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