Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Wesley Clark: Peace as a Paradoxical Ideal

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Get your copy of Gita Wirjawan’s book, “What It Takes: Southeast Asia”, NOW:https://books.endgame.id/Also available on Amazon:https://sgpp.me/amazon/Leave your review here:www.goodreads.com/book/show/241922036-what-it-takes---------------Power shapes history, but character shapes the future. Democracies do not collapse in a single dramatic moment; they erode quietly through short-term thinking and the loss of moral clarity.General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, sat down with Gita Wirjawan to reflect on peace, military involvement in global security, and America’s changing identity in a multipolar world.The discussion spans the Middle East, Russia–Ukraine, nuclear risks, and civilian casualties, highlighting the balance between strength and restraint, realism and hope.Full topics:0:00:00 - Intro0:02:09 - Why joined the military0:16:24 - Spirituality & religiosity0:18:26 - History of the birth of America0:29:07 - What is peace?0:37:55 - The US in a multipolar world0:50:56 - Significance: The quest of the 21st century?0:57:29 - Nuclear proliferation1:08:10 - Middle East1:12:25 - A realist look at Ukraine1:14:40 - NATO1:19:20 - Why invest in Southeast Asia#Endgame #GitaWirjawan #WesleyClark------------------About the guest:Wesley Clark is a four-star U.S. Army general who devoted 34 years of service under eight presidents, spanning from the Cold War to the Balkans. He served as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, leading NATO forces during a defining post–Cold War period. His career reflects decades of experience at the intersection of military strategy, political leadership, and the shaping of modern American power.About the host:Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur and educator. He is the founding partner of Ikhlas Capital and the chairman of Ancora Group. Currently, he is teaching at Stanford as a visiting scholar with Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy.------------------You may also like:https://youtu.be/PCYpeJYu9hY?si=mrMhRwUXgvti4-r7https://youtu.be/oT4OcBYEZac?si=b6YgpSOZwkwewcTjhttps://youtu.be/vZ7ocdh_rsk?si=mJKfaZEmXnVmHuYX------------------

You have to have humility as a nation. You can't pick up American democracy, transplant its laws. Besides American democracy is like any river. It moves. It changes. The rules change. The attitudes change. America is known as one of the ultimate stabilizers. But simultaneously, also is a nation that's been involved in conflicts more than necessarily. How do you reconcile it to?

Yeah, it's a real contradiction, isn't it? Right. The reputation that it gained was not from that America. It was from a different group of people, wealthy people. I want to talk about peace as an ideal. It seems a little bit paradoxical in the sense that it seems to be enabling the waging of a war to attain it. I'm curious as to what your views are with respect to peace. Well, I think that

mankind's going to have to learn to wrestle with its own dilemma. There's not any escapism on it. God speaks in many voices to many people. So, foolish thing it is to be killing people over religion. It has happened again and again and again in history. It's time to stop. Hi, friends.

It's a pleasure to tell you that my book, What It Takes Southeast Asia, has been released in English, and Bahasa Indonesia. You can buy it through books.endgame.id or at any of these stores. Now back to the show. Hi, friends. Today we're so honored to be raised by General Wesley Clark. General, thank you so much for your time.

Thanks for being with you, Jaya. You decided to join the military. Why? From the time I was a little boy, there was a lot of, let's call it, a martial atmosphere. The kids I played with, their fathers were all in World War II. My father had served in uniform in World War I. Everybody who went to high school and didn't go on to college was subject to the draft. If you went to college, you were going to do ROTC, and so you were going to become an officer.

Everybody had a service obligation, and this is the atmosphere I grew up in. And so going and looking at the military was kind of a natural. thing. But also, it was something that I was always attracted to because I was a, I was fearful for the country. From the time I was five years old, I remember when we fought in the Korean War. And I remember a young man who lived up the street from me. He came back and my parents said, don't, don't talk to him because he's, there's, he's not quite right. But I did. But I did. did talk to him and he kept saying, they kept coming over the hill, they kept coming over the hill. And I guess he was under what we used to call shell shock, what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.

He fought in the Korean War and he was reflecting that. And in 1953, we had the first hydrogen bomb. And people said, well, the Soviet Union has an A bomb and we have an H bomb. we should finish them off before they get an H-bomb. It wasn't a serious discussion, but there was some talk like that. And when you're seven or eight, nine years old, in 1956, the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian rebellion. And there were a lot of lurid stories about this in American magazines and pictures. And it was a terrible thing, really, that they did.

and it was only about people seeking freedom. And they were ruthlessly crushed with Soviet tanks and torture and people shot. And it was a shocking experience. And the next year, then Sputnik was launched. And Americans suddenly realized that we could be struck in 20 minutes by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. I was one of those kids who was interested in building models. And so from the time I was five or six years old, there were model airplanes, and there were F-86 Sabre jets and Panther jets and various things.

And then in 1957, after the Sputnik was launched, America tried to launch a satellite. It was called Vanguard One, and it failed. and it was the size of a grapefruit. And the picture was that the launch wobbled like this, and the little grapefruit landed beside the launch pad going beep, beep, beep. And so a lot of us were really appalled by this. And so we began to decide that America needed our help. So model rocket societies sprung up around the country.

So it's how I learned chemistry. They said, if you take charcoal, you can go to the drugstore, and you can buy potassium nitride and sulfur. So you just go into the drugstore and ask for it. So you go down and say, I'd like to buy a pound of sulfur. He said, well, that'll be 60 cents. And a pound of potassium nitrate. Okay, that's a dollar in 10 cents.

Well, I had a dollar in 70 cents, and you go home and you mix it up with charcoal. You grind it up and grind up the charcoal and get it all mixed up. and then you've got a sort of crude form of gunpowder. But then it may not be as good as if you used potassium nitrate. Why would that be? Because nitrate has an extra oxygen atom over nitride. But then if you use potassium chlorate, that's even better. But then when you went to the drugstore and asked for potassium perchlorate,

that's where they drew the line. They didn't have it. And they didn't have the aluminum per chlorate. And so that's what we really needed. But by that time, it was 1958, and people were really serious about, you know, fixing America's problem. So we had a German scientist named Werner von Braun, who was part of the German machinery was brought over here, and an army missile launched a satellite, and we were in the space race. Wow.

So it was something that captured all of it. The next year, they passed a law called the National Defense Education Act, and so they picked some of the outstanding junior high school and high school students in Arkansas for extra education. So I was one of those who was chosen, and I signed up for it, of course, because it sounded important, but it was about biology. Biology, but I was interested in space, stars, going to the moon, Superman, you know, things like that, and this was about biology.

But they taught us, they called it the Federal Radiation Project. And so we took Troosophila-Malonagaster, the common fruit fly. We put them in test tubes with bananas. We took them to the University of Arkansas Medical Center. We put them through x-ray machines. we then check to see if their descendants had red eyes or yellow eyes. And then we learned about Mendelayevon genetics. So he had dominant genes and recessive genes.

