‘Easy answer is China’: National security experts discuss gravest concerns

Music, hello and welcome to the latest installment of America speaks right here on straight arrow. News, I’m Dr Frank Luntz, and what you are about to see has never been done before. A focus group of national security experts from the State Department and the Pentagon, all of them leaders and all of them visionaries in their respective fields, all of them responsible for keeping America safe and secure, and all of them actively considering the need for non partisan and apolitical leadership in matters of national security. Each participant has had a truly distinguished career. Admiral. Bill Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Ambassador John necroponte, the former Deputy Secretary of State and Director of National Intelligence, general nori Schwartz, former chief of staff for the Air Force, General Michael Hayden, former director of National Security Agency and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. We also have the former Secretary of the Army, Louis Caldera, the former Navy Secretary and NASA Administrator, Sean O’Keefe, and finally, Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, former policy director for the Senate Armed Services Committee. Between the seven of them, they have almost two centuries of distinguished government service. This is truly unprecedented, so let’s listen in as they provide their wisdom about what we Americans should be most concerned about right now,
gentlemen, I want to thank you for your participation, and I must admit that I’m rather intimidated by this, because I’ve never been surrounded by so many experts in a field that matters so much in a focus group setting, which usually encourages the opinions of the average American and not the exceptional, extraordinary American. Every one of you on this zoom has accomplishments that put you in the top 100
of 1% of this country. What is brilliant about this is that we have Republicans and Democrats. We have people who have no ideology, no partisanship whatsoever, except service to the country.
Is there any issue, any concern about national security, military, foreign relations, that keeps you awake at night because you have that much deep,
deeply held fear that we should be paying more attention to it, or we should be handling it in a different way. I’ll let you answer that any way you want to. But what keeps you awake at night? Because whatever you answer is going to keep me and the people going to watch this awake as well. General. Schwartz, let’s start with you.
Thanks, Frank. I think the thing that concerns me most is any perception that the American public might have
that somehow the leadership of the Armed Forces has political preferences.
Why does that concern you right now? Well, the reality is, is that the obligation of senior military leadership, at least in my mind, is, is to provide best military advice, and it’s important for
for those who
who offer that advice, for the receivers of that advice, to be assured that that there is no political Spin, there’s no self interest, there’s only the national interest that’s that’s being discussed. And I worry very much that that some, including those who are now
in the political elite, have a different impression of us that that we are in some ways aligned with particular parties or particular candidates. And nothing in my mind could be worse for the for the nation.
Admiral Owens, how would you answer that question? What keeps you awake at night?
Well, I do think that nordy’s comment is very valid. Let me just broaden that a little. I think you know, all of us came to serve raising our right hand. We were kids from places like I am from North Dakota, going off to places I didn’t even know, like Annapolis, Maryland, to go to the Naval Academy, realizing that was not the Atlantic Ocean outside that was the Chesapeake Bay about two years later, and and it’s it’s interesting to me that we always in my.
Experience when when we were young officers, or when we were blessed to be four stars,
realized that we raised our hands to our right hand to support the Constitution of the United States to be answerable to our civilian leaders, but only lawfully, and not to be political in any sense. And many of us to this day remain very apolitical publicly, because we don’t want America to think that we are back to a little bit of what nordy was saying. And we believe that in our hearts. When I was on the Joint Chiefs, we used to call in a lawyer occasionally, a couple of times a year, and we talk about us and the Constitution, and where did that fit in the overall structure of the United States? Because we had several 100,000 young men and women out there serving our country, and we were not there as part of a party. We were there to give the best advice we could to civilian leaders, and respected those civilian leaders, but we were not afraid to tell the truth and and I do, I do worry about our democracy in that sense, Ambassador Negroponte, you’ve served decades
a wide variety of areas, but of all the things that might cause you to lose Sleep today, what’s number one?
Well, I think
I feel that when I first came into government,
it was held up
as a very honorable profession. I can’t tell you the countless number of people who at school, at college, when they were asked what they wanted to do after they graduated the the very large percentage of them who said they wanted to work in the CIA or in the Foreign Service, or they wanted to go into the military, I think the spirit of service was huge.
And obviously some of this was because we were coming off of World War Two and then the Korean War. And when you looked at Congress, the majority, the substantial majority of the members, had served in the United States military. So we all, in a way, spoke the same language of commitment to the country and sacrifice
for our people. And so I guess what worries me the most is that the newer generation would appear to not have quite the same
spirit of sacrifice for things outside of their own immediate, personal, family interests, and I’m not sure it’s entirely their own fault. I’m not sure that we’re asking it of them, whether it’s national service or just to think about, you know, ask not what you can do for yourself, but what you can do for your country. So that’s the question that worries me.
