The Ricochet Podcast - A Bad Time to be at War with Ourselves

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

We can debate all we want about the Doomsday Clock's latest setting, but one needn't be a foreign policy expert to know our proximity to midnight is too close for comfort. As it happens, though, we have a foreign policy expert (and soldier) with us today. H.R. McMaster returns to discuss the dangerous moment we're in, what needs to be done with the precious time available, and why American officials need to stop fighting each other and concentrate on the enemies gathering at the gates. (Be sure to order his excellent new book: At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.)Plus, Peter, Steve and Charlie marvel at the multifaceted Musk; pick apart Harris's performance in her interview with Brett Baier; and rejoice at another small sign that DEI is falling out of favor even among the sophists. - Soundbite from this week's open: Baier presses Harris on her administration's unpopularity. And please visit Ricochet's newest sponsors:Incogni: http://incogni.com/ricochetCozy Earth: cozyearth.com/RICOCHET

Now I can't stand it. This is an outrage. We've crossed over from insult to outrage. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson, Charles C.W. Cook, and I'm an AI version of James Lilacs today with our guest, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, talking about global battle space preparation.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. They say the country is on the wrong track. You've been in office for three and a half years. And Donald Trump has been running for office. But you've been the person in the office. Come on. You and I both know what I'm talking about. You and I both know what I'm talking about. You and I both know what I'm talking about.

I actually don't. What are you talking about? I agree. You'll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, number 713. I'm Stephen Hayward, doing my best to be an AI-bought version of James Lilacs. Remember, last week, he threatened that this might be in our future.

And joining me, as always right now, Peter Robinson and Charles C.W. Cook. So I'm going to skip over James' provocation from last week about whether we may all be obsolete because of AI soon. I actually heard a draft podcast this week, and it was terrifying at how smooth it was and so forth. Okay. Instead, let's think a little bit about what is starting. How do we know you are you right now? That's a good question. You can see me, can't you?

Of course, you've always been a little hard to believe, Steve. All right. Now behave yourself, Peter. Let's start here. I'm starting to feel like there is no October surprise. It's kind of Groundhog Week. I mean, we had another Israeli victory on the battlefield. We had another shaky performance, actually more than one, from Kamala Harris.

And we have a whole bunch of new polls out showing the race is still a dead heat. Did anything change this week? I mean, there are a couple other things to bring up, but go ahead, Peter. Yes, something changed. Good. What changed? There was an immensely significant event, and I'm not even kidding, how it will make its way into politics when I do not know.

But the SpaceX recapture of the booster rocket was a staggering moment. And it did. Victor Davis Hanson, I caught Victor, well, I ran into Victor yesterday. Victor got it immediately. I saw him on Laura Ingraham later that evening. The rest of the world hasn't gotten it, and I'm not sure the rest of the world will. But Victor got it immediately. This race, in some ways the entire culture, is now between those who want to lecture the rest of us and those who want to build. Yeah. By the way, there's a great, you know, the great geniuses of the Babylon Bee.

One of their headlines out this week is, NASA baffled at how Elon Musk managed to succeed without as many gay, non-binary Muslim dwarfs of color as they have. Yes, yes. And this is the running argument that James Lilacs and I have been having. James thinks I'm opposed to space travel, space... Not at all. I'm opposed to doing that on taxpayer money. During the Cold War, you could argue that it was an extension of the war itself, that it was in the public interest to get to the... Okay. Elon Musk did what he did on the money of private investors. NASA has failed to do what Elon Musk did by squandering our money. In any event, so I want to hear what you boys think of that. Am I onto something there? Excuse me, I know I'm onto

something. I want to see if the two of you are clever enough to pick up on it well you may have missed charlie's fine piece about elon musk a couple of days ago so charlie charlie writes faster than i can read so i'm sorry i i refuse to feel guilty about that charlie give us your take on that and and uh plug your piece if you like well the piece was about the myopic habit of focusing primarily on Trump as politician rather than as genius inventor and the problem with doing that is that we rightly allow much less eccentricity in our politicians than in our inventors for example we would not have wanted henry ford to win his senate race but he was nevertheless a great titan of industry and i worry a little bit that by this monomaniacal focus on elon musk's politics we're going to see and are seeing an attempt to cancel him and ignore what

he's doing in industry which is utterly extraordinary and he is the great genius of the era now is he also a weirdo is he also a cheater on his romantic partners is he also susceptible to conspiracy theories sure but those are probably the same instincts that have raises is a fascinating one. My view of it is just that we have now evolved past the need for any government involvement at all. And you see this here in Florida, where at Cape Canaveral, there is an attempt underway to turn this into a site for private enterprise. But that does require a bit of conversion. Back in the day, when NASA was in charge and used Cape Canaveral for the Apollo program

and other launches, for example, you couldn't launch more than one rocket from a given site at a time. The system was set up to be centrally controlled. And as a result, if you had person on launch pad A and person on launch pad B who wanted to launch their rockets within, say, five or six hours of each other, you couldn't do it because the pipes that transmit the fuel were just not set up for this,

