Dr. Victor Davis Hanson:  American classicist, military historian and columnist

[Music] welcome everyone my name is carrie roberts and i'm representing the strategic studies department here at the joint special operations university today we are pleased to present a distinguished speaker including audience q a and this is in conjunction with json's first great power competition seminar the session is unclassified and will be recorded and posted to the json network please keep in mind the views and opinions expressed by all participants do not necessarily reflect the views opinions or policy of the us government department of defense or u.s special operations command if you have any questions after this session please email think json socom dot mil as indicated on the slide today's moderator is mr kyle garland adjunct faculty here at jcell he will introduce the program and today's guest thank you very much kerry hello and good day to everyone my name is kyle garland and i'm from the joint special operations university located in tampa florida i want to welcome everyone to another online interview of think json think jso is an ongoing series that explores research and publications of json faculty resident senior fellows leading academics and the wider soft and international security community the online collection includes interviews and conversations with authors and researchers and is intended to supplement existing publications articles and other active discussions i encourage everyone to explore the complete think json collection by reviewing our online offerings posted to the all partner access network or apan and also available for streaming through our library and social media sites today we are honored to have dr victor davis hanson join us for a conversation on strategic historical lessons in an era of great power competition or gpc dr hansen is an american classicist military historian columnist and farmer he has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for national review the washington times and many other media outlets he is a professor emeritus of classics at california state university fresno the martin and ellie anderson senior fellow in classics and military history at stanford university's hoover institution and also a visiting professor at hillsdale college professor hanson i suppose i should start with an apology for scheduling this interview the morning after election night uh but i'm uh i'm very much glad that you woke up early and that you're joining us this this morning yeah well thank you i don't think many of us slept very much because we were watching returns so it's right we have the advantage of being on the east coast and for our audience dr hansen is on the west coast so it's a little bit different i'd also like to welcome those members of the jso great power competition seminar who are tuning in this morning but uh sir i'd like to go ahead and start our conversation and for our audience just a very quick review after president trump was elected in 2016 the national security strategy was drafted in 2017 which shifted our focus from counter-terrorism and counter-violent extremist organizations to an increased focus on great power competition russia and china so dr hansen i'd like to begin with a big picture and and perhaps overly simple question uh as a military historian sir is there a time in history that resembles our geopolitical and national security environments today well i think there's plenty i think uh i'll give you two off the top of my head i think rome had the same dichotomy in its enemies at various times in the empire it was at war with assassinate um iranians or the what had been earlier called the parthians the carthaginians but simultaneously to that there always was a breakout um with sort of bin laden type characters whether it was mithra deities or jagertha or renegade generals like sartorius so they they have two types of strategies one was go into a province and destroy the guerrilla operations and then when hearts and minds with aqueducts uh create foreign rose and then other in the other sense they had carthaginian peace type of wars i mean their point was to destroy the enemy and that and through conventional means and they had some i mean if you look at the early battles that in the punic wars if you look at later ones there was an enormous amount of carnage but they were conventional battles and the byzantines did the same thing for a thousand years the british were very good at it so they could fight uh non-conventional uh wars in spain and uh or armed allies in spain to do so they could fight in the afghan wars and then they were fighting the french at sea or they were uh uh opposed to the spanish but they had a like we do they had a dual purpose military one for unconventional or non-conventional warfare terrorists etc and then the other was big power rivalry so and i think that's where we are today we we uh we have a lot of exposures we have a strategy that's worldwide and we're not sure whether that we have the assets or the right calibration between assets between non-conventional and conventional it seems to be because of the rise of china and the request of our allies to contain it there seems to be right now more impetus or more worry about a conventional threat than was true 15 years ago or 20 years ago in the aftermath of 9 11. well sir you've you've written many books and uh especially on world war ii uh you often refer to world war ii as a series of border wars that that expanded into a global conflict which is certainly could be a threat for today so sir i'd like you to if you could you please share your thoughts on the necessity for understanding correctly the kind of war in which you're engaged and how is the united states fared in doing so and i just like to add that as a student of professional military education we're often taught that in order to be effective in con conflict we must understand the nature so how are we doing in that sir it's a mix i think it's a mixed judgment uh when you look at the short-term analyses of all of our engagements unless they're very asymmetrical and taking out manual noriega or something of that sort of granada but if when they're ambitious like going into korea going into vietnam going into afghanistan going into iraq the short term i think historically people will say there was no substitute for victory you didn't win and we didn't win because we were in a uh and most of those not all but most of those were cold war surrogate battles between the soviet union and us and they had 7 500 nuclear weapons so there was an understanding that the war would be limited between our surrogates and ourselves in a conventional fashion but so we didn't win vietnam but we did stop communism and uh repelled it for a while and i think more so in korea we have samsung and kia and korea's a is is a humane democracy now and that's a logical trajectory of the sacrifice of the the korean war but it took a long time i'm not so i think you could make the argument for iraq matthew ridgeway i think was recorded of saying the only thing worse than a bad war is losing it and so iraq for all of the tragedies and disasters it did end with a surge and a constitutional government and even when we pulled out troops in 2011 that constitutional government's there people said it empowered iran and that was true for a while but it seems to be a nexus now among the arab world