 All right, welcome everyone. My name is Sharon Burke, and I'm the Director of Resource Security here at New America, and also a senior advisor, including to the Future of War Project. And I'm just delighted to welcome you to this very special event. New America, of course, is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization. I also like to think of it as a house of independent thought and independent thinkers. And we're here today to talk to one of the people who helped build this house, Peter Bergen, who's a longtime expert here at New America and is a top executive now, helping to design the organization itself. And it is not an exaggeration to say that Peter has done more in this last year than most of us could contemplate in a lifetime as a researcher, as a reporter, as a filmmaker, and as a best-selling author. The book we're here to talk about today, and you can see that I enjoyed it since I've decorated it almost as much as a Christmas tree, is Trump and his generals, the cost of chaos. And I think this book is a great exemplar of what New America is as far as a place where we not only think independently, but also this book is scary, it's funny, it's fearless. It's almost a memento mori for where we are as a country right now. At least that's how it struck me. So what we're going to do right now is Peter and I are going to talk for a little while, and then we'll give you a chance to ask questions. And then at the end, we'll give you a little time to get books signed if you're so inclined. Peter has a hard cap at 115 because he's off for other places, so we will be ending promptly. So with that, Peter, I'm going to start by asking you sort of an unconventional question for a book talk, which is a little bit about your methodology. You say in the beginning that you interviewed 100 people, and I would say, so my background, as you know, is I'm a former government official, and I've spent most of my career in the Department of Defense, most recently as an assistant secretary of defense. So looking from the other side, I'm aware that probably everyone you interviewed has his or her own agenda, or someone else's agenda, as the case may be sometimes. And what I was curious about is if you could walk us through a little bit how you write a book like this, particularly as the situation you're writing about is unfolding in real time. Well, Sharon, first of all, thank you for reading the book and for hosting this event. I also want to acknowledge David Sturm and Melissa Sallick-Verg, who spent countless hours helping me research this book and fact check it. And so it's book number six, so I'm making fewer mistakes. I mean, you make mistakes over time, but you kind of do that from your mistakes. And previously, my first book, as an author, there's a tendency to want, I must know everything. Now, it's impossible to know everything, and you'll never finish the book if you try to know everything. So I'm better at sort of stopping at a certain point. I talked to 100 people who worked in the Trump administration or dealt with the Trump administration in some way. Some people I spoke to on multiple occasions. Some people were helpful. I mean, just to give you an idea of what it's like to be an author. This is not a trying to... Sometimes you can spend two days preparing for an interview and talking to somebody and going out to meet them and hanging out with them. And it might end up as one sentence in the book. I mean, so you don't really know what the book is going in. I mean, this book began as a book about ISIS and the fight against ISIS. And then over time, a friend of mine, a former editor of mine, said, why don't you write about the Trump team and the national security team? And I said, that's a great idea. And found an amazing editor, Scott Moyers of Penguin, who really helped me think through some of the big issues. And so, but yeah, everybody has their own agenda. And there's a kind of... There's a thing in American journalism about objectivity, which I think is essentially a false standard, because objectivity is... We all bring our own prejudices and thoughts to any situation. But I think you can aspire to fairness. Fairness is a different issue than objectivity. And when I was writing this book, I was very conscious of the fact that half the country voted for President Trump. One of my closest friends works in a senior position for President Trump. Many people I know voted for President Trump. They're not all the basket of toporals by any stretch. And so that was on my shoulder when I was writing about this, as much as anything else. And somebody who worked in a senior position for President Trump read the book and asked him, is it a fair piece of work? And he said, yeah, so I'm happy about that. That may actually affect sales because people want a I hate Trump or I love Trump book. They don't want a Trump is a kind of complicated figure with some problems, but he's got some things right and some things wrong. That is really this book. And I'm probably, you know, people are immediately canceling their Amazon order as I speak when I say that, you know, that I'm trying to be fair to a consequential president who, you know, said a lot of, one of the themes in the book and Sharon just interrupt me whenever I'm, because I might could just go on. I'm thinking about the book for a while. Well, Steve Colt, my former boss here before Anne-Marie Slaughter became the boss here, said a really interesting thing to me about books. First of all, you write a book and that's a whole process. And then you have to interpret it to other people and that's very different because you have to interpret it for four minutes or half an hour or, you know, and what were you actually trying to say is actually an interesting question because when you write it, you've written a lot, you're sort of so into it. But one of the big themes of the book is the similarity between President Trump and President Obama. And, you know, obviously there are big differences. There are big differences on climate change. There are differences on China. There's differences on Iran, nuclear deal. But if you look at how they actually approach... There are some stylistic differences. Stylistic differences. But when you look, both of them are actually candidates that came from outside the mainstream of the party. We haven't had a conventional election, a party election where a machine candidate wins since 1992, only George W. Bush was a machine candidate. So Obama and Barack Obama and President Trump come from outside the system to the large degree. And they both see themselves as being elected to get out of America's endless wars. And Trump is drawing down in Afghanistan to be speak. In fact, it's so fascinating. I mean, I could obviously don't get to this in the book because we're now talking about today. Trump is in exactly the same position that President Obama was in at the end of his tenure in 2008, almost exactly the same number of troops in Afghanistan. We've got 13,000 today. We're gonna take 4,000 out. That guess is down to around 8,000 or so. That's exactly the number that Trump inherited from Obama, going through exactly the same process, which is both presidents wanted to get out, but they, when they do the math, they always come back to the thing. The only worse thing than staying in Afghanistan is leaving and basically having a sort of Iraq 2011 situation where you pull out an ISIS or other groups like it coming to the vacuum. But they both have relied on the use of special operations forces. They've used the special forces, cyber warfare. They haven't made a major unforced error like sending a major conventional army into