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Jan. 4, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:21
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn: ‘I tell people that I'm not anti-war. I'm anti-stupid-war.’
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I talk about Panama Canal all the time.
Who's controlling this very important waterway?
It's the most strategic waterway for the United States of America on the planet.
China is the dominant player right now between us and them.
At Turning Point USA's AmFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona, I sat down with Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, now retired from the U.S. Army, who has been advising Trump's national security team.
Eighty percent of the largest ports in South America, either the Chinese own them.
Or they control some component, and yet we have people in our government that go, Russia, Russia, Russia.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Michael Flynn, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Great.
Thank you for having me.
I'm a huge, huge fan of you personally, and also Epoch Times, and just what you guys represent.
So thanks.
That's extremely kind.
You know, I'm going to start.
We're, of course, going to talk about, you know, what you're doing now.
And, well, why don't we actually start there?
Yeah.
So what are you doing now?
What's next with this new administration coming in?
Part of what I have been doing is, you know, because my background is intelligence, national security, foreign policy, you know, certainly the military.
And so I have been working with and advising sort of in a background way because that's the way I want to be.
You know, as things are now, particularly during this transition, with the national security team that President Trump has assembled.
So, you know, from people like Tulsi Gabbard, who I've known for a long time.
When Tulsi first came in as a first-term Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii, I got to know her then, and we've maintained that relationship for a long time.
As well as, you know, Cash Patel, Mike Waltz, who's going to be the national security advisor.
Cash is going to be...
Of course, FBI Director Pete Hegseth, who's been nominated to be the Secretary of Defense.
Tom Holman.
I've been in touch with Tom Holman off and on and trying to help him to navigate.
Tom doesn't need a lot of navigation.
Tom knows exactly what he wants to do.
The challenge is going to be, you know, from my perspective, over my many years of the military and then in my time that I got involved in politics.
Particularly by my military background, though, Jan, I have a great, great portfolio and network of foreign relations.
I work with a lot of militaries around the world, and so I still have great relationships with many of the countries that want to work with America desperately to be able to do the things that need to be done to protect, frankly, to protect ourselves from this rise of sort of globalism, I guess, because that's kind of the challenging.
I don't think a lot of people understand that.
Tell me this.
The Trump approach to national security and foreign policy is peace through strength.
Absolutely.
That would be fair to say.
Absolutely.
And that's exactly what George Washington said.
George Washington said, basically, in order to preserve our country, we have to present ourselves as a strong nation.
And he always believed that because he was a soldier, he was a warrior, he was a general.
And Trump, in a lot of ways, he has those same characteristics about...
About doing things, just using good common sense, but also making sure that the country is strong and presents ourselves as a strong, healthy country, because I think that matters.
And I think with the advent of bringing Bobby Kennedy into the team, that's going to be a component of our nation, is not just health of your body, but health as a nation.
And I think that Trump, this idea of peace through strength, that is his fundamental...
You're very skeptical of our military, frankly, right?
I am.
But you're also, as I understand it, very supportive of the peace through strength model.
And to some people, that might seem incongruous.
First of all, today's Purple Heart Day.
So this day that we're sitting here together, we recognize as Purple Heart Day.
Purple Heart is someone who's wounded in combat.
So it's a very special day.
And the fact that we're talking about right now, I tell people that I'm not anti-war.
I'm anti-stupid war.
And you can take that for whatever you want to take it for.
But our country was founded on the idea of being a benevolent, Nation based on a constitution and an equal and fair justice system for all.
And when we project ourselves and what we want to be around the world, we want to be seen as this great, humble, benevolent nation that is a nation of givers.
And this country, I mean, the people of our country are the greatest givers in the world.
They give, give, give to everybody around the world that desperately needs help.
We're always there.
But I think now one of the things that we have to look at is we have to look at taking care of our own country.
And I think that this idea of our peace through strength or who we are as a nation and what we need to do going forward, it's kind of like the body, right?
Your body needs to stay fit.
Well, our nation needs to stay fit.
And in order to do that, we have to protect certain institutions and make sure that they're ready.
To do the right things when called upon, particularly our military.
The United States military cannot be a social experiment to test things about how people should behave in their lives.
Our military serves one purpose for our country, and that is to be prepared and trained and ready to fight and win.
And the key word there is win our nation's wars when called upon.
