The Ricochet Podcast - NRI Ideas Summit- John O'Sullivan and Tom Cotton

Episode Date: May 3, 2015

A conversation with Sen. Tom Cotton and John O’Sullivan, National Review/NRI. Source

The first thing I should say, although you've now been welcomed, is to congratulate you on the birth of your first child, who was born last Monday. And I gather mother and child are both doing well. Senator, you've been a farmer, a lawyer, a professional manager with McKinsey's, and a soldier with two tours of duty under your belt in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, as a new first-time father, you will find out in the next two years just what stress means. Now, you don't really need any further introduction to this audience or from me, but I will just add one thing to the list of occupations to say this. You seem to me to be the exact opposite of a professional politician, because a professional politician is someone who's never held a real job in the real world. And you have held, as far as I can see, about a dozen real jobs in the US forces on Wall Street and elsewhere.

Now, our views probably overlap quite a lot, so this is certainly not an accusatory or hostile interview, but a conversation in which you can not only, I think, express your views, but we also want to know how those views emerge in part from your experiences. But before we get to that, I think we have to ask you some questions about the matter of the hour in which you've played a part, which is Iran and the proposed deal over its acquisition. Well, I think you've already been endorsed by the gathering. Let me begin by saying this. Your letter to Iran, signed by 46 other senators, laid out, it seemed to me correctly,

the constitutional position of the U.S. on treaties. I'm a Brit, so we don't do constitutions. But it did look to me as though you had made a very strong argument there. But in sending the letter to the Iranians, could it not be argued, and some constitutional scholars, some on NRO and from a conservative standpoint, have suggested that this was an improper intrusion on the president's constitutional right to conduct foreign policy. Shouldn't the Senate wait, they argued, or shouldn't senators wait until the agreement has been reached and then insist on having it say? What's your reply to that?

John, first off, thanks for having me here. Thanks for National Review for having me here. The question of Iran is the most important question we face today. A nuclear-armed Iran is the greatest threat the United States and our allies in the world face. The President made a serious, serious mistake in November of 2013 when he started these negotiations. Through painstaking work of many years, both the Bush administration and the Obama administration and the Congress had brought on board multiple countries to impose very stern sanctions that were driving Iran to its knees. One thing I learned in the army is when you have your opponent on its knees, you don't give him a hand up,

you drive him to the ground and you choke him out and you win. Now, when I was in the House, I voted for stronger sanctions along with 400 other congressmen in the summer of 2013. We should have stayed on that path. The President made an even graver mistake, though, when he went down this path and planned to cut Congress out entirely. Because under our constitutional system, there is no doubt that the President negotiates any kind of international agreement, whether it's a nuclear arms agreement with an enemy like Iran or the Soviet Union, or whether it's a trade agreement as is current negotiating. But just as surely, the Congress has to approve those agreements, just like we did with nuclear arms control agreements with the Soviet unions throughout

the Cold War, even though this agreement is much more dangerous because the Soviet Union was already a nuclear state and Iran is not a nuclear state. Now, what we did when we released that letter was simply state the constitutional facts of the matter because Iran needed to get the message. If you heard Javed Zarif the day after we announced that letter, you would realize they needed to get the message because he said international law can overrule the U.S. Constitution. He said that Congress plays no role in the treaty-making process under the United States Constitution. He said it just the other day up in New York as well. And if you think about the leaders in Tehran who are not getting that message, which is why they needed to hear it from the people who approved these treaties,

what do they look at when they think about westernized democracies? They think typically of a parliamentary system like you're familiar with. Our system is very unique. They needed to hear the message from us because they weren't getting the message from the United States negotiating team in Switzerland or that message wasn't being transmitted back to them. As a matter of historical precedent, I would say if you can look at Democratic senators, like John Kerry or Robert Byrd or several others, who have gone in person to meet with people like Manuel Noriega or Lynette Brezhnev or Bashar al-Assad, the difference is they were coddling dictators.

