Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Geopolitical threats as we enter ‘23 - with Senator Tom Cotton

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton recently announced that he would not run for president in 2024. And yet at the same time, he continues to be one of the most important voices in Washington on all matters involving American foreign policy and national security. Senator Cotton also recently penned a new book, called Only The Strong. He returns to the podcast to discuss issues ranging from Iran and Russia/Ukraine to China and a proposed ban of TikTok. Senator Cotton represents Arkansas in the Senate. He currently serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee -- where he is the Ranking Member for the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism; he sits on the Intelligence Committee, and the Armed Services Committee. He is a graduate of Harvard, and Harvard Law School. He served nearly five years on active duty in the United States Army as an Infantry Officer. -- in Iraq with the 101st Airborne and in Afghanistan with a Provincial Reconstruction Team. Between combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Senator Cotton also served as a platoon leader in the Old Guard in Arlington Cemetery. To order copies of Senator Cotton's books: Only the Strong -- https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/only-the-strong-tom-cotton/1141450141 Sacred Duty -- https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sacred-duty-tom-cotton/1129745532

Well, TikTok is really just a Trojan horse on your phone. It doesn't simply take the content you have in that app. It can take content you have from across your phone, your contacts, your messages, your email, your photos, your browser history. It even has the ability perhaps to track facial movements using your camera and record as well. So if you have TikTok on your phone, you should delete it and you should probably get a new phone. U.S. Senator Tom Cotton recently announced that he would not run for president in 2024. And yet at the same time, he continues to be one of the most important voices in Washington on all matters involving American foreign policy and national security. He plays a leading role

in almost every left-right debate about American military power and geopolitics, and also intra-right debates about where Republicans should stand on America's role in the world. That's why one way or the other, you can expect Senator Cotton to help shape the foreign policy of a future Republican presidential administration, and the views of Republican presidential candidates as the primary season gets going next year. For these reasons, and also as he releases a new book called Only the Strong, which is chock full of fascinating history of U.S. foreign policy, I want to check in with Senator Cotton.

Right now, he's in the middle of issues ranging from Iran and Russia-Ukraine to China and a proposed ban of TikTok. He's also taken a contrarian position on the Britney Griner prisoner exchange for Victor Bout. Before our conversation, first some background on Tom Cotton, who's been on this podcast before. Senator Cotton represents Arkansas. He currently serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he's the ranking member for the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism. He sits on the Intelligence Committee and also the Armed Services Committee.

He's a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School. He served nearly five years on active duty in the U.S. Army as an infantry officer in Iraq with the 101st Airborne and in Afghanistan with the Provincial Reconstruction Team. Less well known, between combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tom also served as a platoon leader in the Old Guard in Arlington Cemetery. The Old Guard, or the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, is America's oldest active duty regiment, dating back to 1784. It conducts daily military honor funerals at Arlington. Senator Cotton wrote a book about it called Sacred Duty. Now, between the Army and the U.S. Senate, he worked for McKinsey and served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives. Now, at the end of our conversation, on a lighter

note, we dive into Senator Cotton's, shall we say, eclectic football loyalties. Yes, he's of course a fan of the University of Arkansas Razorbacks, but his NFL team? Well, let's just say he keeps a close eye on a team in the AFC East that's not, I underscore not, the New York Jets. But Tom and I are still friends. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast my friend Senator Tom Cotton from the state of Arkansas and author of the recently published Only the Strong. Senator, thanks for coming back on. Thanks for having me on, Dan. There's a lot I want to get into with you today before we get into some of these contemporary issues, before we get to your new book. But I realized the last time I had you on

was we talked a lot about you being an early, I don't want to say an early believer, but an early, like, let's keep an open mind about the lab leak, lab accidental leak theory on COVID out of China. And we never really talked about your broad foreign policy views, which I've been wanting to do at some point, because I share a lot of them. But I also, I think our listeners never really got to hear how you arrive at your views. So you're in the news a lot and you are in the news a lot, particularly

on national security issues. And I think people, if they don't agree with you, have a very kind of triggered reaction to some of the things you say. And I don't think most folks really, at least most of those folks really understand how you arrived at your worldview and your views about American power and national security. So that's where I want to start. And where I want to start is your decision to serve in the United States Army. So can you talk a little bit about where you were in life? It's a pretty interesting and a pretty unique story, where you were in life when you made this decision, why you made the decision. So on the morning of 9-11-2001, I was at law school. And back in those anti-Diluvian days, we didn't have smartphones or Wi-Fi or any other means to know what was happening outside of the classroom. No TikTok? No TikTok either. So after about an hour after

the first plane struck the World Trade Center, we walked out and learned what had happened. And that moment really changed my life from that point forward. I was not so motivated to become a lawyer and practice law anymore, but rather joined the Army. I did finish school and work for a couple of years to pay off my loans. And then I left the law practice and joined the military. I became an infantry officer in the army and served in Iraq and Afghanistan with a tour at Arlington National Cemetery in between. And my decision was not much different, I would say, from the decision of our forebears who signed up for the army in World War II after Pearl Harbor or World War I, whenever we declared war

against Germany or going back to the beginning of the country. Or your father's decision. Right. My father volunteered for Vietnam in 1968 and served a year as an infantryman in Vietnam. And I certainly respected and admired him. And like so many current soldiers, it's something of a family business, although this is not something, far from it, that he pushed me into or had encouraged me to do. On the contrary, both he and my mother were very, very concerned, suffice it to say, in 2004, as I was preparing to join the Army, as the fighting in Iraq had begun to get especially intense. But our country had been attacked, and I wanted to serve. And at the time,

I was young and single and had no kids. I felt it was my patriotic duty to join and do my part. And I'm very grateful I had the opportunity to lead my fellow Americans in combat in defense of our country. So Harvard undergrad, Harvard Law School, you're being modest. You finished top of your class at Harvard. What was the mood about military service in the sort of culture of, at least when you were at Harvard? I mean, I've got to believe that this was not a common path for people in your shoes, in the academic circles you were in. The mood was absent.

