How to Stage a Coup

Statecraft

How to Stage a Coup

149

1×

0:00

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:13:39

-1:13:39

How to Stage a Coup

"I'm now going to offer you a megalomaniac explanation of the course of events"

Santi Ruiz

Dec 11, 2024

149

Transcript

Today's interviewee has been my white whale for a while.

John le Carré compared him to Machiavelli. David Samuels called him “a gadfly in the corridors of power.” Thomas Meaney called him “a skilled bricoleur of historical strategic insights.” Leon Wieseltier called him “the most bizarre humanist” he’d ever met.

Edward Luttwak was born in 1942, and since then he's lived a wilder life than anyone I know. From Chairman Mao's funeral to late nights drinking with Putin, Luttwak's seen it all.

It’s hard to capture his professional accomplishments in miniature, but I’ll try: Luttwak has written 20-odd books on grand strategy, military affairs, and security. A Romanian Jew, he served in the Mossad before moving to the United States, where he staffed Reagan’s transition team and consulted for the Pentagon (and still does). For a flavor of his consulting work, see the classic opening paragraph from Meaney’s profile:

Luttwak ranches cattle in Bolivia, but I managed to get ahold of him at his Maryland house. I hope you enjoy this episode as much I enjoyed recording it. [A note: if you’re on the fence between listening to or reading this episode, give it a listen.]

We discuss:

How to stage a coup in the 21st century
Why Luttwak is responsible for a global decline in coups
Iran’s real goals in the Middle East
Why the CIA can’t go undercover or recruit talent
Working for a Kazakh dictator
Staffing Reagan’s presidential transition team
Why we need more waste at the Pentagon
How the war in Ukraine will end
China’s great military challenge
Snorkeling in French Polynesia

Your first book was called Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. I greatly enjoyed it. What do you make of the recent events in South Korea?

Well, it definitely was not a coup d'état, because the president made no attempt to recruit military chiefs to follow his orders or anything of the sort. He just abruptly had a moment of panic and realized that he proclaimed martial law.

Because there were neither secret nor non-secret events that justified it, as soon as he proclaimed it, basically none of the authorities moved to implement it. Then there was a parliamentary reaction, a popular reaction, and obviously, he will either resign or be resigned, one of the two.

I don't know what happened. It could have been a purely personal nervous breakdown. Now, it is a nervous breakdown in the context where the national capital is within rocket range of North Korea, and where there are supposedly preparations for national emergency and a provision for martial law in order to respond to a sudden North Korean attack. There have been North Korean attacks in the past, including one that penetrated the presidential Blue House complex and killed the wife of then-ruler Park Chung-hee.

So we don't know. It could be a private psychiatric event. It could be a piece of information that reached him directly without being filtered by professionals, and which he took upon himself to view as a warning of an imminent all-out attack.

In today's world, with incredibly quick dissemination of information, how have coups changed?

Well, I don't think they have changed at all. If you look carefully at the structure of recent events, you see that they haven't changed.

Every state has to have a security apparatus — military, non-military, police, security services. Those organizations are depicted in organizational charts as if they were machines. But they're not machines, they're run by people. Each of these organizations and sub-organizations has a chief. Now that chief may be a commanding figure, whose every word is implemented without question, or it could be simply the head who was appointed a week ago or something. Either way.

But it is evident that the coup d'état is a specific way of changing governance, and that is not to attack the state as a whole from the outside, not to attack the state from launching attacks on government ministries and palaces, as an enemy might do, but simply a process whereby these people who run the actual active elements of the state — which is, let's say, that armored brigade, which is close to the capital city, the police, the gendarmerie if there's a separate gendarmerie, everybody with guns in their hands — can intervene physically.

If you can coordinate them, then, mechanically speaking, you can take over the headquarters of the government: the presidential palace, the prime minister's office, whatever it is. You can do that. You can shut down the mass media. And you can stop the internet because the internet operates from specific physical facilities. You can just open a door, enter there, and switch it off.

You are now free to call in your media, or the media generally, and make your statement: because of the intolerable abuses and misbehavior of the previous ruler, we, the committee of national salvation, have taken over, and so on.

Even if it is only one individual who runs everything, he never presents himself: “I took over.” It’s “The National Salvation Committee, of which I'm the humble secretary,” or chairman or whatever. Then you denounce the previous government and announce wonderful useful reform measures that people have been calling for.

You stop all flights, you control the airport. And then you say, “In order to ensure everybody's safety, there are checkpoints: please don't cross the checkpoints unless you're willing to present yourself and say you have to take a child to hospital and things of that sort.”

And you stabilize the situation. While everything is stabilized, you go and arrest all the political leaders that could challenge you: all the ones that might stand up and speak in front of a group of people or a camera or microphone. You arrest them and you just physically detain them, perhaps to be liberated in a day or so with apologies, perhaps to be killed on the spot — anything in between. Those mechanics of the coup have not changed.

I'm now going to offer you a megalomaniac explanation of the course of events. I wrote my book in '67, published in '68. My book was a response to a great number of coups in Africa, which followed inevitably from the fact that African states became independent in the early 1960s. By 1965, they were ready for military coups, and in the Middle East there were lots of coups. I was tracking events there because at that time I was employed by Walter J. Levy of London, the chief political advisor of big oil companies like Shell [In World War II, Levy led the petroleum section of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.]

