Former Defense Secretary Ash Carter on The State Of The World

TOM ASHBROOK: From WBUR Boston and NPR, I'm Tom Ashbrook. And this is On Point. Ash Carter knows the U.S. Defense Department very well. He was number three there. He was number two there. And, from 2015 to 2017, Ash Carter was number one there, US Secretary of Defense, a physicist and reform agent at the top of the world’s most potent military. Now he’s watching as a new administration deals with Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, ISIS. This hour On Point, former Defense Secretary Ash Carter on the state of the world. You can join us on air or online where this conversation is always on. What's your question for the man who, until January, headed up the Pentagon? Join us any time at OnPointRadio.org or on Twitter and Facebook at On Point Radio.

He’s been there, literally there, literally there. This was November 2015, then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in South Korea, in the DMZ, talking about deterrence and North Korea’s nuclear path: ASH CARTER: The ever-present danger is the reason why we speak of the ability to fight tonight. That’s the slogan up here. No one ever wants to have to do that. But deterrence is guaranteed through strength, and that’s what the alliance is all about.

TOM ASHBROOK: But could it happen? His successor, Secretary of Defense, former General, James Mattis is in that seat right now, a hot seat right now. On Monday, here was Mattis speaking at the Association of the U.S. Army Convention in Washington, saying, “Be ready.”: JAMES MATTIS: Now, what does the future hold? Neither you nor I can say. So there's one thing the U.S. Army can do. And that is, you have got to be ready to ensure that we have military options that our President can employ if needed."

TOM ASHBROOK: James Mattis now holds the reins Ash Carter held until January. He joins me in the studio. He served in the Obama administration as Secretary of Defense until the handover to Mattis earlier this year. From ’09 to ’11, he was Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. From 2011 to 2013, he was Defense’s Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer. Now, Ash Carter is Professor of Technology and Global Affairs at Harvard, direct with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. He’s out with a new report on the fight against ISIS, headlined “A Lasting Defeat: The Campaign to Destroy ISIS.” Ash Carter, welcome back to On Point.

ASH CARTER: Good to be here with you, Tom.

TOM ASHBROOK: What do you make of the North Korea situation right now? There's James Mattis, your successor, talking with officers of the Army this week and saying, “Be ready.” Is there still a chance for a diplomatic solution here?

ASH CARTER: There may be a chance. But Jim Mattis is right, and we’ve been doing that since 1953, standing strong on the DMZ. And so, until we’re able to turn around North Korea on its ballistic missile and nuclear programs and other provocations, which I’ll get to in a moment, deterrence and defense are what we do to protect our people, which we have to do. Deterrence is what Jim spoke about, I spoke about, when we cite the slogan on the DMZ, which is, “Fight tonight.” We are ready.

TOM ASHBROOK: Be ready.

ASH CARTER: We and South Korean forces, both to protect Seoul and South Korea, and then to turn the tide and destroy the North Korean military and destroy the North Korean regime, I'm confident we could do that. And I'm confident that North Korea understands that we can do that. However, you should be clear, Tom, that war on the Korean Peninsula is unlike anything humankind has seen since the last Korean War. It is intense combat—

TOM ASHBROOK: It was a meat grinder in the Korean War.

ASH CARTER: Yes. And now, of course, South Korea is much more densely populated. The war takes place on the northern suburbs of Seoul, which are populated. Artillery rains down on Seoul. Until we can destroy those artillery pieces, there's a great deal of loss of life. And in addition to deterrence, we have defenses in anticipation that North Korea might do what it has done, namely to build ballistic missiles of longer range and develop nuclear weapons. We began some years ago—this was when I was Undersecretary—to deploy missile defense of the United States. We have them now. They're quite capable.

So deterrence and defense are there. But you asked about negotiations and the possibility of negotiations. I've actually negotiated with the North Koreans back in the 1990s. Very strange experience. And I went to Pyongyang in 1999. And we had some temporary success there. And it’s possible that one can do that again. But here is how. And I hope that this is what Jim Mattis and Rex Tillerson are about and able to pull off.

You know, Tom, you turn on the television, and there are commentators talking about the options for our President in North Korea. And it’s either war or diplomacy. In the real world, you mix the military and the diplomatic.

TOM ASHBROOK: You mean the carrot-and-stick threat.

ASH CARTER: Yes. And it’s coercive diplomacy, in which you tie steps you take to apply pressure to things that you demand of North Korea. It’s important to apply pressure to them. But we also need to make it clear what we want them to do.

