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Nov. 23, 2021 - Sebastian Gorka
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Sebastian Gorka LIVE | Part 2: Will Kyle Rittenhouse sue Joe Biden?
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combat soldiers in all the United States was the eye-opening experience of my life, even more so, I think, than seeing my father recover from terrible wounds from the invasion of Cambodia.
Huge man, 6'2", 240, which today is not even a quarterback, but in 1970, it's a big man.
And after a year in an army hospital, he came back weighing about 125, 130 pounds.
And the only thing that kept him in the army was the good graces of a real leader, General Creighton Abrams, who overruled the medical board and said, no, we're going to give this officer an opportunity to recover, which is why he went to England and served there. - which is why he went to England and served there. -
And when you think of the disparity or the geopolitical trends since 1790 today, when America disengages, and you know very well our former boss President Trump is not an interventionist, but when we withdraw from the world or when we show weakness, That breeds contempt, does it not, and creates a dangerous world for all democracy lovers.
It absolutely does, because the bad guys fill the vacuum.
And this is not a new phenomenon.
Harry Truman confronted it back in 1946, when he filled the gap that the retreating British Empire had left open in the Eastern Mediterranean.
And he realized that America could not remain passive.
That there was a force out there that combined the power of extreme nationalism plus a messianic message that communism was the wave of the future.
And he responded with, of course, the Truman Doctrine that we would support all entities, all forces opposing communism.
And then the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe and really became the first of many steps in containing the Soviet Union.
Discuss, if you will, for those who aren't familiar with your very intriguing career path, because I'm just looking at your bio.
It's not just a colonel in the Air Force Reserves, not just former Secretary of Veterans Affairs, but it lists U.S.
Naval Reserve, NSC, and the Office of Naval Intelligence.
So you've had a rather peripatetic career.
Are you a man who just wanted to experience as much as possible?
Just like you.
I know, but for me that's normal.
For a lot of people it isn't.
Absolutely.
To be able to do as much as possible, to experience as much as possible.
I've been blessed.
I've worked for some of the most important people in this country, starting with Senator Helms, who I think most people would agree after Ronald Reagan was the most important conservative leader of the seventies and eighties.
He brought me here and then to work for Senator Lott, Dr. Rice, Steve Hadley, Gates, Rumsfeld.
Learned a lot from them and just been very fortunate My career path and so grateful to President Trump for first bringing me to the Pentagon and then, out of the blue, asking me to go to Veterans Affairs.
Was that a hard decision to step once more into the arena at such a high level?
It's not a hard decision when the President of the United States asks.
You always say yes.
And you have many instances in American history.
I guess the most famous being General Marshall.
Uh, who wanted to retire.
Yeah.
But Harry Truman wouldn't let him and made him Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense after that.
Um, so when President Trump asked me, he said, uh, I have a vision for reform of Veterans Affairs.
It had been the dysfunctional family picnic under Obama Biden.
It had, uh.
Well, for far too long.
Yes.
Far too long.
Yeah.
And, uh, we inherited, uh, an organization that had people dying in the hallways.
The approval rating, according to CNN, not us, was 37% when we left.
The approval rating was 91% for Veterans Health.
And we were able to send millions and millions of veterans into the private sector.
One of the imperatives for President Trump was to make sure that we We applied free market principles to a government agency, and that meant choice.
To make veterans the center of their health care, not the institution.
And I am sad to say that I think that this administration is going back on that.
Everything I hear, they are discouraging veterans from going into the private sector.
And we see that cycle from Obama-Biden beginning to play again.
Well, thank you for saying yes, and thank you for taking on a task that would have daunted lesser men.
We're talking to the former Secretary of Veterans Affairs, a colonel in the U.S.
Air Force Reserves, Robert Wilkie, distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, joined the Conservative Mothership today.
That's heritage.org, the organization fighting for the principles upon which our nation was founded.
The End
Let me quote to you somebody who I deem to be one of the few Few living strategists today.
I think there's maybe six or seven men who deserve the name of strategists.
VDH is one of them, Martin von Krefeld, and then Ed Luttwak.
