Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - How Putin turns this around - with Congressman Mike Gallagher

Episode Date: March 5, 2022

Is Putin winning or losing? It looks like his war effort is not going according to plan, and that he underestimated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the resistance of the Ukrainian military, and the unity of the international response. But could Putin quickly turn things around? What would that look like? Congressman Mike Gallagher brings his perspective. Gallagher served for seven years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps, including two deployments to Iraq. He was a national security aide on Capitol HIll – having served as a top staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Back in Wisconsin, he worked for an energy and supply chain company. He’s also a warrior scholar, having earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, a master’s degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University, a second in Strategic Intelligence from National Intelligence University, and a PhD in International Relations from Georgetown. Congressman Gallagher, who is from Green Bay and represents Wiconsin's 8th Congressional District -- which covers northeastern Wisconsin -- currently serves on the House Armed Services Committee, where he is the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Military Personnel. He also serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. From his perch as a senior Member of the Military Personnel Subcommittee, Congressman Gallagher has been sounding the alarm about the woke agenda he believes is infecting the US military, and why it’s dangerous to our security.

We live in a world where we think it's unthinkable that someone could do something like this. We throw these phrases around like the rules-based international order. I just don't think that's the world that people like Putin or Xi Jinping or certainly the Supreme Leader of Iran live in. They live in a world where might makes right. And we tend to forget that there are people like Putin who are willing to write themselves into the history books with the blood of innocents. Is Putin winning or losing? It sure looks like his war effort is not going according to plan. And he underestimated Ukrainian President Zelensky, the resistance of the Ukrainian military, and the unity of the international response.

But could Putin quickly turn things around? What would that look like? Well, Congressman Mike Gallagher brings his perspective. Mike served for seven years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps, including two deployments in Iraq. He was a national security aide on Capitol Hill, having served as a top staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Back in Wisconsin, he worked for an energy and supply chain company. from Princeton University, a master's degree in security studies from Georgetown University, a second master's in strategic intelligence from National Intelligence University, and a PhD in international relations from Georgetown. In Congress, Mike currently serves on the House

Armed Services Committee, where he's the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Military Personnel, and he's also on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. And from his perch on the Military Personnel Subcommittee, he's also been screaming from the hilltops very intelligently about the woke agenda he's seeing that's infecting the U.S. military and why it's dangerous to our security. Lots to unpack with Mike. I start by getting the perspective of a congressman back in his district, back in Green Bay, engaging with his constituents about our stakes in a conflict over 5,000 miles from the United States. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome Congressman Mike Gallagher to this podcast, who joins us from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Hi, Mike.

It's great to be with you. I'm honored to join this august podcast and your millions of listeners. Millions. I'll tell you, millions of fans in Packers Nation, and I know you're in the belly of the beast right now. So maybe if there's time at the end, we'll spend a minute on that. But we, you know, and I note your Bart Starr jersey hanging in the back, and I notice there's no Aaron Rodgers jersey hanging in the back,

and I wonder if that's because you don't want to have a Denver Broncos jersey hanging up there or wherever. He's coming back. All right. He's coming back. Mark my words. Yeah. All right. I'll believe it when I see it.

In any event, on to more serious matters. You have been monitoring events between Russia and Ukraine very closely. You've been very outspoken on our strategy, U.S. just want to start with this question to set up the conversation. So Russia formally invaded Ukraine in this most recent round on February 24th. So here we are some two weeks later. At this point, do you think Putin is doing better than you had expected or doing worse than you had expected on February 24th? Well, militarily, I think he's doing worse than I expected. I see no reason to disagree with the conventional wisdom that Putin's initial strategy of a rapid collapse of the Ukrainians' will to fight has failed. But, and this is a big but, particularly as I see this kind of, the hive mind in Western press suggest that he's already lost. And over the long term, this is going to be akin to, you know, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979,

which started off as a brilliant conventional operation and then quickly turned into a quagmire, the expedited fall of the Soviet Union. I would like for that to be an appropriate analogy with Putin for this to become another quagmire with him. But we're in the very, very early stages. And I think Putin, having committed himself, will stop at nothing to consolidate gains on the ground in Ukraine, even if it costs his military a lot of lives and money, and even if he has to resort to tactics that he's been willing to use in Aleppo, for example. I mean, this is not a person who... Or Chechnya. Exactly. This is not a person who responds to appeals about human rights and, you know, or is worried about the condemnation of, you know, the Davos crowd. So I think this is going to get much worse, the situation on the ground in Ukraine.

