Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling
Appearances
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Hey, Tim, how are you? It's a pleasure to be on with you today. Let's talk some things.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Well, I mean, first of all, before the Russian invasion occurred, I saw the same kind of memes. It was portraying Russian soldiers as these big, strong guys that were bare-chested and running through the cold and diving into lakes and all that other stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah. And it was just ridiculous because that's not how modern militaries train or act. They're a professional force. And it was interesting to me that almost in every case— the people who were posting those memes or talking that way, like you mentioned Ted Cruz a minute ago, have never served. So they don't know what the military is like.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Even Tommy Tuberville, when he was making the hold on all the generals, saying he really knew what a military is like because his dad was a sergeant in World War II. And you just go, okay, yeah, whatever you say there, Tommy, coach. But the thing is, it takes a lot to train a modern military on complex equipment in very difficult operations. The Ukrainians have it right.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
You know, they've got women on the battlefield. They're looking to train, and they're not portraying themselves as, you know, as woke or... They're a diverse organization, and they're doing pretty good against the fourth largest army in the world, I think the Russians are. So, yeah, it just doesn't hold up. There's no research behind any of those statements. It's just...
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
feel for what they think is supposed to be. It's just ridiculous.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Well, first of all, I don't know who the 120 guys are that are signing up. I'd like to see the list. I haven't seen that list.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
No, I don't want to comment on it, but I would almost venture to say that most of them haven't served lately and haven't been in some of the tough fights over the last couple of years. The second thing I'd say in terms of DEI, I happen to teach an MBA course in my spare time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And if you look at every single research study that's conducted on diversity, equity, and inclusion, it tells you that it does nothing but make organizations better because it generates good ideas and new ideas. So, I mean, I don't want groupthink in any military organization I'm with. You know, I want people contributing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And the wokeness, you know, I keep going back to that because I find it interesting. No one has defined it for me yet. And if woke means caring for your soldiers, if woke means knowing the values, as I talked about in that article the other day, about integrity and respect and trust in one another and giving everybody the potential to serve when they want to serve, then color me woke.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
I'm good with that. What do you think just generally about...
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah, well, what I do first and what I did before the election or right after the election and right after Mr. Trump was the president-elect was, I posted something that said, what will be interesting is to see who he appoints to the key national security positions of DOD, state, CIA, Homeland Security, and Director of National Intelligence.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Because those five cabinet posts, those five posts are the ones that keep us out of danger. And each one of them has to be pretty savvy in what they do. And especially the defense secretary, because I'd love to be in on the questioning of any nominee to say, what do you think the defense department does? Just outline the list of what the defense department, the secretary of defense does.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Because as a young brigadier general, it was my one and only time on the joint staff, and I had to see the defense secretary every Friday along with one of the combatant commanders to go through contingency plans, what we call war plans. And you got to have a little bit more of a strategic view
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
in terms of just the capability of what our contingencies are, but you also have to do acquisition, personnel management, logistics around the world. I mean, Tim, right now, today, because I checked this morning, we've got 180,000 soldiers deployed outside the United States. There are over a hundred ships sailing at sea, and the US Air Force has conducted 5,000 sorties of different aircraft today.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
You've got to manage all that. And that's just a daily thing. You're talking about an $800 billion budget. I mean, I consider myself a pretty smart guy and pretty savvy in terms of military operations. I would not want to be the Secretary of Defense. It would be too hard for most mere mortals. You know, you're doing acquisition defense spending.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
I mean, I could name the tasks that fall under the secretary of defense and it would boggle most Americans minds. And to say, because a guy spent a couple of years in the military and then became a talk shows that he has. I mean, I don't know what it takes. I don't know what other kind of nominee the president could make. The president elect could make. but it better be a good one.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Cause like I said earlier, we're facing some of the biggest challenges I've ever seen in the international environment.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
There's a thing called the executive presence problem. And put the character piece aside, you know, what you do and who you are. Don't even talk about that. But just from the standpoint of presence, someone with executive presence has gravitas. They know what they're doing. They have intellectual capability and emotional intelligence. They have a calmness about them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
They listen more than they speak. And they hear with empathy what's going on in the organization. That's kind of what I want in a guy with a whole lot of experience to be a different cabinet secretary for a nation that is facing a lot of global security threats.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
You know, I tell you, Tim, it's interesting. I was at West Point last week. The seniors of the class picked their branches, which means infantry, armor, artillery. And I had the young woman who's the president of the class asked me to give a presentation to a smaller group of people that were part of her class. command staff.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah, it's interesting, again, going back to personal experiences, because I've shared intelligence and been part of intelligence sharing organizations within the military and the government. And again, the first thing you have to generate is an element of trust.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
that things are going to be kept secret, that when an intelligence service tells you something that's important and that they feel is critically related to something that might happen or that could cause problems, they're going to know you're going to keep it to yourself and you're not going to give them up, first of all. But secondly, they need to know you understand it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And truthfully, I've talked to a bunch of former comrades who used to be senior ranking people in other governments. They're scared about the transfer of intelligence to our country in the future too, because they don't, they've seen what's happened in the past and they don't know what's going to happen in the future.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
So to counter that, many of them are telling me there's going to be changes in our intelligence system in terms of what we're going to share. And when that happens, the world becomes more dangerous.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
We beat Army this weekend, so I can't talk about that. Okay. Yeah. I know. We had a good Nuggets win last night. You know, I think there is the potential for a real fast learning curve to take place because there could be a lot of disasters in our future. We've seen that in the past. I mean, our country's been through tough times before, not just recently, but in our history.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And every time there's a correction to get back to some norms, the folks like you were naming a few of them, I don't know who you should name to be the cabinet secretaries.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And the first question they asked me is, what kind of threats are we going to face as new lieutenants going out into the field? So first of all, their head's on the right place. And secondly, I had to tell them is I had no frigging clue. You know, one of the things, you know, as a military guy is You know, when I entered West Point in 1971, the Vietnam War was going on.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
But I know what the qualifications are and how you've got to have that, first of all, character, then that executive presence, and then at least a modicum of intelligence to understand where you fit in in the state of affairs of a country as powerful as ours. And if it's just going in to turn tables upside down and throw things against the wall, that's not a good approach for government.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
There is certainly some potential for changing things. for making things better, but it doesn't begin with just a complete destruction of our norms and our institutions. That's what concerns me the most.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Now, that's a great question. Maybe that is the positive, because truthfully, Jim, whenever I need a shot in the arm, I go up there. All right. I go out and be with young people because my perception is they are not wrapped up in culture war. First of all, they're just they're just looking to graduate. They're trying to get the hell out of there and go on to their first assignment as lieutenants.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
But secondly, they raise their hand to serve the country. They want to be soldiers, as all soldiers do. So this gets back to your wokeness and your DEI. You go to most units, they're not talking about this kind of stuff. They're talking about, you know, their next training event or their next deployment or how do I take care of the kids?
