{"id":40875,"date":"2018-02-02T15:47:42","date_gmt":"2018-02-02T15:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/uncategorized\/2018\/02\/02\/interview-former-pentagon-chief-chuck-hagel-on-trump-syria-and-korea\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T23:17:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T23:17:34","slug":"interview-former-pentagon-chief-chuck-hagel-on-trump-syria-and-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/defensenews\/interviews\/2018\/02\/02\/interview-former-pentagon-chief-chuck-hagel-on-trump-syria-and-korea\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Former Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel on Trump, Syria and NKorea"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Chuck Hagel, a former U.S. defense secretary, talks about President Donald Trump’s first year and leadership approach. (Jeff Martin and Dustin Q. Diaz\/Staff)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 From 1997 to 2009, Chuck Hagel represented the state of Nebraska as a Republican member of the U.S. Senate. After a few years off, he returned to public service as the 24th secretary of defense, serving under President Barack Obama from 2013-2015, a tumultuous period that saw the rise of the Islamic State group and the spread of great-power competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hagel recently sat down with Defense News to discuss the state of the world and his views on President Donald Trump. For more from Hagel, including videos from the interview<\/a>, visit DefenseNews.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s your view on how President Trump has done through his first year<\/a>?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think he\u2019s done great damage to the presidency, his leadership to our country. He, in his first year, has done everything to intentionally divide America, not unite America. Leaders are uniters. Leaders are not dividers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The issues today are so complicated and so interconnected because of the volatility of the world. If nothing else, that we have to get along, we have to work with each other. You can have strong opinions, of course, and fight mightily for what you believe. But in the end you\u2019ve got to make government work. You have to compromise, you\u2019ve got to sort it out. You can\u2019t continue to vilify the other side and call them names and make so many comments that he\u2019s made about his own intelligence agencies and people in the federal government and individuals. You can\u2019t allow personalization to dominate your responsibilities as a leader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve got a president of the United States that continues to advocate this \u201cAmerica First\u201d agenda with our allies in a world where we need friends, we need alliances. We\u2019re not going to sort everything out by ourselves, certainly the military can\u2019t fix problems alone. We need friends and alliances. We\u2019ve built coalitions of common interest. When you start taking the United States out of treaties and trade relationships \u2026 that\u2019s not the way to lead the world, to create vacuums and to continue to tell the world: \u201cIt\u2019s America First, and I\u2019m sorry about the rest of you.\u201d America can\u2019t lead that way, it\u2019s not in our interest to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you believe President Trump, through either his actions or his words, has made the world more dangerous?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, I don\u2019t think he has helped address the volatility and the danger in the world by his words and by his leadership for the very reasons I just mentioned. American leaders, at least since World War II, have always attempted to reach out and to make friends to build new alliances, not divide alliances and impose tariffs on countries just arbitrarily, unilaterally. All these things have consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You know, world affairs, geopolitics or domestic affairs, it\u2019s like a mosaic. It isn\u2019t normally just one piece that gives you the picture. It\u2019s a number of pictures that come together in a mosaic, and then you start to see the clarity of what that situation is. Intelligence, economics, trade, politics, military, terrorism \u2014 all of that playing in, and a president of the United States must lead and not divide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was it wise for President Trump to remove the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think clearly we have been hurt by our walking away from TPP. Just the other day, the 11 other nations [from TPP] announced that they were going forward with a new trade organization, without the United States. China is everywhere. China lives there. China has influence in Asia-Pacific. Of course they\u2019re filling that vacuum. Of course they are. The Russians are filling to some extent, too. The Indians will fill that vacuum. Of course it affects how we\u2019re seeing our relationships. I hear from leaders in all those countries, leaders from all over the world, meet with ambassadors all the time, and they had the same story: \u201cYou are leaving a vacuum in these areas that the Chinese specifically are filling.\u201c Of course they will. It\u2019s the story of mankind. It\u2019s a story of history, it\u2019s a story of great powers. And there will be no other way that this turns out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u2019t rely just on your military as we have bases and facilities and assets all over Asia-Pacific. You can\u2019t rely just on that to think you\u2019re going to influence outcomes in the Asia-Pacific and you will continue to dominate. That ain\u2019t the way it works. And so I think we are seeing our military put in a very difficult spot here. I think [it] is going to get worse and worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think a pre-emptive strike on North Korea is an option?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you want to bet that if you are going to attack North Korea, however you [are] going to do that, and think that Kim Jong Un and the North Koreans are not going to retaliate \u2014 it\u2019s a pretty big gamble. I wouldn\u2019t want to take that gamble. I know something about this business, and I know the kind of conventional capability North Korea has. I would ask this question: \u201cWhat is winning?\u201d There would be literally millions of people dead in South Korea, tens of thousands of Americans dead. We have 30,000 troops along the [Demilitarized Zone] plus other Americans there as well. Probably Japan doesn\u2019t come out of this without some catastrophe.<\/p>\n\n\n\t