Rubio's Shift: What is Trump's Foreign Policy? Trump/Musk Attack CIA Fronts USAID & NED: With Mike Benz
Marco Rubio's latest comments on Ukraine, NATO, and China could signal a major shift for the second Trump administration's foreign policy — are the neocons finally out? Plus: former State Department official Mike Benz exposes how USAID covertly manipulates populations overseas and topples foreign governments under the guise of humanitarian outreach.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
Ever since Donald Trump entered the White House to begin his second term, there has been, by design, a flurry of highly significant orders, policies and changes, most of which, for better or worse, were promised during his campaign.
The rapidity of these changes have created the impression for some that there is no coherence behind them, that they're all just designed to appease Trump's voter base with symbolism or to impose frantic vengeance.
But if one digs deeply enough, one can locate a coherent worldview, especially when it comes to Trump's foreign policy changes.
When Trump began nominating a series of conventional establishment Republicans to keep positions after the election, people like Marco Rubio at State and Elise Stefanik at the U.N. and others, many people demanded of us that we denounce these picks, given that they signaled that Trump's pledge for a new kind of foreign policy was clearly a fraud.
And in response, my answer was always the same.
Even though I didn't like some of those picks, I never thought that one could reliably read into every one of Trump's choices some sort of tarot card about what Trump would do, given that I kept hearing from Trump's closest circle for a long time now that they were determined to ensure that all of Trump's picks this time around would follow rather than subvert his vision as laid out in the campaign.
Marco Rubio just gave an interview to Megyn Kelly late last week that strongly suggests this is true, as Rubio sounded far less like the standard GOP warmonger he has been for years, and a lot more like a committed America First advocate, with a series of surprising acknowledgments highly unusual for someone occupying a high place in U.S. government officialdom.
We'll look at that, as well as the Trump administration's foreign policy actions thus far, to determine which consistent and cohesive principles can be identified.
Then, Elon Musk over the weekend went on a rampage against USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, that has long been accused around the world with good reason of being a critical arm of U.S. interference in virtually every country on the planet, in fact, being a front for the CIA. The physical building in Washington itself is now closed.
The websites are offline.
Massive cuts have been promised.
And control has been temporarily placed under Marco Rubio.
Democrats, being Democrats, decided today that they finally found their first real cause of protest under the new Trump administration.
They marched outside to the USAID in defense of this arm of the CIA coups and imperialism.
Mike Bentz is a former State Department official during the first Trump administration who has become one of the most outspoken and knowledgeable critics of the U.S. security state.
In the last year, he has appeared on the shows about Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson to do exactly that.
He has become a font of information about why USAID in particular is such a destructive, toxic, and wasteful agency.
All as Democrats march in unison to protect it and help be with us to talk about why all of that is.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Donald Trump often railed against the toxic and evil influence of neocons, particularly in American foreign policy, throughout 2023 and 2024 as he attempted to return to the White House. throughout 2023 and 2024 as he attempted to return to
He seemed convinced of it and had a lot of policy initiatives designed to undermine the premises of neoconservatism and in the process alienated a lot of them, beginning with things like his opposition to or at least skepticism about U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine.
The US making NATO a central part of our foreign policy, even though the original purpose, which is to deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe, obviously no longer applies.
And a whole variety of other pieties of the foreign policy establishment that Donald Trump was waging a frontal assault on.
Once Trump won the election and began choosing his national security cabinet, a lot of people immediately concluded that all of that must be a fraud because Trump was choosing people like Marco Rubio, like Elise Stefanik, like Mike Huckabee to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel, like John Ratcliffe at the CIA, like Mike Waltz to be his national security advisor who have a long history similar to Mike Pompeo or Nick Haley or even Liz Cheney.
In endorsing this sort of posture of endless war, of having the U.S. dominate the world in exactly the way that would please most neocons.
And although, as I said, I wasn't thrilled with those picks, I wasn't the one elected, so my choices would have been much different, I was very resistant to the idea that simply because Trump was choosing some, by no means all, but some politicians who have a long history of establishment dogma, those are the ones who sped through.
Confirmation in the Senate, of course, including with lots of Democratic support.
It didn't mean that those people were going to be governing foreign policy in the Trump administration because it was clear that Donald Trump knew that he was the one who won this race and intended to impose his own vision on the world and wanted loyalists around him who would carry out those visions in contrast to the first term when he had a lot of people there who were deliberately sabotaging.
His foreign policy often applauded by the media, including members, by the way, of the U.S. military, which meant that the U.S. military was essentially seizing civilian control of foreign policy, seizing control from democratically elected officials, and assigning it to themselves so that they would often counter or even ignore his foreign policy decisions and they would be celebrated by the press as the adults in the room.
This was all something that I knew from hearing from many people inside the Trump circle.
Both on the show and otherwise, that they were most determined to avoid.
And so when they were picking the Marco Rubios and the Elise Stefanics, I wasn't happy about it.
But I also knew that it wasn't proof that Trump was going to lead a conventional U.S. foreign policy.
Because it was clear that they were picking people who, beyond any particular set of beliefs, was willing to be loyal to Donald Trump's worldview and his agenda.
Because that's what had just been ratified by the American people.
Even the New York Times, in the wake of the Trump victory in November, and I'm not sure they meant this as a compliment or as a warning, but either way, they were the ones who were coming out and saying, look, these people were neocons for sure, but they've now made radical and visible and palpable changes to the way they talk about foreign policy.
Here from the New York Times, November 12th.
Headline, once they were neocons, now Trump's foreign policy picks are all, quote, America first.
President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering nominees who fit more comfortably within his often erratic worldview in which dealmaking reigns over ideology.
The Republican Party used to have a label for the kind of foreign policy hawk that President-elect Trump named on Tuesday as his national security advisor and is considering as his secretary of state, quote, neocons.
But while they were once neoconservatives, over the past few years people like Representative Michael Waltz and Senator Marco Rubio, both of Florida, have gradually shifted their positions, sounding less like former Vice President Dick Cheney or John Bolton.
Neither of whom supported Donald Trump for exactly these reasons.
They no longer talk about foreign interventions or the prospects of regime change.
Instead, they speak the language of, quote, the America First movement and fit more comfortably within Mr. Trump's often erratic worldview in which dealmaking reigns over ideology.
The result is that Mr. Trump may end up with a foreign policy team composed of deep loyalists.
But with roots in familiar Republican approaches, the shifts that the two men have made reflects the broader marginalization of neocons throughout the Republican Party and the disaster in Iraq and the rise of America First.
Let me say that again, because again, this is the New York Times speaking, and they have a long history of not exactly being...
We're going to try and get up this pen at some point.
Here it is.
They don't exactly have a long history of...
Animosity toward neocons.
In fact, the New York Times has long been a newspaper that did things like cheer the Iraq War.
And yet, here's the New York Times saying that a lot of these things reflects the broader modernization of neocons throughout the Republican Party after the disaster in Iraq and the rise of America First.
Now, this to me is something that is almost like a litmus test for whether your commentary, your Punditry or reporting has any real value, whether you recognize this shift, this realignment.
The migration of neocons away from Donald Trump, away from the Republican Party toward reintegration into the Democratic Party happened precisely because they trusted the Democratic Party as a vehicle for neoconservatism and endless war and constant interventions more so than they did.
A Trump-led Republican Party, as evidenced by Dick and Liz Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump, and making clear that when doing so, they weren't just doing it out of anger over January 6th, but because of their belief that Kamala Harris is closer to their foreign policy ideology than Donald Trump is, which is absolutely the case.
And this, more than anything, is what, since 2016, has shaped my The prism through which I understand American politics.
But because so many people are steeped in partisan training and ideological prisons, it was impossible for a lot of people to see, both the Republicans and Democrats, that the actual warmongers, the actual interventionists are more found in the Democratic Party, but the smarter neocons saw that early on, which is why they began supporting Donald Trump, and in fact, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and not Donald Trump.
In fact, even before Trump descended down that elevator, you could find articles in various media accounts that neocons, the ones from the Bush-Haney administration that were supposedly discredited and set out to pastor, found a new champion in Hillary Clinton.
