Evil Empire 2.0: Tom Cotton on Europe’s Path to Peace and China’s Dangerous Hegemony

>> Ronald Reagan: High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers and less and less competition. So soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying.

Then the worst happens. Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs.

>> Bill Whalen: It's Friday, March 7th, 2025 and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow.

I'll be your moderator today, joined by two of the wisest gentlemen I know, we call them the Goodfellows. That would include the economist John Cochrane, former presidential National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster. We are not joined today by Niall Ferguson and that's a shame because he would have liked to have been here because of our guest.

Joining us today is Tom Cotton, second term US Senator from the great state of Arkansas. Senator Cotton is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is also the chair of the Senate Republican Conference, which makes him the number three Republican. He is also a talented author in his own right.

In fact, he has a book out. It's called Seven Things You Can't Say About China. We're gonna talk about that today. Senator Cotton, thanks for coming on GoodFellows.

>> Tom Cotton: Hey, Bill, thanks for having me on, it's good to join you all.

>> Bill Whalen: One thing about our show, which is a challenge, Senator, is the world just kinda keeps moving faster than we can record.

And our last episode was a great example. We put it to bed, the next day we had the ill fated meeting in the Oval Office between President Trump and Vice President, Vance and President Zelensky. A few days after that, there is the presidential address to the joint session of Congress which you were sitting in.

A lot happened on the terror front which I know John wants to talk about. Yesterday, President Zelensky announces that a Ukrainian delegation will go to Saudi Arabia next Wednesday, March 12th, to meet with the US delegation. Sitting in on the US side are Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, presidential National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, he has General McMahon, old job.

And White House envoy, Steve Witkoff. My question to you, Senator Cotton, if you were sitting in that conference room in Riyadh with the US delegation, what would you wanna ask to your Ukrainian counterparts?

>> Tom Cotton: Well, I think what President Trump has been clear that he wants to do is to get to negotiated into this war.

>> Ronald Reagan: And I wanna get this thing over with. You see the hatred he's got for Putin, it's very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate. He's got tremendous hatred.

>> Tom Cotton: It's fairly obvious that at this point there's not gonna be an end to the war on the battlefield with a decisive victory either way.

Russia has made some very incremental gains in recent months, but I mean, very, very incremental on the front lines. And if a war doesn't end on the battlefield, then it has to end through negotiations. President Trump sees that in our interest. He also sees it in the interest of Ukraine.

They're a smaller country, economically, they're not nearly as large as Russia either. The sooner there's some kind of armistice or cease-fire or truce, that stops the killing, that stops potential Russian advances. It allows Ukraine to start to develop its economic future, hopefully, with deeper ties with America, like through this minerals deal.

I think he believes that's in everyone's interest. So I suspect that delegation is gonna wanna ask, what the appetite for that kind of deal is with the Ukrainian side. It seems that President Zelensky, after the unfortunate meeting in the Oval Office last week, recognizes where the president's trying to go and wants to try to get there.

Obviously, he and his government has to think about that future of Ukraine and to make sure there's not a third invasion of Ukraine in the future for which it's ill-equipped. But I'm hopeful that coming out of the meeting next week in Riyadh will be a framework that Ukraine can support.

And then it really gets put on Vladimir Putin and whether he's willing to accept that kind of framework. Whether he's willing to stop the kind of indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets and infrastructure in Ukraine, or whether he insists on keeping it going. As President Trump said earlier today, if that's the case, then he's prepared to lower the boom on Russia through sanctions and banking sanctions and tariffs and other actions, much as he did in his first term as president.

>> H.R. McMaster: Good job, great, is great to see you. Hey, I went back and I looked at your March 2022 speech at the Reagan Library, which I'd recommend to our viewers. And in that speech, I think you really made the case right for a Reaganesque kind of foreign policy, especially, vis-a-vis Russia.

And that had a lot to do with support for Ukraine. As you're advising President Trump, having discussions with him, what do you think he most needs to know about Vladimir Putin. And the approach with Putin that might work and approaches that might not work, given Putin's track record, right?

He's been in office since the year 2000. So what would you share with our viewers about what you think is feasible in terms of an outcome to the Ukraine war and how to go about it?

>> Tom Cotton: Well, I think President Trump actually used Ronald Reagan's old formulation this week to trust but verify.

You have to try to establish some level of trust with a counterpart in any negotiation, even if they're an adversary, but you never just take their word for it. And I think that's particularly true with someone like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, is, you may have to sit down and negotiate with them just like Ronald Reagan did with Gorbachev four times in three years.

But you don't expect them to breach a bargain out of the goodness of their heart or because you've established some level of rapport, trust with them. They're gonna do it what they think is concretely in their nation's interest and in their own personal interests, as a strongman tends to do.

I think President Trump understands that HR, he also understands that every American president since Vladimir Putin came to power, has aspired to have a better relationship with Russia. And it never quite seems to work. And I don't think that's because of a repeated failure on America's part. It's because Vladimir Putin doesn't really view himself as a friend or an ally or a partner of the United States.

He still views America, as they used to say in the old KGB days, as the main enemy. And perhaps you can reach a rapprochement on this or that particular issue, as we did in the early days of the global war on terror with President Bush. Or have a cease in the fighting in this or that place if Vladimir Putin views it as in his interests.

But I would strongly second the Reagan wisdom that President Trump cited earlier this week to trust but verify.

>> John H. Cochrane: So let me express the, I'm just a little economist, so I got to say things. And you can say, here's why all that's wrong, John. But that might be useful since a lot of people seem to be wrong with me.

You said there's no way to end this war in victory but that's our choice. Russia's economy is bigger than Ukraine's, but it's smaller than Italy's. So if NATO decided to take a George Bush one's approach to Iraq to this and say, you're rolling back to the Russian border, we could do that in a matter of days, if not weeks.

So no victory is our choice, that's a choice we might choose to make for some reasons. But this seems to leave, let's suppose, we stop with sort of a cease-fire. Putin's promises are worthless. Our promises aren't that great either anymore, guys, let's face that. Or we guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine if you give up your nukes, well, so much for our promises.

So what are we gonna get? We're gonna get a pause in the fighting, and then both sides rebuild and reassess. I don't think Ukraine's that interested in invasing Russia, but Russia's pretty interested in bringing this one to a second round. Or maybe Lithuania-Latvia Estonia, now maybe you'll say this was such a disaster for Putin that he has no more interest in expansion.

He just wants a face saving way out and retire and die in his bed someday, rather than the way dictators typically go. But that's a lot of hope in that one. So, you sort of see six months to a year of pause and then bad things happen again.

And this sends a horrible signal to Xi Jinping. The new world order is, you grab what you can, you rattle your nukes, you wait a couple years for stern denunciations, and then we have a ceasefire and you get to keep what you want, Taiwan. So that doesn't seem like a great way of doing things, is this perhaps Nixon in Vietnam?

