On this episode of news World, I want to talk about strategic thinking in a dangerous world. I think it's really important for every American to understand both how dangerous the world is becoming and to understand how important it is to re establish the ability to think and act strategically rather than bounce from press conference to press conference and gimmick to gimmick. So I want to take some time to talk about these and I have to confess. Part of what triggered this was a newsletter I've written on the dangers of nuclear war and the fact that we have to fundamentally rethink how we approach nuclear war and our thinking about it. And I'll come back to that. But in addition, I had looked up some things I had said about Vladimir Putin and I at how much of it was relevant today, even though it was things I had said back in twenty thirteen and in twenty fourteen. When you look at America's relationship to Putin over the last twenty years, we've never come to grips with how dangerous he is. Let me just share with you an example of how long I have been talking about understanding Vladimir Putin and designing a strategy for him. I want to share with you something I said on Crossfire back on September twelfth, twenty thirteen. I just want to take a minute personally to talk about this New York Times op ed piece almost certainly largely written by a Washington firm that's hired by the Russians, but supposedly offered by President Putin. I'm a little surprised at all the different reaction. Senators who wanted to vomit, Congressmen who were insulted. Look, Vladimir Putin is honestly and authentically a KGB officer. He grew up in the KGB, he was trained in the KGB. He spent his career locking people up, overseeing torture, overseeing killings. This is a genuinely tough guy, and he has one interest, great Russian nationalism, and he's very open about it. Now, this is the guy who, for public relations purposes, wrestles beyers. He goes out and shoots tigers stripped to the waist to prove he's a tough guy. The idea that we would take his statements seriously. You could go through and read that document and you could find at every single stage that it's a lie. This is a guy who clearly, for example, invaded Georgia. He didn't go and ask the UN. This guy who killed three hundred thousand people in Cheschnown, he didn't worry about humanitarian concerns. When he lectures us, that's his right, but for us to take it seriously is a sign we have forgotten who Vladimir Putin is and why well we have to deal with him as the president of Russia. We don't have to respect his views, we don't have to respect his opinions, and frankly, we should laugh at him when he tries to lecture America about exceptionalism, because he ain't exceptional. He's just one more in a long tradition of dictators and thugs. So that's my view. So eleven years ago, I was trying to explain that there's certain obvious facts, and it's really difficult because you have two wings of the American system that don't work for very different reasons. The left wing doesn't work because it lives in a fantasy land. It thinks that you can draw red lines. It thinks that you can somehow have sanctions but avoid real conflict. It doesn't want to deal with how truly brutal and serious and dictators can be. That's the left, but the right's equally bad, because the right doesn't want to really rethink our bureaucracies, to really rethink what we have to do strategically. Instead, the right just stumbles forward with a series of actions that frankly haven't worked very well. And so I wanted to talk about the concept of strategy and what we need to do to get back to thinking strategically now. I was shaped in part because my dad served twenty six years in the Army, and I had the great opportunity to study at places like the seventh Army Headquarters with the command librarian who was gathering up material for professional soldiers to use. So even in high school, I was reading things that were really the key to the profession, things like Alfred Theer Mahanes the influence of Seapower upon history, or closewitz Is on war, or Sons Who on the art of war. And from all of that background, I had a very early belief that there are patterns that work. It's a little bit like cooking, you know. The reason we have cookbooks is that there are patterns that create, say a chocolate cake, and there are other patterns that create beef stroganof and if you learn to follow these patterns, you too can be a cook. Well. The same thing's true of the art of war and thinking about strategy. We had been very fortunate in my childhood because we were in the shadow of giants. The people who fought World War Two, had been involved in World War One, had spent twenty years thinking about the coming of a great war, and were prepared to think strategically at a level that very few Americans ever have. And so when we entered World War Two, we really had a remarkably effective and thoughtful strategy, and we executed it on a worldwide basis with enormous capability. When we came out of World War Two, we had hoped briefly that we could work with the Soviets, that Stalin could be reasonable, But the very same people who had led World War Two understood reality. They watched what was happening, they watched Stalin's aggressiveness, and they concluded that they had to have a strategy, not just a series of innovations and press conferences, but a strategy for coping with the Soviet Union. And so they turned to Paul Nitsi, who had been an international banker, who had worked in World War Two and really had been one of the key players in the architect of the American economy during the war. And Nitzy was assigned as the head of the State Department's planning operation to go around and talk to everybody and design a genuine strategy. He wrote a paper which has been published and which has been studied as a great book by Ernest May, a Harvard professor on NSC sixty eight National Security Council sixty eighth, issued on April fifteenth, nineteen fifty. It's worth reading because it really captured where we were. It says, look, here is the nature of the Soviet Union. It is an aggressive imperialist empire. It genuinely wants the entire world to become communist. It is a mortal threat to the survival of the United States. And in order to contain it, here are the things we're going to have to do. And it lays out essentially what we did from nineteen fifty to nineteen ninety one when the Soviet emperor collapsed. Think about that forty years a democracy sustained a general strategy, and it ortoantly worked now to show you the power of strategy. As Nitzi worked his way through all this. They did it because, in the words of Secretary of State Dean Achison at the time, when Truman made the decision at Christmas nighteen forty nine, that we had to build a hydrogen warhead, a bomb whose only purpose was wiping out an entire city, he went to President Truman and said, you know, if the world is that dangerous, shouldn't we try to develop a strategy to avoid using these weapons? And Truman said, I think that's probably right. And so that's what Nittsi was trying to do. Can we design a strategy of containment that will avoid a nuclear war and also will avoid our being defeated by the Soviet Union. When he developed it, he had carefully gone to all of the chairman of the Joint chiefs. These were men who were four star officers Army and Navy and Air Force in World War Two. They really understood large conflict and they said to him, you know, we think it's going to take at least