When you don't start off from a base of values, the rest of it, it doesn't matter.

So if you have these end states of what you want to accomplish and you're talking about all the resources and people that are going to accomplish it, if you don't have the ways you're going to do it, abiding by our values, then to me it's a bankrupt piece of paper.

That's retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling assessing the Trump administration's new national security Strategy.

I'm Margaret Hoover.

This is THE FIRING Line podcast.

Europe doesn't know what to do.

They want to be politically correct and it makes them weak.

That's what makes them weak.

President Trump's newly released national security strategy has drawn outrage in Europe and praise from the Kremlin.

Russia sees us disrespecting our allies, insulting our allies, saying where we're going to shift from Germany to a more Monroe Doctrine like approach.

It casts Trump as the president of peace as the administration faces growing questions about the legality of strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats.

We are bombing boats in an undeclared conflict in international waters where these individuals are unarmed, and there's been no approval of doing this by Congress or even a statement of what the strategy is.

Mark Hurling is the former commanding general of the US Army in Europe and a veteran of both Iraq wars.

He says that President Trump is wrong about reviving the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere.

It's regional hegemony.

It's what Russia has attempted to do in their sphere of influence.

It's what China has attempting to do in the Far East.

And about the role of America's allies?

It's America only, and everyone else supports us.

There were really some elements of this document that were telling other nations how they could better serve us.

General Mark Hertling, welcome to Firing LINE.

It is great to be with you, thanks for asking me.

We are now almost one year into President Trump's second term, second non consecutive term, and we're in a very different world than the president first faced in 2017.

And it's a very different presidency so far.

I wonder, from your perspective, what are the biggest differences in President Trump's foreign policy posture now in 2025 than it was in 2017?

Well, Margaret, there's a bunch of stuff we could comment on, all sorts of things that he's doing, but also the advice he's getting from his counselors.

We saw in the first administration that, and this has been well publicized and he had a lot more people building guardrails for him, making sure he knew what abided by the law and what went outside of it.

What we're seeing now, I think, is he has a coterie of people around him either not giving him good advice or he's not taking it.

So what I'm seeing is a lot more desire to go faster in some very unusual ways and really not care about any of the guardrails that might constrain diplomacy, military actions, economic desires, or informational approaches.

Those are the four elements of national power.

And it really seems to me that he's taking different approaches to each one of them, really apart from what the norm usually is.

What do you mean by unusual ways?

Well, he's not looking at the legal ramifications of some of the things he's doing.

We're seeing that in the last few weeks.

Not prescribing to Congress the ability to either approve or disapprove of any kind of things that would relate to the War Powers Act or stating things that he's going to do in terms of treaties or alliances that are well grounded in law and and agreements, past agreements.

He's just blowing through quite a few things that that are not his alone in my view and many others.

Some of those requirements belong to Congress, to the departments, to the kinds of things that he's asking people to do that are contrary to what our values and our norms are as as a as a nation and what we believe from the very beginning of our founding.

You know, we continue to learn more about the incident in September in which Admiral Frank Bradley ordered a second strike after two survivors were spotted amid the wreckage of a boat in the Caribbean.

Based on what we know so far, you have said that this appears to be a war crime.

And while we have not seen the video of the second strike and have not learned all the details, I wonder what it would take for you general to change your perception or be convinced that the second strike was legal.

Well, it if I were to see the video, I would first compare it to what happened on the 1st strike and what kind of condition the men were in.

That's been described to us on the news by people who have seen the the videos.

But I also put it from the moral perspective, Margaret, you know, we are we are bombing boats in an undeclared conflict in international waters where these individuals are unarmed.

And there's been no approval of doing this by Congress or even a statement of what the strategy is.

We don't know what the president is trying to do.

He has mentioned counter narcotics operation, interdicting drug runners and there's even been mentioned from him and his administration about the possibilities of invading Venezuela.

So what is the strategy that puts these actions in the context?

You know, when when the military takes a look at civilian orders or orders from our civilian masters, you know, it usually has a political end state or at least a an end state to the warfare.

And then the military tries to build campaign plans and the best way to approach it for the life of me, and I've done campaign planning before war and contingency planning and and war plans as it's better known to the American public.