And if the dust settles and Putin controls all or a significant portion of the country, well, I wonder if that's still a victory for him. I guess you could make the argument that, okay, if it wakes NATO out of its slumber, if we harden NATO's eastern front, if the Europeans wean themselves off their dependence on Russian energy, and if we learn the right lessons in this crisis and apply those to Taiwan, on balance, it could be a victory for the West and a loss for Putin, but all of those things are up in the air. And notwithstanding the statements that the Germans have made, I mean, the proof will be in the pudding. And then the fact remains, and I'll end here, that deterrence failed, right? I want to come back to that, because that's a key point. I know you've had a very dramatic exchange, I think, with the naval, with Navy leadership or military leadership in the in the Armed Services Committee just recently. So I want to come back to this issue of deterrence and how and why you think it failed. Before we get to that, I don't I've never believed that Putin would would, you know, have his tactics be captured by some sort of benevolent instinct in terms of how he was going to invade

Ukraine. It was more tactical and I guess strategic that if you go in too aggressively, you run the risk of completely motivating potentially resistance among the Ukrainian population. If your tactics are too aggressive, that will make it harder to occupy the country or it'd be harder for a puppet government of putin's to be in charge of the country and you wind up decimating infrastructure that you need to run a country of 40 plus million people i mean i'm watching these images now of ukrainians hiding sleeping living in you know the bottom of subway stations and railroads being bombed and refugees crossing borders. And it has all the images of previous European wars or European theaters and world wars. But it just seems that if Putin goes too aggressive beyond that and beyond those images,

you wreck the infrastructure of government, which makes it harder for him to run this country, to run Ukraine, to occupy Ukraine, if that's his ultimate endgame. I agree with that, which is why I just go back to this basic point of we're in the very early stages of this. And for anyone making definitive pronouncements of, oh, this has been a complete backfire for Vladimir Putin, and oh, the Ukrainians are gonna fight to the death. I just don't think we know enough to be able to say that. Now, that being said, I think everyone's inspired by the very real bravery on display from the Ukrainians. And the leadership shown by Zelensky himself, it does seem that he has more effectively leveraged the information war and and social media uh than

putin has but those things matter less than than bullets and bombs and tanks right and that's i think that i worry that we're we tend now to mistake sort of like the performance of the thing with the actual thing like what matters on the ground. And even if Putin were to sue for peace tonight, right, he would have already changed the terms of that peace, shifted them in his direction, right, forcing Ukraine either overtly or behind the scenes to say we're not going to pursue NATO membership, forcing recognition of Crimea. I don't see any scenario now in which the Donbass goes back under the Ukrainian government. So even by taking this risk, he's shifted the goalposts in his direction, if that makes sense. Yeah, most conventional wisdom before the war was that Europe would

never be as united. You referenced Germany committing to 2% of GDP toward its own investments in NATO, own commitments to NATO. You've mentioned obviously just the rearming in general. There's all these European countries that we never thought would, you know, take a position against Russia, let alone anyone in a military conflict. The unity, what seems like the unity of Europe, did you anticipate it? And what do you attribute it to? Well, I definitely didn't anticipate the shift in the German posture.

Now, that being said, I'm trying to determine how permanent that is. I mean, it's one thing for Olaf Scholz to say it, and then it's another thing for them to actually spend 2% of GDP on defense for a sustained period of time. And oh, by the way, for that investment to actually buy and field weapons systems that we need that actually help NATO fight in an interoperable fashion. And just a quick aside, I think that's the problem. We've been so myopically focused when it comes to NATO on cajoling our allies to spend more on their defense, on the inputs, as it were, the 2% input, and less focused on the actual output.

What does that actually buy? Are we buying the right weapon systems? Do our weapon systems talk to each other? Does our doctrine allow for us to actually feel the deterrence by denial posture in Eastern Europe? So though I was surprised by the German shift, and I think it's real and I welcome it. I think it's a good thing. I think we still have a lot to see in terms of what that produces. Also, we have a pause in Nord Stream 2 from the Germans, right? And it's not like the Germans have stopped buying Russian natural gas at all. That's where I'm a little bit skeptical that we're seeing a shift. I would love for us

to march forward with a strategy of America's going to unleash the true power of its domestic energy production. Europe's going to invest in regasification facilities so they can use more American LNG, but I've seen nothing to indicate that that's going to happen over the long term. So I've just been a little bit cautious about getting carried away with our hopes for the best case scenario. And based on the briefings you're receiving, and obviously to the extent that you can discuss these, is there any progress being made with regard to Russian public opinion turning against Putin in a potentially concrete way on the streets of Russia in response to body bags coming up and the economic situation deteriorating

in Russia as dramatically as it is? The short answer is no. I mean, listen, there is a very real segment of the Russian population that is not enthusiastic about Putin's war in Ukraine. There are no doubt Russian oligarchs that are losing tens of millions of dollars as a result of this who are angry as well. But I think – I have not yet seen anything that would indicate that is going to force Putin to back down. I think there's more we can do, and I'll just talk vaguely about this, to harness and weaponize that negative public sentiment in Russia and make it more painful for Putin. But he has so effectively consolidated power over the last two decades.

