Piers Morgan, Dave Smith, and guests debate Biden's auto-pen January 6th pardons and Fauci's immunity while analyzing Trump's Alien Enemies Act deportations. The panel critiques U.S. reluctance to deploy the 82nd Airborne against Russia, noting Putin's alleged 2021 non-invasion offer for no NATO membership was ignored despite a 1994 sovereignty treaty. Experts warn that prolonging Ukraine's war without direct intervention risks nuclear confrontation and encourages nations like Iran and Taiwan to seek nuclear umbrellas, potentially repeating 1938 appeasement errors. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Outrage Over Fauci Pardon00:01:46
How outrageous it is that the outgoing president would pardon Fauci.
I accused everybody of being a horrible racist or conspiracy theorists if they brought up the theory of where this virus originated from.
It's one of the gravest crimes that was ever committed by the U.S. government against the American people.
This president, the one we have right now, pardoned January 6th insurrectionists, and you have the temerity after that to talk about Anthony Fauci, who I think did the best he could.
Anthony Fauci belongs in jail.
I hope we see justice from this.
One of the great hopes has always been, well, if Michelle Obama ran, she would take Trump down.
And Michelle Obama's now got this podcast that is spectacularly awful.
And Trump simply lifted it from them because the Democrats had stopped catering to labor and started catering to the kind of people Michelle Obama's podcast is for, rich women.
President Trump has declared Biden's controversial last-minute pardons as void, vacant, and of no further force or effect.
Well, Dr. Anthony Fauci and January 6th committee chief Liz Cheney were among those who got blanket immunity in the final moments of Biden's presidency.
But the outgoing president, shockingly, did not sign the paperwork.
Members of his team instead used an auto pen, adding a digital rendering of the president's signature.
And some legal experts say that means the pardons are literally not worth the paper they were apparently not written on.
Well, the Conservative Heritage Foundation studied a trove of documents signed on behalf of the former president, and they pointed to this interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson as evidence of a much graver problem.
Real quickly, Mr. President, can I ask you a question?
I cannot answer this from my constituents in Louisiana.
Sir, why did you pause LNG exports to Europe?
Questions About Biden's Resignation00:07:40
Like, I don't understand, you know, liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies.
Why would you do that?
Because you understand, we just talked about Ukraine.
You understand you're fueling Vladimir Putin's war machine because they got to get their gas from him, you know.
And he looks at me stunned with this, and he said, I didn't do that.
And I said, Mr. President, yes, you did.
It was an executive order, like, you know, three weeks ago.
And he goes, no, I didn't do that.
And he's arguing with me.
I said, Mr. President, respectfully, could I go out here and ask your secretary to print it out?
We'll read it together.
You definitely did that.
And he goes, oh, you talk about natural gas.
Yes, sir.
He said, no, no, you misunderstand.
He said, what I did is I signed this thing to, we're going to conduct a study on the effects of LNG.
I said, no, you're not, sir.
You paused it.
I know.
I have the terminal, the export terminals in my state.
I talked to those people this morning.
This is doing massive damage to our economy, national security.
It occurred to me, Barry, he was not lying to me.
He genuinely did not know what he had signed.
And I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, we're in serious trouble.
Who is running the country?
Like, I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn't know.
Well, everyone knows that President Biden was in fact not as sharp as attack as many claimed.
There's nothing new there.
Why I think this matters is that many people on all sides are looking very closely into just how little control the former president had.
Even CNN's Jake Tapper, no friend of MAGA, is writing a book on what he calls the cover-up of Biden's decline.
I think a lot more will come out about that.
And the Democrats are already in free fall.
A new CNN survey says their popularity has plunged to its lowest level in recorded history.
How can they possibly begin to rebuild if the whole country is still engrossed by the saga of who exactly was running the country until Biden quit?
Well, many on the left are also asking how the Democrats can possibly rebuild when Chuck Schumer, the de facto leader of the supposed resistance, is voting with Republicans on government funding.
The so-called Schumer surrender has deeply divided the party, as everything currently does at the moment.
This is how Senator Napoleon explained himself.
It's going to be months before we open up the government, and we have no way to stop them.
There's no exit ramp.
It'll be totally up to them when to open up the government.
Shutdowns with autocrats, vicious people, nasty people like Musk and Trump and Doge in charge is disaster for us.
Well, my feedback is that holding these tiny TikTok microphones, as all Democrats are now doing in all of their social media videos, does not automatically make you cool.
Makes you look very, very silly indeed.
We're elsewhere this weekend.
President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport hundreds of alleged migrant criminals to El Salvador.
The U.S. hit Yemen's Houthis with a wave of airstrikes and warned Iran that nothing is off the table.
And the president says he will call Putin tomorrow as he tries to broker a 30-day ceasefire.
So plenty to debate with my panel today.
Joining me are Batia Ungar Sargon, author of Second Class, Julie Roginsi, who's the Democrat strategist and author of the Salty Politics newsletter.
Riley Gaines, host of Gaines for Girls on Outkick, and Dave Smith, the host of part of the problem podcast.
And I'll be joined a little later by the former NATO Supreme Ally Commander, General Wesley Clark.
So welcome to all of you.
Dave Smith, Joe Biden's pardons may not apparently be worth the paper he may not have written his signature on.
Bombshell.
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
It's, you know, I have no legal expertise in the question of whether these auto signatures are legitimate or are not legitimate.
And it's kind of an interesting legal question, I guess.
But I think you hit the nail on the head in your opening there, Pierce.
It's like none of this would ever, there's no way you could make this claim short of the fact that we all know the former sitting president was so senile.
And this is, you know, I mean, these are the type of conversations every single political commentator, including the four of us here and everyone you know, these are the type of conversations we were having privately throughout this whole, the whole last year, at least of the Biden administration.
I mean, when you're at this level of, you know, mental decline, how much can everybody around you just abuse that?
I mean, Joe Biden actually seemed at a state, at least toward the end of his administration, where a staffer could probably just tell him, oh, no, you already said that yesterday.
And he'd kind of have to go, yeah, I guess I did.
And then I guess the bigger question than that, which I think really does rise above a legal question, is just how outrageous it is that the outgoing president would pardon Fauci.
I mean, all of us know that in this whole debacle, which by the way, this doesn't have to be a partisan issue because Donald Trump is very implicated in this too.
He was the president of the United States of America through all of 2020.
He's the one who kept Fauci on the job through the year of lockdowns.
