General Stanley McChrystalstal, author of the new book, Leaders: Myth and Reality, talks about his life growing up in a military family, how he became a leader, and the values that distinguish military families from the rest of the civilian population. He also talks about what it means to be a leader in the military, and why leaders have a much less active or controlling role than we sometimes want to think. The best they can do is produce something between the followers that enables us to do it. His book is available for pre-order now, and will be available for purchase on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide on November 1st, 2019. Thanks for listening and Happy New Year! Go check out his book on Amazon, and don t forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. You can also become a supporter of his campaign by becoming a patron patron. Thank you so much for your support, and I hope you enjoy this Sunday Special with me! Sincerely, - The McChrysanthemian Family Tom and Sarah Sarah and Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, and Sarah's Dad, Larry, Bill and Mary, Tim, Mike, Evan, Mark, Kevin, Michael, David, Julian, John, Joe, and Paul, Chris, Brian, Andrew, Daniel, Kristy, Brad, , and Rachel, James, Ben, Tom, Patrick, Jack, Bryan, & Matt, . John and , Justin, Amy, Robert, Adam, - Steve, Rick, Jon, Brett, Jake, Jordan, etc., & more! & much more Thanks to you all for listening to the Sunday Special? thanks to you, Jon, Ben, Ben Ben & Brian And so much more! Thank you for tuning into the show! - Tom, John, John and Brad, Jake, John Jon Rachel, Mike, Mike Brad Jake Can we have a chance to help you out? Thanks, Rachel Jason, Sam, Matt Jack Chris Joe Evan Michael
00:00:35.000But whenever you plot, You're going to think, well, I should have had life insurance.
00:00:38.000I mean, you may not be thinking anything, but you would have been thinking on your deathbed that perhaps you would have needed life insurance.
00:00:59.000The unbiased advisors at PolicyGenius will handle all the red tape, leaving you free to do all the things you actually enjoy doing.
00:01:05.000And PolicyGenius doesn't just make life insurance easy.
00:01:07.000Whether you're shopping for disability insurance to protect your income or homeowner's insurance or auto insurance, they can help you get covered fast.
00:01:13.000So, if you've been intimidated or frustrated by insurance in the past, give PolicyGenius a try.
00:01:18.000Just go to PolicyGenius.com, get your quotes, apply in minutes.
00:01:21.000You can do the whole thing on your phone right this very instant.
00:01:23.000PolicyGenius is indeed the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
00:01:27.000When you plot, you want to make sure that your family doesn't have to bury you in a pauper's grave.
00:01:31.000You want to make sure you're paid for.
00:01:41.000So, Stan, it feels disrespectful even though you just told me I could.
00:01:45.000Stan, let me start by asking you about sort of your life story.
00:01:48.000For folks who don't know your back story, where did you come from?
00:01:52.000Obviously, folks know you for your leadership in the military and for your leadership in Afghanistan and for you have several, at this point, best-selling books.
00:02:03.000Yeah, I was an army brat, which meant my father was a career soldier and his father before him.
00:02:08.000So I was one of six kids and five boys and a girl.
00:02:12.000All the boys became soldiers and my sister married a soldier.
00:02:16.000So we were an army family that moved around and then My father's career spanned Korea and Vietnam, so I was focused on that.
00:02:24.000I graduated from high school in Northern Virginia and then went to West Point when I was 17 years old in 1972, in an era when the military was not very popular.
00:02:34.000So I was entering a profession that I was very interested in, but the nation had a different view of.
00:02:52.000So I grew up in a very army environment.
00:02:55.000I never thought about doing anything but going in the army because my father was my hero.
00:03:00.000So when I graduated in 76, I was sort of on a path that may have been set for me almost at birth.
00:03:07.000So what do you think are sort of the values that distinguish military families from other families?
00:03:13.000Because there is this pretty stark divide now between people who served in the military or even know people who served in the military and the rest of the civilian population.
00:03:21.000Such a small percentage of our population now serves in the military or even knows someone who has served in the military.
00:03:25.000Well, there of course was an era back in World War II, 16 million people in uniform, and my father really came of age in that era.
00:03:33.000But starting right after the Vietnam War, they implemented the volunteer army.
00:03:38.000And so what happened is you started to have a much more professional military, and most of my career was spent in that environment.
00:03:47.000But the reality was the values that we grew up with around my parents were the idea of service, the idea that you were going to serve the nation.
00:03:56.000And they didn't wear it on their sleeves.
00:03:57.000Every day we didn't go, we weren't preached to go serve the nation.
00:04:02.000But it was sort of quietly, the expectation would be, When you reached an age, you would do something that would have value to the nation.
00:04:10.000And I think that's why my brothers all just sort of reflexively went into the military.
00:04:20.000Had four silver stars between Korea and Vietnam.
00:04:24.000But if you ever saw the movie, The Great Santini, where the guy was bragging, my father was the other end of that spectrum.
00:04:30.000So I thought of leadership and I thought of service as quiet and humble, but yet focused and dedicated.
00:04:40.000My father was not an easy man, but he was a very thoughtful person.
