Change and Continuity in War

>> H.R McMaster: Everything you hear is de-escalation. Right. You know, we need to de escalate. We need to lower the temperature. This mantra of de-escalation essentially has given Iran the license to escalate on their own terms with impunity. Hey, let me know where you're coming from and a little bit about yourself, too.

>> Grant Werrick: Morning, sir. My name is Grant Wernick, and I'm coming from Duke University.

>> H.R McMaster: All the evil ones. I went to Chapel Hill for grad school, but we had a crossover program with Duke, though. It was fantastic. And the one of my classmates from that period, Wayne Lee, was a Duke PhD and now runs the.

What's it called? What's the War Studies program at UNC Chapel Studies at UNC.

>> Grant Werrick: It's a great program. I actually also just graduated from Marines Officer Candidate School on Saturday. And while we were there, we were forbidden from asking about Force Design 2030 to either our platoon commander or our company commander.

That was off limits. So I wanted to ask you because it is a very controversial strategic document. You've had every former living commandant come out and criticize it when General Berger started working on it, so was interested to hear your thoughts on it.

>> H.R McMaster: Okay, here's what I'd like to do is just talk to you about.

Let me see if I can go back. Is there a way to go back? Yeah. I think that that document is flawed because it's making, it's based on unrealistic assumptions about future war. And I mentioned how this revolution military affairs orthodoxy was a setup in the 90s. It's really.

A new version of strategic bombing theory appears about every decade and a half. And essentially, the argument associated with this new version of strategic bombing theory is that future war really is going to be different. It can be waged at standoff range. Right. It's going to be clean and cheaper, and we just have to be niftier.

Right. So, if you read the Obama administration's defense strategy, it talks about integrated deterrence. I mean, you could just substitute pixie dust, I think, for integrated deterrence. And that's really the argument that they're making. I think what the war in Ukraine has really highlighted, once again, to us is hard power really matters.

And hard power means, really, you have joint forces, which means forces that operate, you know, across all the services, but in all the domains of land, sea, aerospace, space, cyberspace, and can integrate those capabilities in joint forces to defeat the enemy and to accomplish your objectives, which in Ukraine, really, for the Ukrainians, is To eject the Russians and to control the, regain control of their territory, populations and and resources in their country and be able to defend against future threats.

Think about the way that we tried to deter the Russians. We declassified some intelligence that was kind of nifty. You know, we threatened them with economic sanctions, also kind of nifty. You know, we did all the, we took all these actions. It didn't make a difference, right. What matters is capable joint forces that can operate in sufficient scale and for ample duration to win, right?

That's how you deter war. And our investments in defense have been paltry. And in this vision for the Marine Corps in 2030, it's based on flawed assumptions. Now, I think this is what this is. I chucked this in here in case it was relevant and thanks for the question.

But I think that, you know, the assumption that the Marine Corps is making is that future war will be in the realm of relative certainty. Because that's one of the assumptions you make if you're going to think you can wage ward standoff range. Because your surveillance capabilities, your various ways of collection, your big data analytics will be able to target the enemy at long range.

And what the Marine Corps has done is they have divested themselves from a lot of close combat capabilities for these longer range capabilities. Fewer infantry, no tanks and, and very little artillery is what's left in the Marine Corps. I believe that war is evolving in a way that will make close combat with the enemy even more important and decisive.

And that's because we are seeing the countermeasures to these longer range capabilities. There are some traditional ones, dispersion, concealment, intermingle with civilian populations and deception. But there increasingly are technological countermeasures, counter satellite capabilities, offensive cyber capabilities, electromagnetic warfare, tiered and layered air defense. Right now, it seems like drones are decisive, but there are about 30,000 drones being destroyed every few months in Ukraine.

 

So, war is this continuous interaction of opposites, as I mentioned, within wars, but also between wars in the development of combat capabilities. So you have the machine gun, remember, the machine gun was decisive, but then you have the tank, so maybe it's not that decisive. But then you have the anti tank missile.

So, the tank isn't everything. But then you have the submarine, the sonar, the bomber, the radar. You have our exquisite precision strike capabilities, but then all these countermeasures that I mentioned. So how you think about future war is really important. Do you believe that future war, this is the fundamental assumption, will lie in the realm of certainty or uncertainty?