I was reading about coups. What I did is I tried to distill the mechanics of the coup. All coups are different, but they're all the same, because all of them depend on taking hold, not of the nation, but simply of the repressive machinery of the state.

So I wrote a description of how to do that. My first words are “Overthrowing governments is not easy,” and I tell you how to do it step by step.

Now for the megalomaniac explanation for what happened next, which was a very rapid decline in the number of coups. Coups had been very common until about two years after the book was published, and then stopped. The reason is that authorities everywhere reverse-engineered the book. The book was published in English, and it was immediately translated into about 13 languages. It went all over the place. I think what happened is that people learned to reverse engineer.

So, you have an armored mobile force, which is near the capital. I say, “Make sure either you move it 400 kilometers away, as far away as you can, or else make sure that it's commanded by your son or nephew or something like that.” So they did that, they put their nephews in charge of any mobile force. My book caused a decline of coups.

For example, King Hassan II of Morocco was the victim of a coup. His airplane was to be shot down coming back from Paris, but he landed and became very energetic, took control of the airbase, and then eventually tracked down the organizer of the coup, who was the minister of the interior, General Mohamed Oufkir. [According to King Hassan’s New York Times obituary, “When pilots of his air force attacked his Boeing 727 jetliner, the King, himself a pilot, seized the radio and shouted, ‘Stop firing! The tyrant is dead!’ — fooling the rebels into breaking off their attack.”]

Now, there is a Hamletic, Shakespearean turn in this, because Oufkir was in fact a devoted, devoted servant of the royal house, who had served the previous king, the heroic Mohammed V, heroically and most deservedly. Hassan II became a reckless and open playboy who in fact was flying back from Paris from another couple of weeks cavorting with the elegant ladies who take money for their services. Oufkir wanted to kill Hassan so that another member of the royal family would come in, someone who was not a playboy and would be serious and determined and courageous and all these other things.

Ironically, when Hassan landed after the attempt to have his plane shot down, he proved exactly that. He immediately went and got a few people, rounded up the pilots, and then came to town and did everything that Oufkir had wanted the heir of the throne to do. But he, of course, entered Oufkir's office and shot him. Oufkir bled to death, and he did so over a copy of my book.

The minister of the interior, Dlimi was his name, promised to give me this copy of the book, which I really needed, obviously. But then what happened is that he tried a coup, and before he could deliver the book to me — because evidently he read the book — instead, before he could deliver it to me, he was killed as well. After that, there was great tranquility over the Moroccan throne to this day. [Officially, Minister Dlimi died in a car crash. However, allegations have been made that he was assassinated.]

But the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad definitely did everything that you would have done if you understood coups and you knew how to reverse-engineer them.

Now, what happened is that reverse engineering also is beginning to fail, because they came up with reverse engineering to protect against my depiction of coups, and then they didn't change it. Then came change, all manner of things change, so the reverse engineering is beginning to fail.

Why did Oufkir's coup fail?

Because it was predicated on the need to kill Hassan in order to preserve the royal family by having somebody else who was not the reckless playboy, a languid playboy who got up at 11 o'clock in the morning and couldn't do anything. But when Hassan almost died aboard that jet returning from France, almost shot down by the F-5 fighters of the Moroccan Air Force, he lands there, and he doesn’t go crying or hiding. He gathers up cadets or wherever it is there, gets weapons, takes a weapon himself, and personally leads them. They take over the base and march down, arrive at Oufkir's headquarters, walk in and shoot him there.

So Oufkir succeeded! Because, as I say, his motivation was lifelong loyalty to the royal house and seeing it collapse into weakness and about to be overthrown and become a government like Algeria or something, because of the king's failure to be a man like his father had been. Well, the king became a man!

And this is very much like Shakespeare. Remember, the one that ends up in Agincourt. It begins with the young king being a playboy.

Henry IV, Part 1?

No, that would be Henry V. It's the apogee of Henry V.

For you personally, aesthetically, what is your favorite coup, the coup par excellence?

You mean a favorite coup? No, I have a string of coups that I like, where the coup leaders maintain the promise of straightening something up, and making it work. There have been cases of it, coups that were better.

Paradoxically, one of those coups is the coup that is universally condemned, which is the coup in Myanmar. There was an election. Somebody won the election and this whole complex of military and police came in and took over. The fact of the matter is that the military was defending the country from two different, equally dangerous enemies.

One is the Chinese takeover of the country, which the military had resisted. The military gave them permission to have a pipeline. They didn't give them permission to do many other things. And the other is the fragmentation of the country because of secessionist tribal movements. National movements, tribal movements, religious movements of many different ilks and varieties, but the largest ones are all under Chinese influence.

There are these rebels that exist on the border of China's Yunnan province in Myanmar. Now supposedly they're bandits and criminals, the guerrillas. They’re driven over the Chinese border and the next thing you see is the rebel leaders having tea with the local Chinese police. So the military that fights those rebels is trying to keep the country together. As for the political movements, they are indeed democratic and the military did suppress democracy. However, the fact of the matter is that they do not have the operational capability to keep the country together. So things are not so clear cut.

In 2007, you wrote about Mussolini syndrome, the way that experts overestimate the military strength of "backward societies." What militaries are overestimated today?

