[dramatic orchestral music] - Hello everyone and welcome to "Amanpour & Company."

Here's what's coming up.

- [Siamak] The other hostages and I desperately need President Biden to finally hear us out, to finally hear our cry for help, and bring us home.

- [Christiane] A cry for help from an Iranian prison.

In an unprecedented conversation, I speak with the detained Iranian American, Siamak Namazi, from inside Evin, his desperate plea to President Biden, plus, analysis with the former State Department advisor, Vali Nasr, and.

- You're dealing with a potential adversary, really, that has the home court advantage.

- [Christiane] Is the United States ready for the era of great power conflict?

Walter Isaacson speaks to Michael Gordon, national security correspondent for "The Wall Street Journal."

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- Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in New York, and tonight we have an extremely difficult, important, and highly compelling conversation, in hugely unusual circumstances.

Siamak Namazi is an Iranian American businessman, imprisoned in Iran for over seven years.

He spoke to me over the phone from inside the notorious Evin Prison, giving us a firsthand look at the desperation of foreign nationals, dual citizens, detained in that country.

I first interviewed Siamak back in the early 2000s, during the reform era, a very different Iran then.

He was a prominent businessman, and an analyst trying to build relations between Iran and the West.

Siamak was arrested during a 2015 business trip, and convicted of cooperating with a hostile foreign government.

Only that government is the United States, and he is a U.S. citizen.

It's a conviction, of course, that he completely refutes.

In the following years, American detainees have been released as part of prisoner swaps with the United States.

Siamak's own father, who was also arrested in 2016 while trying to visit him in prison, was released on medical grounds last October.

But Siamak continues to languish in prison, even going on a week-long hunger strike back in January, and writing a letter to President Biden.

Now he says he feels so alone, so abandoned, and so out of options that he has decided to come to us, hoping to beseech Biden to help him and the other Iranian Americans.

And here is our extraordinary phone conversation.

Siamak Namazi, it's a rare, rare thing to hear from somebody inside Evin Prison.

Can I start by asking you to state your name, and where you are actually talking to us from?

- [Siamak] Well, my name is Siamak Namazi, and this call is being made from Ward Four of Evin Prison in Tehran.

- Siamak, it's a long, long time since we last spoke, when we met in Iran.

And I wanna say that this is very, very unusual, to speak to somebody inside Evin Prison.

Why are you speaking to us in this way?

Why are you speaking out now?

- [Siamak] Well, Christiane, first, it's good to hear your voice as well after so many years, directly, and not on a recording that someone's playing back for me.

I think the very fact that I've chosen to take this risk and appear on CNN from Evin Prison, it should just tell you how dire my situation has become by this point.

I've been a hostage for seven-and-a-half years now.

That's six times the duration of the hostage crisis.

I keep getting told that I'm going to be rescued, and deals fall apart, or I get abandoned.

Honestly, the other hostages and I desperately need President Biden to finally hear us out, to finally hear our cry for help, and bring us home.

And I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures.

So this is a desperate measure.

I'm clearly nervous, just like it's odd for you.

It's very intimidating for me to do this.

I feel I need to be heard.

I don't know how long I have to wait until the White House understands that we need action, and not just to be told that bringing us out is a priority.

- Siamak, let me follow up on that, because you did write an op-ed, that was published in the "New York Times" in the summer- - [Siamak] Yes.

- In which you said that, "The Biden administration's approach to rescuing Americans in distress in Iran has failed spectacularly so far."

And you've recently gone on a, I believe, a one-week hunger strike to draw attention.

Tell me what you mean by "failed spectacularly so far."

- Correct.

I mean, seven-and-a-half years in, and I'm still in Evin Prison.

Look, I believe that the U.S., with all its power, as a superpower in the world, has a great amount of leverage.

And I believe that had that leverage been properly used, we would've been out a long time ago.

I think what is clear is the following, that the three of us, Emad, Morad, and I, are hostages in Iran.

We have not so much as jaywalked.

We've been taken for one reason, and one reason only, and that's because we're U.S. citizens.

And the flip side of that is, we will be only released through a deal with the U.S. You know, all I could do is repeat that.

Seven-and-a-half years is six times the hostage crisis.

What is it gonna take?

- Well, I'm going to try to ask you about that, you know, what is it gonna take, but first, you are one of three Americans in Evin.

They are detained on so-called charges of espionage, but you are not.

You are detained and sentenced on other charges.

Do you have any- - [Siamak] Sorry, I need to correct you on that.

We all have the same charge.

