Kal Raustiala 0:02
Good morning, everyone. I'm Kal Raustiala, director of the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA. And I'm happy to have our audience back for another one of our Zoom session, really pleased to have our longtime Senior Fellow General Wesley Clark on in a few minutes, I'm gonna introduce him in a second. Let me just mention a couple of ground rules and a couple of upcoming events. So first, upcoming events you might want to mark your calendar for. On June 3, we'll do another similar Zoom session with Jim Newton, formerly of the LA Times and now at UCLA who's going to talk about his new biography of Governor Jerry Brown, called Man of Tomorrow. And we're going to focus, of course, primarily on kind of the International dimensions of Governor Browns two tenures. And it's a terrific book, I recommend it. And then on June towards the 20th, I'm just double checking, sorry, June 17. Ben Rhodes, formerly of the White House, Deputy National Security Adviser and longtime speechwriter for President Obama will be on to talk about his recent essay in the Atlantic called the 911 Era is over. And so Ben and I will discuss what he meant by that and kind of expand upon what he discussed in that in that essay. So those are two upcoming events I hope you come to. For this event, remember that although this is being recorded, you're not being recorded only only I am and General Clark is and that will go on YouTube later, but the audience never is. And for questions, please submit those through the feature at the bottom of the screen, you'll see, let me just double check whether it's called q&a or chat, I think it's called q&a. I'll get corrected if it's not called q&a. But I think you can submit your questions that way. And when we get to the question period, I'll then select from those questions that are submitted, and pose them to General Clark directly. So with those preliminaries behind us, it's really a pleasure to have Wes Clarke back with us. As I said, he's been a fellow for a long time and a friend of the center and a friend of mine, and I'm looking forward to hearing from him talking about some broad issues related to US national strategy here in 2020, but specifically, in light of what's happening with the COVID crisis. He's coming in from Little Rock, Arkansas. So General Clark, let me turn the microphone over to you. Or the camera, I should say.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 2:36
Kal thanks very much. And it's great to be with this group. I've always really felt I've always felt privileged to be part of the UCLA group and my grandson's live out there. And so I always feel very close to you. And so thank you all for being here with me today. Now I'm on and everything's working right, Kal?
Kal Raustiala 2:59
Yes, absolutely. Sounds great.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 3:01
All right. So look, I mean, it is a strange time in America, everybody feels that it's like being on like frozen Little Rock. It feels like we're on a satellite orbiting the Earth. We've got plenty of food, water, oxygen, we got each other to talk to. And we can communicate electronically, but we can't get to anybody. We don't know how long this is going to last. And when you turn on the news at night, if you're watching CNN, all you hear is how many people have died in the Coronavirus and what Trump has said and how bad that is. And it's really like an intermission in what's going on even as we're ramping up this presidential election. So I wanted to step back for a second, take a look at the big picture and ask, where's all this going? What is happening? What's likely to happen? So to do that, of course, you have to talk about kind of, you have to bring it in and go through first, like the history. So what are the major forces impacting on us? What are the trends we're seeing right now? What are the uncertainties? We started... let's start back in the 1990s when the United States was a global, not only the global power, but we were pushing for globalism. We worked the World Trade Organization. We pulled people together. We were strong in peacekeeping operations, we actually started a doctrine called R to P the responsibility to protect that came out of the operation I was involved in in Kosovo, where we were going to call nations to account for how they treated their own citizens. And it was a real high point in international law. It was a high point in American policy and American power around the world. 911 came and we entered a new era. And there are a lot of things that have happened. There's the tragic mistake of invading Iraq, was never going to work. It was always hokeyed up, it came out of a split inside the Republican Party, where the hardliners resented the fact that Colin Powell and President George H. Bush had stopped the assault too soon. They weren't real men. And so there was always a plan inside the Republican Party to finish the job, go get Saddam Hussein. And one way or another, they convinced themselves after 911, that they had a reason to do it. China, when we brought it into the World Trade Organization, and when we talked about it in the 1990s, it was like China, well, you could engage them or contain them. And if you contain them, you could never then go back and engage them because you make an enemy of them. So as President Clinton said, at the time, China couldn't be making the kinds of progress it's making economically without having a free and more open society, where information can be exchanged. And so it was inevitable that democratization would accompany economic development in China, and therefore, not to worry so much about the lingering tendencies of authoritarianism and single party control of the state. But after 2008, China lost its respect for the United States. Before that China was like, and this is what they told me when I went to China in 2005, I met with President Hu's Youth Advisory Chair, we know that you and Britain were best friends, and Britain gave you leadership of the world. So China wants to be best friends with America. So you will give us leadership of the world. And of course, everybody laughs when I hear that, because we would never give up leadership for the world of China, not even in 2005. But after 2008, and especially after the civil war that was fought in China, between Bo Xilai and Xi Jinping. And after Xi Jinping has consolidated control, China is a much different place. Not only is it more authoritarian, but it's more assertive in the world. And Xi Jinping's Chinese dream has many characteristics, but one of them is to