Newt Gingrich will be addressing nat-sec topics at AEI today at 2pm. While he will mostly be speaking off-the-cuff, we did get our hands on a few themes he’ll touch on:

– “If the President insists on a July 2011 withdrawal from Afghanistan, he is frightening potential Afghan allies, encouraging our enemies to hang on for a few more months until we cut and run, and courting a disastrous defeat which will have worldwide consequences.”
– “America is at risk of a catastrophic disaster here at home, a reality our elites are hiding from.”
– “The key lesson of the Christmas Detroit bomber and the Times Square car bomber is that our national security system failed completely and we were notified by civilian passengers and a street vendor about two bombs which could have killed many Americans. Yet, there has been no honest assessment of failure. Indeed, from 9/11 to the present nobody has been fired for failure to perform, even though it’s obvious there have been many failures.”
– “The left’s refusal to tell the truth about the threat from radical Islamism is a natural parallel to the 70 year pattern of leftwing intellectuals refusing to tell the truth about communism and the Soviet Union.”
– “Discussing strategy in Afghanistan without first defining the larger war and outlining a strategy in the larger war is like discussing Gettysburg without taking into account the civil war of which it was a part.”
– “The fight against radical Islamism, the imposition of sharia and Madrassas that teach hatred and fanaticism is more important than Afghanistan or Iraq. It is the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth.”

The speech will be live-streamed by AEI here.