We are all charged under Section 508, which is a very nebulous charge of cooperating with a hostile state.

In our case, referring to the United States of America.

We, none of us have had access.

I'll just speak for myself though, but we don't, we're ordinary citizens.

We don't have access to any classified information to give to anyone, which is why we were charged with Section 508, cooperating with a hostile state.

And you're very free to ask details about that.

- Yes, I want to know whether you are in the same location as the other Americans, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Shargi.

- [Siamak] Yes, I currently am.

We haven't always been.

All three of us were at the same detention center at different times, obviously.

I was taken two years, and two-and-a-half years, respectively, before Morad and Emad, but today we are all in the same place.

- And do you hope to all be released together?

- [Siamak] Absolutely, I know what it feels like to be left behind, and I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy.

We're all in this together, and I hope that a solution is found for all of us together.

- Siamak, you wrote this letter to President Biden recently, and I'm going to quote a little bit from it.

"Day after day, I ignore the intense pain that I always carry with me, and do my best to fight this grave injustice.

All I want, sir, is one minute of your day's time for the next seven days, devoted to thinking about the tribulations of the U.S. hostages in Iran."

Did you get any personal response to that letter, Siamak?

- [Siamak] I've never had any response.

This is what makes things particularly painful.

President Biden has been in office for 25 months now.

You gotta excuse me.

This is hard.

- I know it's hard.

- [Siamak] It's hard to expose yourself to the world.

President Biden has been in office for 25 months now, and we kept that the White House declares that we're a priority, rescuing priority.

That the president hasn't so much as made a minute of his time available to meet with our family, if just so much as to hear them out, and offer 'em some words of comfort.

So no, I have not heard anything back.

I don't know what I actually have to do in order to get some comfort from the Biden administration.

- Can I ask you about your own physical, you used the word comfort.

I want to know how you are being treated, if you can.

How is everyday life for you there?

How do you get through the days in Evin?

- [Siamak] Right, look, there's only so much I'm comfortable saying on CNN about this.

- Yeah.

- But I think the short answer is that I've always been made to feel that my very humanity has been taken away from me, not just my freedom.

Today, I'm in the general ward now.

The situation in the general ward is far better than the corner of hell that I used to be in, in a detention center.

It's far from a pleasant place to be in, but everything becomes relative.

It's still extremely difficult to bear the very basic fact that I'm denied many of the rights of a prisoner, because I'm a hostage.

I don't know how to convey that.

I see hardened criminals, I see members of Daesh.

I see people who, human traffickers have more rights than I do.

And I don't know, you know.

So yes, our general circumstances in the general ward are okay.

And I would say that we do the best that we can to adapt to our circumstances.

I personally take comfort, to use that word again, in the fact that I know that I'm doing everything I can to fight this injustice.

I wanna say that my situation today is very different than the first 27 months of my arrest, when I was still being held at a detention center.

There, my situation was really precarious.

I did not feel safe at all.

And I wanna mention that the Obama administration knew exactly, exactly how unsafe I was.

I made sure of that.

At that point, my captors had made it their mission to strip me of any semblance of human dignity.

I spent months caged.

I spent months caged in a solitary cell that was a size of a closet, sleeping on the floor, being fed like a dog from under the door.

And honestly, that was the least of my troubles.

I, to this day, I'm sorry, didn't realize this was gonna happen.

- Siamak, you are under extreme duress.

- [Siamak] I'm really sorry, it's so hard for me.

I suppose the positive side is someday, some therapist is gonna make a good bit of money out of it.

- Well, you are able to make those quips, and there's some positivity to hearing that you are still robust, and that you still have your strength.

I wanna ask you about- - Absolutely.

- The other Americans, because what you've said is, you just don't understand why you have been left behind, particularly over a period of years in which other Americans have been released in deals between Iran and the United States.

- Yes.

- There were a release in 2016, around the Iran nuclear deal, including Jason Rezaian, the journalist, then again in 2019 and 2020.

Each time, you were left behind.

Do you know why?

Do you know why you were not included in that group?

- [Siamak] No, I, you know, I've been in prison all this time, and I obviously am not in touch with the U.S. officials.

Now, I have served prison time, interestingly enough, with some people who were on the other side of the negotiation table, during that 2016 hostage deal with the U.S.

They also tell me that the Americans did not push very hard, why?

That's a question I really would love you to ask Secretary Kerry someday, on my behalf.

And I should tell you that it wasn't just that they left me behind.

Obviously when that happened, I was completely devastated, shattered and despondent.

