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March 25, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
55:11
K.T. McFarland
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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.
In 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.
All right, KT McFarland is with me today.
I've been waiting for this one for a while.
Got to run into her at CPAC. The crazy part about it is through all of our travels, we have been on TV together multiple times on interviews, but never in the same place it seems like at the same time, especially with the last few years going.
And so it was so good to be in the same room, not only the same convention center, but there with you in Orlando.
KT, it's great to have you on the podcast today.
Well, I agree.
I mean, I feel like I really know you well because I've been on television with you.
We've talked to each other, but we've never actually met in person.
And so here we are yet again, not in person, but it's good to be with you.
Yeah, it is, but it works out great.
Well, you know, one of the things is, and especially the way, you know, life goes these days is we all have, you know, our backgrounds and where we come from and people see us and make judgments.
Basically, you know, we're on TV or we're on interviews, we're on podcasts, those kinds of things.
One of the things I love to do with this podcast and it's been great to be able to do is let people see how we became you or how you became me.
It gives people that background so that when they see you, they say, hey, I know where she came from.
I know what's going on.
Tell us a little bit about how you became you in a lot of sense.
That's so nice.
Well, I started out as a freshman in college in 1969. I was from Madison, Wisconsin, from a working class family, but I got a scholarship to go to George Washington University, but I needed a job.
So I was a really fast typist and through a series of accidents, got a job as the nighttime secretary in the White House, freshman in college.
And I was working for Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration.
So I went to college during the day, majored in Chinese studies, rode my bicycle, went to the White House Situation Room every afternoon, and then typed the first draft, what was then called the President's Daily Brief, and it's still called the President's Daily Brief.
And that was the classified items, briefing items, that would be on the President of the United States' desk in the Oval Office every morning at 7 a.m.
So I typed the rough draft at night, somebody finished it off in the morning.
And I did that all through college, through part of graduate school, and ultimately promoted up the chain.
And I was Henry Kissinger's research assistant at a very young age.
And so saw firsthand just some of the most extraordinary periods of American foreign policy was the opening to China, the end of the Vietnam War, the Paris Peace Accords.
The detente with the Soviet Union, Middle East peace negotiations.
So as a very young person in my late teens, early 20s, was exposed to...
People and events.
So after that, I went to graduate school at Oxford, then at MIT, working on my doctorate, dealing with, I was writing about the United States, Soviet Union, then now Russia, and China and nuclear weapons.
Pretty topical.
Anyway, writing my dissertation, Ronald Reagan gets elected.
I was invited to go back to Washington and Joined the Pentagon as the Pentagon speechwriter and special assistant to the then Secretary of Defense, Cap Weinberger, and wrote some really pretty amazing speeches.
I mean, the first draft of President Reagan's Star Wars speech, for example, and was, again, the Reagan defense buildup.
It was when we took down the Soviet Union using a lot of sort of non-traditional ways to do it, using economic power, Using technological power, using moral authority, as well as the Reagan defense buildup.
So that was my training.
And then we won the Cold War.
So I retired, Doug, in the middle, late 80s.
I retired.
I got married, moved to New York, had five kids.
And I was living a really good life on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and was in Lower Manhattan on September 11th, 2001. And saw the towers come down, lost friends.
And that really convinced me, including my then 13-year-old bratty teenage daughter who said, Mom, you know, the country's under attack.
What are you going to do?
Are you just going to hang around with your girlfriends and go to PTA meetings?
Or are you going to get back involved?
So I decided to get back involved in public life.
I ran against Hillary Clinton for the Senate, lost predictably, and then went to work for Fox News as their national security analyst, which I've done for, I guess, almost 15 years.
And then in the middle of that, went to work for President Trump.
As his first Deputy National Security Advisor, and you know, but probably very few other people know, the way a White House works is the President has Secretary of State, and that guy runs the State Department, and is the President's chief diplomat, and negotiates treaties.
Then there's in the White House, in the West Wing, there's the National Security Advisor, And that person is at the president's elbow all day long, deals with the crises of the day, the news stories of the day.
But the deputy national security advisor is a very different position.
It's the person who is supposed to come up with the ideas, the ideas factory.
How do we change our policy?
How do we assess our policy?
What should our new policies be going forward?
So it was an opportunity for me and the Trump administration To work about 10 years from where my first job was at age 18, working for Kissinger, but coming back 50 years later and then working for Trump.
And using a lot of what I had learned over those years of what worked, what didn't work, in dealing with our adversaries to really do what President Trump wanted, which was to completely revise American national security, asking our allies to do more for our common defense, finally somebody standing up to China.
And then particularly important was President Trump.
Trump's vision of becoming not only energy independent, but energy dominant, which allowed the United States to get disentangled from the Middle East, but also allowed us to be dominant in setting energy policy, meaning we could control the price of energy.
Anyway, we can go into those details later, but that's who I am, and I have stayed involved in the public arena since.
And that is amazing.
And one of the reasons I asked that question, because I can have a lot of thoughts, and you and I are going to get to Ukraine and Russia and all the issues with Trump.
