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Jan. 6, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:07
General Stanley McChrystal | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 32
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Time Text
Leaders have a much less active or controlling role than we sometimes want to think.
The best they can do is produce something between the followers that enables us to do it.
Hey, and welcome to the Sunday special.
We have on as our guest today, very special guest, General Stanley McChrystal, author of the new book, Leaders, Myth and Reality.
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Well, General McChrystal, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
And call me Stan, please.
Okay, sounds good.
So, Stan, it feels disrespectful even though you just told me I could.
Stan, let me start by asking you about sort of your life story.
For folks who don't know your back story, where did you come from?
Obviously, folks know you for your leadership in the military and for your leadership in Afghanistan and for you have several, at this point, best-selling books.
But what was your childhood like?
Where did you come from?
Yeah, I was an army brat, which meant my father was a career soldier and his father before him.
So I was one of six kids and five boys and a girl.
All the boys became soldiers and my sister married a soldier.
So we were an army family that moved around and then My father's career spanned Korea and Vietnam, so I was focused on that.
I graduated from high school in Northern Virginia and then went to West Point when I was 17 years old in 1972, in an era when the military was not very popular.
So I was entering a profession that I was very interested in, but the nation had a different view of.
Graduated from there in 76.
While I was there, I'd met a young girl that I fell in love with.
She was the daughter of a career soldier.
Her three brothers are soldiers.
Her sister's the widow of a soldier.
So I grew up in a very army environment.
I never thought about doing anything but going in the army because my father was my hero.
So when I graduated in 76, I was sort of on a path that may have been set for me almost at birth.
So what do you think are sort of the values that distinguish military families from other families?
Because there is this pretty stark divide now between people who served in the military or even know people who served in the military and the rest of the civilian population.
Such a small percentage of our population now serves in the military or even knows someone who has served in the military.
Well, there of course was an era back in World War II, 16 million people in uniform, and my father really came of age in that era.
But starting right after the Vietnam War, they implemented the volunteer army.
And so what happened is you started to have a much more professional military, and most of my career was spent in that environment.
A few draftees were around.
But the reality was the values that we grew up with around my parents were the idea of service, the idea that you were going to serve the nation.
And they didn't wear it on their sleeves.
Every day we didn't go, we weren't preached to go serve the nation.
But it was sort of quietly, the expectation would be, When you reached an age, you would do something that would have value to the nation.
And I think that's why my brothers all just sort of reflexively went into the military.
My father was a very quiet man.
He was a combat infantryman.
Had four silver stars between Korea and Vietnam.
But if you ever saw the movie, The Great Santini, where the guy was bragging, my father was the other end of that spectrum.
So I thought of leadership and I thought of service as quiet and humble, but yet focused and dedicated.
My father was not an easy man, but he was a very thoughtful person.
And so I started to equate that's what leaders do.
I want to talk to you about leadership in just a second, but I have a couple more questions about sort of military background.
One of the, Robert Putnam was a sociologist from Harvard.
He talks about the idea that the military instills this feeling of social fabric, and you've talked about some of those values that are instilled through the military.
Do you think that those have been lost more generally in civilian society, these values of service and trying to help out your neighbor?
Yeah, I think they have.
If you look at what the military does, it's called soldierization.
The day you join the military, they cut your hair differently, they give you different clothes, they actually change your name.
They call you a rank and a name.
And they try to get you to be part of a team.
They try to get you to identify with that team.
They want individual performance, but it's really about the community that you're a part of.
No man left behind, any number of sayings.
I think our society used to have much more of that fabric.
If you think of frontier days where we did wagon trains or barn raising or common defense or volunteer fire departments where necessary, there was an absolute practical requirement that you be interacting and dependent upon your neighbors.
And those neighbors might be your religion, they might be your background, but often they weren't, but they had to be a community.
We're in a slightly different time now where those communities are fragmented.
So now people tend to know people that have the same religion or occupation or income level or education background, and we have a tendency to Talk to them, live with them, interact with them.
And because of social media, we can also choose who we interact with virtually.
So we don't have to talk to our physical neighbor.
We can sit on a subway car, ignore everybody else on the subway car and feel as though we're connecting to someone, whoever they are, and that's who we choose.
So I think what's happened is we have much less identity with the group.
We have much less And one of the things that I see rising from that is this need, almost a gut-level need, for the great leader.
You see this across Europe, you're now seeing it in the United States in a variety of ways.
People who basically feel like, since we've lost the social fabric, we need some person who we can rally around, and this person will bring us all together.
But in your book, Leaders, you talk about the idea that people have just this grand misperception of what leaders are and what they actually do.
So what is your definition of a leader?
Yeah, my definition of a leader has evolved tremendously through my life.
I was absolutely a believer that there were great men and women leaders, and I spent much of my life trying to be one of those and trying to find those to emulate and to follow.
Over the years, my thinking has evolved to where I actually think leadership is this product of the interaction between leaders and followers and other contextual factors.
And so as a consequence, leadership is almost a chemical reaction that occurs.
So leaders enable that and leaders uh, Protect that.
And leaders have a much less active or controlling role than we sometimes want to think.
So as a consequence, what I want and expect from leaders is much less the man or woman on horseback who rides into the center and says, go this way and we will have lower taxes and we'll have victory and whatever it is we want.
Because I know they can't produce that.
I know that the best they can do is produce something between the followers and in the society that enables us to do it.
Ultimately, that's who has to do things, the larger group.
And so I start to think of leadership as being those people who can connect other people, those people who can make it not only accepted, In the book you talk about three main myths of leadership, and I was wondering if you might explain what those are, because one of the things that's interesting about this book is that it's a book about leaders, but it basically is shattering a lot of illusions that folks have about our vision of a leader, as you were just talking about.
