Power and Politics with Mike Pompeo
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This is Honestly. Summer typically means that the news takes a bit of a backseat. Things usually feel slower as the temperature rises. Maybe if you're lucky, you get summer Fridays or find a neighbor's pool to mooch off of. Not this year. Well, the mooching off the pools is happening. But the conversation there, even on weekends, is all politics all the time.

Well, it was another rough day for Americans' wallets with a lot of red on Wall Street today. Tonight, a massive sell-off of cryptocurrency. The January 6th committee's surprise hearing on the attack on the Capitol had no lack of explosive testimony. This summer, the news just will not stop.

To me, it feels impossible to escape. Rising costs, a major issue for so many Americans. You feel it when you make your family's monthly budget. Meanwhile, gas prices keep going up. They've now hit an all-time high. Feel it when you buy milk or chicken, or when you think about whether or not you can afford a family vacation. You definitely feel it when you fill up your tank of gas.

Inflation is crushing millions of Americans right now. Maybe you're included. I was in Chicago last week and a driver told me that he's debating cutting back his hours because the price of gas is so high that he actually saves money by working less. With all that's going on here at home, you can be forgiven for not focusing on what's going on in Odessa or Hong Kong. But the truth is, what's going on in those faraway places has a profound impact on us, even if we can't immediately see it.

For evidence of that, you need look no further than Wuhan, China. Right now, Russia's war on Ukraine is affecting the already high cost of oil. And experts say it could lead to global food shortages in the coming months. It goes the other way too. When we're at each other's throats over everything from our pronouns to whether or not we can trust the outcome of our democratic elections, you can bet that the Chinese Communist Party is watching and cheering.

The point is that there's little distinction in the end between domestic and foreign politics. If you're the world's superpower, and at least for now we still appear to be, they're profoundly connected. That's the case former CIA head and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo makes in my conversation with him today. He argues that what happens in Kiev doesn't stay in Kiev, just as what happens in Wuhan didn't stay in Wuhan.

Love him or hate him, Mike Pompeo plays it straight. In this wide-ranging and frank conversation, he answers my questions about China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. But also, the Stop the Steal movement, Trump, the future of the GOP, and whether or not he's running for president. Stay with us. ♪

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Secretary Pompeo, thank you so much for joining me. It's great to be back with you today. All right, let's get right into it. Let's talk about Russia.

Russia's war against Ukraine has been going on since February, and it just keeps dragging on and on. There's been tens of thousands of fatalities, total disruption in the region, insecurity spreading throughout Europe, and the economic ramifications well beyond Europe's borders.

Let's imagine that you're Secretary of State right now or even President. What would you do? So, Barry, you have to back up to answer that question. You have to start at the beginning. And I don't mean to correct your factual assertion, but this started a long time ago. It didn't start 100 days ago or in February. It started in 2015.

In fact, it started in the mind of Vladimir Putin when he was a young KGB officer and was reinforced when in the last century the Soviet Union fell apart. He's wanted Ukraine back. He believes in all of his heart that Ukraine is Russia. You have to accept that predicate to really understand how to respond. Second, 2015 takes a fifth of Ukraine, captures Crimea.

And then for four years, four years when President Trump and I were serving, didn't take any more of Ukraine. And within a handful of months launches what is the current piece of his effort to retake Ukraine. He gets his tail kicked around Kiev, but he is continuing what is now a decades-long struggle to retake Ukraine and to make that part of Russia. That's a long windup to answer the question. You have to restore deterrents.

you have to deliver on the things that America cares about you have to make clear what they are Ukraine matters to America we can talk about the reasons for that but you have to deliver deterrence this is this is what we've lost whether it was the debacle in Afghanistan when 13 Americans killed or the statement from the president of the United States that said yep minor incursion all good

The fact that when they had a Russian cyber attack, people forget about this, within the opening months of the Biden administration, a cyber attack, shutting down gasoline transit pipelines in the United States, president goes to meet with Vladimir Putin and says, don't do that again.

These are the things that you can't do as a leader. And so you say, what would I do today? Today, you'd communicate very clearly that there will be real costs, that we're in this supporting the Ukrainians as long as the Ukrainians are prepared to fight this. You would build out allies and friends in the region. You'd put actual sanctions in place. We talk about all these sanctions. Just go to the Forex market today and see what the ruble is trading at. That's not serious. I can tell you our Iranian sanctions were serious. I can prove it because we could see what happened to the rial.

That's how you know when you're going to impact the lives of people that might actually put pressure on Vladimir Putin domestically to change the way he's confronting Ukraine. This is heartbreaking to see what's happening in Bucha and Mariupol and other places we've not yet uncovered.

It's a calamity for Ukraine for sure, but it's bad for Europe and it's bad for the United States as well. Well, you mentioned deterrence, right? And the potency of American deterrence power. And here's something that I just kind of remain baffled by that I'd love for you to help me make sense of.

The U.S. still is the world's superpower. We're giving billions and billions of dollars, more than 50 billion from my understanding to Ukraine. People are flying Ukrainian flags all over my neighborhood. We're sending them arms. And the White House and others are talking about how we must win this war. And yet it seems to me that everyone, right and left,

believes that Russia's actually going to win. Now, their timelines are different. Could be the next few weeks, could be the next few months. So there's a gap between what we say is possible and what we're actually capable of or have the will to do.

So I'm wondering if this reveals what a lot of people are saying, which is despite all of the rhetoric, America's no longer really the world's dominant superpower. And we're actually back to great power competition, even if the White House doesn't want to admit it. I think part of what you said is right. I do think we're back to great power competition. But it's not with Russia. It's with the Chinese Communist Party.

And then you got it right. You said, is it will or capability? And the answer is not capability. We've seen the Russian military in the field. We can all see that does not compare to the United States military. It's not remotely close. It's not even remotely close to the capabilities that are possessed by the Europeans. So if we're capable of winning, why aren't we just winning? Why are we choosing to lose? Because we have uncertain trumpets.

Because the president of the United States says, here's what I'm not going to do and ticks off a list of a couple dozen things. I'm not doing those. You can identify things you won't do, but you need to finish that sentence or perhaps it's that paragraph first.

