For those of you who may not know me, I'm
Jordan Moeny. I'm the Director of Events and Communications for the School,
for the Center for Security Studies and I am very pleased to introduce our
lunch speaker today, Dr. Rebecca Lissner. Dr. Lissner is a Non-Resident Scholar
here at the Center for Security Studies. She also is a professor at the
U.S. Naval War College and has held research fellowships all over the place: at
University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House, at CFR, and the International Security Studies
Department at Yale. She previously served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary at
the U.S. Department of Energy and she has her undergraduate degree from Harvard and both her
master's degree and doctorate from the Department of Government here at Georgetown. The Department
of Government is co-sponsoring this event today and we hope that there are some Government folks
in the audience here. I know Dr. Lissner is a proud alumna of their PhD program.
Her research and writing focuses on U.S. national security strategy and how
that fits into the international order and she is here to talk about her most recent book which
she co-authored with Mira Rapp-Hooper. It's called "An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest
for 21st Century Order." She's also working on a manuscript that looks at the effects of
military interventions in American grand strategy and her scholarship has been published just about
any of the political science magazines that you care to look at, as well as Foreign Affairs,
Foreign Policy, Washington Quarterly, and others. Dr. Lissner, thank you for being
here and I will turn it over to you. Great well, thank you so much Jordan. It's really
a pleasure to be back at Georgetown. As you said I spent quite a bit of time in the Government
Department. I'm delighted now to be affiliated with the Center for Security Studies so I'm really
happy to be here and appreciate all of you taking the time during your lunch hour to talk about my
new book. Before I dive in, I just have to give my requisite disclaimer that I'm speaking only
here in my personal capacity, not on behalf of the Naval War College, Department
of Defense, or the Navy of course. So the book that I want to talk with all of you
about today is called "An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century
Order." And this book is really a call to action because it makes the case that the U.S. has to
reimagine its foreign policy for a post pandemic, and potentially we'll find out perhaps next week,
but post-Trump world before it is too late. And my co-author Mira Rapp-Hooper and I began this book
in the immediate wake of the 2016 election, when it was already abundantly clear to us that Donald
Trump himself was more an avatar than an architect of the massive domestic and international
changes that were reshaping U.S. foreign policy. Because the fact is that even if Hillary
Clinton had won the presidency in 2016, she too would have had to contend with adverse
power shifts rapid technological change and acute domestic political dysfunction.
So in crafting this book Mira and I set out to put back, push back, against
two pieces of conventional wisdom that were prevalent at that time and I think
continue to pervade the foreign policy discussion. The first was the idea that President
Trump himself was solely responsible for the collapse of American global power and
the so-called liberal international order. And second was the related hope that
the United States could somehow return to foreign policy business as usual once
Trump left office whether in 2021 or 2025. So by investigating the long-term domestic and
international shifts that predated Donald Trump and will outlast him, our research actually
anticipated the foreign policy emergency that Washington now so clearly faces. Because
the COVID crisis has tragically illustrated our central thesis, which is that an international
order that was built for the world of the 1940s is utterly ill-equipped to meet both the
challenges and the opportunities of the 2040s. So the United States needs to embrace a
new approach. Before I say a bit more about what that new approach would look like, let's
spend a moment focusing on those trends, those trends that predated Trump, predated COVID,
and will be with us even when both are gone. So to begin internationally even before
COVID, American primacy was waning. As West-East powershifts and technological
change fueled China's rise and undermined a U.S.-led international order that no longer
reflected the global distribution of power. China now fueled by several decades of rapid
growth has the largest or second largest economy in the world, depending on how you
measure it and its military power has expanded in parallel. And although China rose within the
U.S.-led order, it now seeks to revise that order, to better reflect its own power and preferences.
And we see this whether in the South China Sea or at the World Trade Organization, where
China is pushing for a change to global rules that protects its own domestic prerogatives.
