 Hello and welcome to Need to Know, a video interview program hosted by the Low Institute's digital magazine, The Interpreter. My name is Roger Shanhan, I'm a research fellow in the West Asia program at the Institute and it's my great pleasure to introduce our first guest, Brett McGurk. Brett McGurk is well known to people who follow Middle East as one of the foremost policy practitioners of his generation. He's currently a distinguished lecturer at Stanford University. He's also rather unique in the fact that he has served under three successive administrations. Under George W. Bush, he was member of the National Security Council, where he's the country director for Iraq. Under the Obama administration, he was deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran and also the special presidential envoy for the coalition to defeat Islamic State. Under the President Trump's administration, he retained that position until he resigned from it in December 2018. So welcome, Brett, to the Low Institute and thanks very much for giving us your time today. I'm speaking to you yesterday, your time, and I'm tomorrow, your time, so it's quite confusing. Well, it's great to be here virtually. Thanks for having me, Roger. This will be in two parts. I'd just like to explore in the first part of this interview, really, the macro issue about your experience of foreign policy development from Washington. In the second part, we'll narrow it down a bit more to your experiences with Islamic State and, in particular, coalition building as it relates to Islamic State. But I mean, in your experience of the three administrations, quite different administrations in their foreign policy outlook, I'm very keen for your views on what at the administrative or administration level, what are those kind of key drivers of foreign policy? How much is it driven by an ideologically driven strategic view of the United States place in the world? How much is it driven by having to deal with the day-to-day crises and being reactive? And how much is it driven by personal characteristics of the presidents themselves? How would you measure or weigh each of those different elements that drive foreign policy? Well, Roger, again, thanks. And that's a, first, it's really great to be with you and the Lowy Institute, which is such tremendous work, and we all follow it closely here in the States. I'm very grateful for all the work that you do and all the opinion research and everything. It's incredibly beneficial to all of us who care about these issues. You know, I'll try to address your question by what I'm dealing with now. So I'm here in Palo Alto at Stanford. We've been locked down here for a couple months. I'm working on a book project, which will come out at some point next year, really looking at the period from 9-11 through the end of 2018. So it's a story kind of through my eyes. We're working very closely, spent a year in Iraq in 2014, worked very closely with President Bush in the White House for four years, in and out of the Obama administration, worked very closely with President Obama, and then two years with President Trump. And so I was making some good progress in my office. We could go to my office not too long ago. But then in the COVID world, I've been thinking, it really feels like I'm writing about not just a different era, but really a different age. I mean, it's just so much is changing so rapidly. And looking at my experience and kind of what presidents were thinking about what the country was thinking about, and just how much seems have fundamentally changed. But when I step back a little bit, the broader lessons that I'm trying to draw in telling these stories, I think really apply even more so now as we look kind of beyond the horizon. And I think a period of constrained resources, and I think one of modest expectations. And that really is a lesson of just getting back to first principles, the fundamentals of sound decision making at the highest levels of any country. And that is just the basic principles of being very careful about how we define our strategic objectives abroad. Really thinking, I mean, this is a kind of, it's an elementary point, but it's one that often gets lost when you're in the situation room in the old office. And that is, how do we define our objectives? And before we declare to the world that we have a specific objective, let's ask the hard questions about how we're going to achieve it, what the resources will be, what our allies might think, how our adversaries might react, just the kind of the essentials of good decision making. And so I'm really writing a story about getting back to first principles, the alignment of N's ways and means, and the risks of having objectives, what setting objectives without having your resource base really thought through, without thinking through costs and consequences, without thinking through how your allies, adversaries, competitors might react. And so I had this unique experience of coming to Washington in the summer of 2001 as a law clerk in the US Supreme Court. And that was a time in the United States in which the Bush v. Gore was the main, the Supreme Court basically just decided the presidential election. The country felt very divided at the time. It all feels kind of quaint looking back on it. But I was there in the Supreme Court kind of right after that all happened. And kind of, you really felt like being in the eye of the hurricane. And then we had the 9 11 attacks in September, which just changed the course of history, changed the course of the country, also made very much change the course of my own career trajectory. So I ended up having an opportunity to go to Iraq in early 2004 and spend a year there on the ground. And just saw very up close this disconnect versus objectives and resources and, you know, the invasion of Iraq with kind of an unlimited regime change and kind of establishing a accountable democratic system of governance with a resource base of about 130,000 American troops, very few allies, just a huge tremendous gap between ends and needs to say the least among other assumptions that were, I think, fatally flawed. I was in the White House with President Bush. We kind of just dramatically reversed the war plan that a massive strategic review in 2006 led to the surge, just really significantly increasing our resources, decreasing our objectives a little bit. I think overall that was a success. And then I lived the experience of President Obama of trying to pivot to Asia, reduce commitments in the Middle East. And I don't want to go through the entire story, but it's just a kind