So what are those three main myths?
Sure, it shattered a lot of my illusions.
I grew up with the idea of mythology, and myths really explain something we can't otherwise explain.
And I explained to people how I had this book with a picture of Atlas standing, holding up the sky, and you laugh at it, kind of G-string holding the sky up, and then you realize for a long time people accepted that because they didn't have another explanation why the sky didn't fall in.
And so having a guy up there doing it, good as any.
And we started to think that heroes would do those things, but as we really study history, we start to find that's never been the case.
And so the three myths that we came out with, the first was a formulaic myth, and you and I are absolute products of that.
When we go through training in school, we're taught that if we do the seven habits of highly effective leaders, Do these things, or George Washington lists of traits or behaviors.
We're going to be a good leader.
And yet, if you look historically, the data, you find that people who exhibit almost all of those often fail.
And people who exhibit none of them succeed.
And you go, now wait a minute.
So there's a disconnect.
The second is the attribution myth, and that's the idea that everything an organization does or fails to do is really dependent upon that leader's success or failure.
It was interesting.
I got out of the military in 2010 and wrote my memoirs.
And I thought that would be easy because I was there.
I would know what happened.
But the reality was we did all these interviews to understand more fully complex events I'd been a part of.
What we found is my memory was good, but it was stunningly incomplete.
So I would make a decision and there'd be this outcome and I'd get credit for it as a big hero.
And in reality, when we did all the interviews, we found there's all this backstory of all the people doing all the things that really made it happen or stopped it from happening.
So as a consequence, attributing success or failure to me was really a myth.
It just wasn't accurate.
And yet, you think about how we read history, particularly through biographies, there's this spotlight on the leader, and we follow them through their lives, and everything else is sort of in the shadows.
So as a consequence, we tend to think everything that happens is where the light is brightest.
The final myth is one that really surprised me, and that's the results myth.
Because I think of myself as a hard-nosed, analytical person.
Although I know I'm not.
I think that I demand leaders who produce results.
CEOs must make money.
Politicians must win elections.
Generals must win wars.
But if you look historically, that's not who we follow.
We follow serial losers and failures.
We don't follow people who are often more successful because really the leadership that people want is far more emotional than it is objective or transactional.
And so as a consequence, we have these myths that we use to select the leaders, to elect them, to follow them and support them.
And they absolutely lead us often to the wrong leaders.
One of the things that's really interesting is you start the book by talking about how you took down a portrait of Robert E. Lee from your office, and it was fascinating for a variety of reasons, including the fact that we're now in the midst of a giant controversy about what to do with statues of folks like Robert E. Lee.
I wondered if you might explain why exactly you decided to do that, and what made you think, okay, well, all of his leadership qualities aside, I still can't have this person's portrait in my office.
Absolutely.
First, the full story.
I grew up near Robert E. Lee's boyhood home.
I live about 70 feet from it now.
I went to Washington Lee High School.
At West Point, I lived in Lee Barracks.
I then served more than 30 years as an army officer, as did Robert E. Lee.
So not only did I grow up in his shadow, I followed his footsteps through my life, and I tried to emulate him because he was the epitome of a gentleman, of a courageous, effective, brilliant leader.
And so when I was a lieutenant, my wife and I had zero money.
My wife was an Army brat, too.
She bought me a painting of Robert E. Lee in his Confederate general officer uniform.
And it wasn't really even a painting.
It was a print with clear acrylic painted over it, 25 bucks framed.
But in those days, that was a big chunk out of our monthly budget.
And I hung it in our quarters for the next 40 years, wherever we lived.
And I did it because I wanted it to remind me of what I believed in and who I believed in.
But I also, when people came to my house, I was proud to have them go, wow, Look, there's a picture of a truly admirable person, and that's who Stan McChrystal identifies with.
I knew I could never beat Robert E. Lee.
He was too perfect.
But he was sort of a beacon you could move towards.
Well, after Charlottesville in 2017, I remember my wife, Annie, came to me and she says, I think you need to get rid of the picture.
And I immediately pushed back.
I said, Annie, you gave it to me.
I couldn't never do that.
She says, no.
I don't think you should have it in the house.
I think it's communicating something you don't believe in." And I said, no, he's just a soldier.
He's non-political.
He's been dead 150 years.
And she said, that's what you think.
But people in our house may think that you are trying to signal that you believe in white supremacy and things she knows I'm opposed to.
And we went about a month with this conversation slash argument slash wrestling match.
And after about a month, I came to the conclusion she was right.
And on a Sunday morning, I took down the picture, took it to the garage or a trash canister and threw it away.
It was not an unemotional event.
And it's also the time we started writing the book, Leaders, and we decided we would write a chapter on Robert E. Lee.
So I really studied him in a way I never had before.
I'd studied his campaigns and his history.
But I studied him as a man who, in 1861, after 32 years in the military, after swearing an oath to the United States of America, the exact same place I had done it many years later, he then turned on his nation.
And he decides to join the Confederacy and spends the next four years trying to destroy the United States for the maintenance of slavery, the greatest evil in American history.
And he did it not without Much reflection.
I mean, people think he just automatically went south.
That was not true.
He went through quite a Plutarchian moment studying and contemplating.
But ultimately, he made the decision to go first with Virginia into the South.
And I think he got it wrong.
I think it's the opposite decision that his role model, George Washington, would have done.
And it's interesting because when I look at that, I think he got it completely wrong.
But I don't think Robert E. Lee is completely evil.
