The "bad guys of the world" are racing to act before the next president is sworn in to take advantage of the weakness President Joe Biden is projecting on the world stage, retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt said on Newsmax Wednesday.
"I think that the bad guys of the world see that the time window is open now but probably closed after the next presidential cycle," Holt told Newsmax's "Wake Up America," where he appeared with Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration. "That's why we see a lot of these things happening. We've never projected weakness like this in American history, ever, even going back to our founding."
The Biden administration and its national security team, through its actions and lack of strategy and the "wanton and brazen extending of American resources, be it tax dollars or weaponry," has put the United States at its current crossroads, he added.
"We have to get out in front of this and look forward," said Holt, warning with "all the terror groups that are lined up to be pitted against us." He said the Middle East "is going to ignite in a much bigger war."
Coates, meanwhile, blasted United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said Tuesday that the attacks by Hamas on Israel "did not happen in a vacuum" as the Palestinian people have been "subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation."
"They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished," he said. "Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing."
Coates termed such comments as an "appalling moral equivalency" and called for Guterres to resign.
She added that she does not know why Secretary of State Antony Blinken "would waste his time" at the United Nations.
"I just think we need to recognize the failure of the U.N.," said Coates, adding that its anti-Israel sentiment has "crept into our media, and most disturbingly, on our college campuses."
"We will have a whole generation thinking it is fashionable to question Hamas" terror and its antisemitism, she said.
Meanwhile, Holt said Tuesday he agrees with retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who said on CNN that he believes Hamas presents greater challenges than other terror organizations, including ISIS, moving forward.
"We have a notorious history of fighting the last war that we fought," he said. "This coming war with Hamas and potentially Hezbollah and other groups, maybe even states like Iran, is going to be very different.
"This is going to take on a kinship to more like World War II, where it is not about surgical strikes … this war is about the elimination of some of these things because we can't afford to keep having them on the playing field. We don't have the resources to keep playing whack-a-mole with everybody's favorite terrorist group."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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