The Jordan Harbinger Show - 410: H.R. McMaster | The Fight to Defend the Free World

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

Lt. General H.R. McMaster (@ltghrmcmaster) was the 26th National Security Advisor and author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World. Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/410 What We Discuss with Lt. General H.R. McMaster: The problem with taking a "George Constanza approach" to warfare if we want to resolve conflict instead of just drawing it out longer than it needs to be. Why does the United States keep fighting, as H.R. said on 60 Minutes, "a one-year war 20 times" in Afghanistan? The importance of exercising strategic empathy in order to understand how opposing states think rather than allowing strategic narcissism to convince us that they have the same motivations and think like us. Why immigration is good for the United States and we should be encouraging it as a way to compete instead of discouraging it. If H.R. believes that climate change is one of our greatest threats and challenges, why did he support a US withdrawal from the Paris Accords? And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. War's human. People fight for the same reasons that Thucydides identified 2500 years ago, fear, honor, and interest. And so if you're not addressing the drivers of conflict, you're just treating the symptoms, and you're going to perpetuate that conflict. It's going to go on longer than necessary. It is a contest of wills. It really requires you convincing your enemy that your enemy has been defeated.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. If you're new to this show, we have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional national security advisor, and each show turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. And today, like I said, the occasional national security advisor, we have General H.R. McMaster with us today. This is a fun discussion about

how the world has continued to get worse while we're preoccupied with partisan discourse and other crap that's ruining the country. We also dip into Iran, China, North Korea, and how he and his team develop strategies that not only affect the United States, but the entire free world. I had a great time with this one, and if you're interested in global affairs and the world and disarray in which we currently live, I think you'll enjoy this conversation as well. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing authors, thinkers, generals every single week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build a similar network. It's a free course. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. No credit card required, none of that crap. By the way, most of the

guests on the show, they subscribe to the course in the newsletter, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. Now, here's General H.R. McMaster. In your job, you have to take every perspective, and then you have to decide which one, or which pieces of which perspectives are actually going to yield the best result. And that seems like a impossibly difficult, essentially lose-lose scenario where you and or everyone around you is constantly second-guessing your decisions. If it's not you, it's somebody else. Where do you even begin that process? Because you have to take your emotion out of the decision. Ray Dalio had that same problem, right? You have a thousand inputs. They come from a thousand different people. Yours are

life and death, though. So you can't just go, well, I liked Jim. And so I went with his decision. and, you know, now we are where we are, and it's a huge problem. How do you evaluate the inputs? Right. Well, Jordan, first of all, you've got an assembled team that can bring together an interdisciplinary perspective. Because, I mean, war, conflict, it's a complex endeavor. And you have to understand really what is driving and constraining the other. In Battlegrounds, this book I just finished.

I mean, I introduced this concept of strategic empathy to try to view these complex competitions from the perspective of the other. I mean, it's not a new idea. This goes back to, you know, Sun Sioux, you know, know your enemy, but then you also have to know the complex environment in which you're operating. And so war is this continuous interaction of opposites, right? You and maybe multiple enemies and adversaries inside of a complex environment. And, you know, nobody's going to have the full range of expertise necessary

to understand that complex problem set holistically. So you have to bring the right team together. And then the key thing is, and you know, as a historian, it's all about the question. You've got to ask the right questions. And you're better off with a general broad question. Like, what is the nature of this conflict? You know, who is the enemy? What is their strategy?

What are their objectives? It's through asking these kind of questions and creating, you know, a collaborative environment with people who bring interdisciplinary expertise. That's how you begin, I think, to frame a problem and apply design thinking. to these complex challenges we're facing. How do you make it okay for people to be wrong around you or to give you advice that turns out to be wrong? Because I would imagine you have to foster that

because otherwise you just have people that go, I'm not 100% sure. I'm not going to say anything even though I'm the Iran expert on this. I just don't want to get in trouble. And then people die as a result. It's all about the climate that you foster. There's this conventional wisdom about the military that's very hierarchical.

Nobody speaks out of turn. That's not been my experience. It's really what you allude to at the beginning. I mean, the stakes are pretty darn high. So what you want to do is encourage people to be participative, to not hold back. Also, you want to create an organization that is really freed in terms of their ability to think and share their thoughts, but also in the military, an environment in which people are free to act and to actually make mistakes at times. I mean, because the most dangerous course of action typically in combat is to not do anything.

And so what you want to do is encourage initiative at lower levels. And to do that, you have to be able to underwrite risk, and you have to be able to, I think, communicate clearly what you want to achieve overall. Tell everyone on your team as much as you can about what you're trying to achieve and how just generally you want to achieve it and free them up to take the initiative. How much does somebody at your level employ or ask people to employ outside of the box thinking? And I know that sounds like a cliche, but you hear in the military, like you said, it's hierarchical, you don't want, you see people at the middle and at the lower level say like, no, we don't want people to think too much. Follow the exact instructions

because otherwise you're going to get your head shut off. But like at the higher level, it seems like you have to be thinking, not just like the enemy, but you have to say, what sort of other outside the box thinking can we employ? Because we see Russia doing this with cyber warfare, well, Russia, Iran, China, you see our enemies doing this. We can't just be, it goes back. I saw this movie when I was a kid where Napoleon was kind of invading all these places and the guys are just marching up and they're shooting cannons and they're just walking slowly. towards this row of cannons and everyone's getting blown to bits. And I remember asking my dad, why are they just walking slowly toward the enemy? And my dad's like, that's how they fought back then.

And I thought, this is, I'm eight, and that's the dumbest idea I've ever seen in my entire life. There's a 10-year-old in the front with a drum. They're all going to die. No, that's why you need an organization that encourages initiative and problem-solving and thinking imaginatively. And this is one of the strengths of the American Army and the Continental Army and our militias in the revolution, right? These were the tactics that the British were employing, even in kind of dense, unfavorable terrain in the South, right? And you had this combination of riflemen within militias and skirmishers that would be out in front and just posed them with a much different look than it had been accustomed to. And it was confounding to many of these British commanders.

You know, my least favorite saying you hear people use sometimes as well, hey, stay in your lane. I mean, hell no, get out of your lane and think about problems from different perspectives. consult others who bring imaginative thinking to these complex problems. I think in the military, you know, what we emphasize is seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative. And the initiative is you gain it by doing something unexpected, by shocking your adversary, surprising your adversary. And then it's kind of like a boxing match.

If you land a jab, you know, you got to follow with your right, you know, very quickly. And I think it's just an important concept to emphasize the initiative. In our command post in Iraq, when we're fighting a really brutal, determined enemy of al-Qaeda in Iraq in their training base. This was kind of the Fort Benning, Georgia of al-Qaeda in Iraq or the Quantico, Virginia, you know, training base. We had hanging in our command post two questions, right? Or three questions.

Who else needs to know? Because one of the ways you see the initiative is you share information horizontally across your organization and you condition members of your organization to say, oh, my buddy over there, he's got a problem or she's got a problem. You know, I can help solve that problem. And so now you're posing the interview with multiple dilemmas because everybody's working together in a kind of a self-synchronizing way within an organization. You know, you can tell really, I think, an effective maneuver unit in the Army by just listening to the radio. Are there communications going straight up and down? Or is the majority of their conversations, is it going horizontally

across the organization. So it's who else needs to know? The other big question in there was, where are the opportunities and how do we exploit them? You know, a lot of bad things happen in combat, right? A lot of bad things happen in life. Sure.

