 Good afternoon, distinguished guests, fellow faculty, current and former Golden Bears, and friends. Welcome to Berkeley's annual Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Memorial Lectureship and National Security Affairs, which since 1985 is hosted a distinguished scholar, military professional, or government official for a series of lectures on national security subjects. You're watching on your screen. When we open the floor to questions, you'll type your question in that chat window and it will be read to our guest speaker by a moderator. But first, you need to register if you've not already done so. To do this, you'll hover your mouse over the portion of the chat window that says, Say Something. This will reveal a gray shaded button that says, Sign In To Chat. Click it and follow the instructions. Signing in works best for me, Berkeley.edu, Google, or Gmail account. You will likely then have to navigate back to this live stream after signing in. Hopefully, you have already had a chance to do this. If not, this may be as good a time as any. The only thing you'll miss is my intro. I'm Captain Travis Petzl, Professor of Naval Science and the Commanding Officer of Berkeley's Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps, which has composed 48 young men and women who have volunteered to serve their country as officers in the United States Navy or Marine Corps after they earn their undergraduate degrees. Berkeley also hosts Army and Air Force ROTC units all under the Military Affairs Program in the College of Letters and Science. Normally, and by that I mean every time prior to the day, we have given this lecture in person. Current events with which we are all very familiar have given us our first virtual Nimitz lecture. While I certainly miss seeing the people who regularly support these events, I'm comforted by knowing that you've showed up for this one despite there being no banquet and its perennial choice of beef, chicken, or vegetable. But it has also given us the chance to invite others who normally don't have the opportunity to attend, such as those of you tuning in from the Naval Postgraduate School down in Monterey. For those of you for whom this is a first, welcome. We hope to see you next year. It is absolutely fantastic to be able to educate and mentor tomorrow's military officers here at Berkeley. And not just for Cal Rugby, though that is a great benefit. Public services always had a great need for our best and brightest. And leadership in our nation's armed forces is no exception. The United States is indeed fortunate to have young men and women from Berkeley volunteered to do so. And I thank all at Berkeley who support this effort. Not just in supporting ROTC, but in providing that Berkeley education that is so valuable. The one that contributes even more than California's gold to the glory and happiness of advancing generations. I want to especially thank the members of the Military Officers Education Committee, led by Professor Daniel Sargent for all of their erstwhile support. As someone who is wearing a uniform of the armed forces of the United States, and who is also humbled to be a member of the faculty here at Berkeley, a standard disclaimer is in order. The opinions you will hear today are not those of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, or the University of California, Berkeley. They are those of our guests, an esteemed and experienced scholar, warrior, author, and advisor. And that is their value, to add to the diversity of opinions available to encourage us to think deeply on the challenges it faces all. The ability to attract this type of speaker is yet another value of a Berkeley education. Speaking of value, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Dr. Bob Jacobson, Professor of Physics and Dean of Undergraduate Studies here at Berkeley. Professor Jacobson has been a great friend of the ROTC programs here at Berkeley, providing fantastic support and mentorship to not just me, but my fellow professors in military science and aerospace studies. However, my spirit is somewhat dampened by this being his last Nimitz lecture as the Dean of Undergraduate Studies and as my boss here at Berkeley. So Bob, on behalf of all of us in the Military Affairs Program, thank you for your tireless support and enthusiasm for the work you enable and encourage both faculty and military to do to prepare tomorrow's military officers to serve their nation with excellence, courage, selflessness, integrity, and most importantly, respect for all. You will be missed. And now over to you, Dean Jacobson, to introduce our guest speaker. Thank you for that. And welcome to all for the lecture in honor of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. Many know Admiral Nimitz from his successes in the Titanic struggle of World War II in the Pacific. Like so many things in California, his accomplishments were memorialized by having a freeway named after him. But there's an important context to that success. Before the war broke out, he chose to work on the most complex and difficult issues of the time. He chose to work on the technological problem of diesel propulsion. He chose to work on personnel, which is actually in some ways a much harder topic than technological ones. Because he, of course, so I need to prepare himself, his colleagues and the Navy and the country for what he thought was to come. And as the midshipmen in the audience know, this resulted in creating ROTC, including our own program, which was one of the original six. All of these efforts were important forerunners to his success, to the country's success during the Second World War. That kind of commitment to engaging on important questions, preparing and advancing them, is also a Berkeley characteristic. Our job, and now speaking to the midshipmen and cadets in the audience, is your job, is to consider the future and do what can be done to be ready for it. So in that spirit, I'm incredibly pleased to welcome tonight's new speaker, General H.R. McMaster. Although regrettably, we can't claim him as a Berkeley grad, he has made up for that with his studies at the U.S. Military Academy West Point, the University of North Carolina, along with work at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Hoover Institution across the water. Beyond the Academy, as a junior officer, he commanded the tank troop and the lead tank in a 1991 battle of 73 Easton, defeating 28 enemy tanks in less than a half hour and without the benefit of the 10-minute advantage of Berkeley time. He went on to command the third armored cavalry regiment in Iraq, whose successful overcoming insurgency was praised by all of President Bush, 60 Minutes and the New Yorker, a trifecta perhaps never otherwise achieved. He alternated these command postings with positions that focused on the development and teaching of tactics and strategy that have had a wide impact. His book, Derelection and Duty, is a critical examination of strategy and leadership during the Vietnam War that has been read and discussed throughout the military. Unfortunately, since we're not in person, I can't get him to sign my copy. He served as National Security Advisor for March 2017 after an 81 to 10 Senate vote through March 2018, retiring from the Army in the following year. Since then, he's written books and articles, advised as a board member of multiple organizations, and in a nod to the 2020s, appeared and posted some excellent podcasts, which I strongly recommend to the audience. But except for the podcast, note the parallels to Admiral Minutes, a relentless focus on developing new capabilities, tactics and strategy that are necessary preparation for success, putting them into practice and learning from the outcomes. I think he's an excellent example of the Nimitz spirit, at least in the Army context, and I am very happy to welcome him here as this year's speaker. Thank you for coming, General McMesson. 18 Jacobson, thank you so much for the privilege of being with you and to have the great honor of delivering this lecture. And it's really great to be here with President Napolitano and Professor Sargent, Vice Chancellor Katz, Director Nolten, and then the ROTC leaders of Captain Petzelt, who's just been wonderful, getting to know him and to getting to know his amazing cadets and midshipmen, as well as Colonel Volpe and Colonel Sean Strappin from the Army and Air Force, respectively. But as I mentioned, it's a huge privilege to deliver the Nimitz lecture named for, Bob, as you mentioned, really a noble officer, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, who I might point out as a student at Tivvy High School in Curville, Texas, hoped for a career in the Army. He tried for an appointment at West Point and when none was available, he took a competitive examination for Annapolis and was appointed to the Naval Academy in 1901. And he, of course, served with great distinction, as you mentioned, in uniform for the next 47 years, including service in two world wars. And he continued to serve after retirement from the military, including eight years as Regent of the University of California. So he accomplished much in that second career as well, including building goodwill between the United States and Japan after World War II. And I think one of the lessons of Admiral Nimitz's life that I think is relevant to the great students at Berkeley, many of whom are about to graduate this year, congratulations, is that you often wind up doing something much different from what you planned in life. And that's