School of War - Senator McCormick Thinks That America’s Military Is Stuck in the Past

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Pennsylvania senator Dave McCormick, a West Point graduate, Desert Storm veteran, and former CEO of Bridgewater Associates, is concerned about America’s wealth gap, which he says is approaching “a version of capitalism I don’t think we want.” Today, McCormick joins School of War for a candid conversation about why the right needs a better answer to socialism, lessons in modern warfare from his recent closed-door meeting with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, and why he regrets his 2002 LA Times op-ed supporting the Iraq War: “I was completely wrong.” 02:01 — From Desert Storm to Princeton 05:05 — Nine Months Traveling the World 06:58 — The “End of History” and the Return of Socialism 08:00 — Can America Remain the World’s Superpower? 09:47 — Is the U.S. Military Stuck in the Past? 12:27 — What Ukraine Is Teaching America About Modern Warfare 13:41 — Rebuilding America’s Defense Industrial Base 17:15 — America’s AI Race With China 22:56 — How AI Will Transform American Jobs 24:03 — Wealth Inequality and the Future of Capitalism 25:56 — Why Socialism Is Appealing to Young Americans 30:52 — The Fight Over AI Data Centers 35:05 — Iran and the Future of the Middle East 41:17 — McCormick: “I Was Completely Wrong” About Iraq 44:08 — Balancing Iran With the Threat From China This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the front line today. Maven Smart System isn't just software you use. It's the platform you build on. Every day, thousands of uniformed service members use AI coding agents to build their own agentic applications across all warfighting functions on top of the DOW's integrated ontology. What once took a contract in a year, now takes a warfighter and an afternoon. Administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. One platform deployed everywhere at all classifications. Build at the speed of war.

Senator Dave McCormick went to West Point and served in combat in the first Gulf War. Today he joins us on School of War. We talk about his political evolution, how he was once a supporter of the second Iraq war and has come to have second thoughts about that. We talk about Iran. It won't surprise you to hear. But then, and I think most interestingly, we have an extended conversation about the role of artificial intelligence in our national security, how it's hitting home in Pennsylvania, the question of data centers, and really the future of capitalism in the face of threats from both the right and especially the left. Let's get into it.

The Iraqi invasion of the parade. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in the ground. The beaches, we shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets which will never threaten. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War.

I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania. Sir, you have a long, an illustrious bio. Before that, we're actually going to get into some of that as part of the conversation. And I want to start us off in the 1990s, if you will. You had quite a start to your career. Grow up in Pennsylvania on the banks of the Susquehanna, West Point, co-captain the wrestling team, see combat in Desert Storm in the 82nd Airborne, the engineer company of which you are the Exo, if I'm not mistaken, you know, doing this work of clearing minds and disposing of ordinance takes some actually some pretty serious casualties. I think a lot of listeners and viewers are familiar with that kind of intense start.

You also then went on to graduate school after that. And I think listeners and viewers are also familiar with having this period after an intense experience of war and combat where they sort of slow down and reflect a bit. I want to take us back to that moment. It's the 1990s. You're in your late 20s or so at this point. And you've been through everything you've been through. talk to me about what the world looked like to you at that moment. What were your provisional conclusions about America, America's role in the world,

but also, you know, at a more personal level, you know, what do you think you had learned at that point about leadership and the more personal lessons of the war? Yeah, well, that was really a really important period in my life. I was in the Army and I was at the advance course. And the, you know, you made a decision at that point to take an assignment. that was sort of put you on a, it wasn't a final decision, but whether you were going to stay in the military or not.

And West Point had asked me to consider coming back to teach. So I wanted to do that. That's why I volunteered to go to Korea. And I wrote applications to grad schools that the Army would pay for, and then I'd come back and teach at West Point. And in all the essays, they never ended with, I want to be a criminal military army officer, which was really kind of a wide, you know, an eye-opening conclusion.

So at the end of that advanced course, I unexpectedly resigned from the Army. And I had mailed these applications, but the applications weren't going to be starting for another year. So this was in October, November timeframe, and I wouldn't start until September if I got accepted. And so I had a year to kill. And this was driving my parents crazy because they thought my light could be a bit determined. You know, I was going to be a career army officer. And so I bought a ticket, a TWA ticket. and around the world ticket.

And this was a time where you, for $5,000, as long as you went in the same direction, you could take as many flights as you could take. And I had a girlfriend in New York. I said goodbye to her, got on the airplane. This is an early November. Right after Thanksgiving, actually, wait in November. And I travel for the next nine months.

