Welcome back to Global Insider’s Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist will share an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. For this week’s issue, Politico’s D.C.-based China Correspondent Phelim Kine talks to Stephen J. Hadley, who served as both deputy national security adviser and later as national security adviser under President George W. Bush about how the world looks in the aftermath of America’s two decades of war in the Middle East.

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Stephen J. Hadley was a fixture in the U.S. national security establishment from the Cold War years of President Gerald Ford’s administration in the 1970s until the end of President George W. Bush’s second term.

Hadley’s career survived the reputational damage inflicted by his failure to remove a line in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech that falsely asserted that then-Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had sought to buy uranium in Africa for a nuclear weapons program. Hadley apologized for that error and offered his resignation, which Bush rejected. But the spurious assertion became synonymous with a discredited narrative that the Bush administration used to justify its invasion of Iraq in March 2003 on the basis that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Twenty years later, Hadley is talking up the lessons of his years of public service on a promotional tour for his new book, “Hand Off: The Foreign Policy that George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama.” The book offers an implicit rebuke to the election-denying chaos and recriminations of the dying days of the Trump administration by documenting how the outgoing Bush administration worked with Obama’s team to ensure a transition “designed to try to do what is right by the country and do it in a way that was nonpartisan.”

I spoke with Hadley about his role in the administration that put the U.S. on a path of two decades of war in the Middle East, his perception of China’s growing challenge to the U.S. and his advice to future national security advisers.

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You were deputy national security adviser and national security adviser in the George W. Bush administrations that steered the U.S. into wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. With the benefit of 20 years of hindsight and an awareness of the costs of those wars, would you have done anything differently?

We went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq to remove what we believed to be serious national security threats to the United States, to our friends and allies and to regional stability. So we removed the Taliban so we could get at Al Qaeda and to make sure that 9/11 was the only mass casualty attack on the United States, not, as the intelligence community predicted at the time, the first of a wave of mass casualty events.

And in terms of Iraq it was because we had 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions that said Saddam was preparing weapons of mass destruction, supporting terror, oppressing his people and invading his neighbors. So it was not done to export democracy through the barrel of a gun, it was done to remove a national security threat. Once that was done, the president decided that we’re Americans, we’re about democracy and freedom, and we ought to try to help the people of Afghanistan and Iraq build prosperous, secure, stable, democratic states. Why democratic? Because those societies with a mix of ethnic groups and languages would only stay together if they were democratic.

So we had big hopes for transforming the Middle East, using in some sense Afghanistan, Iraq and a Palestinian state as a lever. That didn’t happen. We were unable to establish, post-conflict, the kinds of societies in Afghanistan or Iraq that we wanted to. Does that mean that we failed? In the short run, I would say we did not succeed, but the story is not over. Iraq is not a failed state. It is a fragile democracy. So I think this transformation in the Middle East is not over.

The idea of engagement with China for mutual benefit ran through both Bush administrations as well as those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But the dominant narrative today is that engagement failed and the U.S. got played by Beijing. That is: China got stronger, the U.S. got weaker and the U.S. must learn from that mistake. What do you think of that narrative?

The China we faced under former Chinese paramount leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao — two very different leaders from Xi Jinping — was one that wanted a benign international environment so it could focus on its economic development.

It was a reasonable experiment to try to bring China into the international system, so it would not try to disrupt it. And it’s an international system that is based largely on our values.

China under Xi Jinping has become a different kind of country. One that is moving away from economic reform. One that’s challenging the international system. One that’s throwing its weight around and basically aspires to be a regional, if not a global, hegemon.

You were deputy national security adviser in April 2001 when a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane collided off China’s Hainan Island, sparking a bilateral crisis. Did you have a sense of déjà vu watching last month’s Chinese spy balloon incident unfold?

I think it shows a real problem in the relationship then and now. In the EP-3 incident, there was not an established channel of communication between our militaries or between our political leaders at any level to allow us to resolve the crisis. We decided the only way this was going to get resolved was for President Bush to get in touch with Jiang Zemin. And we couldn’t get in touch with him for days. He was in Africa on a trip and there was no alternative reliable channel.

We tried during the period of our administration to create communication channels and protocols to manage those kinds of crises. Some of those channels were put in place, but they were not actually used. And they have atrophied to the point where when that spy balloon goes up, there’s really not much more in terms of channels of communication and protocols for de-escalation now than there was 20 years ago in the EP-3 incident, and that’s a problem.

One of the reasons is because the Chinese say, “You want to have crisis communications and crisis management protocols to make it safer for you to run your airplanes and your ships off the coast of China in the South China Sea, East China Sea and in the Taiwan Strait. And we don’t want you to be there at all. So why should we make it easier and safer for you to do what we don’t think you should be doing at all?” The answer to that is because if we don’t have these mechanisms, there will be a bumping incident or an aircraft collision, and it runs the risk of war between the United States and China.

You did the job that national security adviser Jake Sullivan is doing now. What advice would you give him?

First, Jake Sullivan is doing a fine job and needs no advice from me. But I would tell any future national security adviser that you really only have one client at the end of the day and that’s the president of the United States. You are a staff person whose whole purpose is to enable the president of the United States to play the role he or she needs to play in national security and foreign policy. So your relationship with the president is the most important thing.

Second, run a transparent and open interagency process that everybody feels is fair, where everybody gets a chance to bring their views to the president, and everybody has confidence that in you as national security adviser that that is the kind of process that you’re running.

Third, avoid fights. Many times administrations have been hurt or presidents have been hurt by infighting among their national security team. And it usually involves tensions between the national security adviser and the secretary of state. Avoid that at all costs.

Finally, you’re going to be getting up early and staying up late. That’s the only way to do that job. But you have to try to remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And you’ve got to somehow get into a battle rhythm that allows you to be as close to the top of your game as you can over the long term. Because no sooner are you going to get one problem put to bed than another one’s going to emerge.

Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt and producer Andrew Howard

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