Your Undivided Attention - Is World War III Already Here? — with Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Would you say that the US is in war-time or peace-time? How do you know? The truth is, the nature of warfare has changed so fundamentally, that we're currently in a war we don't even recognize. It's the war that Russia, China, and other hostile foreign actors are fighting against us — weaponizing social media to undermine our faith in each other, our government, and democracy itself. World War III is here, it's in cyberspace, and the US is unprepared — and largely unaware. This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're fortunate to be speaking with Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster. General McMaster was the United States National Security Advisor from 2017 to 2018. He has examined the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that face the United States, and is devoted to preserving America's standing and security.

In 1970, a Russian KGB agent named Yori Bezmanov decided to defect. He warned the West that the Soviet Union had unleashed a program of psychological warfare, going back decades, which consisted of three weapons, demoralization, destabilization, and crisis. Besmanov said the campaign was a runaway success. Just divide the American public, corrupt their information sources, and you can take down their institutions. What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country. It's a great brainwashing process.

Five decades later, that great brainwashing process has only impensified. The nature of warfare has changed so fundamentally that we're currently in a war that we don't even recognize. It's a war that Russia, China, and other hostile foreign actors are fighting, weaponizing social media to undermine our faith in each other, our government, and democracy itself. World War III is here. It's in the metaverse and the U.S. is unprepared and even unaware. I'm Tristan Harris.

And I'm Azaraskin. And this is your undivided attention. And today in the show, we're fortunate enough to have with us Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. General McMaster was the United States National Security Advisor from 2017 to 2018. He examined the most critical foreign policy and national security issues that face the United States

and is devoted to preserving America's standing and security. HR, welcome to your undivided attention. Thank you so much for making time to do this. We're really truly honored to have you. Privileged to be with you guys. I thought we would start off with a really important throughline to the current situation,

which is we have the notion of war by land, by air, by sea, but we don't have by psychology or by culture or by metaverse. You know, we have a space force, we don't have a metaverse force. And obviously, a lot of what we're seeing in the social media area is kind of a psychological and demoralization attack when we look at the kinds of things both that we've seen Russia and China focus on and the kinds of disinformation that they sow natively in the United States and also other countries. It's important. This is a global phenomenon obviously. I was curious you've had when we spoke earlier some experiences when

you were in the Trump administration on the National Security Council and obviously as national security advisor to President Trump. Do you want to speak about the form of psychological warfare that you saw and are worried about now. Yes, Fristana, I'll cover this in the book Battlegrounds. It's a book that attempts to describe the greatest challenges we're facing internationally. And, of course, this is a new battleground of really psychological warfare that our adversaries are using against us. And this battleground is the information space broadly.

It includes social media, but also the pseudo-media. And to a certain extent, efforts to influence the mainstream media as well, right, with R.T. and Sputnik and so forth. So it's really a full core press that is designed really mainly to drag us down, right? Vladimir Putin knows he can't compete with us economically, right?

Russia's economy is about the size of Italy's economy or Texas's economy. And he knows he can't really cope with his head-on-head with conventional forces. He has very dangerous, scary capabilities from a nuclear perspective. But he's been executing a playbook that is designed to reduce the confidence, right,

in countries that are the target of what some people have called Russian New Generation Warfare. And when I was in the White House, of course, we were examining what had occurred during the 2016 election. And what I concluded and what I believe today is that Russia doesn't care who wins our elections. What they really care about is that a large number of Americans doubt the legitimacy of the result. And so they want to reduce confidence again in our democratic principles and institutions and processes and polarize us and pit us against each other.

The other key conclusion is, I think, that Russia doesn't create the divisions in our society, but they're doing everything they can to widen those gaps among Americans. And if you look at just their bot and troll traffic in 2016 and really carrying on beyond that, the vast majority of that traffic and those actions and appropriations of sites and so forth is aimed at issues of race, to divide us on issues of race. And you know what? Hey, we're doing a pretty good job of that ourselves already, right? with this interaction between identity politics and various forms of bigotry and racism

that I believe actually draw strength from each other and contribute to forces that are spitting us apart from one another. And of course, where this is most evident is on social media and the work that you've done to expose this is super important, right? To show how these algorithms that are designed to get more and more advertising money through more and more clicks and to do that by showing people more and more extreme content is a major force that is aiding and abetting our enemies. But what Russia added on to this right now is a very sophisticated campaign to attack

individuals and to create a psychological effect where actually people within a particular administration actually distrusted each other. These were the attacks that occurred against me and the National Security Council staff you know, under the hashtag, you know, Fire McMaster or the hashtag McMaster leaks thing and so forth. The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab said it was the largest Russian attack on any individual up to that point. And the reason why the Russians came after me

is because they saw me as an impediment to their agenda, which really was to get sanctions relief. You know, actually what was happening is there were more sanctions being placed on them as a result of the Magnitsky Act, but also as a result of what they had done during the election, and a whole range of illegal activity internationally with progosion and these organizations associated with the internet research agency and so forth.