And if anybody's super bored, you know, or has a sleeping disorder and needs to, you know, make sure you get to sleep, you can read a monograph I wrote when I was a National Security affairs fellow here, 2002 to 2003, called Cracking the Foundation, Defense Transformation and the Underlying Assumption of Dominant Knowledge and Future War.

And so, in 2002, I was challenging this orthodoxy, but it's come back. I call it the vampire fallacy. You can't kill always comes back. So I think the Marine Corps is putting itself at a severe disadvantage in close combat competency in future war. And that's going to really be painful for the Marine Corps to relearn.

You know what it needs to conduct combined arms operations in close contact with the enemy.

>> Ariana: Hi, my name is Ariana. I'm from Williams College. So, across the past decade, a lot of countries have been nuclearizing. You mentioned that. And different countries have been taking different nuclear postures along with that.

For example, India has had a no first use nuclear policy. China has had a no first use nuclear policy as well. But India has been considering shifting that. And I was wondering if you could possibly give us an example of how India would consider with these strategic steps that you spoke of, how India would consider shifting its policy.

And my second question is, in a nuclearizing age, as new countries come in and take on the nuclear stage, is America's strategy and posture in the nuclear world going to be functional in the future? Thank you.

>> H.R McMaster: So, I think you have to begin from India's perspective, looking at its security situation.

And of course, they're surrounded by a very large neighbor to the north, China, that's nuclear armed, and a hostile Pakistan, which is also nuclear armed. So I think from the Indian perspective, you have to think about how does our doctrine relate to really what you want to achieve, which is to deter attacks on India and.

And I think that has to do with really thinking about what are China's designs? How would you deter China? Remember, it's, it's kind of top of mind for them because China was bludgeoning Indian soldiers to death on the Himalayan frontier just a couple of years ago. And of course, you know, after the Mumbai attacks, which are only, you know, the most dramatic in recent years of, of Pakistan's continued use of terrorist, you know, organizations as an arm of their foreign policy and as a means to attack India.

So I think India, if it forgoes or, you know, revises the no first use, it'll be because it feels that that's the best way to deter a conflict for the United States. I think that we, we were really asleep for a long time in terms of nuclear deterrence, especially during the Obama years.

Our strategic forces atrophied considerably in terms of even just modernization, the development of new capabilities, and even just refurbishing the existing capabilities. A lot of that had been based on the idea that, you know, that the, you know, the Cold War was over. And these assumptions in the 1990s, I really didn't talk about this very much, but there were three assumptions, I think, in the 1990s.

One of them I mentioned to you, which is the idea that future war would be fast, cheap, efficient. Our technological military prowess would guarantee our security well into the future. But the other assumptions were that great power rivalry was a relic of the, of the past and ideological competition was, was over.

And of course, what we've seen with Russia and with Putin, the way he's been rattling his nuclear saber recently, is that, is that we may not have the full range of capabilities that we need to deter Russia from, from, from applying this doctrine of what Putin has talked about, which is escalation, domination or escalate to de escalate.

And essentially what Putin has said publicly is that we could use a, we could use a tactical nuclear weapon against the European city and then pose the United States with this question, okay, what are you going to do? Are you going to sue for peace on our terms or are you going to choose nuclear Armageddon?

So what we did in the Trump administration, and you can read this document, it's an open-source document from early 2018 under the Nuclear Posture Review. As we said, we need a greater range of nuclear capabilities to be able to deter Russia from employing this doctrine of escalation domination.

We also noted in that document, which was significant is that China it was in a race already and it has really accelerated its race to increase its nuclear arsenal. By really 400% is really what they're doing at the moment. And we were involved in treaties with Russia when that was our only really concern and the Soviet Union before it that were, that they're now, were now irrelevant because of what China was doing.

And by the way, Russia was violating the treaty. I'm talking in particular about the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty, the INF Treaty. And, and we also got out of that treaty because it was a fantasy, you know, and we needed the long range capabilities. The Biden administration has stopped some of the modernization efforts and cut funding for it.

And I think if there is a Trump administration, that'll be restored. But I forget what the numbers are. If anybody knows, if somebody can just look it up. I mean, the, how many tactical nuclear weapons does Russia have compared to the United States? It's something crazy like we have like 100 and they have, you know, 5,000 or something like that.