And that's why Victoria Nuland, whose husband, Robert Kagan, is Bill Kristol's longtime political partner, found such a comfortable place inside the Hillary Clinton State Department and then the John Kerry State Department under President Obama because this migration was occurring long before Donald Trump.
Because Democrats began viewing the world as malleable under their benevolent interventions.
You can go all the way back to the Clinton administration as well, where people like Madeleine Albright was so excited to intervene in Yugoslavia while More realist factions in the Republican Party and the Brent Scowcrofts and the Colin Powells were reluctant.
But it really found expression with Donald Trump, who ran against Jeb Bush and the whole Bush-Honey machine, in large part by rejecting this view.
So is the New York Times saying, look, don't get satisfied that he's picking people like Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz who have a long history of conventional foreign policy because these people are now abandoning that and morphing into America First loyalists in order to either ingratiate themselves in the Trump world or because they've actually had a sea change?
The article goes on, quote, Mr. Trump's loyalists and much of the party have now made a full conversion to that worldview.
Few more enthusiastically than Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host who was chosen as defense secretary on Tuesday.
Mr. Hegseth channels both Mr. Trump's avowed isolationism and his impulsive interventionism.
He has also backed Mr. Trump's occasional use of force, notably the order to kill a senior Iranian general in January 2020. Mr. Hegseth, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, described his own conversations to America First, his own conversion, rather, to America First for the New York Times four years ago.
I think a lot of us who are very hawkish and believe in American military might and strength were very resistant to how candidate Trump characterized the wars, Mr. Hegseth said.
But if we are honest with ourselves, there is no doubt that we need to radically reorient how we do it, how much money we have invested, how many lives we have actually invested, and has it actually made us safer?
Is it still worth it?
For Mr. Rubio and Mr. Waltz, the drift from their previous positions to their current ones has been slow.
Evident in shadings of what they said at conservative conferences or interviews on Fox News and in how they altered their votes at key moments in the past few years, Ukraine has been a litmus test.
Now, when I read that article, I found that plausible, but I was by no means convinced either on the other side that, oh, don't worry about these people.
Because I watched in the first administration a whole bunch of them infiltrate.
The Trump administration and the Trump White House and Trump was powerless to defend against them for a whole variety of reasons.
And so I remain deeply skeptical that Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz and all these people with whom Trump is surrounding himself who have a long history of advocating conventional Republican foreign policy, bipartisan foreign policy really, are doing anything other than trying to placate Trump or flatter Trump the way people like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley did in the first administration.
But I also was fairly convinced that the Trump circle was very serious about ensuring that didn't happen this time and is on the lookout for it and would be.
Here is Marco Rubio back in 2023, in March of 2023, talking about the rise of BRICS, which is the countervailing alliance to NATO, founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
And one of the goals of BRICS is to create a monetary system that does not rely on the dollar because the dollar is the reserve currency.
It's what lets the U.S. rule the world through sanctions.
And here's what Marco Rubio said in 2023 about that.
Today, Brazil, in our hemisphere, largest country in the Western Hemisphere south of us, cut a trade deal with China.
They're going to from now on do trade in their own currencies, get right around the dollar.
They're creating a secondary economy in the world totally independent of the United States.
We won't have to talk about sanctions in five years because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won't have the ability.
I mean, that's a pretty remarkable acknowledgement of the reality.
That unlike in the 1990s that the Soviet Union fell and the United States really was the world's only superpower, it was a unilateral world, it's not only the case anymore.
China is a massive power and is leading an alternative bloc that is being strengthened in large part by resentment toward the U.S. use of military force and bullying all throughout the world.
And Marco Rubio is acknowledging that in 2023, which is pretty amazing.
Hear from Reuters when BRICS was founded or near when BRICS was founded in 2014. BRICS stands against Western sanctions, Russian foreign minister says.
That has been a goal of BRICS from the beginning.
Here is the Kazan declaration of BRICS itself in 2024. And you can see one of their goals, strengthening multilateralism for a just global development and security.
And they say, we are deeply concerned about the disruptive effect of unlawful unilateral coercive measures, including illegal sanctions on the world economy, international trade, and the achievement of the sustainable development goals.
Such measures undermine the UN Charter, the multilateral trading system, the sustainable development and economic agreements.
They also negatively impact economic growth, energy, health, and food security, exacerbating poverty.
And you even saw this in the first couple weeks of the Trump administration when it was perceived, I don't think it was really true, but it was perceived that Trump was going around bullying countries like Canada and Denmark and Panama and now even Canada and Mexico.
With the imposition of these tariffs that are now seemingly being resolved in a very quick time by various concessions that the Mexicans and Canadians have made, although they would say these are not particularly meaningful concessions.
But the Trump supporters seem to be energized by this because it was showing that, look, we're the United States.
You do what we say or you suffer the punishment.
And that's the kind of mentality that you can definitely have with the world.
The problem with it is that it's no longer a unilateral world.
There are other places that these countries can go.
And the more they perceive that the U.S. is throwing its weight around aggressively or unjustly, the more we're going to drive countries into the arms of China.
That was a major reason why the Ukraine war and the U.S. and fueling of it was incredibly helpful to China, as is the perception that it's the U.S. behind the war and the destruction of Gaza, which, of course, is true.
So Marco Rubio sat down for a lengthy interview in the State Department with Megyn Kelly on Friday.
I wasn't sure how that interview would go.
I don't typically think of Megyn as a foreign policy commentator and analyst and journalist as much as she does domestic politics, but the questions were actually really good.
She gave a lot of thought to it and asked most of the questions that I would have asked or wanted to hear Marco Rubio's responses to it.
And I found his responses remarkable.
It didn't sound like Marco Rubio.
And unlike Mike Pompeo, who would occasionally just throw a kind of slogan into what he was saying to make it sound like he was more compatible with Trump, this is a Marco Rubio who is being very thoughtful, very comprehensive in what he said.
It sounded like this for the full hour.
And as I said, it wasn't just some empty slogans.
It was a whole worldview that he has clearly embraced.
So I just want to show you a little bit of this, or maybe a little bit more than a little bit, just enough to get a real sense for where the Trump foreign policy might actually be going and the reason they chose Marco Rubio, or at least the directions they gave to Marco Rubio in order for him to become Secretary of State.
So here is Marco Rubio explaining to Megyn Kelly about the need for a pragmatic foreign policy and not one that is dogmatic about the need for the U.S. to rule the world.
It's such a tricky time to be Secretary of State, especially as a Republican, because you look at the Republican Party and it's fractured internally about where we should be on foreign policy.
It's not like during the Bush years where it was, you know, we were much more neo-conny on the right.
And now there's a real division within the right, within MAGA even, on how, what should we do about Ukraine?
Most of the party, I think, wants nothing to do with that anymore.
What kind of saber-rattling should we do?
What are you doing about Iran?
You know, there's a large strain that believes none.
We should be focused on China and we should stop demonizing Iran and Russia and keep our eye on our biggest threat.
I know you think they're our biggest threat as well.
So how, just give me the 30,000-foot level view of how you're going to navigate that fraction.
Well, I think we spent, I mean, it is just so interesting because that is a massive foreign policy division within the Republican Party, within American conservatism, within the MAGA movement.
It's sad that that debate really doesn't exist in the Democratic Party, that the Democratic Party, with a few exceptions, a very few exceptions, tends to be unified about the view of foreign policy that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris pursued and that Democrats believe in.
A very bellicose, assertive, internationalist, globalist, Atlantis, NATO-based foreign policy.
That we should be involved in every one of these countries.
We should be constantly intervening.
Syria and Libya.
In Iraq, in Ukraine, in Israel and Gaza, in Iran, Hakeem Jeffries just gave a speech this weekend about how Israel crushed Hamas and now is the time to go after Iran when they're weak.
This is what the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives is talking about.
And as Megyn Kelly notes, there's a huge division in even the Manga movement about whether that's the U.S.'s business, whether that's in the U.S. interest.
And here's what Mark Rubio told her.
