A deep dive with Gen. David Petraeus on Israel, Hamas & Iran

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LifeLock, identity theft protection starts here. General David Petraeus, his book is now out. Yesterday, it is now Wednesday, it is called Conflict, the Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. Now we can maybe add in Gaza, General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts. And Andrew Roberts, a genius. He's been in here before. Great pairing, General.

Who picked who? He proposed the idea. You know, this is his 20th book.

Wow. He's never had a co-author before. He's always done it himself. Right after the Russians invaded Ukraine, we know each other very, very well. We've done a number of events together around his books or various other things.

He's interviewed me on stage a number of times, and I've done the same. And he rang me up and he said, we should write a book together that provides the military historical context for Ukraine. So it would be again, the Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to now. As you know, there's probably a second edition in the offing that will have to address this terrible current crisis that's ongoing that I'm sure we'll discuss. But it was his idea.

And I thought, what a terrific opportunity. You know, I'd actually wanted to write something about Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, but not as a tell all, but as a history. And what's interesting is the editor for those two chapters, I did those two chapters plus Vietnam and obviously back and forth with everything else very extensively. They said, you know, you can't write this in the third person the way you have. You can't write and then General Petraeus went to see Prime Minister Maliki and raise these new concerns. You should do it in the first person.

Those two chapters, unlike the rest of the book, traditional third person, it's written in the first person and I wrote it. And so I was eager to do that actually, and I welcomed the opportunity to do that. And then obviously to review all these other cases. How important is it for an effective general to really understand military history? It's hugely important. Again, the lessons of history are not crystal clear.

They're not, they're not always, they're always different circumstances, situations, context. But from that, I think you get some very general important lessons. And the one we discussed on air earlier this morning, which we went back to the introduction made even more explicit, which is the critical component of strategic leadership. A strategic leader is the person at the very top of a country or of a military coalition. The strategic leader has to perform four tasks very well if you had to have a shot at winning. Get the big ideas right is task number one. The right strategy requires an understanding in depth of the context of their strengths and weaknesses of your forces, their forces, the human terrain, all of this. You have to communicate the big ideas effectively throughout the breadth and depth of the organizations that you lead country, military command, the rest of the world that has a stake in the outcome of the conflict. You have to oversee the implementation of the big ideas, driving the campaign plan by what you do, your battle rhythm, attracting great people, keeping them, allowing those not measuring up to move on, the metrics you use, the example, the energy, the inspiration you provide.

And then the fourth task is to formally sit down and determine how you need to refine the big ideas so you can repeat the process again and again and again. And if you apply that to the current, this current tragic situation in the wake of this horrific violence, this barbaric violence visited on innocent Israeli civilians, over 1,300 of them now, as we understand it, Saturday a week ago, you then look at the role of Prime Minister Netanyahu. He's the strategic leader here. He has a military command as well, the Israeli Defense Force chief of staff who will be the strategic leader for the military effort. But he's got to get the big ideas right.

There's one big idea out there right now. That is, we must destroy Hamas and also dismantle the Hamas political wing, if you will, because keep in mind, they're not just a terrorist organization, together with Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They also have the government, essentially, the government, essentially, of the Gaza Strip, of the territory.

That's the political wing. But 81% of that is in poverty. Oh, it's terrible. It's just terrible.

I mean, it's among the most impoverished places in the world. But if you take that down, then what? And I am sure that the Israeli military leadership, based on the lessons of history, some of which we learned the hard way, you know, if I asked, for example, in Kuwait, prior to the invasion of Iraq, I was a two-star general, then commanding the great 101st Airborne Division. Yes, excuse me, can you give us a little more detail on what happens after we get to Baghdad and topple the regime, the Saddam Hussein regime?

And they said, look, you just get us to Baghdad, Dave. We'll take it from there. Obviously, our post-conflict planning was inadequate. The assumptions that we had were invalidated. We then made some terrible mistakes, bad big ideas, firing the Iraqi military with out telling them how they're going to provide for their families, and then firing the Ba'ath Party down to a level that included the bureaucrats we needed to run the country without an agreed reconciliation process. So you created hundreds of thousands of individuals whose incentive was to oppose the new Iraq rather than support it. Now, again, the Israeli Defense Force, keen observers of history, saw that episode. It took us years to rebound from that.

