Foreign Policy & World Affairs: Grand Strategy in a New Age of Geopolitics with Edward Luttwak

welcome to the hudson institute's dialogues on american foreign policy and world affairs my name is walter russell mead i'm a distinguished fellow here at hudson and a professor at bard college and the global view columnist for the wall street journal today i have the very great pleasure of speaking with dr edvard lutvac dr litvac is a strategic advisor to the united states and certain treaty allies he has served on u.s presidential transition teams testified before committees of the u.s house of representatives and the senate and has variously advised the u.s armed forces the department of defense the u.s state department white house chief of staff and foreign governments including japan he's the author of numerous books and countless other pieces his first book coup d'etat a political a practical handbook was published in 1968 and has since been published in 23 languages the book was derived from his experiences as a london-based oil consultant his most recent book the rise of china versus the logic of strategy is based on research he conducted for the u.s government he's recently written a series of japanese language short books on japanese issues thanks for joining me today i'm really looking forward to to the discussion and yesterday armenia's prime minister signed the russian-backed settlement to resolve the conflict in nagorno-karabakh what does this mean for the caucasus and how likely is it that this one will be a lasting peace unlike the last few ceasefires we've seen well as you recall when the soviet union broke up um a lot of the borders between the republics that became independent were very complicated borders with enclaves of all sides and some nevertheless all of these republics accepted the borders as they were in the knowledge that if they tried to revise even on common sense grounds like kyrgyzstan having us back enclaves and some then all hell would break loose and it would never end the exception was armenia and azerbaijan the armenians were off to a start right at the beginning the azerbaijan was getting was less organized so in by in a series of combats and activities by 1994 the armenians had succeeded in expanding the borders they inherited from the old armenian soviet socialist republic which was a smaller territory plus an enclave called karabakh the word nagorno they use is the russian term which means more or less the same thing so uh the armenians were victorious by 1994 they take the enclave which is and then they take all the azeri territory between the armenian border and the enclave so they basically double their territory or near enough there's azeri's took a long time to get organized they went for a period of high or oil income they developed uh important relationships with israel and with turkey and they started acquiring modern weapons and some modern military knowledge such as the fact that the all the inherited weapons like battle tanks uh and all that were could be outmaneuvered vertically so to speak by things like drones and some so they basically built the modern muji force much more modern than the armenian which is strong in artillery and tanks but not result they launched and finally launched an attack because there were many border incidents there was always an excuse because there were always incidents bloody incidents bloody attacks they picked one of them they started moving and they have been able to advance successfully and victoriously and finally the russians who were watching all this um finally provided the the you know ceasefire thing the opportunity the armenian had to accept it because otherwise they're going to lose more territory and so now there's a possibility of reaching an agreement the problem is the restoring the status quo of the original soviet borders which is the only real you know basis to there's nothing they could not agree on anything else than that um doing that would require additional you know movements and changes and so and then it would require the azirees to accept the that there is an armenian autonomous region and it should be autonomous at this moment the armenians demand not autonomy within azerbaijan but independence and the answer is to say well in that case we will give you nothing in effect so i believe that the russians will be able to secure this this is a part of the world in which the russian influence is not malevolent it's not causing worse troubles it is uh the russians are being responsible reasonably even-handed and and they're affecting the ceasefire it looks to be following a bit of a pattern where russia and turkey while they're not aligned and necessarily don't like each other very much seem to be very successful at kind of splitting games yes because the turks always defer to the russians yeah the turks erdogan is a guy who speaks very loudly he has this neo ottoman dream which owes a lot to soap opera near ottomanism very little to the ottomans and but when it comes to the crunch he the first of the russians he knows that you know he has a cardboard military force the russians have a real military force so that is why the partnership works yeah so erdogan wins in the sense that the turkish nationalists and the islamists will both be applauding in turkey that's correct azerbaijan gains territory and stature but russia ends up actually controlling a lot of the kia russia's presence in the south caucasus is stronger today than it was a month ago is that absolutely yes yes i mean look they they they didn't play one side against the other they they acted uh responsibly um and this is their zone of