A lot of time in American politics debating tactics like what we're going to do, who we're going to sanction, what letter we're going to send or whatever.
I think it really has to start with strategy.
What is the strategic objective?
What's the purpose, the mission?
And I think the mission of American foreign policy, and this may sound sort of obvious, but I think it's been lost.
The interest of American foreign policy is to further the national interest of the United States of America, right?
America first.
And that's the way the world has always worked.
The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what's in the best interest of China, the Russians will do what's in the best interest of Russia, the Chileans are going to do what's in the best interest of Chile, and the United States needs to do what's in the best interest of the United States.
Where our interests align, that's where you have partnerships and alliances.
Where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests and understanding they're going to further theirs.
I mean, just even the way he talks about China and Russia and Iran there, without any of the demonizing rhetoric, typically characterizing Marco Rubio's references to America's enemies, he's describing them in very neutral terms.
In fact, equating them with the United States.
He's saying China acts in its interest, Russia acts in its interest, Iran acts in its interest, Chile acts in its interest, and we act in ours.
And he goes on to say that Our alliances are not religious partnerships.
They should exist only insofar as they serve the interests of the United States and of the American citizens in the United States, as he goes on to clarify.
Oftentimes when we talk about U.S. interests, we mean the interests of a very tiny slice of military and economic elites.
And this is the emphasis on what are the foreign policies that serve the interests of the American people.
Now, I want to make clear that they are not perfect on this, to put that mildly.
Just today, Donald Trump, clearly influenced by Elon Musk, talked about the need to bully the South Africans and punish the South Africans to change their land distribution laws.
Because as a white South African, Elon Musk has made very clear for a long time he believes those are racist against white people.
Why is it in the interest of the American people to be involved in South Africa's land distribution laws?
And then today, in the wake of the Netanyahu meeting, Trump said in the Oval Office, when asked whether or not the United States would support Israel's annexation of Gaza and the West Bank, began saying how tiny of a little bit of a land Israel has, basically implying that, yes, we would support more Laban's realm and expansion for Israel because their country is too small.
How is that in America's interest?
So these are not ironclad principles that they're going to follow.
They're going to violate these constantly.
But directionally and tonally, And even in terms of policy, this is a change in direction.
And that's been lost.
And I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War because we're the only power in the world.
And so we assume this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem.
And there are terrible things happening in the world.
There are.
And then there are things that are terrible that impact our national interest directly.
And we need to prioritize those again.
So it's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power.
That was an anomaly.
It was the product of the end of the Cold War.
But eventually...
You were going to reach back to a point where you had a multi-polar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.
We face that now with China, and to some extent, Russia.
And then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.
So now more than ever, we need to remember that foreign policy should always be about furthering the national interest of the United States, and doing so to the extent possible, avoiding war and armed conflict, which we have seen two times in the last century.
Very costly.
They're celebrating the 80th anniversary this year, the end of the Second World War.
I think if you look at the scale and scope of destruction and loss of life that occurred, it would be far worse if we had a global conflict now.
It may end life on the planet.
It sounds like hyperbole, but you have multiple countries now who have the capability to end life on Earth.
And so we need to really work hard to avoid armed conflict as much as possible, but never at the expense of our national interests.
So that's the tricky balance.
So I think returning us to that, now you can have a framework by which you analyze not just diplomacy, but foreign aid, and who we line up with, and the return of pragmatism.
And that's not an abandonment of our principles.
I'm not a fan or a giddy supporter of some horrifying human rights violator somewhere in the world.
By the same token, diplomacy has...
Foreign policy has always required us, and foreign policy has always required us to work in the national interest, sometimes in cooperation with people who we wouldn't invite over for dinner, or people who we wouldn't necessarily ever want to be led by.
And so that's a balance, but it's the sort of pragmatic and mature balance we have to have.
Now, there's so many reasons why that's a big change.
Two things in particular.
One is, again, this admission.
The United States has not ruled the world, cannot rule the world.
We are not in a unilateral, unipolar world any longer.
That in particular China, but also Russia, are great powers and need to be understood as such.
We can't just bully them around.
And that means we have to readjust our thinking.
We're no longer this empire, this superpower that goes around ruling the world by force.
That is a vital admission that senior government officials have been in the United States have been very reluctant to make.
And the other part that is so striking, particularly coming from someone like Marco Rubio, is this idea that just because there are bad governments in the world, governments we don't like, we consider repressive, whatever, doesn't mean we have to go and try and isolate them or destroy them.
For somebody like Marco Rubio, whose obsession in life has been, the Cuban government is repressive and communist, the Venezuelans are repressive and communist, we have to go and change the regimes in these countries, which they've tried to do.
We just saw Trump dispatch Richard Grinnell to Venezuela to meet with President Maduro, not with the fake president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, or this opposition leader.
We pretend the real actual leader, not the one we want, but the actual leader of Venezuela.
And he met with him, and we don't know what deal was done, but six American hostages or prisoners were released.
To Richard Grinnell, and there was an agreement to allow deported Venezuelans back into that country.
Clearly, this is an attempt to improve relations with Venezuela rather than to try and overthrow it, which has been done in the first Trump term and failed, which is why John Bolton was gotten rid of.
But it's hard to overstate just how much of a radical change Marco Rubio's worldview is compared to what he said previously, and maybe that's because he's finally accepting the reality of China's emergence.
And Russia's.
The United States tried to defeat Russia and couldn't.
And now has to accept that reality.
Here is Megyn Kelly asking about the perception that Trump is going around bullying other countries with tariffs.
And here's what Mark Rubio said about that.
The New York Times said, okay, you guys got away with this with Colombia.
But you're not going to be able to pull that trick with...
Russia, with China, with Iran.
If you try to sort of bully these stronger nations in this way, it's not going to go very well.
Is that a fair point?
Well, we're not interested in bullying anybody.
And we don't feel like we bullied Colombia.
We feel like we had a deal.
Colombia signed a deal.
They signed a piece of paper that said, yes, send us these airplanes.
And then halfway into the flight, they broke it.
And so our answer was, well, now we flew these planes.
We had to bring them back to the United States.
So now you're going to come pick them up.
Why are we going to pay for those flights?
Because you canceled them.
It's not bullying.
They broke a contract.
We had made with them.
Obviously, look, China has nuclear weapons.
They're tough people.
There's no doubt about it.
They're tough people.
They have nuclear weapons.
They're a great power with a large economy.
They're going to be a global power, but it can't come at our expense.
And so, ultimately, when you're dealing with great powers like China, it's going to be at the highest levels of their president and ours, their premier and ours, and our president.
And that interaction will happen.
In the case of Russia, the same.
Obviously, whatever happens with Russia will be a Putin-Trump dynamic.
But I think most certainly, sure.
I mean, the world, the way you treat, not the way you treat countries, but the way you approach a nation has to be based on the strategic balance.
I mean, again, I can guarantee you I can find endless amounts of clips of Marco Rubio talking about these countries with nothing but venom and demonization.
And now that he's responsible for engaging in diplomacy with the world, he's talking about them with a certain level of respect because you just can't indulge in the delusion any longer that the United States can go around the world doing what it wants.
Here is Donald Trump today.
I'm not going to read this whole thing, but we'll just put the tweet on the screen.
But essentially, he imposed 25% tariffs on Mexico.
In Canada, a lot of people went ballistic.
The Wall Street Journal page, that whole crowd, the stock market took a hit.
Whether he quickly did a deal because he wanted to avoid the turbulence to the markets or whether this was his strategy all along, which I've always believed, which is to threaten sanctions as a way of getting a deal, similar to the way he threatens war to get deals.
Who knows?
But in less than 24 hours, the sanctions have been lifted as a result of...
A conversation that he had with President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico and then also with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
It seems like there's at least a 30-day freeze on those as well.
Here you see the Justin Trudeau tweet from today.
I had a good call with President Trump.
Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan and other kind of things that were depicted as concessions.
So this shows that Trump's not trying to pursue conflict for its own sake.
He sees the threat of conflict as a path to resolution.
Here is Megyn Kelly asking Marco Rubio about China and about the U.S. role in the world.