Or that speech. He still hasn't given a speech to the American people explaining why this matters to the American people. I'm actually going to give one. Tomorrow I'm going to speak at the Hudson Institute. I'm going to talk about why the effort in Ukraine matters to the American people. He still hasn't given it. It's an uncertain term, but we're so afraid we were going to escalate. I mean, Barry, we're talking about escalation while a guy is killing thousands.

thousands of Ukrainian innocents. There was no risk that we were going to do something to cause Vladimir Putin to escalate. We kind of felt like America caused us. Gosh, we talked about their joining NATO. He's not working in Ukraine because they were contemplating joining NATO. He's working in Ukraine because it's something he's held in his heart for an awfully long time. And so- I completely agree with you when it comes to what Putin's true aims are.

and how deep this desire goes, and how the notion that Ukraine's desire to sort of be aligned with the West, whether or not that has to do with being officially a member of NATO or not, the people that are arguing that essentially Ukraine was like the provocateur have it exactly backwards. And yet that is what you hear increasingly on the political right right now. How do you make sense of that?

I actually think it's a minority view on the political right. And I think the rationale is because leaders haven't done enough to articulate why it matters. Certainly our president hasn't made the case. I think if you talk to a lot of American people, they'd say, Ukraine's a long ways away. I don't really understand it. It's bad. They see the pictures on TV. They're horrified by that. They are emotionally gripped by it. But then if you ask them, tell me how that impacts your life in Wichita, Kansas.

or how it impacts your life in Des Moines, they can't articulate it because the leaders haven't presented. And that's not just presidents. That's governors. And by the way, I told this to the Europeans consistently, Barry. I'm not sure I made any friends there. I think they respected what we did. But I would say to them, when they were spending half a percent of GDP, I'd say, no, no, I'll go campaign with you in Bavaria.

You have to go make the case to the people that you represent as a minister in your government in the United Kingdom, in Germany, and wherever it is. You have to make the case for it.

supporting your own national security matters to them. So make the case, make the case, talk to the person you're from Kansas. I mean, talk to the person in Wichita, the person who is going and filling up their gas tank, at least here in LA, it's almost a hundred dollars. They, they see shortages that are already here that are coming. Make the case to them when they're saying, I can't locate, you know, Odessa on a map. Why should it matter to me what's going on there?

what happens in kiev doesn't stay in kiev or what happens in moscow today doesn't stay there let's let's begin with the central idea that americans including people in wichita kansas benefit enormously from the capacity to sell their products around the world right wheat corn soybeans aircraft all the things that are made in wichita kansas have to have markets and we need stability in the world to deliver on those markets

And then we also today are dependent on many of these nations. So the capacity to have stability matters. Russia invading Europe because Ukraine will not be the last piece of this. That's a difficult concept given how it's proceeded. But they should know that Latvia was on the map. Lithuania was on the map, right? Vladimir Putin has no intention of stopping in Ukraine. This will impact everybody in the United States of America. Second, we've always, as a nation, said,

said, you know, sovereign states matter. I care deeply. We're not protecting our southern border. We should be doing that. We should have the capacity to protect ourselves from those who want to kinetically alter our way of life here in the United States of America.

When another nation, when another people wants to do that, the United States ought to provide the assistance to permit them to do that. This is fundamental to understanding our Judeo-Christian tradition here in the United States of America. And you can't be everywhere and always. But, you know, Zelensky hasn't asked for the 82nd Airborne. He didn't ask for a Marine MAGTAF. He said, bring me some howitzers.

And we've not done that, frankly. The Biden administration talks about all that they've delivered. I think we now have four MLRS batteries there. And that 50 billion number, I'll bet you there's not $50 billion on the ground. I'll bet it's under 10 today, Barry. They've half-stepped this thing. And the American people should know that their government's gaslighting them that way. They are telling them this matters, and then they're not doing the things to deliver on the very outcome that would prove why this matters to the people of Wichita, Kansas. Last thing.

You know, Biden wants to blame Putin for inflation. That's not true. It's not fundamentally even close to the mark. It's a series of policies. But make no mistake about it. The fact that red winter wheat won't be coming out of Ukraine is going to make food more scarce in the world. Food prices will go up as a result of the fact that you have significant energy resources that won't be tapped in Europe. It's a global commodity. Prices will go up. These will impact ordinary people from from Kingman, Kansas, to

know, Maine. This will impact all of us. And so there is both a practical, a commercial, and a moral call for us to be doing more, to support them with the tools that they need to defend their own sovereignty. To the person that hears you say that and says, Mr. Secretary, 20 years ago, I would have bought that argument. But that argument was what was sold to me

to get us involved in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And if you just look at polling of American voters, you know, there was a recent poll from FiveThirtyEight asking Americans what issues are the most important facing the country? You know, foreign conflicts was toward the bottom 9% said it mattered, increasing costs 50, of course, right? But they hear you sounding that trumpet, trying to make the moral case that, you know, American- I made an economic case, Barry. I made a case for why it matters to the person who's trying to figure out how to make sure their welfare check-

gets them what they need to pay their rent, or if they work in a machine shop like the one that I ran in Wichita, that when they clock out after working 50 hours that week, they can put gas in their boat and go have some fun with their family. No, that's the practical reason. I talked about there being practical, commercial, and moral reasons to do this. You don't have to hang your hat on freedom and glory and democracy. I think those things matter. I think they actually matter to the American people.

well-being as well. But if you throw those out, if you just say, nope, no good. And by the way, I didn't mention for a second sending 25,000 soldiers to the desert.

Four years as Secretary of State, didn't start a war, didn't send soldiers to do just exactly that. So you can describe my theory of the case as being hawkish. I would argue my theory of the case is the most peace-loving theory that you can possibly imagine. And for the American people, I can demonstrably state that we reduced our footprint in the world while still protecting American interests, our commercial and practical interests, and our interest in stability and peace in the world.