to oppose iran and i i don't know if all that would have happened if saddam hussein i don't think he would be a force to join this new coalition of arab states and so i'm getting that you have to be very careful by saying we just lost because we'd set things in motion that can be conducive to regional stability in our own national interests whether that cost a benefit analysis was worth it is another question in afghanistan i was always more skeptical of that because it's got very difficult terrain it's landlocked there are no harbors there's a lot of nasty neighbors in the region that limit our air ability and it's it's got a history of seeding the plains and then not being able to go into the mountain areas so we'll see but we don't have a strategy yet that will allow us to be confident that a constitutional state will survive in a way it did say from 1918 all the way to the 1970s well sir you've written that a major difference between world war one and world war ii was that world war ii was largely a deliberate effort to kill civilians mostly on the part of the axis powers so with great contemporary power competition engaged across the full spectrum of the elements of national power what moral challenges might we see as civilians are deliberately targeted by economic deprivation deceptive or manipulative information political interference or really any other destabilized destabilizing activities below the level of armed conflict well i think for a western humane liberal society constitutional government people that are uh ruled consensually there's a very different approach to war especially in during the cold war in the modern age and that means that unless unless the war is existential they have certain bridles or restrictions on their application of force and we've seen that in our own time when fighting radical islam in world war ii people say well we would never be able to do what we we burned down 75 percent of the industrial core of japan curtis lemay's b-29s much more damaged than the atomic bombs in fact probably the the worst single-day loss of life and war was march night of march 10th to morning of 11th when we probably kill over 150 000 japanese many of them were civilians most of them but many of them were also engaged in war production but what i'm getting at is that when the west feels that their very lives are at stake or their nation or their existence is at stake and the enemy has no uh compunction about the use of force against civilians and remember in world war ii there's maybe 70 million people were dead 15 million civilians were killed by japanese in china and maybe three or four in asia 20 million russians were killed by the axis another six million in the holocaust another two to three million civilians killed in yugoslavia and poland and that was by powers that to this day if you look at the kill ratio that is the number of germans lost to the number of people the germans killed and especially the japanese they got off very lightly even though they were their countries were destroyed so once you're in an existential war like that then worries about collateral damage against a genocidal enemy what i'm getting at is in the present state uh we are very you know when we have these optional expeditionary operations we have to be very careful about a drone killing of civil civilians or and we try not to but if we get to the point where after 9 11 let's say it wasn't just the two towers and the attack on the pentagon but they had that fourth flight had taken out the capital dome and half our you know senators are house represented and that had been followed by other operations and i'm sure that the united states was thinking of things that would now seem nightmarish so every liberal society has a breaking point as long as life goes on in the home front they feel that they have the moral latitude to conduct war in a way that's not as vicious or brutal as its enemies because of their superior technology operational skill communications capital but all the gloves come off if they feel it becomes existential well sir you also write about multiple theaters multiple strategies excuse me and different resource challenges which we are definitely we we have now uh so are there lessons that we can draw from the world wars that apply to us today as we shift to great power competition i think there are i mean i've had several debates with military historians on who it's a very reductionist question but who won world war ii and it's if you it's sort of the uh left-wing argument that the soviet union won world war ii because they killed three out of four german soldiers but they did so at the loss of 27 million people we lost about 450 000 and we fought in areas the soviet union just was not capable of fighting and in methodologies and and uh theaters in the way that they couldn't do they eventually they essentially fought a land war on a one-dimensional sense but by that i mean they were not able to fight mussolini in italy they did not fight in the mediterranean they did not fight in north africa they waged no submarine uh campaign against japan they didn't fight japan in the last three weeks of the war they had no anti-submarine campaign they had no strategic bombing campaign they did not fight in the pacific at all as i said earlier uh they didn't have a firebombing campaign and they we they didn't really give aid to anybody we supplied anywhere from 20 to 30 of their essential aluminum um some some airplane designs and airplane uh frames that were very helpful radios food parkas technology to them and yet uh so if they had not had that aid and we had not kept the enemy occupied i don't think they would have won and so it's uh it and there was no other country except the united states to do that the british tried it because they didn't quite have the resources they did have the empire and they they fought similarly to us and they fought brilliantly because like us they lost the fewest number of soldiers per the number of enemy that they killed and they fought all over the world and yet their losses and aggregate terms were more per capita but not as in the tolls as we did so i'm always amazed at the united states that they fought on all these fronts they gave all of this aid to everybody they tied down the enemy all the way from alaska to the indian ocean and from the persian gulf all the way you know out to the shore of new jersey in a multifaceted way and that's been sort of what we do and so we have all of these uh resources the problem we have is when you're spread so thin and you're capable of fighting any enemy at any time and you get into a conventional war against a enemy that has superior you know armor or discipline on the ground uh then those assets are neutralized so we're fighting finally in world war ii when germany's interior lines are collapsed to maybe i don't know 500 miles rather than a world empire and they've got panther tanks and tiger tanks and pretty good you know with 190s and one in a single focus in the ardennes or in the hurricane forest they can do a lot of damage to us because you know that wasn't we were doing so many other things if you have to fight 3000 miles away then you're really not you really want a sherman tank it's easy to it's easy to fix the transmission comes out easy 10 hours to one hour of maintenance you can put it on a crane and put it on a ship but once you get it over there you might end up