NYT’s Bret Stephens on Israel, 4 Years of GoodFellows, and An Invite to JK Rowling

>> Pres. Joe: I told him, Bibi, and don't repeat this, but you and I are going to have a 'come to Jesus' meeting.

>> Speaker 1: I'm on a hot mic here.

>> Pres. Joe: That was good.

>> Bill: It's Tuesday, April 2, 2024, and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whelan, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow. I'll be your moderator today, bringing you very good news. All three of our good fellows are with us today. And our three good fellows would be the historian Neil Ferguson, the economist John Cochran, and former presidential national security advisor, historian, geostrategist, all around good guy.

Lieutenant General, HR McMaster, Neil, John and HR are all Hoover senior fellows. So, gentlemen, two topics we're going to explore today. Our b block, we're going to celebrate our anniversary. This is the fourth anniversary of GoodFellows, our first show is April 1st, 2020. Here we are four years of one day later, let's talk about what we've learned in the time of doing this show.

But our first segment, we're gonna talk about foreign policy and domestic us politics. And joining us for that conversation is Brett Stevens. Brett Stevens is a New York Times columnist, he writes weekly on foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. He also once a week does a published conversation on current affairs with his friend, New York Times colleague and sparring partner Gail Collins, a former editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post.

Brett Stevens also was the Wall Street Journal's foreign affairs columnist, for which he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Mister Stevens is the author of the book America and the new Isolation of the Coming Global Disorder in 2022. As a footnote, Brett Stevens, per the government of Russia is barred for life from going to that country.

Brett Stevens, welcome to GoodFellows.

>> Bret: It's good to be here.

>> Bill: So a lot to get into, Brett, today. But let's begin with a conversation about relationships, specifically the relationship or lack there between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. The two of apparently do not get along, unless I am mistaken.

And the use of the word asshole is now a term of endearment, which apparently Mister Biden said of Mister Netanyahu in a private meeting. It's not the first time, Brett, that an American democratic president has wanted to see the end of Mister Netanyahu's rule in Israel. Bill Clinton tried to get Shimon Perez elected back in 1996.

Barack Obama dispatched a field worker to meddle at Israel's 2015 vote. What's different this time, though, when we look at the relationship between Biden and Netanyahu?

>> Bret: Actually not a lot, my own view is that what Biden is doing, is politics that are too clever by half the idea, which I think was adopted by Chuck Schumer as well in his speech to the Senate.

 

>> Sen. Chuck: I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision making process about the future of Israel.

>> Bret: That you can preserve some baseline democratic party support for Israel by distinguishing between support for the country and feelings about the prime minister, who is not everyone's cup of tea, including my own.

But one of the jobs of being a political leader is that you have to get along with foreign counterparts, not all of whom you necessarily are going to like the administration. This administration made a terrible mistake very early in its term by trying to put a lot of daylight between itself and the rulers of Saudi Arabia.

They found that two years later they were going hat in hand to Riyadh because they realized that Saudi Arabia, just like most other countries, have foreign policy options. And not all of them necessarily involve being friendly to the United States. The United States doesn't simply have a values based relationship with Israel.

We have an interest based relationship, we share a lot of technology. We share increasingly economic ties, and most importantly, we have strategic ties and shared enemies, whether they're in Damascus, Beirut, Sanaa, or most of all, in Tehran. So what I think Biden is doing by personalizing these differences is bad strategy for the United States.

It's also bad politics, because if the aim ultimately is to push Netanyahu aside in favor of a more pliable or pleasant israeli leader, it's had the opposite effect on israeli politics. Calling for, when Chuck Schumer called for Bibi to effectively step down, it ended up doing more to help Bibi's case domestically than anything else that's happened in the last six months.

So at every level, I think this is a serious foreign policy mistake, and I don't think it will reap any benefits for the president politically or for his administration strategically.

>> Niall: Brett, I began this year asking who would the biden administration fail to deter in 2024, since they'd failed to deter the Taliban in 2021 and Putin in 2022 and Iran in 2023?

I didn't expect that the answer would be Israel. But it feels as if this strategy isn't working even in its own terms, as you've just said. Apart from the fact that it's not a great look for the US to be saying who should be prime minister of any allied country.

But what happens next if they can't stop Israel pursuing its strategy in Gaza. Can they stop Israel opening another front by attacking Hezbollah on the other side of the border with Lebanon, because when I was in Israel a few weeks ago, that seemed to be a distinct possibility.

And we're already seeing what might be signs that Israel is ready to escalate against other antagonists. Does the Biden administration have any way of stopping that from happening? What's your take?

>> Bret: My sense is, what they're really trying to do is stop the Israelis as it is kind of shaping the nature of the conflict.

So the conversations that the administration has been having with the Israelis about Rafa aren't a matter of whether Israel goes in. But rather how it goes in, how many civilians can be taken out of Rafa before an operation begins and some very sort of tactical trade offs between moving civilian, a moving civilian population from one corner of Gaza to another.

