Victor Speaks With H. R. McMaster

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to listen to the wisdom of the namesake and star, Victor Davis-Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We are recording on Monday, August 26th, and this is a very special episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Very rarely do we have a guest on.

And today we have a guest and an important guest, and that is Lieutenant General H.

R.

McMaster, Victor's colleague at the Hoover Institution.

He's the WAD, I hope I said that right, General, and Michelle Ajami, Senior Fellow at Hoover, and he's the author of a new book, At War with Ourselves, My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.

Now, this book, we are recording, as I said, on the 26th.

This particular episode is out on the 29th.

The book is out August 27th, so it will have been out a day or two already.

But do go and purchase a copy.

And if you're looking for a taste of it, you'll find an excerpt in the last weekend's Wall Street Journal.

We're going to get to Victor's interview and discussion with General McMaster right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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Victor, take it away.

Yes.

Thank you, everybody, for here.

I'm here with my colleague, H.R.

McMaster, and he's literally a colleague.

His office is right next door to mine on the 11th floor of the Hoover Institution.

And I think, H.R.,

you were a national security fellow at the Hoover Institution, and you were departing when I was arriving as my first year.

Is that 2003?

That's right.

Yeah, that's right, Victor.

I was there from 2002 to 2003.

Then I left for the Iraq war, came back.

Yes,

I think I met you once.

And that's when we met.

That's when we met.

Yes.

And I've and then I was sort of in bedded with you for a few days during the search.

And I should tell everybody.

We were together in Baghdad during

one of the roughest times in Baghdad.

Taji, and I remember you or Petraeus said, now the danger is over.

You're going to the airport.

And Rich Lowe and I went to the airport and they tried to rocket us.

So there was no, I think that was important.

I mentioned that about J.D.

Bounce.

There was no front in Iraq.

Even if you were in any place, you were in some danger.

And remember,

H.R.

has been the author of Dereliction of Duty, which was sort of an indictment, I think, a legitimate one and a persuasive one of

the strategy and command of the Vietnam War.

from the military point of view.

And then, of course, he wrote Battlegrounds about challenges to the United States security apparatus.

And then this new one, A War with Ourselves, My Tour of Duty, is about his tenure as National Security Advisor, the second National Security Advisor following the abbreviated tenure of General Michael Flynn.

And

first off,

I think everybody wants to know, what is the war with ourselves?

Who's ourselves?

What's the war?

What's the title?

What's the significance?

Hey, Victor, hey, I count myself so fortunate to have you as a colleague.

Thanks.

And thanks for having me on.

And hey, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about the book.

I mean,

the war I'm talking about is really the war that's going on in American society and the degree to which

our political discourse has become so vitriolic and people automatically go to ad hominem attacks and try to undercut each other.

And of course, this has happened even more broadly beyond politics and it's in society in general.

And we're starting to lose kind of a sense of who we are, our common identity as Americans.

And

our confidence is diminished in who we are and in our democratic principles, institutions, and processes.

So the point I try to make in the book, one of the themes, I guess, that carries through the book, is that being at war with ourselves is not only bad for our psyche, but it is extremely damaging to our national security and our ability to govern effectively.

Yeah, I think that came through that our enemies.

They adjudicate what they say or do with us, depending on which party is in power and what the opposition might say, and et cetera.

But let me, everybody, I read this book twice.

I enjoyed it immensely, but I'm going to just give you my take on the theme of the book and then you criticize it.

And from my reading, and I read it twice very carefully, is the theme, everybody, as I read it, is something like this.

So H.R.

comes in in a very contentious time after Flynn, I think, was railroaded, but that's just a personal view.

Oh,

I would agree with you, Victor.

Yeah,

I really feel that his career was unjustly defamed given his stellar record as an intelligence officer.

But anyway, he came in

and

he understood that Donald Trump was a suey Ginneris.

He ran a campaign that was MAGA different.

He did not have support from the bicoastal Republican and Democratic constituencies in Washington.

And it was challenging to one's career to work for him.

Challenging not because it was challenging in the real sense, that because media and people would ostracize you is sort of what they're doing to RFK now.

And then

he was given a choice.

This is what I'm extrapolating.

He could admit or he could concede that Donald Trump

was different and he was blunt and he shot from the hip sometime, but there were advantages to that.

And his job, as he saw it, was to give the president options and he would try to make an argument for the options that he felt were the most effective.

Sometimes Trump would accept them, sometimes Trump would not accept them.

But when he did not accept McMaster's views, he felt it was his duty to use his knowledge of the military and Washington to fit something he didn't even agree with into a policy because that was his commander-in-chief.

Okay.

And am I doing okay now?

Yes.

Okay.

For sure.

Okay.

So then the second issue came up where Donald Trump would

speak to any, and compared to what we're seeing now with the Democratic candidate, he would speak anywhere, anytime on anything to anybody.

And that was both good because he was blunt and that could create a sense of unpredictability, which is always good in strategic negotiations and let our enemies figure out the enigma of Trump.

And to the degree that H.R.

was able, he was trying to play on that.

Sometimes he disagreed and he said, you know, I wouldn't have said that.

But the point was, when he said it, he tried to incorporate that as an advantage.

The second and more controversial part of the book is that there were other people in the cabinet, and I'm going to be candid,

the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, and to a lesser extent, but maybe General Kelly as well when he became from Homeland Security and transitioned to Chief of Staff.