There's still much about Robert E. Lee I admire.
There's still many of the things about him that I would like to emulate.
But now, instead of him being a two-dimensional painting or a big statue that is just perfection personified, now I see him as a human being.
I see him as a flawed man.
He did a lot of things well, and he did some things spectacularly wrong.
And that makes him human.
That makes him like you or I, flawed.
And so I can think about him now, not as an icon, but as a man.
And I think that that's who I can learn from.
Well, I want to talk to you more about that in just a second, because I do fear that we may be living in an era where political correctness uses the fact that these guys were meant to erase them from history altogether, and I want to talk to you about that.
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So, Stan, back to the issue of how we should view our heroes.
So, this sort of begs the question as to whether there should be statues or portraits at all.
Because the truth is that every single hero that we have is a flawed human being because we're all flawed human beings.
We're now seeing people try to recapitulate Winston Churchill and try to paint Winston Churchill as a racist.
We're seeing people who, a lot of the same folks who wanted to take down the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville also wanted to remove the Thomas Jefferson statue from Charlottesville, even though Thomas Jefferson, of course, was one of the creators of the University of Virginia.
So where do we draw the line between Recognizing that these were human beings, flawed human beings with good qualities that we want to emulate and completely wiping them away as heroes.
Should we have statues?
Should we have portraits?
Yeah.
Everyone has to make a personal journey and decision on this.
I think we should.
I think we need heroes.
I think we need statues.
I think we need paintings.
I think we need to name things after people.
Because if we don't honor people who do a lot, I think future generations won't have the same commitment.
They won't understand how important that is.
If you look at monuments on battlefields, they never have a thing that says, we won, we kicked their butt.
What they symbolize is people who, when they were needed, served.
And that's what our leaders do.
I think we also need to understand that every one of our leaders is human.
George Washington owned slaves.
Everyone in their life has made bad decisions.
I've made a bunch of them and I can't back away from them.
I have to own them.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have those things that represent the best in what they did.
There are times when you could look at a statue of Robert E. Lee and you could say there's so much good in Robert E. Lee.
That we should admire, that we should try to follow.
It doesn't mean we try to do everything they do.
Thomas Jefferson, he did so much for the nation.
It doesn't mean we should own slaves.
And so we've got to be mature enough to do these things holistically and have the conversation.
If somebody says, Ben Shapiro is an amazing leader and we're going to put a statue up.
We've got to be honest enough to say he was an amazing human being, which means by definition not everything was perfect.
And we've got to live with that.
And that's the problem with the mythology because we want to put them on a pedestal and we want to burnish them until they're perfect.
And then we don't want to hear anything negative about our heroes.
And that's not fair and it's really not healthy.
Well, in the American system, one of the areas where leaders really do have a very large personal impact is in the area of foreign policy, where, of course, you are extraordinarily active as the leading commander in Afghanistan.
When you look at the situation in Afghanistan right now, do you think that there is hope for the future of Afghanistan?
Do you think that we should be pulling out?
Do you think we should be ramping up the number of troops we have there?
Because it seems like every president for the past couple of administrations, at least, has basically said, let's get out and then inserted more troops.
Yeah, I think next question you could ask me how to improve education in America.
Equally simple task.
I do think Afghanistan's got a future.
I think by definition there will be an Afghanistan after you and I are both Long dead and buried.
I think the best we can do in Afghanistan is try to move it in as helpful a direction as we can.
I don't think we as the United States, and right now even inside Afghanistan, can fix Afghanistan.
What I think is going to happen is there's been this 30 plus years of chaos.
The Afghanistan that exists today was torn inside out, upside down from 1973 on.
Civil war, the war with the Soviets and whatnot.
Society doesn't look like traditional pre-1973 Afghanistan did.
So it's gonna take a generation or two or three to really fix it.
I would say that the first thing we do is need to be very realistic about that.
We need to say, we should partner with Afghanistan, we should help Afghanistan, we should be strategic allies.
I would leave troops in there now, some.
I wouldn't leave thousands and thousands.
I wouldn't send a lot more because I'm humble about the effect we could have if we did that.
I don't think that we'd have the output we want.
At the same time, I think just turning our back, touching the stove and say it's hot and turn it back.
It's what we did in 1989 when we pulled out suddenly after the Soviets departed.
And Afghanistan needed strategic partners and and no one was there.
This will be a little like raising a child.
I meet couples every once in a while and they say, we're having a baby.
And I say, no, you're not, you're having a person.
And that person's going to be around a long time and you'll likely be involved in that.
So I think we need to be very mature about what we can and cannot do in Afghanistan.
Don't raise our or their expectations beyond what is probably achievable.
Be honest with the American people in the world of what we are trying to do and what we think we can.
And also be open for opportunities.
There's a lot of twists and turns of history when suddenly positive opportunities open up.
Negotiations with the Taliban, peace, that sort of thing.
And if we're postured as partners, I think we can help them take advantage of that.
Now do you think honesty is a political winner in this area?
Because it seems like the only politicians who win on this particular score are the ones who don't tell the truth about the situation in Afghanistan and what it's going to require from the United States.
Because we're constantly telling folks, maybe we live in the aftermath of a World War II mentality, that we'll win a war.
We'll come home.
That'll be the end of it.
And then if a politician like John McCain says, well, you know, in order to actually secure this area, we may have to be there for decades and decades and decades, then people say, no, we're not interested in that at all.
And then, of course, the person who was elected, who pledged never to do that, immediately does exactly what John McCain said that he would do and just leaves people there for decades and decades and decades.
I mean, can the American people stand any honesty on these scores, do you think?
