The Dispatch Podcast - Robert O'Brien Talks Global Threats

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Robert O’Brien, former U.S. ambassador and national security advisor to President Donald Trump, joins Klon Kitchen for a discussion of international politics from a bird’s-eye view. They discuss his time working for the former president, and the job of national security advisor. Plus: How can the United States protect itself from Chinese economic espionage? China’s threat to Taiwan? And what is the future of the war in Ukraine?   Show Notes: -Uphill: The Showdown Over the China Competition Bill -The Current: Ban TikTok Now -The Current: Getting Smart on Intelligence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Klein Kitchen and I get to be your host this week. Joining me is Robert O'Brien, the 27th United States National Security Advisor who served President Trump in that position from 2019 until 2021. Today we'll discuss what the job is and what it's like working for the United States President as his national security advisor. We also talk about Ukraine and the growing sense of restraint on the political right. We talk a lot about China and Taiwan, the growing concerns about Chinese invasion of that island, as well as how the United States can protect itself from Chinese economic espionage. It's a great conversation, and I hope you enjoy it.

Robert, thanks for taking time to join me for a conversation. Great to be with you, Klan. Thank you. So I always like to begin these conversations with a little bit of just background on how individuals in these jobs kind of get there. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you got into this work and some of the other stuff that you did prior to being the national security advisor to President Trump? Sure. The show version Klon is I was a lawyer in Los Angeles for most of my career, but I came from a family that I like to judge and say we had a family of undistinguished junior officers over the couple of centuries. And so I went in the Army Reserve as a JAG officer, had an opportunity in the mid-90s to go work on a commission handling claims against Iraq arising out of the first Gulf War. I came back to California and went back to practicing law. And then I got involved in a couple of presidential campaigns.

And in 2005, I went back and served at the UN, worked under John Bolton as the U.S. alternate representative and did a few other jobs in the Bush administration. I was the chairman of the rule of law program for Afghanistan and that held over for about a year into the Obama administration. I was a senior advisor to Governor Romney and his presidential campaign was Scott Walker's National Security Advisor. And so the pattern you're getting here is losing presidential campaigns. So if you ever see me on a presidential campaign vote against it or short it, you'll make some money.

But President Trump was nice enough to, I supported President Trump after he received the nomination, and he asked me to serve as a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and that's why I got to know President Trump, and he was really believed in bringing Americans who were detained or held hostage or brought home. It was a high priority of his. I think that was the essence of American first for him, and he didn't care how people got there. He didn't care if they were tourists or missionaries or journalists or diplomats, whatever the situation was that landed them in a hostage situation or a detainee situation. wanted him home. And we had a lot of success during that year and a half that I served as his

envoy. And without any plans of becoming his national security advisor, when Ambassador Bolton left, he made the call and asked me to join him. And it was a privilege to do so. Yeah. So talk a little bit about that call. I mean, you're doing this important hostage and detainee work. And then, as you say, Ambassador Bolton leaves the White House. And then you get a call from the president. What does he say? How's that conversation go? Yeah, it was, again, it was somewhat surprising. I was actually in Israel working on a case trying to get an Israeli in that case home, his remains home. It was an IDF soldier who'd been killed by Hamas and drugged through the tunnels back to Gaza.

And the Israeli family had come to Secretary Pompeo myself and asked if we would help. And Secretary Pompeo gave me permission to work for a non-American in that case. And Ambassador Walton left. I was flying home to Los Angeles. and I showed up on a few lists of here, the 10 people that could be National Security Advisor. I kind of chuckled and told my wife, that won't be me. I'll see you in L.A. this weekend. And I got a call and asked if I'd come over the following Wednesday to the White House for an interview

and I did the interview and apparently it went well. So the president made me the offer next Tuesday. I actually eventually flew home to L.A. And he was out in L.A. for a visit and asked me to join him. and I jumped on the team. We flew back on Air Force One and spent the next year and a half in D.C. full time. And you were the fourth NSA to President Trump. Is that right?

I was. So we had Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster and John Bolton. That's right. And so talk a little bit about how the president's general approach to national security foreign policy, the types of work that you were advising him on. So the job of the assistant to the president for national security affairs or the NSA job is to be the principal foreign policy and national security advisors to the president. And I took a little different view of my work than I think my predecessors did. And I told the president this in the

interview. And I think maybe one of the reasons why he asked me to do the job is, you know, I felt that President Trump had a very well-defined foreign policy. I thought he should get the best options, the best advice on whatever issue who is facing. And then once he made a decision that the departments and agencies should implement that decision, I didn't view my job as trying to educate him on what his policy should be. I didn't come to the job with a foreign policy agenda. I've got well thought out views on a lot of issues, but again, I was staffing the president.

I wasn't a principal. I hadn't been elected by anybody to put my foreign policy in place. And so my job was to make sure the president got, whether it was a long-term issue that we were facing, great power competition, for example, or an immediate crisis like COVID or the Baghdadi situation, to make sure the president got the absolute best advice from his cabinet secretaries, and if you wanted my opinion at the end of the day after hearing

from everybody else and everyone having had their day in court, I'd give my advice, and then once the president made a decision on how he wanted to proceed, our job at the NSC was to coordinate with the cabinet secretaries and their departments and agencies and make sure that the president's foreign policy was implemented. That sounds very reminiscent of the way Secretary Rice would talk about her role when she was the NSA, that she wanted to make sure that the president was getting as diverse and as deep counsel as he could on those issues. And, you know, let's put Michael Flynn aside. But you can see how McMasters and Bolton both, yeah, they came in with a very developed comprehensive