So, so I think there, there are elements of deterrence also that, that we, we tried to address in, in the, in the Nuclear Posture Review. One of those, which was controversial but I think made total sense is we said in the Nuclear Posture Review that we could interpret and attack a massive cyber attack against our communication system as a precursor to a first strike and respond accordingly.

So that was a message to China that if you try to take down our infrastructure, we could respond with nuclear force from the beginning under the, under the idea that maybe what you're trying to do is, is set conditions for a successful first strike. And I believe China is trying to get a first strike capability right now.

We can talk more about that if you want. Okay, yes.

>> Nathan: Hi.

>> H.R McMaster: We'll keep moving the mics closer to the top. Yeah.

>> Nathan: Thank you for your talk. My name is Nathan and I'm a junior at the University of Texas. And at the beginning of your talk, you mentioned that you believe that there is a decent probability of a world war sometime in the near future with the powers of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea working together.

But many would also say that these countries have lots of opposing interests and wouldn't be able to work together despite their common interest of ousting American from Americans from their spheres of power. But at the same time, there are lots of examples in history of powers with opposing interests working together.

So my question for you is what do you what are the criteria, you think that allow countries that but together on so many issues to come together militarily? And why do you believe that those four countries have that ability?

>> H.R McMaster: Yeah, well, I think that they see that they can fulfill each other's needs, right?

So you have Iran, for example, that is trying to circumvent the sanctions regime, that also needs some technical expertise for its missile programs. And you have China, who needs, you know, Iran's oil and gas, for example. But also you have this overall idea that's bringing them together better than go specifics that that the world is chaotic, that the world is on the brink of maybe a cataclysmic war.

But Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping believe that that is in their interest, they have said so, right? I mean, if you look at the last summit that they had together, or maybe it's two summits ago, Xi Jinping said something like, there's one word for what's happening in the world, and it's chaos.

And he said, Vladimir, and I think this is working in our, in our, in our favor, right? And so I think that there is this overall drive to really destroy the international order or the rules of international discourse from an economic perspective, from a diplomatic perspective, the redefinition of human rights, for example.

You have the infiltration and subversion of international organizations in a way to turn them against their purpose. The Human Rights Council, for example, or the World Health Organization, for example. And I think that they see the subversion of these international organizations and the pursuit of even more chaos and disruption as actually redounding to their benefit.

I think what happens is when we try to divide them, right, and this is the idea of kind of resurrecting the triangular diplomacy of the Nixon administration, in which we endeavored in the context of the Cold War, to have a closer relationship both with Moscow and Beijing than they had with one another.

And therefore, we could divide them and we could prevent what the great geostrategic theorists have told us, Spikeman and others, that we should, from the perspective of the UK in the late 19th century, is that you don't want a hostile power to dominate the world island of the Eurasian landmass.

So it made geostrategic sense to try to separate them. But I don't think that applies anymore. You know, I think when we pretend like they're separate, when we humiliate ourselves by saying, we're going to talk to Beijing and ask them to get Iran to moderate its behavior, I mean, really, you think that's going to work.

I think what we allow them to do is to cover for one another. We allow China to act like it's calling on all parties to deescalate when in fact it's really materially supporting Iran's threat network of terrorists and And militias across, across the Middle East. When, when we think that, well, maybe Russia can moderate, you know, the Iranians in Syria, for example, this is Putin's Potemkin peace plan for the Middle east in which he says, hey, support Assad staying in power.

And what I'll do is I will work to lessen Iranian influence in a post civil war Syria. That's all a lie, right? So we should stop pretending. I think instead of trying to separate them, we should glue them together, not only because they deserve each other, but we should hang what they're doing around their necks like lodestones.

The Ukraine war, for example, and China's support, very material support for Russia in its continuation of its onslaught against the Ukrainian people. We should hang that around China's neck, I believe.

>> Thomas Bolen: Hello, Attorney General, my name is Thomas Bolen. My question for you today is about what we've seen in Ukraine the past week or so, specifically their offensive in the Kursk region.

Do you think that we will see more initiatives like those, or do you think that Ukraine will go back to trying to bolster their front lines and defend the territory that they have right now?

>> H.R McMaster: Yeah, I think you could see more of these kinds of attacks that have relatively limited objectives.

Because what this has done is it has alleviated pressure on the eastern front for the Ukrainians. I think that was one of the purposes of the attack attack, but another purpose of the attack was to get outside of, from a different angle of this is what I believe just from looking at the map.

