 Welcome everybody, thank you for coming to this book discussion with Jim Shudeau, the chief national security correspondent of CNN, also the host of CNN newsroom, the author of other books, including Recently Shattered War, which kind of outlined the kind of various ways in which the United States is grappling with the rising power of China and Russia. This to his work at CNN and relevant to this discussion, Jim had served as chief of staff in the U.S. Embassy in China for then ambassador Gary Locke and also has reported from various wars around the Middle East for many, many years and his new book is Mammon Theory, Trump Takes on the World. I'm going to turn it over to Jim to kind of make some opening observations about the book and then we'll have a discussion and we'll open it up to your questions as well. So over to you, Jim. Thank you, Peter. You know, clearly the only book people in Washington are talking about right now. No, no, I do. First of all, thank you for the invitation. Thanks to all of you for taking time out of this rainy Washington day to discuss this. Just a little bit about how I came to write this and what the big picture message is here. So what is the madman theory? Students of history, all of us here, even amateur ones like myself will remember Nixon's madman theory, which is a starting point for the book where I talk about how President Nixon owned this theory. Really, really, he believed it to be a powerful weapon for the head of state. He very deliberately instructed his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, to communicate to North Vietnam and the depths of the Vietnam War that he was just mad enough to nuke them to try to gain advantage in those negotiations to end the war. He did their White House discussions of those communications between Kissinger and Nixon and Kissinger went to North Vietnam and delivered that threat. It didn't work, right? We know how those negotiations worked out and how that war ended. But Nixon, H.R. Haldeman and his memoirs proudly owned it as a useful weapon based in part on Nixon's misunderstanding, according to Tim Naftali, of how and if Eisenhower used a similar threat to gain advantage in the Korean War. So 50 years later, we have a very different president who, in my theory, has his own version of the madman theory. He's never articulated as such, but you've certainly heard him, both as a private citizen and as a president, claimed to know just what it's going to take to get either adversaries or allies to do what he wants. And that includes perhaps an art of the deal version of this, right? Coming in at the end of negotiations with a surprising concession or surprising demand, wielding a big stick in those confrontations, even with allies, whether it be steel tariffs against Canada or threatening to withdraw troops from the Korean Peninsula against South Korea or threatening and then, well, bottling through on withdrawing troops from Germany in the midst of tense relationship with Germany, but also, of course, the way tariffs were used and continued to be used in the standoff with China. What's different about Trump's madman theory, in my view, is that he is just as likely to apply it to an ally as an adversary. And we saw in these continuing disputes with Mexico and Canada, with NATO, with South Korea, to our Syrian Kurdish allies in the war in Syria, as he was to apply them, say, to a China or to an Iran or North Korea at the depths of that standoff in late 2017. But add to his list of targets for this unpredictable seat of the pants foreign policy, with a lot of threats thrown in a lot of different directions, his own staff. And that's the other thing that you hear recounted in this book by many of his own senior advisors, is that this is a president who unleashed his madman theory on his own advisors, his own cabinet secretaries, surprising them with decisions and moves that not only were inconsistent with U.S. stated strategies, but his own administrations, national defense strategy, and other stated plans. For instance, as I tell in the book, withdrawing from Syria twice by tweet, and other threats that he issued against the advice offered by his senior most advisors. So that's the difference about Trump's approach to an unpredictable threat infused foreign policy, is that he often uses it against our friends as well as our foes, and keeps his staff and advisors just as off balance as he does adversaries. Of course, the one exception to his madman theory in terms of adversaries, right, I talk about this a lot in the book, one of the most consistent features of his foreign policy is a consistent deference to Russia and unwillingness to threaten or call out even some of Russia's worst behavior, which we saw most recently with the poisoning of Navalny that President still has not called it out personally. And if you saw his answer last week to that question, lots of diversion to others, but no attention or answer to that essential question. That's the big picture theory. A couple of other notes about the book before I go to Peter's incisive questioning is that one, for the book, I spoke only to people who serve this precedent at senior most levels. I didn't go to a bunch of formers, although some are former Trump administration officials, but I focused on people who had first hand experience of the president's decision making and thinking on this. And for that, folks who you would put in the category of critics of his approach, say Joseph Yan or even an HR McMaster, but others who you would still consider and some still in the administration, like Peter Navarro or Steve Bannon, very much defenders of his approach. So that's one thing. I spoke only to them. And the other thing I try to do in this book in the final chapter is not to leave this just to folks' opinions, but try to establish some hard measures, metrics to judge where Trump's madmen theory has left us in each of these fields of play. North Korea, Russia, China, Iran, Syria, four years later, what he inherited and what he has left in return. North Korea being one example, yet a year of fire and fury, three years of bromance, and North Korea has more, not fewer nuclear weapons. Iran is closer to, not further from the breakout point for a nuclear weapon. Russia is more, not less aggressive in a whole host of fields of play, including election interference. So by those measures, you get a sense of what worked and what didn't work. So that's a big picture. Look at it. I appreciate you all taking the time. And I look forward to your hard questions. Yeah, one thing that's sort of striking about the book is something you allude to, Jim, which is, you know, you have a lot of on-the-record, clearly