We Republican senators were standing up to a dictator. You and the 46 senators were representing yourselves in a widespread swathe of American opinion. Were you representing others? What is your view, or do you have any indication how the letter was treated by the French, by the Brits, by the Gang of Five, so to speak? Were you speaking for some of them on the quiet, or are they solidly behind the president? Well, they didn't write me a letter to tell me what they thought about it. But it is well known that the French in particular were pushing for harder terms against Iran than the Obama administration was. And in fact, if you think about negotiating strategy, just from a basic matter, whether you're negotiating a business

or negotiating to buy a home or a car, our position in the Congress should have strengthened the President's resolve. As the fact that the Congress has to approve international agreements was designed to strengthen the President's resolve by our founders and designed to protect the American people from a bad deal. So to the extent that any of our allies, not just the P5 plus 1, but allies like Israel and the Gulf states wanted a tougher deal, Congress standing up to the very dangerous proposal the President is making should have strengthened the President's resolve. It just goes to show the President is hell-bent to get any kind of deal, even if it's a bad and dangerous deal that puts Iran on the path to a nuclear weapon. Now, your initiative set in train a series of events which has led the White House to compromise to some extent on this and led the Senate opinion to coalesce around the Corker bill.

Now, let me just ask you very simply, is the Corker bill a good deal? Because it does look to someone who glances at it that it's replaced the necessity of the Senate to give a two-thirds majority to a treaty with a deal which makes an executive agreement subject to Senate approval like ordinary legislation. In which case, won't we find in future that no treaties are ever presented to the Senate, but only executive agreements which give the Senate much less control over the outcome? Well, the constitutional baseline has certainly been upended. But Bob Corker or Robert Menendez didn't do that. Barack Obama did that. He's the

one that is negotiating a nuclear arms control agreement with the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism dedicated to fomenting Islamic revolution all around the world without any congressional say at all, without any congressional approval, not at a simple majority level, even at a treaty level, which is where it should be. This is not a deal talking about fishing rights on the Great Lakes with Canada. This is a nuclear arms control agreement with an Islamist terrorist sponsoring state. So it's the president who's upended the constitutional baseline, and that's what the Congress needs to demand for. That's why I voted for Ron Johnson's amendment earlier this week to the Corkerman-Endez bill

that would have insisted that this be submitted as a treaty. The president has submitted these things as treaties before. We had a new start submitted just five years ago in which he acquiesced to the treaty approval power of the Congress. Right now we're considering a trade partnership with about a dozen countries on the Pacific Rim, mostly allied countries, countries like Japan. Yet he's going to submit that for an up or down vote. He won't submit his nuclear arms control agreement, though, with the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.

Now, I take it you feel that if the deal goes through and Iran subsequently violates what is a treaty it doesn't really need to violate, what would then happen? Do you have any confidence that this administration or a future one would actually hold Iran to account for treaty violations and rescind the favorable items of the treaty? Because that very rarely happened under arms control agreements in the Cold War. Well, first, let me say there's not a proposed deal or a framework. There's only a list of dangerous U.S. concessions, to which Iran doesn't even agree if you listen to Javid Zarif and Ayatollah Khamenei and read their own fact sheet in their own language. But no, if this deal goes forward, one reason it's so dangerous is that Iran can get a nuclear weapon by cheating, as they've done on every other agreement they've made, or they could

get a nuclear weapon by following the terms of the deal. President Obama said it himself in a moment of indiscretion on national public radio that they could get a nuclear weapon in 12 or 13 years, which Prime Minister Netanyahu said at the Congress is the blink of an eye in the life of nations. And in the meantime, remember, even if they follow the deal and they don't become a nuclear armed state for 11, 12, 13 years, they will be getting tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief. Maybe even a $50 billion signing bonus this summer as it's been reported, as if there's some blue-chip recruit in the NFL draft. Not a terror-sponsoring regime. What are they going to do with that money?

They are not going to build hospitals or build schools or build roads. They are going to resupply Hezbollah and Hamas. They're going to continue their campaign against American interests throughout the region, Iraq and in Syria and Lebanon and in Yemen. And they're going to spread Islamic revolution all around the world, even if they obey the deal, which they probably won't do in the first place. Now, I think Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, in a very impressive article detailing the problems with this, made two points, really. One was that the status quo before any agreement is a bad one. And secondly, it's a worse one because of the concessions that are in effect already made and which probably can't be retrieved. So my question then is, if we face this very dangerous situation, and we'll come on to some of the dangers in a minute,

what is the policy you would have, let's assuming that you are able and your colleagues are able to defeat this particular administration policy, what would the practical response of Republicans be to dealing with the Iranian problem? Well, first, I think it's always important when you're talking about these problems of national security to remember how we got here. We got here by the President consistently conciliating with Iran. The best chance to solve the fundamental problem with Iran, which is their Islamist terror-sponsoring regime, was in the summer of 2009, when the Iranian people rose up in protest against a rigged election and President Obama stood by and did nothing.