push the United States out of its traditional role in the western Pacific and away from its traditional allies and friends there. So China is assuming global leadership. At the same time, the United States was, after 2008 with President Obama, trying to craft a new Mideast policy, trying to withdraw forces, trying to end this dysfunctional conflict, this horrible conflict between Sunni and Shia, between the Persians in Iran and the Arabs in Saudi Arabia. And we ended up with a agreement to freeze the Iranian nuclear program. But we did not get an agreement to freeze Iran's terrorist activities or its efforts abroad to become a hegemonial power in the region. And so that trend was going. Look, Russia decided, in the 1990s, we always knew there was a risk that we might face a resurgent Russia, but President Clinton had a relationship with Yeltsin and we had the Chicago School of economists in there and we thought that not much was really going to happen bad. And they were just having trouble sort of getting their feet on the ground and democracy, and there were elections and the regional governors were elected, and it was looking reasonably positive, despite the corruptions and the lingering influence of the KGB. And this whole change starting in, really in the mid 90s. And finally, Yevgeny Primakov became the Prime Minister of Russia. He said, Russia is a great power, we're never going to be secure. We're never going to accept the leadership of the United States, or the hegemony of NATO in Europe, and we must fight against it. Putin became president took a while, in some head fakes. I had a nice visit with President George W. Bush in Texas. But they were never going to be our friends. And in 2008, during the Olympics in Beijing, Russia invaded the sovereign country of Georgia, is still there. And every year it encroaches a little more with its forces on Georgian territory. It was a test for Putin of how good the Russian military was, well, they weren't very good. So he's reformed the Russian military. And so he's working to push outwards to regain the Soviet space. Got pretty frustrating with what happened in Ukraine in 2013-14, because it messed up the Eurasian union, but he found a way to get into Syria, he pried the door open to the Middle East. And he's there. President Obama said it might be a swap. He might get bogged down there. But he's not seeing it that way, at least not... Of course, Russia and China are now closer together than they've been for a long time. And we're watching this. But what happened to us at home is we faced after 2008, the failure of neoliberal economics in the United States. I know, I know, if you're a Democrat, you're going to tell me it was a great recovery. And every year jobs were added. But if you went to the rust belt, and President Obama knew this, and tried to fix it, but he couldn't, because macroeconomic policies (low interest rates, low inflation, good things for the business community) it's not enough to bring those jobs back to America. And so there was disaffection. And now what we're recognizing is actually what we we hope, big banks at the expense of small banks, in 2008 2009. And in the recovery, we use the Fed, okay, we avoided the depression, true and, you know, eventually people got employed and under Trump employment rate went down real low. But it didn't go down quickly. And we helped Wall Street rather than Main Street. And that's a fact that we're having to live with. One thing that did change in the United States, though, was we became energy, almost totally energy independent in terms of hydrocarbons. They found in the 1980s that they could go to what they call source rock, where the oil and gas bubble out of this hard rock and they formed pockets. And that's what we were, for 100 years, that's what we were finding, refining oil, but we weren't getting at the source of it. Well, through hydraulic fracturing, they learned to get at the source of the oil, and now we're 13 million barrels a day where we were before the last month or so, a net exporter of crude oil, we could send it all over the world. And we found we could get through as much oil as mankind really could ever need, and certainly enough to destroy the planet. It completely changed the economics. And by the way, more than a third of economic recovery from 2010 on was due to the oil market. Republicans never bought on to the Obama strategy for the Middle East. They had historic relationships with Saudi Arabia, and Israel, and Israel wasn't convinced you could ever defang Iran. So as a result, the Obama strategy wasn't a real national strategy. It turned out to be just a one-party strategy. So where we are today. So take those historical facts and forces and look at where we are today. China is assuming global leadership, while the US under President Trump is withdrawn. The European Union has been further weakened by Brexit and the various nationalist pressures, COVID, the inability to really help these economies, they're still talking about a 500 billion year-old bailout. But it's not done yet. It means that the European Union, and the great dream of a Europe whole and free from the Atlantic to the Urals is, as it's further diminished from what people hoped for, in the 1990s. There's no progress in dealing with climate change. We've walked out of the agreements. And despite the fact and the evidence that everything's getting worse and worse, faster and faster, record warmth in the Arctic, etc., we don't have any consensus to move forward. And without American leadership in the world, there will be no progress in dealing with climate change.Russia is moving out in the Middle East. Now their plan in the Middle East is they're going to take over serious oil resources. And they're going to then blackmail the European Union into funding the rebuilding of that destroyed oil infrastructure. They're also very actively engaged in Libya. And they'd like influence in the Libyan regime and working through General Haftar there. Russia has also got a working arrangement with Iran. Now how much they want this versus Saudi Arabia. No, no, they just want to be involved and be able to seek Russia's interest at the expense of everyone else's. So they'll tilt one day, one way, one day, another. They certainly don't want to be tied down to the Iranians, but they also want to be friends with the Turks, but not tied down. And they can use the Saudis from time to time even though right now there's a bit of a dust up over the oil markets. In Eastern Europe, Russia has a really strong grip on Ukraine, through their support of the