Distinguished Voices Series With H.R. McMaster

Lt. General (ret.) H.R. McMaster discusses his new book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, and the geopolitical dynamics that the second Trump Administration will confront.

The Distinguished Voices Series focuses particular attention on the contributions made by a prominent individual at a critical juncture in the history of the country or the world. 

 

FROMAN: Thanks. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Happy new year. I think this is our first major event after the new year, so welcome back.

It’s really a great pleasure to have General H.R. McMaster with us for the day, and a CFR member.

MCMASTER: Absolutely.

FROMAN: Thank you for paying your dues.

MCMASTER: Sometimes late, you know, because it gets lost in my email. But I’m telling you, I’m good for it. I’m good for it.

FROMAN: Really a great honor to have him here. You all know his background. He’s currently the Fouad and Michelle Ajami senior fellow at Hoover, former national security advisor during the first eighteen months, thirteen months?

MCMASTER: Thirteen months.

FROMAN: Thirteen months of the Trump administration. A historian, a really quite renowned historian and author of a new book, At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty at the Trump White House, which you will find at a table outside this room if you are so inclined.

So we’re going to talk a little about the book, a little bit about your time in the Trump administration, and have you look into your crystal ball and speculate as to what the next four years might look like, and then also, of course, talk about the military and your views on military and the integrity of the military as an institution.

Really, you’re not a spokesman for the Trump administration. You’re not here representing President Trump. But you do have certain insights into him and how he worked, how the White House worked under his leadership. The world he’s inheriting in twelve days is different in a lot of ways from the one he inherited eight years ago. What’s going on the Middle East, the axis of autocracies, the ramping up of the competition with China. Tell us a little bit about, first, how do you think he’s going to deal with the changes that he’s going to face coming in. What do you think will be similar or different between the first term and the second term?

MCMASTER: Well, Michael, thank you so much, and thanks for the privilege of being with you and for all of you for being here and those who are online. I think we need CFR more than ever as a place to bring people together for meaningful, respectful discussions about the challenges and opportunities we face, so we can figure out how we can work together, right, to build a better future. And CFR is really foundational to building that kind of sense of community, and I think ultimately, you know, you get the foreign policy that the American people demand, you know? And so I think CFR can really help generate, I think, momentum in a positive direction. So thanks for the opportunity to be with you, and thanks for the leadership of the Council.

I think it is a much different world. I mean, you already alluded to this. It’s a much more dangerous world, actually, than the one that Donald Trump confronted in 2017, and we helped him confront as he—Ken Jester here—in 2017. And it is I think largely because of the coalescing of this axis of aggressors. And I think that’s the principal challenges he’s going to face, is the degree to which this axis, which involves two revanchist revisionist powers on the Eurasian landmass of China and Russia, who have brought into the fold the theocratic dictatorship in Tehran, as well as the only hereditary communist dictatorship in the world in North Korea.

And of course, they each have different objectives in mind, but what they share is a common objective of tearing down the existing international order and replacing it with the new order that’s sympathetic to their authoritarian form of governance, and also, in the case of China, in particular, its status mercantilist economic models. So I think the stakes are really high, because if they succeed, our world will be less free, less prosperous and less safe.

And I think what got us into this more dangerous situation, I would say, is the perception of weakness. I believe that, you know, the Biden administration was obviously well meaning in terms of their foreign policy. But I think overall, the Biden administration, through its actions and many of its decisions and policies, portrayed a sense of weakness to these adversaries that was provocative.

And I would go back to the disastrous withdrawal, deadly withdrawal, self-defeat in Afghanistan, responsibility for which is shared between the Trump administration and the Biden administration, I believe. And that sent a real profound signal of weakness to Vladimir Putin in particular. I think you could draw a direct line from that from August of 2021 to February of 2022 and the massive reinvasion of Ukraine. I believe that efforts to dissuade Putin from conducting that massive invasion may have made sense from kind of a mirror imaging perspective, but actually encouraged Putin to conduct that offensive, because the actions we took—President Biden going to Geneva, laying out red lines to Putin—that’s a green light for everything else, trying to allay Putin’s security concerns, thinking that’s really what motivates him is his security concerns, pulling our ships out of the Black Sea, for example, listing all the things we wouldn’t do to support Ukraine, ultimately suspending lethal assistance, and then withdrawing our advisors and scuttling our embassy, evacuating our embassy. That looked like a green light to Putin, despite the threats of sanctions and everything else.

And I think then later in Biden administration—and of course, this is mainly a problem in Congress—the difficulty that we had sustaining support for Ukraine sent a signal weakness, I believe, to Ayatollah Khamenei, who thought, hey, this is probably now the time to cross this off my to do list, this being the destruction of Israel and the killing of the Jews, you know?

And I think that there are a number of other, you know, signals of weakness. You know, the Netanyahu government, the judicial reform efforts, the degree to which there was dissension within Israel, the difficulty in the U.S.-Israel relationship. But I think the theme that Donald Trump is going to have to confront is that the perception of weakness is provocative. That is what has emboldened the axis of aggressors. And so I think what we need to do is make decisions that portray strength and determination.

And, oh, I don’t want to go on too long—sorry, Michael—but I’ll just say quickly, he has a huge opportunity. Because this axis of aggressors, right, they look strong from the outside, right? The Russian military looks really good on parade, you know, for example. China portrays strength, acts strong. But we thought Iran was strong—or some people did anyway, right—and its axis of terrorists until Israel took decisive action against that network, and against Hezbollah in particular, and directly against Iran, you know, with 140 aircraft that ran laps around Tehran before they returned. And so they look strong from the outside, but they’re actually quite brittle.

We look weak from the outside with all of our divisions, everything on display for everybody, but I think we’re actually quite resilient. And so if you look at the weaknesses across that axis of aggressors, I think they’re quite profound from not just a military perspective, but maybe especially an economic perspective, and this gives President Trump, I think, a tremendous opportunity.

FROMAN: Let’s build on that, because I think you’re right that despite all the talk about the axis of whatever you want to call them aggressors, autocracies, coming together is a new factor definitely on the international scene. Iran is on its back feet. China’s having economic challenges. Russia, you really can’t view Ukraine as a success.

MCMASTER: No.