They felt

that Donald Trump was contrary or antithetical to the traditional way a president comports himself and a traditional

bipartisan, what they felt was national policy.

And therefore, even though that Donald Trump gave explicit orders, they felt their duty was to not follow them or not to fit them in to an apparatus that would enhance that policy, but rather to oppose them and even to stonewall them.

And that created friction,

and

we can go on from there.

But I think that that's how I read it.

What degree would you like to nuance that, critique it, accept it, reject it, whatever you want, H.R., go ahead.

Well, I really appreciate it, Victor.

I mean, I really wanted to explain what it was like, what it was like to serve in the Trump White House, but also to explain to readers what a national security advisor does, or at least what I think a national security advisor should do.

And you laid it out perfectly.

I mean, the job of the national security advisor is not to make policy.

Nobody elects the national security advisor.

Nobody elects the Secretary of State or Defense.

They elect the president.

So we owe the elected president options.

And then once the president makes decisions, we owe it to help the president.

with the sensible implementation of those policies and decisions.

And,

you know, this wasn't always easy in the Trump White House for some of the reasons you mentioned.

And so I really, the theme in the book that I hope readers will get is I just, I tried my best to overcome the frictions,

overcome, you know, the slow rolling and so forth.

And also, as you mentioned, I think that you did a fantastic job.

I mean, I knew Donald Trump was disruptive, but I also believed that there was a lot in Washington that needed to be disrupted.

And

when I left, Victor, I think I mentioned this in the book, I read about this in the book.

the president said to me, hey, General, you know, I agreed with you 90% of the time.

The other 10%, not so much.

And that's

not so much.

I say, Mr.

President, I hope, you know, I hope you realize that I wasn't trying to get you to agree with me.

I mean, I wanted to give you options and then

help you implement your agenda.

And

I hope he realizes.

I think maybe in retrospect, he does, that that's what I was helping him to do.

In retrospect,

as I read the book, book, and I'm now inferring rather than quoting, when you look back at the Obama eight years, and especially in the Middle East, and also

this idea that to empower Iran, maybe to create tension with the Saudis and the Israelis and balance, and we were going to adjudicate without making a moral difference between a constitutional republic and Israel versus a theocracy.

And you look at the fact that during your tenure and the Trump tenure, Putin, for all of the controversy, he did not leave his border.

But he did go under the waning days of George Bush and to George F.

Saysha, under Biden.

He went,

I mean, under Obama, Donbass, Crimea, under Biden, he tried to take Kiev.

Do you feel the Trump foreign policy as disruptive as people had characterized it, including yourself at times?

And at the end of the so-called end of the day, it was more successful than his predecessor or his successor.

Absolutely, Victor.

And

I think that the examples you gave, especially in the Middle East,

when I got the call to interview for the job as national security advisor, I was a three-star general with the responsibility for designing the future army.

But before that, I had spent many years in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

And I was on the receiving end of policies developed in Washington that made no sense to me

in Baghdad or Kabul.

And so I think what President Trump did is he administered some long overdue and very consequential correctives to unwise policies of the Obama years.

And of course, first among them is what you already mentioned, which was this effort to try to bring Iran into the international order, to actually encourage Iran.

to have more influence in the region and to diminish the influence of our Gulf allies and partners, seemingly without recognizing the track record of the four decade-plus long proxy war that Iran had been waging against the great Satan, us, to push us out of the region so it could eliminate what they called the cancerous boil of Israel.

And to do so in large measure by keeping the Arab world perpetually weak, by keeping it enmeshed in conflict.

And so I really think that President Trump had a big influence in a lot of areas on the the competition with China.

He actually confronted Vladimir Putin's aggression in a way that the Obama administration didn't.

But I would put really right at the top of the list what he achieved in the Middle East, because by confronting Iran, by strengthening the alliance with Israel, and by communicating our commitment to our Gulf allies, he created the conditions for the Abraham Accords, which everybody thought would never happen.

And this is, of course, the normalization of some critical Gulf Arab states, their relations with Israel.

And I remember at the time, Victor, everybody was saying, you know, why the heck is Donald Trump going to Riyadh?

You know, why is he going to Spyra?

This doesn't make any sense.

You know, this is a fool's errand by Jason Greenblad and Jared Kushner and the other

kind of

heroes, I think,

in this case,

who were undaunted by the conventional wisdom.

Remember, everybody said

if you move the embassy to Jerusalem, that'll be a huge mistake.

So in the book,

I tell a number of stories about how President Trump bucked the conventional wisdom, how he bucked

the consensus opinion of the government, and I think created some tremendous opportunities.

And again, provided overdue correctives to unwise policies of the Obama administration.

That's very interesting.

I talked to a high Israeli official a year ago or a year and a half ago, and he said something that I've never forgotten.

He said, these are the things that he mentioned to Trump that had never been realized, that were the aspirations of Israel.

And he said, we would like to move our embassy.

We would like to have an opening with the Gulf states in a formal way.

Whether you like it or not, the Golan Heights, we're not going to give up that strategic ground.

We would like you to declare the Houthis a terrorist organization.

We would like to gravitate out of negotiations with the Iran deal.

We would like to have an embargo on Iran.

These are not things that he was ordering the United States.

He just said these are the things.

And he said, Donald Trump said, I don't see what's wrong with that.

