Tanks for the Memories

>> H. R. McMaster: It took them just a few seconds to get up abreast of my tank, about ten seconds, actually. In that ten second span, we were able to get off two additional rounds to the first round that we fired.

>> Bill Whalen: It's Tuesday, January 24, 2023, and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whelan and I'm a Hoover Institution distinguished policy fellow. I'll be your moderator today. And I am joined in the company of our three GoodFellows. We're doing this in person today at the Hoover Institution. Joining me, the historian Neil Ferguson, the economist John Cochran, the geostrategist, lieutenant general HR McMaster, Hoover Institution senior fellows all.

We're in person today because this is a very special episode of GoodFellows, and It is episode number 100. No off ramp here, is there, fellows?

>> H. R. McMaster: It's protracted war, that's what it is.

>> Niall Ferguson: Attrition, it's a war of attrition.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, all three of you survived 100 episodes, so we're gonna begin the episode by going back to where we began back in March of 2020.

And we're gonna begin with the very first question that I asked the three good fellows, and let's roll the tape and take a look. The motto of the Hoover Institution is ideas defining a free society. Let me repeat that again solely cuz I sometimes talk too fast, but to make sure the audience gets it.

That's ideas defining a free society. Here's the question, folks. We live in a time when more than half of America is living at home, told to stay at home by the government. We live during a time when government is deciding which businesses are quote unquote, necessary and which are not.

We live in a time when the president of the United States has told us that we cannot be in touch with each other, we have to maintain our distance for at least another month. And we lived in a time when, if any of us wanted to have a family picnic outside, if we wanted to have a pep rally, a protest march, if we wanted to have a mass prayer, we could be fined, we could be sent to jail.

So here's the question, gentlemen. Is this indeed a free society, and if it's not a free society, as we'd like, how much liberty can government take with taking away our liberties? Neil, why don't you kick it off? Okay, so here we are 100 episodes later. I still talk too fast, you all are still hanging in with me, though.

Let me pose the same question. Neil, I'll ask you again. Is this a free society, is it a freer society than it was back in 2020?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, it's nearly three years ago, hard to believe that I answered that question. And I said, in the time of emergency, in a free society, it is quite normal for citizens to be asked to give up their liberties.

And I gave the example of wartime, and I gave the example of a pandemic. Now then, which was march of 2020, was the beginning of the experiment with lockdowns. The idea that society should be locked down had only really gained traction in the middle of that month. When another Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist at Imperial College, had published a paper saying, we have to lock down society until there are vaccines.

And at that time I said, come on, man, or words to that effect, that isn't realistic. But it became policy on both sides of the Atlantic. It was even more strictly enforced in the UK, and here it was selectively enforced because the US can't stop being a free society even when it tries.

You may remember, Bill, that I was in Montana when you asked that question, and I had gone there to get away from what I feared correctly would be excessive restrictions in California. So I was in a pretty free society as I answered the question. And I think, looking back to me, the striking thing is how much we tried to limit individual liberty and how unsuccessful our efforts were when the goal was to limit the spread of the new virus, the new SARS-CoV-2 virus.

So we did quite a lot of constriction of reduction of liberty, especially in states like California, much less in Montana, it didn't work. We actually failed pretty disastrously to prevent the spread of the virus, and so did most western societies. Ironically, the society that was able to do lockdowns that worked was China.

And very few people realized back in 2020 that that would end up being a double edged sword, that they would come trapped in zero-COVID. And that ultimately would turn out to be just about as problematic as failing to contain the spread of the virus.

>> Bill Whalen: Mm-hm, interrupt.

>> H. R. McMaster: I think we're still a free society it's my role here, right, is to be the optimist.

I mean, we're not perfect, but I do think that we ought to. As we look at China and the severity of the lockdowns and the extinguishment of human freedom there, we ought to be grateful for what we have. And first and foremost, the fact that we do have a say in how we're governed.

And one of the themes across these 100 episodes has been, hey, we have agency, right? We can help build a better future. I think what is most disconcerting about the traumas we've been through, the pandemic, various other traumas across the last three years, is there's a narrative out there that Americans can't do anything about it.

There's a tendency to put the words institutional or structural in front of every difficulty we encounter. And what that leaves people with is this toxic combination of anger and resignation, right? So I think now is the time where we ought to be learning, right, about the failures in the response to the pandemic and applying those lessons, because this isn't gonna be the last one.

I think, as I mentioned on that first program 100 episodes ago, that this is a problem that will stay with us. And it's becoming actually even a greater threat when you look at biogenomics and the potential to weaponize biology, hey, we've got a lot to learn from it.

What I'm concerned about is in connection with the pandemic or the disastrous surrender withdrawal from Afghanistan. Enough people aren't talking about, hey, what went wrong? What do we learn, internalize, institutionalize, so we don't encounter the same problems in the future?

>> Bill Whalen: 100 episodes ago, John Cochran was taking notes, much to Neil Ferguson's chagrin, 100 episodes later, he's still taking notes.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: My two good fellows have a wonderful capacity to organize their thoughts. I don't, so that's why I use my little notepad to try to remember.

>> Niall Ferguson: It's actually a whiteboard substitute, cuz what John would really like to do is some funky math.

>> John H. Cochrane: So as in the first time, this was the fire drill for a real pandemic.

I'm glad to follow HR on this one. Pandemics throughout history have have killed 10, 20, 30% of the people that they infect. This one was bad, but by historical standards, not very bad. And as Neil says, if in pandemic is an externality to be an economist, that is a time when temporary restrictions on some civil liberties are important, but they have to be supported by the populations.

I worry that we're just gonna take the lessons lockdown doesn't work and public health measures don't work, and then go into a pandemic, artificial or natural, that is much more dangerous. I think we learned, however, that freedom, free speech, the free lack of censorship, that is crucial. And one of the biggest mistakes of policy was to try and censor the divergent opinions.

We don't really know what does work, what doesn't work, what vaccines work, what vaccines don't work, what public health measures work, what public health measures don't work? Are masks effective, are they effective on two year old's? Do schools have to be open? And the attempt to censor and impose the science says when it clearly was wrong was, I think, the biggest disaster.

So you can only have interventions, and And trust if you have complete freedom of speech, expression, the ability to debate things and then change our minds as we go along. So I hope what we come out of this is an understanding that, that freedom to speak is actually what is necessary to have support.

And trust in the kinds of interventions that you do need to have in a pandemic. And perhaps we can start looking at the mistakes our government is stuck in the COVID your butt mode of we have to defend everything we did last time. Where is the inquiry to what went wrong?