Well, we have a deal, we have a ceasefire, we have peace with honor. Whoops, two years later, it goes back. And what we've done in the meantime, the president kind of blew a hole in NATO. So, one of the best things we were talking about last week is Europe seems to be finally serious about, whoa, we're on our own here.

But it's not clear, it's in US interest for Europe to be on its own. For example, if you have gone to cozy of the China, well, we got less to say about it, if they have their own defense force. So there's a way of looking at this that says this is not the greatest way to go about it.

And instead giving stuff up to Putin ahead of time might have been a mistake. And we should have turned the screws first and come to the negotiating table later. So why am I wrong?

>> Tom Cotton: Well, first, John, I wouldn't say you're wrong that there was a time when Ukraine might have won this war, might have been able to push Ukraine or Russia back.

Not just to the lines as they existed before February of 2022, but out of Ukrainian territory entirely back to where it was in 2014. That time, I think it was in 2022, Ukraine fought and valiantly won what you might call the Battle of Kyiv, in the first couple months of the war.

Thanks in no small part to all the anti armor weapons that Donald Trump had shipped to Ukraine, that Barack Obama had refused to do. And they had pretty significant breakouts in the fall of 2022 in the Northeast and in the south. But it's clear that Joe Biden's policy and strategy always was to allow Ukraine to avoid losing, but also to restrain them from winning.

>> John H. Cochrane: Exactly.

>> Tom Cotton: He pussyfooted around for three years, he was a day late and a dollar short, and things change on the battlefield. And what might have been possible in 2022 just does not seem possible in 2025. In the early days of this war, I often likened it to the Winter War between Soviet Russia and Finland, from November of 1939 to March of 1940.

Russia made almost the exact same military mistakes in this war as they made in Finland in the end of 1939, and paid the same kind of prices. Unfortunately, I think where we are now in Ukraine is not where Finland was in November and December of 1939. Where they were valiantly and pluckily fighting off the Russian invader, but where they were In March of 1940.

The point where they'd been ground down, Russia's vast advantage and mass. As has often been the case now in history, was pressing on them and they needed to have some kind of armistice that prevented a complete victory of Russia eventually on the battlefield. I'm sure HR as a military historian can give us 17 more examples of why the Winter War and the war in Ukraine are similar.

But I do think that that's where things stand now. It's not just that defensive lines have been dug in so deeply and are so hard to penetrate, but also the advance in technology on both sides. Where you now have many more deaths and casualties on the battlefield coming from drones, not coming from long range artillery fires, for instance.

And if I were in President Zelenskyy's position or anyone else in Ukraine, I wouldn't just be trusting the good offices of Western leaders. As you pointed out, they had promises made to them in the Budapest memorandum from 1994. I would be trying to get the concrete assurances that I need in terms of weapons manufacturing of probably European troops, most likely French and British in the country.

Economic cooperation with the United States to give the United States a concrete, durable, lasting interest in the country, and more economic integration into Western Europe. I think Ukraine has always badly needed that. They need an economy that does not look to the east, but rather looks to the west.

And like the countries on its western border, Slovakia and Poland, Hungary become a part of those Western European supply chains. That raises per capital standards of living, gives them more political stability, therefore reduces the levels of corruption and makes them more economically viable in the long term.

>> John H. Cochrane: Yeah, all of which makes it even more of an attractive target for Russia.

I think more of the analogy of early 1918 when the Western Front was collapsing and the Germans were winning until all of a sudden they weren't. There's plenty of signs that Russia is not doing that well, spending half its economy on the war. It's not clear how long with sustained pressure, with us finally allowing Ukraine to attack, say Russian energy facilities, that it was quite so hopeless, as you say.

And, we've sent a pretty strong message to Xi Jinping. Some of it was, well, we can't fight this war cuz that risks World War III. Well, then we can't fight in Poland cuz that risk World War III. And we certainly can't fight in Taiwan against a much superior adversary with, China's got to be 10 times more of a threat than Russia.

Didn't we just hand Taiwan to China here?

>> Tom Cotton: No, I don't think so at all. Well, first, there is a difference you missed mentioning Baltic nations as well. There is a difference between the Baltic nations in Poland versus Ukraine, those are all part of NATO. They have an express security guarantee in the United States.

>> John H. Cochrane: Does that really matter, I mean, when you say Putin has nukes, and it might be.

>> Tom Cotton: We need to take into account, of course, that Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal. I mean, Saddam Hussein launched an unprovoked war of aggression across an international border in 1990.

And there were like H.R. MCMaster and 500,000 of his closest friends went there to expel him. And one reason we did that is not only are our interests more deeply implicated in the Middle east at the time than they are right now in Ukraine. But also Saddam Hussein didn't have the world's largest nuclear arsenal.

So, I mean, as a matter of prudence, we have to take these things into account. The matter of Taiwan, I mean, it's a different kind of military operation. It would look different than what the war in Ukraine looked like, whether in 2014 or in the skirmishing that lasted between 2014 and 2022 and then the war since then.

But I also think the President has been very clear that some of what he's doing in Europe and in the Middle east. Is an effort to increase the attention and amount of resources we can dedicate to the Western Pacific, our interest there, and maintaining the peaceful status quo across the Taiwan Strait.

>> Bill Whalen: Senator, one way you get people's attention is to take away their intelligence. And so I'm curious as to your thoughts first of all, on whether or not we should be sharing intel with Ukraine or if you use that as a leverage to help move forward the peace process.

And I'm sorry for cutting you off HR, you have a question. But also our relationship, three European allies, which John referenced. And if there are hard feelings in France and Germany and Britain or so forth, is that going to reverberate in the intelligence communities? Are they gonna withhold information from us or am I hopeless, naive?

Are they gonna start spying on us? Do you see ramifications here?

>> Tom Cotton: Yeah, the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, confirmed this week that intelligence sharing had been paused. He said that he thought that pause would be temporary and brief. That's part of the broader administration pause on other kinds of aid to Ukraine as well.

I do think that was in part to try to get the attention that President Trump is serious about this. He wants to try to bring it to a resolution soon. He doesn't want it to drag on for six months on either side. I think that's why he said today that Russia could be facing severe sanctions and tariffs if they're not serious about trying to negotiate.

For our European friends, look, it's a simple fact that they need to do more to protect Europe. They have to care more about your at least as much about European security as we do, and they have to be willing to invest in it. They cannot expect the American taxpayer to be more committed to underwriting European security than European taxpayers are.

They can't expect American parents to dedicate, potentially their kids to a battle for European security than they're willing to do. And fortunately, you're starting to see some action on that front. Not just the willingness of President Macron or Prime Minister Starmer, but to put troops into Ukraine as a kind of tripwire after a ceasefire.

