Are We At War with Ourselves? With General H.R. McMaster

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1:27Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:02Anyways, let's get to it.

2:10I'm honored to have General H.R. McMaster join me on today's episode, someone I have been proud to call a friend since our time working together in the Trump administration. From his incredible military career to the challenges of advising President Trump, navigating shifts in foreign policy, and the hope for a renewed unity in America. There is so much to learn from this conversation. I hope you enjoyed as much as I did.

2:42I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Ostroy's great podcast, The Back Room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout out.

3:10Okay, so joining us now on Open Book, a dear friend and some may have the pleasure of interviewing before, is General H.R. McMaster. The title of the book is At War With Ourselves. What a great title, H.R., My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. And so this is, of course, after 34 years of service in the U.S. military. And I want to start there, if you don't mind. I was in London, and somebody said to me, I listen to Open Book. I said, oh, thank you. Are you going to interview General McMaster? I said, geez, I hope so. I'm going to use my Italian guilt on him. He said, well, make sure you bring up, there's a very famous tank battle that he was involved in in Iraq, and he was a phenomenal tank commander.

3:52So I want to start there. Tell us about your military career. Tell us how you got involved with tanks. And let's start there. Then we'll go to the academic. You write about the Long Island Anthony in your book and the Harvard Anthony. Let's go to the military HR first before we get to the academic HR. Yeah. Hey, Anthony, thanks for having me, man. I mean, I always enjoy talking with you about anything. And thanks for the privilege of talking with you about the book. And I always wanted to be in the Army, and I was just always determined to go to West Point. I graduated from West Point. I was not the ideal cadet, you know, at West Point.

4:25I was sometimes an misunderstood and a victim of circumstance there as a cadet, you know, but I couldn't wait to lead soldiers to build teams, teams that, you know, are part of missions bigger than themselves and teams to kind of become like a family, a good army units like a family. And, you know, you're bound together by mutual trust, common purpose, your sense of honor. And what we saw in combat in Desert Storm is our Eagle Troop of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, We were, you know, we were bound together like a family. And it's really a bond of affection almost. And your sense of honor, like you fear letting the soldier down next to you more than you fear the enemy, you know, or enemy bullets.

5:02And what we did is we encountered a much larger force, a force, you know, eight, ten times our size in the middle of a sandstorm. It was a Republican Guard unit. We attacked because we got a jump on them. If you think about like a boxing analogy, like we stung them with our left and the right option is to follow with your right and knock them out. And that's what we did in about a 23 minute battle. We destroyed, you know, we destroyed 50 some armored vehicles in those 23 minutes, hundreds of trucks, hundreds of infantry. Later, we took hundreds of prisoners and we suffered no casualties in our troop.

5:36Thank God. So what gave us the power to do that, Anthony, was confidence in who we are as a team, confidence in each other. and we did kind of what we expected. And our soldiers were so well-trained, Anthony. I mean, some of them after the battle, they said, my loader, my tank loader. He said, I ain't gonna lie, sir. I was fixing to panic. But I said, don't panic, just do your job. And he fell back on his training. And so I was so proud of those guys. And it's just, it's the kind of teamwork that you want in any organization. And you saw me trying to build that kind of teamwork within our NSC staff in the White House years later.

6:12Yeah. Listen, I mean, I think you know this and I know this. I know this from my business career. We have to build a team. You know, Reagan had a great line on his desk that you can get anywhere you want in life as long as you don't care who gets the credit. I think we both know that line well. We tried to live by that. The book you're writing is about a war with ourselves, but some of it is actually a war with Donald Trump. And it is because he's a team of one. You know that. I know that. You're more or less right about that. Not a team builder. Not a team builder. And so how do you, you're trying to help somebody who's a team of one.

6:50And so it's hard to talk to him, right? Because you experienced this. I witnessed you in my 11 short days experiencing this with him, where you're trying to talk to him. He may not know something, but he doesn't want you to know that he doesn't know something. He certainly doesn't want you to tell him in front of other people the differences in political sex in the Middle East or what various historical treaties mean to different areas of the world. And so you're in a minefield. But before we get there, I want to talk about managing that minefield in a second. But before we get there, let's talk about the call that comes in from Katie Walsh, someone I know well.