Iraq. It's reluctant to commit to combat operations, which you make that case. Josh Gelzer is here. Josh was the senior director for counterterrorism who's also a fellow at New America. Josh was held over by the Trump team. And this is actually a very honorable kind of part of American national security decision making, which is holding over. Particularly when it comes to counterterrorism. Mike Leiter was held over by Obama, even though George W. Bush appointed him to the National Counterterrorism Center. Nick Rasmussen, who's now at the McCain Institute and works with us closely here, was held over by the Trump team from Obama. And before that worked for Bush. So you've seen the counterterrorism sphere that there is kind of a lot of, I mean, you come out of this tradition, right? It's like it's hard. Continuity in the history. There is a kind of consensus about what we should be doing on counterterrorism. Except that, of course, Obama was a departure from, in some ways, from some of that continuity. But you're saying that Trump is continuous with that departure, not... I think you're right, but I would caveat it. Bush too, the second Bush term, the second Bush term is different from the first Bush term. The secret prisons are closed in 2006 where Supreme Court rulings that allow prisoners of government. I think after that second inaugural address, there was, the second inaugural address was almost a height of difference and then it tailed off pretty fast. Yeah, and so that by the end of the second Bush term, which is really when the drone program begins, and then Obama ramps it up dramatically. And actually, Trump, and we practice at New America, most of South America in particular, you know, the Trump team has actually dialed back the drone program in Pakistan to levels that are very low compared to what Obama had. They ramped it up in places like Somalia and Libya. In fact, that's one thing I wanted to mention to you is that I noticed throughout the book that there are places where, I mean, you're a journalist and certainly it shows that you're a reporter and that that's the kind of writing you do. But you're also a researcher and there were several places throughout the book where the fact that you do research on terrorism, domestic terrorism, on the drone program, showed, and it's really kind of where the text smolders a little bit, where you do take issue inherently with some of the things that have been said and done in this administration. Well, that is true. And the travel ban is a classic example of that. I mean, we, David Sturman, in particular, here, tracks that, you know, who is actually conducting terrorist attacks. And we just had one in Pensacola, which was conducted by a Saudi citizen who happened to be a member of the Saudi military. Well, of course, they're not a travel ban country. And in fact, this is the first time a foreign national carried out of the terrorist attack successfully in the United States since 9-11, which were conducted by 15 Saudi nationals out of the 19 hijackers. So the travel ban was, you know, our research at New America shows that this was a solution in search of a problem that doesn't really exist. And, you know, it was basically, I also like the people that are, I mean, the people that carry out these attacks in the United States are American citizens or legal permanent residents. And they're radicalizing here. So this was, the travel ban was, you know, it made no sense. It was, and I get into it in some detail. In fact, the intelligence community was under considerable pressure from the Trump White House to come up with, you know, the intelligence that showed that the travel ban countries were really a problem. And of course, that wasn't the case. And you recall that one of the first countries on the list was Iraq. Well, this caused consternation. H.R. McMaster fought in Iraq. Jim Mattis had fought in Iraq. They knew that Iraq was leading the charge against ISIS. And there was a huge fight between Attorney General Sessions, who was an immigration hardliner who wanted Iraq to remain on the list. President Trump wanted Iraq to remain on the list. H.R. McMaster showed Sessions a portrait of a guy called Al-Jaboury, who's the mayor of Tala Fah, where McMaster fought an important war, battle in 2005. Jaboury had gone on to become a major general in the Iraqi army. And now, you know, when he had family in the United States, now he wouldn't be able to come back to the United States. He has a guy who's leading the charge against ISIS. He can't come visit his own family in the United States. The whole thing was crazy. Mattis and Brex Tillerson went in to see Trump and really argue the case that Iraq should be taken off the list. And they won that one. They won that one. And they showed that in there. And that leads me to something I wanted to ask you about too, which is, that's a good example of what you call in the book, The Axis of Adults. Yeah, I mean, I used the quotation marks, obviously. And you also talk about, right, of course. But it's still, you coined a term. And you also showed that between 2017 and 2019, in 2017, when the Axis of Adults, which would be the former generals, which is, of course, what the title of the book is, Mattis Flynn at first, although I'm not sure I'd call him part of the Axis, but John Kelly, of course, and General Dunford, and then also Rex Tillerson, even though he was not a general officer as a former CEO, I think you count him as part of the Axis. When they were there, and Gary Cohn, you lists basically a number of successes and diminishing returns once they all leave. Yeah, I think so. If you look at 2017, I think the record of national security foreign policy successes is much better than it was right now. So in 2017, ISIS was largely defeated. Trump actually, through his credit, sped up operations against ISIS, changed some of the kind of authorities that competent commanders have to do operations as opposed to have to be micromanaged, but from the West Wing as it was the case under Obama. And also, there were caps on the number of troops in Syria 500 under Obama, three helicopters. And when you have three helicopters in a war zone, one of them's been serviced. It sort of adds up to not really having any coverage at all. So Trump got rid of all that, put 2,000 soldiers in there. Mostly special operations, special forces. A lot of air support armed the Kurds in May of 2017 and the Obama administration had debated this for so long that by the time they kind of came to a conclusion, they were pretty much all out of office. Or they knew that army the Kurds would irritate the Turks, but you can't take a city like Raqqa with a relatively small number of American ground forces. You had to have an actual ground army. So Trump got that right. He also got right the drawing of red line on the Syrian use of chemical weapons in 2017 with a proportional response. China, I think, well, you know a lot about China. I mean, that, I think, when historians write the history of the Trump presidency, they'll say that he got that largely right, even if the tactics on trade have been questionable. But identifying them as a peer competitor, which is in the defense strategy that Mattis oversaw and the national security strategy that Mattis oversaw, and there's been results. So, for instance, the Chinese want to turn the South China Sea into a China lake, into a Chinese lake. In an effort to kind of reverse that, I mean, the Trump administration's done a lot more freedom of navigation exercises than the Obama did. And they're taking a much more skeptical line with the Chinese, which I think there's a kind of consensus of these in this town that that's