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Aug. 27, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
01:39:50
Daily Wire Backstage: The Fall of the West
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Hey, Michael Knowles here.
The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, The Fall of the West, is right around the corner.
Don't miss me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and the God King Jeremy Boring as we discuss the unmitigated disaster that is Biden's handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and what that means for the West as a whole.
Take a listen.
Some days you can't even muster up a good fake laugh.
Welcome to The Daily Wire Backstage, the fall of the West.
I'm Jeremy Boring, joined today, of course, by Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and Ben Shapiro.
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Guys, only a short time ago the President of the United States came out and spoke about the horrific bombing which happened today in Kabul.
We don't know, of course, the exact death toll at the moment, but it seems like already 13 American servicemen Killed.
And the president's speech, I thought, was one of the more bizarre speeches I've ever seen by a president.
And I'm saying this in the year 2021.
So I want to get quick reaction.
I'm assuming everyone had the opportunity to review the president's speech.
Ben?
He is not sentient.
He is not capable.
He is not competent.
He came out.
He looked like a mental patient.
I mean, he really did.
He looked like he was barely awake.
He stumbled his way through a bizarre seven or eight minute speech that contradicted itself about seven different times.
He tried to rely very heavily on the I'm empathetic Joe routine.
But the minute that the questions began, all of that went out the window and he became combative Joe.
He had nothing of merit to say.
He has no defense for his policies because his policies are garbage.
And most of all, if you are an American enemy watching the president of the United States on the same day that 13 American soldiers are killed, 12 of the Marines.
And you're watching as the United States turns tail and runs, leaving a thousand plus American citizens behind in Kabul, plus an unspecified number of thousands of American green card holders, plus hundreds of thousands of people who will immediately be slaughtered by the Taliban.
And as it turns out.
The United States government handed a list to the Taliban of all the people we wanted to evacuate so they know precisely who to kill.
By the way, this is just in Kabul.
There are Americans all throughout the country we aren't even talking about.
Yeah, that's right.
If you're watching this as an enemy of the United States, and then you watch this addled, old, feeble-minded man walk out and barely make it through a sentence, you're thinking, you're like Homer Simpson with a hamburger right now.
Now, Osama bin Laden said in 98, 99, after bombing Kenya and Tanzania, the embassy's there, and after the mild response from the Clinton administration, he said, America's a paper tiger.
I don't know how, if you're an enemy of the United States, watching what has happened over the course of the last month, you can't look at the United States and say, that is a nation that I can do anything I want to.
This is a nation that is ripe for a fall, and this president is ready to let it happen.
Drew, not unfair what Ben's saying.
I mean, the president literally said twice, at least in the speech, that some Americans would be left behind after the August 31st.
You know, I've been struck.
All of this, I agree with everything Ben just said.
I mean, the absolute disability of the guy.
The guy's a walking dementia case, and it's very painful.
It's painful to watch.
I wish I could even feel some schadenfreude because he's in the opposite party to mine, but I don't.
No, he's still our president.
He's still our president, and that really is disturbing me.
But all throughout this, I have been...
Deeply struck by his emotional detachment from the tragedy that he has, and he alone, has brought upon this country.
Because it doesn't matter what you think of the foreign policy, where you think we should stay, where you think we should go.
This was one of the deepest...
I can't even use the word incompetent.
That's too kind.
It was a criminally...
Cavalier.
Cavalier and incompetent.
And the detachment from responsibility that he evokes, the jokes that he makes when people say, how are you going to get other people out?
And he says, well, you'll be the first person I call.
Ha, ha, ha.
And what really bothers me about this more than anything is not what it says about him.
I feel that he actually represents a large swath of the Democratic political class that they don't care about what's happening overseas.
They don't care about our foreign policy.
They don't care about the way we look.
To other people, they are so deeply concerned with transforming us into a woke, socialist, you know, European-style democracy that they really don't think that we should be meddling anywhere in the world because meddling in the world is what great nations do.
War is what great nations do.
Imperial placements in various places is what great nations do.
They have to do it.
They have to do it because they become responsible for the rest of the world and they just don't.
Don't care.
And I think that in that sense, at least, he is the head of his party.
He does represent what his party thinks.
When you have Nancy Pelosi making speeches about how proud she is of a budget-busting $3.5 trillion plan to transform our economy, and she's making those speeches while people are throwing their babies over the barbed wire, and she's saying this is a proud day for America, while they're throwing their babies over.
I have to say that the one thing you have to say about Joe Biden is he does represent the party that he leads.
I think as far as Joe Biden himself goes, I thought the most profound moment of that press conference, profound in all the wrong ways, was the visual.
A lot of times with Joe Biden now, there's the visual.
First, it's just...
Not to make too much of the body language part of it, but just looking into his eyes, you see a sort of emptiness there, like he doesn't exactly know what's going on.
But there was one moment where he's clutching onto his folder and then he ducks his head down in just exasperation, like he's giving up in the middle of the press conference because he's getting a little bit of pushback from Peter Doocy.
And I thought that perfectly exemplifies Joe Biden's presidency.
And then in the broader question, not to jump right into a debate here, but picking up what Drew said...
That our leaders are woke and leftist, and that's why they don't want to meddle in the world.
I also think I agree with you, but that's also one of the big reasons why I don't want them to be meddling in the world.
It's one of the big reasons why I actually think that leaving Afghanistan was the right thing to do, although executed in a horribly incompetent way.
But when I think about a pride flag hanging in Kabul, these are people who, even if I agreed that Having an empire overseas and being an empire and pursuing our imperial ambitions was a good idea.
In principle, what I know is that these people are not capable of doing it and what they want to export is not what I want to see exported by the United States of America.
I find it shameful and embarrassing.
I have been, I think, as charitable as I can be to Joe Biden.
I think I've been as charitable as anybody on the center or the right of the political aisle.
I have not blamed him for problems that I think were many years in the making that were not his.
I have not even blamed him that there was some chaos or that there would even be some violence in a withdrawal from Afghanistan that both parties have been campaigning on for a long time now.
However...
There needs to be a basic level of competence.
There needs to be a basic level of engagement.
It is simply, I think, even if you're a leftist, even if you're a Democrat, you have to acknowledge that there were really basic things that Biden could have done that would have greatly mitigated the risk, that would have greatly mitigated the violence.
And what is happening now in Afghanistan is largely on him.
I am sympathetic, as Matt says, I am sympathetic to the arguments for withdrawing, and actually I'm sympathetic to those specific arguments, as I outlined in a long column, which I thought was fair-minded about this whole thing.
Watching that speech tonight, I think it may have been the worst presidential address I've ever seen.
He just wasn't there.
He was cavalier.
He was showing the world that America is inviting aggression from everyone else.
It was pathetic.
It was pathetic.
We should note that the president didn't come on stage for almost 25 minutes late, which this isn't an appointment you want to miss, right, when the president of the United States addresses the nation about the loss of our service members overseas in the middle of a crisis.
He was boastful about the size of the airlifts and how many Americans have been withdrawn, which is A classic thing that happens with incompetence is that they create crises, and then they want credit for the heroic actions that they take to mitigate the crisis that they themselves created.
The dynamite below the waterline of the Titanic blew it open, and then he's like, look how many people we put on the lifeboats.
Guinness Book of World Records.
Unbelievable.
And then the president had this bizarre moment, which I think we can play.
Basically, he said you squarely stand by your decision to pull out...
Yes, I do.
Because look at it this way, folks.
And I have another meaning, for real.
The president had another meeting.
For real.
For real.
He's not lying this time.
No, no, no.
Not like all the other times.
I looked at a timeline of what this administration has been saying since April.
Yeah.
And they have not said a true word since April.
No, of course.
In April, the president of the United States said that we would pull out in a considered fashion, that we would do so in a rational fashion that would not pose a danger to the Afghan people or to the United States.
That was a lie.
In July, he said this would not be like South Vietnam.
Yeah.
Like Saigon.
That was not only a lie, it was a lie by multiples because when we pulled out, you can at least say that the Viet Cong, for all of their evils, and there were many of them, had not actually attacked the United States homeland and killed 3,000 Americans in the process.
He said on the 18th that nobody had died, knock on wood.
He said that the airport was safe.
He said that the Taliban were working with us.
He's just a damned liar.
They have lied all the way through this process.
And so when I look at the failures here, I think there's three levels of failure.
I think that most of us in the room will agree on two of them, and we'll probably disagree on the third.
The first level of failure is the tactical.
I think it is impossible to disagree that the tactical failure here is epic and immense.
And the fact here is that every single person in the no-no's, you do not evacuate the troops before you evacuate the citizenry.
You cannot do that.
That is idiotic.
That is defund the police, except on a global scale.
That's leaving the place to the criminals.
You don't.
You don't give up the air base before the airline.
Right.
You don't evacuate Bagram Air Base and restrict yourself to Kabul International Airport, which is one runway with no actual buffer zone.
Like, you have to be a complete and utter ass to do this.
Joe Biden doesn't care, so he doesn't care.
I mean, that's really what this comes down to.
There's no empathy from Joe Biden.
And his empathy extends to he does not care about what happens here.
He's made his decision and damned the consequences.
So the tactical nature of this is idiotic.
The notion that the Afghan military collapsed because they were all cowards, they took on 50,000 casualties, 50,000 dead between 2015 and 2021.
The United States in that same period took on less than 100 dead.
So they were shouldering the burden.
The reason they collapsed is because Joe Biden decided that not only were we going to withdraw our troops, which you can make an argument about, We were also going to withdraw our close air support.
We were going to withdraw all of the civilian contractors who maintained their own air force.
So they could not even fly missions in the air, which was their chief tactical advantage against the Taliban in outlying areas.
So immediately, the U.S. says, we're gone, we're taking everything with us, and they disband.
They're gone.
Okay, so all the tactical failures, I think, are pretty obvious and easy to spot.
Then there's the moral failure.
When you make promises to people and then you botch the promises, no ally in the future has any business trusting us.
I do not know why our allies would trust us.
I don't know why if you make promises to people, we've screwed the Kurds, we've screwed the people of Hong Kong, we've screwed the people of Afghanistan.
We've screwed the people of Vietnam.
How many more people can we screw before all of our allies start to look at us and say, you know what, I think I'm going to triangulate a little bit here and see what I can get out of Russia and China.
The one lie you left out, by the way, is the lie that somehow our allies are all on board with the parliament of Britain, of Great Britain, our only real friend in the world besides maybe Israel.
They're actually holding our president in contempt.
And then on the same moral level, Joe Biden keeps saying that we went there to stop al-Qaeda and prevent this from becoming a terror haven.
I've noticed a few terrorists in Kabul lately.
I don't know about you guys, but I've noticed like a few, like the Haqqani Network that's actually running security in Kabul, which is al-Qaeda.