Where are the lessons learned? Military knows how to do that, when you guys lose a battle, you certainly figure out why that needs to be done. Are we free today? I think the fact that this is so contentious is very optimistic. The academic, the restrictions on academic freedom, censorship, what's going on with the Internet, yes, we can all worry about it.

But that is front and center in the debates of a democratic society, which gives me hope that we are at the peak of the forces against freedom within the US.

>> Niall Ferguson: I remember when I think back to those debates that we had in 2020, I was writing the book doom and researching past pandemics, trying to learn from history, which is really what I tried to do here at Hoover.

And what struck me at that time was how quickly the memory of pandemics tends to fade. That, for example, the much worse pandemic of 19-1819 didn't leave a very long shadow in memory. The great influenza pandemic of 1957 was almost entirely forgotten, even by people who lived through it.

And I remember thinking then, could it really be that we'll put this behind us the way they put 19-1819 behind them? And the answer is, yeah, it's amazing the extent to which we've moved on. There is no appetite for anything like the 911 commission, even although our friend Philip Zelikow is ready and willing to write that kind of commission of inquiry.

Cuz there's no appetite in Washington systematically to learn the lessons of what went wrong in 20-2021. And meanwhile, everybody out there wants to just get back to normal with a tremendous, I think and characteristically human impulse. And this is one of the things that was hard to imagine in the depths of the pandemic that by 2023 people would be living, working, traveling, partying, going to football games pretty much as they had done before.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Let's take that another step, Neil, it's like 911. Most Americans do not stop and reflect on 911 about what happened in 2001. But you live with it every time you go to the airport and you get screened by TSA is COVID similar to that, you may not be thinking about COVID every day.

But you have to get tested for it, there are various aspects about the pandemic that are not gonna go away anytime soon.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I think a lot has gone away, a lot more of the COVID restrictions than the post-911 restrictions. And I think that our reaction to these two events was in fact profoundly different.

In the wake of 911, there was a national security response that led to major interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those ended up enduring for two decades. In the case of Afghanistan here, I think it's all over, or it's seen to be all over. Less than three years on and life has largely returned to normal.

One sees masks more often lying in the gutter than on people's faces. Even in China, it's remarkable how quickly travel is reverting to normal now that the zero-COVID restrictions are off. Not entirely to normal, it's probably gonna end up like 80% of normal. But I'm struck by how speedily people have reverted to their pre-pandemic behaviors.

I was just at the World Economic Forum in Davos, rooms thronged with people, parties all down promenade, just like before 2020. So I think compared with a terrorist attack, we are remarkably ready as a species to move on, even after really quite large death tolls. And in particular, there's no great desire to learn from our mistakes, I think that's bad.

The great British banker Siegmund Warburg used to say, you should always cry over spilt milk. We're really not crying enough over this spilt milk, and I think it's dangerous.

>> John H. Cochrane: Maybe that is not the role in this case, especially of government commissions, it is the role of historians.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Did my best.

>> John H. Cochrane: We are-

>> Niall Ferguson: Still doing it, but there's not a great appetite out there for, hey, can we have another book on the pandemic?

>> John H. Cochrane: Historians, academics, public policy people, so the FDA, the CDC made catastrophic mistakes. The government made catastrophic mistakes. I actually worry that a government commission isn't ready, but instead, some really good books and some regressions need to be run.

Some economists, I think this is the moment for first in our society. Let's get the ideas of what went wrong from academia and not from government and government inquiry.

>> H. R. McMaster: There are a lot of lessons here, I'm really proud of our students. Because really, as soon as the pandemic began, I thought, hey, let's put together a team to try to learn lessons from the pandemic.

And as for volunteers within our own research assistance, but then across Stanford, and we had medical students and others. And the methodology was just interview people who are at certain critical points in the pandemic. This is across the public and private sector, federal and local governments, those involved with supply chains.

And we did this in July, August, and we did get the report out by September in time for the next wave. So the lessons, I think, are identified. The question is, will they be learned and applied in the areas of supply chain resistance? I mean, resilience, how to mobilize a medical response.

The difficulties that we encountered doing that with just not having the data. And the visibility across public and private hospitals and state and local and federal entities, all having a different picture. The logistics problems of this, where everybody's competing with each other for the same supplies and stepping on each other.

In doing that, supply chains that became too vulnerable to single points of failure, especially in China. And this is masks and surgical gloves and ventilators, remember, that was a big issue in the beginning, but it's also your pharmaceuticals. And Scott Atlas and I worked on a piece on that.

But I think we've identified a lot of these lessons that are actually, some of them pretty easy to fix. Remember, licensure for nurses so they could move across states and go to where the need was. So those lessons are identified. Will they be implemented? And we've been working with congressional staffs, members of the administration, to revive this report again and say, hey, remember this?

It's teed up for you in connection with legislative remedies. But also remedies within just administrative policy and standards to set, for example, on data and sharing data.

>> Niall Ferguson: And that's why I think it can't just be left to the private sector. Cuz in the end, there has to be a better pandemic preparedness plan than there was back in 2020, which turned out to be a plan that didn't work at all.

In fact, it disintegrated on impact with a real pandemic. So I'm concerned that although there's been a great deal of work on this, including good work by economists who've reassessed how far the lockdowns pass a cost benefit analysis test. I'm not sure how far that work is actually translating into fundamental changes in the way the government will respond to the next pandemic.

And I think there's good reason to be worried that it's going in the direction of the memory hole. I mean, we've never been terribly good at learning the lessons of our terrible mistakes, it's one of America's.

>> H. R. McMaster: We're moving on. The future's gonna be so much different from the past.

We don't have to worry about that.

>> Niall Ferguson: You see the United States of amnesia.

>> John H. Cochrane: No, but in past, like in the beginning of World War two, we were certainly, the military was ossified. Lots of things were ossified, but we cut through that and made it work very quickly, or at least that's my impression.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah.

>> John H. Cochrane: Whereas you look at the CDC and the FDA and that whole, that has not been reformed at all. I agree entirely. It needs thoughtful reform on how are we gonna go into the next pandemic. And-

>> Niall Ferguson: Also the lessons of our success, Operation Warp Speed, also the success of the mRNA vaccines.

I mean, I-

>> John H. Cochrane: Those are getting forgotten.

>> Niall Ferguson: I mean, this is a strange.

>> H. R. McMaster: Remember the name Gus Perna, right? I think one of the unsung heroes of the pandemic. As I mentioned, I think on that early episode, I said, hey, I heard that my friend Gus Perna has been put in charges.

