Welcome to Mississippi Happenings.
My name is David Olds and I'm your co-host and with me today is my friend, Jim Newman.
Jim, how are you?
I'm doing great.
I've got a new airplane.
You have a new airplane.
Tell me about it.
Okay.
How nice is it?
About 400 million.
Oh, okay.
May I ask where you got this $400 million airplane?
Oh, there's a little country in the Middle East that really took a liking to me and just decided they'd donate it to me.
good.
Well, that's a great topic to start out with.
I want to uh introduce uh our guest today, and he is a second timer, and it's a joy to have him with us and for him to uh be with us and share his knowledge.
Today we have retired Rear Admiral Jamie Barnett.
He is the adjunct professor at Ole Miss Center of Intelligence and Security Studies, teaching national security and cyber security policy courses.
And he has a sub stack, is Jamie's opinion aided by facts.
Jamie, great to have you with us.
So good to see you again.
David, thanks so much for having me.
Jim, thanks for having me.
And if I didn't scare away any of your podcast viewers before, I appreciate having the second chance.
Absolutely.
uh got some great comments about that podcast and you have a knowledge that most of us don't have.
You have first-hand knowledge.
In your uh sub stack, opinion aided, you wrote about DIME and you said it, the majority of the students and practitioners of national security and foreign relations know the acronym
DIME.
D-I-M-E, which stands for its categories of international power and influence.
DIME, diplomatic power, information power, military power, and economic power.
ah Jamie, I was just fascinated with that article and fascinated, but also a little bit...
scared and terrified of what I read.
please uh share with us your thoughts.
Yeah, so great.
And so you get an A on remembering the acronym, David.
So, you know, the first thing I would start with is, you know, there's an American tradition of not being very interested in foreign affairs, international affairs.
really, public only really focuses on that when there is some crisis or problem or those foreign affairs have somehow or another invaded our shores.
And so, you know, we see that every day.
I mean,
Americans don't keep up with the fact that Russian jets have invaded Estonian airspace and that the Russians are interfering with Romanian elections.
And so there's it just goes on and on about what we just don't fight.
It's not on our radar.
And what is on the radar actually, Jim brought up.
mean, we're talking a lot about a jet that Qataris want to give us.
In some ways it's a distraction because it is blatantly unethical and against the Constitution's emoluments clause.
And I feel like ultimately that's the way that it'll be disposed of.
I think it'll be too expensive, take too long.
And if they really want to do it, if they want to really do something for the United States, why don't they expand our base in Doha?
Or if they want to contribute some money to expand in our...
our bases in the United States, we could do that.
Or they could just give the jet to the United States and not to President Trump personally, in which case I'm not really sure what we do with it because it would be uh a
lot of money and time to actually fit it for governmental use.
But we don't focus on foreign affairs.
But that doesn't mean that something's not happening with it just because the public isn't doing it.
And so we have these things.
How do we make nations do what we think is in our best interest?
Or how do we find ways for us to seek a common interest?
And that is these four principles of international power influence, diplomatic, informational, military, and economic.
And the United States has been fabulous in that for the last eight decades.
when we finally emerged from World War II and took on the mantle of being a superpower.
And then after the fall of the Soviet Union, the sole superpower.
um And in very rapid order, the Trump administration has diminished each of those categories.
When you mentioned the aircraft and security, I remember when we, the United States.
built the embassy in Russia, in Moscow.
And then we couldn't take possession of it because when they started checking it out, there were spy bugs everywhere.
And come to find out, we let the Russians build it with no supervision.
The Russians were very, very clever.
They embedded listing devices inside cinder blocks that use PZ Electric feature so they didn't actually have to have batteries.
it was just, it was just, and yeah, we never took possession of the building.
uh And you know, it's another aspect uh of my national security class.
If you don't mean, can I get academic for just a minute?
Please do.
Yes.
also have not heard of a man named George Kennan.
George Kennan was a Soviet and Russian uh expert and was uh under April Harriman, was in Moscow, was the, uh ultimately the ambassador, the US ambassador to Russia, or maybe I
should say to the Soviet Union.
And at one point, the Department of Treasury was trying to deal with the Soviet Union and they sent him a request.
to Moscow and said, can you kind of explain to us how the Soviets act?
And he sent back what became known as the long telegram.
It was 5,000 words at a time when most telegrams were between 30 and 50 words.
And what he laid out, now this is a uh very broad simulation or,
simplification of what he said, but he basically says you cannot treat the Russians like other countries.
You have to know that they will deceive you, they will lie to you, they will not follow through on what they say because they think that you're a decrepit, uh decadent uh
democracy that will ultimately fall.
So, you all they have to do is wait you out.
And that has really in some ways been true for Tsarist Russia, and it's true for Putin's Russia too.
