The Bulwark Podcast - Mark Hertling: Trump (Still) Hates Europe

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

Heaping scorn and disdain on Europe, Trump called its countries decaying and its leaders weak, but the U.S. likely needs Europe more than they need us. And while POTUS is whining that Zelensky won't consider his rigged deal with Putin, the corruption of Trump's negotiating team is off the charts, with Witkoff and Kushner trying to work a land deal rather than a peace treaty. Meanwhile, the boat bombings seem to be about performative politics, Hegseth is pushing out another high-ranking black officer—for voicing concerns about the strikes on alleged drug-runners in the Caribbean—and where is the video of that Sept 2 restrike that killed two survivors? Lt. Gen Mark Hertling joins Tim Miller. show notes: Hertling's piece on Trump's new National Security Strategy Hertling on the potential misuse of Special Forces in the boat strikes Remembering National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, by Hertling Email for Tim's mailbag: [e-mail] Trump's Politico interview Exclusive $35 off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/BULWARK. Promo Code BULWARK

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Event ends 1-226. Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Really quick before we get to the guest, I'm going to be doing a little holiday mailbag segment for Bullwork Plus members. It's a good time of year to give somebody in your life a Bullwork Plus subscription. You can go to the Bullwork. dot com and and uh get signed up for that you get access to the secret podcast you get access to jvils

triad the best newsletter in the business and uh you know now i'm going to be asking your more fun questions we asked about this about a week ago for you submit some questions i'm going to tell you i got i got some boring questions and i got a lot of rants disguised his questions it's a holiday mailback send us some fun stuff too you know send me some fun questions about your life and then i'll do serious stuff to it the email is bulwark podcast at the bulwolwork We're going to start doing it at the end of the show from time to time. So I'd appreciate it if you could, you know, I don't know, titillate me. Make me laugh.

Send me some fun questions. All right, today's guest. He served for 38 years in the U.S. Army and retired after being commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe. We're welcome him back to the show, but it's the first time I'm welcoming him as an official member of the team. It's Bullwark Military analyst Mark Hurtling. What's going on, sir? Hey, Tim.

How are you doing today? It is great to be a part of your team and the bulwark team and all the great people there that I've come to know over the last month, super group of people. We appreciate your expertise. I also appreciate your running circles around some of the other folks on your output, okay? I'm looking side eye, some of my other colleagues, saying you've got to keep up to the Hurtling standard now, which I appreciate.

Yeah, yeah, that's it. Out this morning, Politico got an interview with President Trump in exchange for providing him with a new fake trophy. They named it the most influential man in Europe. I want to read you one of the highlights from that interview. Again, this was about the most influential man in Europe award. Trump said this about our allies in Europe. Most European nations, they're decaying. They're decaying. They should be freaked out by what they're doing to their countries. They're destroying their countries and their people. The questioner asked, does that mean they won't be our allies anymore? Trump replies, well, it depends. You know, it depends. Then the reporter asks again,

Do you think that many of them are just weak or do you not really want to be allies with them? And he replies, I think they're weak, but I also think they want to be so politically correct. I think they don't know what to do. Europe doesn't know what to do. Not exactly a kind of a bold statement there in support of our European allies that have, you know, worked with us on so many the military engagements that you were working on. I'm wondering what your reaction is to that, given your experience and what you think the implications, Becky.

Well, you know, I know we're going to talk about the national security strategy later on, but, you know, that's been my focus the last couple of days, trying to parse that thing. And what he's saying in the press now is not a whole lot different than what the document says about Europe. It's, in my view, it was very insulting. The Europeans see it the same way. I've been related to many of the countries in Europe from old colleagues in the military and also in their government. and have been talking to him over the last few years, they were suspect during the first Trump administration. I think during the Biden administration, there was a pretty strong effort to try and rebuild that alliance and help them understand that we're a part of it. But in the national security strategy, and in these words from this morning, it really appears like Trump has been very condescending across the board. he sees Europe as he sees the rest of the world as pawns of the United States. What do we have to do to get them to support us more?

