Podcast Ep 59 - Cybersecurity and the global threats of tomorrow

Narrator: Trailblazers and research, innovators and technology, and those who simply have a good story. All make up the fabric that is George Mason University. We're taking on the grand challenges that face our students, graduates, and higher education is our mission and our passion. Hosted by Mason President Gregory Washington, this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

Gregory Washington: We certainly live in challenging times. as the U.S. navigates complex national security and cybersecurity issues abroad, as well as rising tensions on our own soil. We've got wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, rising tensions between the U.S. and Israel over Israel's handling of the war with Hamas, worries about an expansionist China in Taiwan and in the South China Sea, threats from Iran and North Korea. And a recent Microsoft analysis said that Russia, China, and Iran will likely ramp up new sophisticated interference efforts ahead of our 2024 elections. And believe me, that is scratching the surface.

So let's dive deeper with George Mason University's Jamil Jaffer, one of the most foremost experts on national security, foreign relations, cybersecurity, and counterintelligence in the country to bring this all into context. An assistance professor of law at George Mason's Antonin Scalia School of Law, Jaffer is director of the National Security Law and Policy Program and the Cyber Intelligence and National Security Programs. He is also the founder and executive director of the National Security Institute. Jamil, welcome to the show.

Jamil Jaffer: I’m thrilled to be here, President Washington.

I've been looking forward to this one for quite some time. So I want to familiarize the audience with you and what you do. So for those of us who don't know what the National Security Institute does and why it exists, can you give us a little overview?

Of course. It's an academic center at the Scalia Law School here at George Mason. We aim to teach young people, graduates of undergrad institutions, that are receiving a JM, a Juris Master's degree, a JD, a Juris Doctor degree, or an advanced degree in law, an LLM, in Cyber Intelligence and National Security.

We aim to give them a well-rounded, deep education in these issues that spans the scope of foreign relations, cybersecurity, intelligence, national security, and a real deep understanding of the law and a deep analysis of the law.

And in addition to being an academic center, we're also something of a think tank. We advocate, we discuss, we debate ideas. We have a broad group of experts from industry, from government, a lot of former government officials from across the political spectrum. But people that I think believe that America ought to lead in the world, lean forward, be the strongest ally to its friends, be the fiercest foe to its enemies, and be president active, right? The classic way that we've always thought about America from the bulk of our history of you, by the way, President's on the run in large part today.

Washington: Yeah, I hear you, man. I love what you're talking. So give us an idea of the size of your org.

Jaffer: So, you know, when we talk about our advisory board, we've got about 60-70 advisory board members. These are senior, former government officials. These are folks that serve in Senate confirmed positions and the like.

And then we've got about over 100 fellows that are, the folks who volunteer with us, who write, who advocate, who talk, who debate issues and ideas of our students. We've got about a dozen or so, maybe a little more than a dozen faculty members that teach students, adjuncts at the law school. And all these folks are around campus. They're in Arlington. They're out here in Fairfax. They're talking about the issues today. They're on television. They're in four committees of Congress.

And a lot of them are going into government, into the administrations. We sent six of our advisory board members to the Trump administration. All women, interestingly enough, in Senate-confirmed positions. Eight to the Biden administration already. And more to come, I think, as the years go forward.

Washington: Outstanding. Outstanding. So you've given a whole bunch of metrics here. How do you measure success?

Jaffer: Look, I think at the end of the day, when you're thinking about success in an academic institution, as you well know, I mean, this is your world. It's about the students you educate, the people you put out into the world, the values and education you give them, the skill set they come with, and the work that they bring to bear on what they do in their jobs.

Now, beyond that, we also look at the impact we have in the policy space as well, right? Are we moving the ball up on Capitol Hill? Are we convinced people that this vision of America is the right one? Because, as we talked about earlier, you know, back when I was growning up, right? My father went out to UC Irvine. I remember when UC Irvine, where you used to be, was a one building campus.

We went out there. My dad was in the chemistry department at UCLA. They were trying to get them to come to UCI. We come out there and it's all farmland, right? But back of that era, there was no debate about America's role in the world. Everyone understood. America was the beacon of hope for the world, right? That is not how we view ourselves today. And I worry about that. I worry about a world devoid of American leadership.

Washington: Is that not how we view ourselves, or is that not how others view us?

Jaffer: I think it's both, President Washington. I think it's how people view us because we don't view ourselves that way. We talk about leading from behind. We talk about other people leading in the front. The truth is, we are a world superpower. We've forgotten that here at home, and we don't believe that we can behave that way.

Now, look, when we were a superpower, we acted like a superpower, there were things we did wrong. I don't suggest it was all unvarnished good. At the same time, if you wonder what a world devoid of American leadership looks like, all you need to do is look around the globe right now. You ran down a list. A war in Ukraine, a war in the heart of Europe, a war in the heart of the Middle East, a budding war in Asia, right?

Washington: That’s right.

Jaffer: Terrorists circling the globe, right? This is what a world devoid of American leadership looks like. Chaos.

Washington: No, I agree with you 100%. So you've spoken at length here, but elsewhere, about there being this global pushback against the U.S. being so forward-facing and being in the front in the world. How does this perceive pushback against the U.S. being a front-facing power, being a lead power, being the global superpower, harm us in the cyber domain?

Jaffer: Well, I think in particular the cyber domain, where we don't lean forward, what we see is our adversaries taking advantage. So we've seen billions, maybe even trillions of dollars net walk out the backdoor of intellectual property, built in America, ideas, designed in universities like here in R1 institution like George Mason, that have gone out into practice being stolen by China and repurpose for economic purposes. in that country. Trillions of dollars in total, billions of dollars every single year over the last decade and even longer.

My former boss, General Keith Alexander, the former director of the NSA, said it was the greatest transfer of wealth in modern human history and I think he was exactly right. But that's just one element of it. You see the Russians, you see the Chinese, you see the Iranians getting into our systems. They're stoking very real divides that are real in American society. But they're throwing gasoline on the fire. They're lighting it up.

Washington: That’s exactly right.

Jaffer: And so they're using our own unwillingness to push back in the cyber domain and exploit it. And the worry that I have about that is, look, we know they're baiting our elections. We know they're stealing our IP. What happens when they make a tactical blunder and they make a mistake because they're trying to see how far they can push us because we're not pushing back? They push us too far and then they make a mistake, something bad happens. And now we have to respond. That's what I worry about. I worry about them making a mistake because we haven't set clear red lines and enforced them.