By some estimates, he's the richest man in the world too, that I just think, I think anyone who's hoping for a Kremlin coup, as it were, is going to be disappointed. And again, the reality on the ground in Ukraine could shift rapidly, right? We might hope this turns into a long-term protracted quagmire for Putin, but it could just as easily shift and he could consolidate his gains or just settle into a posture of allowing there to be some sort of government in western Ukraine and Lviv, and he controls the rest of the country, particularly after he takes Odessa in the south, which I think is a very valuable asset for him. And then I think that negative public sentiment might quiet down a little bit in Russia. Yeah, if you look at the history, other than Nicholas II in the 1917 revolution, no Russian leader in more than 200 years has been ousted by popular protests. Now, there have been Russian leaders who've been ousted in Russian history and in Soviet history through palace coups and whatnot. But in terms of just a popular uprising on the streets, I don't think people appreciate how rare it is.

So – and I got to believe that as Putin is such a student of Russian history, this is something he's been preparing to protect himself against. Yeah, and I honestly – the other narrative that people are throwing out there is that, oh my gosh, Putin, he looks crazy, he looks addled. You know, clearly something is mentally wrong with him. I don't know if I buy that necessarily. Well, I think there's a rational calculus underlying his moves in Ukraine, right? He thought he could get away with it. He thought the West looked weak. He

appropriately thought Europe was incredibly dependent on Russian energy. And he just, he gambled, right? It was not an insane gamble, in other words. Now, I think he underestimated the resistance the Ukrainians would put up. He underestimated the rapidity with which he could achieve his objectives. But I don't think the move itself, as offensive as it might be from a Western perspective, this idea that someone would invade a sovereign country, I don't think it was an irrational move.

And I actually think this gets to something that's at the heart of this crisis, which is our tendency to mirror image, right? And what H.R. McMaster's called our strategic narcissism, right? We live in a world where we think it's unthinkable that someone could do something like this. We talk, we throw these phrases around, like the rules-based international order. I just don't think that's the world that people like Putin or Xi Jinping or certainly the supreme leader of Iran live in. They live in a world where might makes right. And we tend to forget that there are people like Putin who are willing to write themselves into the history books with the blood of innocence.

John Kerry made some statement about this recently that was totally nonsensical. Now, I'd rather live in a world where everything was solved diplomatically and we didn't have bad people, but that is not the world we live in. And so if that makes sense, I think there's a little bit of mirror imaging that has produced this crisis. Also, thinking through his calculation, which, to your point, may not have been crazy, if you look at the history of the last 20 years, starting with President Bush looking into his eyes looking into putin's

eyes and seeing his soul and then hillary clinton's russia reset and then we can go on and on the 2008 georgia crisis 2014 ukraine crisis where we didn't provide lethal capabilities to ukraine to defend themselves and some some obama administration officials resigned over that. And then obviously the failure to enforce the red line in Syria and giving Russia a real stronghold in Syria, specifically in the Middle East more generally. And then the Afghan withdrawal, I think the confusing messages during the Trump years. From Putin's perspective, he's the longest serving leader of Russia. He's been through a couple of decades, through four administrations of American leadership, Republican, Democrat. And you just look at all these sort of breadcrumbs he's following, the pattern I just laid out.

And I'm doing it in a glib way. But, I mean, I know there's more nuance to a lot of these decisions. But you can imagine from his perspective, America's moving in one direction, which has been some kind of more or less, again, there have been zigs and zags, but some kind of accommodation with his expansionary ambitions. Or how about this? What would cause Putin to conclude rationally that he could get away with invading Ukraine? Well, perhaps the fact that he already did it and got away with it, right? So he did it in Crimea, he did it in Eastern Ukraine, and all he faced was economic sanctions. Now here, and here he could have underestimated the extent

of economic sanctions that we would put in place. But even there, there are massive loopholes, right? I mean, there's a whole exemption for energy payments. So when we're sanctioning the Central Bank of Russia, I mean, they're still getting profits for selling crude to the US and selling natural gas to Europe. They're a big coal exporter as well. So there's a lot of holes in the sanctions regime. And as much as I support, you know, getting tough economically, I think there could be some unintended consequences, particularly if we allow China to fill the gap. They just signed an agreement where I think they're increasing their energy imports from Russia by 25%. So, but again, yeah, Putin, the West has not put hard power in Putin's path over the last decade. And I think he abides by the whole Leninist adage of you probe with bayonets. If you find steel, you stop. But if you find mush,

you push. And he's found mush for the last... And bipartisan mush, by the way. So I don't just mean this as an anti-Biden or an anti-Obama thing. Bipartisan mush for the last decade. So before... I want to get to the issue of deterrence and just what we could have done differently before the war, but before I do, on a scale of one to ten, how aggressive do you think our sanctions are right now? You know, I think they're pretty aggressive, notwithstanding the energy exemption, maybe a seven. We're talking about de-swifting Russian banks. I think it's fair for the Biden administration to say we're in some unprecedented territory,