They are, I'm sure, asking, okay, Prime Minister, got it. We can destroy Hamas. Keep in mind, it's going to be very costly. It may take a good bit longer than people think.

What do you think, three months? It depends. You truly cannot answer that question, and no military leader should, other than to say, it depends, and then lay out the factors on which it depends. But if you think of how long it took, again, less than the history, how long did it take the Iraqi security forces with American support to clear Mosul, a city of well over a million people at that time, of the Islamic State – by the way, Mosul was where my headquarters was as a two-star after the fight to Baghdad, so I know it well – took them nine months to do that fully.

And again, you have to clear sequentially, progressively. Now, the Israeli Defense Force is much more well-equipped, better trained, more experienced, and all the rest of this. But still, this is not going to be, you know, a 100-hour ground defense of like the C-1, C-4. My feeling is, too, when you guys in Iraq, obviously, the day after should have been planned better. No one said this out loud.

You know what my hunch is? You guys gave, set up a no-fly zone for the Kurds, and they thrived. They set up a good government there.

They really thrived. You say, you give me protection from Saddam? I don't want to leave Iraq, but they thrived. And I thought with the exiles in your ear – not your ear, but the Bush and Cheney ear – saying, we got it, we get rid of Saddam, we'll be fine, we'll be greeted like liberators. After all, if they saw our power in 93, they were greeted as liberators in 93. We were greeted as liberators in 2003. They didn't love Saddam. But the Shia were mad at you for letting them get – for not supporting their uprising, correct, under Bush 41?

Is that correct as you move through that area? I think we were a bit past that. Because keep in mind, we also had a no-fly zone for the southern part of Iraq. No, the Shia actually, when we came in – and again, I was part of that fight – in fact, we liberated the first major city in Iraq during the fight to Baghdad, Najaf, the holiest city in Shia Islam, as you will recall, 400,000 people or so, give or take. And again, a tough fight, a few days, all of a sudden, the Saddam fatigue, there's collapse. And I called my boss and I said, hey boss, good news and bad news. Good news is we own Najaf. What's the bad news?

Bad news is we own Najaf. What do you want us to do with it? And again, this is the first inkling that the post-conflict planning may have not been fully thought through. And he said, OK, we will call those guys that said, you know, when you get to Baghdad, they will take it from there. I said, OK, well, we're a little short of Baghdad.

But how about taking this one over? And the problem was, of course, that it wasn't just that the Saddam elements collapsed. It was that all the government disappeared, even in this Shia city. We were hoping the bureaucrats would stay around, that the police would stick around. Obviously, the military was either surrendering or deserting, but it didn't happen. So all of a sudden, we owned it. And again, we had to leave an entire U.S. Army brigade of about thirty five hundred four thousand troops to administer that. Well, that's combat power that we would have liked to have had when we went into Baghdad or later when we jumped up to Mosul.

Eventually, we got them out of there. So but it's this. So it's the then what in Gaza?

And this is even more challenging, more difficult. By the way, the military operation to clear. No, you don't get up in the morning and before 9-11 and say you knew Iraq was a problem. Clinton knew it was a problem. Bush 41 knew that Saddam was not going away.

So I get it. But after 9-11, you have to quickly come up with a battle plan for Afghanistan. And then you thought Iraq is going to be a belligerent problem. Let's handle this now.

We could discuss the nuances of it. But for the Israelis, they probably do think about how do we get rid of Hamas? They do think about what if Hezbollah attacks because it is the neighborhood they think about all the time. And I ask you, do you think that they are more prepared for what we do if Hamas is eliminated from Gaza than you guys were? And what happens when Saddam is eliminated from Baghdad? I think this is actually even tougher.

And let me lay this out. First of all, I think the military have a plan. The military, I'm not sure. I think if they did, they would announce it. I think, in fact, there should be announcement of not just, again, the big idea we're going to destroy Hamas, which in itself, that tactical operation is going to be just fiendishly difficult. They're going to hide. They're going to hide. They'll use the human shields, civilians, the hostages.

