Michael J. Zak Grand Strategy Lecture featuring Robert Kaplan | March 7, 2018

good morning everybody thank you for being with us today I am Victoria Nuland the new CEO of the Center for a new American security we are delighted today to present the inaugural Michael J Zak grand strategy lecture and panel series as all of you who know the Center for a New American Security are aware we have long been interested in the question of grand strategy do we have one do we need one is it changing how should its change to other countries have grand strategies how do we relate to that but we are delighted that with the support of our the center's longtime friend and board member Mike Zak we are now able to launch this annual lecture series on the question of grand strategy where we'll have a big brain every year and then some panel discussions today our first lecturer in this series as you know is our own Robert D Kaplan he will be the inaugural lecture it is a big day for Bob not only because we have the lecture today but today is also the launch for his new book which was released yesterday the return of Marco Polo's world strategy and American interest in the 21st century so get on Amazon right after the session and order it up please after Bob gives his remarks we'll have some Q&A then we'll take a little break and then have two panel discussions as you know to introduce Bob today is as I said our longtime friend and board member Mike Zak Mike is a partner in Charles River ventures which was one of the first high-tech venture capital entities based in Boston and he was ahead of his time in understanding that tech was the wave of the future he's made many contributions to CNAs over the years he is a four Marine but among the contributions he makes to us is to push every single year for us to think bigger think about the grand questions to go to the pain in the hardest national security issues of the day so we are delighted to have this series now in his name and over to you Mike to introduce Bob Thank You Toria we're here today to learn more about a debate that our nation should be having more of grant strategy and in any pursuit can mean different things it can mean lofty goals often associated with a vision or it might be a forced effort to establish priorities and define what a body won't do as much as it specifies what it will do in national security it can be an exercise in defining the national interest and making the most of the geopolitical hand that a nation has been dealt and at least in my opinion resource allocation what a nation spends on strategy should play a central role in any debate the hard part about grant strategy is that it's a combination of all of the above and addressing the topic is pretty easy to put off when something makes sense to do and it's not being done it's probably because it's hard so thank you for joining with CNAs today on this first of what will be a series of discussions on what grant strategy is an exploration of whether or not the United States has won four national security and an effort to improve whatever it is we have and I'm pleased to have my name associated with this before I introduce Bob Kaplan our speaker I do have a confession to make yes I am a Bob Kaplan fanboy no one on the CNAs leadership team knew that until now and I I can recall the moment this illness afflicted me years ago I ran across his book the Arabists that the topic was of interest to me in a skim through the chapters convinced me to buy it and read it right away that's when I learned that bob was a skilled observer of people's places and events across broad swaths of time he's got a skill in that he can create word pictures for those of us that have difficulty seeing many books come into my home and are read and then moved on to make room for others but Bob's books come in and stay so that they can be read again his insights are superb across his works and we'll hear some of them today please welcome Robert Kaplan well thank you so much Mike for that lovely introduction it's a great privilege and honor for me to be here today to give the Michael J Zak lecture on grand strategy especially since it's an initial program that we're going to do what is grand strategy grand strategy is what a state can do or should do consistent with the fact that its resources are not unlimited and that the appetite of its people is not unlimited and also and so with this with limited resources and a limited appetite of its public and also consistent with the material at hand overseas in terms of history geography culture and specifically how thing like culture can be changed and ameliorated by technology so it's the interplay of all these things merged with what you can do with your limited resources in public appetite in order to improve the world and defend and work in a nation's interests now to get at this I'm going to divide the lecture into two parts the first part I'm going to describe what I see as the material at hand around the world particularly in Eurasia and talk about how you know how I see it after four decades is a journalist and foreign correspondent in the region and also from reading yeah and reading and about ideas and such and then I'm going to try to define what the United States is in a functional sense in order to start off in order to provide a foundation for how we need to act all right so let me start let me get started here um it's not true that technique that technology has defeated geography what's happened is something more subtle it's that technology has shrunk geography it's made the world smaller more claustrophobic more anxious the world is on a taut string is never before you pluck one part of the web and the whole network vibrates that's why a so called short sharp war in the south or east china sea may migrate into something bigger to other regions a you know given the fact that China is already building a hundred and fifty-five acre military base in Djibouti at the other end of the greater Indian Ocean in fact let me put it this way take the concept of Eurasia which up until about twenty years ago was just a high school social studies term it was so big that it had no real meaning it stretched all the way from Portugal to Indonesia but in recent years because of Technology because of the way military technology and transportation technology has developed to defeat distance there is now a co hearing Eurasian system of trade rivalry and conflict that never existed before in history you know so you have the interplay of zones of crisis in the East and South China Sea the Baltic Sea basin the Black Sea basin and Ukraine the Persian Gulf that can in that can interfere and affect each other in fast-moving global crises as never before now to give you an example of what I mean let me take the case of India and China for instance for most of history India and China were two completely different world civilizations that had very little to do with each other separated as they were by the highway all of the Himalayas and yes Buddhism spread from the Indian subcontinent to China in middle antiquity and the opium wars involved both India and China in the same conflict system in the mid nineteenth century but more or less India and China had very little to do with each other now fast-forward to the 21st century you have an Indian intercontinental ballistic missile system that can that focuses on major cities in China you have Chinese fighter jets on the Tibetan Plateau that can include India in their arc of operations you have Indian warships periodically in the South China Sea you have Chinese warships including submarines all over the Indian Ocean and you have China building or helping to build or at least helping to finance state-of-the-art ports with military capabilities throughout the indian ocean surrounding India so that because of Technology a whole new geography of rivalry has been created between India and China that never existed before in history and you can play this out with other countries throughout the world so we're really dealing with a global system and a lesson here is that in the financial community and others we tend to think of interconnectivity as a wholly positive thing when in fact in geopolitical terms interconnectivity can be a negative thing it can make it can lead to greater instability because of the ability of one crisis to affect and aggravate another crisis that's why the financial markets are doing so well generally there's a sense of geopolitical fragility that didn't exist before you know this is the real secret sauce behind it this interconnectivity because of technology and let put it this way think of China moving vertically south towards the Indian Ocean in order to set up ports in Myanmar Sri Lanka Bangladesh Pakistan Tanzania Djibouti etc in other words creating an early phase of the British or Dutch East India Company's with a mercantile throughput trading system with military application all the way from the South China Sea to the eastern Mediterranean where by the way the Chinese are running ports in Athens in Piraeus rather and getting interested in port facilities in Trieste in Croatia and other places and think of India rather than move south vertically is moving east and west horizontally so that India is exerting its power and influence from the Iranian plateau where it's competing with China for oil and natural gas field all the way into the Burmese jungles in the East it's you know it's not just recently but even during the darkest days of the Myanmar dictatorship democratic India had no choice but to engage with the government and yungang in order to compete with China in Myanmar it had no choices you know Indian officials had told me over the years so again we're in this integrated global system now of course the biggest challenge we face is China let me start with the South China Sea and build outward what you could talk to the Chinese all day and night about how they should not be doing what they're doing in the South China Sea and they won't believe a word of it because what they're doing makes perfect sense given their geography given their economics given their strategic their strategic plan the South China Sea for the Chinese is nothing less than the greater Caribbean was for the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century there was a great Dutch geopolitician Dutch American geopolitician in the early 1940s at Yale Nicholas spike Minh and he said that when the United States gained control strategic control of the greater Caribbean by the early 20th century under Teddy Roosevelt the United States effectively controlled the Western Hemisphere because the southern shore of the of the Caribbean was the most populous parts of colombia venezuela guyana etc so that it controlled literally everything from Yorktown to the Amazonian jungles as he as he put it that the Amazonian jungles was the real break point not the between North and South America and front and once the United States dominated the Western Hemisphere it could affect the balance of power in the eastern hemisphere and that's what two world wars in the Cold War in the 20th century were all about it started in the greater Caribbean and the Chinese now see the South China Sea in similar terms effective control over the South China Sea or even effective parity with the US Navy in the South China Sea allows China several things it didn't have before it allows it to push further out unimpeded into the western Pacific it allows it to soften up Taiwan because you know Taiwan is the cork and the bottle at the northern edge of the South China Sea and it allows China an unimpeded access through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean and the Indian Ocean is nothing less than the global energy interstate across which oil and natural gas supplies come on ships through the Strait of Malacca the Lombok and Nunda and other straits into the middle class you know conglomerations of East Asia Japan South Korea coastal China try so with control over the South China Sea China becomes effectively a two ocean Navy rather than a one ocean Navy which which it still is to an extent and China is fighting a war with the United States in the South China Sea it's just that the Americans don't completely realize it because the Chinese method of war is to win without ever having to fight the last thing the Chinese want to do is have a shooting match with the United States Navy because they will lose they may not lose in a generation at the rate they're going but they will lose now so it's a series of thousands of little micro steps a long taken island here build a runway there do nothing for six months then send an oil rig into disputed waters after there's international complaints withdraw the oil rig then take another island it's a very subtle strategy where any reaction to it makes you its eeeem that you're overreacting to it and and you know and so the South China Sea is where it all starts for China now the why does China go to sea in the first place because for the first time in its history it's almost completely secured on land because China actually has very little a naval maritime tradition with the exception of the of the voyages of Admiral Chung Hall in the early 15th century the early part of the Ming Dynasty China does not have a seafaring tradition it because China was never secured on land now it is so it can has the luxury to go to sea why is it more secure on land let's talk for a minute or so about one belt one road or belt in the belton Road initiative is the new acronym has it called what is it really in geopolitical terms number one it's a branding operation for what China has already constructed in terms of roads railways and pipelines across trol Asia over the last 15 years a branding operation that brings Chinese transport and an infrastructure all the way to Iran and Iran is the real key of belton road because Iran plus China is an unbeatable combination which ultimately relegates Russia but we'll get to that in a moment the Chinese are prospecting for minerals in Iran they're investing heavily in the Iranian economy they're helping the Iranians build railroads they're deep Iran is the is the real goal and hub of China's belton Road strategy and that's because Iran because of its large and highly educated population and where it sits geographically is the very organizing principle of the greater Middle East and Central Asia Iran fronts not just one hydrocarbon rich zone the Persian Gulf but to the Caspian Sea area Iran is as much a Central Asian country as it is a Middle Eastern country and then finally what Belton Road does to China is it helps China to solve its internal demons particularly its number one ethnic challenge the Turkic Uighur Muslims in western China so by developing transport and economic links with fellow Turkic former Soviet Central Asian Republics China surrounds the Uighur Turks inside its own border make sure they will never have a real base from which to operate and lifts them up economically at the same time because of all this belt and road investment so we see a system coming into play that challenges the United States it's um it's a system with a vision it's a dynamic and it also goes along very well with Chinese history because the belton road pathways replicate the pathways of the Tong and Wan dynasty's a of the medieval era the same path that Marco Polo traveled along now let's move to the Middle East for a moment why to take a step back from 30,000 feet why is the Middle East been in such turmoil for much of our lifetimes their last 20 years what's been going on beyond the mistakes the United States has committed and other things like that it's because the Middle East for the first time in its modern history is in a post Imperial phase the Ottoman Turkish Empire which ruled from Algeria to Mesopotamia disappeared after the first world war it up until that point no matter whether you are Shia or a sunni a Jew or an Arab you all old loyalty to the Turkish sultan and therefore you had no real territorial disputes among each other you had but they were muted then you had the British and French imperial Mandate systems disappear a few years after World War two as those European colonial systems were just out of gas from from the World War then you had the US and Soviet systems which the oxford historian John Darwin says were Imperial in all but name in terms of the way they functioned and they stabilized the Middle East into different blocks the Soviet system went away after 1991 though it's come back in a limited fashion in Syria and eastern Libya and some other path ways the United States great power influence in the Middle East has dissipated over the last 15 years you know rather significantly and it's also dissipated not only because of mistakes the United States may have committed but because of the political development in these countries indigenously themselves it used to be you had an autocrat with one phone number fax machine and his national security advisor who you could deal with in any crisis but now in many of these countries there's a whole network of people who have to be consulted who can influence people on top so it you know it makes it far more challenging for the United States to project power into this region and as American power is dissipated you see the rise of regional hegemon x' turkey Iran Saudi Arabia Israel all jockeying for position and some of these places are better at it than others the Iranians have a really rich Imperial tradition to draw upon their sphere of influence from the eastern Mediterranean to East to central Afghanistan approximates the sphere of influence of every persians language Empire since antiquity essentially you know this is just the latest iteration of Iranian Imperial strategy and one of the key points of Imperial strategy is how you use proxy military forces very well the Romans did it the British did it the French did it and the Iranians are very very good at it the Saudis have no real Imperial tradition to draw upon they're a relatively young state in Middle Eastern history and we've seen them not you know act far less efficiently in Yemen and guitar in other places as well the Turks also are drawing on their Ottoman tradition but again they've overestimated their capacity to influence events in Syria in Iraq etc now let me move from the Middle East to Europe for a moment I've spoken about a Chinese power projection what's going on in the Middle East in Europe you have the the challenge of what I call Soviet Russian rather Russian soft Imperial subversion throughout Central Eastern Europe the Warsaw Pact is gone it cannot be reconstructed it was too expensive it didn't work and that's a major reason why the Soviet Union collapsed in the first place what Russia seems to be doing is trying to re-establish a soft traditional zone a quasi Imperial influence throughout Central Eastern Europe by by undermining by subverting democratic systems from Estonia in the north to Bulgaria in the south and also including the Caucasus you know things like running organized crime rings buying buying off corrupt politicians buying media through third parties running intelligence operations etc all things that are relatively inexpensive many of which are deniable maybe not credibly so but the yetbut can be denied nethertheless and you can always withdraw from them you can always pull back if you get resistance and this is this is Europe's real challenge essentially how to deal with a new form of aggression that emanates from the Kremlin and you know in in our time in history and I just say that one of the problems of these new demócrata Vleet amok recedes especially in the Balkans is that they want to do the right thing but they have but rule of law is so weak for reasons of the pulverizing of society of because of decades of communism even Stalinism in some countries cases that it's just very hard to do so so that and then finally we have we have Russia and China what I've learned as a journalist over decades is that it's not only the difference between democracy and dictatorship that's interesting and important but the difference is between one form of dictatorship and another form of dictators for instance what does someone like Bashar al-assad or Saddam Hussein have in common with the Sultan of Oman or the King of Morocco or the king of Jordan they're all autocrats they're all technically dictators but one category of these men are essentially liberal trending people you know who are trying to provide both stability a better way of life you know environmental concern women's rights especially in the case of Oman and Morocco and what do they have in common with you know a Qaddafi and Assad a Saddam so the dictatorship is too generic a word and what that brings me to is the fact that Russia and China may now be tactical rivals they may both be dictatorships but they're very different forms of dictatorships that go back to the very differences in Russian and Chinese state development and culture so that um there's real tension between them the Russians you know have made a natural gas pipeline deal with China but the Chinese have taken them to the cleaners on pricing the you know the the Russians are losing out in terms of economic influence and demographic incursion in the Russian Far East from China China has a hundred million people in Manchuria just over the border there's six