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
You know, they're looking at serving in uniform and being proud of it. And that's what I really like about the military is it was a family event. Adhering to similar values and doing the things for others that you signed up to do while supporting and defending the Constitution.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And that's why I wrote that other article about values in terms of getting back to what do we believe as a nation as opposed to all this divisiveness.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
By the time I left there, Europe was red hot. During my time, we never fought a war in Europe except the Cold War. But during my time in Europe, we went to Panama, Iraq in 1990, and then had a terrorist hit the buildings. So, you know, it changes and there's all kinds of black swans out there. That's my preview. Now what I'll tell you is what I'm concerned about.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah, when you're part of any values-based organization, you're going to use those values to make decisions about things, about who you are and what you do. You're going to portray those seven values that you just named if you're a soldier, and you're going to make your decisions based on your loyalty, your duty, and your respect for others, as an example.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
You're going to serve because of selflessness. You're going to serve with honor and integrity. And when it comes down to it, you're going to stand up and use personal courage to say the right things or do the right things, whether it's in peacetime or combat. And it struck me that those seven values kind of drove my decision making.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Whenever I had a thought where, what should I do in this situation? I would go back to those values and say, what do our values say we should do? And it got me thinking about our national values. You can go back through our documents and our speeches and find things that our founding documents and speeches by great Americans said when they reflected on who we were or who we are.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And if you're a values-based organization, and I truly believe that the United States is values-based, it was created out of a sense of values and ideas. You know, one of the things I'd like to talk about is, you know, soldiers or anybody in government, by the way, who raises their hand to protect and defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
It's the only oath in the world that's given to a piece of paper. And that piece of paper reflects ideas and values and who we want to be and who we aspire to be. Other countries go motherland or fatherland or El Presidente. We do ideas and values. So that's kind of what I wanted to portray in that paper.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
is still an expanded war in the Middle East, even though it seems like Hamas is defeated or Hamas is destroyed, Hezbollah is partly defeated, Syria is... appears to get better right now, but you still have the Kurds wanting for their autonomous region that includes the areas within Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. So that's still a very dangerous area.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Well, that's where we get back to the good news story that you were asking about before. Because, yeah, I am concerned about that, that too many people are falling into that trap. But I believe that because we are a nation of values and ideas, that those drive policies and policies drive strategies, or at least they should.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And if you don't have the ideas and the values of our great nation, our policies and our strategies are going to be a mishmash of a bunch of different things. And that's truthfully what's trying to happen.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
When people become windsocks on Capitol Hill, when you see different nominees going in and having said something for a very long time or the last couple of years, and then suddenly when they get in front of the committees and the senators, they say completely the opposite. That tells me they're not basing their answers or who they are on values. I think we're going to get back to that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
I truly believe that. I can't not believe that, Jim, because that's what, you know, I spent 40 years defending and I'm not ready to give it up.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
We're seeing some of them like integrity and personal courage, standing up to people, respect for all others. That's true. I mean, not just people we like, but not just the 48% that voted for us, but the entire country you got to have respect for. Integrity in terms of what you say and what you do. And does the audio match the video? All of those things have application.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And I'm concerned if we lose them, that we could lose our country.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah, I just had that question from the thing I was just on with a bunch of national security professionals, and that's why I'm wearing a tie today. And the same question came up about what will it mean to the alliance if the U.S. pulls out? And first of all, it's more than just a military alliance. I mean, the partnership and the trust and the alliance is just magical.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah, there's a lot of problems with NATO. It's sometimes hard to get decisions when you're in Brussels. But boy, it's stuck around for 80 years doing some really good things in some really tough situations. Could the Europeans survive without the United States? Yeah, they could. but it wouldn't be the same alliance. I think they depend on us as much as we depend on them.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And plus, if we pull out of NATO, which some have suggested, I would think we'd lose the intelligence sharing. We're going to lose the trust and the connection to the continent. We're going to use an economic factor and a diplomatic factor that's part of national power.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
So if you look at the four elements of national power, diplomacy, military, information, and economy, all of those will be decreased for us if we pull out of the alliance. And I don't think it's a very smart move.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Of course, Ukraine, what's going to happen next? I don't know. And it scares the hell out of me because we cannot allow Putin to get away with this invasion of a territory and a sovereignty that he's been doing for the last almost three years now. He has to be stopped.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
I think they're degraded now, but hopefully, you know, for their sake, they would learn some lessons. And that's why I don't think we should, we, the United States or NATO should give them a break. We should not allow them to go to a peace talks because they're just going to pull back, take their chunk of land and then determine how they're going to move forward.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And three, four or five years from now, they're going to invade somebody else that's less well-equipped than Ukraine. All right. So you're a St.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Well, back in the day, SLU and CBC were like major rivals.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