Ed Luttwak came to where I was teaching, National Defense University at Fort McNair, when I was a DoD civilian, a professor there.
And he was introducing his new book on the strategy of the Byzantine Empire.
Fascinating, because it's an empire that should have lasted about three weeks and lasted 800 years.
So there was something interesting about their sense of grand strategy.
And that was his addendum to the grand strategy of the Roman Empire.
Yes, exactly, which came out before that.
And fabulous, iconoclastic presentation, as is Ed's usual performance.
And I got to ask the first question in the Q&A.
And I say this as an American who thinks America is the greatest nation on God's Earth.
And I said, what do you say, Professor Luttwak, to those who say that America is really a-strategic?
It really does not function and act strategically and hasn't done so since about Reagan and the end of the war?
Classic Ed Luttwak response in front of this audience, National War College's beautiful buildings.
Well, what is the point of being a superpower if you can't be stupid?
So, is there not some great irony to the bigger and stronger we are, we seem to make Worse and worse.
I mean, we look at the last 20 years in Afghanistan.
We look at Iraq.
We look at this idea that we had administrations that denied the relevance of religion when trying to understand a group that saw themselves as jihadis.
We look at very small nations, not powerful nations like Israel, Switzerland, which don't have the luxury of making mistakes because otherwise They disappear.
So, are we caught in a paradox that we have so much capacity, we don't think right?
Well, we fall back on what Bismarck said about the United States of America after he was dismissed by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
He said, there's one thing in the world that God protects fools, drunkards in the United States of America.
We have had so much power that other than Nixon and Reagan at the presidential level in the post-World War II world, we really haven't had anyone who can look at a map and say, these are the moves we have to make on the chessboard.
We've had the luxury of having rather sclerotic opponent.
We've had so much wealth and so much power that we could have a haphazard approach to the world, otherwise known as Obama's "don't do stupid stuff." But now we are faced with, I would argue, the most formidable power that this country has ever faced, and more formidable than Nazi Germany, and more formidable than the Soviet Union.
A country with, again, a messianic view of where it needs to be in the world.
It is very open about desiring to destroy this nation.
All you have to do is look at the daily ruminations of the People's Liberation Daily.
Whereas our press secretary at the White House says we're in a competition, the People's Liberation Daily says we are at war.
And the difference between this power and the Soviet power is that there's an economic component to this that the Soviets never possessed.
and an ability of the regime in Beijing to buy people off in the way that the Soviets never did, and to confront us on multiple flanks.
The Soviets in the 70s were rampaging through Africa with their Cuban proxies, but they were also watching the Middle East slip from their grasp.
The Chinese are on the offensive in Central America, in South America, in Africa, and certainly within the confines of the Asian literal.
And they are probing.
And right now, we certainly don't have a response, a cohesive worldview, and it's not complicated.
Thomas Jefferson laid the ground when he sent the entire United States Navy to the Mediterranean to knock off the Barbary pirates.
America is for a liberal world order, little l, and in order to preserve that order, we preserve the global, global commons.
And right now, the most important of the global commons goes right through the Pacific.
If you're not familiar with that story and why the Shores of Tripoli are part of the Marine Corps Anthem, it's one of the case studies in my second book, Why We Fight, Defeating America's Enemies With No Apologies.
There's a reason that Stephen Courtois was made the youngest naval captain in U.S.
history, actually, by Thomas Jefferson because of that incredible operation.
I consider it the first special operations mission of the U.S.
Marine Corps to recapture our ships from the Barbary pirates.
You can get that at our store, sebgorkastore.com.
That's S-E-B-G-O-R-K-A, sebgorkastore.com.
You say this shocking statement, which I concur with since my time in the White House, that China is more dangerous than prior peer competitors and enemies we have faced.
Is a part of that That they're really good at strategy.
Having spent five and a half years in the DoD teaching, then two and a half years at Quantico with the Marines, I see a lack of historic context or understanding.
And I see a paucity of... You could study, when I was a professor, lots of courses on Kosovo and peacekeeping and even Thucydides.
But there was nary a course on Iranian strategy or Chinese strategy.