million Russians in a area larger than Manchuria and the Russian pop the ethnic Russian population is going down not up the Russians have essentially lost out to the Chinese in Central Asia and remember Central Asia is the former Soviet republics the lingua franca is still Russian but the Chinese are beating the pants off them and this precedes belton Road belton Road is really the icing on the cake the capstone for rut for China capturing for capturing capturing Central Asia from the Russian sphere of influence it is said that outlawed amir putin is a great tactician but what i see is he has this obsession with undermining europe and the west and that and that is one reason why he is effectively seated Central Asia and is seeding the Russian Far East to China and and and the whole logic of belton Road were to succeed essentially weakens Russia in Central Asia so uh you know above the surface there's a Russian Chinese Alliance below the surface there's real competition between these two states that are both sprawling they're the organizing principles of Eurasia and they have great differences with each other however one thing you can say about China and this segues into America now is that whatever you say about belton Road at least it's a vision at least it's a direction at least it partially answers the question of grand strategy so it's a good in and of itself from the Chinese point of view in that sense so what is the United States how do you know what yeah you know what should the United States do about all this well first let's define what the United States is it I mean in functional terms not in spiritual terms the United States is the last resource rich part of the of the temperate zone on the earth that was settled at the time of the European enlightenment in other words at the time of the European enlightenment there was one big empty swath in the temperate latitudes and that was the area between the Canadian Arctic and the Mexican subtropical zone and that was settled by the United step by what became the United States so the United States is a great country not only because of its values and what its people believe but because of where they happen to live in the first place and Halford mackinder the great british for over a hundred years ago defined nor the temperate zone of North America as the one great satellite of the mother continent of Africa Eurasia and the satellite that had the greatest potential to influence the old world Africa and Eurasia because it was protected from all the conflicts of the old world on one hand but on the other hand it had tremendous influence over it because of where it was situated between two seas and and this gets me that to the great you know fact of American power which is think about it for a moment we conquered a desert in order to become a sea power the desert was the Great Plains it used to be called the great American desert up until about a hundred years ago because the area between the 98th Meridian in the east central kansas-nebraska etc all the way to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains had less than two inch 20 inches of rainfall per year so it was an authentic desert and by conquering it that was the real challenge of manifest destiny conquering that desert and once we arrived at the Pacific we were not just a one ocean country but a two ocean country and that facilitated the development of the great American Navy right after the last battle of the Indian Wars in 1890 so we are a sea power we're in naval power and we're it and and think about it again that nuclear weapons because of the moral taboo on their use upon their use are really kind of on a daily basis ineffective their symbolic it's the Navy that gives the United States its great power you can move air aircraft carrier strike groups from one ocean to another from one conflict zone to another and it's not page1 in the news it's page two or three you've got to follow specialists websites just to see the location of our aircraft carriers on any given week but you try to move twenty thousand army troops to a foreign country its front page you get editorials in the New York Times Pro for and against etc but a carrier has four or five thousand sailors on it and the destroyers frigates and cruisers in one sub that go along with a strike group add up to you know you've got you know eight nine thousand sailors and you can move them around the world at will and it doesn't even make a news story most of the time so that and and when I say naval power I mean air air power as well air you know air and Marines so we are in great naval power and that also makes us naturally a liberal maritime power because the great sea empires of history tended to be liberal and Venice is the best example or more liberal than the land bound empires and so we're we're you know so naval power liberalism in the classic sense free trade and democracy are all of a piece they all go together very naturally in this sense and this is you know this is part of the building blocks of what gave the United States its great idea you know it's great idea and it's it's great idea was about essentially not imposing our system around the world but just encourage and fostering the advancement of civil society in whatever form was practical in specific countries at you know at very at you know at various points we were you know we were you know as a liberal sea power we protected you know we kept the Seas open for commerce we kept you know we kept that you the maritime choke points open we protected access to to hydrocarbons for our allies and even our non allies the whole global system globalization itself would be impossible without the United States Navy and and the values that had brought upon the United States you know you wouldn't as I you know say that you wouldn't have these conferences at Davos and other places without the US Navy because globalization would not have been able to have taken place in the first place in the way that it has and this American vision system came to a fruition at the end of World War two and then forcep because of the Soviet threat because of the ideological philosophical threat from cut from world communism the United States remained at arms and fostered over 75 years illiterate tried to foster a liberal world order both in Europe and in Asia and that is now being challenged in you know in many you know in in many respects it lasted for 75 years things don't go on forever history tells us that it was an aberration that no that geopolitical conflict is more normal but that but simply because it's an aberration does not mean it cannot continue or should not continue the way I would put it is that is that it all began in the Caribbean for the United States and it's all beginning in China's Caribbean for China in the South China Sea and you know and what do we do about it well we know over the last 15 years maybe longer we've over stretched ourselves you know we've made mistakes and we've seen an upsurge in arguments for restraint as a corrective action and the issue is whether constraint is a corrective action or is it something more it may be a technique only to get us more in you know it you know to into a middle path because we should not want in my opinion the pendulum to swing from one extreme to the other extreme what we would like is a sustainable is a sustainable foreign policy and what is the sustainable foreign policy give it given our geographic and historical situation it's not a foreign policy driven exclusively or even primarily by humanitarian intervention because that is unsustainable but it but also because of our geographic situation asthma kinder pointed out we are fated to lead in some in some degree we are fated to lead because we are both protected from the mother from afro-eurasia but but you know but what you know but we're rich in you know river system minerals etc and we can affect developments in in in in africa and eurasia to a degree that people on those continents cannot do you know there's an advantage to being on the other side of the world the advantage is we have no territorial pretensions in asia and that's why we can be trusted there you know we can you know we can be you know the negotiator of last resort you know innocent you know the trustworthy Ally because we're not threatening anyone's territorial sovereignty and this goes for europe as well so that um so that what you know so what we need is a corrective to the mistakes of the past but not to go so far in the other direction that we lack a vision i think i've written recently that the the deliberate withdrawal from the trans-pacific partnership was one of the greatest self-inflicted errors the united states has made in Asia since the process of the Vietnam War and that's because the Asia pivot was not supposed to end with merely deploying more warships from from other commands into Pacific command's the Asia pivot was supposed to culminate in a free trading system that would give the United States more of an incentive to be even to be even more engaged with Asia than it had been in the past so that what I've seen is our policy in Asia has gone from having a vision to one where it's simply about protecting America from sin North Korea and getting better trade deals from China that is not a vision that excites that energizes that inspires p.m. people in Asia and I've heard this not only in Asia but in a similar respect on my recent trip to Europe where people in central Eastern Europe are very worried that the European Union is out of gas the u.s. is out of a vision and the Russians are playing a long game there so it's again it's we're fated to lead but within limits and what you know how do what is diplomacy at its best I would apply a defined diplomacy at its best as pushing out to the limits of what you're capable of by while at the same time having a sixth sense not to go over those limits it's like working at the edges all the time not withdrawing and saying let the situation take care of itself but not overextending yourself at the same time and you know I think as long as we can work near the edges and you know and exercise more restraint than we have in the last 15 or 20 years but not totally withdraw we will be able to have not lead this you know the 21st century - at least compete well with it because 20 and I'll end here with this 20 years ago I published a cover piece in The Atlantic Monthly called was democracy just a moment where I challenged the assumption of the 1990s that democracy was going to win out I predicted it an age of witness of authoritarian renewal for a number of reasons but now that that's come about to a certain extent I think that a thorat arianism will have its own challenges especially in the 2020s and that's because countries like China and Russia will come up against what I call the Sam Huntington trap which is Huntington was a very clairvoyant political scientist and you wouldn't be smart to bet against them in terms of his record and one of the things he said was when you have the development of a mass middle class when you make people more secure a bit wealthier make their lives a bit better if your institutions don't also advance and become more flexible and enlightened and responsive the very creation of a middle class can actually be politically destabilizing rather than stabilizing and I think that's where China and Russia too are going to have their challenges you know in the next decade so we should not despair is what I'll say and and I'll end it with that we should not despair thank you very much [Applause] okay well Bob thank you for that brilliant tour Dora's all of the grand strategies of the world ending with the US mission I have to say taking prerogative of the chair to ask the first question what I heard you describe was a China with a grand strategy a Russia with a defensive area strategy and Iran with a grand strategy but on the US side you hedged a little bit I got the sense that fundamentally you believe that the grand strategy that has dominated traditional foreign policy thinking here namely that the US should keep the world safe for democracy to quote former leaders maintain the liberal tradition of openness whether at sea whether in trade whether needs to be perpetuated but with some modicum of restraint but that's not where we find ourselves on this news day with the u.s. not only withdrawing from the TPP but also undercutting one of the basic compacts of the liberal family which is that we share security but we compete with each other economically on a level playing field now we are moving in the direction of actually building walls within the order so that's one piece of it but the second thing was your advocacy of not promoting humanitarian intervention but nonetheless maintaining basic peace and security so how do you find those boundaries all right let me spin this out of this so and and address for example Syria to lead to care address pushing back on China do how much should we care and address the weakness of Europe yeah the way I would put it humanitarian intervention should always be there but it cannot define our foreign policy it cannot be r2p should play as high role as possible but it cannot ultimately be dominant because it's unsustainable so it's there you should always consider it and it was considered throughout the Reagan administration throughout George W Bush administration it just cannot dominate I mean Reagan with the Reagan doctrine deliberately did not arm the rebels in Mozambique or Ethiopia even though they fit naturally into the Reagan doctrine because of the you know the nefarious nature of those two you know rebel groups so there was there was discipline and distinction even within the Reagan doctrine I think that you know that you know the the new tariff plan on you know on imports the general you know anti-free trade trend of this administration is bad and I think it cuts it reverses that you know you know it reverses the idea of promoting common values I think the way I always put it is don't in don't in don't install democracy but press at the boundaries of of advancing civil society in whatever form in you know all over the world now in some countries like Oman as I mentioned or Morocco you're not gonna want a full democracy and you don't want to inflict it upon those societies but wherever what all over the world what you do is you encourage the building blocks of civil society and don't get too legalistic about it in many places about because elections don't necessarily mean a democratic system I think with your question was about Syria you said so is Syria is settling the Syria conflict and imperative for us geo-strategically in terms of maintaining order and the Commons and a Middle East that can prosper and stay open or is it a humanitarian intervention that's beyond the pale that was one version of the question I want to push you a little bit on the on the encouragement of civil society which you know has been an American principle but what about inside the advocate of the adversary countries what about inside China inside Russia inside Iran all right on Syria Aleppo Mosul Baghdad all collapsed after the end of Baathist rule there and it resulted in mass bloodshed in all of those places where Damascus has not collapsed Eastern goota is not Damascus I've been there it's way out you know it's a drive Damascus has been more or less it's gotten worse and worse and worse but it's more or less at peace if you were to dislodge Assad my fear is that Damascus would become like Aleppo and that you could get you know ethnic cleansing of the al White's an even worse situation for the Christians there I think there are a lot of hard second and third order effects that have not been discussed in the op-ed pages you know about you know about this so I'm very skeptical about a military Syrian intervention what I do think is that when you have four or five armies all in the same area in eastern Syria Western Iraq this is a picture perfect case study for creative diplomacy I mean because um even though it's all these armies together this is not a question that military generals can solve it's a question that historically has been solved by diplomats at a conference at a peace conference or something and what I see is a real dearth of diplomatic leadership between doing nothing and sending in a hundred and fifty thousand troops there's a lot in between that you can do now some of that in between is military but most of its not most of its diplomatic and economic so that so generally and when you're talking about humanitarian intervention there's a lot we could do without sending in the troops and which don't overextend ourselves well as a recovering diplomat I thank you for that shout out that the profession is not dead audience colleagues questions thoughts please such a brilliant talk I just need to know your opinion about the jcpoa which is a very historical document that the United States signed with you on it's the most comprehensive deal seems like the Trump administration is trying not openly but basically not complying to their side of the agreement I need to know what your opinion and what should should be the u.s. strategy in that area thank you thank you I think I supported the Iran nuclear deal in print because I thought it got an issue off the table for eight or ten years and during which time a lot can happen internally in Iran Iran is a very funny system it's not a complete dictatorship it has a form of limited democracy and you know with disturbances rebellions and not just you know and not just the kind we've seen recently but also ethnic the you know uprisings at the fringes of you know of the Iranian state so I think if we were to undo the Iranian nuclear deal not only could they rush for weaponry but the Europeans would not abide by what we did essentially the Europeans themselves you know would you know would start trading with Iran with you know it we would just be a self-inflicted error at this point so it's a deal that's made it was not Nixon going to China I mean it didn't lead to a rapprochement with the u.s. and Iran and it may have been handled clumsily we met you know there may have been bet yeah an opportunity for much more effective diplomacy with you to reassure US allies and in in Israel and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf but the fact is the deal is done and I think you only make it worse if you try to undermine it well thanks I'm willing Bremen DynCorp international first you must have really little handwriting I'd really impressed that fantastic presentation on a little note card you had I was really taken by your characterization of the Belton Road initiative as a sort of manifestation of of China's grand strategy one thing you didn't touch on is what the Economist has been called sharp power could you talk about that as you know how that fits into China's you know grand strategy what do you mean by sharp power is where they are going to other countries and trying to interfere in their political system in putting their students and teachers into University in trying to change the curriculum try to influence the country and the citizens views of China from the inside yeah well what I've seen is in the case of the port at Hambantota and it in Sri Lanka and at Gwadar in Pakistan the Chinese provide loans and loans and loans the host country does not pay back the Chinese takeover the port and then they say let's be friends you know essentially and what you just described goes along with this as a way to use you know a you know a transport pathway strategy as a kind of entryway for wider Chinese influence you know around the world and I think that that where China is having difficulties is in Africa because you can extract minerals from the heart of Africa as they're doing without getting involved in state politics in Africa it's just impossible not to do so so the Chinese may be overextending themselves in this yeah in this manner I you know to me the Chinese are not about are not a behemoth authoritarian system that's destined to win I think that we have to play the role of the long distance runner here you know by remaining engaged by world without overextending ourselves by ryu no you know refurbishing you know you know really you know redeveloping our diplomatic hand our military hand and to try to you know exert influence without necessarily committing ground troops anywhere good morning patrol up from the Canadian Embassy I've heard partners and allies mentioned a couple of times I heard the moderator speak about the news of today and of course US grand strategy one of the strengths has always been partners allies and alliances it's always been toted as that force multiplier against those that don't have that luxury and yet we've seen an evolution in the dialogue towards partners and allies and we hear it to be going on even today around national security threats from some of the closest partners and allies so in your vision on grand strategy forward where do you see the element of alliances partners allies evolving are we just in a moment or is there a shift going on here a foreign policy without alliances is unsustainable for the United States I believe and we've you know we vote and we were at the brink of a real breakthrough with Mexico until the Trump administration I would argue because Mexico had a president he had liberalized a lot of economic