NASA being in control of the master plan and so on well that needs to change because the eventual plan is to have rockets coming in and out and a bit like in an airport although you have to deal with air traffic control you don't tell each airline when they can do this that or the other you don't have a master plan you just coordinate um so it seems to me that we are in the midst of transmuting what was a government monopoly, for good reasons, the Cold War being one of them, into private enterprise. And I think we're actually getting it right. I think we're creating infrastructure to do that, which is going to be great. NASA has become as completely unnecessary unnecessary as totally atavistic as npr yeah yes well you know my father was mixed up in both apollo and uh and and the gemini program before it and he had a company i didn't know that oh i never told you this story well i should have

because uh among the things my father's company made was the parachute release relays and timers for apollo and the stage separation timers for both gemini and apollo and congratulations as i recall all of that always worked always worked although you know he's a subtext the whole apollo 13 story because uh it didn't make the movie or the book but you know uh engineers up all night long running tests how you know we know what the what the amperage specs are will it still work at a lower amperage spec okay uh and you know since time as we know from that very fine movie about it now one of the things that he used to reflect on is they were in such a hurry to get to the moon because my dad also loved defense contracting for jet fighter planes

and helicopters and he was telling me later about it was quite a contrast between dealing with the pentagon and especially mcnamara's whiz kids about developing some fighter planes including the f-111 which is really a dud but that was one of those genius ideas of mcnamara's people uh but he said in apollo because kennedy had set that date certain we want to be there you know eight nine years from now nasa did not have time to bureaucratize they were in a hurry to get things done and today i mean the kind of i won't say cut corners in an unsafe way but they're in such a hurry that you couldn't slow it down with endless review processes and bureaucracy and you know they trusted the engineers to make things work and you know one of them was actually i I think, was the very second Apollo mission, Apollo 12.

You know, the rocket takes off. It was struck by lightning, and everything went dead. And now it turned out that... Excuse me, I can't remember. Was that shortly after or shortly before takeoff? I remember the incident. Right after takeoff. It was within like a minute of takeoff, I think.

So it's still within the atmosphere but it's under oh yeah it's ascending all right and you know they and you know these days and they turn around they look at all these young 28 year old engineers and their ties and pocket protectors and they said no we're good to go just flip these reset things and they'll be fine and today they would never allow that to happen right i mean it'd be immediately scrubbed anyway um so it's a whole different ethic then and now forget about it it's just another big sludge-filled bureaucracy. Which is, everything we know about Elon, what comes through in the Isaacson biography again and again and again, is that Elon is now the forcing function. Faster, faster,

faster. Fewer people, move faster. It's just... Oh, by the way! So there's another little angle of this while we're waiting for our guest that comes again to the Constitution of the United States and why one feature in particular is so glorious at the current moment, and that is federalism. Because the California Coastal Commission, much beloved of Stephen Hayward because it protects his view between his estate in Cambria and the rolling hills down the Pacific, has now denied Elon Musk permission to increase the number of takeoffs on obviously political grounds. It is an outrage. Does Texas even dream of doing any such thing? Of course not.

Yet another reason why God blesses Texas. Yeah, but also why, as you say, God blesses federalism and why the centralization of this is a bad idea. Obviously, when it comes to launching rockets, you can't just do it from anywhere. You have to be on a line. And that's why Florida, California, and Texas are the best sites. You can't just move to Minnesota, for example. But the sites that are eligible are now all fighting with one another for this business. And so Florida, and I know this because I went down and I visited it a few years ago, Florida is desperate to be the hub, and it's envious of Texas, and it's envious of California. And although California seems to be shooting itself in the foot, as usual, you are going to see this competition between these various sites, driven by eventually private enterprise, where they say, no, no, no, don't launch your rockets from Texas. You know, come and launch them here, which is just incredible.

It's just an incredible thought relative to how NASA was run 50 years ago. Well, one concluding comment, and our guest has arrived. Peter, I hate the Coastal Commission. I know you do. I know I was provoking you, Steve. Go ahead. I wasn't sure that people might believe you. You're so authoritative. There's one real puzzle to me, which is Vandenberg Air Force Base is a federal facility,

and I don't understand how the State Coastal Commission has any legal jurisdiction over it at all. And my counterexample to this is Berkeley, where I have a picture somewhere of me posing by the city limit sign, where they have attached a sign saying, Berkeley, a nuclear-free zone. And up above me in the picture is the Lawrence Livermore Lab, where they do weapons research and still have a working nuclear reactor. Fantastic. That had never occurred to me, of course. It's a federal facility beyond the reach of the Berkeley City Council. So there's something strange going on here.

Steve, just as a final point before we go to our guest, this is one of the issues I was told that Florida was having to deal with as well, is that you have these layers of permission that are necessary and they were trying to simplify it. So with Cape Canaveral, apparently before you could launch a rocket, I think they've changed this. You needed permission from the military because it was the military installation is adjacent to it. You need permission from the FAA, because it's airspace, and you needed permission from various Florida organizations. And to try and make it more attractive, they've been trying to rationalize that so that it's only one institution that has to give permission. So I imagine you need to do something similar in California as well. Could be, but it's crazy. Except that here it would be impossible. Right, right. Of course, you know, one of the things missing from the campaign this year,

it seems to me, is a lot of talk about climate change. It's an unpopular issue for Democrats, but, you know, they're always hectoring us in off years

on our carbon footprint. But you know what's even bigger than your carbon footprint? It's your digital footprint. And most of us, whether we know it or not, have a digital footprint that is the size of Bigfoot.

