Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Top Trump Diplomat Tells All: fmr Deputy Secretary of State Inside the Room Where it Happens

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Top Trump Diplomat Tells All: fmr Deputy Secretary of State Inside the Room Where it Happens · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Attacking Iran, decapitating Venezuela, threatening Cuba, what is really going on inside the
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  room where it happens. Donald Trump's deputy secretary of state in his first administration
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  and the chief negotiated with North Korea, Stephen Began, was in the room where it happens.
• 0:17
  Stephen takes us inside the president's inner circle and the Trump you don't see behind the scenes.
• 0:23
  What other vulnerabilities and liabilities that you would have known in advance could emerge
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  from having President Trump in power surrounded by people who were there because of loyalty tests
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  instead of competence. You can work in that world. You can bring a discipline, a patriotism,
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  you know, I, of course you can't win that kind of people aren't. And so I'm just interested.
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  Some people are. Some people aren't.
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  Get a humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous question.
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  We are all asking ourselves what the hell is going on with Donald Trump's foreign policy.
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  Is this America flexing its muscles or flailing around on the world stage? Is there a method
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  to the madness? What is really going on inside the room where it happens? Today's guest knows
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  he has been there. Stephen Began was the deputy secretary of state in Donald Trump's first term
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  and he was in charge of North Korea policy specifically. He was brought into the room by the
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  secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to try to pull off a really world first historical event, an actual
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  in-person meeting between the president of the United States and the Supreme Leader of North Korea.
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  The pair had just met for the first time and the secretary of state felt that someone with Began's
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  expertise was required to try to shepherd American foreign policy through this completely new terrain.
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  We hear a lot about the adults who are in the room in the first Trump administration,
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  who may or may not be absent in the second Trump administration. While Donald Trump was tweeting
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  about rocket man and about how his missiles are bigger than little rocket man's missiles,
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  it was Stephen Began who was trying to take that and like an alchemist turn it into a world
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  historical opportunity. What was it like to work with Donald Trump on complex foreign policy
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  negotiations? What happened on Began and Trump's last minute sorties into the DMZ between
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  the Supreme Leader and the leader of the free world? And what has Stephen's experience in seeing Donald
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  Trump's worldview up close and in person taught him about how America should be dealing with Putin,
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  with Ukraine and with Iran. Began was known novice to a government. He actually served under
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  Condoleez Arise in the George W. Bush administration on the National Security Council. He's also a
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  business person. He was a senior executive at Ford, the motor company, and he was kind enough to
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  join us while he was in Sydney delivering a major lecture to the Lowey Institute, which kindly
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  facilitated this conversation about American power, diplomacy, the limits of war, and the Trump you
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  don't see behind the scenes. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. The one the only Stephen Began.
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  I'm fascinated initially by the simple cool logistics of going to the DMZ and meeting
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  the North Korean leader, right? So this was the final meeting that the Trump administration had
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  with the Supreme Leader of North Korea in 2019. And I remember, I think it was the first time
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  that I saw your name where I was reading something about this. And I was like, how do I even do it
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  with there at the DMZ? Like, what is it? Talk me through it. What does it look like? You want the
• 3:43
  short version or the long version? Either one. I'll interrupt. I'll interrupt you when it gets boring.
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  So you are correct. This was the last leader level meeting between the United States and
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  North Korea. We had subsequent meetings, but this was the last leader level meeting. And it was the
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  third of three meetings that President Trump had with Kim Jong-un. The first was the Singapore summit
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  in 2018. The second was the Han only summit in late February of 2019, which didn't go,
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  didn't reach an agreement, I would say. I would call it a failure though. People called it a failure,
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  but I heard you say, well, we just didn't get an agreement. What's the difference in a failure?
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  It demonstrably wasn't the end of the diplomacy because they met again in the DMZ at the end of June
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  the same year. How do you know whether they're just meeting to kick the can down the road and
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  keep humoring you while I do whatever they want? Well, I think frankly, if they were not interested
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  in a meeting, they just wouldn't meet. It's not their style to kind of play out or kick the can
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  down the road. That don't have any incentive. In fact, one of their tactics they use is a part of
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  their negotiating strategy is just rationing contact. You can go weeks, even months without the
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  North Koreans responding to a single message. In fact, in June of 2019, which is the period we're
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  talking about here on the DMZ, the North Koreans had not responded to a single message from the
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  United States of America since the end of the Han only summit. That's right. They rationed this
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  contact. They want a concession just to talk. And we just drew a hard line at that. Talking was
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  not a reward. Well, we didn't reward talking. We reward an action. I just clarify, when you say
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  you, all of the contacts that you make go rebuffed, what is the normal mechanism by which governments
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  send an email to each other? Is Mike Pompeo sending a letter, like a stamped letter to Pyongyang?
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  So this has been the dilemma, the impossible situation that previous governments have found
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  themselves in because you can send a letter and they send it back. You can try to slip it under
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  their door and they kick it, literally kick it right back out underneath the door. Unopened?
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  Unopened. If they don't want to communicate, you can try to deal with a cat or something.
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  Trying to tease it into taking its medicine. It is, but it's, but it's, you know, it's their
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  tactic. It is a tactic. There was a point, there was an ASEAN summit after the Singapore summit
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  where our American listeners, that's a club of Southeast Asian nations in ASEAN. Sorry,
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  should be more specific. That's right. There's the North Korean minister was there and Secretary
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  Pompeo, who I worked for, wanted to have a exchange with him, wanted to hand him actually a letter
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  and he literally chased him around the room. The man was running around the room trying to
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  keep the table between him and Pompeo because he didn't want to take the letter and then he finally
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  took it. He got cornered and he took the letter. So that's me with my, your old son trying to
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  get him to put his socks on, but he's on the other side of the cat. Yeah, exactly. But eventually,
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  you get him and we did. So, but how do you normally talk to the North Koreans? You do it through
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  letters, you do it through, you can't, there's no phone. They have cell phones. They're diplomats
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  in the United States and we had those numbers, but they went answer. Amazing. One time, one time with
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  the diplomats, when they were under a period of instruction not to talk to us, accidentally answered
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  his phone and we were, we were considering the possibility he'd be executed and I'm not joking.
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  Wow. It's that severe. So, um, it's like getting a call from a, you know, like, uh, someone is
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  trying to sell you something, you accidentally pick it up. I'd like to talk to you about your
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  energy bills. No shit. No, it's the Americans. Yeah, you know, uh, communicating that them was like
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  serving legal papers. Yeah, right. Right. But they're dodging it, but if you can get it in their
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  hands and and the president of the United States doesn't have a secure phone hookup to nothing,
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  supreme leaders, nothing office. There's no line that goes through, but this is, this is the
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  dilemma that previous administrations had, uh, in the era of Donald Trump, that was conquered. Yeah.
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  Yeah. Well, Twitter, Twitter became the broadcast that the president could deliver messages to
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  the North Koreans and they heard every single one of them. They forward over them. They analyze
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  them. They studied them and very often they responded to them, Josh. Little Kim and his, uh,
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  rockets, uh, little rocket man on one hand and on the other hand, uh, you know, love letters
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  as presidential would call them. Yeah. I won't, when, when Christmas Eve, literally Christmas Eve,
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  I'm in the Oval Office with, uh, with the president and he's penning a year-end note to Kim Jong-un,
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  debating, uh, you know, this word or that word. And he decides on, uh, on a large to also have
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  a photo taken by the White House photographer. And he posted on his Twitter feed and the North Koreans
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  hadn't spoken to us at that point in maybe six or eight weeks. This was in, uh, in December of,
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  of, uh, of 2018. And within 24 hours, uh, they were reaching out to us. So it worked. Uh, and, uh,
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  and that's by the way, how that meeting at the DMZ in, uh, in, uh, uh, in 2019 happened. So
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  I'm sitting in my hotel room, uh, early on a Saturday morning sleeping in my hotel room.