7:24She's the deputy chief of staff for Reince Priebus. General Flynn is being replaced after 2.1 Scaramucci. So he's blown out after 23 days. And I knew Mike, And I sat next to Mike during the transition. I was across the hallway. We each had our own conference rooms. We were both on the executive transition committee. And I don't want to say anything disparaging about Mike, but I think he's lost his way at this point. And I know you like him and you can give me your opinion if you want, but he's leaving. You're coming in. What do you say to your wife, Katie? What do you, what do you, tell me about the transition from military work into the civilian job inside the White House.

8:07Yeah. And as you mentioned, Mike Flynn was a friend of mine all through the Army. Fantastic officer. I don't know what happened, Anthony. And he sort of got caught up on all these conspiracy theories and encouraging, you know. Anyway, I just, I don't know. I don't know. So it's sort of like with Rudy Giuliani with me, you know, I like Rudy. He helped me in the early of my career. I don't like saying disparaging things about him now, even though he's lost the plot. That's right. So, hey, you know, that phone call I got, I tell the story and we're with ourselves. I'm walking down the street in Walnut Street in my hometown of Philadelphia.

8:35Where's my Phillies at, man? Sorry, no offense to anybody. I'm going to do this. I'm walking down the street in my hometown of Philadelphia. It's so painful for me as a mess man. But go ahead, keep going. My phone rings. It was Katie Walsh. And Katie says, hey, can you go to Mar-a-Lago tomorrow? This was the Friday of President's Day weekend. And so this is one of those phone calls that changes your life. And I'd had a few of these. I mean, I was a fellow at Stanford University, you know, the Hoover Institution for War College. And we're about to invade Iraq. And I get a phone call that I'm going to the Middle East, you know.

9:10So I called my wife, Katie, you know well, and, you know, and said, hey, I got this phone call. She said, of course, you have to do it. I mean, you know, she's the same way that I thought about it. This was my seventh commander in chief, you know, that I would have served across my career. How do you not do your duty, you know? And so I go down to Mar-a-Lago. It winds up being a Sunday of President's Day weekend. I have the interview with President Trump that day, and I describe the interview, our interactions, the questions he's asking and everything. And then he holds me over for a second interview on Monday.

9:39There had been a down select from the four candidates. I didn't know who was still a candidate until I ran into John Bolton in the men's room, kind of awkwardly, ambassador general. And then I walk down into the living room of Mar-a-Lago. The president meets me. He goes, hey, there's not going to be another interview. I'm hiring you. He announced it. I fly back on Air Force One to Washington. I didn't live in Washington. I lived down in Tidewater, Virginia. They fly me down to pack a bag and I start work Tuesday afternoon. So, I mean, it was an abrupt change into a significant job, obviously, but I considered it my duty, but also a privilege to serve in that position and to help what I regarded as a disruptive president, disrupt a lot of what needed to be disrupted in Washington.

10:20I mean, you know, that's what Donald Trump tapped into is the belief on the part of a lot of Americans that Washington elites had, you know, had abandoned them, you know, and it had pursued strategies in a foreign policy area and national security area as well that they just weren't working for the country or for them. Okay. And we both agree with that. And I've said this to you, you and I have talked privately about him seeing the desperation in blue collar America that other elite politicians didn't see or career politicians. And I think it's an important part of our future story, how we heal that fissure, if you will, in the body politic of the country.

10:57But I want to talk about something that you address in the book, which is that we do get a lot of things right. You know, we we form NATO. We have strategic alliances around the world. We're trying to reject terrorism. We're trying to find ways around the world to combat terrorism, keep people in the free world safe and keep them free. And so talk to me, if you will. And you write about it beautifully in the book about things we're getting right, things that we needed to change. You know, like there's a wrecking ball approach, General McMaster, but then there's also a version 2.0 of software where there's a gunk in the system that needs to be changed.

11:33So tell us a little bit about that. Do we need to wreck everything or are there certain institutions that are vital that need modification? Where are you on this stuff, you know, and more or less what you've written in the book? So, you know, the story in the book is, as you already kind of alluded to, Anthony, about a lot of the friction that I encounter, you know, with the president. I talk about the three A's of, you know, allies, Afghanistan and authoritarians where we had different perspectives. But really, you know, he was aligned. We were all aligned, you know, in a lot of critical areas like burden sharing, for example, among alliances.

12:03Hey, getting getting our allies to to invest more in defense that strengthens alliances. But then, of course, with Donald Trump, you know, he takes it a step further and says, OK, I'm not going to defend you if you don't pay up, which psychologically weakens, you know, the alliance and could encourage Vladimir Putin. So again, this is the theme of helping Donald Trump disrupt what needed to be disrupted. And what was most effective, Anthony, was we modified kind of the way we would interact with him based on the way he learns, the way he thinks. And what he likes to do is challenge the assumptions of the past.