You know, as a hostage, you only cling on to one thing.

You know, when I'm there, in that closet-sized room all alone, there was one thing I held as truth, and that is that the U.S. government is fighting to release me.

And then, you know, one day I realized everyone's gone, and I'm left there alone.

So this is worse than the fear that political prisoners have, that they'll be forgotten.

I was being abandoned by the U.S. government at a time they knew, they knew how dangerous my situation was.

I don't know how to convey that.

At the time I understood that the Obama administration had left me.

But they essentially, they didn't get me outta danger, but they essentially handed me an IOU.

Secretary Kerry had promised my family that the U.S. government will have me out within weeks.

Obviously, seven years later now, and this was the occasion of my, the seventh anniversary was the reason for my hunger strike, to remind them of that promise, that just didn't happen.

Not only was I not released, but you know, those weeks passed by, and one day all of a sudden, I get called into the interrogation room, and I was cudgeled with a video clip showing my ailing father, wearing prisoner's garb and a blindfold in one of the other interrogation rooms.

So, no, I would love to know what happened.

I just know I was abandoned.

I know I was promised that the U.S. government will release me weeks later.

And it seems like, you know, three weeks is perpetually, I'm perpetually three weeks away from the freedom that is permanently elusive.

- It must be so, so, so hard for you.

I can't even imagine.

You mentioned your father.

Of course, he was arrested.

- [Siamak] Yes.

- And he, as you say, an elderly retired UNICEF official, when he actually came to try to visit you in prison.

He was in prison for two years, following that, prevented from leaving the country for five years, until he was finally released this past October.

And you then were given a furlough, a brief furlough to see him before he was allowed to leave the country.

You were not allowed to leave.

I guess I just wanna know how it felt when you were able to see him, that you could see him at least going to safety, and whether you hope and think you will be reunited.

- If you want to get me bawling, talk about my dad.

You know, every father could be his son's hero.

Mine certainly is mine.

My dad is my hero.

I mean, how could he not be?

He spent his entire life going to far corners of the world, to the poorest, most dangerous possible places, to save children.

How could I not completely be enamored with this man?

And when it comes down to it, I to this day, carry tremendous guilt that it was my choice to come for a four-day trip to Tehran.

And I got arrested, and as you said, my father got lured back and tricked, and arrested because of me.

So there's this tremendous guilt, this 79-years-old human rights medal winner of the United Nations, tossed into, on the floor in a solitary cell somewhere, and interrogated harshly, and then handed a 10-year prison sentence, which at his age and with his ailments, that was a death sentence, which we got way too close for it to happen.

I mean, he was, from that detention center, he was ambulanced to the hospital several times, and he had several heart surgeries, including getting a pacemaker put in.

So he was really in bad shape.

Yes, seeing him finally leave, it's a huge, huge burden lifted off my very guilty shoulders.

Of course, I know who arrested him, and I know that it's not my fault that they're cruel people who take a, arbitrarily arrest a 79-year-old man and treat him that way.

But the fact is, he came for me.

But yeah, I, you mentioned that I got furloughed.

By Iranian law, I'm owed something over 100 days by the strictest interpretation.

It's my right, which is being denied, but I'm so grateful that, for those 10 days, I was allowed to go.

And I have to acknowledge, and it was October, that Iran showed some long overdue humanity, by lifting the illegal travel ban that they put on my father.

My father was a free man, by Iranian law, with a travel ban that had absolutely no justification whatsoever.

But still, they lifted it.

We didn't know they're doing that.

I was given furlough.

And then they came and told us, and my dad was in disbelief.

He thought they're messing with him.

He thought it's one of these games that they play that we've seen, but it wasn't.

It was genuine.

They allowed him to leave, to get, to join the rest of our family and to receive the care that he needed for his life-threatening conditions.

For that, I'm deeply and sincerely grateful, to those in power in Tehran.

And I can only hope that they summon that same spirit of humanity to do what is needed on their part so that the rest of us, Morad, Emad, and I, can also be reunited with our families, and to start putting this dark past behind us.

- Siamak, we will get your message out to the world.

And thank you for being so brave as to talk to us at this time.

- I would really appreciate it if I can also, if I could also get a chance to address the President directly.

- Go ahead.

- Honestly, I really need to be heard if this, I'm taking this risk for this opportunity, so I hope you give it to me.

- Go ahead, Siamak.

- Okay.

President Biden, I certainly hear and I sincerely appreciate your administration's repeated declarations that freeing the American hostages in Iran is its top priority.