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And we thank Incogni for being a new sponsor of this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, let's turn to our guest by saying that if the Ricochet Podcast had a frequent guest program, I think our guest, General H.R. McMaster, would have gold-level status. General McMaster has joined us several times before. Retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army, author of several fine books, including his most recent one, At War With Ourselves, My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. General McMaster, welcome back to the Ricochet Podcast. Hey, Steve, great to be with you. So I've got a kind of a wild opening question for you that I didn't prepare you for, and so I'm going to make you improvise.

You know, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have had their famous doomsday clock since 1947, which is currently at 90 seconds to midnight, starting from seven minutes to midnight originally, and it's gone up and down some. Now, by the way, the primary driver is not nuclear war, as it was, say, in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's climate change, because, of course, everything reduces to climate change. That's a setup for saying, if there were a McMaster scale for the prospect of global war or major international conflict, and I don't know if you want to go 1 to 10, A to Z,

clock to midnight. As I look around at Russiaussia ukraine which is increasingly tense uh the middle east obviously with israel and iran uh and other conflicts uh where on the mcmaster scale of potential worry of a widening global confrontation are we steve i think we're at an eight and i think we're at eight because of a couple of reasons. First of all, is this coalescing of what I would call an axis of aggressors. And this, of course, is China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and the degree to which they are aiding and abetting one another to accomplish their objectives. For China, of course, their objective is to create an exclusionary area of primacy across the Indo-Pacific and to create new spheres of

influence internationally. For Russia and Putin. It's to reestablish the Russian empire, to restore Russia to national greatness. For Iran, it's to kick the United States out of the Middle East as the first step in surrounding and destroying Israel. And for North Korea, their objective is to reunify the peninsula under the red banner, right? So they have different objectives, but they see their interests overlapping, and they have a common interest in tearing down the existing international order and creating the chaos that they need to accomplish their objectives. The second reason, beyond the coalescing of the aggressors, is their perception of weakness, their perception that we, the United States, and our allies and partners internationally lack the resolve

to be able to confront that aggression. And I think it is the perception of weakness that is what is provocative these days. Hey, HR Peter here. I want to spend a moment flattering you. I was listening to you at the Hoover Institution yesterday. You know the presentation you did, and I was in the audience, and a young VC was sitting next to me, and he said, that guy is amazing. He was trained as a warrior, and you were. You speak on public affairs, and you became a serious historian. I mean, and the warrior bit tends to get forgotten about because you blather so successfully, HR. But we should note that you were in command of one of the most important tank engagements since the Second World War. We won't go into the details,

but the Iraqis lost every single tank. And under you, our guys suffered not a single casualty. Anyway, you're a pretty remarkable guy. Here's the question, my question. Ukraine and Israel, our country seems, it may be as a matter of policy that we want a stalemate in Ukraine. Here's what's happened in Ukraine. A bunch of techno-savvy Ukrainian kids have saved their country by figuring out how to use jerry-rigged drones to open up a naval passage along the coast of Ukraine. So that although Ukraine does not have a navy, they force the Russians off so that they can continue to ship grain. They keep the Russians on the defensive. They prevent the Russians from advancing. They can continue to ship grain. They keep the Russians on the defensive. They prevent the Russians from advancing. They force them to dig in. It's a lot of our aid.

It's tremendous bravery, but it's a bunch of techno-savvy kids. We have a Pentagon with a budget of $800 billion. The procurement process is sludge. Then we turn to Israel. The Biden administration has spent basically a year now telling Bibi Netanyahu and the IDF, go slowly, just tap them, don't punch them. Don't clean them out. No, no, no. And at some point, Bibi and the IDF said, that's enough. This is our country we're fighting for. And they've destroyed Hamas and they've gone in and who knows how bad the damage. They've reasserted the invincibility or at least the prestige of the Mossad, of the IDF, of their air force. And they've attacked Iran now.

I mean, so on the one hand, why the heck are we letting Zelensky run our policy? Why are we permitting Bibi to be in the position of provoking enemies to the extent that we may have to, and at the other hand, why aren't we kissing their asses? It's a very strange position to be in. It's a very strange position to be in, but what it comes down to is we should be learning lessons from them. Isn't there something to that? I think there's a lot to that. I think what you can learn, you know, from the Ukrainians is that, you know, war is not the best way of settling differences, as G.K. Chesterton observed. But it may be the only way to ensure they're not settled for you. And the Ukrainians understand

that. So we keep trying to give them, you know, just enough for them to defend themselves, but not enough to really win and prevail. And of course, in war, you know, as the Prussian philosopher, Karl von Clausewitz observed, each side tries to outdo the other. So if you're not trying to outdo your enemy, overmatch your enemy, you're at a profound disadvantage and you cede the initiative to your enemy. So I think this has been the tension between Zelensky and the Biden administration, is that we're meeting out that assistance. We're debating every different type of weapon system. The permissions to use those weapon systems in a way that would allow them to stop the Russian onslaught with these long-range missiles, for example. But the

innovation part of this is immensely important. I think there's a recognition now that these commercially developed technologies have a direct implication to defense and have to be accelerated into our own arsenals. What we have seen are these kinds of asymmetric capabilities like first-person view drones, FPV drones. But you know what, Peter? There's always a countermeasure to everything in war. What we need to do is accelerate those capabilities into our force, but also the countermeasures, which in this case are different types of radars tied to directed energy weapon systems, for example. Lasers, you know, that can drop these out of the sky. Electromagnetic warfare is quite effective against these drones, for example. But as you mentioned, we're not agile

