Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1763 - General H.R. McMaster
Uploaded: 2022-01-13T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1763 - General H.R. McMaster' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-01-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1763 - General H.R. McMaster' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-01-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1763 - General H.R. McMaster

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
There you go?
Yeah, ready, ready, yeah.
Well, thank you, sir.
Very nice to meet you.
Cheers.
Joe, cheers.
Great to meet you.
Great to meet you.
I always wanted to smoke a cigar and have a scotch with a national security
advisor.
So here we go.
All right, all right.
I always wanted to be in one of them smoky rooms where all the shit goes down.
Is there a moment, because every person, every civilian wants to know, is there
a moment when
a president gets into office where someone like you has to sit them down, they
just got
elected, someone like you has to sit them down and go, all right, buddy, here's
what's going
on in the world?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, we're facing a number of challenges and opportunities, and a new
president, I think,
suddenly realizes that he's responsible for how we respond to those challenges
and opportunities.
So I think, of course, as a national security advisor, that's kind of your job,
right?
Yeah.
You're the only person in the foreign policy national security establishment
who has the
president as his or her only client, right?
So it's your job to help the president succeed in the area of foreign policy
and national security.
That job, you have to kind of be like a psychologist as well as a national
security advisor, right?
Because especially if you're dealing with someone like Trump, who's a big
personality.
Yeah, and of course, you know, every president is different and receives
information differently
and has a different set of priorities.
And so I think it's really important to ensure that the way you interact with
that president
is consistent with the way that president receives information, you know,
thinks him or herself
about the world and help them evolve their understanding of these challenges
and opportunities that we
face internationally and then give options, right?
As a national security advisor, like your job is not to determine foreign
policy.
Nobody elected you, right?
Your job is to give that elected president the benefit of the best information,
intelligence,
analysis available, and then to tee up options, right?
And have forums for discussion where he can not just listen to you because you're
not omniscient,
right?
You're not an all-knowing national security advisor.
You should help convene groups that can help the president make the best
decisions.
We always have, on the outside, we always have this idea of what a president
says they want
to do when they're running and then once they get into office, oftentimes they
change or they
abandon a lot of their policies, a lot of their ideas.
And the speculation is always like, I wonder what they learn.
Because, you know, people want to say, oh, they're just liars.
They were lying the whole time.
And I'm always like, maybe, or maybe they get in there and they learn that
there's some
serious issues that they were not aware of and that there's some top secret
stuff that the
general public's not privy to and they get briefed.
And then it's a, whew.
Well, the key is to think through the long-term costs and consequences of any
decision.
And often that involves a decision to take an action, but also not doing
something is a
decision, right?
So I think what a national security advisor should do, any of the president's
advisors
should help the president think longer term and to recognize, right, that we're
involved
in complex competitions, right?
The future doesn't depend on what we decide to do.
It also depends on the actions of others, oftentimes, you know, adversaries,
rivals, and enemies.
And that interactive nature of foreign policy and national security
competitions is sometimes
lost.
And this is what I write about in the book is this idea of strategic narcissism,
right?
The tendency for leaders to think that what they do or decide not to do is
decisive toward
achieving a favorable outcome.
That's actually a pretty arrogant way to look at the world, right?
Because you have to recognize the agency, the influence, the authorship over
the future
that others have.
But if they decide something that's incorrect or something that's correct, it
kind of does
have a large impact on the world, right?
Oh, absolutely, right?
I mean, if you think of just, you know, decisions in recent history, right,
decisions to either
engage or not engage, right?
How about, you know, for everybody wants to talk about, for example, the
invasion of Iraq,
right, that's been the big debate over the last couple of decades.
Should we have done it?
Should we have invaded Iraq?
And I think what we ought to debate more often is who the heck thought it would
be easy?
And why did they think it would be easy, right?
Do you think they thought it would be easy just because of the first Gulf War?
I think that's a big factor.
You know, I write about this in Battlegrounds.
I start, you know, it's an odd thing to start a book out on.
But I write about our tank battle in Desert Storm, and I write about that in
context of
our cavalry troop, the same cavalry troopers who were patrolling the border
between East
and West Germany from Camp Harris in Coburg, Germany, in November of 1989, when
the wall
came down.
And, of course, that event, I think, was significant in terms of bolstering our
confidence, right,
our optimism about the future with good reason, right?
I mean, you know, the East German government faded away, the Berlin Wall came
down, right?
The Soviet Union broke apart.
We won the Cold War, right, without firing a shot.
And so there was a sense of optimism then going in to the Gulf War as well.
And so our troop was training, you know, in August of 1990 when Saddam invaded
Kuwait.
And I brought the whole team together, you know, as 140 cavalry troopers.
And I said, hey, we need to make the most out of this training because the next
operations
order I give you will probably be in the desert of Saudi Arabia.
And then, of course, our experience during Desert Storm was a lopsided victory.
We destroyed a force, you know, much larger than us.
We suffered no casualties.
It was one lopsided victory in a war that was full of these lopsided victories.