There's nearly 200 of them. They'll be in tunnels. They'll have improvised.

If they're as creative in the defense as they were in the offense, this is going to be diabolically difficult. There are going to be very considerable casualties all around, including not just Israeli soldiers, but also innocent civilians and plenty of Hamas. Because again, Hamas is an extremist organization. These are not reconcilable people. They have two alternatives in life. They can come in with their hands up or they're going to be captured for a reduced sentence or they're going to be captured or killed.

But that's doable. It's going to be really, really hard. And the decision makers need to understand how hard and how costly and the damage and destruction that will be done to civilian infrastructure. But they've really got to figure out to whom do they give this?

Again, remember that old adage, the pottery barn rules, you break it, you own it. They're going to break not just Hamas, the extremist group, but also the political wing. So then who's going to administer the territory? Keep in mind that the political wing does social services. It provides basic services to the people. It runs schools, health care, everything.

Yeah. And so who is. And you don't have an answer to that. Is it possible you could have an interim international authority?

I mean, it's possible because it's conceivable because we've obviously laid this out. But who could fund it? Who could lead it?

Where are the, what about the Arab countries in the region that express understandable concern about the plight of the Palestinian people? This would be an incredible opportunity to do something about that. The problem there, though, Brian, is not even enough that you're just going to administer. This is not just going to be governance and nation building and, again, restoration of basic services, repair of damage and all the rest of that. This is going to. It's not Germany after World War Two.

It's not. This is, they're also going to have to fight a counter insurgency. And they're going to fight, Iran wants everything that you're just explaining. They don't want any part of it. They will do everything to make sure they're going to, they're going to fund the remnants of Hamas, of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, anyone else who will try to prevent this from happening, just as they did not want to see the rapprochement, the extension of the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia, which would have been mutual recognition, which ironically, I believe, would have included some assurances for the Palestinians in the West Bank. But so there has to be a vision of this component, the what next. And by the way, I think it should address the Palestinian people, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank as well.

Interesting. I mean, remember they were talking about the 90s and the 80s have a bridge from Gaza to the West Bank. And they said, well, that was then they find out that they thought Yasser Afar was too secular. And he also said, if I accept this deal, I'll be killed tomorrow.

A lot of people living on that. They say we take we take the whole country or nothing. So Tom Warrick wrote in The New York Times today, This is the plan for after and Hamas's culture of economic corruption and Gaza in the heart of Hamas. OK, listen to what the Gaza residents want. Change the educational curriculum. Find a path for Gazans to write a constitution.

Show Gazans that Israel is prepared to help. I'm all for all of that. No, I'm all for all of that. But there's that begs a very big question.

Who's doing that? Right. No, I mean, this is the US have to do that. I'm for all these great these. You know, this is not overly idealistic. This is realistic.

This is not outrageous. But who's going to oversee it? General Petraeus is here. Very fortuitous for us. But his book is out.

It's called Conflict, the Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. And we're also tapping into his knowledge of the Middle East. As you say, the president of the United States is speaking now in Tel Aviv. He's supposed to leave soon and actually sleep in his bed tonight. Brian Kilmeade show.

Don't move. You're with Brian Kilmeade 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. So the president of the United States gave a speech. We were on the air, but one of the things he brought up was the two state solution is the only way. The author of Conflict is with us. One of the co-authors of Conflict is with us. The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts. The general is going to be with us all hour.

General, it's going to be three or four minutes. But the president's remarks two state solution. I said to you, I think it's dead.

You said it has it can't be dead. Well, there's no alternative. Tell me what what you would do otherwise. The status quo, by the way, is obviously not working. Right. If you have a one state solution, if you draw the border all the way around to include Gaza in the West Bank, then the Jews in the Jewish democratic state will be outvoted by the Arabs. Right.

So that's not sustainable. If you don't give them the right to vote, then there's going to be a lot of accusations about that that are quite predictable. So you've got to figure out some way to make it two state or even make it a three state solution if you want to have Gaza separate and West Bank.