FROMAN: In fact, they needed to rely on North Korean troops to try and repel the Ukrainians. So, you know, we are—and NATO is stronger than ever. It’s larger. It’s got more people spending 2 percent of GDP, more countries spending more of their GDP on it. We should be in a good position to deal with this.

Let’s take a let’s take some of the pieces of this. Iran. President Trump famously pulled out of the JCPOA. Iran is now closer to a nuclear weapon than any time before. Whatever you think of the JCPOA, whether it was enough, whether it should have covered other issues, like support for proxies in the region, the fact is, we’re now closer to a nuclear Iran than we ever were before. What do you think a second Trump administration can do vis-à-vis Iran? We tried engagement. We’ve tried sanctions. We’ve tried maximum pressure. What do you think will actually change their behavior?

MCMASTER: Right. Okay, so to go back to the JCPOA quickly and really the Obama administration approach to Iran, I believe it was fundamentally flawed, right? And I read about this in the book, and I had been advising President Trump, among others in his Cabinet, to stay in the short term. You know, because once you pull out, you kind of lose your leverage. While you’re in, you have some leverage, because in particular, many of our European allies who were desperate for us to stay in and say, use that leverage to get to get our friends to put more sanctions on Iran outside of the confines of the deal, and to choke off the finances. Because really, when we developed the strategy, our overall goal—not that we had agency over this—but the overall goal, what we would like to see in Iran was a change in the nature of that government such that it ceases its permanent hostility to the United States, you know, the great Satan. Israel, you know, the cancerous boil. And its Arab neighbors, and the West broadly. So we should evaluate the decisions we make based on whether they contribute to or detract from that overall goal, recognizing that the Iranian people are going to be the arbiters of that, right? So—

FROMAN: That’s regime change.

MCMASTER: Well, or evolution, or whatever you want to call it. But we have to acknowledge that, because of the ideology of the revolution, the nature of that theocratic regime, and the degree to which the supreme leader and the IRGC control its policy, that they are fundamentally hostile to the United States, and that’s not going to change.

The Biden administration and the Obama administration labored under the delusion that Iran could be welcomed back into the international—it would become like a responsible stakeholder. They actually believe this in the Middle East.

And the problem with the JCPOA, we’re not just kind of the sunset clause, which is kind of happening right now, if it were to stay in as, as well as the very weak verification regime—and who the heck trusts the Iranian regime? I mean, nobody should, right? So it really gave them cover to continue the program, in my view, and at the same time be able to reap the tremendous benefit of huge cash payoffs—remember, planeloads of cash going to Tehran as well as the sanctions relief, you know, which was able to really fill the IRGC’s coffers. I mean, they doubled the stipend to Hezbollah and these other groups. They formed a proxy army of tens of thousands of people in Syria. You know, they increased their support for Hamas and PIJ, the Houthis, you know, so the Hashd al-Shaabi militias in Iraq. It gave them the funds that they needed.

And so what happened is Donald Trump, he reversed that. And one of the objectives was to constrain the cash flow available to the Iranian regime. The Trump administration was successful in that, and then the Biden administration reversed it, undesignated the Houthis as terror—I mean, I could go on, but everything they did to resurrect the failed policy of the Obama administration.

So I think to answer your question, what will Trump do now, I think what he’ll do immediately is to constrain the cash flow to the regime by reinforcing the sanctions that are already in place that the Biden administration chose not to enforce to the tune of about $100 billion of additional cash flow into Iran over the last four years, you know. And we know where that money went.

I think it’ll take additional measures that will involve interdicting those cash flows. I mean, there could be, for example, secondary sanctions on financial entities that are that are facilitating financial flows for the Iranian regime.

And I think what you could see is maybe more aggressive physical interdiction of Iran’s threat network in the region, especially, you know, anti-ship missiles to the Houthis, for example. So I think there will be an effort to constrain the regime, because you know what Iran needs? They need that cash flow to reconstitute the organizations that have just taken these very heavy blows, mainly Israel. So I think that’s going to happen for sure.

Now, the big question is Iran’s nuclear program, Michael, you already alluded to. What happens about that?

Well, I think there’s, like, maybe 100 percent chance, you know, that Israel will strike the elements of that program and missile program in the next few years. You know, what does the United States do? Are we part of that? What happens before that? Because, as we know, there’s been a sustained campaign to disrupt Iran’s path to the most destructive weapons on Earth. The Begin doctrine is still in place in Israel, you know? So I think it’s going to happen.

And the question is, does the United States begin to consider a U.S. role in that kind of—and military effort to block or at least significantly delay Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon and the delivery devices that it could use to employ that weapon?

So I think that’s where we are. It’s a very dangerous position these days. But I think what we’ve learned, and what we should have known before, is that the Iranian regime is profoundly weak. And I think what would be appropriate for the Trump administration to do is to take a look at this axis of aggressors and recognize that when you look at them together, there are some real mutual vulnerabilities. A lot of times we give them a free ride, because we look at one at a time without recognizing the degree to which they have coalesced and have become mutually dependent—for example, Russia on Shahed drones in return for, I’m sure—you know, I would imagine, I guess, but I’m pretty sure—technical assistance for Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, for example, the degree to which China is keeping Iran on life support by buying 97 percent of Iran’s oil, you know?

So the list goes on about how when you look at them holistically, you see a lot of leverage, right?

Russia. Russia is sitting on piles of cash it can’t convert, can’t use, you know, is on the verge of maybe hyperinflation, you know, has a real, real labor constraints.

China is enabling the warmaking machine by buying their energy exports, but also providing them with the electronics and the hardware necessary to sustain their onslaught against Ukrainians. Once we realize that, what could we do there? How about driving the price of oil down a little bit? Which would, I think, put Putin in a tremendously precarious position at this stage.

So I hope what the Trump administration does is convene kind of a planning effort, and say, hey, what are the sources of strength and support for these authoritarian regimes, and how do we isolate them from those sources of strength and support? And that’s financial, as I mentioned, and economic. It’s informational, and from a public diplomacy perspective, to counter kind of the stories they tell their people to remain in power and, you know, to portray these regimes that are really preying on their own people as saviors because they’re beleaguered by some outside force, like, you know, Ukrainian Nazis or something. So I think there’s a multiple dimensions to this approach.