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  In Jong-un. No, it was Seoul. Oh, okay. I've arrived in Seoul. Oh, you're coming from the South,
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  obviously. Well, I've arrived in Seoul from the United States because President Trump has
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  expected later that day coming in from Japan, where he was at a G20 summit, the group of 20 nations.
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  Uh, he's flying into Seoul for a, uh, state visit. So I fly ahead of time because North Korea is on
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  the agenda. I don't need to be with him in Japan. I'm in South Korea. And there's a pounding on my
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  door at 6 a.m. It's one of my aides. And he says Secretary State on the phone needs to talk to
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  immediately. So I, I get up by, I call on my, on my mobile. I kept my mobile off because I just
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  traveled Asia. I didn't want anybody waking me up in the middle of the night to ask me if I wanted
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  to have lunch tomorrow. Um, it's Pompeo. Secretary Pompeo on the phone. And he says he had a chat with
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  the president the night before and the limousine on the way home from the state leader's dinner.
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  And the president said, you know, we're going to be in South Korea. North Korea is just like
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  very close. Why don't we reach out to Kim Jong Un and see if he wants to get together when I'm
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  there. He's, mind you, he's not even in going to be in South Korea for more than 36 hours.
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  Right. And so they're in Japan. Uh, Pompeo says, let's, let's sleep on it. I'll talk to Steve
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  and in the morning, you know, we'll make a decision. The president says fine. So Pompeo calls me and
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  say, you know, what do you think? And, you know, he and I looked at it like they're not even talking
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  to us. Like, how would we even reach them? Um, and, uh, and, you know, we, how could we in such a short
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  amount of time prepare this meeting? Is this not, it's not, it's not, and what if they say no,
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  what if they, what if they, what if they rebuff the president? Does that make him look like,
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  does that make us look like so we, we're like, yeah, that idea. So he says, okay, I'm going to tell
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  the president. So I, you know, I'm out of bed now. So I get the coffee maker going making my first
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  cup of coffee and I flip on the, uh, the television flip on CNN to see what happened overnight. And
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  it wasn't a moment later that scrolling across the bottom is the text of a tweet from president
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  Trump to Kim Jong-un saying, Hey, Chairman Kim, I'm going to be in South Korea would love to meet.
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  And I'm just like crap.
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  So much for me being in charge of North Korea policy and this administration, that's living in
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  the Trump world, Josh. So there it is, uh, on the TV, and I'm like, okay, but there's still not
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  talking to us. How, how do we even do it? And, uh, and so, uh, uh, my a do knocked on the
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  door. He's, uh, it was a great, great young diplomat, Korean speaker. I asked him to monitor the
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  Korean news wire, see if they said anything publicly. And sure enough, about two, three hours later,
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  a message came out, said, we are, we are intrigued by the message from president Trump. And, uh,
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  but don't understand what his intentions are. And I heard that construct. I was like, oh, crap.
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  This is going to happen. That's a yes. That's a yes. That's not a no. Because when they say no,
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  they say it like they, like they mean it and you can understand it. So, uh, there we are. We got,
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  it's off, uh, it was off to the races, um, uh, through the guard posts at either end of the DMZ
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  on the most fortified border in the world. There's a hotline that in normal times is supposed to
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  be checked once or twice a day. You just make sure the technology is working. But again, the North
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  Koreans will go months without even answering it, even though that's the agreement. That's the
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  protocol. And so this is a hotline from one side of the DMZ to the South Korea to North Korea.
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  Yeah. Yeah. The other side of the DMZ, not all the way to capital city DMZ, DMZ guard post, DMZ guard
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  post, they can see each other got it. And so, uh, we call up to, uh, we call the US commander,
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  we say, look, can you have the guard post do a hotline call and ask him if they want to meet? And
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  so, uh, the call that phone rings, phone rings, nobody answers it. And so the protocol that we'd
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  been using in the US, when we really had to pass an important message to the North Koreans,
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  usually about local security issues, some sort of incident, um, our, our, uh, US soldiers would go
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  down to the line to the line of demarcation, like right to the border. And they would wait for
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  a North Korean to come down and stand across. And then they would read them a message. And the
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  North Koreans would hold a video camera and tape the message. And that was it. That was the
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  exchange. They wouldn't say anything. They just recorded it actually up until about six months
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  before that, uh, the US soldier would come down there with a bullhorn. And they would stand there
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  with a North Korean about two feet from them speaking through the bullhorn because that was what they
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  were instructed to do. And the US commander said, guys, guys, use a little bit of sense here. But
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  if he's standing right there, you can lose the bullhorn. Yeah, we can lose the bullhorn. So,
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  they did that, uh, two hours later, the hotline rings from the North Korean side to our side,
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  saying, um, we'd like to do a meeting 7 p.m. tonight, DMZ North Korean side. I'm sitting down in
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  Seoul, which is our drive from the border wrapping up a few things. And now it got a hustle to get
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  up to the DMZ. So full up on a helicopter with my team, the, uh, the, again, the US commanding
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  general provided just full support for us there. We flew up and got out of the helicopter in the,
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  at the DMZ and, uh, and stepped out into a, into a minivan driven by a US soldier and with a,
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  with a, uh, Colonel, US Colonel, uh, as an escort in the front seat. And you kind of, you know,
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  you pull away from the helicopter pad, you go up to the row of buildings that, you know,
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  many have seen that kind of row of blue buildings that, uh, that are, you know, the historic
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  properties of the, of the, of Pomegranate Village of the demilitarized zone. You go to the end of
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  that buildings and then you go left and you drive into the woods because there's no road.
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  There's no road between the two sides because the whole point is to keep each other out of each
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  other's countries. Right. And so, and by the way, this whole band between those two borders is
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  mined with, it's heavily mined with minefields. And, but there's an agreed understanding of a route
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  that's kept open. So you kind of go to the third oak tree on the left and then you turn left and
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  you go into the little clearing of the woods and then you beer a little bit to the right and
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  I'll send you pop out in your North Korea on the road. So there is a path. We drove another
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  minute or so, got to a building and, and for the next three hours sat with a group of North
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  Koreans. It was waiting for us there to work out the details of a meeting that happened the
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  next day at 1 p.m. So, you know, less than 36 hours after the president tweets this on television,
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  tweets us publicly from Japan. Um, he's in South Korea on Sunday, just afternoon meeting face to
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  face with Kim Jong-un. How does he get there? Same way? How does the president get there? Well,
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  he flies in here for one and then a helicopter package flies him up to the DMC. Yeah, right. He
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  flies into Seoul. He flies into Seoul. Yeah. He flies into Osan, which is, which is the airport space
• 15:31
  there. And does he have to do the whole third oak tree on the right? No, no. I think I can fly into
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  North Korea. So, in this case, they did the meeting on the South Korean side. Oh, I see. I was
• 15:41
  going to go, but Kim Jong-un came out of a building on his side and there's an open space in the
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  middle. Again, many people have seen this on television. There's literally a line that separates
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  one half of the compound from the other half of the compound from South Korea, from North Korea.
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  Kim Jong-un comes down the stairs and walks to the line and very dramatically President Trump walks
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  up to the line on the other side and they shake hands across the line. And then President Trump
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  says to them, because the next thing you know, he's walking into North Korea. So, he asked Kim Jong-un,
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  he said, look, I'd love to be the first US President to visit North Korea. So, he starts walking,
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  and he's walking, Josh, and he keeps walking. I'm like, how is this? Is he going to stop?
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  Exactly. What is the secret service thinking? Like, I'm just thinking about the security logistics
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  of this, I mean, on a practical level, like that you're in the van going on the third oak tree.
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  How can you be certain that the North Koreans aren't going to mistake the van for something
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  else and they're going to blow you up? How can you be certain that they're not going to
• 16:40
  kidnap the president of the United States? It seems like it seems like winning it in a...
• 16:44
  Well, I suppose you could let your imagination run wild on these things, but we are the United States
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  of America, Josh. I mean, first of all, there's not going to be a lot achieved from doing something
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  to me or kidnapping me. It's not going to move the needle. But yeah, the president of the United States
• 17:00
  is in theory, yes, but truth is, nobody's going to do that. That's not even a bat. That's just reality.
