Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined me this AM:

Audio:

06-25hhs-pompeo

Transcript:

HH: Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been serving this country since he joined West Point a few decades ago, first, and then he graduated number one there. After that, he went into the Army, did a number of years there. Then, he went to Harvard Law School, and then he went to Congress, and then he went to the CIA at President Trump’s request. Then, he went to the Department of State at President Trump’s request. Now, he may even be on a vacation. I don’t know what he’s doing in Europe, but he’s calling me from Europe, and I greatly appreciate it, Mr. Secretary. Mike Pompeo, welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show.

MP: Good morning, Hugh. Great to be back with you.

HH: I have a lot of issues to cover with you, but the obligatory. I’m pretty sure that whatever Donald Trump asks you to do, you will do it, whether it is vice president, State, Defense. Am I right about that?

MP: You are correct. 100%. If I get a chance to serve and to make a difference and try to help this country that’s been so great to me, I am all in, Hugh.

HH: Thank you for that. Let’s begin with your successor, Secretary Blinken, who entertained Yoav Gallant. And it’s odd for the Defense Minister to go over to State, and I sometimes wonder if the Secretary of State isn’t the shadow president. But unbelievably, he asked Gallant, he “underscored the importance of avoiding further escalation of conflict and reaching a diplomatic solution with Hezbollah in Lebanon.” You know, Israel’s not escalating, Mr. Secretary. What do you think of this?

MP: Well, first of all, it’s a fundamental misread of how an issue brings peace to the region and creates stability and prosperity. But second, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of who the aggressor is, just as you described. But it is consistent, Hugh, I must say, this is very consistent with how the Biden administration has behaved in every confrontational theater. They talk about what we won’t do, they restrict our allies and friends, they put limits on the good guys, and they embolden the bad guys. This is how you lose deterrence. It’s how we lost, you know, 1,000 Israelis and a bunch of Americans on October 7th. It’s how we ended up with the disaster in Afghanistan. When you’re constantly reminding your adversaries of the things you won’t do, and reminding them that you are so fearful of escalation that you may not even help your friends in their most dire time, this is a bad recipe for the security of the American people.

HH: What do you think about the controversy over American weapons to Israel? Prime Minister Netanyahu, whom you know well, went public last week and said the Americans are slow-walking our weapons. They were good for four months, and now they’ve slowed them down. Senator Cotton, your friend, sent a letter over to the White House, said what’s going on. And a White House official leaked to the Times of Israel, yeah, we’re just back to normal. We’re not rushing anything anymore. I’m kind of stunned that they would admit that, but what do you think about that?

MP: Well, first of all, I guess I don’t know how bad it is. I don’t know how much they’re slow-walking it. I’m confident Prime Minister Netanyahu would not have done that publicly if he hadn’t already tried to do privately what he needs – get the equipment that he needs. It’s devastatingly bad for the American people. And by the way, the Chinese Communist Party is most certainly watching this, too, thinking, watching the Israelis, what’s the chance they’ll help the Taiwanese? The Poles are assuredly thinking if they’re not going to help the Ukrainians, I wonder where they’ll be when we need them. The Saudis are thinking defense cooperation agreement with the United States? What good is that if President Biden is in office? To see them slow-walk to our most important ally and friend in the region, to slow-walk weapons systems so they can do the simple task of preventing the death, further death of Israelis, is both indecent and a huge mistake for the region.

HH: Now Mr. Secretary, yesterday our friend, John Podhoretz, said on the Commentary podcast, “There is a change in the Jewish-American consensus.” And he went on to explain he believes that friends of Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish in America who have traditionally voted overwhelmingly Democratic and overwhelmingly given money to Democrats, they realize that Joe Biden and Tony Blinken are bad for Israel. You, Donald Trump sent you to accomplish the Abraham Accords, which you did. Do you think the American Jewish community is going to swing fundamentally toward Donald Trump and want him back in the White House?

MP: You know, Hugh, I guess I don’t know is the answer to that. I don’t know how much the swing will be. But I am very confident that even the folks who most ardent, the Democrats who most ardently supported Joe Biden four years ago aren’t going to be so ardent, and there will be some shift. It has to be the case. They now can see, whether it’s what happened in Israel, the fact that we haven’t been able to expand on the Abraham Accords, or what took place in Los Angeles in the antisemitism we have seen all across this country, violent antisemitism all across this country, I think they can see that President Biden has failed to defend the most basic understanding of the U.S.-Israel alliance. And I am confident there will be some swing. How big it will be in the American electorate? Hard to say.

HH: Mr. Secretary, you’re referring, I think, to the Saturday near-pogrom outside of a shul in the heart of the Jewish section of Los Angeles, where the L.A.P.D. violated federal law and wouldn’t let Jews into their shul after Hamas attacked the Jews, or the Jews who were trying to get there. Or you might be referring to the Jewish dad that got beat up in Brooklyn on Saturday. Both ways, are you kind of astonished by the rise in antisemitism in America?