And this was opposed to a Soviet geneticist named Lysenko, who said the environment, not the genes, was the critical thing because he could prove that you could make the ideal Soviet man and you could reform mankind under communism. So that was our National Defense Education Act, progress in Little Rock when I was 14. Would you argue that if there's anybody out there who wants to be good in biology,

wants to be good in space, they could still enlist in the military? Well, you know, it just, things happen. I mean, I was just interested in these things. The next year, I went away to a military high school because when I was in the ninth grade here, there was a desegregation crisis. So they closed the schools so they wouldn't have to let African American kids go to school. And that was the year that I was in the ninth grade. So the schools for the 10th, 11th, and 12th were closed.

So my mother said, you need to go away to school. I picked a school with a good swimming team. I went to Castleites Military Academy. It was a good swimming team. I really thought about it, but when I came back, that summer, I thought, you know, I don't know if I'm going to go back or not. I went to check with the high school and said, can I take calculus as a senior because I still wanted to be a rocket scientist and a theoretical physicist and you had to have calculus? everybody knew that. And so they said, yes, for you,

we're going to have the first calculus class in the Little Rock Public Schools for your year. So I didn't go away to military school. I did calculus. I was really excited about it. We collectively did it together. We at the students and the teacher who had never taught calculus before.

And so it was pretty exciting. we hit at one point we hit X integrate X sign X it's like how do we do this how do we do it I figured it out I was so proud of myself on how to integrate X sign X and so I'm I was really enthusiastic about it but I had decided when I went to American Legion Boy State after the 11th grade I had done some time working as a chart boy in a office that was selling stocks, securities to the public. My job, when I was 16, was to look at the Barron's Financial Weekly, which I'm sure you're familiar with.

And with a number three pencil and a graph paper, chart, the open, the close, the high and the low for the week. And so you had all these stocks, and you had to be careful not to smudge the number of number three pencil, but you got a dollar an hour. And I thought, this is a lot of money. This is a lot of money. Yeah. I could, my mother was making like $40 or $50 a week. I said, during the summer, I could work like eight hours a day? Can I work eight hours a day? You can come in and work all you want. That's what Mr. Medi said. And after I worked three or four days, eight hours a day, doing this, my eyes watering, yawning, taking a break for lunch.

and getting a barbecue sandwich and spending an hour and a half pay to eat two barbecue sandwiches because I was hungry, it suddenly occurred to me that I didn't want to work in an office. That this wasn't for me. And so there was a cadet from West Point

who came and spoke to us at American Legion Boy State. And he said, West Point, it's like MIT in the sciences and mathematics. It's like Harvard in the social sciences. It's a manly outdoor life. You shoot, you run, you camp, you use a compass, you barrishoot. I'm like, God, that's for me.

So I had a scholarship to Duke. I had a scholarship to Georgia Tech. I turned down the Harvard recruiter, and I went to West Point. General, you spent more than 30 years. in the military, illustriously. You were at the top of the class of West Point. You were a road scholar at Oxford. Is that the only path for anybody to be successful in the military?

Oh, absolutely not. It's a hard path. I mean, there are many different ways to be successful. And you have to be careful on what success means anyway. I mean, success in the military really is about serving your country honorably. It's about, you know, use your intelligence, your leadership, your lead. leadership, your competence to do what's asked of you, all in service of the country. And when you join the military, you suspend your independence as an independent person.

You put your trust in the leadership of the country. And so if they said, go here, you're going to go. And unless you decide your conscience is objector and you try to get out of it. But you have to understand that you're connected to something bigger than yourself. In a way, it's a real thrill because you realize you're going to be part of the country in a way that if you're a banker or working in the state government, you're not. This is big stuff. If there's a crisis, you might go there. If there's a problem, you're going to know about it.

So it's a really, on one hand, a really great experience. On the other hand, when you look back on it, it's pretty terrifying because from the perspective, of my age now. I look back and I say these people that gave us these decisions. Sometimes they didn't make good decisions. But you didn't know that when you were a cadet or a lieutenant or a captain.

You trusted them. They were put in their position by the constitutional authority of the United States. They were the best and the brightest. They were what we had to offer. And we did as we were directed. So it was a great experience, but you don't have to come up the way

I did. Plenty of great leaders have come through the officer candidate school. Plenty, plenty have been direct commissioned. Some have stayed as enlisted men and done great things for the country. So it's just, you serve to the best of your ability. It's a little bit of luck. In fact, it's a lot of luck along the way. And, you know, you've cast your lot into something else. When I was on CNN a few years ago, a woman said, oh, General Clark, she said, you've had such an interesting career. I said, well, how old are you? She said, 24. I said, well, it's not too late for you. You can go into the military. You'd have the same thing. She said, oh, I could never give up my freedom. Well, that's what you do when you go into the military.

You do give up your freedom. General, I'm in Arkansas, in Little Rock, Arkansas at your office. Not a lot of people from my part of the work get to visit Little Rock. You were born in Chicago. Yeah, but we'd like them to come to Little Rock. Okay. They're welcome. We would love to. We need some really good Indonesians in this state.

Thank you. We're underpopulated. Thank you. What made you move from Chicago to Little Rock? Oh, my mother grew up here. And after my father died, she felt like this was the right place for me to grow up. So we moved in with my grandmother and grandfather down here. She worked as a secretary in a bank.

My mother did, and I was raised by my grandparents for the first few years while she worked. You've mentioned in the past many times that you were able to maintain religiosity and spirituality while in the military. Explain that to the lay people out there. First of all, I think if you're very, very lucky, you have a sort of spiritual. sense that you always have a feeling that there's something more than what the material world is, that you look at the trees and the birds and you think there's something beyond this. And maybe it's because you need something. Maybe you're a needy person and you sense it.

Maybe it's something else. But I was always lucky. I always felt like I was able to connect somehow beyond. the everyday of life. A lot of people can't. They don't see it for them. Religious and religion is something that's imposed on them. But for me, it's always been something that I sensed, felt, and it goes in and out. If you want to stay in that spiritual world and you have to become a monk or something, I guess, or a priest. And it was never that kind of calling for me. But I could still sense it. And I always felt like I should follow the precepts. For me, it was in the

Bible. It could have been an Islam. It would have been the same thing, I think, because you have to, if you have that sense that there's God and that there's some greater power over mankind, then you show your humility, you show your reverence, you try to do the best you can with what you're given here on earth, you don't ask for too much except to just be given an opportunity. And that's the way it was for me. You know, to a lot of people in the developing world, America is known as one of the ultimate stabilizers, but simultaneously also as a nation that's been involved in conflicts, more than necessarily. How do you reconcile it to? Yeah, it's a real contradiction, isn't it? Right. And the fact is,

the country was kind of started by accident, you know. The first people that came here were looking for gold. They wanted to do what the Spanish did. And the Spanish model was exploitation. Find the natives, enslave them, kill off the leadership, take the gold, tell them you're going to work for me or else. That was a Spanish model. throughout the new world. But when they came to America early in the 17th century, they couldn't find any gold. Instead, they found a bunch of stout-hearted Native Americans

who said, it's my land. You got to come and work with me. And so there's a famous story about the pilgrims who in Massachusetts would have starved if the Indians had not explained that you have to fertilize the corn by putting a fish in with the corn seeds, a dead fish, so that it will decay and fertilize the corn.