It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be unconventional and leverage the private sector the way that they did. And the big decision, right, to underwrite the risk of pharmaceutical companies to buy the vaccine in advance and to begin production immediately before. So there were some bright spots associated with the innovations associated with the pandemic.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: But those were the ones that were the things that were put in place right now. Let's go Operation Ward Speed. That did not come out of the CDC.

>> H. R. McMaster: No. And a lot of people around President Trump were saying, don't do that. Don't buy the vaccine now.

That's not standard procedure.

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, we don't need standard procedure right now.

>> Bill Whalen: Right. But that was part of the challenge at the time. It was part of the great dust cloud that was a Trump presidency. Neil, Early and Goodfellows, you introduced our-

>> H. R. McMaster: Is that what it was?

 

>> Bill Whalen: The great dust cloud?

>> Bill Whalen: You still go down. Early, Goodfellows, Neil, you introduced our viewers to a phrase, cold war two. The idea the United States was now in a rivalry, a geopolitical rivalry, with China. Now we're placing the Soviet Union as our great opponent, not a popular position in early 2020.

But today, pretty commonly held witness the fact that our last guest on Goodfellows, Congressman Mike Gallagher, is running a House select committee looking into China. Neil, was COVID the trigger for moving sentiment that way on cold War two, or was it a compendium of things in addition to COVID?

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I said in the book Doom, that a pandemic, or almost any major disaster, has a character of revelation about it. It reveals things that perhaps were in a cloud of dust. And I think for many people in the United States and elsewhere in the world, what happened in 2020 shone a bright light and a very unflattering light on the Chinese Communist Party and the way it runs China now.

This wasn't just the fact that there clearly were efforts to cover up the outbreak, the initial outbreak in Wuhandhe. I mean, we still don't really have a good answer to the question, how did this begin? Because the CCP simply won't cooperate with any kind of serious inquiry. I think there were other things, too.

I think the way in which the Chinese government went about its messaging in the course of 2020 was extremely harmful to its own international standing. The so called wolf warrior diplomacy alienated a great many people, not only in the United States.

>> H. R. McMaster: And the brazen disinformation, right? Blaming a US army lab-

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah.

>> H. R. McMaster: In Massachusetts. I mean, it just was ridiculous.

>> Niall Ferguson: Wild stuff on social media and elsewhere. So I think for many Americans, and it wasn't only in the United States, 2020 laid bare the realities of China's government. And so it was no longer such a hard sell to say.

You know what, we're in Cold War two. We have been for some time. You could see that in pew research that showed big shifts in sentiment towards China, not only in the US, but in a great many countries around the world. And not only developed western countries. There's been a big shift in sentiment in India, for example.

At the time I was writing Doom so late in 2020, I took a kinda punt, which was that although it seemed as if China was kinda winning the pandemic and the US was doing badly and losing it, that would not turn out to be the right answer. And so in Doom, I argued towards the end that ultimately, the way that the CCP reacted to COVID would almost have a Chernobyl like quality to it.

It would backfire. Its attempts at the cover up, then its attempts at total social control would backfire. And now a much more messy approach, though there would certainly be a death toll to it, would probably unbalance be better. I think that turned out to be correct. Fast forward to 2023.

China's on the back foot. It pursued zero COVID to the point not just of diminishing returns, but real self harm. Had to do a U turn in response to popular protest, a remarkable development late last year. And meanwhile, United States has moved on. Its problem economically was, in fact, it overdid its various ways to achieve recovery, generated an inflation problem.

I mean, from that point of view, it turned out badly for China in more than one respect. I mean, and remember, there were lots of idle boasts. Xi Jinping said Chinese vaccines would be the best, and then they'd be available to the rest of the world. Well, ha ha the vaccines turn out not to work at all well and to be part of China's problem.

So, yeah-

>> H. R. McMaster: And they didn't donate any of them. They sold vaccines that don't work.

>> John H. Cochrane: No one wants them.

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah, right.

>> Niall Ferguson: So I think it's turned out pretty badly for Xi Jinping, and it's forced, I think, some quite meaningful changes. Not at the top. He's still very much in charge of anything, more clearly in control than ever before.

But he turns out to be capable of U turns. First on zero COVID. And now I think wolf warrior diplomacy is pretty much gone. The people who were its exponents are being demoted. So, yeah, Cold War two is clearly in a new phase, but it's more generally recognized.

And the phrase new cold war is now popping up so often in the op eds that it's a cliche.

>> Bill Whalen: John, you've had to put up with this for three years now.

>> John H. Cochrane: And the cold war is on here, too. I still maintain that we are not in Cold War two the way we were in Cold War one.

We're still trying to deter Cold War two. Our long run objective is not we win, they lose. The way President Reagan so clearly put it in the last one. The long run objective is still to try to reengage China to be part of the normal world. We win, they lose would be just a terrible thing.

China has also changed. What we saw during COVID was really the change in China from the China of Deng Xiaoping, maybe, to the China of Xi Jinping, which is quite different. As Xi took over, it became much more authoritarian. It grabbed Jack Ma, it grabbed Hong Kong. These were changes unrelated.

I mean, they may be related to COVID or not, but those are things that certainly made China look a lot worse than it was. And we've seen kinda the backing off of that as well. So we've kinda seen the, hopefully it's peak authoritarianism in China. But yes, having to back off the COVID policy, having to back off the tech, if you want the tech industry to survive.

The one I noticed was backing off the use of COVID passes as a way of controlling the population where you go. We all kinda assumed once you're going authoritarian, it's all the way. Here's this lovely tool to control the population. No, they had to get rid of that one as well.

Authoritarians are always scared of their own population and they've backed off as well. So I think there is hope that it's gonna be a long slog. But that we can still be in the realm of deterring Cold War two and hoping that China has its problems. And we can return to reengaging with China rather than just having to turn to a real cold war mentality.

 

>> Bill Whalen: John, something else has happened in the three years since we started the show, this country has spent a lot, Of money and it's very simple. It's the Rahm Emanuel School of politics, never let a crisis go to waste. So question, gentlemen, if, God forbid, another pandemic strikes, what's gonna stop the government from spending trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars again under the guise of jumpstarting the economy?

John.

>> Niall Ferguson: I have a very good book that seems highly relevant here by one John H.Cochrane, The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, which just happened to find its way into the studio. John, I think you should take it, can you summarize the book for our audience?

>> John H. Cochrane: Quickly, yes.

