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Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. I want Brian Kilmeade. I hope you had a fantastic weekend. We're back in action now. Man, is there action. And I know a lot of you still looked at this this week in your calendar and said, well, that'll be a dead week because it's Labor Day. We're leading it since September. The kids are ready to go back to school in many cases and the campaigns will be slow.
Nothing really starts till after. Well, that was before the most atypical campaign in history with the swapping out of Joe Biden, who they told us he was fine. No one believed it. And then Democrats finally had it to admit it. And they bring in a vice president that is totally unaccomplished, that was looked at negatively by by her own party. And now we don't know what she stands for, but we're supposed to think she's half Indira Ghandry, half Margaret Thatcher and half Barack Obama. I guess that's a lot of halves, but we don't buy that. I don't buy that.
But having said that, that's what's going to be the sprint. Meanwhile, the underpinnings of all this is what's happening internationally and what's happening internationally. Over the weekend, we watched as in a preemptive strike, the IDF bombed 200 sites with 100 fighter jets. Hezbollah responded back and now we're in the middle of peace talks and we see Ukraine moving into Russia.
And a lot of people see that a lot of our energies are in and around the Middle East with two aircraft fighter groups in the region costing us billions of dollars. With me right now, a guy who knows all this backwards and forwards. He is General H.R. McMaster, former national security advisor for Donald Trump and author of a brand new book. It's out tomorrow, right, General?
Yes, it is. Out tomorrow, three star general at war with ourselves, my tour of duty in the Trump White House, and also he's at the Hoover Institute and is a historian. General, great to see you in person for the first time. Hey, Brian, hey, great to be with you. Infinite amount of respect for you through 162 pages of 368 page book, I started plowing through it just gave me great context and reminded me of where the world was when you took over when Trump took over. Yeah, Brian, I'll tell you what I wanted to do is tell readers what it was like, what it was like to serve in the Trump White House.
What it was like to be part of a year in which we administered some very significant and long overdue correctives to foreign policy and to national security. All right, first off, have you had a chance to, because you're on your book tour now, to look at what the preemptive strike was in Lebanon? Yeah. From what you could see, the Israelis, a preemptive strike, I mean, no one denies that they were about to have a massive strike on population centers in Israel, right?
Right, absolutely, absolutely. So what they were doing is looking for intelligence indicators of one of these large rocket attacks. I think it's important for everyone to understand that these are like 150,000 rockets that the Iranians have helped the Hezbollah amass over many years. Some of these are precision rockets now, and you know where they put them? They put them under people's houses. They put them in places that you would think would be a protected site, but it's not protected anymore, obviously, once it becomes a military facility. They saw indicators of preparations for a massive simultaneous launch, and they did what they needed to do. Missile defense is great.
You've got to be able to shoot down the arrows coming at you, but you also have to be able to kill the archer. Thanks for doing it for the civilians out there listening. The problem is these killer drones, and the drones are getting through, and there's a big worry to keep up with the technology. How much has been pioneered in the Ukraine battlefield?
A lot. So it's unbelievable what's happened in Ukraine in terms of the ubiquity of these drones. And these are the first-person-view drones, some of them, which you see.
We really used it very heavily in Ukraine. But also what you're seeing now is the advent of swarm technology, where these drones can almost cooperate with one another. The next iteration in the future is going to be computing power at the edge and the ability for these drones to fight through kind of electromagnetic warfare. But there are countermeasures being developed too, Brian, and this is what's important about the Ukraine fight and learning lessons from it. There's a lot of new technology and counter-drone warfare as well, which involves jamming.
It involves kinetic capabilities. You're shooting them down. But you've got to be able to shoot them down cheaper. You can't fire a Patriot missile at every Iranian drone. Which we're doing in the Red Sea, right? With the Houthis? Well, with the Houthis, we actually, you know, the Houthis are making us go through a good bit of our arsenal in terms of counter-missile defense. I mean, a friend of mine who is very familiar with that operation called each of these incidents in the Bab el-Mandeb, you know, in the Red Sea area, a diving catch.