MP: I am, it’s always been there, Hugh. I fear that this has been a constant. But to watch the radical left, the pro-Hamas wing of the Democrat Party begin to take over one of America’s two political parties on this most salient issue, and to watch President Biden not do the basic law enforcement work that needs to be done, that has, I must say, both shocked, surprised, and frankly, it breaks my heart to see that. We knew it was in academia, but now to see it in the halls of Congress is something that I didn’t think I would see, and I certainly didn’t think I would see an administration that refused to take the basic law enforcement requirements to ensure that people of every faith, including Jews, can go to church, go to synagogue, go to the places of worship that they want to worship.

HH: I want to go back to foreign affairs now. The micromanagement of the Ukraine war – the reason Ukraine did not get overrun by Russia in the first weeks of the second Ukraine war, the first was under President Obama, the second invasion under President Biden. The reason that Ukraine did not fall apart is because Donald Trump went weapons. You arranged with your Ukrainian counterparts to get the weapons there. You had some assists – Robert O’Brien, the Congress, you had a bunch of people helping you. But now, it appears that the State Department and Jake Sullivan, because I don’t think President Biden’s really that aware, are playing Lyndon Johnson and bombing targets. They’re saying you can strike here and you can’t strike there. You’re also a soldier. What do you think of another country micromanaging the war of survival that Ukraine is waging?

MP: First thing is very clear. Vladimir Putin can see that, and is driving a truck through the gaping hole in the Ukrainian capabilities, and the assistance that we and the Europeans have provided to defend their own country. Second, if you think it was difficult to manage your own military forces, for Lyndon Johnson to do that through the Vietnam, another nation’s military forces, and then my final point is you know, what’s the central failure here is that we didn’t let the Ukrainians go do what they needed to do in the moment. I had to remind this past week my European friends that it wasn’t President Trump that sent the defensive weapons systems to Ukraine. And it wasn’t President Biden or Vice President Biden. It was President Trump. And they sometimes forget that when natural gas prices are cheap, and the United States is strong, Europe is safer. And this invasion that took place, this aggressive invasion by Vladimir Putin is a direct result of the Biden administration trying to micromanage, just dole out, parcel out this power in a way that at best lets the Ukrainians fight to a stalemate instead of talking about the thing that matters most – victory and defeat of Vladimir Putin.

HH: Did you in your administration, or to the best of your knowledge in the White House or the Treasury Department, anywhere, did you have any pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah people on your staff, the Free Palestine, From the River to the Sea crowd that’s on the campuses everywhere?

MP: You know, I never saw anybody that was of that ilk. I certainly saw people, frankly at the State Department and a little bit in the analytic team at the CIA, who were less pro-American. And what I mean by that is less understanding of the centrality of Israel to American security than I wish they were. But I never saw anything remotely like the political appointees that have been put in place by the Biden administration that are radically pro-Hamas. And you know, that’s a terrorist organization. That means, from my perspective, that makes them anti-American as well, Hugh.

HH: Now Mr. Secretary, you had to work a lot with the foreign secretaries of both the U.K. and France and all of our NATO allies. There’s going to be a political convulsion in Britain next week, because the Tories are going to get wiped out. And they may, in fact, not even be on the front bench of the opposition. It might be Nigel Farage, because the Tories are so widely disliked. They didn’t do what they promised to do. But in Paris, the Parliament will probably go rightward. All about immigration in France. What do you make of what’s going on in Europe? The only one who’s popular is the Italian Prime Minister, who we were warned would be Mussolini again, and she’s actually the only popular government in Europe right now.

MP: Ah, goodness, I was actually with Prime Minister Meloni just at the end of last week. This is 80% about immigration and their failure to take the fundamental duty of a leader of a country to protect their own people from invasion, from people who are entering their countries illegally. People all across the world, including as we can now see in the United States, even some of our biggest cities, Hugh, even Democrats in big cities can now see that wide open borders and unbridled, unlawful immigration is detrimental to the welfare of a nation. And you’re right. The Tories are going to get their clocks cleaned largely because of that issue. Macron is unpopular for multiple reasons, not the least of which is migration. And you can see it all across Europe. I think the whole world is coming to see how important sovereignty is, how important lawful borders, lawfully closed borders are. We’ll all get lawful immigration right, but you have to correct this piece. And the European convulsions as a result of this failure to do the most basic duty of a government is going to reverberate for the next 12 months. And we shouldn’t forget Germany, too, Hugh. Chancellor Scholz is very unpopular in Germany, and they are going to move rightward over the coming months as well.

HH: Mr. Secretary, before I talk to you about the Department of Defense and the reforms that it needs, we have to do a station ID. But very quickly, you were a tanker after West Point. You sat there in the Fulda Gap. If Israel goes into Lebanon all guns blazing to push Hezbollah back, the tanks will be involved. How long do you expect that war to be? And how much damage do you expect Israel to absorb because of the missile arsenal that Hezbollah has?

