The Team House - How the U.S. Lost Credibility Across the Globe w/ Luis Rueda | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

today I'm joined by 27 year veteran of the CIA Luis Rueda.Find Luis here:https://www.linkedin.com/in/luis-rueda-b060a217/https://x.com/LuisRUE38318851New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.comSupport the show on Patreon:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseFind Mick Mulroy here: Fogbow ⬇️https://fogbow.com/Lobo Institute ⬇️https://www.loboinstitute.org/Twitter ⬇️https://x.com/mickmulroy?s=21&t=-Ze3F_Ix2vlJ18KFvORTCALinkedIn ⬇️https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-patrick-mulroy-31198b52/Bluesky ⬇️https://bsky.app/profile/mickmulroy.bsky.socialMick’s publications ⬇️https://www.loboinstitute.org/publications/publications-of-michael-mick-patrick-mulroy/Find Andy Milburn here: Twitter ⬇️https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fandymilburn8LinkedIn ⬇️https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmilburn2023Substack ⬇️https://amilburn.substack.com/Andy’s book ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/When-Tempest-Gathers-Mogadishu-OperationsBluesky ⬇️https://bsky.app/profile/andy-milburn.bsky.socialFind Jason Lyons here: LinkedIn ⬇️https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-lyons-666873316?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_appBluesky ⬇️https://bsky.app/profile/bgsilverback73.bsky.sociBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I want to tell you guys about the sponsor for today's show. It's Mando. Mando makes a whole series of male grooming products. They are unique in that there are a deodorant that you can use all over your body on armpits if you like, but also wherever else you may deem necessary. And I have been using these products for about three months now. I've been using the body wash. It's bourbon leather. I've been using their bar of of soap, which I really enjoyed, and also their deodorant. And so I exercise a lot and get very sweaty, so I need a deodorant that's going to do the job. And Mando has come through for me. You know, the body wash was great. I actually used all of that and need to reorder some more. The bar of soap is also very cool. It was very smooth, actually. So I hope you guys will go and check them out. They have a starter kit that's up there, and they have a special deal for Teamhouse So the starter pack is perfect for new customers. It comes with a solid stick deodorant, cream tube deodorant, two free products of your choice,

like mini body wash and deodorant wipes and free shipping. As a special offer for listeners, new customers get $5 off a starter pack with our exclusive code. That equates to over 40% off your starter pack. Use code team house at shopmando.com. That's S-H-O-P-M-A-N-D-O.com. please support our show and tell them we sent you smell fresher stay drier and boost your confidence from head to toe with mando hey everybody welcome to another episode of eyes on uh really special guest today we have louis rita he's a former senior CIA officer spent over 27 years in the CIA

we have a oh we have a great episode with him on the team house so after you watch this if you haven't watched that yet check that out it's episode 254 the link will be in the description. I'll have all the links to find Lewis on down in the description as well. And if you want to catch these episodes completely ad free early to a couple days early, both on video and audio. You could check us out on Patreon. That link is in the description as well. Patreon.com slash the team house. Lewis, thanks for doing this. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. So a lot happening. It's funny because every time I do this show, and I'm the host now somehow.

I always say a lot's going on or a lot's cooking. And it always seems to be the case. It's not even like, you know, we'll be in a signal chat and we'll be like, you know what? There's not really much going on. What are we really going to talk about? Do we want to focus on something that's a little bit more evergreen or not? But it seems to be like every day there's something different. As a yesterday, China was doing some exercises around the island.

of Taiwan. That was the big one as of last night. They were putting out a lot of press statements and stuff like that that I was looking at on Twitter. Basically, people were calling it shaping or like what shaping would, like a shaping operation would look like and this and that. I mean, what's your view on that? Well, getting to your first point about something happening, I kind of agree with it.

I bet you, as we're talking now, some chaotic thing is occurring right now. And what it's amazing is so much of it is driven by us as opposed to the United States reacting to events happening throughout the world. We're creating all these problems and chaos. The Pacific is one great example. And as you point out, you know, the Chinese are doing these military maneuvers around Taiwan. They've been doing them for a while. And they've actually also done them around Australia and sent combat ships. around Australia. There's a lot of reasons for that. You've got the basic practice, training,

getting ready. In the event they decide to pull a trigger and invade Taiwan, or there is a war with the U.S. and they have to go after U.S. allies. It is also the possibility that's getting everybody used to this. And the more accustomed you become to seeing dozens and dozens of Chinese ships operating in these waters on a regular basis, you may not pay as much attention as it should when the real thing comes. And there's always the political pressure. But I think while that is not necessarily concerning, but something that we should be paying attention to and trying to figure out, and hopefully they do know why the Chinese are doing this, I think one one thing that is much, much more significance, and I've not been able to corroborate this because this has come out of Chinese government communications.