the right approach. And then finally, I think Trump gave a well-received speech in Riyadh in May of 2017 to the 55 Muslim majority countries, minus Iran, that showed up for that speech. In fact, if you close your eyes and you just, you didn't, it was a speech that Obama could have given minus the Iran bashing. And then, you know, he, trying to think, what else in 2017 did he get right? But, you know, we're now in 2019, and, you know, the- All those people have been purged. All those people have been purged. And it hasn't benefited any of them, right? So, I wanted to ask you in that sense, so you get some successes while they're there. They've all left or been purged since the diminishing returns are clear. He's not succeeding now. So, one of the questions I had is actually from a review that Elliot Cohen wrote. Kind of an odd review, but there's a very good question in the odd review. I'm a big fan of Elliot Cohen's book. Yeah, it's beautifully written. He compared reading the book to going to the dentist, which is not really like, and like, you know, like having root canal surgery without an overcane. I mean, so- But it's clearly talking about the Trump administration, not the book. The book is actually a very pleasant reading, so. Anyway, but so, Elliot Cohen, as many of you probably know, is the dean of size. He's a very impressive military historian, but I think, you know, he led the never Trump movement and clearly, you know, he's not a fan of President Trump. He posed a really good question in the review though that I wanted to see if you could address, which is, he said, you know, these were formidable people, John Mattis, General Mattis, General Kelly, Rex Tillerson. Certainly, Tillerson has no need. None of them did, right? They had all already had very successful careers and successful post-careers at that point lined up. So, why did they do this? Why did they all come back? Well, you know, just to go through it, Rex Tillerson, he's a, I believe that God is- And also, they all knew that they, Trump did not hide who he was. No, they didn't. What kind of president he was going to be. Yeah, they- So they knew what they were getting into. Although none of them knew him personally. In fact, John Kelly has said that not only did he not know Trump, he didn't know anybody who knew Trump. So these were like coming from an entirely different ecosystem on the military side. Rex Tillerson is a very religious guy and basically his wife said when he got the offer, you know, God is sort of speaking to us and God has a plan and obviously it didn't go quite the way he thought it would. God's ways are mysterious sometimes. God works in mysterious ways, yes. But on the military side, you know, H.R. McMaster is a freestyle general in uniform. So the Grarner chief, you know, it's like it's not even a choice for Jim- Except he was in the process of retiring. He was in the process of retiring. He was in the process. So he chose. He would, well, but I mean he, I mean it's, I think duty is a very important factor here. Yes, I do. Jim Mattis certainly felt it was his duty to do this. I mean, one of those interesting news nuggets in the book is that Mattis was his third choice as secretary of defense. The first choice was Stanley McChrystal, who received a call on November 16th, 2016 from Trump Tower from somebody saying, we'd like you to come in to talk about being secretary of defense. Now bear in mind that Sam McChrystal was the closest friend at that time. There's Mike Flynn, who was effectively already the national security advisor and basically making these decisions. And they fought together and buried people together and celebrated, you know, birthdays and together. Famously fired. Or his staff's comments to a reporter about President Obama. So it was also sort of a poke in the eye a little bit. Right, this guy's been fired by Obama. To be fair, a statement of, we're gonna do things differently. It reminds me of Obama appointing Steve Chiu to be secretary of the energy, where it was, you know, the person certainly had quality, but it was also a statement about we're gonna do things differently. But that didn't work out. So McChrystal said, look, I've been looking at the transition and I don't think I'm the right guy. And the first, they're not used to hearing people say I won't even be considered for the secretary of defense, right? So the guy at the other end of the phone says, are you sure? And McChrystal says, yeah, I am sure. And basically he privately thought that Trump was sort of ignorant and dishonest. And he's since come out and said that publicly. So he turned down the job. Then Jack Keane, who I portray as a sort of shadow national security advisor, either on Fox television or in person, the Oval Office is asked by Trump if he would do the job. And his wife had just had suffered from Parkinson's for a decade and a half in the recently died. He said, no, I can't do it. And then they turned to Jim Mattis, who was at a food bank volunteering on November 18th in Washington state. And Vice President Pence calls him, he says, hi, it's Mike Pence, we'd like to, and Mattis says, look, I'm volunteering at this food bank. Can I pull you back? Which is kind of a good response. But two days later goes out to Bedminster and has a meeting with Trump and they have two substantial differences agreements, one of which would really fester and grow over time. The first disagreement is, you know, we call the Trump on the campaign trail. I'd say we should torture terrorists and even kill their families. And Mattis said, look, you can get more information than with a cigarette and a cup of coffee. It was reported at the time as a cup of beer, which makes no sense at all. It's like he's a really fundamentalist jihadi terrorist and not sitting down for a beer. But it really was a cigarette and coffee. And I think Trump was sort of persuaded by that. And then Mattis also said, look, NATO is, he said publicly is probably one of the most most successful alliance in history. And if you didn't have NATO, we'd have to create it. And that disagreement would ultimately lead to the resignation letter in part. So not about that. I mean, you can see I marked up the book a lot. A number of those markers are places where you wrote that Mattis ignored an order or Mattis slow rolled or Mattis refused. That's not normal. Now, to be fair, having spent a lot of my career in the Pentagon, the Pentagon is very good at slow rolling and has a lot of antibodies and not all for bad reasons, right? There's a lot of people like me, I mean, I was career, but I came back as political who have great ideas, right? And sometimes those ideas need to be slow rolled. So it's not all for bad reasons, but that level of ignored, refused, slow rolled is not common. And I think one of your other reviewers who wrote a fabulous review, Derek Chalet in The Washington Post, asked you a direct question in his review, which is how do you feel about that and as a precedent? So we may all feel like, well, this president's a little scary, it's okay. The adults, the access of adults slowed him down. What about the next president? If it's someone that we feel more confident about if we get the same? Well, I think that's a great question. A president, Elizabeth Warren, if she instructs something, you know, that. So the book is ultimately about civil-military relations which sounds very boring, but is obviously important. And there's kind of a kind of paradox baked into all this, which is, you know, the generals have to give their best military advice to the commander-in-chief. The commander-in-chief in the end of the day is a commander-in-chief and he or she can do whatever