Is Strategy Possible Now? Ever?

You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs. My name's Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, I sat down with some old friends. Frank Hoffman, who worked for many years at the National Defense University and is a legend in the world of strategy making. Rebecca Friedman listener. currently of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her last role in government was Vice President Harris's Deputy National Security Advisor and Justin Logan, who leads all things defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute. We have a rollicking conversation on strategy going through almost every region of the world. I think you'll enjoy it. It gets pretty spicy. Thank you all for joining. We got a great group. Very excited to have you all on the show. Frank, I'm shocked that I've never had you on the podcast before, given you've been involved with War on the Rocks from the beginning. This is actually my second podcast. It's been so long you've forgotten it already. You were on the show before? On some show, I remember we had amber liquids in glasses. That's why Ryan doesn't remember. This was just been years ago. It was. It was a decade ago. Oh, okay. All right. Well, welcome back. Rick, I've had you on the show, although not for a number of years. It's been a while. I'm happy to be back. And, Justin, you were just on a few months ago, but I'm still happy to see you. Like a bad penny. I just keep turning up. Yeah. There's so much going on in the world. I'm not sure where to start. I think the broader idea I kind of want to get at is to what extent is there any kind of strategy or grant strategy in this administration, given all that's going on? Or is this a purely sort of personalistically driven set of policies that don't necessarily add up? And I think one place where we can start with that is what's happening with Venezuela, just to go around the horn, who here thinks we're actually going to attack Venezuela or try a regime change operation, which I realize is sort of two different things. Not to be Clintonian, but I'd ask you to define attack. I think the administration doesn't want to go, but the problem is that you may push enough forward that it becomes difficult to climb down. So that's me not very casually trying to not answer the question. I'd say if you asked me a week ago, I would have put odds on some form of military action, Venezuela, but more recent statements coming out of the White House make me think that they're actually looking for a way out. And maybe we'll just see a continued campaign against the alleged drug trafficking votes and not anything approximating a real military intervention of the kind that they seem to be prepared for, at least in a military force buildup sense. Yeah, I just think this is a... pressure operation to induce some change in Venezuela. I doubt that they're going to engage in regime change. It would just really... go against the base so much. It might be a strike operation for face saving for the administration because of the air power that have been struck up. But I don't see any operation that puts troops on the ground inside Venezuela. But I think Frank makes an important point because it does feel like the MAGA base has clarified its position over the past couple weeks against any such operation and that that message seems to have been received by the White House. They put an awful lot of firepower down there. Sure did. Yeah, I guess I'll be the only one that thinks it's coming then.

I mean, one, I'm sure you all read that story about how they tried to bribe reportedly his pilot, Maduro's pilot, to just fly him to Puerto Rico. I do think they want to change the regime. I think they've tried to do that through a show of force and negotiations and course of diplomacy, which I don't think will work. And then I think they're going to, you know, reportedly, J-Soc is down there. I don't think you do all this unless you plan on having the optionality to do something. Optionality, yes, but that doesn't mean they're going to exercise it. Sure, but it doesn't mean that it has to be an invasion or landing Marines on the beach. It could be some sort of snatch and grab operation or something as ill-advised is what Vladimir Putin tried to do in Ukraine in 2022. I hope we don't play the Ukraine movie in Venezuela. I don't think we're going to. The administration is all about cheap wins, emphasis on cheap, right? They took the Hague declaration and said, aha, we've solved the burden shifting problem. They struck in the 12-day war, they struck around nuclear facilities and said, we've obliterated the Iranian nuclear program. And so these are sort of like... willing things into existence by rhetoric, right? The Iranian nuclear program, unfortunately, has not been obliterated. And the burden shifting problem has not been solved. But what they might be able to do is whack Venezuela in some way or other and say, aha, we solved the problem and walk away. And the American people being the American people, a couple weeks, everybody will forget about it. What do you think about that? Yeah, again, the national interest level doesn't warrant the risk that's being taken or the expenditure or we're wasting money right now, which is another problem with thinking strategically of how we piddle away force packages and tasks that are peripheral to main interests right now. I want to concur entirely with what you just said. I'm hoping there are saner strategic minds that are advising the president. No, I think Justin is right. In terms of the spectrum of options, you can certainly imagine a world in which the Trump administration does some strikes on regime-affiliated targets, calls it a win and moves on. It's much harder to see the ground operations that have been reported in the press and the more expansive version of these options. What I think is interesting is to ask the question of why are we even talking about this right now? Because... It would not at all have been on my bingo card that in the first year of the Trump administration, we would be having a serious debate about whether there's going to be U.S. military intervention in Venezuela. And as I've been trying to puzzle through it, I think, and curious what others think about this, that it's an intersection of two political projects that exist within the administration that have intersected. One is the South Florida Republicans, right? Marco Rubio being chief among them, but there are other prominent South Florida Republicans like Susie Wiles and the administration who are plugged into constituencies who've been looking for something like this for a long time in terms of some kind of political change in Venezuela. And then the second piece is the sort of Stephen Miller.

