Vídeo: David Petraeus: guerra e paz não é assim tão simples

🗣️ Transcrição automática de voz para texto.

a [Music] hello we’re delighted to welcome you to another episode of It’s not that simple from the Francis Manu Sant Foundation today we are at the beautiful Kaza the mus the House of Music in the north of Portugal in Porto to meet with our star guest he is General David Petraeus welcome um we are going to discuss and try to break down one of the most relevant most pertinent Topics in the world today which is War and Peace and where we stand as a planet as uh human beings uh entering another decade very soon um of course as you may know General David Petraeus is a former US general with a long career in the military 37 years uh of course you were commander in a war in Afghanistan also in Iraq director of the CIA um also an author you had a best-selling book um that was very successful conflict the evolution of warfare from 1945 to Ukraine that was published late last year I could go on uh talking about your your CV which is indeed illustrious but I wanted to get into the number one topic really that everybody is discussing today when it comes to the state of play um in in in geopolitical tensions around the world we are living in a complicated time we’ve got Wars raging across two continents many other conflicts emerging um we’ve got terrible war in in in uh Ukraine um also of course in the Middle East um General when you look at the state of play today um How concerned are you about global Warfare um very concerned uh first of all thanks uh for being my interrogator my interviewer here Pedro and thanks to the foundation for the invitation to be with you um I think it’s important to put this in context uh I actually left uh government over 11 years ago um since then I’ve been with one of the world’s largest investment firms KKR I chair and I establish the KKR Global Institute which does the geopolitical risk analysis for any of the deals where that is important and it has become increasingly important and that’s quite simply because the world has transformed during that 11-year period from one that could be described as benign globalization in which economics Lar largely drove geopolitics in which the barriers to trade Capital flows investment data flows were all being reduced were all going down and global trade was going like that 11 years later the world has seen seismic change geopolitics is back in a big way with a Vengeance in fact now geopolitics increasingly drives economics now those barriers that I mentioned that were all being reduced before have all been going up and we’re going to see even more of that because we’re in for a number of uh various tariffs of various types uh as the US the EU other major economies around the world are increasingly concerned about China exporting its quote overc capacity you just saw the US put huge tariffs on electric vehicles coming from China that were heavily subsidized so you’re going to see much much more protectionism uh you’ll see much more industrial policy and you’ll see other limits again on where we can invest uh and also how they can export and so on so now globalization has become slob alization it’s almost flat or sometimes up and down and in many respects within it there is regionalization all these major themes that have evolved from the return of geopolitics in fact I contend that today the US its allies the Western World if you will faces more challenges in number and more comp complex challenges than at any time I’d actually argue since World War II but certainly at least since the end of the Cold War if you think of us as the guy in the circus who keeps a lot of plate spinning on sticks uh rushing around and us is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here but so are all of our allies and partners uh there are more plates in that tent and some of them represent more complex problems than any time in the past the US and Western relationship with China is the biggest most important plate in that tent bigger than all the others put together can’t let that wobble if we can avoid it but there’s a much more menacing Russia plate there’s still a North Korea nuclear plate Iran perhaps represented by three plates its nuclear program its support to malign Shia and even Sunni in the case of Hamas militias in the region uh and then it’s its drone and missile program which has expanded so sub substantially there are still individual islamist extremist organizations that you have to keep an eye and pressure on or what happens is what happens when we withdrew our final combat forces from Iraq the Prime Minister pursued sectarian actions the security forces took their eye off the Islamic State which we had destroyed during the surge in Iraq which I was privileged to command and kept down for the subsequent three and a half years and all of a sudden two years later you have the first ever islamist extremist caliphate uh in modern history and there’s a number of other organizations like that extremist groups again that are increasingly concerning uh there are various cyber threats whether they come from nation states criminal entities extremist groups you name it there’s all those there are manifestations of climate change that are ever more worrisome you know the Storm of the Century seems to be every other year now wildfires have never been as destructive uh desertification is causing Mass migration especially of course into into Europe and in especially the southern part of Europe and the Mediterranean and I could go on there’s populism in various countries that is very concerning including to some degree in the United States so think about all of those different plates um think about the effort required to keep them all spinning and I didn’t even really talk about all the conflicts that are in the Middle East which I’m sure we’ll get to as well so that’s the world in which we find ourselves and I learned as a forestar general uh and as a director of the CIA that you have to deal with the world the way it is not the way you’d like it to be and the way it