I can't see how these things fit in one another.

Just arbitrarily bombing boats where there have been no names given of people on the boats.

They declare that they know who these terrorists are, these narco terrorists as they've described them.

They say that they're coming toward the United States.

But we know when people who use these kind of cigarette boats would not be able to reach the shores of our.

So it's not an imminent threat and it's not a declared war.

And so they're they're really destroying vessels in international water.

And as you can imagine, on the 1st strike on September the 2nd, those who were destroyed, those who were bombed in that strike didn't know what the hell was going on.

They got a little bit more of a deterrent warning for the boats that came after that if they were delivering drugs or what they were doing.

But that first one came out of the blue.

It was just a sniper shot with a large missile that that killed 9 out of 11 people.

And the other two people were just trying to survive after that, not knowing what had happened.

I'm trying to put myself in the position of undergoing combat and realizing, hey, I'm not a combatant.

I may be a criminal, or I may just be a mule that's being paid to transfer these drugs.

Why am I being bombed?

What's going on here?

Shouldn't there be bigger fish to fry than me?

And in that sense, what you also have to consider is the release of the Honduran president who was a major cartel owner.

So it just seems to me to be in conflict with common sense and the reality of any time you go to war.

If the president can declare A suspected drug smuggler a military target without seeking approval from Congress or providing any evidence that they pose such a threat to the United States, are there any limits?

Yeah, that's the key question for those of us in the military, and I think that's what the debate is right now.

Was this a crime, a war crime or following orders in an undeclared conflict?

It, it, it, there are so many ethical arguments that could be made in terms of what happened by the individuals who actually are pulling the triggers.

That's, that's the, the thing that I think most Americans don't understand.

You know, you may have a president who gives an order to do something, but it's, it's the individual on the other end of that order that literally has to face the moral damage by killing someone.

Now, you know, you see in this case, special operations forces conducting the attack.

These are individuals who over the last 20 some years have been involved in person to person fighting with killing of terrorist, going up against individuals who were looking to kill them as well.

So they are very highly skilled and well honed in terms of their operational mentality and the way they approach something like this.

So using those special operators in a mission that in the past has been conducted, and by the way, conducted very well by the United States Coast Guard in terms of either deterring these kind of crafts or capturing them in a variety of ways.

And then arresting the individuals who are conducting the smuggling and seizing the drugs that are in the boats is a whole lot different than just blowing them out of the water.

So there is some moral injury that goes with the ladder versus the former.

When you know as a military force your abiding by the rules of of war.

Can you though General walk me through something you and others have said that the Department of Defense Law of War manual specifically refers to the firing upon the shipwrecked as quote clearly illegal, which is an order that the military is required to disobey.

So realistically, how does that work?

If a commander orders a second strike to kill 2 shipwreck survivors, and an individual does not want to execute that order, what does a subordinate who receives that order do if they believe the order violates the law?

How does that actually work in real time?

Yeah.

In In the Law of War manual, Margaret, I'll, I'll say that it isn't specifically described as something you can't do.

It's giving an example of that act as something that would be considered a war crime.

So there's a little bit of difference there.

But what I'll tell you, even in the first strike, again, we go back to the legality of, of conducting an operation like this without it being described as combat.

There's, there should be some questioning of the campaign or how you're going to execute it when you're talking about the difference between the first strike and the second strike, where you can see if this is true in the film.

And again, I haven't seen it, if you can see on the film that these individuals are or to combat or outside the fight and they're just hanging on for dear life, that's murder.

That that is something that the United States military teaches you not to do.

So to go back to your question, what would an individual do in that case?

Well, they would first question the order.

Wait a minute, Sir.

Whoever they're talking to the superior.

Do you really want us to do this?

Isn't this violation of the law that we've been taught to ensure we obey?

And if the questioning doesn't work, then you go to a higher authority, the next level up in the chain of command.

Unfortunately, in this situation, you have the levels of chain of command seemingly, and again I'm speaking on conjecture, all of them approving this strike and not only at the time approving it, but giving a situation that the military calls commander's intent.

If you listen to your bosses for weeks on end and they are telling you, here's what we're going to do, We're going to strike these boats.