And so those concepts that George Kennan helped form was called containment.
oh You're not gonna be able to really deal with them like other nations.
You can't treat them diplomatically.
You can just contain them.
Well, now we're back into another superpower oh confrontation.
We're back to major power competition.
concepts of containment and that we cannot trust the Russians need to come back.
Well, Khrushchev told us that we were going to fail from within.
Right.
Well, and I hope he's not right, but I mean, the fact of the matter is that he was acting on good authority.
The founders of the United States also knew that democracies fall from within.
And, you know, it goes back to what we, I think we talked about this last time.
Benjamin Franklin's answer to the woman who asked him, what have you wrought?
you know, a republic, if you can keep it.
And we've been keeping it for a long time, you know, sometimes better than others.
But I do think it's at risk right now.
And that's probably a discussion for another day, just the question of the rule of law, which we see assaulted every day.
You mentioned that Trump was dismantling this process of dime.
In what ways has he worked to dismantle this?
Well, David during the first administration, oh Trump uh assaulted the Department of State.
uh He dismissed very senior officers.
uh And this wasn't because he was ticked off at them.
This was when he first came into office.
And you know, um it takes a long time to grow a Foreign Service officer, to study another country, to learn its language, to learn its culture.
to build relationships with that country, whether they're an adversary or an ally or somewhere in between.
And so that was tremendously upsetting.
The other thing that he did, which we're still paying for, is he pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, TPP.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership was the United States dealing with, I forgot exactly how many, but I want to say it's 10 to 15 Pacific...
you know, nations, East and West, oh and not China.
And the idea was to counter China's influence in the Pacific West.
And the thing that China did immediately after that was go in and start dealing with those countries.
So that was kind of the baseline from the first administration.
Second administration, he's done even worse.
I mean, he's come in and dismissed
uh Thousands of officers just gotten rid of them.
uh I'm even concerned about the fact that he's invited uh people to take voluntary retirement.
We lose a lot of uh experience there.
So that diplomatic power is incredibly important to us because we really don't want to use our military power.
We want to achieve our national means, our national ends.
without military power.
And so it's just, it's just really, you know, we shuddering embassies, he's cutting back on programs.
We've already talked about what he's done on USAID.
There were, just got so much goodwill around the world, uh, from the programs.
And you know, that, that, that cost us less than 1 % of our annual federal budget.
And, um,
And of course the Chinese have come right in behind that and scooped up those programs, particularly in uh Africa, but elsewhere as well, because uh America has come across as
seeming uh untrustworthy.
And we've done the same with our allies.
We pulled out of the World Trade Organization, basically.
We pulled out of the World Health Organization.
We pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords.
so, know, things that we have done, you know,
We've even basically abrogated uh treaties that Trump negotiated, including the one between um the refit of the treaty between Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
So the tariffs have just uh done tremendous uh harm to our worldwide standing and trust.
um
We can go through each one of the acronym names if you want to or I can stop and breathe and you can let us, uh let me know if you have other questions.
was going to ask you since you brought it up.
ah It sounds like that you might possibly approve of the lifting of sanctions of Syria.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
That's one of the things I teach my students is when you're dealing with national security, there's not a decision that is not complex.
And when, you know, when you optimize one decision, you're probably de-optimizing something else.
So the question of Syria is hard.
And the reason is, is that you've got somebody with blood on his hands that now run at the country.
Now we're really happy about the fact that he overthrew Bashad.
I mean, we're glad that he's gone.
And there's a negotiating room there with regard to those oh sanctions.
It looks to me like we're not negotiating.
We're just reducing them.
And Saudi Arabia and other countries, other Arabian countries request.
What we should be doing is saying, throw the Russians out of their Syrian port.
you know, start acting like a nation that doesn't promote terrorism.
And so there is an opportunity to deal with them.
We have dealt with people that we would not consider our friends in the past successfully.
And there's an opportunity there.
I don't know that we're capitalizing on it right now.
David, I'm sorry I interrupted you.
No, no, no, that's fine.
oh Let's talk, in a way, let's go back to DIME again, you mentioned turning the lights out on informational power.
Talk to us a little bit about Voice of America and what it was and what it is now under the Trump administration.
Sure, and if I can take a step back even from that, mean, we use information to influence world opinion, and so do other nations.
They use information to influence our perception of them, and this has been going on for a long time, all the way back to Roman times.
And America's had a tremendous advantage in that, what President Reagan and others called the Shining City on the Hill.
We were kind of the example, the democracy that worked, that created uh economic prosperity for our people and educational and uh freedom of speech and all that goes with
it.
And that got promoted through our movies, our music and our culture.
mean, people all over the world at one point were trying to get American blue jeans.
I mean, so there was just so much influence there that we were able to take advantage of.
And other countries do that too.
I we think of France as very stylish and their wine is very good.
Those are the type of informational things that we've used.