But if you look at what happens and say, okay, well, how do I turn this to my advantage, right? How do I bend this situation back to our goals and objectives? And then finally, the question was, how do we retain and exploit the initiative? Because you don't want to let up, right? You never want to become complacent.

And so you have this conditioning of a unit to take initiative, I think is immensely important. You actually mentioned this in the book, Battlegrounds, which, by the way, I listened to it in audio and it was like 19 hours. What is that in pages? 400 or something, 500 pages. Right. Yeah, I think something like that. Yeah. That's including notes, though. Yeah. It's a page turner, Jordan, I'm telling you. Well, I read the whole thing. It was a long weekend, but it was a good one. Yeah. You mentioned in the book, Battlegrounds, which will link in the show notes, that going back to what you were saying, exploiting the initiative, we run the risk of are not doing this in Iraq and Afghanistan,

where we're kind of like, okay, we did this big surge and we got them on their back foot, now let's get everybody out of here and go home. And it's like, wait, no, this is, if they're down, this is when you pin them. You don't go, okay, well, let's wait for them to get back up, rest, have some water, get a meal in, get a good night's sleep, and then pounce back up on us.

Like, that's kind of what we're doing with the enemy over there from the sound of it. Right. And what I argue is that one of the reasons why these wars have been longer than it, anticipated and frustrating is we took these short-term approaches toward the long-term problems. We think unrealistically a lot of times about war because we're biased toward thinking about change over continuity.

Right. Hey, we've got this new nifty technology. That's going to make war fast, cheap, efficient. Well, actually, there are a lot of continuities in war that you have to consider. I mean, war's an extension of politics and I'll write about these in the conclusion, right? So you have to get to a sustainable political outcome. So to your point, Jordan, you know, the consolidation of military gains to get to those political outcomes, it's not like an optional phase in war. It's something we've always had to do.

The second factor is that, you know, war is human. People fight for the same reasons that lucidity's identified 2,500 years ago, fear, honor, and interest. And so if you're not addressing the drivers of conflict, you're just treating the symptoms and you're going to perpetuate that conflict. It's going to go on longer than necessary. war's uncertain because as I mentioned already this this interaction with your adversaries that makes the future course of events more anything but linear and then finally wars it is a contest of wills it really requires you convincing your enemy that your enemy has been defeated right and when you're saying hey you know I'm just going to take the George Costanza approach to war you know and and leave on a high note right your your enemy's going to say well I'll just wait these guys out right so I think really making sure that you you consider continuity as well as change when confronting really any kind of complex problem, but especially war, I think is very important. Why do we keep fighting?

I think you said this on 60 minutes a few days ago. We'll link to that video on the show notes. If it's up online, I don't know if it is. I downloaded it in a way that I don't think you can normally do. But I'll leave it at that. But you said on 60 minutes that we keep fighting a one-year war, what is it, 20 times, 20 years in Afghanistan? We're up to 19 now, almost 20, right?

So is that because, and I'm not asking you to assign blame necessarily, but is that because military leaders are like, this is going to be over? Because y'all should know better, right? Or is this politicians going, hey, look, get it done yesterday and let's just get it done as fast as possible, so I don't have to hear about it when I'm campaigning again. Well, you know, it's a combination of both, Jordan. So in the 1990s, after we were flushed with the victory in the Gulf War, right, and the tremendous technological military prowess. And so there was this assumption that grew over time associated with this idea of a revolution in military affairs. People were calling the RMA, right? The future war was going to be fast, cheap, and efficient, waged mainly kind of at

standoff range. And so in Afghanistan, it worked to an extent because we empowered Afghan militias with our tremendous air power, with tremendous special operations forces and with intelligence officers. And they defeated the Taliban regime in terms of driving them out of Kabul. But what they didn't do. What they couldn't do is consolidate gains. And then, of course, we turned our attention to Iraq. Then there was a surge in Afghanistan under President Obama, but he announced the withdrawal of those troops at the same time as the reinforcement. So, I mean, I could go on about this, but essentially it was a combination of military and civilian leaders who didn't really maybe understand fully what needed to happen, or there wasn't the will necessary to commit the effort over that amount of time

and at that level of effort. You mentioned that strategic empathy was one of the weapons. Can you give an example of that one in the book is from Iran where we just maybe don't quite understand what the enemy wants at all? Right. What we tend to kind of rush to what we would like to do, right? So our strategies sometimes are based on what the purveyor prefers rather than what the situation demands.

In Iran, if there's a pattern to U.S. policy toward Iran since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, it is that a belief in a conciliatory approach to Iran and that will affect a change not only in the behavior of the Iranian regime, but in the regime's very nature. Well, it hasn't panned out. And that's because we undervalue the way that the revolutionary ideology drives that regime. And we pay attention instead, you know, to the shop window of the regime, which is typically the president, right?

And so we think in the 1990s, this guy Hattami comes in after the Kobart towers bombing that kills 17 American airmen. And President Clinton was thinking about, well, I wonder if we ought to strike Iran and try to restore a degree of deterrence in this proxy war. They're fighting against us. But there's a new president coming in. The guy's a librarian. He must be much nicer than the other guy. But he's the shop window for the regime. The regime is the supreme leader who is driven by that revolutionary ideology and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who are the protectors of the revolution and whose coulds force exports the revolution and it's really sustained campaign against the great Satan, the United States, the little Satan, Israel, and the Arab monarchies.

And so what I argue for in the book is, hey, we have to just base our strategy toward Iran, our policy toward Iran, on the reality that this regime is permanently hostile to us unless there's a transformation really from within. That's going to be up to the Iranian people. But our policies should be based on not on wishful thinking about the regime, but the reality of what drives the regime. Yeah, it seems kind of crazy. And look, I'm no expert on international affairs. I'm a freaking podcaster. But like, from my whole life has been the 80s. I was born in 1980s. So that was sort of defined by my mom telling me when I was very little about the hostage crisis. And I was like, how do we have people stuck in a house in another hostile country for over a year? How is this even possible? We have all the allies in the world. And then now that I'm older, I'm like, we have this crazy religious theocracy who nonstop on their own television and media, talk about destroying the West entirely and turning the rest of the world into a theocratic crap pile like the one that they're controlling. They have numerous internal revolutions that they put down brutally because the people of Iran don't want to live under them either. And then every year, it's like, well, let's just buy some more time while they try to get nuclear weapons. What's the

worst thing that can happen? And everyone, I feel like a lot of us who I think are just maybe oversimplifying it, but I'd like to think have a little bit of sense are going, what are you doing? You're just going to wait until they have weapons like North Korea, and then we're just going to pray that they don't use them, even though they're shipping Hezbollah and terrorist organizations, as many weapons as they can get their hands on by the truckload. We're going to wait out their nuclear ambition? What are we doing? Why? Right. Well, I think what you're alluding to is this tendency toward mirror imaging, and this is one of the features that I write about in connection with this idea of strategic narcissism, right? We just kind of assume, well, they're going to behave the same way we would behave. And I wrote a book

