Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Highest Risk: 2025-2026 - with HR McMaster

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Upon graduation from the US Military Academy in 1984, HR McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the US Army for thirty-four years. He retired as a lieutenant general in June 2018. From 2014 to 2017, General McMaster designed the future army as the director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center and the deputy commanding general, futures, of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). As commanding general of the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, he oversaw all training and education for the army’s infantry, armor, and cavalry force.He commanded the Combined Joint Inter-Agency Task Force in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012; he commanded the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq from 2005 to 2006; he was also deployed in Operation Desert Storm from 1990 to 1991. General McMaster holds a PhD in military history. He was an assistant professor of history at the US Military Academy. He is author of the bestselling books Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World and Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. General McMaster is the host of two podcasts: Battlegrounds: International Perspectives on Crucial Challenges and Opportunities and is a regular on GoodFellows, both produced by the Hoover Institution. He is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and he also teaches at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. And he chairs an advisory board at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Discussed in this episode: Dereliction of Duty by HR McMaster: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dereliction-of-duty-h-r-mcmaster/1126012409 Books on China by Frank Dikotter: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/frank%20dikotter Battlegrounds podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/battlegrounds-w-h-r-mcmaster-international-perspectives/id1551042106 GoodFellows podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/goodfellows-conversations-from-the-hoover-institution/id1505855709

invading Taiwan would be kind of a tough thing. Taiwan is an island the size of Maryland. It's mountainous in the West. It's densely populated in massive urban areas in the East. There are only a couple of good landing places. Only a couple of months when the seas are amenable to a cross-strait invasion. It's about 150 miles across. Now, if they're looking at a full invasion and subjugation of Taiwan, it's not clear to me that they could pull it off. It'd be a rude awakening for them that is analogous to the rude awakening that the Russians had with the re-invasion of Ukraine. Before we start today's conversation, just one housekeeping note. In our next episode, we have Tyler Cowen coming on the podcast, who's the host of one of my favorite podcasts called

Conversations with Tyler. He also runs Marginal Revolution, which if you do not read Marginal Revolution, the economics blog, you must. I highly recommend it. He's done a bunch of other things. He's one of the greatest teachers I know on everything from markets and economics to the future of technology and now artificial intelligence. We're going to talk about a lot of topics with Tyler. If you have a question for him, please send it to dan at unlocked.fm. That's dan at unlocked.fm. That's dan at unlocked.fm.

Please keep your question to under 30 seconds. Just record it as a voice memo and send it in, and we will pick a couple of them to ask Tyler in our next episode. And now into today's show. General H.R. McMaster is known to be able to break down succinctly just about any military operational scenario. But it's not just military operations and strategy that he can unpack. H.R. McMaster also has a deep sense of history of military affairs, and he served at the most senior levels

of government developing and implementing a national security strategy. And he's also commanded troops on the front lines in military theaters around the world. Upon graduation from West Point in 1984, H.R. served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army for 34 years. He retired as a lieutenant general in June of 2018. He had many posts in the military, too many to list here. We'll post them all in the show notes. But he commanded the Combined Joint Interagency Task Force in Kabul in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012. He commanded the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq from 2005 to 2006. That's actually where the model for the surge, what ultimately became the surge strategy in Iraq, was first tested. And it was back in the early years of the Iraq War that I first met General McMaster in Baghdad. It wasn't his first time in Iraq. He was also deployed in Operation Desert Storm from 1990 to 1991. H.R. holds a PhD in

military history. He was an assistant professor of history at West Point. He's the author of numerous bestselling books, including Battlegrounds, The Fight to Defend the Free World, and also Derelection of Duty, Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and The Lies That Led to Vietnam. A few books have had more of an influence on me and my worldview and how I think about the government and civilian military relations than HR's Derelection of Duty. I highly recommend it. We'll post a link to that as well in the show notes. He's also the host of Battlegrounds, which is a podcast inspired by the name of his book. It's called Battlegrounds, International Perspectives on Crucial Challenges

and Opportunities. And he's a regular on Goodfellas, a podcast produced by the Hoover Institution. I highly recommend you subscribe to both of these. He teaches at Stanford University, where he's affiliated with Hoover. He also teaches at the Business School at Stanford, and he's the chair of an advisory board at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. So a lot here to learn from HR. As we return to an age of geopolitical conflict, are our business leaders and policymakers and the markets and the media undervaluing geopolitical risk, real geopolitical risk, where things could really unravel soon, not off in the distance, but 2025 or 2026?

