Destined for war with China? Graham Allison and Gen. David Petraeus (Ret)

it's wonderful to be back with you all thanks for the warm welcome and a true privilege to be joined at New York's greatest intellectual critical mass by one of my longtime intellectual heroes my boss at Harvard actually where he is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and I've been privileged to be a senior fellow for the last four plus years and also a great friend professor Graham Allison someone many here will recall from his classic work on the Cuban Missile Crisis the essence of decision which I recall reading and graduate school at Princeton I don't know how many printings it was ultimately in but it certainly made an extraordinary name and probably paid for more than a few of your fishing trips over the years he Tom mentioned the works on nuclear weapons and on terrorism the wonderful work on Lee Kuan Yew and now this and I congratulate you on a very significant and important new book destined for war there's no question mark after it although I guess there is a question mark about Ken America and China escape through Sydney's trap it's truly a very very timely and very significant work and the most important relationship in the world and that is the one between the United States the established power as he describes in his taxonomy of such situations in China the rising power and a brilliant discussion of the factors and the scenarios that might actually lead to war between our two countries it's also an extraordinary example of applied history something that Graham has been famous for along with Ernie May and a number of others of his colleagues at Harvard over the years and something they've developed very impressively and now the reviews are in and the blurbs and I read for example Henry Kissinger no small scholar on China who writes that the acidities trap identifies a cardinal challenge to world order the impact of a rising power on a ruling power I read the book with great interest he writes I can only hope that the us-china relationship becomes the fifth case to resolve itself peacefully rather than the 13th to result in war Walter Isaacson has been on this stage many times writes a hugely respected theorists and practitioners in the field of contemporary national security Graham Allison is also a master of applied history and you can bet that China's leaders will read Allison's warnings about Thucydides trap I only wish I could be sure about America's leaders but every informed citizen should buy a copy actually that was by Neil Ferguson one of your colleagues up there Walter wrote can the u.s. avoid confrontation with China that is the geopolitical question of our age and the former director of the CIA and former commander of US Central Command and the surge writes one of the most insightful and thought-provoking books I have ever read on the most important relationship in the world the US and China if Graham Allison is right and I think he is China and the US must heed the lessons in this superb study in order to avoid a war in which neither side would win so I congratulate you on all of that and let me just start by asking if I could you know what prompted you to examine this subject and where did the phrase lucidity strap come from well thank you very much David and thanks for the opportunity to be here at the 92nd Street Y for I don't know the third or fourth time but it's a great opportunity and to share the stage with David and thanks to come and Lawrence Belfer for helping arrange things so this book has been five years in the making though the ideas is it have been percolating for a long time and I won't go too long about it but when I was a freshman in college I am listen at Harvard was it not know what Davidson College David North Carroll Harvard was your graduate degree was it well I transfer to Davidson after two years at Harvard it's a long story is aside but any case I go to my class to learn ancient Greek and the professor says well you know we got to spend most of the year learning script and vocabulary and grammar but if you really study hard by the second year you'll be able to read through CDs and professor Laban said when he said to Sidda T's it was a combination of reverence and exuberance that just you know made a fisherman think oh my goodness and he thought classical Greece was his people of civilization they had been invented everything and you could only really appreciate it if you could read it in the original and so in the end of the first year of studying week we could read Xenophon's analysis but in the second year we began to read facilities and I must say it was a was route okay absolutely I heard who inspire me you heard that inspiring I heard it here first basically if you take what happened these these queex what did they invent you know that has Lyman said everything so we're the drama come from Sophocles Aristophanes Euripides the Greeks in Athens where does history come from lucidity Z the father of history have our philosophy well Plato Aristotle Socrates well a naval professional in babies Athens were the first group to have a professional Navy architecture look at the Parthenon you couldn't find a finer building in the world today democracy Pericles so here's the scholastic creation and as facilities explains in his great book the Peloponnesian War two great city-states become competitive and by the end they've destroyed each other and the Persians are able to come back to become the dominant fortunately happens in Sparta that's Athens and Sparta so basically through cities in a great book and actually I'm enthusiastic about this book tonight but I would do more to tell the truth I'm even more enthusiastic you can for free go download on your Kindle the Peloponnesian War it's so just you can go download read only the first book the hundred pages this is a knockout it's a fantastic book every page you'll learn something extraordinarily interesting but the central idea in it that lucidity said was a famous line it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made the war inevitable between Athens and Sparta so the word is inevitable inevitable so he said inevitable I then thought about this this is a pattern as he said that you're going to see looking forward and notice you're trying to understand what's happening in relations between US and China the best lens for looking beneath the noise and news of the day about the South China Sea or the launch of a missile in North Korea or whatever the best way to look beneath the surface to the sub structural axis is this insight from Thucydides we have today a rising power threatening to displace a ruling power in which you can the dynamics are precisely the dynamics lucidity describes between Athens and Sparta and one this is a pattern we've seen over and over so I then call this lucidity strap and the idea seemed like a pretty snappy way to remind us of a very serious deep insight which did I try to develop in the book and now we actually have some examples of people using the Thucydides trap term do we not let's see if we can make this work now help us up there there's the city's you've got that there's this big line okay we'll come back to that no first I want to comment about this trap fun difficult because I even don't know how to pronounce his name you know the Sicilian trap that people