Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Sunday that increasing political division in the United States and the growing national debt are the two largest internal threats to U.S. national security.
Mattis made the remarks while appearing on CBS News’ “Face The Nation” with host Margaret Brennan, who said that Mattis wrote in his new book that “Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world.”
“What is the biggest national security threat?” Brennan asked.
Mattis responded by breaking down his response into two categories: external and internal threats.
“One is external, and, clearly, those nations Russia and China that are trying to impose their authoritarian models and decisions over other countries whether it’d be in the South China Sea or in the Ukraine, in parts of Georgia that Russia has occupied,” Mattis responded. “They’ve mucked around in our elections. So, externally, I would look at those two and that’s why we rewrote the National Defense Strategy to acknowledge the reality of those nations. Not the nations we wanted to be dealing with, but Russia of Putin. … President Xi or excuse me – the China President Xi.”
“But, internally, my bigger concern is two-fold. It’s our growing debt that we’re going to transfer to the younger generation with [seemingly] no fiscal discipline and more than that, it’s the lack of friendliness,” Mattis continued. “It’s the increasing contempt I see between Americans who have different opinions. I mean, we’re going to have to sit down and remember if we want this country to survive we are going to have to work together, and that there’s no way around that. That’s the way a democracy is set up. So, I would break it into those two fundamental [different] threats right now.”
Mattis’ comments come as nearly all of the 2020 Democrat presidential candidates have endorsed socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) $93 trillion “Green New Deal,” whose creator even admitted is not about the environment and is, instead, about implementing socialism.
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