TOM ASHBROOK: Well, let me ask you something if I may, Secretary Ash Carter, because that hasn’t worked. They have proceeded. Presumably, we've been applying this general formula now for some years. You wrote, more than a decade ago now, you were in favor of striking a North Korean missile test. When the missile was ready to launch on the pad, in the North, you said, “We should take it out with a Tomahawk or some kind of cruise missile.” You said, “If we don’t do it now, it’s only going to get more difficult. It’s only going to get worse.” We didn’t do it then. And now, here we are, North Korea’s nuclear capacity fairly well demonstrated, still lots we don’t know about the complete sophistication of it. But how do you deal with this situation that has gone forward from what you warned? You said, “Take this one out now as a demonstration.” We didn’t do it. Now here we are. They’ve got nukes, and they’ve got missiles flying far. How does coercive diplomacy work in that situation?

ASH CARTER: In fact it goes back even further. My own history, back to 1994, when I did the very first strike plan for the reactor at Yongbyon, which was going to, for the first time, produce plutonium. We were ready to do that. I was capable that that plan would succeed. In the end, it did not, was not necessary to carry that out, and here is why. And this shows that, from time to time, coercive diplomacy has worked. You're right that over a quarter century on the whole, it has not stopped North Korea, three generations now, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and now Kim Jong-un, from going forward.

But in the 1990s, we had, for a period of several years, where their plutonium program was frozen and their missile tests were halted, through coercive diplomacy. And then again, during the Bush administration, the second Bush administration that is, there was, under Colin Powell, for a couple of years, some success as well. So I'm not saying that this will work. But we have had some experience of it.

TOM ASHBROOK: But hasn’t the game changed now, Ash Carter, with their nuclear capacity? It’s just different. It’s greater. They’ve shown it. They’ve done the nuclear tests. We’ve seen it. They’ve let the missiles fly. We’ve seen it. You’ve got many people saying—I mean Steve Bannon was strategic advisor to the President. He said, “No way you can do war on the Korean Peninsula. The death toll is just too high.” And others saying, “You’ve got to let them. At this point, they're going to have nuclear weapons. Get used to it.”

ASH CARTER: I think it’s very hard for us to get used to North Korea having nuclear weapons. This is not Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR, where you can expect a stable situation if North Korea persists in these nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.

TOM ASHBROOK: What do you mean by that?

ASH CARTER: What I mean is that Kim Jong-un wants to survive, for sure. But he needs, also, to constantly prove to his people that he’s in charge, and that he is leading them forward. And therefore, I am not in the camp of people who believes that if North Korea has nuclear weapons, and we simply leave them alone, it will just settle down. Therefore, I think that we need to persist with the deterrence and defense and give coercive diplomacy a shot.

Now, let’s play that forward a little bit. It might work, in the sense of slowing and then reversing their ballistic missile and nuclear programs. That’s the best case. If, after that effort, it doesn’t work, we will have prepared ourselves, our South Korean allies and our Japanese allies, which are inevitably part of this terrible war—

TOM ASHBROOK: Of course. They're right there.

ASH CARTER: And we will have sidelined the Chinese by showing that what has been true for the last 25 years is their unwillingness to use their influence to stop the Chinese from going forward. That positions us better for a dire circumstance if that actually occurs.

TOM ASHBROOK: President Trump last week talked about the calm before the storm. Is that where we are with North Korea? Is there a storm coming? Is this thing baked in the cake already?

ASH CARTER: It’s hard to know what is his statements mean. I do watch what Secretary Mattis and Secretary Tillerson say they're trying to do, which I interpret to be exactly what I'm saying, which is to give coercive diplomacy, that is very intentional, step-by-step diplomacy, a chance here. It might work. And if it doesn’t, it better positions us for a strong response to North Korea if that proves necessary.

TOM ASHBROOK: Can we really go to war here? We’re told that—it’s a terrible phrase, but the butcher’s bill in South Korea could be hundreds of thousands in fairly short order, with Seoul sitting right on the DMZ.

ASH CARTER: Well that’s not going to be our choice. It’s going to be North Korea’s choice. And so, deterrence is about making it less likely that they actually start that war, which you're absolutely right, would be a war like the world has not seen since the last Korean War.

TOM ASHBROOK: Are you sure they would start it? What if they—I mean I don’t know what you mean by “start it,” but we've sort of got red lines out there now about, you know, if they have nuclear weapons on missiles that could do this or that.