The key is that everyone gets along. And neither element of these Palestinian entities, whatever they will be called, can allow extremists to populate in their midst that are going to do to Israel and Israelis what the Hamas extremists and Islamic Jihad extremists did Saturday a week ago. General, isn't it pretty amazing that Jordan wants nothing to do with the Palestinians yet? A lot of their population is Palestinian. That's why.

No, this is why. So if you will, the Hashemites, you know, the Hashemite kingdom, those descendants are actually outnumbered in their country by the Palestinian refugees, which causes, again, them enormous challenges when they're trying to structure elections. And you have to ensure that that, again, they're not going to, in a sense, lose control of their own country.

I can't do the definitive background of the 1978, what it was around was like in 1978. But if it was the old Iran, how much how much closer to peace in that region would they be? It seems like Iran's behind Hezbollah, behind Hamas, behind Islamic Jihad and their focus, obsession seems to be finding a way to throttle and destroy Israel.

Obviously, UBS is not MBS is not the problem in Saudi Arabia. Obviously, Jordan and Egypt aren't the problem. Isn't Iran the problem? There's one of the great truths about the Middle East is that you have to be very clear about who your friends are and who your enemies are. And Iran is our enemy. Iran provided the explosively formed projectiles and other weapons that killed over 600 of our soldiers during the period that I during the period that I was commander there and engaged there. There's no question about their nefarious activities. There's no question that they fund Hamas, even though, by the way, they're Shia and Hamas is Sunni. They also fund the Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, also in Lebanon, Hezbollah, obviously a very formidable, the Houthis in Yemen, all of this.

I want to get to history. I want to get to Ukraine, too, because we want to find out what we learned in the past, how it figures into the battlefield today, and how to solve some of our problems by looking at some of the mistakes in the past. Brian Kilmicha, part of the question on the issues of refugees coming to Jordan. And I think I can quite strongly speak on behalf not only of Jordan as a nation, but of our friends in Egypt. That is a red line, because I think that is the plan by certain of the usual suspects to try and create de facto issues on the ground. No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt. So thanks, King Abdullah of Jordan. It's great to have allies in the area who we give billions of dollars to in Egypt, too. Billions of dollars to, just ask Senator Menendez. With me right now in studio is General David Petraeus. His book's out yesterday.

It's already doing great. It's called Conflict, the Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. General, that's what I would find endlessly frustrating if I'm President Biden. Not only does he not going to take any refugees, and not only does Egypt not want to open up a corridor to let Palestinians through, but he also refused to meet with the President today over a bombing of a hospital, which all evidence now pointing to, including intercepts, that the IDF did not do. Same thing with the Egyptian President. I mean, if I'm on a plane, I'm on the President of the United States, do I have a move?

Do I just have to accept the snub? Well, they're going to call them. They will. They'll have conversations because, again, they need to because they have to be part of the ultimate arrangement in Gaza that we've been talking about that is so difficult to construct. But we should understand again, you know, other countries have domestic politics, too. And the challenge in Jordan is that they're the descendants of the Hashemite tribes, which, of course, include the king, are outnumbered in their country by the existing number of Palestinian refugees. It's a huge drag and drain on their economy. They have no resources in that country. All they have is their wits and their human capital.

There's no oil, no water, very little of anything. And they have to be incredibly innovative, creative and everything else. So they have a huge channel. They can't take more. And then Egypt's economy is really quite moribund right now. He's facing reelection. There's no question about the outcome, I don't think. But again, they don't remember Egypt administered Gaza for a period of time before the Israelis did for several decades.

Nobody wants to do this. The Israelis left in 2005 for a reason. And now what we need to do is find an interim authority that's going to go in there. And it just doesn't do good work for deserving people, if you will, among the neediest people in the world, the Palestinian people who are caught in the middle of all of this.

It also has to have a hard edge to it. It's going to have to have a counterinsurgency campaign because the remnants of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad will be funded by Iran, undoubtedly, as they are now. And they're going to try to come back and take control of the territory again. So you're so diplomatic for a general. I would get that if I'm going up the Air Force One steps and I hear that these people canceled on me. I'm 50 miles from their border. I'm flying to the Middle East, putting my security at risk. I'm taking a big risk politically, too. I'm 80 years old and you're going to tell me now you're not going to see me when I'm there? Isn't that an insult to our nation as well as me personally? Welcome to the real world, Brian.