There was just not any consideration of it at all. It's certainly not like it was, say, in the 60s and 70s on campuses like Harvard, where you had left-wing radicals blockading classes and sitting in administrative buildings, and even worse in some campuses, committing acts of terrorism. Nor was it like what it had become in the years since the 9-11 attacks when it was a more common thing when the American people began, returned to, you know, or celebrated the service of our veterans, especially those who had been downrange. I would say in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, before the 9-11 attacks. It's just not something that young men and women on a campus like Harvard were thinking about.

They didn't really condemn it. They didn't celebrate it. They didn't consider it. It just was not on their radar. To the extent you had any conversation about the military in those days on campus, it was mostly about the presence of ROTC programs and Bill Clinton's don't ask, don't tell policy. But even that, because the very low rates of service in such schools was a very, very small part of campus life. I was recently talking to Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary, former Obama Director of National Economic Council, and most importantly in this regard, former president of Harvard University, who mentioned that he, I think, was the last president

of Harvard to actually attend an ROTC commissioning ceremony, that actually Harvard presidents don't even attend the ROTC programs on campus. I don't personally know that. It wouldn't surprise me from what I know about Larry Summers. I was actually a resident assistant in the college freshman dorms when I was in law school, so I spend a little bit of time each fall with Larry Summers as you welcome the new ones in. And his politics don't always align with mine, but I'd say that he's a pretty sober, level-headed president for the university, unlike most left-wing radicals that are in charge of universities today. In fact, he was an early proto-case of cancellation, I guess you might say. Canary in the coal mine.

Some controversial remarks he made. final months, I was on campus after the 9-11 attacks that Larry Summers was conciliatory and supportive of the military. Yeah. Okay, so you join the Army. Where in the Army do you sign up for? You could have been in one of the legal roles, a JAG, and you choose to be in an infantry role. Why? I could have been, but where's the fun in that? You know, going from being a lawyer in the civilian world to a lawyer in the military. All kidding aside, the Army certainly needs lawyers, whether they're operational lawyers or providing defense or prosecution services in our justice system. But you know, the heart of the Army is the infantry, and the infantry's mission is the

Army's mission is to close with and destroy the enemy by means of fire and maneuver and repel his counterattack. So I wanted to do that. That's what my father had done in Vietnam, and that's what I wanted to do, to go out on the front lines to face down the bad guys. So, yeah, I walked into a recruiting station, and I told the recruiter what I wanted to do, and he kind of looked at me with a side eye since I was wearing a suit and tie from my day job as a lawyer. He asked me what I did.

I told him I was a lawyer. He said that he could sign me up as a lawyer, and it was no skin off his back. He still got credit for the contract. And for me, if I really wanted to go down range to Iraq or Afghanistan, I'd be there faster since the training is shorter, and I'd have more rank since professionals like lawyers and doctors come into the military as captains, not as lieutenants. And therefore more pay.

And I told him, no, I want to be infantry. I want to go to Fort Benning and do ranger and airborne school. And I want to lead a platoon. And he opined that I must not be a very good lawyer. And he was probably right about that. But he signed me up. And let's see, I would have signed my contract in late 2004 and shipped out to basic training in January of 2005. And you get deployed to Iraq, I think, with the 101st Airborne in

spring, the spring of 2006? Yeah, the recruiter is certainly right that when you enlist as a civilian to become an infantry officer, the training pipeline is very long, over a year. So in the spring of 2006,, 101st Airborne was already down range in Iraq. So I was on what's known as the replacement bird, flying from Fort Campbell, Kentucky into theater with a bunch of other people who, like me, had just finished their initial entry training, or perhaps they had been 17 and the policy at the time was not to deploy until you're 18, or they'd been injured when the unit had deployed and they had rehabbed and now they were joining. So I linked up in Iraq in the spring of 2006 with my battalion and took over a platoon shortly after that.

And I can't think of a worse time to have arrived in Iraq than the spring of 2006. The surge in Iraq where the Bush administration had announced rather than winding down, it actually increased our troop presence in Iraq, but that wasn't until January of 2007 that the policy change was announced. And it was in response to things have gotten really, where things were getting very bad, you know, Sunnis being slaughtered, Shiites being slaughtered. I mean, it was like almost like a civil war, small scale civil war during that time. And we really, the multinational

forces just didn't have the security presence to deal with it. Or it seemed at the time, as General Petraeus laid out in a pretty scathing critique, an internal critique, we didn't have a strategy to deal with the escalating violence. So can you just describe what it was like when you showed up there? I'm glad you said the surge was in response to all those deteriorating conditions and not my presence in Iraq. As it happened, I was also in Afghanistan a couple years later, right before the surge in Afghanistan as well. The lesson from both of those to me was fairly obvious, and I took those lessons early in both countries. I write about this some in Only the Strong, that security always has to come first. This is why I feel so strongly, for instance, about funding our military or supporting our police at home,

