[01:00:00:25 - 01:00:29:20] Speaker 1 Only every administration since Reagan has published a national security strategy. The closest thing the U.S. government produces to a single statement of purpose. The 2025 national security strategy is a deliberate break from decades of consensus. In this episode, walks through where the national security strategy came from, what it's for, and what makes this one so important. [01:00:29:20 - 01:01:02:23] Speaker 1 So Doug, a lot of our conversations have been policy oriented. They've been tactical in the sense of what laws or policies is the administration putting in place to execute. And as we hope to fulfill the vision of the Trump administration and the conservative across America that I think carried this consensus into power in 2024, the national security strategy is a bit of a different conversation because it in many ways sets the foundation [01:01:04:23 - 01:01:27:13] Speaker 1 on top of which all of these important policies happen. It is the purpose statement, what we believe, especially as it relates to national security strategy and the framework of how America can prioritize threats and interests to serve the American people and to maintain American primacy. [01:01:29:20 - 01:01:29:20] Speaker 1 While [01:01:31:08 - 01:01:39:13] Speaker 1 the National Defense Authorization Act is not mandatory, the national security strategy is mandatory. The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 [01:01:40:14 - 01:01:50:23] Speaker 1 established the expectation that every administration publish a national security strategy and typically every administration publishes at least one. [01:01:52:21 - 01:02:11:22] Speaker 1 That is, I think, an important place to start because these are really the most important documents that should orient everything the administration does when it comes to foreign policy and national security. [01:02:11:22 - 01:02:21:13] Speaker 2 That is the intent that the American people would have for an administration writing up their national security strategy. [01:02:22:22 - 01:02:27:25] Speaker 2 We voted them in, here is the president and his team, they are sitting at the top [01:02:29:08 - 01:02:31:19] Speaker 2 of the pyramid in terms of our government. [01:02:32:22 - 01:03:05:20] Speaker 2 Hopefully they are thinking big strategic thoughts and we are guiding this thing correctly. I know we will get into this in a second, but the whole concept of the prioritization is really what it comes down to. You can't have just like, "Oh, there is this long list and we are just going to throw it out there. What do the last guys do? What did they say?" Then it doesn't really guide anything. We are just meandering around and, "Well, we are doing this over here because it is over here in the strategy." It is more like a list. [01:03:07:00 - 01:03:11:22] Speaker 2 It really should set the stage for not only internally with [01:03:13:08 - 01:03:21:04] Speaker 2 our state department, our military, but it sends a message to the rest of the world. The rest of the world wants to know what we think. [01:03:22:07 - 01:03:42:16] Speaker 2 As we have seen in previous administrations, if the rest of the world thinks we are just wandering around aimlessly, they will take advantage of that situation. There has to be some significant clarity right out of the gate about what are we about right now? I am thankful this turned out the way it did. We will talk more about the details. [01:03:42:16 - 01:03:45:20] Speaker 1 Honestly, I think you made the most important point of the episode there. [01:03:46:23 - 01:04:12:25] Speaker 1 Previously, the national security strategy, quote unquote, was just a list of threats. I suppose it was typically a list and a prioritization of which threats were most important or at least which threats required the bandwidth of the government to protect against. We were in the army. When you had just left the army, it was becoming the war on terror. [01:04:14:08 - 01:04:54:11] Speaker 1 I do not think it is a mistake that the requirement for this document came at the end of the Cold War when we were very much, I think, playing a game of risk with foreign policy. Which parts of the world do the Soviets influence? Which parts of the world does America influence? In many ways, the national security strategy until now had skipped the strategy part and was just saying, "All right, here are the operational threats to America." What is important and what the national security strategy is actually for is to build out the framework for how we understand threats and how we make decisions across the globe. [01:04:54:11 - 01:04:57:11] Speaker 1 This national security strategy, I think for the first time, [01:04:58:16 - 01:05:11:16] Speaker 1 established what