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Feb. 24, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
42:05
What is next as Russia takes the next step to all out war in Ukraine
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By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
This house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Alright, hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
We're back today with a very special guest, a good friend of mine, Chris Stewart from Utah, 2nd Congressional District.
Not only does he serve on the Appropriations Committee, but he also serves on the Select Committee on Intel.
And I got to know Chris in Congress.
This is one of the more thoughtful leaders that you're going to find on the Hill.
But we also share something else.
We're also Air Force guys.
And he has an amazing background.
We're going to start off with his background.
And then we're going to jump into some of the Ukraine issues and stuff for the day.
But Chris, welcome to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Hey Doug, great to be with you.
Thanks for the invitation.
Man, we miss you.
All of us miss working with you, but thanks for the great things you've been doing since.
And again, it's great to be with you.
Well, I miss you guys too.
Y'all are, there's some things I miss about DC and frankly, Chris, there's some things I don't.
You and others are the ones I miss, okay?
But we're getting stuff done and I think this is important.
One of the things that I do, you know, that Chris, we talked about as well, is I wanted to share, because a lot of us see us in our public roles.
And for you, I don't want to skip over the fact you've got a pretty great background story.
And, you know, not only being, you know, an Air Force pilot, B-1, I believe, you know, setting records there.
You're also an author.
Give us a little bit of who Chris is.
All right.
Well, thanks, Sammy.
We all love talking about ourselves, right?
I'll try to be brief.
So, Chris is a farm boy from Utah.
I wear my father's Air Force wings, as you may see here.
He was a pilot in World War II. I come from a family of 10 kids.
Is that not crazy?
I mean, that's just a remarkable thing.
And my dad, as I said, was an Air Force pilot.
He had five sons.
I'm sorry, six sons and five of us served in the military.
So like you said, Doug, and like you did as well, I served in the Air Force.
Flew combat rescue helicopters and then the B-1.
I have three world speed records.
This is kind of cool.
Including the fastest non-stop flight around the world.
So I got to do some just really fun things when I was in the military.
And my wife and I still consider it some of the happiest times of our lives.
And kind of like, you know, as we began, you miss the people.
It's those friendships that you make.
That's certainly true of our Air Force experience.
And Both of us feel like it was an honor to serve.
Started writing books when I was in the Air Force.
I've written, oh gosh, I don't know, 19 or 20 books.
In fact, Doug, I'll put in a little plug here.
My last book just came out two weeks ago.
It's called The Final Fight for Freedom.
It took me about three and a half years to write because I'm trying to write about the world and the world is just changing so fast.
And I think your listeners appreciate that.
I mean, things that we thought we'd never see, now we wonder, hey, maybe we'll see that by the weekend because, again, the world just seems to be going crazy at a rapid pace.
Anyway, multiple New York Times bestseller.
The last book's doing really well.
And then, like you, we found ourselves in Congress.
And we came to Congress at the same time.
We sure did.
And that work on the Intel Committee is just the most fascinating work in the entire world.
It really is the thing that kind of drives me.
You know, Doug, I think you'll appreciate this.
When you get to Congress, it's kind of like being a freshman in high school, right?
It's like, well, where do I fit in?
Am I one of the cool kids?
Am I one of the jocks?
Am I one of the nerds?
And we kind of look around and go, how can I help?
And, you know, the tremendous job that you did on oversight and holding the administration accountable and holding government overreach accountable.
And I looked at it and thought, I can probably best help in national security.
And so that's where I spend a lot of my time on, again, the intel committee and also work through appropriations, doing much the same thing.
There's a little bit about my background.
I'll say the most important thing for last, I'm a father.
I have six kids myself.
They're all smarter than I am.
And my wife and I feel like, you know, the most important thing we'll ever do is with our kids.
So it's an honor to serve in Congress now, especially such a just a crazy time.
And I'm glad we get to talk about some of those things today.
Well, it is pretty wild.
I mean, I agree with you with the kids.
It's good that we have kids that have a great mom, and they grow up, and they're smarter than their dad, especially.
