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This is Kickass News, I'm Ben Mathes.

Lieutenant General HR McMaster served in the U.S. Army for 34 years and then as National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump.

The author of the best-selling military-classic dereliction of duty, he's written a new book in which he describes his efforts to reassess and fundamentally shift policies while he was on Trump's National Security Council and offers a bold and provocative re-examination of the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that face the United States today.

The book is titled Battlegrounds, the fight to defend the free world.

And today, HR McMaster joins me on the podcast to discuss what it was like to take over the job of National Security Advisor in the chaotic period following the firing of his predecessor, Michael Flynn,

how the lessons from LBJ's military cabinet during Vietnam made him even more determined to provide the president with straightforward, unvarnished policy advice

and why some other people in the president's inner circle might not have had the same motivations.

He talks about the value of empathy in national security and foreign policy and some of the biggest challenges America faces, including an emboldened China that's taking advantage of the COVID crisis to advance its own agenda and threaten its neighbors, and a Russia that he says is determined to drag America down with it.

He explains why the war in Afghanistan is really a one-year war fought over and over 20 times,

why he believes his departure from the Trump administration was largely the result of a social media smear campaign by Russian cyber trolls,

how the National Security Council put in place a strategy for a global pandemic and what went wrong, coming up with HR McMaster in just a moment.

HR McMaster is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford University. He's also a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

He serves as Chairman of the Advisory Board at the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Japan Chair at the Hudson Institute.

He served as a U.S. Army officer for 34 years and retired as a Lieutenant General in 2018. He remained on active duty while serving as the 26th Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

Now he writes about the experience and more in his new book, Battlegrounds, the fight to defend the free world.

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