But I think it’s time for us to become more active against this axis, and by treating them together. You know, we keep trying to divide them, right, to asking China, oh, could you really help with the Iranians? I mean, first of all, that’s kind of humiliating. But anyway, I think it doesn’t work. I think we should be gluing them together and hanging these problems around their necks like loadstones.

FROMAN: You mentioned the importance of acting from strength and expressing that strength. Certainly one of the areas of U.S. strength, historically, particularly vis-à-vis China, is our network of alliances.

MCMASTER: Absolutely.

FROMAN: President Trump, in the first term, seemed to have limited affection for alliances. Do you think he has evolved in that position? Or do you think the experience of seeing NATO work so well together in the case of Ukraine and pull together and devote resources in a more balanced way has convinced him that alliances are worth investing in and supporting?

MCMASTER: You know, I don’t know, Michael. I mean, I hope so. And so, you know, there are a lot of things that Donald Trump is kind of completely consistent on, right? OK, border security, right? We know that for sure, right? How about reciprocal trade and China’s weaponization of its economy against us? You know, the degree to which our defense industrial base has atrophied. I think, he’ll come down strong on defense, you know, and the need to address a bow wave of deferred defense modernization, and the very severe capacity issues we have in our joint force. I think those are—there are others, you know, energy dominance, you know. In the area of—but consistent. You know what you’re going to get.

There are other areas where he does carry this kind of dissonance with him, and the people around him need to really, I think, help him think about what his overall goals and objectives and priorities are, which, if it is burden sharing, then you realize, well, you know, the best way for burden sharing are these alliances, right, are strong alliances.

And so you can make the case for burden sharing, like he has recently saying they ought to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense. So should we, by the way, I think, you know, to maybe set the example in that connection, because we’re spending about 3 percent of GDP on defense, which is a historic low in the post-Cold War period, post-World War II period, really, and during Cold War period.

And so I think, you know, it’s how he reconciles that kind of dissonance. I tell the story in the book about Brussels, you know, which is kind of on that long first trip President Trump made, he went to—remember he went to Saudi Arabia, and then Israel, and then Rome, and then what I was most nervous about was Brussels, you know, because the EU he sees mainly or largely, not, you know, yeah, mainly, as economic competitor, and we’re going to NATO headquarters. And, you know, he had written into the speech language which you’ve heard him use, you know, since then about, well, if you don’t pay your dues, we’re not going to defend you, basically, right? He thinks of investment of 2 percent or more GDP equivalent in defense as the dues for NATO.

So as we’re getting in the car, he had written that back into the speech, and I had to really almost control the secretary of defense and state to get in the car with me, with him, because they always would prefer for me just to do it myself. You know, in this case, I’m like, hey, get in the car, damn it.

So, we explained to him on the way that, hey, you know what you want is you want a stronger alliance, right? So if you want a stronger alliance, don’t deliver a psychological blow to the alliance that gives Putin—you know, that gives Putin a free win here, you know? And, you know, he was persuaded by that. So I guess it really is, how does he reconcile some of these opposing ideas he carries with him, the deep skepticism about alliances?

And, you know, just quickly Donald Trump, I found when you’re in any engagement with him, he asks a series of implicit questions, right, or guiding the discussion in his mind, right? Which is, you know, why do we have to do it? Why can’t somebody else do this? You know, how much does it cost? How do we get other people to pay more?

So he always used to say, reciprocal. That’s my favorite word, my favorite word.

FROMAN: I thought tariffs were his favorite word.

MCMASTER: Well, he’s got a lot of favorite words. He’s got a lot of favorite words, a lot of favorite words. (Laughs.)

So, so I think that that it’s really important to help him kind of determine his own agenda, right? People who try to, you know, box him in a corner or manipulate his decisions, that doesn’t work with him, because he’s reflexively contrarian, you know? So the way to, I think, help him make the best available decision is to get best analysis to him and multiple options, including the one to which he’s predisposed, even if you don’t agree with it, right? Because, you know, I think it’s important for him to see that considered in light of those objectives.

And the story I tell in the book is, I would never go to him for a decision or convene, you know, the Principals Committee of the National Security Council, or National Security Council itself with him there to get a decision without first getting his approval on the framing of the challenge we’re addressing, right? And including, you know, kind of the understanding the nature of that challenge, and the understanding of, you know, what we think our overarching goal, more specific objectives ought to be, you know, what are the assumptions on which this planning effort or policy effort will be based. Because once you’ve got his buy-in on the framing, then you could view the options in context of that framing and help him make the best available decision.

FROMAN: You know, at least in the first term, he demonstrated quite an unconventional approach to policymaking.

MCMASTER: Oh, it’ll be totally different this time.

FROMAN: Yeah, this will be great. (Laughter.)

MCMASTER: But no, no.

FROMAN: That unconventional approach was able, in some ways, to produce surprising results—

MCMASTER: Yeah. That’s right.

FROMAN: —meeting with Kim Jong-un, you know, as an—as an example.

MCMASTER: Sure.

FROMAN: For whatever that, you know, ultimately produced.

MCMASTER: Well, and he made the good decision of walking out into Hanoi, which I think was important, yeah.

FROMAN: Right. So how do you think about that going into the second term? Can his unconventional approach actually produce results that have been difficult to produce through other means?

And I say that because as we all travel around the world, certainly right now the rest of the world is waiting for him to come in. And we talk to foreign leaders or foreign officials, they all want to know what do I need to do to make a deal with Donald Trump? Like they want a deal with him. Does that give him leverage to get some positive things done?

MCMASTER: It absolutely gives him leverage. And I think it also gives others an opportunity internationally, you know? And I don’t mean to be snarky about this, you know, but what if Donald Trump does help make the free world tired of winning? I mean, because if you think about like what his top agendas items are, they’re really shared by Europe as well. They’re shared by Japan, for example. You know, peace through strength, it’s obviously—it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to prevent a war than to have to fight one.

You know, it’s really important, I think, for us to recognize the degree to which we’ve allowed our industrial base to atrophy, that we’ve allowed our supply chains to become controlled, or at least single points of failure associated with those supply chains by a hostile authoritarian regime, China, you know? So these should be shared kind of objectives. And I think there could be a multinational agenda put in place around those common concerns.