But you just brought up, I would have never got into this.
Number one, that age getting a security clearance to do what you were doing, and then working with Kissinger.
I mean, one of the things that I see, KT, I don't know about you, I see so many of conservatives today that seem to have a history lesson of about 10-15 years.
They don't...
And it's so frustrating.
And so, I mean, I've been doing on the podcast, I actually took the last speech of Washington and the last speech of Eisenhower and talked about the themes of those speeches and brought them into today.
It's amazing how...
Really reticent they still are today, especially Eisenhower talking about government-dominated research and paying for that research.
And we saw that play out in the pandemic and everything else.
But for just a minute, for someone that young, you're growing and you're learning at the same time.
I have that disease too that I can top rather fast too, but I didn't get to go to work for Kissinger.
I mean, because that was Kissinger's prime time.
I mean, that late 60s, early 70s, mid-70s.
I mean, what did you think at that point, and now looking back on it, what do you wish you would have asked, or what do you wish you would have learned?
Well, I learned a lot.
I don't have any regrets, and I remain in touch with Henry Kissinger, and he's been a mentor to me.
I did his oral history about 10 years ago.
He had never done an oral history.
Oh, wow.
Sat with him for dozens of hours going over his career and his negotiating strategies and what he had done and the sort of lessons learned.
So I don't have any regrets at this point.
So the difference is that for a lot of women, you say, well, people don't have any, you know, experience.
Yeah, they don't have any experience.
But for me, the exciting part was as a woman, you know, in the late 60s, early 70s, women had no rights.
You didn't have the right to equal pay, equal opportunity.
A woman could go to college and get a degree, and she was the secretary to a guy that she had been sitting next to for four years in the classroom.
So it was an opportunity for me to be really the first generation of women, especially women who were going into a field that had been dominated by men, in my case, national security.
And have real opportunities.
And so I watched my daughters, I have five kids, so two daughters, and I watched them really being able to take advantage of a lot of the things women my generation were kind of struggling with.
You know, how do we do this?
How do you balance a family?
How do you balance a career?
And so we kicked open a lot of doors, and I'm thrilled to see that my daughters have walked through all of them.
That's wonderful.
If you were looking back at it now, and especially because one of the dominant, let's just jump into a little bit today, but I think it's going to go backwards as well too, is this issue of China.
And when you were dealing first with China, I believe, and I've talked to a lot of people, there's this belief Because again, we're very now orientated, not historically orientated, that China has been China for years.
And the reality is when you would have first been dealing with China and you were learning linguistics and you were going through Kitchener and then the opening back up of China, China was literally more of a backward economy, a backward state.
Can you give the people that's listening maybe a taste of what you saw then as opposed to a country now that is an economic power with the largest cities in the world?
Can you give us a good picture of what those two, in less than 50 years, have been like?
Well, when I was starting out, I couldn't as an American And certainly an American with security clearances could not have traveled to alone or gone to graduate school, for example, in China.
I did go to Taiwan at Taiwan National University.
And at that point, there were open sewers.
You know, Taiwan is one of the great 21st century cities today, as is Singapore, as is Beijing and Shanghai and all of those places.
But at the time, it was beyond third world.
There was You know, there was really no public transportation.
There were open sewers.
There were not flush toilets.
It was a really backward place.
In China, 50 years ago, talk about third world.
I mean, it was a country that was really in desperate...
I mean, people were starving.
In the late 60s and early 1970s in China.
And so the United States, so the opening to China, and one of the reasons Nixon and Kissinger wanted to deal with China, and to go back and say, well, why did you open to China?
I mean, why was it closed in the first place?
China, after the 1950s when the communists took over China, we, the United States, had nothing to do with China for 25 years.
It was considered, if you had had any study of China, you were considered to be a communist.
There was some kind of accusation, well, you must really Be involved with the Chinese Communists if you want to study Communist China.
And Kissinger and Nixon, who were in the middle of the Vietnam War in the late 60s and early 1970s, they wanted to do two things.
One, to get out of the Vietnam War and China was going to be integral to that.
But they also wanted to bring China into the modern world, and their theory at the time, and this was shared by a lot of people, was that if China, closed society, communist country, formerly best friends of the Soviet Union, if China could be modernized, economically modernized, and develop a middle class, Then the Chinese society would open up, that they would open up their economy, they would open up their society, and we would be allies and trading partners.
I mean, that was the thinking in the early 1970s, at least on our part.
And it wasn't a bad assumption, because look at what happened with Germany and Japan in the post-war period.
We helped them modernize, open their societies, and they did.
They became You know, democracies, they became trading partners with us and allies.
So we thought the same thing would happen with China.
And that's where American foreign policy went for 30 years, from the early 1970s to 2000. And frankly, a lot of people, including Biden, still think that that's what we should do.
It's only been in the last, well, for me, the last 10 or 15 years, but for most people, the last 10 or 15 months, where they've awakened to the idea that the Chinese present Existential threat to the United States.
Exactly.