00:04:46.000And so I started to equate that's what leaders do.
00:04:50.000I want to talk to you about leadership in just a second, but I have a couple more questions about sort of military background.
00:04:54.000One of the, Robert Putnam was a sociologist from Harvard.
00:04:57.000He talks about the idea that the military instills this feeling of social fabric, and you've talked about some of those values that are instilled through the military.
00:05:04.000Do you think that those have been lost more generally in civilian society, these values of service and trying to help out your neighbor?
00:05:22.000And they try to get you to be part of a team.
00:05:24.000They try to get you to identify with that team.
00:05:27.000They want individual performance, but it's really about the community that you're a part of.
00:05:32.000No man left behind, any number of sayings.
00:05:35.000I think our society used to have much more of that fabric.
00:05:38.000If you think of frontier days where we did wagon trains or barn raising or common defense or volunteer fire departments where necessary, there was an absolute practical requirement that you be interacting and dependent upon your neighbors.
00:05:55.000And those neighbors might be your religion, they might be your background, but often they weren't, but they had to be a community.
00:06:01.000We're in a slightly different time now where those communities are fragmented.
00:06:05.000So now people tend to know people that have the same religion or occupation or income level or education background, and we have a tendency to Talk to them, live with them, interact with them.
00:06:20.000And because of social media, we can also choose who we interact with virtually.
00:06:25.000So we don't have to talk to our physical neighbor.
00:06:28.000We can sit on a subway car, ignore everybody else on the subway car and feel as though we're connecting to someone, whoever they are, and that's who we choose.
00:06:38.000So I think what's happened is we have much less identity with the group.
00:06:43.000We have much less And one of the things that I see rising from that is this need, almost a gut-level need, for the great leader.
00:06:58.000You see this across Europe, you're now seeing it in the United States in a variety of ways.
00:07:02.000People who basically feel like, since we've lost the social fabric, we need some person who we can rally around, and this person will bring us all together.
00:07:08.000But in your book, Leaders, you talk about the idea that people have just this grand misperception of what leaders are and what they actually do.
00:07:14.000So what is your definition of a leader?
00:07:16.000Yeah, my definition of a leader has evolved tremendously through my life.
00:07:20.000I was absolutely a believer that there were great men and women leaders, and I spent much of my life trying to be one of those and trying to find those to emulate and to follow.
00:07:31.000Over the years, my thinking has evolved to where I actually think leadership is this product of the interaction between leaders and followers and other contextual factors.
00:07:42.000And so as a consequence, leadership is almost a chemical reaction that occurs.
00:07:47.000So leaders enable that and leaders uh, Protect that.
00:07:53.000And leaders have a much less active or controlling role than we sometimes want to think.
00:08:00.000So as a consequence, what I want and expect from leaders is much less the man or woman on horseback who rides into the center and says, go this way and we will have lower taxes and we'll have victory and whatever it is we want.
00:08:14.000Because I know they can't produce that.
00:08:16.000I know that the best they can do is produce something between the followers and in the society that enables us to do it.
00:08:26.000Ultimately, that's who has to do things, the larger group.
00:08:30.000And so I start to think of leadership as being those people who can connect other people, those people who can make it not only accepted, In the book you talk about three main myths of leadership, and I was wondering if you might explain what those are, because one of the things that's interesting about this book is that it's a book about leaders, but it basically is shattering a lot of illusions that folks have about our vision of a leader, as you were just talking about.
00:08:59.000Sure, it shattered a lot of my illusions.
00:09:01.000I grew up with the idea of mythology, and myths really explain something we can't otherwise explain.
00:09:07.000And I explained to people how I had this book with a picture of Atlas standing, holding up the sky, and you laugh at it, kind of G-string holding the sky up, and then you realize for a long time people accepted that because they didn't have another explanation why the sky didn't fall in.
00:09:23.000And so having a guy up there doing it, good as any.
00:09:26.000And we started to think that heroes would do those things, but as we really study history, we start to find that's never been the case.
00:09:36.000And so the three myths that we came out with, the first was a formulaic myth, and you and I are absolute products of that.
00:09:43.000When we go through training in school, we're taught that if we do the seven habits of highly effective leaders, Do these things, or George Washington lists of traits or behaviors.
00:10:10.000The second is the attribution myth, and that's the idea that everything an organization does or fails to do is really dependent upon that leader's success or failure.
00:10:29.000But the reality was we did all these interviews to understand more fully complex events I'd been a part of.
00:10:36.000What we found is my memory was good, but it was stunningly incomplete.
00:10:41.000So I would make a decision and there'd be this outcome and I'd get credit for it as a big hero.
00:10:45.000And in reality, when we did all the interviews, we found there's all this backstory of all the people doing all the things that really made it happen or stopped it from happening.
00:10:56.000So as a consequence, attributing success or failure to me was really a myth.
00:11:03.000And yet, you think about how we read history, particularly through biographies, there's this spotlight on the leader, and we follow them through their lives, and everything else is sort of in the shadows.
00:11:14.000So as a consequence, we tend to think everything that happens is where the light is brightest.
00:11:20.000The final myth is one that really surprised me, and that's the results myth.
