9/11 changed our, I guess, our conscience with regard to realizing that we were indeed vulnerable.

We weren't just this, you know, great nation that sat on a continent that was separated by two oceans, that now not just nation states, but a terrorist group could strike us and kill more Americans than were killed at Pearl Harbor.

Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer and today, a somber anniversary, 25 years since 9/11.

A quarter century ago, on a clear September morning, the world as we knew it changed.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the deadliest terror attack in history.

Families lost, parents and children and siblings, and America's sense of security was shattered.

Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.

9/11 became one of those rare moments that divides history into a before and an after.

It transformed US politics and national security.

The war on terror becoming the organizing principle of American foreign policy.

The United States then invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, convinced its military might could reshape a dangerous world.

Every nation in every region now has a decision to make.

Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

But with 25 years of hindsight, it's clear that the Bush administration's freedom agenda did little to make the world safer, never mind more democratic.

The post-9/11 wars killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions more, and cost the United States trillions only to spawn another generation of terrorists and destabilize the Middle East in ways we are continuing to pay the price for today.

A quarter century later, we are living in a much different reality.

China has emerged as America's principal strategic competitor.

Russia, a dangerous rogue state.

Social media has reordered our politics.

AI is transforming the flow of information and very idea of warfare in ways that would feel like the stuff of science fiction 10 years ago.

And yet, for all that has changed, echoes of the post-9/11 era are still reverberating.

They say that history rhymes, sometimes, a little too closely.

The United States is today once again fighting a major war in the Middle East without clear objectives or a coherent exit strategy.

The surveillance state born out of 9/11 is still growing, only now it includes private companies that can track our location, monitor our communication and recognize our faces.

25 years, it's long enough for an entire generation to grow up with no memory of the world before that morning.

And for them, remembering 9/11 means more than what happened that day.

It means asking whether we learned the right lessons and whether the world we built in response is equipped to handle an entirely new set of threats and challenges.

To help us take stock, I'm joined by someone who has had a front row seat to the evolution of American national security, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

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And... - Mark Esper, thanks so much for joining us today.

Good to be with you, Ian.

We're starting, of course, talking about 9/11.

25 years ago, I was here in New York City.

You were a young Army officer.

Talk to us just a little bit.

Put us back in your shoes on that day, what you remember, what you thought.

Yeah, look, it's hard to not remember what you were doing and where you were that day.

I was actually a Capitol Hill staffer working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that morning.

And I was also an Army officer.

At that time, I was in the National Guard, and I was working weekends, of all places, in the special operations and low-intensity conflict part of the Pentagon, which meant that we were actually handling the Osama Bin Laden file at that point in time.

Not many people knew about him or about al-Qaeda, but it was something that we tracked and worked.

And so that fateful morning, I remember watching the TV as I sat in my office, and I saw the breaking news of the first plane hitting the building, and, of course, thought that was really unusual and tragic at the same time.

And of course, like everybody else, the minute that second plane hit, we knew it was something real.

And not knowing what it was, I remember calling my colleagues over at the Pentagon who were in this office saying, are you seeing what's going on?

This is kind of what we feared.

And they were already on top of it, already thinking about Bin Laden, what it may mean, what they would do.

And, of course, on our side, the building at the cap on Capitol Hill kind of lit up with buzz and concern about what was going on.

And soon after that, we were evacuated, because, of course, there was the threat of the inbound plane coming into the Capitol.

And that ultimately became known to be as United Airlines Flight 93.

And at the same time, or just before that, of course, the building -- a plane hit the Pentagon, and there was an explosion at the State Department.

Needless to say, the entire city was shocked, was upset, was concerned, was afraid, all kinds of emotions running through everybody, and lawmakers, of course, who were trying to figure out what this means for the country.

So, when you think about -- I mean, so many Americans that you and I meet now -- and it is a little startling to meet Americans who were born and whose entire life experience does not include 9/11.

You talked to some of them today.

What would you want them to understand about how the experience of 9/11 has changed our country?

- Yeah, it's a really good question.

Obviously, it deserves more thought than I can give it here on the spot.

You know, like in my lifetime, there was a, uh, I was born in the early 1960s.

So I, there's a pre-Cold War or a Cold War era and a post-Cold War era.

And I think it's fair to say there's now a pre-9/11 era and a post-9/11 era.

You know, we know the tangible things that came with it.

We, you might recall, you used to be able to go into airports and meet people when it got off the plane, right?

But it also changed our -- it changed our -- I guess our conscience in some way, our subconscious with regard to realizing that we were indeed vulnerable.

We weren't just this great nation that sat on a continent that was separated by two oceans, that now, not just nation-states, but a terrorist group could strike us and kill more Americans than we're -- or at least more people that were killed than Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor.