on-the-record discussion from Steve Bannon, from HR McMaster, from Sue Gordon, who is the number two for Dan Coates, Joseph Yun, you mentioned Yun, Peter Navarro, Fiona Hill, Mick Mulroy, who is a character that I've not really ever actually heard of. So usually these kinds of books rely on people not going on the record. So walk us through the process a bit. Also, you're a busy guy with a busy day job, and three kids, and wife, and, you know, you've got a lot going on in your life. So how did you, and you also wrote another book recently. So how did you do the book, and what was the process, and what led you to get these folks to speak on the record? Well, first on the sources. So what I found is that many folks who serve in this administration want to speak on the record, and obviously it's easier to take swipes from behind anonymous sources. And I'm one person who doesn't find anonymous sources by, you know, by definition to be a bad thing, because there are certain things that folks can't speak about, right? And it may, when you're able to speak to multiple people, give you a vision of something. But on this one, I lean strongly in favor of on the record sources, just so that folks were backing up their point of view. And I found that people consider this moment in time serious enough. And this administration's approach different enough. And in the view of some dangerous enough, right, that they're willing to put a name to it. So that was one phenomenon, which I think is, is notable, right? And we're seeing more and more of that as we get closer to the election, even in that other guy's book, that just came out. So that was a process, just a brief note about Mick Mulroy, just as to who he is. So he was, he ended up being a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Defense Department under Mattis, his guy for the Midead. So oversight of Syria, Iran, other issues there, you know, front row seat to some of these most consequential decisions, particularly during the Iran and Syria standoffs. And I had interactions with him going back to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when he was, so he had the advantage, not only being a DOD guy, but he was CIA and former Marine. So had firsthand experience, you know, he was on the battlefield with the Kurdish forces, you know, against ISIS. And prior, we actually ended up being embedded him as a CIA op and me as a plain old journalist with the same Green Beret unit that went into northern Iraq during the invasion and then allied with the Kurdish-Peshamerican forces there. So long history there overlapping, just a quick note on him. How did I write this book? I mean, listen, after the shadow war came out, sort of, that was May last year, later that summer, my editor at Harper said, hey, listen, you know, no one's yet really written a broad overview of Trump's foreign policy, America first and what it means and how it played out. Would you want to do that? And I said, absolutely. And they said, problem is I need them before the election. So that means I need the manuscript by like January. And first thing I did is I asked my wife and thankfully, like you, Peter, I have a patient wife and like me felt, and she's also a journalist, like me felt this is an important project. So just squeezed out the time. And it also helped that people were willing to speak to me on the record. And with those kinds of accounts, it just made it easier to get it out. But it took a lot of hard deadlines, right? Like this month, 15,000 words a month, something along that kind of, that kind of pace. And now I'm going to take a break for a little bit. You deserve one. You know, well, I'm, you know, I read the book and found it very interesting. And I think it is an attempt to be as far as possible with somebody who elicits a lot of, you know, strong emotion. But I, as I read your kind of the kind of final reckoning at the end, it seemed to me that overall, and you alluded a little bit already, but like, if we had to march through the big issues, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Middle East, you know, I, I didn't, I didn't take away from your conclusion that there was much advancement on any of these fronts and, and probably some quite the reverse, although you're, you know, you certainly credit them on ISIS. And so let's start, the negative case I think is pretty easy to make on some levels. What's the positive case? So as you know, I spent a lot of time in China going back 25 years. And I've been someone who's thought, you know, standing up to Chinese malign activities and a whole host of spheres, including the trade sphere was long overdue. And I wrote about that some in the shadow war. So the simple act of standing up definitively and challenging a lot of these behaviors, I think, you know, deserves praise, right? So then the question becomes, what have you accomplished with that? I mean, where we find ourselves is actually, you know, that the final word on this remains to be written because we're in the midst of an escalating standoff with China with no clear end game. And this is another criticism of Trump's madman theory, right, is that by the accounts of his own advisors, rarely have ever connected to a broader strategy, very seat of the pants, no hard measures about what I'm seeking in this particular moment in time, except, you know, with China standoff now, just to stand up to them more and more and more and pump it up as you get closer to an election, which has a whole host of dangers, right? In terms of, you know, because they've got ways to escalate to which they are doing. And if you look at it hard measures, yes, they've been stood up to have their trade practices improved, not clearly. By the way, they've nabbed Hong Kong in the midst of this, right? I mean, violated an agreement with the British, and that's a sad, I lived in Hong Kong for five years, that's a sad event. And there's a lot of nervousness about Taiwan, I'm sure you hear that from your own context. So, you know, China to stand up, yes, the end result of that, we're not clear where that's going to lead us, you know, and on the other things as you mentioned, it's just not easy to cite the positive progress. I mean, UAE, Israel, peace is good news for sure. Where does it bring Israel, Palestine? Okay, well, let's, I mean, obviously that happened after you finished your book. But how would you score that in the kind of grand scheme of things where you have, you know, Egypt, Israel, peace, Jimmy Carter, you know, Oslo, which didn't really, I mean, how does it, it's not insignificant, surely, right? But on the other hand, it's not transformative. It depends on what you consider the primary crisis in the Middle