GoodFellows Live: The War in Israel and the War at Home

>> Bill Whalen: It's Friday, October 13, 2023, 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, and I will be your moderator today, and I am joined right now, literally, in the company of greatness.

Greatness as defined to my immediate right by the historian Niall Ferguson, to his right, the economist John Cochran. And to his right, I guess you are the far right person on this panel, that would be Lieutenant General HR McMaster, their Hoover Institution senior fellows all. Gentlemen, let's begin with Israel and HR, I wanna point the crowd to a tweet that you put out the other day.

And it reads, now is the time for Israel to crush Hamas and for all who care about humanity to go after Hamas sponsors in Iran and their proxies across the region.

>> Bill Whalen: To which HR, I say, wow, and how do you do it?

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, well, thanks. It's great to be with everybody, great to be with all of you here and to be with my good fellows in person.

Last Friday, when these, these heinous attacks, these murderous attacks, these brutal, inhumane attacks were unfolding, my wife Katie and I were at Auschwitz, Treblinka. And of course, it weighed even heavier on us as we got back to our hotel and saw the news. And it occurred to me that I had seen this kind of evil before, I had seen it with al Qaeda in Iraq and with ISIS.

And there really is no alternative to crushing, I put here what I would say from the Department of Defense perspective, is to destroy Hamas. Which means that that organization could no longer conduct any more terror attacks without having to regenerate completely. And so I think to do that, it requires a number of steps which you see the Israeli defense forces and government undertaking.

Now, the first of those is to isolate, isolate Hamas in Gaza, but then to do so in a way that allows for the evacuation of civilians. It's really important to understand, I think, that if you are pro-Palestinian, you must be anti-Hamas. And I think it's extremely important to keep reinforcing that message as you try to get as many civilians as you can out of the way.

And then, of course, simultaneous with that, they're gonna strike high value targets, weapons caches, command post facilities. And anything of value to Hamas to be able to continue these kinds of attacks. But then what's also extremely important at this stage is to work from the outside in on Hamas as well, and to map, really, the flows of people, money, weapons, into Hamas.

And to interdict that support immediately, including diplomatic support or informational support for Hamas. And then I think what you'll see here pretty soon are a number of offensive operations into Gaza, probably simultaneous on multiple axes. I don't think it would be wise, I think the IDF is gonna wanna try to take it block-by-block.

But even in dense urban terrain like that, there are critical nodes that you can take that can sort of paralyze Hamas, place something of value at risk to them, and then force them to respond to you. And then once it becomes more fluid, Israelis can apply very significant firepower against those more mobile forces if they try to maneuver on the areas that the IDF has seized.

And then, of course, what's gonna be most important is what's gonna be required after the destruction of Hamas, which I think could probably occur in the next several weeks. Would be to set conditions for the return of the Palestinian population, but under a new form of governance. And that has to be a multinational effort, that's gonna take a lot of convincing to bring others in.

Maybe the Egyptians, though, because the alternative is for them to have all refugees in their country and some other countries. But there will never be enduring security in Gaza if Hamas or a group like Hamas, another Jihadist terrorist organization, is able to come back.

>> Niall Ferguson: H.R, what worries me about this situation is that it's pretty clear that the plan is precisely to lure the IDF into Gaza, get them embroiled in house to house fighting.

And then have Hezbollah attack from Lebanon. We also have the IDF pretty preoccupied with the West bank, so it's almost a war on three fronts. And when I look at the situation of the IDF, they are gonna be stretched very thin. It feels, I mean, I'm gonna offer a historical perspective here, like a more dangerous moment for Israel than 1973.

This happened more or less on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, one day off. And yet in that situation, although at first it really looked bad for Israel, in fact, the IDF was quite quickly able to turn the tables on the Egyptians and the Syrians. And very quickly seize the military initiative to the point that it almost went too far and had to be restrained from completely destroying the Egyptian army.

It doesn't feel like such a straightforward military challenge that the IDF faces. So tell us, how worried should we be about Israel, and can Israel do this on its own, or is it going to need us support, and where will that us support be be needed most.

>> John Cochrane: And for how long?

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, I think Israel can do it in Gaza on its own, it's gonna be costly and difficult and it's dense urban terrain, but as I mentioned, I think that's a period of weeks. I do think the chances are quite high that there will be a northern front opened by Hezbollah, that's why in the tweet I mentioned that we also have to go back to the source, which is Iran.

I think there have been some early efforts to try to deter an opening of a second front. But of course, there's been a very weak message from the Biden administration about the clear complicity of Iran in all of this. And so I think it's really important at this stage to communicate to the Iranians that, hey, if there's a second front against Israel, we know what the return address is for that action.

I think that's an important message, as well as to be prepared to support the Israelis, maybe in southern Lebanon, where, as you're alluding to, Hezbollah has about 110,000 rockets aimed at Israel. Many of those are precision munitions, much like in the 73 war, which you mentioned, there was an element of tactical and operational surprise associated with the integration of sophisticated air defense.

And anti tank weapon systems into the Egyptian armed forces in particular, this is the new dimension of this conflict is the drone missile strike complex that Iran has imported into Gaza and into southern Lebanon. And by the way, into its proxy army in Syria as well, where just yesterday there were some missiles fired.