12:34So, hey, what about the assumption that China, having been welcomed into the international order, would play by the rules? And as China prospered, it would liberalize its economy and liberalize its form of governance. That was the main assumption that underpinned U.S. policy toward China since the end of the Cold War. Hey, it's a false assumption. And because it was implicit, it was never really challenged. So we challenged it and we helped Donald Trump put into place, I think, the most significant shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, Anthony. And that's one that the Biden administration has carried on.

13:06It's an element of continuity. We dramatically changed our approach to the Middle East and to Iran. And the value of a lot of Donald Trump's decisions, especially that one, only became apparent to many Americans until the Biden administration reversed it and went back to the Obama approach of trying to conciliate the Ayatollah and the Iranians. And that didn't work. And I think in many ways it encouraged the conflagrations we see in the region, as well as the horrific, horrendous attacks of October 7th of last year. So I think that was another big shift. We began to rebuild our defense to address a bow wave of deferred military modernization.

13:47We put 180 degree shifts in place on Venezuela. Again, Biden administration reversed that. How did that work out? You know, this conciliatory approach to these groups, even the Houthis, they indesinated the Houthis as a terrorist organization. So I think that in many ways, his policies were solid from a foreign policy perspective. But in others, he would make a tough decision, Anthony, but then he couldn't keep that decision. And I'm thinking in particular about the South Asia strategy and Afghanistan in particular. Yeah. So I'm going to test a few things on you. Never really talked about in the mainstream media.

14:20I don't bring them up. And I'm just curious to get your reaction. So some would say that the move of the embassy, he was told by the State Department not to move it. He was told by secular Jews not to move it. The Orthodox community wanted him to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And people say that there was a dramatic increase in Hamas funding and other terrorist organization funding after that. Do you believe that or do you believe that that movement of the embassy had no impact? I believe it had no impact, Anthony. The reason I think that, I think that the increase in Hamas funding and Hezbollah funding was the Biden administration not enforcing the Trump era sanctions.

15:01Once those sanctions hit, the Iranians cut under Trump, they cut their stipends in half. And so the other thing to remember is multiple presidents going back to Bill Clinton said they're going to move the embassy and Congress, I think it passed with, I think like 49 out of 50 votes in the Senate to do it. It's just no president had had the guts to do it. It's one of the good things about Trump is like, hey, he'll do stuff like that. But what we did, Anthony, I tell the story in the book is rather than just make that decision impulsively, we brought that into the National Security Council decision-making process and we did our best to mitigate the downside and protect against the risk associated with it.

15:40Now, anyway, I mean, it's more complicated than that, but the stories in the book about how we did it and how we helped the president. In this case, I think make the right decision on that. Now, what I would have loved is maybe something else associated with it, like holding out the potential for a portion of East Jerusalem to be maybe a future capital in a Palestinian state. There could have been other mitigating factors that the president decided against. But hey, I didn't get elected. He got elected. So I gave him the options, got him the advice. He made the decision. And this is an area where the cabinet all moved out.

16:11The Secretary of State and Defense, they recommended against it initially. But then they did their best to implement the president's decision, which is the way it should be. Okay. Let me try another one on you. Okay. That's great that you refuted that. What about the slowdown of armaments to the Ukraine? Something that he was impeached for, frankly, was space created as a result of Donald Trump's decision-making and this unexplained love affair with Vladimir Putin, which frankly, you write about. You can't figure out what the love affair was. I certainly can't. I can't even speculate what it was.

16:46But the theory that he slowed down the arms, we had this Operation Porcupine since 1994, fortify the Ukraine to protect the Ukraine. It's a form of deterrence. He slowed down the arms. NATO seemed fractured. We're going to go for his first NATO speech at the first NATO summit in a second. Putin said, hey, we got an opening here. This NATO thing is in disarray. The Americans have slowed down their arms shipments, let me attack Ukraine, or you don't believe that. Well, I think it was wrong. Tell me what you think. I think it was wrong for him to suspend arms shipments to the Ukrainians to get dirt on the Bidens, you know, to use in the election.

17:27But, Anthony, I think what greenlighted the Russian invasion was the fecklessness of the Biden administration demonstrated with the disastrous withdrawal in Afghanistan, responsibility for which is shared with the Trump administration too. And I write about that. I criticize both administrations on it. But hey, when that happened, when August of 2021 in Kabul happened, I think China and Russia said, these guys are over. They've surrendered to a terrorist organization, or at least defeated themselves. And remember the joint statement before the Beijing Olympics, Anthony, where they're like, hey, you're done.