okay. I think as long as you do your best to serve others, to lead with vision and compassion and contribute to missions larger than yourself, you'll be able to make tremendous contributions to our nation and humanity, and you'll have a lot of fun and reap tremendous, really less tangible rewards than monetary rewards. And so I want to, first of all, thank the cadets as you did Bob and the midshipmen with whom I just met earlier for committing to serve our nation in uniform and to serve your fellow citizens. And congratulations to all of you who are about to graduate. I'm confident that you will make tremendous contributions to our society and help us emerge stronger from our recent traumas. It's a privilege to be with all of you to deliver a lecture with the noble purpose of enhancing the spirit of collegiality and sense of community through the multidisciplinary subject matter of national security affairs. I think we might all agree that we could use a little more collegiality and sense of community these days. This great institution of course was founded in 1868 to contribute even more than California's gold to the glory and happiness of advancing generations. And I think that is why Berkeley is the perfect place to discuss how we might work together to improve our nation's strategic competence and help rebuild the confidence necessary to implement a sustained and reasoned approach to foreign policy and national security. I believe that across the last three decades our strategic competence has diminished. In the early 1990s, America and other free and open societies forgot, forgot that we had to compete to keep our freedom, our security and our prosperity. Two events to which I bore witness inspired overconfidence and bred complacency in foreign policy and national security. Event one was the end of the Cold War. In November 1989, I was a captain in the second armored cavalry regiment headquartered in Nuremberg, West Germany. Eagle troop, a cavalry troop of 136 soldiers was patrolling the East German border near Coburg, the town where Martin Luther translated the Bible into German in the 16th century. And the birthplace of Hans Morgenthal widely regarded as the father of the discipline of international relations. It also has some great breweries there in Coburg as well. But that iron curtain that ran just east of Coburg was really an iron complex. Fortifications began well east of the actual border with a 10 foot wall, steel reinforced fence covered with electric strip wires. There then was a road. East German border guards drove their jeeps along that road monitoring the soil next to it for footprints. A steep ditch prevented would be escape vehicles from plowing through. Beyond the ditch stood two more fence rows separated by a 100 foot wide minefield. Those who made it past the mines then had to cross a 300 foot wide no man's land. East German guards had shot unarmed civilians there. It was a formidable system, but it was artificial. And on November 9th, 1989, it collapsed. One moment our troopers were staring down East German border guards at the crossing site. And the next moment those guards stepped aside and threw open the gates, hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of East Germans flooded across bearing bouquets of flowers and bottles of wine. There were hugs and tears of joy. Meanwhile, Berliners celebrated and shipped away at the wall. The East German government withered away. The Soviet Union collapsed. But then came a hot war far away from the Iron Curtain. In 1989, Saddam's first decade as dictator was coming to a close. He should have been fatigued. In 1980, he had started a disastrous eight year war with Iran that killed over 600,000 people. Since seizing power in 1979, he had employed a Stalinist model of repression, murdering over one million more of his own people in a country of 22 million, including an estimated 180,000 Kurds in a genocidal campaign in which he used poison gas to massacre entire villages of innocent men, women and children. But in 1990, Saddam felt more underappreciated than fatigued. Had he not defended the Sunni Muslim and Arab world against the scourge of Iran's Shia Islamist revolution, did not Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states owe him a debt of gratitude and cash to pay off his war debts. Saddam's tanks rumbled toward Iraq's southern border in July of 1990 and on August 2nd, the first of over 300,000 Iraqi troops poured into Kuwait to make that small but wealthy nation, Saddam's 19th province. President George H.W. Bush and his team got a coalition of 35 nations to agree that that annexation would not stand. Those same troopers who were patrolling the East West German border in November 1989 arrived in Saudi Arabia just after German reunification day, almost exactly one year after they watched the Iron Curtain part. Three months later, Eagle troop was leading the so-called left hook to crush Saddam's Republican Guard and kick the door open to Kuwait with a blow from the Western desert. It rained hard on the night of 25 February, 1991. The second armored cavalry regiment had been in Iraq for three days. Soldiers used the 1500 degree turbine exhaust of our Abrams tanks to dry out. Eagle troop had nine of those 70 ton machines and 12 Bradley fighting vehicles and they had mortars. The troop also had three of these new devices called GPS. They worked sporadically so scouts navigated mainly by dead reckoning in a very flat and absolutely featureless desert. Most importantly, Eagle troop had 136 soldiers who were well-trained and confident, confident in their equipment and their weapons but confident in one another. These were men bound together by mutual trust, respect, affection. I was proud to command those men. It was an extraordinary team. As the troop moved out on 26 February, heavy morning fog dissipated. It was replaced by high winds and blowing sand. Visibility was limited. Our scout helicopters were grounded. It was just after 4 p.m. And when Eagle troop began moving in formation with one scout platoon, Lieutenant Mike Petchak's first platoon leading with six Bradleys. The other scout platoon, Lieutenant Tim Gauthier's third platoon moved along our Southern flank. Both great ROTC graduates, one from Georgetown and one from Arizona State. The tanks maneuvered behind the lead scouts in a nine-tank wedge with my tank in the center. Lieutenant Mike Hamilton's second platoon, a graduate of Norwich University in ROTC, was to my tanks left and Lieutenant Jeff DeSteffano's fourth platoon, a graduate of West Point, was to my tanks right. Because the troop had no maps, we didn't know that we were paralleling a road that ran through a small village and then into Kuwait. We also did not know that we were entering an old Iraqi training ground recently reoccupied by a Republican guard brigade and an armored division. Their mission was to halt our advance. The Iraqi brigade commander, he knew the ground well. He had attended actually the infantry officer advance course at Fort Benning. He thought it was the ideal ground from which to defend. He fortified the village with anti-aircraft guns and dug in his infantry. He took advantage of an imperceptible rise in the terrain that ran perpendicular to the road and through the village to organize a reverse slope defense. He built two engagement areas or kill sacks on the eastern side of that ridge. He had placed minefields and he dug in approximately 40 tanks and 16 BMPs. These are small armored vehicles on the side, on the backside of that ridge. So his plan was to destroy his piecemeal as we moved across that crest. Hundreds of Iraqi infantry occupied bunkers and trenches between the armored vehicles. The brigade commander positioned his reserve of 18 more T-72 tanks and his command post along another subtle ridge line further to the east. At 4.07 PM, as Sergeant Maurice Harris's scout squad into the village through the blowing sand, his Bradley came under fire. Harris returned fire with the 25 millimeter cannon. Lieutenant Gauthier moved forward and fired a tow anti-tank missile to mark the source of the contact and thus began 23 minutes of furious combat. As our tanks fired nine high explosive rounds simultaneously into those enemy positions, we received permission to advance to the 7.0 Easting and north-south gridline on the map. We switched to a tank's lead formation. I instructed second and fourth platoons to follow my move. As our tank came over the crest of that imperceptible rise, our gunner, Sergeant Craig Koch and I identified the enemy simultaneously. Koch announced tanks direct front. I was up out of the hatch and I could see eight T-72s with the naked eye and prepared positions at very close range. Our tank destroyed three of them in about 10 seconds. When our other eight tanks crested the rise they joined in the assault. In about a minute, everything within the range of our guns was in flames. Our training was paying off. As Staff Sergeant McRenals recalled, we did not have to be told what to do. It just kind of came natural. Tanks drove around the anti-tank mines. Bradley's and other vehicles followed in the tracks of the tanks. Just as we cleared the western edge of the defensive positions, our executive officer, John Gifford, radioed, yeah, I know you don't want to hear this, but you're at the limit of advance. You're at the 7.0 Easting. I replied, tell them we can't stop. Tell them we have to continue this attack. Tell them I'm sorry. Stopping would have allowed the enemy to recover. We crested the second rise and entered