war on terror, war on drug sort of mash up political project that has manifestations at home and also has manifestations abroad. And that's how I think we've gotten here with these seemingly extra legal strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats as part of an escalating campaign that could actually be used instrumentally to achieve these Venezuela aims in the end. Apart from that, I can't really explain it because there's nothing about how I understand. Donald Trump's core foreign policy orthodoxy that would lead us there. And you ask this question, like, can there be strategy or grand strategy in the Trump administration? And for the most part, I do believe it just boils down to what the president wants. And when you think about the long-term proclivities that Donald Trump has, it's affection for autocrats, its distaste for allies, and it's... strong taste for tariffs and opposition to free trade. And I would expect that his inclination towards autocrats would actually make him friendly towards someone like Maduro, right? It's surprising that he's looking to unseat a dictator rather than partner up with him in the way that the president has sought to do in other parts of the world. So that's my initial answer to the puzzle of why we're even talking about this right now. At the risk of being a complexifier, let me complicate things a little bit. I find the Stephen Miller part of the story to be very perplexing, right? If I know one thing about Stephen Miller, it's that he's really wound up about Latin American immigration to the United States. And if you light up Venezuela, or as we've just in the last week talked about lighting up cartels in Mexico, are we supposed to believe that that would have a salutary from his point of view effect on immigration flows into the United States? John C. Calhoun opposed the Mexican-American War and not just because it was going to bring three states into the Union, right? He wasn't that wild about mixing peoples up generally. And that was part of the reason for the opposition. So that's the missing piece to this puzzle, is why is Miller bought in on this and I just can't figure it out? I don't know how to figure that guy out. But maybe he thinks that we've just sufficiently militarized the border to which those spillover effects are not something that would be much of a problem anymore. But I don't know. I think it's a fair point to bring up, though, Justin. There's a potential interest, I'll call it a domino, that if you can curtail Venezuela's energy exports to Cuba and Nicaragua, you can influence these other countries, and you can get an effect that way. But I agree with Rebecca's point. You'd think the administration would be in league with an energy-producing autocrat. in the region. And maybe there's an economic interest at stake in American energy products or something that's at play as well that might explain where some of the domestic base might be interested in this situation. I think the trouble now is once we've engaged in this, let's say you're all right and it's either some symbolic strikes that don't actually lead to anything or nothing happens. Not that I'm calling for an intervention, because it certainly doesn't fit with my vision of what we should be doing in our own hemisphere. But there is a risk of leaving that regime in place after all this, especially once the world has seen what supposed rag-tag band of militia groups called the Houthis were able to do with some missiles exported from a partner, the same partner that Maduro is pretty close to, although they're much further away geographically. And just the demonstrative effect of what...

A militia group, and we're not even talking about a country in the case of Venezuela, can do to threaten maritime approaches to build standoff strike without having a massive defense budget. Do you think I'm getting at something here? Do you think this is wild? I would just say if there were ever concerns about needing to follow through on threats in order to maintain. the credibility of the U.S. military or the credibility of the U.S. president, that is particularly not the case right now because we have a president whose whole brand is that he ratchets up and he ratchets back down. And there are positives to that and there are negatives to that. But I wouldn't say in this case that the taco president is one who needs to follow through on his defense Venezuela just so that others, you know, power. I don't think it's a credibility effect. I think it's what is Venezuela having survived this storm that regime? decide to do next to secure itself. But that's an argument for not seating the clouds in the first place. I agree with that metaphor, right? Is that, you know, the people in the White House are talking about the Monroe Doctrine. Right. The Monroe Doctrine was about keeping European empires out of the Western Hemisphere. What we're incentivizing right now in Venezuela is bringing foreign empires into the Western Hemisphere, right? The Russians apparently delivered pansier air defenses to the Venezuelans because the Venezuelans are afraid we're going to whack them. So it's like what we're doing is sort of like an inverse Monroe doctrine where we're incentivizing countries in our own hemisphere to look to our adversaries outside. You come in and help them, yeah. Yes, I agree with that. All right. Next issue. Well, let me throw something in it. Again, getting to credibility. If the Gaza situation goes south and Kiev go south, you get an undercutting of the administration's advances over the last year could easily go south. In Venezuela might be very convenient. operation to regain some credibility at far less risk than boots on the ground in Gaza or greater intervention because the administration does not want to get involved in Ukraine in any serious way. Well, and I think that also speaks to something Ryan, you just said, which is they've bought themselves the option. So even if they don't exercise it now, it's probably not going away entirely. And some version of this pressure campaign will continue to simmer in the background, not necessarily at this level of force posture in the hemisphere. We'll see there could be some redeployments. But I think they will continue to seek to put pressure on the regime, including militarily, in such a way that if there were a political need or a diplomatic need to batch it back up, this will remain an option. Yes, hopefully not with this force posture because I never thought I'd lived to see the day that it wasn't CENTCOM stealing forces from the end of Pacific, but now it was Southcom, but here we are. Southcom of all places. But again, picking up on Justin's point on the Monroe Doctrine, this kind of feeds into a conversation that occurred when the administration got started about, you know, spheres of influence and how the administration looked at the world and how they saw great powers and the great powers that they identified. So somehow when people's mind, Russia becomes a great power.

Europe does not, China becomes great power. And there's this inference that great powers have some privilege and some latitude in their regions. And the president has been exercising both rhetoric, diplomatic pressure and economic pressure against Greenland. Canada, Mexico, now Venezuela. Panama, we're swinging our big stick quite comfortably in our own region where we again presume some privilege, which also then presumes that the president thinks that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have privileges that he needs to respect as well. And that's not a worldview that I think most Americans in the middle of the voter base are going to accept. It is one that more restrained. more disciplined and more prudent advocates, you know, do take. Well, how does this fit with the reported direction, at least, of the National Defense Strategy? I've just seen what's been in the press. I have no inside information, but reports say it's focused very much on the Western Hemisphere, the idea of borders, sovereignty, drug traffickers. Justin, I know you're skeptical that these reports are true. Is that fair? I think that the initial Politico report, which was, what, six weeks ago or something that said, it's a sort of hemispheric defense. policy flies in the face of everything I know about the people who were apparently writing the national defense strategy, right? I've crossed paths with some of these people historically, and I don't think they're big advocates of hemispheric defense. So I don't think they would write that document. And I think what you're going to see is... more than the usual throat clearing that's in these documents, right? And if you look back at previous NSS and NDSs, they do mention the Western Hemisphere, but it's in this perfunctory way that says, well, we build on the base of our, you know, inherent internal strategy. And that's how we're going to apply resources to remake the politics of the Middle East or contain China or whatever the case may be. So I think there's maybe. Six paragraphs and people who read parts of the document said, oh, my goodness, six paragraphs on the Western Hemisphere. This is a revolution. I think it's, if that's our suspicion, I think it's not going to live up to it. Frank, you were very involved in writing the first Trump administration's national security strategy as a civil servant working for Secretary Mattis, working alongside Bridge Colby, who is now in charge of writing the new national defense strategy. So I think. I'm particularly interested in your insights on this. I agree with Justin. There's going to be a rhetorical discussion of the Western Hemisphere. People read into the order of regions often. So I don't presume that the rhetorical prioritization will be matched by the budget. Pacing threat is still the pacing threat. Mr. Higgs-F has made one or two speeches that would suggest that the prioritization discussion that occurred in the press was a mischaracterization of his strategy. It would certainly be, I think, a mischaracterization of where the vice president's coming from and the president as well. And certainly Mr. Colby's strategic thinking. So I think you'll see the money and the emphasis and the investment shortfalls and gaps that it's seeking are dealing with the pacing threat.