They claim that Japan, South Korea, and China are talking about a joint coordinated answer to U.S. tariffs on Asia. For me, that is concerning because our two most important allies in East Asia, Japan, and South Korea are now looking to cooperate with China instead of the U.S. And you can see the decline of U.S. influence, U.S. capabilities. Remember, we've got huge bases in South Korea and Japan that we are going to rely on to defend Taiwan to some extent. We've got Guam, but those bases are not enough. We need the big, developed, large bases that we have with, with.

those allies. We're watching our allies begin to doubt us, to doubt our resolve, to doubt whether they can trust us, to doubt when we say, we're going to do this. You know, our most recent history is, no, we're probably not going to do it. We may, we may not. If it comes to us protecting you, we may start squeezing you as the troops start to land on the beach and we may want something from you. And this all started when Trump won, and that's the number one, Trump administration one, pulled out of the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, where the U.S. had lined up all the nations, all the economic powerhouses of Asia, excluding China in a economic community. And it was going to be an economic isolation of China. We walked away from that. And all these,

countries that had come on board that we have coaxed, strong-armed, cajoled into joining or left hold in the bag and say, wait a minute, this is pointless. And it's not just the Asian. So all the Latin American countries, too, that we had brought in, the Pacific Rim. So the U.S. leadership and U.S. influence in the Pacific and other places has really declined. And I think that's going to emboldened the Chinese as they begin to peel away our friends and allies, because they're also working very hard in Latin America, a big chunk of which borders the Pacific, that we may not be in a position to stop them from taking over Taiwan. And there could be a sense within the Chinese Politburo that despite what we say, we may not even. do it. We may not even do it. So they're pretty much getting a free hand in Asia and all our

partners in Asia are saying, well, if the U.S. is not going to be there for us, we might as well make the deal with the devil. Yeah. God. Yeah, that's scary. I mean, it doesn't make sense, too. It does make sense. Like, there's a little bit of mixed signals coming out, right? Because usually the, uh, the messaging out of the White House and the Trump administration, even from the first term, first administration was tough on China, tough on China. And it's clear that, you know, we don't really, not that we don't want to be, but at least the administration doesn't want to be. I could see that there being a little bit of like a back and forth between like the business interests that are trying to do business in China and like the more traditional neo-con, you know, Reagan era Republicans who want to like project and be a little bit more tough. and the world's policemen and, you know,

pick your, pick your, you know, label. It was interesting because we just, before we started, you were talking about like, you know,

the broader sense of what we're going to talk about and there's a loss of U.S. credibility internationally and the isolationism. I mean, if I'm Taiwan and I'm seeing what's going on with Ukraine and our lack of, you know, wanting to help them,

I'm definitely worried. Yes. Yeah. I think, and they're not the only ones. I think there's a lot of countries that are worried. Since World War II, it's pretty much been the American era. And we have shaped and directed what the world looks like today.

And not out of any sense of altruism that, you know, we love mankind and Kumbaya. It benefited the U.S. It benefited the U.S. economically. It made us a powerhouse. Our military strength in part relies on the multiple to 150, 200. Nobody knows how many bases we have around the world from friends and allies where we can project power. People, countries are not looking and saying, well, that's all going away. The U.S. is willingly abrogating that leadership role. What fills the void? That hasn't been answered. nobody knows, but that creates an era of instability. And even, you know, it affects the private sector. The private sector had a freehand economically out the world because the U.S. was there to ensure that Western liberal economic, and I use liberal, not in the left or right sense of the word, but in the sense of freedoms, the economic sense created stability, it created

markets for U.S. corporations to operate in, that instability is going to change that. And you cannot, and we cannot in the 21st century, rely on only domestic consumption and domestic production. It doesn't work that way anymore. This is not 1910. So that's going to hurt in a whole host of places. And every, you know, right now, I have the impression that the, only tool in the U.S. toolbox is a hammer. The only way we want to get things done is we threaten everybody, do this or we'll blow you up or we'll invade. You know, Greenland is a great example. Yeah. The whole, we need Greenland for national security is a bullshit argument. We've always had Greenland for national security. Greenland is affiliated with Denmark. It's part of NATO.

We've had bases there. At one point, we had 10,000 U.S. service members station in Greenland. We closed the bases down because the Soviet Union collapsed. If they wanted bases again, all they got to do is ask, and they'll come to us. So it's not about security. It's not about, you know, you can start to see it's about money. And somebody wants a piece of those resources and someone's going to benefit financially. But the question is, are we going to benefit in the national security sense for,

from taking over another country unwillingly. My answer is no. It's not going to do damage to us. And it is part of, I think, the lead up to the U.S. walking away from NATO. Yeah, I mean, just from the leak stuff that you saw where, you know, Vance and Hexeth were both commiserating in terms of like talking about how, you know,

free ride for Europe again and stuff like that. just a real anti-European sentiment, which I don't really fucking understand. Like I understand like wanting Europe to and the NATO countries to pull their own weight and pay the minimum and do what they need to do. And that's fine. And there's definitely ways of doing that. And like if someone who did,

