The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 398. Dr. Jordan Peterson Speaks to a U.S. Hostage Negotiator ｜ Ambassador Robert O'Brien

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone watching and listening.

00:01:11.420 Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Ambassador Robert O'Brien.

00:01:15.440 We discuss the inner workings of international hostage negotiations, the ongoing success and legacy of the Abraham Accords negotiated under President Trump,

00:01:26.840 the Russia-Ukraine war and its complexities, and the current perception of diminished American strength, a situation which leaves much room for improvement.

00:01:39.020 So, Ambassador O'Brien, you were the fourth U.S. security advisor under Donald Trump.

00:01:47.460 So, why were you the fourth?

00:01:51.300 And what was it like taking on the job knowing you were the fourth?

00:01:55.800 And what was it like working with Trump?

00:01:58.760 I mean, he's a mystery to many people.

00:02:00.860 Maybe he's a mystery to himself.

00:02:02.360 Who knows?

00:02:02.840 But you stepped into a role that had obviously been contentious, and so there must have been some apprehension in that regard.

00:02:12.400 Why did you do it, and what was that like?

00:02:15.040 Well, thanks, Jordan.

00:02:15.820 Great to be with you.

00:02:17.560 You know, I was the fourth.

00:02:19.180 General Flynn was there for a brief period of time, and then General McMaster and John Bolton.

00:02:23.660 It's not a job I expected to receive, but I was serving as the president's hostage envoy at the time,

00:02:28.700 trying to bring Americans home from detention or wrongful detention or being held hostage by terrorist organizations.

00:02:35.800 And I didn't really know the president.

00:02:37.780 I'd been with another candidate in 2016, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin.

00:02:43.020 But I supported the president in the general election, of course, and he asked me to be the hostage envoy,

00:02:49.040 and I got to know him through that job.

00:02:50.600 I think one of the things President Trump appreciated about the work I did is we got a lot of Americans home,

00:02:56.440 and President Trump gets the credit for that.

00:02:58.720 Some people give me credit for it, and it's flattering.

00:03:01.060 But, you know, when things go well for a president, the president should get the credit,

00:03:04.440 and he deserved the credit for bringing these many Americans home.

00:03:07.300 And so we developed a relationship.

00:03:09.740 I was actually in Israel working on a hostage case trying to help some of the Israelis bring the remains of a fallen soldier home,

00:03:18.480 and John Bolton had resigned or was fired, depending on whose story you believe.

00:03:22.720 And I got the call to come in for an interview, and interviewed with the president.

00:03:27.740 It went well, and he asked me to do the job.

00:03:30.480 So I was, you know, humbled and honored to have that position.

00:03:33.920 I didn't know, you know, I was keenly aware that I was a fourth person,

00:03:37.520 but I also felt that I had a good relationship with the president.

00:03:40.760 And I felt my job every day, and the prayer I said as I left my apartment every morning was that we'd keep America safe that day.

00:03:47.340 And I think the president appreciated my commitment to keeping the country safe,

00:03:51.020 and I appreciated his commitment to doing the same, and we had a good relationship, and it worked out well.

00:03:58.080 We had a lot of accomplishments that took place that last year and a half in office.

00:04:02.100 So let's talk about the hostage cases to begin with.

00:04:05.900 So how did you get involved in doing that?

00:04:09.040 And then do you want to walk us through some of the stories and what it is exactly that you were doing

00:04:15.520 before you became U.S. Security Advisor and how that set you up for the job?

00:04:19.720 Sure.

00:04:20.160 So I received a call in late 2017 from the White House asking if I'd be willing to fill this role

00:04:28.280 of being the U.S. hostage envoy.

00:04:30.240 The title is SPIHA, which sounds like a Dr. Seuss character,

00:04:34.100 but it's an acronym for Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs.

00:04:37.540 And I had just started a law firm with a partner, Stephen Larson, a former federal judge in Los Angeles.

00:04:44.520 We'd left a big national firm, and so I wasn't planning on going into government.

00:04:49.060 But I always wondered, over my career, I've spent time traveling abroad all over the world

00:04:55.780 in international arbitration cases and law cases.

00:04:59.760 I always kind of wondered if our plane was hijacked, if we got taken hostage,

00:05:04.260 would someone come look for us?

00:05:05.400 And when the job was offered, I went and talked to my wife, and we prayed about it.

00:05:11.900 We looked at some of the cases of people who were held abroad, and I thought,

00:05:15.220 you know, I'm going to give this a shot.

00:05:16.800 And it's a sacrifice for the family and a sacrifice for my law partners,

00:05:20.260 but I'm going to go see if I can get some people home.

00:05:23.060 And we did the job, and we got a lot of people home.

00:05:26.120 We were very successful at it.

00:05:27.640 Again, credit for that goes to the president for his tough stand on bringing Americans home. 0.98

00:05:33.420 I think he felt that Americans being held abroad just because they were Americans,

00:05:38.020 just because they held a blue passport, was kind of the essence of poking your finger in the eye of the United States.

00:05:43.960 And his America first view of the world was, if you do that, I don't care who the person is,

00:05:49.860 why they were taken, if they were a missionary, if they were a tourist,

00:05:52.740 if they were a business person, a diplomat, a soldier, if you've taken somebody to leverage their life

00:05:59.940 to try and get the U.S. to change our policy or try and get a concession from us or money from us,

00:06:04.320 we're not going to stand for it, and we're going to get that person home.

00:06:08.660 And so that was the job I undertook, and I didn't expect it to lead to becoming the National Security Advisor,

00:06:15.420 but again, we had some success, and I can talk to you about some of the cases.

00:06:18.340 And again, I think at the end of the day, the president gets the credit for making it a high priority.

00:06:25.500 And, you know, you're up against a bureaucracy, other people in government have different priorities,

00:06:31.360 and getting a single American home.

00:06:34.340 But for me, my job was solely focused on, in that position, was solely focused on bringing these Americans home. 0.97

00:06:40.260 So what had set you up in your previous career to be able to conduct those negotiations?

00:06:46.960 And why do you think that you were, apart from Trump's support, which we can go into,

00:06:52.820 what do you think it was that made you successful at doing this?

00:06:57.420 And what was it like to actually negotiate?

00:07:00.160 Who are you negotiating with, and what was that like?

00:07:02.800 How did you do it?

00:07:03.660 Yeah, so great questions.

00:07:07.020 The, you know, I think my past experience as a diplomat, I'd been a diplomat in the Bush administration,

00:07:12.760 and had even carried over and been working on an Afghanistan program for the Condi Rice setup,

00:07:20.180 but went into the Obama-Clinton years when Secretary Clinton was Secretary of State.

00:07:26.820 That certainly helped.

00:07:28.160 I'd been an Army officer earlier in my career, and had worked at the UN.

00:07:32.260 And so I had kind of a diplomatic experience.

00:07:34.740 But I think the day-to-day experience of being a lawyer in Los Angeles, I mean, I was a litigator,

00:07:38.360 and, you know, we've got the toughest lawyers in the country, I think, in L.A.

00:07:44.160 And spent a lot of time in mediations, hundreds of mediations over my career,

00:07:48.820 both serving as a counsel for parties, but also then later serving as an arbitrator, a mediator, and a neutral.

00:07:54.740 I think that was the experience that gave me the best background for the job as hostage envoy.

00:08:00.820 And then to your question about who did we negotiate with, it was, you know, it's tough,

00:08:05.140 because, you know, we couldn't negotiate directly with some of these countries.

00:08:07.960 For example, the Iranians, you know, I had to work through the Swiss. 1.00

00:08:11.700 So we, our international officers were the Swiss diplomats, who are great diplomats.

00:08:17.080 And we worked with them.

00:08:18.760 We worked with other third-party governments to get to governments that we couldn't negotiate with.

00:08:23.800 Negotiated with the Russians directly.

00:08:25.300 We negotiated with the Taliban directly. 0.93

00:08:27.820 And you've got to, you know, you've got bad guys on the other side.

00:08:30.160 You've got thugs on the other side, you know, to some extent.

00:08:32.660 And you've got to be tough.

00:08:34.500 And that has to be backed up by American hard power.

00:08:38.080 The diplomacy is important.

00:08:39.100 The negotiating skills are important.

00:08:40.720 But at the end of the day, they're looking at you to see, you know,

00:08:43.360 what's America going to do if we don't comply?

00:08:45.880 What tools does this guy have in his toolkit?

00:08:49.200 What kind of support is he going to get from the bureaucracy?

00:08:51.220 And that goes back to the classic Ronald Reagan formulation of peace or strength.

00:08:57.140 So working for a president who believed in peace or strength, who didn't, you know,

00:09:01.180 wasn't trying to appease or not provoke our adversaries, but who believed in a strong America

00:09:09.160 and that a strong America was good for peace in the world.

00:09:12.780 That helped me in my negotiations.

00:09:14.340 So, you know, that was the thumbnail.

00:09:18.800 The other thing I did, Jordan, which I think was created a stir at the time.

00:09:23.780 When I became the hostage envoy, there was a memo about the office that had been prepared

00:09:27.480 in the prior administration, the Obama administration, that described what we did

00:09:31.340 in the office of the SPIHA.

00:09:33.980 And it said, our first resort is diplomacy.

00:09:37.120 And the very last resort we'll take to rescue Americans is military force.

00:09:41.960 And I looked at that and I said, this is exactly wrong.

00:09:44.620 And I changed the memo.

00:09:45.520 I said, our first resort will be to use our military, our special operators.

00:09:49.940 And our special operations community was really, the modern special operations community was

00:09:54.020 formed after the failed attempt to rescue American diplomats held in Iran in 1980.

00:09:58.780 And that's how we ended up with Delta Force and SEAL Team 6.

00:10:01.840 And it's this very top tier group of operators.

00:10:05.560 They were originally set up to be hostage rescue guys, based in a large part on the SAS in the

00:10:10.080 UK, the SAS Regiment.

00:10:11.220 And so I said, look, our first resort, if we can affect rescue, is we're going to use

00:10:17.340 these highly trained national assets, these great men and women, U.S. special forces,

00:10:23.280 to go get our hostages back or our wrongful detainees back.

00:10:26.640 And then we'll look at diplomatic options.

00:10:28.740 And I wanted to send a message to our adversaries that, you know, we're going to, this is a

00:10:33.500 different approach and we're going to use American hard power.

00:10:36.940 And so, you know, if you've got a chance to negotiate with us or negotiate with a third

00:10:40.060 party country that's coming to you on our behalf, take it.

00:10:43.080 Because, you know, the other option we've got and our primary option is to go rescue our

00:10:47.460 people.

00:10:48.320 And we had a number of rescues that either using foreign partner forces that engaged special

00:10:55.860 operators of foreign governments or our own special operators that were really exquisite

00:11:00.720 where we brought Americans home. 0.95

00:11:01.820 And I think that sent a message to folks and backed up our diplomacy.

00:11:04.960 So that was one thing that we did to kind of change the policy and at least send a message

00:11:10.000 to our foreign adversaries, either terrorist organizations or rogue governments, that if

00:11:15.620 you take an American, there's a penalty to pay and we're going to get them back. 1.00

00:11:19.900 Okay.

00:11:20.480 So to get, so if I get this straight, so the people that were taking hostages came to know

00:11:25.960 that they might have an opportunity to negotiate through the intermediation of third parties,

00:11:34.700 but that the military option was likely to be brought forward very rapidly.

00:11:40.020 Is that the right sequence of events?

00:11:42.620 Correct.

00:11:44.320 And look, if we had a military operation that could be launched immediately, it becomes more

00:11:51.500 difficult to launch these operations if a hostage is aged, if they've been taken and

00:11:55.380 been held for a while because they're moved and some of the terrorist organizations have pretty

00:11:59.440 good operational security.

00:12:00.700 It's always tougher when a government is holding your hostage because they're held in a downtown

00:12:05.600 jail and somewhere in Caracas or Tehran or Moscow.

00:12:09.380 So those circumstances make the military option more difficult.

00:12:15.000 But if we could find a hostage organization, we did this at the end of the administration in

00:12:20.360 late October in 2020.

00:12:22.780 A group had kidnapped an American named Walton in Niger.

00:12:26.920 We launched an operation within 48 hours, rescued him, dealt with the terrorists, rescued him,

00:12:33.960 brought him home safely.

00:12:35.020 And the whole thing happened in a very short period of time.

00:12:37.520 I think that from start to finish, it was a 72-hour operation from us finding and fixing

00:12:42.340 where he was, where the terrorists had him, the kidnappers, and bringing him back to Washington,

00:12:47.080 D.C.

00:12:47.380 So sometimes, you know, negotiations weren't always an option, but it was for the bad guys.

00:12:54.020 But if they'd secured the hostage somewhere or a government had him in a jail, that was

00:13:00.360 certainly, you know, that was one course for them to take.

00:13:03.900 Right, right.

00:13:04.620 So were there any downsides to moving the military option up the list of priorities?

00:13:09.260 Did that add risk in any situations?

00:13:11.200 Or do you think overall, and in the specifics, it decreased risk?

00:13:16.020 Well, I think overall it decreased risk, right?

00:13:17.960 Because you let people know that if you've taken American hostage, the U.S. military is

00:13:24.340 coming for you.

00:13:24.820 We've got long reach.

00:13:25.620 We can go from, you know, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to wherever you are in a very short

00:13:32.400 period of time.

00:13:33.240 But, and so we think it was a deterrent and prevented further hostage taking.

00:13:39.600 But any time you put the men and women of our armed forces, you know, into an operation,

00:13:44.220 there's risk to them.

00:13:45.520 There's obviously a risk to the hostage in a rescue situation where, you know, bullets

00:13:50.000 are flying.

00:13:50.820 So, you know, and there's also a risk of an escalation so that a hostage rescue turns

00:13:57.640 into more of a conflict.

00:13:58.560 But our feeling was that the deterrent effect of letting folks know we're going to rescue

00:14:05.480 our people and the high degree of skill and capability our special operators had to rescue

00:14:13.700 a hostage if they were taken outweighed the risk of either escalation or death to one of

00:14:19.480 our service members or the hostage.

00:14:21.680 But it's, you know, those are tough calls to make.

00:14:24.560 Wow, there's going to be risks no matter what approach you take.

00:14:28.940 Has the approach that you put in place stayed intact as a consequence of the transition to

00:14:37.180 the Biden administration?

00:14:38.420 Or what's happened now?

00:14:41.160 Well, we have a really terrific hostage envoy.