facing a panther or maybe not a tiger very often but if you did you're going to lose and yet those tanks are not going to be as common because they're not going to be easily serviceable so what i'm saying is that we don't want to get in a land war with china we want to use all these resources around the globe to uh if we were to have a struggle with them to contain their navy to contain their airspace to wreck their economy if that could use that provocative term but you don't want to go into the chinese mainland because of the logistic problems manpower problems etc and that that's a lesson from world war ii well sarah thank you i want to stick with world war ii and try to draw out some of the lessons from that time that can be applied to today so i'd like to ask you a question about alliances uh you have written about old new and strange alliances in world war ii so now about today do you foresee any old new or strange alliances forming over the next decade or two for example uh the maybe the israel with bahrain and the uae as an example uh five years ago you might have said that would be a strange alliance so what do you predict uh you can look into your crystal ball here sir what do you what do you predict for the future well there's two currents here one are strategic strategic moves that are idiosyncratic to the trump administration and some are bipartisan and are post-war in nature if the trump administration should lose i don't think that a very successful strategy of encouraging the moderate arab countries in israel to stop this iranian crescent of you know theocratic iran and the assad dynasty in hezbollah perhaps even hamas reaching the mediterranean i think that strategy is over i think the biden administration will go back to the iran deal and and focus on the palestinians but if trump were to win i would imagine that saudi arabia and all of the gulf states within six months are going to come into an alliance a factor with israel and the purpose of that alliance the subtext with it is they all have now plenty of fossil fuels natural gas and oil they cannot be embargo they cannot be hurt by iranian oil iran is suffering from an embargo in substitution of iran deal the arabs are now very happy and relieved that israel is a nuclear power it's almost a surrogate deterrent that they're using against iran and if uh so that's that's that's very strange the other thing i think it's on the horizon that uh the united states is is starting to look at containing china with not just the traditional allies such as south korea and taiwan and japan in australia but also countries like india that has a border with china and maybe russia russia has not been uh triangulated if i could use that messy verb because of the russian collusion narratives and all of the the steel dossier that's just a taboo word but we should remember hemi kissinger's victim that russia should never be a better friend to china than it is to us and china should never be a better friend to russia than it is to us so if you were able to have a alliance of convenience with with russia and a more conducive alliance with india you have a power with over 7 000 nuclear weapons you've got the one of the largest armies in the world in india comparable population then you have very sophisticated uh capitalist countries democratic that are in the periphery and i think that would be a very easy way to contain chinese expansion should they do something more beyond the spratly islands or they should encourage north korea to do something stupid but so i think that's what we're looking at it would be a very wise move to continue that oh i agree sir i also think it would be a tight rope to have a a u.s russia alliance along with the u.s china alliance but that sort of feeds into my next question during the cold war there was always a great deal of attention paid to the indications of close cooperation and a relationship between china and russia so now uh now that our our great power competition has our three countries we are hearing some of those same concerns expressed again about russia and china forming an alliance so you've already you just brought it up so do you foresee any alliance between those two countries and of course at what level of concern is that to the united states well i've been very worried about i've written about it i think after uh we went from one extreme to the other after the osatia 2008 mass the obama administration came in in 2009 hillary clinton pushed the jacuzzi button the reset button in geneva and said we're into reset and then i think we were very naive about the nature of the putin regime and we combined the worst of diplomacy by hectoring of putin you know idealistically about the need to enlighten his society but at the same time appearing weak and he took advantage of that and then with the russian collusion narrative which i don't think proved to be valid at all it turned out to be a hoax russia was just it became demonized it was suddenly a country we wanted to reset with and then it became demonized and that meant that for all practical purposes you couldn't for a diplomat or a retired general or an acting national security adviser you couldn't you couldn't conduct the type of liaisons that were normative for 75 years to do so you would be swept up in intelligence and considered part of a russian collusion so it was tragic and we don't by that i don't mean we ever thought we had anything in common with russia but russia has a role uh in a lot of ways uh with china because it it can take over it can make china worry about its borders it can make china worry about uh its nuclear deterrent and india along with india and i think we can be much closer to india than we are to russia but these are two valuable tools that that we need to really exploit because uh i'm not i'm not a fan that that there's a inevitable trajectory of chinese power i think they've got a lot more power problems than everybody thinks but i think at some point uh they're going to decide that they have to step up their aggression against their neighbors or they're going to have to because i don't think they're going to win this new u.s policy of containment of china economic i don't know if joe biden will continue this if he were to be elected but at some point they're going to be a little bit more provocative and usually states that feel that they either have a timetable or time is not on their side or uh they feel grievances and they exaggerate them they're very dangerous and china is not as competent as it was and i it feels that if the geo strategic map shapes up as it fears that it would be better to do something quicker than later so i and i think in a way that's a good thing i don't think they're nearly as confident as they were pre-covered okay well that's interesting i say that we've had many guest speakers talk about uh the the china emergence or the arrival of china uh onto the world stage uh but i i do want to continue to talk about russia for just a little bit more sir i suspect a good portion of our audience clearly remembers the euphoria of the period between 9 november 1989 and 20 december 1991 when the warsaw pact in the soviet union essentially vanished as a threat to europe and the wider world order i i certainly remember it i used to uh pull sack alert uh in the air force but we heard expressions such as the peace dividend and the end of history quote unquote but in your book the