• 17:08
  Yeah, right. And as long as he stays close to the Supreme Leader,
• 17:11
  they're not going to step on a landline anymore. Again, if they had a mischief in mind,
• 17:17
  they wouldn't have reshowed up. Yeah. But no, that wasn't even a consideration.
• 17:20
  That's fascinating. And then in terms of the content of the negotiations,
• 17:24
  there, I mean, I've heard you talk about, like, how during the Singapore talks, like,
• 17:29
  it did seem like there could be some movement. And that Kim Jong Un was coming up with ideas
• 17:36
  about how they could sign something on a U.S. aircraft carrier or like.
• 17:40
  Yeah, so you're conflating a few things, but the short answer is, yeah, it seemed like there
• 17:45
  was potential in the meetings, in the one-on-one meetings between the president, Kim Jong Un.
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  Oftentimes, they would together explore kind of the maximum extent where they thought we could get
• 17:57
  in negotiations and diplomacy. On paper, out of Singapore, it wasn't much detail,
• 18:02
  candidly. And it was, I had had very little to work with coming out of that summit.
• 18:06
  But when you watch the interactions between the two, now it's possible.
• 18:11
  It's possible, for sure, with analytical rigor, you have to allow for the possibility,
• 18:16
  Kim Jong Un was just playing the president, trying to buy some time. But again,
• 18:21
  it would contrary to their normal approach, because if that was the case, they just wouldn't meet.
• 18:24
  Right. It's possible also that Kim Jong Un really wanted to go someplace with the United States
• 18:33
  of America, the president, in these negotiations. But he was constrained by his own system.
• 18:38
  And I'd tested this theory with South Koreans, and they'd just roll their eyes and tell me,
• 18:44
  I couldn't be more wrong, because he is a totalitarian dictator. And they're thought that there's
• 18:49
  any sort of collective governance or any sort of internal pressure or constraint on what Kim
• 18:56
  Jong Un could or could not do. They just find ludicrous. But I got to tell you, in my experience,
• 19:02
  across 40 years in U.S. foreign policy, I find that even dictators kind of have to have a sense
• 19:08
  of the room around them. And that may not be a constraint in that it's a constitutional restriction
• 19:13
  on their power or somebody telling them to their face to disagree. But a dictator has a finely
• 19:19
  tuned ear when he's presenting ideas to his audience. Are they looking down at the table,
• 19:26
  or are they looking him in the eye? Are they applauding just a little with a little less vigor
• 19:30
  than they might otherwise? These are your feedback mechanisms and dictators.
• 19:35
  And Kim Jong Un very well may have been prepared to agree with things United States America,
• 19:42
  but they weren't going to fly in the system. And that's a really important thing to understand
• 19:46
  when you're negotiating with the North Koreans, generally, whether it's with Kim Jong Un or his
• 19:50
  the people he assigned to negotiate with me is you're not negotiating with that person.
• 19:55
  You're negotiating with the system. There's so much more that's outside the room that you're
• 20:00
  trying to negotiate with. And I'm not just speaking figuratively. I'm talking literally.
• 20:04
  Like I was negotiating with the North Koreans, the 38th floor of the Coriola Hotel in Pyongyang in
• 20:11
  January of 2018. And about every so often we run into some area of disagreement or they'd say,
• 20:20
  we didn't say that. And I'd say yes, you did say that. This is what our two leaders agreed to. And they'd
• 20:24
  say, no, they did. And you'd get into these like any negotiation. I mean, it wasn't like
• 20:29
  quibbling, but I'm making it simple for you and for the listeners. But you'd run into an area
• 20:35
  disagreement and you'd be sitting and all of a sudden a guy would walk into the room behind you.
• 20:39
  You know, come into the door and you'd have a little folder like your restaurant bill would be in
• 20:45
  when you're when you're finishing your meal and you'd open it up and they're there had to
• 20:48
  negotiate or would take it out and you'd read the note and then you'd put it down. And then you'd
• 20:53
  go a little bit further and then then you'd see what the note said. He'd either say, you know,
• 20:56
  okay, never mind. We're not going to push that any further. We agree with you. We'll give you that
• 21:00
  or sometimes they would say we need to take a break. And and and all that is because somebody's
• 21:05
  listening into the room the entire time in stage managing and sending direction into the
• 21:10
  negotiating. You're not negotiating negotiating with that guy across the table from me.
• 21:13
  There's somebody listening in. There's there's maybe a group of people listening in. And so when
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  they'd say, you know, when they'd say it's time to take a break, you know, it's not like, okay,
• 21:22
  everybody get a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom. Let's be back here in 10 minutes and we'll get going.
• 21:25
  It's like, we'll call you. So we go back to our whole area and it could be 10 minutes. It could be
• 21:34
  two hours. And we got to call. Okay, we're ready to start again. So and if it sometimes they'd come
• 21:39
  back and they looked like the way to the world had been lifted up their shoulders like,
• 21:42
  yeah, finally, we don't have to sell that that line that we've been trying to sell you guys and
• 21:46
  you're not buying it. You could see the relief. Sometimes they'd come back hair frazzled on
• 21:53
  these wide like they've been screened that for for two hours. And then you know, because they somehow
• 21:59
  fumbled, fumbled defense of some point or whatnot, right? You're not negotiating with the person
• 22:04
  you're negotiating with the system. And I think that may even be the case with Kim Jong-un. Yeah,
• 22:07
  fascinating. Fascinating. I Western leaders constrained in similar ways.
• 22:12
  You know, in different ways that they, you know, all leaders constrained in democracies by public
• 22:20
  opinion, by, you know, by the sport of their constituencies, et cetera. That's that's there. But
• 22:27
  but not the same way of North Korea. So our strength we have our strength in these
• 22:32
  negotiations was our ability to be agile. I could sit down with my counterpart. I have a pretty
• 22:38
  good sense of the parameters of my instructions or what the president wants. And so I could test
• 22:42
  different ideas. I could try different things. See the work, you know, break things down, combine them
• 22:46
  differently, sequence them differently. You know, that kind of agility is is is is our strength.
• 22:52
  And if I got a deal or got a provisional deal, I could go back and I could pitch it to the president
• 22:57
  try to sell. That's not how the North Korean system works. They get rigid instructions. They're not
• 23:01
  allowed to deviate an Iota from it. It makes it very frustrating. Right. Because there's no,
• 23:06
  let's test this idea. Right. Yeah. There's no testing ideas. They've got their instructions.
• 23:10
  And their job there's simply to recite the negotiating positions, not to negotiate or find
• 23:15
  middle ground or what have right. It's actually not a negotiation. Then really,
• 23:18
  well, that other person, not with that guy, but with the person and the speaker, they're listening to
• 23:22
  so I'm making my points to he's just the he's the receiver. Yeah. The message is the decision
• 23:28
  makers are outside the room. But you've got to make those points because they're the ones that
• 23:31
  are all coming reflect. It makes it extremely slow. Yeah. Tidious to negotiate. And probably
• 23:36
  because you can't you can't detect the facial, you know, what's going on in the mind of the
• 23:41
  person who you're actually talking to because the person you're actually talking to isn't in the room.