And I don't think, I've not heard any analysts say this. To get outside of their tiered and layered air defense capabilities and be able to employ long range assets against the airfields and long range strike capabilities that Russia's been using with devastating effect against the Ukrainians. I mean, are the Russians going to use glide bombs now on their own soil?

You know, probably not. So one of the biggest advantages that the Russians have had is now kind of off the table. Are the Russians going to try to marshal forces to regain that territory and impale themselves on what are likely to be, you know, prepared defenses, you know, with capabilities like Javelin missiles and so forth?

I don't know. I mean, but it could be very costly for the Russians to do this. So what you've seen with this attack is an effort to regain the initiative, which is what you always want in combat in war, is you want your enemy responding to you rather than the other way around.

You want to dictate the terms of battle. So I think it is extremely effective. I think the, you know, the. The Russians, you know, appear strong in some ways, right, because they can mobilize more people. They have a great deal of firepower that they can bring to bear, especially in a relative.

From a relative perspective, Ukraine has less manpower. Ukraine was struggling with munitions because of the long pause in our support for them with munitions and weapon systems. So that's. That's Russia's strength. What is Ukraine's strength now? Ukraine has struck at weakness, which is you always wanna do in combat.

Don't impale yourself on strength, go with weakness. And I think they must have learned, you know, from the Prigozhin that, remember the Wagner group, you know, attack on Moscow. Okay, this is like an ex hot dog salesman, an ex con, took a bunch of other ex-cons, took over the equivalent of U.S. CENTCOM headquarters, right?

And then marched on Moscow, shot down seven aircraft. Right. I mean, that didn't look like strength to me. So Putin appears strong, you know, but actually, I think his regime is quite brittle now, as. I don't know, you had cocking yesterday, right? Is he Stephen Cochin? Is he the best?

So I'll use my cock in the impression, right? It's really important to understand, right, that authoritarian regimes don't have to be that strong. They just have to be stronger than the organized opposition, they do okay. All right. He's the best, I love the guy. So. So, you know, but I think what it does is it exposes the weakness for Russia.

Right. The more Putin talks about it, the more embarrassing it is for him. Right. You know, so I think it was a brilliant move, actually. It's not gonna be decisive, but I likened it in an interview a few days ago to Washington crossing the Delaware and the defeat of the British and Hessian forces at Trenton and Princeton.

Right. It didn't win the war, right, there were still five years of war to go, but it did change. It changed the perspective that we had lost the initiative completely after the defeat in. In New York. Yes.

>> Jaden Stewart: Thank you so much. Go ahead.

>> H.R McMaster: I'll take two. Let's do two in a row, two in a row. If I can remember, I'm over 60 man, you might have to help me out. What was that first question again? Okay, good.

>> Josh: Good morning, sir. My name is Josh, and I'm a first class cadet at the Air Force Academy.

So I just have a quick question for you. So you had the unique ability to serve as an active duty officer in a traditionally civilian capacity as the National Security advisor. Could you speak to the civ mil dynamic and the dynamic between yourself and the combatant commanders? Thank you.

>> H.R McMaster: Okay, what was your question together?

>> Jaden Stewart: Thank you so much for talking. Really appreciate it. I'm Jaden Stewart, I go to Princeton University. You spoke earlier about the danger of making assumptions in foreign policy. I think one of the longest standing assumptions that we've made is that our allies would support our efforts internationally efficiently and pay their fair share in terms of providing support in terms of our efforts abroad.

So how do you think we can better counteract that and so allay is able to effectively contribute to our efforts abroad.

>> H.R McMaster: Okay, all right, great. So, hey, serving as National Security advisor, it wasn't unprecedented for me to stay active duty. Colin Powell had done that. Actually, Brent Scowcroft had done it as well as a deputy National Security advisor.

Then he, then he transitioned to civilian when he came back into, into that job under a different administration. But, you know, I think there was really no conflict at all from my perspective. You know, now people would want to try to make something of it. President Trump asked me to stay on active duty, I wanted to stay on active duty.

But I told him, and I told Secretary Mattis also, who I think you talked with with Cocky yesterday that, hey, I decided when I took the job that I would retire out of that job whenever I was used up, whenever my time was up. I tell the story in some detail in, in my forthcoming book, which will be out next week.