And ISIS, which is there, and the Taliban, who, like, last time we trusted the Taliban to stop terror, it ended with a couple of buildings falling down in New York, you may recall.
So, like, on that level, it's just asinine.
I would have to, I agree with most of what you said, but when it comes to the Afghan army, and this is really almost irrelevant to what happened today, because as you point out, I mean, this is just a total tactical failure in terms of getting people out.
And I mean, the fact that we have our troops there facilitating the evacuation of just masses of Afghans, many of them citizens, and we don't know if they helped us or not.
I mean, it's hard to believe that they're all interpreters or whatever.
So there's just no plan in place, which is disgraceful and insane.
But as far as the Afghan army goes, I mean, I understand the point that the air support was taken away.
The Taliban didn't have any air support.
What we're told, anyway, is that the Afghan troops outnumbered the Taliban by 3 to 1.
They supposedly had 300,000 strong versus less than 100,000.
Now, I can understand when they're training to have the air support and they don't have it, that that's a huge disadvantage that they have to...
But you would think that as a military defending your nation, you would try to accommodate it rather than just give up in two days, which is exactly what they seem to do.
I don't think we could put all the blame on the Afghan army like Joe Biden wants to do, but to absolve them of all blame, I think, isn't fair.
It's pretty hard to think.
The one thing the Afghanis are good at is fighting, and I really don't think that this is a failure of the Afghan army.
I think it's a failure.
You have to remember the Taliban...
They blend in with the people.
They terrify the people.
The warlords, who the armies were hoping would fight for them in the villages, immediately surrendered because their people are, you know, basically in the villages, the people are afraid of the Taliban.
They will welcome them back.
They're also fighting Pakistan.
Pakistan's Secret Service, which is mostly Islamist, is backing them and has been backing them to their health.
I don't really believe, I've never seen the Afghani fighters give up on anything.
They're a tough bunch.
If you talk to the people that have been over there in our military training the Afghan army, Almost everything I've heard from people that have been in that position, and I've heard, I'm sure we all have talked to quite a few, they'll tell you that it's very difficult because, you know, very often they're there sort of on a mercenary basis.
If they don't get paid, they don't want to show up.
There's a big problem with drugs, huge problem.
And just talking to people that have been in the position of training, what I've been told is that A lot of the soldiers they're training just don't seem all that interesting.
Radical religiously based guerrilla armies tend to do pretty well against organizations that don't have a great hierarchical structure, for sure.
No question about that.
The question is whether they just sort of gave up and ran away.
When you structure an entire military around a certain style of warfare and then you just remove that style of warfare and you say we're leaving...
I agree with this, but the second point is also very important, which is the one thing that they understand in cultures like this is power dynamics.
And it's not short-term power dynamics.
good point.
It's long-term power dynamics.
People who I know who were there in 2015 when Barack Obama first gave his we're leaving speech said that almost to the day, within 24 hours, all of the green on blue, the friendly fire attacks started happening.
Immediately, all the village elders in any rural part of Afghanistan stopped cooperating with the United States military.
And when they would say, yeah, we've given you money, you We've been fighting on your behalf for years.
Why now?
You won't even talk to us.
You won't take our money.
You won't say anything.
Some of the soldiers have started shooting at us.
Why?
And the Afghan answer was, because you're leaving.
And when you are gone, it is only a matter of time before the long-term power dynamics of Iran on our border, of Pakistan on our border.
There's no question where this goes once you're gone.
And if you're not going to be the power center...
The people who are going to be the power center are people who will chop our heads off and rape our daughters.
Like, you can't leave us in a position of a power vacuum that we cannot ourselves fill.
The Afghan army, of course it's not a westernized army.
Of course it's not a sophisticated army.
Of course it's not a tremendously lethal army apart from American close air support, American logistics, American intelligence, which is a huge part of it.
Of course that's all true.
Since it's true, since we're not talking about people who only kill combatants, since if you're an Afghan soldier fighting the Taliban and your village falls, you may be fine, but they're going to rape your daughters and kill your sons.
In that situation, you've left them very little...
Given the realities of the society in which they live, you've given them very few options.
The point that they're a mercenary force is fair enough, but it is part of the failure of our strategy there.
It's not the Afghan army's failure.
I'm not a big fan of the Afghan culture, but still, we created a mercenary force because they had to be loyal to us instead of loyal to what they had been loyal to.
It's their tribal identity.
Right, and there is no real national identity.
Right, which brings us to the sort of geostrategic point, which is where I think the real conversation lies, which is, what were we doing there?
And I think there are points of agreement here, too.
Well, let's get back to why we were there, what were we doing there, because that's a pretty big question.
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So on the geostrategic point, I feel like there's places where we're all going to agree here, too.
And that is, number one, it's not the job of the United States to build democracies out of places that are not right for democracy.
Like, I think we're all on the same page there.
And I think that if you are going to seek to build regime stability, that is a very, very long-term process.
I mean, we currently have 26,000 troops in South Korea still.
And were we to pull our troops, they would immediately be, that country would immediately be under threat from North Korea and China sponsoring it.
We still have some 34,000 troops, 32,000 troops in Japan.
We still have some 10,000 troops in Italy so that we can have air power over northern Africa.
In fact, by the time we left Afghanistan, the number of troops that we had on the ground officially was 2,500.
That ranked at number nine in places on Earth where we had troops.
So the question is, what exactly were we there for?
And if the answer, which I think we all agree, was to kill terrorists and make sure this doesn't become another haven for terrorists...
Then the question becomes, so what was the dramatic urgency in pulling out, considering that we had been experiencing year on year fewer than 20 combat casualties and zero since February of 2020?
Well, I think the question of why we were there, we all might agree on why we would like to have been there or what we wish the reason were.
But I don't think that America was clear on that, because the argument that we were given in the early days of that war was we're going in there to kill Osama bin Laden and the people who were harboring the terrorists that took down the towers.
Then in 2005, at George Bush's second inaugural, the mission was redefined.
That was the freedom speech.
The word liberty or freedom or liberal was used 49 times in that speech.
And he made an audacious claim, and I think a ridiculous claim, which is that Tyranny anywhere on Earth is an existential threat to the American homeland.
This was a radical extreme of ways that we've thought of adventurism and spreading our ideas abroad.
It was obviously untrue, by the way, because not only do we tolerate certain authoritarian regimes, we've actually installed many authoritarian regimes that have never threatened us with so much as an insulting look.
This redefines the mission as building not only a Madisonian democracy in Afghanistan, but talk about a forever war.
Now, he said, we will abolish tyranny on Earth, which so long as man's nature has fallen, I don't think is going to happen and it will commit us to war forever.
So he redefined that.
he redefined that.
Then I think the American people got pretty sick of that in the years that followed.
Barack Obama famously campaigned actually to beef up troops in Afghanistan and to take troops out of Iraq to sort of restart the war there.
But then he wanted to pull the troops out there as well.
Then the mission Donald Trump runs on pulling the troops home, which was popular in both parties at the time.
Then Joe Biden obviously maintains that view.
Now we're told we have to stay there for the Afghan women who suffer a terrible plight and Nobody is denying that.
But women suffer a terrible plight in Pakistan as well.
This is not fair.
Saying that women suffer in other parts of the world is true enough.
The women suffering today in Afghanistan are suffering specifically because of an action that we've taken to withdraw our truth.
I think that's off his point, though.
His point, which is really fair, is that we live in a place where people vote.
And part of running a war is political.
You are dealing with people who have other things to do, like raise their children, do their jobs, and you have to be able to convince them that you're there for a reason.
And the reason in Afghanistan has repeatedly changed.
It has grown.
It's shrunk.
It has it's been different than it was when we first went in there.
And then to turn to the people and say, how dare you abandon this mission?
So I know what the mission was.
First of all, I agree with the political failures of our leadership class and of the media in redefining the mission.
I I mean, again, I think we all mainly agree on the idea that we didn't go into Afghanistan to create a thriving democracy and originally protect women.
That was a good byproduct of the fact that wherever the United States bootsteps, things tend to get better.
But that wasn't the original mission.
We didn't go in there because we were going to free women.
We freed women as a consequence of going in there.
And as Joe Biden correctly but oddly in non-sequitur Bashan pointed out, if the attack had been launched from Yemen, we wouldn't have been in Afghanistan for women.
Of course, that's true.
The problem is this.
Whether or not the American people are properly informed about what they think the mission is, the rest of life exists.
Just because we create a vacuum does not mean that no one is going to fill it.
Just because people in the United States and in our leadership class misunderstand what the mission is does not mean that when we remove troops...
That does not become a terror hotbed again.
And China doesn't take advantage of that terror hotbed to grab, for example, all of the $85 billion in military technology we just left there, including high-tech crap, including drone technology, which they're going to immediately reverse engineer.
None of that means that China doesn't look at what we just did to the Afghans and say, okay, well, Taiwan's right there, and all we have to do is just move right across this strait, and you ain't gonna do nothing, right?
I mean, it doesn't take much of a mind to discover this.
All the terrorist groups on Earth look at this, and they think that we are weak.
So regardless of how this was pitched, And this is my problem with how the Afghan war has been pitched, I think, for the past several years.
The first pitch that was wrong was, this is about a war for establishing democracy in Afghanistan.
You're right.
Then there was a second pitch, and it was equally stupid.
And the pitch was the war of 2017 is exactly the same as the war of 2010, which is a lie.
It is not true.
The United States had taken down its true presence in Afghanistan from six figures down to about 10,000.
By the time Trump left office, down to 2,500.
And so when people said this is an endless war, and I said, what war do you have 2,500 people stationed in a place with zero casualties for 18 months?
You were safer up until Joe Biden took office.
You were safer being a soldier in Afghanistan than you were being a cop in Chicago.
And it wasn't particularly close.
Okay?
The notion that this was an endless war that had to end right now, it had to end right now, and if we don't end it right now, we're going to be putting thousands of troops back in.
It is a lie.
It is untrue.
Again, we've been losing, on average, before the supposed wonderful deal that Trump made with the Taliban, which I opposed.
And I was clear about this.
When Trump was in office, I have perfectly consistence on this.
Before that deal, we were losing 10, 12 guys a year.
That is horrible.
Every soldier lost is terrible.
That does not constitute a full-scale war.
A full-scale war is what was happening in the beginning of the war.
We were losing hundreds of guys per year, thousands of guys in some cases.
But I think you have to...
I agree with your point on the losses and the difference in the nature of the war.
But it would still be endless.
And that is what the American...
So should we remove all of our troops from South Korea?
Is that an endless war?
Well, there is an active civil war going on right now in Afghanistan while our troops were there.
And as we learned today, or as many people learned...
The civil war in Afghanistan is between the people we went there to depose and the people who we've been supporting for the last 20 years.
