02/22/17 – Mark Perry on Trump’s new national security adviser Lt. General H.R. McMaster – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
Welcoming back to the show, our friend Mark Perry.
He is a Pentagon reporter, more or less, I don't want to characterize him too narrowly or anything, but he does great journalism and a lot of it based on what generals are saying about things.
This one is called Inside the Pentagon's Fight Over Russia.
It's from November 2015 and we talked to Mark about it then, but it's very important again because one of the most important figures in the article is the new National Security Advisor replacing Mike Flynn, General H.R. McMaster.
Mark's the first person who taught me all about who this guy was.
Welcome back.
How are you, Mark?
I'm great.
It's good to be back.
Good.
Good.
Very happy to talk to you again.
Can we start, is it okay if I put you on the spot and ask you if you can explain a little bit about the recent escalations of American forces in Europe, some training exercises I think in Moldova and Romania and in Poland.
Is it the Baltics too?
Can you explain a little bit about that?
Yes, and those training exercises are continuing and frankly they're dangerous.
The U.S. has redeployed some of its tanks to Europe, has extended the boundaries of NATO eastward right up to the Russian border, but it's flexing its muscle because of what it views as Russian intervention in the Ukraine, is very anti-Putin, has deployed some of its forward units very dangerously, and there are people in the policy-making establishment, and you don't hear much about this on television, but there are people in the policy-making establishment who think that this is extremely dangerous.
To counter this, Mr. Putin has forward-deployed tactical nuclear weapons, which means that the colonel, brigade commander, can now control nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe.
It's an extremely dangerous situation, and people who warn that we are headed back to another Cold War era, this time with Russia and not the Soviet Union, I think have a good point to make.
We are headed in that direction.
Well, I hadn't even realized, can you say when that was, that Putin had made that change, that he was going ahead and forward-deploying tactical nuclear weapons?
Two and a half years ago.
Oh.
I remember at the time talking to a colonel at the Pentagon, and he looked at me across a lunch table and raised his eyebrows and said, this is really scary.
Yeah.
In other words, this is during the worst of the war in Eastern Ukraine.
Yes.
And, you know, there are people who are working pretty hard on this to try to, you know, ratchet down and turn down the temperature a little bit.
But there are a number, and there are a number of policymakers who have warned and warned and warned, but it's hard to get a hearing, because anyone who, you know, wants an accommodation with Putin, who, you know, interfered in our election, kills journalists, is a thug and a gangster.
I mean, we know the whole routine, the anti-Putin, what anti-Putin people are saying.
Anyone who is saying this is dangerous, we have to come to an accommodation with Putin is siding with Trump.
And there is not much of a sense of giving that point of view a hearing.
So here we are.
What a terrible extra disincentive.
Here we have a president who actually wants detente, but that just makes people even more hawkish against Russia, because they all have to start from the premise of hating him so much and never wanting anything to do with agreeing with him about anything.
You got that right.
That's exactly right.
What a shame.
I don't understand.
I think it's perfectly acceptable to be extremely realistic about Trump, which can only lead you to a very dark place, and still think getting along with Russia is great.
I mean, why can't we parse these things into little pieces?
And you know what I mean?
I don't like Obama either, but I love the Iran nuclear deal.
Yeah, I do too.
There's a common theme here, right?
Making peace, detente all around, everybody.
Let's have some.
The reality is pretty stark.
On the one hand, you have neoconservatives who believe in American power and using American power.
And their opponents in the Democratic Party are neoliberals who believe the same thing, in the use of American power, carrying the big stick, and facing our adversaries on their own ground.
The problem with both of these positions is that they suck all the air out of the room, and people who want an accommodation and are worried are fringe, or considered fringe politically.
It's very frustrating.
You know, I've been working on this story for a long time, and worried about this story for a long time, and there are a lot of people I've been talking to in the press, and some of them, frankly, look at me like I have three heads.
They say, you want an accommodation with Russia?
And my answer is pretty much the same, and very predictable, and they roll their eyes.
They say, listen, I remember a picture of Franklin Roosevelt sitting next to Joe Stalin.
Who did you think he was?
I mean, you know, and Putin is, you know, Stalin is Putin times 10, or 100, or 1,000.