I have a hard time believing like this whole, this whole, all this messaging and going after Canada and Greenland. Huh. Is just to get the European nations that are in NATO to spend their up to their share. right like i can't if that's the if that's the move like i can't really understand it's a dumb move i would say right because it's probably other ways of doing it to get and like you see what's going on now most of the countries now nato are all going to spend or exceed what they need to pay for nato

to you know the minimum two percent or whatever um and it's good that europe is stepping up i think for sure but at the same time like you can't alienate your out like what do we we doing? Like, these are the allies we've had for the longest time. And Nick's talked about this a ton where the only time Article 5 has ever been triggered and used was after 9-11 when, you know, U.S. was the only one who did it. Right. So it's like, and they all showed up. It's just, yeah, everything, go ahead, please. No, it's, I'm sorry. I mean, it's frustrating. Because as you point out, the Europeans already are doing what we, what we need them to do. And, and they're right. They need to pony more into defense. But it's not like they've had a free ride. And I'll give you one example.

You know, we fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where do we support that effort from in a big chunk? From Germany. Yeah. All the casualties that came out of Afghanistan and Iraq were flown into Frankfurt, where we have a huge military hospital and their lives were saved by that. You know, there are so many bases, so many capabilities we have. Afghanistan, as you point out, they all showed up. You can argue, well, you know, they didn't do this part or they weren't, they didn't show up enough or whatever, but they all showed up. Yeah.

And we were in Afghanistan with NATO. So we get a lot out of NATO, this idea that, you know, we're subsidized. We don't subsidize NATO. There is no NATO budget other than the one to keep the NATO headquarters buildings operational. NATO is based on every nation ponying up their military in the event of a conflict. The U.S. budget is not based on NATO. The U.S. military budget is based on what we need throughout the world and at home. And that money is not going into the pockets of the Europeans.

It's building our military. you know, in the 21st century, we cannot go it alone. If, you know, if you want to go it alone, then you're going to have to put a draft in the U.S. And you're going to have to draft two to three million Americans, none of which want to do it. None of them want to go off to war, but you're going to have to do it. And you're going to have to sink the entire federal budget and then some into the military. I mean, look at what that's going to do to the economy, because we can't, we can't do it alone. can't, we've been pushing the Europeans to drag their asses out from Europe into the Pacific

to help us with China. And they have. The Germans have deployed ships, the British, the French, they're all moving out there in coordination with the U.S. That's all going to go away. Because at the end of the day, the Chinese aren't going to invade Europe. It's the Russians. And we're not going to stop the Russians. And then why the hell should they stop the Chinese? And we're going to be by ourselves out there. And that's not going to be a pretty picture. So we're sort of shooting ourselves in a foot. And one concern I have with this administration, and I've seen it in others, to be fair, is there's very little understanding of unintended consequences in collateral effects.

You know, if we hammered South Korea as an example, because, you know, they need to do more, they need to provide more and all this kind of stuff, and they're not doing it. So we're going to start pulling back from South Korea. U.S. administrations tend to look at that in isolation. They don't start looking at it. Well, how is Japan going to look at this? What's the impact on our ability to sustain combat operations in the Western Pacific? without South Korea.

And they don't look at all these things like, you know, when you talk about Greenland, we want Greenland. They don't see what it does to other allies throughout the world who look at this and say, you know, you guys are really out of control. Yeah. You can't be trusted. So they don't see what the third level of effect is going to be.

They look at it in isolation. And that's going to be problematic. Yeah. You mentioned before before we popped all. before we started recording about a leaked Pentagon document about that the U.S. wouldn't send troops if Russia invaded the rest of Europe. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I can't remember one of the major news sources came up with this. I can't remember if it was AP or the New York Times, whoever it was. But there's a Pentagon document apparently circulating leading the discussion of if the Russians attack Europe. What is the U.S. response? By treaty, the Europeans would flip whatever it is, Article 5, and the U.S. would have to send troops to help defend Western Europe or Eastern now, whatever, all of Europe. And this document is saying, we are not going to send troops or anything. No hardware, nothing.

Nothing. Europe will still fall under the nuclear umbrella. Okay. But, okay, what does that mean? We're going to nuke Russia? Right. And Saturday nuclear war? No, that's not going to.

It's a, it's a bullshit piece of pablum to make everybody go. No, no, we're still there for you. That's not going to do anything. And so we're basically going to renege on our treaty agreements, which is not a surprise given that we reneged on every other agreement we have made and leave the Europeans hanging. That in itself will embolden the Russians. because, you know, there's Russian officials coming back and forth to the U.S. nowadays, and they're discussing things.

I'm sure the Russians will raise it, and somebody will say, well, you know, we're not going to do this. We're going to do that or whatever. And that emboldens the Russians, because the next step will be the Baltic states. NATO members who will trigger Article 5 will say, yeah, we're not going to do anything for you. And you can tell the rest of the European countries believe we are not going to be there for them, because I just read an article that Germany has deployed German combat troops in Lithuania. For the first time outside of Germany, except for Afghanistan 9-11, they're permanently stationed German troops there. So the rest of Europe is saying, you know what?