Why do they have that greater sense?
Is it simply because they're a dictatorship or simply because of the age of their civilization?
And Nixon said it.
He said when trying to divine and lead American foreign policy, he said his biggest handicap was that Americans tend to think in terms of five years.
The Chinese think in terms of thousands of years.
And that really is the great difference.
And I wanted to read, we've been here before.
And you have on your shelf the memoirs of America's greatest diplomat, George Kennan.
And on February 22, 1946, he raised the alarm.
He warned America that the World War II blinkers had to come off, that we were facing a threat unlike any other up to that time.
And he said that we have here a political force committed fanatically To the belief that with the United States there can be no permanent modus viviendi.
That it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, and the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.
That led to 50 years of containment of Soviet power.
If you substitute China for that, It's the same argument.
We have incredible levers of power.
Before we use them, we have to create a picture of what it is we need to do, and that is to go back to Jefferson.
We protect the global commons, and that means now, not just the sea lanes around Taiwan, or Korea, or Japan, or Vietnam.
That means cyber Yeah.
In space.
Cyber in space.
In all dimensions.
I'm so glad you mentioned George Kennan.
It's as if we're having a Vulcan mind meld.
I'll give you my take on how that applies today.
I'll give you my take on how that applies today.
I'll give you my take on how that applies today.
I'll give you my take on how that applies today.
I'll give you my take on how that applies today.
I'll give you my take on how that applies today.
I'll give you my take on how that applies today.
I'll give you my take on how that applies today.
I'll give you my take on how that applies today.
I'll give you my take on how that
applies today. - We have a need, I think, for iconoclasts, because Kennan wasn't your run-of-the-mill diplomat.
This is an individual who'd studied Russia, Tsarist Russia, then Communist Russia.
His boss, Avril Harriman, was away on holiday on the Christmas break.
The request comes from, I think it was actually the Treasury.
The Treasury cabled him in Moscow, cabled the embassy and said, what's going on with Uncle Joe?
We don't understand him.
He was our ally.
And then Kennan sees this moment.
He grabs the opportunity, sits down, writes that 14-page classified telegram.
Which, I'm sorry, most diplomats would be afraid to do that in the standard structure.
How much do we need what VDH, Victor Davis Hanson, has called the Ajaxes, the iconoclasts, the marshals, the patents, who the system and the bureaucracy detests, but when the threat is existential, these are the people who save civilization.
Isn't that always the case?
Well that's right and sadly, and I'll speak to the Pentagon today, we don't have that.
We have politicized the senior officer corps to such an extent.
You have been a herald on this and one of my favorite stories from your experience is teaching future generals at the National War College about strategy and America's place in the world.
And when you gave them a problem, 90% of them came back with climate change is the answer to the greatest threat.
The number one threat.
So that is our greatest problem, certainly in the military.
Now, you've served in uniform.
You've served out of uniform.
You've served at a cabinet level.
Given your experience over decades, I have to ask you, because I'm an immigrant, a legal immigrant.
I only moved here 13 years ago.
When did the rot set in?
That story I told you was 05s, 06s, who were working in the Obama administration.
Is it older than that?
Can you see a point at which the politicization of the flag officer corps?
Well, let's go back in history, and I'll give my father as an example.
Incredibly decorated combat soldier.
He could have an entire career on the Central Street at Fort Bragg, on Ardennes Street.
Change the beret, change the assignment.
In those days, the ethos among the officer corps was, we do everything we can to stay away from Washington.
We don't want to pour martinis at the White House.
Or go to diplomatic functions.
Or go to diplomatic functions.
We want to be with troops.
When the Soviet Union was the threat, that was the ethos.
I really think the rot started to set in.
With Clinton.
And the use of the Armed Forces as a prop.
The use of senior officers to promote a political agenda.
And let's take a look at the history of the United States Armed Forces.
And the two most prominent military leaders of World War II.
Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall.
They never voted.
No one knew what their political views were until Eisenhower tells the world after he's the president of Columbia University, I'm going to run as a Republican.