But I remain deeply worried that the White House just doesn't appreciate how dire our situation has become.

It's also very hurtful and upsetting that after 25 months in office, you haven't found the time to meet with our families, if just to give them some words of assurance.

Sir, Morad, Emad, and I have now collectively languished here for 18 years.

Our lives and families have been utterly devastated.

We desperately, desperately need you to finally conclude that we've suffered long enough as Iran's hostages.

President Biden, you and you alone have the power to deliver on the Obama administration's broken promise to my family.

I implore you, sir, to put the lives and liberty of innocent Americans above all the politics involved, and to just do what's necessary to end this nightmare and bring us home, thank you.

- We'll get that message out, Siamak, and I hope- - [Siamak] I'm sorry.

- We can talk again.

- I'm sorry, I, okay.

- Don't be sorry.

- [Siamak] Thank you for doing this.

- Thank you for doing this.

- [Siamak] Take care.

- You take care, Siamak.

- Thanks, bye-bye.

- Bye-bye.

- [Siamak] Bye.

- So we defy anybody not to be moved by that cry from prison.

Of course, we reached out to the White House for comment on this conversation, and they did give us the following response.

They basically said, "Iran's unjust imprisonment and exploitation of U.S. citizens for use as political leverage is outrageous, inhumane, and contrary to international norms.

The United States will always stand up for the rights of our citizens wrongfully detained overseas, including Siamak Namazi.

Senior officials from both the White House and the State Department meet and consult regularly with the Namazi family, and we will continue to do so until this unacceptable detention ends, and Siamak is reunited with his family."

Now, we have also reached out to the Iranian Foreign Ministry about Siamak and his fellow American detainees, and we're still awaiting their response.

So let's dig a little deeper now on their plight with Vali Nasr, himself an Iranian American.

He is the former senior advisor at the State Department, and he's now a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.

Vali Nasr, welcome back to our program today- - Thank you.

- From San Diego.

I guess my first question has to be your reaction to that deeply touching and desperate plea from Siamak Namazi.

- Thank you, Christiane.

That was a very difficult interview to listen to, and I really laud Siamak's bravery and courage and eloquence to reach out and to, not only about his own situation, but also the circumstances of his fellow prisoners, and hostages inside Iran.

I think what has happened to Siamak, to Emad and to Morad is both cruel and unconscionable.

And it is really the responsibility of the Iranian government to show justice and to release them, and to right this wrong that has been done to them.

But I also think it's important for the United States to do everything that is necessary to bring Siamak and his fellow prisoners home.

And there is a deal that is being negotiated.

End of the day, it will fall on President Biden to approve that deal.

And I hope that the United States will do that and bring them home.

- Do you know, Vali, the nature of that deal?

What would it include?

I mean, look, we've seen before, whether it's the Americans, whether it's the Brits, they have got many of their hostages back, their imprisoned nationals back through financial deals, giving back money that's owed to Iran because of, you know, money that was frozen after the revolution.

What kind of a deal could you envision that might be underway to release this batch of American hostages, Siamak and his fellow detainees?

- From my understanding, this issue has been on the table since at least June of 2021, when the Vienna talks on the nuclear deal was ongoing.

And the deal largely was that in exchange for release of these prisoners, that Iran will have access, or get back $7 1/2 billion of its oil revenue proceeds that are frozen in South Korean banks.

That deal didn't go through in the summer, largely because the United States' position was that a deal on the prisoners should happen in tandem with a nuclear deal.

The nuclear deal fell through in September of 2022.

And then we ended up in a situation where you had the protests in Iran, the relationships between Europe and Iran went sour.

And Western governments, the United States included, are now extremely skittish about any kind of a deal that would give Iran money, because of the backlash in Congress and public opinion in the United States.

And I hope that in addition to the White House, people in Congress, in media also hear your interview with Siamak and understand the gravity of the situation.

Unfortunately there is no way to release these prisoners without some kind of a deal.

And ultimately, the White House has to make that decision.

The Congress should support them.

In the past few months, the government of Qatar has stepped in and has been negotiating indirectly with both sides, trying to come up with mechanisms to ensure that the money that Iran would get would only and only be spent on pharmaceutical and food issues, and that they would not, Iran would not have access to that money freely.

And as we are speaking, that deal has been going, that negotiation has been going on for some time.

It's probably towards the end, but when all the technicalities have been sorted out by the [indistinct], between Tehran and Washington, of course Tehran has to make a decision they're going to sign.

But it really comes down to President Biden also making the decision that he's gonna sign and he's gonna pay whatever political cost comes with criticisms in Congress domestically.

