Podcast: All the President's Generals with Michele Flournoy

Transcript

Listen: President Trump used to love a man in uniform but these days he's soured on his generals. This week, Ian looks at how the President's cooling relationship with his top brass has affected U.S. foreign policy and then he'll talk to Michèle Flournoy, who was the highest-ranking woman at the Pentagon.

TRANSCRIPT: All the President's Generals with Michele Flournoy

Michèle Flournoy:

We have a lot of information without going into it, on things that would be very embarrassing to Vladimir Putin.

Ian Bremmer:

We have a pee tape on Putin? Is that what you're telling me?

Michèle Flournoy:

Well, no, it's not pee tape.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast, an audio version of what you can find on public television where I analyze global topics, sit down with big guests, and make use of small puppets. This week I sit down with Michèle Flournoy, a senior defense official who was asked to work under the Trump administration and said, "No." Today I'll ask her, "Why not?" Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Michèle Flournoy, managing partner of WestExec Advisors, and former undersecretary of policy for defense.

Michèle Flournoy:

Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

Almost deputy secretary for defense, or at least former Secretary Mattis asked you, and you declined. Does that look like a good decision these days?

Michèle Flournoy:

I think so. Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

When he left, certainly the conversations around the country where, "Oh my god, we lost the adult. Now the wheels are going to fall off." You of course, know the secretary very well. Tell me how you think about it?

Michèle Flournoy:

Well, I do think that one of the most moderating influences on President Trump, was Secretary Mattis when he was in office. There were countless times when the president was about to make a decision that was not in American interests, that Secretary Mattis went over to the White House and talked him through it, put the issue in context, urged him to take a different direction and convinced him to step back.

Ian Bremmer:

Did Mattis feel that he just couldn't be effective anymore? I mean, we know certainly some of the issues that came to a disagreement over the intervention in Syria, the decision to send troops to the southern border over Thanksgiving. How do you assess that?

Michèle Flournoy:

I think Jim Mattis has got a great deal of integrity. He's a very principled person, and he takes the oath to the Constitution that he took very seriously. I think his letter actually says it all, his resignation letter.

Ian Bremmer:

Where he-

Michèle Flournoy:

Where he was very clear that he thought that we were heading in the wrong direction, and particularly that we were damaging our alliances. And I think he, and many of us, view our alliances as a unique strategic, a source of strategic advantage for the United States. And those were being very much hurt in a way that was damaging US credibility in the long term.

Ian Bremmer:

So do you think Mattis misread the president when he first said, "I'm going to take this job." Do you think he believed that he could have more influence than he did? Do you think at the end of the day he just lost patience and said, "That's it, enough"? I mean, because clearly there is a change in mind that occurs over that trajectory.

Michèle Flournoy:

I think when you have a career military officer take on a role like secretary of defense, the first time it's happened since George C. Marshall 70 years ago, I think Jim Mattis took the job out of a sense of duty. The other contributing factor here is that, after John Bolton took on the national security advisor role, basically the NSC process stopped. There are no principals meetings or very rarely, there are very few, if any, NSC meetings. There's a paper process for sort of signing off on things. But the whole process that's designed to bring a variety of views to a president, including dissent, to help that president make better decisions or more informed decisions, that's broken down, it's not happening.

Ian Bremmer:

Because of Bolton? I mean, he certainly has the bureaucratic experience.

Michèle Flournoy:

Yeah. But he doesn't see the value in that. Every national security advisor has two roles. One is to basically be the systems administrator of the interagency process, ensure the president is hearing the views of all of his advisors. The second is to personally advise the president on national security. Bolton seems to have only taken on the second, and disregarded or discounted the first.

Ian Bremmer:

What does deterrence of the Russians, and separately the Chinese, mean to you?

Michèle Flournoy:

We have to convince Putin that the costs of aggression, military aggression are so great that he dare not go there. Right now, we see that Russia is certainly not deterred below the level of conventional conflict. They meddled in our elections, with virtually no cost. They're meddling in European political systems, with virtually no cost. They took over Crimea and destabilized Ukraine with minimal costs. So I don't think Vladimir Putin's feeling very deterred at the moment.

Ian Bremmer:

And this is true under both administrations?