And what happened in this period of time, Joe, is that we bought into some
assumptions about
the future that were over-optimistic, right?
And I think those assumptions were that, hey, you know, that an arc of history
had guaranteed
the primacy of our free and open societies over closed authoritarian systems.
The second is, hey, great power competition.
That's a relic of the past.
You know, how did that work out?
Look what's going on right now with Russia and China.
And then third, and this is what I think you're alluding to, is that there was
this idea that
future war would be fast, cheap, efficient, right?
Waged at standoff range with our advanced technologies.
And what we forgot, I think, is this interactive nature of war.
I mean, there are two ways to fight.
And you know this from jiu-jitsu, you know, is, you know, asymmetrically, where
you use that
person's strengths against them, or stupidly.
I mean, Saddam fought us stupidly.
And we also had a very narrow political objective.
Hey, turn Kuwait back to the Kuwaitis.
Now, fast forward, okay, to the wars after 9-11, the invasion of Afghanistan in
2001, and
then in Iraq in 2003.
I think we went into those wars under this assumption, the short war assumption,
right?
We could just do this quickly and kind of, you know, almost take the George
Costanza approach
to war and just leave on a high note.
When, in fact, war has always been an activity that involves the consolidation
of gains to get
to a sustainable outcome, consistent with what brought you there in the first
place.
And so this idea in Battlegrounds is strategic narcissism, right?
This tendency to not consider, you know, the interactive nature of war.
The interactive nature of war and the consequences of each and every single
decision that you have
to make.
Right.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I had this wonderful experience in the Army across 34 years,
right?
And in recent years, you know, the last couple of decades, I was on the
receiving end of plans
and strategies and policies developed in Washington that made no sense from
where I was, you know,
in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
So how does that work?
Like who, so a person like you as a national security advisor, like in a
general, where,
who, who comes to you with these ideas and plans?
Well, it's your job to kind of convene the, you know, the, the president's
cabinet, right?
The principal's committee of the National Security Council.
And, you know, Joe, I, you know, I, I, I wrote about this in, in the book.
I, I, I walked into that office really unexpectedly, obviously, right?
You know, I had, I had been walking down Walnut Street in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, all my
way to, to a think tank.
My job at the time was designed, designed the future army.
So I'm an active duty Lieutenant General.
And I was, I was going to brief this think tank community, get their thoughts
on a study
that we had commissioned, uh, almost a two year long study on Russia's annexation
of Crimea
and invasion of Ukraine and Russian new generation warfare and what it meant,
right?
For developing the future army and the future military.
And my phone rings and it's a partially blocked number from, you know, from the,
you know,
from the, from the, from the white house.
Oh boy.
And they say, Hey, uh, Hey, the president would like you to interview for the
job of national
security advisor at Mar-a-Lago on.
It says partially.
So it just says 202, which is 202.
That's it.
That's it.
Yeah.
Oh boy.
That's some like Batman shit.
So that's why, that's why I answered it.
Typically I wouldn't answer my phone on the way to meeting, but maybe I ought
to answer
this one.
So, so, uh, you know, it came, that came out of the blue.
And so that was a Friday, right?
And Sunday I'm interviewing for the job.
Wow.
He hires me on, you know, president's day, Monday.
I fly back to Washington, right?
You know, on, on Air Force One.
And you interviewed at Mar-a-Lago?
At Mar-a-Lago.
So you're having like shrimp cocktails?
Hey, I didn't know how to get food there, man.
So after, after the first interview, right, they said, Hey, the president would
probably
like to talk to you again.
So I, I stayed, they kept me there for the rest of the day.
I went into the military aides office, you know, cause I know, they'll know
those guys
and we're on the military.
So I'm hanging out in their office.
I'm doing emails for my regular job.
And, you know, of course call my wife and call Katie and talking to her about
it.
And, and there's, there's no food.
I don't know how to get food.
So I ate everything that those guys had.
I ate their pistachio nuts, man.
I, I, and I left them a note.
Hey, sorry guys.
I have to replenish your supplies.
You can't ask Trump.
Hey buddy, where's the man get a steak around here?
No, I probably could have gotten some meatloaf or something.
I'm sure.
I'm sure I could have.
Missed opportunity.
But, but so, so anyway, that, that one day I fly back to, to DC and I didn't
even live
in DC so they had these Osprey aircraft waiting to take me back to my house in,
in, in, in
Tidewater, Virginia.
I packed the bag and I started on Tuesday, man.
I mean, so, so it was quick, but I had this, you know, I had this great gift
that the army
gave me, which is the opportunity to study history, you know?
And, and so I walk into, to me, McGeorge Bundy's office, the guy who was
national security
advisor when Vietnam became an American war.
And I wrote a book called Derelition of Duty about how and why Vietnam became
an American
war and identified all of the deficiencies in the decision-making policy-making
process,
right?
In, in, in Washington.
So I resolved at least, okay, I'm not going to make the same mistakes, right?
And, and so those, one of those mistakes for what you're alluding