ASH CARTER: I think if the—What's very clear to North Korea is that, if North Korea attacks the United States or our friends and allies, that the United States will respond militarily, and that a war on the Korean Peninsula will result in their defeat. We recognize that that is a very undesirable war to wage. On the other hand, I am confident that we will win it.

TOM ASHBROOK: We’re talking with former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter. I'm Tom Ashbrook. This is On Point. We’re looking at the country’s military and security challenges right now, the challenges facing the Trump administration. Ash Carter is with me in the studio. It has been a fairly wild time, certainly in terms of rhetoric and threats. In his speech in the UN in September, President Trump threatened to take down North Korea.: DONALD TRUMP: The United States has great strength and patience. But if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.

TOM ASHBROOK: That in the UN. Just in the last week, we’ve heard the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Bob Corker, talking kind of dire terms about the path that the country may be getting on. Here he was in a telephone interview with New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin, Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker talking about the potential international ramifications for the President’s comments and tweets.: BOB CORKER: Sometimes I feel like he’s on a reality show or something, and talking about the foreign policy issues. And you know, you got to realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with all the comments that he’s making.

TOM ASHBROOK: And this, from Bob Corker, on what stands between, he says, the country and chaos.: BOB CORKER: Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis, and Chief of Staff Kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos.

TOM ASHBROOK: Ash, Ashton Carter, has been right there in the seat that James Mattis now holds at the head of the Pentagon. He’s now at Harvard’s Belfer Center at the Kennedy School and with us in the studio today. You can join the conversation. What’s your question for the former Defense Secretary? Would you want to be the officer charged with carrying out a nuclear attack order from Donald Trump? Should we be decertifying the Iran nuclear deal? That is big this week, as President Trump apparently wants to do. What’s your question, right across the world, Iran, North Korea, ISIS, Russia, China? Can we talk about Iran and ISIS? I want to look at that, but Iran first.

This is the week, tomorrow we’re told, the President will announce his position on decertifying, or certifying or decertifying, whether Iran is upholding its end of the bargain on the nuclear deal. James Mattis has said publicly that he believes they are, and that we should stick with the deal. The President not so clear on that. How do you look at this fork in the road?

ASH CARTER: Well, I do think that the Iran deal is a good deal in the sense that it does what it was intended to do; that is, verifiably, and I think it is being verified, block Iran from going—getting a nuclear weapon. However, it also needs to be said that the Iran deal never was, and could never have been, a grand bargain with Iran. We still have serious problems with Iran. Iran is still the “death to America” country. It threatens our friends and allies in the Gulf. And so my instructions after the Iran deal, nuclear was concluded—

TOM ASHBROOK: —from President Obama this is?

ASH CARTER: The instructions I gave my department were with the approval of President Obama, is it didn’t change anything we were doing. We keep tens of thousands of people in the Gulf to deter Iran and protect our friends and allies. We have missile defenses there. We work with the State of Israel to protect it from Iran. And we work against all of Iran’s malign activities, whether they be in Hezbollah in Lebanon, their meddling in Iraq and Syria, where we’ve been fighting ISIL, and they have not been on the right side of that, and elsewhere around the world.

So I think one needs to keep in perspective that this is not a grand bargain with Iran. That said, it does take off the table the capability that would be most disturbing—were Iran to get nuclear weapons. It does that verifiably. And therefore, it is worth sticking with.

TOM ASHBROOK: How do you see the ramifications? If the President decertifies, and says, despite the attestations of his Defense Secretary now, and others, European allies, in this—if he says, “No, I'm not going to certify that Iran is following the rules here,” and Congress follows up on that, tries to reimpose some sanctions, you're not responsible for the whole of this as the Defense Secretary. But militarily, what are the implications of that?

ASH CARTER: Well, militarily, letting Iran have a nuclear weapon, it very much complicates our position in the Gulf and our ability to defend our friends and allies. So it’s a setback. [simultaneous conversation]

TOM ASHBROOK: Do you think decertifying puts us on the road to them having a nuclear weapon?

ASH CARTER: Well, we’ll have to see what actions Congress takes. What I hope is that this expression of concern about Iran ends there. And that, in fact, we do not take apart an agreement, which is having a very important effect at protecting us and our allies. And, by the way, it is odd, at the same time, we are very understandably, as you and I were discussing, concerned about North Korea’s nuclear program. And very much regretting the history of the last 25 years as this state, also an avowed enemy of ours, has steadily moved to nuclear weapons, to allow North Korea—I mean excuse me, Iran to begin down the very same path.