Meanwhile the international order that in many ways emerged after World War II and then
transformed after the end of the Cold War, is becoming increasingly outmoded due to rapid
technological change. And this change is requiring new forms of international governance
that have thus far not been forthcoming. For example there are no meaningful global rules
for cyberspace like restrictions or guardrails that are agreed upon among states that would
prevent attacks on critical infrastructure like energy grids or electoral infrastructure as
we're seeing right now. There are no meaningful global rules for the internet like protections
for your data when you use an app owned by a foreign entity like TikTok. And there are also no
meaningful global rules for AI or automation like limits on how autonomous weapons or other types
of autonomous systems might be used in warfare. So these two trends actually intersect with each
other because as technology increasingly becomes a central theater of great power competition,
China is seeking to write rules that protect its domestic model of techno-authoritarianism and that
advances commercial interests globally, while the U.S. is in many ways struggling to respond. But in
an effort to craft a post-primacy, post-pandemic, and potentially post-Trump approach, the U.S.
faces some significant domestic challenges. And these are actually challenges that may prove more
determinative of America's future international position than anything that's happening out there
in the world. Because even before the pandemic, domestic divisions were causing the U.S. to
operate well below its own capacity. And there are two divisions in particular that are especially
important and that we highlight in the book. The first is partisan polarization or the
growing divide between Democrats and Republicans, which have increasingly sorted themselves into
two opposing blocks, whether at the elite level and the way that centrist legislators have mostly
disappeared from Congress, and we see many more party line votes on the Hill like the one we saw
of course with the Coney Barrett nomination and confirmation just yesterday. But it also
has to do with the way average Americans interact with each other, a phenomenon called
effective polarization has resulted in actually antagonism between Democrats and Republicans
that make the act of compromise itself less palatable. And of course media polarization has
resulted in distinct information ecosystems such that Democrats and Republicans are decreasingly
able to agree on a basic common set of facts. And this partisan polarization,
which is a long-term trend, has many pernicious consequences but
some are specific to foreign policy. A polarized America is less capable of
developing and executing long-term strategy. It is more volatile because foreign policy
tends to swing whenever the white house changes hands between a Democrat and Republican.
And it encourages political leaders to back irresponsible policies without fear of
recourse from their loyal political bases. Of course it also in many ways abets foreign
interference in our domestic electoral processes by making manifest to foreign adversaries
the fissures within the American polity, and hindering the United States ability to respond
to foreign election interference precisely because it is known to have benefited one candidate which
makes that party less apt to respond something else that we're seeing play out in the news today.
But that's not the only division that is hampering the United States and its foreign policy. The
other one has to do with the divide between Silicon Valley or the tech sector
and the federal government. Now, the U.S. government has under-invested in R&D and
basic research ever since the end of the Cold War, whereas at its peak in the 1970s the U.S. was
investing on the order of two percent of its GDP in R&D and basic science. Today that number is
well below one percent, something around point seven percent. And what that has meant is that
in the absence of federal funding and investment, American tech companies have been chasing market
incentives rather than the national interest. And that may mean that they are chasing market
share overseas. It may also mean that they are neglecting commercial technologies that
have important national security applications but aren't as lucrative as other
elements that they might focus on. At the same time, the U.S. government has
been under regulating those technologies and failing in many ways to adopt useful
commercial technologies for national purposes because the government itself has atrophied
its own technology knowledge and talent. And over the course of 2020 with the COVID pandemic,
we've seen that these domestic under-investments in these domestic divisions are even greater than
we knew, as the U.S. has struggled to get off the ground any kind of tech-enabled contact tracing
app that might have come out of Silicon Valley, and partisan polarization has infected, for
lack of a better word, even our public health response to COVID as the wearing of life-saving
masks is itself becoming has become politicized. So what this amounts to is a fairly consistent
picture. The United States is a country that is still mighty by many metrics. It retains either
the first or second largest GDP in the world, the only military capable of global power
projection, the dollar remains the global reserve currency, and the U.S. has unrivaled
centrality in global financial networks. We retain a tremendous innovation base,
immigrants from all over the world want to come to this country, and we have a tremendous
and unrivaled system of alliances. And yet, despite all of those advantages the United States
is performing tragically below its own capacity. And what these trends spell both at the
international and the domestic level is in many ways the demise of the liberal international order
that has prevailed in the post-Cold War period. And frankly the demise of the liberal
international order should not be very surprising to those of us who study
international relations, because international orders always change when power shifts and
for all the reasons that I just discussed, power has actually been shifting for some time.
So the United States to chart a new course needs to begin to really account for those changes.