Well, you just said it. For example, when Nasrallah said that Israel is weaker than a spider's web, he believed that, and originally saw that Israelis were sentimental about casualties. He was not. When 200 Hezbollah people died, well, you know, the families did get death benefits, but that was it.

“We love death as you love life.”

That's correct, all that kind of stuff. And of course, Israel's enemies have always been very confident. In 1948, on the eve of the first war, in 1947, the head of the Arab League, Rahman Azzam Pasha, an Egyptian — who was, by the way, far from a cruel person, not at all, he was a humane gentleman — he gravely warned the Jews that this would be a massacre, a great massacre, like the ones inflicted by the Mongols, the ones of the Middle Ages and so on.

They were sure they were going to win. And they had a reason to. The British Foreign Office made sure that the Israelis had no weapons. The State Department enthusiastically backed them, and so Israel had no weapons. They didn't have weapons before because it was a British mandatory territory, not an independent state. When they became independent, the State Department and the British, who were then all-powerful in the immediate aftermath of World War II, imposed a total blockade. Being disarmed, they were obviously going to lose the war, because the British had armed the Egyptians and the Jordanians and the French had armed the Syrians with tanks, airplanes, and things like that.

But they overlooked a simple fact, which is that even though the Israelis were less than 700,000, they were in fact modern people and acted like modern people. They tried everything. They managed to get weapons from Czechoslovakia, from the non-Jewish Zionists, which have always been present in Prague from the 1920s. The saintly president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk, was an enthusiastic Zionist, and they remained in power until the communist takeover in 1948. When Stalin took over, he continued to deliver weapons because he wanted to embarrass the British.

That's how they won, with weapons. The Anglo-Americans controlled the whole Mediterranean, but the Israelis were able to fly in weapons from Prague with DC-3s, which are small, two-engine, piston-engine transports, just enough to win the war, because modern people with weapons win wars. They didn't need as many weapons as the other side had.

In the Israel-Iran conflict, what should Israel's theory of victory be?

No, no, no. Israel has no conflict with Iran at all. What happened is that the Iranian theocrats that run Iran, these long-robed priests and the unshaven revolutionary guards, decided that Persian Iran, Shia Iran, is going to take over the Arab Sunni world by being more anti-Israeli than they could ever be. “You are anti-Israel, yes, but we hate the Jews more than you do.”

In fact, to this day, the Iranian state funds a Holocaust cartoon festival every year. There are people around the world, in places like Uruguay, who have made money by making cartoons, making fun of the Holocaust. Anybody listening to this who is a good cartoonist, you know, he can make money by doing it.

So, “We are more anti-Jewish than you are. We are more anti the state of Israel than you are. That's why we should be the leaders of the whole Middle East.” That is the Shia Persian power wanting to dominate the Arabs because they think Arabs are lizard eaters, in other words, desert dwellers who are stupid. They're not Persians.

In fact, one of the 17 errors of the Obama-Biden approach to Iran was that when some Arab Shia militia, following orders from Tehran, launched a rocket against Americans in tiny bases in Jordan and Iraq and so on, then the US would retaliate against those militias. But of course, the Persians consider Arabs expendable. If you go to Iran at a dinner party and say, “Hezbollah has lost another 5,000 people today,” they say, “Oh well, pass the next course.”

Israel has no quarrel with Iran. Iran has no quarrel with Israel. It's simply that Israel had to be attacked, because that is how Persians could dominate the Middle East. That’s how the Shia can dominate even though most of the Arab population is Sunni. Any Sunni Arab who sides with Iran is a fool, proving the deepest belief of the Persians, which is that the Arabs are intellectually inferior, easily manipulated.

Historically Persians and Jews have always cooperated against everybody else. When the Shah cooperated with the State of Israel, he was simply doing what every previous Persian ruler ever did whenever there was a Jewish anything going on.

Going back to Cyrus.

In fact, even today, after all these years, there is one fact that every Sunni Arab should have noticed and acted upon, but they didn't. And that is that all the Jewish communities in the Muslim world have disappeared. From Morocco, there is a remnant, in spite of the fact that the Moroccan government was never anti-Jewish, and is not now anti-Jewish. In Tunisia, there are two families. The other communities have simply disappeared. There were communities in Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Libya, and Egypt, and even as far as Penang Island of Malaya. In Penang, the main road is still called Jalan Cohen, named after the man who ended malaria in Penang. [NB: I cannot confirm the existence of this road. There was a Yehudi Road in Penang that has since been renamed.] There was a strong, important Jewish community. They've all gone.

The only one existing is in Iran, where they live completely unmolested. They're not in the army, but they teach mathematics in the Iran universities and so on, and they have synagogues, they have kosher butchers, they have schools. They even have a hospital in Tehran and in Isfahan, and they have communities in Shiraz, Isfahan, and even Hamadan, completely unmolested. So their endless proclamations of hatred for Jews is all a big lie. The people that Persians don't like, and in fact despise, are Arabs.

What should we make of recent events in Syria?

Well, the fall of Aleppo could not have happened if the power of Iran had not been crushed, really weakened by the Israelis dismantling Hezbollah. Iran has invested more in Hezbollah than it has invested in its own army. Iran has an army, not just Revolutionary Guards running around the world. They've spent more on Hezbollah than on their own army. That investment is now for naught.