talk about the CSeries traps the insanity strap the Thucydides trap the facility's trap cassetti's trap acidities trap in China he's probably the only one here at this table who can hear the words through Citadis trap and not have to go to Wikipedia of course secretary Cohen is insulted every member of this committee by suggesting that we don't readily understand we're going to have to manage that competition between us in China there's another piece of wisdom from antiquity that says fear honor and interest always seem to be the root causes of why a nation chooses to go to hostilities so the big idea here an established power arise in power and you've looked at all these cases you go back some five or more sin 5 hundred years shut up and what is the record show so I have I did over the past five years to search for the last 500 years I found 16 cases in 12 of the cases the outcome was a war okay in four of the cases the outcome was not warned so I say in the book and actually I went back with the tutor to help me read the original lucidity that when Thucydides said inevitable the word you picked up would he really was trying to be provocative that was hyperbole exaggeration for the purpose of emphasis he meant very likely but to put it in a striking fashion not 100% inevitable that's the way to bed it so I say in the book business as usual will likely produce history as usual but we have four cases in which people are verted work so we can learn not only from the failures of others but also from the successes if we're trying in this case to escape utility strap so which of those cases that resulted in war is most like the situation today well I would say the nightmare that we should all study and you cannot study too often is what was happening in the world a hundred years ago now right now nothing so again we're still in the centennial of World War one oh it's it remains a story that's just hard to believe I have a good chapter in the book on the road to 1914 how in the world could the assassination of an Archduke in Sarajevo by a Serbian terrorists provide the spark that produced a fire that at the end of which was a configuration so devastating that historians were required to and to create a whole new category world war that's what's called world war one okay a whole new idea if the end of this war the beginning of the war nobody wanted to work at the end of the war every one of the principal actors had lost what he cared about most so the austro-hungarian Emperor instead his empire he's trying to hold together the empires dissolved he's gone the Russian Tsar is backing his buddies in Serbia his whole regime has been overthrown by the Bolsheviks he's gone the Kaiser is supporting his ally in Vienna he's gone France is supporting its relationship with them with the Russians it's been bled of its youth for a whole generation never recovered as a society and Britain which had been a great creditor nation has turned into a debtor in criminal decline in Russia revulsion and you lose there altogether so you look and you say if given a chance for a do-over nobody would have made the choices that he made but they made so what do cities reminds us is that where you've got this serious deep structural stress the rising power thinking I need to be bigger stronger more assertive my interests deserve more attention I can deserve what I'm sayin's way and the ruling power thinking things were great until you became so pushy is an upstart you should be comfortable in your place how did you ever have an opportunity to grow up and be so strong so this phenomenon actually which you can see in relations in many other realms for example as Google and Apple make and Microsoft and comfortable where Zuber makes the taxi industry uncomfortable or even you can see in Animal Kingdom's when in the in the gorilla so when you have alpha gorilla is challenged by a wannabe you can watch the you know what as I named it so the lender those conditions third-party actions like the assassination of archduke can lead to god-knows-what that nobody wants so I look at the current situation and I say could I imagine events in North Korean Pinet in North Korea the Korean Peninsula today being be an analogue of the match that was struck when that Serbian terrorists killed the Archduke absolutely absolutely indeed it's even easier to imagine the path that gets to a war between the US and China that nobody in the US was nobody in China was that as you say in your quote would be crazy but after the fact everybody would say was this bum okay but which nonetheless could conceivably happen you've actually said that the North Korea crisis or situation is like the Cuban Missile Crisis in slow-motion now you wrote about the Cuban Missile Crisis the essence of decision again mandatory reading for every international relations student at the graduate and undergraduate level what do you mean by that how well they get it on the Korean Peninsula today we see two parties moving inexorably towards a collision in which they will each have a choice between colliding and swerving from the path that they're currently on on the one hand North Korea as you know very well David but most people can hardly believe but North Korea has been just taking one step after another poor miserable impoverished isolated country that it is it's nonetheless been putting one foot after the other to the point that it now has nuclear weapons yes North Korea has nuclear warheads yes north Korea has missiles that can deliver these warheads against South Korea yes North Korea and missiles that can deliver these warheads against Japan like Tokyo yes and against u.s. spaces yes and it's on the road to and will shortly like in the year ahead not months but year tests ICBMs Internet intercontinental ballistic missiles that will allow it to strike San Francisco or Los Angeles with nuclear warheads so that's on the one hand on the other hand we have president Trump from the very first instant that he heard about this issue which was in his briefing from President Obama when he was president elect he went out and he immediately tweeted not going to happen that's how you establish policy now that you do your tweet okay but he expressed his view not going to happen and every day thereafter he said I'm telling you one thing a hundred percent and for sure while Donald Trump is president of the USA Kim jong-il is not going to acquire the ability to strike the American homeland with nuclear weapons that's what he told Xi Jinping at Mary Lago that's what he says every day when given an opportunity and actually not unreasonable I mean I'm not looking at young gun the guy is just a little bit impulsive usually if you said how do we feel about them how would we feel about Kim children having the ability to strike the u.s. we yeah we were it's terrifying here he might he might have a bad day it may just he might be erratic he might whatever so is it a good idea doesn't Trump's idea that this should not be allowed to happen this is a guy after all who designs the nerve agent killing of his half-brother in a public Airport right this is a guy who's who took the ocol yeah I was uncle is oh cool it'll may was suspicious up put him up against the wall and took a rocket launcher and blew him out of the blue amount of the scene that's relevant public so this is not a kind of guy you would like