East, right? You know, Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, and that was to head off another war between Egypt and Israel. This one, not clear what war heads up, but, you know, maybe it leads to better relations with the Gulf states who kind of thrown their lot in. It's been an adjustment, right? I mean, by the way, who gets lost in all of this if you care fundamentally about fairness for the Palestinian people that has moved not forward at all, it's moved backward, right? It's moved backward during this time period and, you know, open talk at the end of the two-state solution, which of course predated Trump, but I mean, you could say has been further ingrained. So it's a step. You know, I'd have to peer a bigger case as to how it dramatically changes the dynamic in that region, although it might presage just a different, right, like a realignment that we've talked about a little bit, you know, Gulf states with Israel and, you know, all this talk about, you know, Arab unity with the Palestinians not panning out. So you give Trump his, well, actually, let me back up to something you talk about strategy. So I think you quote Mick Moro in the book saying it wasn't clear that Trump had actually read the national defense strategy or the national security strategy. I mean, I think it's an open and shut case that he didn't. His documents are quite long. I talk about in the book about how he did not read his intelligence briefing material, and I tell the story about how H.R. McMaster and his team, knowing that, boiled down his security briefings to three bullet points on a note card. And then they discovered he was not reading all three bullet points on a note card. So they tried to concentrate all the relevant information into two of three bullet points. And third one became sort of a throwaway line. And then they came to realize it wasn't even reading those. So he's, you know, that's a pretty consistent telling of how this president processes information. So he almost certainly didn't read these big documents, but on the China question, you know, when historians write the history of the Trump administration, would you conclude that, you know, kind of in the big picture, he got it right, even if on the tactics around trade that, you know, that it was kind of, that the tactics themselves may not be that smart. And leaving aside the whole COVID question for a minute. It depends on what your goal is, right? If your goal, and folks like Peter Navarro speak openly about this, if your goal is decoupling and chasing the supply train out of, supply train out of China, if that's your goal, then he set us on that path, right? There are a whole host of dangers that come with us, right? It's funny, when I was in China with Ambassador Locke, I remember sort of in every speech, there was a line about how, you know, the U.S. and China have, I forget, it was either a thousand times or 10,000 times, but in order of magnitude bigger, the trade that the U.S. and the Soviet Union had. And that was a way to kind of keep you tied in a way that you have mutual interests. As that disappears, then these other issues that pull you apart become easier to pull you apart, you know. Is America, is the world ready for that? You know, a decoupled relationship that is purely adversarial? That is a whole host of consequences and dangers, right? Then starts making you think Thucydides trap, right? You know, that you're headed down that path. So it depends on what you go on. The thing is, it's not clear that the President has a goal, right? Or a way, he imagines in all these interactions that he can dial it back and forth at his whim and just perfectly get it to kind of go in his direction or, you know, pull us back from the precipice just in time. I mean, the North Korea thing is interesting. And this is a place where Woodward and my accounts line up. I mean, I talk about my book, how in the depths of the North Korea standoff in late 2017, his own senior military officials were withholding military options from the President because they were concerned he was going to take us to war. Woodward talks about Mattis, you know, going to the National Cathedral to say prayers and sleeping in his uniform because he was worried about that very prospect. And yeah, dialed it back just in time. You know, did he have a good sense of, you know, was it brilliant calculation or luck that kept us from going to war at that point? That's the, that's an open question. Well, some of these instincts are, you know, we say dial it back, are you talking about North Korea or Iran? Well, I was talking about North Korea there too. But also, you know, also you can make the same pattern for Iran, you know, after post-Kasim Soleimani. And we've had the announcement in the last 24 hours of reduction of troops in Iraq to 3,000 and reduction, I think to like 4,500 in Afghanistan. So, I mean, in many ways, this is very similar to the Obama-Biden team, right? A pullout from Iraq at the end of 2011, much discussion in the Obama team about pulling out of Afghanistan in the end. It didn't happen, but there was certainly a desire to go to zero. So, you know, one of the unexpected, well, perhaps unexpected for their supporters or their critics is the similarities between Obama and Trump on this issue. Yeah. Yeah, people forget it, right? I mean, you know, and Trump has a number in mind, right? I mean, he wanted to be below Obama's numbers at election time. And that's what we're seeing, right? I mean, this is the thing about Trump always, almost always transparent on this kind of stuff. What's troubling about that, right, is that, you know, Trump and Republicans excoriated Obama for pulling out of Iraq so quickly, and rightfully so, right? Because you could draw a straight line between that and the resurgence of ISIS, the rise of ISIS, you know, for the political calendar, again, risking the same thing. By the way, I don't know how you, you and your wife know Afghanistan far better than me, but when you look at, you know, the outlines of the peace deal, you know, this administration was willing to take in Afghanistan. I mean, it's, does that leave it, does that protect your ally there? Does it, does it leave it safer? You know, again, looking at this end, you know, clear priority keeping to this end, the endless wars campaign promise, regardless of the consequences, you know, seemingly on the ground. Well, on Afghanistan, he seems to have, there seems to be almost two policies. One is the kind of Zal Khalzad, let's do a deal and get out, which, and then there's the kind of, you know, the CIA, DOD thing, which is we need to retain some kind of counterterrorism policy. Seems that Trump has gone back