It's also between ISIS, right?
As Joe Biden actually rightly said, the Taliban are bad guys, but right now they are our allies against ISIS in this particular battle that we had to deal with today.
So all I'm saying is it's complicated.
It's not just the Taliban versus the good guy Afghans and us.
It's ISIS. It's other Islamic groups.
It's unaffiliated group.
But our goal was to destroy all of those associated terror groups that you just mentioned.
They do have a common interest against us.
Now the Taliban have a common interest to a certain extent.
By the way, I'm still not convinced that the Taliban didn't let these guys through to bomb them.
Even the head of CENTCOM said that today.
He was asked directly, did the Taliban just let these people through?
They were the ones screening everybody at the outpost.
But I think this is the bigger political problem here.
So sure, you say, well, we have endless troop presence in Korea.
Literally everywhere.
We have troops in dozens and dozens and dozens of them.
I do think they're a bit different than Afghanistan, but I grant the point entirely.
You have 900 troops on the ground in Syria.
But I think this is, and I think the same people who want to pull out of Afghanistan want to pull out of Syria.
My point is this.
Our founding fathers warned repeatedly against continual warfare.
James Madison said, there's no greater threat to liberty than continual warfare.
Washington, Jefferson reiterates Washington, and many other founding fathers too.
And you might say, well, things are different now than they were then.
Fair enough.
My point is this, and it's to the political point.
The American people are looking at this war in Afghanistan.
They're not seeing any particular reason to stay there.
They're even looking at the argument that you have to prevent another 9-11 and saying, yes, Saudi nationals were welcomed into Afghanistan, but they then came to America, they trained in America, they were welcomed onto airplanes with tools that were not even illegal to bring on airplanes at the time.
Why do we have a Department of Homeland Security?
Why can't we deal with these things without having an on-the-ground presence in Afghanistan?
And all I'm saying is, whether that is true or not, They have the founding fathers on their side, and so I think we need to answer that.
They don't.
The founding fathers went and killed all the Barbary pirates.
No, no, no.
Knowles is right about this part.
The thing is, this was before the invention of the airplane.
The world was a very different place.
They were talking about a country that was protected by two oceans, and they really did.
That's why I use the example of the Barbary pirates.
But still, the Barbary pirates were a threat to our trade and our commerce.
They There is a tradition in America of isolationism.
And as far as I'm concerned, I would be okay with either being an isolationist nation or being an imperial nation.
What I can't stand is doing both.
I cannot stand the promises.
I can't stand the changing motivations.
I cannot stand an uninformed public, a public who doesn't know Rightly, rightly, they do not know who we are.
They do not know what kind of country we're supposed to be in the world.
Personally, I think that empire is unavoidable.
And I think the Chinese are about to prove this to us by taking Taiwan.
And then we're going to have a much easier time defining who we are.
But just remember, just remember that...
These wars were never paid for.
When George W. Bush was asked by the leftist press, what sacrifices are you demanding of America?
His answer was essentially, oh, we don't have to sacrifice to pay for it.
Well, no, wars are expensive.
You do have to pay for them.
We never paid for this war in the same way we never pay for the kinds of things that the Democrats...
We never pay for anything.
So we never pay for anything.
So the question becomes, where are we going to put our treasure?
And I think that that's the argument that we have.
And the problem that we have is the Democrats know.
They know where they want to put our treasure.
And we, on the Republican side or the conservative side, are really confused about this.
I'm just really having an argument about this that I think we have to settle before the next presidential election.
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A couple of points here.
First of all, on this idea that Afghanistan turns into a hotbed of terror if we're not there.
Well, I don't find that terribly persuasive because the entire Middle East, much of Africa, I mean, there are many places that become hotbeds of terror, currently are.
So are we supposed to invade and occupy all of those places?
I would also say...
No, no, no.
I'll let you...
This argument of bad things happened everywhere, are we supposed to go invade and occupy those places, is revisionist.
No one's making an argument here that we need to go invade Afghanistan and occupy it.
We went to Afghanistan, and we did occupy it.
It's the equivalent of saying, you know, I shouldn't have had sex with Maggie Johnson back in junior year, and so therefore, now on my child's 10th birthday, I'm going to walk away from my child and Maggie, whom I married, and the mortgage which we took out together, because I've realized I never should have gone there.
And when you say, hey, but no, no, no.
Did you marry Afghanistan?
You actually went there.
You actually did something.
There are consequences.
That goes to my next point.
And actually, that analogy, I think, is important, because...
I don't, in a marriage, you make an undying eternal commitment to a person at an altar before God.
I don't believe that the United States of America has made that kind of commitment to any foreign nation, or can.
And in fact, if any government, if any politician tries to make that kind of commitment to another foreign nation, it's not legitimate and there's no reason why it should be respected.
I mean, you talk about...
You talk about, well, we're in South Korea.
We're in Japan.
Japan and Germany.
Yeah, we're in all these places.
Well, an obvious response to that is maybe we shouldn't be there either.
I mean, it's their country.
Can I take that for a second?
I just want to ask you a question on that specific point.
So, it's 1953.
We sign the...
I mean, since we're doing revisionist history now.
It's 1953.
We sign the armistice agreement on the 49th parallel in Korea.
And we say, now you're president of the United States.
Is the answer, okay, we're done, out, we have no interest here?
Because that is how you lose Cold Wars.
No, but it's not 1953.
I'm talking about in the year 2020.
I know, and I'm talking about 2021.
Do you sign an agreement to say the Taliban gets to take over this country and bring in exactly the same people who did 9-11, which is exactly what's happening right now?
In 2021, I would take our troops out of Afghanistan.
I would do it a lot different than Joe Biden did.
I wouldn't shut down our airports.
What strategic interest is served by pulling our troops from Afghanistan?
Well, first of all, it's not only a strategic interest.
But what is the strategic interest?
There's two points here, okay?
And this is a strategic point, I guess, as well.
The idea that the United States of America should be perpetually holding nations, foreign nations, into existence, which cannot exist on their own without our help.
I just reject that strategically, and I reject it philosophically, and I just don't think that that should be our role, unless...
As Drew says, we're going to embrace it and say, you know what, we are an empire and this is what we do.
We build empires.
We take over, you know what, we're going to take over Afghanistan.
It's ours now.
It's our property.
And if that's the argument, then okay, let's make that argument.
But our empire is a uniquely American empire.
No, we don't admit to it.
West Germany could not have survived as a nation if America hadn't left its troops there.
It would have fallen to the Soviet Union in minutes if the Americans had pulled out.
We think that Berlin is in West Germany, by the way.
It's in East Germany.
We were cut off from access.
We flew the Berlin airlifts to keep that city free.
And it's not just that if we had left the next day, if we had left five years later, if we had left 10 years later, if we had left 20 years later.
Similarly, back to the South Korea example, it took...
First of all, a world war to drive the Japanese empire out of South Korea.
Then a Korean war to keep the North and the Chinese and Russians from taking South Korea.
33,000 American dead just in that war.
And then occupation by our troops, not in the old imperial sense, because we didn't run their government, just like we didn't in Afghanistan, but in this uniquely American way, where our troops provide the opportunity for that nation to form.
We had to do that for 42 years.
Before South Korea became a functioning democracy.
And after they became a functioning democracy, we've continued to have our troops there for 35 more years.
So a question.
Do you think that it is America's duty...
To actually perpetually hold other countries into existence, to keep them in existence.
Is that...
If we're the ones who broke the country, in the case of Afghanistan, whatever the political argument for why we went there, we went.
Should we have stayed for a week and then left?
That's a conversation that we can...
It prescriptively applies some of those lessons to future problems, which you can't retroactively.
Would you really say we broke Afghanistan?
It wasn't exactly a thriving place when we got in.
It was not a thriving place, but the problems faced by the current...
Listen, the median age in Afghanistan is like 18 years.
We've been there 20.
The people in especially urban Kabul, the people in these cities that are falling right now, they're not like the guys who were there when we went in.
This isn't people who ever lived under the Taliban.
This isn't people...
This isn't women...
Hold on.
This isn't women who ever were parking.
These arguments do not...
The reason these arguments don't hold water is because they're all really about the Cold War.
And the Cold War was in a fight between two...
No, my argument is about Afghanistan.
No, no, no, wait a minute.
We went into Afghanistan...
Wherever you think we should have gotten out, we held it for 20 years, and now in leaving, we are the cause of the terrible things that are happening there right now.
I don't agree with this at all.
Knowles was right about this.
The place is a mess.
It's going to be a mess unless we stay, and it was a mess before we got there.
Yes, it was a mess before we got there, but we went.
The thing about Germany, the thing about Italy is all of these places were places we occupied to keep the Soviets and the Chinese out.
Right.
And the thing is, no, what I'm saying is we are about to enter a new Cold War.
I think there's no question about it.
We're already halfway in it.
However, however...
The Taliban never, and even Islamism, never constituted the existential threat to our way of life that we basically sold it as having.
And that's the key thing here.
That's the key difference.
And so, in other words, if now...
You're going back 20 years and saying that the arguments were wrong.
I'm saying right now, today, as we speak, an actual thing is occurring.
I'm sorry.
We do not have a responsibility to every country.
I didn't say we have a responsibility to every country.
We have a responsibility to the country we are in and have occupied for the last 20 years.
Let's put aside for a second the quote-unquote...
We have a responsibility to Puerto Rico.
That doesn't mean that we also have a responsibility to Costa Rica.
Puerto Rico is our protectorate.
I know.
No, I don't agree with this.
Well, I mean, here's the reality.
Hold on.
So we're not responsible.
This is a legitimate question.
We're not responsible for what's happening right now?
Well, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
So much of what's happening, this is what's a little confusing about the conversation, is so much of what's happening is a matter of this incredible, I mean, this is criminal incompetence we're talking about.
This is not just like, ooh, I left my shirt at home, you know, I forgot to bring my tie to work.
This is an actual act of impeachment.
Because Biden's argument is it had to happen like this.
Yeah, that's completely insane.
Yeah.
So there are a few things that I think were also conflating.
One is the morality of the situation, whether we owe it to the people of Afghanistan to stay there forever because they're the people of Afghanistan and they came to rely upon us.
And I think there's an argument to say that the answer is no, not in perpetuity.
We're still America.
We have our own interests.
Then there's the question that I actually want to ask, which is, why is it in our interest to turn this back over to the Taliban, have it be a terrorist hotbed, incentivize China to go and get all the rare earths minerals, incentivize China to invade Taiwan, and why is all of that worth it to take 2,500 troops out of a position where no one was dying?
That's the thing nobody seems to be able to answer.
We're not talking about 100,000 troops there.
So Joe Biden's excuse for this is that if we didn't, then tomorrow there'd be a vast wall of Taliban fighters coming over that wall.