Washington: No, that's a good point. You know, when you think about it, you talked about our IP and the commercialization efforts coming out of our universities, coming out of our companies. It's not necessarily happening just in the cyber domain. In fact, I contend to you the primary capital, and even in the country, is human capital. People are taking those efforts and taking them over to our adversaries and helping our adversaries be more successful against us. Right? It's not necessarily some person on a computer hacking into your system and stealing the plans for the next Boeing 787. It's literally an employee that works at the company that takes those plans.

Jaffer: Right, right.

Washington: And walks them over to an operative and gives the plans to an operative.

Jaffer: That does happen quite often. And what's even worse about it is it's our own policies that drive part of this. We take the world's smartest, their best and brightest. We bring them to core research institutions like George Mason, we educate them. And then we tell them, “Hey, you know what? You can't stay here. You've got to go back to your home country and build your business there.”

It is crazy. I mean, you know, Freeds of Korea said this the other day, I don't agree with Freed on a lot of things, but he said this the other day on TV, he said if you took a stupid system and made it crazy by adding a lottery on top of it, right? Our immigration system is so crazy, right?

I mean, you would think we would do it. The Canadians have got it better. They picked the smartest, best, and brightest. They bring them to Canada, and then they incentivize them to stay and build their businesses and build their lives there.

Washington: That's right.

Jaffer: It is crazy that we don't do that. I mean, you look at the Fortune 100, the vast majority of those businesses built by immigrants to this country. My father came first to Canada and then the United States. $300 in his wallet. Uncle you can stay with nothing else.

Washington: Well, you know, I'll be honest with you. This is a relatively new occurrence, right? There's always been tensions between those individuals who have come into the country and those individuals who've already been here.

Jaffer: Right. You want to pull the ladder up behind them.

Washington: Oh, yeah. It's always been that tension.

Jaffer: Right.

Washington: That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about policy. I'm talking about infrastructure has always been such that we find a way to allow many of those best and brightest into the country so that they can become successful.

Jaffer: Right.

Washington: And I'm afraid that this is our... one of the first times in our history where we're really, really losing that and we're losing it at a significant clip.

Jaffer: Yeah. I mean, imagine as you had a name for it, I don't know, call it the American dream. I mean, you know, it's...

Washington: [chuckling] Exactly. That, that to me tells you what we were doing.

Jaffer: Right? We literally talked about it. We literally said, you come here, we will give you the incentives to stay and you can build your business here. I mean, look, let's be honest, even today, even as hard as it is in our country, as much of it is political challenges we have, nobody wants to build their business in Beijing or in Moscow or in Tehran, or even in Mexico. They want to build it here in the United States, even with all our challenges. And we tell these people, no, come here, get educated, take the best in our education system at universities like George Mason and then go build it at home. It is literally a crazy system. And it's only because of our own toxic politics that we can't figure out how to solve that. We know this is the problem. We know it's why we're losing the brain drain. It's because we're telling people you have to leave. It's crazy.

Washington: That being said, you travel all across the world, right, and I've been and I know you've been as well. Most of the major continents - all the major continents, but most of the continents in general - there is still... there is no better place to live than where we are currently. They are nice places.

Jaffer: Right.

Washington: There are places with great weather. There are places with great food. There are places with beautiful people. But there aren't better places and I will debate individuals on that context any day. And you start to add up all of the entities that go into just what makes quality of life great. And you see that there are places in this country that stack up with any place else in the world and exceed them by a significant margin.

Jaffer: Absolutely. And the American Dream is still alive here. We may have forgotten it. But the ability to move up is here. You know, my father, we had the chance when I worked for President Bush. At the end of the administration, the President invited people who worked in White House to bring their families to the White House. My parents came in and, you know, you walk into the Oval Office and they take a quick photo. The President says to my dad, he says “Now, Mom, Dad, where are you all from?”

And my dad says “We're from Los Angeles.”

He said “No, no, where's your family from?”

My dad said “Well, you know, our family's from Tanzania.” Right?

And President Bush says ”Well, I bet when you're growing up in Tanzania, dad, I bet you couldn't imagine that your son might one day work for the President of the United States.”

My dad said, “No, Mr. President, that's what makes the country great.”

And the president, that is what makes the country great, that in one generation, you can come from Tanzania to the United States, you can be an American. You can't go to Germany and become a German. You can't go to France and become a Frenchman. It's only you come to America and you become an American. You become part of the dream and become part of the people running the country.

I mean, on national security, a Muslim during the war on terror in the Bush administration with a family from Tanzania, ethnically Indian. Nobody can imagine that. If you were told my parents that, they would have said, you're crazy.

Washington: That's right. That's right.

Jaffer: And we still have that. We forget that we have that. That is still here. As much as we are mad at each other, as much as we argue and debate, we have got to remember this country is called to greatness. It is crazy that we are abandoning that because we can't get along with one another and figure out how to make things work in this country.

Washington: Man, there are so many directions I can go with this. Let's start here. So you've always said that at the end of the day, America leaning forward and being that forward beacon for the world is positive for our national security, our economic security, and for the average American. You want to expand on that?

Jaffer: Yeah. Let's just take one example. There's a big debate today about whether we should support Ukraine in their fight against Russia. And people say, well, I don't understand why we can't get things fixed right at home. We can't fix the border. We can't do this. Why are we're spending all this money over in Ukraine?

Washington: Right.

Jaffer: You know where the bulk of that money is being spent, President Washington? It's being spent right here in America.

Yes, we're sending weapons to Ukraine. But we're buying those weapons from American defense manufacturers, creating American jobs in the United States.

Washington: That’s right.

Jaffer: 95% of that money is spent here in America.

Washington: Right.

Jaffer: For some reason, we can't get past this conversation. People don't understand that basic fact.

Washington: That's exactly right. And it's by and large not Americans who are on the front lines fighting against the Russians. It’s Ukrainians.

Jaffer: Right. We are fighting an adversary, an adversary that hates us, that hates everything we stand for on the backs of others. By the way, as we fought ISIS with the Kurds, right? It wasn't us that we were there in small forces. In Ukraine, we're simply sending weapons and information and training folks. And the idea that we would say to ourselves, oh, no, we should really step back from that and we should focus here at home.

I mean, how many times have we seen this story where America retreats home, retreats from the world thinking it's protected by its two oceans, and then we get hit at home with terrorism? Or we get dragged into a bigger, much worse war: World War I, World War II. We've seen it over and over again, and it's like we can't seem to remember the lessons of just a few years ago.

Washington: That's exactly right. It's like Lucy with the football.

Jaffer: It's Charlie Brown.