Secretary Caldera,
same question, how do you respond?
You know, what worries me is how corrosive and divisive our politics have become, and how that’s really bleeding into our society. And you know, when I started in elected office more than 20 years ago, you know, it’s still a time when there was a sense that what we were working toward was the common good. What we were seeking was solutions to policy challenges, and where the goal was to find a way to compromise, and particularly with respect to foreign policy and military engagements and those kinds of things. We used to say that politics ends at the water’s edge, that that the US presents a a united front when we’re dealing with threats abroad or our role in the world. And today, everything has become political and to such an extent that that when the President takes action on something outside our borders, the other party is quick to condemn and criticize and
and take the opposite position, to such an extent that we now have a division as between whether we will fulfill the leadership role that We’ve had, that our country has had in the world since the end of World War Two, to be the guarantor of democracy, to help spread peace and security and stability through our role in the world, or whether we’re going to turn back to a more isolationist foreign policy, where.
Where we’re not willing to sacrifice and to invest and to do the hard work of leading to try to solve the problems that make our world less secure. And what really keeps me awake in most cases is in those kind of situations, there is no consistency of American policy as a consequence of it each time there’s a transition, whether it’s peaceful as it always was, or a different variety, like we’ve seen in recent years, independent, either way, whenever there’s a transition, the attitude
it was that everything that was will now change to something different, and that’s the fear. And so that unreliability translates beyond our shores to international partners and those who are our adversaries, in some ways, who believe that there is nothing predictable about what we’ll do, and worse yet, we can’t be believed when we commit to do something for any sustained period of time. That’s a reputation the United States can afford to have, and that’s we’re right on the cusp of exactly that problem. Have we seen anything where we are less strong today because of this tension, where we less strong today because politics has played a role that it shouldn’t have played. I open this up to anybody here.
Have we actually seen failure because of too much politics or partisanship or division in this society that is adversely affected the military? Well, let me just if I may comment on the fact that for the first time, in my experience, we had senatorial holds on a very significant segment of confirmations for
important military positions in the government not to speak of civilian confirmations.
And this was particularly harmful for the for the institutions of the services and and the logic of this would escape me, personally, frankly, other than a punitive action. And so I would just offer to my colleagues here that,
as each of us knows, there is a game plan for succession in any business, and it’s certainly true in the Armed Forces of the United States
and and when there are questions about character or performance or credentials, senatorial holds are certainly fair.
But when it’s not that, when it’s something else, I would argue that’s not healthy. It’s not the tradition of the Senate,
and it’s something of grave concern for each of you. In a sentence, can you describe to me, America’s image and reputation across the globe? Admiral Montgomery? Can you give us one sentence? I think we’re seen as weak and confused. Ambassador Negroponte,
I think in certain circumstances, we’re seen as helpful and supportive. I’d say the efforts we’ve made to
support and strengthen our alliances. On the other hand, sometimes I think we fulfill Nixon’s concern that we be seen by the world as a pitiful, helpless giant.
Secretary, that that is sobering. Secretary Caldera,
I think we’re seen by our allies as an unreliable partner, not sure if we’re going to be there or not. And I think we’re seen by our adversaries as maybe having lost little bit of the of the belly for the fight
where, and therefore they’re probing us for weaknesses, general Haven. Yes, I’m I talk with other people in Europe and the Middle East and so on. They’re worried about us. They’re worried about us, not them.
Secretary O’Keefe,
perhaps we’re well intentioned, but we are totally unreliable.
Admiral Owens, we don’t trust them as much as we did before.
General Schwartz, we’re seen as an uncertain ally and.
Okay, this is awful. Guys, you know this,
this is awful.
I don’t know which is bet. Which is more important, how do we get into this situation, or how do we get out of it?
But the public, who will see this, will think, Oh, my God.
So let you answer either question, how do we get here, or how do we get out of here? They opened it up to our panel.
It’s about leadership, and whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican,
we, we, I think all of us recognize the meaning of a great leader, and we need great leadership in this country to rally around, to be constitutional, to talk about the world, not about ourselves, but the world. I mean, today, we seem to be falling back on all of that belief in free trade we had in the world. We are the reason countries came out of poverty. Look at the WTO and what it did for China. Look at the meaning of Bretton Woods and the dollar as the reserve currency was good for us, was also good for the world. Very stabilizing, and we need that kind of leadership to look at the world and say America is here for you, and to have the world trust us and and not to have all of this backbiting. Is that happening?
