The Dispatch Podcast - Surviving Trumpworld | Interview: H.R. McMaster

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

Retired General H.R. McMaster joins Jamie to discuss his book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, and give a detailed account during his time as Trump's national security adviser. The Agenda: —Trump’s disruptive nature —The Russian collusion narrative that created a cloud over Trump's presidency —Trump’s moods and rages —McMaster’s proudest achievements —Inside Trump’s decision-making process —Should there be a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas? Show Notes: —John Kelly’s comments to CNN —John Kelly's accusations about Trump’s service member comments The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, who famously was National Security Advisor to Donald Trump during his first term or part of his first term. He is also the author of the new book, At War with Ourselves, My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, and famously the book, Their Election of Duty about the Johnston administration and the war in Vietnam. We get into a lot of topics in this podcast, including his book, his time in the Trump administration, as well as issues that are going on around the world like the war in Gaza, among other forefronts of violence. Without further ado, I give you retired Lieutenant General, H.R. McMaster.

General McMaster, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Hey, Jamie, I'm a fan. Great to be with you. Thank you. I appreciate it. I spent the last two days reading, or I should say listening to your book. So I've gone through the whole book. You open up your book by saying that you're not trying to win fans who are anti-Trump people

or people who are pro-Trump people. You're telling the facts what they are, and this book may not. satisfy either. Explain exactly what you meant by that and maybe the pressure that or the expectations that some people might have when a former official writes a book. Well, James, you know on the dispatch parent anybody. I mean, the vitriolic nature of our of our political discourse is, I think, just bad for our psyche and it's bad. I think for governance, it's bad for choosing the best candidates for office. So what I try to do is just transcend it, you know, to get out, to get out of the mud and just try to tell the story from my perspective. And it's a story, you know, that gives

Trump credit for being disruptive and disrupting a lot of policies that needed to be disrupted, but that also criticizes them for being so disruptive that he disrupts himself, you know. And so, but there are themes that runs through the book have to do with, you know, the rewards of service, you know, the importance of strategic competence, the importance of presidential character and, you know, how important it is for the president to be able to interact with, you know, personalities and relationships that are functional in the area of national security. Add of curiosity, when you pitch this book to publishers, did any of them say, well, you know, General, it's much better to sell books if you come on one side or the other here.

If you take the resistance side or the pro-Trump side, that tends to be better for book sales. Absolutely. A lot of people gave me that advice. And in fact, what happened, Jamie, is when I was thinking about writing, because that's what I'm a historian. and I write and I teach here at Stanford University and think big thoughts here at the Hoover Institution. You know, I wanted to write when I left the Army after 34 years. I had written a previous book on how why Vietnam became an American War. And when I put together the proposals for really two books,

one, a memoir of my time as National Security Advisor, and the other, the book Battlegrounds, which I began writing in 2018 when I left government service, when I left military service, my agents, my editors, everybody wanted me to write this book then. And I didn't want to do it because I didn't want to do it when President Trump was still on center stage even. And so it was quite coincidental, I think,

that the book is arriving in the middle of a presidential election and President Trump's the candidate. I thought by this time he would be finishing his second term in office or he would be retired from politics. So it really is just coincidental that it arrives now. and actually at the time, I actually had to threaten to fire my agents who are fantastic people because they kept coming back and tell me, hey, you need to write this other book first because you'll get a much better and much more lucrative deal.

And then, of course, as I worked with two fantastic editors at Harper Collins, my new editor, Sean Desmond, who's really, I think, approved the book tremendously. I think he was sort of pushing me in that direction. You know, he told me at one point, hey, this book should be a warning. You know? And I said, no. I don't want to warn anybody. I want to inform people. I want people to make their own decisions about presidential candidates because, again, it was coincidental that it's arriving when it is. You mentioned in the book that sometimes the disruption of Trump's personality could be a positive. What jumped out at me, though, is you paint a president who can be at times

or often manipulated by what I think are two things you mentioned. One is competitive sycifancy. and the other is a lack of knowledge of history. Can you explain where both of those different things, which are somewhat tied together ultimately, affected policy? Well, of course, it's no surprise that many people want to influence, you know, the most powerful, you know, person you could argue on Earth, right, the President of the States. And so as a historian of the presidency's and was written extensively about Lyndon Johnson,

you know, I emphasized in the book Derellation of Duty how advisors around President Johnson to treat, determined that, hey, to preserve their influence with Lyndon Johnson, they had to tell him what he wanted to hear, and they had to flatter him. Johnson had kind of a fragile ego. It was a huge personality. He was very, you know, he could be bullying at times, you know, the so-called Johnson treatment where he would lean into people's physical space and so forth. But he actually was an insecure person, and people around him would carry favor with him by telling him what he wanted to hear and by flattering him. I saw some of those traits in President Trump, too, you know, so

So I decided to take kind of the opposite perspective, right? I wasn't going to try to curry favor with the president. First, I'd be terrible at that if I try to do it. But the second thing is it's a profound disservice, I think, to a president to tell a president what a president wants to hear. You know, like Johnson's advisors, one of them made the observation that, well, you know, to keep my influence with the president, I had to tell me what I wanted to hear. But of course, that begs the question, hey, what good is your influence anyway if that's

how you're serving the president? Well, the history aspect, too, seemed to be quite relevant. When he would meet with leaders, they would give him their version of historical events. And if you don't have a reserve of what maybe the correct, or if you don't know if it's the correct, at least the alternative version of historical events, that led to manipulation in some ways. Yeah, right. I mean, witness, you know, Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin. You know, that's like a great example of Putin selling, you know, a warped version.

And, you know, I don't know if you ever seen the, you know, the television show drunk history, you know, I mean, it's sort of like the drunk version of history. So, yeah, I think, you know, George Orwell said it best, right? He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future. And you see that effort to manipulate history by leaders like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdogan, for example. So I think what I was in a good position. to do is provide a corrective to that. And having been given the opportunity to learn enough history to know that you never really know history. You have to always make sure that you're skeptical about those who think that they have the answer for today based on what happened in the past. Can you tell the story? There's a story where President Trump reads an article where Vladimir Putin is criticizing the American system but says that Donald Trump is smart or says something nice about Donald Trump, and he wants you to send a article to him with a note on it saying, you know, wonderful, wonderful thing for you to say, President Putin.