You know, with President Trump, though, you know, again, he understands the importance of entering into a negotiation from a position of strength, but he also has a strong desire for, like, a big deal, right? Remember, you know, the trade deal with China, and holding out the prospect of a phase two trade deal I think got him to back off on maybe some trade enforcement mechanisms that he would have put into place to sort of counter China’s weaponization of its mercantilist economic model against us. I don’t know—I think, of course, everybody learns. Maybe he learned from that.

I think with Vladimir Putin, it’s really important to go in from a position of strength. You know, this idea that you can end it in twenty-four hours really kind of cuts against history, right? I can’t think of an example in history in which there was a favorable political outcome or a settlement to a war that didn’t reflect military realities on the ground, right? So I think to get an end to the war, he should come in from a position of strength, with maybe a long-term low interest loan for the Ukrainians that removes their doubts about whether or not they’ll be able to sustain the effort with the weapons and munitions necessary to defend themselves. And actually, I think they’re defending the free world.

And so I think, you know, it depends, I guess, you know, how he’s going to take a look at this. It’s this sort of tension that he has at times between recognizing instinctively to come in from a position of strength, but also having this sort of strong attraction to a big deal.

FROMAN: Do you think—since you mentioned Ukraine—do you think there’s openness to Ukraine becoming a member of NATO? And if not, what are the kinds of security guarantees that you think the U.S. should be offering to make Ukraine, the possibility of being an independent, successful, prosperous country embedded in the West?

MCMASTER: Yeah. Well, you know, obviously it’s hard to imagine now based on the composition of NATO and the need for unanimity, and the degree to which Russia has been able to influence particular countries in NATO, you know, Slovakia, for example, or Hungary, you know? So I think there are real impediments that are practical, that make the conversation not as useful as it would be if there was really kind of a path and a willingness among, you know, all the nations to bring Ukraine into NATO. But also—

FROMAN: But if the U.S. and Germany came on board, wouldn’t they ultimately be able to bring them into NATO?

MCMASTER: I don’t know. I just don’t know, because, you know, Russia would pull out all the stops. I mean, you know, look at what they’ve done in Georgia. Look what they did in Romania recently. You know, they’re quite effective at cyber-enabled information warfare and political subversion. So I think it would be contested, certainly. But so I guess the question is, then, what kind of security guarantees are necessary?

First of all, though, I think that before there is any kind of an agreement that would lead to really Ukraine achieving what I think Ukrainians want to achieve, right, which is, you know, a free, independent, sovereign state that is on the path to reconstruction, economically and financially viable, that can defend itself, right, and against, you know, further Russian aggression. I think there’s a lot of work to be done militarily, and some hard fighting between now and then, because I think the only way to get to that is to convince Vladimir Putin that he’s losing the war. I mean, I really think that’s the only way to get there, is to convince Vladimir Putin that he’s losing the war.

I mentioned some of the economic vulnerabilities that he has. But hey, you know—and I know the Ukrainians have big manpower issues now, and it’s a very difficult situation in Ukraine with the continued onslaught slot against the energy infrastructure as well as the losses they’re suffering.

But the Russians, they’re taking 1,100 to 1,500 casualties a day, a day, right? The North Korean force you mentioned, they’ve already been decimated. I don’t believe that those losses are sustainable, right? You know John Keegan in his great book on “The Face of Battle,” right, he made the prescient observation that battle is aimed at the disintegration of human groups, and every person and every human group has a breaking point. I can’t imagine that the Russians aren’t close to that breaking point. And you hear, well, they’ve got more capacity. But, you know, Putin doesn’t want to do another big mobilization. He can’t do it right now, by the way. And so I think there are real constraints, and what I think we should see at this moment is an opportunity to unconstrain, to drop the constraints on our support for the Ukrainians. You know, President Trump is not one to shy away from criticizing his predecessors. I’ll broach that right now—(laughs)—goes, all those stupid people who came in before me. Hey, criticize—maybe criticize the Biden administration for the halting way that they provided support for the Ukrainians.

I mean, remember President Trump in December of 2017, I tell this story in the book about how he came to the decision to provide Javelin missiles to the Ukrainians, the first really lethal assistance to the Ukrainians that we had provided. And what he had said in criticism of the Obama administration, how crazy is that? I mean, they’re giving them first aid kits, but they’re not giving them weapons. And, you know, I reminded him of that, you know, in December of 2017.

So I think that really what is necessary to achieve what we all would like to see, which is a restoration of peace in Europe in the first major land war in Europe since World War II, with North Korean troops fighting there, which is crazy, right? And we should all be outraged, and maybe talk about that a heck of a lot more, about how these conflicts and competitions are connected to one another—I think the way to get to that, on a path to that resolution, is through a strong position and really a communication of sustained support for the Ukrainians.

Now, will the president make that decision? Who knows, right? Because, as we all know in any administration, there are going to be different camps of people. And I think as you look at appointees in the Trump administration—you know, this is over simplistic, you know, to say it this way—but there are retrenchers, right? And the retrenchers are the people who blame all the ills in the United States, every problem that we have, on like the neoconservatives, you know? And particularly they go back to the invasion of Iraq as what began all of our problems, you know. And so they see disengagement from these complex competitions abroad as an unmitigated good.

And then there are those who, you know, they’re America first, right? They want to prioritize American interests, but they’re internationalists. They understand that in the world that we live in, that we require multinational cooperation so that we can prevail in this competition against this axis of aggressors and build a better world for generations to come, you know? So how is that going to play out? I don’t know.

FROMAN: And there’s a third group that says, well, we should be focusing everything on China.

MCMASTER: On China, right.

FROMAN: Leave Ukraine to Europe, leave the Middle East to others and—

MCMASTER: Right, the geostrategic equivalent of little kids soccer, right? You just all run to the Taiwan Strait while China is scoring goals in the Western Hemisphere and everywhere else, you know. So I—I mean, I—

FROMAN: No question where you stand on this issue.

MCMASTER: No, I think it’s a myopic view. It really is.

And so here’s what I think. Maybe CFR is the place to do this.

FROMAN: But do you think President Trump has a core belief—

MCMASTER: No, I don’t—so President Trump is not—like, he’s not an ideologue. He really isn’t, you know? And he’s transactional. He’s pragmatic. You know, he has certain instincts, right? You know that we’ve been wronged, right, the sense of, you know, America’s been taken advantage of. You know, this goes into the reciprocity agreements, the burden sharing agreements, right? That’s a big element of his instincts on foreign policy.

