School of War - Ep 62: Mike Pompeo on American Foreign Policy

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and author of Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, joins the show to talk about American foreign policy and his service in the Trump administration. Watch this video on YouTube. ▪️ Times  • 01:13 Introduction  • 02:12 Chinese surveillance balloons  • 05:01 Chinese espionage “inside the gates”  • 07:19 Meeting Xi Jinping  • 10:25 “Mushy Middle” diplomacy  • 15:58 Republicans and Russia  • 20:18 America in the Middle East  • 26:00 Why talk to the bad guys?  • 31:35 Afghanistan • 33:05 Resetting the conversation on human rights

Today I'm interviewing Mike Pompeo here on School of War. He was America's Secretary of State and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Trump administration. He saw American foreign policymaking at the highest level and led some of the most significant initiatives of that administration. Mike Pompeo's career is not at its end. It's unclear what he's going to be doing for here. A lot of people say he's going to be running for president. He's made no announcement on that front. But certainly as a readout of somebody who served in the role that he served in the last administration

and who has a potentially very significant career ahead of him as an American policymaker. I'd like to get his thoughts. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Bissamba 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay-on. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who not see buildings there! We shall fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. streets we shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted today to be welcomed by Mike Pompeo. He's the 70th Secretary of Sir. Thank you so much for joining the show. Aaron, it's great to be with you. We'll have a good time today. Wonderful. You're also the author out just these last few weeks of never give an inch fighting for the America I Love, which is a memoir of your time in office in the last administration.

You also share your thoughts on foreign policy. I want to start with an issue that's been in the news the last couple of weeks. We had this incident with this Chinese surveillance balloon crossing the country and getting shot down over the Atlantic Ocean. In the few days that followed that, there were a series of leaks to the media to the effect of this kind of thing has actually happened before. It happened during the Trump administration. I wanted to get your thoughts, you responded to that, and I wanted to ask you what your thoughts were on that specifically. But obviously since then, we've had, I'm starting to lose count. I think we've shut down four things now. I think it's a total of four. Right. Objects. Four objects. One balloon and then

three other things about which the reporting has been more vague. So specifically your thoughts on this notion that this has been happening for a while, specifically under the Trump administration, and then more broadly, I think a lot of people would like to know what's going on here? First of all, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation today.

You asked what this is, or did this happen before? It depends what you mean by this. So the original suggestion was somehow that a balloon the size of three buses had transit to the continental United States during the Trump administration. That's what they wanted us to all believe. Of course, we all came out

said, I didn't see it on my watch. I was the ad director for almost 18 months and Secretary State for a thousand days, Ambassador Brayne, Ambassador Bolton, Secretary Esper the whole gang said, we have no earthly idea what the Biden administration is speaking about. They then backed up and said, well, there were a couple of things

that were sort of like this, and no one knew about them. That is, it was not something that the intelligence community nor the political leadership was aware of. Look, that's not unheard of that you collect something and you don't process it, so it's possible that there was a data piece that they went back and looked at, But the narrative somehow politically that the Trump administration had made a decision just like the Biden administration is just faults on faults.

As for what it is we're staring at, I don't know what these other three objects were. Sounds like they were flying at lower altitude, but this balloon that came across is really dangerous. Dangerous in two ways. One, I don't know what it collected. It appears that it had a signals intelligence payload. It may well have had an imaging payload as well that has the ability to collect data, signals data. They, I'm sure we're collecting data on our air defense systems. That is, what did they see here, learn about how we processed when the balloon entered

U.S. sovereign airspace, something that the Chinese Communist Party would definitely want to know. But finally, there's a geopolitical aspect to it as well. For five days, the world watched President Biden kind of wander around the room and not take an action. Or, by the way, even say, nope, we're not going to shoot it down. Here's what we're going to do as soon as it's out of our country. He just kind of wandered.

around trying to figure out what their response would be. And I am confident that our friends are less secure today in the confidence that President Biden will be any more decisive when it matters to them. I was thinking about the Taiwanese leadership. Imagine you're the president of Taiwan, or for that matter, the Prime Minister of Japan, and you watch a Chinese balloon float across America

and ask yourself, is this a leader sitting in the White House that will actually do what he said he would do? Defend us, help us defend ourselves. in a moment of crisis in the pinch point, or will they dilly dally flounder around and it'll be over before we really get the assistance that has been promised? And so I worry about this more from a geopolitical perspective

than I do the actual intelligence that the Chinese may have collected. Let's stick with the espionage threat for a moment. You tell the story in your book of the shutting down of the Houston consulate over what appears to have been an extensive Chinese collection operation. Talk about that, maybe tell that

story and what does it illustrate about Chinese behavior abroad? So, Erin, that's a very good connection. The balloon is a symptom. It is one tool. It's a thread of the Chinese efforts to both conduct propaganda campaigns and espionage inside the gates, here inside the United States. Probably the biggest near-term threat from China isn't that they're going to invade. It is that they've already infiltrated America.

