarkable leaders in Bahrain, in Sudan, Morocco, and in the United Emirates, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, as well as two great leaders, Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump, who all were able to come together to say, look, we're going to fundamentally rewrite history in the Middle East.
We're going to acknowledge Israel's right to exist.
And it took a strong America who was prepared to move our embassy to Jerusalem, to have the Secretary of State acknowledge that Israel is not an occupying force every place that the Israeli people live.
Those things brought together under the Abraham Accords truly delivered some lasting peace for the people of the Middle East.
I pray that they continue.
I think that the Abraham Accords will, but this administration is about to hand the Iranians a whole bunch of money, and that'll be to the detriment of the United States.
When your administration got no credit at all whatsoever for that negotiation, right, which was beyond historic and really was a unified peace against Iran, do you think Iran's going to get a nuclear weapon in this administration?
I don't know that they'll get it on their watch, but they'll make real progress.
They're going to have the what do you need to build a nuclear weapon?
China's Communist Threat to Us 00:08:25
You need to make sure that you can do it in hidden places so there's no one comes after it.
Second, you need to have the money, tools, and resources to build out the infrastructure to do that.
And then you need the political cover that gives you the space to do it.
The Biden administration is going to provide them each of those three things.
And we starved the Iranian regime.
They're on their last $4 billion in foreign exchange reserves.
It took us two and a half years to put that much pressure on them.
It saddens me because the people in the Gulf, the partners and friends that we have in Israel and America will be more at risk as Iran continues to move close to a nuclear weapon.
Charlie, even as they get close, even when they don't have the completed cycle, their capacity to coerce increases.
Their capacity to say that if you don't do what it is we'd like you to do, Israel, if you don't do what you'd like us to do to the Saudis, then those countries will feel under the thumb because they know Iran is even, even if Iran is only on the cusp of getting those weapon systems.
Yeah, and they will have much more leverage and proxies to do so.
So now I want to kind of end, but it's going to be a long end on the most important of all of them, which is China.
And that is, of course, the one that is the greatest threat, I think, to our way of life here in the West in a variety of different reasons.
The Trump administration, led by you, was kind of the first effort to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable.
There's a lot that I want to ask you about this, but let's just start with the virus.
Do you think it came from a lab?
I do.
I do.
I think it's a near certainty.
And while I can't lay out conclusive proof for you today, you put me in front of a jury in a civil court and I'll win all day long.
Criminal Court.
Criminal Accord might be, I think I could even win there, but I must say.
So the intent threshold, maybe.
We'll see.
Yeah, this almost certainly came from the lab.
Every stick of evidence that we've seen today suggests that they were working on a virus, that they were conducting this research that amps up the virus, makes it certainly more contagious, likely more lethal as well.
And they were doing so for a purpose that's not clear, but we know this.
We know when they learned that the virus was out on the street that they didn't do the right thing.
They knew they had people who were infected.
They knew they had people who were highly contagious.
They knew the virus was lethal and they sent them across the globe.
Charlie, I always compare it to someone who gets behind the wheel when they're drunk.
They may not intend to run over someone, but when they do, they're charged with felony murder.
Whether the Chinese intended the results that have flowed, the results of their reckless activities have now resulted in the death of millions of people all across the world.
That alone justifies massive accountability.
So the China issue in general, and I want to ask you about Taiwan because I think that actually might be the thing in play.
What would we, if you were still in power, what would we do to hold them accountable for such a reckless act like that that killed millions of people, that shut down the world economy, lied about it, and they transported their own citizens to almost help spread it.
So it's a long project.
There's a half a dozen things you can do that are quick and easy.
Examples.
We know who the decision makers were.
Make sure their wives aren't shopping in Paris.
So just pull their Western visas.
Shut them out.
Today we have 360,000 students studying, Chinese students studying in the United States of America.
Some of them are good, hardworking Chinese people.
Too many of them are connected to the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese security apparatus called the MSS.
They must get out.
So really quick, because we're a student organization, what percentage would you say out of 360,000?
Boy, it's hard to know, but this I can say for sure.
Very few of those students are able to go home without being contacted by the Chinese government.
It can be as easy as, hey, we'd like to talk to you.
We know where your parents are, right?
Some of them are subtle or less subtle.
I'm Italian.
I know how the mafia works, right?
These are understandings that say, no, we're not agents directly of the Chinese Communist Party, but there is an expectation.
And we know the government is watching and monitoring our activity while we're here in the United States.
That number is staggeringly big.
And so we ought to rethink our policies.