to have with the capability to strike San Francisco or Los Angeles so President trumpet said no I'm telling it it's not going to happen and he said this you ain't paying at mary logon said look you can solve this problem but if you won't solve this problem I can solve this problem I will solve this problem but you're not going to like it okay and he even took situate the point after the opening dinner while dessert is served he said excuse me I have to go back an announcement and announced that we were striking Syria with 50 Christmas it's just a kind of underlying the point can we do this we can so if President Trump says to secretary mattis strike North Korea to prevent it conducting tests that will allow it to have a capability to attack the American homeland we can do it for sure we can destroy the launching pads so they can't be any missile tests but that question is what's going to happen it mixed with the next move and as you know having looked at this problem multiple times the general consensus in the American intelligence community is that if we strike North Korea even a limited strike Kim jong-un is likely to strike back with artillery against Seoul and maybe kill a million people in the first 22 24 48 hours so now in the capital of South Korea a million people would have been killed and now over to us to South Korea and the US what do we do so I think the plan says and I believe we would try to destroy all the additional missiles and artillery that could kill another 10 million people in South Korea so we'll do a pretty substantial airstrike against most of North Korea well yeah that's called the beginning of the second Korean War most people remember what happened in the first Korean War so I I can work walk my way down this in the same way so what's the similarity with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy found the Soviet Union Khrushchev placing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba and said I'm this not gonna not going to happen I'm not going to allow these missiles to become operational so they can strike the American homeland he then engaged in a confrontation with Khrushchev which historians agree was the most dangerous moment in recorded history in which in the middle of it his brother asked him well how do you think this is going to turn out and he says well I don't know okay I don't know and he says what do you think the chances into the war even a nuclear war he says somewhere between one and three and even and Bobby says to my god you know what what are we doing are we we could have we could end up killing a hundred million people so as they began to realize the situation they became extremely invented and that's the way they ultimately escaped from this but after ratcheting up deliberately after ratcheting up you all the way up to DEFCON ducking to you and just about to and actually he almost had guys in the plane we did and I had people in planes ready to go with nuclear weapons even and this is before we had any luck so again see you around so this was an extremely dangerous situation but if if you get so here is kim jongwan then his own accord going to stop testing missiles no is Donald Trump going to give up on the proposition that Kim jong-un should not be able to attack the American homeland I don't think so so if you want to see actually I mean this is if this sounds too fanciful but look at Jim mattis the Secretary of Defense and Face the Nation last Sunday where he was steak or quizzing him about North Korea and he said this is not a hypothetical threat this is a threat right now today that I'm trying to address right now today so there's no no easy answer to this one but I would say over the months ahead we're likely to see as we did in a very short period of time in the Cuban Missile Crisis these two trains just about coming to a point of collision and we need a wish and hope that somebody someway somehow tries to find some escape well we should go a little further down that track in a moment but first let's come back to the cases and which of the cases that did not result in war is the most instructive to us and necessary thank you so that's a good that's a good question so there are four cases of no war you could look at the book and see them but there are two cases that are weakly hopped that up by two again our of moderate maybe we can okay there we go oops no that's actually this is interesting this is the Chinese building a bridge now we contrast this with the bridge that connects Harvard proper with our business school which has been under construction for at Harvard if any of you been there recently there's a bridge called the Anderson bridge that connects the Business School in the Kennedy School it was even discussed when I was beamed about that's rehabilitation the construction project started in beginning of 2012 so they take two years that's now 2017 they've given up proposing what date it might be concluded it's already three times over budget this bridge this onion bridge in Beijing some of you been across it's only twice as big as the Anderson bridge at Harvard this bridge was that's paving overnight by the way this is this bridges was reconstructed in 43 hours and you can go to youtube and put in Chinese bridge sun-young bridge you can see this this is just a clip from the YouTube video this is only slightly sped up but basically it's slightly unfair because they work at night you know in there otherwise forty three hours you can see the start to stop and you can drive across this bridge and it works very well but that was I just like if I continue stuck in my traffic jam now in New York I know all the construction goes up very quickly and so it's never what's that subway line that's been under construction I think this Paul Volcker told me the second Avenue construction project had been under a hundred years I don't know if you could have blink of an eye here in the Big Apple so these are the cases and there's four four cases of nowhere so the Paris first is when Spain rises to challenge Portugal which at the end of the 15th century was the dominant naval power uh-huh and secondly we have the rise of the u.s. first arrival and into eclipse Britain at the beginning of the 20th century then we have the surge of the Soviet Union against the US which was met by a cold war strategy and that's the one I can't get to the most interesting and instructive for the current the current situation but each of these have great lessons and finally the last case is a little bit of a stretch case what is the emergence of Germany as the dominant power in Europe in the post Cold War era so if I take the Cold War case for a second again most people don't remember what was the Cold War I I gave a lecture in my course at Harvard which I have mostly graduate students by name ten undergraduates and the undergraduates always the smartest in the any case I gave a lecture on the Cold War last year and the coeds whose very smart young lady came up to me after and she said professor Allison that was brilliant there was really brilliant lectures I was feeling very good she said but you know your suggestion that it might be relevant for your for the current quarter the course is called central challenges of American national security and strategy so it's about like today she said your suggestion that it might have anything to do