Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Why China is studying America’s Forgotten War - with Rep. Mike Gallagher

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

There is a lot these days to discuss with a US official who is an expert on China and has major influence over US-China policy. But today we take a longer view of the Cold War (II) we are in with China by looking at a historical comparison in Cold War I. Congressman Gallagher just wrapped up teaching a history class on one such historical comp – the Korean War. Rep. Gallagher served for seven years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps, including two deployments to Iraq. He was a national security aide on Capitol HIll. He’s also a warrior scholar, having earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, a master’s degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University, a second in Strategic Intelligence from National Intelligence University, and a PhD in International Relations from Georgetown. He has served on the House Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee, and he is chairman of the newly created House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, At the end of this episode, we take a detour to discuss what Congress is doing on the topic of UFOs, an issue on which Rep. Gallagher has been active. Items discussed in this episode: "Why America Forgets -- and China Remembers -- the Korean War" https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/why-america-forgets-and-china-remembers-korean-war The Hertog Foundation https://hertogfoundation.org/

China is studying the Korean War as part of a broader preparation for a potential war with America over Taiwan. And this is the message that Xi Jinping is sending to his people, is that you have to be prepared for confrontation with the West. And there's no doubt that if given the opportunity, Xi Jinping would take Taiwan, even if it cost him dearly militarily. There's a lot of news to discuss these days with a U.S. official who's an expert on China and has major influence over U.S.-China policy. We could discuss the Biden administration's recently signed executive order that will bar some new U.S. investments in China and sensitive technologies like computer chips, and would also require notification to the government and other tech

sectors. And then there was President Biden just recently hosting the leaders of Japan and South Korea at Camp David, where they agreed to expand security and economic ties. All of this clearly aimed at China as well, and North Korea. Those are the kinds of developments we typically discuss with today's guest, or return guest, Congressman Mike Gallagher, who's the chairman of a newly created select committee on China in Congress. By the way, I don't encourage people to watch congressional hearings generally, but if any of our listeners want to actually really get informed by the work in Congress, watch Congressman Gallagher's China Special Select Committee on China hearings. They

are actually quite interesting and informative. But what I wanted to do in today's conversation with Congressman Gallagher is take a longer view of Cold War II, the Cold War we are in with China, by looking at a historical comparison in Cold War I. Fortunately, Congressman Gallagher just wrapped up teaching a history class on one such historical comp, the Korean War. He co-taught this class with military expert, former top policy advisor to Senator Tom Cotton, and Mike's fellow Marine, Aaron McLean. It's always interesting for me to observe how members of Congress get informed, how do they develop their intellectual capital, how they spend down their intellectual capital. And here's a congressman who's very busy with his responsibilities on Capitol Hill and his responsibilities back in his district in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and yet is still totally committed to his intellectual and academic development, both learning and teaching. That in

and of itself is something I wanted to talk to him about, how he fit that in to his demanding schedule and why it was so important to him. As many of you know, Mike Gallagher served for seven years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps, including two deployments in Iraq. He was a national security aide on Capitol Hill. He's also a warrior scholar of sorts, having earned a bachelor's degree from Princeton, a master's degree in security studies from Georgetown, a second master's in strategic studies from Georgetown, a second master's in strategic intelligence from National Intelligence University, and a PhD

in international relations from Georgetown. He's a real underachiever. Congressman Gallagher has also served on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee. And finally, at the end of our conversation on what lessons from the Korean War can inform potential future conflict with China, we do have a short conversation about Mike's work on UFOs. Yes, UFOs. Mike Gallagher thinks we need to talk about ETs. And there's actually been some real congressional work done on this. I know you may be skeptical, but hear him out. It's actually pretty interesting. Mike Gallagher on what we can learn from a key period in Cold War I for what lies ahead in our Cold War with China, Cold War II. This is Call Me Back.

And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast fan favorite, Congressman Mike Gallagher from Green Bay, from the great state of Wisconsin, chairman of a very important newly created committee on China, and co-educator with my friend Aaron McClain on a course about the Korean War and the lessons for China, which we're going to talk about. Mike, thanks for being here. It's great to be back. How many times have I been on this podcast? So I took a look, because you mentioned that to me the other day, and I counted three. So this is four, which is not nothing, but you don't get any kind of jacket or baseball cap or anything

or any kind of call-me-back swag until you hit number five. Has anyone hit five? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Who? Neil Ferguson, Mike Murphy, Muhammad Al-Aryan. Damn you, Ferguson. He's always.

Muhammad Al-Aryan. What are his numbers, though? I don't know. We don't disclose that data. But no, no, no. The accent. I can't compete with the accent. But you've got Wisconsin, man.