Washington: We repeat it over and over and over and over again. And I get it. I understand why, right? We do have challenges at home. We do need to focus on those challenges. And when the national rhetoric and the national discussion focuses on us being engaged elsewhere, I can see where a person would say, well, wait, a minute, but what about me? You know, you're fighting more for the Ukrainian than you're fighting for the American.

Now, I don't believe that's true, but I understand why some would think it, why some would perceive it, because of how social media dominates our worldview and how, not just social media, but how the media in general nominates our worldview.

Jaffer: Yeah, no, I was in Iowa and South Carolina and New Hampshire during this last election cycle, and, you know, talking to average folks. And you're exactly right, that is exactly how they feel. They think Washington, DC is fundamentally broken, that it doesn't have their interests at heart, that it's spending money abroad and not spending money here, and they don't understand why they feel worse off than they did. Name your time, whether it was the previous administration, the one before that, whatever it is. Whichever person you want to blame. You want to blame the big tech companies or social media or, you know, mean Donald Trump or mean Joe Biden, right? Everyone's got a beef.

Washington: That's right.

Jaffer: What people don't have, and what's crazy to me is that belief in America. And it's there. It's inside, and they know it's there. They just have forgotten that they've let this victimization take hold and they don't want to rise up. I mean, this country has always been a country of rising up.

We've had real troubles. We have made huge mistakes as a nation. But what makes America great is our ability to figure that out, learn for those mistakes, and try to get past them. And today we're in retreat. We're saying, oh, well, look at all these mistakes we made and blame each other, blame ourselves.

It's crazy. It's crazy.

Washington: Oh, without question. So if I were to ask you to tell me to step back and say, hey, what are the U.S.'s biggest threats and where are they coming from? What would be your answer to that?

Jaffer: Well, look, I think our long-term, large-scale threat is a rising China, right? And their desire to dominate not just their part of the world, but the globe. They have visions of a long-term empire around the globe. They believe that their oppression of their own people, right? The oppression of the Uyghurs, the Muslim Uyghurs, a million intern in camps, right? Modern-day gulags. Their oppression of democracy in Hong Kong. Their attempts to harass Taiwan. They want to expand that around the globe. And as a long-term threat, that is the real major threat. And we've allowed it to grow. We've addicted ourselves to cheap Chinese goods.

And by the way, it's fine to buy T-shirts from... We don't need a car sales off from T-shirts from China, but buying semiconductors, relying on them for critical minerals, that's crazy. Right?

And then when you add up the fact that China's increasingly cooperating with Russia. You see it in Ukraine. You see Russia and Iran. Iran sending drones to Russia, Russia is sending technology to Iran, right? These countries are now making it very clear of the whole world, how closely they work together, right?

And I don't want to say, use a term like axis of evil or anything that got us into trouble before, but let's be real. Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, they are collaborating, and they're doing it out in the open. You don't need to... it's not behind closed doors.

Washington: Well, they're collaborating because they see, and at least this is my interpretation of it, they see that neither is strong enough or dominant enough to take on the U.S. by themselves. So let's band together.

Jaffer: Right.

Washington: Let's come together because then we have a fighting chance. It's almost an admittance of our relative strength.

Jaffer: No, I think that's right.

Washington: And so one hotspot we don't hear about much nationally that I started to follow here recently as Niger...

Jaffer: Yeah.

Washington: ... where a military coup occurred. The U.S. military is now withdrawing and reports say Russian military advisors, my understanding is Russian military advisors from Progozen, and this is his folk have been brought in. One senior U.S. military advisor told CBS News that the situation was a devastating blow to regional counterterrorism and to our counterterrorism efforts and peace in the region. Can you explain why Niger is such a focal point? What is it about it and why is it important?

Jaffer: Yeah. Well, you know, for a long time, a lot of these terrorist groups operating out of Africa have operated out in Niger in that region. You're talking about Boko Haram. You're talking about what used to be al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, AQIM, now ISIS and West Africa. You've got a number of groups, JNIM, there's a number of terrorist groups there operating the region, right? And so we've had active counterterrorism operations there for a long time in Mali, in Niger, in Nigeria, working with the governments in Somalia and Ethiopia as well.

And so these counterterrorism efforts have been really important because a lot of these groups at times have gotten interested in not just operating there in Africa, but expanding beyond the borders into Europe and into the United States, trying to affect operations here. Keeping that pressure up has been a really important part of it.

Now, with this coup in Niger, the Russians and the Wagner group is exactly laid out getting in there. They actually are fomenting some of these coups in Chad. They were influential in trying to, trying to remove the government there. And so we see this movement.

And the government there is a junta government, right? As you point out, a coup government? They at one point sort of wrote us a note, said, you need to leave. And then we're like, OK, I mean, if you don't want us here, we'll start packing up. Now there's a conversation, well, maybe, maybe we want you to stay. And so the conversation remains ongoing. The government there in Niger has benefited, both the coup government and the prior elected government was a government- the governments have benefited, the people in Niger benefited from the American presence there. They're not going to benefit when the Russians show up, right? The Russians are there for one purpose to engage and benefit Russian interests. And so we'll see how this plays out.

I do worry, though, that that loss of that counter-terrorism capability will ultimately put the U.S. and our allies at greater risk, not just in Africa, but in Europe and the U.S. as well.

Washington: So I'm going to go there. I'm going to ask you something. I'm going to make a statement here, and I want you to, let's just do a little engagement.

Jaffer: All right.

Washington: Since we're having fun.

Jaffer: I like it. Let's do it.

Washington: All right. Because I believe fundamentally that we are on an arc, a trajectory, and while that trajectory isn't straight up, it's jagged, it kind of oscillates up and down, but there's a trend, and that trend is better, not worse. Let me throw out some things, okay?

Think about a moment in time. The pandemic had just ended. Isolationism was on the rise. There was anti-immigrant sentiment because of fear of other governments, socialism, communism, and the like. It'd been a crackdown on civil liberties. There were new technologies that were being brought into the household that were changing the way Americans think. There were state legislators who were now, with these new influences, felt the need to control curricula, felt the need to control the way in which people were expressing themselves.

If I were to tell you, name that moment in time, you can easily say that that moment in time was today.

Jaffer: Or yesterday or tomorrow.

Washington: That's exactly right, right?

Jaffer: Yeah.

Washington: But that moment in time was 1923. And in addition to those things, because you just had the flu pandemic that it just ended, right?

Jaffer: Yeah.

Washington: Radio was coming into households in a significant way and changing the way of Americans saw the world, right?

