Retired general, author and former President Donald Trump advisor H.R. McMaster will speak at Old Dominion University’s Waldo Family Lecture Series next week.
McMaster graduated from West Point in 1984 and rose to the rank of Lt. General commanding forces in Iraq and Afghanistan before retiring in 2018.
He was National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump from March 2017 to April 2018. A month later, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal with Iran signed under the Obama Administration. The agreement restricted Iran's nuclear program in exchange for lifting some international sanctions.
WHRO’s Steve Walsh spoke with McMaster about that decision and former President Trump.
STEVE WALSH: So tell me a little bit about this lecture: strategic empathy in foreign policy?
H.R. MCMASTER: It's very important to view complex challenges and opportunities that we face internationally from the perspective of others. And that includes rivals, adversaries and enemies. When you don't do that, you fall into a number of potential cognitive traps that diminish your strategic competence. So strategic empathy is a term that I borrowed from the historian Zachary Shaw, and I use strategic empathy as the antidote to a concept that I describe in the book Battlegrounds of strategic narcissism. Our tendency to view the world only in relation to us.
WALSH: Dovetailing off of that, though, around the time that you were a national security advisor for Donald Trump, he ended the Iranian nuclear deal. That nuclear program seems to be reinvigorated, reengaged. Was it a mistake to end that deal?
MCMASTER: I don't think so. You know, what I was trying to do as national advisor is to convince the president to keep his options open and then to ask our European allies and others to impose sanctions on the Iranian regime that lay outside of the nuclear deal, including the missile program, which was prohibited under a U.N. Security Council resolution - and they continued to violate as well as, again, the four decade plus long proxy war against Israel, the United States and their Arab neighbors. I mean, we gave the Europeans a shot at joining us and they didn't do it. So I think that because of the flaws in the deal leaving, it was fine. You know, if you if the Obama administration wanted the deal to stick, make it a treaty, you know, try for Senate ratification.
WALSH: I did want to ask you about your former boss, President Trump. He's now leading by a wide margin in Republican primary polls. Do you think he should be president again?
MCMASTER: Well, I mean, that's for the American people to decide. And I think what the American people ought to consider are a few things. Does the president take seriously his or her oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States? And I think that Americans are free, obviously, to look at the historical record with President Trump and in particular his effort to inspire, at the least, an assault on the first branch of government. That doesn't sound like, you know, supporting and defending the Constitution to me. Does the president have an agenda for the American people or is it more of a personal agenda? And, of course, you know, President Trump actually tapped into a growing discontent among many Americans who wanted Washington disrupted. I think that saying that President Trump is disruptive is not a criticism. I think that's actually good. But he was so disruptive that he disrupted himself, I think, and his ability to accomplish even his own agenda.
WALSH: Would you vote for him again?
MCMASTER: I think I think that's for every American citizen to make that decision. I think the military should stay the hell out of politics.
H.R. McMaster as the featured speaker for the Waldo Family Lecture Series on Oct. 12. at 7 p.m. in the North Cafeteria of the Webb University Center on the Norfolk campus. The event is free and open to the public.