But also, Brussels and Berlin talking about spending up to $150 billion more on defense. That's a good start. They need to spend a lot more, but that's a good start for European nations to be investing a lot more in their common defense. John pointed out that Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's.

Well, just imagine when you compare it to the EU's economy. The EU's economy is, I don't know, 15 or 20 times the size of Russia's. There's no reason that European nations cannot largely provide for their own security with certain kinds of additional support from the United States. It's not a matter of economic or military limitations, it's a matter of political will for European nations.

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, Senator, I mean, you led soldiers in combat, right? And you understand as well as anybody that what's so most important is confidence, right? Confidence in your ability to prevail is what allows you to kind of suppress your instinct for self preservation and to fight aggressively against the enemy.

Are you concerned about sort of some of these kind of psychological blows that are being delivered to the Ukrainians, at a time when they're struggling, certainly, but Russia's struggling you could say is even more difficult circumstances. What I'm concerned about is like this. A lot of these actions, suspension of intelligence and so forth and suspension of other assistance, it actually is affecting, could affect the morale of the Ukrainians while bolstering the morale of the Russians.

I mean, is that something you're concerned about?

>> Tom Cotton: Well, first, I welcome President Trump's comments earlier today about the tough stance he's going to take on Russia if they don't appear to be serious about negotiations. And I believe that John Ratcliffe was right when he said the pause not just on intelligence sharing, but all forms of aid will be temporary as a way to try to concentrate the mind of Kyiv on the need to meet next week and Riyadh on negotiations.

I can tell you that from my observation on the Armed Services Committee, on the Intelligence Committee, on consulting with Ukrainian leaders who have come through, like the chief of defense or the head of their intelligence services over the years, they are very battle hardened. They are very confident in their ability to fight and defend their territory and their morale and motivation is very high as well.

I mean, you would kind of expect that after what Ukraine went through in the 20th century, the Ukrainians who survived under Soviet domination and World War II were not the shrinking violent types and their kids and grandkids probably aren't either. And so much so, there's a joke, as you probably heard in the early days of this war when the topic of NATO membership came up and Ukrainian soldiers said that Ukraine no longer seeks membership in NATO, but NATO is welcome to seek membership in Ukraine.

And that just gives you a sense of the confidence they have and the drive and the will they have to stand up and defend their territory. So I don't think that's gonna be diminished at all.

>> H.R. McMaster: So can I just ask you too, just because our audience, I'm sure reflects kind of the debate that's going on in terms of the sustained support for Ukraine.

I think there's a lot of disinformation out there associated with where the money spent that's provided to Ukraine and the nature of the assistance. And then also relevant to this excellent book that you just produced, The Seven Things You Can't Say About China, kind of the connection of the competition.

John alluded to this, the connection to the competition that's going on in Ukraine, to the broader competition with the axis of aggressors. So, I mean, I think that, what's important for the American people to understand is the, so what? Why do we care? Why is this important to us?

Can you maybe counter some of the disinformation about it and explain the rationale for sustained support for Ukraine?

>> Tom Cotton: So most of the aid we provided to Ukraine over the last three years is military aid in two large kinds. First, giving them things that we have, so giving them Javelin missiles like Donald Trump did and his first term.

And then the expenditures are reflected in our military, replenishing those stockpiles in some way, that's a good thing. A lot of the munitions we've been providing Ukraine, for instance, are many years old. There's been several more updates, mods, as they're sometimes called. So it's a good thing for us to be sending older versions to Ukraine and getting the latest updated, or mod, if you will.

So that's one big bucket of spending. The second big bucket is money that we are allowing Ukraine to buy our weapons with. So the kind of missiles that are being bought or being made in South Arkansas with American tax dollars, and then those are being shipped to Ukraine.

Those are the two big buckets of aid that we provided Ukraine with, the vast majority of it military. I've been in Poland at the staging ground. Many of these things are tracked electronically down to the point of use. They have cell set up, since American troops are not in Poland, to do things like not just accountability, but maintenance and training on them over zooms like this one, for instance.

That does raise the broader point of how we support not just Ukraine, our friend, like Israel, but our own needs in places like Europe and Middle East, especially the Western Pacific. The war in Ukraine has not caused the brittleness of our defense industry. It's not depleted our stockpiles, it's exposed that brittleness and exposed the depletion of our stockpiles, especially after our military was strained after so many years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So it's a very reasonable concern. I know the President has this, as do some skeptics of Ukraine aid. It's a concern of mine as well that we don't produce enough stuff right now. We don't produce enough things quickly that we can use to defend ourselves and support our friends around the world.

And that's one of the high priorities of Donald Trump and his key aides is, is increasing the rate of production. We're not talking about cutting edge scientific breakthroughs here, although we do that as well. We're talking about simply increasing the rate of productions on fairly basic things like high Mars rounds, interceptors for Patriot missile batteries, the standard missile that our Navy uses both for offenses and for defensive purposes.

These are things that we make already. They're obviously a lot more sophisticated than they were 40 years ago, but that we should be able to make at a much faster rate. That's one of the things we're trying to do in Congress, in the budget bills that we're gonna pass is appropriate for many years out to ensure that defense industry knows that there's gonna be a steady flow of funds so they can recapitalize their factories.

Adeline maybe build a new factory. Same thing that Secretary Rubio is gonna try to do at the State Department by streamlining the ability of our friends and allies around the world to buy all those things we make to give another source of demand. And in that regard, these fights really are linked.

Whether it's deterrence against China supporting Israel, the support we've provided to Ukraine. It all comes back to American industrial might, which simply is not as not as sound as it needs to be and hopefully will be much better after these four years.

>> Bill Whalen: Senator Cotton, HR Mentioned your outstanding book on China, Seven Things You Can't Say About China.

Thank you, HR doing the job that a moderator should do. Thank you for doing that. The seven things you can't say are China's an evil empire. Two, China's preparing for war. Three, China's waging economic world war. Four, China's infiltrated US society. Five, China's infiltrated US government, six, China's coming for our kids, and seven, China could win.

So here are seven things you can't say. Senator, is one of these no no's paramount. Does it stand above all the others or they all carry equal weight?

>> Tom Cotton: Well, the first chapter is that China is an even empire. And the reason I led with that obviously harkening back to what Ronald Reagan said of communist Russia and saying about communist China.

So I think it is very important that you understand that the nature of a regime to understand not just how it's gonna act internally and towards its own people, but externally as well. China is an evil empire, Mao is the worst mass murderer in human history, worse than Stalin, worse than Hitler.

China has never repudiated Mao the way Soviet Russia backed away from Stalin. I mean, literally, his body is still entombed for the public and his giant visage stands over Tiananmen Square. Xi Jinping is an avowed Marxist-Leninist Maoist thinker, he probably hopes that one day people refer to China's leaders as Marxist-Leninist joist thinkers.