And I hope, again, that he hears Siamak, as he thinks about the necessity of making that step.

- You know, you're being very forward-leaning there.

Clearly you believe, and you're a former government advisor, so you get the sensitivities and the complications.

Just as a shorthand, as distasteful as it might be to give, to make a deal as you outline, surely a government, and particularly a superpower, grown-up government, needs to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

In other words, to compartmentalize.

As odious as the crackdown on human rights in Iran, as odious as the allegations of sending weaponry to Russia for its war against civilians in Ukraine, is there not a way, and I ask you as a former government advisor, to say yes, just like with the Soviet Union, we condemned and resisted communism and its tyranny, but we also had, you know, a hotline.

We also had arms control deals and negotiations.

Don't they need to be able to have a humanitarian outreach, and bring back their citizens?

How could that not be seen as the right thing to do by American politicians and American people, but also to enter a nuclear deal that would keep the world safer?

- Well, I mean, first of all, to your last point, if they cannot have a prisoner deal, they're definitely not going to be able to have a nuclear deal.

And so there is an urgency to seeing this prisoner deal done, because there's even larger issues attached to it.

But look, President Biden, end of the day, made a prisoner deal with Russia, with a government that is killing civilians, and destroying and pulverizing an entire country, against international law.

And the president made a deal to, for a prisoner exchange, and brought back home an American prisoner, that was held in Russia.

And I think Siamak is right.

The president of the United States should take that decision.

Unfortunately, dealing with a government like that of Iran, it means that they're not going to release these prisoners out of the kindness of their heart.

They're going to want something in exchange.

Yes, there's going to be criticism of President Biden if he does make that exchange, but the situation for Siamak and his fellow prisoners is grave.

And ultimately there is moral, political, humanitarian responsibility for us to see this through.

And there is, as we're speaking, there is a process happening in Qatar.

So I'm not privy to where that process is, but I know that at some point this process ends up on the desk of the president, and the president has to sign.

And I also do agree with Siamak that the administration has not really reached out to the families of the prisoners in the way that it should.

It has met with many dissidents when the protests were going on in Iran, but it didn't take the step of actually talking to the families of those who are held in Iran.

And I do think that there is an opportunity to, at this moment in time, to use the Qatar process to finish this really, really horrendous ordeal that these prisoners have gone through in Iran, and bring them home.

- Vali, as you know, senior officials responded to our request for comment, and they do say that officials from both the White House and State Department meet and consult regularly with the Namazi family.

Of course, President Biden hasn't.

In June on this program, we had Rob Malley, and put the same questions to him, and particularly why Siamak was left out of the previous three hostage swaps, prisoner swaps that we just mentioned, and that he talked about.

This is what Rob Malley said.

- Siamak is right.

He needs to come home.

He needs to come home, and every day that he's not home is a day that we have failed in bringing him home, and I recognize that, and it's something that we work on as hard as we work on any other issue related to Iran, if not harder.

Now, the reason he's still there and he is not home is because Iran is holding him as a pawn, because Iran wants to extract concessions, and it's unconscionable.

Now, we've engaged with Iran through a third party, to try to get them home.

And we're still making every effort to get him home, him and his three colleagues.

And we'll continue to do that, and until we've done that, we will, we know that we have that very, very heavy responsibility, that heavy burden to bring them home.

- Again, that was in the summer.

And just wondering why, and he doesn't know why.

Do you have any idea why he was excluded from the last three prisoner swaps?

- No, I cannot tell, but Rob is right that, you know, because prisoners are used as pawns, that the Iranians or Russians in the case that there was also a prisoner that was left behind in this last deal in Russia, want to hold onto these prisoners for a next deal and a next exchange.

And that clearly is unconscionable, as Rob Malley says.

But it is the world we're dealing with, and the American prisoners in Iran and Russia are paying the price for this.

And there's a point at which that we have to make a decision that we have to do everything we can to arrive at a deal that would bring them home.

And I'm hopeful that if Americans in the White House, in Congress, in media, elsewhere hear what Siamak had to say today, that they would look at this issue with greater urgency.

- Really important, Vali Nasr, thank you so much for your perspective and your knowledge on this issue.

Thank you, and we do hope something does happen to bring those people home.

Now, as U.S. tensions with countries like Iran grow, our next guest warns that the world could be entering an era of quote, "great power conflict," one that could see the United States face off with China and Russia.

It's a conflict that he says the U.S. is not yet ready for.