That's what we get into today with General H.R. McMaster. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast my longtime friend and sort of intellectual mentor, even though he doesn't know it, retired General H.R. McMaster, former White House National Security Advisor, historian, host of one of the best podcasts I listen to on military affairs and global affairs called Battlegrounds. We'll put the link to it in the show notes. And also co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, Goodfellas, and the author of several books, but one of which had a huge influence on my thinking. I read about a decade

ago, decade and a half ago, Dereliction of Duty, which we'll talk about near the end of this conversation. HR, thanks for joining us. Hey, Dan, great to be with you. And man, this is a great podcast. Thanks so much for the service you're providing here. Thank you. Thanks for doing this. We've had a number of offline conversations over the years. So I appreciate you willing to do one of these online. I hope you are as candid in the online as you are in the offline, but totally understand if you have to be more restrained. I'll be candid. That's why I was only, I think, at the White House for 13 months. Exactly. Okay, so let's jump into it.

One thing I mentioned to you offline is I was recently having lunch with a friend of mine who has done, let's call it a lot of geopolitical, engaged in a lot of geopolitical advisory work one way or the other and has the ear of a number of business leaders and has been doing it for a number of years. And he said that he used to tell business leaders that they were overvaluing and overinterpreting geopolitical risk. That is to say, the reality is the nature of flare-ups in geopolitics, as horrendous and awful and traumatic and gut-wrenching as a terrorist attack may be in any part of the world, he argued the reality is he would tell business leaders, it's not going to affect the macro global economy that much. It's not really going to have long-term impact on the markets, may have short-term impact, but not long-term or even medium-term impact.

And that you business leaders, you the markets are overreacting in the moment to these flare-ups. And he says, what we're dealing with now, sort of, let's make the starting point the Russia-Ukraine war, which is now over a year long, but you could maybe say it was sometime before that, is he says what we're experiencing now, he thinks business leaders are undervaluing and underestimating the impact of and underinterpreting geopolitical events. So what's different now? If he's right, A, do you agree with him? And B, if he's right, why is the business world and the markets undervaluing geopolitical events now relative to pre-Russia Ukraine? Yeah, he's right.

And I think he's making the observation kind of late to the game. I mean, I think that this was clear that I think business financial leaders have undervalued geostrategic risk. I mean, going back to the turn of the century, because we had some harbingers of future armed conflict, future geostrategic competition that we just didn't pay attention to because during the 90s, we were over-optimistic and we became complacent. We were over-optimistic based on some good reasons, right? We had won the Cold War. The Soviet Union collapsed. China, of course, was not yet really a clear competitor in the 1990s.

That didn't really occur until the vast increases in the size of their economy through the 1990s, and especially after World Trade Organization recession in 2001. And we demonstrated our military prowess in the Gulf War. So we thought, hey, an arc of history has guaranteed the primacy of our free and open societies over closed authoritarian systems. We thought, okay, well, who's a great power to compete with us right now? This is what some people called at the time our unipolar moment, but some people forgot the moment part of that and thought that we were going

to have predominant power and influence into the foreseeable future. And then we thought our technological prowess, our technological military prowess would guarantee our security. And those warnings started to happen at the turn of the century, right? We had the largest mass murder terrorist attack in history on 9-11. Terrorists perpetrated that attack, bypassing our technological military prowess. And of course, inflicted tremendous damage on us, murdering 3,000 Americans, but also taking trillions of dollars out of our economy, right? So how about Vladimir Putin coming into power in the year 2000, kind of laying it out in his initial speech, but then taking a series of actions in the early 2000, kind of laying it out in his initial speech, but then taking

a series of actions in the early 2000s, poisoning a presidential candidate in Ukraine, various assassinations, a sustained campaign of subversion, massive denial of service attacks on Estonia, invasion of Georgia in 2008. I mean, he laid it out in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. What did we do? Nothing. We were complacent. You know, I could give many, many other examples of China's behavior that demonstrated that

they were applying various forms of economic aggression against us and not playing by the rules, not becoming the so-called responsible stakeholder. You could say the same about Iran's nuclear program, for example, their sustained proxy wars things in life are are black swans. But hey, this was a pink flamingo. I mean, this was right in front of us for a long time. So you say you talk about confirmation bias or recency bias. in one of your many hats through almost all of modern history the west has been mired in some kind of great power conflict whether it got cold or hot there was some kind of great power conflict and then from the fall of you know the fall of the soviet union until the russia ukraine war we had