while at the same time recognizing we haven't gone as far as we could potentially go when it comes to complete de-swifting and when it comes to going after their energy sector. But I think what people forget with sanctions is that, you know, it's one thing just to put in place all these sanctions. You have to then enforce the sanctions, right? And that's not, it's not an automatic thing, right? It depends on human beings who work in the Department of Treasury to do that. In some ways, I think the effectiveness of our sanctions regime on Iran was a result of the fact you had so many overlapping sanctions that the signal to the world was don't do business with Iran. Iran is radioactive. And even there, we had problems

enforcing sanctions and the Iranians had creative ways getting around those sanctions. So that's one area where sometimes I think we have a tendency to default to the use of sanctions, because it's something real. It allows us to feel like we're doing something without having to pull other levers of national power, which are more problematic and risky, particularly military action. But I think this whole thing is a case study in how and why sanctions alone can't effectively deter. Had we imposed some of or all of these sanctions before he went in? I mean, according to the Biden administration, they were releasing these, you know, these,

they were leaking these, not leaking, they were releasing these you know these they were leaking these not not leaking they were broadcasting these intelligence uh uh intelligence not sources but intelligence information that they pieces of intelligence they had um that they had learned about russia's intentions if we knew of these intentions would it have made sense to impose some of these more aggressive sanctions right away to give putin pause Because to your point, he probably didn't anticipate how far we would be willing to go. Well, at a minimum, and with the obvious caveat that you can't prove a counterfactual, at a minimum, we could have reversed the decision on Nord Stream 2. And I think that would have helped our deterrent posture because I think part of Putin's

calculus was that, okay, the Germans don't want to reverse the decision on Nord Stream 2. As long as this deal is moving forward, I can get away with this. So I actually think one of the earliest things we could have done is reverse that decision. That would have helped our deterrent posture. I think we should have put in place more aggressive sanctions. I can't prove to you that that would have forced him to back down, but he had done enough already to destabilize the situation that you could have made a strong argument for punishment. Now, at the end of the day, my view is that the folly of our approach was, as I mentioned before, sanctions only. Well, sanctions combined with sternly worded statements and hashtag diplomacy, which was a total joke.

I mean, this whole hashtag I stand with Ukraine nonsense. So explain. So what do you mean by this hashtag diplomacy? It's not a term that our listeners will necessarily immediately relate to. Well, actually, you have to check me on it. I think it started with the original Ukraine crisis back in in in 2014 i think the obama administration started doing this but basically it's this idea that if you can if you post on social media hashtag i stand with ukraine you're somehow doing something you're expressing your support for the ukrainian people and the white house

had you know jen s Psaki standing there with a sign that said, I hate hashtag stand with Ukraine. They're trying to encourage as many people on social media to do that. Now, I get it. If people want to express their solidarity with the brave people of Ukraine, I'm all for it. But where it's problematic is that you think that is a substitute for actual action on the ground that might deter Putin. And it gets to the mirror imaging point. I don't think Putin cares if millions of people on social media are tweeting out hashtag I stand with Ukraine or Putin's an evil bad guy and very mean. He doesn't care, right?

We, with a Western perspective, went into this thinking the threat of sanctions and the threat of shaming Putin were going to be enough to deter him. That was the bet we made, and the bet failed, right? We had a deterrence failure. It gives me no joy to say that. I just think it's interesting. We should try and understand it so that it doesn't happen again. And my view is that the reason we had a deterrence failure is that you need hard power to deter. You need a credible threat of military force. And from the start of this crisis, President Biden signaled very strongly that he wasn't willing to use military force, particularly was not willing to increase our military presence.

And not just on the ground, but we could have done more to shift naval assets into the Black Sea, things like that. And time and time again, we relearned the lesson that I think either a Prussian or a Russian leader said that diplomacy without armaments is like music without instruments. It just doesn't work. And even if you don't want to put boots on the ground in Ukraine, and no one does, right? We don't want Americans to die in Ukraine. Why would you tell Putin that you're not willing to do it? That undermines our deterrent posture. So that is, I think, a fair critique of the Biden administration's approach. And the concern is

that this approach will extend globally, right? There'll be some naive belief that we can deter Xi, for example, from invading Taiwan by, you know, talking to him about the rules-based international order or tweeting hashtag I stand with Taiwan and threatening the use of sanctions. It's not going to work. We need to learn the lesson that our soft power draws strength from our hard power. And if you don't have credible hard power, I just don't think your soft power is going to work. It's interesting. I was in Israel about a week ago meeting with some Israeli leaders,

and they were discussing the possibility of the U.S. going back into a version of the JCPOA, a much worse version, I might add. And they kept coming back to, you know, we would never be in this jam, not this JCPOA, not the last JCPOA, if the Iranians believed that the threat of military force from the U.S. was credible. And that, as one leader put it, you know, no country wants to fight a war with America. So if they believe that that's a risk, that will give them pause. And this leader was not saying that America needs to be fighting wars

and these countries should be fighting wars with America and America needs to think about deploying forces. But he was arguing that the U.S. needs to convey that the risk is real to bad actors. And short of that, all the diplomacy and all the signaling and all that hashtags, as you point out, and even in some cases, some of the sanctions are meaningless. Well, it gets to the basic point that,

well, just quickly on the, before I forget this, on the Russia angle, I do think it's absolutely absurd. At the same time, the president, President Biden is promising to turn Putin into an international pariah. That's what he promised, talking to the American people. We are still entirely dependent upon the Russians to negotiate with the Iranians, because they refuse to negotiate with us directly. We're negotiating via Russian intermediaries and some other P5 plus one countries in Vienna.

