The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (34 page)

HH: Senator Rubio, there is exactly one reference to Valerie Jarrett in this memoir. Do you understand Ms. Jarrett’s role to have been more significant than that in the last five and a half years? And if so, what do you think her role is?

MR:
Well, I don’t know what it is. They’ve certainly, I’m not an insider in that White House, so I would probably be the last one to know what her role is. I know she’s a prominent player in the White House, but at the end of the day, I would imagine her role cannot extend beyond making, giving advice. The ultimate responsibility is on the President, and on the members of his cabinet, like Hillary Clinton, who guide policy and who make decisions on management and so forth with regards to the decisions that were made with security at this facility in Benghazi. And for the President, he’s the one who has failed to lay out a strategic view of what America’s role in the world is. To the extent that there is one, it seems to have been that America’s problems around the world were created by a robust foreign policy through the Bush administration, and that his job was to extract us from these things around the world. I think that’s proven to be a disaster.

Interview with United States Senator Marco Rubio, March 24, 2015:

HH: I begin today’s show with United States Senator Marco Rubio. Senator Rubio, welcome back to the
Hugh Hewitt Show
, it’s great to have you.

MR:
It’s great to be on, thank you.

HH: You know, my tradition, I always start with a couple of sports questions with you.

MR:
Yeah.

HH: The Heat are at 33-37…

MR:
Yeah.

HH: The Dolphins are drafting 14 after an 8-8 year. The Marlins only won 77 games last year. The Gators lost five games. I mean, are the sports gods auspicious for a presidential run for you this year?

MR:
(laughing) It’s been a good year, I mean, a bad year, but I think that’s always the beginning of a good one. So the Marlins have actually put together a Major League roster. I mean, so they’re excited about that. The Heat is struggling, of course, because they’ve had a lot of injuries. But they’ve made some, you know, Dragic, the Dragon, who they’ve just added, is a real point guard and gives them, they hadn’t had a point guard on that team in ten years. So the combination of that and Bosh coming back next year hopefully from the blood clot, I think they’re one good scorer away from being a very legitimate contender. And the Gators just had a tough run, but they’ll be back.

HH: All right, then a second question, the MVP debate is hot. Westbrook-LeBron, you do remember LeBron, right?

MR:
I remember LeBron. We beat him last week, actually.

HH: (laughing)

MR:
We beat him for the second time this year. I do remember.

HH: Westbrook-LeBron-Curry-Harden, who’s the MVP, Senator Rubio?

MR:
You know, I think Westbrook’s had a great year. LeBron can be the MVP any year, but you know, Kyrie Irving has really been more of, has kind of really stepped up and taken leadership on that team in ways that no one had anticipated. Now you could argue that that’s LeBron opening up the
floor for him, but you know, it’s interesting. I just think Westbrook means more to his team right now.

HH: All right, now to the serious stuff. I see that you and Senator Cotton have co-authored an amendment. I have been talking about Defense spending for the last two weeks on this show. Tell us about the amendment and about the prospects for a serious return to serious funding limits for the Pentagon.

MR:
Well, let me begin by saying that the fundamental obligation of the federal government, beyond almost anything else, is the national security of our country. That doesn’t mean you just throw away money on programs that don’t work. But I do believe that when you put together a federal budget, your number one object should be how can we protect the country from foreign adversaries, threat of terrorism, etc.? And once you’ve funded that, then I think you begin to fund the other things. But it should not, it is not an equal part of the budget when it comes to the federal government, and we’re not doing that now. We are well below, you know, $487 billion dollars over ten years are the cuts that have happened under this administration. It’ll add up to over a trillion over the next decade as you move forward. These, this is just an incredible decline in spending at a time when the risks are continuing to grow. This country has tried to take peace dividends in the past, after Vietnam, after the Cold War. But at least, that was not a good idea. We had to come back and reverse all that, and it costs more money. But at least at that time, there seemed to be some sort of prospect for peace. This is not in any way a peaceful time. This is a time of increased threats, whether it’s the Asia Pacific region with China’s growth and militarily, in the Middle East with the threat of both an Iranian nuclear weapon and also the threat of ISIS/al Nusra/al Qaeda and all these other related jihadist groups in the region. And of course, NATO needs to be reinvigorated as well. So these cuts couldn’t come as a worse time. So we just want to take it back to the numbers proposed in the Gates budget that was offered up in 2012. And it reflects what the bipartisan, Congressionally-mandated National Defense Panel stated was the minimum required to reverse course and set the military on a more stable footing.

HH: Do you have the votes for that, do you think, on the Senate side? The House will be different. There’ll be a conference. But first, you’ve got to get serious funding out of the Senate to at least get to the conference to get to serious Defense funding?

MR:
Well, we hope we do. Obviously, it’s going to be a heavy lift, because we’ll need some Democrats to come on board, and we’ll need all of our Republicans. And we do have some fiscal hawks in our conference that don’t want to see anything that isn’t paid for. My argument is I want to balance the budget, too. But we can only balance our budget through entitlement reform. You can’t do it by cutting Defense spending. There’s just not enough money there when you’re talking about an $18 trillion debt, and it’s a very dangerous thing to do in terms of putting us at risk. So it’s unlikely we’ll get to 60 votes. Maybe we can convince some people, and of course, Democrats, some even the pro-Defense ones, are insisting on a commensurate increase in domestic spending to support any increase in Defense spending. So that proves to be problematic. But we at the very least have to lay down, we need to know who’s who around here when it comes to making Defense spending a priority.

HH: All right, now you mentioned NATO as well, and I asked Dr. Ben Carson this last week, I want to ask you as well. Putin does not appear to be checked by anything. There is a threat to the Baltic states. Do you believe NATO would back up their commitments to their Baltic members if Putin made an aggression there, and ought they to?