They are committing genocide against the Tibetan people, against the Uyghur people, a religious minority in Northwestern China. They persecute Christians, with China as one of the largest Christian nations in the world, up to 100 million people. They brutalized a harmless Buddhist spiritual movement called the Falun Gong. They broke the promises that they had made to Great Britain and the civilized world by rolling into Hong Kong and cracking down on it in 2020 under the guise of the pandemic.

They probably invaded and attacked their neighbors more than any other country in modern times. So I think it's important that you understand the evil malignancy that's at the heart of Communist China to understand why it's such a threat to us. Why it's economic world war. Why its military buildup is such a threat to the United States.

>> John H. Cochrane: Now one could say much the same thing about Russia. So it's not clear why we want a relationship with Russia and not one with China. I will be curious to hear how just how China has waged economic war on the United States, sending us cheap stuff. Walmart sends us cheap stuff, we don't consider that economic war on small town America.

And the larger question, war. You said the two words deterrence and war, and this is something we keep batting around on Goodfellas. Are we at the stage with China where what we want is deterrence? Deterrence means don't do X, yeah, there's stuff internally we're unhappy about. But let's just don't do, don't invade Taiwan, say we wanna make it costly for you to do that, we want relationships with you.

China still really depends on a lot of exports, well, guys, invade Taiwan and that's gonna blow up. Now, of course, if we cut Taiwan, cut China off economically, then they lose that incentive to be with, so deterrence war. When you move from deterrence to economic war, then I'm gonna hurt you even if it hurts me, and I'm just gonna do stuff to hurt you.

And it's not clear to me whether a lot of our policy towards China is we're just gonna hurt you even if it hurts us. That's fighting a war or is it deterrence? We wanna keep you involved and make it clear to you that it is to your advantage not to do certain things.

>> Tom Cotton: Yeah, on the economic world war point, I would say China has been waging an economic world war against the United States for decades. It's just that the United States finally decided to join the war in 2017 when Donald Trump became president. Well, there's two main ways, as I write in seven things you can't say about China.

 

One is through the massive amount of support and subsidy it gives to its own companies.

>> John H. Cochrane: We support and subsidize, you wanna know what our support to the mortgage industry, to the car industry, to the electric vehicle industry, I mean, no, there's lots of sin here on support and subsidies.

>> Tom Cotton: And every government, every government underwrites certain favored industries or politically powerful constituencies. No one does it to the extent that Communist China has done over the last 40 years through direct subsidies, through state ownership, through tax rebates, through environmental degradation, nobody does it to the extent that Communist China does.

That's what they do internally to underwrite their own companies externally. They really use what you might call gangster tactics against America's companies. They use traditional espionage to put spies inside of companies, try to steal intellectual property, they break in through cyber attacks into those companies. They force companies into joint ventures in China with Chinese companies, force them to transfer the technology, only to cease the joint venture and then kick them out of China, so-

>> John H. Cochrane: It's good say no if they don't like it.

>> Tom Cotton: Both supporting their own companies and undermining ours, and that's what has allowed them to build up their economy over the last 30 or 40 years, and now they use that as a source of great leverage. Both countries that are dependent upon China for Chinese exports in their countries and also countries and industries that are dependent on access to the Chinese market.

They do that not against us, but against other countries as well. They got in a dispute with Australia a few years back cuz Australia wanted to study the origins of COVID and they cut off Australian beef and wine and other products. They got angry, I think it was at Czechia for some minor slights, because some Czech officials traveled to Taiwan.

They decided to cancel an entire order of Czech pianos going to China simply to bankrupt the company. So they've been doing this for 30 or 40 years, it's just that we only joined it recently. Now, the question about deterrence, one, I think President Trump wants to stop a lot of these practices, he wants to level the playing field.

He understands that there are certain goods that we really should not and cannot rely on China for anymore. Whether they're cutting edge electronics and high tech or whether they're fairly basic but essential goods like active pharmaceutical ingredients or generic pharmaceuticals. It's one thing for us to depend on China for artificial Christmas trees and Christmas decorations, which we largely do.

But we could probably get by with a lot of the economic interconnections that we have with China cuz they're not in strategic goods. But for strategic goods that are critical to the health or safety or prosperity of our country, we really need to get away from our response or our dependence on China and get out of any kind of, even limited, but especially sole source relationship.

And then more broadly, deterrence, I mean, I think a sound China policy for President Trump will be handing the reins over to the next president in January of 2029 without any conflict over Taiwan, certainly an invasion, but even a blockade or quarantine. Taiwan's military is stronger than it is now, our military is stronger than it is now, and we are more economically independent from China.

And China has influence because of that economic interdependence has diminished in our society. That's what I think a successful China policy would result in come January 2029.

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, Senator, welcome to the long standing debate here between John and usually me and Niall, thanks for tag teaming in with, on us with this.

And I would just add, Xi Jinping wants to weaponize his economy against us. The dual circulation economy, the military, civil fusion, every company has to act by law as an extension of the party. And I think it's really important for Americans to read your book, so we understand the nature of the competition, because I think John raises points that are on the minds of all Americans.

But, hey, can I bring you to a closer competition here at home? Because I'm sensing that there is a competition going on between competing visions for conservative foreign policy, conservative national security strategy. And when I read what you say and what you write, I couldn't agree with you more in terms of your regulatory.

Approach of peace through strength. But there is this tension that I see now within the party among those who are in favor of retrenchment and disengagement from complex challenges abroad. Many of them are frustrated by problems here at home. And think, hey, what are we doing over there when we should be solving our problems here at home?

Many of them were frustrated by the length and difficulty of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they kind of blame the neocons as they lump them together, whatever that means, more than they blame our adversaries for some of the challenges we're facing abroad. And then this group kind of overlaps the retrenchers, they're the prioritizers who just wanna focus on China and play like little kids soccer there.

But then there are also those who are advocating for big cuts in defense, which is like anti-Reagan esque. And so that debate's going on within the party, I know. Could you maybe make the case for your vision and maybe describe the nature of this competition? Cuz I think it's important to understand the other's point of view and take that into consideration.

>> Tom Cotton: Yeah, so, well, first off, I wanna say that I think sometimes these differences are a bit overplayed by part persons who don't have governing responsibility, as you once did. People who make their living on social media or television or, no offense, podcasts have an incentive in many cases to drive engagement, to call one side isolationist or call the other side globalist or what have you.

What I see in Congress, what I see on my committees in the Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee, but also interactions with the administration are people who have some differing views on this or that policy question. This or that part of the world where our interests lay, but people who believe in American strength and competence.

Yeah, that may lead to different conclusions, obviously about the degree to which we support Ukraine. It doesn't always lead to those different conclusions. Most people across our party are aligned in support with Israel against, not only Hamas, who committed terrible atrocity against Israel on October 7th, but Hezbollah and Iran as well.

