Will Thibeau
speaker
87 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Will Thibeau’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The military has changed the imperative to seem as if they are doing OK or keeping the ship afloat. But it's it's not like you said, it's a disaster. It is in free fall. And the only question is, are we going to wait until it's too late to fix it? We shouldn't wait until the crisis is so undeniable for everyone to see. We've got to get ahead of it.
That's hopefully what Secretary Hegseth is going to do. And that's what President Trump needs to do. And the fact that he's nominating Pete Hegseth means he knows it.
Yeah, Charlie, I think we'll be in large agreement here, but it reflects the understanding that America is a nation in that what benefits America is not an ideology attached to a real life game of risk with soldiers displacing other soldiers around the world. The American nation is what must benefit from defense policy, from foreign policy, from Department of the Interior policy.
And that means it's about affecting the kitchen table, right? It is about the ability of a mom and dad to raise their family with the confidence that their children will be growing up in the land of prosperity and freedom and values, right?
And that they could perhaps send their sons to join the military without fear that their lives would be wasted in far-flung adventures overseas with a nebulous tie to what matters to the American people and to their lives at home. It's not an ideology. It's not a game. We want to do the things that benefit Americans as a people and a nation.
And I think that's what these appointments that you mentioned reflect. It's why I'm excited about the Trump presidency. And I know you're probably in the same boat.
Well, I think you touched on it there, Charlie. You know, there's a lot of reasons to be, I don't think necessarily afraid even, but really wary of China and their growing prominence in the Pacific and in the world and even what they do at home. But we... The question is if you think war is inevitable or not.
And I think any reasonable American and certainly those who are going to be in charge of our military, our intelligence community and our foreign policy establishment should seek to make war not inevitable. to avoid it while preserving American interests.
And, you know, if we move into the space of the Pacific kind of with a fait accompli that certain actions by the Chinese would produce a military response by America, that'll frankly limit our creativity and our ability to respond to China because we'll think that it's only about, you know, killing and destroying Chinese tanks and boats and soldiers.
We should understand that war doesn't have to happen, that there's a way that America can still leverage her economic muscle and her military deterrence in order to make any future Chinese military incursions
Yeah, we shouldn't forget that one of the more recent purveyors of the notion of the Thucydides trap is none other than Mark Milley. And we should make sure that that's a lesson for many of our friends, Charlie, who want to pick up the mantle of this supposedly inevitable war. I think it helps to kind of read the neoconservative line of thinking and their research behind this, though.
The Center for Strategic International Studies produced a really, frankly, excellent war game about what a war over Taiwan would look like. Their conservative estimate of a war in Taiwan where the U.S. is militarily involved is the loss of over 5,000 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors in the span of less than 96 hours.
Half of our losses in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan combined in just a few days, a long weekend. The CSIS, frankly, they pass off those war game results like it's some mere academic exercise. But that's what we're talking about when we discuss the possibility of war and of defeating the Chinese Communist Party often.
We should, again, tie our aims in the Pacific to those results that benefit the American people. This doesn't mean we let China eat our lunch economically or militarily. It means we punish them in many ways, and it means we preserve our economic interests. But it's not a license to act with reckless abandon.
Well, that's precisely right. It's a problem of creativity. A big problem with the foreign policy establishment is not necessarily that they're neoconservative or dovish. It's the fact that you think there are only two choices, to be a neocon or a dove. Let's think about ways that we can enable allies to have a credible military deterrent themselves.
Let's think about how we can punish China economically and lay those punishments in place now and So they know military incursions would be too costly for them to bear because they are susceptible and they are wary of those risks. That's why the people who lead in the Trump administration need to be ready to never take the first answer, the first policy proposal at face value.
It's a big question. But, you know, I think we we still live in the Cold War. Right. The enemy versus friend is absolute. And there are enemies and there are friends. You fight the enemies whenever you can and you protect your friends no matter what's going on. And again, foreign policy. America is not in a game of risk. And. We should understand that. Russia and Ukraine is another example.
The choice is we fight them or we let them march all across Europe. And so we send a lot of money to Ukraine. We send a lot of weapons to Ukraine. But why isn't the government and our military studying how warfare is changing in Ukraine? Because frankly, I think it's changing in ways we don't appreciate. And understanding that is going to be what keeps us out of war in the future.
And so we can be articulate and reasonable about this in a way that burnishes our military power without falling into this false choice that is really, again, a lack of creativity and a sign of how sclerotic our bureaucracy has become.
The first thing is to end race quotas at the Pentagon. Why does every institution from West Point to an army rifle squad have to be a racially proportional representation of America? The military should be something different. The second thing, let's enable...
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