the reserve's circular perimeter. Iraqi tank commanders were trying to deploy against us. They were too late. We destroyed all 18 tanks at close range. Then we stopped. There was nothing left to shoot. There was some more fighting to do, but the main attack, as I mentioned, lasted 23 minutes. Eagle Troop destroyed a much larger enemy force that had all the advantages of the defense. And thankfully, we took no casualties. Our fight was a lopsided victory in a larger battle and a war that were full of lopsided victories. So event two was that military victory in Desert Storm in retrospect, what our cavalry troopers experienced near Coburn, Germany, and at what would become known as the Battle of 7.3 Easting in the Iraqi Desert marked the end of an era. It was then in the 1990s that American leaders forgot that we had to compete in foreign affairs. Those twin victories inspired three flawed assumptions about the new post-Cold War era. First, some believed that an arc of history guaranteed the primacy of our free and open societies over authoritarian and closed societies. The expansion of liberal democracy was inevitable. Second, some assumed that the old rules of international relations and competition were now irrelevant. Global governance and a great power condominium would displace rivalry. Third, some asserted that America's unmatched military prowess would guarantee full spectrum dominance over any potential enemy. Military competition was over. All three assumptions were false. Of course, from Vladimir Putin in Russia to the Kim family dictatorship in North Korea to Iran's theocratic dictatorship, autocracy is alive and well. Jihadist groups from al-Qaeda to the Islamic State have bypassed the United States superiority and conventional warfare and engaged in asymmetric warfare. And a new great power competition is emerged as Chinese Communist Party leaders speak the language of cooperation and a community of shared destiny while conducting one of the greatest peacetime military buildups in history, suppressing freedom at home, perpetrating a slow genocide in Xinjiang, exporting its authoritarian model, exerting ownership over part of the ocean across which one third of the world's trade flows and subverting international organizations and the rules-based order. The stark contrast between those assumptions and today's realities stemmed from what we might call strategic narcissism, the tendency to define the world as we might like it to be. Strategic narcissism undermines our strategic competence because it encourages the conceit that others, including rivals, adversaries and enemies, have no aspirations or agency except in reaction to US policies and actions. It generates policies and strategies based on what the purveyor prefers rather than what the situation demands. The excessive optimism of the 1990s was a setup. It was a setup for shocks and disappointments in the first decades of this century. Foremost among those, of course, was the most destructive terrorist attack in history. On September 11th, 2001, is Al Qaeda used box cutters and airplanes to bypass America's defenses and murder nearly 3,000 innocents. The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, as well as the unanticipated length and difficulty and cost of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the Middle East shook America's confidence further and led many to believe that after long and costly wars, US disengagement from overseas challenges would be an unmitigated good. But we often debate the question of should we have done it? It being the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I think we ought to, we'd benefit tremendously from exploring who the heck thought it would be easy and why did they think it would be easy? But it was in the 2000s after those shocks and disappointments that that over-optimism of the 90s was displaced, displaced by pessimism. And that pessimism generated, I think a bias toward resignation in foreign policy. That resignation or retrenchment was billed as restraint and it's often portrayed as, hey, the best way to reduce costs and advance American interests. The Obama administration under the assumption that wars end when one party disengages set conditions for the return of al-Qaeda in Iraq 2.0 or ISIS with the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in December, 2011. Just over two years later, the most destructive terrorist organization in history was in control of territory the size of Britain. The Trump administration doubled down on those mistakes and portrayed its decisions to withdraw small contingents of US forces that are enabling partner forces to bear the brunt of the fight against jihadist terrorists as actually protecting rather than jeopardizing hard won gains. What I would call the capitulation agreement that the Trump administration signed with the Taliban last year and the Biden administration's affirmation of it was based on this delusional assumptions such as the Taliban has become a benign organization even as it continues to murder innocents and brutalize anyone unfortunate enough to live in areas over which they established control. One wonders, what is power sharing with the Taliban? What would that actually look like? Does that mean every other girl's school is bulldozed? Does that mean that there are mass executions in the soccer stadium only every other Saturday? Or consider the assumption that the Taliban will actually help deny al-Qaeda a safe haven when those two organizations are utterly intertwined and leaders of both organizations are already celebrating what they are portraying as their joint defeat of the United States. So I would just say if it's fair to criticize the George W. Bush administration for a self-referential view of the world which led to an underappreciation of the risk and costs of action such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 it is also fair to describe the most adamant advocates of retrenchment as archetypes of strategic narcissism. That is because some of them believe that the United States is the principal cause of the world's problems. Our presence abroad they argue creates enemies. Our absence would restore harmony. The United States therefore is to blame for antagonizing Russia and China. America they believe causes jihadist terrorism because US presence in predominantly Muslim countries generates a natural backlash. United States drives nuclear proliferation they argue because states like Iran and North Korea need those weapons to defend against an aggressive United States. But the historical record makes clear that American behavior did not cause Russian and Chinese aggression, jihadist terrorism or the hostility of Iran and North Korea. Disengagement would not solve any of these challenges. Despite the ahistorical nature of their argument calls for American withdrawal seem to be gaining adherence though as the nation emerges from the quadruple crises associated with the pandemic, economic recession, social unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd and anger over unequal treatment under the law and inequality of opportunity. And of course the vitriolic partisan politics decombinated in a mob assault on the US Capitol. But I think there's an alternative, right? There's an alternative between interventionist policies and strategies that don't take into account the risks and costs of action and retrenchment. How about just sensible and sustained engagement? I believe that the COVID-19 experience should reinforce a fundamental lesson of September 11th, 2001 that threats that originated abroad if they are not checked can move rapidly across our world. Once they penetrate our shores, the cost of the American people can prove difficult to bear. And we know that the interconnected challenges associated with health security, food and water security, energy security, pollution and climate change do not respect borders. Moreover, I would argue it's much cheaper to deter Russia or China with strong alliances and capable forward positioned American forces than it would be to bear the costs of a catastrophic war triggered by Kremlin or Chinese Communist Party aggression. I think all of us can play a role in rebuilding our strategic competence. And what I'd like to do tonight is suggest that we begin with thoughtful, respectful discussions of the crucial challenges to American security based on what the historian Zachary Shore calls strategic empathy. Professor Shore, who by the way, is just a great person besides being a great scholar. He's a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies there with you at Berkeley. And he defines strategic empathy as the recognition that others exercise influence and authorship over our collective future. Empathy displaces narcissism with an appreciation, especially of the emotions and aspirations and ideologies that drive and constrain the other, particularly rivals, adversaries and enemies. I think this great university is an ideal position. That's an ideal position is a great place to take on the important tasks of educating fellow citizens about the battlegrounds and critical competitions of today and tomorrow. I believe that the study of history is particularly important. I guess that's kind of hashtag predictable for me as a historian to say, but I do think that some social science theories tend to mask the complex causality of events and they obscure the cultural, psychological, social and economic elements that distinguish cases from one another. I think some theories actually risk sapping