And he forgets that I think that there's 49 countries in Europe, 50 if you count Russia, and they each one have their own national security priorities and economic priorities and military priorities and diplomatic priorities. And yet he really seems to be wanting to funnel them into a transactional relationship where they're doing nothing but supporting him and his goals. That's not the way the world order works. So that's what concerns me the most about the strategy and some of the insult he's been leveraging against various countries. Yeah, let's just go ahead and dig right into that national security strategy first, and then we'll kind of go around the world. And Trump had

some comments in that political interview that I'll circle back to from our various entanglements. What is the national security strategy? Who cares, you know, about a document on paper? Is it just, you know, the government puts out a lot of BS, right? Like, why does this matter? Well, two things. You know, it's interesting you said that because Elliot Cohen, who's at Johns Hopkins, one of their MRI professors who I know very well. Co-host of the Shield of the Republic podcast. There you go. Great guy. And he is exceedingly smart. He taught our son get a master's degree from there. And what's interesting is he kind of made a flip comment. that no one reads the national security strategy. And what he meant was no one outside the strategic influencers and the governments and all that. But it is a strategy, first of all, that provides nesting for other strategies like the national defense strategy, like the joint planning strategy, like the state department, the engagement strategy. So it is a top-down base document,

a capstone document that other people will take and then say, okay, how do we write our own strategy. And I'll give you an example. And I talk about this in the bulwark article I wrote that when I was the J-7 on the joint staff, the guy in charge of war plans and transformation, when Bush's national security strategy came out after 9-11, we were pressured into writing a new national defense strategy telling various combatant commanders around the world, here's what we got to do now. So it was taking that base document and saying, okay, what does this mean for the military? What does it mean for military acquisitions, for planning, for contingencies, for training? What are we preparing to do? Then when it gets down to the combatant

commanders, the four-star generals and admirals all over the world, they have to make their theater strategy based on the national strategy. So later on, when I was in European command as the commander of the U.S. Army, I watched Admiral Stravides put together the European Command, Continental or Regional Security Plan. And it told me what I had to do as the three-star Army commander, conduct theater security cooperation with a focus on certain countries, be prepared to deploy, re-look your contingency plans. So there's a bevy of actions that come out of the strategy. And that was one of my main comments about Trump's strategy because he said strategy is a relationship between the ends and the means. And he forgot the middle thing, which a strategy also has to do,

and that's the ways. How do you execute the things you're being told to do? And what kind of actions does it take to incorporate what you're trying to do for an end state? Mark Warner was on with Bill Crystal on Sunday and was talking about just how striking it was to him how little attention was given to China, for example, in the strategy, versus how much attention was given to, like, micromanaging how Europe should manage, you know, oversight of posting on social media platforms, right? And like, there was a lot of written about the culture war stuff in Europe and how Europe is getting out of step where MAGA wants to be and relatively little, you know, for, you know,

the things that are actual potential national security threats to us. Either you kind of riff on that or were there other kind of elements of the strategy that really struck you? Well, what I thought was the most interesting is he started the chapter on what we want or how we're going to get some things was the title of the chapter and I'm pulling it up right now. He started off with a description of what was going in in the Western Hemisphere and the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrum. And what he said in that section was, and I'll quote it, after years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to historic Americans' preeminence in the Western hemisphere. That was a shocker to me. There currently isn't a whole lot of threats. So he's

looking at a strategy that refocuses on one area versus other areas in the world. Then he flowed from that to China. And as you said, he was pretty emphatic about certain things. things within China. Then when he got to Europe in the Middle East, for Europe, it was just kind of a hand wave of how bad they were and how they've declined and how the society in 20 years was going to be non-European. So there was some racist overtones in there. And it just, again, was a proclamation of America first. And when I found the most depressing of the whole thing, Tim, was the fact that there was, I think, one sentence, one sentence in the entire document about building allies and using the strength of alliances.

Everything is about what America will do and what America wants. And whereas that may create some strategic end states, you know, what I've found in this world and after four decades in the military, if we're doing it alone, it's going to get real ugly fast. And he hasn't really looked at the concept of working with others. Now, I know Steve Bannon and Steve Miller probably say, well, that's globalization and you're a woke general and you don't know what you're talking about. But we can't do anything alone today because of supply chains, global interference, and emerging threats. That's the other thing I'd talk about too, which is not mentioned at all in this. It's just currently the strategy really focuses on the state of the world

as it is today and what he wants it to be. I do have got to correct you on one thing. I think we have a couple of allies that they're focused on. El Salvador, Cutter. Yeah, he brings a lot of connections with people in the Middle East because of transactional abilities. So are those allies? Or are they just means of getting some kind of transaction

and making America greater? To your point on allies, this was Antonio Costa, head of the European Council in response to the strategy. He said allies do not. not threaten to interfere in the democratic life or the domestic political choices of their allies. They respect them. And you can just sense the tensions growing. And look, look, there's always been various tensions and you're not, you know, world leaders aren't always going to agree. In the Bush era, there were tensions with France. And, you know, you could go, you could go back.