One of the things that amazed me, and I was reading through a biography on H.W. Bush when he was the ambassador to China, or the advisor to China in the 70s and then into the 80s, and that the reality of it is everywhere they went, it was very, like I said, very backward, but it was very, bicycles, that really the first public cars were not introduced in Beijing until the mid 80s.
And it was like, it's hard to believe that.
And I appreciate you opening this up because so many people...
We talk about China, as you said, in the last 10 to 15 months.
I think it's important for us to understand the country as a whole that you go from basically...
The public transportation in 1984, and for me, graduating high school in 1984, was bicycles, small fishing villages, Shenzhen, which is a now...
A multi-million populous town was simply 20 little fishing villages in the early 80s combined together.
20,000 people.
Talk about that for a second because I think you give some really interesting insight that people haven't thought about.
They began the ring theory.
You see how they began to grow out around Beijing.
You look at that.
Talk about how the country developed into what now, and you started 10 to 15 years ago, which I agree with you, became...
What it is today from that.
I mean, how did they do that and the cost that it paid on the Chinese people?
Well, remember, it's a communist country and it's an authoritarian country, so all the decisions are made at the top and forced on the people below.
And the Chinese decided, really in the late 1970s, again, we opened to them in early 1972, 73, and then by the late 70s, the Chinese leadership, having gone abroad a little bit and seen what the rest of the world was like, said, yikes, we've got to catch up.
And so they devoted all of their attention and resources of all levels of society into modernizing and to take people who As you point out, we're in small fishing villages, rural farms, suffering, you know, constant deprivation, starvation, etc.
The Chinese decided they were going to Start at the low end of manufacturing.
And they got terrific deals from the United States, from Europe.
We gave them very favorable trade agreements.
They charged tariffs on imported goods from the US. We charged no tariffs on their stuff.
So we encouraged them to modernize.
And what the Chinese government did was they built cities in places where there had just been fishing villages.
And they brought probably 25%, 35% of their population out of rural poverty.
And into these coastal cities, where they started by manufacturing tennis shoes and sort of really cheap low end goods, and then moved up the value chain.
So that they, you know, they started making tennis shoes, and then they made, you know, then they made, you know, radios, and then they made refrigerators, then they made TVs and iPhones.
And now, They're at the very top.
They're a pure competitor in manufacturing to the United States and high technology.
Their intention is to replace the United States as the manufacturer of high technology.
It's an extraordinary achievement in the history of the world.
And as I've gone back and forth to China over the years, what I've noticed is a growing sense of chip on their shoulder, you know, a growing sense of saying, well, you know, America You've been great for a couple hundred years.
We've been a great power for 5,000 years.
We've had a crummy 200 years.
The century of humiliation, they call it.
But we're back on top again, and you, the United States, are definitely a declining power, and we, China, are going to rule the 21st century.
So their attitude has gone from very meek and supplicant to now really kind of angry about the United States position.
And you can see the sort of chip-on-their-shoulder anger that the Chinese are using against the United States, even as much as You know, four days ago when President Biden talked to President Xi Jinping.
Yeah, that was...
It's an interesting...
We'll jump into modern day for just a second.
Take that call.
Very interesting readouts there.
The American side, the Biden administration, basically repeated their talking points on, oh, well, we warned them and did this.
China sort of developed it out a little bit further, and I think you got a sense, at least I did, in that sense of what you...
And I love the way you put it, the chip on the shoulder a little bit.
It's like their readout was...
Say what you want to say, we're going to do what we want to do, and sort of quit bothering us a little bit.
Did you read that that way?
Yeah, that's fair enough.
And remember, the first meeting that the Chinese government had, a high-level meeting with the U.S. government and the Biden administration, was in Canada.
And...
The Biden administration, the Secretary of State, started out by talking about human rights and Uyghurs and climate control, whatever he talked about.
And then the Chinese got really angry, and they started calling him names.
And on American soil, this is in Alaska, and on American soil, they said to the Secretary of State, you have no right to call us these things.
I mean, you have such a terrible record.
You've done this, you've done that.
You know, and quoting back to the Secretary of State, a lot of the criticisms of the woke agenda and And, you know, the racist agenda of the people on the far left, and sort of quoting it back to the Secretary of State.
And the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is a nice guy, but he just sort of meekly took it.
If it had been me, I would have stood up and said, thank you very much.
You're in my country.
You don't say things like that on American soil.
I'll come back and talk to you when you're ready to talk and be polite.
But they didn't.
So that's been the attitude of the Chinese government really throughout the last year and a half with the Biden administration.
They're lecturing us and they do not want to listen to us lecture them, whether it's over human rights or whether it's over China or certainly whether it's over Taiwan's relationship to China.
I'm not trying to be rhetorical here, but it lends itself to me.
They just have no fear of the Biden administration.
No, they don't.
Here's something that I thought of, Doug, is that when Joe Biden campaigned and even as president, he said, well, I know Xi Jinping.
I've met with him more than anybody else.
I know Putin.
I've met with him more than anybody else.
Well, that's probably quite true.
And what are they looking at when they see Joe Biden?