And along the way, there was no cell phones or email. I called my folks and they say, hey, we got a letter that you got accepted into Princeton and they're going to they're going to give you you know scholarship money that nine month period was probably the most consequential time I had I had a backpack full of books I started in the Middle East I went to well Greece then overland through Turkey I hitchhiked through Turkey I went across the border into Syria how I went through Syria into a spent a couple weeks there went into Jordan into Israel I had to have two passports at the time and then ended up in

Egypt and spent a couple weeks in Egypt. And that was the first four months. And then I got an airplane and I flew to Asia. And I spent time in Borneo and Malaysia and Thailand and China and Taiwan. And then my brother was stationed in Hawaii. I flew back in, you know, late, I guess, early August, mid-August, and then started grad school at Princeton. And so this was like this. Imagine seeing that the world through the eyes of everybody you're meeting with. Syria, of course, had been an ally of officers in the Gulf War, seeing the Middle East through all those different voices. And I came really ready to learn and meet other people and really expand my horizons. And this was someone who wasn't a particularly good student at West Point.

I was an engineer. And so, you know, Princeton kind of opened me up to a whole new world of people and ideas. I found a couple conservative professors. I was a Democrat. Both of them. Yeah, yeah, there was only two. But I was a Democrat. My folks had, you know, my family had been,

my pop-up was a county commissioner in Western Pennsylvania. And through the next couple years, I decided I was going to do a PhD. I learned to write. I had a couple professors who really took an interest in me, Aaron Freeper, who was one of them. And that became really an eye-opening experience, really to wrestle deeply with my military experience,

the world, which, was a very, it was in many ways a moment of unbridled optimism. Probably much of which was overstated, but you remember it was the end of history. I do remember. Kukiyama had that wonderful essay. You know, we now have determined the ideas that sort of underwrite America are the ideas that the world will embrace. And of course, we thought we had seen an end to communism and social,

And those ideas, we thought they were in the dustbin of history. And here we are full circle, you know, 35 years later. And those same ideas, which have failed over and over again and are, have proven to be bankrupt, are very much in the, in, in the conversation. I associate Aaron Friedberg mentally with the issue of China. I mean, he's written about many things, but I think of them in that context. What was the conversation like in those years? Obviously, it's front of mind for us all now. In the mid-90s, what was the conversation like? Well, the thing about Aaron, he had written really a seminal book, which was called The Weary Titan. Right.

And that had been about the transition of Great Britain to a more multipolar world and one in which it's maintained its influence in the world, even though it was in relative decline. And the question at that moment was, is America on an upward trajectory, are we in decline? Remember, Paul Kennedy had written, rise and fall ground? great powers and so forth. So that was the question, or one of the questions I was dealing with, which I'm still dealing with now, which was, what's America's trajectory and how do we continue to be the sole superpower in the world? How do we continue ensure that those basic tenants of free market capitalism and the freedom agenda and all those things that have made America, America, how do we make sure those remain very much intact? And so based on that,

I wrote a dissertation, which became a book about how the military should think about its constant renewal in a period where it was downsizing because the Cold War was over. And so that became the focus of my interactions with him. My other professor was another guy who had been a student of James Q. Wilson, John Diulio. And for him, it was about how do you keep organizational excellence. And he had written a lot about that. And so I was trying to think, but how does the military maintain its effectiveness, its efficacy in a period of dramatic change when the threat was dimming,

when our history had been that we can consistently fight the last wars, not the future wars, and how do we make sure our military stays very present and ready for the future? Well, what were your provisional answers and how have we done? Well, in many ways, we failed, I think, you know, despite having a magnificent military, the key was not surprisingly leadership. And how do you keep a leadership mindset that's moving forward, not backward? And how do you maintain a leadership that is not risk-averse? How do you not state anchored to the old ways? How do you not, as an example, have most of our military capability dependent on 30 or 40-year-old

platforms, which is frankly where I think we are today. So we have an incredible military, incredible leadership. But if you look at the dramatic changes in warfare, and you're far more of an expert on this than I am, but if you go to Ukraine, my wife and I were in Estonia and Finland and Norway and Denmark a few months ago, I mean, the nature of warfare on the Ukrainian battlefield is dramatically different than what I experienced, what you experienced as a soldier, what's happening with autonomy, what's happening with robots. So if you think about how just as a simple matter, if you're a CEO, you say if that's the future, how much of our budget are we spending the future? For our budget, it's a pie chart.