Overall, obviously, Obama had tensions with Israel. And so you go through the list. But this seems like an across the board of Trump trashing of the allies, particularly in Europe. And given your time there, You know, our colleague, Jonathan, last also wrote this week about how NATO, you know, it's kind of leading to a crumbling of NATO, just peeking behind the curtain here for people in our staff meeting on Monday. You indicated you might not be all the way on JVL's view on that, so we can explore that a little bit. But I'm just wondering, like, what do you think the implications are in particular with

that, like the allied relationships with Europe threats to NATO and how they're reacting to this strategy. Yeah, the folks I'm talking to in Europe, both. both the military and a few government officials from various countries, especially the Baltics and the Nordic countries, who are sort of the new NATO. With Sweden and Finland joining recently, they have taken an onus of kind of building a block. They call it the Baltic-Nordic-8 in their northern region, which didn't exist before because

they realize the threats they face. But what I'd say is when you talk to them, they will tell you they are angry when you finally get into a three-bure conversation. You know, the first part of it is politeness and respect and all that because of past relationships. But by the time the third beer is down, they're talking about how pissed they are at America and how they don't think we're going to recover from this very well. I tend to disagree with that. I think the alliances will come back together because of emerging threats and our realization that we need them more than they need us.

And it will come back to that. And that was the commentary I made about JVL's comments that I think we're going to attempt to rebuild our relationship once this administration is done because we're going to realize we need it more than they need us. All right. I have not bought a single Christmas present, not one, December 9th. Concerned about that.

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acute impact of that fraying, kind of alliance between us and Europe. Ukraine has gone through a period that's, I think, a little bit shaky. You were on this very early. I remember you wrote days after Russia invaded, talked about how people would be surprised by how strong Ukraine's preparation will be and how weak the Russian military will be. And that is really borne out, you know, in the ensuing years. But Ukraine lately is dealing with some corruption issues related to Zelensky's chief of staff. and some battlefield issues, you know, Russia having some successful attacks on infrastructure.

How do you kind of see the state of play there and like what's needed? Yeah, it's interesting. The first thing you brought up was the corruption issues because that's always been an issue in Ukraine. The very first time I went to Ukraine in 2008, I think it was, I took the secretary of the army with me because he wanted to see how our alliance partners were working together. So when we were flying up there, he said, so tell me about Ukraine. And I said, well, it's a very corrupt country. And he goes, well, wait a minute. Hurtling, he says, you're taking me to a corrupt country? Why are we doing that to show interoperability? And I said, because they have potential. Their corruption is based on what's

left over from the Soviet regime, and they're trying to get through that, but it is a culture that's going to be difficult to overcome. My counterpart in Ukraine, a guy named Colonel General Verobeoff, one of the first things he asked me to do with him as a partner was help him get rid of the old Soviet generals that were in. in his army, which was fascinating. He told me, he said, the government's corrupt, and this was in 2010, he said, the government's corrupt, they're working on it. He said, but I want to make the army better faster, and he did. You know, if there's every once in a while a guy popping up in the Ukrainian cabinet or society that's corrupt and taking money, the only response I would

have is, well, how many corrupt Americans have we seen in the last week doing exactly the same thing, you know, in terms of getting pardons or stealing money or stealing cash or, you know, whatever, name that tune, every government's got corruption if it allows it. So I'm not excusing it, but it happens. I take your point that like there's going to be corruption in these sort of situations. It's not to excuse it. It's just kind of the reality. I do wonder if these two things are related, though, where Zelensky is, starts to get underwater politically because of concerns about corruption around him while they are a little bit more vulnerable, you know, on the military side than they have been.

If he's feeling more politically vulnerable, that might make Zelensky act differently, you know, vis-a-vis these negotiations, the pro-Russia negotiations than he may have months ago. What do you make of that? Yeah. And what you see, though, is, you know, he was, I think Zelensky was willing to adapt. He wanted to see what Trump was going to do for him or with him. It didn't happen.

It's been swayed both ways by this crazy negotiating team that has no understanding of either the culture of Russia or the culture of Ukraine, and that's gone back and forth. So now I think he's turning more toward the major European partners and saying, how can you help me out? And he's seeing that they are going to give them help because they are also breaking from the United States based on some of these insults and what they're seeing, based on the corruption of the negotiating. team. I mean, sweet, Jesus, you've got Whitkoff and Kushner and others who are working land deals as opposed to true peace treaties. And then you've got Kellogg, who should know better, saying some crazy things about what Ukraine is looking for. And, you know, it's interesting, Tim, because you mentioned my comments early on in the war. I was in my hotel room and across the street from CNN when the war started because they asked me to come there. And I listed five different strategic objectives of Putin, and four of them had to do with Ukraine and breaking their will, you know, taking their capital, destroying their army, taking the Black Sea ports.