with the course seems to me to be miss mistaken because that's irrelevant because it's ancient history so I had I'm an old cold warrior so I she could see I was a little caught up by this she said I said well okay would explain what what do you mean by ancient history she said everybody knows what's aged industry ancient history and things that happened before you graduated from high school I said okay thank you thank you very much I think Oh from you everything is new but I'm telling you this is a lesson that's quite useful so here's what happened in the Cold War US has been involved in world war ii huge effort biggest effort ever as a society successfully finally defeats the Nazis and Japanese exhausted everybody wants to come home George Kennan who's the number two person in them Russian the Soviet embassy writes back a long telegram April of 1946 which says there's another adversary that's going to be bigger and more challenging and more dangerous and a greater existential threat to America than the Nazis nobody wanted to hear this in Washington and it's the Soviet Union so initially this landed like a bombshell people hoped it would go away we will forget about it the events began to validate it as Stalin left his troops in Eastern Europe so it actually initiated a conversation and over the next four years people we now revere as the wise men so Kenan Atchison marshal Truman Vandenberg mitzi so you get a conversation and by NSC 68 in 1950 has emerged a strategy for Cold War which is something unheard of so this is war by every form and dimension except bombs and bullets so in my column this war means cold war metaphorical not real war ok and how do they imagine this well somebody said well I think ok we have to reconstruct the nations of Germany and Italy who are just killing our citizens and who we were displaying our soldiers like David to go kill we have to go we construct their societies they take the American taxpayers money in the Marshall Plan and rebuilding Europe and other people said are you out of your Americans who've never going to pay we just paid for war we're not going to pay for this this makes no sense that was the Marshall Plan and 70 years ago this month George Marshall went to Harvard gave a speech how about the Marshall Plan Nate hung in 49 you construct a treaty an alliance that commits the u.s. 1 foot by article 5 that an attack on the Europeans ISM attacked upon us what George Washington told us that's a bad idea all of our history has been successful by not getting entangled in alliances not alliances this was an alliance that put our blood at risk for other nations so they constructed this amazing construct that was a cold war strategy which then people like David and I were part of basically working with in older over the whole period of the Cold War I worked in the Reagan administration with enthusiasm we're basically Ronald Reagan said the civilian it was the evil empire I think that was right ultimately the evil empire was defeated I think that was a great defeat so this was a fantastic strategic invention and I would say that inspirational for Ray because who could have imagined that anybody could have dreamed up something that intricate that viable that's that capable I would say that's inspiration for this generation of people to say ok here we have in China not something exactly like this over you know of course not but still a huge lucidity and challenge can we be inventive again I think why not yeah some differences of course really one obviously the whole economic concept of the Soviet Union eventually has proven to be empty great not capable of competing with that of the West indeed the West was so ascendant that we thought that history had ended as you well know so industry Frank Fukuyama and it was over and we won but now China has at least caused given a reason for the study of comparative six once again on college campuses after a bit of a hey Epsilon for a couple of dentists if you take the dish you say David I think excellent excellent weight to remember if the Soviet economic system had proved viable yeah the way as viable is it as it appeared it was going to do so again I noticed in the book when John Kennedy became president in 1961 he believed the Soviet Union was going to overtake the US as an economy in the 1970s they'd already why did somebody in space why did we had put up they had already put people in space or he had already tested their weapons and this view was not his view uniquely if you go to the economic textbook of the time Paul Samuelson's textbook in 1964 the addition says by the end of the 70s the Soviet Union will overtake the u.s. we nobody can believe that today giving Russia and what it is but that system seemed to be like it was working now if it had worked well this month it turned out to be a somewhat different story and I think the reason why the Chinese challenge is interestingly importantly different is that their economic system for the time being has been working spectacularly successful I mean here over 30 years just in our in our you know recent generation a country that didn't even appear on any of the International League pennants has jumped to a position of rivalry with the US in very in virtually every every arena so how could this be possible well partly they have four times as many people so if Chinese are only one-fourth as productive as Americans let's say LM in economies biggest hours and why should they be only one-fourth is productive maybe they could be half as productive in which case lower the whole they would be twice as large an economy kazuya so this is as Lee Kuan Yew says and I quote in the book this is the biggest player in the history of the world and sharing the world with it for Americans will be very very uncomfortable because I mean as a red-blooded even red-necked American myself I know USA means number one I mean that's who we are somewhere it's written I don't know in the Bible or in in the Constitution or the laws of nature only wait for it Harvard it would be it USA means number one so there's nobody else but us it's supposed to be number one Chinese don't agree with this Chinese had the view that we were the biggest power in the world for five thousand years there were since then this 200 year exception where Westerners came here and exploited us and that's what you could going on and try to aim yes yeah you know in fact it is worth recalling that China has done something that no other country in history has ever done and that is two decades each year of which so a double-digit GDP growth I think with maybe one exception of a year around the Great Recession and so a truly extraordinary record and while we may not agree with a good bit of their policies in various areas they have done something quite extraordinary well if you've got to when two facts here just so if you go back a generation ninety six people out of every hundred in China were poor today four out of every hundred or poor so in one generation you've had the most incredible anti-poverty explosion of just gentlemen in one generation so you look as as I quote vaclav havel the former great president of the Czech Republic dude who says things have happened so fast we haven't yet had time to be astonished well it's worth reflecting on that now is all of this still applicable in the nuclear age I may get one if you note