Ron Paul Liberty Report - Joe Kent - "A National Security Strategy For Our Republic, Not An Empire."
Aired: 2026-05-02
Duration: 28:32


=== Preventing Future Disasters (06:27) ===

[00:00:11]  When the next speaker did something incredibly brave, which is that he resigned in protest of this war from an extremely high position in the intelligence community, he must have known what was coming at him at that point, the most vulnerable time.
[00:00:30]  What happened to me after I woke up and the shock partially wore off is I got a good call from my good friend Eric Garris at antiwar.com, and he said, knows how to get in touch with Joe.
[00:00:43]  Uh, you should have him speak at your conference.
[00:00:45]  And I, I don't take suggestions.
[00:00:47]  I don't take requests, but I thought that was a pretty darn good suggestion.
[00:00:51]  And so I texted Joe and I, I could only imagine how his phone was ringing off the hook.
[00:00:57]  Uh, I texted him and I waited a while and I thought that, you know, it was a good idea.
[00:01:00]  It's not going to work out.
[00:01:01]  And then I finally heard back from him and he said, you know, I love Ron Paul and I, I love to see if I can make it work.
[00:01:08]  Uh, and he's just a perfect person for us because he is a man of great integrity who sacrificed More than anyone that should have to sacrifice for their country.
[00:01:18]  And he's willing to come and speak with us and encourage us in what we're doing.
[00:01:22]  So we're so grateful to have Mr. Joe Kent.
[00:01:24]  Thank you.
[00:01:42]  Well, thank you all very much.
[00:01:43]  I'm very honored to be here.
[00:01:45]  Can you guys hear me?
[00:01:45]  Is this okay?
[00:01:47]  Good.
[00:01:47]  Very honored to be here.
[00:01:48]  Dr. Paul, thank you so much for having me.
[00:01:50]  You've been an inspiration for Americans who care about liberty and fighting for the truth for multiple generations now.
[00:01:56]  So it's a true honor to be here.
[00:01:59]  I kind of had a roundabout way coming here to get to this moment in my life and in my career.
[00:02:05]  So I'm going to talk a little bit about who I am, what I fought for, why I left the administration, and how we kind of got to this moment that we're in right now, where despite all the promises that were made, despite all the lessons that should have been learned, For the last 20 plus years, we find ourselves in the midst of another Middle East war.
[00:02:24]  And I think that this one is probably going to be more catastrophic than the ones that we fought in previously.
[00:02:30]  So, a little bit about myself I served in the Army for a little over 20 years.
[00:02:35]  I started out in Ranger Regiment and then was a Green Beret for quite a bit.
[00:02:39]  As far back as I can remember, when I was younger, all I wanted to do was join the military and be a commando.
[00:02:44]  I'm still proud of being part of the warrior class of this nation.
[00:02:47]  I still believe we need to have a very strong national defense.
[00:02:50]  I think this country.
[00:02:53]  Raises up great warriors.
[00:02:54]  I think our all volunteer force has been a true testament to the valor and patriotism of the American people.
[00:03:03]  Unfortunately, I do think our volunteer force has been squandered in a way that not only has cost us a lot of great Americans, but it has also given the American people a very casual view of war because the all volunteer force has let us send us off on conflicts for over 20 plus years where most people in the country are disconnected from them.
[00:03:22]  They don't feel it in the way that the Vietnam War was felt, World War II was felt, et cetera.
[00:03:27]  But I volunteered and volunteered as much as I possibly could in special operations.
[00:03:31]  That gave me a front row seat.
[00:03:33]  I joined in 98 when the war was on the horizon.
[00:03:37]  And then when September 11th happened, I was actually in the special forces selection process.
[00:03:41]  So, the process it takes to become a Green Beret.
[00:03:44]  And at the time, I was afraid I was going to miss the war because I thought that it was going to be a war like Panama, Grenada.
[00:03:50]  Little did I know that we were going to be at it for 20 plus years.
[00:03:52]  When I finally got done with training, I deployed right away to Baghdad, Iraq in the summer of 2003.
