Gen. Stan McChrystal Sees Parallels Between Jan. 6 & Nazis

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, as the world also grapples with the humanitarian fallout in Afghanistan, as we discussed earlier, our next guest is watching it unfold knowing all too well what’s on the line. He is the former four-star U.S. General Stanley McChrystal who commander of the American and coalition forces in Afghanistan, drawing on this experience, his new book offers “A Users Guide to Risk.” And here he is talking with Walter Isaacson about the major global threats on his mind right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And General Stan McChrystal, welcome to the show.

GEN. STAN MCCHRYSTAL (RET.), CO-AUTHOR, “RISK: A USER’S GUIDE”: Thanks, Walter.

ISAACSON: You have a book called “Risk: A User’s Guide.” You talk about flaws in leadership today, and you say it really begins at the helm. Let’s drill down on that. Let’s talk about COVID. What flaws in leadership happened?

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Yes. They’re huge, Walter. If you stop back and think about COVID, COVID is not an enemy that is 10 feet tall. It’s something we should have been able to handle. One, we know that viral challenges like that come with relative frequency. Pandemics come. We also know public health pretty well. We have a history of that, experienced it. So, we know that it’s coming, it’s inevitable, we know what to do about it. And then, we were aided by a scientific miracle. The fastest production of vaccines ever. And so, if you line those three factors up, we should be having a celebration right now of how we fended off COVID-19 and we did it as a united country because this was an enemy everybody could hate. Nobody could be sympathetic to COVID-19. And yet, that didn’t happen. What instead happened is very early, we started having communication that was confusing, in some cases it was contradictory. It was going to be incomplete because you don’t know enough in evolving situation. But instead of saying, we don’t know enough, we put out partial information and sometimes, absolutely incorrect information and we caused our society to go into tribes on that. Similarly, some of the actions you have to take, the thing about a pandemic is you have to act early. That means you have to act before it’s apparent to the population, just how bad the threat is. And that risk being unpopular because you have to spend money or take actions that are inconvenient or unpopular before people see thousands and thousands of people being sick, because you have to get in front of it. But they didn’t. They held off. They delayed. They waited until it was very, very obvious. And then, in many cases, that’s too late. But that’s what we pay leaders for. That’s what we select them for. And so, we’ve got to look for that in our leaders.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s talk about right now. We’re still debating mask mandate. We’re still debating vaccine mandates. We’re still making this partisan and political. You advise a lot of states. Tell us what we should do in this moment on COVID.

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Yes. Well, personal opinion, we need to mandate masks. We need to mandate vaccines. If you think about a military analogy, the common defense relies on a common set of people out there defending it. In this case, every American is part of that common defense. You can’t have some soldiers do their job and others not do their job or there’s no coherent defense. To have a common defense against COVID-19, every American needs to do as much as they can. I think the mandate is — the mask mandate is table states. I think the vaccine mandate is the same. I would advise the president now to take some steps like requiring vaccines to travel, to get on airplanes, to get on trains, to do the things. It sounds draconian, but you’ve got to make it inconvenient, very inconvenient to be unvaccinated, because you are leaving a hole in the nation’s defense when you don’t.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s talk about the risks and the vulnerabilities that deal with China, and if China does something in Taiwan. What do you think the risk of that is? How should we prepare for it and should we be prepared to go to war with China over Taiwan?

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Well, the question you ask is a question that China is trying to get us to ask ourselves. So, the Chinese strategy now, over the last 72 years has been to increase their capability so that they make our imply the security guarantee to Taiwan be very, very dangerous for us. Expensive. They were — for many decades, we could do it, we could counterstrike them to China. And so, if they did it, would be theoretically much more painful for China than it would be for the United States. Their military improvements in the last couple of decades have made it so that it would be difficult, not impossible, for us to do it, but it would be difficult. They’ve raised the stakes for the sole purpose of getting you to table the question you just asked, do we really want to defend Taiwan? Do we really care? It’s a long way away. None of my relatives live there. You know, whatever mindset you want to put. And if they can convince the United States that it’s just not worth it, then suddenly, a couple of things will happen, the population of Taiwan will feel much less guaranteed insecure and they’ll probably recalculate how they want to move forward. Also, our other allies in the region. I don’t have a perfect answer for the question you just asked. I can’t tell the president of the United States what the right answer is, but I can say, that’s the question on the table and the first thing we have to do is give ourselves as many options as possible. So, the first thing to make sure that our military capability gives us that option if we choose that. We can defend Taiwan if we want to. We can go head-to-head with the Chinese. But then, we also have to build alliances in the region. We have to do all those other things because if you don’t have options, it’s not really a question. You’re just going to do whatever the Chinese say. If we have options, then we can have this discussion.