That is huge. I did not know that about you. I wish I had known that earlier. I would have given you a hard time a whole hour earlier.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And I'm afraid that some in our government will tend to placate him, which will only cause more frozen conflicts, which he's created five of the continent of Europe. The partnership between Putin and Kim is just horrible.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Hey, thanks, Tim. Appreciate it. It's been a pleasure. Really appreciate it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And I think Kim's getting the worst of it now because reports this morning saying that, you know, he's sending waves of North Korean soldiers against Ukraine and they're being destroyed. So he may be getting missile parts for his intercontinental ballistic missiles in North Korea, but... It's not going to help them in terms of doing anything for that country.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And then, of course, even though China's economy is in the toilet and going down faster, they're still a major threat because they've got the biggest military in the world and they have great ambitions. Is that all? No.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Domestic terrorism, international terrorism, climate change activities, and anybody that's scoffs at that, I'll tell you the Department of Defense has been looking at climate change for the last 30 years, and they know what the implications of that are. I could go on and on. It's a bad world out there. It's the worst that I've seen in my 40 years as a professional.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah, that's a huge possibility. But what I've learned in the Middle East and the amount of time I've spent there, whenever you think everything's about to go right, suddenly there's another car bomb somewhere and it causes more things to happen.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
So yeah, I would agree with you that Iran's capability, they have been embarrassed and their capability was always poor and they've lost all their proxies. So it could be good. But again, there's always a fight somewhere in the Middle East.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah, boy, that's a great question. And there's been a couple of folks that see it from the stand. If you've never been to Israel, you don't understand it. I was in Israel in 2012 with my counterpart there near the place where the concert occurred, where the Gazan division was. And we were just standing around talking on the outside and suddenly a couple of rockets started coming in.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
This was in 2012. And he said, this is a typical experience. When you have the kind of terrorist threats they do, And when you have the terrorists doing things that Hamas and Hezbollah have done, specifically create the victim's doctrine, as they call it, in 2014, where everything that Israel does, we will call it the worst thing possible and take film of it and get it out on the world stage.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And at the same time, they're building literally hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath Palestinian citizens and wanting those citizens to be killed to put more blame on Israel. Yeah, you can understand both sides of the story. Israel has executed the war, in my view, very well.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
There's been a lot of horrendous casualties and killings, but they had no other choice because they had a major terrorist organization three miles from their citizens. Uh, they had to do so. We would, we would do the same, I think. And Katie bar the door. If someone, you know, as far away as New Jersey started attacking Manhattan Island, we would go in and bomb New Jersey to smithereens.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
So from a military perspective, they probably the X, they executed the war the best way they could. It's the political perspective that why did it get to this point? What caused them to come to the conclusion of no intelligence, lack of interaction with the Palestinian people, doing the kinds of things they were doing on the West Bank and in Gaza to really subjugate those Palestinians?
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
That all contributes, and you've got to account for that as well.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
You know, I think Russia is on the weakest footing they've been on since the start of the war began. I mean, truthfully, you know, you've got Putin as a kleptocratic authoritarian mafia boss who has destroyed his military. I mean, it's about three quarters of his military, it's estimated, has been destroyed. His bond market just went flat yesterday. His economy's in the toilet.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
His GDP is on a war footing, and it's paying nothing but hopefully for regurgitation of more forces that are going to get destroyed on the battlefield. And now he's using... North Koreans as his cannon meat, their equivalent term for cannon fodder. So nothing has changed in terms of the way they've conducted operations other than getting more fierce and more diabolical and more criminal.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
So the potential for a Putin collapse and a Russian collapse, which is dangerous in and of itself, I think is much higher today than it was three years ago.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
The problem is if support for Zelensky and the Ukrainians dry up, then we've got potentially another frozen conflict where Russia has been able to grab 20% of a sovereign territory and get away with it and will potentially rebuild and grab more if they're allowed to do so.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah. I agree. You know, Putin is not the kind of guy you negotiate with for two reasons. First of all, he always wins. And secondly, he never lives up to his promises. He's a liar. So when you put them in a position of the Minsk Accord or the Normandy conference or anything like that, he has lied every single time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And even a week before the invasion, he was telling everybody he wasn't going to invade. So how do you trust somebody like that? And say, oh, yeah, we can move forward if we can just get him to the peace table and give him X amount of Ukrainian territory and call it even. That's not what the Ukrainian people deserve.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
He lies and doesn't negotiate in good faith, much like other autocrats around the world.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah, you know, I was able to go to Russia on four different occasions, and the first time was an exchange. I had the Russian chief of the ground forces, a three-star, visit me first.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
This was in, oh gosh, 2011, I think. This wasn't the first time I was in Russia, but it was the first time we had this exchange. And when I went over to see his forces... Everything I saw was a demonstration. Everything that he was telling me was a training event was just a rote exercise that people had practiced multiple times over and over for show.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
When I talked to the generals, they were almost always drunk. When I talked to the lieutenants and captains. They were obviously just obeying orders of the drunk generals. They had no sergeant's corps. They didn't have a very good doctrine. You could tell where most of their senior leaders were corrupt and stealing things from the government. They treated their soldiers like crap.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
I mean, I was in a training barracks one time where I literally saw one of the young officers beating up a soldier with a baton. I mean, just corporal punishment. So there's no trust between the military and the government, and there's no trust between the soldiers and their military leaders.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
