Speaker 1: Now I can't stand it. This is an outrage.
Speaker 2: We've crossed over from insult to outrage.
Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask
Speaker 1: what you can do for your country. Mister Gorbichaw, tear
Speaker 1: down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson,
Speaker 1: Charles C. W. Cook and I'm an AI version of
Speaker 1: James Lylax today with our guest, Lieutenant General h har
Speaker 1: McMaster talking about global battlespace preparation. Let's have ourselves a podcast.
Speaker 1: They say the country is on the wrong track. You've
Speaker 1: been in office for three and a half years.
Speaker 2: And Donald Trump has been running for office, so you've
Speaker 2: been the person holding the office.
Speaker 3: You and I both know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: You and I both know what I'm going to Actually,
Speaker 1: what are you talking about? I agree you'll never get
Speaker 1: bored with when we never get bored. Welcome everybody to
Speaker 1: the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and thirteen. I'm Stephen
Speaker 1: Hayward doing my best to be an AI bought version
Speaker 1: of James Lilacs. Remember last week he's threatened that this
Speaker 1: might be in our future and joining me as always
Speaker 1: right now, Peter Robinson and Charles C. W. Cook. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna skip over James's provocation from last week about
Speaker 1: whether we may all be obsolete because of Ai soon.
Speaker 1: I actually heard a draft podcast this week and it
Speaker 1: was terrifying at how smooth it was, and so forth. Okay, instead,
Speaker 1: let's think a little bit about starting.
Speaker 3: How do we know you?
Speaker 2: Are you right now?
Speaker 4: That's a good question.
Speaker 1: You can see me, can't you. Of course, you've always
Speaker 1: had a little hard to believe, Steve, All right, now,
Speaker 1: behave yourself, Peter, let's start here. I'm starting to feel
Speaker 1: like there is no October surprise. It's kind of groundhog week.
Speaker 1: I mean, we had another Israeli victory on the battlefield,
Speaker 1: we had another shaky performance, actually more than one from
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris, and we have a whole bunch of new
Speaker 1: polls out showing the race is still a dead heat.
Speaker 1: There anything change this week? I mean, there are a
Speaker 1: couple of things to bring up, but go ahead, Peas
Speaker 1: something changed? Good? What was? What changed?
Speaker 2: There was an immensely significant event and I'm not even
Speaker 2: kidding how it will make its way into politics when
Speaker 2: I do not know, but the SpaceX recapture of the
Speaker 2: Booster rocket was a staggering moment, and it did Victor
Speaker 2: Davis Hansen. I caught fick well. I ran into Victor yesterday.
Speaker 2: Victor got it immediately. I saw him on Laura Ingram
Speaker 2: later that evening. The rest of the world hasn't gotten it,
Speaker 2: and I'm not sure the rest of the world will,
Speaker 2: but Victor got it immediately. This race, in some ways
Speaker 2: the entire culture is now between those who want to
Speaker 2: lecture the rest of us and those who want to build.
Speaker 1: Yeah, by the way, there's a great you know, the
Speaker 1: great geniuses at the Babylon b One of their headlines
Speaker 1: out this week is Nassa baffled at how Elon Musk
Speaker 1: managed to succeed without as many gay, don binary, Muslim
Speaker 1: dwarfs of color as they have. Yes, yes, right, And.
Speaker 2: This is the running argument that James Lilacs and I
Speaker 2: have been having. James thinks I'm opposed to space travel
Speaker 2: space not at all. I'm opposed to doing that on
Speaker 2: taxpayer money. During the Cold War, you could argue that
Speaker 2: it was an extension of the war itself, that it
Speaker 2: was in the public interest to get to the Okay,
Speaker 2: Elon Musk did what he did on the money of
Speaker 2: private investors. NASA has failed to do what Elon Musk
Speaker 2: did by squandering our money, that in any of it.
Speaker 2: So I want to hear what you boys think of that.
Speaker 2: Am I onto something there? Excuse me? I know I'm
Speaker 2: onto something I wanted to see if the two of
Speaker 2: you are clever enough to pick up on it.
Speaker 1: Well, you may have missed Charlie's fine piece about Elon
Speaker 1: Musk a couple of days ago. So Charlie, Charlie.
Speaker 2: Writes faster than I can read, So I'm sorry. I
Speaker 2: refuse to feel guilty about that.
Speaker 1: Charlie, give us your take on that and plug your
Speaker 1: piece if you like.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 5: Well, the piece was about the myopic habit of focusing
Speaker 5: primarily on Trump as politician rather than his genius inventor.
Speaker 4: And the problem with doing that is.
Speaker 5: That we rightly allow much less eccentricity in our politicians
Speaker 5: than in our inventors. For example, we would not have
Speaker 5: wanted Henry Ford to win his Senate race, but he
Speaker 5: was nevertheless a great titan of industry.
Speaker 4: And I worry a.
Speaker 5: Little bit that by this monomon I will focus on
Speaker 5: Elon Musk's politics. We're going to see and are seeing
Speaker 5: an attempt to cancel him and ignore what he's doing
Speaker 5: in industry, which is utterly extraordinary. And he is the
Speaker 5: great genius of the era. Now, is he also a weirdo?
Speaker 5: Is he also a cheetah on his romantic partner? Is
Speaker 5: he also susceptible to conspiracy theories?
Speaker 4: Short?
Speaker 5: But those are probably the same instincts that have led
Speaker 5: him to revolutionize space travel and banking and cars and
Speaker 5: satellite internet and maybe eventually link the brain to a computer.
Speaker 5: So my lament was that I'm seeing pieces in the
Speaker 5: New Republic saying he's an idiot who's good at nothing.
Speaker 5: I think the space question that Peter raises is a
Speaker 5: fascinating one. My view of it is just that we
Speaker 5: have now evolved past the need for any government involvement
Speaker 5: at all. And you see this here in Florida where
Speaker 5: at Cape Canaveral. There is an attempt underway to turn
Speaker 5: this into a site for private enterprise, but that does
Speaker 5: require a bit of conversion. Back in the day when
Speaker 5: NASA was in charge and use Cape Canaveral for the
Speaker 5: Apollo program and other launches. For example, you couldn't launch
Speaker 5: more than one rocket from a given site at a time.
Speaker 5: The system was set up to be centrally controlled, and
Speaker 5: as a result, if you had person on launch Pad
Speaker 5: A and person on launch Pad B who wanted to
Speaker 5: launch their rockets within say, five or six hours of
Speaker 5: each other, you couldn't do it because the pipes that
Speaker 5: transmit the fuel were just not set up for this.
Speaker 5: NASA being in control of the master plan and so on,
Speaker 5: well that needs to change because the eventual plan is
Speaker 5: to have rockets coming in and out, and a bit
Speaker 5: like in an airport, although you have to deal with
Speaker 5: air traffic control, you don't tell each airline when they
Speaker 5: can do this, that or the other.
Speaker 4: You don't have a master plan, you just coordinate.
Speaker 5: So it seems to me that we are in the
Speaker 5: midst of transmuting what was the government monopoly for good reasons,
Speaker 5: the Cold War being one of them, into private enterprise.
Speaker 5: And I think we're actually getting it right. I think
Speaker 5: we're creating infrastructure to do which is going to be great.
Speaker 2: Kanessa has become as completely unnecessary, as totally outavistic as NPR.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, but you know, my father was mixed up
Speaker 1: in both Apollo and UH and and the Gemini program
Speaker 1: before it, and he had a company.