00:14:43.520 The guy who took over for me is a guy named Roger Carson, an ambassador.

00:14:47.680 And he's a former military special operations guy.

00:14:50.580 I've got a lot of confidence in him.

00:14:51.920 But again, he's working in an environment that, you know, is more of a, what I'll call it,

00:14:59.200 don't do not provoke, appease mentality of the Obama folks who came in and have now

00:15:05.840 staffed the Biden administration.

00:15:08.140 And I think there's a lot less emphasis on hard power and a lot more emphasis on just

00:15:12.900 pure diplomacy and soft power.

00:15:15.400 And, you know, look, that can work in some cases.

00:15:18.240 You know, you have different tools in your toolkit.

00:15:20.860 But I think there's a perception of American weakness now.

00:15:24.500 And I think that makes the job of the hostage envoy tougher.

00:15:27.380 But I think Roger's done a great job.

00:15:29.040 And to his credit, I think the current national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, who took my

00:15:32.920 position, my final position, has been good on these hostage issues.

00:15:36.580 But again, you're only so good as the environment that's around you.

00:15:40.620 And if your adversaries know that, you know, military force is off the table and the likelihood

00:15:45.540 of appeasement or a ransom or a concession is on the table, they're going to look for

00:15:49.520 those, you know, results instead of just turning over the hostage and hoping that they don't

00:15:54.760 get punished for having engaged in malign activity.

00:15:57.940 And do you think that that's reflected in the broader geopolitical landscape, especially

00:16:05.380 in relationship to, say, what's happened in Ukraine with the Russians?

00:16:11.440 Look, sadly, that's the case, Jordan.

00:16:13.900 I mean, we saw a direct line from this catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the way that 0.94

00:16:18.680 it was handled to Vladimir Putin sensing that America was weak.

00:16:22.820 And American weakness is provocative.

00:16:24.560 You know, American strength keeps peace in the world.

00:16:27.960 But when our adversaries believe us to be weak, they take chances and they look for

00:16:32.840 opportunities to exploit that weakness.

00:16:34.220 And I don't think America is fundamentally weaker than we were four years ago.

00:16:38.060 We're a very strong country.

00:16:39.160 We've got geography on our side.

00:16:40.680 We've got demography on our side.

00:16:41.840 We've got innovation.

00:16:43.260 We've got a tremendous military.

00:16:44.820 But the perception that our adversaries develop over time, watching things like Afghanistan,

00:16:51.540 watching the failure to deter Putin in Ukraine.

00:16:55.960 I mean, you recall, Jordan, all the talk with the pundits and the administration folks before

00:17:01.780 Putin's invasion was, we don't want to provoke them.

00:17:04.220 We don't want to give the Ukrainians extra weapons. 0.98

00:17:06.000 We don't want to, you know, do things that would dissuade the Russians because that could

00:17:09.500 provoke Putin into an invasion.

00:17:12.080 Dictators look at the world very differently than we do.

00:17:13.900 It's not a rational, it's maybe rational from their perspective, but it's not how, what

00:17:17.800 we believe is rational.

00:17:19.180 I mean, I remember commentators saying it would be crazy for Putin to invade Ukraine.

00:17:23.360 Well, Putin didn't do it that way.

00:17:24.780 Putin saw us withdraw from Afghanistan.

00:17:26.740 He sensed weakness.

00:17:28.220 He thought he had an opportunity to gain geography, to gain territory.

00:17:32.220 He's got a demographic problem in Russia.

00:17:33.760 He could gain 40 million more Russians.

00:17:36.100 He could get access to agricultural land and increase Russia's ability to trade.

00:17:42.280 Ukraine has some natural resources, some oil and gas.

00:17:46.200 So he looked at that as an opportunity to take the whole thing, whereas we would think

00:17:49.780 that's irrational for a big country just to invade its neighbor because it could, because

00:17:53.960 might makes right.

00:17:55.260 But for Putin, it was perfectly irrational.

00:17:58.040 And so when he sensed our weakness, he moved.

00:18:01.140 And we didn't do a good job to turn him.

00:18:03.220 And that was a failure of policy.

00:18:05.580 Now, we've done a pretty good job supplying the Ukrainians since then, since the invasion.

00:18:10.080 But we lost a real opportunity to prevent the whole war from happening. 0.80

00:18:14.160 And that was a shame for the Ukrainian people and, frankly, for the Russian people.

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00:19:54.360 Well, it was very interesting to me.

00:20:00.000 I mean, Trump's a very complicated character, and the U.S. is a very complicated country in

00:20:05.740 a complicated world.

00:20:07.200 It was very interesting to me, though, especially having contemplated Trump's legacy in the intervening

00:20:13.960 years, that when he first emerged on the scene, some of the fears associated with him were

00:20:22.660 that in his sort of bullying and provocative manner, that he'd be a real bull in the China 0.81

00:20:28.740 shop on the foreign policy side of things.

00:20:31.780 But he seemed capable of simultaneously charming people like Putin and the leader of North Korea

00:20:43.700 while simultaneously keeping them on their heels, I would say, maybe as a consequence of

00:20:52.660 his perceived unpredictability, but also his clear willingness, perhaps, to use force.

00:20:59.360 And the consequence of that, I mean, there's two consequences of that that I find quite

00:21:03.840 fascinating.

00:21:05.460 It's sort of reminiscent to me of what happened with Reagan when he bombed Gaddafi.

00:21:11.280 You know, I was pretty young when that occurred, and when Reagan bombed Gaddafi, I thought,

00:21:15.720 oh my God, all hell's going to break loose.

00:21:17.580 There's going to be terrorism everywhere.

00:21:19.380 Because, I mean, I think Reagan, if I remember correctly, killed a couple of members of Gaddafi's 0.71

00:21:24.420 immediate family in that bombing raid.

00:21:26.680 And I thought all hell was going to break loose, but what happened instead was that Gaddafi was 0.63

00:21:32.940 actually chastened, and the degree of terrorist activity emanating from Libya declined to pretty

00:21:39.360 much zero.

00:21:40.540 And then when Trump took power, I think one of his remarkable achievements, and I really

00:21:45.540 think that he has got far less credit for this than he deserved, was that there was a

00:21:50.720 period of four years without, with no wars.

00:21:53.880 Like, no wars.

00:21:55.240 And that's pretty damn rare.

00:21:57.480 And there's always some chronic, irritating conflict going on.

00:22:02.360 I mean, Afghanistan was continuing, but Trump didn't start that.

00:22:06.180 And also, he initiated the Abraham Accords, even though the Obama administration had had

00:22:12.840 an opportunity to do so.

00:22:14.260 It was Trump who moved on it.

00:22:16.080 It took a while, but he did it successfully.

00:22:19.160 And that could have obviously been expanded, the Abraham Accords.

00:22:22.260 They could have been expanded under Biden.

00:22:24.560 The Saudis, as far as I can tell, would have signed those accords if Biden would have taken

00:22:29.360 the opportunity that was right bloody well in front of him to take.

00:22:33.360 And so, we have this strange spectacle of someone who's pretty blustery and noisy,

00:22:38.520 and who might easily be regarded as provocative, actually setting up a circumstance where,

00:22:45.680 by your testimony, the negotiation for hostages was much more likely to be successful, but also

00:22:51.560 where there were no incursions of the sort, say, that Russia undertook in Ukraine during

00:22:57.420 that four-year period that would precipitate a war.

00:23:00.120 And we also saw the initiation of a really large-scale and major peace process, because that's

00:23:06.160 certainly what the Abraham Accords represent.

00:23:08.660 So, what do you make of all that?

00:23:11.340 Well, so, Jordan, you had a very perceptive comment at the outset of that question, and

00:23:18.820 that was, how could President Trump be cordial with some of these bad guys, and yet still

00:23:24.320 obtain the results that we wanted as America, that we're under a national interest, and to

00:23:30.300 deter these thugs and dictators and tyrants from engaging in malign activity?

00:23:36.700 And, you know, there's an old saying that diplomacy is saying the nastiest possible things in

00:23:41.140 the nicest possible way.

00:23:43.000 And President Trump was really a genius at that.

00:23:45.280 He was always very cordial in his conversations with allies, but also with Putin or Kim Jong-un

00:23:51.720 or Xi Jinping.

00:23:54.780 I was on many of those phone calls.

00:23:56.160 He was very cordial, got along well with them.

00:23:58.840 But at the same time, we put more sanctions on the Russians than anybody since Ronald Reagan.

00:24:04.420 And we put the Russians in a box. 1.00

00:24:06.520 And yet, the President was very cordial with them.

00:24:09.060 And so, they understood, here's a guy who's being cordial, wanting to reduce the risk of

00:24:14.020 a nuclear war, in the case with Russia, wanting to make sure that we got our message across.

00:24:18.180 But at the same time, this is a tough guy who's not going to take any nonsense from us.

00:24:23.500 And there was a level of unpredictability.

00:24:25.480 And the President talked about this, that, you know, the odds of us sending troops to

00:24:30.140 Ukraine were small if Russia invaded.

00:24:32.160 But there was a risk there.

00:24:34.480 And Putin had to take that risk into account.

00:24:36.360 It complicated the lives of his planners.

00:24:38.120 His military planners had to say, what if Trump does engage?

00:24:42.080 Then we lose.

00:24:43.140 And that could be a disaster.

00:24:44.340 So, we better, you know, factor that into the risk and not invade Ukraine.

00:24:49.540 So, the same thing happened with North Korea.

00:24:52.180 And the President had very cordial relations with Kim Jong-un.

00:24:55.800 But it didn't start out that way.

00:24:57.360 And I was a hostage envoy at the time.

00:25:00.160 And when we were talking about Little Rocket Man and Fire and Fury and my button's bigger

00:25:04.660 than your button.

00:25:06.100 But it wasn't just the rhetoric.

00:25:07.400 And this is what American politicians oftentimes miss.

00:25:11.300 It's backing up the rhetoric with hard power.

00:25:13.620 So, the President moved two aircraft carriers into the Yellow Sea, near North Korea, and said,

00:25:19.960 look, you want to keep playing this game?

00:25:21.520 I've got, you know, 80 aircraft per carrier and a good chunk of the U.S. Navy sitting

00:25:27.140 off your coast.

00:25:28.560 How do you want to do this?

00:25:30.180 Would you rather have a summit and try and work things out and denuclearize?

00:25:33.660 And we obviously didn't get there, but we went down that path.

00:25:37.120 And Kim Jong-un committed to denuclearization.

00:25:39.580 We didn't get there, but at least he committed to it.

00:25:42.460 Or do you want to keep testing your nuclear weapons and see how it works out for you?

00:25:46.880 And so, it was that combination of cordiality and frankness and, you know, good cheer with

00:25:54.180 our adversaries and with our partners as well, but backing it up with American hard

00:25:59.020 power and letting them know that, you know, if you cross a line, and we're not going to

00:26:03.540 be like Obama.

00:26:04.220 We're not going to set red lines that we don't intend to enforce.

00:26:06.200 But if we set a red line, know it's going to be enforced.

00:26:08.920 So, you understand what you're getting into.

00:26:11.660 That's your call.

00:26:12.400 That's not on us.

00:26:13.100 And that raises a very important point that you made.

00:26:17.320 President Trump was the first president since Jimmy Carter.

00:26:20.760 Technically, you could probably argue Reagan as well, that didn't start a new war.

00:26:24.480 We didn't send, you know, we eliminated some of the great terrorist threats to the country.

00:26:28.360 We got Baghdadi. 0.75

00:26:29.620 We took other measures to protect the country.

00:26:31.860 But we didn't start a new war.

00:26:33.860 And the reason we didn't start a new war is the same reason Ronald Reagan didn't start

00:26:37.180 a new war.

00:26:37.620 It's because our adversaries understood if we cross American red lines, if we damage

00:26:42.640 American national interests, there's going to be a heavy price to pay.

00:26:46.040 And we better factor that into our planning, our consideration.

00:26:50.100 And so, they didn't engage in the activity that would have led to us having to engage

00:26:53.920 militarily.

00:26:55.480 And so, the last president that really, truly did that was Ronald Reagan.

00:26:59.120 Now, he had the invasion of Grenada.

00:27:00.400 But I'd argue that was more of a big hostage rescue of the medical students in Grenada that

00:27:07.000 turned into a, you know, taking over the country.

00:27:09.720 But other than Reagan, in recent presidencies, Republican and Democrat, no one has been able

00:27:15.760 to stop our adversaries without engaging in military action on a large scale until President

00:27:22.460 Trump.

00:27:23.300 And I think that's one of the great accomplishments of his administration.

00:27:26.980 I wonder if that proclivity that Trump has to strike terror and disarray into the hearts

00:27:34.300 of his political opponents within the U.S. who seem to regard him as, you know, the next

00:27:41.460 best thing to Satan himself in terms of the danger he presents to the integrity of the state.

00:27:46.900 I wonder if that is the same unpredictability and menace, cordial menace that inhibits, that

00:27:59.580 intimidates his potential opponents or the potential opponents of the U.S. on the foreign policy

00:28:05.540 side.

00:28:06.280 You think that's the same manifestation?

00:28:08.280 You know, I'm not sure if it's intimidation.

00:28:11.740 I mean, whether it was our allies, we had, you know, pretty competent and confident leaders

00:28:19.480 like Macron in France or Boris Johnson in the U.K.

00:28:22.800 Angela Merkel had a very different personality, but was a very strong character. 0.85

00:28:28.220 And then our adversaries, you know, Putin's a tough guy and Xi Jinping is a tough guy and

00:28:32.960 Kim Jong-un is, you know, unpredictable himself.

00:28:35.960 So I'm not sure if it was an intimidation of the leaders, but I think what it was, it 0.87

00:28:40.460 was the resolve that he showed.

00:28:42.320 And they understood that this guy represents America.

00:28:45.760 And sometimes we look at our adversaries and think they're 10 feet tall.

00:28:48.480 And sometimes our adversaries get ahead of us and we've got to catch up with them.

00:28:51.780 China's gotten ahead of us on a couple of things where we've got to catch up with them.

00:28:54.820 But the reality is America is a fundamentally very strong country.

00:28:58.060 And if you've got a president that's willing to use all the tools of American national power,

00:29:01.640 economic, diplomatic, military, and is resolved to protect our national interests, and the

00:29:08.160 other guys know that, they can do an assessment of the balance of forces and decide, are they

00:29:16.120 going to win or lose if they press the issue?

00:29:18.440 And I think with President Trump, they understood at the end of the day, this guy had a lot of

00:29:21.860 backbone and wasn't going to fold.