17:58We're in charge now. It's the new era of international relations. I think that's what led to the reinvasion. And the Biden administration, I would say they pulled our ships out of the Black Sea. The Biden administration suspended weapon shipments to Ukraine too, to allay Putin's security concerns. We listed all the things we wouldn't do to support Ukraine. We evacuated and scuttled our embassy, right? And took all of our advisors out. And then we offered Zelensky a ride out of the place. I mean, to me, that looks like we almost greenlighted the invasion. So I think the story I tell in the book about bringing the decision of President Trump to provide javelins to Ukraine the first time, the point I was trying to make to him, and I described how we did it with the chart and everything, is that what provokes Putin is the perception of weakness.

18:44Trump got that. But then he doesn't stick with it a lot of times, depending on who's in his ear, whether it's Rand Paul or whoever it is, some of the kind of, I don't know, the retrenchers or neo-isolationist wings of the Republican Party. So, you know, anyway, there are a lot of stories in the book about Ukraine and his evolution of his approach toward Russia. And I'm concerned about this. One of the areas I'm concerned about, you know, in a second Trump administration is would he sustain that support? What I'm hearing about these, you know, so-called peace plans would be a gift to Putin and misunderstand Putin again.

19:19Putin won't stop unless he is physically stopped in terms of his aggression, not only against Ukraine, but against Europe and the West in general. What do you think it is? If you had to speculate, never says a bad word about Putin, always praises Putin, tells people during an invasion how smart Putin is. What do you think it is? Well, there's a couple of things. I want to hear what you think maybe too, Anthony, because I'm sure you've got thoughts on this. But I think overall, he fancies himself as the great negotiator, right? And if you want to negotiate with somebody, one of the techniques, right?

19:49We learned this in getting to yes, man, in negotiation mediation theory, you separate the relationship from the negotiation and he tried to build a good relationship. That's one big part. He wants the big deal. I think that's one big part. Also, I think he sees authoritarian leaders regarded by their populations in the way he wants to be regarded as a strong man. And then the third aspect of this is he really wants to do what's right for the country in some areas. He's really worried about the nuclear arms race, nuclear instability. And he thinks, okay, if I can get a really big deal, right, how great would that be?

20:24So, I mean, it's not all just weird motivations or warped motivations. He wants to accomplish some tangible things with Russia. And finally, Anthony, he's reflexively contrarian. So like if everybody tells him, hey, Vladimir Putin has to be confronted. Vladimir Putin is not going to back off. You can't cut a deal with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine. You know, he tends to kind of want to do the opposite of what he hears. So does that make sense to you? I mean, that's how I view it. I don't think he has anything on him. I don't think there's any, and all of that, I think, is noise that feeds into, you know, his kind of sense of beleaguermen and insecurities as president.

21:00You know, the Mueller investigation, all of that, charges of collusion, it created a really negative atmosphere, you know, in that first year. And I read a lot about that in the book as well. Oh, I mean, you know, this is me interviewing you, not you interviewing me, but I'll just say one thing and then I'll switch to something else. I think it's a money thing. I know this sounds weird, but he loves money and he loves attention. And I see I think he sees himself as having a moneyed relationship with Vladimir Putin. You know, he wanted to build a Moscow Trump Tower and he sees Putin as the richest person in the world.

21:35And I think it's a money thing. But whatever. That's just me. And I agree with you. I don't think they have anything on them. I think it's very simplistic stuff, which, but to me, you know, it's unpresidential, but that's just for me. You know, the United States, you know, because you've looked at our intelligence briefings, you know, the adversary relationship we have with Russia. You know what they're doing to foment division in our democracy. You may remember this. You recommended a book to me called Putin's People by Catherine Belton. I don't know if you remember that. Fantastic book. You got me onto that book.

22:09And during COVID, I read the whole book and it would be hard pressed as an American president if you read a book like that to say, hey, I'm going to be so praiseworthy of Vladimir Putin. I mean, no American president would do that. So, all right. But let me, I know we're limited on time. I just want to go to two quick things and then I'm going to ask you to respond to a few things. But I want to go to the NATO summit and I want to go to something that I I think you call reflexive contrarianism where you tell him, don't mention the fact that there's, we could use Venezuelan troops as a military option.