I'm interested in your thoughts on the American inability to collect good human intelligence. The name of this newsletter came from staring at my shelves and seeing a book by Angelo Codevilla called Informing Statecraft. He wrote that in 1992, and he had the same assessment.

I knew Angelo very well. Well, in order to have an intelligence organization, you need talented people who have a particular proclivity to go outside of their own country. They know how to make friends with people. They know how to recruit people. They have a way of handling that.

So, for example, there are many Americans who are born in Utah, they get married in Utah, they study in Utah, and they work in Utah. If you parachute them into northern Macedonia, they are unlikely to be ready to make friends in northern Macedonia and get people together. Now, the way CIA is run is that, in order to avoid espionage penetrations, you cannot work for CIA without getting a security clearance.

The people doing the security clearances — many of them are Mormons, as it happens — but the people doing the security clearances, they have absolute criteria. “CIA cannot employ anybody that we cannot easily clear.” Any American who became interested in the outside world and started traveling around, made friends in different countries, had love affairs and things like that, they say, "Sorry, we can't clear you, goodbye, go elsewhere."

One of the people I recommended to them is a lady who learned one important language of a particular nation which speaks two languages. She became interested in that population, which is a substantial population in a very important place. And so she went and found a boyfriend, who spoke the other language and she acquired both languages, and then read whatever was written in them and so on.

At my encouragement, at my behest, she applied to the CIA. CIA quickly responded, “We can't clear you,” because as soon as a Mormon hears that an American girl goes to Paris looking to pick up somebody who speaks a Kurdish language in order to learn from you, they immediately say, “Oh, no, no, no clearance.”

The clearance mechanism of CIA rejects all possible candidates of any value. If you are the kind of young American who could serve your country in the CIA, they won't let you into the CIA. That's a simple fact. Everything else follows downstream.

Then there is the fact that people who do get into the CIA are like municipal employees with handsome pensions before the city goes bankrupt. These people come in who cannot deliver and do not deliver, and they make demands, and one of the demands is that they refuse to serve under cover.

They have a whole category called NOCs, non-official cover agents. They called them “deep cover agents,” “covert agents” and all that. The very few non-official cover people we have, the only ones who can actually conduct espionage, as opposed to occupying the large CIA dependencies within US diplomatic missions, the so-called station — station, it sounds so operational, just a bunch of people behind desks — these people serve in places like Paris and maybe Warsaw. As for serving in Iran, forget it.

And when you ask them why not, as I did, to successive heads of CIA, the answer is, “Oh, my God, you can't operate there. There are the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij [a paramilitary volunteer militia], there is the police, there is the gendarmerie. Oh, my God, you get caught in there.”

Why do they say that, by the way? Because in their totally feeble way, at one point, they recruited a retired FBI person with no Middle East knowledge or experience, with no languages, and introduced him into Iran through that small island where they received tourists from Dubai, the open door to Iran, one they watch very closely. There's this older guy, ex-FBI, and they ask him what he’s doing here, and he was plainly sent by CIA. That is who the CIA tries to send, okay?

There are plenty of people who live in the United States who speak Persian. But they can't recruit them, because they lived in or have relatives in Iran. So you send a retired guy who didn't speak Arabic or Persian into the Arabic-speaking part of Khuzestan in Iran.

In fact, one of the fundamental aspects of the CIA is that their people don't know languages. I was in Kazakhstan many times. And one time in Astana, I ran into the CIA director of the station and said, “How many of you people speak Kazakh?” “We don't. There's no need for it. Everybody here speaks Russian.” That's what they said.

So I said it's fine. [speaks in Russian] I speak Russian. No problem. He says, “As a matter of fact, I don't.” So I said, “How many people in your station know Russian?” He had one person who he said spoke Russian. When I tried to speak with that person, what I got was elementary school level.

On that occasion, I was traveling around Central Asia, and I made inquiries in three other capitals, and all three the same: “We don't speak the local languages because everybody speaks Russian” — which is not really true where it matters, like in Tajikistan, where even government people don’t speak Russian.

At our station in Tajikistan, nobody knows Tajik; our station in Turkmenistan, nobody knows Turkmen; our station in Kazakhstan, nobody knows Kazakh; and in Uzbekistan, nobody knows Uzbek, because “they all speak Russian,” except they don't, and the CIA guy doesn't even speak Russian! We have lived with this scandal.

And I blame the State Department, because these Foreign Service officers of the State Department, who do have the qualifications they need for their jobs, they do a cover-up. They cohabit in these missions all over the world with CIA people, and they know they're clowns.

But somehow, they don't talk about it. They're the ones who should find a proper, legitimate way to inform their fellow citizens that the CIA is a fraud, that the so-called human intelligence, all the people they send overseas, all their so-called CIA officers overseas, and their NOCs are frauds. They're all frauds and I've never met one who is not a fraud.

Why is the lack of language proficiency so common? I don’t mean just in CIA, but in the State Department itself. 15 years into the war in Afghanistan, State couldn't fill half of Dari-language posts with qualified foreign service agents.

Americans don't like to study. They would like to go to school to socialize, play games, they don't go to school to learn anything difficult, hence very little mathematics and very little foreign languages. They are willing to sit in classes to dabble and brabble about movies. To read books, less and less. To learn foreign languages? Forget it. And that is a fundamental reality.