Now just to be clear, what is international order? International order is the norms, the rules,
and the institutions that govern international politics. And of course precisely because these
orders always reflect great power preferences, the so-called liberal international order was
just one possible form of order, not the only one. The LIO was the one established by the United
States and victorious allies after World War II, although had an earlier intellectual origins in
Wilsonian internationalism. It was of course never fully liberal, fully international, or fully
ordered. The UN system itself was universal, but the advent of the Cold War and the descent
of the Iron Curtain created two opposing camps of order that were layered on top. The order itself
evolved over time with decolonization and it experienced crises like the Bretton Woods crisis
in the 1970s with the end of the gold standard. So it was really only with the collapse of the
Soviet Union that the liberal international order really surged to prominence as a term and began to
seem universal. The United States unparalleled in its power after the end of the Cold War, at the
dawn of the unipolar moment, for the first time it really seemed possible that the end of history
was upon us and that liberal markets and liberal political systems might spread inexorably to
all corners of the globe. But if it wasn't obvious before COVID, it's certainly obvious
now that American primacy is in its twilight. China is continuing its ascent. International
power is diffusing to a number of other middle powers as well. And what that means is that the
international order simply cannot endure as it was. So my book with Mira, "An Open World," turns
the question to what comes next? What do we do? And our book argues that the U.S. should shift
from this concept of liberal universalism to a different idea: the idea of openness as
the guiding principle of its grand strategy and approach to international order. We argue that
an openness strategy would allow the United States to secure its dearest interests and values even
though it has lost military and economic primacy. So what does openness entail? The core objective
of openness is to keep the world open to promote open and transparent interactions between
states and to promote those interactions within the context of international institutions
that are themselves also open and transparent. So what that means is first of all, all
states should be able to make free and independent political choices without
foreign interference in their domestic decision making processes and certainly without
outright domination by a more powerful nation. Second, international waterways, airspace, and
outer space must all remain open and accessible for commercial and military transit. Which means
that countries like China and Iran should not be able to close off transit through important areas
like the South China Sea or the Strait of Hormuz. And third, global cooperation and the
free exchange of goods services and ideas should proceed and be governed
through international institutions that are governed transparently and
modernized for 21st century challenges. So thinking about those sort of three core ideas
that guide an openness strategy, it becomes clear that there's really only one nation in the world,
only one major power competitor, that both has preferences for closure as opposed to openness and
the means to bring them about. And that country is China. Because China itself could dominate Asia,
whether through sort of outright domination like territorial annexation by military means. Or it
could dominate Asia through subtler 21st century means like the use of technologies like 5G that
might make it impossible for states in its region to make free decisions, might limit the flow of
information ideas, and might siphon international data for governmental use by the CCP. Now, even
as an openness strategy really zeros in on China as the chief antagonist to openness, an open
strategy does not imply that China or any other state can't have influence. In that indeed, in
many ways it recognizes that China's growing power will mean that China does have growing
influence but it seeks to forestall Chinese hegemony or Chinese dominance in whatever
form that may take over the coming decades. Openness also doesn't encompass all of America's
interests. It's a necessary precondition for the United States to achieve its objectives in
the world, but an openness strategy or the idea of an open world doesn't necessarily dictate
specific policy decisions on every possible issue. And it's also important to recognize
that an openness strategy does not exist without limits. It doesn't mean that the U.S.
has to throw open its borders to unfettered immigration or unfettered capital flows.
And indeed in some forms of emergency like the pandemic that we're living through right
now, an openness strategy is fully consistent with taking emergency measures, whether to
close off U.S. borders or take other forms of restrictions that might be necessary when
living through something like a global pandemic. So just to be especially clear, let me
just underscore the ways in which openness does depart from liberal universalism because of
course they are important in these distinctions. The first is the way in which an openness
strategy acknowledges the need to live alongside a powerful and authoritarian China
that is within the international order but is unfortunately unlikely to liberalize anytime
soon. So what that means is that the U.S. and China will be competing on many issues, while
cooperating as mutual interests may dictate. And this is a variegated picture. So neither the
universalism of the liberal international order nor the sort of Manichean binary of Cold War
ideological blocs really captures the likely dynamic that we will see between these
two great powers over the coming decades. Second an openness strategy recognizes that
the U.S. does not need to dominate the world or to engage in regime change, whether armed or
otherwise, to preserve its safety security and prosperity. But what it does need to do is rally
other countries behind a shared ordering vision. And third, in building diverse coalitions for
openness, we seek to include liberal as well as illiberal states. Understanding that states
preferences on matters of international order are not strictly co-extensive with their regime type.