on Vietnam years ago, titled Derelliction of Duty. And it's about how and why Vietnam became an American war. And what was extraordinary about that story, I think, one of the elements of it, is how this mirror imaging affected the Americanization of the war in Vietnam. And in particular, the assumption that Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese communist leadership in Hanoi would respond just the way we would to our actions. In fact, one of the memoranda that came out of the Pentagon around that time talked about Ho Chi Minh being like the Rehman being like the Rehabilis. reasonable man in English common law. Well, he wasn't, right? He was driven, you know, by a nationalist and a communist ideology that defied, you know, really what our calculations were based on

the reasonable man of English common law. Yeah, I think we make this mistake a lot. I often hear arguments like, oh, well, Kim Jong-un or Kim Jong-il or whoever we're talking about at the time, I guess Kim Jong-un now, of course, is going to be rational. He's going to react rationally to whatever we're doing, but it's not even the right kind of rational. It's like we're thinking, well, he's going to do what's best for his country and this and that and the other thing. It's like, no, you're talking about a despot who's in power at all costs, the cost of his own people, murders his own family members with cannons. He's not going to react rationally. It's like telling yourself that your cat is going to react rationally or your two-year-old's going to

react rationally. Why would they do that? They're not looking at long-term consequences. They're just trying to hold on to the next day so they don't die. And what you could say is it's a different form of rationality, right? You could say, you know, Kim Jong-un is a rational person based on how he calculates his interest and makes his decisions. And as you mentioned, he's driven, mainly by how do I keep the Kim family regime in power, right? This is the only hereditary communist dictatorship in history, right? And, you know, he doesn't want to be the one to let it go, right? He's the third in line. Well, also, there's probably no safe place on Earth for somebody like that because even if he negotiated a treaty with half the world and said, look, leave me alone,

I'm going to go live in privacy in Panama like the Shah of Iran did in the 80s or something like that. Someone's going to go find that guy and that's going to be the end of it. He has too many enemies over too long of a period of time. I mean, even if it's just the North Korean people, they're going to trample him to death. They get half a chance. Right. And those in his network, too, right? It's the kind of criminalized patronage network that he's created around him. And so this ruling class is fearful, right? They're fearful of any kind of the North Koreans deciding at one point, hey, well, maybe I should have a say in how I'm governed. You know, maybe I should end this corrupt, brutal dictatorship that is just, you know, wringing the life out of the country. I mean,

it has starred, millions of their own people. It seems like there's no win for them, because even the elite in that country are people that probably make the equivalent of 50,000, maybe half that U.S. dollars per year. They can't go live in Monaco or Panama. for the rest of their lives, if they call it quits over there. They will be eaten alive. So they're holding a wolf by the years over there. I think what's changed a little bit in North Korea, one of the factors that are bringing out in the book is this, there is kind of a new class there. It's kind of an emerging, a middle class, a privileged class in Pyongyang. And it's not clear how they're going to react when they start really, really feeling the pinch of maximum pressure

and these unprecedented UN sanctions have been placed, thank goodness, I mean, based on large measure on Nikki Haley's Herculean efforts there when she was our ambassador to the UN. So if we can actually get those sanctions enforced, I think there's a chance maybe that we can test this thesis that Kim Jong-un can be convinced that his regime is safer without these weapons than he is with them. Yeah, that's a good point. Because I think as soon as you get a, I guess, critical mass of people that realize that the only way they're not going to starve to death is to walk across a frozen river to China and smuggle in and rice and other food, they're going to realize that something is wrong, especially when those people start to see the outside world, which is inevitable.

I mean, even getting information in is tough. But if you have a cousin whose job it is to go to China every week and smuggle food and goods in and out, they're going to tell you, hey, there are dog bulls with more food than we've seen on any holiday on the floor in China. Right. You know, there's something wrong with our government. I cite this book by Lonkov called The Real North Korea, and I used it heavily as I was writing and the Chabber. It's really well done. And the guy's one of the most foremost experts. And what was, I think, neat about what he said. You talked about how the, you know, the moon government, South Korean government is really anxious, you know, to remove the minefields and barriers between

North and South. And the point that Lankoff makes is, hey, the main barrier is psychological, right? These are people who have been conditioned that you can't even have an independent thought. So he thinks, as you're alluding to, what is most important is to give them access to information, and get them to begin to have their own thoughts. And that's the psychological barrier, the mental barrier that is going to be, I think, most important when eventually the peninsula unifies, right? That's going to be the biggest obstacle, I think.

Yeah, it seems like it almost will happen from within the military. The South will end up getting some communication through a lot of effort and a lot of back-channeling that says, hey, all that artillery that's aimed at you, we're not going to fire that thing, but we need you to come in and figure this out

because it's so much, I mean, it's going to cost, what, three trillion to develop the north. And that's just to build, what, roads and electrical infrastructure, and it's not going to bring it up to snuff in the South. That's going to take two generations, probably to do something like that. Yeah, a lot of your listeners have probably seen this, you know, this nighttime satellite image of North Korea. You know what, actually, it's a very sad situation in the North, but, you know, we ought to feel pretty good about what the situation looks like in the South, right? Yeah. Because, you know, at the end of the Korean War, and this is one of the

arguments on making the book, about no short-term solutions to long-term problems. The situation in South Korea, it looked pretty bleak in 1953, right? You had a country that was devastated by decades of war, a brutal occupation, the country had been stripped of, you know, really any tree, you know, had no raw materials, it had an illiterate population and a hostile neighbor, right? Who's going to sign up for that program? But we did, right? And the country didn't make rapid progress, really, even until the 70s, late 70s, and the 80s, the reforms of the 80s is when, man, it really took off, right? Now, the Korean people deserve the credit for that. I mean, the South Koreans, you know, a friend of mine was a Catholic priest and a chaplain,

Father Vince Burns, one of the greatest guys in the world, Philadelphia, and, you know, he said, yeah, when I look at South Korea, I just think, man, after the war, they started rebuilding and didn't even take a coffee. Yeah. because they are an incredibly industrious and entrepreneurial people. But all that's been stifled in the North, right? What's the different? It's the same people north of the 38th parallel. But the people north of the 30th parallel have just been subjected to this totalitarian, brutal regime.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, General H.R. McMaster. We'll be right back. And now back to H.R. McMaster on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I actually, I've been to North Korea a few times on tours and things like that, and you see a lot of people there that are really intelligent. I've heard sort of, I guess you would call it, not locker room talk, what's the word I'm looking for? Like, kind of like when you're going to the bathroom and you're like, so, what's it really like? You know, there's guys that have told me things like, we just want to be normal, man. All this Kim Jong Il, all this Kim Jong-and stuff.

A lot of people think it's pretty stupid, but we just don't want to get in trouble. And then you leave the bathroom and it's like, yeah, sorry, I don't speak English, right? I mean, it's interesting to hear that kind of thing, because it's not that everyone thinks that way, but there's certainly an educated middle slash higher class where they just go, this is the dumbest thing in the world. I've been to China. I went on a business trip. I know they have electricity after 9 p.m. unlike us. Right.

What the North Korean regime has done is, you know, they've done really not as sophisticated as China has from a technological perspective, but they've weaponized people's social networks, right? So they have informants spread out, like within every village. And, you know, if they're suspected of saying a crossword against the regime, they just disappear and go into these gulags or worse yet, they're killed. You know, so it's really, it's a humanitarian kind of catastrophe there in the North. And it's worth calling that out. You know what I'm a little bit disappointed in these days. And, you know, I've got to talk some more of my South Korean friends about it.