forty billion dollars a year in order to be able to defend America World Wari and the current Secretary of fans want to only give them fourteen billion. In their minds, they were something like twenty six billion short, but they were going to get less than half of what they thought they needed. Atchison said very wisely to Nittsi, do not put a number in your plan, because if you do, nobody will read the plan. They'll focus only on the number. There'll be a big fight over the number. And we want them first to understand the concept of what we're doing, and then to come back and decide how much will it cost to do this, If this is the right strategy, what will it take. What's one of the great ironies of history that Truman released a strategy on April fifteenth. We really don't know what it would have led to. But on June twenty fifth, nineteen fifty, the North Koreans invaded South Korea, and suddenly we realized that we were right at the crisis of the system, that they were testing us, and that they wanted to find out whether or not we would defend South Korea. They didn't think we would, and they thought would be an easy victory. Truman decided we had to stop them then and there. The great lesson of the nineteen thirties and the failure to stand up Dadolf Hitler had led to a dramatically bigger war. And therefore, if this was the time to teach Stalin that we were serious, Harry Truman was going to do it. The amazing thing was, remember I said, the Secuary Defense wanted fourteen billion, the Joint Chiefs wanted forty billion, and in the very first year, under the pressure of the Korean War, they got sixty five billion dollars. Now here's what makes it amazing, And here's an example of strategy. Nitzi had concluded that the central front in the survival of the West was Germany, that if the Soviets could capture Germany, that they would in fact have such economic opportunities that we would have a very hard time surviving. And so we had established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and General Eisenhower had come out of retirement where he'd been president of Columbia University, and he went to Europe and began to pool together his old friends who had been part of the Coalition of World War two, and they were building a defense against the Soviets. Well, when Korea started two out of every three dollars at the increase went to Europe, not to Korea. Now that's the power of strategy, because we had understood it is all intellectual. What is it we're trying to do. We're trying to contain the Civil Union. Where's the greatest threat. It's in Europe, not Korea. Therefore, let's pile on resources in Europe and let's block them. And by the way, it worked from that point on. Remember we've been through now over seventy years in which NATO has survived and in which Europe has been largely at peace for the longest period in its history. Meanwhile, we put enough resources into Korea to autumnally defeat the North Koreans. The Chinese came in and we put enough resources in to fight them to a tie. But we were not prepared to go into a major war with China because that wasn't strategically what we're trying to do. And I want to come back to this concept of strategy. We have not had since the fallless of the Union in nineteen ninety one, a coherent strategy for the United States and the world. On the one front, we have been involved in a series of wars at the periphery, if you will, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and we have no strategic doctrine for winning those wars. And if you think about it, we fought in Vietnam and lost over fifty five thousand men and women, and we learned almost nothing. We came back and spent literally twenty years in Afghanistan and learned almost nothing. We went into Iraq and we were very confused about our strategic goal. One side wanted to go in with a very small military, defeat Saddam and pull out. The other side said, if you're going to stay and try to occupy the country, you need two or three times bigger force. Well, we ended up doing the worst of all worlds. We sent it a small force, decisively defeated Saddam, and then decided to switch to an occupation strategy without the forces necessary to succeed. And so Iraq has remained a mess ever since, and may in the near future ask us to leave. Because the truth is, over the last ten years, the Iranians have grown stronger and we have grown weaker. And if you're the Iraqis in your next door neighbor of the Iranians. Maybe you're more afraid of Iran than you are of the United States. So now you come to the other great strategic problems Iran, Russia and the terrorist organizations, whether they're Hamas against Israel or the groups like Al Kaheda and groups that want to destroy the United States in the West. You cannot find today a strategic explanation of what we're trying to accomplish. I would argue there's been a war going on in Ukraine at least since the occupation of Crimea and the occupation of some of the eastern parts of Ukraine, the most heavily Russian parts of Ukraine, and that war has now been going on for a decade, much hotter when Putin decided that he would invade then go to Kiev. But the war has been going on. The graduation exercise of the Russian Artillery school was to go on fire rounds into Ukraine, and this has been going on for a decade. So Putin hasn't changed. He is the same brutal, methodical thug trained by the KGB, passionately deeply believing in Russian greatness. Has said publicly that the greatest disaster of the twentieth century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that his mission is to recreate the Soviet Empire. Now that resonated with me, because in nineteen ninety three I was on a congressional delegation to Moscow. I ended up meeting with the then Vice president under Boris Elsen of the Russian Federation. And the vice president was an Air Force three star general, and we were meeting in this huge room and one entire wall was a map of the original Soviet Union, And being fairly naive, I said to him, gosh, that's a map of the Soviet Union. Now, remember this is two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. All sorts of countries have declared their independence and they're now down to basically the Russian Federation. He looked at me, without blinking an eye and said, yes, it will be that way again. Now what does that mean. It means you have to take back Kazakhstan, you have to take back Ukraine, you have to take back Mielarus, you have to take back Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. And he was calmly, pleasantly dead serious. Well, we have had no coherent strategy for dealing with a Russian leadership which is dedicated to using force, proves routinely that it will kill its political opponents. The recent killing of Putin's major opponent is only one of a long history. They have been killing people, including in London, for a very long period of time, and I suspect you're going to see them continue to do this. And the reason simple, there's no consequence to them. Now we can talk about sanctions. And when Crimea was invaded, Obama, in a classic left wing approach, wanted to use sanctions. And I said at the time, telling the Russian leadership that they're not going to be able to go to Disney World is not exactly going to stop them. And so you have to say to yourself, what is a strategy that would stop them? And notice, we're now in a much more complicated world than we were prior to nineteen ninety one. During the Cold War. If we could truly focus on the Soviets, and