Dan Snow's History Hit - National Security in Trump's White House

Episode Date: August 22, 2021

H. R. McMaster is both a soldier and a scholar and has served at the highest level in government as National Security Advisor to President Trump. He served in the US Army for more than 30 years achieving the rank of lieutenant general, he saw combat during the first Gulf War and later was a counterinsurgency advisor to General David Petraeus. He has a PhD from the University of North Carolina and examining the failures of leadership during the Vietnam War and he is now a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joins Dan on today's podcast to bring his experience and knowledge from decades of public service to bear on some of the most challenging questions of our age. He and Dan discuss the failures of the Vietnam and Afghan wars, how to fight a successful insurgency campaign, the meaning of leadership and what it was like to work for Donald Trump. 

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It is a very exciting day because we managed to get Herbert Raymond McMaster, H.R. McMaster, Donald Trump's National Security Advisor, a retired United States Army Lieutenant General who became famous for his successful prosecution of counterinsurgency in Iraq during the US occupation there, and then went on to serve the highest levels of government. H.R. McMaster is on the pod. Very, very excited indeed. He is both a soldier and a scholar. He served in the First Gulf War as a cavalryman. He did a PhD in which he discussed military and political failures of leadership during the Vietnam War.

And then he became one of the top counterinsurgency advisors to General Petraeus in Baghdad during the insurgency there. In February 2017, he succeeded Michael Flynn as Donald Trump's national security advisor, and he resigned just over a year later. In this podcast, I'll ask him about his PhD, Vietnam, leadership, Afghanistan obviously came up because we talked during this week's events in Afghanistan. Also about Donald Trump and what it was like serving in his cabinet. This was a huge pleasure. It's amazing for me to talk to someone who is at the same time a veteran, who's seen active service on the front line. He's held high command. He's thought widely and deeply about military histories and academic now. And he's also served the highest levels of government.

Not just any government, folks. Donald Trump's government. This was one of my favourite ever podcasts. For those new listeners, I have a history channel as well as a podcast network. It's called historyhit.tv. It is a Netflix for history. Simple as that. It's a place where we have hundreds of hours of history documentaries, which for a very small subscription, the price of a smart cappuccino or a frappuccino, this time anyway, for the price of that every month, we give you hundreds and hundreds of hours of documentaries and thousands of podcasts without the ads. That's accessible anywhere in the world, apart from maybe China. But anywhere in the world, just go to historyhit.tv, sign up,

join the revolution, tens of thousands of people subscribing. It means we can make better and better podcasts, get more and more interesting guests, and keep making great history TV shows. We're talking about some good First World War archaeology for the autumn at the moment, for the fall. So with your support, we will be breaking ground on the Western Front in a few weeks' time. If that sounds interesting, please head to historyhit.tv and subscribe. In the meantime, everyone, here's my interview with H.R. McMaster. H.R., thank you very much for coming to the podcast. Hey, Dan, thanks for having me. Great to be with a fellow historian.

I'm not in your league, sir, but thank you very much. What, particularly at the moment, we're watching events in Afghanistan, you've served in the military, you've served as national security advisor, you've been in government, and you've also written a PhD on this exact subject. What have you come to learn about the different pressures on the politicians, the men and women ultimately making the final decision, on this exact subject. What have you come to learn about the different pressures on the politicians, the men and women ultimately making the final decision, and the military men and women who are there to advise and carry out those decisions, often at risk their own lives? Yeah, well, of course, you just allude to it there, right? These are life and death decisions.