The Chinese diplomatic facility in Houston, Texas, a country. consulate, had dozens and dozens of diplomatic officers, and they were conducting espionage there, probably the largest espionage operation ever conducted inside the United States. And we'd known it, frankly. The United States government had known this for a while, but had declined to actually take decisive action for fear of provocation, as a shorthand. I'd seen this a little bit when I was a CA director, and it became Secretary of State, it became clear that the FBI was overmatched, their responsible agency.

to prevent that kind of espionage in America as the FBI. They do our internal counterintelligence work. And it was too big and too much of scale. And so along with Chris Ray, we concluded we would run an operation close a facility down. President Trump signed off on it. And we gave the Chinese 72 hours to get out. And I tell the funny story that when I met with Ambassador Shretankai, who was the then-Chinese ambassador to the United States,

told him they were conducting spying. They needed to be out in 72 hours. He said, nope, we're not spying. much like it was a weather balloon, same kind of denial. And within minutes, absolutely minutes of his departure from my office, there were massive fires at the facility. The Houston Fire Department responding to calls to make sure that the surrounding areas around the Chinese consulate, Houston, Texas,

wasn't going to set all of Houston on fire. This era, that's kind of funny. But the reality is this is a serious business. They were stealing cigarettes from our energy companies, high-end energy, think the corridor from Woodlands, Texas, down to the port. Texas has a massive research set of institutions inside the University of Texas school system, and think of the University of Texas medical system, and more broadly the medical system around John Anderson,

all very high-end research medical facilities. They were stealing our stuff, and we stopped it. You had a number of opportunities to meet with Xi Jinping during your time in office. What was that like, and what does he want? He's been pretty clear about what he wants. He has talked about China as the Middle Kingdom, refers to it as the Great Struggle, Pickup, terminology that gets translated from Mandarin to English.

He wants global hegemony. He wants political control of the entire economic sphere. He wants military control as broadly as he can establish that because he wants the world to live more like them than we live here in America. That's his end objective. In meeting with him, I met with all the bad guys. if he went through the hit parade, he was the most dead-eyed. The others you could have a conversation with,

you might ask about their family, you might have some conversation on something that was going on in the world of that day, pop music, something right, something that was away from the central core that you were going to get to. There was none of that. He was on his talking points. There was no exchange of ideas. I never saw that either with President Trump or when I was with him by myself.

It wasn't, hey, what if we did X might you do? why there was no capacity for the free-flowing exchange of possibilities to find some place where there might be commonality. There was just none of that. It was, we are, do not touch Taiwan that is interfering with internal Chinese politics. Tibet is ours too, right? Just the lip, the hip right, I could go through them in sequence. And it was simply a list of demands uttered in the harshest tones you can imagine.

I'll ask you to speculate a little bit here, if you will, but was that something, was Does that approach something idiosyncratic to Xi as an individual? Is there something about the Chinese system or the Chinese Communist Party that that speaks to? Goodness, you know, scholars might have a better answer for that. I can certainly give you my experience. When I met with the foreign ministry leaders, Wang Yi and Jiangxi-Shea and their team, very much the same. So it was, if not, culturally, part of how they thought about it. It was certainly the directive, and they believed this was what would be rewarded inside of their system.

Having said that my counterparts at Treasury and other parts of the Chinese Communist Party political apparatus often had different conversations. Dr. Kissinger talks about having had different conversations that were more free and wide open. So maybe this was just the Trump administration or just Xi Jinping at this moment. I'll leave that to others. But my experience was inside this cone on national security matters, the things that she was most focused on for our four years, this was pretty consistent. So you mentioned Henry Kissinger.