she wants and has very large latitudes. By the way, if President Trump said that everybody in the Pentagon has to dress as big by today, they would have to do it, right? I mean, but the fact that he is. They would find all kinds of regulations about feather size and things that would mean that it would take a little while. Yeah, well, yeah. But so he, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. And we look at these problems of these special operations guys, and that I think, you know, most, a lot of military veterans and serving military, I don't think are comfortable with Trump doing that as commander-in-chief. But, you know, it raises some very interesting questions. You know, of course, H.R. McMaster wrote Derreliction of Duty and it became bestseller on Amazon when he looked like the day he was appointed, and it was his PhD history thesis at Chapel Hill in North Carolina. And the whole point of that book is that the generals kind of didn't give Lyndon Johnson the military advice that he would have needed to win the war. But you could also make the argument that, I mean, Lyndon Johnson also didn't want to hear that military advice, right? He wanted to do this graduated pressure campaign against the North Vietnamese, which really was more about body counts. It wasn't really about winning the war. And, of course, the war wasn't won. So, you know, there's an adherent difficulty in the relationship. But, so one response to, Jim Addis' response to Trump was to slow roll things. So when he was asked for options on Iran, he just wouldn't provide them. When he was asked to do a war game on South Korea, on North Korea, and the military options there at Camp David in the fall of 2017, Vice President Pence and McMaster were gonna oversee it. He just didn't provide war planners. You can't have a war game without war planners. So, and I think Jim Addis may have certainly misunderstood the president. Certainly, you know, his rhetoric is, you know, he's rhetorically very kind of, I mean, he's a bloviating bully. Let's summarize it that way. The president? Yeah, okay. And, but that, you know, but doesn't really transfer. And I think our enemies and our allies kind of have begun to sort of discount some of this. I was talking to the European diplomat yesterday. He just said, look, we used to respond to every tweet. We just don't, we don't even pay attention to that. So, so the Iranians are, you know, there's Jinger Lee starting there in Richmond. The North Koreans are talking about a Christmas present to President Trump, which I'm sure is not a box of chocolates. And then we've got. They do like to do things like Christmas. If you look back. Oh, yeah. Well, news only happens on holidays in August and on Fridays is my experience. So we'll see over Christmas. One of the other things that kind of related to that about not a slow roll in things and the fact that the Pentagon is very good at, at managing what it doesn't want to do. Or even, you know, but as it builds things, there's a very deep well of how things, how the institution is actually built. And you do talk a lot in this book about the institutions of governments. And I started marking those two as deep state, where, you know, deep state. Places where the bureaucracies, including people that he appointed, just didn't do things. Yeah. Well, the example is Pompeo at CIA. I mean, Pompeo, like, it was regarded, I mean, I wouldn't use the four letter explanation of how he behaved there. But he wasn't like, particularly liked as a person, but he was, they liked the fact that he didn't subscribe to the Russian kind of, you know, the kind of idea. He didn't promote some kind of conspiracy theory that Ukraine has been involved in as opposed to Russia in the election. When he was at CIA as a director, I mean, they liked the fact that he kind of, you know, kind of was a kind of conventional CIA director in his sense. But the organization, I mean, the organization was concerned about these clearances that would be given to people that shouldn't really happen. And so they were being more careful about what sources and methods they put on, papers that were shared with the White House. Their allies are more reluctant to share intelligence with us on a certain level because even though they have no idea what the relationship between Putin and Trump is, they've got to assume it's the worst case because it's some kind of like, and so that, I'm quoting people at the agency that affected intelligence sharing. So one thing that has really struck me and a lawyer like Josh Kelce could help with this is, you know, in Britain, we have an unwritten constitution and in the United States, we have a written constitution. But as I'm thinking about the book and writing the book, I realize we have an unwritten constitution in the United States that we're not really aware of. And that unwritten constitution says the president won't just attack his own law enforcement agencies or his own intelligence community. A president won't call the media the enemy of the people. I mean, there's a certain kind of set of norms which we just kind of have grown to expect. Now, is Trump a norm breaker that will be the kind of defining features of the way forward? I mean, I don't look back on, I mean, you recall the events and just not far from here on Capitol Hill where people almost beat each other to death on the Capitol Hill, on the floors of Congress or recall, you know, it's not like we're in some particularly polarized moment compared to the rest of American history where we had a civil war, where we had the conflicts of the 70s. And so, you know, I don't think we're in some bronze age of kind of bad behavior. Because I think that it comes and goes in waves. And the Cold War, in a sense, united the Republicans and Democrats around a common objective, particularly when it came to foreign policy and national security. We don't really have that agreement. We have that agreement after 9-11, you know, President Bush had a 90% approval ratings highest of any president in American history in the weeks after 9-11. And the Iraq War kind of blew up that. And the lowest. And the lowest. Yeah, and the Iraq War blew up this consensus. And why do we have Trump? I think we have Trump for the two really very simple big reasons. One is the financial crisis. And the other one is the Iraq War. The elites have failed the American people with a war of choice, which turned out to be very expensive in blood and treasure. And with the kind of self-dealing that exists in both parties that allowed, in a sense, this financial crisis to emerge. And Trump seemed to supply answers to both of these questions, basically saying, we're going to end these endless wars, and I'm going to work for the common man. Now, has he succeeded in either of those? You know, that's not really for this discussion. But the point is, if the Democrats are going to win against Trump, they have to produce somebody who has some ideas about both these issues. And it seems like it has implausible answers to some of these questions. And just a comment, I would agree with you that one thing I saw serving in the Bush administration was, I don't think I appreciated, even though I'd been a civil servant for some time at that point, I don't think I appreciated how much of our system of governments is customary and not statutory. And that if people choose not to do things and there's no enforcement of the norms and the way that we run our government, then it doesn't happen. Like the Geneva Convention's enforcement, for example, was one of those examples. So not to get off on that. On the deep state thing, there was a quote that I thought was pretty