But in a vast country full of people, the Central Intelligence Agency should be able to recruit if it wished to. But it doesn't.

By the way, many of them are Mormons. If you drink a beer once a month, they say you're an alcoholic. That's a minor point. The major point is they refuse to even consider an applicant who is a young American, curious about the world, lived around the place, had a few girlfriends and boyfriends, whatever, and learned languages, picked up some languages. None of that.

No, no, no, “We bring you from Utah, we will teach you!” And then what they do, of course, is they teach languages the way Americans teach languages, i.e. not to learn languages.

If we did recruit many more people who had spent time abroad, who had relationships abroad, how would you protect against the counterintelligence risk?

Okay, now listen. You're talking about the profession which, at the present moment, has a practitioner whose work is proven, and that practitioner is the Mossad. Now, the Mossad recruits online. And they recruit people online who know Hebrew and who know English and who know Arabic and Persian, but they can accommodate other languages too. They are quite confident that they can recruit people — not merely people who are not born, brought up, and educated and lived all their lives in Utah, but people who come from Iraq, for example, people who live in Iraq every day, whose cousins might have a good job with the Revolutionary Guard.

They believe that it is an elementary part of human intelligence to be able to tell the difference between somebody who will serve you loyally and somebody who won't, and if you can't do that, choose another business, like advertising.

I will now tell you something that I will immediately assure you I have zero evidence for. A gentleman proposed to Hezbollah that they should completely bypass and cut out Israeli penetration of every known smartphone of all companies at all generations by using phones you pick up in any bar or restaurant pursuant to a message from a device in your pocket.

It's very simple to send a message, which is “Call the office.” The only other possible message was a high-priority message. If it's high-priority, you have to press both buttons on that device.

Okay. Now: the gentleman who persuaded Hezbollah to do that is an Iranian. A citizen of Iran, an employee of the Revolutionary Guards. Recruited online.

Now, you have to know what you're doing. What people running CIA personnel want to do is to obviate the need for intelligence officials to be intelligence officials, to be able to assess recruits, to understand them, to know what they are dealing with. They want to do this by getting only people who have never had contact with any foreigner (which, by the way, doesn't assure anything).

In other words, if you want to improve the CIA, you have to empty out the building. You have to fumigate the building — exclude any technical people who really should belong to one of the 17 intelligence organizations that cover electronics, photography, and everything else. Nevertheless, CIA has some of those people — Those people should be transferred. Having transferred them, you restaff with young Americans interested in foreign parts who have traveled around and picked up a language or two. We start with that. And if you're worried about counterintelligence? Your professionals should have the feeling in their fingers. And if they don't have it, they should sell insurance.

You mentioned Kazakhstan earlier. You've spent a lot of time there.

Yes. Nazarbayev, the evil dictator, had a propensity of hiring people, regardless of nepotism or anything at all, on a pure talent basis. And first an extremely talented economics minister invited me to visit, then an extremely talented prime minister gave me various tasks to do, which I was very happy to do.

Nazarbayev, the evil dictator, was still alive. He had a couple of characteristics that were very useful for a multinational state: he was truly, sincerely, and entirely devoid of any racial prejudices, religious prejudices. He saw each person as an individual in the most genuine way. Kazakhstan having so many nationalities, it was crucial that it wasn't somebody pretending to go along with the current obligation to be not racist and so on, but somebody who lived that — careers for the talented, the ministers and not the nephews of anybody. They're talented people. He had this idea that the most talented people should serve.

A while ago, we spoke to Andrew Weber. He was first secretary at Almaty. He got ahold of a trove of their nuclear-grade uranium.

Yeah. He was part of the vast effort under the Nunn-Lugar Act to go to the Semipalatinsk and Kurchatov areas to recover the plutonium the Soviets scattered in a vast testing area. They would leave plutonium lying around as if it was clean.

Weber said there was a rusty padlock on the warehouse, you open the door and there it is.

Absolutely. Yes. The cleanup came about because the Russian personnel who remained behind after the fall of the USSR would rather stay in their houses in Semipalatinsk than to move to an uncertain situation in Russia. Especially when American money came in to improve their salaries, these people were 100% cooperative. The fact that there was clear, clear leadership in Kazakhstan with no ambiguities and that corruption was kept out of the place both by the remaining Russians and the new Kazakhs: all of these factors made it possible. Otherwise, the world's terrorists could each have got their 20 kilos of highly enriched uranium.

The North Koreans were sniffing around.

Listen, everybody tried to go. It was a question of remoteness, and the Kazakhs retained Soviet skills in terms of controlling the borders and things like that. It was a near miss for the world, this thing.

We had scheduled a prep call last week, but you were called away to the Pentagon, where you spent the day. Can you tell me what that was about?

I make a living under a research contract for the Pentagon, on strategic matters. And periodically I visit my customer.

You were a strategic consultant and you have been for a long time. You were a consultant for President Reagan, including on his transition.

That was different because there were only seven of us. The Interim Foreign Policy Advisory Board. One of them became Secretary of State, one became National Security Advisor, one became an Undersecretary of State and of Defense, and then one became Deputy Secretary of Defense [see here]. I myself did not want to work in the government, even though I was very happy to be on that board because that board took action, important action, which has never been registered in American history: the action of forcing the Iranians to give up the hostages.