And what it means in terms of the effectiveness of the ultimate operation against Hamas. And by the way, I think that's a perfectly reasonable conversation for the administration to have, I wish they would be having it a little more privately. There is, in effect, a war already happening between Israel and Hezbollah.

Hundreds of so-called Radwan special forces of Hezbollah have been killed. Thousands, hundreds or thousands of Hezbollah missiles and rockets have hit northern Israel. 60,000 Israelis, which is by, in American terms, would be a huge number of people, like millions of people, are living outside their homes. So there's a war going on, the question is how it escalates, and when it escalates, I think that's a consideration that's on people's minds.

I can tell you from some conversations I've had with Israeli leaders that one serious consideration for them is the return of the school year in September. There is a strong feeling that Israelis who live in towns like Kiryat Shmona up in the north should be able to send their children to their local schools once the school year resumes.

And I think that's part of the kind of not just the strategic calendar, but the political calendar. I think for the administration, on the contrary, the pregnant question is before or after November's election. So that's a two month gap that I think is fairly significant. Israel wants a war with Hezbollah.

The question is when and will they have the diplomatic, political, and above all, military backing that they require for an operation? That is, I think, and I'd love to hear from the General about this, but I think there's going to be orders of magnitude more serious than what we're seeing now with Hamas and Gaza.

 

>> H.R.: Hey, no, I agree, Brett. I think they've already made the decision to go into southern Lebanon. They have to do it because I think the lesson from October 7th is you cannot have a terrorist organization on your border that has the kinds of capabilities that Hamas has.

And as you've already alluded to, Hezbollah's capabilities are orders of magnitude greater in terms of 150 or more thousand, 150,000 missiles and rockets. But also a pretty significant paramilitary, really military force with conventional military capabilities like mortars and artillery and even some mobile protected firepower. So I think what Israel's already decided to do is to do that next.

I think likely what we're going to see is really a option A is Rafa now, option b is Rafa after Ramadan. I think the approach that the IDF should take is exactly the opposite of what the US administration is saying. I mean, there's no such thing as these precision raids in a dense urban area against a terrorist organization that is using the population for human shields.

And we should be behind helping and encouraging to evacuate that civilian population. Screen those who are departing, take all the biometric data from all the military age males. Move them into an area where you have the humanitarian assistance, where they're saying, no, I don't want another frozen chicken.

And make it clear that if you're pro Palestinian, you should be anti Hamas. And to launch a much more effective information campaign. I think it's likely to happen right after Ramadan because I know a lot of, some of my friends that are in the IDF, in the reserves, they're on leave now till the end of May.

And so something's going to happen at the end of May. Then, as you mentioned, phase two of, I think, the same war from the Israeli perspective is Southern Lebanon. And the big lesson from the 2006 war is, guess what? You can't do this with just precision weapons. Now the IDF is knocking the hell out of Hezbollah right now, because Hezbollah, to conduct these rocket attacks, are exposing the numbers of their fighters.

And whenever the IDF responds, they respond a lot heavier. And Hezbollah has taken a lot of casualties. What Israel has also decided is that this is a multi theater war, including, obviously, Syria. And so they're no longer playing nice with the Russians, thank goodness, in Syria in the hope that there'll be a moderating factor on the Iranians.

And they're starting to take out the supply chain associated with this missile capabilities. And the IRGC, which is in the process of assembling a proxy army on the border of Israel to destroy Israel. That's what they're doing in Syria, and they're mobilizing people from Afghanistan, the hashtag militias in Iraq.

And so this latest strike against the consulate, hey, from my perspective, it's overdue. So I think what you're gonna see is a massive offensive, as much as they can muster into southern Lebanon because you can't do it from the air. And the most capable armored brigade for the IDF is now conducting training.

They're back in northern Israel.

>> Bret: There's also a historical lesson, general, which is that Israelis have internalized the belief that was powerfully reinforced on October 7th that there is a first mover advantage. 1967, Israel moved first with preemptive strikes that destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian air forces. They won a sweeping victory in six days.

1973 their hand was stayed by the Nixon administration from preemptive strikes. They suffered horrific casualties in the first week or so of the Yom Kippur war. And it was the most traumatic military experience in Israel's history all the way up until the events of October 7th. So I think as they're looking at Lebanon, they're thinking that better we go first and have that advantage than allow Hezbollah to essentially shape the opening chapters of the war.

There's one other factor that's interesting, and you must have seen this, Neil, when you were up there. So if you had gone to the northern border of Israel, looking out at Lebanon, say, a few years ago, you would have noticed that it's sort of a kind of a forest and brush.

There's a lot of dense foliage and cover up there. You go up now, much less of it. A lot of the territory has been burned by falling rockets and other munitions. And just as 60,000 or so Israelis have fled the north, something like 80,000 Lebanese have fled the south.

So that if in the event of a war, there would be fewer Lebanese civilians interposed between Israel and its targets with Hezbollah.

