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Visit Samsung.com to learn more about Galaxy Z Fold 4. Josh Rogin, welcome back to The Brian Kilmeade Show. Great to be back with you, Brian. Hey, Josh, you're a busy guy.
You're not just focusing on China, you're focusing on everything along with your book coming out on paperback and your Washington Post column, as well as the podcast you're on. First off, I loved your column today talking about Kharkiv and the mayor. They've been shelled, what, for three straight days at least? A lot of their energy has been shut off, but the mayor vows to do what?
Right, Brian. Well, I spoke to the mayor of Kharkiv from his bunker, and he vowed that the city will not give up, that the army will not give up the fight to the last man. And he would appreciate it if we could stop futzing around with sanctions on oligarchs' yachts and actually give him some weapons and some food and some medicine and some first aid equipment for his first responders.
And some heavy weaponry so that they might actually survive and save their city from shelling, bombing, missiles, rockets, cluster bombs and an onslaught of hundreds of heavy vehicles that are squeezing and encircling the city like a boa constrictor. He's in a desperate situation, but he's projecting confidence because his people are fighting alongside of him. And, you know, it's just shocking when you talk to people on the ground in Ukraine fighting for their lives, how disconnected that is from our discussion in Washington about sanctions on oligarch boats, which is nonsense when you think about actually doing something that could change the course of this war and maybe save this country from Putin's aggression. So, you know, what's pretty amazing is that we had the biggest build-up, the biggest wind-up in the history of conflicts for this. And we remember in 2000, we famously young President Obama, let's not provoke, I want to reset that relationship, let's not provoke the Russians by giving the Ukrainians anything besides blankets and MRAs. And then Trump came in and gave them some lethal weapons, but obviously there's such canary going on that resulted in the impeachment, but all tight, what a mess. And then the shipment, I understand, was coming into Odessa and was turned around on the transition of power with President Biden. I don't understand if you're going to telegraph a war and a conflict like we did, and I think that's a good move, why wouldn't you at least get arms in there?
How do you rationalize not getting arms in there at a great rate? Right. No, you're totally right, Brian. While there will be plenty of time to look back at all the mistakes we made and the most urgent thing is to help the Ukrainians fighting now, I will take a minute and look back at the mistakes we made because they're egregious. And I say that three administrations in a row have failed to give the Ukrainian people the respect, the money and the arms that they need to build their fragile democracy without signaling to Vladimir Putin that he should attack them. It did start with President Obama in 2009. If you remember 2008 when Putin invaded Georgia, George W. Bush, to his credit, parked U.S. Air Force planes on the ground in Tbilisi and dared Putin to attack them. And Putin backed out because the only thing Putin understands is security, risk and reward. He understands the use of power, not the threat of sanctions in some future world where he doesn't even care about the people who are getting sanctioned. So in 2009, Obama came in with a reset. Then Putin got the message. He attacked in 2014, took part of Ukraine.
No real consequences. He got the message. And here we are in 2022 and we're wondering why does he think he can do this without the world responding? Well, I was in the Munich Security Conference, Brian, three weeks ago with all the Europeans saying, oh, no, he would never do this. We can't give.
I'm going to break some news on your show right now. I have reporting that the National Security Council officials told the Hill in December that they didn't want to give stingers to the Ukrainians because they couldn't handle them. They couldn't absorb them.
They wouldn't know what to do with them. And here we are, what, a couple of weeks into this war and all of a sudden everyone's found religion on helping the Ukrainians. And it's almost too late.
It's atrocious. We fail to understand that Putin, like all dictators, the appetite grows with the eating. And we fail to understand that when freedom and democracy retreats in the world, in places like Hong Kong and Afghanistan, just for two examples, autocracy fills the void. And we fail to understand that while Americans are rightfully weary of American interventional ism abroad and rightfully skeptical of the U.S. government's ability to do things abroad, as it turns out, the alternative is worse because that's when the dictators come in and blow everything to smithereens.