forces in eastern Ukraine, through Russian diplomacy, and through the absence of actual American diplomatic support for Ukraine, in the way we could have supported. We've left this to the Europeans, we put it on Angela Merkel, and Macron, and these countries have never been strong enough to stand up against Russia. That was the whole purpose of NATO. They're not strong enough now. In the 19th century, everybody in the world of geostrategy believed the center of the world was Ukraine. But actually, right now, the center of the world is Western Europe. And both Russia and China are contending to dominate Western Europe, just as the United States is engaging in quarrels, talking about tariffs, wanting to put pressure on Germany for not paying their share and backing away from NATO. This is the top or... Europe is the center, is the cockpit of conflict, because of the great industrial potential. China needs it. Russia needs it to stand against China. And the United States needs it. But we're playing to these sentiments in the States that we've been taking advantage of by the Europeans. In the Middle East, there'll be grinding conflicts continuing. And Kal, I hate to say this, but we should probably discuss this. But I think it's inevitable that nations are going to move away from a rules-based international order and the accompanying tenets of international law, to the extent that the United States is not there to lead and help enforce. So we may be dominant in certain technologies like medical technologies, we will probably maintain that. I mean, it's amazing what we're doing with respect to COVID, more than anybody else, faster than anybody else. 20 potential vaccines out there, stuff's already being tested. It's really impressive. We still have great science, and through the system of the market, we have great competition for success. So those forces are still gonna play and they'll keep us dominant in most of this along with defense investment through the end of the decade. But there are problems. Look, where we are right now is we're focusing on China. And at least the Republican Party has decided China's the winning card to play for this election. Democrats feel like China hasn't played ball with us very well. And Republicans like it, they like an enemy. So this tension with China is going to grow. And it's reflected in face to face diplomacy, but troop movements, ship deployments, the way we restructure our armed forces, our defense announcements, the United Nations, friction in the World Health Organization. We've recast the Defense Department away from the terrorist threat and into facing up to the challenge of China in the western Pacific, although to be honest with you, I don't see a strategy for the United States that's successful in this. In the MidEast, we're trying to get out. With NATO, we're clinging on despite the occasional statements by President Trump, the bureaucracy is still hanging on to NATO, and will. Meanwhile at home, we've got national debt raising its head. Okay, how much can the Fed put in: 5 trillion, 7 trillion? Is there a limit? And as we start to do this, Republicans say this is an opportunity to go after Social Security and Medicare. When Democrats are talking about Medicare for all, Republicans are talking about less Medicare for some; it's just the way the partisan divide is, and forget about the student loan forgiveness. That's off the table in the current political environment unless there's a change in governance. In Arkansas, it's so bad that actually in response to this terrible COVID emergency, the state has has managed to prevent abortions in the state. So, I mean, partisanship is alive and well. And what you're seeing here at home is a conflict. Democrats believe the doctors, Republicans want to get the economy open. And much of America is caught in between this divide. It's confusing, and it's difficult. There's some major uncertainties ahead. So where are we going? First of all, is there going to be a second stage of COVID? This fall and winter? And how severe will it be? No one knows. But if history is any guide, there will be a second stage, the vaccines won't be out there and available for everyone in time. And so we may end up having to go back into social distancing. Will Donald Trump be reelected in November? If he is, all the trends about us withdrawal from the world will be accentuated. If he isn't, the Democrats will try to take half a step back. But the Trans Pacific Partnership and engagement with some of our allies in Asia, still going to be a problem, as well as relations with China. So it could be two steps in the direction of Donald Trump, or maybe a half step back if there's a change of government. We don't know how long China is going to be patient with this. China plays a long game, and traditionally, they don't use force, except when they think they're losing. But under Xi Jinping, there's more pressure, there's more military pressure being brought against Taiwan. We've never said we would defend Taiwan, but we've never said we wouldn't. And so there's a sort of dance going on. The Republicans want arms sales to Taiwan, China objects, China sends its forces out there. We know that if we put aircraft carriers in and around Taiwan, they're vulnerable to being struck. And it only takes the sinking of a single US aircraft carrier in a conflict to be declared the loser if you're the United States. So we have to be very careful during this period. And a lot of it depends on whether China thinks it can win and continue to win by playing the long game, or whether President Trump is so successful in turning the whole world against China on the basis of COVID and other things that the Chinese feel compelled to take dramatic action with the forces at hand. And finally, we don't know what Putin is going to gain out of this. We know he's running scared in Russia right now from public opinion. If you're a dictator, that usually means you need a distraction. And Ukraine is available for distraction, maybe not before the election but certainly in the winter timeframe, Ukraine is going to be increasingly vulnerable. So what we're entering is a period of movement away from a rules based international order in which the United States was dominant, and increasingly into a period of multipolarity, in which the power blocks reform, reassert their prerogatives, and move away from international law, and diplomacy. How we play this as Americans depends on how we vote in November. With that, I'd like to stop and, Kal, let's take some questions and see what your audience is interested in.