So I think there is the potential for another three front war, I believe the IDF can do it. I think they learned the lesson in the 2006 Lebanon war when there was an assumption on the part of some Israeli defense force leaders, hey, we can take care of this from the air alone in southern Lebanon.

And they were unprepared to seize the territory in southern Lebanon that would allow them to eliminate that rocket threat. I mean, this is nothing new, remember, it took operation market garden to eliminate the v1 and v2 threat to London, right? I mean, it's not possible really to eradicate this kind of a threat from rockets and missiles exclusively from the aerospace or maritime domain.

 

>> Bill Whalen: H.R, let me run a hypothetical by you. We've learned a lot about how Hamas works now in terms of weapons, how they acquire weapons. We've learned, for example, that you can DIY, do it yourself missiles of rockets, apparently, if you have a pipe and engineering background. But we also learned that the Iranians send weapons and weapons parts into Port Sudan.

They then get shipped by Bedouins through Egypt and then into Gaza, that way. So question, should Israel bombort Sudan?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, I think what we could do is we could have a multinational effort. You saw that the British have also sent some naval vessels to the area. We should have a multinational effort to interdict the Iranian terrorist network and to interdict it from financial perspective, but also physically interdict the weapons that they are shipping, not only to Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic jihad and their proxy forces in Syria, but also to the Houthis in Yemen and to the hashtag or these militias in Iraq as well.

And Iran appears as if they're the masters of this and that they're relatively strong because they use these proxies. But I think Iran is actually extremely weak. And the reason they are able to do what they do is because they get away with it. The only time recently and we have acted as if we understood the return address was with the killing of Qasem Soleimani.

And before that, you have to go back to the 1980 and 1988 Tanker War when after an Iranian attack, we sunk their fleet. So Neil has alluded to the chances of an escalation to a broader conflict. I think those chances are quite high as well. But I think if it does escalate if we were to respond in a resolute manner, we've just moved two squadrons to the region.

We moved a marine detachment there, we could impose costs on Iran way beyond those that they factored in when they instigated this. And to Neil's earlier point about isn't this what they wanted to do is to lure Israel into Gaza? Hamas is gonna get a lot more than they bargained for, right?

I mean, these murderous attacks from a Hamas perspective, those were suicide attacks for Hamas. And I think they're gonna be done after this operation.

>> John Cochrane: Well, let me ask that question. As an economist, I try to look one step farther out on the chessboard. Why would you do something so brutal, so barbaric, so video barbaric as what they did?

There's a reason for it. They wanted to bring on a strong Israeli response. Maybe not as strong as what they're gonna get, but they knew they were gonna get something wrong. Now, why would you do that? Well, cuz they're prepared. They have their tunnels, their bunkers, the mosques, the schools, they're waiting for Israel to come in and put it on video, and, the great victim that's already happening on media around, especially Arab media around there.

Why would they do that? So I have two theories which I will try. When do you start a war? One is you start one when you think you can win it, and the other is you start one when you think you're about to lose. So let me try that one first.

Why was Hamas so scared they were about to lose? It's clear this was the first thing they wanted to do, was torpedo the Abraham Accords and the expansion of it to Saudi Arabia, the new Saudi Arabia, Israel, other Arab states axis. And there was an interesting economic part of the Abraham Accords.

A lot of it was a plan for Palestinians which involved, forget about political solution first, then economics. Let's solve the economic problem. Let them become prosperous, and then 20, 30 years from now, you can solve the political problem. That is obviously a death knell for Hamas. They live on Palestinians being poor, victimized in horrible circumstances.

If they could have jobs in Israel, which they increasingly were, if they could have trade with the Arabs, if they could have development, Hamas isn't gonna last very long. Now, if that's what's going on, a lot ought to stand on Arab states. Maybe it's time for them to say, my God, we have allied ourselves with these completely brutal barbarians.

We need to keep the Abraham Accords going no matter what, because the point of this was to sink the Abraham Accords. Or maybe it's what Neil alluded to, this is the first step in a larger war orchestrated by Iran. But I can't see how Iran thinks they could win, or now is the time to win a war.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I guess the one thing I would say is don't underestimate the role of ideology and the degree to which the ideology of the revolution and Iran's stated goal of destroying Israel plays into this. And I think we tend to underestimate it. If you look at recent comments by the supreme leader, Khamenei, he basically said this is the start of the campaign to completely eradicate Israel.

And I really believe that is what they want to do. And I do think that there was this perception, a perception of weakness on our part. Do you know that under the Biden administration, and this spans a little bit back into the Trump administration, the last couple of years, there were 83 Iranian proxy force attacks against US forces or locations in the Middle east.

And we responded to three of them. And those three that we responded to, we responded to extraordinarily weakly. Then they're looking at a weak and divided US, but it's weakened, divided Israel. They see some politicians in the United States saying that we don't have the endurance to support Ukraine anymore.

You've seen that they've cultivated useful idiots and self loathing young people in universities and in western European cities who have come out to be apologists for these mass murders. So I think that there's this perception of weakness that led to triggering this attack. And I think that they think that they have a lot of capabilities marshaled in southern Lebanon as well.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: I worry that's right. I think preventing the Saudi-Israeli normalization was not actually the top priority. The top priority was to take advantage of a position of weakness, not only in Jerusalem, where, as you all know, there has been deep division over political questions, particularly the status of the Supreme Court.