>> John: So I'd like to ask two questions. Israel seems to be losing the propaganda war. Whereas in fact, so the lesson of this thing that the actual numbers I've seen is that civilian to combatant deaths.

This is lower than anybody has ever done running a urban campaign, especially against a terrorist foe that is deliberately using its population as human shields. The takeover of the hospital that was just in the news really struck me because I read the IDF tweet pointed out correctly. They either killed or captured thousands of terrorists who were in a hospital deliberately using patients and doctors as human shields with zero civilian casualties.

Yet even the Wall Street Journal reporting it was on what a terrible, catastrophic thing this was. Israel is doing a remarkable job, but of course, is accused throughout the world of genocide against Palestinians, even by our own conservative media. This propaganda war is very important on their loss of diplomatic support for what they're doing.

And the second question, which is somewhat related, our administration is calling what's the long run answer here? Our administration has this idiotic idea of a two state solution which will hand to the Palestinian authority some sort of two state solution. And that will solve. I don't think I need to go on about why I think that idea is idiotic in the current circumstance.

Nobody in Hamas is asking for we want a two state solution, and it's obviously not going to work. Yet there was a previous sort of a plan which was get rich first and get politics later, become Dubai on the Mediterranean, and then we'll talk about your own country, which seems like the only potential long run plan.

So how are they losing? They gotta win, get back the propaganda war if they're gonna keep doing it. Otherwise they're gonna be all alone here. And this, we need some sort of credible, long run plan that no one seems to articulate, and certainly not our administration. What's your view on either of those?

 

>> Bret: Look Israel doesn't need to win the propaganda war, Israel needs to win the war. At some level, the propaganda war was lost before anything hostilities had even opened. And you saw that on October 7, students at Harvard University were already preemptively blaming Israel for anything that would happen in the war.

Israel is guilty first by the nature of what it is in a kind of tragic but predictable repetition of old fashioned antisemitism. The audience that Israel needs to win over is not students at Brown or Stanford or Harvard. I think the audience that really matters to Israel is in Riyadh, for example, because whatever the Saudis are saying in public, what they really want is for Israel to demonstrate its effectiveness as a country by getting rid of a shared enemy.

Hamas is the cat's paw of iranian power on the Mediterranean along with its friends in Lebanon and further south in Yemen. They want to see it gone, they want to see it defeated. President el Sisi in Egypt, not Mexico, Egypt, bad joke. We get it in Egypt wants to see Hamas defeated because Hamas is an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

>> John: But not enough to let Palestinians into Egypt to hide from the war, I mean, there's a lot of shared culpability here on the civilian suffering.

>> Bret: Look, I think that arab states ought to know that if they just try to hand back the Gaza problem to Israel, it's going to open a door to hell in their countries as well.

Not only because they want to see Hamas firmly defeated, but because continued suffering in Gaza among the civilian populations is a domestic problem for them. My proposal, and I know it sounds fanciful, but my proposal, which is kind of a 20 year idea, is an arab mandate for Gaza that could become an arab mandate for all of Palestine.

I certainly don't as a someone right of center person in this conversation, I'm certainly not against a Palestinian state. I just want to make sure a Palestinian state is dedicated to living in peace with its neighbors and pursues prosperity for its people. So I'd like to see a Palestinian state roughly on the model of the United Arab Emirates, which came from virtually nothing, a kind of a dusty British colony in 1970, to what it is today, to say that should be the long term goal for the Palestinians.

But that requires two things, it requires the absolute defeat of Hamas by Israel, and it requires major Arab investment, not just economic investment, but also political and security investment. It is much better for the Palestinians not to have either Hamas or effectless and incompetent Palestinian authority, but to have an Ab force in there that can maintain security, that has legitimacy, and that has an idea about how to create zones of prosperity for Arab speaking people.

And that should be, I think that's a goal that every side can actually get behind. With enough american diplomatic muscle, we could, for instance, forgive Egypt's debts in exchange for their participation. We could make promises to Saudi Arabia, which we were pursuing before October 7 with respect to nuclear energy for Saudi Arabia, security guarantees.

This is a deal that's entirely possible, but it requires some real imagination and diplomatic muscle. And it's not going to be enough for Arab states to wash their hands of Gaza or for an American administration to kind of hem and haw about its feelings about Israel versus the Palestinians.

There needs to be some kind of kiss and jury and clarity about what the outcome is here that's been missing but I'm hoping we on this podcast or elsewhere can provide some of it.

>> Bill: All right, let's end the segment with this question, Brett, you've suggested a solution, and that's creating in effect, a new UAE in the Middle East.

HR, you suggested the war is going to expand into southern Lebanon. A question, Brett, for you in the panel looking to November who has the greater political longevity? Is it Joe Biden or Bibi Netanyahu? Who would you wager on?

>> Bret: Bibi, I think it's always been a bad bet to bet against him.

He's been written off many times before, look, I'm no friend of Bibi Netanyahu, I don't think we've spoken in a number of years. I've called years ago arguing that he should step down but you don't understand your opponent unless you can respect his strengths and there is no one in Israel today who has his political skills.