[00:04:00]  Right as the insurgency was picking up, I did two pretty high intensity deployments in 2003, 2004, and I still truly believed that we were looking for these weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had hidden somewhere and he might give them to Al Qaeda, you know, because I thought that the individuals, the generals, and the political leadership above me wouldn't lie to us naively.
[00:04:22]  But by the time I hit my third deployment, which was about 20 years ago, I started to feel that we had definitely been lied to.
[00:04:29]  As a Green Beret, you get the opportunity to not just go kick down doors and fight bad guys.
[00:04:34]  But a lot of what we do as Green Berets is going out and living with the indigenous population, really getting to know the Iraqi people at the street level.
[00:04:41]  I spent a lot of time in Baghdad.
[00:04:43]  When I kind of came to my senses a little bit, I was out in northwestern Iraq, kind of just in the hinterlands outside of Mosul.
[00:04:50]  And I really started to realize that we had been lied to.
[00:04:53]  There was no Al Qaeda that was inside of Iraq before we came into the country.
[00:04:58]  We sort of created Al Qaeda in our own way by invading Iraq and becoming this vector for jihadis.
[00:05:04]  So we became a self fulfilling prophecy in that way.
[00:05:06]  I've seen that repeat over the years several times.
[00:05:10]  But I was very frustrated then as a young man, already having lost several of my good friends in the war in Iraq and then in the war in Afghanistan.
[00:05:18]  I was frustrated that there were also veterans who were senior to me, gentlemen who had fought in Vietnam, had gotten through that process, and who didn't speak out in the lead up to the Iraq war.
[00:05:29]  Because in my eyes, they should have known better.
[00:05:32]  They should have seen that we were being lied to.
[00:05:34]  They should have understood the consequences.
[00:05:36]  And so I made a promise to myself I said, if I'm ever in a position where I can influence policy and I can stop us from sending young men and young women to go off and fight and die in a pointless war.
[00:05:48]  I will do everything that I can because now that I have this knowledge, I can't just forget about it.
[00:05:52]  I can't just focus on the profession of being a soldier and say, well, I like doing this.
[00:05:56]  I'm just going to continue to apply my trade and hope political leadership gets it right.
[00:06:00]  If I'm ever in a position, I'm going to do what I can to ensure that we actually implement the lessons learned.
[00:06:06]  And so that was something I said to myself, you know, 20 plus years ago, not really knowing where life would take me, but God has a plan.
[00:06:13]  And so I wanted to stay deeply involved in special operations and in the intelligence community because I felt that we needed good people on the inside who could make sure something like Iraq, Afghanistan, later on, Syria, Yemen, et cetera, didn't happen.
[00:06:28]  I kept thinking if we just got the right people in the right place who had the right experiences, my generation of warriors, that we had the right experiences, we would be able to prevent the next disaster.

=== Lessons from the Trump Administration (03:07) ===

[00:06:38]  We'd be able to prevent this war with Iran that seemed inevitable.
[00:06:42]  And, you know, as the years went on, a war with Iran was heavily petitioned for multiple times over.
[00:06:48]  Under the Obama administration, probably towards the tail end of the Bush administration as well.
[00:06:53]  And so it was always kind of there on the horizon.
[00:06:55]  But I became a Trump supporter back in 2016 when President Trump came out against the military industrial complex and actually attacked Jeb Bush and attacked the Republican establishment for getting us involved in the wars overseas.
[00:07:08]  And so I thought, okay, finally we've got a guy who understands that we shouldn't be fighting these wars, that we do need to focus on our own country, a pragmatic national defense that keeps us out of these wars.
[00:07:18]  In his first administration, I think he did about as good of a job as you can as an outsider.
[00:07:23]  He didn't get us involved in any new wars.
[00:07:26]  Tragically, I lost my late wife.
[00:07:28]  She was also in the military.
[00:07:29]  She joined right after 9 11.
[00:07:31]  She's a native New Yorker.