30 years of no great power what what you're saying there were signs of it and yeah and so some commentators uh were late to it um and some of our government leaders were late to it but there were but but it certainly wasn't late the sort of visible concrete form of great power conflict that had existed through the cold war and through the first world war and we can go on and on and on back through history so we kind of had this 30 of great power conflict that had existed through the Cold War and through the First World War, and we can go on and on and on back through history. So we kind of had this 30-year, this three-decade quasi-break, not full break, but quasi-break. And many of our leaders in government today in the West came of age during that time. That's when they developed their

skills. That's when they developed their knowledge base. That's what they knew. And suddenly we're in this new period, what feels like a new period as it relates to the US and China and the US and Russia. So first of all, how would you characterize this new period? And how much of a problem is it that our leaders have no real experience with this kind of environment. It's a big problem. It's a big problem because we have two revanchist revisionist powers on the Eurasian landmass who are determined to rewrite the rules of international discourse, economically, from a security perspective. I would define human rights, for example,

and are promoting their authoritarian, and in the case of China, mercantilist model in a way that would be to our profound disadvantage if they're able to succeed. And so the stakes are quite high. But what's happened is, and as you suggested, Dan, is that our complacency has led to a couple of things. First of all, it's led to, I think, a lack of strategic competence. Our skills in competition have atrophied. In fact, we became so complacent in the 90s and in the 2000s

that we vacated key arenas of competition that are critical to our future, to future prosperity and preserving peace and security. And those are economic arenas of competition, for example, but also even physical arenas of competition. The South China Sea, for example, we're trying to lay claim to the ocean. And so I think that we are behind. And I think it's sort of as a result of this over-optimism and maybe soft-headed

cosmopolitanism or whatever you want to call it, you know, in these terms like the global community and the international community, we've talked ourselves into this idea that the world operates as a condominium of nations who cooperate through international organizations to solve global issues. That's not the case. So Gary Cohn and I wrote this essay in 2017 entitled America First Doesn't Be America Alone. It was in the Wall Street Journal, and there's a subsequent, I think, in the Times along the same theme in which we said, hey, we have to compete.

You know, competition doesn't mean confrontation, but it means that we have to reenter some of these arenas of competition. For example, when you think of an organization like the World Health Organization, why would that be controversial? Shouldn't we work together on global health? Well, I mean, China actively subverted that organization like it did the Human Rights Council. So I think we have to recognize the need to compete and the need for us to get some of our muscle memory back to do it because our muscles are atrophied. And I think what's even worse, the second factor is that overconfidence, of course, maybe a touch of hubris in the 90s led to some profound disappointments. It led to a disappointment associated with the horrible terrorist attacks in 9-11. But how about the disappointment of the unanticipated length and difficulty of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Dan, I think we first met in Baghdad, 2003, like right after Baghdad fell,

you know? And what I think we ought to talk more about is not whether or not we should have evaded Iraq in 2003, but who the heck thought it would be easy? Because a lot of people thought it would be easy. So we were flying too high in the 90s. Then we flew too low as a financial crisis hit, as we had an opioid epidemic, as we saw social media increase the vitriol of our partisan discourse and polarize us. And we saw identity politics and new forms of reified philosophies and critical theories and postmodernist theories interact with old forms of bigotry and racism and draw straight from one another, right? Create centripetal forces that are spinning us apart.

I mean, so we went from being too high to too low, and now we have to regain not only our competence, but also our confidence. Our confidence in who we are as a people, our confidence in our democratic institutions and processes and our principles, but also our confidence that we can develop and implement a competent approach to foreign policy and national security. Okay. So I want to get back to that in terms of what it would look like in a moment. But before we do, you say that there was, you know, we spent a lot of time debating whether or not we should have gone into Iraq in 2003 and not enough looking at why we thought it would be so easy. I tend to agree with you. Today, there seems