Yeah, I guess I can't comment on that because I'm one of the world generals. You know that. But you build trust and you build the capability to fight by treating people well and by building teams and understanding the complexities of modern war. Russia doesn't do that. You know, it was interesting that I tell the story that the general, Streicher was his name, came to visit me in Germany.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And after I showed him whatever he wanted to see and opened up every closet for him, as he was leaving, he said to me, hey, you know, you've got a good military here. How can I make mine more like yours? It was a really telling moment. And I said, General, you can't because you don't have professional values. You don't have an NCO Corps and all your generals are high bound and crooked.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Putin's Weakness
And until you fix those issues, you can't you can't defeat anybody on the battlefield.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
is the one that normally establishes a peacekeeping force and the U.N. has not been involved in this at all. There is the continued asymmetric possibilities that Russia could do. And, you know, I'm a Cold War kind of guy. I was a young lieutenant when the Cold War was still going on all the way up through the rank of majors.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And I actually, as a tanker, did border patrol between the old Czechoslovakia and West Germany and West Germany and East Germany. And you know for the guys on those front lines, even in a Cold War, that there are activities taking place that have to do with kinetic events, people shooting at each other. This is a hot war. This is not a Cold War.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
This is going to continue on along that 700-mile front. And Russia will take advantage of it because I know that's what Russia does.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Yeah, I don't think we're going to see that. I mean, Trump has already in his first administration has said he wants to get out of NATO. And he's already made comments about getting all of our forces out of Germany and maybe putting them in Poland. But now there's a fight between Poland and the United States. I mean, that's going on.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
So when you take a look at the European continent and who would be supportive of U.S. forces over there, everyone would be Except Mr. Trump, you know, he is doing the shift or the pivot toward Asia, which is, you know, it's a strategy. I'm good with it. But I was there when Obama said he wanted to do a pivot toward Asia and it caused huge disruption on the continent in terms of.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
how people were interacting. I spent a good part of my career in Europe and understand how NATO works, how the US forces in Europe work, and what they do for a relatively small amount of people. They fight above their weight class in terms of pulling people together. But you make that combination with the fact that the Trump administration continues to demonize Zelensky and Ukraine.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And I can't figure out how they're getting away with that with the American people and even with members of Congress, because there were so many people in Congress and the American people that understood that all of these things were transgressions against Ukraine, and they were supporting them from the very beginning. And now almost half of that has turned around.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Well, we'd take about an hour to go through all those things. But he is, I think, as we sometimes say in the army, talking through his ass. You know, he would like all those things to be true, but none of them are. Trump has not put Putin under his thumb.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
He created a huge problem by interfering with the supply chain to Ukraine and basically negating their intelligence feed for even a short period of time. The ball isn't in Putin's court. He knows exactly what he's doing and he will play it the way he wants to play. You know, I read a piece by Anne Applebaum this morning. about the ball being in Putin's court.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And she said, yeah, he can hide the ball, take the ball away and go home, deflate the ball, throw it over the fence. And she basically said all the things that this so-called ball being in Putin's court could create that would go wrong. She's a great writer, by the way, and she knows Russia more than anybody in the United States. So she knows exactly what's going to happen.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And I'm always in agreement with her.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Well, it's interesting because Vance was at the Munich Security Conference. And whenever I used to get with a group of Europeans, they would all tell me how much they hated Russia. In fact, Georgia makes a joke out of toasting. When you toast with beer as opposed to with wine, you're supposed to say something you don't mean.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And I had one Georgian toast with a beer and he said to Putin's health, you know, they hate this guy. Because the majority of them have been under Putin's thumb. And I'll bring up the point too, it just shocked the bejesus out of me yesterday, Tim, when I saw all of the European force chiefs, all of the military chiefs from the European countries coming together with Macron.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Because back in the day, when I was the commander of US Army Europe, we used to have something called the Conference of European Armies, where we would have all the European defense chiefs in Heidelberg, and we would talk about commonalities and things we were going to do and exercises. And by the way, Hegseth has eliminated exercises from the European force.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
So we can't work and play well with others next year. All of those things are detrimental to our security. And I can't see what level of earth these guys are living in right now to think any of this is good.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Yeah, I mean, it would be possible. I think when you're talking about the overall strength of NATO, they are very good and they outweigh Russia and their military force. But that's really not what I'm worried about. It's if they are together as a NATO. they can withstand any kind of Russian aggression.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
But what we're seeing is it gets to one of Putin's strategic objectives when he started this war in 2022. He truly believed that NATO was very divided and the US was very divided. And he didn't think anyone would take action. Well, he was surprised over the last three years. Well, now the question would become, will NATO pull together without a US input? I think they will.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
But you now even have competing governments saying, no, we're the lead. No, we're the lead. I mean, the dynamic between France, Poland and Germany right now is very interesting to see who is building armies, who's going to be in charge. You know, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe has always been an American because they tried to pull all the nations together.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
The question is going to be, there truthfully is, as Rundfeld once said, an old Europe and a new Europe. And the new Europe has experienced the threat of Putin during the Cold War. The old Europe is kind of good in their economic standards and they're feeling good about themselves. The question is, can those 32 countries of Europe fight?