is that if you don't have security, if you don't have safety, you have no other form of human flourishing. You can't have economic prosperity. You don't have safety, you have no other form of human flourishing. You can't have economic prosperity. You can't have sound education. You can't have strong families without security. And as you said, in Iraq in 2006, that was simply lacking. We were fighting an insurgency, mostly against Sunni insurgents tied in many cases to Al-Qaeda, but also grafted over a civil war in which you had Sunnis fighting Shia and those Shia militia groups would in turn fight against us as well. In some ways, the violence between those two groups was worse than either one of them directed at us, though we were often

caught in the crossfire or often took on one group's enemies as we tried to protect the local population. But it was clear throughout 2006 that we were failing in that mission because we simply didn't have the forces necessary to achieve it. This is, again, a lesson from Iraq, a lesson from Afghanistan. You can't do these things on the cheap or try to under-resource them. Much better to go big from the very beginning and stabilize conditions so you can have a withdrawal of larger numbers of troops quickly. And I write about this in Only the Strong, too. If you look at what Obama did in 2011, it really is a tragedy. By January 2009, Iraq was basically stabilized.

The surge had succeeded. George Bush and Bob Gates had remarkably turned it around by leaving our fantastic troops. And Barack Obama, who had campaigned against the Iraq War, but also in a somewhat vague sense, never quite committed to how quickly he would take out troops and how many troops he would take out. He ended up leaving more than 50,000 troops in Iraq for most of his first two years. But he insisted by the end of 2011 on withdrawing all of our last troops because he had campaigned on it. Again, I think if he had left behind what Bob Gates, as I explained, and only the strong was proposing, somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000

troops, Iraq would have remained stable. As it was, we didn't get out of Iraq, as Obama always liked to say. We simply took a short break from Iraq because we had troops back in that country barely three years later as ISIS rose from the ashes of al-Qaeda in Iraq and rampaged throughout the country, seized major cities like Fallujah and Ramadi, and began to threaten Baghdad. So it really is a tragedy to think about what would have happened if Barack Obama had followed the advice of people like Bob Gates in late 2011, left a few thousand troops in Baghdad.

There's a good chance that by the end of 2016, we would have actually had fewer troops in Baghdad than we had had, than we actually did to fight against ISIS. And meanwhile, ISIS would have never risen to the strength and prominence that it gained. You know, it reminds me of a story. When I was there in early 2004, Ambassador Brimmer was having a secure telephone conversation with Vice President Traney. And the vice president was asking what Brimmer's sense was of how things were going. And Brimmer, I was sitting there, I remember he said, you know, Mr. Vice President, we have the worst of both worlds. We have an ineffective occupation, meaning you got to choose one or the other. In other words, if you're going

to have an occupation, there is some downside to occupation, which is the local population deals with, you know, the humiliation of tanks, American tanks on every corner, and, you know, the sense that the American troop presence everywhere, but they can handle it if you're, if this presence, if this occupation is going to provide basic security, so they can have some kind of return to normalcy, and you can begin to win the population over. But the worst of all worlds is to have the symbol of occupation, but not enough of it, so that you're actually ineffective and people see American presence, but they don't see the security that comes from that presence. Yeah, that's a good point. And it's something that we saw, you know, as I write in Only the

Strong, I mean, which focuses mostly on the progressive left's effort to sabotage American power, going back to Woodrow Wilson, Republicans certainly make mistakes. We're all human. George W. Bush did not commit enough troops early to the Iraq War. His father did not respond forcefully enough to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Donald Trump took too long to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran. But these are all mistakes. They are poor judgments, miscalculations, errors that can be corrected. And in fact, in Donald Trump's case with the killing of Qasem Soleimani or George W. Bush's case with the surge, you see them correcting those mistakes. like Barack Obama or Joe Biden, Lyndon Johnson, who consistently and almost purposely take steps that will undermine American power or prevent our troops from winning wars that are imminently winnable. As you see throughout our history, for instance, with the surge in Iraq or with Richard Nixon's turning Vietnam around in his first term. Okay, so let's stay on that. By the way,

just one piece of data that I'm always struck by. During that time in Iraq, someone had passed on a study to us in Baghdad from RAND that looked at the history of U.S. occupations or occupations that the U.S. was involved with going back to World War II, post-World War II Germany and Japan, and then all the way up through the Balkans and beyond. And it basically showed that on average, the ratio of successful occupations that provided basic security was about the population 20 to 1. For every 20 people in a local population,

there's at least one occupational force providing security. And in Baghdad time around the time you arrived the number was something like 700 to 1 which was basically like we were invisible but in any event um okay so you talk let's then jump into your book you you you i mean it's it's it's an ambitious book because you start with um you and i want to talk a little about your book and then get to some contemporary issues, but you start with our founding fathers and you talk about the foreign policy decisions and the national security priorities or principles of people like George Washington and John Quincy Adams.