influence and they're using it positively as for the other race they are not in any sense islamists as you know it's the only shia republic in the world other than iran and you also know that they are actually truly secular yeah now this does not seem like a good result for iran in that it actually brings an increased azeri presence on the border and limits iran's will it's a defeat for iran's ally armenia too right as you well know iran is the last of the multinational countries all the others have broken up between the kurds and the baloch in the east and the kuchistani arabs and various other turkic populations and then luries and some the azeri's a block of 20 million that occupy the whole of western iran other than the kurdish areas the azeri's rebelled against the fact that the tehran government was supporting armenia against azerbaijan there is shia iran supporting christian armenia against shia azerbaijan the reason is that azerbaijan is a danger to iran precisely because all month multinational countries break up and here is the 20 million answers having a smaller number in azerbaijan but doing very well very successfully when you are in baku you see people crossing the border in to go to baku to enjoy its restaurants and hotels and for the girls to be able to walk around without the rags on their heads and some so the border was open and had a very deleterious influence on the iranian influence and control of the central government's control over azeri so yes it is not a good result for them and also when one looks at the the success that the israelis have had over the years in good and remarkably good intelligence penetration into iran it does seem that the azeri's must in some way be at least one of the factors contributing to that success well i don't think they speak about intelligence uh transiting and cooperation all that much but the fact is that there is a strategic alliance between israel and azerbaijan and it's not some kind of pragmatic deal between dictators or something like that because the azeries happen to have been uh identif seriously friends of the jews for about three centuries and two centuries ago there was in fact a migration of jews from pakistan nearby mountainous area into azerbaijan by invitation so they actually have their own there's a jewish town in azerbaijan so shia muslim or as they are nevertheless friends of the jews specifically for centuries so the israeli agreement with them and the fact that israelis have have sold them willingly very high tech staff that they wouldn't sell just to people just for the sake of the cash is reflects this and the others have benefited in the war because obviously they're not on getting equipment they're also getting methods to use it yeah so does this suggest that russia i mean iran can't be grateful to russia at this moment for its caucuses they would have wanted uh you know look the russians played we i hope that at least in this part of the world what they're doing in ukraine is nefarious every single day in this part of the world constructive also because as you know turkey strongly supported azerbaijan very strongly and in theory could have helped azerbaijan very directly by simply attacking iran because turkey and iran and uh sorry turkey and us and armenia armenia i said iran i'm sorry turkey and armenia share a border right turks instead of traveling to baku to help the azeries could have simply attacked armenia well the russians might be clear to them that no matter where what else was happening they wouldn't tolerate any attack on armenia at all and that it would come down like a ton of bricks so the easiest way for turkey to support azerbaijan mainly to put military pressure on armenia was prohibited and we all know that many other countries around the world would immediately have stepped up given the atrocities the unrequited unacknowledged atrocities of the past so um this is it's all very very interesting how this happened it it's also that neither the united states nor the european union had any role in the agreement that was reached and that must be kind of a source of joy to putin well it was a choice it was an american choice uh because you know there is a so-called minsk process there was a mechanism for europeans to be involved there was a mechanism for the americans to get involved but there was no inclination to get involved in on either them europeans the europeans i mean as you know macron intervened seriously yeah to stop one of erdogan's uh naval adventures in the mediterranean but you know the fact is this is russia's neighborhood you know uh the concept of zones of influence is supposed to be in 19th century whatnot etc but they do exist they're not supposed to but they exist yes the russian zone of influence so we all be thankful that so far it has been used responsibly yeah proper way all right um and you so you think this is a possible stable result that we're seeing now yes if the answer is add you know in order to succeed in war you have to win the battle and in order to succeed for real you have to win not the battle by the war and to win the war you need a peace plan the only purpose of war is to bring peace right the peace brought by diplomats always fails wars some brings real peace they have had the real war there was a winner and a loser but the loser lost was only what he took in 1994 so in it's a restoration of what was a recognized globally recognized border yeah so therefore uh you know this this thing can can stick because you win a war and the territories you win the whole world says belong to you you should keep them but now the azeries must come up with a peace plan they have