second world wars you explain in detail why war broke out post-world war one post versailles treaty just 20 years later sir in your opinion how did the management or the mismanagement of the quote unquote world peace circa 1981 1989 to 1991 how did it lead us to where we are today i think it's a general rule both of diplomacy and geo strategy and human nature that it's very very dangerous to have a rhetorical pose especially a humanitarian pose when your enemies or rivals suspect that it won't be followed up in other words that either it is so powerfully humanitarian or utopian that nobody would dare question its premises or you have adopted this idealistic stance because you're repelled by war after versailles just to take a an example it was pretty clear that the germans felt right after the armistice that they were going to be invaded that pershing and folk and clements who wanted to go in and occupy and then when that didn't happen within six months they were very stubborn at versailles and within two years they were blaming jews socialists because they said we never surrendered on german soldier we were stabbed in the back on foreign soil we were on their mars that was a lie really but it was very persuasive and so we got into the weird situation where the winners of world war one never wanted to go to war again and the losers were very anxious to and so i think we have to keep that in mind that if you start to pose and declare things and i'm getting now back more relevantly to your question if you're going to have a nato post 1991 92 9 18 1989 whatever date we choose for the end of the cold war and you're going to accept new no nato members and you have this idea that the more nato members that are accepted the more now are within your safe zone of democratic market capitalism you you know utopian western values then somebody's going to look at this and say they've stepped further and further to our borders i.e russia and uh all we have to do is go into finland and we'll say to the people having cappuccino in florence or you know staying in a bar in amsterdam are your kids going to go out there and die for finland and they nobody thinks they are or do you really want to go into ukraine you know associated nato members so my problem with the expansion of nato is i think it should have been much more carefully calibrated and each country that was allowed in should have not just been voted in by the membership but there should have been a more accurate appraisal which country do you feel essential to your national security and are you willing to up your defense budget as you promised to two percent of gdp and will you send your young kids out there to die for that country and if the answer was no and each time i think you added one that was more likely to be no then the alliance like some chain was only as strong as its weakest link or not and now i'm very worried because if we were to get a president that vladimir vladimir putin thought was predictable and could be tested that the wisest thing he could do would be to challenge a marginal or nominal nato country and see what happens and then if that happened who knows what would be left of nato or or to take another example we always had a problem with turkey uh for a variety of reasons it was our only islamic country we had a we put an inordinate amount of responsibility on our southern flank in turkish hands and yet it always had a neo ottoman streak and under ergoyan it's been fully manifested and i just don't i think a lot of people feel now in the nato countries whatever situation turkey got itself in a nobody in nato wants to go die for everyone and they wouldn't do it i can't envision that happening i can see some nato bureaucrats saying it's a member we've got to go protect it from its you know it's in armenia or this or that but it's not going to happen and then more importantly it seems to have a technological relationship of exchange of expertise and material it could be quite damaging to nato with russia and i don't know why we still have nuclear weapons there but the turkish government seems to have assumed that their de facto part of their own deterrent and it would be very hard for the united states to get them out i don't know whether we've got them all out or we got some out but there's a lot of problems with turkey and so when you have an alliance and you have members are either weak or they're they they're not going to be defended by the membership or they're in fact duplicitous it's it's very weak and and people are not addressing this with nato to mention nato is a sacred cow you say anything about nato and you're considered an but it's got a lot of existential problems with it oh yes sir as you mentioned uh there's been a lot of discussion about nato's growth that actually reinforces russia's narrative of being surrounded so um and threatened but uh sir my next two questions were going to be about nato but since you just discussed it i think you saved us some time so i'm going to skip forward a little bit and ask you questions a little bit more specific to great power competition um so so i guess the first one is how do you see the challenges and responses to gpc moving forward uh for example do you believe the current emphasis on great power competition is merely just a return to cold war dynamics or do you believe we are confronting a new and different security environment great power rivalry i mean it's it begins with recorded history it's nothing new it's it's not it's just simply that certain times in history whether it's sparta or athens or carthage in rome or britain and france or the islamic world versus christendom and during the crusades you power focuses in two antithetical blocs and they usually don't want to go to war against them if they feel their their enemy has a viable deterrent they use surrogates they use religion they use ideology and then finally when they do fight usually eventually one side wins and then you have a unipolar and everybody comes out and says the spartan empire is now united hellenism and it's it's a war is all over athens will never come back or the british say that you know we've defeated napoleon we have no problem and and then that never lasts very long and so there's always areas p there's always nations and forces that fill that vacuum so it's wise to to study these these rivalries and what we have tried to do as i understand american foreign policy after world war ii is we developed a deterrent of such a caliber that when our big power rivalry with the third reich and the japanese empire was over we we foolishly for the first year the truman and second year disarm but we got over that illusion very quickly and then we recalibrated and we were able to do detour in each theater the replacement so the third reich vanished and suddenly we had the soviet union in europe japan vanished and suddenly we had mao in asia and i think that happens a lot and and there were enough wise people in the united states to say you know it doesn't really matter whether the soviet union was our partner it doesn't really matter they made an enormous sacrifice it doesn't really matter that chiang kai-shek is is corrupt this is the greater threat in terms of diplomacy 51 uh is all you need to have an enemy sometimes so they were they were the greater threats there were other problems but uh we were wise enough to see that these were global communist forces they