is right now is fairly fraught uh it’s there are lot lots and lots of threats uh I believe that it’s absolutely in our cold hard National interest in the United States and in the interest of the other countries that hold the values and principles and so forth uh dear that we all do together uh to do everything we can to maintain the rules-based international order which has actually been very good for us not just in security terms but also frankly in terms of uh our economies and again a world that allows our system to continue to operate wow you did really well to set the stage and set the table for this conversation and you actually this is what I do for a living after I also teach by the way in fact I teach a course on great power competition a graduate seminar at Yale is my academic Endeavor right now well I’m looking forward to to learning from you during this conversation because it’s so clear that it is so complex and taking into account all the different spinning plates it’s important to have someone or uh uh the right people spinning those plates right so we’ve got obviously a big day coming up with the US elections how much many many months off still it’s a quite a long period of time a lot can happen Okay true but still um how how much does world peace and the ability to spin those plates correctly depend on the outcome of of that election it’s certainly a factor um if we obviously if Biden stay wins re-election that you’ll have a degree of continuity that you might not have with President Trump returning to the White House but that’s not actually clear that depends on who is around him it depends on his individual relationship with individual leaders some leaders worked much more effectively with him in his previous term than did others depends frankly on whether Europeans continue to step up to the plate and spend 2% of GDP on defense and help Ukraine it’s their their your continent after all this kind of thing so again I think there was a number of factors that will actually determine if he is elected what the policies are and certainly there are some areas in which there could be again if you the reversion to perhaps America First although we saw that play out last time and I used to always caution people and say yep read the tweets listen to the sound bites but then follow the troops follow the money and follow the policy uh and by and large the policy on Europe and nato in particular despite the harsh criticism at times of certain countries in particular but the most important country is actually now spending 2% of GDP on defense and that is Germany which just recently became the number three economy in the world so you’ve had the ziton Venda here so again I I hate to lay out you know all these I’m going to say it depends a lot uh for two reasons one is that I used to teach economics and the answer to every question is always it depends and then you lay out the factors but the other reason is frankly because it really does depend I mean if you ask me what’s going to happen in Ukraine I will answer it depends it depends on Contin us assistance we now have that $61 billion is a staggering sum of money it’s 11 billion than the more than the entire EU contribution of 50 billion is all in security and it’s even almost 20 billion more than we provided in the first two years of the war which was very substantial 44 billion it depends also though on Ukraine getting its Force generation processes cranked into high gear they had a very emotional debate uh in their rod in the parliament over the conscription law you know they have a very different concept from our systems in the two Wars that I was privileged to command at the top level Iraq and Afghanistan the average age of a soldier on the front lines is roughly 19 to 22 the average age in Ukraine is 42 or 43 is because they conscript much later they believe young men should be able to finish their education get married start a family and then it used to be at the age of 27 they’re first eligible for conscription they have Lo reduced that to 25 that’s good uh but now they’ve got to get the process going and all the rest of this and because there’s been so much displacement to try to find all those who are now eligible for conscription crank up the training base all the rest of this so that’s a huge issue it depends on the relative ability of Russia to continue to generate forces and Replacements and soldiers noting that of course however impressive president zelinsky’s strategic leadership may have been and strategic leaders have to perform four tasks they have to get the big ideas right the strategy they have to over they have to communicate the Big Ideas effectively through the breadth and depth of the organization and all stakeholders they have to oversee the implementation of the big ideas and then they have to determine how to refine the big ideas and do it again and again and again think about his first big idea is I don’t want to ride I want ammunition I’m going to stay in ke my family’s going to stay in ke we’re going to fight for ke we’re not going to give up our country uh and and on and on however impressive that has been of course his communication skills are exceptional was after all an actor in fact he was a comedian who played the president so effectively to got elected president uh and then his example energy inspiration all these in tasks of overseeing the implementation you know he’s never worn a suit since day one he put on some form of military uniform goes to the front lines in contrast to Putin who’s at the end of a long marble table so again all very very impressive but there’s a reality here and that reality is that Russia has a population that’s much more than three times the size of Ukraine’s and probably even more than that given the the uh individuals who have uh left Ukraine um and then you have an economy in Russia that’s at least 10 times the size of Ukraine’s as well so this very very challenging it depends on relative technological advances on other side look at what the ukrainians did for example with their Maritime and air