To put it simply, in a post-primacy world the U.S. cannot keep the world open on its own and
it also can't be too picky about its partners. So that militates in favor of a more
expansive approach to coalition building in order to build coalitions for openness that
may not be the same coalitions on every issue but preserve a balance of power that tilts
in the favor of an open world going forward. So in practice, an openness strategy would
entail three policy pillars. The first is order modernization. With the liberal international
order in its rear view mirror, an openness strategy would set out to rebuild a new one for
the 21st century. That strategy would seek to modernize some existing international institutions
like the UN Security Council or the WTO, in collaboration with allies and partners. But
it must also work to develop new regimes in un- or under-governed areas in which the United
States has a clear interest in setting open norms and rules. That includes climate, emerging
tech, cyber, internet governance, and even trade. But it's also important to recognize that in
a system that does include authoritarian great powers, the act of order building itself will be
competitive and a future order will not be either universally open or universally ordered.
The second policy pillar of an openness strategy is for the United States to make
a new set of national security choices. The fact is that the American foreign
policy apparatus is under-equipped for the international environment it will confront in
the future. As great power competition with China will span economic, technological,
ideological, and military domains, while the perils of borderless challenges like
climate change and pandemics are becoming ever more urgent. So what it really means to
make a new set of national security choices is to rebalance away from the military and the
Department of Defense as the leading instrument of American foreign policy, and towards diplomacy and
development. It's also going to mean that the U.S. needs to pursue new forms of coordination within
the government with the U.S. private sector, new forms of public-private partnerships. And
also with partner nations potentially in the construction of public-private partnerships
that span many different countries, like for example a 5G or an AI consortium
that might pool efforts across a number of different nations to develop cutting-edge
technology and provide alternatives to China. And the third pillar by no means the least
important one in many ways the most important one, is domestic renewal. And this of course begins
with renewing u.s competitiveness and something that is no small task amidst a public health
crisis. But also includes investments in education, infrastructure, and so on. But the
fact is that it really can't end there. Because what the United States needs to do is to work to
bring its governmental capacity and the power and influence it brings to the international stage
in line with its power, with its capabilities. And that means bridging the divide between the
tech sector and the U.S. government through game changing investments in R&D and basic science. It
means breaking down barriers to the flow of talent between the public and the private sector. And it
means reforming the way the U.S. government both regulates and procures from technology companies
so that it can work better with cutting-edge agile startups while also dealing with larger technology
companies and regulating them appropriately. And finally, an openness strategy really rests
upon the enhancement of domestic resilience. Because the fact is that an open world
does have some negative externalities. If the U.S. retained closed borders didn't
interact with any other countries, it would be less vulnerable to threats like pandemics.
But the fact is that a closed world would be a more dangerous one for the United States. So we
need to take steps to withstand those negative externalities that do come with participating
in an open world, whether that means resilience in U.S. supply chains or enhancing the domestic
stockpiles of critical medical supplies so that we aren't caught flat-footed in the ways that
we were over the course of this COVID pandemic. So before we turn open to Q&A and I look forward
to the discussion with this group i just want to leave you with a final point, which is that the
opportunity the United States faces today will not come again. We are today at the most consequential
geopolitical crossroads at least since the end of the Cold War and maybe since the end of World
War II. And what that means is that the U.S. has a narrowing window of opportunity to revamp its
foreign policy to abandon its post-Cold War hubris in favor of a new strategy that is
both disciplined and globally engaged. Because the fact is that America remains
extraordinarily powerful. And with appropriate political will, it can turn this moment of
domestic and global destruction into a moment of creation. But if it fails to do so, if the United
States fails to seize upon this opportunity, then the results will be dire. Authoritarian
rivals like China will consolidate their power, which will result in a world that is more hostile
to U.S. interests and values. And as we've seen so tragically over the course of this year already,
without U.S. leadership on global challenges, the pandemic that we're living through
today may itself prove a mild harbinger of much worse disorder to come. So with that,
I will conclude my remarks and very much look forward to the conversation with this group
and to your comments and questions. Thank you. Thank you so much Dr. Lissner. So folks, I