But the fact that Fauci was covering up the fact that his own or subsidiaries of his own agency had funded the lab where the whole thing came from, and then they covered that up and they accused everybody of being a horrible racist or conspiracy theorists if they brought up the theory of where this virus originated from, and then to impose lockdowns and mandates and just lie to the American people the whole way through.
It's one of the gravest crimes that was ever committed by the U.S. government against the American people.
And the idea that a president would give out blanket immunity for those crimes is so appalling that essentially I'm saying any way that we could undo these pardons, I support it.
But it does bring up a fascinating question and one that we talked about on a previous episode of this show, Piers.
There's questions about the Joe Biden resignation letter itself.
It was such a bizarre way for a sitting president to announce a couple weeks before the convention that he wouldn't be seeking reelection.
He did it through like a letter, not an address to the American people.
And then he threw his endorsement to Kamala Harris through a tweet.
This is just so bizarre.
It's like out of a crazy fiction novel or something.
But I'm excited that people are looking into this.
You know, you're so right about the Biden announcement.
I was in New York and I think I saw it on X, right?
It just suddenly popped up that the president of the United States was effectively quitting.
And I was like, whoa, what?
What?
I'm so sorry.
But just one more quick announcement.
I believe I was on your show in New York City the day after this.
Yes, you were.
But also, it was a Sunday.
That Sunday morning on the Sunday morning news shows, surrogates of the Biden campaign were going on and saying, what are you guys talking about?
He's not dropping out.
It's Trump versus Biden.
Which one do you want?
And then later that day, the president announces in this mysterious way, so bizarre.
I was actually talking to President Trump the night before, who, if you remember, had made his first rally stump appearance since the assassination attempt.
And I said to him then, I think you've got this election in the bag after this because the American people are responding so well to your fight, fight, fight.
And he went, you know, the one thing I've learned this year, three months is a long time in this election cycle.
And literally, within about 12 hours, Biden had resigned.
All right, Julia, there's a lot to unpack from Dave's increasingly spectacular rant there, which led to, I think he was basically implying that Fauci should be in jail by now.
And many people might agree with him.
But Julia, this issue of the pardons, I mean, if the president wasn't cognizant enough to even personally sign them, is that not a big problem?
Hypocrisy On Ukraine And Economy00:10:57
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Well, first of all, I appreciate that Dave is going after Fauci and relitigating 2024.
Let's talk about the fact that President Trump used an auto pen to sign all of the pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists who literally assaulted our capital and the seat of our democracy.
So if you want to talk about that, is President Trump not compassmente to sign them himself?
Did he use an auto pen to, I don't blame him for not wanting to sign his own signature to pardoning insurrectionists, but that's exactly what he didn't do.
So let's look at this from a really, really realistic perspective.
There is nothing in the Constitution that has the auto pen exclusion.
And President Biden is still very much alive to tell us that he, in fact, wanted and did pardon the people that he pardons.
So this whole thing is crazy.
It's done to rile up the base.
It's done to tie up the courts.
I'm sure the Supreme Court, even the Supreme Court, is going to say this is ridiculous because auto-pens have been used consistently in signing documents over and over and over again in this administration, in the previous administration, in the first Trump administration.
So there's no auto-pen exclusion to the United States Constitution.
But I understand why Dave wants to talk about Anthony Fauci.
He wants to talk about anything other than the fact that, of course, this president, the one we have right now, pardoned January 6th insurrectionists.
And you have the temerity after that to talk about Anthony Fauci, who I think did the best he could, did the best he could under very challenging circumstances.
He did not pardon people who were convicted by a jury of their peers and sentenced to decades in prison for attacking the United States Capitol and putting in harm's way not just Democrats, but even Mike Pence.
But Julie, you talk about putting people in...
All right, but Julie, you talk about putting people in harm's way.
I mean, Anthony Fauci, all right, you say he did the best he could.
But what does this say about the front man for the whole pandemic defense in America that for so long, he pushed what is clearly now a completely false narrative about this virus emanating in a wet market, when in fact it now looks almost certain from all the independent studies that it emanated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they were literally testing new coronaviruses.
And who had a hand in some of that?
Anthony Fauci.
So, you know, I can totally understand why people on the, who were called conspiracy theorists, I remember it.
I was sort of lulled into thinking it might be myself because why would you go against the front guy for the whole pandemic?
But he didn't even realize.
So either he's incredibly naive that he thinks it was in a market, not the literal Institute of Orology, where they were testing new coronaviruses, or he's a malevolent player in this who knew exactly where it started, which is, in my view, far more likely.
And then he created this whole kind of story to deflect attention from what America was also involved in doing in that lab with the Chinese.
Do you know what I love about this whole discussion?
That you want to have a conversation about pardons and you'd rather focus on Anthony Fauci.
And not once did you mention anything about what I said about the January 6th insurrectionist.
Apparently, we could just put that aside.
I thought you made a good point.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
I thought you made a good point.
Why aren't we talking about Anthony Fauci?
Listen, why are you talking about the public?
I thought you made a good point.
Your response was very good.
You said that Trump did the same thing with the pens and that he pardoned all the January 6th people.
I've said this regularly on the show.
I do not think any of the ones on January the 6th who committed acts of violence should have got pardons, particularly against police officers who the Republican Party has always said should be the most protective people out there.
So I don't understand why that happened.
It was wrong.
So just to be clear, that's my position on it.
But I also think that Dave raised very interesting questions about Anthony Fauci getting this blanket pass dating back to 2014, by the way.
So God knows what was going on for the previous six, seven years.
But whatever it was, they felt the need to go back to 2014 to issue the blanket pardon.
Riley, let me bring you in here.
You posted about Fauci when you saw this story.
And, you know, in a way, Julie's right.
Look, there's a bit of hypocrisy here.
I get that.
And also people are now trying to use it to flip back to the Fauci immunity issue.
But a lot of people feel very strongly about this, that they were basically hoodwinked by the man who was the face of the pandemic defense.
Yeah, well, I feel hoodwinked by Anthony Fauci.
Look, I was a college student at that time.
I was a college athlete during that time.
And living through COVID, the effects of that on the education system.
I mean, to be more specific here on my athletic career, what that looked like, look, his lies, his negligence, and quite frankly, his greed.
It killed innocent Americans.
And we've seen him testify before Congress, doubling down on these closures and stay-at-home orders and mask mandates for children, despite previously admitting that there's no scientific backing in these actions.
So I am someone who certainly believes that Anthony Fauci belongs in jail.