And we have pretty broad alignment on the threat that China poses as well. Many of our differences I see are really like you say, HR trying to balance those. And some people do act like five year olds playing soccer. When it gets to the China threat, I understand that cuz it's the most severe threat, but it's also a threat that plays out in other parts of the world.

As President Trump has made plain about Chinese investment and intrigue in Latin America and has already had a big win on it with BlackRock announcing this last that they're gonna buy the two big Chinese ports on either side of the Panama Canal. That China is working closely with Iran, for instance, to undermine sanctions against Iran's oil industry so they can get oil at a cut rate and so Iran gets more money to support it.

So these threats are interconnected and one reason is that we're the global superpower. And I saw that in my first days in the Congress, in the House of Representatives, after President Obama walked away from the so called red line in Syria. I was in East Asia a few months later and I was surprised to hear so many people talking about the Syrian red line.

You don't think that officials in Seoul or Tokyo would be all that concerned about what's happening in the Syrian civil war. But when it's America that underpins the security order in every part of the world, of course they're gonna be concerned. Cuz it's not just about American military might, it's about America's will as well.

>> John H. Cochrane: Let me add a last economic potshot here, we talk about jobs. Well, we have a 4% unemployment rate. I'm curious just how many more jobs China did posse could have stolen us. If you had a number, how much has US GDP been hurt by China? How much wealthier would we be overall if China remained desperately poor, $200 a person GDP rather than $20,000?

And how does 25% tariffs against Canada and Mexico possibly help? And I wanna put that in a foreign policy way. If we want a geostrategic long-term economic competition with China, I would think we want friends. And we want Mexico and Canada to make the hard choice of well, we'll buy the more expensive car from the US not the amazingly cheap car we can get from China.

We would want Europe, which is still in its various green phases. We want Europe to turn down those cheap Chinese solar panels, electric cars, and so forth. Europe doesn't really care about Taiwan, we want friends. And just how in the world does 25% tariffs on our closest neighbors make sense in that context?

>> Tom Cotton: So on the first question, John, I'm not gonna predict down to the percentage point how different our GDP would be or how much of-

>> John H. Cochrane: 10th of a percent, 1% or 10% is good enough for me.

>> Tom Cotton: What's the old joke about economists? They use decimal points because they have a sense of humor.

>> John H. Cochrane: Exactly.

>> Tom Cotton: But I will say there's no doubt that you can look at not just companies, but entire industries that have been hollowed out, really, over the last 25 years or so.

>> John H. Cochrane: Other industries gain, the way trade works is stuff we don't do well, they do.

And then we do stuff better, so the overall economy, yes, industries have been hurt, but-

>> Tom Cotton: But we're not an economy with a country, we're a country with an economy. And we should care about all of our people, and it's not just simply a GDP mark. We shouldn't just be a GDP maximized machine, we should think about the health of all of our people in all of our regions.

>> John H. Cochrane: Poorer but more equitable, it's almost sound like a Democrat here. We're poorer cuz we have China, but it's more equitable population.

>> H.R. McMaster: I think what we're talking about, I think where we bring this together, though, is the social good of not being dependent for critical supply chains or manufactured goods on a hostile state that can use that dependency for coercive purposes.

>> John H. Cochrane: So we're poor.

>> Tom Cotton: No,-

>> John H. Cochrane: I'm not saying we're poorer.

>> Tom Cotton: You need a healthy and balanced economy to have a strong country. You can't have an economy where, again, no offense, where everyone makes a living appearing on each other's podcasts or reviewing each other's books. You need people to grow your food and to make your stuff and to deliver it.

I mean, you have to have a healthy, balanced economy. And there's a lot of voters in places like Arkansas and Ohio and Michigan who look at what has happened over the last 25 years since China got permanent Most Favored Nation status and got admitted to the WTO. And thought, gosh, we were promised this was gonna make us better off.

And it sure doesn't seem that way when you drive by shuttered factories or towns that have almost shriveled up entirely.

>> John H. Cochrane: Unemployment rates 4%, and they all have found other jobs, and you both kind of said, well, we're worse off.

>> Tom Cotton: And the labor participation rate is still much lower than it should be, so.

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, there's a lot of reasons for that.

>> Tom Cotton: So, anyway, your second question. I mean, what President Trump has done with Canada and Mexico obviously is different cuz they are allies, unlike China. I would just point to the cooperation we received from Mexico over the last month and a half on cracking down on the cartels.

They extradited a large number of senior cartel officials, cartel leaders. Leaders are going to hiding, they're scared to death of what the United States, Mexico might gather. Illegal crossing at the southern border-.

>> John H. Cochrane: A threat to get them to do stuff.

>> Tom Cotton: I mean, I don't do that, I mean, Donald Trump says that all the times.

It's not me doing it, he's very open about what he's done. And look, you had months in the Biden administration where 300,000 people were crossing our southern border. In the first full month of the Trump administration, it was fewer than 9,000.

>> Bill Whalen: Senator, I have to jump in here because we have more than used up your time.

But I do have one last question for you and let's see if you can do it very quickly. I'm guessing that on Tom Cotton's phone there is not a TikTok app. And I'm guessing that because I read your book and here's what you say, quote, if your kid uses TikTok, I urge you to stop reading now and immediately delete the account.

Well, Senator, we're in the middle of the 75 day reprieve on the TikTok ban right now, I think that ends on April 5th. What's the outcome gonna be and what's that gonna say about our view toward China?

>> Tom Cotton: Yeah, I would encourage you to delete TikTok if you have it on your account. I suspect the three of you don't, maybe HR does cuz he likes to post videos of himself dancing.

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, senator, I was the funkiest national security advisor, just in case you're wondering what distinguished me from the others.

>> Tom Cotton: I did, another reason to get rid of TikTok.

I understand a lot of Americans use TikTok, they don't see what the issue is. It is a severe threat. It's a social media platform like Facebook or X or Snapchat or what have you, but the difference is TikTok is under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party. I hear people saying, well, it's just kids data, what does it matter?

Well, it's not just kids data, there are a lot of adults who use it. But also kids grow up. Kids grow up and they join the military, they join the intelligence community, they take sensitive positions in cutting edge companies. So that is a threat. I also hear people saying, well, the content on TikTok is harmless, no big deal.

Cat videos and how to videos about home repair cooking and HR McMaster dancing. Where's the harm in that content? And you're right, most of the content on TikTok is harmless. But there's a lot that's very harmful. And TikTok, if you look at the evidence that state attorneys general have produced in lawsuits against it, will intentionally target teenage boys with graphic violence or obscene pornography.

Teenage girls with eating disorder content or body image content, both with content that's glamorizing drug use or even suicide, even when you're asking for happy content to counteract your depression or your sadness. And sadly, as I write in the book, some teenagers have committed suicide after viewing that kind of content.