And then we continued to conciliate with Iran. If you look around the Middle East and you see all of the pressing problems we have, all the questions raised, the answer is frequently Iran. That's one reason why the President has not taken action in Syria, because he has conceded Syria as a legitimate sphere of interest for Iran. That's one reason why the President has not taken action in Syria, because he has conceded Syria as a legitimate sphere of interest for Iran. One solution I would have had is what we voted on in the House just 18 months ago. I guess now it's almost two years ago. Tougher sanctions against Iran to stop them from gaining the resources they need to continue their nuclear weapons program. We should have never started down this path. The president should have walked away from it last summer and last fall

when he got extension instead. And he should have kept the credible threat of military force on the table. He keeps saying it. He keeps saying it, but no one believes him. I've spoken with leaders from governments throughout the Middle East. No one believes him, least of all the leadership of Iran. And the president, in fact, is actually diminishing his own credibility because he presents what he calls a false choice when anybody else makes it.

On the one hand, there's no military action. On the other hand, there's military action like you saw in Iraq in the last decade, 150,000 troops and heavy mechanized tanks and armored personnel carriers. That's not the case. Military action that he was talking about in his own words troops and heavy mechanized tanks and armored personnel carriers. That's not the case. Military action that he was talking about in his own words surely would have looked something, surely would have looked something like Operation Desert Fox against Iraq in December of 1998, or the Kosovo Air Campaign, or Ronald Reagan's tanker war in 1987-88. Targeted air and naval

bombing against Iran's nuclear facilities, command and control facilities, to make it clear we will not allow them to get nuclear weapons. And if we have to take military action, we will take it. That's one of the fundamental flaws of his approach to this diplomacy to begin with. Well, you've already answered, I think, my next question, which was what kind of military force might be credible, because that is the big problem. Does America have the ability to prevent the Iranians getting nuclear capability? And you may want to just deal specifically with that because if it doesn't, its position is altogether weaker and your position is weaker. But let's also go on to ask this question. Assume that the American efforts fail and Iran gets the bomb.

Now, what can American policy then be towards what would be the inevitable proliferation of nuclear weapons as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other countries sought to give themselves ultimate defense against the ultimate threat of a nuclear-armed Iran? Well, that's why this path the President has taken is so dangerous and why a nuclear-armed Iran is the gravest threat we face because there are very few, if any, good options once Iran gets a nuclear weapon or even gets to the nuclear threshold

in which they could develop a weapon with the proverbial turn of a screw. Look what's happened in North Korea. We entered a similar kind of agreement in 1994 with North Korea, which wasn't submitted to Congress, which should have taught the president his lesson. Within just a few years, they were already cheating on it. We didn't take military action,

in part because North Korea had a stronger conventional threat against key allies like South Korea and Japan. And then they detonated a nuclear bomb in 2006. Now, credible reports in the Wall Street Journal just last week say they could have as many as 20 on their way to 50. If that happens with Iran, though, as you said, first, you may see nuclear proliferation. And then you could have the world's most volatile region strong with nuclear tripwires, whether they develop it with their own indigenous capabilities, as some countries in the Middle East can, or they simply procure it with their

oil wealth. Those countries could provide nuclear weapons to terrorists, or those governments could fall, as has happened in that region in the last four or five years, and terrorists could get nuclear materials. And Iran may launch a nuclear strike. I mean, their most recent president before Rouhani talked about Israel being a one-state bomb, or a one-bomb state, meaning that Israel could be eliminated with one bomb. Their original supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, said, they tried to erase it from the history books,

but he said he was not committed to the Persian nation and its history. He was committed to Islamic revolution. They only adopted a nationalist streak to their thinking to defend their war with Iraq in the 1980s. If they think that it's going to foment their view of worldwide Islamic revolution, they will use a nuclear weapon. And they can use it against the United States simply by providing a terrorist or on the intercontinental missiles that they're developing right now. We have questions from the floor, and I want to just get a couple more points out. So we move on directly from Iran, but let me ask you to comment on something really that interested me, which is a few weeks ago, the President of Israel, President Sisi,