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Thirty one, if you discount the United States, pull together under one real main body. And if Poland gets attacked or let's put it in a different way. I'm sure Michael Weitz is concerned about this because he's got a lot of friends in the Baltics. If Estonia gets attacked or Lithuania gets attacked.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Is Brussels and is Poland, well, Poland will, but will Spain, will Norway, will they come to their aid? That's the big question. Will Article 5 drive these 31 other countries to pull together and defend against Russia that, quite frankly, is a third of the size of the Californian GDP and their military is three quarters of what it used to be or one quarter of what it used to be? So I don't know.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, but we made that mistake when we said, well, Russia's got the equipment.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
The key is, do they have the will to come together and fight? And we found out in Russia is no, they did not.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Sure. I mean, you couldn't do more things to disrupt the norm than what is going on right now. And that's the other thing. You read Crenshaw's statements. There just seems to be an apologist approach and, in fact, a praising approach to all the things that the administration is doing without the recognition that it really is, first of all, driving our economy.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
But for me as a military guy, more importantly, driving our national security. toward the base, toward the bottom. And I just don't understand why. When things are in pretty good shape, you can comment on trying to get the NATO countries to live up to their GDP, which percentage of their GDP spent on defense, which is happening.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Or you can say, hey, we really need to take a look at our economic relationships with different countries unilaterally. But to throw something directly at the entire European Union, It represents a big hand, little map approach to national security. And not every country in Europe is Germany. There are differences of the 49 countries that make up the European footprint.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And it's got to be the latter. based on the attempts at damaging various institutions that contribute to what we are as a democratic nation, all the way from the three elements of government to the institution of the courts, the military, all of the different bureaus. I mean, it's one thing to say, as we've talked ad nauseum, it's one thing to say, hey, let's take a scalpel and eliminate waste.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
It's another thing to just chop half-heartedly in terms of what you know people do and how you're going to destroy institutions.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Well, you know, Tim, I kind of compare this to what happened with USAID. Most people in the United States could not even spell USAID a couple of months ago. They had no clue.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
That's what I mean. But they had no idea what that organization did or does. And I would think, you know, when you say VA to most Americans, what do they think of? Well, they think of, you know, former retired military people going to hospitals and getting medical treatment. But the VA is just a massive organization that does everything from
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
taking care of cemeteries throughout the country, all the veteran cemeteries, the national cemeteries, all the way to suicide helplines for a generation of veterans who have experienced post-traumatic stress. To have somebody like an Elon Musk who has never served go in and just start chopping away at it and eliminating programs without even knowing what they do.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
It's not as dangerous as eliminating the nuclear guys that he eliminated that monitored our nuclear programs, but it is pretty frigging dangerous on an individual level for something that Abraham Lincoln created to say, let's take care of those who fight our wars. It just is mind boggling to me. You can't predict the repercussions of the slices to people who work in the VA facilities.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
But it's everything from doctors and nurses who get paid a whole lot less working at the VA hospitals than they do working at a major healthcare organization because they have a sense of patriotism, all the way up to the
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
the people who run the cemeteries, which there are hundreds of across the country, and even the people that answer the phones on the VA crisis hotlines for people who are thinking about committing suicide, which the military has the largest suicide rate percentage of any organization other than railroad workers in the country.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Well, it's tough because the veterans can comment like I'm commenting right now, but the active duty force can't. They, according to civil military semi-requirements, you don't talk about the administration if it's elected by the people. You work for them. So there's this restraint by the military in that regard to even talk about it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And even guys like me as retired generals, they say, hey, you've got to stay in that zone, too, where you can't really show disrespect to the administration that's been dutifully elected by the majority or, in this case, the plurality of the population.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
But I will tell you, there is unbelievable amounts of talk from what I'm hearing, not just at the senior leader level, but from soldiers I used to work with. And they're scared. They are very concerned. We could go into the Department of Defense and what they're doing to denigrate women or transgender.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
But I mean, even that is, I think, going to cause challenges with recruiting and retention, because why would you want to stay in an organization that doesn't? doesn't seem to care for you while you're there, and then also doesn't treat you well after you leave.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Yeah, well, that's been reported by a lot. I mean, I don't think we have a whole lot of proof of any of that happening other than what Trump said happened.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Yeah, but it seems to be a very strange pick. I met Dan Cain one time in a very short office call with him in one of his assignments. And he was an Air National Guard guy who rose to three stars and then left the military. I'm sure he's a very competent guy. But I do worry about the continued politicalization of the military by the current Department of Defense secretary and others.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
You know, President Trump meets somebody and says, hey, they look the part. They're the movie role characters. model of a general. They say the right things in a three or four minute interaction. And then as Mr. Trump has found out with Mattis and Kelly and others, and Milley, by the way, I mean, I keep going back to the fact that he chose Milley to be the chairman and he chose C.Q.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Brown to be the chief of the Air Force. So, you know, that those initial impressions sometimes are not long lasting. And what I'm very concerned about is there seems to be a tug on toward doing everything the president wants, whether it's illegal, immoral, or unethical. And I think that's what he's trying to set up in a bunch of different organizations. And that concerns me.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Well, it gets to the requirements of the various cabinet secretaries. And if we want to use Secretary Hegseth as one of them. Do they have the competencies of running the large organization that they've been put in charge of? Do they even know what those organizations do?