I wrote a strategy for the Pentagon that was published by the Army that reflects my thinking, and I prioritize missions, and I put homeland first. And some of that was because of the vulnerabilities in the homeland, which involve critical infrastructure, not border security, involve missile defense, not drugs. There are gaps in vulnerabilities, and I think both the base and I think the American people expect. more attention, you know, to those kind of rising vulnerabilities, which aside from missile defense, don't necessarily require a lot of money, require a lot of coordination, a lot of private and public sector cooperation. But missile defense could be a huge slush fund. You could, you could spend a lot of money on. Well, before we go down the golden dome path, let me just make two points about what's been said. I mean, the first is to Justin's point, I mean, the Biden administration national security strategy said that there's no region of the world that more directly affects the United States than the Western hemisphere. So at least as a rhetorical position in major strategy documents, that proposition is not new. What is new is the idea that what therefore follows is that our presence in the Western Hemisphere, our means of exerting leadership should be primarily military in nature, right? Instead of economic, which was a major focus of the Biden administration policy and even of the first Trump administration policy as they were renegotiating NAFTA into USMCA. So is the Western Hemisphere incredibly important for the United States? Yes, of course. But does that mean that we should be leading with the military instrument? I would say absolutely. not. And I think most Latin Americanists who are glad to see the hemisphere playing such a role in our strategic debates would nevertheless want us to be putting the emphasis elsewhere. To Frank's point about Homeland, similarly, you know, in the Biden administration, NSS and NDS, of course. You were involved in the NSS. I was. And, you know, coordinating closely with the NDS team. Of course, defending the homeland has to be the A number one priority for any administration, for any president, for any Pentagon. The question is, from what are you defending the homeland? And here, I think we are likely to see a difference in emphasis, both in terms of the text of the documents and also how they're messaged by political leadership at the Pentagon and the White House, in terms of what the main threats to the homeland are. And whereas we emphasize many of those threats that Frank just mentioned, many of which originate from China in terms of critical infrastructure, et cetera, I expect to see this articulation of homeland defense to be much more focused on drugs, on migrants. as part of what it means to really fortify the homeland in the Trump administration construct. So I think in terms of the highest level of sort of ordinal priorities, they might look similar. But then when you look at sort of how they're described and how they're messaged in particular, I do expect the points of emphasis will be quite different. Frank, you've been involved in these things since they were called the QDR. In fact, you've probably been involved with more strategy documents than anyone I'm aware of who's still living. I had copies of that take a large shelf. You made a point earlier where you said it really comes down to the budget is not going to follow the strategy. How often is that the case where the strategy says one thing, the budget says something totally different, which then sort of calls into question the exercise of these strategic documents?

There's the policy world, which is not often associated with money very well. Most of my policy friends are not, I would call resource or programmatically literate. But increasingly, I think they are in the last 10 years or so, particularly the Biden people. I think we're physically conscious. But, you know, there's a lot of variables. You know, you can write a document and you can prioritize what you think investments should be. And then it goes to the hill and you get that influence. You have the services both before, during, and after. pursuing their equities. And then there's the industrial base, the business world. And right now, those are significant constituencies, particularly the commercial world on what they think we should be doing and how they influence the hill. And so it's not the... policy worlds lack of clarity on the strategy. It's the implementation and how much the administration has bought in, how well it sells and articulates. And this is one of the challenges with strategy. You want to clarify the crosswalk between your objectives and your programs. You have to sell it. So the language needs to be persuasive and compelling. One of the things that... I thought we achieved in 2018 was before, during, and after when we talked to the Hill, they liked what we were selling, they understood what we were trying to do, and they plused us up $60 to $80 billion. That was not continued, unfortunately, but they bought into Mr. Mattis's theory of the case and plused it up. That has not been sustained, and maybe the money hasn't been spent as well. But to your point, there's a lot of variables at play, and you always don't get eventually. what you want, when you want it, and other factors come into play. COVID, fiscal disasters, wars, Kyiv, that start changing your resource allocation. So strategy is dynamic. You can sit in a room for a year, try to plan it all out, and then things happen. And you were involved in this, Rebecca, also pre-Ukraine. We had the, I think it was the NSS that was supposed to come out, right, which had to then change pretty dramatically. That's right. I've been thinking about it recently because I spent the first year of the Biden administration helping to write the national security strategy. And we had one. In January of 2022, the problem was we knew that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, and it seemed like a crazy time to put out a major statement of strategy at a time of such acute risk and uncertainty. I have a feeling that the Trump administration may right now be in a similar position. We've seen reports in the press that there's an NDS that's on Secretary Pete Hegseth's desk. We've seen reports that the NSS is done. But if I were them, I would be pretty worried about what do you say about Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere? What do you say about... Gaza? What do you even say about Ukraine? It's such a dynamic moment for so many of their top geopolitical priorities that it does seem a risky time to release a strategy document. And that speaks, I think, to the larger challenge here, which is aligning the timetables for budget development and strategy development. So over the arc of the Biden administration, I do think that we did a pretty good job, reprioritizing, building on work, frankly, that the first Trump administration had done towards the Indo-Pacific in line with our