They're saying, wait a minute, this is not the guy who he was 25 years ago.
This is a guy who's slower in cognitive decline, and I'm pushing back against him.
And so I think that that, you know, Biden has a point, but it's not the point that he thought he was making.
The Chinese are not afraid of the United States.
They have every intention of replacing the United States as the dominant power, the sole dominant superpower of the country.
And They plan to do it economically, technologically, militarily, politically.
And they think it's inevitable.
I mean, they think we are absolutely in decline and their rise is inevitable.
Looking at that, I want to posit a question for you here and having your expertise on this.
Yeah.
Oh, hey, I got mine right here.
We're good to go.
Yeah.
For anybody else, hey, this is a great conversation between Katie and I.
You brought up something, though, that I'm going to posit a question here because we'll get to Trump's relationship with China, which was, I think, interesting in and of itself.
It was different than the...
We're sort of cramming 12 years, or we'll be right now, we're cramming about 10 years of Obama, eight years, two years, a year and a half of Biden, in which, as you said 10, 15 years ago, we've watched this Chinese sort of...
Bulk up as they go.
If they're wanting to be the head in the 21st century, if they're really, you know, which is what they have said at all, you know, there was a lot said about Russia going to Ukraine and in this war that China would sort of back them up there.
Do you think, and I may be playing something off here, but that China is saying, okay, the only other one out there we're really, we've really not had an interesting relationship with China.
We want some of their, we want their oil and resources, but Russia, go wear yourself out in Ukraine.
We'll sit back and watch you do that.
Do you think there's any thought of that?
Well, I think, yeah, this is not played out the way either country expected.
But the Chinese looked at Russia and said, yeah, you'd be our stalking horse.
We want Taiwan.
You know, we know you want Ukraine.
Why don't you go first?
And let's just see how it goes.
And it's not played out according to plan.
You know, the Chinese and Russians met.
Xi Jinping and Putin met at the beginning of the Olympics.
And they signed this joint statement.
We had no idea it was coming.
It's a very long, extensive statement.
5,000 words.
They must have been working on it for months.
And it basically says, you know, we're in an alliance that has no limits.
We're going to cooperate on everything.
And in that document, it talked about Russia's right to having a sphere of influence in its neighborhood and security rights.
I don't think it mentioned Ukraine, but the implication was, Russia, you know, you should get Ukraine.
And the Russians returned the favor saying, well, China, you know, you should have Taiwan.
And I think that they anticipated that this would go.
I'm sure Putin said to Xi Jinping, oh, look, I'll go in three days.
I'll own that country in three days.
And then you can do the second part of the punch.
You can go for Taiwan.
And none of that's played out the way everybody thought they thought it would.
But I do think they're joined at the hips and they're in cahoots.
And when I watch today, when people say, well, we're going to sanction Russian energy, Europe shouldn't buy it.
No, Europe shouldn't buy it.
But don't fool yourself.
China's going to take all the energy that the Europeans and other countries are not buying from Russia.
China's thrilled to have that oil and natural gas.
And China will probably get it at bargain basement prices.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, they're not going to pay the market price.
I mean, they're going to take it off their hands and let them go at it.
I think that's been an interesting list as you look at what's going on here that they're joined.
And China has had this...
Let's go back to your concern from the last 10 to 15 years.
I have been to China and it was very interesting.
The most stark thing that stood out for me was the mix of capital...
What you perceived as capitalism in with the traditional old...
You know, communist mindset, that very, you know, strict mindset.
I mean, it shocked me.
And I guess maybe because of the vision, you know, issue for me, that right off Tiananmen Square, not a half, I mean, a quarter of about 2,000 yards off of Tiananmen Square is a restaurant in a Johnny Walker store.
I mean, think about this.
I mean, it's like...
Huh?
And then you have all these, you know, the very fine, high-end shops.
I read something yesterday, and I know for you looking at China doesn't surprise, but I think it would surprise a lot of people that China has the largest concentration of billionaires in the world.
And one of the largest concentration of female billionaires in all the world.
And I think it goes that when you dismiss China, and we have some who do, they dismiss China and don't want to think about China.
That wealth accumulation and that manufacturing and the issues that they've had have truly put them in an interesting position going forward.
Yeah, you know, the Chinese, they love these sort of long five-year plan, ten-year plans.
And so they've had one plan that's called Made in China 2024. And 2024, two years from now, In 2024, China had identified 10 critical areas of modern technology that they planned to dominate.
They were going to buy the companies, steal the technology, but they were going to manufacture and be dominant and control the market in these 10 technologies.
And it's things like robotics, artificial intelligence, Quantum computing, bioengineering, all those things.
Now, I don't think they get there by 2024, but that's what they were talking about doing.
They also have something, I think it's called Artificial Intelligence 2030, and that's that by 2030, they plan to really control All of the artificial intelligence, which will be a huge game.
It'd be like the fourth industrial revolution.
They also, with their 5G internet network, they were talking about 5G. We think of that, oh great, I'm going to download my Netflix stuff really fast.
No!
5G And Huawei communications means that the Chinese will dominate.