I hope we see justice from this.
President Trump this morning, I believe on Air Force One, look, he said it's not by my decision.
He said it would be up to a court.
You know, they get to ultimately decide if it's null and void.
But he even, you know, reiterated the fact that Biden didn't have any idea this is taking place.
And to Julie's point, you know, she says Biden is alive.
We can just ask him.
I haven't seen a single thing from Joe Biden since he pardoned his family moments before.
Do we actually know he's not being funny, but do we actually know he's even alive?
I mean, he's just disappeared.
The guy has disappeared.
We do.
We do.
We assume he is.
We do.
Right?
But I mean, wouldn't it be?
I know.
Julie, Julie, be honest.
Julie, I wouldn't be able to be with him.
Would you genuinely take his word for it over anything he now said, which involved him having to remember stuff that happened a few months ago?
Because I wouldn't.
I think we saw quite clearly that this is a man.
I don't think Donald.
I don't think.
Listen, I don't think Donald Trump is particularly mentally well.
You may agree with me or disagree with me on that.
I couldn't disagree more.
Trump to me is exactly the same.
I'm glad.
I'm glad he's not.
He's exactly the same.
You may not like him.
You may not like it, but he's exactly the same Donald Trump I've known for 20 years.
Honestly, it's like the same guy I met on day one.
Well, he's a bit different than the guy that I used to know when I used to be at Fox News all the time.
Let me tell you, I think that's a little bit off the deal.
Yes, he is.
Why?
Because he is.
He just is.
Tell me.
Because he's not with it the way he used to be.
He's just not with it the way he used to be.
But if we're, but wait, okay, I'm sorry.
Am I diagnosing like psychiatrists here?
I'm telling you right now that's not.
I've seen no evidence he's not with it.
Okay, listen, Piers, here's the problem.
The problem is that you guys would rather talk about Joe Biden, who has said Donald Trump is mentally unwell.
I'm just saying, what's the evidence?
Yes.
The guy is 78 years old.
He still does two hours.
So he does two hour press conferences.
He does two hour rallies.
He does endless off-the-cuff media encounters way more than any of his predecessors.
For a guy who's got mental problems, that's pretty bold.
I don't think that, yes, just because he's able to have the stamina to do that does not mean that he comports himself as somebody who is mentally well.
You and I can agree or disagree on that.
The truth of the matter is that you guys would much rather talk about Anthony Fauci.
You'd much rather talk about Joe Biden than you talk about what's going on right now, which is that our economy is in the toilet, that Donald Trump has handed over Ukraine to his friend Vladimir Putin, that you showed a clip of the Speaker of the House talking about how he could not believe that Joe Biden cut off LNG exports, which would only help Russia.
Well, what else is helping Russia right now?
What Mike Johnson is allowing Donald Trump to do, which is to effectively sell Ukraine out to the Kremlin.
You guys would rather talk about anything else.
But he hasn't yet talked about 18 years ago.
He hasn't done anything of the sort yet.
He hasn't watched.
He hasn't done anything of the sort yet.
Trump has not sold anything out to anybody yet.
All he's done is bring Ukraine to talk about other stuff.
Can I answer that?
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Democrats' Deep Sense Of Betrayal00:16:10
Now, on with the show.
Well, we're actually going to come to Ukraine.
So let's hold fire on Russia.
We're going to come back to that.
I want to bring in Batsy, who's been waiting very patiently, which given you are the superstar of social media the last few days.
I think your stunning performance on Bill Maher, which was great, by the way, and you had a brilliant answer when he came after you about why would you support Trump on tariffs.
So congratulations on that moment.
But on this issue of pardons, I mean, as Julie says, is there a bit of rank hypocrisy at play here?
Are we really that bothered about auto pens?
You know, I know that, for example, if you've got a Beatles signed anything for about a three or four year period, it's almost inevitably will have been done by an auto pen, right?
So do people who've got those signed albums feel cheated, robbed, and want to go to their lawyers, or they just turn a blind eye and go, you know what, they meant to sign it.
And is it the same with the presidents?
They're so busy, they've got to sign so much stuff.
Should we all just dial down from being exercised about auto pens?
But maybe, as Dave Smith did, focus on the bigger picture, which raises again the issue of actually if Fauci was brought to account, would he actually end up in serious trouble?
Which is why they gave him such a lengthy immunity.
I'm not bothered by the pens so much as by the whole concept of a preemptive pardon, which seems to me to be an enormous assault on law and order.
It suggests that there is nothing that Anthony Fauci could have done that the Democrats would consider worthy of prosecution.
How can you possibly say that about any human being alive, especially somebody who is in charge of such controversial things?
So I have never considered those pardons to be in any way justifiable.
And I'm very curious to see what happens if they're brought before court.
So I agree with Dave on that.
And I agree with Riley.
I'm sorry, Julie, I feel like you're alone here, but I want to agree.
I think Riley brought up something really important, which is that President Trump tweeted the way that he often does or sent out a social media post like the Town Crier, like, I now consider these to be null and void.
But when he was asked about this on Air Force One, he said, he was asked, are those executive orders, those pardons now null and void?
And his answer was, as Riley said, I think so.
It's not my decision.
That'll be up to a court.
And I invite Democrats to look at these two speech acts by the president, what he wrote on social media and what he said.
You know, what he said is what he believes, which is that he doesn't have the power just to decree this.
It will go to the courts and the courts who he respects will make their decision.
You know, the Democrats, it's going to be a long four years if they take every single social media post literally instead of trying to understand who our president is and what he's trying to do, which is actually very popular with the American people.
Well, you know, the other thing, Dave, is just that the shocking polling on the state of the Democrats right now.
They are at historic lows of popularity in America.
Historic.
Like they've never, ever had worse numbers of public approval for their performance in recorded history.
And that's polls from NBC and other very reputable news organizations.
What does that tell us about the state of American politics?
To me, the Democrats can howl away about Trump.
This has been their go-to plan with him for many years.
It doesn't work.
And actually, all it says to me is they don't have a plan and they don't have a messenger for a plan that can galvanize America to be an alternative.
Their only plan is to demonize Trump.
Well, we've seen that playbook for many years and people are just not buying it anymore.
Yeah, I mean, Pierce, when you think about it, the Democrats' approval ratings are shockingly high.
I mean, after everything we've been through in the last few years, I can't believe there's anybody who stands by.
You know, I find it, it's kind of, I must say, it's kind of amusing to hear Julie.
