The Dispatch Podcast - Ukraine Hit By Cyberattacks

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Today on the podcast, Sarah and Steve are joined by Klon Kitchen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, to discuss the latest in Ukraine after the country was hit by cyberattacks. Plus, how much is the Republican Party’s foreign policy views changing? And what exactly can the Chinese government do with all that TikTok data?   Show Notes: -TMD: “Ukraine on the Brink” -Klon’s Dispatch piece: “The Old—and Incoherent—Foreign Policy of the New Right” -Ahmari, Deneen and Pappin: “Hawks Are Standing in the Way of a New Republican Party” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes. And this week, we are talking again to Klon Kitchen. He is a senior fellow at the American Interprides Institute, former national security advisor to Senator Ben Sass in a 15-year veteran of the intelligence community. Plenty to talk about today, of course. We're going to, though, go through cybersecurity issues around Ukraine and Russia, as well as where sort of the partisan lines are at this point in foreign policy in the United States. Plus, a substantive discussion on whether TikTok should or should not be on your phone. Let's dive right in.

Thanks so much for coming back. Thrilled to have you. I don't even know where to start. You've been saying lots of interesting things. about what is going on in foreign policy right now. Let's start with the cyber aspect. You know, one of the points that you've made is that with or without iron, you think that Russia's plans for Ukraine may be less visible.

Well, I certainly think that if Russia decides to take any kind of an action in Ukraine, cyber will feature heavily, just because it's what we call a force multiplier. So, inevitably, if tanks are moving and bombs are being dropped, all of that can be prepared for and made more lethal and more effective using cyber meets. And we know that Russia has those capabilities. They've talked about and demonstrated how they've used them in the past. And so, yeah, I think if things continue to go forward and Russia makes a move, cyber will feature heavily. And what's our ability to thwart that?

I mean, one of the things we've seen our intelligence community do, would this administration do, that I think is new and creative, and I want to get your feedback on, is basically releasing intelligence in sort of real time. As soon as they get it, they're announcing it publicly as sort of a deterrence factor, you know, mentioning that Vladimir Putin planned to have a deep fake video of Ukrainian quote unquote atrocities to give him the cover then to invade, things like that. Do you think that that has been effective? And is that one of the ways to thwart some of these more audacious cyber attacks? Yeah, so I'll take the, you know, what can we do about it first?

And then I'll talk a little bit about the strategy that the Biden administration has been using. So I'll give you maybe three categories in which Putin might choose to use this capability. So there's what we call IPE and IPB, meaning intelligence preparation of the environment or intelligence information, preparation of the battlefield. All that really means is setting the condition. using technical capabilities to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of what you're trying to do. So that's everything from information operations to, you know, in placing vulnerabilities in Ukrainian networks so that when you're ready to go, you push a button and they stop working.

And then with IPB, it's going to be things like making sure that you clear spectrum airwaves so that your guys are able to communicate undisrupted and Ukrainians can't. That's an example. The other way you would use cyber is for denial and deception. So you would, you know, if you're Russia and you're kind of moving to the right, you may sig signals and indicators via cyber means that make it look like you're moving to the left. You may try to prevent Ukrainian intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities from actually being able to track you. You may send them mixed signals.

You may just flood the zone, so they don't know what's real and they don't know what's fake. And that's the kind of third category is this idea of disrupting Ukrainian, U.S., or even partner command of control. So that would be everything from, you know, making sure our comms don't work to, again, flooding the zone with all kinds of different data, that kind of thing. So the short answer to, you know, having already given you the long answer, is with these capabilities, you're essentially unlimited in the creativity in which you can employ in terms of. of their use, right? So really just you're limited only in terms of your imagination. And so that means that it's an offensive game, not a defender's game, because you can't possibly defend against everything. Now, in regards to the Biden strategy of kind of intel release, a couple points there. So one, it's a strategy that you use when you've decided not to do much of anything else,

right? I mean, we've been very clear that we're not going to have troops in the region. We're not going to really push back. Our European partners haven't been particularly helpful in kind of using coercive diplomacy to change the calculus of Putin. And so it's a strategy, and it's not the worst strategy, but it's not inherently a strategy of strength, right? It's not the thing that you employ when you're in a really strong position. It has its benefits. So, you know, it does seem to have caused Putin to kind of maybe check up a little bit and not enjoy some of the freedom of movement that he had wanted. I don't know that that's been decisive.