And so America got started in this way of sort of encroaching on other people's land. And it went like that all across the country. And some of the greatest American presidents were involved in this. George Washington was a surveyor. and he was a man who was a proud man, big man for his time, physically strong guy, and he decided he would make his fortune on the frontier. His mother was ambitious. He didn't have too much money himself, but he got himself out started as a surveyor. And then he met prominent people, and he got, because he'd been a surveyor, he got into the militia. And later he, after the, uh, the, uh,

British and Indian wars, he managed to scavenge up a bunch of land in Virginia, some of it from veterans that didn't need it. So he became a landowner, married the widow of the second wealthiest man in Virginia. And so he worked his way up. But he started as a military guy. And the country then moved west. And every time it moved west, it had conflict, conflict with the British. Conflict with French, conflict with the Indians, and some terrible things happened. Conflict with the Mexicans. Some people think the Mexican war was started deliberately by the United States. It may have been because President Andrew Jackson, he told Sam Houston,

Sam, he said, go get Texas. This is like in the 1830s. And Sam brought a lot of Americans from Tennessee and maybe from Arkansas down there. and they homesteaded. The Spaniards sort of welcomed them at first because under the Spanish model, there weren't enough Indians here to do the job of exploitation. But these Americans, they were pig-headed.

They wanted to own their own land. They didn't want to work for anybody else, and they immediately came into conflict with the Spanish rulers down there, and sure enough, there was a war of independence, and Mexico had lost its possession of Texas. And then, you know, we were careful. We didn't want Texas to be independent.

So, you know, we hornswoggled them, tricked them into signing up to become American state. Then we sent our military down there to figure out what the boundary is. Is it the Picos or is it the Rio Grande? And there was a Mexican troop that somehow trespassed on us. There was a shooting war. And by God, that was it. And we invaded Mexico. And we sent 12,000 troops finally under Winfield Scott.

We captured Veracruz and marched on to Mexico City. We took it. We held them hostage. We demanded they sell half the United States to Mexico for, I think it was $20 million or something. And it was all about conquest. It wasn't nice. Thomas Jefferson, who's revered as the writer of the Declaration of Independence, speculated at one point in his life.

He said the one place we really need in the western hemisphere is Cuba. So we finally got it. 1898 of the battleship Maine blew up and people didn't know exactly what happened. It had black powder. It could have been a spontaneous like spark or it could have been that the Spanish blew it up intentionally because they didn't like it in Savannah Harbor. But we didn't wait to find out. The war drums were beating.

We declared war on Spain. They were colonists anyway. Somehow we ended up with Thomas Dewey sailing into Manila Bay, and we ended up with the Philippines. And on the way in, he picked up the Philippine revolutionary leader, put him on board, and he was fighting against the Spaniards, too. He thought he'd be an ally. But then at the end of the war, we demanded Spain,

turn over the Philippines and the colonies to us. We became the colonizer in the Philippines, and we fought the man that we brought in as it's a tortured story of America's growth. And a lot of well-meaning people, but a lot of greed. And most people just out here just trying to do the best they could. My mother's parents, my grandfather was born in 1878, and he was born up in northeast Oklahoma. and so they never had public schools.

When he was 12 years old, his mother died, his father married, his mother's sister, and she was a real mean mother, apparently. And she forced my grandfather out of the house, said we don't have enough food to feed you, you go take care of yourself. So he got a job taking care of horses for a timber business. He worked his whole life on sawmills, and he moved up to become a chief engineer. Never had a day of schooling, never owned a house, ever drawn a car. This is America.

This is 20th century America. My grandmother's family lost their money in the 1893 Depression. She was pulled out of the third grade. And so she married my grandfather. He was a big strong guy. And she was like 16 or 17. And she had to get out of the house also. So that was the America that was.

wasn't involved in war and conflict, just ordinary people struggling to survive, just like people anywhere. When I was in Ukraine in 2014 and the fighting had just started and the Russians were coming into Donbos, the interpreter that was with us was a woman whose parents were in the area occupied by the Russians. And I said, well, why don't you get them out? She said, well, they're retired, she said, and they basically, they can't leave because in the summer they grow food in their garden and they can it. And that's basically what they live on all year with a little bit of money. Occasionally, they might buy chicken or something, but they're basically living on the vegetables they can that they grow each year. Well, that sounded pretty primitive, but wait a minute,

that's the way my grandparents were here in the 1950s. We had a kitchen full of canned goods. We grew corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, squash out in the backyard. And we worked at it diligently, and grandmother and granddad tanned everything. That's basically what they lived on with occasional chicken or a pot roast or something. So that was the America of the 1950s. The reputation that it gained was not from that America. It was from a different group of people, wealthy people. people who were pressing on to acquire land and take property and so forth.

But the majority of Americans aren't connected to any of that. They're just like people everywhere just trying to survive. They don't have any great education. They don't have any great aspirations. They're happy to be Americans. But the policy of the country has been driven by other things. In the early 20th century, we did a lot in Central America. The United Fruit Company had discovered bananas, and bananas were the biggest thing at the turn of the 20th century.

You had to grow them in plantations and bring them in and ripen them, and everybody wanted them for breakfast, everybody on the East Coast. I don't know if bananas got as far as Arkansas. Maybe they did. But then when people in those countries said that, you know, we don't want to just work for a United Fruit Company, we sent in the United States Marine Corps. we created the Panama Canal we're very proud of it when we did it and you look at it now it's a big thing but you know the way we did it

is we persuaded a bunch of Colombians that you're way up here or away from Bogota why don't you have your own country we'll back you and we'll send in some Marines to protect you in our fleet because we want that canal the one the French failed to build so they declared

independence we came in we put and it's a great American success story, if you look at it that way. But if you look at it the other way, it's pretty ugly. And that's the record of America. We've always had high ideals. We've never quite lived up to them, but we still have the aspirations. And the American people are basically people who believe in God. They believe in their families, their homes, and they trust in their government. But they don't control the government.

It's representative government. So the government has sometimes done things that maybe if it had been subjected to a vote, maybe it wouldn't have happened. But maybe it would have because people didn't fully understand it. I want to talk about peace as an ideal. It seems a little bit paradoxical in the sense that it seems to be enabling the waging of a war to attain it. I'm curious as to what your views are with respect to peace.

Well, you know, in the Bible it says that there will be wars and rumors of war forever. But, you know, it's human nature to be acquisitive. It's human nature to be competitive. Everybody wants to do the best they can for their family. And even if they're not ambitious for themselves, eventually push comes to chauvin. they do what's necessary. And so in the Christian religion, Christ tells us to turn the other cheek,

but in practice, that's a very hard thing to do when your family's at risk and so forth. And so peace is, it's an aspirational state, but the actual model for peace is proposed in a system of capitalism. which is a tough economic system where people are competing against each other.

So, you know, peace is, okay, what is it? Is it the absence of competition, the absence of stress, or actual physical danger or hardship? What is peace? And so most people need a little bit of stress to get their juices flowing and get up and work. Some people thrive on stress. and so people don't want to see destruction. People don't want to see war.