So this just came out, January 17th was the official release date. I've been working on this for decades. In some sense, I'm the luckiest economist in the world. I wrote a book that I've been thinking about for a long time that says if you drop $5 trillion worth of checks on people, you get inflation.

The original introduction said, well, we haven't seen inflation, so someday somebody will care about this, maybe. And the government did me a favor to do exactly what I told them would cause inflation.

>> H. R. McMaster: I'm glad it's a bright side.

>> John H. Cochrane: Run out and buy it but it's full of equations.

I believe in convince the academic world first, and then we'll get to it. Let me try to answer the question. I think exactly that is what will happen, if China invades or blockades Taiwan and there's a horrendous financial crisis and a recession. If there's a new pandemic, our government will turn to the one tool that it seems to have, which is to spread money around like there's no tomorrow.

And what we will get is what we just saw, more inflation faster and sooner. We've seen the limits of the strategy cure everything with rivers and rivers of money. And so I think that's the next, the lessons of inflation are really strong. One, that that strategy has got to come to an end.

Two, that the whole business of you just need secular stagnation. You just need to spend more money, that's over. We are at the supply limit of our economy. You want a better economy, you got to fix the supply side of the economy, not just throw money, more money around.

That changes everything, that is the hard reality of the economy going forward.

>> Niall Ferguson: John, can I ask you a question? The Hoover institution will always be associated with Milton Friedman, who spent the later part of his career here. And most people, if they know one Milton Friedman quote, know that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

And your book is The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, are you in fundamental disagreement with Milton Friedman?

>> John H. Cochrane: I hate to say it, but yes, much is that.

>> H. R. McMaster: Wait for the earthquake here, you know what I mean?

>> John H. Cochrane: I do think that if we could bring back Milton, which he would make a lovely, good fellow, he would outshine all of us for sure.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, I had the great privilege of meeting him a couple of times when I was here as a national security affairs fellow. He and his wife were just fine people, wonderful people.

>> John H. Cochrane: If we could bring him back and he were to look at the current institutional reality our Central Bank sets, interest rate targets were awash in money.

I hope he would come to this as his conclusions cuz it's philosophically very much Milton Friedman. It just comes to a different answer and I'll tell you the basic difference. We all agree if the government drops $5 trillion from helicopters, you're gonna get inflation. Fiscal theory says that, monetary theory says that.

The big difference is suppose the government gives you Neil, I'll give You $10,000, but I take back $10,000 of treasury bills. You're no wealthier than you were before. You just have $10,000 in your interest paying bank account rather than $10,000 in treasury bills. Is that gonna make you go out and spend money and cause inflation?

Fiscal theory says to first order, no, monetary theory says first order, yes. And that's, I think, the central difference between the Milton Friedman view and this view. But almost all inflations have been caused by governments printing money to finance deficits. And there we 100% agree that's gonna cause inflation.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, one last retrospective question, then we'll go to news of the day. This is the question of what has surprised you over the last three years. If I could pick all three of you up from March of 2020 and supplant you, put you into January 2023, you looked around, you went on the Internet, you read the newspaper.

What would surprise you the most? I'll begin, the biggest surprise I've seen in the last three years. At least my choice would be the reddening, the crimson turning of Florida. Back in 2020 Florida was the ultimate swing state in American politics. Ron DeSantis was a first term governor who won by, I think, one half of 1%, something like 30,000 votes out of 8 million votes cast.

Not a player in national politics but we've seen in the last three years people who flocked to Florida. It's now become a very reliable Republican state. So that to me, from 2020 to present, would be a big surprise, Naill?

>> Niall Ferguson: I guess the thing that's surprising to me is the quite rapid waning of the power of big technology companies.

If you go back to 2020, they seemed all powerful. And one of the arguments I'd made in my book, The Square and the Tower, which was 2017, was, this is the new hierarchy. These few companies are gonna be entirely dominant.

>> Bill Whalen: Google, then Facebook.

>> Niall Ferguson: Right, so Google, Facebook, Apple and I think these companies seem much weaker today.

In particular Facebook, which in its new guise as Meta has suffered a pretty steep decline in valuation. I think more generally, it's clear with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, particularly ChatGPT, it's not obvious that Google's dominance of search will endure indefinitely. And so also Apple, which, after all, is a company that designs things here and assembles them in China.

It's not clear that Apple's model is necessarily going to be a particularly enduring one. So I'm surprised at how much less powerful those companies look in 2023. It's partly because I think they missed an opportunity to increase their influence in 2020. There was, of course, a great deal of debate back in 2020 about contact tracing, about whether we could use technology better to combat the pandemic that all went away.

The tech companies essentially did not participate in any meaningful way in dealing with the pandemic. So I think for me, the surprising thing is the waning of those once mighty empires. And oddly enough, it's Microsoft, which was deeply unfashionable and unhit back in 2020, that seems to be at the cutting edge of the Artificial Intelligence revolution.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: I think it's the speed with which the free world has kind of come to its senses in connection with the consequential competition with authoritarian, revisionist powers, especially China and Russia. And, of course, there are a number of factors that led to this recognition now. And I think it has a lot to do with Xi Jinping and Putin, maybe they're the principal cause of that.

But I think that if you think back to when we first had our first GoodFellows, there was a great deal of doubt about the resilience of the west, the determination of the west and the free world more broadly to confront economic aggression from the Chinese Communist Party. Or at the time you were calling Russian new generation, or hybrid warfare, which turned into renewed, brazen conventional aggression on February 24th of last year.

I think the response has been surprising and positive, but again, probably due in large measure to the actions of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

>> Bill Whalen: John?

>> John H. Cochrane: So I'll say I wasn't surprised by tech companies cuz I keep saying there's no such thing as a monopoly unless it has a government license.

And every time somebody told me that the fangs were monopolies, I said, yes, yes, of course, Netscape, AOL Time Warner, they've got a lock cuz they were there first and yahoo. So, the dinosaurs come and go very quickly, if there's a competitive.

>> Niall Ferguson: Fair enough, and you did say this on previous editions of GoodFellow.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: Then you're a historian, so you remember.

>> Niall Ferguson: It's old fruit.

>> John H. Cochrane: There are things I'm surprised at. I am surprised that climate hysteria, which I think we'll talk about a little later, has persisted and stayed as the central obsession of certain parts of our policy, politics especially.

I didn't expect the war in Ukraine, I didn't expect the Ukrainians to do so well and the Russians to fall apart, but I'm not a big strategist like this. But even that has woken up Europe a little bit, but still, the obsessions go on in the United States.