Speaker 3: That didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Oh I never told you the story. Well I should
Speaker 1: have because among the things my father's company made was
Speaker 1: the parashue release relays and timers for Apollo, and the
Speaker 1: stage separation timers for both Gemini and Apollo, and.
Speaker 2: Congratulations, as I recall, all of that always worked.
Speaker 1: Always worked. Although you know, he's a subtext the whole
Speaker 1: Apollo thirteen story because I didn't make the movie of
Speaker 1: the book. But you know, engineers up all night long
Speaker 1: running tests. How you know, we know what the what
Speaker 1: the amperage specs are. Will it still work at a
Speaker 1: lower amperage spec the other okay? Uh? And you know
Speaker 1: since time, as we know from that very fine movie
Speaker 1: about it now. One of the things that he used
Speaker 1: to reflect on is they were in such a hurry
Speaker 1: to get to the moon. Because I also a love
Speaker 1: defense contracting for jet fire planes and helicopters, and he
Speaker 1: was telling me later about it was quite a contrast
Speaker 1: between dealing with the Pentagon and especially MacNamara's wiz kids
Speaker 1: about developing some fire planes, including the F one to eleven,
Speaker 1: which is really a dud, but that was one of
Speaker 1: those genius ideas of McNamara's people. But he said in Apollo,
Speaker 1: because Kennedy had set that date, certain, we want to
Speaker 1: be there. You know, eight nine years from now. NASA
Speaker 1: did not have time to bureaucratize. They were in a
Speaker 1: hurry to get things done. And today, I mean the
Speaker 1: kind of I won't say it cut corners in an
Speaker 1: unsafe way, but they were in such a hurry that
Speaker 1: you couldn't slow it down with endless review processes and bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: And you know, they trusted the engineers to make things work.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of them was actually I think
Speaker 1: it was the very second Apollo mission, Apollo twelve. You know,
Speaker 1: the the rocket takes off, it was struck by lightning
Speaker 1: and everything went dead. And now it turned out that yo, say, excuse.
Speaker 2: Me, I can't remember. Was that shortly after or shortly
Speaker 2: before takeoff? I remember the end right for takeoff. So
Speaker 2: it's like a minute of takeoff, I think, because you know,
Speaker 2: it's still within the atmosphere, but it's under Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a sending.
Speaker 1: All right. And you know they and you know these
Speaker 1: days and they turn around, they look at all these
Speaker 1: young twenty eight year old engineers and their ties and protectors,
Speaker 1: and they said, no, we're good to go. Just flip
Speaker 1: these reset things and they'll be fine. And today they
Speaker 1: would never allow that to happen, right, I mean, it
Speaker 1: would be immediately scrubbed and anyway. So it's a whole
Speaker 1: different ethic then, and now forget about it. It's just
Speaker 1: another big sludge cludge filled bureaucracy.
Speaker 2: Which is if everything we know about Elon, what comes
Speaker 2: through again in the Isaacson biography again and again and again,
Speaker 2: is that Elon is now the forcing function faster, faster, faster,
Speaker 2: three people move faster. It's just, oh, by the way,
Speaker 2: So there's another little angle of this while we're waiting
Speaker 2: for our guest. That comes again to the Constitution of
Speaker 2: the United States and why one feature in particular is
Speaker 2: so glorious at the current moment, and that is federalism.
Speaker 2: Because the California Coastal Commission, much beloved of Stephen Hayward
Speaker 2: because it protects his view between his estate in Cambria
Speaker 2: and the rolling hills down the Pacific, has now denied
Speaker 2: Elon Musk permission to increase the number of takeoffs on
Speaker 2: obviously political grounds. It is an outrage. Does Texas even
Speaker 2: dream of doing any such thing, of course, not yet
Speaker 2: another reason why God blesses Texas.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but also why, as you say, God bless his federalism,
Speaker 5: and why the centralization of this is a bad idea. Obviously,
Speaker 5: when it comes to launching rockets, you can't just do
Speaker 5: it from anywhere. You have to be on a line.
Speaker 5: And that's why Florida, California, and Texas are the best sites.
Speaker 5: You can't just move to Minnesota, for example. But the
Speaker 5: sites that are eligible are now all fighting with one
Speaker 5: another for this business. And so Florida, and I know
Speaker 5: this because I went down and I visited it a
Speaker 5: few years ago. Florida is desperate to be the hub,
Speaker 5: and it's envious of Texas, and it's envious of California.
Speaker 5: And although California seems to be shooting yourself in the
Speaker 5: foot as usual, you are going to see this competition
Speaker 5: between these various sites driven by eventually private enterprise, where
Speaker 5: they say no, no, no, don't launch your rockets from Texas,
Speaker 5: you know, come and launch them here, which is just incredible.
Speaker 5: It's just an incredible thought relative to how NASA was
Speaker 5: run fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: Well, one concluding comment and our guest has arrived. Peter,
Speaker 1: I hate the Coastal Commissions.
Speaker 3: I know you do.
Speaker 1: I know it was provoking. You see, God, I wasn't
Speaker 1: sure that people might believe you. You're so authoritative. There's
Speaker 1: one real puzzle to me, which is the Vandenburg Air
Speaker 1: Force Base is a federal facility, and I don't understand
Speaker 1: how the State Coastal Commission has any legal jurisdiction over
Speaker 1: it at all. And my counterexample to this is Berkeley,
Speaker 1: where I have a picture somewhere of me posing by
Speaker 1: the city limits sign where they've attached to sign saying
Speaker 1: Berkeley a nuclear free zone. And up above me in
Speaker 1: the picture is the Lawrence Livermore Lab where they do
Speaker 1: weapons research and still have a working ternastic that had
Speaker 1: never occurred to me. Of course, it's a federal facility
Speaker 1: beyond the reach of the Berkeley City Council. So there's
Speaker 1: something strange going on here.
Speaker 5: Steve, Just as a final point before we go to
Speaker 5: I guess this is one of the issues I was
Speaker 5: told that Florida was having to deal with as well,
Speaker 5: is that you have these layers of permission that are necessary,
Speaker 5: and they were trying to simplify it. So with Cape Canaveral.
Speaker 5: Apparently before you could launch a rocket. I think they've
Speaker 5: changed this. You needed permission from the military because it
Speaker 5: was the military installation is adjacent to it. You need
Speaker 5: permission from the FAA because it's airspace, and you needed
Speaker 5: permission from various Florida organizations. And to try and make
Speaker 5: it more attractive, they've been trying to rationalize that so
Speaker 5: that it's only one institution that has to give permission.
Speaker 5: So I imagine you need to do something similar in California
Speaker 5: as well.
Speaker 1: Could be but it's crazy except that here would be impossible,
Speaker 1: right christ You know, one of the things missing from
Speaker 1: the campaign this year, it seems to me, is a
Speaker 1: lot of talk about climate change. It's an unpopular issue
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Speaker 1: let's the turn of our guest by saying that if
Speaker 1: the Ricochet Podcast had a frequent guest program, I think
Speaker 1: our guests, General hr McMaster would have gold level status.
Speaker 1: General McMaster has joined us several times before. Retired lieutenant
Speaker 1: general in the US Army, author of several fine books,
Speaker 1: including his most recent one, At War with our Selves,
Speaker 1: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. General McMaster,
Speaker 1: welcome back to the Ricochet Podcast.
Speaker 3: Hey Steve, great to be with you.