These have been diving catches is what he's called them. And so, you know, what really bothers me is the degree to which, at least in the beginning, we were very constrained about going after the Houthis directly with offensive targeting. What you want to do is you want to destroy these missiles before they ever get launched. The problem is when you start administration and decide that Saudi Arabia is a pariah nation and demand that they stop bombing the Houthi rebels in deference to Iran. When you start like that, I guess people have egos and realize, well, we screwed that up.
They removed them from the terrorist list. Yeah, it was just terrible, a huge reversal of what our right and at war with ourselves. One of the paragraphs in the postscript is that a lot of the value of Donald Trump's policies only became apparent to many Americans after the Biden administration reversed those policies. And especially in the Middle East, especially vis-a-vis Iran, when Trump put into place, and I think it's worth going back to a speech that President Trump gave in September 2017. It's worth rereading it because he lays out what is the problem with Iran? What are we going to do about it?
And he talks about really over time, the only way that the Iranian people are going to have a better life and people in the Middle East are going to have a better life, if there's a change in the nature of the Iranian government such that it ceases its permanent hostility to the United States, the great Satan, Israel, who they call the cancerous boil, and then their Arab neighbors as well. I mean, they have so much blood on their hands, and they've created so much human suffering in the Middle East. Just look at the Syrian Civil War. Half the Syrian population is dead, wounded, or displaced. And where were the college protests about that, Brian?
None. And here's the thing, the Alawites are Shia, right? Most of their country is Sunni.
They were so brutal on the protesters when they won a degree of, I guess, equality or say in their government, they beat them down to the point where it rallied the terrorists and other Sunni groups to maybe go at them, which caused the Shia Iranians to get involved. And the Russians said, I'll help, because I would like to keep our only port in the area, and that is our one ally. And next thing you know, during the Obama years, we now have Russia back in the Middle East the first time since the 70s.
Absolutely. So what you're alluding to is like, you know, and describing clearly is the cycle of sectarian violence, right, between Sunnis and Shias. And this is what Iran wants. Iran wants that cycle of violence to continue, because that's how they keep the Arab world perpetually weak, and how they extend their hegemonic influence in the region, try to build a land bridge to the Mediterranean. They're trying to put a proxy army on the border of Israel to destroy Israel.
And they've done it. And you know what the Biden administration did, actually the Obama administration did, is they invited the Russians into the middle of that, with the unenforced red line in Syria after the mass murder attacks using chemical weapons in 2013, 2014. Then they invited the Russians to come in to verify the dismantling of Syria's chemical weapons, which of course they never did. Then Russia gets Assad up off the mat. I mean, Assad was getting the crap knocked out of him by the resistance in Syria. And then now what Russia does in the Middle East is they play the role of both arsonists and firemen. They're pouring fuel on the fires in the Middle East and then saying, oh, well, we can help be part of the solution. I did not know the degree in which the Saudis and Iranians were rivals until the WikiLeaks of Hillary Clinton's emails. And you saw the Saudis reaching out to us, will you show some strength against Iran?
We need your help. But they weren't saying that publicly. You knew that you would know this stuff.
You were fighting war, you were in the war at the time. Right, and this is where President Trump took advantage of that dynamic. Do you remember when he took the trip, and I read about this in the book, when he was going to Saudi Arabia, people were like, what the hell is Donald Trump doing going to Saudi Arabia? Right, to his first visit, his very first visit abroad. And it was brilliant because he went to the center of the world's three greatest religions.
Or the people of the book, the time of Abraham, right? He went to Saudi Arabia, then he went to Jerusalem, and then he went to Rome. And if you look at his speeches again in that period of time, he set out a vision for bringing the Arab world and the Israelis together. And people thought that was crazy. But he did it in the Abraham Accords.
One by one. And Saudi was next. And the people who did it, who don't get enough credit, were Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt. Those two guys did a fantastic job with that over the Trump administration.