00:11:25.000Because I think of myself as a hard-nosed, analytical person.
00:11:47.000We don't follow people who are often more successful because really the leadership that people want is far more emotional than it is objective or transactional.
00:11:58.000And so as a consequence, we have these myths that we use to select the leaders, to elect them, to follow them and support them.
00:12:07.000And they absolutely lead us often to the wrong leaders.
00:12:12.000One of the things that's really interesting is you start the book by talking about how you took down a portrait of Robert E. Lee from your office, and it was fascinating for a variety of reasons, including the fact that we're now in the midst of a giant controversy about what to do with statues of folks like Robert E. Lee.
00:12:25.000I wondered if you might explain why exactly you decided to do that, and what made you think, okay, well, all of his leadership qualities aside, I still can't have this person's portrait in my office.
00:12:44.000At West Point, I lived in Lee Barracks.
00:12:47.000I then served more than 30 years as an army officer, as did Robert E. Lee.
00:12:52.000So not only did I grow up in his shadow, I followed his footsteps through my life, and I tried to emulate him because he was the epitome of a gentleman, of a courageous, effective, brilliant leader.
00:13:05.000And so when I was a lieutenant, my wife and I had zero money.
00:13:19.000It was a print with clear acrylic painted over it, 25 bucks framed.
00:13:24.000But in those days, that was a big chunk out of our monthly budget.
00:13:28.000And I hung it in our quarters for the next 40 years, wherever we lived.
00:13:32.000And I did it because I wanted it to remind me of what I believed in and who I believed in.
00:13:38.000But I also, when people came to my house, I was proud to have them go, wow, Look, there's a picture of a truly admirable person, and that's who Stan McChrystal identifies with.
00:13:49.000I knew I could never beat Robert E. Lee.
00:14:49.000And it's also the time we started writing the book, Leaders, and we decided we would write a chapter on Robert E. Lee.
00:14:56.000So I really studied him in a way I never had before.
00:14:59.000I'd studied his campaigns and his history.
00:15:02.000But I studied him as a man who, in 1861, after 32 years in the military, after swearing an oath to the United States of America, the exact same place I had done it many years later, he then turned on his nation.
00:15:19.000And he decides to join the Confederacy and spends the next four years trying to destroy the United States for the maintenance of slavery, the greatest evil in American history.
00:15:29.000And he did it not without Much reflection.
00:15:34.000I mean, people think he just automatically went south.
00:15:49.000I think it's the opposite decision that his role model, George Washington, would have done.
00:15:54.000And it's interesting because when I look at that, I think he got it completely wrong.
00:16:00.000But I don't think Robert E. Lee is completely evil.
00:16:04.000There's still much about Robert E. Lee I admire.
00:16:07.000There's still many of the things about him that I would like to emulate.
00:16:12.000But now, instead of him being a two-dimensional painting or a big statue that is just perfection personified, now I see him as a human being.
00:16:34.000And so I can think about him now, not as an icon, but as a man.
00:16:40.000And I think that that's who I can learn from.
00:16:42.000Well, I want to talk to you more about that in just a second, because I do fear that we may be living in an era where political correctness uses the fact that these guys were meant to erase them from history altogether, and I want to talk to you about that.
00:16:52.000But first, let's talk about your investment.
00:16:54.000So, maybe you're just learning how to invest.
00:16:56.000Maybe you're interested in learning how to invest.
00:17:27.000You can place a trade in just four taps on your smartphone.
00:17:29.000And the Robinhood web platform also lets you view stock collections that it curates for you, like 100 Most Popular, or social media, or curated categories like female CEOs, and analyst ratings of buy, hold, sell for every single stock.
00:17:40.000Learn how to invest as you build your portfolio.
00:17:42.000Get educated in how exactly to trade in the stock market.
00:18:04.000So, Stan, back to the issue of how we should view our heroes.
00:18:08.000So, this sort of begs the question as to whether there should be statues or portraits at all.
00:18:11.000Because the truth is that every single hero that we have is a flawed human being because we're all flawed human beings.
00:18:16.000We're now seeing people try to recapitulate Winston Churchill and try to paint Winston Churchill as a racist.
00:18:22.000We're seeing people who, a lot of the same folks who wanted to take down the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville also wanted to remove the Thomas Jefferson statue from Charlottesville, even though Thomas Jefferson, of course, was one of the creators of the University of Virginia.
00:18:34.000So where do we draw the line between Recognizing that these were human beings, flawed human beings with good qualities that we want to emulate and completely wiping them away as heroes.
00:20:21.000And that's the problem with the mythology because we want to put them on a pedestal and we want to burnish them until they're perfect.
00:20:29.000And then we don't want to hear anything negative about our heroes.
00:20:32.000And that's not fair and it's really not healthy.
00:20:34.000Well, in the American system, one of the areas where leaders really do have a very large personal impact is in the area of foreign policy, where, of course, you are extraordinarily active as the leading commander in Afghanistan.
00:20:44.000When you look at the situation in Afghanistan right now, do you think that there is hope for the future of Afghanistan?
