Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio to criticize American libertarian-conservative political commentator and author George Will and the lack of true statesmen across the country.
Leahy: Crom, you’ve got a bone to pick with George Will?
Carmichael: It’s not so much a bone to pick, because this is Barton Swaim who is writing an article about George Will and talking about how George Will has been this stalwart over the years for limited government. I see George Will as an advocate for political failure.
That’s the way that I’ve always viewed George Will when he decided to resign from the Republican Party because of Trump. If you’ll recall, George Will was a big George Bush the second supporter. He liked them both, and they both spent money like I’m not going to say like Democrats, but they both spent money.
George W. Bush expanded Medicare dramatically. He was quoted as saying, we have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move. If that statement is true, then that means that there is no limit as to how much government would spend or waste in order to help a single person.
Leahy: A lot of people hurt.
Carmichael: A lot of people hurt.
Leahy: They hurt during the era of the founding of the country, and the government didn’t always jump in and fix their hurt.
Carmichael: No. The point is, there will always be people who are hurting. And so if the federal government is looked upon as both the repair of hurt, of first and last resort, then slowing government spending, keeping us from going, by the way, giant deficits cause more people to hurt. It’s self-inflicted. That quote was by George W. Bush in 2003 shortly before signing a law to expand Medicare.
Leahy: This was five years before he announced that he was breaking the laws of the free market in order to save the free market. Remember that?
Carmichael: Is that George W. Bush?
Leahy: George W.
Carmichael: But George Will historically stood at the center of cutting back on entitlements, which is politically a political loser if you recognize that what motivates the left is the power and money that comes from government. George Will, intellectually, he’s actually a lightweight. His time has come and gone.
Leahy: His time has come and gone.
Carmichael: And I’m not sure his time ever came, but it’s gone.
Leahy: That’s a good point, because he was a big opponent of Ronald Reagan in the early days. When Reagan was running against George W. Bush.
Carmichael: I have no idea. If George Will could do whatever he wanted to do I have no idea what George Will would want to do. He’s a lightweight. He comes across as serious, but he’s always been kind of a lightweight.
Michael, I’m not sure that when it comes to true statesmen, they are few and far between. When I look across the world, I don’t see anyone who stands out as a great statesperson in any of our major institutions.
Leahy: Our major institutions have gone into a world where they accept certain propaganda, right, shall we say? They’re not particularly intellectually honest. In fact, they’re the exact opposite of intellectually honest.
Carmichael: And part of the problem is that you have people like The Wall Street Journal opinion page that became so angry and upset with Donald Trump’s victory. Donald Trump has many shortcomings, but the shortcomings have more to do with his persona than they do with his policy.
Leahy: Let me follow up on this Crom. It’s very interesting that you mentioned that, because there is of course, I don’t know if the country wants to see a rematch of 70, then it’ll be 78-year-old Donald Trump against 82-year-old Joe Biden. I don’t think the country necessarily is looking forward to that.
But the ABC- Washington Post poll came out, and despite all of the missteps that Donald J. Trump has had since he left the presidency, the latest poll has him up 48-45 over Joe Biden. On the big issues of foreign policy, who would you rather have? Donald J. Trump or Joe ‘Surrender’ Biden?
Carmichael: I said that Trump’s policies were good. His personal way of handling himself leaves a great deal to be desired, and I think it actually hurt his ability to accomplish things. Now, having said that, there’s a lot between here and here in the next election.
Leahy: There is an awful lot between here and the next election.
Carmichael: And I think that we are going to find out from Biden sometime by the middle of March through the end of March at the latest, whether or not he intends to run for re-election.
Leahy: By the way, we could roll tape on this Crom. But I think someone in this studio made a prediction.
Carmichael: Yes. That he wouldn’t serve out his term.
Leahy: Someone made that prediction.
Carmichael: I think that probably was me.
Leahy: I think it probably was.
Carmichael: My prediction is he’d be gone by now.
Leahy: I think your prediction was he’d be gone by April.