The U.S. is unreliable. The polls, the polls are talking about nuclear weapons. Yeah. We're going to have nuclear proliferation up the world. Wazoo because the French and the British nuclear arsenals are not going to be enough. So other countries are going to start getting nuclear weapons. If you're Poland, why wouldn't you? Yeah, exactly.

You could see Poland, who is building up the strongest military in Europe, is getting extremely concerned and has no faith in the U.S. being there to deter a Russian attack. yikes uh yeah we're entering an extremely dangerous period of time uh this is what provokes nations into making mistakes uh or taking risks that otherwise they shouldn't be taking and and kicking off a bigger global conflict yeah and we're kind of stupid to think that well if that all blows up we're fine here between our two oceans and we just sit back uh and i think And it ain't going to happen. It'll eventually come to bite us in the ass.

What's interesting is, though, like, we really have no problem moving equipment and men and, you know, six B-2 spirits over to Diego Garcia to, like, saber rattle for Iran. Yeah. Which I'm not saying Iran's not a problem, right? We've discussed Iran on this channel a lot. And, like, I get it. The proxies are, you know, need to be, you know, stopped and stuff like. that Israel's done a good job of that, but I kind of feels, and this is a layman speaking, that obviously Iran should not be a nuclear power.

I feel like they're probably doing this to try and get them to the negotiation table, and hopefully it works. But I don't know if we should be taking really our peas and cues from like Israel. Because we all know Israel wants to bomb the shit out of Iran. It's what they wanted to do for a longest time, and I understand why they want to. Well, well, Israel wants us to bomb the shit out of Iran. Well, yeah, correct. Yeah.

They can do limited strikes, but to take out the Iranian infrastructure, that takes a sustained air campaign, which the Israelis cannot sustain. Guess who can? And that's the big problem. Yeah, I mean, look, the Iranian regime is far from one of my favorite things. But here's the thing. And it's one thing, a lot of news media is not covering. Yes, the Iranians basically turned down the U.S. offered to negotiate.

But they didn't, a lot of news media doesn't tell you why. The Iranian response was, we can't trust you. We had an agreement and you walked away from it. And now you're in the process of walking away from the other agreement. Why should we believe that you're serious? this time. Yeah. So it's, it's not that that Iran is, is being recalcitrant and fanatical. Iran is, is saying, look, this is our experience. This is what we, this is the world we live in. Not your world where you like, oh, you know, we're good, we're kind, we'll do this. No,

we're in a world where you go back on every agreement that you've made. And even if we reach an agreement under this administration, there's no, there's nothing saying that the next administration is going to change it because the precedence has been set. During the Cold War, whether you had Democratic or Republican administrations, the goal was the same. You had differences in how you applied it, but we had a consistent policy. And it was a policy of containment that was developed by Truman, the Democrats. And everybody kind of, so, you know, the idea was, we're going to contain, and this is how, now we'll put more pressure, we'll put less pressure, we'll do economic, we'll do military, whatever it was. But it was a consistent policy.

We don't have that anymore. We flip 180 degrees. And we flip on our own. It's like look at the tariff war with Canada and Mexico. We had the North American free trade agreement. Trump came in and his first administration and said, this is a crappy agreement. I'm going to renegotiate. He renegotiated, came back and said, this is the greatest agreement ever reached.

And that's the agreement he's violating now and saying it's a piece of crap. Yeah. We're slapping tariffs that we shouldn't be slapping on these people. So everybody is saying there's no point going to the negotiating table with the United States because tomorrow you can switch your point of view. And it's totally different. And today we can agree that we will limit the number of missiles and reactors, whatever it is. And tomorrow you'll say, no, we're not happy with that.

Yeah. So we shot ourselves in the foot if we're genuinely. interested in reaching an agreement with the Iranians. The big question mark is, is it really just a pressure point to send all these equipment into the area, or are we serious? I'm not a military expert, but I tell you, my concern is the C-17s that were flying out of South Korea. My understanding is in South Korea, there are a number of busts. bunker buster bombs designed to take out the North Korean nuclear program. And I wonder if shifting those C-17s-Sadigosia, they're bringing in bunker busters because

they're serious about doing a strike in Iran. I have no information to that effect, but, you know, that's a serious concern. Are they pressuring it or are they, even if they're pressuring it, are they on a hair trigger to say, well, as soon as they say no, off we go. Without consideration, what that is going to do to the rest of the region, because this is not going to be a, we bomb the Iranian nuclear program, we take it out and we go home. Everything's changed. Everything's fixed, right. Yeah, no, my God. Everything is going to turn into a shit show. Well, according to Charles Lister talking about that, he spoke to somebody in the U.S. military

and told him at the end of February that the best we could do is set it back three months. and that's us because they're so deep their facilities are already so deep that our biggest bunker busters can't reach it

which, you know, what does that do? Yeah, it's, and it's probably 100% correct. I mean, you know,

it's not like the world doesn't know what our capabilities are. Sure. We've demonstrated them time and time again. And a bunker buster can go only so deep.