And from my perspective, I attest to that.
But before we dig into some of the things, I mean, I love how your humility is amazing.
You know, just, oh, well, I have three world records, speed records, and run around the world.
All right, real quick, number one, where did you fly the combat helicopter?
Where did you fly the greens at?
Well, kind of all over.
It started out at Langley.
It was up in Washington for a little bit down in Florida.
So, you know, here and there.
Okay.
My first base in the Air Force was Moody.
Oh, yeah.
So, you know, the combat rescue wing down there and then served when I was in Iraq, served with the guys out there.
And we had some of our guys from Nellis and then some from others.
So I'm very familiar with the combat rescue side.
The pararescue side is real close to my heart.
And those helicopter drivers are really amazing.
Tell us, though, about...
Now, you did it in the B-1, correct?
The speed record.
Around the world, how long did it take you?
How many times did you refuel?
And what was that like?
Well, thanks for giving us...
Yeah, talk about that.
I'd a lot rather talk about that than politics, right?
Flying, because that was cool.
And by the way, I've got to give a shout-out to those combat rescue guys and special forces.
I volunteered to go do that because I thought that's just such a great mission.
And they're some of the best pilots, and they have some of the most...
I mean, demanding missions.
I mean, they're out there almost every day in one fashion or another doing really remarkable things.
So the PJs and the Special Forces, again, that you know and are familiar with, they're just American heroes.
Okay, so to the world record, remember, Doug, when, you know, this was like early 2000s, 2010-ish.
After the first Gulf War, we realized we were never going to be able to put B-1s, a strategic asset, in the region.
And so we were practicing these bombing missions, flying from, you know, the United States over to the Middle East, doing a practice bomb run, and then coming back home.
And these were like, you know, 17, 20-hour missions.
And it takes a lot of work to prepare for those and, you know, planning.
And as we were planning for one of them, I said to the guys, hey, you know, we're We're going about a third away around the world.
What if we just kept going?
And that was kind of the genesis of it.
And we thought, you know, let's do that.
Let's fly around the world.
Let's show the combat capability to be one.
Let's show how quickly we could respond anywhere in the world.
And as we started, you know, moving forward on that, as we started to prepare it, you know, again, I wondered, hey, I wonder what the record is for flying around the world.
And we looked it up and we realized, holy cow, we're going to destroy that record.
We won't even have to try.
So it wasn't just to go set the record.
It was a, you know, a global power demonstration mission.
It was to show, again, the capabilities of the V-1.
We carried bombs with us and dropped them on four different ranges around the world.
and by the by the way the speed we did it was uh let's see 36 hours just over 36 hours um so 36 hours 13 minutes every bomb hit the target plus or minus one second which i think is really cool that you could fly a 36 hour mission and still hit your targets again plus or minus one second uh six air refuelings uh we got in trouble a couple times hit hit a typhoon down in the philippines and almost ran out of gas and I couldn't get clearance to fly over Egypt and a couple things like that.
It kept it interesting, but it was a lot of fun.
So, Doug, thanks for asking me about that.
It's obviously fun for me to talk about.
No, is it cool for people to hear?
Because again, we're going to get into the real war and the things that are attributable to that.
But I mean, to see our military capabilities and the way that you portray that is, oh well, almost run into a typhoon, almost run out of gas.
This goes on every day, Chris, and you know this as well as I do.
I'm about a week out from 20. I hit 20 on March 1st.
You know, I probably keep going a little bit longer, but there are folks who get up and do this every day.
And now when you have, you know, the world situation like it is, it's good to hear stories like this of our capabilities of our warfighters and our airmen and soldiers and Marines and sailors, you know, doing, you know, just fun stuff.
I mean, but yet projecting global power at the same time.
How close, when you plan a mission like this, just real quickly, Did people look at you and say, why are you doing this?
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
And getting leadership to support it was actually a bit of a challenge as well.
And the reason that they finally did was at the time, the B-1 went through a cycle a lot like the F-35 is right now.
