McMaster and Bowman on the Axis of Aggressors and Cold War 2.0
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General H.R. McMaster has written a memoir, not of his life or his years in the military, though both would, I think, be interesting, but of the action-packed 13 months he served as National Security Advisor to the 45th President of the United States. It's titled At War With Ourselves, and I found it a riveting read. H.R. focuses on the widening divisions among Americans, divisions not just between the major political parties, but very much within them.

The Trump White House was a sausage factory, to be sure. But H.R. emphasizes that many of the sausages produced were of good quality, unquestionably superior to those churned out by the Obama-Biden and the Biden-Harris administrations. H.R. is an historian as well as a soldier, and his mission in writing this book was, as he spells out for readers,

to explain what the Trump administration achieved and failed to achieve in the areas of foreign policy and national security during a pivotal moment in American history. He recently paid a visit to FDD headquarters, where he discussed his book and a range of conflicts, crises and issues. During that FDD event, moderated by Bradley Bowman, senior director of FDD's Center on Military and Political Power,

HR emphasized that the most important adjustment that needs to be made to policy now is to impose costs directly on Iran. You can find that discussion on FDD's website. We also recorded a podcast on September 26. And since then, at another think tank event this week, General McMaster said that the U.S.,

in light of Tehran's October 1st ballistic missile attack on Israel, should consider wiping out drone and missile factories inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. The objective can't be like an emotional cathartic, I feel better now because we struck Iran, he said. It should be to impose costs on Iran to go far beyond anything that they factored in.

General McMaster is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of the Board of Advisors at FDD's Center on Military and Political Power, CMPP. Bradley Bowman, who serves as senior director of CMPP, also took part in the discussion. I'm pleased you're with us, too, here on Foreign Policy.

So, HR, welcome. Good to see you. Looking well. Hey, good to see you, Cliff, and to be with you and Brad. Brad, good to see you. Always good to be with you. HR, I mentioned earlier, or during my little introduction there, that I thought your book, no, I mentioned to you off the air that I thought your book should be made into a series on Netflix or Prime, a little like West Wing, but maybe a little bit more like Veep.

But maybe actually more like the bear. I haven't seen it, but I know it takes place in a restaurant kitchen with a lot of difficult personalities and very long knives. Interpersonal conflict. But the question I'm asking is who would play you? I don't know. I don't know. I'm thinking of Vin Diesel. Or maybe Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Yeah.

Or Mark Strong, a British actor. I'm a big fan of Mark Strong's. I don't know if you guys know. I don't know if our listeners know. I know. Would you be happy with them or are you going to hold out for Brad Pitt? I'd be fine with any of them. I think it would be a stretch, yeah. Do you guys remember Tully Savalas? Oh, I'm a huge fan of Tully Savalas. In fact, I mentioned him in a forward to a book I wrote recently about a really fantastic –

officer named Theodore C. Metaxas, who was a retired breeder general and was the commandant at Valley Forge Military Academy when I was a cadet there. And his son has written a fantastic memoir of his father and biography of his father. I wrote the foreword for it, and I wrote in the foreword that he reminded me

of Telly Savalas, who was himself a World War II veteran. Right. And Greek-American. Was a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and had advised Amuja Hedin in the 80s. I mean, this guy was a tremendous breadth of experience and service, you know? But he was, you know what, that Telly Savalas grizzled non-commissioned officer character in the World War II movies. Oh, that's right. Was he the dirty dozener?

Yeah, he was in Dirty Dozen, but he was kind of the deranged guy in Dirty Dozen. Right. But also... Do you remember him, Brad? I think so, yeah. But he's also in Kelly's Heroes, too. But I can't resist telling you this. He may be most famous. He played Kojak, a TV cop, right? Of course, yeah. Kojak. And at one point, it was the most popular TV show in the world. And I spent two weeks with him and wrote a profile of him that was a cover story for Newsweek International. Wow.

So I hung out on the set. I actually got kind of friendly with him. I was living on a houseboat. I took him to my house. I was working for Newsweek, making like $15,000 a year. Just when you think you know everything about Cliff May, you learn things like this. There are stories. This is phrase something baby. It was like something baby. And he had like a lollipop. He had a lollipop because he didn't smoke. And yeah, something baby. And I can't. I'm going to have to look it up. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe you can find it, Danielle. We can throw it in here at some point. It was actually a baby.

All right. Listen, you've been talking about your book a lot and, you know, getting beat up on Morning Joe because you wouldn't be more political. I got to see that. Is there more you want to say about your book or should people just buy it and read it? It's enough already. Well, it is a page turner, Cliff, you know. No, it is. It is.

New York Times basically said that. No, thanks for your review of it too. And it meant a lot to me. I really, I wanted to bring people with me into the White House to understand what it was like to serve in really in any administration, but in the Trump administration, obviously in particular,

But I hope that the tone of the book is one of, you know, frustration at times because of the friction and unnecessary friction and things being harder than they had to be. But really, I think it's a positive story of being able to transcend a lot of that friction and put into place some very long overdue and significant correctives to previous unwise, you know, foreign policies. You know, here's something that occurs to me, and I'm jumping ahead, but I can't help it.

It's very hard for any president to have a strategy.

Why? Because he's in four years. Maybe he's in eight years. Because we're divided among ourselves, it's not like the next president is going to say, we disagree on many things, taxes and taxes. But when it comes to foreign policy, our divisions end at the water's edge. No, a four-year strategy is not really a strategy. Now, meanwhile, you have, say, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Ayatollah Raleh Khomeini comes in in 79. He knows his goals, death to Israel. That's more imminent. Death to America, that's eventual. He's there 10 years. Then comes Ali Khomeini. Since 89, he's been there. He has time to figure out a strategy to achieve his goals through the ring of fire around Israel, by spreading with the revolution, all of that.