And everybody at the beginning, they were just dismissive of the whole idea. And then, again, this is another area where you see the reversal of Trump policies and the supplication to the Iranians during the Biden administration to try to resurrect that flawed, fundamentally flawed Iran nuclear deal. And in doing that, as you mentioned earlier, they undesignated the Houthis as a terrorist organization. Then they didn't enforce the sanctions that were put in place during the Trump years. They're not allowed to sell their oil when China's buying it?
Yeah, absolutely. So they'll get billions of dollars, but the people of Iran hate their government. They hate their government. And we realize that even in 2018, of course there have been a series of protests after that. After Masa Amidi's murder because she wasn't wearing her headscarf and then the protests across the country, across Iran that we've seen in recent years. But I remember in 2018, when I was still in the job as national security advisor, the Iranian people were chanting, the problem is not America.
The problem is right here. That was one of the chants of the protesters. And so I think it's important for us to impose sanctions on Iran, but we should give the theocratic corrupt dictatorship in Tehran full credit for destroying the Iranian country. And it's just like when you look at what's going on with Hamas, fundamentally.
You're the expert, General McMaster. But every time they talk about civilian deaths, they should say who's responsible? The people that perpetrated October 7th and then go into the tunnels and let their people die. That's their tactic. Let civilians die and public opinion turn on the Israelis. Why is that not defined in the higher echelons of the White House? And I mean, they're not only using people as human shields, but as you're stating, they want to get as many Palestinians killed as possible. If you look at Sidwar's statements, he's basically said that we want to create martyrs is what he says. And now just think about what he's done to victimize the people of Gaza over, you know, over many years, right?
Since they took over. But the line's been blurred by an administration that is worried about or maybe sincerely worried about this huge Palestinian sympathy support that's on these countries and these college campuses, which I don't want to get too far off your book, but is actually within it. It's being financed by the outside. The unrest in America is being pushed and pulled by forces on the outside. Why is there not a Department of Justice investigation into who is propping up and paying these protesters?
Yeah, I think Columbia, Penn, all these harbors, all these schools. Yeah, I think I think there I think there should be, you know, and of course, I'm not saying that we shouldn't obviously we should worry about innocent Palestinian lives. We should ask the Israelis, hey, apply firepower in a decisive way, but continue to take steps to apply that firepower discrimination. But then you've also got to realize, how about all these tunnels and everything underneath Gaza? How many of those are available for the Palestinian people to take shelter?
None. Because they're used as part of Hamas's terrorist network. And so you've got to place blame on, you know, I heard you play the clip of Jake Sullivan about, you know, making progress toward a two state solution. The destruction of Hamas is a precondition for any progress toward a two state solution because Hamas says that they want to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. That doesn't sound like an organization signing up for a two state solution. I don't know.
I've got to remit you in the lines for that. I want to come back and discuss, too, because today is three years since the explosion at Abbe gate that killed 13 great Americans, 12 men and one woman. And there was a laying of the wreath down in Arlington, not a word from the White House. Now, I know it's not a proud day. They shouldn't be proud of it.
But how do you not acknowledge that? Well, they haven't acknowledged at all what I call the stain of 2021 in August 2021. And it's something we're going to pay for.
Of course, those 13 servicemen and women paid with their lives. And of course, we should put the blame, you know, on al Qaeda, on the Taliban. But what were they telling us at the time? Remember, they told us these big lies about the Taliban, that the Taliban would share power.
How did that work out? The Taliban would treat the Afghan people, especially Afghan women, better. And the third thing they told us, though, is that there's this bold line right between the Taliban and other jihadist terrorist organizations.
That was a fabrication. What we had done is we created the enemy we would prefer to fight instead of the real enemy. And so now, Brian, you have 65 or so al Qaeda and ISIS and or ISIS related terrorist sites that we know of in Afghanistan. You have you have, you know, Siraj Akani is the minister of interior, one of the most heinous terrorists in the world.
He's the guy issuing passports to people. You have now a state, a terrorist state that is a huge threat to the world. And it's the worst possible scenario that and you tackle that in your book about Afghanistan. The president said, I want to get out of there, just like Obama says, I want to get out of there. Biden got out of there totally irresponsibly and then tried to blame you guys, not you, but you were out by then.