and forth between those without coming, getting back to a larger point about strategy. It's like, it's hard to sometimes discern what, what the strategy is. Let me, let me turn to a couple of questions that have come in. One is about Bob Woodward's book, and it's from Dr. Mia Bloom, who's a near America fellow and an expert on counterterrorism. And she's asking kind of the hypothetical question, because Woodward is getting some criticism for kind of withholding the information he had. Early on about the disconnect between the president's public statements about the coronavirus and what he was saying privately. Is that a legitimate critique or? Well, listen, I, first of all, the primary, we're not even 24 hours, right? And I feel like the primary discussion is the commander in chief here, right? I mean, it's, he knew it and his public statements, but like that, right? Not just public statements, but also decision-making on it. And to this day, as I was talking about on our show this morning, the president's still downplaying the outbreak, right? It was a week ago, he shared this conspiracy theory about the death toll being overrated. I mean, you know, so being, being massively, you know, overstated. So he's still playing that game. And I think, you know, that, from my perspective, is a far bigger thing. I mean, listen, what, I suppose you could make that argument. I mean, is it on the scale of public servants who know this stuff still not coming out? I don't think so. I think that's a legitimate discussion. I mean, listen, Woodward wasn't called to testify in an impeachment inquiry, right? You know, do I put it in the same category as Bolton? You know, I don't. It's, I mean, what, you know, it's, I guess it's a, it's a sort of, it's almost a university debate, right? Because what is the, if you're a journalist and you're reporting out a story and it's a big picture story, right? You're trying to connect all the dots and you get a, you get a line of information here that's part of that bigger fabric. Do you put that line of information out before you have the other bigger fabric? I don't know. I think it's a debate. How do you come down on that? I'm curious. Well, look, at the end of the day, commander in chief is a commander in chief. What can Bob Woodward has no ability to actually operationalize any responses? So, I mean, but I, you know, just to go back to your book here on, because I think you wrote, there was some news that kind of came out and you, which you reacted to on CNN, CNN.com, before your book was published, we read it around kind of a very interesting thing that the book does discuss in some detail, which is the way in which the intelligence community would deal with the fact that Trump really didn't want to hear anything about Russia. So tell, tell the audience a little bit about, about that. Yeah, there was. And I'm glad you brought that up. I almost forgot. But like a month or two, even before the book came out, what was happening then that was, it was, it was, I think it was the whole question of the Russian bounty thing. Yes, it was Russian bounties and whether the president had been briefed about the Russian bounties. And I called up my boss and I said, listen, you know, as I watch this story, it's very familiar to something I was told from my book called Jeff Zucker, my boss. And I said, I think we should report this now. So you're right. I mean, I, I jumped, I jumped the gun on the book because I thought that the reporting was relevant to the discussion at the time. And that particular story was this. And that is that Trump's intelligence briefers at the highest level very early on discovered that the president blew up their description when they brought up any intelligence about Russia, any sort of Russia threat, whatever it was, election interference, messing around in Ukraine just blew up, didn't want to hear it, attacked them, said, what do they really know? It was clearly a sensitive point to him. And their reaction over time was to brief him less on Russia threats. Sounds crazy. Either way, and I pressed them. I said, are you kidding me? You brief them less on threats? Just, you know, what's your job? And they said, well, listen, we have to maintain this conduit of information with commander in chief. So we really had to pick our battles here and brief him when it was a sort of 10 level threat as opposed to a three level threat, you know, so that you weren't kind of burning, you know, your ammunition or whatever the, you know, the metaphor is there. That was their explanation for it. And it struck me as, first of all, in light of the broader, his broader approach to and attitude towards Russia, but in light of that. So yeah, I guess, I guess journalists sometimes do. I almost forgot about Peter Bergen. So I'm right. He's wrong. Buy my book. A question from Faribor's Fatimi. So what did the Mab and theory achieve with Iran, except they make everything more dangerous in this area? And the UAE relations had been going on for decades and that kind of changes nothing. I guess the UAE and Israel had to have this sort of below the table kind of relationship. The Obama-Biden administration, you know, Iran's most important. So they worked hard to make an opening with this nuclear agreement. Listen, the Iran policy is a failure on that front by the definition. The goal, the goal of the president was to get a better deal. He doesn't have a better deal. He has no deal. And therefore, the security situation is weaker. And they are closer to a nuclear bomb. They have what, 10 times? I mean, Pompeo tweeted it the other day, they have 10 times the highly enriched uranium limit that they had under the agreement, which US intelligence assessed Iran was abiding by. Just to clarify, Jim, so my understanding is it was like 4% that they could enrich and they've gone up to 5% or more. But what was Pompeo getting at? I mean, well, Pompeo is getting at that now they are violating the treaty. But they're violating it in a way that 90% is what you need for the bomb. They haven't gotten to a bomb, but they have passed the limits contained in that agreement and therefore they're closer to break out than they would have been. So if your goal was to get a better agreement, you haven't gotten it, right? And if your goal was to make Iran further away from a nuclear weapon, then closer, you've done the opposite, right? They're closer to a nuclear weapon. I mean, their essential argument going into this was the Obama agreement didn't cover enough and for long enough, right? That's a fair criticism. You could say. But the agreement was always just nukes and not other military aggression ballistic missiles in the region. That's what the