to present a peaceful they have to talk reconciliation and peace and all that kind of stuff the winner has to be the peacemaker and they have to define uh some kind of autonomy for carabao don't they absolutely they status quo and where the azerites get all their territory back also means that the karabakh area has to have its autonomy this is an armenian area and the armenians in karabakh have to have real autonomy which is what was written and in the original that was the original setup and if you're going to restore it you have to restore it in full you can't deviate one way the other otherwise there'll be war again yeah so it sounds like maybe two-thirds of the armenians have fled karabakh as what i'm saying yes but that is temporary and they and they would immediately go back as soon as it's re-established they don't have homes you might call mainland armenia their homes are there uh karabakh is not an unfortunate part of the world it's the area in soviet times and it was a a very pleasant uh you know it's a it's so it's almost here you know hills and vineyards and things you know not a bad part of the world so sort of like georgia in some ways yes it's like georgia yes i mean it is it's a recognizable variant on the mediterranean landscape yep yeah yeah yeah all right well this is helpful now what about turkey you you're i mean here's turkey seems to be involved in libya in azerbaijan that's that's a range i hear from some french diplomats that turkey's been involved in west africa has signed agreements with niger and other places how seriously should turkey be taken as a factor in world politics now or regionals well it depends because uh erdogan's uh poses you know this neo ottoman pose implies that empire empire's conquest implies success in war but actually turkish military capabilities are much less than what meets the eye there's modern ships that they sent to the eastern mediterranean were much bigger newer and bigger than the greek ships but it's a cardboard navy you know it's a carbon navy i'm told the french could sink them in 19 i'm told the french could stink them in 15 minutes if they wanted to right they sank the french you know the british still have sovereign bases in cyprus yeah there's sovereign territories on which there are naval and some and the french sent two rafale aircraft to cyprus and some turkish not a military person a non-military person commented that this was joke and the turk turkish air force says many more aircraft or something actually one of their turret files were quite enough to seek the the navy that everyone said so turkey can make noise so long as not actual combat if there is any actual combat against anybody resembling a european type force no chance no chance but erdogan's game is that he has been losing popularity at home for many the reasons many reasons and real likely because of an economy which is in very bad shape partly because of his mismanagement of his son-in-law or some such person so he therefore offers his people circuses you know adventures the people who accept the the entertainment that erdogan offers the imperial posturing the neo ottoman posturing which as you noted extends as far as africa you know the activities in somalia and so on but it's you know the libyan adventure the claim to half the mediterranean on the basis of an agreement between turkey and libya whereby they divided the mediterranean between them so i commented that they should have made the agreement with morocco because that they turned i have even more it would extend it all across and engulf sicily and southern italy and so so all of this entertainment activity is not preventing the erosion of his power because the actually turkey is a country where there are universities some of these universities are not very bad universities some are quite good and more and more educated people and as you know erdogan lost the elections in the capital city ankara with the universities and educated people then he lost it in istanbul which is a megalopolis you know 20 million which was his political base why because educated turks are rejecting the immediate ottoman posturing these adventures the provocations and all the conflictuality brings with europe and so on so he's losing ground and so he therefore offers more circuses because he can't offer for example economic advancement he's not part of his system his party was full of talented economics you know people who really knew how to manage the company but they're all followers either of fethullah gulen whom he of course broke up with over the mavi marmara episode because really was a peaceful he is a real islamist and a really peaceful one very few of them and uh so he lost all the gulenists who were educated most of the honest civil servants in turkey were gulenists and he lost them and then he lost the educated of his own party like the foreign minister david ogle university professor and all that and google the president girl who was a distinct economist he lost he educated people in his own party then he lost all the gulenists that were persecuted and are being prosecuted in prison and so he got left with the his original akp group who are football hooligans basically comes out of a football thing in istanbul you know it was a and he himself is uneducated and so i don't think this erdogan thing is going to last very long because every time there's an election he loses ground so where does turkey go well turkey can go to it's turkey can have its own path for its own modernity through this very educated the educated advanced and civilized people who rejected the neo-ottomanism for example when he converted the argus sophia