Now, I used to know Julie back in the Fox News days.
I used to do some panels with you there.
But to hear you tell me that I just don't want to talk about Ukraine is, if you keep up with me, I'm actually quite happy to talk about that topic.
I think what Julie probably wouldn't want to talk about is exactly where she was, say, in the summer of 2020, the fall of 2020, the spring of 2021.
Let any of the Democrats run back what they were saying about this pandemic and how dead wrong they got it about everything.
You have that on top of the fact that, look, they went all in on the vaccine and just lied their asses off about it, Fauci included, saying things he damn well knew they hadn't tested to be true.
Then they propped up a senile president for four years, just played this ridiculous game of the emperor's new clothes, thinking they could gaslight.
And look, to be clear here, I don't know what Donald Trump's mental state is.
I think he's a different mental human being than any other human being I've ever seen.
But psychoanalyzing someone is one thing.
Me saying that Chris Christie is obese is a different thing.
That's something that anybody looking at a camera can see.
That's what it is to say Joe Biden is senile.
This isn't like some why.
I'm not psychoanalyzing the man.
And they went all in on this.
Then they tried to throw Kamala Harris, a deeply unpopular vice president up at the last minute.
They played.
I mean, Pierce, we've gone through it so many times on the show.
All of the lies.
Tony Hinchcliffe was a commentator giving a speech.
It was a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.
What the Democrats have gone through in this last election is unlike anything I've ever seen.
They've lost their voter, their voting base, and they've lost, I think more importantly, their propaganda app.
And you know why?
You know why.
And I'll come to Julie.
I'm completely destroyed.
Well, I'll come to Julie here.
And Julie, you're slightly outnumbered.
So I do accept that.
I think you can more than equip yourself from the early salvos.
But this issue of the Democrats, I mean, I think honestly, they lost it the moment they tried to persuade everybody that men should be in women's sport.
I mean, from that moment onwards, Trump won the battle.
In fact, Batsy, I was watching Bill Maher, and he was talking about Trump winning the battle for common sense.
I mean, who would have thought that Donald Trump would be in the end the person that galvanized America over the issue of common sense?
And it's because the Democrat, the woke progressive left arm of the Democrats went so nuts, they alienated large numbers of people.
I mean, how do you feel about that before I get to Chuck Schumer, who's another fascinating part of all this?
So I'm going to say that.
Is it to me or to Julie?
No, so it's to Julie.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I wasn't sure.
No, no, no.
I don't disagree with you.
No, no, I don't disagree with you, Piers.
I think the Democratic Party has no message.
I think the Democratic Party has no messenger.
I'm disgusted with what Chuck Schumer did.
I'm disgusted with what Chuck Schumer said in the New York Times this weekend about what he did and why he did it.
I don't, I agree that the Democratic Party is at the lowest point in modern history of its approval ratings.
And the reason for that is a lot of Democrats, like me, are disgusted with the leadership of the Democratic Party.
So you're not going to get an argument from me about any of that.
I would also caution to say that Donald Trump's approval ratings also stink.
And so it's not like the American people are enamored with either party right now.
But yes, the Democrats have a tremendous, that's not to diminish from the fact that the Democrats have a tremendous amount of rebuilding to do.
The Democrats, I think, don't know how to fight.
The Democrats certainly don't know how to message.
And I agree with you that the Democrats don't know how to make sure you say is common sense.
On that point about fighting, this whole issue of Chuck Schumer, you know, basically helping the Republicans out, causing mayhem with a lot of the progressive left.
Just see Alexandria Orquezo-Cortez's reaction to what he did.
Senate Democrats to completely roll over and give up.
I think there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal.
Just to see Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk, I think it is a huge slap in the face.
Now, what was interesting, I mean, you know, Schumer, I think, took a pragmatic view, which he articulated by saying that a government shutdown would have been a far worse option than passing the GOP's spending bill.
And that once it shut down, you know, Trump, Musk, and the others would have free reign to do what the hell they liked until it got reopened.
I understood that argument.
It was a pragmatic answer, but I also could see the fury from his own party members.
How did you feel about it?
I was furious, and I will tell you that, of course, the minute that that bill was signed, Donald, that containing resolution was passed, Donald Trump ignored what was in it and decided to sequester money that Congress had already appropriated.
So, look, it's not like you're going to ever be able to work with Donald Trump if you're a Democrat.
Donald Trump is on a grievance-filled rage to pay back the people that he thinks tried to put him in prison.
And therefore, he will not work with Chuck Schumer.
He will not work with the House Democrats.
He will not work with Senate Democrats.
He is not somebody who is going to have a kumbaya bipartisan moment.
And the minute that Chuck Schumer realizes that there is no working with Donald Trump, there is no working with Senate Republicans and House Republicans who are basically handmaidens to Donald Trump, who've given up their own co-equal branch of government responsibilities to do whatever the president wants.
The minute they can start standing up for the other 50% of this country who doesn't agree with Donald Trump, until he does that and until he realizes that messaging is part of that equation, I don't think the Democrats are going to be successful.
And so I share Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's anger.
I share the anger of the Democratic grassroots.
And I think that Chuck Schumer is not the right man for the moment that we're living in right now to be the Democratic leader of this party.
Riley, as somebody who was one of the heroes, really, of driving this whole debate over biological men in women's sport, it did seem to me that that was one of the pivotal planks of the common sense culture war, which Trump so successfully won here.
And, you know, I've just written a column for the Spectator magazine here that amid all the hysteria that I'm seeing about Trump, as always, we're two months in.
And if I was a betting man, looking ahead to say six months down the line, say to the end of the year, I would say there's a very good chance by the end of the year that Trump has got the U.S. economy purring, that he's got peace both in Gaza and in Ukraine.
Not perfect peace because they never are, but peace.
And that he's probably got the border into a far more controlled state than it was under the previous administration.
And if he's done those four things in his first year, he will go down immediately as one of the most transformative presidents of modern times.
So I think the Democrats are in real trouble here.
And the reason they're trying to chuck everything at Trump and Elon Musk and the others is because I think a lot of them think this might be what happens.
Hey, Mike Baker here, host of the President's Daily Brief podcast.
If you want straight talk on national security, foreign policy, and the biggest global stories going on of the day, this is the show for you.
We publish twice a day, Monday through Friday, once in the morning, again in the afternoon.
And on the weekend, we go longer with the PDB Situation Report with excellent guests, including national security insiders and foreign policy experts.
Check us out on Spotify and Apple or wherever you get your podcast.