And what we really don't want to do is we don't want to call upon our country and our military constantly.
You know, I spoke here.
We're at Turning Point here.
Beautiful setup that Charlie Kirk has organized.
I spoke yesterday, and a lot of young people are here, right?
I mean, and that's what Turning Point is kind of known for.
And there's young people in here, and I spoke to a bunch of them yesterday, that they weren't born when 9-11 happened, okay?
So their entire lives, our nation has been at war.
Think about that.
So for the entire adult, like some of them were 20, some of them were 21, you know, college-age kids.
And I'm looking at them and I'm thinking, man, you kids weren't even born when 9-11 happened, right?
And we went to war in Afghanistan.
Then we went to war in Iraq.
Now we're looking at war in Eastern Europe.
We still see the wars in the Middle East.
We have the rise of the Chinese Communist Party globally around the world.
And they constantly present a threat.
We have to recognize that in order to understand the way the world is, is we cannot be in this constant state of war, Jan.
We just can't be.
We have to return to a place where peace is the norm and war is the aberration.
And right now, it's just the opposite.
And with somebody like a Donald Trump, who I have had the opportunity to speak with him, and I have stayed in touch with him.
And from my very first meeting with him back in 2015, two weeks after he came down the famous escalator ride, you know, his whole thing was, why are we involved in all these wars?
Where are we making a mistake?
And that's how we connected.
And to me, it's like I say, as a military officer, as a general officer, having served our country in wartime, you know, I mean, we sort of follow the direction of the commander in chief and the president of the United States.
But when you start to begin to look at what's happening, you go, okay, when does this end?
And it can end, and it can end on our terms, especially when we're smart about it and we just use good God-given common sense.
You mentioned this giving, and there's a number now of analysts that I find to be highly credible who say that we actually kind of built the whole Chinese regime, which is our, I don't know if you agree, but...
Our major strategic threat over, you know, everything else.
What we have inside of our government right now, and we've had, and it's been rising.
I mean, if you really understand the depth of the history of our country post-World War II, you know, we've had this sort of incremental rise of communism in the United States of America.
A lot of people don't want to recognize that, or they kind of go, oh, it's, you know, but it's true.
Eisenhower is the very famous warning, right, about the military-industrial complex.
But the whole thing wasn't mature then, Jan.
Now it's mature.
Now we're 2024. We're, you know, whatever, 75 years later, let's say.
And so this communist infiltration into our country is a real threat.
And when you look at the CCP, you look at China.
Because China is a...
You know, the politicians can call them competitors, and then maybe the folks that look at economics can call them economic competitors.
As a military guy, I look at them as adversaries and, frankly, an enemy if we had ever to address them from a military perspective.
And I think what people need to understand is that sort of the shift of what China has been doing globally.
So if you really understand their One Belt Initiative, right, One Belt, One Road, whatever you want to call it, but the One Belt Initiative, it's not just some road from northern China into Europe.
It is a global, economic, financial, political, certainly military and information war that they are waging globally in our own hemisphere, in the hemisphere of the North and South Americas.
In the Caribbean, in Central America, there are large, let's just talk port facilities, right?
I mean, like 80% of the largest ports in South America, in the southern hemisphere of our own hemisphere, either the Chinese own them.
Or they control some component of the largest ports in our own hemisphere.
We talk about the Panama Canal.
I talk about the Panama Canal all the time.
Who's controlling this very important waterway?
It's the most strategic waterway for the United States of America on the planet is the Panama Canal.
We built it for a reason way back when the United States did.
So my sort of bigger strategic point is that China is they see themselves as the global Principal, sole superpower this century.
And they've been rising since we, the United States of America, helped their rear ends out of being basically dominated by imperialism and Japan at that time, right?
Late 30s into the 40s.
Japan conquered everything, all the way over to really modern-day Pakistan, Burma Road, right?
I had an uncle that fought on the Burma Road during World War II and then returned to Burma and spent 25 years of his life in Burma to try to help the people of Burma as a Catholic place.
I'd love to hear that story sometime, by the way.
I know I'm going on about this, but I want people to understand that China is the dominant player right now between us and them and the way the world is moving.
And yet we have people in our government that go, Russia, Russia, Russia.
Russia is actually a declining...
They're a declining economy.