TOM ASHBROOK: And decertifying, you would see as a step toward them getting back on that path?

ASH CARTER: It is. But there are many steps that remain. And so I hope that it doesn’t lead to the unraveling of something which is in our national security interests.

TOM ASHBROOK: You're guessing or hoping, I'm hearing, that even if the President decertifies, Congress would not follow up on that with the concrete actions that would suspend sanctions.

ASH CARTER: Yeah. And that—that—

TOM ASHBROOK: Or reimpose, I should say.

ASH CARTER: Yes. And that would save the substance of the agreement. And the President would have expressed himself about his concerns about Iran and his longstanding opposition to this agreement. But it would end there. And we wouldn’t, so to speak, cut off our nose to spite our face here and interrupt an agreement that is serving U.S. national security interests and our friends and allies.

TOM ASHBROOK: Ash Carter, can we talk about ISIS, or ISIL, as you say? I'm reading headlines here saying—this is from just a couple days ago—“Islamic State nearly expelled from its last urban stronghold in Iraq.” There's another headline, just a couple of days ago, “ISIS fighters surrendering en masse.” Now, we’ve got a long history here. And there have been times in the past when we sort of thought maybe the tide has turned. Maybe they're going down. What about this time? How do you assess? You were very active in U.S. strategy here and operations carrying it out against ISIS or ISIL. How do you assess where we stand now?

ASH CARTER: Well, what you see in Raqqa today, Raqqa in Syria, and what you saw in Mosul and Iraq, were the expelling of ISIL from the two principal cities that it said allowed it to claim that there was an Islamic State based upon this ideology. We can't have an Islamic State based upon this barbarism. We needed to destroy that. And it was necessary to destroy it in Mosul and destroy it in Raqqa. That is the military campaign plan we put together two years ago, and that you have seen steadily unfolding. And that culminated earlier in this year in the taking of Mosul and is culminating now in the taking of Raqqa. [simultaneous conversation]

TOM ASHBROOK: Please be more specific about that. I mean that’s in Syria.

ASH CARTER: In Syria, and Raqqa, which is a town most Americans of course have never even heard of—

TOM ASHBROOK: Yeah, the putative capital of the Islamic State.

ASH CARTER: Yes. What they said was the capital of their so-called state. And so it had enormous symbolic value and had practical value as well, because there were people in Raqqa—[simultaneous conversation]

TOM ASHBROOK: Doesn’t it still—Isn't it still—I'm sorry, forgive me.

ASH CARTER: Just it’s important that Americans know that there were people in Raqqa. It was there that most of the plots were hatched, where they were trying to inspire Americans and direct Americans to kill other Americans, and also Europeans as well. And our job [simultaneous conversation]

TOM ASHBROOK: —to float in and join the movement.

ASH CARTER: —is to protect our people. And we needed to protect our people. And to do that, we needed to get into Raqqa and kill them or expel them. That has now been done. And this is a great success for the U.S. military. You really have to salute what we have done. Now, we did it with the help of local forces, which was the strategy. Because we’ve had the experience of conquering places ourselves, then you become—then you have to govern them.

TOM ASHBROOK: And that’s tough.

ASH CARTER: Exactly. And so we have worked in the painful—and demands a lot of patience—to work with the Iraqi forces, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Syrian defense forces we’re working with in Syria. But it’s necessary in order to make defeat of ISIS stick. And now, my concern, at this point, Tom, is less the military campaign—and I salute my successor, Jim Mattis, he’s a good friend of mine, I've known him for 20 years—for continuing the campaign, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joe Dunford, and bringing it to this point.

My concern, at this stage, is less with the military side than with the political and economic side. Because if the people who live in Mosul and Raqqa don’t, as a consequence—they're glad, and we know this, to be free of these barbarians. Many of whom were foreigners, not local people at all, people from Russia and China and Europe and elsewhere, who got all jazzed up with the idea they were going to join an Islamic State, many of them sociopaths. And they're glad to be free of their rule. At the same time, they need to see their lives improve or, again, extremism will be able to take hold in Syria and Iraq.

So we need to do the economic and political follow-up. But really, I think this is a moment when Americans ought to look proudly at the performance of their military and their country. No other country could have put together a coalition like this. No other country could have led to a victory like this.

