Shownotes Transcript
Before we get started with the episode, I want to tell you a bit about a special event that Malcolm Turnbull, the former Prime Minister of Australia, had down under recently. And War on the Rocks, of course, were concerned with the United States and its allies, and I think it's worth drawing attention to this discussion of how a key ally, Australia, is thinking about its relationship with America moving forward. Whether you agree or disagree with it, I think it's important. The panels from this event are featured on Malcolm's podcast, Defending Democracy, which you can listen to on any podcast app. And here's a trailer.
from that first episode. For 80 years we've regarded our great ally, the United States of America, as having shared values and shared interests. Well, not all interests were aligned all the time, but certainly we felt the values were. So how do we in Australia recalibrate? Certainly we need to do more, be more resilient and independent. And yet, with an exquisitely bad timing, decisions in recent years have made us far more dependent on America
just as America was becoming less dependable, not through weariness or neglect, but now by deliberate design. I think those three assumptions on which our entire foreign policy is based are false. And Donald Trump is proving them to be false, but we should have recognised they were false long before he got back into office.
To say that Australia is not well positioned is an understatement. It is a dog-eat-dog world. I think our policy playbook has been disrupted but it's not been completely torn up. Critical question I think is also whether we are facing now with Trump 2.0, is it an aberration or is it a seismic eight on the Richter scale of international relations?
We really do need to get on the offensive by reimagining and planning for greater strategic resilience and competitiveness and by accelerating and pursuing new trade agreements, rethinking regional groupings and engaging more and with those with whom our interests align.
Quite clearly, Australia faces many, many security threats. But the reality is here today, the only one we're actually interested in is of course China. That's the 500 kilo panda in the room today. We have done nothing substantive to enhance our capacity to deter China over the last 10 years. And of course, on the economic front, as you say, our interests and our objectives and our policy actually point in exactly the opposite direction. Both sides of politics have regarded the issues as too big
and too scary and too complex. They don't have easy answers because there aren't easy answers. This is really difficult. And our political system has failed to throw up leaders that are prepared to really engage in this issue. No one should have been surprised when the PLA Navy sailed down through the Tasman Sea. That's what great powers do. And China will be doing that more and more often.
The key focus for Australian defence policy should be to maximise our capacity to raise the costs and risks to a major Asian power like China, or one day India, to allow us to defend ourselves independently against a major Asian power. This conversation today is too important to be had in a room of just 100 people. The Australian public deserves a better level of debate and discussion on matters that are fundamental to the security of our country. MUSIC
You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans. I am the CEO and founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, we say bye to Net Assessment, which has been one of our core podcasts for quite some years now. This is a joint episode recorded with me and the Net Assessment crew. It also went out on the Net Assessment feed last week. Net Assessment will now be produced online.
by the Stimson Center where our friend Chris Preble works. It will still feature Melanie and Zach, and you don't need to change what feed you listen to. Just keep listening to the Net Assessment feed. Nothing really changes, and we hope you enjoy this episode. So big news about Net Assessment. Melanie, what's the big news? The big news is that Net Assessment is leaving War on the Rocks and going to the Stimson Center where we will have our new home. Is that not true? That is true.
And the good news is, is you don't have to change your feed. You could just keep listening to Net Assessment exactly where you listen to it now. It's just going to be supported by the Stimson Center, specifically by our friend Chris's program at the Stimson Center. But nothing changes. Your hosts are still going to be here and we're still going to be listening as fans and friends.
from the sidelines. We've been planning this for a while, but after six great years at War on the Rocks, it's time for Met Assessment to go on to bigger and better things with the Stimson Center. Six and a half years, Melanie and I, we first met at the restaurant when... Was that when you guys first met in person? We first met at the restaurant when we hatched this idea with Brian McGrath, and then we survived...
Think of all the things that we've survived, right? Actual net assessment. The actual, we outlived actual net assessment. Too soon, too soon. Yeah, a little too soon. But yeah.