You've got the Midwest, which reminds me, by the way, one of the reasons we have you on is not really to talk about geopolitics, although that's very important. The real reason we have you on is I've been meaning to ask you, this is something that I've been really struck by, is my impression always was that Aaron Rodgers was not a great leader when he was at the Green Bay Packers, that he was delivering some locker room chemistry issues, not great morale. That was just kind of always my sense of things. And what's been extraordinary about his

arrival in New York is what a strong leader he has been for the New York Jets and how much all these young players are responding to him. And he's almost like a coach, a mentor. So has he always been a great leader or did he just kind of save that for the Jets? Well, let's stipulate that whatever the deal was between the NFL and the Jets and Aaron Rodgers to do hard docs with the Jets this year had to have a provision that said this has like this has to be deliberately designed to make aaron rogers look as good as possible and it does that so you watched it oh yeah i've watched the first episode and i was the second episode is better than the first well i was desperate to watch it while i was in transit earlier this week but my wife could not

remember our hbo max password so i'm like and now i like have to because she doesn't want to watch it with me i have to find like an hour that i could do this here at home okay so but seriously so you're you're like kind of blown away by how how good he comes home well no i mean i'm a i'm a rogers apologist just because he's i mean he's first ballot hall of famer and i feel like if you have a quarterback that good for that long you just have to be grateful and i think if you listen to, as I have, the interviews he used to do every week with ESPN Milwaukee on Aaron Rodgers Tuesdays or Tuesdays with Aaron, and then all the interviews he did and continues to do with Pat McAfee,

this is the side of him that comes out. I don't know if that's the side of him that was present in the Packer locker room for the last three years because it does seem like the organizational leadership in him had a huge falling out at least starting with when we drafted jordan love but like this is the fun funny smart guy that like comes through in the podcast which i've always liked about him um so so when you watch him so not only when you watch him on hard knocks but uh when you when you watch that first press conference he gave when he showed up at the jets facility after he had signed the deal it was a master class that

press conference it was like first of all he knew so many of the reporters by name he'd known things that he they had written about he referenced them he completely charmed them he knew who like the big iconic like fireman fireman ed who's like this famous new york jets fan who's at every game whose seat is right by our seats we see him at every game he like cited fireman ed i mean he this is a guy it was impressive and like i just everyone told me he's he's unpleasant he's he's um, he, he's not interested in like kind of culture. He's not interested in dealing with, but dealing with the press. But this was, this was a guy who like was tapped into how to appeal to the fans, how to appeal to the press. It was, um, so it was just like, given the guy's reputation, all the noise coming out of green Bay, I've been, and then you watch Hard Knocks. And I should disclose I've been to two practices. I've been to two training camps in the last few weeks and watched him. You watch him with these young players on the field, like mentoring them

and teaching them moves and going over – and some of these players are like really no-names. People – players who are going to get cut. They're not even going to make the final roster, and he must know that. And he's still spending time with them and dropping his pearls of wisdom. And it just seems like it's a guy who's like, who's really committed to his external image in New York, to his internal image at the,

at the team. And like I said, side of him, I've never seen. So we are like thrilled to have him. Well, I'm happy for the jets fan base. I will say I've,

I've now done two TV interviews today where the Jets came up, and this has never happened before, on Squawk Box and on CNN. Joe Kernan asked you. Was it Kernan? It's Kernan. Kernan's a big Jets fan. He's huge. Well, he saw the Bart Star jersey behind me,

and then he made a crack about the Jets. I will say the Jets fan base is unreasonably cocky right now based on a couple episodes of hard knocks but i'm happy for you guys it's good i've just and i always go back to the moment we talked about before which is when you're at lambo and you asked me what do you guys do with the stadium in january i said we play playoff games jets fan wouldn't wouldn't know about that you would think it's like it's such a bad use of a stadium to have a big open stadium in a wintery place because it just gets no use. But I'm happy for you guys.

I'm happy. Hey, let's get – let's get. You got a lot of really interesting young players. It is cool to see them like these guys are coming up to them saying, I used to watch you when I was growing up. Well, that's the thing. They're all kids. We have a very young team.

Sorry, to our listeners, we will – for those of you who aren't Jets fans or football fans, we will get off this in a second. But I will say we have a very young team. Garrett Wilson, Williams, just go through it. Sauce Gardner, all these guys are really, really young. So they're in their early 20s. They're all guys who have been drafted in the last two or three years at Zach Wilson.

And so they grew up watching him. I mean, they him on not just through college they watched Aaron Rodgers all through high school and suddenly they're on a team with him well hey I mean I still don't think the Jets are going to win anything but again I'm happy for you guys everyone was like oh the uh the motivational speech that Sala gives at the beginning of it is so great I'm not sure that was true. The whole crow and the eagle thing. But I will say, I just went to Australia and I gave a speech where I did an extended joke that I'm not sure anyone thought was funny about orca whales and great white sharks.

So in general, I'm in favor of animal metaphors to make a broader point about an organization or geopolitics. I will finally say that whether he you know if the whole jeopardy hosting thing doesn't work out he does you watch hard knocks and you watch him with these practices and you think this guy's post nfl playing career could be as a coach um but uh he he does probably a commentator a highly paid commentator yeah yeah yeah he makes more sense although he's he's canceled right he's he's uh you're not allowed to be skeptical of the vaccine. Yeah, but I think we're all kind of over that.

