Deterring an Axis of Aggressors: A Conversation with H.R. McMaster

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China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are forming a new axis of aggressors to oppose the United States and its interests. With chaos unfolding around the globe, how should the US and its allies restore deterrence, maintain global leadership, and protect the prosperity of its people?

Join Chair of the Hudson Institute Japan Chair Advisory Board and former National Security Advisor LTG (Ret.) H.R. McMaster and Media Fellow Jeremy Hunt for a discussion on this topic.

Event Transcript

This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.

Jeremy Hunt:

Good morning and welcome to Hudson Institute here in Washington DC. I’m Jeremy Hunt, a media fellow here at the Institute, and we’re a research organization dedicated to promoting American leadership for a secure, free, and prosperous future. And today we’ll be discussing a new axis of aggressors, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea who are joining together in opposition to the United States and our interests. And I’m so honored to have with us today, Lieutenant General retired H.R. McMaster, who’s also former National Security Advisor here with us, and he’s also the Japan chair here at the Hudson Institute. General McMaster, it’s such an honor. Thanks for being with us.

H.R. McMaster:

Hey, Jeremy. Hey, great to be with you. Actually now, I was Japan chair, I’m advisor to the Japan chair now, and Ken Weinstein has taken over and obviously is doing a fantastic job.

Jeremy Hunt:

Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much. And I wanted to start by talking about, just kind of tracing, if you could, just how this alliance began between Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. How did we get here into this place and how did it all come together?

H.R. McMaster:

Well, Jeremy, it began with a very close relationship between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Two revanchist powers on the Eurasian landmass who are determined to tear down the existing international order, the existing rules of international discourse from security to economic to financial, to how do we define human rights and replace that order with a new order that’s sympathetic to their authoritarian model of governance and China’s statist mercantilist economic model. And remember before the Beijing Olympics in 2022, they declared their partnership with NO LIMITS.

Since then, they’ve met several times as well, and Xi Jinping has noted that the world is in chaos, but also thinks that that’s a pretty good thing because it’s an opportunity for China and Russia to tear down that system. They have declared essentially what they’re calling a new era of international relations. And the message has been, “Hey, you’re over United States. You’re over in the free world. It’s our time now, get used to it.” It’s a profoundly arrogant message that I think belies real weaknesses with those two states. But they’ve brought in, I think largely based on a perception of weakness in the United States and in the West, other partners, Iran with whom China has, and Russia both entered into strategic partnerships.

And North Korea, the only hereditary communist dictatorship in the world, and you have Kim Jong Un, who doesn’t want to be left out and has his own revanchist agenda, aggressive agenda vis-a-vis in particular South Korea, but also Japan, and the United States, and our forces on the peninsula. So they’re providing real material support to each other. They provide psychological, informational, and diplomatic support to each other. And what has allowed, I think this axis of aggressors to coalesce is this perception of weakness and the belief that now is the time, now is the time to accelerate toward the achievement of their objectives in their regions and for China, it’s really a global objective they’re pursuing with a number of big initiatives. We know with the Belt Road, predatory loaning, trying to create servile relationships through these predatory loans and economic relationships. But there’s also the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and maybe of them all, the Global Civilization Initiative. And these are all aimed explicitly at tearing down the existing order and allowing China really to gain a dominant role internationally.

Jeremy Hunt:

Wow. Wow. And so you would say, in terms of what ties them together, is it pretty much only just opposition through the free world and to the United States? Is there anything else that bind these countries together outside of that?

H.R. McMaster:

Yeah, there are real benefits. I mean, China’s energy is poor and is the world’s hub, which was a tragedy that happened, of manufacturing. And so China is energy thirsty and Russia can quench that thirst. And you see increasing exports of oil and gas obviously to China, but also Russia needs China to sustain its war-making machine to sustain its ability to continue the onslaught against Ukraine. They’re providing that support in a number of ways with their Wolf Warrior diplomats who provide cover for Russian atrocities. But really the material support has been vast in terms of equipment and hardware necessary for Russia to continue to manufacture weapons. And so these are often trans-shipped through central Asian countries, for example. But there’s no doubt that Chinese companies, Chinese banks are doing everything that they can to circumvent the sanctions against Russia.