interesting. And I realize it's kind of a little unfair because you've been immersed in this book, so it's hard to remember what's on every page. But this one, this really caught my attention. You said in the end, the real deep state, retired senior generals, such as Keen and officials at the Pentagon and State Department, managed to keep many hundreds of American soldiers in Syria and so on. But when you said the real deep state, you said retired generals, people who are outside of the system that have direct influence, because you talk a lot about the way that Keen was able to have direct influence on Trump's decisions, probably more than almost anyone else. Yeah, well, Jack Keen is a fascinating character in the book. Jack Keen grew up in the projects of Manhattan. He rose to become Fort in Vietnam. He rose to become Army Chief, Vice Chief of Staff, Four-Star General. Trump passed him not once, but twice to become Secretary of Defense. Keen can speak to Trump directly and speaks to him directly on television, on Fox. And occasionally Trump, one of the scenes in the book is Keen is saying, look, if you really want to get the North Koreans to pay attention, basically evacuate all the American families that are with the service members' families and that will really get their attention. This causes great consternation in the Oval Office and the White House, because the North Koreans really would believe we were going to go to war and the South Korean stock market would crash and it would create this big crisis. And that was slow rolled and it didn't happen. So where was I going with that? But some of my friends have such influence. And he's not part of the system at all. Well, but I mean, Jack Keen went, he'd go back to the surge in 2007 and it's a fascinating story about how outside advisors can really make a difference. So there was a debate within the National Security Council about what to do in Iraq and there were people who were in favor of the surge, for instance, Negan O'Sullivan, Brett McGurk, who would show up later in the story, and Steve Hadley to some degree. But Jack Keen went into the Oval Office and basically told Trump, you've got to put Dave Petraeus in charge, have a surge, and move to a counter-insurgency strategy. And so Keen is not the first time that he's had a lot of this influence. And that I think was one of the reasons we had the surge in the counter-insurgency strategy and Dave Petraeus in charge in Iraq. Similarly with this, Keen was able to go into the Oval Office and say that the context here is December 2018 when Trump has announced this unilateral pulling out of Syria, which surprised everybody in his own cabinet and all our allies. And Keen went in and basically knows that Trump is a visual learner, not a briefing book kind of guy, and he rolls out a map. And he says, look, this is where the oil sees. You quoted in the book saying the briefing has to be on an index. Yeah, McMaster told the National Security Council staff, don't send a 70-page paper, send an index card, and also some suggested tweets. That's a lot shorter than most leaders for their briefings. But so Keen rolled out the map, and he showed where the oil fields are in Syria, and how Iran would control them if we just pulled out. And Keen said that Trump will listen to you if you're giving him new information, if you're giving him the same old argument as he was just tuning you out. And so that was persuasive. Now the thing about Trump is he's consistently inconsistent. So December 2018, let's pull out. Then we decide to stay, partly because of Keen's intervention. Then three months later, we're gonna pull out. No, we're gonna stay. And I think that this consistent inconsistency might be helpful in some Manhattan real estate deal, but it is less helpful if you're conducting the foreign policy of the United States. And one thing I do say in the book, which I think is true, is that Trump has been very lucky. If you go back to FDR, every president since FDR, you've argued before, has had some major foreign policy crisis. The rise of the Nazis, or the return of the iron curtain going down in Europe. The Saddam invading Kuwait, 9-11, the global financial crisis. Clinton had two of our embassies blowing up to more than 200 people, and the U.S.S. coal blowing up killing the 817 American sailors. Trump hasn't had this kind of crisis. So the interesting question is, how would he react in this crisis? Now, based on his past behavior, I would say that what we know about him, that doesn't mean that we is a totally accurate predictor, but he has, I think he's been kind of somewhat discriminatory in the use of American power, military power, but he hasn't had a major foreign policy crisis. Impulsive. He's impulsive. Part of that inconsistency. Yeah, so I think the consistent inconsistency is not helpful to our allies or our enemies. I think our enemies kind of want to know what our red lines are as it were. I always want to know that we're with them when it matters, and he's made it clear that they can't count on that. There's such a great scene in the book about, I got advice from my publicist to talk about the book when we're doing book talks, sorry, I'm going to talk about the book. So I'm going to talk about the book. There's a great scene in the book when Angela Merkel comes for the first time to Washington and to meet Trump. And Trump has, you know, Trump has incensed that Germans only spend 1% of their GDP on defense spending when there's been an agreement that every country should spend 2% in NATO, up to 2% or more of... By 2024. By 2024. And so Trump, the staff did up an invoice to give to Angela Merkel for $600 billion, which Trump presents to her. And she's like, you know, don't you know this isn't real? I mean like the Germans don't owe us $600 billion. This is not the way NATO works, but like Trump either willfully misunderstands this or misunderstands it or whatever, but it's a... Allies ripping us off is a very consistent theme of his. It's been... He took out a full page ad in the New York Times in 1987 saying the Japanese are ripping us off and free riding on us and the Saudis are ripping off of them. They need to pay down our federal debt, which at the time was only $200 billion, with it being kind of a bargain. But, you know, so it's a kind of a... It's an obsession with him that allies, our friends are ripping us off and our enemies in some way need to be embraced. And this is of course, when ultimately what are the things that did in the generals is that they didn't share this view at all. If you look at H.R. McMaster's speech, the Munich Security Conference, where somebody asked him a question about the just indicted 12... In 2018, right? Yeah, Russian military officers who were involved in sabotaging the presidential election in 2016. McMaster says something like, we have to show the indisputable proof that the Russians have done this and then immediately Trump tweets that Mars is kind of wrong, mistaken. And Mattis did a speech at the Reagan Library in California a few months before he was resigned and he said he can't trust Putin. So I mean, they do have a kind of core... They have a view of the world which Trump doesn't share. And I opened the book with this amazing meeting in the tank in the Pentagon, which is where the Pentagon opened, I think, in 1943. And so the tank is the most secure conference room in the Pentagon, where all the most highly classified discussions, you must know the room. And so this is where FDR and George Marshall plan the end of World War II. So the reason I opened the book with this meeting is, to me, is the most important meeting of the presidency in all the ways. Trump