Excellent comments on foreign affairs by General Jack Keane
Posted By RichC on March 12, 2025
After excellent comments by retired 4-star General Jack Keane the other day, I heard him again this past weekend with Mark Levin.
No matter what your thoughts are on politics or views on foreign affairs, Jack Keane is someone with a lot of knowledge, experience and insight … and his commentary is worth listening to — or perhaps reading along below (testing Otter.ai’s transcription from audio. Below the break).
| General Jack Keane with Mark Levin | 3/8/2025 |
Welcome back America. We’re here with one of my favorite guests, General Jack Keane, retired four star Army General and a fox senior strategic analyst. He’s really America’s strategic analyst General. Let me ask you a question here. It’s one thing for people to have a different view of this war where Russia attacked Ukraine. I get that. I don’t. I really don’t get it, but that’s okay. But what think of people who sort of have a fascination with Putin, who will spend more time trashing Zelensky than they do exposing this former KGB agent who’s got 1000 you know, nuclear armed missiles aimed at the United States, whose jets are buzzing our ships, who’s got 10 military bases in the Arctic Circle aimed at us, really, I mean, President Trump obviously sees this. That’s why he talks about Greenland. That’s why he’s talking about spending more on our military. That’s why he’s talking about building up our naval capacity and so forth. But I’m talking about other people out there who seem to make excuses for him. Have you ever seen anything like this?
Makes no sense, and certainly, Russia has grown into a major adversary and threat of the United States, clearly, to have this limitless partnership, as they define it, with China. They’ve embraced North Korea and Iran as well, and they all coordinate and cooperate together. And you can see the significant assistance that China, Iran and North Korea are providing to Russia, and they have helped them get through this war. Make no mistake about that, yes, and Russia, clearly, we know for a fact that Russia wants to topple a government in Ukraine and wants to move into former Soviet Union countries in Eastern Europe. That’s a fact. This is not disputable. This. These are their ambitions, and he’s a war criminal in how he fights a war. 1000s of children have been kidnapped and taken into Russia. That is a war crime in of itself. Whoever heard of doing anything like that? These people are evil. That’s the reality of it. And certainly we’ve got to help Ukraine end this war on their terms, sovereign, independent state with the capability to deter Russia from having another attack on them. We know Mark that what will happen here is there will be a peace agreement. We hope, if Russia wants to play that’s still uncertain whether they’re really going to come to the table and make meaningful compromise. But if we get a peace agreement, we know that’s not going to change their aspirations at all at a time convenient for them, they will re attack Ukraine, and that is a fact. So that’s what we’re facing here. And isn’t that why it’s very important that this minerals deal, as I understand it from published reports, get done where we have a huge, massive capital investment in Ukraine, Americans working next to Ukrainians that helps invest in Ukraine so they can rebuild their infrastructure, if they want, I suppose, their military. And for us, the benefit is, of course, to get some of our money back, as well as these rare earth minerals. And that’s another reason Russia wants to take down Ukraine. They want those rare earth minerals, and so does Communist China? No?
Oh, absolutely, the both of them do, yes. And the brilliant journalist Mark Thiessen and I wrote an op ed on this very piece. Because the theme of the op ed is, let’s stop having the American taxpayer fund supporting Ukraine. We can do it with frozen Russian assets, and there’s close to 300 billion of those enhanced most of Europeans. And also the trillions of dollars that are tied up in rare earth minerals we have to explore, we have to mine it, but we can make a deal now where we have a stake in it, and also we can give money to Ukraine and and the minerals are collateral for a loan, which we know for a fact can be paid back. So yeah, this, this is all all to the good. And I think we had obviously a pause here, given the debacle that took place in Washington, DC, with that press conference where Zelensky and Yermak together wanted to litigate some of their grievances in front of the press, which I think was a mistake given the fact they had a 20 minute session prior to that same same place, Oval Office, same people with without the press. But we’ve got to get on with that deal, and then on with the negotiations. And mark it remains to be seen if Russia is gaming us here, and are they going to move off their very hard line positions that they put on the table right now? And if they don’t move off of those, then President Trump’s going to have to take some action, slap some tough sanctions on them, possibly up gun Ukraine a little bit to so definitely that Russia, if you’re going to come to the table, we’re not. Going to buy into the hard line conditions you’ve got, you’re going to have to make some compromises. And I think Trump’s prepared to do this. You know, he’s the one who used the word, this is an organic agreement. There’s organic security in this agreement because of the significant presence of American American investments and businesses. And JD Vance, I believe, said the same thing on Fox as well. So if I’m Zelinsky, I pocket this deal, and then I deal with the next phase and the phase after that, as things develop, we’ll be right back.