Also on our YouTube channel at President's Daily Brief.
That's right, Pierce.
You believe that because Trump is a man of his word.
He makes promises and he keeps his promises.
Watching AOC's remarks, watching the response that we have seen following Chuck Schumer's vote on the CR, I mean, to your point, to Dave's point, it's like every single day I wake up to a new nonsensical, destructive hill that the Democrats are willing to die on, whether it is men and women's sports, whether it is, I mean, Aunt Jemima on a syrup bottle.
I think today the hill that Democrats are willing to die on is an auto-pinned signature from a vegetable president on a preemptive pardon for totally innocent people.
And violent, criminal, non-U.S. citizens are entitled to due process.
They have built their entire movement on identity politics, on corruption, on media control, on hypocrisy, but now it's all collapsing under its own weight.
We are seeing infighting.
We are seeing failed policies.
And we are seeing now the general public waking up to this scam.
And I can say as someone who, I mean, the past, what, 16-ish years, 12 of those years leading up to, of course, January 20th were under Democrat control.
So most of my adult life, we have seen Democrats in charge of this country.
This is something that I, this type of infighting, I really haven't seen before Democrats in total disarray like this.
Normally it's happening on the Republican side of the aisle.
So to see Republicans together and cohesive and advancing in this way and united really, I think it's something we haven't seen before.
And I think it's largely to blame the Democrats.
They are their own worst enemy.
They are eating each other alive.
We've now seen Chuck Schumer this morning that he just announced that he had to cancel his book tour after his own party revolted against him.
So again, the Democratic Party in a nutshell is unquestioning loyalty and total conformity.
Or else, and we saw what happened with Gavin Newsome, right?
I think he started the Democratic Party civil war of 2025 after his comments and saying, look, it is unfair to allow men onto women's sports teams.
Well, they're all working out.
They're all working out.
You were right all along, as I kept telling you you were whenever you came on.
You were.
And you were very brave because actually, to be as vocal as you were about that issue two years ago was to sign your professional death warrant in many places.
You know, the cancel culture was alive and aggressive and nasty.
And people like you and J.K. Rowing and others who stood up for women's rights were getting destroyed.
So it took a lot of courage.
And I've saluted you for that.
Batsia, it's interesting because one of the great hopes that you might think might come through all this has always been, well, if Michelle Obama ran, she would take Trump down.
And Michelle Obama's now got this podcast out with her brother that is spectacularly awful and might be ending any prospect that she could ever run for president podcast by podcast.
Let's take a look at one of the more enthralling clips.
Every year we'd have the turkey pardoning.
And that was the one thing that the girls would do at Barack was go stand next to him when he pardoned this turkey.
And it was cute when they were little, but as they got older, you could see on their faces in the shots of just them thinking, I would just poke my eyes out just right now.
Just get me out of here.
I'm standing with my father telling these stupid jokes, you know, next to a turkey.
Now that's a brother, Craig.
And look, it's perfectly nice, fair if you just want to hear tittle-tattle about turkeys and whatever, but it's not doing very well.
And I think that that is indicative of the problem the Democrats are in, Batsy, because you're trying to work out where are they going to go.
They're either going to someone like Newsom, who's performing U-turn after U-turn on what he persistently stood up for, which was all the won't stuff, or they've got to find someone, haven't they, out there who can be the new Bill Clinton, maybe?
Somebody a lot more to the center who instinctively understands what the average American probably thinks and who can genuinely take on Trump and then whoever follows Trump.
Because at the moment, I just, if this carries on the way I think it is, the idea the Democrats can win in 2028 is for the birds, I think.
Here's the problem that the Democrats have.
Trump has outflanked them to the left on the economy.
So he stole what was the Democrats' platform for 100 years, economic protectionism, creating an economy that rewards hard work of working class people, protecting labor through tariffs and through controlling the border by limiting the supply of labor, which of course raises the wages of Americans.
This was the Democrats' economic platform since the New Deal.
Trump Steals Democratic Economic Platform00:03:40
And Trump simply lifted it from them because the Democrats had stopped catering to labor and started catering to the kind of people Michelle Obama's podcast is for, rich women.
And because the Democrats don't have an economic platform anymore for the working class, they had to take on Trump with these cultural battles that make them sound insane, like defending the right of men to show their penises to little girls in locker rooms, what Riley was exposed to horrifically.
And so Trump found it so easy then to simply say, well, I'm going to be the moderate on this, on all of these social issues.
And so he won both on the economic policy, then on the social policy, and then on the foreign policy by stealing the Democrats' anti-war platform.
So basically, you have a New Deal Democrat in Trump.
And so the Democrats are really struggling.
Like, what would you say they stand for now?
Well, they say we stand against Trump's abuses of the LGBTQ community.
He appointed the highest ranking out gay in American history.
It's not going to wash.
It's all nonsense, right?
And so people are not going to buy it.
I'll just end with this, Pierce.
If I was giving advice to the Democrats, which I would love to do, I don't know why they don't invite me to.
I'm a leftist and I would be very happy to explain their path back to the working class, what they need to do.
You're a MAGA leftist, though, aren't you?
I'm a MAGA leftist.
I think this is what they need to do.
They need to say Trump is right on the economy.
He is creating an economy that is going to reward working class labor, but the Republicans are bad on abortion and they're bad on health care.
So we will give you immigration control.
We will give you the tariffs.
We will protect working class labor, but you won't have to worry that abortion is going to become illegal.
I mean, that is a winning, winning agenda for the Democrats.
Unfortunately, they simply, all they care about now is fighting Trump and fighting Musk.
They've lost any interest in actually elevating the working class.
See, Batsu, you've got a very interesting voice in this.
Let me ask you, were you surprised by the reaction to your appearance on Bill Maher?
In the room, you get booed by the audience a lot if you defend any of these things.
So I wasn't surprised by that, but I got to tell you, Pierce, I have received thousands and thousands of messages from people saying to me, that's what I am.
You are what I am.
And it's truly humbling.
I feel really humbled and grateful to God that he put me in this position to give voice to something so many people feel and they just don't feel heard.
I mean, we're lefties.
We would love to still be Democrats.
You know, there's nothing preventing that except the Democratic leadership, which is totally not interested in catering to labor anymore.
So yeah, I was very surprised by that.
You know, you know, Betty, you got away quite lightly because I appeared a few years ago on Bilma with Jim Jeffries, the comedian, who kept calling Trump Hitler.