And also what they wanted to do is diminish confidence in the NSC staff by fostering this deep state narrative. And ultimately, I think what they hoped is that even the President of the United States would no longer have confidence in his own administration and therefore be less confident and less effective. And of course they love the polarization, the political polarization, both parties played into this, right,

to score partisan political points. And so we make ourselves vulnerable to this, really. And the attacks on me began with attacks from this kind of amorphous movement of the alt-right who saw me as an impediment to their agenda within the Trump administration. And then what happened is the IRA just jumped all over it and said, hey, what can we do to add to this? And so you had some of these odious characters who saw conspiracy theories on the pseudomedia, joined it by various bloggers

and people who are particularly active on Twitter and they created this kind of snowball effect that was aimed at attacking me and members of the NSC staff and I think really to drive a wedge between President Trump and the NSY staff and so I think that we have to expect more of this and this idea of AI-enabled

messaging that can take the data that they take from you in terms of understanding your preferences and predilections, and then just feed you messages and material that are going to move you psychologically in a certain direction. And I think this is a very grave danger, and I think we haven't learned enough from recent conflicts going back to the Russian attacks on the Baltic States in 2007, right? On the precursor to the attacks on Georgia in 2008, the 2013-14 campaign that ended up with the annexation of Crimea and evasion of Ukraine.

So these were specific uses of information space to reduce will and to set conditions for physical aggression. And I think we have to learn that, apply that, to what's going on around Ukraine today, what's going on on the borders of Poland with weaponizing migrants on the Belarusian border. And I think we don't pay enough attention to how these activities in cyberspace

and social media is a subset of that relate to aggression in the physical world and enable aggression in the physical world. You also fight an information war, and actually that brings up a quote by Marshall McLuhan saying in 1968 that World War III would be a global information war that would make no distinction

between civilian and military combatants. And that to me is just so accurate to what we're facing today. And obviously, there needs to be an education. And one of the things that I think I find, I've talked more in the last year to more national security leaders, And there's a kind of naivete that I think civilians can sometimes have about being peacetime or wartime.

And I think it's important for people to also understand the kind of broader set of conflict or competitions that are happening. I know when we spoke with our friend R.P. Eddie, we talked about just a list of some of the things that are happening in the sort of broader space of global competition, buzzing satellites, ramming fishing vessels. Would you say a little bit about kind of the broader context in which this is taking place? because I think I feel the urgency to what you're talking about to a degree that if we don't get our act together, if we don't suspend our partisan differences

and focus on our shared identity and rough consensus to statements, we can all agree the zip code shouldn't determine your longtime prospects and let's all work on that together. But I think for people to understand a little bit more about what is that great power conflict and what are some of the things

that are happening in the broader arena which motivate why we need to drop all these differences and focus on how we can actually show that the form of liberal democracy can actually work in the global stage in the 21st century. Absolutely. So this is a really important point, right? This information space has created a new arena of competition.

And we've largely been absent from it, right, under the belief that it would be a benign arena or it would be completely beneficial to connect everybody and to have the ease of communication. And our adversaries in the meantime have weaponized it, right, against their own populations, to tighten the totalitarian power over people and to mobilize people's social networks

against them, if they have the temerity to oppose the government, but then against us, right, to again widen the gaps within our own society, pit us against one another, and really reduce our confidence, right, and even who we are as a people. And what these hostile powers want to do is they want to accomplish their objectives below the level of what might elicit a concerted military response from us. And in China's case, I described this in battlegrounds as a campaign of the three seas, co-option, coercion, and concealment.