put this in the chat but please do you know feel free to either drop your questions in
the chat and I will ask them or you can use the raise hand function and I'll give you the,
I'll call on you and you can ask them out loud But as we give folks a minute or so to kind
of form their questions, I did want to ask a, I'll start things off with a question
for you. Sorry just one moment. I figure I will come on
camera while I ask questions. So you talked a lot, like you made a very
strong case for this kind of openness policy, but I wonder if I can ask you to do a little
bit of, maybe this is prognosticating a bit, but how realistic do you think it is, and
to what extent do you think either of the next administrations whether that's a second Trump
term or a Biden administration, how likely do you think it is that either of those administrations
would move toward this kind of openness strategy? Absolutely. Well a week before the election,
Jordan that is certainly the question I think that would be on many people's minds. And I
think the fact is that this strategy is much easier to imagine and abide in administration
than it is in a second Trump term. But if Donald Trump's team is serious about competing with
China, they should consider it. So let me explain a bit about what I mean there. Now beginning
with Donald Trump, I mean it's pretty clear that some of the president's personal proclivities
are in stark contrast to the core tenets of an openness strategy. Whereas the president has
repeatedly expressed antipathy towards alliances, the strategy sees allies as being really critical
and the need to modernize our alliances as being critical to the success in achieving an open
world. Where the president has so preferred authoritarian partners to democracies, we very
much see democratic partners as being a focal point for cooperation, although not the only
counterparties for cooperation. And of course President Trump has frequently expressed hostility
to international trade, whereas open trade and modernize trade with high standards is an
important part of this strategy. That being said, the Trump administration whether in its National
Security Strategy or its National Defense Strategy, has been very clear that they see China
as a great power competitor and in many ways you know more more dangerous than Russia in terms
of the threat that it poses to American national interests. And if the Trump administration is
serious about competing with China it needs to think about the ways in which it can rally other
states, allies, and partners to work alongside the United States in that effort. Because over the
next decade the geopolitical math is simply not in the United States' favor. We cannot do this
on our own. Whereas combined with our allies, we have something on the order of 27 times
China's GDP. So that's a really strong case for building a coalition and articulating an
affirmative vision of the type of international order the United States does seek. Now what
certainly isn't going to work is withdrawing from international institutions and effectively
seeding the field to China/ So this is a place where an openness strategy would recommend
a very different approach than the one that we've seen in a first Trump term. Really engaging
more thoroughly and you know whether it's the WHO or certain UN bodies, to try to modernize them
make them more effective, make them better, make them work according to our interests and
values so that China does not do the same. Now in Biden administration it's certainly easier
to see this type of openness strategy taking hold.But we do need to be clear-eyed about the
immediate and urgent crises that are going to be landing on a President Biden's desk on his first
day in the Oval Office. We as a country are living through a health crisis, an economic crisis,
a racial justice crisis, a climate crisis, and it's very likely that we're sort of on the brink
of some kind of democratic integrity crisis as well coming alongside the election. And those are
all going to demand really immediate attention. So it's going to be much easier for a
Biden administration to focus on those crises du jour rather than thinking about
long-term strategy and building towards it. But nevertheless I think that there is an
opportunity for a Biden administration to early on articulate the core principles of an
openness strategy as being the guiding vision, not only for international rebuilding
post-COVID, but also for domestic reconstruction. A Biden administration could work to embed
the priorities and values of openness within its early crisis management steps to create a
foundation for engaging in the type of order modernization and sort of longer term efforts that
might become more feasible at a time when a Biden administration would have more bandwidth to focus
on these types of strategic matters having, you know brought COVID more or less under control at
home, dealt with the economic fallout, and so on. Thank you so much for that
response and as you know either administration kind of moves ahead, I know
the United States is in a you know in a relatively unique situation in the world but
are there nations whose strategy toward this the U.S. should be emulating over the
you know coming years and decades? That's such an interesting question and I think,
what I like about it is it illustrates the type of humility that in many ways will be required of the
United States to lead in a world in which we are no longer the world's uncontested superpower and
no longer have the ability to unilaterally dictate global outcomes to the extent that we ever did.