and public kind of worldview on foreign policy issues. And I can see the daylight between how you're describing your approach and perhaps how they might have. And it, I think, think from at least open press reporting why the president kind of chafed against some of that. He probably didn't want to feel like he was being kind of lectured to. He wanted the implementation of his view. No, I think that's right. And I worked for Condi at the State Department when she was secretary and she was one of the first visitors I had. I think I took office on a Tuesday and she flew back to see me on a Sunday. We sat in her old office, my new office. And she very generously gave me a couple hours of her time. And I had a hard time, you know, breaking myself

from calling her Madam Secretary. And she was very clear that Robert were colleagues now. It's Condi. But she gave me a lot of good advice on that front. And I think Condi tried to follow, and I tried to follow a model established by Brent Scowcroft, who served twice as National Security Advisor under both President Ford and President Bush, H.W. Bush. And again, I tried to implement both in how we ran the NSC with the meetings in the process, but also how we interacted with the president to follow the Skowcroft model. And every national security advisor, when they come into office, kind of invokes that. It's kind of a mantra that, you know, we're going to do the Skokroft model. But I think it's been followed in the breach more than

in regular order. So I really did try to restore the Skokroft model. And I think when you when you look at what we did with a slim-down NSC, I mean, when I got there, there was still almost 200 policy professionals. You know, Condi had 106 at the height of Afghanistan, a right, Act, global war on terror, a great power competition. She had half that, and I kind of took that as my model as well. We got a very efficient NSC. We had an NSC that really ran on process where, you know, again, all the cabinet agencies and departments had their day to, you know,

give their best views and best options. And if there's a split opinion, I'd have each side elect a representative, so it might be Pompeo on one side or Mnuchin on the other. And we'd go see the president. I'd make sure the president heard both both, both sets of views. But for the most part, we were able to drive consensus and go to the president with a set of options that we thought were best for the American people. And again, that was derived out of, you know, deputies committee meetings and weekly principal committee meetings

where we got the best input from whether it was Treasury or Commerce or State or Defense or the IAC. And we really, I think the results of what we did with NATO funding, with getting Baghdaddy, with putting Iran in a box, with the new consensus on China, certainly on the peacemaking front with the Abraham Accords, with Serbia, Kosovo, with the healing the Gulf rift, and even Afghanistan, you know, I think the results were pretty impressive in 18 months that. And again, I don't take credit for that. The credit belongs to the president, but I think we assisted him in getting there with a Skowcroft model at the NSC. So I spent a little over 15 years in the U.S. intelligence community working a range of issues.

And I'm curious, including some time supporting the NSC. And I'm curious about your perspective on the state of the intelligence community. I think we can, I imagine you would agree with this, that we're talking about tried and true patriots. We're not talking about people who want to do anything less than give the nation there all. who work very hard, often with very little recognition. I do wonder sometimes about how well-suited the intelligence community is to modern policymakers' needs. I'm curious as someone who was in the thick of it engaged on these issues, what's your take on the IC? How's it doing?

Are there specific ways that it needs to evolve to be more aligned to kind of modern statecraft and policymaking? That's a call. That's a big question. And as you know, there are 16 or 17 agencies, depending on how you count, that make up the IAC. And there are places that most Americans don't think about when we think about the IAC. So, for example, you've got at the State Department, you've got the research department there, which is an important part of the IAC. You've got National Geospatial, which does great work.

Of course, you've got all the intelligence components of the armed services. inform branches. So it's a big, broad, diverse group. You know, we tend to think about the CIA and the NSA and ODNI, Director of National Intelligence is kind of the big ones, but there are a lot of great people out there in diverse areas and it's a very specialized niche areas collecting for the United States. So I think when it comes to collection, we're second to none. It's pretty impressive what we can pull together. And I think the IC like anything else, it's a tremendous tool. They have great abilities, whether it's Cigant or Eilent or even, you know, human intelligence, however we think of it and how we collect. It gets the policymakers, people like me and the Secretary

of State and the CIA director of the folks that have to advise the president and advise Congress on what we should be doing. It gets us what we need. I think one thing that's, I think there are a couple of issues with the intelligence community. One, I think it's like any big bureaucracy see it becomes a little risk adverse. And sometimes we need people that'll, you know, even if they're wrong, that'll, you know, step up with an innovative or thoughtful theory that may not fall with conventional wisdom. And you always worry that people might not want to, you know, be the outlier because they're

afraid of how to affect their career. But we need the outliers. And even if the outliers are wrong, they're provocative. And they cause us to think about things that maybe look at things a different way and come up with a different solution. So I think we need to make sure that the. the IC doesn't get, you know, follow group think or conventional wisdom. And I think that's always a problem with analysts. And again, I think we need to reward people that are willing to take

an out-of-the-box approach. So, you know, and then on the analysis, you know, we've got to be careful that we're not fighting the last war. And so we've got a lot of people who are highly skilled and spent, you know, the best years of their life in places like Jawabad and Kandahar and and Bar and Fallujah and places like that and know that part of the world incredibly well. But the world's changing and those places remain important in the United States. We can't ignore them.

But our existential threat comes from the Communist Party of China and the Ministry of State Security on the IC front or those guys are deadly and serious. And of course we still have the former KG, what was a former KGB, the FSB, SVR now with the Russians, and the Iranians have the MOIS. And so we need to start shifting our focus, both as a government, to the Indo-Pacific, but also to Russia and Eastern Europe and keeping an eye on Iran. And so we want to make sure we're not just constantly living

in the surge in 2006 in the glory days of Baghdad and the second Bush term, which, again, we did great work then, and I appreciate the work that our folks on the ground did, kicking doors and developing intelligence and defeating ISIS and defeating the Sunni, the hardcore Saddam bulldovers. But at the same time, we've got to get prepared for the next, you know, the next, hopefully not war, but the next challenge that we've got, and that's certainly the Indo-Pacific and Eastern Europe. Yeah, and I want to walk through both of those AORs in a second.