Co-opt countries and elites and companies with the lure of short-term profits, of access to China's lucrative market, of Chinese investments, right? And then once you're in, once you're dependent, then to coerce you to support their foreign policy agenda and to support really even the most draconian and horrible means of population control,

including a campaign of slow genocide against the Uyghurs. And to conceal all of this, this is just normal business practices, right? And there's a very sophisticated campaign ongoing by the Chinese government to diminish our will to obfuscate and to conceal. And you see this in the co-optation of business and financial elites, but they're very active at the local level as well. And then they use our own sensibilities kind of against us, right? So you often hear the Chinese Communist Party equate opposition

to their efforts to create. exclusionary areas of primacy across the Indo-Pacific and to rewrite the rules of political and economic discourse in their favor, or to dominate global logistics and supply chains and apply a whole range of unfair trade and economic practices, which put us at a severe disadvantage. They portray our efforts to compete against that

as anti-Asian or anti-Chinese or Asian-American. Well, just think about what they're doing, right? They're actually being incredibly bigoted themselves saying that Asian Americans, for example, really have no option. But to support the Chinese Communist Party, what they're doing, of course, they came to this country

because their ideals, I think, and their principles are inimical to what the Chinese Communist Party is doing. So I think that they become very adept at providing cover for their aggressive action. And, of course, Russia is masterful at this because they keep learning from previous efforts and honing their abilities

and becoming more and more effective. And so this is an area where we have to defend, right? Because Russia right now, as they're massing forces on Ukraine, are also engaging in a massive information campaign to reduce Ukrainian will to resist what could be a military invasion, but I think really is designed to really try to achieve something more like annexation by invitation or just a slow erosion of Ukrainian sovereignty over time. This is what China is doing in Taiwan also, to diminish Taiwanese will to maintain their freedom and their representative form of governance

and their free market economic system. And these competitions are ongoing. And it's not just the cyber-enabled information warfare, but of course, as you know, I mean, cyberspace is a battleground every day. We're paring, you know, a large number of maligned cyber actors who are engaged in trying to make our infrastructure vulnerable. They're engaged in cyber-enabled industrial espionage against us,

designed to steal sensitive technologies and intellectual property. This is really a war. It's a competition, certainly, that is high stakes and is ongoing. So would you then say, are we in that kind of Marshall McLuhan World War III? Because as you said, HR,

as soon as we say all the things we just said together, China could run an information campaign saying, well, HR and Tristan and Aza are xenophobic and anti-Asian and racist against China. And then they would put that meme, into maybe the left progressive sphere and then create an anti-opposition campaign. So you can actually manipulate the whole dialogue.

And I think when people just understand the degree to which information operations exist jointly with kinetic operations, which is what you're saying. I mean, a cyber operation to go after Ukraine's electricity grid happens in coincidence with going after the information that demoralizes citizens, happens in coincidence with the kinetic movement of troops

on Ukraine's border recently. And I think for people just to understand, just the stakes of where we are. We're not in a cold situation. You talk about strategic narcissism so many times in your book and in your work, and I'd love for you to also mention that here. But we always define the world in our terms,

and I think the narrative terms that we define the world, I think the Francis Fukuyama, we're now in peacetime, the end of history, democracy won, and there's actually a very hot competition that I think is taking place that many civilians may not have as much access to. If you can give just a little bit more color for listeners. Absolutely.

Well, I mean, I do think this is a manifestation and part of this strategic narcissism, which is a load stunt around our necks. And this is our tendency to be self-referential, right, to define the world-only relation to us, and then to assume what we do or decide not to do is decisive toward achieving a favorable outcome.

And, of course, the problem with this is it doesn't acknowledge the agency, the authorship over the future that others enjoy. And also, it's profoundly arrogant. And you see this interpretation of history or deconstructionist post-modernist theories, right? They say, we're the problem, right?

Therefore, if we just disengaged from the world, it'd be better, right? And this is also on the far right, the neo-isolationist far right, who also sees our disengagement from competitions, abroad as an unmitigated good. They assume that others,

adversaries, rivals, potential enemies, only have aspirations that are in reaction to what we do, right? They have no aspirations of their own that go beyond that. And of course they do, right? And so we have to acknowledge that they're operating,

you know, based on their interests, but also the emotions and aspirations that drive and constrain them. The Chinese Communist Party is driven by fear, fear of losing its exclusive grip on power, fear and aspiration are inseparable because the aspiration to achieve national rejuvenation and the narrative associated with that,

this jingoistic nationalist narrative, is also a mechanism of the party maintaining control. And so I think that we don't acknowledge that, right? We become complacent and we don't compete effectively. And I think there are many examples of what China is doing, from an informational and economic perspective that is augmented by what they're doing militarily, with military often being a tertiary consideration. So if you look at just the objective, right, the objective of creating exclusionary areas of primacy across the Indo-Pacific