And who stands to gain from a revival of the JCPOA? And that's not even accurate because as you alluded to, this deal will be far worse than the JCPOA, the 2015 Iran deal. Well, Russia stands to gain. Russia wants to sell uranium and weapons to the Iranians. An expanded Iran that destabilizes our traditional allies

is probably good for Russia in the region. And here's what I predict is going to happen if they announce that they have a deal. They're going to use the current energy crisis, which is to some extent self-induced by bad Biden administration. They is the Biden administration in this case, right? Which is a function of their war on domestic production, largely. It's actually not, the conflict in Ukraine has exacerbated it to be sure, but it's primarily a result of their bad energy policy.

They're going to say, well, you know what would be good and would help Americans at the pump? If we put one to two million barrels of Iranian crude on the international market. So the Iran deal will help us alleviate the economic burden here. I guarantee you that's the justification, one of the justifications that's going to be used for this going forward. And your point about, the Israeli point about military deterrence, I think is absolutely fundamental. It is the essential irony of deterrence, right? Which is, the goal of deterrence is the avoidance of war or a specific behavior.

But the irony is that in order to avoid war, you have to convince the other side that you're willing to go to war. And if you're not, or if you just don't have the steel for that, then you're going to see massive deterrence failure. So you believe the Biden administration before last month could have been, or in the early parts of last month, could have silenced their language about no forces, we're not going to deploy forces. They didn't have to say,

we will deploy forces, they just should have not been assertively saying, taking it off the table, and then made military asset and troop movements, again, not to get them activated into conflict, but to start positioning them in a way that really sent worrisome, would have sent worrisome signals to Vladimir Putin. Yeah, I think the most important moves, having more disciplined rhetoric, speaking softly and carrying a big stick, would have been – I mean we had five years to get this program right for our support to the Ukrainians. And the Biden administration for the past year delayed decisions on sending more support to Ukrainians on the ground out of fear of provoking the Russians. And because of some abstract debate about international law and whether this would make us a co-belligerent. So our program to arm the Ukrainians to the teeth was a failure.

Now, it's a failure that I think predates Biden, but I believe we could have done more to put more javelins, more stingers, more mines, more body armor, more sniper rifles in Putin's path prior to his invasion that would have made him think twice. And I actually think that's the most important thing. And I actually think that for conservatives that are skeptical of further military intervention, I actually think that model is what we need to be. We need to find lethal allies on the ground who are willing to fight for themselves, and we can play a supporting function. We can be a combat enabler. We can provide weapons, we can provide intelligence, we can provide training, and thus we don't need to send a couple battalions of Marines to Ukraine in order to fight the Russians and risk nuclear escalation if we proactively build up the combat capability of our allies.

Point one. Point two, as I alluded to before, I think we could have increased our naval presence in the Black Sea, and we're seeing the Russians close off access. I know there's this whole complicated debate about something called the Montreux Convention. And Turkey has sort of moved from NATO ally into the frenemy category at best in recent years. But there are things we could have done to increase our naval presence, as well as reestablish our naval supremacy in the Mediterranean, where we got Russians all over the place. And then third, you know, I've been an advocate for, we could have used this, we could have used Putin's threats in used putin's uh threats in order to deploy intermediate range missiles to nato's eastern front and i guarantee you that would

have made putin extremely extremely nervous now obviously this reflects my bias which is a hard power bias um but uh and and then perhaps there's more we could have done in the cyber domain to mess with Putin a little bit, but I can't prove it. It's a counterfactual. I think all three of those things combined with better rhetoric from the Biden administration, avoiding massive gaffes, like the minor incursion gaffe, and oh, by the way, not royally screwing up the evacuation of Afghanistan, or dare I say, the humiliating surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan, I believe that was connected to our deterrence failure in Ukraine. There's no way in my mind that Putin didn't look at that and think, my gosh,

the Americans are feckless right now. And I think that contributed to the crisis we're seeing in Ukraine. There is some political leaders, some analysts, think tank types, public intellectuals starting to throw around the term no-fly zone, that we should declare a no-fly zone. And I think there's a tendency, I'm struck by in some of the commentary, that by declaring a no-fly zone, a no-fly zone happens. It's just like you declare it, and then it goes into existence. Can you explain, actually, you've been in theaters of war, how a no-fly zone works? Well, I've never imposed a no-fly zone as a lowly second lieutenant. Just a matter of time. Just a matter of time. You've got a long career ahead of you.