Carmichael: Well, I think he’ll be gone. (Leahy laughs) That would be then one of those predictions that turns out to be incorrect.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “George Will” by Washington Speakers Bureau. Background “United States Capitol” by David Maiolo. CC BY-SA 3.0.
Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to discuss Taiwan’s historical progress versus China in the 80s and the capitulation of Pope Francis.
Leahy: Crom, lots of stuff going on. What else is on your agenda? By the way, it is the first day of summer. And it felt like the first day of summer. I got to drive in this morning at 4:25 in the morning, 80 degrees out.
Carmichael: Well, it felt like the first day of summer a couple of weeks ago when I got up close to 100 degrees. So that happens this time of year?
Leahy: Yes. Tennessee. Yeah, that’s right.
Carmichael: There are three or four articles all about China that I find that I find very interesting. But there is one that isn’t explicitly about China and it really helps understand some of what’s going on in terms of the foreign policy.
Leahy: Now Crom, I will tell you you have piqued my curiosity. I like the way you set that up. Well, now I’m thinking this is clever Crom seeing the influence China somewhere, and I’m sure it’s there. I wonder where you seeing it.
Carmichael: Here’s a headline. So anybody who read this headline could see it. This is in the business section of The Wall Street Journal. The World Relies On One Chip Maker in Taiwan, Leaving Everyone Vulnerable.
So that gives us an idea that one of the reasons why China is so insistent that they take over Taiwan. And we now know what China will do once they take over an area even if they promise to do something different because of what they did in Hong Kong.
Leahy: They promised one thing, and they did exactly the opposite.
Carmichael: They did not leave the people in Hong Kong free. They’re now under the subjugation of the Communist Chinese Party, just like everybody else.
Leahy: Let me just stop for a moment on that. When the United Kingdom signed the agreement to give Hong Kong back because their 99-year lease expired everybody knew this would happen.
Carmichael: I would assume so. But I’m not sure what the alternative was, because as you point out, there was a 99-year deal. And the 99-year deal was going to be coming up soon.
And I don’t think the Communist Party of China was in any mood at all to extend the terms of the deal, as they had been before. So it’s kind of like if your lease is running out in a building and you don’t have a right to renew, guess what?
Leahy: You’re out.
Carmichael: You’re either out of are you going to agree to the landlords’ terms. Now you have a choice of getting out. In the case of Taiwan, though, that’s not the case.
Leahy: That’s right. In the case of Taiwan, you had Chiang Kai-shek and a number of Chinese who fled the Communist Party back in the late 40s to the island of Taiwan which had virtually nothing on it. And Taiwan is now one of the wealthiest per-capita communities.
Leahy: It is booming from what I hear.
Carmichael: In the world. It’s only been there for 70 years.
Leahy: I guess 20 some odd million people live on the island, but it is a hub of entrepreneurial activities. And it’s a garden spot, I hear.
Carmichael: Well, I was in Taiwan quite some time ago.
Leahy: You were? What was it like?
Carmichael: Well, this is back in the late 80s and so it’s not fair. We were in China at the same time. And Taiwan was a bustling community and a huge city with lots of cars and lots of beautiful buildings.
In other words, it was a first-world country whereas in China at the time, we were one of the very, very, very few cars on the streets. And when we were on the streets, the driver would drive at about 10 to 15 miles an hour and beep his horn like a heartbeat because there were tens of thousands of bicycles.
And the bicycles had to just kind of move out of the way for the car to pass and move right back in the path. It was just quite extraordinary to see that. But China was very, very poor in the late 80s?
The tallest building in Shanghai was 40 stories and shared a hotel. And now Shanghai is a huge metropolis, just a huge, bustling city. But Taiwan was that before. And Taiwan is also a very, very technologically advanced society.
So there’s lots of technology that’s been developed. Apple phones and a lot of Apple equipment are made in Taiwan. But this one chipmaker is the largest chipmaker in the world by far and many of the chips that they make are very sophisticated.
And so this actually has national security implications in regard to that. What’s also interesting in regard to China is the House Republicans in Washington are targeting the Chinese Communist Party for covering up the origins of the Coronavirus and have introduced legislation to allow people to sue China.