On your point about risk aversion in the IC, obviously that's one of those things that if you look back at all of the various intelligence reviews, they always talk about that, creativity and risk aversion and then timeliness and accuracy as well. My experience on that was, you know, there was really never a lack of willingness or risk aversion at the kind of line analyst level. and maybe even at at the kind of team chief level but where things, especially for the presidential brief, where things got really kind of tight and locked down, was at that mid-leadership level,

that SES-1, S-E-S-2 level, where, you know, look, to some degree it's understandable. It takes a lot of guts to go to the DCIA or the DNI and say, hey, listen, we want to put this, you know, creative hypothesis in front of the president and see if he and his team think this is a good idea. And then, of course, the DCIA or the DNIs, of course, understands that with the president, it's typically always, what have you done for me lately when it comes to Intel? And, you know,

it can feel a little bit risky there. But anyways, all that to say. Yeah, I agree with you, but I don't even think it's just at the president level. And I think some of these young agents, when I was a, the hostage envoy, I had some great young agents from the FBI that were working cases and some great special operators where we're dealing with things, where it was going to be more of a military solution. And I can't tell you how many times I'd have a, you know, young lieutenant J.G or a seal officer pull me aside after I haven't just gotten briefed by a combatant commander or the deputy combatant commander and pull me aside and whispered to me, you know, quickly, you know, we can get this guy, we can do the rescue,

we can make this happen. And, you know, as soon as the senior officer starts walking over, it's, you know, clam up. And I'm like, well, son, that's how a bill becomes a law. And we'll talk, you know, call me in Washington or FBI agents pulling me aside saying, hey, you know, we think we've got something, something, a lead here. But again, once it gets the upper levels, there's a, there's a risk adversion that with senior policymakers. It's not just the president. It's with the secretary of state. It's with DCIA, D&I. because I think there's a lot of times that, you know, Gina Haspo would have heard something, having been a case officer, her whole career, and said, hey, that's a great idea.

But it doesn't get to Gina, or it didn't get to John Radcliffe or Rick Rennell or, you know, or to me. So it's not just even at the presidential level. I think he's even at the, you know, the assistant secretary level above. And I think you're absolutely right. I think some of these young agents and operators are, I mean, they're just the best America's got. They may not have the season judgment and wisdom of, you know, having been a the job for 20 or 30 years, but they're eager and they're smart and they're willing to take

risk. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And I think that's a fair characterization of kind of the intel community and, you know, a whole bunch of institutions that you stood on top of and that characterize, you know, much of our government and even industry. So a key part of the point that you were drawing, though, is, you know, you've got 17 or 18 agencies, a growing number of which are focused on the domestic threat.

So as you were in your position, what types of domestic threat work were you engaged in? What did that look like? What were the kind of concerns that developed over the course of your time at the White House? Yeah, my biggest domestic concern, Klon, was the CCP, the Communist Party of China and the public people's revoltic of China and their infiltration into the U.S., which is extensive, pervasive. There are cells everywhere. they have an unbelievable ability to track their students who are here to enforce their party orthodox on Chinese, even, you know, second and third generation Chinese that are here to collect intelligence to steal our IP. And Christopher Ray talked about this in the summer

of 2020 in a speech he gave. We gave a series of four speeches, Bill Barr, Chris Ray, myself, and Mike Pompei, we just gave a speech on China. And we each took a different area and it laid out the threat. And Chris Ray made a statement in his speech that I thought was really interesting. I've repeated it several times that the Chinese IP theft is the largest transfer of wealth in human history. In other words, the Chinese are taking more money and value out of the U.S. over the past 40 years through theft of our intellectual property than any sack of Rome, any, you know, Trajan's campaign in Dacia. I mean, no one has ever brought back more loot and booty than the Chinese have and taken out of this country.

And what it's done, it's created a domestic issue because they've hollowed out our industrial base. So it's not just that they've stolen the ability of the inventor or the manufacturer to get license fees, right? So that if they come and bought the invention or bought the IP and paid license fees, the inventor loses that source of income from the theft. But it's even worse than that because they would take the IP, back, they'd then develop a factory and produce the product and they'd subsidize it and they'd dump it

here in the U.S. and they'd put the company that originally invented the idea or invented the IP out of business. So it wasn't just the loss of the revenue stream from the license. It was the loss of the entire manufacturing capability on just an array of issues and products and items. and then the factory closes and Americans are out of work and that industrial basis transferred to China. And so that's the biggest domestic I don't want to call it a domestic threat

because it obviously originates in a foreign capital but that's why I spent most of my time focusing on. Look, there are certainly threats here. We had an Antifa threat. We had domestic terrorism on the left. We're seeing now some of the reports about the oathkeepers and proud boys and some of these threats on the right.