[00:07:33]  Her father and her uncle were both 9 11 ground zero first responders.
[00:07:37]  And so her and her younger brother both joined the military right after that.
[00:07:41]  She was killed in 2019, about a month after Trump tried to get us out of Syria the first time.
[00:07:47]  So, had Trump actually been, had the orders that President Trump gave been followed by the administrative state, the generals, the unelected bureaucrats, my late wife would still be alive to this day.
[00:07:59]  And so that made me even more of a believer that we needed to have the right people in the right places.
[00:08:04]  So, I was still inspired by the message of President Trump because I truly believe that he wanted to get our troops out of these wars.
[00:08:11]  I fought heavily for President Trump on the campaign trail.
[00:08:13]  I ran for Congress twice unsuccessfully in the Pacific Northwest.
[00:08:17]  It's a challenging place for people with our values to run, as some of you guys know.
[00:08:22]  But, you know, tried to move the needle as much as I could.
[00:08:24]  Any chance I got to really articulate what I believed, anyways, at the time, the MAGA American First foreign policy was, how these wars had really just been a detriment to our country.
[00:08:36]  I took that opportunity and tried to educate as many people as I possibly could.
[00:08:41]  When Trump won the election in 2024, I was offered a job somewhere in the intelligence community.
[00:08:47]  Tulsi Gabbard had come out and campaigned with me.
[00:08:50]  Tulsi's still a good friend.
[00:08:51]  She's still fighting the good fight from the inside.
[00:08:53]  And so, her and the Trump administration asked if I'd come and run the National Counterterrorism Center.
[00:08:57]  I said, absolutely.
[00:08:58]  If your country calls you to serve, I will 100% go serve.
[00:09:02]  Our country is facing a lot of legitimate terrorist threats that are out there, mostly because of the open border.
[00:09:08]  But there are enemies out there who want to seek to harm Americans, which is another reason why we shouldn't be let off sending our resources into disastrous wars of choice.
[00:09:17]  We need to keep our eye on the ball and do what it takes to keep Americans safe.
[00:09:20]  So, I said, absolutely, I'd be more than honored to serve in the Trump administration.
[00:09:24]  So, Took a job basically on day one of the Trump administration at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was eventually confirmed as the National Counterterrorism Center Director by the Senate.
[00:09:35]  And that gave me a unique perspective.
[00:09:37]  So I could see all of the intelligence across the entire intelligence community, both law enforcement intelligence and then also the overseas intelligence as well.

=== Stopping Iran Nuclear Ambitions (15:34) ===

[00:09:46]  And so in the lead up to the Iran war, I was pretty shocked to see just the amount of influence that the Israeli lobby, but it's much more complicated than the Israeli lobby.
[00:09:59]  To see their influence.
[00:10:00]  Now, obviously, I believed in Ron Paul's message in 2008, and so I already thought a certain way about our foreign policy.
[00:10:08]  I believed in President Trump's message in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
[00:10:12]  I had read a good deal about the Israeli lobby and all the different military industrial complex lobbying mechanisms that are out there, but I didn't understand it until I saw it up close and personal.
[00:10:23]  I'll just share a little bit of that with you guys right now because I think it's important context for us to have as we enter this next part of the war and how we can hopefully extract ourselves from it.
[00:10:33]  Before we have a massive disaster in the Middle East.
[00:10:37]  So, in the lead up to the first iteration of the war, the 12 day war and Operation Midnight Hammer, initially President Trump was very bullish on the negotiations.
[00:10:47]  And he had every right to be bullish on the negotiations because the Iranians themselves had basically agreed to come to the negotiating table.
[00:10:54]  And they didn't just tell us that, they showed us that.
[00:10:57]  When President Trump came back into the Oval Office in January, the Iranians did a couple, I think, pretty remarkable things.
[00:11:05]  They stopped having their proxies attack our forces in the Middle East.
[00:11:08]  Under the Biden administration, the Iranians saw weakness.
[00:11:11]  They knew that Biden was weak.
