00:00:00.000this is the primal scream of a dying regime pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on
00:00:11.040these people here's not got a free shot all these networks lying about the people the people have
00:00:17.640had a belly full of it I know you don't like hearing that I know you try to do everything
00:00:21.420the world to stop that but you're not gonna stop it it's going to happen and where do people like
00:00:25.140that go to share the big line? MAGA Media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people
00:00:32.800had a conscience. Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? If that answer
00:00:39.460is to save my country, this country will be saved. War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.0.62
00:00:47.860in founders fire tell me how you get the inspiration for doing that so many of the books
00:00:57.200that you've written have either been about these amazing times in history like the scottish
00:01:03.000enlightenment where if you get how the scots invented the modern world you have a country0.96
00:01:08.180that is a backwater that's totally on its ass and because it's it's stunning i mean when you0.97
00:01:14.640If you read Freedom's Forge, it's about how we built ourselves, took the Industrial Revolution from England, but did something quite different and really became the forge for global freedom during the great fascist and imperial wars of the mid-20th century.0.98
00:01:33.480But then you also pick out individuals.
00:01:36.000Here in Founders Fire, you kind of do both.
00:01:40.380They're individual vignettes, but you also talk about groups like the Founding Fathers.
00:01:43.780How did you come up with this construct for the current book?
00:01:47.440Well, a lot of it actually flowed from the Freedom's Forge, because one of the things, the themes of that book, which is about the power, the energy, drive and dynamism of America's private sector,
00:02:01.660and that at crucial moments in our history, when the public sector, when government is able to
00:02:07.900really harness that drive and energy and dynamism, miraculous things happen. It happened during the
00:02:16.520Civil War. I talked about that in Founders Fire, too, of the way in which America's growing
00:02:21.460industrial might was set to work in the North by Abraham Lincoln in order to win that conflict.
00:03:21.900And that's what that book really lays out as the key lesson.
00:03:24.920But what I also came to realize, Steve, in writing it and in thinking about it now a decade later, a decade after the book originally came out, was, yes, it is about industrial might, and it is about building factories, and it is about, you know, amazing weapons, you know, the P-51 Mustang and B-29 and, of course, the atomic bomb.
00:03:49.460but it's also about leadership. That book is about who provides the kind of leadership
00:03:55.040that makes it possible to unleash that dynamism and energy and drive that is embedded in
00:04:02.220American economy, but I think also in American society. And what I came to realize is that
00:04:10.980a lot of what is being talked about, buzzword, in the business community right now, which is
00:04:18.380about founders, founder mindset, founder mentality. They're talking about it all in the business
00:04:24.680schools and so on, that this is that founder mentality. Those characteristics are one that
00:04:32.080are rooted all the way through our history, not just in our business leaders and in our inventors
00:04:39.600and discoverers, men like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford or the key figures like Henry Kaiser from
00:04:47.520from Freedom's Forge, but it roots all the way back to the revolutionary generation of 1776
00:04:55.100and even before that. How does it tie back? How is that an unbroken chain?
00:05:02.380I see it as an unbroken chain from almost the moment that the Pilgrims and Puritans land1.00
00:05:09.120in Massachusetts, and who find themselves in a world totally unlike anything that they've ever0.90
00:05:17.860experienced back in England, and who realize that they have a choice. Either they're going to forge
00:05:24.880ahead and make new lives for themselves, or they're going to die. And that they come to
00:05:34.220think of themselves as having, and the term that they use is, an errand into the wilderness,
00:05:41.440and that God has given them this moment to create a new lives for themselves, create a new society,
00:05:49.020and has chosen them for that. But that fulfilling God's command requires enormous hard work.
00:05:57.520It requires a lot of what we call sort of self-starting approach to life, from whether it's breaking ground to build crops, defending yourselves against indigenous natives who would rather not have you there at all, or whether it is, in effect, creating a new form of government, a new way of governing yourself that's suited to the life here in this errand into the wilderness.