strategy. But it's also the case that the OMB-led process of writing the president's budget was happening on a different timetable than our process of writing the national security strategy, national defense strategy. And that's just inevitably going to be the case. So I think this idea that you would neatly package as was originally envisioned when... Congress mandated the national security strategy that you would have an NSS and a budget that would go to the hill at the same time, that's very unlikely to happen because each of the processes are distinct. But I do think over time, there's an opportunity to align them, which in general, I think we did, albeit, of course, imperfectly. Justin, you've argued, I believe that these documents shouldn't even exist. This is a very small studio, and I'm within swinging distance of pretty much everybody at the table. But yes, I authored for some rag called War on the Rocks, an article called The Case for Abolishing the National Security Strategy Strategy. And the basic argument there was that, you know, Frank talked a little bit or everyone's talked because substantially about the disconnect between strategy and budgets. And, you know, Frank put in relief, I think, the problems, right? It's a Christmas tree ornament problem, right? Everybody wants their little shiny trinket on the tree. Well, that guy's trinket is higher. on the tree than mine is. I'm not even sure whether that one's going to make it on. And so what you wind up with is a document that mentions 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 different priorities. Of course, the problem is if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. And so the politics of strategy documents are such that it's very difficult for nerds like us to look at them from outside and say, aha, I understand what this administration prioritizes. And I want to. violently endorse and amplify Frank's comment about the disconnect between budgets and strategy. And if I had to use one or the other as measures of what an administration cares about, I'll take the budget. Thank you very much. Now, argue with them. Go, get them. The budget is a strategy. The one that I had the most work with supporting Mr. Colby's efforts. I thought the crosswalk. The priorities were, the threats were clear. Congress regarded us to prioritize and describe the threats. The investment priorities were clear. There was nine or 11. The priorities were fought over. I had a lot of debate with a lot of people over where to prioritize certain things. Mr. Mattis asked for some priority changes, and we discussed those in discourse with the secretary. They matched the funding. There were very big ticket items at the top of the list, and there were smaller items that we went down. But a lot of folks were interested in autonomy and lethal autonomous systems, and we inserted those kind of late in the game in a discourse with the secretary and the senior leadership council. So Mr. Colby and I got to brief Mr. Bros and the staff staff. The crosswalk slide discussion went very clear. The staff was very pleased. Senator McCain was surprisingly. Satisfied, and he's a hard bar to make. So if you can satisfy the secretary, you can satisfy the chairman. You can satisfy Senator McCain. I think you've accomplished something. And the other strategies I've seen, I've seen good strategies, I've seen a lot of bad strategies. The worst ones I've seen often are the classified ones because the logic is in as clear. Because it doesn't have to be, I guess, is clear. So I can live with a simpler NSS, maybe a classified thing of the president's.

desires and objectives and his priorities. And then I would rather have more implementing, you know, things from state, from DHS and from DOD that get a little more rigor. I think during the hearings classified and unclassified, that kind of process goes on and you get support from the Hill. Here's the thing. What is the national security strategy really? It can be a true strategic document, which is to say an articulation of very clear priorities, you know, ends ways, means, and all of that. But it's a lot of other things, too. And so I don't think that's the only rubric we need to use to think about the value of these documents. To me, in some ways above all, the national security strategy is a communications document. It communicates to the bureaucracy, what it is that the president seeks to accomplish what their theory of the case is. It communicates to the allies and adversaries. It communicates to the hill. To the extent the American people are paying attention, it communicates to the American people. And so to have that as the song sheet from which the whole. administration is singing, I think is very helpful, even if we're just talking about, you know, how do you describe what it is we're trying to do in the world? And you're right, Justin, that a lot ends up in there. But the United States of America does a lot of things. There are a lot of things that are important. And so to me, in writing these documents, what's important is to on the one hand, be clear about the prioritization to the extent that you can, while also acknowledging that... We're going to do a lot of things that bureaucracies need to see their priorities reflected and that you do have an opportunity to provide guidance, even on second and third tier issues through these documents and Nazi utility as well. Do you think that's what's happening now? I don't know. All right. That's a fair answer. So moving on to our more traditional sucking chest wound. Let's talk about the Middle East. I'm not particularly optimistic on the president's Gaza settlement going much further than it has now. I think it's obviously wonderful that the hostages were released, which I think was tremendously important and an accomplishment in and of itself, which I talked about in the last episode. But this whole idea of a stabilization force, Israel seems not interested in having some of the countries that want to participate, participating like Turkey. None of the other countries seem to want to participate for reasons I don't blame them. Like, why would you want to be another Arab country policing the Gaza Strip and suppressing Hamas? So what happens next? I expect it to unravel a little bit and there'd be some more violence. And I expect Israel to remanove forces in and engage again. And there are advocates for taking ownership positions inside Gaza within the Israeli government. And those voices will, if Hamas strikes back. may come to the four. It's not clear to me that we're going to see a full-scale resumption of the war. I don't think that we are in the near term. But.

It's also become clear that even within the context of the ceasefire, there is space for Israel to conduct military operations. So I agree with Frank insofar as we're likely to see an increased cadence, which Israel will say is consistent with the ceasefire. And then it will depend how Hamas responds and whether that leads to a cycle of escalation or if it can remain at a fairly low boil such that the broad framework remains in place for a ceasefire. We're not making great strides towards true peace, towards the debate. of an international force, but it's kind of the status quo as we see it now more or less holds in a way that's still net better than what was happening before the deal was concluded. I would like to wish that the American foreign policy establishment, the Trump administration, and all Americans conclude that. The United States of America has neither the vision nor the leverage with either side to solve the problem, washes his hands of it and walks away. We've been peace processing for my whole life. And yet, as the great philosopher king Anton Chigur noted, if the rule that you followed brought you to this of what use was the rule. You're the second person to cite the most sociopathic villain in modern film history. This is the Middle East we're talking about. Philosophical insight. But go on. You had me up until then. Yes, right. We've been at this. for my whole adult life, and I've got some gray hairs, as you can see, right? I just think that, you know, and George Kennan, in the year that I was born in a book called The Cloud of Danger, so seldom can a great power have maneuvered itself into such an unsound position where both sides believe it's through us that their various desiderata can be achieved, but we actually have very little leverage with either party or leverage that we're willing to use in any of that. So I just view this as the most calamitous... categorical failure, which is not a failure of any individual or even any community, right? Some problems aren't ready to be solved. And so I think in many cases we've made the problem worse and we should wash our hands of it. and let the sides and the rest of the world take a swing at this thing for itself. But Justin, just so I understand, are you saying wash our hands of the relationship with Israel as well or just the attempt to make peace? I think we should have a normal arm's length relationship with Israel and cooperate them where we share interests and where we don't share interests, we shouldn't cooperate them. So if we want to get into the sort of theology of the special relationship, yes, I'm not in favor of the special relationship. I'm in favor of a normal relationship like we have with Japan or Germany. Those are pretty special relationships. Yeah, I mean, those are special. Those are full treaty lines. I mean, yeah, I'm a little confused because they are, those are treaty. We're not treated as with Israel. We disagree significantly regularly. Do you mean we should be supplying Israel with arms in the way that we do? Not to the tune of $4 billion a year. We shouldn't provide it with the kinds of diplomatic cover we should provide it with. And again, where we agree with the country, we should cooperate with the country. There's plenty of places where we agree with Israel. And where we not sure Israel is on the right path, we should say so. And I think there's this weird dualism where on the one hand, advocates of this sort of very tight special relationships say Israel's so immensely powerful, it's such a powerful ally in the Middle East. But then there's this sort of sub rosa claim that like without $4 billion a year from the United States, Israel would be on a knifehead. I just don't see that, right? It has 80 or so nuclear weapons. It's got dolphins in the Mediterranean Sea.