It was a very, very expensive weapon system, very complicated, especially for its time.
And it had some growing pains.
And the press loved to jump on the B-1 and say, look, look at this debacle here.
Look how much money we spent, you know, $500 million per aircraft, and they can't even fly.
Well, of course, that wasn't true.
But it is true that like a new weapon system, it takes a while to kind of work out some of the kinks.
And we know that every time we build a new airplane.
Every time you build a new aircraft carrier, whatever it is, it takes a little time to work out some of the kinks in it.
And that's kind of the phase we were in at the time.
So the reason we were able to convince, you know, leadership to do it and they supported it was because this was a chance to go say, look what this aircraft can do.
And it wasn't just me, by the way.
We actually had a three ship and then one of them peeled off.
So two airplanes flew around the world and we did it without a hitch.
And so it was a good chance for us to say, hey, this is a good aircraft.
It's combat capable.
It can do things that no other aircraft can do.
And I think for those reasons, leadership was willing to kind of get behind it.
I think that's important as well.
There's a lot of discussion now.
Chris, you're seeing it in Congress.
I saw it beginning in Congress.
This leads us into our next discussion.
I know there's a lot of things.
I'm going to have you back on.
We're going to discuss military.
We're going to discuss your books.
I want to get into your books.
I've written one book.
I thought it was going to be the life of me.
I want to write more because I enjoyed it.
I've got to come back and learn from the master here on this.
I'll try and find a master to introduce you to then.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anybody listening to this podcast, go look up Chris Stewart's book.
You will not be disappointed in that.
But taking off, and I wanted to do the Around the World on purpose, because what it showed, again, and I love the way you described it, was a global force.
What is our forged footprint?
What is our tip of the spear?
What are our capabilities?
Those kind of things.
Could never be more important than really today.
We're sitting here on February 23rd.
We're talking about this.
Ukraine, Russia is blowing up as we speak in different ways.
And you talked about how we position our assets.
We're also seeing in Congress right now a discussion that I see growing, and that is, what is exactly America's power?
I don't think any of us want to see American ground troops probably in Ukraine.
It's just a problematic situation that has no end.
But this is becoming more of a problem.
Do you sense in Congress right now a misunderstanding, or maybe a misunderstanding, But a beginning to be a different of opinion on how we use our military force and maybe from an isolationist standpoint.
Yeah, I do.
And I honestly kind of agree with part of the argument in the sense that we and you again will appreciate this is because your time in Iraq.
I mean, look, we took on something there that we just didn't understand at the time.
And we thought we're going to bring democracy and we're going to bring a republic to Afghanistan or to Iraq, much like the United States.
And it just turned out it was a bridge too far.
It was just the people and the agencies and the infrastructure there.
Everything there just wasn't quite ready to support that type of government.
And it's not upon us to compel that type of government.
I understand the limitations.
And, you know, I think you and I, again, are more sensitive even than many people are because we see the sacrifice and we see the cost.
And we realize, yeah, we can't be the world's policemen, to use a phrase that, you know, has been around for a long time.
But having said that, the truth is, is the world relies on us.
I mean, we are the glue that holds the world together.
And if we stumble or if we're not willing to play that role, the world crumbles underneath us.
And I'm just convinced of that.
And so the problem we have, or the challenge we have, is using judgment and discretion on when do we use this global power?
When do we use the military?
And what will the American people support?
And I completely agree with you.
I would never advocate for sending US forces to engage Russians in Ukraine.
I mean, talk about a potential catastrophe.
That would be a tinderbox just covered with gasoline.
And it has to be really upon our NATO allies and European allies and to some degree upon the Ukrainian people to determine what happens here.
But on the other hand, Doug, we can't just turn away and say, well, shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's not our problem because the world looks to us for leadership.
And I'm deeply concerned about this president's ability to project that kind of leadership.
And I mean, we can directly attribute What is happening in Ukraine?
By the way, is attribute a word?
Did I use that correctly?
I think we attributed it to that anyway.
Thank you.
I'm a highly trained author, right?