The call was very straightforward, and I basically said, you're acting in the best interest of China, we're going to act in the best interest of America.
We're two great powers, and in areas where we can work together, there's probably no problem in the world we couldn't solve working together.
In areas where we have disagreements, we have a responsibility to manage it so it doesn't escalate into something catastrophic.
But be clear that what really matters is the decisions we make moving forward.
And, you know, China wants to be the most powerful country in the world, and they want to do so at our expense.
And that's not in our national interest.
And we're going to address it.
We don't want to war over it.
But we're going to address it.
In the case of China, there's two things.
I've just described one, which is the grave threat that they pose to our national interests.
And the other is the mature realization that no matter what happens, China is going to be a rich and powerful country.
We are going to have to deal with them.
In fact, and I said this in my call with their foreign minister, but I've said this publicly, the history of the 21st century will largely be about what happened between the U.S. and China.
So for us to pretend that somehow we're not going to engage with them is absurd to control that.
They're doing it because it's in their national interest.
They are doing, frankly, what I would do, maybe not the human rights violations, but they are doing what anyone would do if they were the leader of China.
They are acting in China's best interest.
What's been missing is American policy that acts in our best interest.
I mean, I can't emphasize how remarkable that is to hear United States leaders talking about China in this way.
Not leading with...
They're vicious, evil dictators and communists who are saying, look, we may not like it.
We may wish it were true.
But the reality of the world is that China is a very serious and large economic and military power that we cannot change that.
We have to deal with them.
We have to get along with them.
We're competitors with them.
But the history of the 21st century will determine how well the United States and China manage their competition.
That is a radical change from even the last administration.
Where the Democrats have been incredibly hawkish on China, but the reality is that it's not just that China is a major power, it's that the United States and China are inextricably linked in ways that countries have not been that the United States or the U.S. security state have wanted to target.
Now, the same thing with Panama.
A lot of people say, oh, Trump's threatening to take the Panama Canal.
If you listen to what Trump's saying, it seems clear that what he's doing is saying he wants a better deal.
In terms of how much American ships are charged for passing through, and they also think China's influence is excessive because that's obviously an important part of the world for the United States, and that's what they're bargaining for.
Here is Marco Rubio talking to Megyn Kelly about the ceasefire that Donald Trump, by all accounts, was responsible for facilitating in Gaza.
Who's involved in politics, not a politician involved in politics.
So he approaches these issues from a transactional business point of view.
So he is not going to begin what he views as a negotiation or a conversation by taking leverage off the table.
And that's a tactic that's used all the time in business.
It's being applied to foreign policy and I think to great effect in the first term.
You look at the Abraham Accords and the Democrats mocked the Abraham Accords when they were made.
And then by the end of the Biden administration, they became the linchpin of a lot of what we're hoping to build on.
That never would have happened had there not been a transactional approach.
You look at what his envoy to the Middle East, Steve Woodcoff, has achieved.
The Biden administration asked Woodcoff.
They asked for him to be involved in these conversations.
He has brought a businessman's approach to a very delicate and intractable foreign policy challenge and delivered a ceasefire that obviously is tenuous and has long-term challenges to it.
But there are hostages being released every day.
That didn't happen for over a year and a half until he became involved.
And that's the president's envoy and very close friend who's brought the same kind of business approach to some of these challenges.
I mean, there's just no denying that.
There's no denying any of this.
That if you do not deal with these countries practically, if you keep beating your chest and engaging in these kind of moralistic decorations of superiority, if you try and talk tough, even though you cannot back it up, you're going to look like an idiot.
And it is the case that Trump likes this boisterous, aggressive discourse, these kind of threats, these very melodramatic threats.
But that is how he conducted himself as a business person.
As I said, when I was doing litigation in New York, that's when Trump was a real estate mogul.
And his organization was notorious for just being incredibly litigious and refusing to settle and threatening all the time.
That's whole Trump's entire self-branding is the art of the deal.
And the art of the deal is you threaten and you threaten and you threaten to destroy somebody unless they come to the table at better terms and then you get a good deal that way.
And that seems to be infused into U.S. foreign policy, at least thus far.
And I'm not saying that's ideal, but it's certainly better than indulging these fictions that we've had for decades under both parties that the United States can go around the world just condemning everybody and denouncing everybody and ordering everybody around and punishing them if they don't obey.
Because that world no longer exists, and it's really amazing to hear Marco Rubio admit that.
And again, it's not a new admission, as we showed you, he was admitting it since at least 2023 on Fox.
Megan also asked Marco Rubio about NATO and whether that alliance should continue to be sacrosanct in American foreign policy, and here's what he had to say.
One of those issues that's become dicey within the Republican Party is NATO. We've talked a lot about these other countries doing their fair share and doing their part.
And this is why NATO's become controversial, because there are many people who believe, what are we doing this for?
I mean, it made sense right after World War II, but does it make sense today?
And the United States tends to be the dominant player.
The Europeans can support themselves.
They don't need the United States to be the big babysitter of the world.
And it creates more opportunities for us to get involved in foreign conflicts.
We shouldn't be involved in.
To that, you say what?
Well, the president's position on NATO is the same every other president has had, and that is that our allies, many of our allies in NATO, do not do enough to provide for their own security.
Every other president has made the same complaint.
He's just actually been serious about it, and that's what he's pointing to.
And look, it's interesting, and in fairness, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, the closer you are to Russia, the more they're spending as a percentage of their GDP on national defense.
But then you have countries like France.
Or you have countries like Germany.
These are big economies, powerful economies.
And they don't spend as much on national security.
Why?
Because they rely on NATO. They say, well, we don't need to spend that much on...
Yeah, we don't need to spend as much on defense because America has soldiers here, and if they get attacked, they'll be our national defense.
So we can instead spend all that money on this enormous social safety net.
When you ask those kids, why can't you spend more on national security, their argument is because it would require us to make cuts to welfare programs, to unemployment benefits, to being able to retire at 59 and all these other things.
That was a choice they made.
But we're subsidizing that.
So I think if you were to articulate the President's point on NATO, number one, they need to do more.
And I do think long-term, there's a conversation to be had about whether the United States needs to be at the front end of securing the continent or as a backstop to securing the continent.
And if you talk to countries on the eastern periphery, the ones closest to Russia, all of them are building the capability to be at the front end.
The polls, the checks, you know, all of these different places.
And if you move further west to the richest economy, Now, that is the America first view of the world when it comes to foreign policy is we had this alliance.
It went back to the end of World War II. The Soviet Union was this massive power.
It came out of World War II victorious.
it had the right to essentially embrace and govern all of Eastern Europe.
That was the deal that Stalin and Churchill made with, FDR and Churchill made with Stalin at Yalta and elsewhere, was that Western Europe will be with us and here's Eastern Europe for you and they'll be communists and they will be part of the Soviet was that Western Europe will be with us and here's Eastern Europe for you and they'll be communists
And for a long time, NATO, the idea of NATO that the United States would embrace these Western European countries and guarantee their security against a potentially aggressive Soviet Union was central to post-World War II US foreign policy.
But the reality is that the Soviet Union does not exist anymore.
And the idea that Vladimir Putin or Russia is looking to or can invade and conquer France and Germany and...
Spain and Italy and the UK and the way that the Soviet Union was perceived to be a threat to do is laughable.
Nobody believes that.
But the inertia of the US foreign policy community is such that they exist unto themselves.
They don't need a reason to keep growing.
They just grow because that's what they do.
It's inertia.
And so you watch the fall of the Soviet Union, the disappearance of the threat to Western Europe and NATO. It continues to exist in at least as expensive and assertive a form as it did previously.
And then the question became, well, NATO doesn't really have any purpose any longer.
It has no mission any longer.
It was supposed to be a defensive alliance against incursions by the Soviet Union to Western Europe, and instead, it lost its purpose.
So what did it do?