I don't know. I don't think the people that control the media. If he takes the Jets to a Super Bowl, you watch. This is a very emotionally abused fan base and emotionally abused sports media. So I think the path to redemption for Aaron Rodgers in their eyes will be enormous. Okay, let's get into this. So I want to sort of set the table here. So you and Aaron McLean co-authored a piece for Foreign Affairs called Why America Forgets, and China Remembers the Korean War. That's the title of the piece that you guys just published, I think, on the 70 year anniversary of the end of the right around the 70 year anniversary of the end of the Korean War.

And the subtitle is the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party's Dangerous Historical Distortions and the struggle over Taiwan. So you guys wrote a piece timing this anniversary, looking back to the Korean War, what many call the forgotten war, this war that occurred, the first kind of real hot war in the Cold War, in the context of the Cold War, between World War II and the Vietnam War. It gets much less attention than the Vietnam War and World War II. And this piece you wrote pivots off a class you taught. So you and Aaron taught a class that was sponsored by and organized by the Hertog Foundation. So most members of Congress, and this is an interesting in and of itself, most members of Congress do many things in their spare time, you know,

during recesses or whatnot. But you chose to spend some of your spare time teaching a class about the Korean War. What was this class? Why did you want to teach it? Like, just that's sort of that's that's unusual. Well, I've always been obsessed with the early Cold War. That's what I did my graduate work on. I mean, I was in a political science PhD program, but I was basically kind of a wannabe Cold War historian. Always found this period fascinating. In particular, I found sort of the early Eisenhower administration

fascinating. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it has something to do with the fact that we had just come out of World War II, victorious, and we were struggling with how to modernize our national security bureaucracy to deal with the rising threat of the Soviet Union. And a lot of the agencies and organizations that we still depend on today to keep the country safe were indeed created in this unique period between roughly, let's say 1946, when Churchill goes to Fulton, Missouri to give the Iron Curtain speech to 1961, the end of the Eisenhower administration. I've always also just admired Eisenhower and a lot of figures of the period as leaders, George Marshall, obviously. So that was my interest. I became particularly

interested in the Korean War, in which I'm not an expert, about two years ago or at some point during the pandemic, because I started to realize that in China, there was this emerging cult of the Korean War. At the time, there were all these Wolf Warrior diplomats attacking America online. And I asked myself, why are they called Wolf Diplomats? That relates to this movie, Wolf Warrior 1, Wolf Warrior 2, which is like the Chinese version of Rambo. it's like super jingoistic and anti-american action movie i watched these during the pandemic right here in this basement um these one of them wolf warrior two was the highest grossing chinese movie of all time until

a movie came along called the battle at lake chengen which supplanted it as the highest grossing chinese movie of all time which was a retelling of the battle of chosen reservoir from the chinese perspective and as a marine the battle of chosenoir is one of the iconic sort of moments in Marine Corps history. There's an argument made that the Marines saved the entire war effort through their fighting retreat from Chosin Reservoir. So all of those things conspired to make me incredibly interested, if not obsessed with the Korean War. I became obsessed with this one book in particular that had been on the Commandant's reading list for a long time called This Kind of War. And when Roger Hertog approached me with the idea of teaching a course, I wanted to,

but I was really hesitant just because I didn't think I'd have the time. And so I tried to resist him for as long as possible, but he wore down my defenses. By the way, isn't there something about in order to be a rabbi, you have to deny it three times or something? No, no, no. That's really funny. In order to convert to Judaism- That's it. You have to, so like my wife converted to Judaism, when you want to convert to Judaism, you have to request, you request, and you are typically rejected by the rabbi and you have to request multiple times, three times before the rabbi is supposed to kind of take your request seriously. So you have to show commitment. And, you know, so that's that's I like that.

That's your analogy. Well, how many times did you have to request permission to marry your wife before you wore down her defenses was it more we're gonna we're gonna save that for the for your episode five episode five episode five that's gonna be on episode five the teaser for our listeners long story short i went down this rabbit hole of studying the korean war and then i had an opportunity to sort of teach a seminar via the hertog foundation And in order to mitigate the fact that I just didn't think I'd have time in sharing this committee on China,

but I really wanted to do it for no other reason than it would force me to kind of learn the material better and organize my own thoughts. I reached out to Aaron to co-teach it with me, who I serve within the Marine Corps and who has extensive teaching experience. He taught at the Naval Academy

and is obviously very interested in, in military history, has a fantastic podcast on military history. And so it was really, it was, it was a great partnership. And Aaron was, I mean, just even watching Aaron teach was, was awesome. I mean, it was remarkable. He was, he's fantastically talented. And so it was a real rewarding experience for me. The final thing I'd say, I know I'm going on here is. No, no, no. This is fascinating. The students were awesome. I mean,

I never, I used my GI bill to get my PhD at the time. I thought I wanted at least a part-time and an adjunct status to pursue a kind of a parallel academic career. I never had the opportunity. I was working full-time while I was finishing my PhD. So I never got to do, I never got to be a TA. So it's been a real gap in my resume and just an experience I wanted to have. And so the ability, I had no conception of like what students would be like. Now, granted, this was not a representative sample because these were all very talented students from across the country, many of whom have military experience, but they were amazing. And a lot of them, they had not only all read the primary material, but it brought in a lot of their own outside research.