You know, our universities today, every time we started to challenge this, Charlie, you can appreciate this.
Just like many elites on Wall Street, the university presidents would write letters saying, you don't understand my school can't survive.
These students pay full ticket price.
Full ticket price.
Even at a place that, think about Wichita State, the flagship university in my hometown of Wichita, Kansas, has an enormous capacity for Chinese grants that impact the school's ability to do engineering research and a whole lot of Chinese students.
We have to fundamentally rethink.
We have 11,000.
We have 360,000 here.
We have 11,000 Americans studying in China today.
Chinese students.
And then last, here's the other big lever that we could get our hands on very, very quickly.
Today, the financial community in the United States is so closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party.
We need to separate that.
The way to separate is just tell the Chinese when they invest in America, they're going to invest on the same terms we do in China.
They're not going to let us invest there.
And so we should then reciprocally deny them the capacity to do that.
Is this the Siffiest?
It's Siffius, but it's also even bigger than that.
It's about securities rules.
They're trading on an American market and not having to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, the compliance rules that American companies, frankly, and European and African and Vietnamese companies, China has this big space where we let them get away with the absence of accountability.
Wow.
We have pension funds, American pension funds investing in Chinese companies that are tied to the Chinese military apparatus.
We should make that unlawful.
Yes.
And these are just a handful of ideas that one could, an administration could do very quickly and would communicate to the Chinese Communist Party that we're no longer going to be your lapdog.
We're no longer going to turn the other cheek.
We're going to impose enormous costs on your economy until such time as you conform to the set of understandings that are acceptable in the global space.
Run your country the way you want to, but we're going to make sure that everything that you do that impacts us, we're going to hold you accountable.
What would the longer term projects be for that?
The longer terms are confronting the global footprint that Xi Jinping, the leader in China, Belton Road, their increasing growth in their military, their ever-expanding nuclear capability.
Those are the central features.
And then lastly, we have to make sure that the whole world understands when China comes knocking on your door with a commercial offer that looks good, it's too good to be true.
You can bet on it.
It is about political control.
So that means to build friendships and alliances.
We had started this with the Japanese, with the Australians, with the South Koreans, with 1.4 billion people in India that says the West.
And I don't mean a direction, but I mean an idea.
Western values.
Western values.
Those with Western values who value free markets and democracy are going to work together to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party doesn't destroy the world in the way Xi Jinping wants to to create global hegemony for the Chinese Communist Party.
It is the single biggest risk outside of the United States to the next generation of Americans.
I mean, I totally agree.
So China is posturing right now over Taiwan, and Taiwan is a sovereign nation, and we should be unafraid to say that.
This administration seems to be kind of tap dancing around it.
I don't want to get my facts wrong, but they seem to just kind of be hedging.
This seems like a potential place of conflict.
Is it the United States' role to make sure that Chinese Communist Party forces don't take over Taiwan?
This administration has bought the Chinese narrative.
The Chinese talk about reunification of Taiwan.
It was never.
It was part of Crimea.
It was, yes, it was never.
It was never.
It was never part of China.
And what I hope is they've actually said some good things about Taiwan, but in the end, it's actions that Xi Jinping will watch.
We sold them F-16s.
We made soldiers told the Taiwanese F-16s.
We made clear that we were going to do all the things that were going to provide the Taiwanese people with the space and resources they need to defend themselves.
And then we made clear that we were going to have a Pacific fleet that was fully capable.
Yes.
I haven't seen this administration do that.
Their language is good, but you know this, Charlie.
You can't really tell what someone thinks until they get hit in the face.
That's right.
Everyone's a hero to the government.
And I think the Chinese are likely to find a place.
Maybe it's Taiwan where they hit us in the face.
And I hope this administration is prepared to come back over the top.
Well, I know you got to run.
You got a lot to do.
Thanks for Listening Everybody 00:00:57
So thank you for being so generous with your time.
If you run in 2024, I'm talking.
You can listen.
I think China's going to be a major issue.
And I think you're better versed than almost anyone else to be able to understand that.
And you're a true conservative.
So I think it'd be very interesting to kind of see how that all works on the landscape.
And maybe the president runs and maybe not.
We'll see.
But I do think, though, the China issue is going to be like the Soviet issue was in the 80s.
I really do.
I hope that it is.
It's that important.
Because people talk about inflation.
They're talking about critical race theory and all that, all important.
The Chinese issue could be a truly material threat to our way of life.
Slash you.
Thanks for having me on Charlie.
Thanks so much.
Appreciate being with you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.
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