We're going to kill all the terrorists.

We're going to make sure the boat sunk and we're going to, you know, ensure that the drugs go to the bottom of the sea.

And if that mantra is repeated and over and over again, you know what your boss wants, you know what they want to do.

So when it comes to the actual act itself, you're conditioned to obey those orders even though you've known they're illegal or suspect that they might be illegal by what your Judge Advocate General tells you.

If all of those along the way have been ignored, and if there's been no voicing of non support for those kind of actions, even though some people know that they're violating the law of war, then that's problematic to be sure.

In 1990 you wrote a Military View article calling for treating drug cartels as military targets, which you now say was naive.

Why, General, in your view does that?

Why doesn't this approach work?

Well, because back in 19, I'm glad you cited that.

I hadn't thought about that thing for a long time.

Back in 1990, we were discussing at the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth the kinds of things we should do if the president were to ask us to conduct a drug war.

What does a drug war mean?

And in a very naive approach, I looked at it from one side, the destroying of the supply of drugs.

And I said a lot of things in that article about what the potential would be for the military to be brought into that fight.

And in that article, I talked about working with the host nation government, working with host nation security forces.

How do you smoke out these individuals who are part of a cartel and not only does destroy their equipment, but potentially if they were countering you with guns, to kill them as well?

But then I realized I was very naive on this because any kind of a campaign that consists of drug running consists of the supply side coming from South America, or at the time it was Colombia versus the demand side.

And you can do as much as you want to the supply side and your enemy will get a vote.

And in this case, the enemy are the drug cartel leaders.

So they will adapt, They will adjust their approaches.

They will maintain different lines of effort in terms of getting the drugs to the United States, but it's just important, just as important, excuse me, to ensure that the supply side is also provided support to stop taking the drugs.

So this is a two way St.

both supply and demand when you're talking about drug, drug cartels and what they're providing inside the shores of the United States.

We don't seem to be addressing the demand problem at all, other than just saying fentanyl is bad or cocaine is bad.

There's got to be more to it than that.

Does it give you any?

You mentioned guardrails as one of the differences in the second Trump administration versus the first Trump administration's foreign policy.

It seems as though the Congress has this week suggested that it may hold up the secretary of defense's travel budget until the second video is made available to some of the key committees.

Does that give you a degree of confidence that perhaps some guardrails or checks on the executive may be instituted or reinstituted?

Well, it's.

An interesting approach, but truthfully, I'm a little bit more hardcore than that.

I would like for the Congress of the United States to do a whole lot more, have some inquiries into everyone that was involved, not just Secretary heck, Seth and or Admiral Bradley, but others the the former Special Operations Command commander, General Fenton.

He would have had to have known about this because remember at the time of the first strike, Admiral Bradley was not the Special Operations Command commander.

He was the Joint Special Operations Command commander as a three star Admiral.

So he was one level below his boss.

His boss would have had to know this, and we are now seeing some questions being thrown at Admiral Halsey, who is a Southern Command commander.

He's the guy that's responsible for the entire area of operation.

And whenever special operations come into an area of operation like what was controlled by Admiral Halsey, they need to coordinate every single one of their actions with him.

And not only special OPS actions, but also actions of CIA agents.

And the president has announced that there was covert CIA in Venezuela at this time and any other actions that were going on inside of a country.

Now, Admiral Halsey, the Southern Command commander, has been in that location for a couple of years, but because before he was the commander, he was the deputy commander.

So he knows the nations that are involved in these kind of counter narcotics efforts.

So I would bet he would be a pretty good advisor to the Secretary of Defense if he were listened to.

And we now understand that there was some huge contentious debates going on not only between Admiral Halsey and Secretary Hegseth, but also between Admiral Halsey's lawyer, his staff Judge Advocate and the general counsel in the Pentagon.

So what you're seeing is a bunch of different stories, advice being given, military advice being given to civilian leadership to the extent that it caused an individual to offer his retirement.

That tells me there's a whole lot of fire behind the smoke.

I.

Want to turn to the national security strategy.

The Trump administration has recently released a new national security strategy.

This is a document that outlines the priorities and principles for its approach to foreign policy.