to be, and you and I have talked about this, it's the only topic on which there's a real bipartisan consensus, which was confronting China in some way. And the only two issues where you can find bipartisan consensus today in Washington is on confronting China and reigning in big tech. And on big tech, there may be a bipartisan consensus that big tech needs to be reined in, but each party has a different concern about big tech, and therefore it makes a sort of remedy for dealing with big tech, at least breached in a bipartisan sense, difficult to imagine. But that's not necessarily the case with China. I was struck by that first hearing, the congressional hearing, Mike Gallagher's committee on China about a month ago. And

basically the Democrats and the Republicans, and there was that TikTok hearing also, I think that was maybe in the Commerce Committee in the House. Democrats and Republicans, basically, it's the only time in a long time I've seen republicans and democrats on capitol hill basically they could have been interchangeable uh in terms of the toughness they were talking so there's a consensus on confronting china in some way do you worry that like the consensus before the iraq war about how easy it would be, which was also a bipartisan consensus. A, we need to go into Iraq and B, the sense that it would be easy. Do you worry that there's not enough internal discussion about what confronting China will look like? And are we kind of, you know, tiptoeing into a military confrontation, a head on confrontation, that we're not fully imagining the risks around and we'll regret, like, well, why weren't we having a more robust internal

conversation before we let things escalate to this degree? Yeah. Again, I think the reason why we didn't have an earlier discussion about this is complacency. I mean, in March of 2017, we were rushing to get a sort of conceptual foundation in place for a new the Obama administration's policy toward China and observed that we were about to affect the most significant shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. And that's because the Obama administration's policy and actually the policies of previous administrations going even back to George H.W. Bush in the post-Cold War period were based on the fundamental assumption that China, after being welcomed into the international community economically, diplomatically, and so forth, would play by the rules. And as China prospered, that it would liberalize its economy and liberalize its form of governance. It was by 2017 clear that that was not the case.

It was clear based on Chinese actions and behaviors. And, and, uh, and that required us to, to, to take an approach and the shift that we took is toward transparent competition. And, uh, and so I think that, you know, the reason we didn't do that sooner is because we clung to that fundamentally flawed assumption for, you know, for far, far too long. And I think for those, you know, who would say, hey, isn't this dangerous, this consensus? No, I think it's just way over. I'll tell you, it was not the consensus in 2017, Dad. I'll tell you, when we rolled out the policy

and we talked about the policy, there was a tremendous amount of pushback from those who continued to cling to that fundamentally flawed assumption. And then I think what China's done is China's really helped create the consensus themselves. I mean, if you want to thank anybody for the consensus on China, thank Xi Jinping. You know, I kind of want to send him flowers and chocolates, man, and say thanks for helping

everybody realize that this is a real problem because look at their behavior. I mean, just since COVID. How about foisting COVID on the world? How about going after anybody who tried to ring the alarm bells, persecuting journalists and doctors who were trying to do so, subverting the World Health Organization in the midst of the pandemic, adding insult to injury with this wolf warrior diplomacy, massive cyber attacks on our pharmaceutical companies and medical research activities during the pandemic.

How about economic coercion during the pandemic toward Australia? You said, hey, I think we have to try to figure out where this virus came from. They punished Australia economically. Same treatment for Estonia. I mean, look at what they did in the South China Sea, rammed and sunk vessels during this period of time, bludgeoning Indian sores to death on the Himalayan frontier. this, I mean, vessels during this period of time, bludgeoning Indian swords to death on the Himalayan frontier. Okay, I mean, what more do you need, you

know, in terms of evidence? We haven't even talked about the coercive, the coercion toward Taiwan or the threatening sort of military actions in the Sukaku areas around Japan and Northeast Asia. I mean, the list just goes on and on, you know, and so how about like enabling the Russians as they have been, uh, in Ukraine, uh, that,

you know, the, the, the strategic partnership with Iran, you know, joint, uh, naval exercises with the Iranians or the Russians. I mean, you know, I mean, let's wake up to, let's wake up to this, Dan, you know, and recognize that we should stop underwriting our own demise with financial and economic relationships that strengthen the People's Liberation Army, that help them perpetuate or perpetrate a campaign of slow genocide against the Uyghurs and stifle human freedom, or employ their statist mercantilist economic model against us in a way that fundamentally disadvantages our businesses. So, yeah, I mean, I'm not afraid of the consensus. I think it's just long overdue. So, yeah, so what you're basically saying is there was not a consensus before