laws he allowed Texas oil companies to buy into the you know into the Mexican hole oil industry we were really leading to a point where Mexico in the United States could sort of emerge economically and that has now gone out the window at a time when we're gonna have a Mexican election this summer that's gonna probably bring to power a socialist nationalist of some sort I think you know with Canada there were a lot of missed opportunities along the way you could argue that the Keystone pipeline you know is unnecessarily delayed by President Obama I think that allies allow you a number of things they allow you to magnify your own power they allow you to spread the risk so if you do have to get involved in a military sense overseas you can build alliances and coalition's when you already have allies more easily than if you and if you have alliances and coalition's then you spread the risk and you make it easier to do an intervention without the downside risk I mean one of the met you know getting involved in Kosovo and in Bosnia was much different than Iraq for many reasons but one of the differences worse it was a NATO coalition effect you know involvement in the Balkans whereas Iraq though technically it involved quite a number of countries was effectively unilateral so I think that you know that a foreign policy begins with allies Jim Connors my question is America has an implicit strategy of an open and anonymous internet and when I look at for example China and their stated policy to have a social score like we have a 850 credit score that their people are through artificial intelligence and facial recognition the application of today's technology to to directing a billion plus people towards a common goal and if they get out of line it's it's Gitmo how China's strategy to use technology to repress the people brings a different dimension to what happens to authoritarian governments and as you said in 2020 you thought they would break I don't think so alright I actually wrote about this just a few days ago in the world in post I said that the Chinese are on a route to be able to monitor the certain you know the seek the searches and the sequence of searches that peak that if people use on the internet which means and you know if you think about it if they can monitor the sequence of your searches they're inside your brain it's very creepy you know they're in thought they're inside your thoughts system and that combined with facial recognition and other technologies allows for a degree of big brother-type repression that is unprecedented and it also shows how technology which has been sold to us by Silicon Valley as an altogether positive thing in history can also be a very negative thing in the hands of authoritarian systems I think the Chinese tent you know direction in this matter is leading China from being an enlightened authoritarian regime to being an unenlightened authoritarian regime but I think the effect of this on the long term it will an increase anxiety neurosis psychosis on the part of individual Chinese and yeah and you know and if you and in a situation like that combined with the enlarging middle-class stability trap which Samuel Huntington wrote about in 1968 you do have you know the possibility of an of a crisis for authoritarianism if not in this decade perhaps in the next good morning you took us on a great tour of the world both what's currently happening and then tying that to history what is your approach for collecting information since synthesizing so much of that kind of bringing that all together what's your mental model your thought approach to thinking about the world because you're clearly going all around the world talking to people how do you figure out which information is the best bring it together into kind of a coherent package that you kind of see the world through well I think that I think of geography in the nineteenth century a sense of the word meaning geography is a starting point it's not an endpoint it's just a starting point to deal with history civilization culture politics because what is culture what is a national culture it's it's the effect it's the experience of a very large group of people upon a similar landscape for hundreds and thousands of years and you know and their experience upon that landscape that leads to a language of culture ways of doing things you know peculiarities etc and from that you go to individuals and what individuals have you know have to say because I the the way I see it is 50% of what goes on is about individual choice you know it's Shakespearean you know if you really want to understand you know various dictators in the past for instance like chow Ches Q or gums accordion in the Republic of Georgia or Milosevic and his wife and Yugoslavia it was Shakespearean you know you know you had to really get into their you know their mentalities the relationships with their advisors their spouses etc but the other 50% is is you know the record of history economics geography and culture and it's the interplay of the two essentially that creates what we you know that we see in the world so what I what I like to do is because most you know most analysts look at the human Shakespearean dimension and the idea dimension that emanates from it liberalism conservativism I've tended to kind of emphasize the other the other 50% of the coin last question thank you nina Wagner I work at the Department of Defense thank you so much it's a pleasure to hear you speak after years and years of reading your works and having seen the scope of what you've written on I'm curious to your question or to your points around the lack of a u.s. vision and the state of different powers in the world and some taking on a very subtle form of competition would you mind speaking about the capacity of the US government and the u.s. society that exists to compete and how that capacity might need to evolve yes I think there is significant capacity in our system but leaders have to make sure not to test it at its limits when I look at what to me was like the closest model in foreign policy that I've been comfortable with over the years where you know I've seen the fewest mistakes where I could see where I made my own mistakes and I should have followed those guys so to speak I would say the moderate Republican presidents you know during the Cold War Eisenhower Nixon George HW Bush and even Ronald Reagan because remember Ronald Reagan spoke the moral rearmament of Wilsonian ISM but he surrounded himself with very pragmatic people George Shultz Frank Carlucci Caspar Weinberger and others which modified his own vision and because of the way they modified it as I said earlier even with something like the Reagan doctrine they were places that they stayed away from even though there was a cry for help because they just because the you know because the client there simply didn't measure up to our standards on it in many respects so I think yeah and when you think of Eisenhower and Nixon Reagan in many respects and the elder Bush will you have as a kind of an enlightened realism you know so ladies and gentlemen what I forgot to mention at the beginning is that you can buy Bob Kaplan's new book right outside during the 10-minute coffee break we're about to have please join me in thanking Bob for this spectacular first [Applause] thank you for sticking around for the the panel portion of our event I want to switch gears from the substance of grand strategy into what is frankly a lot harder in policy circles the implementation of national security strategies and other strategies I have a fantastic panel who need little introduction I have Ridge Colby my former colleague the deputy assistant secretary of defense for excuse me for a strategy and force development former Gates fellow at CNAs so welcome back to the CNAs family kathleen hicks senior vice president and henry kissinger chair and director of international security program at CSIS i think possibly more complicated than any DOD title you had yep but also former principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy and the first assistant secretary for strategy plans and forces and OST policy and then lastly we'll and Godin the William powers executive director of the Clements Center for national security and distinguished the distinguished scholar at Straus center for international security and law also former senior director of the Office of strategic planning at the National Security Council and veteran of the State Department policy planning office you may notice a theme throughout each of their titles each of these folks was involved in some form of national security strategy a national defense strategy QDR more than I can count over the last several years so I want to start by talking about when you're a baby walk walking into the Pentagon and you think that's when the president or when the Secretary of Defense is speaking that or they make a strategy or they sign a policy document that their word is law and therefore that whatever they say will just suddenly become so like Captain Picard make it so this as it turns out you learn very quickly when you start in government whether at the Pentagon or the State Department or elsewhere that it's significantly harder than that and that there are all sorts of barriers between the the broader strategy documents that people spend so much time on and the implementation process which takes sometimes years if not decades to see if it actually bears out in any way now if you pay attention to the Twittersphere you'll think that it's the deep state to the dastardly deep state that is the one who prevents a president or his senior leaders from implementing any of their agenda in any form but my sense is it's actually far more complicated than that and has much to do with how the strategy has developed how its communicated out to different audiences and thinking through what that the implementation looks like over the the development process and katz a team actually just recently did a report at CSIS on strategy formulation where they talked about how the formulation process has to think about all of those elements not only what the backroom smokey the strategy development process is but also the communication and key audiences the implementation side and thinking of metrics of how you know you succeeded in any way so I'd like to actually start with that point and why is it that strategy is so difficult in the expel me back this up and my experience strategy is difficult to implement in that you put an enormous amount of effort into that development process but once it has it been issued you are you're a bit spent as an organization you haven't really thought through what is that next step so sometimes you're a little lacking on the implementation side why is it I'd like to ask each of my panelists in lieu of opening remarks why is it that strategy implementation gets that short shrift and then are there teams that have invested the time and energy to actually have successful strategy implementation I shall start with will and I give a bridge a little bit of a break since he has to speak for their current administration okay sure well I'll highlight three particular challenges in strategy implementation and I'll just put them out there briefly and then perhaps we can follow up on some of them in detail so we could be curious to hear what Katherine bridge have to have to say but these the these are stakeholders resources and then events the first stakeholders this gets to one of the the paradoxes or challenges of putting together a strategy so for example when a national security strategy document has been written you know the Trump administration just recently released theirs I worked on the 2006 Bush won there's a trade-off if you keep the process much more tightly held just one or two people have the pen it's a it's a small high-level group working on it that facilitates often more strategic coherence rather than just sort of a laundry list of building blocks that every last you know office director you know across the internet agency sets up and it often can prevent leaks as well so it gives you more protection for deliberation and really working it through and can produce you know hopefully a finely crafted elegant nuanced balanced piece of strategic genius or so people hope but the real trade-off there is when that is then sprung on the rest of the government the implementers they often feel like you know foreigners in the on process in terms like wait a minute we were not there we were not present for the creation so we just don't have buy-in on the implementation I mean again we can talk to talk more more MORE about that I mean that certainly is the stakeholders part the second one of course is resources and you know bridge can talk about this more more recently but again as the way our government is currently constituted even though we have a number of strategy offices strategy documents being put out there still are not enough formal connections between those and budgeting and other other resourcing process not just budgeting about some personnel allocations there have been some improvements there you know that's something that we can go into more more more in-depth but again the best ideas in the world if not matched up with the people and the money and the material and the diplomatic energies and what-have-you for 14 and then finally just just events you know no strategy is produced in a vacuum even if it's done and you know ivory tower at you know some elegant New England University they're always done in the context of a nation's history its present challenges and unfolding events and so you know example I've used before is when we are working on the 2006 national security strategy a number of our components on terrorism as well as on democratic governance as well as on non-proliferation we'd be ready to release the thing and then the Palestinian elections happen in Hamas wins and so we got you know provides that and then we're ready release the thing and then the IC brings out some you know bad news about new advant advantage on Iran's nuclear program so we we amend that we finally get the thing out predicated on a certain certain aspect of our relationship with Egypt it's released in a month later the summers at 11:00 on Wharf summer of 2006 breaks out two months later the North Koreans test a nuclear device and so we realized a lot of the assumptions we'd had about our partnership with Egypt or the status of North Korea's nuclear program for example were not quite made obsolete by those events we certainly had to be radically reshaped and so that's the challenge of having a strategy that's specific enough to address the world actually as it really really is but still with enough wiggle room that when those events change the whole thing isn't completely tossed asunder I will endorse absolutely everything we'll just said I would only add to it that there are these these structural dynamics inside the whole national security apparatus DoD itself but also certainly in the national security strategy development system that really puts strategy off into a corner if you will and it treats it episodically if you think about ppbe you know the first P is the strategy and then you know we we still look at it as these you know tablets that come down and then others move on and the reality of the that is the power structure supports strategists and the strategy making process only episodically and so even the best intended of great idea strategists if they aren't empowered by leadership that's really engaged in a strategy continually it gets lost it gets lost to the structural imperatives in particular in DoD of the budget and as we'll just pointed out at the White House the the pace of events that are happening in the world more than anything how do you see that manifest I mentioned ppbe you can look at hearings that the hill has how often is the hill actually calling people up routinely to discuss strategy and insert of a grand sense it happens from time to I'm typically around the times that they develop perhaps every four years maybe every two we'll see a strategy they'll have a posture hearing on that but mostly it's about the budget right and my old friend Clark Murdock used to say if it ain't in the PAS mandate and and that and then feeds to the bureaucratic element which is we also tend to think a strategist this great defense intellectuals who might descend as we have all in some way or another descended on to the national security system to give it the light of our incredible intellect and often we don't empower that those that community with the same bureaucratic ninja skills they need to survive the implementation stage so with the best of intentions to implement well unless they have that overarching you know guidance and oversight from leadership that says no strategy is infused in everything we do and I ant this is my vision and I'm going to implement it which is why that's so important in the case of bridges strategy that secretary Madoff so fully owns it that really helps the implementation stage and then to the extent that he and his staff are the bureaucratic ninjas or at the NSC that that team are the bureaucratic ninjas that helped to protect the ideas not just the document but the ideas behind it through the process while others have been waiting they may have engaged in a skirmish but pulled back during the document development maybe they fought it to the end but they know they can live to fight another day because they're all these other stages and implementation and that's when you really have to be trained and savvy to work inside the system the bridge you are living this right now and I'm sure your team here is rapidly taking notes but how as you've now finished the national defense strategy of which there's a classified component that most of us here have not seen how are you thinking about reorienting your team and the broader strategy team in the Department of Defense towards this implementation side sure well thanks thanks Lauren and it's really wonderful to be back with my former colleagues here at CNAs a place I have the greatest fondness for and respect so I know that's widely shared within the department so just a couple a couple points I mean I think I think the way that the will and Kath kind of end that work hath ended up I think maybe maybe what I would say is the sort of necessary or the sort of realistic backdrop to strategy is we don't live in a unitary system right we live in a system where the checks and balances are even greater than they normally are in human organizations we have divided government then we have agencies that often that report to the executive but also reported to Congress that have bureaucratic dynamics of their own where people can't be hired and fired it will James Q Wilson great book on bureaucracy is I think an amazing thing here just about the limits of executive power in in the in the government and how in a way it's a lot of it's actually suasion and kind of moral power rather than rather than sort of a dictatorial kind of thing as you might have in the corporate world that's all that's all place so that's the kind of necessary backdrop I would say I think Kath got it right I think maybe we have a good fortune or we do have a good fortune to be working for a secretary who prizes strategy and a leadership including secretary in the deputy secretary who were and the chairmen who are deeply focused on implementation and believe that strategy should be implemented understanding that that even the best of intentions in the secretary with his much credibility in stature so forth his secretary mattis you know that his strategy is is not is not just going to turn into it into reality I would say we paid a tremendous amount of attention to implementation as the as the department's kind of various components collaborated to work together on developing it I think where I would see a lot of the some of the kind of core core balancing act if you will is even if you have a secretary and a leadership that want to give clear direction they also don't want to go out there with the ten thousand mile screwdriver and say we have the how-to manual and you out there in Central Command or Pacific Command or European Command or strategic management Transportation Command here's exactly how to do your business so you have to balance a I think a desire to be clear and provide clear vectors with a desire to just from a kind of principal-agent point of view have your have your components actually be empowered they're the ones who know what's going on and that's and that's you know that's that's a balancing act where we're you know we see things that that in the strategy are pretty clear vectors of prioritization on grape our competition on readiness for high on conflict on shifting the nature of the joint force from the Desert Storm model to the lethal resilient agile ready model well what does that mean concretely it's not like everybody you know people in you know their line I was using something tomorrow's there's no pretense that the center and those everything so there there are genuine differences of view and assessment where things are complex and probabilistic and those filter all the way down so I think in the implementation process one thing that's been very clear is a clearest possible signal from the leadership that that the