Kal Raustiala 23:32
Great, Wes, that was terrific. So what we'll do is I'm gonna start off with just a couple questions of my own, and then we'll pivot to what's coming in over the chat. So first of all, that was a great tour of a lot of big issues. Let's pick up where you left off, which is the idea that we're moving to a different kind of world and part COVID is just an accelerator. It sounds like in your view of that, but we were already moving this way. And that view is not is not unique to you. I mean, John Mearsheimer, probably the most well known realist scholar, published a piece last year saying the liberal international order is over, and we're moving into a multipolar system. And, you know, here's all the implications of that. So I think it's a view that's out there. And I think it's an important one. The question is, what does it really mean? And what does it mean for sort of concrete issues, concrete institutions like NATO, like the WHO, the UN, like the World Trade Organization, etc. So maybe let's start with the US China dimension first. So it does seem like China has been ascendant well before COVID, obviously. Do you think that COVID is going to... you said, Well, maybe Trump will be successful at making China seem like the bad guy and there's good reason to think that. What do you predict is actually going to happen? And do you think China's kind of global leadership will rise or fall on this issue?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 25:07
So it's really, China's really working very hard right now. So they've had, they've done it on multiple fronts, they pushed back first against the United States with this information, alleging that we had brought COVID to China. Nice try. But they then have managed to dominate much of the world's markets for personal protective equipment, for ventilators, gloves, face masks, but here's the deal in a very chaotic supply chain. And there are literally hundreds and hundreds of Chinese factories producing these goods, and many of them are substandard. So there's been two consequences to that. One is a huge embarrassment for China on this when governments who are the purchaser site, this is no good. I mean, we didn't get what we promised. There's been a huge crackdown in China. One of my friends was on the phone with a mayor of a medium sized Chinese city for 5 million people. And he said, He's too busy to talk. He's got shipments that have been rejected at Shanghai, he's got to bring them back. And he's working factories. It's a chain of command economy. So the business in China does what the government wants. The government's peddling, like a duck, really hard underwater to try to improve its... take advantage of this period. So they've got strong authority, moral authority inside China. They've got control that no other country has in terms of public activities, and at least expressed public attitudes. But whether they can translate that into some broader dimension or not, is unclear. There's already starting to be some backpedaling by the Europeans on accepting Chinese investments, for example. The Africans have understood that, you know, Chinese investment comes with lots of strings attached. They basically, you either pay it back or they're taking your land for nothing, after you paid for them to develop the port. So China has, in this outreach, it's not as fearsome, it's not going to be as effective as some people believe. But it is a challenge to American values, and especially to the American business community. Because at the heart of it, we have to grow our economy, we've got more people coming in, need jobs. You can't take money from rich people and just hand it out to poor people, we've got to give people better jobs. And so China's growing impact in international institutions, and in these countries, erodes the rule of law, erodes the ability to do honest business, it erodes the ability to bring relationships in. And I'll give you an example. So in one country in Africa, where I'm close friends with the president, he received a an offer from a Chinese firm for $2 billion worth of rail extension to the Indian Ocean. But he looked at it carefully. It was going to be financed by China, was done by China Rail Corporation. Looks like a sweet deal. And we got a hold of it, took it to some European railroad engineer, he said it's got $600 million of slush money in it. And the railroad is substandard. But you shouldn't do this. Well, the President went down and met with Xi Jinping in January, he did it anyway, because no one else was going to provide the money. So this is the kind of thing that happens in Africa to these countries. This is the way China reaches out. So it's going to be a struggle, and that struggle will impact on the United States on our business community. And it will interfere with our ability to work with our NATO allies on things like Huawei.
Kal Raustiala 29:04
And do you think that Chinese leadership is going to be more brittle because of the way that they handled COVID? So there was such a cover up initially, and then Xi disappeared. And then he sort of reappeared and took the lead on whatever policies they were doing. But a number of different China watchers have seen this as a sign that the support for the regime has been reduced because their incompetence has been exposed, and in a really deadly way. Do you think that it will have larger repercussions?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 29:42
Why should you
Kal Raustiala 29:43
And do you agree with that?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 29:44
Yeah, I do agree with this. To the extent that there is internal opposition to Xi Jinping, we know this. He doesn't have a total free hand. You never do when you are an authoritarian leader. You can never trust even the people that smile and support you, you always have to look behind the facade, at their real ambitions and interests, and there's a lot of potential conflict in China. But here's something's very surprising: that the East Asian neighbors of China haven't condemned it the same way. They have been grateful to China, for the leadership that Xi Jinping took, so he doesn't have the same, he doesn't have the same universal condemnation that Trump is trying to put on him. Secondly, appreciate the fact that President Trump and President Putin, they seem to really work well together. And if you were president Putin, and you were worried in the long term about China, there's nothing you'd like more than a US China quarrel. Now, the Chinese know this, and they understand exactly who Donald Trump is. So they're in a delicate, three-way balancing act. On the one hand, they have to maintain control, Xi Jinping has to maintain control and authority to grow China. Secondly, he doesn't want a conflict with Russia, he wants to use Russia, and its natural resources. Third, he doesn't want to conflict with the United States, he still needs the technology. He's got a lot of money tied up in it. And he wants to ride on the coattails of American technology and business elsewhere into the world. So it's a balancing act. But the balance is shifting in China's favor and against the United States on this. This is what we all see. The question is, how do you combat it? So by harsh rhetoric, what you do is you provoke China. And this is really our danger, is that Xi Jinping takes the rhetoric, listens to Donald Trump, he looks at what's coming from these European allies, Italy, France, Germany, say you actually you have covered up on COVID. And he feels he's threatened. And if China feels threatened, China can take action.