One last question on this. I guess what I'm asking is, even if you can make both the moral and the more practical, less noble, the monetary practical case for wanting the outcome to not go in Putin's favor, is it now a political liability, not just on the left, but also on the right, to...

try and sell to the voters the idea of American interventionism abroad. They just don't seem to like that idea very much anymore. Yeah, I don't think that's true. Okay. I think the American people fundamentally understand that we, just from the time of our founding, we've known you don't want to become entangled when you can avoid it. I think Washington talked about that a whole lot when he was

walking his way through being commander in chief. But at the same time, they understood that you don't want to fight that war here, that you need friends and allies in the world. They were mercantilists. I think of it a little bit differently. But in any event, they knew that trade mattered to the United States of America. Markets mattered. Stability, the rules on which we trade matters.

I think the American people are decent and noble and understand the idea too, that every human life does matter. And while they are focused on the things in their ordinary life, as I am so thrilled that they are, the American people shouldn't be focused on these things I'm describing. They should be focused on making their community better, their church better, cooking chili dinner for their Boy Scout troop, right? Those are the things we should all spend our lives doing. But I think when presented with, uh,

what they know to be true, that when there's instability in Europe or the Chinese Communist Party is threatening us here at home, I think they can see that these two ideas, this idea that there are things foreign and things domestic no longer, that doesn't hold. The Chinese Communist Party is inside the gates. The Russians are working on us here as well. This economic warfare takes place across our economy, not necessarily kinetically.

I think the connectedness between the well-being of people in simple places all across the world is deeply connected to what's happening in places elsewhere. And I think most Americans get that. I just think you see a few politicians on both the left and the white grandstanding. Well, we have a big debt, so we can't do this. These are not mutually exclusive options. We're a nation with enormous capacity to protect the things that matter most to us here in America. And for four years, I did it.

One last question on Russia. And I'm shocked that this hasn't become more of a cause celeb. The WNBA player, Brittany Grenier, has been held in Moscow since February under the pretense of having, I think, a vape pen or hash oil in her bag. Russia is saying she could face up to 10 years in prison. The other day, she celebrated her fourth anniversary with her wife from jail.

To me, it's clear that she's been kidnapped. She's being held as a political hostage. How should we retaliate against a hostile foreign government essentially kidnapping one of our citizens, one of our athletes? And how do you show strength in a case like this? How would you handle it? And why do most people not even know her name? Barry, these are tough problems. We dealt with scores and scores of hostage issues previously.

During my time, we were pretty successful. We got back more than four dozen people home. We, in spite of the enormous pressure we put on the Iranian regime, we got folks out of Iran that were being wrongfully detained in the same way that this young woman is being wrongfully detained inside of Russia today. But these are complicated issues. It always turns back where I'm confident that somehow lawfully we're actually holding Russians somewhere. And the Russians just use these things to extort, just in the same way that the Iranians do as well.

There's no magic answer to this. We would drive three processes. One, we wanted to make sure that we kept their friends and family informed of all that we were doing so that they could understand that we were making a real effort and help us think our way through how best to approach the problems. That second, we were pretty clear, whether it was my ambassadors in the field or my team from DC that might be talking to someone,

we never missed a moment to remind them that we wanted those folks back, that they were wrongfully detained and they needed to return to us. And then where we could find places where we could raise this to a level where we could impose real costs for such hostage-taking, we certainly did that. And it was a combination that did not get everybody home, but I'll never forget the night that I flew back to Joint Base Andrews with three citizens, three American citizens, three pastors who were being held in North Korea.

It was the most amazing moment for me personally and emotionally to be able to get them out of this horrible place in North Korea and that dozens of others were able to get back heartened me. And to this day, to this day, I am saddened and have regret that when I left office, we still had Americans detained in places, in too many places. Okay, let's go to the Middle East. One of the major winners already of this war is Saudi Arabia.

While campaigning for president, Biden vowed to treat the kingdom as a pariah. This is, of course, following the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi and so many other awful human rights violations. But now, because Russian oil is banned and energy prices are absolutely nuts, Biden's pivoting and asking, basically, the Saudis to please pump more oil. How do you think Biden has played this? Yeah, horribly. Horribly in the sense of,

In the first instance, the place we ought to get energy is from here. And that's just inconsistent with their party and their orthodoxy and their climate change faith. And I use that word deeply intentionally, I believe for most on the left.

The climate agenda is a religion unbounded by science or reason. So it's very hard for them to walk away from this. I saw someone from the White House this morning saying, oh, we're pumping more oil here in the United States today than we did, I think it was like the last year of the Trump administration during COVID, right, or some comparison. But the irony, I guarantee you, she'll be scolded. She'll go back to her office and the environmental groups will just come back.

I almost used some bad words. They'll be very unhappy with her for having bragged about how much oil we're producing. So mistake number one is shutting in American energy and American capacity. It's a job creation, wealth creation for America, and it is the least treacherous. You don't have to give up anything to get that for the United States. If you're going to produce fossil fuel energy, we ought to do it right here at home for a second. You should be very careful about the people you say you're not going to speak to when you're the leader of the world.

To say you're going to make them a pariah nation because of an individual or an individual act or because of something, to say that you're going to make that nation a pariah, you better measure twice and cut once. And, of course, President Biden got caught.

He got caught making a promise he could not deliver on because now we need energy that comes from across the world. And he's basically told them you are beneath contempt. A very difficult pivot to make not only here at home, but imagine what the Middle Eastern leaders are thinking. I'd add here, imagine what Vladimir Putin thinks about that.

He says, well, if President Biden says I'm a war criminal today, he'll probably come asking me for something a week from now. These things are all so deeply connected. It's why when you're in charge, when you're the leader, you have to be so careful about the things you say because the second order ramifications are so deep.

So now he's going to go travel. He's going to go to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and he's going to talk to probably not just the crown prince but probably other leaders there asking OPEC to produce more energy. I hope that they will agree to do so. It would be a good thing for the world if they did. Here's a question that I almost think is so simple that it's dumb, and yet I never get it answered. So I'm asking you. I'm going to answer it for you. Good. Good.

Aren't the Saudis dependent on us? Meaning we sell them weapons. They're invested in our financial institutions. Don't we have more leverage? Like even if Biden hasn't been super friendly, even if he's been freezing them out rhetorically, don't we have the upper hand? And why does it seem like we have to go begging with hat in hand?