Israeli politics has been in a state of almost permanent crisis for what seems like years now. There's also the perception of weakness and distraction in the United States. And so I think the Iranians calculated, this is in fact a great moment to advance our objective of destroying Israel.

This is one of our best opportunities. The west is preoccupied with another war that is increasingly a bone of contention. So I agree with you, HR. I think unfortunately, they picked up the signal that this was a good time to go all in. And I fear very much that we're going to see far more harrowing scenes in the weeks ahead.

And as John hinted, it'll be very, very hard for Israel to avoid being represented in a negative light because that's what Hamas wants most.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah.

>> Niall Ferguson: Ideologically, it's extremely important at this point for Israel to appear in the worst possible light throughout the Arab world. And the extent to which, say, saudi media coverage has flipped in the space of 48 hours is really striking.

So I think in a way you've got to regard Hamas as really pawns on a chessboard, you said that as an economist, you look several moves ahead, that's not how non economists, in fact, see you.

>> Niall Ferguson: But if you think of it in strategic terms, Hamas are pawns, Hezbollah are pawns.

Let's not forget Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who are a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran. And the Iranian government, which for some reason we, our government says it has no evidence of its involvement.

>> H.R. McMaster: I can't believe.

>> Niall Ferguson: That stretches my credulity completely to breaking.

>> H.R. McMaster: But just a quick point on this.

But the Biden administration, just like the Obama administration, has been supplicating to the Iranians during the entire course of this administration. And of course, trying to revive the already dead nuclear deal, making concession after concession, again, not enforcing the sanctions that were in place. One of the reasons why Iran is not feeling much pressure these days is they're selling a hell of a lot more oil, and we weren't even doing the work to maintain the existing sanctions.

Then we just cut a deal to get them released, $6 billion to pay for hostages. I mean, I just think that these are, again, these symptoms of weakness, and you have the controversy surrounding the envoy to Iran. Who was apparently aiding and abetting Iran's influence network in the United States.

So of course they thought, okay, we don't have the resolve to respond, but John's point, and your point, Niall, is dead right. What they're gonna try to do is make Israel now look like the perpetrators and use this kind of moral equivalence, narrative and everything else. And I think it's very important to understand what we just heard in the last 24 hours is when Israel said, hey, get out to South Gaza to minimize the chances of civilian casualties.

What did Hamas say? No, stay there. When we did an operation against al Qaeda and Iraq and Talafar, and we told them to evacuate the civilians, al Qaeda in Iraq said, stay there. And we had to call the Mukhtars in and say, okay, this is gonna be on your hands.

If there are civilian casualties, we're holding you accountable for it, get people on the road now. And they began to evacuate them, but I think it's extremely important that this evacuation happened. And then, of course, the Israelis are gonna have to apply a significant amount of firepower in that dense urban area, but they're gonna have to work, obviously, to do that with discipline and discrimination.

 

>> John Cochrane: Just to add to what you said, it's always struck me as funny that our successive administrations in dealing with Iran have been all about nuclear and not at all about terror. Do whatever you want, but just nukes, nukes, nukes. Well, what happens? And I saw hilarious, a pathetic interview with a Hamas leader who said, yeah, the United States just paid $6 billion for a hostage from Iran.

We got some American hostages, we need some money. These things breed, but I wanna ask you the question, do we have? And I mean, we cuz we need to support Israel in this, they can't do it alone. Do we have what it takes to win a war? We've just been through Iraq, where we won the war, thanks to people like you, but we kind of lost the peace.

Afghanistan, where we won the war but didn't have, you said, get rid of Hamas. Well, we didn't get rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, where we were, I remember the first weeks of the Ukraine war. This is horrible, Russia must lose, we must win. And here we are at, well, sit around and maybe we'll give them something, maybe we won't, it's not clear that our objective is win this war.

And are we going to be able to do that for and with Israel, and it's gonna be ugly going forward, not just come to some negotiation, restraint, peace process, win this war?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yes, it's a great question, I mean, I think it has to do with Will, certainly we have the capability.

I think Afghanistan, as we've talked about on GoodFellows, I mean, I view it as a self-defeat. And I think it's extremely important for us to recognize the importance of winning. And we came up with these phrases in recent years, we just wanna bring this conflict to a responsible end.

There needs to be a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, even as Russia continues to occupy Ukrainian territory. And I think it's important to understand that in war, each side tries to outdo the other. And so if you're not in it to win, actually, it's counterproductive, and by the way, it's a criterion for just war to have a just end in mind.

That's why I think it's important to have words like destroy Hamas, that's a military objective. But, of course, then you have to turn that military objective into the consolidation of those gains and into a sustainable political outcome, which is another problem set. But that's what it's gonna take to win, and I think winning needs to come back into fashion.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, there's a lot more we could get into. For example, I wanna.

>> Bill Whalen: I should have said that beginning, by the way, feel free to applaud. There's a lot more we can get into. Niall, for example, I'd like to explain the difference between a militant and a terrorist because this keeps getting interchanged constantly.

The BBC apparently has a policy that if you attack Israel, you're not a terrorist, you're a militant, apparently, so I'd be curious about that. Let's end this segment, though, with a very quick question, there's a lot to talk about, there'll be a lot unfolding next three weeks. Give me one aspect of these hostilities that we'll be looking at the next three weeks, it's one facet of this very complicated situation.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I'll go first. We keep reading about a tremendous failure of Israeli intelligence.

