Matt Walsh argues no country has an inherent "right to exist" — including Israel and the United States
Matt Walsh, host of The Matt Walsh Show on The Daily Wire, presents his view on the "right to exist" debate prompted by a Tucker Carlson interview with Ambassador Mike Huckabee.
Summary
Matt Walsh opens by referencing a Tucker Carlson interview with Mike Huckabee — now the U.S. Ambassador to Israel — in which the two debated whether Israel has a unique or special right to exist based on biblical, historical, and ethnic grounds. Walsh argues that the entire debate rests on a false premise: no country, including Israel and the United States, has a "right to exist" in any meaningful sense. His central claim is that all nations come into existence and persist through force alone, and that any nation incapable of defending or sustaining itself is not, in any real sense, a country at all. He applies this logic universally, pointing to nations like South Sudan and Somalia as examples of entities that functionally do not exist as sovereign countries because they depend entirely on external support.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Tucker Carlson Interviews Mike Huckabee on Israel's Right to Exist
Matt Walsh: On Friday — I think it was Friday, maybe Thursday, Friday I think — Tucker Carlson interviewed Mike Huckabee, who is of course now the Ambassador to Israel. I thought it was an interesting conversation. There's one clip I want to play and talk about that kind of represents the theme of the conversation. Here it is.
Tucker Carlson: You've spent a lot of time thinking about the right of the Jewish people to their homeland. Do the Irish have the same right to a homeland?
Mike Huckabee: As long as they can defend it and as long as they —
Tucker Carlson: As long as they can defend it.
Mike Huckabee: But Tucker, here's the point. I'm telling you —
Tucker Carlson: Wait, hold on. Hold on. Now you just flipped. You're the minister here.
Mike Huckabee: Yeah, and I'm telling you — as long as they can defend it, and if they can't defend it — allow me to tell you that what is very, very special here is that there is a biblical as well as an ethnic and a historical case. You can take any one of those, but if you add them all together — biblical, historical, and ethnic — you have a very strong case that the Jewish people are living in a land that is indigenous to them, that has been their historic homeland for 3,800 years.
Tucker Carlson: You can repeat it as —
Mike Huckabee: And you can also look at the archaeology. The stones cry out. You've been to the City of David, for example — one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in all of history, because it's stunning. And they still continue to find things that date the Jewish people to this land archaeologically for 3,800 years.
Tucker Carlson: We can date the British people to their land much longer — thousands of years longer. Stonehenge is 3,000 years older than any building built by the descendants of Abram in this country. I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's right. I'm just wanting you to affirm that right universally, but it makes you uncomfortable and you won't. I don't know why.
Mike Huckabee: Because I've honestly never sat down and asked myself —
Tucker Carlson: Are the lines around the —
Mike Huckabee: We know what the lines are. I'm saying, are those lines rooted in something other than the historical connection?
Tucker Carlson: Well, great — then they should have it. They have a right to have it. But then you said "if they can defend it," and if they can't, they lose the right.
Mike Huckabee: But I didn't say it was exclusively one or the other. I think you're really going off the —
Tucker Carlson: I just want to know if these principles apply universally or if they only apply to the people of Israel.
Walsh's Core Argument: No Nation Is Entitled to Exist
Matt Walsh: This is a conversation — a debate — about Israel's right to exist, and much of the interview centered around that question. That clip may not have even been the best representative sample of that debate, but it is certainly related to it. Much of the conversation circles around this question: does Israel have a right to exist?
I just want to say that from my perspective, the whole question, the whole debate, is based on a false premise. And my answer is one that doesn't really make anybody happy, because I don't think that Israel has the right to exist. I don't think that any country has the right to exist. I don't think there's any country we can look at and say they have a right to exist. Let me explain what I mean by that.
First, I think you have to define your terms — not to be pedantic, but in this case it matters. What do we mean by "right"? This is a word that comes up constantly in our debates on any topic. It always comes back to someone making a rights claim. "I have a right to this. I have a right to that." Well, what do you mean by that? What does that mean? Very often the people using the term couldn't tell you where that right comes from if you asked them.
To me, the word "right" means an entitlement. That's what a right is. You are entitled to something. "I have a right to something" means I am entitled to it. If you object to my definition of right, you have to tell me what yours is, because as far as I can tell, that's what we mean. When someone says they have a right to something, they're saying they are entitled to it.
You can be entitled to things. If you have a contract with your employer, you have a right to the compensation outlined in that contract. You are entitled to it. Those words mean the same thing. My kids have a right to be cared for by me — fed, protected. They are entitled to that, both legally and morally and spiritually and in every other sense. We have rights outlined in the Bill of Rights — we're entitled to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the ability to own firearms, and so on. We are entitled to that as Americans.
Now, the word "entitled" gets a bad rap because people are constantly claiming they're entitled to things they aren't actually entitled to. We spend billions of dollars on entitlements in this country, and not a single cent of that spending actually goes to people who are genuinely entitled to what they're getting. Nobody is entitled to receive what they get through our entitlement programs, even though we call them that. So that's the confusion. But people can be entitled to certain things, and those are their actual, real rights.