Yeah. First of all, I'm not sure I'd describe it as begging with head in hand. We're asking them to do something that we think is in America's best interest. We will hope that they will do that. It will be interesting to see what President Biden is prepared to do in the event that they say no.

Because to your point, there are many things that every nation is dependent on the United States. I never entered into negotiation without lots of tools in my kit bag, almost all of them economic tools. Many of them, frankly, Barry, we've actually given up now because one of my biggest tools was American energy. If you went to Bulgaria or Asia, they wanted American energy, reliable energy. And we can't do that anymore because that's just we can't even talk about it.

So, yes, the Saudis are dependent on us, but it's always a matter of degree and your willingness to use those tools to say, well, I have this dependency. I'm prepared to use that as leverage to achieve my objective.

And I haven't heard President Biden talk at all about the things he's prepared to do to actually deliver on that. And so he may have done that privately. That's often the best way to do it. I hope that he has. And perhaps he'll have a very successful meeting and the world will have a greater global fuel supply as a result of his meeting. That'd be a good outcome. Should the U.S. pressure Saudi Arabia on its human rights abuses? Of course.

By the way, you said no one ever answered your question. Did I answer your question? Yeah, you did. But yeah, pretty good. OK, we could spend two hours on Iran. So I almost hesitate to bring it up. But I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about the status of the revived Iran deal.

Obviously, Trump was opposed to the deal, scuttled it, Biden revived it. You have been, you know, vociferous in your opposition to the deal. You've said that it undermines stability in the region and it's, quote, put us all at risk. Why? For people who don't follow this issue, for people who think Iran, you know, vaguely somewhere there over near Iraq is

Explain to them why this deal is dangerous and bad for the U.S. and for them specifically. So I'll start in the same way you did with respect to Russia and Ukraine. You have to know who the aggressor is. And the aggressor in the Middle East today, the single largest state sponsor terror in the world, is the Iranian regime. So once you acknowledge that fact, something the Biden administration talks about very quietly, they kind of, can't we all just get along, kind of a Rodney King analysis of the Middle East situation.

We recognized that they were the bad guys. We also recognized who the good guys were. The good guys were the Israelis. They were our friends and partners. They were committed to the United States for lots of reasons. Our traditions are the same. Our democracies are similar. It mattered. So we knew who the white hat was. We knew who the black hat was. And then we knew there were a bunch of folks that would prefer to be on the side of the white hats alongside of us. That's how we approached it. The nuclear deal itself, in some sense, Barry,

It's kind of passe. The Iranians have moved to a place today where if we rejoin the deal, it was horrible in 2015. It would have been bad when we got out of it in 2018, 2019. At this point, most of the terms have expired. It's kind of silly to even think about going back into that deal today. The risk to the American people, if you ask why it matters—

I'll start again. The Iranian regime has made clear its intention to wipe Israel from the face of the earth and when they are done with that they're going to come for the United States of America. And they have killed scores of Americans in the course of the recent decades.

And we ought not permit this rogue regime that has both designs and potentially a nuclear capability to have the ability to extort Israel, all of the Middle East, and indeed American interests in the region. And so that's why we were working so hard to slow the Iranian nuclear program down and to deny the Iranian regime. Our central thesis was...

We're going to work. We're going to try and find a pathway forward with them. But until we do, we're going to take money away from them. We're going to sanction them. We're going to build out an alliance. We had 90-plus nations working to defeat ISIS. We had 12 nations working on security in the Persian Gulf. We built the Abraham Accords. Iran had never been so isolated. And when they are isolated, they have to make hard decisions. And I pray that one day the hard decision they will make is that either they find a

Or they find a way to convince these leaders that you can't continue your malign behavior all across the world. Why is there a reflexive embrace of Iran on the left, or at the very least downplaying their sins, while at the same time a reflexive sort of disgust and hatred of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states? Where does that come from, that paradigm? The irony is that with respect to Saudi Arabia, you mentioned the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Sign me up. But it doesn't compare to the horrors that have been inflicted by the Iranians. I mean, the scale is just crazy different. And the human rights issues inside of Iran are worse than in Saudi Arabia and trending wrong as opposed to Saudi Arabia, where at least there are reforms being made today, historic reforms. I don't know why the left is so wedded to it. President Obama had this theory of the case that said you need to balance the Shias and the Sunnis.

I think you need to balance those nations that are looking for stability and peace. And the Emiratis, the Kuwaitis, the Omanis, I could go on, the Saudis, they're trying to find a way to build out their economies, grow their nations, make life better for their own people. And the Iranians are intensely focused on exporting terror.

It's a theocratic regime that would seem to be a really bad fit for the left, but for some reason they have this idea that these Gulf states, not just Saudi Arabia, but these Gulf Arab states are bad and the Iranians are our potential partner. It's an enormous misunderstanding of the region in my judgment. I think they would bring up the war in Yemen and the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which has starved an untold number, many thousands of people.

How would you respond to that? Because in their view, this is an enormous conflict that the U.S. has a hand in and sort of gets buried by the mainstream news. This is an argument that I'm seeing more and more also sort of on the new right. Let me give you one more piece, but I agree. I would respond to that by saying you just have to know who the aggressor is.

The Yemenis aren't firing rockets into Saudi Arabia every day. Iranians are providing rockets, and they're teaching the Yemenis to fire rockets into Saudi Arabia today. The Lebanese aren't fighting with the Syrians. It's the Iranians that are providing weapons systems that have driven 6 million people out of Syria. And it is an Iranian-sponsored, Iranian-backed Bashar Assad that is doing that. I'll give you one more reason I think the left is more inclined to push towards Iran. It's they're less wedded to Israel.

When the Iranians underwrite Hamas and fire rockets into Israel, the left reflexively says, can't we all get along? We say Israel has the right to defend itself. So there is a distinction in how we think about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians that is deeply reflected in their Iran policy. I think you will not find, you should go fact check me on this. I think you won't find anybody who ends up being pro-Palestinian who is not also pro-Iranian.