You know, people try to cast him with these recent comments on, you know, Panama and Greenland and everything. You know, as somebody—well, do you think he’s going to use military force? No. I mean, President Trump is not someone who would use military force capriciously. I mean, quite the opposite. I mean, if you remember, after the Soleimani killing, the al-Assad attacks, you know, the shoot down of an American drone from Iranian soil, the attack on the Saudi Aramco facilities, I mean, he decided against really responding to those acts of Iranian aggression in the wake of the Solemani killing.

So I think, you know, there’s certain aspects of his personality, you know, his predisposition that you can bank on. But how those prepositions and instincts will manifest themselves in policy decisions is difficult to determine. And he’s not inflexible of mind on this, on these issues, you know? And you know, he often will say like, I don’t do red lines and so forth, and but he’ll make comments that are, you know, disquieting, to say the least, you know, whether, you know, on Taiwan, and they stole our chips, damn it, you know, and so, why do we defend them? And which, I think can be irresponsible, right? Because it can encourage aggression. So I think, hey, you know, it’s going to be not boring for sure, you know? (Laughter.)

But, you know, he’s got a good team in place that can help him, I think, make the best decisions. When I look at the incoming national security advisor, he’s ab extremely accomplished person. He’s got a great personality and disposition to foster the kind of collaboration you need across the government and internationally.

The secretary of state, for example, you know, is extremely accomplished and working across the aisle and with international partners. And we had the opportunity to work very closely with him on a Cuba policy and other foreign policy issues, and he and his staff were extremely helpful. So I think, you know, there are some real, you know, A team players coming in. And of course, I think they understand their roles, right? Nobody elected them to be president. They know that. You know, the American people elected Donald Trump. So it’s not your job to try to manipulate Donald Trump into decisions. It’s your job, as I write in the book, to be the guardian of his independence of judgment and to provide him with best analysis and multiple options. That gets good results with him. If you try either to manipulate decisions based on your agenda, you know, Trump will lash out against that. If you define your role as protecting the country and the world from Donald Trump, as some people did, you know, in Trump one, that’s not going to work either. You know, so I think the emphasis should be, you know, on building kind of the trust, you know, across the administration, and trust with the president, which was lacking, you know, in the first Trump administration. But now these are really clearly his people, right? I mean, Donald Trump didn’t know me, or Rex Tillerson, or Jim Mattis, or anything. So those who wanted to kind of kneecap us, you know, or to create a rift between the president, it was easy for them to do that, you know?

So I think even though there were these different camps that represent Donald Trump’s dissonance on some of these issues, I’m hoping that there’ll be a more collaborative, you know, and positive collaborative relationship in this administration. That may or may not happen. As President Trump likes to say, you know, we’ll see, right? We’ll see. Stay tuned.

FROMAN: Great.

Let me open it up. Just a reminder, this is on the record. Please stand if called on, identify yourself. Make it a short question. We’ve got some 400 people online, so we’ll try and get some questions in there as well.

Yes, Motulsky.

Q: Thank you. Hi. Thank you for your comments. Dan Motulsky, member of Council.

One thing I wanted to follow up that Mike asked that you touched on, but if you would expand a little bit on, is thoughts on potential security guarantees for Ukraine as a path forward, if there’s a ceasefire or whatever form it takes and however you get there. You know, what are some alternatives to path to NATO, which you did comment on, of security guarantees so that there’s a lasting peace, as opposed to a brief period?

MCMASTER: Okay, great.

Well, you know, as you know, I mean, there are a number of models out there, right? And I think maybe a multilateral, you know, peace enforcement, monitoring force that would—you know, I’m thinking like the Sinai force, you know, that’s been there since the ’70s—could be the model.

I think, also, you know, just a series of bilateral, maybe not even necessarily a multilateral relationship with Ukrainians that would involve, you know, training and logistics support. And really what they need now, I mean, they really need in-country training. They really need in-country logistics support. I mean, that could make a huge difference right now, by the way. And I think that would have a significant deterrent effect, you know, for example, on Russia as well. not only based on the presence of trainers and logistics personnel and advisors and so forth there, but also on just the building up a Ukrainian capability over time so they have their own strong defense capabilities, which, you know, they already have a nascent—not nascent, but a growing defense industry, drone production, and so forth.

So, yeah, I think that may be the way to go. Because if you wait for all NATO countries to agree on, like, a NATO presence or something, I just don’t think it’s going to happen. And I think we have to get more used to this, right? A lot of our international institutions are not really performing the way we would like to perform. And so you can try to reform them, or you can create new ones, you know, and new multilateral relationships. And I think that’s what we’re going to have to do.

FROMAN: Let’s take a question online.

OPERATOR: We will take a question from Michael Gordon.

Q: Thank you, H.R.

MCMASTER: I’m used to those. Hey, Michael.

Q: Hi.

You’ve talked about the emerging alignment between Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, and the need to project strength against this partnership. But for the past few days, the focus in Mar-a-Lago has been on acquiring Greenland and settling grievances with Panama for its administration of the canal. From a national security perspective, do you think it’s important for the U.S. to acquire Greenland? Do you see an issue with Panama’s control over the canal. And are these the right priorities for the United States to pursue at this time, and the right way to pursue these objectives?

MCMASTER: Right. And, Michael, as you know, and everybody here knows, I mean, this is just, you know, President Trump being President Trump, I mean just what he does. I mean he says, at times, you know, outlandish things, or what many would regard as outlandish things, but there’s something behind it, right?

So, I mean, what’s behind the Greenland comment I think is a recognition that not enough has been done in the area of security, you know, either by Denmark or NATO or the U.S. bases there to secure Greenland and its very important claims to the Arctic as that becomes an even more important strategic part of the world, you know?

On the Panama Canal, he maybe thinks we’re probably getting short shrift there in the canal with, you know, paying too much, and so forth. And you know, he’s concerned about China’s influence in Panama, which he should be concerned about. But, you know, hey, we didn’t really give them much of an alternative. I think we went for six years in Panama without an ambassador there, you know, or something crazy like that.

So, he’ll say something—you know, and I tell the story in the book about one time—yeah, in the Oval Office—and others have had various similar experiences on the same topic. So, you know, General, why can’t we just bomb them? Bomb what, Mr. President? The labs, the labs in Mexico.