There is zero evidence of this.
None.
Okay?
We'd had a stasis situation in Afghanistan, effectively, since 2014.
Pretty much nothing had changed.
So what we are talking about when we talk about ending endless wars, I think that's a bumper sticker slogan because it does not count as an endless war when you station a baseline force of 2,500 people there with zero casualties for a year and a half.
Is there any reason to think that that would maintain, though, given that Afghanistan is not...
It has maintained for the last six to seven years.
I think that there is very little evidence that the Taliban were on the verge of radically overrunning the country.
I've yet to see Joe Biden present any of that intelligence evidence.
Do you think if we stayed exactly as we were 10 years from now, do you think we've now gone 16 years without...
I think what you would see is what we have typically seen in situations like this.
When it gets a little hotter, we put in a few more troops.
When it gets a little colder, we take out a lot more troops.
I don't think there's a situation in Afghanistan where we're dumping another 100,000 troops in there because we had forces on the ground constantly, constantly degrading the Taliban.
Because the Afghan army, at the cost of thousands and thousands of lives a year, We're going and killing the Taliban.
So my question again, we can go back to the fundamental principles of when do we owe things to people.
I think also, but I think that, Drew, you mentioned the Cold War.
The world is filled with threats on a consistent basis.
This is where you and I agree.
The notion that the Defense Department exists mainly as a make-work program for people to sit on a base in Alabama is silly.
This has become the Democratic talking point, which is that our soldiers should never be put in the line of combat in favor of American interests unless those interests are existential to the United States.
This has never been the perspective of any nation that has been worth its salt.
Well, this is the part where you and I agree.
I mean, this is the thing.
And what I'm saying is, it seems like a fairly cheap deal to me to have been stationing 2,500 troops in country...
Providing air support, close air support with some military contractors at the cost of like 0.5% of the United States budget every year to keep the Taliban from taking back over the country and re-bringing in al-Qaeda and re-bringing in ISIS and turning...
I mean, you know how much money we had to spend and how many troops we had to put back into Iraq just to quell ISIS? And I remember you being in favor of that.
This is all based on the assumption that the situation right now would maintain in this tribalistic, hellhole country in the middle of a civil war between all these various different factions.
I don't think, first of all, there's any reason to think that that's true.
Six to seven years in the grand scheme of history is nothing at all.
We're going through a period of relative...
20 years in the grand scheme of history is hardly anything at all.
Agreed.
So they're going through a period of relative calm, if we can call it that, in Afghanistan.
I don't think there's any reason to think that it would maintain that way.
And there was always this threat when you send our guys over to Afghanistan.
They're still at least at a serious threat of being killed in service to this No, they really were not.
They really were not.
You have 2,500 troops there and zero combat deaths since February of 2020.
Seven years prior.
But I'm saying that could change at any moment.
There's no reason to think.
That's true, Matt.
That's true literally anywhere on Earth.
That's true literally anywhere on Earth.
Tomorrow, yes it is.
Tomorrow.
It's not true in Japan.
I mean, Japan, I think, If China decides to get militaristic with Japan and they have fired some missiles into the Sea of Japan, you could get militaristic pretty there.
Everyone knows South Korea is the biggest hot spot.
We've got 26,000 troops there as a tripwire.
But you would agree that Japan and Germany are not nearly as volatile as Afghanistan.
Right.
The volatility is the reason to keep the American presence.
The volatility is the reason to have...
When we invaded Afghanistan, we had to use hand-drawn Russian-era maps.
We had no intelligence.
We knew nothing about Afghanistan.
We knew very little about border Pakistan.
We had very little eyes into Iran.
Pakistan, by the way, a nuclear power with 75 nuclear weapons, who...
Already, their intelligence service for this whole time has been sympathetic to the Taliban, and now they have ejected all Americans since Biden's withdrawal in the last two weeks.
Are you guys making two different arguments?
Because you're saying, on one hand, we should stay there because it's peaceful and nobody's dying, and on the other hand, we should stay there because it's volatile.
I'm saying that America's strategic...
We're keeping a lid on it, and now you remove the lid, and they get a show.
And it's in America's strategic interest to not have a show there.
This goes back to the political failure, and it's a political failure that has gone on since the Bush administration.
You can't say to people, we're going in there to get bin Laden.
I mean, this is still a democracy of some sort.
You can't say, we're going in there to get bin Laden.
Oh no, we're going in there to build a civilized country.
Oh no, we're going in there because we need Bagram in order to fight the Chinese people.
Interest.
No, you can't do that and succeed unless we understand ourselves to be in a conflict of great powers.
And this is where you and I agree.
I think the conflict of great powers is inevitable.
It's here.
We're already in a conflict.
It's always here.
It's always here.
And we should start to talk like that.
I never want to fight a selfless war ever again.
I never want to hear you broke it, you fix it ever again.
I want to be, when my fellow Americans send their sons and daughters into harm's way, I want to know that they are there for this country and for our interests.
And part of our interests is fending off China.
I wish most of our major corporations knew this.
I will say, you better have a damned compelling reason for pulling out 2,500 troops From a place where they're the lid and they're the cork in the bottle, especially when that is now going to subject 19 million women to rape.
You better have a very good reason and better not be a slogan like, no endless war.
That is not good enough.
You guys keep saying these things, slogans.
All of democratic politics are slogans.
Don't be a deconstructionist.
No, I'm not being a deconstructionist.
I'm talking about the reality of political...
I have a question.
When did this become about whether...
Just because the American people like a thing does not mean that they are correct to like the thing.
But it doesn't have a right to set their nation's course, doesn't it?
I mean, I think they still...
I know that, especially for recent decades, there is this idea that...
On foreign policy, they 100% do not.
What's the last congressionally approved war?
I think they do.
What's the last congressionally approved war?
Well, this wasn't a war.
I mean, that's the other problem.
Was this a war?
Was this an occupation?
Michael, if we're talking about the realities on the ground, when was the last time the American people approved a war?
But this gets to Jeremy's point.
I actually think Jeremy made a very good point here, which is when you said, yes, America's an empire, but it's a special kind of empire.
And I jokingly, but not so jokingly, said, yeah, it's special because we don't admit that we're an empire.
That, I think, is the problem.
The reason that we don't admit it, by the way, is because our nation is founded not to be an empire, and all of our most revered founding fathers said, don't do this, don't have perpetual war, don't have entangling alliances, don't go overseas.
And then they proceeded to move directly from one coast all the way across to the other coast, all the way down.
Fighting the whole way.
But they didn't occupy it as some imperial territory.
They would bring it into the nation.
Wait, wait, hold up.
They would annex it into the nation.
All these places were literally federal territories until they became states.
Until they became states.
Are we going to make Afghanistan a state?
I don't think so.
Nobody's talking about making Afghanistan a state.
But then I'm making a distinction between empire and the nation.
Wait, wait.
So you're saying that it is not imperialistic.
You're saying it's less imperialistic to make a thing a state Yes, by definition, because it becomes a nation.
Yeah, because it's part of the nation.
But if you hold it as an...
That's ridiculous.
The British Empire turned us into British citizens.
If you go to the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C., it says, we came to liberate, not to conquer.
And that's been basically our idea with all...
That's why our troops have been there for seven years.
With everywhere else.
Well, okay, then what Knowles is saying is right, that the problem with our empire is we don't admit it's an empire.
Now, Ferguson makes this argument all the time, and I think he's got a point.
And I think if you don't make the argument, if you don't tell the truth, the American people who still do vote for the president of the United States, who still is the guy who runs most of our foreign policy, are not going to be convinced.
And you can't accuse them of bumper sticker slogans when you're I do pretty much everything else politically.
You're basically selling them a bumper sticker slogan themselves.
I still think just we're operating with this assumption that because the situation was a certain way, it's going to maintain that way.
And that denies the risk that our military was in over there.
I know that it's been a certain way for a few years, but I don't think we can do that.
I don't think it's fair to do because part of this is we're sending, you know, our sons and daughters are actually going over there.
And there is many of them have died in the last few years, not as many, but there's always that threat Of something terrible happening to them, as we've just discovered.
And on top of that as well, I mean, there are other things too that we haven't brought up.
Like one of them, again, in talking to the veterans that served over there, even in the peacetime, they'll talk about things like, you know, I don't know, they come home traumatized because they have to overlook child rape.
Which is utterly widespread in the Afghan army and in the Afghan leadership.
And they're just over there and they have to just deal with it.
And they're told, not to mention the threat of being killed by our supposed allies.
But even that alone, just that piece alone, to me, means send our guys home.
Because they've got to go over there and look the other way while children are raped left and right.
And it was as widespread as that.
Wait, hold on.
Are you going to be a realist or are you going to be a moralist here?
I'm going to need one or the other.
Well, you're answering the moralism with a sort of moralistic argument on the other side.
It's not a moral answer, though, to say, X people do bad things, therefore let's create a vacuum in which people who didn't do those things suffer a moral consequence.
I'm trying to bring it back around to focusing on the actual human beings, our countrymen, And our service members who we are sending into these situations.
So when we say that there hasn't been a combat death in six or seven years, I think that overlooks...
In 18 months.
In 18 months, right.
And few for, you know, relatively...
There has been relatively few for six or seven years.
When we say that, that overlooks some realities that they were living with that I think we have to at least contend with if we're going to have this conversation.
No, look, putting the military in places always is a question of cost versus benefit.
And so you're lining up costs, and I'm saying that there were actual benefits.
And I think one of the things that's happened here is that what has happened in the wake of the United States pulling out is being labeled a potential cost to the United States when it is an actual cost to the United States.
Meaning that what Joe Biden has done is in the aftermath of us pulling out, and as they bomb American troops, and as the Taliban takes over the country again, and as ISIS comes back in, as al-Qaeda comes back in, My argument is pretty simple.
If we hadn't left, this wouldn't have happened.
And my evidence for this is that if we hadn't have left, this wouldn't have happened.
Joe Biden's argument is, if we had stayed, this would have happened.
He's going to have to prove that case stronger than I think this would have happened because the counterfactual is already here.
It's happening.
It's happened.
The Taliban have taken over the country.
So I already know that if A, then B. He is saying...
If not A, then B. That doesn't exist.
That's an alternative history.
And the last data point that I had was that it wasn't happening until he pulled out the troops.
So unless he can show me, which he has not done, extremely compelling data that leaving 2,500 troops in place was going to result in this strawman argument where we have 50,000 troops back in there fighting close hand-to-hand combat in Mazar-i-Sharif, I'm going to need some actual evidence of that, not some bullshit from Joe Biden to justify the fact that he wanted to pull out in 2010 and can't get his head out of his ass.
This is also why I don't want any more selfless wars.
I don't want any more selfless wars.
Okay, you can prescriptively take that wisdom into the future.