But one of the things this happened to America is that our last war here was 180 years ago, 170 years ago. So people have forgotten what it was like. It was ugly. There's a story in Arkansas that the, When the war started here, we were a border state. And so we weren't one of the first states to secede. But the state was through the legislature, it was controlled by the planters in the eastern part of the state that had slaves and they had cotton plantations. And they were making a lot of money.

Arkansas was the 13th wealthiest out of 33 states. And so they wanted to keep slavery because it would destroy the economy. but the rest of the state, and if you look out my window, you can't see it here. I'm pointing, just in case notionally people understand, I'm pointing to the north and the west. There's mountains and hills up there. I remember that. It's not the greatest mountains. But they're a couple of thousand feet high, and if you're walking them, they look like mountains, and they feel like mountains.

But up there, no slaves. It didn't work. You couldn't have a big plantation with a bunch of slaves. You couldn't grow cotton up there. The land wasn't for it. People up there were small farmers. They had apple and pear orchards and maybe a couple of cows and stuff, and they were subsistence farmers. They had their own civilization and so forth.

They didn't want to secede. So when the state decided to secede because the bankers were controlled by the farmers and the farmers wanted to keep it and the bankers had the legislature. And so we voted to go out. People scattered every which direction. Some people went west. Some people joined the Union Army. Some people join the Confederate Army. They didn't know what to do.

Some people just tried to do nothing. But the war swept through here back and forth a couple of times, and the Union forces came in here in 1863, I think it was, and a man named Smith from a town up the Arkansas River away, came to see the Union General and said, I like permission. He said, there's a lot of lawlessness where we are. We don't have any police left,

and there's horse thievery going on, and women are being abused and things like this, and said, we need to form a militia. Can I have your permission to do it? So the Union General said, you got my permission. So we formed a militia. And a few months later, before the Civil War was over, a group of 15 or 20 men on horseback rode into his front yard,

and they said, Smith, get out here. And he said to his wife, I think I'm about to meet my maker. He had a 16-year-old son in the barn who saw the whole thing. So Mr. Smith walked out on his porch. He had a shotgun under his arm. And these people with bandanas on just opened up on him.

And he was murdered right there on his own porch. And so they obviously didn't like the idea of the militia, right? So his son looked at these people, looked at the horses, the saddles, the blankets. People in those days, they didn't have a whole lot of variety in their wardrobe. And he recognized him. And he said to someone, maybe his mother said, I know who they are, I'm going to kill every one of them. And so in 1923, I think the story goes. This is some almost 60 years later.

He was interviewed by a newspaper reporter, and they, said, now, Mr. Smith, you're known as a mean, mean man. And they say you've killed a lot of people. How many have you killed? And he said, too many, but I didn't get them all. He had, for years afterwards, ridden through the county, he'd found people. Some of them he shot in the face, some of them he shot in the back, some he ambushed, some he went to their homes. But that was the terrible spirit of the civil war in this part of the country. It's gone now. Americans, they don't see any destruction.

They see it only on television. It's done to other people in their name. And when I was growing up, you could still talk to people from the south and from Georgia, whose relatives had remembered Sherman's March to the Sea. In 1864, he had moved through Georgia, deliberately destroying livestock, barns, homes, burning people out so that they couldn't provide logistic support to the Confederacy. They hated him. And 90, 100 years later, they still hated him. You know, the memories get passed down.

Wow. So, but now it's been another 60, 70 years. So those memories are forgotten. Now it's about collegiate sports and maybe pro football or something. Golf. Maybe it's about golf. I mean, it's different today. And the America that struggled for subsistence where people barely got by,

now that America is gone today for all. intents and purposes. All of Americans are wealthier. Some, not so much more. You still have unemployed. You still have people who are struggling. But compared to what it was in the 30s, 40s, 50s, much different. Much different. And so we're not as attuned to the actions that America's taken overseas. So when you talk about peace and war, it doesn't resonate the same way. That, for example, if you go to Europe and talk about peace and more, oh, especially if you go to Eastern Europe and talk about it, there you've got a lot of fresh memories. If you go to Poland and talk about the Russians, they'll tell you everything about the Russians. And if you look at Ukraine today,

it's fresh. It's like a woman in Ukraine told me, she said, the Russians killed my husband. I will kill every Russian I can see for as long as I live. So those center. are not current in America because we just don't know it. But the government has tried to maintain a containment of communism and later tried to stabilize the world after the fall of the Soviet Union. And it has used force of arms occasionally. There's been an evolution in not just America, but in many other parts of the world.

on the assumption that the world is becoming more multipolar, where countries that would have been tiny decades ago have become much larger, they tend to want to be a bit more revisionist with respect to the preexisting order. How do you see the role of the United States going forward in arguably a more multipolar world? Well, I think there's been too much made of multipolarism, to be honest with you. I think because the United States is still a developing country. If you look at this state of Arkansas, we're a big state. We've got three million people.

In many countries in the developing world, we'd have 25 million people and wouldn't be overpopulated. So while we were bringing in immigration, we were growing 1% a year through immigration. It's pretty good. And that's one of the reasons why the American GDP continued to grow, even though we were a developed country. We didn't have the birth rate of, let's say, Nigeria or Uganda, but given with immigration and the birth rate, we were still a growing country, as opposed to, let's say, Britain, France, et cetera. And so we felt like there was no reason to sort of wring our hands and say, okay, well, the American era's

over. It's going to be multipolar. No, we did that. We brought two billion people out of poverty. We did that. We Americans. We wanted Indians to, when growing up, people would say, you better finish your food because there's some poor Chinese kid that wants that food.

But, you know, China's a wealthy country today. On the whole, there's still poor people in China, a lot of them. But on the whole, it's come so far in the last 45, 50 years, really, since the death of Mount Chetan. And so when you look at America and you look at its resources, there's no reason it needs to to shrink back and say, okay, well, we give up. No, we should still, we have values, we have significance, we have a system of rules and law and order. People still want to come to this country. They don't go to China.

They don't go to Russia. They want opportunity. It's like three Pakistanis told me one day, one Pakistani taxi driver. New York, he said, we came from Pakistan, he said, and I'm driving this taxi, but we also have a restaurant. And my brothers and I are buying the building. He said, only in America could you do this. And I think that's true. And so this is still a land of opportunity.

It's a land in which there is mostly impartial justice. I'm not saying they're not exceptions, but in general, the courts work. In general, the laws are enforced. When you see a line of people waiting to get an automobile license, you don't go up and say, hey, I got $100, I want to be up in line and to slip it to the clerk, say, oh, yeah, oh, you're next. That doesn't work here. People tell you, get back in line.

Some countries, that works. And so it's a desirable place to live. And we should be proud of what we've built, despite the fact that it's been mistakes and some things along the way that from the perspective of the 21st century, you look back on them, You feel really bad about it. And you wish it hadn't happened. But we are where we are. And the question is, how do we go forward?

So I don't feel that there's any reason to shrink back. China says they'd like to operate on a G2 basis, just the United States and China. Where does that leave Southeast Asia? What do you have to do? Go, mother, may I? Please, may I talk to somebody? Because you big adults are talking. No, we never believed in that.