And he was aghast that somebody had been that logical.

And he said to me, I have met with people with PhDs.

I've met people who are very sophisticated, with much more experience, but I've never met anybody whose common sense.

He didn't consider these these controversial.

And I think that was that was why when Jake Sullivan remarked right before October 11th, 7th, he said, Remember, HR, he said, my portfolio in the Middle East that I basically inherited was a calm.

It was kind of boring.

It didn't take them long to screw it up.

But we're going to take a break, Jack, and we'll be right back.

We're back.

I didn't hear Jack interrupt me, so I'm going to continue.

I have another couple of questions, and that is,

was it difficult

when you were nominated and Mattis was nominated and Kelly was already there, that we had three generals, and there were a lot of people on the left, more so than the right, because Trump kept talking about MacArthur and Patton were his heroes, and he loved the military, etc.

And some of us wrote,

I wrote an op-ed, I think too, supporting your appointment, but also Mattis's exemption.

And Kelly, but then you were all in the same branch of the service.

And you, did rank come up?

Because in the book, you allude to the fact you were a three-star, they were a four-star, you had these army connections.

At one point, I think Mattis suggested that people should wear uniforms.

Was there something there that

was unusual?

It was for people on the left that looked at, my God, we have three generals.

We're militarizing the Trump administration.

That dissipated when

you left and then Mattis was a critic and then when Kelly, but not at the beginning.

And was there tensions there just because of the nature of having three high-ranking army officers?

I think that would be part of it.

But really, I think that...

you know, every individual brings into every job, not just kind of what their professional background is, but a whole range of different elements of character and personality and experiences.

And so all of us had had kind of a common experience to a certain extent in the military.

Both Generals Kelly and Mattis are people I had tremendous respect for, still do.

I should say that Mattis was a Marine general, not Army.

They're both Marine generals, right?

Both, excuse me.

Yeah, that was.

But I did not know.

any either of them very well.

I knew of them and interacted a little bit with

Secretary Mattis before.

But

I was determined, hey, I'm going to make it work no matter what.

Our jobs are too important to let any kind of interpersonal tension interfere with them.

But I write in the book that, of course,

and many people know already, but maybe I provide this a little more detail.

I had a less than harmonious relationship

with

General Mattis and General Kelly and with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

I think that might have something to do with

Secretary Mattis didn't want me to stay in uniform,

to remain on active duty.

I wore civilian clothes, but I was still an active duty military officer.

But the president wanted me to stay in uniform.

And I assured Secretary Mattis, I said, look, I've already made the decision that when I'm finished with this job, I'm going to retire.

I'm not going to compete for a four-star or another assignment.

But that didn't seem to allay his concerns.

I think maybe he thought I would challenge his advice in the White House by being an alternative source of military advice, which was never my intention.

I mean, I realized that, you know, a national security advisor has to kind of be the honest broker.

You know, he has to make sure that the president has access to his cabinet's views, you know, and not to in any way interpose, you know, himself or herself between the president and his cabinet.

So, but that didn't seem to work.

And I think also what was at work here, Victor, and you would understand this probably better than I would, is that I think that there was a tendency among some people in the administration to look at the president as kind of a danger to be controlled.

Yes.

And because I was the president's national security advisor, and because the national security advisor is the only person in the national security and foreign policy establishment who has the president as his or her only client, they began to see me as an extension of Donald Trump.

And your office was in the White House, the West, right?

Right, right.

And so the Secretary of State...

I was an extension of Donald Trump.

I was.

I mean, I wasn't making up my own policy.

And you make up.

I noticed in the book, you drew on this historic tension.

You talked to Brent Skrokoff.

I think he was in his 90s, and you talked to Kissinger, and people described the fact that the National Security Advisor is even physically has a closer proximity than does the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State.

So there were existing tensions that were force multipliers of all this.

If you're playing the Washington game, you know,

which I was, I really tried, Victor.

I mean, you know,

now that I look back on it, I look at all the issues I had.

Maybe I was the problem, Victor.

I'm not sure.

Maybe it was me.

Well, you know, this is a very,

everybody, I mean,

if you think I'm a little candid, this is a very candid book.

And when you wrote Battlegrounds, which was not really, it was disinterested.

It was more strategic.

It didn't get into politics.

You got some criticism from the left that says, wait a minute, why don't you trash Donald Trump?

And you didn't.

And in this book, you're much more candid in your assessments.

I think it's, I felt it was a positive assessment of the, very positive of the record of the Trump and positive in the sense that there are elements of Donald Trump

going against the grain that were needed and

if

and could, I don't mean control, but in the proper context, and that was a lot of the time, they were very effective.

You spend a good time mentioning

as an example of that,

the little rocket man and all of that.

And people were aghast that he was my buttons bigger than yours.

And I think you pointed out that as national security advisor, rather than go chew out Trump and say, what are you saying?

It was, wow, this can be used because now for the first time, we have somebody that they'll take serious.

And he's unpredictable.

Right.

Absolutely.

I mean, a lot of his unpredictability, a lot of his, you know, to some people were shocking statements.

And he made many of them, you know, and a a lot of people, you know, would make too much of it.

He thinks out loud.

He says things for effect.

But the effect that he wants to get a lot of times is to challenge existing assumptions.

You know, what if we, you know, fill in the blank?

And some people who weren't with him every day or multiple times a day would be aghast.