Kal Raustiala 32:08
We have a huge number of questions. So I'm gonna start jumping into them.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 32:13
I'm gonna go quick, then.
Kal Raustiala 32:15
Yeah, no, no, no, we have about 30 minutes and a lot of great questions. But they're deep questions. So I'm just going to start with a few. And then we can adjust accordingly, depending on the kind of question they are. So one of them really follows closely on what we were just discussing. So the question is, what what could a democratic administration do to reinstate a rules based international system? So in other words, if we see a change in the fall, is there anything we can do to arrest some of these trends we've been talking about?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 32:49
Well, you have to start by rebuilding your alliances with Europe. And that means working through the various conflicts of interest that have emerged through the Trump period, the prices of automobiles and so forth, what happens with Brexit... because you can't move forward with a rules based order without help from Europe. And secondly, you then have to work Africa in a serious way. Africa is the cockpit in which the challenge to the rules based order will be felt first. President Buhari of Nigeria was before COVID was in Moscow, someone nearby Putin, and Putin said, This is no, this is secondhand information, not firsthand. Putin said, you better start listening and respecting Russia. We want a greater role in Nigeria. And we're there now. You know, he has mercenaries, this Wagner Group is all over Africa. And they're controlling Central Africa Republic, essentially. And he wants to move them into Nigeria, he wants to control the oil markets for Nigeria. So all these countries in Africa have always had trouble with rules based order. So you've got to go to Africa, got to have an American presence there. You can't do it without investment. But here's the good news. The banks have been changed in the United States or OPIC. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation is now something else. And with money appropriated from Congress, it can support American economic development in Africa with American entrepreneurs, should be a big step in getting us in the right direction. Because when you put your own business people on the ground and they're complaining about graft and corruption, and, you know, how you get a license and all that stuff, you bring it to the ambassadors, you're putting money in the country. Now, you can begin to move this forward. And it's also a pushback against China and what it's doing. But we're going to have to revive the Trans Pacific Partnership in some way. Maybe with a couple of different rules. But we got to bring our Asian allies into this as well as our European allies, as well as Africa. I think I'll stop on that.
Kal Raustiala 35:10
Perfect. So another question related to Russia, which we only briefly discussed. So if you took the temperature of US Russia relations right now, how would that temperature compare to the animosity during the height of the Cold War?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 35:26
Well, it's a very, very complex question to answer because there was a lot of misunderstanding during the Cold War. I mean, here's the thing. American foreign policy is always a reflection of American politics. And so it was convenient during the Cold War to beat the drum against the Soviet Union. President Reagan called it the evil empire. And people just flocked to that. And then when he was able to have a meeting with Gorbee, and try to bring peace, I mean, he became hugely popular, even with a left wing Democrats for helping defuse it. So when you're looking at relations, you're always talking about domestic politics. Condoleezza Rice told me one time she said, Look, before they got into office, she said, Look, we're going to use Russia, they're going to help us. Said you people in the Clinton years, you made an enemy of Russia, we're gonna make friends with Russia. Every US administration tries to reset relations with Russia. I think, though, that President Trump is the only one who's been really successful. And I'm really concerned about why. So, you know, he always says he's been tougher on Russia than anybody else and it's true, there's still sanctions in place. It's true that we've improved our NATO forward presence against Russia with some NATO battalions in the Baltic states, we had a big exercise that had to be cancelled because of COVID that was set for late March, early April for NATO, with troops coming in from the United States. But that aside, what we've done is we've... that's superficial, what we've done is two things that looked off aren't. So the weapons to Ukraine, they're in storage, I mean, it would take two weeks to get those guided, those anti tank missiles out of storage if Russia ever did come across the line of separation, in out of the Donboss, they'd never be used. That'd be the first thing the Russians would take care of through bombing. So there's that. The sanctions, yeah they're bad, but we're still making exceptions for them. For example, we've allowed a big Russian aluminum plant to invest in Kentucky. That's why they're calling him Moscow Mitch, I guess, I don't know. But it gets into the partisan politics of this. And, um, the Mueller investigation, you know, it looks really bad. But it's being discredited. And so that also eases the friction between the United States and Russia. And President Trump can call President Putin. So I would say it's a much different relationship now. And it's much more dangerous. During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain protected Russia from the West, or Soviet Union from the West, but it also protected the West from the Soviet Union. So people that came over there that were spies and intelligence agents, they wore big baggy suits. They couldn't speak good English. And everybody can learn that, you know he's from Bulgaria, right? I mean, and it was so obvious. And now they're integrated with us. There are 10s of thousands of Russians here in the United States, the series The Americans on Netflix, which I'm sure many of you seen, I mean, that's not fiction. That's true. And there are Russian hit squads all over the world that are able to travel freely, which they couldn't during the Cold War. So it's a much more dangerous time for America. ORT, by the way, is broadcasting from Kansas City. And I regularly turned down an opportunity to be on ORT, it is a Russian propaganda means and somehow it's broadcasting from Kansas City. So the tensions are lower. The threat is greater.