This wasn't a selfless war.
There is unanimity going in by that.
It is a selfish withdrawal.
America is not responsible for every humanitarian crisis in the world.
We're just responsible for the ones that we create.
We are creating this crisis.
If we had gone in, tried to kill bin Laden and left, if we had used airstrikes and left, I don't buy the Colin Powell if you break it, we bought it.
But if you break it, Create it.
Hold it.
Let a generation of people come of age under American protection, and then just decide on a whim for no strategic upside, that you're just going to bail on them and leave them all to the slaughter.
I think that's, and leaving out that last part about no strategic upside just for a minute, I think that argument is basically saying we have to throw good money after bad.
If we go into a place and we have an American interest and we cannot find, we cannot serve that American interest and we withdraw because we can't serve that American interest and the country reverts to what it was before we got there, you know, I'm not sure I can hold us responsible for that.
We're responsible for the two million people who died in Southeast Asia after we abandoned the South Vietnamese.
Of course we bear responsibility.
We are not wholly responsible.
I mean, if you take this to domestic context, the question is, are the people who are pushing defund the police responsible for an increase in crime?
To my mind, sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, well, this is the exact same thing internationally.
If you remove the cops, then people go around killing other people.
Yeah, but I assume you're the cops.
Then you're embracing this as the world police.
But we are the cops.
We went over and took over that country.
We were in the position of being the cops.
In fact, we didn't just take over that country.
We created that country.
By the way, you can make the case that if you had to redeploy the people, like, to take the domestic context, if you had the police in one area, right, when you had to make the decision, we need to redeploy the police from here to here because it's more important to have them over here.
By the cost that we are undergoing in this city, you know, for the police, too many cops are dying.
We're moving them and we're putting them here.
You're still responsible for what comes next over here because you've removed the police.
But at least you can say the costs here were worth the benefits here.
The point that we're having in Afghanistan right now is that the costs here are accruing not only no benefit but negative benefits.
So I think the question that is coming up is what changed?
Not only what changed in the last 10, 20 years, but what changed since 1950?
What changed since our establishment of a sort of empire overseas?
And I think we should define the terms because we're using different terms for imperialism and nationalism.
When I say that Texas, the acquisition of Texas is not imperialism, of course it's imperialism when you go and you...
Lincoln thought it was imperialism.
But when you make it part of the nation, that is a very different thing, or even Hawaii for that matter, making it part of the nation, that is a very different thing than the British nation.
I'll show you the distinction.
When Great Britain holds India as an imperial territory, it is not holding it as a part of the British nation.
It is recognizing this is a distinct culture, a distinct country, its own thing, but we are holding it.
We are the British Empire.
We don't really do that with Texas, as distinct as Texas is.
We say it's all part of the American nation.
Now, we hold imperial territories.
Like Puerto Rico, we've held other imperial territories that because of our national origin, we gave up and we have always felt uncomfortable with in the 19th and 20th century.
But this brings us then to the question, what changed between 1950 and today?
And it gets back to your point, Drew, and it gets to your point also, Matt, which is, we in the middle of the 20th century were...
A strong superpower with a lot of national cohesion that knew who we were.
We knew what it meant to send truth, justice, and the American way overseas.
We can't even put that in Superman movies anymore.
They actually cut that line out.
To your point, Matt, you say, what are we there for?
Are we going to raise the pride flag on the embassy in Kabul?
Which we actually did.
I don't think a lot of Americans are going to get behind that.
That has become a sort of imperial flag, but a lot of people don't support it.
So I think it's very important, if you want to choose, are we...
Just a nation, or are we just an empire?
Or is it inevitable to become an empire, which I think probably it is for great nations?
What is the empire?
What is it?
And I just think if you're in a situation where we can't agree on anything, in this country we can't even agree on the definition of man and woman at this point.
You've got major political activists with the support of the Democratic Party burning down the country for 2020.
I'm just not sure that we have the ability to project that overseas.
I'm not sure what we're projecting.
This, I think, is an enormous, enormous strategic and ideological mistake.
If the notion is that the weaknesses and internal failures of the United States do not allow us to either pursue a strategic interest overseas or to say to the Taliban, sorry, whatever it is that we are pursuing is better than what you are pursuing, then I think that there are failures on the right as well as the left.
I'm not a fan of the problem.
I just want to make this one point.
I'm not making even a prescriptive argument here.
It's a descriptive argument?
And the descriptive argument is this.
70% of Americans want it out of Afghanistan, and the majority of Americans, both parties, have wanted out for a long time.
I'm not saying that's a good thing.
I'm just saying...
I think the reason for that is the collapse of our cohesion, and we had a lot more of it.
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I wanted to make a quick point on this, which is that...
I totally, listen, you don't have to argue to me about the lack of cohesion and the moral decline of the United States, right?
I think that as a nation, one of the symptoms that we are so eager to get out of Afghanistan, I think that is a symptom of the fact that we are a nation that is ready to climb into a warm bath, get fat, and slit our wrists.
I think that is where we are as a country.
I think that's why Joe Biden is president right now, because he's effectively a senile president presiding over a nation in a tragic state of decay.
I think that seems like what it is unless there's some sort of dramatic resurgence.
Yep.
With that said, I think what happened in American foreign policy is pretty obvious.
We had a mission when the Soviet Union was around because we recognized there were existential threats to the United States in the form of the Soviet Union.
Then the Soviet Union fell, and we figured we have no idea what the hell we're doing, right?
Are we doing this for capitalism?
Are we doing this for liberalism?
Are we doing this for nothing?
Should we do Pat Buchanan retrenchment?
Should we instead try and spread the message of the IMF? Like, what exactly are we doing here?
What we fail to recognize is that once again, nature and foreign policy abhor a vacuum.
And the notion that the United States was forever and always, that we'd reached the Francis Fukuyama end of history, which of course is slightly misinterpreted, but that we had reached that end of history where the United States was destined to be the everlasting hegemon, created the sense of, so what do we do with all this stuff?
What do we do with all this power?
And what that failed to recognize is that there are always powers on the move.
And that is what you're seeing in Afghanistan right now.
And the fact is that when we leave, it is not as though everything just goes back to a tribal state of warfare with no externalities.
By the way, the Taliban was in charge for a grand total of five years in Afghanistan.
Everybody acts like the Taliban was in charge since forever.
They were in a state of constant civil war with serious externalities, particularly the Soviets and for surrounding republics, for quite a long time.
And the United States was deeply involved in Afghanistan all the way back in the 50s, right?
Eisenhower actually flew into Kabul airport in 1959.
So the United States has always been involved all over the world.
The question is always one of costs and benefits, which I keep coming back to this because I think that's a hard-headed way of viewing foreign policy.
And so I ask, again, I don't see the benefit in pulling out other than the fulfillment of this muddle-headed idea that we have somehow sinned in being in Afghanistan or to continuing sin to remain in Afghanistan at extraordinarily low cost to keep a lid on what was going on there, and especially in the face of Chinese aggression.
The notion in American foreign policy, we were able to keep an empire, effectively, during the Cold War, because we were doing so as an anti-communist empire.
Not because we were doing so as an American empire, but because we were able to do all the stuff saying we were opposing the Soviets, right?
And the reality is, nature's going to force us back into that.
You can say we're out of Afghanistan.
Not for long, we ain't.
We were out of Iraq, and then we were back in Iraq.
What you just said is far more in keeping with my tragic view of these things than anything else that anybody's talking about.
But in the interim, during this end of history phase, we did fall apart.
And Knowles is right about this.
It is very hard to project power without...
It's very hard to project the kind of power that is American power without an American set of values.
And we no longer have an American set of values.
And I think...
Listen, it's a truly tragic thing that it is China that is about to force us back into the great game.
But in forcing us back into the great game, it will help us redefine who we are.
Because it's not true that everything we did against the Soviets was simply against the Soviets.
We were against the Soviets because they stood for something that we didn't stand for.
It was only in my horrific, cursed generation that we lost the plot of what we stood for against the Soviets.
I agree with everything you just said.
And by the way, just one more thing.
You know, Vietnam gets a bad rap, and in some ways it deserves a bad rap, but the Chinese looked at us in Vietnam and thought, those people are crazy, and it kept them in line for 50 years, and they didn't really start to stretch out their imperial tentacles because they saw we were going to fight them on every level, and they just didn't want any part of that.
Yeah.
So I agree with what you just said, and I agree with what you just said.
The reason to remain in Afghanistan is America's strategic interest.
I do think that we're abstracting our way out of the urgent moral question.
There is a moral question about whether or not, in addition to pursuing our strategic interests, we also create moral obligation along the way.
I agree that you don't have a moral obligation to go into every place that something bad happens.
I agree that you don't have a moral obligation to...
To occupy every country that you drop some bombs on or send special operators into.
I agree that you don't have a moral responsibility to build governments in countries even if you do occupy them for a brief amount of time.
Those are philosophical, political questions.
They are abstract questions.
They're questions that can deeply inform our view of the world.
They can deeply inform the actions that we will take in the future.
The urgent question today, the moral question today, is do we have an obligation to the people who for 20 years lived under whatever drove us there, whatever took us there, whatever mistakes we made along the way, whatever things we should or shouldn't have done, whichever things we hope to do in the future or hope not to do in the future, we did do something in Afghanistan.
And because of what we did for the last 20 years, we keep using the word women, the people being raped and murdered are women.
They're not women.
They're small girls.
They're 13.
Of course.
Girls who were going to school, girls who were not wearing burqas, girls who were not Westerners.
They did not have our values, but they had something far better than the values of the generation that preceded them in Afghanistan.
And they had them as the direct result of actions that we ourselves took.
So while we are, I believe, betraying our strategic interests, I think we're emboldening China.
I think we're emboldening Russia.
I think we're going to see the fall of Pakistan to the Taliban, and now the Taliban will be one of the six nuclear powers on the earth.
I think we're emboldening Iran.
I think we're emboldening ISIS and al-Qaeda, just like when we pulled our troops wrongly out of Iraq under Barack Obama, and suddenly we lost half the country that we had fought and bled to win.
And we lost Syria, and ISIS formed, and Europeans started getting bombed and getting their heads chopped off, and now we had to fight yet another war in Iraq, and yet another war in Syria.
I think we're going to see the same thing.
For all the reasons I think it's horrible for the interests of the United States of America to withdraw our troops, I also think there is a moral question about our withdrawal of our troops.
But let me address that one moral question, which is, in order to answer that moral question, you have to imagine the counterfactual that Joe Biden did not screw this up beyond the imagination of man.
You have to be able to say that there was an orderly withdrawal.
We left.
We left the place intact.
We left the government intact.
We left the army intact.
And we withdrew slowly in an orderly manner.
We got our people out.
We got our allies out.
All of those things you have to imagine first, right?