Well, it was a New York Post article in a period, I think it was March or maybe February, late February of 2017, sorry, 2018. And this story is illustrative of, you know, the job of the National Security Advisor, right? You're the only person in the National Security and Foreign Policy establishment, who has the president as his or her only client. So you should be looking out for the president's interest. In this case, you know, Vladimir Putin, you know, who's a master at this kind of, you know, manipulation or, you know, using, you know, disinformation or propaganda to his advantage. You know, he grants an interview, I think, to a journalist and it gets reported in The Washington Post and he basically just criticizes the hell out of our democracy and

our political system, but has words of praise for President Trump. So President Trump liked the article because he likes, you know, praise for it for Donald Trump. And so he, you know, he took out his medium sharpie, and I was there on another matter. It was kind of later in the evening. They had something to do maybe with North Korea or maybe I was staffing for a phone call to the Far East. But he writes on the, on the article, you know, a nice note to Vladimir Putin. Vladimir, you know, thank you so much and so forth. And so, and he asked me to get it to President Putin. So at the same time this was happening, the news was breaking of the Scrapal poisoning. You might remember in Salisbury, England, you know, two Russian, you know, GRU agents

had gone to Salisbury for the purpose of murdering Sergei Skripal and who had been a former KGB agent. And in doing so, they placed, you know, hundreds, maybe thousands of people at risk with a banned military-grade nerve agent. And so the, you know, the news is breaking of this. It's clear, you know, that this is the Russians. And of course, you know, It's pretty obvious that Putin would know about this and greenlighted it. And I thought it would be really bad for the president. You know, if this became public that he sent, you know, Putin a nice note. And, of course, you know, you can't put it past Putin that he would make that public to embarrass President Trump.

Because what, you know, what Putin loved is he loved the narrative that there was some kind of collusion with the Trump campaign. It was a false narrative. It turned out to be completely false. And the president was wrongly accused of this. But, you know, Putin loved to keep it. live, you know? And, and so I brought it down to the staff secretary in the White House who sends correspondence out like this. And I said, hey, don't do anything with this yet. Hold on to it for a while. And then as the situation clarified about Salisbury, I went back to the president.

I said, hey, Mr. President, you know, I didn't send that letter, you know, to President Putin for these reasons. And, of course, he was angry with me. Generally, should do what I tell you to do, you know. And I said, I hope you know, I did this with your interests at heart. And then you just kind of grumbled and we went on to something else. But, but, you know, I think it's just, it's a, you know, it's a story that's illustrative of, hey, you know, the National Security Advisor has to look out for the president and sometimes has to tell the president what the president doesn't want to hear. Or in this case, you know, I went back and told him, hey, I didn't do what you told me to do

because I think it would have been a gift to Putin and he would have tried to embarrass you with it. Can I ask you, I mean, in the book, you bring up the, the, well, you, I don't think you refer to as the Russian collusion hoax like President Trump does. But is there any lingering, I mean, clearly there wasn't any evidence of the high level communication between a coordination between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. But was there any lingering doubt whether, you know, there was Manafort who was dealing on the Trump campaign, giving poll information to people close to Vladimir Putin, or even just Trump not wanting to criticize Putin because if he lost the election, perhaps there would be, you know, a good deal to be made in Russia for real estate. Is there anything there that still makes you wonder whether there was- I didn't see evidence for any of that, you know?

And what I write about in the book is, you know, how lamentable I think it is that there was this cloud over President Trump from the beginning. Because, you know, he's not great at handling that kind of criticism. And, you know, the degree to which the mainstream press was, I mean, it was mainly, you know, hostile to him. So it created this kind of atmosphere of beleaguement that was not helpful to him, you know, in assuming his duties as president. And so, you know, I really think that in retrospect, and this is the Durham report is great on this, you know, this is obviously an investigation that began with the discredited steel dossier, you know, a report that was funded, you know, at least in part by the, you know, the Hillary Clinton campaign. I mean, I think it's a real travesty, this, you know, this kind of cloud over President Trump. So, so how do you explain it, right? How do you explain President Trump's strange affinity, you know, for Vladimir Putin? And I described this, you know, in context of his, you know, kind of

affinity for some authoritarian leaders. He wants to be viewed, you know, as having kind of the same kind of qualities as some other strong men and so forth. But really, I think what explains it the most is his belief that he can get a big deal, you know, and when he looked at, for example, you know, the number of Russian, you know, tactical nuclear weapons and other nuclear weapons and the development of like these new, you know, sort of undersea capabilities, you know, what they were doing in space, the violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, it really concerned President Trump. He's like, hey, wouldn't it be good if we could have a big, get a big deal with Russia, you know? And so it was the same kind of trap, you know, that Putin set for George W. Bush, remember when he looked into President Putin's soul or President Obama with a reset strategy and, you know, leading over to Medvedev and saying, hey, we'll have more flexibility after the election and he trades off missile defenses in Poland, you know, to allay Putin's security concerns.

is this myth, right, that Putin is driven by security concerns associated with like the encirclement of Russia by NATO. No, Putin actually has aspirations and has goals in mind that go far beyond anything that is in reaction to us, right? And you see that with this, you know, 2007 Munich speech. You saw it in that the long essay, you know, he supposedly penned in July of, of 21, that was kind of the justification and the precursor for, you know, his assault, renewed assault on Ukraine. So anyway, this is what the advice I would give President Trump, you know, frequently is that, hey, this guy's never going to be your friend. You know, he's the best liar, best deceiver in the world. And what I would try to do with President Trump,

who's reflexibly contrarian, is I would tell him, you know, how Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, wanted to put words in his mouth and manipulate him. And I think at times that worked, you know. I think after I left, I don't know how he was staffed, but I don't know if you remember the, you know, the Helsinki, you know, summit. And I tell the story in the book. I left the job several months earlier. And I was just, I was yelling at the television.