Try to play the previous administration for the deal that was in place. A lot to discuss. The good news is the generals here for an hour.
His book is fantastic. You really need a perspective on this because you're about to vote in a few months at war with ourselves. This is my tour of duty in the Trump White House. General H.R. McMaster here for a while.
Don't move. Brian Kilmeade show. It's Brian Kilmeade. The Fox News Rundown, a contrast of perspectives you won't hear anywhere else. Your daily dose of news twice a day featuring insight from top newsmakers, reporters and Fox News contributors. Listen and subscribe now by going to Fox News podcast dot com. The fastest three hours in radio. You're with Brian Kilmeade. My assessment was back in the fall of 20 and remain consistent throughout that we should keep a steady state of twenty five hundred.
And it could bounce up to thirty five hundred, maybe something like that in order to move toward a negotiated gated solution. Right. So that was his recommendation. That was General Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in front of Congress. General sitting right next to him, General Frank McKenzie, Cup 53. General McKenzie, do you share that assessment? Senator, I do share that assessment. Did you ever present that opinion personally to President Biden? I'm not going to be able to comment on those executive discussions. Did General Miller ever present that opinion personally to President Biden?
I think we best ask him. I believe that his opinion was well heard. So when you saw what's happened, the series of events with the Biden's agreed to General H.R. McMaster's got a brand new book out. It's out officially tomorrow, At War With Ourselves, my tour of duty in the Trump White House. General, did you say this is going to happen, this is going to fall apart? Would you have read would you have seen this thing, too?
Absolutely. I mean, you know, I'll tell you, you could you could tell what's going to happen earlier in the year when once, you know, once President Biden gave the military a date and a number. OK, what that did is it compelled the military to shut, you know, to shut the airfield down, Bagram Air Base, and then it puts you in a position where you have to do this evacuation, you know, right out of Kabul Airport. And Brian, I'll just I'll tell you, I mean, I made sure that the president, the White House knew from my perspective.
I wrote a letter earlier in twenty twenty one and said, unless we do these six things, it's going to be an unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan. And you knew to hold on to Bagram and you knew where Pakistan is, you knew where China is, you knew where Russia is, you know, a vital that place built by the Soviets. Right. How vital that was to hold on to that. Right.
And then once you go down below a certain level, you can't secure the place. And I think, you know, how does it make sense, Brian, in any world to evacuate the military before you evacuate civilians? I mean, that's what Trump said.
And it was like a ready made hostage situation. Do you think Trump would have done the same thing? I don't know.
I don't know. I you know, of course, in the book, I write a lot about I think the courageous decision the president makes the sound decision. I think President Trump put into place the only reasoned, sustainable approach to Afghanistan that we had in the whole course of that war.
And and this was in August of twenty seventeen. He gave a fantastic speech where he lays out a whole different approach, like no timeline anymore. It's going to be the Afghans bearing the brunt of the fight. And we're going to do everything we can to support them. He took a fundamentally different approach to Pakistan, which was supporting our enemies.
And we're providing them with aid and assistance. President Trump stopped that. So he put into place a fundamental shift in what we call the South Asia strategy, but included the war in Afghanistan. But, you know, in the book, I do criticize him, you know, from my perspective, for, you know, for going back on that, you know, from not being able to stick with that decision. Now, what happens? I don't think Khalilzad did a great job.
That was terrible. So essentially, I think it was a surrender. I mean, I don't know how else to put it, you know. I'll tell you why I believe it wouldn't happen with Trump.
And it plays, it comes to the theme of one of your books about his personality. H.R. McMaster, Morning Moment. I understand that you're the principal military adviser, that you advise, you don't decide, the president decides. But if all this is true, General Milley, why haven't you resigned? Senator, as a senior military officer, resigning is a really serious thing.
It's a political act if I'm resigning in protest. My job is to provide advice. My statutory responsibility is to provide legal advice or best military advice to the president. And that's my legal requirement.