I've always wanted to, yeah. I've always wanted to go to the Yalu in North Korea, and I've always wanted to impose a no-fly zone, my two goals in life. But it's an extraordinarily complex and costly operation that doesn't just require massive use of air assets. It also requires a significant presence on the ground to make it workable and effective. And the reason I'm not willing to go that far right now, and I think people are kind of glibly throwing around no-fly zone. In fact, I might have been Jonah Goldberg or somebody who said the other day, it's like Michael Scott on The Office declaring bankruptcy. Declaring bankruptcy, right?

I declare bankruptcy. I just declare it. You just declare it. Yeah, just declare it. No, no, it is declaring. It's an act of war, too. It's an act of war it's an act of war right that's my point my point is i don't think people fully appreciate that by declaring a no-fly zone you are whoever declares it is formally entering the theater of war as a combatant yeah and it was interesting too is it seems the russians have yet to establish air supremacy uh over throughout the

country of Ukraine. Now, that could be related to what you suggested earlier, which is that they don't want to go full Grozny Aleppo just yet because they want to preserve the infrastructure and would like to just have effective control of the country or install a Vichy government in the country and Finlandizes the entire country in their direction. But I don't know. So I don't think we're there yet, both as a matter of, you know,

what is necessary militarily, but also as a matter of national policy, that would be a massive escalation. And so I disagree with those proposals right now. And I don't think they're yet necessary. Okay, so you have been an outspoken leader on foreign policy and national security issues for a number of years. I've been very impressed with just how you've articulated America's role in the world over the years, which we see less and less of among members of Congress of either party, meaning leaders, elected leaders, willing to stake a lot of their public platform and their office on these international and national security issues. So you're back in Green Bay now. You're

talking to constituents while this war is going on. I want to pull up a poll here from a Washington Post-ABC poll that's been tracking American attitudes towards Russia over the last two decades. And the question is, thinking about Russia, do you feel that Russia is a close ally of the U.S., is friendly but not a close ally, is not friendly but not an enemy, or is it unfriendly and an enemy of the United States? Okay, so the number of enemy of the United States slash at best unfriendly is 80%. According to the Washington Post-ABC poll, 80% of those sampled say that Russia is unfriendly at best or an enemy at worst. And that number, you're going all the way back to like 1979 numbers in terms of American attitudes towards Russia.

Came way down in the early 90s. Obviously, the Soviet Union collapses, bubbles up a little bit, but basically stays down for most of the 90s. 2000s, Soviet Union collapses, bubbles up a little bit, but basically stays down for most of the 90s. 2000s, it starts to go up. And then in the last few years, like a rocket ship, 80% of Americans, according to the poll, believe Russia is unfriendly to the U.S. or an enemy of the U.S. How much of that do you see reflected when you're talking to your constituents back in Green Bay? Well, what's interesting is that I would imagine the parties, notwithstanding the current crisis, probably come to the Russia question in different ways, right?

I would imagine the Democrats' negative view of Russia is largely a function of the 2016 election and their perception that Russia intervened and tipped the balance somehow, whereas Republicans would be more related to um the current crisis i guess that would just be my i don't know if you digged into the data that would be interesting uh to me um on the ground i would say this has not yet had the same impact uh in northeast wisconsin as the afghanistan debacle did i think because that involved the abandonment of American citizens and allies, it was much more of a gut punch where, I mean, I was just blown away by how strong the concern was in Northeast Wisconsin over Afghanistan.

And I think even a lot of people voicing it were of the opinion that we're skeptical of continued presence in Afghanistan, but we're ashamed of the way in which we withdraw and felt embarrassed and don't like that feeling of America getting pushed around on the world stage. There's a little bit of that going on right now, but I don't think it's at the same level. But I don't think there's a lot of people that buy into this argument that, okay, you know, the Russians are actually a long term, a partner with us in the competition with China, we need to work with them, etc, etc. I think that's a very small percentage of people. And again, I think though your average person in northeast Wisconsin isn't sitting there

monitoring every single thing that's happening in Ukraine, they don't like this feeling of America looking weak on the world stage. And when you combine all these things, Afghanistan, Russia, just the looming threat posed by China, the threat from Iran, it all contributes to this general sense that things are not going in our direction. And it almost makes me feel a little bit like 2016. And the conventional wisdom is that foreign policy doesn't matter in an election. But think about what had happened in that year and the year prior. We had a string of incidents, starting with the rise of ISIS, continuing with the very acute expressions of Salafi jihadism throughout Europe, domestically in things, a lot of negative fallout from the precipitous withdrawal in Iraq.