The other favors that are exchanged between Iran and Russia include Iran providing drones and missiles. So Russia can continue its onslaught against the Ukrainian people. And in return, Russia is providing a great deal of technical expertise to Iran on their missile programs, on their conventional weapons capabilities, aviation, for example. And I believe on their nuclear program. Kim Jong Un, what he wants is to break out of the isolation. And Russia has helped him do that with providing the energy needs for North Korea, that’s let up a lot of pressure on North Korea. And what North Korea has done for Russia is provided millions of artillery rounds and other arms to Russia in exchange for even more technical assistance again to Kim Jong Un. Putin and Kim Jong Un met recently, remember him driving around Pyongyang. So, they’re helping them break out of the diplomatic isolation as well.

And what all of them want to do is push the United States out of critical regions as the first step of them achieving dominance in those regions. So, for example, I think if Donald Trump is elected president, what you’re going to see right away is Kim Jong Un try to rekindle their bromance. And then what he’s going to do right after that is he’s going to say, “Hey, I’ve got a deal for you. I’m going to satisfy your impulse toward retrenchment. And in exchange for US forces leaving the peninsula and just letting me have only just a few nukes, I will stop my long-range ballistic missile program and I’ll limit my nuclear program.” He’s going to hope to get something like an Iran Nuclear Deal, a terrible deal for the United States is what that would be. Now, he won’t get that from a Trump administration, but he’s posturing himself for that. And of course, Putin is helping him in that connection.

What Iran wants to do is to extend its hegemonic influence across the Middle East and to do that, they need to push the United States out of the Middle East, isolate Israel, and then establish really the ability to execute the Ring of Fire Strategy and destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. I mean, that’s what they really want to do.

And so what you hear over and over again is this mantra of getting the US out of these regions. So China can establish an exclusionary area of primacy across the Indo-Pacific. North Korea can get the US off the peninsula as the first step in unifying the Korean Peninsula under the so-called red banner. What Iran wants to do is again, to extend it hegemonic influence, and Russia wants to reestablish itself as a great power and reestablish the Russian Empire. I mean, think of Vladimir Putin as Catherine the Great without the hoop skirt. And so they’re all cooperating with these agendas.

And so what concerns me more than anything Jeremy, is there’s some people who say what we have to do is we have to play five-year-old soccer. And because the threat to Taiwan, the South China Sea is what’s most important, we all need to run over to the Taiwan Strait and to the South China Sea. And when we do that, we’re going to get goals scored on us man in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world because the competition with this Axis of Aggressors is a global competition.

And so we and our allies have to be strong because what’s going to deter them, hard power is going to deter them. Hard power is going to deter them. Not threats of sanctions, not declassifying intel. We saw all this in the run-up to the re-invasion of Ukraine in 2022, not allaying their security concerns as the Biden administration tried to do. “Hey, these are our red lines, everything else I guess is fair game,” Putin thought. We pulled our ships out of the Black Sea. We suspended lethal aid to Ukraine. We listed all the things we weren’t going to do to support Ukraine. Then we evacuated our advisors and evacuated and scuttled our embassy. Okay, now that combined with the Afghanistan disastrous surrender to a terrorist organization withdrawal, you can see why there’s this perception of weakness. You can see why there’s this impetus for them to coalesce this Axis of Aggressors because they think we’re done. If deterrence is capability times will, they think our will is zero.

Jeremy Hunt:

Yeah. Well, on that note, it does seem to be. . . I’ll say policymakers on both parties seem to moving towards this isolationist attitude of withdrawal and pulling America out of everything, American leadership, just surrendering American leadership abroad. How do we make that case that American leadership actually ensures, and we talk about here at Hudson, a secure, free, and prosperous future?