You know, I don't like Putin any more than anyone else, but I certainly don't want to risk a major war simply because we don't happen to like Putin.
Yeah, well, and the problem, too, is it seems like the groupthink and the consensus here about just how bad he is on this personal Saddam Hussein is Hitler type kind of a level, it kind of just presumes that there's some truth to the idea that Russia is an expansionist power that needs defensive containment, when, as you said, hey, we've extended our military alliance all the way up to include the Baltics, right on, literally on their border.
And of course, Moscow is just a couple hundred miles from the border, right?
How would we, how would we feel if the Russian army were conducting, excuse me, how would we feel the Russian army were conducting exercise in Mexico?
How would we feel if the Chinese Navy was conducting exercises in the Caribbean?
But that's where we are.
That's what we have.
All right.
So now back to McGregor and McMaster here.
If there's somebody who ought to be, you know, somewhat immune from these kind of politics, it would be big, tough guy generals like these who can say peaceful things, because what are you going to do?
Question their patriotism?
Right.
So maybe because of the somewhat insulation that these generals have from the politics of the McCainiacs or whoever it is that other appointees might have to deal with in a more subordinate type of a role.
Maybe it's kind of ironically the case that these generals can help Trump be more peaceful.
And there is some precedent for this, even though, of course, the standing army, it's a problem for getting you into trouble.
But, you know, Admiral Fallon was the one who really stopped Dick Cheney and George Bush from attacking Iran 10 years ago.
That's right.
So maybe McMaster and Mattis will say, hey, you know, let's actually separate the rhetoric from the reality here for a minute.
And yet it seems like actually these guys are in a contest for how best to fight Russia in Eastern Europe right now.
It terrifies me to think of the glasses through which they're looking at all of these questions is in terms of which direction their tank divisions are supposed to go.
Well, you know, I people have told me I'm a little bit harsh on H.R. McMaster and that may well be true.
I think that what people say about him is true.
He's very smart.
He's very articulate.
He's a good thinker.
He's a first rate writer.
He's a patriot.
He knows how to fight wars.
He knows all about wars.
He knows 10 times about how to fight a war than than any American I know.
You know, is his outlook the one that we should be adopting?
And he calls it forward deterrence.
That means putting American young men and women on the front lines in countries that face down our adversaries.
There is another point of view that is credible.
It's called offshore balancing.
It was an article written by it came from an article written by Steve Walt and John Mersheimer.
Offshore balancing is the view that we can support and we should support our allies.
But it's their future and they have to be responsible for defending their countries.
We can help, but they should do the fighting, not us.
And this back and forth between offshore balancing, as it's called, and McMaster's forward deterrence is really the debate happening inside the military.
Now, Mr. Trump is apparently, although I'm sure that he doesn't really realize it, he's made a decision.
He's in appointing H.R. McMaster to be national security advisor.
He's come down in favor of forward deterrence.
And this and this is not this is not what he said he would do during his campaign.
So it's worrisome.
Are we going to get out of these wars, as he told us he would, or are we going to double down?
I think the first test of this is Afghanistan, whose commander there has asked for more troops.
That's the debate that's going to go on over the next few months.
Right.
It'll be interesting to see what McMaster has to say.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I'm holding my breath for, right?
Because not that the media will pay any attention to it or anything, but the Taliban is doing pretty good over there and they have been doing better and better from in terms of securing their interests and creating their own government to rule major parts of Pashtunistan anyway, if not the cities.
And either we're going to cut and run or we're going to triple down.
And, you know, I was wondering, actually, if you could help clarify this about McMaster, because I read that he really was one of the very top level brain trust people helping with the rewriting of the coin doctrine with Petraeus.
And Petraeus was, you know, supposedly copying him and his supposed success in Tal Afar with all of his clear holding and building and all these things when they did the surge and the supposedly successful coin doctrine escalation in 2007, 8 in Iraq.
But then when I was reading about Afghanistan, they said, well, McMaster was in charge of an anti-corruption program for the Afghan military or under NATO, whatever it was, seemed like kind of a diminished role.
And I wonder and I hadn't read anything in all my reading about the Afghan surge.
I hadn't really read anything.
I don't think about him being a major champion of coin there.