>> Bill Whalen: Yes.

>> Niall Ferguson: And I'm not actually convinced that that's the story at all, I think there's reason to believe that Israel knew that something was coming from Gaza, they just underestimated the scale. The failure of intelligence was surely in Washington a week before, seven days before these attacks.

The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told an audience in the United States that the Middle east was remarkably quiet and he no longer had to devote much time to it. That's a shocking thing to reflect on and just wish that he had spent some time on it. So I think we need to focus on the failure of US intelligence, which seems to have been asleep, and HR raised an important question.

What exactly is going on with the administration's envoy to Iran, who is now under FBI investigation? Why is it that you can only read about the iranian influence operations and their penetration of the administration in one part of the New York Times? And that is Bret Stephens column, the story doesn't appear in the newspapers.

I think there is much, much more here than meets the eye, and we need to, I think we need to be digging deeper into what exactly has gone wrong in Washington, not in Jerusalem.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, John, what are you looking at?

>> John Cochrane: I think the important question right now is how does the Arab world especially but the international community respond?

Are we gonna play the same cycle we've played over and over again and now there's gonna be civilian deaths in the Palestinians, Israel must restrain and so forth? The Arab press, of course, is full of this stuff. Does there come a point when Saudi Arabia says we have allied ourselves with some awful people and say it much louder than that, it's time to jettison them and actually help the Palestinians?

Let's remember, no arab state allows palestinian refugees in their states. They don't want anything to do with these people, they have blockaded the borders from the other side every bit as much, in fact, much more so than Israel from their side. Where do they say, we wanna help the Palestinian people and get, and just avoid this cycle and start being honest with our own people about what's happening here?

And I hope the brutality of what happened is enough to shake us out of the usual cycle of, they called it mow the grass, except the grass got pretty tall this time.

>> Bill Whalen: General.

>> H.R. McMaster: I'll be watching the same thing. What is the reaction? What is the narrative?

And is there a growing recognition that the problem is with these jihadist terrorist organizations, not with, in this case, with Israel. I think it's really important to understand that the number one victims of, category of victims of jihadist terrorist organizations are Muslims. And it's really important to isolate them from these populations.

And I hope that, again, that we begin to realize now the folly as well of providing assistance into areas that are controlled by these terrorist organizations. Because all they do is divert that assistance, use it to consolidate their own power or divert it to violent purposes. So it's really important, I mean, I wonder how much EU money and other money from the Qataris and others that were just recently infused into Gaza were applied to this operation.

I think probably a significant amount.

>> John Cochrane: This is, like, crucial. These organizations do not live the way the city of Palo Alto lives by taxing its citizens and providing services. They live by foreign money coming in, and completely, it's a mafia. They completely dominate their own population, who largely hates them.

And if you disagree with Hamas and you live in Gaza, you're going to get a bullet through the back of your head really fast.

>> Bill Whalen: Let's shift now to the war at home and let's start with this campus, Stanford University, and something that happened the other day which I find just deeply disturbing.

A class of freshmen, a lecturer teaching a class of freshmen, asked the jewish students in the class to raise their hands. They raised their hands. He then asked them to stand up, they stood up. He then asked them to take all their possessions and march over to the corner of the room and sit in the corner of the room.

He then went over and said, now you know what it's like to be a Palestinian and you are a colonist like the Israelis. Professor McMaster, Professor Ferguson, Professor Cochran, you all have taught or are teaching at universities. Is this how you teach a class?

>> Niall Ferguson: It's outrageous, but in a sense, it's the culmination of years where activism has been tolerated amongst academics.

The great German sociologist, Max Weber, wrote an essay on what he called Wissenschaft, science as a vacation, in which he said that one must leave one's politics at the entrance to the lecture hall. And I've always abided by that injunction. In fact, it should be impossible for a student to tell how a professor votes.

In an ideal world, you keep your politics out of the classroom because it's an abuse of your position as a professor. The position you have relative to the students, one of superiority, to start imposing your political views on them. Well, all of that has been forgotten in that the current generation seem to pride themselves on explicit political activism in the classroom and on the campus.

And it's disgraceful, and this is its hideous culmination. I feel so sorry for the students in that class, for the way they were treated, particularly the Jewish students. It's outrageous, and I hope that there'll be disciplinary consequences. This university has come close to making itself a global laughing stock in recent years because of the ways in which this kind of behavior's being tolerated.

And I really, really hope that we've reached the point at which the people responsible for the university, the trustees, understand that there's been a terrible failure of governance, and it's not unique to Stanford. The same kind of nonsense has been going on in campuses all over the country.

And what I particularly object to, Bill, is the way in which the leaders of American universities have expressed themselves about the atrocities committed in Israel in the past week. It's been astonishing, the mealy mouthed word salads that have emanated from presidents here and there. This would, I think, be more explicable if they always issued word salads.

But I don't remember anything but clarion calls for action following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. There were equally unequivocal calls for political support for Ukraine when it was invaded by Russia. But for some reason, when we encounter acts of hideous violence against Israelis, acts that recall the worst excesses of the Holocaust, the beheading of babies, my God.

For some reason that can't elicit a condemnation from university leaders, this rot has to stop. And I feel extremely strongly about this. I came to the United States 20 years ago believing that I could make a contribution to American academic life and that American universities were the world's leading universities.

