PURELY POLITICAL Q & A with KT
She's advised four presidents – Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Trump – and KT McFarland believes what worked against the Soviet Union will work against Russia and Iran
A Conversation with Former Deputy National Security Advisor KT McFarland
Kathleen Troia (KT) McFarland graduated from George Washington University, earned a master’s degree from Oxford University in England, and completed a PhD on nuclear weapons, China, and the Soviet Union at MIT. She was the featured dinner speaker at the Ronald Reagan Center in downtown Santa Barbara on Friday, October 13 as part of an ongoing lecture series supported by former Santa Barbara News-Press publisher Wendy McCaw. The talk was co-sponsored by the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women. The subjects were supposed to be Ukraine, Russia, Europe, the Middle East, China, and the rest of Asia, but the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel took precedence. Regardless of the subject, however, her advice to the Biden Administration would have been the same:
“Follow the money.”
KT (a frequent visitor to Greg Gutfeld’s five-days-a-week late-night show on FOX Cable News, as well as a regular guest there and on other channels as a foreign policy expert) says that “whether it’s with Russia and Ukraine, whether it’s in the Middle East, whether it’s with China, it’s always about oil. Oil, natural gas, energy.” Her opinion is that countries and leaders around the world – bad actors mostly – are analyzing the ongoing political, financial, and cultural turmoil that has taken hold in the U.S. and are concluding that “It’s now or never” to achieve or advance some of their long-held goals.
We settle into upholstered chairs around a small table in the private library just above the main room at the Reagan Center for what I’ll call a half-hour warm-up interview before the main event: dinner and her talk to Reagan Center supporters.
KT’s husband, lawyer Alan Roberts McFarland, Jr., joins us to listen in. The couple have been married nearly forty years and have five children.
“Well, America’s distracted,” she notes as she settles in. “Iran has decided it’s now or never because Israel’s about to have historic peace with the Saudis and change the whole complexion of the Middle East. China looks at all this and says, ‘They’ve drawn down their weapons, they’re in political disarray. The Middle East is on fire, Europe is on fire. Maybe it’s now or never…”
KT believes China won’t have to invade Taiwan to take it over. “I don’t think they’ll have to,” she says. “I think they can show that they can do it and then use economic pressure. I mean, I think they could do it and I think they will show they have the ability to do it – and they will do it if they have to – but I think their pressure will be economic [a la Hong Kong].”
Q. So, as a national security adviser, what would your plan be to tackle this mess?
A. When I worked for President Reagan (KT has worked for four presidents: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Trump) the genius of Reagan was that in the early part of the very first year of his presidency he was given two options for dealing with the Soviet Union.
Those two options were?
Either perpetual twilight – Cold War – where we’re all in each other’s sights, with a gun at each other’s head, or we have a hot war, and nobody wants that. Reagan said ‘No, I want another option. I want an economic option.’”
Did he get his other option?
Yes. National Security Decision Directive [# 32]. The Soviet Union needed technology. They didn't even have Xerox machines in the eighties. So, the plan was to stop the export of any technology, shut them out of the international banking system, and [beat them] in a military buildup… We made sure they couldn’t borrow money.
I do believe that plan worked out well.
Yes, our economy got better thanks to Reaganomics. The Soviet economy, for various reasons was doing poorly. They had crop failures. Their military buildup cost them much more than we had understood at the time. And then Reagan understood – we all understood – that if you could drive the price of oil down, you could bankrupt the Soviet Union. So, Reagan sent Air Force General Vernon Walters, who knew the king of Saudi Arabia, to the desert to ask the Saudis to pump more oil. He explained to the king that it wouldn’t be to his economic advantage to do so, that he’d lose money on it, but that if he did it, ‘America will be your friend forever.’
Within nine months, the price of oil went from $40 to $18 a barrel. The Soviets’ income was cut in half. On top of that – and the thing I was most proud of because I was involved with it – was the ‘Star Wars’ speech. Reagan said we’re going to build a whole new defensive system. We’re going to build a shield [to protect us from your rockets].
The [Soviet] leaders finally said, ‘Okay, we're broke. We've had bad harvests. We’re starving. We're way behind on technology. We know we can't build a Star Wars system. We're not sure if America can, but we know we can't. We're already hard pressed for our economic situation. We cannot borrow on the international markets.’ The banks wouldn't lend to them.
So, there was more to Ronald Reagan than “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Yes. That was the end of the Soviet Union. I think you could use those same things today, and that's how you would solve most of the world's problems.
I do believe President Trump used some of those tactics with both Russia and Iran.
Absolutely. That was our plan. Trump doesn't like to study the charts and all that, but he just sort of intuitively understands it. And we all understood that because of fracking, by 2016, the price of oil was starting to come down because American energy – oil, natural gas – was entering the world market.
If you could drive the price down, you'd bankrupt Russia. [Putin’s] only export. The only way the Russians make money is through oil.
You bankrupt Iran; it's the only way they make money. And it would be great for our economy not only to be energy independent, but we could also become energy dominant. We could set the global price.
And we were on our way to doing just that until the 2020 election, right?
We were absolutely on our way to doing that. And that was reversed. I think it'll come back in a different administration. I think we go back to using our own energy.
Any regrets about the Trump administration?
I think the one thing I would say, and I think [Trump] would say this too, is that when he went to Washington and of the people he brought, I was the only one who had ever worked in the White House, who had ever been in government before. President Trump said he'd never even spent the night in Washington D.C. before becoming president.
But he owned an elegant hotel there. It used to be the Washington Post Office.
Yes, but he never slept there. He always went home at night. He really didn't understand how Washington worked. And I think most of the people around him didn’t either. We underestimated the blowback and the throwing of sand in the gears from the permanent bureaucracy. I think that would be the one regret that everyone would have: that we just underestimated how tricky they were.
I’ve always believed the main reason for President Trump’s unsuccessful hires early on was that word had been put out among the establishment, including Republicans, that if you work for this guy, you'll never have lunch in this town again. So, his selection pool of qualified candidates for critical posts was extremely limited. Would that be a correct assumption?
Absolutely!
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Part Two of Kt’s interview and her speech at the Reagan Center will be in next week’s issue of Jim’s Journal. We’ll also have more on the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women. Sign up for your free subscription: jimb.substack.com…
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