And so it was incredibly rewarding experience. And I can't say enough about the Hertog Foundation for just giving us and the students that experience. So let's, let's talk about that. The war that's, that's fascinating. I'm a big, I'm a big fan of all the Hertog and TICFA programs. Um, so, uh, but when, when I saw that you were teaching it, I thought that was a real testament to the program and a testament to you for for i'm doing it for other for other reasons you say i want

one one topic i understand that you guys you and aaron got into in the class is how close the u.s military came to failure in 1950 and um can you talk a little bit about that because it sounds to me like that has implications for your thinking about running the same risk in the Pacific today. Well, I think you've got to put it in the overall context of where the country was at the time, particularly in 1949 and then early 1950, leading into June 1950. There was still this bring the boys home sentiment after everything that we had expended in blood and treasure in World War II. And even as we had a series of kind of subsidiary geopolitical shocks, whether it was the Soviet test of a nuclear weapon in 1949, which truly shocked us and some generals at the time compared to a new type of Pearl Harbor, whether it was a series of domestic spying cases that we had in America, or whether it was the communists winning the Civil War in China and the formation of the People's Republic in China in 1949, we still had this downward

pressure on defense spending and this desire to demobilize. And as a consequence of that, our forced posture on the Korean Peninsula in particular was pathetic. We had basically kind of outsourced management of the peninsula to the UN. And then, of course, there comes this famous moment when Dean Acheson gives a speech at the National Press Club infamously saying that Korea is outside the defense perimeter of the United States. So all of those things, I think, inspired to lead to the initial North Korean invasion of the South with Soviet approval, in large part because they felt they had an opportunity to take over the entire peninsula, both because we didn't have the actual forces on the ground to resist, but also because they didn't think Americans had the willpower, uh, or, or just even had an

interest in, in, um, dying for, uh, the defense of the Korean peninsula. And then there's a few, a series of things that happened after the initial invasion, which cuts us off guard. Um, you know, we get, we get pushed all the way to what's called the Pusan perimeter. So there's this residual force of American troops surrounded effectively by, you know, in the rear water, but on at least three-ish sides of them by North Korean forces. And all of the attempts to slow that advance fail. Quite famously, there's this incident with something called Task Force Smith, which is a small element that MacArthur deploys from Japan as what he calls,

you know, an arrogant display of U.S. strength. And he thinks that this small element is going to, you know, cause the North Koreans to collapse or at least slow them down, not collapse, but to slow them down. And it very much doesn't do that. There's this big, like, column of North Korean tanks that are slowly going down a road and any half competent and well-armed military unit could have absolutely decimated the North Korean tanks. And even though task force Smith has access to the entire arsenal of anti-tank weapons in the Indo-Pacific at that time, which is a grand total of six, uh, they're unable to stop the tanks. And that's just a microcosm of the broader struggles that the U.S. military and our

South Korean allies at the time or partners were having in response to the invasion. And that's the final point I'll make. There was a highly inaccurate and overblown assessment of the Koreans' ability to fight and defend themselves. In at least a few press accounts, they were touted as one of the top five, if not top three armies in the world. And that wasn't true. And that gets to a broader issue that bedevils us throughout the war, which is just a lack of good intelligence. The Korean War is a product of and features two of the biggest intelligence failures i would argue in the entire cold war the initial invasion and then the failure to anticipate um the entry worse worse than than the cuban missile crisis worse than i mean i mean that that's a pretty big statement

in the context of the whole yeah i mean you could argue uh well you know as an intel guy i have to point out that um you know there are no intelligence successes, only intelligence failures. So you can argue we detected that the Soviets eventually put missiles and we found a way to defuse the crisis. Yeah, a little bit late. So the intelligence failures were what? The failure to anticipate the original North Korean invasion of South Korea. And remember, we had sort of arbitrarily carved up the peninsula along the 38th parallel. There was this group of Army and Navy planners, you know, towards the end and in the aftermath of World War II that did it.

And we failed to anticipate that the North Koreans would invade the South. And then you fast forward to the end of the first year of the war, the end of 1950, November, December timeframe, there's a failure to anticipate that the communists in China would get involved on the side of the North Koreans. Now, what's interesting about that, there's a lot of things that are interesting about that. One, so we get pushed back in the initial stages of the war to the Pusan perimeter, and then there's this huge, massive military gamble

that MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur, Wisconsin's own Douglas MacArthur, he got his commission to West Point from Milwaukee. And his dad won the Medal of Honor fighting for a Wisconsin unit in the Civil War. First father-son duo to win the Medal of Honor. I did not know that. By the way, fun fact. Lots of fun facts coming out of Wisconsin.