• 23:44
  Right. Although in time, I think those two, there's a bit of a mind meld where you begin to see
• 23:50
  in the in the face of the counterpart. Right. The reflection of what the other what they're
• 23:56
  being screamed at about. It's like there's a puppet with a mask and you have to interpret the
• 23:59
  mask to know what the puppeteers negotiating with North Korea is not easy. So what was the
• 24:05
  aircraft carrier thing that I? So we had the Singapore summit in June 2018. And this is both the
• 24:14
  the kind of the quality of the president of the United States Donald Trump, but also the North
• 24:19
  Koreans. They just loved the they all loved the fanfare and media attention and the, you know,
• 24:24
  it was it was quite the moment. Singapore was just insane. And I wasn't there. I should I should
• 24:29
  say that I only started after Singapore because that's when the decision was made to have an
• 24:33
  negotiation up until then it was a conversation about a negotiation. The Secretary Pompeo and I
• 24:41
  flew to Pyongyang on my first visit as as the special representative is a chief negotiator in
• 24:47
  October of 2018. And one of the issues that that you know, we wanted to test was another summit
• 24:54
  because the hypothesis that we were testing here was that all the failed diplomacy of the preceding
• 25:01
  25 years was because it left room for maneuver for the senior leader in North Korea to kind of
• 25:08
  pick and choose or say no or yes. But if you engage him in the actual discussion at the leader level,
• 25:14
  then you were working the system in the right spot. Because I can say you're working you're negotiating
• 25:18
  with the system, but here you're working with absolutely the top of the system. And you would hope
• 25:22
  that whatever he decides gets driven down into the system and becomes a position. So the hypothesis
• 25:27
  here was leader level diplomacy could resolve the issues that 25 years of working groups and you
• 25:33
  know, six party talks and et cetera had never been able to to to resolve in a durable way.
• 25:43
  And so first thing we wanted one of the things we want to talk about when we were there in October
• 25:48
  2018 is another summit meeting because we used those summits as action-causing events. That was
• 25:53
  our strategy anyway. And North Koreans wanted another summit. So they were ready to talk about it.
• 25:57
  It wasn't just North Koreans, it was actually Chairman Kim. So Secretary Pompeo and I are meeting
• 26:02
  with Chairman Kim with his sister Kim Yo-jong in an interpreter. And then we had our own in a closed
• 26:10
  door for about two or three hours in in Pyongyang. And when we got to the issue of the summit,
• 26:15
  you know, they were already they were already yes on and having another meeting the question was
• 26:20
  where timing it was it was a question too, but ultimately the question was where. And so we tested
• 26:25
  a few different ideas. He wanted Ulaan Batar, Mongolia. But the White House had already told us in
• 26:30
  advance under no circumstances. Are we going to Ulaan Batar in February? And there's only one hotel
• 26:36
  there that's worth staying in. And you know, and is also Chairman Kim put that on the table? And
• 26:43
  you know, Secretary Pompeo kind of push past us said, well, well, what about what about what if we
• 26:50
  tried here and we were looking at Thailand or Vietnam. And it was an interesting moment, Josh,
• 26:57
  because Pompeo listened to Kim Jong Un's suggestion, but they kind of moved on to the next
• 27:04
  possibility. He didn't really treat it seriously. And Kim Jong Un bristled. You could see it
• 27:09
  this is a guy who nobody says no to. This is a guy who's not used to having his idea kind of
• 27:15
  said, okay, well, the good idea, let's try something else. Right. When he says it in his system,
• 27:20
  his idea is gospel. Yeah, I just said Mongolia. Yeah. What do you not understand? And so with with a
• 27:30
  constraining his anger, but you could see him bristling. Kim Jong Un says I would do something
• 27:35
  along the lines of I would appreciate if my idea was given consideration. And so we went back and
• 27:41
  we talked through the issues about Mongolia, the winter, the weather, the press, the hotel,
• 27:47
  the constrained hotel space. Kim Jong Un even volunteered to sleep on his train. So I'm going to
• 27:52
  take my train. I'll be on my train. President Trump can have the Shangri-La hotel. And but the
• 27:58
  White House had already said under no circumstances are we going to a little bit more. So we eventually
• 28:03
  moved on to testing other ideas. We proposed Bangkok they weren't interested. We thought Bangkok
• 28:11
  would be a good location for both sides. He said, I think I think we tested the DMZ as a possibility,
• 28:21
  but he said, you know, perhaps I could meet you somewhere, for example, on a US aircraft carrier.
• 28:26
  This was Kim Jong Un's suggestion. And we were like, oh my gosh,
• 28:32
  kind of like the idea actually. But then there's no dock in South Korea or North Korea that we can
• 28:39
  we can bring a US aircraft carrier to the shore. So it would have to be anchored off the coast.
• 28:47
  And he'd have to fly out on a US helicopter. We wouldn't let someone else fly out
• 28:50
  onto one of our one of our aircraft carriers. And logistically, it just, you know, it was
• 28:56
  interesting for a moment. I mean, it's such a shame in a way, isn't it? Because it would have been,
• 29:01
  I think he doesn't understand what the optics would be of coming to a US aircraft carrier. I mean,
• 29:07
  that there's a lot of history there. Yeah, there's a lot of history there. But that is an act of
• 29:12
  humiliation. To my novice eyes, that would be an act of self-humiliation for an
• 29:18
  elite. It'd come onto a USA aircraft carrier. But he wasn't that way interestingly. I mean,
• 29:24
  he probably just thought it was cool. In the year 2020, uh, uh, Secretary Pompeo, Pompeo,
• 29:30
  I met the top two officials in the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Yang Jichu, who was a state
• 29:35
  counselor and, uh, and Wang Yi, who, uh, sorry, no, it was a sweet young guy, the then ambassador,
• 29:42
  and Zheng Ziguang that now a Chinese ambassador. You could barely much say any names and I would believe.
• 29:46
  Okay. Trust me on this. Um, we, uh, in the, in the, in the absolute darkest moment of the
• 29:53
  COVID pandemic in June of 2020, we were trying, we were doing one last meeting and tried to arrest
• 29:58
  to the sharp decline in the US China relationship, see if there was any basis for, you know, kind of
• 30:03
  finding the bottom. And so the Chinese, uh, and, and, and we agreed to meet in Hawaii, you know,
• 30:08
  kind of equidistant from Washington and Beijing. And the only place we could meet in all of Hawaii
• 30:13
  was on a US military base because the, um, because of the lockdowns and the, and Hawaii was
• 30:19
  particularly tough on its lockdowns. And the state governor has a lot of authority in the state.
• 30:23
  And so we could only meet on a federal facility there to bring the Chinese, because they refused
• 30:27
  to be COVID tested or anything like that. That was a non starter for them. And, uh, and so, uh,
• 30:34
  you know, we said, okay, well, we're going to do it at Pearl Harbor. And they're like under no
• 30:37
  circumstances, but we come to Pearl Harbor to your point. Yeah. You are seeking, you are seeking
• 30:42
  to send messages. Yeah. And we're like, well, come on. No, I'm with them. I'm with them.
• 30:48
  They did it. Steven. They did it. They did it. We had a great meeting. Uh, well, actually,
• 30:52
  I should take a big, we had a meeting today meeting. I mean, speaking of meetings versus great meetings,
• 30:56
  the, the negotiations, you know, you say it wasn't a fail negotiation, ultimately in
• 31:00
  Hanoi with the North Koreans. Um, but it didn't reach an agreement. And prior to President Trump,
• 31:07
  as you were saying, like, they've been 25 years of diplomacy. And when Trump started floating
• 31:11
  the idea of meeting Kim one on one, there was a lot of, I remember, you know, eyebrows being
• 31:18
  raised amongst the foreign policy establishment saying, like, you know, this guy's an idiot. He
• 31:22
  doesn't realize Trump meeting you know, because he doesn't understand that the top level meeting
• 31:27
  is supposed to happen after all the groundwork has taken place. There are professional career
• 31:32
  diplomats who spent their lives studying this stuff and understand exactly what the contours
• 31:36
  of the North Korean regime are. And so the sort of, I suppose, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
• 31:42
  worldview is you do all of that hard, wonky work in the background. And then that leads up to
• 31:48
  the leaders meeting. You don't just expect the leaders to meet and then come to some kind of
• 31:52
  agreement in the absence of all of that contextual stuff that the foreign policy establishment
• 31:57
  is supposed to do in advance. This isn't going to work. You didn't reach an agreement. Were they
• 32:03
  right in hindsight? No. And this is one of the things that really was attractive to me to take
• 32:08
  this position is President Trump didn't have any time for that rubbish. And it is rubbish. That's
• 32:13
  what didn't work for 25 years. That the other one didn't work. Right. Okay. Fair enough. But we
• 32:17
  were trying something new. We were testing a new idea. And it didn't, it hasn't worked yet. I'll say,
• 32:23
  but it's not over. In Trump's mind, it's certainly not over. I'll tell you that Josh. You can see
• 32:29
  it in his occasional comments. He's a little bit busy right now. So North Korea isn't that it
• 32:34
  isn't occupying the top spot on his to-do list. But it's out there. And so you know,
• 32:42
  I mean, this is a tendency in the United States that is somewhat frustrating at times, which is that
• 32:47
  you know, we think we're punishing another country by not talking to them. So let me take the
• 32:52
  example of Russia. So for better part of a decade, well, eight years from 2014 to 2022, we
• 33:01
  went talk to Putin. I don't love Putin. And I think people know, well, my views of the Russian
• 33:09
  government and the terrible things that it's done and are doing right now. But we thought we
• 33:15
  were punishing Putin by not talking to him. But what we were really doing is giving him more room
• 33:19
  for maneuver. We were not forcing him to confront challenges to his views or his potential actions.