00:29:25.320 And so they better not cross the red line.

00:29:27.020 So I'm not sure if it's intimidation or, you know, more confidence that the president

00:29:32.280 shows when he enters into a room.

00:29:34.260 And look, that works with adversaries, but it also works with our partners.

00:29:37.700 So one of the great accomplishments of the Trump administration that's inured to the benefit

00:29:42.060 of Ukraine today and Europe today is back in 2019.

00:29:46.220 I hadn't been national security advisor very long, maybe a couple of months.

00:29:49.680 And we had a real problem with NATO.

00:29:51.220 The president was very unhappy that our NATO partners weren't paying 2% of their GDP,

00:29:56.560 with the exception of, I think at the time it was four or five countries.

00:29:59.780 The UK was one of them, Greece, the Baltics, Turkey. 0.78

00:30:03.660 But the rest of the countries were getting a free ride on American defense.

00:30:06.620 And we're spending 3.5% to 4% of our economy, of our GDP, to defend not only America, but

00:30:12.660 the free world.

00:30:13.640 And the president said, hey, that's not right.

00:30:15.100 Everyone committed to at least 2%.

00:30:16.520 That's still half of what we're paying.

00:30:18.120 But you got to pay the 2%.

00:30:19.480 And the Europeans kind of chuckled and said, well, every president, I went back and looked

00:30:24.120 at this.

00:30:24.500 I actually wrote an article about it.

00:30:26.280 Every president running for president since 1972, the theme has been, one of the campaign

00:30:31.440 planks has been on both the Republican and the Democrat side is, Europe will pay its fair

00:30:36.060 share.

00:30:37.000 You know, Europe will step up for its own defense.

00:30:39.160 And no one got it.

00:30:40.400 Even my hero, Ronald Reagan, couldn't get the Europeans to pay their fair share, bear their 1.00

00:30:45.620 fair portion of the burden.

00:30:47.280 And President Trump made some pretty tough comments about NATO.

00:30:50.920 And I thought, wow, you know, I'm a big NATO supporter and it's a great alliance.

00:30:54.540 It's kept the peace in Europe for many years, 75 years.

00:30:59.140 And so I thought, how is this going to play out?

00:31:01.460 But it gave me the opportunity to go as the negotiator with Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary

00:31:06.920 General of NATO, who's a terrific statesman.

00:31:09.440 And Jens and I were able to go to our allied partners and say, look, the days of Germany,

00:31:15.700 you know, getting cheap minerals from Russia, selling expensive finished goods to China and

00:31:21.060 letting America pay for its defense while it runs up a budget surplus.

00:31:25.280 That's just not fair.

00:31:26.100 That's got to end.

00:31:27.080 It's not fair to the American taxpayer.

00:31:28.600 It's not fair to your other partner nations.

00:31:30.760 And it wasn't just Germany.

00:31:31.840 It was, you know, Canada.

00:31:32.780 It was all the countries.

00:31:33.500 And so the fact that President Trump was being tough and talking about, you know, does Article

00:31:38.600 5 apply, you know, if you're not paying your dues, so to speak.

00:31:42.880 I mean, they weren't dues, but, you know, that's the way the president phrased it.

00:31:46.980 That kind of struck some fear into the hearts of our allies.

00:31:51.080 So we walked away from that summit with going from four or five countries paying 2% to 11

00:31:56.600 countries paying 2% of their GDP committing to it.

00:31:59.480 But we also had an overall increase.

00:32:01.320 And, you know, we didn't get Germany as high as we wanted, but we got a small increase

00:32:04.780 from Germany.

00:32:05.800 But because the German economy was so big, it was a lot of money.

00:32:08.940 We got $400 billion in commitments for new NATO spending outside of the U.S. over the

00:32:13.780 course of 10 years, that December summit.

00:32:17.000 And of course, the hand wringers, the diplomatic correspondents and, you know, the folks that

00:32:22.840 cover the State Department and cover NATO, they rang their hands and said, this is terrible.

00:32:26.980 And it's awful diplomacy and the standing of America has gone down in the world.

00:32:31.720 Well, yeah, I'm sure our European allies weren't happy in some cases that they had to spend the

00:32:35.560 money.

00:32:36.300 But guess what?

00:32:37.100 They're happy now.

00:32:38.280 I was at a conference in Prague recently, a defense conference, and I had Germans coming

00:32:43.400 up to me saying, you guys were right.

00:32:45.040 Thank you for making us spend more money.

00:32:46.480 And that additional spending, even in the initial three years from 19 to 2022, allowed

00:32:53.280 some of those European countries to get new platforms and new weapon systems so that when

00:32:57.000 Russia invaded Ukraine, a lot of those countries were able to send their old Soviet equipment,

00:33:00.980 especially in Eastern Europe, their old equipment that was no longer, they'd modernized and they

00:33:06.260 went to stockpiles and they sent that equipment to Ukraine.

00:33:09.140 And so a lot of the initial equipment that Ukraine got was a direct result of the additional

00:33:13.960 increase in defense spending that came out of that 2019 summit that President Trump was

00:33:19.240 pilloried for, for being, you know, arrogant and rude and, you know, putting America first

00:33:24.020 and that sort of thing.

00:33:25.060 And in fact, what we did is we put our allies in a position where they could defend themselves

00:33:28.280 and help Ukraine.

00:33:30.060 And so again, it's counterintuitive, you know, someone taking that sort of an approach and

00:33:35.700 it's not something that it may be grating to people and diplomats might not like it,

00:33:40.600 but when you look at the results, they were incredibly successful.

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00:34:50.140 What do you think it is in Trump's character that makes it possible for him to do those

00:34:57.780 things?

00:34:58.080 Because that is, it's quite a track record really of success, right?

00:35:03.260 Because you've laid out four different instances.

00:35:05.400 You said he was very effective in relationship to hostage negotiation.

00:35:10.180 He was good at keeping potential enemies at bay and established peace for four years.

00:35:16.240 But he also, he successfully negotiated the Abraham Accords, which we'll turn to.

00:35:23.760 But as you pointed out, and this is quite orthogonal to those other enterprises, he was

00:35:30.100 instrumental and successful in getting the NATO allies to pay their fair share, which

00:35:36.160 was something I was watching that from the outside, from the Canadian perspective.

00:35:39.580 And I know certainly full well that we haven't pulled our weight at all and continue to not

00:35:44.560 do so.

00:35:45.540 But it was quite striking to me that he was able to manage that.

00:35:49.920 The justice of the cause seemed self-evident.

00:35:52.460 I mean, it's completely absurd that America has to shoulder this burden by itself and also

00:35:57.380 take all the moral slings and arrows that go along with being the prime defender of the

00:36:02.100 West, right?

00:36:02.740 It's just too much to be asked to pay the financial price and then to bear the moral,

00:36:09.880 you know, opprobrium at the same time.

00:36:12.480 There's no excuse for that.

00:36:13.620 But Trump was very effective at negotiating for that to be rectified.

00:36:17.980 And so what do you think it is about his character, the way he conducts himself, that makes him

00:36:22.460 capable of doing those things?

00:36:23.640 You talked about, you know, his willingness to rely on military force, say, in relationship

00:36:28.900 to potential foreign enemies.

00:36:30.680 But of course, that's not going to be an issue when he's talking to NATO allies.

00:36:35.860 So what's he doing right?

00:36:38.120 Well, look, I think I didn't know President Trump before becoming his hostage envoy.

00:36:41.400 And I got to know him a little bit during that period of time and then, you know, came

00:36:44.820 to know him fairly well as his national security advisor.

00:36:47.760 But I think it's your background.

00:36:49.240 You know, we all bring whatever our background is to the new job, right?

00:36:52.780 You know, you've got a background as a clinical psychologist.

00:36:55.680 Now you're doing, you know, political analysis, which is, you know, par excellence.

00:37:00.460 And I think what Trump did is he brought his background as a real estate developer, where

00:37:05.400 you're in New York, you know, in the thick of it, whether, you know, he had a track record.

00:37:10.980 Some people liked his track record.

00:37:12.180 Some people didn't like his track record.

00:37:14.020 But he built big things.

00:37:15.100 He built big buildings.

00:37:16.200 You know, he built a hotel empire.

00:37:19.180 And in those real estate negotiations, I used to see this as a lawyer with clients.

00:37:24.140 You've got to keep two things in mind at the same time.

00:37:26.280 And it's hard for a lot of people to understand that.

00:37:27.860 That you're trying to do a deal with someone, and you're trying to beat the heck out of

00:37:31.060 them and get the best price you can.

00:37:33.340 And at the same time, they're a partner, because you want them to consummate the deal, right?

00:37:37.760 So you want to get, if you're buying land from somebody or buying a building, you want to

00:37:42.200 get the very best price.

00:37:43.740 But at the same time, you want to keep them at the table and have them not go to the other

00:37:46.960 guy and sell the building to someone else, because you want that asset.

00:37:50.480 Or if you're selling the same thing, just on the other side of the table.

00:37:53.540 I think President Trump learned that, you know, through years of negotiations in real

00:37:57.540 estate, a 50-year career.

00:37:59.840 And even younger than that, watching his dad, Fred Trump, you know, do deals.

00:38:04.260 That, you know, you've got to be tough, and you've got to get the best deal you can.

00:38:09.500 But at the same time, you've got to prevent your partner from walking away from the deal

00:38:12.380 and walking away from the table.

00:38:14.020 And striking that balance, I think, is pretty tough.

00:38:16.840 And look, a lot of people don't have experience with it.

00:38:18.680 A lot of people come into government from think tanks or from academia or from the military

00:38:23.460 where folks are used to following orders or even as lawyers, but, you know, maybe without

00:38:28.620 the litigation or the deal experience.

00:38:32.480 So they come to government and people expect them to be great negotiators, but they've never

00:38:36.420 really had that experience.

00:38:38.280 Whereas President Trump came to office probably with more experience negotiating, you know,

00:38:42.180 than certainly anyone in his cabinet, anyone in his immediate circle, but also any other

00:38:47.900 politician in the world that he was dealing with.

00:38:49.720 So for better or for worse, I mean, you know, there are all kinds of different ways to prepare

00:38:54.120 to be president.

00:38:54.760 I'm not saying being a real estate developer is the best way to prepare to be president.

00:38:57.900 But for President Trump, it worked when it came to these negotiations that we've been

00:39:01.960 talking about and trying to come to a deal where you get both parties to say yes, but

00:39:06.580 you get a good deal for America.

00:39:07.720 And so I think that's probably the best preparation he had for some of the things we've been talking

00:39:13.340 about, Jordan.

00:39:14.420 Well, you've worked as a diplomat and a litigator and national security advisor and all of that

00:39:20.780 involved negotiation.

00:39:22.420 And, you know, one of the things I've noted in my private life, watching people and in my

00:39:27.840 clinical practice and I suppose in my role as a professor as well, is that generally speaking,

00:39:36.280 people are very bad at negotiating.

00:39:38.720 They don't say what they want.

00:39:41.100 They don't admit what they want.

00:39:43.460 They don't listen to the other side.

00:39:46.320 They don't understand how to strike that playful balance between competition and keeping their

00:39:52.440 partner in the game.

00:39:55.100 They're not trained to negotiate.

00:39:57.020 We do a very bad job of that in our society.

00:39:59.900 People can't negotiate with themselves.

00:40:01.920 They can't negotiate with their spouses. 1.00

00:40:03.940 They're not good at negotiating with their kids.

00:40:05.900 They can't strike a deal with their business partners.

00:40:08.140 Like, it's a big problem, right?

00:40:09.720 Because negotiation, there's no difference between bringing a successful negotiation to

00:40:16.420 a conclusion and establishing peace.

00:40:18.580 Those are the same things.

00:40:20.100 Now, you've done a lot of negotiating.

00:40:22.040 And as a diplomat, which is more diplomatic, obviously, as a litigator, which is more on the

00:40:27.300 offense side, let's say, and then under stressful conditions when you're negotiating for hostage

00:40:32.400 release, what is it that you've seen that makes a successful negotiator?

00:40:39.500 What skills do you have to master?

00:40:41.200 And what pitfalls do you have to avoid?

00:40:43.380 And how have you mastered that?

00:40:45.200 Or have you?

00:40:46.180 You know, do you feel that you've mastered it?

00:40:47.760 Well, I certainly haven't mastered it.

00:40:50.220 But I have had a fair amount of experience and sometimes successfully negotiated deals or

00:40:56.440 releases or diplomatic accords and sometimes unsuccessfully.

00:41:01.540 So it's certainly not 100% track record.

00:41:04.520 It's a big question.

00:41:06.860 And there's a lot that goes into that mix.

00:41:08.260 And you talk about all the different scenarios in which we're involved in negotiation, whether

00:41:11.540 it's in our home life or our business life or professional life, putting totally aside

00:41:16.500 politics and international affairs, we're all negotiating all the time.

00:41:21.300 I think there are a couple of things that have been lodestars for me in negotiating.

00:41:25.700 One is understanding that the other party has to get something out of the negotiation.

00:41:30.900 That doesn't mean money, necessarily.

00:41:32.620 It doesn't mean, you know, but it usually means respect.

00:41:37.500 So I think being respectful and being cordial with your adversary, even if they're a, you 1.00

00:41:42.320 know, I've sat across the table from some pretty unsavory characters.

00:41:47.280 But if you're respectful and you're cordial, that's one thing that you can give that costs

00:41:52.200 you nothing other than, you know, some goodwill and some humility.

00:41:59.460 So that's number one.

00:42:00.340 Number two, you have to listen to the other side and try and figure out what is it they

00:42:02.840 really want?

00:42:03.820 Because they may be saying they want one thing, but they really want something else.

00:42:07.200 And figuring out what their, you know, bottom line is, what's the least amount they'd take

00:42:12.700 to give you what you want requires you to listen to them.

00:42:17.140 Number three, I think you have to be honest.

00:42:18.660 I mean, I've never done a negotiation in my private life or as a lawyer, as a litigator,

00:42:25.440 as a diplomat, where I've lied to people.

00:42:28.660 I just don't think, I may not disclose everything, all the information I've got or that I know,

00:42:32.740 but I don't lie to people.

00:42:34.300 Because once you get caught out in a negotiation, telling something that's false or lying, you've

00:42:40.280 lost your credibility and your ability to get a deal done goes away.

00:42:44.120 And I think the last point I'd make in response to that question, and again, probably 100

00:42:49.260 if we sat and thought about it and talked longer, you've got to be willing to say no.