agreement set out. So find and make that criticism, then what do you replace it with? Do you successfully rally your allies and China and Russia and Iran and pressure them successfully to sit down and negotiate a broader, more restrictive agreement? They didn't do that. In fact, China and Russia have never appeared interested. And now you have your own ally. You're at loggerheads with your own allies on enforcement of snapback sanctions. So I mean, remember early on in this, by their own standards, they have failed on the Iran policy. I recount this too. Esper started an Iran strategy group. Oh yeah. Well, by the way, that's the first time I'd heard about that. So tell us. Yeah, I was hoping that would make more news. But Esper started an Iran strategy group to assess the success or failure of the Trump administration strategy by these measures. And their conclusion was that it had failed. Tactically, it succeeded. It had caused Iran more economic pain, but strategically it had failed because Iran is closer, not further from a nuclear weapon. Iran is no less aggressive in its ballistic missile program and is arguably more aggressive in other kind of military activities around the region. So by those standards, it's failed. And Mick Mulroy makes the point who was involved in this Iran strategy group that you've also made it very difficult to negotiate the next agreement, whether it be with Iran or North Korea, because the last agreement your country negotiated, you pulled out of some some error. So what's your, what's your credibility to stick in the next one? Well, that goes to my next question, which is if let's say there is a Biden administration, obviously, somebody Tony Blinken and others that were involved in the Iran deal under Obama would presumably have pretty large and important roles in a future Biden administration. If they try and resuscitate the deal, I mean, presumably Iranian moderates already moderates quote unquote, already had to make quite a lot of concessions to the hardliners to get in the deal in the first place. Is there a universe in which the Iranians would even take a deal unless they had a guarantee of Senate ratification, which the last deal did not have? Yeah. Well, no, I mean, they they have their own domestic politics, right? And how do you win over the skeptics and kind of like, you know, shift the balance between the hardliners and the you know, the quote unquote moderates there? I don't know. I don't know. And what's the credibility? I mean, it raises a broader question about our pendulum swing politics in this country and how it affects broader national security issues, because just as we have a pendulum swing on domestic policy, you know, portable care acts, knock it all down, right? You know, tax policy, you know, you know, knock it all down. You have it arguably on what were kind of, you know, bipartisan issues in the international space, you know, Russia's a bad guy, you know, and we're going to stand up to them, the Iran nuclear deal. So, you know, are our deals or alliances, do they only have four year timelines? It's kind of an alarming thing to think about. I mean, NATO, and it's not me, it's Bolton, right, saying that NATO's 70 year old alliance, you know, might be gone in 56 days, you know, and if Biden wins, how confident are Germany and others, and by the way, how deterred is Russia, that that lifeline for NATO has any more than four years, you know, given the current back and forth. Yeah. Your book does not address this. So I, you know, if you don't want to address it, we have a question about Cuba, basically, kind of, you know, obviously, one of the changes was, you know, kind of essentially closing that door again with Cuba. Any thoughts on that or? Well, I did see the question because I saw whether it was carrying water for Putin. I tend to think that Cuba is more personal for Trump, that Trump, and his own advisors say this, that is so driven by personal animus for Barack Obama that anything that he built up, he wants to take down. And it's not to say that's the only reason, right, because he has other policy disagreements with him, but put on Obamacare, one on the Iran nuclear deal. I mean, even, Nobel Peace Prize. And there's also the small matter of the state of Florida. Yes. Well, there is for sure. No question. Absolutely. And that's why, remember, look at Venezuela, right? I mean, there's some Venezuelans in Florida. And the presidents, and I talk about this in the book, is like six months attention span for Venezuela, had political aspirations attached to it. And it's a great story of Venezuela there about how the president really believed he could just flip Venezuela in that moment. For a moment, Guaido could do it. And he seemed to be convinced by some of his advisors that it was doable. And the president was lightly throwing out the prospect of US military intervention, though it was never really serious. And then when it became clear, Maduro was strong, moved on to the next thing. We don't hear about that anymore. Guaido showed up at the State of the Union, but not as a serious contender to take over leadership there, more as a kind of like token, you know, with a political. Yes, we were talking about the positives. Clearly, Venezuela was in the kind of negative column, but at least from their point of view, because they didn't, Maduro, still in power. But so China, yes, big positive UAE, Israel, you know, kind of interesting development, ISIS, defeat geographically. What else would you put in the positive column? Well, he will put in there that we didn't go to war with North Korea, but that's one of those classic examples of ramping it up to, you know, he ramps it up to here. And granted, it was, it's not like God knows it was not hunky dory when he came into office. But in terms of the real precipice was late 2017. And again, like as I say, recounting the book, his own advisors were concerned, the president was tipping us over the precipice to war. So he dials back with diplomacy after that. And again, imagines that purely his personal relationship will fundamentally change North Korea's motivations there, which hasn't been the case. So, you know, that's it. It's not so much a victory as drawing yourself back from a from a grave mistake or escalation of that conflict. I'm open to suggestions for other successes in the international sphere. I don't see them. I mean, I talk in the epilogue about the pandemic as a another encapsulation and crystallization of his America first approach. And on that, you know, a failure and you see, you see so many elements of his way of doing things under his madman theory play out in the coronavirus pandemic. And I kind of lay it out in the in