My wife Katie came to say, hey, what's going on? And I couldn't believe, you know, what he was saying. And I think he was probably not, you know, not prepared well, you know, for that, for that press conference and had been subjected. Remember, there was a one-on-one, you know, with Putin before that. And, you know, Putin's great. He can play those mind tricks, you know, he can, you know, by this time, I'm sure for the entire Trump presidency, you know, the, you know, the Kremlin intelligence officials

who, you know, who do profiles on world leaders were working overtime, you know, on President Trump. Given the picture you paint in the book of President Trump and manipulation, which I think You know, it wasn't only insiders who could see, see this, that he liked nice words and things that were said about him. I always wondered, and maybe you can answer this, why the Palestinians or the Iranians didn't flatter him. And do you think if they did flatter him instead of having a confrontational kind of approach that he, that the policies towards Iran or the policies towards Israel, the pro-Israel policies that President Trump made, may have been a little bit

different? No, I don't think so. You know, I, you know, I think, you know, I think, you So, Abumazen, you know, he based, you know, he tried to stay in President Trump's good graces, you know, and there was kind of a, you know, a glimmer of hope there in the beginning that there could be some kind of progress toward, you know, a peace agreement of some kind, you know, between Israel and the Palestinians, at least West Bank part of the Palestinian population, certainly not, you know, in Gaza where the, you know, Khamas was in control. And of course, that was the biggest impediment to any kind of progress anyway. because, you know, Israel had seen, you know, what had been the, you know, the disadvantage, the mistake, many of them would say, of withdrawing from Gaza, only to see it taken over by an organization that was determined, you know, to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews, right? So, you know, nobody was polyanish about, you know, the prospects for an enduring peace. But in some of those initial conversations, you know, I think that there was a good relationship. With Iran, though, I'll tell you, President Trump saw Iran as the cause of,

of so much of the suffering, the brutality, the violence in the Middle East, quite rightly, you know, from the very beginning. And remember, you know, during the 2016 campaign, right, one of his favorite phrases was the JCPOA or the Iran nuclear deal was the worst deal ever. And he believed that because of all the concessions made in the area of sort of a verification of the agreement, the sunset clause, right? It didn't include the missiles. But he also saw it as a huge mistake because of the transfer.

of so much cash to the Iranian regime as a result of sanctions relief, and remember the direct payments, like the plain load of cash and everything. And he couldn't believe it, because it was clear by 2017 that where did that cash go, it went into the coffers of the IRGC,

who then intensified their proxy wars across the region against us, you know, the great Satan, against Israel, and against the Arab neighbors, you know, to keep this kind of cyclist sectarian violence going in the region. And of course, by this time, the humanitarian catastrophe that was centered on the Syrian Civil War was clear to everybody. And, you know, based on the effect on the Syrian people, but on the region and in Europe as well

with the migration crisis. So anyway, the president would say oftentimes, President Trump would, everywhere there's trouble in the Middle East, I see Iran, I see Iran. So I think, you know, there's no way, I can't imagine, you know, Ayatollahomene having a charming effect on Donald Trump. Even if they said you're, you know, sent a letter saying, President Trump, you are the wisest man in the world. You could help us if you, if you just did this, that, and the other. Yeah. I mean, even Donald Trump's, you know, vanity or, you know, or susceptibility that has its limits. And, you know, I don't think. So, so, you know, President

Trump, and I guess, I mean, to rhyme this, he's not a chump, right? I mean, remember, he's a, he's a New York, you know, businessman, a real estate business person. But, you know, people around him, you know, and, you know, and world leaders, they're trying to influence him. They're trying to push his buttons, you know, but that has its limits. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your 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.

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without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. One of the reasons I think that you wrote in the beginning that this is not going to satisfy to people that are just anti-Trump is because you're proud of what you accomplished during time with Trump. What are the three things that you're the proudest of that you accomplished during your period as National Security Advisor? I'll tell you, Jamie, there's a lot, right? So first of all, I would say, at a very high level of generality.

And again, thanks for highlighting this good. It really is the theme in the book. Remember, I mean, all the reporting back then, 2017, 2018, not without justification, but you couldn't look at a headline without the word chaos being in there to describe the White House. And it's not friendly to the press, I would say. The book is, you're not very happy about some of the press reports. Well, you know, hey, the press is the first cut of history, right? This is kind of more of a second cut of history, you know, and then historians who get access to archives and everything else,

that'll be the third cut, you know. But I think, you know, I think that there was so much, you know, kind of, you know, distaste maybe to use this a more mild word for President Trump, that it drove a reaction to some of his, you know, outlandish statements and sometimes outlandish behavior that a lot of times was like worse than whatever Trump said or did, you know? So, and I give an example of that in the Warsaw speech, you know, where the president, it really makes, I think, a really strong speech about the transatlantic relationship, about Western civilization, the importance of our common principles, including rule of law, you know, and then he gets lambasted for that for being like a dog whistle for white supremacists or something kind of crazy, you know. So anyway, I just think that there are all these kind of reactions that I highlight in the book, but it's not to be critical of the press.

It's just to try to give a perspective on what is at war with ourselves mean, right? It's at war with ourselves within the administration. And I tell a lot of stories about that, which gets to your point of, you know, despite that, what I was trying to do was put a process in place and to have the discipline, you know, from kind of a stoic philosophy position to focus on what we could control. And despite, you know, the friction, despite the obstacles, we got a heck of a lot done in the area of long overdue correctives to previous unwise policies. And again, the high level of generality, I would say the most significant shift is the shift toward this, from this belief that in the post-Cold War world, there would be this global community that would emerge, right? And there would be a condominium of nations and great powers who would work together to solve the world's problems.

And we called out in the December 2017 National Security Strategy, that's not the world we're living in. We're living in a world where we have revanchist, revisionist powers on the Eurasian landmass who want to revise the international system, tear down the existing one and place it with a new one that's sympathetic to their authoritarian form of governance. And in China's case, it's status mercantilist economic model. So I would say achievement one, hey, that we reentered arenas of competition that we had vacated based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about the nature of the post-coil war world. The second that is related to that is that we are in a new era of great power rivalry, and we need to have a much more sophisticated and holistic approach to the competitions with these hostile authoritarian regimes.