strategic empathy and encouraging a reduction of complex problem sets into frameworks that create only the illusion of understanding. And then I think finally, what can we do? I think what we can do is we can all resolve to improve not only our competence, but also the confidence necessary to implement a sustained and reasoned approach to foreign policy and national security. George Floyd's murder and the protests and violence that sparked in the midst of the pandemic as well as the assault on our capital stoked by conspiracy theories and baseless claims of widespread election fraud exposed deep divisions in our society. Those divisions I think have sapped some of our confidence. Confidence in our common identity as Americans and confidence in our democratic principles and institutions and processes. What I fear now is that a lack of empathy for one another is catalyzing a destructive interaction between identity politics and vitriolic partisan rhetoric and bigotry and racism. This lack of empathy is rooted I think in ignorance. I think those who know the least about issues and who are strangers to their fellow Americans seek affirmation of their biases rather than knowledge and they judge their neighbors rather than try to understand their perspectives. I think history can play a role here as well. We might reinforce the worn fabric of our society by considering how our past produced our present. Divisions in our society and civil unrest associated with them, it's not new, right? I mean, a broad historical perspective, I think has to lead us to the conclusion that we are still coping with the legacy of slavery. As bias and vitriol contaminates the information environment today, the manipulation of history remains an important tool for those who want to sow division and conflict rather than foster unity and goodwill. Ignorance of history compounded by the abuse of history undermines our ability to work together to improve our nation and our society because it saps our national pride. As the late philosopher Richard Rorty observed, national pride is two countries what self-respect is to individuals and necessary condition for self-improvement. Pride in our nation should not derive from a contrived happy view of history but rather from a recognition that the American experiment in freedom and democracy always was and remains a work in progress. For example, the emancipation of four million people after the bloodiest war in our history was only the beginning of a long journey for equal rights. Milestones along that journey included failures, the failure of reconstruction after the Civil War, Jim Crow segregation and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and separate but equal. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement dismantled the legal basis for Jim Crow segregation but of course as we know, cultural, economic, educational and other forms of disenfranchisement continued. The manipulation of history was foundational to the obstruction of equal rights for black Americans and the creation of the myth of the lost cause which you have portrayed slavery as benign instead of cruel. And the civil war is a noble effort to preserve states rights rather than slavery. But Americans should also know that it is an abuse of history to cast the American revolution as an effort to preserve slavery rather than a righteous struggle to found a nation on principles that ultimately rendered that horrible institution unsustainable. It is possible to celebrate the principles enshrined in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by the creator with a certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and also recognize that much of our history has cut against those principles and that work remains to realize them. A sense of our history, I think can help us recognize demagoguery when we see it and hear it reject false dilemmas and work together today to build a better future. It is possible to improve equality of opportunity and in particular access to high quality education and healthcare so that the zip code into which one is born does not impede access to the great promise of America. It is possible to protect our privacy from the avarice of social media companies and to counter cyber-enabled information warfare while preserving freedom of speech. It is possible to ensure voting rights while constantly improving the security and transparency of our electoral process. It is possible to overcome racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry without surrendering our individual agency or succumbing to reified philosophies that promote victimhood as a new heroism and teach our children that they are defined more by their identity category than the content of their character. Americans can make progress because our republic was founded on this radical idea that sovereignty lies neither with king or parliament but with the people. We can demand better from elected officials but a citizens of democratic nations need not wait for the political class to restore our confidence. We can all make a difference, reach out to our fellow Americans, engage in respectful debate and arrest the destructive interaction between identity politics, critical race theory, bigotry and racism. We can empathize with one another and strengthen our commitment to one another and the principles we hold dear. As a civil rights activist and patriot, Rosa Parks observed, to bring about change, you must not be afraid to take the first step. We will fail when we fail to try. Hey, I think it's time for all of us to take that step. Beot Lux, thank you for the privilege of being with you. Thank you, General. We will now open up for questions. Remember, if you have a question, please type it into the chat window along with your name and affiliation and our moderator will pose the question to General McMaster in the order they are received. We also have a select group of individuals in our Zoom room who can pose questions to General McMaster directly. In this room, we're fortunate to have the current director of Berkeley Center for Security and Politics and former UC President, former Secretary of Homeland Security and former Governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, Berkeley's Vice Chancellor of Research, Dr. Randy Katz, Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Dr. Bob Jacobson, Director of Athletics and Sobringer of the Rugby, and also a West Point graduate, Mr. Jim Knowlton, Emeritus Riva and David Logan, Distinguished Chair and Investigative Journalism and winner of multiple awards in journalism, Mr. Lowell Bergman, the Thomas and Allison Schneider Professor of Public Policy, Dr. Michael Nacht, Professor of Political Science, Dr. Robert Powell and Professor of History and Public Policy, Dr. Daniel Sargent. Our principal moderator is midshipman first class Christopher Relag who will graduate this spring from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in East Asian Studies, after which he will report to the mighty USS Benfold an early Burt-class destroyer forward deployed in Yikusuke, Japan for his first fleet assignment. Midshipman Relag, take it away. Thank you, sir. As Captain Petzl mentioned, my name is midshipman first class Christopher Relag and I will be the moderator for the Q and A portion of this lecture. For our distinguished panelists on the Zoom call, thank you for joining us. Please just indicate to me if you have a question so I can call on you directly. I will also be reading questions from the live stream audience starting with Captain David Foote, US Navy retired from the Cal class of 1969, who asks, what is your opinion, sir, about the risks of present Biden's decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan by the 11th of September of this year? Yeah. Hey, Chris, good to see you. You know, Chris is a student in my Master's of International Policy class in Stanford and a great student. Happy that for the role reversal here, you can put me on the spot. Hey, I think the consequences are vast in terms of physical consequences and strategic risks. You know, I think this is what was missing in the effort to sustain our will in Afghanistan. The American people never heard from really, you know, three presidents in a row at least, really what they deserve to hear if they're gonna sustain an effort like that in Afghanistan, which is, okay, what is at stake, right? And then secondly, what is a strategy that will deliver an outcome, a favorable outcome at an acceptable cost? And so what's at stake, I think, is really relevant to your question. And what's at stake is that I think terrorist organizations will once again regain a safe haven and support base and be able to control large portions of territory, populations and resources. And we know that when when jihadist terrorist organizations have that luxury that they have the resources available, the time, the space, the ability to plan, prepare, train for and implement mass murder attacks against all civilized peoples, right? It's the peoples of the region who suffer most initially. But of course we saw with Al Qaeda on September 11th is not a theoretical case in many foiled attempts since then. And what ISIS was able to do across the region in Europe and in connection with inspired attacks here in the United States as well. So the immediate consequence is gonna be a strength in jihadist terrorist organizations who by the way will have access as well to a drug trade that could bring them billions of dollars potentially to finance their efforts. Well, where is