And, you know, they tell you, whatever it is, 5,000 feet under a mountain. And so what are the Iran going to do? We'll go 6,000 feet. Right.

You know, it's stuff like that. They spread the program out throughout the country. So it's not one target, two targets. You know, the Israelis had great success with the Syrian and Iraqi programs because they went after one target in each one. We're going to have to go over 100, 120, 150 different targets. That is, you know, 6B2 are not going to do it. Right.

That is a sustained campaign for weeks, if not months. And as you point out, the end result is, okay, we push it back three months and give you the reason to speed up your program. Right. Right. Because at the end of the day, are we willing to send in a quarter million troops to take over Iran? Oh, God, no.

Absolutely. Oh, my God. Right. No. And that's, I mean, that's, you send in the entire U.S. military. What is it? 450,000 army, 150,000 Marines, and then the Navy Air Force. That's a, that's a serious war when the Iranians will potent. And the military is not powerful or potent, but they'll pony up two million people. Right. And, you know, you've got insurgencies,

you've got wave attacks, you got all this kind of stuff, and it's going to suck resources. It's going to suck lives. To what end? Right. And God knows, like what, you know, another occupation would look like how it would change the region. That went really well for us for Afghanistan and Iraq. We're really good at that. Yeah, I really like that. We're really seeing the ROI on that come to fruition. More about us losing like our international credibility, essentially.

You know, we always talk about China. And like there was a big talk about pivoting to China, pivoting to China. And set com is just like, that's never going to happen. We want all the money and the bombs. And it doesn't seem like we're pivoting to China, frankly, because like we're moving a carrier group that was in the Pacific to the Middle East now should be there in a couple weeks to supplement the one that we already have there. We're moving C-17s and equipment and assets from South Korea to Bahrain, is it?

I think it was Bahrain and probably Diego Garcia. Yeah, both. Yeah. So I made a snarky comment on Twitter. the other day where like if you pivot hard enough to the Pacific, you end up back in the Middle East. And it kind of seems like exactly what's going on. Yeah.

We can't let go. And part of the we can't let go is because our relationship with Israel and Israel's need for us to support their aims in the Middle East. It's hard for us to do it all. It's just It's a matter of fact The resources that would take I remember when I was when I was growing up

The U.S. military always had Their plan was the ability to fight a two front war Yeah And then it became a war and a half And then became two insurgencies You know part of it is It costs horrendous amounts of money And resources to do that

And if we're going to fight a war with Iran and pivot to China at the same time. We just do unless, I don't know, we really got to go on to a wartime footing, which I don't think the American people or American industry would like that. But part of the problem is, and you can see it in our discussion,

we have reduced ourselves to a military solution for every problem. going pivoting to China doesn't mean we've got to send 300 F-35s and 10 carrier battle groups to China. Yeah. There's a lot of other things we do. And I give you an example. There was an article I read like a couple of years ago. And they were interviewing.

There was a diplomatic economic meeting in Asia. And they were interviewing. some of the Asian diplomats, you know, from Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, etc. And they made a very interesting comment. He said, you know, it used to be that when you got to these meetings and the international forums and stuff, we were swamped by American diplomats. And they were, you know, getting the American point of view and pushing for the American agenda and all this kind of stuff. He says, now we don't see American diplomats. You know who we see? Chinese diplomats. And they're pushing the Chinese line. We have, we have surrendered the diplomatic initiative, which was very

effective, especially during the Cold War. Sure. We got rid of AID. We got rid of voice of America. We've reduced the State Department. We have a much, much smaller footprint overseas, which means less influence, which means less ability to use soft power, which everybody, as a derogatory term nowadays, we don't have the ability to shape the environment, to shape the situation that we used to be able to do just by flexing diplomatic and economic muscle. The only option now we have is we're going to blow you up. Yeah. And that's only going to hold true for a certain time, and then that's going to go out the window.

So we have given that up, and now the only option we have is we're going to fly B2 to Diego Garcia. Yeah. Yeah, an obvious, like, show of force, right? Because, like, the whole point of B2s we talked about in the last episode is, like, they're supposed to be stealth, right? We're not really, no one's supposed to know they're coming. Yes.

So, and they can fly from St. Louis or Missouri to wherever they need to go across, around the globe to do what they need to do. Yeah. I mean, like, we do a really good job, I think, on this show is trying to, like, be analytical and stuff. not so much me. I'm more of like a ready fire aim, meaning like there's things that like I don't agree with,

right? And being non-political, like Mick does a really good job. So does Andy and stuff. But Andy's had his experiences like with the Mozart group in Ukraine and stuff like that. So his stance is pretty clear, you know, in terms of so is Mick, obviously.