we could truly contain the Soviets, almost everything else relatively fell into place. There were marginal changes, you know, we lost in many ways, Nicaragua, we lost Cuba, but overall the system was relatively stable and most countries having to choose between a vicious Soviet dictatorship and the free markets and the openness of the West. Tended to decide with us and tended to be glad that we were around because we were less dangerous and less brutal than the Russians. We're in a different world now, then we have literally not adjusted to it, and the best of my knowledge, there is no current strategic effort to really back out and say, okay, if we're going to be in a multi polar world where China is a pretty big country, India is passing China in population this year and is a big country. Indonesia is a remark probably large country. Actually, the largest Muslim country in the world is not in the Arab world, it's Indonesia. The fact is Russia remains dangerous. Pakistan and India both have nuclear weapons. North Korea has nuclear weapons, the Iranians, for all practical purposes, have nuclear weapons. The Israelis have nuclear weapons. We have no grand strategy that says here's what America wants to accomplish, here's what we're capable of doing, and therefore, here's how we're going to allocate our resources, and how we're going to organize things, and I think this is an enormous challenge. First of all, if you really measure the world accurately, you would rapidly conclude that you have to have a dramatic overhaul of our school system because we literally are not producing people capable of working in the modern world, and we're going to find it very, very hard to compete with other countries if we end up with a workforce that literally cannot do what needs to be done in the modern world. Second, we're faced with extraordinary technological changes, and I think it has been a great surprise to the American military how much electronic information flow is changing everything. And they've discovered, for example, that if you have a cell phone and it's turned on, that you're now emitting and the other team can figure out where you are and they can track you in real time. And so a lot of things are having to change just to survive in this increasingly electronic world. We also recognize that there are breakthroughs coming in science and technology. Our pentagon today is so bureaucratic, and it's so slow, and it's so cumbersome. It's very very hard for it to adjust to the rate of change and it's impossible for it today to have contracts issued in an entrepreneurial, small business way to be at the cutting edge. And this is going to accelerate as we go through artificial intelligence. It's an artificial general intelligence and other kinds of breakthroughs, because we literally will not be able to purchase and think through and use new technologies within the cycle of the technology. By the time our bureaucracy will have figured out, it will already be obsolete and there'll be new technologies following it that we once the en'lb behind the curve. This is a particular challenge in dealing with the Chinese, but it's also proving to be a challenge because of the world market. Technologies can be created anywhere, and if you'll notice the Russians are now using Iranian aircraft, you know they don't just have to build them in Russia. If you really want to have a series of weapons, you can actually buy for about twenty five hundred dollars a cardboard drone from Australia that they mass produce. It doesn't go very far and it carries a very small weapon, but for twenty five hundred bucks compared to what Americans spend for huge, expensive, complicated systems, it's not a bad buy. The Uranians are probably the largest makers today of drones, and they sell thousands of them to the Russians. The Ukrainians themselves are making drones. When you comin drones with GPS so that you can actually target very precisely where things are, and if you look at the impact. For example, Elon must startlingk system which he has allowed the Ukrainians to use, giving the Ukrainians what would be almost impossible for them to have built themselves, and yet gives them a kind of targeting and communications capability that allows them to operate against the Russians with remarkable capabilities. All of these things are a reminder that the world is changing very, very rapidly, and we are not prepared to deal with that now. We shouldn't be totally shocked. The Pentagon is a huge giant bureaucracy, and it is the nature of bureaucracies to change the facts about reality rather than to change the bureaucracy. One of my favorite stories from a book by Colonel Johnson called Heavy Bombers and Fast Tanks, as a chapter in which the then Chief of Staff of the Army. George Marshall calls in the Head of the Cavalry and says, to the head of the Cavalry, you know you've now seen the Germans used tanks in blitzkrieg's in Poland and in blitzkrieg's in France, and I'm very curious what does the cavalry think the correct response is to the rise of this tank truck relationship and the speed with which they move and the combat power that they have. The Head of Cavalry says, oh, we've been studying this very carefully. We're very aware of it. In fact, we have concluded that what we need to do is get trucks that can carry the horses so that we can bring the horses closer to the fordage of battle so they are arrested when they're thrown into combat. And Marshall looked at him with a sense of total disbelief and said, this has been really, really helpful. The guy left. Marshall called in his then secretary Beatlesmith and said, I want you to retire him as of five o'clock today and to abolish the post of Commandant of Cavalry because it is clearly not a touch with reality. Now, that's natural in a bureaucracy. The British had concluded that they had to defend Singapore against seaborn invasions, and so they built a remarkable fortress capable of fighting off a fleet. What they hadn't thought about was what if instead of coming by sea, people landed in northern Malaya came down through the jungle and came to the back of the fortress. And it turned out that the fresh water supply was outside of the fort and so you literally couldn't survive very long if somebody captured the back of the Singapore and occupied the water supply. And so Churchill, who did not understand all this, sent an additional division of troops to defend Singapore at the very moment they were about to collapse, and they all had discern it's the largest single surrender in British military history, and it's because nobody had any sense of imagination. Similarly, as bureaucracies work, we had before World War Two a joint planning Board for the Army in the Navy, and the Joint Planning Board was designed to coordinate the wartime plans of the two services. Well, because they're bedcracies, and they don't want to pick fights, and they try to make everyone feel good. It turned out, when Pearl Harbor happened and the Japanese bombed our fleet and we knew that the Philippines were going to be in trouble, they looked at the two plans. The Army had a very clear plan for defending the Philippines. They could hold out for three months until the Navy arrived. The Navy had a very clear plan, which was they could arrive in three years. No one had ever forced a meeting to say, guys, this pretty big mismatch here between three months and three years. And of course, our troops surrendered in the Philippines in the spring of nineteen forty two. Even without Pearl