And I would say, hey, listen, you know, that's the president just saying the status quo is not working.

You know, come up with other options for me.

And so I think that some people struggle to understand that.

And

we're kind of in a perpetual state of astonishment around Donald Trump

as a result or whatever they interacted with him.

I also write about Victor Howell,

he's very candid.

I mean, he really,

as I think every American knows by this point, he has no filter.

No, he doesn't.

And

for many, for many of the foreign leaders, that was arresting at first.

But as you mentioned, like with the Israeli person with whom he had that conversation, it's also refreshing for a lot of them them because they're just getting him on various.

And a lot of times, like, if he didn't understand something, he would say, Hey, kind of explain the Syrian civil war to what is going on there.

And he would interact in ways that were, you know, that were conversational,

but I think quite effective in advancing our policies.

He would say to

the Russians sometimes, like, why are you in the Syrian civil war?

How is this good for you?

What do you, I mean, yeah, and then just by saying it that way, I think he made very important points.

I had a European journalist who was very critical of Trump on Russia, and I said to him, I guess you don't like Donald Trump because he killed 200 of the Wagner group in Syria, or he greenlighted javelins that Obama had put on hold, or he let them have offensive weapons that Biden, when he came in,

put again on hold, or he had sanctions on the oligarchs, or he

pumped enough oil that collapsed.

Closed the Seattle Consulate, closed the Seattle.

Yes, and he got out of an asymmetrical missile deal.

So he was pretty tough on them, and that journalist didn't like that.

We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back.

Jack, Fowler.

Oh, yeah.

I'm going to read a little spot here right now.

Okay.

Yeah.

Our only one.

Thank you, Victor.

And thank you, General.

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And now, Victor, it's back to you.

Okay.

We'll take another break in about 10, 15 minutes.

Okay.

So, HR, now we get to the more controversial aspects.

So, when

let me, and I'm going to be kind of explicit.

You tell me where I'm accurate or not.

So

as things got heated up, you had these tensions with state, you had the tensions with defense, you had the tensions in some cases with the chief of staff,

and then you had people outside,

in this case, John Bolton, that were probably angling for the job.

It all came to a head when you

remarked that there had been, I think the word you used, correct me if I'm wrong, was there

inconvertible evidence that the Russians had tried to interfere in the 2016,

and I don't know to what degree that was reported, Mueller.

When you looked at that,

Do you think that was, that you believe that was accurate, but were you suggesting that Donald Trump was actually guilty?

Or do you feel, in retrospect, you didn't have an opportunity to say they were trying to interfere with the election, but as a Mueller, Mueller Mueller has not found that Donald Trump was engaged in collusion.

Can you clear that up for everybody?

What was going on?

So I was at the Munich security conference, and the guy who asked me this question was a member of the Russian Duma.

He's a Putin

loyalist, and he was recommending that we work together on cybersecurity between Russia and the United States.

And of course, the guy was just posturing and

it was ludicrous.

So I called him out on it.

And what I was referring to is in the Mueller investigation,

what he did find is that the Russians were attacking our election process.

And so

if you remember, around that time, the indictments were announced for Russians, for Russians, had nothing to do with these allegations

of President Trump's so-called collusion, all the false.

claims you know based on you know the the steel dossier that the hillary clinton campaign paid for and so forth.

So I, so I, I would, what I was trying to say to the Russian was that, hey, you know, I'm not going to buy into your, you know, your, your, uh, you know, your false, you know, your false promise of working together on cybersecurity.

But what, what somebody fed to the president, I'm sure, you know, and then what Sputnik News and all the Russian outlets said is that, you know, that

I was countermanding President Trump.

I wasn't saying anything about the really the second and third question.

The first question is: did they attack our elections or try to

undermine our confidence in our elections?

The answer to that is yes.

Yes.

The second question is: did they have an effect or do they care even

who wins a presidential election?

And I'll tell you, from everything that I've seen as National Security Advisor, the Russians don't care who wins our elections.

What they care about is they want a large number of Americans to doubt the legitimacy of the results.

And of course,

was that comment,

as was reported, did that lead to your resignation?

Or was that just an excuse?

Or were there long, what that tension when you mentioned that you thought you were on the way out?

Was that just the final excuse that was used?

Or did you feel that had you not said that, it wouldn't, I mean,

if it hadn't been reported or you hadn't said it, things would have been different.

Was it that landmark event or not?

It just accelerated it.

And Victor, it gave, it gave people more fodder than people who wanted me out of the job.

Because if you remember, like one of the themes in the book is, you know, there are a lot of people who don't want to give the president multiple options.

What they want to do is manipulate decisions consistent with their own agendas.

And so I had this strange situation where the people who thought Donald Trump needed to be controlled wanted me out.

And the people who, you know, who wanted to push their own agendas also wanted me out.

So let me just stop you there.

So you're saying that the people people who rep who felt that they represented the status quo method of adjudicating foreign policy, and we'll say General Mattis or Chief of Staff Kelly or Rex Tillardson, felt that you were not, you were trying to

You were trying to implement strategies and policies of Donald Trump that they disagreed with and felt were injurious.

And they felt that their job was to obstruct that rather than to work with it and to further the agenda.

But that group wasn't the only group.