They end up on the same side of the argument about who the oppressor is and who the aggressor is. If you think Iran has been treated wrongly, you believe that Israel is also an apartheid state that is occupying Judea and Samaria. I think those ideas go hand in hand. And so if you ask me why the left ends up, I don't want to say siding with Iran, but certainly as they think about

malign activity in the region. They cite Saudi Arabia long before they cite Iran. I think that's at least in part the reason. Okay, last question on the Middle East, and then we'll go to China. And this question concerns our shameful, sloppy withdrawal from Afghanistan. When I sat down with General H.R. McMaster on this show, this is what he said. Our Secretary of State signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban.

This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn't defeat us. We defeated ourselves. He's talking about you, and I wanted to give you an opportunity to respond to him. Yes, General McMaster said that a couple, three times in public. He's just wrong. I don't hold it against him. He fought and served there. He is a war hero. But he's simply wrong. There was no surrender document. I can actually prove it.

The day that I left office, there was, for Afghan standards, there was stability in the region. We had drawn down from 15,000 uniformed military personnel to a couple of thousand. It was the right thing to do to get our folks home. H.R. disagreed with that, you should know, when he served in the Trump administration. He threw himself on the desk to try and prevent us from getting our soldiers out of Afghanistan. He thought it was a mistake. I think he straight up believed that. It's just a difference in judgment philosophy analysis. I think that's fine.

As for our deal with the Taliban, we also struck a deal with the Afghan government. It's less talked about because it's more fun for folks like General McMaster to talk about the one and not the other. But we had a central set of understandings for the conditions that would have permitted us to get all the way down to where President Biden ultimately took us in a way that was a calamity.

That did not happen on our watch. Everybody said that it would. You don't have to guess what President Trump wanted. He tweeted about it dozens of times. I wanted it too. I wanted to get our boys and girls home. I believe that was the right thing to do.

And we did it. We achieved it. We didn't get all the way. But we had a set of conditions that continued to provide sufficient support so the Afghans could defend their own nation. And you can argue about whether that would have lasted another hour or another 50 years. I can't prove it. Just as I won't say Putin wouldn't invade Ukraine if we were still there, I can't tell you what would have happened here. But I can tell you what did happen for four years.

I can describe precisely to you, there was no surrender. There was no giving in to the conflict. There was no relaxation in our counterterrorism efforts. I ran the CIA. We had an enormous workload in Afghanistan, and we delivered powerfully to keep American lives safe. And I want to use this one second here, too, to say, Barry,

I talked to soldiers who were veterans of Afghanistan all the time, not folks who were generals, but folks who were soldiers there. They're pretty down about the way we left Afghanistan. They should know that this secretary of state knows their work was noble and it was important. And I know that they saved American lives. I saw the terror plots that we took down during my four years, first as CIA director and then as secretary of state.

I love them. I love them for the risk that they took for themselves and their families. Bless them and bless their service to our country as well. Let's talk about China. TikTok is the most popular app among American young people. The statistics are eye-popping. Most downloaded app in 2021, more than 3 billion downloads.

Many of these people are under 14 years old. They spend hours and hours a day on this app. And it's all being powered by an algorithm that many people argue is the most powerful algorithm in social in the world right now. Obviously run by China. So here's the question. Is TikTok a threat to our national security? 100%.

A hundred percent a threat. There are a long list of others as well. We ought not focus on TikTok to the exclusion of all the other challenges, which are legion and extraordinary. But sure, I'd say in the first instance, the role of the American government is to educate parents about this so they know what their kids are using. Your point about it being this powerful AI tool, I've been told the same thing, that it is literally the most powerful AI tool at a consumer-based level that they have seen.

And so you can see it too. You can see it with kids. Their usage just increases and increases and increases, and it gets them drawn into ever tighter circles of what it is that they see. As a national security matter, you should know if your child uses TikTok, the Chinese Communist Party is in possession of really, really important information about your kid that you would not want them to have if you knew about it. Think facial recognition. Think patterns of behavior. Think things that they like. Think who their friends are and who they're communicating with.

This is not good for a young person to hand that over to a malign actor like the Chinese Communist Party. And then in the aggregate, in the aggregate, that data will be used in Chinese databases and it'll be used for things that I don't even want to talk about and things that we can imagine. But make no mistake about it, the Chinese Communist Party is going to have access to that information in spite of the fact that they claim that it's being stored here in the United States and

A talented engineer at ByteDance, a parent company for TikTok, I am confident can get the channels and the information that he would like. If TikTok is a threat to our national security, why is it legal? Yeah, there are lots of things we do here in the United States that create risk that aren't illegal, some of which we should be able to do. It's a harder question to say if we should actually ban this or not. My judgment would be that we ought to.

We ought to ban not the algorithm itself, but we should bar any Chinese connectivity to it. It's what we were working on in the Trump administration when President Trump signed an executive order that President Biden undid. We were trying to make sure that there was no Chinese touch to this data set. And mind you, I would tell you, I worry about American companies have access to the same data too. So I worry more when it's in the hand of a malign actor like the Chinese Communist Party. But parents should know that...

These big tech companies are collecting a lot of stuff on your children. And we can't ban them all. That's not an appropriate role for the federal government. But when it comes to having access to this, we should do everything we can to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party at least does not have access to Americans' information in a way that is this addictive and this surreptitious. Should Americans be thinking of our data as our most valuable and sensitive resource? I think that's a very fair point.

I've spoken about this before, a little bit when I was at CIA, but a lot when I was the Secretary of State. The nature of conflict is fundamentally different today. We still need a big army. I was a tank guy. Sign me up for more M1 tanks. But the conflict today is very different.

It is in space, it is in cyber, it is in data, and it is in economics. Economic power, databases, the capacity to transfer that information, think of cyber, the fact to use that in a way that can undermine the other person's capacity to collect data and use information in real time. Those are the places the conflict is being fought out today in the first instance. And you should know that it is my judgment that the Chinese Communist Party has been at war with the United States on this very front for at least two decades.

I think China increasingly is an issue about which there's kind of rare political consensus, right? Broadly speaking, most elected officials think that China is our most important strategic enemy. And I think most Americans think that too. And yet American corporations are a totally different story.

Despite all of the corruption, despite the CCP's tight grip over the private sector in China, American corporations, our financial institutions, I mean, the NBA, Goldman, BlackRock, to name just a few, they're bending over backwards for access to the Chinese market.