So we probably both agree, but we may not that that pie chart needs to grow. I still think that pie chart needs to grow. But the more consequential question is, what slice of the pie in the pie chart is facing forward and what slice of the pie is anchored in the past? And I think any honest reckoning of the pie chart would say that 90% plus is backward focused. Right. At a very small percentage is forward focused. The reason that's so important is we lull ourselves into a false sense of confidence,

I think, that, well, listen, we outspend China. You know, by we spend 900 plus billion. They spend, I think, by most reckoning, you know, 300 plus billion. We're outspending them. Well, maybe not. Because if they're spending 80% of their three or 400 looking forward, and we're spending 10% of our 900 looking forward, then on the kind of warfare that's likely to define future battlefields,

we may be behind. And I think we're seeing that. Just as an example, Zelensky was here last week. We did a closed-door meeting with him. 10,000 drones a day is what Ukraine's producing. right that's that's that's a radically different way of thinking about warfare than our current military um it's very jarring um you know your combat service was at this moment which in retrospect people sort of acknowledge was the peak of american global dominance um in my own time um and i've spoken about this we would use f8ines or harriers in afghaners in afghanistan to do gun runs on individual iED emplacers people who are armed with shovels and homemade explosives in buckets um to flash forward to 2026, we have munitions issue that we're all dealing with. We have the fact to your point about Ukraine. I was in Ukraine earlier this year, talked to a number of people

about their Delta system with which I know you're familiar. This is the data management system, you know, with which they monitor Russian activity and came to the realization that I think their way of sharing information about enemy activity on the battlefield was in some ways more sophisticated than ours was in the Middle East at the start of the Iran War, as I think evidenced by some of the hits the Iranians were able to get through. I'm curious your thoughts on, first of all, any reflections you have on this, you know, strange moment that we're in. And second of all, what would you prioritize when you talk to the Ukrainians? Okay, we have to modernize. We have to move. What are the absolute priorities there if you had to pick one or two

or three things? Well, there's sort of a big answer to that question and narrow answer. I'm probably more equipped for the big answer, but I'll try to do both. The big answer is, the big answer is, is a little bit of what I was trying to do a couple weeks ago in Carlisle, which is we need to re-industrialize our defense capability. And if you were going to summarize it in one sentence, we need new players in different processes. And so the goal of that, we had this summit in Corny War College. We had 1,300 people, president came, cabinet came, chairman came, Chairman Kane came, Pete Eggset. We had all the CEOs of all the defense, major defense contractors. We had the Emergent Technologies, Anderall and Palantir and others represented. We had about 500 companies

from Pennsylvania, most of them emerging technologies, satellites, drones, and so forth. And the whole purpose of this was to reckon with that problem I said earlier, which is we need to do two things. We've let the defense industrial base drift. And so basic fundamental things like shipbuilding, as an example, we've lost the capability of that. to do that. We have less than 1% of global shipbuilding. So in the Philadelphia shipyard, we need to go from one ship a year to 20 ships a year. In Rhodes, which is the submarine component manufacturer next to the Philly Shipyard, we're going from, you know, one submarine a year to three submarines here. So there's some basic, even in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is the 155

unitions. The battlefield of Ukraine is defined by that incredible sophistication of drones, as you say, and 1-5 frowns that are getting lobbed in. So I would call that more traditional, but we need to double down on the more traditional part of our defense industrial base. And then we need to really create a much more effective set of production capabilities around these emergent technologies, robots and drones in particular.

We think Pennsylvania is uniquely positioned to do that because we have Carnegie Mellon, we have Penn State University, We have all these next generation robot manufacturers in Pennsylvania. We have drone manufacturers. We've got the skilled labor. So we're trying to position Pennsylvania to really help lead that defense transformation. In terms of like the narrow question, I mean, clearly drone warfare is changing the nature of warfare.

And this is where I think the Ukrainians have a lot to teach us. He said that many of the drone attacks could have as many as a thousand drones. So there's two pieces that one is having drones that are the right capabilities to be able to offset and go head to head with our adversaries. But the other is the production capability to do that. And we are nowhere on the ability to produce drones at a cost per unit that are consistent with the modern battlefield. And I think that's where a lot of the emphasis needs to be.