You also, as I read the book and what you said, you had some MAGA

supporters, guy like Steve Bannon, who felt that they really did have an agenda that it doesn't seem that Trump really bought into it that much of getting out of completely withdrawing from, say, Syria or getting out of Afghanistan instantly.

And we saw what happened when Biden did that

and Ukraine.

And so there were

two forces, right?

That's absolutely accurate.

And, you know, the president and I, we had a good relationship.

I just talked to him straight up about it.

I just said, Mr.

President, you know, this might not be working out.

And I just want to let you know that whenever, you know, whenever you're ready to make a change, I will help the new person come in.

I don't expect any other kind of job on the back end of this.

It's been a privilege to be with you.

And, you know, President Trump doesn't really like difficult conversations.

A lot of times he'd be like, oh, general, we're doing a great job.

You know,

we'll talk about that later.

We'll talk about it later.

But so it's not like we didn't talk about it.

And then, of course, this Munich security conference thing with the incontrovertible, you know,

came up.

But then there was also a leak, I think, from somebody who wanted me out

of the White House who leaked the prep materials for a Putin phone call.

And there was that's the thing.

And remember, the top of the card was do not congratulate.

Yeah, well, the fact is the president never saw that card.

I prepped him the day before for the phone call, had a conversation with him the day before for the phone call.

And I knew he was going to congratulate putin even though i told him advised him not to i said mr president you know i don't think that you should congratulate putin you know on his illegitimate election when he's trying to undermine your legitimate election you know as president and but i you know that that's the art of the deal that trump feels that if he compliments somebody then he's he's more able to be tough on them people don't absolutely and to the degree that he criticizes them chapter two of art of the deal i mean absolutely i read the art of the deal and the art of the comeback and it's always yeah talk uh quietly or praise your competitor and then screw him if you can but not not boast and carry a twig

exactly that is good negotiation techniques right you separate the relationship from negotiation you know so i i did and

the forces that

Because

one thing I didn't understand is that so you're you're on the outs.

And before you're even out, it looks like Bolton is in, right?

That he was probably campaigning for the job and using his,

if you'll not be offended, his greater knowledge of the inside or how Washington works on the inside than yours, because you're in the military.

He's a guy

who's been navigating these wars and turf wars his entire life.

So

was the force of the...

Was that, was the MAGA people, were they instrumental or was it more the Bolton representing the status quo conservative way of doing strategy or was it just everything?

I think it was just everything.

And this is, you know, the at-war with ourselves theme, right?

And, but, you know, what I realized, Victor, I mean, I'd served in the Army by this time.

I was going into my, I was in my 34th year of service.

And, and every job that I had ever since I was a second lieutenant was bigger than any one person, right?

It's your responsibility to the country.

And so I was at peace with leaving whenever I was used up, whenever I felt like I was not effective anymore.

And, you know, the time-honored way to get somebody out of Washington is you leak that the person's leaving in advance of it.

So that was happening.

And then the cause for concern for me is, hey, I'm interacting with my foreign counterparts.

And if they know if I've got a foot out the door, or

if they think I don't speak for the president, I'm not effective.

And so that's why,

and you predicted, I think in the book, you mentioned the word.

I think the metaphor you used was oil and water with Bolton thought he was to sink with.

But of course, Bolton had a different agenda than Trump's agenda, right?

I think so.

Yeah, clearly.

I could tell it wasn't going to work.

But the president would always ask me, hey, what do you think of John?

What do you think of John?

He even asked my wife, Katie, when I was saying goodbye to the president of the Oval Office.

He said, hey, what do you think of John?

She was John Kelly?

He's like, oh, John Bolton.

And so Katie said, well, I used to like that, Mr.

President.

I hope you like him.

But what I would say is, hey, Mr.

President, if you trust the person, if you value the person's advice, then that's the right person for you.

It's up to you.

I can't tell you who the best choice is.

And he asked me for other recommendations.

And I recommended a couple of people who I respected and I thought would do a good job for him.

But ultimately it was his choice.

And I told him, you know, the day that he called me to say that he would decide he's going to replace me with John Bold, I said, hey, Mr.

President, I'll stay along with him and ensure a smooth transition.

I think that might have surprised him a little bit.

I mean, he thought, maybe he thought I'd be angry or something.

I mean, no, I was grateful.

And that's, I hope that tone comes through the book, Victor.

You know, is that well, the book is, I think the, the book,

to be candid, it's in the election cycle.

So everybody's hyped up.

And you've got people on the right who will think you're too critical of Trump.

And you've got people on the left who feel you weren't critical enough, which brings me up.

I watched this interview you did on Face the Nation.

And so they ask you a question question that's not, I couldn't find it in the book about the

impeachment, the first impeachment.

Did they ask you about the phone call with Zielinski?

Right?

Yeah.

I think.

Yeah.

And I didn't see it.

I don't, I, I, uh, when I watched it, I looked in your book and Zelensky's not even the index.

You didn't mention that.

So it wasn't.

No, no, that wasn't.

So that, and everybody, what I'm referring to, everybody, is the July 2019 phone call where Donald Trump called

Mr.

Zelensky, President Zelensky, newly elected president, and said, basically,

we have congressional approved

military aid.

And by the way, it had been the offensive weapons that he had approved had not been signed in to operation by Obama.

And he said, I'm going to hold them until you can ensure that the Hunter-Biden

burisma connection and the the Biden family are not crooked.