the in the epilogue, minimize the crisis. I got this. It's not as big a deal as you think, politicize it. Anybody who doesn't agree with my approach is a never Trump or Democrat, Marxist, whatever, and politicize even the facts, right, in the numbers, which he's still doing demonize the experts. You've heard his attacks on Fauci and others and rarely strategize, right, that it's sort of like a what suits me in the moment, you know, diverted to the states, you know, that kind of thing. And we're, you know, we're paying the effects of that right now. Yeah, I thought that was a particularly strong section of the book where you kind of unpack this kind of set away to usually deals with big problems, you know, hyper personalization, forgot that one, all the experts. I mean, it's a very good kind of laundry list. We have a question from Doug Oliver, who was the former NSC director for Iraq under George W. Bush, and also spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and also as a New America fellow. And Doug, how's it going? Doug asks, doesn't this administration feature to quote two policies on almost every foreign policy issue? Peter Brown talked about Afghanistan, but on China, we have an emerging decoupling competing against the more traditional Mnuchin view on Russia. We have Fiona Hill versus more forgiving on Iraq policy with a country with a post 2003 policy versus policy sees Iraq as part of Iran policy on NATO president versus the Pentagon. Is there any foreign policy on which this administration speaks on it? No, really. I mean, and I'm with you, Doug. It's it's exactly that. I mean, you have, I mean, McMaster talks about this a lot in the book. He's like, we did all the meetings. We had the national defense strategies. We had the plans, et cetera. But Trump would upend them, right? And, you know, which one really matters, right? Is it the one? Is it the written one? Or is it the one as it plays out? I mean, when you look at a Russia, for instance, does Russia is Russia deterred by a statement from the National Security Council spokesperson on the balcony? Or the president saying something definitive about it, right? I mean, the NSC spokesperson in a tweet, you know, followed, you know, our, you know, US principles and history and all that kind of stuff. But the president said, what does Russia say? They say, well, we could probably get away with the next one, you know, you know, on, you know, Canada, there's a section in Canada on the book. And this made a lot of news in Canada about a week and a half ago, Navarro dismissing the US alliance with Canada. And it's just a remarkable back and forth that we're really asking to read it because I was, you know, dumbfounded as I'm listening to him because, because I said, listen, you're, you know, you're applying the same cudgel to Canada that you are to China on trade and so on. And I, and I said, yeah, well, you know, they didn't treat us well on trade. And I was like, well, okay, you have disagreements over steel and dairy. But I mean, Canada is an ally. It's like, are they really? I said, yeah, I mean, Normandy to Afghanistan, you know, there and I was like, really, did they really fight those wars to help us? Or themselves? I was like, well, they bled a lot on those battlefields. I mean, there are, you know, they invoked the NATO charter after 9 11 read the exchange because it was immovable on that, right? So you can hear and in the wake of that, you had US ambassador to Canada release statements, all that kind of stuff. But who's Canada listen to? Unless that guy or Trump and Navarro, right? It's a, now you do have areas where those policies come into conflict, right? I mean, like today, you see dear cash, you know, Treasury Department is sanctioning him as a known Russian intelligence agent. Meanwhile, Giuliani was meeting with them getting dirt on Biden. And by the way, so was Ron Johnson until just like a few days ago, you know, so you have, you know, what rules a day? I don't know. I mean, I know that Putin, I mean, I ask folks in Intel all the time, how does Putin interpret this on all these levels? Or even the president's failure or refusal to warn Russia away from interfering in this election? Even if you get a statement from, I don't know, someone else, who does Putin listen? He listens to Trump. So which one of those wins out when you have these conflicts? And here's the other thing is when you talk to these guys in the book, and I'm sure you've heard similarly, in a second term, a lot of things that were half measures in the first term, they expect to become full measures in a second term, including, you know, up and leaving something like NATO. That answers the question. Question from Chris Fussell, also new American fellow, President of the McChrystal Group, former commander in the SEAL teams. Jim, what's your sense of how the administration has impacted our view of truth? You sense that Trump has undermined the concept of truth in a deliberate and intentional manner? Is he naturally unconcerned with provable facts and solely focused on outcomes, which allows him to manipulate the concept of truth at a much more strategic level, including our adversaries than Trump would ever have intended? Yeah. Hi, Chris, by the way. Thank you for the question. I think extremely deleterious. And one of the most, you know, demoralizing developments of the day. Didn't start entirely with Trump, but it's certainly accelerated. We don't have an accepted truth right now. And I know there are different ways of looking at a whole host of things, right? Be a party or news outlet looking at, I don't know, healthcare policy, who's responsible for the severity of the coronavirus outbreak, et cetera. But there shouldn't be two ways of looking at essential facts, right? How many dead people there are, right? Is Dirkash a Russian agent, you know? But there are, there are even on base. And is it right to take information from someone like that? Does that count as foreign election interference? You know, it's interesting. The Trump approach is very Soviet in that sense. And this is what the Intel folks tell me in that, you know, their strategy through the years is not always to convince you, right, but just to muddy the waters. Raise a question. What do we really know, you know, both sides? I mean, how often do you see that? Two ways of looking at whatever, even on stuff that either is a element of fact, you know, it's raining today. You know, these people died from coronavirus or something that used to be a generally agreed upon truth. Russia is a bad actor in the European space, right? It is, I don't know how we dial back from that. It's interesting. I, you know, I was watching when the