Retired Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster had a heated exchange with MSNBC host Katy Tur on Friday when she questioned his refusal to speak out against the reelection of former President Donald Trump.
Instead of directly addressing Trump’s reelection, McMaster pointed out what he views as failures by the Biden administration.
McMaster, who was Trump’s national security adviser early in his presidency before retiring in 2018, emphasized to Tur that it was not his place to “tell people how to vote.”
Despite Tur’s persistent efforts to get him to criticize Trump, McMaster focused on criticizing the Biden administration’s foreign policy, labeling it as “feckless.”
Biden – Harris foreign policy. pic.twitter.com/3bYUzHn55E
— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) August 26, 2024
“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.”
.@SteveForbesCEO explains why he thinks that the Biden Administration is continuing to dither in foreign policy, calling out Biden and VP Kamala Harris for allowing the threats of Russia and Hamas to fester through appeasement and mollification of brutal aggressors. #WhatsAhead pic.twitter.com/DaJgB8WqkA
— Forbes (@Forbes) August 29, 2024
Earlier in the interview, McMaster declined to explicitly endorse or criticize 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.”