And I must say that the decadence that I have beheld in recent years, not only here but elsewhere, has been one of the most depressing things. I never thought that I would live to see illiberalism triumph, academic freedom be ground down in these great American universities. Something has to change, I hope these disgraceful scenes are the catalyst for this long overdue change in our universities.

 

>> Bill Whalen: John and HR, I wanna get your thoughts on whether or not you think we're maybe reaching a tipping point on this. And now let me throw Harvard under the bus for a couple of minutes. So, Harvard, this past week, what started the ball rolling at Harvard was the, quote, joint statement by Harvard, Palestine, solitary groups on the situation in Palestine.

How's that for brevity? This was 31 student organizations writing a letter contending Israel, I think we have a poll quote from it up there for you to look at. And you talk about the law of unintended consequences, what happens after this comes out is the following. First of all, a very mealy mouth written by committee letter by the newly installed president at Harvard.

What did she pick? A bad time to start working in Harvard. You then have Larry Summers, former treasury secretary, former Harvard president, former Goodfellows guest Larry Summers, who goes to, X, formally Twitter. And he tweets the following, quote, in nearly 50 years of Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.

What happens after that? CEO's start going on television, they wanna list, they wanna see the names of all the students in these organizations, why? They don't wanna hire them. So question, gentlemen. Question Neil, question John, question HR. Is this a tipping point? Is this what it's going to look like now?

Are your actions in college gonna have consequences?

>> John Cochrane: Well, in my view, Neil's opinions are mild.

>> Bill Whalen: Neil does tend to hold back.

>> John Cochrane: Cuz it's not just about statements made by university presidents, which we get emails all the time and we know we put them in the trash.

Our institutions, academic institutions, scientific institutions, philanthropic, more, and more government institutions have been taken over by a small, highly ideological, totalitarian, religious, political cult. And I mean totalitarian, their aim is to have power. Their aim is to silence the rest of us. They bleat about the end of democracy, but God forbid that voters actually vote in somebody that they don't like.

They have the reins of power and they are maintained by an ideology sometimes called woke. They are not gonna change, but they have been revealed for who they are, and this is one thing that gives me hope. What will change is, let's call them the limousine liberals. All of you, you're here because you participate in philanthropic affairs, so you know on a board of anything else, what it's like.

And the people who sort of, yes, well, they're a little bit too much, whatever, are waking up to pictures of parachutes coming down, yeah. Are waking up to the approval of barbaric acts and their role in it. And so I have hope that this is the moment, at least, when we have lots of friends on campus who are gently liberal.

So, yes, that's a little bit weird, but I don't wanna stand up, I don't wanna be seen with these people. Well, now you know who these people are, and I hope this will be a time of moral clarity, but they're gonna fight back. So it's the beginning, but certainly we all can do our part, and you who are donors, talk to your friends.

Why are you still giving to universities who approve of the horrific stuff, and who have been taken over by this group of people. Why do you support scientific societies which now do not allow discussion of basic questions like, are there two sexes as opposed to gender? It stands in, I guess, what the Marxists called the useful idiots, well, the useful idiots, I hope, are waking up, but it's not, obviously.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I think it cuts against the actual purpose of university. Obviously, we ought to be teaching our students to question orthodoxies rather than adhere to these orthodoxies. And I think it's important also to ridicule these people. I mean, do they really think that Hamas is gonna respect their pronouns?

 

>> H.R. McMaster: I don't think so.

>> H.R. McMaster: So I'd like to see a couple of South Park episodes on this. And draw out the internal inconsistencies in this kind of thinking.

>> Bill Whalen: One challenge here is you take an 18, 19-year-old boy or girl, man or woman, whatever you wanna sign them at, and they are intelligent, smart enough to get into a great university, but they don't understand nuance.

And when we look at the Middle East in particular, this is a very complicated history, it's a very nuanced history as well. So how do you put nuance into the brain of an 18 or 19 year old?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, it's certainly difficult if professors who are responsible for teaching the history of the modern Middle East are partisan, engaged on one side explicitly and use classes to advance their partisan views, that really can't be how it works.

I can remember being on an appointment committee which was looking to fill a position in modern Middle Eastern studies, and it was a revelation to me that nearly all the candidates appeared to have some strong partisan affiliation. So I think the problem is a broad one, that it's become acceptable to engage in political activism in academic jobs, and also to engage in political discrimination.

Because one thing that happens is that as it becomes generally acceptable, departments get taken over, and it simply becomes a monoculture because they won't hire anybody that isn't on their ideological side. Now, some people say to me, but universities have always been like this. They've always lent left or been liberal, but this isn't quite true.

What's really striking is how American universities have swung ever further to the left since the 1980s, if not since the 1960s. And this is demonstrable, we got clear data that showed credible ratios across the country. This isn't just in the elite schools where the ratios are, what, 14 to 1, Democrats to registered Republicans amongst professors.

And in some departments, you can't calculate the ratio because there are no conservatives and in fact, conservative professors now an oxymoron. It's an almost extinct species, they're gonna stuff us one day and put us in glass cases and say, here are the last three conservatives that they allowed onto the Stanford campus.

Some people say, but the pendulum will swing, but I'd love to see this pendulum, I don't know where it's located.