South Korea seems like they're not as supportive of some of the escapees from the North as they passed. And I don't understand that. You know, I think that the right answer is to welcome them, right? Give them a jump start. you know, as entrepreneurs in the South and help them with education, right? Because if and when that peninsula, you know, comes back together, they're going to need a cadre of people who can go, can go up to the North. Yeah. And can help rebuild what is becoming a more and more kind of destitute, but, you know, dangerous place, right? Because, you know, the Kim regime, they make

a choice where the resources go and they haven't been cutting back on the missile program or the nuclear program or the military broadly. Yeah, it's scary. I used to live in the former East Germany. That was a reunification process. That was markedly different because it was just like, hey, we're all the same people. Get the cranes out. Let's build up the city of Berlin and then go and clean out all these old chemical factories and sell them to Dow and have them modernized. North Korea is starting from like 50 years behind where East Germany was and probably a lot more of a cultural barrier because at least in East Germany they knew who Pink Floyd was and had Bon Jovi records. But in North Korea, it's like just a complete wall. Right. It's what you see some of the

the latest tensions between north and south about, right? Some of these groups that have been sending information into the north via balloon, right? This is what really has Pyongyang up in arms. It's why they blew up the building that was supposed to help coordinate between north and south. And, you know, really, that's, I think what they see is the greatest threat to them, right? Is any kind of information that the regime does not directly control? Going back sort of to the macro level, you talk about integrated strategies. So not only mapping out strategies of of combat or of relations, but also the emotions and ideology behind other nations and their actions. We're kind of touching on this right now with North Korea. You mentioned as well with

Iran. Is somebody actually doing that or was there just something you recommend? And it's like your office does it, but other people are kind of going, eh, we don't need that. We just need invasion plans. No, we actually did. Right. And what's really important about, to understand about the National Security Council staff is that that national security council was developed after World War two on the beginning of the Cold War, kind of to avoid another Pearl Harbor, right? That was one of the big lessons of Pearl Harbor is, you know, this one agency knew this, but the other did know. It was also a lesson of 9-11, you know, in the 9-11 commission and the establishment of the director of national intelligence. Whatever you think of that decision, I mean, that was a,

it was an adaptation meant to avoid that ever happening again. But what these sort of failures that we view, at least we understand better, at least in retrospect, always highlight is a lack of coordination and integration between departments and agencies. You could say that about the COVID response, too, is that some of the biggest disappointments in our ability to generate a, you know, biomedical response to the crisis, it was really having to do with lack of coordination and integration across the government. The NSC staff is where that's the only place I think can happen in the government, right? Because you could appoint like health and human services, hey, lead a group of whatever. But, you know, those other departments don't work for that department,

right? They all work for the White House overall. And whereas the national security advisors should never direct anything, what the national security advisors should do is run a process. that results in the best analysis, this interdisciplinary analysis we talked about at the beginning of our conversation, but then it also results in these integrated strategies where we can combine the elements of national power. We have so many competitive advantages as the United States to be able to integrate our diplomatic efforts, our economic efforts, our financial efforts, informational efforts, and then military as well, but intelligence. We have law enforcement, right? We can bring so many tools to bear, and especially if you extend that to our private sector,

where there's so much potential. And then if you extend it even further to our like-minded partners and allies internationally, I mean, we can do this. We can overcome these challenges. And I think oftentimes we just don't think clearly enough about how to integrate those elements so that they're synergistic, or at least maybe not in conflict with each other, right? If we can just get everybody pulling in the same direction. And then what you do is you develop a high level strategy, right? You're not going to tell, you know, the Department of State how to do things or defense or anything for the White House. It's not useful. But you should identify, you know, where are the areas where the departments have to work together? What are the important simultaneous actions and initiatives and programs

and operations that are to be conducted and what are sequential, right? How do we build on each other? And then once you have that strategy, you got to be flexible, right? I mean, you know, the world changes, right? Your adversaries react. But without that strategy, when something happens, you know, what I've seen in government a lot of times, at the high levels especially, our government then just reacts to that event. Oh, look, what happened, an attack against us, or a Curtis referendum in Iraq, or, you know, fill in the blank. But if you have a strategy, you can say, oh, wow, you know,

we didn't think that was going to happen. But how do we bend or torque that event, so we can make progress toward our objectives, right? How we can overcome obstacles to progress or exploit opportunities. So I think strategies, you know, are never just written in stone. And like you call it a day, hey, yeah, we're done. problem solved, but without a strategy, you're just reactive, right? And you're, I think, much less effective at being able to advance your interests. From the outside looking in, and especially

from reading your book, correct me if I'm wrong, I came away with the impression that China certainly has a strategy. They've integrated their private companies because every company's essentially owned by the Communist Party in large part. And also Russia slash Vladimir Putin, because he's the only one pulling the strings over there, has a strategy. But the U.S., like you said, seems to be reacting. Meanwhile, Putin's like, good, okay, I'm going to take that move that piece over here and I'm going to do this and then China's doing the same thing all around the world and the U.S. is kind of like juggling and then China throws us a chainsaw and we're juggling that and Putin throws us a grenade, we're juggling that. But nobody's going like,

hey, what's the plan for putting all these things down and then us moving forward with what we need to do? Well, that's what we endeavor to do. And I believe that's what we produced, Jordan. So for your listeners, I'd recommend the highly readable December 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States. this for President Trump. And I mean, I think it's a solid document. You know, I mean, I don't know who's going to win the election. I think whoever does, that document is going to stand the test of time. And it reflects really us putting into place some long overdue and important shifts in our approach to these complex challenges. In particular, I think that the approach toward China. We do have a strategy now. You often hear, oh, well, you know, the Trump administration is doing X and Y and Z,

but they don't have a strategy. Well, you know, X, Y, and Z, actually that amounts to a strategy. we are protecting our industry and our research and development from China's sustained campaign of industrial espionage, that's a good thing. If we're simultaneously investing more so we can maintain our technological advantages in connection with the emerging data economy, as well as from a best perspective, that's a good thing too. If we are indicting and calling out APT10, their main hacking organization, and we're doing it with 12 other countries simultaneously, that sounds good to me. If we're promoting transparent standards in infrastructure investment internationally, if we are conducting armed sales to the Taiwanese so they can deter China from forcibly subsuming Taiwan into the mainland.

When you look at broadly, the broad range of efforts, it is a strategy. It's pretty clear. And I think that whoever's elected in November will continue it. I think it's really important, Jordan, foreign policy. This is one of the reasons I wrote the book is, you know, it should be controversial. Like if you're, when we were attacked on 9-11, you know, Al-Qaeda didn't target Democrats or Republicans, right? They targeted Americans. And so it's, we need to come together on these challenges relevant to foreign policy and national security and work together. And as you mentioned, you know, these autocratic regimes, they can have a consistent long-term policy, right?

They can announce, you know, China's made in China 2025, right? Right. Or by 2050, you know, the Chinese Communist Party will have reached X, right? But we have to strive to do better because it seems like in this partisan environment we're in, you know, the new administration comes in and says, hey, what do my predecessor do? Oh, I'll do the opposite. Undo that. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think our divisions domestically right now are one of the greatest threats to our national security? Absolutely, George. They are. And our adversaries are doing everything they can to exploit them. I mean, Russia is masterful at this, you know. People talk about

meddling in the election in 2016. That was part of it. The election meddling was part of a campaign that was designed mainly to drive us apart from each other and pit us against each other on really the three main issues, right, number one, like 80% of the Russian bot and troll traffic from this IRA, this internet research, yeah, right, was on race. Then a distant second, you know, were issues of immigration, gun control, and so forth. We can be our own worst enemies unless we come together as Americans. And I hope we can restore confidence, you know, in who we are and in our democratic principles and institutions and processes. Do you think we kind of slept after the Cold War ended, the USSR falls?

