 Can you hear me in the back? Am I loud and clear? I'll try and keep you awake It's a great pleasure to come back to Newport and This great institution which is now entering as you know, it's 14th decade The likes of Stephen B. Loos Alfred Thayer Mahan William Sims the inner war years about which Chester Nimitz said the only thing we didn't think through about World War 2 with a kamikaze attacks then other presidents such as James Spruance Stan Turner and Medal of Honor winner Jim Stockdale my thesis today is that history is food for thought as Exercise and practice artists sports history is intellectual as food and as Exercise and practice artists sport Now if you were Bobby Jones, and you are natural you didn't like to practice things don't don't apply to him but for most people They do and I want to talk a little about history and context before I get to my book and talk about it in three parts first I want to ask you three questions, which I don't expect you to answer I will give three I think relevant historical examples, and then I will get into my book a Handful of bullets how the murder of Archduke France Ferdinand still menaces the piece but put it in a Current and contemporary setting so those of you are interested in history You may be a little bit bored, and I also will try to keep Admiral moral awake tonight He was at my lecture yesterday, and so I said I would entirely change it so Denny This is going to be entirely different to handicap myself in terms of Background I'm reminded of the story between Oliver Wendell Holmes Almost a hundred years ago who was then associate justice of the Supreme Court and William Howard Taft Who was president of the United States? Now you may not know that Taft and Holmes hated each other You also may not remember that Taft weighed nearly 320 pounds and One day when the associate justice was meant to introduce the president He said to his audience in a Gus group like yourselves Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our pregnant president Mr. Taft got up slowly Amble to the podium Turned to the audience and said I want to let you know that Mrs. Taft and I are aware of my condition We have decided that if it's a boy, we will call it after me If it's a girl, we will call it after Mrs. Taft But if as we both suspect it's nothing more than a bad case of gas, we will call it Oliver Wendell Holmes I want to ask you three questions, and I don't expect you to answer but take these home, please First why is America lost every war that it has started? beginning with Vietnam How was that happen? Why did we lose Afghanistan when we shifted from going after Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to nation building and more importantly Why have we actually lost Iraq after 2003 invasion, which in my mind is the greatest strategic blunder in our history? You just look at conditions in the Middle East and Persian Gulf today And they are our largely our doing had there not been an invasion So think about that. Why have we lost every war we have started? Second Why is it that the best armies, navies, air forces and Marine Corps in the world Can not defeat an adversary who lacks an army, navy, air force and a Marine Corps Why is that? Why is it that when an adversary who relies on other means at Clausewood's sighted We seem to be militarily at a loss think about that and Third when you think back about the three most recent presidents of the United States, and I say this as a fierce non-partisan Why have we elected presidents who are not ready for the job when they took office? Realizing that the presidency is very tough and as Jack Kennedy Said there is no school for presidents but why do we persist at least for the last 25 years to elect presidents who are not remotely ready for the job and Who take so much time to get into the job that great mistakes are made at every level three questions? Let me give you three examples of history, which I think are important first is Afghanistan in 2001 as you know We had a rather interesting battle plan Using the Northern Alliance, which was largely indigent indigenous forces to take on the Taliban and when the Taliban were routed by a combination of special forces B-52 and B-1 bombers and of course the Northern Alliance the first forces that we actually sent into the ground on the ground Was a Marine Corps? Brigade headed by then Brigadier General Jim Mattis who went on to be a four-star central command Commander among other things One of the most competent division commanders the Marine Corps ever had is marched to Baghdad leading the first Marine Division in 2003 is a tactical masterpiece Anyway, Jim went in and he got there and he said the Marines are here have no fear The commander's central Central command then was an army four-star general named Tommy Franks and I will say politely Tommy Franks is the only general in history our history who's lost two wars But Tommy heard this and became hugely offended Because we were going after bin Laden who is escaping to Torah Bora in the eastern part of pack of Afghanistan heading to Pakistan Now Jim who was one of the most serious Students of war and politics his lies personal library is over 5,000 books Knew about the Hindu Kush and Torah Bora, which was 12,000 feet above sea level and Jim decided that the best way to go after bin Laden Was to use the same plan the army used in 1876 to trap Geronimo in the high sea in the southwestern part of the United States He laid out this plan meticulously now what you may not know The most competent and prepared high altitude fighting force in the world is the US