And finally, it's also a tool for Chinese communist propaganda. You can't learn about TikTok just like you can't learn on Deep Seek, the new AI chat from China about Tiananmen Square or about the Uyghur genocide or about Falun Gong. On the day that the House was considering this legislation last year, TikTok sent push notices to all of its users saying click here, call your congressman and tell them to vote against that.

What would we do if TikTok used that same function if Donald Trump was threatening 60% tariffs, not 20 tariffs or in a moment of tension against or over Taiwan. So these are all the reasons why TikTok is such a threat to the well being especially of our kids and also our national security.

Why Congress passed a law that didn't say, once again I wanna stress, ban TikTok. It said that its parents company has to sell TikTok and break ties entirely with China if TikTok is gonna continue operating here or in the future if any similar app controlled by another foreign adversary is going to be operated in America.

>> Bill Whalen: Senator, we've kept you seven minutes longer than we promised so your time is up. Thank you for joining us. The book again is 7 Things You Can't Say About China. Senator Cotton, thanks for your time, come back to GoodFellows.

>> Tom Cotton: Thanks gentlemen, it's good to be on with you.

>> H.R. McMaster: Thanks Senator.

>> John H. Cochrane: Pleasure, thank you so much.

>> Bill Whalen: For our second block we're gonna stick with the tariffs conversation and dig deeper into it. John Cochrane, here's what President Trump said in his joint address to Congress and I quote, tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs, they're about protecting the soul of our country.

Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, he likes that word, great. It may be a little bit of an adjustment period, but bear with me. So John, are you bearing with the President and let's talk about tariffs in two regards, John, the sheer economics of it but also HR as a diplomatic use.

It strikes me that Trump is basically engaging in gunboat diplomacy, whereas Teddy Roosevelt use a great white fleet Donald Trump is parking tariffs off nation's coast and trying to get his way. Use that John, let's start with the economic side of things, terrorists.

>> John H. Cochrane: So I'm trying to be sensible here your economist union card says tariffs are bad, rent control is bad, so forth.

But as the Senator said, there's a national security game going on here. If you're using tariffs as a threat to get a better behavior on security issues or better economic behavior, that would be great. I'm a little dubious because the average mugger says give me your wallet. He says exactly what he wants and when he wants it.

So I wasn't really clear when these tariffs gonna end. It's not really clear that what we want is complete free trade with countries and this is a means to an end, as you quoted nicely, all the wonders of tariffs by them. Tariffs do seem to be here like an answer sort of wandering around in search of a question.

And there’s a lot of economic, I'm trying to find a polite word, fuzziness, that I hear, I really haven't heard any reasonable defense of these tariffs. If you don't like trade, let me put this, suppose you don't like trade deficits. Trade deficits are a terrible thing. Well then you ought to love foreign aid.

You ought to love tax Americans, give foreigners the money cuz what do you do with dollars, you buy American goods. So if you don't like trade deficits, you'll love foreign aid. If you think tariffs are a great idea to raise revenue, well, why don't we have tariffs between California and Nevada or between San Francisco and Oakland?

Well, that's clearly a bad idea. And in fact, Canada and Mexico, we joke about 51st state, they were kind of on the way to 51st and 52nd state. They threw their lot in with us under NAFTA. They became extremely dependent economies on US trade the same way Florida is dependent on U.S. trade.

And that's how Europe kind of is, is working its way to United States of Europe. And we just kind of said you're on your own, this was a huge mistake. So I'm finding it even with an open mind, tariffs are costly, economically costly. There must be benefit. Now economists would say aircraft carriers are costly and economists don't get the jump to so don't buy aircraft carriers cuz as HR would tell you, tanks.

Sorry, HR tanks, come in handy every now and then. But I have not heard a coherent economic or national security argument for the kind of tariffs we're putting in. And HR has this beautiful essay by the way, well done on the new version of the economic statecraft essay laying out narrow tariffs headed for specific national security reasons.

But we want friends, we want Mexico and Canada to say no to China. I do not understand where the current tariff policy is coming from.

>> Bill Whalen: But I see a pattern here HR twice now the President has said there will be hell to pay in the Middle East if the hostages aren't released.

He said it before he was elected and he said it the other day, there'll be hell to pay. And now he is on a couple occasions now imposed tariffs, but wait a second, once he imposes him, he backs off on like TikTok. There is a stay on the execution and right now we're waiting to see April if the Mexico, Canada ones will come through.

He's also put tariffs on China, it's just to be seen, isn't this how Trump goes about doing things HR? It's just he likes to take sort of cudgels as a means to the end, the end being getting a deal.

>> H.R. McMaster: When he sees a situation that he's not happy with, right?

He tries to disrupt that situation sometimes with what some people regard as outlandish statements, sometimes it's with announcement of tariffs. I mean, there are a whole range of, of tactics that he uses. But I think what's important, though, is with the point that John's making is I think it should be important it was to state upfront what the objective is.

He does that on occasion, sometimes it's not quite as clear. Is it reciprocity in trade and market access? Is it trying to get others to stop what we would regard as unfair trade and economic practices through subsidies or overproduction, or in the case of China now, offshoring to evade US Tariffs and so forth.

And to violate kind of what we wanted to achieve with the USMCA with rules of origin and everything. So, I mean, what is the objective? Is it border security, is it fentanyl? And I think it's always clear what I tried to do for that period of time when I was national security advisor is when we had these debates, I try to say, okay, hey, what is it that we're trying to achieve?

And if the fundamental problem is China, John alluded to this, then it doesn't really help a lot to go after our allies in a way that they see as hostile, because ultimately it would be beneficial if we had the same approach toward China. So China couldn't do a divide and conquer, for example.

So, I used to say to President Trump, hey, Mr. President, if we shoot all of our allies to get to China, China wins. And so I think it's important to have those kinds of discussions with the president, but really across the departments and agencies within the White House, with the NEC and the NSC, to, hey, what's the objective?

And then to assess, right, kind of war game out. If we take these actions, what what do others do next, are we making progress toward our objectives? So it's not always clear with President Trump up front, but what he's doing is trying to address what he sees as a fundamental problem that needs to be disrupted.

And I think that's why we're in this phase of tariffs at this level, maybe that level, maybe suspend for 30 days, what happens after 30 days, we don't know. And of course, he does follow the markets, though, and John, I don't know what your thoughts are about how the degree, at this degree of uncertainty is affecting markets and what the president, people around him.

Scott Bessant and others who are from that world, what they might conclude about this kind of disruptive approach.

>> John H. Cochrane: Yeah, I think we're seeing fairly clearly that the uncertainty. Companies are putting investment plans on hold until they know what the situation's gonna be like. And the actual tariffs themselves would be pretty damaging, especially cuz they weren't particularly well crafted.