So what you owe any leader is the benefit of best advice, right? To try to highlight the long-term costs and consequences of decisions that can lead to war. And to recognize, though, of course, as G.K. Chesterton observed, you know, in the early 20th century, that war may not be the best way of settling differences, but it's the only way to ensure they're not settled for you, right? So it's important to recognize that at times, you know, the use of force is necessary to protect your vital interests, obviously your security. And we see this play out in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then what you want is you want a leader, you know, this is our civilian leaders in our democracies to make sound decisions, but then also to put in place effective strategies that recognize what Sir Michael Howard has observed, you know, the late Michael Howard,

brilliant military historian, he said that the explanations for victory or defeat often have to be found far from the battlefield. So it's the explanations for victory or defeat often have to be found far from the battlefield. So it's the integration of the military instrument with other elements of national power, which is essential to effective strategy in war. I always think it must be so frustrating for your generation of senior US officers. You can deliver military impact anywhere in the world at any time with such an overwhelming force, unlike really any armed force that has ever existed in the history of the world. You can dominate the battlefield. Yet, as you say, victory and defeat is decided away from that battlefield.

That must be difficult for you. Well, you know, I would recommend never using the word dominate, right? Because I think that's a word that became overused in the 1990s, right? And I think what happened is, you know, after the Renaissance and the American Armed Forces after Vietnam, we did develop a tremendous capability, a tremendous capability to employ military force and do so in an effective, integrated way across all the services, right? The naval forces, the aerospace forces, land forces. But what I think we forgot in the 1990s is that it's important also to consolidate any kind of military gains to get the sustainable political outcomes.

And the combination, I think, of victory in the Cold War and victory over the world's fourth largest army in Desert Storm, this is the first Persian Gulf War against Iraq to return Kuwait to the Kuwaitis. I think that we bought into assumptions about the nature of future conflict, which turned out to be fundamentally flawed and a setup, a setup for, I think, what were unanticipated difficulties and frustrations and costs and length of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so this is the orthodoxy of this revolution in military affairs, right? And you couldn't pick up any kind of joint military publication at the time without seeing the word dominant. In fact, the U.S. military said that we're going to achieve full spectrum dominance over any potential enemies, right? And if any enemy even had the temerity, you know, to challenge us, that word be fast, cheap, and efficient.

One of the concepts was entitled rapid decisive operations, okay? Hey, who's going to be against that? I mean, are you for ponderous indecisive operations? So what it did is it divorced war from continuities in the nature of war and emphasized almost exclusively technological changes that delivered technological military prowess to our armed forces. And we forgot, hey, war is an extension of politics, right? That's like the, you know, the commercial here in the United States, there's an insurance commercial where like everybody knows that. Okay, yeah, everybody knows that. You know, Clausewitz said that. But what that means is you have to get to sustainable political outcomes. You have to consolidate gains. That's never been like an optional phase

in war unless it's just a raid. The second is war is human, right? People fight for the same reasons Thucydides identified 2,500 years ago, fear, honor, and interest. Third, war is fundamentally uncertain because of its interactive nature, right? Clausewitz, this is the 19th century oppression philosopher of war, said that war is a continuous interaction of opposites, and therefore progress in war is not linear. I mean, so like, how could it be in these recent wars that we announce years in advance, you know, exactly the number of troops we're going to have, what our drawdown plans are? Hey, you know, guess what? The enemy has a say in the future course of events. And then finally, you know, war is ultimately a contest of wills. And American leaders, I think, across the courses

of these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, failed, failed to develop a sound strategy and communicate that to the American people. And then also to continue to explain to the American people, what is at stake, right? Why is it worth the sacrifices, the risks and the costs to continue to explain to the American people what is at stake, right? Why is it worth the sacrifices, the risks and the costs to continue these war efforts? You're one of these very remarkable historians who has earned a PhD in the 1980s, writing about military and political leadership in Vietnam. And then you went on to become a top counterinsurgency advisor in a complex counter-sociality in Iraq in the early noughties. How important was your study of history in doing your day job, you know, 20 years later?