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. Maven isn't an app. It's a builder ecosystem. Right now across the joint force, thousands of uniformed service members are pointing AI coding agents at their hardest problems and building the tools they need themselves, targeting workflows, Intel products, battle management. No ticket, no vendor, no wait. The warfighter closest to the fight is now the one building for it. That's how you fight at the speed of war. So continuing on this theme of technology, I want to ask you about AI. I know this is a subject you've been giving some thought, too. It's a theme in these summits you've been holding both this year and last year in Pennsylvania. And I've read some of what you've written on the subject,

and I'm sympathetic to what I take to be a dilemma that's at the core of you. You gave a great speech at the Manhattan Institute recently on this. I'll articulate the dilemma in my own words, but I'm curious your thoughts on it. Most people agree that when it comes to competing with other countries in particular China on this technology, we need to beat them. We need our AI to be better resource to have all the hardware, the data centers, everything else, the energy we need, and the software to be more sophisticated because God knows what could happen if their AI is better than our AI, both for strategic reasons and for commercial reasons. And yet, here at home, the concerns about AI on our economy, on our culture, for a whole variety of reasons, the concerns are real. People's concerns about what it means for the labor market, very justified, it seems to me. I don't know if it's coming for podcast hosts yet, but soon enough, no doubt.

I think you can actually, I said that as a joke, but I think actually you can just generate podcasts on AI now. But without the charm. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, yet. So we have concerns about the labor market, which are very urgent. You have concerns about the concentration of wealth. You have concerns about safety, what these models mean for children or for vulnerable people

who are interacting with them. There's a whole deeper level of concern to me of, I think about this in particular in the educational context. You have young people who basically don't need in a direct sense of efficiency to read books or to write themselves anymore. So what does that even mean for the future? of being human. In other words, this is a revolution in how we are living our lives. So the dilemma seems to me we got to win the AI race, but we're not sure what this tech is going to do to us.

How do you, how should we think about, if you agree with the premise, how do we manage that dilemma? Yeah. Well, I think it starts with do you agree with the following, which you said, but I think it's worth stating, which is, first of all, the AI revolution is happening. It's not like we can put the genie back in the bottle. China is embracing this. It's taking off at, you know, at an accelerating pace.

So do you believe that being in a leadership position on this and guiding how it manifests itself is critical to America's future? I believe that. I think the answer to your question to your question depend largely

on what we do. And I think to break it up a little bit, I'd put it in sort of three buckets. One bucket is how do we manage this innovation and leadership and innovation with the risk associated with this technology going into the wrong hands? And so how much government control and oversight should be involved in guiding this? And when you start by recognizing that the government probably isn't that well equipped or people in the government are, about that, well, could even understand how to do that. So how do you get that right? And that's, in some ways, the naughtiest problem, in my opinion. So protecting children and things like that

are the easiest part. But how do you, because you can restrict access and so forth, but how do you, and we should, but how do you manage the fact that these models are being developed at a breakneck pace? And most of China's advances are through the distillation stealing the IP of American inventors. and the more sophisticated that you get there are more, there's corner cases where you could use an AI model for some nefarious purpose, biological or otherwise. So how do you manage that regulatory oversight, government oversight?

Because there's only one institution. There's only one thing that can do this. Government, this is one of the places where government has responsibility for the security of its people, but you can't do that in a way that stops this breakneck innovation. or you potentially. So getting that balanced right is a really a difficult challenge. And I'm not sure we have good answers. On one hand, you certainly feel like you need to lean into the corner cases and say, well, we need to restrict those things that could put a biological agent in the hands of some terrorists. That seems obvious. But the same had how to do that in a way that isn't stifling the innovation, particularly as China, continue.

used to raise the head of break-nake-nake-n speed. So that's a balancing act. Then my instinct up at the list point has been, if you're going to err, err on the side of not being overly prescriptive because we don't know enough yet. But I think these things are moving so quick and starting to take shape that we do need to have a government input, probably at every step along the way to make sure that the corner cases are guarded against. And how to get that balance rate? There isn't a body in the government today that I think is equipped to do that. So how do you create the right cross-functional group of people to do that? It's going to require some industry participation to like FINRA, but I'm not sure FINRA is enough. So that's one question. That's the hardest one, in my opinion.