00:42:53.680 There has to be a point at which you'll walk away from the table.

00:42:56.760 Because if there's not some level that you'll say no and walk away, your opponent will understand

00:43:03.160 that.

00:43:03.580 And they'll push and push and push until they've taken everything from you.

00:43:06.620 You've got to have a red line.

00:43:07.840 And sometimes it's hard because saying no is going to mean somebody staying in prison

00:43:12.540 longer or somebody being in a dungeon longer or not getting the deal you really wanted

00:43:17.680 for your client if you're a litigator or not getting the peace deal that would make the

00:43:23.440 headlines and help solve a war.

00:43:26.740 But if you're not willing to say no and your adversary understands you're not willing to

00:43:31.400 say no, there's no limit to what they'll take from you.

00:43:33.760 And so you have to have your own, and that doesn't mean you have to disclose those red

00:43:37.800 lines and tell them what you're going to say no.

00:43:40.540 And that's kind of the interplay with the honesty issue.

00:43:43.520 But you've got to be able to say, you know, oftentimes you're ambiguous about it, where

00:43:47.820 you tell the other side, there's a point that I'm not going to go beyond, and you're

00:43:51.080 getting close to it.

00:43:52.320 And if you get to that point, I'm going to get up from the table, I'm going to walk

00:43:54.580 away, and then you're going to lose the negotiation as well.

00:43:57.420 Because the point that, look, they're there because they want something from you as well.

00:44:00.860 Well, it's not you coming as a supplicant usually, you know, they're not supplicating

00:44:05.180 to you, you're not supplicating to them, but there's a deal to be had.

00:44:08.240 You know, how that deal works out, you know, you have to see.

00:44:10.720 But if they know that you're not willing to get up and leave, you're never going to get

00:44:14.300 a negotiation done.

00:44:16.260 I had this happen, and I'm not going to mention the country, but we were involved in pretty

00:44:20.200 high-stakes negotiations when I was national security advisor.

00:44:22.700 And we thought we had a deal with the leader of the country, and we came back to finalize

00:44:28.140 it, and the foreign minister and some of the other leaders kind of tried to put new conditions

00:44:33.880 on, tried to renegotiate the deal.

00:44:36.180 And I did something at the time, I was a little tired, it had been long nights and a couple

00:44:41.620 days straight.

00:44:42.480 I just packed my briefcase, and I had a whole team of State Department folks with me, and

00:44:46.900 I don't think they'd ever seen that before.

00:44:48.260 And I packed up my briefcase and said, okay, thank you, we tried, we gave it our best shot,

00:44:52.260 but we're done, and got up and started to walk away.

00:44:54.580 And I think the other side was shocked by it.

00:44:56.960 Certainly the guys from the career officials at the State Department were looking at me

00:45:00.260 like I was a nut.

00:45:02.380 And I said, come on, guys, let's go, we're out of here.

00:45:05.260 And the other side said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you know, and then we got back to

00:45:09.300 the deal we had the night before with the leader.

00:45:12.500 But our State Department guys had never seen someone pack up a briefcase and leave.

00:45:16.960 Well, I'd seen people pack up their briefcases and leave 100 times as a lawyer in Los Angeles.

00:45:21.720 You know, and usually if a good plaintiff's lawyer didn't pack up his bags and leave three

00:45:26.960 or four times during the day during a negotiation, then you weren't doing a good job.

00:45:31.040 So you got to be willing to walk away from the table if the other side's not serious.

00:45:39.360 And that doesn't mean you don't come back.

00:45:40.920 You laid out three principles there that I think are worth delving into because this is

00:45:46.300 very important, I think, for people's proactive lives as well.

00:45:49.860 So I learned something very profound from Carl Rogers and a lot of Rogers' clinician,

00:45:55.620 a lot of Rogers' work has been instrumental in establishing mediation processes over the

00:46:02.260 last few decades.

00:46:03.260 And Rogers delineated out what's come to be known as active listening, which is kind of

00:46:09.940 a cliched version of what he was attempting to put forward.

00:46:13.980 And I've used this a lot in my private life and also in my clinical practice because it

00:46:20.280 actually works.

00:46:21.020 It's one of the few psychological techniques, so to speak.

00:46:23.960 It's not manipulative that actually is credible and not just cliched.

00:46:28.860 Anyway, Rogers suggested to the people he was attempting to inform, the clinicians he was

00:46:36.680 trying to train, that when they listened to a client, that they listened without interruption

00:46:47.500 and then provided back to the client a summary of what they had just said and asked the client

00:46:56.660 whether or not that summary accurately represented the intent of the communication.

00:47:03.880 And that was useful in three ways, say.

00:47:07.380 The first element of utility is that it indicated that at least that the listener was interested

00:47:14.680 in and attentive enough to fully and brave enough to fully understand what was being communicated.

00:47:22.660 So that's very useful because that's a sign of respect, right?

00:47:25.340 Attentive respect.

00:47:26.680 The next part of it that was useful was to indicate to the person that what had been said

00:47:34.380 was actually understood, right?

00:47:37.360 Because if you're going to put the gist forward, you have to have understood it.

00:47:42.980 And that also often helped the person who was communicating clarify what it is that they

00:47:48.520 were actually trying to communicate because it's not always the case that the person you're

00:47:51.960 talking to knows exactly what they want.

00:47:55.660 And so you're offering them a gift, if you can summarize it.

00:47:59.420 And then you also have some insight into the potential conditions of satisfaction that the

00:48:06.200 other person is attempting to establish.

00:48:08.620 Like if I'm talking to my wife, one of the things about something where there's some contention,

00:48:13.380 and we've negotiated this as a meta-negotiation strategy, is that it's incumbent on both of

00:48:20.140 us to say, to define the conditions under which peace could theoretically prevail.

00:48:26.000 You know, because you can ask someone, well, what would I have to give you, hypothetically,

00:48:31.220 so that this went away and you were happy?

00:48:34.340 Now, it isn't necessarily the case that I can or will deliver that, but at least I'd like to

00:48:39.040 know, right?

00:48:40.460 Okay, so that's active listening.

00:48:42.220 And then you said also, and conditions of satisfaction, you also said, this is something I always told

00:48:49.120 my clients too, is that if you can't say no, you can't negotiate.

00:48:55.440 And then no means, this is what no means.

00:48:59.280 No means, if you continue doing what you're doing, something you do not like will happen to

00:49:08.320 you with 100% certainty.

00:49:12.200 Now, that might just be that I'll leave and that the negotiation ends, but, you know, it

00:49:16.460 could be other things as well.

00:49:17.780 But if you don't have that in your back pocket, in the back of your mind, if there's no line

00:49:23.440 that you've put forward that can't be crossed, of course you can't negotiate because the

00:49:30.420 whole negotiation is a lie.

00:49:31.840 Because really what you're doing is walking into the situation saying, I'm fully yours for

00:49:37.000 the taking, but I'm going to pretend that's not the case.

00:49:40.580 And if the person on the other side is the least bit canny or the least bit pushy, like

00:49:45.320 a good litigator would be, they're going to figure that out by every nonverbal cue you

00:49:50.160 put forward and by everything you say and don't say.

00:49:54.360 So you need to listen so you know what the person wants.

00:49:57.160 You have to find out their conditions of satisfaction to see if they can possibly be met.

00:50:01.160 And then you have to determine, as you pointed out, that you can and will say no and that no

00:50:07.660 actually means, well, it means that something that isn't pleasant isn't going to transpire.

00:50:13.620 Otherwise, you have no strength, as far as I can tell.

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00:51:29.820 Well, no, that's a great summary.

00:51:35.520 And again, you know, I didn't have the formal training from Rogers.

00:51:38.540 It was more of the kind of the school of hard knocks of litigating a lot of cases and working

00:51:43.640 as a diplomat and, you know, learning those experiences.

00:51:47.460 But I think it's a great summary.

00:51:48.640 So, 100%.

00:51:50.080 And again, I think that being willing to say no is just critical.

00:51:55.160 Folks have to know that there is a point.

00:51:57.140 And as you point out, there's a point of no return where the unpleasant thing may just be that the negotiations end.

00:52:05.480 But it may be that there's going to be a military strike.

00:52:07.340 It may be that there's going to be an economic sanction.

00:52:09.120 I had this happen with a relatively well-known case.

00:52:13.920 I was sent to Sweden to bring home an American rapper named A$AP Rocky.

00:52:18.860 And it was somewhat controversial because he was being held by an ally.

00:52:22.280 It was a result of a street scuffle.

00:52:25.560 But we determined that he was being held unfairly.

00:52:28.800 And the Swedes didn't like the fact that I was showing up as a hostage envoy.

00:52:32.120 In fact, I remember one reporter was joking as I was walking to the courthouse.

00:52:37.220 It's, are you sending a carrier?

00:52:39.100 Are you going to send the SEALs?

00:52:41.240 But we had to negotiate with our Swedish partners.

00:52:43.480 And, you know, they've got a new NATO ally.

00:52:45.500 And they were close partners then.

00:52:47.800 But they had no intention of negotiating with us.

00:52:49.960 I mean, in their view, this is in our legal system.

00:52:54.100 Stay out of it.

00:52:55.020 He'll get dealt with as we see fit.

00:52:57.760 But the problem is the president of the United States has put our credibility on the line.

00:53:00.300 The president said he's wrongfully detained.

00:53:02.200 We're going to bring him home.

00:53:03.380 He thought he had a deal with the Swedish prime minister.

00:53:05.520 The Swedish prime minister saw it a different way, which that happens.

00:53:08.920 There are miscommunications and no blame on the Swedes.

00:53:13.640 But I had to sit down, and Mike Pompeo wrote about this in his books.

00:53:16.840 I'll mention it because Secretary Pompeo mentioned it.

00:53:19.320 When Mike sent me, I was a hostage envoy at the time, sent me to Sweden.

00:53:22.960 He said, listen, you've got carte blanche.

00:53:25.200 You can use whatever economic tool you want, you know, and tell them they're never going to sell another Volvo in America.

00:53:29.820 And so at that point, even though the Swedes weren't prepared to negotiate, when we kind of said, we understand that.

00:53:37.520 And that's, in fact, I actually told the deputy foreign minister that's quite admirable, that you're willing to stand up to the U.S.

00:53:43.740 You're not going to negotiate.

00:53:44.840 But, you know, this is important to us now because I've got hostages all over the world.

00:53:48.380 I've got hostages in Lebanon and Syria and Iran and Venezuela and North Korea.

00:53:53.420 If we cave to Sweden because, and don't get the result the president said we're going to get, our credibility is shot around the world for, you know, dealing with other regimes.

00:54:02.260 They're going to say, if the Swedes can push you around, we'll, we're far nastier than the Swedes are. 1.00

00:54:06.260 We'll do the same.

00:54:07.080 I said, so I understand your point of view, and it's admirable, but you're never going to sell another Volvo in America.

00:54:14.320 And so, you know, there are going to be factories in America that you've built and factories in Sweden that you've built that won't have, you know, you're going to have to fire thousands of Swedish workers.

00:54:23.680 And if, you know, you've got to decide what's more important to you at this point, you know, keeping this rapper who you've, who was attacked by some, some Afghan migrants, and they've kept that out of the press, you know, and, and fought back.

00:54:38.140 And, you know, lesson learned for those guys, don't attack a rapper in his posse, not, not a good idea in a street fight.

00:54:46.360 But, you know, if it's so important, you put him in jail for a year or two, and kind of a dubious situation, their argument was that he defended himself, but then, you know, the longer the fight went on, it exceeded his self-defense rights.

00:55:00.400 But I said, on a, on a, on a relatively dubious thing that would never even be charged in a place like Los Angeles, I mean, it wouldn't even get to the DA's office, the police would have dealt with it.

00:55:09.760 And, uh, I said, and it's so important that you're going to put, close down some of your factories to, to maintain that principle and, you know, God bless you.

00:55:19.380 And, uh, we, we saw a newspaper article come out a day or two later that said the U.S. is bullying Sweden.

00:55:25.220 We knew it was leaked by the Swedes because we didn't, uh, disclose it.

00:55:30.380 And so I knew at that point that they'd probably made the decision that they'll blame the U.S. for bullying them.

00:55:34.380 And that was fine.

00:55:35.240 I mean, I wanted, I wanted them to be able to say face.

00:55:37.720 And Sweden's a great country.

00:55:39.000 They were helping us in North Korea.

00:55:40.260 We, I remember meeting with the, I'd become national security advisor a couple weeks later, met with a foreign minister who was a really impressive woman. 0.83

00:55:46.740 And we had, had a great meeting on North Korea.

00:55:49.500 We let bygones be bygones with the ASAP Rocky case.

00:55:52.200 And, um, but, but again, you have to, it's easy for a party to come to the table and say, I'm not negotiating with you.

00:55:58.220 I get everything I want.

00:55:59.560 And if you've ruined it, if that's what you're going to do, then just pack up your bags and go home or don't even show up at the negotiation.

00:56:06.740 But if you're going to, if you're going to try and get the result you want and your credibility is on the line, then you've got to be willing to, to, to let people know that there is a consequence that comes with a no.

00:56:16.560 Like you can say no, but there's a consequence that comes with it.

00:56:19.000 And, and, and in that case, we were able to get the whole thing resolved.

00:56:23.320 Sweden convicted them and then let them go for time served.

00:56:25.740 So they, they say face their justice system was, was able to run its course.

00:56:30.500 We, I stayed for the trial and after the trial, ASAP was able to get home and, and come back to America.

00:56:35.360 And, and it all, it all worked out very well.

00:56:37.400 And we maintained cultural relations, but it's an example of a negotiation where, where both sides were pretty well dug in.

00:56:43.620 And, and it didn't look like there was a way to get it, get it done, but we, we got it done.

00:56:47.740 So on the, on the, with regard to when you should say no.

00:56:53.420 So, and this is tied up very tightly with the issue of honesty.

00:56:58.500 I think it's incumbent on you to say and indicate no when you're convinced of the fact that the alternative position, what you're going to accept instead is actually an untenable solution in the long run.

00:57:13.940 Like if you, if you exceed to a negotiation, but you walk away bitter and resentful, and you believe that the conditions that you now have to abide by are not only unjust, but unlikely to be maintained, then you should have said no more harshly during the negotiation.

00:57:31.660 And that does take a certain amount of forthrightness and willingness to confront.

00:57:35.760 And also the kind of honesty that has a long-term view, right?