TOM ASHBROOK: Is ISIL actually vanquished?

ASH CARTER: Well, you can't say. It is a major, major advance to have them expelled from Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. And from their putative capital in Raqqa. It’s a great advance to have many of them killed. It’s a great advance to have the narrative punctured that there's going to be an Islamic State. But there's still some of them who survived. They're heading down the Euphrates Valley now. We will pursue them, attempt to kill them there.

TOM ASHBROOK: That is toward Baghdad?

ASH CARTER: Yes. And then you always have to worry—and this is what the FBI and Homeland Security and so forth do—about the American and his keyboard who’s never been anywhere, but is incited to violence by this. Now that becomes, I think, less likely because no one sitting at a keyboard in the United States can possibly believe that there is a successful Islamic State that they're operating on. But at the same time, people are sociopaths, and they have firearms and so forth. They can go out. And that’s where law enforcement and Homeland Security are still going to be important.

TOM ASHBROOK: What about the Islamic State turning outward if they lose—and have lost—territory in the region? We've always been told they may turn to terrorism abroad, maybe even here, themselves.

ASH CARTER: Well, they’ve been determined to carry out terrorist acts in the United States. And destroying their nests in the places from which they could stably plot makes it more difficult for them to attack the United States. They do aspire, Tom, to going other places—Libya, Southeast Asia. There are little nests of ISIS in Afghanistan. And I used to talk about the cancer of ISIS, and its parent tumor being in Iraq and Syria. But their burden metastases as well. It's necessary for us, and of course we did expel ISIS from Sirte in Libya last year. You know that the President Trump made a decision to remain in Afghanistan and, in fact, slightly increase the troop numbers there. That’s a decision I support. I recommended to President Obama, when I was Secretary, that we not leave Afghanistan, and actually a slight increase also then in our troop numbers. So this is something we need to stick with.

TOM ASHBROOK: Let’s go to our callers. Bob in Montreal. Bob, thank you for calling. You're on the air.: BOB: Hi Tom, Mr. Secretary, pleasure to share the air with you. This week, the Saudi king visited Russia, but with President Putin. I think this is the first time such a diplomatic happening took place. And apparently, they did a lot of business in the defense or arms industry. The Saudis bought some equipment from the Russians. My question to you, sir, is, it seems that President Putin has more sway and clout in the Middle East than ever before. And I'm wondering how you read that, in terms of U.S. influence in the Middle East and the region.

ASH CARTER: Well I read Vladimir Putin—People often ask me, “What is Vladimir Putin thinking?” And, of course, I've dealt with him for many years now. And I say, “You don’t have to wonder what he’s thinking. He tells you what he’s thinking.” And he does want to play a stronger hand in the world. And above all, he wants to thwart the United States. He sets that as a specific objective, which makes it so hard to deal with Vladimir. In general, I'm in favor of talking with other powers, including those who may be our opponents. But if somebody’s specific objective is to frustrate you, it’s a little hard to build a bridge to that objective. That has been his objective, in the Middle East. A question he came into Syria, his Defense Minister called me to say that they intended to fight ISIS and to move Assad out of Syria, with both [simultaneous conversation] move Assad aside, as he said.

TOM ASHBROOK: That hasn’t happened.

ASH CARTER: Well either—They didn’t fight ISIS either. So the two things they said they were going to do they didn’t do. Instead, they fueled the civil war in Syria and buttressed Assad. And they did nothing. It is we who have defeated ISIS. Russia had nothing to do with it. And yes, you’ll see them flirting with the Saudis. I think it’s pretty clear that we are the partner of choice for Saudi Arabia. They have nowhere else to go. And so, I'm not too concerned to see them talking to the Russians. I think, fundamentally, the Saudis need the United States. They recognize they need the United States. And we have been a good friend and supporter for them.

TOM ASHBROOK: Are you supportive of the Trump administration’s—President Trump’s friendly warmth toward Vladimir Putin and the Russians?

ASH CARTER: I don’t think it’s warranted, and I don’t think it’s actually going anywhere. Because if you think about it, there is no rapprochement ongoing with Russia. I don’t think that would be supported in this country. I think it’s made more difficult by the widespread recognition that Russia has not only been opposing the United States abroad, but meddled in our democratic process. That’s incontrovertible proof of that. And so, that’s not happening. There is no rapprochement with Russia. I don’t think—

TOM ASHBROOK: Does it matter, then, when the President has said, on the campaign trail and beyond, has talked about his admiration for Vladimir Putin, and talked about—Does that matter?