And those are things we need to keep an eye on. But again, I think they're, I don't want to minimize those threats, but I think the threat that we're facing from the Communist Party of China is a threat to our way of life and our future liberty. And I think we've got to be very careful about, you know, sending FBI agents out to school boards, you know, to watch parents protesting about CRT when they really ought to be trailing, you know, chai-com agents who are operating here that we know about. And we've got to be careful not to let our domestic politics, you know,

you know, influence how the IC does our counterintelligence here in the U.S. And so that was my biggest concern. Again, not that the other concerns aren't important, but, you know, when you think about our kids or our grandkids going to have liberty and the ability of pursuit of happiness, not just in America, but in the other democracies, you know, that's, we're facing an existential threat right now. Yeah, I mean, anyone who knows me will know that I'm singing from the same song and music there in terms of the concerns about Chinese.

technical espionage, human infiltration, the whole bit on domestic side. And I want to talk about that quite a bit. And by the way, we've also got Hezboa cells all over the country as well. And so that's an Iranian cells that are active here. And not to mention, you know, we've done a pretty good job, I think, on ISIS and Al-Qaeda, but that doesn't stop the self-radicalization that folks get over the Internet and that sort of thing. So, you know, our counterintelligence folks have their hands full with, you know, Russia, China, Iran, Hezbollah, and then, you know, the jihadi networks in addition to, you know, some of these domestic groups are problematic.

Yeah, and it does seem, I mean, for years, the domestic or homegrown extremism threat was largely associated with kind of Islamic extremist threats originating in the continental United States. But it does seem over the last several years to have adjusted to some of the kind of what we'll call politically right-wing groups that you mentioned and that are in the news right now, obviously, with oathkeepers and proud boys and the like. Not only them, but certainly them. How did that come up as an issue for you to deal with? I know that you're overwhelmingly focused on kind of outside the continental United States challenges and threats, but as NSA, it's correct to say that you do advise the president on domestic homeland security as well, is that right? You do. In my case, we had a great Attorney General in Bill Barr and Chad Wolf is our acting

Homeland Security Secretary and both very capable men. And so, you know, for the most part, we certainly coordinated the advice they got, but we left that to the FBI and the DOJ and Homeland to do most of those briefings. You know, I would, of course, be there. And again, the threats we saw changed over even the year and a half that I was National Security Advisor. At the outset, we had the BLM movement and a lot of Antifa. So, I mean, you had situations where, you know, pallets of bricks were being delivered close to the White House and a really impressive logistics chain, not impressive because it's a good thing, but impressive in that these Antifa folks were very good at logistics and created massive damage. I mean, you know, far greater damage than happened on, you know, January 6th, which, again, I, I condemned at the time in real time and it was a terrible thing to happen to our country.

But we also faced, I mean, I was taking an undisclosed location at least two times because of attacks on the White House that are, that by Antifa that haven't been covered to the same extent as some of the other outbreaks. So both on the far left and the far right, whether you've got Antifa or you've got these, the prod boys types. and, you know, I don't even think it's fair to call them far left or far right because I think it's unfair to liberals or conservatives, but just these domestic extremists. And certainly they're being radicalized and coordinating. We know this from both types of groups, Antifa was very, very savvy using the Internet and using even Twitter to organize their protest that would turn violent. And then we know that from these chat rooms,

and 4chan and these various things. I'm not as savvy technically as you probably are, Klan, but both sets of extremists have figured out how to use modern technology to organize and to amplify their, not just their message for self-radicalization, but also to organize their attacks or riots or protests or whatever they're going to be involved in. So it puts a lot of strain on our domestic, you know,

counter surveillance and counterintelligence folks to to keep track of that and keep us safe. Yeah, I think you're exactly right in the sense that no political faction, wherever it is on the, on the, on the spectrum, has a monopoly on, unfortunately, on kind of political violence and extremism right now. It does seem to be this proliferating challenge. And it has evolved over the course of even my time, you know, kind of engaging these issues. You, I just want to touch on this briefly, but, you know, you bring up January 6th. What was your day like that day? Like, how did those events unfolding? What does that look like from your perspective in the White House?

What's going on in that kind of description? Yeah, so I was actually, and it's been publicly reported. I don't spend a lot of time talking about it. I was in Florida at Southcom, and we had a very successful program. At the outset of COVID, I was very concerned that the cartel, from a lot of intel that we're receiving, the cartels were going to attempt to take advantage of COVID to move a lot of their product,

whether fentanyl or opioids or marijuana or cocaine, into the U.S. warehouses here because they assumed all of our attention would be on COVID. And so Bill Barr and I got together and developed a plan with our Coast Guard Commandant, Commandant Schultz, and our Homeland Security Secretary, Chad Wolf. We developed an interdiction plan. And we wanted to really ramp up what we could do on that front.

We had a little difficulty. The Navy wanted to help. We had a little difficulty overcoming the Office of Secretary of Defense, which was never really interested in doing anything to protect American civilians in the homeland if they thought it was a law enforcement matter. But we overcame those challenges and we got the Navy to contribute three or four gray holes to us. We got a couple of white holes, Coast Guard ships, and then we went diplomatically to the Brits,

to the Dutch who had a frigate in the Caribbean down at Aruba, and the Brits had a Royal Fleet auxiliary ship, and I think we got the French to contribute, and we got some of our Central American allies to give us some landing rights and contribute to some troops. And we put together just a dragnet across the Caribbean and even into the eastern Pacific on the California, Baja, California border. And over the, from, I think we launched it in March

until January 20th, when I turned over the keys to the White House to Jake Sullivan, I was the last senior official there to hand over things to the Biden administration, the incoming folks, we seized over $4 billion above the baseline in narcotics that were coming to the U.S. And that was really a successful effort. It just so happened that on January 6th, I was down at Southcom in Miami with Adam O'Fallon and his team, making sure that that whole program was going to get transatlantic. to the Biden folks in a, you know, professional manner and that we would keep it going because

we just felt it was, and I think for the most part it has kept going, and it's one of the unsigned successes of the COVID challenge. And I think the Trump administration is that that operation, which was multinational, whole of government, involved everyone from the FBI to the Coast Guard, to the Navy, to the Army. It was really an impressive operation. I think we saved a lot of American lives, because we've got a terrible opioid slash fentanyl slash cocaine narcotics problem in this country. We're losing, you know, 100, 200, 300 people a day. And it's heartbreaking.