strategy should be implemented and everything you do down to your performance appraisal should be linked to the NDS lines of effort so that gives I think a very clear signal of leadership by and that this is something that and it you know it's interesting I think it's not a story of you know Mike's a couple thoughts maybe without going on too long couple thoughts one is that the story is rarely I think and I'm curious what you guys think that you know that that the leadership comes in and says that the department's been doing everything wrong and nobody knows what they're doing and here's what you should do rather there's often debates within the department about what makes sense and so often that people are looking for prioritization because in a sense what a strategy can do is give top-level guidance and and cover for others to make hard choices at a lower level and that's one thing I think the national defense strategy is really trying to do is say people down the components know that we need to focus again on the great power competition the readiness for high end conflict and so forth but they haven't felt they've had enough clear clear guidance where they could go out and do it and make the hard the hard calls and that builds on another point which I think it's successful strategies particularly in something as large as the Defense Department or a balance again between transformational and to use a fraud term and evolutionary you know I guess I'm a Berkey and you have to you have to build on things that are already have a dynamic of their own and then the leadership can kind of really catalyze them and accelerate the shift one other kind of point I'd make is a backdrop is I think DoD is different and maybe this gets back to Wilson's point about different executive agencies but strategy is important the department defense and I think the fundamental reason is the department defense has to make investment decisions totaling hundreds of billions of dollars based on what the future looks like a lot of other organizations are basically day-to-day operating organizations so the future you know is out there but today meanwhile there's a crisis tomorrow but in the department offense you're still laying down you know peels for ships that are not going to come out into the fleet 10 15 more years I mean the last ballistic missile submarines of the new Columbia class is going out of the fleet in 2080 that means the the strategy is actually really valuable and in particularly in ppb and II and the force development process is really is really important so will I want to come back to a point that you made in your opening remarks about how those were making strategy and the strategy itself adjusts to events and new contact new contacts and the feedback that we get to it and you mentioned a few events in your experience I remember in the Obama administration as we were developing the second national security strategy we had Ukraine we had events ongoing in Syria we had a resurgent Russia all of these making it difficult to both issue a strategy and then once issued realized how do we how do we come back to some of the core assumptions within that so in your experience like how how to do this well how to develop a strategy that is going to continue to matter that even if events change drastically and to force yourself to go back and revisit the key assumptions the objectives and you know adjust the implementation process in a way that's going to make it relevant continuously rather than just the day at the issued yeah so Lauren a great question I think that the answer your question is contained in one of the word you've mentioned several times there are the assumptions and this is and so I you know the practical takeaway here for all the strategists in the room is strongly encourage you to make explicit the strategic assumptions that are guiding the strategy you're putting together make them upfront as great intellectual exercise but those can also be I know tripwires indicators what have you for the implementers to be watching this going forward because if one of those assumptions then is proven untrue or events events change it that can be a lead an indicator okay so if the assumption is now changed then then some of the strategy could I mean I could give a couple examples of one of the ones that we are working on and this was you know one of the reasons for the Bush administration's you know early early travails in Iraq as one of these strategic assumptions in the early phase of the Iraq campaign was that political progress would lead to security and stability and that you know that dictated a lot about the letter footprint for structure and any number of other things and a lot of the efforts with the transitional Iraqi government the end one of the key precipitators of the what became the search decision and not just you know the you know five new combat brigades but also a new counterinsurgency strategy was going back and revisiting that assumption and realize you know the assumption got it backwards security and stability will need to precede political progress and again it you know obviously in hindsight that seems like such an obvious obvious truism but at the time those things could have been argued either either way and surfacing that assumption earlier rather than treatment as implicit would have helped another interesting one is I'm currently working on a book on Reagan administration foreign a defense policy and they were I think early on even though the first year the Reagan administration was a bit of a mess in early 82 when the reg ministration started putting together its big national security strategy in SD d-32 classified at the time now now Declassified they were explicit about a couple their strategic assumptions about the Soviet Union's brittleness and fragility which again in hindsight seems so obvious to everybody at the time was very contested and was reversing several decades of American strategic bipartisan consensus on the Soviet Union's stability and feature as an enduring part of the international international landscape and so I think the fact that the Reagan administration's surfaced that assumption early and then build a strategy around that of looking for different pressure points to accelerate the internal tensions and so on and so forth and that that also in turn helped the Reagan administration recognize when Gorbachev came forward as a fairly genuine reformer again a lot of debates within the administration not everyone recognized it right away but that they'd had that assumption of the fragility help them Riyadh recognized earlier when you have a Soviet leader who also sees that fragility so again surface the strategic assumptions helps the implementers which I wanted to ask you about Congress's role they always play a critical role in strategy implementation whether they realize it quite or not but are typically not usually part of the development process but a couple years ago in the National Defense Authorization Act they fundamentally redid how DoD does its strategy process gave them the opportunity to do a classified strategy and change a lot of the guidance that went into here's what you need to include in that strategy did that change how DoD in any way you looked at Congress's role in this process both in the development and implementation and can you talk a little about how Congress was involved in this round yeah I mean I think the department's seen Congress is an invaluable kind of partner and enabler and of course implementer as well as it's obviously its own autonomous role of course goes without saying but I think you know we we are all very conscious whenever I've secretaries talk to Congress number of times deputy secretary I've talked to Congress different audiences over there a dozen times or something like that maybe there's a strong interest in Congress I think there's a feeling of ownership in Congress of the defense strategy coming out of the NDAA or I would say ownerships maybe too strong but a kind of an investment a stake in a way that maybe wasn't as much the case in the past and I think a strong clear signal from the Congress of the seriousness that they invested in the strategy that it was going to be a classified document that it was supposed to be more directive internally rather than what some fairly or not had perceived as QDR is becoming a bit sort of christmas-tree kind of log-rolling exercise or something like that fairly or not that I think that that was something that really motivated in the sense that Congress was very invested in interest in this really it really helped the department you know in the sense that again there's all these these sort of sort of almost impersonal forces of inertia that that people are rowing rowing in the same direction against but having having that that alignment within the department but also with Congress has been really really powerful and I think I think now in the in the in the implementing phase I mean I think we've had very very positive response from Congress and in a sense the Congress is asking similar questions the leadership right what does this mean how do we explain this how do we work this out what are the next steps that need support or attention or whatever so I think that's been that's been a really important so Kath one of the challenge of strategies is that they often include an element of fantasy within them that we use phrases like comprehensive approach or integrated approach that sound grates in practice and on the page but don't necessarily have a lot to do with how we implement policy in practice and for a number of reasons our adversaries are able to integrate their efforts far better than we are in cases that you can go back to Iraq Afghanistan and also in the past are there examples of where we actually have managed to bring those that fantasy into a reality and how might we organize ourselves a bit more effectively going forward so that when we are implementing that it's a little more realistic I am only laughing because I swear I'm not going to mention the Marshall Plan what up playing Colombia our plan Colombia so yes I think there are examples there's no doubt in my mind the United States government has within itself the ability and ingenuity to work across the structures that are put in place under the 1947 National Security Act to make things happen you can see the additional changes that happened after 9/11 for example on information sharing and also with regard to strategic communications strategic messaging that required departments to work across each other so I do think there are a lot of examples and they could they don't all follow the same model whether it's a drug czar if you will example or force you know a senior special representative of the president model more of an interagency like a.j of south model where it's integrated I don't think there's a single point so solution that we should be aiming for I think we should be have the forum follow the function but there's no doubt in my mind that in the current environment this is coming into stark relief and the NSS and NDS both of which emphasize this idea of competition with in particular with China and Russia bring this point forward which is if we're going to compete it is now an imperative for us to be able to integrate accordingly given the acknowledged in both documents about the multiplicity of tool sets that are required to be leveraged public and private allied you know whole-of-government if you will and then and then joint and joined up so I think the imperative now is on the executive branch to have those plans back to the implementation piece to say okay and it's not incumbent primarily on the Defense Department although the defense has a significant role to play it's really incumbent on the White House to pull across these various sectors and say you know how does our trade policy carrots and sticks how is our our defense - defense relationships and our defense posture add in our diplomatic presence and of course our messaging which is I think the area most of us are deeply concerned about being far behind how are they going to blend together into integrated action sets that move the ball forward and then if there's a structure organization whatever that that propels that I that's very visible that may be part of the solution I don't think that's required I think it's there may be ways to do it that's largely building on the processes of good government essentially but I don't think right now we've really seen either and I think the NDS and NSS provide that imperative that we need to move regime yeah because thanks I think one thing is I think the secretary is very attuned to this is cap suggested and I think his real kind of core concept of expanding a competitive space one of the key elements of this is really the ability to work more effectively with other elements the interagency and and for the departments and its activities to align more you know continually improving in their alignment with our our political objectives and so forth so I think that's some of the department is really attuned to I think you know as you suggest in your question sort of flagging the problem has not necessarily contributed to remediating it so I think one of the things that I think the NDS and perhaps implicit drivers or ideas in it is that a clearer elucidation of the problem and the priorities should help people to align their activities better that one of the traditional problems was without the clearer top-level guidance about what's important and what's less important then essentially it effectively defers down to lower components and doesn't allow for the resolution at lower levels of prioritization issues which is and how to work together more because that's in a sense what's what's behind a lot is okay where do we put resources where don't we put resources what kind of activities make sense what's don't make sense but here we have the secretary saying 2+3 china and russia is the main thing while concurrently standing strong on the other missions and doing it in a more tailored and effective way kind of over the long-term that's sustainable you know and in particular in that two plus three competition but with the reality of preparedness for high in the conflict so is what you're doing out there contributing those objectives now if you can narrow the framework in which the lower-level bureaucratic arguments are had that should actually contribute to a greater alignment so it's a kind of a there's both the NDS is both sent a circular both saying I want you to work together more and I'm providing you basically the prioritization by which it should be easier to do so do one more question and then we'll turn it over to the audience for their questions so will one of the problems that you talked about in your opening remarks was about how when you do strategy and a small group formulation there's this issue of no Moses coming down from the mountain saying here this is what you're going to do and everyone else saying I'm not quite certain what you're saying what is this how does this relate to me or in this administration you occasionally see that with with tweets being issued by policy what can policymakers do in the strategy formulation process to actually make it easier to implement is is the inclusion of developing roadmaps or agency plans is that useful are there kind of roadmaps that they can do within their own process that and integration with the rest of their agencies while they're coming up with strategy are there is there any kind of tips you can offer from your experience yeah well this is where to you know to give some praise I do think that the process of the most recent national security strategy that the Trump administration released was as far as I can tell about as good as you're going to get with the process you know Nadia shablow and Seth Center that I think they balanced what you needed where on the one hand they primarily had the Penn working very closely with National Security Adviser McMasters he had some strategic coherence there but you know probably everyone in this room probably met with him at one point or another during the process right him and they were just very active in going and going not just across the interagency but also around town soliciting ideas previewing some of the things that they're looking at and so inviting more conceptual stakeholders in if they weren't having people you know sheets okay you know give us a draft of chapter two or give us the building blocks for this become so again obviously wasn't perfect and as you already indicated you know the the big potential breakdown is how much the president is committed to the strategy that his administration produced but everyone else I thought it was a really really good really good process I'm one who's still at the end of they would have a bias towards a little bit more of a tightly held product of strategic coherence and then is to very aggressive diplomacy and outreach with your own people afterwards just because I do think it's so easy for it to get you know pecked pecked into death or you know you know pick pickier bent afford death by a thousand thousand cuts or just turned it turned into a turned into a Christmas tree I think we have some microphones out in the audience and we'll go to audience question just raise your hands state your name and where you're affiliated with and please actually ask a question I know sometimes that's tough in these circumstances go ahead Joshua Walker I want to pick up right where you left off we talked a lot about the way DC does things we live in an environment which is obviously fluid we heard the very first you know Bob's great presentation about this given the world we live in where strategy is more difficult to implement because of tweets and because of kind of domestic and foreign policy how does that reflect into other capitals and how are other capitals coming and trying to understand how they react to it because it used to be we kind of were the center of grand strategy they look to us for advice on think tanks and foreign policy now it seems sometimes we have to look outside the regions whether it's in Tokyo or other places so I guess I'm questioning the interaction between the two of our own internal process how that is affected by kind of when it meets the rubber meets the road well take what one thing I want to just kind of push I mean I've and I am I don't think we'll of us adjustments but I mean I think the president is the only time of presidents ever rolled out of national security strategy yep more or less you know the you know I the president is committed in the national security strategy this administration has a very strong strategic orientation that the president has has supports the national defense strategy Nuclear Posture review etc so actually I you know and I mean just I I see where I think I understand where you're coming from but I push back I actually think this this I would say this administration is actually on is actually unusually strategic I mean if you look at our position on the indo-pacific for instance we are being very clear on the prioritization of competition with China being a reality and cheatin and recognizing the reality I mean I'd commend to all of your attention Kurt Campbell and Eli radner's excellent piece of them in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs saying that our policy towards China at least since 10:00 and men in some ways before has failed and this administration is saying is the one that's saying we have a new strategy and I'd give a lot of support to Nadia but also Matt pottinger and Randi Shriver and others and of course the secretary Tillerson Sectary Madison president but that were basically out there doing strategic stuff and and we are interacting and Nadia and we and then others are interacting on a very regular basis with countries in the region which are when we take their feedback and we're also giving it back so in the sense of you know what's going on say and you say in Tokyo we have a very very close strategic relationship with them which is which is you know a lot of alignment about what's going on in the Indo indo-pacific that we need to get make sure that our military advantage is not not further eroded that that our that we are in a competitive relationship and I think it's increasingly clear with where China's domestic politics are going that we can't hope for a change in their economic behavior and so forth that that we're not looking for a confrontation but we're looking we have to be competitive in order to have have them not not miscalculated our resolve to stand by the free and open orders and the Alliance and in partnership constellation that hit that have underwritten that so I I just I kind of push back strongly on the on the implication that that that weren't that there isn't a strategic coherence to what we're doing I'll just add I think to the heart of the the question you're right that the the we have over time and very apparent I think these days had to broaden the pool of people we talked to things we read trends we watch in a global environment and that the influencers of our strategy our national security strategy come not only from the US and its view of adversaries for example and sort of a classical sense but really from a broad range of trends that are public-private that