MR:
Well, a couple points on that front. The first is that I think we’ve got some European partners that quite frankly are not excited about the prospect of having to have someone invoke the common defense agreement, the collective defense part of NATO, and they’re worried about that to begin with. You’ve seen some of that already, although Ukraine is not a NATO member. You’ve seen some reluctance there to do things like arming the Ukrainians, beyond just the capability argument. I mean, almost all of our NATO allies have significantly reduced Defense spending over the last few years. Virtually none of them except Poland, and I might be mistaking one other country, is meeting at the threshold number that’s been set for NATO membership. So part of it is just a capacity argument. And the notion that America, there’s never been a NATO without America. You really can’t have it. We’re still the cornerstone of it, and we have our own capacity issues that we’re facing. So I would hope that NATO would live up to its defense agreements. It certainly, I think, says it would. But the question is one of capacity, and cost benefit analysis for a lot of these countries. And I think that it’s a challenge, because Putin has made a very clear decision, and that is he wants to rewrite the European order in the aftermath, and he wants to rewrite post-Soviet Europe.
And I think Moldova is the next target, and you’re already starting to see moves in that direction in terms of supporting separatist groups in Transnistria and other places.

HH: Now today, the President announced that he is going to delay the departure of at least half of the 9,800 troops that remain in Afghanistan. Did he make the right decision today? And ought he to extend that decision through 2016 as it seems the Afghan president is asking for?

MR:
Yeah, I think he made the right decision, but I think the better decision would have been to follow some of the military advice that he’d gotten in terms of troop strength. And I hope he’s learned from the mistake of Iraq, where the rapid exit of American troops left behind a vacuum that was ultimately filled by these radical elements that now find themselves there, these, through ISIS and others, and has created basically an Iranian invasion of Iraq in terms of being on the front lines of controlling these Shiia militia, which they do, and have an increasing and exorbitant influence over Baghdad and over the Iraqi government. And you could make the argument that had the U.S. remained, it would have been a check on Maliki’s abuse that certainly occurred when his abuses of the Sunnis in the country, which created the conditions for a lot of what we’re facing. So back to Afghanistan, absolutely, I think it’s important. And by the way, something that’s not being covered enough, there is a growing ISIS presence in Afghanistan. They are actively fighting with, not warfare, but they’re actively competing with al Qaeda and Taliban elements for influence in a post-U.S. Afghanistan. And you worry about where some of the mid-level Taliban officers are in terms of their true allegiance at this stage.

HH: Well now, speaking about the ISIS threat, I spent an hour yesterday with Benjamin Hall, who wrote
Inside ISIS: The Brutal Rise Of A Terrorist Army
. He spends a lot of time talking about the fact that Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Quds Forces, actually got operational control over the Shiia militia. Petraeus mentioned this, General Petraeus mentioned this last week in the
Washington Post
. It appears as though we’ve lost Baghdad, Marco Rubio, and that in fact, it’s already under the operational control of Khamenei. So if that is in fact the case, why in the world are we negotiating with them in Switzerland?

MR:
Yeah, and that’s the argument that I’ve made. I mean, first of all, I
believe a lot of what’s happening in terms of U.S. strategy against ISIS and Iraq is being driven by our desire not to turn off the Iranians, because they certainly don’t want us there at all. And I know John Kerry testified to the opposite. He’s wrong, and he knows he’s wrong. They don’t want us there at all. They’re suspicious of what we’re doing there now. And they foster all sorts of conspiracy theories and lunacies about who we’re really helping, and accuse us of double playing and so forth. So I think that’s a big problem. And the second problem is the one you’ve outlined, and that is that the Iranian influence over the government in Baghdad has grown exponentially in the absence of a stronger American presence on the ground. I still think there are elements of the Iraqi government that are distrustful of Iran, and would want to work with us. But we don’t have the footing to do it. And I think long term, our personnel there are in potential danger from the Shia militia, who aren’t fans of the United States, and could easily turn on us at any moment.

HH: Should we walk away from these negotiations in Geneva right now because of the conduct of Iran in other places than that negotiating room?

MR:
Well first of all, we need to remember what’s not being covered by these negotiations, which are just as important as their nuclear ambition, and that’s the intercontinental ballistic missiles that they’re developing. And it’s very reasonable that before the end of this decade, Iran could possess a long range rocket that could reach the United States, the Continental U.S. They’re rapidly, that’s not even being covered by these negotiations. They’re not even the subject of sanctions. And I think that alone is a reason to be imposing sanctions on Iran, not to mention their state sponsorship of terrorism. That being said, any agreement that allows Iran to retain enrichment capability, leaves in place the infrastructure they will need in five, ten, eight, whenever they decide to ramp up enrichment and produce a weapon, if the only thing standing between them and a nuclear weapon becomes, and the ability to deliver it through a long range rocket becomes the ability to enrich at a higher level, that’s the easiest switch to flip. And you saw the North Koreans follow a model such as this. So I just think the deal is premised on an agreement on something that is totally unacceptable, and quite frankly, abandons almost a decade of sanctions built on the idea originally that they would not be allowed to enrich. And by the way, the Saudis, the Turks, the Egyptians, even the Jordanians have made very clear that whatever Iran is allowed to do under this agreement, they will expect the same. So if Iran is
allowed to enrich up to 5%, 20% for research, the Saudis are going to insist on the same capability.
HH: Then let me ask you the three ifs. If that deal is in fact signed by President Obama that allows them to retain enrichment, and if you run for president, and if you win, would you revoke that deal?

MR:
Yes.