[00:11:12]  And after October 7th, they enabled their proxies in Iraq, Syria, a lot of them in Hezbollah as well, to attack our forces.
[00:11:20]  But primarily, our forces who were still in Iraq and Syria were attacked around 200 times.
[00:11:25]  Now, I don't think they should have been there.
[00:11:26]  I think our bases, and this is proven to be true, our bases in the region were more of a liability than they were an asset.
[00:11:33]  But our forces were under heavy fire under the Biden administration.
[00:11:37]  Right when Trump came in, The proxies stopped attacking.
[00:11:40]  And so the Iranians said, hey, we're going to withhold the proxies from attacking.
[00:11:44]  And then they also agreed immediately to get to the negotiating table.
[00:11:47]  That was because President Trump and the Iranians agreed on a starting point.
[00:11:50]  They agreed on the biggest part of the so called nuclear agreement.
[00:11:54]  President Trump had always said, and he continues to say this sometimes, and it's very interesting to watch the language that he uses and when that language changes.
[00:12:03]  President Trump had always said, and he continues to say, that Iran can't have a nuclear bomb.
[00:12:07]  Well, the good news is the Iranians, under the previous Supreme Leader before we killed him, said Iran can't have a nuclear bomb as well.
[00:12:14]  And this wasn't just words on paper.
[00:12:16]  It was a religious decree.
[00:12:17]  And you can even take the religious decree and say, I don't care what a fatwa is.
[00:12:20]  They're just going to break it anyways.
[00:12:22]  However, Iran had self enforced this red line since 2003.
[00:12:26]  So if the Iranians wanted to have a nuclear weapon, they would have had a nuclear weapon long before President Trump even came down the golden escalator.
[00:12:33]  So the Iranians were holding that line on their own.
[00:12:36]  They had a self prohibition on developing a nuclear weapon.
[00:12:39]  And President Trump said, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.
[00:12:41]  President Trump's the art of the deal.
[00:12:43]  That gets you at the negotiating table.
[00:12:44]  You agree on first principles.
[00:12:46]  This is what gave us a lot of hope for there to actually be a nuclear deal.
[00:12:51]  And if you rewind to about a year ago, and you can still find these clips online, you'd see Steve Witkopf on the Sunday shows, on Fox News, talking about the different levels of enrichment that might be tolerable, how the enrichment would be observed.
[00:13:05]  Because basically at this point, we were just working out the details of a deal between us and Iran.
[00:13:12]  But then something very interesting happened.
[00:13:13]  And this is what really alarmed me.
[00:13:15]  I think something that we all need to be aware of.
[00:13:17]  I think, like Marjorie said, I think a lot of you have been more aware of this.
[00:13:21]  Longer than most Americans have, but it was an eye opener for me.
[00:13:24]  It wasn't just, you know, one Israeli official came in.
[00:13:26]  It wasn't just that BB came to the White House.
[00:13:29]  What I saw, and I described this a little bit in my resignation letter, is that there was an echo chamber that was developed around President Trump.
[00:13:35]  And the echo chamber is pretty sophisticated.
[00:13:38]  You would have senior Israeli officials who would come in and do their official engagements with us, with Americans, whether it was in the intelligence community, diplomats, or other just long standing relationships.
[00:13:48]  They would come in, they would talk with us, they would speak with the president as well.
[00:13:52]  And then you'd have the donor network that would come in, and also they have a certain degree of access to the president.
[00:13:58]  But then you have a very sophisticated media campaign that was used on Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, various think tanks throughout Washington, D.C., the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, et cetera.
[00:14:09]  They all kind of in unison around this time last year, probably starting in March or so, they started saying the American policy is zero enrichment.
[00:14:18]  And they just kept echoing it over and over again.
[00:14:20]  And suddenly, before you know it, this is actually getting said and repeated by American officials that Iran can't have any.
[00:14:26]  Enrichment.
[00:14:27]  Now, the Israelis are smart.
[00:14:28]  The Israelis knew that zero enrichment was a red line for Iran.