Help me square the rare moral clarity that it seems like we have from Washington on this issue with the total lack of clarity and lack of unity that we have between American corporations and China. Barry, it's a great question. We could spend a lot of time talking about it. First, I want to take credit. I think that moral clarity came from the Trump administration.

We made unambiguous for the first time, not President Bush, not President Obama, not President Clinton. We made clear for the first time what has been known, but no one wanted to talk about this threat from the Chinese Communist Party. And we responded with an information campaign that I think has changed the direction and the way people think about the threat from the Chinese Communist Party. You need only look at the consulate that we closed. We had to close the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas.

They were running the largest espionage operation, I think, ever against the United States of America from that place, stealing technology from the University of Texas medical system and from the energy corridor there that runs from roughly Woodland, Texas, down to Houston.

We have come to see that these companies were told, go to China, do good work, make money, sell them more stuff. We'll buy trinkets. We'll sell them stuff. This was American policy for 40 years. Right. And to give it the most generous argument, it wasn't just cravenness or greed. The idea was that as China's markets were open to the West, it would liberalize them politically, which obviously hasn't happened. But that was the idea. Right.

Hold on. By the way, I accept the hypothesis. I've had this debate with Dr. Kissinger, and I concede that in 1972, that was probably the right theory. I even concede that it might have been in 82 or 92. But in 2022, it's no longer viable, and yet we were sleepwalking through this economic warfare.

And President Obama did nothing. The Bush administration didn't do anything. They just saw it. And to your point, Wall Street was ruling our way that we thought about the Chinese Communist Party. Here's the good news. I'll give you the flip side of the good news. And by the way, it's not just big business. Our schools, our colleges and universities are deeply dependent on the Chinese Communist Party.

thousands of students, 360,000 Chinese students studying in the United States of America pre-COVID. Research grants. I tried to give a speech. I won't tell the whole story here, but I tried to give a speech on a major American campus and was told that I could not because they feared that they would lose Chinese grant money for their research. Let's hear that story. What was the school? It's appalling. It was at MIT and we were all set to go. And I was, we were, I don't know, I can't remember. We were days away from making that set of remarks. I was talking about Chinese students

connectivity to American institutions of higher learning. And we got a call that said, nope, can't do it. And when asked, they were at least candid. They were honest. We're afraid of reprisals from the Chinese Communist Party.

We ultimately gave – you can read the speech. I gave the speech at Georgia Tech University. God bless them. And to the best of my knowledge, there have not been reprisals. How have we – Last thing, don't forget, the Catholic Church has not done what it needs to do to push back against the Chinese Communist Party. They are allowing Xi Jinping to pick their bishops in China today. So your point is exactly the right one. The elites –

are loathe or at least slow to see this risk. But those of us who can see it, and I think Americans all across the country, and I think people in Europe now are starting to see it too, they can see that we've allowed this one to get inside the gates and it's time to respond.

Okay, speaking of higher education and inside the gates, you have been very outspoken about institutions like the Confucius Institute, but also just the influence that comes from unbelievable amounts of Chinese money flooding into these institutions. There's an example that I just read about today where Senator Marco Rubio sent a letter to the president of Harvard University saying,

in which he's alleging that there was this quid pro quo agreement where officials from this real estate company called Evergrande, which has close ties to the CCP, donated more than $100 million to Harvard Medical School in exchange for access to people including Fauci who were studying the origins of COVID-19. Days after Harvard received the donation, and this is the connection that they're making, Harvard linked virology experts,

privately and publicly condemned the idea that the virus might have emanated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Have you been following that story? And for people who don't follow this subject closely, how typical is an example like the one I just said to you? So I'm familiar with this particular story. And your important question is the second one. This is common.

This is common. If you go, I think it's fair to say that there are but a handful of universities inside the United States of America that if they were cut off from Chinese Communist Party grant money and cut off from Chinese students attending their schools, paying full freight, right, they don't get discounts like in-state tuition. There are few universities that wouldn't have to make significant budget cuts.

And the Chinese are very, very good at coming in saying, hey, I have this $10 million grant money for you. I have this $50 million grant money. Wouldn't it be great if, and you finish the sentence in different ways. I tell folks, even governors, county commissioners, we had a case up in Wisconsin that I went up and spoke with the Wisconsin legislature about. When they show up at your PTA meeting with a $10,000 check, think about that, at a PTA meeting in America.

They show up with a $10,000 check. If they do that, it's not because they're looking out for your kid's physical fitness or well-being. They're trying to make friends. You mentioned the Confucius Institutes, but this is Legion. They are using their resources to try to make friends inside the United States. So when people like me present themselves...

And say, here's what's going on. They will have laid a foundation and people go, oh, that guy's, that can't possibly be right. No, it is a concerted effort. It is inside the gates. It is not easy to get at. It is like a cancer. There are lots of things that get harmed as you get rid of that.

But it is time that we actually address this in a serious way. We started it. We didn't get nearly far enough during our time. There's a lot of work to do. And I am happy. This is not political. This has not fallen along Republican-Democrat lines. This is bipartisan. I pray that it will stay so because it's going to take time.

multiple administrations that will surely be both Republican and Democrat over the coming decades, it's going to take that long to actually respond in a way that is sufficient to protect the American people. So you're saying the CCP is effectively buying off our universities, and that's influencing the way that these universities talk about things, research things, put their thumb on the scale of important public debates, including most recently the origins of COVID-19.

Right? Yeah. Essentially, that's what I'm saying. They have enormous influence because of the resources they're providing. Just like a big donor can get his kid into the school when the big donor turns out to be the Chinese Communist Party. Yeah, you have influence. There's no doubt about that. No doubt. So the people that are running these schools, you mentioned MIT barring your talk because of fear of Chinese reprisal, but also the people running the NBA, Disney, all of the rest are

Are they traitors to America? That's too harsh. That's too harsh, at least for the moment, because we owe it to them to make sure they know what it is they're doing, and we give them alternatives to that. I started with this. I feel bad for some of America's companies that are doing business in China only because...