The fifth one was further dividing the United States and further dividing NATO. The only ones he's succeeded on is that last one. Ukraine continues to stay strong, whereas we're the one that's kind of faltering a little bit. How did the, like, your successors who spent so much time in Europe and worked with Ukrainian military and understand the enemy and the threat from Putin, how do these guys stomach listening to, you know, an outer borough real estate man talk about how wonderful Putin is? I like, you know, the breakdown between like having Wickhoff and Kushner, you know, trying to rig this has got to be just unbelievably galling to the people doing the actual work. It is. And if I were to open up my behind-the-scene DMs and text messages with former colleagues, you would see some of that. It is, you know, it is mind-boggling what those of us who understand the continent see in terms of individuals who are really neophytes at dealing with some of the Europeans. I mean, even Secretary Rubio, the first press conference I saw him in, you know, I just thought to myself, he's making every single mistake that any congressional delegation makes when they come to a foreign country. They're being condescending and, you know, just doing things that are not an understanding of how masterly, or masterful, I guess, Putin and Lavrov are,

and they've been in command of that country for 20-some years. And here you've got these new guys coming in thinking they can bowl them over with a land deal. It's just ridiculous. And I think Zelensky sees that, but he didn't want to insult anybody because he realized a lot of the United state's support was helping them. And that's the essence of what's going on there. Yeah, you'll be shocked that in the Politico interview. Trump, again, is kind of dumping the blame on Zelensky saying like he feels like we've got a good deal on the table and he wishes Zelensky would consider it more closely. So it's just time and again to this whole process, you know, he vacillates back and forth between, you know, being fully in a Russian, you know, propaganda mode. And then like some people

bring him back on side and, you know, he gets annoyed that Putin isn't doing what he's asking for, but like the pressure is never put on Putin. No, never. He's intimidated by Putin. So the pressure is always put on Zeletsky. It's a schoolyard bully thing. Yeah. I said something to someone the other day who was saying, why are we supporting Ukraine? And, you know, I used the World War II analogy. Okay, then why didn't we support Hitler, even though we were told that he was taking the Sudenton land and he was killing Jews in the Holocaust and, you know, he was going to kind of go into hiding for a couple of years while he rebuilt his army and then reattacked into Belgium. Would you be okay with that?

Because that's exactly the mode of operation of President Putin. That's what he does. He's a criminal, a crook, and a dictator. And he just wants more land and more property. So I talked about the Whitkoff and kind of how military, generals and experts must feel about like dealing with his clownishness. That is also true for the sitting secretary of defense as a former weekend talk show co-host. There's some buzz out there in the right-wing media, which, you know, you've reason to believe that they would have insight into this stuff, since it's, you know, all there are people that are on the inside, that there is an internal battle happening at DOD.

And I think Laura Lumer called it a coming coup attempt with Daniel Driscoll, the Army Secretary, trying to displace Hegset. I'm wondering what your sense is of, you know, Hegseth's standing at this point with the military folks. It's kind of noteworthy that, you know, I mean, obviously Trump still had his support and he's still been very visible, but like he hasn't been included, you know, he's been left out notably of some of the military meetings recently. I was surprised when Secretary Driscoll of the Army went to Ukraine and Geneva. that's very unusual. And where was Hexath during this period? I guess there was something else going on at the Pentagon or maybe a push-up, pull-up contest or something. I don't know.

Something more important. But it just seems strange. Why is it unusual? Just for people who don't know, it says, why would it be unusual for the Secretary of the Army to go to this? Well, the Secretary of the Army is responsible for manning, equipping, and training the Army. You know, he's not all that involved in diplomatic affairs or defense with allied nations. I mean, the secretaries go out and see things and all that, but they normally focus on what the Army is doing in Europe as an example. But he was at the table for the diplomacy action, and that just really is kind of unusual.

I mean, even Secretary Dyscal does not have a whole lot of experience in Europe, does not have a whole lot of experience with war fighting. I think he only spent three or four years in the Army. So it's those kind of things that give you pause. Having said that, Secretary Heggseth doesn't have a whole lot of experience. with Europe either or how to do diplomacy. So maybe it was better that they kept them at home. I mean, you look back at the previous administration when Secretary Austin would go places, he had the immediate gravitas of being a former four-star general, knowing the area of operation, knowing what the military does. And he represented the Defense Department. Well, I don't think we

see the same thing in Hegseff other than lethality versus legality. It's interesting. It was not So long ago that the Secretary of Defense wasn't supposed to be a uniform military officer. And like now we go through this phase. We had Mattis kind of in the first Trump term and people are kind of like, okay, we're going to let this go because we want to have an adult in the room around Trump. And then Biden continues that with Austin. And now, I guess, some discussion of Driscoll. Do you have any thoughts on just sort of that change and how things are now