Well, whether they can stand it or not, I think the American people need to get it.
And I actually think they want it.
If we go all the way back to World War II and other times where we said, we'll win World War II, we'll come out, and then we spend decades there.
We told people in Vietnam things about that war that were not true.
And the whole point of the Pentagon Papers was to show that in many cases, the United States government knew a reality on the ground that they would not communicate for political purposes to the American people.
And I understand the expedience and the temptation to do that.
I believe we have to have a basic honesty with the American people.
The problem is it's not an applause line.
It doesn't do well in an election where you stand up and say, I'm going to cut your taxes, pull out of Afghanistan, I'm going to do all these things, and it'll be great.
Sometimes you have to look at them and say, we're going to have to pay more, we're going to have to do more, and it's going to take 30 years.
And you're unlikely to get that thunderous response.
But we owe the American people that honesty.
The American people themselves, or their sons, or daughters, or at a minimum their treasure, are the people going places.
And they have a right to know that this is, if it's going to be hard, tell them.
If we don't know, tell them that too.
We think we need to do something.
We're not sure how this will play out, but we frankly don't have a better option than trying this.
And that's where we'll go.
I actually think over time the American people not only want that, but they would respond well to it.
When you were the top commander in Afghanistan, you famously had some pretty public quarrels with then President of the United States, Barack Obama.
In retrospect, how do you evaluate President Obama's performance on Afghanistan?
And do you think that it was a mistake, for example, you had recommended that more troops be put in at a particular point?
He ended up going with sort of a halfway measure with fewer troops.
How do you evaluate those decisions?
Yeah, I'm probably not the most unbiased person to give.
was sent to Afghanistan.
I'd been there for a number of years before, and then I was back on the Joint Staff, and I was sent in the summer of 2009.
And the situation in Afghanistan was markedly worse than I think anybody thought it was.
And it had been getting worse when everybody said, we've got to get out of Iraq, but Afghanistan's the necessary war.
And that's what President Obama had in his campaign.
And then I think when he got into office, it was a bit of a shock to he and the people with him that, in fact, it was worse and it was going to take more commitment.
They were schooled in the history of Vietnam, and I don't blame them that.
And from the day that they entered office, I think there was great frustration in this entire administration that suddenly the military and defense department were saying, we need to double down on Afghanistan.
We need to put more troops and greater commitment.
And this is almost a replay of what they believed that they had read about Vietnam.
And there were absolutely parallels.
So you start with this.
Growing discomfort, distrust between the Department of Defense and this new administration.
Nobody evil.
I was in the Pentagon during the first part of that.
It's good people on both sides, but you could see it growing.
Then when I got in Afghanistan and I was asked to do an assessment, I came back and said, we have to change the strategy.
And I didn't know when I went over there that I was going to have to ask for more troops.
But after we did all these computer simulations and everything, I realized we need more troops.
That was not going to be popularly received back in D.C.
And it wasn't.
I actually commend President Obama for putting everyone through a pretty rigorous decision-making process to come to the conclusion to accept the recommendation for more forces.
He didn't provide all that were asked, but he did it.
That was a tough political decision.
If we were collectively wrong then, and I think we were.
When he made the decision, I could almost hear in his voice when he gave the speech at West Point, Bayer's remorse.
He was doing it, but he didn't like it.
There was a group of people who said the generals had pushed him into it, and from my standpoint, we weren't pushing him.
It wasn't our war.
You know, we're there trying to answer the question, if you want the outcome that you've asked for, this is what it takes.
But you could almost sense that we're doing it, but we hate it.
And whenever you're in that situation, it's like going to your in-laws for dinner when you don't want to go and you're in the car driving over and people are unhappy.
We needed to sort that out because that's a recipe for a bad outcome.
We really needed to stop, get all the players and step back and say, if we are not more united and not more comfortable with this decision as we go forth to execute it, I think we're going to have problems.
I could have spoken up more.
I think other players could have.
And I think it's a cautionary tale for future endeavors for the United States in foreign policy, because Certain things are going to be hard and take a long time.
And if you don't start with a certain unity, if you don't start with a level of resolve, you almost preordain problems.
So you think it was a problem that he was giving withdrawal timetables from the very outset?
I would not have recommended that.
In fact, I recommended against that.
I understood the political reason for it.
But I think in retrospect, as we all look at it, that made it more difficult.
And what do you think, you know, now, bringing us up to present, of how the Trump administration has handled Afghanistan?
It's almost become the Forgotten War.
It's not in the headlines anymore.
We don't read about it very often.
The president, again, seems to be of divided mind about whether we ought to be there or whether we ought not to be there.
What have you made of the Trump administration's handling of this or the Defense Department under General Mattis?
Well, I know there are good people, good people I know out there working really hard trying to get a good outcome.
I don't think the policy is clear.
I don't think America's objectives are clear.
If they are clear, they're not clear to me.
They're not clear to a lot of people in the American public.
And I think when you have sons, daughters, and husbands and wives over risking their lives, they need to be clear.
Now, I would be the first to tell you, maybe the leadership has to stand up and say, this is extraordinary complex.
There is no simple solution at hand.
The best we know to do now is to continue on the current course of action and hope that things evolve.
Again, that's not an applause line.
That's not going to sound great to people.
But when you look at the alternatives of pulling out and potentially even al-Qaeda safe haven, or dumping a bunch more troops and increasing the level of violence, Sometimes you say, well, you know, maintenance may be a rational course of action, but we need to explain that to people.
We can't act like it doesn't exist.
It's not fair.
We need to put it on the table and say, if someone else has a better, more clever plan, Please send it in.