and we've worked through these issues and the threat has become so glaring that it's not like suddenly people the american public has expressed through its representatives in washington are on a war footing it's that it's a delayed reaction after a lot of kind of walking around willfully blindfolded um or blindfolding ourselves uh and hoping that that this threat you know wasn't wasn't real and now we realize it's real and to your point, long overdue. And some people are struggling still. I mean, if you look at Chad Yeltsin's recent speech on China, I mean, it is a textbook case of cognitive dissonance, textbook. And so I think there are still some people who, you know, are disappointed

and they should be disappointed. Uh, but I think that, that, that many people are still reluctant to wake up to the new reality that we have to compete. Uh, our, uh, mutual friend, Hal Brands coauthored a book with, uh, Michael Beckley called the danger zone, Zone, about what he regards as the coming hot war with China. And, you know, he kind of lays out that this is not a far, like a long, you know, this is not long, far out in the horizon. This is, this is happening soon, potentially really soon. So can you, can you just summarize his take? Do you agree with it? Like, what does it look like?

Are we actually looking at a U.S.-China flare-up as a 2025 event, a 2026 event? Yes, we are. And I think the reason we are are because of the aspirations and the fears of the Chinese Communist Party. And I think there's two misunderstandings we have to correct, you know, about the nature of the competition. What is the tendency to kind of just blame us, you know, because we're trying to keep China down

or to say that this competition is really just part of the Thucydides trap, you know, and a natural sort of confrontation between a rising power and a status quo power. But I think you have to, again, look squarely at the Chinese Communist Party's actions, but also read their words. I mean, the great scholar of Communist China, Frank Decoder, I highly recommend his five volumes now on the party. He said that people tend to, when they look at China, to treat secondary sources as primary

and primary sources as secondary. But if you look at what Xi Jinping's saying, he's preparing the Chinese people for war. He was talking about the need to make sacrifices. He's talking about the situation today and portraying it as analogous to Mao's decision to intervene in Korea, which they call the War of American Aggression.

And he calls it a preemptive blow that Mao delivered to prevent another hundred blows. And so as the Chinese economy struggles, as know, fails because of its own decisions, the frailties in the economy based on their race to surpass us, the, you know, the focus on economic growth to a fault where they've incurred so much debt. You see this playing out in the real estate sector. I think what you're going to see is who are they going to blame? They're going to blame us, right? And that's going to lead to, I think, an increase in jingoistic nationalist rhetoric. And it's going to lead to, I think, potentially more aggression oriented on Taiwan or in the South China Sea. And I think Xi Jinping thinks he has maybe only a fleeting window of opportunity to act,

you know, to act before maybe China grows old, before it can grow rich, you know, maybe act before Taiwan strengthens its defenses further. And we have some big events coming up, the Taiwanese election in February, for example, a U.S. election in 2024. And I think the danger is if they portray weakness, which leads to kind of the second misunderstanding, you know, that what we do to compete might be seen as provocative. You know what's provocative?

Weakness is provocative. I mean, if you look at Russia's renewed invasion of Ukraine, it followed the disastrous surrender to a terrorist organization and withdrawal from Afghanistan. And Putin looked at us, Xi Jinping looked at us, us being the West, the United States in particular, and thought, hey, they've got nothing. You know, in fact, they said as much in Beijing just prior to the Olympics and just prior to the re-invasion of Ukraine. They said, basically, you're over, United States. You're over in the West. This is the new era of international relations. Get used to us being in charge.

So I think we have to really recognize that, you know, kind of Reagan was right, you know, peace through strength. And not that we want to be, you know, beating our chests about it or anything, but we need to just demonstrate real military capabilities. And we have to demonstrate real resolve to compete economically in the bolster supply chains and to ensure that we don't trade energy dependency that we had like in the Middle East in the 1970s for an energy dependency on China associated with hardware and equipment that necessary for the transition to renewable energy sources. I'm talking about solar panels and wind turbines and the upstream components and the rare earths associated with those or battery manufacturing.