How do you explain to a modern audience, because it obviously seems just like literally another world, what the decisions that the George Washingtons and the John Quincy Adams had to make relative to the decisions that, you know, the Joe Bidens and Donald Trumps and Barack Obama and George W. Bushes have to make in this era. What do you think are the, you know, the key lessons to take from that era that are actually applicable to this era in a practical way? So in a very simple sense, I'd say the reason we study our founders and learn from them about how to make our way in the world is the same reason that we read the Bible and learn from the figures of the Bible. Those people at our founding, those people recounting the Bible, are no different from you and me or anyone else alive today if you believe that human nature is fixed and eternal and unchangeable. And that is one of the main cleavages, as I describe in Only the Strong,

between conservatives and between progressives, going back to Woodrow Wilson. Progressives for more than 100 years have believed that nature is changeable and controllable and can be engineered, and therefore we can achieve a utopia. We can restore the garden, this side of heaven. Conservatives simply don't believe that. It's hard to believe that anyone would still believe that after the bloodshed that ideological movements of the 20th century produced. Churchill, who was a contemporary of Woodrow Wilson, didn't believe

it at the time. He pointed out that we had gotten into our hands for the first time the technological ability to eliminate our entire race with no appreciable gain in moral virtue, which again is the conservative sentiment about this. So if you believe that of course you should want to study the past to learn about the future. A second key point I make in Only the Strong when thinking about the world is that geography is the most important and fundamental part of foreign policy because it's the most permanent part. It never changes. Germany always faces the same situation that Germany's always faced. Great Britain is always going to be an island, at least on human horizons.

United States is always gonna be a continental power that is essentially more British compared to the rest of the world than Great Britain is towards Europe. So those two features are kind of unchangeable, and therefore history can provide us a guide in how to think about the world today. All that said, foreign policy is foremost the domain of practical reasoning or prudence,

prudential judgment, if you will. So there's always going to be a million and one considerations to think about in any particular circumstance. And that's hard and you can make mistakes about it. But if you take your saying as your lodestar, what the founders did, which I say, and only the strong is the blessings of liberty to borrow from the preamble of the constitution and further kind of teasing that out

to make it a little more concrete, those blessings are safety, prosperity, and freedom. Then you can always think about particular circumstances today and how we should take action to secure our safety, our prosperity, and our freedom. Again, that's hard to do. Not many people are very good at it, and even the best still make mistakes, like a Churchill, like a Reagan. But that's why I think it's relevant to think about how the founders considered these things. And again, you have to account for all the changed circumstances. You know, George Washington is often cited as someone who didn't want to have foreign alliances,

who was worried about America being enmeshed in the disputes of the old world that were coming to the new world from his farewell address. But there's a lot else in his farewell address that stresses we need to gain time, we need to grow our strength, we'll be able to command our own fortunes in the future. So the founders could see a time when we would not be an infant nation that was heavily dependent on European manufacturing and also very vulnerable to continued European powers presence in North America as well as threats from Native Americans as well. So I think you can take from the founding some basic principles and modes of reasoning and apply that to the problems we face today.

A big part of your book deals, a large part of your book deals with the Vietnam War, which you really treat as like a turning point in our story, in this story. Why was the Vietnam War so important? What did it reveal to you? Well, there's two real turning points in the left's turn against American power and American national interest. The first, we've discussed some already with Woodrow Wilson. Wilson and the progressives, thinking that human nature was changeable, was malleable, could be engineered, and therefore you could achieve a utopia on Earth, decided that national interest was just too kind of like grimy and grubby and unseemly a way to guide your action in the world.

Influenced here heavily by German historicism and German romantic philosophy. They thought you should always be taking actions just for the good of their own sake, not for your own national interest. Whatever you might say about that when it applies to individuals acting as individuals, I think it's foolish in the extreme when applied to nations acting as nations. But what they did when they explicitly repudiated the moral basis of our founding, and Wilson was very explicit in repudiating the Constitution, the Declaration itself, it was a very short step towards the next turning point, which was Vietnam in the 1960s and

70s. Because once you repudiate the American founding, it's not a very far step to repudiating America itself. And that's what you saw in the Vietnam era with the radical left saying that America is flawed and rotten to its core, so much so not that it can't even be redeemed by using our power on behalf of other peoples to improve their economic and social and political well-being, but it simply can't be redeemed at all. That's why they often spelled America with a K in the German fashion, just in case you missed the undertone to their comments, or America with a KKK to make it even more explicit. And you still see those two strains of thought in progressive Democrats today,

a kind of utopian internationalism where they're going to remake the world like Madeleine Albright wanted to do in Somalia of all places in 1993, and also a kind of virulent isolationism. You know, you might say that, and it's an old joke, that there's two kinds of isolationists. It used to be on the right that conservative isolationists would think America is too good for the world, whereas liberal isolationists that we've been talking about, they think the world is too good for America. You might put Bernie Sanders in that camp. And so in terms of decision-making in Vietnam, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon,

how do you evaluate each of their respective performances in this topic that you delve into in your book? Kennedy was a disaster on every level, not just in Vietnam, a foreign policy disaster on every level. Babe Pigs, Berlin Wall, I mean, a lot happened under his watch. Yeah, the hagiography around JFK is completely misplaced. In fact, I can't think of a single foreign policy crisis or decision in which he made the right decision. As you said, the Bay of Pigs in April of 61, the disastrous summit with Khrushchev a few weeks later, the Berlin Wall, ceding the territory in Laos to the Laotian communists in Ho Chi Minh that later became the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which killed so many Americans.