The Democrats are completely opposed to that. So we now kind of see which side the Democrat party is on.
Leahy: They’re on the side of the Chinese Communist Party.
Carmichael: Yes. That’s really quite interesting. Apparently, nobody’s asked Anthony Fauci that question. If they have I’ve not seen it. So if one of our listeners has actually seen Anthony Fauci opine on whether or not the Communist Chinese Party should be held responsible now that he’s admitted that the virus likely came from the lab.
But he’s not admitting that very hard. And then there’s another interesting story where Pope Francis did something that no Pope has done in centuries and that is he capitulated to the Communist Chinese Party. The Communist Chinese Party gets to pick the priests.
Leahy: Yeah, that doesn’t happen. It’s never happened anywhere that I know of in the Catholic Church.
Carmichael: This is something that he agreed to. So now a Communist priest, somehow those two words just don’t seem to go together.
Leahy: It’s an oxymoron.
Carmichael: Yeah. Thank you. You can look that word up.
Leahy: It’s pernicious.
Carmichael: Pernicious. (Laughter) Very good. And then the last little item here is this in Yahoo. News of all places. And the headline is ominous.
Leahy: Not pernicous but ominous.
Carmichael: The U.S.-China relationship going down the path of a great confrontation, analyst says. I’ve read the story and I believe it’s true.
Leahy: Well, when you’re weak, the strong party will take advantage.
Carmichael: Yes.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed IWF’s Senior Fellow Carrie Sheffield to the newsmakers line to discuss her recent piece at CNN and connecting with an audience that she calls ‘the persuadables.’
Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line our good friend Carrie Sheffield, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, most recently with our good friend John Solomon at Just the News. Welcome, Carrie Good morning.
Sheffield: Yes. Hi.
Leahy: Good morning, Carrie.
Sheffield: Hi. You cut out for a second, but here I am. How are you?
Leahy: Well, we are great, Carrie. Now, I have a little bit of mystery here that I’d like to see if you could help me solve. So you actually were able to get an op-ed published at CNN. How did that happen?
Sheffield: I give credit to the CNN op-ed editor. He’s had a long career at News Day, which is out on Long Island, which is one of the more conservative places of New York. I think he’s got respect. He understands there’s actually a need in the opinion section for CNN for more voices.
Leahy: Was this the first time you had an op-ed at CNN, or have you had it up there before?
Sheffield: No, I’ve been writing for almost four years. Fall of 2017 was my first.
Leahy: Wow. Cheap things I didn’t know Carrie about you or CNN. (Laughter)
Sheffield: I’m more than happy to write because a challenge people who are going to be triggered. But the secret part of why I do CNN and been on a bunch of MSNBC programs on shows like Don Lemon and Al Sharpton is because even though on Twitter and elsewhere I’m going to be dragged and there are very vocal liberals. I do know that there are some persuadables, and usually, they’re not as vocal. And I’m really trying to reach them.
Leahy: So what kind of response you get from CNN readers to your columns?
Sheffield: I would say the average as I said, I get online, a lot of hate. Liberals will post on Twitter or Facebook or other social media about how much they hate the column. But like I said, my audience, my target audience isn’t them. I’m really trying to reach people who are persuadable.
Leahy: So the persuadable people who watch CNN, who don’t sit in their basement and send nasty-grams out. That’s who you’re trying to reach.
Sheffield: Well, exactly. I was just at the airport yesterday and low and behold, they’re playing CNN everywhere. So it is one of those brands that I think that the operators of places like bars and airports and other public areas, doctors offices, maybe they’re not so political, and they think that it’s more down the middle and they don’t really realize how far left it is. Again, I’m more than happy to take any opportunity I can to get a good word out there.
Leahy: Heads must have exploded in Jeff Zucker’s CEO suite after he read this piece. Trump Deserves Credit for Policies Biden is Adopting on Foreign Policy. You wrote that it and it was published yesterday. Make the case here for our listeners that you make in this column.