Somebody like Obama comes in and thinks in four or eight years, oh, I know what I can do. I have a strategy. I'm sure that come in, he really cares about the 401ks for his people and job programs. I'm sure he likes me because I respect him. And besides, my name is Barack Obama. He'll love that. You know.

In other words, last thing I'll say and then I'll let you guys talk about this. It's one thing not to have a strategy and your enemies have a strategy if you're so much stronger than your enemies that you can just slap the hell out of them if you need to. But not if you start getting close to what are they called? Peer competitors. Right. Peer and near peers. Peer and near peers. So talk a little bit about it because you must have thought of it. You think strategically. Frankly, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure Trump thinks strategically. Obama did it in a faculty lounge sort of way that I think was really naive and didn't understand the people in Iran or the people in Russia or the people in China. I opened this up to you. So, no, I appreciate it. What I try to do is provide a corrective to that kind of

Those kind of cognitive traps, right, of mirror imaging, of optimism bias and really neglect of history. I mean, I think what you've seen across multiple administrations, even going back to the Carter administration right after the revolution, was this idea that you could conciliate.

you know with with the iranian regime and and each of these administrations every one of them up to the trump administration which i did not did not fall into this same trap thought that you know that if you could accommodate iran's interest that the regime would moderate its behavior what that neglected was the ideology of the revolution uh the the the permanent hostility of those who won the revolutionaries to to the united states israel and their arab neighbors

And it also undervalued just the historical record. I mean, they've been waging a four-plus-decade-long proxy war against the great Satan, right? Israel, who they call the cancerous boil to wipe off of the earth. And so what I wanted to do with this strategy and others—

is to frame them, these strategies, with a strong dose of what Zachary Shore calls strategic empathy, to pay particular attention to the ideology, the emotions, and aspirations that drive and constrain our rivals, enemies, and adversaries. Strategic empathy means you understand them. And strategic narcissism means you think, which I got from you, means you see yourself through your own...

As a version of you, which is not right. I mean, right. And you think that that really what you choose to do or choose not to do is decisive toward achieving a favorable outcome without considering the agency or the authorship over the future that the other has the other being the supreme leader and the IRGC, for example, in Iran.

Yeah, no, Cliff, it's a great question. One of the things that HR talks about in his book is what they were able to accomplish in those first 13 months. And one of the things that he says that I agree with is it was the most significant shift in American foreign policy on China since the end of the Cold War. And I think with deference to you, what made that possible is that

You had someone in the role of National Security Advisor who had studied previous NSCs and National Security Advisors, and you made that list that you wrote about in the book of lessons learned and previous mistakes to avoid. And a lot of people use the word strategy in Washington and don't really understand what it means. They don't understand what it means.

It's the allocation of finite resources, the mitigation of risk. And if you're not doing those things, it's not a strategy. It's a wish list or look at me how great I am. And HR understands that because he's lived on the battlefield. He's looked our adversaries in the eyes on the battlefield and negotiating tables. And he brought that knowledge and that self-reflection in the White House. And I think that's why we're able to put to rest this fiction that parties of administrations of both parties had for so long about China.

That if we – as you said so many times in your interviews and in the book, that if we just help them enrich themselves, they'll moderate and they'll buy into this rules-based order. And we now know what the benefit of hindsight. That was a fiction. And we're now on a better course. And I think that's because of what HR helped orchestrate as an actual security advisor during the first 13 months. And part of what you did there just to –

You were smart enough to recognize that Matt Pottinger, who came in, I think, as senior director for Asia, and then you made him deputy national security director, that he, a Mandarin speaker who was willing to eat the sawdust, as he puts it, of reading speeches and articles written by Xi Jinping.

was able to say, look, these guys do not want to be our friends. They mean us. This is what he says. And you got that. And that, I think, did change because – and this is – I just want to make this one important point. I listened to your episode with Matt, too. It was fantastic. Matt's always fantastic. If your listeners missed it, you've got to go back to it. And I've been reflecting on this in columns because of the 9-11 anniversary, 23 years –

At that time, when FDD was formed, we thought we had a real problem with jihadism, with Islamism, the ideology, theology of Al-Qaeda. And we also pretty much soon understand of the Islamic Republic of Iran. But we didn't think we had a problem with China because it was in 2001 that we gave most favored nation status to the People's Republic of China, brought them in WTO. These guys are going to be our friends. Everybody's buying stuff. We were all going over there for vacations. It's lovely. It's wonderful. It's wonderful.

fashion. And also in 2001, uh,

Almost nobody, including me, understood how bad Putin was going to be. That was also the year that President Bush said, I looked into his eyes, you know, he's- Saw someone who cares about his people. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we didn't- Put it into his soul. So that brings us to where we are now and a concept that you get and I think FDD gets and we're trying to talk about and more and more people I would say are picking up on this, which is to say, wait a minute, what we have is here is an axis of

And some are – we're calling it – originally I called it an axis of tyrannies with Waller Newell who is a scholar, the great scholar of ancient tyrannies. He said, yeah, that would apply. And then we're talking axis of aggressors. There are people calling it axis of revisionists, axis of autocrats, axis of authoritarians, different things. But there is an axis and it's getting more and more clear that that means China –

playing first violin, and then Putin, but then Tehran, increasingly Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and of course, the various terrorist groups that don't threaten Moscow or Beijing, they're welcome into it as well. Sure, yeah. I mean, two days after the horrific attacks of October 7th, Vladimir Putin's meeting with Hamas leadership and saying you have no greater friend than Russia. So,

So there is, it really is. And Brad and I worked together on an essay that we published months ago, a long time ago, in which I think we coined the term axis of aggressors in that essay in Newsweek. And of course, it's something we've been tracking for a long time here at FDD, this coalescing of this axis and the degree to which they're providing material support to one another increasingly with

The Iranians obviously providing drones and now short-range missiles to Russia so they can continue their onslaught against the Ukrainian people. North Korea providing millions of artillery shells. What are they getting in return? They're getting probably technical assistance, certainly for the missile program, probably for their nuclear programs as well.