00:57:38.960 I mean, a successful negotiation should also appear to be, should be, and appear to be just to both sides, because otherwise it's going to be undermined in all sorts of secretive ways as soon as the negotiation concludes.

00:57:52.960 Well, the old saying in, you know, LA litigation circles was, you know, it wasn't a good deal unless both sides walked away unhappy.

00:57:58.940 You know, so I think another way of restating what you just said, where both sides felt like they had some sort of win.

00:58:06.820 And I'm not talking about the Chinese, you know, the Chinese talk about win-win negotiations, and it's always the Chinese win and you lose. 0.94

00:58:12.780 But a real win-win negotiation, not a propaganda one.

00:58:18.560 You know, both sides need to come away with something.

00:58:20.720 But when it gets to your issue of no, and you're right, it's a really good point, Jordan.

00:58:26.460 You can say no in a negotiation, that doesn't mean we're done with negotiating.

00:58:30.120 You can say, no, that's not a good deal, I don't want that, but let's keep going.

00:58:34.180 But when you get to that ultimate no, that needs to be your bedrock, because you don't want to say no and walk away and think, you know, I could have actually given a little bit more and gotten to where I needed to be.

00:58:43.040 You need to be honest with yourself about where is it too painful for me to continue, but where, you know, I may say no because I don't like the deal and try and get a better deal.

00:58:53.000 But where does the no come where you pack up your briefcase and you literally walk away and you're not coming back?

00:58:58.860 And you have to prepare for that before the negotiation and know what you're, internally, that doesn't mean you share it with the other side.

00:59:06.540 But you have to know internally, what are my red lines and where can I, what's that point where I can't jump off the cliff and commit suicide, but, you know, how close can I get to the cliff and still get a deal that I can be happy with?

00:59:21.100 And that's something you have to, you have to think about that before you start the negotiation.

00:59:25.560 Right, right.

00:59:26.200 Well, when I was working with people who were involved in salary negotiations, for example, there were often people who had worked quite diligently that weren't very good at reporting what they had done to their superiors, that were laboring under some degree of bitterness and resentment because they didn't feel that their contributions had been recognized, and perhaps rightly so.

00:59:46.080 Well, we would always ensure that before they went and had a conversation with their boss that their CV was in order and they'd already checked out the alternative job market and they had at least a lateral move in mind and maybe a better move.

01:00:01.280 And then we'd practice the conversation so that they knew exactly what they were saying.

01:00:05.580 But the reason for them to get their CV in order and so forth was because they needed to walk in there knowing that they could tell their boss to, that they would leave.

01:00:14.540 Now, they didn't want to, you know, that wasn't the outcome.

01:00:17.660 But if they didn't have that in their back pocket, they were weak.

01:00:20.280 And if they did have it in their back pocket, they're much more effective negotiators.

01:00:24.740 They knew what they wanted and they knew where their line was.

01:00:27.180 And that stiffened their spine in the, and you have to have all that straight in your head before you go into the negotiation.

01:00:33.980 No, this is a great point.

01:00:35.180 What I used to tell people and still do tell colleagues who are thinking about leaving their job or aren't happy or think there's a better opportunity,

01:00:41.400 I always tell them keep one arm on the monkey bar when you're swinging for the other one,

01:00:45.720 but don't drop it in the air and hope you're going to catch the other monkey bar.

01:00:49.140 Make sure you've got, make sure you've got a plan B.

01:00:52.580 You've got another job or you can keep your current job, but don't drop the monkey bar and hoping you have enough momentum to get the next rung. 0.98

01:00:59.420 It may work, but you could also end up in the sand pit down on your butt. 0.99

01:01:03.900 Right. 0.99

01:01:04.040 Well, it helps as well.

01:01:05.400 So, you know, it helps very much as well to walk into a negotiation, having plotted out what you'll do if it goes as badly as it could.

01:01:15.840 Right.

01:01:16.140 Because there's going to be fears that beset you.

01:01:18.740 What if this is a catastrophe?

01:01:20.420 And the answer to that can't be, oh, it won't be a catastrophe.

01:01:24.120 The answer has to be, if this is a catastrophe, here's the steps that I will take to ensure victory on a different front.

01:01:33.400 And that also stops you from being pushed around.

01:01:37.240 Yeah.

01:01:37.660 Yeah.

01:01:37.880 A hundred percent.

01:01:38.640 How to mitigate the downside.

01:01:41.380 And look, it helps to have a counselor, you know, and I'm not just talking about a national security advisor.

01:01:46.200 It helps to have someone like you or a lawyer or a psychologist or a friend or your wife that you can sit down before the negotiation and talk these things through.

01:01:54.500 Because sometimes it's hard to do it on your own.

01:01:56.640 So if you've got people you can rely on, whether it's colleagues or professionals that you can bring in to help in the negotiation, and you walk through these things, you know, you can become more focused and figure out, you know, here's my real red line.

01:02:08.300 If I have to walk away with that red line, here's the downsides to me.

01:02:11.580 How do I mitigate them?

01:02:12.400 And here's how I can give the other side downs.

01:02:14.840 You know, here's how I can, you know, prepare downsides to the opponent, you know, so that they've got to keep that in mind when they're negotiating.

01:02:21.840 Yeah, well, it's also very helpful to pre-negotiate with people who are quite pushy so that they can push your limits and test you out.

01:02:30.160 And that's actually part of the purpose of critical thinking, right, is you can have all the weaknesses in your position analyzed by, you know, without any real threat, except maybe to your self-esteem and your ego, you know, with your inability to formulate your arguments clearly.

01:02:44.840 But it's a hell of a lot better to have them pre-tested than to have them fail on the actual battlefield.

01:02:51.120 A hundred percent.

01:02:52.480 Absolutely.

01:02:53.040 So, you characterized earlier, and this will be a lead into some questions about Russia, you characterized the withdrawal from Afghanistan as catastrophic.

01:03:04.940 And so, that's all faded away in principle, although we may be suffering from the aftermath of that in the form of this, you know, never-ending conflict or a conflict that looks like it's going to never be ending in Russia and Ukraine.

01:03:24.720 Why would you characterize the withdrawal in Afghanistan as catastrophic?

01:03:29.920 I mean, the U.S. did extract itself.

01:03:31.940 It was a messy, long-term conflict.

01:03:35.620 So, in that way, it's come to an end.

01:03:40.360 And you could imagine that there might be some benefits from that, but obviously that isn't the way that you look at it overall.

01:03:47.400 And so, what is it about the withdrawal that you object to, and why do you characterize it as catastrophic?

01:03:53.540 So, let me walk you through that, but let me first make a point when you said it faded away.

01:03:58.340 And you're right, because we've got a short attention span in the West.

01:04:00.900 It's not just America.

01:04:01.800 It's Canada.

01:04:02.240 It's Western Europe, Japan, Australia.

01:04:04.400 What I kind of call not the geographical West, but the ideological West.

01:04:08.280 Hopefully, India is becoming part of that group and other countries.

01:04:11.940 But we've got a short attention span.

01:04:14.020 We go quarter to quarter with our stocks.

01:04:16.120 We go election to election, two-year cycles for the House of Representatives here, four years for president.

01:04:21.720 We've got a short-term view.

01:04:26.320 And I think that's true with Afghanistan. 0.57

01:04:29.540 And so, people have already forgotten that this just happened two years ago.

01:04:35.420 But guess who doesn't have a short-term view?

01:04:37.940 The Chinese Communist Party.

01:04:39.000 So, when I was in Taiwan in March of this year, I led a delegation there for a GTI, a Global Taiwan Institute, to work on how do we improve U.S.-Taiwan relations, and how can we strengthen Taiwan and make it more resilient to deter China.

01:04:52.580 One of the videos that they showed on TikTok and on Instagram to undermine the confidence of the people in Taiwan in the relationship with the U.S., but also in their own ability to defend themselves, is they showed a picture of that C-17 that was running along the Afghan, the runway at Hamid Karzai Airport in downtown Kabul.

01:05:15.580 And I had the Afghans running alongside it and people climbing on the wing and people trying to get in the wheel well. 0.97

01:05:21.440 And they said, this is what America will do to you.

01:05:24.900 This is how America leaves.

01:05:26.360 This is, you'll be, in essence, you'll be these poor Afghans running along trying to hop on the American airplane as they take off. 1.00

01:05:32.620 You better cut a good deal with us now because this is your future.

01:05:35.200 And so that Afghanistan withdrawal that we might want to forget and, you know, forget the 12 or 13 Gold Star families who lost their loved ones at Hamid Karzai Airport and the suicide bombing, and we want all that to go away.

01:05:51.820 Our adversaries aren't forgetting it.

01:05:54.960 And so it was, you know, seeing those videos emboldened Putin to go into Ukraine, but it's also the Chinese are very skillfully using it to undermine the confidence of our allies in Asia about our ability to stand with them in the event of a Chinese invasion. 0.92

01:06:09.100 So, in other words, cut the good deal with us now because America won't be there.

01:06:13.140 But going to your broader question, why was it a catastrophe?

01:06:16.520 You know, we wanted to get out of Afghanistan. 1.00

01:06:17.940 That was a forever war.

01:06:19.240 However, Secretary Pompeo and Ambassador Khalilzad spent a lot of time for President Trump negotiating a deal with the Taliban, which we signed in February of 2020.

01:06:30.220 And that deal was stop killing Americans because the president had gotten sick of going to Dover and was sick from going to Dover.

01:06:39.100 And I was with him on three occasions.

01:06:40.780 I represented him on another three occasions for the dignified transfer of the remains of our fallen heroes.

01:06:45.340 And you'd have to go in and comfort those families and watch these young men come home.

01:06:49.640 And there were no women at the time, in my experience.

01:06:52.460 But these young men coming home in a flag-draped casket, and it was a beautiful, dignified transfer.

01:06:57.700 But that's not the way their parents or their loved ones or their wives wanted them to come home.

01:07:01.860 And that's not the way America wanted them to come home.

01:07:04.440 And those were heart-wrenching experiences.

01:07:07.200 And we decided, look, we've got to end this Afghanistan war. 0.96

01:07:11.860 It's taking, number one, it's taking too many of our lives of our young women who volunteer to go serve our country and defend ourselves, defend America.

01:07:20.820 And it wasn't just America.

01:07:22.100 It was Canada that was there, and France, and many of our partner nations.

01:07:25.620 But it was also costing us billions of dollars every month.

01:07:30.660 And while we were plunging billions of dollars into Afghanistan with very little return, Afghanistan was not on the way to becoming a new Sweden.

01:07:41.700 The Chinese were taking those same billions of dollars and launching a new frigate or a new destroyer every month. 0.91

01:07:45.960 So they were engaged in great power competition, building the biggest Navy in the world, which they now have, bigger than the U.S. Navy.

01:07:52.580 And we were pumping this money into Afghanistan.

01:07:55.020 Much of what was getting put on pallets and cash and being shipped to Dubai because of the corruption there.

01:08:01.140 It had to come to an end.

01:08:03.580 But it had to come to an end in a way that met American national interests.

01:08:06.760 And so what President Trump ultimately decided, and it took a lot of time to get there, is that we'd leave 2,500 troops there as a counterterrorist force to deal with ISIS-K, to deal with Al-Qaeda.

01:08:18.980 We had 5,000 NATO troops.

01:08:20.700 So for the first time, when we left office in January, January 20, 2021, we had 5,000 NATO troops and only 2,500 American troops.

01:08:29.160 So we had two to one NATO contribution to America.

01:08:31.860 NATO was bearing the burden.

01:08:32.900 We were supporting NATO with exquisite capabilities, but NATO was bearing the burden.

01:08:38.320 We kept Bagram Air Base because Bagram had big fields of fire.

01:08:42.720 It couldn't be overrun by the Taliban. 0.91

01:08:44.380 It would have been the perfect place if we ever had to engage in a somewhat expedited withdrawal.

01:08:50.340 Bagram was the place to do it. 0.81

01:08:51.880 So we put everything in place.

01:08:53.480 And then we insisted to the Taliban that you have to negotiate with the Afghan government.

01:08:57.740 That, you know, this can't be, we're not turning the government, we're not turning Afghanistan over to the Taliban.

01:09:03.820 You've got to negotiate with your friends, your frenemies, your fellow Afghans. 1.00

01:09:09.880 And you've got to have a government of national unity.

01:09:11.680 And we're staying here until that happens.

01:09:14.080 And even after that happens, we're likely going to stay because you're going to need our help,

01:09:17.240 which the Taliban is now even admitting, with ISIS-K.

01:09:20.980 I mean, ISIS-K, the al-Qaeda offshoot, which is just a brutal terrorist organization, is alive and well in Afghanistan.

01:09:28.580 And you know it's bad when the Taliban are calling them extremists.

01:09:32.660 You know it's pretty bad when the Taliban are saying, hey, those guys are Islamic extremists.

01:09:37.860 You know, it's got to be pretty bad.

01:09:39.980 They're not taking hold in Afghanistan.

01:09:41.480 So, had we gone with our plan, kept a counterterrorism force there, had the Afghan government and Taliban come together as a government of national unity,

01:09:51.320 used American prestige but hard power to make sure that happened,

01:09:54.520 that would have been a very different result than what we saw of Afghans falling out of wheel wells and plunging to their death at Hamid Karzai Airport,

01:10:02.320 leaving behind thousands of Afghan collaborators who worked with our interpreters or Afghan special forces, Afghan pilots.

01:10:11.480 Leaving behind hundreds of Americans. 0.56

01:10:13.740 I mean, there are still Americans trapped in Afghanistan.

01:10:16.120 And that gives the Taliban leverage over the administration. 0.91

01:10:19.880 You know, in every negotiation they have to free up funds or that sort of thing,

01:10:23.120 because they've got these Americans there, and they've got our allies who are still there that they could, you know, do harm to.

01:10:29.900 So, you know, it was a very different scenario that we had in mind than what played out.

01:10:35.020 And what played out led to what we talked about at the top of the show is this perception of American weakness.

01:10:41.820 That we're so weak that we're running out with our tail between our legs with the Chinook helicopters going to the top of the embassy

01:10:47.160 and extracting our diplomats and racing them to safety while our Afghan allies suffered the results of a Taliban takeover.

01:10:54.880 And, again, you know, maybe the Biden administration didn't expect it to happen.

01:11:00.320 Maybe they didn't expect the government of Afghanistan to fall as quickly as it did.