>> Bill Whalen: First, Neil, I wanna ask what I hope it's not too personal a question, but you and your family have recently moved to the UK.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, we are there on sabbatical-

 

>> Bill Whalen: Sabbatical-

>> Niall Ferguson: For a year, but I do find that more and more in California, and it may be equally true in Massachusetts, where we used to live. These ideological issues surface in the classroom, even amongst very young children, whether it's issues about race, about which we are sensitive, as we're a mixed race family.

I don't want the boys to be told that's the most important thing about their lives, I don't want them to be categorized. Will all the white children go and stand in a corner? That's exactly what I don't want to be happening in any class that my sons are in.

So I think we need to recognize that the problems that we're talking about here are not confined to the universities. They actually extend right down to the K through 12 education system. And this is really troubling, so I think we have a problem, and it's the ideological skewing of our entire educational system.

It's something that we at the Hoover Institution, I think, exist to counter. But we have a huge challenge on our hands because this process has gone so far. It extends through the entire educational system and right across the country.

>> John Cochrane: Let me answer that.

>> Bill Whalen: I'll let you jump in, first, I wanna point out what a great set of things, because Neil has to look at me, he cannot see John taking copious notes.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: He's not really allowed to take notes-

>> John Cochrane: The point of the notes-

>> Bill Whalen: That's against the rules.

>> H.R. McMaster: It's a running gag on this show.

>> John Cochrane: The notes is an effort to be brief, Neil. So if I don't get notes-

>> Niall Ferguson: How does that work?

>> Bill Whalen: You have three seconds John, go ahead.

 

>> John Cochrane: I cross out the ones I'm not gonna say, you said nuance, it's not a need for nuance, it's a need for basic facts. The way the system works is about censorship, if you're not allowed basic facts. If you're required to put people of color on your reading list, as now in many universities, you are, even if it's a class in general relativity, that those people cannot include Tom Sowell, Glenn Lowry, Walter Williams, people with plenty of basic facts.

So censorship of basic facts is the problem, not the need for nuance. Internal inconsistency, which HR mentioned, it's kinda funny to us, but this is how an ideological cult works. You stand up and say, the emperor has no clothes, over and over and over again. And the more the thing you say is ridiculous, the more you are then bought into being a member of the club.

The Soviets understood this, that's how they had the Chinese understand it. That's how ideology works, and Neil's exactly right. Look at the curriculum of any Masters in teaching program these days, which is a required degree in order to be able to teach in the public schools. And it is nothing but indoctrination and critical studies from the beginning to the end.

They understood something that our totalitarians of the 1930s understood perfectly. Get the schools first, wait a generation, you've won.

>> John Cochrane: And might I add, look at what happens in Palestinian schools where the math lesson is the sorta thing that the California math people who are equalizing our math, they would love this.

It's literally, if three, they don't use the word terrorist, but if three terrorists-

>> Niall Ferguson: Militants.

>> John Cochrane: If three militants kill four Jews and four more militants kill five jews, how many jews do you get killed? That's what's taught in their curriculum, and that's the approach we're taking here, too.

 

>> Bill Whalen: HR, should we add military academies to this conversation?

>> H.R. McMaster: Sure, yeah, I mean, I think we should, I could tell you more about West Point, but I was fired by two presidents, which I'm very proud of. Just bolstering my bipartisan credentials President Biden fired me from the board of visitors at West Point.

But I have confidence in our military academies, I think that they are under duress now. I think that the military is under duress by those who are advancing these reified philosophies within the military that really cut against military effectiveness and combat effectiveness. And those are these philosophies that teach people that they should judge one another by identity category rather than by their sense of honor, their courage.

They're willing to sacrifice all those elements of the warrior ethos that makes combat units effective or they're taught to arrange people. As we see in this recent incident here, on the scale of relative victimhood and this valorization of victimhood overall that I think robs people of agency. I mean what you need is military units who understand that they're gonna encounter hardships.

Soldiers join our army because they expect it to be hard, and they expect to encounter hardships and work together as part of a team in which the man or woman next to them is willing to give everything, including their own lives for each other. So I really am concerned about this, the politicization of our military and trying to infect our military with these same kind of ideas.

I don't think it's working, but there are a number of political appointees who are advancing this agenda, and I think it's something really to pay attention to.

>> Bill Whalen: So let's close out this segment with one way to change the status quo you were doing it physically, you've started university in Texas.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I came to the conclusion that it would be extremely difficult to solve this problem with the established institutions, and that came of twelve years at Harvard and then observing the scene here. I actually think we need new institutions, this is what America has always been good at, after all, once upon a time, Stanford was a new institution, by Oxford standards, it still is a new institution.

And I think creating new universities allows us to model new ways of protecting academic freedom, new ways of institutionalizing meritocracy. I spent some time earlier this year drafting a constitution for the new University of Austin, and this is a chance to reinvent the way a university runs itself.

And my dream, it's probably unrealistic, but my dream is that if we can build something new that runs itself on the foundation of academic freedom, the pursuit, unfettered, fearless pursuit of truth and of meritocracy. If we can build something like that, that will attract talent, it will attract the adventurous intellects, and that will exert some pressure on the incumbent institutions.

And so that's the experiment that I'm committed to running, and I really have some hope that we can do this. The enthusiasm with which this idea has been greeted, and it's only two years old, has been really heartening. So, yeah, I think that's the only way, I think it's the American way.

If you're dissatisfied with the status quo, the thing that distinguishes this country from the country where I grew up is Americans start something new, and that's the spirit that I find so exciting about this country.