the American interest is. That is the policies and actions of the United States government that serve the American people in the arrangement of the international order that is not [01:05:12:20 - 01:05:25:25] Speaker 1 for the existence of the international order as such but is arranged in a way that benefits the American people. As far as I can tell, even if it was alluded to, it was never established in such a way until this year. [01:05:25:25 - 01:05:31:17] Speaker 2 Which is crazy when you think about it. Exactly, right. It really is troubling. Well, we're here. We've made it to this place. [01:05:33:08 - 01:05:48:19] Speaker 2 I've heard it said before and this is totally true, even though we're the best country that's ever existed and the most powerful. An administration comes in. It's like a giant chess board. There's only so many moves you could make. You can't take this piece and go way over there. It's not possible. [01:05:49:21 - 01:06:37:17] Speaker 2 You have to take a real assessment of where the thing is, where the whole globe is currently, where we are, where we could go, and then build a strategy around advancing our country against these other interests around the globe so that our country ends up in a better place at the end of that administration or whatever. Maybe it gets to keep going. Right. The American people are like, "This is good. We need to keep moving down this path." So that's, to your point about what this one says, it takes all that into account, I think. It just says, "Here's the situation. This is what's happening in our hemisphere. This is what's going on with China, all these different things. Right? Here's where NATO is or isn't and what people have to do. And then we're going to push that out there. And then now the challenge becomes that we have to stick to it. Right. [01:06:39:02 - 01:07:27:20] Speaker 2 Which sometimes can turn into a whole separate thing, but at least we have the strategy out of the gate. Which, if you look at the strategy and you go, "Hey, if we can pull that off in the next four years for this administration," I think we'd be in a better place, for sure. And that's what the American people want. Now, the globalists would say otherwise, "Oh, no. We just need to go and do whatever the world says we should do. We should take orders from the rest of the world." This is where I'm thankful that conservatism is on the rise, hopefully for a long time here. But it basically says, "No, no, no. This is our country and we're going to dictate our terms as best we can. And we're benevolent compared to everybody else." And so I think that this is a good moment for us to be like, "Okay, [01:07:28:22 - 01:07:35:18] Speaker 2 this is where the world is, and this is where we want to go as a country. And hopefully we can pull it off." There's a lot of details in this thing too. [01:07:35:18 - 01:07:50:20] Speaker 1 Off the top, I think the United States, really since World War II, had been governed by a desire to maintain a consensus. An international consensus, free versus closed, [01:07:51:22 - 01:08:46:00] Speaker 1 liberty versus communism. And then I think post-Cold War, there's a post-Cold War consensus, this order of the free world against the encroach of totalitarian regimes. And there's goodness there. But what I think happened is that we let the consensus become the organizing motivation of American policy as opposed to America and the American interest. And so that, again, off the bat, the 2025 national security strategy redefined that, I think order of operations, that we operate as a nation, a powerful nation, to secure our interests, not to maintain an abstract consensus that was perhaps needed during the Cold War or after World War II. We're in a different era, and so we should call it as such. And we do that [01:08:47:11 - 01:08:52:15] Speaker 1 to seek peace, but to seek peace through strength. Which connects obviously to our other priorities. [01:08:52:15 - 01:09:00:23] Speaker 2 That's right. And gain on our interests. And that's, I think, you know, you make the point about for a long time, it was like two teams. Yes. There's this team and that team. And I, [01:09:02:03 - 01:09:14:25] Speaker 2 you're absolutely right, that has changed and it's frayed and everything else. You have to see it for what it is. But I think the globalists would like us to believe that, no, we can all come together and be one thing, but, you know, hey, America, you got to do what Europe does. [01:09:16:01 - 01:09:22:11] Speaker 1 Or that America should serve Europe to maintain some arrangement for European security and interests. [01:09:22:11 - 01:10:06:20] Speaker 2 And how dare you say anything about about the Chinese, even though they're trying to destroy you. I mean, those