Can't use big words.
But we can draw a line, I'll say it this way, directly from what we watched in Afghanistan.
To the Ukraine today.
There's just no question about it.
The intelligence on this is very clear and common sense is very clear.
A seventh grader could look at this and say, yeah, Vladimir Putin probably chose to do this after watching what happened in Afghanistan and determining, hey, this is the time and this is the American president that I want to challenge.
Yep.
I'm glad you said Afghanistan.
There's two questions coming out there that's going to lead to our further discussion here.
Number one, I am firmly convinced that all of the missteps of the Biden administration on economics, the domestic, the just hyper focus on social agenda and everything else, is not why his poll numbers are as bad as they are.
I believe it is because of Afghanistan.
Because there's one thing that unites Democrats, Republicans, Independents, anybody who don't care, is they do not want to see America look bad on the world stage.
And we didn't just look bad, we looked awful on the world stage.
That set the stage.
So moving from Afghanistan, you also brought up another issue that I think provided the framework for Putin.
But from your seat on the Intel Committee, and when I was in Congress as well and in leadership, we looked at this, and I've been to Europe and Eastern Europe several times, Does it disturb you that it seems to be more ginned up in America about the Ukraine than it does in Germany, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, France to an expense?
They just don't seem to be ginning up for this as some of what they're expecting us to do.
That presents a problem for me.
Yeah, absolutely no doubt about it.
I mean, in your time in Congress, when you were in Europe, in Eastern Europe, I'm sure you went to Germany.
And I'm sure you had conversations with him about, hey, why are you guys, you pay less percentage of your defense than any other NATO country, and you're the richest country in NATO. The richest country in Europe.
I mean, that's just one example of the challenge we have in engaging our European allies.
But it comes back to what we said earlier, and that is, they wait for US leadership.
What they want to know is, well, is the US going to engage?
Because if the US doesn't, then we're not.
If, on the other hand, the US will, then we'll probably join them.
But this is their backyard.
And by the way, they're the ones who are going to pay a much higher price than we will.
We're going to be affected by the price of energy.
There's no doubt about that.
We already have.
And if I could sidebar for just a second, if you want to hurt Russia, then drive down the cost of energy.
And if you want to help Vladimir Putin, then do what this president has done, and that's drive up the price of energy.
Because it's an enormous cash cow to them when they have oil at $80 or $100 a barrel versus $40.
So Europeans are going to deal with that problem, but they're also going to deal with the humanitarian crisis.
There's going to be hundreds of thousands, maybe more than a million Ukrainian refugees who flee into Eastern and Western Europe if this turns into as bad as we fear that it might.
So they're the ones who are going to have to, you know, they're going to pay the greater price than we will.
And to your point, they absolutely should be more willing to engage than they have been.
But again, honestly, Doug, we're not terribly surprised it's the way it's been since, well, really since, you know, the very beginning of the Cold War.
Exactly.
And it was amazing.
I want to get to it a little bit.
The revisionist history that Vladimir Putin laid on the other night, you know, in a sense of Ukraine.
But let's dive deep because I like on this podcast for us to talk more in depth than what you just sort of see on the TV. Ukraine is a unique...
I know from my time when I went to Slovakia, Czechoslovakia and others in those times, they were very concerned about Ukraine because they understood the uniqueness of the Ukraine.
Historically, Ukraine is sort of the heart, and I know this sounds strange for maybe, you know, young people today, Ukraine is sort of the heart of the old Soviet Empire.
It sort of came out of there, and that's why the Crimea and others, you know, that Russian influence, especially in the East, And they're not part of NATO. They're not part of the EU. Again, from what you're seeing on the ground, take off of that and explain why Ukraine, especially to Russia, to Putin in particular, but to that area, Ukraine is sort of an isolated area and makes it so difficult to deal with.
Yeah.
To use a phrase that's very common, well, Doug, it's complicated, right?
And it really is complicated.
I mean, Historically, there are historic ties between Ukraine and Russia, going back more than a thousand years.