ISAACSON: As the U.S. commander in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, it must have been gut-wrenching for you to watch what happened in the past few months with our withdrawal and how it happened. How do you think that President Biden assessed the risks and the vulnerabilities in pulling out of Afghanistan this year?

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Yes. I certainly won’t speak for President Biden. But from where I stand, President Trump’s administration signed the Bilha (ph) Accords. So, there was an agreement in place that the United States would leave on date certain one May 2021. So, when President Biden came into office, he had two choices. He could aggravate that agreement and stay, in which case, he accepts the risk of extending the forever war, which was not very popular in the United States and was very much against President Biden’s very public position on the war. Or he could stick to the promise that we would pull all Americans out. He did delay it a bit, but he could do that. So, that’s a tough choice. Politically, he’s going to get beat up either way. If he pulls out, they’re going to say, you pulled out. And if ISIS or Al Qaeda does it, he’s going to be tagged with it even though the war goes 20 years. If he doesn’t, you know, he gets tagged for not being courageous and not having the courage to end the war. So, tough decision. Then they make the decision to pull out. And there’s been a lot of criticism of, you know, intelligence failure, this and that. Actually, this is tricky business. The danger was not so much the Taliban because the Taliban were already incentivized not to attack Americans, but ISIS and Al Qaeda, those in the country, were incentivized to do just that, to try to make us flee. So, I think the calculation, and I wasn’t involved in it, was try to extract the American force as quickly as you could to reduce the window of vulnerability to ISIS and Al Qaeda attacks. And I don’t think people saw that the government of Afghanistan and their military would collapse as quickly as they did. You could say that’s an intelligence failure, but that was less a military calculation than a psychological calculation on the part of the Afghan people who just lost confidence.

ISAACSON: Do you think Biden made the right decision to pull out of Afghanistan this year?

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Let me put it this way, Walter. I would have recommended that he leave a force there. Had I been president, I would have left a small force there, but I’m clearly biased. I mean, I’ve got part of my heart and soul in Afghanistan. I think President Biden made a courageous decision and I think once he made that decision, the American people should line up behind that decision and say, OK, this is what we’ve decided to do. Admitting they were two tough courses of action. There wasn’t an easy right and a stupid wrong. This was a tough one.

ISAACSON: You poured so much of your heart and soul in Afghanistan. Just tell me personally what it was like to feel that this mission ended, it seems to me, in such a failure.

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Yes, it does. And it feels badly because many of us, me included, believed it was possible, believed that the Afghan people could build a society, and in many ways, I think they did. I watched progress. From 2001 on, that the role of females in society, they have more females in their parliament than we do in our Congress. So many things improved, but they just couldn’t get the legitimacy of the government, you know, to the point where it completely was credible to the Afghan people. So, it was heart wrenching to see and to know that Afghanistan’s young population particularly wants a different country. The Taliban are not a popular revolution that took over and suddenly met the desires of the people. And so, there’s a big part of the Afghan population that I think is very disappointed. So, I share their disappointment and pain. What I don’t want to have happen now is that the American people say, well, Afghanistan was impossible. It was the great yard of empires. Nobody can succeed there. Therefore, you know, we just made a bad mistake going there. I think that lets us off the hook. I don’t think it was impossible. I don’t think it worked partially because we didn’t do everything we could have. We got some things wrong. And there are other players too, the Afghans share responsibility, the Pakistani share responsibility. But the bottom line is, our conclusion, in my opinion, we now be, we can never do this kind of thing again, because we’re going to have to help other nations again in the future. We just need to do it better.

ISAACSON: Let’s talk about the January 6th insurrection, because in your book, you talk so much about the enemy is us in some ways. We’ve got to figure out what to do in our republic. Tell me how communications and technology led to that and the risk you see coming out of the January 6th uprising.