and whether there's any risks there? Yeah, I think there is risk in that because it sort of blends the civil military relationship. And here I am talking and dissing a little bit on the political masters who are conducting these engagements. And I shouldn't be doing that. I'm trying to be respectful, just making an assessment. But when you put someone in that position, they need to be separated from the demands of the military, but at the same time understanding what the military does. That organization of the defense, Department is huge. It's the second largest cabinet in government with close to three million employees, if you want to call them that, and worldwide obligations. So you got to have somebody

that's pretty savvy. And I think Mattis was a good choice, even though someone, a lot of people pushed back on that. And Trump understood soon why it wasn't a good choice for him, because Mattis was kind of given the example. I think Austin was a good choice to repair relationships. And that's what Biden chose him to do more than anything else and get the military out from under what had happened in the first Trump administration. We're going to need the same thing again after this administration with another Secretary of Defense. It's not saying that it requires a military guy, but it better be somebody who really understands the organization and is smart enough to realize that it's got to be run as a business, too. All right. Let's go down to our war, non-war in Venezuela.

I don't know what we're calling this. We're just bombing boats with no official declaration of war. You know, the big news of the past a couple days has been, you know, the briefing of six members of Congress over this strike. You're saying we shouldn't call it a double tap. We're calling it a restrike. What are you saying we should call this? Restrike. Reengagement.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, a secondary restrike in the Caribbean. And the big takeaway from this is that, like, all of the Democratic members who saw this basically said that it was. was totally inappropriate and shocking to watch the video. Some of the Republicans who saw it are not commenting. Tom Cotton is the one who is commenting, and he's sending a story where these two guys were apparently in the water and we're about to turn over the boat that had been bombed and get back in it, go meet up with some friends of theirs, and then bring deadly drugs to

America to kill millions of Americans. I'm wondering what you think about Tom Cotton's assessment and what we've heard so far from the hill. Well, it just surprised me that. it was so one-sided and so lacking in common sense. If you're with 11 of your buddies and you've just been blown up and nine of those 11 are killed and your boats capsized and your drugs are floating away, you're not going to be thinking about continuing the mission. You know, having been blown up myself, that's the last thing on your mind. You just want to, you know, kind of get the unwrung bell and continue the operation and get to safety. But we've got to pause here for a second. Tell us about when you were blown up.

You can't just let that slide. I was involved in an IED blast in 2003. So we were in a Humvee. And when I say blown up, I was not physically blown away. Yeah, I know. I know. But, you know, it spilled my coffee. Let's put it that way.

And everybody that was in the truck was the same way. But when you experienced that kind of explosion right next to your vehicle. And in our case, none of us were harmed. It just blew out the windshield, blew off the, you know, some of the side panel and stuff, it still rocks your boat, no pun intended. So when you see nine of your 11 friends killed, your boats upside down, and by the way, this is the first time it happened. So these guys are like, what the fuck just happened to me, you know?

That's a great point. This is not like one of the ones where now some of them have got to be expecting it or concerned about it, you know, because the news gets out. Yeah, if I'm going out on a boat, I might get blown up. This one was like, what in the hell just happened? So that's an issue. But I don't understand why Senator Cotton would do something like that because he's a military veteran. He should know better.

It's just dumb. Or there's an agenda in there somewhere, which I think is probably the case. I talked about this a little bit with Bill yesterday. But now that we have a military expert, we should at least somebody has experience. Like, let's just even take them at the story that they're telling, just to try to even understand what would possibly be in some. the minds of Heng Seth and, you know, the admiral that's in there, Bradley. So they bombed this boat. They're two guys in the water.

Allegedly, they're saying that there's another boat that they're going to meet up with and that they're worried about these guys. Even taking them at face value that that is what happened, wouldn't the right thing to do then be, okay, well, let's interdict them. Who is on the other boat? You know, what kind of information can we gather? Like, wouldn't there be a rationale for interdicting them, interviewing them, grabbing them out of the sea, you know, rather than doing what we did? There would be very good rationale because, number one, you're not committing a crime.

Number two, you're gaining intelligence. Number three, you can pick up any drugs that are still remaining and put them in your Coast Guard cutter. And that's the thing, Tim. It's not like we don't have any experience with this. We've been doing Coast Guard interdiction of boats on the high seas probably for 20 or 30 years. And in fact, it was interesting because when I was a one-star general, I went on a trip to Key West, and we literally watched a Coast Guard vessel launch an aircraft because they had on their radar or sonar, whatever, they had a boat that was coming in, a cigarette boat, and a Coast Guard cutter can't keep up with one of these Go Fast boats. So they launched a helicopter with a sniper hanging off the side, shot out the engine, got out, captured the boat, captured the people who were transporting the drug, took all the drugs.