ASH CARTER: It has not been translated into a change of policy. And I'm glad of that, because I don’t think Vladimir Putin deserves that. Again, I don’t mind people talking to the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, Iran. But you need to understand what you're dealing with, with Russia. And this is a country, whether it’s been in Ukraine or in the Middle East or with respect to brandishing of nuclear weapons and its build-up of its nuclear arsenal or meddling in the U.S. democratic process, has been hostile to the United States. And that’s the Russia that we reckon with. And that's the Russia that we need to deal with. And that seems to be the case, notwithstanding what the President-elect said months ago.

TOM ASHBROOK: I'm Tom Ashbrook. This is On Point. We’re talking this hour with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter about the country’s military and security challenges. Right now, the challenges facing the Trump administration. Ash, Ashton Carter was Secretary of Defense from 2015 until the handover to the Trump administration and General James Mattis earlier this year. He joins me in the studio right now. And you can join us as well. Dana is calling from New Britain, Connecticut. Dana, you're on the air with Ash Carter.: DANA: Hi Tom. This is Dana. I just wanted to say quickly. I am a Trump voter. And aside from destroying ISIS in Raqqa, which is something that Trump did promise to do on the campaign trail, I got to say, these drumbeats towards war for North Korea and Iran is absolute insanity. It’s not what we need. It’s not what the world needs. We’re still reeling from the trillion dollar-plus wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the thousands dead and wounded. And you know, this is absolutely insane. It’s crazy to even—to even think about not one, but two wars. And it just reflects the control the neo-conservatives still have over our foreign policy.

TOM ASHBROOK: Well, is it what your candidate promised you, Dana, as a voter? You support Trump. Is it what you thought you had coming from this President, if he was elected?: DANA: No, it’s not, it’s not. I thought we were getting America first and staying out of these foreign theatres and, you know, sticking to ourselves, unless we’re attacked. And it seems like they're trying to manufacture crises and create these conditions for justification of starting all kinds of new wars.

TOM ASHBROOK: Dana, I appreciate your call. Ash Carter, a lot of Americans look at the threats, the language that Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee saying we’re at risk of being put on a path to World War III, and do feel exactly this high level of concern that, in fact, we may be close to some significant armed conflict here. Is that a fair assessment?

ASH CARTER: Well even though I have been, my entire life, charged with defending our country, and I believe very deeply in that mission, Dana has a point, which is that there is a frustration. And this is one of the things that I share, and that I'm working on right now, in our country, with the feeling that progress, particularly technological progress, isn't serving the entirety of the population. And that there are some people whose lives are disrupted and who were left behind.

TOM ASHBROOK: How does that relate to the fear of war that Dana is expressing?

ASH CARTER: Well, Dana is saying that he was looking for someone who would look more towards America’s problems at home. I wish we were able to it either/or. I'm just acknowledging that Dana’s right. We have things here at home that we need to pay attention to. And I realize people—and I understood this, and I heard a lot of that when I was Secretary of Defense—fatigue with being overseas. At the same time, I have to say, we need to protect ourselves. It’s a dangerous world out there. And we do have Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, ISIS, other terrorist organizations. And we simply have to protect ourselves. So I understand that we need to do more at home. And I share much of Dana’s belief that there's work to be done at home.

At the same time, I think, without getting us into every conflict that we could conceivably have, we do need to stand strong and protect ourselves. I've already said, in North Korea, that I favor a path of giving coercive diplomacy a chance, and a caution, which it sounds like our caller shares, with the price of a war there, which would be far greater than anything we did in Iraq or Afghanistan.

TOM ASHBROOK: What about the characterization of the Obama administration which you served? It’s reflected in this comment from a listener. A question to Ash Carter. Did Obama’s policy of appeasement succeed, regarding Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela? That word appeasement, that’s a Trump kind of characterization of what came before. And you hear this listener saying, “Well, was that it?”

ASH CARTER: Well, let’s see. Let’s just walk around the world there. With respect to Russia, President Obama supported NATO, supported standing strong, our build-up of our own forces in Europe, which I led, and didn’t fall for what they were doing in Syria.

TOM ASHBROOK: They the Russians?