There's no more authoritarian superpowers, but we just think, all right, liberal democracy, capitalism, we win, pack up all the tanks or whatever, we're good now. And then it's like Vladimir Putin goes, all right, they are sleeping. They think they've won, start screwing with them. I mean, that's what it looks like from my perspective. Right. You know, I tell these stories in the introduction of the book, you know, that I bore witness to this growing confidence, right? Because, you know, our regiment was patrolling the East

West German border the day that East Germany lifted travel restrictions to the West, right? And so that was a time of great jubilation, right? And celebration. And it should have been. We won the Cold War without firing a shot, right? The Soviet Union collapsed. And so that was a boost to us. And then our same regiments deployed to a hot war in the Gulf War and demonstrate our ability to overmatch Saddam Hussein's military. Then I think that led to a period of complacency based on that overconfidence in the 90s. And that overconfidence was in many ways it was a setup, right? It was a setup, I think, for some of the disappointments of the early 2000s, not just the 9-11 attacks, but also the unanticipated length and difficulties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I read about how our confidence was shaking even more, you know, by the 2008 financial crisis. It's time for us, I think, to get away from this kind of dramatic swing, you know, from what was over-optimism and maybe hubris, right, to pessimism and, like, resignation, maybe as we looked foreign policy. Like, how was something in the middle? And that's really what the book is an argument for. It seems like Putin and our enemies in general played a pretty poor hand well, and the U.S. and Europe played a really great hand pretty poorly. That's a very broad, I realized. But would you agree with that? I mean, it seems like we had everything we needed. And Putin was like, well, this is all I got, went all in, and we just didn't react until now. Yeah. And you know,

you can get a lot done if you're absolutely unscrupulous. Right. Putin knows he's in a position of relative weakness, right? The trends aren't in his favor, especially now. 2020 has been a bad year for everybody, right? Yeah. It's been a really bad year for Vladimir Putin, right? It's supposed to be a big year for him. He was supposed to have a big celebration of the victory in the great Patriotic War of World War II. He was supposed to actually celebrate his extension in power with changes to the Constitution until 2036. But of course, what hit him, you know, a pandemic, like it hit all of us. What else hit him? Collapse of oil prices, right? The demographic trends

in the country are not good. Their economy is the size of Italy's or Texas's economy. What does Putin do? He says, okay, if I can't be on top, I'm going to drag everybody else down. Yeah. That's what he's been doing. He pictures himself as the last man standing in Europe because everything he's doing to us, he's done it earlier in many ways more intensely to Europeans, right?

To divide European countries from each other and also to divide communities within each European country, pit them against each other. Again, it's his effort to drag everyone. everybody down. It's a very Russian thing to do, and I don't mean that against Russian people. I mean, there's this, in fact, I think most Russians will agree with this. There's this story, and I always get it wrong, but it's a farmer has one cow and his neighbor has two cows, and then he gets a wish or something like that, and he goes, okay, great, kill one of my neighbor's cows. Like, not give me 15 cows, kill one of my neighbor's cows. There's different variations of this, too, right?

Like, a guy loses an eye, and his enemy has both of his eyes, and he goes, oh, poke both that guy's eyes out when he gets a wish. And it's not just a Russian thing, but these are like parables. in Russian history that go well before, probably back through even the time of the Tsar, these things were existing. Right. I tell the Russian peasant story. I mean, I got to give full credit to my colleague at Stanford, Catherine Stoner, who told me the two cows story.

And I use in the book, it is a perfect metaphor, right? I mean, Putin wants to kill our cow. And so let's not let him do it, right? Let's not be our worst enemies on this. What do you think about countries like Germany making these huge multibillion-dollar, is it a natural gas pipeline, basically is going to make Germany massively dependent on Russia. It seems like a terrible idea. I wouldn't want to buy a key part of my infrastructure from North Korea or Iraq. In Iraq, for all intents of purposes, at least a friendly country or not outright hostile. It seems like

the worst idea ever. I just don't understand it. It's a terrible idea. And, you know, President Trump, I mean, he's been tough on Germany, you know, and I love Germany. I mean, I lived there for six and a half years, you know. I love Chancellor Merkel. I think the world of her. One of my best colleagues as National Security Advisor was Christoph Beiskin of Germany. We worked extremely well together. But Germany has to step up at this stage, right? I mean, I think they may be on the cusp of doing it. I hope so because I think they're seeing how aggressive China's been.

And they're also seeing with the poisoning of Navalny, Putin's main political adversary with this Novichuk nerve agent and then landing in Germany for medical care. I mean, I think more evidence do you need. So I think what Germany could really do is step up on defense spending, right? They spend only like 1% of their GDP. And we had this European deterrence initiative where we're spending about $9 billion a year more defense-wise to rotate our forces to Germany. Hey, that's like 33% of like Germany's defense budget.

How about stepping up? And the other thing is, as you mentioned, Nord Stream 2, you know, the gas pipeline. I think it's a no-brainer. The other thing is there's a good sourcing of that gas now, certainly through Ukraine, which could be disadvantaged if that pipeline. line was shut down, but also now the U.S. is a big exporter. Could be a huge exporter of liquid natural gas, which, by the way, is great for the environment relative to other fossil fuels. It's a bridge to get the renewables. Germany and the energy sector, man, they made a mistake, right? They made a mistake.

They said, okay, we're going to go to 100 percent renewables. And then they said, we're not going to do any nuclear. Well, I mean, you can't do that. That's not going to work. It's not going to fuel economy. So this is one of the reasons why they're on a path to becoming overly dependent on Russia. And the bad part is, you know, Russia will use that energy to coerce Germany. Of course. Yeah. Doing that already, you know, internationally. So you're making a really important point, Jordan. I think that, you know, it's time now, really. This is why the subtitle of the book is, you know, the fight to defend the free world. Okay. So hey, free world. Yeah. Let's work together. Let's work together on these problems. Yeah, it seems like in so many ways. And the

United States also has been doing this to a certain extent. So I don't mean to pick on Germany. I've got family there. I used to live there as well. I love the place. That's why I worry about it. I also worry about Russia because I think the people are amazing. And I think you mentioned this in the book, we need more immigration from Russia. We need more immigration from China, not only because we can force a brain drain on those countries, but because we, who doesn't want the best people, some of the best people in the world to come and live in the United States and work in the United States? I always like to highlight these because inevitably when I do this, I get emails from

Germany, Russia, China. They're like, hey, man, why you such a jerk? Why don't, why do you hate us? And it's not. No, I want the people to live in a society where they don't get put in the equivalent of a gulag because they sneezed in the wrong direction, and their family has upward mobility because it's not just a crony-based corrupt economy where only friends of Vladimir and his buddies can get jobs. We want that to change. Right. You know, Jordan, you know, it's a great

example. And I use this in the book as well as, is when Tiananmen Square Massacre happened in 1989, President George H.W. Bush said, hey, if you're a Chinese student studying the United States, you get a green card. You can stay here. And, you know, tens of thousands of Chinese students took them up on it. And you know, there's some of our most productive greatest citizens these days, right? So, I mean, what if we were to say, hey, if you are a Chinese employee of an American company in China and you and your family are subjected to the coercion of the party come to the United States? We'll give you a special benefit parole visa. I mean, I think that turns the tables. And that's always been our strength, right? I mean, think about, you know, the great minds

that fled the Holocaust and came to the United States. Yeah. I mean, and who really were the foundation, many of them, for the technological advantages we've enjoyed in the 20th century. There are so many stories of, we're a country of immigrants. And when you hear the discourse on immigration, everybody's always talking about who we don't want. You know, what are we just talking about, like, who we do want, right?

