World order without America?

good morning ladies and gentlemen I hope you all are well today and you had a very good Veterans Day weekend my name is John Allen and I'm the president of the Brookings Institution and it's great to be with all of you who have gathered here today for this event and all of you who are tuning in via webcast this past weekend marked the centenary of the conclusion of World War one as the historians in the audience will recall it was the armistice agreement of 1918 that would cause the guns of the Western Front to fall silent on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of that year thus Armistice Day and from 1954 onward in the United States it would be known as Veterans Day for all its participants the casualties and the suffering of World War one vastly exceeded that of any previous war and for the European participants it would be the war to end all wars and they marked what would become known as the lost generation and recognition of the millions of young men who died in the trenches of World War one as horrendous as the war had been for all the warring parties America's entry into the war in 1917 largely decided the outcome and saved the Allied effort even so the US would suffer over 50,000 combat deaths and over a hundred thousand total of their deaths on the Western Front and this war would last barely a year for the United States nevertheless America's appearance in the war catapulted it to the world stage for the first time in its history as it stepped forward as a political economic and military leader of a nascent World Order it soon after the United States largely disengaged from that same international order that had helped to build becoming sadly isolationist protectionist and xenophobic with devastating consequences over the next two decades leading directly into world war two to both marked the centennial remembrance of Armistice Day as well as discussed how the decisions and the events of those days unfolded and the subsequent impact that they've had on history we've gathered three top experts on international order for a conversation on the role of the United States and the world both then and now in the aftermath of World War one for that discussion I'll be welcoming Bob Kagan our senior fellow here at Brookings and author of the excellent book the jungle grows back America and our imperiled world as well our guest today is Adam to's the Katherine and Shelby colum Davis professor of history at Columbia University dr. twos is also the author of two recent highly relevant books for today's discussion the deluge the Great War America and the remaking of the global order 1916 to 1931 and crashed how a decade of financial crises changed the world dr. two's Adam it's great to have you with us this morning thank you for joining us and finally we'll be welcoming the man moderating today's event Brookings senior fellow and director of our Center for the United States and Europe Tom Wright and after roughly an hour of discussion they'll turn out to you the audience for questions and answers and a final reminder that we are live and were on the record for today's session let me close just a moment with two simple requests though as we reflect on the most recent Veterans Day and I would ask that each of us make a point both thanking a veteran for his or her sacrifices while on active duty or for those who remain on active duty to thank them for their service and second remember that all veterans all the veterans who came before us sacrificed for us so that we could gather today to have this conversation and though we've moved past the day itself with the inevitable march of time we should recognize that many of our veterans are leaving us in large numbers even as we speak today and it's never a bad moment to show your appreciation for these precious individuals who gave so much for the freedoms that we enjoy today in America and around the world so with that let me welcome to the stage Brooking senior fellows Bob Kagan and Tom Wright and our visiting scholar today professor Adam to's for today's discussion thank you very much and welcome gentlemen [Applause] thank you John thank you all to you in the audience for coming and for all of you joining us on webcast so I'm delighted to moderate this panel discussion today with Adam and Bob on the topic of the world one Armistice Day what it means for today and but also what followed were one that 20 year period and that led to the collapse of a world order and World War two and the role of American leadership and both Adam and Bob have written really fascinating books on this topic and so we'd like to look at those lessons but also take it to today what it means for the role of Europe today for American leadership for US China but I think it would only be appropriate we need to start with the history and so Bob if I could maybe start with you and just ask what do you think the main lesson is of the interwar period and what followed were one for world politics today lost a big sort of take away from your scholarship and work on that and geopolitics well thank you Tom it's a pleasure to be here it's a pleasure to be on a panel with Adam to's for him I have enormous admiration his new book is crashed which is a big making a big sensation but I strongly recommend that you go back and read his book the LA deluge or is it just billiard anyway which is uh it covers a interesting period 1916 in 1931 I always wanted to ask you how you picked those exact dates but I guess it's probably clear from the book which anyway which is a terrific book and you should go back and read it I mean it when I was listening to John talked about Armistice Day and the return and the sort of the end of the war you