ASH CARTER: The Russians. With respect to China, President Obama supported me again in a build-up of our forces, the so-called rebalance. We’ve put our newest and best stuff out there. With respect to North Korea, we have 28,500 troops. There was no diminution in those number of troops. And we’ve improved them very greatly, qualitatively. With respect to Iran, President Obama did conclude the Iran nuclear deal, which, as I've said, actually is in our interest because it takes off the table one of the things that Iran could use to threaten us and our friends and allies. And then finally, with respect to ISIS, the campaign that I talked about earlier, which is culminating now, and resulting in the defeat of ISIS in Mosul and Iraq, was one that I and Joe Dunford recommended to President Obama, and he consistently approved. And I never, when I asked him for more in Iraq, even though we all recognized this was someone who did not want to be in a war in Iraq, as something he ran on, he nevertheless approved every single request that General Dunford and I made. So that’s kind of a walk around the world.

TOM ASHBROOK: Carol in New Orleans. Carol, you're on the air with Ash Carter. Thank you for calling.: CAROL: Hi. Thank you for the pleasure of speaking to someone who really knows the workings of government. But my question is, the allies that we have in Europe, particularly Angela Merkel, has stated that, you know, the European countries are now, pretty much their destiny is left to themselves. They don’t trust this President. They know he’s not competent. They know he’s not stable. How can we be such a great power in the world and continue to be that when you have this instability in our own country, someone who doesn’t understand the complexities of the world? And then he touts off all the—and physically abuses to other world leaders. I mean this is a bizarre situation for our country.

TOM ASHBROOK: Ash Carter?

ASH CARTER: Well, I think that there are people in the United States who think that alliances, which we have with our NATO countries, are a gift that America gives to foreigners. They're not. They're one of the ways we get what we want. And so, by working with Europe, we help protect ourselves, first of all against Russia, and that’s what the NATO alliance was born for. And now, in recent years, we have had to recreate NATO as, essentially, a bulwark against Russia. And also, NATO works with us in Afghanistan and has worked with us in fighting ISIS.

So if you look around the world, and you say, “Where are there people who are kind of like us? They share some of our values of civilization and decency and respect for people and respect for the world order.” Europe is one of those places. So I think they're valuable partners and allies. At the same time, I am in a long line of American leaders, and our current President is one also, who have complained that the Europeans don’t do enough in their defense. So I would—I had that same view. I told the Europeans very bluntly they needed to do more.

At the same time, I believe that the NATO alliance is in our interest. And you really have to look—Spin a globe sometime and ask yourself, “Where are there people who share the values of western civilization?” They're certainly not in ISIS, and currently in Moscow and Beijing, certainly not in Pyongyang or Tehran. So we need to—we need to keep our friends.

TOM ASHBROOK: Has President Trump’s attitude damaged those alliances?

ASH CARTER: I can't say, Tom, because there's—As I talk to foreign leaders around the world, they have stopped paying attention to each and every tweet. And they tend to watch the behavior more.

TOM ASHBROOK: What does that mean for American leadership?

ASH CARTER: Well it means that we lose an opportunity to inspire others to do what we want to do. So that’s clearly a missed opportunity. At the same time, people are looking at what we do and not what we say. And what we do is we continue to have our forces in NATO. We continue to work with NATO. President Trump finally made a statement in which he said that he supported the NATO alliance. So it’s not as good as leadership, but the actions are what people are looking at, and less so the words. That’s just sadly the situation that we find ourselves in.

TOM ASHBROOK: A listener writes on Twitter, “The blanket of diplomacy that covers the whole world with sanity is coming unraveled. And the U.S. is pulling the string now.”

ASH CARTER: Well, the blanket of diplomacy is one of the principal—Obviously, I'm responsible for defense. But I very much respect the diplomatic function. I respect what the State Department does. And it is the principal way that the peace is kept.

TOM ASHBROOK: Is it coming unraveled?

ASH CARTER: Well, I think that clarity and consistency and principle are important in American foreign policy. There's no one else who can do what we do. There's no one else who could have, for example, led the defeat of ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa.

TOM ASHBROOK: Are those being delivered now, clarity and principle?

ASH CARTER: Oh, I’d like to see more clarity, consistency, and principle, no question about it. I think we miss an opportunity when we don’t have that. Even if people have learned to not pay attention to every tweet, that’s not as good as being inspired by the United States. That’s the opportunity that we miss. And I hope we can someday return to.