And it was an interdiction effort, and they likely got a whole lot of intelligence about where the drugs came from, who the cartels were, who these members were. And in that case, frankly, all of them were just mules looking to get paid. They weren't drug runners. They were just people trying to get a salary. And that's what happens a lot in combat. That's what we do. So I don't, I truthfully don't understand why we brought special operators into this to launch drone aircraft and destroy boats and kill people other than performative politics.

It doesn't make any sense. It's also telling you, you say the performative politics. And another piece of evidence that they're doing this for performative politics is that they're releasing all these videos, which is not standard operations that we've seen in the past in situations like this and for time to time. but, you know, just to, like, release the video of every strike on these boats. But they are not releasing the video of that restrike, of the subsequent strike, and even though Trump had promised. And I think that tells you a lot. It does. And what I'll tell you, too, to carry this on with Secretary Hegsef the other day, saying, oh, we're going to sanitize it, and we're going to clean it up to make sure it's, you know,

there's no sources or methods or tactics, techniques, and procedures is what he said. What I'll tell you, again, I go back. This attack happened on the 2nd of September, knowing how military people do things. There's a log. There's, you know, the film is already sanitized. There's nothing to look at other than the strike. And you're seeing something that based on audio, video, and written documents or type documents that says, here's exactly what happened on a TikTok, the date to date, to date, to date.

Yeah. So I don't know why it's taking so long. This thing happened three months ago. it's either releasable or it's not. And it's just an excuse to not release it. That's my view of it. I mean, every operation I ever conducted, a strike against a facility or a group of people when I was a division commander in Iraq, we had the film, we had the log, we had the

input to a computer and what we were doing. We had the rationale for why we were doing it. And right next to us, there was a lawyer saying, yeah, this is, we're okay. It ain't that tough, is what I said before. here's what I think too if I can continue on because today is the most interesting part of this because you not only have continual debate about what Admiral Bradley said today Admiral Holsey who is the Southern Command Commander whose area of operation this was occurring in who had a fight with Secretary Hegg Seth and by all reports and his lawyers had a discussion that was

contentious with the Department of Defense lawyers about what was going on, and suddenly he was asked to retire in the middle of October, that testimony is going on in Congress today, too, with a much smaller group. Yeah, talk to me about the dynamics there with Holsey, because that's pretty strange. He was in that position running Southcom for about a year, and he's pushed out, which you mentioned, he's black. I think it's relevant in the context of Higgs-S anti-D-EI campaign, where you really do see a trend of the types of people that have been pushed out of DOD. How do people inside the military you think process that? Like, how strange is that? Maybe it's less strange than it seems. Like a new administration comes in. They want their own people.

You know, explain what you think happened there with Holsey. Well, knowing a little bit of background of him, he had a pretty fascinating career. He's done a lot of good things. But before he was the commander of Southcom, he was the deputy commander of Southcom as a three-star admiral, a vice Admiral. Then he was promoted, took Southcom as a command about 10 months ago. I think he took command last October. So it's been less than a year. Whenever you have someone who retires with less than a year in a new position, what you've got to understand is when admirals seemingly to the American people are promoted and given a new rank, they are actually assigned to a job that has that rank attached to it. So when he went from three star to four star, deputy commander to

commander, he was then promoted for the position he was in. When you retire with less than a year in duty, you're not going to retire as a four-star. Now, he may get an exception, and, you know, he'll retire as a four-star general, but it's just interesting that he was asked, linked to disagreements with the operations in Southern Command. What you also have to understand is a combatant commander or any commander is responsible for their entire. area of operation. When special operators come in, like Admiral Bradley is the J-Soc, the Joint Special Operations Command and Commander, come into that area, or when the CIA comes into that area, they still are connected to the combatant commander, Halsey. When you say connected

to them, do they report to them? They coordinate with them. They coordinate with them. So what I think you're going to see is a two-pronged chain of command between sect-def, between the the special operators and sec-deaf to the southern command commander. And that's going to be confusing in of itself. And when what I believe is going to show up in testimony is Admiral Holsey is going to say, hey, look, this is my area of operation. I didn't agree with the approach. I was telling them I didn't agree with the approach.

I thought there was some activity that they shouldn't be doing. and because I voice my concern about either legalities or approaches, I was asked to retire. So how unusual is that? I mean, like, that's what I'm trying to understand. You know, I could go back to your experience in Iraq or whatever. Like, there had to have been high-ranking military officials that didn't agree with a strategy or an approach that Rumsfeld had put forth or would express it. Like, how does it usually work in that sort of situation?