That's what the law is. The president doesn't have to agree with that advice. He doesn't have to make those decisions just because we're generals. And it would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to just resign because my advice is not taken. Well, that's General Milley saying that's why he didn't put his four stars on the table and resign. But I believe H.R. McMaster, General H.R.
McMaster, he has four, you have three. That if he had threatened to do that, he would not have pulled out of Afghanistan because General Milley was someone who took on Trump at the end. And here he is praising Biden. And if he used his political cachet and said, you do this, it's going to collapse.
Here are my stars. General, I believe that they wouldn't have left the way he left. He would have been forced to listen to him and maybe leave twenty five hundred there. Yeah.
Hey, Brian, you might be worried about that. But here's the other thing to consider is like, you know, hey, you don't want generals to make policy, right? Nobody elects generals, right?
So what you want is you want the American people to hold the president accountable. Tell that to Mattis. No, but yeah, I mean, well, I know he was a civilian at the time, but he left when Trump says, I'm pulling out of Syria.
Mattis goes, I quit. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think there you know, I think there are other factors that were involved with that decision, too. But but hey, I just I just got to tell you, I mean, it was really important is what Milley said is his job is to give best military advice.
Right. That's his job. Not to cross the line from best advice to like making policy. And, you know, he made the right move in your mind. Well, I mean, it's his decision, right? It's his personal decision. I would not take exception to it because it's not his job to make policy. It's his job because you don't want generals to make policy, right? I mean, you want you want you want generals out of the out of the out of, you know, out of that chain because they're not held accountable. Nobody elects generals, right? You want your elected officials to make the policy decisions. Point taken. You're the one who spent decades in the military and you are the general. I'm not. But I wrote a book about largely about this called Dereliction of Duty, about how and why Vietnam became an American war, which had which makes me want to read reading this book.
I just want to read that book. And he goes, get about. This is what I said. This is the reason you've characterized Trump well from your perspective.
You thought that in some ways he's insecure, in some ways he's overconfident. I believe that he knew the optics of what could happen in Afghanistan if H.R. McMaster or Bolton at the time got in his ear or or Johnson got in his ear, Robert O'Brien rather got in his ear and said Mr. President, Afghanistan is falling. It's falling right now.
They're on the march. The Afghanistan army is collapsing. He would not have allowed that because it would have been a severe loss for him in America on his term. He never would have recovered. No, he would have started bombing Baradar right there before he hit Kabul.
Well, I could see that for sure. And really what happened, what happened in the path to the disaster of August of twenty twenty one, if you think about what we did. Right. Step A was negotiating with the Taliban without the Afghan government present.
Right. That was a slap in the face to the Afghan government. But then what then what you had after that is a series of decisions to withhold support from Afghans, air support, logistics support, intelligence support. And you know what happened around that time?
This is now in twenty twenty one. You have the Taliban going around to all of the all of the Afghan officials and core commanders, military commanders and saying, hey, here's the deal. Either you accommodate with me when I give you the signal or I kill you and I kill your whole family. And so what kills me, Brian, is even OK, even the Obama administration, when they got out of Iraq completely, they didn't negotiate with Al Qaeda in Iraq. What the hell were we doing? Talking to Mullah Baradar.
And that was when you guys decided to do it with the Trump team. And then what I would often hear across multiple administrations, the Trump administration and the Biden administration, I would hear people complain about President Ashraf Ghani. And I would just say, hey, do you prefer Haibatullah Akhansada, you know, the terrorist who's in charge of Afghanistan now? I mean, what are you talking about? Afghanistan is not perfect.
It's not going to be Denmark. But we have a very small number of troops who are helping the Afghans bear the brunt of the fight against modern day barbarians. But every day you guys were there was one more day where I'll get where a generation grew up, knew how to read. Women were treated with respect over the whole position.
So every day was gaining. That's how I would have characterized with the American people. And there was no in your book just talking about the dynamics. We know what happened with General Flynn. He's out and he got screwed. No, he did get screwed, honestly.