China is helping feed Putin's ATM by purchasing more and more of his oil and gas so he can sustain his war-making machine and providing vast amounts of components, electronic components and hardware and equipment that's necessary for Russia to keep his defense industry going despite the sanctions. And of course, Venezuela, look at Venezuela. As soon as Maduro stole that election,

I mean, the opposition won 70% of the vote, right? And they demonstrated it because they were so smart. They went to every polling station. They immediately uploaded onto the internet the results from every poll. So it was incontrovertible. But Maduro just denied it. And then who immediately recognized him? The axis of aggressors, you know? And what do they provide him with? I mean, the Wagner group's been there for years. He has, you know, he has Cuban security around him, all sorts of Russian military assistance,

Iran helps with oil and helps them organize their ghost fleet to circumvent sanctions and move money. They're using Bitcoin for these transactions. China is supporting them financially. I mean, so you can really see it play out around the world, right? This is why people who argue that to compete with China, we should all play like little kids soccer and run to the Taiwan Strait.

What that would result is China would score goals on us everywhere else. It's a global competition. It doesn't mean we have to be with a heavy presence everywhere, but we have to be on the field and we have to be competing diplomatically and economically as well. Well, I'd go a little further, and I think you would too, to say if we had this axis of aggressors and if they have hostile intent towards America, if they want to replace the U.S. as the preeminent power in the world, if they want to replace China

what we call the world order. And there always is a world order of whether it's a Roman empire running or the British, there always is something. And we had, we had an idea for one after world war two, that was better than better in the sense that we weren't going to make anybody a colony. We weren't going to tell that damn French what to do. We weren't going to tell, you know, we were,

So they want to do all that. So if that's what's going on, then that means there is – and credit to your colleague Neil Ferguson. I think he was the first to put this forward. Then there is a Cold War 2.0 taking place right now that we're fighting. Now, if we agree that that's the case, then the question is are we mobilized to fight it? I think the answer is not nearly. Yeah.

So, you know, I think Brad has written and FDD has done some really great work on this, augmenting the, you know, the defense review that was recently completed. Your essays with Admiral Montgomery and others have been just dead on. We haven't mobilized, you know, because and under the recognition, you know, that it's going to take more investment, maybe 5% of GDP. And we're now under 3%. But that would be a historic kind of low in the context of the Cold War, right?

And, you know, heck, it's a heck of a lot cheaper to prevent a war than to have to fight one, you know, and I think that what we have to do is demonstrate to this axis of aggressors that they can't accomplish their objectives through the use of force. And, you know, if you look at what China has been doing recently, you know,

In combination with what's happened in Europe with the first major land war in Europe, a million casualties now in that war, the crisis across the Middle East, really a regional war there, and really Israel facing, I think, a seven-front war.

in Gaza, in the West Bank, with an Iranian proxy army in Syria against Hezbollah. The Houthis and other militias are attacking them from long range, and they've had direct attacks on them from Iran. You know, so this is...

But these crises could cascade further into the Indo-Pacific region because we're preoccupied and we're kind of out of defense capacity, you know, and so it's an urgent time, but we're not acting with the sense of urgency we need.

Brad, what do you think?

For too long, I feel like too many in Europe felt that Iran was someone else's problem. And we see them coordinating now. And each of them, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, are becoming more capable as a result of this collaboration because of weapons transfers. And I'm also concerned about increasing intelligence sharing. If you think of those four adversaries sharing intelligence on us in ways that they haven't in the past –

That could be very troubling. And we've had longstanding assumptions in the Pentagon and elsewhere about how many major combat operations we would face at a time. And it's not crazy to think that you could have China and Russia coordinating and conducting simultaneous aggression. In fact, the National Defense Strategy Commission that HR just referenced, led by Eric Edelman, our colleague, who's also on our board, and Jane Harmon, whom we respect, said

said the following, the new alignment of nations opposed to U.S. interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multi-theater or global war. And so if our defense budget, and we're at about 3% of GDP, we're at about 11% of federal spending, both are near post-World War II lows.

does not allow us to deal with two major combat operations at the same time or only one and a half, then that increases the likelihood that our adversaries will roll the dice. And then the last thing I'll say is that HR mentioned our Newsweek piece. One of the main arguments we were making there is that what America does or doesn't do in Ukraine is…

is not just going to affect European security, right? Because we know that the Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran are watching. And deterrence is based on their perception of our military capability and our political will to use it. And if we don't have the political will to give Ukraine less than 3.5% of what we spend on the Pentagon over the same time period to deal body blows to the second leading conventional threat we confront without putting a single U.S. service member at risk,

Why would they think we're going to send hundreds and thousands of Americans to die in the Taiwan Strait? So that will increase the likelihood of aggression. And we even see some leading voices in Washington threatening Taiwan. Hey, spend more defense. How foolish is that? That increases the chances of aggression that we're all trying to deter because, as H.R. said, deterring is a lot cheaper than dealing with the war you could have prevented. Yes. And this is something I've learned from you. And I want to – I guess we should foot stomp this. But just –

Very important to say, deterrence may be expensive, but let's be clear on this. Deterrence, however much it costs, is cheaper than a war. Even a war you win, but it's really cheaper than a war you lose. And the only way deterrence works, again, I've learned this from you guys, is if your adversary believes you have capabilities that far exceed his and the will to use them. Both those things have to be in play.