And we're just going to have to come back and clean it up later. So do you mean additional stingers? Because I thought there were already stingers on the ground at that point.
You mean no one? What I'm saying is that as you pointed out, this buildup took months and months and months. And I and many of us in Washington and around the world watched the Biden administration get dragged tooth and nail, you know, bit by bit into doing the right thing. And first they got embarrassed by the Brits who provided weapons before they did even the intelligence disclosures. They were following London on that. Then they were trying to sync up with the Germans and the French who it until the very last minute, didn't want to give the Ukrainians anything really to defend themselves. The stingers is one example. My reporting, again, is that there was a reluctance to provide them with stingers as late as December. And now they're speeding hundreds of they were giving them javelins and toes and other things.
But the stingers, just for one example, and those are the things that actually protect the areas because those are the things that kill Russian planes. But if you put that into the context, into the pattern of the Biden administration, oh, well, we'll sanction this oligarch, but not that oligarch. We'll sanction this bank, but not that bank. They still won't sanction the Russian energy sector, which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it, because we're trying to force Putin to empty his coffers and then we're paying him money to refill them by buying his oil at the same time. It's crazy, Brian.
And this is because we don't want to provoke him. Is that what I think that ship has sailed, frankly, from the Fox News podcast network. I'm Ben Domenech, Fox News contributor and editor of the transom dot com daily newsletter. And I'm inviting you to join a conversation every week. It's the Ben Domenech podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to Fox News podcast dot com.
I do, too. And I think one thing is pretty clear. We're trying to judge Vladimir Putin on Western values and we're trying to pretend as if he's playing a fair game. And I just think the best example of that is what happened with those MiGs that were supposed to be delivered, even though they were older, to Poland and be part of the Air Force, maybe the only part of the Air Force for for the Ukrainians. And at the last minute, NATO pulled it back.
They thought it was going to be too provocative. Right. We're going in this crazy cycle where we have to clear everything that we do with 27 other European countries for the sake of unity that never really existed in the first place. And all that does is result in a policy that's the lowest common denominator. We are only going to give them the things that 30 countries agree on.
No, no, no, no. We have to give them the things that they say they need. And again, if you talk to the Ukrainians, if you bother to and trust me, they want to talk. They're trying to talk to us. They're begging us for stuff. What they say they need is very specific. Armed drones, fighter planes, javelins, anti armored tow missiles, stingers, munitions, helmets, bandages, food, medicine.
You know, like the list is endless. They also need economic support. They need financial support. They can't really collect taxes right now.
They can't really pay the garbage, you know, removal people right now. So they need a lot of things that we're just not giving them while we're celebrating that some billionaire jerk got his yacht taken in the Monaco. You know, it's it's it's an alibi and, you know, sanctions are not going to do it. It has to be a mix of all of the use of American power.
And just to agree with what you said up front. Yes, Putin is a totalitarian, expansionist, aggressive dictator. We fooled ourselves for a long time into thinking that he could be coerced or convinced or bribed into joining the community of free and open societies and pushing his country towards more freedom and democracy.
He's not it's not happening, by the way, it's not happening in China either. So this should have woken up all of those people in our discourse who think that these are not threats that we have to deal with. This should have woken up people in our discourse who believe that we were the history was over and that, you know, all we had to do was strike a couple of deals and that Russia and China would join us in a Pax Americana or whatever nonsense we've been telling ourselves since the end of the Cold War. History didn't end. Autocracy didn't stop. And unfortunately, there's no one else to lead the world to fight it except for us. And I wish we would get in the game a little bit. I would, too.
And it must be in Munich. Was there any country that really understood the urgency before Zelensky, of course, showed up himself, which took risk? It was risky, too. Was there anybody that you said, wow, this country seems to get it? Yes. The Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, to an extent, the Poles, the ones next to Russia, the ones who used to be invaded and controlled by Russia, who understand what Putin is, who understand the revisionist vision that he has for the world, who understand that freedom isn't free and democracy is fragile and that if you signal to Putin that he can bomb a country to smithereens and not pay a price, that's exactly what he's going to do. So, yeah, the Eastern Europe. But, you know, you go to these things in Munich, it's always the Germanys and the Francs that you think they're so special and they run all the events and they look down on the Eastern Europeans. Zelensky got up and said, hey, guys, you guys are whistling past the graveyard and this is going to be really bad and we wish you would wake up.