Sheffield: Yeah, absolutely. What I did was I went through and I looked at the way that to his credit, I mean, I could write pages and pages and multiple books on ways I disagree with Joe Biden, but he is backtracking on some key foreign policy decisions and going in the direction of Trump.
One obviously is a really big one about China. And the big point I made in the lead was that look, he’s saying some right things, but the big question is whether he is actually going to back this up.
For example, on China, he said that he really wants to take a muscular posture. Biden expanded the list of Chinese companies that are barred from U.S. investors. His Secretary of state has been saying pretty much the exact same thing that Mike Pompeo was saying about the Uyghurs and the human rights abuses there in China.
And then the big kahuna is that he reversed course on doing a deeper dive into the roots of the Wuhan virus. And before we know, Democrats were saying that when Trump was calling for that, that was somehow xenophobic.
And now you have people like even Anthony Fauci, who were saying they want more of an investigation. I don’t know if there’s going to be any teeth to this or this is all just performative.
I hope that they will actually do more of an investigation. I don’t know that there are even the materials and the evidence at this point. It’s probably been destroyed. But at least they are willing to admit that they were wrong.
Leahy: The four keywords from your lead sentence about Biden backing Trump policies in some instances now were, ‘at least on paper.’
Sheffield: (Chuckles) Yes, exactly.
Leahy: By the way, that was a very nicely written lead sentence. And I’m sure as you’re thinking that through, at what point did you say I got to add these four words at least on paper?
Sheffield: Right from the get-go because that really is the big question. It’s interesting how much Biden says one thing and does another because he certainly did that quite a bit during the campaign where he promised that he was just the nice moderate, the friendly moderate in the race, and he’s governed anything but.
I do think that on foreign policy realism has set in. At the end of the day, I think a lot of this is coming from his staff. And so he did another thing that he continued from Trump which was with Russia.
This Open Skies Treaty, which was about patrols that were allowed by Russians and the United States over each other’s territories. And the Russians kept cheating on it. And President Trump said we’re going to pull out of this because they’re just not keeping it.
And at the time, Joe Biden said it was a short-sided policy of going it alone and abandoning American leadership. He said it would increase the risks of miscalculation and conflict and alienate Europeans who wanted the U.S to stay in the treaty.
And it turns out now Biden is saying and the exact opposite again, to his credit, he is keeping the U.S. out and not trying to get back into that treaty. He is doing some things that I very much disagree with Russia.
President Trump had put some sanctions on some Russian companies that were trying to finish the Nord Two Streamline Pipeline. And I found it really ironic that Joe Biden removed those sanctions and basically paved the way to allow this major strategic pipeline that’s going between Russia and Germany.
It’s going to make Germany way more dependent on Russian fuel. And this pipeline bypasses Ukraine, which means that Ukraine is going to be economically weakened right now or in the future going forward because they’re not going to get the land transfer fees, and it’s hurting Ukraine.
It’s making Europe more dependent on Russia. Meanwhile, here in North America, Joe Biden rejects the Keystone Pipeline. So just putting that in context, he killed a domestic source of oil with the pipeline while promoting and removing sanctions against a Russian pipeline.
If Trump had done the opposite, the left would be screaming and saying that he’s compromised and that he’s a Russian asset. And again, no one’s asking him about this.
Leahy: Carrie Sheffield, that is a fascinating point. I had the same thought you’ve articulated it very well. Carrie, it is always a delight to have you here on The Tennessee Star Report. Come back with us again and come to Nashville and come in in person sometime. We’d love to meet you in the studio.
Sheffield: I would love that. Thank you so much.
Listen to the full second hour:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Carrie Sheffield” by Patrick Ryan. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed author and The Washington Times correspondent on national security Bill Gertz to the newsmakers line to discuss Biden’s recent decision to leave Afghanistan, the U.S military, and the continued threat of China.
Leahy: We are joined on a newsmaker line, our good friend, Bill Gertz the well-known Washington columnist, an expert on National security, and an expert on China. Good morning, Bill.
Gertz: Hi. Good to be on the show.
Leahy: Well, we’re three to four months into the Biden administration. How is the Biden administration doing in terms of foreign policy?