I mean, they're still a world superpower because they have the most nuclear weapons on the planet.
And we're involved in, and we're talking more about nuclear war than we've ever talked about in my entire lifetime.
My entire life.
And that includes the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So, I mean, we could just have a discussion just about China alone.
One quick sec.
We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with General Michael Flynn.
This is actually really interesting.
It's something that's been on my mind in a big way for the last few years.
You know, what Valina Chakarova calls Dragon Bear, right?
That alliance, right?
Obviously highly problematic, right, for the U.S. and frankly, I think for the free world.
Is it possible for Russia, with eyes open, right, understanding, you know, what kind of a system it is?
Because, you know, I think...
Some people are kind of mistaken about that.
But is it possible to bring Russia out of that alliance?
Yeah.
Because it would seem to be a good idea.
Again, a little history lesson.
There was a China-Russia split a few decades ago, right?
The Russo-China split.
Very important.
And you have to understand sort of why did that happen then.
And I think that there's some...
We always have to go back to the history of these nations and these regions.
Russia is primarily a Eurocentric and wants to have a Eurocentric focus, okay?
Because they're part of, you know, we say the Eurasian continent, right?
But it's really, Russia sees themselves principally as a Eurocentric, you know, sort of entity, nation-state, sovereign nation.
They really don't want, I mean, if they could have their way, they really don't want that alliance with China.
The current administration that we have still, and even in the past, in other administrations, we've seen our nation push Russia into the sphere of influence of China.
And we want that, you know, we need to change that.
You know, it doesn't mean that, you know, Vladimir Putin's a good guy, whatever.
I don't want to look at that.
The personality side of this.
What I want to look at is, you know, the demographics.
I want to look at the relationships, the economic relationships, the military relationships, really the ideas that we have in common between American people and the Russian people.
And I can talk about that with the Chinese people.
The Chinese people, most of the Chinese people don't like Xi.
Of course.
Xi's afraid.
I mean, we have to push Xi because it's the paper tiger, right?
We need to figure out, and under this coming administration, we need to figure out how we can draw Russia back into a more Eurocentric sphere of influence and how we can have a better relationship.
It is a peer-to-peer relationship because we're talking about, at the end of the day, we're talking about the two great nuclear powers on the planet, right?
So we have to face that reality.
But we also, what are the other things that are in common?
And, you know, all of the people in the United States intelligence community, they'll listen to this part of this, and they will.
They'll listen to this part of this conversation that we're having, and they're going to go, see, he's a Putin puppet.
No.
What I am is I'm somebody who's looking to achieve peace, right, and get ourselves away from this notion that we always have to have an adversarial relationship between these people.
We don't.
There's so many good things that we can do.
Obviously, we actually can't really do that with communist China, right?
And a lot of people argue that it's impossible with Russia now, given everything that's happened, too, right?
It's becoming more difficult.
So you're optimistic that it's possible, I guess that's...
Yeah, I'm optimistic for a couple things.
Number one, I'm optimistic that we can figure out, with the right leaders, how we can develop a strong relationship to one...
Slow this train down of war.
I mean, world war is real, and we've been through a couple of them.
We're in a new century.
We're in the third decade of a new century.
We've been at war the entire century so far.
The United States of America has been involved or engaged in some level of conflict where people are being, you know, lives are being lost, right?
So, you know, here we are in this Purple Heart Day.
So I am optimistic that that can happen with the right leaders.
Geopolitically and geostrategically, how we return to a much greater balance here in the world.
And the only way that we're going to do that is to slow this pace that we are heading on right now towards a much more dangerous war.
And we need good, strong leaders who are willing to...
To work their way through the noise of the media and through the noise of the, frankly, of the intelligence system that we have that works to undermine and is already, they're already, they did it in the last Trump administration, they're already starting to do it again.
And that's why we have to have good leaders at every level inside of those organizations.
Because we can do this, Jan.
We can achieve peace.
It doesn't mean that you're not going to have these conflicts around the world because people, sadly, that's what happens.
But we can achieve peace with the great nation states and live on this planet in a much more refined, natural state instead of constantly being at each other's throats and trying to go to war.
We have to move away from that and move towards more of a place where we have conversations about what needs to be done instead of confrontations about what...
Is being done.
The message that Americans just sent to the world is, we the people are now back in charge.