But in addition to everything I just highlighted, the KKK had more than six million Americans who had joined their ranks because of anti-crime rhetoric and fear of crime. And that included 10 senators, 30 members of the House of Representatives, and five sitting governors. Right?

And out of the midst of that, out of the midst of that, from 1923, until today, we have seen the greatest accumulation of wealth in the history of the world. You get what I'm saying?

Washington: I do.

Jaffer: And that is still ongoing to this very day. I have three students, two students of mine who graduated. I do some work in AI. They got really good jobs at big tech companies in California. In two years out of graduation, they're both millionaires to this day.

Jaffer: Amazing.

Washington: Right? Now, that's far better than anything I did.

Jaffer: You and me both.

Washington: [laughing] Two years, two years out school.

And so, look, we're living in a time of great peril and fraud, but we're also living in a time of tremendous opportunity and outcomes.

Jaffer: Yeah.

Washington: How do we get people to balance? And how does NSI fit into all of that?

Jaffer: I mean, tremendous opportunity outcomes that we have created in this country. Every major AI company in the world is here in the United States, Open AI, Anthropic, Scale AI, you name it. Every single major technological advancement, including the ones published in a paper just today about how the internal neurons work within large language models. They're using a single layer of neurons to say, okay, we're actually identifying the various things that code for.

Washington: Figuring out how they work.

Jaffer: How they work. That is being discovered here in this country, not in Russia, not in China, not in Europe. Europeans love to pride themselves on, oh, we do this, we do that, right? Let's be real. The reason they don't innovate is because they don't have an economic system like ours. It may be close, but it's not like ours. And they don't give people the opportunity to rise up and rise to the ranks. They continue to maintain that largely class-based system.

We have problems. Don't get me wrong. We are making that middle class smaller, and that's a problem. But we still have opportunity in this country, just to your point, that you raise about your two students.

Washington: Right.

Jaffer: And people forget that. And so we've got to remember. You know, it's easy to think about the immediate moment. I'll admit, I'm probably guilty of it myself, that even this recency bias. That the things happen to me right now is, it's the worst possible.

Washington: But it's not.

Jaffer: It's not.

Washington: And that is the key thing for us to kind of internalize. You know, and I always struggle with whether I should talk about it or not for two reasons. Number one, I want people worried about our problems today. I want them focused on them. I want them engaged on them because, by golly, it can get worse.

Jaffer: Right.

Washington: Right?

Jaffer: We've seen what it looks like in Europe when it gets worse.

Washington: That’s exactly right.

Jaffer: We've seen the rise of fascism. We've seen the rise of communism.

Washington: We've seen it. We've seen it. And secondly, man, we're on such a great trajectory, right?

Jaffer: It’d be crazy to squander it now.

Washington: Yeah.

Jaffer: Be crazy.

Washington: I want us to continue. You know, there have always been adversaries for America. Recently on Bill Mahar's real-time show, Jillian Ted, a member of the Financial Times editorial board, said, and you highlighted this earlier, that the new, “Axis of Evil” is Iran, Russia, and North Korea. China was left out of it, interesting enough. How does that fit into how you see the international picture today?

Jaffer: Well, I think she's certainly right about those three, but I think it's the most telling part is that they left China out.

Washington: [laughs]

Jaffer: And what's funny is the-

Washington: That's the biggest adversary.

Jaffer: It's the biggest adversary. And the Europeans seem to think that- well, here's the bottom line. We don't survive in a real long-term fight with China without the Europeans. And they definitely don't survive without us.

We need to make common cause across the Atlantic. And the idea that the Europeans see us as the problem, right? They literally, they hate American companies coming over there and sell them to their people. They're putting on all these trade barriers in place. And, you know, they put in, you know, GDPR, this law is about privacy. Everyone they sell, it's this amazing privacy law. GDPR ends up getting enforced only against American companies.

Washington: Yeah, isn't something?

Jaffer: The real story is they want to cut American companies down to size because they don't like the fact that we're innovating faster.

Washington: And- that's right. The actual innovation rate is about twice the rate of European companies right now.

Jaffer: Oh, wow.

Washington: I just push back at all of these folk. You hear it in the national rhetoric amongst our politicians about how America is worse than it's ever been and we've got to make America great again. The reality is that America is actually great right now. We got our challenges.

Let me make sure I'm clear. But the country's a great country right now, and you know this by how all our competitor countries are acting. They're acting like we're great. They're banding together. They are figuring out ways to counter American strength and outcomes.

Jaffer: We seem to be the only people in the world who don't realize how great we actually are.

Washington: I agree with you 100%. So I was really fascinated... We're going down a lot of threads here. This is why I love it. I was really, really fascinated by this latest back and forth between Israel and Iran. They launched that attack on Israel on April 13th, and it was incredibly well telegraphed by the U.S. government. Like, we told them it was coming. We knew when it was coming. We knew, you know, pretty much what it was going to look like. We had very, very, very advanced intel, right?

It was almost as if, and I'm stretching, here, but I'm saying anyway, it was almost as if the Iranians told us, we're going to launch the missiles here. Here's what we're going to launch all of them. And, you know, just so you know, we're launching them from right here, and we're going to launch them at about this time. Right?

Talk to me about the security apparatus, the national intelligence infrastructure, and how it was able to basically telegraph that. How would it know?

Jaffer: Well, you know, we have a tremendous number of capabilities, sensors, satellites, and the like, that take pictures that identify threats. But the single most powerful intelligence collection tool that we have today that makes up the bulk of the President's Daily Brief, the most sensitive intelligence product in the U.S. government, is a capability called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Washington: Ahhh...

Jaffer: It's a law that allows us to collect communications intelligence about foreigners located overseas. So these are non-Americans outside the United States, but we're able to capture it here in the United States. You might say to yourself, I don't understand that. How could we capture the information about foreigners located overseas in the U.S.? It's because we built the world's communications infrastructure. It all comes to the United States.

And so we're able to get tremendously valuable intelligence. And there's this big debate over, well, how do you deal with Americans that might be swept up in the middle of it? And the truth is, every time you collect a phone call, every time with a court order, you're going to get the person calling their dry cleaners or their- or their donut shop or whatever it might be, you know, ordering Chinese food, right?

And the way we deal with that in the normal collection context, we turned that, we turned it on and off. If people ever watch The Wire, right, that great show about cops in Baltimore, you see them turn the listening device on and off.

Washington: Right.