mosque to the ige sorry the argus of your cathedral church into a mosque well they in istanbul there was very little applause very applause because from the point of view of the istanbul is this was a primitive backwards step uh tourism is important in istanbul exactly yes sofia was the greatest tourist attraction in all of turkey and now by simply turning it to a place where five times a day there are upturned buttons confronting the visitor that's enough and the istanbul's didn't want that they didn't want this present from erdogan yes that's the way forward for turkey simply to embrace his modernity which is very considerable and to turn his back on you know this obsolete past of it the gulf arabs seem terrified of turkey well they're not erdogan let me say right because it's a matter of relative capability relative capability you know somebody attacked the gas separation facility and abukkai an immense installation burned half of it saudis have spent two billion or three billion or maybe more 10 billion on the air force yet when their uppercut facility was bombed by iran either through its own or you know directly indirectly there was an iranian singer did it the saudi government did not have the courage to pick up the phone and tell the air force to take out targets target package four you know something they didn't do it so when people have no military capability a country like turkey that has some military capability becomes an absolute threat they feel totally powerless plus of course erdogan has been hosting the islamic brotherhood yep sworn enemy of egypt which is the backup country for all the arabs and uh sworn enemy of everybody these days except for the qataris who are friends with everybody absolutely everybody including the muslim brotherhood yeah so that that i found interesting that that outside of the region turkey is taken less seriously but inside seen as a relative capability yes yeah in the country of the blind etc do the turks and the israelis ever get back together if the turks go embrace their modernity or is that phase of history kind of over no if i think if they do you remember that modern turkey never broke with israel yep turkish airlines uh until the coverage stopped everything tel aviv was the number one destination for turkish airlines i think 10 flights a day for turkish airlines and they're competing turkish airlines another four flights or five flights a day so you're supposed to be terribly remote and distant hostile whatever of a country and you run 15 flights a day to it they run to any arab country by far so there are lots of connections lots of links and uh only at the political level the government's quarrel but you know the turks were very careful never to take on the israelis militarily i mean when they threatened with their ships that they proclaimed if you recall they recently proclaimed that uh the part of the mediterranean they claim is theirs is wrapped around cyprus right the attribute to northern cyprus southern waters of south you know by some you know some map they invented would have come cut across the israeli uh zone of i'll go see but no you know and they realized that cardboard can't go against steel so they've been careful they've they've acted in libya when there is no reopposition they acted in syria in the north um you know with these uh turkmen men actually very different people they're like the azores really but because they can pretend that they're turks and stuff so they're being careful there's been reckless talk from erdogan but he's been careful not to actually collide you know have his cardboard collide with steel in some ways as i look at turkey i think about your book on byzantine grand strategy you know the byzantines never really thought they could resolve things on any one front but they needed to sort of manage on many different is that totally correct one enemy attacks you it's terrible if three an enemy attacks you that is got the solution right there all you have to do is to to persuade them one way or the other to attack each other they're ready they're kind of people who attack so you know it's a slight turn of angle and so you know the turkish foreign ministry uh has been impacted by the erdogan degradation of all turkish institutions but not as much as the armed forces where a lot of them were kicked out thrown out or whatever and the turkish diplomatic corps is very respectable has a lot of expertise and it's one of the resources that is waiting to emerge once erdogan allows them to get good diplomats and they understand these things well let's let's take a journey of a few thousand miles and think about china for a while talk about china for a while we have now you know certainly during the campaign president trump was saying that joe biden is going to be soft on china we've seen dramatic shift in u.s opinion about china and in a polarization between the u.s and china under trump where do you think things are headed now under a new administration walter i i feel the need to preface my remarks by saying that um there are synologists synologists are people who invested a lot of time and real effort to learn chinese and to be able to read these chinese characters which convey concepts and ideas as you know not words i myself have only ever been a tourist in china i was there in 1976 actually i was there when mao died i was invited to the great hall of the people and actually looked down and saw his dead body i traveled to places like um you know i was in in mongolia in mongolia xinjiang tibet uh years before they were open to tourism and i've been traveling ever since and i have many friends in china but because