And so a very tragic event.

It went on for -- obviously rippled throughout us, throughout the country for weeks and months.

And, eventually, it ended up in the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and in some ways led us to the war in Iraq in 2003.

By that time, I was a deputy assistant secretary in the Pentagon.

But it took us on a whole different arc in terms of where our history might have gone had we had not had 9/11.

- 25 years should be long enough for us to learn some lessons.

When you think about the things that we have done as a consequence of 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the broadly, more broadly branded war on terror, global war on terror, GWAT, the Department of Homeland Security, the mass surveillance, the Patriot Act, all of these things.

Can you talk a little bit about where you think we got it right, where you think we got it wrong?

- Yeah, another great question.

You know, as I said, I worked on Capitol Hill, so I was still working as a Senate staffer when the foreign relations committee that I worked on passed the authorization for the use of military force.

I eventually worked for the Senate Majority Leader, we went through all the intelligence protocols, so I had a front seat, if not partly on the field when we went through all that.

I would say a few things come to mind.

We have to remain vigilant always and prepared, because you never know what the threats are and as you recall, at least I do, from the 9/11 Commission, the number one finding was that we lacked imagination of what those threats might be.

So I think vigilance is number one.

Number two would be cautious of overreach.

And I think that's one of my conclusions drawn from the Afghanistan war, and that is the tendency for Americans to overreach, to think that we're somehow going to transform a tribal society that is living in futile times into some type of Jeffersonian democracy, and all the blood and treasure and sweat that we expended there.

I think that's another lesson.

And, look, I think the other one, too, that is often forgotten is keeping in mind what makes America great.

And those are -- that is our democracy and our values, and making sure we sustain the principles of free speech and assembly and not making -- not using national security -- and I say this as a national security guy as the means to -- by which we cut off Americans' freedoms and do stuff like that.

I think living in democracy, living in our democracy means we have to accept some risk when it comes to foreign threats and not sacrifice that because we're afraid.

So that -- those are just some quick conclusions that come to mind for me.

- So, do you think -- I mean, what I'm hearing from you is, you know, you think we overshot a bit, maybe more than a bit, in terms of -- I mean, obviously, there's going to be a knee-jerk reaction to, we need far more security.

We need to focus much more on, you know, everything to fight this war on terror, and that individual rights and liberties in the United States were not adequately safeguarded in this period.

- No, I think they were.

I think at times, though, they were questioned, right?

We talk about the Patriot Act and things like that.

I think there were some folks who would like to have gone further.

I think we largely found the right balance with regard to privacy and Americans' rights and some of the small sacrifices that we ask Americans to do, like we talked earlier with regard to going through airports and subjecting yourself to searches and stuff like that.

Some of that was prudent.

I think, though, we had those good debates, and, at times, we might have tried to push back too hard.

I think, on the overreach part, look, I'm a veteran of the Gulf War.

And I spent eight months in the Middle East.

And my unit was the most furthest-based unit, conventional unit of the U.S.

forces, the 101st Airborne Division.

And I remember at the time, after the 100 hours expired, people thought that President George H.W.

Bush made a mistake.

We should have gone all the way to Baghdad.

In retrospect, boy, that has looked very prudent to me over the years, right?

He didn't overreach.

He had a very clear, specific political objective in mind.

He had the resources to do it.

The military could achieve it.

And that was that.

We didn't have that, I think, with Afghanistan.

And I think we -- that was the overreach of thinking we could transform that society, instead of maybe pulling back, pulling out after, for example, when Bin Laden was killed.

Maybe that would have been the time during the Obama administration to pull back and to marshal our resources.

Because part of this is, during those 20 years of the conflict in, certainly, Afghanistan, and Iraq was a big part of that, we lost our focus on China, which is my top concern.

I think it's an existential threat to our country, to our way of life.

And yet we lost 10, 15, 20 years taking our eye off of that ball.

So, you know, it's a good transition to another war that we find ourselves in right now in Iran.

And certainly there are arguments you can make that this is overreach in the sense of the military equipment that appears inadequate for the United States to continue to fight this war, in the sense the lack of clarity that the American people have for why the war is being pursued.

Do you fear, I mean, this is of course a president that was elected in part on a promise for no new wars, no forever wars, well, only six months in, I get you, it's not Vietnam, it's not Afghanistan, but it's surely unpopular and it doesn't seem to be going very well, at least not compared to what President Trump said when he first announced it.

So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as someone who's no longer responsible for the decisions.

Yeah, look, I think we've had incredible tactical success with regard to neutralizing their Navy and their Air Force and doing damage to other parts of their military, to their industrial base, etc.