Now, all that we've just mentioned on democracy, uh and diplomacy in particular, also it's been affected by this.
These tariffs have reduced our standing around the world because it's affected people's pocketbooks and their confidence in their economies.
But also in the past, we have used various aspects, specific instruments of information.
And we started within about two months after the US entered World War II with Voice of America.
And it was, you know, it has evolved into scores of languages pumped into uh countries that uh do not have a free press, by and large autocracies.
Some of the countries that it's the only one they get and there are various uh
We've heard of Radio Free Europe, there's radio and television, Marti, uh Spanish language, all these sort of things, getting information too.
But sometimes that's the only information that's true that they get.
In one fell swoop, by the dismissal of Voice of America, by Carey Lake, which the overall organization is called the US Agency for Global Media.
basically just dismiss them, even though it's supposed to be independent, congressionally funded, congressionally mandated.
And they've launched a lawsuit and the judge has said, no, you can't do this.
But the fact of the matter is that they can be starved and I have a feeling that they will not be funded past September 30th of this year.
And so it looks like it's going dark.
uh for millions and millions of people in the world.
And then I did an update for the article you mentioned like that because it looks like it's even worse than that.
uh Carey Lake has contracted with an extreme news organization called One American Network News, or News Network, OAN, and uh that is going to basically pump pro-Trump
information around the world.
So that becomes like a state media.
oh And we were already concerned by the fact that uh Elon Musk with his hundreds of millions of followers on Twitter X, X Twitter, and Trump's true social was already
creating kind of this state social media that's affecting things for which there's no filter.
uh
the free press, the fourth estate with professional journalists acts as something that can sift through and find what is true.
So in my way of thinking, it's worse than it possibly could have been.
And the information power is now maybe it's put a lot of people in the dark.
It's left them open to the state medias in those countries and what they're gonna be getting from the United States.
is going to be very slanted in favor of Trump, who he knows does not have a strong adherence to the truth.
That's uh absolutely frightening.
Are we losing our democracy and are we becoming...
oh
And I'm not, you know, are we coming, becoming an uh authoritarian nation or a fascist nation or what's happening?
What's, what's happening to us right now?
In your opinion.
a little bit from dime right now, but I'll be happy to speak about that.
And the aspect of it is, yeah, we mentioned rule of law.
uh The rule of law or the checks and balances that hold uh the president to account.
And the Congress has uh totally defaulted on its ability to hold the president to account.
Now, this is a long time in coming.
It goes back.
uh
certainly into the Ronald Reagan years when there was this concept hatched totally.
mean, doesn't go back to the founding of our country of the unitary president.
As a matter of fact, I would tell you that the founders were afraid of a unitary president.
And so the concept of separation of powers is that each of the three co-equal branches would be jealous of those powers.
And the Congress has become very not jealous.
It has ceded power to the president, even as the president does things that are clearly unconstitutional or illegal.
So the very conservative former Federal Circuit Judge, Judge Ludig, has an article in the Atlantic this week, really in its last 24 hours.
where he goes back down chapter and verse of every major executive order that the President Trump has signed and said why it is illegal, why it is unconstitutional.
And he's very much concerned that that is against the rule of law.
The arrest of the judge who they accused of letting an illegal immigrant get away, he uses as an example, they did not.
use a, um, a judicially approved warrant on that.
And so the arrest of judges is another indicator of a breakdown in the, uh, in the rule of law.
And you may not know it, but all of our constitutional rights are being assaulted, our Sixth Amendment constitutional rights to, uh, representation, when he goes after law
firms.
And I'm very proud of some of the law firms that I know in Washington, DC that have stood up to it, but not all of them have.
So all of these across a broad front, our democracy is being assaulted.
And the only place where it seems to be holding up right now is uh in the courts.
oh The courts are routinely saying these executive orders do not pass constitutional muster.
They're routinely saying, you you can't claim that we're being invaded uh like a military invasion because that's what the Alien uh Act, Enemy Alien Act was all about.
So for right now, the one guard rail that seems to be holding up are the courts.
uh And we'll see if they can withstand it, how long they can stand it.
So we're at risk.
Yeah.
And I wasn't ignoring you while you were talking.
You mentioned the rule of law.
And I was just looking up what Chief Justice John Roberts said recently ah that the rule of law is the most endangered.
I thought that's...
And seems that uh in most...
And tell me...
where I'm wrong and it's, but it seems like all of the courts in the Supreme Court are kind of siding with what Trump wants to do.
Is that correct?
So far, I mean, there have been some that where they have, uh but I mean, David, if you remember a couple of weeks ago, there was a question of, you know, whether or not uh
undocumented uh immigrants into the nation have a right of due process.
And there was a five, four decision by the uh Supreme Court and I apologize, I don't remember the name of it right this now.