We set up the United Nations, where everybody has an equal voice in the General Assembly. And then for the Security Council, then you get your turn. And there are five permanent members, and I'm not saying it shouldn't be reformed to bring some other countries in. Their growth has changed. It's a dynamic process, but I don't see the United States as necessarily giving up leadership. Certainly, we shouldn't give up NATO. We shouldn't give up our alliances with Australia and New Zealand and Japan and South Korea. We should still be working the way we used to work in Latin America.

We tried to win friends, build investment, promote development, and the cultivation of drugs. Some of the things we succeed at, some of the things we don't. But I think we still should go forward with it. I think the American experiment's not over. America has proven historically that it's been able to remedy itself from faces of difficulties and all that, right? Give some sort of an indication of duration within which you think America will be able to be revisionist in a good way. As it relates perhaps, you know, for example, the perceived efficiency with decision making at the UN. Well, you know, we've been through three major political cycles since the Civil War.

First, we had this marvelous expansion of industrialization. And I've got a lot of German, French, and British investment that built a railroad system on iron, steel, and coal. But the labor was done by a lot of East European immigrants. They're still up there in Pennsylvania. You'll find the names if you go through Western Pennsylvania. It's entirely different than Arkansas. off. And they demanded a free, they demanded unions. They wanted a better living conditions. And then in the south where we had farmers down here, we were oppressed by Wall Street that doesn't like

inflation. And so they wanted to, they wanted to shrink the money supply. Well, in the 1890s, people couldn't, they couldn't do anything down here. They didn't have any money. That's why a Democratic presidential candidate said, you can't crucify America on a cross of gold. He didn't win. A guy named McKinley won the 1896 presidential election. But gradually, a reform movement built up. And in 1905, this incredible story about the meatpacking industry and how bloody it was and how exploitative it was and how it really misused the people that were in the slaughterhouse. in Chicago and elsewhere burst onto the American conscience. And it began the reform movement that ended up with labor unions,

with socialized medicine under Medicare and social security and regulation of the stock market. And so gradually the country was more regulated. We created an administrative state. We regulated interstate commerce. We regulated banking. We regulated trade. We didn't let just a single family control the rates at which railroads could charge farmers, exorbitant rates. We had a concept of the common good.

When airplanes came along, we regulated the skies. When radio came in, we regulated the airwaves. We said, it's for the common good. And this was the progressive era. and it lasted really until the late 1970s. It's like everything that we used to say in the Army, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. So maybe we overdid it.

Maybe we over-regulated. It turned out to be really hard to regulate airlines. And people that owned radio stations and TV stations, they want more of them. And why were they not permitted to have more in one, a single market? And why did you have to say that you have to have a fairness doctrine? What's fair? I mean, what's fair in your eyes is not fair in my eyes, so why don't we throw that out?

So we moved away from the progressive era into the age of Reagan, which is low taxes, less government regulation, and sort of less fettered capitalism. and people like Rush Limbaugh in the radio shock jocks were able to come in and make fun of politicians. Before that, politicians were, well, they were respected. And we knew they weren't perfect, but you didn't go check on their private lives. You didn't look at their bathrooms and all that stuff. But under Rush Limbaugh, politics was fun, fun. These people were just like us, only worse. Isn't that fun?

You know, you're down there. working hard at your home. He's up there having a good time in Washington, chasing a bunch of women. Isn't that funny? And you're paying him for that. Is that right? And so it built a different spirit in America, a more toxic politics. And the politics became toxic because a man named Newt Gingrich decided that the Republican Party would always be a minority party.

Democrats had more kids, immigrants were voting Democratic, unless you could do two things. Number one, you could capture the relationship with Israel because Americans believe in Israel because says so in the Bible. And you had to be able to say no to the Democrats. So Newt Gingrich established the contract with America in 1994. before, he became the first Republican Speaker of the House in years, and he shut down the government. But he lost. But he established a serious form of resistance inside the Republican Army, which later emerged as a Tea Party after the 2008 recession.

And then, you know, they were naturally receptive to Donald Trump. Donald was personality. He was a leader. He was there. You knew him. He was entertaining. He's funny. And he called it like it is.

He's never going to lie to us. As it said on the posters, Donald Trump, no BS. And it's been all over the state of Arkansas that way. So this was the sort of final push, in my view, of the age of Reagan. in which capitalism is less fettered, regulations are less binding. It's more about the profit motive. Let's turn loose American dynamism, and let's do it all overseas.

And let's not worry. Don't go crazy about things like the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act and other things, because, you know, you've got to give a little in business sometime. I mean, it's just, it's the way the world works, okay? Let's don't be too hung up on these ideals that these liberals are put in. And so, and I'm just speaking the voice here. And so that's the age of Reagan that we're in. Now, you're asking what could happen?

One of the hardest things to predict is what's going to happen in politics. Even a week before an election, you don't know for sure how many people are going to vote and what they're going to vote for. So some people thought that the election of 2020 was the end of the age of Reagan. Apparently it wasn't. Some people think it'll be over in 2028. Some people think it'll last forever. So if you look at what happened in Hungary, some people thought Viktor Orban would be there forever, but he isn't. So you don't know what the future holds.

But what you hope is that as America and the world. becomes more wealthy, people become less self-centered, more able to see the other person's perspective, more willing to share, to cooperate, to broaden their horizons, to travel, to understand that most of us are all the same. We're interested in our families, ourselves. We want a good life. We don't want to hurt other people anymore than we have to. We feel bad when we do it. Some of us feel worse than others. But for the most part, mankind got to learn to get along together. And the great problem of the 21st century is going to be, what is it that it's all about? If the 20th century was all about sort of this emergence from poverty, from two billion people

when I was growing up to eight and a half billion people today, from $2 a day in Africa to some people who are incredibly wealthy, from countries like Indonesia, which were under Dutch colonialism when I was growing up to one of the largest and greatest democracies in the world today. Where do we go from here? So in Indonesia, General Prabowo wants every school child to have a lunch. Well, of course. I mean, who can be against that? As he said, and as an arboral, he wants every child to have the benefit of fresh fruit that's grown in Indonesia.

Of course they should. And when we move forward with this in a generation or two, and people realize that there's so much wealth in the world, there's so much capital, everybody could have a home, food, clothing, an education, transportation, entertainment to some degree. Then what's it all about? Is it just a struggle for survival? Is there something higher in the evolutionary chain?

Do we move up Maslow's needs hierarchy? so that now we're all looking for self-actualization. Is it what John Adams famously said? He said, I study war because I want my children to study business and commerce and their children to study art and literature. Well, maybe that's too compressed in three generations. But nine, 12 generations, can we move forward in a way that gives the whole world a about? better state. I don't think GDP is the right measurement. Yeah. So that GDP is, we're always looking at growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, what is growth? It's a monetary measure. So we've got to

move beyond this into more values, into what's significant in people's lives. You know, the greatest gift you can have in life is not financial, it's significance. It's like a friend of mine said, He was a young man whose father was a farm worker about my age. And instead of going to Vietnam, he was working on a farm. He was 17 years old. He got his arm ripped off with a tractor accident. So he never went in the military. But he said when he was in his 60s and early 70s, he said, you know, I'm real proud of myself.