Gertz: Well, it’s still a work in progress. They’re kind of getting their people in positions. They’ve got Tony Blinken the Secretary of State is kind of leading the foreign policy effort there Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon. I think it’s they’re battling now. The agenda is not so much between Democrats and Republicans, but between Liberal Democrats and radical Democrats in terms of policy fights.
The bright spot is that the China threat, which, again, is my big issue with things that I’ve written books about and in The Washington Times about is that the Trump administration pretty well boxed in the new Biden administration on a lot of China issues. So they’re really doing pretty much a lot of the things that the Trump administration was doing. Take Taiwan, for example.
Right now, we’ve got a real threat. The Chinese are stepping up tensions with Taiwan. They appear to be testing the Biden administration. And then on the other side of the world, the Russians are also testing the Biden administration by saber-rattling against Ukraine. So it’s going to be an interesting few weeks going forward to see how those two hot spots play out.
Leahy: The big news foreign policy-wise yesterday was President Biden’s announcement that the United States will be withdrawing entirely from Afghanistan. We’ve been there almost 20 years now, I guess 18 years. It’s not seemed to of made much progress. But is this a wise move? Will it create a power void in that area?
Gertz: Well, I think this is going to pit the political leadership and the Biden administration against the military. The military’s view is that we’re not done. We can’t leave now because the threat posed by the Taliban remains. I think it’s the right choice. I mean, if you’re not winning, you’re losing and they’ve been losing there. We don’t have a department of nation-building in the U.S government.
And the military, their job is to fight and win wars. You’ve got a low-level insurgency now. The Taliban controls quite a bit of territory in Afghanistan. So timing the departure to September 11th, though it may not be a good idea because it’s going to give the enemy a chance to just delay things and really step up its activities.
It’s not looking good for Afghanistan I can tell you that. The government there, I think it’s got problems with corruption and problems with governance. Afghanistan is not really a nation. It’s a bunch of tribes that are often fighting. And now you’ve got the Taliban to deal with. It’s a terrorist organization.
Leahy: What about the symbolism of selecting September 11th as a day to leave? That struck me as an odd choice by the Biden administration.
Gertz: Yes. I don’t know where that came from, but again, certainly, 9/11 was one of the reasons we went in there because Al Qaeda had managed to operate from redoubts within Afghanistan. There are still terrorist groups there. ISIS is there and Al Qaeda’s there. But according to the latest intelligence assessment that was just released this week by the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the terrorist threat is there, but it’s been degraded significantly by years of U.S military activities. A lot of our special operations people have been doing excellent work and really making the terrorist threat diminished.
Leahy: Is the Biden administration’s decision to leave Afghanistan, is that any different than what President Trump would have done had he been reelected?
Gert: Yeah. President Trump had tried to do that and kind of ran into opposition from the military leadership. The military’s view on it is basically no military leader wants to be the last one to say, hey, we didn’t win. And we’ve spent a lot of treasure and lives trying to solve this problem of Afghanistan. I think pretty much Trump definitely was trying to get out and the military push back. I think it was General Mattis when he was the Secretary of Defense. He quit in protest over the decision to pull out of Syria, where we have special ops people working there.
Leahy: In retrospect, was that war ever winnable?
Gertz: Well, I guess it was if there was a way to establish a stable Afghan government. And again, we spent trillions of dollars trying to do that. And yet it’s just a really difficult problem. Nation-building is not easy to do.
Leahy: Absolutely. Let me ask you this question about the difference between state and defense now. So we had Mike Pompeo, very powerful. I thought he was very much aligned with President Trump’s policies. And now we have this fellow who’s last name is Blinken. Tony Blinken. So he doesn’t seem to be a very powerful figure. He seems to be kind of a return to, I don’t know Jimmy Carter type foreign policy. Am I giving the guy a short trip there? Is there more to him than that?
Gertz: I don’t really know him, but I do know his background. He’s basically a Senate staffer, so he doesn’t bring a lot of vision and a lot of individual thought and strategy to the position. As you mentioned, I think Mike Pompeo is one of the best Secretaries of State that the U.S has had, especially when it comes to China.