00:20:49.000Do you think that we should be pulling out?
00:20:51.000Do you think we should be ramping up the number of troops we have there?
00:20:53.000Because it seems like every president for the past couple of administrations, at least, has basically said, let's get out and then inserted more troops.
00:21:03.000Yeah, I think next question you could ask me how to improve education in America.
00:23:14.000There's a lot of twists and turns of history when suddenly positive opportunities open up.
00:23:19.000Negotiations with the Taliban, peace, that sort of thing.
00:23:22.000And if we're postured as partners, I think we can help them take advantage of that.
00:23:26.000Now do you think honesty is a political winner in this area?
00:23:28.000Because it seems like the only politicians who win on this particular score are the ones who don't tell the truth about the situation in Afghanistan and what it's going to require from the United States.
00:23:37.000Because we're constantly telling folks, maybe we live in the aftermath of a World War II mentality, that we'll win a war.
00:23:46.000And then if a politician like John McCain says, well, you know, in order to actually secure this area, we may have to be there for decades and decades and decades, then people say, no, we're not interested in that at all.
00:23:54.000And then, of course, the person who was elected, who pledged never to do that, immediately does exactly what John McCain said that he would do and just leaves people there for decades and decades and decades.
00:24:03.000I mean, can the American people stand any honesty on these scores, do you think?
00:24:06.000Well, whether they can stand it or not, I think the American people need to get it.
00:24:11.000If we go all the way back to World War II and other times where we said, we'll win World War II, we'll come out, and then we spend decades there.
00:24:20.000We told people in Vietnam things about that war that were not true.
00:24:24.000And the whole point of the Pentagon Papers was to show that in many cases, the United States government knew a reality on the ground that they would not communicate for political purposes to the American people.
00:24:36.000And I understand the expedience and the temptation to do that.
00:24:40.000I believe we have to have a basic honesty with the American people.
00:24:44.000The problem is it's not an applause line.
00:24:45.000It doesn't do well in an election where you stand up and say, I'm going to cut your taxes, pull out of Afghanistan, I'm going to do all these things, and it'll be great.
00:24:54.000Sometimes you have to look at them and say, we're going to have to pay more, we're going to have to do more, and it's going to take 30 years.
00:25:00.000And you're unlikely to get that thunderous response.
00:25:03.000But we owe the American people that honesty.
00:25:07.000The American people themselves, or their sons, or daughters, or at a minimum their treasure, are the people going places.
00:25:14.000And they have a right to know that this is, if it's going to be hard, tell them.
00:25:32.000I actually think over time the American people not only want that, but they would respond well to it.
00:25:39.000When you were the top commander in Afghanistan, you famously had some pretty public quarrels with then President of the United States, Barack Obama.
00:25:45.000In retrospect, how do you evaluate President Obama's performance on Afghanistan?
00:25:50.000And do you think that it was a mistake, for example, you had recommended that more troops be put in at a particular point?
00:25:54.000He ended up going with sort of a halfway measure with fewer troops.
00:26:06.000I'd been there for a number of years before, and then I was back on the Joint Staff, and I was sent in the summer of 2009.
00:26:11.000And the situation in Afghanistan was markedly worse than I think anybody thought it was.
00:26:17.000And it had been getting worse when everybody said, we've got to get out of Iraq, but Afghanistan's the necessary war.
00:26:23.000And that's what President Obama had in his campaign.
00:26:27.000And then I think when he got into office, it was a bit of a shock to he and the people with him that, in fact, it was worse and it was going to take more commitment.
00:26:35.000They were schooled in the history of Vietnam, and I don't blame them that.
00:26:39.000And from the day that they entered office, I think there was great frustration in this entire administration that suddenly the military and defense department were saying, we need to double down on Afghanistan.
00:26:51.000We need to put more troops and greater commitment.
00:26:53.000And this is almost a replay of what they believed that they had read about Vietnam.
00:27:42.000I actually commend President Obama for putting everyone through a pretty rigorous decision-making process to come to the conclusion to accept the recommendation for more forces.
00:27:54.000He didn't provide all that were asked, but he did it.
00:28:21.000You know, we're there trying to answer the question, if you want the outcome that you've asked for, this is what it takes.
00:28:28.000But you could almost sense that we're doing it, but we hate it.
00:28:32.000And whenever you're in that situation, it's like going to your in-laws for dinner when you don't want to go and you're in the car driving over and people are unhappy.
00:28:40.000We needed to sort that out because that's a recipe for a bad outcome.
00:28:45.000We really needed to stop, get all the players and step back and say, if we are not more united and not more comfortable with this decision as we go forth to execute it, I think we're going to have problems.
00:29:01.000And I think it's a cautionary tale for future endeavors for the United States in foreign policy, because Certain things are going to be hard and take a long time.
00:29:10.000And if you don't start with a certain unity, if you don't start with a level of resolve, you almost preordain problems.
00:29:19.000So you think it was a problem that he was giving withdrawal timetables from the very outset?
00:30:34.000That's not going to sound great to people.