know Americans had a very mixed reaction to war that had that they had played a part in winning obviously that the war was won by French and British troops the Americans came very late even though we entered the war technically in April of 1917 we didn't get any substantial forces to anything like the front until the summer of 1918 and by that time the you know then the war ended in November and this actually had an unfortunate effect in terms of American attitudes which is the soldiers that hung around in Europe for months waiting to be shipped back home and in that time they were sort of bivouacked in French and German homes and they found out that they didn't like the French and they did like the Germans for some reason and and so when they came back they they were not actually there was no great feeling about their experience most of them hadn't gone into the fight they'd spent a long time training and there was very little in the way of celebration actually because they were in the it was in the middle of there had just been a political election midterms neither the president nor his opposition wanted to give the other side any credit for anything that had happened so and then Wilson immediately headed off to Europe to negotiate and so he did he never took a victory lap and all this contributed to a tremendous sort of disillusionment which was then heavily compounded and used in what was a bloody partisan you know the metaphorically bloody partisan struggle that began immediately I know this is shocking to you to think that politicians would use foreign policy or any other tool in order for purely partisan purposes even without Twitter party even without Twitter even without Twitter yes and so and everybody was thinking immediately as happens after a midterm election what happens after midterm election what's the next subject the next subject is the next presidential election and for the Republicans everything was about winning the next presidential election and the leader of Republicans of the leading publican in the country was Henry Cabot Lodge who would become the Senate Majority Leader chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his number one goal was to get a Republican back in the White House after the Democrats had been in the White House for eight years under Wilson which was a tremendous aberration since the Civil War and unthinkable and he used the treaty fight as a way of doing that it was essential that Wilson's treaty and League of Nations had to be defeated otherwise it would help the Democrats in 2020 and which led in turn to a tremendous sort of insistence that everything that Wilson was trying to do and everything was happening in Europe was a failure that is a prelude because I think it's important to understand the political background to this that Americans then were terribly disillusioned and negative about the war they defeated the treaty and this had a huge impact in Europe and the impact was inevitable because what the United States had done in entering the war was completely shift the balance of forces in Europe to what from what had been at most a stalemate and possibly still may favoring Germany to a situation where Germany now had was completely overwhelmed by essentially American economic and ultimately American demographic power added to that of France and Germany and Britain and so the American role in the war completely changed the balance but when America then decided that it was not going to participate anymore the balance that had been created and the balance upon which the Versailles Treaty was promised was then removed the Americans were pulled out of the equation now you had once again an unstable balance on the continent and a treaty that reflected one balance now had to be carried out in a different balance and so the withdrawal of the United States essentially and we could talk about all the economic and the military aspects of that but the bottom line was the Versailles Treaty which is so credited in by so many historians was never meant to work without the United States and with the United States I actually think there was a chance of achieving a stable peace in Europe without the United States there was effectively no chance and so you know in our this we we always think about what happened after World War two the United States playing this critical role the United States had the opportunity to play that critical role after 1918 and chose not to and I think it falls heavily on the United States the disaster that then unfolded over the next 20 years so Adam you're in in the deluge you're I think take a sort of a similar line in terms of the role of the u.s. after world one but you're very critical of President Wilson rather than of their domestic sort of political situation and as I understand it your argument is that the US had this immense power of this sort of looming potential from 1916 on and that the u.s. basically failed to take sort of a constructive role in terms of working with Britain and France to construct this order do you sort of see things sort of similarly to Bob in Germany and also address it if you have a totally different sort of lesson from that period as well please talk about that but I've just interested also in in trying to tease out some of the differences maybe on where the blame lies in the 20s for that application of US leadership yeah no I mean nineteen thank you very much and it's an absolute delight to be here Brookings is a legend and it's delightful to be on a platform with the famous blue backdrop and to be alongside Bob and Tom is really is a delight so very very happy to be here and on this occasion in particular of course I was thinking about World War one because I I wrote