You both knew Brian already, though, right? Yes. And you both survived Brian McGrath. We did survive Brian McGrath. Brian survived us. We survived Brian McGrath. The Navy did not. That's right. We survived COVID. We survived all that. The invasion. Yeah, that's right. Which invasion? The one of the several immigrants? The one of Steve Miller's comments the other day? The three years ago invasion. Yeah. If you think back, what are some of the best experiences
episodes you think you've recorded on this show? I think our ones on the National Defense Strategy were really good. And also the ones on AUKUS. I like those ones. They were hard ones to do, especially the AUKUS one, because there was a lot going on there. And I think that we had a fair bit of disagreement. I got hate mail on the first AUKUS episode for a year.
From who? From Australians who thought it was all a ploy to make them go nuclear and, you know, all the proliferation stuff that our friends in Australia are, you know, fine, go ahead, be concerned about it. But also the cost. And, you know, there's a lot of things to that. But that was a big move by the Biden administration. And so, you know, something that people had not been expecting. And so I thought that was a really important topic and show. But then the defense strategies out of the last administration, I thought those were fun. Sure.
and worthwhile to really rip apart what our priorities are, which by the way, I think we've been, it's not picking on one side or the other at both. We've just been fundamentally, we're still so unserious about things. But those are important because those are the documents that say, this is what we believe, this is what we're going to do. And we just cannot, you know, you put those words down so that you have a metric and we just cannot get there. We've done several shows on alliance relationships and burden sharing and thinking about sort of
pivots of various kinds and I think you know I could say over the years several shows on those issues and this is obviously a very live topic and I think we all had certain ideas about how this was going to play out and yet nevertheless circumstances have a way of surprising us and so maybe
If nothing else, it seems to be happening maybe faster than we expected. More on the history of the show. Did you two both know Zach before he became one of your co-hosts? I didn't know Zach. You didn't know Zach. I mean, I knew who he was, but we never met. I've hated Chris Preble for a long time.
That didn't just start on the show. He hated me before I even knew who he was. So I introduced, so I made a lot of connections. You did, right? You said, Zach won't do the show. He's too busy. He's got little kids. He travels too much. And I said, no, you ask him. Still has little kids, still travels too much. And that's all true, but still, yeah.
No, we did not meet in person because we started recording during COVID. So we did not meet in person until several years, a few years after we had been recording remotely. And so that was a nice treat. And Zach was the inaugural speaker at our, we do now monthly brown bag lunches and Zach was the inaugural speaker to talk about his new book. So.
It's been a good relationship. Yes, indeed. Yeah. You know, Brian left, ironically, it was right before COVID. Right. And his whole thing was we recorded in person and he's like, he has to drive from Eastern Shore and this is before we switched to recording remotely. He used to leave that sweet, sweet estate. But how many years into it was that? It was just over a year. Just over a year. Yeah, that sounds about right. It was about 15 months. How many years have you been doing it now, Zach?
I don't know. It feels like forever. It's been five years about exactly. Yeah, I think that's right. About five years. Yeah. Because it was, but it was in the middle of COVID when, yeah. Brian left before COVID. Yeah, he left at the end of 2019. So let's jump into some of the substance of what's happening in the world. This is going out on both the War on the Rocks feed and the Net Assessment feed, which again, the Net Assessment feed will stay the same. So you don't have to resubscribe to anything. The demise of the Office of Net Assessment. Have either of you worked together?
with the Office of Net Assessment in the past or been funded by them? I got an email this morning about a project that I was involved with that is not happening. So yes. What was the project? Probably can't talk about it. But had you worked with them in the past as well? A lot. Yeah. Sort of everywhere I've been. A lot of the work that I did years ago at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments was supported by Net Assessment. So
know them well. And we've talked about this a little bit the last couple of weeks, but I think the reality is everyone understands that there were projects that NetAssessment funded that maybe weren't that insightful, but also that's kind of the cost of doing business. And if you're trying to look pretty far out, you're going to get things wrong a lot. But there's some stuff that NetAssessment was very, very right about a long time ago that I think has been quite influential.