enough. We haven't built those capabilities into our force as quickly as we need to. And then the other part of your question has to do with will, our will to prevail in conflicts. And this message that we give the Israelis, hey, you need a ceasefire, you know, in Gaza. You need a ceasefire against Hezbollah. How does a ceasefire make sense until Hamas is completely destroyed? Until, as we just saw in the last 48 hours, Sinwar is killed. But also, you must destroy Hamas. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. You have to destroy Hamas as a precursor to getting to any kind of enduring peace. The same people who say, oh, we need a ceasefire right now, Israelis,

stop pursuing the leadership of Hamas. Then in the next sentence, oftentimes, President Biden did this recently, talked about getting on the path to an enduring peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel and the Palestinians, and a two-state solution. Hey, if Hamas still has the guns in Hamas, I mean, in Gaza, and they're still in charge, and in their charter they are determined to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews, that doesn't sound like a two-state solution to me, right? So there's a complete disconnect between what our political aims are and what we are doing militarily. And again, what Clausewitz would say, it's the first duty of the statesman not to try to turn war into something alien to its nature. And what we're doing is advocating for military strategies, constraints on forces that are inconsistent with the political objective.

And then we wonder why we're having difficulty accomplishing political objectives. I have a question relating to the eight out of 10 answer you gave earlier. I just wonder if you can contextualize that for me. Historically, if we're an eight now what were we because often the doomsday clock is so close that it becomes lost in the proximity um if we were an eight now what what were we 20 years ago 40 years ago 60 years ago how would you how would you uh set that up yeah i would just say like five five years, for example, six years ago, we were probably, you know, I would say like at a three, you know, or a four. And the reason is, you know, we still

had a significant amount of credibility associated with our ability to use power effectively to deny our adversaries the ability to accomplish their objectives through the use of force. What has changed in those years? I think certainly we should go back at least to 2021 and the disastrous and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. I think it was at that moment that the axis of aggressors looked at us and go, you know, these guys just surrendered essentially, really across two administrations to a terrorist organization, you know, and so now's the time for us to act. It was at that very moment that Vladimir Putin supposedly wrote that long essay laying out what his objectives were for Ukraine and began to marshal the forces that he kept in place there to conduct a massive reinvasion of Ukraine.

It was at that moment that China began to become much, much more aggressive, from everywhere from the Himalayan frontier to the South China Sea to vis-a-vis Taiwan. And it was during this period of time, as the Biden administration came in and began to supplicate to the Iranians that they forfeited the gains associated with the Abraham Accords and actually emboldened the Iranians to intensify their proxy wars against the great Satan, you know, us, and against Israel and their Arab neighbors. It's been since then that North Korea has resumed testing of cruise missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles, teared down the reunification arch, is providing billions of artillery rounds to the Russians,

and now Russians are training North Koreans in Russia for employment in Ukraine. Okay, so I think the breakpoint, at least just in recent history, Charles, as I would say, is the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. And combined with the disastrous policies of the Biden administration in the Middle East. General, my sense of this is that in the fullness of time, especially if there's a wider conflagration ahead of us, we're going to look back on the Afghanistan withdrawal as the equivalent of the Munich Agreement in 1938, as a point of no return, as a fatal mistake. And you reminded us a few minutes ago of the time-honored principle

that weakness invites aggression. But there are two kinds of weakness, and we've dwelt largely on political weakness. The ineptitude of our foreign policy leaders at the moment under the Biden administration, but there's another kind of weakness that tempts aggressors, and that's military weakness. Now, you know, I keep reading stories, and I don't have any deep expertise or contacts, that, you know, morale is bad, we're falling short on our recruitment goals, a lot of our equipment is in disrepair, the Navy keeps seeming to have a lot of accidents that seem to me would never have happened years ago.

And so, again, on the McMaster scale of worry, you know, 1 to 10, 10 being worse, how worried should we be about our military readiness and preparedness? Yeah, I would say like a 7, we should be worried, but recognize that these problems that you're laying out are quickly reversible if we act now. What has happened, as you've already mentioned, is there's been a diminishment of resources available to the military because the Biden administration budget, despite the threats we've been talking about, actually went adjusted for inflation is a real reduction in defense spending. And so we have this bow wave of deferred modernization. It's kind of a triple whammy as we look at it. A bow wave of deferred modernization. We have capacity

issues in our armed forces because we've assumed for way too long that fewer and fewer and more exquisite systems could deliver security for us. And those exquisite systems we now know because of countermeasures are prone to catastrophic failure. We need capacity. The size of the force matters. And we have the recruiting issues. And I believe that we can address all of these. On the recruiting issues in particular, though, I think it's connected to the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think it's connected to the degree to which popular culture cheapens and coarsens our warrior ethos. I think it's connected to efforts to politicize the military in both political parties, on both political extremes, I should say, with the narrative that the military veterans were not overrepresented as a portion of the population on the January 6th assault on the Capitol, for example. But that was a false narrative of the Democratic Party who tried to label, you know, the members of the military as extremist or or like people talking about white supremacy in the military. I'm like, what military are you talking about?