But I wonder if, you know.
Well, it's a very good point.
And I think it's going to take some rewriting of history.
The colonels, the group of colonels that really were for the surge and for the counterinsurgency doctrine will claim that they got it right in Iraq.
But if you talk to people on the ground, what really happened during the surge is that General Ray Ordierno in Baghdad built walls and it wasn't counterinsurgency at all.
It was a full on house to house, block by block fight against Muqtada al-Sadr.
It was the Battle of Baghdad that that solved the problem that led to stability in Iraq.
It is true.
H.R. McMaster did a terrific job in Tal Afar, providing security and working with the local people.
But the idea that somehow coin won in Iraq, I think, is an overstatement.
In Afghanistan, I don't even think it was really tried that hard.
I don't think it would have worked in Afghanistan.
It hasn't worked in Afghanistan.
This is a straight up, full on battle with the Taliban.
And the coin denizens and the coin doctrine really don't have a lot to do with it.
So, you know, I don't want to be overly complicated here.
But I think that we need, you know, this is always force on force.
Well, it sounds like what you're saying is chances are what we're going to have is a surge without the pretension of coin, just an escalation of the war against the Taliban.
That's a good way to put it.
I think that's exactly right.
I think that that's exactly right.
Now, you know, we have to remember that the Obama administration had this same debate back when Obama first became president.
The military wanted to put 80,000 troops in Afghanistan.
And Obama had just gotten off a campaign saying he wanted to pull out of these countries.
So, you know, he wheeled and dealed and got their number down to, what, 30,000, 40,000.
But he was dissatisfied with that number because it wasn't going to work.
And he didn't think it was going to work and he wasn't alone.
The military didn't think it was going to work either, but they had to make a stand.
They had to stand up the president.
They had to, you know, double down in Afghanistan to show their credibility and to show that they were willing to do it.
Now we're down to, what, 8,700 troops.
And the situation after 16 years is actually not good still.
So here's the question.
You know, what wins in Afghanistan?
80,000 more troops, 70,000, 150,000?
Well, maybe it's simply the kind of conflict that you cannot win in the normal military sense of the word.
Maybe we ought to be doing something different, like getting out.
Getting out is a real option and it's one that Trump could take.
I don't think he's going to take it because all the people around him, McMaster and Mattis included, are going to argue, I would bet, they would argue for a surge, for increasing reinforcements.
And I'll bet that Trump would buy it despite his campaign promise.
Well, let me ask you this.
And we're going to get back to Europe because I got the same question about Europe in a second, too.
But it was announced a week before the inauguration that 300 Marines are being sent to Helmand province to help prevent Lashkar Gah from finally falling to the Taliban there.
And, you know, I don't even think any of the articles said Obama ordered this to happen.
They just sort of said that they're going.
And and then what just a couple of weeks, two weeks, two and a half weeks, something like that into the Trump presidency, you have the general in charge there, Nicholson, testified before John McCain's Armed Services Committee in the Senate that, yeah, we need at least a few thousand more troops to break this stalemate.
And, you know, it seems like it is just like 2009 and what they did to Obama.
What he later complained to Jeffrey Goldberg was them jamming him and forcing him basically to do it, although he didn't have to.
He could have faced them down.
He could have gladly accepted their resignations and said, but you can go work on the next John McCain committee if you want to.
But that's a campaign if you want to.
But I wonder whether I honestly wonder whether Obama even ordered those 300 troops Marines to Helmand province.
And I wonder whether, you know, to what degree these generals are looking at Donald Trump.
It sure does look like they're looking at him the same way they looked at Obama, that basically he's a target.
He's the mark and they're going to make him do what they want to do here.
Looks like it's kind of already on.
I mean, I don't want to read too much into it.
But then again, I'd like to.
I think it already is on.
And, you know, the thing that kind of stunned me, I was going through this yesterday.
They're doing some research for some articles I'm writing, and this guy, Nicholson, who's the commander in Afghanistan, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the one thing that really bothers him is Russian meddling in Afghanistan.
And I thought, holy cow, John McCain must love this.
Not only are we facing the Taliban, but now we're facing a surrogate or proxy.
Enemy in Afghanistan, and guess who it is, it's Russia.
Yes.