Tens of thousands of businesses flocked to China because we wanted them to go there. This was a U.S. policy. They were being supportive of American policy. Now we're saying, nope, go rip that off your balance sheet. That's hard stuff. I get it. I ran two small businesses. And so just like you can't get to running our nation on windmills and solar panels in an hour,

We're not going to get to the right place in an hour here either. But what I do demand of them is they begin to lay out strategies to fundamentally reshape their connectivity to the Chinese Communist Party. And over a period of time, not forever, but over some period of time, recognize this risk to the United States and then take actions that decouple them from helping create that risk. If in 10 years or five years, it's still the case that they are still as connected and they are still as leaning in and they are still as wedded to Chinese money.

then yes, then I'd be prepared to say much harsher things about them than I am today. Here's why I don't think they're traitors. When an American company goes into China, there's all of these rules and restrictions that are in place to help the Chinese economy.

So why don't – I'm not saying we should imitate China, but I'm saying there's no equivalent here. Why should it be legal for MIT or many of these companies to do business with the CCP? Why don't we simply pass a law, say, sorry, not happening anymore? So you've now hit on my core theory of the case. This is how we prosecute and protect America.

We do it with the central idea of reciprocity. And your point's exactly right. You say, we don't want to copy China. No, we want to do our thing and force the Chinese to copy us, right? So reciprocity, think about this. I'll give you a good example.

A good example is that in a Chinese company, you have to have a majority of board members that are Chinese, frankly, members of the Chinese Communist Party themselves. In the United States, we have no such rule. We ought to make the rule that we won't have Chinese officials who are members of the Chinese Communist Party be members of our board of directors, and then they can choose how they'd like to respond. This idea of reciprocity matters. Just the last two days, the

A regulatory commission inside of China said that every American entity operating in the financial sector inside of China will have to have a Communist Party organization inside of their company, essentially a little CCP headquarters inside of their business. It will be very difficult for American companies to figure out how to respond to that. And I do want to go back to your one-level higher idea. You're exactly right. Those activities are legal today. We need to begin to make them not legal.

Remember the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Companies came and said, what are my choices? Everybody's bribing everybody. We have to compete. And we said, fine, we're going to make it a felony to compete. Now American companies don't do that and they're still succeeding. We ought to do the same thing here. We ought to make these rules reciprocal. A Chinese company

Why did the Trump administration do that then? We didn't get to it. I agree. Sign me up for work to do. It's why I'm still in the fight, Barry. It's why there's still eight more years worth of work to do. And maybe why there's maybe a future presidential run? It's why I'm not going to walk away from this. This issue of the Chinese Communist Party,

along with the culture challenges inside the United States, are the two things that can cause my grandchildren, I'm praying that I have one before too long, cause my grandchildren to live in America that's different than the one that I got to live in. And I'm not going to walk away from that. And so I concede, we didn't get to it on our time. We began the effort, we started to turn the aircraft carrier, but we didn't get remotely to where we needed to be. It feels like we're experiencing a sea change in the global balance of power.

Why does it feel like American dominance is slipping away? Because you've seen the rise of China. I don't concede at all that this is not a very capable nation with incredible technology. 1.4 billion people, they've created an enormous amount of wealth using their system. And so we now have a peer competitor. In some ways, not unlike at least militarily and from a security perspective like we had with the Soviet Union.

And I'm fine with having an economic peer competitor. The Chinese economy growing is untroubling to me, as long as they play by the same set of rules that everyone else in the world plays by. But make no mistake about it, that's not how this has rolled. They've done it on, they've grown their economy on the backs of the American people by stealing our stuff and destroying our jobs. And American leaders failed our country in permitting them to rise at the expense of

at the expense not only of the United States but Europe. They've permitted it to rise at the expense of those of us who believe in the basic ideas of contracts, property rights, and human dignity. And for that, lick on us. We all have to go fix it. After the break, I asked Mike Pompeo about January 6th, the Stop the Steal movement, the future of the GOP, and whether or not he's running for president.

Stay with us. Okay, let's turn to the GOP. All right. Right now, the Democrats are doing really badly, politically speaking. Poll after poll shows that voters are likely to turn the house red in the midterms. And there are 30 Democrats in the House who aren't even going to run. They're going to retire instead of fighting what they see as a losing battle. So you'd rightly think,

Great time for Republicans. I hear from disillusioned Democrats constantly and independents, you know, who are just absolutely fed up with where things are, the economy, other things as well, crime, and they're open to voting Republican. But then they look at something like what has just gone down at the Texas GOP convention over the past few days in Houston.

And they see a party platform, not randos, a party platform saying that the election in 2020 was stolen. They see Dan Crenshaw, an American hero and a conservative member of Congress, being shouted down as a traitor and being demeaned as I patch McCain. And, you know, to use another example, I'm not nutpicking. There are many. There was a Republican campaign ad that showed a guy with a gun saying he was going out to hunt rhinos.

So what do you say to the politically homeless who are open to crossing over, but see the infighting, the denial of reality, and the lack of focus on things that matter? I would tell them that...

This isn't a Republican or Democrat issue. These issues are American issues. And so I'm happy to criticize the ad that was by, I think it was Eric Greitens' ad down in Missouri that you referenced there. That kind of thing is just unacceptable to me. It creates risk and danger where there ought not be any to say you're targeting people with the military. That's just...

I used we all use this language. You have to be careful. Right. We use this language to like, yeah, that's a good shot. Right. So but this was intentional. This was in a plan campaign ad. It was was too much. And it is the case that even places like my home state of Kansas, it can be too much. You can be a serious conservative. I don't think anybody's going to ever doubt the conservative bona fides of Mike Pompeo. Check my voting record for six years.

But you can do that and still do so the way that is decent and honorable and consistent with American history. And I think that's what the American people are looking for. I think we're going to see this majority of Americans turn out in November, and they're going to vote for the candidates that present real solutions, economic solutions. They can see how bad the Biden economic policy has been for them, but they're also going to support those candidates who aren't out espousing crazy ideas and aren't focused on the future, the things that actually impact –

them and their families. I hope that's where this campaign, as we turn from primaries to general election season heads, I'm going to go out and campaign hard for those candidates that are prepared to do just that. And then as we move beyond that, I hope that everyone who puts themselves forward in 2024, for every office, school board, city council...