• 33:26
  We were allowing him to surround himself with sick offense, who were feeding him information
• 33:32
  that he wanted to hear. And in the process, we allowed him to stew on his own perverted sense of
• 33:39
  what the history of Ukraine is and to convince himself that it wasn't a country and that he needed
• 33:44
  to conquer it and reabsorb it into Russian and all the attendant issues came of it. But you know,
• 33:50
  we kind of could smugly claim the moral high ground that we did not grace him with our presence.
• 33:55
  I think that's a mistake. Do you think that he really went off the deep hand on Ukraine during the
• 33:59
  because America didn't talk to him? I mean, he annexed Crimea in 2014. So he like, he was already
• 34:06
  champion in the big. But we were already isolated. We were already we were already withdrawing from
• 34:10
  engagement with him in 2014 too. So this even even goes back further to 2008 with Georgia.
• 34:17
  Yeah, you know, the COVID had a big impact on this too because he was really in the most
• 34:22
  extreme isolation. It really just a case of you wonder what his mental health state was at a
• 34:28
  certain point. I've wanted about this. If you like, if you're a betting man, if COVID doesn't happen,
• 34:33
  does Putin still invade Ukraine or is he deranged by that?
• 34:38
  You know, relation.
• 34:41
  Counter-histories are hard to make the case for. You just don't know. It's the short of it.
• 34:48
  President Trump says he would have invaded if President Trump was still the president too.
• 34:52
  He said, never would happen on my watch. Do you buy that?
• 34:55
  At a certain level, maybe. But again, I think being in the other side's face
• 35:02
  is is productive and good for you. It's not I don't think it's a moral compromise to be in the other
• 35:07
  side's face. So there's the there's this view of the war in Ukraine, you know, the skeptics of
• 35:12
  American power put forward, which is that at the end of the Cold War, we were all triumphalists.
• 35:17
  I say, we meaning the Western world broadly, American its allies and didn't give Russia the
• 35:22
  respect that it deserved. We're too enthusiastic about expanding NATO. We're too enthusiastic. We're
• 35:27
  I guess victorious. And that that was irksome to an old KGB hand like Putin and his cronies.
• 35:36
  And that from their perspective, they're in a defensive posture rather than an aggressive one.
• 35:43
  This is a kind of a mechimer, you know, a world view of American power. Do you have time for it?
• 35:49
  Yeah, I've done it all. I think it's an invented narrative. And I think it's counterfactual.
• 35:54
  It's just not it's not proven by the events that took place. First of all, we were incredibly
• 35:58
  generous and forward leaning and gracious after the collapse of Soviet Union president George Herbert
• 36:04
  Walker, Bush, Bush 41 was adamant in his instruction across the government that nobody
• 36:10
  called this a victory. This is a shared victory between us and the Russian people that it's a it's
• 36:16
  a it was a the history was there is much victims of the history as as the as the people that they
• 36:22
  committed offenses against in that that he would never allow that. We provided billions of
• 36:27
  dollars assistance, not sensibly quite frankly much of it wasted. We tolerated too much corruption
• 36:34
  and ultimately the dear deterioration of of even the nascent democracy that that was forming in
• 36:39
  Russia. But but the US approach towards Russia was incredibly generous. With NATO enlargement,
• 36:48
  we brought them into discussion. It was discussed with them in the in the early waves of NATO
• 36:52
  enlargement. There was acquiescence. They didn't love it, but they also understood it. And if you
• 36:58
  if you look back now to to that period from the 1990s forward, you know, it'll never happen.
• 37:04
  But Vladimir Putin knows NATO and the West to thank you. Because what happened is stable,
• 37:11
  peaceful democracies began to be constructed along the borders of Russia that posed absolutely
• 37:19
  no threat to Russia. In fact, chaos, corruption, weak governance would have been a far more dangerous
• 37:27
  consequence of that period than these strong, stable, secure democracies. I mean, Poland,
• 37:32
  that assumes that Putin's world view is as rational as yours and that he doesn't
• 37:39
  code what we see as peaceful, stable democracies as proxies for a Western hegemony that is hellbent
• 37:49
  on undermining the, you know, the Russian dominance of that sphere. So we have to be careful
• 37:55
  not to project our logic on others like Putin. So Putin would consider that what we're doing by
• 38:02
  assuming that he has to see peaceful West and democracy. So Putin would, I'll come back to that,
• 38:07
  but Putin would constantly refer to Ukraine as a threat to Russia. There's no
• 38:12
  objective way that we would consider threat that Ukraine's a threat to Russia.
• 38:16
  Right. Ukraine is weak. Ukraine doesn't have a military. It's poorly armed. It's poorly governed.
• 38:24
  You know, when we think about a threat, also in the West, say, we think about a threat in terms
• 38:31
  of kind of country, invade my territory. What could that country undermine my, could it destroy
• 38:38
  my economy? Could it undermine my political system? That's a threat that we would conceive of
• 38:43
  the right. But that for Putin is an authoritarian. Authoritarians have a very different view of what
• 38:49
  threatens them is what they don't control. So Putin doesn't see Ukraine as a threat like we would
• 38:56
  in a conventional way. He sees it as a threat because he doesn't control it. He needs to control it.
• 39:00
  And it goes beyond the borders of Ukraine too. He needs that control. That's the nature of authoritarianism
• 39:05
  is what you don't control threatens you. That's why authoritarian is usually their biggest fear
• 39:11
  is their own people. I mean, the resources that China and Russia use to repress their own people
• 39:17
  dwarfs even what they spend on building up their militaries and adventurism are broad. And so
• 39:23
  for Putin, that's his threat. That's not a threat that we can accept that he has to control. And
• 39:28
  this is what this is what was also this is part of the gift that Russia got in the 1990s when
• 39:34
  stable secure democracies in prosperous countries grew on their borders through NATO, through the European
• 39:41
  Union. All the wars in Europe, all the wars in Central Europe started when the strong invaded the
• 39:48
  week. It's there's just some magnetic pull to the week or disintegrating state that brings the
• 39:54
  outside powers in to seek conquest. And so this even, you know, I'm the Russians will never agree with
• 40:01
  me on this. Let me I'll just say that right out. But the Russians even were were able to avoid
• 40:08
  the attraction of trying to once again annex and conquer Poland, for example, or the Baltic states.
• 40:13
  But Ukraine was kept outside that partially because of its own decreptude. It's it's we governance
• 40:19
  its corruption partially because I think in 2008, we made the judgment that that that it would be
• 40:27
  too provocative to bring Ukraine and then Georgia into into into the Western world. It'd be too
• 40:33
  provocative for Moscow. And so we didn't do it at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. And ironically,
• 40:39
  those are the two countries that Putin has invaded since. I mean, they're also I mean, the other
• 40:44
  thing about Ukraine, of course, is it looms very large in the Russian imagination in a way that
• 40:48
  Poland may not. I mean, it used to be the seat of this Russia, right? I mean, like he has this
• 40:53
  I'm Polish America, Josh. My my great-grandfather's immigration papers, he renounces his his
• 41:02
  potentate, Nicholas II of Russia. And I'm Polish. I'm not Russia. Yeah, my my grandmother was
• 41:08
  born in Poland as well. I mean, I'm not saying that the Russians haven't meddled a lot, but there's
• 41:12
  there seems to be something uniquely like attractive. Well, it's his if he's golem then Ukraine is
• 41:17
  his pressure. Yes, so it's a long history. And there's you know, and and and and the the
• 41:22
  Kievan Rus in the in the in the first in the year, you know, 10, 1000 was the birthplace of what
• 41:31
  ultimately grew into become the Russian Empire. But Ukraine has always been a separate and distinct
• 41:36
  part of it. And this is what I talk about is that, you know, Putin's perverted version of history.