doesn't know much about what we're doing in the world, obviously. And why do we have 190,000 troops posted around the world? What are our trade agreements? What are our nuclear weapons posturings? Where are our aircraft carriers? How many do you have, et cetera. So the idea was to basically give him a lay down of what the world looks like. And Jim Mattis and Rex Tillerson presented Soda Garycone about our trade agreements. And they were basically presenting in an effort to persuade Trump that the international order that the United States had largely created and had largely worked in our favor since World War II, this is the world that both Republicans and Democrats had kind of agreed made sense. And Steve Bannon, who was a back bencher and then the Trump's chief strategist had a very different goal for this briefing, which is basically to show Trump how overextended and over committed we were and had to have this international rule-based order to actually work against us. And the meeting did not go well for the so-called globalist. I mean, you know, Trump basically used a bunch of swear words that I can't use on C-SPAN. And, you know, and Soda's shouting and saying, you know, we're getting screwed by our allies and Chinese deficit to really mean something. And why are we never losing any war? Why do we continue never winning wars? And General Dunford, of course, ran the Afghan war before becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs was sitting there. And anyway, the meeting was widely regarded as being a total fiasco. And the car back to the White House, Steve Bannon said to Jared Kushner and Ryan Spribos, then the chief of staff, this was Lincoln and his generals. And by what, by that he meant that, I mean, obviously this is kind of an overwrought comparison, but Lincoln, you know, during the Civil War, when the war was not in one, he fired various generals. And so the point that Bannon was trying to make with the Civil War buff was that Trump was really laying down a marker about what this presidency is gonna be about. And then they went back to the White House. And they were learning the old ineffectual ways of doing business. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, some of this, I mean, Trump actually asked, you know, when I talked to people in the National Security Council about what's Trump like in these meetings, and he would basically ask a set of questions which were very consistent. Why are we doing this? Can't somebody else pay? What does this mean for the American people? Why are we here? Like in Afghanistan, you know, why are we here 16 years later, 17 years later? He asked about skeptical questions. But these are not unreasonable questions. And of course, you know, we live in the part of the swamp and we sometimes don't consider them as... There's a lot of consensus amongst Republicans and Democrats on the National Security side, I think, about around these questions. And so the fact that he's asking questions is not bad. But if the answer isn't always, you know, our allies are ripping us off or it makes no sense. One thing I do think that I don't say in the book that I've been thinking about is Trump has kind of conflated persistent presence with endless wars. There's a big difference between an endless war and a persistent presence. So for instance, in Afghanistan right now, we're kind of, you know, at an interesting point. You could imagine a policy, which I think it's a policy we're gonna kind of go down, where we keep a relatively small number of special operations, special forces. We don't say we're leaving. There are very limited casualties. The amount of money is not that much. I mean, there's a scene in the book where General Dunford said, no one wants to buy life insurance, but we buy life insurance because it's smart. And this is in the context of the decision-making around the Afghan war. And by that, what he meant is like, you know, we can't, if we leave, we've already run this, by the way, the United States has repeatedly run this experiment, not the obvious ones, like leaving Iraq at the end of 2011 and the chaos that then ensued and produced ISIS. But we closed our embassy in Afghanistan in 1989 because we defeated the Soviets and we said goodbye and Clinton zeroed out age one of the poorest countries in the world. And into this, that there was a civil war and the Taliban came and al-Qaeda came and we were kind of blind. So the point is that just because the United States decided to withdraw from somewhere, it doesn't mean the war is over. Quite the reverse, often the war can be worse. And what the United States, United States was founded as a sort of anti-empire project and therefore we're very uncomfortable with anything that sort of feels like that. Part of the reason we get these things wrong is no one learns the languages. We're always there for six months and then we're gonna leave and we never have any, our attention span is limited and then it's political cycles come up and so it's hard for us to have a kind of consistent policy and the Afghan policy has been, we tried a lot of different flavors here. But I think there is a kind of common sense approach that a Democratic president or a Republican president of the future would also kind of sign on to, which is a persistent presence, an advise and assist mission that doesn't involve the United States taking, by the way, I think one thing that I think is fascinating is how well the ISIS campaign was conducted. And you think about 17 American soldiers died in that five year campaign, now there's 17 soldiers, too many, 11,000 Kurds died. I mean, and I'm not, what I'm saying is this, that this is one of the most successful advise and assist missions, both in Iraq and in Syria that we've conducted. And I don't think sometimes we kind of forget that we can do things successfully, particularly with the right partner and you look at the Iraqi counter-terrorism service, it's a pretty effective military force that we help create. I think the last point to end on before we turn it to the audience. I think it is a community, the foreign policy and national security community that tends to have very strong norms and tends to be governed by consensus, sometimes for good reasons because a lot of things have been tried and you find that there's a fairly narrow range of what works. But that also counts against you in that Afghanistan all these years where we keep saying we're turning the corner and it's getting better, which is now, I think, become a narrative that more of the public's familiar with, that it's a fair point that we have a tendency to stay inside a very strong mainstream. And so I definitely think that people in my community recognize that the criticism is valid and particularly we're at a time now where we need to have a disruptive national security strategy. I don't personally think that this president is helping us in our long-term goals, particularly the way that he's conducted himself with our allies. As you just said, whether it's Kurds or NATO, we do need allies to promote our interests in the world. Church will have the famous observation, the only thing worse than fighting with allies is not having any allies. So, you know, we, look, allies are problematic but not having allies doesn't help. And yeah, and you look at Afghanistan since we're on the subject, you know, the first time the Article V of NATO was invoked. One thing that Trump never talks about is that there's hundreds of French and German and British soldiers who died in Afghanistan fighting a war that's really sort of on our behalf and that resulted as they did not. And so, and, you know, it was an attack on Trump's