The second one is a very profound question, but I think the answers are easier to get your head around, which is the economic implications of it. And there's really two pieces that. One's disruption to the workforce. Now, that's not happening. yet. In fact, the AI boom and the energy infrastructure boom has created incredible job growth in Pennsylvania, and we see it. I mean, if you're a experienced welder, I mean, it's the most secure job of the world and they're making $150,000 to $200,000 a year. These are great jobs and they're growing dramatically because you can't really say AI without energy. Right. And those two go hand in hand, on the, on the, uh, uh, some jobs, white collar jobs, for a lack of a better term,

will certainly be disruptive. And, and other jobs will be disrupted. I think the answer to that is helping people with the training to be able to lean into AI and become the beneficiaries of it. It's on a much smaller scale. This happened with the internet. I remember some jobs went away. Other jobs were created because the technology offered enormous opportunity. If you're an entrepreneur, it's the greatest time ever to be an entrepreneur. Because AI can give you the capabilities of 100 people to think about financial models, to think about marketing plans. I mean, it is a huge enabler for business creation.

So helping people become familiar with how they can use AI to their advantage is part of it. But then the second thing, which I'm really focused on, is wealth concentration. We have had in our country the biggest concentration of wealth in the last 15 years. If you were an asset holder, you got richer. Right. You didn't have to be smart investor. You just got richer because all assets went up. Well, unfortunately, most of America are not asset holders, only of a small fraction hold assets. That concentration is growing dramatically. And so you're quickly approaching where 1% of the population will have 50% of the wealth. We're not there yet, but it's about 31% today. But you see that growing. And that's not, that's not sustainable. That's not sustainable as a political matter. That is a version of capitalism that I don't think we want. So I think we're going to need to make adjustments into how that wealth is shared to preserve the capitalist engine that's created the wealth in the first place. There's no greater system for bringing people out of poverty than capitalism. But I think we're getting into precarious territory. So how do you do that? On a small scale, the Trump accounts are a good example of that where you invest in the next generation. Everybody needs to have a piece of this incredible, innovation and the productivity gains and the wealth creation that's going to come with it. I'm an

optimist that this is going to create incredible benefits, but we need to make sure others come along. And that's a noddy or problem, but it's one that I think we need to address. And hopefully I as a conservative and a strong-minded capitalist can be part of that answer. Third piece, and I'll just tease it. And then we can talk about it more if you like is the whole question of data centers and infrastructure on the ground. That's a big issue. It's become very controversial on places like Pennsylvania. I think there's a path through that, but it's, we need to, we need to lead on it. Well, I want to come back to that because it is important, but first, the way you laid out the first two parts just make me think, if I were searching for a set of

conditions that were better grounds for Marxism, I'm not sure I could come up with better conditions. As you outlined it, downwardly mobile, college-educated white-collar workers whose jobs are going away because it just doesn't make sense to be an accountant anymore. If being an accountant meant you simply processed the forms. AI can process the forms now. You have this concentration of wealth issue, which is just a very appealing issue for the left. The left, of course, will have a set of policy answers for all this stuff. And we see progressive candidates doing very well out there. And you hear them talking about things like data centers and AI as they run. The left's answer will be, yeah, well, we've been right all along. The capitalists, we're always

going to take all your stuff. And here they are doing it. And we're going to take it back. The state will take it back and we'll distribute it. And that will be the left's answer. How do you plan to make the rights answer attractive in the face of all of that? Because their answer, it strikes me, will be somewhat compelling in the years to come. Well, we agree that the sentiment of what's driving the rise of this socialist pulse is the anxiety, the uncertainty of the moment. And so the left is trying to fill that void with with bad ideas. And the thing we can say about those bad ideas is that they've proven themselves to be bad ideas over and over. The path to creating wealth and opportunity for people across America is not for the government to be the allocator

of capital. We've proven that time and again. So for those of us on the right who believe that capitalism is the engine, we have to find clever ways to deal. We've given. We've proven that deal with the challenges that this is presented by keeping the essence of what created all the wealth in the first place, which is a free market system, we have creative destruction, where people are willing to take risk, where capital allocators take risk and are rewarded many times over for that risk and where when they take a bad bet, they lose all their money. And when a business fails, it fails. That is the essence of capitalism where you have free market principles that drive in.

So how do we deal with this problem, but in a way that does undermine those principles? I think there's, I don't have all the answers, but I think there's a couple pieces to it. One, you want to, if you're taking money from some of the wealthiest beneficiaries of this moment, If that money is voluntary, it's very different than if that money is prescribed. We see that. We see Michael Dell just gave $7 billion to these Trump accounts. There was this notion of the Buffett Pledge where some of the richest people in the world said we were going to give 50% of their wealth away. So the difference between the government coming in and saying, I'm going to take all your money versus someone who's been very wealthy.