And I think there you know you could really think about the idea that there is a global battle that
is underway between forces of openness and forces of closure. And on the one hand you have certain
of America's allies, I think especially of Japan and Germany, who have been fighting really
hard to keep the international system open at a time when the United States has retreated
from leadership of that system. So in many ways they do serve as sort of models, or at least they
were bulwarks, of an open system at a time when the United States has been looking elsewhere. So
they in many ways are the countries to emulate and also the partners to join with whether as a
matter of modernizing the World Trade Organization so that it covers digital trade, digital services;
so that it is more responsive to the concerns raised by Chinese intellectual property theft, and
illegal subsidies, and state-owned enterprises. Whether it's a matter of developing alternatives
to China's BRI, development alternatives with both Japan and Germany have been involved
with. Whether it's modernizing and you know changing the composition of the UN Security
Council, a priority for both Japan and Germany that is really required so that that body
which was constituted at least in its permanent membership with you know, the victors of World
War II better reflects current power realities. But the fact is that our allies like Germany
and Japan are really struggling to uphold openness at a time when the U.S. hasn't been a
champion always for openness over the past several years. And also at a time when China and Russia
are increasingly cooperating with each other for closure. So unless the United States
really steps up as a force for openness and as a coalition builder for openness, it's
going to be very hard even for those countries who would ardently support these principles
to further them on their own. So I would say those are both the models and the partners that we
should be looking to over the next several years. Do you think that there is a point of no return
here? Is there, you know I know that this is a long-term process and a long-term strategy, you
know say that the next administration doesn't really make this a priority or even the
next two, is this something that future administration should be coming back to time and
time again, or is there a point at which it's going to be difficult to come back from this
closed off strategy that we've been pursuing? The timing here is really important. And I
think the fact is that the U.S. does have a small and narrowing window of opportunity
to put forth the principles and to really embrace the strategy of an open world before it is
too late. And the reason for that i would say is twofold. In the first instance, we are coming out
of this massive global and domestic crisis which has made many of the basic terms of both domestic
and international governance newly malleable. And so the decisions that the United States takes and
the world that emerges from COVID, in many ways, will set the tone for many decades to come. And
the United States wants to be leading in that effort. And it wants to be crafting a post-COVID
world, a post-COVID global economic recovery that reflects our interests and our values in many
ways the values of openness. That opportunity will simply not come again. The other reason why the
U.S. is in a unique position today is the fact is that we do remain extraordinarily powerful.
We have all the advantages that I talked about before whether that's in terms of you know massive
economy. still the world's most powerful military, still unrivaled centrality in the global financial
system. And the U.S. needs to make good on these advantages to try to lock them in and encode them
in a modernized international order before it is too late. Because the fact is that over time,
China is going to continue to rise, the U.S. will likely continue to decline relative terms and in
many, and also many of our sort of historic allies are experiencing especially in Europe and
also in Asia fairly sluggish growth rates. So the time is now to take advantage of the
malleability of the international system in the wake of COVID and also to really capitalize
on the advantages that the United States still does have and to show that we are really willing
to lead once again, so that countries don't begin to hedge against the possibility of American
retreat and make different choices that will make it much harder to keep the world open and
build coalitions for openness in the future. Thank you and I have a question in the chat
here from one of the our audience members who's wondering if you could explain your comments a
little more about working with illiberal partners? They say obviously the argument for building
the largest and strongest coalition possible is sound but could this strategy potentially
undermine this concept of global openness? Where in your mind should the
U.S. and its allies draw the line? It's a great question. So I think you
know, to begin, countries that embrace openness domestically via democratic political
systems, open societies, free speech, economic interdependence are of course the United States'
natural partners in pursuing an openness strategy. Because the fact is that open societies stand
to benefit the most from participating in an open world that fosters the exchange of people,
information, ideas, and trade in a cooperative international system. And of course it goes
without saying that the United States itself needs to remain one of these open societies that is a
leader and a democracy that stands for openness. But that has to come alongside a recognition that
there are many countries like China and Russia that will be closed societies until their people
choose otherwise. And that Beijing and Moscow prefer to change some if not all international
rules and norms to make them friendlier to autocracies. So we need to really focus
on how to guarantee international openness in spite of that fact. And what that means is
that the United States does need to build diverse coalitions in favor of openness understanding that
democracies aren't always going to align with the United States preferences for openness and that
sometimes the liberal states will align the United States preferences for openness. So here we can
begin by thinking about a country like India, which is itself a major rising power and a
democracy. And it aligns in many ways with the United States vision for a free and open
Indo-Pacific and indeed we've seen over the past day or so U.S.-India cooperation towards
that end is actually growing much closer. But at the same time India is illiberalizing
domestically. It has engaged in prolonged internet shutdowns in Kashmir for example, in a way
that actually aligns its preferences for global technology governance and order more with the sort
of Chinese and Russian vision of cyber sovereignty and less for the sort of open information systems
that the United States has historically stood for. So even other democracies aren't always going
to be on the side of openness. But we should be trying to recruit them to the extent that we can.