You'll be glad to know the city of Palo Alto will soon require everybody to take out their gas stoves and hot water heaters and put them back in with electric ones. Which run on natural gas that is burned somewhere else in order to make the electricity. That obsession, its persistence and in fact its gathering steam seems to surprise me in the face of it's a problem, but it needs a sensible solution.

And I am still surprised at the spread of, I hate to use the term woke ism, but you know what I mean. The self-immolation of American academia is now spreading into the hard sciences, which are not allowing education in hard sciences and which are increasingly the professional societies are now at it.

Stopping research in hard sciences, which is something that the Chinese are certainly not doing at all. So that the now we're talking about it more, there's at least people complaining about it. But the spread of that self immolation into the hard sciences and stem education is something I didn't expect to go as far as it has.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the gas stoves, by the way. The state of California does not have electricity to go around, so of course they wanna take away more of your utilities and put in electricity. So next time we have a GooFellows dinner, we're gonna be sitting in John's backyard, four guys sitting around an open fire with hot dogs on his stick, wait for that.

Your son may find that charming, by the way, but such is 21st century.

>> Niall Ferguson: We got our gas in just before they changed the rules, so you will actually have a nice gas fire.

>> Bill Whalen: So today is both the 100th episode of GoodFellows and also Niall Ferguson happens to be the 52nd anniversary of the founding of the World Economic Forum this day in 1971.

Strap in, my friend, you're gonna have to defend the WEF now we have a clip.

>> Al Gore: We are not winning, the crisis is still getting worse faster than we are deploying these solutions, and we need to make changes quickly. Emissions are still going up, all these promises of the last few years to cut emissions, emissions are still going up, when are we gonna bring these emissions down?

People are familiar with that thin blue line that the astronauts bring back in their pictures from space, we're still putting 162 million tons into it every single day. And the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth.

That's what's boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level. And causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach 1 billion in this century. Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees, what about a billion?

We would lose our capacity for self-governance on this world. We have to act, there's a lot of blah, blah, blah as Greta says, there are a lot of words and there are some meaningful commitments, but we are still failing badly. The rest of us have to reform these international institutions so that the people of this world, and including the young people of this world can say, we are now in charge of our own destiny.

We're gonna stop using the sky as an open sewer, we're gonna save the future and give people hope we can do it, and remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.

>> Bill Whalen: Sadly, I have a beach hat like that straw hat that lady is wearing, but that's another topic for another day.

Niall, it's easy to poke fun at the World Economic Forum when you see clips like that, but a serious question, what propose does it serve?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, Al Gore has a lot of work to do to compete with Greta Thunberg when it comes to hyperventilation on the subject of climate, and I give him a nine out of ten, he nearly got there.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Greta, by the way, just arrested outside a German coal mine, I think, but that's another.

>> Niall Ferguson: So long that she couldn't make it to Davos.

>> Niall Ferguson: I look at a clip like that and I ask myself, what does we mean in this sentence, in this rant? Because in reality, North America and Europe have reduced their CO2 emissions.

It is China, and it must also be said India, that have increased their CO2 emissions. China in particular is responsible for 63% of the increase in emissions since Greta Thunberg was born and about 85% of the increase in coal consumption. So when Al Gore sits there in Switzerland to an almost entirely western audience ranting that we have not done anything.

It's actually a great misrepresentation because the real problem of CO2 emissions is primarily an Asian problem. Now, you asked the question, what's the point of the World Economic Forum? And it's not just to sit and listen to self-righteous rants by the likes of Al Gore and Greta Thunberg.

The real point of the World Economic Forum is to get as many people from as many more or less large businesses in the world into one place for a week so they can speed date. And it's really one of the most efficient bazaars in all of human history.

It is a little bit like a bazaar, it's not that people are selling rugs and they're exchanging business cards.

>> Bill Whalen: That's why you go.

>> Niall Ferguson: Doing a lot of meetings. Well, that is the best argument for going to an event like that, and I'm not going to complain about the experience, it's somewhat exhausting.

Davos, if you ever go, is a bit like being in an airport where you constantly go through security but never get on a plane. But I would say that those people who vilify the World Economic Forum from the left used to be the left that did it, and now from the right.

Arguing that it aspires to be a world government, are really missing the point. The headline sessions like the one we just saw a clip of are somewhat spurious, they're sort of a pretext you put on this show, people talk about the world's ills in more or less excitable terms.

In reality, most of what is going on is meetings, not on a platform, often behind closed doors. And we should think of it as Klaus Schwab's great bazaar and not exaggerate its political importance, cuz I don't think it has much.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, John Havat.

>> John H. Cochrane: How much fun can I have with this one?

 

>> John H. Cochrane: I do think we've sort of seen peak Davos, I mean, everybody notices the hypocrisy of thousands of people coming in on private jets to tell the rest of us to lower our climate emissions. Davos crowd is now more of an insult than it is a sign of respect for one's betters.

Al Gore was a lot of fun there, as Niall pointed out, you got the facts wrong, US emissions are in fact going down. Climate is a serious issue, but it's all about China and India now, and if we're gonna talk to 2100 Africa. And the real fact is the Davos crowd wants to forbid Africa, where demographics are the real issue, they are the ones who are growing population.

Wants to forbid Africa from joining this modern world, which requires fuel to not live a medieval lifestyle. And one can think of all sorts of words for, I'll start with neocolonialist about wanting to say we get to live this way, but you have to live in poverty forever.

Boiling the oceans, if I may quote the inevitable Inigo Montoya.

>> Speaker 7: I don't think it means what you think it means.

>> John H. Cochrane: And climate refugees is a very interesting view into climate hysteria, it's the fallacy of compressing time. People moved, in the US in the 20th century, 70% of our population moved from farm to city.

Most, a lot of people moved from other countries to the US, over 100 years people can move a long way. The sea level may go up 1 meter. People don't sit there for 100 years and wait to drown for a 1 meter rise in the sea level. So this hyperbole that envisions everybody in the earth moving in the next six months and causing political problems is just, well, it is hyperbole.

It's an interesting one to watch repeated constantly. If you want to think about Africans moving, it's not going to be because it gets one degree warmer there, it's because their population is going to grow like crazy, and ours is collapsing like crazy and there's kind of a natural reason for people to move.

But people move around the earth, all of our ancestors moved without causing political catastrophes, except Neil's.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I did eventually move. It's got a long way from Glasgow to Palo Alto.

>> John H. Cochrane: So anyway, it's kind of a fun sign of what I was talking to before, but nonetheless, this is that kind of animation is still going on.

