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This is a conversation with General HR McMaster - one of the most experienced, respected and impressive military and national security thinkers and practitioners of our time. He is a military historian, Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump in his first term and a former three star general in the U.S. Army - who among other things commanded US troops during the Gulf War in the biggest tank battle since the 2nd world war and who has been called the “best brigadier general of our time” and “the pre-eminent warrior-thinker of the 21st century”.

As we're recording this, the United States and Israel are two weeks into a war with Iran, and the war in Ukraine is still grinding on. And General McMaster has been warning for years that these - and other conflicts - aren't separate crises - but that they're part of one connected, escalating struggle between the West and an axis of authoritarian aggressors. In this conversation, we get into why he thinks the West is dangerously underestimating this threat, what's really driving Putin's strategy and why does Trump keep refusing to increase pressure on him, whether starting a war with Iran war was a good decision and how will it end, whether the West still even exists if U.S. president threatens to take Greenland or why is the momentum of escalating and cascading events only picking up steam - and what comes next.