I don't know that it's been a huge frustration. I think there are much broader calculations that he's probably engaging in. But it's also demonstrating, it's giving a little bit of a sense of the access that we have, which means that access is likely to get closed. Right. So the fact that we know that they're doing this, that, or the other thing, there's only so many sources that you can have that give you that type of insight. Putin's not dumb.

He's going to figure that out and he's going to close. those doors and you know so there's a cost to that strategy as well we saw yesterday we're recording this wednesday morning uh we saw yesterday massive cyber attacks on the the ukrainian defense uh foreign defense defense and foreign policy um ministries um the from the public facing stuff to the back facing stuff there is a report out within the last hour from tom winter at nbc news that says Ukraine says they are suffering from the largest cyber attack they've ever experienced. Victor Zora, the head of the State Special Communications Service, said that they cannot confirm that Russian hackers stand behind the attack on Ukraine's critical infrastructure networks.

What if, you know, a lot of this is guesswork. We understand that. What, if we reason back from those data points, what we saw yesterday, which says, seems to have been fairly widespread and went beyond, by the way, the defense and national security infrastructure. It targeted the education ministry and other things yesterday. And then this report today, in the past, certainly we've seen these be precursors to more active Russian engagement on the ground. But of course, Russians are involved in these kinds of cyber attacks all the time, so they're not necessarily. If you had to help us understand what we're seeing,

what the Ukrainians are likely seeing now, without speculating about whether it will lead to boots on the ground later today or this week or anything, what do you think they're trying to do now in those categories that you talked about before? That's the benefit of this kind of thing, right? You can push a button once and do this type of activity, and it serves multiple purposes depending upon what your next move is. So, you know, they could be, well, number one, as you said, we don't know who did this, even if we could, you know, tie this back to a, you know, a specific cafe somewhere in Moscow.

We don't know. Is that state backed? Is it, you know, not? Is it just a bunch of hooligans? So the point, though, is that by interjecting this kind of friction into the moment, it serves a couple of purposes. So it may just kind of keep the screw tightening down on Ukraine and just confusing the situation.

and allowing, you know, Moscow an advantage just because Ukraine now has to respond to this, and that's going to distract policymaking, defense leaders, and even resource allocation, that kind of thing. If it's a precursor to something, then it serves that purpose. Plus, it may set the stage for kind of cascading effects, right? So you can use this kind of activity as a way of drawing resources, like actual electron resources away, and then that opens up avenues of approach, you know, for a more severe attack. So these kinds of activities are so, the real point is that the bar to entry

and the cost of conducting these types of actions are so low that there's just no reason a serious state actor wouldn't employ it, right? It's just too easy a thing. to do with so many possible positive ramifications that that's why I say, you know, no matter what happens, iron or no iron, you're going to see cyber in Ukraine. As we see more prevalence of cyber attacks, I mean, this is going back 10, 15, 20 years. There's been a big debate in the United States and elsewhere about how we should regard these. With the Ukrainian regime, let's say that these are sort of prepping the battlefield, field. Would the Ukrainian government regard these as acts of war? Would the U.S. government regard

these as acts of war, or did they fall short of those? And this is a leading question because eventually I want to get to NATO. And if these were to spill over and there were attacks on Poland's critical security infrastructure. One of the challenges of the cyber is that we don't have kind of established international norms. When does something become an act of war? typically where we've landed just practically is on what we call kinetic effects. So if you conduct a cyber operation and it results in the loss of human life, or if you were to target something severe like, say, a key piece of critical infrastructure or, you know, the nuclear infrastructure,

something like that, now you're moving into the realm of even though we haven't specifically identified those things, I think you're clearly talking about acts of war. What we're looking at yesterday, I mean, honestly, this kind of stuff happens all the time. The only thing that's different here is the context. Now, the context makes it something that could be associated with a potential war, and certainly we wouldn't ignore that. But the act itself, I mean, there are literally websites where you can pay them to conduct these types of distributed denial of service or DDoS attacks for you. And you can just identify, hey, I want you to DDoS this website. And if we identify that as an act of war, we're going to be a lot of wars.

I'd like to move to the Sarah asks really obvious questions that she truly doesn't know the answer to. Starting with Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. And we all moved on with our life. Nobody really, you know, in terms of day-to-day Americans, noticed. Why do I care this time? Why is this so different? Why is this being treated like the precursor to World War III when it feels like, if I'm looking at just facts on the ground, it looks pretty similar to 2014? Yeah, I mean, that is a great question. So one, the reason why the world didn't pay attention last time is apparently because they didn't have Russian patches on their uniform. And so we just didn't know what was happening. And this is so confusing. As Eddie Izard used to say, no flag, no country. Those are the rules that I just made up.