This issue of a car part can cross the border eight times before the car is actually made. So you charge eight times the tariff. Well, that would have been an easy one to say we only charge tariffs on the net. But they didn't think to do it that way and then they had to back off.

>> H.R. McMaster: And you've got USMCA renegotiation coming up too. It's probably starting the next couple of months. There's an opportunity if you do have some real issues on how USMCA is being followed or not followed or is inadequate to achieve what you wanna achieve, that renegotiation is gonna happen in the next year.

>> John H. Cochrane: But I'm a lowly economist, so four dimensional chess of geostrategy I leave to bigger minds like you. But there is, I think a danger that when you're trying to blow things up to kind of get to where you want, you really piss people off and make it less likely to enter into those difficult long running.

Yeah, Canada, they have tariffs against US dairy, that's silly. We have tariffs against Canadian wood, that's silly. They got a lot of wood, we got a lot of cows. This is not a hard one, we wanna kind of stir things up in many, many areas. We've been stuck in things for 20, 30 years, so.

But the blowing things up has a cost, the Canadians are really mad and any sort of goodwill is gonna be hard to re establish.

>> H.R. McMaster: And just one last thing here. I think what's missing guys is like a positive agenda with these countries, with these allies, right? Think about how much we could get done with Canada.

Hey, North American defense, right? President Trump is prioritizing that missile defense. Hey, guess who our best partner is on missile defense? Canada, because they reach all the way up to the Arctic Circle, and that's where you need your defensive systems. We already have the North American defense system, NORAD, that needs a refresh.

We could have Arctic security. I mean so many, so many agenda items with Canada, with Mexico obviously. And I think what's missing a lot of times is, is that positive vision, the positive agenda to work together in a mutually beneficial way.

>> John H. Cochrane: And on Canada, we can have our arguments about strategic competition with China and so forth, but Canada, it's right next door.

And the long run vision for trade with Canada has to be trade with Canada should be about as hard as trade with North Dakota. And, it's obvious they're our friend, they're our ally.

>> H.R. McMaster: Energy dominance that item on the president's agenda, total alignment with Canada, especially if there's a conservative.

>> John H. Cochrane: I love what you just said, stay where we're going. And where we ought to be going is continents in northern American, complete free trade, sort of like Europe has. That would be a great, and we want to be your ally and your friend, and yes, absolutely, say where we're going.

>> Bill Whalen: So, you know who has a bad job in Washington right now is Howard Lutnick. He is the Commerce Secretary, and for the past several days, he's had to go out and try to make sense of the tariff policy, what's in, what's out, what's gonna happen. He said something very interesting the other day, he said that the goal of the administration is to create an External Revenue Service which would collect the tariff money.

But then, John, he said the Trump administration goal is to create, quote, to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay. Now, John, here I turn to the grumpy economist because the grumpy economist likes to talk about the tax system and what the grumpy economist wrote in January, and I quote.

The current income tax system is an abomination, burn it and start over. John, we're in the middle of tax season right now where everybody's thinking about this. Just give me two minutes on what should be done here. Forget about the External Revenue Service, what about the IRS and what about taxes?

Just a couple minutes here, quickly.

>> John H. Cochrane: I don't think Lutnick has a hard job cuz I think he believes it. Scott Bessant has a hard job cuz he has to say nice things about stuff he doesn't. Yeah, in two words, if you ask an economist what is the right tax system, if what you want to do is raise money for the government at minimal economic damage, the answer is a flat consumption tax.

Even Paul Krugman would have to admit that he might be spitting up about. I wanna ask a different question, but if that's the question, that's the answer. The income tax is an abomination as you can see in front of you, income isn't really a meaningful quantity. And income tax has led to all these horrendous distortions and Swiss cheese of exclusions and so on and so forth.

So, once you throw out the income tax, you've also thrown out the income tax deduction for all these politicized, quote, nonprofits. You throw out the mortgage interest deduction, you throw out the healthcare deduction and all the other original sins of American tax policy. That's the right answer, get rid of the income tax, estate tax, corporate tax, put in a tax only on consumption.

What about the rich, get them down to the Porsche dealer. What about redistribution, send them checks. That would be a much more efficient system. Now I'm always blue sky, but I think it's important to say blue sky. If you just say, if you only say, how are we gonna tweak the code and the depreciation schedule and this, that and the other thing.

If you never talk about the promised land, you never get to the promised land, that is the.

>> H.R. McMaster: We need to get John a gold plated chainsaw is what I'm thinking, is what.

>> Bill Whalen: HR many, many Aprils ago I was having a conversation with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm not gonna name drop on purpose cuz I will lose that battle with you, but it was April and I said to him, you must hate this time of year.

And he said why? I said because you must pay a lot in taxes. And looked at me and he goes, I love paying taxes. And I said what? And he goes, I love paying taxes cuz that means I make a lot of money. So I put it to you, HR as our in house optimist, do you like paying taxes?

>> Ronald Reagan: Hey, well, I mean apparently I'm in California, right? I mean, our whole family moved out here bucking the trend to pay the maximum amount of taxes we could.

>> John H. Cochrane: But taxes, so I got one economist insight. We should not ever say just taxes, there's tax revenue and tax rate.

And the crucial idea of economics is to square the circle and make more tax revenue, while lowering the tax rate. And the way you do that is you get rid of all that Swiss cheese. Why? Cuz of incentives. I move to California like HR pay a lot of taxes, but what I compute, if I take a consulting job, how much do I actually keep, right?

Know that number and the answer is better than consulting jobs.

>> Bill Whalen: Yes All right, gentlemen, we'll leave it there a great conversation. We're gonna play a little game that we call- Big deal, little deal or no deal at all.

>> Bill Whalen: So question one, John Cochrane. The Trump administration has created a digital assets working group which is tasked with creating a quote, cryptostrategic reserve along the lines of existing US reserves of gold and oil.

John, big deal, little deal, no deal at all?

>> John H. Cochrane: So depending on the size of it, big or little silly deal, most governments throughout history have taken to printing fiat money rather than buying fiat money. As Mr. Trump, in his own personal finances, has been issuing coins, not buying them.

>> Bill Whalen: All right, if you gentlemen lived in Washington DC, good luck seeing the musical Hamilton. And that's because the show's creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda has pulled the plug on at the Kennedy center saying, and I quote, we're not gonna be part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center.

So, gentlemen, big deal, little deal, no deal at all that the president is at war with the arts?

>> H.R. McMaster: I just think it's kind of a little deal, in the grand scheme of things. It's too bad cuz Hamilton is a fantastic musical, by the way. And it's fundamentally a patriotic message, that if that's the only way you can get to help young people understand, the miracle of our founding.

And this radical idea that sovereignty lies with the people. And to appreciate those who were willing to sacrifice everything, for our freedom and liberty and this great country, then it's regrettable.