Jaffer: You know, if you watch Casino, right, you see the wives get on the phone. I don't mean to say anything bad. There are plenty of badass, you know, women gangsters, but in the case the casino, the wives get on the phone, pretend to talk about whatever, and then when you hear the FBI click off, they get the things to the bosses and they talk about the dirty stuff, right?

Washington: Right.

Jaffer: So that's how we do it in criminal context, in the foreign intelligence context, because we know that people are going to use code. We know that people are going to run these sort of operations. We listen continuously. We remove out Americans' names, American identifiers, the like. That's how we minimize collection there.

And there's a big debate. Okay, Americans are being collected on what are we going to do. Those are fair debates to have. But the idea that we almost let that entire system stop and it almost expired.

Washington: Well, wait a minute. Now, we renewed it, but only for two years instead of five years.

Jaffer: Right.

Washington: What challenge do you think that has?

Jaffer: It just puts us back in the doom of having to do this over and over and over again. I mean, it's almost like a Russian roulette with our surveillance thing. Congress wants to force themselves to vote again.

Here's the crazy thing about Congress, though. If they want to change the law, they don't have to wait for the two-year reauthorization. They don't wait for the five- year reauthorization. They can do it tomorrow. The problem is they create this cliff for themselves. So they force themselves to re-look at it and debate this thing over and over again.

Be adults. Just do your job. If there's a problem, fix it. There's not a problem. Let it run. Make it permanent. Why do we keep torturing ourselves over and over again, one year, two years.

And you know, by the way, two years is going to be right in the middle of the next administration, whoever that might be. And you know they're going to have an opinion. You know they're going to have an opinion.

Washington: Oh yeah, without question. A viable solution- Every single politician I've talked to, and I've, you know, given where we're located, gotten to spend a significant amount of time with a number of them. But every single politician I talk to say that a viable solution to a problem is to delay a decision on the solution. In other words, kick the can down the road. And that seems like what's happening here.

For those of you who don't know what we're talking about, we're talking about FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And Jamil just really highlighted why it was put into place and in my understanding why its reauthorization is so important.

Jaffer: Well, you know, President Washington, why these politicians get to kick the can down the road? It's because we let them. We voters let them.

Washington: Now, there is one, on this particular issue if I stay focused here, there is some good reason for debate here, right?

Jaffer: Sure.

Washington: And it goes back to a guy named Edward Snowden, right? A good bit of what we see, the issues around the use of FISA, right? The use of surveillance really involved, not just foreign actors, but also involved Americans. And now it becomes a little difficult to how you use- relative to how you use these tools. Because we're so globalized, right? Is an adversary who is in Russia as much of a threat to us as an American who's been radicalized and who is now working on behalf of Russia, right? Both of them can cause you damage. FISA was created for one, right? But the other, we don't have as many protections against. And I understand why it's been confused, but can you talk a little bit about it?

Jaffer: Yeah. So, you know, Edward Snowden, part of the story is a really important one. So Edward Snowden, when he stole the classified information that he was entitled receive, but wasn't entitled to disclose, when he engaged in that illegal activity of disclosing it. He did disclose one program that had a real impact of Americans' privacy and civil liberties. It was a program that involved the collection of phone records, right?

Washington: Metadata.

Jaffer: The numbers that you and I dialed, metadata, right? Dialed phone numbers, date time and duration of a call, no content, just the fact of the call. And yes, those were collected across the United States, my phone calls, your phone calls, through a set of American carriers, and all that data was collected.

And what you could do is once that data was in a database, you could dip in and look for a terrorist phone number and pull out one, two, three, three hops. That was a lot of data, for sure. And that did, admittedly, have a very, a real impact on Americans' privacy and civil liberties to the extent that you believe metadata, right, the numbers you dial have a relevance.

And they do, because you might be calling your, you might be calling, you know, somebody you don’t want people to know you're calling, I'm calling your lawyer, you might be calling your...

Washington: But wait a minute. But let's pull that thread, because that to me, this is the whole point. This is the same point that I’m making. Let's suppose for a minute, and actually we're not supposing. We know that this happened, and this is how some of that data was used. You got terrorist X, right, who is actually working with operatives who are in the U.S. who are U.S. citizens.

Jaffer: Right.

Washington: And that person is making calls, passing out information, and the way they discovered the U.S. operatives who were assisting terrorist X was by the utilization of that program.

Jaffer: Right. And then if you want to collect on that American or anybody in the United States-

Washington: You need a warrant.

Jaffer: You've got to get a FISA quarter order or warrant. Exactly. So there's no way you can even get that content unless you have a real court order. And so this whole sort of myth that developed around Snowden, that it was more than the metadata, there was something else going on here. None of that was true.

And in fact, then you look at the other 99% of whatever it's Snowden revealed: highly sensitive information about very capable terrorism programs and surveillance programs against foreign actors overseas. The bulk of what he distributed, that were leaked out to all these newspapers and given to the Russians almost wholesale had nothing to do with America.

It was one program. And yes, that program generated a good debate, right? The law was modified.

By the way, it's worth noting that program was never stopped under the Obama administration. It was never discontinued. It kept going. Congress even modified and even authorized that program with more limited boundaries around it and ultimately decided not to continue that program, but that program was tremendously valuable, and the reality of the situation is that yes, there was one disclosure. The bulk of it is not Edward Snowden, the hero. The bulk of it is Edward Snowden, the traitor. And let's be real clear about that.

Washington: Well, look, you won't get any pushback from me on this one.

Jaffer: And by the way, that man lives in Moscow today, and he has Russian citizenship. Let's not get it twisted about who that man really is. That man is not a hero.

Washington: It's a very, very interesting. I did watch a docudrama on his life. I found it would be pretty intriguing.

So for a while, your institute was focused on China. I want to spend a little bit of time here just because of TikTok and some of the other things. I really want to get your feeling.

And so you were focused there. You did a lot of work there. But then it looks like it kind of tailed off somewhat. And I can see why with the Russia Ukraine piece, with the Israeli Gaza piece as well. But is China still at the top of your list in terms of a focus? And can you talk about its influence and why we should be concerned?

Jaffer: Yeah. You know, they are at the top of the list. And what we're seeing increasingly is the collaboration of these various bad actors, right? The Russians, the Chinas, the Iranians and North Koreans.

We just saw President Xi and President Putin meet in Beijing. It's their 40th-plus meeting in just the last few years. They met about a year or two ago previously, and if you remember at the end of that visit, there was a very telling moment where they both knew the cameras were on. And President Xi and what looked like a pull aside, but he knew the camera was running. He says to President Putin, he says, you know, the world is seeing, the biggest changes is seen in three decades. And we, you and I, the Russians and Chinese, were architecting that change.