If you had to explain to the layperson what ONA was, how would you explain that in plain language? They're thinking 20 to 30 years down the line about what the global situation is going to be and what that means for defense requirements. I think that's right. And I think I've never worked directly with ONA, and so...
I've seen the stories and sort of shrugged my shoulders and whatever. I think that the value in looking into the future at some length, I mean, I've worked, I've had the benefit of working with Matt Burrows over the, you know, over the years, first at the Atlantic Council and now at Stimson.
And Matt, for those of you who don't know, was on the Nick and wrote several of the global trends reports. Every five years, they do a global trends report. And I've learned from Matt mostly just the value of long-term thinking. It's funny, I bumped into a mutual acquaintance a few weeks ago who remembered one of those Nick global trends reports from the mid-aughts, predicting something, which she said at the time, that's absurd, that could never possibly happen. She came up to me after and she said, you have to tell Matt that they did.
He got that exactly right. And the point is that the NICS product or others like it are not just focused on defense requirements. ONA obviously has a special responsibility to think about defense requirements. But I think that what we've learned is that there are so many other global trends that are not uniquely suited to military solutions. I think that the canceling of ONA, and supposedly it might be reconstituted in some form. I think it will be no matter what by the next administration eventually, but...
It gets at something that I see as a pattern in this administration is there's a kernel of truth that they get at when they cancel something or get rid of something. USAID, for example. There's a lot of problems with the way USAID operated, but to then go ahead and just get rid of the whole thing.
and get rid of HIV treatment for all these people, which has downstream effects like death for large numbers of people, is not the way to handle it. So there were problems with ONA. There was a bit of an old boys club network to it and funded a lot of the same people over and over, and that was problematic. But to sort of then just say, well, we're getting rid of this thing is maybe not the right approach to reform. And I think that's true, I mean, broadly on a lot of the research that the administration is skeptical of. If you just cancel medical research and
and you cancel foreign policy research, the result is you've got people in government who are very busy. And oh, by the way, they're going to be more busy because you fired a lot of their co-workers and you're going to get a lot of short-term thinking. I agree with that. And you look at what Todd Harrison has written in the last couple of weeks, and there is a lot of fat that can be trimmed in the Pentagon. There is a lot that can go. Part of the problem is, though, when you're just asking for resignations, a lot of the people who are going to resign are
are people who are doing the heavy lifting and that can go find really productive and rewarding jobs in the private sector. And a lot of the people that are going to want to stick around are maybe the people that are getting close to retirement and not doing so much of the heavy lifting. The other thing I'll say is I wrote something for InBrief on USAID. And Ryan, I agree with you. There is a
a lot there that can also be cut. And there is a lot of silly stuff. And, you know, looking at some of these programs, they were worthy of scoring. And just also, you know, years and decades of bureaucracy and just giving to the same over and over again without really going through and having an on-the-ground assessment of what is this doing? What is this helping? But then canceling, you know, Radio Free Europe and things like that, or
some of our aid programs that are only way to really be in China doing certain kinds of work and certain kinds of help. And we don't have a good cultural assessment of a lot of things that are going on in China because we don't go to school there anymore. And we just don't have the kinds of relationships that we used to. And so, again, I would say even maybe not even a scalpel. Some of those things did need something, you know, bigger than a scalpel. But just swiping the whole thing at once for some of those programs is
it could be a bit of a heavy lift to repair. Eric Hsu wrote this great article in War on the Rocks about Doge and the Pentagon and how the key is not to get rid of people. It's actually to improve processes and make things more efficient, which isn't really about firing people. It's about changing the way things work. And to Doge's credit, which words I never thought I might say, but honestly, to Doge's credit, it is taking a very different approach to the Pentagon so far, and I think a lot more thoughtful approach. And I hope that continues.