H.R. McMaster:

Yeah, I would say Jeremy, Hudson is on top of this, so are other think tanks and scholars. I think it’s really important to make two fundamental observations. The problems that develop in these other parts of the world, I would say especially in the Middle East, which is daunting because it’s always a violent place, but problems that develop there don’t stay there. And we’ve learned this over and over again with obviously 9/11 for example, that it’s a really bad idea if jihadist terrorist organizations who want to kill our children have a safe haven and support base. Of course, in the withdrawal and surrender in Afghanistan, we now have scores of Al-Qaeda locations cropping up. It’s kind of like an R&R and a training site for Al-Qaeda.

So problems that exist in other parts of the world don’t stay there. The second key thing is that those problems can only be dealt with at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores. Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to solve the world’s problems. We’re not going to conciliate the Middle East’s Furies, but when we disengage, we embolden our enemies. Look at what happened under the Biden administration. They said, “Hey, we want to get out of the Middle East. They supplicated to the Iranians in an effort to resurrect the flawed Iran Nuclear Deal. They relaxed sanctions, which resulted in the transfer of about 80 to 100 billion dollars into Iran’s coffers. They undesignated the Houthis as a terrorist organization. How did that work out? So I think disengagement is really, and the professed desire to disengage. We didn’t really disengage the Middle East, but we said, “Oh, we’re leaving. Hey, we’re leaving.” And of course, that just encourages Iran and all of its proxy forces to give us a push out the door.

Jeremy Hunt:

Right, right. I want to go zoom in a little bit on North Korea for a second because I know that a lot of. . . We hear a lot of different scholars talk about this Access of Evil, Axis of Aggressors, and we hear Russia, China, and Iran, we don’t hear as much about North Korea as being a part of that. Why do you consider North Korea in your calculus, in this Axis of Aggressors, in particular?

H.R. McMaster:

Well, North Korea is the only hereditary communist dictatorship in the world. It’s an extremely dangerous country because it has been an aggressor since June of 1950 when it invaded South Korea. But people forget that North Korea has launched a sustained campaign, a subversion against South Korea since then. And I think it’s 1967, 1968, they waged essentially guerrilla war against South Korea, assassinated South Korean leaders. During those years, actually, we lost more US soldiers in South Korea than we lost during the last couple of years in the Afghanistan war, in South Korea, in the late 60s. And we’ve seen the shoot-down of a South Korean aircraft. We’ve had the sinking of South Korean vessels, the firing of artillery across the board. I mean, it’s a dangerous place.

But also what’s really important to recognize about North Korea is that they’ve never met a weapon that they didn’t try to sell to somebody, including their nuclear program to Syria until Israel bombed that site in 2007, I believe. So I think that it’s really important, recognize that North Korea having the most destructive weapons on Earth is a danger not only because of the direct threat to South Korea and Japan and maybe the United States if they have long enough missiles, but also because of proliferation of those weapons, maybe even the sale of weapons you could imagine to a jihadist terrorist organization.

Jeremy Hunt:

Absolutely. One of the things, and I’ve heard you talk about this a little bit before, that one of the challenges to building strong coalitions, especially with some of our strategic partner nations, is our ability to demonstrate to them that the United States will see our commitments through to the end. We know that in today’s polarized political climate, new presidential administration comes in and changes. There’s a whole about facing that has been done before, and then they kind get this back and forth, and it can be challenging to allow our strategic partners to invest in long-term partnerships with us. How do we overcome that challenge, especially in our polarized political climate?

H.R. McMaster:

Well, there are a couple of ways, I mean, to do that. And I think first of all, that president has such an important role in communicating to the American people, what is at stake in these regions of the world? First of all. And then secondly, what is a strategy that can help achieve a favorable outcome for the United States at an acceptable cost and risk? And of course, again, assuring the American people, we’re not going around trying to solve all the world’s problems. What we’re trying to do is engage. Engage with these competitions, engage in these conflicts in a way that prevents them from getting worse, that gets on a path to resolution, but also prioritizes US security and at times economic interests associated with these competitions and these conflicts. And also just to communicate in general, that really sustained US commitment abroad, including military commitments of capable joint military forces that alongside allies and partners can operate at a sufficient scale and for ample duration to, if necessary, fight and win because it’s that kind of capability and capacity that prevents wars.