"The Wall Street Journal's national security correspondent, Michael R. Gordon, has been reporting on the United States military for decades, and he tells Walter Isaacson that America has to come up with new ways of waging war.

- Thank you Christiane, and Michael Gordon, welcome to the show.

- Glad to be here.

- You have this amazing piece in "The Wall Street Journal," about how the era of great power competition is reemerging.

I mean, we went through that in the Cold War and then after, you know, 1989, we thought it was receding with Russia, and then 9/11 made it that we were fighting insurgencies.

Tell me what you mean about the rise of the superpower confrontations.

- Well, this in fact is the main business at the Pentagon, and has been really since 2018.

And following the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to a certain degree in Syria against ISIS, there was a stock-taking at the Pentagon, and a reevaluation of what the next missions would be.

And it was determined that the Pentagon really needed to gear up for what they called at the time, a world of great power competition, which was a thin euphemism for China and Russia.

That was a strategy that was promulgated by then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

But the Biden administration has doubled down on it, in its own version of the strategy, which it issued last year.

- And so does that mean we change the way we procure weapons and do a lot of things, with a focus on the fact that we may be fighting Russia and China, not insurgency wars?

- It requires a very substantial transformation of American defense in terms of where we put our forces, the kind of military technology and weapons that the U.S. buys.

The very structure of some of the Armed Forces has to be rethought.

They have to find a way to connect them all up so that they can share targeting information in real time.

Because the task of deterring China, which is the primary threat, according to the Biden administration's Pentagon, is just an enormous undertaking, where you are dealing with a potential adversary really, that has the home court advantage, with Taiwan just a hundred miles from the coastline of China.

- If you read, you know, and you're a great military historian, but you go back to Thucydides, and obviously Bismarck and Metternich, you're talking about great power competition, but the real warning they always have is never get into a great power competition with two different great power adversaries, especially when you're pushing them closer to each other.

Aren't we making that mistake with Russia and China, moving them closer to each other as we become adversaries to both?

- No, they've moved themselves closer to each other.

I don't think you could fault the United States for that.

I mean, what's happened is, we just have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

And in this world, China has been, its military might has been growing substantially.

It has a strategy of trying to coerce Taiwan politically to rejoin China, to extend its jurisdiction over that.

At the same time, Vladimir Putin has his own agenda, which you've seen play out in Ukraine, to kind of push back NATO.

And these two countries have found common cause with each other against the United States.

I don't know that you could call it a formal alliance, but they clearly see benefit in cooperating to a certain degree, in their kind of broader project to diminish American influence around the world.

So this is an enormously, a challenging thing for the Pentagon, because it has to be prepared to both deter a conflict in the Western Pacific, thousands and thousands of miles away from the United States, and simultaneously deter a conflict in Eastern Europe, halfway around the globe.

And what makes it even more complicated is that China and Russia have both studied how the United States went to war in Desert Storm against Iraq, and they've devised novel strategies and tactics to try to frustrate the U.S. - You've written a book recently called "Degrade and Destroy," which is about the campaign against ISIS that we're fighting.

Book comes out in paperback soon.

Tell me what lessons we learned from these insurgency wars, or maybe bad lessons we learned that apply today.

- We had advantages in fighting ISIS and in fighting Al-Qaeda, and even fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, that we don't enjoy against China.

For example, in those conflicts, we had totally unrivaled, uncontested air supremacy.

These insurgent and militant forces didn't have an air force.

They didn't really have effective surface-to-air capabilities.

So we had air dominance.

None of that would apply in a war in China.

Second of all, we had bases throughout the region from which we could project power, ground power, air power and the like.

And these bases were largely immune from enemy attack.

That also wouldn't be the case in a conflict with China.

They'd go after our bases in Japan and Guam from the get-go.

So the war against ISIS was very similar, but there are some lessons, which is that in the war against ISIS, we relied extensively on the Iraqi military, on Syrian forces to be the ground element.

We didn't put a lot of American forces in combat.

There were some, but not a lot.

So we let them do the main fighting.

I think that's the way of the future for wars in the Middle East.

Why is that?

Because our main focus is gonna be on China and Russia.

And if we're gonna have to tangle with militant forces in the Middle East, at least we're gonna wanna rely heavily on partners on the ground instead of our own troops.

One exception would be if there's ever a war with Iran, but I think one of the lessons is the war against ISIS showed how we need to fight in the Middle East, if we are gonna put most of our effort into deterring China and Russia.

- Are we in an inevitable conflict with China?