Harbor, the Navy probably couldn't have gotten there because of the dangers of dealing with the Japanese fleet. But certainly after Pearl Harbor and the American battleships were sunk and damaged, they had no possibility of getting to there, which led to one of the great strategic decisions of World War two, a decision which was recommended by then Brigadier General Eisenhower, who had served in the Philippines. Knew many of the people personally had been a senior aide to Douglas MacArthur, who was in charge of the American military and the Philippines. He was brought to Washington and George Marshall said, go and figure out how we can help the Philippines. Now he was dealing with his personal friends. He knew how desperate this was. And he spent about two weeks and he came back and he said, we can't. Then Marshall said, what do you mean. He said, we can get modest amounts of ammunition there. The truth is, we don't have the ships, we don't have control of the sea. We're going to lose the Philippines. So we had better design a strategy that accepts that reality. And Eisner then wrote a memo which I've always thought was one of the most amazing documents of World War Two, and he said, even with all of our sources, even as wealthy as we are, we have to distinguish between the necessary and the desirable, and we have to do only the necessary. We cannot afford the desirable or will be stretched too thin. Well, that raises the question, then, in a dangerous world with artificial intelligence, with cyber warfare, with potentially warfare in space, with a whole range of potential opponents, from Venezuela to Cuba and Nicaragua to Iran, to Russia to North Korea to China. What is necessary and what's merely desirable? And if you really applied that to the entire American system, not just the military, you would find that we have a whole range of things that are necessary strategically. Probably the most necessary is intellectual honesty. Be honest about who Putin is and what it will take to either defeat him or to make the cost of taking us on so great that he decides that he'll back down, or to find a way to have some negotiated agreement and be honest about it. If we want to defeat him, we probably can, but it does risk nuclear war, and it does require us to completely change the way we've been doing this. You can replay the last two years as though you understood what had happened, and you would realize immediately the first thing that should have happened is a massive flow of sophisticated weapons to give the Ukrainians such a huge advantage on the battlefield that it would havepset any problems of numbers that they have give the same challenge in looking about strategy in terms of dealing with Hamas. The Israelis finally concluded, after the enormous painful of October seventh, that they had to destroy Hamas, not bruise it, not wound it, destroy it. And they're engaged in a campaign which nobody apparently in the West thought about. When Biden, for example, said We're going to be with the Israelis through this whole thing, nobody said to him. You know, to destroy Hamas, you have to go into all of Gaza, you have to be fighting in urban warfare where civilians inevitably are part of the problem. You have to be prepared to go all the way down to the Egyptian border. And of course, when people began to realize that that's what it was going to take, suddenly began to say, well, maybe we can't destroy Hamas. Well, that's fine if you can't destroy Hamas. And remember, as of the time I'm talking to you, the Hamas leaders are very clear they will not accept any agreement which allows Israel to survive. They really they do want to eliminate every Jew, and they really want to take over the whole region, and they don't mind dying. They don't mind the fact that they have tremendous casualties, and they certainly don't mind civilians dying. They just become martyrs. So if you don't destroy Hamas, it will rebuild, it will regain, and five, ten, fifteen years from now, there will be another attack that's even more horrendous. And they say this publicly. We've had leaders of Hamas saying it on television. So what's the strategy for dealing with terrorists who are genuine, legitimate fanatics. And you have to respect the fact of your opponent. They really believe what they're saying. I always ask audiences, you know, what do you think when the legislature in Tehran chance death to Israel, death to America? What do you think the Iranian theocratic dictatorship might mean by the frame is death to Israel, death to America. Well, about two months ago, the ayatotly Hamani, the leader of the entire country, went on national television and said, I just want to reassure you death to America is not a slogan, it's a policy. But you know, we've had no strategic debate about what do you do if you're faced with an opponent who sincerely wants to destroy you. And as you know, the response of both Obama and Biden has been to appease them, to give them money, try to be nice to them. And they think where it is they're sitting there side themselves when Lennon said, the capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them, these guys are perfectly happy to take the money. They use it to finance their nuclear program, they use it to finance their missiles, they use it to finance terrorism, and they're thrilled at the Americans are the stupid. But we've had no serious strategic debate. And there's a practical reason when you are in a period of grave difficulty. And this is what happened to the democracies in the nineteen thirties. People like Chamberlain weren't cowards. The Prime Minister of Great Britain had lived through World War One, he'd seen a generation of young Britain's killed. He really wanted to avoid having that happen, and he really did everything he could to find a path that would enable Germany to be satisfied without having several million Britains die and he was sincere. And his problem with Churchill kept trying to tell him was you were up against the leader who you will have to defeat because every time you appease him, he grows stronger. As Churchill once said, if you feed the crocodile, eventually the crocodile gets bigger, and then one day you're the last meal that's left. That's, in a sense what happened. Well, every one of the challenges we face now requires really dramatic change. Getting our education system to work correctly will take dramatic change. Rebuilding our industrial base so that we have the most modern technology in the world produced at a reasonable cost and huge quantities will take dramatic change. Having strategies for dealing with dictatorships like North Korea and Iran and Russia and China and Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua will take dramatic change. And it's very hard in a normal peacetime democracy to accept that level of change or to believe that the world can be that tough. But it can be, and it is, and we need strategic thinking more today than any time since nineteen fifty and I hope we can have a national debate what are the strategies necessary for America to survive with safety, with prosperity, and with freedom. Because unless we come up with strategies that are real in a world that is dangerous, we are going to run a real risk of a disaster in the foreseeable future. And I hope this has been helpful. New World is produced by gingersh three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld consign up for my three free weekly columns at gingrishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtworld.