We need to really do quite a bit, Dan, and we're already behind. Frank Dakota, the book, the one volume I know and read parts of is the, I would say, Devourer. But my friend John, who knows, says whenever I say I've devoured a book, he doesn't believe me because he doesn't think I could devour that many books. So it's true. Sometimes I dip in and out of books and that the dakota book on famine is one of them but it's a multi-volume you're saying he's got many volumes that was great famine is that's one that's the one on uh the one on the great beat forward right right then he then what he did is that was the first one he wrote then he then he wrote the the to that, uh, which was on, on the, uh, the

coastal revolution. Then he wrote the prequel to both of those, which is the history of the party, uh, going all the way up to 48, 49, uh, really up to the, up to the, the great leap forward. And then the last volume is, is, uh, is the party sis mal, you know, and I'm telling you, they're just, yeah, we'll put them all in the show notes. He's, yeah, he's a force of nature. If China

tries to take Taiwan militarily, do you think there's any way the U.S. does not get involved? Is there a world in which we don't get involved and doesn't China know that? Well, yeah, we will be involved, right? I mean, just look at microprocessors, semiconductors, you know, I mean, the world goes into global depression. I mean, that's what happens if that supply chain is disrupted. Now we're at a race to try to bolster that supply

chain, obviously with factories everywhere from, you know, South Korea to, to Japan, to, you know, to Ohio, to Texas, to, to New York and so forth. But, but, uh, but, you know, that's going to take five, five years, you know, as a, as a conservative estimate. So I think, uh, I think the world would be involved for sure anyway, you know, and, and I, I, you know, there's a big debate now, Dan, I don't really know what to do about this, you know, about the strategic ambiguity policy and whether or not we should remove strategic ambiguity, which means that, that we don't explicitly, uh, enter into a defensive alliance with Taiwan. And it's not clear whether we're going to be, uh, where we intervene or not. And the idea with strategic ambiguity was that that would be

sufficient to deter the Chinese communist party, but also it would, it would, it would provide impetus, you know, for, for the Taiwanese to provide for their own defense. But, you know, President Biden's kind of almost, almost removed it. You know, he said, you know, he's known for making misstatements, of course, but if this is a misstatement, he's made that misstatement three or four times. Right. And, and pretty clearly. So, So I think that commitment seems to have been made. Now, what does that mean in reality? What happens if there's a soft or a hard blockade of Taiwan? How do we respond? I think we do respond. And, a recognition based on the war in Ukraine that we've been underinvesting in some key sectors of our defense innovation base and industrial base. manufacturing munitions and to address the bow wave of deferred military modernization, to address the bow wave of already

purchased weapons, $19 billion worth to Taiwan. So there's a lot of work to do. But invading Taiwan would be kind of a tough thing. And if you look at just the U.S. subsurface capability or submarine capability,

I think the peoples of the British Army would be, you know, it'd be a rude awakening for them that is analogous to the rude awakening that the Russians had with the reinvasion of Ukraine. You know, Taiwan is an island the size of Maryland. It's mountainous in the west. It's densely populated in massive urban areas in the east. There are only a couple of good landing places only a couple of months when that when the seas are are amenable you know to uh to a cross-strait invasion it's about 150 miles across now there

i mean there are other things they could do with the islands that are you know just a couple of miles away and so forth but if if they're looking at a full invasion and subjugation of Taiwan, you know, it's not clear to me that they could pull it off, that the people's liberation army could pull it off. Can you tell us, and then I want to move to a couple of quick other topics, but can you tell us where you see the current Russia,

Ukraine war, where it's heading over the next few months, particularly as we head deep into the summer? Well, I think it's important to assess the relative strength of Russia and Ukraine based on capability and capacity, how effective their military forces can be in terms of operating with combined arms and joint capabilities and a sufficient scale and for ample duration to accomplish the war aims, but then also to look at the will factor, the will within the fighting forces, but also the will of their national leadership and those who support that national leadership. So let's look at capability.

Hey, the Russian military is spent conventionally. I mean, their army, for sure, is spent conventionally. Not all their joint capabilities, certainly not their nuclear forces or their air forces and not all their naval forces and so forth. But their army, I think, Dan, must be at the brink of moral collapse. You see that with some of the hodgepodge forces,

the Wagner Group forces, some of their paratroop forces, and these, you know, these Dinesh Republic militias around Bakhmut that are just, that they're just suffering unsustainable casualties. And if you look at the overall casualties they'd suffered, you know, the term decimation comes from the idea that when a force is decimated, it takes one-tenth losses that it loses its combat effectiveness. There are more that decimate it. They can't regenerate the combat capabilities that they've lost, and so they can't win commercially. But what they've done is they've developed very extensive defenses. And the question is, okay, now on the Ukrainian side, they have the will.