The US government is still on a whole of government approach to get rid of our gas stoves. So I just hope for sanity, science, regular, normal policy to take over here.

>> Bill Whalen: HR, I think you have to go next year, and you have to make a promise to wear those army socks.

Can we get a shot of these socks, by the way?

>> Bill Whalen: These are great.

>> H. R. McMaster: Hey, I went, I went with Donald Trump in 2018, and I said, hey, you're a globalist now, you're in Davos. But we actually endeavored to make the most out of that trip, and we got a lot out of it, I think.

In terms of the meetings that we had, the engagement we had, we had engagements with leaders of industry and European leaders of industry to encourage investment in the United States. We had some concrete objectives. Whenever President Trump traveled, I tried to connect it to clearly define goals and objectives, and then plan the engagements and the meetings around that.

It suited our purpose. But in terms of the climate hysteria at Davos, I think the sad part about it is that that hysteria leads to bad decision making, and those bad decisions actually exacerbate the problem. So if you want to cancel gas, right? And then what you do is you burn more coal.

If you cancel nuclear, you burn more coal. And global energy demand to lift people out of poverty in India and Africa and China is forecast to go up 50% between now and 2050. And we know for sure that even the most optimistic assessments of what renewables can give you is like 28% of that.

So where's that gap? Well, there, actually, there are some solutions out there. There is the conversion to cheap natural gas, if we would create more of it, along with others who are beginning to pump more and do more offshore exploration than Marietta's, for example, and the guttery's. But there also is next generation nuclear power.

So it is just, the hysteria around this among environmentalist ideologues actually leads to very poor decision makings and exactly the opposite of the outcomes that they want to achieve, that we would all would want to achieve.

>> Niall Ferguson: I think it's also worth adding, isn't it? That when someone like Al Gore engages in this kind of hyperbolic symbolic discourse and talks about hundreds of atomic bombs going off every year, the oceans boiling, a great many people listening think that's wildly over the top.

This whole thing must be BS. And I do wish the proponents of radical policies to alter the trajectory of global warming would moderate their rhetoric, engage in more scientifically realistic discussion, because they're actually defeating their own cause with that kind of language. It doesn't convince ordinary people. If anything, I think it leads to a quite dangerous backlash where people say, you know what?

This is all completely over the top. I'm just going to ignore it all and pay no attention to what seem to me to be real concerns about rising global temperatures. I think that the time has come for Al Gore to stop flying around the world on his private jet, dealing in engaging in a kind of rhetorical arms race with Greta Thunberg.

It's ironical that the state of the union, which has made the furthest advances in the direction of renewable energy, is actually Texas. Now, when is Al Gore ever going to admit that Texas is doing something?

>> John H. Cochrane: This is an important point. We have to remember in the 90s, climate, after the success on ozone, climate was one of those things that was headed towards bipartisan technocratic solution.

Using the science we know we're going to make a transition, let's not waste too much money along the way.

>> Niall Ferguson: Sure.

>> John H. Cochrane: We know the technology will keep changing, let's try and find the good ones. Let's adapt where we need to adapt-

>> H. R. McMaster: Catalytic converters in LA.

>> John H. Cochrane: And I think Al Gore gets a lot of the blame for turning this into a partisan political moral crusade which instantly turns off the other half and then people see they're being lied to and that turns them off as well.

And it has gotten wrapped up in a bunch of other causes. It's gotten wrapped up, I mean, the anti-nuclear people still can't admit that nuclear power emits no CO2. It's gotten wrapped up into degrowthing and a bunch of extremely progressive far left causes that then once you wrap them up altogether, then people who disagree with the other things disagree with those as well.

So it's really sad that this has to stop somehow being a partisan crusade and become a technocratic thing because you want policy that lasts 100 years. 51 to 49, stuff it down their throats, it's not going to work.

>> Bill Whalen: Now, Neil, Mr. Gore was not the only Nobel laureate to address the Davos crowd, so did Henry Kissinger and a future Goodfellas.

I think John will put up your Kissinger book and we'll promote that, which I think is why you're growing the beard, by the way.

>> H. R. McMaster: Hey, if you look at that first episode, can you see the book right behind me in the first episode?

>> Niall Ferguson: That's right.

>> H. R. McMaster: I was plugging your books.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: You were plugging my book.

>> H. R. McMaster: Subtly. It's not forgotten.

>> Niall Ferguson: I think I did some reciprocal plugging of battlegrounds.

>> Niall Ferguson: I'm in the throes of writing the second volume of my biography of Henry Kissinger and he just keeps adding new material.

>> Niall Ferguson: He's in his 100th year and he still is making the news.

He made the news with his intervention at the World Economic Forum, in which he shifted his position on Ukraine in a couple of remarkable ways. One of which was essentially to say, Ukraine is winning this war, indeed has won it by exposing the limits of Russian military power.

And secondly, he now thinks that Ukraine should be admitted to NATO, which is a big shift in his position. When you asked earlier, Bill Wehner, what surprised you in the last three years? John was right. One of the most astonishing things to happen last year was the extraordinary resilience of Ukraine's defense.

I wasn't surprised by the Russian invasion, but I did not expect Ukrainian resistance to be nearly as tenacious and effective. Why? Because I know Ukraine well. I've been going there every year for more or less the past decade, and anybody who did that knew that. Ukraine had terrible problems of division and corruption back in the news this week.

And that led me to expect that Ukraine would not be able to withstand a Russian invasion. It turned out the most amazing thing, really, of the last three years, that this war brought about the birth of a nation. Ukraine's united in a way that it wasn't before. It has leadership that has proved far more effective than any we'd previously seen in the person, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

And here we are, debating how far the next Ukrainian offensive will be able to take back territory that the Russians conquered after February 24. And this brings us to tanks.

>> Bill Whalen: It does bring us tanks, you don't forget.

>> Bill Whalen: I mentioned earlier, DeSantis in Florida. Maybe DeSantis, we put him aside.

Maybe it's Zelensky was the biggest shock last three. He was, what, guy in a sitcom. Three years ago.

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah.

>> Bill Whalen: Now, he is a great?

>> H. R. McMaster: Almost popularity rate was 120%.

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah. His position was a powerless one by late 2021. And President Putin has created, and it must be a nightmare for him.

A war hero out of a sitcom star who could have seen it.

>> H. R. McMaster: Zelenskyy deserves the credit. Most of it, I would say.

>> Bill Whalen: H.R, this is where you get to educate us.