You may recall that Jimmy Carter's presidency was wrecked by the hostages, as the United States’ interests in the Middle East were wrecked till this day, because Jimmy Carter did not act correctly when the Iranian revolutionary people took American diplomats hostage. He failed to get them back, and he failed to use the B-52 bombers that were designed and built for this very purpose to ensure that the Iranians regretted not giving them back.

So I was very happy that we ended that. However, I had arrived in the United States in 1972, and I was just establishing myself, and I needed to earn money, which the government did not offer, unless you're willing to steal it, and I'm not willing to steal government money. If they offered me $400,000, as much as Reagan was getting as president, I would have served him happily.

I see. I want to ask you about the Pentagon. I've got a couple of your books here. In the 1980s, you wrote versions of this essay several times saying we need more waste, fraud, and mismanagement at the Pentagon.

Yes, and also I wrote the book called The Pentagon and the Art of War. That is the most important book I wrote, and I'm very, very happy to tell you that that book, which I worked very hard on, was rendered obsolete by the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, which got rid of 90% of the problems identified in that book. I testified before every possible committee of Congress. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was unalterably opposed to the reform.

He doesn't come out looking very good in your book.

He complained publicly that senators and congressmen were listening to a PhD with a foreign accent instead of their own Secretary of Defense.

He wanted to keep things as they were, and I wanted to have a drastic reorganization, which was indeed drastic. The 1987 Defense Reorganization Act changed the relationship between the services, the chairman, everything else. It ended decades of absurd inter-service wheeling-dealing in designing operations, of which the Iran rescue attempt was the ultimate, with Marine pilots flying unfamiliar Navy helicopters, so as to have them represented, too, along with the Army and the Air Force. It had to be inter-service, everybody present, and they got the Marines in by making them pilots of these airplanes, which were not Marine helicopters, but Navy helicopters.

All of these shenanigans ended, and within four years the new structure was tested in the 1991 Iraq war, which is the last time the United States was victorious, the last time the United States framed realistic war aims, and achieved the aims and went home. This was under Chairman Colin Powell, who was an enthusiastic supporter of this reform. You know, when they pass a major law, they write a report. In that Senate report, I was quoted 101 times.

For readers who are unfamiliar with this debate from the late ‘80s, will you explain?

The United States, like everybody else, has a multi-service organization. All countries in the world except for Israel are multi-service. The way they did it over the years was in a reasonable way, that everything was a compromise between the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marine Corps. They compromise things. You do this, I do that.

So when they have to do a rescue operation, they all have to be represented. They couldn't take commando forces and parachute them into action. No, no, no. You have to have the Navy, Air Force, everybody there.

In fact, the Iran rescue mission failed because the Navy helicopters manned by Marines collided with a C-130 aircraft of the Air Force because they use different procedures, different nomenclature, and so on. Even Reagan's operation in Grenada, which had a superpower attacking the party militia of a small Caribbean island, almost screwed up because they couldn't communicate. I believe that some American Army officer found a telephone booth and managed to reach the Air Force.

All of those problems were listed in The Pentagon and the Art of War and were drastically remedied in the legislation. The services have their own cultures. There's always going to be frictions. There's going to be competition, but you don't have the disastrous attempt to avoid friction by sharing everything.

I was just reading The Pentagon and the Art of War this morning, and your first chapter is about Vietnam. The coordination challenge of trying to get everybody to sign off is just remarkable.

Yeah. The Vietnamese village is bombed, and then it's reconstructed by the Reconstruction Corps, then the artillery burns it, and then you have eight people going there to persuade them to side with the government. No, Vietnam was a place where every military bureaucracy got to do its thing. There was no command and control.

But what the 1986 Act could not stop is the lack of intelligence. It didn't address the lack of intelligence when President Bush the younger decided to invade Iraq in 2003. The intelligence community was silent when he said nonsense, nonsense like, "We remove Saddam Hussein and there is democracy."

Any competent intelligence organization would have said that if you remove Saddam Hussein and you don't replace it instantaneously, as in a coup d'état, by having a new dictatorship, maybe the American military government dictatorship, what's going to happen is that the Shia will come out and they're going to set fire to the schools that educate the children, the hospitals where they send their families, and they're going to wreck and ruin everything.

Tell me more about the board you served on for Reagan before his administration.

This was an all-powerful organization called the Interim Foreign Policy Advisory Board, which consisted of a very few people and Reagan sat in with us in meetings, and we were all-powerful. Now, we were the transition office, so we could not act in the name of or with the means of the United States government. That would have been in violation of the Logan Act, if you want to cite an act, but the simple point is that Reagan was not yet the president. He was inaugurated January 20th, but Reagan said, "I want you to get rid of these problems, find a way, find a way," and we did find a way.

You know, we told the Iranians: “Jimmy Carter is going to go, and the moment he goes and you still have the hostages, you're also going to have B-52s bombing and flattening the town of Qom,” which was the headquarters of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Remember, Jimmy Carter is a catastrophic, catastrophic president because he was a pacifist. He didn't have the sincerity to admit it, and therefore, the moment the United States was challenged, the United States could not respond because he was a pacifist. Even when he authorized the foolish and misbegotten rescue mission, his big assurances, his big emphasis talking to Colonel Beckwith, head of Delta Force, was, "Don't kill Iranians. Whatever you do, don't kill people." So what the f*** are you going to do? But Carter was emphatic. Jimmy Carter, much celebrated on sentimental grounds, caused the half-century catastrophe of Iran all by itself because of his personal attitude.