Have they been able to disengage enough forces and train them adequately and provide them with the range of capabilities they need for a sustained offensive? And we're going to see that pretty soon. And I believe that if they can penetrate those defenses and turn the Russians out of the defenses along the coast to the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, then Ukraine becomes economically viable again. And the Ukrainian armed forces can place Russian logistics facilities and bases in Crimea in a position where they're no longer tenable. You're starting to see that now with some of the Ukrainian long-range strikes against depots, against aircraft.

I mean, the Ukrainians shot down two aircraft over Russian territory in the last week. And so these strikes in depth are meant to prepare for the offensive. But once the offensive starts, that's when you have to combine mobile protective firepower, protected mobility, skilled infantry, fires, aviation capabilities, electromagnetic warfare,

along with engineering. You're going to see combat engineering being decisive here. They're going to have to make river crossings, which the Russians have failed to do, and the Ukrainians have not yet attempted a river crossing in contact with an enemy. Multiple obstacle crossings. I mean, hey, this is not an easy military problem to conduct a sustained offensive against prepared defenses. So, I don't know, Dan, my gut tells me the Ukrainians can do it because of the paucity of Russian will and the degree to which they've suffered unsustainable levels of casualties.

And so the time is now to give the Ukrainians everything we can. I mean, I was so glad to see the United Kingdom provide some of these long-range missile capabilities. It's important to defend the Ukrainians from these onslaughts that we've seen over the past week of massive missile strikes. I mean, to defend against these missiles, you have to be able to shoot down the arrows, but you also have to be able to kill the archer, you know?

And so they need these long-range capabilities for defensive purposes as well as to disrupt the enemy's command and control and their fire's capabilities in depth as they initiate this offensive. There's a lot, HR, on the UK take on Russia, Ukraine and the military role in your recent episode of Battlegrounds, your podcast with General Nick Carter from the UK military that I highly recommend. I wanted, just before we run out of time, I want to jump to a few of our questions. We said you were going to be on. We got a ton of them. We can't get to all of them, but there's a huge HR fan base out there. So I'm just going to try

to rattle off a couple of these. Here we go. This is Corey Gruber from Virginia. General McMasters, why is there a near wholesale lack of accountability for senior military leaders? Have they been batting a thousand for the last two decades? It's like right out of Dereliction of Duty, your book. So what's your response? Yeah, well, of course military leaders should be held accountable, responsible, you know, for military operations and efforts. But, you know, as Sir Michael Howard, the great historian, has said, and I don't want to make excuses for anybody, but he said that most often the causes

of victory and defeat are found far from the battlefield. And I would say that in our most recent frustrations in Iraq, but especially in Afghanistan, those frustrations were caused, I think, by fundamentally flawed and inconsistent policies and strategies that were created in Washington. The war in Afghanistan, which is heartbreaking for me, was not a 20-year war. It was a one-year war fought 20 times over. And I describe this in the inconsistency and the fundamentally flawed nature of those strategies in the book Battlegrounds, if anybody's interested in more on it. And then not to take anything away from this awesome podcast, but I vented on Afghanistan with Barry Weiss,

who asked this question to me on her Honestly podcast right after the disastrous retreat, I think, you know, I, I think, uh, from as long as the, you can call it from Afghanistan, uh, in, in August, September of, of, uh, you know, of 2021. So, um, I, I am, uh, you know, I, I'm sympathetic to your question, but, you know, ultimately as I wrote in dereliction of duty, you know, a president can get the military advice, you know, he or she wants based on the way they structure that relationship. And I think it's quite clear that across both the Trump and the Biden administrations, those two presidents prioritized withdrawal over the achievement of any kind of worthwhile outcome consistent with our interests in Afghanistan. All right.

I'm going to, I mean, it is amazing. You think about it from the perspective of many parts of the world, particularly the Middle East, that they've had multiple administrations from different parties focused on some kind of withdrawal from the region. And how could they talk about a bipartisan consensus? Here's another question for you. A military question for Mr. McMaster. The West has been trying to stop the Iranian nuclear program for decades. At this late date, does Iran have any nuclear infrastructure that could be hit successfully by a military strike?