are the kinds of things that it becomes, it becomes a mindset against mindset. You know, and I think that that's where, you know, Trump has been able to, he sees that side of it correctly. And we put it down on paper. He says it out loud. Oh my goodness, what's he doing? It's in the end of the rest of us. Like, well, he's talking the truth about the situation, right? And we have to, we have to deal with it. We can't pretend like it doesn't exist that way. And that's the most important place to begin. Like what you're saying, you can't, you know, what is it? You know, you don't fight, they'll get caught fighting the last war, right? Right. Same thing. Don't get caught, you know, defending the last strategy that did, it doesn't make any sense anymore. I mean, they didn't serve us well. That's right. And everything's changed anyway. So let's get, let's get real about it. [01:10:06:20 - 01:10:18:03] Speaker 1 Well, and so I think the administration put forth, there are kind of three sections or three points that were, again, really unique. One, that economic strength is integral to national security. [01:10:19:11 - 01:11:30:01] Speaker 1 The appropriate use of tariffs, trade deals, economic leverage is national security. And we should not subvert that to military action. It's a component of it. The second is that our defense industrial base is a component of national security. You know, we came into this administration, and if we were all being honest with each other, basically our entire sub component, component architecture for our military weapon systems were from China. That's right. Who we had previously identified as our gravest national security threat, completely incomprehensible. That's right. And then the third is that there's an imperative and something in the American interest to shift burdens to allies. Europe needs to do more to maintain their own defense. They can't just rely on a persistent presence of 100,000 troops. Countries like Korea, and even Israel to an extent, have to do more to secure their own interests, without relying on the explicit military presence of America. Those were pretty controversial. And again, implementation has been a little bit fractured, but a sea change. That's right. Based on previous ones. [01:11:30:01 - 01:11:47:16] Speaker 2 This is said it out loud. And I think I kind of view it too, in terms of just the whole lines of supply and combat and stuff like that, and lines of communication. You get too extended, and you haven't shored up back home. You're going to have some problems. We've seen that over time. [01:11:49:04 - 01:11:49:11] Speaker 2 We [01:11:50:27 - 01:11:58:16] Speaker 2 have our side conversations about the decades of what the heck was going on in Afghanistan and everything, and it ended a weekend. [01:11:59:29 - 01:12:32:12] Speaker 2 So why don't we just dial this back, think about it differently. And I, for one, really appreciate the side of like, hey, this is our hemisphere over here. And the cartels are a problem. And Maduro was a problem. Things like that, where it's like, okay, and the Cubans are still falling apart, and I know that we're talking to them and everything else. But there needs to be a feeling from the Chinese and the Russians that, hey, I guess you can try to come over here, but we got this side covered. And so that's where you feel like you've got a good home base set up. [01:12:33:19 - 01:12:55:24] Speaker 2 We're building our own stuff, our own military and everything in turn. That starts to make all Americans feel like, okay, we got our act together. And then we can talk about what's going on in the rest of the world, but not the other way around. That's what makes everybody uneasy. We're way over there doing all this stuff, and our own deal is falling apart over here, and fentanyl and the cartel. It's like, come on, let's see this correctly. [01:12:55:24 - 01:13:23:24] Speaker 1 Well, and that was fundamental. And it's honestly, I think, sickening that it was such a surprise that when the administration did list some priorities in the national security strategy, the first one was protecting our borders and dominance in the Western hemisphere, our part of the world, the part of the world that's most proximate to Americans and most proximate to our interests. If it was in the top five of previous national security strategies, I missed it. [01:13:25:03 - 01:13:26:05] Speaker 1 But it is such a [01:13:28:22 - 01:13:53:24] Speaker 1 natural and simple reality that we should ensure that we maintain influence, even dominance, in the Western hemisphere. Because that's going to be the domain, that's the way to take advantage of the blessing of the continental nature of our republic. But we hadn't yet. And then the other threat we certainly