He said, I didn't have anything to start with, but I own now thousands of acres of farmland. it's worth hundreds of millions of dollars and I own two banks and I'm real proud of myself. I did this myself. I said well Ray that is a wonderful thing and why don't you give your children the same gift?

Let them do it themselves. He said well you know that that's a real good thought. He said I'm going to go home and talk to my wife about this. I asked him the next day I said did you talk to your wife about it? He said I sure did. I said what did she say? She said

no so I'm sure his boys are good young men I'm sure there are presidents of banks and so forth but they didn't get the sense of satisfaction that Ray had from building it himself and the greatest it's the greatest gift you can have is significance in other people's lives if you can help them if you can pull them up if you can teach them if you can build economies and stuff I admire General Provoa because that's what he's trying to do for Indonesia. He didn't have to do that. And he knows it's hard work, but he's doing it. And I look at other people and other political systems and some people have it.

And some people have sort of ridden the system up. They got started in politics as in early age. It's like, what else would I do? I don't know anything else. And they end up at the top. And for them, it's just a struggle to stay on top of the heap. and, you know, whatever happens. When I ran for president, my former boss, General Shalikashvili, he said,

well, he said, why would you want such a job? He said, before you run, they will attempt you to destroy you so you can't get the job. When you're in the job, they'll do everything they can to prevent you from doing anything significant. And afterwards, you'll spend your entire life defending what you did. Why would you want to do it? He said, I will support you, but why would you want this job? Well, because it was a chance to do something for other people. And that's why people should aspire to leadership positions.

And I think there are people all over the world who do this, not just an elective office, but in businesses and charities and churches and synagogues and mosques and everywhere, people who are dedicated to helping other people. but each generation and each person has to see it for themselves. I look at these people who have gone to Islamic extremism and become terrorists, and I feel sorry because I know they're seeking significance in their lives. They can't find the meaning of life. They're in a system they don't feel comfortable with. They didn't invent it. They don't have any roots in it.

They've been many of them injected into a society that's not, exactly welcoming to their own family and practices and they're and they're looking for significance and um you know if you look at um at at movies and things like hunger games right what's hunger games about but the same thing what is star trek about yeah same thing lord of the rings all these great adventures and fantasies that people want to live in today and um And then you look at the other ones, the ones that are not so nice, the ones on line where you're killing people and stuff. And millions of people are playing these games, killing each other, in opposing forces, and fantasy games. And it's all about significance.

I like the optimism in your tone and the hopefulness. But as a military person, I'm just curious as to your views on the risk of, nuclear proliferation going forward at the rate that these countries that used to be tiny, they've gotten much bigger. They'd think a little bit differently about the world now. Maybe. But when I meet people from these countries, I still see people who are concerned about safety, their families.

I don't see them as being reckless. Now, maybe there's some people and some people. said the Iranians were like this, that if they got a nuclear weapon, they'd use it. Maybe there were some who would like that. But the majority of people in Iran are certainly not like that. And maybe that's a country that is dystopic. Maybe it shouldn't be permitted. And maybe in the 21st century world, nations like that will be outcast and nobody will support

them. And we'll move past this geostrategic competition. I look at China, and when I was in China in 2005, I met with the president who's youth advisor, and he explained to me, he said, you know, you think it's a dictatorship, but really all these people that are on the Politburo, they're not all friends. They don't automatically see things the same way. And when you look at China, said from the perspective of the Politburo, then you realize it's a lot of the public bureau, then you realize, it's a roiling, twirling, bubbling mass of humanity. It can break out into violence at any time. And so it has to be carefully nurtured and watched and grow this.

So it's a little bit different now, 26 years later, or 21 years later, under Xi Jinping, he has changed the system of the rotation. But I think he still must feel the use of the Chinese communist. Party to leaven the Chinese electorate and the public because some systems don't work in other countries. You know, America can say, well, you need human rights and you need democracy in China, but maybe it's going to take a while to get there. I was with President Museveni in Uganda a few years ago, and he said to me, he wrote on the

blackboard, he said, Adam Smith. I'm like, yeah, Adam Smith, of course. I used to teach him in economics. He said, you Americans, he said, you don't understand. He said, you're trying to make me live by your values. I'm trying to build this economy. My people don't live by your values. It's a hard thing to explain.

So I think you have to have humility as a nation. You can't pick up American democracy, transplant. its laws. Besides American democracy is like a, it's like any river. It moves. It changes. The rules change. The attitudes change. It's not the same country year after year. Four percent of the electorate is different. Each four year cycle, we lose about one percent per year. And so, if you look at the people and what their attitudes would have been in the election of 2000, which was disputed between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and here we're coming up, 28, years difference. That's 28% different electorate. Of course they're different. I mean, I talk to young

people, and they were born after 9-11. They don't know what the Cold War was. For them, that's ancient history. Yet, when I was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and I was in England, we were only at that time 13 years in England passed rationing. They didn't stop rationing until 1953. And, And when one of my friends tried to break into a line in London for a bus, an old woman hit him with an umbrella. And she said, young man, you wait your turn in the queue. Yeah, because different cultures, different times, different experiences. So it's always moving.

So every generation must have its leaders who have the ability to connect, but also the wisdom to look past the fads and the foibles of the immediate to see further ahead. And when you can't do that, when you don't have leaders who have some foresightedness, you're going to have real problems. So when democracies elect people who are only tacticians and only interested in winning elections, then certain problems will emerge. And historically, this has been a, real failure of democracies. They don't last because of the self-centeredness, the short-termism,

the inability to look longer term. Even today in this American society, people are saying, well, you know, you're giving so much money these old people. What about young people? Young, old people are getting older. There's more of them. They're taking Social Security. They don't need it. They're living well. People in the 30s can't get jobs. They don't expect to do as well financially as their parents. And young people, you won't, give them free child care, you won't pay for universities, that money's going to old people. What are they doing with it? And so, this generational divide is becoming more of a visible issue that people are able to look at.

Whereas in the 1940s and 50s, when I was a young person, you were in trouble if you were an old person. Maybe you got $20 a month for Social Security. You couldn't live on it. You know, my grandparents, they got a little bit of money on Social Security, but they basically lived off my mother's salary, just like I did. And I took Coke bottles up to the store when I was six years old, got two cents a bottle. And I was real proud of myself. And, you know, my mother ate lunch when she worked as a secretary in the bank for 25 cents, a quarter of a dollar each day.

she paid 15 cents to ride the bus to work and back and she made $40 a week so the country has changed and people's values change with it people today in America there are still poor people but they're not poor relative to what they were before they have clothes they have food they have opportunities they have travel they have relatives they have communications I mean these are poor people running around with cell phones. Right. And it's a lot different than what it was 75 years ago in America. So I think that you have to be hopeful as we move forward. We're not going to have nuclear war.

We're not going to collapse. An asteroid's not going to hit America. Dinosaurs are not going to suddenly appear. Mankind's going to have to learn to wrestle with its own dilemma. There's not any escapism on it. Elon Musk is not going to suddenly invent a starship and move 40 million people to the planets of Alpha Centura. It's not going to happen.