Andrew Carnegie, Pittsburgher, who wrote the gospel of wealth. he basically said, listen, I've been blessed by this country. I want to give back to the people. So I think you're going to see a huge outpouring of philanthropy. The reason people don't give to some things is they don't know how the money is going to be used. So that's the second principle. We have to circumvent the government.

So the money has to be able to go to the people that are the beneficiaries of it directly. That's why the Trump accounts, that's why the school tax, school choice tax credit and the Working Families Tax Cut Act, these ideas where you're giving the next generation, a stake in the economy, either through opportunity or through actual ownership of equities, like in the Trump accounts, I think is a second principle. Third, we can't lose the essence of America, I think, which is that we're not giving entitlement. We're giving opportunity.

So I think in this moment of profound change, we need to make sure every American has opportunity. That's why school choice is such an important part of this. Not a promise. So I'm against those that are arguing in this moment of change. for universal basic income. I think I understand that we could afford to do that, but I think it would undermine the dignity that comes with working. And I think what we need to do is create the opportunity for everybody to take part in this boom through ownership but also through the opportunity to work.

So at the risk of oversimplifying, if the left's answer is redistribution of the now highly concentrated capital, the rights answer will be something like making sure that everyone has a share in the sense of literally being shareholders in the enterprise. They're shareholders in the enterprise. And bigger and bigger shareholders based on their capacity to lean in and work and take advantage of this moment of enormous opportunity. Data centers, because you raised it, you know, I was struck in the first year of this second Trump term, the open embrace of pretty breakneck progress, breakneck speed progress on

this front. The theory behind it seemed to be. me to be something like if we're going to beat China, we need X amount of energy, X, Y amount of compute. The numbers are huge. It's unclear how we get there anyway, but we may as well get after it. And that seems to me to have motivated the last year or so of policy. What do you hear on the ground in Pennsylvania about what this means on the ground and what are your thoughts on the infrastructure? It's a different community by community. That's the first thing. It's interesting. This debates move dramatically in 12 months. In China, AI data center,

have about 80% popularity. In America, it's 20%. There's a connection between those two things. So China and Russia, there's hearings in the House on this point, are trying to influence the debate here at home. Why? Because, as you and I just discussed, leading an AI requires capability of energy and computing power. And so if you were going to try to slow America and you were trying, how would you do that? Well, you'd create big political controversies. That's one of the reasons. It's not the only reason, but that's one of the enforcers. Second influencer is the hyperscalers have done a terrible job, in my opinion, in these early days, some of the developers, very secretive, behind the scenes, deals would be announced. That's not going to work.

No senator in Pennsylvania is going to come into Pike County or Columbia County where I grew up and say, hey, you need this data center in your back here. These need to be decisions that township supervisors, county commissioners make. It's a big decision for a community to make this. And in order to make that, my humble counsel is make sure you're both well informed, but here's five things you should consider. There should be a covenant that exists between the data center, the hyperscalers, and the Gnady. Number one, there should be protection on energy prices.

Rate protection, the hyperscalers should bring more energy than they use. That's happening in Pennsylvania, for example, Omer City. We're going to have 4.4 gigawatts. It's a coal-fired plan being transitioned. into a gas-bired plant, a gigawatt's going to go onto the grid to try to lower energy prices. So one's energy. Two is water. They got to be closed-loop systems.

95% of the closed-loop is recyclable water, but they can't have some big environmental degradation on the community. Third, taxes. These are economic engines. They are economic engines for the community. What's it going to mean for property taxes? What's going to mean for the tax base in general? In many places, it's lowering taxes. But what are the terms of that arrangement?

been up from. Number four, labor. They've got to bring local labor. This can't be imported from other places into build the data centers. You have the data center jobs of construction. You have the permanent jobs. You have the jobs to upgrade the data centers with new technology every three to four years. You have the hotels, the logistics, the restaurants. We want to have most of that economic engine happen in the communities. And number five, what else are you going to do for me? They're spending $20 billion in most of these communities. In Pennsylvania, and the AWS just announced $20 billion,

two big data center campuses as an example. Are they in those school? Are they in those roads and bridges? What is the proposition? With all those things, I think most communities are going to opt in. I have a farm where I grew up. I don't really want a huge big data center

on that beautiful cornfield behind my house. I really don't want that. But if that was the right thing for the community and all those things made sense, I think most people are going to opt in. And if they don't opt in, like I've been hearing around Pennsylvania for 40 years, we can't keep our kids. We don't have the economic engine.