More thoughtful, you're saying, than other departments?
the effects are very clear. I worry that when you break things at other places, the effects may not be quite as obvious in the near term, but the downstream effects are no less bad, right? Like if you break the State Department by firing huge numbers of people and then we're less effective at diplomacy, it just makes the US government in the long term much less effective. Yeah, that's fair. Although it's hard to know how much of this is Doge and how much of this is RFK Jr., but you look at all these people being hired from CDC, for example, I think the implications of that are much clearer.
But would love to get your thoughts on Secretary Hegseth's visit to the Philippines, which I actually think was a pretty important development, building on some successes. So I just got back from Tokyo right after Secretary Hegseth was there and in the Philippines, and I think he did really well, actually. I think the message that he was
talking about was reinforcing that they're going to focus on the Indo-Pacific. He said explicitly, and this kind of ties into the new interim national defense strategy that they reportedly have put out, that the two priorities are going to be the homeland and the Indo-Pacific. We'll see if that proves out based on some of the recent actions they've taken in the Middle East. But I think the messaging was pretty reassuring to a lot of folks in the region, whether they were in Japan or in the Philippines. Yeah.
Yeah, I guess I was surprised at the surprise from some in the region that it went so well and that Secretary Hegseth was sort of reaffirming the U.S. commitment to some of our allies in Asia and the Indo-Pacific as juxtaposed with the treatment of the European allies.
And I thought it made perfect sense in the context of if this administration is serious about a pivot, then they don't call it that, of course, and they shouldn't. But if they're talking about sort of reallocating resources and shifting attention, it should not surprise us that Hegseth went to Japan, Hegseth went to Philippines, and presumably the other conversations that are ongoing, you don't need to go to the region to have conversations, obviously, are very different from the conversations that the Trump administration is having with the European allies right now.
And Zach may speak to this more, but my understanding from the Japan side was there was a lot of relief about that visit because they are worried about tariffs and they are worried about what we might do to them, what our economic relationship might be with them. So it wasn't just about the defense side of things, but the economic side and if we really are going to be a friend or if it's going to be a more complicated relationship. So yeah, I think that both the visits seemed really...
really good and very impressive. And I'm glad that that was a priority trip. I think part of what's tricky, though, is to figure out, you know, the administration is talking a lot about burden sharing. I love the Philippines. But if you're talking about burden sharing, the Philippines is pretty far down the list of U.S. allies in terms of capabilities. And so it's a little hard to square
how the administration can have a very positive visit with the Philippines and yet be so negative on European allies, many of whom are doing, frankly, a lot more than the Philippines when they're under less threat. And I understand that the Indo-Pacific is the priority theater, and obviously I want that to be the case, but I think this is going to be a little bit of a challenge for them going forward. I don't know the region as well as you do, Zach, but I wonder if Manila understands that they're
their geography and basing access is so much more important to this administration, given its proximity to Taiwan. I think that's right. Washington needs Minna in a way that isn't true in the minds of many of the Trump folks about Europe. But I also think, given the president saying that Taiwan should be spending 10% of GDP on defense, which is completely unrealistic, if you go look at Philippine capabilities... It would also be terrible for Taiwan's economy, yeah.
And it also wouldn't change the military balance. But at some point, the president is going to ask, hey, how much does the Philippines spend on defense? And the answer is not going to be reassuring for him. Speaking of economics, we're recording this before the Rose Garden announcement of what Liberation Day quote unquote means, which is we'll be sweeping tariffs supposedly, although we'll see because tariffs have often been announced and then not actually levied. Thoughts on how this impacts our security relationships?
Well, I mean, it affects our security relationships to the extent that it already has soured relations with a lot of key allies. But I think the economic effects are more important. And I think everything from the market, which is spoken pretty clearly on the uncertainty that's created by Trump's announcements and then withdrawals and basically all the gains in the market have been shed since November. So there's that. And I also think, I mean, I think there's going to be an interesting period in which
China, in particular, is reaching out to major U.S. trading partners and saying, we're not going to play this game with you. Here is the situation. Let's talk kind of thing. And I just don't know that the Trump administration has thought this through. I think that they have thought it through. And this is still the conclusion that they are coming to. I mean, Donald Trump has thought this for decades.