Now, Ronald Reagan was decisive. First, the State Department delegation came and explained to us that now that elections were over, the task was to work up to the September ministerial meeting, when all the foreign ministers come for the UN General Assembly. “Gromyko will also come, the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union. We have to work up for Gromyko’s meeting with the Secretary of State that you will choose, Mr. President. You can start the dialogue after this election” — in which Reagan kept attacking the Soviet Union as an evil empire — “Well, we have to overcome that and work up to this meeting and the September ministerials, to prepare the way for the summit meeting between the president and the Secretary General, because after all, we must coexist because nuclear weapons can end the world. Therefore, we must coexist.”

Reagan said, "Relax, boys. You don't have to do anything to prepare for the September ministerials. I have no intention of meeting the Secretary General, the Soviet dictator. I have no intention of meeting him. You can relax, because I do not want to coexist with the Soviet Union. I want the Soviet Union to cease to exist. We exist: they must cease to exist. No coexistence."

Now, immediately the word spread in Washington that Ronald Reagan wanted nuclear war. And, of course, the last thing Ronald Reagan wanted was nuclear war.

He was against nuclear deterrence. He said we should intercept missiles. Israel's ballistic missile defense represents the potential that the United States could have had by saying, “We're going to have very strong ballistic missile defenses, we don't want to add nuclear warheads. We don't need nuclear warheads, we have ten times too many already. We need ballistic missile defense and so on.”

Al Haig became Secretary of State. He didn't really believe in Reagan’s refusal of coexistence, but he did not try to block it. He had a clever scheme. He wanted to overthrow Fidel Castro and to give that win to Reagan, so that he could go back talking to Gromyko. But that didn't happen.

The job I got in the transition board was to think of a way of winning the war in El Salvador, since the US had lost all its guerrilla wars. I told the president, “Mr. President, when you become president, I won't be with you, unfortunately. But remember, don't send the US armed forces to Salvador, because otherwise some idiot is going to start talking about building the country, you know, nation building.” Then congressional delegations would follow.

And so what you have to do is to give this job to contractors. And if you do that, I'll be the first in the queue to seek a contract. Contract not to do nation building, but just to find and kill guerrillas. Just find and kill them.

If you do that, there is already a democratically elected president, Napoleon Duarte, whatever his name was, who is committed to land reform. And land reform should certainly proceed and be backed. But no US Army. Of course, because there's a conflict zone, CIA was nowhere to be seen anyway. [Sarcastically] They did no harm.

When I did ask them to do one thing, they were very reluctant, but they did it: I needed to bring in some lawnmowers to cut the grass behind the residence of the ambassador, because it led directly to a stream that led directly to the Guazapa volcano, where the guerrillas were. I was concerned they would come down the stream and attack the residence. "Can you get some lawnmowers and cut the tall grass?"

That's what the CIA was good for?

I did it only when I went to the director, Mr. Casey, in Langley, Virginia, and he ordered them to do what I said. Casey had been doing OSS operations in World War II. He knew what the CIA had inherited. But to my recommendation that he should empty out the building and start anew, he says “Well, I can't really do it. It's too drastic.” So I said, okay, just fire half of them and put the other half on leave and let's start hiring young Americans who have been in foreign parts.

Never happened. Never happened, not with Casey, not with the subsequent heads, two of whom were personal friends of mine.

You were mentioning nuclear deterrence a moment ago. I wonder how you see the Russia-Ukraine war?

When Putin invaded Ukraine, he did something very, very bad because he brought war back to Europe. Now arguably it was not such a bad thing, because, after all, Europe has never prospered in the absence of wars. The attempt to abolish war from its natural home, which is Europe, has had disastrous social consequences. They used to have a war, then the warriors came back, the women wanted warriors, the warriors wanted women, and all the deaths of the war were quickly overcome by a big explosion of births, as people got married and made children. Now they don't make war, and they don't make children, etc.

But Putin did a terrible thing by invading Ukraine. Then he did an even worse thing by publicly stating that he would not use nuclear weapons unless Russia was in imminent danger of destruction, i.e., only a strike-back deterrence. Now, he's not the first one to have done this, because the Indians and Pakistanis have been fighting wars with nuclear weapons. The result is we now live in a post-nuclear era.

So Putin is terrible because A, he invaded Ukraine, B, would not use nuclear weapons, therefore he ended the myth of nuclear weapons and restored pre-nuclear conditions.

How should we expect the war in Ukraine to end? In your book The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union, you describe a common Russian device as “an armistice followed by protracted and inconclusive negotiations.”

Should we expect the same in Ukraine?

No, no, no. I think that if Donald Trump acts on his obvious intent, which is to end the war, Donald Trump can do it. He can do it by telling Putin that he wants to end the war and develop good relations with Russia. The enemy is China, but Putin has to go halfway and do it.

My personal suggestion, which I know Putin is aware of, because we have a person in common, who happens to be his strategic advisor —

Who is that?