It was most important. I mean, I can't imagine having been able to effectively do my job without the training I had as a historian, really. And I think that my opportunity to read, think, research and write about history full time, right? The army gave me this great gift to go to grad school full time for a couple of years and then to teach military history at West Point. I think that was the best preparation for the responsibilities and duties I had in wartime and across the Middle East and then in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and then ultimately to take on the position as National Security Advisor. And it would have that historical training opportunity to study history give me, I think, hey, first of all, the ability to ask the right questions, right? And then also to understand really, you know, how our military efforts, what the context

is. And, you know, Sir Michael Howard, you know, the great military historian who sadly we lost a couple of years ago, he said that we have to study military history in width, depth, and context, right? In width, so you can see, you know, the changes that occur in the character of warfare over time, but also remain sensitive to those continuities that we're discussing. And then in depth so that you understand the complex causality of events, right? And he says that, you know, that when you study campaigns and battles and wars in depth, the tidy outlines of history melt away, right? And you can understand even better the role of contingency, the human, the psychological, the political factors, you know, that make war so darn complex and unpredictable.

And then finally, in context, right, in context of sustaining popular will in our democracies for a war effort, for example. And so, you know, I think the opportunity to do that allowed me to understand better the nature of the conflicts that we're engaged in and then what was necessary to get to a sustainable outcome. Now, oftentimes I was frustrated. I'll tell you that I was, I mean, more often than not frustrated because we clung to sort of simple solutions to complex problems. We took short-term approaches to long-term problems and we didn't think about the wars that we're fighting in context and we didn't integrate all elements of national power and efforts of like-minded partners

to achieve well-defined goals and objectives. I am as wary as you are of Vietnam parallels and Vietnam metaphors and the specter of Vietnam everywhere you look in the world. What did you identify were key weaknesses in the decision-making process, political and military in Vietnam? And how did you try and act differently,

put those right as you rose up through the ranks? Well, I'll tell you, Dan, in particular, it was kind of a surreal experience to walk in to what is known as the Kissinger Suite in the West Wing of the White House. And for me to recognize, hey, this was McGeorge Fundy's office, essentially. And he was the National Security Advisor during the decisions that led to an American war in Vietnam. And I'd written a book on the subject. And so now, of course, I was then really in charge of the national security and

foreign policy decision-making process that I criticized during Vietnam. So I resolved to, hey, at least not make the same mistakes, right? And I tried to put into place a process that would ensure we didn't make the same mistakes. So what did I see as the mistakes and what did we do? Well, first of all, it was clear from how and why Vietnam became an American war that American leaders, the president in particular, didn't spend enough time thinking about the nature of the problem. And so we put into place a principal small group framing session to apply design thinking to the top national security challenges we were facing. I also wrote about in this book, Derelicts in Duty, I wrote about the fact that there was no clear objective, clearly understood goal and objective in Vietnam.

Well, how can you integrate with efforts across government and with like-minded parties if you don't even know what the hell you're trying to achieve? I mean, George Bunny at the time had argued, hey, it's better not to have an objective in Vietnam because that gives the president more flexibility. Were we to fail there in the domestic political realm? president more flexibility were we to fail there in the domestic political realm. So I insisted that we establish overarching goals and more specific objectives by understanding the vital interests that were at stake and viewing this complex challenge during the framing sessions through the lens of these vital interests. And then I think importantly that during the lead up to Vietnam, there were implicit and fundamentally flawed assumptions that underpinned the policy. And so we endeavored to make the assumptions that underpinned our policies and strategies explicit and put them

to the test. And we reversed a lot of key policies as a result of this, the policy toward China, for example, or in South Asia, sadly, that I think sound strategy that President Trump put in place, he abandoned and put us in the situation we're in now, I think it's in South Asia, along with the Biden administration doubling down on the Trump administration's flaws. But then finally, the problem with Vietnam is the president's advisers. They tried to understand what Lyndon Johnson wanted. Right. What was the answer he wanted? And they did everything they could to give him that answer, which was a strategy for Vietnam that avoided him making a difficult choice between war and disengagement.