They did everything they could to stay away from it and now it is viewed
as a ticket of advancement uh... and and i know many of these people and i'm not going to cast any personal aspersions but when you have the leadership of the armed forces talking about climate change and white supremacy white rage among white rage then we have crossed a river that we should never have crossed
And the sad thing about that is that these folks don't even know what makes the American military special.
And I'll give you a Colin Powell story, of all people, because you know this from your British citizenship.
Colin Powell once said that when his parents left Jamaica, if that ship had taken a right turn at New York City and gone to Southampton, The best he could have ever hoped for was to have been a regimental sergeant major.
Correct.
But it took a left turn.
And he rose through the ranks in this land of opportunity.
The military is the great leveler in our society.
It doesn't matter what you look like or where you came from.
If you perform just like professional athletics, you are accepted.
And this particular leadership coming out of this White House has denied that very central fact of American military life and on top of the political pressures put on the senior leaders.
This is a combustible mix that I'm sure they are laughing at Beijing and Tehran right now.
Yeah, they're laughing into their strategic coffee cups right now when they look at what's coming out of the White House and this NSC.
Do you believe that America is the greatest nation on God's Earth?
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The End
Let's talk about what you did, Robert, in the administration, the Veterans Administration.
How much of, I can talk about this until the cows come home, but how much of what you were able to do at the Veterans Administration was a function of what I call President Trump's utter disrespect for sacred cows.
The quickest way to anger the President was when he asked somebody, even I saw this with, you know, four-star generals, he said, why are we doing X?
And the response would be, well that's how we've been doing it for 20 years.
That was not a good answer in front of President Trump.
So we had been told that the VA is unfixable.
These are government employees, unfixable.
It's not true, is it, Robert?
It's not true.
And let me give the credit to the President.
He laid out the strategic vision.
Fix it.
Make veterans the centerpiece of the institution, not the institution as the centerpiece.
And he gave me everything that I wanted.
And we had to break a lot of glass.
A lot of glass that people thought sacrosanct.
If we had listened to the professional class in this town, and they opposed all of our reforms, or they were silent, we would have been right where Obama Biden was.
And what struck me is that in this town, The American soldier, particularly by the left, is portrayed as a victim and someone worthy of pity.
Instead of an American who worn the uniform when it was not mandatory, volunteer for the most part.
You know, that Vietnam generation sadly is getting smaller every day.
That was the last of the conscript military.
Um, and proceeded from there, that the function of VA was not what General Omar Bradley, the most famous leader of VA said, which was to make a veteran whole and return him to civilian life as if he had not been in the service.
It was to create an environment where the most important things were checks coming from the government and a system that did not reward those who had been wounded in combat.
I'll give you an example.
A friend of yours, Dan Crenshaw, he lost an eye and he's lost almost about half of the use of his good eye.
Under the VA construct, that's a 30% disability rating, whereas someone who's been out of the military a long time and has sleep apnea, that's a 50% disability rating.
What?
And that's something that's correctable.
I mean, you could treat that.
And when I said, issued a directive with the president's full support, that if you have a purple heart, and this was the easiest way to discern people's status within the military, when they go to the top of the line, The first in line.
The Howells.
So that was something that you started?
Right.
And people objected to purple heart holders?
The professional classes.
Right.
Because the line was all veterans are equal.
Now, I'm not equal to my father.
My father had a chest full of medals.
I'm a staff officer.
My service is modest.
But the original purpose, as laid out by President Lincoln in his second inaugural was to make sure that we return veterans to society as whole as possible.
And the other thing that we did was that we put people in charge who had vast military experience, people who understood the culture and the language, and we were able to get around the entrenched… Bureaucronic roadblocks.
Right.
So I have to ask you, because I believe in any organization that is decrepit, misfunctioning or what have you, it is the first few hours and days that matter.
Can you give us an anecdote or tell us what was the indicator?
How did you tell people, new boss, new president, new secretary, what we're doing is no longer acceptable?
Well, it was very much a Reagan-esque approach that Trump knew instinctively.
As someone who sits at the pinnacle of power, if you are involved in the day-to-day business of handing out very particular and complicated missives, you have lost the ghost.