are originating in other countries and regions and I do think over time the strategy community and I think that's a really a bipartisan national security edgewood meeting it has really recognized that and sought to incorporate into the strategy development process more and more the role of allies I know we I'm sure you still do have a formal role for allies inside the strategy development process there are communities of interests that are meeting routinely obviously whenever any of us travel or when hope we host folks that this is a primary topic of conversation how should we interpret what you're doing how she would you interpret what we're doing the NDP Qi exchanges with the Japanese are a great example but they're not they don't stand alone they're happening around the world particularly with our our partners who are themselves more focused on strategic planning you are I think there were a lot of things completed in that question the other piece I think you were trying to back your way into is this issue of the domestic audiences that's a real issue it's a different issue it's not an issue primarily for strategists to figure out but we have a real challenge where even if there are leaders in other countries that want to find a way to work with the United States in support of common interests they're challenged by their own publics at this point and that puts them in electoral peril assuming they're democracies generally speaking we like to work within the community of democracy so I'm hoping that's the case that we're talking about but they have a real struggle in terms of trying to align with us strategically while we sometimes undermine their own electoral viability in terms of the way we're messaging in particular the role of allies but also our values more generally I think that's a real strategic challenge for the United States it's part of this whole chaos environment that I do believe we're living in and it's gonna be challenging for us to sort of steer clear a path through that if I can jump in quickly this when Lauren Edie picking up on bridge and Kass comments and also particularly your work with Japan Josh China is a interesting example of some of the other other inputs into the American strategy process so again it was early 2006 that Bob Zoellick gave his when he was deputy secretaries and I'm gave his responsible stakeholder speech and some ways we might see that as the and it's a sophisticated nuance speech I want to be active here but in some ways that might be the apotheosis of the previous strategic assumptions that economic liberalisation growing prosperity integration and the multilateral system will lead to political reform and more Pacific behavior by the Chinese and I think bridge is exactly right as you know the Curtin Eli's new article of this is terrific saying that the last several administrations have more or less you know bought into that framework in it was fundamentally wrong so back to some of the inputs here so after after that after that speech a few months later when President Bush asked Steve Hadley and those of us in the national security planning strategy cell to do a study on for the next ten years of where China gonna go work with ice I see on this and Bush's mandate to us I'd written on this before but I thought it was a great mantra for strategic planners he said I want you to look at the lines of our China policy now and then and where it might go in ten years and then come back with some answers to this question what what policy should we adopt now in 2007-2008 so that my successors successor will later look back and be thankful and and so what we did on that strategy review with China is hold lesson what I did in terms of the two or three you know all of our Asian allies capitals got some great inputs from the Indians and it wasn't just what should the strategy be but where do you guys see China going here's some of our assumptions what are you guys seeing with Japan and you know who is most helpful in some ways on this review where a number of Chinese dissidents that we met with both in in Beijing but also also here here in DC and asking them what they were seeing internally with their society and some of these assumptions of economic liberalisation prosperity leading to political reform and the dissidents were the most pessimistic and of course they're gonna have a very particular viewpoint on this but looking back they were better strategists and I think we realized so I'm not gonna say by any means that that strategic review fixed everything or got it all right but for me is one of these early warning indicators that some of the strategic assumptions we were working with in that window we're not we're not going to hold because that's not how our allies were seeing this and that has some of the most perceptive voices inside China we're seeing it yeah ken Mayer core TV producer did the idea to build a 30,000 I want to offer a case study that might prove illuminating did the idea to build a 30,000 man force on the turkish-syrian border result from deep deliberation among strategists to the foreign policy establishment or was it the bright idea of some local commander well I I can't speak for this administration or will I get put verge in the position of having to do so on that topic I will say I highly doubt it just this alone the bright idea of a local commander just given the way in which we tend to have decision-making happen inside the military chain command up to the Secretary of Defense and the Defense chain of command that said I think most notably on both Syria policy and Afghanistan policy what you really see manifest is the the problem we're having making the jump from operational to strategic and by that what I mean is you have because we have a well empowered military system obviously with a civilian secretary of defense at the top but with a strong operational background you have a lot of energy into these operational decisions you have a lot more flexibility to commanders in the field and that's a separate topic for debate but what you clearly have lacking is a state department you seem to have lacking sort of on-the-ground diplomatic presence and an engaged non-military lens from the National Security Council staff so what you get in some cases I think is this may be fine looking operational decisions that if they were put into a broader strategic context and by that I mean what's the viewpoint of our allies how does this fit into broader Europe strategy or other you know sort of lenses you might make different decisions and that's a concern that I have that for all our operational savviness that I think is out there and there's a lot of potential there and I think secretary mattis brings a lot of that I think I worry because these decisions if they're going to be strategically smart in a holistic foreign policy sense need a lot of other voices in the system in order to make sure they're smart other questions Lindsey thanks everybody this has been great one of the questions that strikes me in listening to what you've been saying is the question of time and time horizons when you're thinking about strategies comes up a lot how as a strategist and in bridge you raised you know the indo-pacific strategy and I think that one of the challenges we also often have you develop a strategic document you're laying out conceptually where you want to go there's often a lag right built into the system between laying out the concept and the actual implementation of that concept showing up because you have to develop budgets you have to do all the things for people to actually see it happen I think in the obama administration one of the challenges we saw sometimes when you looked at asia-pacific policy was we had this rebalance concept and we heard a lot of times about what what are what are you doing right and posture agreements trade agreements all these things take a very long time to show up so how do you ensure as you're thinking about implementation that your strategy remains credible that there's enough buy and right when people may say but when is the stuff actually appearing the goes along with this concept that you've laid out sure a great question why I mean let me let me speak for at least about the defense strategy and that's I mean look at the you know Phoebe 19 it's a good example a lot of those things won't materialize for a number of years but they are there concrete evidence of dealing with the problem or not and I think T V 19 is a very good story about the prioritization on major power and I again also that's the shift I mentioned which is so crucial from the kind of Desert Storm model to the lethal resilient agile ready force that is that is also recognizing the reality of the potential for conflict and necessity for serious work to to modernize our deterrent to deal with nuclear-armed major powers so you know that's a very very clear indication you can look at over time the development of novel concepts and novel ways of using the force that would then go along with with new capabilities of course I think concrete posture agreements would be would be one thing but I think you know again it's through the prism of preparing for a major power conflict in order to deter it so you might not see you're unlikely to see huge new bases emerge because those are exactly the things that are that the Chinese and the Russians have been working at holding of risk so you might see activities farther afield more cotton more exercises that are more oriented at getting the force ready for high end high end conflict and so I think those are actually pretty trackable in the near term and I think in some sense as you know I think often strategies and this gets back to my sort of Burkean point that they will be building on things that are already happening and catalyzing and accelerating and expanding and making them more of kind of creative opening up space for them to do to do more thinking and more stuff that's that's on point but I think I think you know the end the esperance is you should be able to see pretty concrete evidence in you know in the next you know certainly with TV a theme but going forward when when when twenty comes out you should also be able to and it should be a progressive story of that shift from that force from the kind of Desert Storm maximize for efficiency and permissive operations to one that's ready to take AG looking and keep on ticking that doesn't have a glass jaw etc and then I think at the you know at the kind of national geopolitical level it's a similar thing what what are we doing on on our you know economic integrity on the on the IP front I think on the political front I mean I think one of the things that were that were you know that the NSS is saying the president of the general McMaster and Adi are saying in the national security strategy is that we are deeply committed to the free and open order we are living in a we re entering a period of intensified geopolitical competition in which we cannot take our power advantages for granted we have to work for them and earn them and we hit and since we have to be more strategic that actually sounds kind of banal but in a sense often strategic means hard choices that are that are focused on key priorities and so I think the main message that we're sending out there if I could put it into a short form is if you're interested in sustaining the free and open order in the face of competition from China and Russia who clearly one of quite different organizing principle and is surveying their regions in the case of China beyond probably and increasingly have the capability particular and again in the case of of China we're in shouldn't working with you now exactly how we work together this is not John Foster Dulles running around Asia creating seto this is hey what works what's tailored what's you know you know what's what's available ranging from arm sales ranging from political engagement dramatic engagement economic activity everything's on the table and we are not going to have a kind of procrustean model that we might have tried to impose in 1997 or something like that when we were when we were you know the unipolar kind of moment but rather were you know that's that's the kind of message that we're gonna out there and I think that people are starting to understand that probably have time for one or two more questions here a reporter from Voice America both of the panelists just mentioned that they the engagement policy with China for the of the previous administration sort of failed selling this laundry it is the high time for the United States the United States to end the engagement policy with China thank you and we're not we're not ending engagement with China I mean to the contrary that you know there's a high level of engagement with China what I think we're saying is that there is a reality of competition that we are essentially understanding how China is viewing the world and viewing us and it has not moved in the direction that that Bob Zoellick and others were we're hoping we're aspiring to but rather is building up its own military powers continuing to behave in ways on the economic front and others that are that events a competitive and and fundamentally different view of how the region and the world should be should be ordered so we're sana saying okay understood we gave it a long run but now we realize that we have to be we have to be competitive and we're willing to work really with anybody you know I mean not within reason who shares their vision of a free and open order of an uncoerced Asia of open interaction and so forth and obviously people can differ on what exactly that means but I think in a sense what we're saying is actually we are likely to have better engagement with China if they see that a less productive relationship with us is going to read down to their disfavor that for too long we have sort of and there's China has benefited from this they perpetuated the idea that if we have good relations you know that things will go well but rather that that's fo phenomenal what they need to see is that they are their interest watch they suffer if they don't engage with us in a productive way and engage with countries in the region with whom we we have shared interests you know some of this is highly semantic and over politicized there is a long term bipartisan us approach on China that has stayed within a range of certainly a military competition since the 1990s at least has been a very clear trend the US has expressed concern about obviously now a point a point of extreme pain because the Chinese military advancements have progressed to and lack of transparency alongside it have progressed to such a level that there they're inducing pain but I think the key question is how if anything can you avoid war right and bring them into that vision of an engaged world where they can be a constructive player and I think the argument is really over how to align the carrots and sticks to get them there I don't think for the most part there is a view that instead we should move entirely to a competition model in which we close ourselves off from China and asked our allies to do the same because it's simply not realistic given the you know the way in which the economy is constructed and the role that China could still play it's about shaping behavior the question is how do you best shape behavior if I can jump in there again with apologies to Graham Allison Graham Allison in his new book it's not just a simple matter of looking to some historical analogies of how have status quo established great powers manage rising powers in the past what strikes me as a historian is almost completely unprecedented here is the fact that the rising power china in the status quo power of the US have sets deep economic linkages and in some ways mutually reinforcing interests there while also having the political and military competition and yeah I've never liked bumper stickers for our China policy in the past you know whether I whether I agree with the bumper sticker or not I just think they is Katharine bridge they both said they really over oversimplify it a complex situation and so in some ways the geopolitical facts haven't really changed of this economic linkages and political and military competition but rather the strategic assumptions have changed about what that might lead to and now used to be the strategic assumptions were that will eventually lead to a nice convergence of you know US and China's you know great partners in both you know you know more or less democratic capitalist countries now the strategic assumptions are how do we manage this so it doesn't doesn't lead to war while also not doing severe damage to to the American economy and this word will be interesting with you know some of President Trump's recent announcements on potentially imposed in some tariffs we may start to be seen some changing facts on the ground dependent where that goes of that may perhaps some of the economic linkages starting to pull apart a little bit too which will then me mean some more rethinking of the strategic assumptions one more question from the audience and I'll throw in my own and visible these will be last comments from all our panelists my question kind of gets to a point that both of you raised on bumper stickers and short handing in strategy I think about in DoD we had the Michelin Man to talk about force planning and any number of other sometimes helpful sometimes not so helpful short hands and bumper stickers for how we talk about strategy and if you each if you have any examples of where maybe sometimes it's helpful in communicating what our message is meant to be or other times where it's unhelpful and then our last question here thanks Jonathan word Atlas organization and CNAs next-generation program so I have a question which is really about the economic rise of China I think I would personally say one should be very careful about assuming that you know that that's the next thing to rely on is that somehow this economic interconnectivity is going to lead a better behavior etc I mean Xinhua just said you know in their own words by mid-century we're going to regain our position at the top of the world you know yesterday I mean this is just after she has done what he's done with term limits etc so the point is that the military advancements that we're talking about all of this the militarization of China it's multi-regional you know position at this point is all based on the economic rise of China it's all built on on that I mean essentially you can fund the Chinese military budget two times over just on the trade deficit with the United States the amount of cash that they've acquired from the world is so substantial that that's basically what we're talking about so it seems to me I'm wondering what the appetite is for the basic problem which is China attempts is you know sees itself ultimately it's becoming the top economy in the world I mean is that something that we should be working on preventing essentially I I don't know what that means to prevent it from it's like such an odd frame for the question I think to a group of strategists because I think you know the question is where do we want to see China go what are the challenges to that and how do we and opportunities where are there opportunities to shape that and how do we get there I think as American strategists we always want the United States to have the largest most capable both military and economy in the world so that precludes anyone else being the number one ACOTA Chinese economic strength if you will in general terms can be very helpful to the US economy thus to our prosperity and our security how do you think we fund our security right it's through our prosperity and to building ties that could ameliorate conflicts leading into conflicts in the military domain so without having to bind to all of Democratic peace theory I think there is a basic view generally held that to the extent that you can show mutual interest you are less likely to go to to pursue your conflicts through war so yeah I would not I would greatly prefer not to have trying to be the number one economy in the world the question is what are the tools that we ought to be using to shape that and surely they involve if you will sticks but carrots and the carrots may be about them they may be about others TPP would have been a great example in order to develop policies that bring us into greater a better position in the competition without trying to drive us toward the brink of war I think that's where we don't have a positive vision today I don't know what that vision is I if there is one welcomed it but I think right now what we know is we have a problem what's good that's the first step we've known we had a problem on the military side for a while I think that's now as I said in very stark relief in you know the timing of this administration Sheamus is right alongside the stark relief of the advances of the Chinese have made we've obviously seen the growth of autocracy inside already a communist authoritarian system there are a lot of signs to worry about and now the question is how do you deal with that that's the real challenge to the strategist and it's not as simple as saying yeah I don't want him to be the number one economy okay well what do I want and how do I get there and I cannot imagine simply having a totally negative strategy