And so I don’t think he was really asking me for options to bomb the labs. But what he was saying is, hey, 90,000 Americans are dying every year from fentanyl poisoning. It’s coming across our border. What we’re doing right now is not working. Why don’t you bring me some options? I mean, that really is what he was saying to me, right?

So President Trump, he does think out loud. He tweets out loud, you know, and I know that that is disquieting. Oftentimes it gets in his own way. You know, it diminishes, really, his options for what he could do to actually accomplish his objective of strengthening security, you know, through NATO and Denmark and Greenland, for example. But you know, that’s his style, you know?

And at times those tweets were productive. You know, when he would say—after he had made the decision and directed our government to cut off assistance to Pakistan because they’re continuing their support for jihadist terrorists who were killing our soldiers, committing mass murder against Afghans in Afghanistan. You know, he tweeted it out, stop giving anything to the Pakistanis. And I was like, hey, thank you. I mean, you know, I’m glad you put that out. It would help me actually get our own Department of Defense and Department of State to do what he was telling him to do to begin with.

So I think, you know, with Donald Trump, almost everything cuts both ways, right? And so what we would try to do is bend, you know, what he was doing, communicating into the policies that he’s approved and to try to advance objectives, you know. And sometimes it was counterproductive. Sometimes it was just humorous, frankly, you know? I mean, I would never call Kim Jong-un short and fat, you know, for example, right? So, I mean, at times you’ve just got to laugh at it. At times you should be grateful for it because it’s an effective form of communication. At times you should lament the fact that it actually cuts against his own agenda at times, right?

And one of the themes in the book is, you know, Donald Trump’s disruptive, right? We call agree on that, whether you love him, hate him, right? He’s disruptive. There’s a lot in Washington that needs to be disrupted. I think we would all agree on that, right? I think the challenge for those coming into the administration, for the president himself, will be to help him be disruptive in the areas that need to be disrupted, but help him to not be so disruptive that he disrupts himself, right, and his own agenda.

FROMAN: Yes, woman in the third row. Microphone is making its way. No, in the third row.

Q: Paula DiPerna.

And thank you for your service. It’s mostly thank you for not legitimizing and normalizing what was dangerous and for the way that you’re speaking today.

So picking up from what you just said, you only named two of the nominees who have qualifications, vaguely. And in the complexities you’re describing and the need for what you just said, this group of people are ideologically driven and very much unable, in my view—and that’s what I’m asking, your view—to address these complexities.

MCMASTER: Yeah. OK, so I think you’ve got to really—we all ought to be grateful for our founders’ advice and consent in the Senate. And so the confirmation process, the hearings I think will draw out, I mean, many of these concerns on some of the nominees that you’re alluding to. I would imagine it’d be DNI and secretary of defense, maybe, you know, maybe others, FBI and so forth.

So, you know, I think that’s what we’ve got to rely on. And I think that we ought to really focus on the issues and whether or not these people we think are well-equipped to fulfill their responsibilities under the Constitution and for the president.

I think it’s really going to be difficult, for example, for the DNI nominee to deal with the split screen of the exhumation of 100,000 tortured bodies south of Damascus and having dinner with Assad, you know? So I’m not going to be the person who makes that decision. Our senators are going to make that decision. And I think that’s what we ought to expect of them, you know, is to really fully embrace their Article 1 responsibilities, you know? And I think they’ll do that.

And I think we have to compensate. You know, there’s so much around President Trump, you know, that involves kind of this idea of like democracy is over, and everything else, you know. But I think there’s ample evidence of politicization of institutions that should not be politicized in both political parties, or elements of both political parties. And I think that ought to be the standard for CFR, for all of us, you know, who care about our country, to apply that standard to both political parties, right?

So you may not agree with the nominee for FBI, and I think that, you know, there’s some serious concerns there. But I think you also have to be able to read the Durham Report and say, hey, that wasn’t good either, you know? So I think the challenge for the Trump administration will be is, you know, the president does have this kind of impulse toward, you know, retribution, or whatever, you know, some of the language that he uses at times. And I just think we ought to maybe encourage him and others around him to just ensure that the cure for what you see as the disease isn’t worse than the disease itself, right? And I worry about that in connection with really critical institutions like the Department of Justice, but also the military as well, you know?

FROMAN: Can you say a little more just on that point?

MCMASTER: Yeah.

FROMAN: I know it’s something that’s deeply important to you. How do you maintain the integrity of the military as an institution in this increasingly political—(inaudible)?

MCMASTER: I think tell all politicians, keep your hands off the military from a partisan perspective, you know? And I think what we’ve seen, as I mentioned, is both political parties attempts to kind of politicize the military, to try to, you know, somehow supplant loyalty to the Constitution, which we all vow to support and defend, and to try to make it like personal loyalty or loyalty to a party.

And I think you’ve seen this, you know, with the narrative that the military is extremist. You know, remember after January 6, you had this false claim that military veterans were overrepresented on January 6. That was not true. But you know, what did the administration do? They did an extremist stand down. You had people who were in their hearings before the Senate for confirmation, and the Biden administration said, my first priority is going to be to stamp out white supremacy in the U.S. military. I’m like, man, I served in the army for thirty-four years. You know, and I didn’t see white supremacy in the military. And anybody who we saw as, you know, a confirmed bigot or racist or sexist got the hell thrown out. Because the military culture is fundamentally hostile to all forms of bigotry and racism, because it’s destructive to military effectiveness.

But people came into the Biden administration with an agenda to change the culture of the military. You saw that in some of the recruiting videos and the various offices that sprung up that advanced or reified philosophy associated with what I would call kind of radical DEI orthodoxy. This is really equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity, right? Or the valorization of victimhood, you know, all this sort of these reified philosophies and various post-modernist theories that have, you know, done so much damage to our universities. I mean, why the hell would we want to import that into the military?

But then, of course, you have the reaction to that, which is, you know, the military is woke, you know, on elements of the far right. Hey, the military is not woke. The military is not extremist. And by the way, guess what? Generals don’t make policies. Nobody elects generals to make policies, right? And so it’s the civilian leadership you’ve got to be concerned about.

So this talk about like a tribunal to go after woke generals, that’s nonsensical, but it’s also damaging, because instead of what the Trump administration should do is reverse this kind of effort to politicize the military with this kind of, I don’t know, postmodernist agenda, whatever you want to call that agenda, you don’t want, again, you know, the cure to be worse than the disease, you know, and to further politicize the military.