Welcome to the Middle East. This is my, you know, this is where I spent so many years of my life. You don't take it personally. I know the King very well. I used to have met him all the time.

But he's got, again, he's got a seat to his interests as well. He's trying to- You're in understanding. I know.

I'm just saying. Again, welcome to the Middle East. What better than see a president face to face and say what General Petraeus just told me? Just say, hey, listen, I got my own constituency here.

This is what I'm worried about. I just want to show you, Mr. King, I got intercepts here. They didn't bomb the hospital and they weren't the one who did the massacre October 7th. They weren't the one to watch baby's heads get cut off. Now, the operation in particular, I've been reading a lot about this. For your military perspective, they were able to bust through the fence. They were able to get bulldozers through.

They were able to get hang gliders with dune buggies on the other side through. They were able to fly drones and they were able to do surveillance on military bases and penetrate them on the inside. As you look at this operation as we know it, what is your impression? That the Hamas operational security was ramped up incredibly. That they came to understand the ways in which Shin Bet, in particular, the internal security service, but together with Mossad, together with military intelligence and their signals intelligence, and their signals intelligence, but Shin Bet in particular, because it's an internal issue, God's in the West Bank, they understood how Shin Bet has in the past been upstream.

It's described in that world. So they're actually seeing something before it happens. They have a sense of what's coming.

They're that good. And then they had all of this surveillance apparatus set up and Hamas must have come to have an understanding of this sufficiently that they could mitigate the risks of their planning being detected, their training and equipping and rehearsing and marshaling and all the rest of this, and even reportedly use those very channels to send disinformation and indicate that, hey, you know what? We're not really planning something. We're going to live together. Look, we got more work visas.

The relationship is better than ever before. And then, of course, keep in mind that the internal security services of Israel get distracted by violence in the West Bank. So they shifted resources over there. Same with the military. And also just this enormous domestic turmoil, which had potential threats associated with it, had to be focused on as well. And you had military reservists not wanting it.

So all of these issues combined, then it's on a on the Shabbat and then it's a religious observance on top of that. And military readiness is reduced. They're on leave.

They're going to celebrate. So and then in carrying this out, they very expertly use drones with little explosives to take out the nodes, the communications nodes that actually are the relay for the video feeds and so forth, the other sensors that they have that convey it back to the command post. So all of a sudden they're blinded at the hour of maximum need and take advantage of it.

In the book, the manuals are recovered. They said they expected Israeli security forces to be there three to five minutes. It was over an hour. Yes, again, the military. So this wasn't just an intelligence failure. This was a military readiness failure as well. It was really, I think, also similar to a bit again before 9-11.

There was a lack of imagination about what they could do, just as we couldn't imagine that extremists could get into flight schools and then get into cockpits and then could fly aircraft. And in retrospect, we see Ramzi Yousef was actually practicing that. Exactly.

So and he was the nephew of KSN. You can always connect dots after the fact. It's hard to do it before the fact or in real time. But I do think it's important to understand now, don't wait till after the conflict ends, because you don't know what's coming next. You have to find out what your enemy's capable of doing. Don't you agree? It's not a matter of pointing fingers.

No. First of all, they're trying to find hostages. Second, they're trying to identify what are the defenses of Hamas. If we have to clear every building, every floor, every room, every seller, every tunnel and everything else and do it progressively and sequentially and then walled off or at least keep it secure and leave forces behind to make sure they can't reinfiltrate.

We need all the information on the enemy. Where are the headquarters? Where are their logistical depots? Where are the explosives caches?

Where all of this? They've recovered a lot. They got over a thousand by.

They killed a lot of they end up coming in. Victor Davis Hanson was on Saturday and he just said, Mike, what's your impression? Let him go. He said, first thing is, since when you can kill twenty nine Americans and we so laid back about it, since when can you kidnap 14 Americans and we're not taking the lead on it? That doesn't that's not the way we should be operating. General Petraeus, do you understand as he's a military story and you know, I know him well, he wrote I was one of the savior generals in his book.