Even the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is often viewed as Kennedy's finest hour, was also a strategic disaster of the first order. So first off— Can you just—not to digress, just a minute on that, why was it a strategic disaster? Because very much of the news today is this—our current administration thinks through how to not get into a situation with potential threats of nuclear escalation with Russia, and everyone's pointing back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. So what, in your view, did Kennedy get wrong? So that long train of errors that we just discussed is what convinced Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo, I have no doubt, that they could take the extremely provocative step of stationing nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba. Now, you can say that once we discovered those missiles, Kennedy handled the situation well in October of 1962, but let's look at how the two nations came out of it. So the Soviet Union had no nuclear capable missiles in Russia, you know, months before the crisis. Coming out of that, they were able to

pressure Kennedy to remove our nuclear capable missiles from Turkey, which had been the status quo. They got an implicit acceptance of all weapons short of nuclear weapons in Turkey, which had been the status quo. They got an implicit acceptance of all weapons short of nuclear weapons in Cuba, which was a change from the status quo. And they got an implicit assurance that we would not try to overthrow the Castro regime. Again, a change from the status quo. What did we get in return? Absolutely nothing. But this is just an example of Kennedy's extremely short-sighted and kind of frightful foreign policy that put a foot wrong every time, especially as it relates to Soviet Russia. In Vietnam, what did he do in particular? He turned what should have been a war between North and South Vietnam into an American war. As I mentioned, ceding that territory in Laos

along the Laotian-Vietnamese border was an incredible mistake. But second, he authorized, or at least tacitly accepted, the historical record is a bit mixed on this, a coup which led to the assassination of South Vietnam's leader. Now, he was the president. He could have stopped if he wanted to. And Ngo Dinh Dinh was, you know, no Mother Teresa, don't get me wrong. He wasn't, you know, a liberal Democrat, you know, someone from Denmark or the Netherlands. But he was a fairly effective leader for South Vietnam. He prevented it from being overrun in the Eisenhower era. And as subsequent history proved out,

he was the only partner we had in South Vietnam because after his assassination, it switched rapidly through a series of ineffective South Vietnamese leaders. And it was only after that that you saw the presence of American troops in South Vietnam go from very small, you know, 5, 10, 15,000 to over half a million early in the Johnson era. So Kennedy set the stage for what was and what should have remained a Vietnam Civil War with America backing our partners in South Vietnam against the murderous butcher Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam. And then Johnson forced the military to fight with one

hand tied behind its back. They couldn't achieve their objectives. They couldn't bomb regularly in North Vietnam. He was even picking targets in the Oval Office. Robert McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, was not much better. And again, we don't have to guess or speculate what would have happened if things had been different. We know, just like we know with the surge in Iraq, once Nixon took office and he allowed the military to fight the American way of war, which is hit them as hard as you can with as much as you can, as fast as you can, and keep on moving, to paraphrase U.S. Grant. By the end of 1972, you had the Paris Peace Accords and what could have been a durable peace agreement that created for some time two separate nations, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, as we still have on the Korean Peninsula today. But unfortunately,

the Paris Peace Accords were backed in part at least by the expectation on both sides that Nixon would back the South Vietnamese if the North Vietnamese made gains. And then starting in 1973, he was badly weakened by water date and then impeachment and Democrats won sweeping victories in the Congress in 1974. And they voted to not provide aid in 1975, including a young senator named Joe Biden, who voted against that aid. And so the images that we often see that symbolize the one take on the kind of failure of Vietnam, the image of the chopper leaving the embassy in Saigon. That was after aid was being cut by the United States to South Vietnam. Yeah, that was, I mean, that was in kind of the final days, and it's not clear from the historical

record if something could have stopped then. But if the Paris Peace Accords were signed in early 1973, that last helicopter left the Saigon embassy in April of 1975, Nixon was already pretty badly weakened by the summer of 1973. And the Democrats increasingly called the shots on the amount of aid we were able to provide to South Vietnam. And therefore, the North Vietnamese gradually made gains throughout 73 and 74 that led to the seizure of Saigon in 75. And again, as a counterfactual, think of how different the world would look today. Think how much our struggle for master with China would look today if South Vietnam hadn't lost in 1975.

But at worst, those two countries were still separate countries. You had a communist North Vietnam, which by the way is no close friend of China, but you had a South Vietnam that looked much like South Korea, a vibrant, democratic, capitalist economy that sits on some of the most critical terrain in the world, right on the coastline of the South China Sea. Just imagine how different our struggle with China would look today. Two related questions, because I know the book represents a lot of how

you, what shape you're thinking about contemporary issues. I want to get to contemporary issues, but before I do, you're very critical of President Obama in this book, and yet at the same time, you cite quite frequently Bob Gates. You cite his memoir, you, in conversations I've had with you over the years, you cite him a lot. You have a relationship with him. You think he was a very important figure in our national security infrastructure. I work with him a little bit, and I have a similar view. What do you think it says about President Obama that he chose to include Bob Gates as head of the Pentagon after he had excoriated his predecessor, George W. Bush's defense policy when running for president. And then he keeps Bob Gates on, who was President Bush's defense secretary.

I mean, that was actually pretty impressive. I think a shrewd political judgment to be sure. So Barack Obama wouldn't have become president in all likelihood had it not been for the Iraq War. He may not have even run for president had it not been for the Iraq War, because if you recall, that was the key contrast that he shaped on policy matters with Hillary Clinton throughout 2007 and 2008 primaries. Hillary Clinton had supported the war resolution in 2002. Barack Obama had given a speech against it as a state senator in Chicago. However, by the fall campaign, by, say, Labor Day, because the surge had largely stabilized the country and where George Bush was prepared to hand off a stable and improving situation in Iraq, there was not much focus on

the Iraq war in the fall campaign. It was entirely about the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the financial crisis. And those are the issues that dominated the final weeks of the campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain. Now, I think that Barack Obama recognized in that time that he was going to have significant economic and domestic challenges. He didn't really want to have to deal much with the Iraq War. That's very clear from, say, his memoir, from early speeches he gave, that Bob Gates, because of his success in 2007 and 2008 and his past service as well to include for Democrats like Jimmy Carter and others had won him some goodwill among Democrats