And this was a fundamentally flawed strategy called graduated pressure. So I insisted that whenever we presented options to the president, there would be multiple options presented. And we would compare those options. They would be distinguished from one another based on level of risk, but also level of resources, likelihood in accomplishing the previously agreed to objectives. And then finally, we endeavored to insulate the process from domestic political considerations so that we weren't basing decisions involving foreign policy

and national security on what was best in the near term from a partisan political perspective. And I think we did that effectively. Now, actually putting that process into place got me used up in the job, but I was at peace with that, right? I did it for as long as I could. And of course, there were those who weren't interested in giving the president multiple options. What they preferred is to try to manipulate decisions consistent with their own agenda. And there were others, I think maybe especially in the Trump administration, but probably true in all administrations, who cast themselves in the role of saving the country and the world, maybe from the president, right? And this is like the anonymous writer, he's no longer anonymous. But I think that those people, if they take that as their motivation for serving, they're actually undermining the constitution, right? Because nobody elected

them to make policy. So I think it's always good practice to give a president access to the best analysis and then multiple options. I'll come to the vagaries of the Trump administration, perhaps in a second. But yeah, in terms of any administration, when you sat in the room where it happened, when you had to make those calls, did you feel like you want to go back to your younger self and be like, you should have been a little bit easier on Bundy and all those guys? I mean, is it easy when you're in the armchair, in the archive, in the library, writing criticisms of these actors? And what's it like then going into that room? Well, you know, I'll tell you, I wouldn't have changed a thing. I really wouldn't have. I mean, I really think that my personal experience here as a national

security advisor did not in any way result in me revising what I wrote from the evidence in Dereliction of Duty. And what I tried to do in that book and what I had the great gift of being able to do based on the timing was to gain access to a wide range of records through multi-archival research, but then also a good number of oral histories and tapes of telephone conversations and meetings. And there were still people alive you could interview. And I'll tell you, I mean, the people who were hardest, I think, on the characters in this story were the characters themselves, right? So when the chief of naval operations said, maybe we were all weak, we should have stood up and pounded the table, but we didn't do it. And he said, I we were all weak, we should have stood up and pounded the table.

But we didn't do it. And he said, I'm ashamed of myself. So this was a perspective that I was able to bring in to service in the White House. And I think I was better for it. Right. I was resolved to never not give the president the benefit of best advice and alternative perspectives. Now, in doing so, it didn't make me maybe his favorite, but I really didn't care about that. You know, Dan, you know, it would have been a disservice to him to join in what I saw initially as an environment of competitive sycophancy, right? I'm just not cut out to do it, first of all. And it would have been a disservice, not only to the president, I think, but to the country and to the Constitution if I had

decided, hey, what does in this case, President Trump want to hear and just give him that. You sound like you're able to divorce the idiosyncrasies of Trump, you know, the things he said during the campaign, the sort of norms that he broke in the way he used Twitter and language and things. You seem to have divorced that from the office of president, the role of a national security advisor within a functioning constitution. Is that what encouraged you to take the job? Because inevitably, it's going to be more controversial, perhaps than serving your run of the mill president. Well, yeah. And also, you know, I was still on active

duty, right? I served across five administrations. By that point, I took the oath of service when I entered West Point at the age of 17. Right. And, you know, I had read biographies of George Marshall, and I decided to try to model myself in the area of civil military relations and, you know, I had read biographies of George Marshall and I decided to try to model myself in the area of civil military relations and, you know, the military's role in our democracy after George Marshall. So I never voted. I thought that was an important way for me, at least symbolically, to maintain the bold line between the U.S. military and partisan politics. Right. And of course, our founders had this very much on their minds because they had in mind the bloody civil wars of 17th century England. And they were determined to prevent a Cromwell in America. And they did a pretty darn good job of it. And I thought it was important for me as a serving military officer to keep that

line in place. So how could I not serve the elected president? And the oath that you take, of course, in the United States is an oath to the Constitution of the United States. And I think I can say with confidence that every day I did my best to uphold that oath as an active duty officer serving as the assistant to the president for national security affairs. Listen to Dan Snow's history. I'm talking to former national security advisor H.R. McMaster. More after this. podcasts. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the poisoners cup in Renaissance Florence.