I think an American president is in a great position to explain to the American people, “Hey, it’s a lot cheaper to prevent a war than to have to fight one.” And then of course, to make sure we have the resources and capabilities available. I mean, our defense budget that the Biden administration has submitted is anemic, it’s a real reduction, and we’re facing really major challenges in the world, dangers in the world with a military that has a bow wave of deferred modernization and has inadequate capacity and has a recruiting issue in large measure I think because of some of the misguided policies and ideological approaches of the Biden administration, which have not infected the military in my view, but many people think they’ve infected the military. I think that’s one of the reasons along with the disaster in Afghanistan why we have recruiting issues.

So the American president has a huge role. I think bringing Congress in to the process early in the framing of these challenges, soliciting recommendations from across the aisle before a policy’s done, that is always helpful, because you know what you’re going to find? You’re going to find, for example, as I found, that in the Democratic Party, when you convene with their leaders, they have a wide range of views. And so what happens is once your policy is rolled out, you can say to them, thank you for your advice, because many of their views are reflected in the president’s policies. And then for the others maybe who you didn’t agree with or the president didn’t agree with, they’ve at least been consulted. And so I think that kind of collaboration with Congress early in the policymaking process is another way.

Another way is in burden sharing. This is where President Trump has had a very strong argument. Americans don’t want people free riding on their largesse. And so if you get allies to demonstrate they’re doing more, like Japan, Japan has doubled its defense budget. Japan has reinterpreted its constitution so we can have a real mutual defense treaty. Japan is developing counter-strike capabilities that I think are very important to deterring conflict in Northeast Asia. So I mean, once you can save the American people, look, they’re stepping up. South Korea, for example, has a very robust defense capability and is increasing their defense spending both of those countries defray the cost of US forces such that if you were to move those US forces to the United States, you would pay three or four times more as taxpayers to sustain those forces and their facilities. Paying all of this out for the American people is really important in terms of everyone understanding the real benefits to Americans of US forces positioned abroad alongside allies and partners.

Jeremy Hunt:

Wow. Yeah, that’s good. And many of us, I think even I’ve heard you say this too, have talked a lot about peace through strength, this kind of Reagan era motto about the importance of deterrence and then peace through strength is a north star in terms of path forward. But we also recognize that the world is very different now than it was 40 years ago. It’s much more complex and an interconnected global landscape that we’re involved in now. In what ways, what does peace through strength look like now in comparison to maybe how it looked like before when you were graduating West Point back in the ‘80s?

H.R. McMaster:

Yeah. Well, I think peace through strength, it has to be demonstrated in more domains. Since the Reagan era, cyberspace has emerged as a domain of warfare, so has space, space has contested. So as you’re mentioning, I think Jeremy, the principle holds, but you need a much broader range of capabilities, and you have to be able to integrate capabilities across all those domains. When I was still serving in the Army, one of my missions was to help design the future of force. And one of the terms we came up with, which some of these terms can be kind of trite, but it was multi-domain warfare. Well, warfare has always been multi-domain, but what we were emphasizing is the need to be able to protect power across multiple domains, across the cyber domain to affect the land domain and the air domain and the space domain and vice versa. All of these domains and efforts within them and capabilities with them have to be integrated with a very high degree of sophistication.

And that’s where effective military operations come from, is to understand that combat, war, it’s rock, paper, scissors. If you only have the rock, the paper’s going to do you in, so you better have the scissors ready to go. And so there are a lot of times when people think, “Oh man, now the drone, it’s the drone that’s going to win a future war.” Or it’s the, you fill in the blank, the newest silver bullet. New forms of warfare typically don’t replace older forms of warfare. They’re grafted on top of them. I think you see that in Ukraine, for example. So what we need to do is invest in the broad range of capabilities that can demonstrate to our potential enemies that they cannot accomplish their objectives through force at an acceptable cost. You can also use, obviously, other elements of national power, financial, economic, and so forth. But unless you have that hard power, I mean, that’s what matters. I mean, ultimately you have to hit somebody over the head Jeremy, or have the ability to do it.