00:06:26.900the Mayflower Compact. Tell me about the Mayflower
00:06:31.080Compact. Why is that so important? It's important because what it is, it's a vision
00:06:35.040for not just how the settlers arriving in Massachusetts
00:06:39.420would govern themselves and organize life for themselves, but
00:06:43.340also to think about it as, in a sense, a model for the rest of the world.
00:06:47.600If you like, we talked about, we can talk about utopian views
00:06:51.240and you can say, well, isn't that also a utopian view?
00:06:55.380this idea of the shining city upon a hill, uh, that, that, that, that, that vision encompassed
00:07:01.440and, and, and, and involved, but it was a utopian view. All right. But it's one that first of all
00:07:07.480is formed within the bounds of, of, of theistic belief of Christianity, uh, and understanding
00:07:16.160that ultimately the basis, the basis of any, but I think, I think, I think, I think the
00:07:22.460The Mayflower Compact is so important because it gets back to your...
00:07:25.780Remember, they had the lived experience of being on a tiny vessel for a couple of months
00:07:31.200with people, with two-thirds of the people were not believers.
00:07:34.120The pilgrims or the Puritans were one small section of the vessel itself.
00:07:39.540They had other people that came aboard.
00:07:41.400And in the cramped quarters, remember, I think even a couple of marriages broke up, right?
00:07:49.440as a result because you were cheek by jowl right in very confined quarters and remember the compact
00:07:55.440came up after they dropped anchor they kind of said hey look let's let's sit down here and go
00:08:01.680through how exactly we're going to comport ourselves when we get there i to me it's always
00:08:06.920been about the practicality and common sense of how do we get disparate elements into kind of one
00:08:14.100you know thinking about how we're going to make this progress for the pursuit of happiness
00:08:20.380as we as we go it's a it's a they when they were picking them up in holland and in in england
00:08:27.280they weren't talking about a mayfair compact that lived experience of the cramped ships
00:08:31.780and what it was really going to be and of course some of the people who were not puritans were
00:08:37.680you know uh how do i say this toxic masculinity is not it but they were men's men who were in a
00:08:45.840very tough situation and they were looking out that they were the the place they arrived didn't
00:08:51.720look like virginia or what it wasn't it didn't look like it was sold to them as virginia no it
00:08:56.380was it was very quite barren and very cold right or it was going to be very hostile and so the
00:09:02.640compact came up from this thing you keep talking about the common sense of the scottish enlightenment
00:09:07.600I like your read. That's a I think that's an important dimension to this as well, that it is on the one hand, you have the sort of utopian hopes, but they adjust to reality. Yes, they adjust to the reality which you perceive. And the fact that you're going to work with people who may not have that same kind of messianic pursuit of perfection. And it's kind of the genius of the it's kind of the genius of the English and the Scottish. Right.
00:10:13.420I've got to go to my current obsession.
00:10:15.560Let's talk about your current obsession.
00:10:16.320Because people know that I get my obsession.
00:10:18.040So we're getting ready for the Memorial Day.
00:10:22.940We always do Memorial Day weekend about the honored dead.
00:10:26.520And we this year we have a special on Saturday about Peleliu and Terawa, the bodies that have not been brought back.
00:10:32.580We talk about those those battles. And it gets me to thinking that President Trump just returned from this huge summit with the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.
00:10:42.860And everybody everybody talked about that, took all the businessmen over.
00:10:46.120And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking that, you know, there was a guy that kind of understood this better than any of the Americans at the time.
00:10:57.500And he's been kind of kicked off into history as as a as a guy that might have been a great war leader.
00:11:03.980But it's dropping. I said, that's MacArthur. And there's one book that really explains that.
00:11:09.720And so then I just do a model kind of research and I get to a major article about how MacArthur understood what modern Asia was going to become.
00:11:18.740And it's by it's through the Hudson Institute is by Arthur Herman.
00:11:23.120And then I remember, oh, my God, it was it was his book.
00:11:26.720I've read every biography on MacArthur and there's one biography of MacArthur takes a very different take of MacArthur than Americans.
00:11:34.020And they've had great writers. I mean, Manchester, tremendous, tremendous writers.
