On Thursday on “The Ben Shapiro Show,” Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro interviewed Victoria Coates, who served as former deputy national security adviser for former President Donald Trump, about the Biden administration’s disastrous foreign policy.

“Let’s talk about the chaos that has engulfed the United States on the foreign front,” Shapiro began. “There’s just fires everywhere. Why don’t we start with the situation between Russia and Ukraine? The Biden administration has been sending mixed signals over what’s going on in Russia, Ukraine, for a very long time.”

“So you start with the original intelligence failure that this was going to be quick and then we would support an insurgency,” Coates responded. “But the problem is the administration never pivoted from that. And, you know, in April or May of 22, when the Russian economy was reeling, there was very unified international support for Ukraine. That’s when I think the Biden administration should have leveled the truly crushing economic sanctions modeled on what we did to Iran during the Trump administration, where anybody who did business with Russia — you call them secondary sanctions —would also be subject to those sanctions.”

“We could have cut it off then and they didn’t,” she noted. “And instead we’ve been dribbling and dribbling out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in a means that has not been sufficient to win the war. So I think we all have to ask at this point, what is the strategy?”

Shapiro commented that Russian President Vladimir Putin was willing to wait it out, believing that the West’s resolve would eventually collapse.

“Once he didn’t get his three-day war, for him, a war of attrition is a winnable prospect,” Coates said. “He has more people. He can rearm himself. … He’s also getting supplies now much more openly from North Korea and Iran both of whom are more or less acting on China’s orders. So for him, the long game is a winning plan.”

“As you mentioned originally, that if you remove this ridiculous pause on U.S. LNG export licenses, you remove the deadly chilling regulatory regime that the Biden administration has put in place,” she told Shapiro. “And you really reassure partners and allies the United States should be your reliable supplier of choice. You can really start to drain Russia’s resources and again, make this as distasteful for the Chinese as possible. Do they really want to rescue Russia under those circumstances or do they want to make the best of a bad hand and try to get to a resolution here?”

“Meanwhile, there are fires all over the Middle East,” Shapiro said. “Iran obviously has its hand in all of them from the Red Sea, where shipping has essentially been shut down, to the situation on both the northern border of Israel as well as its southern border with the Gaza Strip. The Biden administration once again sending insane mixed signals. On the one hand, they suggest that they are supportive of Israel. On the other hand, they’re suggesting that they have to hold Israel’s leash in some way and prevent Israel from committing human rights violations.”

“I think we’re over-dignifying the administration approach with the word policy,” Coates answered. “I think you’re having a series of kind of confused reactions to events and very much to political pressures here in the United States. I think they’ve come to the unpleasant realization that full-hearted, unified support for Israel might cost them a couple of thousand of very critical votes in areas like Dearborn, Michigan. And so they’re trying to have it both ways.”

“Unfortunately, if the events of October 7 taught us anything is that you can’t have it both ways,” she said. “There are two sides here. There is good and there is evil. And it’s time to put on a jersey and join a team, not to try to equivocate and say, ‘Oh, you know, the Palestinians deserve a state.’ No, they do not deserve a reward for what they did. They need to realize that Hamas is a deadly poison to them. If they cannot relinquish Hamas, they are going to have to be defeated on the battlefield.”

“I keep going back to the 1923 Jabotinsky essay ‘The Iron Wall,’ which gives its name to things like Iron Dome and Iron Beam,” she recalled. “And the whole premise of that is that while the Arabs think that they can still conquer the Jews, Israel needs that iron wall of security to convince them that Israel is not going away. The Jewish people are not going away. And in my estimation, that’s what the U.S.-Israel alliance should be: It should be that iron wall. You can’t eradicate Israel because we’re not going to let you. And when that is made crystal clear to the Palestinians, then they might become reasonable. They might be able to come to some kind of negotiated settlement. But while there’s doubt in their mind  — and that’s what the administration is sowing is that doubt —they’re always going to go for the eradication of Israel; They’re going to go for from that ‘From the river to the sea’ nonsense.”

“What exactly should the policy be with regard to the Houthis?” Shapiro asked. “Because this bizarre notion of deterring terrorist groups, I just fail to see how that has ever been an effective policy deterrence. Terrorist groups literally exist to not be deterred. It’s a bizarre miscalibration to suggest that the Houthis are somehow going to act in the same evil but rational fashion as the Iranians, who would prefer to remain in power. The Houthis are an actual terrorist group whose slogan is Death to the Jews, Death to America. I fail to see how you’re going to deter these people.”

“It does come back to the Iranians, Tehran, and what they think they can get away with,” Coates asserted. “And right now they are acting with impunity across the Middle East, attacking the United States, attacking our friends and allies. It’s particularly dramatic in Yemen, because, as you say, the Houthis are not 100 feet high and, you know, they’re not fully into the 21st century. And so as the United States military has demonstrated, we have all sorts of capabilities that they don’t have. And what they need is a very clear demonstration in an offensive, not a defensive way, that we are going to use those capabilities to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And that is what is going to happen to the Houthis unless they cut this out.”

“They are utterly undeterred by the response of the administration over the last six weeks,” she said. “They call it their Houthi strategy; I would call it an abject failure. We just should not tolerate this kind of behavior out of a radical theological dictatorship in Yemen, which has ruined the country and is now trying to ruin global shipping. It should be intolerable to the administration. But they’re so scared of provoking the Iranians, they won’t take any serious action.”