I felt so bad for him and his family. But you come over and you do you open up with the resignation. And then President Trump says to you, we agree with 90 percent. And let's just end, you know, friends and this is not a vendetta book. But you bring the inside the administration. And Madison Kelly did not respect you like they should have. They worked together to undermine you. They were constantly critical of you. They wanted you to resign as general.
They want you to retire. And that was starting the starting of the tension. Well, I think the way I try to explain it from an empathetic point of view, right, from their point of view. And what I came down to is that I think we had fundamentally different motivations. I mean, I was there to help the elected president determine his own policy approaches, make his own decisions. And I think that some members of the administration, you know, they thought that President Trump was a danger to be contained.
Everybody knows Kelly felt that way and everybody knows Mattis felt that way. And I'll tell you, not not only is I think that the wrong approach, because obviously, again, nobody elected them. Right. You're actually, I think, undermining the Constitution, to a degree, if you are obstructing the elected president's decisions. I mean, it's OK if you don't agree with them. I mean, in my experience, President Trump wasn't doing anything illegal. Right. But he was doing things that cut against the foreign policy conventional wisdom, which, in my view, having served so many years overseas and seeing the nonsense that came out of Washington, I was happy for him to disrupt those foreign policies.
You said a lot of Trump's instincts were really good. And you were open to saying, OK, that's not conventional, but maybe it'll work because you're a student. As much as you're a war fighter, you're also a student and historian. Right. I'd studied the presidency, had written about the Johnson presidency, taught national security and an American military history. So I had this perspective that I knew a lot of these tensions that I was encountering.
They weren't unprecedented. Right. That every president I knew brings his own background to the job. It was on personality and character. And the bottom line for me was the American people elected Donald Trump. I mean, Brian.
Yeah. And I had never even voted. I know listeners might think that's crazy, but, you know, I took the oath of service at age 17 on the plane at West Point, you know, the parade ground at West Point. And I followed George Marshall's example to keep that bold line between your partisan politics in the military. And I never had even voted. President Trump was the sixth commander in chief under whom I had served in uniform.
And I considered it a privilege to do it every day. And you also thought it was an emergency for us to reconfigure our national foreign policy because it was nothing but weakness. Russia began to get emboldened.
China obviously has not stopped the emergence of Iran. There was a good guys, bad guys. The best of a bad situation was Saudi Arabia. You saw a way to bring back some order in the world and you were upset that the Russians were back in the Middle East. And then we're starting. China is beginning to rattle everyone's cage in the Pacific. And we needed to show some strength and somebody that would spend on the military.
Yeah. One of the stories I tell in the book, Brian, is on my first second full day on the job. I had an all-hands meeting with the National Security Council staff and I shared with them that assessment. You know, that the balance of power in the world had shifted profoundly against the United States in large measure because we had vacated key arenas of competition. And you know what, Brian?
If you're not on the field, you're going to get your ass kicked, right? So a lot of what we did and tried to help President Trump do and what President Trump did is re-entered arenas of competition that we had vacated under flawed assumptions about the post-Cold War world. And if it wasn't for this Russian undercurrent, which the Mueller report did an effective job of showing that it was all BS. You write in the book Hillary Clinton paid for that dossier that caused all this unrest and made your job so much harder. And it made the president's job harder. How are we supposed to even try to have a strategy with Russia when you're actually projecting things that they didn't even do in some cases?
Right. It created kind of a sense of beleaguerenment, you know? And what I read about in the book is how that empowered some people, right? We mentioned, hey, you know, some people come into administration, they're there to help the elected president get that elected president multiple options. Other people see the president as a danger, you know? But there's a third group of people who try to manipulate decisions consistent with their agenda, not the president's agenda. And that sense of beleaguerenment allows people around a president to create kind of a bunker mentality, you know, to say, hey, you can't trust anybody. You can only trust me, you know? And there were some of those figures in the administration that I think, you know, got inside the president's head and took advantage of the hostility of, you know, the majority of the media as well as the Mueller investigation and these, you know, these false accusations of, you know, collusion with the Russians.