[00:14:32]  It was essentially a poison pill to kill the deal.
[00:14:35]  And now, you know, people will say, why do the Iranians need enrichment?
[00:14:38]  If they have any enrichment, they're going to develop a nuclear bomb.
[00:14:41]  I say, don't trust what anybody says, but look at their behavior.
[00:14:44]  They've had the fatwa, the prohibition in place since 2003.
[00:14:47]  If these guys wanted a nuclear weapon, they would have had it by now.
[00:14:50]  They're also a very oil rich country.
[00:14:52]  They simply could have just traded enough oil or other commodities with Pakistan or someone else.
[00:14:57]  To get a nuclear bomb.
[00:14:58]  So they are self regulating.
[00:15:00]  They don't want the nuclear bomb, but they're smart.
[00:15:02]  The Iranians are actually pretty astute observers of the region and American foreign policy.
[00:15:08]  So the Iranians watched us, the American government, under multiple presidents, basically say, hey, if you have any kind of nuclear enrichment capability, we'll go after you, like we went after Saddam Hussein.
[00:15:19]  If you say you may have a nuclear weapon, if you're going to hide any kind of nuclear production enrichment that you have, you get the Iraq treatment.
[00:15:28]  Now, if you go the Qaddafi route in Libya and you say, okay, I'll be above the board with you guys, here's all my nuclear enrichment, here's all of our ability to make any kind of nuclear weapon, then you get the Qaddafi treatment.
[00:15:38]  So, what the Iranians had developed actually was based off of the policies that we enacted.
[00:15:43]  And they basically have what I like to call the Goldilocks method for enrichment.
[00:15:47]  They want the ability to be a threshold state, to have enough where they could have a nuclear weapon, but they don't want a nuclear weapon.
[00:15:54]  That gives them, I'd say, their national pride, their national dignity, but it also makes it so that they can't be toppled so easily.
[00:16:02]  So, it was really important for the Israelis, from their perspective, to move that red line because the Iranians, and you'll still hear them say this, they're not going to back off on enrichment.
[00:16:11]  So basically, by saying the U.S. policy, by having that interjected into the U.S. foreign policy doctrine of saying Iran can't have any enrichment, we killed any potential for the deal.
[00:16:22]  Now, President Trump, this was controversial.
[00:16:25]  We weighed the merits of knocking out the Iranian nuclear facilities, essentially to take the issue of enrichment off the table.
[00:16:33]  Now, obviously, that was risky because it could have started a wider war.
[00:16:36]  However, once again, the Iranians, and I'm not saying this as a spokesman for the Iranians, I'm an American, I did 11 combat tours for my country.
[00:16:44]  However, the Iranians, after Midnight Hammer, showed that they wanted to get back to the negotiating table.
[00:16:49]  They showed that by their actions.
[00:16:51]  After Midnight Hammer, when we bombed their nuclear facilities, the Iranians shot back an equal number of missiles as we dropped bombs on their nuclear facilities.
[00:16:59]  And then they said, hey, we're ready to negotiate.
[00:17:01]  And they shot those missiles at basically an empty quadrant of one of our bases in Qatar.
[00:17:05]  And as we've seen in the second iteration of fighting, if the Iranians wanted to be accurate, they could have been accurate.
[00:17:11]  So after the 12 day war, after we kind of Pretty much lied to them about the negotiations.
[00:17:17]  The Israelis kicked off the 12 day war.
[00:17:19]  The Iranians, despite all that, were willing to get back to the negotiating table with us because they knew there could be a deal there.
[00:17:26]  And our guys got back to the negotiating table with them.
[00:17:29]  But this enrichment issue kept coming back up.
[00:17:32]  And this is when we saw a lot of dissenting voices within the administration.
[00:17:37]  We were kind of blocked away from President Trump and not allowed to kind of give him alternative views.
[00:17:42]  And the Israeli echo chamber kicked into overdrive.
[00:17:46]  We saw them constantly on the media.
[00:17:48]  Constantly engaging with President Trump.