This took place

as the primaries were just, not the primaries because they wouldn't happen until 2020, but the declared candidacies were starting to appear.

And so then he was impeached by the Democratic Party that had won the House in 2018, come into the majority in 2019, and they had alleged that Donald Trump was using congressionally approved aid and leveraging not because he really genuinely felt that this government would divert it or was corrupt, but because he was trying to

use them to find evidence

about the Biden

family and

Joe Biden would be a likely candidate.

And so anyway, they ask you about that.

And I think you,

I didn't quite understand what you were trying to, what was your answer on that?

Just a couple of things.

You know, this is illustrative, I think, of

President President Trump's tendency to assume the role of antagonist in his own story.

You know, sometimes he just, you know, he's so disruptive, which a lot of times I mentioned in the book is very good, but sometimes he disrupts himself, you know, or, or, you know, maybe he'll be, he'll be

untrusting of people who are trying to, you know, do the right thing for him and trust people who kind of ingratiate themselves, like in this case, Rudy Giuliani, who I think he got terrible advice from on all this.

So, I mean, you know, nobody's perfect, Victor.

And so in in the book, and this is why maybe some of the most avid of Trump supporters might not like parts of it,

is because I try to be candid, you know, about the president's strengths and the president's weaknesses and how they played out in specific instances by telling the story, you know, telling the story of how oftentimes he made really tough.

important and very good decisions in my view.

But also at times he had a hard time sticking with those decisions, you know, and

And so, I mean, I hope that people will realize I had no agenda with this book except to tell the truth as I saw it and as I experienced it.

Yeah, I think when I heard her, I think when you

What's going to happen when you do these interviews is people on the left are going to want to use this as

a critique, and some people on the MAGA side are going to be upset.

But I agree with you.

It's the theme of the book, everyone, is how can I use my military expertise and as a diplomat during the military in Iraq having to deal with diplomatic questions, how can I translate MAGA Trump into actual effective policy for the United States in a way that he envisions?

And to the degree that I disagree with him, I think it's counterproductive.

I have to stop there because I'm not the president.

I'm going to, and I think that comes through in the book.

The only thing I had about the impeachment though, and I think because I've written about it and I think people were upset because that was a July phone call and Biden was pretty much considered not going to win the nomination.

In fact, he didn't win.

He would not win New Hampshire.

He would not win Ohio.

He would not win Nevada.

That was all.

Everybody mysteriously dropped out.

So I'm not sure that Trump thought that he was going to be

the candidate.

And then number two,

from what we learned with the $27 million, there were legitimate worries about the Biden family.

And then number three,

the media did not apply to Trump, I think, a fair standard.

And I'll give you one example.

Joe Biden

put on hold

3,500

JDAMs or smart bombs to Israel.

And those were congressionally approved.

And he put them on hold as a lever, he said, and his administration, to get them to, I guess, get them closer to a ceasefire.

So there was a hold on U.S.

offensive weapons.

But people who were cynical, like myself, said, well, he was looking at the 250,000 votes, and some of the people in the administration sleeked that, the 250,000 votes of Arab Americans in Michigan.

So by the democratic standards of what constitutes an impeachment, that is, for your own future political expediency, you're willing to put a hold on congressionally approved weapons.

I think this was a more egregious case because when Donald Trump did that, Ukraine was not, it was in a Cold War, but it wasn't in the real war where it was an existential question.

Israel was fighting for its, I think, its existence, and we put a hold on offensive weapons as an appeasement of a particular constituency that he felt would be critical to his reelection.

You know what reminds me of Victor, you know, you mentioned the book, Dereliction of Duty.

And of course, it was kind of a, I write about this in work with ourselves, you know, it was a strange feeling walking into the West Wing of the White House, sitting in the National Security Advisor's office and realizing now I was responsible for the decision-making process that I had criticized under the Johnson administration.

And one of the five things I wrote on a legal pad that day to avoid,

so I wouldn't make the same mistakes as McGeorge Bundy made,

was that to try to insulate the policymaking, decision-making process from partisan politics because you know we're talking about issues of life and death victor you know and and lyndon johnson of course he viewed vietnam as a danger to his domestic uh political priorities and his partisan priorities and and uh and as a result went to war with a fundamentally flawed strategy he cynically gave remember the johns hopkins speech in april of 1965 everybody thought oh it's johnson the peacemaker well johnson himself had said that speech was aimed at the sab sisters and peace societies and so he was making his decisions based on how does he placate various constituencies.

And that's always, you know, that's always dangerous and it masses the long-term consequences.

We had Mark Moyer on to talk about his second volume of his comprehensive history of Vietnam.

And he went into that, the political expediency of the Johnson administration and how it really

shorted it.

We're going to take a brief break and then we're going to come back for our last segment with H.R.

McMaster.

Everyone, the book is at war with ourselves.

It's just out, my tour of duty in the Trump White House.

We're in election year.

It's going to be controversial.

I think it's bestseller.

I looked today on Amazon.

It hasn't even come out.

And it's in the top five or something, 10.

So it's selling already.

It's going to be,

it's a very interesting book, and I really enjoyed it.

I've read it, as I said, twice.

And I'm trying to ask the author, H.R.

McMaster,

some tough questions because I want to get the the theme out because I think there's going to be a lot of misinformation.

And we'll be right back.

And we're back with H.R.

McMaster at war with ourselves.

So you're going to be asked this all the time when the book's out.

