Caller Takes on C&B, Thinks It’s “Our Fight” in Ukraine

CLAY: We’ve got a guy who disagrees with me. John in Roanoke, Virginia. John, what do you disagree with?

CALLER: Clay, I’m disagreeing with you on your stance that you said it’s not our fight in Ukraine. Yes, it is our fight.

CLAY: Okay. So what I said was I wouldn’t want —

CALLER: (crosstalk)

CLAY: Hold on. I said I wouldn’t want my 18-year-old to go fight in Ukraine. Do you have kids?

CALLER: No, I don’t.

CLAY: So would you be willing to go fight yourself? It’s our fight. Would you be willing to go fight?

CALLER: Yes, I would.

CLAY: Okay.

CALLER: If I was physically able to go. The problem is this, when the Soviet Union fell, the nukes were in Ukraine.

CLAY: Yep.

CALLER: And we promised Ukraine that if they would return them to Russia, we would have their back if they were ever attacked. They are attacked right now by Russia, and where’s our promise?

CLAY: So you’re willing…? To your point, my point is I’m not willing to have thousands of Americans die in order to fight in Ukraine. You feel differently. I wouldn’t want my kids there. I wouldn’t want your kids or anybody else’s kids. But you feel differently. So you’re certainly entitled to that opinion.

CALLER: Well, the problem is we’ve already seen that Putin has gone in and attacked the nuclear plant. He’s gonna try to blackmail Europe. He’s gonna try to blackmail us and go even farther. It’s not just Ukraine. It’s gonna be Moldova, it’s gonna be Estonia, it’s gonna be Poland, it’s gonna be all the Eastern Bloc countries, and then we got a world war. If he’s not stopped —

BUCK: Can I just…? This is Buck now. So you think the way to avoid a world war is to send U.S. soldiers, planes, tanks to fight against the Russians in Ukraine? You think that would avoid a world war?

CALLER: Yes.

BUCK: That’s fascinating.

CALLER: As NATO, yes, because the war can spill into Poland.

CLAY: I guess our argument here would be once we commit troops to fight in Ukraine, we are effectively by default creating a world war. Now, where we agree — thanks for the call — is if they invade, Russia, NATO countries, we are certainly, I believe, obligated to defend there alongside of the other NATO countries — and that, unfortunately, I think would create a world war as well.

Look, people are entitled to disagree with me. I just personally don’t want to commit American soldiers to go and fight and die in Ukraine. And I would put it in the context, Buck asked me earlier, I’ve got three boys. My oldest is 14. If he were 18 and said, “I want to go fight in Ukraine,” I would tell him I disagree with that decision. He could potentially make that choice however he wants. They’re allowing volunteers to show up. But I would not want as if I were a politician — and certainly, I don’t want as somebody who just talks on the radio and tells you what I think — for us to be committing the lives of American soldiers to Ukraine.

BUCK: I just… Here’s what you have to be willing to accept. If you’re gonna talk about having a foreign policy that puts American interests first, that means you’re putting the lives of Americans ahead of the lives of other people around the world who are not Americans. Now, you can argue whether that’s a moral principle or not, but it is a principle that I adhere to or try to adhere to, and in this context, the question seems pretty straightforward.

Are you willing to sacrifice American lives to protect Ukrainian lives? My answer is, “No, I am not.” I would not be willing to do that. If I were the commander-in-chief or if I were in a decision-making role here on this issue, I would not put Americans in harm’s way over the issue of Ukraine. And I would want to know also why we sat back and did not do — and I think it was the right move.

We did not get into Syria during the Syrian Civil War which lasted for many years, and probably close to a million people died in that war. It’s certainly over 500,000/600,000, and that was not our fight, either. We got involved in different ways in the outside. We tried disastrously under the Obama administration to create and train a Free Syrian Army, and they ended up spending something like hundreds of millions of dollars and they trained three guys that actually deployed.

It was a total mess. But we didn’t send anyone. We could have dropped in 82nd Airborne. We could have sent in Marine Expeditionary Force. We could have done all these things. We didn’t because it’s not our fight. We cannot be drawn in to conflicts all over the world every time someone decides that they’re going to use military force against someone else, even in a fashion that we view as inherently unjust.

We’re going to be the are we the world’s policeman argument, and I think the people increasingly after 20 years of American war abroad, realize no. If the North Koreans land in Long Island, Clay and I will be there with M4s and helmets on repelling them. There are realities that we would have to face if there were U.S. interests, critical interests involved, but on this issue, Clay — and, by the way, it’s gonna get harder. A lot of people right now are saying, “Oh, I don’t think we should commit troops.”

You’re going… I believe, unfortunately, you’re going to see some of the true horrors and atrocities of warfare in the weeks and months ahead in Ukraine. There will be an emotional impact. There will be a sense of, “How can we leave the Ukrainians to fight this on their own? We just send them weapons. We should do more!” What does a war between Russia and the U.S. even look like? That’s what people need to also think of. What happens if Russia says, “Okay, we’re at war with America.” How does that going?

CLAY: And as much as people want to analogize what’s going on right now with World War II, the difference in the early days of World War II in Europe was, there’s no nuclear weapons. So the idea of Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg, that was the apex, in theory — the bombing of London, bombing of England, all of that was the apex — of where military technology had advanced to at that point.

If we get involved in a serious way — and this is why we started off the show, frankly, saying that neither one of us agreed with Lindsey Graham coming out and saying somebody needs to kill Putin. You can believe that privately. You might even be able to have conversations and discussions about that privately when you’re a United States senator. To go on one of the biggest television shows in America, Sean Hannity’s show, and say, “Hey, someone needs to kill Vladimir Putin”? (laughs)

I would just say, think about what our reaction would be in this country if a top Chinese or Russian official — regardless of what you think of the president of the United States, Joe Biden’s, job right now — I think almost all of us would be furious if they went on their version of Sean Hannity’s show and said that Joe Biden needed to be assassinated. That would be a major issue.