And you, General, have met, you have read many of these documents, you have helped draft defense strategies based on them.

Can you just briefly help us understand the significance of the President's National Security Strategy document there?

There are some that will write off.

The National Security Strategy is just a piece of paper.

But I got to tell you from allies and foes alike, they are also reading this thing.

The allies are taking a look at it and saying, what does this mean to me in terms of our relationship with the United States?

And just like we debate the NSS in our war colleges, in our seats of government, other countries are doing the same thing, in Sweden, in Finland, in Germany, in Italy.

And by the way, our foes are doing the same you.

Called Russia's delight over the national security strategy document troubling why is that troubling for you It's.

Hugely troubling.

Russia sees us disrespecting our allies, insulting our allies, saying where we're going to shift from Germany to a more Monroe Doctrine like approach and expanding on the Monroe Doctrine in which they call the new Trump Doctrine.

It's extremely troubling in terms of the way they approach different things.

Within that document for our allies and our friends, but it also gives a lot of gifts to our foes.

President Trump's first national security strategy from 2017 could be boiled down to one line.

You know, America first, but not alone.

Based on what you understand about this document, what would be an apartment one liner to describe the new national security strategy of the second Trump administration?

Oh.

Wow.

Based on my read of it, it's America only and everyone else supports us.

There were really some elements of this document that we're telling other nations how they could better serve us.

So it was very transactional in nature as opposed to the first doctrine, the first national security strategy that was written by a friend of mine, HR McMaster, when he was the National security Advisor.

Let me ask you about.

Let me ask you about one piece of that you just referenced the National Security Strategy.

This document, as I read it it, it is noticeably devoid of principled arguments about American values.

The the 2017 strategy that you just referenced that was authored by HR General HR McMaster, who was then the national security advisor to President Trump.

It's grounded in the ideas that America's principles are a quote lasting force for good in the world.

The new document, the new National Security strategy of this Trump administration seems concerned with denouncing elites moving away from alliances projecting power in the Western Hemisphere.

Does the absence of values based arguments for our strategy concern you?

Absolutely.

And and it should concern anyone that's has studied American government because we know that our ideology and our values drive our strategies and our strategies, Dr.

our policies and approaches.

So when you don't start off from a base of values, just like in corporate America, if your company doesn't have values, if you haven't determined what you want to be and how you want to act, the rest of it is it doesn't matter.

One of the things that was in the the strategy too, is it talks about the relationship between ends and means.

And it totally disregards the, the, the key element of strategy.

And that's the ways you do things.

So if you have these end states of what you want to accomplish and you're talking about all the resources and people that are going to accomplish it, if you don't have the ways you're going to do it, abiding by our values, then to me it's a bankrupt piece of paper.

What?

Are the values that are espoused in this new national security strategy.

I couldn't find any to be honest with you.

It was all very economically based control of different parts of the world, telling others in different parts of the world how to run their governments and how they are about to.

In fact, the the statement about Europe is within 20 years they are going to be nothing like they've been over their last several centuries of existence.

So those kinds of insults certainly don't correspond to the American value of respect for others or an understanding of what others doing, or liberty or freedom are some of the values that are in our founding documents and that have been in our speeches throughout our ages, like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Kennedy's inauguration or Roosevelt's 4 freedoms.

You can't see any of our values in the current national security strategy.

And if we're not living by our values, then we are going to turn away from who we are as a nation.

The Trump administration calls for a quote Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine, of course, refers to President James Monroe's 1823 doctrine that claimed the Western Hemisphere belonged to the United States's sphere of interest and warned European powers not to interfere in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere.

Now the Wall Street Journal editorial board, famously conservative editorial board, says that this will, quote, please China and Russia but discomfort America's allies.

So why focus on peace in the Western Hemisphere when the greatest threats to global peace are elsewhere?

I I.

I don't know the answer to that, but the only thing I could consider is Ernest.

There is an approach toward various key powers in the world controlling a regional area of operation.

So it's regional hegemony.

It's what Iran has attempted to do in the Middle East.

It's what Russia has attempted to do in their sphere of influence.

It's what China has attempting to do in the Far East.

So it puts us in that position of being a regional hegemon for North and South America.

And you even see it in some of the changes within our military organization.