Mix a former, you know, ground branch guy. Like, what are we talking about? So, you know, his stance is kind of clear too. But he's very good at being analytical. and as apolitical as possible. Me, not so much.

Like, I think the effect Israel has on our geopolitical view and our foreign policy, I think is extremely detrimental to what we're trying to do, you know, especially if we're trying to really counter China, which I think is what we should be doing. Yeah. And countering Russia because, like, sure, we spent 100 or given 150 plus billion dollars, but the Russian military is in Chambers, right? Like, you would have never gotten this.

And not a single American. troop has died. Yeah. So there are and so like, like the proverbial toxic relationship that we have with the Middle East, that Israel continues to like pour some gas on it. Yeah. I think is a detrimental thing to US foreign policy. It is. It's, look, I mean, you know, the Middle East is, is the Middle East. It is, it is an area that is sucking up our attention, our time, are resources when it shouldn't be sucking up that much. Right. I mean, you point out, yes, we've given billions to Ukraine.

But I come from an intelligence background where I look at that and say, money is a tool. I don't come from the private sector and money is the end-all be-all. Money is a tool. Right. And that tool is destroying the Russian military. One chess piece off the board, something we don't have to worry about. Now, we walk away from Ukraine.

have to worry about the Russian military because they were rebuilt. But it's, it's, it's just costing us dollars. Yeah. It's not costing us lives. It's not costing us tanks and aircraft and stuff. It is, a logical administration would say, you know what, we're going to pivot to China, pivot to the Pacific, and in cooperation with Europe, we'll let Europe take the lead in Europe and counter the Russians. We'll help you. We'll be there. But you guys take the lead, we'll be behind you. And we'll take the lead in the Pacific. And you'll take the lead in the Pacific. And you'd be behind us in the Pacific. And it works well.

But what we're saying is forget Europe, forget the Pacific in China. Let's focus on the Middle East. And I'm like, why? Yeah. What is that going to do to us? Yeah. It's because that's what we know, right,

for the last 25 years. Yeah. I mean, you look at like even like China's capability. In terms of just, obviously naval and shipbuilding capabilities are insane in China. but they're like advanced like air-to-air missiles are as good as of as ours now right we used to have a huge lead on them and we used to worry about development and now it's kind of like we're slapping things together like we're putting SM6s like the naval missiles on f18 and that's good i guess as like a band-aid and you know we've had our longer range amram in development for the last four or five years we still haven't seen one strapped underneath anything or inside of a band-aid and you know we've had our longer range amram in development for the last four or five years we still haven't seen one strapped underneath anything or inside of a band- of F-22. So, like, these are real issues where China is producing these PL-15s that are, like,

they're everywhere. You see them on every airplane. You know, to think that they're not close to parity with us is crazy. Yeah, sure, they have less, they don't have as many aircraft carriers, but aircraft carriers are just big fucking targets. They'll have, look, the Chinese have problems. Every military has problems. We saw that with the Russians that we assumed the Russians were this, you know, huge

juggernaut. It fell apart. But you can't assume that's going to be the case all the time. Right. And the Chinese are very good. And I tell you, it's frustrating. I don't get a sense that that we have a real strategy, overarching strategy on how we are going to meet the threat. And I don't mean fight the war. I'm sure they got a, they got a strategy for the war. But how do we compete? You know, an example, they just announced this, what is it, the F-47, whatever it is? Yeah, yeah, the new Delphi-FIRE. Yeah. We can't afford it. Right.

It's, it's, it's great, between that, the new ballistic missile submarines, the ICBMs we want to build, all this. There's no money. Right. We could give, we could take the entire federal budget and give it to the Pentagon, and And the response is it's not enough. And we give them the entire GDP and everybody's salary, not enough. When you're spending 300, and it's going to be more, million dollars per aircraft,

that's for the NGAT, yeah. That's for the NGat. Then you've got the Navy's version coming up. I mean, how, you know, a ballistic missile sub is, what, $10 billion now? Yeah. You can't. We've got to look and say, how can we feel? fix this problem because we're going to wake up one morning in that NGAD,

we're going to have two. That's all we can afford. Yeah. And I just, I don't think we've got a, we've got a strategy on how we deal with Chinese manufacturing industrial capability. Right. The fact that, that our military capability to build is declining, our shipbuilding is in serious, has serious problems.

we're not, I mean, this is down the weeds, but we don't have enough welders to do the welding on submarines, which is critical. I just don't think we're addressing the real problems. We're looking at it's buy, by, buy. Yeah. Oh, the Chinese have this, that we need 10 of those. Right. No, you need to come up with something that's affordable and realistic and how to counter them.