That's where I was on January 6th. I was actually going to skiff most of the day until I was pulled out of the skiff by my staff to let me know what was going on. We finally made it back to Washington late that night. Well, look, in real time, I put out tweets on my personal Twitter account, and I was impressed by the courage of the vice president. staying there. And I spoke to a number of our senators. I was waiting for my Coast Guard plane to get me home and certainly condemned the protesters and did all that very

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We should definitely engage China. A couple of things that I think are particularly interesting. When you think about China and the possible move on Taiwan, do you see that as a growing possibility? What were the types of briefings that you were getting while you were NSA? And how would you encourage listeners to this podcast to be thinking about that possibility? That's a great question. Look, it's a very serious concern. It might be the most pressing concern that Jake Sullivan, the current national security

advice in the present face, Lloyd Austin, the SEC Def and Tony Blinken. We know from Admiral Davidson, Admiral Davidson, who was the combatant commander for the Indopacom AOR out in Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, said a couple of years ago that he thought it was a five to seven year window for the Chinese to invade, attempting to coerce a, what I'll call an enchlos, referring to the old Germany, Austria, reunification or unification, or to actually invade the launch amphibious invasion of Taiwan. And so folks refer to that as the Davidson window. So I refined it, and I think in the last days I was national security advisor, I said, look, I think it's going to be shorter than that. And since President Biden's taken office and as the Chinese watch what's happening in Ukraine, there are folks now I saw a headline today that one analyst is predicting in October, 2002 invasion of Taiwan.

And we're seeing that the Chinese put everything in place to be able to do so. I mean, it used to be that there were, that would have been unthinkable, especially if the U.S. intervened. to protect Taiwan, we'd send a couple of carrier groups, and that would be the end of it. But the Chinese now have, they just launched their third carrier, their fourth carrier is almost ready. They're launching a new frigate or destroyer every month. They now outnumber the U.S. Navy, and while our Navy forces are spread across the world, there's a concentrated in their home waters for the most part. Very capable of Blue Water Navy.

They've got anti-access area denial capabilities with hypersonic missiles. that unfortunately during the Obama administration, we stopped our hypersonic programs. It was my number one priority as national security advisor on the defense front to get our hypersonic program back up and running again, and we were successful in doing that. And we're going to start deploying hypersonics this year, late this year, early next year. Why were those canceled? What was the Obama administration's rationale for kind of mothballing those programs? Yeah, it's unclear.

I think it was the same rationale for mothballing the, you know, for shutting down the assembly line of the F-22, which is still the best fighter we've ever produced. And I think there was a feeling that the era of big power competition is over, that America had won, that the arc of history was bending towards justice, that, you know, if your country had a McDonald's in it, you know, this is Thomas Friedman's famous, you know, line that two countries of McDonald's have never fought a war before. You know, that it was just, it was the end.

I think they bought into this idea that it was the end of history and that everyone's going to become a Democrat, small D, and it would have a democracy, and we didn't need these, you know, very sophisticated weapons of war. And what happened is the Chinese and the Russians were brilliant. I mean, they sent folks over here, and they picked up our entire program,

and they did a lot of it without even espionage. They went to universities and picked up what we call it, you know, kind of gray sector, not necessarily classified material, but they went to the universities, and they got all of our research that we've conducted since the space program, on hypersonics and they took it home to Russia and China

and they launched programs and they invested money because they understood the massive tactical and strategic advantage having these weapons would give their countries. And we slept for eight years. And we let the Navy deteriorate. We let the Air Force deteriorate. We were focused on Afghanistan and Iraq,

which were important post-9-11, but that was our sole focus. And we let our adversaries get a big lead, especially in this area of hypersonics. And so my, you know, the problem with that is when your adversary has a weapon that you can't, you know, this is a missile that can go faster than Mach 5 and we don't have defensive systems to take them down, a Patriot can't take those down. And so if an adversary launches a conventional hypersonic attack, we've got no response to it. You know, the next step is escalation to a nuclear situation, which is the last thing you want to have to go to the president to do to say, sir, we can either surrender or we can launch. nuclear attack. There's nothing in between because we don't have the tools. And we're now getting

our warfighters the tools they need to deter and to defend ourselves and themselves. But it was a it was really a massive, massive mistake. And it's getting fixed. And I'll give the Biden administration credit. They're continuing with the hypersonic program that we got started in the Trump administration. And it's moving forward. But going back to your question about Taiwan, I mean, look, the Chinese have been very diligent, and they've been working for years now to put themselves in a position to do an amphibious assault on Taiwan, to make sure they've got the ships and systems to take out Taiwan, but also to have the systems and platforms to deter the United States from intervening. So if you're the president, you're thinking about sending the carrier

close to Taiwan to defend them and to use our naval aviation to defeat an amphibious landing, We've also got to, we know that our carriers are now at risk because of these Chinese hypersonic weapons that could potentially take out 5,000 Americans on a U.S. aircraft carrier. So the Chinese have put themselves in a position to move. I think they're considering it. They're watching what's happening in Ukraine and the West response to Ukraine and they're factoring that in as they make a decision. But I think we've got a very dangerous couple of years ahead of time, ahead of us. And so do you think that it depends on how we define success, but do you think a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan

is that there's a potential there for kind of a fait accompli where they could act in such a way to where they could act quickly enough and decisively enough before the United States could really respond to where it just becomes a done deal? Is that a possibility? And that's our playbook. I mean, the good news is without getting into details,

we've got a few things up our sleeve as well. We don't lack all capability to defeat it, defeat a Chinese amphibious invasion. We've got some exclusive capabilities of our own that many of which aren't public. And so I don't think the Chinese can, I think they're trying to put themselves in the position to do that kind of an invasion

and, you know, hit fast and accomplish their goals before we can get into the theater. But we've got some things that could interrupt that, that planning and that sort of, that's sort of an operation. I'll look at that. Yeah, no, that's fine. That's fine.