Right. Exactly. So, I mean, look, that was a real failure. with the Obama administration in terms of allowing that to happen in such an obvious way and not realizing its implications. But, and okay, so then I want you to add this to your question then. Okay, so if we don't pay attention to it, then there are far fewer consequences here at home. I understand that may have serious consequences for Ukraine. It may even have consequences, positive consequences for Russia.

But if we ignored it basically in 2014, and everything continued as normal here for the last eight years, doesn't that also mean that ignoring it would be a viable foreign policy solution? Go. No, but there are lots of people arguing that. And I'll explain why. So the kind of unsaid part of your point there is, well, we were able to kind of keep going with no real issues until now. So I think it is a mistake to understand what's happening now. as somehow independent of what happened previously. I think this is the direct result of us not engaging and responding to what happened previously. So here's my sense of things. One, great big strategic level, European stability is a prerequisite for dealing with the rise of China

and our strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific region. And the reason I say that is because American national security is dependent on European capability and Europe not being a dumpster fire if we're actually going to make a meaningful pivot to the Asia and Pacific region. That means we need a that means we need European partners who are actually able to step up and and kind of take care of their home turf. One of the unavoidable, I think, conclusions of what's going on right now is that we should have less confidence in some of our European partners' ability to do that. And that's going to be something that we're going to have to engage. So that's that's one. If we want to do what we're trying to

long-term strategically, we can't let the European backyard kind of catch fire. Two, the reintroduction of great power imperialism, this kind of invasion and expansion of boundaries by military force, if that's allowed to reassert itself, that will massively destabilize the continent politically, socially, economically. David French, I think, has actually talked about this, where Russia has a tendency of expanding its border aggression when it expands its borders, you know? And I think that this kind of leads to my last point, and that is, if Putin takes a part or all of Ukraine, he's going to be bumping directly into four NATO countries, which makes the risk of the U.S. being pulled into an Article 5 conflict much more likely.

So the bottom line then is, no, this isn't the kind of thing that we can just ignore. Putin won't allow that, and its implications are just necessarily so significant for the United States that some type of action has to occur. I would argue, too, that one of the reasons that we've seen this sort of fecklessness from our European partners is because we were so weak eight years ago, right? I mean, I think we've seen a weakening of the alliance overall, and we've seen the Germans in particular elevate their own economic concerns over this political alliance. and it's had the effect of weakening NATO, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons that Putin did what he did eight years ago. And the second point I would make, you know, I think, Klan, I agree with your assessment about the way the Obama administration approached this. And it was really almost sort of a shrug of the shoulders. You know, there's a lot of talk about

diplomatic off-ramps and about Putin not understanding what was in his best interests, which I found sort of the height of arrogance, but I don't think they really believed it. I think the Obama administration understood that Putin knew what his interests were quite well. They just used that as sort of a cover for not really doing anything. But if you look back in that time frame and there were no flags on the uniforms and we didn't know what was going on, and we knew exactly what was going on, the Obama administration knew exactly what was going on. And And the critics in real time, the critics of the Obama administration's permissiveness and weakness, we're talking exactly about these things. So they said, no, no, no, we can't possibly allow this kind of invasion to take place without a response, without a serious response, precisely because it will emboldened Vladimir Putin, we'll see more aggression in the future.

changed the dynamics on the ground in eastern Ukraine, you know, there were long lists of consequences that were almost certain to follow the U.S. And let's be fair, it was not a non-response from the Obama administration or sanctions. Sanctions had some effect. But we could have done more. We didn't do more. And we talked about it in a way, I think, that suggested to Sarah's point that we didn't much care, that this wasn't going to be serious. I mean, even even in real time, all of the talk, you remember leading Obama administrations talk about the coming isolation of Vladimir Putin and the isolation of, of Russia. Even as we were saying that, we were having bilateral talks with, with the Russians. And there was no real indication that

that was ever going to come to pass. So I think it's, I think it's really important that we not look at something like this as an isolated incident, but as, you know, it, you know, it's not probably accurate to, to look at it on a linear or strictly chronological timeline either, but, but these things happen because in a context, in, in, because other things have either happened or haven't happened. Well, and I'm, you know, that's not to suggest that any of this is easy. I'm a big proponent to say that, yeah, foreign policy is hard.