70 years. He is not going to change. He's not that old. He's got this for 60 years, right? When he was nine years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's not going to change his mind. The interesting thing is he has people around him who never would have supported this kind of a thing until they hit the administration. And I think that there was some hope that those people would be able to put the brakes on. But I think that they hit the accelerator. You see Letnick going out and doing this kind of stuff.
But I do have really grave concerns because combined with how we're just treating our allies like, you know, Canada and Denmark, if you are following anyone's feed from Denmark in the last couple of weeks,
They are very unhappy. And they are just saying outright, we've got to find other allies and friends. And I don't like that. I don't like it because I like being the good guy. And I also like being smart about these kinds of things. And I want Europe to do more on defense. And that will be a good thing, you know, that they do. But you know what? The defense minister of Denmark was in France yesterday signing a deal for missiles. That's a good thing. But at the bottom of the announcement, it's we really have to think about supporting our European friends.
And it's a dig at the United States. It's not just, hey, we have to do better. And that's a real problem. And the other side of that is we are making it more expensive for our allies to build up their defense. And we are putting tariffs on things that are costly and some things that are exquisite that they are going to have to really pay.
put a premium price on now. And it's so self-defeating in every respect. And I wish they would all say, fine, our tariffs are zero and dare us to do the same. I think the other problem they're going to have is a political issue, which is that my sense is that Scott Besant's plan was to do tax cuts first, stimulate the economy, and then tariffs. Carrot, then stick.
What you've gotten is the opposite. And the reason that the timing matters is there's this stagflation concern. Can you tell our audience what stagflation is? Sorry, yeah. So, you know, the tariffs are going to— Because we haven't experienced it for so long. Right, the tariffs are going to slow down the economy combined with other actions, right? Like crackdown on immigrants is going to increase prices.
Also dries up the labor pool, right? You know, if you walk around Washington, you'll see a lot of signs up in restaurants and some hotels asking for help that weren't there recently, because I think a lot of folks aren't showing up for work because they're scared about ICE coming to their doorsteps.
I think the danger is the economy slows, but inflation is high. The Fed, which looked like it had all kinds of room to run and could do anything a few months ago, now looks stuck. And the risk is that actually the U.S. economy ends up in a pretty difficult spot. I think this is the only existential threat to the Trump administration. This president can spin a lot, but I'm not sure he can spin his way out of a recession easily.
And so I think the Trump team is more likely to back off of some of these tariffs, despite everything that Trump is talking about, if the recession signals hit hard the next few weeks. On what you mentioned about Denmark, Melanie, when I was a Department of the Army civilian, I worked with Danish troops very closely in Helmand years ago. I go to Denmark all the time. I have close friends there. It's one of the most wonderful places in the world. And they really sacrificed a lot when they didn't have to. And I think it's fair to say their reaction is what
what the fuck? And I totally get it. I think it's so strange what we're seeing because Trump can literally get everything he wants materially from existing agreements. And it's hard to understand what is logically driving this. I was extremely disappointed by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal the other day by Walter Russell Mead, in which he seems to say, yeah, it's a bit strange, but Trump should just keep on pushing it home. He might get there because
We made these forceful territorial acquisitions in the past. By the way, all these happened when we were also enslaving black people. So I don't know what he's really getting at is like, we did this in the past, so it might work in the future. But I just don't get the strategy here. Yeah, the strategy is, again, it's just so self-defeating. The administration talked about doing this the first time around. So then what did we actually do to strengthen the defense? And then here we are the second time, and if we really wanted to build it up, they would be happy to.