- Well, it's hard to foretell what's gonna happen in the American relationship with China.

But in the case of China, their project to extend their influence and control over Taiwan is at variance with the American posture in the Western Pacific, which is to defend free trade, to protect allies like Japan in the region, whose security would be greatly compromised if the Chinese were in control of Taiwan.

- And do you think President Biden's taken that a little bit further, the defense of Taiwan situation?

- He's taken it a lot further, because the policy had, the official policy is still one of strategic ambiguity.

And what is the policy?

We provide arms and weapons to Taiwan.

We provide a limited number of trainers.

"The Wall Street Journal" recently had a story on how that was gonna be expanded, but it's really a small number.

We are trying to give Taiwan the capability to defend itself against China in order to deter China from ever forcefully trying to take over that island.

Where the ambiguity comes in is, the U.S. has left unclear whether it would deploy its own forces, to come to Taiwan's aid.

Now what President Biden has said on more than one occasion is that the U.S. would, and the Pentagon in fact is planning to do so, not because a decision to do so has been made, but because you have to have the plans and the capabilities in hand in advance, in case you're called on to do so.

Now, one thing that's important to recognize is the Pentagon doesn't think China can take Taiwan today.

It would be an enormously challenging task for China.

They have to do an amphibious landing, which they've never really done.

They would have to, China forces haven't fought with the Americans really since the Korean War.

So it would be, it's highly ambitious.

And in fact, according to the CIA, the current Chinese military leadership is not confident it could carry out such an operation today.

But Xi Jinping has instructed his own forces to be ready to do so in 2027, according to the CIA.

That doesn't mean they would do so, but it means that he wants to have at least that option, at a minimum for political coercion, and perhaps more than that.

So what's going on now is there's a race, there's a race between the Chinese to get ready to develop this option, and there's a race by the Pentagon to develop the capability to counter the option, so the Chinese don't employ it.

And in this race, we're trying to develop new capabilities and deploy additional forces.

And many of these programs won't come to fruition until the 2030s.

So the next five years are a pretty anxious period for that part of the world.

- You wrote in your piece about war games, you know, that we play sometimes, and you can explain what a war game is, but it's something the Pentagon does.

Tell me about the war games that've been happening, on the concept of a struggle in Taiwan.

- Well, the Pentagon does highly classified war games or simulations.

They're all done in kinda computer simulations, and conference rooms, and in military bases.

And in my recent article, I recount one that was done in 2018, and there is an Air Force general, he's a lieutenant general, Clint Hinote, and he had recently been assigned from the Middle East to come back to the Pentagon and be one of the people planning the future of the Air Force.

In fact, today he's in charge of that task.

He's Air Force Futures is what the office is called.

And he comes back, and he told me, all on the record, that when he first saw the results of the war game, of how we would fare in a conflict with China, the expression he used was, "Holy crap," you know, "we're gonna lose if we fight like that."

- So what went wrong?

What were we missing?

- Unlike the conflict in the Middle East, if you assume there'll be a war with China, our air bases in Japan are gonna come under missile attack almost immediately.

Our naval base in Guam is gonna come under attack immediately.

This is gonna interfere with our ability to replenish subs at sea, and subs are really important.

Our ability to supply our own troops with logistics is gonna come under fire.

There's a terminology for this in the Pentagon.

They call it contested logistics.

None of that was true in our wars in the Middle East.

Those, we assembled forces over a period of six months, if you remember the Gulf War.

No one interfered with that.

We picked a time when we wanted to initiate the conflict, and then we did, without any interference.

Well, that wouldn't hold in a war with China.

So what general Hinote was pointing to was that these assumptions, which guided the U.S. employment of force in previous conflicts, would no longer obtain.

Therefore, you need a totally new concept for how to do this.

You need to have some forces that could survive within range of the Chinese missiles.

That's what the Marines are trying to do now.

You have to have additional standoff capabilities, long range missiles that you could fire from a safe distance into there.

You have to integrate these capabilities in novel ways.

So it's not merely a matter of shifting our current military to another part of the world.

It's a matter of coming up with what the Pentagon calls new operational concepts, new forces and new ways of employing the forces to deal with a threat that's entirely different from the one that we've been involved with for the past few decades.

And then you have to factor into this, the possibility that if Russia and China are not formal allies, if we were caught up in a conflict in the Western Pacific, Russia might act opportunistically to pursue some aims in, let's say, Eastern Europe.

And we know the Russians have had a hard going in Ukraine, but you still have to be prepared for the contingency that, let's say a decade or two from now, they might strike out somewhere else, thinking we were bogged down in the Western Pacific.