Call that war with ourselves, not to plug it, but it is, you know, I mean, there's still some beach reading time available and it's a, it's a page turner. It's a page turner. So but in it, I try to explain this in greater depth this question. There were practical implications for me.

I mean, I, I went to interview for the job at Mar A Lago on a Sunday over President's Day weekend. I'd received a call on Friday. My job at the time was to develop the future army, you know, as a three star general. So I, I flew down to Mar a Lago.

I had the first interview on Sunday. The President held me till the end of the day, that first day and then ran out of time for a second interview. And I was part of the down select, you know, between two of us for an interview on Monday. I didn't know who that was, the other candidate was until I ran into Ambassador Bolton in the men's room on my way in.

They were trying to give a separate ambassador general. So he was on his way out. I came in and. And the President said, hey, I'm not gonna do a second interview with you, you're hired. I flew back with him on Air Force One. I didn't live in Washington, so they had aircraft waiting for me, right?

Marine Corps Osprey aircraft, to fly me back to my house in Tidewater, Virginia. Pack a bag, and I start at work on Tuesday, you know. And so if I had gotten out of the army, that would have really delayed so much. And the army took care of me.

They got me a house on McNair. Fort McNair. So it eased my transition, was one thing, but also, I didn't see any conflict at all when there was a. When people would criticize, you know, a guy, he's. He's, you know. He shouldn't be in uniform. It was typically when I was making statements of policy, of administration policy, which I didn't see in any way, you know, infringing on, on the, you know, my military professionalism or ability to stay above partisan politics.

I think actually it was a tremendous advantage to stay above partisan politics. Like, I would never go to, like, a political rally with President Trump. You know, I never did that. I never did anything explicitly political. But I did work on helping him understand his foreign policy agenda, make decisions, put in place what I believe were long overdue correctives to unwise policies.

And I had no problem describing those, you know, and communicating those to the relevant audiences. I would have preferred not to be on television that much doing it, you know, but when you have, you know, secretaries of State, Defense and others who don't want to go on Sunday television, you know, it kind of defaulted to me a lot of times, you know, so anyway, so I really didn't see a conflict in it at all.

And I think, you know, I could see it again where I think a military officer could fulfill that position well. And then on allies and partners, I think we have to do is you have to map interests, you know, and understand where those interests overlap and where they diverge and then manage those relationships in a way where you try to incentivize the actions that you want these, these allies and partners to take.

They're just not automatically going to go along with you. And, and then, but also, I think with allies and partners, it's really important to do this kind of, this framing of these challenges, like, like I mentioned, to, to pose, to pose questions to them. Hey, how can we work together to help stabilize Iraq and ensure Iraq is not aligned with Iran?

How can we work together to make some kind of progress toward a resolution of the Syrian conflict while ensuring the enduring defeat of ISIS and limiting Iran's and Russia's influence in a post civil war Syria, right? Ask those questions before you say, here's the US Policy. I need you to sign up for this.

And so one of the things that I did as National Security Advisor is I convened the Quint Forum, which is the UK, the U.S. germany, Italy and France, under the idea that all of us had certain different competitive advantages and we could work with other partners internationally around an agreed approach to some of our first order problems.

And it was like the third full day on the job. I did a video telephone conference with them, and I said, hey, I'm the new member of the club here. You know, what advice do you have for me, I think that shocked them because usually they're used to Americans just talking and telling them what they think.

What are your biggest challenges? I took notes and I said, hey, I've got an idea. What if we. What if we work on these? We take the top five of our big challenges to our security and prosperity and so forth, and we assign one to each of us to be the lead and we convene kind of a policy coordinating committee across our five countries, with each of us taking the lead in this.

And we frame out a multinational strategy to address that challenge. And we inventory kind of our relative competitive advantages. And this can be a very high level strategy. And we did that, you know, and then we actually implemented that approach and we kept track of where each of our leaders were.

So if Chancellor Merkel was meeting with the Sultan of Turkey, Erdogan or I would send a one pager, hey, it'd be great if she could make these points. This is the points of President Trump made. And we would stay. We actually implemented together, too. A lot of times, people think meetings are planning.

They're not. You got to break the meeting culture and have a planning culture where you bring people together and you work together to identify opportunities to advance your interests. Rather than brief each other and then call it a day and go back to doing things as usual.

>> Aditi: Thank you for your talk.

My name is Aditi and I'm a medical student from King's College, London. I had the pleasure to sit with Professor Kotkin yesterday at lunch, and he was mentioning the difference between winning the war and winning the peace. So, for example, he gave, in Afghanistan, we won the war, but we did not win the peace.

Or in Vietnam, we lost the war, but won the peace, that Vietnam is now an ally to the US.

>> H.R McMaster: Kind of an ally, still communist dictatorship, but okay.

>> Aditi: So I wanted to understand your perspective on what he was saying and how can we use the military to not only win the war, but win the peace as well.

>> H.R McMaster: Yeah, okay, great. That's a great question. There's a great book by one of our colleagues here at Hoover, Nadia Schadlow. It's called War and the Art of Governance. I highly recommend it. And in it, she talks about American Denial Syndrome, in which we always deny that, hey, this is part of war is consolidating gains getting to sustainable political outcomes.

And I think what you had after Vietnam is what I would call the Vietnam Syndrome and the Vietnam syndrome. There's a great, there's a great essay by Conrad Crane on this by the way, was that, hey, we're just never going to do that again. We're never going to have to fight a war that, that's complicated and we can fight just these kind of really sharp military engagements, whether it's, you know, the Panama invasion or Desert Storm.

And we're just not going to do that again. And there was a generation of officers that were influenced by that kind of thinking, consolidation is not a integral part of war. But of course it, it always has been. Whether, and give you so many examples, right? Panama is one of those examples, right.

Dominican Republic in 1965 is an example. Small, smaller scale examples. How about, you know, how about South Korea? Everybody thought that was going to be a failed state even after 1953 and the end of the war. World War II, there had to be a consolidation of gains to get to political outcomes.

So, you know, I'd say first of all, you have to acknowledge that that's part of, I argue in the book Battlegrounds that the difficulties that we encountered in both Afghanistan and Iraq were due in large measure to us taking a short term approach to what were long term problems there.

And our short term approach and our desire to disengage actually lengthened those wars and made them more costly. The Afghanistan example I think is an important one to look at, but not for the reasons maybe that Professor Cochin mentioned. I might have a different perspective on this. I think what Afghanistan was, was a self defeat that we had already won the war in Afghanistan.

Now Afghanistan had not become Denmark, right? It's not going to ever be Denmark. It's gonna be Afghanistan, and it would be violent. But we weren't fighting anymore. We were enabling an Afghan force that was now taking kind of a sustainable level of casualties, unlike it was in 2016, 17 when we changed the strategy and we were knocking the hell out of the Taliban in 2018, 29, 2018 into 2019.

Then we reversed that strategy. A strategy that I believe was working at a sustainable level would have cost about $22 billion a year. Think about how much, how many billions of dollars of equipment we just left there. Think about what the cost has been to build an over the horizon counterterrorism center in Qatar for $20 billion.

I mean, that's not effective by the way. And we had a force that was fighting with us on a modern day frontier between barbarism and civilization against these jihadist terrorist organizations. And we were having a huge impact from a humanitarian perspective. Right. So when President Trump reversed that strategy and he sent Zad, an ambassador to essentially to surrender to the Taliban, that's when we began to actually actively partner with the Taliban against the Afghan government.

It is a stain on our history that's going to take a long time to overcome. Now, what do you mean? How could we be partnering with the Taliban against the Afghan government? Think about what we did. We talked to those jackasses, the Taliban, in In Doha gutter without the Afghan government humiliating the Afghan government diminishing their influence.

What else did we do? We listed for the Taliban all the things we wouldn't do. And, and we, and we reduced our intelligence support and for us to target actively the Taliban. We went back to the Obama period of time when we had to see hostile intent first.

You couldn't actively go after the enemy until they had direct contact, typically with Afghan forces. And then our air power was pulled back. We canceled our maintenance contracts. We forced them to release 15,000 of the most heinous criminals on earth during this period of time. So, we threw Afghanistan under the bus on our way out.

I mean, even the Obama administration, when they said they're going to get completely out of Iraq in 2010, they didn't negotiate with Al Qaeda on their way out. Why the hell didn't we just leave if we were going to leave? So, I would say that our failure in Afghanistan was a self-defeat and a humiliation and really an astounding abandonment.

And there were a lot of reasons why this happened. I called somebody who was still senior in the administration, the Trump administration, and I just said, hey, what the hell are you doing? And what I got back was a complaint about President Ashraf Ghani. And I said, hey, do you prefer Hasibullah Akanzada?