And again, it gets back to my point. That's why you have allies. That's why you look at allies and say, what can you pony up in this strategy for us? The South Koreans and the Japanese have amazing technology. Do you think that maybe we could look to them and say, hey, can you pick up this side of the slack for us? Now, we don't want to do it because it's all about money. And if we let the Chinese, I mean, the Japanese produced this or South Korea, well, somebody in the United States doesn't make money. but I'm not looking at it for the money angle.

I'm looking at it for the national security angle. And there's no reason we can't sit there and say, let's come up with a joint manufacturing capability that enhances what we have and gives us the ability to match the Chinese. Yeah. I mean, that would make sense. Yeah, but sense is not on the docket.

Yeah, it's just, it's kind of, I mean, I guess it's a little scary and a little worrying. where we clearly have a rival, right? And the goal should be to out technology that rival, right? And make sure we're at the position where we can dictate terms if we need to. And it seems more and more that that's not the case. Because, you know, yeah, Russia, we talked about Russia's army and their military and it kind of almost completely collapsed. But they didn't spend the amount of money that China spent, right?

Like they spent, I think it was 70 billion a year. like, which is a lot of money, but China's spending, you know, upwards of $500 billion. And that parity is real. That, you know, that purchasing parity thing is absolutely real. Like they're getting a lot more for their money. And so I don't know what we're doing really because I don't think we need 12 aircraft carriers anymore, right? Maybe four to project our power in the Middle East where we know they won't get not, they won't get shot out of the water. Yeah, you know, I have to ask myself that question because I'm actually, I'm rereading.

a great trilogy on the U.S. Japan Naval War in the Pacific World War II. And you can see the similarity at the lead up to the war. Everything was about battleships, battleships, battleships, battleships, they were just incredible. And in one morning in Pearl Harbor, that was it. Done. Battleships, a piece of shit. It can't survive.

And the aircraft carrier reigns supreme. And I wondered to myself, are we at that? at that point where carriers, carriers, carriers. Yeah. And it doesn't do it. It's not what it used to be. As the Chinese developed these long range area denial weapons where, you know, you can't get your aircraft carrier close enough to launch your planes to strike China for fear that

Chinese missiles are going to sink your aircraft carrier. Yeah. But we've got generations of naval officers who grew up with aircraft carriers. And maybe you're right, maybe 11 or 12, we don't need them anymore. Yeah. Maybe that's not the weapon to take into the Pacific. Like you said, I think it's submarines, right? Just take that money.

You're going to spend the $15 billion. You're going to spend, or $20 billion, you're going to spend on an aircraft carrier and put it into submarines. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, I, I firmly believe that differing views, contrary in views, are critically important in decision-making. because if you've got group think and everybody thinks the same way, you're going to come up with the same solution. And if you have people who disagree with you, it forces you to, A, to think and say, are they right? And am I wrong?

I do need to look at what they're pointing out and maybe make allowances. And I think we as a nation, or at least as administrations, as governments, as military, we have group think. This is what we believe in. This is how it's got to go. And those people who think differently are just shunted to say, remember if, no, I don't even remember. But before World War II, there was an army officer named Billy Mitchell who was advocating, as a general officer, advocating air power. And he demonstrated what long-range bombers could do to a battleship. and he took the old World War I German battleships that we had taken and sank them.

And he showed that, you know, your battleships just aren't cut out for modern warfare, the result of which he was court-martialed. Oh, wow. Subordination. Yeah. And, you know, and that was another example of group think. You had, you had group think where it's the battleship, this is supreme. it was groupthink when, you know, again, I don't want to hark on the same thing, but

Pearl Harbor came and there was group think, you know, Japanese pilots suck, Japanese aircraft or poor copies, they're no good. And Pearl Harbor happened. They realized Japanese carrier pilots were the best in the world. And the Japanese zero was the best carrier-based fighter in the world. And they, that group think had discounted that. And I wonder if we're into that group think where it is it's the aircraft carrier this is how we're going to deal with it and you know you want to say listen to people who disagree even if the people who disagree with you are wrong there listen to what they say there may be issue there may be points that are important to listen to they may be right it'll make you think and you have to defend yourself because if you got people say no the

aircraft carrier sucks you got to sit down and think well does it yeah is it the right thing and it forces you to come out to it. And I think we're on a, on the, I don't know, it's not necessarily the wrong course in the Pacific, but we are on a course that is not going to guarantee us success in the Pacific. We may, we may get it, you know, and I'm jumping all over the place. That's all right. But, but I want to point out, you made, you used a very interesting word, which I, I 100% agree with. You say, we have a rival in China. And two, often we run around saying China is a threat. No, it's not. China is not going to invade us. And China's not going to. Not yet. Maybe in a hundred years. But they are our rival. And the

Chinese clearly have a strategy. And that is to become the preeminent power in the Western Pacific in Eastern Asia. They don't care at this stage what we do in the Eastern Pacific, but they want to be able to be dominant in the Western Pacific. They don't. They don't. They don't. have the ability yet to project significant power beyond that, whereas we do. They want to get there, but they're not there yet, but they're doing it step by step. And we are stepping out of that as evidenced by Japan, South Korea, talking to China about tariff, coordinated tariff response and allowing the Chinese to have that, to gain that dominance in Western Pacific, Eastern Asia. that is scary like actually like trying to like them if it's real like coordinating with

south korea and japan because they are going to have that economic influence on them right and part of our power sure we have nice hairy you know weapon systems and stuff like that that are scary but it's economic power yes how we've like thrown our weight around for since war war two yes and it is it is that economic power which the Chinese have latched onto. It's got to be, yes, you have to back it up with significant military power. But the lead on this is the economic power, the fact that everybody uses the dollar, that everybody has to use a swift system to move their dollars around.