But one of the...
interesting things is even though there was a five four decision on how it should come out, all nine agreed that illegal immigrants are owed due process.
Now that is a fundamental, mean, if due process, and due process, you know, is just simply the right to know what you're being accused of and the opportunity to be heard about it,
to give your side of the story.
It's not much.
It's not a guarantee that you're going to get justice, but if you don't get due process, there's almost a guarantee that you're not going to get justice.
And so I was, I was encouraged that even a Supreme court judges that I think get it wrong a lot of the time got it right on that one.
So, you know, right now, um, you know, it seems to be, you know, holding and what justice Roberts was talking about there was in a very unusual thing.
He does not speak out.
But he was, essence, answering the president who said that a judge should be impeached for giving Trump a bad decision, a decision that Trump doesn't agree with.
And we have in the law a way to complain about decisions we disagree with.
It's called an appeal.
But threatening judges, uh there's, I'm very concerned about...
uh
and I hope a lot of people will hear about this, about this new pizza strategy.
uh So a judge whose uh son was murdered uh during a pizza delivery, the pizza delivery was just a ploy to get him to open the door, and now she's getting uh pizzas delivered that
weren't ordered.
Other judges are getting pizza delivered in her son's name.
You know, it's a threat.
And uh clearly uh threatening attorneys, threatening judges, trying to intimidate them is much more indicative of the types of autocracies that we wish to avoid.
uh And so there needs to be people speaking out against this.
If we disagree with the judge, fine, appeal it.
uh But right now, uh the whole judicial system, which is a co-equal branch,
And one of the decisions that came out recently uh was, know, they were basically the Trump administration was saying, well, you shouldn't impede the presidential's prerogative
in this.
And the judge basically said, you're trying to write Article III of the Constitution out.
That's exactly what we're supposed to do is question the decisions of the executive branch.
Jim, you had a comment uh on that, the real law.
Admiral, you and I both read the same article in the Atlantic.
ah And I don't think, there's so many distractions.
is, he's an artist at distraction.
ah If it's not the airplane, it's the Memcoin, it's the...
$250,000 dinner, it's always something.
He's got to have his name on this five o'clock news or six o'clock news.
And he will do whatever it takes to stay in the public domain.
And what I think a lot of people don't realize is what you brought up and what that article pointed out is that of all of these presidential orders that he's given, probably
95 % of them are not void, are not legitimate.
Like the recent firing of the Library of Congress woman.
The Library of Congress belongs to Congress.
It doesn't belong to the president or that branch of government.
It belongs to Congress.
They have that right.
So we're going to spend money to go to court.
And I think the courts will find that he cannot do that.
And she'll probably get her job back if she wants it.
I don't know why she would, but, uh,
Yeah, there's a lot of jokes.
concerned about the personnel aspect and the way that he's treated federal employees, Jim.
uh they got rid of a lot to nearly 20,000 people just by saying, hey, sign up and leave and we'll pay you through September or something like that.
Fired a bunch of more.
And then even in the last couple of weeks, one of the things that I wrote about on my sub stack was schedule F.
Something else.
America's not paying attention to because there's like you said, there's so much else.
There's so many Qatari jets that we have to deal with and you know, immigration gold cards, any number of other things that he does.
But Schedule F is going to convert 50,000 federal employees to oh partisan appointees.
More particularly, he can fire them for being disloyal.
uh And so this is
terrible.
It reverses over a hundred years of civil service uh protections.
By the way, mean, people can respond through May 23rd to the proposed Schedule F rule at OPM.
uh You know, I don't know that that Rouse is going to listen to us, but at least we can complain about it.
But once that goes into effect, what that
in essence does to 50,000 federal employees, they know that they can be fired at an instant.
So they're going to, I think, have to adhere or they're going to feel like they have to adhere to whatever degradations or illegal actions the president wants to take.
And here's the thing, you know, we talk about the public service of serving in the military.
and the sacrifices that have to be made.
uh President Trump, and I'm afraid the Republican Party largely, has come about denigrating federal service, public service.
A lot of times they have expertise in a field where they could be paid a lot more someplace else, but they're doing it because they feel like they're doing something good
for the nation.
I served with many of them at the Federal Communications Commission.
dedicated people who want to make it right.
And the fact that we'd have this many, tens of thousands of federal employees leaving the service, oh there's going to be something that we'll have to pay for that.
There is damage that's being done that we may not know for weeks, months or years, because somebody that we needed in a seat in Washington DC or some other,
position across the country isn't there.
Well, if you just think back to Ronnie Reagan when he fired all the FAA controllers when they were on strike, the situation at Newark airport is
The ultimate result of that, it takes years and years to have a controller trained well enough to manage the job he's given to do.
And we don't have enough.
We've never had enough since Reagan fired him.