Because the immoral thing that's happening is happening because of this incredible, almost mind-boggling act of incompetence.
And I suppose what I would say to that...
In that case, if we left Afghanistan in an orderly manner and Afghanistan still could not maintain its government and still could not maintain its system, then I would say, no, we don't actually have an obligation.
And I suppose what I would answer to that is we had essentially withdrawn from Afghanistan.
We had the lightest touch.
We were using the lightest touch.
But now you're changing the question.
I mean, the question is, do we have an eternal moral obligation?
And no, eventually another country, unless we're an empire, eventually other countries have to be able to...
Was it immoral to pull out of the Philippines?
No.
I don't think it's unreasonable if we had any moral obligation to the people of Afghanistan.
And frankly, I don't think we did or do.
But if we did, then I think 20 years is a pretty good amount of time to give them to figure out how to run their own country.
And honestly, we all agree that the way that we pulled out was terrible and incompetent and all that.
No matter how we pulled out, I just think you are the military of Afghanistan.
This is your job.
You should be able to do this no matter how America leaves.
And if they can't, then I think the moral failures fall on the Afghan army.
More so than on the American army.
I think you think 20 years means 20 years was enough.
Like, the longer you're there, the more you need to leave.
And I think what I'm suggesting is the longer you're there, the more responsibilities you begin to incur.
Yes, if you go into a country and bomb them and get out, if it's shock and awe and leave, If you shoot some cruise missiles into the Sudan, you have very little obligation to the Sudan or the people of the Sudan that you incur as a result.
If you were there for a year until Tora Bora, we realized that Bin Laden's probably out of Afghanistan and we're going to have to take our fight elsewhere, you've incurred more moral obligation, but certainly far, far less than if you've been...
We have been there and we have engaged in nation- What happens if you withdraw your support for a tyrant like the Shah of Iran and another tyrant...
An Islamist tyrant comes in and takes over like the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Essentially, do you have an obligation there?
Do you think like, oh, gee, we should have kept supporting the Shah?
Certainly 100% we should have kept supporting.
Yes, for political reasons, but not for morals.
I think that even when it comes to foreign policy, morality is a currency.
I mean, that is just a reality of the situation, right?
This is why the United States ought to win the Cold War, for example.
Morality is a currency.
And one of the ways that morality is used as a currency is via incentivizing people to join your fight.
I actually don't understand what you're saying.
So in Afghanistan, it is not merely that we went there and out of the kindness of our heart, we were like, here's some liberalism and we're here to save you.
We went in there with a particular purpose, as we all discussed, the political leadership botched the explanation of that purpose.
All that's true.
We then made a bunch of promises to all the people who work with us.
Hundreds of thousands of people who work with us.
If you work with us, you will have these things.
Your women will be able to go to school.
Your women will be able to walk out in the streets.
And women helped us.
Many women helped us.
You will be able to live a different life.
And they lived that life.
And many of them kept those obligations.
And so now the question becomes, if you make a promise, and then you withdraw the promise, Is that a problem?
And I think the answer is yes.
And then the question becomes, okay, so how do we deal with that promise?
So, for example, if we were talking right now, because these are now the alternatives.
Now we're to the real world alternatives, right?
The alternative, alternative number one, we pull out of the country, we made promises to literally hundreds of thousands of people that we were, Joe Biden says this all the time, that we were going to help them get out, if not to the United States, then someplace else.
That if we leave and if this thing collapse, you're going to get out.
And by the way, we did the same with the Vietnamese boat people, or we should have in the aftermath.
Many of those people are unbelievably good American citizens.
We do this for people who are trying to escape Cuba from a bad life to a good life.
If the alternatives are, figure out where 250,000 people who actively work with the United States are going to live, or keep a baseline truth presence there and nobody has to leave, which one of those is better?
Now, again, I think that you can, in the end, everything in foreign policy, just like in politics generally, comes down to transactional cost.
It comes down to cost and benefit.
When you're making a calculation as to the promises that you made to people on a moral level, Do we bear any responsibility for those people?
So, for example, forget about keeping the troops there.
Do we bear any responsibility to the people we made promises to that we were going to evacuate them to help them evacuate?
Or should we have just said, you know what?
Screw it.
We helped you for 20 years.
You're on your own.
I think we'd all agree that we had responsibilities to the people we promised to evacuate.
If our government made those...
We evacuated a lot of them, by the way.
Right.
And they did.
Okay, so we agree on that.
So then the question is just whether, with regard to the keeping of the skeleton force, whether that would have been better, or is it better to try and airlift out hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds more thousands, by the way, are still going to get left and slaughtered.
And do we own a moral obligation to not just the girls who are about to get raped, but to their fathers who worked with us?
parents who worked with us.
And I think the answer is yes.
When you incur a mutual obligation in order to get a thing done, you owe something.
Do you think that's an everlasting moral obligation is, I guess, is the question.
I mean, I think that it is a moral obligation that if you promise someone, you know, we didn't promise the people who fought with us that here's the deal.
You fight with us today in 20 years, we're out.
Right.
And if the Taliban take over, that's it.
We'll fight with you today.
In 20 years, we're gone.
And that's not how you promise in foreign policy.
No one promises that way in foreign policy because then nobody does it.
So we promised we'd be there forever?
No.
We promised that they were going to have a particular kind of life.
This is what happens in foreign policy.
Which would entail us to be there forever.
Not necessarily.
Or we fly them over here.
Not necessarily.
Or we fly them over here.
Or maybe there's the possibility that if we withdraw in more orderly fashion and don't completely collapse their air force from within.
Did the Afghan government and military have any obligation of its own to its own citizens?
Of course they had an obligation to the tune of 50,000 dead over the course of the last six years.
And 67,000 dead in the 20 years we've had.
That is an awful lot of human beings.
That is an awful lot, but that's also...
That's more American troops than we've lost in all wars combined since Vietnam.
But that's the way the ratio should be, at least.
I mean, they are defending their own country.
They should take the lion's share of the casualties.
So I agree with you.
So the idea that we're supposed to, you know, admire the Afghan military for being the ones to take the brunt of the casualties, of course it's your country.
Who else is going to do it?
We shouldn't be the ones.
But my question is, I suppose I just don't understand the tremendous urgency that was felt by so many people We must get this tiny, bare-bones force out of Afghanistan, forthwith, and even with the consequences, our world's historical.
And they are.
Okay, when you turn over a country of 38 million people to the Taliban, welcome in all these terrorist groups, give China an open running field, give Russia an open running field, and then, yes, create the moral hazard of...
And this does make a difference in the world.
When our allies look at us, and they...
And yes, this goes back to the political leadership point.
Maybe we should never talk in moral terms.
But I do happen to think that it was kind of a good thing that we stopped mass rape in Afghanistan.
So if George W. Bush said in a couple of speeches, we stopped terrorism, and by the way, we also stopped the mass rape of 12-year-old girls in Afghanistan, I don't think that's the end of the world.
But if people in the world...
We were looking the other way on the rape of boys, though.
I mean, that's...
I mean, so he should have said that, too.
And he should have moved on that.
Okay, like, we can all agree I'm not in favor of the rape of boys.
I think we're all on the same page on this one.
There is the painting of the Afghan allies, and I'm very grateful for the allies who helped us, but there's the painting of them as these pure as the driven snow charitable people who didn't commit.
But what Matt is saying is they committed some of the same atrocities that we're all focusing on here.
The South Koreans did too during that 42 years that we occupied South Korea.
And so did the South Vietnamese and so did Pinochet.
That's the nature of foreign policy.
The question is, is it more moral?
Was the United States presence, did we make Afghanistan in the period of our dominance better than it had been under the Taliban?
Sure.
But if we're now having the moral discussion, then I think it's important to remember that when we went in there, the people who helped us in Afghanistan, I don't think they did so on the suggestion that we were going to stay there forever and claim it as an imperial territory.
That was not the argument we made when we went in.
I'm sorry?
Who claimed it as an imperial territory?
Well, I think we're saying now we should have stayed there for many, many more years.
I still don't think that makes it an imperial territory.
Yeah, it does.
I think it does.
But Germany is not an imperial territory.
I think both of you are wrong about that.
What would you say if China tried to build a base?
What if some other country tried to build one military base in our country?
We would say you're trying to claim us as your own, right?
Just to get back to this moral point.
So isn't it the same thing if we do that in another country?
Ben brought up transaction and foreign policy is decided by transaction.
And I just think that it's worth remembering.
I'm grateful for the support of our Afghan allies.
They were doing so because they had an interest.
And I actually don't believe that they thought the United States was going to stay there forever.
I don't think we said we were going to stay there forever.
I think when you look at America's victories in the last century, Any place where we fought and won, we still have troops.
Before 1975.
Anywhere, I'm sorry, in the last...
No, but I mean, I just mean...
Until 1970.
Literally every place that we fought and won, we still have troops.
Every place that we fought and suffered humiliating defeat, we don't still have troops.
If I can just inject one more time my morbidly tragic life here.
One thing we should also keep in mind that the thing that we're actually noticing is that a democracy is a very bad system for running an empire.
And the reason it's a bad system for running an empire is because one day you've got George W. Bush running the place and the next day you've got Joe Biden or Obama running the place.
Don't agree.
And they pull out our troops and they put our troops back in and our promises are broken.
And our promises are broken for democratic reasons because we voted for somebody who was going to break the promise of the last guy we voted for.
This is one of the reasons that as great as free nations become strong and free nations become strong, they become empires and they stop being free nations.
And this is one of the prices I believe we're going to have to pay.
There's a reason the Roman Republic fell.
There's a reason this republic will fall.
And I think that we have to understand that what you guys are talking about, keeping your promises, is going to be a drain on the democratic process.
I'm also curious what...
Foreign policy has been...
I mean, I just...
Again, I'm going to point out that every president since Barack Obama pledged to get the troops out, and nobody did it.
Because it turns out that foreign policy is not a democratic process.
Not at the moment.
It's not.
It's not what it is, you know.
It has not been since World War II. Joe Biden did not get out because the people of the United States were rabidly demanding that Joe Biden get out.
If you looked at the list of American priorities...
Getting out of Afghanistan.
But they voted for somebody who was going to get us out.
Okay, now you're actually justifying the idea that they voted for somebody who pledged that he was going to go to universal health care.
I mean, that doesn't work.
That's not right.
No, but it's true.
I'm not saying it's right.
I'm saying it's true.
And George W. Bush was right in 2005 when he said you voted for a guy who's going to privatize Social Security, except that's not the way this works.
Okay, just because you vote for a president of the United States and because that president wins does not mean that he has a referendum on every single issue down the line or that his calculus...
We're talking about the reality of it.
I'm not arguing the morality.
We're talking about the reality of it, and this is one of the reasons why great nations lose their republic.