We don't have the old days. Well, this is an economic engine. And Pennsylvania is uniquely able to take advantage of it because of our energy, our skilled labor, our proximity to most of the population. So I say to my friends that I meet on the ground in some of these communities, hey, if you're not going to, if this is not going to be your economic engine, what's it going to be? I think with those five conditions, I think a lot of communities are going to hop in. Welcome, more thoughts on AI if you have them, but having settled that complicated issue, I want to move on to another easy one, which is the Middle East.

Yeah. You are chair of on the Foreign Relations Committee of the subcommittee that focuses on the Middle East. Start very big picture, but obviously we have Iran specifically to talk about. You know, in the first Trump term, the Abraham Accords seemed to me to set a pretty clear strategic direction for where. the president wanted the Middle East to go. An alliance of sorts, certainly a network focused around the U.S., Israel, and its Gulf partners, our Gulf partners. The Biden administration, it sort of flirted with the Obama offshore balancing,

being friendlier to Iran stuff a bit, but actually to a surprising extent, at least to me, sort of stuck with that basic logic. Here we are in 2026. there's a fierce literal battle underway for the future of the Strait of Hormuz, which if Iran ends up in control of it, which is one possible outcome here, seems to me like it will deal a pretty significant blow to that regional architecture. How are our Gulf partners meant to align against Iran if they have to essentially get Iran's approval to sail their stuff in and out of the Strait of Hormuz? It was an organizing strategic idea for the region. How important is it that it be preserved? What's the route to preserve it?

So I think if you'd have looked at been a student of the Middle East, and you would just objective apolitical, and you would have said from, you know, 2018, I guess, to, let's say, 2030. So that 12-year period. Yeah. Peter said in that 12-year period, we would accomplish the following. Or the Middle East would have the following changes. Abraham Accords 1, the complete evisceration of Hezbollah, Hamas, these terrorist proxies,

at a minimum, a huge setback to Iran's nuclear ambitions through Operation Midnight Hammer, at a minimum, an enormous setback to Iran's capabilities in missile, launchers, missiles, drones and manufacturing capability, not to say it has lost all its capability, but a significant setback. The solidification of Abraham Accords, in my opinion, because they've lasted through this period of conflict. And, you know, Iran in a position where it's largely isolated in the region, which is that's where we would be. Now, there's two big things. I'll come back to a minute. But I think the arc of that, that arc of that transformation is pretty complex. bill. And I give President Trump credit for doing a very hard thing because it was a very hard thing

to, after 47 years, go in and say, we cannot have Iran having a path to a nuclear weapon. And I believe he believed that I think with good reason that the likelihood of Iran and I think all the intel, a public intel would have said that the likelihood of Iran having a nuclear capability that it could deliver under his second term. was very high. So if you believe those things, I think we've made enormous progress. It's not a straight line. It's a squiggle. So there's challenges. There's no doubt there's challenges. The two big challenges, of course, we got to finish the job on the nuclear. We have to gain confidence. It could take a number of manifestations. We have the confidence there is no path to a nuclear weapon. We can't have

made all this investment and taken all this risk and put American lives at risk and lost 18 Americans without finishing the job. And then second, obviously, we've got to have and we've got to not have Iran continue to be the underwriter of terrorist proxies, which I think we've made each progress on that. And then finally, this trade of Formuz has to continue to be an open channel.

We're at a point where there's a couple different forks in the road on how we may accomplish that. Iran's proven itself to be a deceptive and untrustworthy partner to say the very least. My personal opinion on this is there's not going to be a ha-ha day where they say we can, you know, we're going to move down a path to prosperity. I think we're going to have to keep the pressure on with blockade, keep the pressure on with selective military operation. You know, Tim Sheehe, my colleague here says, listen, when you time we've been at war, we've been at war with Iran, this is just a different chapter of that war. And it is creating economic consequences here at home, which are not small. Right. The politics of this in Pennsylvania? when gas prices are up a buck a gallon, it's a real thing. So the president's going to have to manage his way through this, but I think his willingness to lead on it, it's very admirable, and I support him 100%. Well, I want to wrap up on the politics of this, because this is,