No reason to press further on that. It's just I think the thing that we would agree on is no matter how exquisite our resources, we've certainly made it harder on ourselves than it needed to be. And if we can spend this kind of window of opportunity here soon on kind of, you know, always improving your battle position, right? You know, digging a better foxhole and getting us in a position to be even more. more effective and efficient and hopefully, ultimately, in a position to deter China from making that move in the first place, that would be...

A hundred percent, Clon, and look, you know, going to your point, you know, Stalin used to say that quantity has a quality all of its own, and the Chinese are banking on that. So we've got some very sophisticated platforms, but we need to have them in a quantity sufficient to defeat the Chinese. It's not just about taking out one ship, the Chinese are going to launch a thousand ships at Taiwan, you know, including. including civilians ships. So again, we need to be very careful that we don't get smug about our capabilities because we've got some very, very potent weapon systems, but they have quantity

on their side. And that, it's very difficult to defeat that sort of quantity. I mean, look, the Germans learned that World War II against the Russians, right? Their tanks were, I don't know, two, three, four times better than the Russian tanks. And yet they were overrun. And fortunately, for history defeated, but the point is we see what a dedicated, especially a totalitarian adversary that has little regard for the lives of their soldiers, sailors, and an airman and a lot of quantity, it's very difficult to stem that type. And we need to put ourselves in a position to, A, deter that sort of invasion, and then if it happens to be able to help our Taiwanese friends defeat it.

Yeah, kind of pivoting on that point of scale. One of the additional challenges of scale that China brings is when we think about their use of industrial espionage. The Trump administration was very aggressive. I mean, I was heavily involved on the conversations on ZTE and Huawei. And we've talked about TikTok toward the end of the Bush or toward the end of the Trump administration. It's in the news now here again. But the underlying challenge, again, going back to this point of scale, is that the same rationale that was operative on conversations about Huawei,

that specifically every Chinese company is bound to avail itself and any data that it collects or holds or otherwise leverages, it has to make all of that available to the CCP. And we know that the Chinese Communist Party does that. So that leaves us in a place where essentially any Chinese tech company and others operating in the United States is potentially a, real problem. How do you think about that? How do, how would you recommend the United States start thinking more comprehensively about disrupting Chinese technical espionage in the United

States? Well, look, it's a great question. It's a big issue. And you saw this with Huawei. So when I, when I first took office, I was advised by a lot of people and very smart people, including in the U.S. government, that there's nothing we can do about Huawei. They won. They're going to, they're going to be the 5G backbone of the whole world, including all of our allies, and we'll have to figure out some encryption tool to protect our data because we can't beat Huawei. And in a very short order, we beat Huawei. We rallied the West, we rallied our NATO allies, we rallied Australia. New Zealand was a little more problematic. We got Japan on on board, and with Prime Minister Abbe, and then with Suga, and then later Kashita.

and so we basically, we got India on board, we basically shut down Huawei, but it took a lot of effort. It was a massive diplomatic effort. And I had some very tough conversations with some of our very closest allies that were not interested in seeing the investments that they'd already put into Huawei or some countries that Huawei had offered everything for free. And my comment was, well, free sounds good, but there's nothing for free. What do you think they're going to get in return for owning your information background so

that every bit of data that goes up into the cloud also goes to Beijing. And it might have overwhelmed an intelligence service in the past. How do you sort through all that data? But with machine learning, that algorithms and AI, the Chinese can exploit that data. And so we basically stopped Huawei. And now we get the question of the apps. And TikTok is one of them. And it's, you know, parents all over the country are worried about how much time their kids are spending on TikTok. But every time their kid gets on TikTok, the Chinese Communist Party is getting biometric data on their kids. They understand their personality, what they like.

And there's been a file on every American that watches TikTok in some Ministry of State Security database in China. And so we tried to ban TikTok and a couple of the other apps. WeChat is an app that the Chinese used to control their dissidents and to threaten people every day in America. Now, we weren't successful. Unfortunately, the Biden administration decided to go a different route. One of the courts took a dim view of it.

I think that decision was wrong by the courts. I think the Biden administration should have not just implemented the TikTok ban, but expanded it. We saw this happen in India. So you remember a couple of years ago on the line of actual control, there was a brutal attack by a Chinese platoon against an Indian patrol. They killed, mutilated them, and it couldn't be covered up. And the tabloids in India showed the mutilation of their soldiers and how brutal the Chinese had been. in this offensive, and the Indian government, in turn, banned 400 Chinese apps, including TikTok, WeChat, Weebu, all these applications from being used in India, because the Indians

realized the Chinese are scooping up massive amounts of data on our 1.3 billion people, and this is an intelligence and national security nightmare for us. And the Chinese are doing the same thing here in America, but we haven't taken the steps that Prime Minister Modi and the Indians took. And we need to start thinking about doing that and making sure that we protect the American people from the types of collection that are taking place in China.