>> Bill Whalen: John?

>> John H. Cochrane: I would say, the arts are at war with the president, and it's kind of sad that the arts have become a predictable left-wing politics.

I'm glad to see some returns, but I was in DC recently, and went to see the fantastic World War I Memorial.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah.

>> John H. Cochrane: Glad to see some classical art coming back. The arts community is just sort of predictable, it's not even shocking anymore. It's not even courageous to have sort of predictable left-wing partisan politics, they're kind of making fools out of themselves.

>> H.R. McMaster: I think art in general has tremendous potential to bring us together, and to celebrate our common humanity. And to reverse some of the divisions and polarization we see in our political lives. So it's just regrettable when art moves people in the opposite direction.

>> John H. Cochrane: Yeah, and I would add we need to go back to a tradition in America which is respect the office.

He is the President of the United States, so you may not respect the man or his policies, but respect the office.

>> Bill Whalen: I think you're right on little deal in this regard. Hamilton debuted in August of 2015, it's been around for almost 10 years. This is not the same as Taylor Swift pulling the plug on concerts.

So I think the public will somehow survive, you can even find Hamilton on YouTube if you want to. HR question for you, the Pentagon is renamed an army base in Georgia, once Fort Moore, now once again, Fort Benning. The catch being that Benning now honors a World War I soldier, and not a Civil War general.

The loser in all this HR is Army Lieutenant General Hal Moore, who served with the 7th Cavalry in Vietnam. He's the author of We Were Once Heroes, which is both a great book, but also a terrific movie starring Mel Gibson. HR your thoughts, I believe you knew General Moore.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I think it's a big deal, I think it's a big mistake. This is again, kind of the tendency to define policies and to make decisions mainly in opposition to those who went before you. The renaming of Fort Benning, of the post that I commanded, to Fort Moore was really a smart decision.

Benning was a traitor he was ineffective. The original Henry Benning that was named for, and they changed the name. And I think the name changes were also important to understand in context of when those changes happened. When those name changes happened to post with, for Confederate generals, for example, and why they happened.

And I think it's clear from our history they happened to accommodate between Northern and Southern whites, largely at the expense of Black Americans. And Black Americans who were going to war in World War I and coming back from World War I. So I think that's a valid reason, to change the post, and to name it for a real hero, a hero of the battle of Ia Drang.

Fantastic book by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once And Young, and the movie. And also what's regrettable, it was the only post that was named for a husband and wife team.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> H.R. McMaster: And it was how Moore's wife was appalled at the way the next of kin were being notified, about the death of their spouse, or loved one in Vietnam.

They were just delivering Western Union cables from cabs. So then she organizes this effort to identify those cabs as they come on to Fort Benning, where they were stationed. And to grab those telegrams and to notify people in-person, which of course, is how the army does it now.

Very officially and respectfully, and to try to provide as much comfort as possible. That's just one of many stories of Hal Moore's and his wife's tremendous leadership. So, it's kind of a big deal to me, you get wedded to the name of the place that you came up in in the army.

So Fort Benning, it had a place in my heart, maybe not a good place for my early days going to ranger school there. But I get that part of it, the nostalgia for the old names. But these name changes, by and large, Cavazos in Texas, these were really good people to emulate, and to motivate younger generations of soldiers.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, you've got Lynyrd Skynyrd on your social media feature. We're doing a one-on-one GoodFellows this summer, we're gonna have a conversation about what all you subscribe to.

>> John H. Cochrane: That's just what the algorithm fed me, it also feeds me earth, wind and fire. So I'm in with HR mcMaster was recently.

>> Bill Whalen: Now you're showing a respective agency.

>> John H. Cochrane: Just how great they were.

>> H.R. McMaster: But Leonard Skinner came out against Wallace and segregation, right?

>> John H. Cochrane: Exactly.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> John H. Cochrane: They did have a confederate flag in the background.

>> H.R. McMaster: I know, yeah.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, final question gentlemen, I don't see smudges on your forehead, so I'm guessing you don't partake, but Lent began this week.

So hypothetically, if you did observe Lent, what would you give up for a month, HR?

>> H.R. McMaster: Gosh, I think what I need to do is give up being distracted by just emails and everything. I just feel like that these days I'm not as productive as I could be, because of the kind of the mundane tasks.

But let me think of something that, I should give up for Lent. Maybe I should give up red wine for Lent, or maybe I'll do that, but maybe not also, maybe not,

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, John take us home.

>> John H. Cochrane: Yeah, well, one is tempted to, I'll give up emails, and FaceTime, and all the other distractions of life. But of course-

>> Bill Whalen: That's work.

>> John H. Cochrane: Part of being, why do we do it? I spend half my day answering emails, and the other half is showing up at seminars and events that I'm not that interested in. Well, you're doing it for FaceTime, you're doing it to be kind to your fellow human.

So maybe that's not the kind of thing to give up on. Maybe the thing one should focus on in a Lenten spirit is how to be a better person, and give up on things that you feel that you've done, that have been hurtful to other people.

>> Bill Whalen: I would probably remove the YouTube app from my TV, and I shouldn't say this since we're on YouTube.

But ever since I went to streaming on my TV, YouTube is killing my sleep, and it's gonna be a cause of my early demise. And that I start watching that thing late at night and I start going down rabbit holes, I watch HR and John and Niall. I start watching random things on the British Navy, random things on how Beatles videos were made, and before it's 2 in the morning, it's death.

>> John H. Cochrane: I feel like, yeah, I should say I give up my X habit. But then after three pointless videos, and come some new piece of information that I hadn't seen, like that wonderful essay that I just sent HR last night that came in over Twist so.

>> Bill Whalen: All right, let's leave it there gentlemen great conversation.

We can survive without Niall Ferguson for a week or so I guess we proved that. So Niall, if you're watching, we missed your buddy come back soon. A viewer's note, we will not be back until late in March, we're taking a little bit of a break. I think Amy Zegart, our colleague here at Hoover, who's an expert on AI is gonna join us.

Also our fifth year anniversary of GoodFellows is fast approaching that's April 1st, 2000. So, maybe we're gonna do a little retrospective on the show, and talk about how the world has changed the past five years. I would note we are doing a Mail show, a viewer of questions show in April, so this is your cue to start sending us questions.

If you have a question for HR, John, Niall, or any combination of the GoodFellows, send it to us. And you do that by going to the following website, Hoover.org/AskGoodFellows. So we repeat that again, Hoover.org/AskGoodFellows. On behalf of the Goodfellows, John Cochrane, HR McMaster the absent Niall Ferguson, our guest today, Senator Tom Cotton.

We hope you enjoyed the show, till next time, take care. Thanks again for watching.

>> Presenter: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch Battlegrounds also available, @ hoover.org.