nation." we continue our conversation now with our foreign policy panel. hr mcmaster, general mcmaster, i want to ask you from a military perspective, we heard the cia director describe a full-fledged military partnership between russia and iran. what does this look like? >> well, i think where it heads next is support for russia's war-making machine more broadly. i think you're going to see missiles. you already have reports of islamic revolutionary guard trainers in assembly of these drones. i think what we're recognizing is these problem sets we're facing with the theocratic

dictatorship in iran and the hypernationalist putin, they're connected to each other. and they're connected to china. so, i think we are hopefully now in full recognition that we are in really consequential competitions with authoritarian regimes who are hostile to us. we have to respond much more effectively than we responded in the past. and that's a broad range of, i think, preparations for potential military conflicts so we can deter a widening of the war and also very significant economic and diplomatic aspects of these interconnected problems. >> one of the things you're saying there is recognize that the attempt to broker a nuclear deal with iran is dead. >> it's a pipe dream. you know, try to revive something that is completely dead. i couldn't believe it, margaret, as wesupplicating to the regime and i think we lost a lot

of ground in the middle east because we are chasing this pipe dream to try to revive this nuclear agreement. if we diplomat, what would happen is we would give iran a pass on the destructive effect the dictatorship has had on the iranian economy. if we're going to be in the business of making predictions, i think the chances are quite high of a significant conflict in the middle east. maybe entailing an israeli strike on iran's nuclear program. >> michele flour nonoy, do you agree with that? >> they will acquire highly enriched nuclear material to make a bomb. israel has made that as an unacceptable condition for them to have, to co-exist with. and then the decision that places on the president, the u.s. president's desk, do we support them? d we stand back? what happens? and do we find ourselves in an escalating situation with iran in the middle east? >> and, mike, the intelligence

community has not determined iran actually will make a nuclear weapon, it's just that they're giving themselves the possibility to do so at a future date. >> the judgment has always been that what the iranians want is to get to the threshold, right, to have all the pieces and be able to put them together quickly. right now they have enough fisile material for bombs, and they could get to 90%, for a weapon, in a matter of weeks. so they're very, very close. >> does the regime, which has withstood many popular protests, withstand what's happening in the streets, which is unique with these protests that were started by young women? >> i think you have to look at the current protests in the context of a series of protests that have occurred since 2017. they've all had different causes but the one thing they have in common is a growing alienation of the young people from the

regime. and a growing group of people who want a more normal life and a lesser rigid life. at the same time, there's a large number of iranians who support the regime. 18 million people voted for the current president, who's a hard liner. so i don't think we're going to see regime change unless there's an incident that takes us in a different direction. >> it is fascinating that the dynamic is there, that women who started this round of protest and it makes me think of, again, the young women paying the price for what is happening in afghanistan following the withdrawal of the united states. do you buy the argument that that choice to withdraw factored in, in any way, to russia and china's assessment that the u.s. was in decline? >> it's one brick in a wall they've been building for quite some time that has many bricks, which is why it's so important that we need to invest in our

alliances, really demonstrate our credibility when we make foreign policy commitments and so forth. i actually would give the administration some credit for that in terms of pulling nato together after russia's invasion of ukraine, building stronger partnerships in asia to try to deter and counterbalance china. >> are you optimistic that those alliances in the west will actually remain solid? because there is an argument that if vladimir putin hadn't bombed kyiv and terrified european leaders, that they wouldn't be united. it's not just diplomacy, it was actual fear. >> well, we are where we are, and i think the nato alliance and the u.s./eu relationship, they have found their purpose again. there's a tremendous answer of transatlantic unit that i think is quite solid. i also think as beijing overplays their hand, that actually bolsters our alliances and our partnerships in the

region. but we have to play our cards well and seriously compete, not only diplomatically but shoring up deterrence militarily, competing economically, tech logically, keeping our edge, making the right investments at home. >> ambassador sullivan, you're not at the state department anymore so you can speak freely. how much of the withdrawal, how it was executed and the agreement with the taliban is responsible for shaping the perception of weakness of the west? >> i completely agree with michele that the russians, beijing, they will use any misstep by the united states, real or imagined, against us in their false narrative. unfortunately, in this case, we did make a major misstep. i think particularly in how we implemented the withdrawal. there's no doubt in my mind that it factored in at least in some way in the russians' calculation about our strength, our ability to convince allies and partners to oppose what the russians were