Right. I just don't see this kind of dolphin-class submarine. Sorry. Sorry. There are dolphins. I thought they had some trained dolphins going on. Maybe they have that, too. Who knows? Yes, I've seen a Bond movie about that, I guess. But I just don't view Israel as vulnerable in this sort of existential state that would frequently is sort of hanging in the background, right? It's a grown-up country. It's pretty powerful. It's run the table on all conventional militaries that it's squared off against, again, since longer than I've been on this earth. So we should sort of, that's a good news story. And we should have a normal relationship with it. Yeah, I agree with Justin on this point. I'd like to see some of the money maybe go into the reconstruction of Gaza and humanitarian aid in the short term that might help Israel as well in ameliorating the conditions there. Funds that they're probably not willing to spend on that, that would be a better use. Well, I'm in the awkward position of playing devil's advocate against the position that I largely agree with. But advocates for the aid would say, well, actually, most of that money goes back to the American defense industry, which is a good thing. particularly on the aid that Israel, because they're buying some of our kit. And then we've co-developed some things that have been successful for them, the parts of Iron Dome that are tactically useful. But, yeah, it is a secure country. It is very high tech. It's very economically successful. It probably has some shortfalls now after some of the strikes and everything. They've expended a lot of air defense capabilities that they... You know, they could either buy from us or build themselves. But solving the Gaza problem is not going to be done necessarily by missiles and more artillery rounds and more patriot missiles. There's a human disaster. That's... if not ameliorated with immediate aid, I think is just going to become another generational problem for Israel and for the region. And Israel still occupies, people forget and think it's, this is said, it still occupies more than half of the Gaza Strip right now under the deal. And a portion of the West Bank that's a growing portion of the West Bank. Let's move eastward towards Iran. So there was an operationally, at least, if not strategically, very successful operation launched by Israel, joined by us. against Iran, decimating most of their air defense, dropping the bunker buster bombs on nuclear targets. And the message from Trump was, this might just be the beginning unless you guys negotiate in the way that we want, which means, I believe, giving up uranium enrichment and negotiate with the United States. It doesn't seem like we're much closer to that kind of a deal with Iran, at least according to the reports that I read publicly. What do you all think comes next in this? I think we're at a really... Interesting moment right now where you had the war between Israel and Iran with which we helped. We've had attempts at diplomacy that haven't made much progress at all. And insofar as the Trump team and Steve Witkoff are still communicating directly and indirectly with the of Iranians, it doesn't seem like either side has moved its position in such way that's creating a new diplomatic opening even after the war. You have snapback. which was this great threat that was hanging over the Iranians for years, which it seemed like they really didn't want to see happen. Can you break this out? Because I think this was covered a bit in the U.S. press, but the European press paid a lot more attention to it. So just for our listeners, break down what that meant to snap back. Sure. What it meant basically was there was a deadline after which point.

the UN Security Council could no longer reimpose the sanctions on Iran that were lifted as part of the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal. And so the... European powers on the UN Security Council for a long time have been saying if there isn't a resumption of diplomacy, then we will invoke snapback. The United States, since it's no longer a party to the deal, could not lead the invocation of snapback. And so in September of this year, maybe it was late August, it went into effect, I think, in late September. And these are pretty serious sanctions. They're serious sanctions, but, you know, they're also somewhat outdated, right? These were the sanctions that were put in place prior to the nuclear deal in 20. And so they were, ideally you would update them, right? If you really wanted to exert pressure on Iran, you would not only have these sanctions come back. You would have them be enforced, which, by the way, they're not right now because Russia and China are both refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of snapback. And also you would update them because of course, sanctions regimes need to be updated over time. But nevertheless, you know, they are meaningful and they have now come back into force. And there was a time over the summer where it seemed like if snapback happened, Iran was threatening to maybe withdraw from the, withdraw from the NPT, maybe take more overt steps in terms of trying to progress its nuclear program. But in fact, none of that happened. So on the one hand, Europe. has used its last major point of leverage and has exercised it. So there's not much more that they have to do or threaten against the Iranians. But on the other hand, snapback, which many parties have been anticipating as this major kind of deadline potential crisis for a long time, it happened and nothing came next. And so now we're just back in this holding pattern where there doesn't seem to be an immediate impetus for renewed military action, even though we're all seeing reports of Iran doing. construction at Pickax Mountain. We're seeing reports of them trying to ramp back up their missile production. But unless the Israelis have Intel, you know, which of course I won't have seen at this point, I don't think we're going to see renewed military action anytime soon, but nor are we seeing progress towards a deal. And so it just feels like despite both sides having sort of taken steps that had previously been off the table, we're nevertheless in a holding pattern for now. I'll just say I would have tried to do as a non-historian a little bit of the history here because it's been a hell of a year. I remember I was in Brussels on Liberation Day, which was a weird time to be in Brussels. But I remember my hotel room watching press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump. And of course, all the chaos, the first 25 minutes of the press conferences, what about this tariff? What about that tariff? Is this going up? Is this going down? And Benjamin Netanyahu's sitting there like a bump on a log going, what am I doing here? And Trump drops on him in short succession. We want the war in Gaza to end. We're entering negotiations with the Iranians directly this weekend and some other thing. And Benjamin Netanyahu just went white as a ghost. And he was like, you know, it's a very awkward time to have a TV camera train on you when somebody tells you a whole bunch of stuff that you don't want to hear. So the Trump administration enters into negotiations with the Iranians directly. Steve Witkoff goes on Fox News and says zero enrichment seems like a weird thing.