[00:17:51]  But I still believe that President Trump did not want to get sucked into this war.
[00:17:56]  The problem that we have is that we always refuse to take things away from the Israelis that would prevent them from going on the offense.
[00:18:03]  Even before the 12 day war, some of us were kind of looking at how we could prevent the Israelis from going and doing strikes inside of Iran because the Israeli calculus basically was if they can kick the bear enough over in Iran, then we will get hit back and then we will be sucked into the war.
[00:18:19]  And the Israelis' goal this entire time, and they're really not.
[00:18:23]  Shy about this at all.
[00:18:25]  Their entire goal is regime change.
[00:18:28]  But regime change in the American mind, because we're kind of, I think we're fairly simplistic, straightforward thinkers in the West.
[00:18:35]  In the American mind, when we think regime change, we think Saddam Hussein.
[00:18:38]  Like, we're going to roll in there, we're going to knock out the regime, and we're going to militarily dominate them, and it's going to be over.
[00:18:44]  If we have to occupy, we have to occupy.
[00:18:45]  That's regime change in the American mind.
[00:18:47]  The Israelis think much differently, and the Israelis have a much higher tolerance for chaos.
[00:18:52]  Like, Americans will never come out and be like, our goal is chaos.
[00:18:54]  Like, We won't say that.
[00:18:55]  That doesn't sell well.
[00:18:56]  I don't care what side of the aisle you're on.
[00:18:58]  Military planning doesn't thrive on chaos.
[00:19:00]  However, the Israelis, being from that region, they understand chaos and they can thrive in chaos.
[00:19:06]  And it is part of their national defense strategy.
[00:19:08]  So the Israelis are completely comfortable with going over and continuing to kill Iranian leaders until the regime falls.
[00:19:14]  And if the regime falls into chaos and there's no one to actually replace the leadership there, the Israelis are fine with that too.
[00:19:20]  Because in their mind, if Iran becomes like Lebanon is to a certain degree, like Iraq was during the height.
[00:19:27]  Of our involvement there, where it's just chaotic, or like Syria was for the better part of a decade, well, then the Iranians can't pose much of a threat to Israel.
[00:19:36]  Too bad for everybody else who has to deal with that chaos.
[00:19:39]  Their national security objectives are met.
[00:19:41]  So, we had a very hard time separating our goals from the Israelis' goals because the Israelis are very good at coming to us and saying, Hey, we have better intelligence than you guys do.
[00:19:51]  And in many cases, they do.
[00:19:52]  And that's a place where I think our intelligence community needs to do a lot more work.
[00:19:56]  And they would say, Hey, the Iranians are developing a nuclear weapon, et cetera.
[00:20:01]  We would check it in our systems and our intelligence, and we just simply wouldn't see that.
[00:20:04]  But the Israelis were very, very persistent with their messaging.
[00:20:07]  And so we knew within the U.S. government that more than likely the Israelis were going to go back and take another swing at the Iranians, this time going for a regime decapitation, which at the same time, we also knew that, hey, the Iranians would not be restrained this time.
[00:20:22]  They would view this as the existential threat.
[00:20:24]  Basically, the final round negotiations are done.
[00:20:27]  They've got to protect theirs.
[00:20:28]  So we knew they would strike back at our bases in the region.
[00:20:32]  And so our task at the time was to see if we could basically take away enough military equipment and support from the Israelis to prevent them from going on the offense.
[00:20:41]  And in my mind, That was how we could have prevented not just the 12 day war, but this second iteration.
[00:20:46]  But we never had the fortitude or the courage to go to the Israelis and say, hey, we pay for everything in your military.
[00:20:54]  We pay for your entire defense.
[00:20:56]  We'll pay for your defense, but we'll not pay for you guys to go on the offense.
[00:20:59]  We just simply refuse to do that.
[00:21:01]  And so the Israelis, realizing that Trump was back at the negotiating table throughout the summer, throughout the fall, and the winter, they were afraid that he was going to get a deal.