region as a way of getting the U.S. out, and then also creating servile relationships with countries in the region and isolating China's main regional competitor, Japan. To do that, they're engaged in forms of economic coercion, setting debt traps for credit. are weak governments that in debt future generations and give them coercive power over the economy. In many of these cases, these debt agreements that are entered into to build infrastructure of dubious value, creating dependencies on exports to China to give them coercive power. Whether this is South Korea is a good example, so is Australia, right? And the party's use of that course of power to punish Australia for having the temerity of

suggesting an investigation into the origins of COVID-19, right? And that economic coercion is aided and abetted by a sustained influence campaign, an influence campaign that operates on social media, but across all media, with CCTV, for example, being also an arm of influence. But the main arm of influence is corruption and the buying off of elites, right? With, you know, why is it? I don't really get it that we are investing in Chinese stocks and bonds, even as they crack down more and more on their economy.

The reason is investors think it's low risk. because those companies that are closest to the Chinese Communist Party, many of which are developing the weapons that are designed to kill our grandchildren, are the ones that Wall Street's investing it, because they know that the party will support those companies, and there's no downside to that financial risk from their view. So they're actually aiding and abetting a totalitarian regime that is antagonistic to us. You know, the old saying that is erroneously attributed to Lenin,

that the capitalist will sell us the rope with which we'll hang them, it's worse than that. We're actually financing China's purchase of the rope with which they intend to hang us. So a lot of the information campaign is to keep us complacent, right? To keep this sort of narrative of moral equivalence, to portray China as kind of a victim of the mean United States trying to keep the Chinese people down, right? The lucidity's trap narrative, right? That we what we face is this choice, really, between either acquiescence to the party, to the Chinese Communist Party, or disastrous war. right all of this is false but it's part of their it's part of their narrative that that actually is

critical to them being able to to carry out various forms of economic aggression and then of course the military aggression is designed to essentially send the message to countries in the region of who's your daddy basically right like you know this is a unprecedented military buildup not unprecedented but maybe at least going back to the 30s right 800% increase in defense spending since the mid-1990s a 44 or 45 highfold increase, and then the intimidation using maritime militias, as you mentioned, ramming ships in the South China Sea, destroying ecosystems to build islands in the South China Sea and weaponize them, bludgeoning Indian soldiers to death on the Himalayan frontier, flights into Taiwan's air defense identification zone, similar intimidating flights with both

Russian and Chinese aircraft oriented against Japanese and South Korean airspace. I mean, this is the message that they're sending is, listen, if you thought you could rely, like on the United States or your own defense capabilities, you're wrong about that. We own, they're trying to own the ocean in the South China Sea. I mean, this is the area through which one-third of the world's surface trade flows, right? And they're extremely ambitious about it. And you might ask, okay, why did it take so long for us to wake up to this competition?

And the reason is we were lulled into this complacency by a very sophisticated and sustained information campaign that, again, just reinforced our predilections and our narcissistic view of the world. hey, China, as they're welcomed into the international order, this was the assumption, right? World Trade Organization entry is now, this is the 20th anniversary of that, by the way. I think it's the 20th anniversary of China's entry in the World Trade Organization. And they'll liberalize as they prosper, the liberalize our economy and the liberalizer form of governance.

Okay, I don't think that was ever going to be the case. Roche Dosci's book, The Long Game, shows that this is the case, right? And, of course, Xi Jinping has been a step change, you know, in terms of how great. rest of the parties come and they've kind of thrown off the old Deng Xiaoping hide and bide and lull us into complacency. They've been more jingoistic and brazen with various forms of competition. But there's more continuity actually than change in Communist Party leadership. And they were always intending, always intending to hang us with the rope that we sold them. I mean, so I think that all of this

plays out in cyberspace in the information space. And I think understanding this as, you know, cyberspace and understanding various forms of media and social media in particular as contested spaces where our enemies are actively operating to advance hostile agendas is a really important dimension of this competition. So we just heard about a bunch of false assumptions that the United States had with regard to China, liberalizing with more and more access to markets and how that didn't pan out. Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about another fundamental assumption that concerns me, which is about security and war in the 21st century.