All the easy choices have been made and the only thing that's left is the hard stuff. So, you know, as serious as I think this is and as significant as of the implications that I've laid out are, you know, I'm not advocating that we deplore forces,

and, you know, kind of have our guys and gals, you know, fighting a Russian invasion hand to hand. It's just that, you know, I always say the other guy gets a vote and, and, you know, it forces us to respond and sometimes we don't have good responses. My only, my kind of main point is just that what we've chosen to do previously has seemingly had a foreseeable consequence and now here we are with only harder choices. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind.

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already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethoos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. I want to talk, not a little, I want to talk a lot about the piece you wrote on the dispatch website last week, the old and incoherent foreign policy of the new right. And I just want to read a couple sections. Basically, you're replying to a piece that was published in the New York Times titled, Hawks are standing in the way of a new Republican party. And you really take their argument quite seriously. You try to provide, you know, thoughtful, non-strawman responses to everything that they're presenting their idea being, you know, sort of hawkish, imperialism, crusading versus exemplar democracy, sort of building up our own country as a model and just let everyone look at the model, the Shining City on a Hill concept. But particularly when you talk about, you know, how they're, how they're, how.

they're going to apply that exemplar foreign policy to China, for instance, or to what's happening in Ukraine right now, for instance. Your point is, you know, talking points are all well and good, but this kind of falls apart when the rubber hits the road. And I'm hoping you can walk us through some of that. The first time I read the essay in the New York Times, I was, frankly, I was confused. There's just a lot of, it struck me as kind of Marxist rhetoric, you know, kind of the people and the elites and like all this kind of stuff and it was it took some negotiating. The second time I read through it, uh, I think I, I think it's fair to say that there was a, there was a, there was a, there was a bit of empathy, uh, in terms of, I, I get some of the

frustration that you're describing and, and, and I hear family and friends that I know in the kind of echoes of some of the rhetoric and frustration with how they view, uh, foreign policy and what the United States has been. But then the third time I read through it, and I was really trying to break down the argument. And that's where, one, it became clear to me that, okay, this is not a new argument. This is actually a kind of a rehashed version of the restraint or kind of a neo-isolationist argument.

And then the vulnerabilities or the weaknesses of that argument became much more clear to me as I started thinking about it. So look, they're making a very specific point that we're trying to establish a realignment of the Republican Party domestically and that anybody who is on the populist team who's arguing for a, what they would call a liberal imperialism foreign policy,

a hawkish foreign policy, is actually undermining that realignment project. And they identify Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton as being exemplars of that. And they say they do that because that kind of foreign policy leads to a bleeding of resources and energy

away from domestic renewal. It provokes Russia and China. It creates ungoverned spaces around the world. It kills the working class men and women who were sent over to fight these endless forever wars and so on and so forth. That's great rhetoric, right? I mean, that's all easy to say. The problem with it is that it's wrong and it's just not true. So it presupposes, it builds the entire argument based on this idea that there's a monolithic foreign policy blob that that kind of makes things happen in the United States. And I specifically refer to an essay written by a guy named Michael Mazar who's at the RAND Corporation. And he talks about it more broadly in terms of the

simplistic diagnosis. And I'll just do a quick quote from him because I think he says it better that I could. This idea of kind of this binary approach of crusader nation versus an exemplar republic. He says, such an approach overlooks a huge, untidy middle ground where the views of the U.S. national security officials reside and where most U.S. policies operate. That middle ground tends to reflect far more nuance and indeed instinctive restraint than the stereotypes offered by many restraint proponents would suggest. And he goes on, I won't belaborate. But then that, so when you when you start with that false presupposition, that then leads you into the second,

so their prognot or the diagnosis is wrong, but then their prescription is also wrong because they can't tell you what they mean by restraint. Depending upon which advocate you're talking to, that means that, you know, we should be a part of NATO or we shouldn't be a part of NATO. We should be trying to pivot toward the Indo-Pacific or we shouldn't be in the Indo-Pacific.

Like, we care about Ukraine, but not that much or not at all, or too much, you know, it's never very clear because it's all just kind of rhetoric. And in the context of China is where I really, you know, that's where my kind of dander got up, just because, number one, they called them our civilizational equivalent. And I find that particularly insulting.