a book about Nazi Germany and thinking about not to Germany led me back to the war and the argument of the book about Nazi Germany was that the United States was pivotal to driving Hitler's aggression in the sense that the United States was the looming force in global politics from the 1930s onwards already the economic power of the United States even in a situation of depression with the promise of fordist mass production transforming the material circumstances of everyone's lives is deeply saturating European and Asian political and social culture at this moment all of this was in the background so is it were the shadow of American power hangs over Europe and my read was the National Socialism was not Hitler's movement in its aggression was a reaction to that threat of course in his case suffused with anti-semitic conspiracy theories which have attached themselves to American power for longer than were my credit this is a long-standing idea that American power reflects the influence of the world Jewish conspiracy and in the book I wrote about world war one what I wanted to do was write the prequel to that and to understand whether it was really true the European that politics more generally across the world power politics had come to revolve around the United States and I do think that 1916 is an extraordinary moment in that respect because it's obviously an American presidential year and for the first time in history the attention of the world was focused on the outcome of an American presidential election this is so for the follow at the century and more that has followed we take this for granted I was saying earlier today that in Berlin ten days ago there was a concept there were two conceptions of the world plan a and Plan B and it hinged on the outcome of the American midterms that's literally the basic structuring question for German foreign policy and after the American midterms they probably don't still don't know what world they're in that reality of everyone's decisions being conditioned on the outcome of American democratic processes stems to 1916 if you think about the mass of historical literature that we have on the outbreak of World War one in 1914 in the July crisis America features nowhere however long the book and it could be a thousand five hundred two thousand pages America the trauma the diplomacy of William Jennings Bryan a Secretary of State is an irrelevance to 1914 it wasn't until the 1890s that the British became the first European power to actually install the full embassy on Embassy Row in Washington DC up to that point America was such a peripheral irrelevance the global affairs that you could do with the consulate so quite the world.we orientates around the United States and I do think it does so quite spectacularly whether you look at decision making in Imperial Japan or the insurgent nationalists in China or the French Republicans trying to figure out whether they can make the French Republic survive or the British Empire trying to figure out what future it will have in the 20th century or indeed in Germany everyone's can decision making in the final phases of world war one is conditioned by some idea about how they're going to relate to the United States and we shouldn't be too pessimistic I think about the outcome of the war and the way in which it ended particularly we shouldn't fall into the trap of contrasting it negatively with the end of World War two which many people think of as being the liberal war where we learned the lessons and we should be cooperative with each other and out of them came European integration and then contrast that darkly with what happened in 1918 that's about as much the inverse of reality as we could possibly imagine the extraordinary thing about 1918 in a sense is that it was ended through negotiation this is a total war with tens of thousands of men dying every week in the major battlefields and yet the European states in the United States found it within themselves even as the shooting was going on in those final battles of 1918 as those chair was saying those 50,000 Americans they died in a space of about six well they don't space of two to three months even as killing on that scale is going on like entire Iraq war campaigns compressed into a single week the politicians and diplomats are finding it within themselves to negotiate and what enables that is module Wilson and it's hugely controversial at the time Woodrow Wilson starts unilateral it's not Twitter but it's telegraphed diplomacy with Berlin in the first week of October just as the American army is going into intense fighting in northern France and the reaction of the insurgent and the resurgent Republicans who are going to win those midterms in the first week of November is to impeach Wilson for betraying the American soldier who's fighting in the field and without the cooperation of the British in the French without communicating with them the American soldiers are fighting alongside British and French troops with British and French equipment this isn't World War two American soldiers in World War one fight with French equipment not the other way around over the heads of London and Paris Wilson is negotiating on his peace terms with Germany and it's out of that process that we get to the Armistice of the 11th of November contrast with 1945 at torque out where the war ends when there is literally no living German no living German between the advancing Red Army and the American GIs so messy is the battlefield on which they meet that it takes them three days to clean it up satisfactorily for Time magazine and time Life magazine to be able to take photos because what the German retreated German army had done is blown up a bridge including women