in the Congress. So keeping Bob Gates in office allowed continuity and allowed the Department of Defense to build on the success of the surge while Barack Obama was able to focus on things like his stimulus and Obamacare and what became Dodd-Frank. But if you read Secretary Gates' memoirs, you see some of his more candid interviews, you'll see that oftentimes I think he felt he was running into a brick wall in the administration. Not always. He had a good relationship, for instance, with his successor, Leon Panetta, who at the time was at the CIA. And he and Hillary Clinton maintained positive relationships at the Department of State, but especially with the White House National Security Council,

that he and, for that matter, the first National Security Advisor, Marine General Jim Jones, were just astonished at the degree to which Barack Obama deferred to a bunch of campaign operatives who had driven vans for him in Iowa over the last two years. You just now were very critical, and you're critical in your book of the decision of your predecessors in the Senate to vote against aid or cutting aid for the South Vietnamese in the 70s. I wanna fast forward to today because the Ukrainian defense of its country

against the Russian invasion has been impressive for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the impressive political wartime leadership of its president, Zelensky, but also because of the support that the U.S. has been providing to Ukraine, not only now, not only in the context of this war, but actually for many years leading up to this war when no one was really paying attention. We have a new Congress being sworn in in the weeks ahead, and we have voices on the right seriously questioning, including in the new Congress, questioning whether or not we should be continuing to support the Ukrainian effort to defend its country. And you have a president, which I think the White House has done a pretty good job, I mean, not before the invasion, but post-invasion in getting Ukraine the support it needs,

and yet seemingly unwillingness to talk about it much. And I think these kinds of geopolitical crises require a U.S. president to explain the stakes, explain why America is doing what it's doing on a regular basis so the American public understands the sacrifices the country's making, in this case financial, and feels invested in it. Tell me, you know, again, coming back to that point you focus on in your book about the cutting of aid to South Vietnam. How do you think about it in the context of Ukraine today? Well, as a policy matter going forward, I think, one, we should continue to back Ukraine to the hilt with military aid. Two, however, Europe really needs to do a better job of backing Ukraine with financial, economic, and humanitarian aid. In particular, Paris and Berlin. They cannot expect the American taxpayer who's

already spending tens of billions of dollars on military aid, which in many cases only the United States can provide. Only the United States has the defense industrial capacity to provide these weapons. That's going to continue indefinitely if Europe doesn't do more, and especially Paris and Berlin don't do more to provide what they have plenty of, which is simple cash, cash for financial, economic, and humanitarian assistance. Some countries are doing great, the countries you would expect, like the United Kingdom or Poland or some of the other Eastern and Central European countries, but France and Germany, suffice to say, are not. For President Biden's policy on Ukraine, I would liken it somewhat to John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. You know, Woodrow or Winston Churchill was

asked what he would call World War II in his aftermath, and he immediately responded to unnecessary war. I would say the same thing about this war in Ukraine. It was unnecessary, and it wouldn't have started if it hadn't been for a year of concessions and appeasement by Joe Biden towards Vladimir Putin. When you combine with the debacle in Afghanistan, it's not a coincidence, in my opinion, that just a few weeks after we left Afghanistan, Vladimir Putin began marshalling troops on Ukraine's border. Since the war started, I do think there's still some reasonable critiques of Joe Biden's policy. So on the one hand, as I write several times in Only the Strong, he's prone to these kind of intemperate, unhelpful outbursts in speeches that, you know, we're going to charge Vladimir Putin with war crimes or Vladimir Putin

can't remain in power. Don't get me wrong. I have no doubt that Russia has committed war crimes and that Vladimir Putin is an evil dictator. However, when Vladimir Putin has invaded one country in Europe and sits on the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, it might be more prudent to keep our focus on the matter at hand, which is expelling Russian troops from Ukrainian territory and protecting our interest in Europe. On the other hand, though, we've consistently seen, you still see it to this day, a tendency by the Biden administration to withhold certain kinds of military aid or intelligence that Ukraine needs, oftentimes because they're fearful of escalation. And I can tell you,

since I've been following this closely on the Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee, it follows a very simple pattern. We hear from the Biden folks that they can't provide this, that, or the other kind of weapon or certain kinds of intelligence because Russia would view it as provocative and they would escalate. What happens is three months later, we start providing it and Russia doesn't escalate in the way that's predicted. Or in the meantime, they have already escalated, taking the steps that were predicted based on their own logic and own imperatives. So from the beginning, I've said simply that we should provide Ukraine with the weapons and the intelligence it needs to expel Russian troops from its soil and to defend its territory, which is a primordial right of any people. What should we be doing about Iran?

There's a, you know, when you were dealing with Iran in previous years, and the U.S. was and Israel was, there had been a real protest movement in 2009 in Iran. The U.S. was largely quiet in response. Now Barack Obama expresses regret for that decision, but there was a rationale behind his decision in 2009 for the administration to stay quiet, which was based, I didn't agree with it, but it was basically that they planned to begin negotiations with Iran. It was a real politic decision, so they weren't interested in getting in a public tussle with Iran. Here we are today. The U.S. is speaking out certainly more

than it was in 2009. This doesn't seem like a protest movement, but as Brett Stevens said on the last episode of this podcast a week ago, he said that this is not a protest movement. This is a revolution. This is a revolution in the making, which is different from a protest movement. And Iran at the same time is on the other side of this Russia-Ukraine war, providing drones and other military supplies to Russia. So further alienating the US, alienating the EU. You have Macron in France meeting with Iranian pro-Iran, Iranian protest activists.