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah.

>> Bill Whalen: Tanks. The current controversy.

>> H. R. McMaster: How long do you have, man?

>> H. R. McMaster: Try to think of a problem you can't solve with the tank.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: I mean.

>> H. R. McMaster: You can't. So, of course, I've got a background in this field. And I really think that it's time to provide Ukraine with Mobile Protected Firepower. That's what a tank is. It's Mobile Protected Firepower. And when you're in close combat with the enemy, you wanna overmatch the enemy, right?

You don't ever wanna have a fair fight in combat. Fair fights look bad even if you win, right? So what you wanna do is overwhelm the enemy with precision, direct fire. That then creates opportunities for you to maneuver. To gain positions of advantage over the enemy. And in the case of tanks, to take the brunt of that battle.

So you can allow your infantry to move across danger areas. And then deploy in positions of advantage that give them positional advantage over the enemy, to turn them out of their positions. And then also to be able to sustain an offensive mounted with more protected firepower tanks and protected mobility.

The Bradleys and martyrs, you're hearing about the infantry fighting vehicles. And, of course, the tank was invented to break the stalemate in World War I. And those who argue against tanks, Mobile Protective Firepower are really arguing for a reenactment of World War I, cuz that's what you get.

The automotive revolution happened. And you need this combination of mobility, protection, and firepower to really decide outcomes in war.

>> Niall Ferguson: Offensives without tanks are incredibly costly for the attackers. This is Ukraine's problem.

>> H. R. McMaster: That's right.

>> Niall Ferguson: It's succeeded in gaining ground, but it's taken very heavy casualties in doing so.

And that's why this really shouldn't have been a long protraction debate.

>> H. R. McMaster: No, not at all. I'm sure these numbers are classified. What we do in our military, I would imagine Ukrainians do this as well, is whenever you have a soldier wounded or killed, you look about how that soldier was wounded or killed.

And then you do an analysis of where the vulnerabilities are. This is what led to innovations in body armor. In all sorts of first aid techniques, bringing back the tourniquet, the ability to train soldiers, to really have EMT like skills forward. So you make adjustments. But I think when you look at the casualties in Ukraine, you're gonna find that the vast majority of those casualties are shrapnel wounds taken by soldiers who were in light skinned vehicles, right?

So it's important to remember the tank was invented to defeat the machine gun. And the best use of a tank, from my perspective as a cavalry officer, is not to impale yourself on the enemy's strength, but to conduct effective reconnaissance. Find out where the enemy's weak, and that's where you penetrate the defense.

And then you sustain that momentum such that you turn the enemy out of prepared defenses, or completely envelop and destroy that enemy. And of course, there were offensives in World War I that had been successful without tanks. The Ludendorff offensives in 1917.

>> Niall Ferguson: 18.

>> H. R. McMaster: 18, and infiltration tactics associated with those.

But they could not be sustained because they couldn't sustain logistically. And they couldn't gain enough depth to then overrun the command post in artillery. As a tank officer, as a cavalry officer, what I aim for is not to destroy their tanks, although that's good to do too. But to destroy the enemy's artillery, logistics and command posts.

Running over them with a tank is the most gratifying element of an opportunity.

>> Niall Ferguson: I love it when you talk about tanks.

>> Bill Whalen: I see the excitement in his eyes.

>> H. R. McMaster: No, but I mean, so you need tanks to be able to penetrate these defenses. But if you look at the scale of the defensive of lines here, really the form of maneuver, I think, would be a rapid penetration and transitioning into a turning movement.

That would give the Ukrainians the initiative, allow them to get the Russians out of these prepared World War I, like defensive positions.

>> John H. Cochrane: Can I ask. So you're gonna plan the Ukrainian offensive. Modern combined arms includes tanks and air power.

>> H. R. McMaster: Absolutely.

>> John H. Cochrane: We don't have air power.

There is an issue of the Russian tanks proved to be very.

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah.

>> John H. Cochrane: Susceptible to drones dropping and grenades.

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah.

>> John H. Cochrane: And then I'd like you to fill us in on the issue of the day, the Abrams versus the leopard.

>> H. R. McMaster: Okay, okay, so air power gives you a third dimension, first of all.

And so that's effective not only in the application of fires in a fluid way, like the German offensive in 1940. Which integrated the Luftwaffe.

>> John H. Cochrane: Right.

>> H. R. McMaster: With armored forces.

>> John H. Cochrane: Can we do without.

>> H. R. McMaster: Which gave them really flying artillery. It's the reconnaissance capability associated with, now, reconnaissance from satellites as well as reconnaissance from drones.

But also fixed wing aircraft and rotary wing aircraft. And what you wanna do is apply all those assets so that you're gathering information from multiple sources. And then you can fuse together your intelligence picture for a number of reasons to make the decision about where do you attack?

Where do you isolate strength? Where do you attack weakness? But then also to apply fires and apply fires in depth to try to paralyze the enemy. You don't wanna just fire at the point where you're penetrating. And you wanna strike their artillery. You wanna strike their defense systems.

You wanna strike their command posts and their logistics. And that's what allows you to gain the initiative, is to get the enemy to respond to multiple forms of contact simultaneously. So we're talking about giving them tanks, but we're not talking about giving them airplanes.

>> John H. Cochrane: Is this gonna work?

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah, I think we should give airplanes, too, obviously. But I do think with long range precision fires combined with satellite imagery and with unmanned aerial systems, you can have the same effect as you would with MiG-29s or F-16s. Especially, if they integrate the ATACM systems, the longer range systems, and longer range surveillance systems, like the MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial system.

Which can operate over friendly lines and therefore, be relatively protective. But see, very deep.

>> John H. Cochrane: So you're saying something that is fairly revolutionary here, that we were talking about the tank being outmoded, but you're saying, no, it's the air force that's outmoded.

>> H. R. McMaster: Well.

>> John H. Cochrane: We can do a combined arms without the air force.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, you need it all right. Hey, I'll tell you. Combined arms, combat, it's rock, paper scissors. And what you wanna do is apply a range of capabilities, fires, mobile protective firepower, infantry, joint capabilities, aviation, cyber capabilities, electromagnetic warfare, all in combination and simultaneously and sequentially based on what you think is gonna have the greatest effect against the enemy.

So that you gain the initiative, you gain a physical advantage over the enemy. But you want to gain a psychological and temporal advantage over the enemy such that you're imposing a tempo of events on them they cannot, to which they cannot respond. And I think that, whatever that takes to do that, that's what we ought to be providing the Ukrainians, not debating discrete weapons systems.

