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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:
by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
October 22, 2026
My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!
Frank and I discuss:
Why allies must be partners, not dependents
Trump’s leverage in Ukraine and Russia’s dependence on China
Anduril, SpaceX, and reforming the Pentagon’s long-broken defense procurement
Why the Moon’s south pole could decide who controls humanity’s future
It’s a full half-hour of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!
Our full discussion:
Frank Gaffney: We’re back. And when I get to say, “So is Rod Martin,” it’s a banner day here at Securing America. And this is not only a banner day in that respect, but it’s a banner day because this is the day that Rod’s new book, titled Trump’s New World Re-Order, goes on sale and in bookstores across this country, and it’s a great day for all of those reasons, and we’re delighted, as always, to have it in-house to talk about.
Rod, welcome back, my friend. Congratulations!
Rod D. Martin: Thank you. Good to be here.
Frank Gaffney: We’re going to talk about the book, but let me just level set again for those who don’t know you as well as they should. You are, of course, a man with some background in the policy arena, working for the wonderful governor of Arkansas at the time, Mike Huckabee, now the ambassador of the United States to Israel. You’ve been quite successful in the business arena, including some time with the PayPal mafia early on, of its operations, and you also are entrepreneurial, pursuing a wonderful product called the Rod Martin Report.
Subscribe to RodMartin.org. I encourage everyone to do it. On top of all of that, you’re the chairman of the board of our Institute for the American Future as I said earlier. And, folks, it’s the outfit that makes all this possible, so please support us if you can.
Rod, let’s talk about the book. At the moment, what it feels as though is going on, rather dramatically, is a lot of new world disorder. You’ve got a different take on it, and one that’s considerably more optimistic than that prospect.
Talk us through both what you see, what you are calling attention to with your new book, as well as on that other dark side that’s out there as well.
A New American Alliance Architecture
Rod D. Martin: Well, there are always difficult times. The question is how you deal with them. In the old order that we've lived under for the last 80 or 90 years, depending, America spent blood and treasure, and other people called the shots. I mean, it's really kind of been ridiculous. We give the IMF a veto over things like currency swap facilities.
What is that? I mean, we have a veto over them, but they have a veto over us. So if we need to help an ally, whether it's the UAE or Argentina or anybody else, you know, we're told no.
Well, it’s our money, and it’s our treasury, and it’s our currency. And that clearly has a deleterious effect on our ability to maintain dollar dominance.
If you’re talking about alliances, you know, we have been expected in NATO for decades now to spend about 70 percent of the total bill of defending the alliance. Germany, not that long ago, was showing up at NATO exercises with broomsticks because they didn’t bother to buy enough rifles.
Why would they need to? They have America. And so the American defense budget subsidizes the German welfare program while Germany is charging us four times the auto tariff that we were charging them.
So, you know, in these and a thousand other ways, Donald Trump has stepped in and said, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to help our allies: we’re always up for that. But what we’re not up for is having them act like a bunch of teenagers in our basement. They actually have to move out and get a job.
So that’s what we’re doing with the 5 percent of GDP commitment with NATO. They finally hit their 2 percent commitment. Only took them a decade, decade and a half.
And now it’s 5 percent, and that’s great. Actually, that’ll increase alliance spending by about two and a half times, which is not insignificant. And no, it won’t make them — by which I mean Europe and Canada — any kind of superpower. But it will mean they can take care of their own backyard. And only in a crisis do they need us to come in with decisive force.
We want the same thing in the Middle East. We want the same thing in East Asia. Not that we want to pull back in any way, just that we don’t want to be solely responsible for every corner of the planet when we have perfectly capable allies competing with us economically and otherwise that are freeloading on the American taxpayer. Enough is enough.
So Trump is reordering all of that. And of course, nasty things will happen. Nasty things always happen. The question, once again, is how you deal with it. And if we have strong allies who are partners, not dependents, then the United States can be the decisive factor in any crisis and thereby avoid most of them.
Certainly the crisis that is looming with China and would have surely spiraled out of control if the Biden team had continued to be in control.
Ukraine Negotiations, and Russia’s Dependence on China
Frank Gaffney: So, Rod, when you talk about defending their own backyard, the Europeans have in their backyard Russia, of course. And Russia is actively involved, as you’ve alluded to, in an invasion of Ukraine, an unbelievably costly war for both parties, but particularly for the Russians. The question of whether or not Russia is in frustration over its inability to finish off Ukraine and its pique with the Europeans who are helping prop it up, may lash out at the Europeans.