had as their target the destruction of the west and we just forgot our recent history and we contained them very successfully well sir as i mentioned uh in the introduction the joint special operations university is currently conducting a great power competition seminar uh the first one of i expect a series of seminars so i'd like to ask you a question that's near and dear to the hearts of the united states special operations command but during a recent presentation one of our jso senior fellows was asked about the role of special operations forces in this new strategy of great power competition and he suggested that we should look at the dynamics of the cold war and identify what worked and what did not work so sir are you aware of any cold war lessons that are relevant to today's national security strategy and soft's role therein well if you're talking about special forces or special forces training indigenous forces or cia operations we we want to avoid something like the bay of pigs and by that i mean where the special forces has a strategic plan that may be okayed by the president and it has an effective strategy and it may win uh its objectives but at some critical point and that happened very early in the bay of pigs it becomes a geostrategic issue in other words the pro the administration in power i think wrongly but nevertheless historically you look back and say the ken administration had legitimate concerns that that effort to cause an indigenous pushback against castro would bring russia in and the following would be bad and in fact it in some ways it contributed to the cuban missile crisis but my point is that you have to have joint opera uh special operations within the fabric of a geostrategic strategy they have to be able to work toward an end and not not interfere with a traditional conventional response or deterrent policy so that you don't have some brilliant special forces person who said you know you can go into the sudan or somalia or you can go into afghanistan and you can achieve results without the conventional forces and without a lot of money and train and then you find yourself in a full-fledged civil war or uprising and then some state department official or pentagon official says wait a minute we didn't really think that this is this is necessary and that was pretty much what happened in korea i mean there were dean atchison said korea is not in our sphere of military responsibility and that was a green light to the north koreans it was a green right to china and so when we got down to pusa and there were a lot of people in europe especially who said why don't you just get out of korea i'm glad we didn't but that war part of the problem without war was that there were people in the state department and the military and in europe that said you're expending a lot more resources and that's not in sync with the overall strategy which was europe first and to hone our our defenses against the red army on the ground outside germany well sir i'd like to take a a couple of questions from our online members and the first question sir is in your book carnage and culture you list free peoples and rational thought as reasons why the west prevailed the question sir is does that still hold true today and if so is that an advantage for the united states in gpc i think it is i mentioned in carnage and culture that there were certain reasons and this was kind of controversial why uh hernan cortez was in mexico city tenochtitlan and the sophisticated aztec culture was not able to go uh navigate its way into madrid and uh so there was an asymmetry there and the the theme of that book is that the west was able to to create a system of technology and government and values uh that allowed it flexibility that meant that even when they were in the wrong place at the wrong time distant from home and they were faced with geniuses uh they could still win the battle eventually because they had built-in advantages sometimes not always tactically they could win but strategically they could win i think i think that's still quite true that uh nobody that the taliban the taliban are not able to go anywhere outside of afghanistan and their backers and uh to the degree that they had some successes on 9 11. i don't think they've been we very quickly reacted to that and so the ways that we reacted to that was that we had free discussion we had technological superiority we had people coming forward with predators we had the congress back and forth trying to adjudicate a policy and out of all that messy conundrum pretty much we did a lot of damage to radical islam and now we know what it is and we're deterring ourselves we're doing a lot much a lot better i think than is europe and europe's doing pretty well i think overall so uh what i'm getting at is that in the long term uh these western values that are deeply held constitutionally and among the people themselves and we know what they are rationalism technological uh research that's not impeded by sec uh religious dogma secularism the inclusion of women in the process greater propensity from people of all ethnic racial backgrounds that have a common values rather than every a [Music] stubborn tribalism all of that tends to give the west advantages doesn't mean they're going to win every battle but it means if they want to win a war strategically they have innate values that overcome screw-ups war is one by the side that makes the fewest mistakes and corrects the best of the mistakes they make well sir i'd like to take one more question from our online audience and it reads is it fair to say that the demonization of russia has more to do with the crimea eastern ukraine than the collusion accusations how can the u.s normalize relations with russia after their changing of european borders by force yes that's a good question but we have to ask ourselves why did uh vladimir putin take that bold step to absorb crimea and eastern ukraine when he did and so because i asked that question because the reset policy that was instituted in 2009 was to reassure vladimir putin that the united states was not an enemy of his and that we were going to be supportive on his inevitable transition to democratic government that was the premise of it if you read what our ambassador said and what the obama administration did and so i think the the answer to the question is that that magnum entity that was shown by the obama administration was interpreted as weakness to be exploited or rather than outreach to be reciprocated and by that i mean in 2011 in seoul i'll give you an example when barack obama was caught off mike he said tell to the then russian president tell vladimir and i'm trying to quote him exactly i just need some space if he'll give me space before my last election then i will be flexible on missile defense and most people translated that unintended quid pro quo as telling the russians were perfectly willing to stop all the progress with the checks of the polls on missile defense that's nominally aimed at iran that would be useful against russia and in exchange we don't want you doing things like going into crimea and we don't really want you to go into ukraine at least during 2011 and 12 and i think putin putin kept the bargain and then after that was over he felt what other deterrence is there in the united states are they selling ukraine lethal weapons no we we forbid that are they uh worried that we might get into the