He did groundbreaking work in really reorienting the entire U.S government position on dealing with the threat from China. Tony Blinken has inherited that and hasn’t really moved to change it. Again he’s adopting a lot of the Liberal left policies and climate change and personnel diversity. I don’t know how that’s going to affect American foreign policy.
It’s kind of one of those political issues, but so far, he has done pretty well on the China threat. And one thing I would give him credit for was he did not back down from the legal designation by the State Department of genocide by China of the ethnic Uhygers in the Western part of China. And I think I’d give him credit for that.
Leahy: I’m trying to figure out what on earth is going on at the top levels of the Department of Defense. The way it’s operating seems to me to be so woke, so progressive, so interested in equity and diversity and so disinterested in winning wars. This is just my view. What’s the story with Lloyd Austin, the new Secretary of Defense?
Gertz: Yeah, he’s basically following the Biden plan which is the new issue that the Pentagon is doing. They did what they call a stand down on extremism in the military. This is really a red herring issue. There’s not a lot of extremists. There may be a very small percentage of people, but it’s not a big problem and yet they’ve tried to make it a huge problem.
And they forced every military and defense component in the Defense Department to do a so-called stand down on extremism which is ill-defined. They haven’t defined it. And it looks to a lot of critics, I included, that this is some kind of a political purge to try and politicize the military, which has traditionally been a very conservative institution.
Listen to the full first hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Tennessee Star National Correspondent Neil McCabe to the newsmakers line weigh on his recent exclusive at The Tennessee Star and the different stylings on foreign policy between the Biden and Trump.
Leahy: We are joined by our good friend our longtime colleague the Washington correspondent for the Star News Network, which is The Tennessee Star, and five other state-based news sites. Neil McCabe with another breaking exclusive story on American foreign policy with the founder of the Gold Institute, Eli Gold. Neil, how do you keep getting breaking these exclusives? And what did Eli Gold tell you about Biden’s foreign policy?
McCabe: Eli Gold is an amazing guy who started the Gold Institute because after spending about 10 years in the sort of Washington think tank community he decided that nowhere was anybody actually doing things. They were creating a lot of policy, but nobody was ever getting anything done. And he wanted to create a place where there are practitioners, who are actually advising the decision-makers. And I guess I’ll let the cat out of the bag Mike. I am a media fellow at the Gold Institute. And so I just called Eli and I talked to him.
Leahy: Well, of course, that’s how you get these things. It is up now on The Tennessee Star. Exclusive: Gold Institute Founder Says Biden’s Foreign Policy Rejects Trump’s Successful Style, Substance. Tell us more about that Neil.
McCabe: Mike, if you look at it, I just made a quick list of 12 countries. Mexico, England, China, India, Japan, Canada, Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Afghanistan. And in every single instance, the Trump foreign policy was better than what was going on before Trump. And that’s not just Obama but Bush and everyone else that actually our posture towards those countries or with those countries was better under Trump.
And so what Eli was saying is that there are two things at play with the buying foreign policy vis-à-vis Trump. number one. He is bringing back sort of the left-wing establishment way of doing business. So the policies are going to be different. But almost more importantly the second thing is that Biden operates in a different way than Trump. Trump was revolutionary. Trump broke the mold.
And what he means by that is that is the Washington National Security foreign policy establishment believes or acts as if the rest of the world acts like they do in Washington. so the way you get things done in Washington is the way you get things done with the world. And so you talk to foreign leaders just like there are groups of congressmen trying to help you get through a farm bill. And it just doesn’t work.
And it never worked. and so what Trump did is Trump brought a personal one-on-one type of diplomacy. One that he honed as a New York City developer. He developed personal relationships. He got personally involved and he figured out how to get things done. And the key example for that in the article is what’s called mesa which was it was proposed as the Middle East Strategic Alliance.
And that was going to be sort of an Arab NATO and that came out of the Riyadh Summit which was you Trump’s first trip to Saudi Arabia. Trump signed off on it. He talked about it at the Riyadh Summit. They got things going and then the state department just sort of muddled through it. And the state department basically was just telling these countries to sign on to this thing and then we’ll figure out later what it is.