So I think it would be as foolish for me to write him off now as it would have been to write him off many years ago. I personally have grave doubts about whether President Biden will be in office come January. So if I'm a betting man, I know where I'm placing it.

 

>> Bill: John, who do you bet on?

>> John: Well, certainly if you want to ask for longevity, it has to be B in support of his population. Yes, I love the way Brett phrased that, that Biden won't be in office, not necessarily betting on who will be in office.

Very, very cleverly worded, Brett.

>> Bill: HR.

>> H.R.: Well, Brett knows a lot more about this than I do in terms of internal Israeli politics but based on the fragmentation and the personalization of Israeli politics, I don't think there's anybody else who can put a coalition together and he's demonstrated his ability to do that multiple times.

So I would say he's going to have a greater longevity.

>> Bill: Neil, you get the last word.

>> Niall: I'll take the other side of it actually, I'm more sympathetic to Bibi Netanyahu than the new Brett. But I think it's going to be extremely hard to keep this coalition in one piece in the course of this year.

Whereas I actually think Biden's going to get reelected, though it's going to be close. So I'll take the other side of it and we'll see whose crystal ball works better.

>> Bret: I hope, you know.

>> John: We also all hope and I think we stumbled over this one because the long run interest of nations should not be wrapped up in a particular president winning a narrow election.

And I hope for a US policy and an Israeli policy that looks at long run interests more than particular personalities.

>> Bill: Rhett Stevens, you have to run, thanks for joining us today. We truly enjoy your columns and come back again soon, please.

>> Bret: Thank you so much.

>> Bill: All right, gentlemen, onto the b block and that is happy anniversary, GoodFellows.

It was on April 1, 2020, that the first episode of GoodFellows debuted. Let me read to you the summary of that, gentlemen, the summary reads as follows. Quote, in the inaugural episode, the Hoover GoodFellows have a lively discussion about how much civil liberties can be sacrificed in an emergency, what steps should be taken to prevent the health crisis from becoming an economic and financial crisis, and whether the decoupling of the US China relationship will accelerate.

Well, here we are four years and a day later. There's no longer a quote unquote health crisis, so I am curious as if you think that Covid is coming roaring back in some form. Neil Ferguson, the author of Doom, that a coupling of the US China relationship is still up for the debate.

Let's talk about what we've learned in the last four years since we began this sheltered in place Covid experiment. HR give us one big geopolitical takeaway from the four years of doing goodfellows.

>> H.R.: I think the biggest takeaway is that the perception of weakness is provocative to this axis of aggressors that we're seeing.

Coalesce because of that perception of weakness. And I think there are many examples of it. But I would begin really with the disastrous self defeat and surrender in Afghanistan as a direct line between that and the statement of their mutual love for one another, between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, the partnership with no limits.

And declaring a new era of international relations where they're in charge and we're done. And the reinvasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 and that crisis that is now cascaded into the Middle east is also related to that perception of weakness. We've talked a little bit about that in terms of the perception of weakness in the Israeli government, but in the Biden Netanyahu relationship and the US inability to sustain support for Ukraine.

I think all that factored in to the October 7 mass murder attacks on Israel and the conflagration we see now really across the Middle east. The question, I think, if we're looking at the next anniversary, the fifth year anniversary, as we look back, will be, will these crises cascade further into other regions, especially in the Pacific region?

And I think the chances for that are quite high. And the danger zone, I think, is increasingly centered in the South China Sea.

>> Bill: Niall, you're nodding your head.

>> Niall: Yeah, I think that's right. It's fascinating to look back four years, and we were, of course, preoccupied for much of our first year as GoodFellows with the pandemic.

But I remember we discussed that there was a geopolitical dimension to the pandemic precisely because it had originated in China. And already in the early phase, there was a kind of argument about who was handling it better. And youll remember that it was widely claimed that the United States was handling it disastrously badly, and China was top of the class.

So much so that some states and most European countries, with the exception of Sweden, tried to copy the Chinese method of locking people in their homes. Four years later, its clear that, in fact, the Chinese approach was not the best or right approach and that countries in the west that tried to copy it ended up doing probably about as much harm as good and maybe more harm than good.

And the geopolitics has turned out very differently from, I think, what most people in 2020 expected. China now looks in a significantly weaker position than it was four years ago. And the United States has come roaring through this test not without casualties, of course, but in terms of the impact on its economy.

And here I'm throwing it to you, John. The impact has been, to use an overused word in economics these days, transitory. The impact of the pandemic was transitory. The impact of the fiscal overshoot was not transitory. So, John, tell us what you think the economic takeaway is four years on.

 

>> John: Well, give three answers. I'll try to be brief, Bill. Of course, inflation, exactly as we told you. Drop $5 trillion of money on people, and you're going to get inflation. Thank you both Biden and Trump, for doing it. Just in time for my book to be published.