made two very powerful speeches in the same week. One addressed to the Copts offering cooperation and religious toleration and the other addressing a group of Islamic religious leaders in which he said it was madness for Muslims to think they could wage a war on the rest of the world and appealing again for toleration. Now, I've been very struck by the fact that not a single major Western leader that I've seen has mentioned that speech, has endorsed it, has repeated some of the ideas in it. What's your interpretation of that? Why that silence? Well, we have a president that

won't even call radical Islamic terror what it is. He wants to call it violent extremism or workplace violence. I mean, until we face up to the fact that there is a sizable minority, not a large percentage, but a sizable minority in a faith that has over a billion followers in the world that is committed to Islamic terror, we will not be able to defeat them. President al-Sisi is facing up to that in his speech at Al-Azhar University in January. He called for a revolution in Islam, not the kind that Iran wants, but the kind that Islam needs, which is rejecting violence as a method of spreading the religion or achieving political aims. We should encourage

that and we should support reformers all around the world. We should have supported the protesters during the Green Revolution in Iran. We should have stood by Iraq rather than abandon them in 2011 and let them slide back into sectarian warfare. And it's true that there's still too much repression in Egypt, and that's something that the al-Sisi government needs to address. But at the same time, when they're taking the fight to the Islamic State and taking the fight to the Muslim Brotherhood and supporting their treaty obligations with Israel, we need to encourage and promote that kind of thinking. Thank you. Now, as that answer implies, you believe in a broad global presence for the United States.

It should be the leader of a worldwide alliance system that is able to cope with these problems, not always intervene, but to take prudent measures to prevent crises becoming worse. Which leads me then to ask you, you actually were working with allies at the most basic level in Iraq and Afghanistan. So what lessons for dealing with allies did you draw from experience? And do you think that Americans as a whole are really prepared to have, or do they have the stamina to maintain wars or interventions or other forms of more calibrated assistance over the long haul? They did for 50 years in World War II and the Cold War. That's because we had political leaders of both parties who were committed to America,

America's strong, confident leadership in the world to protect our interests and our allies. This president simply has not committed that. He talks about withdrawing from the Middle East, and you see the Middle East up in flames. He talks about pivoting to Asia. Well, what does that say to Asia about where we've been for the recent decades and what does that

say to the Middle East and Europe about where we're going? We don't pivot as the global superpower. We have global security challenges that we confront. And we need to encourage allies to share their responsibility for it. We can do so in part by considering their interests when we're making our decisions. This President is soft and soothing and supplicating towards dictators and adversaries, but harsh and unyielding towards allies. You know, what about your own experience on the ground in these countries dealing with allies in, you know, both Western allies and Middle Eastern allies? It's positive. America, because of our size, because of our wealth, has capabilities and capacities that no other country in the world has. But countries that fought alongside us in Afghanistan, like Canada or Poland or other countries,

they can contribute important things. Poland just this week, or I think it was last week, announced that they were going to upgrade their missile defense system and continue to improve their aviation capabilities because they want to shoulder their share of the load as a NATO power, whether it was in Afghanistan in the last decade or whether it's confronting a revanchist Russia right now. So all of these countries should be encouraged to develop greater capabilities, maybe ones that supplement or fill gaps in the United States capabilities or that are particular to their region, so they can help shoulder the load, but if they will not do that,

if they do not reassure that we are going to take their interest into account when we're determining our course of action and we're going to uphold our obligations to them. My final question before I go over to the questions from the floor is I saw your interview conversation with Walter Russell Mead, and at one point you both agreed that America's interest was in a stronger EU. is I saw your interview conversation with Walter Russell Mead. And at one point, you both agreed that America's interest was in a stronger EU. Now, living as I do in Europe, Britain and Central Europe, I noticed that some of the strongest pro-Americans

are not in favor of closer political integration in Europe and certainly do not want to see a European defense structure in any way rival NATO, which is an American-led institution, and in which they have deep and historical confidence. Maybe that confidence isn't altogether as strongly justified as they hope, but nonetheless. So isn't it time to really look at Europe and wonder whether or not you want to continue to encourage,