But then, too, with China, they admit in their essay that the United States has to engage with China in a way that pushes back on economic espionage, coercive economic policies, and all kinds of other things. But then they don't acknowledge, what it would take to actually do that, right? That takes things like building up partner nation

capabilities so that they can do force projection in the Pacific, and we don't have to. It includes, you know, broad economic cooperation and treaties so that we can actually move in a concerted effort to push back on China's course of economic policies. In short, if you want to push back on China, it requires us doing a lot of what we're already doing. And so if you're, if If they're going to argue that we should push back on China, but they don't have a meaningful difference of strategy versus what we're doing, then you kind of got to ask, like, so what's your point? If you're only going to sit back and just be the critic, well, that's easy, but that's not a solution.

And when it comes time to actually operating and doing real policy in the real world, if you've got nothing new to offer, I'm not sure we need the essay. Yeah, I love this essay for a number of reasons. first, it was very dispatchian in its approach. As Sarah said, you really did treat their arguments seriously. I would argue perhaps more seriously than they deserved, honestly. And you avoided getting into motives, which I think is healthy and helps us have a more effective discussion. I do think it's worth pointing out the context that one of the primary authors of this, So Rob Amari was a proponent of the kind of vigorous American foreign policy presence that he

now criticizes as recently as two or three years ago. And it's also worth noting in the context of China, you know, I think it's fair to say Amari and his co-authors, they call themselves post-liberal. They sort of no longer believe in the sort of founding ideals of American classical liberalism and have become comfortable in some ways, I would argue, shockingly comfortable with the demise of the United States as a global power. So Rob tweeted and then later deleted the following, I'm at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century. Late liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower. Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of its Confucian roots will possess a great deal of natural virtue. I would just say if if that's what

you believe, he later tweeted it, deleted the tweet and said people were dumb and mischaracterizing it. I'm not going to characterize it beyond the words that I just just read to you. But I will say if you're not worried, if you don't see China as a threat, like plainly his words suggest that he doesn't, it wouldn't be shocking that you don't want the United States to do anything to diminish that threat. If it's not a threat, we're not going to take the threat head on. I guess I want to broaden the lens even further. And there's this big debate taking place in the Republican Party right now. There are, you know, this is a wide range of views. I think from the isolationists to neo-isolationists and non-interventionists sort of a spectrum to the people I would consider

to be actual neo-conservatives like a Lindsay Graham. Where is, in your view, I mean, you've worked with a lot of these folks. You know them personally. You've had these conversations with them. Where do you think the Republican Party is today if you had to describe sort of the fundamental beliefs of the party or the people who are elected as representatives of the party? Or is it not possible to do that at this moment? Yeah, and let me add, where do you think the Democratic Party is? Because I don't know that I have a good sense of either one at this moment. I feel like there's a national security apparatus and they share some common foreign policy

goals in mind. And then there's others that fall into different camps, but I don't know that they fall neatly into partisan camps. I'm curious if what you think. Those are really good questions. I think the distinctions are less clear. Sarah, I like your point in terms of they seem less party aligned and more kind of interest aligned. And what I mean by that is, you know, like different policymakers have different interests.

And if you're inclined toward national security and foreign policy issues, there's actually a good bit of shared perspective bipartisan, in a bipartisan way on those interests. So, for example, you know, I think back to the previous administration with Trump, I think the only thing I could point to as being any type of a bipartisan consensus during his administration is the concerns about China, that you would actually have Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer saying many of the same things as Donald Trump was in terms of the concerns about the rise of China and that kind of thing. When you close the doors on the Senate Armed Services or the House Armed Services Committee and you start debating those issues, there's a lot of agreement. And it really comes down to, frankly, only slight differences in how we engage certain challenges and threats.

But there's a shared perspective. And that's because they're all getting the same briefings, right? And they're being told by people in the national security community who have legitimacy in their eyes what the challenges really are and how significant they are. and what their implications are. And, you know, you can only run around that so much. Right. Now, when you move that conversation into the public domain

and it becomes kind of this political issue, you know, there's a whole bunch of people who would just rather talk about tax policy. And that's fine. You know, that's fine. But it's much easier to- I would say that that's a very generous take that they want to talk about tax policy.