In the 1990s, it got involved in a land war in Yugoslavia began bombing Serbia, blowing up civilian infrastructure and bridges, and then ultimately split up Serbia and Kosovo and decided that Kosovo is now its own independent country,
a precedent, by the way, that Vladimir Putin at the time warned would be extremely destabilizing because there's a lot of different places in Europe where different provinces regard themselves either as independent or part of another country that were part of the post-World War II borders.
And he said you're going to spawn independence movements all throughout Western Europe based on this Kosovo model that you have created.
And of course that's what happened in places like Georgia and even in places like Ukraine where these provinces do not regard themselves as subject to the central authority of Georgia or of Ukraine and want to be part of Russia instead.
And then he also went in engaging a regime change operation in Libya.
Obviously, Yugoslavia, Serbia, whatever you think of Serbia and Milosevic and the whole intervention there, it was not a defensive NATO war.
It was not an attempt to defend Western Europe or the United States, nor any NATO members, nor was the regime change war in Libya.
And so NATO has completely morphed from what it was supposed to be into something completely unrecognizable, just the way that the United States goes around throwing its weight around the world.
And as Marco Rubio said, and this is Donald Trump's critique, and you can go back to the 80s and 90s and hear Donald Trump saying these things.
Why are we paying for Western Europe's military defense and therefore allowing these very rich countries to give their citizens very generous social safety nets that Americans do not themselves enjoy?
Now, at some point, I hope that rationale is going to get applied to Israel.
Why is the United States funding and financing Israel and then giving them even more money, more billions, whenever Israel wants to have a new war?
When the Israelis enjoy a higher standard of living than millions of Americans, access to health care and health insurance that Americans lack, free college and universities that Americans lack.
And a whole variety of other social services as well.
While America falls apart, its infrastructure falls apart, certainly no one in the Trump administration is at the point where they're ready or willing or able to make that application and probably not even wanting to as well.
But still, once you start embracing this ideology that we have allies only to the extent that our Interests overlap.
These are not enduring religious-like commitments, which is, by the way, what George Washington said, what Thomas Jefferson said, that we, the United States, have to avoid enduring alliances or enduring enmities.
We shouldn't be permanent enemies with other countries.
We shouldn't be permanent allies with other countries.
Something we've completely lost sight of.
And to hear this kind of talk, not only just from Donald Trump in a campaign, Or in a lazy sort of way when he's just riffing, but in a way that seems to be a more serious thought-through effort, and you're seeing some policies already in the first two weeks that embody and reflect these kinds of views, that's pretty encouraging.
Now, speaking of encouraging, here is what Rubio had to tell Megyn Kelly about the war in Ukraine, and it's...
Remarkable because Marco Rubio has been a hawk on Ukraine from the beginning, like most of the Republican Party.
Almost all of what Marco Rubio says here about the war in Ukraine, if you had said this in 2022 or 2023, as I did and a few other people did, you would have been called, as we were, Russian agents or pro-Kremlin propagandists.
And now reality has set in.
And just like Marco Rubio's acknowledgement that China is a major power on par with the United States and we can't do anything about that, there is now a recognition, certainly in the Trump administration and even in Western European capitals, about the absolute necessity to resolve the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in about the absolute necessity to resolve the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in a way that entails concession of Ukrainian territory to Russia and other concessions that the United States could have made that refused to
and saved huge numbers of lives and countless hundreds of billions of dollars Here's what he had to say.
...potentially.
Ukraine's another issue that's got the party divided.
You've got a lot.
I'm sticking with the Republicans now because there's a whole other debate with the other side of the aisle.
But who say, no, Putin's a bad actor, Russia's a growing threat, and we're doing the right thing by backing Ukraine.
And I would say the majority of Republicans now are against that viewpoint and think we've lost.
We've spent too much.
It's any place from $105 billion to $187 billion.
And they've lost.
We just have to be realistic about the fact that Ukraine has lost.
It's not going to gain back any of this ground.
And we need a negotiated settlement now before we keep throwing good money after bad.
And we can't afford it.
We've got Americans who are suffering now.
I think that's the majority view, even on the Republican side now.
It also happens to be the reality on the ground.
First, let me say this.
We think what Putin did was terrible, invading a country, the atrocities he's committed.
He did horrible things.
But what the dishonesty...
That has existed is that we somehow led people to believe that Ukraine would be able not just to defeat Russia, but, you know, destroy them, push them all the way back to what the world looked like in 2012 or 2014, before the Russians took Crimea and the like.
And in the result, what they've been asking for the last year and a half is to fund a stalemate, a protracted stalemate, in which human suffering continues.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is being set back 100 years.
Their energy grid is being wiped out.
I mean, someone's going to have to pay for all this reconstruction after the fact.
And how many Ukrainians have left Ukraine living in other countries now?
They may never return.
I mean, that's their future, and it's endangered in that regard.
I mean, I am kind of shocked by this, just how brazen it is.
Everything you're saying there is absolutely true.
There's no question about that.
But it's been so obvious for so long, since the beginning, in fact, that this is going to be the outcome.
And although Marco Rubio is now describing this as sort of a series of lies or misleading or deceit, Convinced people that we're going to be able to drive the—of the Ukrainians, we're going to be able to drive the Russians back to pre-2014, 2014 borders where they no longer had Crimea anymore.
And they left all of eastern Ukraine, just kind of got driven back, even got crushed Russia, regime change possibly.
This was a ridiculous, absurd pipe dream.
And there were a lot of people, not Marco Rubio, saying that from the start and getting— Demonized and mauled for it.
But it always was true and it's true now.
And it's absolutely tragic that it took this long for people to be forced to admit it.
And the reason it took this long for people forced to admit it is because from the start NATO defined victory in the most unrealistic way possible which is what Marco Rubio just described which is pushing It was never realistic to define victory that way, and yet NATO and the U.S. painted themselves into a corner.
And finally, I don't even care what the recommendations are about the past, it's good that the Trump administration and Marco Rubio is facing reality and are willing to say it.
Here's the rest.
The president's point of view is this is a protracted conflict and it needs to end.
Now, it needs to end through a negotiation.
In any negotiation, both sides are gonna have to give something up.
I'm not going to pre-negotiate that.
I mean, that's going to be the work of hard diplomacy, which is what we used to do in the world in the past, and we were realistic about it.
But both sides in a negotiation have to give something, and that's going to take time.
But at least we have a president that recognizes that our objective is this.
Conflict needs to end, and it needs to end in a way that's enduring because it's unsustainable.
On all sides, it's ultimately unsustainable.
Russia's paying a big price for this in their own economy, their inflation rate and the like.
At the end, that's the president's position.
And it's the truth.
And I think even a growing number of Democrats would now acknowledge that what we have been funding is a stalemate, a protracted conflict, and maybe even worse than a stalemate, one in which, incrementally, Ukraine is being destroyed and losing more and more territory.
So this conflict needs to end.
Who's the bigger...
You know, I mean, music to my ears, I guess.
I wish that had been permissible to say in Washington at the highest level of the government.
And unfortunately, it was nowhere in Washington nor in most of Western Europe.
The only people you heard that from were right-wing populists who got mocked for it.
Not a single Democrat, let's remember, expressed a modicum of dissent when it came to U.S. funding of the war in Ukraine.
Speaking of these kind of changes to foreign policy that seem to be genuine, Friend of the show, Darren Beatty, who has been on many times before, he was a speechwriter in the first Trump White House.
He has a PhD from political science from Duke.
I find him one of the smartest thinkers.
He's had controversies because he attended a conference where there were white nationalists.
I asked him about that.
It's the kind of thing where in 2019 you would get destroyed because you were at a conference where white nationalists were.
He got appointed today by Marco Rubio to fill a key State Department role.
He has a lot of genuine populist and American-first foreign policy views on things like Ukraine, for sure.
On NATO, he's a big advocate of Imran Khan, the elected president of Pakistan, who was overthrown in a Biden State Department-supported coup and is now in prison and releasing him from prison, as well as some heterodox views on Israel as well.
So you're starting to see this sort of emergence of a, I wouldn't describe it as a radical break, but certainly a very palpable and visible break from some components of bipartisan US foreign policy in the way that a lot of people hope would happen in the first Trump term, and never but certainly a very palpable and visible break from some components of bipartisan US foreign policy in the way that It seems like a much more concerted and serious and thoughtful and disciplined effort, this time to make good on these promises and again,
A lot of this is going to be imperfect.