I would think that after all this time, the Iranians have all of its nuclear sites buried so deep or hardened to such an extent that any military effort by the U.S. or Israel would have very little impact. In other words, is the threat of military action an empty one? My name is Joseph. Thank you for your answer. I think it's important to recognize that any kind of a strike, a single strike, would probably be inadequate, that there would have to be a sustained campaign to block Iran's path toward a nuclear weapon that could threaten Israel with destruction. I believe that it's going to happen. I mean, if Iran doesn't enter into some kind of agreement that provides a high degree of transparency and very rigorous verification mechanisms

and inspection regime, then I think the begging doctrine is alive and well in Israel, kind of across the political spectrum. So this is something to think about and to consider how something like this would happen, a strike, a series of strikes, and really a sustained campaign to block Iran's path to the most destructive weapons on Earth. I think it would have to include a range of capabilities that would have to be disrupted. Not only nuclear facilities, but those involved with the program that have knowledge or where that knowledge base is stored. Of course, it's tied to Iran's missile program as well.

These aren't the only weapons of mass destruction either. To be clear, it's not just for our listeners. It's not just about their nuclear capability. It's about their ability to take that nuclear capability and deliver it in the form of a weapon, which is dependent on their missile development program. Right, and to threaten Israel with destruction, right? And, of course, what they're doing is trying to deter Israel through these capabilities,

but also through their proxy forces in southern Lebanon and Gaza and now in Syria. I mean, they've been trying to place a proxy army on the border of Israel and Syria. And so it's tied, the effort to block their path to a nuclear weapon is also tied to addressing Iran's four-decade-plus-long proxy war they've been waging against the United States, Israel, and their Arab neighbors. So I think what you really need is a comprehensive approach to the threats that Iran poses to international security. And we should be

working together with partners and allies in the region. But of course, our idiotic policies toward the Middle East, I think, have set us back quite a bit with some of our Arab partners and allies. And we have to really, I think, work hard to regain lost ground in those relationships. All right. We will leave it there, HR. Thanks for doing this. I said at the beginning we would talk about their election of duty. Well, we really didn't get into it. One of those questions teed it up, and I will put that book in the show notes. I highly recommend it. It is a book I actually devoured, John. And it's really about military, what led to decision-making in the Vietnam War.

And anyways, it's like one of the three or four books I recommend to people interested in foreign policy and decision-making in the US. HR, we're gonna have to have you back because we had a lot of questions that we didn't get to. But sadly, given the state of affairs in the world, they will all be relevant. They will continue to be relevant, those questions. So we'll just put them in our inventory system and we will repurpose them when you are next on.

That is a way of me securing an early commitment to have you back. Until then, thanks for coming on. Hey, Dan, great to be with you. And, you know, when I made the transition, you know, to silicon valley i reread startup nation again uh and uh and so i just want to thank you for for that book it helped me understand israel better i went to the museum of innovation when i visited tel aviv you know and and uh and your book was just a great primer for my my last visit to israel as well as a primer for my understanding kind of the importance of an innovation ecosystem

like we have here in Silicon Valley as well. Thank you. And the reason he's saying here in Silicon Valley is because we're recording this, he's sitting at his office at the Hoover Institute in Stanford University in case anyone is mentioning. I'm looking at you HR, you've got like a fantastic view which is

reason enough to stay there. I'm in the literal ivory tower here at the Hoover Tower. A little better than Fallujah. All right. Take care. Thanks for that. Thanks for the plug for Startup Nation. I'll talk to you soon, my friend. That's our show for today. To keep up with H.R. McMaster, you can track him down at the Hoover Institution. That's hoover.org. You can also find him at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. We'll post his books and his podcasts in the show notes.

We had one technical hiccup when we recorded this episode. Choppy Wi-Fi at Stanford. I guess they're not paying their phone bills. So we're unable to get to all the questions. A couple of the questions that you had sent in fell off. We only were able to get to one of them. But when we have Tyler on, we will be sure to make up for it and get to more of your questions. So please send them in to dan at unlocked.fm. Just keep it to under 30 seconds, record it, and send it in. And some of the questions you all sent in for HR are readily usable for future guests, whether it's HR or anyone else on

geopolitics. So we'll figure out a way to play a couple of those questions for future guests, because sadly, those questions and the issues raised in them are not going anywhere anytime soon. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Seymour.