of of complete shameful laziness all i have is con some colloquial chinese i can understand chinese television cctv the news you know because they're talking about things that you can wallace guess what they are they show pictures but so i therefore speaking about china i have this limit um so let me and say two things first of all once countries get into collision they're v their image the image of the other country in your country gets flattened so here are these chinese and they're all the same and they're all doing exactly what xi jinping tells them and what are they doing is they are threatening countries like the threat in australia yesterday saying you better watch out because otherwise sir they ex they have expanded they've actually stolen um coral reefs and shawls and tiny rocks through a zone of three million square kilometers in the south china sea and promising that they wouldn't do anything there then they said they were going to build air sea rescue stations that is a turbulency and that promise by the way was believed by the obama administration until 2015 when xi jinping actually was arriving in washington that they would not militarize it then as you know they have attempted to steal the islands of uh the southernmost islands of japan senkaku they have relentlessly during the long period when the indians believed that they had the best of relations with the chinese during a long period they had they advanced from tibet from the tibet that they had conquered in 1959 to take more and more of the intervening territories in the ladakh area which is this tibetan area of northwest india through et cetera et cetera territorial expansionism relentless relentless territorial expansionism unless stopped that is to say not the approach of a you know genji's khan the conqueror but rather the hotel burglar who goes the corridor tries every door if the door is open and comes in the door is not he doesn't so this is all of this has been going on and as you know as it was going on we kept wondering who is doing this because concurrently there were naval incidents where u.s ships and chinese ships would meet and the chinese ships were trying to cut across the u.s ship almost cause accidents when the u.s captain would call the task force commander chinese side and say what do you go what the hell are you doing the answer is i didn't authorize it now where is there all these phenomena venturism uh pressure uh you know one of xi jinping's thing has been that he has cut down the chinese army by two-thirds it's now uh you know less than a million really it was three million and to get more money for air force and maybe and so when they suddenly cross the border into ladakh we may suspect that you know and we don't know okay so bottom line when i wrote a book 10 years ago saying that the chinese would relentlessly grab and advance and threaten bringing into existence a coalition against them the first country and when i wrote that the hover press which as you know is peer-reviewed turned to synologists and said there's a fellow lutheran who is not a synologist depicts the china that is behaving mindlessly which is to say it's like a remote controlled car poorly guided hits the walls and i said no it's like when this very cheap stamped metal cars that you wind up and only go straight bangs against the wall and keeps trying to bang against the wall so when i said that very s a very serious person who works in a pentagon as i was in i was writing a contract from you know research for the pentagon another such person who unlike me is a real synologist protested and wanted the book report to be suppressed okay he's a gentleman so he didn't do it behind my back suppressed on the grounds that it was a delusion that these countries would respond to china unless the united states did so first well the united states did not at the height of the expansionism when it really came out 2009 in response to the financial crisis which they misread in obama station was focused on you know dealing with the terrible crisis at home and needed the chinese to help out by boosting demand and other things so they basically didn't respond that was when the australians came out with the white paper saying if we don't contain china even new zealand will be taken by them at that point the japanese as you recall had the neutralist phase neutralist government didn't want to get involved well the australian prime minister gifford a woman formidable lady went there 2011 just after the tsunami went up to fukushima to show she's not afraid of radiation descended in washington tell them better bear up and of course alba arrives the next year first australia then japan go into containment mode meantime in india you still have the singh government that says that all this himalayan stuff is just a waste of time there's nothing there you can't grow any potatoes there or rice let alone etc then by 2014 the indians come in so we now have australians japanese and indians by 2014 the vietnamese have been there for about 2000 years so they're also part of this coalition and then in 2015 obama discovers that he has been misled by his advisers that there is no conciliation that xi jinping is arriving in the white house not offering to settle matters but not at all to insist that this is our right it's our territories so that is when obama authorizes the first freedom of navigation operation of that phase which was very frustrating until then to you know commander chief pacific who tried to have themselves so this coalition was brought into existence by chinese behavior so they act in a certain way they drive a friendly country into neutrality then