They will own the infrastructure of the internet.
That means that at any given time, they can listen to your phone calls, watch what you're doing online.
So that's another area where they're dominant.
And then finally, which I find the most terrifying, is that they're the first total surveillance society.
They know everything all their people are doing all the time.
But they plan to do it for the whole world.
I mean, they're hoovering up this personal information from our healthcare industries, and who knows what they're going to do with it.
Maybe it's just to create better drugs, but they could do a lot of really bad stuff with all that information, too.
Yeah, yeah.
That was the most amazing thing for me.
And it got to be a game with us while we were there and I was on a congressional delegation.
It got to be a game that I would leave a light on in one part of the room or leave something.
And just to see what changes.
Because you knew they were in your room.
I mean, it was just that dominant in there.
In looking at this, while we're on China, let's just continue this out for the next little bit.
As someone who's watched China now from the early 70s to now, been highlighting it and basically sounding the alarm on China for a number of years now, in the Trump administration when you were there, now into the Biden administration, what are we doing right with China as far as You know, managing that relationship, and what are we doing wrong with China right now?
Well, that's a really good question because it's not an easy answer.
I would start out the answer to that question by saying, what are we doing wrong here?
Okay.
And the way I would respond to it is to say, we're two very different systems.
You know, the Chinese, because they have no...
Even though they may have all those billionaires, they're...
Every company...
In China is really ultimately controlled by the government one way or another.
They have the National Security Act which says that if the government The Chinese military, the Chinese intelligence community wants you to do X, Y, or Z. You've got to do it.
And if you don't do it, you go to jail for life.
So they have this fusion between their public sector and their private sector.
And they dominate it.
And from the top, they determine where the private sector is going to go from the top.
Now, we obviously have a separation between our public sector and our private sector.
And that's good because it allows us to be more creative and innovative.
But it's bad in the sense that it's very difficult for us to get sort of a national plan to how do we confront like, you know, even something like cyber attacks, cyber hacking.
How do we deal with something like we want to be the leader in artificial intelligence, but are we going to rely on individual companies to sort of take the lead?
Or should there be some government sponsorship of that?
So when I look at where we are now, I think that the United States has been asleep.
At least for the last 15, 20 years even, in investing in high technology.
And we spent 20 years in the Middle East chasing around in these wars that we were never going to win.
And as a result of that, we really cut back on a lot of the research and development money and the sort of STEM issues.
We should have been doing it.
We haven't.
We should do it now.
We should really have a Manhattan Project effort to have the public and the private sector working together To really reclaim the commanding heights of technology.
Once we do that or once we get on that road, we'll be unstoppable.
I mean, we're really good at inventing stuff and creating stuff.
The Chinese aren't.
They have to buy it or copy it or steal it.
And so that would be a better way of approaching our relationship with China.
Let's get back where we belong on the technology frontier.
But the other thing would be just there would be I guess I would look at it the way Reagan looked at it.
Number one, rebuild American military forces, but do it smartly.
The Chinese now seem to have a weapon that can take out American aircraft carriers.
Well, maybe that's not where we should put the defense budget.
Maybe what we should do with the defense budget is do a lot more satellite technology or cyber technology.
But really build up the American military forces with an idea Not that you want to use it, but you don't want to have to use it because you want to be so strong.
Number two, build up the technological advantages of the United States.
And then stand up to China.
Now, how do you best stand up to China?
By making sure that the alliances that we have Particularly with like-minded democracies are strong and together.
Now, the one thing the Chinese don't have, I mean, they don't have allies.
They have subjects.
You know, they have vassal states.
And their plan to dominate the 21st century not only is to dominate the technology and using their trade advantage to do so, but to pick us off one at a time and to intimidate countries into doing their will.
So, for example, Little Australia, who everyone assumed has sort of been in China's pocket because China's their major trading partner.
Well, after COVID broke, the Australians joined 100 other nations to say, maybe the World Health Organization should look into the origins of COVID, and then we can better protect ourselves against COVID 2.0.
And what did the Chinese do?
They said to the Australians, how dare you?
You can't do that.
You can't.
Even though the Australians didn't say to criticize China, but that's how the Chinese took it.
And so they sent to the Australian government a 13-point plan that they expected Australia to do or else.
And it was things like, don't you dare criticize China, you government of Australia.
Oh, by the way, the media in Australia, you can't criticize China either.
And then they went down for all their demands.
And China and Australia, to their eternal credit, said, no, we're not going to do that.
You don't own us.
And so as a result, the Chinese have tried to crush Australia economically.
Australia's wine exports or their beef exports or their mineral exports all went to China.
And China just shut that down.
That's how China plans to deal with every country, one at a time.
Pick off the little guys first, until the only country left standing is the United States.
So how do we counter that?
The best way to counter that is to build really strong alliances.
With our allies.
And maybe what that means is we contribute more than they do.
But the relationship between the United States and India, the US and Japan, US and Korea, US and Australia, New Zealand, let us have a really almost like a security as well as an economic alliance with those countries.