Is that who you prefer? Right. And then what the Obama administration did was horrible. I mean, they flew the Pride flag over the, after, over the US Embassy during Pride Month. And then, and then, and then consigned all the Afghans to hell in the way they left it.

But then they said, well, we had to abide because it was a Trump policy. Well, Trump was securing the border. They decided they didn't want to secure the border anymore. Trump was putting pressure on Iran. They decided, well, no, we should alleviate pressure on Iran. Trump had sanctioned the Houthis and they said, no, we're going to undesignate them.

We put pressure on Maduro. And they said, no, we think we can make Maduro into a Democrat. I mean, they reversed every other Trump policy, but they couldn't reverse that one. So anyway, I. Sorry to go on about it, but I, I would say that, you know, we'd already won the war in Afghanistan.

We had, you know, what if we had 10, 000 troops there, nobody would even know notice that. And, and the support was about $22 billion a year. Nothing really, and I could go on about that. You can tell he kind of hit a nerve there.

>> Speaker 9: General McMaster, thanks so much for speaking with us today. And thank you for your service as well. I wanted to ask, you know, this has been an incredible talk about America's kind of strategic history, and I wanted to ask, what do you think is America's greatest strategic failure in the 21st century? And what do you think was America's greatest strategic missed opportunity where it could have acted but didn't?

>> H.R McMaster: Okay. All right. Okay. Well, there are a number of examples. I, I would say that because the biggest failure is associated with multiple administrations, and it has to do with the mantra of disengaging from the Middle East. Right. That seeing the Middle East as just a mess to be avoided.

Right. And this is across multiple administrations. Right. The Obama administration essentially defined its foreign policy based on President Obama's opposition to the Iraq war. Saw everything through that lens. And so what happened as a result of that? Actually, in the Obama administration's efforts to avoid what they perceived as the mistakes of the George W. Bush administration, they actually exceeded those mistakes. They exceeded them in Libya. We're not going to get marred in Libya, but we're going to change the regime. Look at Libya today. Libya's a country that's vast but only has 6 million people. What if we had done something, anything to shape the political outcome there?

You know, maybe we wouldn't have the hell that's in Libya today. Maybe the migration crisis in Europe wouldn't be as great. How about the Syrian civil war to avoid the mistakes of the Obama administration or the Bush administration? The Obama administration did not enforce the red line against Syria after the mass murder attacks in 2013, 2014.

What happened as a result of that? I believe you had an acceleration of the civil war. You had Assad, who was on the ropes, get picked up off the ropes by the Russians, who we invited into Syria to verify that they were dismantling their chemical weapons. How did that work out?

It's crazy. Then that allowed Iran to accelerate the cycle of sectarian conflict in the region. You know, I mean, I just, I could go on about so many different examples, but I think these had other geostrategic effects as well. For example, I think you draw a direct line from the unenforced red line in Syria to the invasion of Ukraine in, in 2014.

I mean, I think there's a direct line there. There's a direct line between the uninforced red line in Syria and the Chinese building Islands and weaponizing those islands in the South China Sea. So I. I think that the biggest mistake has been regionally there, but overall, a failure to recognize across multiple administrations that what is provocative is the perception of weakness.

Is this mantra today after the Iranians fire 500 UASs and missiles at Israel, what's our advice to Israel? Take the win. Really? Take the win. Everything you hear is de escalation, right? You know, we need to de escalate. We need to lower the temperature. This mantra of de escalation essentially has given Iran the license to escalate on their own terms with impunity and continue to pursue its strategy of expending every Arab and Palestinian life in its quest to subjugate the Middle east, its neighbors, and to destroy Israel.

So, I think if there's a thematic failure to go along with the kind of the geostrategic failure of disengage, now, we're not going to conciliate the Middle East furies. We're not going to solve the Middle east problems, but, you know, actually disengagement from the Middle east, you know, things can get worse if we do that, right?

I mean, you always think things can't get worse than those. Well, I mean, I think we're seeing today, heck yes, they can get worse. And by the way, you know, the Middle east does not adhere to Las Vegas rules, right? What happens there doesn't stay there. So anyway, I think Middle East and then this overall failure to recognize that it's the perception of weakness is provocative.

>> H.R McMaster: Thanks. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.