00:30:36.000But when you look at the alternatives of pulling out and potentially even al-Qaeda safe haven, or dumping a bunch more troops and increasing the level of violence, Sometimes you say, well, you know, maintenance may be a rational course of action, but we need to explain that to people.
00:30:57.000We need to put it on the table and say, if someone else has a better, more clever plan, Please send it in.
00:31:03.000Let's get back to sort of what the central tenets of foreign policy should be.
00:31:06.000So it seems like the shift in direction of the American mind has been isolationist in orientation really since the second Bush administration, that after the war in Iraq started to go badly in 2004, 2005 and we required the surge.
00:31:21.000That the American people turned against the war in Iraq.
00:31:25.000They turned against the war in Afghanistan to a certain extent.
00:31:27.000They've turned against, in many ways, the idea that America ought to be a forceful presence on the world stage.
00:31:32.000And then, of course, as you say, presidents get in power.
00:31:34.000They look at the actual situation on the table.
00:31:36.000They say, well, we don't really have much choice about this, so we have to continue doing what we're doing.
00:31:41.000What do you think the central planks of American foreign policy ought to be?
00:31:44.000What's America's interest in the world and how forceful ought we to be in pushing it?
00:31:50.000Think of the times when we've really gotten it wrong.
00:31:52.000We failed to join the League of Nations almost 100 years ago and we paid a big price for that.
00:31:58.000The reality is the world is there and it's not going anywhere.
00:32:02.000In fact, it is more relevant to us on a daily basis because things are physically closer now because of transportation and the speed of digits.
00:32:10.000Economically, they are now intertwined and we can't disconnect those.
00:32:15.000In fact, our level of prosperity in the United States It's dependent upon a robust global trading and interaction, as is the rest of the world.
00:32:27.000Our peace and security are best secured furthest from our shores.
00:32:32.000They are best secured by conditions in other countries that make people not want to immigrate or not want to be terrorists or whatever.
00:32:42.000So I'm very much of the mindset that we need to think globally.
00:32:47.000Now, do I care more about the United States than other countries?
00:33:33.000Share them if you want and if you will.
00:33:36.000And I think that we need to be prepared to To make the kinds of decisions to support allies when necessary, also to oppose people or impose nations around the world when they upset the status quo.
00:33:52.000And it's easy for us to say or it's tempting to say, well, we're tired of being the world's policeman.
00:33:57.000Why can't other people spend as much on defense as we do or do as much or lose as many soldiers in combat as we do?
00:34:07.000But I would respond, we get so many advantages from being that nation in the world.
00:34:14.000We are economically, politically, socially advantaged for the fact that we are engaged in the world and we've had this superpower position.
00:34:25.000And I think that everyone needs to understand that for all the things, the price we've paid for that, we've gotten many times the return in the value to us.
00:34:37.000And I think young Americans particularly need to be educated that the world is there and that We're not superior.
00:34:44.000They need to go learn foreign languages.
00:34:46.000They need to go learn foreign cultures.
00:34:48.000They need to interact, not so that they can become them, but so they understand them, so they empathize them.
00:34:55.000I think the thing that hurts us most is when we look afar at some culture and we think, well, they wear rags on their heads, or they don't speak English, so they must be messed up, or they believe a different kind of religion.
00:35:06.000And then you get up close and you realize they're rational people.
00:35:09.000And they do some things that are pretty thoughtful and in some cases more thoughtful than we do.
00:35:14.000And it doesn't mean we have to change, but it means we have to understand enough to empathize.
00:35:19.000So you've served under a bunch of presidents and obviously observed presidents while you weren't serving.
00:35:24.000Which president do you think has best emulated the sort of foreign policy that you find attractive or worthwhile?
00:35:34.000You go back to my very youth, I remember the excitement of John F. Kennedy very much, started the Peace Corps.
00:35:40.000He said that the Peace Corps wouldn't really do what we wanted by getting young Americans out until 100,000 young Americans doing those things overseas.
00:35:50.000President Nixon reaching out to China, for all the faults that President Nixon had, he actually was very globally oriented.
00:35:57.000He understood that America was going to prosper based upon how the chessboard of the world worked and he worked very hard at it.
00:36:06.000President Reagan, of course, reached out to Europe, and he gave a little shove on the Berlin Wall at the right time.
00:36:13.000And he did it in a way that allowed American values to come across not as jingoistic, but very, very positive.
00:36:23.000And a lot of people wanted to emulate not just Ronald Reagan, but America in that period.
00:36:30.000We do a lot of things wrong in the world.
00:36:32.000But I think the idea, and while nobody gets it right, the much maligned President Obama speech in 2009 when he reached out to the Arab world and he basically said some of the things we've been doing over the last eight years have not been fair to you.
00:36:50.000If you strip aside the idea nobody ever likes to be apologizing for our own country, that's not a bad thing to be willing to look out to the world and say, we don't always get it right.
00:37:01.000What we're willing to do is come halfway.
00:37:04.000What we're willing to do is to try to partner with you.
00:37:08.000And so that give and take, it's got to be organic.
00:37:11.000It's presidential leadership at its most mature.
00:37:17.000First of all, I have to acknowledge that I was a massive critic of the 2009 speech because I thought he went far too much in one direction as opposed to the other.
00:37:23.000I don't think that he drew the balance properly, particularly when he was talking with many nations that have had a long record of supporting terrorism.
00:37:30.000But with that said, it's interesting that most of the presidents that you cite as being, you know, The sort of foreign policy leaders that you like existed during the Cold War era.
00:37:39.000Do you think that once the Cold War consensus is shattered, and that that has sort of shattered our notion of what foreign policy ought to be more generally, and it's fractured Republicans, it's fractured Democrats, it used to be that at least the idea was that foreign policy stopped when, that arguments stopped once you hit the water's edge.
00:37:57.000But that hasn't been the case for most of my lifetime, certainly.
00:38:01.000I wonder if you see that hard gap as happening when the Soviet Union fell.
00:38:04.000Yeah, it's interesting because it took some structure and logic away from our foreign policy, because regardless of whether you're Republican, Democrat, or whatever, when the Cold War existed, you politically and just logically sort of fell in line with certain things we had to do.
00:38:21.000I think that there's much to come around now, but we haven't found how to do that.
00:38:27.000We are backing into another Cold War, I fear.
00:38:30.000And Russia, of course, doesn't have near the power that the Soviet Union did, but they've got some serious intent.
00:38:37.000And it wouldn't take much for Europe to be in a pretty difficult place again.
00:38:42.000China is not a backward nation anymore.
00:38:44.000So I think the idea that we need to be serious about American foreign policy, it's not a ping pong ball we can bounce around internally and ignore how the rest of the world sees it.
00:38:56.000I think that We really need an approach in America that says, when you leave the shores of the United States, we may not agree on everything, but we are going to be much more tightly aligned.
00:39:08.000One of the things that always shocks people when you travel, like I spent so many years away, we don't know what's happening inside country X to any great degree.
00:39:18.000Most people around the world, even in small countries, know an incredible amount about what happens inside the United States.
00:39:24.000Our political ruminations, the comments and whatnot.
00:39:28.000So everything we are doing is done on a world stage that I'm not sure we always appreciate.
00:39:33.000So how would you handle the Russia situation?
00:39:36.000You talk about the possibility of backing into a Cold War.
00:39:38.000Obviously, the Obama administration ceded an awful lot of territory, not just in Crimea, but actual kind of psychological territory to the Russians in places like Syria.
00:39:48.000The Trump administration obviously has its own problems with its dealings with Russia.
00:39:52.000They may be more practically anti-Russia in a lot of their dealings, giving the Ukrainians deadly weaponry, for example, but obviously the president has spoken in very warm terms of Vladimir Putin.
00:40:01.000Putin is a bad actor on the world stage, without a doubt.
00:40:04.000What do you think is the best way for the United States to confront the Russians?
00:40:08.000Is it to be more aggressive in our language and be more clear with the consequences that will follow if they were to violate certain lines?
00:40:14.000Yeah, Ben, that's an essential question.
00:40:16.000I don't think that we need to be aggressive in our actions to the point of provoking.
00:40:24.000I think if you go back to the Cold War, there need to be certain expectations, almost like the Article 5 era.
00:40:31.000If you do this, that's an absolute crossing the red line.
00:40:34.000I think President Putin has taken advantage of a certain amount of uncertainty.
00:40:40.000His invasion of Georgia, the move back into the Mideast.
00:40:45.000We weren't very clear with what was happening in Syria and they're back.
00:40:50.000If I was the Baltic states now I'd feel much less comfortable than I'd like to.
00:40:54.000And of course Ukraine speaks for itself.
00:40:57.000So I think we need to be more firm with Russia.
00:41:01.000I think we need to understand President Putin.
00:41:04.000He came of age during Chechnya, and he was very aggressive.
00:41:08.000And every time he's been aggressive since, his popularity is buttressed.
00:41:13.000And of course, he's become an oligarch himself.
00:41:15.000So I think we need to call that for what it is.
00:41:18.000At the same time, I don't think we need to take Russia and say they're part of the evil axis and the world won't be safe until Russia is obliterated, because that's not true.
00:41:28.000Russia will evolve like every other country.
00:41:31.000But for at least the next foreseeable future, we need to treat Russia for what it is.
00:41:50.000Because this has always been the conundrum, is that they're a huge trading partner with us, obviously.
00:41:56.000We tend to think that opening China was a good thing for purposes at least of separating them off from the Soviet Union at the time, but it also enabled them to become a much more long-lasting power.
00:42:04.000Perhaps if we don't open China, they collapse the same way the Soviet Union does economically.
00:42:08.000In any case, we're now in a trade standoff with China.
00:42:11.000China has obviously gotten very aggressive in the South China Sea.
00:42:15.000How should we be treating Chinese ambitions?
00:44:13.000It's pushed into every place from Iraq to Yemen.
00:44:17.000And it's created basically a bifurcated Middle East where this, by almost accident, this sort of newfangled counter alliance between Israel and Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia has formed.
00:44:28.000What do you think is the best way for the United States to deal with Iran?
00:44:31.000Yeah, I think one way is to cover our eyes and pretend it's not there and then take our hands away.
00:44:37.000And if it's still there, we better come up with another plan.
00:44:40.000The other plan is 80 to 90 million Iranians.
00:44:46.000It had a period when we thought that they were the bulwark of democracy under Shah Reza Pahlavi.
00:44:52.000And from 53 when we helped him get into power until he left in the late 70s, it was sort of this thing that was going to be really good for the Mideast because they bought stuff from us and they did what we wanted.
00:45:04.000Then, of course, with Ayatollah Khomeini in this really difficult period where if you really look at history, we were as bad to the Iranians during that period as they were to us.
00:45:14.000And so if you're an Iranian, you have every reason to look at the United States and say, wow.
00:45:22.000You know, you guys are just everything you can do to hurt us, you have done.
00:45:25.000You helped Iraq after Iraq invaded Iran.
00:45:29.000You shot down the Iranian airliner in 1988, killed almost 300 people, 60-some kids.
00:46:15.000And so, just like Arab countries got together and said, we don't admit the existence of Israel and we're just gonna wait till the chance to wipe them off the face of the earth, Iran being one of them.
00:46:26.000If any of these other coalitions say, we're just gonna wait until we can wipe Iran off the face of the earth and they go away, that's equally unrealistic.
00:46:35.000The Iranian people are not all aligned behind the Supreme Leader by any means, but they are all aligned behind Iran.
00:46:43.000And so the idea that Iran will be a powerful regional player is rational, it's popular inside Iran, and it's inevitable.
00:46:52.000Do you see the possibility of a coup inside Iran?
00:46:55.000I mean, I think that kind of thing could happen over time.
00:46:59.000But if there was a coup inside Iran, the next leader, if they were what I predict, would be a strong person who would want a strong regional power, wouldn't love Saudi Arabia, You know, so it wouldn't change the dynamics as much as we think it would.
00:47:17.000It might be much easier to negotiate with and stop some of the rogue behavior.
00:47:21.000But the reality is they have national interests.
00:47:24.000And those national interests are, we disagree with some of them, but they have been rationally pursued.
00:47:31.000And so I think if we have to look at the region that way.
00:47:35.000I want to ask about the major controversy that's broken out over recent years has been the sort of social engineering of the military.
00:47:42.000And in the past we've seen that for great use with regard to the integration of the military under Harry Truman, for example.
00:47:48.000But there's been a lot of complaint from folks who are on the front lines, I've talked to many of them, who are upset with the idea of women in combat roles, for example, on the front lines, or the new push for transgender members of the military.
00:47:58.000Where do you come down on how the military should be used for social engineering?
00:50:36.000And when I talk about that, you think about the African-Americans that so desperately wanted to fight in the Civil War.
00:50:42.000And you think, why in God's name when you want to fight?
00:50:44.000If the white man will do it for you, let him do the fighting and dying and we'll get freed.
00:50:50.000They understood implicitly that if they fought, if they on an equal footing accepted the cost and risk of that, that they would be more legitimate as citizens.
00:51:02.000They would have a larger ability to argue for the kinds of rights that they deserved in America.
00:51:08.000I think that's true of military service today for every part of society.
00:51:12.000So in making all of that happen, the two issues that I've seen when I've talked with various members of the military are the issues of troop cohesion and standards themselves, meaning the worry about the lowering of particular physical standards, for example, to absorb more women into, if you want a female Navy SEAL, women on average don't tend to perform the same way that men do physically.
00:51:32.000And if we do, how does that make our military stronger?
00:51:35.000And when it comes to transgenderism, for example, you have a biological male who now believes he's a woman and should be barracked with a bunch of women, and those women are uncomfortable with it.
00:51:54.000On the first one on standards, this is harder than it sounds.
00:51:58.000I believe you set standards for different military occupational specialties.
00:52:01.000An infantryman carries a lot of equipment and a squad of non-infantrymen have some common equipment they all have to help carry.
00:52:09.000So if a person doesn't have the physical ability, capability to do that, It's not fair to the rest of the squad.
00:52:16.000So I think we have to be really good about coming up with standards and it will make it uneven because there are physical differences.
00:52:23.000Now the thing about it is we gotta make sure we're fair because there's sometimes a tendency to say, okay, we're gonna make these standards and you gerrymander them so that anyone who's a female, you know, we gotta be better than that.
00:52:39.000On the other part, this is a sociological thing, and I'm not quite sure how to deal with that, because you can argue that if somebody is transgender and then they're put in with the other group, that people will feel uncomfortable.
00:52:53.000I think we're going to have to feel our way along here because I know that if you'd gotten me 40 years ago and you said I was going to be in a squad with, you know, gay men, I probably would have said, I don't think it's a good idea because I'll be vulnerable.
00:53:08.000And then you learn that's not the way it works.
00:53:12.000I think the transgender part will just sort of have to work it out.
00:53:15.000I don't think that we should automatically beat everybody over the head and say you're horrible because you want a man who's now become a woman.
00:53:23.000You don't want her to live in the female barracks if I'm a female.
00:54:08.000I never thought of myself very political.