And eventually I said, he's not Hitler.
He hasn't killed 12 million people.
At which point Jim Jeffries said, oh, fuck off.
He's Australian.
And then J.K. Rowling tweeted as it was then.
Piers Morgan being told to fuck off on Bilma by Jim Jeffries is so deliciously satisfying.
And my reason telling that story is despite her doing that, I have still relentlessly supported J.K. Rowling on the battle she's waged for fairness for women.
That is how a democratic society ought to work, where you put aside your little petty squabbles with people and you actually, and that's why I admire what Chuck Schumer did.
What Chuck Schumer did was he put the country in a way, I think, before petty party political partisan bullshit.
NATO Encroachment And Nuclear Lines00:15:09
And for that, he knew he'd get hammered, but I admired him for taking that stand.
Dave, let's segue to Ukraine, which Julie doesn't think you want to talk about.
So let's talk about it because I know you're probably gagging to talk about it.
I want to play a clip of Trump on Air Force One talking about a forthcoming plan to maybe talk to Putin.
What sort of concessions will you be seeking to have Putin make to get a field out?
Well, I think we'll, you know, be talking about land.
It's a lot of land.
It's a lot different than it was before the wars, you know.
And we'll be talking about land.
We'll be talking about power plants.
That's a big question.
But I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides.
You'll ask him.
Ukraine and Russia.
You'll ask him.
We're already talking about that.
Dividing up certain assets.
I mean, Dave, it seems to me that there are certain inevitabilities about how this peace deal will look.
And there are inevitabilities as a result of where the battlefield has got to, which has pretty much not moved very much now for most of the last year.
But it's basically been, I wouldn't say stalemate because I think Russia has been slightly edging on the battlefield, but so in such a small way, it's kind of immaterial.
And that basically you're down to, well, they're going to freeze it on the current lines, I'm sure of that, or pretty much the current lines.
They'll tell the Ukrainians to get out of the little bit of Russia they're in.
Ukraine will be told they can't join NATO and they'll have to sign up to that.
And the issue to me that remains outstanding, unless you quibble with what I've just said, is the issue of whether Putin will allow European peacekeeping troops on the new border of the southeast of Ukraine, which Putin has taken.
And I think that's going to be a big debatable issue because he will view that probably in the same way he viewed what he perceived to be NATO encroachment in the first place.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's essentially right.
And I think, you know, you've made the point on the show many times before that your brother, who has expertise in this field, has kind of weighed in.
And this is from everybody with military expertise.
Basically, there's a consensus that in order to drive Russia out of the territory that they control now, it would take the 82nd airborne.
And there's just simply no, there's just no political will in America to do this.
And despite the talking points and the propaganda that's come out of the West about how vital this war is and how this is a battle between good and evil and democracy versus dictatorship and all of this stuff, nobody really has the political will.
Nobody thinks that we're going to risk a confrontation between the two biggest nuclear powers in world history.
Nobody thinks that we're going to send American boys to die to determine whether Luhansk is controlled by Kiev or Moscow.
But I would say, Dave, I would pick you up on one thing though.
I would say those two things can both be true at once, right?
It can be true that Vladimir Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine was a disgusting affront to all the democratic norms that Europeans have held for centuries, that he just helped himself to 20% of land that wasn't his, murdered so many people in the process.
But it can also be true that we are where we are, right?
And there's no one's going to risk, as you said, there's no American political will.
The American people just don't want to wear years more.
And they certainly don't want to wear American troops on the ground.
So we are where we are.
It's disgusting.
It's like in my gullet, but we are where we are.
But that doesn't mean that what Putin's done was not a disgusting assault on a sovereign democratic country.
Yeah, of course, no.
It doesn't follow that Putin was justified to invade.
I'm just talking about the reality on the ground.
Look, George W. Bush was not justified in invading Iraq.
He did it on a bunch of lies.
But if Vladimir Putin had decided to start funding the insurgency, and then let's say you had Russian politicians as Dan Crenshaw, who you've had on this show, is tweeting out that, oh, the Ukraine war is great because we get to kill Russians and it doesn't cost any American lives.
Imagine, imagine Russia or China was funding the insurgency in Iraq that we were fighting for over a decade there.
And they were bragging about the amount of American boys that they were killing.
No, it doesn't follow from that that George W. Bush was justified to invade the country, but you could still look at that and be like, what are you guys doing?
You're risking a wider war.
You're risking a nuclear conflict.
Look, the bottom line, the facts on the ground here are that there is no, we have no means by which to repel Putin.
And all we really can do, you know, Julie framed it earlier as kind of like giving this to Putin, but he already has it.
All we can do is what Joe Biden did, which is continue to prolong the war, have more and more people die.
And I will mention just one final time because I know I've said this a lot on your show, but according to the head of NATO, Straltonberg, he said that in late 2021, Vladimir Putin actually sent a draft treaty to NATO.
And all he was asking for was a written promise that they won't, that Ukraine will not enter NATO.
And on that, and he would agree to not invade.
And to just sit here and say, what, how much better of a deal that would have been than what we're going to get now?
Yeah, I mean, the difference between wiser people.
Okay, but I would say I wouldn't believe Vladimir Putin as far as I could chuck him.
So you're taking him.
You're going to end up having to believe him now.
You're going to end up having to believe that.
Well, we're going to have to not believe him because I don't believe that this has got anything to do with NATO encroachment.
It's got everything to do with him believing the Soviet Union should never have been dismantled.
And but actually a lot of Ukrainians speak Russian and therefore they're mine.
And actually that's the...
Listen, okay, so I reject, I think there is an element of that view with Putin, and I also reject that with you.
But I'm an American.
I mean, we don't believe in any of that.
You know, like our whole founding of our country is like, I don't care who has a historic claim over us.
We're free men and governments are things that men institute to protect our rights and we can overthrow it whenever we want to.
Like that's the Declaration of Independence in a nutshell.
So I'm with you on that.
But look, would you, Pierce, if you had a time machine, would you go back and sign that draft treaty right now?
Forget whether you trust him or not.
Hundreds of thousands of people's lives may have been saved and Ukraine would have all of their territory.
All it would have taken is a promise to not join NATO, which they're not going to get.
I think if the same situation is not a trendy state, you can't tell me, Pierce, if you could go back, you wouldn't have signed that deal.
Well, if the same situation happened with the UK, I think we would have taken the same action that the Ukrainians took, actually, which is...
But I'm not arguing that.
You could fight.