I mean, do you buy into individual freedom to our democratic form of government? Are you a tolerant person, you know, tolerant of religion and sexual orientation? I mean, do you respect others, right? Do you believe in rule of law? Do you believe that if you work hard in our free market economic system, you can make a better life for you and your children and grandchildren? Hey, if the answer to those questions are yes, come on, you know, join us. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, General H.R. McMaster. We'll be right back.

Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us going. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you've just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors for yourself, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes as well at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of our episode with General H.R. McMaster. Speaking of education, it seems like education is our best defense against things like manipulation, especially online, which we're dealing with right now, going back to what you were

talking about with Russia and Vladimir Putin, these disinformation campaigns. Does the military ever come out and say, hey, if we didn't have so many uneducated knuckleheads, we might be better able to defend ourselves, because it seems like y'all are being quiet over there. Like, we need to, what's going on? This is obviously a huge problem, and people go, oh, education, you know, we need to read up on this. It's more than that, though. Like, we really need a national effort to improve our education system. I went to a public school as a kid, and it was a good one, and I remember thinking, this is pretty bad, you know, and that was in the 80s and 90s. Now it's worse, and it's the majority of our education seems like is in the hands of parents, especially with the COVID

thing and the homeschooling. I got lawyers friends over here teaching fractions and they're like, help me. What are we doing? We have to demand real reform, right? And my mom taught for over 30 years in inner city Philadelphia was just an amazing educator and sensitized me to it from an early age on how it's the most important factor in determining what it's going to be successful. Your family is as well, obviously. But I think it's time to really demand real reforms, you know. And if teachers unions are are an obstacle, we've got to tell them, hey, you can't instruct perform anymore. Unions have a purpose, but some of these unions have gone beyond their purpose because they're defenders of mediocrity. They're defenders of really the soft bigotry of low expectations. Now, I think school choice is a way

out of this potentially. We need a combination of policy remedies and we need to demand it. This is why I hope that, you know, there is a period of introspection that follows these triple crises of, you know, the pandemic, the recession, the divisions in our society, bear by the horrible murder of George Floyd and then the anger over inequality of treatment and inequality of opportunity in our country. Okay, let's roll up our sleeves and do something about it and have meaningful discussions based on facts, real facts, you know, instead of, I mean, defund the police? Come on. Is that could have been helpful in terms of security in our cities? And we're seeing right now the lunacy of that now and how it's actually inflicting more suffering on our most

vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. Right. So what we need, and I, I, I, This is the argument I make on climate change as well. We don't have any more time for non-solutions. We need real solutions for these problems. Do you think climate change is a huge threat? I know the book mentions this as well, and you talked about it on 60 minutes. I think a lot of people go, well, if you think climate change is such a big deal, why leave the Paris Accords? And you made an interesting point on that, and I would love for you to take us through that.

Because when we left the Paris Accords, I thought, okay, officially we just don't care anymore. But you have a good counterpoint. Well, Jordan, I mean, I argued for us to stay in it. I didn't see the downside. But of course, there are those who argue, hey, listen, these goals that we signed up to that can put us at a significant disadvantage. But what really, when I revised my assessment of it was really after the fact, after we were out, I thought, you know what, it may be a good thing that we left because the Paris Accord was giving us a false sense of security. Climate change is a problem. It is manmade and we can do something about it. But the Paris Accord is not the right thing because it gives the biggest polluters in the world the ability to continue to poison the earth. And what we need is we need solutions. to this problem that are economically feasible globally, including in developing economies.

And this is where I'm really excited about some of the new technologies. Renewables are going to be much more affordable. But look at what happened in the United States. We reduced our carbon emissions way beyond what everybody thought was possible. And it happened by really an unanticipated development called fracking, which gave then us access to a vast amount of natural gas, drove the price to natural gas down and then incentivized the transition out of coal to natural gas. That's what did it. So that's the kind of change we need internationally. Other promising technologies that I cover in the book are, you know, the next generation nuclear power, for example. But there are people who say climate change is really bad, but I don't like nuclear and we have to go immediately off of fossil fuels. Well, you know,

what economic impact is that going to have? Yeah, we're going to be running on hamster wheels, so keep the lights on. Exactly. So it gets to this point of, you know, no more non-solutions. Let's have real solutions. Yeah, when the consequences of inaction are left to future generations, inaction will rule the day. And I can't remember if you said something like that in the book or if it just came to me in an inspiration, but it makes sense. I mean, if we're just sort of like praying that Gen Z figures this out, what are we going to do? We're going to sit here and burn coal. Right. And we owe it to ourselves. We owe it to future generations to get to work on it, but get to work, as I mentioned, in a realistic way. And really, whatever we come up with, it has to be adopted in China, in India,

and across developing economies in Africa and beyond, you know, or else it's not going to solve the problem because obviously carbon emissions, right? They don't respect countries' borders. The carbon cloud over L.A. has its origins in China, right? And so we have to recognize that. My family in Germany sent me a photo of a red sunrise, and I said, oh, that's what it looks like out here or a couple weeks ago. And he said, yeah, it's the smoke from Silicon Valley blowing over on the jet stream. And that's from a forest fire. Imagine something that lasts 20 years instead of two weeks. I mean, of course, it's going to blow everywhere. We saw that with Shernoble. I think that was people's first sort of experience of, wait, you mean the Soviet Union can make a big bungle and it can

end up in Germany and Poland and Finland? Like, oh, maybe we should pay attention. Maybe we need to work together on this. When do you think we're going to see conflict over things like water and food security? That has to be right around the corner. Well, it's, and it's already happening in some places, right? And I use the example of South Asia and India in particular. And I think what's important about these problems is they're interconnected, right? So you have interconnected problems of energy, environments, and there's also climate change associated with that, then food security, water security, and health security, right? These are all interconnected. And what happens, I think oftentimes is we say, okay, let's solve like one of those problems, right? And when you do that,

you create a ripple effect that makes other problems worse than they were, right? So for example, if food security is an issue and you just divert water into agriculture, then you, you create a crisis in potable water, right, for your population. So I could go on with examples, but it's key to look at these systemically. And I think, you know, it's in all of our interest. India has to succeed, right? I mean, you know, India is a big country with a lot of people, right? If there's a failure in India, it's going to affect all of us.

And India is a democracy. It works in kind of a, you know, kind of a strange way. But it works. And I think that we ought to work together with India as really an example, maybe, that could be then adopted more broadly, hopefully by China. especially associated with these interconnected problems. A lot of people think that action by the United States creates Islamic extremism, a hostile Russia, a hostile North Korea, an antagonist China.