Marine Corps And the reason is that during the Cold War the Marines prepared to go to northern Norway to prepare to defend that flank Against the Soviets and in so doing every battalion would go through pickle meadows in California That's some 12,000 feet above sea level and for those of you who have never experienced altitude sickness It's something you don't want to have and you just can't go above 10,000 feet without training Tommy Franks and a bit of peak said no no no we're not going to let the Marines go in they've had enough credit I'm sending in the 10th Mountain Division The 10th Mountain Division is a very very competent force that trains at 600 feet at Fort Drum, New York And so when they went in to high altitude They were a disaster their helicopters weren't ready and they weren't fit and bin Laden got away but the point I'm making is Mattis with his historical background knew he would pick on Geronimo's capture at 1876 Point one point two You probably have heard about hybrid warfare. Is there anybody who hasn't heard about hybrid warfare where you combine all sorts of Propaganda and everything else besides military force All right, I'm going to give you a scenario and you can make a guess as to when this took place It's an Eastern European country Approximate to Russia The Russian leadership decided that it wants to take charge of this country So it sent in little green men in uniforms, but not uniforms that were Russian It applied a huge public relations propaganda campaign to try to scare the populace and it decided it would attack the Communications Center to control all communications in this country now most of you're saying aha, that's Ukraine No, it's not It's Estonia in 1924 and Lenin went in and Lenin used all these tactics and was roundly defeated in those days the center of communications was the telephone exchange. I Make this point because there's really nothing new about hybrid warfare Except we tend to say it's new Now The last example I will use is cyber warfare. You've all heard about cyber warfare I'm sure if you go back to World War one There was cyber warfare Room 40 in the British then Ministry of War were code breakers and one of the great rivalries between the Germans and the central powers and the Allies was getting control of Underwater telephone and telegraph lines So you would either pick them up and destroy them or you would intercept and monitor them and the Germans Indeed were so clever technologically in trench warfare. You all remember the World War one movies Trench warfare telephone lines would be strong using wire and the Germans had a technology then that did not have to tap Into the wire physically but could pick up these sound signals genius cyber and About cyber today and you hear all the vulnerabilities. We talk about the need for a Cyber Manhattan project Manhattan project as you know built the atom bomb for World War two but the big difference is that the Manhattan project had a simple operational thesis It was Einstein's e equals mc squared which meant Boom that is theoretically you could generate a nuclear reaction And so the Manhattan project was based on a Theory that would produce an outcome the trouble with cyber is that there is no equivalent theory So until we get that equivalent theory Cyber is going to be a jumble of dealing with symptoms Not causes my point is historically there are lots of analogies that we can use To build a basis of e equals mc squared for cyber the first maritime rules of the road How long did it take to develop rules of the roads that ships did not collide in themselves among themselves So we need that form second after and I mentioned the Manhattan project 1945 and the destruction of Erosium and Nagasaki We were able to come up intellectually with theories on deterrence That formed the basis for the strategy of the nuclear years So we had the equivalents of nuclear deterrence theory is their equivalent for cyber and most important I would say that Financial and money markets are the best equivalent because like cyber Money is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. You need it You've got guys with guns who want to rob banks or rob you you've got the Bernie Madoff's who are trying to con money out of you and so the analogy between the bad side of money and Cyber is very real, but my point is historically if we want to take cyber on there are a lot of lessons from the past Let me then jump having pressed three questions to you and giving you three examples to talk just for a minute about my book And then I'd like to listen to your comments and questions a Handful of bullets how the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand still menaces the peace Was based on the proposition that if you stepped back and just said beyond what happened Over the 70 or 80 or 90 years since the Archduke was killed. Is there something we have missed now? We all know the assassination precipitated World War one We know that World War one was an unfinished war was not the war to end all wars as President Wilson said it put in place the seeds for World War two And even though World War two was a decisive victory for the Allies including the Soviet Union It put in place the bases for the Cold War, but was there anything else and I argued that because of various forces particularly the diffusion or spread of power economic power social power military power and Because of globalization the interconnectivity and interdependence of people around the world you pick up your cell phone You can call somebody in Botswana China anywhere if you wanted to and vice versa