I don’t care if you’re a Republican, a Democrat, you know, what spectrum you are. You should encourage your sons and daughters to serve in our military because of the importance of that service being part of something bigger themselves, because we do have to defend our freedom and our way of life against an increasingly, I think, dangerous axis of aggressors, and because of the tremendous rewards of service, you know, being part of an organization in which the man or woman next to you is willing to give everything, including their own lives for you, being part of an organization that buys into the warrior ethos, really, which is around principles such as honor, you know, courage, a willingness to self-sacrifice, you know, for the mission and for one another.

You know, we don’t have that narrative in our society anymore. And I think, you know, for a number of reasons, because this politicization, I think because of maybe the humiliating, disastrous, you know, self-defeat in Afghanistan, you know, the degree to which popular culture cheapens and coarsens our warrior ethos and the way we portray veterans as traumatized, fragile human being, you know, all of this is weighing down, I think, on our ability to recruit our best young women into military service, which is what we need, you know?

And so you’re not going to address that problem by trying to make the military partisan. The military has to be, you know, absolutely nonpartisan. I tell this story in the book. I mean, I never voted when I was on active duty, you know. And I think, you know, soldiers, servicemen and women, they should vote. That’s fine. But I made a personal choice to emulate George Marshall. And when I took the Oath of Service on a plane at West Point at age seventeen, and I thought it was really important to keep that bold line in place between the military and partisan politics.

So, yeah, I think that we all have to work on that and maybe demand better, you know, from our political class that they did not participate in this continued effort to drag the military into partisan politics.

FROMAN: Take the next one from the online audience.

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Harvey Rishikof.

Q: Hello, H.R. Great to see you. Thank you for everything you’ve been doing.

MCMASTER: Hey, Harvey. It’s been a long time. It’s great to hear your voice.

Q: Great. And very happy for you doing this.

So, H.R., I want to ask a more sort of structural question. As you know, we’re in a real interesting relationship with China when it comes to cyber, and we’re also having real structural problems with the defense industrial base and with the Magnificent Seven. And what is your thoughts about what would it take to trigger something like the Defense Production Act in order to organize both the defense industrial base and the cyber community to be organized for our interests? What are your thoughts, given where you’ve been over the last couple of years, about that problem set? Over

MCMASTER: Hey, well, thanks, Harvey.

You know I think, well, first of all, what we need to do is we need to further develop the strategy that has been maturing across now two administrations to counter various forms of Chinese aggression, including cyber aggression and economic aggression and physical aggression. And I think that what is needed is really an effort around, you know, kind of a problem statement of how to prevent China from establishing exclusionary areas of primacy across the Indo-Pacific and creating new spheres of influence internationally that allow China to rewrite the rules of international discourse in a way that favors their statist economic model and their authoritarian governance model. And so that would be kind of like the overall challenge. And there’ll be multiple components to that, as you mentioned.

I do believe we have to impose very significant costs on the CCP and the PRC about these massive cyber intrusions. I mean, hell, they listened to President Trump’s phone, you know, and everybody around him for six months, right? They’ve stolen extraordinary amounts of data. We’ve found them on our telecom networks. And I believe that what China is doing—and you know, I mean, you might think I’m kind of crazy for saying this—but I think China is laying the groundwork for a first strike nuclear capability against the United States. And the reason I’ve come to that conclusion is I’ve looked at what they’re doing from a cyber perspective and really developing at least a latent capability to take down our communications networks, as well as a massive buildup in their strategic forces, a 400 percent increase in their strategic nuclear forces, for example, as well as what their overall surveillance and intelligence collection capabilities have focused on, which is quite heavily on our strategic forces.

So I mean, if that’s the case, we should be quite serious about this. And from a defense perspective, you know, with a layered kind of active defense for our critical infrastructure, but also with an offensive capability, an offensive capability in cyberspace, but also from an economic and financial perspective. You know, I mean, if they’re going to play this game, we ought to impose very significant costs and maybe exacerbate some of the very significant difficulties they have associated with their economic growth, which is probably half of what their Bureau of Statistics has announced, the massive youth unemployment that they have, you know, the housing crisis, the debt crisis, and so forth.

So, I mean, I think, you know, we have to counter their various forms of aggression, and we should do it in a holistic way. And of course, I think what’s necessary in these kind of cases, Harvey, is to recognize that whatever you do will elicit a counteraction against you. And this is why I think kind of war gaming, you know, not that about war, but maybe using the term euphemistically a war game, in terms of playing out action, counter action from an economic, diplomatic, informational, and military perspective, is what’s important to try to anticipate kind of counteractions and to apply the tools that are available to us in a holistic way, in a synergistic way. And what I’m talking about are some of those that you mentioned, Harvey, which were cyber tools, for example. President Trump, you know, “tariffs,” that’s another favorite word, right? Another favorite word.

FROMAN: Absolutely. That’s part of the dictionary.

MCMASTER: Tariffs. (Laughs.) But also, you know what we’ve seen the Biden administration employ and carry on—follow on to what the Trump administration did in the area of export controls, inbound and outbound investment screening, investments in some of our own capabilities to address the degree to which our supply chains have become vulnerable to coercion by the Chinese Communist Party. Our industrial base broadly, you know, maybe it is on critical minerals, to have some kind of a government insurance policy, to put a floor down on the price of some of these critical materials, so we can incentivize long-term investment. I think we’re starting to do multi-year contracting in defense. We have to do better to provide—to unleash kind of the power of our free market economic system and our unbridled entrepreneurialism.

So I think all of these are elements of that response, Harvey. And I would convene kind of like an NEC/NSC-led planning effort to take on the problem, the problem holistically, and to kind of war game it out, and to make sure we’re considering the second and third order effects.

And then, of course, you know, ultimately, you would want to bring in multinational partners, like minor partners, because it’s really important, I think, for us to not allow China to play us off against each other. The Biden administration has done a pretty good job on a lot of this, especially is in connection with chip manufacturing hardware, which is like a model, you know, that we could use to employ to other critical sectors. And I think what the Biden administration has done recently, with, again, you know, identifying some of these major companies, you know, COSCO, CATL, Tencent that have a defense nexus under the Chinese program of civil-military fusion.