Is he right? Should we not? Not entirely, because first and foremost, the Israelis don't want us in this fight directly. They have stated this publicly. They do not want U.S. military in this fight. Certainly we're going to help them in every way we can with intelligence, with planning. If we identify our citizens and our special mission units are within range and we coordinate that, perhaps that's a way in which we might get involved. But no, I think I think you have to understand the Israeli desire for them to carry this out and not get Americans involved. How how much does it get under your skin as a general that was in both theaters, two surges, that they are using reportedly some of our weapons in Hamas? Very concerned, obviously.

Sure. Four billion dollars we left behind the exit of Afghanistan. I can imagine that that is beyond emotional for you. It was emotional for everyone who served there, I think. But especially in life, you know, I I said at the time that I feared that we would come to regret the decision to withdraw. Keep in mind that this is this administration carrying through an agreement that was made by the previous administration. But I don't possibly think that Trump would, with which I wouldn't I wouldn't assume that they made the agreement and they were on on Clyde path.

I thought the administration should have reversed it. I mean, you know, they did held on to Bagram, which was the plan. Well, again, these are some sort of tactical issues. We're talking about the big issue, which is do you have to leave?

I know these. They reversed tons of other. You know, it went back to the United Nations organizations, World Health Organization, the climate accord, all this. And so it's not as if they had to follow through with this. There were alternatives. We could you know, the situation was was frustrating. It was maddening. Our partners were imperfect.

There were all kinds of issues that could cause you to throw your hands in the air. But I felt that staying there with 3500 troops, we hadn't lost a soldier. NATO didn't want to leave.

The NATO countries all wanted to stay. I think they had a clearer picture of what was going to happen than we did. And I think the result was not just tragic and heartbreaking for the Afghan people, the bulk of them. It was disastrous and disastrous overall for American foreign for American foreign policy.

Do you believe? And also sent a message of inadequate strategic commitment. President Xi seized on that very quickly, said, see, you can't count on the Americans or an unreliable partner, unreliable ally. And they got the rare earth.

And oh, by the way, look at what happened as they came out. They're a great power in decline. And then what do you think the Russians try for the rest of Ukraine, if not for the way we left Afghanistan? If if I think that was a factor in Putin's determination that he should invade, there were other you know, he has these historical grievances.

He has this revanchist revisions, twisted history of Ukraine and the fact that it shouldn't have a right to exist and all the rest of this. And I do think that that was I think the red line that wasn't a red line may have been a factor. The inadequate response to Crimea and the Donbass was a factor.

There's a number of these that all added up, I think, to convince Putin that he would be able to get away with this in a way that he did not. He underestimated not just the Ukrainian defense and their capabilities. He overestimated his own capabilities. And then I think he underestimated how the U.S. would respond. And if you look at our past, which your book talks about, we have to respond strongly to aggression. And that's the reason we won the Cold War. It wasn't one day.

It wasn't one president. It was you want Korea? We're going to stop you. You want Vietnam? OK, we're going to make it hell.

And we could talk about that conflict. You're going to take Africa. We're going to put proxy forces. Are you going to be in Central America? You're going to try to take Nicaragua. We're going to make it hell for you. And you guys found that out when the Soviet opened up their books.

The last thing they wanted was Truman coming in with an airlift for 11 months to prop up Berlin. You know what the key is to be firm, to be consistently firm, to have strategic patience. You know, you don't want to be needlessly provocative. That you shouldn't do either. But again, you have to show that there will be consequences for aggression in particular. And this case in Russia invading Ukraine and the way in which they've done it, you know, this is a force that stealing kids and sending them back to Russia. And again, they almost seem to embrace a culture of war crimes.

In fact, Andrew Roberts and I have written a piece, I believe it will be in the Washington Post, called The Russian Way of War, which is, again, unlike Western countries, we make mistakes. We had Abu Ghraib. We had some others. But we try to avoid those. And then we try to learn from those. We mitigate the risks of it happening again. We adhere to the Geneva Convention. We believe hearts and minds do matter. And you don't win hearts and minds by carrying out operations that create more bad guys than you take off the street.

And our great advantage is we got a better product. We don't tell you how to live. We want to give you an opportunity to live.