[00:21:09]  And again, I still think there was a deal that could have been had.
[00:21:12]  And the Israelis decided that they were going to ruin that by going in and taking strikes.
[00:21:16]  At Iran, knowing what would follow next.
[00:21:19]  And so, right after the war kicked off, basically, Secretary of State Marco Rubio came out and said just that.
[00:21:25]  He said, Well, the imminent attack was that the Israelis were going to imminently attack Iran and then the Iranians would hit us back.
[00:21:31]  And so, therefore, we decided to go in ahead of time.
[00:21:34]  They've come back and they've tried to clean that up.
[00:21:36]  But even if you go to the official state.gov website, it's up there right now that we got involved in this war at the behest of the Israelis.
[00:21:43]  And so, for me, seeing all that take place, the promise I had made to myself 20 plus years ago.
[00:21:50]  We worked really hard for the first two weeks of the war just to try and give President Trump a couple different options for off ramps.
[00:21:57]  None of those are being listened to.
[00:21:58]  It was pretty clear that we were in this and that the Israelis were going to dictate much of the timeline and much of our involvement.
[00:22:06]  And so I couldn't be involved in that anymore.
[00:22:08]  And so I decided to resign, but not just resign, but resign publicly to come out and just be transparent with the American people because I think this level of influence that Israel has over our actions, especially in the Middle East.
[00:22:20]  The American people can see.
[00:22:22]  Again, you in this room, you guys have seen this for quite some time, but I think the rest of the country is waking up and seeing this.
[00:22:27]  And I think it's important that we have folks from the administration come out, especially my fellow veterans, come out and say, hey, this is not what's being sold to the American people.
[00:22:35]  This isn't vital to our nation's defense.
[00:22:39]  Because if we don't find an off ramp, thank you.
[00:22:49]  Thank you.
[00:22:49]  Because I think we have a very limited window of time right now to hopefully communicate to President Trump that he doesn't have to do this.
[00:22:58]  If I would have had more of an opportunity to engage with him, I would say to him that, hey, you have 77 million people who voted for you.
[00:23:04]  You can say no to this very powerful lobby.
[00:23:07]  You can say no to foreign leaders.
[00:23:09]  It doesn't matter who it is.
[00:23:10]  You have 77 million Americans who voted to not get us in these wars, who voted for you to focus on this country, all the issues that Marjorie laid out that are not being handled right now on the domestic side.
[00:23:21]  Well, that's because all of our attention is being focused on yet another war in the Middle East, which is like basically what no MAGA voter voted for.
[00:23:30]  So I think it's really important that we offer that perspective and those options going forward to the president, because I think we still have a little bit of a window right now.
[00:23:38]  The president is marshaling a tremendous amount of military resources in the region, which typically tends to mean that we're going to do something.
[00:23:46]  And look, what I think we have to understand as Americans, and I'm sure other speakers covered this.
[00:23:52]  The Iranians have a very high tolerance for pain.
[00:23:55]  So, thinking that we're going to blockade them into submission or we're going to bomb them into submission is just foolish.
[00:24:01]  The longer you play out the military equations in Iran, number one, you see that you don't have a lot of good options.
[00:24:06]  But you either have to do some kind of insane ground invasion, which we don't have the manpower for because the country is just so big, or you have to use some kind of catastrophic weapon of mass destruction, which would be horrible as well.
[00:24:18]  So, there's no good military options inside of Iran.
[00:24:21]  The best thing that we can do right now, I think, to buy us some time.
[00:24:25]  It is to reflect back to what Ronald Reagan did in 1984, what Dr. Paul talked about last night, and just say, this isn't worth it.
[00:24:32]  And I think if the president could understand that there's enough people here in the country right now who would support him, yeah, you'd get all the neocons on Fox saying that he surrendered or he cowered or we backed out and let the Ayatollah win.
[00:24:44]  But the American people don't care about that.
[00:24:46]  We care about not getting sucked into yet another war in the Middle East.