there's not been a war since the nuclear a hey although as you note also we came very close in the situation about what you wrote in essence a decision so again trying to figure out whether or where are the continuities in history and where maybe the the breakpoints on this one i side again with Thucydides he says in the beginning of his Peloponnesian War that as long as human beings or human beings the future will resemble the past more or less so there'll be some differences but more or less so while there are many differences in the current situation none more important than nuclear arsenals and not just nuclear weapons but as David was referring to superpower nuclear arsenals that create a condition of mutual assured destruction which means whatever I do in my best efforts to to disarm David at the end of it he can still kill me so I explained in the book that not only in the relationship with the Soviet Union with this first occurred but now in the relationship with China this is as if you it's a slightly grotesque image but it's as if you woke up one morning and you discovered that you are now part of a Siamese twin partnership so you have your same head you have your same arms and legs but somehow in the night your backbone and your respiratory system have been integrated and therefore however evil however are dangerous however provocative however deserving a punishment or even to being strangled your twin is whenever you think about strangling them you also then remember that you would be also committing suicide so you think probably not a good idea so this is had a huge cautionary effect did in the case of the relationship with the Soviet unit is important part of what to build on in the relationship with China so that's on the one hand on the other hand as you say rightly that didn't keep us for a missile crisis in which things had turned out differently you would have ended up with a war and you would have said well it was as horrible as the nuclear weapons would have created it to be so I would say if statesmen were today trying to craft a relationship between US and China to to escape Thucydides trap one big piece to build on would be nuclear another big piece to build on is the economic integration between the two countries remember one trading partner the others are extremely strategic and another piece is climate we're either together we work on the climate problem or individually we fail for sure and you also have this strange phenomenon of globalization which I don't think we yet have our minds around but there's no question that consciousness made possible by communication which all of us have people we know very well in Beijing everyone can see everything all the time on our smartphones everybody's conscious for many of the most people in the world of them the connected people in the world are conscious of what's going on so how you know if you think if you imagine here's Xi Jinping and his wife in the Chinese tradition because they had this crazy one-child policy I'm only one child a daughter so where do they send her to be educated to harbor harbor you think she would only could be she into Princeton he'd probably know well what is she's there she's searching for targets I don't think so great thing except if she was going to the store so yeah no she's a very nice young lady she came to get a good education her mind is going to be different then you know somebody who's sitting there in their different fashions she's talking to her dad and her mother so the idea now I think it's imaginary citizenry in any case would be able to say let's just look back and be adult about things at the same time you've got all the impulses in both societies for populism and nationalism extreme nationalism in China today yep which push you off in other direction let's talk a little bit in fact about that by coming back you have a discussion in the book where you talk about she and you talk about Trump and you talk about each one each once for each country and how this could actually again result in a stumble that ends in war when Donald Trump but in this campaign the mantra was make China sorry make the u.s. great again I point out in the book that this was basically a knockoff underlying that GNP enunciated in 2012 when he became president of China which he calls it the great rejuvenation of the great Chinese people when if you putting it colloquially and people even have t-shirts in China that say make China great again so now what does Chinese mean by make China great again well I guess I mentioned their story is we were great always in fact their word for China is called mental Kingdom which is the center of the universe so when the Chinese conception of the world China is at the top of the universe and the thing that connects earth and heaven and every other country is further down on the totem pole and defines themselves in relations to China and then there was just this little two century interruption caused by foreigners like us that were interfering but if we but out China will be back to being great and great China will be at the top of the pyramid and that's the way things ought to be well Americans believe USA is number one so the competition between these two parties I think is quite through civilian and as I said the book was finished before Donald Trump became president so this is not a book about Donald Trump though I do say in the foreword there's the only place that I mentioned the president I say that if Hollywood were casting and we're producing a blockbuster pitting China against the us on the path to war central casting could not have imagined a greater lead for Team America than then our president so and I think lucidity z-- would say he's to some extent even an expression of this to Sidda T and dynamic where the ruling power has this feeling that wait the rising upstart is trying to displace the incumbent we belong where we are and you belong where you are and if you were encroaching on our greatness that's the problem and we need to adjust this so that we're great again that's that very natural that's very normal facilities would understand that in a second and I think from the Chinese perspective they look and they say wow the reason why you're trying to keep us down why are you keeping us confided is you don't want us to be as big and strong as you are you don't want us to behave in our regions the way you behave in your region so I think this is both she and Trump could have fun almost trying to play each other's place well this raises just as an aside a huge question could she build Trump's wall maybe a great wall so David David knows that I'm it hardest smartest and so part of your deal one of the that the Chinese like every every international group have been terrified about Trump God knows who he is what does he believe what is he going to do and whatever so they were working extremely hard for having this first meeting between the president and the Chinese present Chinese President has on his agenda only one thing for the Year 1970 the year 2017 is only one thing which is get through the 19th Party Congress which is going to happen in the fall and he's going to be we elected for a second term and going to put in place a Standing Committee that gives him a runway for as far beyond that as he wants so he's trying to consolidate power he wants things to be