And you pick your government. That's all we want. We don't want to own you. We want to give you an opportunity to live the life you want.

And that's the product that we try to sell around the world and why we won last time. We're kind of getting away from that this time. A few more minutes with General Petraeus. Conflict is now out. You got to pick it up.

Don't move. This is The Brian Kilmeade Show. General Petraeus is with us. The book Conflict is Out. It's already top 20 on Amazon. And you haven't felt the impact of Fox & Friends and this radio show yet. We're waiting for the Fox Bump. Right. And the New York Times, Lester, I'm sure, will be there.

It's called The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. And I'm going to be talking to you. I'm lucky enough to interview with the Union Club next week. So that'll be great. We'll talk about this.

But you always talk. I interviewed you before at another great event over in Atlanta. I forgot it was Houston.

Excuse me. So it was a West Point grad there who's now president. Great veterans organization.

Yes. So General, you talk to me about your concern about a play. If you want to be strong internationally, you got to be strong politically.

How bad do we look without a speaker right now? Well, I just did the pre-book tour. Book tour in the UK also was in Warsaw and Warsaw in particular, because it was a Warsaw security forum on their board. And so you have a huge gathering of international figures there, very heavy NATO representation. And the question they all had for me is what is going on in Washington?

And it's a legitimate question. And they're concerned that we can't get stuff done, that it doesn't seem to be a path forward for this or that. My hope is, obviously, that the House can sort this out.

They can get a leader. And then there will be there's bipartisan support in the House for continued support for Ukraine, obviously huge support for Israel. There's some other things we had a package with that, perhaps something involving Taiwan, the southern border. And let's not forget FEMA because of the greater incidence of really terrible storms and wildfires and all the rest of this. All of these, I think, are very legitimate needs. And we should fund those. And we have the capacity to do all that. I don't agree with those that say, well, if we do Ukraine, we can't support Israel or we can't do the Indo-Pacific.

We can do this. The U.S. is the world's greatest superpower. We can keep more plates spinning than everyone else in the rest of the world with our allies and partners helping us. And by the way, Europeans have stepped up big time.

But I know I talked to a lot of people to a lot of them were Republicans and say, I'm tired of spending those plates. Why are we spending those plates? Because it's in our national interest. It's clearly in our national interest. We need a leader to explain that.

Yeah, no, I regularly, you know, question, no question about it. We have to do that just as it was in our national interest, whether Republican or Democrat, to stay strong on the Cold War. Again, these are and these are connected. By the way, I remember a prime minister in a major Southeast Asian country when I was meeting with him right after the red line turned out not to be a red line in Syria. And he said, General, you know that that reverberates out here, that echoes and it undermines the deterrence that you're seeking to achieve in the most important region of the world, which is, of course, the Indo-Pacific. And why it was important to take Soleimani out, to take al-Baghdadi out, to put troops into Syria, but not take them out. Right.

Last question. And we are we have sustained them and in Iraq as well and in Iraq at the request of the prime minister publicly. Why is it partisan to enforce? Why is it partisan to reinforce the border? I don't think it is partisan to reinforce.

How did this happen? I think we should. Again, you guys do domestic politics.

I don't. I'm not political. But is it? But it is an issue that is a that's not just a security issue. It's an issue for our states and cities that are struggling to accommodate the huge numbers, even those that are even some cases, the so-called sanctuaries that welcome.

They're overwhelmed by this. And so we have to have what would really be helpful is actually if we had policy, not just awesome, which is, by the way, that's a great point. General Petraeus pick up his book, Conflict, the Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. It really makes sense. These these battles build on each other to understand why we're at we're at today. Thanks, General. Good to be with you, Brian.

Thank you. At just 30 years old, the founder of FTX was one of the wealthiest people in the world. That all changed in November 2022 when the company collapsed and filed for bankruptcy. Now, Sam Bankman Freed stands accused of committing one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history. Join me, Kelly O'Grady, every Monday and Thursday as we follow the trial of Sam Bankman Freed. Subscribe today wherever you download podcasts or at Fox News podcast dot com. Listen to this show ad free on Fox News podcast plus on Apple podcast, Amazon music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.