Good quarterbacks and fun facts. We're the beneficiaries of them all here in New York. Exactly. So MacArthur decides he wants to do this amphibious landing at Incheon above in order to in order to sort of get get behind the North Korean forces, catch them by surprise and ultimately retake Seoul, which is, of course, the capital that the North Koreans had taken in the early parts of the invasion. MacArthur, in fact, conceives of this huge gamble in the earliest parts of the war, but has to delay it because the Americans are getting their butts kicked, essentially. But he has, this idea had started to take shape early on and everybody was against it except for MacArthur. Um, primarily because, uh, amphibious landings in general are hard, but that it's

particular port at Inchon, uh, the conditions were not good at one point. I think the top Navy official on MacArthur staff says to him when they're briefing, the operation says the best thing I could say about it is that it's not impossible. Um, you know, you have to scale the seawalls, the tides are not friendly. If you're able to get past the resistance and over the seawalls, you're not landing on a beach. Um, then you have to trudge through all this mud. It just, it's a huge gamble. MacArthur goes forward. He overrules, you know, uh, the, the joint chiefs at the time are at best ambivalent, but are more are more accurately, incredibly worried about the operation. But they're they're not willing to stand up to Douglas MacArthur. He goes forward and the gamble pays off. It's one of the most brilliant military maneuvers in history. It revives the war effort. We retake Seoul. And there's this rapid push to Seoul

because he wants to get there basically a year to the day after the initial invasion. And then he sort of hubris gets the best of him and he pushes north of the 38th parallel and wants to push up all the way to the Yalu River. And that brings us to Chosen Reservoir and the Chinese decide to get involved at the time. And I'll shut up after this. I apologize. It's just really curious incident that is almost without parallel that I can think of. But my knowledge of presidential history doesn't really go back beyond 1945 so this could be really inaccurate um macarthur and truman have this meeting um i think after in sean you have to double check with mclean because mclean actually remembers this stuff i had it in my head for a week and a half

and then i forgot the details got in this operation yeah i'm just i just show up yeah i wear the congressional pin right Right. You're the performer. You're the performer. You're the talent. Yeah, exactly. I can't be bothered. You got a trailer. You got the makeup artist. You got, yeah, okay.

So rather than MacArthur, who's the commander of what's called FECOM, Far East Command. And remember, MacArthur is sitting in Japan at this time and indeed spends most of the war in Japan. He doesn't spend a night in Korea throughout the war. He's like the emperor of Japan. Effectively, he's rewriting the Japanese constitution. He's helping rebuild the country. MacArthur, instead of going to D.C. to meet with the president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, Truman flies all the way to Wake Island to meet with MacArthur. Such was MacArthur's's power at this time.

And this becomes a huge political problem for Harry Truman because MacArthur gets increasingly, let's say, disobedient. And ultimately, Truman has to fire him. But at the time, there's this meeting of Truman and MacArthur on Wake Island. And MacArthur tells Truman effectively, there's no way that the Chinese are going to invade and get involved. And if they do, I will absolutely crush them. I will annihilate them. And because MacArthur just thought American air power was such that he would be able to detect the Chinese coming across from Manchuria, across the Yalu River, and then he would be able to just completely destroy them. And American air power did give us a massive advantage throughout the war, but the Chinese are able to use rudimentary tactics like moving only at night in order to blunt that advantage.

And during the day, they're very disciplined in terms of the steps they take to conceal and cover both their movement or just wherever they happen to stop at the time. So the point is we just fail to anticipate that the Chinese are going to get involved. The entire intelligence community, such as it existed at the time, and it's about three or four years old at the time, is really just parroting whatever is coming out of MacArthur's headquarters. And MacArthur's intel is bad. Um, and the Chinese get involved in a massive, massive way, multiple, multiple divisions. And ultimately the American

troops find themselves surrounded around this massive manmade reservoir, um, referred to as, as chosen reservoir. Um, incidentally, um, there is, uh, a, a is an army element, Task Force Faith, on one side of the reservoir that gets absolutely wiped out, just completely wiped out. And Ned Almond, who's MacArthur's top lieutenant and in charge of one of the two major units on the ground at the time, um, flies to the task force faith's position with three silver stars, which is like a major military decoration. And he gives one to Colonel Don faith who's in charge. And he says, uh, tell me who I should give these other two silver stars to. And so faith literally just like hands one to like these two random guys that are walking by, one of whom happens to be working in the mess.

He's like a waiter or a cook in the mess. And like a silver star is a big deal at the time. And it's really even more so now. And faith then takes the silver star. He just got pinned on by one of his commanding generals and throws it into the snow. It just sort of goes to show you the problems we had in terms of overall command relationships, esprit de corps. And then the Chosen Reservoir is a site where the Marines can fight their way out all the way down to the port of Hungham and are able to save

the war effort. And then we kind of evolve into this multi-year stalemate as we're trying to negotiate into an end of the conflict. That involves brutal, brutal and deadly fighting still across the peninsula. But in the lead up to the war, you mentioned great Wisconsinites from Douglas MacArthur to Aaron Rogers, but there was another one, this Republican Senator, John,

John J. Blaine, who apparently you cited as the lone vote against some kind of pact or, or in 1928, the outlawing war what was this now we're talking about this so this almost has nothing to well john blaine i don't even think he's alive at the time of the korean war he would have been very old i forget exactly when he died but you chose to invoke him john blaine is a forgotten wisconsin hero a couple of reasons. Well, he was a governor and then a senator. He authored the amendment to the Constitution that got rid of prohibition.