The big debate of whether the economic recession was going to be v shaped or l shaped was also resolved in favor of good old common sense that a pandemic is like a snowstorm. Everything shuts down, and then it comes right back again, as you would have thought, the minute the pandemic is over.

So it kind of reinforces classic, simple lessons that your grandmother would have taught you over the sort of large, over complicated views that most people have on macroeconomics. I think the big lessons are domestic political, having to do with the pandemic itself and the catastrophic policy response that can pending.

First of all, let us say out loud and not forget, this was a lab leak of an engineered virus. We have just had the first deliberately engineered virus to reproduce in humans, released on the human population. Accidentally, yes, but that's where it came from. But the response was way over the top.

The chinese response might have been appropriate if 10% of the people who got it died, but the number turned out to be 0.1% of the people who get it died, concentrated among old people. That response was completely inappropriate for what it was and how slow it took for people to figure out what our own Jay Bhattacharya figured out in a couple of weeks.

That this was, in fact, relatively minor in terms of death rates and did not warrant the response that will be warranted if the next one is a 10% death rate. But then the incompetence of our public health bureaucracies, imposing lockdowns, denying obvious science, and then lying to us.

The extent to which the CDC and the FDA have been lying to us, and then censoring people who, in a democracy and in a time of great confusion, the ability of people to say, hey, wait a minute, the evidence is wrong on you. Masks don't actually work. Yes, it did come from a chinese lab leak.

Locking down schools is a disastrous thing to do for learning of young people which will have no benefit to these things, were all said and censored. So the incompetence of our public health authorities and the political censorship of dissenting views that erupted afterwards, I think is one of the worst things to have come out of the era and one of the biggest lessons.

 

>> Bill: Now, Niall, what's your takeaway? Since you're sort of our intellectual swiss army knife on this show? You can go in any direction you want. But I'm kind of curious about culture, Neil.

>> Niall: Well, I think I look back on the conversations I had in 2020 with Nicholas Christakis, the great polymath, whose book was the first to be published on the pandemic in 2020.

And he made a great point, which I had my doubts about, and that was that we would roar back to normal social life and have the roaring twenties at some point after the mortality had come down. And he correctly predicted that there would be a series of waves, but then after maybe wave three, there would be a remarkably rapid return to normal and this would be accompanied by a kind of party atmosphere.

And he was right about that. No, it was swift. And you only need to look at Taylor Swift concerts or any other example of massive gatherings to realize how right he was. And his analogy was with the post 1900 1819 influenza, followed by the roaring twenties. He got that right.

And we kind of look around us. I do this periodically, and I think how amazingly quickly we returned to flying around the place and gathering in huge numbers. I was just at a wedding, and Buenos Aires, which was one of the most spectacular weddings I've ever attended, with young people mobbing one another on the dance floor.

It was great to see. And it just made me think four years ago that all seemed to be over when it wasn't. And hats off to Nick Christakis. His analysis of the cultural consequences was right. They really were transitory.

>> John: You got to come back to Palo Alto, where it's still fashionable to wear a surgical mask outdoors, although often just below the nose.

But it's a great, great sign of

>> Bill: Not to mention the kind of cheap cloth mask. It doesn't really stop anything at. It's completely useless.

>> Niall: Somebody spotted at the time that that mask wearing was really a kind of virtue signaling, it was really taking a position of political alignment rather than doing anything that was remotely likely to stop an infection.

Not that there won't be another pandemic at some point, that seems extremely likely, but I think the history of pandemics tells you that they're sufficiently spaced out that you kind of forget all about what you learned. And we aren't doing anything to learn, by the way, from the mistakes that were made.

John is absolutely right, what he says about our public health bureaucracy, and what is shocking to me is complete reluctance to learn any lessons from the mistakes of 2020. Which means that if finally there is another pandemic, those mistakes will all probably get repeated, John, which is a really dismal prospect.

 

>> John: Which I agree entirely, and it might be worse, because the next one might kill 10% of the people. Don't you think, culturally, this is one more nail in the coffin of elites don't know what they're doing. Average Americans look around, and with the exception, by the way, of the vaccine, the warp speed vaccine was really a remarkable success of both technology and public policy.

Even if it doesn't work perfectly, it really did let this thing-

>> H.R.: And logistics, John.

>> John: And the logistics.

>> H.R.: Way just to get it out, what Gustave Perna did, by all-

>> John: That was beautiful. So, not everything was awful, there were a few beautiful things, but the general sense of the vast swath of America who drives Ford F150 to the Walmart parking lot, that the elites in charge don't know what they're doing.

And if the New York Times can't figure out why they're voting for Trump, that might be part of a cultural zeitgeist there. Don't you think that had to do with that? That certainly was one more thing that they'll point to.

>> H.R.: Well, it fit into a pattern, right?