And at the institutions that we normally rely on, Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, if they are adequate to recognizing another paradigm change where digital war is being fought. So the United States, for example, has these massive oceans on the west and east coast that meant something for protection and war in the 20th century, where you're separated by thousands of miles from your adversaries. But those huge oceans are erased in the 21st century when you move to the Metaverse, where your adversaries are one click away. Those billions of dollars that you spent on border walls, passport controls, and Patriot

missile defense systems, well, those were erased. I worry that there's a kind of blindness between our institutions and the new threats posed by social media and the ways in which you can infiltrate and break an enemy from within. And there's an intergenerational blindness between the people who are tasked with protecting the country and those who actually know something about where the country is being infiltrated. For example, generals at the Pentagon might know about the latest AI and drone technology and precision guided bombs and advanced aircraft. But what do they know about TikTok?

Do they know how their own children are being influenced? on TikTok right now? I mean, if the Pentagon generals were told outright that China at this very moment was influencing their own children and convincing them to speak more positively about China, well, surely something like that would sound like a conspiracy theory. But we know the Chinese Communist Party

has a strategy called Borrowing Mouths to speak, which in TikTok is about finding the Western voices that say positive things about the Chinese government or about its treatment of the Uyghurs and actually amplify them. War is too expensive to wage anymore, both politically and financially. Why would someone spend billions of dollars on the latest military technology when I can spend a few thousand dollars influencing an election of a NATO country

that destabilizes Europe? Who needs to control the outcome of election when I can simply amplify fears of voter fraud or claim that certain states were helping one side win? I would actually call Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok a kind of stuck-suffer If you remember Stuxnet for democracy. If you remember Stuxnet, it was the cyber weapon that was used to derail the Iranian nuclear reactors, to spin the centrifuges involved for separating nuclear material faster than it can actually take while the sensors were saying, everything's okay, everything's okay, until it all broke.

And this is like social media. It's a psychological Stuxnet, where I basically spin your society faster and faster into polarization. But everything keeps reading out like your democracy is fine until it finally breaks, and you get a January 6th. and you get a January 6th. The punchline here is that we're not protected and we're not aware that we're not protected. And where we might tell ourselves a story that we are protected,

let's say by Facebook investing more into trust and safety teams that can protect the next election in the United States. Well, if I'm Russia or China, I just start sewing misinformation and disinformation into Haiti or Central America, telling everyone to flood the border. And I can start to destabilize the country, indirectly from the outside. This is a totally different generation,

a totally different paradigm for warfare and what security would mean. And this would require changing our institutions to be commensurate to the challenge. But so far, I don't see that happening. And it's important to realize that we have a major election coming up in 2022 with the midterm elections

and a major presidential election coming up in 2024. And this isn't about one party winning or another, it's about social media disrupting our ability to have a unity of effort for any task ahead of us as a country. I'd like to ask you a question, and Tristan, we were talking about the contrasting effects that social media and the internet have had on authoritarian regimes who have been able to harness this domain to actually extend and tighten their exclusive grips on power and to control their populations and in our free and open societies how it has an effect of fragmenting us right and has

had a destructive effect and and results in a profound lack of confidence right in governments and and really a disturbing I think lack of a sense of agency and and I think what many people are left with these days is a toxic combination of anger and resignation they don't understand that they can be part of building a better world for them and future generations. It saps them of agency. So what do you think is the remedy to this? I mean, by the way, I think Xi Jinping saw what Jack Dorsey and what Mark Zuckerberg did to Donald Trump and said, hey, man, that's not going to happen here. And this is why Jack Ma disappeared, man. This is why the crackdown on the tech sector happened in China.

Yeah, well, I think what you're bringing up is how we can notice that digital autocratic societies like China are employing the full suite of new exponential technologies, surveillance, big data, AI, mass information control, censorship systems, you know, information incentive systems to incentivize people to speak more in certain ways versus others, and they're using that full new suite of technology to make a stronger autocratic society, a kind of super digital authoritarian society. But in contrast, as you've stated, the West and democracies are not consciously employing the same full suite of tech to make a stronger form of super democracy or a super open society. We're instead allowing the kind of private business models

and private profit incentives of today's engagement-based companies that profit from engagement to actually profit from personalizing each boogeyman for our own nervous system to create that loss of trust and faith that you're talking about. And so that to me sets up a bigger kind of security question, which is one of just global competition. How can digital open societies actually out-compete digital closed societies. And this is why I think starting off with the question of when there's a new revolution in technology and availability of technologies and a combinatoric integration of those technologies, how do we make sure that our security and our prosperity are integrated with

that new view of how the technology creates new conditions? That's a well-crafted question. I mean, I think that's exactly what we all have to be working on. You know, it might sound like a little bit of a cop-out, but I think that The main solution is education. I think that people are most susceptible to disinformation when they know the least about a particular issue. And then I think the other remedy, besides education and knowledge as an antidote to disinformation and conspiracy theories like, you know, Pizza Gate or the Stop the Steel, whatever it is. Education is important.