On this episode of news World, I want to talk about strategic thinking in a dangerous world. I think it's really important for every American to understand both how dangerous the world is becoming and to understand how important it is to re establish the ability to think and act strategically rather than bounce from press conference to press conference and gimmick to gimmick. So I want to take some time to talk about these and I have to confess. Part of what triggered this was a newsletter I've written on the dangers of nuclear war and the fact that we have to fundamentally rethink how we approach nuclear war and our thinking about it. And I'll come back to that. But in addition, I had looked up some things I had said about Vladimir Putin and I at how much of it was relevant today, even though it was things I had said back in twenty thirteen and in twenty fourteen. When you look at America's relationship to Putin over the last twenty years, we've never come to grips with how dangerous he is. Let me just share with you an example of how long I have been talking about understanding Vladimir Putin and designing a strategy for him. I want to share with you something I said on Crossfire back on September twelfth, twenty thirteen. I just want to take a minute personally to talk about this New York Times op ed piece almost certainly largely written by a Washington firm that's hired by the Russians, but supposedly offered by President Putin. I'm a little surprised at all the different reaction. Senators who wanted to vomit, Congressmen who were insulted. Look, Vladimir Putin is honestly and authentically a KGB officer. He grew up in the KGB, he was trained in the KGB. He spent his career locking people up, overseeing torture, overseeing killings. This is a genuinely tough guy, and he has one interest, great Russian nationalism, and he's very open about it. Now, this is the guy who, for public relations purposes, wrestles beyers. He goes out and shoots tigers stripped to the waist to prove he's a tough guy. The idea that we would take his statements seriously. You could go through and read that document and you could find at every single stage that it's a lie. This is a guy who clearly, for example, invaded Georgia. He didn't go and ask the UN. This guy who killed three hundred thousand people in Cheschnown, he didn't worry about humanitarian concerns. When he lectures us, that's his right, but for us to take it seriously is a sign we have forgotten who Vladimir Putin is and why well we have to deal with him as the president of Russia. We don't have to respect his views, we don't have to respect his opinions, and frankly, we should laugh at him when he tries to lecture America about exceptionalism, because he ain't exceptional. He's just one more in a long tradition of dictators and thugs. So that's my view. So eleven years ago, I was trying to explain that there's certain obvious facts, and it's really difficult because you have two wings of the American system that don't work for very different reasons. The left wing doesn't work because it lives in a fantasy land. It thinks that you can draw red lines. It thinks that you can somehow have sanctions but avoid real conflict. It doesn't want to deal with how truly brutal and serious and dictators can be. That's the left, but the right's equally bad, because the right doesn't want to really rethink our bureaucracies, to really rethink what we have to do strategically. Instead, the right just stumbles forward with a series of actions that frankly haven't worked very well. And so I wanted to talk about the concept of strategy and what we need to do to get back to thinking strategically now. I was shaped in part because my dad served twenty six years in the Army, and I had the great opportunity to study at places like the seventh Army Headquarters with the command librarian who was gathering up material for professional soldiers to use. So even in high school, I was reading things that were really the key to the profession, things like Alfred Theer Mahanes the influence of Seapower upon history, or closewitz Is on war, or Sons Who on the art of war. And from all of that background, I had a very early belief that there are patterns that work. It's a little bit like cooking, you know. The reason we have cookbooks is that there are patterns that create, say a chocolate cake, and there are other patterns that create beef stroganof and if you learn to follow these patterns, you too can be a cook. Well. The same thing's true of the art of war and thinking about strategy. We had been very fortunate in my childhood because we were in the shadow of giants. The people who fought World War Two, had been involved in World War One, had spent twenty years thinking about the coming of a great war, and were prepared to think strategically at a level that very few Americans ever have. And so when we entered World War Two, we really had a remarkably effective and thoughtful strategy, and we executed it on a worldwide basis with enormous capability. When we came out of World War Two, we had hoped briefly that we could work with the Soviets, that Stalin could be reasonable, But the very same people who had led World War Two understood reality. They watched what was happening, they watched Stalin's aggressiveness, and they concluded that they had to have a strategy, not just a series of innovations and press conferences, but a strategy for coping with the Soviet Union. And so they turned to Paul Nitsi, who had been an international banker, who had worked in World War Two and really had been one of the key players in the architect of the American economy during the war. And Nitzy was assigned as the head of the State Department's planning operation to go around and talk to everybody and design a genuine strategy. He wrote a paper which has been published and which has been studied as a great book by Ernest May, a Harvard professor on NSC sixty eight National Security Council sixty eighth, issued on April fifteenth, nineteen fifty. It's worth reading because it really captured where we were. It says, look, here is the nature of the Soviet Union. It is an aggressive imperialist empire. It genuinely wants the entire world to become communist. It is a mortal threat to the survival of the United States. And in order to contain it, here are the things we're going to have to do. And it lays out essentially what we did from nineteen fifty to nineteen ninety one when the Soviet emperor collapsed. Think about that forty years a democracy sustained a general strategy, and it ortoantly worked now to show you the power of strategy. As Nitzi worked his way through all this. They did it because, in the words of Secretary of State Dean Achison at the time, when Truman made the decision at Christmas nighteen forty nine, that we had to build a hydrogen warhead, a bomb whose only purpose was wiping out an entire city, he went to President Truman and said, you know, if the world is that dangerous, shouldn't we try to develop a strategy to avoid using these weapons? And Truman said, I think that's probably right. And so that's what Nittsi was trying to do. Can we design a strategy of containment that will avoid a nuclear war and also will avoid our being defeated by the Soviet Union. When he developed it, he had carefully gone to all of the chairman of the Joint chiefs. These were men who were four star officers Army and Navy and Air Force in World War Two. They really understood large conflict and they said to him, you know, we think it's going to take at