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Do they have the savvy to listen to the experts, the people who have been there for 40 years and say, here's why we do the things we do? I mean, I had one assignment to the Pentagon. It was on the joint staff, and I had a lot of interaction with Secretary Rumsfeld. And that was tough in and of itself because he was smarter than everybody in the room.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And whenever you have someone that's smarter than everybody in the room, you tend to make mistakes because – They don't understand they're not the smartest one. Secretary Hegseth just recently said that over the last weekend, I wrote an article today about his comments regarding climate change.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And that seems to be one of those things that, you know, there are elements of society that says, why are we even doing this? It's a hoax. It's a fake. Well, the Department of Defense have been studying this and they have data that says it's going to be really critical that to understand what climate change does to bases and to combat operations and to the force.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And yet they're throwing that all away, as Secretary Hexler says, because it's all a bunch of crap. Well, it's not a bunch of crap. And when you dismiss something as important as that, it may not be your top priority of lethality and warrior spirit at the platoon level, but it is pretty important for a large organization. The question comes back to,
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
What would you do to a CEO of a major corporation that was doing some of the things that they're doing to disrupt the efficiency and effectiveness of the various organizations some of these people run? The answer would be the board would fire them immediately.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
It's not just the UK too. I've talked to a lot of European guys, especially Australia and New Zealand are saying the same thing. But of course, if I were having in the old days, a conversation with the chief of the German intelligence, and I knew anything I might say would be broadcast by their chancellor, I wouldn't say it. And I wouldn't share intelligence. And those are the kinds of
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
partnerships that are created and alliances where, you know, what you do is you don't, you know, I've said this many times before, you don't win hearts and minds, Tim, you win trust and confidence, and you don't deploy trust. It doesn't just come up in a heartbeat. It's something that's built over years. And when you suddenly become distrustful of another military leader's government,
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Which, by the way, I had to on a couple of occasions in Europe when I was commanding there. I mean, we were distrustful for a while of the Italian government because of Berlusconi. We couldn't give anything to our Italian counterpart because we were afraid of where it would go. And that was minor compared to some of the things we're doing right now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Well, I could cite all kinds of examples, but when you have the kinds of release of information... or the kind of terrorizing of the intelligence community and what they produce and the knocking of their capabilities, it does everything to eliminate trust between nations.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Yeah, it's pretty damning. When I saw that, it was like, because I know Mark and Scott Kelly, by the way, both of the twin brothers, both are great guys. They are true patriots, unlike some of the patriot that's term that's used by others who aren't quite patriots. And they are trying to do the right things for the right reasons in every situation.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And to have someone with the visibility of Elon Musk say something like that about another individual, first of all, it's uncivil. And that's the best you can say about it. But secondly, it's, and I'll say this, it's idiotic.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Here's a South African saying someone that has rode a rocket, rode a piece of dynamite into the sky a couple of times and has conducted combat operations and really is trying to help a nation that's had its sovereignty and territorial integrity invaded. He's being called a traitor. It's mind-blowing in terms of the ridiculousness of it.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
You have to refrain from becoming furious so many times every single day to just not react to this kind of craziness.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Well, and right after he calls him a traitor, he's ethically proclaiming all of the quality of his Tesla products on the lawn of the White House, which tells me that's tritorious toward how we look at the separation of the state and the citizens.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
I'll go back to my army days, Tim, and say there are seven army values, and one of them is personal courage. And all our new soldiers think about, well, that means you attack and throw yourself on a grenade when your other... No, it also means standing up for what's right and doing the ethical and moral thing.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And what we've seen is a deterioration of that in some of our elected representatives who seem to have forgotten... the phrase representative in their name. They represent other people.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And yeah, they may be voted on by a majority or a plurality, but there's a great line in the play 1776 where the congressman from Georgia, and I can't remember off the top of my head the name, stands up and says he's going to vote for independence even though most of his constituents don't want to. And he was the remaining vote for the declaration.
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Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And he says sometimes your morals have to override what the people tell you to do. And we're not seeing the personal courage or the morality of some of our members of Congress, which is the most disturbing part of all of what Trump has done to co-opt. I mean, I won't name his name, but I know him very well.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
There was a congressman all over CNN and MSNBC yesterday, a Republican congressman, proclaiming how we had to stand with Ukraine. And bigger than Dallas, he voted for the CR last night, which basically shows he continues to support Trump when he knows that that was not a good CR. So anyway, that's my thought on it. And I don't know what we do about that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Yeah, I'll just say from the very beginning, I'm very, you know, I was skeptical of the Hamas-Israel ceasefire. This one, I'm very pessimistic because I agree with Peskov. The administration is getting out in front of their, way out in front of their skis, thinking they're going to
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
drive this deal through Russia the same way they did with Ukraine, because they don't have any tools to extort Russia that I know of. And what's going to happen is this could very easily follow the paths of other frozen conflicts which Russia has instigated inside of Europe. And I think there are all kinds of challenges
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
with what Secretary Rubio and National Security Advisor Walz agreed to even with Ukraine yesterday. It was a horrible negotiation. I wasn't in the room, obviously, but you can tell that Ukraine went into this with their hands tied behind their back.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
They couldn't do much else because they had to get that intelligence sharing back and they had to restart the flow of arms and ammunitions to just survive on the battlefield today because they were taking some pretty good They were taking as many good hits on the battlefield as we were taking in the stock market yesterday.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, too, we can't ignore the fact that there were moral implications to this. I mean, it's one thing to cut off intelligence when someone's on the battlefield and fighting. But what Russia has been doing is not just...
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
attempting to retake ground, which is typical of any kind of war fight, but they were continuing to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure, kill Ukrainian citizens. Those are all war crimes.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
So I would even go to the point, Tim, where we were complicit and maybe even accessory to war crimes over those couple of days where we just kind of unplugged the intelligence servers within Kyiv and in the front lines, not just for the tactical fight, but for the defense of Ukraine infrastructure and citizens.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Which they've been doing since the very beginning, by the way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And when you think about the Russian way of war, where they do area fire as opposed to precision fire, where they really don't do the targeting process the way most modern militaries do, where you're attempting to destroy the enemy's military and their enemy's capability, they were really focused primarily, as they have been from the start of the war, on causing pain to Ukrainian citizens and their government.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And that's the part that just kind of continuously. I mean, the Hague has said Putin is a war criminal and all the people who are executing his his operations, the special military operations are war criminals. And if that's the fact, if we're giving them an advantage, then we we do become complicit in their war crimes and maybe even accessories to to the act.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Yeah, well, I left the military in 2013. And at the time, Russia had not yet invaded Ukraine the first time in 2014. But prior to that, on a daily basis, when I'd go into the office, I'd get something called a black book, which showed intelligence capabilities of the U.S. force and what we were collecting on and how we were collecting it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
At the time, there were three major frozen conflicts in Europe. And it was interesting, Tim, the other night I was with a group of Americans and I said, has anyone heard the term Transnistria or Norgano-Karabakh or Kaliningrad or South Ossetia and Abkhazia?