For 34 years, our military is fundamentally intolerant of any form of bigotry or racism or sexism. Do we have problems with that? Yes, because people come into our military from our society, but our culture rejects, you know, that kind of behavior and predisposition. But the second part of that is that, you know, this idea that the military has gone woke. The military is not extremist. There are people who are advancing their crazy social agendas associated with postmodernist critical theories and the valorization of victimhood and the organization of people into categories of oppressor and oppressed and on a scale of victim and oppressor. That nonsense, there are political appointees who are pushing that on the military, but the military has been

resistant to that. And what we need is we need whatever administration comes in, get your hands off the military, understand what the military's for, reestablish the priority of being ready to fight and win wars. That's what our service secretaries should talk about. If you look at the Biden administration's service secretary's priorities, you could scratch your head and say, please, somebody remind me again, what's the military for? So the standard's got to be combat readiness, combat effectiveness. And the last thing I'll say is there is a big important social dimension to this. You know, if you teach our children that our country is not worth defending, who the hell

is going to defend you? And I think the curriculum of self-loathing in our universities, in our secondary education is taking its toll. I really believe that's the case. Combined with the way that popular culture and even some well-meaning charities portray veterans as traumatized, fragile human beings. And so Americans don't see the tremendous rewards of service. Hey, being part of the team

that's committed to a mission bigger than yourself, being committed to the man or woman next to you and willing to give everything for them. Being part of teams that really take on the quality of a family in their commitment to one another and their commitment to our nation and their mission. And the vast majority of veterans, they emerge from even the most harrowing experiences. Stronger, more resilient, and they go on to make tremendous contributions in other walks of life in our society. So I think it's this combination, you know, of trying to politicize the military, these false narratives of extremism or wokeism in the military. It's

popular culture, and it's the curriculum of self-loathing combined, I think, with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. And surrender. I don't want to say self-defeat in Afghanistan. So we can overcome all this, but we need leaders to get after it. And when you have members of both political parties trying to politicize the military, whether it's President Trump going to Area 60 at Arlington Cemetery, you know, where our most recent war Our political leaders are just completely disconnected from what motivates our servicemen and women. And that gets back to kind of this warrior ethos, right? This covenant that binds servicemen and women, warriors to each other, and should connect them to those in whose name they fight and serve. That ethos is based on values, you know, like their sense of honor, their sense of duty,

their willingness to self-sacrifice, their courage, right? And so I think we have some work to do to get politicians' hands off the military and the military ethos, but we could all, I think, talk more about the importance of service and the tremendous rewards of service. H.R. McMaster's new book, At War With Ourselves, My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. H.R., you and I taped a long interview this past summer about the book, so you know how much I admire it. I won't go through the whole book right now. You're very critical of President Trump in a number of regards. In particular, he set in motion what would become in the Biden administration, the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He proved willing to deal with the Taliban in a way of which

you disapproved. At the same time, you say that President Trump had a number of achievements in foreign policy. The book is fascinating. It's an important historical document, At War With Ourselves by H.R. McMaster. We are now just over two weeks from an election. I'm not going to ask you who you're going to vote for, but you've served in the military. You served in the White House. You know Donald Trump, you've been a close observer of the Biden administration, which of course includes Kamala Harris. Advice to voters when it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to reasserting American strength, to putting right the way the rest of the country treats the military, how should voters weigh these two

candidates? How should voters decide which candidate would be best or at least which candidate would be less bad into the defense of this republic? Well, you know, I think, Peter, it goes back to the discussion we're having and Steve's question about where are we on the scale of danger? You know, I think we're on that high on that scale of danger because the perception of weakness, who's going to portray strength? Who's going to recognize that it is the perception of weakness that's that is that is provocative? Who's going to reverse the disastrous policies in the Middle East, in particular, the conciliatory approach to the Islamic Republic of Iran and the theocratic dictatorship there. You know, who is also going to recognize that, you know, that Vladimir Putin is a bully, a thug, and a coward all at the same

time. And what provokes him also is weakness. So I think what we need is somebody who's going to lead and somebody who is going to be seen as having the resolve necessary to counter this aggression and to do what we all want to do, right, which is prevent these cascading crises that we've witnessed. The largest war in Europe since World War II, a regional war ongoing right now. This is one of the reasons why the scale's an eight, because there are already two major wars going on, not even to mention, you know, the growth of jihadist terrorist organizations. You know, there are now training camps, terrorist training camps in 15 Afghan provinces, very predictably. And we have the expansion of ISIS, for example, in West Africa, as those

coups that are engineered in large measure by the Russians have led to the withdrawal of U.S. and French forces that were in support of local forces there who were conducting counterterrorism operations. I mean, I could go on about this, but it's going to be a president, I think, from a national security perspective, who understands that these challenges to our security that develop abroad can only be dealt with at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores. And so I think that, you know, that people should try to try to extract more substance from the candidates in connection with what their policies would be, you know, vis-a-vis this axis of aggressors and what they would do to secure

a better future for Americans by preventing a large-scale war, which I think is a real possibility, and then also promoting American prosperity through countering, for example, Chinese economic aggression. I wonder, you mentioned some issues that would presumably be altered if the president changed, which it will, depending, irrespective of what happens, the president's going to change. And then you mentioned a bunch of cultural issues. irrespective of what happens, the president's going to change. And then you mentioned a bunch of cultural issues. For example, the charities and NGOs, the way they depict soldiers. How long do you think the panoply of issues you just raised is going to take to fix? How long do those cultural questions take to remedy is is is that a matter of