Well, I mean, I think it’s more of a mixed bag than we’ve been saying so far, because I think the idea of strengthening our alliances, we’ve done a lot in Europe with bringing on Sweden and Finland and to NATO. I think our East Asia policy hasn’t been half bad. When you talk about
the pivot to towards Asia, what we’ve done to build up deterrence against China, bringing Japan and some of these other countries more into
into our military orbit, or national security orbit. I think all of that has been to the good. So I think it’s a mixed bag.
I think, I think we need political leaders from both parties to come together and say that the politics of politics of division are wrong, that we have got to get beyond this, that you know, we have to break this fever where, where it feels good to attack the other side. So curious for you guys, is it worse today than it was you? Some of you been doing this now 40 years. Is it worse today than it has been over the last 30 or 40 years? Are we or are we just misremembering and thinking that the past was better than the present? So Frank, I would remind us. You know, we had, like a former Secretary of Treasury and a vice president, you know, have a duel with each other. So things have been worse. So, you know, and domestic politics has always had this thread through it. We had members caning each other on the floor in the 1840s so, I mean it, there is a thread of disagreement on foreign policy, though it especially after World War Two, there was a level of consistency, as General Schwartz mentioned with Scoop Jackson and Bob Dole and Howard Baker and that group I worked for Senator McCain. What was unique about him was he, he disagreed. He would disagree with implementation, and would, and would certainly hold
political and military officers accountable for his disagreement with them. But that is wholly different than than a disagreeing with whether or not the United you know, the United States should get, you know, should respond to a crisis. Let me ask General Hayden and Ambassador Negroponte, the two of you have combined an incredible amount of public service in various different agencies and various different responsibilities. You all remember a different time, a different era. Is it as bad
as the public thinks it is? Is this the worst of times in modern times. We’re not going back to the 1800s Is this the worst that you’ve seen? It both of you, Mr. Ambassador. Well, I mean, I thought we went through some pretty nasty times
with President Nixon. I was on his National Security Council staff, but just what happened during that period, I thought was very disturbing and very destabilizing, so I don’t think it’s necessarily the worst of times, and we’ve seen stuff like this before, and which gives me hope that we can get back to.
Uh, back to some greater sense of semblance of normality in our political system. I really do have a I want to talk about truth.
And I think for a lot of people in the United States, truth doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter.
You know, I could do, I could say many things, but I won’t say that. It’s just that’s different than it was 2010 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. That’s really important, and I think so when I talk about what’s going on in the world, in the United States, truth matters, and maybe it doesn’t matter, if you know what I mean, yes.
Okay, so let’s look towards the future. First thing I want to ask you is, if you had the chance to talk to both presidential candidates, because we’re keeping this non partisan, and if they were standing behind the screen right now, what would you say to both of them about the civilian, military relationship,
about civility between people, about what needs to happen for national security from a political standpoint, what advice would you give them? And General Schwartz, I want to start with you.
I think I would say that any thought of replacing the chairman out of cycle would be the end of a a political armed force.
Is that a possibility? General?
I, I have, I have heard innuendo to that effect,
okay, Secretary O’Keefe, you’re laughing, please tell me why. Well, because it is entirely plausible if one candidate you know comes up, but independent of that, the civil military relations issue, I think, is one that both candidates need to fully appreciate
the scope
of any change to make in
enforcing the principle that
a
uniformed military follow the authority of the President of the United States,
but has the responsibility, the duty, to make a determination
of the lawfulness of that order if they make a change to that, this becomes chaotic
and worse yet, it goes back to the very reasons why so much of the tradition that has built up over this nearly 250 years was designed very specifically for the purpose of not introducing an element of partisanship on the uniform military in interpreting what they believe
to be the the
purpose of following orders other than making a determination of whether it’s lawful or not, that’s a critical feature, and we’ve come dangerously close to that
recently, and my my colleagues and friends here are absolutely right. There’s been plenty of points in history US history in which we have was really engaged in conflict on matters that are make what we’re going through today look not quite as as as bad as we think it is. I mean, the fact, the mere idea of being in the midst of a civil war
is not something we’re encountering now. There’s no question that said this is we’re showing all the signs, all the trends of heading in those directions, and little evidence to suggest that we can move past
it on allowance. How would you respond?
Well, I would tell them that I hope the two of you can hold hands a little bit more. I’d like to see you a little closer together, just as a general statement, but it’s it’s hard to improve on the comments that have been made here so far, except to remind them that probably the most respected institution in the world today out there, rarely talked about in political.