00:11:38.220I mean, American Caesar, I devoured that back, I think, when I was just starting the Navy in the late 70s, early 80s.
00:11:58.940But I also want to go back to Freedom's Forge.
00:12:02.060the geniuses we had in the industrial side and even in the war, how they actually gave away.0.96
00:12:09.680We did walk away from China and turn it over to the worst people on Earth, the Chinese Communist Party.0.97
00:12:15.640So first of all, tell me about terrible. Let's start at the end with how MacArthur knew your piece in the in the Wall Street Journal, Asian Wall Street Journal,0.98
00:12:24.040how MacArthur of everybody actually understood what we now tell today modern Asia.
00:12:29.520In my view, Douglas MacArthur is the greatest grand strategist America's ever produced.
00:15:06.060And Manifest Destiny, I say this over and over again, Manifest Destiny was about the Pacific.
00:15:10.820That America did not end at California in Washington and Oregon.
00:15:15.520That the Central Pacific, as Mackinder, the great Scotsman, the king of the Scottish Enlightenment, said that Asia, the Central Asia is the pivot to the world island.
00:15:26.000The 19th century intuitively got that that Central Pacific is the strategic pivot of the United States.
00:15:33.200And that's why we naturally have to expand to the three island chain.
00:15:37.240And to understand that, you've got to go to Beijing and become military.
00:15:40.660And that America has an advantage over its European rivals.
00:15:44.540Because remember, in the 1870s, 1880s, the European powers are just beginning to carve up China, which has been fatally weakened at the center with the decline of the empire, Chinese empire.
00:15:58.560They're just beginning to carve out sections of it for themselves as part of colonial rule.
00:16:04.220America, however, can slip in through the back door, as it were, not by moving east, as the Europeans do, across that landmass, but moving by seaward.
00:16:13.960the Central Pacific. By the Central Pacific.
00:16:16.280Which will be the battleground of World War II.
00:17:05.140America being, in his mind, the key representative
00:17:07.960of that sense of a legacy in ideology based on freedom and liberty,
00:17:12.920and the other empire. And the empire he's thinking about is Tsarist Russia. But his son,
00:17:20.820Douglas MacArthur, will absorb from his father, from that Chinese memorandum that his father had
00:17:27.420written, and from his father's long talks with his father when they go on a tour of Asia,
00:17:34.160when MacArthur is a young officer in the U.S. Army, and they go on his tour to visit all the
00:17:41.640major stops there in India and in Indonesia, as well as Japan and also the Philippines.
00:17:51.460He long talks with his father. He learns that this notion of an eternal struggle between autocracy
00:17:58.800and democracy is one that Asia will be the cockpit in which that struggle will be played out,
00:18:09.900And that America has a responsibility, not just to itself, but to the world, to be the representative of democracy in that eternal struggle.
00:18:18.380But here's why it's so, and I believe you're the only historian and biographer that went and got that memo.
00:18:26.260Others looked at it and they thought it was very interesting, but it didn't sink in the way it did for me.
00:18:31.680But here's – if you go back – this is where I had to go back to the book.
00:18:36.320If you go back to Beijing with President Trump, at the very opening, Xi throws out about Thucydides' trap, the declining power and the rising power from the Peloponnesian Wars.
00:18:48.760This is what Kissinger and Graham Allison tried to sell in the 70s, 60s and 70s, about the United States' declining power and the Soviet Union as a rising power.
00:18:59.560This is why we had Carter and even Nixon fell into this trap of trying to get all these arms agreements.
00:21:46.720Okay. He's put there to organize that. How do we allow in those first in the years, 47, 48 and 49, we've just won in that in the Chinese people have lost 35 million casualties minimum in that war.
00:22:03.080In fact, I always argue the Second World War actually started not in Poland in 39. It actually started in 31. Yeah, that's right. In China. The global conflict started there.
00:22:14.960Um, how did we, with MacArthur in Japan and just having won this magnificent victory in the Pacific, really with American force of arms and our ally having taken 35 million casualties, how did we allow the state, a handful of people in the State Department?