drones and anti- ship missiles have sunk over onethird of the ships of the Black Sea Fleet of Russia they forced Russia to withdraw from the Western Black Sea including the centuries Old Port of sevastopol in Western Crimea which means now that the ukrainians can export grain which is really important for their fiscal situation it’s also important for Egypt’s food security that’s 25% of the world’s grain exports so you see what what technology can do they’re each racing with each other to use these unmanned systems of various types in the battlefield in the front lines the ukrainians in particular because they want to send machines not men given the disad advantage that they’re at in that regard they’re producing tens of thousands of drones per month and you’re seeing there by the way hints of the future of conflict ironically or paradoxically though Ukraine has been described correctly by Max boot one of the great Washington Post writers as the war in which All Quiet on the Western Front Of course a World War one uh reference reference uh meets Blade Runner uh you know you’ve got World War I style trenches dugouts barbed wire concertina wire use of Cs gas by the Russians miles deep uh Mine Fields and so forth but then right on top of them where you have Cold War era armored systems and so forth with improvements trying to breach these minefields right on top of them you have drones and the drones can send a coordinate digitally back to the fire Direction Center which puts it on the guns and you have very accurate Fire Within very short period of time so again it’s a almost a hybrid Warfare in that regard in terms of old and new um and so all these different Dynamics continued European support is very important as well and the Europeans have been stepping up to the plate and Trump can perhaps gain claim some credit for that although every US president uh that I ever soldiered for was critical of Europeans for not and not not enough of them spending 2% of GDP on defense but how sustainable is it to keep up this support sustainable yeah no it’s very sustainable we can do this it’s it’s we can keep all these different plates spinning in fact we have to think about it if the most important Dynamic is the relationship between the US the west and China what are we trying to do there well we’re trying to deter conflict deterrence is a function of two elements one is the potential adversaries assessment of your capabilities the other is the assessment of your willingness to use those capabilities and if you can’t even sustain or support uh a partner uh who is fighting a common enemy who is carrying out the first invasion of a neighboring country in Europe since World War II what does that say about your willingness to use your forces in the Indo Pacific frankly I thought that the withdrawal from Afghanistan which I argued against I said publicly we would come to regret and I believe we have it’s a horrific outcome um and predicted that if we pulled out that the Afghan forces at some point were going to sustain a psychological collapse I think that undermined deterrence in fact president she seized on it he said hey all you first island country countries uh look at that us is not a trustworthy partner Ally and by the way look at how it went they’re are great power and decline now I don’t agree with either of those and I think we have responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine probably much more substantially than Putin thought he was probably influenced by Afghanistan as well nonetheless you have to make sure there’s no no question without you don’t want to be needlessly provocative but you don’t want any doubts in the eyes of an potential adversary about your willingness to employ the forces that you have and you need to transform those forces which is what it is we’re doing in the Indo Pacific we’re hardening bases we’re putting headquarters underground we’re dispersing the forces we’re proving the defenses Shoring up our alliances Philippines Japan and Korea working together all of these different actions the quad and so forth uh those are all very very important because again the most important task in the world is to ensure that this relationship that the US National Security adviser has described as severe competition does not become severe confrontation I want to get into China in a in a moment uh first however uh we need to address the situation in the Middle East it’s obvious that the US position in the war in Ukraine and Russia is to support Ukraine obviously Israel has been a longtime partner and Ally of the US but how long do you think that can happen for and will always be there regardless of what the behavior and the attitude of the IDF is in the war in Gaza and the atro I think it’s generally going to always be there uh there are certain Dynamics in American society that will lead us to do that um that said uh and I was in by the way been in Ukraine three times in the last year including I guess it was five or six weeks ago and then I was in uh Israel uh also around that time and I have a relationship with the minister of defense and with others and I have talked to them and and said publicly as well that while I do believe that Hamas does need to be destroyed I I equate Hamas to the Islamic State it’s not reconcilable it is an it is an islamist extreme historic Army that cannot be reconciled we did reconcile in Iraq as you may recall we reconciled with 103,000 former Sunni insurgents lower ranking and Shia militia uh but not with the irreconcilables uh they have to be detained or they have to be killed if they don’t go into detention so destruction by the way as a military doctrinal term means to render the enemy incapable of accomplishing his mission without reconstitution again I believe they do need to be destroyed I believe that they can never be allowed to rule Gaza again or to govern Gaza and of course you got to get the hostages back the problem is that how you do this matters enormously that’s number one um and in that regard their campaign design is inadequate they’re essentially going