• 41:40
  He's constructed in his mind, historical narrative where where this is like the heartland of Russia.
• 41:44
  Right. And he's wrong. And the Ukrainian people are wrong. And it didn't matter even if he was right
• 41:50
  historically, this was a sovereign independent nation recognized by Russia, the United Nations,
• 41:55
  by every country in the world recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine. And it wasn't it wasn't his
• 42:01
  prerogative, certainly across those borders, invade the country and try to incorporate it into
• 42:05
  Russia. If you were Grand Emperor with a time machine of the universe and you were able to go back
• 42:10
  and try to prevent it from happening, do you take action when he invades Georgia? Do you take action
• 42:16
  when he annexes Crimea? Do you just wait until 2022 and then go all out and not hold back on what
• 42:23
  you're giving the Ukrainians and call his bluff and say, no, we're going to give them the long-range
• 42:27
  missiles that they need that you say you're going to blow up the world if we give them. What do you do?
• 42:30
  Yeah. You know, there's a lot of context in the moment. It's I'm not dodging the question.
• 42:35
  It's hard to answer. Let me answer it in a different way and you can push me if you want me to
• 42:38
  answer more. There was a failure. There was only one person responsible for the invasion of
• 42:44
  Ukraine. That's Vladimir Putin. That one man started this war. That was not going to start without
• 42:48
  Vladimir Putin. But there were failures that we have to own as well. We'd given up on Ukraine
• 42:54
  because it was a corrupt and poorly governed country. We kind of stopped, we stopped engaging on
• 43:00
  Ukraine and we should have known better than to leave this kind of gray zone, very unstable country
• 43:08
  in place and not expect across the entire lesson of history that somebody wasn't going to
• 43:14
  at some point move in. But more importantly, it was a failure deterrence. Now a lot of that failure
• 43:19
  deterrence is on the part of the Ukrainians themselves for never having built a strong sovereign state
• 43:23
  that could could rebuff Putin's invasion. But it was a failure of deterrence. We knew in December
• 43:33
  of 2021 that this invasion was going to happen. President Biden and his intelligence and his
• 43:37
  intelligence director spread the word far and wide that this is going to happen. Some were
• 43:43
  allies didn't believe it until the eve of the invasion. But we knew it. We didn't do enough
• 43:49
  between the point at which we reached that conclusion in February 24th of 2022 when he did the
• 43:55
  invasion to deter him. And we should have acted more. We should have armed the Ukrainians. We should
• 44:00
  have sent direct messages to Putin. Because would you have met, I mean, would you have taken a leaf
• 44:06
  out of the Trump and Kim playbook and said, you know, if you were President Biden, just got on
• 44:11
  a plane to Moscow and met with Putin if you could and said, listen, we know what you're doing.
• 44:16
  And if you do, then X, Y, Z happens. A president Trump put it back with them.
• 44:20
  Absolutely. And so when Trump, when President Trump says this war never would happen when
• 44:24
  President, he would have tried certainly tried different things that President Biden didn't at
• 44:29
  that point, including, including meeting directly with Putin. You know, Trump is a real dilemma for
• 44:34
  the Russians. Because in the one hand, they really want to play him. They think that, you know,
• 44:41
  they think at one level, he offers a personality who's willing to give them a deal that they like.
• 44:50
  And in another level, they also welcome some of the chaos and instability that he causes in the
• 44:55
  global global system and it causes even the United States of America with polarization, et cetera.
• 45:01
  There's nothing not to like for them and all that. And yet, he keeps handing them defeat after
• 45:06
  defeat after defeat with a smile on his face and with a kindly, kindly word. And you know, I like
• 45:12
  Vladimir Putin. He's a good guy admiring him for being a killer. And yet, they're proxy in Syria's
• 45:19
  gone, Assad is gone. Their proxy in Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro is gone. Their proxy in Iran is under
• 45:26
  a sustained assault right now. He's a dilemma for the Russians because on the one hand, he appears
• 45:33
  to be everything they'd want to be. But the outcome of that is exactly the opposite. It's interesting
• 45:39
  that you raised this contrast between the public and the private persona of the president in the
• 45:44
  sense that this is something that I think a lot of Americans, a lot of people in the world are
• 45:48
  confused by and curious about. There's this public persona of somebody who appears superficially
• 45:57
  uninterested in policy details, prone to flights of fancy, prone to anger, unpredictable
• 46:06
  humorless and erratic. And then you talk to some people who know him well and they say,
• 46:13
  that's an act. He's actually quite thoughtful. He's quite funny. He's quite strategic. And he's
• 46:20
  taken big swings. And we'll see where they go. Who was the Trump that you worked for?
• 46:28
  A little bit all that. There's nothing that is mutually exclusive in that entire set of descriptions
• 46:37
  that you gave. I mean, that is the complexity of Donald Trump. Well, I think being humorless,
• 46:42
  thin-skinned and stupid by which I mean not book-learned and stupid, but too overly focused on
• 46:49
  tactics without an understanding of strategy. I'm not saying there's any strategy here.
• 46:54
  Well, I mean, those would be in conflict with a view of a person who's playing a character
• 47:00
  of a buffoon in order to play a strategic game with other people. We have already talked about
• 47:09
  this more than he's thought about it. So one has to be very careful. He's impulsive. He goes with
• 47:17
  his gut. He's got the conceit of the negotiator, which is that everything is negotiable. I mean,
• 47:21
  the root of his foreign policy is that notion that everything is negotiable. I actually don't think
• 47:26
  everything is negotiable. I think sometimes people don't want to give things up. And they're not going
• 47:30
  to. Kim Jong-un was not going to give up his nuclear weapons. The Iranians did not give up their
• 47:34
  nuclear weapons. Not everything is Nicholas Maduro was offered an opportunity to live a cozy
• 47:42
  existence in a third country, but he didn't want to. He wanted to rule Venezuela.
• 47:48
  Probably didn't buy anything. Probably didn't buy the threat. I don't know. I mean, if he went to
• 47:52
  Moscow or something, besides there. No, no, not that he didn't buy that he would be safe. But I
• 47:56
  think he didn't buy that his rejection would lead to him being kidnapped in the middle of the night
• 48:00
  and then tried in a New York courthouse. So how'd that work out? Make the deal. This is who the
• 48:09
  president is, but that's not to call it strategic. And it's very unpredictable. And so you can't
• 48:15
  predict what day you're getting. And also another feature in this. This is both an opportunity
• 48:22
  and challenge to work in side Trump administration as I experienced is the president is incredibly
• 48:29
  transparent. He's the most transparent decision maker that we've had in the presidency in my entire
• 48:35
  career in public service. But that's not always a good thing. The cliche is watching the sausage
• 48:43
  be made. The president tests ideas publicly. He he relitigates them publicly. He seeks input affirmation
• 48:52
  or or questions from from various quarters, even even people he doesn't like. He'll ask their
• 48:58
  opinion. And in his decision making process is all in the public. It's it's full of faints and
• 49:05
  shifts and retreats and advances. It's it's it's peppered with rhetoric, insults,
• 49:14
  you know, cajoling. And is that true in the room as well?