Speaker 1: So I've got a cind of a wild opening question
Speaker 1: for you that I didn't prepare you for, and so
Speaker 1: I'm going to make you improvise. You know, The Bulletin
Speaker 1: of Atomic Scientists have had their famous doomsday clock since
Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven, which is currently at ninety seconds to midnight,
Speaker 1: starting from seven minutes to midnight originally, and it's gone
Speaker 1: up and down some now. By the way, the primary
Speaker 1: driver is not nuclear war as it was say in
Speaker 1: the Cuban missile crisis. It's climate change, because of course
Speaker 1: everything reduces to climate change. That's a setup for saying
Speaker 1: if there were a McMaster scale for the prospect of
Speaker 1: global war or major international conflict. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if you want to go one to ten a to
Speaker 1: z clock to midnight. As I look around at Russia, Ukraine,
Speaker 1: which is increasingly tense, the Middle East obviously with Israel
Speaker 1: and Iran and other conflicts, where on the McMaster scale
Speaker 1: of potential worry of a widening global confrontation are we, Steve.
Speaker 3: I think we're at an eight. And I think we're
Speaker 3: at eight because of a couple of reasons. First of all,
Speaker 3: is this coalescing of what I would call an axis
Speaker 3: of aggressors, and this, of course is China, Russia, Iran
Speaker 3: and North Korea, and the degree to which they are
Speaker 3: aiding and ambtting one another to accomplish their objectives. For China,
Speaker 3: of course, their objective is to create an exclusionary area
Speaker 3: of privacy across the Indo Pacific and to create new
Speaker 3: spheres of influence internationally. For Russia and Putin's to re
Speaker 3: establish the Russian Empire, to restore Russia to national greatness.
Speaker 3: For Iran, it's to kick the United States out of
Speaker 3: the Middle East as the first step in surrounding and
Speaker 3: destroying Israel. And for North Korea, their objective is to
Speaker 3: reunify the peninsula under the red banner. Right. So they
Speaker 3: have different objectives, but they see their interests overlapping, and
Speaker 3: they have a common interest in tearing down the existing
Speaker 3: international order and creating the chaos that they need to
Speaker 3: accomplish their objectives. The second reason, beyond the coalescing of
Speaker 3: the aggressors, is their perception of weakness, their perception that we,
Speaker 3: the United States and our allies and partners internationally, lack
Speaker 3: the resolve to be able to confront that aggression. And
Speaker 3: I think it is the perception of weakness that is
Speaker 3: what is provocative these days.
Speaker 2: Hey, hr Peter here, I want to spend a moment
Speaker 2: flattering you. I was listening to you at the Hoover
Speaker 2: Institution yesterday, you know the presentation you did, And I
Speaker 2: was in the audience, and a young VC was sitting
Speaker 2: next to me and he said, that guy is amazing.
Speaker 2: He was trained as a warrior, and you were. You
Speaker 2: speak on public affairs yours, and you have become You
Speaker 2: became a serious historian. I mean, and the warrior bit
Speaker 2: tends to get forgotten about because because you blather so successfully.
Speaker 1: Hr.
Speaker 2: But we should note. We should note that you were
Speaker 2: in command of one of the most important tank engagements
Speaker 2: since the Second World War. We won't go into the details,
Speaker 2: but the Iraqi's lost every single tank and under you,
Speaker 2: our guys suffered not a single casualty. Anyway, you're a
Speaker 2: pretty remarkable guy. Here's the question, my question Ukraine and Israel.
Speaker 2: Our country seems it may be as a matter of
Speaker 2: policy that we a lot of stalemate in Ukraine. Here's
Speaker 2: what's happened in Ukraine. A bunch of technosavvy Ukrainian kids
Speaker 2: have saved their country by figuring out how to use
Speaker 2: Jerry Rigg drones to open up a naval passage along
Speaker 2: the coast of Ukraine, so that all though Ukraine does
Speaker 2: not have a navy, they force the Russians off so
Speaker 2: that they can continue to ship grain. They keep the
Speaker 2: Russians on the defensive, they prevent the Russians from advancing,
Speaker 2: They force them to dig in. It's a lot of
Speaker 2: our aid, it's tremendous bravery, but it's a bunch of
Speaker 2: technosavvy kids. We have a Pentagon with a budget of
Speaker 2: eight hundred billion dollars. The procurement process is sludge. Then
Speaker 2: we turn to Israel. The Biden administration has spent basically
Speaker 2: a year now telling bb Net and Yahoo and the
Speaker 2: IDF go slowly, just tap them, don't punch them, don't
Speaker 2: clean them out. No, no, no, And at some point
Speaker 2: BIB and the IDF said that's enough. This is our
Speaker 2: country we're fighting for. And they've destroyed AMAS and they've
Speaker 2: gone in and and who knows how bad the damage.
Speaker 2: They've reasserted the invincibility or at least the prestige of
Speaker 2: the masade of the IDF, of their air force, and
Speaker 2: they and they've attacked Iran. Now, I mean it's an
Speaker 2: So on the one hand, why the heck are we
Speaker 2: letting Zelensky run our policy? Why are we permitting BIB
Speaker 2: to be in the position of provoking enemies to the
Speaker 2: extent that we may have to And At the other hand,
Speaker 2: why aren't we kissing their asses.
Speaker 3: It's a very.
Speaker 2: Strange position to be in. It's a very strange position
Speaker 2: to be in. But what it comes down to is
Speaker 2: we should be learning lessons from them. Isn't there something
Speaker 2: to that?
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot to that. I think what
Speaker 3: you can learn, you know, from the Ukrainians is that
Speaker 3: you know, war's not the best way of settling differences,
Speaker 3: is G. K. Chesterton observed, But it may be the
Speaker 3: only way to ensure they're not setting for you. And
Speaker 3: the Ukrainians understand that. So we keep trying to give
Speaker 3: them just enough for them to defend themselves, but not
Speaker 3: enough to really win and prevail. And of course, in war,
Speaker 3: you know, as the Prussian philosopher work Carl von Klausot's observe,
Speaker 3: each side tries to outdo the other. So if you're
Speaker 3: not trying to outdo your enemy, overmatch your enemy, you
Speaker 3: are to profound disadvantage and you see the initiative to
Speaker 3: your enemy. So I think this has been the tension
Speaker 3: between you know, Zelenski and the Biden administration, is that
Speaker 3: we're meeting out that assistance. We're debating every different type
Speaker 3: of weapon system the permissions to those use those weapon
Speaker 3: systems in a way that would allow them to stop
Speaker 3: the Russian onslaught with these long range missiles, for example.
Speaker 3: But the innovation part of this is immensely important. I
Speaker 3: think there's a recognition now that these commercially developed technologies
Speaker 3: have a direct implication to defense and have to be
Speaker 3: accelerated into our own arsenals. What we have seen are
Speaker 3: these of asymmetric capabilities like first person view drones at
Speaker 3: PV drones. But you know what, Peter, there's always a
Speaker 3: countermeasure to everything in war. What we need to do
Speaker 3: is accelerate those capabilities into our force, but also the countermeasures,
Speaker 3: which in this case are different types of radars tied
Speaker 3: to directed energy weapons systems, for example, lasers you know
Speaker 3: that can drop things these out of the sky. Electromagnetic
Speaker 3: warfare is quite effective against these drones, for example. But
Speaker 3: as you mentioned, we're not agile enough. We haven't built
Speaker 3: those capabilities into our force as quickly as we need to.