Talk about that in the context of the New World Re-Order, which you write, particularly President Trump’s efforts to clearly improve relations with the Russians, get access to their diesel fuel, for example. And otherwise, you know, signal to the Europeans that we have a preferred outcome in this exercise, namely that there is a settlement on terms that are more agreeable to Russia than the Ukrainians.
Rod D. Martin: Well, there’s a settlement on terms that are agreeable to ending the slaughter. And Volodymyr Zelensky is, in many respects, being utterly unreasonable here. If he wants to fight on to the last Ukrainian, I don’t really think that’s a good result. If he were able to actually dislodge Russia from Crimea, I think we would have seen that actually happen sometime this year.
Now, to be fair, I’m very, very proud of what the Ukrainians have achieved in terms of taking massive amounts of Russian oil refining, pumping, and even just production capacity offline.
That is the right answer, and it’s an answer that Donald Trump has enabled, because Joe Biden handcuffed Ukraine completely, preventing them from firing any attack, any missile, more than about 100, 120 miles into Russia. So he can attack immediate supply lines, he can attack immediate armored formations, but God forbid we should do any damage to the actual Russian economy! It’s Donald Trump who turned that around. It’s Donald Trump who enabled that. It’s Donald Trump who is shipping all of those new ERAMs over there.
All of that is happening because Donald Trump wants them to be able to get the best settlement they can. But along with that is, they actually have to be willing to settle. There’s no meaningful chance that Ukraine is going to be able to push Russia out of the Donbas. It’s not going to happen. And it’s been obvious that wasn’t going to happen for five years. So how many more people have to die?
And the truth is, being able to dislodge Russia from the predatory embrace of China is a good geopolitical development for everybody but China.
So there is stuff there to be done.
Frank Gaffney: Do you think that’s actually in the offing, Rod? Just to drill down on that for a minute. Do you think that weaning the Russians off of the Chinese teat, should I say, I guess, is in the cards, actually?
Rod D. Martin: Well, absolutely, because China has exploited Russia ruthlessly for the last five years after promising them, you will recall, about a week before the invasion, Xi Jinping promises “an alliance without limits.” Well, okay. When’s the Chinese army going to invade Ukraine? Still waiting. You know, when are they going to give their buddies in Russia some slack on actually buying all this petroleum and natural gas that they’ve been buying? No, none of that. They buy it at a steep discount because Russia has nowhere else to sell.
They require the Russians to pay for anything they buy from China in gold or in yuan. So they can’t use rubles. In every dealing you have with China, it doesn’t matter who you are — it doesn’t matter if you’re Venezuela, it doesn’t matter if you’re Cuba, it doesn’t matter if you’re Iran, it doesn’t matter if you’re Russia. Every dealing you have with China is predatory, and it’s on their terms. They are not interested in being anybody’s ally or friend, and the world’s starting to notice, thank God.
East Asia is certainly starting to notice. There are no real deals you can have with China except on the basis of overwhelming strength, and that’s exactly why we need our East Asian partners to stand up, as Japan is beginning to do, and actually face this threat as what it is. That, in combination with us, can contain it, and if need be, beat it. But what we were doing wasn’t working.
Frank Gaffney: That’s for sure. We have to take a short break. We’ll be right back with the author of Trump’s New World Re-Order. That would be Rod Martin. Stay tuned for much more on the other side of this very short break, including what we need to be doing to assert ourselves in this new world order on the seas. Why it’s so important. Stay tuned.
Sea Power and Rebuilding American Shipyards
Welcome back. And once again to Rod Martin, the proprietor of the RodMartin.org website, where you can find the Rod Martin Report, as well as some very important insights into how you can obtain Rod’s brand new book just on sale today. First day. That would be, as I’ve mentioned, Trump’s New World Re-Order.
One of the touchstones, clearly, of the reordering that the president is about — and one that I know you feel very strongly and very supportively, Rod — is this question of our maritime strength, specifically our naval military and power projection capabilities, which have been allowed to seriously atrophy for years, we recall some of us of a certain age, Ronald Reagan’s commitment to build with then-Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman’s considerable help, a 600-ship navy.
I don’t think we ever quite made it, but we got pretty close.
Rod D. Martin: Very close, yes.
Frank Gaffney: We are now well below 300 ships in our country. Talk to us about not only the importance of that in the abstract, but really as its centrality to the New World Re-Order that Donald Trump is pursuing.