I'll give you an example. So Tillerson says, hey, Mr. President, I got the ambassador and Lavrov. Why don't we bring them to the White House? What a dumb move for the optics reason anyway. Right. And they say that Trump at that time gave top secret information from the Israelis to, I think something about the Saudis, to Russia. Right.
You had to come in and go, no, it absolutely didn't happen. Right. For the record, he did not ask to see the Russians. Right. That was set up by his secretary of state, who was recommended by the greatest, one of the greatest people you ever meet, Condoleezza Rice. Yeah.
Right? So that was, that meeting set up, next thing you know, he's finally got his meeting with Russia where he was, I don't think he was smart, but he came out. And said, Comey's the problem.
We want to start a fresh relationship. Yeah. And how Comey made up this story and we're going to be, we're going to be done with it. Right.
Right. So then that ended up being this huge story, this huge distraction. Well, it was, you know, it was suggested as one of the, it's just an example. It's one of the examples in the book that I give of, of, you know, how people who are against Trump, often their behavior is far worse than what people don't like about Donald Trump. I mean, the reaction to President Trump creates more problems in the air of national security.
That's why the title's like at war with ourselves, like we need to get over this. What happened in that meeting, Brian, is, you know, the president did not divulge any kind of intelligence source. I was in the damn meeting. And by the way, the president didn't even know what the hell the source of the intelligence was because he didn't really need to know. It never even came up in conversation. So what happened is somebody got a readout of that, of that meeting and left to the conclusion and then they leaked it.
It wouldn't stop. And they leaked it to the Washington Post. So it's in the newspaper.
That's a far worse leak. And by the way, that intelligence was already shared with the Russians because it was a counterterrorist intelligence, you know, report. And we routinely share that with the Russians.
So, yeah, it's just so frustrating. The other thing you point out to get some context, people say, well, chaotic administration. You point out, too, during the first two years of the Reagan administration, they were constantly at war with each other. James Baker and Deaver, I think I remember, was a faction against another faction. George W. Bush had this prestigious, Donald Rumsfeld, second term around, at war with Colin Powell. Right. Right. So, okay, so you had the conformity, you had the establishment.
They were always at war. It's only Casper Weinberg who was a problem. And when George Shultz first took over as secretary of, as I'm reading this book of Beirut, he didn't do a great job telegraphing what was happening in Lebanon.
I don't think Reagan did a great job initially in retrospect. Right. About understanding the terror threat.
And Secretary Shultz was very disappointed in the no response, right, to what would become later Hezbollah's bombing. This was a Shia militia that Iran was supporting in 1983. Right. Kills 241 American Marines, the largest loss of life since Iwo Jima for the Marine Corps.
Right. And then we left. And he was taking notes, a guy named Osama bin Laden was like, okay, I know the playbook now. And one of the guys who was the architect of that bombing, the Israelis took out three weeks ago.
In Beirut, exactly. And, you know, which I think was pretty poignant because remember Prime Minister Netanyahu, during his talk to Congress, he said, we are fighting our common enemy. Our enemy is your enemy.
He's true. And then of course the IDF strikes against this guy who was behind a bombing that killed 241 of our servicemen. General McMaster wrote a fantastic book. It's out tomorrow. Download it today or order it today.
Get it this week. Out war with ourselves. My tour of duty in the Trump White House. A couple more minutes on the other end with General McMaster. Learning something new every day on the Brian Kilmeade show. Hey, welcome back. H.R. McMaster's here. He's got a brand new book out.
It's out tomorrow. Out war with ourselves. My tour of duty in the White House. He's over at the Hoover Institute, too. Can you imagine having someone with this type of experience, a three-star general teaching a class who graduated from West Point in 84. So you are older than me. So, General, I'm. And we've got our 40th reunion coming up.
You do? I can't believe it. And what's striking to me, okay, where you get a sense of what they call the long gray line at West Point, is the 40th reunion when I graduated from West Point were World War II veterans. Class of 1944.
Wow. Who went right to war, you know. So it gives you a sense of what we call at West Point the long gray line.