Well, you provide your. advice, your best military advice, you fight, if you will, for your point of view. But then when the civilian decision maker says, no, here's what we're going to do, you salute and say, okay, I'll execute it to the best of my ability, unless it's unlawful or illegal. I guess I've been wondering watching through all this, you know, there's this big hullabaloo about that video that Mark Kelly and Jason Crow and others put out slacken Democrats and Congress, talking about how you'd fear in the military, you do not have to follow an illegal order. That video came out like a couple days before all of this reporting. And I don't

have any inside information on this, but I do wonder if there was scuttlebutt about this. And like, you know, it's hard for me to determine like where the line is, right? Like there's some obvious examples, you know, it's like, you're a soldier and they're like, shoot a U.S. citizen in the street. Like, that's an illegal order. You shouldn't do that. Where does this Venezuela war, not war, fit in that? you know, and like, what are the gray areas? Because like, it's not even a, we don't even have a declared war. We're just bombing boats, right? So it seems like the whole operation is illegal. But so I wonder what you think about all that. I don't know, certainly what was in

the mind of the six legislators that made the video. You could debate whether or not it was appropriate. My contention is it was made mostly for individual units who were being asked to go on the streets of the United States cities. I think that's who, it was geared toward. But it was also made toward the potential of this war, not war in Venezuela. I don't know. I mean, Mark Kelly and I are friends. We've texted each other a couple of times. He's never told me what drove them to make this video. But it's interesting to me that all of this seems to collide at the same time. But it was just a reminder. Some in the military will say, well, that's unnecessary. Everybody is taught not to obey unlawful or illegal order.

But it sure came at a time when it seemed a lot of those kind of orders might have been teetering on the edge for commanders who were being asked to do things that maybe they shouldn't be asked to do. Think about where they go from here. There's a CNN report yesterday that the administration's quietly building plans for if Maduro is ousted. This isn't really surprising. I'm sure the military is building plans for lots of stuff. Trump in that political interview today said that they don't want, he doesn't want to rule in or out expanding the war on the land in Venezuela. He said, I don't want to talk to you about military strategy. And then he did also say they're open to expanding the use of force and their fight against quote unquote narco terrorists to include Colombia and Mexico. I mean, at some level, Admiral Olsey's may be lucky that he's out of there. I don't, you know, I hope he gets his fourth star. But like this other command, situation is pretty uncertain at this point. I mean, what do you kind of make about all of that and all the scuttlebut about what might be next? Well, first, regarding Admiral Halsey, he is

retiring, I think, at the end of this month, he is still the commander, but when he leaves, I don't know of anybody who's named to replace him right now. So the question is going to be, are you going to have an acting commander? And that's always challenging. So he's overseeing these strikes then, or they've gone around him, basically, or we don't really know? I think they've basically going around them. That's my contention. You know, the CNN reporting, you know, they've got a Pentagon reporter that's getting scuttle butt, hey, contingency plans are made to do X, Y, and Z. The fact of the matter is the military is always asked to do potential plans, and they normally give a couple of courses of actions. They can't say, no, we're not going to

give you any plans to invade Venezuela. They have to provide, here are some options if you want to invade. And then when they give those plans, they said, and here are the downsides or the upsides to do in each one. Okay, that happens all the time. So anytime you hear from the media that, oh, the Pentagon's planning to invade Venezuela, no, they're really not. They're being told to commit plans for the president or some civilian authority. It would be, in my view, a huge mistake to go into Venezuela. It's a huge country. It's bigger than Ukraine. It's got a population of 31 million people. It's got deserts and mountains and terrain. When you go into a place like that, especially if you're thinking regime change, much like we have in past couple of wars that I was involved in, there are

some on the civilian side that say, oh, well, just replace the president and get the new guy in there. Well, what we've seen when you conduct regime change operations, it's a whole lot messier than people think it will, and we end up staying there decades with a lot of lost soldiers. At the same time, too, going back to our discussion on national security strategy, you know, if Colombia is now involved and Honduras and others are now thinking of being invaded too by the president, these are countries we've had a counter-narcotics campaign with for 30 years, and they've been pretty successful for the most part. So I don't know why we would be reinvading Colombia because they've kind of overcome most of their drug problems. There's still, you know, there's still

drugs coming out of there, but it hasn't overwhelmed the government like it used to during the narco phase of their democracy, as it will. This might be a dumb question, because probably the answer is it's different for different people. But it's hard for me to get into the minds of military folks who are stationed or involved in the Western kind of theater right now. Because at some level, this is maybe going to sound glib, but like you want something to do. You know what I mean?