complicating factor or, you know, the Viktor Orban people will say, hey, wait a minute, he's trying to get this thing settled peacefully. Now, if you look underneath the hood, you see all these sanctions, exemptions and other things. Yes, that's absolutely true. But I think they are, the people over there do want an end to the conflict. It's just not an end to the conflict that the polls or the Estonians see. Let me take this in a different direction, which is to suggest that, again, returning to this theme of, is there a strategy? I think there's a proto strategy here, which I actually think is a direction the Republican Party could go post-Trump if, for example, we were ever to see a president, JD Vance, which is the creation of a global, right, conservative coalition and the aiding and abetting of that political project through the very... powerful tools of American foreign policy. And we've seen this play out in our own hemisphere. We saw a large bailout of Argentina on the eve of elections there in support of the Trump-aligned president, Javier Milei. We saw sanctions on Brazil in order to punish that country for prosecuting their former president, Jair Bolsonaro. And we see these transatlantic ties, whether that's JD Vance's speech at Munich, his meeting with the AFD, et cetera, Trump. and Viktor Orban. And so what I am looking for is to see whether Trump and his allies domestically continue to invest in relationships with the European right and maybe even begin to interfere politically in order to help them out. And to me, that is potentially the basis of a very different transatlantic relationship. which is still values based in a way, but is based on very different illiberal values. But, you know, if you have the rise of the national rally in France, if you have the rise of the AFD in Germany, where it's already, of course, Maloney in Italy, who's sort of moderated, you have Viktor Orban in Poland, et cetera. I mean, that is a coalition that could coalesce in the future. And I think it's something important to watch. Maloney's been very pro-Ukraine, though. She has. She has. She's surprised many in the way she's oriented herself, but nevertheless, part of the reason I think Trump likes to work with her is, in the end, she does come from a historically very right-leaning party. It is a longstanding cynic of the transatlantic relationship. This version of the transatlantic relationship, the sort of Viktor Orban, Trump, I forget the name of the party in Poland, the sort of right-wing party in Poland. It's not a coalition that can do all that much. When I was in Budapest, there's a lot of talk about how bad wokeness is. I think it's bad, too. What does that mean? Like, the transatlantic relationship in the 1950s, I could tell you a story about what the transatlantic relationship was about, what it was trying to do. What would, and I'm just interested because I take, there's a, like, I'm interested in your argument. What kinds of things internationally at the level of high politics would such a coalition do, do you think? Taking up Rebecca's line here. I could see, I think we are already contributing. politically, to include Mr. JD Vance's speech, both in the UK, in Germany, in Slovakia, in Hungary. And I could see a coalition that is operative, is more successful politically, could dominate, particularly in France and Germany, and Hungary, Slovakia, maybe the Czech Republic over time. And you would have a more pro-Russia-leaning coalition that would not be resisting.

Moscow in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and more of an alignment that favors Moscow economically and perhaps from a security perspective. And I could see that being adverse to our interests over time. Not all of these right-wing parties are pro-Russia, though. Certainly in Poland, they're not. Yeah, there's a unique history with Poland and Russia that would be very hard to overcome. Yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting national level variation, right? Some of these right-wing parties in Europe are very pro-defense spending, and so that would still be consistent with the movement that we've seen European allies take towards increasing their expenditures on defense, defense industrial-based integration, and so on. Some of them are quite... pro-Russian, others less so. So it's not uniform, I think, in terms of what the foreign policy implications would be. Probably the most profound implication would be the sort of replication of what President Trump is doing here in the United States domestically in other European countries, which would amount to a pretty significant move towards illiberalism and sort of replication of these more autocratic-leaning. tactics even in the context of liberal democratic societies that we would see in Europe. And so in some ways, I think that would be the most profound implication. But I do think it would have a lot of knock on implications as well for foreign policy. And you would have those countries who were not part of that right word movement, who would probably be trying to maintain something more like. A status quo foreign policy that we see right now. And then there would be others that would be pulling in a lot of different directions, all of which would amount to in the context of two consensus-based organizations, the EU and NATO, effective stalemate, which over time would accrue to the benefit of Russia, whether explicitly or implicitly and likely to China as well. I think it's symbolic. that we're short on time and that we don't have time to talk about the Indo-Pacific. I think that fits with the policy mood of the moment. Might fit Justin's world, but not mine. Yeah, I know, I know. But it fits with the current zeitgeist anyway. But I appreciate you all joining me. We're really not going to talk about the Indo-Pacific. I thought you guys are, you have more time. Does everyone have time? I have lots of time. All right. Five minutes. All right. We have five minutes to talk about the end of Pacific. So, I mean, the big news is, of course, is this trade. Truce, I guess we could call it, with China. The president has messaged this as a big win. Other observers disagree and say it's just a partial respite. at the other end of which we're pretty disadvantaged. Where do you all come down? It's an armist. It's a time-limited armist. It's 12 months long. It just puts out the fires that the administration created in the first place, buys us time. And there's not enough time to recover on vulnerabilities we have with chip production. It's not enough time to deal with rare earth production and processing. And so China will still hold some leverage at the end of 12 months. It'd be interesting to see what...