Rod D. Martin: Well, I want to stress, none of this is in isolation. Obviously, the Institute for the American Future and RodMartin.org are very concerned about all aspects of American power. I just did a piece a couple weeks ago on the new M1E3 tank, which is awesome. And, you know, we’ve done stuff on the F-15EX and the F-35I and certainly Golden Dome, all these things. And hardly anybody’s talked about space power as much as you and I have.
But, folks, let’s get real. We are a maritime nation. We always have been. America rests on sea power. It cannot be avoided. And if you care about land power, if you care about air power, the Navy carries all of that, too.
It is absolutely essential that we have the kind of Navy that can actually patrol not just the Taiwan Strait, not just the Luzon Strait, not just the Strait of Hormuz or the Strait of Malacca. We have to have a Navy that can actually control all the chokepoints of the world.
That’s an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. And you cannot do it with 287 ships. That’s ridiculous. So, you know, at the end of the Cold War, we had 15 aircraft carriers. Now we have 11. 11 means that on your very best day, you actually have six that are available for deployment. Frequently, it’s more like five.
We do not have enough Navy. And this president gets it. This president is doing everything in his considerable power to increase American shipbuilding capacity just as rapidly as possible.
And you’re seeing that in our trade deals even because we brought in the South Koreans and the Japanese and even the Finns to help us build some of the ships we need, especially frigates and icebreakers overseas because we just don’t have the shipbuilding capacity here.
But the deals all require that those foreign shipbuilders, who haven’t let their technology atrophy — they’ve actually jumped ahead — actually have to come here and either operate or build an American shipyard, and train American workers to operate that shipyard. They can bring their people briefly, but only long enough to get our people trained. This is a good deal for them, as it is also for us. They’ll make a ton of money on it and we’ll build up American sea power.
But we need more. We only have one nuclear-capable dock for surface combatants in the country. It’s absurd. We have just two facilities that can build nuclear submarines. That isn’t keeping up. We are absolutely at a critical point there. We have a requirement for at least two Virginia-class submarines for ourselves each year. We can actually only produce 1.2. And with the demands that we now have, both for expansion of our own Navy, for the new SSGNs, for AUKUS — because we’ve got to provide boats now to the Australians too — we’re going to need to be able to produce three of these things a year.
We can’t produce much more than one. It’s just not acceptable and it’s absolutely needless. We are 26 percent of the world’s economy and we can’t build ships. My gosh, China has 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States! 230 times. That’s like the U.S. Army going up against Little House on the Prairie.
It’s ridiculous and it’s a completely self-inflicted wound, almost as though a lot of those people in the Beltway were doing their best to help China take world dominance.
Frank Gaffney: Well, this is a suspicious point of note in our book, of course, The Indictment, which talks about those enablers of the Chinese Communist Party, the so-called captured elite in this country that has helped put us in this fix.
Rod, I did want to just give you a minute or so before we have to take another break to talk about Anduril and this new shipyard in the Baltimore area that we’re told is going to be cranking out unmanned vessels in considerable quantity.
How does that fit into this overall scale?
Anduril, SpaceX, and Fixing Defense Procurement
Rod D. Martin: Unmanned vessels, which are increasingly important — both surface and undersea combatants — but also segments of those Virginia-class boats. So it radically increases the potential throughput at Newport News and at Groton. And that’s absolutely vital.
What I’d like to see is for Arsenal-2 to also be able to build Virginia-class boats. That’s not going to happen in the next four years, but that’s where it should go. And of course, Palmer Luckey is brilliant. He’s also building a facility in California that will be much more focused on the undersea drones, but also on critical components for the Virginia-class.
This is exactly what I’ve been calling for. I’ve been saying to you and others for two years, what we really need is for Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey to get together and fix defense procurement. And it’s happening.
Frank Gaffney: Praise God. And we’re going to talk more about how that might apply to the next domain of warfighting space right after this. Stay tuned.
China, Reusable Rockets, and the Space Frontier
We’re back! So is Rod Martin, the great Rod Martin I should say. The man who has helped us make the Institute for the American Future a go program, as well as so much more, including his marvelous online resource he calls the Rod Martin Report. And Rod, you feature there guest writers. Stuart Cvrk, I believe is how he pronounces his name, is a retired Navy captain, and a very, very insightful analyst of national security policy and programs, for that matter.
And you feature there on the website, the RodMartin.org website, that is, an article that he wrote about what China is doing to, well, put a fine point on it, dominate space. The options that it’s pursuing and their implications for us. Could you give us a sense of what that’s all about and how it fits again into the reordering?