Yeah, was, you know, was applauded by the anti-union people, but the fact of the matter is they were, the unions were telling them what they needed.
They needed more people, better working conditions and more money.
But I think the main thing is, is that they saw is that the system even then was under stress.
And look where we are today.
Nothing's changed.
Jamie, earlier when you were talking about schedule F, you mentioned O-B-E-M.
oh
so that's the Office of Personnel Management.
So OPM is the agency in the United States that handles most of the personnel, not all the personnel, but it handles the rules, the HR rules for the government.
Are federal employees ah forbidden to form a union?
There are some significant restrictions on federal employees forming unions.
There's some exceptions to that.
But, um you know, they're not allowed to do collective bargaining.
because it seems to me that they're not on an equal footing when it comes to their continued employment.
ah
right.
And that is why the civil service regulations are so important.
um Typically what's happened is the federal employee organizations lobby to strengthen the federal service rules.
And there are various organizations, Communication Workers of America, Association of Federal Government Employees.
oh
are organizations that have done a lot of good advocating for civil servants in a particular time when the Congress has not generally stood up for them.
I think we just ought to maybe move Washington DC to Mississippi.
And in Mississippi, we've got employment at will so they can just fire whoever they want whenever they want.
And there's no problem.
is what I'm afraid of that's going to happen with schedule F.
Yes, that's what it sounds like.
How about the money part of DIME, the monetary part?
You talking about Trump's pocketbook?
monetary part, uh on the economic power, uh we really have been at the top of the heap for a long time.
The tariffs have upset that and we were already being threatened, Jim, uh because uh
and this just a quick history lesson, even before the end of World War II, President Roosevelt could see that we needed a way forward.
And it wasn't just the United Nations.
There was a conference among the allies at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 to form what has been for the last 80 years, the world's financial system.
So this was to create the
the World Bank to help rebuild uh Europe.
This was the international monetary fund so that there would be a stable currencies around an exchange system.
And a lot of things that got set up like SWIFT and the ability to um exchange money uh confidently and securely.
um set up the, at that time they set up the general agreement on
tariffs and trade, which became the World Trade Organization.
All of those things were put into place and we have used those uh very effectively.
It's benefited the United States and our allies.
It's also benefited our adversaries.
China and Russia have greatly benefited.
There has been a great boost worldwide in productivity.
Doesn't mean there's not poverty in places, but uh as the world population has grown,
These things have benefited.
Now, we've also used that to punish people.
We've punished people like Iran and Russia and China with our economic sanctions and they don't like it.
And so they have oh conspired, I guess you could say, to break out of that, you know, American led rules based world economic order.
And I've got an upcoming oh substack
that I'll let you in on about should you be afraid of BRICS?
Well, BRICS is an acronym, B-R-I-C-A-S, uh Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South America.
But it's many more nations than that now.
I've forgotten it was 10 or 15 nations that are involved in it now.
And what they want to do is break out of using the American currency as the world reserve currency.
They want to break out of the exchange system.
uh And so uh if we place economic sanctions on them, uh they won't be affected about it.
And that movement is growing and unfortunately what Donald Trump has been doing actually enhances that.
We don't hear a whole lot about, like you said at the beginning, what's going on in other countries.
ah When I think back over the first hundred days, it almost seems to me that Trump used the tariffs to create a bad economic situation.
for a number of countries.
But the real goal, as I see it, ah is that he was doing it.
to enrich his fellow billionaires and himself.
Because all of a sudden, we go from 145 % tariff, oh, 80 % is fine.
Just picks it out of the blue.
The stock market goes up over a thousand points.
People make millions of dollars.
I didn't make millions, but I did okay on that day.
and the days subsequent to that.
And I sometimes wonder if that was not his real purpose, if he could create an economic situation bad enough that the stock market would go down and then everybody that's got
funds left buys on the so-called dip.
And then he just picks a number out of the air and stock market goes crazy.
You know, Jim, I think that as time goes on, we learn more about that.
There may be some serious allegations about market manipulation, uh insider trading on that.
I don't have enough information on that right now.
It does seem suspicious to me that, you know, he suggested one night uh that people ought to put their money in the stock market.
And the next morning, he retards the
tariffs and so the market shoots up.
uh But I do think that he doesn't really know what he's doing.
you can look, you can, so I don't know if he actually had a principal in there.
He has been, apparently been a believer of tariffs for a long time.
uh And that takes us, you know, back to a Republican party that existed during and before the Hoover administration and was proven to be wrong.
and he's got as his principal economic advisor, Peter Navar, who is a charlatan.
and, you know, when he wrote his, his book on, uh, it had a convicted felon and, and, he wrote his book on, about tariffs, how, how good tariffs he, he referenced an authority on
it.
That was him that he made up.
So that's the level of integrity of academic and intellectual integrity that's advising the president.