Campaigns is the United States military. And yeah, we go to their funerals. And yeah, we go to Arlington. But just remember the institution is a precious commodity, and you need to treat it like that precious diamond. Preserve it in every sense, as our friends here have said, you know, choose the very best military leaders who will give you good advice as they are sent to you by the Department of Defense. And don’t choose them because of some something that might be viewed as political, that they’ve said or done or their race or their color or their sex, choose the very best ones, because what they are is they’re that precious diamond, and you want to preserve that diamond for the long term and for the Good of America, I would tell tell whoever wins
has got to go, then reach out to the party that was defeated and try to re establish the principle that politics stops at the water’s edge. I think perhaps one of the best examples of that was Senator Vandenberg and Franklin D Roosevelt, yeah, at the end of World War Two. And I think that is a principle that just needs to be emulated, and I think time and effort must be invested in actually making that a reality. It isn’t just going to happen by waving a wand. It’s going to be through concerted effort and investment in relations between the President and the top leadership of the opposite party. And I think that it can be done, but it just requires an investment of time and effort. And
I would just note, Mr. Ambassador, you’re right on the mark. Vandenberg was 180 degrees out. He was the hardest lion isolationist in the Senate, until he realized the consequences of where this was going and completely reversed course to precisely create these conditions in which you’ve described. And Roosevelt cultivated him. He sure did,
no doubt about it, but it was, it was really quite a conversion,
right on the mark. General. Schwartz, you want to respond,
I take the point
that that the that one that all of our institutions need to emphasize the nobility of public service.
So I’m still I’m stuck on that, because there’s one other issue that I’ve not mentioned, and that’s the desire by some people to politicize the civil service. We’ve not talked about that here, and I gotta believe that you all would be very strongly against it to be sure. Do you want to I think we should raise that because it’s being discussed as we speak. The American people probably don’t know about it, but it’s currently being debated on Capitol Hill, and it’s being debated among the elite in Washington, DC. Do you want to offer a point of view on the idea of taking 50,000 government employees and making them
have to respond to a partisan selection rather than a career selection. Look, Frank, you don’t want the US government to be a startup every four years.
I I’m looking
for me when I was at CIA, okay? Those are really good people, you know. And I like them because they want to go to truth, okay, and,
and they
so I know some of you, we go to the McLean family restaurant, okay? And I talk with CIA employees, all right. How is it going? Is it okay? Is it okay? You know, it’s okay or or not.
I’m worried about those people.
I’m really worried about those people because in a year or two years or five years, they have to do something that.
They say, I’ve got to leave. I’ve got I can’t stand it anymore. And then if we do that, what’s going to happen for our democracy,
whatever challenges. I’m sorry. Go ahead. Lou, go ahead. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Sean. You know, whenever I talk to people about about my time in in government, I always tell them how unbelievably blessed our nation is that there are so many people who are not serving in high profile roles, but young men and women who put on the uniform and go represent our country all over the world and career civil servant professionals who work unbelievable hours in the Department of Defense, in all other federal agencies, who have education and expertise, and they’re scientists and engineers and doctors and diplomats, and they are unsung heroes, because we don’t know their names, but our country couldn’t function if we didn’t have these very, very dedicated individuals. And so we need to, in every generation, recruit the next set of individuals who are inspired to serve their country, often far from home, and who are willing to put up with, you know, all the hardships and all the challenges that that kind of service entails,
and do it out of love of country, but we can demoralize them. We can lose them. We can drive them out of that public service if we don’t respect the contributions they have here to make. Will each of you, all seven of you, pick one dispute that America is having and offer viewers the chance to understand what you would change or how you would address into China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, Ukraine, whatever you want to do, but just pick the one that you’re most concerned about and that you would suggest that we tackle it potentially in a different way. And actually, Admiral Owens, I’m going to start with
you, yeah. So it’s an easy answer for me, and that is China.
You know, we have a lot of things going on around the world, and I think we’re all concerned about Israel and we’re concerned about the Ukraine and Russia, and we’re concerned about these but there’s one that looms for our kids and for their and for our grandchildren, and that Is China. They they are in buying power, the largest economy in the world today. With the yuan, you can buy more Mercedes, more nuclear ships, more anything than you can in the United States. They’re very large. And we have to remember that there is a Chinese side of the story. Now, I am not a proponent of China, don’t get me wrong, but I do believe that along the way, we’ve seen some very bright administrations who have tried to bring along
a discussions at government level. We’ve seen this in Republican and Democratic administrations and to talk about things, to be able to air issues, so that we understand their side of the story and they understand ours. That’s not happening much now. We are continuously disagreeing with the number one or number two country in the world, and I just don’t think that is necessarily the best way to go into the future. And so we want to stand up for good versus bad, for democracy, for sure, for our Constitution, but we we want to find ways to reach solutions, just as we have in the past with other difficult problems, Admiral Montgomery, one issue and one solution.