into areas in Gaza destroying the the battalions again there’s about 24 battalions to begin with down to about 19 or 20 the rest have been temporarily destroyed the problem is that they are clearing and leaving which is what we did before the surge in rock and it’s very ephemeral yep you destroyed that unit unit you rendered it incapable of accomplishing its Mission but you did not prevent it from reconstituting and if that’s the case it will reconstitute we’ve seen they had to go back into alifa Hospital which they should have held on to and made them to the greatest Medical Center in the Middle East to take care of the people who were caught uh in the crossfire uh they’ve had to go back twice into Northern Gaza and so the idea is that they need to add two other elements and essentially they need to conduct a comprehensive civil military counter campaign just like what we did in Iraq noting that the context is different in a number of ways and it’s fish more challenging given 350 Mi of Tunnel right an enemy who uses civilians as human Shields holds over a 100 hostages and all the rest of those and knows the neighborhood far better than Al-Qaeda and Iraq ever did in ratti fuia mosul and so on that said the construct the campaign design I think un inescapably has to be clear hold and build or they will never really accomplish their mission in a sustained or sustainable Manner and what I mean here is that you you do first of all first and foremost you announce before an operation we are going to destroy Hamas we’re going to then make life better for the Palestinian people in Gaza and here’s how we’re going to do it uh once we get Hamas out of your neighborhood we’re going to create a gated community we did 12 of these I think it was in fujia you have an control Point into it um you biometric ID cards so you know who’s who and who can go in and out uh bomb sniffing dogs x-ray machines and everything else you flood these areas with humanitarian assistance so they show you are making life better you gradually work with local Partners there’s Clans in there that some of whom can be incorporated into helping in this regard they’re not going to love the Israelis the way the Arabs Sunni Arabs eventually came to love the Americans um as they saw that we were really improving their lives but again you at least get them to avoid fighting you and then you start to rebuild but sorry to interrupt this hasn’t really been done though it we did it in Iraq course right but the Israelis are not really following this this is the challenge not at all no and despite despite counsel despite suggestions um no question um and there’s a number of reasons for this uh we should understand one is the trauma that the Israelis sustained we lost not quite 3,000 in the 9/11 attacks this would be the equivalent for us what the Israelis suffered of 42,000 killed and 7,000 taken hostage so just think about that this is the worst day in the history of Israel and that has rendered the Israelis in many cases uh finding it difficult to differentiate between Hamas and innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza even the Minister of Defense said said was you know this is going to be a scorched Earth campaign early on in this campaign and I and I know him and have enormous respect he’s an old Soldier old comrade um so that’s first then the second is that they’ve never done a counter Insurgency campaign all of their Urban operations are essentially punitive you go in and you strike something you destroy of headquarters or something and then you pull back out in the past there’s no field manual for it there’s no training by the way it took us years to figure this out in fact it was on my I had six consecutive commands as a general officer only one was not in combat and that’s the one where we wrote the Canter Insurgency Field Manual did all these other work overhauled every aspect of preparation of our forces leaders organizations equipment and everything else for Iraq and Afghanistan it made a huge difference is again we had to learn how to do this and of course it’s at the end of the day it’s a conscript Army it’s not the kind of long tenured professional force that we had as well there are spectacular capabilities resident in it and extraordinary initiative and brains and technology and everything else but this just takes boots on the ground uh and you have to conduct the operations in a way that does not sew the seeds of Hamas 2.0 we had which you were very careful to do we were very very careful about that we had we first of all we took the Geneva Convention and laws of land Warfare very very seriously we had very uh strict rules of engagement based on those but then we all you know I had a sign on the wall and these again I five combat commands the general officer the sign was staring me in the face asking will this operation take more bad guys off the street than it creates by its conduct if the answer to that is no in other words it is going to create more bad guys you’re supposed to go back and figure out how you get to yes if you can’t get to yes you go sit under a tree until the thought passes with the way we phrase this um now this is a fishlyn that come licate everything because you at some point you have to use some pretty substantial Munitions they work very hard to get the civilians out of the way with text messages leaflets loudspeakers you name it some civilians just won’t leave then you’re in the Dilemma of what is the military necessity here versus the potential collateral damage these are tough issues and I’m very loath to sort of second guess from afar but clearly the damage and Destruction has been very substantial and the loss of innocent life regardless of whose metrics you use in the arguments over how many of these are actually hos Etc has still been been you know quite quite significant so how you do this first of all getting the campaign design right then actually executing the clear operations which are where that’s the kinetic component then how do you keep the neighborhood secure gated Comm we built miles and miles of