they drive them from neutrality into opposition and they keep punching the same way so that was my that's why i wrote this book without any if buts now on the other hand predicting it in a deterministic way because i affirm my view of it now i have to specify that the country that i described as a cheap wind-up toy is a country where during those 10 years the study of western philosophy has increased in more and more universities xi jinping himself uh has launched the huge translation program of goethe goethe in 85 volumes good lord every germanist every chinese germanist is at work on it because he knows faust by heart he is a faustian character he upholds the communist party that caused the death of his mother for the suicide or something just after having everything to go with his father was a top party man demoted side by side in the street while she was shouting to him counter-revolutionary dog pig capitalist whatever while the mob was pummeling them both his sister died uh his sister committed suicide a half-sister and the other sister uh almost died of hunger except she the daughter of some mongolian party chief would throw her food through the window onto the floor that she would grab with her hands on the dirty floor to eat so this is the communist party the xi jiupine upholds every day specifically the maoist party that party the one that caused the death of his father and drove and sent him into the most when he was like 16 or something the most primitive village where he almost died of you know very he had worms and hunger and all that stuff this faustian character knows faust by heart so the china we're dealing with is not some simple-minded thing it behaves externally like a cheap wind-up clock because he attacks everybody you know two weeks ago two weeks ago it was a week when they simultaneously attacked the canadian government canadian swedish government the australian government the us government japanese government and indian government all in one week okay so this ship one to behind it as a nation where the study of latin is increasing while u.s universities are dropping latin chinese studying latin where there be four translations of the iliad iliad is not politically correct so probably american universities are dropping it the chinese are reading daily art they're studying philosophy the chinese is one of the the the ministry of the education of china has funded both the study of artificial intelligence to defeat the americans and the translation of the carmina of cathullus as you know cartoons is not a politically correct poet but he is many people believe the finest roman lyric so the chinese are translating it so this country the base like a wind-up toy is not internally itself something that we should flatten right so how does this how does this resolve you have you know why is it still behaving in such a a sort of monomaniacal way when it is so complex on the inside all right so add to it the latest thing very new which is xi jinping's deviation from stalinist policy on the nationalities they followed that blindly which is national informed communist in content you deviated from that he now wants the mongols to stop learning yeah mongolia he wants the uighur as you know to become chinese-speaking atheists and in tibet they can't do this so directly but what they're doing is they launch the training skill track program to convert herders this is the real tibetan herders the true to convert them into factory workers and then send them to work outside china in addition to attacking 17 countries per day in addition at home deviating from the chinese policy of recognizing national expression and national culture suppressing it and this is cannot continue you cannot have anything in the world escalating without limit what's been going on in the last few years is internal escalation external escalation this cannot continue either xi jinping goes or the or the chinese system is going to really um i think will simply they will be blocked in so many directions i mean right now a perfectly innocent chinese businessman as you know china is a communist country where there are numerous millions and millions of private operators private entrepreneurs you do all kinds of stuff so a chinese entrepreneur arrives in bolivia he wants to buy a ranch uh for very good reasons i have a ranch in belize yes very good idea to raise capital in bolivia it's great fun and quite profitable he arrives and he's he's a guy from xiaomi maybe you know who has got some money uh he may have been a car dealer i don't know what he wants to go there wants to be a rancher that was my ambition i did it he's no different than me well he's chinese and even though bolivian government and eva morales was you know pro-russian pro-venezuela and pewdiepie's and that nevertheless just because he was chinese they stopped him he wanted to buy ranch and stuff there was another crazy chinese wanted to go to iceland and buy a lot of land in iceland to have a golf course golf course he got kicked out because he's chinese in other words chinese individuals who want to do honest business are prevented because of their government chinese researchers who want to study an innocent subject not something military are now rejected chinese students are wanted by american universities because of their limitless greed but they're not really wanted in many other places so many chinese are paying a price every day for their behavior or their governments every day moreover unlike the soviet union where they paid a bigger price in the soviet union they were kept inside the soviet union they were not allowed to travel and therefore they had