leadership and quick turnaround or are we looking at a decade here of of change i think it's a decade of change you know i think charles it's a lot easier to tear things down than to build things up yeah i look at you know i wanted the this is a military example, but I look at the disaster of the policies associated with the Vietnam War and how they destroyed the United States Army. You know, I really put the army under a real strain in the 1970s and then how it took really the Reagan administration, really kind of the very end of the Carter administration, but then the Reagan administration to address that and then and how it took a number of leaders in our army who had seen the army before these destructive policies to implement really a renaissance in the army that began with improvements in higher standards in recruiting, in education and leader education in particular, a change in our doctrine, a modernization of the force. And that's the army that emerged from the 80s. I think one of the strongest peacetime militaries relative to

adversaries in the history of the world, you know, and that's the military that, you know, Saddam Hussein was, you know, was stupid enough to challenge, you know, and the 91 Gulf War. So I think that, I think of it, I think of it in terms of a decade long project of rebuilding. And of course, not to overcorrect, right? So I talked about this curriculum of self-loathing. You don't want to replace that with some contrived,

happy view of U.S. history. But I think what's wrong, you know, with the way that we teach history is we've just bought into an orthodoxy of the new left. We've always had that, right? Charles and Mary Beard, William Appleman Williams. I mean, it's always been a strain in our interpretation of history, but it shouldn't become an orthodoxy, right? And I think what we ought to teach our young people is, yeah, I mean, our republic has always required constant nurturing. Right. We know our republic, though, wasn't founded to preserve slavery.

It was founded, for example, on on ideals and principles that ultimately made that criminal institution untenable. And we should teach our children that we fought the most destructive war in our history to emancipate 6 million of our fellow Americans, but then also teach them about the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow and separate but unequal, but then teach them about the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement, you know, and the end of de jure segregation and inequality of opportunity. Does de facto inequality of opportunity still exist based on, you know, maybe the zip code you're born in? Yes. Okay, so let's get to work on that.

I think what's happened is this orthodoxy of self-loathing and, you know, and critical theories. And, you know, I think it robs Americans of agency. And in particular, it leaves our young people with this kind of just toxic combination of anger and resignation. So that's going to take time to restore. I think what we have on our side is the younger generation. I mean, I think it's their job as students to be skeptical about this kind of orthodoxy that is being forced on them in some universities and in some curricula in secondary education as well.

Yeah. So, General, again, the title of your most recent book, At War With Ourselves. Happily, we are not at war with ourselves here at the Ricochet Podcast, and we will look forward to having you back again soon. Keep up your gold status as a Ricochet guest, and hopefully when the McMaster's threat meter is down from eight to a more tolerable five. Thanks very much for joining us, General. Steve, thanks. Thanks to all of you. What a pleasure to be with you. HR, thank you. All right. So, well, I was mentioning at the very beginning, of course, that we had a lot of familiar things happen over again this week. You know, Kamala working her word, salad

shooter, you know, new deadlock polls. One thing we didn't have is we did not have another hurricane so i'm assuming charlie this means that you are sleeping better at night right now i am sleeping better at night right now especially because i sleep on cozy earth sheets now of course he has become american he can he can do he can do obvious segues. There we go, you see. And the great thing about these sheets is that my wife loves them. I love them too, but if my wife didn't love them, then that would be the end of it. But she absolutely loves them. And so should you, because Cozy Earth's goal

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if you're not completely in love with them after that which you will be return it for a full refund to take advantage of this offer go to cozyearth.com forward slash ricochet and use the code ricochet for an exclusive discount of up to 40 off that's cozyearth.com forward slash ricochet c-o-z-y-e-a-r-t-h.com and if you do get a post purchase survey you must to help us out, say you heard about Cozier from Ricochet Podcast so they know exactly who sent you. So I want to continue with you, Charlie, a little bit. I guess we ought to get in on the fun

with Kamala Harris this week with Brett Baer on Fox. What, I guess she did what, Call Me Daddy podcast? Or was that last week? I don't remember. But I did stumble across this article by one Charles C.W. Cook. The headline is, Kamala Harris is an idiot. Now, Charles, I wish you wouldn't be so equivocal and uncertain in

your judgments. But I mean, what do you have to add about what we saw of Kamala this week? Is she desperate? What's your theory of why she decided to go on Fox? And how do you think she did? Yeah, well, this piece was part of what I've referred to as a trilogy. My verdicts being that Joe Biden is an asshole and Donald Trump is a lunatic and Kamala Harris is an idiot. I think it's important sometimes to distill powerful or would be powerful people down to their essence and the essence of harris is that she's an idiot she doesn't know anything she doesn't think about anything she doesn't have a worldview she is not interested in politics except insofar as it might help her gain power and it shows i don't quite know what's going on with the campaign what i do

know is that they think they're losing. It's not the same thing as losing, but they think they're losing. And the Democrats and their friends in the press seem to think that they're losing too. And I suspect that the appearance on Brett Baier's show was the product of that sense. And what we saw on that show was predictable, given that Harris, as I said, does not have anything to her except a support for abortion and a loathing of Donald Trump. There are two topics and two topics only where Harris is confident and coherent and eloquent and forceful. And they are, when discussing abortion,