But to be specific on a key concern here, right? The Texas Republican platform said this, we reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election and we hold that acting President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.

Yeah, that's just wrong. That is not, that's what? I think the vice president did the right thing that day. And I think that's what they're getting at, right? When you talk about certification, when you begin to use that language, I think that's what they're getting at that day. I think Vice President Pence made the right decision. We don't want vice presidents to be able to willy-nilly overturn what state elected officials have done. As someone who worries that

Power accruing in Washington is almost always bad for the American people. I'd much rather have these debates play out in 50 states across America. My side will lose some, but that's the place that this debate should have taken place, not on that day with the vice president making the change. And for that reason, I think they got that piece of their platform wrong. I haven't actually read it, but if that's what it says—

That's a mistake. I think it misunderstands the American tradition. Mike, do you think Stop the Steal is a big deal or a sideshow? In what sense, Barry? Do you mean Stop the Steal? Well, let me put it to you this way. Adam Kinzinger said this, there is violence in the future, I'm going to tell you. And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can't expect any differently.

There was a piece the other day in the Washington Post that cited several experts who studied democratic breakdown and see a coming age of instability, you know, comparable to the troubles in Ireland. And these are not just, you know,

loonies that are saying this. There are a lot of respected people who say, when you deny the true result of a democratic election and you have a not insignificant number of people inside the base of the Republican Party clinging to that, and certain leaders like Steve Bannon and others saying that and echoing it and insisting on it to their followers, you start to heed those kind of warnings. And I'm wondering,

How you hear them and your level of concern and worry about a massive number of people in the United States who no longer believe in the outcome of democratic elections. No, this is very dangerous. I saw it across the world. When people don't think that elections are straight up, bad things happen. That's way oversimplified, but I think it gets to your question.

I'll say this about this past election. There were lots of things that took place there that I question, right? The way that laws were changed at the end in Pennsylvania and Georgia. There were lots, because we had COVID, there were lots of mail-in ballots that are difficult to identify their origin. These are the kinds of things...

that create the very uncertainty you're describing about, that permit people to say, oh, this was rigged, this was stolen. We should be able to, in year 2022, hold an election that is transparent, where everybody who's entitled to vote and chooses to vote gets to vote. They get to vote once, we count that vote, we count it once, and everybody has confidence in it. And yet, you don't have to go very far back, right? The Democrats think the election was stolen in 2000. I think you're old enough to remember hanging chads.

This isn't the first time. I remember hanging chats. I'm always careful about these things. Try to be polite. So this idea of American elections and making sure we get them right is absolutely paramount. We've got to figure our way through it. And for me, there are a lot of things that I'd like to see changed. I think voter ID is really important for this very reason.

It's not, this isn't a Republican talking point. This is about convincing Americans that this is real. And you got people on voter rolls that are just wrong. I couldn't tell you exactly how many. No one can. That's what creates this uncertainty. But Mike, even someone could hear you talking about these kind of irregularities and think, aha, he's winking to us. He knows that we're onto something. I want to clarify, that's not where you are. No, no, no. I don't wink. I

I do my best. I try to be just honest about exactly what it is I believe. It is both possible to believe that there were irregularities in the elections that we do not have our hands around yet and have not fixed yet.

and also believe that Joe Biden is properly the president of the United States today, and the vice president made that choice that day. Yeah, I mean— Because you don't have to hold— I'm just worried about the rise of political violence in general, right? You look at the summer of 2020, violence from what can largely be called the political left, and it's hard to think that if Trump had been reelected, that that violence would have been even worse. And I worry that we're getting to a point where, you know, people can only accept—

peacefully the outcome of an election that go the way they want them to. I think this is where this argument becomes political. I think this is where people go to their barricades. I think they don't understand that it is possible, as I believe, to say, no, that wasn't a good election because there are people who have doubts about it, I think sometimes legitimate doubts, and still say, nope,

I'm focused on 2022. I'm looking, I'm trying to make my way forward. You can hold those two thoughts in your head, or at least I believe that I can. And I think others can as well. It's not an attempt. It's not an attempt to wink at either side. It's an attempt to be honest about the state of American elections and our capacity to hold good, sound, transparent elections that everyone can have confidence, or at least 99% of the people can have confidence that says, nope, Sally really is our city councilwoman. Yeah.

All right, Secretary Pompeo, I know your time is limited, so let's cut to a lightning round. Are you running for president in 2024? Only the Lord knows at this point. Ron DeSantis is, fill in the adjective. Really good governor of the state of Florida. Is that an adjective? Yes. Blake Masters is...

I've never met Blake, but I hope if he's a successful candidate in Arizona that we crush the astronaut guy. I want to win that race, not crush him physically. Careful, right? I want to make sure that the results are crushing in their defeat for the Democrats in Arizona. Julian Assange is back in the news. He's being extradited to the United States, likely. You were summoned by a Spanish court over an alleged CIA plot to kidnap or assassinate Assange when you were the director of the CIA. Is there any truth to that?

Not going to comment on anything other than Julian Assange violated U.S. law. He put our soldiers, sailors, airmen at risk by stealing information and then dumping it to the public through the Russians. He made our soldiers and sailors, airmen, Marines less safe. And for that, I hope that he has extradited the United States, stands trial, and I hope the jury sees the facts the same way that I do. January 6th was fill in the blank.

January 6th was a bad day for America. When you have that kind of violence around politics, it is always bad. Who's the most dangerous person in the world? Xi Jinping presents the greatest threat of any single individual. What's the last book that you read? The last book that I read was David Friedman's book, Sledgehammer, from my former ambassador. I wanted to see his version of the Abraham Accords. And did you see Top Gun Maverick? Yes. Did you like it? Loved it. ♪

Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State Pompeo, I should say, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Barry, thank you. Have a great day. My thanks to Secretary Mike Pompeo for making the time to talk to us. Do you have suggestions for guests, future debates that you'd like to hear on the podcast? Maybe there's a story that's uncovered that you want us to report on. Write us at tips at honestlypod.com.

As always, please share this podcast with your community. Have an honest conversation of your own and support our work by becoming a subscriber today at commonsense.news. See you next time.