Afghanistan situated, right? It's situated in an area that is of great psychological significance as well to jihadist terrorist organizations. And this effort will certainly, this disengagement by us, this I think capitulation is the only word I can think of, you know, by us, it will be seen as a victory by Al Qaeda in Iraq as well as the Taliban and they will declare victory. And that victory and that perception of winning is a big recruiting tool as we know with ISIS as well. An organization that raised to 30,000 fighters, you know, like that in 2013, 2014. And so it'll be destabilizing internationally. The alumni of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Tayiba, these jihadist terrorist organizations today are orders of magnitude larger than the Mujahideen-era alumni of the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. And it was that alumni who committed the mass murder attacks of 9-11. So it's a problem of much bigger scale. And then also we know that these organizations are desperate to get a hold of much, much more destructive capabilities, right? So there's a great book on this by Audrey Cronin who's brilliant on terrorism called Power to the People, which I highly recommend. So it's gonna get more dangerous. Chris, what I'm gonna say, what I would say, it's dangerous from a physical perspective, from a psychological perspective. It is going to create a humanitarian crisis of colossal scale if the Taliban cannot be effectively defended against. It will create a refugee crisis immediately that will affect Pakistan, a country that has nuclear weapons. I mean, I could go on, but it's bad, okay? And we can foresee it because this is, as I mentioned, not a theoretical case, right? We, I think we know what's gonna happen. Thank you, sir. Professor, yeah, Professor Bergman, you indicated you had a question. In the discussion of strategic narcissism internationally, have we been guilty of narcissism domestically for underestimating extremism, in particular the kind of extremism we saw on January 6th? And particularly in the military, where we've figured that now that there is an infiltration of ideology in the military that's being investigated, but it dates back to the attacks of Timothy McVeigh and others, 30 years or 25, 30 years ago? Yeah, okay, I say, yeah, of course. I mean, I think we underestimated the degree to which we have become polarized and the degree to which many people, I think, have felt as if they're disenfranchised and that would be susceptible to this kind of demagoguery, these ridiculous conspiracy theories, and that would be susceptible to, you know, to a president, a commander-in-chief who's charged with supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States, encouraging an assault on the first branch of government. I mean, I didn't think that was gonna happen, even when I had been in that administration, I didn't think that was within the realm of what even Donald Trump would do. So I think we underestimated it a little, but I would say, you know, on your second point, you know, I think we ought to also not, you know, try to paint a whole lot of other people with the same brush, right? So, I mean, those who assaulted the Capitol are guilty of a crime, and the FBI is hunting them down, right? And I hope others who would act, you know, against their fellow citizens, against their own representatives and government would learn vicariously from the fate of those that the FBI are tracking down. They will be subjected to due process of law and those who are guilty will be convicted and punished. I think that it is also important for our military to continue to foster a culture that is absolutely intolerant of treating people differently based on their identity category, whether it's race or sexual orientation, or to come into the military with any other agenda, other than the oath that they swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic and to bear true faith and a leadence to the same. And so, you know, our military, it draws on people from across all society, but what my experience is in our military is because the institutional culture is absolutely intolerant of racism, any other form of bigotry or prejudice because it has to be for combat effectiveness because that kind of, you know, that kind of predilection, that kind of, those kind of biases, that kind of feeling about their fellow soldiers and servicemen and women is the greatest threat to a unit cohesion, right? We can't, we are absolutely intolerant of it. So, you know, I for one think that the issue of your extremism in the military probably has always been there, right? I mean, you know, George Washington had to go give a speech at Newburgh to tell the Continental Army, hey, I think you should, you know, you should disband, believe me, you know, this is not the way to behave. So, you know, we had, you know, we had large numbers of members of our armed forces defect for slavery in the 1860s, right? I mean, this is not new, but I'm telling you in today's professional force, this, I think we have a lot of things to worry about. I don't think this is something to worry about in terms of the scale of it or the military's ability to enforce good order and discipline by punishing and throwing out anybody in the military who doesn't understand that their responsibility is to the Constitution and to their fellow soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines. That's a short follow-up. When you took the job in the National Security Council, you had to get rid of three guys you thought, three people on that council who were extremists, right? Well, no, I mean, these were people who were not there to serve the Constitution and not there to even serve the president, right? So I'll just say quickly, I think there are three types of people that serve in any administration. The first group of people are those who I served alongside in our military over the years. And those are the people who are there and this is the vast majority of civil servants and certainly military officers, intelligence professionals and so forth who are there to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and to do their best job for the American people every day, right? And then there's a second group of people, I think in any administration who were there, really, not to give the president options, the elected president options, they're there to manipulate decisions consistent with their own agenda. They come into the government with an agenda. Maybe it's on trade, maybe it's on immigration, but they're there for their agenda, not to serve the elected president, not to serve the Constitution. The third group of people that are there, I think to find themselves in the role of maybe saving the country or the world from the president, right? This is the anonymous author and so forth. The problem with that second and third group is, hey, nobody elected them, right? And so they're actually undermining the Constitution of the United States because in our society, sovereignty lies with the people and the people exercise that sovereignty by electing leaders. The leaders that they elect the administration are the president and the vice president and the elected representatives in Congress. So if there is to be an appropriate check on presidential power, it doesn't come from a bureaucrat or a military officer or even a political point, obstructing the lawful decisions of a president, right? So I think it's important for civil servants. I think military officers understand this as part of our culture, but to understand what the appropriate role is under the Constitution. Sir, I'd like to turn to Dr. Katz for the next question. Thank you very much and thank you, General McMaster, for your lecture and your service to the country and your leadership that you have shown under so many different circumstances. My question is about really the capability of our US military to prepare for and be trained for the next war. It's a well-known phenomenon of preparing for the last war. And I'm sure that in your military education, you probably learned a lot at West Point about great power conflict. Yet we had as a military to fight a counterinsurgency war in the Gulf in Afghanistan that initially we were not prepared for and maybe we didn't do as well as we could have given the blood and treasure that was spent. My question is how well-prepared is the US military today for returning to great power conflict, let's say in the Taiwan Strait or in the Ukraine? Yeah, well, I think well-prepared, right? But I think it demands greater investments in defense these days to rebuild not just really certain capabilities but also the capacity and the size of our force to be able to deter conflict effectively which is what we want and we need good old fashioned Thomas Shelling deterrence by denial, right? Which means convincing your potential enemies that they can't accomplish their objectives through the use of force. And we also have to, I think we need forces in greater scale to be able to do that with some additional capabilities. So what are Russian China do? They watched that lopsided victory in the Gulf War, right? And they said, okay, we're not going to replicate those exquisite capabilities. Let's figure out how to take that apart with offensive cyber capabilities and electronic warfare and our satellite capabilities, tiered and layered air defense, long range missiles, swarm unmanned aerial systems and undersea systems. So they came up with asymmetrical means, right? I mean, there were two