But at the strategic level, we're certainly on our back foot.

We're behind, arguably, because we started out as this being the means by which we get them to the negotiating table to discuss nuclear issues.

And now we're not even bringing up the word nuclear.

We're trying to discuss freedom of navigation when it comes to the Strait of Hormuz.

So we're not in a good position.

On the other hand, look, wars change quickly.

Think about the Korean War.

I know you're a historian.

The Korean War opened up, and the American forces were pushed down to Pusan, south of the peninsula.

And then you have the Incheon landings a month or so later.

And now we're north of the Chinese border.

I mean, war's kind of moved quickly.

We have to see where this eventually plays out.

We're not in a position where I would want to be right now.

But we have to see-- we need to see what the strategy is, what the political objectives are.

And I think we need that from the administration to tell us what this looks like.

Because otherwise, right now, it seems like it's not going to end anytime soon.

Militarily, with the forces, I mean, you've got no more aircraft carrier right now in Asia.

You've got, you know, limited numbers of interceptors available.

The Ukrainians are obviously feeling that.

I mean, if you're running defense, what do you try to do in this environment?

Well, that's why I've argued for a policy of economic strangulation.

I think it's the least worst option.

So the other two options being go all in, ground forces into that country, and nobody wants to go there, right?

The losses in terms of life and treasure are just not something we're willing to do, and I don't think we should do that.

On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum is completely withdraw from the straits, surrender to the Iranians.

That's not a good option either.

So I've argued for this economic strangulation approach.

I would blockade them from the air, the sea, the land.

I would impose all types of sanctions on them.

And then it takes time and discipline and patience to wait them out.

And still, there's no guarantee that you'll get them to the table.

But it's the least worst option, because, again, Ian, I'm focused on China.

That's what I'm concerned about, is what might the Chinese want to make a move on Taiwan or somewhere in the South China Sea, or does something happen, an accident that escalates, and we find ourselves in some type of shooting match?

That's where I keep my focus, not on Iran per se, although the nuclear issue is a very important one, and we cannot allow them to get a nuclear weapon.

- So it does sound, I'll get to China momentarily, but it does sound like, in terms of Iran, you know, yes, dealing with their nuclear program, let's say the 12-day war a year ago, June, you would have been on board with, but the decapitation strikes, the all-out war against the regime, you think was a strategic mistake.

- I think anything that delayed their program, whether that was Operation Midnight Hammer, I thought was a good thing.

Anything, my view when I was in office was always, you know, do we need to fight this fight now?

How far are they away from having a weapon, from having a really viable program?

And in most cases, the intelligence, both ours and Israelis, for example, pushed it really far off.

So to me, that was a problem that you didn't have to act upon now unless forced to act upon.

And so my view is anytime you can push that off, you can push that off.

Now that said, I want to be consistent.

When, after the talks broke down in Geneva in late February of this year, I supported the president going back and taking some shots at them as a means of bringing the Iranians to the table in a serious way in terms of showing our seriousness.

I think the problem was that -- was that the rhetoric, the expectations were presented to the American people, so forth and so on, kind of set us up for a situation where we pushed the Iranians into a box whereby they had no choice really but to close down the strait and put all their cards on the table.

You know, we all recognize that any regime coming in behind the former Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was likely to be more hardcore and likely to be controlled by the IRGC, which is exactly what happened.

- So you were also Secretary of Defense for a period of time during these 20 to 30 years that you say we took our eye off the ball.

The most important issue is dealing with China.

I certainly agree with that.

And so I'm wondering, again, I know you're not responsible for those policy decisions, but as someone who was in the room, why do you think that happened?

- Well, first of all, I didn't take my eye off the ball.

I testified and told Congress, told the president, told the Pentagon, my first day in the office, that my top agenda item would be implementing the National Defense Strategy, which called China our top threat, and I laid out 10 strategic objectives by which we would achieve it, from the tactical to the strategic level, and that became my focus.

Now, of course, this was pre-Russian invasion of Ukraine in a major way.

- Right.

- And part of what I was doing at the time is, we had these, you know, during my tenure with President Trump, many times, people around the national security table would bring up, let's do something against Venezuela, let's do something against Iran, let's hit them hard.

And strangely enough, it would be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and myself pushing back saying, let's hear the consequences, hear the pros and cons and ramifications, and really pushing back against that.

Because I think we, I know for sure, wanted to be focused on China.

And I think we had a pretty strong national security team at the time focused on the China problem.

I mean, H.R.

McMaster wrote a very good national security strategy.

So, you don't see that now, but that was the contrast between Trump 1 and Trump 2.