Welcome back America. You know, general, I looked at the contribution that these NATO nations are making to NATO even during the course of this war with Ukraine and Russia. And it seems to me, some of these leaders with the biggest mouth are contributing to the least percentage of their GDP. I mean, Poland’s way up there. The Baltic states are way up there. These are relatively small countries, but not Britain, not France, not Germany, not Italy, they’re the big four. And so when Macron says, we’re going to do this, and we’re going to do that, we’re going to do this, and President Trump looks at it and says, Well, I have an idea. Why don’t you muscle up your NATO expenditures? And furthermore, I’m reading reports that their their military industries are not even in full capacity right now, if they believe this is a potential for world war three, that a Putin takes Ukraine and he says he wants to go into Poland, it’s not a secret. I mean, he’s written about it. Why aren’t they muscling up? What the hell’s wrong with these people? Yeah, well, certainly their problem has always been with what’s in their head. I mean, for the last 30 years, their investment in these social democracies, welfare states, at the expense of defense, has really been been the problem. And every one of those countries has economic problems because of it, and the entitlement programs they had and they opened the gates back to immigration, which has caused a huge amount of problems with people who are in their country committing crimes and whatnot, just like we have in our country, but they’re starting to get more serious about it. And that’s the fact Starmer in the UK, he’s going to 2.5% of GDP. So that’s an increase. Fred Mercer just is the new chancellor of Germany. He is doubling down on defense, and that is a major departure from the past. Germany, the biggest economy in Europe, has always been, as you correctly identified, one of the people who was not funding NATO anywhere near what they could afford to fund NATO given the size of their economy, France and Italy, they could, they absolutely can do more. Here’s due to right on the border president, due to Poland, he’s had he’s at 4.1% heading towards 4.7% of GDP. And why is that? Well, he’s looking right at Ukraine, and he knows full well that they would be on the docket for Russia, and he’s making certain that he has the capability to deter them. Yes, they can do more, and let’s keep it going, that President Trump has got to keep the pressure on him, and they’re responding to him. These recent additions are all about him becoming elected. That’s really what is happening here. Now I remember general having served eight years in the Reagan administration. The Reagan buildup was over 5% of our GDP, and he massively built up our military, because it was Reagan’s view, we must be the number one superpower on the face of the earth. He wanted to strengthen NATO, he wanted to strengthen all these alliances, and he wanted to defeat the Soviet Union. He didn’t want war with the Soviet Union, but he didn’t want detente, which was Nixon and Kissinger. He said, we can defeat them. They’re weak. He defeated them economically. He defeated them militarily, not by firing a shot, but wherever they were confronting us or we needed to confront them, whether it was Central America or Africa or Far East Asia or the Middle East. That’s what he did. I want to move on quickly to one other issue. China’s warships are turning up in unexpected places and alarming US allies. Is this the new normal? CNN general, China is being very aggressive towards the Philippines, towards Australia, towards South Korea, the Vietnam waterways towards us. They basically threatened war the other day and said, Hey, we’re prepared to go to war right to the end. In response to, I think it was Secretary hate Seth or JD Vance, whether it’s tariffs or war, we’ll fight to the very end. I think we better wake the hell up and we better start beefing up our military, which has been flat lined under the prior administration. What do you think? No, no, absolutely. I just did congressional testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, and I recommended a 5% increase in defense spending, much larger than anything in the Biden administration, for sure, and really didn’t get much pushback at all, not surprising from Republicans, but not much. Push back at all from the Democrats, and that means there’s consensus growing, at least in the Congress, of the danger that we’re really facing here. I mean China, when you just look at their military, they’ve been investing in this for 20 years. They outgun us and outman us. They out man us in every single platform, whether it’s a missile platform, defensive missiles, a ship, except submarines. That’s the only place we have an advantage in but we can’t get them built fast enough, because of our defense industrial base. We got to put more money on the table. But here’s what we have to do at the same time, we have to fix our business practices in the Pentagon. If we don’t fix those business practices, we’re going to, Scott squander some of that money. The administration knows this, and we got to do both together, you know, going forward. And if we, if we do that, then we can have a deterrence that Reagan established with the Reagan build up, and that that is what is absolutely critical, having the capability that the Chinese sea, and they know we will impose significant costs on them if they attack and therefore they’re going to back away from it, just like the Soviet Union did as a result of what Reagan put on the ground. The President is going to have a special office on this ship only, which is a brilliant idea, and I would remind the Putin supporters and the others who seem to hate America first, they’re the war mongers, not us. They’re the war mongers. General, keen, I want to thank you for your past service and your current service and your future.
Comments