And they've already taken a bunch of steps to do it. I care about Denmark. I'm Danish. My family's from there. I want it to be well protected. But it's the way that we are going about saying, we're going to have you. We're just, we're going to have you. And won't rule out using force. Yeah, and won't rule out using force. And J.D. Vance was much more measured, if you listen to all of his remarks when he was there last weekend. It seemed like somebody sat him down and, you know, said, you need to balance this out. But Donald Trump was here in Washington saying the same thing he's been saying.
we're going to have you and we won't rule out the use of force. And so again, it's kind of a disappointment because we were going to change from the last four years that I thought were lethargic and some good things, but I was hoping for more energy in some of the different ways. Okay, well, yes. Okay, fine, fine. But I'm just feeling some of the disappointment. I think part of what's difficult is it's hard to see what end game they have in mind on many of these
big issues, you know, like the Canada one. If Canada was actually the 51st state, Republicans would immediately lose power. At the end of the day, I think in many cases, they just haven't played out where this all goes. And that is jarring as people that think about strategy. I think the end is not the point of the exercise. I agree. The end is the appearance of doing things. Look, their inability to think about strategies
second and third order effects is pretty breathtaking. I mean, even just in the case of Canada, Zach's absolutely right. I mean, they were absolutely serious if they're actually serious about the 51st date. But on a more practical level, the threats against Canada have put the Liberal Party in a much stronger position than it was relative to the Conservatives. And do the Trump people actually think they're going to have a better relationship with Canada if the Liberals stay in power? No, they shouldn't think that. And yet the unintended consequence of these threats has been to
help a Liberal Party that was in real danger and now, you know, is basically a dead heat is what I've heard from Canada. I think the other part of this, which we kind of alluded to earlier, is you look at some of the actions that they're taking in places like the Middle East and
And they seem to be undermining everything I thought the Trump administration strategy was based on. Well, let's talk about the contrast between what we're seeing and the interim defense strategy, which I actually think is a from what we've read about it in the press, because we haven't seen the actual document, just excerpts been reported because it is secret.
I really like the excerpts. Very sensible to me, very thoughtful. But it was very Asia-focused, and what we're seeing right now is not particularly Asia-focused, at least in expenditure of resources. Right. I mean, the people at the Pentagon who are in the policy shop who've been the most vocal have been incredibly critical the last four years of any movement of forces to the Middle East or to Europe. And what we've seen the last few days is
is moving missile defense literally from Asia, Patriots and THAAD, from Asia to the Middle East, and apparently also carrier strike groups. Two carriers, yeah. I mean, this is the complete antithesis of everything that they've talked about. So I understand what the strategy might say, and I'm sympathetic to it also, Ryan.
But it seems like they're doing exactly what the last administration did. Right. And we have to remember that when President Trump announced the national security strategy, the speech concerning the national security strategy was completely disconnected from the text of the national security strategy. This is not a new phenomenon. And then just to talk about the specifics, we're sending two carrier strike groups to the Middle East. And what else? There's THAAD. Two patriots. Two patriots and a THAAD. And they've increased the Air Force. Like a third of our bombers. Right.
This seems to be, I think the theory of the case is to exert pressure on Iran to negotiate directly about their nuclear program. I think so too. I mean, I think it's a carryover from our last show. We record that show and then, you know, 37 things happen. And I think that that seems to be the pressure. But I just find this all a little bit hilarious because the argument for not helping Ukraine more was that it was a distraction, whereas the Biden argument was that you put resources into foreign
forcing the Russians to get out of Ukraine, and then you can pivot back to Asia. Well, it's basically what the administration is saying now. We'll deal with Iran now, and then we'll turn back to Asia later. The logic is almost the exact same thing that we're hearing.
Thank you for listening to the War on the Rocks podcast and its joint episode with Net Assessment. Remember, you don't need to change your feed if you listen to Net Assessment. It's the same exact one. And if you don't listen to Net Assessment, now is a great opportunity to sign up for it, to keep supporting them. Stay safe and stay healthy.