People who lived in what could be called primitive third or fourth world countries because of this thing called a dish and satellites have absolute access and So because of those factors I argue what is missed is that four new horsemen of the apocalypse have been created and They have been created in part because the empowerment in in some measure due to The information and communications revolution the internet has empowered not only states Look at the rise if you will of China and other countries But so-called non-state actors, which is a horrible term to include Al Qaeda To include the Islamic State and other terrorist groups and individuals Think about Edward Snowden and what he did by revealing all that information About the National Security Agency or Julian Assange and wiki links and how individuals now have been empowered now It's true on June 28th. Gabriele Prince up a Serbian nutcase was sitting in a cafe and with three bullets was able to start World War two. Yeah World War one Sure, there are individual instances like that. My point is now instead of there being one Archduke and One assassin when you think around the world of all the potential explosive places India Pakistan Afghanistan Iraq Iran Syria all those places Africa You now have almost an infinite number of potential archdukes and you got a lot of potential assassins By the way, you don't have to fire a bullet and an archduke directly to get a kill a hopeless Tunisian fruit vendor four years ago lit himself a fire and caused the Arab awakening Absolutely unconnected and boom in Tunisia. This thing spreads and we have the Arab awakening So those are some of the differences that have arisen to help create the four horsemen now The first of the four horsemen is failed and failing government We have failed and failing government Afghanistan to Zimbabwe with Washington and Brussels in between And I'm sure those of you who look to Washington shake your heads and wonder how this country has got to a point Where both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are not only constipated But the only way they look at each other is through the lenses of extreme partisanship and the most Vituperative politics we have ever seen and it's not unique to the United States second economic despair disparity and dislocation The United States has not recovered from the 2008 financial crisis Our real unemployment if you include people who are only working part-time or given up It's probably closer to 15 percent than 5 percent But the United States is not unique almost anywhere around the world. You look Greece Afghanistan Iraq economics an economic despair an economic dislocation and disparity are Forces that really create a lot of people who are Removed from the political process and that in turn builds great deals of resentment as you can understand One of the biggest problems that President Xi Jinping in China faces that he has an underclass of Three or four hundred million people out of a population of one point three or one point four billion That underclass is bigger than the population of the United States How do you deal with it? Because they've got their cell phones. They have their television discs They can watch everything and yet unless their standard of living goes up Xi has got to deal with a problem that every single Chinese emperor member of the Communist Party had to dealt with peasant uprising going back five thousand years and intensifying all this is The issue of religious violent extremism and of course we've seen this since September 11th Let me go back in history When Lenin took over Russia in 1917 He used communism Marxism Leninism as the legitimizing theory to mobilize the public He was a political activist of the first order and he used the ideology To help him take power and to continue power. It was an end rather than a means when Hitler who took office Legally in Germany in 1933 did so with Nazism It was an ideology around which he could mobilize the party Well, what's happened with Al Qaeda and now the Islamic State? They are using the most perverted form of Islam as a Mobilizing factor as a recruiting factor as a legitimizing factor in which they are bringing together People who see this as a vision in a way that they can either retaliate against Things that have been done to them or in the hopes Optimistically and even madly madly in the same in the way of being insane that they can achieve their ends We're dealing with that and finally I will not go into great detail Except to say that the fourth horseman is environmental catastrophe People are having a huge drought and can't get water in California and people are drowning in Texas We have earthquakes storms the most bizarre weather patterns let alone climate change and on top of that We have little things called Ebola and other diseases that can be rapidly communicated around the world And so we have to be very very concerned about the whole impact of Environment catastrophe Now in my book I go into chapter inverse about how we deal with broken government in the United States how we repair it How we deal with economic despair and disparity how we take on the Issue of violent ideological to extremism and to a lesser degree the issue about the environment Let me just focus because I'm sure you're all very very well read and have your own views about the broken American government On two areas before I stop and let you ask questions What do we do about the economy and what do we do about violent extremism? I have argued I thought I lived in a fourth world city in Washington DC We live in Georgetown on end