Michèle Flournoy:

Yes. It's a problem that started with Obama and continues with Trump. And it's not just a military problem. I mean, deterrence has to have, you have to really use effectively all of the instruments of our power.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, we have, of course, we do have now more forward deployment for NATO-

Michèle Flournoy:

Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

... in these countries, including the Baltic states, and Poland. But when you talk about deterring the Russians, of course our experience over the past decade has largely not been about conventional warfare, and tanks rolling across borders.

Michèle Flournoy:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

It's all this asymmetrical stuff.

Michèle Flournoy:

It's below that.

Ian Bremmer:

It's below that. What needs to change?

Michèle Flournoy:

Yeah. So I think the heart of any deterrent strategy is really understanding what is the adversary value, and in this system it is what does Vladimir Putin value? We have a lot of information without going into it, on things that would be very embarrassing to Vladimir Putin, illicit activities, all kinds of things that he's been involved in over time.

Ian Bremmer:

We have a pee tape on Putin? Is that what you're telling me?

Michèle Flournoy:

Well, no, it's not a pee tape.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay.

Michèle Flournoy:

But I mean, I think there's just a lot of information that could be brought out. I think there are things that we could do in the cyber domain, things that we could do in an information economic domain, that would make it very clear to him, "Don't go there."

Ian Bremmer:

Tell me where you want to spend money on dealing with China right now?

Michèle Flournoy:

I think one of the mistakes we tend to make, is counting shiny objects as the primary metric of our defense space.

Ian Bremmer:

I know they're building a third aircraft carrier.

Michèle Flournoy:

So. Right.

Ian Bremmer:

That is a very shiny object.

Michèle Flournoy:

So, how many aircraft carriers? 355-ship navy. How many air force squadrons? How many tanks? Etcetera. I am more interested now, on we have a Legacy Force that we're going to have for decades because we've already made the capital investment. So the questions in my mind are, where are the trade-offs between more quantity versus capability that makes those systems relevant?

Michèle Flournoy:

So for example, if you take aircraft carriers. We now know that the Chinese have systems that can sink our carriers. We know that they now have air defenses, layered defenses that would make it very difficult for the aircraft on the carriers to actually reach and penetrate those defenses, and actually hold targets at risk. So I'm more interested in saying, at what point do you forgo an extra carrier battle group, and take all that money and invest in electronic warfare? The systems that will defeat the Chinese missile that can take down our ships? The munitions that can penetrate those air defenses, the refueling and the other steps that would give us back range, the mixing in unmanned systems, both air and undersea, that could give the carrier and new relevance?

Michèle Flournoy:

So, it's really a question of, what are all the capabilities that we have to invest in, the new technologies?

Ian Bremmer:

I want to ask you an existential strategic question which is, when I think about the Cold War, there's an argument to be made that the Americans forced the Soviets to their knees in the arms race because of the spend. Our economy was much bigger than theirs. They weren't able to keep up.

Michèle Flournoy:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

Ultimately, Gorbachev had to give it up. The Chinese economy is likely to outstrip the American economy in absolute size in the next decade. As we look ahead to the next 10, 20, 30 years, if that were [to] continue, if we were to start to see that a Chinese economy is getting much larger than the US, the gap is much bigger, at what point does that affect the way you think strategically about what the United States should be trying to do in terms of global defense?

Michèle Flournoy:

Well, I think it's a huge argument for going back to our alliances. If you take the US alone, you're right. But if you take the US economy and the European economies, all the NATO and EU countries, Japan, Australia, South Korea. If you were to take the democratic economies, and our allies' economies, and put them together in the sense of, a set of countries who are trying to work together, shape the Chinese calculus, compete where we need to, then it's a different ballgame. Then you're in a very different position. And that takes a strategy. It takes a serious amount of diplomacy, and it takes embracing creating high standard trade agreements that actually give us advantages. I mean, one of the biggest strategic mistakes that I think will go down in history-

Ian Bremmer:

TPP.

Michèle Flournoy:

Is TPP.

Ian Bremmer:

Trans-Pacific Partnership. You really didn't like the Americans pulling out of that?

Michèle Flournoy:

We negotiated a fantastic trade agreement with our allies and partners in Asia that would've raised the standards and allowed us, would've given us tremendous competitive advantage along with our partners vis-à-vis a rising China. And then we walked away from it. We? The Trump administration walked away from it.