Speaker 3: And then the other part of your question has to
Speaker 3: do with will, our will to prevail in conflicts and
Speaker 3: this message that we give the israelities, Hey, you need
Speaker 3: a ceasefire. You know in Gaza you need a ceasefire
Speaker 3: against Hesbola. How does the ceasefire make sense until Hamas
Speaker 3: is completely destroyed, until, as we just saw in the
Speaker 3: last forty eight hours, sind Wars killed. But also, you must.
Speaker 2: Destroying happened to a nicer guy.
Speaker 3: You have to destroy Hamas as a precursor to getting
Speaker 3: to any kind of enduring piece. The same people who say, oh,
Speaker 3: we need a ceizepar right now Israelis, stop pursuing the
Speaker 3: leadership of Hamas. Then in the next sentence, oftentimes President
Speaker 3: Biden did this recently, talked about getting on the path
Speaker 3: to an enduring piece between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel and
Speaker 3: the Palestinians and a two state solution. Hey, if Hamas
Speaker 3: still has the guns in Hamas, I mean in Gaza,
Speaker 3: and they're still in charge and in their charter they
Speaker 3: are determined to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews,
Speaker 3: that doesn't sound like a two state solution to me, right. So,
Speaker 3: so there's a complete disconnect between what our political aims
Speaker 3: are and what we are doing militarily. And again what
Speaker 3: Klausowitz would say, it's the first duty of the statesman
Speaker 3: not to try to try, not to try to turn
Speaker 3: war into something alien to its nature. And what we're
Speaker 3: doing is advocating for military strategies constraints on forces that
Speaker 3: are inconsistent with the political objective, and then we wonder
Speaker 3: why we're having difficulty accomplishing political objectives.
Speaker 5: I have a question relating to the eight out of
Speaker 5: ten answer you gave Elie. I just wonder if you
Speaker 5: can contextualize that for me historically, if we're an eight, now,
Speaker 5: what were we Because often the doomsday clock is so
Speaker 5: close that it becomes lost in the proximity. If we
Speaker 5: were an eight, now, what were we twenty years ago,
Speaker 5: forty years ago, sixty years ago?
Speaker 4: How would you how would you set that up?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would just say, like five five years ago,
Speaker 3: for example, six years ago, we were probably you know,
Speaker 3: I would say like at a three, you know, or
Speaker 3: a four. And the reason is we still had a
Speaker 3: significant amount of credibility associated with our ability to use
Speaker 3: power effectively to deny our adversaries ability to accomplish their
Speaker 3: objectives to the use of force. What has changed in
Speaker 3: those years? I think certainly we should go back at
Speaker 3: least to twenty one and the disastrous and humiliating withdrawal
Speaker 3: from Afghanistan in twenty twenty one. I think it was
Speaker 3: that at that moment that the Axis of Aggressors looked
Speaker 3: at us and goes say, you know, these guys just
Speaker 3: surrendered essentially really across two administrations to a terrorist organization,
Speaker 3: you know, and so now's the time for us to act.
Speaker 3: It was at that very moment that Vladimir Putin supposedly
Speaker 3: wrote that long essay laying out what his objectives were
Speaker 3: for Ukraine and began to marshal the forces that he
Speaker 3: kept in place there to conduct the massive reinvasion of Ukraine.
Speaker 3: It was at that moment that China began to become
Speaker 3: much much more aggressive for everywhere from the Himalayan frontier
Speaker 3: to the South China Sea to Visa vi Taiwan. And
Speaker 3: it was during this period of time as the Biden
Speaker 3: adminstration came in and began to supplicate to the Iranians
Speaker 3: that they forfeited the gains associated with the Abraham Accords
Speaker 3: and actually emboldened the Iranians to intensify their proxy wars
Speaker 3: against the Great Satan, you know, us, and against Israel
Speaker 3: and their Arab neighbors. It was. It's been since then.
Speaker 3: At North Korea it has resumed testing of cruise missiles
Speaker 3: and intercontinent pilistic missiles teared down. The reunification arch is
Speaker 3: providing millions of artillery routes to the Russians, and now
Speaker 3: Russians are training North Koreans in Russia for employment in Ukraine. Okay,
Speaker 3: So I think the breakpoint, at least just in recent history,
Speaker 3: Charles as I would say, is the disastrous withdrawal from
Speaker 3: Afghanistan and combined with the disastrous policies of the Biden
Speaker 3: administration in the Middle East.
Speaker 1: General, my sense of this is that in the fullness
Speaker 1: of time, especially if there's a wider conflagration ahead of us,
Speaker 1: we're going to look back on the Afghanistan withdrawal as
Speaker 1: the equivalent of the Munich Agreement in nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: as a point of no return, as a fatal mistake.
Speaker 1: And you remind us a few minutes ago that of
Speaker 1: the time honored principle that weakness invites aggression. But there
Speaker 1: are two kinds of weakness, and we've felt largely on
Speaker 1: political weakness. The ineptitude of our foreign policy leaders at
Speaker 1: the moment under the blade administration. But there's another kind
Speaker 1: of weakness that tempts aggressors, and that's military weakness. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, I keep reading stories and I don't have
Speaker 1: any deep expertise or contacts that you know. Morale's bad.
Speaker 1: We're falling short in our recruitment goals, a lot of
Speaker 1: our equipment is in disrepair. The Navy keeps seeming to
Speaker 1: have a lot of accidents that seemed to me would
Speaker 1: never have happened years ago. And so again, on the
Speaker 1: Maaster scale of worry, you know, one to ten, ten
Speaker 1: being worse. How worried should we be about our military
Speaker 1: readiness and preparedness?
Speaker 3: I would say, like a seven, we should be worried,
Speaker 3: but recognize that these problems that you're laying out are
Speaker 3: quickly reversible if we act. Now, what has happened is
Speaker 3: you've already mentioned, is there's been a diminishment of resources
Speaker 3: available to the military because the Biden administration budget, despite
Speaker 3: the threats we've been talking about, actually, when adjusted for inflation,
Speaker 3: is a real reduction in defense spending. And so we
Speaker 3: have this bow wave of deferred modernization. It's kind of
Speaker 3: a triple whammy as we look at it, a bow
Speaker 3: wave of deferred modernization. We have capacity issues in our
Speaker 3: armed forces because we've assumed for way too long that
Speaker 3: fewer and fewer and more exquisite systems could deliver security
Speaker 3: for US, and those exquisite systems, we now know, because
Speaker 3: of countermeasures, are prone to catastrophic failure. We need capacity,
Speaker 3: the size of the force matters, and we have the
Speaker 3: recruiting issues, and I believe that we can address all
Speaker 3: of these. On the recruiting issues in particular, though, I
Speaker 3: think it's connected to the million with we're all from Afghanistan,
Speaker 3: gets connected to the degree to which popular culture, cheapens
Speaker 3: and cours ins are warrior ethos. I think it's connected
Speaker 3: to efforts to politicize the military in both political parties,
Speaker 3: on both political extremes. I said, should say with the
Speaker 3: narrative that the military is extremist, right, I mean, we
Speaker 3: know that you know that that military veterans were not
Speaker 3: over represented as a portion of the population on the
Speaker 3: January sixth assault on the Capitol, for example. But that
Speaker 3: was a false narrative of the Democratic Party who tried
Speaker 3: to label you know, the members of the military is
Speaker 3: extremist or or like people talk about white supremacy in
Speaker 3: the military. I'm like, what military are you talking about?