Let's get back to sort of what the central tenets of foreign policy should be.
So it seems like the shift in direction of the American mind has been isolationist in orientation really since the second Bush administration, that after the war in Iraq started to go badly in 2004, 2005 and we required the surge.
That the American people turned against the war in Iraq.
They turned against the war in Afghanistan to a certain extent.
They've turned against, in many ways, the idea that America ought to be a forceful presence on the world stage.
And then, of course, as you say, presidents get in power.
They look at the actual situation on the table.
They say, well, we don't really have much choice about this, so we have to continue doing what we're doing.
What do you think the central planks of American foreign policy ought to be?
What's America's interest in the world and how forceful ought we to be in pushing it?
Yeah.
Our interests in the world are huge.
Think of the times when we've really gotten it wrong.
We failed to join the League of Nations almost 100 years ago and we paid a big price for that.
The reality is the world is there and it's not going anywhere.
In fact, it is more relevant to us on a daily basis because things are physically closer now because of transportation and the speed of digits.
Economically, they are now intertwined and we can't disconnect those.
We don't want to disconnect them.
In fact, our level of prosperity in the United States It's dependent upon a robust global trading and interaction, as is the rest of the world.
Our peace and security are best secured furthest from our shores.
They are best secured by conditions in other countries that make people not want to immigrate or not want to be terrorists or whatever.
So I'm very much of the mindset that we need to think globally.
Now, do I care more about the United States than other countries?
We all do.
But that doesn't mean that we put our head in the sand and we get inside walls and we wait and see what happens.
It means we interact.
I actually believe that we need a robust network of alliances around the world with people who trust us and admire our values.
I believe that we need a robust network of commercial connections.
So that would be trade agreements and whatnot.
And I think we should be active in that.
We should be out with American values constantly.
Not saying American values are perfect and therefore you must adopt them, but saying American values are something we believe in.
Here they are.
See them.
Don't wonder about them from afar.
Share them if you want and if you will.
And I think that we need to be prepared to To make the kinds of decisions to support allies when necessary, also to oppose people or impose nations around the world when they upset the status quo.
And it's easy for us to say or it's tempting to say, well, we're tired of being the world's policeman.
Why can't other people spend as much on defense as we do or do as much or lose as many soldiers in combat as we do?
I got that.
But I would respond, we get so many advantages from being that nation in the world.
We are economically, politically, socially advantaged for the fact that we are engaged in the world and we've had this superpower position.
And I think that everyone needs to understand that for all the things, the price we've paid for that, we've gotten many times the return in the value to us.
And I think young Americans particularly need to be educated that the world is there and that We're not superior.
They need to go learn foreign languages.
They need to go learn foreign cultures.
They need to interact, not so that they can become them, but so they understand them, so they empathize them.
I think the thing that hurts us most is when we look afar at some culture and we think, well, they wear rags on their heads, or they don't speak English, so they must be messed up, or they believe a different kind of religion.
And then you get up close and you realize they're rational people.
And they do some things that are pretty thoughtful and in some cases more thoughtful than we do.
And it doesn't mean we have to change, but it means we have to understand enough to empathize.
So you've served under a bunch of presidents and obviously observed presidents while you weren't serving.
Which president do you think has best emulated the sort of foreign policy that you find attractive or worthwhile?
Yeah, I think in some bits...
Many of them have.
You go back to my very youth, I remember the excitement of John F. Kennedy very much, started the Peace Corps.
He said that the Peace Corps wouldn't really do what we wanted by getting young Americans out until 100,000 young Americans doing those things overseas.
President Nixon reaching out to China, for all the faults that President Nixon had, he actually was very globally oriented.
He understood that America was going to prosper based upon how the chessboard of the world worked and he worked very hard at it.
President Reagan, of course, reached out to Europe, and he gave a little shove on the Berlin Wall at the right time.
And he did it in a way that allowed American values to come across not as jingoistic, but very, very positive.
And a lot of people wanted to emulate not just Ronald Reagan, but America in that period.
We do a lot of things wrong in the world.
But I think the idea, and while nobody gets it right, the much maligned President Obama speech in 2009 when he reached out to the Arab world and he basically said some of the things we've been doing over the last eight years have not been fair to you.
If you strip aside the idea nobody ever likes to be apologizing for our own country, that's not a bad thing to be willing to look out to the world and say, we don't always get it right.
What we're willing to do is come halfway.
What we're willing to do is to try to partner with you.
And so that give and take, it's got to be organic.
It's presidential leadership at its most mature.
Well, it's really interesting.
First of all, I have to acknowledge that I was a massive critic of the 2009 speech because I thought he went far too much in one direction as opposed to the other.
I don't think that he drew the balance properly, particularly when he was talking with many nations that have had a long record of supporting terrorism.
But with that said, it's interesting that most of the presidents that you cite as being, you know, The sort of foreign policy leaders that you like existed during the Cold War era.
Do you think that once the Cold War consensus is shattered, and that that has sort of shattered our notion of what foreign policy ought to be more generally, and it's fractured Republicans, it's fractured Democrats, it used to be that at least the idea was that foreign policy stopped when, that arguments stopped once you hit the water's edge.
But that hasn't been the case for most of my lifetime, certainly.
I wonder if you see that hard gap as happening when the Soviet Union fell.
Yeah, it's interesting because it took some structure and logic away from our foreign policy, because regardless of whether you're Republican, Democrat, or whatever, when the Cold War existed, you politically and just logically sort of fell in line with certain things we had to do.
I think that there's much to come around now, but we haven't found how to do that.
We are backing into another Cold War, I fear.