Ian Bremmer:

A new American president could rejoin if that person chose to.

Michèle Flournoy:

Yes. But in the meantime, China has gained some significant advantage because of the perception that the US has pulled back, and created a vacuum.

Ian Bremmer:

What's the thing that concerns you most today, in terms of China's stance and capabilities vis-à-vis the United States?

Michèle Flournoy:

I think the thing that concerns me most, is that they have an authoritarian system where they can strategically invest in the fundamentals that will allow them to compete successfully in the future. STEM education, technology, on, and on, and on. Whereas we, have not got our internal house in order. We are not investing in educating the people we need. We are not investing in science and technology, and research and development. We are not investing in infrastructure. We are not investing in the drivers of our own economic competitiveness long-term, especially vis-à-vis China. And then you couple that with their concerted campaign of intellectual property theft, on the power of China. And in a lot of areas where we've always assumed technological advantage, that is fast eroding, if not already shifting to China.

Ian Bremmer:

What are the sudden sea changes that are most likely to come in the near term future, from in technology on the battlefield?

Michèle Flournoy:

I think the two we haven't talked about are cyber and space. So if you look at Chinese doctrine, their ideal scenario is if it comes to conflict, they launch a series of crippling cyber attacks on our critical infrastructure here, and our space architecture, that basically prevents the US military from moving. That prevents us from even projecting power into the region. And so it's over before it starts, and they break our will before we even get there. That is their ideal scenario.

Ian Bremmer:

We know that because of public discussion of military doctrine in China, because of what they're spending money on? How do we know that?

Michèle Flournoy:

I think people who read their military journals, do the translations and so forth. I think that it's a scenario that is talked about in military circles in China, both in publicly available materials and otherwise.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, given that Chinese critical infrastructure is controlled by, in a sense, a smaller number of vertically integrated, government controlled and linked organizations, aren't they more vulnerable to those sorts of cyber attacks than the Americans would be?

Michèle Flournoy:

I mean, they have their own vulnerabilities. But actually one of the challenges we have is most of our critical infrastructure is not owned or operated by the government.

Ian Bremmer:

Right.

Michèle Flournoy:

And so we are only as strong as the weakest link. So-

Ian Bremmer:

So they're more hardened in that regard, you're saying?

Michèle Flournoy:

Well, I'm not sure, but it's not necessarily a symmetric thing, because we have to project power to get there. They're there, and they have their home region. And so if they're invading Taiwan, or they're getting into a conflict with one of our allies or partners in the region, we have to project power to get there. And again, as I said, they're going to try to stop, interrupt that process. So-

Ian Bremmer:

What interests me about this-

Michèle Flournoy:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

... is that historically the way we used to think about the Chinese is, with military doctrine is, they could take a hit of a few hundred million people in sort of a horrible nuclear war, and they'd still be around and we kind of wouldn't be. Right?

Michèle Flournoy:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

And I mean, when you talk about switching that to cyber and space, I mean-

Michèle Flournoy:

The other thing is-

Ian Bremmer:

... it's not clear the why they would necessarily prefer that as a doctrine.

Michèle Flournoy:

Well, because preferring that, it's a matter of if they were able to do that with minimal actual casualties. I mean, so now you've crippled the American military, but you haven't killed Americans, they hope not to... you haven't kinetically struck the American homeland, and so they're trying to avoid the sort of risk of nuclear escalation. It's more a matter of influencing decision and will. If they make it too hard, if they create a fait accompli, and they make it too hard for us to respond-

Ian Bremmer:

So, it's a leveler.

Michèle Flournoy:

It's almost like a, can you create enough of a debate internally to say, "Look, why do we care about Taiwan? Or why do we care about this? Or why do we care about that? Maybe we should just stop. This is too hard."

Ian Bremmer:

Michèle Flournoy, thank you so much.

Michèle Flournoy:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week. Same place, same time. Unless you're watching on social media, in which case it's wherever you happen to be. Don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company. Imagine a bank without teller lines, where your banker knows your name, and its most prized currency is extraordinary client service. Hear directly from First Republic's clients by visiting firstrepublic.com.