All of these things added up, I think, to the American people not feeling safe and not liking it. And I think Trump harnessed that feeling to great effect. I had a lot of people telling me in that campaign, asking me, is it safe to go to a Packers game? If the state of American leadership is languished such that it reaches Lam is it safe to go to a packers game if the state of american leadership is language languished such that it reaches lambeau field you have a problem so i guess the lesson is foreign policy doesn't matter until it does and i think right now the american people don't feel safe they just don't feel safe with the the the combination of all

these the the collapse in our position in various parts of the world that makes i remember i remember i think part of what you're diagnosing is when it feels like an abstract discussion, it feels okay to be disconnected from national security and international affairs. But when it feels like a real threat or that something's just not working properly and we're kind of like under siege, not literally under siege, but practically under siege globally, it becomes a lot less abstract. It reminds me after the 2010 midterm elections where there was this libertarian strain in Republican politics that had really taken off.

Rand Paul was on the cover of Time magazine. We soon after, within a couple of years, had basically fully withdrawn more or less from Iraq. And it was the libertarian, isolationist moment. And then I think it was 2013 where those two Americans taken hostage by ISIS were killed on, you could watch them being slaughtered. And public opinion completely shifted.

And suddenly it felt real. And it felt like it mattered, even if it wasn't impacting people's daily lives. And I do think we're sort of in something comparable to that now. Yeah, I guess this is what – maybe he disagreed, but what Walter Russell May would call the Jacksonian impulse in American foreign policy. There are limits to how much we're willing to get pushed around. And as much as we'd like to, and we do this throughout our history, retreat to Fortress America, at some point we realize that that's just not a viable strategy and that if we don't lead, no one else will. And maybe the American people are waking up to the fact that, as I said earlier, there are bad guys in the world that want to destroy us. Some actually want to kill us. Others would just like us to get out of their neighborhood and for them to dominate the global

economy and to be able to hold us economically hostage for the next 100 years. But they don't share our values, and they are committed to destroying the American idea. And that may seem like an extreme statement, but that's my view based on my studying these issues for a while. Well, with regard to risk to the American idea, I do want to switch topics before we hop on a recent speech you delivered that relates to your work on the Armed Services Committee and a specific subcommittee that you are currently the ranking member on. And if the Republicans win the majority, I guess you'll be chairman of. You recently delivered an address at Hillsdale College where you laid out what will, you know, this issue or a concern you have of the woke agenda, which we tend to think of something

that's happening in schools and universities, in some cases the workplace, and journalism, but your concern is now infecting the military. And you cited published Marine Corps doctrine, which states, and I quote, that the military has two basic functions, waging war and preparing for war. I'm quoting here, any military activities that do not contribute to the conduit of a present war are justifiable only if they contribute to preparedness for a future one. So do you believe we're actually moving away from our fidelity to that doctrine in military affairs? I do. And to be fair, it's not just because of the effort by the Biden administration over the last year to impose so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on the Pentagon, thereby adding

to the massive Pentagon bureaucracy. It is also a result of that pre-existing bureaucracy and the way in which rather than ruthlessly focusing on warfighting, we're imposing bureaucratic requirements onto our warfighters that don't really have anything to do with whether they can close with and destroy the enemy in future war. What concerns me about this, and I was admittedly initially tempted to just dismiss it and kind of as political theater. Of course, the Biden administration, you know, has a woke mindset. They have a lot of leftists that influence them. They seem to have bought into identity politics. One of the first executive orders they put out was about, you know, combating systemic racism in the federal government. So I just, I thought, okay, they're going to make noise about this, but it's not going to be a real thing that affects the military. But the more I

dug into that, the more, the more concerned I became for a variety of reasons. One, I think it's fair to say that this DEI movement and the broader identity politics philosophy of which it's part has, in some meaningful sense, destroyed higher education, or at least made higher education hostile to viewpoint diversity. And that leads to my second concern. Okay, we talk about diversity as this intrinsically good thing. And I think most Americans understand that, right? On some level, we're a big melting pot society. You know, we draw from all over the world. That's a cool thing. I like it. I actually think it's a strategic advantage relative to communist China and at least the Chinese Communist Party, which is a profoundly racist institution that advocates the Han ethnic worldview at the expense of minorities, be they ethnic or religious minorities. There was actually an Office of Net Assessment report written a decade ago about Chinese racism and why we should exploit it to our advantage. But, and this is a big, big but, two points. One, when military leaders talk about diversity,

as they do endlessly now, and this was the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Defense Austin, one of his top priorities, they talk about it solely in terms of racial and gender diversity. So the question is, what type of diversity are we interested in? In my opinion, the diversity that could probably improve unit performance, both military and civilian, is intellectual diversity. But that is, of course, not the diversity they're talking about. And my concern with the DEI movement is that it's hostile to intellectual diversity. And what do you mean by intellectual diversity? Explain that. People, different ideas about how a job should be done. And the military should be an apolitical organization, but it should draw from people that are conservative, that are liberal, all in between, but put their politics at the door in order to serve in defense of the

United States. What the DEI movement is suggesting, no, we need to focus myopically on the color of people's skin as well as their gender. And I think that's problematic for a variety of reasons. One, it seems like we're moving away from the goal of a colorblind society. Two, if it results in different standards, that would be incredibly damaging to the military. And three, the specific narrative that's being pushed right now is that the military post-January 6th is endemic with extremists, specifically white supremacist extremists. That's not accurate. Well, you actually pointed out there's literally no social science data or survey data to prove that.