Oliver Stone made this argument on the show, hey, if we just minded our own business, these people have better things to do than bother us. They're just trying to handle their own business. I don't buy that for a second, but can you set us straight on this? Because you're in a better place to say whether or not action by the United States is creating these enemies or if they were there before. Well, Jordan, just think about how arrogant that is, right? So it's just like, this is like, you know, this is an interpretation, you know, that is

a historical, but it's also profoundly arrogant because, you know, what we're saying is, hey, others, they have no aspirations of their own. They only react to what we do, right? They have no authorship over the future. And so it's crazy. We didn't cause jihadist terrorism. We didn't cause the Iranian revolution and therefore the 40-year-long proxy war. against us. You often hear this on Russia, you know, that we were just so mean to Russia.

No, we weren't, but we did everything we could at the time to help Russia make that transition from the Soviet Union to a representative government and a free market economic system. It didn't work, right? It just didn't work. And China, you hear the same argument, too, you know, gosh, if the Trump administration wasn't so mean, then China wouldn't be much better and played by the rules. Really, how's that working out with COVID-19, with Wolf-Weirer diplomacy, with bludgeoning Indian soldiers to death on the Himalayan frontier, with unprecedented cyber attacks across all sectors against Australia, you know, with a land grab in the South China Sea,

with repressing freedom in Hong Kong, with threatening Taiwan. Is the United States making them do that? I don't think so. Are we making them waged a campaign of cultural genocide in Xinjiang? I don't think so. So I think that it's a profoundly arrogant interpretation and it's typically used to justify retrenchment or withdraw from these complex problems.

overseas. But, you know, as we know with COVID-19, it's much better to deal with what the problem is over there, you know, abroad, before it gets to our shores, because then coping with it is usually at a much higher cost. And I think the pandemic's an analogy for that or an example of that, and so is 9-11. What do you think about folks who say, bring all the troops home, why don't we just stay out of everything else and become isolationist like America was before Pearl Harbor and World War II? because there are a lot of people that actually say things like that. Usually people that have friends and family in the surface. So I understand it.

They want their family and friends out of harm's way. I'm not blaming those people, but it is based on a flawed assumption that we can just like kind of unplug everything and that it's not our problem anymore. Well, you know, and I don't blame people who have this thought, you know, because of the frustrations, right, associated with the unanticipated length and difficulty

of the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And what the American people haven't heard from leaders enough is, hey, what's at stake? Why should they care? What's important about this conflict to them? And then what is the strategy, right? What are we doing, not just militarily, but diplomatically and informationally and economically and so forth to achieve an outcome consistent with our security and our interests at an

acceptable cost, right? That's what the American people deserve to hear. And I think they've only heard that on occasion in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. then oftentimes when we have had sound strategies in place, I think like the surge and the aftermath of the surge and really, I think, a win in Iraq, a very fragile and reversible win in Iraq and followed sadly by the complete withdrawal December of 2011. And then I think we had it in Afghanistan with President Trump in his August 2017 speech on South Asia strategy that again was abandoned prematurely. It's tough for me to see it. I think the stakes are high in these conflicts, but the American people

deserve better in terms of an explanation of, okay, so what? And then. then what's the strategy? Why is the United States seemingly behind on cyber warfare? Is it a matter of funding or are we actually really great at it, but it's not talked about as much because we don't get caught? Where do we stand with this? Because it seems very clear that this is where China and Russia are playing right now and probably in the future since they can't really combat us militarily or physically. What is it? What's the term kinetic warfare? They're just not up to snuff. They don't have carriers and force projection like we do. Are we behind on that or what? We're ahead. We're the best in the world. That's a relief. But there's no reason to be complacent, right? Because if you have an adversary

who's determined, right, to disrupt, to attack, you know, we have a big attack surface. You know, it's like, you can't shoot down every arrow that's coming in your system through a cyber attack, whether it's for the purpose of espionage or criminality or taking down critical infrastructure. So the critical part of this is, you know, good offense is a key part of a good defense. I think we've realized that, made some adaptations that are important. But then also we have to be cogniz of the fact that we're up against some very capable state actors. You know, Russia, China, obviously, Iran's getting better. North Korea is getting better. They all have different, like, kind of competitive advantages with each other, right? You know, Russia's really good

at cyber-enabled information warfare and a bunch of other offensive cyber capabilities. China is really, really good at cyber espionage, and they're getting better at other forms of disinformation and political subversion through cyberspace. You know, North Korea is really good at cybercriminality. That's a big moneymaker for them. And they're also good at retribution attacks against like Sony. Remember, on the realm? And then Iran has been good at destructive attacks, like against Saudi Aramco. They did a cyber attack.

They did that drone attack recently, but even before that, they did a cyber attack on Saudi Ramco. And they attacked our financial system that denied service for a period of time, which impelled us to make our defenses better. This is years ago. So we have to be a congressent of the range of state actors and how they're evolving. And this is a contest. I mean, Jordan, this is going on every day.

day, every day we have Americans in this fight every day. And we have to be cognizant of non-state actors now, too, who are trying to get these capabilities. And what's critical about that is, you know, you can deter a nation state, because you can hold something of value to them at risk. Right. But the non-state actor, it's harder to do that. And so I think that this is a big element of what I emphasize in the book is the need for us to really maintain our edge on this. But then also from a defensive perspective, you know, we need systems that can degrade gracefully, you know, that aren't vulnerable to. a catastrophic failure. And we held that in from the beginning, right?

I mean, if we're building sensitive technology with components from China, I mean, that's probably really stupid to do at this point, right? And so we have vulnerabilities associated with what people think like software and hacking. Hey, but there are hardware vulnerabilities, too. There are all sorts of vulnerabilities. And what these adversaries do is they look at your whole organization. They look at your whole person, your household. And they're just looking for points of entry.

They're like a burglar looking for the open windows. How do I get in? So we have to be much more security conscious than we've ever been. How do the United States competitors view us right now in general? Do they see us as weak? I mean, it seems like they do, but obviously you're the expert. No, I'll tell you, Jordan, I think they see us as weak right now. And I think they see what's going on in our country, the divisiveness, right?

The fact that we're driven apart from each other based on these divisions in our society, but what social media is doing to us by driving us apart with these algorithms to show you just more or more extreme information based on your credulctions, the fact that, you know, if you're of one political persuasion, you watch one TV network and somebody of a different political persuasion watches a different one, right? And so you're creating two different realities instead of really at least some kind of basis, right, for a common understanding and civil conversations across the political spectrum. We're doing this to ourselves, Jordan. We got to stop. We got to stop. And I think everybody has a role, right? We got to come together within our neighborhoods, within our communities.

I think it's possible. It should be possible to celebrate our democracy, to celebrate that, hey, we have a say in how we're governed, that we are committed to those ideals that are in the Declaration of Independence, that are in our Constitution. And we can still, we can go that far, but then we can recognize, hey, we're imperfect, right? This has always been a journey for us. After the revolution, we didn't resolve the greatest contradiction in our Constitution until almost 100 years later. with our most destructive war in history that resulted in the emancipation of four million slaves. Hey, that's good. You know, put that in the positive column. You know, but then you have the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow in the South. Okay, put that in the negative column. Then you have a long struggle for civil rights. You know, you have women suffered.