America wants to encourage, as it has done for 60 years now, the closer integration of Europe, or whether it wants to encourage a structure in which Europeans have the same kind of sovereignty as Americans do. Well, it's a question for those countries, the kind of formal structures they want to adopt, and whether a country wants to, say, enter the European Union as a formal matter, or whether they want to enter into some kind of bilateral or multilateral agreements. But it is very much in our interest, I think, for

Eastern European countries, Caucasus countries, Central Asian countries, to move towards the West, not to move towards revisionist powers like Russia, like China, who do not share our basic principles of individual rights and free and fair elections and separated powers and so forth. So whatever kind of formal structures they adopt, that's really a question for them. We might help mediate that, but it's a question for those countries and the EU. But we should encourage greater cooperation and expansion of Western capitalist democratic values. Good. Thank you. Now, here's a question from the floor. What should be the U.S. response when a security treaty ally has a flag vessel detained by another nation, and it's a reference to the MERS vessel flagged under U.S. Marshall Treaty Island, the U.S. Marshall Islands and Iran?

It shouldn't be allowed, and we should use naval force to prevent it from happening. Look, the response, so a week and a half ago, Iran was sending naval ships to Yemen, most likely to resupply their allies, the Houthis. For the first time in a long time, the president did something that looked like the application of military force, sending an aircraft carrier group in their direction. Iran turned around and went, took its naval ships and turned around and went back. Unfortunately, he is so dedicated to his vision of a nuclear deal with Iran and rapprochement with Iran, he probably didn't view that as a successful application of military force.

He viewed it as an example of Iran changing its behavior and pulling in its horns. What they did with the Maersk was probably a direct result of losing face. What we should have done is ensure that it didn't happen, and we should be demanding that it's returned right now because we have a responsibility to the Marshallese, and the largest Marshallese expat community in America is in my state in Arkansas. We should be standing by our obligations to make sure that ship is freed and those Marshallese citizens are freed as well. And it's not about a single ship or about an oceanic protectorate. It is about fundamental American trustworthiness and commitments. There's a story today in the paper about how the White House and the administration

can reassure the Gulf Coordinating Council. So Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Qatar, UAE, so forth. They're going to have a big meeting up at Camp David in a couple weeks to try to reassure them that we're not leaving the Middle East, that we're not going to let a Shiite Persian country get a nuclear weapon and leave them defenseless. And they're talking about maybe giving

them a new name or selling them a different kind of weapon a little bit down the road. How about we stand up to our obligations to countries like the Marshall Islands, not letting their ships be hijacked by Iran, and then those countries won't need to be so reassured? Now, here's a very unfair question. How can you get, how can we get, Democratic senators to protect our national security in Iran? You're being asked to be a spokesman for the other side.

Well, it's very hard right now. I mean, the president's deputy national security advisor said a nuclear deal with Iran is the foreign policy equivalent of Obamacare. Now, that's not the way he meant it, but I would say it's the way I would mean it. But what he meant is that the stakes are so high politically for the president, it is his signature legacy issue that he will twist any arm to keep the Democratic senators and congressmen in line eventually. In 2009, on Christmas Eve, there were 60 Democratic senators. Sixty Democratic senators voted for Obamacare, over half of whom were no longer serving in the Senate,

many of them lost in part because they voted for Obamacare. The Democratic Senate caucus has now moved substantially to the left. In the end, they're not going to block the President's signature foreign policy accomplishment in his eyes. And the President's going to twist every arm that's necessary to keep them in line. That's simply a fact. And that's why turning the constitutional presumption on its head is so dangerous. 34 senators, 34 senators can allow this president to make a nuclear arms agreement with Iran. 41 senators can prevent the president from even having to veto a bill that would disapprove that deal. Well, this question comes directly to that. About the Corker bill, why do you think so many reasonable amendments have been rejected by Republicans? Because the Democrats are scared to vote on any single amendment. Very simple

amendments. You know, Marco Rubio here spoke yesterday. He talked about his amendment that would require Iran to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state before they get the very weapon that would allow them to eliminate Iran or to eliminate Israel. But he has another amendment that is even simpler than that. He took the fact sheet that the president released and said there can be no sanctions relief until a final deal is consistent with this fact sheet. And the Democrats called that a poison pill. That the final deal has to reflect the President's own fact sheet. The amendments that I filed on Thursday say that the underground military bunker at Fordow has to be closed before there can be sanctions relief. There has to be any time, anywhere, no notice inspections before there can be sanctions relief. And Iran has to disclose, as it has an obligation