calm everything to be calm as long as it's called he's happy having already earned status equivalent to that of only Mao and exactly he's already he's already the supremo but yet he needs to get his his a reaffirmation of this shouting so that's what he wants so he wanted a summit where there's he shown honor things are calm and so forth so all the Chinese running around trying to find what clues that they have and so one of the things Chinese do and their tradition is when the president of China goes to visit countries he often comes bringing a huge I called it a tweetable present okay so something that gives to the to the and oftentimes in China when they call especially to developing countries he says okay I'll build for you a sucker or the presidential palace or some some huge thing and the Chinese common room like that like the bridge you saw and they built so I saw I'm thinking well what so they would kept say people Chinese kept couldn't come in to me and say well what do you think what do you think jump what should she to bring to poor trunk so I said well okay I have a I've had idea unless I say this was kept Tony and Jakarta he could say president Trump you've talked about the wall you know you're on a wall so we will we read the Chinese will build for you a great wall the Trump's great wall along the border with Mexico okay and we'll build it ourselves we'll build it in one year for free that came for free then he would show them this video of the of the and he would say let me point out a couple of things first we like walls you know there's a lot of people in the u.s. criticize walls but we think country should have walls borders secondly we know something about walls actually we have a great ball it's called the black college right now we're not giving you our wall but we know about this walk our first dipper started building this 200 years before Christ it goes 5,500 kilometers and it keeps guys that we know one out you know in out that's how it works thirdly we actually have some 21st century construction methods that may be interesting for us that explains them to show you you know when we build this one but we'll build it for free and all in one year they didn't they didn't a bite but I think it still watch this space it's coming soon to a theater near attic and in their turn of course the master of the art of the deal presents jarred in Ivanka's daughter who sings the hit song sung by President Xi's wife when she was still a performer absolutely good mosy but we can actually know what I want not this he's got it it's coming they were here this is this is hard to believe and for those of you who might know there are many in New York like in Cambridge that underestimate our president he understands the art of the show absolutely so at the Marie Laveau summit the young lady here you can see is Arabella she is his granddaughter and she's five years old I think she sang in Mandarin the song called jasmine which is the signature song of Xi Jinping's wife who's a famous Chinese singer and they simply couldn't believe it I mean look at Gigi pig this they took a video of this day Valley and I had fifty million hits in China already from the moment after that he thought he had gone to heaven this will this prevent war if they did they did okay let's go to the questions from the audience here by withdrawing from TPP the trans-pacific partnership with given China the the free trade reign here we're giving them climate change apparently now is it more likely that we give them global leadership rather than the Chinese take it that's a good question so there's no no question that having invested as much of our energy and as much of our rhetoric in the TPP the Pacific trade arrangement and having gotten the Asian states to go ahead and pay the price for this because the way trade negotiations work is that once you sign up and get this through your politics you've already offended all the people you're offending in order to get the deal so you have to now report some people to help other people so in Japan or in Australia or in Singapore people already paid the price and then for the u.s. to withdraw from the TPP and leave it there on the table I think he's had a huge negative effect across the whole region and David you and your colleagues at KKR I'm sure feel that and understand it better than I did so I would suspect as the Chinese will come along as they ever did with their own version they call it a regional economic agreement it's not anything like TPP but in any case gives them a special relationship in trade with the countries in the region and it's already the case that China has become the dominant economic relationship for every one of the ages of countries and so in the case of which the USS was drawing other people are coming to China's agreement on China's terms they will end up writing the rules and this will be a big advantage for them which we basically gave them just by retreating in the climate space as well again I think there's no debate about no legitimate debate about the scientific proposition that human behavior is having a big impact on the climate and that you could imagine that the most likely scenarios over the next century is if we continue emitting as much greenhouse gases as we have been we may make large parts of the climate of the planet uninhabitable so in that case oh the question of what to do that's a big question and what how to do it but is no reasonable dispute about the necessity to try to address it in Paris and the Paris Accord was a important step in that direction not a successful conclusion of it only the beginning but nonetheless an important step so again if we say well we've decided we're not part of this conversation anymore almost all the other reasonable people in the world will say this is nuts and Lee Kuan Yew was one of the people who was very clearest about this he said look I just cannot understand how great powers can look and say there's a the evidence is overwhelming that in a hundred years if you keep doing what you're doing something terrible will happen to everybody's great grandchildren and you say forget about it it just said you can't do this you know it as you recall in the study of international relations the countries in the neighborhood of an emerging power can take one of two actions against that country's rise they can either seek others to balance against it which really defines what took place up until relatively recently where all of the countries that shared a maritime boundary with China and who all of whom had a dispute with China's aggressive actions in the South Haiti's China Seas sought the us to balance again Kevin ionship but you can also at a certain point bandwagon with the growing power and essentially it's a degree of capitulation right and it will be very interesting to see whether the remaining 13 countries that were part of trans-pacific partnership will ultimately do a deal themselves perhaps the US figures out some inventive way of rejoining it after fixing elements of the deal that were viewed as unacceptable or indeed if they start again - in a sense capitulate - bandwagon and you see it actually with the Philippines and president duterte absolutely where he has actually made overtures while still sort of trying to keep the u.s. onside and so this will be very revealing I thought I think that