The general should never be tactical.
Absolutely.
My job was to create strategic guidance and give people the opportunity at all levels to carry out that vision.
And I'll tell you the other thing that we did.
We implemented a program that in your library you have the biography of one of America's greatest airmen, Curtis LeMay.
Curtis LeMay inherits strategic air command.
And he says, okay, let's kick the tires.
I have 1200 planes.
We're going to sortie to seven fictional targets in Canada.
Of those 1,200 planes, only 100 got off the ground, and only seven reached the target.
This is in 1946.
And a lot of people lost their jobs because of that.
But once they did, LeMay set out a course, here's what we do.
And we do this by involving everyone in the decision-making process.
So what does that mean?
Let's take a B-52 squadron at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
They meet on Tuesday.
You've got the squadron commander, the XO, the engineer, the senior pilot, the logisticians, the intelligence guys.
And they go over what went on Monday.
Not necessarily what went right, but what didn't go right.
And people have an input in that.
Um, we, we implemented what we call the just culture.
So everyone from the custodial staff up to the surgical staff was meeting every day to determine how do we do this better?
But the other hammer, the hammer that Trump gave me was I could dismiss people.
I'm going to have to ask you that, the details of that, because that's what the mainstream media has told us is impossible with government employees.
They don't need unions, but they're just carved in stone.
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This is one-on-one with our special guest, former Secretary of the Veterans Affairs, Robert Wilkie.
From this day forward, it's going to be only America first!
From this day forward, it's going to be only America first.
America first.
Thank you.
And heck, I don't think many Prussians understood Klaus Witts.
But the centerpiece has to be, I think, the starting point, not just the centerpiece.
It's the unique position of the United States in the world that we represent a continuum that goes back to what the great conservative mind Russell Kirk said.
Four great capitals, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and London.
Those places and those people who gave us the ultimate expression of freedom which is what we have in the United States today.
And I don't think we understand our place in that continuum.
People like Dwight Eisenhower did.
They certainly understood the unique nature of this.
And I would also add, Dr. Gorka, I think we need to allow people, as Eisenhower was permitted, to study longer.
Yes.
Not just the perfunctory check the box, but make it more rigorous.
I've graduated from the Army War College and Naval Special Warfare Intelligence course and Air and Staff College.
We need to redirect, but the most important thing is reducing the amount of staff here in D.C., getting these people back out to the troops, and that'll be a good start.
How long will it take?
It's going to take, well, it depends on the leadership.
If you have the requisite leadership.
Oh, I think, I think you could start turning this ship around just as we did at VA almost immediately.
Fabulous.
All right.
You are clearly an exceptionally well-read individual.
I'd like to leave our listeners with one question.
If they have, listening to us, listening to you, been bitten by the bug of grand strategy, I've mentioned a few people, you've mentioned a few, such as Russell Kirk, I've mentioned Luttwak, I'm a big fan of Victor Davis Hanson, Colin Gray.
Who do you recommend as a good starting point?
If you're getting into this stuff, you're a bit, the grand strategy bug has bitten you, where should you begin?
Well I'm gonna go in a different direction.
Because I mentioned grounding oneself in the continuum of Western civilization.
You've mentioned all the great, the only ones you haven't mentioned are Sir Julian Corbett and Halford Mackinder, who really set the stage for Britain's transfer to America of the mantle of global leadership.
But the history of the English-speaking people.
But not just that one, but also our friend Andrew Roberts' addendum to that.
So you're a fan of his... Yes.
We actually spoke last week and I've quoted him several times in my analysis of what damage President Biden has done to the US-UK relationship.
Larry Arnn as his official historian?
Yes, that's right.
And I think that is the most important thing.
Before you get to grand strategy... You've got to understand the civilization.
You have to do that.
You have to do that.
God bless.
Well, I could go on for hours.
I better stop now because there's another show that has to take the airwaves instead of this one.
But it's been a distinct pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for what you do.
Secretary Wilkie, God bless.
And you.
This has been One on One on America First with me, your host Sebastian Gorka.
Former strategist to President Trump.
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