>> Bill Whalen: John, you brought up money, don't give, is that the best way to push back?

 

>> John Cochrane: So how can we save some existing institutions? All of our institutions have methods of reform and control, universities are singularly protected from the market for corporate control if a corporation misbehaves, I was trying to say this politely. There's an easy answer, you buy up the stock, you fire the management, you run things better.

Universities don't have that, but they do have donors, boards of trustees, who can see what's happening and say, stop it. I'll tell you our policy, we've looked at our charitable giving, and if it has a diversity office, so called diversity office, we don't give them money, might consider the same sort of thing.

 

>> John Cochrane: Which means it's not about race, it's about politics, the diversity statement affair, which now is federal government, all federal grants require a diversity statement before you can do research. And it's not at all about race, it's about pledging your allegiance to a political agenda and that's what I don't want to give money to.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: I just want to make a quick plug for not giving up on existing institutions, though, I mean, I think there's some tremendous courses offered here. I know that condes course that she teaches with Stephen Kotkin is the most popular course and is quite different from some of the courses that we're talking about or the experiences, the bad experiences students have had.

And I think we have to give the students more credit, I'm really impressed with this younger generation, and I think that in the courses that I teach, I try to present a broad range of views. I have readings that really span the spectrum of each particular issue, and students have to reconcile those and come up with their own presentations and papers.

And I have not encountered in my classes any of these dynamics, and I think that there are ways to raise questions about the orthodoxy within class as well. Asking the question, does it really make sense to you to judge the person next to you based on their identity category rather than their character or what's in their heart or how empathetic they are?

I mean, so I think that there are ways to raise these issues in a way that is respectful and then gets really the students or encourages the students to question this orthodoxy.

>> John Cochrane: I gotta tell you, you just flunked your DEI statement. The official rubric on the University of California DEI statement says, if I treat people equally for the content of their character, not the color of their skin, f and your application just got kicked out.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Martin Luther King would have been failed also.

>> John Cochrane: Yeah.

>> H.R. McMaster: So many good company.

>> Bill Whalen: HR, thank you for finding a positive optimistic thing, HR is always the eternal optimist on this show, which adds to the nice balance, so thank you for ending on a positive note.

So we have about ten minutes to go, so it's now time to segue to the lightning round. Lightning round.

>> Niall Ferguson: Does it do that every week?

>> Bill Whalen: Does it, thanks for watching the show.

>> Niall Ferguson: I'm on the show I don't need to watch it.

>> Bill Whalen: I know it is kind of painful to watch yourself, so don't tie.

So anyway, you give us more money, we'll give you fancier graphics folks, how's that for you? Okay, so I have three lightning questions for you guys today.

>> Niall Ferguson: We don't have a diversity program on GoodFellows, you may have noticed.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yes.

>> Bill Whalen: I don't know we go from hair to less hair, no hair, that's kind of diverse.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: That's kind diverse kind of.

>> Bill Whalen: Exactly. All right, three non eradic questions for you from our Hoover donors. Question number one, what approach should the US take to limit Iran's ability to promote instability and disrupt international security? HR.

>> H.R. McMaster: I think we have to act, that we know what the return address is, we have to constrain the resources that they have available.

I do think when the sanctions were reimposed under the Trump administration, it had a significant effect on the resources that the IRGC had available. And then I think what we have to do is kind of restore deterrence, and that can be, I think, by imposing costs on Iran far beyond those that they factor into their decisions when they support these groups, and then I think, help organize and.

Plan heinous attacks and assaults like the one we just saw.

>> Bill Whalen: John?

>> John Cochrane: Take the terrorism seriously. There's a joke I heard last week, that Iran is ready to fight Israel down to the last Palestinian. Well, take that seriously in your negotiations with them.

>> Bill Whalen: Neil?

>> Niall Ferguson: Regime change.

Yes, regime change. It's what the Iranian people want. The Iranian people are weary of this tyranny. They're weary of this tyranny.

>> Bill Whalen: But we've been hearing this for. Decades and it's gonna come from within, the revolution is nigh, so where is it?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, we've had glimpses, frequent glimpses of popular dissatisfaction, but I think we've lost the self confidence that we had in the first cold war, to try and give proper support.

We simply watched and do almost nothing to help the opposition groups in Iran and nothing much. That's tragic because in many ways, the Iranian people are the most liberal people in the region. The only solution will be for this regime to fall, and I hope I live to see it.

 

>> John Cochrane: Can I add one of the hopeful things? I have to be HR optimistic. I saw a video of a Iranian soccer game where the government came out with the Palestinian thing and hooray, we killed a bunch of Jews and they were loudly booed by the audience. So there's hope.

 

>> Bill Whalen: There's hope, that's good. Question two, where do you go to get your Middle East news? Where do you go for television? What do you read? Neil?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, it's very hard to rely on the more established media outlets, from the BBC to the New York Times, I actually rely heavily on experts that I know I'm lucky enough to work with.

I'll give a shout out to brilliant Cambridge trained scholar Jay Mens, who saw this coming and who's consistently argued. He's the Middle East analyst at my advisory business Greenmantle, and he's consistently warned that this was coming. He was highly skeptical that the rapprochement of the Saudi rains would happen, and he feared exactly or more or less exactly what has come to pass.