to under multiple UN Security Council resolutions, the past military dimensions of its nuclear program. Those three things are all positions President Obama has taken himself, some of them since the negotiations began in November 2013. Yet the Democrats are saying those are poison pills, those are vitamin pills, and the Democrats don't want to take them. Can I ask you a very topical question? As you know, 10 days ago, 900 people drowned in the Mediterranean when the ship ferrying them from Africa to Italy overturned and sank. I think since in the last 20 years, 22,000 people are estimated to have died in this way. Now, we in the Europeans are Judeo-Christian nations, and we can't let people drown. On the other hand, we can't let borders become meaningless and anyone enter.

And we seem to have lost a rational system for resettling genuine refugees who were protected by treaties, which we did have at the end of the Second World War and which dealt with the huge problem of displaced persons and even after 1956. So I was wondering if you would like to give us your thoughts on what might be done to prevent these tragedies but also to protect national borders, which, of course, the United States has recently seen its own borders. The Mediterranean refugee crisis is a human tragedy. It's also a serious security threat to Europe and, therefore, to the United States as well. It's a source of a lot of different factors. The President has said al-Qaeda is on the run.

I mean, he's correct if he means they're running wild all across the world, to include in Africa and places like Nigeria and Libya that are causing the conditions that are driving people to get in these boats to try to cross the Mediterranean. A lot of NATO allies, especially on the southern border of NATO, have not fulfilled their treaty obligations to spend 2% of their national income to maintain the military capability to intercept these boats at sea because of the free movement across borders within the EU, which causes some internal EU problems. A lot of countries who aren't on the southern border

are very reluctant to take them. I mean, the United States and the European countries taking Gaddafi out of power in Libya without having a reasonable plan to stabilize that country has contributed to it as well. So it's something we have to address, but none of these problems are going to be solved in the short term. They're all long-term issues that result in part of the American retreat from

throughout the world that we've seen and talked about most particularly in the Middle East. Thank you. And now here's another question from the floor. Is Goldwater-Nichols still sufficient for organizing our modern military, or do the Joint Staff competent commands and services require a revision of relationships or, indeed, wholesale reorganization? I think it's served us pretty well so far.

I mean, we should always be open to reconsidering the way that we've structured our commands to make sure they're reflecting the new realities and the challenges we face today, both from a geographic and from a functional standpoint. But if you talk to secretaries of defense or chairman of the joint chiefs, people like former Vice President Cheney, who was the first secretary of defense to go to war under Walter Nichols, he'll tell you it was a vast improvement of what we had beforehand. Thank you. And another question from the floor. It's expected that we should be fighting Democrats,

but how do we deal with the family feud with the Senate leadership? Can the GOP leadership actually lead? I didn't know we were in a family feud. The Senate is a very different kind of institution than the House, in which I served for two years. It's designed to empower not just the minority but the individual senator, in part on the constitutional design that our founders gave, but also the rules that have been built on top of that design, and then the customs, manners, and mores that have been developed to reflect that design and those rules. So I work very closely with a lot of our leaders.

I worked with them this week when we were debating the Iran bill. I'll be working with them over the coming month when three critical provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expire that would reopen gaps in our pre-9-11 intelligence capabilities. I don't always agree with them. Of course I'm not always going to agree with them. I voted against the DHS funding bill in February because I thought that it didn't do enough to stop President Obama's executive amnesty decree. That doesn't mean that we don't see eye to eye and that we don't have a good working relationship. And in the end, the problem is not any Republican in the Senate.

The problem is you've got a left-wing ideologue in the White House who's had three opportunities to change after two bad electoral defeats and one re-election, turn the page and do what, say, Bill Clinton did, which was turn the page and work with a new congressional majority, and he just refuses to do that. And the Senate Democrats are carrying the water for him, just as they did for four years when Harry Reid was in the majority. You said, I think, that Iran was the number one national security threat, and indeed international security threat to us.

I suppose on any list, how to deal with Vladimir Putin's Russia, particularly over Ukraine, but not solely over that, would be a second or third. So my first question on this is, how would you advise the West and the U.S. to deal with Putin over Ukraine, while at the same time ensuring that long term, we make plain that we think Russia can be brought back into the family of civilized nations

and play a part in the government of the world? We have to confront Vladimir Putin's ambitions and aggression all around the world on every front. That's the way Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. He didn't conciliate with them. He confronted them. He called them what they were, the evil empire. He said our strategy is simple. We win and they lose.