I mean, mostly they would rather talk about, you know, these issues that would culturally inflame people. But I take your point. Yeah. Well, and I guess part of it too for me is, you know, you mentioned, you know, kind of my tone and tenor in this essay. Number one, I try to do that. I try to stay away from motives as often as I can. And I try to take ideas at face value. One of the things that helped me on this particular one is that I hear family members. Like I had the voices of brothers-in-laws and aunts and uncles and moms and debt, like, who would express a similar sense of exasperation of like, I'm tired of being in a family. war. I'm tired of, you know, Klon, you deployed. I'm tired of your cousins being deployed. I just want them home. I don't, we can't constantly be doing this. And we do have real domestic challenges and like these things are bleeding us of blood and treasure and I'm tired. I'm entirely empathetic to that sense. I get it. I think that ultimately though is rooted more in how we've

chosen to do what we've done, not the needfulness of those things to be done. And, and, you know, that's hard because, you know, nothing's ever, it's not always obvious how we should do things. That being said, all that to say. I think the Republican Party particularly is trying to figure out what its foreign policy looks like. I think it's going to be a greater gradation than it has been for like the last two or three decades. And I think that this view that was articulated in the essay by Amari and Danine and happen, I think it's going to have a constituency. And yeah, I think that we're going to be dealing with this kind of this worldview for the foreseeable future. So can I, can I ask you, as we look at that, and I agree with you entirely, I mean, I have the same conversations

with some of my family members, some of my friends about, you know, the overextension, if you will, of the U.S. and trying to shape events and outcomes that, in their view, we shouldn't have done, certainly not with the backing of the U.S. military. It seems to me, and I don't quite know how to break this down, there is a very respectable, even if these are not the positions I hold, a very respectable intellectual tradition of non-interventionism and a case that can be made sort of, hey, you know, they date it back to George Washington and foreign entanglements. Hey, these things really aren't our business. We should focus at home and engage abroad only in the, you know, in furtherance of trade and what have you. There is, it seems to me, on the

rise on the right, something that is similar but different. And that is this embrace of authoritarian's abroad, the sort of moral equivalency on steroids. We saw this during the Trump administration. You remember that he gave an interview, gave an interview before he was elected. We gave an interview just a few months after he was elected when he was asked about Vladimir Putin and being a killer and said, hey, we're killers. We do this stuff too. We're really, we're bad, they're bad. And you've now seen prominent cable TV hosts, others who share those views, in effect, take Vladimir Putin's side. And that's not an exaggeration, right? I mean, that is not, that is exactly what they are doing in some cases. You know, I mean, I think Tucker Carlson actually

asked the question, why would I not take Vladimir Putin's side? Why would I be on on Ukraine's side. What are, do you think those have common roots, this sort of intellectual non-interventionism and this embrace of authoritarian? Or is there something else going on to explain the latter? I think it is entirely possible to be a principled non-interventionist and make a coherent logical argument as to why you think that's the best foreign policy without ever having to do, in my view, the indefensible moral equivalency that you're describing by Tucker and others.

I don't think that those have to be the same camp. I think they sometimes are, but I don't think they have to be. So, you know, when someone argues, well, you know, Vladimir Putin just wants to secure his borders and wouldn't we? You know, what if China was invading through, you know, Mexico? Wouldn't we feel the same way? That is a level of ignorance that would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerous and so historically ignorant, right? And for people to kind of posture themselves as that being a justification, like, look, I'm just saying, that drives me crazy. Because there's a reason, like, NATO exists for a reason. It wasn't just like, hey, you know, let's get together. Let's have a thing. It was, it was, you know, deliberately intended to help constrain

Russian aggression. It's not as though we don't have a long history of dealing with. with this challenge and knowing what it looks like, right? We don't have to make it up. We know what happens when an expansionist autocratic regime, like the one in Russia, is enabled and given freedom of movement. It's bad. It's always bad. And it's bad for a lot of people.

And it's so bad that we don't get to avoid it. That even if we look the other way, it still comes down to an interest where they will expand until it hits an interest where we have to engage. And so it's much less costly and it's much less difficult to preemptively shape that than to wait until the worst possible have-to-act moment. You know, and the same thing's through with China. I mean, this is, pardon me, I'm going to slowly step down off of my soapbox as I was climbing onto it very quickly. But I just, you've already been very dispatching. So boxes are okay on occasion. Well, you know, this is the Churchill argument against the re-rise of Germany, right?