And you know, there's clearly internal friction about this with his treasury secretary.
And not that I would trust Elon Musk, but Elon Musk doesn't like his economic things.
And so all of this is based on very bad economics.
know, Adam Smith, so the wealth of nations, this is...
you know, kind of the beginning of modern economics.
And it was, he promoted free trade, basically low tariffs.
He didn't say no tariffs.
He thought that they could be used, you know, incrementally if you've got an internal tax on stuff that's being made here uh and something else is being imported, well, you could
have a tariff on that to kind of level the playing field.
But, um
What Trump is doing so far outstrips that and shocking the system.
He may have thought that this is the way you do it, like you're buying a building or something like that.
Someone wants to buy your building, you quote an outrageous price and then you bring it down.
But it has shocked the world system.
And I think he's going to find that regardless of what the start market does, oh the world economy is going to suffer for months, if not years.
And that goes to
our economic power.
You know, um we have to have the money.
We have to be generating the economy to afford a military, a diplomacy, to do all the things we want to do.
There's a lot of stuff that goes into economic power that's more than just Wall Street, which is all he seems to understand.
And that includes, we need to have a workforce that's healthy.
So there's all these cutbacks to Medicaid, all these cutbacks to
to the things that give us a good education, that hurts our economic power.
And again, it could last for a long time.
It also hurts our influence around the world, be it HIV treatments or any number of nonprofit organizations throughout Africa and the rest of the world that, yes, they are,
including some in Afghanistan.
angry.
What do you think about the...
Go ahead.
uh
they feel betrayed, they are also angry.
So yeah, Jim.
What do you think about?
ah
is sending or repealing the...
immigration status of the Afghans, Afghanistan's that we got out of Afghanistan because they were helping the Americans and they would have been probably executed.
And now he says Afghanistan's safe enough.
They all need to go back home.
Yeah.
So that'd be an option for them.
to do what?
to stay here or go home.
No, I mean, oh once again, we give our word, uh we ought to follow up on it.
uh And uh there were still some people of Afghanistan that I think we should have gotten out if we could have.
uh There were a lot of the 21st century American military decisions have been made by our political leaders, which is as it should be.
but it has been a history of adventurism, which Trump says he's against.
And I appreciate a restraint on that.
uh But uh we shouldn't have ever been in Iraq.
That was totally engineered.
I appreciate and applaud the actions of our troops that were there.
I applaud the actions of our troops in Afghanistan, but we should...
We shouldn't have stayed as long as we did.
We lost focus on going after Al-Qaeda as we went into Iraq.
Once we got Osama bin Laden, we should have evaluated.
And one of the things that America has failed on in the past is this concept of creating democracies and things that are like America.
we've had some success.
We had success in South Korea.
South Korea didn't start off as a democracy.
It started off almost like a military dictatorship that evolved over time into the democracy that it is right now.
But it didn't work in Vietnam.
It hasn't worked in a lot of other countries.
And so I think America has to understand what the limitations of making other countries, nation building other countries into our own uh likeness.
And therefore the decision was correct.
The decision that
President Trump made, that President Biden uh fulfilled of leaving Afghanistan because we didn't have a purpose there anymore.
uh The withdrawal could have gone better and there were some intelligence failures.
uh And as with regard to the people in Afghanistan that helped us, we owe a duty to them and we also always should uh uphold that because
It won't be the last time that we need people in another country to help us.
And that goes back to.
all of the brain drain that you were talking about, losing federal employees that have years and years of diplomatic service and histories.
ah I forgot in the book I was reading, ah it was, I can't think of the name of it and it's immaterial, but it goes back to, uh
the second world war after it was over.
And the United States wanted, the United States and the allies were interested in having, for lack of a better word, spies to find out what the Russians were doing.
But the only problem was we didn't have anybody that spoke German or Russian.
So we ended up hiring Germans who we had just defeated.
for quite a while, we got intel that we wanted to hear, not what was really happening, but it was intel that we wanted to hear because we hired the people we had defeated and they
gave us what we wanted.
And it takes years to develop those relationships of trust and confidence.
And you just can't do that overnight.
Yeah, that's why I'm concerned about so many intelligence officers being uh dismissed uh after World War.
I mean, we didn't really have an intelligence service before World War II, other than army intelligence and Navy intelligence.
And so the central intelligence agency was, you know, outgrowth of the office of special services, but yeah, it was fledgling and mistakes were made.
then
Then Alan Dulles got a uh hold of it and some real hubris and American adventurism around the world occurred.
Our intelligence service now is tremendous uh and it should be supported.
And it goes to the talk about people being dismissed.
I'm very concerned even today hearing about another 120 generals and admirals being dismissed.
uh
To me, this is a follow on of Senator Tuberville's disastrous hold on military promotions, which it affects the military, but it also affects military families, transfers, people
that have kids in schools, that now they're held there, they're interrupted in the middle of the year.