Speaker 3: For thirty four years, our military is fundamentally intolerant of
Speaker 3: any form of bigotry or racism or sexism. Do we
Speaker 3: have problems with that, Yes, because people come into our
Speaker 3: military for our society, but our culture rejects you know
Speaker 3: that that kind of behavior and and and position. But
Speaker 3: the second, the second part of that is that you
Speaker 3: know this idea that the military has gone woke. The
Speaker 3: military is not extremist. There are people who are advancing
Speaker 3: their crazy social agendas associated with postmodernist critical theories and
Speaker 3: the valorization of victimhood and the organization of people into
Speaker 3: the categories of oppressor and oppressed and on a scale
Speaker 3: of victim and oppressor. That that nonsense. There are political
Speaker 3: appointees who are pushing that on the military, but the
Speaker 3: military has been resistant to that. And what we need
Speaker 3: is we need whatever administration comes in, get your hands
Speaker 3: off the military, understand what the military is for. Re
Speaker 3: establish the priority of being ready to fight and win wars.
Speaker 3: That's what our service secretaries should talk about. If you
Speaker 3: look at the Biden administration service secretary's priorities, you could
Speaker 3: you could scratch your in and say, please, somebody remind
Speaker 3: me again, what's the military for?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: So the standar's got to be combat readiness, combet effectors.
Speaker 3: And the last thing I'll say is there is a
Speaker 3: big important social dimension to this. You know, if you
Speaker 3: teach our children that our country is not worth defending,
Speaker 3: who the hell is going to defend you? And I
Speaker 3: think the curriculum of self loathing in our universities, in
Speaker 3: our secondary education is taking its toll. I really believe
Speaker 3: that's the case, combined with the way that popular culture
Speaker 3: and even some well meaning charities portray veterans as traumatized,
Speaker 3: fragile human beings, and so Americans don't see the tremendous
Speaker 3: rewards of service. Hey, being part of the team that's
Speaker 3: committed to a mission bigger than yourself, being committed to
Speaker 3: the matter woman next to you, willing to give everything
Speaker 3: for them, being part of teams that really take on
Speaker 3: the quality of a family and their commitment to one another,
Speaker 3: and their commitment to our nation and their mission. And
Speaker 3: the vast majority of veterans they emerge from even the
Speaker 3: most harrowing experiences stronger, more resilient, and they go on
Speaker 3: to make tremendous contributions in other walks of life in
Speaker 3: our society. So I think it's this combination, you know,
Speaker 3: of trying to politicize the military, these false narratives of
Speaker 3: extremism or wokeism in the military. It's it's popular culture,
Speaker 3: it's and it's the curriculum of self loathing combined, I
Speaker 3: think with disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, so and surrender. I
Speaker 3: don't want to self defeat in Afghanistan. So we can
Speaker 3: overcome all this, but we need leaders to get after it.
Speaker 3: And when you have you know, when you have members
Speaker 3: of both political parties trying to politicize the military, whether
Speaker 3: it's President Trump going to Area sixty at Arlington Cemetery,
Speaker 3: you know, where our most recent wars are buried, or
Speaker 3: whether it's President Biden going there when he announced the
Speaker 3: withdrawal from Afghanistan thinking that that we be a positive thing.
Speaker 3: So I just think that our political leaders are just
Speaker 3: completely disconnected from what motivates our servicemen and women. And
Speaker 3: that gets back to kind of this warrior ethos, right,
Speaker 3: this covenant that binds servicemen and women warriors to each
Speaker 3: other and should connect them to those in whose name
Speaker 3: they fight and serve. That ethos is based on values,
Speaker 3: you know, like their sense of honor, their sense of duty,
Speaker 3: their willingness to self sacrifice, their courage. Right. And so
Speaker 3: I think we have some work to do to get
Speaker 3: you know, politicians hands off the military and the military ethos.
Speaker 3: But we could all, I think, talk more about the
Speaker 3: importance of service and the tremendous rewards of service.
Speaker 2: HR McMaster's new book, At War with Ourselves, My Tour
Speaker 2: of Duty in the Trump White House.
Speaker 3: HR.
Speaker 2: You and I taped a long interview this past summer
Speaker 2: about the book, so you know how much I admire it.
Speaker 2: I won't go through through the whole book right now.
Speaker 2: You're very critical of President Trump in a number of regards.
Speaker 2: In particular, he said in motion what would become in
Speaker 2: the Biden administration, the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He proved willing
Speaker 2: to deal with the Taliban in a way of which
Speaker 2: you disapproved. At the same time, you say that the
Speaker 2: President Trump had a number of achievements in foreign policy.
Speaker 2: The book is fascinating. It's an important historical document. At
Speaker 2: War with Ourselves by H. R. McMaster. We are now
Speaker 2: just over two weeks from an election. I'm not going
Speaker 2: to ask you who you're going to vote for. But
Speaker 2: you've served in the military, you served in the White House,
Speaker 2: you know, Donald Trump, You've been a close observer of
Speaker 2: the Biden administration, which of course includes Kamala Harris advice
Speaker 2: to voters when it comes to foreign policy, when it
Speaker 2: comes to reasserting American strength, to putting right the way
Speaker 2: the rest of the country treats the military. How should
Speaker 2: voters weigh these two candidates? How should voters decide which
Speaker 2: candid well, which candidate would be best or at least
Speaker 2: which candidate would be less bad into the defense of
Speaker 2: this republic.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think, Peter, it goes back to
Speaker 3: the discussion we're having and these question about where are
Speaker 3: we on the scale of danger? You know, I think
Speaker 3: we're on high on that scale danger because the perception
Speaker 3: of weakness. Who's going to portray strength, Who's going to
Speaker 3: recognize that it is the perception of weakness that's that
Speaker 3: is that is provocative. Who's going to reverse the disastrous
Speaker 3: policies in the Middle East, in particular the conciliatory approach
Speaker 3: to the to the Islamic Republic of Iran and the
Speaker 3: theocratic dictatorship there. You know, who is also going to
Speaker 3: to recognize that, You know that Vladimir Putin is a
Speaker 3: is a bully, a thug and a coward all at
Speaker 3: the same time, and what folks him also is weakness.
Speaker 3: So I think what we need is somebody who's going
Speaker 3: to lead and somebody who is going to be seen
Speaker 3: as having to resolve necessary to counter this aggression and
Speaker 3: to do what we all want to do right which
Speaker 3: is prevent these cascading crises that we've witnessed. The largest
Speaker 3: war in Europe since World War Two, a regional war
Speaker 3: ongoing right now. There's one of the reasons why the
Speaker 3: scales an eight, because there are already two major wars
Speaker 3: going on, not even to mention, you know, the growth
Speaker 3: of Jahada's terrorist organizations. You know, there are now training camps,
Speaker 3: terrorist training camps in fifteen Afghan provinces, very predictably, and
Speaker 3: we have the expansion of ISIS, for example in West Africa,
Speaker 3: as the coups and engineered in large measure by the Russians,
Speaker 3: have led to the withdrawal of US and French forces
Speaker 3: that were in supportive local forces there who were conducting
Speaker 3: counter terrorism and operations. I mean, I could go on
Speaker 3: about this, but it's going to be a president, I think,
Speaker 3: from national security perspective who understands that these challenges to
Speaker 3: our security that develop abroad can only be dealt with
Speaker 3: at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores. And
Speaker 3: so I think that you know that people should try
Speaker 3: to try to extract more substance from the candidates and
Speaker 3: connection with what their policies would be, you know, vis
Speaker 3: a v this, this access of aggressors, and what they
Speaker 3: would do to secure a better future for Americans by
Speaker 3: by preventing UH a large scale war, which I think
Speaker 3: is a real possibility, and then also promoting American prosperity
Speaker 3: through countering, for example, UH, Chinese economic aggression.