least forty billion dollars a year in order to be able to defend America World Wari and the current Secretary of fans want to only give them fourteen billion. In their minds, they were something like twenty six billion short, but they were going to get less than half of what they thought they needed. Atchison said very wisely to Nittsi, do not put a number in your plan, because if you do, nobody will read the plan. They'll focus only on the number. There'll be a big fight over the number. And we want them first to understand the concept of what we're doing, and then to come back and decide how much will it cost to do this, If this is the right strategy, what will it take. What's one of the great ironies of history that Truman released a strategy on April fifteenth. We really don't know what it would have led to. But on June twenty fifth, nineteen fifty, the North Koreans invaded South Korea, and suddenly we realized that we were right at the crisis of the system, that they were testing us, and that they wanted to find out whether or not we would defend South Korea. They didn't think we would, and they thought would be an easy victory. Truman decided we had to stop them then and there. The great lesson of the nineteen thirties and the failure to stand up Dadolf Hitler had led to a dramatically bigger war. And therefore, if this was the time to teach Stalin that we were serious, Harry Truman was going to do it. The amazing thing was, remember I said, the Secuary Defense wanted fourteen billion, the Joint Chiefs wanted forty billion, and in the very first year, under the pressure of the Korean War, they got sixty five billion dollars. Now here's what makes it amazing, And here's an example of strategy. Nitzi had concluded that the central front in the survival of the West was Germany, that if the Soviets could capture Germany, that they would in fact have such economic opportunities that we would have a very hard time surviving. And so we had established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and General Eisenhower had come out of retirement where he'd been president of Columbia University, and he went to Europe and began to pool together his old friends who had been part of the Coalition of World War two, and they were building a defense against the Soviets. Well, when Korea started two out of every three dollars at the increase went to Europe, not to Korea. Now that's the power of strategy, because we had understood it is all intellectual. What is it we're trying to do. We're trying to contain the Civil Union. Where's the greatest threat. It's in Europe, not Korea. Therefore, let's pile on resources in Europe and let's block them. And by the way, it worked from that point on. Remember we've been through now over seventy years in which NATO has survived and in which Europe has been largely at peace for the longest period in its history. Meanwhile, we put enough resources into Korea to autumnally defeat the North Koreans. The Chinese came in and we put enough resources in to fight them to a tie. But we were not prepared to go into a major war with China because that wasn't strategically what we're trying to do. And I want to come back to this concept of strategy. We have not had since the fallless of the Union in nineteen ninety one, a coherent strategy for the United States and the world. On the one front, we have been involved in a series of wars at the periphery, if you will, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and we have no strategic doctrine for winning those wars. And if you think about it, we fought in Vietnam and lost over fifty five thousand men and women, and we learned almost nothing. We came back and spent literally twenty years in Afghanistan and learned almost nothing. We went into Iraq and we were very confused about our strategic goal. One side wanted to go in with a very small military, defeat Saddam and pull out. The other side said, if you're going to stay and try to occupy the country, you need two or three times bigger force. Well, we ended up doing the worst of all worlds. We sent it a small force, decisively defeated Saddam, and then decided to switch to an occupation strategy without the forces necessary to succeed. And so Iraq has remained a mess ever since, and may in the near future ask us to leave. Because the truth is, over the last ten years, the Iranians have grown stronger and we have grown weaker. And if you're the Iraqis in your next door neighbor of the Iranians. Maybe you're more afraid of Iran than you are of the United States. So now you come to the other great strategic problems Iran, Russia and the terrorist organizations, whether they're Hamas against Israel or the groups like Al Kaheda and groups that want to destroy the United States in the West. You cannot find today a strategic explanation of what we're trying to accomplish. I would argue there's been a war going on in Ukraine at least since the occupation of Crimea and the occupation of some of the eastern parts of Ukraine, the most heavily Russian parts of Ukraine, and that war has now been going on for a decade, much hotter when Putin decided that he would invade then go to Kiev. But the war has been going on. The graduation exercise of the Russian Artillery school was to go on fire rounds into Ukraine, and this has been going on for a decade. So Putin hasn't changed. He is the same brutal, methodical thug trained by the KGB, passionately deeply believing in Russian greatness. Has said publicly that the greatest disaster of the twentieth century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that his mission is to recreate the Soviet Empire. Now that resonated with me, because in nineteen ninety three I was on a congressional delegation to Moscow. I ended up meeting with the then Vice president under Boris Elsen of the Russian Federation. And the vice president was an Air Force three star general, and we were meeting in this huge room and one entire wall was a map of the original Soviet Union, And being fairly naive, I said to him, gosh, that's a map of the Soviet Union. Now, remember this is two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. All sorts of countries have declared their independence and they're now down to basically the Russian Federation. He looked at me, without blinking an eye and said, yes, it will be that way again. Now what does that mean. It means you have to take back Kazakhstan, you have to take back Ukraine, you have to take back Mielarus, you have to take back Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. And he was calmly, pleasantly dead serious. Well, we have had no coherent strategy for dealing with a Russian leadership which is dedicated to using force, proves routinely that it will kill its political opponents. The recent killing of Putin's major opponent is only one of a long history. They have been killing people, including in London, for a very long period of time, and I suspect you're going to see them continue to do this. And the reason simple, there's no consequence to them. Now we can talk about sanctions. And when Crimea was invaded, Obama, in a classic left wing approach, wanted to use sanctions. And I said at the time, telling the Russian leadership that they're not going to be able to go to Disney World is not exactly going to stop them. And so you have to say to yourself, what is a strategy that would stop them? And notice, we're now in a much more complicated world than we were prior to nineteen ninety one. During the Cold War. If we could truly focus on the Soviets, and