I think, the Iran war in its effect on both left and right, I think shines a light on massive forces at work on both sides. On the left, it's almost, in my view, sort of easier to understand. It's sort of easy for them. It's not their administration. It's not their war. they're against it. And it's, it's fuel and fodder for the progressive end of the left-wing debate on this stuff, which tends increasingly in what I will characterize as an isolationist, sort of left-wing, isolationist direction. On the right, you have a debate of its own. You have critics of this war on the right. You have, I think, some big open questions. This takes us back to the start of our conversation and sort of reflecting on what the role of America in the world is. On the right, you have

some very prominent voices questioning whether America as a global leader is in the interest of Americans, is in the interest of Pennsylvanians. And I think using this war and the fact that it's still underway in August as a data point to support their argument, what is the future of the right in terms of American global leadership? What is the effect of this war? What do you say to Pennsylvanians when these questions in whatever form come up. Yeah. I think is, see that Los Angeles Times article?

I do. That Los Angeles Times article, I wrote, I guess about a year after 9-11. And that the title of the article is, let's roll against Saddam Hussein. I mean, I was so like red blood. We got to go in there, kick down doors. We got to get those.

Number. You know, this is, we had Intel at the time that we thought, weapons of mass destruction, we got, we gotta go. I just worked for President Bush. Subsequently, the War for President Bush, Mr. Meyer, President Bush, it turned out to be a catastrophic error, in my opinion. So I was completely wrong.

And we had 20 years of treasure and blood with what I think were unclear objectives. And it's created, I think, an understandable skepticism and concern about Forever Wars that you were part of, of getting America embedded in situations where the objectives aren't clear. And so I think that creates some of the context

for your question. And I think the wrong reading of that history would be that America shouldn't be promoting its interests abroad, that America doesn't need to have the most powerful military in the world to protect his interest. I think the lesson from that is

the goals need to be circumscribed. They need to be clear that we need to be humble with the use of our military power that the decision to put young men and women into combat is a decision that should take, you know, an enormous, it's an enormous step to take, and we shouldn't do that lightly. I don't think the president is doing that lightly, but the objectives need to be very clear. I think in this case, the threat to America, this wasn't just the threat to our ally Israel. The threat to America

was unequivocally clear. This is a regime that has killed more Americans over the last 40 years than any other through terrorist proxies. They were on a path to a nuclear weapon. We could debate whether it was three months or three years, but it was inevitable. And their goal, explicit goal, was to destroy the grace Satan. So this was a threat to my kids, to your kids. This was a genuine threat. And so now the question is, how do we make sure that we stay clear that the strategic goals we don't waver?

How do we make sure that we don't get dragged into other things that are derivative to this? The use of American power and strength abroad should be done with great humility and great care, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use our military. We need to use our military to promote objectives. And I think having a maniacal regime of a bunch of lunatics that say they want to kill America and have a path to a nuke or weapon, I think most Americans understand that's an unacceptable, unacceptable circumstance. And they're willing to give the president their support for taking on a really tough problem. That's the way I feel about it. How do you balance just taking

everything you just said as true for purposes of argument, how do you balance that urgent need to manage the Iran issue, get to a better place on it with strategic challenges, for example, with China? Because that's another argument you'll hear on the right. Sometimes you hear some version of we need to divest of all of this. This is all contrary, essentially, to the interest of the average American and being involved in all this stuff. Another argument you'll hear is that Iranians may be bad, not too many people are going to suggest that they're good. But we got bigger problems in the Pacific. How do you think about that? Well, I think that's why. keeping the strategic goals clear, not wavering, not letting things expand is a really critical

part of it. I go back to the strategic goal we just talked about. That's an unacceptable outcome. That doesn't mean we should take our eye off the ball on the strategic significance of China. There's no doubt. That is the existential threat, as we talked about earlier in this discussion. That is the rival that can truly challenge America's role as the global superpower. So we need to do both. But part of doing both, but part of doing both is not letting what happened in the previous war, again, with all due respect to President Bush, who I work for, not letting it go down a path where it becomes unfocused and this continued investment of resources and blood and treasure without a clear outcome. And I think the president's

very mindful. I think President Trump campaigned on that. I think he's very mindful of that. And I think that's very much at the front of his mind, certainly at the front of my mind is someone who tries to be a clear voice on these issues. Senator Dave McCormick, thank you so much for the really thoughtful conversation. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Of course. Appreciate it.