of an elementary lesson of objective setting and thinking through resources. The problem just to get, bring it up to date in the Trump administration is that, and I think this is a feature of American presidents when you really go back and study foreign policymaking, the tendency to set maximalist objectives across the board. I mean on almost every issue, right? So we now here have a national security strategy. The national security strategy which defines U.S. strategic policy is oriented now around great power competition. And that means like, we don't call a pivot to Asia, which was the Obama administration, but it really is a reorientation. And I was in the Trump administration when this was done, and it's pretty clear that we are going to prioritize, particularly Asia, and that means the Middle East will have a lower priority scale. So one thing that meant, while we continue to really prioritize the fight against ISIS, and we'll talk about that, I think in our later discussion about how that went, what we did, where we are now, it was also very clear we're not going to get significantly new resources for the Middle East, right? So kind of make do with what you have. At the same time though, as we set that national security objective, great power competition, our objectives in the Middle East actually increased. So on Iran, a significant increase in objectives, pulling out of the JCPOA, Pompeo gave a speech with 12 points, which are basically, it's effectively a regime change policy. Nobody calls it that, that's what it is. In Syria, which I was working very closely on, which is just one of the most complex foreign policy problems to say the least, but our objectives there actually increased, right? So not only the war against ISIS, we also want to see all Iranians leave Syria, and we still have, which is effectively, we want to see Assad either fundamentally transform himself and how he governs, which is highly unlikely, or somehow remove himself from power through Geneva-led political process, which has been going on for a decade. So here we are, while we're, you know, big picture level, brand strategy, reprioritizing elsewhere, we're actually increasing our objectives in the Middle East region. And this is all going on at the same time that we are kind of shedding alliances, and I felt this very up close, of course, dealing with all of our allied and partner capitals. And in the Middle East, for partners of ours, and I use that word term broadly, because every capital has their own interests, but start to really kind of go after each other. And so rifts that had been opening a little bit, but that we had been working, as the United States does, as diplomats quietly to try to keep them at a low boil, really burst into the open. And that is Qatar, UAE and Saudi, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, UAE, Saudi, that kind of divide, and that just kind of really burst open. And because we weren't doing all that much maintenance diplomacy, which is really critical, those problems got even more complicated. So just break in there. I mean, is that one of the issues that when you're talking about ways and means that perhaps Washington has been underweighting for a number of years in that maintenance of relationships, not only in the Middle East, but maintenance more broadly, because you need to be able to draw on those kind of links. But it's very difficult to do if you haven't spent enough time in maintaining them. Do you think that's a fair criticism? Yes. So if you are going to have a national security strategy, which is going to focus on great power competition, which is kind of the phraseology of the day and of the moment, what are the ways and means to actually affect you at a policy like that? I think number one, our comparative advantage of the West of the United States of Australia is the ability to build alliances, build alliances and maintain alliances. That is the critical ways and the part of the means actually harnessing our strength to be able to do great things in the world. So if you're not paying attention to that and you're not very focused on day to day, the blocking and tackling, we call it to use an American football phrase, of maintenance diplomacy, you're actually going to find yourself in a worse position vis-a-vis great powers. Again, this is not a her shattering point. This is like Master of the Obvious Stuff, but this is stuff that we I think are getting fundamentally wrong. And if you go back to the, there's a lot of talk these days about new Cold War and everything, but you really go back to the foundational documents that were established, the Truman Administration, the Eisenhower Administration, George Kenden's Long Telegram. It talks about our strength, US strength is really greatly harnessed. It's where foreign and our domestic policies meet and intersect. And what does that mean? That means our strength at home, what's happening here at home will pretty much determine how effectively we can be abroad. So we have a lot of problems in our country right now. We're sharply, we're greatly divided. We have about 25 trillion dollars in deaths, which are continuing to increase. And so to take on all these problems around the world, setting maximal subjective everywhere, while we also don't have our own house in order, I think you're setting yourself up for a massive fail. So just to bring it back to your first question, I'm writing about this period from 9-11 to the end of 2018, which I think is a very unique period in history where a lot of mistakes were made. And I lived through a lot of that. And I think we actually did a lot of good things and learned some lessons. So I'm trying to draw that out in a way that will be, I hope helpful and beneficial and being very honest and hard on myself and others who live through this. Because these are really hard. I've been pretty tough on President Trump. I also recognize it's almost impossibly the president of the United States these days. It's almost an impossible job. So we need to keep that in mind. But there are timeless lessons of strategy, timeless lessons of foreign policymaking, and timeless lessons of how to harness national strength and alliances, which I think we cannot allow to wither on the vine. And right now I think they are withering. Very much, Brett. And I think we'll just leave it there at the moment for your insights into the current foreign policy decision making in Washington. And I'd just like to segue nicely from there into a more focused discussion about coalition building as it relates to Syria and Islamic State. So thanks very much, Brett.