Force as the Only Basis for National Existence
Matt Walsh: What does it mean for a country to be entitled to exist? I truly don't know. Entitled based on what? The only way any country has ever come into existence is through force. There are no exceptions to this rule on the planet, and there never have been and there never will be. No country exists unless it has forced its own existence, violently. And no country continues to exist unless it continues to insist on its own existence through force, through violence. The very idea that any nation — that the political entity of a nation — is entitled to exist is incoherent. It makes no sense.
I make this point about Native Americans all the time. You often hear people on the pro-Israel side say that Israel is the only country that has to justify its own existence — the only country where people constantly have to justify its existence. And every time I hear that, I think: have you ever heard of America? What are you talking about? We're built on stolen land. We hear that all the time. We heard it at the Grammys. We have policies and laws based on that idea in some places. We have an entire major political party that professes it and tries to advance policies based on it.
My whole response to that is that the idea that the natives in the New World were entitled to remain permanent owners over the entire hemisphere is ridiculous. They only claimed ownership in the first place through an act of sheer force, through violence. Does that mean no one is allowed to ever conquer them? They conquer the land and then say, "We're entitled to have this forever — yes, we used violence to take it, but no one's allowed to use violence to take it from us. That would be infringing on our rights." How does that make any sense? They claimed ownership through force. They had to defend it through force. They tried. They couldn't. And history played out the way it was inevitably going to play out.
If you as a nation are able to support and defend yourself, then you can exist. If you as a nation cannot support or defend yourself, then you have no right to exist. You're not even a real country. And I apply this logic to every country on Earth.
Applying the Standard to America and the World's Fake Countries
Matt Walsh: When people say, "Would you apply it to America?" — absolutely. If the United States ever got to a point where it could not exist without the protection and patronage of some other nation, then the United States would have no right to exist at that point. In fact, the United States would already not exist. If we were in some dystopian future where China basically owns the United States and we exist at their pleasure, then we don't exist anymore. We're already a vassal of that other nation. Our existence would be a phantom, a ruse, a charade.
The problem now is that we have a world full of around 180 or 190 countries, and many of those countries just aren't real. They're fake countries. I understand this view is not popular, but I can't see it any other way. If you were to go back to the year 1700, there were not nearly as many countries on Earth. It was the same amount of land, obviously, but there weren't as many countries because you had a few empires that owned basically the whole globe — the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Ottoman, the Chinese, and so on. Go back another thousand years, you had different empires controlling most of the globe. And where you didn't have empires, you had small tribal societies — very small, often nomadic, constantly in a state of war with each other, especially in much of North America.
That was, to me, a much more honest and clear way of dividing things up. The powerful empires used their power to expand and claim ownership over land. And now we have this distinctly modern situation — which most people don't appreciate how modern and unusual it really is — where we have 190 countries, many of them totally unable to support themselves financially or protect themselves. We have countries with no real military, relying entirely on the threat of force from bigger countries. We have countries whose economies depend fundamentally on foreign aid and humanitarian services for the most basic things. They wouldn't be able to feed themselves without it.
South Sudan, just as one example, relies on us for food, healthcare, and basic government programs and services. This is very common. And here's my point: all of those kinds of countries — the ones that can't support or defend themselves — still exist entirely through force. It's just that the threat of force comes from their benefactors. In the year 1700, you'd have the same scenario, except we would have called it an empire, and the fake country wouldn't exist. It would be a property of the empire. Well, it's the same thing right now. We've just built this fiction, this phantom of fake countries that can't exist on their own, don't really exist at all, are totally helpless, cannot govern themselves, cannot defend themselves.
And then we start talking about the right to exist. Does South Sudan have a right to exist? It doesn't already — it already doesn't exist. It's not a real country. Does Somalia have a right to exist? How could it have a right to exist when it can't exist on its own? If your country cannot exist on its own, then it has no right to exist. I don't know how else to put it.
Why Walsh Doesn't Take Sides on Israel
Matt Walsh: That's why I say that no nation has a right to exist. That doesn't mean no nation should exist. It just means that no nation has a right to exist. A nation exists if it forces its existence and continues to force its existence onto the globe — or else the nation is a vassal, a subject of another nation, even if we still call it a nation.
Do I apply that logic to Israel? Yeah, I apply it to every country on the planet, including our own. And in that dystopian future, if China invades and we're about to be conquered, I'm not going to be sitting there saying, "We have a right to exist. This isn't fair." If we can't defend ourselves, then we don't. You can cry about your rights all you want, but to whom are you crying? Who are you appealing to? Who are you claiming this right against? You want a country, you better be able to defend it. Can't defend it — doesn't exist. That's it.
I'm kind of boring in that way. Maybe you've noticed. I just have these really simple ways of looking at things and I apply them to everybody consistently. That's my deal. That's my thing with Israel. That's why I don't fall into either camp — I just have a way of looking at things, I apply it to every country, the same for Israel. It's no different.