All Russia is doing in Afghanistan is supplying helicopters for the government that we put in power there.
Well, don't tell anybody.
But I mean that, you know, who said that Nicholson said that Nicholson said, man, these guys really are nuts, huh?
Well, I mean, yeah, it's a little over the top.
I will.
I agree to that.
It is.
That seems pretty nuts to me.
I mean, you might as well start saying that Iran is our enemy in Afghanistan, where everybody knows we've been fighting for Iran's interests there all this time.
Well, you remember what James Mattis said.
James Mattis said there's only one country in the Middle East that ISIS isn't attacking, and that's Iran.
That should tell you something.
Yeah.
Which is completely insane.
Maybe he maybe he simply meant by that.
That's because they're too busy being attacked by Iran all day long.
Right.
It's so strange.
I, you know, I've spent a career arguing.
That the military or the military leaders are the least likely to agree to a conflict, but that's not true anymore.
It's now become kind of right in their wheelhouse, a way for them to prove their patriotism, to show that there were the troops, to be a part of the foreign policy discussion, to to be involved in policymaking.
I haven't heard I haven't heard anyone in the very senior levels, with the exception of Marty Dempsey, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs staff, say that further deployments are just a bad idea.
That is now considered a fringe view.
It's always more deployments, more soldiers, more big sticks, and it's simply not working.
It's costly.
It's going to bankrupt the country.
Well, bad news all around here.
The military, these generals specifically, probably they're the last institution that Americans believe in at all.
I think that we're going to see a change in that.
I think that I think that there is so much disaffection.
I can be wrong, I suppose.
But I I do believe this is the case, that there's so much disaffection for these wars among the American people, that if we insist on ratcheting up in Afghanistan and, you know, declaring a no fly zone and then deploying Air Force bombers to Syria, there's going to be there's going to be a price to pay for that politically.
It doesn't matter if it's Trump or anyone else.
The American people simply are not going to support these wars.
That's my belief.
I could be wrong.
Maybe everyone will stand up and applaud.
We'll have a parade.
But I don't believe it.
I think there's a very dangerous situation.
It's a misreading of the American public to think that they're going to forever go along with it.
They're not going to.
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Well, you know, I think probably a lot of the hope is pinned on then.
Maybe that's even more of a reason and an incentive behind the Cold War with Russia that the game is.
We've seen this before.
What you do is you have a big brinksmanship and a big buildup, but you never fight.
It's just like an Orwell.
You build the ship, but then you just sink in the ocean.
You build a rocket.
You blast off into space.
Doesn't matter as long as, you know, some Lockheed shareholders are get their dividend on the way.
Then the game gets to continue on.
Only the problem is they're gambling on if there's a mistake, then we all die in thermonuclear warfare.
But otherwise, it's a really great game for a lot of Air Force generals and a lot of Lockheed executives.
And and, you know, fighting Arab peasants in flip flops doesn't cash in nearly the way that building up all of the state armies of Eastern Europe with the latest high tech gear does.
You know, I think there's I think that there is something to your point of view.
I I've always suspected.
I'm going to accuse him something now that he would really that HR McMaster would absolutely disagree with.
But I've I've always suspected that one of the reasons that HR, I think, escalates the threat he sees from Russia is because it's the one way we can get out of the sequestration cuts to the defense budget.
That if you point to if you point to enemies, if you are of the mind that the United States is surrounded by enemies, and that it's a very worrisome situation, then you're going to get your budget.
And frankly, for many army officers, that makes sense.
And it's sad.
It's what Eisenhower warned us against in the military industrial complex, but there it is.
It's a fact of life.
I think we have to understand that.
And and we have to be tougher about questioning it right now.
We don't have the political wherewithal in the Congress to question the military's argument for more, more, more.
No one is standing up and saying why?
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, because I've gotten us diverted on on lots of different questions here.
But to bring it back to McMaster specifically, and, you know, I hate to kind of do this to you this way, but can you just sort of tell us everything you know about this guy?
Because it seems like you certainly know a lot.
And as as we've already learned, you know, opinions slightly leaning this way or that on these issues can have incredible consequences.