And do so in the same with Europe.
And together, the European and the Asian free market democracies, well, China doesn't have a chance.
Even China allied with Russia doesn't have a chance up against us.
But we can't do it alone.
So in one way, I do applaud the Biden administration for carrying on what the Trump administration did about getting a better and stronger relationship with our allies in Asia.
It's just that we got to do a lot more.
We got to do it really fast.
That is it.
And one of the things coming out of that is, and you mentioned it earlier, was Anthony Blinken.
And, you know, the question's always coming, like, where did this guy come from?
I mean, you know, it's just like, this is not, you know, the Secretary of State's always one of those jobs, even if it's sort of, you know, an off pick, you always seen someone with an international gravitas, if you would.
Looking at Anthony Blinken just doesn't give you that feel for America.
And I think our foreign policy right now is suffering because you have Joe Biden, who is not the Joe Biden of 20, 25 years ago.
I don't care what anybody wants to think.
And by the way, the number two is even worse.
And I think that's become even more of a problem.
In looking at this, I know they're trying to reach out here.
Is there a desire to do the things that we need to do in the foreign policy of China, or is there just a resignation that they're growing and we're just going to have to compete?
It's sort of the Obama said, well, they're here now, we're going to have to just treat them differently.
Oh, I think it's a complete capitulation.
Donald Trump stood up to the Chinese and he understood the value of Americans buying Chinese goods and how in a trade war we don't necessarily lose a trade war with China.
But the Biden administration, I think for a whole lot of reasons, part of it is mindset and part of it is just habit.
And part of it is being co-opted by You know, Chinese investors, or Americans who make a lot of money in China, or academic institutions who take a lot of money from China.
I think that the Biden administration has been very slow to the game.
I mean, you know, look, they talk about China now, but I'm not seeing that they're doing a whole lot.
You know, they talk about a lot of stuff, but they rarely follow through with any of the stuff they talk about.
I think the Biden administration is sort of like it reminds you of the teacher faculty lounge at one of the Ivy League schools.
They talk about everything.
Oh, well, this theoretically could be done.
Theoretically.
Well, Jim, let's just go get some tea and talk about it some more.
There's no action.
Is that one of the things that I'm glad you brought President Trump up because we both had lots of dealings with him?
It was the action item side that not only, one, irritated most of the elite and most of the media in Washington DC, but it was also that action orientation that I believe connects him most to Reagan.
And I say it this way.
Russia, Iran, China over the years did not know how to deal with Reagan and they did not know how to deal with Trump, which sort of kept everything in a neutral position as far as they weren't going to try anything.
We don't see that with Biden out.
Has there been sort of a whiplash in the world economies between Obama, Trump and now Biden again?
How do you deal with America?
Well, it's interesting that you talk about Ronald Reagan, because I wrote a book called Revolution, Trump, Washington, We the People.
It's considered, and I shouldn't brag, but I will, it's considered a great classic about the whole populist movement and particularly foreign policy.
And so having worked for Reagan closely, I compare Reagan and Trump.
They're nothing like each other in temperament or personality or any of those things.
But their policies were not dissimilar in the way that Reagan, instead of accepting the status quo of the United States and Russia and the Soviet Union were going to be locked in this sort of mutually assured destruction, Bear hug that we could never defeat communism or win the Cold War, we could just coexist.
And Reagan said, oh no, wait a minute, we're going to win the Cold War.
And then he used America's strategic advantages, you know, our technology, our strong economy, our economic system, and he sort of speeded up the decline and demise of the Soviet Union.
Trump understands the same thing.
He understands that American technology, and particularly the boon that we've received in the last 10 years from the energy industry, where scientists and engineers, American scientists and engineers, they figured out all sorts of things like horizontal drilling, fracturing, and they figured out how to get oil and natural gas out of rocks.
Well, it turns out we have the best rocks in the world.
So they developed this shale energy technology.
The United States is the most energy-rich country in the world, even more so than Russia and more so than Saudi Arabia.
And President Trump understood that, well, that was going to be our advantage.
That was going to be our great advantage, is that we would have reliable, cheap, Energy, ad infinitum, not only for ourselves, but we could export it to the world.
And that was a complete game changer, the same way Reagan wanted to not go along with the old system, but think outside the box and then create a new system.
So I think that Biden's, you know, he's a retrograde.
He's gone back to all the old group think of the past.
So whoever comes after Biden, that's the one I want to launch.
Well, that is going to be interesting, and I think what is interesting here, you should bring that up, is sort of one of the articles I know you just wrote for Fox, and it's talking about gaining our goals in Russia and Ukraine.
But one of the things is that it was really interesting you said this, and it caught my attention when you said it a few minutes ago, and that was that Biden's mindset It's probably back in the 80s and 90s.
I mean, back in a different world, a different mindset.
Everybody forgets that this man came into the Senate in the mid-70s.
When you were in Washington, he was just coming into the Senate.
He's been there ever since.
He knows no different.
But Russia and Ukraine issue...
Could that also be said that Putin is, and one of the reasons that some are having trouble dealing with him is they don't understand his historical mindset as much as they do how he's acting out.