I start with first we have essentially economic gravity though as China has grown bigger and stronger and become the dominant trading relationship the economic balance of power has shifted in their favor significantly that's in the best thing at the same time every nation in the region knows China is a natural bully so again the very few people who will talk about this in public because they're afraid of China but we Kuan Yew was the world's greatest China watcher was also very respected by all the Chinese leaders because they would come to him for advice and was the manner in Chinese speaker was in he was set up so I could rot his neighborhood even sit with them he spent thousands of hours with all the leaders would come to him to ask him questions and called him mentor so he had gotten to be many years old and he decided I can say what I think so he would say what he thinks and he said here's what we got in this book on Lee Kuan Yew that I did we asked him the question we say to him you know how will China behave when it becomes number one he says you know they would do these kind of looking at you like well that's not very intelligent question or something I think he looks Li he said wait a minute we already see this every day in Singapore he said Chinese say to us all nations are equal we're not ahead Yuma but if we do something they don't like they say you have made one point four billion people unhappy know your place so basically in this relationship as China has become stronger it squeezes when it wants other nations to get them to do what it wants and I would say as you watch what's happening now in the Philippines and I would say watch what's the South Korean story I think that story is on the same track in which you'll see the splintering from what has been the traditional relationships and dependencies upon the u.s. in part because of the gravity and in part because of mistakes we're making in well staying on the Korean Peninsula what in your view are the main interest for China to go to war with the US over Korea so let me let me say again I don't believe there's a single person in Beijing who thinks war with the u.s. is a good idea and I know there's not a single person in Washington that thinks war is a good idea so - despite the overwhelming American superiority and virtually have any category what's happening again we have more flat deck carriers and fibs everything tire rest of the world pair together they have one that's a hand-me-down it brought it out on the first trip but they're building more but they're building where the US taxes let's say I owe London in a significant way so I think they've been smarter actually dealing they're not a trillion dollars worth of our nabis probably guess I funny how similar their planes look throughout it look exactly exactly I say in the book that one of my Chinese winces away you know you guys have R&D that's called research and development we have our D and T research development and theft and X the theft works a lot better than the research and development because we only steal things that have already been demonstrated to work and they're free okay excuse me yeah so if you look at the Chinese but the other thing is they don't feel obliged to buy the legacy systems that our Defense Department continues to buy so they say we don't need to have carriers the way you have carries we have b21 missiles in which for a million dollars I can kill a billion dollars well how does that work well that's pretty good and so lo and behold we've had to move air carriers back further away from the mainland so they can play an asymmetric game that I think is quite troubling nonetheless the point in our war so to be clear nobody I think there may be a few insane people but a few insane people aside nobody you mean irresponsible positions the Defense Department the iru i think ever met nobody with zero certainly not people that understand about war think war with china is a good idea vicen same thing in the Chinese Ministry of Defense so it's not that anybody's going to think war is a good idea what they do think is a good idea is North Korea should not be able to attack San Francisco with the nuclear weapon and I'm going to do whatever I have to do to prevent that or alternatively for China Korea is not going to be unified under a government that's a little ally of the u.s. with the u.s. having military troops and bases on the Korean Peninsula we fought a war with this with you already the Chinese say and we beat you back to the 38th parallel so if you want to do this again go for it so I think it's not because anybody would want war it's because they want things that in the course of trying to accomplish might slide them or stumble or somehow fall into a trap that they didn't ignore you know we've talked before about again China can't accept a hostile power and Pyongyang the capital of North Korea can't accept US forces on the Yellow River the border between North Korea and China so I actually have to mechanized divisions recently deployed up there to prevent refugees which they all say can't accept they don't like North Korea with nuclear weapons we can't accept new North Korea that has nuclear weapons that could hold Los Angeles or San Francisco hostage could you envision any way that you could get to some kind of Finland ization where North Korea is not Hostel to the salary it's not hostile to China it somehow stands down on its plans to negative abilities so I I have a I had a op-ed in the New York Times today in which I began to speculate about this and I would say if we think of this as the Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion and we think of Kennedy's lesson from the Missile Crisis is above all don't get your opponent into a situation within which they have to choose between war and humiliation so if we let our imaginations work one idea that was broached at the Marylander summit is Xi Jinping said well what about restraint for restraint so what could that mean so if he could somehow persuade Kim ji-woon the quit testing ICBMs so they can't hold separate sue sausage could we do some substantial modification in our military exercises and even some of our military deployments in the region again most people in the Defense Department would now say no we're not giving anything for them doing things they should do anyhow but I would say once we begin to look at it if we were more imaginative I could imagine doing some adaption or adjustment now harder cases what if fission pain would say as I've talked to some Chinese who said the following they say you know the problem here is simply one thing that you're there this is on our border look at it from Beijing Korea's on our border what are you doing in South Korea I say whether it there was a war in South Korea we fought the war South Korea is one of the most successful countries in the world it's one of our allies it's a 12th or 13th largest economy it's a democracy our and we are there helping to defend it they say well who you defending it is okay where defend against North Korea because North Korea attacked it what's before they can attack it again they said well but if you were just not there we think we could solve this power so is there any way you can imagine the u.s. not being there in terms of troops or in terms of bases or in terms of military alliance I don't think