He wanted the world to hear that, that we are working together and we're moving the world. It's not America. It's not Europe. It's us.

And that's a really telling moment. Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, China and Russia inked a no-limits partnership. No limits. They put the name on it, and they doubled down on it just this past week in Beijing. And so, you know, these actors, so when you see us talk about Russia, Ukraine, that is not different than China, Taiwan. That is not different than Israel, Hamas, and Iran's role in that, and Iran's role in Hezbollah, right?

These are all interrelated, interconnected, and they're all working together, right? There's a reason why the North Korea nuclear program looks a lot like the Pakistan nuclear program, which looks a lot like the Iranian nuclear program. It's because the AQ Khan Network from Pakistan sold that information about how to make those centrifuges.

So there are very direct connections between these actors in the world. Y’know, you think about it. China's interning a million Muslim Uyghurs in termicamps, in gulags, in the Xinjiang province, right? You know who says nothing about it? Nobody in the Middle East. Pakistan, Imran Khan, the famous cricketeer that all the Pakistanis love, right? Gives China a pass on interning a million Muslims. It's crazy, right?

Why is the U.S. have to call out under both the Biden and the Trump administration that a genocide is happening in China to a million Muslim immigrants? Why isn't Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Jordan and all these people who are protesting about Palestinians and what's happening with Hamas and Gaza? Why don't we talk about the million Muslims in prison camps in China?

Well, it's hard to talk about that because, you know, we get a lot of really cheap cars, a lot of really cheap shirts, a lot of really good semiconductors from there. It's hard to make trouble there. The NBA, the NBA, an American Basketball League, told its own owners and operators, don't talk bad about China because we make too much money there. They pushed Enos Cantor out of the league because he talked too much about the Uyghurs. Crazy.

Washington: So the actual security concerns with regard to Chinese influence on American politics in mining user data, for example, has led to legislation calling for Chinese divestment of the app TikTok on national security concerns.

Jaffer: Yeah.

Washington: Why is it important that the U.S. government take these steps to potentially ban TikTok, in your opinion?

Jaffer: Look, you know, people say I don't understand why people care about TikTok. It's just kids having dance videos. You know, what's the big deal, right?

But the reality is it's not just these videos. It's who you share them with. It's who your social network is. It's who you're communicating with. It's where you are and where your phone, where your devices at all times. It's connecting all of that data.

Washington: Metadata.

Jaffer: All that metadata with the data the Chinese has stolen from our credit bureaus, from the security clearance databases. Everyone with security clearance had their information stolen from OPM. All of our Marriott Hotel records, right? All these health records from major insurers.

Washington: Wait a minute. They got our Marriott Hotel records?

Jaffer: They got your My Bonvoy account, all gone. But think about what that means. Think about your credit records, your hotel records, your travel, your security clearance, you combine all that. Then you add in your social networks on TikTok, who your kids are communicating with, how they operate, how they play video games. Combine all that and then apply AI over that.

And what you now have is an amazing, very detailed insight into the live of average Americans, including the people that hold the highest level security clearances and who their kids are friends with and how you can approach them for a target and take advantage of them.

That is what TikTok is about. It's not about dance videos.

And by the way, this whole claim that, oh, Americans' free speech rights are being trampled and being trampled upon.

I mean, last time I checked, you got Twitter, you got Instagram, you got reels, you got so many places that put your voice out there. YouTube. You need TikTok? That's the only way is a Chinese government-controlled app that you can get your voice out there?

If that's suppressing free speech, then we got real problems. So do you have any predictions on whether or not ByteDance will comply and identify?

Jaffer: They will not.

Washington: Of course not.

Jaffer: Of course not.

Washington: And so, you know, my next question, right? What happens next?

Jaffer: I mean, look, we put our foot down, right? I mean, it was, for a long time, it was very controversial, and ultimately, Congress has figured it out. You know, look, the truth is President Washington, the American people were waking up to the threat that is China, right?

They realized it really during the pandemic, when we realized, wow, all of our PPE, our personal protective equipment, all of our pharmaceutical precursors are made in China.

And so we started to realize that. We've now started to forget that a little bit because, you know, Americans were so innovative, we've moved so fast, we forget things happened recently. But I think that America is finally waking up to the reality of what China is and what they're doing in their long-term game here.

Washington: So this is interesting. I was at a very, very high-level meeting here. We had some former high-ranking members of our government, also foreign European governments, a number of leaders from industry, from some tech companies from a very prominent chip manufacturer, who I will not mention. And we were having the similar discussion.

And I asked the question, is Taiwan a Chinese entity? Because I know what the law says on this, and I know what the- you know...

And I was surprised how the debate manifested, because many of the people there, basically tried to paint the picture highlighting that it wasn't, that it's not a Chinese entity. It was very clear to me that it's a Chinese entity.

Then, you know, later on, as I began to pontificate and think as to why they had such an issue, it became very clear to me, well, if Taiwan is a Chinese-owned entity, then the main driver of wealth in this country, the semiconductor, is basically, at least in some sense, owned by the Chinese.

Jaffer: Yeah.

Washington: Because TSMC, which in my opinion is the most of, well, it's not in my opinion. It is clear they produce the highest quality chips. They produce the most complex chips. All of our major chip development companies use TSMC to manufacture their chips, and TSMC is easily five years or so ahead of the next closest rival.

It's the one area. It's the one thing that, you know, when you look at the U.S. and we make design the chips here, right? You know, our great companies design those chips, but the bulk of them are actually manufactured by TSMC. And they don't even have a close rival. There's nobody anywhere near them.

Jaffer: Not even close. And we've spent billions of dollars in the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, to try and rebuild some capacity. It is a drop, is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what TSM has got in the capabilities. There is no company in the world that can do a three to four nanometer process.

Washington: That's exactly right.

Jaffer: Other than TSMC. There's no company that builds the that builds the equipment to do that three to four nanometer process with EUV technology other than ASML, a Dutch company. None of these companies are American. And that is terrifying because we're creating those three to four nanometer processes, the ideas and design. But we can't execute it.

Washington: We can't make the chips. And so this brings to the point. And to me, this is the number one security issue that we have.

Jaffer: It's the harder.

Washington: That's right. If China goes into- And I think this is driving all of this. It's like a chess game. They're trying to get your king. That's the king. The king is whoever controls TSMC has a very, very firm hold. All of this stuff we're talking about with Jensen Wong and NVIDIA and NVIDIA chips. Where are the chips being produced, right? Where's that? It's coming from TSMC.