Each week on echoes of history, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories,

listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. When the time came for you to leave, was it an easy decision because of the things that you had written, because of the history that you had studied? It would have been easy for you, surely, just to keep your head down and agree with everything that anyone said and keep the nice office and the exciting government work. I mean, I would be so tempted to stay in the White House. Yeah, the White House mess, too, man. I'll tell you, it's a good menu there, you know.

No, but I'll tell you that, you know, for me, when I took the job, I decided that I would not compete for a four-star job. I was a lieutenant general, a three-star general in the army. And I thought that would be kind of liberating. It would allow me to serve the president better. And it would make clear to everybody that, you know, I didn't take the job to get a four-star, right? So when there were those in the administration who didn't like what I was doing because I was giving him multiple options, and there were those who would have preferred to try to present only one shiny option to Donald Trump because they were afraid of what the heck he might do. Right. Which, by the way, is a bad way to deal with Trump, because

if you do that, he'll make the opposite decision just to be contrary. Right. But there were those who were offering me to compete for four star jobs. And I turned it down and said, when I'm done, I'm done. And I will retire after 34 years in the army and leave happily. And I had frank conversations with President Trump about that. I just said, hey, listen, whenever you think that you would like somebody else in this job, make the change and I will help with that transition. I think that kind of surprised him, you know, and then he would ask me, like, well, what do you think about this person? What do you think about that person? What do you think about John Bolton? And I would just say, hey, listen, this person who you hire will be the only person in the foreign policy and national security establishment who has you as his or her only client.

So you need to pick somebody you trust and you need to pick somebody whose advice you value. Right. And of course, as a national security advisor, I think nobody's omniscient. Right. So it's really your job not to give the president what you think personally, but to give the president access to the best advice possible across the government and then beyond the government. And so I think he was kind of surprised by that. And then we left on actually good terms, which is pretty unusual, you know, Trump administration. And I said, hey, I'll stay on. I'll help John Bolton transition in. And I think that's surprising, too. Oh, really? And I said, yes, that's what we do in the military, right? That no job, no person is bigger than these very important jobs of serving the country, right?

And I think sometimes maybe the president didn't appreciate that himself. But I think the ethic of service is immensely important when you're in positions of significant responsibility and also a sense of humility, right? It's not about you. It's about the country. And it's about doing what's right for the interests of the American people. And I think in many cases, obviously, all humanity. I find the position of U.S. presidents so fascinating because everyone calls them the most powerful man or one day woman in the world. And yet domestically, compared to many other Western democracies, they're not super powerful.

They've got to get things through Congress. There are breaks on their part. But in foreign defense and national security, they can be powerful. And yet they often don't prioritize that. How did you find Trump? Was Trump engaged with national security? I think he was engaged with it. He didn't particularly like it. I mean, I was the person who was asking him to spend time on the things he probably wasn't as interested in. But, you know, to paraphrase Trotsky, right, you might not be, you may not be interested in national security, but national security is interested in you.

And of course, we had a lot of really important priorities at the beginning of the administration, foreign policy priorities associated with, I think, what is the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. And that's the shift from this, I think, strategy of cooperation and engagement based on fundamentally flawed assumptions on the Chinese Communist Party to a strategy of transparent competition with China. Just as one example, right, the maximum pressure campaign on North Korea was a dramatic shift. We actually, despite the president's public statements, which ran counter to it, he approved a policy that was quite tough on Putin and the Kremlin for Russia's sustained

campaign of political subversion against us and our allies. We did a 180 degree shift on Iran policy. We did a 180 degree shift on Cuba, on Venezuela, on the Syrian civil war. I mean, he reversed this strategy, but not wholly. If you look at the speech associated with that, it was fundamentally, I mean, the best strategy we could come up with at the time to defeat ISIS and then to begin to arrest the cycle of violence across the greater Middle East and try to attenuate the humanitarian catastrophe associated with the serial episodes of mass homicide in the Syrian civil war. Part of that, of course, was confronting Iran's continued proxy war. So, I mean, there was a lot of work to be done, Dan, and we got it done.