no information or whatever it is none of this is true the chinese great wall against internet penetration is pierced by many halls i was my last visit to china quite recently really i was on the north korean border i wanted to use gmail and because just kept google and sound kept down and at the hotel when i was staying right on the yalu river border i said i want to use i want to use google or gmail down they say okay okay and cost me ten dollars ten dollars you go through the great you know ten dollars and you go right through the world so it's not sustainable not sustainable this thing cannot continue like this you can't first of all xi jinping is running out for countries to borrow it you know as i say last week sweden and buy some remote you know happenstance i happen to be in beijing one night long time ago i mean like 35 years maybe more when i was invited to the swedish embassy where i had friends because they were having a little event because of the inauguration of the first chinese foreign cultural program state level culture was changed 35 years ago well two weeks ago the swedes closed them all down shut them down completely because of abuse just etc so uh and as i said that is the day when i checked and they were having the corals with all these different countries and all these different things cannot continue so it's fascinating but does this end with a bang or a whimper well and nothing that the chinese are doing uh involves a government which will ignore uh nuclear deterrence so whatever they're going to do has to be sub-nuclear so let's say they can't invade taiwan because as you know taiwan is the only country in the world whose protection is the legal obligation on the u.s government taiwan relations act there's no you know portuguese relations act there is a taiwan relations act they know that the united states cannot stand by if they attack by one and however reluctantly the americans will get involved and that could escalate so there is that limit on chinese combat there are others limits like this operating in different ways the one limit that is not operating is the fear of making enemies out of countries that would rather be friends they have been doing that and continue to do that but they can't escalate it can't go into a bank uh they're not irrational right you know i happen to know personally a guy called luau yuan you can look him up luo yuan admiral he's the great warmonger look at a lot of stuff um he came to washington once he loved my wife's brisket this leon who's a tall good-looking guy he talks cheerfully about nuclear war then he orders another drink he has a little institute of his own he's well regarded he has several staff members former military like himself and he appears on television a lot and so but that's not the that's not decision making so so he's like xi jinping is like wilhelm ii without a schlieffen plan yes wilhelm the second analogy is perfect because he's a naval guy you know he thinks and he's an evil guy who doesn't understand maritime power sea power is buying warships in the rich country you could buy 50 of them maritime power is having relationships with the insulin peninsula countries so that your ships are welcome in their ports they can get resupply of fresh salad or whatever sure leave but also radar coverage yeah things all that stuff yeah and xi jinping is a wilhelm ii who thought that you build warships and you some of the you know one and two he shares william the seconds obsession with worthless uninhabited islands that you have to protect at great cost but to give you no value if i recall the germans went as far as guam you know yes yes well guam which is really through asia up oh you know closer to japan so yes william the second but without the schlieffen plan uh that is to say uh they cannot uh he is very much like william ii he's you know he's a german file and stands for um but he cannot do that you see because as you know the nuclear weapon is too powerful to be useful yes and the chinese have them and it exceeds the culminating point of utility it's like you get into quarrel with your four-year-old toddler and you have nothing except yes yes don't choose it don't use it but we do have a problem amidst all this cheer a very serious problem walter that is that the united states to deal with china should have intelligence on china and we don't there is no situational awareness the central intelligence agency believes in operating out of embassies because that means that you can have pta meetings or whatever it is and so they don't do what other people do which is china is full of expatriates not only the crowds of expansions in the big cities but you go to a small town like dali in yunnan province and you go around the corner there's a german couple we run a factory okay yeah yeah yeah which is everywhere in china the fact that the agency refuses to operate except from embassies the fact that the agency refuses to train people to learn languages i mean languages like french okay let alone chinese oh no it's too difficult the russians in their diplomatic academy insist on two languages so lavrov lavrovian that's his real name he knows he was forced to study sinhalese and maldivian and he spoke about 300 300 there are 30 uh what is it 30 000 people or something maybe more maybe 300 000 people but that's it and he has to learn maldivian the cia people in central asia which is to say in turkmenistan kazakhstan in tajikistan in all of these places they don't have one person who speaks the local language and then you say how come you can operate there he said we don't need the local language they all speak russian so i say yes and