Well, imagine that. You know, women can vote and everything. That didn't come until the early 20th century. You have the civil rights movement. You have the dismantling of the legal basis for Jim Crow in the 60s. But hey, we're not high-fiving yet, right? We still have more work to do. So let's think about it.

Let's work together to really to make our republic better every day. And there are some who don't want to do that. They think that, hey, you can't even empathize. You're not even allowed to empathize with some people anymore. And it's a real tragedy. It's a real tragedy. Well, in closing, I want to just get this out of the way because I'm sure a lot of people were waiting for it and they're going to be disappointed.

I was pleasantly surprised. You didn't write a book that talked much at all about Donald Trump. It was just not there. It was a book that was about a world in disarray, what we're doing about it, the direction we need to go. I know this was obviously a conscious decision. Your publisher was probably really bummed that you didn't throw in any drama. I'm glad you did because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to have this conversation on the show because I typically avoid that stuff. But why did you choose that? You probably could have cashed out a nice fat check had you gone the other direction. Yeah, Jordan, I begin with the preface saying, this is the book that nobody wanted me to write, you know, and I really felt like it wouldn't be useful. I want to make a contribution to bringing Americans together to helping us cope with our most crucial challenges, right? There are plenty of tell-alls out there. There are plenty of palace entry books out there. And I hope that this book will be more substantive that will bring people together across the political spectrum to have meaningful discussions like, kind of like the one we had today, you know, and then use that as a basis for working together to overcome these challenges, to take advantage of opportunities. and just build, you know, a better future for generations to come. And then the other part about this tour is I certainly aren't for 34 years, you know. I've been studiously apolitical, right? I don't want to get drugged down into vitriolic partisan politics now, right? And so I hope that the book will transcend that for people, will help get us, you know, unmired from that. And then the other

aspect of this is, you know, I was in a position of privilege there. You know, what's unique about the National Security Advisor position is you're the only person within the foreign policy establishment who has the president as his or her only client, right? If during a president's tenure and National Security Advisor, they write to tell law, like what future president is going to ever trust their national security advisor? And by the way, I was in uniform at the time. Who's going to trust a senior military officer? So I think it would have been irresponsible for me to write, you know, kind of a tell law

or a palace entry. And this was more gratifying for me. I worked with a great team of research systems here at Stanford. It was part of my self-education as well. I mean, I really am grateful for the opportunity to have done it. I hope that your listeners judge it to have been worthwhile. And I really appreciate the opportunity to be with you. Yeah, this has been excellent.

And the book, don't think you got the gist of the book listening to this. It goes into Iran, China, Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq. Am I forgetting anything? There's probably more. Well, except that it's just super readable and fun. I know these are depressing topics, man. But what I want to say is, hey, it is a message of positive message, right? We can emerge from these challenges from COVID.

We can emerge stronger. And so, Jordan, thank you so much for the privilege of being with you. Yeah, this was really excellent. I really appreciate your time. Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for the opportunity to have really a full conversation on it, man. I mean, I felt like we would connect, man. I just like the pace of the conversation.

I mean, I really enjoyed it, George. Thanks a lot. Hopefully we can continue the conversation at some point and get together in person sometime. My pleasure. Have a great week. We'll talk soon. Take care. Bye. I've got some thoughts on this one. But before I get into that, here's a quick preview of my two-parter with Eric Aday. This is one of the craziest stories I've ever heard on this show. He was tricked into unknowingly smuggling opium into Pakistan, ends up in a prison. He's a stuntman, and he used a lot of his skills to survive against the police and other inmates. This story is just bananas.

Here's a quick bite from that one. Pakistan was just one of many bad things that happened to me in my life. I've had so many things happen and I just learned to get over it. You know, you get knocked down six times, you get up seven. And that's the only way I've ever known how to live. When I got out of the cab with the suitcases to leave Pakistan, the guy who was there was like, next time you come back, we'll show you around, we'll hook you up with some girls, you'll have a great time. And I'm humoring this guy.

I'm like, yeah, sure, next time I come back. I know for a fact I'm never coming back to Pakistan. Country sucks. That fucking country sucks. And I'm good at finding, like, good things that are everywhere. So it's early in the morning, and I go into Internet, I should know the partchers and this long line curving around the corner. I'm waiting in line and the line goes all the way up this wall to where there's customs tables.

And when the customs officer sees me and flags me because I'm about six inches taller than everyone, and I get brought to another room. Finally, the guy who asked me if there was narcotics in his suitcase comes in and he's holding these two sandwich-silled things. And his exact words to me is, what is this? And I said, I don't fucking know what it is. Yeah, sure. He says, this is all filmed. So why are you showing me this?

Because it came out of your suitcase. I felt like such a fucking idiot. Yeah, because I thought that the DEA was going to hook me up, you know, because they were going to see that I'm innocent. I truly thought those guys were going to be there to help me now. Because I wasn't guilty, so that this shit doesn't happen to innocent people. Three years of my life for a crime I didn't know I was being used to commit. To hear the rest of one of the most harrowing stories I've ever heard in my time doing this podcast,

check out episode 147 with Eric Aude, here on the Jordan Harbinger show. What a fascinating show, fascinating guy. He's huge on reading. He actually said that he packed more books than clothes when prepping for his job as the National Security Advisor. They actually tried to get him to resign by offering him a fourth star. He ended up getting fired by tweet. That's the world we live in these days.

By the way, H.R. McMaster, is that not an awesome name for a general? I think it's up there with Admiral McRaven as far as military names go. It really is. Not a ton of positive news out of this one. I mean, we discussed a little bit about this, but the terrorists now are stronger than they were on September 10th, 2001. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, they're in order of magnitude more capable than previous iterations of terrorists.

They really have, unfortunately, regrouped, gotten their stuff together, and as we've seen from the news, they're just not slowing down. I mean, it looks like we're taking care of them, but they're regroup in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, I mean, this is a war that is not going to be won anytime soon. And in America, the will to win a war or to go to war is only as good as the information that the public receives. And our population seems less informed and ironically even less educated than ever before. Even though we have internet and a ton of information, we're less educated than I can certainly remember. This plus outside disinformation, it just seems like a recipe for disaster to me. You know,

we have narcissistic interpretations of history, which is often worse than complete ignorance of history when it comes to dealing with places like Iran and Iraq and the Middle East. And Iran uses this conflict with the United States and Israel to divert from their own corrupt looting and their oppression of their own country. I worry about every country doing that to their own people, to be honest. This book was super engaging. If you're interested in what's going on in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, North Korea, China, if you're interested in world affairs and global conflict like you're going to dig this book. It is a huge book, but it's a great read. So big thanks to General H.R. McMaster. The book is called Battlegrounds. We will link it in the show notes, as we always do.

And if you buy it, please use the links in the show notes. That helps support the show. Every little thing adds up there. The worksheets for this episode are in the show notes. The transcripts of this episode are in the show notes. And there's a video of this interview on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also hit me there on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems, using tiny habits. This is our networking course. It's a free course. It's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig that well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show they've contributed to the course in some way. Please come join us and you'll be in smart

company. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My amazing team includes Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, Millie Ocampo, Josh Ballard, and Gabe Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. Please do share the show with people interested in global affairs, strategy, military folks. I think they'll dig it. Hopefully you find something great in every episode of this show, so please do share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on this show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great

podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast, focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laugh. why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same.

Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something You Should Know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work, itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.