cement wall every night we didn’t build the walls we just slung the walls somebody else is building them you put them on lowboys you have cranes you put it that’s how you keep these communities free of uh in our case Al-Qaeda and Iraq which became the Islamic State but also the Shia militia and certain areas as well so there’s all these tactics techniques and procedures then you get biometric ID cards and and all the rest of this this is very challenging stuff but if you don’t do this you’re going to have to keep going back into these areas now you might hermetically seal Gaza which they are they now control the Rafa Crossing as well but and so you’re whittling down Hamas but in the meantime it’s pretty chaotic inside Gaza not just the humanitarian uh challenges that exist there and the constant pushing around of the displaced people um but also who’s actually providing security if you will or who’s in charge and it’s a mix there are literally criminal groups in some cases there are Clans that actually might do a reasonable job remnants of Hamas and of course the minute the Israelis leave Hamas is going to start to reconstitute so you’ve got to clear hold build and if if this is not done you’re just not going to achieve the results that that they want and and again that I’d like to see them achieve noting that how they do it really does matter how concerned are you that the longer this conflict goes on for the higher the probabilities are for involvement or further involvement from Iran from Lebanon um and and that the situation could then also uh uh escalate and impact Supply chains in in the Red Sea and and yeah I the interesting thing about the Middle East is that unless there is a reduction in the supply of crude crude oil natural gas and distillates coming out of the gulf it has very little effect on the global economy you know there’s no great Supply chains in in these areas there certainly Israel is a technological superpower startup nation and so forth but at the end of the day that’s not akin to disrupting the China supply chain to the US and the EU during the pandemic um yes it takes 12 or more give or take days if you have to go around Africa instead of through the Suez Canal yes Egypt is very concerned because they’re losing 60% of the revenue that they normally get from ships transiting the Suez Canal but again by and large the the markets price that in very quickly and it’s really all about the flow of crude natural gas and distl it’s out of the gulf and here’s the irony uh Iran exports 1.5 million barrels of oil and distill its a day they’re not going to interfere with freedom of navigation in the Gulf obviously the other countries don’t want to interfere with it and frankly the US is not going to put sanctions on Iran uh in an election year where price of the gasoline pump is a big factor in in inflation so if you understand the Dynamics here I just don’t see it affecting now that doesn’t mean that that the conflict is not very concerning it doesn’t mean there’s not possib abilities of escalation but frankly uh Hezbollah the Iranian supported Shia militia Army really in southern Lebanon they’re limiting themselves both in the numbers of attacks they do per day and the the distance that they’re doing these um and so it’s you know 13 attacks or so 8 to 13 something like that Israelis are responding in kind sometimes going a bit deeper after some of the leaders or something like this but again okay that’s not a full pledged War now we’ll see what happens because Israel does want to push Hezbollah north of the Laton river which would get certain of the more ubiquitous rocket launchers and so forth out of range of Israel so that they can move tens of thousands of Israelis who used to live in the northern part of the country and have had to be evacuated just as they’ve evacuated tens of thousands from the south so that’s a dynamic presence certainly the Iranians supported Shia militia many of them from Iraq carry out individual attacks the houthis as I mentioned but we’re actually grinding the houthis down you’re not seeing as many attacks in the Red Sea what’s really interesting about the Red Sea is that this is the first Naval Combat real Naval Combat something more than the little tanker Wars that we had in the Gulf some decades ago real Combat since World War II if you think about it I mean they’re getting really shot at and they are defending themselves and they’re shooting back and this is quite a quite an interesting and and again technology will Leap Forward during this kind of event because the importance of uh combating the C the uh drones so counter unmanned aerial system cuas is really big right now and I think we’ll see some breakthroughs we’re going to see high power microwave okay make its make its appearance on the battlefield I should acknowledge I’m a personal investor in what I think is the best high power microwave system it’s publicly known that it’s it’s the Army US Army is deploying it to the to that region I think it’s going to prove very impressive and you’re seeing again technological advances in Ukraine and also to a degree on Russia they are also very impressive in fact Russia’s electronic warfare which has always been one of their strengths is actually reducing the effectiveness of some of the Precision Munitions the US has provided and so we’re having to retool those and having to figure out how we how we deal with that and Ukraine is doing the same on their side um Ukraine even has remote controlled machine guns now the problem is they can’t figure out how to reload them remotely or how to fix a stoppage but you know it’s yeah know the the advance are quite significant but again to come back does this really affect the global economy not necessarily what it what what’s going on in the Middle East th though does reaffirm what we used to call the centcom truths there’s three of these um the first is that Las Vegas rules do not apply in the Middle East what happens there doesn’t stay there it tends to spew violence extremism um instability and a tsunami of refugees in some cases all