But on the other hand, the Ukrainian people are aware that the Stalinists killed tens of millions of Ukrainians for little other reason than that they were Ukrainians.
To say oppressed is an enormous understatement.
So the Ukrainian people remember that.
Ukraine was the breadbasket to the former Soviet Union in many ways.
I mean, the Ukrainian people are the ones who kept the rest of Russia from starving to death more than once.
They were also, for example, very strategic and very important for, say for example, missile fields, intercontinental missile fields and other very important strategic military assets.
So it really is complicated.
One other thing I would add to that, and I could add more, but I think we can illustrate it with what we said.
But the eastern regions of Ukraine, there really are a number of ethnic Russians.
They speak Russian.
But even there, they're still in the minority.
And what's really clear is the rest of Ukraine does not want to be part of Russia.
They do not want to be folded in under Vladimir Putin's dictatorship.
They know how that will end for them.
They've been yearning to be more closely associated with the West since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Now, we were not going to invite them to NATO. They're a generation away from being qualified to join NATO, if ever.
But they clearly want to have closer ties with the West, and that's what Vladimir Putin is so angry about.
And to your point about the speech that he gave, you've got to give him credit in his speechwriters.
It was brilliantly conceived to be able to create, really out of thin air, this justification for, yeah, this is why we're going to take Ukraine.
And it took a complicated history and kind of filtered it down to one or two simple things that sounded good in a speech.
But, you know, A, it's based on things that just simply aren't true.
And B, even if it was true, they're a free and independent nation.
They're not part of the Soviet Union.
They don't want to be part of the, you know, Russia's living under, again, Russian leadership.
And Vladimir Putin has no right to go in and say, well, these breakaway republics are now mine, and to use that as a stepping stone to go further into Ukraine, which is clearly his intention still.
Well, and I think that's what makes this so difficult, and I agree with you.
The Russians have never been at a loss for propaganda.
They understand it.
RT, Russia today, I mean, you see it all over Eastern Europe.
You see it even in America.
It's part of our cable in some areas we have here.
The issues that, though, come out of this, and this is where I think we get the disturbing part, because if you take and look around them, Chris, and I don't think people are discussing this, even if you wanted to isolate Ukraine, if we could figure out a way, and as you said, they weren't coming into NATO, if we could figure out a way to say, okay, Putin, look, for the next 50 years, this is off the table.
Ukraine's not coming in, but, but, They're also going to be sort of protected on both sides.
They're going to be sort of the...
Not necessarily a Switzerland, but I get your complaint, Russia.
You don't want NATO this close to your border.
You've got to understand our concern and their people's concern.
They want more freedom.
There needs to be a balance there that, frankly, Russia don't want to give to them.
But once you step out of the Ukraine going west, you start running into Slovakia.
You start running into Moldova.
You start running into Poland.
You start running in...
Where you will have an issue with NATO at that point.
Does that disturb you in the bigger picture?
Or do you think this would be enough?
I don't buy that Putin wants to put together the old Soviet Union.
I don't buy it completely.
I think he wants to have the perception, but he ain't gonna do what it takes to get there.
But do you think it could lead, with especially the weakness right now in this administration, to a challenge that NATO would have to respond to?
You know, it's hard to predict the future, right?
Turns out that's a challenge.
I agree with what you said, though, and I've honestly kind of changed my mind on this a little bit regarding what does Vladimir Putin really want?
Does he really want to create the former Soviet Union?
I think he certainly does, but I think he also certainly understands he's not going to be able to.
Like, he's never going to be able to bring Poland under his umbrella without a Almost probably a global war in order to do that, and certainly a war similar to World War II in Europe, because NATO will defend Poland.
And I think he knows that.
But on the other hand, we need to kind of couch that with the reality of his view of the world.
And he has said again and again, the greatest catastrophe of the previous century was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I mean, he doesn't think it was World War II, With maybe 80 to 85 million people who died because he doesn't think it was the Holocaust.
He doesn't think it was any of those things.
He thinks it's the fall of the Soviet Union.