Instead, before we can ever get there, we have to get the right balance between the innate competitiveness and aggressiveness that emerges from human psychology with a more enlightened sense of the common good and a greater recognition of other people as indivisible for ourselves. General, the Constitution is supposed to protect soldiers from disobeying orders that would have asked them or instructed them to kill civilians. Why are we still seeing many civilians being hurt? When you're talking about the U.S. Constitution? Or are you talking about other's constitutions?

The U.S. Constitution. In the United States, you don't see any soldiers in the street killing people. but you do see occasional accidents. But when Iran fires its missiles into the Sabik industrial complex in Saudi Arabia or the desalonization plant in Kuwait, that is deliberate. They are going after targets that are designed to hurt ordinary people, not military targets, and they know it. So when Hezbollah shoots rockets into Israel, they're not going to. after military targets, they're going after civilians, terrorism. And so when Israel fights back, people are killed. We're certainly not going to invade Iran. I hope we don't destroy

Iranian civilization. It's a great civilization. But I hope that the people who are the established regime in Iran will understand their unique place in human history at this time. and recognize that the purpose of a state, it can't be its purpose. It cannot be its purpose simply to destroy another group of people because they have a different spiritual approach. There is no one spiritual approach that's perfect. Nobody has it perfect. Everybody, all these spiritual approaches are filtered through the human mind,

the senses, the interpretation of the observer and so forth. God speaks in many voices to many people. So, foolish thing it is to be killing people over religion that has happened again and again and again in history. It's time to stop. You've mentioned a few times. We don't know what we don't know.

How long is this thing going to go on? Is there a way out of this? With respect to what's happening in the Middle East? Well, I think it's going to go on until people realize that you can't, you have to find a way to live together in peace. And you have to appreciate the innate goodness of people and innate talents and work cooperatively

to take advantage of those talents. But thus far, we don't seem to be able to do that very well. How do you think this will impact the security architecture within the Middle East and the short run, mid-run and long run? Well, I think in the short run, the Iranians made fundamental mistake by striking the Arab states of the Gulf, because these nations were definitely of two minds about Iran. On the one hand, they didn't want to suffer the extremes of Shia zealotry,

as when the Iranians tried to take over the holy center of Mecca during the Haj in 1979, but on the other hand, they want a stable Iran that they can trade with. They don't want an enemy across the Persian Gulf that's always undercutting them, and they don't want a failed state with millions of people struggling to get out and all kinds of disease and terrorism lurking there. So that was a mistake to strike. I think in the short term, what has to happen is that somehow Iran has to accept the fact that it has survived the air assault, and it has to graciously acknowledge the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is International Waterway,

and it has to work a trade-off so that there's no nuclear weapons, but there's also recognition of Israel's right to exist and then there's no need for nuclear weapons and then there's that opens up a lot of other possibilities but I don't hear anyone in the proposal saying that Iran must recognize Israel's right to exist well if you would do that you might stop a lot of this I mean Israel is just a fact now Israel needs to stop also and provide a two-state solution for the Palestinians. But nothing's possible in the middle of this conflict, and everything's possible if it stops the right way.

In the long term, I think Russia is going to have to ameliorate, moderate. I don't think it's going to be able to, Putin's not going to be able to live his dream of recapturing the space of the Soviet Union. People don't want to live that way. That's old think. New think is they want to be, they want to be. they want more independence, they want growth, they want to be associated with the dynamism of the West.

But the people in Russia haven't been exposed to it. They're in a big country, they're far from borders, they don't travel a lot of these people, so they don't really know what they don't have. And as we were saying earlier, most people are mostly happy with what they have. They don't see the broader world. What we have to do in the 21st century

is help people recognize the potential in a way that's constructive, not destructive, but a constructive approach to the future. And I think you've got to have statesmen who see that and can push the world in that direction. Maybe it's Sharif in Pakistan who's trying to bring peace right now. Maybe he's got the vision. Maybe it's Xi Jinping or his successor in China. Maybe it's some European leader. Maybe it's Lula in Brazil who can do something.

maybe it's some American leader who shows up or Canadian, but it's going to take a concert of national leaders to move the world from the conflict pattern of the 20th century fully into a greater realization of human potential in the 21st century. And we're in that transition period right now. And so people are looking back and they're remembering what the atomic clock was and they're worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

probably going to proliferate, but that doesn't mean they'll be used. And it doesn't mean they'll be discarded because the habits of insecurity, insecurity will take generations to go away. You're one of very few people who understand Europe. What would be a realistic measure for the conflict to end in Ukraine? A realistic way of the war ending? Yeah. We wash her withdrawing from Ukraine, all of it.

And the return of the children who've been captured and brainwashed to think they're Russians and an end to the militarization of the Russian population under Vladimir Putin and to come into the 21st century. I was at a NATO conference in 1998 and Soviet Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primokov, an old KGB operative, lecture the other members of NATO, and he said, he said to quote the famous Count Gorkchikov,

Russia has no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Well, actually, Count Gortchikov was quoting Lord Palmerson from the 1830s, who said that. And it was a mistake. And as I listened to Primakov, I thought, you know,

that's so out of date. I mean, in the 21st century, nations should have permanent friends and work to make their interests congruent or synergistic through trade, through investment, through travel, through education, rather than having permanent interests that are separate and distinct from others in which you can shift from hatred to friendship

to manipulation and transaction. that the world shouldn't be a transactional place. There's maybe a transactional place when you're selling a used car. I understand that. But when you're dealing with nations and people's lives and futures, it's not about transactionalism. It's about values. It's about foresightedness.

It's about long-term relationships. It's about guiding the evolution of societies so they can work for the common good of mankind, not just for the self-interest of the ruling party. The current posturing by Trump seems to be reductionist as it relates to NATO. How do you see the role of NATO going forward in the context of preserving peace for Europe? When NATO was established and General Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first Supreme Allied commander, his first report to President Truman, he wrote, The French and the British aren't doing their job.

They promised so many forces and they're not here. Yeah. The French were fighting in Indochina. The British were fighting against rebellion in Malaya. And so from the beginning, there was a burden-sharing argument. In the 1970s, the 60s, the United States turned us back on NATO. and we drew down our forces there. We took out our personnel, and we focused on Southeast Asia and Vietnam.