We can take action now. It's not hard to predict where this thing is going. We can take action now to shape this in a way that will be far less costly to everyone, including the Germans, or we can wait until we're forced to act and it's going to be god-awful for everyone. Now, I'm not arguing that, you know, preemptive war is the right answer all the time or anything like that. And I, by the way, have a strong category of not needing to intervene in everything. So feeling that we ought or can intervene in some circumstances is not at all the same as arguing that we ought to intervene in every circumstance.

I think the vast majority of circumstances, we ought not to. Well, it depends what we mean by intervention too, right? I mean, I think it's become intervention has become shorthand for military intervention. And it's just not accurate. I mean, I have a, I probably have a much higher threshold for when military intervention is necessary than, say, Lindsay Graham, who, I mean, Lindsay Graham actually does sort of meet the Rand Paul caricature of wanting to send troops everywhere all the time. I mean, I think for the most part, that's a cheap demagogic argument that Rand Paul likes to use against the people he, he labels as neo-conservatives, but it's close to fitting with Lindsay Graham. There are, I think, many times when the United States is best served by seeking to shape outcomes without knowing the deter, without necessarily even being in a position to determine what those outcomes are. But it's in our interest to seek to shape them, but to do so by non-military means.

I don't think that, you know, that doesn't make me a crusader neocon hawk. I think this is the way that I can see American interests, and I think this is the appropriate role for the U.S. government to advance them. The problem is we've gotten to the point where, and I'm sorry, I jumped in and totally interrupted you right in the middle of a thought, and I only usually do that to Sarah. So I'm really sorry. But it's almost difficult to have a discussion about what we mean by intervention

because it so quickly becomes a U.S. invasion or, do nothing. And that's a problem with the way that we discuss foreign policy and national security. Well, and I can hear the kind of restraint rejoinder to all that saying, well, why are you trying to shape the world anyways? Like, isn't that the height of arrogance? You know, why are you trying to embroil us into, you know, everybody's problems and operate as the world's trap at copper and so on and so forth? And again, that's the type of thing that sounds like wisdom when it passes through a lazy mind. But it's not how the world works. I mean, number one, I begin. with the presupposition that, you know what, our culture is good. There is a discernible

distinctive between how the world was before the rise of the United States and its influence on the global stage and what it has been like since. And it is an overwhelmingly net positive. Yes. Look around in the last 80 years are your answer. That's right. And now, certainly not perfect. All kinds of problems. Of course not. Right. I've been quick to comment on those elsewhere. But the reality is, is that their entire cultures that, that, you know, unrestrained tend to lead to war. And in a modern context, war is really, really bad and has a profound tendency to spread quickly and to go into the depths of violence. And it's awful. And it's, one of my colleagues actually wrote a book, How Brand,

and co-wrote a book called, what is it, the Lessons of Tragedy, I think is what it's called. And his whole argument is that the United States has benefited so significantly from relative peace and economic and political and military superiority that it's forgotten what the world is like otherwise. And that because of that, we're more likely to kind of revert back to that because we're not as committed to defending the order as is required. And I think he's right. I think he's right.

So I'm not unsympathetic to the underlying concerns that Amari and others articulate, but it just strikes me as polyamish and ignorant of how things actually work. And by the way, that's why you find very few actual national security practitioners who advocate their position. It's all rhetoric and all theoretical. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. 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 varied by race.

Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.ca.com. I want to walk you through a very small, narrow slice of the history of me. And it started, what now? A year ago, maybe a little more. And I downloaded TikTok on my phone. And then I downloaded TikTok and deleted it. spent a good nine months without it. Then I re-downloaded TikTok and found it pretty addictive.

So now I've undownloaded TikTok. You have a tweet from this week and it says, do not use TikTok. And now you're quoting, TikTok can circumvent security protections on Apple and Google app stores and uses device tracking that gives TikTok's Beijing-based parent company bite dance full access to user data. Okay, I hear you. That doesn't sound great. Then again, the amount of, I think, companies that have full access to my data in or out of Beijing feels pretty high. Can't even keep track of it anymore. And those are just the ones we know about. I assume there's all sorts of stuff that's on my phone that I will find out about some years from now. I assume my phone has no privacy. You know, all the people talking about how like I talked about this thing. I haven't Googled it. I haven't looked it up. And suddenly I'm getting ads for it. I thought that was. Silliness. And now this happens multiple times to me. But regardless, how many bigillions of people are now on TikTok? It is now at some point a tipping point place to figure out what's going on culturally, socially, anything else, including what's happening at the Ukrainian border, by the way,

TikTok has become a major source of information there. So I'm curious if you would like to add any nuance to do not use TikTok. Can I like, I don't use it in the sense I don't post things, but can I just flip through TikTok, please? By all means, feel free. And I'll quietly judge you from here. I don't have an account. I don't post things. I'm not contributing. I'm a voyeur on TikTok. Well, but see, here's the thing. While you're a voyeur on TikTok, TikTok is a voyeur on you. And that's the challenge, right? So a couple of things. One, the article that I link to there, it's not the best reporter article.