hometown that precipitated this operation. So. Let's give the audience a chance. And just one thing for you to bank while we're taking the questions. You wrote this book as this was happening, which was really challenging. And, you know, you say in the end, there were a couple of things you said that I thought were really interesting. You know, Trump is now his own general. And then you said, is he an outlier or a harbinger? And so I would ask you at the very end of this conversation, what's the next chapter? So let's go ahead. You had your hand up first. So if you would please identify yourself. Sorry, a little host privilege here. I'm Fuzz, working in America, and I wanted to follow up quickly on something you said last question, Peter. You said, even if we leave the war isn't over, what about the inverse? We have troops in Germany, we have troops in Japan, we have troops in Korea. Could Trump or the next president declare the war over either of them? And stay? And how would the generals feel about that? Well, I mean, that would, in the case of Korea, we have like 25,000 troops in Korea, a lot more than twice as many as we have in Afghanistan right now. So, I mean, but for those troops to leave, you'd have to have a peace agreement with the North Koreans. And that is, right now we have an armistice. It's all apparently. Oh, yeah, right. And right now we have an armistice. So, you know, for those troops to leave, there would actually have to be a real agreement. The war is over, we're just... You're talking about a large presence, though, with an all-volunteer force. That's not easy. So, we're in Germany, Japan, the war is over? Yeah, yeah, I mean, clearly the war, I mean, I mean, I, we, what's the question I've gotten so... Can you declare the war over and stay? So, can you stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq, presumably in Syria with the American... Or just say so. Just in a non-combat situation. Well, that's kind of where we are in Afghanistan. We're not in, we're not conducting combat operations, really. I mean, we're, except on the counterterrorism side. So, yeah, you could, you can stay and the war is over. The war is over clearly in Japan and clearly in Germany. And you can, that's why I think you can, that we need to make a distinction between persistent presence, which is what we have in Germany, and the endless war, which is what I think a lot of Americans think we are in Afghanistan. I think that we're moving more towards persistent presence and that makes sense. So, and if you could identify yourself for us and your affiliation. And I just wanna warn you that I seem nice, but I'm really not. And so, if you declaim, I'm gonna cut you off. Peter Harpreet, Intel analyst and a former diplomat. Given that these gentlemen have a limited shelf life, A, do you see a resistance to each subsequent guy coming in? Is it getting harder and harder to bring someone in? And B, does the administration have a round in the chamber or are we starting a search process every single time? So, you mean Secretary Esper has a harder time than his predecessor in telling them? Well, it's harder to recruit. Oh, okay, right. Yeah, I mean, look, I think in a normal, I mean, Mark Esper seems like a perfectly competent guy, but he's not Jim Mattis and Robert Bryan seems like a perfectly competent lawyer, but he's not H.R. McMaster. I mean, the talent pool is not as big over time. And that's true in any administration as a clock sort of ticks down. But I think in this administration, like, you know, I mean, just do the math. I mean, the likelihood of you being fired or forced out or having to resign is pretty high in these jobs. And, you know, I'm sure the universe of people just willing to do it through that, I think, is smaller and there's still lots of jobs still open and they've got part of them as a fan since state. Yes, and also I would say from my former colleagues and contacts in both parties, yeah, they're having a very hard time recruiting and their best people continue to need. Hi, my name is Jonathan, just a taxpayer and want good leadership in the United States. Peter, this question's just for you. Basically, you've done all this incredible research on the history of the presidency, National Security Council, defense. If you were to distill Trump's leadership style, pros and cons, and what we could learn from that, looking forward into the next 10, 20 years for the future potuses, what would you say? Well, I mean, his leadership style is idiosyncratic, I would say. And I mean, it's hard to sort of encapsulate in a kind of neat, let me say this. He is running, he is the White House, like he ran his real estate company now, which is maybe what he always wanted. And by the way, it's his prerogative to run it however he wants. He's the only elected official in the room when the cabinet meets. But he's surrounded largely by a group of yes men with a sprinkling of yes women and family members. And it's a one man show, right? I mean, and I think the group of generals and other leaders that he had in 2017 was a more impressive group of people. They actually debated with him about matters of substance. They kept the Iran nuclear deal alive for 18 months. Jim Mattis wanted, he didn't think it was the world's greatest deal, but he negotiated with the English, the French and the Germans and we give our word and we stick to our word when we have this deal. And the deal is working because the Iranians weren't enriching ringing for weapons production. So I think that his leadership style has, he's kind of reverted back to what he knows best, which is a one man show with people just saying yes. That doesn't really matter, I think probably most of the time, but it does matter if a major foreign policy crisis hits and he's not getting the best advice that you should be getting. That said, as we've discussed already, he's reluctant to use American military power in general, which is good. He is capable of changing his mind. I'll give you an example that we haven't discussed. Saipov, who was the Uzbek American, he killed eight people in Manhattan with a vehicle attack in Halloween a little over a year ago. Trump immediately said we should send him to Guantanamo. And within 24 hours he said, actually, I've changed my mind about that. Why do you change your mind? Because enough people said to him, look, he's sent Saipov to Guantanamo, he's never gonna be tried. We haven't tried Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of 9-11 who's been in Guantanamo now since, or in American custody since 2003. So he's capable of changing his mind about the facts, but he has certain instincts. I'm not carrying that Republican orthodoxy was, you can't say you'll try them in American questions. Well, that's true. Yeah, yeah, Republican orthodoxy is we should send all these people to Guantanamo. He himself said that for a while. So, you know, I mean, I'm gonna kind of duck your question a little bit in the sense that it's too early to tell is kind of a good answer to all questions. And to quote Yogi Berra. How about a specific gloss on that question? Yeah. His use of tweets to directly communicate is unprecedented. Well, that is... Unfiltered tweets. Yeah, well, that's a really good observation. I mean, clearly that is just, I mean... Will that continue? Yeah, well, I mean, why have a White House press secretary if President Trump is doing these so-called chopper talks every day and or tweeting? I mean, it's a much more direct form of communication unfiltered, this is what the president thinks at any given time. It's hard to imagine that a, the next president wouldn't adopt some of these kind of communication strategies, right? So, certainly on that front. I mean, I think Americans also, if you look at polling data, a lot of Americans, a majority, think we're doing too much in the world. So Trump, it's not that Trump is unreflective of where a lot of Americans are. It's the so-called deep state. It's the Republican Democrat national security establishment that takes it as an article of faith that actually one of the reasons that we've done so well is because we set up all this national security architecture and trade architecture, the kind of, it all boats rise, but at the end of the day, it was the United States that was sort of the architect of this. So, okay, another way to answer your question. Let's do the thought experiment. I don't know what to ask you. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, I actually, let me, So just hit to repeat it because the camera would have picked it up. That's good leadership for the president of the United States. Let me start with the observation that when we're electing our president, we're not electing, he or she is not being elected because they're a nice person. Lyndon Johnson would routinely be in the bathroom screaming and doing his thing, screaming orders at people in the White House. You're more explicit about that. Yeah. Bill Clinton would be, had a sexual affair in the Oval Office with an intern, which he lied about to the American people. The age of his daughter. Yeah. You know, the nicest American presidents of recent era, President Carter and George H.W. Bush, both of one-term presidents. And also by all accounts, we're not necessarily nice internally in the way that they did. Well, I also- They were just as salty and decided- Well, but the point is that they, we're not electing somebody who's nice. So like all these leadership books would say, like, you know, you have to be the seventh leader and all that, that I don't think is really true. You're very military-ish in the process that you've portrayed. Well, yes. So I mean, if they may be in the military, but I think for the president, it's a different matter. So I don't think we're electing sort of a nice person. We're electing an effective person. The question is, has Trump been effective? And I think that, you know, when people look at that 401K, they're gonna say this guy was effective, right? If that's the measure or- At least for now. At least for now. If this makes a Canada trade deal, you know, that will be seen potentially as effective. If the Chinese really stop stealing our intellectual property, trade in a more fair manner, buy more of our goods, that will be seen as effective. So, you know, I think it's just, it is too early to tell in the broader sense I can't really answer your question, to be honest. But do you think also this sort of no-holds-barred, you know, my way or the highway, and I don't care what our system of government is, is there gonna be, if the pendulum swings back, are there gonna be the same conduct? But it doesn't matter that we're, have checks and balances. I'm the strong executive. I'm gonna do whatever I think is right and break plates if that's what needs to happen. Well, I mean, that was, you're describing Lyndon Johnson, right? I mean, so that just goes back to this, like, so if your question is about what personal characteristics do we want in a leader, I don't think niceness is one of them. That is, and being a gentleman, or let's say, I mean, one of the big differences between the military and President Trump is, the military has a sort of honor-based code of conduct. Trump clearly doesn't. I mean, but what really separated the generals from Trump is not the way that, I mean, there's an astonishing scene in the book where Trump is saying, you know, Afghanistan wasn't worth the death of one single American soldier, and he says that in the presence of John Kelly, whose son, Robert Kelly, Robert Kelly's lieutenant, Marines, was killed in Afghanistan in 2010. Did Trump not know that fact about his chief of staff, the guy he spends the most time with then, of anybody in the White House, or did he not care, or some combination of both? I don't know. But the point is, is that, you know, his lack of empathy is, you know, that ultimately is immaterial because the American people are voting for somebody who act in their interests in a way that is appropriate. And I think that Trump has got lucky without having a major foreign policy crisis. He hasn't made major unforced errors like the Iraq War. And so I think the jury is kind of out. And I mean, let's see how it goes with the Chinese, which is really, you know, I think one area where he's done terribly is an area that Sharon knows very well, which is climate change. And I think that Trump could have said, I disagree with the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by humans, but I'm aware of it, it's happening. And therefore, I'm a builder, we're gonna do big infrastructure projects, we're gonna protect lower Manhattan, we're gonna protect Palm Beach, two of the places that would be most affected by climate change in the United States. And he hasn't said that. So that was, I think, that is a dereliction of duty in my view. So anyway, there is, I don't have a simple answer to your very good question. But it was a good discussion. I think we have time for one more, at least one more, probably more than one more. Hey, Heidi Voet, I was a reporter in Afghanistan during McChrystal's tenure. And so a bit of a hypothetical. I'm wondering, you know, if he had said yes, you know, he was always known for his sort of casual, straight talking demeanor. Do you think he would have had more success managing Trump or, you know, even just strategically, do you think he would have taken a different approach? I think the short answer is no. Can you give a longer answer? Because what you used were interesting word, managed. One thing Trump hates is, if he thinks he's being managed, he doesn't like being lectured to. There's a great scene in the book where Steve Bannon says, look, to Terry Charles McMaster, look. You know, Trump is a guy who like partied all night, didn't do any, didn't read any of the books, you know, comes in in the morning, puts him on a cup of coffee, reads your notes, gets the passing grade on the paper. You know, he's not, like he's not at all, that's why he doesn't like being, he doesn't like professors, he doesn't mean like lectured to, he doesn't want to be managed. He believes in his own instincts. He believes, you know, there's a quote that you begin the book with, which he's back in 2004, Trump talks in the New York Times and said, you know, you don't ask Babe Ruth how he did things, he did it by instinct, right? So he's kind of comparing himself to somebody like Babe Ruth. So he has a great belief in his own gut. So I don't think there was any person, Jim Mattis had his approach, John Kelly had his approach, H.R. McMaster had his approach. I mean, none of those approaches really work. And the approach that seems to work is just to sort of say yes, and sort of like you're right. And I mean, he doesn't, I wouldn't really want to be married to him. Lucky for you. Lucky for you, I don't think it's in the cards. I don't think so. So we have to end now. I know you have a question, but I would invite you, if anyone would like the book signed, this is your moment. We don't have a whole lot of time for that. So please approach and if you would, please come up, feel free to ask your question. But we do need to end now and I want to thank you very much for coming and joining us for this conversation and encourage you to read this wonderful book which you can see that I enjoyed. Thank you Sarah. Thank you.