middle east we haven't been there since 1974 or five no they've invited us to go in and be a a a monitor of wmd and the assad dynasty we invited them in after they hadn't been there for you know 40 years so i could go on with those examples but the sanctions weren't really crushing against the russians so they interpreted uh 2011 and 12 as a a reset policy that was in in their interest and they defined that interest that you know the obama administration would or would not or could not maybe could not i don't know say or do anything but once they went into eastern ukraine you would have thought we would at least sold the ukrainian's anti-tech uh tank weaponry and then they they judged us right again they thought you know once we broke our word and where there's no longer reset i don't think the obama administration they thought will do much at all that's not saying that it that it wouldn't have been difficult it would have been very difficult to stop them once they were in progress because there were a lot of problems i mean crimea for all of its late independence by many russians was felt to be part of russia and they lost a hundred thousand men there in the siege of sebastopol when van meinstein you know leveled the city so they have historical ties of blood and sacrifice the russians do in in the crimea so that there it was it would have been very hard for any administration to tell vladimir putin if you go into the crimea you're going to pay a big price because i mean their nuclear power what we could have done is say we consider the crimea an independent country we consider ukraine part of europe they're independent countries and if you go in there we're going to find ways to punish you and it won't be in a cost-benefit analysis to your advantage whether that would be sanctions or we have blockades or we try to crash the world price of oil but when you're telling the russians we're going to buy a lot of gas and oil from you if you're angela merkel or we're going to translate a transition to [Music] fossil out of fossil fuels or we're going to stop fracking they don't consider they don't consider there's a lot of threats there if we had said we're fracking we're horizontal zoning we're going to destroy the world oral market that's your only source of real revenue by having becoming the world's largest gas and oil producer and that's going to hurt you we're going to tell angela merkel she's not going to do a deal with you we're going to line up eastern europeans and say we're going to have missile defense and you're not going to have a pipeline we've done all of that and i think we could have awarded a big power potentially nuclear standoff but we instead as i said we did the worst of both things we lectured them about their inadequacies uh on human rights which i agree with and we lectured them that they that the wealthier they supposedly would become the more democratic democratized they should be which and then we were not tough nobody likes to be hector you remember your school days nobody likes a teacher that just whines and hectors and says this and then never spanks you you have no respect for or him i sure would like to ask you a question about strategic influence strategic communication uh information slash disinformation i think we all understand that these are these are weapons in our in our current days especially with the increasing access to social media sites so sir my question for you have you seen any trends either domestically or internationally in strategic influence or social media dynamics that may have caught your attention or should be cause for concern i'm very concerned about this because we all knew i think chairman of the house intelligence committee at the time devin nunes came up to our military history group in a closed session and he pretty much outlined the dangers that russia and china pose for the integrity of u.s elections and this was in 2014 so we all knew it was there but looking back at this obsession with russia and we try to calibrate exactly what they did we know now that the attacking of the hillary emails we don't know who did it because crowdstrike was allowed to examine the evidence and then under uh sworn testimony the ceo of that of that company said under testimony to the house intelligence committee that he didn't know who hacked it even though he had leaked and said that russia had hacked it and then when we look at the actual amount of money that russia spent on facebook it was considerably small and this was going on when i think you could make the argument that with 380 000 chinese students that one or two percent of them were actively engaged in espionage technological espionage and we've arrested i think nine now researchers at major universities that have been passing on technology and we're very worried about uh technological appropriations as a price of doing business in china and what i'm getting at is that there is a threat from russia but it's dwarfed by the threat from china but china has a much more sophisticated propaganda they much better understand uh the social economic and cultural contours of the united states that than russia does and so if if you're a pundit or an a commentator or an op ed writer and you're subject to influence here's the difference somebody from russia tv calls up kind of a sexy voice and says we love you we'd like you to go on russian tv that's very easy to see what they're doing if it's the case of china they'll email you and say we know you share our concern about human rights and the racist treatment that we've been receiving and the racist uh the racist tropes that are going on in your own country and given the history of asian exploitation in your own country and they understand us very well and it's a much more sophisticated argument and appeals to a lot of people in a way that the clumsy russian effort doesn't and the stakes are so much higher because given the size of the economy vis-a-vis russia china is a real existential threat so i'm worried about china because not just because they want to have a cyber capability they want to disrupt their elections they want to undermine our institutions but they have a great much greater ability to do that when you have the national basketball association essentially it's marquis starr's lecture in the united states on his moral shortcomings and then they were completely quiet about the wagers hong kong democracy being destroyed the end of tibetan culture organ harvesting endemic racism in china there has to be a reason the reason is that to bulk up a failing market which is uh losing the viewership they've got a five to six billion dollar endorsement and franchise market in china or when you wonder about certain hollywood products and you're told pretty explicitly through communications from hollywood executives the chinese say these are the these are what we want you to make and we don't want any dark-skinned actors in them we want lighter skin because that appeals to the chinese mark and they do that so their efforts to influence american society at all levels are so much more insidious and effective from their point of view than our russia's and yet we're obsessed with russia so it doesn't make any sense to me well sir we're approaching the end of our time i what i'd like to do is ask you one final question and then i'm going to uh ask some of the questions that are piling up from our online members but my final