Kal Raustiala 39:32
Interesting, interesting. Let's stick with Russia for a second. So another question that came in. How do you think the issue in Ukraine will resolve? Will Ukraine concede territory to Russia? Is there a realistic possibility that Russia will withdraw? What do you predict?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 39:50
Well, I think it's frozen politically because even though Zelensky, President Zelensky, the comedian who was elected and is a novice in politics... politics is just common sense. So he came in, everybody in the West said, Hey,you got to get Kolomoyskyi, the oligarch who controls the banks, and he's the center of corruption, he was your big backer, you got to get him out. And so at first it looked like that's what was going to happen. But there was pushback. And Zelensky, like most politicians, he moves with the forces that act upon him. So Kolomoyskyi was invited and allowed back in, his people came back in to some extent. The hardline reformer was pushed out of the Prime Ministership, the guy who's close to Zelensky now is reported to have relations with the Russian mafia, which of course, is the way... it's Putin's intelligence arm of action out there. And Zelensky is trying to balance the forces off. He doesn't have strong enough support from the United States to really be able to stand up to Russia. So he's playing rope-a-dope with them, he takes the punch, he backs up a little bit. I think his heart's in the right place. I think there are a lot of people in Ukraine who will stand firm against Russian encroachment and, I think, Putin, as long as it's a very low cost. It's on the shelf, it's a crisis on a shelf waiting to be used at the appropriate time by Putin. Until then, it's a bleeding sore for Ukraine, and a continuing daily challenge for Zelensky. So my prediction would be unless something dramatically changes in Russia, before the election, nothing until after the election. And then it could well become the first crisis a democratic president has to face.
Kal Raustiala 41:48
Great. So question about China. There's many questions about China. But I thought this one was especially interesting, and you were a longtime consumer of intelligence. And the questioner asks, with the growing influence of Huawei and their 5G deployment, will this erode American intelligence sharing with historic partners, create major security interests with European allies that adopt Huawei technology, for example, the UK. So how is this going to change the way our sharing, the Five Eyes and other intelligent sharing arrangements we have operate going forward?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 42:25
You know, well, it's good
Kal Raustiala 42:26
And is the risk real? Let me just add on. How real is this Huawei risk, because there is some debate on that is,
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 42:31
it is a real risk. And let me just add on to the Huawei risk by saying that there was a Chinese drone manufacturer who just traded a bunch of free drones to some of the cities and municipalities in the United States, they were connected to the Chinese cloud. So everybody in the intelligence community understands that these drones were flying over taking pictures of pipelines, you know, electric grids, and so forth, all of which is considered critical infrastructure, and all of which is fed back into China's artificial intelligence targeting engines that are, you know, preparing in the eventuality, they had to take action, how would they do it? Do they have all the facts they need? So Huawei is is a real threat. And through Huawei they have access to communications and data that they would not otherwise have. Will it destroy our intelligence sharing? Well, look, no, it won't. And it makes our European allies more vulnerable. It gives China more traction in those societies. But we have many ways of protecting our intelligence and our intelligence activities. And as long as that intelligence sharing is valuable to our allies, which it is, they'll work double hard to persuade us they're safe. And I don't know that, you know, many of the people here probably are not have not been inside the intelligence community. Some of you may have been inside, you know very well, there's a sort of Five Eyes agreement. So we only really share sensitive intelligence with Canada and Australia, New Zealand and UK, you don't share with France or Germany, for example, or certainly not Italy. But there's stuff we don't share with anybody. And a lot of stuff that we don't share with anybody. You never know what you don't know, in the intelligence business. I'm very confident that we'll hang on to what we've got. It's not Huawei, it's really about... the greatest risk, Kal, is always human penetration. That's the greatest risk. Our greatest failures have been with people who were inside our intelligence community, who for whatever reason, decided to throw open the doors take money, get out. I mean, the stories are legion. Now it happens with Russia too. But Russia has a way of retaliating. And you know, we haven't been nearly as hard hearted, let's say, as others have
Kal Raustiala 45:08
A couple of questions that came in actually more than a couple about the question of international institutions. And you mentioned this a few times in your opening remarks about what the implications would be of a retreat from a rules based order. So first question is, what do you think of the Trump administration's push to defund the World Health Organization? So maybe answer that both in terms of what does it mean for COVID or global health, but then also, is it a sign of something bigger?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 45:37
Yeah, well, it's a it's a problem for us. I mean, what you'd like is you'd like to be able to have these international institutions jump to what we believe is our own US national interest. I mean, we're not a disinterested party in this. It's not like Americans come from Mars, and we say, all you Earth people, get together and do what's good for everybody. No, no, we use all these institutions to support our own interests. And really, our interest comes from domestic politics. But also, you have to see it in a broader framework. There's tremendous networks of international cooperation in the medical field that had nothing to do with the World Health Organization. They're cooperations of respect of shared business ventures of scientific ideas that are exchanged between people. And one of my friends in the Los Angeles area is working on a Corona treatment. And he's working with people in Italy, because he knows them and trust them. It has nothing to do with the World Health Organization. But what we needed the World Health Organization for is medical intelligence, early warning, and to protect and be a helper for American response in things like the Ebola crisis, where we used them. So they're an organization that can help us. And when we turn our back on them, we make life more difficult for ourselves.