There are going to be a lot of deviations.
There's political realities.
There's all kinds of special preferences at play.
Miriam Adelson gave $110 million and Bill Ackman gave $40 or $50 million because they expect things in return and are going to get some of those.
But directionally and tonally and even in terms of policy, this is a real change.
certainly from what we saw in the first Trump administration and much more, much closer to the kind of America first foreign policy that Trump ran on even more so this time that we're starting to see the fruits of now. much closer to the kind of America first foreign policy Free speech is under attack.
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Mike Benz worked in the State Department during the first Trump administration and now has become one of the most vocal and informed critics of the U.S. security state.
I am happy that he has appeared on Joe Rogan's program as well as Tucker Carlson's program in the last year to explicate those views.
He's long been a virulent critic of USAID. We are delighted to have Mike.
Thanks, Glenn, and thanks for all your work around these very entities and organizations and this spindly little government nexus with the NGO complex around Internet censorship.
I think your stewardship on that issue has been very impactful.
Thank you.
I appreciate that I feel the same way about yours.
So let's get into the substance of this.
Honestly, I don't think I ever thought I would see the day when the U.S. government, the executive branch under elected president, would basically be waging open warfare on two of the most...
Toxic and destructive arms of the U.S. imperial state, which is the National Endowment for Democracy, and especially USAID. National Endowment for Democracy, I think the reasons that it's considered a CIA front, and certainly it is, are much more well documented.
USAID is a little bit more subtle.
Why have you become so focused on USAID as a toxic force inside the U.S. government?
Well, the closer you look at the National Endowment for Democracy, the closer you see that it really is the constant companion of USAID. USAID and NED share many joint programs that they jointly coordinate.
For example, there's a program called CEPs.
It's the Consortium for Excellence in Political Process Strengthening.
Don't you know all we want to do is strengthen your political processes in your country?
So you need...
So this is a joint program jointly operated by the U.S. State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
And the reason I refer to this program so often is because it played a central role in coordinating Internet censorship.
They have a countering disinformation arm, which is about launching the NGO complex funded by U.S. tax dollars to compel foreign governments to pass internal censorship laws.
The sorts of laws that will be banned by the First Amendment, USAID funds the advocacy for those laws to be passed in foreign countries in order to censor the rise of populist politicians where USAID has internally designated populism as a threat to democracy, so they get to use their democracy promotion programs to promote censorship of misinformation and political populism.
But I come back to that to say that the State Department provides the policy direction.
So NED, the National Network for Democracy, does the technical on-the-ground implementation by directly liaising with all of the grantees, all the USAID grantees.
But none of it would be possible without USAID. The other two parts are, in a sense, less pernicious.
There's a great government document that I found assessing U.S. military strategy and attempt to reorganize it in 2022, where...
One of these three-star generals says in a survey that the military prefers to work with USAID over state in many matters because USAID actually does stuff, which is to say that USAID provides the money.
And without money, nothing's possible.
State can scrawl on a napkin.
Or debate in a skiff all they like about what the policy should be, and they can think in abstractions about ways we should twist foreign government's arms or, you know, what we should do on certain negotiating postures with the U.S. ambassador talking to that counterpart president.
But the fact is, unless there are actual boots on the ground institutions in that country exerting influence, nothing gets done.
And USAID is the mechanism for getting that done.
So NED would really be nothing without USAID. And at this point, State Department would be totally crippled without USAID, which is why I find what's happening so fascinating, because for the past two and a half years, I've been telling everyone who follows me that there is not an inch of daylight between USAID and the State Department.
And USAID exists as an illusion to fool you into thinking that USAID... It's not the State Department, but it is.
The only reason it's an independent agency is because that gives aid workers access to areas state can't access directly.
U.S. diplomats can't just walk into civil society institutions in foreign countries or in conflict zones, can't just get into government buildings, can't just access the indigenous population.
But if they're aid workers, the doors swing open.
And so it exists as this front.
But the fact is, is the CIA, the operations...
We're initially scheduled to be or conceived to be parked under the State Department.
The CIA was only created to be a plausibly deniable arm of state because state decided it would jeopardize the purpose of it to house it there directly.
Well, it's the same thing.
So it's a long way of saying what I find so funny is the current plan to close down the Ronald Reagan building and close down USAID HQ. Move it into the State Department.
The grand irony to me is that's what it was all along.
I think that's such an important point, and I want to kind of zero in on this, and I don't know what the answer yet is.
I'm very interested in hearing what you think, because on the one hand, you have this very elaborate, informed, historically-based critique of how these agencies function and what their real purpose is, as you just laid out, as I've talked many times before about.
They destabilize other countries.
They're designed to kind of install this ability of the United States government to control other countries the way we want from Washington in a way that doesn't serve the country but serves a very narrow set of elites.
Then you have the war that Elon Musk and secondarily, I guess, Donald Trump are now waging on USAID. And if you listen to Elon...
He seems to be focused on this because he perceives this as an agency of things like waste, of funding, woke programs that the United States government has no business funding.
You know, the thing about $50 million in Gaza for condoms, which wasn't really true, but we do fund programs like that elsewhere.
You know, $35,000 for a trans opera in Argentina or whatever the examples are.
He seems to be talking about this more as about waste and funding left-wing woke projects.
I noticed, actually, over the weekend when this was happening on X, said, oh, USAID, like the National Endowment for Democracy, has long been an arm of the CIA that serves no interests of American citizens and it can't die soon enough.
And his response was, and they're not even good at it.
And I kind of got to thinking...
It's his concern here that we need an agency that does that, but kind of without the waist and the left-wing agenda, but one that is, as you said, still nonetheless effective to allowing the U.S. government to enter all these parts of civil society under the pretext of not being part of the government.
What do you think is motivating their attack on these agencies as opposed to why you dislike it?
Or maybe they're the same.
I'm so glad you mentioned so many of these things.
It sort of lit up a pinball machine in my mind of what area of that to attack.
I guess, starting at the beginning, I don't know what's animating Elon in terms of which aspect of the USAID octopus is most horrifying to him, and that may have tipped the camel's back, so to speak, around...
You know, just shutting down the agency entirely.
But to me, I, while I am very, wokeness is a real thing, and it's very real, and you know it when you see it.
I have been saying for a very, very long time that what you see, it's very easy to mistake wokeness with blobness if you're not looking with a careful lens.
And what I mean by that, I'll give a great example.
So a few months ago, Max Blumenthal's outlet, The Gray Zone, published the internal leaked files from the International Republican Institute, which is the Republican arm of the National Endowment for Democracy.
So it's NED. And the State Department was displeased with the results of the Bangladesh election in 2018. The State Department-favored candidate got walloped.
And Ned, through the IRI, submitted a baseline assessment to the State Department of the best way to win the next election.
And they decided that that would not be possible without destabilizing Bangladesh and Bangladeshi culture and society in order to do the classic street riot color revolution type work that Ned has been doing now for four decades.
But in the baseline assessment, again, this is the Republican wing of Ned.
Their baseline assessment said that basically the only groups we lost the election overwhelmingly were.
The groups who are most upset at the current in-power government that we could capacity build with state and USAID funding are LGBT groups, two racial minority groups in Bangladesh, and young people and student groups in Bangladesh.
Who like to listen to rap music.
And so IRI poured State Department U.S. taxpayer funds into transgender dance festivals, into a whole slew of, you know, sort of woke identity events around minority rights and funding minority rappers in Bangladesh.
Ultimately culminating in throngs of street protests that forced the democratically elected prime minister to flee the country in a helicopter as a Clinton Global Initiative fellow was named the new president and they've canceled elections.
So all this is to say that I don't think that the Republicans at IRI are woke.
I think that you have tactical wokeness in service of statecraft.
And this is what's motivating.
Just today, you had all these news.
Well, in 2009, the National Endowment for Democracy, this was actually written by Carl Gershman himself, the founder of NED, wrote a similar piece in 2009 about how to topple the government of Cuba.