I mean, I think people who have lost confidence in our democratic principles and institutions and processes, and I just tell our viewers there's a great new program here at Hoover on strengthening institutions. And I think it was just another body blow, I mean, from the financial crisis, to the unexpected length and difficulty of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hey, toss in an opioid epidemic, and then look at the effects of social media, right? And a model, a business model that shows people more and more extreme content, more and more clicks and more advertising dollars. And then the pandemic, and then.

>> John: Let's say it's not really institutions, it's the busy body, self-appointed elites who are trying to run things.

I think American institutions are still quite strong, they held through the last election, which was pretty-

>> Bill: No, but I think, John, they buckled during the pandemic. He didn't trust the government's policy, he didn't trust big pharma, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory goes on. Let's exit this segment, gentlemen, let me ask you a question that appeals to either your vanity or your contrition.

The question is this, name one thing that you got right over the course last four years, or if you'd like to cop up to something that you got wrong. HR, something you got right or something you got wrong.

>> H.R.: Well, I think what we all got right were the severe consequences of the surrender and disengagement, humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The consequences associated with strengthening jihadist terrorist organizations like ISIS K, that just perpetrated this attack in Moscow. Like the geostrategic consequences of this perception of weakness, which I mentioned already, and the reinvasion of Ukraine. And so, I think we kinda got that right. In terms of what we got wrong is, I really thought, and I think I mentioned this on a program maybe about a year ago, that the Biden administration would change its approach to the Middle East, cuz it would have to, right?

Because of the degree to which Iran was becoming increasingly aggressive. And you remember the Biden administration came in supplicating to the theocratic dictatorship in Iran, and not enforcing the sanctions and working through, like the Russians, as a trusted interlocutor, really? So I thought, there's no way that's gonna continue, but they proved actually pretty determined to continue our self destructive policies in the region.

And still, I think, are reluctant to take the kind of actions necessary to confront Iranian aggression.

>> Bill: Neil, you may crow or you may confess.

>> Niall: I'll do a bit of both. I'll crow briefly, when I was writing the book Doom, I was also doing this show, and I remember having to make a prediction about how things would turn out at the end of the book.

And that was writing in the fall of 2020. And the thing I got right was that it would turn out much better for the US and much worse for China than it seemed at the time. That was a good call, and it was a risky call cuz I remember making it and going to press before we even had the phase three trial results back from the vaccine makers.

The thing I got wrong, and I got it wrong, GoodFellows, more than once, was that I thought Donald Trump was finished after January 6th. I was wrong about that. And I was wrong about another thing, too. I remember thinking, I'm never gonna go back to that crazy life of traveling all the time.

This has shown me the joy of being in one place, and I'm really gonna stick to that. Well, you know gentlemen, that I've utterly failed in that respect, I'm back. If anything, it's even worse than it was pre pandemic. So, I got two things at least wrong, and probably many more that listeners can remind me of.

 

>> Bill: Neil, I look at your life right now and I think of the travel scene in Borat, where he goes from Kazakhstan to New York and he goes through about 50 countries on the way.

>> Niall: You're talking about my most famous former student, Sacha Baron Cohen.

>> Borat: My name is Borat, I like you, I like six, it's nice.

 

>> John: I think of Up in the Air with George Clooney.

>> Niall: I watched that movie on a plane, and I knew my life had gone wrong. And here I am in Zurich, having been to Buenos Aires, and, where am I going next? I don't even know where I'm going, Hong Kong, I'm going to Hong Kong next.

And this has to stop, but it's gotta be easier than to have another pandemic. I need to find a better way to slow down than that.

>> Bill: All right, John, let's close out the segment, something you got right, something you got wrong.

>> John: I'll take credit for inflation and the V-shaped recession.

 

>> Bill: Good call.

>> John: I even wrote the book and I was one of the earliest ones to say, hey, here comes the inflation, just on basic fundamentals. And that this pandemic will be quite different from every other recession that we've seen, that it's like a snowstorm will come back wrong.

Like Neil, I thought Trump was finished, and I thought hard about why I got that wrong. And I think there's two things that I underappreciated. One was that the Democrats would go on this law fair strategy of using the criminal justice system to persecute the guy. I didn't think they would do that, talk about norms and institutions of America that are being torn to shreds.

Of course, cuz the perfectly predictable response is that Trump supporters, you look at the polls, the minute they go after him, boom, his support goes way up. They may not like Trump and they may kind of disapprove of what happened at the last election, but they see their country being torn apart like this and they are unhappy, and voting for him is what does.

The other thing that I missed about Trump, we have to recognize what an amazingly talented politician he has become. This is the greatest political recovery, certainly since Nixon, but probably given the state of the way things were, bigger. And the New York Times was making fun of him for it, for going out and making politicians bend the knee and give him their endorsement.

Yeah, that's what Robert Caro would have said of Lyndon Johnson, he got the Republican Party in his pocket by hook. Crook, by good means or bad means, he has turned into the most consequential politician of our current era, which, like it or not, is. And they're preparing to actually do things in office next time.

So it's an underappreciated change in his personality and what he's been doing that I didn't see, I thought he was finished as well.