of total negativity if you will is likely to lead to the best possible outcome so I would say obviously the United States wants the people of China to flourish and to have greater prosperity I think in some ways the the legacy model was willing to put up with a lot of behavior that under normal circumstances and in a different kind of relationship we wouldn't have tolerated I mean state-owned enterprises favoritism I saw recently that I think the you know that they strengthen the hand of the Communist Party in certain beastin state-owned enterprises I think the fundamental dynamic is there that I would differ with caveny there is this quite market shift that obviously there was people like you know deputy secretary work and so forth who deserve a lot of credit for being early on this problem but there was a lack of clarity and there were there was a significant ambiguity about about the nature of a relationship and I think what what the NSS is really saying and another other kind of document strategic guidance at the Department of the the government is quite coherent on this point is that we are in a competitive relationship now obviously we have significant elements of mutual interest but again the bet the way that the theory that I think that we're most likely to get better Chinese behavior over time particularly as they get stronger and as we see the indications of a more assertive Chinese policy which we've already seen them go through things that used to be taboo like overseas basing and so forth that we need to present them with the right incentive structure that we no longer are sort of hoping that that that kid gloves will will yield fundamental changes we've seen that they're not they're not that's not how they're gonna they're they're going to react and so I think it's a very clear Kohi an approach and I think everybody in the region and elsewhere it's it's something that we can communicate very easily if you're in the western Pacific or the Indo Pacific or the set Indian Ocean area if you're in Europe if you're in Africa the United States is saying we are in a competitive relationship that's a costly signal that's not easy to walk back from this to the military domains the economic demands the political domain so we are going to stand strong so those of you who are worried about whether you could stick your neck out a little bit as the Chinese get more assertive you can we will work with you through however it works across the dynamic and again there's that prioritization saying the relationship is competitive it's not confrontational the purpose is to sustain free and open order without war not just the not you know it can't just be de-escalation only there has to be an element of strong deterrent across the picture and I think that's the message that that we in Washington are sending out and I think people are really receiving did you want to comment on the bumpers to your question oh okay I'll go take I agree with it's about everything my colleagues said on the China economic question so so even though since as the guy who earlier was somewhat disparaging of bumper sticker concepts now let me defend bumper sticker Hamptons look I'm a professor now we're free to contradict ourselves all the time right it comes with territory so the you know the the the archetype for this is containment and the looking back I think the real genius of containment came in in two ways the first is it created a new paradigm for a strategic concept because at the time that you know Kenan comes up with it the early days of the Cold War in 46 then 47 the the dominant paradigms are either fight or flight like when there's an emerging military threat you either go to war with it or else you appease it and pull back and we didn't have this kind of Third Way category of of containing it of active measures to oppose it and eventually to end and defeat it short of the use of military force and the second advantage of containment is it had a political purpose for domestic opinion it gave the American people a way to once it was once you know cannon put it out there in his 47 Foreign Affairs article to understand and buy into our new relationship with the Soviet Union because again it's easy for us to look in hindsight think Soviets communists always bad yeah I think we're always bad they all where our most important ally in power terms and material terms in World War two and so if you're an average American citizen and it's late 1945 you're a paradigm for the Soviets is a little weird little oppressive but boy they sure we're with us and they essentially you know Russian blood helped win when the warrant feet the Nazis that's a huge shift to a few months later go to thinking okay they're now our mortal enemy and we may have to go to war with them and so containment also had that domestic political purpose of giving the American people a new way to think about what is our relationship towards this towards this hostile power sort of a sort of actually having to having having to go to war and finally contain my had the advantage of its malleability you know the great history of this is by John Gaddis and the title is you know says all strategies plural of containment so even within that paradigm it gave strategic flexibility and adaptability you know it looked pretty you know somewhat different under Eisenhower than it did under under Truman and then you know even each successive administration and so that's that's why I will defend the utility of containment as a bumper sticker even if we need to nuance it some when I think will and calf and bridge dare I say it's been grand next up we'll have CNAs president Richard Fontaine to bring us back up into the ivory tower of grand strategy and please all thank our panelists here [Applause] it's a side of things having had Bob talk about his kind of diagnosis of what's happening around the world and the his view of America's response and then talking about how you implement these strategies once devised we're going to talk about fundamentally what these strategies should look like and what the American approach to the world should be you know it's the kind of discussion that a few years ago I think you know would be more academically interesting than it is today today there's really some you know concrete implications about all of this I mean in my view the boundaries of the debate over what America's role in the world should be are as wide as they've been at least since the end of the Cold War as we try to determine you know the kinds of prioritizations of the various threats we face in the world the mission of the United States or if there should be a mission beyond security and economics and so forth so to discuss these things in this final discussion we have three folks who don't need a huge introduction so I will give them a short one to my immediate left is will rigueur he's a vice president for research and policy of the Charles Koch Institute and vice president for research at the Charles Koch foundation he previously taught at Texas State University in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin he is an officer in the u.s. Navy Reserve and a veteran in the Afghan Afghanistan war Toria Nuland is of course CEO of the center for new American security and former Assistant Secretary of State for Europe ambassador to NATO and deputy national security advisor to the vice president among other government positions and quite relevantly she teaches at Yale University's grant strategy program and then to the far left maybe not politically but just sort of geographically here is is how brands who is the Henry Kissinger professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins Zeiss how is the author most recently of American grant strategy in the age of Trump which came out this year and he's written or edited a number of books on other issues related to grant strategy he also served in government as special assistant to the Secretary of Defense for strategic planning so a lot of expertise and a variety of perspectives here on the stage so how maybe I can start with you given your historical writing and work on on this how has American grand strategy atz's been thus far changed since 9/11 and and maybe even a little bit more since the end of the Cold War what are the kind of elements of continuity here and and what's new the short answer is that it's change changed at both of these inflection points less than you might think and so I actually don't think that the sort of first-order judgments about what the United States is trying to accomplish in the world and what the main pillars of our engagement the world have changed a whole lot since the late 1940s and I think after World War two American policymakers made the decision that they were no longer going to define American Security and Prosperity and narrow terms they were going to define it in terms of fostering a broader international order in which we would be secure and prosperous by helping like-minded countries become secure and prosperous and they pursued that vision by doing a range of things that were quite extraordinary at the time but have come to seem ordinary now because they're so familiar so this is everything from you know maintaining forward force deployments and concluding military alliances around the globe anchoring the International economy and so on and so forth and and none of those as sort of the 50,000 foot judgments that that structure American grand strategy and none of those changed at the end of the Cold War in fact we kept doing what would change the theme of the Cold War is we kept doing what we had been doing beforehand and even intensified it somewhat and the more favorable climate of you know polarity and none of that stuff changed after 9/11 there were there were certainly second-order judgments that changed particularly after 9/11 so our view of what the most dangerous threats to American national security and international peace and security were certainly shifted after 9/11 the the amount of military strategic risk we were willing to run to deal aggressively with those problems certainly changed after 9/11 and it changed again after 2008-2009 so there's certainly been a lot of change and if you look at specific policy issues there have been changes and there have been bitter debate so for what we should do regarding Iraq or regarding a number of other policy issues but but what has remained constant for about 70 years are these first order judgments and I think that's what makes I think most people would agree that's what makes the current moment so jarring because it seems like some of those first order judgments not might now be open to debate and the way that they haven't been for a long time great and we'll maybe I can turn to you on this question of the first order judgments and one of the first order judgments is how expansively to define American national interests in the world you know in during the Cold War we discerned a national interest in you know the domestic governance of Laos among other things and we're ready to act militarily to affect that and in other places around the world is your sort of take on the the consistency of that definition more or less the same house or is it different and and how appropriate do you think those definitions have been over time yeah I think Cal is right there's been more continuity than discontinuity in these periods I guess what I would say is that what's changed is the nature of the threat environment so during the Cold War of course particularly in the early Cold War this was a necessary response to meet as America's national interest even narrowly defined in the face of the Soviet threat I think the problem for American grant strategy in many ways is that the nature of the threat environment changed and yet our policies didn't our approach to the world didn't and I think that was where we made a big mistake there was a real chance after the end of the Cold War to rethink what the United States needed to do in a much more dramatic way that still met our security the conditions for our economic prosperity and the nature of our regime alright Toria so how about that so is the threat environment so different today that it should merit this kind of shift or a dramatic shift and the kind of global profile that we have or is it just a different character of things in these these calculations about the degree of American activity and resource expenditure in the world should you know continue on in this rather expansive way that they've been well I actually think we're back to the future so picking up on what both colleagues have said you know I was I was gratified to hear bridge Kobe in the last session say that the underlying principle of u.s. grant strategy and the Trump administration remains defense of a free and open order and advancement of that but as Will has said you know the the rationale for that the enemy against that the great push that had to be resisted during the Cold War was obvious was well defined you could justify almost any military political action as part of that great competition when the cold war ends the great assumption is that we will be able to integrate an increasingly Democratic increasingly European Russia into our European security system that they'll be happy to have the nato-russia Council where they've got an equal vote with Germany around the table and we'll all solve problems together in the China context as Bob made so clear this morning the great assumption was that prosperity and a growing middle class would would also lead to greater responsible stakeholder ship--and and an integrated China both militarily and economically into the system that we had made and now we have an administration that is declaring rightly I think that we are back into a period of great power competition of whether you want to call it I do think it's a form of ideological competition so but what we haven't changed is to go back to explaining to the American people or putting together the comprehensive toolkit to address these issues so from that perspective I think you could very easily draw a straight line from the Trump administration national security strategy national defense strategy the investments that we're making in the military around the world to the argument that this free and open our order is now imperiled its imperiled in a way that we didn't quite understand that as Kurt and Elie wrote we did not succeed in getting China to join up with the world that we made or Russia to join up that's with the world that we made and therefore we need to use all of the tools of national power in harmony to blunt check deter those who want to undercut the order but my concern now is is a that we're not explaining that it that way in a way that will sustain the investment with the American population instead we're saying that somehow we got a raw deal from this leadership that every trade deal every alliance somehow we get cheated so how do you expect the American people to support the investment if you're not explaining it but secondarily we're not using all the tools of power I think it I'm quite supportive of the military investments that we're making but my own home agency has completely evaporated our trade policy is incoherent in terms of the standard American approach which was to enrich our friends and those who share our worldview and wanna promote an open system and to blunt the efforts of those who don't or who want to change the rules of the road and and therefore we are not living true to the moment that we're in I want to come back in a minute to this question of whether Americans are getting a good deal out of the International order and globalization as sort of currently configured or a bad deal because obviously there's a key question of the time which is informing a lot of decisions but before we get to that when just to talk for a second about this idea that of the International order which is you know at the forefront of everybody's minds or the last couple of years you know the the Obama administration was very explicit that there is a the United States is aiming for together its friends allies at an undifferentiated liberal order or rules-based order or whatever words whatever adjectives you like in front of order that would reject spheres of influence so countries as close as they may be to Russia's borders should be free to choose their allies same thing in Asia this is not spheres of influence that is one rules-based international order to which we all should aspire together bridge sort of hit that theme you know talking about the importance of the order although it's interesting that that term doesn't appear anywhere the national security strategy in any of its potential varieties and yet the administration has said you know the officials will say privately well philosophically we're there we just don't sort of use the same words and things like that but maybe we'll I can start with you I mean is this a is this the the right thing for the United States to be aiming for this undifferentiated international liberal order or whatever you would call it and then to do we have the resources and should we be spending the resources necessary to defend that given the other thing that was talked about in last panel which is the rise of pretty powerful competitors who seek to undermine that yeah I mean I don't want to be to flip but it's like beef flip it it's great if everybody gets a pony right but the question is is what are the costs and is it necessarily good for us and sure I'd love to see liberal democracy flourish all over the world I'd love to see people have all these choices that we might like but the question is are we willing to pay a cost to defend that choice so if Georgia wants to be part of NATO are we willing to pay the cost that that might incur on us in terms of what will Russia how will they respond what does it mean to give an article five guaranteed to a country like Georgia and and there I'd have to say we should go back to what our interests are our interests aren't a rule-based international order that is a potential means to satisfy our ends our our ends are our safety and security the conditions for our prosperity and our liberal democracy here at home and I don't see how adding say a country like Georgia meets the condition you know meets any of those interests and a liberal rules base order again it sounds good there's a lot of good aspects of it but not each part of it is worth the cost we have to be prepared to get that so for example one of the best parts of that order something I think we all agree on is the liberal system of trade that is I think being undermined by some of the rhetoric we're hearing in Washington and even some of their actions that's something that there the cost of engaging in trade it's a positive some right this is something that we could simply agree to have more free trade to work with things like the TPP you mentioned earlier these are relatively cost less for us I mean yes it's gonna need the US Navy to sustain in terms of keeping strategic choke points open to command the global Commons but we don't have to be fighting in Syria for that we don't have to be adding Georgia to NATO for us to maintain that trading system but when it comes to a lot of the other parts of that system again I'm just not sure that the you know it's worth the cost and again I think you always have to be focused back on what our interests are and then means are really things that we determine whether they're good or bad as they connect to those ends and I think that's part of the problem with the status quo approach to foreign policy we've had since back to since the end of the Cold War is that we've confused the means for the ends and so we've wanted to fight for those means even when they are disconnected from those ends given the nature of the threat environment and how you you hear this quite a lot these days that the the notion of liberal international errs become totemic that it's it's you know it's something to which it's an unquestioned appeal to this this great good that would justify you know any expenditure of resources and so forth and so forth where do you come down on this question of liberal international order however you might define that versus more of a sphere of influence and then this questions of resources and expenditures which is pretty real so I mean it's if the goal is to have a truly universal liberal order where everyone is a responsible stakeholder and liberal values really are universal then then that was always unrealistic and it's certainly unrealistic today if the goal is to deny rival great powers their own spheres of influence that that's a different proposition and that's a more manageable proposition and basically since the birth of American diplomacy one of the guiding ideas has been that we don't like anybody's sphere of influence except our own and in part that's because we manage our spheres of influence a little bit different than other great powers particularly authoritarian great powers have done but it's also just because you know a little bit of hypocrisy is okay in international politics but there's good reasons why we've opposed particularly during the 20th century rival great power spheres of influence one because if a rival great power could consolidate a sphere of influence particularly in a place like the Middle East or in East