Street right behind us is a pothole if you jump into you can go to China We my wife and I were in New York, I was talking at the Harvard Club two nights ago The roads are even worse in New York City than they are in Washington And we were driving up here in 95. I needed a tank and not a sports car So our infrastructure is falling apart We have fracking and you know fracking produces natural gas right big deal How do you get natural gas out of the country? You're not going to fly it out. You're not going to drive it out Ships right how many ports do we have that are capable of handling these large supercarriers? You bet who know one the electrical power grid in 1982 and a study done by in a Think tank I used to be associated with Center for strategic international studies said the most this is 1982 More than 30 years ago biggest vulnerability in the United States today as our electrical power grid because it's so vulnerable And guess what it's even more vulnerable So my view is we need a national infrastructure bank now you're going to pay for it our national debt is 20 trillion dollars You don't want the government Getting into more debt the way I would do it is to say to corporations which have over a trillion dollars in Cash real money overseas because of tax issues say you can repatriate that money here We'll give you a tax break if you invest it in these infrastructure projects and Similarly, we will sell the equivalent of war bonds to the public so we could probably raise say two trillion dollars We do it over 30 years. We would pay interest rates 2% above prime so you'd make more money than if you invested it in the bank where you get virtually zero and It would be paid for by user fees tolls and other charges that would come from improving the infrastructure And this could be as varied as you want to include education the internet But what we need to do is to put the United States in a position where we are Prepared to compete in the 21st century because otherwise your grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to be at a huge disadvantage the last point I would make about Dealing with violent religious extremism Most of you have probably heard about code breaking Ultra and enigma during World War two One of the best sources for doing that was called Bletchley Park in England and you may have seen the movie about Alan Turing that came out about four or five months ago where all the code breakers Were in Bletchley and they were able to break the German codes and the Japanese codes We need the equivalent of that for dealing with the Islamic State and these terrorist groups Now unlike the Cold War we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on satellites and so-called national technical means Today Penetration can be done entirely using social media. It's fascinating Looking at YouTube where selfies have been posted Twitter all these other social media accounts and to give you an example At the Atlantic Council three fairly junior members of the staff and ten unpaid interns We're able to prove without a doubt that they were Russian troops in Ukraine Now those of you who had seen the movie cost of Blanka Claude Reigns Will say Yep Gambling at ricks. I'm shocked. There are Russian troops in Ukraine Of course, how do you prove it and one way they proved it which is fascinating? They traced a young Russian paratrooper who was in Siberia 3000 miles west Ukraine and they fixed him in Siberia because of a selfie He posted on the internet and they traced them all the way into Ukraine where he was picked up on a video That some Ukrainian had been had been using and with voice and facial recognition You can do that Now if you take that to an extreme instead of using all these Very very very expensive national technical systems We have a means of being able to penetrate to understand the why and the how of these groups It's something we need to do And so if you take anything away from this talk, we have huge opportunities here We have huge problems the four horsemen I talked about broken government economic despair Ideological nutcases and environmental catastrophe we can deal with those but it's going to take the public You and hundreds of millions of other Americans to get themselves engaged because unless or until We demand the government That's going to suit our needs We will not get that government and if we do not impose Any kind of pressure on the government we will also get that form of government and that's not going to make life any better for any of us Thank you very much, and I would be delighted to answer your questions Several solutions and your poor horse. Yeah, the the underlying issue of the solutions And you heard the first horseman the government right has to do with Leadership right how do you get something started to fix the grid for example And how do you follow through to be sure the money is spent where it's supposed to be spent and how do you hold accountable those who Don't follow through and do it properly and how do you how do you assure the outcome? One of the biggest problems I talk about failed government. We have Is that we may be at a situation where our political system invented by the best minds of the 18th century of checks and balances? No longer works. You've got divided government You've got a problem in the Congress where you need virtually everybody to say yes And if one person says no ran Paul in the debate over the NSA law Things don't work This is going to take time to overcome I Argue for universal voting that is to say every eligible citizen has got to go to the polls They don't have to