Elections have consequences.
This is true.
Of course.
It is also true that the American people have a piss-poor understanding of foreign policy because our leadership class is garbage when it comes to this stuff.
And it has been since the Cold War.
And during half the Cold War, we had a piss-poor understanding.
It was America's...
Leaders have been piss poor on foreign policy way before the Cold War.
Piss poor on everything also, but I am curious what you guys say about this issue on the moral question of our country right now, when we talk about exerting our influence, and we think about what that influence actually is.
Now, I think about one of the most powerful videos that I've seen recently was, and it was a small group, but still, it was in Jamaica, and I don't know if everyone's seen this video, But our embassy in Jamaica was flying a pride flag.
And the Jamaican people got together and protested it and said, we don't want that here.
That's your values.
It's not ours.
We don't want it here.
And I look at that and I side against our embassy.
I'm on their side, 100%.
And I don't like that.
I mean, when someone's protesting our embassy and I have to be on the side of the protest.
It's not a good place to be.
It's not a good place to be.
It's also...
It's tragic and sad that I have to say that.
Why are we flying that flag?
Right.
So what about that problem as well?
I'm just curious what you guys think about that.
I don't disagree with any of that.
I do think that it is better for...
I think that if the package deal...
And I wish there weren't a package deal.
I wish that we weren't flying the Pride flag.
I think it's absurd to fly anything but the American flag, period, at a United States embassy.
The American flag is now more controversial in the United States than the Pride Progress flag.
Much more so.
Significantly more so.
Because the Pride Progress flag is, in my view, my humble view, the imperial flag.
It's universal, and we put it at our embassies all over the world.
But putting aside the...
So then the question is, okay, so here's the package deal.
I disagree with flying the Pride Progress flag in Kabul.
I definitely agree with preventing the mass rape of 18 million women.
So if I have to balance those out, that's not that tough a balance.
America may suck in a lot of ways, but we don't suck in that big, giant way.
Yeah.
And so I have generalized moral objections to the conflation of America again.
And you see this a lot, actually, with the kind of left-wing approach to the United States.
We can't criticize this country over here because look at all the problems we're having over here.
And I do see it mirrored sometimes on the right, which is, look at all the bad stuff we're pushing over here.
You know, gender ideology and critical race theory.
And that makes it inappropriate for us to, quote-unquote, spread our values anywhere else.
And all I would say is, yes, those values should not be spread even at home.
But it's a fallacy to say...
that because there are people in the United States spreading that at home, it is therefore bad for other countries to export the parts where we kill the guys who are the rapists abroad.
The pride flag here is just sort of symbolic in a lot of ways, but it represents the overall problem.
Obviously, if you're going to weigh the rape of thousands of girls against a pride flag hanging on an embassy, the rape of thousands of girls is obviously a lot worse, clearly.
What we are exporting in general, and the pride flag is only one small symbol of it, is just, I think, utter, total moral confusion.
And I do think that people in Jamaica and across the world see that, and what they're saying is, we don't want any part of that.
We don't want that here.
You guys are falling apart morally.
On a broad scale, I mean, we weren't flying the pride progress flag in 2005, and the Taliban didn't seem to waver in their determination to overthrow the...
Michael, what are you going to say?
Macron, the leader of France, came out, this was about a month or so ago, and he addressed woke ideology, political correctness, whatever you want to call it.
He said, this is bad stuff.
We don't have that in France.
This is France.
This is one of the most liberal nations I've ever known.
He goes, we don't have that here.
It is a poison.
We are going to prevent it from coming into our schools and our institutions.
And I think that's kind of what Matt is getting at here is, yes, we historically have exported wonderful things and ideas and values around the world.
And that is changing.
That has changed.
And even Western, enlightened, wonderful leaders are recognizing that.
And I think that causes some of the lack of cohesion at home.
It has absolutely changed.
Our values today in many ways are worse.
Some of our values are a lot better, though.
And I think one of the mistakes that we make on the right, because we're definitionally reactionary, that's what the right is, is that we, because we point at all the bad things that are beginning to happen, We wind up, and even Donald Trump did this, you know, when he basically said, oh, we do bad things, too.
The Russians do bad things, we do bad things.
That's a horrible line, because it is 90% true and 100% wrong, right?
Yes, we do.
Of course, it's true that we do bad things.
There is no comparison.
America is, like, we still live...
We still have, fundamentally compared to most people in most places at most times, a great way of life, a great value system, a better value system in some ways than we've ever had, a worse value system in some very important ways, and a worsening value system in some very particular ways that we need to fight.
But when you see, like, Nicky Fuentes, little Nicky Fuentes, saying on the only social channels he's still welcome on, which, of course, he should not have been banned.
I still also like to rub a little salt in his mouth.
But he said, you know, Afghanistan is falling to a regime that makes women cover their faces and some little clever little list of...
Haha, I made you think because really America is just as bad.
And you go, no, America isn't just as bad.
The fact that America has gay marriage does not make it as bad as the Taliban.
The fact that America has transgenderism confusion, which is a horrible moral sin that needs to be combated, doesn't make us as bad as Afghanistan.
Honestly, even the fact that America has abortion, which I think is the grave sin, far worse than gay rights, far worse than even the trans ideology, a blight that will...
If God permits the earth to continue, a blight that future generations will look back on, not the way we look at slavery, the way we would look at slavery if slavery involved murdering every black person.
Nevertheless, we live in this broken and fallen world, and America is still better.
Our way of life is still better, and our values are still better than in most of these places.
I'll take America over the Taliban any day of the week.
That's why I'm living here, and I don't want to move to Afghanistan.
But, broadly speaking, can I say that I recommend the American way of life as it stands right now?
And the answer is no.
It's not something that, broadly, to the entire world, I want to broadcast and try to bring people into.
I think the abortion thing, you know, if we really take that seriously, just homing in on that for a second, if we really take seriously the idea that 1,800,000 human beings are being slaughtered every single year, You can make the argument.
It's actually hard to find something worse than that.
That's about 60 million human beings we've killed in about 40 years.
Since Roe v.
Wade.
Yeah.
So do we believe that or not?
Do we actually take that seriously as a real death toll or not?
And if we do, then we're in a pretty bad shape against almost anybody, actually.
Well, not against almost anybody because...
Abortion is legal in almost every other Western nation.
Because for most of our lives, abortion was mandatory in our only true rival superpower.
So when you're still talking globally about the values that are being imported or exported around the world, then yeah, America is still better than China, even with those grievous sins.
Because China has all of...
Well, not all of the exact same...
They have abortion, certainly.
The same grievous sins...
And more additional grievances.
That's an okay argument, but it's not that great an argument.
I think what Matt's saying does have a lot of weight.
There's also...
No, wait a minute.
I think this idea that we are slaughtering this many babies, like 3,000 a day.
3,000 a day.
I think this should weigh on us a lot more heavily than it does.
One of the great triumphs of the left is because we can't see the babies who are being killed.
They've convinced us that they have no humanity.
And if we could see them, what was happening, it would be on a parallel with raping the young women of Afghanistan.
And if we were going to Afghanistan and then immediately forcing abortion on all the women there, I think that that would be a far...
Graver.
I think that the big question in politics that people generally fail to ask is, compared to whom?
I agree.
This is a great country if you survive birth.
Listen, you don't have to preach to me about abortion, but when it comes to the question of whether the United States has the right and or obligation to push our values when we are so confused and discombobulated and screwed up at home, I think the answer is compared to what?
Because I think, in certain circumstances, the answer would probably be no.
If you were saying, do we need to pursue cultural imperialism with regard to a Western European country that happens to be stricter on abortion?
Say, Ireland four years ago.
Or France.
Right, or France.
Not really.
I don't see a need for us to be culturally imperialist on that.
I don't see our need to be culturally imperialist with regard to wokeness.
And so I think it's almost a non-sequitur to say something like, you know, the problems that we have at home are the problems that we are exporting abroad, when in large measure that is not true.
The problems that we are having at home are problems that we are screwing ourselves up with at home and a symptom of our failure.
To have any sort of heart for the fight for our own values that we have no values.
So what I would say is that our withdrawal from these places, our attempt to go isolationist, is a symptom of our interior weakness, not a reconsolidation.
It's almost as though, like, you hear a lot of people on the right make the argument, well, you're spending all this money over here, let's bring that money home and let's spend it on the border.
It's like, well, yes, but that's not where any of that money is going to go.
Joe Biden's not going to take one dollar of that or one soldier there and put that person on the border.
It's not going to happen.
So you're just doing a non-sequitur now.
You're just saying, I would like more security on the border, and also I don't want troops in Afghanistan.
And that's not the same thing.
You're going to have to show the connection between those two things.
I can say it once.
I hate wokeness.
I think all the stuff the left is pushing is serious garbage.
And also, I don't understand how that is of any comfort at all to anybody who is still trapped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan.
But it is true that within living memory, at least my living memory, it wasn't always so that this was a great country as compared to what?
Yeah.
You know, that's a new phenomenon.
I don't think that's true.
I mean, I think that, no, because I think that, I mean, and this is where you're going to get the argument.
I mean, pick a period.
Michael, which period are we talking about?
I think the period after World War II, this country actually entered a period of...
Missing segregation there.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
I didn't say that it was perfect.
I didn't say that it was...
No, but then it is compared to what?
The Soviet Union made this exact argument.
I know they did.
That was what aboutism, but abortion is different.
And also, to Matt and Drew's point here, a lot of the way that we spread our imperial reach is through non-governmental channels, or NGOs, literally, right?
And we actually do spread abortion through NGOs, and this is something we've gotten a lot of pushback from Africa.
So one of the values we're spreading, I'm sorry to report, is abortion.
And I think, you know, Jeremy...
Well, you bring up this point about this guy Fuentes.
But it's not just him, right?
It's other people, too, who will make this argument and say, are we so much better than the Taliban?
And the reason that some people can make that argument with more credibility is because they have, as we joked, been kicked off of social media.
They have been taken out of financial institutions.
They've been put on the no-fly list without being accused of crime.
Yeah, we've got some problems.
But I'm just, I guess my point again is descriptive, which is I understand why some people would make even that semi-joking comparison when perhaps we would not.
I think that it's disingenuous to have this particular group of people devolve into some sort of tacit accusations that maybe we're not pure enough on the abortion issue.
No, no, no.
Nobody's saying that.
That's not true.
The abortion is like unto slavery in two ways, and wholly different than slavery in most ways.
It's like unto slavery in two ways.
One, that it is culturally, in broad swaths of the culture, considered moral, even though it is wholly unrighteous.
And it is likened to abortion in that it is somewhat ubiquitous.
Slavery was ubiquitous in all of the world.
Abortion is ubiquitous in all developed nations, really, on Earth.