I want to ask you about Taiwan. The US relationship to Taiwan is an important and complicated one. We began, as a country, a kind of movement away from close Taiwan relations under the Nix administration. We've corrected back in the direction of Taiwan. And last year, you called for a correct my wording here, if I get this wrong, but essentially recognition of Taiwan's sovereignty, diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. I think there are a lot of people who would suggest there are big risks that come with that

and big downsides. It's a bold suggestion. Why did you make it, kind of assess why the advantage is that way the disadvantages? So there are absolutely risks. There are equally risks to the place we find ourselves today. I think if there is a lesson, maybe there are multiple lessons, but a primary lesson from the problems that are happening in Ukraine today is that being in the mushy middle is really dangerous.

When there aren't bright lines, when there aren't boundaries, when your adversaries don't know exactly what it is you will do, you create risk that they will push and eventually push in ways that are hard to get back from. They're hard to restore the very deterrence that was the original objective. And I think Taiwan finds itself in that place today. It's in the mushy middle. They don't know if the West, broadly speaking,

and you gotta be careful with that term. But think Japan, South Korea, Australia, other nations will rally to support Taiwan, not only in its military defense, but in defending its economic interests as well. And I think we are now past the point where the model of what Dr. Kissinger did back in 1972 may well have made sense,

then, but I think Xi Jinping has broken that agreement. That is, it's not the case that we're abrogating a set of understandings. I think those understandings are long gone. She has made clear his determination to, quote, reunify, end of quote, Taiwan to China. And once he made that clear demarcation, he has violated what he and the Chinese Communist Party had agreed to previously. We need to respond by making clear our expectations for how China will behave,

and recognizing them diplomatically would achieve that. There was an interesting series of war games just run by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank here in Washington. Interesting on a number of counts. One, they're in the public domain. They're unclassified so we can actually read what went into them. And two, they were optimistic. We're used to seeing reports of war games focused on Taiwan that are classified, but indicating the reports indicate they didn't go well and that America, Japan, and others lose when we try to defend Taiwan. These were interesting because they suggest that we might actually succeed.

But there was a condition to our success in all the iterations of the game that CSIS ran. The requirement for American or Japanese victory in this potential war was that the Taiwanese stand up and fight for themselves and fight for themselves effectively. You've had many conversations with the Taiwanese. You're familiar with the problem. Give us your assessment of the Taiwanese ability to fight. It's good but not sufficient today. That is, and maybe this is true as someone who went to West Point. But maybe I always just think it's not sufficient.

Maybe I'm always looking for more. They need to prepare. Civil defenses, we need to provide them with the capabilities, tools. Don't think just air defense systems in mind thinks intelligence capabilities, early warning capacity, all of the things that provide a comprehensive solution to a potential attack and signal very clearly that you're in this, right? I think about things that one does and says, no, I'm locked in. Right. match and a UFC match and you walk over to the gate and you lock it and you throw away the key,

right? I am in this. The Taiwanese need to do that in a way that will very clearly signal to the Chinese Communist Party that they are prepared to do precisely what you described. I think your predicate is also correct. Ukraine decided that they were willing to sacrifice their own young men to go fight and die, and they've been able so far to successfully deny Putin his political objective. Contrast that with President Ghani, who flees the country immediately when the Taliban begin to advance inside of his country. Political leadership will matter in that moment as well. And so it's not just the hard goods. It's not just the stuff and the people. The political leadership needs to steal itself as well, because as I see, I'll speak about the open source

wargaming. As I see the open source wargaming, this is tough. This is nasty. Nothing is unscathed. There's stray, there's collateral risk, lots of places in the Pacific to American interests in those same regions as well. This will be competed for in cyber and other places as well. So this, well, what happens in Taipei won't stay in Taipei. This will become a broader conflict unless that deterrence can be reestablished incredibly quickly. China is an issue on which there's some consensus in the right of center of policy conversation. Actually, between right and left. I was going to say even more broadly than that, there are many on, I think that I know you spoke with Congressman Gallagher, I think his committee, broadly speaking, is going to find some good ideas about how we can defend America from the challenge of the CCP.

Right. I want to ask you about an issue where there's less consensus, at least on the right and some odd political dynamics, and that's Russia, of course, in Ukraine. There's a lot of disagreement within the Republican Party about the extent to which America should defend Ukraine's independence. about what the American relationship with Russia ought to be. There was debate and conversation within the Trump administration about this. You document some of your conversations. No doubt about it. Never give an inch.