and that is a good issue for the Democrats, I wish it weren't, but it is, and when pointing out that Donald Trump is a liability, which is another good issue for the Democrats, everything else she flails when asked about. And the key reason for that is that the questions that Bayer asked her are unanswerable. I don't even think she needed to be an idiot for much of that interview to go the way that she just needed to have changed her mind on every question that was put before her since 2019. She just needed to be a part of the Biden-Harris administration, right? The two things Bayer kept

hammering her on were were why have you changed your mind on everything since 2019 there's no good answer to that the answer is because i want to win but she can't say that and are you the second coming of joe biden and the answer to that is yes but she can't say that but she's also adopted that as her answer default because she doesn't want to say i've changed all of my opinions since 2019, and she can't go back to them either. So she's in a completely untenable position. And I think that Bayer, because he's very good at his job, made that clear, except on the question of Trump, where she has a point and she knows that she can score some points. And although it didn't come up in the interview so much on abortion, where she knows she's on a 70-30 winning side. Yeah. So, Peter, as someone who

has crafted short, memorable statements, you know, tear down some wall or something, stuff like that, I wonder if you remember when George H.W. Bush was running for president in 1988. The reason I bring this up is, you know, Kamala on The View last week said, I can't think of a thing where I disagree with Biden. And I have a synapse I haven't killed with whiskey yet that reminded me that at the very first, I think it was, Republican debate for the 88 cycle, everybody's after Vice President Bush.

Jack Kemp was in the field. Al Haig. Pete DuPont, the governor of Delaware. It was a formidable field. It really was. And one of the first questions, I'm wondering if you were involved in this, remember it, it can help my memory. One of the first questions, I tried to look it up and can't find a transcript, but I remember it pretty

vividly. One of the first questions was, Vice President Bush, can you please tell us what policies or decisions of President Reagan's that you have disagreed with or argued against during your vice presidency? And he, a very confident and assertive Bush, said, I could, but I won't. I won't for two reasons. One is that it's a vice president's duty to give candid counsel to a president, and if you start having vice presidents make a practice of talking publicly about what they disagree with, he will ruin a very important relationship of confidentiality between a president and a vice president. And second, this campaign's about the future, not about the past.

And then he, of course, laid out a couple of his main points. And that was the end of it. He never got pressed again to put daylight between himself and President Reagan. A couple different circumstances, but do you remember that episode at all? Maybe you were part of that. No, no, I wasn't. And why couldn't Harris campaign? This is their incompetence. They could

have given almost exactly the same answer. And that's exactly right. That is exactly correct. Of course, the difference is that Ronald Reagan was extremely popular and Joe Biden is not. And Bush would almost have been able to say, and three, there was no substantive difference. But still, you're exactly right. Well, we could go into this, we won't go into it, we could go on and on about it. There are answers that both of these candidates could and should be giving that are crisp, that are reasonable, that would be illuminating, and that would advance their causes politically. And for, what do we have, a lunatic versus a know-nothing, a lunatic versus a... They're both, they are who they are.

They are who they are, and they're missing one chance after another. By the way, so may I ask the two of you the same question I asked HR, and isolate it to the question of foreign policy alone. Trump versus Harris, and what's the correct way of weighing it? What is the correct way of assessing it? And by the way, Steve, a side note for you, since you and I are both in California, and our votes in California won't matter anyway, this state is going overwhelmingly for Harris, shall we agree right now to write in H.R. McMaster? I was going to suggest that, yeah.

And then we can also you and i start the committee for hr mcmaster 2028 yeah we should there we go exactly but but boys how do you weigh it how do you assess it we're going to end up with one or the other of these how do we weigh it so i don't completely agree with charlie that trump is a lunatic although i understand why he and many other people think that but you know but is he crazy like a fox well that's what i kind of think but but there's uh there's an advantage to having someone that our enemies wonder about right and that you know he might be crazy he just might he just might level the country like he threatens to do on twitter and there's some value in that now it's got to be credible and but you know taking out general suleimani back in uh you know 2019 that sent the message that you know, taking out General Soleimani back in 2019, that sent the message that, you know what, he will do that kind of thing once in a while.

So that's why I think it tips in his favor. Charlie may disagree. I don't know. And don't we have to suppose that the people he'll surround himself with will be better? I don't necessarily suppose that. Oh, you don't? No. Charlie?

My description of Trump as a lunatic isn't really related to his foreign policy. I actually agree with you on this. I think that Trump's perception as a crazy man probably did help while he was president, and the way that he talked probably did help as well. I think that his behavior after he lost, and some of the things that he said, suspend the constitution, for example, with sheer lunacy and were disqualifying. But in terms of foreign policy, and I'm not a foreign policy expert, so I want to say that upfront, this is just not my area.