question for you sir is obviously we're we're not really talking too much about the political situation in our country right now but it's hard not to being november 4th um so there's been a lot of concern about uh the american people's security and becoming more concerned about domestic security in the wakes of the pandemic in the wake of natural disasters and civil unrest as you just uh mentioned so if the united states begins to look more inward and less outward based on historical examples once again are there lessons that we can draw upon if we indeed find ourselves in this path well i mean if you looked at athens in 431 and its war against this preemptive sparta people thought maybe this party would win given its army but given athenian democracy its cosmopolitan culture its vast flexibility and defense was pretty clear from the first year that athens could win and then they had a plague it took a fourth of the population they had internal dissension they had one coup and 411 then finally what ended the war wasn't just the battle of agosphotomy but uh another coup inside so athens lost the peloponnesian war because there was internal dissension rome won its much more ambitious punic wars because they had a better constitutional system that were that created greater cohesiveness at home i'm very worried about that because um by our foreign policy is now becoming reflective of one of other political party there is no bipartisan post-war consensus maybe there shouldn't be because the world has changed but if there is a change in administration i have a feeling that things that are considered matters of foreign policy will be radically different i could envision a biden harris if they were to win to actually take down part of the wall reopen the border i could imagine them telling israel that we really don't believe that your our embassy should be in jerusalem i think we should negotiate about the golan heights that's not set and we're going to get the palestinians back right in the center of discussions as they should have been and we don't really like saudi arabia given its human rights record butting into this equation and we feel that iran was unjustly sanctioned we want to go back to the iran deal so these would be very radical and then there was a push back we would have a reversal there is no consensus now because of the dislike of these two for this red blue urban rural liberal conservative republican democrat and it's affecting our foreign policy i will save it much more controversially and i don't know if i'm allowed to say this that there is also a political dialectic that's changing vis-a-vis the traditional support and the military and it makes things very complex by that i mean it used to be that the left said they were very suspicious of the military after vietnam and when you look at conspiracy theories seven days in may or dr strangelove it was always the premise in the 60s that the military is capable of a coup or the military is unhappy with cons it was it was a complete slander but it was you know where it was coming from that has reversed now and when i read in foreign policy in january 9th of 2017 a very prominent intellectual who served in government suggesting there's three ways to eliminate this new administration at the time 11 days into it whether it be one the 25th amendment to impeachment r3 a possibility of a military coup and then when i see maybe 35 officers with our most illustrious officers four star and above navy air force and i see terms like that their commander-in-chief is mussolini or he's using nazi-like tactics or the border reminds someone of auschwitz or the the commander-in-chief should be removed sooner than later what i'm getting at is i'm not suggesting um that that's a coup at all but i'm suggesting that we better really look at the code of military you unicorn uniform code of military justice and really decide whether a retired or present officer can quote disparage whoever it is the commander-in-chief or not and if it's there that should be enforced if not because what i'm getting at is the traditional support for the military came from the conservative community and i think there's a there's a radical change in perception as i understand it when i go and speak that's the first question that i get and it's just mind-boggling that people are very half the country is very supportive of the military and they feel it's a and that's the more progressive path because they feel it's a way to get a whether it's transgender or gay marries or women in combat you can get an agenda without going through the clumsy legislative process or the other half the conservatives part says you know what i used to object to generals or admirals being on defense boards i don't i i i used to support that they should never be on a defense board again they can't be in a revolving door i don't want a retired general saying that he wants the commander-in-chief removed sooner or later so we've had a complete flip and i haven't calculated the effect on the military but the military's traditional source at least that one sort of four-star support in the conservative community is really gone and it's been taken over by the progressive community partly that's because high-ranking officers are more washington-centric than they were in the past but the days when the left worried about a george patton or curtis omay are over with and now they're seen as social justice warriors and the rights sees these generals i won't name but have said things as sort of insurrection moving that's a complete switch and it's something i think the military needs to discuss internally because that's not going to be good if we find ourselves in an optional military engagement and they feel that they're going to appeal to traditional sources of support within the united states they're not going to have it for a variety of reasons thank you sir um again we are about out of time so sir this is going to be my final question for you and this comes from one of our online members and it's about nato this person was intrigued with your conversation about nato earlier but uh uh the the person is asking if they're if the rift between the countries of the nato countries in the north versus the south uh if there is a rift how would that play out in a conflict with russia and then you can as a comparison you can compare that to afghanistan where some nato countries contributed uh assistance and forces while others did not yeah well in the southern it's very interesting because speaking of someone who lived in greece for three years when greek you know i lived near papadia montapulu street where the truman statue was and he was beheaded almost every two months and then they had a whole inventory of truman heads they could put back on but that's really changed now so the greeks i never thought i would live to see it but after 40 years later of going to greece they're very pro-american the government is pro-american they're terrified of turkey they think turkey is a neo-ottoman power they think that they systematically fly into the dodecanese airspace they claim territorial waters that are not their own they feel that these matters were adjudicated they don't trust europe because of the financial uh problems of 2008 especially the the strong historical and economic ties between turkey and germany they find france conducive and now they are deliberately cultivating the united states