We had these conversations with great frequency, and we suffered under the Russia hoax for two and a half years. Right. It was front and center. And something, I commend you for this, and I recommend folks to the portions in your book that deal with this. You have a way of untangling these various strands of the claim that Donald Trump was a Russian

asset as one strand of Putin's behavior separately as its own independent strand and sort of treating each objectively and clearly. So maybe my question to you is help us separate these things. What ought to be the U.S. attitude towards Vladimir Putin? What ought to be U.S. policy towards Ukraine? So let me try to do that. And you're right. Big debates inside amongst my friends, right, conservative friends, about how we ought to respond

to the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin. So let me kind of go back to first principles. First principle is what's in America's interest? How do we think about our place in the world and what matters to us and what cost are we prepared to pay to achieve that end? With respect to Europe, it matters an awful lot. If you are an ordinary American citizen sitting in Tennessee or Arizona or Idaho, the fact that Europe is a Western democracy, a set of Western democracies matters an awful lot.

To have them under authoritarian control by Vladimir Putin would be bad for you. I could spend a lot. of time unpacking that, but suffice it to say, I think it's pretty apparent, but you have to accept that central premise. You have to accept also that Vladimir Putin wasn't intending to stop in Kiev. This was a way station to Poland and Hungary and Romania and maybe Sweden and Finland. He views Greater Russia, I spent enough time with him, he views Greater Russia as essential to the continuity of Russian nationalism, of Russian history. It's something he believes it's in his DNA. And so if you accept those two premises and you have Ukrainian forces that are prepared,

to fight and they're not asking for American boys and girls, we ought to give them the things that they need. And we should give them all to them as quickly as they can train, absorb, process, maintain, and actually implement them in a way they can execute and deliver power against Vladimir Putin. Because again, the objective, from an American perspective, is to end this thing as quickly as you can on terms that make it permanent that result in delivering for the American people

sovereign Ukraine that doesn't encourage Xi-Shing-Ping-Ping to go do this same. to go do this same kind of thing. There's a little bit to unpack there, but that's why I end up in a different place. Look, we've always had in our party a more isolationist element, right? Think of the campaign of Pat Buchanan. So we've always had that part of our party that said,

no, let's just really go focus intently on things at home and kind of push the rest of this aside. I wish it were possible. I just think today the world is too deeply connected and our interests demand that we come to defend things, on America's behalf before they get to America. Last thought, you asked about the disentangle

and what the relationship ought to look like with Russia. Sign me up for having a good, deep, friendly relationship with Russia. It's simply not possible with Vladimir Putin in power. We tried. It was incredibly difficult because of the impeachment process that was ongoing for the first couple years, right? It hung over every interaction with the Russians.

I tell and never give it into it. tell the story where Vladimir Putin's issues of press release thanking me because the CIA had saved probably American lives but certainly Russian lives as well we took down a terror plot in St. Petersburg. I remember when the press release came out thinking, well I'm going to get impeached too, right? This is how unhinged the media had become here. Did the Russians attempt to meddle in our election in 2016? 100%. They did so in 2016 and 2012 when I saw a comment from Ted Kennedy in the 80s. The Russians have been at this for a while. Was Donald Trump or Russian asset?

A hundred percent not. You can hold those two thoughts in your head simultaneously. And for much of America, for two and a half years, they were told by Adam Schiff, and by CNN and MSNBC, they conflated those two ideas in an attempt to undermine our democracy and certainly our administration. So we've been talking about China and Russia. Nobody denies a potential threat that China poses to America and the world. Russia, there's some disagreement, but their behavior is pretty aggressive.

pretty aggressive. They set on a large nuclear arsenal. It's pretty easy to take them seriously. You spend a lot of time in office and a fair amount of time in the book talking about the Middle East. And there's another trend in not just conservative thought in the American conversation about foreign policy, that the United States would be better off, certainly militarily, washing its hands of the Middle East. Why are we spending so much time there? We have these great power concerns. You can hear this inside the Pentagon. Sure. In some ways, that's what the Obama administration, I think, I'm curious your view, was trying to do with the JCPOA, set up a a regional balance of power and security structure that would require less of the United States.

You weren't a fan, at least of that approach specifically. What's your take on America and the Middle East most broadly? Aaron, you credit the Obama administration a little bit too greatly there, I think. You're right. They were trying to set up a balance of power. They were trying to somehow balance the Shia, Iran, with the Sunni Gulf Arab states. Maybe that was the theory of the case. I won't try to make their argument here today.