He can reveal his name, I can't reveal his name. It's something I know well, I know Putin personally quite well, I know what I'm talking about here. [Luttwak spent time in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, and has previously said he “used to invite (Putin) to the only two decent restaurants in town at the time.”]

The easiest way to do it is to remove the burden from Zelensky and Putin of giving territory away, by simply having every disputed territory conduct a 1919 plebiscite. 1919 plebiscite rules mean that only certified people are allowed to vote and that everything is supervised by neutral soldiers, not gentlemen in suits and frock coats. In this way, neither Zelensky nor Putin have to give away anything. It's the local population that decides one way or the other with true plebiscites. This was done after the First World War in Belgium, Denmark, Austria-Hungary, Poland, Germany, and all of the plebiscites were successful, they ended ongoing conflict, and that is the formula for it.

If the Ukrainians don't accept plebiscites under third-party control, we'll cut them off. If the Russians don't, then it will be up to Trump to say, “All my inclinations are to cooperate with Russia, not to fight Russia. But if you don't give me a choice, I will have to unload onto Ukraine the products of that massive industrial upsurge, which I'm going to do. And that would be a horrible thing. The last thing I want is for Russia to be defeated.”

In 1983, you called the Soviet Union "the only European empire that still survives." Are there any empires left today? Some people would describe America as an imperial power. Would you?

No, America is not an imperial power. Let us stick to the accurate use of language. An imperial power is a power whose nominal-nationality citizens rule over those who are not of that nominal nationality. There’s only one surviving empire, and that is the Chinese empire.

But China is nothing like a British case where you have 12 Englishmen ruling 1,200 tribes, but you have Chinese ruling non-Chinese: the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, and of course, you have the Hui, who are ethnic Chinese, but Muslim, and you have the Uyghur of Xinjiang. In Xinjiang, you also have Tajiks and Kyrgyz. You have many nationalities, but only the Han count. Only the Han voice is significant. Now, admittedly, they're 90% of the population, so these are minorities. There are no real colonial empires at all, unless you look at Iran, where the titular nationality, the Persians, account for a diminishing percentage of the population.

The birth rate of Iran across the board is much lower than Israel's birth rates, but the Persian birth rate is particularly low compared to the Kurdish and Azeri populations and the Turkmen of the northeast and so on.

You once wrote that warfare would be more difficult when there were fewer spare children.

Yeah, that was “post-heroic war.” I wrote that a long time ago in a series of articles [in Foreign Affairs], drawing attention to the drastic collapse in tolerance of casualties that occurred.

When I was at school, they called it "force protection fetishization."

You see that in Russia itself. Putin could not send conscripts into combat. No conscripts. Russia has not declared war and does not mobilize the armed forces because it couldn't send conscripts into combat. Why is that? Because they're very scarce.

Families are shrinking — with three or four children, you have one male child who inherits the land. Somebody else marries a woman with land. The third one goes, a fourth one goes to the army and doesn't go back. It's really tragic, but still the family continues.

In China, we've gone to the extreme. The Communist Party of China, which is always totally and utterly decisive in doing anything, whether it's very clever or very stupid, resulted in a population of single children. Good luck to Xi Jinping to fight the war with this army of single children. What everybody should know, if they ever get to fight the Chinese, is: forget about destroying materiel. Forget about invading territory. Kill soldiers.

You said last year that “No one in history has fought a war whose soldiers are the single children of their families.”

That's correct. That is the experiment that Xi Jinping wants to undertake. But he's taking precautions to make this possible by doing the efficient thing, which is subverting Taiwan's military officers, most of whom belong to the Kuomintang party, which is ideologically committed to unification, and who clearly have no intention of fighting.

This year, they started one-year conscription, and they hardly trained the conscripts. They should have started 30 years ago. They have no intention of fighting. They already have their villas in Xiamen, across the border.

Xi Jinping wants a war, but as for the conquest of Taiwan, he relies on treason. And eager betrayers are the senior officers in the Taiwan army. By the way, they were thrilled when a delegation of Marine officers came to give them advice. They need advice not from the US Marine Corps. They need advice from the Finnish Armed Forces about how you mobilize an entire population.

The Finnish population is 5.5 million. In any conceivable encounter, the Finnish army will greatly outnumber the Russian army because they conscript everybody, they train everybody, and they put them in reserves, which are refreshed and kept up to date so that they have a vast army. Or they could learn from Israel, which has the reserve system, but they are not interested at all in Israel. No, no, no. They only want contact with the United States: you know, the golden touch and stuff. The only thing they care about is buying equipment, not using equipment. You use equipment and it gets dirty.

In your life, you have been a big snorkeler. Do you still snorkel?

Yes. But I go to where the coral and fish still survive. Wherever cruise ships arrive, 500 people jump in the water, they put on ill-fitting masks and cover themselves with sunblocker, which contains metals that destroy the coral. If I could have my way, I would like to organize a private submarine service that will go sinking cruise ships.

When I go, I go to the French Pacific atolls. They never have the red coral of the Caribbean, but they have soft corals and lots of fish to see. The reefs are largely intact in French Polynesia.

You've written something like 20 books. Are you working on anything right now?

I actually started very recently on a book, which I should have written a long time ago. It's a book on the organization, training, and operation of a modern intelligence service.