the way into our Europe European allies yeah um second is that you’ve really got to know who your friends are and who your enemies are and Iran is our enemy and we should never confuse it for anything else Israel and others the Gulf States and so forth are our friends um and then the third is that we need to understand that these efforts to try to leave the Middle East which we do periodically we have the pivot to Asia we have this we draw down we you know when I was the commander of us Central Commander and the whole region which is from Egypt in the west to Pakistan in the East Kazakhstan in the north Yemen and the pirate infested waters of Somalia in the South we had 250,000 men and women in uniform alone and another 250,000 or more contractors as well it’s vastly reduced from that time and it should be but the effort at a certain point you need to recognize there’s a certain threshold presence that is required and stop trying to leave because leaving the Middle East for the United States is like Michael Corleone trying to leave the mafia you just keep getting sucked back in you mentioned at the top of our conversation that China was definitely the biggest plate that had to be y spun without question um you know largest trading partner for about 120 countries around the world uh the world’s manufacturing Colossus although some of that is Shifting because of a variety of Dynamics including recognition that you shouldn’t have all your manufacturing and assembly done in one part of one country especially if there’s there’s a zero covid and you’re making Apple iPhones so where are they building the new factories India so a lot of and then there’s Rising labor cost there there’s problems concerns about supp supply chain security dual use Technologies all of this and the restrictions on what we can sell them and what they can buy with us all of these are much newer if you will uh uh and are the factors that have transform the world from again benign globalization to renewed great power rivalries so so how difficult will it be how challenging will it be to keep that trade partner aligned in any way when it no longer makes a a secret out of backing Putin and his efforts in in Ukraine when it cannot align politically and maybe even uh um when it when you consider the geopolitical forces at play in various conflicts around the world how do you keep trading with them how do you keep aligning with them in having that interaction and and when it can continue to be morally sound or not y well first of all you can’t decouple you can drisk to varing degrees but they can’t decouple from us we we depend almost entirely on China for certain critical minerals strategics processed again it’s an enormous dependence there are third largest trading partner right after as always the our two North American neighbors um but they also have a pretty big dependence on us without what we sell them they can’t feed their people and they can’t feed their livestock so there’s a you know a dual dependency this is two ways absolutely um it would be great if we could all recognize you know can’t we all just get along and be more have a more mutually beneficial relationship but right now it’s again it’s a very competitive severe comp competition as the Jake Sullivan has described it what you want to do is again make sure that doesn’t break into real conflict and you the way you do that is you talk talk talk you have military to military ties keep in mind when that Chinese intelligence balloon floated over the United States before we shot it down um the Pentagon picked up the hotline and nobody answered in Beijing that’s not good that’s dangerous and so again that’s what you have at play here you’ve got to talk you got to establish guard rails a floor to the relationship all the rest of this and we’ve been doing quite a bit of that especially since president piden and president she met um out in uh outside San Francisco during the big Summit when you have a look at uh all the conflicts that are occurring in the world today in taking into account your extensive experience on the ground which one worries you the most well actually again I I would come back to the importance of deterence of again conflict with China that’s what matters most then after that probably Ukraine because it’s such a profound threat to the you know if Putin succeeds in Ukraine he’s not stopping there this is a guy who when he was asked what was the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century a century that of course had two world wars and a Great Depression among others he said the dissolution of the Soviet Union that gives you an insight into how he thinks and he’s been trying to reassemble as much of the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire or whatever that as he can pretty Limited success so far uh bellarus I guess really and you know he’s sort of lost Armenia now to a considerable degree lost the Central Asian States again they still have relationships and ties but it’s not the remotely what it is that he’d like it to be but if he succeeds in Ukraine mova is next in fact mdova has a very important election coming up um and we need to do everything we can to help them uh help this government to show that they’re the right choice for the people rather than the opposition which will turn East rather than West and we’ve seen a little bit of that of course in Eastern Europe as well um then he would go after Lithuania probably or one or more of the Baltic states and now you’re into a a Russia NATO uh conflict and that’s very very serious obviously fortunately here in Portugal we not really Dragged In to any of these conflicts we’re a pretty neutral country um Peace abiding country but as you as you sit here today and and and we here on on Portuguese territory what what m message do you have for a country like Portugal for uh young people here for Europeans when it comes to the role that we can play as a country and as as a continent as as Europe as EU in in maintaining some kind of deterrence from serious conflict and and warfare well I mean frankly it