So the next time you have a drink, you can thank John Blaine for his hard work. So hoist one to John Blaine. And then he is the sole senator in uh when would the vote have happened 1929 I guess the pact was negotiated in 1928 what was the pact uh the Kellogg brand pact which was this sort of uh utopian effort to outlaw war after world war one um and John Blaine votes against it for a variety of reason part part of them part of them, uh, is that he, he doesn't like the Brits particularly. Um, and he thinks they're sort of imperialists and colonialists. Um, but like part of him is just skeptical that like any legislative body could

outlaw war because the international system is anarchic and has always, always will. And so it's actually relevant to the present day because particularly on the American left, there's this persistent utopian belief that like the UN or some sort of multilateral organization can transcend the basic anarchy of the international system or that bad guys like Vladimir Putin

or Xi Jinping or the Ayatollahs in Iran care about commitments that are made in these international fora, when my view is that they care far more about hard power and have disdain for some of these organizations and don't operate under the same set of values that we in the West do. And it is our tendency to mirror image and graft our own values onto those regimes. And Aaron has actually written about this repeatedly and eloquently. That gets us into trouble because we underestimate what they're willing to do. Case in point, Ukraine, February 24th, Vladimir Putin. Okay. So the Korean War,

36,000 U.S. servicemen killed, something like 7000 remains, still unknown, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans killed in action. Why is this the forgotten war? Those numbers are staggering. I mean, they're not Vietnam-level numbers, but they're not far off. Huge numbers. I thought about this a lot. I mean, the honest answer is I don't know. And part of what Aaron and I are trying to do in teaching the course and writing about it is to ensure that the Korean War isn't forgotten. And we believe that there are enduring lessons for the present day. Foremost among them is just the importance of military readiness and military strength, as we just talked about. I think perhaps it's because it, well, at the most basic level, it came so quickly on the heels of World War II, and World War II tends to overshadow it. I think there's also this idea that Americans don't like the idea that so many people died for what is essentially a tie, right? There was no definitive. I mean, we're still locked in an armistice agreement.

The conflict was frozen. There's a third and related point. I think that this was not troops on the 38th parallel. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So it's sort of like, that's all we got. We just sort of, it just like froze.

The, the, I'll make two more points. Um, uh, one of which is that, and this is really the, one of the main themes of the book that Aaron and I taught, and I highly recommend this book called this kind of war by Tierra Ferenbach, which is that at the time our country was not comfortable with a, a, a limited war for a decisively sort of political objective. Um, the argument he makes is that Americans are far more comfortable getting involved in grand crusades. In general, we don't like to sort of go abroad and get involved in wars, but when someone attacks us, we mobilize, but it has to be for this massive crusade where we feel like it's us against evil. We're less comfortable in the gray zone in limited warfare. And to conduct that type of warfare, you need what Ferenbeck describes as legions. You need sort of

hardcore, highly trained, highly armed troops that have no illusions about the business that their country is asking them to conduct, about the fighting and dying that is necessary to maintain national interest, even if it's not for some sort of grand crusade. Beyond that, there could be the issue that we never called it a war. Truman sort of famously calls it a police action. He leverages UN authority and he leverages a poorly timed Soviet absence from the UN to get a vote, basically authorizing police action on the Korean Peninsula. And so that set off a debate we're still having today about the nature of war powers under the American constitution. What can the president do? What can he do? Does UN authority give the president carte blanche to send Americans into harm's way to die? And so

all those things I think inspire to make it the forgotten war. But I think it's a tragedy, not only because it offers lessons for the present day, not only because our foremost adversary, the Chinese Communist Party, is not forgetting it, they are studying it intensely, but also for no other reason, just because of the stories of bravery and heroism on the part of American and Republic of Korea forces that we just have a duty to honor those. So I can typically not draw a direct line between a Hertog Foundation-sponsored course and articles attacking the instructors in the Chinese daily press, in the China Daily. But in this particular case, we have that.