Just don't worry. How do you feel about Civil War generals being taken off? Yeah.
See, I'm okay with it, Brian. And the reason is I think with these monuments and so forth, you have to look at two things. When was it put up and why was it put up? And I think what happened is right after World War I, when a lot of black veterans were coming back to the United States, there was a real kind of new Jim Crow movement, you know, that put up a lot of these monuments like, hey, you know, make sure you know your place again.
So I think, you know, I think it's good. I mean, I commanded Fort Benning, Georgia. What was Fort Benning is now Fort Moore, Georgia. The guy that Benning was named after, you know, never really was even in the military. You know, he was just a local guy there.
And now it's named for a fantastic officer and his wife, who we know from the book We Were Soldiers Once and Young and the movie. So anyway, I think that's a great point. Yeah.
But when you have Nixon talk about reconciliation and no revenge, I thought, man, is that the wrong message? But if you put up a, you know, if you're putting up for people who fought in the south, it's an intellectual discussion. It shouldn't be an emotional discussion. Right. That's right.
But if you put up parties to reinforce segregation, that's absolutely another story. So the one thing that comes out with this is some of the infighting that really hurt. So I look at General Kellogg, who's a friend of Lieutenant General Kellogg, who's a friend of the show. But he did not like the fact that you got this job. And he went out of it. You write in his book, he went out of his way to undermine you.
Yeah. Well, you know, I think that it was unfortunate, Brian. I mean, what I tried to do is have a good working relationship with everybody. And, you know, and I hope the tone in the book and it is not positive. Yeah, it wasn't to settle any scores or, you know, I'll tell you, my editor's a great guy, you know. But I think he wanted it to be like, at one point he said, a warning. I said, no, I'm not warning anybody. This is to inform people, just to tell the story from my perspective. Do you think he'd be a better president the second time, Trump?
I would hope so, yeah. I mean, one of the reasons that, you know, I'm critical of the president at times in this book, President Trump at times in this book, is because, you know, like all of us, we should learn from our experiences and try to, you know, try to understand, you know, where the pitfalls are and how we can avoid them. And one, don't listen to the wrong people. Well, I think that's one of the keys, right? And one is Steve Bannon is the problem.
Right. Well, you know, I think what I tried to do with President Trump is not exclude anybody's voice, right? The whole idea in running our National Security Council process and National Security Council staff process was to give him access to a broad range of perspectives, you know, but the best analysis and multiple options so he could make his own decisions. One of the chapter titles is called Guarding His Independence of Judgment. I wasn't there to try to manipulate President Trump in certain decisions.
I was there to help him make his own decisions and put into place his own policy. And you're just pretty amazed, like, when you talk about Memoralago and meeting President Xi there, how he liked to talk to Trump and have his own invention of history. How, like, you know, it was this century, that lost century that they had where they were abused by everyone and he basically blames America for it. We had nothing to do with it. Right. And don't even mention World War II, the great role we had in liberating them from Japan.
That's right. It's the Chinese, you know, the century of humiliation narrative. It's a warped view of history. And that's what he was trying to get President Trump to buy in on.
It didn't work. I mean, President Trump saw through it. And he was starting to make some progress. And you talked about China had one vision of us and it was win-win. They win twice.
That's right. That's what win-win means from the Chinese Communist Party is that they win twice. And, you know, President Trump, I think, put into place, and I write this in the book, the most significant shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. And that's the shift from, you know, cooperation and engagement with China under the belief that they're going to liberalize their economy and their form of governance and play by the rules to a policy of competition. Right.
He had a lot of great instincts. And you talk about it, how you helped out war with ourselves. Pick it up, General H.R.
McMaster. It's been a thrill. Thanks so much for the time. Thanks, Brian. Congratulations.
Thank you. The world of business moves fast. Stay on top of it with the Fox Business Rundown. Listen to the Fox Business Rundown every Monday and Friday at foxbusinesspodcast.com or wherever you download your favorite podcasts. Listen to the show ad-free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple Podcast, Amazon Music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