And that's what allows economic embargoes. We just flip the switch. You can't use it anymore. Yeah. And the entire nations are screwed over. You start to lose that and you lose a significant amount of influence and power and weight. and military power is not going to take that place. We can't run around the world beating everybody up.

Can't do it. Yeah. And I'll give you an example. Growing up during the Cold War, American cultural influence dominated everything. Everybody wanted to be American. Everybody wanted to wear Levi's, listen to rock and roll, watch American televisions. You know, that's people kind of discounted. But that was amazing because you had an entire world that willingly came into the American camp.

And the other part of the world that was in the Soviet camp wanted to come in. I can't tell you how many East Europeans, Russians you talk to in the diplomatic circus. And I'm like, oh, you know, can you get some blue jeans? Oh, what about the latest Rolling Stone album? It was that kind of soft power influence was amazing. What it did to people. That's gone. We are now, we're now viewed, which is stunning to me as, as the assholes on the block.

Yeah. I mean, listen, I'm a big hockey fan, right? And that Four Nations was going on about a month ago. And the beginning games were in Montreal, right? So when they played, they played both anthems. When the United States anthem, they were booming. Yeah. And if you're Canadian or even if you're American, even if you're American,

you can kind of understand why they'd be booing, right? And you have seen like a big switch between a liberal party and their more conservative party that was more Trump-esque. The polls have football completely, right? So it's not hard for people to look at the United States more and more, which is crazy, Canada, as more of a threat than anything else. And it's insane to think of that. Like you want a better deal with Canada.

You want a lesser trade deficit. Maybe number one, make some more shit in the United States. It's affordable across the world to do that. Or number two, I don't know, you shouldn't be picking fights with allies. It's just real simple. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. Again, we're going to jump a little over the place. It is, it is, it is.

Welcome to my brain. Yeah. It is stunning for me to find America on the other side now, where people boo us. Yeah. And people look at us. And it is, I think, a lack of understanding that governments and peoples are responsible for these, for these deficit stuff. You know, here, the reason we have a deficit is we want to buy stuff from Canada. Right. And why do they manufacture overseas? Because American companies move their production overseas because it's cheaper and it increases their profits. Not because of government policies.

I mean, government policies are driven by the private sector saying, we want bigger profits, so we want to move our car factory down to Mexico because we're paying them, whatever it is, $400 a month, and we don't have to deal with the labor laws we have here. You can't, unless you're going to institute a dictatorship, you can't force American companies to come back. Right. And you can't go out and beat up the Canadians who are providing something that we want. It's like the Canadians showed up and said, you need to buy all your lumber from us. Yeah.

We're like, hey, we like your lumber and we like the price and we're going to buy it. It's the same thing. I was listening to some guy who's very knowledgeable in the oil industry. And he said, yes, we import Canadian oil. Says, but we don't use it. We don't consume it. It says American companies bring Canadian oil in and turn around, refine it and sell it to other countries. They make profits from that.

It's not that we're, you know, that that oil comes in and Americans consume it. It doesn't even hit the pump here. It goes someplace else. It's, you know, it's just, it's, it's, we're fighting fights that we don't have to fight. Sure. And not paying attention to the fights we need to be fighting. Yeah, Lewis. I mean, this is freaking awesome.

I got talk to you all day. Let's do this again for sure. Sure. Happy to. And we'd love to have you back on the team house as well. Again, if you guys want to hear about Lewis's over 27-year career in the CIA, check out episode 254 on the team house. The link is in the description there.

However, I forgot to mention anything. I mean, we've hit all the spots, but. Oh, there's a thousand things, and we'll never cover it, and there's probably four more things that have just occurred. But next time, we can sit down and discuss how the invasion of Greenland went. Oh, yeah, exactly. How the U.S. performed. Doing an after-action review.

Yeah. Of course, anything, if you guys want to find, Lewis, the links are in the description. All the links for the rest of the guys are in the description as well. And the best way to help support the show, you get ad-free audio, ad-free video, early access is patreon.com slash the team house. Lewis, Rita, thanks, man. Really appreciate it. My pleasure.

You have a good day. Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a much. moment about how you can support the show if you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this. You can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com slash the team house. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of the team house ad free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast Eyes On with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, Mick Mulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad free.

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