And they were like, oh, that was so rude. They were fooling themselves. Even the U.S. Biden administration in Munich was fooling themselves into thinking everything was going to be OK. And now they're scrambling. The only silver lining of this whole thing is that all of a sudden Europeans realize that American-led world order is better than the alternative. OK, it's not that we're perfect. It's not that we do everything right in history.
It's not that we have unlimited resources, but the alternative to the system that we built is this. It looks like Syria. It looks like Grozny.
It's a North Korea in the middle of Europe. That's what we're about to see if we don't get our act together and quick. Josh, I think the things that changed is, number one, Zelensky can communicate. His guy really is selling his story and the composure he has under pressure. He left. He left.
He left. So when things got tough, he got better. He shamed the world leaders into backing him. And when Berlin hosted 500,000 protesters in support of Ukraine, they made their leaders change their policy. 40 happened the first weekend in America. We saw it in Paris.
We saw it all around. The Western leaders had to be embarrassed to changing policies by their people and by a fearless leader who demanded respect by his actions. Do you agree?
Yeah, no, absolutely. He showed that freedom is worth fighting for, even sometimes worth dying for. And that is what they didn't have in Syria. They didn't have a democratic leadership and a courageous leader to fight the Russians. And they ended up getting killed by the Russians for set for 12 years, getting it ongoing. So, yeah, that's that's an asset the Ukrainians have. It's always easier to fight for something that you believe in than to fight for an evil dictator who sends his people into Ukraine to be cannon fodder.
So that's that's their advantage. But I'm just a little bit more skeptical than you that the world really has woken up, because why didn't we send those 70 fighter planes? Well, because Putin threatened those countries with economic punishment and they acted in their own interests, not in the not in the enlightened self-interest of the free and democratic world. So, yeah, we moved the world. The history has changed.
The whole world has changed in the last two weeks. But we're still not giving the Ukrainians the things that they need. We're still pretending that we're putting pressure on Putin, again, by sanctioning oligarch's yachts and not the energy sector of Russia, which is how he makes all of his money in the first place. I mean, it's not serious. I'm not saying that we should go to World War Three. I'm not saying that we should put American troops in harm's way. I'm just saying if we're not going to give a no fly zone because there's no political appetite for it and Biden doesn't want to do it or whatever, then let's do all the economic stuff and not piecemeal it out while these people are literally being shelled to death with cluster bombs. It's insane.
Got 90 seconds left. Josh, you also have an expertise on China. China has their own swift system, which they're going to offer to give to, you know, to be a part of with Russia. Overall, do you think China has been that big backstop and that big savior for Russia that many thought they would be?
Absolutely. There's this crazy notion inside the Biden administration around Washington that somehow China could be a broker or a diplomatic, constructive actor in this Ukraine crisis. And it's totally wrong. China is a co-conspirator. OK, they've underwritten the invasion literally by buying all of the oil and gas that even though we won't sanction it, Western private companies no longer will deal with. They roped Putin into endorsing their vision for a Chinese led world order in Beijing during the Olympics. And then they've done everything they can to convince their people that that it's Ukraine's fault, not Putin's fault, that it's actually a fight against the United States and their propaganda is aligned, their interests are aligned, their best for enemies. And that's the way it's going to be.
And we just have to deal with it. Josh, it was fascinating talking to you because you get the sources, you break the stories, you move the you move the story forward. Thanks so much, Josh. Anytime from the Fox News podcast network. Subscribe and listen to the Trey Gowdy podcast. Former federal prosecutor and four term U.S. Congressman from South Carolina brings you a one of a kind podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to Fox News podcast dot com.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-02-15 01:05:06 / 2023-02-15 01:11:43 / 7