Rod D. Martin: Well, one of the crucial points that Stu is making there, and it does matter, is that China doesn’t have real capital markets. For them to have a space IPO is a joke. They are claiming to have the kind of securities regulation that you can count on in the United States, when in reality, the whole thing is just another centrally planned op.
These are not real standalone companies. They are utterly dominated by the CCP, and their money’s not going to be spent the way that a public company in the United States would have to spend it. It’s just going to go to whatever the CCP wants done, regardless of profitability or shareholder value. So that’s the first warning.
But the bigger warning is that China understands, probably better than anyone in the United States except the Trump administration, just how vital space is going to be. Donald Trump created the Space Force. Now he’s creating this new United States Space Academy. He gets it. He sees this future. He understands the crucial thing that most Americans have missed, which is when you reduce the cost of anything, people demand far more of it.
So 10 years ago, the cost to send a single pound of whatever to orbit was $10,000. Well, at that price you’re not going to send a lot to orbit, period. You’re just not. Elon with Starship has brought it down, at least notionally, to about $200. You’re going to get a lot more demand, and we already do. Look at Starlink, which is amazing. Fantastic, low-latency internet service and about to be phone service as well. Well, that operates on the basis of tens of thousands of satellites that have to be replaced every couple of years.
Nobody in the world could have afforded to do anything like that just a few years ago. It’s only possible because of that reduction in the cost per pound to orbit.
Well, the Chinese are moving on that too. They are moving as fast as they can to develop true reusability, which just makes sense. I mean, you wouldn’t get on a 737 and fly home to see grandma and then scrap the plane and build a new one. That’s just nuts. And rockets shouldn’t work that way either.
So the Chinese get it. They understand there’s crucial real estate in the inner solar system and even in the Earth-Moon system that if you have it, it’s going to be the equivalent of the Spanish getting hold of the Canary Islands or Cuba back in the early 1500s. And it’s going to determine the course of the next half millennium of human civilization. So Donald Trump also gets it. We have to control that. We have to dominate it or the future will not be free.
It will be red. It will be communist. And there won’t be a thing we can do about it.
The Moon’s South Pole and the Future Balance of Power
Frank Gaffney: So let me ask you specifically, because one of the sort of leading indicators in all of this, I think, Rod, is who gets to the Moon next? And what do they do on it that will determine, quite possibly, who else gets to the Moon and what they get to do with it? And how does that, again, fit into this larger assertion of dominion by the Chinese and projection of power?
Rod D. Martin: And not just anywhere on the Moon. I mean, there is a big difference in sailing your big wooden ship and finding Virginia and sailing your big wooden ship and finding Sonora or Death Valley. You know, you can’t do a lot with that.
Okay. The south pole of the Moon has lots of water ice. That is the holy grail. It is very expensive. Even at these reduced prices, it is very expensive to move the bulk of water into space. You don’t want to be trying to do that from Earth. But if it’s already there, that’s quite another matter.
And you may think I’m just talking about, you know, drinking water or, you know, being able to flush the toilet or whatever. No, no, no. You separate it into its component parts and now you have atmosphere. You separate it into its component parts. Now you have rocket fuel. Whoever controls the south pole of the Moon controls the future. It’s just that simple.
And the Chinese...
Frank Gaffney: The future not just of space or of the Moon, but here on Earth as well. The future of all of us.
Rod D. Martin: Absolutely. Because the more space infrastructure you have, the more you’re eventually going to dominate the global economy. You’re also going to be able to build weapons that are almost unimaginable today that just give you global dominance. There’s no escaping it. And the truth of the matter is that south pole of the Moon is a relatively small prize in the grand scheme of the entire inner solar system. But it’s the crucial one without which none of that other stuff happens.
We’ve seen how they play in the South China Sea. In the South China Sea, they pretend to follow international law up to a point. And the Outer Space Treaty does kind of the same thing. Oh, you can’t own the Moon. You can’t have sovereignty over space. Okay, but if you have administration of it, if you have an exclusive zone of control, you might as well just call it sovereignty. And eventually, they always do. So it’s all a bunch of legal sleight of hand, but they are planning to own it all.
Frank Gaffney: Rod Martin, we need to talk further about what that means for all of us. It's a New World Re-Order that may not be to our liking. Keep up the great work, my friend, and all of your aspects, including the Rod Martin Report. Come back to us soon. I hope the rest of you do the same next time. Until then, you all go forth and multiply.