They've sort of accustomed themselves that Russia had fell off the world stage, they were struggling, and that Putin was just a nationalistic Nice.
We'll just keep him at arm's length.
But they really have not taken into account his desire and goals for that safety protection that you spoke of with the China agreement.
You know, I think that one of the things I learned from Kissinger at a very young age is it's not what you think is right or what we Americans think is right.
It's what the other guy thinks is right.
And what is the world through his glasses?
You know, what is his perspective?
So let's take Putin.
I've studied him for 30 years.
Putin was in the KGB, we know that, and then the Soviet Union collapsed overnight.
Putin left the KGB and he went to grad school and he decided he was going to get involved in politics.
So he wrote a graduate dissertation.
And in it, he said, here's how Russia is going to reclaim greatness again.
We're going to restore the old Soviet Union and restore the Russian Empire.
So we are going to take all of those oil and natural gas companies and other mineral companies that have been taken over by the oligarchs.
We're going to get rid of those oligarchs and we're going to bring all those companies under the control of the state.
And then we will use that as our main money making operation.
We will use the exports and the revenue we get from the exports to fund the rebuild up of the Russian military, Russian society, make Russia great again.
And we will also use the political leverage That that dependency gives us.
In the 1980s, when I was working for Reagan, Reagan said to Margaret Thatcher, and he said to European leaders, but this was before the first pipeline was built.
He said, don't you guys get dependent on Russian oil and natural gas?
Don't follow those pipelines.
You're, you know, you're going to really regret the day sometime in the future because you'll be so politically dependent on Russia's good graces because you'll be economically dependent on them.
And that's exactly what's happened.
And that's been Putin's plan all along.
And, you know, he was pretty well along on that plan until the United States figured out how to get oil and natural gas out of rocks.
And as a result of that, we could then set the price when we're energy dominant, not just independent, but dominant.
The United States can then, you know, our companies, as I said, our companies make money.
If it's $40 a barrel, the Russians need it at $80 a barrel.
So just bring that price down, and the Russians are broke, and we're in a terrific position.
And that's what screwed up Putin's game plan.
And his mindset is that, again, like the Chinese mindset is we're a great nation.
You know, we were the rulers of the world for 5,000 years.
We've had probably 200 years.
Well, the Chinese...
I feel a lot of ways are the same as the Russians.
The Russians have an even bigger chip on their shoulder.
And the Russians feel that when the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States made a lot of promises that they broke.
Now, I don't think that's true, but that's what the Russians think, and that's certainly what Putin thinks.
And therefore, we have every right to go back and take what's ours, Ukraine, etc.
I think Putin was searching and you could see it in the years of Trump and even in the years right before they were still searching for that.
You could see him reach out.
He is very much seemingly a man who looks for weakness and we saw that during the Obama administration when he reached into Crimea.
We see it also in his reaching into Syria.
We saw it in others.
Do you think last year, especially you talk about energy dominance and all, that when he saw that the Biden administration came in and did exactly the best thing for the Russian oil market or energy market and that is begin the attack on the American energy market and then the And as someone who still serves in the Air Force and been there for 20 years, I was in Iraq and others, it bothers me.
And I'd love to hear your opinion on this.
Over the years, and you've been in this game for a long time, Americans will tolerate bad domestic policy.
They'll tolerate back and forth on domestic.
They don't like it.
They'll change things.
But the thing that galvanizes most Americans is that they do not want to be seen as weak in a...
International Front.
They don't want to be seen as, you know, that their country was the one that got beat or their country was at wrong.
And in Afghanistan last year, everybody points to the economic numbers and everything else.
I truly believe that most Americans, even Democrats, lost faith in Joe Biden with the absolutely tragic pullout of Afghanistan.
What's your thoughts about that?
Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things to unpack that.
First, you know, when President Biden comes in, and he's hired all the same people that were in the Obama administration.
So what does Putin say?
Well, I know these guys.
These are the guys that let me get away with taking part of the country of Georgia and Crimea.
I know how to do that.
And so there he goes.
And then Putin says, I see these same guys back.
They've now made me rich.
I know they're weak.
And The example of the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, I think, emboldened Putin to say to himself, these people are idiots, and I can run rings around them.
You know, the tragedy, if you look at, so the world is now trying to help Ukraine, right?
We're giving lethal weapons to Ukraine, aid to Ukraine.
Do you know that when we left Afghanistan, we left far more valuable In money and in quality, weapon systems, they turned them over to the Taliban.
Much better stuff than the Ukrainians that were giving to the Ukrainians.
So I think that Afghanistan, we will look back in history and we will say, that was the point at which our allies no longer could trust us and our adversaries figured, now's my time.
The United States is weak.
We're going to go after the United States and we're going to get what we can.
You know, international relations is like a shark attack, right?
So the sharks, one shark takes a bite and there's blood in the water and then all the other sharks run in and they get their bite too.
This is not a coincidence that Everybody's taking advantage of us right now.
The Russians are invading Ukraine.