doing, our credibility. did it ultimately turn out to be the case? no. as with so many things, putin was wrong about that, too. >> mike, after the fall of kabul, iran's program and you correctly forecast that the taliban knew where al qaeda's leader was inside afghanistan. >> right. >> so i'm wondering what your thought is about where the emerging terror threat is now. >> so, al qaqaeda is a problem that needs to be watched inn afghanistan. the bigger problem in afghanistan at the moment is isis. they are increasingly recruiting from neighboring countries, and those individuals are coming in where they're getting training from isis and the concern is that they might leave afghanistan, go back to their home countries and conduct attacks against western interests. think embassies. the bigger terrorism problem is actually in africa, all the way from somalia to west africa, where you've got both al qaeda affiliates and isis affiliates.

they have control of huge swaths of territory. they have conducted local attacks so far. but western military bases in africa and possibly europe could be targets. if we're going to make a prediction for 2023, i would say we're going to see a terrorist attack against a western interest somewhere in the world. >> well, that's terrifying. it's sobering. it's a reminder that declaring victory was too early. >> terrorism has always waxed and waned. it has always gone up and down. and i think it's starting to bounce back again. >> general mcmaster, do you agree with that assessment that the emerging threat is coming out of africa? >> i do, but it's also coming out of afghanistan and it's also coming out of the middle east still. and isis in syria has not been defeated. the main lesson from 9/11 is threats, jihadist threats that develop abroad can only be dealt

with at exorbitant cost once they reach our shores. so the partners in afghanistan is critical to our own safety and security. >> i want to transition to the other looming threat that you hear the administration saying it will turn its eye towards in the new year, and that is china. michele, where do you begin to try to de-escalate? >> well, i think there is a desire to right the apple cart. that said, neither side is going to change its fundamental interests. and those interests are in many ways in conflict. so, there is a competition ongoing. it's economic, it's technological, it's informational, it's political, it's military. i think the real name of the game in 2023 is shoring up deterrence. i don't think president xi wants to move on taiwan. he's got, you know, covid to deal with. he's got a youth unemployment problem to deal with.

he's got all kinds of domestic challenges. and i think he'd prefer to take taiwan using economic and political coercion ultimately. but he has instructed his military, be ready by 2027. so, we've got the next few years to really make sure that he cannot have confidence in his ability to succeed militarily. so that means we have a lot of investment to do alongside investing in the drivers of our economic competitiveness, our technological competitiveness as well. >> ambassador sullivan, how does secretary blinken approach this sort of trying to defrost this frozen relationship? >> we're not going to do this alone. we just saw the japanese government announcing its new national security and defense strategy, significantly increasing its defense budget. our european allies and partners becoming more forthright about the threat they see, the challenges they see from china. >> i want to get to general

mcmaster. i know you spent a lot of time thinking about china. how do you see it? >> it's a grave threat. i think xi jinping means what he says. i think we have to be careful not to mirror image, not to fall into the same traps as we did with vladimir putin. eco xi jinping has made clear he's going to make china clear and preparations are under way. what is important is what a mitchell said, deterrence. i think we're underinvested in defense in the united states. china has become increasingly aggressive not only from an economic and financial perspective, but physically with its military. and what's really disturbing is i think xi jinping is preparing the chinese people for war. in some of his speeches he said for us to restore china to national greatness it's going to

take some sacrifices. i think we have so take it very seriously and act to extend really our power. we talk a lot about relying on our allying and then maybe if we take a step back, the allies will do more. i think actually the opposite is the case. if americans do just a little more, many of our allies will follow suit and bolster their defense capabilities and capacity as well. >> thanks for joining us. we'll be right back. hi, i'm jill and i've lost 56 pounds on golo. hi, i'm barry and i've lost 42 p pounds. jill and i are a team. if she tells me to do something, i usually jump on board. golo was doable, it's realistic, and it's something we can dodo the rest of our lives.