vote, but they've got to show up and the reason I think that will be important over time It is going to force more Americans to become engaged in their government It's also going to factor out money because you just don't have enough money to try to influence that I think it's also going to force more of our politicians to run from the center Rather than from the extreme left or the extreme right which they have to do in the primaries look at poor Romney Mitt Romney had to stand on a stage with a bunch of idiots and Was embarrassed by it and had a run to the right to get the nomination and by the time the election came He was dead meat. You know the Democrats really had to do was to show You know those spectacles with Marine Bachman and Herman Kane and all those other lightweights there And I say this is a non-partisan And I think public engagement is going to be the only way you also have among the younger generation a failure of people to become interested in government My none of my my wife's children or my brother's children have any interest in going to government You know, it's painful So I think universal voting is a way that you could attract people back into government we also have to have a Revision of our national security act of 1947 You know, it's 70 years old and quite frankly it was written at a time even though it's been amended When the world was different we've got to do that This is not going to happen overnight If you take a look at the candidates who are running on both tickets right now None of them in my mind has the experience of the requisite skills to be president with one exception And I don't think he's going to make it that's John Kasich of Ohio Interestingly if you want to be president you got to win an Ohio and I admit in my book with tongue-in-cheek That maybe we ought to have just the election in Ohio determine everything in the 49 other states can not spend all the kind of money But the issue is can we make our political system work? And I would argue the only way is to get the public reengaged That's the issue. It's going to take a lot of leadership, but quite frankly It's going to take Americans just to say we are fed up We've had enough of this nonsense. We have got to do something and whether that will catch fire as it did in 1775 I don't know now if it doesn't I don't have an apocalyptic view of the world I don't believe the barbarians are at the gate no matter how bad things get in the Middle East and they will get worse I think we are somewhat insulated, but what will happen will be our national standard of living will decline and May decline precipitously and the expectations of the American dream will not be met Now at some stage in the future whenever that is ten years a hundred years I don't know the consequences could be very very very very great as in 1775 Remember the best line in the Declaration of Independence that Tom Jefferson wrote when government becomes destructive It is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and establish a new one and we did we got rid of George So there is something in our roots But your question gets the heart of democracy and the future of the United States and it is by no means clear whether Our system is self-riding. It may take a huge crisis Remember the country was in worse depression in 38 39 than it was in 29 And it was really World War two that enabled us to recover from the depression to become an economic superpower That's a long-winded question to answer to a very good question, but it is the question Thank you, please we're supposed to have the best military in the world which we do or used to and During the Civil War President Lincoln called Grant in after three years of right and he says I've tried to run the war and I can't do it Win it so Grant did so my question is we don't have people of that caliber in politics So we gotta get rid of the level of the dead Political system That was probably the greatest existential crisis in our history in 1861 and of course the world was a lot different than and it wasn't Grant alone who won the war the fact that we won the war I should say the North one was because there's no way the the Feudal South could ever take on the economic industry of the North. I mean it was almost for ordained Despite Grant and guys like Sherman and others I Go back to this issue that presidents are just not Experienced enough when they take office the last president of my mind that was Experienced and is ready for the job as possible was George H. W. Bush When his son came in Bill Clinton came in and Bill Clinton is the luckiest man in the world We just won Desert Storm in 91 The economy because of H. W. Bush was turning around and guess what the Soviet Union had collapsed So he's sitting in a poker game. He just got a royal straight flush Brilliant Bush comes in September 11th and for the wrong reasons because he thought he could really fix the geostrategic Landscape of the Middle East we go into Iraq and I think had there been no weapons of mass destruction We still would have gone in because people would have argued you can't trust Saddam Hussein It's an experience lack of judgment and then Obama comes in and unlike Clinton Obama had been dealt the worst hand of any president since FDR Look, he's got a financial crisis before the election Iraq is gone to hell in a handbasket Afghanistan is going south quickly and he makes these huge mistakes So the only way around that is if you can get a president who's got the right skill set To have the maturity and the judgment to deal with that But it's extremely difficult because