I mean, we actually got a heck of a lot done in those 13 months, including a fundamental shift in South Asia strategy. In August 2017, the president gave a speech, which I think was the first time we had a reasoned and sustainable approach in place to the Afghanistan war and South Asia. And sadly, of course, he abandoned that in 2019 with the initiation of what I would call capitulation negotiations with the Taliban. So he flip-flopped on Afghanistan. And as we're hearing at the moment, the criticism coming at the Biden administration deserves to be shared, I guess, equally between Trump and Biden. Biden doubled down on Trump's latter policy in South Asia. Absolutely. And that's the story I tell on Battlegrounds, Dan. I mean, those two chapters,

I think that there are many you could blame, right? You could go back to Bill Clinton, who took an over-the-horizon approach to counterterrorism and didn't take al-Qaeda seriously. And the first World Trade Center bombing that was done by a truck bomb in 1993, al-Qaeda declares war on us, bombs our embassies in 98. We fired a few cruise missiles and called it a day. You can blame, I think, George W. Bush not for entering into the war. I think he had to do that, right, based on the most devastating terrorist attack in history on September 11th, 2001. But I think you can blame the Bush administration for not doing enough to consolidate military gains and get to a sustainable outcome. And it was, in fact, the short-term approach to a long-term problem in Afghanistan

that actually lengthened the war and made it more costly and difficult, I believe. Or you can blame the Obama administration, who in 2009 approves a reinforced security effort in Afghanistan and at the same time announces the timeline for a withdrawal and then establishes this Taliban political commission to negotiate with them after we've told them we're leaving and then stopped targeting the Taliban, even though they were killing our soldiers and committing mass murder in Afghanistan.

The Trump administration, I think, resurrected those same flaws, as you mentioned. And then the Biden administration doubled down on them with this disastrous withdrawal that we witnessed recently in the aftermath. So I think that there's plenty of blame to go around. I think if there's a common element in it, it's what I call in this book Battlegrounds strategic narcissism, which is the tendency to view the world only relation to us and to assume that what we decide to do or decide not to do is decisive toward achieving a favorable outcome. And the problem with this is obviously it's self-referential and it doesn't acknowledge the agency, the influence, the authorship over the future that others have, especially

brutal determined enemies like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, jihadist terrorist organizations, Pakistan's inter-service intelligence, right? These actors have agency and authorship. More generally, having been in the army for decades and served at the top of government, what is your view now on the organized use of force? I mean, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Have you come away thinking that the US has got a role to deploy hard power? Or are you left more jaded in thinking that the US has got a role to deploy hard power, or are you left more jaded in thinking about the US role on the world stage? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's

Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

Well, I'm disappointed by our inability to learn from even our most recent historical experience, right? And I think what we're in danger of is learning the wrong lessons again, right? So if you look at the conventional wisdom today, it's that we were wrong to do what people are now calling nation building in Afghanistan. Now, hey, were we naive about the complexity of doing so? Yes. Did we dump resources into the Afghan economy far beyond the absorptive capacity of their economy and thereby sort of encourage and provide an environment conducive to widespread corruption and organized crime? Yes. OK, so we made all sorts of mistakes. But I think the lesson that we're gleaning from the frustrating long experience in Afghanistan and in Iraq is that, hey, let's never do that again. But as the historian and my friend Conrad Crane has said, we've never, let's never do that again. But as the historian and my friend

Conrad Crane has said, we've never been able to never do it again. The consolidation of military gains in the political outcomes has never been an optional phase of war, except in a raid, right? And the definition of a raid is a military operation of limited purpose, short duration, and planned withdrawal, right? So there are raids as exceptions to this, but otherwise we have to consolidate gains. And what's interesting is how, you know, the old Mark Twain saying that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. As you know, I'm a huge fan of Margaret MacMillan, and she's written an amazing essay, which I think deserves more attention, called The Rhyme of History, which is on the Brookings website as well. And I think that our history today is rhyming with the aftermath of Vietnam.