So it just seems that the whole dynamic has changed. Obviously the relationship between Israel and the Gulf states is different than the last time there was a real uprising in Iran. So where do you see this? You know, you sit on the Intel Committee, you sit on the Armed Services Committee, as you said. Where do you see this going and what do you think the U.S.'s role should be? Well, I believe the Iranian regime is more fragile and brittle than it probably appears. And I also agree with the assessment that this is a revolution. This is not simply protests. And it's now set in and it's proven durable for a number of months.

The administration should be much more forceful in supporting the rights of the Iranian people to have a government that responds to their interests. It should also make it clear that we are done with the farcical negotiations to give Iran hundreds of billions of dollars in sanction relief in return that they would reenter an outdated and fatally flawed nuclear agreement. I mean, if that money goes or to ever go to Iran, we can see, obviously, they wouldn't be spending it on hospitals and roads for these people. They nuclear agreement. I mean, if that money goes or to ever go to Iran, we can see obviously they wouldn't be spending it on hospitals and roads for these people. They would be spending on their secret police to suppress them and to build more drones to send to Russia to kill Europeans with,

to shoot missiles and drones into major metropolitan areas in friendly countries like the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia. So Joe Biden doesn't have the same kind of ideological ambition with Iran in the Middle East that Barack Obama does. But in this regard, he's basically running Obama's third term with Iran, which needs should stop. And I think the political conditions, given what Iran has done to its own people during this revolutionary movement and their support for Russia and Ukraine are right, both here and in Europe, to an iran deal and while biden was sort of you know just like an autopilot continuing it or trying to continue it or try to re-enter it he i don't think it doesn't it's never felt to me that he personally is the same like he i felt i always felt that he had the passion he was passionately committed ideologically committed

to pull out of afghanistan he'd been trying decades to do it. So I wasn't shocked by that decision, disappointed, but not shocked. With Iran, once things start falling apart and then you have this revolution on the streets, it's just not clear to me that he's committed to it the way Obama was. No, he's not at all. And with Barack Obama, most clearly on Iran, perhaps also on Cuba, what you have to understand is I think the conservative critique, the common conservative critique of Barack Obama and his foreign policy is that he was incompetent, he was inexperienced, he was naive, he got caught flat-footed a lot. I think that's wrong. I think you should see Barack Obama and his foreign policy is what most people perceive his approach to domestic policy and politics was, is that he was a ruthless ideologue.

And he pursued his goals ruthlessly. If that meant ignoring those protesters in Iran in 2009, then that's what he did. And it wasn't just to get a nuclear deal, which is badly flawed. That was just part of his overall ambition for a grand rapprochement with Iran. I mean, he genuinely believes, wrongly, but genuinely believes that America is the source and responsible for the tensions we've had with Iran going back not just 40 years, but going back 70 years to when he thinks we supposedly overthrew a democratically elected leader in Iran, which we didn't. And he wasn't democratically elected. And if anything, he was the one- You're talking about the 1950s, the quote unquote coup, yeah.

Yeah. He was the one that upended the Iranian constitutional tradition. And in fact, it was the Ayatollahs of the time who were most responsible for removing him. But Barack Obama strongly, strongly believes. I mean, he said it in multiple speeches. He's written it in several books that we are responsible for that. That's the source of the tension

going back decades with Iran. And if we would just apologize and atone for our sins and pull on our horns, Iran would become a more normal nation. Furthermore, it would be able to balance off against Israel and Saudi Arabia and UAE, and we could exit the Middle East more rapidly and more completely. Again, I think this is a diluted ideological approach, but it is a clear and consistent ideological approach he pursued. The nuclear deal is just part of it. I don't think Joe Biden, again, is that kind of consistent ideologue that Barack Obama is. I just think that at this point, because of Barack Obama's continuing influence as the most powerful man in the Democratic Party and the way he turned the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 and 2016 into a purely partisan matter, that's the way Joe Biden and most Democrats still see it. If you're for the deal, you're wearing a blue jersey. If you're against

the deal, you're wearing a red jersey. All right. Two final policy questions and then one lighter question, then we'll let you go. Two policy questions you've been outspoken on. One, the proposal to ban TikTok, and two, the recent hostage exchange, prisoner exchange, sorry, regarding Brittany Griner. I want to start with banning TikTok. Can you explain how you've come out on it and why? Well, TikTok is really just a Trojan horse on your phone. It doesn't simply take the content you have in that app. It can take content you have from across your phone, your contacts, your messages, your email, your photos, your browser history. It even has the ability perhaps to track facial movements using your camera and record as well. So if you

have TikTok on your phone, you should delete it, and you should probably get a new phone. There's also the fact that TikTok in America is very different from TikTok in China. In China, you know, Chinese youth only get a few minutes a day on it, and the content is restricted largely to things like eat your vegetables and respect your elders and do your homework. In America, I'm aware of lawsuits that are proceeding that have created new TikTok accounts on new phones with no past history, no history in TikTok itself.