And what they assessed is that the Afro-Cuban population is the plurality ethnic faction in Cuba, but represents a very, very, very small part.
of Cuba's government, and there's racial animosities that could be inflamed.
They did a baseline assessment of how they could angry up the Afro-Cuban population through DEI-type programs.
That wasn't the name in 2009, but they were diversity programs.
And these all played a significant part in the 2021 summer protests in Cuba.
These DEI wokeness programs are part of the ethnic balkanization and human rights predicates that are laid by the state in order to topple and control governments.
And so that's the sort of thing that Trump likes to win on foreign policy.
I would not be surprised if many of these DEI programs go away for a while.
But if we need them, if there's a recalcitrant country...
And Trump wants to play hardball.
I would not be surprised if some of these money spigots get turned on.
But what I'm trying to convey here is I don't see this necessarily as waste, fraud, and abuse and them not being good at it.
I do think it's wasteful.
I do think that money is better spent on our own country rather than this level of foreign meddling.
But the fact is, is that money serves a purpose.
It is capacity building.
The cultural groups, the ethnic groups, the minority groups, the gender groups, the political groups.
And so that's why you see strange things like dance festivals and music festivals and ethnic identity events and whatnot, because they're funding the fusion of networks that are then instrumentalized by the State Department and, by extension, USAID and NAD. Yeah, I think it's such an important point to understand U.S. foreign policy and especially this desire to rule the world in ways that don't actually serve the country.
If you look at, for example, when George Bush and Dick Cheney announced the bombing invasion of Afghanistan, which leave aside the debate over whether that was wise, I remember very well they had Laura Bush publish an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times two weeks after 9-11 or so, basically touting the invasion as necessary for I remember very well they had Laura Bush publish an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times two weeks after And this is the Bush family that is very closely tied to the Saudi regime.
I don't think they were motivated in their foreign policy by a desire to liberate women, but it can kind of cover the same thing with we're going to Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people.
And now you have, you know, all kinds of expenditures in Ukraine on LGBT groups to try and...
Turn Ukraine into a kind of toward the influence of the United States.
And so often this kind of identity politics and this woke agenda has been depicted as this left-wing cultural war cause, which inside the United States it might be.
But as you say...
There's this very important component that it plays in how we sell our foreign policy to Western populations, to our own population, and then to divide these other countries in ways that are instrumental for us.
I guess that's what I was trying to get at, was I'm not sure that Elon Musk is thinking about that so much, because I'm not even sure that he would be bothered by that, and that's why that comment that he made, well, they're not really good at it, meaning if they were kind of better at it...
Maybe I would support them.
But I also just want to add here in terms of...
It worked in Bangladesh.
What's that?
It just worked in Bangladesh four months ago.
And it worked in Ukraine, too, to bring these issues to Kiev, to make Kiev much more pro-Western.
But I do also want to ask you, because I think what motivated Elon as well, at least in terms of the escalation of his rhetoric, this war that he waged on USAID all weekend...
Part of that was because, whether you like it or not, Donald Trump has deputized Elon Musk to have this agency that's designed to eliminate waste as the White House sees it.
Wasteful spending, unnecessary spending.
And so when the people that are part of this effort that Donald Trump has created after he won the election went to USAID, and it's happened in other agencies too.
You see almost this physical resistance, like, how dare you come into our realm?
You don't run us.
You're just the elected part of the government.
Where this agency that exists, independent of you, where does this mentality come from that they have this right to pursue their own agenda independent of any elected officials or elected parts of the government?
Well, the entire agency exists as a carefully constructed lie.
Just like James Clapper and John Brennan and Leon Panetta, these are the holders of the great American closet of skeletons of state secrets.
And you don't just hand that over to a random taxicab driver because 51% of the population elected him because he does funny TikTok dances.
I think what I'm trying to say here is, if you remember the recalcitrance around sharing intelligence with President Trump, both in his 2016 presidential run and then again in the lead up to the 2024 election, I think what's happening at USAID is essentially an echo of that, which is that USAID is supposed to be untouchable.
I mean, virtually, there's no USAID project on God's green earth that is honest.
If we are irrigating the rivers or irrigating the agricultural fields in a country, it's because we're trying to control the territory there.
If we are working on the water supply, it's because we're trying to control the rivers.
If we're working on famine relief, it's because we're trying to control the food supply and make inroads into the indigenous populations there.
If we are helping them write their constitution and go through democratic legal reform, it's so that we can control their laws.
Every single thing USA does is dual purpose.
It's dual purpose by charter.
They're only allowed to do the things that advance U.S. foreign policy interest.
And we just put a little bow on top of it and we say, in the process, we're making the world a better place because it's going to these humanitarian groups who are administering this thing, which in the process will help U.S. foreign interest.
But the fact is, is the worst scandals in American statecraft.
In the 1960s and 70s and maybe early 80s were the CIA. In recent years, the worst scandals in American statecraft have been USAID, from funding the Wuhan lab to growing heroin in Afghanistan and irrigating the poppy fields, to setting up fake Twitter in Cuba with an explicit...
USAID document saying that the plan is to have algorithms favoring sports news and hurricane updates.
And then once we have enough people, switch to get them to hate their government and topple their government and take to the streets in smart riots.
To them even using public health HIV prevention clinics as undercover for USAID workers doing intelligence work.
To get people to overthrow their governments.
And this gets me to another point that I'd feel remiss if I didn't say because I've been thinking about it so long and haven't really had a venue to just kind of open say it.
Open and say everything that you want because this is the venue for it.
You recall how in 2011 the CIA was busted running a fake vaccine clinic in Pakistan.
Do you remember this?
Yeah, to find Osama bin Laden was their claim.
And they undercut all kinds of confidence for years.
That was the claim, was they wanted to register these people in the hope of getting connection with the population.
But it was a fake vaccine program.
Vaccine activists were angry because they had worked so hard to build confidence in vaccines.
And it turned out that it was a whole fake plan and designed to get the United States to get data on Pakistanis.
Yes, right.
Had nothing to do with David Petraeus' counterinsurgency manual calling to collect 85% of the country's biometrics.
Yeah, it was just a sound in line.
But the fact is, is they were caught flat busted in that situation with a fake vaccine drive, fake vaccine clinics.
And that was 2011. It took them 16 months to issue a written statement, a non-binding written statement that they would no longer use vaccination work or public health work or public health facilities.
to do intelligence work out of.
So we have a non-binding written statement from the CIA that took them 16 months of fighting it to issue to say that we will no longer use our public health facilities as a front for CIA work.
Well, given that USAID is CIA, there is no daylight between those two organizations.
That is why you see the likes of AOC and Chuck Schumer saying that If Elon Musk gets access to the highly classified documents at USAID HQ, it will put US national security at grave risk.
Well, what is a humanitarian aid NGO sponsor doing with so many troves of such highly classified state secrets that it will massively endanger all of US national security if somebody outside of USAID reads it?
That's the sort of thing that you typically would reserve for a CIA or NSA. We don't know that when CIA pledged to not use public health facilities for intelligence work,
that the baton wasn't just handed off to its identical twin cousin, USAID. And I have an open question.
When you look at the fact, for example, that HIV clinics in Cuba and the Western Hemisphere were being used by USAID as cover for color revolution work, formal cover.
In fact, in their own documents, they said that the HIV program would be the perfect excuse because Cuban counterintelligence would never think to look there.
Well, how many other public health facilities operated by USAID are doing the same thing in Africa?
South America, in Eastern Europe, in Central Asia.
And so I guess what I'm getting at here is turning over that level of scandal.
It's bad enough if Americans know it, but it becomes an international incident.
I mean, one of the things that I ran into at State, Glenn, which you might find interesting, is when we were trying to convince foreign countries to move off of Huawei.
Because it's backchanneled by the CCP and Chinese intelligence, we would get hit with a counterargument, well, you want us to use American IT architecture, but Snowden.
We read the Stone Files.
Yeah, that was part of the big story that we published was that they were, you know, backdooring that same technology.