politics in the United States now are no longer about governing They're about getting elected and reelected and in doing that you do that by virtue of negative campaigning Positive campaigning you want to really destroy the adversary So until we get people who are prepared to be more serious about national security and not focus on sound bites And slogans rather than understanding We're not going to be able to deal very very very successfully with that And so I don't have a very very good answer to your question As I said I think in the field case it is probably the only one That might make had the makings of course somebody could be surprising like Harry Truman Nobody thought Truman would be a great president and he was But I think that candidates should be made to read the Constitution and Article two of the Constitution says Executive power shall be vested in the president when we talk about the president as commander-in-chief That's a lesser included authority. It's executive power And so you think you'd want to get a good executive and if I were running the debates That would be my first second and third question Executive power is going to be vested in you. How do you intend to use it? So I think part of the right answer is asking the tough questions, but we'll see Please how do you see the involvement of personal and public media now that there's almost Intentaneous ability to arouse people and I see it increasing protest I'm protest now being it Clearly there has been a revolution in social media. I'll give you an example the BBC in England Interviewed 15 kids Ten and under 12 and asking which is more important your cell phone or your television set guess what they all said Cell phone of course, of course but the point is the social media cuts both ways and So administrations can you and they in this particular White House has been using social media much more than others But you need a message that resonates and the problem is we do not have a good message that resonates This goes across administrations We're getting killed in the for example in the propaganda war in Ukraine Putin is beating a seven ways from Sunday. The Islamic State is beating a seven ways from Sunday Why is that I go back to my suggestion for a Bletchley Park and so yeah, obviously communications are different Kids today Will not have the social skills of your generation my generation other generations Because why they all are going multi-tasking. They're on their computer. They're on their cell phone And they've got networks of friends on Facebook etc etc etc, but no face-to-face contact It's all done through the ether and by electrons The point is we have to understand about how to use these tools in government much better And that's going to require thought I go back to cyber Where's the e equals mc squared equivalent for cyber and so if we get the foundations right then we can make progress But the government unfortunately has been very ineffective in being able to do that Hand in the back, please Yeah It's it's mandatory in countries like Well Australia Australia Switzerland and Brazil among others have mandatory voting I assume most of you pay taxes have real estate taxes. You have driver's licenses, right? That's mandatory And if you want to practice law practice medicine fly an airplane you've got to get a license And so we have in government the capacity to be able to license people to do things You put together a network on the state and local level This is not going to require any kind of federal law to change things in which people are Mandated and you have the way of identifying people because They're they either have some residents they either paying some taxes They've got phone bills so forth and so on where you have a pretty good handle of who people are and you've got to follow Up on all that we still have registration for social for for the draft for selective service so this is not going to be a Herculean problem and even if you only get 90% of the population under those circumstances And you get a miss super majority of those people to vote that would still be 70 or 80 percent as opposed to the 50 plus percent So I'm not worried about how you organize or get people to do it And you can if you fail to vote or show up because you don't have to vote You just have to show up and presumably people will show up and vote Then you can either have fines or more importantly you then have people have to do public service So if you fail to vote you have to commit 50 or 100 hours of public service And part of that some public service could be reading history books and civics books to get you better educated So I mean this is not a Herculean problem, but the issue is entirely political Can we get a political system to face up to this because Republicans and Democrats are going to say hell no That means other people might be elected so getting the political system to move is critical But if we don't do it and we still have a relatively small majority of Americans who are eligible voting We're going to continue to get the same kind of government we have and that's just not working in my judgment So how do you change that without changing the Constitution dramatically? Yeah Oh, yeah, I mean this had been done 40 years ago, I think we just were stupid quite frankly You sit It's it's tragic Jim Jones was national security advisor Jim Jones, and I have been close forever I've been on I was on Jim's advisory board when Jim was commandant and I was on the Allied Supreme Allied Commanders job Obama came in he was inexperienced the first thing he did was have an Afghan