MP: Well, it will take an extended period of time. This won’t, there’s no Blitzkrieg solution to this that ends in days or even weeks. The damage that it has inflicted on Israel as a result of that will be a direct reflection of whether the United States leans in and does what it needs to do to help Israel defend itself. And to hear the Biden administration, according to reporting, tell the Israelis, you know, we just may not be there for you, I promise you the bad guys sitting in Tehran are watching that. And that means that the damage inflicted on Israel will be even greater just because the United States has refused to make clear to the Iranians, don’t you dare get into the center of this thing. We know you’ve funded Hezbollah. We know you’ve funded Hamas. But don’t get into the center of this thing, because if you do, we will impose costs not in Beirut or not in Marjaayoun, but in Iran. And if the United States does that well, we can give the Israelis the opportunity to do what is necessary, which is to get their 100,000 people back in their homes in the north of Israel, and defeat Hezbollah.

HH: When we come back, I’m going to talk with Secretary Pompeo during the break and play it next hour about the Department of Defense and whether or not he would urge President Trump either as vice president or SecDef, or wherever, to deploy two carriers to that region in support of Israel right now. They’re not there now. They were for four months, and Joe Biden got tired. I’ll be right back.

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HH: I’m back now with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Mr. Secretary, if you were either the vice president or the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State in Trump 2.0, would you be urging that there be two carriers right now in the region to support Israel in their efforts to push back Hezbollah?

MP: Absolutely, Hugh. I would absolutely make sure there were two carriers there. And I would make sure that all the other support features that were needed, not just the hard, good, above sea, but all the other elements of American power needed to support Israel. And I think that presence alone changes the dynamic for the Iranians dramatically and gives the Israelis all the space they need.

HH: All right, last question, Mr. Secretary, and we’ve got three or four minutes for you to hold forth on this. I had Captain Hendrix on yesterday talking about Mahanian view of the world, but I am also aware that there’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey with Anduril. There’s Vannevar. There’s Joe Lonsdale with all of his companies. Pentagon contracting is a mess. If you were running the largest military in the world, how would you address this contracting problem, because we are just not producing the arsenal of democracy stuff that the world needs?

MP: You know, Hugh, that’s certainly true. You can see that the American industrial base is not delivering, whether it’s the hard goods or the software sitting behind it that the world needs to keep itself secure. There are really two primary levers one can use. One is just resources and money. President Biden has proposed a budget that in real terms declines to less than 2 ½% of GDP over the course of the budget time period of the next ten years. That’s disastrous, because it doesn’t give the industrial the longevity, the long lead time it needs to invest and recapitalize the industrial base. So we’ve got to go fix that. Second, your point is very well taken. Those companies you identified, these are the companies of the future that are creative and innovative, and can build weapons systems that match our time. I’ve frankly seen some amazing innovation that’s taking place in Ukraine on my last trip to Kiev and surrounding areas. I watched how they were able to innovate at the speed of war. We need to use those talented people, whether it’s Elon or Alex Karp at Palantir, or Palmer Luckey. All these folks are out there doing remarkable technology, who want to do it and want their companies to do that in defense of America. We can use those tools as a contracting matter and get away from some of the big guys who frankly just have not delivered for America, and deliver affordable, good value warfighting capabilities, both hardware and software, that can both prepare the United States to do what it needs to do, and have tools and equipment available for our allies and friends as well in volume and in time. We know how to be the arsenal of democracy for the world. We just have to unleash that, and the Department of Defense is Ground Zero for executing that mission, Hugh.

HH: Last question, Mr. Secretary. When you were at the CIA, I interviewed you for MSNBC. I went up to the 7th floor at State to interview you. I asked you about how do we deter China, and do we have the cyber ability to do so. Admiral Paparo talked about creating a hellscape. Do you think we have the present ability to interdict or deter China, deter China from crossing the Strait and invading Taiwan? One minute.

MP: You know, Hugh, Hugh, when you look at someone like China and their decision on Taiwan, you have to look at two things – their capabilities and their intent. They have both the capability and they’ve clearly stated intent. The United States has the capability to deter them. The question is does President Biden have the will? Does he have the intestinal fortitude to make very clear to the Chinese Communist Party that we don’t just defend, we won’t just put Patriot batteries into Taiwan, we won’t just defend the island, but there will be enormous hell to pay inside of your own country if you go down that path. You can’t go fight them on the defense always, just as we’ve forced the Ukrainians to do. You have to go take the conflict to them on multiple fronts – commercial, economic, military and cyber. We have the capability to do that, Hugh. It’s just do we have leadership with the will to do so? And if we do, you can deter the Chinese Communist Party. I’m very confident of that. I am very confident of President Trump who will restore that will and that deterrence.

HH: Mr. Secretary, thank you. Safe travels, and I look forward to talking you again soon.

MP: Thank you. Bless you. Have a good day.

HH: Thank you.

End of interview.