So it's a really very formidable challenge.

- Will you talk about one of the battles coming up, which is the budget battle, and that's really beginning this week and next week.

And so many times over the past decade, the budget battles have caused us to spend more in some ways on weapons, even as we try to spend less.

We spend as much as the next nine militaries combined, and yet we don't get a whole lot of bang for the buck.

What do you think is the problems we're facing with our budgeting strategy?

- Well, I do think we get a lotta bang for the buck.

And I feel that the idea of comparing American spending to other countries is a little misleading, because first of all, we have a professional military that pays a lot more than Chinese military pays.

So personnel costs eat up a lot, as does healthcare.

Also, the United States has global responsibilities.

They're trying to deter Chinese aggression and Russian aggression, in totally disparate parts of the world.

There's no other country that has that as a mission.

So to compare our budget with countries that have niche capabilities and limited responsibilities, I don't think it's directly relevant.

The Congress is, sometimes has been helpful to the Pentagon.

I mean, here's an example.

They've added money to the Pentagon budget in recent years, primarily because of their concern over the China threat.

So in the last year when the Pentagon proposed a research and development budget of $130 billion, that's an enormous amount of money, as will be the highest R&D budget in Pentagon history.

Well, the Congress added 10 billion to that, saying, "Well, we gotta do more on hypersonics and other technologies."

- The Biden administration has put 25 billion, I think, in weaponry into the Ukraine conflict.

Tell me how that's affected this strategy in our military readiness.

- Well, I don't think it's affected our military readiness in a bad way.

I may have a slightly iconoclastic view on this.

It certainly, we've spent a lot of resources in Ukraine, but a lot of the weapons that, number one we're giving Ukraine are from drawdowns from our own stocks, 155 artillery shells, Javelins, things of that sort.

I mean, those are not the kinda weapons U.S. military is gonna use in a war with China.

We're not fighting a land war with China.

We'd be operating with, you know, long range anti-ship missiles, or Marine forces with anti-ship missiles and the like, hypersonic missiles.

We're not gonna be fighting trench warfare with the Chinese.

So some of these weapons that are being provided to Ukraine are not relevant for a U.S. fight with China.

The second point I would make is, the Russians have lost more than 1,000 tanks.

They've lost a substantial part of their armed forces.

They've had more than 100,000 killed and wounded.

Their military capability has been diminished significantly.

That's a positive thing, from the U.S. perspective.

So yes, we've given Ukraine a lotta weapons, but they've been used to diminish Russia's military capability for, at least conventional military capabilities, they still have enormous nuclear capability, for a period of time.

So that's a net plus from a U.S. strategic standpoint.

But here's the problem for the U.S. What Ukraine war has shown is that in a conventional conflict, weapons can be consumed at enormous rates, I think much more than the West anticipated.

So, and there's a problem with the American defense industrial base, and just keeping the weapons flowing.

I mean, it's not enough to have small numbers of these things.

You have to have massive numbers of these things to keep up the volume of fires.

So one of the hurdles to implementing the new strategy is to revamp the defense industrial base.

I mean, take submarines.

We're producing about 1.5 attack submarines a year.

There's a deficit of submarines.

Submarines are important in the Western Pacific.

That's not a a problem that's easy to quickly remedy.

It's a product of concluding that the Cold War was over and spiking the ball in the end zone a little too soon.

So these are sort of the bigger challenges that have to be met, if you're really gonna make this strategy real.

It's one thing to announce the new strategy.

The Trump administration did that, and so now has the Biden administration.

That's the easy part.

The hard part is implementing the strategy, and doing so consistently over a period of a decade and longer.

- Michael Gordon, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you very much for the opportunity.

- And finally tonight, amid the news of a real strenuous pushback against the Israeli coalition's assault on democracy, there is also a farewell, a fond farewell to the Israeli actor, Chaim Topol, who has passed away at the age of 87.

Topol starred as Tevye the milkman in "Fiddler on the Roof, on stage and on screen, earning him an Oscar nomination.

Here he is in a clip from the film, explaining how we're all, in our own ways, fiddlers on the roof.

- A fiddler on the roof.

Sounds crazy, no?

[milk cans rattling] But here, in our little village of an Anatevka, you might say, every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck.

- And perhaps needed now more than ever, he's Israel's best known actor.

Topol appeared in works ranging from Brecht to Bond, but after more than 3,500 performances, to his fans, Topol is Tevye now and forever.

And that's it for our program tonight.

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