And if China goes in and takes Taiwan, TSMC is the primary reason for them doing it. I don't think they would care about Taiwan to the degree they do now if TSMC were not there. And I don't think we would care either, right? And so can you talk a little bit about this?

Jaffer: I mean, imagine if your king on the chessboard had no pawns around it.

Washington: Right.

Jaffer: Because that's the situation with Taiwan right now. If the Chinese decided to invade tomorrow, and they're not going to invade tomorrow, because they don't think they're ready, right? They're not going to invade tomorrow. Maybe in a couple of years, but not tomorrow.

If they were going to invade tomorrow, we couldn't get there in time to really put up a real fight. It would take us months to flow the forces to the region that we need. And we have already a carrier battle group in the region. We have a Marine Expeditionary Task Force out there nearby. We couldn't get there with enough forces in time to really have a force-on-force fight with the Chinese over Taiwan. By the time they went and took it, the game would be up, we wouldn't even get in the fight.

The only way we could really fight that fight is if we put forces forward and no president, not Trump, not Biden, not Obama before him, not Bush before him, was willing to put the forces forward to do that. And until the American president is ready to do that, the Chinese will read that for what it is, which is America is not ready to defend Taiwan and won't do it.

And so the only question: they're not waiting for us; they're waiting for themselves to be ready. The lesson they're taking from Russia, Ukraine is: don't go in and be not ready. Don't go  without a military you can trust. Know that you're ready to be able to take it. Make it a fait accompli within the first month.

Yes, you may have to fight a long-term insurgency. Don't even let the U.S. get in the fight, and they don't want to be in the fight. They read what we see as a successful Ukraine policy: We've supported the Ukrainians. They've kept the fight going. They see it as American weakness. We're not willing to put boots on the ground. Every little bit we're eking in a little bit more every so often. We're not going to put M1A1 because you might use nuclear weapons. We won't put them in. And then eventually we put them in, oh, surprise, surprise. He doesn't use nuclear weapons.

Chinese know that too. That's why they're tripling their nuclear force. They know that we're afraid of that, and we won't go up to the line. And so they view it as it's a question of not if but when. And that's the real scary thing.

And the problem is the president's trying out there. He goes on TV all the time and says, we will defend Taiwan with American troops if we need to. He's done it four times in the last two years. But every time he does it, my friend Jake Sullivan comes to the White House podium and says, what the president really meant was we'll send weapons of Taiwan. He didn't mean troops.

Now, the administration says, well, that's strategic ambiguity, right? We're keeping it unclear. But that kind of strategic ambiguity, it doesn't help. It creates risk. It tempts them to test our boundaries. You don't want to test our boundaries. They should have a clear understanding. You go to Taiwan. We will fight you toe to toe, and we're going to put the force forward to make that true.

And the reason we won't do it today, and Trump wouldn't do it and Biden won't do it, they're afraid if we do that, that we'll be the ones who trip over the wire and start the thing. It's just like Russia, Ukraine: We put too many weapons in; we'll tip it over.

That's the opposite. Our adversaries understand and respect power. We don't use it. We don't show it.

Washington: But they know it's there.

Jaffer: If we're ready to fight. They see us as unready to fight. They see the American people not ready, and they don't see the kind of leader who will step forward and bring the American people to- American people will fight a just war if they need to. But they have to be told by an American leader why it matters.

Washington: So let's follow that thread just a little bit. What happens if they do take Taiwan.

Jaffer: Oh, it's bad.

Washington: Now, you say, okay, well, we can't stop them. And I tend to agree with you. We can't.

Jaffer: In the immediate aftermath-

Washington: But we would see them coming, right? They would need to amass troops. We would know that it is getting ready to happen before it's happened.

Jaffer: Kind of like Russia Ukraine.

Washington: Right. Yeah, we saw, we saw them coming. And what I hear you saying is that they want to be ready. Do you think they want to be ready for a fight in Taiwan, or do they want to be ready for what they're going to have to deal with relative to us? I think it's the latter. I don't think that they're worried about the Taiwanese forces that much.

Jaffer: They want to telegraph to us that they're going to take that island so fast and so directly that by the time we get there, we'd have to fight a rear insurgency for many, many years, and we lose a lot of lives to retake the island. They want to make it more costly for us than it was for them to go in, and they assess, I think... And now, I will admit that I may be applying an American mentality.

Washington: Yeah, I think you are.

Jaffer: I may be mirror imaging, right? And so I may be wrong. But my worry is they see us as unwilling to fight fights. Post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan, the terrible departure from Afghanistan, the way we've left Iraq, the way we abandoned our Kurdish allies in the Trump administration... They see America is on the retreat, unwilling to defend its allies, unwilling to put its forces forward. They think we're weak and they think they can play their card. So they want to show strength and say, we got a strong hand. Don't even try coming here. We will make it very painful for you, and you don't want to bear that cost.

Washington: Okay. So I hear what you're saying. Let me tell you why I disagree.

Jaffer: All right. I like this. All right.

Washington: When it truly matters, we figure out a way to get it done. Right? When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, right, we saw his troops massing at the border. We knew what was going to happen. We used the rhetoric and all of that to get our folk ready. You know what I'm saying?

Jaffer: You're right.

Washington: And then we went in and took care of Saddam Hussein. And that was to protect the free flow of oil, right? Because every major recession in our country, including the Great Recession, there was an oil shock. Not everyone, but most of them. There was an oil shock, a significant increase in the price of oil that preceded it, right? And so they knew that the connection, our economy's connection to oil is significant.

Well, our economy's connection to chips is as significant, and I would contend to you, it might actually even be more significant now because of these other kinds of electric vehicles. There are other modes where we can make do without as much oil, right?

Jaffer: You're right.

Washington: There is no substitute globally right now for TSMC.

Jaffer: Yeah.

Washington: There's none. It goes away. It loses ability to do what it does. We can be a third rate power from a technology perspective.

Washington: No, you're right. We would care a lot less about the Middle East if there weren't fossil fuels under that land.

Jaffer: Of course. We care a lot less about Taiwan if TSMC weren't there. You're 100% correct.

Washington: So we will figure out a way to do what we could to support and defend Taiwan. And I would be, we would be unwise if there aren't scenarios, if they're not people, hundreds of them right now, drawing up the battle plans and drawing up. up the scenario analysis relative to this very issue. I would be surprised if that were not happening to this day.

You know, you and I are pretty smart people. There are smarter folk looking at this. I can I can tell you without a shadow of doubt.