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
So it's not too bad. None of them had heard of any of those places. Well, these were places where the Russians had invaded or had stoked conflict within Moldova, Georgia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and then most recently in the Donbass and Crimea. And in every single one of them, they have continued to stoke that over the years and the decades to disrupt governments.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
I'll use the case of both Moldova and Georgia. They have prevented from attempting to join NATO because they can't right now. The member action plan says you can't have a conflict on your territory. And both of them have, in fact, irredentist or a minor civil war in Transnistria and Moldova and in the two provinces in Georgia.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
So you can see not only those kind of active conflicts, the so-called asymmetric warfare of Russia, but then you include things like electronic attacks in Estonia or little green men going into different places or assassination attempts in Great Britain and Germany. So all of those things contribute to the kinds of turmoil that Russia creates. When we now go into Ukraine,
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
And we're talking about a ceasefire, which includes, first of all, a 700-mile front in the four occupied territories. And it takes away 20% of Ukraine's territorial integrity, which includes the Oblast or the provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson, as well as Crimea since 2014. I think it might be best even to compare it to the United States.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
If we were to have 20% of our territory taken away, it would be like occupying all of California plus South Carolina or all of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama together. And when you do that, when you occupy those territories or draw a line, a fence line or a pausation line between a no man's zone, if you will, you're talking about taking away grain production from Ukraine.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
It's most of the sunflower oil, which Ukraine produces, which is indicated by their yellow over blue flag is in the region which was taken over their coal mining and metal. I mean, I could go on and on. But you can see the disadvantage it puts Ukraine at if Russia continues to occupy these territories and how it gives Russia a foot forward in controlling the country.
The Bulwark Podcast
Mark Hertling: Aiding and Abetting a War Criminal
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. They will not. There will be boundary disputes, additional requirements placed on each side. You know, the big thing Ukraine is looking for is some type of security agreement. And I think Rubio and Walsh wish that away. They said the Europeans will put up a peacekeeping force. Really? How do they control that? And what does it look like? Because the U.N.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Well, I guess relevant to this podcast, I got involved in intellectual politics when I became an editor of the public interest back in 1980 and worked for Irving Kristol and ended up going back to Harvard to get my PhD and worked very closely with Daniel Bell and Knack Laser and New Pat Moynihan.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
And so I was part of that whole world and then found myself drifting away from it in the 1990s as the neocon world changed, became more populist. And since then, I've been, you know, I feel like I'm the last Mohican of the Moynihan tradition among my peers. I guess me and Leon Wieseltier. Well, maybe Bill's kind of returned back to you.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Prodigal son is back, right? With a big car and tail fins. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I got my PhD. I'm now a professor at Columbia. I've been at Chicago, been at NYU. And my main place to write has been the New York Review of Books, though now I'm also writing regularly for Liberties, quite happily. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
If your listeners don't know what Liberties is, it's an extraordinary quarterly edited by Leon Wieseltier that is as close to you. You can come to the partisan review for our time. And so I find myself in this position of being the kind of centrist realist who annoys progressives. And I still have relations with people on the conservative side.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
And I write about what's going on in the right, mainly with a broken heart. My books, I have been, I've mainly been, I guess you might say, studying the dark side of the street. My interests have been in the counter-enlightenment, in the radical right, and I have a couple of Thank you. Thank you.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
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The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
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The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
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The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
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The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
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The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
What we want to do is move into the future, but inspired by the past so that we get a new muscular future that's inspired by the way America used to be. But it's going to be not bucolic. But rather, it's going to be muscular and strong and authoritative and all the rest.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
In both of those positions, the nostalgia for the past and the idea of leaping to the future are deeply anti-liberal and deeply anti-conservative.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Yeah, somehow an aquarium has been turned into fish soup and we have to figure out how to turn it back into an aquarium, right? Well, it's been interesting. I mean, if we talk about personalities, what happened to Rod Dreher or what happened to Patrick Deneen, they began speaking like the genuine conservatives, Rod more in a kind of
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Blakey and romantic view of the past where with Patrick, it was more old small town America. It was very attractive. His first book was really good. I mean, his first political book. And then something happens and Trump coming on the scene and Orban coming on the scene. somehow flipped a switch in the minds of certain people. Now, there are still some people on the right of the old style.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
I think of Yuval Levin, and I'm sure there are other people at AEI that you can come up with. But this toxin has entered the bloodstream.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
As far as comes to power. That's right. That voice just just gets killed. And so I spent a week. I was invited to teach in the summer school at the University of Austin in Texas two summers ago. And it was weirdly schizophrenic. So they have these courses that are called like forbidden courses.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
However, the president of it, Pano, I forget his last name, a Greek name, he was the former president of St. John's. And so when he came on, the vibe that was given off of it is that actually we're going to be kind of St. John's University with students who may have these right wing politics, but they simply want to get away from a liberal environment. But we'll do what St. John's did.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
And so I gave a course precisely on this subject, the difference between conservatives and reactionaries. great kids from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
And then there was an afternoon program where it was, you know, it was just flag-waving, own the libs, all these odd tech types who came in from Silicon Valley, futurist types, some of them talking about René Girard and all the rest. And it was just... And the kids themselves noticed it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
They said, you know, we're getting whiplash here, going from reading Roger Scruton and Michael Oakeshott in the morning and talking about DEI in the afternoon as if they're connected. It's one thing if, you know, you go to your study and study the great books and then you go out for the fight. But there's this impression that these things have to connect. And it was a big disappointment.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