There's a long essay by this story on Conrad Crane called Avoiding Vietnam. And in it, he essentially makes the case that in trying to avoid Vietnam, we made many of the same mistakes in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We announced the complete withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011. Then Vice President Biden called President Obama on the phone from Baghdad and said, thank you for allowing me to end this goddamn war. He presided over the war ending ceremony with General Lloyd Austin, who was now our Secretary of Defense. And of course, wars don't end when one party disengages. At the time, Al-Qaeda in Iraq didn't look around and say, oh, hey, the Americans are gone. Let's just stop our jihad. And what they did over time is they morphed after releases from prison. of territory the size of Britain and visited just horrible atrocities on the people of Syria and Iraq, especially women, right, who were put into rape camps and enslaved. It was horrible,

the mass executions. What happened to the Yazidis? Hey, we've repeated the same thing in Afghanistan. We actually forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 of some of the most heinous people on earth, who immediately returned to the Taliban, began to victimize the Afghan people again. We stopped targeting the Taliban so they could marshal forces and place weapons caches at the direction of Pakistan's ISI around population centers and prepare for the offensive that we saw just this year. And we repeated exactly the same errors because we disengaged politically in Iraq and in Afghanistan as well. And, you know, sadly, in Afghanistan, it seems like we resolved to do everything we could to strengthen the Taliban and weaken the Afghan government and security forces on our way out.

So the lesson we're going to learn is like, let's just never do that again. Well, I mean, what is that? That is the consolidation of gains to get to a sustainable outcome. I mean, look at what's happening to the Afghan people now, but also look what's happening to jihadist terrorist organizations who are declaring victory over the world's greatest superpower. And of course, they didn't win. We defeated ourselves.

But the psychological effect in terms of bolstering the enemies of all humanity is significant, and we're going to pay consequences for it. Did you, when you were in the White House, did you ever chat in that mess with some of the political guys, the guys who are looking at the polling data? And did you have some sympathy for why if Western democratic liberal publics on the whole, I've got limited patience for distant

foreign wars of which they don't really understand. The numbers sound big. The body count is awful. Brothers, daughters coming home in body bags. Do you have some sympathy for the politics of it? How do you solve that bit? The way you solve it is leadership, right? So people these days like to say, well, you know, the American people didn't want to sustain the effort in Afghanistan. Okay, really? Is that surprising? After three presidents in a row said that we just need to get the hell out? Of course, they're not going to support it. So in a democracy, what people need to know is they need to know what is at stake, right, in this effort. And then, of course, what is a strategy that will deliver a favorable outcome at an acceptable

cost? And our leaders have failed to tell the American people what they deserve to know across three administrations. And what's astounding about Afghanistan is that we weren't fighting in Afghanistan. We were enabling the Afghans to bear the brunt of the fight. We had, I think it was 3,500. Who cares if it was 8,500? It doesn't matter, right?

I mean, Dan, I mean, we are the United States, right? We're not Ecuador. If we were Ecuador, it might be hard, you know, to have 8,500 troops there. But it's worth noting that we still have over 30,000 troops in South Korea, right? And that's a war that ended with an armistice, at least, in 1953. We had 100,000 troops there all through the 1950s, and of course, tens of thousands all through the 1960s. What people forget, Dan, it was in 1967 to 68 that Kim Il-sung was looking at American city, America looks weak. I mean, Americans are protesting war

in Vietnam. So now's the time. Now's the time to unify the peninsula under the communist red banner. And so he initiated an insurgency against South Korea. There were 300 attacks between 67 and 68. 15 American soldiers were killed in those attacks and 65 were wounded. And of course, this was against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. So maybe it didn't garner that much attention at the time. But we sustained our commitment there. And you know what?