Kal Raustiala 47:06
I mean, I would add also that it seems like one of the criticisms we've heard from the right, but also sort of across the spectrum has been that the WHO was overly credulous about Chinese claims. And part of the problem is that China has become a huge funder of these international organizations, exerting a lot of power on issues like Taiwan, and our retreat is only going to feed that, and that not only seeds the terrain but also, in this particular case, can lead to, you know, even worse outcomes for infectious disease. So I think it's a kind of double a bad thing. But a related question about international institutions. So question is General Clark, can you comment on the current state of the International Criminal Court, and its future prospects? And do you have a good anecdote from your experience there?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 47:55
Well, um, I want to come back to the ICC, because I want to just... Kal, you brought up something, we have to just have one more word on, which is that China has a whole of society approach. It has a national strategy. It uses these international institutions. There's not a single Chinese representative in any international institution who will speak up of his own accord and say well, this is my opinion, I'm not sure waht they say in Beijing, but just, you know, as a real Chinese businessman, I want to tell you how it really is in China. Are you kidding us? Like he gets his head cut off. But so do most of the other countries. So here's a real life incident. In the United Nations, we have an international council that allocates satellite positions in geosynchronous orbit, this was done because otherwise you'd have all the satellites competing with each other in one spot. And so there's an American representative on this and there's a French representative, etc. The American representative is a woman who's got some satellite and some telecommunications experience, who is in private business. She doesn't take instructions from the American government. So when it came to try to block Iran from having a geosynchronous satellite, the French came to us and said, Hey, we got a satellite there, you should help us. You go to the US government, they said you're right, this would be really bad if the Iranians get that orbital position. You go to the person who's sitting on the UN council that decides and she said, Well, you know, but if you look at the record and stuff and legally, well, I think Iran is legally entitled to this position. And, and so therefore, no, I'm voting against the American interest on this. And the French government came to me and they said... how? What kind of government participates in international organizations like this, nobody would do this. You're lying to me, America, there must be some secret reason you're against France. And that's why she's voting that way, tell us the truth. But there wasn't. See the Chinese were so much more adept. It's not only the money Kal, it's the fact that they know what they want and they go after it, after it, after it and after it. Remember the Trump administration: for them pandemic was like, hey, that's a that's an Obama thing. You know, let's get rid of it. We don't need it. It's the same way the Bush administration treated, you know, Richard Clarke, before 911, when they tried to tell the Bush administration, you're gonna have real problem with Osama bin Laden and terrorism. They were like, no, that's a Democratic problem, so they washed it away. This is the exact same thing. On the ICC, what you have is... it's peaked, really. It was always ponderous, it was always difficult. Unless you conquer a country, you can't get access to what you need to do and the information to really prosecute. So in the case of Rwanda, for example, basically, yes, we could prosecute Hutus. In the case of the Balkans, it was really hard because we had to fight for every scrap of information, we never did get the Serb really-disturbed files. It's one sided. And as a result, it's excessively legally scrupulous. Look, that commercial Malaysian airliner was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 and nothing's happened yet, except more disinformation from Russia. So I believe in these institutions. And I think they're important. And I think we have to emphasize them and strengthen them. If I had my way we'd be... the United States would be part of the International Criminal Court system, they wouldn't duck it, and our soldiers would follow the law as international law and set the example. But it was politics. It wasn't that the Clinton administration didn't believe in it. They couldn't get it through the Congress, because it's the way Americans see the world. That's why so much depends on this election.