You and Aaron wrote a co-authored piece, as I quoted at the beginning in your foreign affairs piece, and then China Daily comes out with a piece attacking this course and attacking you personally. What was their response and why do you think they did it? Well, part of our argument in the piece is that China is studying the Korean War as part of a broader preparation for a potential war with America over Taiwan. I think if you watch this movie, I referenced the battle at Lake Changin. That becomes clear. Incidentally, the movie starts not with North Korea invading the South, but with Douglas MacArthur invading China effectively. So the story they want to tell is that America started the war and they

conveniently omit a lot of the details. And that China, though a technologically inferior military at the time, was able to beat a technologically superior foe in America through its bravery and its will to fight. And this is the message that Xi Jinping is sending to his people is that you have to be prepared for confrontation with the West. I see a lot of his efforts to decouple from us and from the West more broadly as part of this preparation for war. And there's no doubt that if given the opportunity, Xi Jinping would take Taiwan, even if it cost him dearly militarily. The other thing that comes out in studying the war is this idea that certain regimes, particularly communist regimes, or let's say Marxist-Leninist regimes, are far less sensitive to casualties than we in America

are for obvious reasons, because we have elected leaders and those elected leaders hear complaints when young Americans are dying in wars where there aren't as robust feedback loops in totalitarian regimes. So I think the Chinese Communist Party, that argument caught their attention. And they also wanted to ensure that their lessons from the Korean War got out there. And it wasn't just McLean and Gallagher saying, these are the lessons of the Korean War. Their lessons are slightly different than ours. Their lessons are that America should basically shut up, stop criticizing them, and shouldn't test China's military resolve. And in this piece they uh said i have um uh the the madness and arrogance

my madness and arrogance are comparable to that of douglas macarthur uh which will probably be on my gravestone at this point that's a great but i mean if you think about it though it's really interesting that they they not only read the whole thing and i know they read the whole thing because part of what they attacked were things that came later in the piece. In less than 24 hours, they were up with an official propaganda response to our piece, which I think, I mean, you have to ask our students, I don't know, I think was interesting for our students to see in real time

that this was playing out not only as sort of like us, there was actually sort of a small bit of geopolitics playing out. Yeah, if they had any idea that this was like a real, like we're in the middle of a real Cold War, like America was in 1950, like you watch this, this is like a microcosm of that. Yes, exactly. There's one thing I have to agree with, though, in what they said.

At one point in the piece, they say, the only thing that's changed between the Korean War and the present day is that China is far more powerful. And I think on some basic level, that's true. I mean, what they're doing in terms of their military buildup is absolutely remarkable. And economically and technologically. I mean, you make that point, right? Yeah. Particularly their Navy. I mean, it's the biggest Navy in the world. You know, ours is on balance more capable. But if you examine the empirical record over the last 1200 years of naval battles, it's very rare that a numerically inferior force, even one that's technologically superior, defeats a numerically superior one. And so they've made massive investments in order to achieve what I think is their near-term ambition, taking over Taiwan, but also their mid-term ambition, which has become the dominant power in asia if not globally okay this is not the only topic on which you've generated a lot of attention these days you

mostly generate attention on china all things china or in this case korea uh as a china yeah but i wanted just a lot of people five minutes on i want to spend five minutes on another area topic you've made attention on which is that of ufos okay now this is going to be a surprise to many of our listeners so just just 30 seconds here the the whole ufo i'm just gonna give 30 seconds of background the whole ufo mania that we're that we're seeing about seeing right now really began in 2017 when it was revealed that the u.s government had a program that was revealed that the U.S. government had a program that was looking into the existence of UFOs. And this created pressure to inform Congress and the public on what's going on. And then last year, the Pentagon released an unclassified report

on its Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. I wrote the name down. It's a great name for a task force then following that report you and one of your congressional colleagues ruben galego helped pass a democrat from arizona helped pass a bill that makes it easier to report ufos and offering whistleblower protection so why did you get involved in this issue and how much should we be paying attention like what how real is this well Well, uh, so just quickly, these, we started to get all these reports from pilots, like legit pilots, top gun trained pilots, that things were appearing on our ranges and fouling our ranges. They're called range foulers.

Um, and you couldn't dismiss the pilots and it wasn't just based on their personal anecdotal or visual observation. It was based on other forms of data that their planes were collecting, that the ships that their planes fly off were collecting. And as yet, there's still certain incidents that we can't explain. So for me, initially, as someone who focuses on sea power and conventional hard power, my interest is ensuring if our ranges are safe and that we understand what's happening on our ranges. And that kind of led me to this. And now since then, there's been all these subsequent claims about potential government programs with recovered materials.

Of all the cases that the UAP, it's not it's called Arrow now, the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, have examined, there's a subset of these cases that can't be explained by natural weather phenomena or adversary aircraft or our own programs. So my only interest is in figuring out what's going on. I'm not sure we're there yet. I don't think we have enough evidence to say that this is some sort of extraterrestrial phenomenon, but that's also not something that we can completely rule out. And I, what I've said to the Pentagon is this is, if you think that's implausible, this is a great opportunity to disconfirm that hypothesis. Or if you think these people that are coming forward are lying about a potential black program, then provide the counter evidence. But the secrecy, the secrecy around it,

I think according, I mean, based on what you said, I think is that it's motivated by an opera, this operation to reverse engineer the technology for defense purposes. Like there could be a defense. There's a legit defense national security motivation in the, in keeping it so this program so quiet.