The Chinese are pushing us around, especially in the South China Sea.
The Iranians are getting this nuke deal, which is going to allow them to have nuclear weapons.
And the North Koreans have fired off more missiles than they've ever fired off before.
Everybody is going to get what they can get out of Joe Biden in the next year.
Yeah, and that's concerning, especially when you see Iran, you know, this Iran deal that's now going down, Russia negotiating this Iran deal, you know, and, you know, Israel in weakest.
So probably, we haven't even had a chance and we won't have time to talk about it today.
We'll have to talk about this some other time.
I mean, Israel's leadership on the world stage is probably the weakest that I've seen it in my lifetime, especially in adult lifetime.
And we're seeing this, you know, Iran come back out.
As we wrap this up, and I know you're finishing your day, I'm looking at this as well.
Look ahead, if you could, three, five years down the road.
Where do you see some of these things playing out?
Ukraine, the Chinese element, the Iranian element especially.
I've yet to understand the Biden-Obama fascination with Iran.
I've not understood that yet.
But it's an obsession with them.
Where do you see the world in three to five years, KT? Well, I see it in one of two directions.
The direction where we continue to have a fractured United States leader, weak leadership and fractured politics at home.
And an economy that's just zipping around where it shouldn't be.
Yeah, I think that the United States is a declining power.
And at a certain point, it will happen very quickly.
On the other hand, I see an election in 2022, Republicans taking the House and the Senate, and a Republican president coming back in 2024, and reversing a lot of the policies of the Obama-Biden administration folks.
And going back to President Trump, whether it's President Trump himself or somebody like President Trump, it's not rocket science.
We know how this stuff works.
Reagan did it.
Trump did it.
You can stimulate the economy in a lot of different ways.
We know how to do that.
And then once you have a strong American economy, a lot of other things become possible.
So what I've described as the best way to counter China, technology investment, The best way to deal with Russia and the Iranians is energy dominance and pushing the price of oil down.
Then I see a really resounding restoration of the United States.
What I didn't talk to you about, Doug, was when I was in the Trump administration, at the end of my time at the Trump administration, I got caught up in the Mueller investigation.
And they came after me and they slapped me around pretty hard.
They knew I'd done nothing wrong, but they still wanted to see if they could trick me into doing something.
And frankly, they tried to pressure me into saying that I had done stuff that I hadn't done.
And they tried to pressure me into saying Donald Trump had done stuff that he hadn't done.
And I didn't break.
I came really close, but I didn't break.
But when that was all over, I left the country.
My husband took me to the western coast of Scotland, to the most remote part of the Hebrides.
I mean, there were like no cars, no TV, no Wi-Fi, no nothing, just sheep and whiskey.
And so I spent a lot of time thinking about what's going on with my country.
You know, this is horrible.
And what I concluded was that the United States goes through these periods, and it happens with great regularity every 40 years, where we reinvent ourselves.
And a lot of the period of reinvention is brought about economically, but it's also political reinvention.
And we have these political revolutions every 40 years, starting with the American Revolution, and then we have the Jacksonian democracy, and then the Civil War, and then the Industrial Revolution, and then Reagan, and now Trump.
And what we do is because America is a constantly evolving and changing society.
We're very dynamic, more than anybody else in the world.
And government by its very nature just wants to hang on to power.
And so every 40 years, the people of the United States, the grassroots, they rise up and say, you know, you're not doing it for me anymore.
I want new leaders.
I want new policies.
And our founding fathers expected us to do that.
And that's why they wrote the Constitution the way they did.
I think we're going through one of these periods now.
I think it's going to be horrible and miserable, and everybody screams at everybody else.
But at the end of the day, what makes America great is not just our system of government, not just our people, not just our immigrant experience, and not just our melting pot society, is that we reinvent ourselves.
No other country has ever reinvented itself with this kind of regularity.
So if we can do what I think we're capable of doing, In 2024, and we reinvent ourselves again.
I mean, I don't know how it happens or who leads it, but we certainly have done it every 40 years.
And I think that the United States comes roaring back even better and stronger than before.
Every time we've done this in the past, we've sort of taken, you know, two steps back, then three steps forward.
And that's just how we are.
That's us.
We reinvent ourselves as individuals and as a nation.
Well, and I think that's the positive vision that we need to have because I believe you're right.
And the question comes back to us as a country.
Go back to Washington in his first address.
He said, at the end of the day, you have your own beliefs.
You came from different places.
But he entitled that America.
It's amazing.
America first mentality that...
That we're Americans because we have chosen to be.
I love that language that he used in that last address.
He said, you have chosen this Constitution.
It did not say that it was forced upon you.
He said, you chose it.
And I think that's a very powerful statement for today.
Katie, this is hopefully not the last time you and I talk on this podcast.
There's so much more we still have left to go, but we could be here for hours upon hours.
It is great having you on.
Everybody sees you on Fox.
I hope they get to know you better today through this podcast, and I promise the listeners this will not be the last time you and I are together on this podcast.
It's been really fun, and it's also been a great honor.
Thank you, Doug.
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