What I think they fundamentally misunderstood is there's really I have one partner in front there and we should turn to them. And when we do that and confront the world's largest state sponsor terror Iran, then we will find that the goal for Arab States will say, I want on Team America. And that's what we did. We flipped the script there. We endeavored, although we ran out of time putting enough pressure on the regime in Iran that they would have to fundamentally change the nature of the regime itself.

And we give the Iranian people the space to go do that. We didn't get it done, but I think we were closer than the world actually believes. We were unmistakably clear about our partnership with Israel. I've worked so closely with the Mossad folks when I was at CIA and then with Prime Minister Netanyahu that became the Abraham Accords. And that often – and we can talk about the Middle Eastern piece of that, but if you think about America's place in the Middle East, the most fundamentally important thing to the American people about the Abraham Accords is that it reduces the risk that we'll have to go fight there

again. We now have Emirati jets not flying to attack Tel Aviv, but in formation with jets. that fly out of Israeli airbase. I mean, that it's hard to underestimate the change and the shift in risk to America from that. If you're a son's a Marine or your daughter's Apache helicopter pilot, the chance that they have to go risk their lives in the Middle East some days is just demonstrably lower now that four Gulf Arab states,

say four Muslim countries, including two in Africa, have now said, nope, we're going to make peace with Israel. We should get more. We should create more prosperity for them. We should create stability in that region. And when we do that, we will get what President Obama, as you described it, was trying to do. It will let us go refocus our energy towards the Pacific, towards confronting the great power struggle. And, of course, the great power struggle isn't completely irrelevant in the Middle East.

I want to talk about the China challenge in the Middle East. I was just in Saudi Arabia a couple months ago. We had a meeting with a senior government official who I won't name here on the air, but I know you know. And the conversation turned to China. And I was struck by how bad this official's answers were on China. Frequently or in the Middle East, I don't know to tell you. You ask folks about China. You ask the Israelis about China.

Sometimes you get an answer to the effect of they're bad, they're bad. We know they're bad. But what do you really want us to do? And what was striking with this official was that was not the answer. The answer could have been scripted by a CCP apparatchek. Chinese imperialism, never heard of it. There's no such thing as Chinese imperialism, French imperialism I've heard of, you know, just a long spiel about China essentially being not only a necessary evil,

but a kind of equivalent, maybe even better power. It was aggravating. I think it was intended to aggravate. Yes. Is Saudi going in the wrong direction on China? What do we do about Chinese influence in the Middle East? So this is a very complicated question. Your point about Saudi is well taken.

The same would be true for the Emirates, the Kuwaitis, the Omanis, the Israelis, too. I had my most difficult conversations with Prime Minister Nainiahu on this topic of China. As they were, I think at the time, it was a Huawei research facility that we were focused on. But that's a symptom of the challenge of presenting the case to them about the threat from the Chinese Communist Party. One can't be successful at getting them to come to understand that threat without a relationship with them. That is, these are rational actors. And if America is weak, if you're the Kuwaitis, and America is not there with you, and you come under a challenge or a threat,

or if you're not trading sufficiently with America, as an economic matter, you're gonna hedge your bet, and you're gonna go find that other country with 1.4 billion people in a massive economy, and we'll sell you stuff really cheap. We need to make clear the national security threat doesn't just extend to Europe and the United States. It's for them as well.

It may be a slow burn, maybe a longer process, but make no mistake about it. I think, Aaron, you may be wrong, you said they were intentionally aggravating. They know. The truth is somewhere down in their soul, they can see it as well. And I never heard them say if they had a choice between choosing America and China, they wouldn't choose America. The question is, will America be there with them?

And if you see American leaders sitting at a table with the Iranians being negotiated via the Russians, yeah, you end up saying, you know, I'll take that meeting with Xi Jinping, or I'll have Wang Xi Xi come in. It'll irritate the Americans, and maybe it'll get there. attention. They are engaging in fundamentally hedging behavior because they are they are actors that are trying to make sure they have their place and their security partners. I'm confident will continue to be the United States, but they need to have confidence in that as well. I'd like to ask you a question about, I suppose diplomatic style would be one way to put it, but I don't think it

quite sums it up. You obviously as Secretary of State and as director in the CIA spent a lot of time talking to unwholesome characters. In a couple of countries, we could talk about North Korea in this context. We could talk about Afghanistan in this context. You, you You led on the administration's behalf very substantial negotiations with interlocutors on the other side of the table who obviously are acting in bad faith, obviously do not want what America wants. And I sort of defer to you to describe the outcomes in the North Korea case. In Afghanistan, ultimately, in the next administration, the Taliban ended up in charge in Afghanistan with catastrophic consequences for Afghans, for Americans, and so forth.