00:22:36.940And as you said, General Marshall, who went and kind of hung out with Mao for a week in the mountains,
00:22:44.980how did we, with MacArthur and Japan, allow them to turn over China to the Chinese Communist Party, sir, in 1949?
00:22:54.080Well, you know, you've got to understand something about MacArthur.
00:22:57.460He's an extraordinary figure, particularly in the U.S., in American armed forces and the history of the Army.
00:23:06.940he is, in many ways, he's the kind of personality that I talk about in Founders Fire. I could have
00:23:12.640had a chapter on Douglas MacArthur in Founders Fire because he has all of the characteristics
00:23:16.880of your classic founder. He's got the big vision, right? The greatest grand strategist we've ever
00:23:23.700had. He's got this drive. I mean, when he's focused on a military campaign, when he's focused
00:23:31.700on how to reshape and rehabilitate Japan. That's all he's focused on. Every action is dictated0.65
00:23:39.700by pushing ahead with that. Founders always get the signal, not the noise. And MacArthur had that
00:23:48.560kind of gift. He's a hands-on guy, too. In every battle, every landing in the Southwest Pacific
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00:30:57.780Strategic intelligence based upon predictive analytics. It's what chairman and CEO
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00:31:05.660War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann.
00:32:24.360I know MacArthur didn't try to—and this is one of the questions.0.99
00:32:27.360Why didn't he break up the Zabatsus?0.94
00:32:30.040But how does he allow Marshall to spend a week in 1949 with Mao0.90
00:32:37.560and get snowed with all these communists in the State Department,0.64
00:32:40.880and we come up with a solution of which MacArthur would tell you
00:32:44.020is the worst possible thing you'd ever do of turning over,
00:32:47.900as bad as Chiang Kai-shek was, and Stilwell was a great man,
00:32:51.440as hard as the problem of General Stilwell had controlling him,0.99
00:32:54.220because at the end of the day, they are kind of Chinese, right?0.99
00:32:57.020Circumstances change. And, you know, Madam X and in Chiang Kai-shek, they were pieces of work.0.91
00:33:03.360Right. But you had to. But how do we turn over? It's it. It haunts us today.
00:33:09.960We, the United States of America, did this. This was an action of us.
00:33:13.420And Lao Bajing, when I talk to Chinese freedom fighters all the time, they go, hey, look, you guys turned it over to him in 49 when you had control.
00:33:19.900And then in 1989, when we were in the streets with the goddess of liberty and Tiananmen Square, you know, Bush and those guys bailed him out.
00:33:28.260And after we threw off these demons or in the process of throwing them off, you turn it back over to him.
00:33:33.680There's got to be some somehow your deep state or there's something at work in the United States that that somehow likes to have this.
00:33:41.980And now we've got a situation where we go and President Trump goes out of his way to say what a great guys they are.
00:33:49.900and how we're going to work together, and we're going to be partners.
00:33:52.400And they slap us in the face in the first two minutes of the thing.
00:34:16.660What I call the Thucydides' trap trap.
00:34:19.900Because if you try to see the world through those eyes, you're going to be misled in every direction.
00:34:24.160Tell me about that. That's important. Tell me about that. Why?
00:34:25.520Well, it's the whole idea that somehow that major conflicts arise because of declining powers versus, quote, rising powers.
00:34:33.180And that's not true. Wars come about through a whole range of situations and a whole range of conflicts.
00:34:40.960And even I think my own belief is that to try and understand the rivalry between Athens and Sparta in terms of rising versus declining powers is completely misleading.
00:34:53.240It doesn't lead to any kind of understanding of ancient Greek history, let alone of how history takes place, falls out elsewhere.
00:35:01.020If anything of what President Xi said about rising and declining powers, it applies.0.53
00:35:07.960The declining power right now is China.0.96
00:35:10.960Their economy is in serious, sad shape.
00:35:15.200Their role in the world is also, they're watching their allies be snatched away one after another.
00:35:21.760Venezuela, Cuba, and now very likely Iran as well.0.82
00:35:27.180Whatever final arrangement, whatever comes out of this conflict, it's going to be a much diminished Iran.