what she does with his time and see how we waste or exploit the 12 months we have. I want to get on this rare earth's thing. As a sort of rare earth's skeptic, what's happened over the last several weeks did look scary to me. The chokehold that China has is on processing, not on the actual minerals themselves. Well, it's about 90% of processing and 60% of supply. Exactly. So pretty considerable in supplies, other places that although they're not subsidized as heavily as China, we know where they are, we can get them out of the ground, etc. I've talked to nerdy, restrainty, realist academics that say rare earths or BS. And I've talked to former Trump administration people that say rare earths or BS. And let me clarify what I mean by that. It would cost the United States on the order of nine figures to build up an economically inefficient but redundant capability to refine rare earths, right? So we're talking in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year. If China has that leverage against us, and if it costs a billion bucks a year to remove that leverage, I say this is a Cato Institute guy. Spend the damn money. Take a billion dollars out of the domestic. Someone from Cato is pro-industrial policy. Spend a billion dollars. This is an actual. Big government from Cato. That's right. It's an actual choke point that it has against the United States, and it costs a billion dollars a year. And 12 or 18 months to spin up. We're really bad at building things these days. Let's say it takes two years. spin up. Go for it. Do it. I'm with Frank in that we're net worse off than where we were pre-liberation day in April and that a lot of vulnerabilities have been exposed. And I think you're right, Justin. These aren't. vulnerabilities that we could never remedy. Certainly, you know, in the Biden administration, we're working on how do you work with allies and partners to build critical mineral alliances? Like, this is a set of problems for which there are solutions. The speed at which those solutions come online sort of depends on the level of political will and money that can be mobilized very quickly. Nevertheless, I think President Trump has fallen once again for the illusion that atmospherics can overcome structural realities. And he thinks that he can build some kind of relationship with President Xi Jinping, that he can negotiate some kind of deal that will overcome. the fact that as just a structural matter, the United States and China are in a long-term competition. And it's hard for me to see any version of a deal that can overcome that. What I worry about is President Trump is so narrowly commercially minded and how he's thinking about the U.S.-China relationship.

But our interests with China are, of course, so much broader than that. That's something that Beijing realizes very well. And so as we're moving through this sort of one-year, quote-unquote, truce period as we're seeing these reciprocal visits, as we're allegedly moving towards some grand bargain, I think she is going to be playing for Taiwan. He's going to be playing for U.S. posture in the Indo-Pacific. He's obviously playing for tech controls, chips, and so on. Whereas Trump is really only playing for things like... purchase agreements and maybe for structural changes to the Chinese economy that we all know are never going to happen. And so I feel that even if we're able to remedy some of those vulnerabilities, there's still just a massive strategic gap in terms of what Trump thinks that he can get and his ability to deliver versus where the Chinese are. And so that makes me very concerned about the direction of travel. I think at the highest level, you make a lot of good points, but there still is good work going on at lower levels. that some of which started in the Biden administration on basing access, Philippines, expanding our footprint in what we're doing in and with Japan. And Trump did have a really good visit in Japan. Oh, yeah. I don't mean that those things have already been traded away. But what we have seen is Trump holding large weapon sale packages to Taiwan. We've seen the denial of transit to President Lai of Taiwan through the United States. We've seen the downgrading of defense dialogues between the U.S. and Taiwan. We've seen willingness on the part of this president to pull back on some of our other strategic interests in service of getting a deal. So you're right. There haven't been large-scale concessions. And in many ways, key elements of our... Indo-Pacific defense policy continue to move forward. But I don't exclude the possibility that as the Chinese try to add those to the pot of what's being negotiated over, that we could see some retrenchment from those commitments or at least sort of willing to negotiate about them in a way that would make me uncomfortable. I thought the Biden administration, particularly in the first one or two years, you know, set up a more strategic approach in the competition with China. I disagree with an emphasis on military. posture issues or even aligned structures. So that's competition to me is economic and it's S&T based and are becoming more competitive. It's not about us constraining China or undercutting China or tamponing or, you know, somehow reducing China's opportunity. It's about building up our own. And I think everything that we've done so far, particularly against allies, particularly against the things we're doing with universities, STEM research grants, visas. foreign students were undercutting the innovation echo system that is the source of our strength over time. And that's, that was the strategy that I thought the Biden folks. balanced very effectively and put into place. I think if you were fully right on that, Frank, though, the Biden administration would have joined the largest free trade pact in the agreement, which would have probably been the most important structural thing we could have done. Neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. Biden went that way, I think for a domestic reason, but for more strategic reasons. We should. And this gets back to the other point on that both the economic and the S&T, those kind of partnerships are what allow us to.

shape to the degree we can, you know, China's behavior and it's access to markets to get standards on technology and some of the other things that we want them to do. I disagree, I guess, a little bit, Rebecca, on there are major structural changes that we're not going to get in the Chinese economy, but there are some international aspects if we work collectively, but instead we've tariffed everybody and then we... We should have played the China card first with allies and partners and gotten as much as we could, and then we could deal with the reciprocal tariff issues that we have with some partners. No, I think that's fair. And there were glimmerings of a coalition to address Chinese overcapacity, including through the G7 that we saw by the end of the Biden administration. And through this administration's tariff policy, it has become much, much more difficult. The Europeans came on board a little bit of a year behind us, I think, in understanding the systemic rivalry and the structure. Germany seems to have just realized it within the last week or so. Yeah, I guess better late than never. I've had interactions in London with European industrialists. And I think the industrialists actually got it more than the policy elites when I would meet with folks in London. They knew that they were losing the auto industry. They knew they were losing solar energy. They knew they're going to lose machine tools. They know the Chinese strategy is to. learn, adapt, and then replace. I think they understand the Chinese strategy, but affecting changes in Germany in particular and in the UK a little bit is harder. But here's what's changed. I mean, whereas there was this slow dawning realization amongst the Europeans that they needed to de-risk from China. Now they feel they need to de-risk from us too. And that is going to be very hard to recover from whatever follows this Trump administration. One final question on China. Does anyone think that we can read into she's willingness to make that deal, even if it was a pretty advantageous deal for China in some ways? And the fact that Taiwan was not on the agenda, at least the public agenda, as him revealing his intent that he doesn't plan perhaps to go to war within the next year or so. Or do you think that's just, you know, it's impossible to know. I think some internal issues will affect his decision on that. It will not be between now and 2027, and it's perhaps a 2030 issue. 2017, 2018. I didn't buy into the- You're not a Davidson window guy. I'm not a Davidson window guy. I don't know very, actually, very few people that are, but there are a few people. Telling the military to be ready and then doing the risk calculus and making the steps and accounting for the costs, which we will impose on them, are different factors. But he does want the military to be ready by 2027. And judging from the purges that he's putting in place. He's not getting what he wants. And so the Davidson window might have to be extended to the right, which is where I would put it.