• 49:20
  Well, you know, a lot of it is public and performative. But you know, he's still the same guy
• 49:25
  behind closed doors as he is in public. What was he like as a boss? You know, I don't want to
• 49:32
  exaggerate. I wasn't with him every day. I was with him episodically when I was North Korea
• 49:36
  negotiator. You know what? At the summit in Hanoi when when we got to the final moment of that
• 49:45
  agreement, I have to say I was impressed with the president. So he had laid out a proposal for
• 49:51
  Kim Jong Un. We had spent months developing this proposal that really required Kim Jong Un to
• 49:57
  say yes or no. Yes, I want to take this deal, which is going to transform history. It's going to
• 50:04
  be peace on the Korean peninsula. It's going to be a permanent peace. You know, we still haven't
• 50:08
  signed a peace treaty in the Korean War. We're technically in a state of war armistice.
• 50:17
  Maybe that was our one real achievement in Hanoi. Our our main achievement Hanoi was that we
• 50:23
  had a proposal that Kim Jong Un had to say yes or no to. And he said no. Now before he said no,
• 50:30
  before it became final, no president said, test it and he said, can you give me a little bit more
• 50:35
  or can you ask a little bit less from us? And Kim Jong Un was like, no, can't do that. And
• 50:41
  president said, well, you know, you haven't put everything on the table. We know there's parts of
• 50:43
  your nuclear weapons program that you're not you're not willing to share with us here, but we know
• 50:49
  about it. And can we can we can we figure out a way to deal with that? And Kim Jong Un just
• 50:55
  has nope in the president said, well, we tried gaps too large. Look, this has been great to see you.
• 51:01
  I love our meetings together. We got further along than we were when we last met and we're going
• 51:06
  to keep trying. We're good. This done, but we're not going to get an agreement today. And and so
• 51:10
  thanks for coming. Lovely to see you. Have a safe trip home and and hope to see you soon.
• 51:15
  That's how it ended. It didn't end with acrimony or slamming doors or stomping out. Kim Jong Un
• 51:22
  looked like you can see the shock on his face that he just realized the moment it slipped away.
• 51:26
  He was convinced that the president desperately needed a deal. The president says, but the president
• 51:32
  understood that the contours of what they were offering was unacceptable to the United States,
• 51:37
  to our security, to our friends and allies and partners in the region, much less ourselves.
• 51:41
  And so the president said, no, you know, that's what you want your president to do. And he even,
• 51:47
  we went into the whole room before that ultimate meeting. Just we had one more break. We were both
• 51:51
  sides went back to confer and then come back for final discussion. And he went around the room to
• 51:56
  John Bolton, to Mike Pompeo, to our Asia advisor, Mike, a Matt Pottenger, etc. Me, the chief of staff,
• 52:03
  the others who are there. And he said, okay, I don't think this is a deal that we can take,
• 52:07
  but what do you guys think? So yeah, he actually asked everybody. Everybody said the same thing.
• 52:11
  We agree. They weren't like, they were blowing in the president's ear. We all knew that the North
• 52:16
  Koreans were falling short and they weren't going to budge. And so president came back and said,
• 52:20
  looks, we're not going to get a deal. And that's how it ended. You mentioned John Bolton,
• 52:24
  Mike Pompeo. There were a lot of people in the first Trump administration who many people
• 52:31
  regard as being sort of the adults in the room. You know, the people who would guide him in ways
• 52:36
  that were consistent with traditional understandings of American foreign policy. If I had come to you in
• 52:43
  2019 and I'd say, okay, I've got a crystal ball here. You're currently working in the Trump
• 52:49
  administration. There's going to be a terrible pandemic next year or Trump's going to lose the
• 52:54
  election. There's going to be a Biden presidency, but he's going to try to run for a second term
• 52:59
  in the midst of a concealed cognitive decline and he's going to lose and Trump's going to come back.
• 53:04
  And in that administration, you're going to have Cash Patel running the FBI. You're going to have
• 53:11
  the guy who hosts the weekend morning show on Fox News as the Secretary of Defense and he's
• 53:16
  going to call himself the Secretary of War. You're going to have the Democratic lawmaker conspiracy
• 53:22
  theorist, Halsey Gabbard running the NSA. You know, I could go through the clown car here.
• 53:29
  You're going to have Pam Bondi as Attorney General. You're going to have Christy
• 53:34
  know him at DHS. You are one of the adults in the room. You're a traditional
• 53:43
  and businessman. What would your concerns have been?
• 53:48
  That's, you know, so if you asked me this in 2019, I just want to see that future.
• 54:02
  But I'm telling you it's going to happen. Right. I understand. I would have treated it with
• 54:08
  disbelief that I would have expected maybe, well, obviously, wrongly, that it would look a lot
• 54:15
  like it did in the preceding years. And it wasn't all easy. The president is a very unconventional
• 54:20
  leader. There's no process. It just falls off the table immediately. President makes his own
• 54:27
  decisions. Like when he was tweeting on North Korea, 90% of the time, I saw it after he posted it
• 54:32
  on social media. And I just had to react to it as the chief negotiator. It wasn't like, you know,
• 54:37
  we had some, we had some deliberative process that seemed to show the president to show it.
• 54:40
  No, but all of that scaffolding of which you were opposed was able to guide American policy
• 54:46
  in the midst of this figure who was quite unpredictable and some tweeting and so on. Certainly
• 54:51
  by the end of the Trump presidency in January of 2020, 2021, excuse me, I would have told you
• 55:01
  Josh that it was going to be different than the first term. I would have, I would have predicted
• 55:05
  that it would be very different, not the least being because the president had four years of
• 55:10
  experience. President, president was much more accustomed to the levers of power, much more
• 55:16
  comfortable in his judgments, much less likely to second-guess himself or to listen to the
• 55:24
  contrary advice, even gently applied from senior officials around him. And so, you know, in that
• 55:33
  sense, I would have predicted it would, it would be different. This line up of characters,
• 55:40
  you know, I, I, I, in a lot of people in Washington would be asked in, in, in the run up to the
• 55:47
  president's inauguration in 2020, 2025, you know, who's going to be this? Who's going to be that? And
• 55:52
  you know, there's only a couple that anybody could have guessed in a million years would
• 55:55
  be going to be in those positions. You were just taking off. Rubio would have been a pretty good
• 55:58
  bat for, for Secretary of State. You'll notice I didn't mention him. Yeah. But, but, you know,
• 56:06
  not a lot of the others. I mean, there was a real concerted attempt in the personnel process
• 56:12
  in 2025 to the gatekeepers who were running that process sought to weed out any sort of
• 56:21
  independent thinking. They wanted people who were completely aligned with the president who,
• 56:27
  you know, in 2020, in 2017, when President Trump was assembly his first administration,
• 56:34
  the kind of the, the, the, the, the filter was, have you said anything bad about the president?
• 56:40
  Did you sign one of the letters attacking him? Or, you know, do you have a social media fee that's
• 56:45
  full of never Trump or rhetoric? Have you done anything to oppose the president? It was very
• 56:50
  different in 2025. It was like, do you have a, do you have a confirmed record of supporting the
• 56:56
  president? And then it, even it would extend to things like accepting the, accepting the, the fact
• 57:03
  that the 20, 20 election was stolen. Where did you come down on that? Did you affirm that the president
• 57:10
  was, was, it properly agreed that his election was stolen in 2020? And he was, he was, he was
• 57:17
  illegitimately deprived of the presidency. So by 2025, they were looking for a positive
• 57:23
  affirmation endorsement of the president. And then we're aware of the loyalty tests. I guess my
• 57:28
  interest is that in, as a negotiator, part of your expertise and your role is to think through
• 57:33
  contingencies and to, to identify possible future risks and avenues. Well, if we accept this,
• 57:39
  still then what happens and to kind of game things out, right?
• 57:42
  To identify potential vulnerabilities or liabilities, what are the vulnerabilities and
• 57:49
  liabilities that you would have known in advance could emerge from having president Trump
• 57:56
  in power surrounded by people who were there because of loyalty tests instead of competence.
• 58:05
  Obviously a very different circumstance than, than when I decided to go into the government
• 58:10
  2018, but you know, I'm motivated by equal portions of patriotic willingness to serve my country.