Speaker 5: I want h You mentioned some issues that would presumably
Speaker 5: be altered if the president changed, which you will depending
Speaker 5: I respective of what happens, the president's going to change.
Speaker 5: And then you mentioned a bunch of cultural issues, for example,
Speaker 5: the charities and NGOs, the way they depict soldiers.
Speaker 4: How don'd you think the.
Speaker 5: Panoply of issues you just raise is going to take
Speaker 5: to fix? How long do those cultural questions take to remedy.
Speaker 5: Is that a matter of leadership and quick turnaround or
Speaker 5: are we looking at a decade here of change.
Speaker 3: I think it's a decade of change, you know. I think, Charles,
Speaker 3: it's a lot easier to tear things down than to
Speaker 3: build things up.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I look at you know, one of the this is
Speaker 3: a military example, but I look at the disaster of
Speaker 3: the policies associated with the Vietnam War and how they
Speaker 3: destroyed the United States Army, you know, really put an
Speaker 3: army on a real strain in the nineteen seventies. And
Speaker 3: then how it took really the Reagular administration really kind
Speaker 3: of the very end of the Carter administration, but then
Speaker 3: the Reagan administration to address that. And then and how
Speaker 3: it took a number of leaders in our army who
Speaker 3: had seen the army before these destructive policies to implement
Speaker 3: really a renaissance in the army that began with improvements
Speaker 3: and higher standards in recruiting and education and leader education
Speaker 3: in particular, at change in our doctrine, a modernization of
Speaker 3: the force. And that's that's the army that emerged from
Speaker 3: the eighties. I think one of the strongest peacetime military
Speaker 3: is relative to adversaries in the history of the world,
Speaker 3: you know, and that's the military that you know, Saddam
Speaker 3: Hussein was, you know, it was stupid enough to challenge,
Speaker 3: you know, and and and and uh ninety one go
Speaker 3: for So I think that I think of it. I
Speaker 3: think of it in terms of a decade long project
Speaker 3: of rebuilding and of course not to overcorrect. Right. So
Speaker 3: we talked about this curriculum of self loathing. You don't
Speaker 3: want to replace that with some contrived happy view of
Speaker 3: US history. But I think what's long, you know, with
Speaker 3: the way that we teach history is we've just bought
Speaker 3: into an orthodoxy of the new left. We've always had that,
Speaker 3: right Charles and Mary Beard, you know, and the and
Speaker 3: the William Appleman, Williams. I mean, it's always been a strain,
Speaker 3: you know, in in in in our interpretation of history.
Speaker 3: But it shouldn't become an orthodoxy, right And and I
Speaker 3: think what we ought to teach our young people is yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, our republic has always required constant nurturing, right
Speaker 3: we you know, we you know, are a republic though
Speaker 3: wasn't founded to preserve slavery. It was founded, for example,
Speaker 3: on on ideals and principles that ultimately made that criminal
Speaker 3: institution untenable. And we should teach our children that we
Speaker 3: fought the most destructive war in our history to emancipate
Speaker 3: six million of our fellow Americans. But then also teach
Speaker 3: them about the fellow of reconstruction, the rise of the
Speaker 3: Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow and separate butt unequal.
Speaker 3: But but then teach them about the triumph of the
Speaker 3: civil rights movement. You know, in the end of Djora segregation,
Speaker 3: inequality of opportunity, does the facto inequality of opportunities still
Speaker 3: exist based on you know, maybe the zip code you're
Speaker 3: born in. Yes, Okay, So let's get to work on that.
Speaker 3: I think what's happened is this orthodoxy of self loathing
Speaker 3: and you know, and critical theories, and you know, I
Speaker 3: think it's it robs Americans of agency, and in particular,
Speaker 3: it leaves our young people with this kind of just
Speaker 3: toxic combination of anger and resignation. So that's going to
Speaker 3: take time to restore. I think what we have on
Speaker 3: our side is the younger generation. I mean, I I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, I think it's their job as students to
Speaker 3: be skeptical about this kind of orthodoxy that they're that
Speaker 3: they're that you know that you know there's being forced
Speaker 3: on them and in some in some universities and and
Speaker 3: uh and in some curricula and secondary education as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, General, the again the title of your most
Speaker 1: recent book, at War with Ourselves. Happily, we are not
Speaker 1: at war with ourselves here at the Ricochet Podcast, and
Speaker 1: we will look forward to having you back again soon.
Speaker 1: Keep up your gold status as a Ricochet guest, and
Speaker 1: hopefully when the McMaster's s threat meter is down from
Speaker 1: eight to a more tolerable five. Thanks very much for
Speaker 1: joining us, General.
Speaker 3: See, thanks, thanks to all of you. What a pleasure
Speaker 3: to be with you.
Speaker 1: Hr thank you all right, So well, I was mentioning
Speaker 1: at the very beginning, of course, that we had a
Speaker 1: lot of familiar things happen over again this week. You know,
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Speaker 1: One thing we didn't have is we did not have
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Speaker 1: So I want to continue with you with Charlie a
Speaker 1: little bit. I mean, I guess we ought to get
Speaker 1: in on the fun with Kamala Harris this week on
Speaker 1: with Brett Barron Fox. Ah what I guess she did?
Speaker 1: What Calmly Daddy podcast? Or was that last week? I
Speaker 1: don't remember, but I did stumble across this article by
Speaker 1: one Charles CW. Cook. The headline is Kamala Harris is
Speaker 1: an idiot? Charli, I wish you wouldn't be so equivocal
Speaker 1: and uncertain in your judgments. But I mean, what you
Speaker 1: have to add about what we saw campbella this week
Speaker 1: is she desperate? What's your theory of why she decided
Speaker 1: to go on Fox? And how do you think she did?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, this piece was part of what I've referred
Speaker 5: to as a trilogy, my verdicts being that Joe Biden
Speaker 5: is an asshole, and Donald Trump is a lunatic, and
Speaker 5: Kamala Harris is an idiot. I think it's important sometimes
Speaker 5: to distill powerful or would be powerful people down to
Speaker 5: their essence, and the essence of Harris because she's an idiot.
Speaker 5: She doesn't know anything, she doesn't think about anything, she
Speaker 5: doesn't have a worldview. She is not interested in politics
Speaker 5: except in so far as it might help her gain power,
Speaker 5: and it shows I don't quite know what's going on
Speaker 5: with the campaign. What I do know is that they
Speaker 5: think they're losing. It's not the same thing as losing,
Speaker 5: but they think they're losing. And the Democrats and their
Speaker 5: friends in the press seem to think that they're losing too.
Speaker 5: And I suspect that the appearance on Brett Bear's show
Speaker 5: was the product of that sense, and what we saw
Speaker 5: on that show was predictable given that Harris, as I said,
Speaker 5: does not have anything to her except a support for
Speaker 5: abortion and a loathing of Donald Trump. There are two topics,
Speaker 5: and two topics only where Harris is confident and coherent
Speaker 5: and eloquent and forceful, and they are when discussing abortion,
Speaker 5: and that is a good issue for the Democrats.
Speaker 4: I wish it weren't, but it is.
Speaker 5: And when pointing out that Donald Trump is a liability,
Speaker 5: which is another good issue for the Democrats. Everything else
Speaker 5: she fails when asked about. And the key reason for
Speaker 5: that is that the questions that Bear asked her are unanswerable.