And Russia, of course, doesn't have near the power that the Soviet Union did, but they've got some serious intent.
And it wouldn't take much for Europe to be in a pretty difficult place again.
China is not a backward nation anymore.
So I think the idea that we need to be serious about American foreign policy, it's not a ping pong ball we can bounce around internally and ignore how the rest of the world sees it.
I think that We really need an approach in America that says, when you leave the shores of the United States, we may not agree on everything, but we are going to be much more tightly aligned.
One of the things that always shocks people when you travel, like I spent so many years away, we don't know what's happening inside country X to any great degree.
Most people around the world, even in small countries, know an incredible amount about what happens inside the United States.
Our political ruminations, the comments and whatnot.
So everything we are doing is done on a world stage that I'm not sure we always appreciate.
So how would you handle the Russia situation?
You talk about the possibility of backing into a Cold War.
Obviously, the Obama administration ceded an awful lot of territory, not just in Crimea, but actual kind of psychological territory to the Russians in places like Syria.
The Trump administration obviously has its own problems with its dealings with Russia.
They may be more practically anti-Russia in a lot of their dealings, giving the Ukrainians deadly weaponry, for example, but obviously the president has spoken in very warm terms of Vladimir Putin.
Putin is a bad actor on the world stage, without a doubt.
What do you think is the best way for the United States to confront the Russians?
Is it to be more aggressive in our language and be more clear with the consequences that will follow if they were to violate certain lines?
Yeah, Ben, that's an essential question.
I don't think that we need to be aggressive in our actions to the point of provoking.
But I think we need to be more firm.
I think if you go back to the Cold War, there need to be certain expectations, almost like the Article 5 era.
If you do this, that's an absolute crossing the red line.
I think President Putin has taken advantage of a certain amount of uncertainty.
His invasion of Georgia, the move back into the Mideast.
We weren't very clear with what was happening in Syria and they're back.
If I was the Baltic states now I'd feel much less comfortable than I'd like to.
And of course Ukraine speaks for itself.
So I think we need to be more firm with Russia.
I think we need to understand President Putin.
He came of age during Chechnya, and he was very aggressive.
And every time he's been aggressive since, his popularity is buttressed.
And of course, he's become an oligarch himself.
So I think we need to call that for what it is.
At the same time, I don't think we need to take Russia and say they're part of the evil axis and the world won't be safe until Russia is obliterated, because that's not true.
Russia will evolve like every other country.
But for at least the next foreseeable future, we need to treat Russia for what it is.
It's an opponent.
It is a rogue state.
It is, as far as we can see, not to be trusted in many, many things.
And so that means we've got to stand united against it.
And what do you make of China?
Because this has always been the conundrum, is that they're a huge trading partner with us, obviously.
We tend to think that opening China was a good thing for purposes at least of separating them off from the Soviet Union at the time, but it also enabled them to become a much more long-lasting power.
Perhaps if we don't open China, they collapse the same way the Soviet Union does economically.
In any case, we're now in a trade standoff with China.
China has obviously gotten very aggressive in the South China Sea.
How should we be treating Chinese ambitions?
Yeah, as an inevitable competitor.
And when I say competitor, I don't use the same term.
I think the Soviets are actually an opponent, an enemy right now.
I think China's a competitor.
I think if we hadn't opened China it would at some point open itself and just the energy of the people and whatnot.
They've just been remarkably effective at doing that because they've matched this commercial economy with a very unified government.
So they've been able to move things.
It's not without flaws.
But the reality is now they offer extraordinary ability to compete with us.
And not just in ways that are obvious, building aircraft carriers and going in the South China Sea, those matter.
But reality is they put their tentacles out around the world and Africa, they invest, they take natural resources.
That's where we are losing.
In sort of the midterm.
As we think of America first, they think China first, but they think China first over there.
And I think that's important.
The last part we need to look at is there is the equivalent of a heavy trade competition.
We have to protect our interests on intellectual property.
We have got to be pushing for fair trade.
And I think we can do that.
I think we can do that without war, but we need to be Disciplined enough to do that.
People will criticize President Trump for poking China about trade, but in reality we've had a lot of firms and people in the U.S.
who've benefited in the short term from things that hurt us in the long term in terms of buying things from China and whatnot.
I think we need to get to a middle on that.
We need to say it's not sustainable unless we trade like trading partners and not like one person doesn't follow rules and the other does.
What should we do about Iran?
Obviously, the three main kind of foreign policy issues, we've discussed two of them, Russia and China.
Iran is the other one.
It has significant regional ambition.
It's pushed into every place from Iraq to Yemen.
And it's created basically a bifurcated Middle East where this, by almost accident, this sort of newfangled counter alliance between Israel and Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia has formed.
What do you think is the best way for the United States to deal with Iran?
Yeah, I think one way is to cover our eyes and pretend it's not there and then take our hands away.
And if it's still there, we better come up with another plan.
The other plan is 80 to 90 million Iranians.
It's Persia.
It's the Persian Empire.
It had a period when we thought that they were the bulwark of democracy under Shah Reza Pahlavi.
And from 53 when we helped him get into power until he left in the late 70s, it was sort of this thing that was going to be really good for the Mideast because they bought stuff from us and they did what we wanted.
Then, of course, with Ayatollah Khomeini in this really difficult period where if you really look at history, we were as bad to the Iranians during that period as they were to us.
And so if you're an Iranian, you have every reason to look at the United States and say, wow.
You know, you guys are just everything you can do to hurt us, you have done.
You helped Iraq after Iraq invaded Iran.
You shot down the Iranian airliner in 1988, killed almost 300 people, 60-some kids.
We've just done a lot of things.