explicitly mentioned by name was the need to counter China. [01:13:54:24 - 01:13:58:28] Speaker 1 They are in our hemisphere in the sense that they are a Pacific rival power, [01:14:00:01 - 01:14:09:07] Speaker 1 and they're obviously making a play subversively, economically, and militarily in Central, South America, and even the Caribbean. And so they require a lot of [01:14:10:27 - 01:14:16:17] Speaker 1 confrontation even to ensure that we're oriented on the threat they are to the American way of life. [01:14:16:17 - 01:14:17:15] Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a whole [01:14:18:21 - 01:14:29:10] Speaker 2 section of the foundation here now is countering the Chinese threat. And it's like the greatest trick the devil pulled sometimes, that everybody thought he didn't exist. [01:14:29:10 - 01:14:29:21] Speaker 1 That's right. [01:14:29:21 - 01:15:01:08] Speaker 2 The same with the Chinese, they are doing so much, even in our own country, to undo us. Right, exactly. And we're like, "It's okay, we'll just keep buying their stuff." And back to the tariff thing, I always look at that now. We could have just gone straight at the Chinese and started fixing a lot of stuff on the tariffs. So that's probably a whole separate topic. But I just think that we need to be very clear-eyed about what's going on in the world relative to how our enemies are thinking about us. [01:15:02:10 - 01:15:02:16] Speaker 2 They [01:15:03:21 - 01:15:20:21] Speaker 2 are not like us. The Iranian regime is not like us. The Chinese Communist Party is not like us. That's like the mob in China and the mob around the world now. And we've got to see it correctly and it's got to begin here. If we don't begin with it here, then [01:15:21:22 - 01:15:41:01] Speaker 2 it's not addressed basically, which is lovely for them. That's like they're like, "This is great. We'll just free reign and we'll do as much as we possibly can." But if you start here, you at least put them on notice. We know what you're doing. And I think what needs to happen as we go forward, this is a great start. It needs to get more and more aggressive. [01:15:42:05 - 01:16:10:16] Speaker 2 Because if you don't stake out your own grounds, "Hey, it's a fallen world. There's 196 countries in this world. This is ours. This is our country. This is our deal. This is where our flag is." If you're coming at us, guess what? We're going to come at you too. And instead of just like, "Oh, let's just play defense on this stuff all the time." Well, they just keep chipping away at us. It's the death by a thousand cuts is what's going on. And we have got to call it what it is and reverse it for our kids and our grandkids. Otherwise, it's not going to be the same country. [01:16:10:16 - 01:16:15:03] Speaker 1 Well, and before we get to the implementation of how that takes place in [01:16:16:04 - 01:16:34:18] Speaker 1 the Restoration of America Foundation was out ahead of this, the Trump administration listed the establishment of merit and competence as opposed to a DEI regime as a national security issue. Which is something, again, you've led on Doug. I think you and I are right there. But it is true that we [01:16:36:11 - 01:16:47:17] Speaker 1 cannot assert American interests in our hemisphere around the world if we are a nation that categorizes and prefers people based off of [01:16:49:08 - 01:16:59:04] Speaker 1 mythical notions of racial injustice and categorizing people based on the color of their skin. The administration recognized that too, and they put in the national security strategy. That's right. [01:16:59:04 - 01:17:02:09] Speaker 2 That's right. There's all kinds of ways you can destroy your own country. [01:17:02:09 - 01:17:03:04] Speaker 1 Yes, exactly. [01:17:03:04 - 01:17:32:14] Speaker 2 And this, like we said in the previous episode, hey, it's a lot of money for all this and it's a lot of effort and everything else. But this is a wonderful place. This is a great country. Like everybody says, oh, we got our problems. Yeah, OK, we got to fix some things. But I would rather be here than any place else in all of human history. So that comes with a burden. And we got to call it what it is and do the work to root this stuff out. And fortunately, we have an administration that calls it what it is. [01:17:32:14 - 01:17:41:02] Speaker 1 Well, and so when it comes to implementation, I think it's been an interesting year or so since the national security strategy came out. [01:17:42:05 - 01:17:55:06] Speaker 1 To me, it makes complete sense in the context of the national security strategy why you would oust a hostile dictator in Nicolas Maduro, especially with the endpoint of securing access, American access to Venezuelan oil. [01:17:56:07 - 01:18:15:15] Speaker 1 