Kal Raustiala 52:02
Yeah, let me ask about the election. So a couple of people, many people actually, have asked about your claim earlier that that we're retreating or a rules based order is dying. And so there's a number of questions, I'll just kind of summarize as what do we do about that? So in other words, what will American strategy look like in a less rules based order? But then related to that, if you could... you know Joe Biden, you have experience with people who are likely to be leading American foreign policy if Biden wins in the fall? What do you predict he's going to do about the kind of grand strategy questions we've been discussing?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 52:41
Um, so on the first, I mean, the slide away from international institutions is inevitable. We have resisted the rebalancing of the United Nations Security Council, for example, for 25 years, it was clear that China at some point was going to have to come on, they came on, but what about India? Or about Brazil? Why is it France that's still on the Security Council. You know, maybe you have to make it more permanent members, maybe you have to make it larger. But we just never could focus on that. We didn't even want to pay our dues to the United Nations. And so, in part because we've resisted retooling these organizations, because we couldn't see a broader interest than our own national politics, we've let these institutions sort of slip away from us. And it's going to be difficult for any president in his term, barring some catastrophic event in the international community, to totally reverse that. It's just it's too hard. If the Democrats had swept Congress in 2008... wait, they did sweep Congress in 2008. Yes. And what did we get for it? Do we get labor reform? No. Did we get... well, we got Obamacare, did we get a public option? No. And so that was even after we had control of both houses, so even if Joe Biden comes in, he's gonna have a hard time reversing many of these forces that are out there. And that's the problem. He's going to certainly make a trip to our allies. He's gonna reinforce NATO, he's going to, but but we don't want bad relations with Russia, or China. We're not going to make an enemy of Putin. Every president wants to get along with these people. And we're going to still have to, you know, support Israel in the Middle East. And we're still going to want to be friends with Saudi Arabia. And we'll try to do something with Iran to sort of resurrect that strategy, we'll try to bring Iran back in. And we'll try to work through multinational institutions, and we'll try to get our UN dues and peacekeeping dues and WHO dues repaid and put good people on there. But America is a very different system than China and Russia in that the President, except for Trump, a Democratic president cannot really control and impact the business community. Even Trump has a hard time. But for example, when the atolls were being built in China, it would have been really easy for someone from the White House to call up Exxon Mobil and say, get your damn rig out there in the South China Sea, and in somebody's international water and start finding some oil out there. And then when the Chinese judge say, Hey, get those boats away from our rig, that's international waters. Instead, we we use the military as an instrument because we weren't adept enough to use the whole of society the way the Chinese have done it with fishing boats and other things. So there's an asymmetry there that makes it hard for Americans to compete in a sort of ratchet period. We can hold the line or we can collapse it, but to go back and recreate these institutions, or restrict them, is gonna take a re envisioning of America. And it's going to take a reenvisioning of American business away from quarterly earnings statements and dividends and share buybacks and a bunch of other things. And I know that for those of your listeners who were big supporters of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, you think all that's coming. But as somebody who also has a lot of relationships in the business community, I can tell you, those are really unpopular measures. And if the Democrats were elected, they'll have to think their way very carefully through the trade offs that are involved. The inside story on why there's no public option in Obamacare is that while it was being considered, there was a meeting at the at the Hay Adams Hotel in Washington, the White House staffer who was running Obamacare was invited over, a bunch of the big lobbyists for the for the pharmaceutical companies and the health insurance company said, Hey, bud, listen, we understand you guys are talking about a public auction. I promised you, we'll put $500 million of lobbying against you and will defeat your bill if you put a public option in. He went back to the White House, hustled back said, hey, guess what happened to me? There was no public option. Because Democrats were pragmatic, they said why do we have to go through this fight for the public option. Let's get as far as we can, take what's available, and then we'll work it later. So this is the kind of political reasoning that Democrats generally exhibit. And that's why I say it's hard, barring some catastrophic event, to move past that, even if the Democrats win the White House, the Senate and the Congress, there'll be pragmatic reasoning.
Kal Raustiala 58:04
Was it Will Rogers who said I'm not a member of any organized party, I'm a Democrat?
Gen. Wesley K. Clark 58:08
And it's true today as it was 96 years ago. It's the way it is, the two parties are totally different, Kal. And so I respect the people in both parties, most of them are earnest and sincere people, are trying to do what's right for the country as they see it. But the charges you sometimes hear from young people that oh, both these parties are the same. They're absolutely different, and different in orientation, different in capacity. And it's that slice of people in the middle who make the difference. But I know we're running out of time, I just want to say this for the listeners. Those of you that are in college that are young people, please think about what this election is going to mean and vote. I don't care whether you vote for Democrats or Republicans, but you know, you always hear what young people think, but then you don't see the young people's impact on the election outcome. I'm one of the gray beards now. Or at least there's a ghost patrol when I walk through the neighborhood, all the old people, and they're the ones that vote, they got Social Security and Medicare to protect, well, you've got student loans, and you've got a lot longer in this country than any of us do. And so it would be wonderful to see 50%, 60%, 70% of youth turnout 18 to 24 in this election, as opposed to (unintelligible) percen. So I'm hopeful.
Kal Raustiala 59:33
General Clark, thank you so much for doing this. Really appreciate it. For all of you watching and listening, we hope we see you on June 3 when we talk about Governor Jerry Brown with Jim Newton. And thank you for joining us have a great day. Take care, everyone.