 

>> Bill Whalen: But there's a risk here, you give the Ukrainians heavy tanks, they get a strategic advantage, you gave them air power, they make gains, Vladimir Putin has a card to play, the Ukrainian stone, mushroom cloud.

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah, but, here again, we've talked about this before, but, and I want to hear what you think about this.

I think the one who fears escalation the most is Putin. First of all, a nuclear weapon is not usable in that scenario to give him any kind of military advantage. The winds blow east onto the Russians, they've got a hard time operating, not in a radiological environment that army does, that will complicate things.

The breadbasket of Russia is right there, they remember Chernobyl. And I think the whole world turns against Putin, right. I mean, it becomes North Korea on the Volca in connection with Russia's status as a pariah state. And guess what? We get to escalate after that, too, or the Ukrainians would as well.

So I think there's been some strong language, important language, I think, for the Biden administration about that, Jake Sullivan's statement several months ago. So I don't think that's the issue. And I do think that, instead of talking about these discrete weapons systems, although all I could talk about tanks for a long time, is that we should be agreeing on objectives, it should be teed up to the president.

Mister President, we think that Putin must be defeated here because that will not be the end of aggression until he acknowledges he's been defeated. We think that the military objectives associated with that defeat are twofold. First, to prevent Russia from continuing the onslaught against the Ukrainian people and against Ukrainian infrastructure and creating all this human suffering, so that's one, that's a protective objective.

And the second is, to help the Ukrainians develop the offensive capability and capacity and ability to sustain an offensive such that they can regain all the territory taken since 2014. That's what I would recommend. Now, once you get agreement on that, you look at the risks and the consequences of now striking targets in Crimea, making the Russian positions on Crimea untenable, which I think the Ukrainians could quite easily do actually, with the right equipment and weapons systems.

Then you can put together a strategy for training and equipping and assisting the Ukrainians, that makes sense. And you can evaluate what you're doing to see if it's adequate relative to your objectives. So then instead of tanks or not tanks, Bradley's or not, Bradley's tackles are. I mean, come on, let's elevate this discussion and provide the range of capabilities necessary.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: I think it's fairly clear that the administration does not want Ukraine to take back Crimea, does want there to be something closer to the pre February 24th, 2022 lines and wants there then to be a negotiated settlement. And I think this is gonna be an extremely big bone of contention in 2023 because it is absolutely clear that Zelenskyy and his people do not want to settle for that.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: And I think you're right and that needs to be drawn out, right, and the assumption underpins that position. The assumption is that the war can end under favorable or acceptable conditions, if Ukrainians stop at this line.

>> Niall Ferguson: Yeah, and this is where I think Kissinger and others have concerned, it's quite hard to know what the end state is.

In your scenario, we give them the weapons to win the war, and not only to win it up to February 23 lines, but all the way back to before the annexation of Crimea. And I think the counter argument against that is, yes, but Putin does have the ultimate option of using tactical nuclear weapons because it would be existential for him if you lost Crimea.

And this is where the debate is, I heard Boris Johnson, the former British prime minister, say confidently, there was absolutely, absolutely no chance that Putin would do that. And I think the more I hear Boris Johnson say that, the more worried I am, because it is not that his judgment on that kind of issue is to be relied upon.

The reality is that if it's Crimea that's gone, if in fact, Putin is driven back to the 2013 or the 1991 borders, it's pretty much game over for him. And is he the kind of leader who goes quietly into the night? I think if you're back in your old job, you would have to advise the president that there is some significant risk, not of a Russian collapse, but of some last desperate, I'll call it the Tony Montana sequence of events, where this ends badly.

And I think it's legitimate to have that concern, given the man that Vladimir Putin is and given that this would be existential for him.

>> John H. Cochrane: But let me be fair with you on that, Naill, is the world we go to, the world where you can have what you want, so long as it's little green men, but you can't have what you want with invasions.

Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Sweden and Finland have all learned very important lessons here, and I don't think they like that outcome either.

>> H. R. McMaster: But actually, I think this is exactly the debate that has to happen that we're not hearing, right. All you hear is about tanks or no tanks or Abrams or leopards or whatever, I mean, but this is the debate, right.

And I think the counter to the counter argument is that the war doesn't end, unless in the Ukrainians take back, unless Putin acknowledges been defeated. It's just continued missile strikes, drone strikes.

>> John H. Cochrane: So we end up, and that's clearly the war is not going to end, we're just a new set of lines.

And the other example is Saddam Hussein. We rolled right back up to the border and he was not instantly out of power. So it's not obvious to me that an autocrat cannot lose something and stay in power if he so wishes to stay in power.

>> Bill Whalen: The war may or may not end, the show has to end, though, I'm getting a signal, we have to go.

One last question for the group. Some bands get together, they put a little bit of work together, they burn out, they break up. Other bands stay around forever, rolling stones on their eighties or going out on a tour with artificial hips and knees sponsored by Metamucil, and on it goes.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Unlike the stones, we got to the stage of being senescent rockers at the beginning, so it's not like we can really age much further. I predict we'll still be doing this in ten years time.

>> Bill Whalen: That's the question.

>> Niall Ferguson: And the war in Ukraine will still be going on in ten years time, and we'll be debating Cold War two in ten years time.

And they'll probably be the omega variant of COVID in ten years time to force us back into lockdown. So, yeah, prepare yourself for ten more years of goodfellas.

>> Bill Whalen: John, you're up for another ten.

>> John H. Cochrane: I'm in and if it needs be, I'll be Paul and tell us all to get back to work, because I enjoy so much talking to you guys, learn so much.

We've got so many issues still to talk about that we haven't gotten to. And events, my dear boy, events, something I learned from Naill, will keep us busy. So let's keep the band together, guys.

>> Bill Whalen: General, can we count you in?

>> H. R. McMaster: No Heck, yeah, I mean my friend Mickey Hart was drummer for the Grateful Dead and out Dead and company.

He said there's a rhythm to life, right, he explores how rhythm can inform our understanding of life. And I think we've got a certain rhythm going here and let's keep it, let's keep it going.

>> Bill Whalen: Thanks, so that's it for episode 100. Who would have thought we would have gotten this far?

But still going strong and we'll be back soon with a new episode. On behalf of my colleagues, Naill Ferguson, HR McMaster, John Cochran, also here at the Hoover institution. We hope you've enjoyed these shows these many years and many more to come. We'll see you soon.

>> Speaker 8: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch battlegrounds.

Also available at hoover.org.