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we now want to go to ben tracy, senior international and environmental correspondent out in los angeles and welcome kevin book, energy analyst and managing director of clearview energy partners. ben, i want to start with you. i don't want to just admire the problem. i want to talk about how to plan for what's ahead and what is being done. and i know out in california you've had, for a long time concern about drought in the west. and you have these predictions from nasa about flooding here in

the east at record levels. so, what is happening? what do people need to plan for? >> well, when we talk about climate change, you're basically talking about extremes, right? so the extremes get more extreme. as you said, out here in the west, we're talking about hotter and drier. that's created this 23-year-long mega drought we're suffering through. in the east, as you mentiond, there's flooding. when you get these rain storms they're supercharged and getting more flooding. here in the west the real plan is how do you kind of forecast and deal with water supplies when you're talking about hotter and dryer as the long-term trend? so, when you get more rain and less snow, you have less snowpack up in the mountains and that is created this crisis with reservoirs, with the colorado river. that's really impacting millions of people when it comes to the water supply. it's hard to plan for. you now have the federal government coming out in the west and saying, okay, states, you have to get together and

figure out how you're going to use this water supply or we're going to start imposing pretty significant cuts on you if you don't do it yourselves. >> at the federal level, ben, we saw this historic investment, $369 billion, as part of this inflation reduction act. and the argument that all of this was ultimately supposed to alleviate climb change, but near-term it's really an investment in green energy. what difference is it going to make? >> it's a huge investment and it could make a huge difference. the analysis of the bill really shows this could get us to 40% cut in u.s. emissions by the year 2030. that's huge. much much of that comes from investment in the power grid and renewable energy. in fact, the international energy agency came out and revised their forecast and said that transition is actually accelerating. we're going to see renewable energy overtake coal as the predominant energy supply worldwide by the year 2025. >> kevin, you look at this from the perspective of investments and planning.

so, what is the biggest change that's coming in 2023? i mean, we hear all about this money being spent on incentivizing people to buy electric vehicles, for example. is that the upshot? >> it's a big topic because europe is not happy about the incentives we're giving domestic manufacturing. but we're coming into 2023 on the heels of big energy changes. when you talk about the inflation reduction act one of the parts of the bill is it keeping existing nuclear capacity on stream. the challenge is to keep clean electricity on the grid as adding green electricity to the grid. there's no equivalent for hydro. you can't use a tax credit to make it snow in the sierra nevadas. in the meantime, we have to make sure we don't go dark before we go green. existing fossil resources are front and center as we go into the year. russian fossil energy exports about 5% of global consumption are now being shunned by the west. and that's on top of an investment wave that is slowed

considerably after the demand collapse of the pandemic. and so we're going into the year short on conventional resources. that's a big challenge. >> but one of the criticisms of some of this legislation is that the payoff would be so much further down the line to something that ben is describing as an immediate crisis. but you also hear from people who are in the marketplace that some of it just wasn't written well. >> well, fast drafting of big spending is hard. actually, the democrats tried to get the bill done on a party line basis and do it in a hurry. that was also hard. what's ahead is harder still. they have to spend a lot of money and do it fast. if republicans take over washington in 2024, some of the unobligated balancs could be targeted. the tax credits, about $270 billion of the $370 billion in the bill, if you look at history, the last long-term extension of solar tax credits was in 2008. it was projected by the joint committee on taxation at about $3 billion over ten years.

came in over four times that amount. the credits, a lot in the i.r.a., are uncapped, there's no limit on them. when the government hands out free money, it usually gets a lot of takers. no, not an immediate result but potentially much bigger than forecast. >> ben, when you talk about climate change it sounds like one little box but we're talking about financial investment, geopolitics, local government. it's a huge beat you have here, ben. but on the sliver of geopolitics, talk to me about why this spike in prices for gas and oil in the wake of russia's invasion of ukraine hasn't actually led quickly to going green? in fact, it made for dirtier energy investment, right, with coal. >> yeah. exactly. there's a lot of tension there because as those natural gas supplies were lessened to europe, this he had to turn to other forms of energy. you did see a ramp up of coal use. a lot of analysts are saying