ways to fight more, right? Asymmetrically and stupidly. And you hope that your enemy picked stupidly like Saddam did in 1991, but I think kind of Russia learned vicariously through that experience. And what did we do in the 90s? We doubled down on what we thought was the cause, the cause, we learned the long lessons, I think of the lopsided victory, some of the wrong lessons in Desert Storm. Stephen Biddle's done some very good work on that in particular, learning the wrong lessons of Desert Storm while our adversaries were learning some of the right lessons, I think. And so we have to develop countermeasures to those countermeasures. It's always a continuous effort, right? To modernize a force and give it the range of capabilities, right? Remember that you have the submarine, then the sonar, the bomber, then the radar, the machine gun, the tank, the tank and a tank missile. So we have to develop some new capabilities to counter what we see China and Russia developing and Russia displaying and China displaying in the South China Sea and vis-a-vis Taiwan. But I think our force is in good shape if we keep up the investments, right? There's a lot of debate now of, hey, shouldn't we cut the defense budget to really solve the debt problem? Well, I mean, that's not gonna solve the debt problem. Obviously, we're talking about 3.8% of GDP at the high end now and we just sent checks as part of this recovery package equivalent to about 16% of GDP. And we have obviously a range of non-discretionary spending that is really what you would have to cut to try to reduce the deficit and get it to debt long-term or raise revenue, right? So anyway, I think there's kind of some elements of a false debate there on what it's gonna take to remain effective. What I worry about is us doubling down on fewer and fewer, more and more exquisite, more and more expensive systems. Because I think that puts us on a path to exquisite irrelevance. It began mainly because our adversaries or potential enemies aren't developing countermeasures always. Sir, I'd like to turn to Secretary Napolitano for the next question. Yeah, thanks, General. How would you advise President Biden with respect to creating a strategic framework vis-a-vis China? And do you think military conflict with China at some point is inevitable? Yeah. Hey, thanks, thanks, John. It's great to see you and thanks for your leadership and an example over many years. In government and outside of government and in the UC system. Hey, I think that conflict is not inevitable, right? But I think what we have to do is compete. And when we put into place the shift in strategy in 2017, I convened the principles committee of the National Security Council around a five-page paper that we had written collaboratively about what the nature of the challenge from the Chinese Communist Party. And in this meeting, which was in March of 2017, I read excerpts from previous policy toward China and observed that we were about to affect probably the most significant shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. And the reason we were affecting that shift is the fundamental assumption that underpinned previous policies toward China had proven to be false. And that was the assumption that China having been welcomed into the international order would play by the rules. And as China prospered with liberalized its economy and the liberalized its form of governance, it was quite clear that that wasn't going to happen under the Chinese Communist Party. And we endeavored to use Zachary Schwarz's model of applying strategic empathy and to try to understand the ideology and the aspirations and the emotions that were driving and constraining Chinese Communist Party leadership, under Xi Jinping. And we determined that the party's behavior is driven mainly by the party's obsession with control and its effort to extend and tighten the party's exclusive grip on power internally. And that was tied to the narrative and the objectives associated with national rejuvenation externally. And so we came up with a set of assumptions to underpin our policy that were actually diametrically, the opposite of assumptions that underpinned previous policies. Those are available unclassified now. They were under the free and open in a Pacific strategy or the IPS, if you Google it, the IPS strategy declassified. And that was one of the foundational documents to a strategy that existed under the Trump administration imperfectly implemented. I never saw, never understood like how steel and aluminum towers, for example, on our allies gets to the problem of Chinese over capacity, over production and transshipment and dumping, for example, in those areas. So what would a strategy look like? I would say it is a strategy of competition. And I think I'm really heartened by the language that the Biden administration is using vis-a-vis China. And I think what will make it effective is a strategy of transparent competition and a recognition that we have to and the Chinese Congress Party leadership understands we have to reenter a renaissance of competition that we vacated based on flawed assumptions. Those renaissance of competitions involve economic competitions that involve countering Chinese unfair trade and economic practices and sustained campaign of industrial espionage. It involves various forms of financial aggression and debt traps that are set for countries. And as we've seen in what was exposed just a few weeks ago, how those come with some pretty severe strings associated with countries having to adhere to the Chinese Congress Party talking points and support their foreign policy, for example. There is certainly a technological element of this competition that overlaps with the economic element of the competition. And there's a financial element of the competition that involves our investments in China. In many ways, President Napolitano, I think that we are underwriting our own demise with the flow of dumb money investments into China in a way that compensates for the bad business decisions that Chinese leaders make because they're pursuing strategic aims rather than trying to get returns on investment. So I think there ought to be kind of a Hippocratic oath for US businesses and US entities that are investing in China. And that ought to be to do no harm in three ways. If you're a research facility, for example, that tremendous research facilities in the UC system and is don't aid and abet the People's Liberation Army's effort to gain a differential advantage over our military or to gain an unfair differential advantage in the emerging data-driven global economy. Secondly, don't aid and abet the party's effort to establish this technologically enabled Orwellian police state and suppress human freedom in China and to export that model as they are into places like Cambodia and Zimbabwe and elsewhere. And then finally, don't compromise the long-term viability of your company and your workers' jobs in exchange for short-term profits in China. We've seen many businesses do this in some key sectors, especially those involving renewables these days, solar panels and wind turbines. And we see this with battery manufacturing now these days and how supply chains, the criticality of supply chains now that we're biased too much in favor of efficiency and not enough in favor of resilience. So the economic competition is what I would highlight maybe unusual for a military person to do so, but I think that's really the most important arena of competition because we're so far behind in it because we were complacent. And then again, militarily, I think we have to, we have to maintain deterrence by denial. But I think it's transparent competition. You know, there was, when I was with President Trump in Beijing, right? During his trip to Beijing, I think it's worth actually, if you can find the clip, watching the press conference he did with Xi Jinping. And at one point in that press conference, he turns to Xi Jinping goes, hey, you know, he recounts just some of our grievances associated with Chinese unfair economic practices. And he looks at Xi Jinping says, hey, I don't blame you, I blame us. And I think that's the way Chinese leadership ought to look at it. Now the other thing I would say that's really, really important is that we ought to do some things that are counterintuitive in this. And we ought to be granting, I think more student visas to Chinese students, more work visas to Chinese nationals to work for international companies and will come work in the United States. Because I think at a time when the Chinese Communist Party is shutting down the space where we can interact in a positive way with Chinese people and entities who are not acting aggressively as an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, we should be trying to keep that access open. And I think that we should do things like if Chinese employees of US international companies are exposed to the coercion of the party, we ought to grant them special benefit parole status or fast track and H1B visa for them and for their families. So, I think this is a time for us to recognize maybe more than ever. Hey, China is not monolithic. If any place in the world is not monolithic, it's China. And we ought to recognize that our problem is with the policies and actions of the Chinese Communist Party, right? We're not trying to keep China down. We're not trying to keep the Chinese people down. And our issue is not with the Chinese people. I would welcome your comments on any of this too, President Napolitano, if you wouldn't mind taking a second to react to that and share your thoughts. Well, you said much with which I agree, General. I think another aspect to pour into the mix is creating a multilateral approach to China that it's not just the US versus China. It's really the democratic community of nations that and those alliances need to be strengthened and there needs to be a unity of effort created there. I would put that in the mix. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. The first in that unclassified strategy, the first line of effort is to galvanize a multinational effort, right? And I think the Biden administration has done quite well on this. I think the Trump administration actually contrary to conventional wisdom did a pretty darn good job in some key areas like the indictments against APT-10 in December 2018 which 12 countries did together, for example. But the way the Biden administration has really worked with Europe on these sanctions against those responsible for the genocidal campaign in Xinjiang and forced labor there. I think that was in the Quad format of the US, Japan, Australia and India strengthening that further. I think that's all very positive and you're absolutely right about the importance of it. Hey, what I would say is a lot of times also you hear from friends across the Indo-Pacific I often hear, hey, don't force us to choose between Washington and Beijing. And then I just go through what the party's done since COVID-19. How about forcing COVID-19 on the world, going after anybody who was trying to ring the alarm bells about it, doctors, investigative journalists. How about insult to injury? Goal for your diplomacy. How about a massive campaign of economic coercion against Australia? How about bludgeoning Indian soldiers to death on the Himalayan frontier, extending the party's repression of harm into Hong Kong? Taking hostages essentially as a method of their foreign policy, the militarization of the South China Sea, telling the Coast Guard to fire on vehicles now, ramming and sinking Vietnamese vehicles, the threats to Taiwan, massive cyber attacks against our medical research facilities in the midst of the pandemic. Obviously I could go on about this. So what I try to say is, hey, it's not a choice between Washington and Beijing. It's a choice between sovereignty and servitude, right? And I think that positive vision, you know, of a free and open Indo-Pacific is the best counter. I mean, you don't even need to mention the word China. Let's work together on our positive vision. Thanks. Sir, I'd like to take a question from the chat next. Lieutenant Redder from the Naval Postgraduate School asks, does this strategic narcissism that you bring up often stem from the Klaus-Witzean principle of inadvertently framing an opponent's thinking within one's own frameworks? And if so, how is this avoided? Yeah, okay. So, you know, I think it's really important to obviously, you know, obviously focus on the perspective of the other. And, you know, I think Klaus-Witze would agree with that. You know, I think Sun Tzu certainly would agree with it, right? With, you know, who made that observation, you know, over 2,000 years ago, right? So this is like, this is not a new thing that I'm coming up with, right? In basic courses, we all know as military officers, the first thing you do is paragraph 1A, you know, the enemy and to think really about the tactical problem you're facing from the perspective of the enemy. So I think the best antidote is really to recognize that what we decide to do, you know, isn't gonna happen in the way that we envision it probably because any form of competition is inherently interactive. You know, whether you're on the rugby pitch, you know, or whether you are in a war situation or in a diplomatic situation, right? Where you're competing for influence and trying to advance your interests, you know, well below the threshold of any kind of military response. So, you know, this is where I think the competency of negotiation and mediation really fits in, right? I mean, I think, you know, the idea of mapping interests, right, of separating relationships from, you know, the negotiation itself, understanding what the best alternative for a negotiated agreement is of the other, right? Doing kind of the worksheet that, you know, Roger Shapiro and other of these founders, I think of this really well-developed now, you know, a body of negotiation and mediation theory called current perceived needs to understand how the other views whatever, you know, this negotiation is. So I think all of these are exercises of strategic empathy and we just have to all put those top of mind, right? And we have to apply design thinking and frame, you know, challenges we're facing before we leap to action. You know, we always want to do something, right? As I think as Americans, we tend to act a bit capriciously and we also tend to assume that there are short-term solutions to long-term problems. Well, if it's a long-term problem, you need a long-term solution. Thank you, sir. And for the next question, UC Berkeley alumni from the class of 2020, Hunter Hall asks, what are your thoughts on the creation of the US Space Force? Hey, you know, I was skeptical about it at first. You know, I thought, hey, well, you know, I, you know, there are three ways I think fun about ways to effect change in organizations, right? When you need really a significant change. One way is to just change information flow. I mean, a lot of times organizations can get more effective just by sharing information more effectively. You also often hear the term, you know, you know, networked organization or a matrixed organization. Well, the problem a lot of times those matrixed organizations are a bunch of different entities that are working at counter purposes. So information and making sure everybody has a common vision of what you're trying to achieve and a common concept about how you're gonna work together to achieve it. The second way is authorities, right? A lot of times people who are in the best position to really get after a problem or take advantage of an opportunity, they don't have the authority to do it. So, hey, just give me authority to do it. That's another way to effect organizational change. And then finally, you can reorganize. But I'm telling you, the most painful of all three of those is reorganization, right? Because it involves rice bowls. And I mean, bureaucratic infighting, you know, it was a sad day, you know, when the Army Air Corps left the Army and became the Air Force, I believe me. So, you know, I think that, you know, that I was skeptic about it, but hey, now that we've done it, hey, I think it was the right move to do. And because space for so long, we assumed, okay, we're gonna try to keep it benign, right? We don't want military competition space. We don't want that. So again, this narcissistic view, well, if we don't want it, I mean, I guess other people won't want it either. Well, they did want it to be competitive. They being China and Russia in particular, because they saw space as being one of our greatest competitive advantages. And so, I think what Space Force has done, especially with the leadership it has in place, I mean, they're great leaders there. I mean, the officer who wrote the space strategy for the Trump administration, which is a real strategy, the Class 5 one, it's really good and it's actually resourced and it integrates public and private sector space efforts in a way never before in terms of gaining visibility of what's going on in the private sector, how that relates to national security and how national security and national type developments affect the commercial sector and help us be competitive. So it's a really well done strategy. His name is Lieutenant General Bill LaCaurie. If you're ever looking for somebody to talk with you across UC system on space, he's the greatest and has done a really fine job. So anyway, I'm sorry, I went on long about it, but I think it's the right move. I didn't initially, I changed my mind. Sir, our next question is from Rear Admiral Dan McKinney, retired at UC Berkeley alumni from the class of 1969. Admiral McKinney asks, the Biden administration appears to be considering rejoining the Iranian nuclear deal. Do you believe that the Iranians are willing to constrain their missile development programs or the Republican Guard Corps malign activities to reach an agreement? The answer is no. This is where, so I would say, I would give the Biden administration like an A, you know, on China strategy, you know, but if I were grading their Iran strategy, I would have to give a much lower grade. Let's just say that, right? And the reason is that I think that members of the administration apparently are still laboring under the self-delusion that we can change Iran. You know, we can change the nature of the regime such that it ceases its permanent hostility to the great Satan, the United States, you know, the little Satan, Israel, and the Arab monarchies. And we undervalue, and I write about this extensively in Battlegrounds, we undervalue really two fundamental aspects of our relationship with Iran that we have to consider. And when we fail to consider it, we wind up with poor policy. And the first of these is to understand the ideology that drives the regime. And it is the ideology of the revolution. And I think it's a brief interview that was just leaked a couple of weeks ago, Lowell, that shows you the power of investigative journalism, right? To be able to get that out. This is when the foreign