And it's just a disrespect for our men and women in uniform.
I, they're...
there does not seem to be a military or national security purpose in any of it.
And to, you can't go into General Motors or IBM and hire a new Admiral or General, you have to grow them.
And um so when those are dismissed, to me, that is like millions of dollars of investment that's gone.
And it is a disruption because there is a progression.
We send, you know, our
senior officers to the Naval War College, National War College, National Defense University.
We prepare them for very tough roles of leadership and a lot of that's getting interrupted now and the people who are having to take up the slack, uh you know, may not be ready for
that particular role exactly.
Now, is there a reason to downsize?
You can do that.
We did it in the 1990s.
You have congressional hearings, you have study committees, you figure out where you can do it.
But just to rate people out means that some things are not going to be done, some things are going to be lost.
And that's another situation where we may not see what the problem is today or this year or next year, but it may be a problem in the future that can be traced back to the ways
he's treating that.
So, uh
And I'm very concerned about that and the dismissal of so many people from the federal government.
A lot of them will be in the Department of Defense if we were going to downsize.
Now, let me praise a couple of things that are going on.
Our Senator Wicker, who I do not always agree with, is promoting a larger defense budget.
He is promoting the Ships Act, a shipbuilding thing.
You know, after we spent...
five, six trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the first part of the century, money for which we cannot claim that we have any additional national security right now.
That money could have been going into Air Force jets, it could have been going into Navy ships, revitalizing our naval bases around the world, protecting them for the climate
change that's coming.
So I'm glad to see that there's a recognition of that.
support that.
There's one other thing that I have to say that I think is a good outgrowth byproduct, shall we say, of the tariffs.
When the Chinese locked the door on exporting processed rare earths to the United States, it's a huge problem for us.
There's about 900 pounds of rare earths in an F-35.
There's about 9,000 pounds in a submarine.
And we need them for our cars.
We need them for our cell phones.
We need them for all of our manufacturing.
And China has about 90 % of the processing power for rare earths.
Rare earths aren't technically rare.
They're very available, but they're only available in certain places of the world.
We've got some, Ukraine's got some, and China's got some, but they have more of the processing power.
And so one of the things that I hope that does come out
of all of this is that we really do revitalize our Western and American uh processing of rare earths.
That's a national security thing.
We've recognized it for a few years.
We've got one plant that's in Southern California.
I think that they weren't finding it profitable to operate it.
Maybe now we'll see that there is profit.
Even uh Adam Smith said that there are certain tariffs that are
you should have to protect industries that are vital to your national interest.
And we need to look at that.
The people who have fought against that for years and years is the Republican Party.
You mentioned ah
I'm trying, I lost my train of thought there.
ah
and I can't think of what it was, it'll come back to me.
mention one other thing about economic power when we're talking about that just a minute ago.
So as Russia and China and the people that followed them pull away from what has been an American and European led uh world economic system, and they start pulling out and
flouting the World Trade Organization rules.
One of the things we need to keep our eye on the fact is that we have more debt now
uh than we ever have before.
And it is growing at an exponential rate.
uh I've forgotten exactly what it is this minute.
You can look at the world debt, the American debt clock, but it's about $33 trillion.
And so the Republican bill that I saw today says it's going to add to the debt.
uh Right now, I think it's about 122 % of
our gross domestic product.
during World War II, Franklin Roosevelt boosted our budget to 100%.
So there's 100 % debt compared to our gross domestic product.
But he could do that because it was only 41 % before that.
So we are at real risk there.
And David, Jim, there's nobody.
in either party that is actually proposing solutions to this.
So the fact of the matter is that we are going to have to take budget cuts in some places.
We are going to have to increase taxes in some places in order to address that debt.
And if we don't, there is going to be hell to pay at some point because if that economic system crashes, if we aren't able to pay our debts, what that means is people will start
pulling money out of American treasury notes.
And our borrowing will either become impossible or become so expensive that we can't do anything else.
And we've seen this happen to other nations and it has not looked good.
You know, it took 15 or 20 years for Japan to come back from that kind of situation.
So I'm very concerned about that.
What we really need to have is a debt commit, bipartisan debt commission.
that has real power and can propose things.
That is not what's being worked on and it is one of the greatest threats to our national security right now.
Let me ask you about your students.
Are you impressed with your students' education when you get them?
Or are they lacking a global perspective?
So I think that they're drawn from the American population.
So they're smart, they're knowledgeable.
And the thing that I'm encouraged about is that they're interested in international relations and in national security.
They wouldn't have signed up for the course if they weren't.
So I find that they're uh eager uh and open to it.
One of the things that
interests me and concerns me uh is that occasionally their questions uh show the influence of Russian propaganda.