this will eventually more quickly accelerate this clean energy transition because you now have europe looking at russia saying, we can't count on this in the future. so we need to more quickly transition to other forms of energy like renewables, so solar and wind. you guys mentioned nuclear power. that's an interesting one because you've had this real reconsideration of nuclear power because it is a form of clean and reliable energy. here in california, you've actually seen there's one nuclear plant still operating in this state and that was going to be mothballed. they have reversed that decision. the governor came out and said, we need this because we don't have enough renewable energy yet to make this transition off fssil fuels. >> but that's a difficult local government problem because people in this country often don't want nuclear plants in their backyard. they don't want mining and that kind of local production happening. >> you're going to have this real tension all over this country if we want to mine these things domestically. these critical elements for the

future of energy. they are going to be in somebody's backyard. they are going to be in places where people may not want them. the question is, is that a tradeoff versus getting it from a place like china and having them control that supply chain? so, that's a real tension for president biden and his own party. >> that's what's interesting. president biden wants to go green, but not only is coal and natural gas cheap, but when you go green, it also makes us in some ways dependent on china, as ben just said there, for the elements that go into, for example, electric vehicle batteries. kevin, how does that shift actually happen? how do you convince americans that the drilling needs to happen in their backyard versus bringing these in from other places in africa and china? >> margaret, this is a question mark whether we can. indeed, a lot of what we're looking at for the biden administration is a tension between rapid deployment and the development of domestic industry.

and so solar panels are a big example of this. a lot of them come from china and a lot of the solar material that goes into those panels comes from a region with forced labor allegations that are quite serious. >> human rights kernlgz. >> how are we going to balance human rights with the green agenda? the administration has been struggling with that. the other part is how are we going to get development inside the borders of the united states? globalization made it easier to tighten environmental laws. now we're trying to bring it home. the question is how can we do that in a way that's compatible with our stricter environmental rules? >> the department of energy reports china controls 80% of rare earths. those ingredients ben was talking about in production and refining. that goes into generators for wind turbines. china controls 61% of global lithium refineries for battery storage and electric vehicles. you can't go green right now without china. >> it's true. and deglobalizing was

inflationary enough. buying new stuff was inflationary. it has a financial cost. how are we going to do this without going through china? the answer is we can't, not right away. >> i want to ask you about pricing. we had these nightmare scenarios going back to fossil fuels of oil at like $125 a barrel in the new year. are we past that? are we still in that potential for real severe spike? >> we are stuck in the middle of a structural shortage. not only did we have underinvestment but the shunning of russian energy we're doing now is leaving a hole in the supply picture. if gas isn't going into europe on pipelines that it used to traverse, it coming off the water from other countries. what are they burning instead in some are burning oil. in other words, energy is tight everywhere because there's less of it in the world right now. as we look ahead, you ask, what's going to change? we're seeing new infrastructure risks, new risks whether you're looking at iran attacking saudi infrastructure or the in order

st nordstream pipeline or the matter of fires, floods and freezes. these challenges to supply are starting to mount. it's a pretty good expectation we're going to be living in a time of scarcity for a while. it's changing our thinking but slowly. we bought a lot of big cars when energy was cheap. >> and scarcity means high prices. >> i do mean high prices. >> kevin book, great to have you here. ben, thanks for joining us. we'll be right back.

that's it for us today. thank you for watching. until next week, for "face the nation," i'm margaret brennan.

american funded radio free europe continues to broadcast in some of the most dangerous and undemocratic places in the world. how do they do it? "60 minutes" tonight.

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connected tv. i'm courtney kealy, cbs news, new york. >> announcer: this is the "cbs overnight news." good evening and thanks for joining us. a fierce storm has ushered in the new year in california. in sacramento it was the wettest new year's eve on record. at least two levees have been overwhelmed. and tonight the danger is not over. this is highway 99. it's a major north-south roadway where some drivers became trapped. and fast-rising floodwaters led to several rescues throughout the region. the storm is now headed east, bringing feet of snow to utah