I would just say that I think Davidson was trying to do basically what she was trying to do, which is to create a sense of urgency and bureaucracies, right, to get back to my gimble and eye about how bureaucracies work and strategies and all those things. You know, we inferred that because she wants his military to be ready to go, he's going to go. What does that do in our bureaucracy? Well, it creates a sense of urgency, right? So I think that, you know, she was in all likelihood, I'm endorsing your view that he was trying to create a sense of urgency, a target to hit. And I think that if you have a little bit of a mildly cynical eye about the Davidson window. It looks like a similar kind of instrument to me. I guess I would just say that I think President Xi Jinping still doesn't know what he can get from the Trump administration willingly. So if I were him, I would at least play out the next year and see what I could negotiate for before I considered military action because I don't exclude the possibility that President Trump could still decide to make major concessions about over Taiwan in the context of whatever. follows diplomatically from the Trump Xi Jinping meeting in Seoul. And so I would at least run that play if I were Beijing before seriously considering military action, which of course would unleash so many foreseen and unforeseen consequences for China. To close out, returning to this question of, is there strategy in this administration conceptually process-wise in terms of results? We've just covered most of the world. Like every other U.S. policymaker, we skipped sub-Saharan Africa. There's a lot of places where crises and conflicts can erupt and re-errupt. And that raises questions of capacity, not just in terms of material capacity and military capacity, but also high-level focus, choices, which we are historically bad at making. And just a lot of an unpredictableness, let's just put it that way. So returning to that question, where do you all come down that we've now reviewed most of the world? We also missed that on Antarctica. So I should say, but only like 100 people live there, so temporarily. I wrote a piece at War on the Rocks about strategy as a instrument of appetite suppression. And I don't find much interest in Antarctica. The GLP1 of foreign policy. Yes. Yes. Well, Lord make me chaste, but not yet. Yeah. So we will make choices. We will apply and constrain resources. And we will deal with uncertainty. We will have external crises that we did not anticipate. And the forces that we shape today will have to adapt to the realities that unfold. There's some lovely texts in. Rebecca's closing chapter in Wars of Revelation that deal with that. That's the reality of strategy. We're forecasting a future in which we are making choices, some of them badly. Xi Jinping is making some choices, some of them badly. Eight years ago, I thought the transition between the two great powers, you know, would be intersecting. and they're not. I think we're doing better in some places than we anticipate in terms of the resilience and dynamism of our economy. Xi Jinping has imposed political controls that have constrained some of his economic output. So we'll continue to muddle along and adapt. We'll implement a strategy of impulse that will often be contradictory and will appear incoherent to those of us, I guess, on the outside. And that's just the reality we're going to have to deal with. I would say two things.

One is thinking about decision making in this administration. I am concerned that they have come to believe their own propaganda about the so-called Trump doctrine and that they think that overwhelming military force is a cheap way to achieve our ends overseas and that they can use military force, whether it's in a place like Venezuela, whether it's a place like Nigeria, whether it's a place like Iran. at low cost without becoming entangled. And I do think the experience in the Middle East over the summer suggested that there are certain situations in which that is possible to do. But I would be reluctant to bet on the likelihood that we could run the Iran play in all these different places without finding ourselves. in a situation where the United States was becoming entangled or facing very difficult choices between either using military force and then leaving without having met our strategic objectives or having to see through the strategic objectives in such a way that bogs us down. So that's sort of one thing on the Trump doctrine and I think just something to watch as these various crises and choices play out. The second point that I would make is that one of the durable impacts of the Trump administration's foreign policy is to create a world where strategy is just going to be harder for the United States to do in general. For all the reasons that Frank said, this administration has diminished America's capacity at home. whether that's in our S&T base, research universities, ability to attract immigrants, whether that's just in the capacity of the U.S. government to do things like foreign policy, but to do a lot of other things too, we're just becoming less capable as a country. At the same time that this administration is by its own admission laying siege to an international order that the United States created after World War II in order to make ourselves powerful and prosperous. And while that order requires a lot of renovation, to be sure, it has still continued to work for us. And in the absence of those structures, whether those structures are alliances, whether those structures are international institutions in which the United States has a very powerful role, it will just become harder for us to translate our considerable power into actual influence over other states' choices and over global outcomes. So I think we're entering into a period of much greater disorder in which even a post-Trump administration. will find it more difficult than it used to be to both develop and execute on any given strategy in a more chaotic world. I'll make also two points as quickly as I can. One is a coda to the Asia discussion. I went to the University of Chicago, so I have to ask this question. But I'm always confused. Does the United States want China's economic growth to slow or does it not? And to me, nobody ever answers that question. I think we all know the answer. And the reason nobody wants to say it out loud is because it sounds so ugly. But we all sort of have this old thing. We would never contain China. We would never.

I think we want China's economic growth to slow. I do. I think we want our potential peer competitor to go away. And if that's the case, then all this other stuff that we're doing to say, we would never, oh my goodness, how dare you? Of course we want China's economic growth to slow. And in that light, we need to view the strategy in Asia. On the question, can we do strategy? Does Trump do strategy, right? If you imagine the most elegantly written. national security strategy and national defense strategies imaginable that grasple in the most forthright ways with scarcity, tradeoffs, et cetera, et cetera, and lay out a list of priorities, match resources to them in the sort of platonic ideal of these documents. And Donald Trump gets a bag of soggy French fries from McDonald's and decides that in a current crisis, he wants to go 180 degrees from the direction that the document would suggest. Does anybody think that that document is going to constrain Donald Trump? I don't. No, but I don't think anyone's suggesting that it would. I mean, it's not meant to. No, the document will be successful if it, as best it can, reflects the preferences, proclivities, and worldview of the president. They change significantly in very short order. That's fair. We're not going to resolve any of that here, but this is a great conversation. Thank you all. Thank you.

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