we could truly contain the Soviets, almost everything else relatively fell into place. There were marginal changes, you know, we lost in many ways, Nicaragua, we lost Cuba, but overall the system was relatively stable and most countries having to choose between a vicious Soviet dictatorship and the free markets and the openness of the West. Tended to decide with us and tended to be glad that we were around because we were less dangerous and less brutal than the Russians. We're in a different world now, then we have literally not adjusted to it, and the best of my knowledge, there is no current strategic effort to really back out and say, okay, if we're going to be in a multi polar world where China is a pretty big country, India is passing China in population this year and is a big country. Indonesia is a remark probably large country. Actually, the largest Muslim country in the world is not in the Arab world, it's Indonesia. The fact is Russia remains dangerous. Pakistan and India both have nuclear weapons. North Korea has nuclear weapons, the Iranians, for all practical purposes, have nuclear weapons. The Israelis have nuclear weapons. We have no grand strategy that says here's what America wants to accomplish, here's what we're capable of doing, and therefore, here's how we're going to allocate our resources, and how we're going to organize things, and I think this is an enormous challenge. First of all, if you really measure the world accurately, you would rapidly conclude that you have to have a dramatic overhaul of our school system because we literally are not producing people capable of working in the modern world, and we're going to find it very, very hard to compete with other countries if we end up with a workforce that literally cannot do what needs to be done in the modern world. Second, we're faced with extraordinary technological changes, and I think it has been a great surprise to the American military how much electronic information flow is changing everything. And they've discovered, for example, that if you have a cell phone and it's turned on, that you're now emitting and the other team can figure out where you are and they can track you in real time. And so a lot of things are having to change just to survive in this increasingly electronic world. We also recognize that there are breakthroughs coming in science and technology. Our pentagon today is so bureaucratic, and it's so slow, and it's so cumbersome. It's very very hard for it to adjust to the rate of change and it's impossible for it today to have contracts issued in an entrepreneurial, small business way to be at the cutting edge. And this is going to accelerate as we go through artificial intelligence. It's an artificial general intelligence and other kinds of breakthroughs, because we literally will not be able to purchase and think through and use new technologies within the cycle of the technology. By the time our bureaucracy will have figured out, it will already be obsolete and there'll be new technologies following it that we once the en'lb behind the curve. This is a particular challenge in dealing with the Chinese, but it's also proving to be a challenge because of the world market. Technologies can be created anywhere, and if you'll notice the Russians are now using Iranian aircraft, you know they don't just have to build them in Russia. If you really want to have a series of weapons, you can actually buy for about twenty five hundred dollars a cardboard drone from Australia that they mass produce. It doesn't go very far and it carries a very small weapon, but for twenty five hundred bucks compared to what Americans spend for huge, expensive, complicated systems, it's not a bad buy. The Uranians are probably the largest makers today of drones, and they sell thousands of them to the Russians. The Ukrainians themselves are making drones. When you comin drones with GPS so that you can actually target very precisely where things are, and if you look at the impact. For example, Elon must startlingk system which he has allowed the Ukrainians to use, giving the Ukrainians what would be almost impossible for them to have built themselves, and yet gives them a kind of targeting and communications capability that allows them to operate against the Russians with remarkable capabilities. All of these things are a reminder that the world is changing very, very rapidly, and we are not prepared to deal with that now. We shouldn't be totally shocked. The Pentagon is a huge giant bureaucracy, and it is the nature of bureaucracies to change the facts about reality rather than to change the bureaucracy. One of my favorite stories from a book by Colonel Johnson called Heavy Bombers and Fast Tanks, as a chapter in which the then Chief of Staff of the Army. George Marshall calls in the Head of the Cavalry and says, to the head of the Cavalry, you know you've now seen the Germans used tanks in blitzkrieg's in Poland and in blitzkrieg's in France, and I'm very curious what does the cavalry think the correct response is to the rise of this tank truck relationship and the speed with which they move and the combat power that they have. The Head of Cavalry says, oh, we've been studying this very carefully. We're very aware of it. In fact, we have concluded that what we need to do is get trucks that can carry the horses so that we can bring the horses closer to the fordage of battle so they are arrested when they're thrown into combat. And Marshall looked at him with a sense of total disbelief and said, this has been really, really helpful. The guy left. Marshall called in his then secretary Beatlesmith and said, I want you to retire him as of five o'clock today and to abolish the post of Commandant of Cavalry because it is clearly not a touch with reality. Now, that's natural in a bureaucracy. The British had concluded that they had to defend Singapore against seaborn invasions, and so they built a remarkable fortress capable of fighting off a fleet. What they hadn't thought about was what if instead of coming by sea, people landed in northern Malaya came down through the jungle and came to the back of the fortress. And it turned out that the fresh water supply was outside of the fort and so you literally couldn't survive very long if somebody captured the back of the Singapore and occupied the water supply. And so Churchill, who did not understand all this, sent an additional division of troops to defend Singapore at the very moment they were about to collapse, and they all had discern it's the largest single surrender in British military history, and it's because nobody had any sense of imagination. Similarly, as bureaucracies work, we had before World War Two a joint planning Board for the Army in the Navy, and the Joint Planning Board was designed to coordinate the wartime plans of the two services. Well, because they're bedcracies, and they don't want to pick fights, and they try to make everyone feel good. It turned out, when Pearl Harbor happened and the Japanese bombed our fleet and we knew that the Philippines were going to be in trouble, they looked at the two plans. The Army had a very clear plan for defending the Philippines. They could hold out for three months until the Navy arrived. The Navy had a very clear plan, which was they could arrive in three years. No one had ever forced a meeting to say, guys, this pretty big mismatch here between three months and three years. And of course, our troops surrendered in the Philippines in the spring of nineteen forty two. Even without