minister just said, hey, I'm the shop window for the regime. The real power is the supreme leader and the RGC. And those are the true believers in the revolution and an ideology that is permanently hostile to us. And the second, I think, element of the relationship we have taken place is, hey, they have been waging a four decade long proxy war against us. And we have to take what we're doing today in context and learn from what we've done in the past. And what I write about in Battlegrounds is that across multiple administrations, beginning with the Carter administration, continuing in the Reagan administration, continuing the George H. W. Bush administration and the Clinton administration and in the Obama administration, there was a general approach of conciliation at times during those administrations toward the Iranians under the belief that that would change the nature of the regime and ameliorate, reduce their hostility and so forth. It didn't work. It didn't work because well, at times, there have been struggles internal to Iran between the revolutionaries and the Republicans or the hardliners and the reformers. Hey, the revolutionaries want, they want. And they're in charge. And they're in charge of the RGC. They're in charge of the besiege. They're in charge of the biggest companies in Iran. They're the beneficial owners of the biggest companies. And so I think that this is a policy that's not going to succeed. It's a policy that's not going to succeed mainly because of Iran. Now, we're talking about resurrecting the Iran nuclear deal. Hey, it's dead. It's actually dead already. No matter how many times you apply the paddles to that thing, it's not going to come back. And the reason it's not going to come back is that Iran is already violating it and the sunset clauses are about to kick in 2025. So I think what Secretary Blinken has said has been most encouraging. What he said, hey, listen, a new deal has got to take into consideration the flaws of the first one, right? The sunset clauses, missiles not being included, the really poor verification regime. Remember before the ink was dry on the thing, the Iranians were saying to the administration, hey, here are all the places you can't come visit to verify compliance. And then finally, of course, as you mentioned, as the admiral mentioned, it's also addressing this destructive behavior in the region as Iran is, I would say, the principal cause of the humanitarian catastrophe across the greater Middle East. There are others responsible as well, but Iran is the principal cause of that humanitarian catastrophe. And so, I'd say it's dead. I think that it's not coming back. And the sooner we reconcile ourselves at the better. The other reason it's not coming back too is that the Iranian government is likely to move even further to the revolutionary side with this next election. Remember in Iran, this is the appearance of an election because the only people who get to run are those who aren't gonna question the theocratic dictatorship and if we lay out all the key or rule of the George Prudin and are gonna essentially be with the program from the beginning. And the president that gets elected will be elected for the next eight years. They're gonna want somebody in there that at the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Hamanay dies, that that president is on the side of putting in a revolutionary as the next Supreme Leader as well and maintaining the theocratic dictatorship as it exists. So, and also Iran is not as isolated as they were during the initial negotiations of the Iran nuclear deal. China is buying about a million barrels of oil from them a day now. So anyway, resurrecting the deal I think is not gonna happen. That's my prediction anyway. And I think that I hope that the bottom station revises its approach to Iran. What I would do is try to force them to make a choice. The chapter in the book is called forcing a choice, right? Hey, you can't have it both ways anymore, right? You can't, I mean, you can't be treated like you're a normal nation. You know, when you are funding proxy or armies and terrorist organizations, you know, across the great, the greater Middle East and attacking us frequently through those proxies, right? I mean, you can't either you stop that or you suffer the consequences of diplomatic and economic isolation. Sir, for our last question, I'd like to go to Aviv Rosenzweig, UC Berkeley alumni from the class of 1989 who points out that the enemy is relatively easy to determine and to tank battle like 73 Easting, but going forward cyber encounters are much less clear. So how do we counter cyber and disinformation attacks? Yeah. Hey, I, I, I read about this a lot in the book and I don't have the answer to it in there, but I think I have parts of the answer. You know, I think that the most important aspect of protecting ourselves against cyber-enabled information warfare is what all of you are all about and that's education. And I think that, that it's education that makes us less susceptible to cyber-enabled information warfare against us. I think, you know, and Lowell Bergman, I hope will be sympathetic to this. I think we need some reform within the fourth estate. You know, I think that, that our information environment, the way we receive, you know, news and trying to understand the world is fundamentally flawed. I mean, I think that, you know, it's, it's a real travesty that if to work for the New York Times, you have to adhere to a certain orthodoxy. I would recommend Barry Weiss' letter on departing the New York Times as, as the best window into, into, into how negative that is. Then also why is it that if you lean one way politically, you watch one cable news station. If you lean the other way politically, you watch one of other two cable news stations. I think if we're not coming together, you know, with at least kind of a common grounding in basic, you know, information, then we're, we're at a disadvantage in connection with, with, with, with cyber-enabled information warfare. Now, compound that by the pseudo media, you know, and these other organizations that peddle these kind of crazy conspiracy theories, but have the veneer of legitimacy because they look like a media organization. And then add on top of that, social media and the fact that the average of these companies has, has them adopting a model to get more and more advertising dollars based on more and more clicks. And the way you do that is you show people more and more extreme information and images and data, you know, so that they'll get, you'll get more clicks as you drive people further away from each other. Right? So these are all aspects of the problem we have to get at. And then of course we have other, other cyber threats that involve cyber crimes, cyber espionage and, and offense of cyber threats to infrastructure and data and so forth. Which required, you know, different remedies. But in cyber-enabled information warfare, I mean, I kind of just come down on education's got to be number one. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, I really hope that the main, the main, you know, the main point that I made in the lecture is, hey, we all have a role in this, you know? We all, I mean, if somebody tells you, hey, you can't empathize with somebody because they're in a different identity category than you. We have to say, come on, that's crazy, man. We do have a common humanity, right? We do have souls and hearts and we can empathize with one another and come together, you know, not only across, you know, America, but across the world, you know? So one of the things that I found is in my many years in places like Afghanistan and Iraq is that we have much more in common across our cultures than we have differences. Of course we want to be sensitive to and respectful of those cultural differences. But hey, how about, you know, how about, you know, a few cheers for common humanity? And working together, you know, across those categories. Thank you, sir. And at this point, I'd like to turn the discussion back over to Captain Petzl for closing remarks. All right, I'd like to just say in conclusion, I even, I like political scientists even. No, okay, so I don't, I mean, I really, I mean, I mean, I think we should all not over-categorize ourselves. Well, General, thank you for your time today, especially since we were unable to offer you chicken beef or vegetable. You've certainly given us all a lot to think about. And a special thanks to our live panelists for being here today. And certainly thanks to all of you who attended today. It looks like there were over a hundred of you and that was fantastic. And we greatly appreciate your support. And we hope to see you all next year. General, any last words for the group? No, hey, just thank you so much for the opportunity to be with all of you. Hey, it's just a special one to the graduates. Congratulations, it's a heck of a year to graduate, but hey, it's all uphill from here. And I am so confident in our younger generation. I'll tell you, I don't believe any of this nonsense about the younger generation, not wanting to serve and being selfish or, I mean, I am so impressed by the young men and women I get to meet on college campuses across the country. I'm so proud of all of you. And I'm so, I'm so anxious to see the great contributions you're gonna make to our nation and all humanity. Thanks for the privilege of being with all of you. Well, again, thank you, General McMaster, for all of that and thank all of you for attending. Have a great evening.