And I believe he sincerely believes that.
And he will certainly try to rebuild that as much as he can.
But again, I think his ability to say, okay, well, we're going to go right into Poland or we're going to take the Baltics.
He probably knows he can't do that right now.
Although, you know, if you go to the Baltics, those people are scared to death and have been for a long time.
And I understand why.
And Poland has a very unique view.
I mean, if you talk to Polish leadership or Polish people, they'll point out, hey, World War II for us started in the late 1930s and it didn't end until the 1990s because we were occupied by Russia during that entire time.
And their view is the war lasted for, you know, 50 years.
So, you know, I do think this, that you described it well when you talked about Vladimir Putin's interest in Ukraine.
His risk appetite in Ukraine is extraordinary.
And part of it is he feels like he can't allow this part of his neighborhood to lean and to be enfolded in the West.
On the other hand, it's pretty clear, too, that he would love to rebuild the former Warsaw Pact.
And if you're successful in Ukraine, at some point, he'd probably look at others, probably the Baltics, and say, well, you know, maybe we'll go there as well.
Well, it's going to be interesting to see here, because I like the way you said, you know, that sort of that, I'll call it a pain tolerance.
What will he be?
It's interesting.
When we talk about that in the United States, we talk about it from, generally speaking, with politicians.
We talk about the average man in the street.
That's what our media says.
When Putin or the elite in Russia talk about it, they simply look at it as a...
A temporary kind of thing.
They look at it in a much longer perspective.
They look at pain tolerance being something that is sort of their birthright.
They've been in pain many years, so this is not new for them.
So they're willing to endure it.
The energy sanctions that we're seeing going on with Germany right now, with Nordstrom 2, it took Germany to say no on Nordstrom 2. We still don't have Biden willing to jump in on that, which I think is amazing.
But the other issue is this coming up a lot.
Love to hear from your perspective from the Intel side of this.
Why are we not going after, why is Europe not going after the SWIFT system?
That's the economic, the money changing.
Why are they not...
Putting some cartel on Russia in that regard, which would affect their average every day almost immediately.
Yeah.
Well, I think, and I think this is the, your introduction to this question is the most important thing we could talk about regarding Russia and Ukraine.
And that is, you know, we, we clearly understand what Vladimir Putin wants.
Now, how do we stop him?
And SWIFT is one of the tools that we have.
And they have been reluctant to do that.
But as we said in your previous conversation, we're going to have to drag some of our allies along.
I mean, Germany clearly does not want to shut down the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
They've made themselves dependent on Russian oil and gas, which was a real mistake they made over the last five years or so.
The rest of Europe is greatly dependent upon them as well.
That leaves us with a few tools.
One of them is SWIFT. There's about 2,500 institutions that participate in SWIFT, and if we were to cut them off, it really would cut off Russia's ability to have any international exchanges of money.
But they've already created or have agreements with 400 of those organizations that they won't participate if they sanction Russia on SWIFT. So in anticipation of this, over the last several years, they've already tried to do a workaround.
China has said that they will help them as well.
Now, China's not going to come in and rescue them.
And China's not going to be able to take away all of their pain.
But they're going to be able to buffer some of it.
And primarily, and most importantly, in that they'll say, well, we'll buy all of the oil and gas that you're not able to sell to the West.
China has a great appetite for that and very little resources of their own.
But the key to this, Doug, is this.
And I've been shouting this from the housetops for several months now as we looked at the intel and realized, hey, he's probably going to do this.
And he demonstrated yesterday that he was.
But there's one thing that Vladimir Putin is truly afraid of, and I think it's the only thing that he's afraid of in this scenario.
He'll lose Russian soldiers in a military operation.
They know that they will and they'll accept that.
But if week after week, Russian soldiers are killed because there's a well-armed and well-equipped insurgencies, if there are freedom fighters who will fight for weeks and months and kill Russians at every opportunity, Then that breaks this for Vladimir Putin.
The Russian people won't support it, and we certainly learned a lesson in Afghanistan, and so did Vladimir Putin.