Pakistan study had 11 basic assumptions each one was flawed And and the trouble is that in my judgment Obama is a very very smart academic very cautious guy Who believes that if you do too much, you're going to get into trouble? And so he thinks I believe that the way to deal is to take a de minimis position That is to do the least that you have to do and so as a result the Afghan Pakistan issue and The withdrawal and the way it was done was Obscenely bad in Iraq He didn't have a chance a choice because Bush could not negotiate a status of forces agreement And so we were forced to leave Iraq under those circumstances And even though the Republicans want to blame Obama That was the issue and unfortunately we're stuck with Maliki the then prime minister who was a villain a Villain and so I'm afraid that Iraq was not self-healing There was little that I think Obama could have done at the time now having said that He has been enormously reluctant to re-engage in Iraq and the region March a year ago 2014 I Was able to influence John Kerry Secretary of State for whom I have the highest regard To get General John Allen retired Marine into the White House to meet with Obama about what was happening in Iraq The situation then got worse in June of last year. You will remember that Mosul fell to the Islamic State Only in September did Obama then agree to form a coalition to take on the Islamic State He called it the junior varsity And we have been very slow in rallying that coalition Now it's very difficult because Iraq is a mess. It's basically been divided up not de facto, but Actually de facto into three different parts The Sunni Shia problem is huge and it's not getting any better But as I have argued we could have done a lot better and Obama in my mind has failed so Juba Yeah, it's over. It's long overdue, but you know, this is an elephant and chicken stew I mean, I think it was important that we normalize with Cuba, but that's the chicken and the elephant is Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan Now if the talks with Iran work and we get a verifiable credible agreement to limit their nuclear aspirations That could be a huge success. That could be a game-changer and I don't know whether Kerry's broken leg is going to impede that He's optimistic right now and thinks he's going to be able to get back and I don't know how serious the surgery was I will find out shortly But if we do get that agreement and the Republicans and the Israelis who are going to go ballistic no matter what happens That could be a very very positive impact and if we build on that that might be enough Leverage to be able to contain what's going on in Iraq and Syria, but I'm enormously critical of this administration in this president Unlike George W. Bush, who I think by the end of his second term was a very very good president Even though he had been disastrous in the beginning I don't think Obama has learned and so I'm very pessimistic that unless Kerry can pull off a small miracle We're not going to see any really great things emerge from this administration Sorry, there's a hand way in the back. Oh, it's finished. For those of you don't remember 1916 Sykes and Pico a British and French diplomat Redefine the Middle East cutting up forming, you know What's what the current Middle East looks like over artificial when it was on entirely tribal and that has been one of the problems Sykes Pico is finito No, no we can't and they never really were up with the pressure is such and unfortunately This will sound harsh But if in Syria, we were going to use as a single metric human life If we wanted to minimize the loss of life because there have been nearly 300,000 Syrians killed We should have supported Assad As brutal as that sounded because fewer people would have been killed Even though if you're on the other side living under Assad is like living was like living under Saddam Hussein But the Islamic State would be a lot less of a threat And for political reasons, we couldn't do it and so we're stuck with this mess and I don't as I said, I don't have much confidence that this administration this White House I should say because Kerry is capable. He's not president sadly Doesn't know how to work all these different moving parts, and I don't think it will You had a Yes, what is your opinion of the unions in federal work? I Don't really have a strong view quite frankly. I'm not really competent. I haven't looked at it enough I don't have any real problems with them. The reason I ask is the attitude in many of these Neurocracies will not change Stagnant and you can't fire them Well, that's not unions that you thought you're talking about the civil service regulations, which are which are something different No, not really some of them are but not all of them that look the problem is we've got it We have a government that was designed based on a 20th century model And we've got it, you know, we've got all these Redundant cabinet positions. I mean if I were president I would probably go down a three or four or five cabinet positions You know this monstrosity called the Department of Homeland Security, you know 16 in agencies They don't know what they're doing And should that be a surprise? Because you just don't have look Any I'm not suggesting that what happens in the private sector is perfect and always and always always applies But you take a look at any of the big fortune 50 companies Do they have a headquarters staff money in the tens of thousands? course not Why because you've got to decentralize and you've got to assign responsibility and the problem with our system of