And especially in the area of China, I would say this was what I put in the second achievement is the shift from cooperation and engagement with China to transparent competition. And I think that that is the most significant foreign policy shift since the end of the Cold War. It was long overdue, and it's an element of continuity,

a rare element of continuity in foreign policy between the Trump and Biden administrations. And I think it will carry on for decades, at least, until there's maybe a fundamental shift or a change in the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and the government in the PRC. The third big achievement is policy toward the Middle East. And under that heading, there are a number of sub achievements. I think the first of these is stopping the delusion of the Obama years that the Ayatollah, if we reach out to the Iranians and welcome the backing the international order will be like the Grinch on Christmas Eve, right?

His heart will grow two sizes bigger, you know, and he'll jettison the ideology of the of the revolution. He'll stop the four-decade long proxy war against us, and that's nonsense, right? And so we imposed very significant costs on Iran that constrain the resources available to the IRGC, which, of course, then feeds their terrorist organizations and militias and proxy armies in the region. and we put into place a policy of really weakening the Iranian's regime and forcing them to choose between continuing the proxy wars and the economic and financial benefits that the Obama administration gave them. And I think that related as well to the Abraham Accords, because what President Trump took advantage of was the degree to which President Obama had alienated

are the Gulf states and Israel, and by it largely, mainly by, I would call it supplicating to the Iran and this delusional policy toward Iran in reversing the approach toward Iran, recognizing the very significant and justified security concerns about Iran by Israel, you know, who had been in Iran's cross here since like 1979. and the Arab states that were being kept in a state of perpetual weakness by Iran, by Iran keeping them enmeshed in these sectarian civil wars, that created the opportunity for what became the Abraham Accords. So I would say Middle East, you know, this is no order of priority,

the China policy, and just the overall approach to foreign policy and national security. How was the reader supposed to view this, right? So on one hand, you have a picture of a president, who is easily manipulated, doesn't know history causes a lot of errors. On the other hand, you just laid out what you think are significant achievements. Are these achievements due to President Trump in his approach? Are they in spite of President Trump? Because there is elements in the book of reverse psychology to get him to do things

that he might not do normal. I think it's due to President Trump. In this period of time, right, from 2017 to 2018, it took, I think, his disruptive nature to disrupt a lot of the existing policies, right? And remember, because, remember how, I mean, take a look at any of the op-eds, right, during this period of time. The foreign policy establishment, which is not homogeneous or monolithic, of course, you know, it has, you know, but really almost universally, there was criticism of Trump's policies, which I think turned out to be pretty sound. Now, what I do

write about in the book, though, Jamie, is that, you know, he has a hard time sticking with some of these tough decisions. I would have put in that, in those top. achievements, I would have put in a sustained, reasoned approach to South Asia and to Afghanistan, which he did put into place in August of 2017, but then he reversed his own strategy. And in doing so, recreated a lot of the fundamental flaws in the Obama administration's approach to Afghanistan and South Asia. So, hey, it's like with any president, it's a mixed record, right? And his personality and character interacted, you know, with these complex challenges to national security and opportunities, and in some cases, delivered,

you know, good outcomes. I would say energy securities way up there, you know, in terms of the degree to which his unshackling of America's energy potential helped us from a security perspective and from an economic perspective. And again, that kind of approach, I think, is much needed today and holds a lot of potential, right, for countering the influence of authoritarian regimes who use energy to have coercive power over other countries. It has a great revenue potential for the United States. It has a great, I think, environmental potential, especially in the area of natural gas

and the ability to kind of bridge out of the higher carbon-emitting sources such as oil and coal. And I think what it does is it gives us maybe the opportunity, you know, to tax it if we drive the price down and pay down our national debt, for example. So, I mean, I think that, you know, What we need is a president to come in, whichever president does get voted into office, to take a look at the dangers that we have today, which are quite considerable,

and I think it's a much more dangerous world than it was in 17 to 18, but also to look at opportunities, right? What are our strengths? How can we magnify our strengths and our competitive advantages in this increasingly dangerous and competitive international environment? One other thing that stood out to me in the book is the rages that you talk, the moods of President Trump that occur from time to time, often when he's on foreign trips, often when he's being briefed on, he doesn't want to be briefed, it seems like.

Can you describe what are these like? Are these just annoyances of someone who's busy and has other things that he wants to focus on? Or what is a raid being in the midst of a storm, an anger storm of President Trump like? Well, you know, Jamie, you know, I've seen people under stress in many different environments, you know, including combat and so forth. So, you know, I think everybody's got, you know, Not that he broke, but everybody has kind of a breaking point

or a point where you snap, you know, and you lose your temper and so forth. And, you know, the President of the United States is a high-pressure job. Sometimes it's fast-paced, you know, and demanding from a physical, as well as a mental perspective. And so, you know, I tell a story a couple of times

when he completely lost patience with, the one thing about National Security Advisor is, hey, you know, when the president's in a bad mood, you're like the last guy that gets to lead, you know. if it's an issue of foreign policy or national security. So I do tell the story, you know, and I hope that, you know, that some of these stories are at least mildly amusing because they are amusing to me in retrospect. But nobody wanted to get in the beast, you know, which is the president's armored car.

Nobody wanted to get in with him, you know. It was the end of the A's a trip. It was a grueling trip. It really was. But the president, I think he'd done a fantastic job on the trip. So I get in the car and I didn't know I was going to bear the brunt of this, you know. And, you know, he said, what are you doing to be general? How did you plan this trip?

Now, I could have reminded it, which I didn't. I read about this in the book that when we were planning this Asian trip, I said, hey, Ms. President, we should break these into two, two, two. I mean, this is going to be too long, too hard. And then Ryan's previous had been the chief of staff at the time when we were debating, you know, longer, you know, long trip or two short trips. And Ryan's, you know, made the argument for one long trip, you know. And I said, okay, Mr. President, but remember, at the end of this trip,

when you're really grumpy about it, you know, You've got to blame rights because this was Rice's recommendation. But by this time, rights was gone. It would have done no good for me to remind that President Trump about it. But, yeah, I mean, the President lost of temperate times. But, you know, I'm kind of not a thin-skinned person, you know. And I guess at that point, that was kind of a service I provided, you know, to President Trump is the opportunity to vent on me.