Just this week there was a change of command at U.S.

Army Forces Command to make it called the Western Hemisphere Command.

That, to me, is a little bit troubling it It appears that instead of looking at worldwide potential deployments that would stand for the values that we hold dear, we're focusing on what, just one part of the world?

You know, it strikes me, General, and I'd like your reaction to this, that the new national security strategy also emphasizes peace, but it doesn't clearly define the threats to peace nearly as clearly as the President Trump's first national security strategy did.

It outlined in 2017 the revisionist powers, namely China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, the so-called axis of authoritarians that are, by the way, coordinating even more today against American power than they were then.

It seems to me that those powers pose the biggest threat to global peace.

And yet this national security strategy doesn't even mention North Korea.

It barely references Iran.

It calls for more stable relations with Russia.

Can Trump really cement his legacy as the president of peace without confronting the countries that threaten peace Well?

It's not only that, Margaret, I'll take it a little bit further and say, yes, all of those countries are dangerous and all of them are expanding in their approach to their global territory and they are dangerous.

In each particular instance.

You lied.

But what also isn't addressed are the potential coordination of other countries in areas like cyber malinformation, misinformation, disinformation malinformation, space based platforms.

These are the kinds of Gray zone efforts that are currently going on.

And we're just beginning to see the effects of some of these things when various countries collaborate to counter what we're trying to do.

This perfect example is Russia.

They have wanted to divide the United States.

They have played an active part in doing that as well as attempting to disrupt the NATO alliance.

They seem to be doing that very well with things like election interference in various countries, cyber conditions.

I'll give the example of Estonia murdering people on foreign soil.

That affects governmental actions.

Those are the kind of things that they're not seen as tanks or artillery pieces rolling across borders, but they are going to be just as dangerous in the next several decades.

Last week at the Ronald Reagan Defence Forum, Secretary Heck Seth declared quote the Monroe Doctrine is in effect and it is stronger than ever.

General on the original firing line with William F Buckley Junior in 1980.

Buckley himself made the case for a similar position.

Take a look at this clip.

It seems to me if we don't assert the Monroe Doctrine, we we are creating a vacuum in into which we we invite future Cubas.

It's it's easy enough to say that Cuba isn't in and of itself a threat, but it has certainly taken up a lot of our time during the past 15 or 20 years since the advent of of Castro.

So is there any reason why we shouldn't accept as a challenge for the 80's the reimposition of the Monroe Doctrine?

William F Buckley Junior made this argument at the height of the Cold War.

But there are conservatives today who argue that the United States does have a strong strategic interest in expanding our influence in our own hemisphere and countering China's presence in Latin America.

Do we?

I think we have a strong requirement to counter any kind of malign influencers anywhere in the world, people who try and take away liberty, our freedoms or individual value in, in any nation or the, the, the choice that people have of electing their governments, then yeah, we, we have a responsibility to try and counter that.

But it's the way you do that that's important.

It isn't by driving people away or going in and killing people.

We've learned that lesson over and over again.

We should try, in my belief, to contribute to good governance in our partners and our allies.

Show them what that means, and show what malign activities might do for democratic societies.

That's a different kind of approach.

And, you know, Mr.

Buckley said all that at the height of the Cold War, where a lot of Latin American and South American countries seem to be teetering between authoritarian governments and democracies.

And it may have been right for those coming out of colonial power and those who were trying to determine their future, but I don't think it's right today.

We have a much different approach to governing and the way we interact with other nations of both our allies and our foes.

And I don't think any of that commentary from Mr.

Buckley should be applied today.

General, just this week, the New York Times reported that President Trump announced that NVIDIA will be allowed to sell its second most powerful chip, semiconductor chip known as the H200, to China.

This is, you know, an act that could enable China to use American technology to gain military and economic advantage in artificial intelligence over the United States.

Now the National Security Strategies section on Taiwan says clearly quote in the long term, maintaining American economic and technological pre eminence is the surest way to deter and prevent large scale military conflict.

Did President Trump's choice to sell semiconductors to China, some of America's best semiconductors to China, directly undermine the National Security strategy that he published only days before?

It certainly does countermand it, but we're all assuming that President Trump, like his first term, actually read the National Security Strategy.