Once you're invaded, I'm not saying that you can't fight back.
And I don't think anyone, I haven't heard anyone make the argument that Ukrainians didn't have a right to fight off the invasion.
The question is...
The irony, the irony of your question is that what Putin has done is show the world exactly why Ukraine was so desperate to be part of NATO.
Because had they been part of NATO, he would never have attacked.
And so this chicken in the air.
Or, Pierce, perhaps, or perhaps if we had not for years said we were going to bring them into NATO, while for years every Russian leader screamed from the top of their lungs, this is our red line.
We will not let you do this.
Perhaps if Trump in his first term hadn't foolishly poured weapons into Ukraine, something Obama, who backed the coup that overthrew the government, wasn't even willing to do.
And perhaps if we hadn't been doing joint military exercises between NATO and Ukraine since the fall of that war and there hadn't been a civil war all this time, maybe, listen, it was Bill Burns, Joe Biden's CIA director, who in his own words in the Net Means Nyet memo wrote, this is a choice Russia does not want to have to make.
That was a secret memo from him to Condoleezza Rice back in 2008 when he was ambassador to Russia.
Julian Assange dumped it.
That's the only reason we even know about this.
But at least from the highest level of U.S. intelligence perspective at the time, Putin didn't want to do this because as America has found out over the last 25 years, wars are actually very costly.
And this has caused Putin a lot of problems too.
And he's got a whole bunch of like brothers and mothers and people who have lost their relatives who were conscripted soldiers in this who are mad at him now.
So that's all I'm saying.
Yeah, I mean, the other thing, look, I'm going to move on to the rest of the panel, but I would say just on the red lines point, that Putin has set a number of red lines during this war with Ukraine, all of which we've ignored.
And guess what?
He hasn't let his nukes off at anyone, having threatened to every single time.
So the guy uses red lines as a political comfort blanket.
And actually, sometimes you've got to call people like him and their bluff because he's not an Islamic fundamental.
He's not going to blow himself up for the cause.
He's got $200 billion worth of assets, which he thoroughly enjoys.
But he might invade Ukraine.
Well, he might.
And he did.
Sometimes you have to call them a bluff, and sometimes maybe you shouldn't.
All right, Julie, we are where we are.
I mean, I kind of agree with Dave there.
And he's right to quote my brother because my brother said from day one, you know, you realize that there's no way Ukraine can win this war, right?
I mean, you do understand that.
And now we are where we are.
What is pretty clear to everybody, Ukraine cannot win the war.
Well, here's where we are.
If you want to talk about treaties that were on the table, your country, mine, Piers, back in the early 90s, signed a treaty with Ukraine, effectively saying to them that if they gave up their nuclear weapons, and at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had the third largest nuclear stockpile after Russia and the United States.
We told them that if they gave up their nukes, we would protect their sovereignty and territorial integrity.
That was a commitment that the United Kingdom and the United States made together Ukraine.
I mean, you're right.
It was the Soviet Union.
You're right.
There were Soviet nuclear weapons on Ukraine's soil.
So, okay, so they're nukes.
They're also not Russia's nukes because those were all 15 Soviet republics and there was a Soviet Union that was dissolved.
So there was Kazakhstan.
This is something I actually have a Graduate degree, and so trust me on this one.
There was Kazakhstan, there was Ukraine, there was Ukraine, and there was Russia, right?
Through three Soviet republics, which housed the Soviet nuclear stockpile.
In order to have Kazakhstan and Ukraine give up their nukes, we assured them that we would protect their sovereignty and territorial integrity.
So that's not debatable.
It isn't their nukes in as much as they were Russia's nukes.
That is true.
All right.
So the lesson that we're showing to the world now, and not just to the good guys, but also to people like Saudi Arabia, who I would not necessarily call a good guy, although we have a beloved hate relationship with them, to the Egyptians, certainly to the Iranians, to the Taiwanese, and others, that if you think that the United States is going to protect you with its nuclear umbrella, think again, because we go back on our word.
And therefore, as a result, you might as well go nuclear because the only way that you can protect your sovereignty and territorial integrity is if you have your own nuclear umbrella.
Well, funny enough, you know, that is the position.
That is the position in which we find ourselves now.
Now, if you think that that's going to make us any safer, and if Donald Trump thinks that the quote-unquote big, beautiful ocean can protect us from the ICBMs and the mid-range nuclear weapons that could be delivered in New York City within moments, he's smoking something.
And so I want to be very clear that what we have done in Ukraine has made the United States so much more imperiled.
And the same with Great Britain and the same with the European continent.
So I don't agree because it's happening right now.
Well, I don't agree with you because we actually have more nuclear weapons combined than Russia does and that they're right there as the deterrent.
I'm not talking about Russia.
I'm talking about all these third-tier countries that are now going to go nuclear.
Well, I agree with you.
I agree that some Saudi Arabia.
I agree that's a concern because I actually, you know, Zelensky told me only three weeks ago he wished he had a nuclear weapon because then he wouldn't have been invaded.
I think it's a perfectly valid point.
We've got to wrap up, but very quickly, I want to bring in Riley and Bashi on this.
So, Riley, just quickly, what is your take on this?
Look, I will just say on the one hand, of course, I am glad to have a president with a spine who isn't afraid to draw hard lines in the sand and hold them.
We have seen how virtually every world leader has changed their tune with President Trump back in the White House in comparison with Biden in the White House the previous four years.
But on the other hand, of course, I don't want a compromise with Putin.
But again, what I do know, what I saw with my own eyes, look, I was at State of the Union just a few weeks ago.
I know that President Trump is anti-war.
And I know that the Democrats are not based on the response that I saw in the room with my own eyes when President Trump mentioned, you know, he said, we've given Ukraine $350 billion.
That is the only thing that the Democrats stood and applauded and cheered for.
You've seen the headlines.
You've seen the posts on social media.
And it's not even true, by the way, that figure.
Yeah, well, no, but it's definitely over 200 billion.
Actually, I don't think it is, actually.
I don't think it is.
I mean, Zelensky went through.
Zelensky went through all the numbers.
They've only had 70 billion, and most of that is wrapped up in American armaments.
So it's all quite complicated, but it certainly isn't the numbers that people have been spouting around.
Regardless, again, Trump is anti-war.
I get your point.
I get your point.
Again, the Democrats have been outflanked by somebody who's playing their own game.
You've got a Republican president who doesn't believe in war because it's bad business and bad for body count, right?
And I agree with you, Riley.