But, I mean, you refer to almost age here. And can President Biden, we are seeing this with President Biden now, Can presidents operate at the level that they need to at an advanced age, especially when going on international trips? Yeah, I think it's an important factor for voters to consider, you know, does the president have the endurance, the energy, but originally the cognitive, you know, ability. And, you know, you had, remember you had Ambassador Haley, Nikki Haley had made, you know, had made that recommendation during the, during the campaign, I think mainly, you know, oriented on President Biden, who I think, you know, Jamie, I don't know what you think about this, but I think it's one of the biggest coverups in recent American political history is, is this, you know, this kind of, you know, so many people, I think we're, you know, we're working together to hide the president's cognitive decline. I mean, you know, this isn't, you know, this isn't 1919 and Woodrow Wilson. You know, this is, this is, you know, the modern age and, and, uh, do you think you should, do you think, do you think that, uh, from what you've seen at a distance, this is someone who can not only not run for reelection, but can't run the country currently?

Hey, I just got to tell you, I wish whoever's the president will, right? So I don't mean this in any kind of a mean, spirit of way or anything. But yeah, Jamie, I think he should, I think you should resign just because, right? Just because, uh, you know, it's a very dangerous world. And it's getting more dangerous. I think that, you know, we just had National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan come back from China. He was there because it is a period of increasing tension. What people have been reporting on about that tension is are the tensions in the South China Sea and the degree to which China has been committing essentially acts of war against a treaty out of the United States and the Philippines. But also, I think what has not been reported very much is the degree to which China is about to unveil a really concerted effort to crater our economy by disrupting supply chains that are critical to our industrial base and our defense industrial base in particular. That's just one example, I think, of how a, one of, I think, the big four hostile authoritarian regimes are looking at us and are encouraged by the perception of weakness. That is in part, I think, based on the perception of President Biden's

cognitive decline, but it's also, you know, because we're always out of each other's throats, right? we're with ourselves. And so I think the degree to which we're pitted against each other within our society, along partisan political lines, it's kind of a, you know, it's kind of a sign of weakness that emboldens our enemies, rivals, and adversaries. Was there any evidence just during your time with President Trump that there was any cognitive decline there? I mean, he wasn't as old as he is now, but he was not young. No, I never saw anything like that. No, I didn't. I didn't. You know, he was, you know, of course, I talked about, you know, anybody gets tired. And then he would lash out and

so forth, to tell a couple stories about that, you know. But, uh, but, you know, in my experience, he was, he was high energy, you know, he keeps, it keeps kind of odd hours, you know, and so forth. But, uh, when he's there, he was always on, you know, sometimes, from my perspective, excessively on, you know, but, uh, but, you know, I, I, I didn't see any evidence or anything like that. The book also describes what you might call a testy relationship between you and then Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of Defense, uh, James Mattis, Why do you think they hampered your efforts to what you thought was bringing order to the national security process? Well, Jamie, that's not unprecedented, right?

So I read in the book how grateful I was for the opportunity to study history, to research, the Johnson administration, how why Vietnam became in American War. I was cognizant of the tensions between, you know, between Henry Kissinger and the Secretary of State. It's a big new Brzezinski. Yeah, I write in the book about how, you know, I spoke to every living national security advisor, you know, And I've summarized some of those conversations. And Kissinger told me, you know, it's kind of a great sense of humor. You know, the relationship between the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State has never been better than when I held both positions. You know, so there's a natural tension there, right?

And, and again, it goes back to the National Security Advisor being the only person who has the president as his or her only client. Everyone else in the cabinet, they have a home department as well, you know. And so that's like a different constituency. Those departments oftentimes are resistant to major changes in foreign policy because the old policies are kind of baked into the bureaucracy. And this is what some people would call the deep state. I would just prefer to call it bureaucratic inertia. So that's an element of tension. The other element of tension is just kind of the idea of like who should, who should run foreign policy.

Is it a presidential model? I think it should because, you know, the president got elected. The president's the one accountable to the American people. You know, nobody elected a secretary of state or defense. So I believe that what the national security advisor's role should be is not to direct policy by any means, but to run a process that coordinates and integrates efforts across the department's and agencies to give the president, you know, best advice and multiple options, multiple options so the president can determine his or her foreign policy.

Others would prefer the secretarial model, you know, and what I would often hear from, you know, the secretary of defense or the chief of staff in the White House, like, hey, we only have one Secretary of State. And what I would say is, hey, we only have one president. And so, you know, nobody, no other departments work for the Secretary of State. So if you want to integrate an approach to foreign policy, where I believed the Secretary of State should have, you know, the foremost voice. But your foreign policy armed is not only the State Department, from a financial perspective, Treasury has a lot of responsibility. All of your intelligence agencies, you know, have a role in an aspect of foreign policy. Certainly, the Defense Department,

or, you know, I mean, you name it, right? So, so I think there was an aspect and not even not even getting to the economic dimensions of policy and how economic policy and an approach to national security should be integrated. So there are two different philosophies. And then the other one, Jamie, it's just the other explanation. I try to explain all this in the book, you know, because these are two people for whom I have respect, right, cigarette state defense. You know, I have no acts to grind with either one of them.

I see it as one of my personal failures, right, that I was unable to foster a better relationship, working relationship with them. You know, I share responsibility for that. I was one of the three, you know, of those big three. And never was a full member of the club of two. I used to jokingly refer to them, you know. And so I think part of this is just proximity, you know, you're with the president all day, you know, and not every day, but not all day every day, but you're with the president every day

and multiple times a day. And, you know, they're over at foggy bottom or across the river, you know, at the Pentagon. And, you know, I try to keep, you know, channels of communication open, could be completely transparent. But I think there's kind of like a, hey, what is, you know, what is the national security advisor cooking up over there, you know, with President Trump? And then, of course, finally, I do write in the book that they tended to view President Trump as a danger to be contained or controlled, right? And they saw the process I was running to give him multiple options as breaking down a degree of their ability to control foreign policy and national security decision making. That's where I was going to ask you about it. At one point you allude that they were slow rolling the process almost because they thought President Trump was a threat to democracy.