But then also, I think there's a social aspect. aspect of this, where we have to convene groups of our fellow citizens, right, to really restore our ability to empathize with one another and to maybe begin conversations with what we can agree on, because I actually think we can get a heck of a lot done if we just focus on that, right? So if we put aside, you know, kind of identity politics and then we say, okay, do we all agree that it's wrong, that the zip code into which one is born determines, the number of obstacles that a person has to overcome before they can take advantage

of the great promise of this country. I think we can all agree with that, man. So let's work on that together. Let's make a concrete difference, right? And, you know, I'm often inspired by Clinton quotations and by Clinton, I mean George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic. And in 1972, they put out the album, America Eats It's Young. One of the tracks, I think it was on that album,

maybe was on the next album after that, But what was, you know, if you don't like the effect, don't produce the cause, right? And I think that if we don't like polarization, don't produce the cause. Have meaningful, respectful discussions about the challenges and opportunities we face as a way of agreeing on what we can do together, you know. And, you know, stop sending fire emojis to each other. Right. Instead, you know, how about picking up the phone or, you know, jump on a Zoom call where you can have full discussions with a number of people or better yet, you know, meet up for a bad. basketball game, you know, and play some hoops together and have a discussion. You know,

or for me, I would prefer the rugby pitch back in my day, which is, I think, a good metaphor for what we need in society, right? We compete with each other in rugby. It oftentimes leads to heated moments on the pitch. But then we all have a beer afterwards, man, and celebrate the great gift of fellowship together. So I just think, you know, we can all do our part from an education perspective and information perspective but also from a social perspective and i don't think we can wait for the political class to do it i think we all have to all do whatever we can on universities and church groups and boys and girls clubs in our neighborhoods wherever we are we've got to try to convene people and have these kinds of conversations so what would you say russia and china's kryptonite are and the solution

as you see it if you were sort of you know waving your magic wand towards what would give you hope as a set of strengthening endeavors and what their weaknesses might be i think it's a judo move right I think the kryptonite is, how about getting information to the Chinese and the Russian people to which they otherwise would not have access? And this can be the truth. It doesn't have to be disinformation, right? This can be what we see as the truth anyway. Alternative sources of information.

I mean, if they're confident about their totalitarian authoritarian regimes, let's have a competition of ideas, right? I, Tristan, I don't think anybody is culturally predisposed toward not wanting a say in how they're governed, right? And I think that if we can surmount the great firewall in China, I think that this would be tremendously beneficial to the Chinese people and to the world. Is there one thing, HR, that you think you know that others don't, that gives you hope here? I think what I know as a historian is the tremendous resilience of our democratic system. We saw our democratic system survive the January 6th attack, right, through separation of powers. So the fact that our founders made sure the executive branch didn't even have a role in the transition

in our judiciary, right, which adjudicated, I think, effectively of the false, claims of widespread fraud and the actions of the vice president and the Senate majority leader at the time McConnell, right, who did the right thing. And we're true to really exercising Article I authorities under the Constitution. And then also we've been through tough times, man. The 70s wasn't like it wasn't a picnic, right? It was a resignation of a president. It was a lost war in Vietnam and it was tremendous social divisions, right? At the Iranian Revolution, a hostage crisis, a stagflation, energy crisis, right? And so we came out of it. We are resilient. I think authoritarian regimes are brittle.

Remember in the 70s, when we were having all these problems, the Soviet Union looked really strong. I mean, this year was the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, but it was also the 30th anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev's resignation and the breakup of the Soviet Union. So I really think we should be more confident. H.R. McMaster is a retired United States Army Lieutenant General, who served as the 26th National Security Advocate. of the United States. He's a historian of war and author of two books, Derelliction of Duty, Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. And most recently, his book, Battlegrounds, the fight to defend the free world. General McMaster is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution and lecturer in management at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization working to catalyze a humane future. Our executive producer is Stephanie Lep. Our senior producer is Julia Scott. Engineering on this episode by Jeff Sudaken. Dan Kedmi is our editor at large, original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday, and a special thanks to the whole Center for Humane Technology team for making this podcast possible. You can find show notes, transcripts, and much more at HumaneTech.com. A very special thanks goes to our generous lead supporters, including the Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Evolve Foundation, among many others. And if you made it all the way here, let me just give

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