and children in a convoy and the scene was of that of mangled civilian devastation where the Russians and the Americans met in 1945 in 1918 it's a emerging America German democracy which negotiates this peace that the result of the subsequent visa negotiation should be disappointing I think is the last thing that should surprise us it's it's evident that it's evident that it will be disappointing because that kind of negotiated peace out of the Maelstrom the horror of a war consuming tens of thousands of lives every single week has to be based to some degree on illusions you have to be kidding yourselves about what you're going to get out of this otherwise you never get to that moment of actually ending the fighting you you simply wouldn't need that element of illusion compounded by the fact and this is to exculpate the Americans if you like that the expectations of every single power in the world a focused on a matter and they're not compatible with each other some people are going to end up devastatingly disappointed by the confused and the Americans managed to disappoint everybody which does take a certain amount of failure on the American part but that this should be a disappointing conclusion should not distract us from the fact that the war ended and it war ended without the total annihilation of Germany and that I think would be the next point that I would make in defense of 1918 and is that is that the peace itself is not the act of savagery that it's sometimes made out to be and certainly not the act of savagery that the reality of peacemaking after 1945 was the way in which the difficult ethno-political landscape of Eastern Europe after 1945 is resolved is by means of the ethnic cleansing of 13 million Germans 13 million Germans this is larger than the Pakistani India transfer it is at least as murderous 13 million Germans up earth after 1945 so as to create the ethnically homogeneous states of Poland and Czechoslovakia that will become the foundations of a peaceful order in the Cold War period under Soviet hegemony none of that kind of violence is contemplated in 1918 the fundamental sovereignty of Germany to the agony of Germany's politicians who have to exercise it remains intact infringed of course hemmed in subject to conditions but the ultimate agony for the Germans in June 1919 is they have to sign this peace no one expected Konrad Adenauer to sign the peace that ended World War two there was no peace that Germany could sign he was a installed government in the Western zone after all of the dirty work had done were being done in 1919 the German politicians are asked to sign their own evisceration as a state yes absolutely this would have been a much more stable structure if the United States had stayed in place and one should then add that this is a chain reaction because America pulled back Britain pull back to Britain's commitment to France was conditional on America's commitment to Britain why did it have to be because Britain's only weapon was the blockade that's its most powerful weapon and the blockade is dangerous for Britain if it doesn't have the cooperation of the Americans because it's what leads to the alienation between Washington and London in the course of 1915 and 1916 British power is a smothering naval blockade which could only be implemented alongside the American said the Americans won't cooperate then it's not safe for Britain to commit to France and so Britain pulls back too and that leaves tribes in a position where it can only seek security by means of aggression towards Germany which is the the fundamental driver why does America pull back you could adduce the politics the the extreme partisanship the one can make a case I think for this as a moment in the long troubled history of American partisanship of an extreme it's the moment where the Democrats are associated with Bolshevism for the first time where you get an association between the Democratic Party and leftism that it's extremely dangerous for American political DNA from that moment onwards I would reduce structural causes as well that need to be part of the consideration here the American state is just not ready to wear bear the weight of global hegemony and what is the fundamental indicator of this it's the tax base it's the fiscal apparatus the key issue in the negotiations with the Allies and the Germans and the Americans after World War one what least the fundamental one that's burns most slowly and most agonizing these reparations British and French demands for reparations from the Germans are conditioned by the claims for dollar repayment being made by America America cannot forgive the into a lie debt so-called easily after World War one because they constitute one third of the total debts of the United States so in modern terms it would be a matter of trillions of dollars that the Britain and France Oh to the United States this is a pre big government a very confederal government it's not the government of the 19 of 1945-46 we're in the hugely inflated apparatus of New Deal America you can hide the Marshall Plan as a relatively small element of American government expenditure in 1919 it's front and center and America furthermore has financed the war by massively progressive taxation which Americans were paying extraordinarily high tax rates in 1918 1919 so the Republican backlash is a political backlash against Wilson it's also a political economic backlash saying this kind of craziness has got to end ten years ago income tax was unconstitutional in the United States now I'm paying a marginal tax rate of 65 to 70 percent this has got to end and melon's program and the Republican administration is indicative of where that's going to go a scaling back of government