And I guess I was just going to ask you, given what happened on January 6th, did they have a point? Well, I write the book. I said, hey, some people may be looking at that as an ex post fact. acto justification, right, you know, for controlling him. But I would disagree with that because we did get really good policy outcomes in that first year because we were giving him multiple options, because we were acknowledging his predilections and giving him information relevant to those predilections. In fact, what I would do most often is we structured these decision-making fora for the president, you know, for example, national security council meetings, right, where

the president's the head of the table in the situation room or less formal ones in the Oval office or ones that we did offsite like at Camp David is I would show the president option one as like his preferred option from the beginning. But then in generating other options after having his agreement earlier on goals and objectives, we could compare and contrast those options and consider long-term costs and consequences. So I think that kind of transparency with him allowed him to evolve his thinking and allowed him to make what I regarded were the best available decisions at the time. The other approach, right, of not giving information, not bringing subjects up, maybe even avoiding the president and just, you know, staying out of this,

out of this, out of this, out of this, out of this, out of this eyesight. And I think at one point you mentioned, he described what you thought like the military in the 1970s to suggest they weren't capable of doing something. And it wasn't the military that you, you, you, you, you knew about. I mean, this was a probably dishonest way to describe what the military was capable of. Yet there was this, I think, belief among some people, you know, and I can't, you have to, I don't try to not have to speak directly for them, I try to just try to explain maybe some reasoning behind, behind these kind of interactions, you know, that the Trump would be capricious in the use of military force. But that's really not as nature at all, you know. And so I think that in many ways, you know, some people were fighting a rear guard against phantoms, right? You know, one of those phantoms was Trump and the capricious use of force.

Another phantom was, you know, kind of a, you know, a directive National Security Council decision-making process or I think more of the way that the National Security Council staff worked in the Obama administration where you had like activist, you know, senior directors who were, you know, speaking for the president and, you know, directing the actions of departments and agencies or had in many cases, in some cases, his back channels to world leaders, you know, leading into the Eisenhower Executive Office building, you know, I mean, I put an end to all that stuff, you know, and I inventoried in the first, you know, a couple weeks on the job, all of the authorities and decisions that, that had been centralized in the White House and brought the president decision memoranda to devolve those back to the departments and agencies. So again, you know, Jamie, I think in some ways they were fighting a rear guard against phantoms. But you raise a valid point, right? I mean, maybe January 6th, you know, highlights that they had, they had, you know, their reasoning, uh, was not

unjustified. Let me ask you, I mean, you give one this specific example of a policy disagreement, which has always been interesting to me because I think it's a, it's a question that's more, it's broader. And it was on Afghanistan where, uh, uh, general Mattis thought that, uh, self-limiting principle because the American public wouldn't support something more. And, and your view was you want to present, you know, how to win, even if it's not, if it's an expansive principle. But what role outside of this specific incident, what role should the fact that it does seem that the American public has a limited support for operations that might take much longer play and what America can do and should do based on the limited

attention span of most of the public? Yeah, Jamie, I think that preoccupation, with, you know, the American public not supporting, you know, the so-called endless war in Afghanistan, I think it was just flat wrong. I don't think if you polled Americans, they would even know, they would have even known at the time how many troops we did have in Afghanistan. And at this phase of the war, and this is really before President Trump reversed what I think is a fundamentally sound policy decision that he made, the first really reasoned and sustainable approach to Afghanistan and South Asia generally in the history of the war in August

of 2017, you know, that, you know, the Afghans were bearing the brunt of the fight, right? So what the president did is he lifted restrictions on our ability to support Afghan forces. We weren't even actively targeting the Taliban. I mean, how's that work, Jamie? Like, in a war, you're not even actively targeting your enemy. And then you give them a timeline for your withdrawal and then try to negotiate a favorable outcome with them. That just cuts against the very nature of war, right?

you know, washed up generals, we love to quote Carl von Klausowitz, but he said the first duty of the statesman is to try to not turn war into something alien to its nature. And war is, you know, of course, a competition. Each side tries to outdo the other. And in war, if you're not trying to outdo your enemy, you know what's going to happen? You're going to get your ass kicked. And also, by the way, if, you know, if you're not trying to outdo the enemy, I think that war becomes unethical because you're asking soldiers to and servicemen and women to take risks and make sacrifices, but you're not committed to what St. Thomas Aquinas, you know, identified as one of the key criterion for just war is a just end, right? So what is the just end in mind? I think what

we saw in Afghanistan after what I would call the self-defeat and, of course, the deadly and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in August of 2021, that's not a just end, you know? And so what I was trying to do is give the president an alternative to the hell that is Afghanistan now and to the terrorist safe haven that is Afghanistan now. Let me ask you, you write about John Kelly a lot in the book. Can I read a quote that he supposedly said and have you comment on it? This is what CNN reported, he said. He said about President Trump.

The depths of his dishonesty is just astonishing to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it's more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life. The most, is that your experience? Is President Trump as bad as, I mean, that's a pretty overarching statement from General Kelly? Yeah, I'll let him speak for himself, right? And what I did in the book is, you know, I just told what happened from my perspective, you know, and, and I told, I tell readers, you know, my, you know, my take on the president's character and how he measures up to what I think are the critical, you know, criteria for evaluating presidential character is really how, how well a president is equipped to lead the nation and to take on the responsibilities of that office. And I use the framework of the three disciplines from Stoic philosophy. I mean, to,

