Sebastian Gorka - Why We Fight - Why We Fight - Defeating America's Enemies - With No Apologies

Dave:Okay. So I want to shift a little bit to foreign policy because I think that’s sort of one of your main strengths.

Sebastian Gorka:My claim to fame is counter terrorism and stuff like this, but deep down I’m a strategy wonk. Grand strategy is my thing.

Dave:So we’ll talk in the lens of strategy then. So, as we’re taping this right now, like I was saying earlier, it’s going to sit on the shelf for a couple days, so I don’t want to get too lost in anything that happened today, but at the moment it’s a little upside down in Syria. There might have been strikes already from when we were taping this. Hungary just had elections. In your Wikipedia, it says you worked for the guy that just won. Apparently, you never worked for him. What are your general thoughts on foreign policy strategy, and what is a sensible policy and is Trump applying that view?

Sebastian Gorka:First things first. The great irony of our nation is that we are the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, and until recently we have been the dumbest and most astrategic. I mean, we haven’t thought or acted strategically since 1989, November the ninth, when the Berlin Wall fell.

Dave:How have we acted?

Sebastian Gorka:The ’90s was just confused, “What-is-national-security about?” lurching for the snooze button. Who are the threats? Is it China? Is it weapons of mass destruction? Is it ethnic cleansing such as in Yugoslavia? It was just a mess, and then we had 2001, on 9/11, and we had the neocon disasters.

It’s not an accident these guys are former Trotskyites, because they’re so naïve at the way they look at the world. We’re going to create democracy at the end of a gun barrel in a country with thirty-six languages that defeated Alexander the Great and the British Empire and the Soviets? You couldn’t be stupider if you tried. So we’ve done some very foolish things because we haven’t stuck to the basics.

Strategy, at the end of the day, is about one thing: It’s about prioritization based on interests. You’ve got to say some things are more important than others and, guess what, some countries are more important than others. But in a postmodern secular world, you’re not allowed to say that. All countries are equally important. Vanuatu is as important as Turkey. Wrong! It’s not. I may love the people of Vanuatu, but no, it’s not of geostrategic import to the country of America.

So, number one, we have to prioritize, and I think this administration does. I doff my cap to Nadia Schadlow, H. R. McMaster’s deputy. She held the pen in the meetings that I was in on new National Security Strategy [8] The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, The White House, December 2017 https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf of America, and I tell you, Dave, it is the first document in thirty years that deserves the name “National Security Strategy.” Every administration has them. This is the first one that says, this is what we stand for, these are our friends, these are our enemies, and this is what we’re going to prioritize. Prior to that it was laundry lists—we’re going to have two large wars at once, we’re going to save the whales. You have to prioritize.

Finally, this administration is about “America first.” We are not isolationists, nor are we interventionists. This really annoys me. If you’re a conservative, for twenty years, you were given two choices: Button A: Invade other people’s countries and occupy them. Button B: Close the curtains on the Pacific and the Atlantic and say, “We don’t care about anybody else.” Well, for the most powerful nation in the world there is a large palette of options between the two! It’s about being smart and it’s about our interests.

To summarize the president’s approach, this isn’t official, but I like it. We have numerous former generals and active generals from the Marine Corps at the highest levels of the administration, the chairman of Joint Chiefs, the chief of staff, the secretary of defense, and the interesting thing is they all come from the same Marine Corps Division—not just the Marine Corps, but the same division. That division has a motto: “No better Friend. No worse Enemy.” That’s “America first.”

Dave:So when you see someone like John Bolton being now part of the cabinet, and if you were to look, not that you can get truth out of Twitter, but the day it was happening, everybody was saying that this is going to start World War III and just the general hysterics. Now John Bolton is definitely, I suspect, more of a neocon than you would be comfortable with …

Sebastian Gorka:I don’t think it’s fair to call him a neocon. I don’t think he’s ideologically driven. If you watch the videos recorded of his speeches twenty years ago, he was sounding very much like Trump. “We’re Americans and we have interests. If you want to work with us, fine. If you don’t, there’s a problem.” I think it’s very telling that within forty minutes of the president’s tweet about John coming on board, Bolton gave an interview on Fox, and they asked him about what are you going to be like as a national security advisor, and he gave a very interesting answer. He quoted Dean Acheson, the doyen of foreign policy in America. I don’t know if this is a true story, but John said, “Dean Acheson was once asked, ‘How do you have such a good relationship with the president you serve?’ and Dean Acheson said, ‘Well it’s very easy. We may disagree on policy issues, but at the end of the day, I never forget who was elected president, and it wasn’t me.’ ” That’s a John Bolton 2.0. He understands that, unlike his predecessor H. R. McMaster, he’s not there to lecture the president and foist his version of what you should do onto the commander in chief but to be an honest broker and provide a palette of options because the person who was elected president gets to decide. So I’m very excited about John, and I’m as excited about Mike Pompeo coming from the CIA to the State Department. We are in very good hands, Dave.

Dave:So how do you make sure, if it’s between the pure isolationists and the neocons or something like the nation-builders that not everything that you do outside of our borders becomes something much bigger. I mean, look, we’re still at war in Afghanistan. I don’t think anyone knows why. Can you tell me why we’re at war in Afghanistan? Can anyone tell us at this point?

Sebastian Gorka:I’ll tell you why we went to Afghanistan in October of ’01, and it still is the only reason we should be there today. Nothing’s changed.

The idea that girls can go to school—I love it, I get it. And that people can listen to music freely and the Taliban won’t execute you. My parents lived under communism. My father suffered under fascism. He protected his Jewish classmates during the occupation of Budapest. I don’t like those kinds of systems, but there was only one reason we were there: to make sure that that landmass would not be used to execute mass casualty attacks in Manhattan, in Washington, or in a field in Pennsylvania. End of story.

It’s not about building a ring road around Kabul that not even the Soviets could finish. It’s not about building hospitals. I’m sorry, you never make the ideal the enemy of the good. What the president does is he looks at things as questions of possibility. You can’t be a massively successful realtor in the toughest market in the world, New York real estate, if you have a filter that distorts reality. Either this square footage is worth x or it’s not worth x according to the market, and that’s how he approaches these issues. So Afghanistan’s only important to make sure that bad guys don’t use it again to kill Americans in America.