I've come to realize that relying on mainstream media for Middle East coverage is quite hopeless.

>> Bill Whalen: John?

>> John Cochrane: Yeah, the New York Times' headline on the day of the terrorist attacks was Netanyahu declares war on Gaza.

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, there you go.

>> John Cochrane: So, yeah, I do read mainstream media, but I'll recommend Barry Weiss and the free Press.

She's just been on fire this week and remarkably insightful about what's going,.

>> Bill Whalen: H.R.

>> H.R. McMaster: So I go to a number of different sites that translate press from the region and curate it. One of them is done by Joel Rayburn, who's a visiting fellow here at Hoover. It's the American center for Levant Studies.

It's worth subscribing to that. The Middle East institute that Jay Menz is associated with as well does really good analysis. Anything on the syrian civil war? I go to the Institute for the Study of war, but for the broader analysis and dynamics, I go to Russell Berman's center here.

And if you look at the caravan and the essays that have appeared in the caravan at Hoover publication, I mean, I think they're quite prescient and were predictive of what we're seeing today as well. Like always, you can't just go to the mainstream media, I mean, there's occasionally good reporting.

There are great reporters who know the Middle east well, but you have to go, I think, to some of these sources that get more deeply into the region. And also those that employ people from the region who were sort of stringers for them and are plugged into the dynamics, that otherwise you miss at a higher level of reporting.

 

>> Bill Whalen: What was your reading when you were in the NSA director, NSC director, excuse me, when the national security advisor, what would you read every morning?

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, so I would still read those open source, of course, I would read everything from Hoover, but I also read other think tanks that I think highly of.

And then, of course, you read your classified material every day. I think our intelligence community does a fantastic job, actually, on the presidential daily brief. It really is well done.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, final question. We've been doing this show for three and a half years now, I think it's been.

We're in the hundreds now in terms of episodes. Name the one guest you'd like to have on the show, and I'll give you a lot of latitude, living or dead. Actually, let me start with my choice, I would choose either A Jesus of Nazareth. Because that answers a lot of questions after an hour with him, or Warren Buffett.

Just because Buffett's 93, he's still pretty sharp and this guy always sees what's coming around the corner, investment wise, so I'd like to spend an hour hearing what's on his mind. But, Neil, who would you like to hear from?

>> Niall Ferguson: I would love to have Winston Churchill on Goodfellows.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Wouldn't that be something?

>> H.R. McMaster: Let's #Predictable right there.

>> Niall Ferguson: Fair enough. Sometimes the predictable is the right answer. Would be an amazing show. Because there was a statesman who actually knew history, and because he knew history, was unafraid to take positions that were unpopular until vindicated. And I just feel the lack of the Churchillian spirit amongst today's leaders, is one of the great deficits of our time.

We lack that ability to think historically, to take courageous positions, to accept that it's the loss of the statesman to make difficult decisions and not necessarily be rewarded with popularity. Think of Churchill losing the election in 1945, that's after he'd led the nation to victory. There's nobody like that today.

If we could somehow resurrect Churchill on goodfellows and then keep him around, say, okay, after Goodfellows, could you be prime minister again? I mean, you're getting on a bit, but these days old people get to be really quite eminent in politics.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, John, we have Jesus of Nazareth and we have Winston Churchill.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: It's gonna be a great show.

>> John Cochrane: I have a long running fantasy where I bring back a founding father, and I think I'll choose Ben Franklin. And I take him around the Bay area. Well, we start on a plane flight tonight. I show him where we are, I take him around the bay area, and, he gets see a car, a freeway, an airplane, a computer.

He gets to see the seedy parts of the Bay area and then we bring him to Goodfellows and asks him, what do you think of what you've seen? And I think he would be amazed, they did not know that the system they brought forth would produce such material prosperity.

But I think there are things he would be horrified and we can only begin to guess what those are. Neil wants me to be brief, so.

>> Niall Ferguson: No, I'm enjoying this.

>> John Cochrane: But I think that would be a great show.

>> Bill Whalen: The problem with the Ben Franklin show is that you have Philadelphia, Ben Franklin with son of Philadelphia H, it would be.

 

>> Bill Whalen: It would be insufferable.

>> John Cochrane: Not to outdo the Brits, but the US FDA just banned a vaping, one of the major vaping products, which, of course, does allow you to have tobacco without all the carcinogens in it. Brilliant idea, guys.

>> Bill Whalen: There goes my weekend plants. All right, HR, you get the last word?

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, I'll be predictable, too. So I had a great professor and advisor at UNC Chapel Hill, the late Don Hagenbotham. Anybody know Don Higginbotham? Wonderful, wonderful man. Great historian of the American Revolution, and he wrote this great essay called Washington and Marshall. And so George Washington and George Marshall, who are bound together, I think, as paragons of the American military tradition and our professional military ethic, okay?

 

>> Bill Whalen: Guys, well done, great conversation. We're seeing you all. Couple days our next show is gonna be with Steve Cocking. Speaking of shy and retiring people.

>> Bill Whalen: Should be great. So that's it for this episode of Goodfellas, on behalf of my colleagues, Neal Ferguson, John Cochran, HR McMaster, all of us here at the Hoover institution, many of whom you probably can't see, depending on where the camera is pointed.

We hope you enjoyed the conversation and we'll see you soon. Till then, take care, thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch battlegrounds. Also available@hoover.org dot.