Retired Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster sparred with MSNBC host Katy Tur on Friday while being pressed about his refusal to warn against the reelection of former President Donald Trump, outlining a list of what he sees as mistakes by the Biden administration.
McMaster served as national security adviser to Trump early in his administration before retiring in 2018. McMaster told Tur it was not up to him to “tell people how to vote,” a position he maintained despite the MSNBC anchor pressing him to condemn the former president, describing the Biden administration as “feckless” on foreign policy.
“How did it make sense, Katy, to like, cancel the Canadian pipeline and green light Nord Stream 2? You know, how did it make sense to relax sanctions enforcement on Iran, you know, and allow the transfer of about $100 billion, you know, into Iran’s coffers to intensify its proxy wars?” McMaster asked Tur. “How did it make sense to undesignate the Houthis, or to alleviate sanctions on the Maduro regime, seeing what’s happening there? I mean, I could go on about this, you know. It didn’t make sense to pull our ships out of the Black Sea and to lay out red lines with Putin in Helsinki, which gives him like a green light on everything else, you know, evacuating our embassy in Kyiv and scuttling our… I could go on.”
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Earlier in the interview, McMaster refused to explicitly endorse or denounce either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.
“What I try to do with the book, and maybe, you know, it might be just impossible these days, but it is to kind of transcend the vitriol of the partisan politics and just write about my experience and let everyone, every reader come to his or her own judgment about the presidential candidate,” McMaster said.
“The book is largely about how I helped this disruptive president, we did as part of the national security team, to put into place some really significant, long overdue and what turns out to be, in retrospect, I think, wise shifts in U.S. foreign policy,” McMaster continued.
The Biden administration has been criticized for not being as strict towards Iran, including freeing up $6 billion from oil sales that were being held by South Korea in exchange for the release of five Americans being held in the country. Biden also eased sanctions on Iran, allowing the country to export more oil and allowing Iraq to continue purchasing electricity from the country.
Tur also pressed McMaster, asking the author to explain why he seemed to be “sanguine” about Trump returning to the White House when other former Trump administration officials had endorsed Harris.
“You have kind of a, you know, either a choice between, you know, Trump’s erratic nature, and I describe a lot of that or what I would describe as a degree of fecklessness, you know, on the part of the Biden/Harris administration,” McMaster added.
Featured Image Credit: The Biden White House