It cites it, I just want to be transparent on that one. It cites these two security researchers who are named and are associated with named companies, but the reports that they're reviewing and commenting on have it been published, which I actually have questions about because it makes me want to know where they've come from. But the findings that they comment on are in keeping with well-established cybersecurity reviews of that app. And so I was happy to kind of kick it out. Also, the horse is out of the barn. And so I'm not on a mindless crusade to kind of take us back to, you know, pre-app days.

I think that I think that's done. I am trying to help people understand the implications of the choices that we've made. And to raise user awareness so that we can stop owning ourselves. So you would rightly say, plot, like, who doesn't have my stuff at this point? I mean, it's just not, it's just like, it's done. And you're not entirely wrong there. I mean, if you want privacy, get a flip phone. But if you want one of these fancy brains that you keep in your pocket, then yeah, it's going to come with some tradeoffs. The tradeoffs are what they are at this point. Right. And the problem is, is that I don't think we as a nation or as individuals have fully understood the tradeoffs. And that's my second point. So you could again say, you know, what is what is Beijing going to do with my data? I mean, they're going to target me, you know, that most likely no.

But they could if they ever decided to, number one. But number two, it's not about you fundamentally. What it's about is the in-depth understanding that they gain by looking at a hundred million U.S. users. It's what they learn about American society. It's what they learn about our media consumption habits. It's what they learn about our online viewing habits. It's also, by the way, if you look at the terms of service of TikTok, they collect things like keyboard swipes and patterns. So if I know where you've been online, and I can correlate that with your keyboard swipes and patterns, you know what else I know?

Username and passwords, right? But then on top of that, if I'm a foreign state and I want to influence the American people politically, I have every bit and bite of data I need to know how to micro-target to the nth degree and how to shape an entire population toward policies that I want. And then finally, if you ask any app developer in Silicon Valley, any of the big companies, Facebook and all of them, the reason they would all kill for TikTok and why Microsoft was kind of looking at shops at the possibility of being able to buy it, is because its algorithm really is very, very good at pulling people in and keeping them locked in. Well, you have to ask yourself, well, what do we know about algorithms and why they work?

Well, they run on data. What is it about this Chinese app's algorithm that makes it demonstrably better? Well, it must be collecting more and different data than other ones are doing, right? That's an indicator of kind of the problem we're dealing with. So I'm not trying to ruin your fun dance videos or your fun, you know, puppy videos. I don't, that's not my, my intention, but I can't ignore the implications from a national security perspective of this. And I feel like we've got to engage it. Okay. So Instagram Reels, I should stick to Instagram Reels. There's, it's a little bit better than TikTok. Well, just because I need

to be completely honest, all that data that's being collected on Instagram Reels, some of it is aggregated by third party data aggregators. And they can be, that can be purchased by. the Chinese government. There's no law against what they actually purchase it. So as I said, get a flip phone. Just have Jonah send you his dancing videos like directly. That's what he does for me. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. Creepy. So creepy. All right, Claude. Wait, wait, wait. That wasn't creepy. I wasn't thinking anything creepy. You injected creepy. Wait, wait, that Jonah sends you personally dancing videos. Yeah. That alone is creepy. But just fun dancing videos with his dogs. I don't care if he's flossing. Like, no. The

dance flossing, which you probably aren't aware of, actually. That, you know. I have flossed in the past. You have not flossed. I flossed at a commencement speech that I gave at my son's graduation to embarrass him. I was going to say, I'm horrified on so many levels. No, my daughters, my daughters. It was the way I finished the speech.

You don't even remember which kid's life you ruined? They probably equally resent it because he was there, too. Clon, have you flossed? No. See, Clon doesn't know what that is because he's not on TikTok because he uses a flipboard. I know it is. I have a teenage son who plays Fortnite, but no. All right.

Klon, thank you so much for joining again. We learn so much every time we talk to you and just highly appreciate your willingness to just jump on and shoot some of this around. I love it. My pleasure. This episode. 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.

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