01:11:04.060 But you can see, in hindsight, you know, which is always perfect,

01:11:07.560 you can see how just one step after another, withdrawing our troops down to 600 troops,

01:11:12.100 giving up Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night without telling our allies,

01:11:14.740 you know, appeasing the Taliban, you know, begging them not to take this city until a certain number of days.

01:11:23.020 You know, that's the sort of thing that led to this catastrophe.

01:11:27.700 And as Churchill talked about with the Munich Accords,

01:11:31.440 this is something that was going to carry on with us long down the road.

01:11:35.940 It was a defeat without a battle.

01:11:38.260 And we're seeing that now with Xi Jinping in Taiwan.

01:11:40.480 We're seeing it with the Ayatollahs in the Middle East.

01:11:44.800 And we were certainly the most concrete example as we're watching Vladimir Putin, you know,

01:11:49.640 invade Ukraine with limited success,

01:11:53.180 but also with causing great and terrible humanitarian damage in Ukraine.

01:11:57.260 And basically to his own people as well as own soldiers,

01:11:59.720 thousands of young Russian lives have been lost in that meat grinder. 1.00

01:12:04.300 So, you know, all of these things you can tie back to what happened in Afghanistan.

01:12:07.940 And so in hindsight, it was a really poor decision by the Biden administration

01:12:12.200 to handle the evacuation and the withdrawal the way they did.

01:12:16.340 Ending the war, good idea. 1.00

01:12:17.860 Doing it in that fashion, bad idea.

01:12:20.060 Well, given that that plan was in place to keep 2,500 troops there

01:12:24.060 and that there were 5,000 NATO personnel there as well,

01:12:27.720 and that that would have been a credible peacekeeping and deterrent force,

01:12:32.120 why do you think the Biden administration acted contrary to that plan

01:12:38.240 and so precipitously?

01:12:40.920 Yeah, I think there was just bad analysis.

01:12:45.060 I think they thought the Afghan government could stay in power longer than it did,

01:12:47.960 that they could get out quicker.

01:12:50.880 I think they didn't quite understand the structure that we'd left behind,

01:12:55.720 although we'd briefed them on it many, many times.

01:12:57.660 And so you heard things like, well, this is Trump's fault,

01:12:59.800 and Trump signed the deal.

01:13:00.960 Trump didn't have a plan.

01:13:01.860 Look, I think part of it goes back to what we talked about earlier was Trump's resolve.

01:13:07.260 I mean, the Taliban knew not to push Donald Trump very far. 0.75

01:13:10.920 They knew the results that he'd take.

01:13:14.680 They saw the Baghdadi right. 0.99

01:13:15.780 They saw how tough we could be around the world.

01:13:19.760 I think they had a very different measure of Joe Biden.

01:13:23.300 And so I think all these things played into it.

01:13:26.780 And look, I think another part is Biden always wanted to get out of Afghanistan.

01:13:30.280 I mean, as did we.

01:13:32.400 He wanted to get out of Afghanistan back in the Obama administration.

01:13:35.080 And it was shut down.

01:13:36.540 Yeah, well, I think they also wanted to see a quick accomplishment on the foreign policy side.

01:13:43.220 And that beckoned.

01:13:44.640 Let me talk to you now about the situation in Russia.

01:13:49.660 We talked a little bit about what led up to it,

01:13:53.400 although there's a lot more to unpack with regard to that.

01:13:58.040 I mean, I see our relationship.

01:14:02.160 I guess we could talk about that a bit.

01:14:03.580 I see our relationship with Russia since the 1990s as an unbroken string of missed opportunities, 0.84

01:14:10.960 virtually unbroken string of missed opportunities by the West.

01:14:15.340 And I also don't understand what we're looking for,

01:14:21.180 what our conditions of satisfaction would be in relation to the current war.

01:14:25.680 So this is how it appears to me.

01:14:28.960 In the 90s, after the wall collapsed, there were all sorts of attempts to modernize the Russian economy,

01:14:38.380 often conducted by economists who were out of their depth,

01:14:44.160 because modernizing an entire nation's economy,

01:14:47.460 bringing it into the capitalist realm is complicated beyond anyone's understanding.

01:14:53.720 You need a bedrock of trust between people before that can even happen.

01:14:58.040 And it's not easy at all to understand how to instantiate that trust, right?

01:15:02.240 I mean, in the West, we assume that the default economic transaction will be honest.

01:15:07.560 And that's an absolute miracle.

01:15:08.980 I have no idea how we ever accomplished that,

01:15:11.120 because it's so unlikely that distant people on eBay, for example,

01:15:16.580 can conduct transactions without attempting to rip each other off.

01:15:20.940 The fact that that's the case is an absolute bloody miracle.

01:15:23.760 In any case, it looked to me like we had an opportunity to bring the Russians fully into the Western fold. 0.93

01:15:32.060 And I think that by applying a Cold War mentality to that situation,

01:15:38.480 either by commission or by omission, consistently for 30 years, we squandered that opportunity.

01:15:45.280 Now, I know that people view Putin as having expansionist proclivities,

01:15:50.940 and that may well be the case if you look at what happened in Crimea and the Donbass.

01:15:55.260 But I also think that the Russians regarded Ukraine as an extension of Russia,

01:16:01.200 and were very concerned about NATO incursion into Ukraine.

01:16:05.160 And it isn't obvious to me, and I'm perfectly willing to be corrected in relationship to this,

01:16:11.680 it isn't obvious to me why we didn't try to bring NATO into, or to bring Russia into NATO too,

01:16:20.040 especially given that the fundamental concern that we're going to be dealing with in the long run is clearly China.

01:16:26.080 And now Russia and China are much closer than they might have been.

01:16:30.040 And that's further complicated by the fact that we're settling down into a very long war here.

01:16:36.560 We're going to spend the sort of money that we spent in Afghanistan that could have been put towards strengthening the Navy, for example.

01:16:43.600 We're going to spend the billions of dollars in Ukraine that we were spending in Afghanistan there.

01:16:48.580 And I don't see what we have as a plan for either peace or victory.

01:16:52.780 So that's a lot of things to throw at you, but it's quite a mess.

01:16:57.200 So there is a lot of things to be thrown there.

01:17:00.660 So anything you have to say that would bring some clarity to that would be more than welcome.

01:17:06.920 Well, there's a lot to unpack there and a lot of good thoughts.

01:17:10.320 I think starting at the beginning, how we dealt with Russia after the fall of the wall.

01:17:15.540 And we missed opportunities, but I think the Russians missed a lot of opportunities too. 0.97

01:17:19.080 I think a lot of times in the West, we're very critical of ourselves.

01:17:21.400 If we would have only done this, then they would have responded reasonably.

01:17:26.140 I mean, Russia was a very corrupt society.

01:17:28.280 It had just come off, you know, over, you know, the revolution was in 18.

01:17:35.060 So, you know, basically 80 years of tyranny, of Soviet tyranny, of the most brutal kind, purges and famines and millions, I mean, tens of millions of people being killed.

01:17:45.220 So there's no surprise that the fabric of the society across the former Soviet Union was frayed and there wasn't the trust that you talked about.

01:17:54.400 And by the way, I agree with you.

01:17:55.460 It's still a miracle that you can do a deal on eBay and most of the time or on Craigslist or something.

01:18:00.600 Most of the time it works out.

01:18:02.000 It's shocking.

01:18:02.900 Yeah, it's like 99% of the time.

01:18:06.000 Yeah, and it's a testament to, you know, that our system works.

01:18:11.860 And when we have faith in our system, it will work for the benefit and prosperity of all.

01:18:17.520 But Russia didn't have that.

01:18:19.700 And I think the other issue is, you know, Russia was an empire.

01:18:24.640 Britain acquired an empire and then gave it up.

01:18:27.480 Russia has always been an empire. 0.86

01:18:29.340 It was the Russian empire.

01:18:30.360 There was no differentiation between Russia itself and its colonies and its constituent republics.

01:18:36.800 So, you know, they were assembled in the Soviet Union, but it was basically the Russian empire.

01:18:41.820 And I think the Russians really struggled with the idea that, you know what?

01:18:45.640 Ukraine is just not that into us. 0.89

01:18:47.460 I mean, if you go to Ukraine, yeah, it was subjugated by Russia and there were Russian-speaking people in Ukraine.

01:18:52.880 But most Ukrainians were Western.

01:18:55.100 They were, but at one point, the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the Polish empire, or the Polish kingdom were, you know, they were Roman Catholics to a large extent, not Orthodox.

01:19:06.620 And so they didn't want to be part of Russia.

01:19:08.520 And I think that was very, very hard for the Russians to understand, just like a guy who's pining after a girl and she's just not that into you.

01:19:15.940 The Ukrainians just aren't into the Russians, the Balts, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Estonians, not that into Russia, didn't want to be part of the empire.

01:19:25.120 They'd been subjugated.

01:19:26.280 And so, but it was very hard for the Russians to understand that some of these countries that they subjugated and dominated didn't want to be part of them. 0.60

01:19:34.680 And I think that was a failure on the Russians' part. 0.92

01:19:39.280 So, you know, we may have, you know, there's a lot of talk about NATO expansion.

01:19:44.180 We tried to bring Russia into NATO.

01:19:45.520 We had a NATO-Russian partnership.

01:19:47.260 The Russians had military officers in NATO headquarters, which you think now is quite shocking, you know, in 2023.

01:19:54.220 But, you know, in 2002, that seemed like a great idea.

01:19:58.700 And unfortunately, the Russians didn't take advantage of that.

01:20:01.260 And I think the Russians are being very short-sighted. 1.00

01:20:03.100 And this is something I pointed out to Patrashev when I negotiated with him in Geneva.

01:20:07.740 A big part of Russia, and Russia's wealth is in the east, which is underpopulated in Siberia and in eastern Russia.

01:20:15.120 It's where their diamond mines are, their platinum mines, their oil, their gas, their timber, wildlife.

01:20:20.980 I mean, they're massive lands.

01:20:22.600 A lot of that territory was taken or agreed to be transferred to Russia in 1860 under something called the Convention of Peking or the Treaty of Peking about the time of our civil war here in America.

01:20:36.720 China gave up thousands and thousands of miles and, you know, millions of acres of land to the Russians, including the city of Vladivostok, right all along Siberia.

01:20:47.060 The resource-rich lands, that the Russians forced the Chinese, because the czar was far more powerful than the Chinese emperor at the time.

01:20:54.960 They forced the Chinese to recognize that as all Russian land.

01:20:58.480 Now, Xi Jinping has said many times that the century humiliation will be overcome by the Chinese people,

01:21:04.120 and that they'll take every square inch of property back that they believe was theirs, that they believe was historically Chinese.

01:21:09.920 That's why you had Macau and Hong Kong and Xinjiang with the Uyghurs in western China. 1.00

01:21:14.920 That's why you see them fighting the Indians today, engaged in bloody battles along the line of actual control in the Himalayas.

01:21:21.560 You see it with Tibet.

01:21:24.180 Why?

01:21:24.800 You see it with the threats against Taiwan, of course.

01:21:27.420 You know, this idea that China's going to assemble all this land that it lost to western powers or it lost when it was humiliated because it was weak.

01:21:34.980 Do you think they're not coming for the Russian lands? 1.00

01:21:37.040 Do you think they're not coming for Siberia with its treasure trove of resources that the Chinese are desperate for? 1.00

01:21:43.040 Because the Chinese are relatively, for as big a country as China is, it's bereft of natural resources the way that Russia or America has these great stores of natural resources and wealth. 0.99

01:21:53.440 They're coming for that.

01:21:54.400 And I told that to the Russians. 0.99

01:21:55.480 And Tom Clancy wrote a book about it, you know, years ago, called The Bear and the Dragon or The Dragon Coming Over the Mountain or something along those lines.

01:22:04.500 The Chinese are coming for that land and they're doing it very cleverly. 1.00

01:22:07.800 Right now there's, I think, 9 million people in eastern Russia.

01:22:12.080 3 million of them are illegal Chinese immigrants.

01:22:14.700 The Chinese are flooding into Russia. 1.00

01:22:16.620 They throw a bottle of vodka at the border guard and, you know, get let in.

01:22:20.380 And they're going to take that land back.

01:22:24.460 And that goes to this national interest.

01:22:26.460 Russia's national interest is not with China.

01:22:29.020 China looks at Russia as being weak, as being a country that can be colonized or can be reabsorbed into China in large part.

01:22:36.540 And they can be dominated by Xi Jinping.

01:22:38.820 The Russians are proud people.

01:22:40.780 And they're not, they're no longer communists.

01:22:44.160 They're authoritarian.

01:22:45.440 They're imperialists.

01:22:46.560 But they're not communists.

01:22:47.500 They've got no ideological affiliation with Beijing.

01:22:50.660 You know, Vladimir Putin or whoever comes after him, you know, the one thing we know about Russians throughout history, whether it's the czar or the general secretary of the Communist Party, they don't like taking a back seat to anybody as a Russian.

01:23:02.480 They're a very proud people.

01:23:04.440 I don't think they're going to want to be a colony of China.

01:23:07.220 And so, you know, unfortunately what's happened is, you know, I don't want to say we've pushed the Russians to China.

01:23:13.500 And the Russians would tell you the West has pushed the Russians to China.

01:23:18.040 But we needed to come up with a way, and we still need to come up with a way, to deal with Russia that doesn't allow them to invade their neighbors, doesn't allow them to invade Poland or Lithuania or Latvia or Estonia or Finland or Ukraine, but that pulls them back away from this unholy alliance that they've got with Beijing. 0.65

01:23:34.080 And how do you see that happening?

01:23:36.300 And it's in the Russians' interest. 0.92

01:23:38.140 So how do you see that laying itself out, given that this war is devolving into—well, it's very difficult to get accurate representation of the situation, but my understanding is that it's turned into something like a grinding stalemate with the advantage possibly shifting to the superior Russian forces.

01:24:01.200 Now, like I said, I'm not confident in the information that I have, but what do you see happening currently, and how would you outline something approximating a productive pathway forward?

01:24:15.420 Well, look, I think you're right in describing the situation, and that's what I said.

01:24:18.740 The Ukrainians are very tough and very savvy at the outset of the invasion, and they really dealt the Russians a bloody, bloody nose. 1.00

01:24:26.500 One of the reasons they did that was because we got them—in the Trump administration, we got them 600 javelin missiles, anti-tank missiles that were highly effective at blunting those three armored accesses that came into Ukraine.

01:24:37.680 And, you know, up until that time, you know, when I was National Security Advisor, we were having a heck of a time getting the Pentagon to even deliver them, those javelins to Ukraine, because there were people in the Secretary of Defense's office that didn't want to provoke Putin.