should be everything that that country can possibly do especially when you have a situation like Ukraine yes you know you’ll say well what do we do really does it really matter it does absolutely it’s not just the political effect there is a physical component to this there’s good forces here you know we’ve had have soldiered with uh Portuguese and and all the DAT countries obviously I think the Coalition in Afghanistan was something like 60 to 65 countries um and some of those are pretty small I remember there was one prime minister and minister of defense and chief of Defense staff that were visiting me and I realized I was giving him more minutes of my time than he was giving us soldiers from his small country that’s okay you know coalitions matter I I think Churchill had it right when he said that the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them um and you need every member of that Coalition it does matter and I would never uh sell yourself short in that regard there’s lots and lots of ways in which to contribute and of course it’s it’s the cumulative effort especially when it comes to sustaining again the values and principles that we hold dear we which have generally served our countries and the world might find some different opinions on that in in the global South but generally has served certainly our interests very well and kept the world largely safe for the practice of democracy and free market capitalism before we get into our quickfire section um and the show that we have with all our guests uh I I didn’t want to let this opportunity uh to have this conversation with you pass without asking you about Afghanistan quickly and if there’s anything that can be done to deter the Taliban Rule and to have some kind of progress whether that’s socially culturally economically in that country I’m pretty pessimistic about Afghanistan I mean it’s turned out the way a number of us feared it would including now the fact that there is an islamist extremist organization that is using the inadequate security conditions actually fighting the this is the Islamic State horisan group and horison is generally a broad region that extends Beyond Afghanistan and all around in the region and of course it’s that group that carried out that horrific attack in Moscow um yes we have Intelligence on this yes we were able for example to get the leader of al-Qaeda remember the Taliban agreed they would not allow International extremists back into their country and not that long after they took control of Cabell uh you’ll recall there was a drone St from the US that killed the leader of al-Qaeda there the successor to Osama Bin Laden who we got during the final months that I was commanding in Afghanistan our special ops under CIA control um and here he is a couple of blocks from the presidential Palace in a in a in a building controlled by the Taliban so um and the fact is they have done what we feared they would do which is take the country back in time to an ultraconservative 8th or 9th century interpretation of Islam that denies 50% of the population the opportunity to go to high school much less college and you know I was a big supporter of the American University of Afghanistan in fact my wife and I had a put scholarship every year for a woman to go to uh the American University there and of course now they’re going to the American University but it’s in Cutter or Albania or Sania Iraq so it’s tragic to see this again we didn’t go into into Afghanistan to give women’s rights but it was sure a wonderful benefit of what did take place and as tragic to see the efforts of 20 years go up in a in Smoke basically um the problem was we didn’t a lot of people didn’t understand that the the defense strategy for Afghanistan which was inescapable it’s the only possible one you could have is to have marginally trained and equipped police and soldiers protecting the urban area the major urban areas in in the critical infrastructure and then when they’re hit by the Taliban the 35 5,000 strong highly trained motivated equipped Commandos who are around the country and in key locations get on helicopters and go out and come to the rescue essentially and it worked quite well uh for a long period of time until we had insisted after my time and selling them overly sophisticated American helicopters by American Blackhawks very very powerful very capable but very difficult to maintain so then we had 7 ,000 mechanics or maintenance people largely from the West on the ground so the critical withdrawal was actually not the 3500 US troops which we could have sustained forever we hadn’t even had a a loss of a soldier in the final year and a half until the tragic suicide bombing at Abate um but the real challenge was how did they maintain the helicopters after we because the 177,000 couldn’t stay once we left and so you had this almost bizarre effort to try to maintain the helicopters using FaceTime uh from cutter uh with translators talking to these sort of inadequately trained Afghan maintainers and the operational Readiness degraded very quickly of course they’re also getting shot at and all the rest of this and then we had forced the Afghan government in that terrible diplomatic agreement that we signed with the Taliban to release 5,500 Taliban members who of course went right back to fighting and enabled the Taliban to conduct mult offenses at one time which they could no longer respond to the minute the soldiers knew no one was coming to the rescue as I mentioned earlier it was predictable there would be a psychological collapse so we are now where we are the Taliban are not responding to any kind of inducements they are implacable the economy has largely collapsed uh and you know at least half the country again can’t do anything really productive and half of the country is also starving uh and you see it because they’re voting with their feet and and trying to get out if they can General we’re uh going to finish our conversation with the quick fire round so a handful of questions where I would appreciate just a one word or one sentence answer uh