Yes. But I don't think that would obviate the defense department or the white house from their, what I would argue is their constitutional, if not their practical need to consult with at least some subset of Congress. Um, and it's, it might be possible that I'm just not part of that subset, but I don't know. Thus far, it's kind of been an antagonistic relationship between us and the executive branch when it comes to getting answers on these issues. And I guess my other main concern is just whether or not there's adversary technology out there that we don't understand, Chinese technology or Russian technology. Now, the other hypothesis that we rarely talk about is not the extraterrestrial hypothesis. It's the interdimensional hypothesis that it's us from the future, Dan.

It's future humans coming back and surveilling us for whatever reason um but then you get to the you get to the terminator paradox right which any anything about time travel ultimately becomes circular right in logic so i along with marco rubio have done a little bit we we passed legislation basically trying to inject some transparency into this, trying to make sense of the overall thing, um, and allowing a pathway for whistleblowers that feel like they have information that's a value and don't want to be retaliated against, um, uh, to be able to come to Congress or to arrow, provide that information, um, and be freed from, um, you know, previous, uh, nondisclosure uh agreements so we're just trying to figure out what the heck is going on um there's a lot of interest in this topic as i've discovered

it's unbelievable i know i feel like you just kind of popped off on it in another interview i think you said it was on a sports you know program sports radio program and then boom like this just lit up a ton of uh interest so I think the same surge in interest you will see from your appearance on the Call Me Back podcast. You should do a Call Me Back just on aliens. I'm going to. UAPs. I'm going to.

Who are you going to bring in? I don't know. I need some guidance from you. But this is hot, man. I mean, I'm telling you. I think this is fascinating. And it's somewhere between kind of sci-fi and the one you laid out. They're like real issues, actually, in the context, like practical policy.

So, Dan, if the aliens came and they asked you and you had to make your case for why they should spare you, like what would be your main argument, do you think? What value do you think what what value do you think i thought a lot about this because i realized i i'm not as handy as i should be around the house so like an advanced race i'm just not sure what practical value i could add at that point and i need to defend my life so what what's your what's your spare me alien overlord pitch you know i'm a magician did you know that i literally am i did not know this yeah this is how i paid my way through high school and college i was a professional magician and um so i i um you know i've it's it's entertaining my magic tricks my magic pattern my

show it's entertaining i provide like it's like a nice pastime for the aliens when they're doing their work that like if they i can be helpful and kind of lightening the mood when they need some downtime that's a great answer yeah that is a great answer what do you have you're going to teach them about the korean war i mean like yeah it's like thanks that's it they're like we already got mclean signed up for that exactly you got nothing go to the salt mines i want to i want to just before we let you go i do want to something you said at the beginning just kind of stuck with me that i feel like if i if i don't you know if I let it go uncorrected, it will be a huge problem. The Jets did not want hard knocks.

They did not want to be selected for hard knocks, nor did Aaron Rodgers. They did not want it. They thought there was too much hype. It was setting expectations too high. And it would just set up a narrative that if things don't go well at the beginning of the season, people would be, oh, hard knocks, they got so cocky. So they were resisting it. And if you actually watch this hard knock season

compared to previous seasons, the actual amount of access the crews have is nothing compared to what they've had access to in the past in terms of terminations and emotional scenes with the different players. So it's pretty locked down. So I know you think this is all one kind of pr machine and rogers wanted it and the team wanted it but that is not the case and i just want to disabuse our our listeners of that misinformation from a from from a kind of disgruntled packers fan who lost their quarterback

my point my point is really that i get that they didn't want it. Nobody wants it. I don't think the Packers have ever had it. As part of the terms of accepting it, is that they had to make everybody look great, particularly Aaron Rodgers. And if the concern was that expectations would go way up and you might not meet those expectations, well, you really screwed yourself on that one.

Trust me, that's the only thing I'm worried about. By the way, the best part of episode one was, I thought when Sauce goes and gets his college degree, and then randomly Nick Van Exel is there. NBA legend Nick Van Exel and Sauce Gardner are hanging out at their college graduation. And they're mic'd. Yeah, exactly.

Key point, they're mic'd. So, anyways, i don't want to spoil for those who haven't seen episode two there's an opening scene in episode two that's both incredibly entertaining and you do realize it's the jets pr machine that is literally just trying to fill airtime with this little show at the beginning without actually having to give the hard knocks crew real access it's incredibly incredibly entertaining, but it involves a mentalist. I don't want, I don't want to say anymore because I don't want to spoil it.

Mike Gallagher. Thank you for joining. This was, um, as always incredibly illuminating and entertaining. And, um, you know,

it just got you one step closer to, to episode five. What do I get again? Swag, swag, stay tuned, man. You'll get swag.

Okay. All right. Very excited. All right. I'll teach another course on some obscure topic or get do an aliens podcast that or an aliens course i'll talk to roger her dog about that thanks dan thanks that's our show for today we will post in the show notes the foreign affairs piece written by Gallagher and McLean that we discussed in this episode, as well as a link to the Hertog Foundation, which offers a whole range of interesting programs that I encourage you to take a look at. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.