Now you can also think about illiberal states, which may not be on the side of openness or human
rights on many important issues. Here you could think about a Vietnam for example. But that does
share the United States interest in keeping the South China Sea open. So what this amounts to I
think is a need to sort of decompose the idea of international order. Recognizing that it's going
to vary regionally, it's going to vary by domain, and that the United States will be able to find
different partners in different areas. And so it's going to have to engage in an agile multi-polar
diplomacy to try to figure out which countries do align with the United States' preferences for
openness, in what areas trying to bring them on board as we seek to modernize and build new forms
of order. And we can't simply default to regime type in order to achieve this. Because I'll just
conclude by saying the fact is that many of these countries whether democracies or illiberal
states or mixed regimes don't really want to choose between the United States and China and we
shouldn't force them to do so. And so what that means is creating opportunities for cooperation
with a liberal states whether that means U.S.-China cooperation on existential challenges
like climate change or narrow or cooperation like military cooperation with states like Vietnam
to keep the international waterways open. And just as a follow-up to that, the
same person added on, if you could talk a little bit about how Turkey and NATO fit
into that same kind of question as well? Absolutely I mean this is really tricky
because it's important to recognize that um all of our treaty allies aren't necessarily
good partners and Turkey has been a really challenging manifestation of this problem. So
one argument that the book makes and that is part of an openness strategy is the idea that the
United States, even as it sort of retreats from its recent posture of democracy promotion, trying
to create democracy where it doesn't exist today, should still be engaging in robust democracy
support; trying to prop up democracy where it does exist and using the levers that we do have in
order to enforce that. And so Turkey is a really good example where there has been substantial
liberal backsliding and under Erdogan over the past, over the past period. And the United States
does have levers that it can pull through NATO as a means to exert more pressure on Turkey to
uphold the values of democracy and openness, to protect human rights and so on. So the United
States does need to be more assertive and taking advantage of the leverage that it does have
through its alliances to impose certain types of penalties on those allies that are not abiding
by our common values as embedded in organizations like NATO. But certainly certainly no easy
answers there but it is but it is an important an important element to hold these countries like
Turkey up to the agreements on human rights and otherwise that they have already agreed to and
to impose costs to the extent that they don't. Thank you and I appreciate you
giving us the approaching the questions that don't have easy answers in all of
this. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit, you know we've talked about how various
allies, different countries could fit into all of this and how they will fit into all of
this. But can you talk a little bit about how private entities fit in? You know we have,
especially right now with the election coming up, a lot of talk about how technology companies play
a role in public life. Where do corporations, non-profits, all of these other non-governmental
entities fit into this whole strategy? They're very important. Because one of the core
arguments of the book is that state-society relations or the United, or any country's ability
to leverage its non-governmental forms of power for national interest is going to be really
determinative of geopolitical competition in the 21st century. So to be more specific what
that means is the United States ability to leverage its private sector and especially the
innovation that comes out of its private sector is going to be really important in competing with the
China that has a fundamentally different model of innovation than we do. We've seen in China that
has launched this made in 2025 strategy with massive centrally directed investments in R&D and
basic science. China has you know, state champions and very close relationships between even its
nominally private tech companies and its federal government. There are CCP cells and all the major
Chinese tech companies. And China has this sort of civil-military fusion framework where the barriers
between sort of civilian and military applications are often fairly blurry. So this is a formidable
challenge. But the United States should not set out to replicate China's way of doing
this, even as we do want to compete with it. So what that means is really moving towards
a new approach to public-private partnership in the United States to make sure that our
private energies and private capital and private innovation is being directed towards the sort of
geopolitically necessary national ends at the same time as we are protecting the sort of innovation
and vitality that does come from competition and free markets. So I think that will
take a number of different dimensions. One of course as I mentioned before is increasing
the U.S. government's investment in research and development and basic science. This is something
that we did at very high levels during the Cold War. And in many ways it was U.S. governmental
investments in things like the internet and semiconductors which originally had more military
applications that have become the foundation for the United States technological advantage, which
we're still coasting on in many ways today. So we really need to reinvest in that innovation
ecosystem. That means that sort of whatever the technologies are of the future, and we don't
know what they are yet, the United States remains a leader in innovating and developing them.