And we awoke in the early 70s to realize the Soviet Union had gone through a complete modernization program. They'd replaced the T-55 with the T-64 and the T-72, and they'd replaced a armored vehicle with BMPs, with Sagger missiles and 73-millimeter guns, and the hind helicopter was coming in. And suddenly we went to our NATO allies and said, we have to do better, all of us. Let's agree to the long-term defense program and raise our budget by 3% in real terms each year,

the LTP. It was a big accomplishment. And then we realized the Soviets had created the SS20 Roadmobile, solid fuel, three warheaded, mobile, intermediate range missile. We said, this will destroy deterrence. We have to have an answer. It was a tough two-year struggle with Germany,

but we got theater nuclear modernization approved. And this led to the zero-zero option. but one of the things we tried to do in the early, well, at the beginning in the 1950s, our British and French allies invaded Egypt. Nikita Khrushchev threatened a violent response if we intervened in Hungary or if we attacked Egypt. Eisenhower called them back. Called them back. The Israelis took Sinai, but the Brits and the French,

didn't get the Suez Canal, and it was the end of an independent UK policy. People thought maybe NATO won't survive. But to help build a NATO deterrent, we promised in the early 60s that we would create and give NATO forces a multilateral nuclear force. We're going to take Polaris missiles, put them on surface ships. But then, 1963, McNamara said, no, we're not going to, you can't give the Belgique's. the French, they're going to have our nuclear secrets? No way. So we killed the MLF. Charles de Gaulle said, in that case, you're out. And he kicked us out of France.

People said, it's the end of NATO. No, it wasn't the end of NATO. 1989, the wall came down. France said, surely, if the Warsaw Pact isn't here, there's no need for NATO. The NATO Secretary General in 1993, Montfer Vernor said, said, NATO either is about stabilizing Europe or not. Therefore, we have to be more than a defensive alliance. We either go out of area and stabilize the Balkans or we go out of business.

And so we changed NATO. 1999, we did the Kosovo Air campaign. Afterwards, the Europeans got together and they said, we're not going to let those Americans ever again tell us where to bomb. But in 2011, we acted against Qaddafi. The Americans ran the bombing. So NATO's been through crisis after crisis. It's going to get through this one.

Good to hear. I'm sensitive of time. The last part is about my part of the world, Southeast Asia. There seems to be lack of diversification of economic capital from the U.S. or the West into my part of the world. Right. And I know you're giving advocacy to people across the world, right? What would be your advice for people in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, for purposes

of attracting capital or economic capital or even technological capital from places like the U.S.? Well, I think that Indonesia shouldn't feel too badly about this because Indonesia has a huge market. General Probeau is going to develop a greater, I believe, equality of wealth by reducing some of the restrictions on, let's say, some of the way that fertilizer has been distributed, the way that oil has developed. He's going to continue the policy of his predecessor, greater regionalization, to be able to reach the people. He's going to. He's going to, reduce some of the bureaucratics that were left over from the colonial regime. And I think

you will attract investment from Singapore, from Japan. And yes, there's a Japanese legacy, and it's not altogether favorable. But it's been going on 80 years since the Japanese came in. Memories fade. And so Japan is an outwardly mobile country. It's got plenty of capital. And China is looking to expand and invest. So all of these things should help Indonesia. As for the United States, the United States is far away.

It's a difficult flight. But if it's in the right interests of Indonesia, then India, I'm sorry, Indonesia and the United States need cooperative programs. We have to start with young people. We need more young people in places like Stanford,

University of Arkansas, Harvard, we need scholarships to bring them to every part of the United States. And there's a lot of wealth in Indonesia, but some of that wealth is not easily applied back into Indonesia because of the way the capital

markets work, although they're being reformed because of the way the certain sectors of the economy are held under the government, but that's being opened up. So I think it's difficult for people who've grown up in Indonesia and have seen security from investing outside Indonesia to recognize the opportunity that's at home. But I think Indonesians also have to measure themselves against when they come to the United States and they want to get a driver's license they open a business,

buy a home, they've got to ask themselves, well, how does that compare to what I do at home? And if it's more difficult in Indonesia, why is that? And can't we fix it? We're a democracy in Indonesia. Raise the issue.

Get people to focus on it. write newspapers, so forth. And so I think there's a lot that can be done in Indonesia. I think Indonesia is a kind of market that could easily attract more U.S. capital investment. The reason is that in the United States, every year, there's a, I don't want to say that capital isn't worth anything. It is. But when I started in the private sector 26 years ago, private equity was the way to go. It had been private equity, really looked for 10 years.

Returns might be in the 30, 40% IRA. Businesses could be bought and streamlined and financialized. And it brought enormous returns. And there was adequate opportunities for the people who were released from the businesses to seek and find other employment. But over the 25 years, now it's a lot of money, not many opportunities. So even for a company like Goldman Sachs,

the average size of its investment has grown because the amount of funds available have grown, and those funds have to be put to use somewhere. When I was with Blackstone, where I saw as every year, the pension funds brought in and said, we'd like to give you this. We're like, well, you're not going to turn it down,

but then how can you effectively use it? So rather than returns in the, 30s and 40s for individual investor returns, you're driving down toward the teens, sometimes the low teens, to get these returns. And so it's natural that American capital could go overseas. But you have to worry about the exchange rate. Right. And so the exchange rate is a function of confidence in some respects and balanced budgets.

And it's a restraint. And so the United States, thus far, has been blessed with, we call fiat currency. People believe in the sanctity of the dollar, so they trust it. They don't necessarily believe in the value of the Chinese renminbi or Indonesia's money or India's money. And so they don't use them as reserve currencies to the same extent. And for investors, you could invest and make a 30% profit in Indonesia. But if the Rupia goes down, you've lost a lot of that profit when you try to repatriate it.

And so it's a step by step by step approach that has to go on many different axes. Education of young people, better business practices, better government practices, more cooperative work with neighbors. and pointing toward then the stabilization of the currency and avoiding the kinds of risks of currency that have impacted Indonesia or the risks of, let's say, resource starvation. So, you know, with what's going on in Iran right now, it's like musical chairs.

People are worried about the price of oil, but the simple fact is that price is going to ration the oil. And some people won't get it. any price because it's not there if what's happening in the Gulf continues between Iran and the Arab states. So there are many different things that Indonesia has to work on, but I will want to conclude it by saying as I began, I think Indonesia has a wonderful future, boundless opportunities, great promise. And it may be the strongest country. by the end of the 21st century.

It has unique location, natural resources, a youngest population in the region. It's just ripe to emerge explosively with growth. All it's going to take is the right leadership and the right opportunities.

I'll burn to sins and say my prayers for that. My last little question, General. Singapore has been getting disproportionately much more capital from the U.S. than Indonesia, right? And there is a view out there that the two reasons is why Indonesia may not be doing as well as Singapore and attracting capital would be the lack of rule of law and the lack of ability to translate from uncertainties to risk. I guess my question is what would be the one or two key steps in the near term that the leadership of Indonesia and the people of Indonesia could do to remedy those if that perception were true? Those are really important questions and I think that it's very difficult for me as an outsider to give a really good answer on it. If you look at the surveys of sort of ease of doing business, Indonesia doesn't rank high.

It's a matter of transparency of decision making. It's a matter of the ease of doing business in the country and opening businesses and so forth. And it's about property acquisition and ultimately it's about rule of law. But these are not things that can be immediately resolved. They're partly cultural and partly they just have to be addressed sequentially, step by step, step by step. And they will be addressed because Indonesia has so much to offer that the outside world will come in demanding that these issues be addressed. If Indonesia can get ahead of it, so much the better. But they will be addressed because Indonesia is so potentially wealthy.

General, you've been kind, gracious. Your time. Thank you. Thank you for lying me to be in Little Rock. And thanks for the great questions. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you. That was General Wesley Clark.

Thank you.