And then in 2003, to their surprise, they are named to the Axis of Evil by George W. Bush.
And suddenly they're in the winner's circle in the Axis of Evil going, how did that happen?
Now, They have done an enormous number of things.
I have fought Iranians in Iraq and whatnot and didn't appreciate that at all.
They are involved with Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, sort of you name it in the region and now in Syria so heavily.
They're a difficult regional actor and they need to clean up that act.
At the same time, they're a reality.
And so, just like Arab countries got together and said, we don't admit the existence of Israel and we're just gonna wait till the chance to wipe them off the face of the earth, Iran being one of them.
If any of these other coalitions say, we're just gonna wait until we can wipe Iran off the face of the earth and they go away, that's equally unrealistic.
The Iranian people are not all aligned behind the Supreme Leader by any means, but they are all aligned behind Iran.
And so the idea that Iran will be a powerful regional player is rational, it's popular inside Iran, and it's inevitable.
Do you see the possibility of a coup inside Iran?
I do.
I mean, I think that kind of thing could happen over time.
But if there was a coup inside Iran, the next leader, if they were what I predict, would be a strong person who would want a strong regional power, wouldn't love Saudi Arabia, You know, so it wouldn't change the dynamics as much as we think it would.
It might be much easier to negotiate with and stop some of the rogue behavior.
But the reality is they have national interests.
And those national interests are, we disagree with some of them, but they have been rationally pursued.
And so I think if we have to look at the region that way.
I want to ask about the major controversy that's broken out over recent years has been the sort of social engineering of the military.
And in the past we've seen that for great use with regard to the integration of the military under Harry Truman, for example.
But there's been a lot of complaint from folks who are on the front lines, I've talked to many of them, who are upset with the idea of women in combat roles, for example, on the front lines, or the new push for transgender members of the military.
Where do you come down on how the military should be used for social engineering?
Should it be used?
Should we just be worried about what makes the military stronger?
How do you think all that math works out?
Yeah.
I believe that the military has to reflect society.
I was a cadet at West Point from 72 to 76, and during the last two years, they made the decision to let women attend West Point.
Now, the first woman didn't show up until right after I graduated with the new class.
And I remember old grads said that literally West Point would cease to exist.
It would slide into the Hudson River and float away and all this kind of thing.
And of course, that has not been the outcome.
The women have come and they've done pretty darn well.
Every time something in my career, the integration happened before me, but it was still sort of maneuvering along.
Women at West Point, then women in combat, there was this great angst over it.
But the truth is, women were in combat about 10 years before we had the final decision.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, they just were.
They were shooting, flying, they were doing all the things you have to do.
And in my experience, they were doing just fine.
The same with gays in the military.
We had the pretty painful era when anyone who was identified as homosexual was immediately chaptered out.
I think it was Chapter 15, they called it.
Then we had Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which was, it encouraged people to be deceptive, to lie.
Now, but it maybe was a necessary bridge to something later.
The reality is we had gays serving in the military doing just fine, and most of the force didn't care either.
If you were a good soldier, sailor, airman, marines, everybody said fine.
Whatever you do is fine.
I think transgender is exactly the same way.
I think transgender, you know, it's sort of the latest thing that a few people will get upset about.
At the end of the day, military is necessarily a meritocracy, because you need the people who operate with you to be effective.
Therefore, you just want people who will perform well.
And if somebody wants to, or volunteer military, wants to perform, they'll do well.
We need to sometimes help mandate that.
Military leaders have got to help the force, you know, because there's always different opinions inside the force.
Got to help them along.
And the military can be a great exemplar for the rest of society.
Look, you know, it works just fine.
What are you worried about?
Everybody needs to have equal rights.
And when I talk about that, you think about the African-Americans that so desperately wanted to fight in the Civil War.
And you think, why in God's name when you want to fight?
If the white man will do it for you, let him do the fighting and dying and we'll get freed.
They understood implicitly that if they fought, if they on an equal footing accepted the cost and risk of that, that they would be more legitimate as citizens.
They would have a larger ability to argue for the kinds of rights that they deserved in America.
I think that's true of military service today for every part of society.
So in making all of that happen, the two issues that I've seen when I've talked with various members of the military are the issues of troop cohesion and standards themselves, meaning the worry about the lowering of particular physical standards, for example, to absorb more women into, if you want a female Navy SEAL, women on average don't tend to perform the same way that men do physically.
Do we try to lower those standards?
And if we do, how does that make our military stronger?
And when it comes to transgenderism, for example, you have a biological male who now believes he's a woman and should be barracked with a bunch of women, and those women are uncomfortable with it.
How do we deal with those issues?
Are the women wrong?
Should we be, you know, scolding the women for being non...
Yeah, it's great.
On the first one on standards, this is harder than it sounds.
I believe you set standards for different military occupational specialties.
An infantryman carries a lot of equipment and a squad of non-infantrymen have some common equipment they all have to help carry.
So if a person doesn't have the physical ability, capability to do that, It's not fair to the rest of the squad.
So I think we have to be really good about coming up with standards and it will make it uneven because there are physical differences.
Now the thing about it is we gotta make sure we're fair because there's sometimes a tendency to say, okay, we're gonna make these standards and you gerrymander them so that anyone who's a female, you know, we gotta be better than that.
And I think I do see that.
On the other part, this is a sociological thing, and I'm not quite sure how to deal with that, because you can argue that if somebody is transgender and then they're put in with the other group, that people will feel uncomfortable.
I think we're going to have to feel our way along here because I know that if you'd gotten me 40 years ago and you said I was going to be in a squad with, you know, gay men, I probably would have said, I don't think it's a good idea because I'll be vulnerable.