Woodward stuff came out, and actually this Atlantic piece, and I know the Atlantic piece is, you know, probably more of an opening there because it was anonymous sources, but the Woodward, the Woodward stuff, here's the president's voice saying, I downplay it, right? Even as you play the tape, three seconds later of him saying, you know, you know, acknowledging that he knew how bad it was, and then saying, you know, it's no big deal. And I switched back and forth between the various competing networks, and I looked at some, you know, Twitter feeds and so on. Night and day, Venus and Mars, I mean, two totally different views of it. That's where we are, man. I don't know what pulls us back from that. You know, one in Trump's defense, we may not be able to point to like a ton of successes. Chip Pitts has chimed in to say USMCA is a Trump success. I don't know what your take on that is, but I think the general view is there isn't a huge difference between that and NAFTA, you know, it's kind of like sort of, I presume that's a reference to the Mexico-Canada trade agreement. But I mean, one thing that Trump has not done is to make some sort of huge foreign policy mistake like Iraq war 2003, or maybe, I mean, you know, his response to coronavirus may be a version of that in sense that sort of it's not really foreign policy, kind of more our own national security. But he hasn't made a major unforced error overseas, shall we say, let's say at the scale of the Iraq war, or even Lyndon Johnson sort of prolonging the Vietnam war. So is that kind of a form of success in some way? Well, it's interesting. I'll make the comparison in the book that there is some overlap between the Obama don't do dumb stupid you know, or stupid stuff that is cleaned up to and Trump in this sense, in that the grand ambitions, right, if you think 2003 invasion, rewriting the map of the Middle East, starting a tide in democracy or other, you know, grand American missions, I don't know, Vietnam war, right, that the two of them share a limited realistic, if you want to call it that, or just unambitious view of America's kind of change the world sort of role. Now, overlap, I'm not saying equivalency, right, because because Trump Trump is a, from his point of view, he views the world end of American acceptance, right, there is nothing special about America in the world. And he shares and Fyodor Hill talks about this in the book, because I asked everybody about explain his fascination with Russia Putin, and beyond some suspicions, which I did not report, because I wanted to just talk about what people knew or experienced. You know, the best answer they could come up with is that he shares a nihilistic view of the world with Putin. Zero-sum game, everybody's a dirty player in a dirty game, allies and adversaries, they're all seeking to take advantage. In an odd way, he looks at allies more skeptically than adversaries, because you expect your adversary to screw with you. The allies, we've been bankrolling in his view for years, they've been free-loading off of us, so they owe us more, so he's more skeptical and almost hostile to them. So he takes a limited ambition for the U.S. role in the world to a, we're no different, we're the same. And you saw that in his comments to Bill O'Reilly, right, going back to, well, Putin's a killer, are we that much better? Or even more recently, with these bounties and Russian arms sales to the Taliban, the president saying, well, we sold arms to the Taliban, it's all the same. There's no real difference in these players. So, yes, it did not start a horrible war in the Middle East, right? He did not like the, what's the line from a Princess Bride, you know, the first rule is never get involved in a land war in Asia, right? The second is, so he didn't do that. I would say, though, that we shouldn't, like on, you know, did not responding to the pandemic in a coordinated national way with all the recommendations that are pretty simple and consistent about testing and screening and so on, would not only have saved lives, but obviously, you know, probably limited economic damage to some degree. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't downplay that as a, as a major national security mistake, but yeah, not, we didn't go to war yet. Question from Alexander Stark, who's also near America and is sort of an expert on the question of proxy warfare in the Middle East. She says she's curious about the Madman theory framing when Thomas Shelling's version of this is a deliberate tactic used by an otherwise sane leader. But it doesn't seem like that Trump is doing any of this deliberately as much as, like you said, following his instincts. To what extent does the administration deliberately use Trump's indecisiveness as a tactic to their advantage versus, versus are they simply reacting to and trying to dial down his random statements and tweets? Yeah. No, listen, I mean, I, when I'm describing, I say he's madman by accident, right? You know, it's a, it's a, it's a execution of the madman theory by accident because he is just unpredictable. He makes his decisions in the moment and it's not part of a grand strategy, but he will still defend those moves because he knows better than everybody else, right? You know, like you look at, look at his two withdrawals from Syria in December, 2018 and October, 2019. No advanced discussion, even with his sort of coterie of, of informal advisors, etc. He just gets off the phone with Erdogan and says, I'm done with that place. Has he done the job? I asked his advisors that they described instances where he did learn on the job. They said that, for instance, when he did the quote unquote walk from the Hanoi summit with Kim and I was there, that that was an instance where he listened to his advisors and said, Kim has not given you anything here. You got to get out. He's not, you know, and they cite that as an example. So yes, they also say that he's learned at times, I don't know if you want to call them negative lessons, but he's reinforced his own confidence at times to give an example, the moving of the embassy in Israel that prior to that he was told by everybody in intel and elsewhere, you move that embassy, there's going to be months of rage in the Middle East. It's going to blow up terror threats, bombings, you know, hellfire, etc. didn't happen. And Susan Gordon tells it as the president came out of there saying, you guys know what you're talking about. And he sort of looked at the world coming out of there is like, what else can I do that you tell me is wrong? And I got right. And but similarly with the Taiwan phone call, like with the phone call from the Taiwanese president right after his victory, he