Month after month of Russians being killed trying to occupy a nation is something that's very, very hard to justify back home.
And if this president were to say, we will arm and equip and do everything we can to support Ukrainian freedom fighters, we will get NATO and our allies to arm and equip and support You're Ukrainian freedom fighters.
I think that, again, that's the one thing that Vladimir Putin is really, really afraid of.
And it could be the one thing that would dissuade him from going any further than he has so far.
Well, and I think you're right there.
Again, isn't it amazing, Chris, you know, how long time we talk about this?
History plays such a big role here.
And to me, this was the one thing that I saw in Congress too many times, is we had too many times our leaders, not only in the Again, going back to Obama in 2014, the Crimea issue here, this is, you know, really Biden's playing out a third Obama term in this regard with what's happening here.
But history plays, and maybe for the younger listeners, or maybe in your college age, or maybe you want to share, if you're a parent, share this podcast.
Reading and learning history matters.
Because Afghanistan, I'm glad you brought that back up, The reason that Russia got out of Afghanistan was not because it was uncomfortable in the military.
It was because we armed the Muhadine with things that, in the old Charlie Wilson days, we shot down the helicopters.
I mean, when you started shooting down the helicopters, that's what did this.
This was the big difference in, you and I lived through the, what I call the catastrophe of the 116th Congress.
It was just a disaster with having to deal with impeachment.
It was just, that's all I dealt with in all the Ukraine, all the Russia, and they were tying to tie President Trump.
The interesting thing is, is Obama and Biden have done things completely in many ways, but Biden's trying now.
But at least Donald Trump gave them weapons to say, look, you come this way, we're gonna shoot you.
We're at least gonna be more than a speed bump on your way to Kiev.
So, how much is the appetite, not for our troops, but for the equipment to do that in Congress right now?
I guess we'll see.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi, as you know, she rules that thing with an iron fist.
And we could propose any piece of legislation.
And it could be non-partisan.
It could be clearly to the benefit of the American people.
And Nancy Pelosi could choose to kill it in a heartbeat.
And there's nothing we can do about that.
So it won't be up to the Republicans in Congress to decide this.
It will be up to Nancy Pelosi, by and large.
She controls his presidencies in ways that would frighten many of us if we actually understood it.
And she's been reluctant to engage on many of these issues.
She may be compelled to on this one.
I mean, the public pressure may just force her to do things by herself because she's as progressive as any person in Congress.
But I really think Nancy Pelosi She's a brilliant politician, but she's also as progressive as AOC. I mean, in her heart, she and Inacio Cortes believe almost exactly the same thing.
But you remember, being in a minority in Congress, as Republicans are, there's very little we can do to push her, which is why it's so important that we take back the Congress in 2022. It's so important that we take back the Senate.
We're not going to be able to push forward many Republican items, but we're going to be able to stop some of the absolute nonsense that we've seen, some of the worst ideas that have been presented in government in American history, and we can stop some of that.
Honestly, Doug, I guess we'll see how much support there is for Congress in doing something like that.
It would make a difference.
Of course, we could afford to do it.
Give them the equivalent of the Hellfire missiles in Afghanistan, the equivalent now is the Javelin missiles that will take out their armored personnel carriers and their armor, their tanks.
I mean, they're so simple, a seventh grader could learn to fire them.
And we'll see if Nancy Pelosi and Democrats would support that kind of effort.
Well, you brought up an interesting point here, and I think maybe from the author side of you and from the study side that both of us have, a little bit of history.
You made a mention of Pelosi being as progressive as AOC. I don't necessarily disagree with you.
There's one big difference in the two.
Nancy Pelosi knows how to get things done.
AOC does not.
She is a YouTube star and Twitter star.
Nancy Pelosi actually knows how...
I mean, here's the thing I've said about this, and I'll say it now as you turn a little bit to politics.
We as Republicans, or conservatives in particular, have to be willing to do, and this is the only area I'll say this in for the most part, do what Democrats are willing to do.
Nancy Pelosi twice now has been willing to give up position and power for policy.