At the same time, they were telling people not to use the Chinese companies because they were backdooring it.
We were backdooring.
In fact, we were intercepting the devices that people around the world ordered, opening devices the FBI was and putting in the technology that would allow us to backdoor that equipment.
And, of course, that created skepticism when we were trying to convince them not to use OI and other Chinese companies.
Right, right.
So the point that I'm driving at here is these things, the Snowden story, it's very easy to look at as an American.
And the concern that I think folks in the blob, folks in the national security complex and the international relations complex have is...
If only Americans learned how bad USAID was and what it was really doing, for example, if that story I just mentioned in Bangladesh, if Americans had full access to everything that USAID and its spindle groups were doing in all these other countries, that's one conversation.
That's bad enough but maybe tolerable.
But the problem is when other countries learn about this, it becomes a diplomatic incident.
It becomes something that harms our standing with partnered nations and it makes neutrals want to turn to Russia and China instead of the United States because we look like the bad guy.
It harms our standing at the UN. It allows foreign countries who may be hostile or neutral to us to hold up these scandals in front of the UN and move international favor against the US. Which then can have trickle-down effects on our national security, our economic engagements in various countries.
It can sever trust in countries that we're trying to court.
And that then harms the economic interests of all the different private sector companies who draft behind the battering ram of American statecraft.
Everything from the tech companies to the oil companies.
You name it.
Let me ask you about that, though, because that, I think, is central to this whole discussion.
I mean, first of all, I think there's a lot of recognition of what the real function of NED is and USAID is outside of the United States.
In fact, Russia expelled USAID because Hillary Clinton's State Department was funding...
All those agitations and anti-Putin protest movements on the street.
But then even just over the last couple of days, you have the president of El Salvador, who's pretty much tied to the international populist right, saying nobody wants U.S. aid in our countries.
It just destabilizes it.
It's designed to divide, as you were saying.
But then you have the president of Mexico, who's very much on the left, saying pretty much the same thing.
That these, you know, are not here to help.
They're quite the opposite.
So you, in some way, I think it's almost reversed.
It's like the world knows this.
It's Americans that don't.
But, and that's true of so many things.
But what I want to ask you is, let me just ask you about the defense of people who defend USAID, including all these congressional Democrats who are marching in front of there as though they were defending something noble, the CIA front.
That's what the Democratic Party is now.
They would say, and I think defenders of the blob, the people on the blob would say, if you don't exert this influence in these other countries, especially with the pretense of helping, you know, we're building an irrigation system for you, we're doing this, we're doing that, even though we have ulterior motives, if we withdraw from that, if we defund that, China is just going to go in and do it, or the Russians will do it, or the Iranians will do it, and we will end up harming ourselves.
What about that argument?
No, there's a lot here, and fundamentally, my hesitation in responding is because I don't know exactly what's motivating the high-level thinking on this, because the answer to that question depends on what happens next.
because technically USAID HQ is set to shut down if Trump and Musk went on this.
But the plan is to fold it under the State Department.
And I posted this on X just a little bit ago, but the fundamental thrust of it was killing USAID does not end USAID.
Killing U.S. aid as an organization does not end U.S. aid as a function.
The State Department is now inheriting USAID's portfolio.
So USAID is essentially going to be, you know, the State Department is basically going to inherit a, I think I used the phrase, USAID herpes complex attached.
It's basically going to be State Department with USAID herpes attached now, unless the actual programs are cut.
The grants are cut.
In a sense, you know, I was joking to a friend earlier, sort of lovingly tongue-in-cheek, but that, you know, maybe—I was joking that—I don't really mean this, but, you know, that maybe this whole thing was Marco Rubio's idea so that he could, you know, be the most powerful secretary of state in modern history, running not just the State Department, but USAID as well.
Well, let me stop you there for a second, because I don't know if you saw this, but we have Rubio.
Answering reporters' questions about how he's now the acting director of USAID. And here's what he has, Sam, interested in in your reaction to that.
Let's go ahead and play that.
USAID, what's happening at USAID and how does that affect the country?
Well, look, I mean, my frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress.
It's a completely unresponsive agency.
It's supposed to respond to policy directives of the State Department, and it refuses to do so.
So the functions of USAID, there are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue that are going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American I said very clearly, during my confirmation hearing, that every dollar we spend and every program we fund, that will be aligned with the national interest of the United States.
And USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that and deciding that they're somehow a global charity separate from the national interest.
These are taxpayer dollars.
I'm very troubled by these reports that they've been unwilling to cooperate with people who are asking simple questions about what does this program do?
Who gets the money?
Who are our contractors?
Who's funded?
And that sort of level of insubordination makes it impossible to conduct the sort of mature and serious review that I think 4&A writ large should have.
We're spending taxpayer money here.
These are not donor dollars.
These are taxpayer dollars.
And we owe the American people.
The assurance is that every dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interest.
And so far, a lot of the people that work at USAID have just simply refused to cooperate.
So what is your reaction to that?
I don't know how well you can hear, but that gets to the thing that I was worried about, which is what they're really after here are the things that just don't matter.
You know, the actual just sort of like charitable stuff that some ideologue inside USA decided to fund, but that they do want to continue.
The kinds of programs you were describing that in their minds do advance U.S. interests in a way that might involve bringing divisiveness to various countries.
Although then again, if you listen to other things Marco Rubio is saying, he does seem to think we're overextended and over-involved in the world.
So I'm just kind of curious what your reaction to his perception is.
Well, I don't think USAID is ideological at all.
I actually think they are the most...
Cold, calculating, ideologically agnostic organization in the U.S. federal government.
And to what Marco Rubio said there, that's the reason you park it at USAID. It's because what if the in-power administration at the State Department doesn't want something to be done or has a slightly different opinion on it?
USAID allows basically a A rogue group within the intelligence community to continue to carry out operations under the banner of being totally independent and silent away.
But I will note that under the Biden administration, before the major falling out towards the end with Kamala Harris and the sort of DNC Civil War, that broke up what was a total party unanimity with the whip hand in Congress holding Congress.
Congressional Democrats is a total bloc, as well as at the executive level.
But if folks recall, USAID was born in the early 1960s, 1961, 62. It was never on the National Security Council until just three years ago under Joe Biden.
Joe Biden considered USAID to be so important that he put Samantha Powers on the National Security Council.
You know, to directly coordinate, you know, CIA and State Department interagency activity.
And so the point that I'm getting at here is there has long been a fight between the CIA and Congress over oversight.
This was the heart, for example, of the start of Bill Barr's career when he started his career in the CIA and went to Knight Law School while working at the CIA and then as First real substantive CIA job was as the CIA's liaison to Congress to block congressional investigations into CIA malfeasance during Iran-Contra during the early Reagan years.
The CIA gives out internal awards around operational security, and there's weird histories with some of that involving obfuscating congressional efforts to actually get access and oversight.
To the CIA, even on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
So USAID is able to block that out.
USAID is basically doing the same sort of obfuscations that the CIA used to do, but USAID is where the operations of CIA happen.
CIA mostly plays the liaison role for operations, but they have no assets to play with unless USAID capacity built them.
Yeah, I think what all this reveals, at least as much as anything, is precisely the fact that there is a massive part of our federal government that operates completely unto itself.
They perceive their entitlement as operating outside of democratic accountability.
And the fact that they are so resistant to any control by the executive branch, to any control by the State Department, that the Democratic Party acts as though this is some grave assault on the national interest to put them inside the State Department when they're getting...
Operating as an arm of the federal government anyway.
I think it really reveals the fact that not only is there this deep state that has been there to resist Donald Trump and the outcome of the election, but also partnering with the Democratic Party to do it.
And whatever Elon Musk's motives are, and I'm not sure how well thought out they are at this point, but whatever they are, anything that just kind of crushes that structure and starts bringing it out into the spotlight.
And letting people understand what it really is and how it functions, I consider to be a positive thing.
And your work has been as instrumental as anyone's in helping people understand that.
So I'm so thrilled that we finally have you on the show.
It's been something we've been talking about for a while.
Just sometimes you need to wait for the right moment.