But what I'm telling the American people that listen to this, to you, and to listen to this great platform of Epoch Times, is that we now have a responsibility, we have a citizen's responsibility to stay engaged.
To stay engaged at the local level.
And I use this phrase, local action equals a national impact.
Donald Trump can't do this on his own.
Every single citizen.
I just met a great young lady who just won the superintendent election in one of the biggest counties in our country.
A county well known by probably people globally.
It's called Maricopa County.
She's wonderful.
She's bold.
She's brave.
She's super smart.
And she knows that she's going to have a fight ahead of her at the local level.
But she made a decision to do more than what she was doing, right?
Serve your country.
I serve my country.
I'm still serving my country.
You're serving.
You're serving in this capacity, Jan.
Everybody out there needs to start thinking about, what is my responsibility to serve?
As a citizen at the local level.
You serve at the local level, you're going to have a national impact.
That's what we need to do to stitch this country back together.
Well, and what's really interesting is I feel by doing this, I'm actually serving my country of Canada as well.
Yeah.
Right?
Which is very interesting.
The people of Canada need to understand.
I think they do.
We're very complex.
The United States of America, our system of government is very complex.
Federal, state, local.
I mean, tribal in many cases.
Canada is very complex.
So, coalitions have to come together for what's best for Canada and what's best for the United States of America.
And these coalitions, like we talked about prior, you know, I'm a former Democrat.
I just left the Democrat Party like three years ago.
And so, there's a lot of people in this country that are Democrats, right?
And I still have a...
My belief system hasn't changed.
I just changed my party affiliation.
That's why I was such a big fan of Bobby Kennedy when Bobby Kennedy made the very bold, courageous decision to step down and put country before self.
And that's my message to everybody that's listening.
We now have to put each of us.
You don't have to be Bobby Kennedy.
You don't have to be General Flynn.
Just be yourself, but put country before self, and we can get this country back.
And it's going to take an entire coalition of people, not just Republicans and Democrats.
I mean, I've been described as a hardcore right-wing, you know, fascist.
I mean, Christian nationalists.
I mean, all kinds of names.
But if people meet me and they get to know me, I actually am, you know, I mean, I served in our military.
During a very, very difficult time in war.
Five years I've spent my life in combat.
And so I love this country.
I love all people.
You know, and I think that's kind of where Donald Trump's coming from.
And as bad as he's been, you know, described in sort of the woke media, he's actually a really good guy who loves people.
Well, so as we finish up, I wanted briefly to talk about your new film, Flynn.
I thought that new came out in April.
I mean, you've had a...
A very adventurous life over the last few years, to say the least.
And I just want to quote something you said.
You said, I feel blessed to feel alive right now and I can tell my story.
I haven't really given you a chance to do that here because I got so interested in your other thoughts.
But maybe briefly tell us about the film and how people can watch it.
So the name of the film is Flynn.
Deliver the truth, whatever the cost.
They can go to FlynnMovie.com.
And thank you so much for allowing me to just talk about it for a second.
FlynnMovie.com.
You can live stream it.
I think it's like $3.99.
And so, yeah, I actually think it should be mandatory viewing for anybody going into the government right now, honestly.
But it's an inspiring story of survival.
It is a story of faith, definitely faith, and family.
And it is a story of corruption, deep corruption in our country, in our government.
And it touches everybody.
It's not just...
Democrats.
It's not just the left and the right.
It's the whole system of government that we have that has really kind of overpowered the people of this country that are supposed to be the rulers, right?
We, the people, are supposed to be the rulers of our destiny as a republic.
And so that's what the movie really does take you through that.
It has emotional highs where you'll laugh and it has emotional lows where you'll absolutely break down in tears when you listen to my wife and listen to my son describe what they went through because the attacks weren't just on, you know, little old General Mike Flynn.
It was directed against my family.
And so these are people that are in my life that were all impacted because they all know me.
You don't rise to being a general in the Army and then being chosen as a National Security Advisor and be the person that was described and actually to have to do the things that I had to do in order to protect my family.
And so watch the film.
It's a great film.
Go to FlynnMovie.com.
And also, thank you so much, Jan, for having me.
Well, no, and Michael Flynn, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
It's great.
I love Epoch Times.
You guys are wonderful.
Thank you all for joining General Michael Flynn and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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