So, I mean, you talk about in the article how McGregor and McMaster together, I guess, were the commanders in charge of the big heroic tank battle of the beginning of this now 25 year Iraq war, 26 year Iraq war we've been fighting.
And that's how they got their their big credentials.
Everybody says he's such a rogue and he's so brave.
But it seems to me that that just means he was bravely calling for an escalation in Iraq earlier than others or something, which doesn't impress me too much.
But you said he's a real thinker and he's really great and he does stand apart in some ways for good or for ill or whatever it is.
So I was just, you know, I know the audience really wants to know as much as we can about this guy.
He's thin skinned, he's very thin skinned, he's very opinionated, he's very articulate.
He looks like a weightlifter, he probably is.
He's in tremendous condition.
He has a Ph.
D. from, I think, the University of North Carolina.
He wrote a book called Dereliction of Duty, which had a profound impact on the military talking about Vietnam.
He's he was a tank commander in the first Gulf War at the battle that you talk about, 73 Easting, with who in the squadron he was a part of, was commanded by Doug McGregor, a friend of his, but also a critic.
And he's, you know, he's highly respected.
He is viewed as the military's leading intellectual.
And it's hard to disagree with that.
I think he is.
But he's a very opinionated guy.
He's very pro-army.
And as I say, he has a philosophy of forward deterrence, which is forward deployment.
And he doesn't see any way out of it.
He gave a recent talk at the Command and General Staff School on the four vultures and the kind of misinterpretation that people have of the kinds of wars we're fighting.
It was clear from his talk that, you know, he believes that the United States as a global, as the sole global power, superpower, has a responsibility to fight these wars, has a responsibility to protect the innocent, and that it has a responsibility to flex its muscle and protect the American people where they where they can, according to him, be best protected, which is not on our shores, but overseas, which means, you know, he's likely to be the guy in the next month who would say to Donald Trump, yeah, we're going to need more troops in Afghanistan.
I support that.
It's it's it strikes me as odd, given his background and his history, that he would support this because he's always been a lifelong skeptic of the use of power.
But now I think that's he's turned that on its head.
He sees no way out of the United States using its power, and he thinks that we ought to.
Man, that's something else.
I can hear Lindsey Graham now calling him like he did McChrystal and saying, don't forget to say al Qaeda a bunch of times.
You can't just say we must dominate all of Eurasia.
Americans don't think like that.
You have to say al Qaeda.
Remember, don't forget.
I think that we're going to need to take a step back.
And nationally, have a debate about what it means to be the world's sole superpower and what kind of rights and responsibilities that confers on us.
It's not clear to me that we've had that debate, but I think it would be useful to have the debate.
Does it mean that we're responsible for the peace of the world?
Or does it mean that we should, a la George H.W. Bush, shape coalitions of like minded countries to keep global order instability and to understand that there are limits to what we can and should do.
And he's the one who got us into this mess, Mark.
What we got to do is nothing.
But if you look at if you look at George Bush, as opposed to, let's say, his son.
Well, yeah, but look at anyone in world history compared to George Bush on anything.
But no, you're right.
I mean, well, George Bush sent his team out of diplomat to recruit.
Like minded countries, Europe and the Middle East, I mean, we had Syrian troops fighting beside us.
Of what, a 39 nation coalition, which we didn't pay for, we spent thirty million dollars on the first Gulf War.
We spent two trillion.
I got to tell you, Mark, you know, when it comes to a realist argument such as yours compared to the neoconservatives or the liberal interventionists, I always prefer you guys every time.
But I think you realists need to be a little bit realistic about the fact that the neocons and the liberal internationalists, all they are is the cutting edge of what is basically the permanent realist, real politic consensus since World War Two, which is that America enforces the will of the U.N. Security Council and international law under the doctrine of permanent collective security.
We're the sheriff that makes the law the law.
And all Richard Perle does is say, let's not pretend that the U.N. is really driving this cart.
We're the ones driving, but it's in pursuit of what they have structured all along as these massive multinational institutions, which include everybody and which are going to always necessitate American enforcement as long as we have the pretension of this sort of pseudo global federalism that we have.
The realist position on foreign policy that I espouse is now considered a fringe doctrine.
But I believe it is one that will circle back because going it alone and bankrupting the country in the process will wake people up to the fact that we can't be everywhere and do everything that we need to build coalitions and that there are some conflicts that we simply cannot resolve and we shouldn't try.