A couple of my, you know, friends who were political scientists, one of whom was the late Alexander George, who I got to know here. He was just a fantastic scholar and a fantastic person. But what I used in the book were really the three disciplines of perception, of action, and will, right? So perception is really your ability to understand, you know, complex challenges and opportunities internationally. I write in the book about, hey, how some of the president's instincts and understandings of those competitions were dead on, to use the phrase that he used with me, you know, sometimes not so much, you know, dead on, you know. In perception of action,

you want a president who can get something done, right? And because the president was unfamiliar, you know, kind of roles in responsibilities across the government, you know, who really did what, who was responsible for what. He wasn't really, you know, a well-suited, for organizational leadership in that job. Now, a question is, like, what does he learn, you know, from that, you know, from that first term in office if he is to get a second term in the, in the area of the discipline of action? And then, you know, an area where I think he was deficient as LBJ was deficient, and I have a chapter in the book called LBJ and DJT, you know, and that's, that's, that's, that's the, you know,

the discipline of will and the ability to kind of drown out the noise and focus on what's important, right? As, you know, as, as stoic philosophers have said, you know, focus, this is going all the way back to, you know, to Aristotle, supposedly, you know, focus on what you can't control and you can get a lot done. The president was distracted, you know, by the vitriol, it was distracted by the war with ourselves that was occurring, you know, within the administration, but especially, you know, outside in the country and how he fed into that, you know, and he didn't really, he didn't really attenuate, you know, that, uh, that, uh, that situation. Well, let me ask you another thing reportedly. I mean, he's the source for and President Trump blames him from being the source of it

that John Kelly has said. He, uh, and it goes to the question of character, uh, the claims that he said, you know, would call the fallen soldiers losers, um, uh, you know, suckers. Did you ever hear anything like that? You know, Jamie, I never heard anything like that. You got to ask John Kelly about it, you know, because of course, you know, that's true. it's astonishing, it's terrible, it's horrible. But I never heard him make anything even close to that kind of a comment about servicemen and women. And, of course, the recent statement he made about, you know, comparing mental freedom

and mental honor, you know, I mean, President Trump does say things that are outlandish sometimes, you know, especially if he's riffing on something. But I never heard him make any statement like the one that has been attributed to John Kelly. I don't know if he's confirmed. Did he ever really confirm that? I'm not sure. You know, I've heard that quoted in a number of times.

Yeah, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump blames him for it in speed. Blames him for it. Okay, well, yeah, I just don't, I never heard. But again, remember, you know, remember I left in 2018, I did interact with the president a couple times, you know, on the phone or, you know, saw him once when I was actually researching this book, going through my old, my old, you know, files and notebooks and so forth, and delivering a copy of my previous book, Battlegrounds, to which I inscribed to him, you know, thanks again for the opportunity to serve, because I really do feel gratitude for the

opportunity to serve, you know. And, and I said, I think you'll find the contents of this book consistent with what you told me that you will agree with it 90% of the time and the other 10% not so much. One last question of character. And then I want to just close with some broader questions in the limited time we have less about American foreign policy. Do you view Donald Trump as a patriot? Yeah, I do. Yeah. I mean, I would define a patriot as somebody who loves his or her country and wants to advance the interests of his or her country. I believe he wants to do that, right? I mean, he loves his country. He loves himself a lot, too, you know, Jamie. But I mean, but I do, but I have not. That's actually the corollary to the question is when the country's

interest and his interest are in conflict, which do you think he chooses? No, so I write that in the book, Jamie. In the book I write about, I think I've got that exact phrase in there. I'm pretty sure, you know, that he's most effective when, when the interests of the country and how he perceives his, his interests are aligned, right? And, and obviously, you know, where they're divergent. Isn't that an issue? Well, here's, let me give you an example. I'll give you an example of where they diverged, or at least in his mind they diverged, and it had an unfavorable outcome. And again, you know, I write a lot about this. My editor cut a lot out, and I'm glad he did because I was, you know, it was an emotional thing for me. So I, I probably had.

too much in the book, in the draft of the book, on Afghanistan. You know, and he made, again, he made a really great decision, I think. Go back and read the August 2017 speech he gave on the South Asia strategy. I think it's really hard, especially seeing what we've seen happen in Afghanistan, to take exception to anything, any aspect of that decision. Well, you know, of course, people were in zero after that. You know, this is not in your interest. You know, you're going to alienate your base.

It's going to make you look weak. you know, we have to end the endless wars. He said you were going to end the endless wars. And so he became convinced by these various Iago figures in his ear that he had made a decision that cut against his interests and cut against his political base. And remember the whole mantra, you're like, hey, there's no military solution in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, all of that nonsense, right? I mean, hey, the Taliban came up with a military solution, didn't they?

But people were in his ear with all this. stuff. And, but the main message is, is really related to your question as they were telling him, hey, this cuts against your interests, you know, the strategy and policy you put in place in August of 2017. In the closing 10 minutes we have, I'd like just to go through kind of some issues of going on in the world and just get your thoughts. The war in Gaza, do you believe Israel is doing its best to avoid civilian colleges or do you think there's any merit to those who claim Israel is committing a genocide? Well, there's no merit to that. Israel committed a genocide. Okay, so just to answer that up front. Can Israel do more to prevent

civilian casualties? Yeah, you can always do more to prevent civilian casualties. And, you know, I'll tell you I've commanded units in difficult situations in urban terrain against terrorists, but nothing. Nothing is complex as what Israel is doing at Gaza. And the reason it's so complex, and this is really important to remember, is because Hamas is deliberately using their population as human shields. These are people, this is a terrorist organization that doesn't give a damn about the population. They've diverted how many billions of dollars, we don't know, away from the Palestinian people in Gaza, and into their terrorist infrastructure so they can make good on their mission statement, which is to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. So I think what is immensely important at this stage, and this cuts against kind of the conventional wisdom, Jamie, that you're hearing from, you know, the administration and others, the worst thing would be a ceasefire because how much. Hamas still has the guns in Gaza.