That means you don't want – and I've heard you talk about this. I can't remember and write about this. The last thing you want is – and this gets back to strategy. The last thing you want is a balance of power. You want an imbalance of power in your favor and whatever you spend. Now, then this question comes up. People say to me, oh, but Cliff, look at how much – we're so in debt. We have no money to spend. And there's something we're working on. We don't have the research yet. We're working on it. But here's the thing.

McKinsey believes that globally about $5 trillion a year, $5 trillion is being spent for an energy transition that I got to tell you, I am convinced is totally bogus.

And whatever you think, it will not have an impact on the climate, not least because the People's Republic of China and India, they're building coal plants and they're going to continue. It's not going to happen. Kerry went to convince them, we have to fight this. They blow him off. It's not going to happen. No matter what we do, no matter how many EVs we produce with Chinese batteries, by the way. And EVs, you know, that the components of which are manufactured are

In China with electricity generated from coal-fired plants. Generated from coal-fired plants. Yes, of course. That's right. And the environmental damage done in Congo in terms of getting the materials, the coal, all of that stuff. So if $5 trillion is what's being spent annually, it's mostly being spent, you've got to figure, by the U.S. and the Europeans, like Germany, right?

Probably the U.S. is spending at least $1 trillion of that $5 trillion. Again, we need some research to figure out. If you could not spend that and add $1 trillion to the defense budget, that would more than double the defense budget right there. And by the way, it wouldn't affect anything in terms of climate. People can still move to Florida as they are and turn on the air conditioners. And of course, the big problem with the debt and now service on the debt is really the non-discretionary part of the budget.

And so if you're going to make progress on paying down the debt, because it is a big issue. I mean, service on the debt is now really at parity with our defense spending. And this is what Neil Ferguson pointed out a long time ago. I think it was...

called Ferguson's rule that any country that spends more on its debt service than it does on its defense will not remain a power for very long. So we do have an issue. I mean, but I think energy is part of the solution. What if instead of what the Biden administration has done, which is declare a moratorium on LNG export facilities, that we exported more energy in the United States, drove the price down, maybe taxed that a little bit, paid down our debt and

And by really cheaper natural gas, you help people bridge away from coal. You accelerate. Naturally, that's being cleaner than coal. You accelerate nuclear power, you know, like you see Microsoft doing now with the reactivation of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Because of the energy demand is going way up. Way up. For all sorts of reasons. But artificial intelligence is one of those reasons. Huge. And the computing power that you need. Yeah.

But then how do you go to Africa? How do you go to India and say, hey, you know, I know that you want to grow your economy and grow people out, you know, grow people out, bring people out of poverty. But what we really need you to do is focus on the green energy transition. That's not going to sell. So you need free market solutions that can be readily adopted in developing economies in India and ultimately in China as well. So, I mean, I think the whole approach has been wrongheaded. What we need, and this is what any new administration coming in should do,

is have an integrated approach to energy security, national security, and the reduction of man-made carbon emissions. When you separate those three, and you do what this administration has done, which is just focus on man-made carbon emissions reduction, you get the opposite effect. I mean, these are people who canceled a Canadian pipeline and then green-lighted Nord Stream 2. So, I mean, not even understanding the connection between energy security decisions and national security decisions. Right.

And if you ask yourself why this administration decided to greenlight the Nord Stream pipeline, which is a pipeline from Russia to Germany, bringing in energy supplies, natural gas in particular, I believe,

My guess is this was thought of, oh, this will help. This will conciliate Putin. He'll be very pleased. I remember talking to you about this, talking to German diplomats way back when and saying, hey, you're addicted to Russian politics.

And it's, no, the Russians are addicted to euros. It's really Putin wants our money. That's much more important. I said, I don't think you understand Putin. And he has money. That's not his problem. This is what I read about this in the book about President Trump's meetings with Angela Merkel. He was dead on on this. He went to the three C's conference. Yeah.

in Poland and made the same points. He said, you're addicted to Russian oil. This is bad for you. You know, they're giving Russia course of power over your economies. He said, why are we defending you when you're not paying your dues? Which is if anybody met was investing in your own defense and collective defense, you're feeding Putin's ATM, you know, by purchasing his gas.

And he had a point on all this, you know? And I think now, I mean, my old friend, Christoph Heusgen, who was Angela Merkel's national security advisor for like forever, you know? And I used to say to him, I said, Christoph, after doing this job for so long, how is it that you're still alive? But he's a very good guy. But he had to, of course, you know,

relate Angela Merkel's position. Now, you know, he's admitted to me, you know, that the whole time he didn't believe it, that, you know, that it was a mistake to give Russia coercive power over Germany's economy.

I see you scribbling.

And that ruffled a few feathers. But the thing that really ruffled feathers when I, the obnoxious visiting American, had the temerity to mention Nord Stream. It's like back off. None of your business. Who are you? I mean, that was of the five-city tour. That was where I got the most tease. Like, wow, that's interesting. And I think history proved HR right on that one. HR often talks about the integration, synchronization, coordination of tools of national power to defend ourselves and our allies and do damage to our adversaries. Well, America is an energy superpower.

But sometimes we don't act like it. And countries around the world have energy needs. And if we're not meeting those needs, then countries like Russia will. And that has formed. Or Qatar signing all kinds of energy deals, you know, because we declared the moratorium on new export facilities. And so, you know, countries who have the demand are.

require more natural gas or signing deals with anybody but us right now. - Well, and this quick digression, Qatar is a small country, 350 or so people who are citizens, many people who live there and do various work who are not citizens and never will be.

But it's usually rich because America hasn't – didn't act after World War II like an imperialist power. We said, hey, we're not going to take from you like imperialists often do. Your natural resources, we're going to buy them at a market rate. That's who we are. And what the Qataris have done is said this gives us enormous, enormous power.

And how can we utilize this power? Well, we'll start Al Jazeera, which will be a medium of propaganda, I would say, throughout the Arab world and through much of the Western world as well. Right, propagate the Zionist crusader conspiracy. Conspiracy. And turned killing Americans from extreme into mainstream.

And did this after 9-11, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And corrupt University Middle East Studies Department. Not the only source of corruption, but it's an important source of corruption. Bankroll Muslim Brotherhood organizations around the world, which are in many ways the gateway to Salafi jihadist organizations. Yeah. Right.

and say, hey, we're going to host Hamas leaders here and Taliban leaders here, but we'll act as mediators. We can be very helpful to you. And we say, oh, wow, that's so great. That's so cool. Thank you very much. Except they don't because, for example, they didn't say, wait a minute, Hamas took Americans hostage? We have Hamas leaders here.

We're going to sit them down in a chair with bright lights and tell them they got to do something about it because that's not what we expect of people we host because America is our ally. Actually, America made us a major non-national ally. So we have obligations to America and American diplomats didn't say that. And that gets my next subject, which is diplomacy and the failure of, I think, of certainly the current administration. Others, too, we can talk about it.

to understand how diplomacy works.

Right. How does a diploma, if we have a dispute. This is what you hear from this administration all the time, right? We need more diplomacy. A diplomatic solution. We need aggressive diplomacy. Aggressive. A diplomatic church. Robust diplomacy. What does that mean? What are you talking about? I mean, I had a whole list of words in the National Security Council staff that were outlined that we could not use. You could not use robust. No robust. Oh my God. I don't know if you've seen the Veep episode about robust diplomacy.

I'm sure I saw it after years after I outlawed the word. I saw that episode. It's hysterical, but it's crazy. And I think what the misunderstanding is, Cliff, I don't know if this is where you're going is, is what George Shultz said. George Shultz said, you know, that, that negotiation is a euphemism for capitulation unless the shadow of power is cast across the bargaining table.

And they don't understand the integration of what you're doing militarily with what you're trying to achieve diplomatically. Yeah. Look, if the U.S. and Canada have a dispute, we can send our diplomats in and find a compromise for it. I'm sure that works.

But when you're talking about Islamist, communist... It's usually about dairy or lumber. Well, I may write about this. Do you know, I was looking this up yesterday. There is a tiny barren island off the coast of Maine that is in dispute between the U.S. and Canada in terms of who actually owns it. And there's a little lighthouse with Canadians in it, but we don't recognize it. But anyhow, I think you could actually...

A diplomatic surge, we could figure this out. Maybe we could build competing islands out there. We could do that too. Up to the Chinese. But when you're talking with, you know, with revolutionary Islamists, when you're talking with Chinese communists, when you're talking with imperialist fascists like Putin, I don't think it works like that.

Or you're talking with Hamas. I don't think it works like that. I think you have two choices, it seems to me. Tell me if I'm wrong. One is you can bribe them. You can see if that works. Hey, we'll give you a lot of money. Will you do what we want? And I think, for example, the JCPOA...

which the Obama, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was an attempt to bribe. We'll give you a lot of money. If you get richer, you don't need to build nuclear weapons quite yet. Doesn't that make sense to you? And they might think, yeah, we can delay it for a few years in order to get all this money. Why not? But it was only delaying. At least it wouldn't be under the above. But if you're not going to, so that's what you can bribe. But the other thing is you have to coerce. It's got to be, I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse.

Because you have to understand the shadow of power, real power is behind me. And you do not want me to use it against you because we will hurt you. And it gets to the things like, I want to hear anything on this, but I did want to talk about the Houthis. Why do the Houthis upset me? They are a non-state actor. They are a terrorist group. They are a proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

HR, is it really possible that the U.S. does not have the power to defeat or even deter the Houthis? What does that say about our military? Absolutely. Or about not our military?

just to authorize strikes against the launch facilities and launch platforms rather than shooting down these missiles. Every one of those missile shoot-downs is a diving catch, you know, in the Bob Elm and Deb. You have an IRG strategic strike between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.

You have an IRGC general officer who is in Yemen orchestrating all these attacks. - IRGC being the Iranians, yeah. - And then you have an Iranian ship

anchored just off of Djibouti, collecting all the intelligence. And so I just don't understand why is that IRGC officer still alive? And why is that ship not at the bottom of the strait? I mean, I don't understand it. And then also with the Houthis, you know, we have asymmetrical advantages ourselves, right? We have combined arms formations. We're not going to

We don't need to occupy Yemen or anything. But I think this is a situation in which a raid to destroy the enemy, as much of the enemy's infrastructure as possible, would be an option to present to the president. There are risks and there are downsides to all of this. But we often lament the asymmetrical capabilities of our enemies and adversaries.

Without acknowledging that we have our own asymmetric capabilities and oftentimes just don't use them. Yeah. I mean, it seems to me with the Houthis, you know that they're, as you say, instructed by Iran. You should not sink one Iranian ship that's involved in targeting. And that sends a very clear message. Then the diplomats can come in.

But you should also say to the Iranians, this is going to stop. If it's not stopped by next Tuesday, you're going to pay a severe price. And that could mean an Iranian port. That could mean the Iranian Navy. Whatever it is, you're going to pay a price, and you do. And then you don't have to – How about the facilities that manufacture the Shahed drones and the missiles? Well, I think even during the Iraq war, we knew that IEDs were killing Americans, and those IEDs were manufactured in Iran.

I think you tell me you were served there. I think we should have bombed the factories making the IEDs that were killing Americans. And that way. And then, you know, and then the diplomats can say, you want to talk some more? We're happy to talk. The Iranians were responsible for 600 us deaths in that period of time. And, uh, and, uh,

And also, you know, we didn't even act as aggressively as we should have against some of the militias. So in the Soleimani strike, when the Trump administration killed Qasem Soleimani, they also killed one of his Iranian puppets, Abu Mandir Mohandas.

But there's another guy there, Case Cazale, others, you know, who are parts of the government who I think years ago we should have gone after to kill or capture because they were actively engaged in committing acts of war against Americans.

And just one other point here. It's also, you know, we did a raid in Iraq. I can't remember what year it was, Brad, but it was maybe 2006, 2007. And we captured a guy named Mullah Dadduk in this raid. He had been complicit in the kidnapping of some American soldiers. And he's Lebanese Hezbollah, you know? And so what you begin to see is

is how you have Iran was using Hezbollah because they're an Arab organization.

to sort of have a cutout and to counter the narrative that this is really a Persian-driven enterprise, which it is, to keep Iraq perpetually weak by keeping Iraq enmeshed in conflict in a sectarian civil war. It's the model that they apply with the support for the Houthis. It's the Lebanese model, right? It's the Hezbollah model. But it's also what they're doing with the support for the Assad regime as well. And so we have to consider the Middle East is important for a number of reasons, right? For...

We have real interest there. We have, you know, obviously the energy market is a reason, but countering Iran is important, not only to our own interests, but to the protection of Israel. And then also the Middle East is an arena of great power competition, much like we were talking about Venezuela, for example.

You have Russia who wants a warm water port and an airport and wants to keep Assad in power, wants to have influence across the region through arms sales, but also by posing as both the arsonist and the fireman in the region.

And then you have China, right? China wants us out of the region desperately because they don't want the United States to have the keys to their gas station. So we have tremendous geostrategic advantages associated with our relationships and a sustained commitment to the Middle East, not to conciliate the Middle East furies.

But to counter Iran and to also compete effectively against Russia and China, which are all too eager to fill any vacuum that we leave with our continued, you know, profession of our desire to get the hell out of the region. And we never really leave, but we always say we're going to leave, which creates doubts among, you know, among the Gulf states and others who then think, well, should I bandwagon with China instead? Right. You know, should I hedge with Russia? Right.

We mentioned George Shultz's quote earlier and I love that quote. I used that a couple of years ago with Mark Dewitt's in an op-ed and we're talking about this relationship between power and effective diplomacy. And in a monograph that FTD recently published that I co-authored with Ord Kittrey and Benin Bintalibu.

And Benham really did the great work on this part of the monograph. Went back and looked at multiple case studies over years in terms of where we effectively deterred Iran and where we didn't and tried to draw key principles that could be used now to dissuade them from making a sprint to a nuclear weapon between Election Day and Inauguration Day because a lot of people, including Senator Graham, believe there's a real –

window of danger there if we're not careful. And so that was kind of the focus of this monograph. And in my section came up with more than about a dozen recommendations that could be done in the next few weeks to try to shift their cost benefit analysis. And HR lived this in Iraq and saw elements of it also in Afghanistan. But

when we are strong, the Iranians back down. It's just, you know, it's like, ooh, that's a big insight. Well, I mean, but that insight doesn't inform American foreign policy. It doesn't. It's like, oh, you're saying something obvious. Okay, but it's not informing this administration's foreign policy. They say, we don't want to fight. We don't want to fight. We don't want to

We don't want to escalate. We don't want to escalate.

on U.S. forces, 175. I mean, don't let that wash over your listener. Our sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, neighbors are to raise their right hand, send me standing between us and those who want to kill us. And they've been attacked 175 times since October 17th. How many times have we responded? 11 to 12.

11 to 12. And rather feckless responses.

Empty kitchen table in Jordan. And then how did this administration finally belatedly respond? They hit 85 targets in about a 24-hour period. Then a few days later, they killed a leader of Khaitab Hezbollah in Iran. And why are those decisions even being made in Washington?

If forces are, you know, are attacked in the CENTCOM area of responsibility, the CENTCOM commander should be able to immediately respond. When the Wagner Group attacked our outpost, us and British forces were in early 2018,

Uh, we responded with everything that was available. And killed all of them, as I understand. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Until they begged for it to, to be able to, uh, for a ceasefire. At first they said, well, that's not us, you know, in the deconfliction line. Um, but you know, this goes back to what my old platoon sergeant said, you know, uh,

He said, if you're in the U.S. military, if you mess with one bean, you mess with the whole burrito, you know? And so, I mean, if you— That should be—there's a strategy. There's a strategy. The whole burrito should come down. That's what I want—that's a strategy we should have. And you know what happened after—and we wrote about this in a subsequent op-ed using our tracker data as the foundation. After we did that, after we hit 85 targets and killed a leader, we had, I think, don't quote me, 22 weeks with like almost no attacks on our forces.

It's like shocking, right? Because they messed with us and they got the whole burrito and they learned something, but that doesn't last forever. It erodes and has to be maintained over time. And now this administration, Cliff, I know as we're recording this, right, we've seen over the last three or four days a major escalation of war between Israel and Hezbollah, and we may be getting to that in a moment. And what is, what are the Americans and the French, not the Americans, what is this administration and the French doing? De-escalate, de-escalate, de-escalate.

Pressuring Israel. And the UK, everybody. Yeah, and pressuring Israel. And this goes back to power and diplomacy, right? There's this thing called UN Security Council Resolution 1701. There's this thing called UNIFIL, UN Peacekeeping Force, thousands of forces whose job it is to enforce that. It's a great monograph, by the way, that FDD has out on this, on the failure of UNIFIL. Thank you. And Israel's been saying, hey, we have more

than 60,000 of our citizens who aren't in their homes. We're getting these... The day after October 7th, the worst single-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust. The very next day, Hezbollah starts attacking Israel. Israel says, this is not acceptable. Hey, everyone talks about diplomacy, international organizations, the UN, now's your moment. Solve it and enforce this. They didn't. They said, okay, you're not going to do it. We have to do it ourselves. And now how is this administration responding? They're trying to pressure Israel to stop. You

Israel is applying- Instead of pressuring Hezbollah- Exactly. Who had the opportunity to move 30 kilometers back. Right. And they refused to do it, right? They continued to launch rockets, killed 12 children on a soccer field. Look, Hezbollah could- If you want to cease fire, why isn't Macron saying to Hezbollah-

You need to stop rocketing, missiling the Israeli north. Just stop it. And if you stop it, I'll go to the Israelis and tell them to stop hitting you. Just do that. You don't need a whole negotiating process. What the U.S. negotiator, what's his name? Amos Hochstein. Amos Hochstein.

You know, again, he was using the bribery school of diplomacy. I'm going to tell the Hezbollah through – we'll get you a lot of money and energy resources. We'll get the Israelis to back off and let you pull out all those – all you have to do is agree to a peace fire. And they said essentially, no, we don't want the money so much even though –

Lebanon is essentially a failed state at this point. We want to keep hitting the Israelis and shrinking the country. We're running low on time, and I want to be respectful, but you brought up one of the subjects. At least I want to get this in, and that is you talked about Hezbollah. People need to remember that Hezbollah has killed more Americans than any terrorist group with the exception of al-Qaeda. The Israelis killed two Hezbollah leaders who were involved in 1983 bombings at the U.S. Embassy and Marine Barracks.

248 Marines lost that day. They had also bombed our embassy, killed some of our embassy employees. And then they had also attacked French paratroopers on the same day as they attacked our –

But we couldn't – either we couldn't or wouldn't find them. The Israelis were able to kill them and won the same – within – at that hour. And right after Prime Minister Netanyahu gave a speech in the United States saying, our enemy is your enemy. So it was quite – the timing was –

was, uh, was helped to make that point. But this, where's the ministry? Cause what, cause when things are done to us like that, or the Saudi ambassador, this attempt to kill him in Georgetown while he was, you know, taking his chicken cacciatore, we say, well, we will, we, we will answer this at a time of our own choosing. And that time never comes. And that's not good. But the, but the thing I definitely wanted to hear you talk a little bit about is Israel.

I didn't want to steal it from him, though. He's stolen many good lines from me.

He deserves it. But I want to know if you have any problem with the idea of ready to wear, prête à porter, and ready to explode, prête à exploser, pagers, and also what this tells us about what Beijing may be doing, because they're not stupid and what we need to do. And I'll just give you a line from our friend, former representative Mike Gallagher in the Wall Street Journal. He said that Xi Jinping seeks a future

where he could turn off the lights in Green Bay or Geneva knowing we could not do the same in Guangzhou. So this is an area of real competition. Absolutely. So, I mean, I think what this does, well, first of all, I just want to say this was a just attack, right? I think if you look at...

just war criteria and, and, and the, and the principles of, of, of discrimination and proportionality, right? These were people who were actually involved in planning and about to execute a major attack on October 7th to celebrate the mass murder, mass kidnapping, infanticide, rape, mass rape attacks against, against Israel. So,

They knew that these pagers, who has pagers anymore? Well, no, they ditched their cell phones and took pagers. So you know that this is Hezbollah leadership who has these pagers. So that meets the criteria of discrimination. I think it's proportionate because they're trying to kill

to kill Israelis. And I think it was a brilliant attack that then followed by the walkie talkies, which they, it was the last thing. And then importantly, followed by the physical meeting, because then they couldn't trust any devices and they had to physically get together. Reminded me of an operation we conducted against Al Qaeda in Tal Afar in 2005. And,

We shut down the enemy's communications. They huddled in alleyways thinking we couldn't see them, but we were operating with Apache helicopters at 5,000 feet and we were hitting them with HE frag hellfires. We actually ran out of hellfire missiles and had to have an emergency resupply. When we turned the comms back on, the first intercept was we are being slaughtered. And they tried to figure out who was still alive and then arranged for a meeting to reestablish the chain of command.

We watched them go to a school. No children in the school. Nobody had been to school for a year because Al-Qaeda took over the city and extinguished the life of the city. And we hit it with a laser-guided bomb from an F-16. When all the leadership was in there to reestablish the chain of command, it was a dud, unfortunately. So all of the bodyguards ran into the building, and the second bomb was not a dud.

And so that had a devastating effect on leadership. Then we began our offensive operation to defeat the enemy in the city. We had already evacuated civilians, which made it a lot easier for us than it is for the Israeli Defense Forces.

But I think that this is part of what Israel has done here is that they have disrupted the leadership to such a degree that they will have, I think, not an easy time, an easier time if they do conduct a land offensive to push Hezbollah out of that, you know, 30 to 40 kilometer area up to the Latani River and allow the, you know, the 60 to 80,000 people who are displaced from 10% of Israel's territory to go back to their homes. And I think that's...

that has to be first and foremost in everybody's discussions about this. Why is Israel doing this? Because they've had to evacuate 80,000 people. They're living in hotels in Tel Aviv. And not that the expense is the big thing, but the government's paying for this. The people want to get back to their homes. They want their kids to go back to their schools.

So, I think this is a context that is missing oftentimes from this discussion. Very hard for diplomacy to work when the enemy is saying, here's what we want. We want to exterminate Israelis. That's what we want to do. Now, tell us what a compromise position will be. Waste six months to exterminate them, exterminate half of them. How do you do that? Right. And then the whole idea, you mentioned this already, Cliff and Brad, this whole idea of de-escalation, the folly of de-escalation. Right.

And what that does for the Iranians, for Hezbollah, is it allows them to escalate on their own terms with impunity. Because no matter what they do, then the call is, oh, we have to de-escalate, turn down the temperature. It sounds a lot to me like Robert McNamara and the WizKids in the 1964 or 5, which you've heard about brilliantly, by the way.

All right, the last question for today, I promise I got many more, but I won't. Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran, any chance the U.S. will stop this regime from getting nuclear weapons? And if not, can Israel stop this regime from getting nuclear weapons? Easy question for you to answer in short, in 30 seconds. Yeah, I think that has to be an explicit goal is to block Iran's path to the most destructive weapons on earth. It certainly is for the Israelis who have never repudiated and continue to maintain the Begin doctrine, which is

Israel will not allow a hostile regime to have access to the most destructive weapons on earth. So I think it's, it's inevitable that Israel will do everything it can to, to, to deny that capability. I think what you'll see is maybe more unexplained explosions. You know, you'll see, you know, the, what we've seen over the years with direct action in, in, in Iran cyber attacks, for example. I mean, the, the, we're talking about the beepers and walkie talkies and,

but there was also the interdiction of a supply chain associated with the Stuxnet attacks and the centrifuges spinning out of control and blowing up. So I think you'll see everything up to a direct strike happen in the next maybe year, year and a half. But you don't think an American president, and every American president has said it would be unacceptable for this regime in Iran to have nuclear weapons.

to actually say, to actually follow through on that. They'll just say that it's unacceptable, but they'll accept it. I think, I think whoever is the, you know, the secretary of defense and the national security advisor, they should bring to the president an option to compel the, the, the end of, of Iran's nuclear program without their cooperation. And, and I think that would, that would involve a military action as well as range of other actions that,

I think if you go back to 1994 and North Korea, we might have wished we had done something different in 1994 in North Korea. I think so. And instead of the agreed framework, instead of Jimmy Carter going there, do you remember? I remember that. I'm old now. I'm a boomer. I mean, I think in retrospect –

you know, there's always a cost and risk of action, right? Raids and bombing campaigns, they never completely solve a problem, but there's also a risk and cost of inaction. And I think in the case of Iran, one of the reasons that you could compel them or convince them

to stop the nuclear program is to convince them that they're safer without the weapons than they are with the weapons. And I think that, so I think that's why, again, this goes back to our point that you're not going to get anything good out of negotiation unless you have a credible threat of

of military, you know, military strike or capability. Make them an offer they can't refuse. Go ahead, Brad. Cliff, I can be very quick. Just three quick ideas. I think the danger here and easy for me to say sitting in the safety here in Washington, D.C., is that we spend too much time talking about the three H's, Hamas, Houthis, and Hezbollah, and not enough time talking about Iran.

That's exactly what Iran wants. They're the puppet master. They want all the counterpunches to be delivered at the puppets and us not talking about Iran's nuclear program. So, yes, Israel has to do what it has to do with respect to Hezbollah, but we can't take our collective eye off Iran, the puppet master in this nuclear program, number one. Number two is I think a primary determinant of whether Iran makes significant advances towards a nuclear weapons capability or does a full-fledged sprint is

potentially before inauguration day, is their perception of whether the United States and Israel have the political will to use our military means to prevent it and endure the tough consequences that might be involved with doing that. Their perception of that question, I think, will be the primary factor, whether they do it or they don't. And then lastly- This is another great FDD paper, by the way, that you and Benham and the team put together. I think we should just implement all those recommendations right now. Thank you.

Thank you. And the last is – and this is a point I'm borrowing from Mark Dubowitz is we need the supreme leader in Iran to be spending more time worrying about his own people than how they're going to attack us next or advance their nuclear program. China, Russia, and Iran and others are conducting information war against us. We wrote the cognitive combat monograph on this. Yet we're reluctant to do information war against them because that would be provocative and destabilizing.

So why the heck are we not implementing information warfare against China, Russia, and Iran, exposing corruption, hypocrisy, abuse of their own people, how this regime is more interested in exporting terrorism than the welfare of the Iranian people? Why are we not doing that? So I think those three things will determine largely whether we're confronting a sprint to a nuclear war. You know, that is such an important point. I mean, I think what you need is you have to really three critical tasks.

One is to clarify our intentions, right? Our intentions are to defend ourselves, right? To stop this sustained campaign of subversion and murder across the region. The second thing is you have to counter enemy disinformation and propaganda. And the third thing you have to do is really help trace the grievances of the populations in these countries back to who's causing those grievances. And, you know, there's a lot of these protests in Iran over the last couple of years that

They were chanting, America is not the enemy. The problem is right here. Yeah. You know? Death to the dictator. Right. And if you remember Obama, are you with us or against us? Yes.

I would love to go on. I have plenty more, but I won't because I want to respect the time I give you a big day. Thank you. Thank you for your service today. Thank you for being with us today. Thank you for the guidance you provide, HR. We really are grateful and value it. No, I learn so much from FTD all the time. It's a real privilege to be associated with you and the team and Brad. And what the center is doing is fantastic, really fantastic work.

Brad, thanks for everything you do and all the great work you do here. And thanks for all of you who have been with us today for this conversation here on Foreign Policy.

Follow FDD on social media and visit our website at fdd.org. There you can find research by FDD experts. You can subscribe to all FDD's products. You can catch up on any past episodes you may have missed. Finally, we'd love your feedback, your ideas, your questions, your criticisms. Send us an email at foreignpodacy at fdd.org. Until next time, I'm Cliff May, and you've been listening to Foreign Podacy.