So I think that this is a competition that will certainly continue under the Trump administration, and it’s one in which there’s been a very high degree of continuity between Trump one, the Biden administration. And I think what we did in 2017 with the help of Ken Jester, Matt Pottinger, a lot of really fantastic people in the Trump administration is effect the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, and that was from this cooperation and engagement approach to China, to the transparent competition.

FROMAN: Yes, here in the second row. Wait for the microphone.

Q: Can you hear me? Hi, I’m Vicky Ward. I’m an author and journalist. I wrote a book about Jared Kushner’s influence on the Trump foreign policy.

And my question is, as we approach Trump 2.0, what do you see regarding Saudi Arabia’s considerable financial influence over the Trump family. How would that affect national security?

MCMASTER: Thanks. (Laughter.) Well, I guess what I would say is, I don’t know. I don’t know. But what I would say is, I think our interests are very well aligned with the kingdom right now. I mean, I just think they’re aligned. And I think that, in many ways, you know, Mohammed bin Salman is kind of waiting for Donald Trump to come back. The Biden administration I think has made up for what was initially a very difficult relationship, and you know, President Biden’s comments about making him a pariah and so forth. And of course, there had to be costs imposed on him and the kingdom, you know, for the brutal murder of a U.S. resident and journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

So I think now, though, what’s happened, based on really the war in the Middle East, across the Middle East, is a very clear alignment of U.S. long-term interests with those of the kingdom and the other Gulf states, especially associated with the threat from Iran and Iranian proxies. And of course, you have MBS’s reform agenda, you know, the Neom initiative and the various liberalization efforts he’s made.

You know, I read about the first trip in the book to Riyadh, you know, the president’s first stop. And people were saying, OK, what the hell is Donald Trump doing going to Riyadh, you know? And I think it was absolutely brilliant, you know, for him to do it. Because if you look back at that trip—and the media really didn’t cover it, because I mean, I think we just have to admit, OK, the vast majority of the mainstream media was fundamentally hostile to Donald Trump, right? And just all they want to do is report on intrigue and you know how he was, you know, unfit, rather than what he was trying to accomplish.

And if you go back and kind of read the speech that he gave in Riyadh, and read King Salman’s speech, that was kind of a sea change in the kingdom, from really support for Salafist, you know, madrassas and mosques that were gateways to jihadist terrorists to a recognition that this was a threat to the world and to the kingdom in particular. And so I think that we built on that over that year. It was a deliberate effort to kind of jumpstart what became the Abraham Accords. And in my view—and I write about this in the book—Jared Kushner played a profoundly positive role in all of that. He really did. And a guy named Jason Greenblatt, who was fantastic, played a really phenomenal role in the Abraham Accords.

And of course, you know, people would say, oh, God, he was just naive. These guys are naive. Hey, I’ll tell you when, if you’re dealing with the Middle East—and what a complex, frustrating place that could be—maybe a little bit of naivete is okay, you know? And so I think that there is a tremendous opportunity to rekindle, you know, and reinvigorate the spirit of the Abraham Accords, given the degree to which Israel has helped create that opportunity by demonstrating the profound weakness of Iran, the degree to which the Assad regime—remember, everyone was accommodating with Assad, right? He was going to be there forever. I mean, Italy just had normalized relations again, right? And so had Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis, right? Well, hey, guess what? Actually, he was profoundly weak to begin with.

And there’s a paragraph in the book I’d like you to look up, if you don’t mind about, you know, I was countering that conventional wisdom about Assad and trying to argue that he was profoundly weak, you know, back in 2017, 2018. So there’s an opportunity, I guess, I would say.

The only place where I think Iran still has strong inroads at the moment is with the Houthis, to a certain extent, but with the Hashd al-Shaabi militias in Iraq. And so I’m hoping that there’ll be kind of a reinvigorated effort there. And I hope that President Trump—again, this is kind of this dissonance here, right? He knows Iran’s a problem. I mean, he would say to me all the time, hey, everywhere I look, General, in the Middle East, you know, there’s a problem. Iran’s behind it. I’m like, yeah, hell yeah, absolutely.

But then also he has this impulse to disengage, because he sees kind of the Middle East mainly as a mess to be avoided. And of course, the counter argument is, hey, the Middle East to use, you know, Ken Pollack’s phrase that he coined years ago, you know, it doesn’t adhere to Las Vegas rules. You know, what happens in Middle East doesn’t stay there, right? Whether it’s jihadist terrorism, you know? And then—and then also—you know, also, just when you think it can’t get worse in the Middle East, it actually can get worse. (Laughter.) And then—and so, you know, you’re not going to conciliate the region’s furies. You’re not going to solve the region’s problems. But our disengagement from it makes it worse, because every time we say we’re leaving—and this has been across multiple administrations, right? Remember the Obama pivot, right? So everybody’s always leaving the Middle East, but we never really leave.

And it’s important to view the Middle East—and this is kind of the little kids soccer argument about China—holistically, who takes advantage of a vacuum in the Middle East? China and Russia? How did Putin get away with playing arsonist and fireman for so long in the Middle East? Because we said we were leaving. Why did China come in over top of the normalization deal between relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran? They came in because Saudi Arabia, they asked them to do it because we gave up our leverage vis-à-vis Iran because we were disengaging. You know, China doesn’t want us to have the keys to their gas station, right? I mean, the Middle East is connected to all these competitions, and I’m hoping that people will kind of lay that out for the president and help him understand that it’s more than just a mess to be avoided. We can play a productive role. We’re not going to solve the problems, you know. We’re not going to nation build. We’re not going to turn, you know, Syria into a Jeffersonian democracy, you know.

But we do, I think, have a strong interest in supporting the SDF at this moment, and to telling the Turks really, very clearly, you know, stop what you’re doing here, use the leverage we have with the SDF and who is sitting on top of about 70 percent of Syria’s oil reserves, to provide leverage into whatever the political settlement is going to be there, and recognize that if you just disengage, we’re just we’re going to enter a new phase of the Syrian civil war.

So anyway, I hope people will be making those arguments to him and he’s willing to listen to them.

FROMAN: H.R., we are so grateful to you for your service, most importantly, but also for sharing your candid and thoughtful views with us today. And you can hear more, read more of the views.

MCMASTER: Page turner, page turner. (Laughter.)

FROMAN: Thanks very much. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.