I think it's another reason why the Democrats are really struggling because they look like a bunch of warmongers here.
That's right.
That's right.
So I'll be interested to see how tomorrow goes.
Of course, I am hoping for a resolution.
I believe, I mean, if this is something that President Trump can help aid, I believe he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for getting Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Barack Obama got one, and we still don't know why he got it.
So I think you're absolutely spot on.
Batia, finally, to you, just quickly, if you don't mind, your take on this.
I mean, do you think it's good that Trump's going to talk to Putin?
Do you think that he's playing this well or is he being used like a Putin puppet is some claim?
No, I think it's the opposite.
I think he's playing Putin like a fiddle.
Putin threw out that thing recently, I think, as an opening salvo.
This war is going to end along the lines that it began along.
It's going to end with a ratification of what the status quo was in 2022, which is that Crimea is part of Russia.
Donetsk, Luhansk, the Donbass.
At the time, it was an independent republic supported by Russia.
It will be declared part of Russia, and Ukraine will be delighted to be not part of NATO.
And that is crucial because Ukraine could have also avoided this by not saying we are pursuing membership in NATO.
You say that if they were part of NATO, then Putin wouldn't have invaded.
Well, if they hadn't been threatening it and if we hadn't been threatening to bring them into NATO, it also wouldn't have happened.
And the reasons that Ukraine does not have membership in NATO, it's not just because of Russia.
It's because it actually doesn't qualify.
Security Concerns Triggered By NATO00:07:33
It is an unbelievably corrupt country.
And that is not to, you know, to denigrate an ally or what have you.
It is simply to state the truth that one million young men ago, there was a status quo that we in the West were threatening.
And so, yes, Putin goes out and makes speeches about the greater Soviet Union, but Dave is totally right.
Ukraine is its buffer zone.
And Russia is allowed to have legitimate security interests, even if they do things we don't approve of, like start a bloody war.
They have legitimate security concerns, which we triggered.
Are you guys literally getting like Russian Kremlin talking points?
Because I listened to Kremlin talking points in Russian and I'm hearing them translated into English right now.
This is absolutely insane.
We're back to Russia, Gate.
This is great.
This is one of the demo.
This is all.
I just cannot believe.
I cannot believe what you guys are saying.
I cannot believe what I'm hearing.
I'm now going to get rid of you all and bring in the former NATO Supreme Ally Commander, General Wesley Clark.
So thank you, panel.
And I'll go to him and I'll get him, Julie, to set the record straight about some of the stuff you were raising your eyebrows at.
Because I was with you, Julie, on some of your raised eyebrows.
So I'll go to General Wesley Clark and we'll get some answers.
Thank you all to my panel very much.
I appreciate it.
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Thanks, Piers.
Well, joining me now is the former NATO Supreme Ally Commander, General Wesley Clark.
General Clark, great to have you back on Uncensored, and particularly at this time.
Let me first ask you about President Trump planning to talk to Vladimir Putin.
He's obviously brought Ukraine via a very hostile bust up in the Oval Office.
It seems to have brought them to the negotiating table.
What is your overview of where we are with this?
Well, I think that President Trump and President Putin are going to talk and agree on how to carve up Ukraine and try to end the war in a way that's favorable to Russia and very unfavorable to Europe.
So you, against the United States, I might add.
Do you feel, as many do, if that is the scenario, it's a betrayal of Ukraine?
Well, I think it's actually we're caught up in a betrayal of America's principles of international relations and the global order that we've established since World War II, in which international law, international obligations don't seem to matter.
Russia signed the pledge, as did the UK and U.S., to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Russia is a violator of that.
They're an aggressor.
You can't make a deal and give them half of Ukraine and say, oh, it's okay since you've got nuclear weapons.
When you do that, this is like 1938 in slow motion.
And people in the United States, they may not remember 1938, but peers, your countrymen remember 1938.
And this is a moment of extreme peril for the West.
This is a moment when Britain and France and Germany should be crashing forward on rearmament, just like they were in 1937 and 38.
But we aren't doing that yet.
We're talking about doing it, but we're not doing it yet.
You're going to have, very shortly, a Russian force on your doorstep.
And that's a very bad thing.
And I'm talking about on the doorstep of NATO across the board.
And when they start the move against the Baltics, or they incorporate the defeated Ukrainian forces into their own forces after Ukraine is discombobulated, Europe's going to face some unimaginable consequences.
Will you think that in that circumstance, Russia would attack a NATO country?
Absolutely.
Once they have established the principle that aggression pays, once the United States is distracted by the Middle East, by Yemen, by Iran, the door is open.
But the argument against that is why should America race to defend non-NATO countries who are not part of that organization?
We established in the 1990s the principle for NATO that you can't maintain stability in Europe unless you're willing to go out of area.
That was the way NATO Sec Gen Manfred Werner explained it.
That's why we went into Yugoslavia.
We stopped the fighting in Yugoslavia with the NATO force there.
Now, because Putin is a nuclear power, NATO shrunk back.
Maybe that was the cowardice of the Biden administration or their unwillingness to face the different circumstances after 30 years of U.S. superiority, not recognizing that we are under profound challenge right now.
So you're about to see the map of Europe and the international global structure reordered, absent some strong leadership from the United States, Britain, France, and major defense reinvestment.
On a separate issue, America has been involved in military action against the Houthis in Yemen.
Are you supportive of that?
I am because I felt that the approach under the previous U.S. administration was improper.
We were playing tit-for-tat, and I don't think you should play tit-for-tat with people like this.
You've got to go after and take out the capabilities to go in for them to do what they want.
Now, the problem is, right now, this is part of a larger strategic perspective.
We're dealing with an imminent threat from Iran and its nuclear capacity.
But even that is only part of the larger geostrategic picture.
So if I were sitting in the White House or in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, I'd be, my priorities would be, number one, stop Putin in Ukraine.
Number two, break the relationship between Russia and Iran.
Number three, deal with the Iranian nuclear issue, and then the Yemeni problem will go away.
One of our problems, Piers, has been we're shooting more sophisticated weapons than we're producing.
And so we're continually drawing down on stockpiles.
I know that Russia's 24-7.
I don't think we're 24-7 operation in the industrial base.
And so when you look at all this stuff, you say, well, we've got superiority right now.
Yep, great, great weapons, great missiles and so forth.
But they're not ready for a global challenge.
That's our problem.
And we're facing a global challenge.
Fascinating.
General Clark, thank you very much indeed.
I appreciate it.
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