And that does not get out of jail free card for us where abortion is concerned.
But it is to talk about the scope of the problem of abortion.
That abortion does not make America unique.
And it also...
America is a grievous evil.
Abortion is a grievous evil.
And we're worse on it than most others.
It's not a unique.
That also, what you're talking about also, I think, could potentially mitigate to a certain extent the personal moral culpability of some individuals who choose abortion because they're in this environment where they're told by everybody that's okay.
But in terms of the point that I was making anyway is not about any individual here.
It's actually all of us.
I had this thought just the other day when we were going out to eat or something and we passed by Planned Parenthood, which we all do all the time.
We passed by Planned Parenthood.
And I didn't even think much.
I just went to eat.
And only later did I stop and reflect.
I'm like, I just passed by a building where they were killing babies.
And it didn't even register fully on me as pro-life as I am and as we all are.
So this is, like Drew pointed out, this is a success the left has had.
This is something unique about abortion that we don't see the victims.
And so that prevents us all from fully confronting it.
I think that if these were, and I'm sure we all, I know we all agree, if these were two-year-old children who were being, and we could see them being carted in by their parents, to have their brain sucked out of their head.
I wouldn't have been able to go eat.
I mean, I would have had to charge in there and stop it.
And none of us really have that.
Abortion is the lords of the ring sin.
It's the sin that God can't see.
If you had the ring of power and you could turn yourself invisible, 100% of all men would go into the women's locker room.
Your very first thought.
It'd be like, yep, women's locker room.
Just instantly.
Because God couldn't see you.
And when I say God, I really mean Man, because God knows the heart of it.
God sees all.
But we reduce God down to us.
So abortion is what it is in particular because people don't see...
Not only do they see the crime, they don't see the criminal.
And in that way, I will confess in various moments in my life, always thinking that abortion was a grievous crime, I've been confronted with the part of myself...
They could have snuck around and done it.
Because I know what I could do if I could get away with it.
It's that passage of Jesus in the book of Matthew about adultery.
If you lust after, you're an adulterer.
If you have hate, you're a murderer.
You're kind of like them or you're on the path to being one.
You are one because you've revealed what you actually would be if no one was watching.
Abortion just happens to be the one that actually no one is watching.
We've actually run out of time, but rather than ending the show, I'm going to prolong the suffering because we promised that we would take some questions from our Daily Wire subscribers.
They make it possible for us to conduct this crap show.
I would argue that the longer the show goes, the more moral obligation we incur to our subscribers.
Now I even more strongly disagree.
Exactly.
We should just withdraw.
The first question for the group, how will the reduction in American might and reputation have ramifications on other world events, namely China moving on Taiwan and Russia flexing its muscles in Eastern Europe?
That's the question, Ben.
I mean, I think it's going to have dramatic ramifications.
I think everybody who follows foreign policy can see that people are talking openly in China about moving on Taiwan.
Frankly, I think they'd be fools not to move on Taiwan before Joe Biden is out of office.
Because while the getting is good, I think you're going to start to...
They may try to pursue the Hong Kong model of trying to pressure the government there into moving more pro-China because they feel like they're not going to get American support.
So just basically softly take them over the way that they did Hong Kong before they marched in the troops.
But look, China's on the march.
They're taking advantage.
Russia's on the march.
They're taking advantage.
We're not going to have any bases now, not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan.
So we have no ability.
When Joe Biden talks about how we're going to have over-the-horizon capacity, we absolutely will not.
In order to do that, you have to have people on the ground who actually know where to spot the actual bad guys so that you can actually put a laser on it so that our guys can hit it.
So it's a disaster area and a wide...
Array of foreign policy issues is the really short answer.
And again, I think our enemies are looking at this, and they are just drooling.
To Drew's point, America is about to have to actually face the question of what is our role in the world.
Do you think Biden is going to be impeached or is going to be forced to step down?
And is that even a good thing?
Because Kamala is just as bad and also should be impeached.
Kamala, too, because she obviously had a part of this plan.
Also, in fact, right before it all went to crap, she made a major point of saying that she was very involved.
How incompetent do you have to be where you're like, okay, this thing is going to be just, but I need to be on that bandwagon.
Well, don't forget, at that first speech, she wasn't there.
I think she had to have her arm twisted a little.
But to this point, I'll defer to the lawyer in the room, but as a simple matter of impeachment, maladministration is not a basis for impeachment.
High crimes and misdemeanors is a basis for impeachment.
There's also nobody who's going to impeach him.
Right, exactly.
I think the question of whether he will have to step down is unanswerable because he is such a...
We just don't know how bad off he is, and it's possible at some point they won't be able to hide it.
If he looks the way he looked tonight, I cannot imagine him running for re-election, but at the same time, they can't let Kamala Harris run.
I think he runs for re-election.
I don't think either of them would run for re-election.
Did you just see, so the Yahoo headline just came out about his poll numbers and they said, this is really hurting Biden-Harris.
Harris is only leading Trump by 2%.
That was the headline.
Wait, is she running?
I didn't know that was part of the patch.
I'm kind of with Ben.
I think that they will, it'll be weekend at Bernie's.
They are terrified.
I mean, Kamala couldn't win a primary.
She certainly isn't going to win.
And the idea that both the president and the vice president would not seek A second term against a Republican.
I don't know if we've ever seen that.
I think that's going to happen.
We don't know the future, but I think that's going to happen.
I think it's very hard to know.
It really is impossible to know what's going to happen with Biden because it may just be impossible to prop him up.
Do you believe the Biden administration will pay a ransom for remaining Americans who are left in Afghanistan before using military force?
For sure.
One billion percent.
Yeah, exactly.
There are going to be pallets of cash that are shipped over that we're never going to see.
There already are.
Oh, 100 percent.
By the way, that actually is an impeachable offense.
Yeah.
So you're not right.
I mean, that actually is.
So if we start shipping money over there without any sort of congressional approval to a terrorist group, then that actually is an impeachment.
But who's going to do it?
Right.
But I mean, just to the legal question, by the way, to the legal question, the real answer is it doesn't matter because impeachment is a political exercise, right?
So it doesn't really matter.
Right.
What are the chances that China decides it's time to go after Taiwan?
I mean, we're basically all... 100%.
And if I were China, I'd certainly do it in the next three years because we don't know what's coming.
And by the way, who exactly is going to oppose them?
To speak of the West and its restrictions on freedom, it makes more sense to have that conversation less in the guise of the Taliban than it does with regard to China, considering Chinese social credit system, considering how Australia is currently locking its citizens down.
Did you see the video from Nine News?
And it was like, I was just waiting for the...
And there was the guy who's coming down the elevator and the anchor's like, his name is...
And I was like, I'm waiting for them to release the hound on Montag.
I agree.
You're the only person who got the reference.
But I was like, this is the end of Fahrenheit 451.
He's running for the river and you've got the hound following him because he might have COVID and he's asymptomatic.
It's unbelievable.
It is the fall of the West right now, and it is the Chinese moment.
I mean, you wrote your book, The Authoritarian Moment, and really what you mean in some ways is that this is the Chinese moment.
There have been, for the last 25 years, there have been two models that were sort of dominant.
There's the Western model, basically the American model.
Now, in Europe, it's further left, and it has more a parliamentary system, and it has, you know, bigger social space.
It's essentially the post-war American order.
And what we're seeing, to some degree even domestically, which is very concerning, is that in some ways both left and right are looking at China now and saying, you know, this system of strong authoritarian regimes with liberal economics may be scalable in a way that this isn't.
This happened before World War II, too.
You know, there were plenty of people in America who were going like, Hitler isn't such a bad guy.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's got a point.
Do you believe that this is a combination of idiocy, incompetence, naivety, or intentional?
In other words, are they trying to inflame the American populace and thereby increase military operations overseas?
I think it's A. I've heard the conspiracy, if you want to call it that, the conspiracy theory that this is a purposeful attempt to debilitate us and demoralize us.
I just don't think they're that smart, to be honest with you.
Joe Biden is a moron.
He's a moron.
I suppose the only moron.
And he always was, even before this.
So put my tinfoil hat on, though, if I could stand up for the question.
To Ben's point, the people do not control foreign policy, or at least have not in many years, many decades.
And we know that the bureaucracy and the foreign policy establishment did not want to pull out of Afghanistan.
And we know that Joe Biden is not running the show.
And so there is the question.
I don't want to ascribe to malice that which is explained by stupidity and incompetence, and there was a lot of that.
We left a lot of stuff behind at Bagram.
We left a lot of stuff behind in the country.
75,000 vehicles, over 200 aircraft, 600,000 firearms.
Ten million rounds of ammo.
I mean, we're missing an army's worth of stuff.
That is either historic incompetence or...
Or they're worth competing.
I think we're missing an option, though, which is indifference.
I think part of it, the problem is the people that run our country don't really care that much about Americans or our country at all.
So I think there's also...
Joe Biden's always been committed to his peculiarly stupid idea of the moment, right?
I mean, it's like, what if we just took this country and we sliced it in three?
And you're like, well, there are no natural resources in one third of that country.
And he's like, I don't care, man.
Come on, man.
And it's that here, too, right?
Didn't his press conference tonight where he's like, all my generals agreed on this?
He kept saying this over and over, right?
Not all my generals.
All the higher-ups in the military.
Right.
Which actually extends even beyond...
Like, one person has to say, I mean, I didn't.
By the way...
It's not true.
We have many, many stories of all his guys going, you can't pull out this way.
And he's like, we're doing it.
And then he's like, but they also agreed that we should not defend Bagram.
It's like, oh, you mean once you said we could have two troops and you could put the two troops in one place?
They said let's do Kabul instead of Bagram?
Wow, big agreement there, but it is amazing.
I do think that we can't talk about it on this show because we've got to go home.
This is ridiculous.
But I do think that there is a case to be made that our intelligence services are infiltrated by our enemies.
Yes.
I think that there is a case.
Of course.
Of course.
And the thing, we talk about the big things.
I'm not committing suicide if I die.
You wrote a McAfee-esque letter.
You did just give up the whole plot.
Biden's not going to run, Kamala's not going to run, and Hillary's going to be president.
You're in real trouble, buddy.
We talk about the big things, Humvees, armored vehicles, airplanes, and helicopters.
It's the 16,000 pairs of night vision goggles that I'm the most worried about.
Our special operators have ruled Afghanistan truly for the last 20 years.
They're the most lethal fighting men that have ever existed in all of human history.
And their superpower is that they can see in the dark.
That's their superpower.
And we just gave the enemy the superpower.
The good news is, where are they going to buy batteries?
That's all the time we have for tonight.
We want to especially thank our DailyWire.com subscribers for being patient with us tonight.
It took us a minute to get to your questions.
but we're grateful that you are with us.
Thank you all for tuning in.
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