So because I think a lot of people pick China, go a little contrarian, and say the one where I think we can make the quickest, most dramatic change on right now is Iran. We’ve allowed Iran to attack our soldiers over 200 times over the last 14 months with a with a mortar and rocket launches and missile launches. They’re, you know, they’ve shut off shipping through the Red Sea. We’ve expended billions of dollars with the weapon systems playing a defensive mode. Well, they’ve, they’ve also, you know, attacked Israel. Israel is taking a much more aggressive stance. I think the right action for us at this point is to join with Israel and impose cost, real cost, on Iran. And that would mean striking things like their oil system, their oil refineries, their ports that transship equipment to the Houthis and and, you know, their factory.
That build the Shahid drones that have been bothering us, bothering Ukrainians, bothering the Israelis. I think it’s time we really impose some cost on them and begin to assert the, you know, the you know, a strong US deterrent posture in the Middle East. We have been extremely passive. We’ve allowed Iran, Israel to cut, you know, to face the brunt of this, and we’ve been extremely non responsive. I can’t think of another place in the world where we’d let American troops get attacked 200 times and do a handful of kind of really soft, kinetic responses in return. It’s time. It’s time to take action against Iran, and I think it would be a strong signal to China and Russia and North Korea. About us resolve, I believe that we cannot allow Ukraine to collapse under Russian domination,
and
we have ill equipped
a
a nation of 1/10
the size in terms of the military, to to
maintain their sovereignty, and that, in my mind, is, is a serious Near term concern. In other words, we need to relax our inhibition, our self imposed limitations. We have self deterred here, I think, and place the Ukrainians in a very difficult place, irresponsible in my mind,
General Hayden,
yes, indeed, it’s China. Okay, there’s a lot going on in the world, but it’s China. I think
it doesn’t mean war. There’s other things that we can do, but for the next 100 years, that will be the most important
for America.
Ambassador Negroponte,
one area and one solution,
I agree with what Mike just said, but, but the area I’d like to pick a build a little bit on what Admiral Montgomery said, which is,
in my opinion, we’ve really given Iran a free pass up until now. We allow them to support their five or six proxies throughout the Middle East. I call them the capillaries, and then we respond by hitting the capillaries, whether it’s Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis or whomever, and
Iran gets off unscathed, there won’t be peace
in the Middle East, in my opinion, until Iran
and Israel recognize each other’s right to exist
the way the fighting has gone of late, we’re in a very interesting situation, because with Iran’s major attack the other day with the missiles.
The ball is now in Israel’s court.
I think, just like the Admiral said, I think that we should use more coercive measures directly against Iran, and we should allow and encourage the Israelis to do that, but with a specific purpose in mind. It’s got to have a political purpose in addition to just responding to an act of violence, and I think the purpose has got to be to set relations between Israel, or the situation, on a path towards Israel and Iran, recognizing each other’s right to exist, or, more specifically, Iran recognizing Israel’s right to exist and not hell bent on its ultimate
destruction. And until there’s that kind of peace between Iran and Israel that I think the Middle East will continue
to fluctuate in various stages of turmoil for the foreseeable future. And Secretary Caldera, I
agree with general Schwartz, I think that we have to do much, much more in concert with our NATO allies, to make it very clear to Russia that they cannot win in Ukraine, the Ukrainian people have suffered terribly, and we’ve we’ve kept the gloves off, and we’ve signaled way too much to Russia about what we weren’t willing to do, and might have been better off with a little bit of ambiguity about whether we were willing to give them weapons that would reach in.
To Russia, about providing air support, about embedding
us
advisors with Ukrainian units, but I think what we do in Ukraine will signal to the rest of the world what our resolve is about protecting our allies, and the sooner we do those kinds of things, the sooner Putin has to have a different calculus about his inability to win there. I would add Frank that from seven experts there, you got three, China to Russia to Iran, which just proves the rules of gigantic clusterfuck, you know, because,
you know, this is, I mean, all the three of those are good answers, and all three of but all three of them require action. And to go back to what we said the beginning, that means all three of them require bipartisan consensus to allow whomever is elected president to go handle these in a way that’s that he or she considers in the best interest of the United States, and to make sure that the institution, the military and the defense budget are properly appropriated to support that
when an unprecedented conversation from seven exceptional, extraordinary individuals, it doesn’t get better than that. So on behalf of America speaks right here on straight arrow News, I’m Dr Frank Luntz, we’ll see you again soon.