Like you didn't join the military to do nothing, I guess. Most people didn't. But then on the other hand, it's like all of a sudden out of nowhere, you have this ridiculous kind of mission where you're bombing these boats that are allegedly coming from America but really seemed to be maybe going to the Caribbean islands and then to Europe. What do you think it does, like something like this does to the psyche of people that are in the military? I can only give you an example, Tim. I was in the Pentagon on 9-11 and was actually.

It's the only time I've been assigned to the Pentagon. I happen to be there, get there a month before the attacks. We watched and supported the attack into Afghanistan to get rid of al-Qaeda. But then when the drumbeat started about invading Iraq for a variety of reasons, the people on the joint staff were pretty split, not evenly so, against going into Iraq and opening the second front. And I was one of those as the war chief war. planner saying we should not do this. It's dumb to open up a second front and we don't have

good information, but we went. And during the next 11 years of that war, either myself or our two sons and our daughter-in-law were back and forth into Iraq and a war that none of us thought was probably the best thing to do. But once you get in there, you do your very best to execute the mission of the civilian authority. That's why it's so important to not have people in elected positions that do crazy stuff with the military and they think it through, which brings us back to Venezuela. I think part of the issue with Admiral Holsey, the Southern Command commander, is he had probably been in Southern Command for a total of about five or six years of his career. He knew what a successful drug policy should look like. He knew how to coordinate the actions of other

governments. He knew what it would take to do a counter-narcotics campaign, and he probably expressed those views to Secretary of Defense, and yet we have a Secretary of Defense that just wants to come in with aircraft carriers and special operators and start bombing drug boats. So that's where the contention lies within the military of trying to give your best military advice and see it overrun by people who may not know about the area as well as you do. well we'll be watching for admiral holsey's testimony closely and listening for it so i'm sure we'll be grabbing you on youtube over on the bulwark takes feed once we learn more for what he has to say lastly you wrote a really beautiful piece about sarah bextrum who's the west virginia national guard member that was killed in washington dc just tragically and um folks said that should go to the bulwark and then we'll put the link here to read the whole thing but i just if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit of kind of how you react to that based on your experience. I've shown this before.

Let me reach over my desk. I've had a box on my desk that says make it matter on the front of it. Inside of it, if I can open it and show it to you without dumping pictures, are the cards with pictures of soldiers, the 253 soldiers that were under my command in Iraq on a couple of deployments. Or when I was an assistant division commander under another commander, Marty Dempsey. I look at that box every day, take a couple of cards out, think about where they would be today. When you have people who raise their hand and say they're going to support and defend the Constitution and they know that there's a possibility that they might sacrifice everything they have to include their life

when they do that, even if you don't know the soldiers that were killed like Special Spectrum was, you have a connection to them. You understand what they've gone through. You understand that they may be performing this mission when they really didn't want to, but they were sent there, and that seems to be the case with her, although she was making the best of it. She had a family, but she was also a young soldier. She was only, I think, 20 or 21. She joined the army when she was 18. And on this particular mission, one of the things I pointed out in the story was that she had taken the pre- Thanksgiving Day duty the night before Thanksgiving because one of her soldiers who was going to perform that duty had an opportunity to go home or be with loved ones or

whatever. I don't know the details. So she took it for another soldier when she didn't have to on Thanksgiving weekend. You know, it just tells you what kind of people they are, these young folks who will give more than what they're being asked to give, and they always do it. So truthfully, I thought, you know, just offering some of my perspective after seeing so many of our soldiers killed in action, and that doesn't even mention the wounded, talking about what they sacrifice and how good they are and how America sometimes doesn't realize how much

these young people should be given in terms of respect and loyalty. So that was the purpose of writing that article. Well, we appreciate very much. Appreciate having your perspective and expertise and experience here as I think it's going to be extremely relevant going into 2026, no matter what happens in Venezuela and Central America, but also potentially at the use of military in the streets here in the U.S. And so we'll be having you back again soon. And people should be going to the bulwark.com to check out your writing. Thank you so much, sir. Okay. Thanks, Tim. Appreciate it. Have a great day, too. All right. Everybody else will be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. See you all then. Peace.

My ocean's darkness Comes pulling me back again Oh, yeah, Oh, yes, miss me Oh, yeah, last time I've seen you, baby You do the something was I'm missing from your trust. Oh, yes, miss me some question to be on a room. all I ever wanted to be so loved you said love is like water baby flowing down

to dig into the river to feel my love i want to come to your soul like that all i want all i ever wanted to feel your love The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brough.