the first one is what is one good personality trait that an exemplary leader could benefit from having determination I think um you know if you there’s an old adage that luck is what happens when preparation opportunity and you have to really commit to preparation you have to lifetime of study be serious about it you can never you know nobody wants to be led by someone who is proud to be average uh or you know you can’t lead from the rear of the formation all this kind of stuff so it’s really about being really determined self-disciplined self-aware so that you are constantly preparing for the challenges that may come down I mean a lot of people said look betrus was lucky you know first he got commanded 101st airborne division during The Invasion and you know just for a couple months it could have been the other guy and then well he gets called back to do this and then lo and behold he’s called on to command The Surge and just CU you know timing or whatever well not entirely I mean they call your number because they think you can perform and the more desperate they get the more willing to willing to call your number so I think again this determination or maybe just it is a fierce desire to be the very best you can be while all o being the best team player that you can be that was a really long sentence but I’ll let it go it was I I’ve filibustered my way out of a lot of situations over the years um what is the biggest challenge that humanity is facing today God there’s a lot to pick from I think um there’s a number of them again I this is not one where you can say the biggest I mean again it it depends on the moment obviously the various conflicts around the world the various challenges around the world manifestation of climate change all all these different um you know I’d say the wealth inequality differences between the North and the global South all of these issues I think are enormous challenges and there still is extremism of various forms some of it domestic as well as uh islamist and so on so there’s no end of of challenges and I guess you know in the US there’s a degree of partisanship that we think is unique we’ve actually had some pretty partisan moments in the past one one of them was a civil war um but there’s there’s quite a bit of partisanship right now we saw that uh on Capitol Hill uh it it delayed the it’s actually dynamics that delayed the House of Representatives because we had a bipartisan majority in both houses it was just the dynamic that one person could take down and the speaker which is a really foolish agreement if you could change one thing if I gave you a magic one now you could change one thing about the planet right now what world peace I know it sounds like a Miss America Pageant right but it but it is true it is it is really what the big worry is can’t we all just get along yeah Can’t We Live and Let Live finally um what is the most important learning of your life and career uh the the intellectual construct I laid out for you for strategic leadership uh it’s a model I developed it during the between my three and four star tours in Iraq I used it explicitly during the surge in Iraq for the first time constantly thinking of getting the Big Ideas right communicating them effectively overseeing their implementation there’s all kinds of you know sub tasks here in each one of these uh and then formally sitting down determining how you need to refine it so you do it again and again and and the truth is it applies in the business world as well you know I’m again a partner in one of the world’s largest investment firms um and this is one of the ways we evaluate companies are the Strategic leaders capable or the Strategic leader often times the CEO I mean it works in the civilian world as well and I’d very quickly go through Netflix with you um Reed Hastings one of the great strategic leaders in the world his first big idea is put movies in the hands of customers without brick and mortar so they’re going to undersell Blockbuster Blockbuster is largely going out of business except for one place in a contrarian community in Oregon which is great because people of my age can take our grandkids there and show them what we used to do on a Friday night I didn’t know they still had movies there’s one there and there’s one in Alaska um then the second big idea he recognizes the context has changed so he can have a new big idea which is they can download movies third big idea is the real breakout moment make our own content $100 million in House of Cards alone and all these other iconic series and then the fourth big idea is make major Motion Pictures and he goes out and buys not one but two major movie studios it does so well a metric is part of the oversea and implementation he gets more Academy Award nominations three years ago than any other major Studio there is one issue that I’ll finish our conversation with and I addressed it with him I’ve talked about this intellectual construct um and that is the movie in which Brad Pit played my very close Battlefield comrat General Stan mccristal who commanded our special operations forces for five years and then was the commander in Afghanistan when I was his boss at Central Command that I replaced him um and I said you know Brad Pit just did not get Stan mistal he’s very wooden sort of stiff salute awkwardly never cracked a smile had no sense of humor but beyond that I said I couldn’t believe that Brad Pit didn’t hold up out to play me it’s never too late it’s I’m going to I’m yeah that’s right we’re going to have a movie on the surge um General David Petraeus uh an absolute pleasure privilege thank you so much for sharing your encyclopedic knowledge of some of the world’s uh most uh relevant and uh uh crucial topics when it comes to War and Peace I think you definitely I don’t know if you painted a pretty picture but it’s not a pretty picture exactly but it’s a Frau picture yeah but but you definitely helped us understand why for guiding it nicely yeah you helped us understand why it’s not that simple so thank you so much privilege thanks [Applause] [Music]