She did it in 2010 when she was first speaker for Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, those kind of things, which by the way are still in existence.
She spent eight years in exile.
She's now came back out to the speakership, and she's pushing through the stuff that we've seen, the stimulus package, the infrastructure bill, and then almost, almost got a Build Back Better package that would have been disastrous.
I'm wondering in this, though, is she going to take that...
I think you've hit it, though.
Is she going to take this initiative to push this administration because she sees a possible way to get over what I know she sees as Afghanistan being a complete debacle, that this could be Biden's chance to get back?
Is she willing to help him there?
Well, again, I wish I knew, but we'll see.
But I think, Doug, you bring up such a good point, and this is just so important.
The Democratic leadership, and I said Nancy Pelosi is progressive, but I also said she's a brilliant politician, and she does exactly what you described.
Hey, we're going to take a bullet here.
We're going to take a loss, but that's okay, because we'll come back into power, and when we do, we'll pick up the baton, and we'll keep going from where we left off.
And they're willing, and by the way, so are their members, apparently, are willing to take votes where they'll think, I'm probably going to lose my re-election.
But I'm going to do it for the team.
And we're going to get these policies in place because people can come and go and the leadership can come and go.
But the policies, once they're there, they're there forever.
And then, as you said, they just take it and they keep going.
And you got to give them credit.
It's been effective for them.
It has worked for them.
And that's where we are, you know, seeing even right now.
Well, we're finishing up here on this thing, but I think it's a great place for us to finish.
I mean, the Ukraine is at a terrible time right now.
I mean, they need help to fight their own battles.
It's one of those things we found sometimes in Iraq, we found in Afghanistan.
They didn't want to fight their own battles.
They wanted us to fight those battles for them.
Ukrainian people, especially in the western part of Ukraine, are willing to fight these battles.
They just need the equipment to do it.
But that last point, so my hope is, and when we talk about politics, we'll end sort of here, is that conservatives, Republicans, you take back the House in the fall, you take back the Senate, hopefully, you'll still have the third Obama presidency, you'll have Biden in the presidency.
And so you're not going to be able to go promise the world.
It's just not going to happen.
But what you can do is shut stuff down.
But when you can take it back over, I think we've got to be willing to do more than just block Biden.
We've got to actually be able to put forward an agenda that says, look, these votes may be tough, But we're willing to do it if we can get it into law because we know it will outlast us.
That's the big difference I've seen in the last 10 to 12 years among Republicans and Democrats.
We tend to like to hold on to position in power and the policy we'll try to get there.
Democrats do it completely different.
Yeah, I agree.
And there's one of the things I would add to it.
And Doug, this is the thing that you were, and I'm not just being nice.
I mean, this is just so true.
This is the thing that you were so good at.
The thing that you were brilliant at, which is why you were given a leadership position, although you hadn't been in Congress that long.
But providing that oversight, you know, providing, exercising that power that Congress has to hold people accountable.
And that's one of the things that we're going to be up to our necks in that a year from now.
Because we are going to look at these things that the Democrats haven't been willing to look at.
And the list is very, very long of things we're going to investigate under this administration and some of the things that they've done.
It is.
Well, Chris Stewart's with us, Utah 2nd District.
A great friend.
One of the people that you want to see in Congress.
This is the kind of man you want to see in Congress.
He's an Air Force veteran.
He's a pilot.
He's a best-selling author.
He's an intelligence committee, a prox committee.
He gets it.
He gets the history.
He gets behind what is there.
Family man.
A dear friend of mine.
And I appreciate him a great deal.
We're going to have Chris back on the podcast later because I want to dig into some more of the intel issues, some of this oversight issues, and some of the things that we see in our military, which we've been talking about here on the podcast.
But for now, Chris, we're going to let you go.
You get out.
We'll talk some more later.
Thank you for being a part of the Doug Collins podcast today.
Hey, it's been an honor.
Please have me back.
I'd love to come back and talk about some other things, and it's a great way to start the day.
So thank you, sir.
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