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Yes. We’ll start first with communications. We, I believe, are a society that is ahead of ourselves technologically than we are in terms of maturity. Meaning, we have more technology than we are yet comfortable using. So, we can communicate faster than we can think, and we usually do. We also have given opportunity for people who would leverage communication because the cost of passing information is essentially zero now. And so, there’s no barrier to entry in how much communication you can pass. So, someone who wants to leverage that to get people to do something, particularly people who are already misinformed or are open to being misinformed is pretty dangerous. In the book, we describe Adolf Hitler. He literally just takes a series of very basic messages and hammers them. And the scary part is not that some fringe part of Germany followed Adolf Hitler. It’s that parts — massive parts of the German population did. And until the day he died in 1945, he was still relatively popular. And so, the power of this should be daunting to us. We also —

ISAACSON: Well, let me ask you. Tell me about the parallels you see. Do you see a parallel with that?

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Well, I do. Because when people use the ability to inform and influence, in a form, I’ll call it political opportunism. What they do is they leverage up people who are reliant upon pretty limited forms of input information in some cases, you can get them to do things that, like the January 6th insurrection. I don’t believe that everybody who went to the capitol was a bad person. I don’t believe they were racist. I don’t believe that they were trying to do something they thought was wrong, and that’s the part that should give us pause. Because they did something that I view as extraordinarily wrong and dangerous, but they did it believing they were doing something that was right.

ISAACSON: So, who is to blame for that?

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: I think President Trump is at the top of that list, but he has an entire of people around him, all of whom see some benefit for themselves, either politically or otherwise to align themselves and use that. And I —

ISAACSON: So, what’s the ongoing risk and vulnerability to our society coming out of January 6th?

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Well, a fragmentation of our society. I think we come out of January 6th, it should — just like COVID-19 should have been the ultimate unifying factor. January 6th should have been a wake-up call. It should have been like getting cold water dumped on us and saying, wait a minute. What are we doing? We need to stop. We need to sober up. We need to do whatever we have to do to come back to some kind of rational, political discourse at the highest levels, people who are in the political sphere. And then, the rest of us need to get out of some of our tribal camps and we start to interact. And the danger is, I think, in the aftermath, we haven’t done that.

ISAACSON: At the recent rally in Des Moines, Former President Trump insisted that he won the 2020 election and he won a lot of the state, which is, of course, incorrect. Does that concern you that it’s almost like a coup and what do you expect for 2024?

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: I think, first, I’ll answer it in two parts. First, Walter, I think we need to look at our processes and we need to very transparently communicate that to the American people so that the absolute facts as best we can know them are known to a number of officials and then, potentially, then to every American. So, the truth is out there. The reality is out there. Then the question is, how do we treat people who just claimed something that isn’t so? I think if a person propagates the big lie, and we’ve had the big lie propagated for years, American tobacco refined the process for decades and they did pretty well with it. And so, we know how dangerous it is. We’ve got to have the courage to call it out. We’ve got to have the courage to say, that’s just not true. And if you say things that are not true, you are in all terms, a liar. And our society can’t celebrate that. They can’t say, yes, that person is a liar but they’re a good person or they do good things. I can’t connect the two. You know, there’s a lot of people who say, don’t pay attention to what a certain leader says, pay attention to what they do because what they do is good. What they say doesn’t matter. I think what they say matters, because if you can’t pay attention to that, how do you know what they’re going to do? And so, I think this is a societal norm issue and then, it’s one we’re going to have to all take on.

ISAACSON: But it comes down to the question that as a military person, you know very well, which is collaborationism. People who are tempted to collaborate, and you have a lot of Republican senators, people you know and congressmen from Leader McCarthy to Senator Graham who just seem to go along with it. How dangerous are the people, including Republican leaders, who collaborate in this big lie?

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Well, I think to the degree any of us is tempted to collaborate, we become dangerous, even more so because we give credibility to it. I would give a quote that I believe was used by Senator Cruz some years ago, he said, history will not be kind to the people who held Mussolini’s coat. And so, I think history is going to be really hard on those of us who don’t stand up to our values when we know what’s actually right.

ISAACSON: General Stan McChrystal, thank you so much for being with us.

GEN. MCCHRYSTAL: Thanks, Walter.