>> Bill: So the one thing I got right was my instinct that it would be incredibly wonderful experience to share a Zoom screen with you guys every other week can bask in your wisdom.

It's been tremendous gentlemen. What I got wrong is I didn't think this would last for four years because we started this as really an experiment, and frankly, we had you guys held hostage. John, you were trapped here in Palo Alto, I think HR, you might have been trapped in Newport beach, and, Niall, you were in some undisclosed location in Montana battling wildlife as our members.

So it's been a fun ride, gentlemen, I hope we have many more shows ahead of us. So congratulations, happy anniversary, by the way a fourth year anniversary, gentlemen. I looked it up, I kid you not, it's either fruit, flowers, or appliances.

>> Niall: I'll take a firearm.

>> H.R.: We also got to acknowledge Scott, who's our fantastic producer, nobody gets to see.

And the fact that this was Shauna Farley's idea to put us together, man, I've had a blast, I learned so much from you guys and from our audience, man, our audience is fantastic. The questions that they ask and the way they engage, it's really been tremendously rewarding to do it.

So thanks.

>> John: Shana, whose idea this all was, thanks for getting us together. Bill, who we just come in and blather, Bill and Scott, behind the scenes, do a lot of work to make this thing. And my two fellows, this has been a tremendous pleasure to force you guys to nail your feet to the floor.

Our listeners don't know how hard it is to find a time when these two, particularly, are able to come talk, to Niall your feet to the floor and have a consequential conversation. These two brilliant guys, once a week or two has been a great pleasure my last four years.

 

>> Bill: Well said, and happy anniversary, GoodFellows.

>> Niall: Question is, do we need to seek re-election after four years?

>> Bill: This is like Putin's Russia.

>> Bill: You're here for life, actually, it's a hotel California.

>> H.R.: 87.6% of viewers say that we should continue, it's the Hotel California, you can check out anytime, but you can never leave.

 

>> Bill: All right, gentlemen, on to the lightning round.

>> Lightning round.

>> Bill: So this is my opportunity to ask our viewers to send questions to Niall, John, and HR, either individually or collectively, and you do that by going to hoover.org/askgoodfellows. Send your questions, we'll try to get them into the lightning rounds ahead.

Let's do something different this week, let's do one viewer question to each of you. So let's begin. HR, the question to you from Djeven, or Djeven, I apologize for getting the name wrong, in Ontario, Canada, he or she writes, quote, counterfactual question. General McMaster, what if Ukraine was granted NATO member status at the 11th hour in February 2022?

 

>> H.R.: Yeah, I don't think Russia would have invaded, and I think actually there would have been. I would like to go back even further in time and just provide them with additional defensive capabilities without them becoming a NATO member. And I think if Ukraine had the capabilities in February 22 that they have now, I think Russia would not have invaded again, it's the perception of weakness as provocative.

I know it's the lightning round, but I'll just say I think we're the actions of the Biden administration that were meant to allay the security concerns of Putin.

>> Pres. Joe: Essentially green lighted the invasion in February of 2022.

>> Bill: Niall, John, you wanna play the counterfactual game?

>> Niall: I agree with HR, but there were so many things done wrong in 2021 that positively encouraged Putin to make his move.

It's not at all difficult to imagine a different administration, suppose Trump had won, doing the things that would have deterred him. So it's a good counterfactual question because it's plausible, the alternatives are plausible, and you wouldn't actually have needed to give Ukraine NATO member status. Simply arming it sufficiently and indicating that there was a major military risk, not just a risk of sanctions, that would probably have been enough to deter Putin.

 

>> John: The question was 11th hour status in February 2022 when we did not want to fight. And we had an argument on this show where I was the hawk even more than HR and Niall was the, no, don't touch Russia, cuz they might have nukes. And I was for at least a air cover for the Ukrainians.

If we had granted NATO status in February 2022, then we would have wanted to face, had to face the fact that we didn't wanna fight. So if here's a article five, an invasion of, then it happens invasion. Ooh, then our bluff would have been called. So, in fact, I think it would have been because either we would have gone in and fought which would have ended the war in about a week, which would have been lovely, but I don't.

We didn't wanna do that, we didn't even wanna give them reasonable weapons, which we're still not wanting to do, then our bluff would have been called. And there's a good deal of our current foreign policy, which involves, are they gonna call our bluff or not?

>> Bill: John, let's stay with you a question from Adam in Indianapolis, who writes, quote, last September on this show, you advised me not to purchase gold as a hedge against inflation.

Gold is now up 14% over the last six months, what do you have to say for yourself? By the way gold reached a record $2,286 an ounce yesterday.

>> John: Well, the value of my advice was exactly what you paid for it.

>> H.R.: Don't buy it now, right? Don't buy it now.

 

>> John: Well, if you think the secret of investing is to listen to podcasts and what people bloviate about what's gonna go up and down and follow them, I got bad news for you. You're not gonna make a lot of money.

>> H.R.: Well, maybe I should start giving financial advice, and then viewers could just do the opposite of that.