Asia or in Europe they could use that as a springboard for global competition and they could contest the International Commons in a much more serious way and so that that's been a basic geopolitical principle of American strategy for a long time and I think the basic logic remains intact today certainly if you look at a competitor like China I think it's quite naive to imagine that the China would become less assertive on the global scene after they had managed to establish a sphere of influence in the western Pacific in East Asia more broadly so the question is can we engage in this strategy of denial any longer and I think certainly as the last panel underscored the costs of doing that are going up we could do this on the cheap after the end of the Cold War because there was no one who even had anywhere near the potential to exert dominant influence on a key region after we defeated Saddam Hussein in 1991 that that's no longer the case today and and so if I would just I so the costs are going up but I don't think the costs are unmanageable and if bridge were still here I think he could tell us the exact answered this question but American military spending as a percentage of GDP is is somewhere in the low 3s today you know between three and a half three and three and a half percent raise okay and so that is about a third of what it was at the height of the Cold War it's a little bit more than half of what it was in the 1980s it's much less than it was even at the beginning of the 1990s and so the idea that we simply cannot as an economic matter generate more just for instance military resources to hold the ring in these regions doesn't hold true there are very tough political choices we would have to make in order to do that and that's where I don't know whether we're gonna be able to make those choices or not but but simply as a matter of national power I don't think it's unmanageable to try to maintain this this denial of rival spheres of influence in the same way we've done for quite a long time great Tory let me come to you on this question about pointedly should US policy be essentially to be comfortable with its own sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere and maybe in other places and to deny a sphere of influence any other great power especially China and Russia so that's sort of the first question but the second one is is picking up on what Hal just said in terms of the affordability of this so how's the answer is in the aggregate it is a economically affordable but one of the lessons the last couple of years is the costs are perceived as falling disproportionately on different segments of the population so you know it is perceived that you know the you know the 1% that serve in the military come from you know not equally spread across the population and that you know the effects the economic effects of not necessarily design spheres of influence but the kind of international economic order built on the back of free trade and the free movement of capital and so forth has been good for some and not good for others and the pain for the ones for whom it's not good is probably felt more acutely than the good stuff so how do you kind of put if the if your answer the first part is sort of yes we should be in that business how do you deal with this second part of making it work for all Americans or for more than perceived it to work now first of all two wills point I think a lot of people can have a pony it may not be the biggest pony but the more ponies there are the safer we're all going to be I think but we'll come back to that on the sternum for an influence thing I think there's a fundamental manifest difference between the way we operate in terms creating Alliance and sticky associations with with other countries and other democracies in particular and the coercive nature of China's relationship with its neighbors and certainly Russia's relationship with its neighbors we actually don't go out and recruit new members to NATO they come knocking at our door we make them go through 10 15 20 year process to be ready and you know use that process to increase the the depth and strength of the openness of their systems and the strength of their militaries it's never perfect and we've seen plenty of backsliding but you know on the on the Georgia point I don't think you know Georgia's been knocking out the door for a long time and the United States has not been been saying yes for reasons of readiness and and all the things that will lays out but from from that perspective I actually think we are currently spending the money militarily and so we're getting all of the cost right now whether it's increased involvement in Afghanistan increased involvement against Isis in Syria and I support both of those things but what we are not doing is the cheaper things that would be equally important in terms of of deterring exposing challenging the alternatives that are being offered by Russia and China so you know just for example on the on the Russian malign influence whether it's interference in elections whether it's buying politicians whether it's coercive behavior in the energy sphere good hard support of our allies exposure through intelligence through an financial collaboration of those kinds of malign activities can do a lot can shine that sunshine which is disinfecting on that on that weapon and it doesn't cost anything like you know the new f-35 and so if we're playing our game well we can do that on the China side there are lots of countries who are either existing allies in the United States or friends the United States who would like to take Chinese investment but they want to do it smart and they don't have the kind of touring and support and understanding of how you can create review processes like our Sophia's process to ensure that you can have you can channel Chinese investment in a way that is good for your economy and blunt the ability to coerce the ability to force default force ownership of strategic assets that you can protect your labor force etc but we need to be out there playing on that financial diplomatic political field to channel this energy and that's where I don't see us involved right now so that also takes you to the conversation that has to be had with the American people I think we made a mistake both in the trade agreement that I was involved with the TTIP with the Europeans and with TPP not going out and consulting more aggressively with States with industry to figure out how we could ensure economic growth we can ensure better support for our own export base but at the same time you have to tie it to the kinds investments we need in next-generation economy that's going to be able to compete I mean we are still the most innovative we're still the best at retraining all those kinds of things we shouldn't be afraid of losing certain kinds of jobs as long as we're working hard to gain other kinds of jobs but it requires not demonizing the world out there but giving the American people confidence that we are still the best that we can still compete go back to a Reagan style form of optimism rather than a defeatism how let me go to you and then oh we want to go to will on this question the Turia's addressing here at the end I mean to simplify a bit you have more or less a foreign policy establishment that believes that the international order is good for America good for Americans and therefore worthy of Defense and including the expenditures necessary to do that you have a president who believes the international order has been in many ways bad for America and bad for Americans and is worthy of significant modification trade issues on alliances and burden-sharing all these other kinds of things so one who's right but but also to the extent of which we're trying to you know mobilize or draw on the political support and therefore the economic and other form of support of the American people you know from a historical perspective especially hell and then to will I mean does the pot does articulating the positive view of all the possibilities in the world work to mobilize Americans because during the Cold War it wasn't you know that we could seize all these opportunities it was the commies were gonna come get us and after 9/11 it was a terrorist we're gonna come get us and that was a real motivator to spend and do things so how much is this sort of positive case of all the possibilities in the world in Americans a gauging them how does that does that do it I mean I think historically if you look it's it's generally been a mix of positive and negative stimuli and so certainly you know the Marshall Plan appealed to Americans because it was it was a noble endeavor to help rebuild Europe and save people from starving it also appealed to them because they were scared as heck of what the of whether the Soviets would simply sort of walk into power and Western Europe via via democratic means if communist parties were elected and of course the final Marshall Plan appropriation didn't come until early 1948 after the coup in Czechoslovakia sort of put an exclamation point on a lot of this the United States intervened in Vietnam in part to block the spread of communist influence and Southeast Asia and in part because it sort of fit with a longer line of American efforts to sort of improve and uplift developing parts of the world so there's no there's always been a mix of these things and you can see them after 9/11 as well I I think you know the really interesting question today and I phrase it like that because I don't actually have the answer to it is certainly as you pointed out in your comment the the elite consensus still exists mostly the question is whether Trump who bucks the elite consensus is an aberration or whether he is reflective of a deeper popular dissatisfaction or apathy and the reason I don't know what the answer this is is that I think there's actually two hypotheses that each have a significant of supporting evidence and so one is that Trump is simply an aberration because he actin did not win the popular vote you might well have lost the electoral vote if not for a few late-breaking developments to a candidate who was basically a card-carrying member of the foreign policy establishment and if you look at the public opinion polling Americans still like all the things they've traditionally like they still like alliances they still like free trade at least in principle they still like having the world's most powerful military and so you could look at all this and say Donald Trump is not reflective of where the American people are on foreign policy at the same time Donald Trump is the president and what that indicates is that even if Americans didn't necessarily vote for his foreign policy which I don't think they did they didn't think that his views were disqualifying and the way that they might have 25 or 40 or 50 years ago and and I think there are a variety of reasons where you can sort of plausibly argue that that someone like Trump's views are becoming more acceptable and part just has to do with with the fact at the end of the Cold War did deprive us of the single easily identifiable enemy around which we had organized our efforts for a long time and part it has to do with with the fact that you know globalization and particularly the entry of China into the WTO has exerted pressure on American manufacturing in some ways even though I think that that sometimes overblown and so it's really not not clear which of these hypotheses is is more adequately supported by the data at that point but I think it will become clear over the next four to eight years and that's certainly what I'm going to be watching well can I turn you on this yeah I think it's certainly the case that that Trump has kind of knocked over some of the China himself but I think it's really we would mistake the you know cause for really an if you know the first in many ways a there was confused the result for the for the cause Americans are I think are looking at the last 15 to 25 years and going is this really worth it is it working I mean Americans are pretty pragmatic they look at Iraq they look at Libya they look at Yemen now they look even back to Afghanistan and even though the original invasion of Afghanistan and defeating the Taliban government and then a treating al Qaeda was successful they look at the last 16 years and say what is this nation-building project what is government in a box and Helmand doing to meet our needs particularly when government isn't being sent in a box to Detroit not that that would necessarily be the right solution but they're looking at that and saying is this actually working for us and I think what was really interesting to me probably the defining moment of the well there are so many defining moments of the campaign right but in a in a less egregiously nasty way but was in South Carolina when Trump went to a Republican state of deep red state with a big military tradition military bases and he said Iraq was a mistake George W Bush was responsible for all these problems and he lived to tell about it and I think that was I think expresses what Howe was saying is that there is a kind of new sense of debates being much more broadly acceptable even within say the Republican Party that weren't available to Republican candidates in the past and I think that's important because that opens the door for a much wider debate now I want to touch briefly on this question of the positive and the negative I mean you know if we look back to the Cold War and we we note this kind of fear of communism and really trying to ratchet up the sense of threat so that we would do the right thing and get America's support for it I think sometimes what happens though since is that we ratchet up the threat we do engage in threat inflation for things that aren't really necessary for our our safety you look at after the end of the Cold War you had the rogue state doctrine and it's not to say I support rogue states I certainly don't it's not to say these are great places they certainly aren't but not all these rogue states necessitated in the 1990s the kind of American involvement I mean you have to do triage which ones are potential threats which ones and not so much and which ones really don't matter and I think that's what responsible statesmanship does is do that triage and at the same time doesn't inflate these things and I'm worried about threat inflation when it comes to Russia for sure because this is a country that has a GDP the size of a mid-tier country in Western Europe its military budget is about I think what 60 to 65 billion which is 10% of the American defense budget this is a country that has lots of problems ahead demographically in terms of its economy if we believe what we believe about the virtue of free markets and co and attacking corruption and how corruption drags down an economy we can't look at Russia and say my goodness they're just gonna blast through the moon when it comes to their future GDP and then be able to harness that for their military spending that's not the case we're gonna continue to outpace them militarily and economically it's only going to increase the divergence between us in terms of our national power and so I'm not that worried about it sure there are there are issues in their near abroad but I don't think that this is an existential threat and I'm worried that that Washington will create a kind of existential threat around places like Russia that really doesn't exist and that does and that that means that we have to be cautious about overreacting that's a great segue into the last question I'll ask on the stage and then I'll turn to the audience to be thinking of your brilliant questions because we'll go there in a minute so in the national defense strategy less clearly in the national security strategy there's this kind of tiered threat and it's pretty new I mean you know saying explicitly terrorism is not the number one challenge to the United States anymore it's great the return of great power of competition which means specifically Russia and specifically China and we got to worry about that and then the second is sort of these rogue states around North Korea and then you've got terrorism and failed states and fragile environments and all these other kinds of things that we might want to do or that we might be challenged with how do you how do you what do you make of this of this sort of tiered list I would see maybe we'll we can start with you is it accurate to assume that you don't you wouldn't put Russia at least or Russia and China at the top Richard are other things are may be explained right I mean I think it's it's it's the right thing to do to think about tearing up what are the the bigger threats on the horizon you know what are the ones that yeah if maybe we'll deal with it if we can get the first things right and then the ones that we should simply ignore that's smart but we also want to make sure that we don't create self-fulfilling prophesies when it comes to China and then with Russia that we don't engage in threat inflation that really doesn't help help us in terms of a talking to the American people about what we really need to do but also I think talking to ourselves about that right if we create this notion that Russia is this big bear it's just like the cold war it's gonna be a return to the Cold War then that's gonna mean that we're gonna take we're gonna take chances or we're gonna do things that could actually undermine our ability to deal with the ones that are really at the top of the list so well missus might be your army well I actually agree with at what Admiral Mike Mullen said when he said that the biggest national security threat was our debt and deficits because I think that our economic power ultimately is the foundation for our future military power as well as being good in and of itself and therefore we have to be careful about undermining that through military expenditures now that aren't necessitated by the threat environment so I think our military spending is irresponsible at the level it is right now particularly with the 20 trillion dollar debt and I know that it's a common mantra and Washington talked about it's only up a certain percentage of GDP but I don't think that's the way you do strategy I mean you look at the world what are our threats what are our interests and what are the means we need and then you build that the forces you don't say what's a certain percentage of of GDP you heard this 4% for freedom argument happening I mean to me it was like well is that applicable anytime through history so in 1850 and 1890 in 1920 and you know today we should spend 4% because that's the right number I mean that and I know house not saying that he's too smart to say that and he's right that we could sustain 3.8 percent in a certain way if we could get domestic spending under control let's say but we know the actual politics of Defense budgeting especially in a world that's essentially a 50/50 scrum politically that you're going to have to increase spending on domestic it's a domestic agenda and you're gonna spend on them on the military and at the same time you're not going to in touch touch entitlements and so if you have discretionary domestic spending discretionary military spending and no cuts to entitlements you get massive blowout deficits that lead to debt and I think that's ultimately a bad thing for us I'll note that the comment of citing Admiral Mullens admonition about the national debt happened before Admiral Mullen walked into the room just a minute ago so if at any point you can Admiral you want to make a comment or a question we'll go to you although it's it's already been raised for even walked in Torrey let me go to you on this question of a tiered nature of these threats and how you would rack and stack these kinds of challenges you know I I agree with will that Russia is playing a relatively weak and very strongly and that it is not in terms of the way we need to array ourselves over the long term the same kind of challenge that that China poses and and even that some of the regional bad actors Iran North Korea pose but the problem is that we are not playing our response hand at all and therefore you know we're not doing it in terms of forcing through the right kind of policies responses a real conversation about their violation of arms control treaties we are not using our own if we have to if they won't come to the table weapons systems to challenge what they're doing as as we talked about at the at the beginning we're not strengthening and supporting either our own internal system to harden it against their machination zand ability to manipulate the u.s. political conversation or the election and across europe our allies are in much more difficult coalition governments as a direct result of Russia's work with fringe parties to raise raise their vote block these are not easy but relatively manageable things to address and not expensive things to address if we would just do it in a comprehensive manner on the China front I think it's a much longer more difficult game and it's a and partly because of the assumptions that we had that a more rich China would be a more globally responsible China we have to reorient the way we think about this including being a lot clearer in the way we talk to the Chinese people and Chuck talked to others about the dangers of a system where state