i try to speak russian well as a matter of fact i don't in other words russian is just an alibi so we need an intelligence organization they have a building in langley if you empty it and fumigate it and you start all over again but people actually know something because the science boys are okay you know the satellites intercept national security and some but we actually need situational awareness because we can't afford to mistake countries for paintings paintings they paint the country yeah yeah they painted you know iraq is the country ready for democracy whatever they actually go there you have to have secretion awareness in china we need this desperately yeah it does strike me that the sort of bureaucratic culture in washington does not lend itself to the kind of knowledge of the world that one needs and then not just in the cia but in a whole number of washington bureaucracies think tanks and so on there's a there's this sort of operating assumption the world really is america you know or the the diff you know we don't need to really understand other people or try to try to understand how they might be different from us right and and in regard to that very exotic country called france in today's tablet magazine tablet which i look at there is a translation of an article which i originally read in french written by a very careful journalist who points out that the american press completely cannot report on terrorism in france the american press turns out the terrorists are not white so the terrorists are non-white hence they must have a reason to attack okay for example charlie hebzo cartoons being offensive the french authorities are repressive uh the french policemen shocked this terrorist just like that and uh what about due process and all that here's a french journalist a feminist as it happens writing a major article in france tablet magazine runs it in english and what she documents carefully is how the washington post new york times are unable to report on france because france is too complex he's too too remote too different okay that was not the case in the past the whole american elite was very much at home in france yeah it's become an exotic country why because you export your domestic obsessions the terrorists happen to be non-white hence if you are properly woke they must have you know this has to be payback and this and that and all that stuff and you therefore can't report on the fact that these same people terrorize their own community 99 percent of the time they're terrorizing fellow people from north africa or whatever one percent of the time they kill some french guys and french government is reacting to the 99 but all of this is too difficult we have a problem as a society if we're going to live in the world we should have some knowledge of that world and i know there's a lot of ignorance but the one that roils me is the agency's ignorance because that's paid to know okay and instead what we had like the shoyer guy who was the bin laden uh office did not know arabic wasn't he wasn't demanded that he learns arabic and he didn't try to learn arabic when i asked him at the time how do you do your work ancestor i read translations and here's osama bin laden that was his target the most verbal the guy was using his language to communicate to signal and there's this guy who's supposed to be in charge of the office who doesn't know and his deputy didn't either definitely did not either so you set up a bin laden office neither of them know arabic and very recently i spoke to a group of 50 of them 50 of these people and i said since you're all middle east people let me talk in arabic for this president answer oh we don't know arabic 50 top analysts three of them claimed to know arabic two of them were actually arabs we can't have this kind of stuff it doesn't matter if it's trump body or anybody else we need to when we deal with china we must have finger feel we must have understanding of the layers and the complexities of it not otherwise we will be fighting cardboard china and we will not do very well all right well thank you this is uh we've we've had about an hour of conversation which i very much appreciate and once this are you in maryland now where where are you i live in chevy chase okay yeah and i can see tall buildings from where i live but we have deer and we have raccoon and early this year we had the bear briefly i was hoping to stay and eat all the cats and dogs of the neighborhood regrettably he left a bear in chevy chase yeah a bear yeah a bear came well somebody else photographed it i didn't but they descend you know when the mothers kick them out to them yeah they're the things they descend in churches they're right well i know they've seen coyotes in central park but i think no bears no no we have we have uh i've not seen the cruelty but we see lots of wildlife chevy chase is the place to be because we have and i'm really hoping this next year we'll get a couple of bears living here in my garden i i was practically willing to shovel a you know a home for them unfortunately they moved on all right well i hope soon we can get together for lunch or dinner it's great to see you always by all means listen we're organized if you email me uh then i'll be happy to invite you over for lunch that would be lovely we have a deck on a sunny day like today and we have a porch if it rains so get in touch and i'd love to have you over well that would be great thank you thank you

Channel: Hudson Institute

Views: 4,028

Rating: 4.5555553 out of 5

Keywords: Hudson, Institute

Id: uqaosa0Gqjg

Length: 58min 17sec (3497 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020