[00:24:49]  So I think that the louder that we can make our voices, the more pressure that we can put on the administration to get us out of this, that we have a slight potential of avoiding chaos.
[00:24:58]  Now, The world has changed.
[00:25:00]  I mean, we killed a ton of the moderates inside of Iran, and people say, well, there's no moderates in Iran.
[00:25:05]  Well, I would say the last Supreme Leader was holding that prohibition on proxies attacking our forces, but also since 2003, the development of a nuclear weapon.
[00:25:15]  The geostrategic chessboard has been changed quite a bit.
[00:25:18]  Iran is going to be some form of a major power.

=== Building a Diverse Coalition (03:10) ===

[00:25:21]  And I think it's on us diplomatically to figure out how we can exist in a world with Iran.
[00:25:26]  I mean, prior to 1979, Iran was a great ally of ours.
[00:25:29]  It's not too far fetched to think that we could have that back again.
[00:25:32]  America has a great economy.
[00:25:34]  We're a great country.
[00:25:35]  There's no reason why we can't figure out how to cooperate and trade with major countries like this.
[00:25:40]  I'm not an isolationist completely.
[00:25:43]  I think there are times when we do need to go overseas and we do need to use military might and military power.
[00:25:48]  But I think it's incumbent upon our elected officials that they explain exactly why that's being done, what the end state is, and how long it's going to take to the American people just so that we're actually honest with them for once.
[00:26:01]  I have a lot of hope going forward because I do think this issue of the Iran war. Is bringing together quite a coalition, a diverse coalition of people who are liberty minded, of folks who voted for President Trump, and then also a lot of, I would say, unconventional allies probably on the left.
[00:26:20]  Going forward into the 2028 primary for the president, this issue of Israel and this issue of foreign wars, I think it's going to be front and center in both primaries, both the Democrat and both the Republicans.
[00:26:31]  So, I think, folks, with our view of the world, I think if we play our cards right, we can actually play a significant role in shaping who the candidates are on both sides.
[00:26:41]  Because I don't think any candidate is going to be able to come out and hope to get any kind of meaningful vote under the age of 50 and say, you know, I'm going to give Israel absolutely everything they want.
[00:26:50]  And I think we should double back down on this war in Iran.
[00:26:53]  I think President Trump's the last president who's going to be able to do that and actually retain power.
[00:26:58]  It's going to be very challenging for Republicans that are surrounding him right now to say, no, I'm different than what he's selling.
[00:27:05]  I think the message that we have, as Marjorie said, you guys have been right for so long.
[00:27:09]  This message is actually the right course for our country to be on.
[00:27:13]  And so I think it's going to be incredibly important for all of us to stay together, to stay unified.
[00:27:18]  I would say something I say to folks on the left all the time is that we may disagree on a lot of social issues, on a lot of domestic issues, but after being in the executive branch for a brief period of time, I can tell you the reason why none of the domestic issues really get touched is because foreign policy is something the president controls completely.
[00:27:37]  And it's much easier for a president to deal with foreign policy because, in that realm, he doesn't really have to go to Congress.
[00:27:43]  He should, but technically, he should.
[00:27:45]  However, he just doesn't have to.
[00:27:47]  He doesn't have to deal with states.
[00:27:48]  He doesn't have to deal with governors.
[00:27:49]  So it's much easier for him to kind of be king of the world and play foreign policy all day long.
[00:27:54]  And that can be very, very destructive, as we've seen for the last couple presidencies.
[00:27:58]  So, what I think is important going into 28 is that the issue of foreign policy is probably the most important issue in terms of the executive branch.
[00:28:07]  I would encourage people to vote.
[00:28:08]  Top ticket in terms of who's going to keep us out of foreign wars, keep foreign influence out of our federal government, and then vote all your social issues down ballot, vote all your local issues down ballot, because those are the positions that really affect those types of issues.
[00:28:21]  So I'm just really honored to be here, honored to be included in the speakership here.
[00:28:26]  So with that, God bless you all, and let's go forth and do good things for our country.
[00:28:32]  Thank you.