And countries were saying no, we’re not going to sign something and then find out later what it is. Like Nancy Pelosi saying you have to pass Obamacare to figure out what it is. And Trump got personally involved. He saw what was good, what was bad, what was working and not working. And out of what was supposed to be the Middle East Strategic Alliance Trump’s personal involvement led to what’s called the Abraham Accords.
And that’s where you know he was able to get Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to sign agreements recognizing Israel and sure of dropping that sort of War posture that these Arab countries have had with Israel. And in the second term, obviously, the big enchilada was going to be Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords.
But this is sort of a result of Trump’s personal involvement. Whereas Biden is not personally involved. Biden wants to run everything by a committee. He wants to go back to the old ways and that’s why you’re seeing a sort of muddle through foreign policy. I think people can feel it where we are 40 days into a Biden administration and there just isn’t the speed and the action that we were used to in a Trump administration Mike.
Leahy: Well Neil, here’s my take on it. Just looking at it from afar. You are the expert on this. You deal with all these Washington foreign policy people. It strikes me that what we have now with the current occupant of the Oval Office the legal but not legitimate president of the United States Joe Biden. It looks to me like we have Neville Chamberlain with early-onset dementia surrounded by a bunch of third-rate lefty propagandists. Tell me where I’m wrong about that Neil.
McCabe: No. You’re absolutely right to the extent that I think you’re being a little unkind to Neville Chamberlain. (Leahy chuckles) I think he would stack up a little better next to Biden. But you know, this is one of the problems with a monarchy, right? Because the reason why is kind of like the son succeeds the father kind of monarchy because a civil war every time the King dies is not worth it.
And so sometimes you get a great king and sometimes you get a stooge but it’s better than a civil war and then maybe the next son will do alright. And we sort of watch this in England. But one of the problems is what if you have somebody who is not mentally functioning properly. And we saw that the other day maybe it was yesterday the day before yesterday Biden is doing this live stream with House Democrats and somebody says hey Mr. President will you take questions?
And he says, sure I’ll take questions. And as soon as he offered to take questions the White House shut the feed off. They just shut it off. Who knows what it’ll be like if you ever had to take a real press conference. We saw President Trump speak for 90 minutes with 150 international reporters from the U.S. And when he was in Europe, he would take all comers and he would keep taking questions until the reporters were tired.
And I’ve been in situations where Trump just keeps talking and talking and talking. Whatever questions are coming up he’ll take it. Even when someone’s nasty he’ll take the questions. Biden doesn’t take questions. It’s almost like those game shows where he’s in the soundproof booth. The president has to be protected from himself Mike
Leahy: Neil McCabe our Washington correspondent for the Star News Network. A big final question for you. How much damage will this somnambulant Biden administration’s foreign policy do to Americans’ interest? And will we survive it after the next three-plus years of the Biden/Harris administration?
McCabe: Yeah, Mike, I think that some severe damage can be done. If you look at the way President Biden’s administration is trying to reboot what was really becoming an American Iranian Alliance in the Middle East. You’ll see what he’s trying to do with China. Who knows what’ll happen the NAFTA. You have the negotiations for free trade with England. There’s a lot of things on the table. You have Germany, which is supposed to be like the heart of Europe is really absent without leave from NATO.
And Trump was pressuring Germany to step up and pay more for its defense. In the meantime, Germany got rid of its draft. Germany is giving billions of dollars to Russia, the country wearing NATO to defend Germany against. And these are the kinds of things that Biden is going to roll with. And if you go down that list of 12 countries, he’s every single one of them is postured to get worse. The Americans are going to lose out and it’s not good Mike. I’m not optimistic Mike.
Leahy: Neil McCabe the best investigative journalist in Washington, D.C. He’s our Washington correspondent for the Star News Network. We look forward to talking with you again next week on The Tennessee Star Report. Always look forward to your exclusive stories Neil. Thank you so much for joining us.
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