Jaffer: They're doing it. And the problem is that if we don't fight on day one for Taiwan and day two and day three, but we will wait till day 100 or day 150, it is a lot more costly a fight.

And yes, you're right. We may very well take that fight on. But if you're right, and it's so critical, which I agree with you, by the way, 100%, you're absolutely correct. Then it would be insane for us not to be prepared to fight that fight on day one and win that fight on day one. And as a result, make it clear to the Chinese that that is our intent, it is our policy, and to put the forces in place to be ready to have that fight.

Every day we don't do that, we tempt them to take action and we wait longer-

Washington: I hear you.

Jaffer: And it's more costly.

Washington: And this is, like I said, we're going to have a little bit of debate on this one. I actually think, while I can't give you a definitive answer on what strategy is, I don't know. I would be totally surprised if there were not a strategy. It's just too obvious that the Chinese are going to take it for the U.S. not to have a strategy here, right? Too many smart people with their time and resources on their hands, they're looking at this. They've got to be, right?

So, you know, I'm prior military. I spent time in the military. And then I spent a significant amount of time on what's called a scientific advisory board for the Air Force. And when you're on those scientific advisory boards as a researcher, they use researchers in the country to help them deal with very difficult problems and challenges to deal with the government. You are routinely engaging members of the Pentagon, very high-ranking senior military officials and the like. Let me make no doubt about it. Some of the smartest people I've ever met.

Jaffer: 100%.

Washington: Brilliant. So there's not a competency issue there. Now, politics.

Jaffer: That's what I'm talking about.

Washington: Murkies the water a little bit.

Jaffer: I’m talking about the competence of politicians, the policymakers.

Washington: But the politicians aren't going to prosecute that battle.

Jaffer: They got to decide.

Washington: They do.

Jaffer: They're not ready. They don’t have the guts.

Washington: They do, but the people that I engaged have already taken into account the fact that they may be slow to act or may not act at all. And they have scenario planning in place for those type of occurrences as well because they're too smart not to. And I know it's kind of a blind faith, but I believe it because I've spent time with these folk. I mean, real time.

Jaffer: No, you're right.

Washington: Right. And so it will be an issue. I just don't know that I would be very, very surprised if we didn't have a plan in place for how to deal with it. And I think that not only do we have plans in place, I think the Chinese know that we have plans in place and that's why they haven't taken it. Do you see what I'm saying?

Jaffer: I do. By the way, I don't think you're out of that far apart. I think we actually agree in large part on this, which is to say there are absolutely scenario plans. There are absolutely plans that would allow us to rapidly accelerate, build the defense force, the union, get them there fast, and fight that war, right?

Washington: Or plans to totally isolate in wall-off significant portions of Chinese economy that causes them to have real, real challenges there as well, because them taking Taiwan won't just affect the Americans. It's actually also going to affect the Europeans. It's also going to affect other countries in Southeast Asia that are developing. It's going to affect Vietnam. It's going to affect the Japanese. It's going to affect the Indians. Everybody will be affected by this because TSMC is that dominant.

Jaffer: And, by the way, let's not, and people don't want to talk about this, but let's not take it off the table that there are probably contingency plans to, if, in fact, the Chinese take TSMC off the map.

Washington: Yeah.

Jaffer: I’m not saying that's the plan. I'm just saying, like, let's not kid ourselves that that's got to be in the cards as well.

Washington: Well, they're building a facility here in the U.S.

Jaffer: Right. But here's what I worry about, right? I worry that we have a political system today and political leaders today who are increasingly responsive too much to what they perceive as the views of the American people rather than leading. We are not- We are a representative democracy. We are not a pure democracy. And the more we take this populist turn, whether you're a liberal or a conservative, doesn't matter.

Washington: Oh, without question.

Jaffer: When you don't have leadership amongst policymakers, they're trying to take the pulse to the American people and do what the American people want every single day, that's when you make these failures. That's when you don't act when you need to act. And that's when you put our military and the men and women who put their lives on the line every day as you did for our country. That's when you put them at risk and greater risk every day. And we make it more dangerous and more costly for American treasure and American lives. And that, to me, is cavalier and inappropriate. We need real leaders in government. And you know how we get real leaders in government? We got to do our job. We got to hold our leaders accountable.

Washington: Actually, you've given me an idea. I'm going to get you and a couple of other folk together, and we're going to have a roundtable to discuss this very, very issue, the issue of leadership in this country. I think it's something that we should definitely talk about. And I think we actually have the right horses here at George Mason University in order to do it.

Jaffer: We do.

Washington: I’m going to end on this question. As I understand it, your National Security Institute is a bipartisan entity. That being said, we have significant levels of partisanship in our government, and quite frankly, as we've been discussing in the public sphere. What can NSA do to break through that clutter?

Jaffer: I think the key is to talk to the American people about what makes this country great. And to recognize that, as you said earlier, all those elements of greatness are still here. We are still the most innovative country in the world. We are still the strongest economy in the world. We are still the strongest people. We have the best laws. They may not be perfect. Our political system may not be perfect. Our political leaders may not be perfect. But we have a duty to talk about who we are, to be proud of who we are, and to be a strong country.

It is what we were built on, is what we were built to do. And every day that the American people spend time at each other's throats and allow our leaders to put ourselves at each other's throats is a day we are losing the battle to the people that want us to lose: to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea.

So if we want to think about how to fix our problems in the world, it begins here at home. It begins with voting. Voting every day. It is a crime that half the American people that could vote don't register. It is a crime that half those that are registered don't vote. Take responsibility.

All our young people that are listening to this here at George Mason, every single one you must register to vote. You want to go protest, go protest, but vote. And vote for adults. Vote for people who have real serious thoughts. And at the end of day, for me, that's about national security. That is about bipartisanship.

Because at the end of the day, this isn't about Republican/Democrat. This is about America. This is about a vision. This is about a dream. This is about the ideals that we have in this country. And they are the right ones. And we are called to this mission. We have been since our founding, and we still are today, no matter how hard it is.

And that's what NSI is out there talk about and fighting about every day.

Washington: Oh, man, I love it. I love it. Well, we're going to have to leave it there. Jamil Jaffer, thank you for connecting some dots for us in an extraordinarily complex puzzle. I am George Mason University President Gregory Washington. Thanks for listening and tune in next time for more conversations that show why we are all together different.

Narrator: If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu for more of Gregory Washington's conversations with the thought leaders, experts, and educators who take on the grand challenges facing our students, graduates, and higher education. That's podcast.gmu.edu.