took that, it was that you just upset the one China policy, it's all over. Oh, and the one China policy survives. And he's like, I know better than you guys. Somebody was chiming in saying that we keep referring to the Israel UAE deal as a good thing, which I think isn't kind of probably your view, Jim, or mine in a way that I think that in a sense, I mean, we understand it's not a good deal for the Palestinians. You know, for reason, how this is right is that Netanyahu played Trump on this right or Kushner, and that he held the prospect of annexation and what you may still be serious about, pulled back. That was his kind of concession there by pulling that back anyway. Do you see, I mean, UAE, speaking of UAE is pulled out of Yemen and they've have a downhill to this public deal with Israel. You know, can you, I mean, obviously we still have Mohammed bin Salman and the relationship with the Trump administration there, which you don't get into too much in the book. But how would you assess kind of just the, we've talked about Iran a fair amount, but like the relations with the Gulf and this big bad MBS and the extent to which that worked or didn't work? Well, it is, it's an instance of the end of human rights being part of U.S. foreign policy, right? It's under Trump. It's, and again, regardless of what the official papers say, Trump's own decisions show that it's not a priority or even an interest at all of his. I mean, you know, keep referencing the other guy's book, but you know, the part about, you know, Trump reveling in Kim's telling of murdering his uncle, you know, it's just remarkable. But there are instances like that across the board. It doesn't factor in. Again, this is, it's just a dirty game. We're all dirty players in a dirty playing game. You do what you got to do. So, you know, it remains to be seen what the U.S. has gotten out of this Saudi partnership definitively. I mean, you could say the same about Erdogan. What has the U.S. gotten out of Trump's gifting above our zone in Syria to Erdogan? They're still buying the missiles from the Russians, right? They're sticking their thumb in our eye in other instances. You know, there's a paper tiger element to Trump's toughness and his constant claims that these leaders respect him like no other president in history. I mean, Kim played it in North Korea, right? Putin is more or not less aggressive. So, where's the proof of, you know, the great realignment of U.S. relationships with these folks? Yeah, that I think is maybe the bottom line of a lot of this discussion, which is what is the, why this, as you put the Canadians and the Germans and the British at some points and the French, I mean, and, you know, complain about NATO, which matters publicly described as the most successful alliance in modern history. And then, you know, embrace Russia and really get not much for it and Kim and not get much for it. I mean, what that, it doesn't, you've mentioned this lack of strategy, but there really seems to be, it's hard to understand what the, what is the end game here with this approach? Yeah, I don't know. Political wins in the moment. Things he could characterize as wins, even when they're not wins. Things that enough 40% of the country will agree with and that his friendly allies on the Hill and right wing media will consider victories. You know, it's, it seems like there's such an emphasis on in the selling of it, right? There is an appetite, I mean, I do, I think there is a disconnect between sort of coastal elites and their desire to engage with the outside world. And so a lot of Americans think we should be less engaged. And of course, the United States has gone back between isolationism and interventionism, depending on the political circumstances. But so, I mean, just as we wind up here, sort of a final thought, I mean, to what extent, even if we agree that there is not a particularly coherent set of ideas here, necessarily, if they're in 2021 or 2025, depending on if there's a second Trump administration, will his brand of sort of American nationalism kind of continue to exist in the Republican Party or elsewhere? Is it, is it sort of, is there kind of a Trump doctrine that will outlive him? Well, again, you know, to your point, right, and I spent a lot of time on this in the first chapter talking to Bannon and Navarro, what are the politics behind America first? And they're understandable, right? And Bannon, in classic Bannon style, talks about the deplorables, and he's like, in his words, the deplorables always get fucked, his words. He said they got fucked by the trade agreements. And he said, then they had to send their kids to the wars in the Middle East. And he's like, you know, from their perspective, there's no grand mission there, right? They're tired of it. And I get that. And then, you know, even Navarro, Navarro, when, you know, we're talking about U.S. strategies and so on, he's like, ah, the Washington establishment, what have they gotten right? You know, the last 10 or 20 years, did they get it right on a rock? No, you know, did they, you know, going back to, you know, you could cite the mistake, you could cite, you could make an argument for things they got right, but you get it, you know, you get that that does not come from nowhere, right? And a lot of those are understandable critiques. And that's the politics at the root of this, the politics behind America first. We, you know, whether you want to call us coastal elites or just folks who think about the broader implications of this, you know, why is it important to stand up to Russia and to stand up for democratic values and the rule of law and all that kind of stuff? You know, we can make the case for that and believe it. McMaster talks in the book about how much trouble he had explaining to the president, the benefits of alliances. He's like, yeah, okay, those are the costs. But what about shared values? What about intelligence sharing on terrorism? You know, the president just didn't see it. It's very transactional. What did you give me in this moment? And those are the arguments you have to make to the American people, right? You know, it's not FDR struggled with, you know, explaining the relevance of war in Europe, right? Until Pearl Harbor, you know, it's not entirely new. I mean, I guess that's a thing about populism, right? I mean, there's truth, you know, at the root of populism. The thing is, then, what do you do with that? Jim? At the president calling? Yeah. Jim, we all want to thank you very much for the presentation. Good luck with the book tour. And thanks to everybody who participated. Jim, thank you. Thanks to everybody. I appreciate you taking the time and appreciate the question.