Korea really didn't get on the path to success until transformations in their economy in the 70s and governance reforms in the 80s. And look at South Korea now. Was it worth it? Well, I think, look at life north of the 38th parallel compared to life south of the 38th parallel. Hell yes, it was worth it, right?

And so was it worth it in Afghanistan to preserve the freedoms that the Afghan people have enjoyed since 2001 and to deny the Taliban the ability to control populations and resources? Look at the humanitarian catastrophe that's ongoing. Was that worth 2,500 soldiers, 3,500 soldiers enabling Afghans to bear the brunt of the fight? I would say, heck yes, it was. And it was actually a pretty small insurance premium to pay against what we see happening now. But nobody was having that conversation with the American people. It's not the American people to blame for losing faith in the effort. It's a failure of leadership. I imagine if I was ever in the corridors of power and then I was out, I'd be restless. I'd be

frustrated. I want to get back amongst it. How do you find it? What's it like being on the other side? Well, you know, I poured it into this book, Battlegrounds and sometimes the fight to defend the free world, because I do believe that we are in a series of very critical and consequential competitions. And what I'm really upset about, Dan, I guess, concerned about, I guess I should say, is that I think more and more across the free world, we're complacent, right? We don't recognize what is at stake. And we see, of course, the polarization in our societies these days, where the effects of some people in our democracies feeling disenfranchised. And then, of course, the role of the information environment and social media pushing us further and further away from each other, right? We're better connected

to each other than ever electronically, and I think more distant from one another than ever emotionally, you know, and socially. And so what I've made kind of predictably for myself, I guess, as somebody who spent 34 years in the Army, is a mission statement for myself, which is to contribute as best I can to a deeper and better understanding of the most crucial challenges and opportunities we face so that we can work together to build a better future for generations to come. And I think that through that better understanding and through education, what your podcast does, by the way, is a way to help us to transcend these differences, to recognize our common humanity and all of our interests in strengthening our democracies, preserving our freedoms, and contending with authoritarian rivals and jihadist terrorists and others who have a much different view of the future. If these enemies, adversaries and

rivals succeed, the world will be less free, less prosperous and less safe. And so I hope to help more people understand what is at stake as a basis for helping us work together to build that better future. Well, it's an honest, a small part of that mission statement. You've set yourself up there. Now that you're a civilian, sir, last question. If Donald Trump was reelected in 2024 and asked you to serve, would you serve in his administration? No.

Well, because, you know, I mean, what did Aristotle say? Didn't Aristotle say it is only worth discussing what is in our power? And I think I served him as best as I could. I think I served him as best as I could. I think I served him well. I think he might even say that for those 13 months, especially considering the record of my successor. And I think that I got used up in that job. You know, I did my best as long as I could. I wasn't going to try to keep the job or go on to a next one. And I was at peace with that. Whether I would serve again in the public sector, I certainly would if I could make a difference, if I felt like I could make a difference.

But I'm really enjoying, you know, university life. I work with amazing students. In the last three paragraphs of Battlegrounds, I just talk about that I could not have written this book anywhere else but at the Hoover Institution with great colleagues, you know, and colleagues really beyond Stanford and Hoover who helped me, and amazing students.

I mean, I have worked with these great research assistants, and I teach courses here at Stanford that I really enjoy. So I'm not itching to go back to Washington. In fact, I did not see it as a disadvantage that being here at Stanford was just about as far away from Washington as I could have gotten and still be in the continental United States. Things took a turn after you left the White House. I'll say that much. Well well thank you very much indeed for coming on remind everyone the title of your book it's called it's called battlegrounds the fight to defend the free world and i think dan you want to say that it's a page turner and it's a perfect beach reading for the rest of the summer oh yeah it's a light it's a

perfect light beach read for sure oh brilliant hr thank you so much for coming on no dan great to be with you thank you so much and thanks for this amazing podcast you do i feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all work out and finish thanks folks you've met the end of another episode. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit,

we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give a little rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account so please don't ever do that can seem like a small thing but actually it's kind of a big deal for us so i really appreciate it see you next time you