Yeah, 100% agree. And write about that frequently. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability, and vary by race terms and conditions apply learn more at mx.ca slash y annex okay so let's let's now kind of turn to ukraine

and as we talk about ukraine i think one thing that would be especially helpful is if you could obviously give us your insights in terms of what you're seeing and what you're anticipating but also there is a growing movement on the kind of right side of the political aisle toward what the euphemistically refer to as is restraint there's a growing kind of restraint movement in uh particularly conservative politics, where, you know, with the recent $40 billion supplemental bill that was passed eventually for supporting Ukraine, there was a lot of disagreement on the political right about this. And I think that is, in fact, an emblematic of this growing voice within Republican and conservative circles. Curious about your thoughts on that and then kind of the broader

Ukraine challenge and where you think the United States should be aligning its time and resources on Ukraine? Well, let me address the political issue first. I spent a lot of time around the country over the past year, year and a half, campaigning for and supporting Republican candidates. It's a little unusual for national security advisor, former national security advisor to do. There's a speculation that I was doing because I was running for president. I was doing it because I wanted to see Kevin McCarthy, a fellow California, and a good friend

of mine, you know, elected the Speaker of the House. The other problem is I've got a bunch of friends in Congress or her running for Congress, and I can't have a hard time to say no when they asked me to help them. So I've been out there. So I've got to know the base. I've been to the Utah GOP Convention and the Keep Idaho Red Rally. And I call this the basiest of the base. And these are hardcore Trump supporters and mega supporters and party activists. And I talk about Ukraine. And I talk about what Ronald Reagan talked about, which is peace or strength. is, you know, the way to stay out of a war, and people are exhausted by the wars. And these are the folks that have sent their kids off to go fight in places like

Jalalabad and Fallujah and Anbar and all the, in the Sahel, in Burkina and Nijer. These are the people that send their sons and daughters out to go fight those wars. And so there is a concern and exhaustion that America is overextended and that were perhaps fighting in wars that we shouldn't be involved in. trying to turn Afghanistan into Sweden or that sort of thing. And that's a legitimate concern. And I understand the folks who raise those issues. But Ukraine's a very different situation.

You know, Ukraine, the Ukrainians are fighting for themselves. The Ukrainians aren't asking for American airmen to enforce no fly zone. They're asking for MIGs so that their own pilots can enforce a no fly zone over their own country. They're fighting out on the front lines in Dombas and under incredibly trying circumstances and fighting for their own country, and they've got massive enlistment. There's no lack of morale. There's no lack of dedication to fighting.

But what they're asking for is for America to be the arsenal of democracy. And if we don't stand up for freedom here, and if we don't provide folks in Ukraine or other places with the tools and equipment they need to stop Russian aggression, eventually it's going to be up to Americans to go do it. And so once you have that conversation,

You know, I found that, you know, I found very little disagreement when, when Americans understand that Ukrainians are fighting for themselves and all they're asking from us is for us to give them the tools they need to fight the Russians. And I think you get a very different response than maybe your standard, you know, Tucker Carlson monologue. And again, I haven't found whether it's in Oklahoma or Nebraska or Idaho or Utah, any of these places I've been that are very conservative and very much. you know, folks who believe in America first, when you explain the stakes that are at issue, when you explain that this is the first time since the 1930s that a bigger neighbor has decided to invade a smaller neighbor just because they want their natural resources, they want their population, they want to, the might makes right that they can expand their empire through conquest. I mean, we haven't recognized territorial expansion through conquest, you know,

at least since the UN charter, but even 100 years before that. And so, The idea that this is happening today is very bad. And when they understand that Xi Jinping in Beijing is watching to see how the West reacts to Putin's invasion of an attempt to occupy Ukraine, he's watching that to measure what he's going to do in Taiwan. And when Xi Jinping attempts to take Taiwan, and if the Chinese communists are successful in taking Taiwan, geopolitically, that's an absolute disaster for the U.S. We could maybe survive in Ukraine being taken over by the Russians.

it would be very, very difficult for us in the end of Pacific and for our allies to survive a Chinese takeover of Taiwan. That's the court coming out of the champagne bottle in the Pacific, and the champagne, which is the People's Liberation Army and Navy, will spill all out into the entire Pacific from the allusions to Hawaii, to Midway, to Wake, to California, south, to all the islands that our grandfathers and great uncles fought for in World War II. the Chinese are going to control the Pacific that it's such a critical island in Taiwan that and that's the most important economic zone in the entire world for the future and for the future of our economy so that would be a travesty so stopping Putin and Ukraine will send a message to Xi Jinping that you know we might stop them in Taiwan and avoid a real catastrophe for American allies in the Pacific yeah as I've engaged this you know I I can engage the restraint argument on a geopolitical point and then also just kind of on a raw

politics point. On the geopolitical point, Putin has given every indication that if he were able to roll through Ukraine, that eventually he's going to go, he's going to continue on the expansion, all the same rationales that he used for Ukraine would exist with other countries, including NATO bordering countries. And so eventually, you know, if Vladimir Putin is not sufficiently chastised and kind of push back into his hole, he's going to take an action that even the most restrained kind of individual won't be able to kind of look away from, right?