so that I can work my way to that but I but I might try to work on it if the alternative we've come we for sure the alternative is we end up with the war with China a lot of things that look horrible would be better than that so could you work this follow I I'm not sure that what I'm pretty confident about is that in Beijing for Xi Jinping and for the leadership of China they have no sympathy for Kim jong-un and for North Korea if they could somebody could find a way to solve the problem mysteriously they would say go for it but they can't figure out what to do and I think what they felt very uncomfortable about coming out of the merry LIGO summit was that basically President Trump said to them the defining issue in the relationship between the US and China is going to be you're solving the North Korean problem and as one of the people who was there said they said that wait a minute he said I hear what he said but you have not been able to solve this problem yourself already for 20 years so when going through he was trying to develop nuclear weapons you didn't stop him when they were trying to develop missiles could hit South Korea or Japan you didn't stop them and now you come to turn to us and say okay your turn you've given us an almost impossible problem and if you if you have a good idea tell us what do you think we can do but so I said well I'll think about it and I'll try to work on it but I don't have a very good idea you would like to be able to say well somebody just goes there strangles the guy find somebody else they take his place in the situation is okay and I think if that could happen I would vote for it but if anybody that looks like you might strangle them Kim Jong just kill some medium please and this is a pretty hard task if you were back at CIA you would have to you know work on this problem yes you might say that I could possibly comment where does we haven't talked it all really about Russia yes it not arrives in power certainly arguably a waning power as President Obama stated a regional power that really had to stick in the crowd of Putin if that loves that of course but where does Russia fit into the us-china competition does it matter does it fit it doesn't it does matter and I think the US government's perception of Russia in this picture and the picture that's conveyed in the press is I think hugely misleading so the general story says well of course Russia and China cannot collaborate and can't be aligned because look at it here you had a huge rising China you got a weak faltering Russia you can Siberia that's mainly depopulated you got a billion for people with a lot of resources I tell you how this game works out and I would say over the long run I would not like to be playing the Russian hand relevant relative to China that's on the one hand on the other hand in the real world today next year and over the next decade who is Xi Jinping's best buddy in the world Putin and who is Putin's best money XI and when they get together what do they talk about the US you know who I'm under said Trump out there but all I'm saying us undermining undermining both regimes the first visits when she became president his first visit immediately to Moscow the pay respect to Putin when I said at lunch today with Steve Schwarzman ages been at this one belt one road events yes there she gives his speech and then he said from nowhere cable he thought it was a hologram or something pops up Putin at this event just last week who's also telling about one belt road road and you know however the things so this relationship is quite aligned and I think in both cases she is quite happy when we hear entangled with Russia and whatever is happening in Ukraine as long as we're not looking at China he thinks that's good and I think Putin is quite happy when we look in China thinking we will leave them alone well let's bring this to a close with a very happy question here this questioner asks is there any reason for optimism under President Trump in foreign affairs okay good question i I I come from I come from from Harvard and Cambridge and so I I tell my colleagues we're all part of the ninety five percenters who are 95% ours these are people that live in Massachusetts or Boston or Manhattan or DC ninety-five percent of whom voted for element so we hardly know any people in quote real America and we don't have any perception or understanding or feeling for this but I come from North Carolina and my wife comes from Ohio vitarka we both have colleagues brothers sisters people I'm a sister living in Colorado so I tried to talk to regularly and my wife reads everyday that Cleveland Plain Dealer to keep in touch with her roots from Lorraine Ohio in large parts of the country they have extremely different view than the New York Times of The Washington Post or you know the elite media as we think of it and if I try to be positive about this this was not my candidate that he is our president and ah we live in extremely dangerous world so god help us I always that's what I pray for you know every every president but in this case if we try to do the positive I think part of what Trump represents is a rejection of the establishment especially the political class and the elites which are places like us places like Harvard and others who lots of people in our society don't think have done a great job with the opportunities that our country has had and I would say you know they're not entire not entirely one so Trump's willingness to not be Orthodox to not be captured by the conventional wisdom to explore possibilities that he wouldn't have thought of otherwise I mean I can Kiki here he's essentially unconstrained by most of the inheritance most of which I believe in and which I'm part of okay but nonetheless which is confining and what does mean that he could conceivably be much more imaginative so I could I could imagine if I'm trying to be positive to include here can you can you imagine him doing a big deal in the Middle East to have two states I I can and actually an Israeli friend of mine a a very insightful Israeli came to me and he said you know this is really not that hard and this is the only guy who could do this okay because he doesn't he's not beholden to the Jewish community he's not beholden to the Republican Party he's not become beholden to the Democratic Party he thought we hold it any better if it comes into his mind and he wants to do it he thinks he's a big deal Diller here's a deal he could do this deal in the case of Korea I would say this is another case where you could imagine him saying oh look right this is just a real estate problem this is just this is not that hard we can figure out on trades this for what for that you and I would say took wait a minute we've got a treaty with these people for this many years you can't even think of that to which his answers I don't know but that we had a treaty I don't know but it said I don't know for how long and in any case I'm trying to prevent this guy from being able to attack us so I've made a deal that's all I I think I think I'm hopeful well I am as well and I think you can all see why Graham Allison is such a special friend an intellectual hero and observe thank you you

Channel: 92nd Street Y

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Length: 69min 50sec (4190 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2017