01:24:52.040 And it goes back to this whole theory that if we help the Ukrainians, we'll provoke Putin.

01:24:56.860 So after Russia invaded Ukraine the first time in 2014 and took Crimea and took parts of the Donbass, you know, remember the Obama administration said, we're going to aid Ukraine.

01:25:06.960 And we sent them Gatorade and MREs and blankets and, you know, a few night vision goggles.

01:25:12.300 And what they needed, you know, was—it's like Zelensky said this time when they offered to send them a helicopter, he said, I don't need a helicopter.

01:25:18.400 I don't need a ride. I need ammunition.

01:25:21.660 And we got them the ammunition to blunt the initial invasion.

01:25:25.520 They got more from the Biden administration.

01:25:27.160 I credit the Biden administration for doing that when it came time.

01:25:31.820 But the Russians suffered. 0.99

01:25:33.500 But what I've told people is the Russians aren't stupid. 0.99

01:25:35.900 These are very smart people. 0.98

01:25:37.020 These are technical people.

01:25:38.440 They've got engineers and scientists and doctors and, you know, musicians.

01:25:42.040 I mean, this is a culture that's—they got Sputnik to space before we did. 0.96

01:25:46.520 But so don't count the Russians out because they're not dumb. 0.92

01:25:50.860 And if you look at Russia's wars, whether it was Sweden or France with Napoleon or Germany with Hitler, the Russians always do poorly at the outset. 0.93

01:25:59.700 And then because they're willing to throw men and material into the meat grinder in a way that we can't do in the West because the political constraints aren't on them, they can go through 100,000 dead young men without losing the presidency.

01:26:12.160 That wouldn't work here in the West.

01:26:13.520 It wouldn't work in Canada or America.

01:26:14.820 But it works in Russia, and they use it to their advantage. 0.90

01:26:18.120 Stalin did it.

01:26:19.260 Putin's doing it now.

01:26:21.200 And between their smarts and their cruelty to their own people, you know, they're going to turn things around.

01:26:28.920 And I think they've started to do that.

01:26:30.600 And so it's a—you know, we're in a very, very difficult situation for the Ukrainians.

01:26:35.100 So now the big question, and look, I don't have the answer on this, Jordan, but we need to figure it out, is how do we resolve this situation so the Ukrainians have a safe and secure country, get most of their territory back, if not all of it, end the war, give them security guarantees.

01:26:55.660 And the Ukrainians are going to be skeptical of those guarantees because they had the security guarantees from the U.S. and Britain and Russia and France and the Budapest Accords, and, you know, that didn't help them out.

01:27:06.840 Right, that was a precondition for them giving up their nuclear weapons.

01:27:10.800 Right, which, by the way, now this whole thing is another, you know, argument for any country that's thinking about getting a nuke is get a nuke because, you know, that's the only real way you can defend yourself against a great power.

01:27:23.540 So it makes non-proliferation tougher and counter-proliferation tougher.

01:27:32.200 So the question is, how do we get the Ukrainians what they need and the security they need, and how do we get the Russians to back off and pull them away from the Chinese and integrate them more with the EU and the West and try and make them a responsible stakeholder and player? 0.73

01:27:50.420 Well, especially because we need much of what they have to offer.

01:27:53.740 I mean, the world can't do, as far as I can tell, without Russia slash Ukraine natural resources, particularly with regard to fossil fuels, but also with regard to, well, the ammonia that those fossil fuels produce.

01:28:09.640 That's a crucial issue, but also the amount of edible grain that both of those states produce. 0.90

01:28:14.960 And, of course, that's not their only contribution to the world's economy.

01:28:18.940 I mean, it's hard to defeat a trading partner upon whose resources you're actually dependent.

01:28:26.140 And, I mean, it's terribly complex, as you said.

01:28:28.780 I mean, Ukraine has to be supported because they did give up their nuclear weapons, and that's obviously a bad thing.

01:28:34.700 If they give up their weapons and strip themselves naked and now they have no defense, that's not a good precedent for operating in the rest of the world.

01:28:42.940 I mean, it doesn't look—I'm speaking out of turn here, but I'm going to anyways, because you have to start somewhere.

01:28:49.660 I can't imagine the Russians ever giving up Crimea. 0.83

01:28:51.940 I think they'd go backs to the wall to keep Crimea. 0.93

01:28:57.420 With regard to the newer territories they took over, their argument, of course, is that those territories were primarily occupied by Russian speakers who have a primary allegiance to Russia.

01:29:07.700 And it seems to me that that could be, in principle, settled by something approximating a referendum in those districts, if that was something that could be established under international supervision.

01:29:18.380 And then to provide the Ukrainians with territorial integrity guarantees and to invite the Russians back into the Western game, looks to me that something like that looks like a pathway forward.

01:29:30.900 And maybe I've been accused in my attitudes of being a Russia appeaser, and I'm certainly not trying to do that.

01:29:36.660 I think I'm fairly cognizant of the dangers of the Russian enterprise overall. 1.00

01:29:42.600 I think that makes me more appreciative in some ways of Putin than other people might be, because my sense is that by historical standards, Putin is by no means the worst and most reprehensible leader that the Russians have ever managed to produce.

01:29:58.140 And so, you know, it might be lovely to consider what the country would be like in his absence, but—

01:30:03.960 Yeah, so it's a low bar for him.

01:30:05.380 It did, that's for sure.

01:30:07.560 It's as low a bar as has ever been established anywhere, with the possible exception of the Chinese.

01:30:13.220 So, anyways, I mean, those are thoughts about what a potential move towards solution might approximate.

01:30:21.280 I mean, what do you think of those thoughts, and what do you think there is as an alternative?

01:30:26.960 I mean, the Ukrainians, I think, are going to become increasingly desperate.

01:30:30.240 And that also brings up the terrible danger of having the West dragged in, you know, which is the most likely outcome, dragged in by their sleeve into this terrible, monstrous machine. 0.94

01:30:42.500 Well, look, I think a lot of good points, and let me start with the first thing you mentioned about the trading partner.

01:30:47.620 Look, if Russia could get integrated like it was on its way to, into the West, selling oil and gas and agricultural goods,

01:30:56.560 and the agricultural goods are—they may not be that expensive, they may not be considered, you know, cash crops or the same as diamonds or platinum or oil and gas,

01:31:05.540 but that agricultural output of Ukraine and southern Russia, that's a breadbasket for Africa, for Southeast Asia, for Asia.

01:31:15.260 I mean, without that, we're going to face famine, and it's critical that we get this grain out of Ukraine,

01:31:20.320 and a lot of the Russians keep trading their grain, because there are so many people that will just literally die in places like, you know, the Congo and Egypt and other places,

01:31:29.660 Lebanon, that will have real trouble if they can't get access to it.

01:31:33.020 The other issue in, you know, Canada has something in common with Ukraine and Russia here,

01:31:37.760 is potash, which you need for fertilizer and to grow crops on an industrial scale.

01:31:43.120 Well, Canada, Russia, and Ukraine are the only folks that make potash at commercially viable levels.

01:31:49.740 They can allow for modern agriculture, which has kept the world from going into famine.

01:31:53.920 So there are a lot of important things that, you know, to the world in getting this conflict resolved.

01:31:59.720 As far as your, you know, the kind of, the pieces or parts to a compromise or a settlement or an accord that you laid out,

01:32:08.380 look, I think those are things that people are talking about around the world.

01:32:10.440 The Ukrainians are smart. They're thinking about those issues.

01:32:14.020 The Russians are thinking about them.

01:32:15.840 But I think what's happened is there hasn't been, you can't get a negotiation if you can't get the two people, the two parties to the table.

01:32:23.960 And right now, Ukraine's not ready to come to the table, and Russia's not ready to come to the table.

01:32:28.320 And I think that the other part of that is we can't do the negotiations for them.

01:32:32.920 The West is particularly bad at negotiating for other countries.

01:32:35.800 And, you know, we're willing to, you know, we saw this happen with Vietnam. 0.99

01:32:40.100 We saw it happen certainly with Czechoslovakia and Munich when Chamberlain talked about these are faraway places in which we know a little about.

01:32:48.820 So we'll just give up the Sudetenland for the Czechs, and they'll be happy with it, and we'll end a war. 1.00

01:32:54.860 And again, remember, that was incredibly popular in Britain.

01:32:57.020 When Chamberlain came home and said we had peace in our time, that's now ridiculed.

01:33:01.460 That's mocked.

01:33:02.400 That wasn't at the time.

01:33:03.400 At the time, he was met by huge crowds at the airport.

01:33:05.580 He came into Commons, the House of Commons, and had a standing ovation, bar five people.

01:33:11.160 Churchill and four of his colleagues were the only ones sitting in bipartisan labor and, well, tripartisan at the time, liberal labor and conservative, standing ovation for Chamberlain.

01:33:20.220 So appeasement can be very popular, and we've got to avoid the temptation as America or the Europeans to come in and tell the Ukrainians what they have to do or negotiate a separate deal with the Russians and impose it on Ukraine.

01:33:34.760 We've got to have the two parties, if we want this to be long-lasting and we want to be stable, Russian-Ukraine have to do the negotiations.

01:33:41.820 We can counsel the Ukrainians, counsel the Russians, support the Ukrainians as we have been.

01:33:46.820 And that's all important, and those are rightful roles for the EU and for America and Canada and our NATO allies.

01:33:54.640 But we need to make sure that we're not trying to negotiate for someone else because that won't work, and that'll end up with another conflict down the road.

01:34:02.760 What leverage do you think the U.S. has given its provision of arms to Ukraine to entice or compel, which is more dangerous, obviously, them to the negotiating table sooner rather than later?

01:34:20.840 With Ukraine? 0.97

01:34:22.100 I mean, certainly it's the diplomatic, the economic, the military support that they're getting.

01:34:26.180 Ukraine, that's huge leverage from the West on Ukraine.

01:34:28.780 But you don't want to use that unrighteously or unjustly.

01:34:31.320 I mean, keep in mind Ukraine's been invaded.

01:34:33.760 War crimes have been committed in Ukraine.

01:34:35.540 Entire cities have been wiped out.

01:34:37.180 And maybe the most pernicious thing that's happened in Ukraine, and I know you did a show on OUR recently and the Sound of Freedom movie, 1.00

01:34:45.320 100,000 Ukrainian kids have been taken out of Ukraine and sent back to Russia.

01:34:48.860 Now, I don't know if this was for sex trafficking or for—my guess is the Russians were trying to improve their demographic situation because the demography of Russia is so bad that they get these kids and they incorporate them into Russian families 0.95

01:35:02.080 and they end up with 100,000 more Russian kids and families and fathers and that sort of thing down the road.

01:35:06.920 So Putin knows he's got a problem, but that's—think about the parents of these kids who were kidnapped and put with other families.

01:35:13.920 I mean, this is really dastardly, you know, stuff that's happening in Ukraine. 1.00

01:35:18.800 So we've got to support them, and we've got to—and we don't want to be unrighteous in the pressure that we put on them.

01:35:24.420 But if there comes a point where we believe the Russians are willing to come to the table in a good-faith manner, 0.91

01:35:31.160 and we think we could—resolving the Ukraine crisis could help pull Russia away from China, and we could get a long-lasting solution,

01:35:39.780 then we do go to the Ukrainians, I think, and say, look, we've been with you from the start.

01:35:43.920 We've given you hundreds of billions of dollars in aid.

01:35:47.320 We think—we evaluate this as being a real opportunity to negotiate.

01:35:50.920 We'll be the brokers.

01:35:51.780 We're not going to let the Chinese be the brokers. 1.00

01:35:53.320 That's another mistake that we made was letting the Chinese take the lead in peace negotiations.

01:35:58.300 That should be the U.S. and the West job. 0.93

01:36:00.580 We'll sit down with you.

01:36:01.520 We'll be the honest brokers, and we'll help try and get a deal done.

01:36:04.740 And, look, I don't know if this administration has the ability to do it for a whole number of reasons,

01:36:09.360 but I think a new administration, whether it's President Trump or potentially DeSantis or whoever it is,

01:36:14.800 could come in with a clean slate and maybe lay the groundwork for that sort of a negotiation.

01:36:20.080 But it's a heck of a challenge, not just to the Ukrainians who are bearing the brunt of it and have paid the biggest price.

01:36:29.180 I mean, we spent a lot of money, but they paid the biggest price in human sacrifice for their soldiers,

01:36:34.700 sailors, sailors, and Marines who have been killed by the Russians, and their civilians who have been killed,

01:36:38.900 and their children have been lost.

01:36:41.540 But it's been a sacrifice for everybody involved in the conflict, including third-party beneficiaries of grain from Russia and Ukraine

01:36:50.180 who aren't getting the grain they need to stay healthy in Africa and the Middle East and Asia.

01:36:54.600 So we need to figure out how to get this thing to a resolution.

01:36:59.560 And you've talked about some of the outlines of what could be a potential solution,

01:37:03.800 but right now I just don't see anything that's going to bring the parties to the table.

01:37:07.900 Maybe if the Ukraine offensive stalls, if there's a change in government here in the U.S.,

01:37:13.220 if there's a change in government in Russia, which I don't see happening right away.

01:37:17.520 There are variables that could speed up the process that we don't see now,

01:37:22.840 but right now things look pretty bleak.

01:37:25.160 Right, right.

01:37:25.980 Okay, well, let's close this.

01:37:28.020 I also wanted to talk to you about the Abraham Accords,

01:37:31.060 their current status, how you evaluate them overall, and how they might be extended.

01:37:37.540 Maybe you could just start by reminding people who are watching and listening

01:37:41.820 what the Abraham Accords were and what they signified

01:37:44.460 and how it was that they were successfully negotiated, which was somewhat of a miracle.

01:37:48.580 And then what you see them having produced and may still be capable of yet producing.

01:37:57.340 Well, look, I think it was one of the great accomplishments of the Trump administration,

01:38:01.940 but I think it's an American accomplishment.

01:38:03.440 I don't think it's just a Trump accomplishment or a Jared Kushner or Mike Pompeo or Steve Mnuchin

01:38:09.560 or Robert O'Brien accomplishment.

01:38:10.660 I think it was an accomplishment for our country that we were able to use America's influence

01:38:14.920 to bring peace.

01:38:16.480 And it goes back to what we talked about earlier in the show about peace or strength.

01:38:20.340 A strong America is good not just for America, but it's good for the world

01:38:23.940 because it allows for peace to break out.