And if you create it as a 14-year-old boy, it immediately starts showing you videos of violent pornography or other instances of violence. If you're a 14-year-old girl, it starts showing you videos related to body image issues and eating disorders and so forth. So I strongly believe that we should ban TikTok entirely from this country. It's a threat to America, especially America's youth security and privacy, and it will be one for as long as they live. Is there any precedent for something like this? Well, I think what's unprecedented that we would allow, you know, Chinese media company to become so entrenched in our society. We would never allow Soviet Russian media company to do that. And today, technology is so much more important to warfare

than it was then. We're also lacking it to, you know, allowing ourselves to be dependent on Soviet Russian, you know, munitions or steel or rubber or what have you. Matt Pottinger was on this podcast a couple weeks ago, and he pointed out that it started out TikTok providing videos that were sort of, you could argue, were cute and innocent and trivial. And now TikTok is the number one source of news for a majority of Americans under 30 years old. So to have the Chinese Communist Party of news for a majority of Americans under 30 years old. So to have the Chinese Communist Party in control of a platform about which most young Americans are getting their news is really analogous to what you're talking about during the Cold War. You were very outspoken on the Brittany Griner deal, prisoner exchange deal. Why?

Well, Victor Boot is one of the world's worst monsters. I mean, he provided weapons that killed and maimed. And this is for just to refresh for our listeners, he was the one that we exchanged that we gave up in response in return for Greiner. Victor Boot is the Russian arms dealer known as the merchant of death for the number of weapons that he provided throughout third world revolutions, insurgencies, and civil wars. Again, we're not talking just like AKs and pistols here. I mean multiple rocket launch systems, heavy artillery systems, tanks, armored personnel carriers to advance Russia's interests around the world into so chaos. When he was finally arrested, he was arrested by U.S. informants for selling

anti-aircraft systems to FARC rebels that were going to use them to target our drug enforcement agency personnel. So this is one of the world's worst arms dealers. And furthermore, he's not, you know, 78 years old and living out, going to live out a peaceful retirement, you know, on the Black Sea coast at Sochi. He's only 55 years old. There's a reason why Vladimir Putin wanted him out so badly over the last 10 years since he's been in prison, and especially over the last year while he's fighting a war that increasingly relies on private mercenary soldiers and arms. So I think it's fair to say that Victor Boot is going to be back in action very, very soon for Vladimir Putin. I think Brittany Griner's case was trumped

up. I think they used it against her for political reasons. I think in part because Joe Biden and Democrats projected that they would be susceptible to that kind of pressure. But I would not have traded Victor Boot for anyone, not Brittany Griner, not Paul Whelan or any other person. He's simply too dangerous a man. And it's a huge national security victory for Russia. We welcome back one of our fellow citizens, but we don't have the same strategic implications on our side. Okay. We will leave it there, Tom. But before we do, on a much, much, much lighter note, I know your primary focus when it comes to following football are the Razorbacks.

But when you're not watching college football, I know you keep an eye on the New England Patriots for reasons that just completely elude me, and we'll save that for an entirely different conversation another time because I can't think of a more annoying team than the Patriots. But how do you feel about their, after their dazzling move, final play in their game against the Raiders?

How are you, which for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, just Google Patriots final play against the Raiders and you'll see what I mean. It's almost like a, like a comedy, like a Laurel and Hardy comedy routine. I'm sorry. Just,'s just too much fun. But how do you now, in light of that, how are you thinking about the Patriots' playoff chances? Spoken like a true Jets fan. Yeah, that final play against the Raiders

may have been one of the worst plays in NFL history, maybe right after the butt fumble in the New York Jets. All right, that was the old Jets, not the new Jets. So, well, I became a Patriot fan in college. You know, in Arkansas, we don't have a pro team. So a lot of people support the Cowboys because Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson, when they took over. Oh, right.

They're from Arkansas. Right. Not just from Arkansas, but played for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks. You have some Chiefs fans and Saints fans and Titans fans as well. But when I was in school, I didn't have cable, didn't have red zone, didn't have a Sunday package. So all you could do was watch CBS at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. So I watched the Patriots, saw Bill Parcells and Drew Bledsoe go to the Super Bowl in 1997. And I was there for the first Brady Belichick season. But, yeah, that game against the Raiders ended on a very deflating note. I was watching it with my 7-year-old son, who's also a Patriots fan.

Poor kid. I mean, that's by birth, right? I mean, it's just like – Well, you're the one that's inflicted the Jets on your sons. Yeah, these things happen in the world. But he looked at me with astonishment and silence, and I said, that was a very bad play, son. And he said, I think Coach Belichick is going to be upset.

And I said, yeah, I think he's going to be upset too, son. And then he said, yeah, Jacoby Meyer is going to have to go to NFL principal's office. That's pretty good. God, the press coverage today with these interviews with Jacoby Myers are like, I mean, basically they completely improvised. I mean, they said this wasn't part of the play. They just, the players just took matters into their own hands

against the wishes of their coaches and their coordinators. So anyways. All right. Well, look, my prediction is the Patriots will not make it to the wild card. The Jets are maybe. A lot depends on how they do these next three games and how the Chargers do. But I'm hopeful if the Jets hold their own against the Jaguars and the Seahawks and don't lose to the Dolphins, they have a shot.

And that will be wonderful news, mostly because it'll make Patriots fans like you very, very disappointed. Well, Merry Christmas to you, too. Exactly. All right. Senator Cotton, thank you. We will post the book in the show notes, which is a very important read, regardless of where you stand on these issues. Only the Strong is an important history of American foreign policy and certainly a contrarian take relative to a lot of the conventional wisdom one hears about these major developments in foreign policy. So I encourage people to read that and also Senator Cotton's previous book, which we will maybe revisit in a future conversation. But until then, thanks for coming back on. Thank you, Dan. Appreciate you having me on. That's our show for today. If you'd like to order either of Senator Cotton's books, Sacred Duty or Only the Strong,

you can do it at your favorite independent bookstore or at barnesandnoble.com or that other e-commerce site, which I think they're calling Amazon. Call Me Back is produced by Lon Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.