But it also means that we need to recognize that the United States is not going to itself be a
leader in all geopolitically salient technologies. So that's where these sort of international
public-private partnerships might come in. You think for example about AI or 5G where a lot
of relevant talent and expertise actually exist outside of the United States. In the case of
5G, Nokia and Ericsson in Sweden and Finland are themselves the leaders in manufacturing 5G
hardware and therefore the primary competitors with Huawei. So what the United States can do
is build these new public-private coalitions. You know for example using tools of development
financing in order to provide alternatives. Because the fact is that we are not going to
beat China in every competition. We are not going to exclude China from every market, there
are still going to be many countries that choose to use Chinese technology, Huawei to build their
5G networks for example. But the United States can work with its allies and partners to provide
alternatives. To make sure that there are options that are cost effective so that countries don't
end up with Chinese technology simply by default. So thinking creatively about the various ways
in which we can both bridge the gap domestically between the public and the private sectors, make
it easier for people to go back and forth, realign incentives so that we're all moving in the same
direction is going to be a critical part of it and also developing the tools to make sure that both
the U.S. companies and U.S. companies in concert with other foreign companies that are like-minded
can work together in strategically directed ways to provide a diverse marketplace that enables
more competition and economic sense between sort of Chinese commercial alternatives and more
sort of U.S. based commercial alternatives. And there's something of
a follow-up question here. Someone as I asked that last question put in the
chat something very similar. But asked about you know the public-private partnerships and bringing
about domestic renewal and how that all fits in. How, they ask, how would this look different
from a military-industrial complex? I suppose it depends what your definition
of a military industrial complex might be. But certainly what this would
look like is closer cooperation between the military and other national security agencies
and the private sector. Because the fact is that many cutting-edge innovations are happening
in the commercial technology space and the U.S. government and the Defense Department in
particular is at a disadvantage because it has fared quite poorly in adopting those technologies.
And those span those really run the gamut from you know better IT infrastructure that just makes
the work of DoD more efficient. It has to do with managing health care records. It has to do with
sort of optimizing supply chains or even maybe deployment patterns. Many sort of logistical tasks
that might be aided for example through big data and AI. But it also might take on other dimensions
for example in the intelligence community. There has now been a proliferation of
commercial space activity and especially private and commercial satellites which can
provide an open source flow of intelligence that the United States could better integrate in its
own collection efforts and also more easily share with other countries with whom it is difficult to
share classified information, but if we actually have for example satellite images that are coming
from unclassified sources it becomes much easier to circulate and thereby to sort of address a
number of subtle challenges, mostly of the gray zone variety. So certainly there are elements of
the military industrial complex as it's called or military-industrial-congressional complex as
Eisenhower called it that entail waste, fraud, and abuse and by no means is this an endorsement
of that. But insofar as we're talking about closer cooperation between, especially sort
of agile startups, and the U.S. government that certainly is the type of the type of
relationship we should be working towards. Thank you and thank you for gainly jumping
in on that even though we didn't necessarily have a definition of which kind of complex we're
talking about. We have you know just a few minutes left until one o'clock and nothing else in the
chat right now so I, this is perhaps a bit of a curious question, but is there a question you
particularly love answering about that this topic? Or one that you wish people would ask you?
And if so what is that and what's your answer? Sure. So I guess I would say for this particular
SSP audience that we ought to think about what power will entail in the 21st century and
whom will be empowered. Because we have the sort of traditional definition of power as being
sort of primarily economic in nature because we think of military and economic power as
being essentially fungible. But going forward, I expect that we will see certain
areas, especially in the tech space, where technological power will not be strictly
correlated with the size of a country's GDP. There are a lot of countries that are advanced
democracies that have high-tech economies that innovate in important areas whether that's
AI or quantum computing or other areas that are themselves not large economies. And what
that will do over the coming decades I think is tax the way that we traditionally think of power
and force us to really conceive of it in a new and more creative way. So military power will remain
important but there will be these other sources of power that in many ways may be more usable
and more salient going forward. And what that means in turn is that these middle powers that are
able to sort of generate these new forms of power, the alignments that they choose will be
highly determinative in terms of the future of international order. Because they are going
to be sort of engines of innovation, because their economic choices will matter considerably
in building you know different trade alignments. The United States really has to work hard to court
middle powers and try to bring them on side along the side of openness with us. So I guess that
is just sort of a call to expand our collective apertures and we're thinking about how to conceive
of and measure power in the decades to come to really sort of look beyond the way that we've
traditionally thought about military competition and expand to think about what it
means to be engaging concurrently in a military, economic, technological,
and maybe also ideological competition. And what the interdependencies of those
different elements of power might be, and also what the exercise of non-military forms
of power for coercive means actually looks like in practice, and how we might go about doing that.
So as you all go along with your own research and learning efforts, I would say that's that's an
important question to keep in mind for the future. Thank you so much, that feels like a good
place to wrap things up. So thank you so much Dr. Lissner for joining us today, for
answering our questions, for talking with us. Again the book is called "An Open World." It is
available now if anybody wants to seek it out. And thank you to everyone in the audience who
joined us today and stayed on for the full hour. Thanks, thanks a lot for having me Jordan and all
of you for taking the time, really appreciate it. Thank you.