00:54:10.000I think that now I come down that America needs a different way ahead.
00:54:18.000I think that America needs a centrist way ahead.
00:54:21.000I think that our two political parties, in my view, have both gone too far to the ends of the spectrum.
00:54:30.000I'm not sure they represent people like me as much as I'd like them to.
00:54:35.000I mean, I have things I believe in on different issues, but the reality is, once you get out to the fringes, I feel like I'm in a foreign land.
00:54:44.000Like, where do you think that the Republican Party has gone too far to the right, and where do you think the Democratic Party has gone too far to the left?
00:54:50.000If you take the Democrats, I'm not a socialist.
00:54:53.000I'm a great believer in, you know, people work, because I don't think socialism works.
00:54:58.000So people should have to work for what they get.
00:55:01.000There's an awful high level of responsibility required.
00:55:04.000At the same time, I believe that government has a significant role in society, a significant role to give people opportunity to help them do that.
00:55:13.000So just because if by accident of birth I am born in West Virginia, and in West Virginia the coal industry, for example, is struggling against all the other competitors, and that's not surprising.
00:55:28.000I don't think that I ought to be left to fall behind people who happen to be born in New York.
00:55:36.000I think that the federal government has a role to look at that and says, how do we help the parts of our society that need it?
00:55:43.000For 150 years, we depended upon coal from places like West Virginia.
00:55:48.000If it hadn't been for people willing to go a mile underground to dig coal so we could make electricity and power boats and things like that, we wouldn't have had the Industrial Revolution.
00:55:58.000Then when energy shifts for us to suddenly go.
00:56:02.000Good luck with that You know That's not fair.
00:56:06.000I think we need to we have a responsibility for each other and and similarly when when we get Very far on the right we get very conservative in terms of not letting immigrants in or things like that I don't think that reflects America.
00:56:22.000I think America is an immigrant country.
00:56:24.000I think it's a compassionate country and I think it's a country that gives people opportunities, accepts responsibility for things like that, and so when you get out there, that's when I start to want us to pull back to the middle.
00:56:39.000So the fact that you've been discussed as a Democratic candidate, would you be more likely to run in a Democrat primary or a Republican primary if you were at some point to run?
00:56:50.000I don't, I'm really not at the point to say that, you know?
00:56:56.000I do want to say that I think we need the best people we can find to run for office.
00:57:02.000One of the things that disturbs me most, particularly about young people, is not this, that they're not dramatically political.
00:57:09.000There are not a lot of young Republicans and young Democrats.
00:57:11.000What I find is a lot of young people are apolitical.
00:57:28.000I really want young people to run for office who are pretty centrist, want the society to be better.
00:57:34.000Maybe they don't want to stay a politician forever, and that actually would like that.
00:57:37.000Maybe they want to do that for just a little while.
00:57:41.000And it doesn't matter to me whether they go a bit to the left or the right.
00:57:45.000You know, I endorsed a Republican this time and a couple of Democrats because I was looking for people I thought could compromise.
00:57:52.000Do you think that there's a possibility that anyone who's actually serious about foreign policy can win in the near future?
00:57:56.000I mean, what we've seen is on the Democratic side of the aisle, there's been significant attempts, President Obama obviously did this, to cut the military.
00:58:06.000When Jim Webb ran for president in 2016, basically the death of his campaign is when he talked about his military experience actually in a primary debate.
00:58:15.000And on the right, obviously President Trump took an extraordinarily isolationist tack in the primaries and ran roughshod over people who were more interventionist or at least more, in my view, realistic on foreign policy.
00:58:28.000Do you think that we've reached sort of an isolationist endpoint?
00:58:30.000And is there going to be a resurgence of folks who want to take foreign policy seriously in either party?
00:58:35.000And if so, which party do you see taking it more seriously in the near future?
00:58:40.000And I think that your analysis is right.
00:58:42.000You go back to the Kennedy-Nixon debates.
00:58:45.000They were talking about the missile gap and the need to do things.
00:58:48.000And that is almost entirely out of discussions now, political, because it just doesn't resonate for domestic I think we have to.
00:59:06.000I think we're going to have to get back to that.
00:59:08.000I think we're going to be pulled to it.
00:59:11.000My sense is we may be pulled by events more than... I don't think a candidate's suddenly going to arise in the near future who says, I'm the foreign policy president, because I think people will go, yeah, but You know, I need a job or I need health care, all the things they do need.
00:59:28.000I think the foreign policy president arises when foreign policy pulls us there.
00:59:33.000And then we go, wow, we really need competent leadership for foreign policy.
00:59:40.000I think a president who gets in office, whoever he is, we need to select them for the team they can build around them.
00:59:49.000Much of domestic policy is competent government.
00:59:52.000It's just getting things done that need to get done.
00:59:55.000And then on the foreign policy side, I think you need to have a president with enough experience, enough maturity and enough willingness, because that's where you really have to lead America a bit.
01:00:06.000Think of the leaders who have, the presidents who've done great things in foreign policy.
01:00:12.000They tend to be a step ahead of the American people because the American people necessarily are Looking at daily business.