And that's not surprising because oh our information system in the United States, the distribution of news has fractured so badly now.
uh And we've heard Russian propaganda on the floor of the House and Senate.
uh And we've had the
Republican head of the intelligence committee complained about it.
So, you know, I've gotten questions like, well, is Ukraine even really a country?
Yes, it really is a country and it has been for decades recognized by the United Nations.
and, you know, I've heard questions, you know, that would kind of blame the war on Ukraine, which, you know, is ludicrous.
So, and you know, my students are susceptible to reason, and so, you we've been able to talk through those.
But by and large, they are very interested, they have some information, and the thing that gives me some hope is that we're giving them a boost on some understanding of national
security for this next generation.
I appreciate what you're doing ah because to me...
a chief executive officer of a corporation is not the CEO because of what he does today.
He's CEO because of what he is planning to do next year and two years out and three years out.
He's looking ahead.
He's got other people that are worried about today.
Today is already here.
There's not much you can do about changing it.
So...
Yeah, you know, in this class too, it's not that it's partisan at all.
matter of fact, what we're trying to teach is critical thinking, to look at hard facts, make sure you're checking your sources.
I mean, I'm teaching national security within the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies.
A lot of these students will go on to become intelligence officers or law enforcement officers.
We try to teach them critical thinking.
So mean, we also look at the fact that the Biden administration made
uh mistakes.
I have an acquaintance, Jake Sullivan, who is the national security advisor.
I think the Biden administration made mistakes in the way that it supported Ukraine.
It was very tenuous.
It was very cautious.
The thing that was irritating to me is that they say, we're not going to give you air defense systems right now.
And they would delay and delay and delay because they were afraid that it was going to create Putin's to go nuclear on.
And then later on, they did give them the air defenses, they did give them the tanks, they did give them the jets.
you know, if those things had gone on earlier, uh we might not be at the juncture where we are now.
And so I think there were mistakes that were made on.
I'm a little bit older than you are, so ah I remember Vietnam very vividly.
But it seems to me that since the Second World War, we have made a number of commitments of military support.
And when push came to shove, we might have been there for the beginning, but we did not stay.
And I often have thought, who do I blame for that?
Do I blame the military for not, for going in, but not having an exit plan before you leave, before you even get started?
Or is that exit plan something that Congress should develop so that...
It's not all of a sudden one day, we declare victory and we're gone, but things haven't changed a whole lot.
ah
Well, I'm not positive that Congress certainly uh should exercise its oversight authority, which I'm afraid it has not always done a good job of lately.
uh And we do enjoy in the United States, uh civilian control of the military, something that uh was given to us by George Washington, that concept when he handed in his
commission.
uh
to the Continental Congress sitting at that point in Annapolis after he'd won.
And uh if his name had been Napoleon, it would have been very differently.
It was a very Cincinnati type thing to do.
So civilian control, but that means that civilians need to understand the employment of military power.
And one of the things that I think is problematic is that we think that military is the only solution or the first solution.
uh
And that's why it brings us back to dime.
It's those other uh elements of international power that should come first and should be developed.
uh And so that we don't have to use military power.
And the military has definitely made mistakes.
And the military will tell you that is one of the aspects of war is that there will be mistakes.
so Eisenhower said plans are useless, but planning is everything.
planning process gives you options for when things go wrong.
So we have a lot to answer for, but ultimately our decisions about when to employ the military are made by our civilian leaders and that's as it should be.
Guys, this has been great.
ah As we close out, Jamie, any final words of wisdom, anything else that you want to share with us?
Well, the thing that I would encourage is uh for people to keep up with not only what's going on in the headline news, but if America is a world leader, then our citizens need to
be kept informed of what's going on around the world.
And then understand that the elements of national power also include the education of our people, the nutrition of our people, the medical care of our people.
And one other thing I would
just on the medical care aspect of it.
World War II, oh the reason that a lot of people weren't able to serve in the military because they were malnourished uh in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, one of the reasons we
couldn't call up the people that we needed is because they had dental problems.
So, you know, that's just an indication that the general health of the population does go to our overall national security.
Thank Jim, last words from you.
Come fly in my beautiful new airplane.
I guarantee you, the Admiral and want nothing to do with your $400 million aircraft.
Well, I haven't accepted it yet because I don't know what the taxes are going to be that I got to pay.
Don't worry about it, Jim, you can carry that.
That's no big deal.
ah I do want to uh invite everyone uh to take a look at JB's Op-Ed opinion aided by facts on substacks.
uh I do want to thank our oh sponsors.
I do want to thank our subscribers.
oh Please, if you have any questions, comments on this, uh send us an email at mississippehappeningsofone.gmail.com.
That's mshappeningsofone.gmail.com.
uh We'd love to hear from you and once again, may we never become indifferent to the suffering of others.
Thanks guys.