This the, I would say that Ukraine already constitutes a significant national interest in our part, in part because of the way you've described it. But then, too, even if you don't, he will continue to push. And he has made that very clear. And so unfortunately, we don't have an option of avoiding kind of conflict because, you know, with the other guy, and in this case, Putin, he gets a choice. And he's making that choice, and he's making it very clearly and publicly. And, you know, sometimes you just have to accept reality. And so you've got to engage it. So that's the geopolit. You're 100% right, by the

way. I mean, look, he's threatening Poland. The reason the Finns joined NATO is he said Finland was part of the Russian family. I think the Finns woke up after that speech and said, what the heck? And he's threatening the Baltics. I mean, these are NATO allies. Certainly Moldova and Georgia. So we're going to end up, if we don't stop them in Ukraine, we are going to have American soldiers engaged with Russian soldiers in one of these other countries. And at that point, the risk of escalation is so high that you've got two massive nuclear powers in a land war. The risk to America at that point are extraordinary. So we're far better off, as you point out, Klan, 100 percent, you know, letting the Ukrainians try and push the Russians back in Ukraine without asking for American. troops on the ground. And if we get them the tools and the platforms they need, I think they can get

the job done. The problem is we're just not doing it. That's right. No, I completely agree. And, you know, the, just to kind of wrap that portion of the conversation up, on the political argument against some of the kind of the restraint arguments right now, is that, you know, you can look back and see when the political bottom fell out for the Biden administration was when he so dramatically mishandled Afghanistan. That, I mean, that was just not only from, from a pure national security perspective, was that awful? But just pure politically speaking, Americans don't like to lose. Like, there was, it was an open conversation about, you know, how long should we stay

in Afghanistan and what should that presence look like? That's a real conversation worth having. But the withdrawal was so incredibly mishandled. And you can look at all the numbers. And that is when the Biden administration really, really took a nosedive. And they haven't really recovered. And it is amazing to me that there are individuals. on the political right now who think that, you know, if they win the House and they take

the Senate that somehow cutting off Ukraine and not supporting Ukraine and then having essentially the exact same outcome as what we've seen in Afghanistan, that they're somehow going to survive the political ramifications of that. That just seems naive and foolish. And I do not think that they would have the support of the American people if they treated Ukraine the way Biden treated Afghanistan? Well, look, I think you're right. Except for a small portion of maybe the far left that don't watch sports, Americans like to win.

And like Democrats like to win. Yeah, the most rabid fans in the world are in football fans are in some of these blue, deep blue cities. And Americans like winners. And we didn't win in Afghanistan. And that was a catastrophe in the way that was handled was really a heartbreaking, especially when we saw 13 Americans killed at the airport and the helmet carside airport and Kabul airport that I've flown it out of a number of times.

And you could see where that was going because, you know, giving up Bogram and not using that as an evacuation center, put our troops in terrible peril. So there was one mistake after another. There's been no oversight on it, but in some ways the American people know exactly what happened. And you're right that the Biden administration's paying a high price politically. for it. And we can't make the same mistake in Ukraine. And Ukraine is different from Afghanistan. And you've got a highly motivated big industrial country that wants to fight for its own independence

and freedom. But what they want from us is the tools to do it. The best argument I heard from one senator who voted against the Ukraine aid package, which I was in favor of, as he said, look, we're going to give Ukraine $40 billion. A lot of taxpayer money, big package. That's fine. month the Germans are still today, as of July 12th, every day the Germans are spending $900 million for Russian oil and gas, $30 billion a month. So the Germans are going to pay the Russians this month what we gave the Ukrainians in the package. So until we've got the guts as the West to stop with these half measure sanctions and to fully sanction the Russian federal bank, the central bank of the Russian Federation and cut off all oil and gas products,

This war is going to keep going because Putin is actually making money on the war. Every day the price of a barrel of oil goes up a dollar, Putin's making billions. So our sanctions are spitting in the wind. Our aid package to Ukraine, frankly, was spitting in the wind unless we're going to get serious about cutting the Russians off from these massive inflows of cash every month. Yeah. And to me, that makes a lot of sense to me. My response to that, though, is, well, then that's a reason to turn the screw on Russia

and Germany not to screw Ukraine. Yeah, absolutely, 100%. I agree with that. But the point is, is the administration is not making the, you know, they're making the argument, but they're not actually, you know, they're not walking the walk. They're talking to talk, but they're not walking to walk. I mean, for example, the migs, why weren't the Polish migs got, you know, given to Ukraine in month one?

That wasn't going to spur a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. You know, keep in mind, a lot of our grandfathers and fathers fought in Korea and Vietnam. They were shot at every day by Russian migs. I mean, there are Russian migs in Korea. There are Russian migs in Vietnam. We didn't launch a nuclear war, say that was some sort of red line. If the Poles wanted to give the Ukrainians 29 migs, why didn't we facilitate it? I mean, I kind of think back on our administration, you know, Gina Haswell was so clever. Gina would have sold the planes to the Ukrainians to a Russian middleman. Putin would have gotten his 10% cut of it, and they would have been in Ukrainian

the next day and no one would have known what happened i mean and instead we had this big public you know debacle on on the mix i mean so so look we got we got to cut off the russians we got to get the ukrain's the mix already and we got to get them the long-range artillery and let them defend their country against the soviet this this russian invasion yeah robert you and i can keep going there's a ton of things that we can talk about but um you've been very generous with your time already we're bumping into an hour so i want to kind of bring it to a close but um listen being the National Security Advisor to a U.S. President is a big job. It's a tough job. And, you know, look, I think the nation owes you an appreciation for the work that you did under difficult circumstances

on some very difficult issues. So I appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation with me. Thank you. I honored to be with you, Kalani. You served a long time as well. And so thank you for your service in the IC and in government. But let's do this again someday. This episode. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style.

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