Why? Why talk to people like the Taliban? Why talk to the Kim family? You know, how close did you come with the Kim family? Just make the case for this style. Because as you know, there are folks who even in the administration were critical of these. Yeah, no, John Bolton didn't think we should do either of those. I mean, I'm pretty candy. He's been out there talking about this. He thought these were each bad ideas. First of all, I was Secretary of State. President Trump was the president. So the reason that I was doing is because the president. and thought it made sense. But second, maybe we should take each of those. My book's called Never Give It, so you'd say, oh my gosh, this is not a guy who's going to sit and negotiate. In the end, almost all conflict is resolved through some form of conversation. I think of what's going on in Ukraine today, unlikely to end in total defeat. That is cataclysmic failure on either side. It is almost certain to end with some negotiated solution with an enforcement mechanism sitting behind it. In the case of North Korea, I judged and the president judged that

25 years of efforts to negotiate with junior leaders. So there were always conversations. President Clinton and President Bush, always conversations, multiple deals struck. Never with the full force and power of the North Korean leadership, really. In that case, the most senior leader is the sole decision maker. And so we thought, new face there, Kim Jong-un, a young guy, maybe we can make the case to convince him it's in his best interest to give up his nuclear weapons program. In the end, we fail. And I talk never giving an inch a lot about the things we didn't get done. This would be at or near the top of my list of work that remained when we left. I thought we were much closer. In Hanoi, I actually thought we

had a substantive, enforceable outcome that would flow from that when we arrived. It became clear Kim Jong-un wasn't going to do it. And, you know, Ambassador Bolton's fear was President Trump wouldn't be, that he would get there and just need a deal for political reasons or because he was the master of the, quote, art of the deal, end of quote. That was his fear. And Trump never got even close. He heard what Chairman Kim said, and I said, no, that's not what we'd agree to. And there was this little kerfuffle. And President Trump said, well, I can't do that. I couldn't possibly do that. And we walked away. But the conversation was useful in that I think we now do collectively have a better understanding of the priority set, not only for Kim Jong-un, but the

leadership around him, which we should never forget, right? These are all old military guys. I talk about Kim Jong-Chol, who was my counterpart, this guy. Given his own choice, he would die eating grass, right? This is what he told me directly. But Chairman Kim was different. He was new, and we thought there was this window. In the end, we couldn't get it done. We managed the problem a little bit better. There were no long-range missile tests and no nuclear testing, so his program wasn't advancing at the same rate, but I can see a good management with a unsatisfactory outcome. Taliban was a different kettle of fish altogether. Twenty years on, massively wonderful counterterrorism work that had been done. I take no credit for that.

That all happened before my watch, a truly remarkable global scale effort to prevent something like what happened on 9-11. But we had been much less successful at building up an Afghan military and political apparatus that could create cohesion across all of Afghanistan. And so President Trump was unequivocal, I won out. He campaigned on this. I think he waited 50 plus times about getting out. And I can't tell you how many times my mic, get out, right? Get out now.

So we were working our way there, General Dunford, then Chairman, Secretary Mattis, and then Millie and the Defense Secretary of all. We're all trying to find the model that delivered on four outcomes. getting out, but second, making sure that the risk of an attack from that place was still mitigated, getting our people home, and getting our equipment largely out to the extent we could. We never were able to present the president with a plan that could do that. We got from 15,000 to uniform military personnel to about 2,500. But even as late as September, October of 2020, the president's like, when are we going to get

the last 2,500 out? And I said, Mr. President, we can't pull them out without something really. bad happening, a bad break. And we were trying along this time to create the conditions, to your point about the deal that we struck, the piece of paper we signed with the Taliban. And not as much talked about as we signed a piece of paper with the Afghan government as well. And everybody was in the room. Aaron, a five-year process, 10-year process probably of negotiation. If you look at history and whether it's in South Africa or Columbia with the FARC, these are long, hard negotiations. And we were setting the course for them.