Yeah, I mean, when I read the most recent national security strategy document, it does not appear that this administration shares your concern that China is the big thing.

Yeah, no, I think China's only mentioned maybe a handful.

That may be overstating it of times.

It's the focus is mainly the Western Hemisphere, defending the hemisphere.

Again, I think, look, we are a global power.

We are the superpower.

We can do more than one thing.

And I think we have to prioritize those.

And I could go back, may seem a little bit dated, but my national defense strategy that I was pursuing, trying to implement, focused on China, number one, Russia, number two.

And then you had the regional threats, North Korea, you had Iran, and then others, ultimately culminating in keeping a sharp lookout for the rise of global terrorism that could attack the United States.

So, we can do all that stuff, and we can structure the military, organize, train and equip it to be prepared for all those threats.

And, importantly, we have to do so with our allies.

I mean, it's the greatest asymmetric advantage we have against the Chinese are our allies and the geography and resources and capabilities they would bring to a fight.

And importantly, deterring the fight in the first place, which is why I get concerned when you spoke earlier about readiness and munitions depletions and things like that.

That's where I start getting, I've been concerned with regard to what I'm reading out there in the press.

- Now the allies, they have not grown as much.

They have not spent as much on defense.

That is obviously starting to change now.

In part, that's starting to change because of their direct regional threat environment, in part because the Americans have been pushing them.

So you would respond favorably to that.

- I think Trump was spot on.

President Trump was spot on about pushing the allies.

My concern, and I still have this concern, is that many of our allies are being motivated by fear, fear of Putin and fear of Trump.

I want them to be motivated by shared values and shared interests and shared threats.

And I'm not sure I see that yet.

Time will tell because at some point in time, President Trump will not be president and maybe Putin will be gone at some point.

But NATO still needs to endure.

Our alliances still need to endure.

And that's my concern.

- So last thing I wanna ask you about, Mark, I mean, you know that the DOD is not a small organization.

It doesn't move quickly.

It sets strategies in five-year chunks, right?

And it also has a lot of big legacy systems, the military-industrial complex, big, big corporations that have been around for a long time, jobs that are very important in every congressional district.

And yet, national security is changing really fast.

We see the Ukrainians and what they can do with drones right now.

We see other smaller actors that are able to pick that up quickly.

AI changing very dramatically, very quickly, the force balance with the United States and others around the world.

How is the Department of Defense, I'm going to use the term defense because it hasn't been changed legally, how is it doing presently in terms of its engagement with the private sector to ensure that the United States continues to be at the cutting edge of those security capabilities?

Yeah, look, this team, and frankly, the Biden team before them, is doing the right thing by trying to engage industry more.

And in particular, the Silicon Valley, I'll use that as a proxy word for any set of entrepreneurs and innovators, et cetera.

But they're not doing good enough to keep up with the pace of warfare, to keep up with the pace of technology and so on.

You know, before I went in to be Secretary of the Army and Secretary of Defense, I worked for one of those prime industrial companies.

And when I came out, I'm now working in venture capital from the other end of the spectrum.

And I see the great capacity, the great innovation of America and what we can do.

And the bottom line is, we don't have an innovation problem in this country.

We don't have a private capital problem in this country.

But what we do have is a problem of the Department of Defense to quickly adopt these technologies and implement them into their structures, into the formations, into their doctrine.

We have been watching the Ukrainians now, observing them on the battlefield, taking back lessons learned with regard to drone and counter-drone warfare, and we still haven't stood up the capabilities to do what they do.

They're producing this year probably seven million drones.

We will be lucky to have a couple hundred thousand or so on the shelves of the Department of Defense.

So, look, we're not moving quickly enough.

It's not all the responsibility or the fault of the Pentagon.

You have a lot of good people working in there in a tough bureaucratic system.

And then their hands are tied on the outside by Congress through archaic appropriations and other procedures that don't allow them to buy or shift money or spend money as quickly as they need to.

So there's a lot of change that needs to happen.

I don't know what it's going to take.

I have tried to push from the inside.

We're trying to push from the outside.

But I think it's going to take a much more cohesive group of leaders from both the House, the Senate and the White House to get together to figure out a system that can be restructured and made more adaptive for the pace of change in technology and warfare that we're seeing today and will only likely accelerate in the years ahead.

Mark Esper, thanks for joining me on GZERO World.

Thanks, Ian.

That's our show this week.

Come back next week if you like what you've seen or even if you don't, but you're ready to assemble your own coalition of the willing.

Come check us out at gzeromedia.com.

(upbeat music) - Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is investing in the future, working to create an impact in advanced recycling and in emerging technology companies that will help shape tomorrow.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation.

Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And...