TOM ASHBROOK: Can we turn to the cyber front? We've heard for years about the U.S. strengthening its cyber defenses. And yet I sometimes wonder if we have defined them too narrowly. And you described the Soviet—or the Russian, excuse me, intervention in our election, efforts to get right in the middle of that last year. We have seen ongoing reports of espionage, sometimes pretty deep, from China. There's a report I'm reading here, a South Korean legislator saying that North Korea has been reading our battle plans with the South Koreans in case it did come to war in the Korean Peninsula. Are we really taking on the full breadth of cyber threat? Or do we have to kind of imagine our line situation here, where we’re kind of taking it seriously, but we’re still more into tanks and planes and ships? And, if push came to shove, we could be disabled digitally?

ASH CARTER: I don’t think we’re taking it nearly seriously enough. I believe that in defense. And that is why I was so intent upon improving our cyber defenses. But they're not where they should be. And I never believed our networks were secure. And you see, again and again, security breaches by the National Security Agency, which is the agency which is supposed to be the most expert at cyber. And then it pervades civil society as well. You see companies being hacked. Your personal information being revealed. And then we have the very democratic process, the electoral process. So people should not assume that data is secure, that networks are secure. And I believe, as a technological matter now, and as a technologist myself, we are a long way from there.

TOM ASHBROOK: Do we have a false sense of security, then, behind our—We have a $700 billion dollar budget for the Pentagon.

ASH CARTER: If you have a sense of security about cyber protection, it is false. And therefore, for example, I said I simply assumed that our networks were penetrated. [simultaneous conversation]

TOM ASHBROOK: But could you have a real effective defense in place?

ASH CARTER: Yes. [simultaneous conversation] Yes, because we planned, and we trained people to prevail and continue to fight and to win despite having their networks disrupted. But you need to pay attention to that. So we spent a lot of money, and we need to do more. I'm not saying, Tom, that it’s not on the contrary. We need to do more to protect our networks and strengthen them. But we also need to take into account that we need to protect ourselves even if our networks are vulnerable.

And I think individuals need to understand the same thing. When you go on, and you give people your personally identifiable information, don’t believe that there won't come a day when that might be revealed.

TOM ASHBROOK: We've just got a couple of minutes left. We got a lot of people asking about the nuclear—even nuclear exchange fear or war fear that's in the air these days. Describe, if the President—if a President gives the order for a nuclear attack, what happens? And is there a place for a pause before it’s actually carried out, or even a resistance to the order?

ASH CARTER: In our system, only the President of the United States may authorize the use of nuclear weapons. I was number two in the chain of command. I was not authorized to use nuclear weapons.

TOM ASHBROOK: Were you authorized to slow it or resist it or pause or say, “Wait a minute. What’s Congress think?”

ASH CARTER: In the event that nuclear use was contemplated, I certainly thought and believed that I, as Secretary of Defense, would be on the telephone with the President, that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be on the telephone, that the Secretary of State, quite possibly the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, and we would all be able to make our views heard.

TOM ASHBROOK: But if the President says, “Go,” could you, as Defense Secretary, now James Mattis’s role, say, “No”?

ASH CARTER: I am in the chain of command. And I would try to—If I thought it was a rash act, I would do everything I could to try to talk the President out of that. You always have, as a senior civilian leader, the option of refusing to carry out a Presidential order, in which case you need to resign.

TOM ASHBROOK: And then what happens?

ASH CARTER: And then the Deputy Secretary of Defense becomes the Secretary of Defense. We’ve been in circumstances like this before, Tom. Not about nuclear war, but when Presidents, and then Richard Nixon did this with his Attorney General, gave an order that the Attorney General was unwilling to carry out, and the Attorney General resigned. But I think that this is why, well before you get to the point where you're on that telephone with the President, and that circumstance, you, as Secretary of Defense, need to help the President to understand his duties better. I hope that is what Jim Mattis, is an old friend of mine, is doing now. So you don’t get to that circumstance where rash decisions could be made.

TOM ASHBROOK: Ash, Ashton Carter, former Defense Secretary of the United States, it’s been a fascinating conversation. Thank you very much for joining us today.

ASH CARTER: Always, Tom.

TOM ASHBROOK: Listeners, thanks for all your questions and comments here. You can continue this conversation. Get the On Point podcast at our website, OnPointRadio.org. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Tom Ashbrook. This is On Point.

END OF INTERVIEW

Interview with Tom Ashbrook on National Public Radio's "On Point"