Again, the president, as with Iran, has been conciliating and appeasing Vladimir Putin from the very beginning. This is not a secret when the president took office. You know, they invaded Georgia in the summer of 2008. It was reported in the press in 2008, as far back as 2008, that they were violating

the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Yet what did the president do? He sent Hillary Clinton over with a misspelled reset button to yuck it up with Sergei Lavrov. He withdrew missile defenses from countries like Poland and the Czech Republic that stuck their neck out to help us. He looked the other way continuously on INF treaty violations and didn't inform Congress. At the same time, he was trying to get through the New START Treaty, which favors Russia, in my opinion.

And what have we done over the last year? Sanction a few people that doesn't really hurt them that badly. So what we need to do is confront Vladimir Putin's aggressive, revisionist drive in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, in functional areas like space and cyberspace as well. You know, you're absolutely right. Reagan's policy was one of confrontation at every point. But the other element in it was that from the day he was recovering from the assassination attempt, he sent letters on more than one occasion to Soviet leaders saying, look, there's no reason for us to have these quarrels, and our two peoples should surely work together comfortably.

Now, I think that was one of the reasons why Reagan was cheered to the echo in 1988 when he went to Moscow University, for example. So he did have this, in a sense, double policy. Do you think the second half can be applied in the case of Russia today? Certainly. I mean, Vladimir Putin is as repressive at home as he is aggressive abroad. We should look at more legislation like the Magnitsky Act, which are designed to punish Putin and Russia's leadership for their gross human rights violation.

Again, though, these murders of journalists and activists go back before Obama took office. These are not recent surprises. We might start broadcasting more effectively into Russia since Russia controls so much of the airwaves and submits such virulent propaganda, not only in Russia but in countries like Ukraine as well. We have to be willing to confront an aggressive Russian leader, but also let the Russian people know that we hope to be their allies.

There's an old joke about the Soviet Union that the problem is only partly that they were communists, but it was also partly that they were Russian. And Russia, I mean, Russia can legitimately say to the West, well, you know, Germany has invaded me twice and France has invaded me once, so I have a legitimate fear of my borders. But today, Russia is in a stronger position on its borders than it ever has been. There's no legitimate claim that NATO or any Western power is a threat to Russian borders or any country on its borders than it ever has been. There's no legitimate claim that NATO or any Western power is a threat to Russian borders or any country on its southern border. There's no legitimate claim to that. And Putin cannot make it.

He can, but it's specious. And therefore, the Russian people are suffering under Vladimir Putin, but they need not suffer because we need not be antagonistic towards their interests for basic respect for human decency, individual rights, and living in a free and prosperous society. As a practical matter, what can we now do both to assist the Ukrainians and particularly to deter an invasion or quasi-invasion of the Baltic states, which is the, so to speak, the Achilles heel of NATO? Well, first we have to start reassuring our Eastern European allies, who are now doing, as allies always do when they don't think the United States or on their commitments are doing things that are not necessarily stabilizing, like Finland just dropping death charges on unidentified undersea objects in the last week.

So with Ukraine, we need to provide them the arms that they need to help defend the line of separation because there are signs that Vladimir Putin's rebels may be gearing up again in concert with his intelligence services and his special operations forces to either go south toward Mariupol or north further into Ukraine as well. We need to significantly enhance our presence in eastern Estonia and Latvia, which have land borders with Russia, and sizable Russian populations. We need to announce as NATO and European command that the kind of irregular warfare

that we saw in eastern Ukraine a little over a year ago will not be accepted in eastern Estonia and eastern Latvia. It will be deemed military action against a NATO country, and Article 5 will be invoked. Because if we don't make that clear now, the day will come when Vladimir Putin crosses the wrong line, and it will be too late to turn back then. Here's a question which directly responds to something you said about Iran. And it is this. responds to something you said about Iran. And it is this.