I had some hope that maybe it would work out, but it's not.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Well, just to give a super quick phrase of the book, it's something I began...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
working on 25 years ago when I gave a lecture at Chicago on this theme and was picking at over the years, the book is really about the human desire not to know and what the psychology of that is and what the implications are for our beliefs about the soul and God and spirit, how we think about children and innocence, how we think about coping with the present and imagining a more perfect past.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
But the core of the book, the beginning of it, is kind of not so much an argument as an unveiling of the complicated psychology or the psychological forces that we're beset by to know and not to know. And so Aristotle says everyone wants to know, which is true. But the will not to know is really not explored much in the philosophical tradition. But it shows up in literature. It shows up in myth.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
So I begin with the myth of Oedipus, who wants to know and doesn't want to know what his relation is with his mother-wife. And then St. Augustine, we move to the present. So it's a kind of, I call it a ramble through some of these issues. On a theme that no one seems to pay attention to.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Yeah, well, part of it is we couldn't get through the day if we didn't. An example I...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
use in the book is imagine if everyone had an led screen across the forehead that where you just had a tape of what they were thinking at every moment and if you engage with them they're thinking about you and you're reading about yourself and they're reading about your reaction to them works out on this podcast everybody's just hearing what i'm thinking at every moment but maybe as a society level that might not yeah right
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
But you couldn't even develop as a self that you could know if yourself is nothing but the result of all this information coming in. So there are all sorts of things we block. You know, we don't want our movies to be spoiled. We wrap presents up. Don't want to go to the doctor if you feel like you have a, for some people, yeah. For some people, do you want to know the sex of your kid?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
So there are all sorts of ways in which we, certainly at my age, walking past a shop window is a very charged thing. I've got to suck my stomach in and hold my head in a certain way that it looks like I have more hair than I do. So we do it in life. But what happens is that at the much deeper level, we find it hard to cope with just the human condition. And we find it hard to cope with death.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
We find it hard to cope with uncertainty in particular. And so we don't quite know how to regulate our own curiosity or make sense of this desire. Some people are just naturally curious. We all know them, right? They're always looking stuff up online and looking at documentaries. And then there are people who generally think they don't need to know more than they do.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
And then there are people, and they're the interesting ones, who are really resistant to new information, right? They have their views about things. This is my view about vaccines, and it's not gonna change. And so I think about how people get into that sort of position. When it comes to politics, you can see how this would work itself out ideologically.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
But I also think we live in a special period, and that's what you mentioned. I've learned a lot from the books of a Polish sociologist now dead named Zygmunt Bauman, B-A-U-M-A-N-N, that your listeners may or may not know. And he wrote a number of books with the word liquid in the title, the first one, The Liquid Society. He was a former Marxist, and he had this deep idea, which is that
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Marx's and Engels's idea of everything solid melting into air was for them a tragedy. They believed in solidity. And what they thought was that the sort of atomization of life under capitalism was unhealthy and we needed to move to a more stable, just society, which would be after the revolution.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
But we find ourselves living in societies not where, as in archaic societies, that the institutions we're born into exist where we die, or in a situation where maybe one or two things change. But we've created a world for ourselves where everything is changing all the time. And with the internet, we're aware, potentially, of everything going on everywhere at all moments.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
We're not built to cope with this. We're not built to live this way. We're sort of built to live on land, and instead, we're all suddenly on surfboards, and the waves keep coming, and we're just trying to stay afloat. And in that sort of situation, This will to ignorance comes out as a kind of healthy one, too, that people can't make sense of all this change. And so they shut down.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
They have certain views about sex and gender. Case closed. They have certain views about old America. Case closed. Certain views about tariffs. Forget the evidence. Right. That's the situation we're in now.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Yeah, and the more information we get, the more we feel we don't control our environment. And that's frightening. And the tech futurists, they have this idea that, well, we're going to know so much. But a lot of what we have to know is what other people are like. But other people are changing all the time. And they're changing because things out in material life are changing.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
And so it's not that you, oh, we have this information that comes out from a stable world and then we navigate it. It's not that. It's that we're surfing and causing the waves at the same time. And so our ability to master anything is, or when things go wrong, we don't have. You know, someone once pointed out to me that if you look at all the history of utopian schemes, none of them have prisons.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
They're ideal cities. You know, there's no sense that anything could go wrong. Right. And the tech futurists are like that. They don't seem to want to recognize the limits of what we can take in and our need. You know, we can't wake up every morning asking ourselves whether today is going to be a day when our parents love us or it's one of those days when they're not. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
We need to have a kind of continuity in our beliefs just to get through the day. If we changed our beliefs, every second that we got new information, we'd be frozen in time. So we need to kind of commit to an opinion for a while.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
Well, with regard to politics, I guess the first thing is to notice what is happening. I mean, to notice this will to ignorance, and how it pops up. And it can pop up on every side. I mean, if you just look at the reaction of the White House under Biden and the press in his last years, the strong refusal to believe their lying eyes was extraordinary, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
But the other thing in the moment is that, as you said, conservatism is dead. These people are not conservatives. And that you're up against reactionary forces that are all about will and not about understanding. And they have to be met by other sorts of means. But we can give up our own quest for understanding precisely these things.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1016: Jonathan Cohn and Mark Lilla: Lobotomizing America
So checking your priors and also just trying to get used to uncertainty when things change so much all the time. It's very hard to just sail forward and at least to be aware of that and what you're doing with regard to that. It just means more self-awareness.