• 58:20
  And I thought it was very important to serve my country in 2018, especially on the issue of North
• 58:24
  Korea, considering how close we came to a war in 2017. A second part of that is a practicality
• 58:33
  that the American people vote for the presidents. I get to choose whether I work for the president,
• 58:38
  and I'm a free will, but I'm also a senior experienced Republican foreign policy hand.
• 58:46
  And I should take very seriously whether I can contribute to that. The third was you need a healthy
• 58:52
  measure of optimism. But the really, I'm not giving you a hard time. No, I know that. But you
• 58:58
  can do it is my point is that you have to approach it with a practicality. You know, I don't get,
• 59:03
  I don't get to pick who's the, who's the attorney general or the, or the secretary of defense or
• 59:08
  secretary of war. I don't get to pick that. I don't get to vote. I get cast one vote at 77 million
• 59:14
  people elected Donald Trump. And so would you vote for him this time? We never disclose who
• 59:21
  would you vote for him again if there was an election held tomorrow? No, there be unconstitutional.
• 59:26
  Let me put it this way. All right. Josh, I can tell you, but let me finish. Yeah.
• 59:32
  You can work in that world. You can bring a discipline, patriotism, a practicality.
• 59:39
  You know, I, of course, you can't, the current people aren't. And so I'm just interested. Some people are,
• 59:45
  some people are. Yeah. I could name people who weren't doing that in 2018 as well. Even some of
• 59:51
  the people you mentioned who are in that government in 2018 had their own agendas or were, were,
• 59:56
  were, were, were advancing themselves, not the country. Right. Do you, let me put it this way.
• 1:00:02
  Then do you have any personal anxieties about the trajectory of the United States between now
• 1:00:10
  and the inauguration of the next president? Sure term. Sure. It's a very difficult time in America.
• 1:00:18
  It's very polarized polity. It's, you know, political violence in America. I mean, these are,
• 1:00:24
  these are very uncomfortable times for many Americans. It's a period of dramatic policy shifts and
• 1:00:31
  transformation and an unconventional president to say the least. So yeah, but I also have a,
• 1:00:39
  I, maybe it's this optimism. I have a long term confidence that everything is going to be okay.
• 1:00:43
  I'm not, I'm not here to tell people bedtime stories that, you know, sleep well tonight because
• 1:00:47
  this is all going to work out in the end. But I'm saying there's a chance and there's a chance
• 1:00:51
  because the people who constructed this government from its very beginning, 250 years ago,
• 1:00:57
  anticipated moments just like this. Our institutions are designed to be durable as they were in
• 1:01:03
  January long. So the institutions continue to function in Congress. I mean, you know,
• 1:01:08
  the founders had an expectation that the legislative branch would be a proactive check on the
• 1:01:13
  executive branch. They love it as not functioning. They positioned it to be a proactive check.
• 1:01:18
  But you know, I was, I was speaking at a program a few months ago. And there was a journalist
• 1:01:26
  friend of mine, very smart guy, but he was talking about how the institutions would have failed,
• 1:01:29
  but for vice president Pence refusing to dismiss the election or but for, you know, the Congress
• 1:01:37
  having to affirm the election or so on. And I just, I caught him right there. He's not American.
• 1:01:42
  I said, look, you're misunderstanding America. Our founding fathers didn't design our institutions
• 1:01:47
  to work because good people were in them. They actually, exactly the opposite. They designed
• 1:01:52
  our institutions to work on the assumption that all human beings are going to be weak, greedy,
• 1:01:56
  power hungry, corrupt. And the institutions are forced to compete in friction. And then we have a
• 1:02:03
  regular process, almost, you know, oftentimes feels like too many elections to constantly
• 1:02:08
  reaffirm that with the public. We're going to have another one in this year. And you know,
• 1:02:12
  we may be having a very different conversation about America after November of 2026. Then we're
• 1:02:17
  having today, Josh, you could have Democrats controlling the House in the Senate. The American
• 1:02:21
  people still get to say in this. And if they like it, they'll affirm it. If they don't,
• 1:02:26
  they'll cast a decide in it will happen. An individual leader can't stand in the way of that.
• 1:02:32
  I think evidence suggests that in 2020. I know you're going to go, but just thinking about
• 1:02:38
  foreign policy, the future foreign policy. Some countries have lines in the sand. As you said,
• 1:02:45
  it's been a bit difficult to know what Iran's line in the sand has been. Like, are they, you know,
• 1:02:50
  was the Obama nuclear deal? For example, just him being led up the garden path by the Iranians
• 1:02:56
  because they were dedicated to having a nuclear. Was it worth giving a shot in order to try to buy
• 1:03:00
  time until the regime collapses under the weight of its own contradictions? Who knows? But
• 1:03:06
  in light of the fact that the United States has taken military action against Iraq and Afghanistan
• 1:03:11
  and Libya and Iran and Venezuela. And now he's talking about Cuba. Has US foreign policy made
• 1:03:20
  the only logical thing to do to be to get a nuke? Because you're not talking about North Korea.
• 1:03:28
  Yeah. I mean, the president, you know, this is a question is particularly acute in the case of
• 1:03:32
  Iran, obviously, because the others others were not in pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Iran
• 1:03:36
  demands really was. The president can look at the, I mean, every rogue state can look at the
• 1:03:41
  others and go, well, there's a reason why North Korea isn't on that. Yes. President,
• 1:03:44
  president's in a dilemma here. So the president's lead out, you know, three primary objectives on
• 1:03:51
  this war. One is to permanently remove the ability north of Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.
• 1:03:57
  The second is to end their development of the anti-Belistic missile program. And the third is to
• 1:04:03
  curtail their regional destabilization. You know, president, president is making noises like he
• 1:04:10
  wants to find a way out of this war now. I think you can see that in the press today. He doesn't
• 1:04:14
  think he's losing incidentally. He doesn't think he's losing the war, but he wants to wrap it up.
• 1:04:19
  His challenge is that if he wraps it up without having achieved any of those three objectives,
• 1:04:25
  particularly on the nuclear weapons, then we're going to be in no better position after this war.
• 1:04:29
  Well, we will be in a better position and that there's been a huge degradation of Iranian
• 1:04:33
  capabilities, but still they have to sign up. It happens to Iran doesn't it? I mean, if you
• 1:04:37
  how to stand up with the enriched Iranian then yeah, well, or or or even a survival of a revolutionary
• 1:04:43
  regime 2.0, you know, you know, it's hard to argue that the lesson that they're, you know,
• 1:04:50
  the lesson that you would want them to learn from this is that pursuit of a nuclear weapon made
• 1:04:54
  them more vulnerable to this kind of attack. But I think it's reasonable to believe that the lesson
• 1:05:00
  that they are going to draw from this is we should have had the nuclear weapon. And so now we're
• 1:05:05
  really in a dilemma here that if having having, you know, I think it was Machiavellia said, if you
• 1:05:11
  try to kill the king, be sure you do not miss. That's kind of where we are that you can't half
• 1:05:17
  topple this regime. It's a, you know, it's kind of a fight to the end now. And that's the dilemma
• 1:05:23
  of the president finds it because I'm not sure the president is there. I think he, I think he's
• 1:05:27
  got very oftentimes very flexible view of what, what is winning outcome and he'll sell it as such.
• 1:05:32
  But the Israelis have a very different view of that. The Israelis, it was really, you know,
• 1:05:37
  believed that Iran poses an existential threat to Israel because of their
• 1:05:41
  combination of nuclear weapon and their hatred for Israel and their, their threat to annihilate
• 1:05:46
  Israel. But yeah, it is a, it is a lesson in geopolitics and incidentally that if you tell someone
• 1:05:53
  often enough that you're going to annihilate their country, they may do something about it and
• 1:05:57
  Israel's doing something about it too. I don't know that the president can can get out of this
• 1:06:04
  conflict without addressing the three reasons why we got into this conflict. Otherwise,
• 1:06:10
  it does run the risk of being in even more dangerous situation in the long run.
• 1:06:14
  Stephen Fabulous to talk to you. Thanks for your time.
• 1:06:16
  Good to see you.