And that expending 4,000, 5,000, 10,000 American lives in the pursuit of goals that can't be reached is a bad idea.
If I were Russia, I'd be doing the same thing they are doing.
I'd be developing weapons to oppose the United States and publicize them like crazy so that we could overspend and go bankrupt.
And I would punch above my weight, which is what Russia is doing.
This country is not a threat.
Russia is not a threat to us, just simply is not.
Al-Qaeda is not a threat.
ISIS is not a threat.
China is not a threat.
And yet, if you live and work in Washington, as I do, and you listen to what people say, you'd think we were under siege from everyone.
It's nonsense.
It's complete nonsense.
And we need to take a much more realistic and tone down the rhetoric that we have and understand that the wars that we're fighting are unwinnable.
It's not our, you know, Shia versus Sunni in the Middle East.
It's not our fault.
It's not our fight.
And we can't fix it.
And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we'll get out of these wars.
Yeah, boy, I sure am with you on every bit of that.
And, you know, I think I asked you specifically about this before on the on the issue of Russia.
But I hear what you're saying about.
It's true if you're talking about Al-Qaeda, Iran or any of these things, all the crazy things that us regular people out in the country hear from the lunatics in power.
That seems to be the overriding lesson of our conversations here, Mark, is that they really do believe this stuff, man.
Oh, they really do.
Oh, there's no question they absolutely do.
You know, I hear we hear every night on MSNBC or CNN or Fox News that Russia's strategy is to break up the NATO alliance, undermine democracy, make the United States a second rate power and and compete with the United States for control of the world.
There's absolutely no evidence that that's the case.
But we keep repeating it.
In fact.
Prior to four or five years ago, we cooperated very closely with Russia on any number of issues and we still can't.
And I understand people listen, I'm no fan of Putin, I'm not I'm not going to defend Putin.
But.
Reaching an accommodation with Russia beats the hell out of a confrontation with Russia, which could lead to unbelievable consequences.
Well, I just want to bring up two very important and recent and obvious examples of what you just said, which is that they helped us avoid war when Obama talked himself into a corner and almost had to bomb Syria over it in 2013.
Putin gave him an out.
I'll have Assad give up all the last of his mustard gas and everything if you don't bomb.
Deal saved us from a war that the entire American population opposed left, right, center, town, country, black, white and everything else said, don't do this.
And Putin gave him an out.
And Putin also.
I don't know how hard he leaned on a mark.
Maybe you know better than me, but he certainly influenced the ayatollah that, hey, you know, I would really like it if you would do this nuclear deal with the Americans here and get this thing out of the way.
I know he was helpful, you know, very helpful to the American position on the nuclear deal virtually throughout the entire Obama administration, which is huge.
He was absolutely key.
But, you know, we're we're you know, we're also facing people who think that the Iran nuclear deal was a surrender, was appeasement.
And there's no convincing them if it's their political point of view.
It's a it's a matter of it's almost a catechism.
And, you know, it's unfortunate, but there it is, we're going to have to we're sooner or later, we're going to have to fight that.
I wonder if Maddow thinks that now.
I wonder how powerful her cognitive dissonance is that the Iran deal was a Russian plot to get us to accept a permanent nuclear.
You've been watching.
I try not to.
There are you know, listen, I'm not I'm not a fan of Trump.
I'm certainly not a fan of Trump.
But to to characterize anyone who wants an accommodation with Russia as a potential trader.
Seems to me to be going a step too far and to say that, you know, which they're coming close to saying that Trump won this election, if it hadn't been for Putin, he wouldn't have.
It's just ridiculous.
It's crazy.
Yeah, well, and as a first premise of America's relationship with Russia in this, you know, so-called Trump era, as long or short as it happens to last, is a really bad step.
I mean, one good thing is he's so brash that he still said at least as of a week ago, hey, I want to get along with Russia.
Why would that be so bad?
Wouldn't that be not bad?
You know, I at least he kind of is self-confident enough.
That seems to be one slogan.
I don't know if we can get his policy to follow it at all or not.
That seems to be one thing that he thinks he believes, you know, I don't know.