And so if you want, if there's any hope for any kind of governance in Gaza, Palestinian governance that has legitimacy and is not Hamas, Hamas can't have the guns. Because anybody who says, hey, I'll be the mayor of Gaza, is going to get a bullet in the head. So a precondition for a better life for the Palestinians, if you care about a two-state deal, how does it work that you want a two-state deal and the organization that's in charge in Gaza wants to kill all the Jews? It doesn't work. So getting rid of Hamas is a precondition, a precondition for improving the lives of the Palestinian people

and restoring any kind of glimmer of hope toward an adoring settlement and peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Just out of curiosity, we've had a guest on the show, John Spencer, the head of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point. Are you familiar with him? I mean, he kind of emerged out of nowhere to become this great voice. And I'm just interested to get your thoughts on him. Well, you know, he's been on the ground in Gaza. I've not been there. So, I mean, he strikes me as a candid, you know, thoughtful person.

And I've heard what he said, you know, about it. And he's one of the sources I go to. You know, I also go to the Institute for the Study of War, which does, I think, fantastic open source, you know, reporting on the war in Gaza, the war against Israel broadly, on the northern front and the West Bank, and also on the Syrian Civil War and also on the Ukraine War. I mean, it's a fantastic open source analysis organization.

And they hire really bright analysts. They, you know, they skim social media. And they look at, you know, what is now a big change is how much unclassified data is available, you know, from, you know, from planet satellites to, you know, you name it. You know, it's so anyway, that's where I go to. And as well as the Modern Warfare Institute at West Point where I think Mr. Spencer is. do we this is a question I've had since the failure of what a lot of prediction was was a quick victory for Russia in Ukraine do we overestimate the ability of a lot of our enemies are we so sure how confident are you that China's military is as strong as we portray it to be or Iran is capable

if Israel took out its nuclear program of doing a significant response yeah there is a tendency to have imperfect assessments of enemy or adversary or potential enemy militaries because people like to count stuff, right? They count like tanks and missiles and aircraft. And so they come up with kind of this balance sheet. But war's not that, right? I mean, you know, war is psychological, it's emotional,

and there are all sorts of qualitative aspects to military effectiveness, the level of training, the competence of the leadership. You know, the degree to which units are cohesive and can overcome fear in combat, you know, the degree to which the military culture allows for initiative and decentralization of decision-making so you can have the kind of agility that allows you to gain a temporal advantage over your enemy. I mean, all these things are really hard to quantify. And so I think, remember the Gulf War, you know, a war in which

I had, you know, the privilege of leading an armored cavalry troop, the predictions of high casualties before that war, right? And I never believed it. I never believed it. Because I knew our unit. I knew our regiment. I knew how well trained we are. And so anyway, I think it's important to take all that consideration. In the first week of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I predicted that they would fail utterly. And it's not because I'm like, you know, a smarter guy than anybody else. It's just because I had the perspective of understanding the qualitative aspects of combat effectiveness. And I believe that the Russian army was about to impale themselves on a much more capable Ukrainian armed force than they had imagined. And that's what they did. You know, so I think,

you know, but of course you don't want to underestimate your enemy either. There's a great monograph called the albatross of decisive victory that compares the IDF in 1967 and 73 wars and makes the argument that it was the crushing victory on the side of the Israelis in 67 that set them up for the difficulties they encountered early in the 73 war. So, you know, it kind of cuts both ways, right? And that's why, you know, war is always going to be in the realm of uncertainty because you can't really quantify the human dimension of war. Given what we're seeing of Iran in the Middle East now,

and you saw then, but even worse, I would say, now how can Israel, how can the United States allow Iran to get nuclear weapons? And if they're on a path of nuclear weapons, what should the United States or Israel do? Well, we should develop options to block that path to a nuclear weapon. We should do everything we can, obviously, short of direct military action like you always do. But I think you have to prepare a whole range of options, you know, for blocking a ramp's path toward a nuclear weapon. I think one of the ways to do it is constrain them from a supply perspective, interdiction of supply, you know, important components and supplies to, you know, to build.

the nuclear devices and obviously to university uranium to the degree. But a lot of that is kind of beyond, you know, what is able to, we're able to control. We ought to also do everything we can from a financial and economic perspective. The Biden administration has not done that. The Biden administration has not enforced the Trump era sanctions against Iran. And that has resulted in the transfer of about $100 billion over the last three years into Iran's coffers. So there's a lot more to be done short of military action. But I think military action has got to be on. an option for whoever's like the president. This is why this election, I mean, the president who comes in, you know, next year is going

to face an extraordinarily dangerous world, you know, and we see that already based on the cascading crises we've witnessed from Europe into the Middle East, but also these looming crisis in the Pacific. And a lot of things we're not even talking about, you know? I mean, look at the degree to which Pakistan is destabilized these days based on the terrorist haven in Afghanistan, and what was always been, you know, kind of a relatively lawless area in the northeast of Pakistan and in the Balochistan region, hey, there are nuclear weapons there, you know? Look at the degree to which al-Qaeda and ISIS now have, we think, the

count is about 65, you know, training areas or, you know, rest areas, planning areas in Afghanistan. And that's really a cause for concern. There's a resurgence of ISIS and in northeastern Syria. I mean, the list goes on, you know. Look at West Africa. Look at what's happening in Sudan, you know? Or in Yemen, we're aware of it because of the Houthi threat, but that's a humanitarian catastrophe too in Yemen.

So, hey, the world is really at a very dangerous point. And so I think this is where, you know, presidential character, strategic competence at which are themes in the book are extremely important. Well, I'll close on this question then, General. As you just said, this is a very important election. Have you decided who you plan to cast your vote for? Yeah. You know, I studiously avoid that question because I don't think anybody needs washed up generals telling them how to vote. And one of my concerns is that even though I'm a retired general, I don't want to, I don't want the military to be associated with

partisan politics. And I respect others retired officers. They're, you know, their freedom to endorse candidates and that sort of thing. But I do think there's a danger associated with getting the military drug into partisan politics. And I've seen, you know, members of both political parties in recent years try to do that. I mean, my message to them would just be hands off, you know. And, you know, there's these narratives out there about, you know, the military being woke or the military being extremist. That's nonsense, man. But I think that's one of the reasons why, you know, we have some recruiting issues. We have to just, we have to stop it. And I just don't want to contribute to that kind of, you know, the military being seen as, as a participant in,

partisan politics. General McMaster, thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. Jamie, hey, great to be with you. Thanks a lot. You know,