Cuz that's been my track record, it's been almost perfect.

>> Bill: All right, Niall, a question for you from Kevin and Winnipeg, Canada. He writes, in the pity of war, you made the case that a German victory in world War one would have been manageable, wouldn't the same apply to a Russian victory in Ukraine?

 

>> Niall: Well, no, Kevin, because in 1914, although Germany called itself an imperial power Kaiser Reich, it was a parliamentary system in which the social Democrats were the largest party with the rule of law. And although it would have been, of course, unfortunate if Germany had defeated France and Russia, as I argued, in the pity of war.

The consequences for Britain strategically would have been good, and the consequences for the people of Europe would not have been catastrophic. Would it be very different from a situation in which a fascist regime had won a war unopposed? So it's a very different case because Russia today is a fascist regime, it's already shown what it's capable of in butcher.

And I think the consequences of allowing Russia to win the war in Ukraine will be strategically disastrous for the west. Not just for western Europe, but I think they will be profoundly adverse for the United States. So it's a very different case, but it's nice to be reminded of the pity of war, which was written a very long time ago, but I still believe in.

 

>> John: That's what you mean by manageable I mean, I think Niall's analysis and mine, is that letting Russia win in Ukraine and not letting the Ukrainians win will be a tremendous blow to deterrence. It's just one more, we're losing wars one after the other. Now, if you could somehow say, well, you can have this, but we're getting our spine really stiffened, you can't have anything more, then it would be unpleasant.

I would think it highly distasteful, but manageable. The US isn't about to be invaded, but overall a bad idea, and as Neil points out, very different circumstances.

>> Bill: All right, one last question for you gentlemen. Neil Ferguson, your chance to defend your homeland. Yesterday, April the first Scotland's Hate Crime and Public Order act went into effect.

This criminalizes speech and opinion deemed, quote, unquote, hateful, even if it's in the confines of one's home. Is this the case of April Fool's fellows, or is this the end of three plus centuries of the Scottish Enlightenment? Neil?

>> Niall: Well, it's an astonishing piece of legislation, and I'm glad to say that JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, is taking this ridiculous law on and telling the police to come and arrest her.

The whole idea that you can have hate crimes for speech, that you can commit an offense of stirring up hatred not only against a racial minority, but you could do it on the basis of disability, religion, sexual orientation, age and transgender identity. All of this is completely at odds with the enlightenment ideas of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and David Hume.

And it represents a new low that the Scottish National Party has taken my native land. I hope that this wretched law is held up to sufficient ridicule around the world that it is swiftly repealed. But it's a sad reflection on what Scotland has become that such a thing should ever have been passed.

Free speech is foundational to a free society, and the essence of free speech is that you have to be able to put up with people saying things that you deplore. The fact that my fellow countrymen appear to have forgotten this, and that it takes the author of Harry Potter to set the record straight is, to me, a deeply shocking thing.

And it makes me sad, but also makes me rather glad that I got out of Scotland all those years ago.

>> Bill: John, you flagged this about a week ago.

>> John: Yeah, and it's not just Scotland. Ireland, I think, narrowly defeated one with the sentiment strong. In England, you can be prosecuted for hate speech.

Canada, Australia, the anglosphere, except the US, is all heading in this direction of strong law and enforcement of speech. And I just wanna give up, thank our founding fathers for realizing, you know what, yeah, we have this strong tradition of free speech, but we better write that one down and, yeah, I guess we do need a.

The constitution originally didn't have a bill of rights. Yeah, we better write that one down and invent the Supreme Court thing, that'll make sure that we stick to it. A written constitution guaranteeing that right turned out to be enormously valuable in keeping the US from following the same direction.

 

>> Bill: HR, I'll give you the last word.

>> H.R.: Hey, I just think we can't take any of our freedoms for granted. And that's why it's great to be at the Hoover Institution. It's in our mission statement.

>> Bill: Okay, well, gentlemen, congratulations once again. Happy anniversary. See you this time next year for our fifth year anniversary, I'll look up what the proper gift is.

Neil, what appliance do you want as a four year gift?

>> Niall: Actually, I've changed my mind, I don't want a firearm. I want JK Rowling on GoodFellows.

>> Speaker 2: Yes.

>> H.R.: Let's do it, that's great.

>> John: 100%.

>> Bill: Make it happen. So that's it for this episode of GoodFellows.

We'll be back in early May and then we'll be back again in mid May. That mid May episode, by the way, GoodFellows fan favorite Stephen Cock and will be joining us. And we're gonna talk about counterfactual. So in addition to sending questions and to Neil John at HR, send a few counterfactuals our way.

Maybe we'll throw those into the conversation as well. On behalf of other GoodFellows, Neil Ferguson, John Cochran, HR McMaster, all the talented people behind the scenes here at the institution who make this show go. Thank you very much for your support over the past four years. We enjoy doing this and we're glad you enjoy watching it and we will see you soon.

Until 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.