This would be the time when his cabinet members like his Secretary of State, his Secretary of Defense and Commerce, Treasury would all be up in arms about something like this and coordinating their response through the National Security Council to get to decision making on the part of the president.

But in this case, as in so many other cases, it appears we're seeing the president make decisions without the advice of his counsel, his cabinet members, because they're too busy promoting him and and being sycophants in terms of what he's trying to do.

This is where it takes individual standing up in a cabinet meeting or in face to face primary committees or deputy committees saying this is not good for us.

But that doesn't seem to be happening.

The coordination of actions don't occur to be part of the schedule agenda on the president's daily briefings.

You know, we see that as he kind of gutted the National Security Council, which is supposed to be coordinating these kinds of actions with the different cabinet members.

We don't see that happening as much as I think we should.

I.

Mean does the choice to sell H200 and NVIDIA chips to China compromise American National security?

Absolutely.

From everything I know about it.

I am not a chip expert, but I know that there's a competition in this region and by selling our best to another country who is considered our competitor is not a good idea.

You wouldn't do that in business.

You shouldn't do that in government.

So why would President Trump so clearly compromise American National security on the heels of writing a document if he's so clearly going to undermine the the principles he stated about ensuring that America has technological and economic superiority over China with respect to chips and then to go just days later sell those chips to the Chinese Communist Party.

How is?

How does?

How do you square that?

Well, you probably square it in the same way as you would square bombing small drug boats while releasing a major drug cartel leader in the president of Honduras.

These are actions that cause confusion not only within our own government and the United States citizens, but they also cause a massive amount of confusion with our allies because they don't know what we're going to do next.

We may state something in our national security strategy, which is our approach, but then when the president does something that's completely contrary to that, it can only cause angst and confusion within our allies.

With respect to Ukraine, this strategy asserts it is the core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine in order to re establish strategic stability with Russia.

Should re establishing strategic stability with Russia be the key objective of our country in my?

View Absolutely not.

The strategic stability of Russia is not something that we should be considering at all in these peace talks.

It should be the sovereign territory of Ukraine.

The the dynamic of President Solinsky actually governing his own country within their borders and also holding a war criminal at Bay for what he was responsible for doing, which by last count was over 12,000 cited war crimes.

This would be the equivalent of saying, well, Gee, in 1945 we want to contribute to the stability of Germany.

So that means we're going to give them back the sedent land and dismiss all of the war crimes they committed in the Holocaust and at the same time give them the opportunity to reboot and potentially attack through Belgium again.

That's my corollary to what is happening now with Russia.

We're giving them an opportunity to be war criminals and invade another country by saying we're contributing to their stability.

That just doesn't make sense to me as a military guy General.

You have a a forthcoming book that will be published this spring.

If I don't return.

This is a journal that you wrote for your sons when you were deployed to Iraq in the 1990s, and your sons are now veterans themselves.

In this moment of tension and uncertainty for Americans and also for the American military, how are the lessons that you imparted to your sons significant?

Well.

The The original was for our sons Margaret.

The next copy is for our five grandsons, because that's what one of our sons asked me to do, to take what I wrote back in 1990 and 91 and apply it to the rest of my life and, and give the same kind of reflections on topics that I've observed over 4 decades in the military.

So I traced the kinds of things I talked about in 1990 all the way through my retirement and then beyond in new reflections.

And hopefully what it talks about and the gift I'm trying to give is an understanding of character, leadership, patriotism, smaller dynamics like what goes on in the army when they go to war, how you should love your wife and your family.

Because I wanted our sons.

If I didn't return to know how to be men, Well, I did return.

That's the spoiler alert of the book.

And so I'm trying now to give new advice to a new generation.

And I finished the last chapter with some thoughts on a long chapter on leadership and also MacArthur's prayer to his sons, which talks about what kind of person you should be in your life to make your parents proud.

So that's what I tried to do in this book and I'm excited for it to come out.

Well, we look forward to it, and I hope you'll return to Firing Line when it does.

General Martin Hartling, thank you for your service to our country and thank you for joining me here on Firing Line.

It was a.

Pleasure Margaret, and thank you for having me.