Obama decided to, from the floor, Obama decided to turn his back on the millions of Iranians back in 2009 who were peacefully protesting against the Islamist regime and instead took a path of negotiations with a brutal and repressive regime. Shouldn't we focus on this? I'm sorry, I can't quite read that. Shouldn't we focus on this? I'm sorry, I can't quite read that. Shouldn't we focus on this when we discuss Iran and the danger it presents? And I would just add to that, one of the steps that Ronald Reagan took was the foundation of the National Endowment for Democracy

and the two partisan assistant agencies of it. And he waged a very important ideological warfare, which consisted of promoting the virtues of democracy. Now, that's gone rather out of fashion lately. But doesn't it still have some weight in dealing with Iran and other similar powers? We shouldn't just focus on it. We should have acted on it in 2009. That was the very best chance we had to change the fundamental problem with Iran. It's not the kind of weapons they seek to obtain. It's the nature of their regime. Lots of countries are nuclear threshold powers. Japan, South Korea, Germany. Policymakers

in the United States and the West don't stay up late at night worrying about them because they are peaceful capitalist democracies. They are not terror-sponsoring Islamist regimes. We ignored it at the time. We should promote it now. We should encourage the Iranian people to replace the Ayatollahs with a peaceful, representative government that is going to be a source for stability in the region, work with its neighbors, and support American interests in the country or in the region. Now, I think the response of the audience throughout this little session has demonstrated the positions you are taking have a very great deal of support, certainly in this room and outside.

But what is the center of gravity on foreign policy today in the Republican Party? I mean, you've got Rand Paul. You've got yourself, really, I would say, the polar opposite. And where is the majority of opinion? Where is it now? Where is it shifting? And what would you do not just in the Senate, but in the country, is awoken to the gathering dangers we face on our horizon.

If you look at the senators who were elected in the last cycle, it wasn't just me, but it was someone like Joni Ernst and Dan Sullivan, both of whom are military veterans of overseas conflicts themselves, or that ran campaigns that were focused on the security threats that we face. There was no one running a campaign that wasn't attentive to things like the Islamic State or like Russia or like the border crisis we had last summer. Those things were central parts of our campaigns. And I can tell you when I'm home in Arkansas and I'm talking to Arkansans, not just the kind of Arkansans that will come out on a Saturday morning to a town hall

or attend an evening speech at a party organization, but the ones that I see at Walmart when I'm buying groceries or at the gas station or at the gym. By far, the number one question outnumbering all other topics combined is national security. It may be Iran. It may be the Islamic State. It may be China's island building activities. It may be Vladimir Putin. But those questions combined outnumber every other question combined. And I get a lot of questions about things like Obamacare or taxes or what have you. But the American people are awoken to the dangers that we face, even though we don't have a leader that is alerting them to their dangers.

Normally, it takes that kind of leader. It takes a Churchill in Great Britain or it takes a Ronald Reagan in the United States to focus the attention of the American people on the threats that we face in this big, wide world. But today, the American people, despite what the President is saying about the state of the world, recognizes that the dangers are grave and that they're gathering and they can no longer be put off. One final question. We haven't mentioned China until now, and you have about a minute and a half. The question is, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon helped to lay the foundations of winning the Cold War by bringing the Chinese from a neutral position to our side against the Soviets. Today they are at best an adversary.

How are we going to ensure that they don't exceed their power, they don't threaten peace in Asia without making them an enemy, winning them back to a friendship? Well, it goes back to honoring our commitments. We have a series of strong allies in the so-called first island chain, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines. We have to reassure those allies that we are going to honor our commitments. And when they see things like us letting the Maersk ship be detained, when they see President Obama drawing a red line on the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then walking back from it, it impacts them. Some people may say,

well, those are different parts of the world and they have little to do. No, because everything has to do with the willingness of America to keep its promises, which comes down in the end to the president's character and his resolve. So it's critical that we reassure those countries that we are going to be their allies. We have to stand up to the outlandish, outlandish activities and claims that China is taking, as if their territorial waters extend to the entire South China Sea on the Nine-Dash Line. And they can just go out and start building new islands in the middle of that sea so they can project power against the Philippines or against Vietnam. So the outlandish claim that they can set up an air defense identification zone

in the East China Sea that includes Japanese-controlled territory. It is ridiculous. And we have to start reinvesting in our military, which is a topic that's not just about China but all the threats we face, but in particular rebuilding our Navy and investing in our Air Force, which are the kind of weapons platforms we need, not to fight and win a war in East Asia, which is the last thing any of us should want to do, but to stop it from happening in the first place. Senator, I think all I need to say is many, many thanks.

Thank you.