01:38:26.520 The Abraham Accords originally started out as a deal between the UAE,

01:38:30.600 the United Arab Emirates, and Israel to bring peace to those two countries,

01:38:34.380 both strong partners of the United States, both small countries,

01:38:37.920 but the small countries have punched way above their weight in international affairs

01:38:41.620 and certainly in the region.

01:38:43.540 And every effort to get peace in the Middle East up until this time had been stymied

01:38:48.700 because the idea was if Israel couldn't do a deal with the Palestinians,

01:38:52.040 they couldn't do a deal with any other Arab country. 0.78

01:38:54.520 So we started out with the Palestinians, and we proposed a great deal

01:38:58.820 as the kind of neutral mediator in the deal.

01:39:02.420 We proposed a great deal with the Palestinians. 0.99

01:39:04.460 We had to put a lot of pressure on the Israelis to accept it.

01:39:06.860 But the Palestinians, it was one diplomat once said,

01:39:10.580 never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, miss that opportunity.

01:39:14.960 We were able to then have the Israelis go to the UAE and say,

01:39:18.160 look, we gave this awesome deal to the Palestinians.

01:39:20.100 They turned it down.

01:39:21.500 Why are you going to allow them to keep us from having a deal,

01:39:25.740 keep us from having peace between our two countries?

01:39:27.660 And it took a lot of negotiations with the Saudis because none of this would have happened 1.00

01:39:33.040 without Saudi approval.

01:39:34.300 The Saudis didn't ultimately sign the deal, but had the Saudis been totally opposed to it,

01:39:38.580 it wouldn't have happened.

01:39:40.080 We did a lot of negotiations with the UAE, Bahrain.

01:39:44.220 And I think the parties made a courageous decision because it wasn't just a political decision

01:39:50.700 to make peace.

01:39:51.520 It was really a physical security situation because we look at what's happened to past leaders

01:39:56.380 in the Middle East that have made peace, Sadat or Rabin, or you could end up dead very quickly.

01:40:01.220 And so I think it took a lot of courage from the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Zayed,

01:40:05.240 from Bibi Netanyahu to the King of Bahrain, to King Mohammed in Morocco,

01:40:13.220 who all entered in this peace deal.

01:40:15.480 And it was improbable.

01:40:17.620 It was improbable from the American side.

01:40:19.160 We had to pull together our whole team.

01:40:20.860 And, you know, the power that the National Security Advisor has isn't so much as a line.

01:40:26.980 You don't have line authority.

01:40:27.960 You can't order people to do things.

01:40:29.180 You can't order ambassadors to do things.

01:40:30.700 That's the State Department.

01:40:31.620 That's the Secretary of State.

01:40:32.920 You can't order generals to do things.

01:40:34.560 That's the Department of Defense and the Secretary of Defense.

01:40:38.800 But you can convene people.

01:40:39.920 And we brought together a great team of Mike Pompeo and the Secretary of State and Steve Mnuchin

01:40:45.420 and Jared Kushner and our team at the NSC and others.

01:40:50.540 And we got that whole team all running in the same direction, in the same boat,

01:40:54.720 which doesn't always happen in the U.S. government, unfortunately.

01:40:57.520 And we got the president behind it.

01:41:00.340 And, you know, we knew it was a long shot.

01:41:02.440 I mean, you know, we'd been counseled by very senior former officials that said,

01:41:06.680 don't waste your time with Middle East peace. 0.73

01:41:07.980 It's a mirage that every administration goes for.

01:41:11.540 No one gets it.

01:41:12.280 And you waste all your time and energy, you know, pursue other priorities.

01:41:16.360 But we thought we could get it done.

01:41:18.380 And the parties took big risks to make peace.

01:41:21.580 The Israelis gave up, you know, settlements, annexing settlements in the West Bank.

01:41:26.560 The Arab countries risked their street rising up or being upset with them.

01:41:31.620 They risked potential terrorism from Iran or from the Palestinians.

01:41:35.060 But we got them together.

01:41:36.140 And what does it mean?

01:41:37.980 I mean, number one, militarily and intelligence-wise, it's a great alliance to these countries,

01:41:42.860 or not quite a military intelligence alliance, but a partnership against Iran.

01:41:47.420 Because Iran wants, like China and Russia, Iran wants to change how the world operates. 0.97

01:41:51.760 And they want to place themselves with their Shia ideology, their end times ideology, 0.99

01:41:55.700 at the top of the region in the Middle East, dominate the entire Middle East,

01:41:59.200 and ultimately have great influence all over the world and change the way we live our lives.

01:42:03.100 And, you know, this Abraham Accords took a very strong UAE, a strong Israel and other countries

01:42:09.780 and put them together and helped them stand up to the Iranians.

01:42:12.760 So, number one, militarily, it was a—and intelligence-wise, it was a great deal.

01:42:18.100 Number two, economically, you know, we've got the most dynamic country in the world outside of America,

01:42:24.700 outside of Silicon Valley, is Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Israel.

01:42:29.820 The tech sector there, both on the hard tech side, the computers and chips, the soft side with software,

01:42:36.220 but then the ag tech and figuring out how to make the desert blossom

01:42:39.560 and grow the food that we need and to manage the water,

01:42:43.380 which is, you know, going to be as important as oil in the future.

01:42:46.100 That's all coming out of this little tiny country of Israel is just blossoming. 1.00

01:42:50.580 But they need investment.

01:42:51.980 And so the UAE has almost an unlimited amount of capital to invest.

01:42:56.840 They've got a very wealthy country.

01:42:58.300 They've got very well-established capital markets.

01:43:00.540 You know, they're the crossroads of trade, and not just for the Middle East, but for Africa and Asia.

01:43:05.240 So to put the UAE and their capital and their trading expertise together with the Israelis and their tech

01:43:10.160 is just going to create an economic dynamism that, you know, it's not going to be one plus one equals two.

01:43:17.140 It's going to be one plus one equals like five.

01:43:19.560 The benefit it had for us as Americans is, as we've pushed the Chinese out of our tech sector 1.00

01:43:24.100 using the CFIUS process and other tools, the Chinese were starting to invest heavily in Israel

01:43:29.500 because they were going to go, you know, the Chinese are good at mimicking and copying, 1.00

01:43:34.320 but they're not great at innovating.

01:43:35.840 And so they were going to go where the innovation was happening.

01:43:38.600 Well, now what's happened is this Arab money, this UAE money capital,

01:43:42.460 is being invested in Israeli startups, and it's pushing the Chinese out of Israel,

01:43:46.920 which is another great benefit to the United States.

01:43:50.260 So you've got this military, you've got this intelligence, you've got this economic benefit.

01:43:54.800 But the intangible is peace for peace sakes.

01:43:58.580 You know, we always kind of look at things in my world, national security and foreign policies.

01:44:04.040 How do we advance American interests?

01:44:05.420 How do we protect ourselves?

01:44:06.340 How do we keep ourselves safe?

01:44:08.000 You know, it's kind of a hard analysis.

01:44:10.440 But for human beings, every time I see a friend send me an Instagram photo

01:44:14.400 of somebody having their bat mitzvah or their bar mitzvah in Dubai,

01:44:17.820 and say, isn't this great?

01:44:19.560 It's pretty amazing when you think about it, that this just happened, you know, three years ago.

01:44:24.920 I mean, in September of 2020.

01:44:26.940 And you've got all these Israelis' kids wanting to go do their bat mitzvah or their bar mitzvah in Dubai. 0.95

01:44:32.240 I mean, that's good for the human spirit.

01:44:35.060 It's good for the soul.

01:44:36.400 When you see Emiratis up on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, 0.99

01:44:40.900 going to the Al-Aqsa Mosque or the Blue Mosque,

01:44:43.960 and making the pilgrimage to what they believe is the third most holy site in Islam,

01:44:47.700 and they can now go fly directly from Abu Dhabi to Jerusalem,

01:44:53.120 to Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv,

01:44:54.320 and drive up to Jerusalem up to the mountains and go have their pilgrimage.

01:44:59.680 These are things that were just, that were unheard of.

01:45:02.560 I mean, no one would have even believed that they'd happened,

01:45:04.720 you know, even when I was a hostage envoy and doing work in the region.

01:45:08.660 You know, if you would have told me that the peace would be breaking out,

01:45:12.760 you know, it was something that you wouldn't have thought possible.

01:45:16.300 And yet, it is.

01:45:17.340 And so there's a human element and an example to other places in the world

01:45:21.020 that no matter how intractable the problems are,

01:45:24.040 and maybe even Russia, Ukraine,

01:45:26.060 you know, that you can, you know, come up with an accord.

01:45:28.820 And I'm proud of the United States that we were the ones that brokered it.

01:45:32.280 But we didn't, there was nothing we gained directly from it.

01:45:34.740 We gained indirectly, obviously, from the security and the economics

01:45:37.820 and just the goodwill and brotherhood of mankind.

01:45:41.300 But this was us putting all of our political capital on the line.

01:45:44.840 The president taking big risks and putting his political capital on the line.

01:45:49.020 You know, our, you know, departments and agencies

01:45:51.520 don't always get along well together,

01:45:53.620 playing together to make this push.

01:45:57.280 And then, you know, again, I want to give credit to Netanyahu

01:46:00.320 and Mohammed bin Zayed and King Mohammed

01:46:02.940 and, you know, the others that actually signed the deal

01:46:06.140 and put their own lives on the line.

01:46:08.320 It was really quite an accomplishment.

01:46:10.600 And I hope there's now some talk that Saudi,

01:46:13.080 that the Biden administration is pushing for the Saudis

01:46:16.300 to join the Abraham Accords. 0.85

01:46:18.140 I mean, putting all politics aside,

01:46:20.060 it would be great if Saudi joined the Abraham Accords. 1.00

01:46:22.040 Yeah, that's for sure.

01:46:23.240 That would be a real coup.

01:46:23.720 Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and President Biden,

01:46:26.600 I wish them luck.

01:46:27.240 Yeah.

01:46:27.900 Because, you know, putting aside the politics of how,

01:46:30.980 now, of course, President Biden will get the Nobel Prize for it,

01:46:33.660 which President Trump didn't get, but that's okay.

01:46:35.540 Well, he should have got it.

01:46:37.240 The team should have got it, clearly.

01:46:40.200 But, look, it'd be good for the region,

01:46:42.940 good for the world, and good for America

01:46:44.260 if Saudi joins the Abraham Accords. 0.93

01:46:46.400 And if Saudi does, then you're going to have, you know, 1.00

01:46:48.360 a good chance at Kuwait and Oman and other countries.

01:46:51.320 Certainly some of the Islamic countries in Africa will join.

01:46:54.220 And I think you could have a real, you know,

01:46:57.000 kind of gold rush for peace here and change the way that,

01:47:00.460 and then hopefully the Palestinians come along 1.00

01:47:02.640 and get on board and have their own state.

01:47:05.940 And they're creative people.

01:47:07.280 They're smart people.

01:47:08.060 They're doctors and, you know,

01:47:10.460 businessmen and well-educated folks, literate folks.

01:47:14.860 But they've been kept down by these leaders, 0.93

01:47:17.480 these corrupt leaders in the Palestinian Authority 0.98

01:47:19.540 or the Islamic extremists in Gaza. 0.98

01:47:21.720 And if they get rid of the corruption and the extremism,

01:47:25.300 the Palestinians would have a chance

01:47:26.760 for a tremendous future in the Middle East

01:47:28.380 and a free and prosperous Middle East.

01:47:30.600 So there's a lot of good that can, that's, you know,

01:47:33.260 we did a lot of good,

01:47:34.200 but there's a lot more good that can happen.

01:47:35.780 And I, you know, wish the Biden folks, you know,

01:47:38.540 luck as they pursue this, the next piece,

01:47:40.620 which is clearly Saudi Arabia.

01:47:43.080 Look, that's a really, well,

01:47:44.680 it's very nice to be able to end on a high note.

01:47:46.760 And I do think there's tremendous promise

01:47:48.940 in the extension of those accords.

01:47:50.460 I mean, and that would be a miracle of peace

01:47:53.480 and a miracle of economic expansion.

01:47:55.700 And man, we could definitely use,

01:47:57.960 we could definitely use more of that.

01:47:59.320 Some union among the people of the Abrahamic faith.

01:48:01.880 I know they're pushing that hard in the UAE.

01:48:03.740 And so that's a hell of a thing to watch for.

01:48:06.860 And it's something extraordinarily hopeful.

01:48:08.700 So yeah, good luck to the Biden administration

01:48:11.460 in pursuing that if they can manage it.

01:48:13.100 That would be real.

01:48:14.860 That would be very forward looking of them.

01:48:17.120 And to, and also, you know,

01:48:19.840 it'd require them giving the devil his due.

01:48:21.900 And that would be Trump in that situation.

01:48:23.600 But man, the payoff would be so great that,

01:48:25.840 you know, you'd hope people could lift their eyes

01:48:27.540 above the internecine conflict

01:48:29.540 and look to the long run.

01:48:32.740 Thank you very much for talking to me today.

01:48:34.560 Thanks for having me, Jordan.

01:48:37.080 My honor.

01:48:38.160 Yeah, it was a pleasure.

01:48:38.940 It was a pleasure hearing from you

01:48:40.120 and getting further educated on the,

01:48:43.080 with regard to the issues that you've,

01:48:44.660 you know, been so involved in

01:48:46.380 and mastered to such a degree.

01:48:47.900 There's lots of other things

01:48:48.780 we could have talked about.

01:48:49.920 And having said that,

01:48:51.200 I'm going to continue talking to Ambassador O'Brien

01:48:54.200 for another half an hour

01:48:55.040 on the Daily Wire Plus side of things.

01:48:56.840 If those of you who are watching and listening

01:48:58.660 are interested in that,

01:48:59.560 please join us there.

01:49:00.400 We'll delve a little bit

01:49:02.720 into the more autobiographical,

01:49:05.140 more biographical side of Ambassador O'Brien's life.

01:49:09.040 And so you can join us there if you'd like to.

01:49:11.460 Otherwise, thank you very much

01:49:12.500 for your time and attention here on YouTube.

01:49:15.600 And thanks once again for agreeing to talk to me today.

01:49:18.960 It was a pleasure.

01:49:19.840 Great to be with you.

01:49:20.440 Thank you, Jordan.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 20, 2023

398. Dr. Jordan Peterson Speaks to a U.S. Hostage Negotiator ｜ Ambassador Robert O'Brien

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