Yeah, it is the one thing he he thinks that he believes in, you put it well, because he's so unpredictable and he has not given me confidence that he's prepared for the presidency.
But, you know, I say that and then I step back and I tell my progressive colleagues, listen, I understand the problems you have with Trump, but don't tell me that Hillary Clinton was a progressive.
She was not a progressive.
Well, and on all of the things that he's done horrible so far, including the raid in Yemen and putting Iran on notice and telling Russia you have to give back Crimea to get the sanctions lifted.
These are all Hillary Clinton's positions.
Everything Obama's done so far that's caused this controversy.
I mean, maybe not getting into a yelling match with the Australian prime minister or whatever the hell that was, but the things that mattered, she would have done the exact same thing.
It is somewhat disturbing.
And I think, you know, despite their very clear sophistication and their ability to think clearly, and despite my support for them and my honoring of their service, it is a little disturbing that what we have in key foreign policy positions in this administration are military officers, senior military officers.
I think the NSA ought to be filled, the National Security Advisor ought to be a political figure and a civilian.
I just do.
I'm not saying that H.R. McMaster is not qualified because he's eminently qualified.
My problem is that he's not a civilian and that and being a military officer comes with some baggage.
And we ought to be aware of that.
And it seems to me, given his points of view, he is the one guy in this administration who's unlikely to tell the president, Mr.
President, let's not deploy more troops to Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm sorry, I'm a broken record on this audience.
But, you know, the whole thing, if you take this the other way around, if Trump was a strong enough leader like he seems to think he is and all that, what he could do is he could corral these military men like Madison McMaster and say, listen, I'm going to make peace with Russia.
I'm going to make a real good deal with China, with Iran, with North Korea.
And you guys are going to help me do it.
And you're going to stand and protect my right flank in the only Nixon can go to China kind of way.
Only a real estate tycoon, billionaire Republican with generals helping him do the negotiating and everything can make peace with our last five problems in the world.
We're going to get out of Afghanistan.
And Mattis, you're going to tell the people it's OK to go ahead and cut and run from Afghanistan.
And we're going to go to Russia and McMaster.
You're going to be the one to deliver the news to the people that don't worry.
Trust me, this is OK.
We're going to make peace with Russia.
We're going to have a new deal with Russia.
They could do this if Trump wanted to do that.
If he just understood, hey, if Nixon can shake hands with Mao, then I can shake hands with the Ayatollah.
Let's get it on and use the the these generals to protect his red, white and blue right flank.
Right.
And then.
But he doesn't have the vision to do that.
He's just going to go along with whatever the hell they want, even though they probably would follow those orders if he put it to them like that.
Absolutely.
If if he said, let's get out of Afghanistan, let's ratchet down these wars.
I'm going to go see Putin and we can come to an accommodation with China.
You know what they'd say?
They'd say, yes, sir.
We think it's a good idea.
There you go.
That's their job.
And they and they you.
So you're right.
And they would be able to implement it.
In fact, they're perfectly placed to implement it.
And I think privately, they probably give a sigh of relief, but.
I'm very skeptical that that kind of thing is going to happen.
Yeah, me too.
If only he read.
I don't know how to finish that.
I was going to say more or books or something, but actually at all, I think would be nice, you know, if he perused the news at the end of the day instead of just watching TV because he just doesn't know enough to know any of these things.
I mean, he would have stumbled across you.
He would have stumbled across the national interest and said, I like some of this stuff here.
Who's this Bandai guy?
Who are these guys?
You know, but he's just he's not that interested enough to have found him.
So that's right.
He's not.
He's just not there.
Hey, listen, I'm sorry.
I'm taking up your whole afternoon here.
Thank you so much for your time today, Mark.
Great to talk to you again.
As always, I appreciate being on.
Thank you very much.
All right, you guys.
That is Mark Perry, the great reporter from Politico magazine.
He wrote this one back a year and a half ago.
Now, it's called Inside the Pentagon's Fight Over Russia, and it's McMaster and McGregor and NATO expansion and all of these things.
And there's a follow up there also at Politico magazine called The Secret U.S.
Army Study That Targets Moscow.
That one is kind of a companion piece, although it's not by Mark.
But anyway, thanks, guys.
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