government is That every White House wants to avert a political re eight relations disaster I mean here you got the Department of Defense shipping live anthrax. Oh my god is the end of the world so What happens is that all power? Mitriculates to the White House they're in charge cabinet secretaries are relatively powerless And so you have a government that is just paralyzed by all this and so you got to change that you've got to give The cabinet secretaries the authority to run their department and the president has got to be as I said the executive and Yet the system has been moving into a direction where that has become impossible And that's why government certainly on the executive side is broken and then you get on the congressional side It's equally broken and so as Samuel Johnson that great English writer of several hundred years ago said it's not That a dog walks on its hind legs badly It's that it walks at all on its hind legs And it's amazing that our government manages to function or doesn't in its current condition and can do the minimum that it's doing Well, you overfund too many of these Yeah, I agree I agree that Talking about not really you mentioned the coalition in the Middle East, right? Exists. Yeah Yeah, they're meeting they were meeting the other day in Paris at 62 countries Well, here's here's the other question there Let me just if you don't understand the coalition is 62 like-minded states 28 of whom come from NATO You've got the six Gulf cooperative countries Saudi Arabia Kuwait UAE Oman Bahrain who did I forget gutter. Thank you, Denny. And then you've got Egypt Jordan Turkey, well the Perkins part of NATO part of this the problem is when you take a look at what's happening in The Middle East and the coalition Who is in charge in the White House? Please tell me because I don't know of this operation Please tell me the command structure. Please tell me how central command in Tampa Special forces command in Tampa European command in Stuttgart, Germany and Africa in Stuttgart, Germany Africa command relate and tell me how the coalition has been assigned Certain responsibilities. What is Turkey doing boom boom boom boom boom boom? John Allen who's our special envoy is pulling his hair out because we haven't been able to Take a strain and get this going now. We've had nine months ten months of the coalition Ten months Ten months after Pearl Harbor after December 7th, 1941. We were winning the war We mobilized the country. We had won at Midway. We had won at Stalingrad and the Axis powers were in retreat in ten months Ten months. We've been in the Middle East and we haven't accomplished anything. I you know, I despair sometimes Anything else American Faro in the Belmont I'm not I'm not betting I'm I'm non political I will provide advice to anybody as I said on horses That's probably a better bet I'm just not enthralled by anybody on either side maybe maybe Kasich Pataki who's got a lot of executive experience frightens me on foreign policy Jeb Bush made a speech in Chicago on foreign policy that I found to be really not good And the fact that he's got a lot of retreads from his brother's administration does not sit well I'm not a great Hillary fan because Even though I think she's very bright very very competent and she's good at being Hillary I don't think that she's got the judgment to be a good president Bernie Sanders is Almost my age, and that's too old to do anything And Martin O'Malley is not gonna get is not gonna get over Baltimore is not serious and Chafee is a good guy knew Chafee when he was a senator. I knew his father as well I don't think he's gonna be a serious contender. So on the Republican side if he had a better voice maybe Rick Perry could make a Resurrection But I'm just not you know the only two guys that I think would be good presidents are John Kerry and Colin Powell and neither is gonna run Unfortunately sorry lady in the back Everybody knows senator's in United money is free speech Yeah Money is free speech and so packs can give unlimited amount of money and they don't have to disclose Yeah, I think the Supreme Court had that that decision may be as bad as dread Scott in 1854 I Think it's my view is very simple with campaign financing no limits no limits, but complete Transparency and if you are guilty and this is room for meddling because you can see one party doing it to the other party to try to You're out of politics forever lifetime ban just like gambling and baseball lifetime ban But any other the Citizens United is just ridiculous quite frankly and under the current system Yeah, you're gonna guys guys like Sheldon Adelson who are gonna put up hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars That's why I think universal voting mandatory voting takes that out of play because there's not gonna be enough money to influence enough people When you have you know 200 250 million Americans voting So that's one of the reasons why I favorite, but you're right. It's distorting our politics And it was not a very it was not a good Supreme Court decision in my judgment Well, what drives me what drives me some of you may be members of the NRA not the National Recovery Act with the National Rifle Association I Wish we could read Second Amendment a well regulated militia Necessary to the security of a free state the right of the people to bear and carry arms shall not be infringed If you ask the writers of the Constitution then what they meant. It's not what this Supreme Court has done, but you know Tempest Fugitive Time goes on anyway. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed being you