Pearl Harbor, the Navy probably couldn't have gotten there because of the dangers of dealing with the Japanese fleet. But certainly after Pearl Harbor and the American battleships were sunk and damaged, they had no possibility of getting to there, which led to one of the great strategic decisions of World War two, a decision which was recommended by then Brigadier General Eisenhower, who had served in the Philippines. Knew many of the people personally had been a senior aide to Douglas MacArthur, who was in charge of the American military and the Philippines. He was brought to Washington and George Marshall said, go and figure out how we can help the Philippines. Now he was dealing with his personal friends. He knew how desperate this was. And he spent about two weeks and he came back and he said, we can't. Then Marshall said, what do you mean. He said, we can get modest amounts of ammunition there. The truth is, we don't have the ships, we don't have control of the sea. We're going to lose the Philippines. So we had better design a strategy that accepts that reality. And Eisner then wrote a memo which I've always thought was one of the most amazing documents of World War Two, and he said, even with all of our sources, even as wealthy as we are, we have to distinguish between the necessary and the desirable, and we have to do only the necessary. We cannot afford the desirable or will be stretched too thin. Well, that raises the question, then, in a dangerous world with artificial intelligence, with cyber warfare, with potentially warfare in space, with a whole range of potential opponents, from Venezuela to Cuba and Nicaragua to Iran, to Russia to North Korea to China. What is necessary and what's merely desirable? And if you really applied that to the entire American system, not just the military, you would find that we have a whole range of things that are necessary strategically. Probably the most necessary is intellectual honesty. Be honest about who Putin is and what it will take to either defeat him or to make the cost of taking us on so great that he decides that he'll back down, or to find a way to have some negotiated agreement and be honest about it. If we want to defeat him, we probably can, but it does risk nuclear war, and it does require us to completely change the way we've been doing this. You can replay the last two years as though you understood what had happened, and you would realize immediately the first thing that should have happened is a massive flow of sophisticated weapons to give the Ukrainians such a huge advantage on the battlefield that it would havepset any problems of numbers that they have give the same challenge in looking about strategy in terms of dealing with Hamas. The Israelis finally concluded, after the enormous painful of October seventh, that they had to destroy Hamas, not bruise it, not wound it, destroy it. And they're engaged in a campaign which nobody apparently in the West thought about. When Biden, for example, said We're going to be with the Israelis through this whole thing, nobody said to him. You know, to destroy Hamas, you have to go into all of Gaza, you have to be fighting in urban warfare where civilians inevitably are part of the problem. You have to be prepared to go all the way down to the Egyptian border. And of course, when people began to realize that that's what it was going to take, suddenly began to say, well, maybe we can't destroy Hamas. Well, that's fine if you can't destroy Hamas. And remember, as of the time I'm talking to you, the Hamas leaders are very clear they will not accept any agreement which allows Israel to survive. They really they do want to eliminate every Jew, and they really want to take over the whole region, and they don't mind dying. They don't mind the fact that they have tremendous casualties, and they certainly don't mind civilians dying. They just become martyrs. So if you don't destroy Hamas, it will rebuild, it will regain, and five, ten, fifteen years from now, there will be another attack that's even more horrendous. And they say this publicly. We've had leaders of Hamas saying it on television. So what's the strategy for dealing with terrorists who are genuine, legitimate fanatics. And you have to respect the fact of your opponent. They really believe what they're saying. I always ask audiences, you know, what do you think when the legislature in Tehran chance death to Israel, death to America? What do you think the Iranian theocratic dictatorship might mean by the frame is death to Israel, death to America. Well, about two months ago, the ayatotly Hamani, the leader of the entire country, went on national television and said, I just want to reassure you death to America is not a slogan, it's a policy. But you know, we've had no strategic debate about what do you do if you're faced with an opponent who sincerely wants to destroy you. And as you know, the response of both Obama and Biden has been to appease them, to give them money, try to be nice to them. And they think where it is they're sitting there side themselves when Lennon said, the capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them, these guys are perfectly happy to take the money. They use it to finance their nuclear program, they use it to finance their missiles, they use it to finance terrorism, and they're thrilled at the Americans are the stupid. But we've had no serious strategic debate. And there's a practical reason when you are in a period of grave difficulty. And this is what happened to the democracies in the nineteen thirties. People like Chamberlain weren't cowards. The Prime Minister of Great Britain had lived through World War One, he'd seen a generation of young Britain's killed. He really wanted to avoid having that happen, and he really did everything he could to find a path that would enable Germany to be satisfied without having several million Britains die and he was sincere. And his problem with Churchill kept trying to tell him was you were up against the leader who you will have to defeat because every time you appease him, he grows stronger. As Churchill once said, if you feed the crocodile, eventually the crocodile gets bigger, and then one day you're the last meal that's left. That's, in a sense what happened. Well, every one of the challenges we face now requires really dramatic change. Getting our education system to work correctly will take dramatic change. Rebuilding our industrial base so that we have the most modern technology in the world produced at a reasonable cost and huge quantities will take dramatic change. Having strategies for dealing with dictatorships like North Korea and Iran and Russia and China and Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua will take dramatic change. And it's very hard in a normal peacetime democracy to accept that level of change or to believe that the world can be that tough. But it can be, and it is, and we need strategic thinking more today than any time since nineteen fifty and I hope we can have a national debate what are the strategies necessary for America to survive with safety, with prosperity, and with freedom. Because unless we come up with strategies that are real in a world that is dangerous, we are going to run a real risk of a disaster in the foreseeable future. And I hope this has been helpful. New World is produced by gingersh three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld consign up for my three free weekly columns at gingrishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtworld.