James Diddams: Well, it’s my privilege to introduce to you our next speaker, Dr. Rebecca Heinrichs. Dr. Heinrichs is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, where she directs their Keystone Defense Initiative. Most recently, she’s the author of Duty to Deter: A Just War Defense of American Nuclear Deterrence. So, without further ado, everyone, please welcome Rebecca Heinrichs.  

Rebeccah Heinrichs: I think Mark said that if we start a little early, we might leave a little earlier, but I intend to take up all of the time. So, I just got a few extra minutes with you all, and my hope is that I will leave plenty of time for Q&A, which is my favorite part because it gives me the opportunity to answer the questions that you are all considering as you’ve already had a day and a half of great talks and food for thought at this wonderful conference.  

So, thank you so much, Mark, for inviting me here again today. I love this group, and nobody is doing what Tooley and his crew are doing, and it’s an enormous value and asset to our country and beyond. And so, I’m incredibly thankful and privileged to be a speaker once again here at this event.  

Okay, so if you are taking notes, this is my first big point. As a good Baptist, I’m going to lay out some outline here for you—at least that’s the way we do our sermons at Capitol Hill Baptist Church here in D.C.  

The first point is this: I think this is really important that we get this right because, in an age of populism, where things are dynamic and questions are being asked of things that used to be sort of taken for granted as bipartisan consensus or assumptions that professional national security or diplomats agreed on, as years have passed, it’s become increasingly clear that those professionals have failed to interrogate those primary assumptions and then make the case for what they’re doing.  

Because of that failure of the professional class to make their case, they have sort of become haughty and, I think, hubristic in what they’re doing. And so, there’s some misunderstanding, I think, between the American people and what the professional class is doing. But not only is there a misunderstanding, but I would say that the professional class is in many ways at odds with what the American people actually believe are their interests and are the right thing for the United States to do to exercise American power prudently and virtuously.  

So, I want to get back to this. I think it’s incumbent upon all of us who are going to be making arguments for what the United States should and should not do with our resources and our power to make the case for what it is that we’re trying to defend, what we believe is the fundamental purpose of the federal government’s power that the American people, as sovereign in our democratic republic, have permitted those in power to use for their defense.  

Here’s the first point: The most powerful nation economically and militarily is the nation that will have the most influence in the world.  

Okay, that has always been true. The country that is the most powerful economically and militarily is the nation that will have the most influence in the world. Every American should want that to be the United States.  

So, even if you are really mad at our current government and the bipartisan consensus for how they’ve used it, if you look at who the alternative is, it’s bad for us. Okay? It’s China, and it’s leading an axis with the Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans. So, you should want your country to have the most power. We derive that power from our economic engine and our military. 

“The U.S.-led international order and the values it upholds are at risk from the Chinese and the Russian authoritarian regimes.” I am now quoting from the bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission, on which I had the privilege of serving as one of the Republican-appointed commissioners. That just means I was appointed there by Chairman Mike Rogers, who’s a Republican and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.  

This this commission was conceived of by Democrats and Republicans in Congress who said, “Listen, we haven’t had a bipartisan effort to look at what the U.S. strategic posture is.” So, when I say U.S. strategic posture, I’m talking about our nuclear forces and the non-nuclear forces that complement our nuclear forces.  

We haven’t had a bipartisan look, a fresh look, since the 2008–2009 Strategic Posture Commission. And a lot has changed since then, so let’s put some folks in this bipartisan effort to take a look at that.  

It’s amazing that we came up with a bipartisan, really nonpartisan, consensus document. Part of what we explained was, in the opening section before we even got to the threats, we talked about what’s at stake. That quote is from that:  

What’s at stake? It’s the U.S.-led international order and the values it upholds. 

So then here, I’m going to spend some time explaining what I, now speaking just personally as Rebecca—no longer a consensus participant of the Strategic Posture Commission—think. It’s very hard to get consensus, and I treat it as a precious thing. So, now I’m speaking only as myself, because I’m sure that my colleagues would not agree with every single thing I’m about to say here. But this is, I think, important as I understand it.  

What is the U.S. international order—the U.S.-led international order? Notice I did not say the “liberal, rules-based international order.” I did not say that. I said the “U.S.-led international order.”  

What is it? This order is the post-World War II order, wherein the U.S. is the strongest power economically and militarily. It is one in which the U.S. and its allies enforce the norms and rules that serve our collective interests. 

What are those norms? Free and open sea lanes for peaceful commerce. The peaceful use of global commons beyond the oceans. So now we’re not just talking about commerce—we’re talking about seabeds. What’s on those seabeds? Internet cables, of which the PRC has been cutting—connecting it to Taiwan, for instance, or the cable that goes from Finland to Estonia that recently was cut.  

It was an energy pipeline. We have a Finn here who can confirm that for me. And it got almost no press because this was happening since Russia’s last full-scale invasion of Ukraine post-2022.  

There was a cable cut on the seabed, and you know what ship was up there? There were really two ships side by side: a Russian-flagged ship and a Hong Kong or Chinese-flagged ship. It was a Chinese ship with an anchor on the bottom that it dragged to and fro along the seabed cutting that cable.  

What has the “international community” done about that? Nothing. It has done nothing. The Chinese have said it was bad weather. Objectively speaking, there was no bad weather. You can—you know—the Finns have the anchor. The Estonians have the anchor. It was an anchor that was dragged.  

So, the peaceful use of trade, commerce, seabeds, peaceful use of those seabeds that nobody owns, the international waters, peaceful use of outer space, the security of internationally recognized physical national borders. That is, Israel’s borders are recognized for what they are. Ukraine has borders that we recognize for what they are. Estonia has physical borders. The United States of America—despite what our current immigration status looks like—we do have physical borders. If only we would defend them.  

The sovereignty of intellectual property necessary for free and fair trade and relations between responsible nations—this is what we are defending when we talk about the U.S.-led international order. This system has resulted in unprecedented, enormous peace and unprecedented, enormous human prosperity and the protection of the American way of life.  

You want your free speech? You better want the United States to be the preeminent power, and not China. You want free and fair trade? You better believe it’s got to be the United States controlling those sea lanes and not the Chinese Communist Party.  

From 1800 to the present day, 37 million people globally have died in wars. Of those, 75% died in wars before this international order was created by the United States winning, with our allies, the Second World War. Enormous peace and prosperity.  

So, what is the U.S.-led international order not? It is not a system that relinquishes U.S. sovereignty to international bodies. We are not a party to the International Criminal Court for a reason. Here, the people govern—it is the consent of the governed. And so, we do not submit our own sovereignty to an international criminal court that does not have the consent of the governed and, of course, nor does it share U.S. understanding of due process and the principles on which our entire system of justice is built.  

It is not, again, the U.S.-led order is not a memorandum as a substitute for no-kidding outcomes. NATO might be patting itself on the back for another communique, or for the fact that NATO is still essential and still the greatest political-military alliance ever created. I agree with that.  

But I would argue that NATO is taking too many victory laps for what it has provided to Ukraine. It might agree to some communications; it might agree to some political statements. But I would argue there are some fundamental problems with the way the alliance is currently delivering on what it should.  

It is not merely the existence of the UN, as made very obvious again and again by the failure of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, which has sided with Hezbollah in its genocidal war against Israel by permitting Hezbollah to reconstitute, to exist, and to carry out its terrorist activities against Israel.  

So, if you hear people defending the rules-based international order and they point to the UN as the guarantor of this system, I would point out where the UN continues to fail.  

Why has the UN not denounced and implemented more sanctions against the North Korean regime for violating agreed-upon Security Council resolutions in the last several years? It cannot—because China and Russia forbid it.  

It is not merely the existence of free trade agreements that enable our enemies to get strong at our expense. The WTO gifting China with Most Favored Nation status has not liberalized the nation of China. The Chinese Communist Party has not become a Jeffersonian democracy as it has been integrated into the global economy.  

It is now a wealthy Chinese communist state, using its wealth—based on a system that we created in the principles of capitalism and free trade—and it has used that wealth to build a military designed to target the United States and break the U.S.-led order.  

It is not merely the existence of treaties that countries like Russia systematically cheat on while we, the United States, abide by them at our expense, to the great advantage of the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and North Korea.  

Let me give you an example of that. In the last administration, there was lots of distress and outcry when President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA—that is, the Iran nuclear deal. There were cries that this was the end, you know, the unraveling of the international rules-based order.  

Well, the JCPOA enriched the Iranian regime without dismantling their program or stopping delivery systems, which are hand-in-glove part of their nuclear program. It enriched the regime to carry out its terrorist activities throughout the Middle East. And so, that particular agreement did not serve the outcomes it was supposed to serve, and it undermined the United States and our security.  

Take also the INF Treaty. The INF Treaty banned, during the Cold War, intermediate nuclear and conventional forces that are ground-launch systems in Europe. The Russians had been cheating on that treaty since at least 2014.  

The Obama administration did not pull out of the treaty because it kept trying again and again to get the Russians to comply. They believed that the treaty still served our interests. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party was building up a missile force, over 90% of which would have violated the INF Treaty had it been party to it. It was fundamentally at odds with U.S. security interests. So, withdrawing from that treaty, as President Trump did, was right and good—rules-based order notwithstanding.  

What about the Open Skies Treaty? President Trump withdrew from that. Why? The Russians were using it to their advantage in a way it was never meant to be used—to spy on what the United States was doing on our command and control. And they were prohibiting U.S. from overflights over key regions where we wanted to see what the Russians were doing. It did not serve our interests, so the United States withdrew.  

Another example: the World Health Organization. This is another organization designed by the United States and our allies to have some understanding for responsible and collective good behavior for global health. That is a good thing.  

But the WHO has been completely overtaken by corruption and by individuals that serve the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. You could see this during the COVID pandemic when Taiwan was begging the world to understand what it knew early on in the conflict, but it is not permitted to be a member of the WHO.  

Okay, so what must we do?  

First, we must defend the U.S.-led international order. Even though I just outlined all of the things that are not going well, that does not mean that I think we should destroy it. Why? Because the first point I made: the country that is the strongest power economically and militarily will be the country that influences the world most effectively.  

So, we should not disband the U.S.-led international order. It will be replaced by another powerful country that will design a world order in which it serves its ends and its national goals.  

So, we can defend it. That is my third point.  

So, first point: what it is. Second point: we must defend it. And I’ll get back to why that is. But third point: we can defend it.  

I will have a lot of people who will agree with everything I just said, and then they will say, “Rebecca, it’s too hard. We have squandered the end of the Cold War, when American power was at its apex. We have squandered it.”  

We have squandered it with wars without clear objectives. We have squandered it by permitting China into the WTO and giving it Most Favored Nation status. We are now too reliant on China. We have squandered it by fighting low-intensity conflict at the expense of preparing to deter and win, if deterrence fails, against major powers. We have squandered it by letting our defense industrial base atrophy.  

It is too late. To which I say: it’s not. But we also don’t have a choice. The alternative is subjugation, which I am completely unwilling to accept. So, what must we do?  

The United States possesses 25% of global GDP compared to China and Russia’s combined 20%. Now, I’m pulling from an op-ed that Matthew Kroenig and I co-wrote last year for National Review—you can go and read that whole article. If one adds formal treaty allies to the equation, the Free World possesses nearly 60% of global GDP—a clear preponderance of economic heft.  

We have that. We have it. We have the best military in the world. Now, that is not something we can take for granted. We’ve got some major problems, but we still have the most capable, most effective military.  

One of the most undiscussed, underappreciated aspects of the U.S. effort with our allies to enable Ukraine to defend itself and push the Russians off its territory is that part of the reason—and I don’t want to take away anything from what the Ukrainians have been able to do to fight for their own country, as it is a marvel what they’ve accomplished—is that Ukraine has been willing to sacrifice enormous blood and treasure to defend the sovereignty of their country.  

But you can see what the United States has done. The extent to which we provide intelligence, training, and real-time ability to conduct some of their battlefield assessments. These aren’t even our best weapons. We are sending them our old weapons, and if you talk to the Ukrainians, they’ll tell you some of them don’t work. But it’s American ingenuity, it’s American technology, that has, without even being directly in the fight, enabled this country to defend itself.  

Imagine if the United States was actually in the fight. Russia doesn’t want that. Let me put it more specifically: Putin doesn’t want that. Putin understands that if the United States led NATO to fight Russia, it would be an awful, terrible war, which we must deter—but Russia would lose.  

We must defend. We must rebuild the defense industrial base. The defense industrial base is, very simply, the United States’ ability to produce weapons at scale and quickly. That’s what it is. If you start looking at just the number of munitions we have on standby, that’s part of it, but I’m talking about our ability to reconstitute our forces and produce weapons at scale.  

Our support for Ukraine has begun to reboot the defense industrial base. Our initial assessments back in 2020 about what the United States could provide Ukraine have proven to be far exceeded.  

Our ability as a country to say, “Okay, what do we need to do to go faster?”—things like giving the Department of Defense direct acquisition authority to contractors like Boeing—has proven effective. For example, if they say, “We need a weapon system that can do this,” and tell Boeing to go figure it out, we’ve been able to bypass the sluggish bureaucracy that has calcified since the Cold War. 

The Boeing Company took a weapon system that we had previously only delivered from fighter aircraft early in the war—when Ukraine didn’t have much of an Air Force to speak of—and repurposed it into a ground-launched system. This was delivered to Ukraine in six or seven weeks. That’s just one example.  

There is enormous potential and ability for the United States to move fast when there is the political will to do it. A lot of the things that make this country slow and make our acquisition process cumbersome are of our own doing. Not only has the defense industrial base shrunk since the Cold War, but our environmental and contracting regulations have grown. 

If we had a country with the political will to defend what is ours and what makes the United States strong, we could conduct an audit, cut out unnecessary obstacles, and see just how fast we could go.  

We must defend it by restoring the organizations that harm us. For instance, I mentioned the WHO. I argued during the Trump administration that the United States should pull out of the WHO and defund it. Then people said, “Well, okay, but then we’ll be out of the world health game.” No, we wouldn’t. Start a new one. Make Taiwan the first member. Start a new one where every country that provides good information to help public health, and that does not execute its own scientists and doctors when they come forward with good public health information, gets to join.  

You would quickly see how the United States could steward its resources and diplomatic leverage to create a World Health Organization that actually works for the American people and provides good public health for us and our allies. I recommend calling it the WHAT. I want to get out of the WHO and into the WHAT. I have not yet come up with what that acronym would mean, so I’m taking suggestions. 

We must defend it by returning to a public diplomacy that embraces the American principles that the order was successfully built upon and that can unite Americans. This might be my most controversial hot take, but I believe it is vital.  

Some would say the international order I just laid out has essentially been undermining us because it is indistinguishable from the wokeism or progressivism coming out of higher education. They argue that what America promotes as U.S. interests is essentially indistinguishable from a lot of the radical, frankly Marxist, ideology coming out of higher education. That deserves its own speech, but I’ll say this: there is a lot of truth to that.  

You can look at what the State Department, the CIA, and our military training are doing to prioritize their missions. We must have a return to something much closer to the post-World War II world order, in which we promote American principles and values to the world. We should showcase to the world that Americans can unite behind these principles, even in this time of great division.  

What are those principles? They are the principles in the Declaration of Independence: the dignity of the human person, dynamic democratic government, where there is accountability to the people.  

The people do not live to serve the government; the government exists to serve human beings—the citizens of that specific country. And free and fair trade, property rights as a subsequent policy that is derivative of that first principle: the dignity of the human person. 

You start putting forward those principles, and just ensuring that the only flag we put on any embassy is the American flag. The only flag should be the American flag.  

The American flag is the great unifier. It is the most fundamental representation of what the United States stands for. It is the most anti-racist, the most pro-woman. The American flag.  

So, that needs to be a return. We are toast if we try to do all these things without getting that part right.  

And then I’ll just conclude here. We must have an aggressive embrace of what the United States really stands for. It’s a merit-based society, right? A society based on equal opportunity under the law.

We must do this. We must do this because we have entered an era of extreme danger, in which China is contesting the United States economically and militarily. China is on a very intentional path to undo America’s alliance architecture, because Xi Jinping understands that the U.S.-led international order is most concretely a system of alliances. That’s what it is.  

And so, he is targeting those alliances, and he is doing this in collaboration with the Russian government, the North Korean government, and the Iranian government.  

In conclusion, we are really at the cusp of, I think, losing what all of us have had the enormous privilege of growing up in and inheriting. We have the responsibility—and the duty—to understand what has given us the enormous prosperity and freedom that all of us enjoy. Despite all of our differences at home, we must unite to come up with a bipartisan effort to save, restore, and rebuild American preeminence and to defend the U.S.-led order.  

Thank you.  

Q&A

And I’d love to take questions now. I do want to say that this is partly why my book is really only a piece of this. The summary of the thesis of the book I wrote is that, when you boil it all down, the greatest source—no kidding—of American power is our nuclear deterrent.  

Our nuclear deterrent permits the United States to make good on its alliances, to extend power abroad, to defend international commerce, and to protect the things that most concretely make up the U.S.-led international order.  

I argue that it is not only in our interest for the United States to adapt the deterrent to ensure it is credible, but that it is our moral duty to do so. The way the United States does this is by targeting what the adversary values, which in totalitarian regimes is not its people or its cities. It is its military forces and the systems that keep their regimes in power and in control of their populations. That’s what the United States needs to build: a nuclear deterrent that holds those things at risk, along with a missile defense system that protects our ability to do that and safeguards innocent Americans.  

I try to make that argument based on the just war doctrine in about 130 pages. I feel like I don’t do the subject total justice, but it’s a good and necessary start so people can think clearly about what our nuclear weapons are for and how they are different from how our adversaries use theirs.  

With that, I’m happy to take questions.  

Question: Hello. My name is actually also Rebecca, and I’m from Patrick Henry College. I have a question about kind of a third aspect of the way I think China is trying to take over the United States—in addition to military and economic means, which you touched on—through cultural influence. I’m talking about things like media, Hollywood, even TikTok. How do you think American policymakers can combat that aspect of Chinese influence in American society in our efforts to maintain our cultural independence?  

Answer: Thank you so much for asking that question. I want to clarify: it’s the country that has the military and economic relative strength that enables their ability to do all of those things.  

I don’t mean to say it’s only the military and economic domains that give them their power. It’s their economy and their military that enable them to exert influence culturally, technologically, in Hollywood, and in our big sports leagues. It’s all of those things.  

The only reason China has the ability to silence American companies is because we are so sideways with the Chinese Communist Party right now—economically and militarily. We’re in a serious competition, and the United States does not have sufficient relative preeminence over them to make that not the case. Does that make sense?  

If you look at American investors, it’s only getting worse with Xi Jinping’s rise. The longer Xi Jinping is in power, the more problematic this becomes. There are Chinese-American businessmen inside China who are not allowed to leave right now. 

You had the China Commission in Congress really trying to raise awareness about this. The last time, I think, Antony Blinken went to China to have negotiations with Chinese leaders. The reason China can get away with these actions is that we lack the leverage to make them stop.  

They’re not going to stop based on the benevolence of Marxist-Leninism. That doesn’t exist. I would argue we must get the hard power piece right. The United States will not have the courage or leverage at the UN if it doesn’t have the ability to protect its allies, make good on security commitments, and contest the Chinese and the Russians.  

You have to get the no-kidding hard power piece right in order to push back culturally and in the other ways you mentioned. I definitely think the United States should not be quiet about those issues. I’m a big proponent of reciprocity. For example, Xi Jinping is toast if the Chinese people push back on what he’s doing. There are too many of them. 

The United States should be demanding reciprocity. If China wants to beam in their Communist propaganda via X (or Twitter), then fine—but we should demand the same. Let the National Review, Providence, The Washington Examiner, and The Washington Free Beacon beam their news into China. Let us beam our news into China.

That’s not allowed. It’s not allowed. I would demand reciprocity, for instance. I would not allow them to spew their propaganda into the United States, which divides Americans and amplifies the worst things happening in our country through our social media platforms. I mean, I can feel myself getting mad at what I’m seeing, and then even more mad when I realize I’m only seeing it because a Chinese troll put it in front of my face on my X account, you know? That’s coming from someone who understands what’s even going on. I can see the information warfare. A lot of Americans have no idea—no idea—that they’re on platforms being used to subvert us.  

So anyway, we should use our great advantage of free speech and robust debate. We should use that to our advantage to get it into these countries and regimes. We need to stop being on our back foot and start being on our forward foot. We have a lot more going for us than what these regimes permit or what we are willing to exercise. One of those is information—and culture.  

I could go on. There are other things. For example, American companies cannot divest from China unless they’re forced to, because they’re capitalists. They’re going to think about how to get rich. If their competitors stay in China, they’re afraid to leave China. Now, it’s becoming an increasingly toxic place to do business anyway, so the Chinese Communist Party is kind of helping us there. But it’s going to be too slow.  

I’m actually in favor of the federal government making it very, very dangerous—even more toxic and dangerous—for companies to continue to overly invest in China, especially in key areas of enormous national importance for the United States. There’s no reason we should still be having our key pharmaceuticals made in China. That is insane, for instance. So anyway, great question.  

Question: Yeah, McGregor Langston, Regent University. One of the big obstacles to American power, especially in the national security sphere, seems to be that our industrial base has been so hollowed out. I mean, in World War II, that was our superpower—our ability to produce, not only enough for ourselves but for our allies as well. Now we’ve offshored so many industries that we don’t even have the infrastructure anymore. On top of that, we don’t have kids my age wanting to take jobs in industrial base-related fields. We don’t have people to build ships and planes and things like that. Do you have any thoughts about how we’re going to improve our industrial base to ensure those goals?  

Answer: Yeah, I mean, part of the problem is our public schools are teaching kids that our country stinks. Why would you go do something to defend it anyway? If we have a public school system teaching kids that there’s no real difference between the United States and China, then why defend it?  

They’re told we’re systemically racist, systemically misogynistic, and that we’ve made the world worse. They’re told to look at our allies and see terrible countries behaving badly, so they think it’s not worth defending. Maybe they even think China is efficient, that it’s the world’s most sophisticated, technologically advanced, robotic nation, and that it’s brought all these people out of poverty. They’re told it’s so great, so maybe it’s time for them to rule.  

I say that flippantly and mockingly, but that is actually, legitimately, what some people argue. So that’s a problem. That’s really pulling the curtain back and figuring out how to fix this. But the good news is, there are already states addressing this. Some states are requiring civic education and similar programs, because right now, we have public schools indoctrinating kids against loving their own country. That’s the first problem.  

The second problem is why I’m a little more… well, I’m a political conservative, small “c,” but I’ve been much more curious about industrial policy. That makes some of the more libertarian-minded people look at me like I’m a heretic.  

But one of the things I say is, listen: capitalism is not an end in itself. Capitalism serves the interests of the American people for the freedom, security, and prosperity of the American family. If we don’t have a strong American nation, we’re toast. You can go down, subjugated by the Chinese Communist Party, saying, “But Ayn Rand!” You know—it’s like, she was wrong.  

So, I think that I’m in favor of—and curious about—some ideas of good industrial policy. “Build Back Better” should be all about the American industrial base. Yes, build back better.  

Let’s imagine a national recruiting effort to compete with Silicon Valley, or even work with Silicon Valley, to see what we can do to use the best innovation.  

Because we do have innovation. The defense industrial base may have atrophied, but we have all kinds of innovation happening.  

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk is eating the government’s lunch on space launch. I tell people I want the United States to have a space-based missile defense architecture, proliferated with satellites that have a kill capability so we can intercept enemy missiles coming at us—something like Israel’s Iron Dome, but for the American homeland.  

They look at me and say, “Rebecca, the United States can’t launch satellites cheaply enough to make that make sense.” And I say, “But Elon can.” Elon can. He’s doing it. So it’s possible—it is technologically possible.  

We need to look at what has created an environment where people outside the government are coming up with new, emerging technologies. They can use them for all kinds of things, but the Department of Defense has been shackled by too many restrictions, bureaucracy, and a desire to have a system for the sake of itself, rather than being outcome-oriented.  

There is no reason that Kim Jong-Un gets to test missiles nonstop to improve his capability at a rate that should make us embarrassed. We have got to get back to testing and testing and testing—and not being afraid to fail, because we learn from those tests. We’ve got to have a hypersonic offensive and defensive capability, because our adversaries have them.  

We are so afraid to test because we are so afraid to fail. We’ve got to get out of that. So anyway, I think if we had the right American leadership, we could say, “Yes, I recognize all these problems. I totally agree with you, but I refuse to submit to the idea that this is just an unchangeable problem.”  

The United States has the ability to educate Americans such that we have the practical ability to produce a manufacturing base that defends the nation. The really hard part, though—and this is why Xi Jinping and Putin think their systems of government, their authoritarian systems, are better than ours—is because we have this big country that relies on our ability to convince one another. It’s based on consensus, which makes it really hard. The founders, in their brilliance, designed a system that made it really hard to make big changes because they wanted us to achieve consensus.  

But that means we’ve just got to get at it. We just have to work hard to do it. That’s all I’ll say about that. I could go on.

I was super excited about—did anybody watch the Olympics? Just real quick. Okay, we are still producing the best Olympians. It’s not even close. I looked at this and thought, “America is so awesome.” I was going crazy over the medal count every night because I was like, “Oh my word, we have to beat the Chinese Communists.”  

It wasn’t even as close as it seemed. They have 1.5 billion people, and they drive their people like the world’s most sophisticated techno-authoritarian nation. They hurt their little kids if they’re not performing right. 

And then we get up there, and every single one of our athletes is like, “You know, I just…” I was laughing the whole time because they all just sounded like Americans in a system that values their own wellness. It’s a totally different system, and we still produced better athletes. Anyway, I was just very excited about the Olympics.  

Question: I’m Madeline, I’m from ACU. You mentioned a couple of times that you want to build up the American industrial complex and the military, and that we should pull out of organizations like the WHO and focus more on alliances that are for our benefit.  

Obviously, we’re going to have a lot of allies, particularly in Europe, that aren’t going to be super excited about that. You mentioned that if we ended up in a war with Russia, we would almost assuredly win, but I’m not 100% sure I want to live in a world where we’ve gone into a full-on war with Russia.  

So how would you propose living in a world with allies that are sort of drifting away from us without alienating them completely? Because I’d say that’s probably something we can’t afford to do.  

And then also, how would you propose building up the American military so much without putting us in a position where we end up in World War III? And I say that as someone who mostly agrees with you, but I just want to hear your thoughts.  

Answer: Great. No, I think it’s a great question, and you articulated that very, very well.  

I would say, one, our adversaries are already going as fast as they can to challenge the United States in their respective regions—so in Europe and in the Pacific.  

I disagree that the United States building up our defense industrial base is going to provoke a war. The best way we can prevent a war—and my book is called Duty to Deter—is to regain deterrence. We’ve had an enormous collapse of deterrence over the last three and a half years. I want to get us back to deterrence.  

I do not want to go to war with Russia. I do not want to go to war with China. I do not want to go to war with these countries. I want to make that very, very clear.  

My argument is that this is always a game of stakes—who is willing to defend what they believe is more important to them, country-wise. My argument is that the stakes for the United States are enormous. The American way of life is on the line.  

So, my argument is that building up the defense industrial base, collaborating with allies, and posturing our forces differently to regain deterrence is our best bet for preserving peace and avoiding war.  

If you look at the last three and a half years, the United States has been stepping back, trying to de-escalate. What has happened? Have our adversaries de-escalated and stepped back? Absolutely not. The Chinese are far more belligerent and aggressive against the United States and allied forces.  

The Russians have not reciprocated our restraint. The United States has restrained Ukraine. The United States has restrained Israel—thankfully, the Israelis are increasingly not listening to the United States. It’s a shame that I have to say that, but it’s true. The United States has tried to restrain Israel and Ukraine, both to their detriment.  

So, I actually think that my vision for restoring and rebuilding the strength of the U.S.-led order would be very popular among allies. As I’ve shared this with people in Poland, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Britain, they’ve said that a clear-thinking world in which the United States has the confidence to say, “Yes, the West is worth defending,” would be a welcome change.  

Furthermore, my vision is a world in which peace that’s more restrained is American. I’m against American progressive imperialism. I don’t think the United States should force our allies to take on the most controversial left-wing ideas about marriage and family—ideas that are far more left-wing than what the rest of the world believes. Maybe one European country would agree with that vision, but truly, the rest of the world does not.  

My argument embraces geopolitical pluralism in the Free World. I’m not going to tell Poland how its democracy has to conclude. I’m not going to henpeck India about what it has to do domestically. I’m not going to do that in the vision I’m laying out.  

I’m going to look for allies and partners who agree that their own security and prosperity will be in a much better place when the United States is the preeminent power—and not China. I can’t think of any country that, when really given that choice and pressed, would choose China. 

I completely agree with the assessment of those who say, “Listen, Germany’s not doing enough to defend NATO.” You can go through the list—Canada has been out to lunch for decades. You can make all those critiques, and they’re absolutely true. But my vision relies on collective wealth being put to good use. It’s not going to do us any good if we’re wealthy but don’t use it.  

That’s why you need strong, muscular American diplomacy—even with our allies. Reagan understood this. Reagan used a really tough, hard-nosed diplomacy with our allies. Sometimes U.S. leadership requires delegation.  

We have got to be in a place where this is the golden era of allies. Another thing we have to reform is our technology exports. AUKUS, the idea that the United States, the UK, and Australia are going to collaborate for this security architecture to deter China, is great, but only if the United States reforms our willingness to share key technologies with our allies.  

That’s the pillar two of AUKUS. Pillar one is about submarines, but pillar two is really where the good stuff is. Again, we have to sort of wake up from this slumber since the post-Cold War era and understand that a lot of these regulations and restrictions we’ve put in place are luxuries of peace. We’re not really in that time anymore. We’re in an era of no-kidding, rigorous competition for our interests. That’s kind of a long answer to your very articulate, short question.  

Question: Hi, thank you for being here today. My name is Alison Angle, and I’m from Liberty University. I’m so glad you brought up the point about the way our international institutions have been corrupted and kind of taken over by the axis of resistance in the world.  

I love the idea of leaving the WHO and creating a new international organization. In terms of that, my question would be: given how prominent the UN is on the world stage, I’m especially disappointed with the way we allow ourselves to be treated in the UN and the failures of its humanitarian elements. But, given how prominent it is, do you think it’s feasible to reform the UN at this point? Are we better off leaving the UN and creating a new organization, or should we focus more on dealing with our allies one-on-one? What’s your take on the best way to approach that? 

Answer: So, definitely, the UN Human Rights Commission has been—I mean, Nikki Haley was right to withdraw the United States from it. 

It depends on which mechanism within the UN we’re discussing. To the extent that we determine something is no longer serving our interests and is, in fact, undermining them, we should withdraw and start a new one.

There’s nothing that says, “If we’re not at the table, we can’t influence.” But we’re not influencing now, so I reject those two choices. There is another way to go.  

The United States has to use its elbows to actually say, Look, this is a joke that these countries are sitting on the UN Human Rights Commission, the UN Security Council, and various commissions. And when you see what the UN has been doing in Lebanon, you have to be willing to call it out. You have to be willing to say it is not serving the interests of the international system that we all say is good for us. It would just depend—it would be specific to what it is.  

If you really want to see how bad things are at the UN, go back and look at the whisperings at the end of the first Trump administration about how much influence China had across the board during the pandemic.  

Do not forget—regardless of where COVID originated—that the behavior of the Chinese Communist Party amplified the spread of that virus. They spread false, slanderous lies about where it came from and what it was doing, which increased the number of human deaths and prolonged ridiculous, awful, and inhumane lockdowns.  

China did that. As a country, we’ve just memory-holed the whole thing. That should be something the UN is discussing to get to the bottom of. The Australians tried. In the middle of the pandemic, the Australians tried to get to the bottom of COVID origins.  

What did China do? They turned around and sanctioned Australia. They gave Australia a list of 14 points they had to meet in order for China to remove the sanctions—11 of which dealt entirely with domestic Australian politics. 

Anyone who says a world order in which China leads instead of the United States would be less invasive into the domestic lives of democracies is peddling nonsense. Look at what the Australians endured. 

It’s going to take clear eyes and no-kidding resolve to publicly lay out what’s been going on. It’s also going to require hard conversations with allies first before going public with them.  

There’s a way to do it that makes sense, but we should not have an ideological attachment to these international organizations.  

They should always be measured against, “Are they making Americans safer and more secure, or are they not? That should be the measure.”