I do think that there is still a fundamental divide, and I don't think trump negates this between the broad world views of the left and the right and the republicans and the democrats and the sort of people who are around harris and trump that creates a substantial difference in attitudes toward foreign policy once candidates are in office. And I think that difference is a belief in the immutability of human nature. And at the risk of getting too philosophical here, everything I see from Biden and Harris, whether it's Israel or Iran or China even, seems to presuppose that bad actors in the world act badly because of the United States and its conduct or something that we said,

or because there are fundamental injustices that need to be remedied. And I think that, by and large, Republicans believe that there are just bad people out there, and that they have bad instincts and bad aims. Now, there is a caveat here in that I don't think that Trump is a stooge of Putin. I don't even think that he's as useful to Putin as people say. And if you look, for example, at when he was president, he was the one who sent heavy weaponry to Ukraine, which Obama didn't do. He has not been as opposed to funding the war in Ukraine as many think. In fact, one of the funny things about our politics is people have pretended to make fit their

ideological priors that Trump is against funding Ukraine. So you had the bulwark saying, wow, he must have been really angry with Mike Johnson when actually he helped Mike Johnson get that funding through. And then you had American greatness, for example, saying, look at all of these traitors in Congress who passed this funding without acknowledging that Trump was among them. So I'm a little confused by some of his rhetoric on Russia, but I don't think he's, you know, anything like as friendly toward Russia as the press says. But by and large, I think Trump understands that there are bad guys out there, that the world is dangerous, that the geopolitical interests

of the United States should not be subordinated to some sort of Berkeley thesis on hierarchies of grievance. And that if we get a Trump administration, its foreign policy is going to be better as a result. And I just think that the presidential candidates and the parties they represent, and the ideologies that they heed to, make that difference really concrete, and it will manifest itself after the election. Very nicely put. I wish, Mr. Chairman, I wish to associate myself with every word of Charlie's remarks. Okay. Very nicely put.

Well, let me begin drawing us to an end with two sleeper items from this week. And you can grab either one of them or neither if you like and suggest a third one. The first one is, you've heard a lot of chatter and there seems to be some evidence in campaign talk uh about how the whole business of transgenderism uh and you know women men and women sports is the sleeper issue in this campaign and i gather some republican candidates for the senator running some very effective ads putting democrats on the defensive and brett bear brought this up with the kamala harris who tried to run away from it as fast as she could. So there's that.

I wonder if we think that that really is a big sleeper issue. We're going to wake up on Election Day or the day after and realize it was a factor. The second one was, and I don't know if you guys saw this, but I'm on a college campus and I'm in Middle East academic fights. The New York Times this week ran a very long story, right, on the DEI business at the University of Michigan. And what's notable about it is not just how savage it is about how awful and corrupt and ideological far-left ideology, the writer says, but the story was written by Nick Confessatore,

who's a pretty left-wing reporter for the Times. And indeed, it was confessional. I hope I got his name right. But, I mean, the story is, I kept thinking Chris Ruffo could have written this article. Yes, it was an astonishing piece. And, you know, there's the cliche, if you've lost the New York Times, but that's got to leave a mark, except I think we're going to see, and that story made clear, that they're digging in so hard with the whole DEI ideology for reasons General McMaster laid out that it's going to be

hard to root them out. But I thought that's a remarkable thing that the New York Times would run such a long piece like that. So those are my two sleeper stories of the week, or items of the week. May I comment on the DEI question? Sure. Charlie mentioned a moment ago the glories of federalism, and here we have yet another example. I discovered on a recent trip to Texas something that I think Charlie is already well aware of, and that is that Florida and Texas, the governors of those two states keep an eye on each other, and the legislatures of those two states keep an eye on each other, and the legislatures of those two states keep an eye on each other, and they feel competitive about who is doing the most rigorous and sweeping job of instituting conservative policies. We have states competing to keep taxes low, to reduce regulation, to fighting for the aerospace industry as it is emerging under the likes of Elon Musk.

And when Ben Sasse, who had to step down as president of Florida because of the University of Florida, because of his wife's illness, but this past spring, Ben Sasse announced that DEI was going to be forbidden at the University of Florida. And the way that would be handled is that DEI officials in the university's employment would be first on the list for new jobs as they became available. And the Texans looked over their shoulders at what Ben Sasse had done and said, we'll see him and raise him. And the legislature made DEI illegal at state institutions. And of course, in Texas, the state institutions, in particular UT, dominate higher education in Texas. And this year, they are being serious about

it, hauling into the legislature for public hearings, provosts and other officials from the UT system to make sure that they are obeying the law. And in Michigan, of course, it's a different, but oh my goodness, thank, yet again, thank goodness for federalism. In this country, there's still always some new place to go. You know, I mean, two quick things about that. I know a bit about the Texas story. They're actually slow in the legislature to figure it out, but once they did, because I know people were talking to him for two, three years now about, you need to do something about this. Oh, is that so?

Yes. Oh, yeah. I know faculty members, you know, and they've said now, we're not going to be fooled by renaming something. That's a tactic going on a lot of places. But I do remember, you know, when I had a long conversation about this with Governor DeSantis a year and a half ago, and one of the things he said was,

I don't understand why redder states than Florida, the Republican governors are not taking after their public universities. Well, now they are, because I think they looked around and said, oh yeah, he's got the right idea. So I think that's what's going on. We have come to, and I think maybe even surpassed the end of our hour, we want to thank our new sponsors, Cozy Earth and Incogniti. I want to encourage listeners to give us a five-star review on Apple

or wherever you source your podcasts. And please send us your comments. And we'll see you all in the comment threads on Ricochet 4.0. Bye, guys. Bye-bye, boys. Next week. I think next week. Yes, yes, next week.

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