This is cited all the time, and there's nothing to substantiate it. There's nothing to substantiate it, and it is, I'm obsessed with the bad social science underlying this claim. One, because it's going to turn off a lot of people that would otherwise be inclined to join the military or stay in the military. And we need dedicated people. We have an all-volunteer force. We need as many of the best and brightest as we possibly can. And two, it's not true. And we should be interested in the truth. And the military is citing all of these studies

without taking any time to examine whether or not they're true. In my speech, I referenced something called Task Force One Navy, which was a report that the Navy put out after the death of George Floyd. And if you dig into this report, and again, all these Navy leaders are going out there saying diversity is our strength, diversity is our strength. One, the head of Navy personnel went so far as to suggest we need to reinstate photos for selection board so that skin color can factor into promotion. That is wrong on a number of levels. But if you dig into this report, they try and quantify it, right? They say diverse teams are 58% more likely than non-diverse teams to accurately assess the situation.

So first of all, the idea that something like this could be quantified is absurd. It represents sort of what is most absurd about political science right now. But then you go to the footnote and you look at what they're actually citing. They're citing a 2014 article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which took 180 strangers who were trained in business and finance and divided them into diverse teams or non-diverse teams.

So the diverse teams were teams where you had white people briefly interact with ethnic minorities. And then they went to their separate cubicles in front of computer terminals to make fake trades in a fake stock market. This is a study evaluating price bubbles in experimental markets. So these methods are so bad. I don't think this is generalizable to the private sector, let alone to the specific business of asking young men and women to kill or be killed for their country. And that's my final point. I'd say even if you believe that DEI is a constructive movement in the private sector,

and again, there's no data to suggest that DEI programs have actually improved performance or resulted in a more inclusive environment. In fact, the latest meta-analyses we have suggest the opposite, that it actually increases intergroup hostility. It doesn't alleviate it. So we're actually ignoring the social science such as it exists. But even if you believe it's good in the private sector, the military is a different thing. It's a different thing to ask someone to fight for their country than to maximize returns in the private sector. And so sorry to go on a rant there.

No, no, no. It's a great rant. And I just hope you'll have the platform to – I know you're already working on it, but even do more about it uh after january uh 2023 after the midterm elections because i yeah go ahead can i make one final point on the stand i'm sorry because now i'm fired up i know we're over our time i'm fine if you're fine okay the mill okay are there are the racists in the military uh probably it's a massive organization

with millions of people and we shouldn't tolerate that we shouldn't tolerate any form of discrimination but the military was integrated in 1948 right i mean it led the way that's something we should be proud of you know by the way if you read memoirs for the korean war and i cited one in my speech there's a great one called colder than hell by a mortar platoon commander a marine mortar platoon commander in the korean war and he said something which i think is true today it's actually it's even better today much better he said okay there were some people from the south that were initially hesitant about this but the overwhelming feeling in the marine corps was that the politicians had hollowed out our military and we needed all the men we could get so whether you were black or

you're white a marine was a marine and And I can tell you for Marines that are at the tip of the spear, this is certainly my experience. No one cares about the color of anyone's skin. The saying is we all bleed green, right? We're all on the same team, one team, one fight. I worked in diverse units. So this idea that the left is trying to push that because there were some veterans there on January 6thth that suddenly the military is a racist institution it's just not true i could argue it's one of the least racist institutions uh in america in fact given the military's history i think it's very easy to argue um so uh in any event this is i i appreciate the rant it's not a rant it's an important uh it's an important debate and i'm glad someone is grabbing it and digging into it because it's the kind of issue that i i think most

most voters are not paying attention to most most citizens aren't paying attention to it's just it's one of these issues that stays within the confines of certain aspects of our government but if no one puts a spotlight on it we're not going to know know about it. And the risks to us from a security standpoint, from the health of our society are staggering. Indeed. Thank you for this conversation, Mike. As always, you leave us a lot to think about and it actually got us a little fired up.

So that's also good. And hopefully we'll have you back on the podcast. I appreciate it, Dan. And I look forward to joining you again. All right, great. Take care. That's our show for today. To keep up with Mike Gallagher, you can follow him on Twitter at one of two handles, at Mike4WI, at M-I-K-E-4-F-O-R-W-I's in Wisconsin, or at Rep Gallagher, G-A-L-L-A-G-H-E-R.

Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.