Jeremy Hunt:

Right, right. And we hear a lot about, and I know that you’ve talked a lot about the importance of staying engaged on all different fronts. We can’t just run to the Pacific and forget the Middle East and leave some parts of the world, disengaged parts of the world, we can’t do that. But we also live in an era where we have limited resources. And so obviously in an ideal world, we’re engaged everywhere, but how do you stack up priorities as time goes on, and how should the next president address all the different. . . How does the next president address these challenges while still being able to use our forces and make sure we have our forces in a disposition that makes sense.

H.R. McMaster:

Right. Well, I mean, we’ve been talking a lot about military competition, but really the competitions that are playing out in other regions of the world are largely economic and diplomatic and financial. And I think what we can do is we can provide an alternative to China’s predatory economic interactions and loans and so forth. And we could do that, I think by emphasizing the benefit of our free market approach to development, for example. And this could be an area where it’d be a win for us and other international companies because they could help other countries develop the infrastructure that they need for economic growth and development and to do so in a way that doesn’t compromise their sovereignty. I mean, I often say to friends in Southeast Asia, and Latin America, and Africa, “Hey, the choice you’re facing is not a choice between Washington and Beijing. It’s really a choice between sovereignty and servitude.”

And I think that should be our message in these competitions. And I think there are many other ways that we can compete much more effectively, in the informational domain. I think we have been really maladapted to this, Jeremy. It frustrates the heck out of me. I think if we could pull the curtain back on the behavior of the axis of aggressors, for example, and counter their disinformation and propaganda about us and clarify our intentions in the world, and ultimately trace the grievances of a lot of these populations back to those who are creating those grievances. Look at how Venezuela, the Chavistas, and now Maduro have destroyed that country. They’ve destroyed that country with the help of the Cubans, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Iranians. All of them have had a role there, expose that and then you can help communicate more effectively to the Colombian people, do you want to throw your lot in with this far left nut job, Petro, or do you look at Venezuela? Do you want to be Venezuela? No, you don’t want to be Venezuelan.

And look at the successful examples of sustained US partnership with Colombia, with other countries in Latin America, for example. So I think that we can compete at a low cost, and much of these competitions are playing out in the private sector. And I think one of the first things we could do though also is stop underwriting our own demise with investments into China, smart money investments, but also the dumb money flows that are in some ways, the scaffolding that holds up their statist mercantilist economic model and allows them to weaponize it against us. And there’s a lot we can do Jeremy to compete. It’s not military competition, it’s not lots of US soldiers positioned abroad, it’s really recognizing the nature of those competitions and integrating the elements of US and allied economic power, financial power, informational power, which is quite considerable, but kind of latent. We haven’t mobilized it effectively.

Jeremy Hunt:

Right. Wow. Well, I know we’re just out of time here, but first off, it’s just an honor to have you join with us and not every day you get to interview one of your heroes. So this is very cool for me, just personally-

H.R. McMaster:

Oh hey, Jeremy, you’re one of my heroes, man.

Jeremy Hunt:

And I just-

H.R. McMaster:

Thanks for your service, man. I’ve got one more thing though, go Army beat Navy.

Jeremy Hunt:

How about that? Beat Navy, any day. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much.

H.R. McMaster:

Well, we love the, Navy. No, we actually love Navy except that one day every year. That one day.

Jeremy Hunt:

That’s right. That’s right. One day where, we have one mission that is to beat the Navy. Well, thank you and thank you for all of you watching at home. You can continue to stay engaged with us. Go to Hudson.org, you can see all the events that we have coming up, and we’d love to see you next time. So thank you and continue to join us. Thank you.