So people are going to say, so...

You were critical, you were positive.

So are you going to endorse a Republican nominee and vote?

So we all say, Victor, I'm not going to endorse anybody ever.

I really feel like the military is getting drug into partisan politics.

It is.

Even though I'm a washed up three-star general,

I just don't want to get in the business of endorsing people.

But what I want to do is, you know,

of course, I had a lot of people who were anti-Trump saying, you have to make this a warning.

Like, no.

I'm trying to inform with this book, not warn with this book.

And, you know, when I decided to write this book, I didn't write it as my my first book after I left government service and I have left the military because I didn't want it to be in the middle of

an election year.

I thought Donald Trump would be finishing his second term, you know, around this time.

So anyway, I wrote it with no agenda.

I write that up front.

There's a little note to the readers in the front of the book.

And

I'll tell you, I really tried, though, to make it clear that any criticisms of President Trump in this book is not an endorsement of his opponent, Because I do place the Trump administration in context of the eight Obama years that preceded it and the four Biden years

that followed it.

And those policies, I believe, have been disastrous to our interests.

Let me ask you a series of questions there.

So

I'm just going to go through a list and you tell me

because you were looking at things that happened before and things that are after.

And I'll just give you the theater and you think whether it's better, it was better in 2017 to 20 or better, it had declined and eroded from the Obama years.

So let's start with Ukraine.

Was the situation better

as far as Ukraine was and Putin, whether he goes into a border or not during the Obama or Biden or Trump?

Far better.

And Victor, you may mention this, but I think...

I think the reinvasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, you can draw a direct line from the disastrous, humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, which we're commemorating today,

to the reinvasion of

Ukraine.

How about Middle East?

Better before or after or during Trump?

Much, much better before

Biden,

much better during Trump,

and much worse.

you know,

after Trump.

And was China less of a threat or more of a threat?

I mean, part of of it is it was growing no matter who was president, but how about China?

I think what you've seen is the Biden administration embraced Donald Trump's approach to China in large measure, although

they were divided within their own administration, kind of like the Trump administration was a little bit as well, you know, between Treasury and others.

And you guys worked something to you.

You inaugurated a policy then that was different than the Obama policy.

Absolutely.

It was the biggest shift in U.S.

foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, Victor.

How about a more controversial one?

And this is one about NATO,

not what he said or didn't say or threaten, but the actual structure of NATO and the United States' role in NATO and the armament of NATO.

When he left office or when you left your tenure, do you think that NATO was better equipped to meet aggression?

Or was it,

as the people have argued, it was in less good shape?

Yeah,

actually, NATO is in better shape now in large measure because of President Trump's insistence that allies share the burden and invest what they pledged to invest at the Wales Conference of the equivalent of 2% of their GDP in defense.

It's stronger now, I would say, also because of Russian aggression in Ukraine.

And of course, you've had two really strong members of NATO to just join, Sweden and Finland,

who have significant militaries, have

strong economies, um and and uh and really strengthen the you know security in the in the in the nordic region of nato so yeah i i think nato's in a stronger position now for a number of factors how about the

the preparedness uh whether we define that by recruitment armament expenditures of the military before or after trump or during the trump years

i think the military is in a weaker situation now and i think a lot of it is has to do with these efforts to politicize the military to you know it's uh yeah i think it's really important for any of your listeners to know the military is not woke the military is not extremist but it's these kind of fringe narratives uh that are creating the impression that the military is becoming politicized in one way or the other so what we need is you know we need our civilian leaders to stop screwing around with the military because i mean i agree you guys

you really didn't i don't think the trump administration did that no i no i think not at all i was really worried today there was an article There was a report of the merchant marine is short.

Thousands, they're going to have to idle dozens of ships because they can't get the recruitment.

The manpower is not there.

This is the largest we've ever been, 330 million people.

And we can't.

In our military, Victor, you know, our young men and women in our military get more responsibility at a younger age than in any other walk of life.

They're part of teams in which...

The man or women next to you is willing to give everything for you.

You're part of missions bigger than yourself.

There are all these really tremendous rewards associated with service.

But I think our popular culture these days and the narratives we hear, it tends to portray veterans as traumatized, fragile human beings.

And the veterans we know, Victor, right?

They, they, they go on from the military and they make true.

And they're all running for office.

They're very confident.

They're running businesses and entrepreneurs.

Yes.

So I would just tell our, you know, I know you have a lot of young fans out there.

If any of them need any free, non-binding advice from a washed up general, you know, about how to get in the military, I'm your man.

I mean, I think you should join.

And

you don't have to stay in for 34 years like I did.

I mean, when I retired, my wife gave a really funny speech.

I mean,

she, it was a roast kind of at my retirement party.

And she said, when we were married, that, you know, that I was going to be in the army for five years.

And she looked at me and said, thank you for the bonus 29.

So let me ask you a couple of final questions because we're almost out of time.

Has after you left, have you talked to Donald Trump?

I did talk to him.

I talked to him a couple of times.

Not for a number of years now, but he called me.

I tell the story of the book,

that he called me a few months after I left and told me he missed me and everything.

We did actually, we left on very good terms, you know.

And then I was doing research for the book and I stopped in to see him in the Oval Office.

This is right after the book, Battlegrounds came out.

I gave him a copy of the book, Battlegrounds, and I wrote in my copy to him of Battlegrounds.