surveillance of the individual is becoming so pervasive that there are no individual rights there is no even set of economic rights are going to be undercut by the way Big Brother the big brother stayed as Bob said is is developing and you know that is a set of issues that we could take on frontally in terms of whether humans really want to live that way that plus president-for-life xi without increased expenditure of the level that we're doing on the on the military side you know in terms of the uncovering spaces I do think we should give ourselves some credit over the last ten years for doing a better job of isolating the terror threats that emanate from on governed spaces and getting ahead of it whether it's in Somalia whether it is the move quickly on Raqqa before it could grow whether you know as difficult as it is to stabilize and get ourselves out of Afghanistan we've managed to isolate that threat but that requires a certain degree of continued rigor but it doesn't have to be the bugbear that it used to be so I would say largely the tearing is right with the exception of Russia not being a military threat so much as a asymmetric and political threat slice I mean I basically agree I think I have very little to quarrel with in the way that the threats are teared in the in Deus in particular and and I take certainly wills point about Russia being in a different league you know power political sense than China but I actually think that that's reflected in u.s. defense strategy where you Europe is still being treated as an economy of force from a defense perspective and the stuff that we're doing there actually isn't particularly expensive even though I think it's quite valuable if you look at things like Eri now called European deterrence initiative and so on and so forth but there are there are two big problems or two big challenges I think and by the way I would say here that the NDS from 2018 is actually not dramatically different from the defense strategic guidance of 2012 I mean Russia has a very different role in this one and that one but that one was also about reorienting to think about great power competition although it didn't use that term and downgrading the role of particularly counterinsurgency and stability operations in the Middle East and this relates to the first challenge which is that it's right and it's good to put these priorities down on paper but the challenge is always how do you maintain discipline in terms of how you're prioritizing these challenges when a lot of the political incentives cut the other way and I think the political incentive to do more on terrorism in particular relative to other national security priorities is always strong it's particularly strong with this president who made terrorism really the central plank of his national security program when he was campaigning for office and since he's been in office so that that's one and the second one is that I think the NDS is correct and the NSS is correct to be looking in the vein of more competitive strategies toward great power rivals but unfortunately I don't think that's where the president is and in fact a lot if you sort of separate the president from the rest of the US government a lot of what the president is doing is cutting against a strategy that would be more competitive whether that's and sort of taking a very relaxed attitude towards Russian information warfare or whether that's in basically downgrading the role of economic statecraft and competition with China whether that's I think the best example we saw this was just the announcement of the steel and aluminum tariffs which are almost seemed almost designed to divide the countries that would otherwise be working to counter the threats from Russia and China because the countries that they're gonna slam the hardest happen to be our allies and so I think that I don't disagree with much that's in the NDS as a document but whether we can actually get there as a government I think remains to be seen great and let's open up to questions just signal if you'd like to ask one wait for the microphone yes ma'am thank you three on the reporter from a reporter from Voice America I have a question for mr. mr. Newland you mentioned that the great power competition is actually ideology competition now so could you elaborate on that the reason why I'm asking because in Chinese President Xi Jinping still claims that he is kind of upholding the liberal trade system so I'm just wondering could you on the discussion thank you I think you can't on the one hand claim to be supporting a liberal open trading system and be changing the rules of the game in terms of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea I think you can't claim to be supporting a free and open trade system and cutting coercive economic deals with neighbors and partners along the belt and road that ultimately are not win wins for both sides but result in strategic assets being owned by a foreign government so you know one of the great strengths of both the Chinese system in the Russian system right now is they they say X and dou Y so I think the question for us is as the national security strategy does to call it to call it as we see it and I don't I think they are threatened by an open free political systems that are threatened by open and free economic systems and they are actively trying to change the rules of the road on the ground and in international fora despite claiming the opposite Patrick after chrono from CNAs thank you very much what a great panel discussion I know you have different views of grand strategy it's been implicit in everything you've said but putting that aside and accepting at least the current administration's national security strategy as that hierarchy that sort of looking at strategic competition particularly with China and trying to achieve a free and open international order or non international order at least indo-pacific that is in the documents of the administration I think all of you have hit upon the fact that the United States right now does not have competent means to pursue so we've heard the militaries being over invested so we're hurting our economics that's that's a reasonable argument we know we don't have the diplomatic political sort of institutions right now to pursue a gray zone competition and a broad competition with major powers and we're also wondering what is that geo economic strategy that we've replaced the TPP with we know where is it when we're going in the other direction so how would you advise any administration right now regardless of exactly how they define that grand strategy which may be beyond anybody's ilk in this world what how do we rebuild those institutions the the economic strategy the the sort of diplomatic political strategy and even in the military how what is enough there we've heard I think sea lines of communication perhaps but but what else is necessary to go back to bridge sort of Colby's idea that we do need a strong deterrent but we can argue over how much that requires thank you well I'll just take one part of that and that would be institutional you use the some of the great aspects of our constitutional order namely separation of powers article one you know Congress can enforce Congress can really try to use its weight on these policy questions because the president doesn't exist in a vacuum particularly on trade I think that would be really important for a pro free-trade Congress to try to moderate some of the impulses coming from particular parts of 1600 and I think that be valuable particularly because I think the case is very strong and this is one instance in which I think that there is an establishment consensus that is worth trying to sell to the American people and Congress should try to do that Toria I I would agree with that entirely and I think we do see the Congress understanding that it has to play its constitutional role you know whether it's in enforcing sanctions ahead of ahead of the president whether it's you know moving on on certain kinds of defense investments etc I think you know fundamentally if you've declared both Russia and China the top of the heap in terms of competition and challenge then you need a comprehensive whole of government then force multiplied with allies strategy towards Russia and towards China those strategies are going to be different but you know in the in the Russia case you want to deny remove expose the weapon of gray zone manipulation whether it's dirty money whether it's dirty politics whether it's manipulation of public opinion or false flag NGOs energy strategy and you want to do that comprehensively while getting back to the question of hard core strategic stability conversations and offering what Russia needs most now which is economic openness to the West as as the the carrot for you know book before Putin's great great gas station you know bankrupts his own country from from under him so I think you could have a comprehensive strategy if you used all the tools of American power and if you lived the documents that you've just put out but it would require presidential leadership similarly on China you could sketch the exactly the same where there there are carrots and sticks associated with more responsible economic behavior where you're working with allies and partners as I said earlier to channel belt road into a win-win direction and to blunt the ability to use it coercively and where you can maintain vigilance and and standoff and more flexibility in your response to Chinese military encroachments on friends in the region so I'll just pick up on something that will set and and sort of its I guess it's an irony of the current age that somebody like me who is long been a big supporter of executive power I now find myself a big fan of congressional government but but I would just say that I think there and I agree with everything that will set on this but the the trick I guess is that there are certain issues where Congress is much better able to act effectively in the current context that than others and and so we've seen you know Congress has been able to prevent the worst of some of the proposed budget cuts from hitting this the State Department which is good they've been able to act on Russia sanctions and really to tie the admit the administration's hands they've even been able to pick up a little bit of the burden of Alliance management simply by sort of stepping into the void in some cases or flat-out contradicting the president when the president does something that could be damaging to American alliances I mean it seems like it was a long time ago but I think was back in January or early February when Trump had that a horrible phone call with Malcolm Turnbull the first person to sort of leap into the breach after that was was John McCain and to sort of reaffirm the American alliance but but nonetheless and I think this is too bad because this is one of the issues where we're doing real damage it's much harder for Congress to act on trade to counteract what may be seen as counterproductive presidential policies and there are people who know far more about this than I do but my understanding is that if you wanted to either block steel aluminum tariffs or more broadly to wrest back the trade authority that Congress has essentially delegated to the president over the past half-century you would need veto-proof majorities in order to do that and trade is a divisive enough issue it's not like Russia trade is a divisive enough issue that it might be hard to get to 67 votes in the Senate or two-thirds majority in the house even in the current texts and so I'm optimistic about the prospects for congressional leadership on some of these issues and less so on others other questions yes sir yeah can my record again a question for mr. Ruger do you believe there's a faction within the foreign policy establishment that has a long-range plan for achieving u.s. global hegemony so it's it's funny you asked that question because I was sort of asked that question in a symposium that the the national interest magazine did on is there a deep state and so I take your question to be is there kind of a deep state that's you know affecting or causing American foreign policy and and my answer to that is is no what we have instead is a set of shared mindsets within the foreign policy establishment and that includes the civilian decision-makers who are elected or appointed and this is something that Steve Krassner a political scientist and Bob art my mentor made this case you know 50 years ago that essentially the president can has a lot of levers that he can pull on he can get a lot of information from different parts of bureaucracy he can decide who whispers in his ear and so the president isn't at the kind of isn't-isn't caged by a kind of bureaucratic element that wants to promote liberal hegemony I would say the problem actually is us if you will right liberal hegemony is is core to the entire Washington foreign policy establishment and so one of the things that I think we should do is is to really challenge that the premises of that but it is the shared mindsets that kind of groupthink if you will it's in terms of assumptions about America's role in the world assumptions about the right means to to secure America's interests assumptions about what the proper historical analogies are you know I think Iraq Lybia Vietnam those are more relevant historical analogies than the one we once we frequently hear but again when you go to most panels like this one and I applaud you know scene asks for having me here today because I do offer something that is a little bit different again I don't think I'm on the 20-yard lines but I might be on the 43 instead of the 48 where most people are we believe in all colors of the debate exactly no again I really do applaud it because I think we have to have this kind of conversation and I'm a good old-fashioned liberal in the million sense which even if I'm wrong it's gonna make the our foreign policy better because they'd have to confront some of these different arguments and if some of the things at least that I say and others you know I see crisp ramble over here and other folks like that have said if they're right or at least partially right then that can also improve that the kind of foreign policies were pursue but I don't think it's because there's some kind of cabal or deep state or bureaucratic set of actors that are constraining where otherwise presidents and their advisers would want to go I mean is there anything more establishment than Kelley mattis McMaster and Brian Hook and and so forth I mean that's the establishment and they're helping run policy for good or for bad we have time for one more question yes sir right here is it safe to conclude that since we haven't included fixing the entitlements problem it's impossible to have a grand strategy so that's a do we need to fix entitlements to be able to afford any grand strategy if anyone was picked up on that and then I might ask one last question there's more specifically you can have a grand strategy it's whether you can actually afford it and it's gonna undermine your future ability to to make choices right because at a certain point you know there's no free lunch and and the bill is going to come due the question is how long is that gonna last are we going to be able to grow our way out of some of those problems are we going to do better than the rest which is relevant for whether people will buy your debt so I think yeah I mean I don't think this guy is gonna fall tomorrow but I think that's why we should take actions now and again the my issue the grant strategies I think that restraint would be called for in our grand strategy whether we were in times of Plenty or in times of needing austerity because it's the right thing to do based on what our ends are and what the threat environment is I just think that the United States is in a position to pursue a much more prudent realist approach because we don't need Georgia for our safety or our economic prosperity we don't need to be fighting these wars of choice like Iraq like Libya in order for us to be safe we should be looking at the as Calvin Coolidge said not the 10 problems coming down the road at us because nine of them will be in the ditch but the one we really need to focus on let me just close with one last question and I'll try to provoke a little thought here that there's a you know I think a built in attraction sometimes articulated in current sort of grand strategy of the United States that Russia and China are revisionist powers that want to change more or less fundamentally key elements of the international order of the work the United States the United States is the preservationist and should be aiming at preservation of the liberal international orders to spend resources and things like that and that this letter polar liberal international law has various facets or domains right so trade or interstate relations or you know the maritime domain and things like that but do we miss something on our own side when we say okay well you know look at r2p that that's an innovation that we support the Russians and the Chinese do not and that is new ish on the Sun of international order and so they are more of a status quo actor than we are on that on trade you know we're the ones right now who are sort of you know putting tariffs in place and and and suggesting that the WTO ain't all it should be and and threatening to withdraw from key arrangements even in law the see clearly what China's doing in the South China Sea is as a violation but they even couch their violations as a sort of compliant with the law of the sea in the framework of the law see and of course they're party to the law of the sea unlike the United States so do we miss in in in our own ambitions to preserve this international order some of the elements that we have actually sought change rather than preservation and where they may be status quo rather than us yes I think revisionism is all in the eye of the beholder and certainly if you were to go to Moscow they would say what do you mean we're the revisionist power I mean you're the country that's been undermining sovereignty which is one of the pillars of the international system for quite a long time you're the country that keeps pushing the dividing line between Russia and the West farther and farther toward our borders and so you know those are fair points I suppose but but the reason that we use the revisionist label is that it does capture something essential about both Russia and China which is that they do have grievances with the current distribution of international goodies they they have grievances with the current set of norms that are taken to be dominant and and they're working in various ways to undermine those and and so if you think of revisionism as a pejorative label then perhaps it can obscure more than it then it clarifies because this is the warp and woof of international politics the countries that view themselves as the have-nots even if they've benefited from the system enormously it was in China's case like to change it and in there and in their favor but but clearly it does capture something about their behavior and their ambitions today toriel anything or will anything that you want to add will is taken up a story last word before I close up here I don't think we can improve on that but just to say that you know the sphere of influence idea may be attractive as a poli-sci concept but nobody's ever satisfied with the sphere they've got it's intrinsically unstable so either we're running an open system or running an increasingly closed system inevitably that's the audiological tension that we're in now it's not need not be as expensive to make our case and defend our interests in that as we are making it right now I think including some of our own mistakes great well this concludes the final panel of our inaugural Mike Zack grant strategy lecture program because it's an Argyll that means we will do it again and so we will invite all of you back to participate thank you for being here thanks for the panel when we adjourn here in just a moment Bob Kaplan will be out there signing his new book the return of Marco Polo's world I have once heard an author tell me that you honor an author not by reading their books but by buying them and so if you subscribe to that you will have the opportunity to do so in the room just adjacent to here thank you again to the panelists thank you to Bob and and to the other speakers here and thank you all for joining us today [Applause]

Channel: Center for a New American Security (CNAS)

Views: 27,146

Rating: 4.6475096 out of 5

Keywords: Defense, Think, Tank, Military, Policy, Washington, DC, Strategy, Pentagon, Army, Navy, Air, Force, Marines, CNAS, RobertKaplan, grandstrategy

Id: JK7fhSn5AGo

Length: 189min 24sec (11364 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 14 2018

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https://youtu.be/JK7fhSn5AGo

Watch this video around the 28 minute mark up to about 32 minutes. China and Russia are regional geopolitical foes under the surface. Russia cannot compete with China economically so they need an ally who can counter Chinese influence

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Original Comment: /r/worldnews/comments/90okbl/cia_official_china_wants_to_replace_us_as_world/e2s9cfn/