Speaker 5: I don't even think she needed to be an idiot
Speaker 5: for much of that interview to go the way did.
Speaker 5: She just needed to have changed her mind on every
Speaker 5: question that was put before hers in twenty nineteen. She
Speaker 5: just needed to be a part of the Biden Harris administration.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: The two things Bear kept hammering her on were why
Speaker 5: have you changed your mind on everything since twenty nineteen?
Speaker 4: There's no good answer to that.
Speaker 5: The answer is because I want to win, but she
Speaker 5: can't say that, And are you the second coming of
Speaker 5: Joe Biden, and.
Speaker 4: The answer to that is yes, but she can't say that.
Speaker 5: But she's also adopted that as her answer default because
Speaker 5: she doesn't want to say I've changed all of my
Speaker 5: opinions since twenty nineteen.
Speaker 4: Then she can't go back to them either. So she's
Speaker 4: in a completely untenable position.
Speaker 5: And I think that Bear, because he's very good at
Speaker 5: his job, made that clear, except on the question of Trump,
Speaker 5: where she has a point and she knows that she
Speaker 5: can score some points. And although it didn't come up
Speaker 5: in the interview so much, on abortion, where she knows
Speaker 5: she's on a seventy to thirty winning side.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, Peter, you know, as someone who has crafted short,
Speaker 1: memorable statements, you know, tear down some wall or something
Speaker 1: stuff like that. I wonder if you remember when George H. W.
Speaker 1: Bush was running for president in nineteen eighty eight. The
Speaker 1: reason I bring us up is, you know, Kamela on
Speaker 1: the View last week said I can't think of a
Speaker 1: thing where I disagree with Biden, and that I have
Speaker 1: a synapse. I haven't killed with whiskey yet. That reminded
Speaker 1: me that at the very first I think it was
Speaker 1: Republican debate for the eighty eight cycle. Everybody's after Vice
Speaker 1: President Bush, right, you know, Jack Kemp was in the
Speaker 1: field Al hag Pete DuPont, the governor of Delaware. It
Speaker 1: was a formidable field and one of the first questions,
Speaker 1: I wonder if you were involved with this, remember it
Speaker 1: and helped my memory. One of the first questions. I
Speaker 1: tried to look it up and can't find a transcript,
Speaker 1: but I remember it pretty vividly. One of the first
Speaker 1: questions was Vice President Bush, can you please tell us
Speaker 1: what policies or decisions of President Reagan's that you have
Speaker 1: disagreed with or argued against during your vice presidency, And
Speaker 1: he very confident and asserted. Bush said, I could, but
Speaker 1: I won't. I won't for two reasons. One is is
Speaker 1: that it's a vice president's duty to give candid counsel
Speaker 1: to a president. And if you start having vice presidents
Speaker 1: to make a practice of talking publicly about what they
Speaker 1: disagree with, he will room one a very important relationship
Speaker 1: of confidentiality between a president and a vice president. And second,
Speaker 1: this campaign's about the future, not about the past. And
Speaker 1: then he course laid out a couple of his main points,
Speaker 1: and that was the end.
Speaker 3: Of it.
Speaker 1: He never got trussed again to put daylight between himself
Speaker 1: and President Reagan. A couple of different circumstances. But do
Speaker 1: you remember that episode at all? Maybe you heard of that. No, No,
Speaker 1: I wasn't by that. Why couldn't Harris campaign? And this
Speaker 1: is their incompetence that they could have given almost exactly
Speaker 1: the same answer, And.
Speaker 2: That's exactly correct, That is exactly correct. Of course, the
Speaker 2: difference is that Ronald Reagan was popular, extremely popular, and
Speaker 2: Joe Biden is not, and Bush would almost have been
Speaker 2: able to say. And three there was no substantive difference.
Speaker 2: But still you're exactly right. Well, we could go into this.
Speaker 2: We won't go into it. We could go on and on.
Speaker 2: There are answers that both of these candidates could and
Speaker 2: should be giving, that are crisp, that are reasonable, that
Speaker 2: would be illuminating, and that would advance their causes politically.
Speaker 2: And for what do we have a lunatic versus and
Speaker 2: know nothing and lunatic verses in it? They're both they
Speaker 2: are who they are, they are who they are, and
Speaker 2: they're missing one chance after another. By the way, so
Speaker 2: may I ask the two of you the same question
Speaker 2: I asked Hr and isolate it to the question of
Speaker 2: foreign policy alone, Trump versus Harris, and what's the correct
Speaker 2: way of weighing it? What is the correct way of
Speaker 2: assessing it? And by the way, Steve, a side note
Speaker 2: for you, since you and I are both in California
Speaker 2: and our votes in California won't matter anyway, the state
Speaker 2: is going overwhelmingly for Harris, shall we agree right now
Speaker 2: to write in hr McMaster.
Speaker 1: I was going to suggest that, Yeah, and then we
Speaker 1: can also you and I start the committee for hr
Speaker 1: McMaster twenty twenty eight. Yeah, we sure, we go exactly,
Speaker 1: But boys, how do you weigh it out? How do
Speaker 1: you assess it? We're going to end up with one
Speaker 1: or the other of these? How do we buy it?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 1: I don't completely agree with Charlie that Trump is a lunatic,
Speaker 1: although I understand why he and many other people think that.
Speaker 3: But he's not crazy.
Speaker 1: But is he crazy like a fox? Well, that's what
Speaker 1: I kind of think. But there's an advantage to having
Speaker 1: someone that our enemies wonder about, right and that you know,
Speaker 1: he might be crazy. He just might. He just might
Speaker 1: level the country like he threatens to do on Twitter.
Speaker 1: And there's some value in that now, it's got to
Speaker 1: be credible. But you know, taking out General SULEMANI back
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen, that sent the message that, you know what,
Speaker 1: he will do that kind of thing once in a while.
Speaker 1: So that's why I think it get tips in his favor.
Speaker 1: Charlie may disagree. I don't know.
Speaker 2: And do we have to suppose that the people he'll
Speaker 2: surround himself with will be better?
Speaker 1: I don't necessarily suppose that, but you don't, all right, No, Charlie.
Speaker 5: My description of Trump is illinity isn't really related to
Speaker 5: his foreign policy.
Speaker 4: I sctually agree with you on this. I think that
Speaker 4: Trump's perception.
Speaker 5: As a crazy man probably did help while he was president,
Speaker 5: and the way that he told probably did help as well.
Speaker 5: I think that his behavior after he lost, and some
Speaker 5: of the things that he said suspend the Constitution, for example,
Speaker 5: with sheer lunacy and we're disqualifying. But in terms of
Speaker 5: foreign policy, and I'm not a foreign policy expert, so
Speaker 5: I want to say that upfront, this is just not
Speaker 5: my area.
Speaker 4: I do think that there.
Speaker 5: Is still a fundamental divide, and I don't think Trump
Speaker 5: negates this between the broad worldviews of the left and
Speaker 5: the right, and the Republicans and the Democrats and the
Speaker 5: sort of people who are around Harris and Trump.
Speaker 4: That creates a.