And then President Biden made a different decision. I think we could have maintained, careful with the word, stability, but Afghan level of stability there, with 2,500 boots on the ground, President Biden made a different decision. He decided to pull that last folks out to set a date, arbitrary date. And when he did, we got exactly what we told President Trump would happen. I mean, it unfolded nearly jot and tittle, just as we would have anticipated had President Trump made that same decision.

Something I still don't understand about the months that led up to the final disaster there under President Biden are the claims made by any number of folks, to include folks in uniform, that they were taken by surprise, by the pace at which the Taliban took control. Anyone who served in Afghanistan, as I did, and had experience working with the Afghan army, which, to be clear, was the best of the various government institutions. Yes, absolutely right. I knew many brave Afghan soldiers and officers who did, and, you know. intended to continue to fight for their country.

But the notion that it would be a surprise that they would rapidly collapse in the absence of American support is hard for me to understand. It strains credulity, yes, to be very diplomatic and polite. No, it's insane. So what's your account of that? How is it that people with real reputations and real backgrounds can stand there and make that claim? I don't understand it. Maybe when they say that they're gilding the lily just a bit, well, we were surprised it

happened this fast. It happened in days. We thought it would take weeks, right? that no one, I saw no one inside our administration or the senior military leadership, civilian or military, that thought that the Afghan army absent either political leadership or American air support and firepower could withstand the Taliban's continued push. So I don't know where that comes from. And while I wasn't in the room, and so I'm humble in that sense, I think the military told

President Biden exactly the same thing it told President Trump about it. If you do X, what we saw unfold is almost. certain to happen. I want to ask you a question about this really interesting project that the Department of State sponsored under your leadership. This is a commission on unalienable rights. You know, in the book you talk about yourself as a, I think I'm quoting here, a real politic guy. I've heard you in other context talk about yourself as a realist. This is a commission about, as I see it, resetting the debate, resetting the international conversation about what rights are and what the American vision of rights are. Talk a little bit about its work. And then, as you can tell,

my broader interest here, the follow-up question, which I'll just deal you up front, is how do you reconcile being a real politic guy on the one hand, but a guy also concerned with, you know, what rights are and what America ought to be doing with respect to rights? Yeah, it's a great question. They're deeply connected. I'll try, I mean, first talk about the project and then why I thought it was important and connected to sort of no BS real on the ground, how are we going to deliver good outcomes. show up at the State Department

and we're sending cables around the world that are saying, and here's America's view on human rights. They were offensive to many of these countries. And they were also ungrounded in American tradition. And as I understand our rights, they came from God, but our Constitution laid them down for us. And we would send out cables talking about,

we were flying the bride flag, we were doing this stuff that was deeply disconnected from America's founding ideas. And I think that presented enormous risk. Because I think our friends who, people who wanted to be friends with around the world, said, this is indecent. This is not right. This is not who we've known America to be for a couple hundred years.

And so I wanted to reset that. And so the idea was to go reground American foreign policy and more narrowly our tradition of rights, as we and our diplomats around the world explained them to the world in our tradition. So we created a commission. It was run by a woman named Marianne Glendon, had a fellow named Peter Berkowitz, people from every faith, many faiths, lots of different political views. And they did that. They went back and looked at the Eleanor Roosevelt's work.

They went back and looked at our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence, and they laid down for my State Department team, this is how you should speak about property rights and human rights and individual dignity and autonomy. Why does that matter? When we overextend ourselves and claim that we can enforce a vision inside of other countries' domestic, policy, we should be clear about the things that we're doing and how we're defending our institutions here at home. That disconnected us created risk that we would both cause problems with our friends and our adversaries would be able to pounce on that and use that against us.

So we needed to be more humbly consistent with America's tradition as we spoke about it when we went around the world. That enabled us to have a foreign policy that was based on protecting America, putting the American people first. they were really two ends of the same string. When you are out making claims about rights and then seeking to demand that other countries conform with your understanding of those rights,

and they aren't even consistent with your own traditions, you create the risk that you're going to have to overextend your use of American power in ways that create enormous risk. Mr. Secretary, author of Never Give It Inch, it's been a fascinating conversation. Any announcements you'd like to make here on School of War before we wrap for the day? No, Aaron. No announcements. I hope we keep taking down these Chinese balloons, though. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production.

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