And then you learn that's not the way it works.
I think the transgender part will just sort of have to work it out.
I don't think that we should automatically beat everybody over the head and say you're horrible because you want a man who's now become a woman.
You don't want her to live in the female barracks if I'm a female.
Because you have to respect them.
At the same time, we have got to understand that we can't let people use things like that as reasons to maintain old biases.
They used to say that African-Americans weren't smart enough to be soldiers.
They used to say they couldn't fight.
They said all kinds of stuff.
And of course, it's been proven wrong time and time and again.
So we've got to push those natural biases, but at the same time, understand that there are things that people do worry about.
So you've been talked about as a potential 2020 Democratic nominee.
Are you a Democrat politically?
I never was anything.
I never thought of myself very political.
I think that now I come down that America needs a different way ahead.
I think that America needs a centrist way ahead.
I think that our two political parties, in my view, have both gone too far to the ends of the spectrum.
I'm not sure they represent people like me as much as I'd like them to.
I mean, I have things I believe in on different issues, but the reality is, once you get out to the fringes, I feel like I'm in a foreign land.
So can you name some of those?
Like, where do you think that the Republican Party has gone too far to the right, and where do you think the Democratic Party has gone too far to the left?
If you take the Democrats, I'm not a socialist.
I'm a great believer in, you know, people work, because I don't think socialism works.
It's not human nature.
So people should have to work for what they get.
There's an awful high level of responsibility required.
At the same time, I believe that government has a significant role in society, a significant role to give people opportunity to help them do that.
So just because if by accident of birth I am born in West Virginia, and in West Virginia the coal industry, for example, is struggling against all the other competitors, and that's not surprising.
I don't think that I ought to be left to fall behind people who happen to be born in New York.
I think that the federal government has a role to look at that and says, how do we help the parts of our society that need it?
For 150 years, we depended upon coal from places like West Virginia.
If it hadn't been for people willing to go a mile underground to dig coal so we could make electricity and power boats and things like that, we wouldn't have had the Industrial Revolution.
Then when energy shifts for us to suddenly go.
I don't need you anymore.
Good luck with that You know That's not fair.
I think we need to we have a responsibility for each other and and similarly when when we get Very far on the right we get very conservative in terms of not letting immigrants in or things like that I don't think that reflects America.
I think America is an immigrant country.
I think it's a compassionate country and I think it's a country that gives people opportunities, accepts responsibility for things like that, and so when you get out there, that's when I start to want us to pull back to the middle.
So the fact that you've been discussed as a Democratic candidate, would you be more likely to run in a Democrat primary or a Republican primary if you were at some point to run?
I don't, I'm really not at the point to say that, you know?
I do want to say that I think we need the best people we can find to run for office.
One of the things that disturbs me most, particularly about young people, is not this, that they're not dramatically political.
There are not a lot of young Republicans and young Democrats.
What I find is a lot of young people are apolitical.
They're almost non-political.
They're almost anti-political because of what they've seen.
And the people who run for office, not all, but there are an awful lot of very ambitious people running for office.
That's actually not what I want.
I really want young people to run for office who are pretty centrist, want the society to be better.
Maybe they don't want to stay a politician forever, and that actually would like that.
Maybe they want to do that for just a little while.
And it doesn't matter to me whether they go a bit to the left or the right.
You know, I endorsed a Republican this time and a couple of Democrats because I was looking for people I thought could compromise.
Do you think that there's a possibility that anyone who's actually serious about foreign policy can win in the near future?
I mean, what we've seen is on the Democratic side of the aisle, there's been significant attempts, President Obama obviously did this, to cut the military.
When Jim Webb ran for president in 2016, basically the death of his campaign is when he talked about his military experience actually in a primary debate.
And on the right, obviously President Trump took an extraordinarily isolationist tack in the primaries and ran roughshod over people who were more interventionist or at least more, in my view, realistic on foreign policy.
Do you think that we've reached sort of an isolationist endpoint?
And is there going to be a resurgence of folks who want to take foreign policy seriously in either party?
And if so, which party do you see taking it more seriously in the near future?
Ben, that's a really good question.
And I think that your analysis is right.
You go back to the Kennedy-Nixon debates.
They were talking about the missile gap and the need to do things.
And that is almost entirely out of discussions now, political, because it just doesn't resonate for domestic I think we have to.
I think we're going to have to get back to that.
I think we're going to be pulled to it.
My sense is we may be pulled by events more than... I don't think a candidate's suddenly going to arise in the near future who says, I'm the foreign policy president, because I think people will go, yeah, but You know, I need a job or I need health care, all the things they do need.
I think the foreign policy president arises when foreign policy pulls us there.
And then we go, wow, we really need competent leadership for foreign policy.
I think a president who gets in office, whoever he is, we need to select them for the team they can build around them.
Much of domestic policy is competent government.
It's just getting things done that need to get done.
And then on the foreign policy side, I think you need to have a president with enough experience, enough maturity and enough willingness, because that's where you really have to lead America a bit.
Think of the leaders who have, the presidents who've done great things in foreign policy.
They tend to be a step ahead of the American people because the American people necessarily are Looking at daily business.
So I have one final question for you.
I want to ask you about the leadership tips that you give to young Americans based on your book and your experiences.
But before we get to General McChrystal's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, go to dailywire.com, click subscribe.
You can hear the end of our conversation there.
General McChrystal, thank you so much for stopping by.
It really is an honor to have you here and it's really been a pleasure taking up some of your time.
Thanks again for your service and everything that you do.
Really appreciate it.
It's been my honor.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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