Speaker 5: Substantial difference in attitudes toward foreign policy wants candidates are
Speaker 5: in office. And I think that difference is a belief
Speaker 5: in the immutability of human nature. And at the risk
Speaker 5: of getting too philosophical here, everything I see from Biden
Speaker 5: and Harris, whether it's Israel or Iran or China, even
Speaker 5: seems to presuppose that bad actors in the world act
Speaker 5: badly because of the United States and its conduct, or
Speaker 5: something that we said, or because there are fundamental injustices
Speaker 5: that need to be remedied. And I think that by
Speaker 5: and large Republicans believe that there are just bad people
Speaker 5: not there, and that they have bad instincts and bad aims.
Speaker 4: Now there is a.
Speaker 5: Caveat here in that I don't think that Trump is
Speaker 5: a stooge of Putin. I don't even think that he's
Speaker 5: as useful to Putin as people say. And if you look,
Speaker 5: for example, when he was president, he was the one
Speaker 5: who sent heavy weaponry the Ukraine, which Obama didn't do.
Speaker 5: He has not been as opposed to funding the war
Speaker 5: in Ukraine as many think. In fact, one of the
Speaker 5: funny things about our politics is people have pretended to
Speaker 5: make fit their ideological priors that Trump is against funding Ukraine.
Speaker 5: So you had the Bulwark saying, wow, he must have
Speaker 5: been really angry with Mike Johnson, when actually he helped
Speaker 5: Mike Johnson get that funding through. And then you had
Speaker 5: American Greatness, for example, saying, look at all of these
Speaker 5: traitors in Congress who passes funding without acknowledging that Trump
Speaker 5: was among So I'm a little confused by some of
Speaker 5: his electric on Russia, but I don't think he's, you know,
Speaker 5: anything like as friendly toward Russia as the pressers. But
Speaker 5: by and large, I think Trump understands that there are
Speaker 5: bad guys out there, that the world is dangerous, that
Speaker 5: the geopolitical interests of the United States should not be
Speaker 5: subordinated to some sort of Berkeley thesis on hierarchies of grievance,
Speaker 5: and that if we get a Trump administration, it's foreign
Speaker 5: policy is going to be better as a result. And
Speaker 5: I just think that the presidential candidates and the parties
Speaker 5: they represent and the ideologies that they here to make
Speaker 5: that difference really concrete, and it will manifest solf after
Speaker 5: the election.
Speaker 2: Very nicely put, I wished, mister chairman, I wish to
Speaker 2: associate myself with every word of Charlie's remarks.
Speaker 1: Okay, very well, nicely put. Well, let me begin drawing
Speaker 1: us to an end with two sleeper items from from
Speaker 1: this week, and you can grab either one of them
Speaker 1: or neither if you like, and suggest the third one.
Speaker 1: The first one is, you've heard a lot of chatter
Speaker 1: and there seems to be some evidence in campaign talk
Speaker 1: about how the whole business of transgenderism and you know, women,
Speaker 1: men and women's sports is the sleeper issue in this campaign.
Speaker 1: And I gather some Republican candidates for the Senator running
Speaker 1: some very effective ads putting Democrats on the defensive. And
Speaker 1: Brett behar brought this up with the Kambla Harris, who
Speaker 1: tried to run away from it as fast as she could.
Speaker 1: So there's that. I wonder if we think that that
Speaker 1: really is a big sleeper issue, we're going to wake
Speaker 1: up on election day or the day after and realize
Speaker 1: it was a factor. The second one was that I
Speaker 1: don't know if you guys saw this, but you know,
Speaker 1: I'm on a college campus, I'm in the middle of
Speaker 1: these academic fights. The New York Times this week ran
Speaker 1: a very long story right on the DEI business at
Speaker 1: the University of Michigan. And what's notable about it is
Speaker 1: not just how savage, it is about how awful and
Speaker 1: corrupt and ideological far left ideology. The writer says. But
Speaker 1: the story was written by Nick Confessatory, was a pretty
Speaker 1: left wing reporter for the Times.
Speaker 2: And indeed it was Confessional.
Speaker 1: I hope I got his name right, But I mean
Speaker 1: the story is I kept thinking Chris Rufa could have
Speaker 1: written this article. Astonishing piece, and you know, if you know,
Speaker 1: there's the cliche if you've lost the New York Times.
Speaker 1: But that's got to leave a mark, except I think
Speaker 1: we're going to see and that story made clear that
Speaker 1: they're digging in so hard with the whole DEI ideology
Speaker 1: for reasons. General McMaster laid out that it's going to
Speaker 1: be hard to root them out. But I thought that's
Speaker 1: a remarkable thing that The New York Times would run
Speaker 1: such a long piece like that. So those are my
Speaker 1: two sleeper stories of the week or items of the week.
Speaker 1: You comment on the DEI question, sure, Charlie mentioned a
Speaker 1: moment ago the glories of federalism. And here we have
Speaker 1: yet another example. I discovered on a recent trip to Texas,
Speaker 1: something that I think Charlie is already well aware of,
Speaker 1: and that is that Florida and Texas, the governors of
Speaker 1: those two states keep an eye on each other, and
Speaker 1: the legislatures of those two states keep an eye on
Speaker 1: each other, and they feel competitive about who is doing
Speaker 1: the most rigorous and sweeping job of instituting conservative policies.
Speaker 1: We have states competing to keep taxes low, to reduce regulation,
Speaker 1: to fighting for the aerospace industry as it is emerging
Speaker 1: under the likes of Elon Musk. And when Ben Sas,
Speaker 1: who's had to step down as president of Florida because
Speaker 1: of the University of Florida because of his wife's illness.
Speaker 1: But this past spring, Ben Sas announced that dea I
Speaker 1: was going to be forbidden at the University of Florida,
Speaker 1: and the way that would be handled is that DEI
Speaker 1: officials in the university's employment would be first on the
Speaker 1: list for new jobs as they became available. And the
Speaker 1: Texans looked over their shoulders at what Ben Sas had
Speaker 1: done and said, we'll see him and raise him and
Speaker 1: the legislature made DEI illegal at state institutions, and of
Speaker 1: course in Texas. The state institutions in particular UT dominate
Speaker 1: higher education in Texas, and this year they are being
Speaker 1: serious about it, hauling into the legislature for public hearings,
Speaker 1: provosts and other officials from the UT system to make
Speaker 1: sure that they are obeying the law. And in Michigan,
Speaker 1: of course it's a different but oh my goodness, think
Speaker 1: yet again, Thank goodness for federalism in this country. There's
Speaker 1: still always some new place to go. You know, I
Speaker 1: am I mean two quick things about that. I know
Speaker 1: a bit about Texas story. They're actually slow in the
Speaker 1: legislature to figure it out, but once they did, because
Speaker 1: I know people were talking to them for two three
Speaker 1: years now about you need to do something about this. Yes,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I know, faculty members, you excellent. And but
Speaker 1: they've said, now, we're not going to be fooled by
Speaker 1: renaming something. That's a tactic going on a lot of places.
Speaker 1: But I do remember, you know, when I had a
Speaker 1: long conversation about this with Governor DeSantis is a year
Speaker 1: and a half ago, and one of things he said was,
Speaker 1: I don't understand why redder states than Florida. The Republican
Speaker 1: governors are not taking after their public universities. Well now
Speaker 1: they are because I think they looked around and said,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, he's got the right idea. So I think
Speaker 1: that's what's going on that we have come to and
Speaker 1: I maybe even surpassed the end of our hour. We
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Speaker 1: all in the common threads on Ricochet four point zero.
Speaker 1: Bye guys, Bye bye boys.
Speaker 2: Next week I think next week, yes, yes, next week.
Speaker 3: Ricochet h
Speaker 2: Join the conversation.