Honestly, for me, it even makes sense why we would make strong, assertive claims over Greenland because of just how proximate Greenland is to Arctic security interests and what Russia and China could do without our control of Greenland. That's right. That applies to Cuba, too, the rest of Central and South America. [01:18:16:25 - 01:18:57:20] Speaker 1 It's, I think, a greater tension when you understand what's been happening with Iran since late February of this year. There's clearly an American interest in ensuring Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon and that they can't antagonize the Middle East. I don't know that there's as much of an interest in a protracted conflict that is tough to see ending in certain ways. I do think that's one spot in which the American people, and I know the Trump administration is thinking about this, has to be diligent to ensure we don't revert back to the whack-a-mole strategy of threats around the world. [01:18:57:20 - 01:18:59:19] Speaker 2 That's right. As [01:19:01:03 - 01:19:06:18] Speaker 2 of the filming of this, it's going on a while. To your point, [01:19:07:22 - 01:19:14:22] Speaker 2 we all watched these guys for 47 years. It's one of my earliest memories of the Iranian hostage situation. Then [01:19:17:04 - 01:19:27:27] Speaker 2 you hear them talk. I believe those guys when they say that they want to destroy us and Israel and everything. That, to them, is a feather in their cap when they cross over to their [01:19:29:10 - 01:19:44:11] Speaker 2 belief system. It's like, "Okay, well, this is a problem. These guys get a nuclear weapon." The problem that we're running into right now, just to play Monday morning quarterback, is if we're going to do this, we should have done it last year with midnight hammer. We should have had a whole, [01:19:45:25 - 01:20:12:06] Speaker 2 in addition to obviously the strong, prolonged military action, at the same time, diplomatic, economic, the full gambit, prepare our allies, all that stuff, have that strategy. Then, militarily, you don't go to a ceasefire until your enemy is begging you for a ceasefire. That's when you go. Maybe you don't even do it then. You think about it for a while. Because when the ceasefire begins, you want them to capitulate. [01:20:12:06 - 01:20:12:20] Speaker 1 Right. [01:20:13:28 - 01:20:22:04] Speaker 2 That's not what happened. Now we're in this back and forth and the strait and everything. It's gotten messy. [01:20:24:21 - 01:20:35:05] Speaker 2 Strategy's good. You got to have one, especially for any kind of conflict you're going into. Maybe we didn't have this where we needed it to be. [01:20:35:05 - 01:21:03:08] Speaker 1 That's right. I think the administration is at a point where they're balancing diplomatic, economic, and military power to achieve an outcome. Whereas 20 years ago, it was, "Okay, military power to achieve an outcome. We'll invade Iraq. We'll invade Afghanistan. Figure out the rest later." It's clearly a different scenario. It doesn't mean we... Because we do need to be vigilant about ensuring that we're ready to confront China, that we're ready to secure the Western Hemisphere. [01:21:04:11 - 01:21:08:10] Speaker 1 Candidly, I think the national security strategy still should carry water there. But [01:21:09:13 - 01:21:45:04] Speaker 1 the point I think we'll end with is that this is not a national security strategy of non-intervention. That's right. It's not a national security strategy of retrenchment. It is a national security strategy that's built on a precise, balanced... But aggressive assertion of American interests, where we're not afraid to use military power, where I think our threats mean something, in that we're able to bring the full weight of the American empire to the problems around the world. And that's what we're seeing the Trump administration do. [01:21:46:29 - 01:21:55:05] Speaker 1 They're the ones in the seat, but it's just good to continue to resurface their own documentation in these discussions. [01:21:55:05 - 01:22:15:23] Speaker 2 I think it's what the American people expect. You get a new president, you get a new administration, hopefully coming into it, you know where they stand, but you want them to have a moment where like, "This is what we're doing going forward, and this is how we're looking out for everybody in this country." That's right. And along the way, it's going to help some other people. Yeah, okay, that's good. But the beginning part is we're doing this for our country. Exactly. [01:22:15:23 - 01:22:32:29] Speaker 1 Peace through strength, America first. These are no longer simply political slogans, but strategic objectives and outcomes of the Trump administration. How we get there is another question, [01:22:32:29 - 01:22:52:11]