and they're pro-american i think that in their disputes with turkey uh it presents a dilemma for us because we've always considered turkey let's be honest in realist terms as the more valuable ally we took greece for granted turkey was on the front it had a larger population larger army and we armed it to the teeth more than we did the greeks but now i think it's just the opposite we're very worried that turkey is is antithetical to to nato values it cannot be trusted with nato technology it would not necessarily come to the aid of a nato country and mates might start a war with another nato country like greece because i think if you look at the jurisprudence of the cyprus debate i think most international lawyers see turkey as culpable and then you throw into the mix that while turkey is desperately seeking russian health russia is an orthodox country and or russia seems to be very supportive of armenian orthodox interests as it is serbian orthodox interests as it is greek orthodox so we have to be very careful in the eastern mediterranean but i think what we're trying to do is say to turkey you don't have a lot of friends the friends that you think like russia will probably not come down on your side and nato probably won't get into it and wants to preserve the alliance but the united states when it comes down to it will probably tilt toward greece as far as afghanistan i don't think any european i think will happen is the europeans will say to us after all our sacrifices there we have to stay the course and then we'll privately be relieved and not have to send anybody and it's it's uh i think the american people it's going to be very hard to to convince the american people that the pentagon has an effective strategy that would reduce our commitment to something i don't know five or six thousand troops in perpetuity that would keep kabul and the inland level plane areas safe and then allow the taliban taliban to be mitigated or to evolve in some ways that i just don't see that happening and i don't think for fairly or not i don't think the american people see the strategic consequences of afghanistan in terms as they do for a you know a 70 70 year commitment in south korea i may be be mistaken we're in afghanistan for one and only reason it was from there that bin laden launched these attacks against the world trade center and we felt that he would do it again unless we occupied remove the taliban and cleared that space as a sanctuary and now i think with improving technology predators uh air power i think people are starting to come to conclusions especially after the death of solomoni and baghdadi that we could accomplish those missions against a a surrogate or a new bin laden-type character who used afghanistan a sanctuary without going into the country rebuilding it and the only thing i think that's keeping us there is humanitarian when we we realize that should we abruptly pull out we've got people who are 20 years old that were have never seen the taliban they've lived under american protection in kabul and a few other cities and and we know what happened to people like that when we pulled out of south vietnam well sir thank you very much uh for our online attendees if i failed to uh address your question i do sincerely apologize but we are at the end of our time uh but uh dr hansen before we sign off would you like to offer any closing comments to uh the silcom audience attending today well i think all of us uh i think especially all of us realize that in these turbulent times political differences and social chaos is that the one thing that everybody agrees on is the u.s military because it's always performed well beyond anybody's wireless expectation and it's done so in very difficult times with volatile political leadership back and forth and all i can tell you is everybody expresses their thanks and gratitude and has enormous confidence my only worry about you is that sometimes we have such ambitious strategic objectives that we don't have the resources to fulfill them and then when we don't fulfill them we start to blame the military and sometimes we don't fulfill those strategic objectives because we ask the military to do things that are really very hard to do for any military and then when they try to do them in medias raybus we medius rebus we say you know what don't do that so my worry and i try to tell my civilian counterparts is we've got to be very careful that our resources match our strategy and our wisdom is manifested in our strategy and we never ask the military to do a mission unless we support it and i um i really believe that once you get yourself into a bad situation you've you've got to give the military the resources to finish the job or to extra skate itself without losing deterrence but this idea you send them somewhere and then magically they don't win and then you say that was somebody else's my brilliant war or my brilliant intervention was screwed up by some other person's terrible uh occupation that's just not that's not a viable idea once you commit you have to commit to win and you shouldn't commit unless you you have a good chance of winning and you don't think you're winning then you double down if you think the objective is still viable i think usually it is so that that's my worry that we're going to i don't think we can ask a lot of americans to go over to some place again and fight very well and then pull support and say it was the other administration or it was this guy did this and and now it's their war they screwed up and you leave them out there and i think that was shameful i speak of someone i went on two in beds in iraq and i just it was tragic to hear in 2006 and seven people say to me well they told us to come over here and we're doing a pretty good job now and why why what's going on and so we don't want to get into a situation like that again and yet that's a great danger that we will well dr hanson i'm i'm sure you're anxious to get back to the election results uh but uh on behalf of the on behalf of the president of the joint special operations university dr ike wilson i want to thank you very much sir for participating in this conversation and for sharing your time and expertise with us today well thank you for having me i appreciate it for our online audience today if you have feedback for this session or anything json activity or if you'd like to nominate a speaker for a future engagement please contact us at thinkjsow.socom.org and i would like to put it a plug for an upcoming interview with lieutenant general retired h.r mcmaster which should be happening on 13 november i'd like to close by once again encouraging everyone to explore the complete think json collection by subscribing through the library apan or on json's social media sites where all these videos are loaded and of course the usocom library is an exceptional resource for checking out electronic books such as dr hansen's or to download past and present json monographs through the json press so i'd like to close by saying that this series is brought to you by the department of strategic studies of the joint special operations university i want to thank dr hansen and i want to thank all the online attendees for making this a successful engagement thank you all for watching thank you [Music] you

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Length: 70min 0sec (4200 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021