I think you will find the contents of this book consistent with what you told me.

You will agree with it 90% of the time.

The other 10%, not so much.

Not so much.

A final thing,

and I want to just finish on that comment and let you expand on it about, and I wasn't suggesting you endorse Donald Trump at all.

I was just curious to, because that was sort of the theme of the book, that military people come in and they're nonpartisan.

And I'm not going to mention names, but it seemed that people's animus, and I could think of seven or eight very distinguished generals with an admirals, admirals and Air Force officers, Army, General, Marine, General,

who were really explicit, especially July, oh, let's say,

of 2020, that last year of 2020.

And I wrote that I was very worried because not only did I thought there were violations of Article 88 of the Uniform Court of Military Justice that one does not disparage the military commander-in-chief.

And that seemed to be interpreted as applying to retired officers as well.

But it didn't seem to me that it was symmetrical that if a captain or a lieutenant colonel had been explicit in the public like that, retired or active, they would have faced severe condemnation.

But it seemed that the more that these four stars came out, the

more joined them.

And

And I don't know if they, because many of them I know unlike.

And it seemed that the more that that happened,

it really hurt the reputation of the military.

Well, what we should say, though, too, is remember, these are retired.

These are retired general officers.

Obviously, nobody in active duty would ever make any kind of endorsement or

criticize

their commander-in-chief.

I mean, that's really a court-martial offense.

I think you might remember when some of these people were trying to get rid of me in the Trump White House, they planted a false story that I had used a disparaging comment about President Trump.

I don't remember what it was, but

of course it was a lie.

I mean, I never said anything critical about the president to anybody.

You know, when I, when I was.

And even that accusation was, I don't think there was ever an accusation you ever said thing public.

It was something about overhearing a private conversation allegedly.

Right.

Among certain people, all of whom said that.

conversation never happened.

So it was clearly, you know, just an effort to try to slander me, you know, get me out of the job.

So, but on this issue of officers and, and taking political stances, I think there has to be this bold line.

I do respect people's, you know, they can all, everybody has to make their own decisions.

But I just think whenever you do something as a general or as a retired general,

it does risk, you know, politicizing the military.

And of course, as you know, Victor, this goes back a long way, at least in recent political history.

Remember, it was Bill Clinton who first started to amass these big lists

from

generals and admirals.

and then of course these candidates would come up with their dueling lists of of flag officers you know they do endorse them they do now and it's kind of bad practice you know bad practice it's kind of there's a dichotomy there because we have grant versus sherman you know sherman i will not serve as president if nominated i elected i will not serve and then grant who was who actually was a better president than people thought.

And then we have the kind of dichotomy with Ike, who was, I thought, was a good president, but

he was political at the end in a way that George Marshall didn't even vote in elections.

And he made that clear to people.

So it's a very hard call, but I think something about Donald Trump,

you know, we have that with the Never Trumpers.

He affected

the more distinguished retired officers in a way that no other president had done.

And they felt they could come out and be more explicit than we had seen in the past.

And I think in retrospect, people regret that.

Well, and you know, some of the president's language, you know, my generals, that kind of thing, it gets people all amped up.

But I remember when he was, when the President Trump was first elected, there were people who, some of whom are regarded as like civil military relations scholars.

I mean, one of those people actually called for a coup, you know, against the president.

Like, what?

I know.

I think that was,

was it, well,

I'll be candid.

Rosa Brooks wrote on the 11th day of his, you know, Pentagon legal that there were three ways to get rid of Donald Trump.

One was the 25th Amendment too long.

One was impeachment and the other was a military coup.

Yeah, that might have been it.

And then there was also John Nagel.

I think he and another lieutenant colonel co-authored an op-ed saying that Mark Milley should go and intervene and make sure, you know, we move him.

And that, I think that led to the resignation of Nagel from

educational post.

And these are all distinguished people.

So, and then I think Admiral McRaven said something that I think, you know, that he regretted.

And he's a great guy.

He just just said,

I think the president should leave sooner the better.

This is what I write about in At War With Ourselves.

And I think I have a line in there.

Yeah, you do.

And I was trying to bring that because you do try to, I think you make the point that you're all serving the president of the United States and

you don't want to do that.

That's right.

And also, you know, I write about how, you know, President Trump says things that offend people, right?

He says things that

might be polarizing.

But oftentimes, the reaction to him is worse than anything he ever says or did.

I know.

And that begs the question whether he knew that it would be, because he has this ability to make people melt down and reveal something that they shouldn't reveal.

Anyway, we've been talking with H.R.

McMaster.

He's a long friend of mine.

He's a colleague at the Hoover Institution.

And he's written a book that I think you'll enjoy.

Is it about 100,000 words?

It's 220 pages of text, 230.

Right.

It's a page turner, I think, is what readers need to hear.

It's a page charter.

And it's not a, you know, it's

something that's well-written, accessible, and it's already a bestseller, and it hasn't even been out.

At War With Ourselves.

My tour of duty in the Trump White House by H.R.

McMaster, three-star general, very instrumental in the surge in Iraq in a very effective and successful way, and Donald Trump's second national security advisor.

And contrary to press

reports, he left on very good terms with the president.

HR, thank you very much for spending this time with us today.

Hey, Victor, thanks for the privilege of being with you and Jack and your awesome listeners.

Thank you.

Thank you.