00:35:32.940It's going to be an Iran which is not going to be a conduit for the military.
00:35:36.960The Chinese military technology didn't stand up too well in natural combat.
00:35:40.460And that's been part of one of their big sales pitches.0.99
00:35:45.100But we wouldn't have gotten here if we didn't have 1949.
00:35:48.640How does that happen, particularly when MacArthur's on watch over there?
00:35:58.160This is the challenge of dealing with MacArthur and that inevitable opposition that he faces.
00:36:03.120Whatever warnings he has with regard to the dangers of communism in Asia, whatever support he gives to Chiang Kai-shek, who really had been the U.S.'s allies during World War II,
00:36:18.180and that MacArthur was not alone in believing that Stilwell's advice had been very bad advice0.61
00:36:27.280of how to deal with Chiang Kai-shek and the use of the Chinese as allies against Japan,
00:36:34.580that all of that is going to be, in a sense, discounted.
00:36:37.280And what instead will be seen as being the outlook for Asia
00:36:43.760is one that the post-colonial Asia is one
00:36:48.400which will be built around progressive principles.
00:36:52.560It'll be one that will open up a whole new era
00:36:55.880of New Deal-type liberalism spreading across Asia.
00:37:02.880And I'll tell you someone else who suffered from the same delusion,
00:37:09.700And his view of decolonizing and the end of the British Empire in Asia was that a whole series of these sort of moderate socialist regimes would spring up instead of the enormous chaos and dislocation that resulted, particularly in India afterwards.
00:37:25.440I've written about that, too. But you have on the one hand, you have a state, you have leading figures in the State Department, China experts who have a grasp and understanding of Chinese language and Chinese history.
00:37:39.700who are seeing Mao and his forces through the rosy-colored glasses of their own progressive view about what is best for Asia.0.67
00:46:57.420But his point was, is that, and I think if you look at military analysts who come to understand what the situation was during the Korean War, and also in China in 1950, 51, that what he realized was that Mao's move and his advance into Korea was also an act of desperation.
00:47:19.100that his government, his rule was vulnerable at that moment,
00:47:24.740that China had committed, Mao had committed so many forces,
00:47:29.060so much of his military force to the fighting in Korea,
00:47:32.740of which he was taking a terrible beating, terrible beating.
00:47:36.980China was losing by the tens of thousands in the face of the American response
00:47:44.080that the moment had come when you would be able to topple the regime.
00:47:49.100Mao's regime was vulnerable, and if America moved boldly and swiftly enough, particularly0.75
00:47:55.520if we unleashed Chiang Kai-shek and his divisions still mobilized, still ready for action on
00:48:04.100the island of Formosa in Taiwan, that the possibility would come, if not actually to
00:48:10.700topple Mao's regime entirely, to force a partition of China in a way that would be
00:48:18.480beneficial to the United States and the West, and it would truncate both Mao's plans for domination
00:48:25.980in Asia, but also Soviet Union's plans for domination as well. We've got to bounce, got a
00:48:31.340couple of minutes. Do you still write every, do you research or write for new books every day?
00:48:37.120For every day, no, but I'm always on the lookout for new ideas and where to go. And as I, the way
00:48:43.680I like to put it is each book, they're like stepping stones. Each book leads to the next one
00:48:49.300and leads to the next one. So from the point of view of what Founders Fire is about and what it
00:48:56.660is I learned, because every time I write a book, it's about learning something new. That's one of
00:49:01.260the things that draws me on. But one of the other things that happens in the process of writing a
00:49:06.640book is something else appears on the horizon. And I'd say, that's a really interesting subject.
00:49:12.560I'd like to learn more about that, and that puts me out.
00:49:15.340Founder's Fire is such a great way to celebrate the 250th.
00:49:19.580It's a very different take on everything.
00:50:10.980Wow. And I publish essays there on a regular basis. In fact, the essay we talked about, about the two enlightenments, French Enlightenment, you'll find it in the Civitas Outlook.
00:50:21.040I want to thank you for joining us, taking this time.