Gen. Flynn: I believe the biggest issue is protecting our economic engines within this country. That’s the biggest issue. We have to protect innovation and the economic system that we have in order to maintain a prosperity for this country. Especially in the last four years, we’ve seen all these things pop up, like being energy independent is a big deal. So the economic system that we have, we have to make sure that we balance that economic system, and keep it very powerful, and protect it, and not abuse it.
From a 100,000 foot level down to the 60,000 or 50,000 foot level, there are clear competitors and adversaries on the world stage today that have a completely different political system than us, and they believe that their political system is better than ours, and they have plans, over time, to basically dominate both the economic systems and the political systems of the world.
So that would be clearly China, clearly Russia, clearly Iran. Other second tier threats are countries like North Korea, and I describe them as second tier because of their relationships with the regions of the world that they come from, so North Korea relationship with China, relationship with Russia. Iran, I put in that same category with Russia and China because Iran has a geostrategic position in the world and resources that enable that country to, frankly, they’re not thriving but they survive, but they’re also very dangerous.
And then other countries like Venezuela. When we look at our own hemisphere and we look from the 70s, and 80s, and 90s, there was this shift to more democratic nations, if you will, and then there’s this subtle shifting back towards nations that are not democracy, so to speak, with free and fair elections, but moving more towards socialism or communism or dictatorships, in some cases.
Those are the nation states that still are out there that if somebody was going to lose sleep at night, those would be the ones I would lose sleep over. Principally China because it’s not like we don’t want to deal with them, but we have to deal with them from a stance, like a football player has a stance on the line before that player moves forward to move to the right, or move to the left, or move forward, or stand back and maybe block a little bit, so it’s like that.
To use a sports analogy, we have to understand what is our stance on the world stage. How long do we want to maintain that stance? In this case, China, what are the ways that they are trying to penetrate our lines, so to speak? What are the ways that they are trying to defend in their own defensive backfield to catch, and grab, and deceive the kinds of plays that we might be running?
It is a big game. It’s a very serious game because there are two competing ideologies and they’re not aligned. This particular large nation [communist China], I think it’s 1.6 billion [in population], I believe, versus us with let’s just say 330 million—it’s a demographic imbalance. Plus how they view themselves and how their economy is, and frankly, just basic human rights, the clear militarization that is happening in China, the relationships that have developed over time between Russia and China.
I forget how many years ago, a few years back probably, five, I guess, the Russians and the Chinese signed a huge military agreement, training, and weapon sales, and all these kinds of issues, as well as an energy agreement, so you have to watch those things because it’s not just that they have a new weapon system or they got a new aircraft. We were talking about, “We have the F-35 [combat aircraft].”
We talk about things, and what we really need to be talking about is where are the relationships and how are those relationships evolving because as you know—and I met your lovely wife the other day—we’d all be kneeling at the altar of Nazism had we not taken advantage of relationships [that] today we probably could never have. Had it not been for Russia and the United States, and the other allies that we had, in Europe at least, we probably wouldn’t have beaten Adolf Hitler.
So that was an alliance of convenience or was an alliance because we both saw—frankly, in sort of my lifetime, I was born after World War II but it was less than 100 years ago—that altar of Nazism and altar of imperialism required relationships to form to be able to defeat them. And it wasn’t just defeating a military, it was defeating an idea, an ideology. And that’s what we have to understand when we talk about why we do the things that we do.
And maybe another conversation we could have is all this nonsense about Russia and the Middle East and China. What is it about alliances that we have to consider? Because alliances matter. And it’s not always about just being able to be friends with somebody or do trade. There’s a lot of other aspects of having an alliance or a partnership with a country beyond just trading with them. It’s everything, and it consists of everything.
But at the end of the day, the principal thing that the president of the United States has at his or her core is the responsibility to provide for the safety and security of every American citizen. And the subtext of that [includes] things like making sure that we are able to have the prosperity that we want, making sure that we have rule of law and systems that work. A kid dials 911 in an emergency and a police officer shows up and takes care of the problem, right? I mean, it’s that simple sometimes.
But these are big, big relationships that this town will tell you, this is bad. All this town has done is get us and keep us in wars. And as I sit here today, this is December of 2020, and we’re still arguing about whether or not we should bring forces home from Afghanistan, or what we’re doing in Iraq. And I’ve said this publicly that the biggest probably strategic mistake in the early part of this century was to get us involved in Iraq, nevermind Libya.
There are threats that we have. And as a president considers all these things, and the intel community comes in and says, “Bad, bad, bad. Worst case, worst case, worst case,” what a president has to do is decide for the country, for we the people, what are the right ways to take advantage of the alliances, the geostrategic alliances. It doesn’t mean that somebody is an ally, it just means that we need to have them as part of a geostrategic alliance to do things, to do smart things.
Because we don’t want to go to war. We don’t want to do any of that. What we really want is—I love to say we’re all going to get along. That’s not true. That’s not the history of the world. The history of the world is, and I say this a little bit tongue in cheek, we’re still 19 years at war. We’ve [been] at war, whether they want to define it like that or not, since 2001, 9/11. We still have people over in Iraq and Afghanistan. And there’s people over there trying to kill them.
The soldier that’s on the ground sees it as war, sees it as combat. Maybe the person going to Starbucks, frankly, doesn’t even understand that. But we have to ensure that we understand what’s the aberration. Is peace the aberration, or is war the aberration? Do we have long periods of war and short periods of peace?
So if you look at it historically, if you were in various military formations in the history of the world, you’ll find yourself where you’ll feel like you’re at war all the time. So I think that we have to understand what these geostrategic alliances are, in addition to the way that I describe some of the threats.
Re: США / U.S.A. - 2
Originally Posted by XCNY
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