a scaling back of tax and all of that makes it extraordinary difficult for America to do the deals that the big government the New Deal apparatus of the post 45 period can do with such extraordinary finesse after World War two yeah I mean that the war debt issue is a critical issue and it's a couple of things just to just to add to Adams story when one is when the United States began lending this money as a government as opposed to it has been private Americans had been lending huge quantities of money before the United States entered the war but as soon as you Knights entered the war Congress passes I think a three billion dollar loan to the Allies and the on the floor of Congress the the people who are arguing for this for this loan are saying this is a substitute effectively for American troops this will help them fight for us and I there are even congressmen saying and we don't even care if we ever get paid back because what this is doing is it's making it unnecessary for American boys to die overseas so let the Europeans die will loan them the money to fight the war well needless to say when the war is over that's no longer operative and Americans are just saying now and I the only thing I want to is operative is in the minds of the Europeans no no it's okay they can do that math too like my son died and they why did I pay taxes today as you know the French many times say you know we paid in blood so you can afford to pay in dollars uncle and now it's it's also true that I I don't want it I don't think you mean to but I don't want to leave the impression that Americans had no choice about this Republican policymakers who then were in charge chose not to make certain kind of sacrifices they didn't want to run a big budget deficit because they were witnessing budget deficits that had never seen before and they did want to lower taxes and do all those other things that were typically and by the way they wanted to raise tariffs because I was a terrific traditional Republican policy which also made it harder for the Europeans to earn the dollars necessary to pay back the war debts I mean they did everything they possibly could to make this impossible but the major financial institutions of the time and the major bankers of the time JP Morgan was saying you've got to forgive the debt otherwise you're gonna choke off the international economic system you know that stuff much better than I do but but most of the people as far as I know who were actually in the banking community wanted to at least you know postpone payment of the debt I mean I would absolutely not deny the importance of choice but you have to imagine the choices as constrained as the choices are in the American political system today America is a system built of checks and balances it's built on a system of federal representation of local interests it's an extremely divided entity both in partisan terms and in terms of its political economy the interests of Wall Street are not the same as those of middle America and so the question of the ability of American to govern and to act as a hegemon depends on American political forces developing a package that works at moulten several different levels at once right this is the thing you can you break the logjam in several different places at once otherwise you the American system is going to be haphazard you'll be lucky sometimes but the rest of the time it's a recipe for incoherence and what you do have to credit Wilson with in his so-called new freedom agenda devised by Brandeis before 1914 is a kind of New Deal vision light but it was coming out of the convulsions of the post reconstruction period of the crisis of the 1890s the extraordinary upsurge of the first populism and the American Democratic Party with William Jennings Bryan running very close on the presidency of 1896 who would have taken America out of the gold standard and what the Democratic Party is trying to put together is an agenda that would combine increased taxation at home reduced tariffs a rebalancing of the political economy of America the struggle in 1916 and about keeping America out of the war is a struggle over whether or not the White House or JP Morgan controls American policy because it wasn't just ordinary Americans who lent money to to the to the European combatants it was JP Morgan which was the dominant force in Wall Street at the time out of whose offices European war contracts were being organized in 1916 greater than the total exports of the u-19 6:19 States in 1913 so that one private corporation with the British Empire the French Empire and the Russian Empire acting from the other side was doing a kind of public-private partnership to mobilize the United States economy against the wishes of the White House and the Fed emerges precisely out of this struggle in the United States going back to the 1890s who actually controls the money power in America all of these kind of issues are at play the first thing that Wilson does after he's re-elected in November 1916 is to get the Fed to issue a memo to Wall Street saying we no longer approve of issuing new private loans to the auntaunt which would have strangled Britain and France but for the German decision to go for u-boats the point I'm trying to make is yes there is agency at an individual level but given the complexity of America's political economy it takes a movement it takes a coherent package like the Reagan and market agenda which moves lots of different pieces of the pie simultaneously it's an electoral strategy or regulatory strategy it's a macroeconomic strategy it's a grand strategy in terms of defense just that you out but I do an impressive thing okay and I want to press you both on one thing but because I think this is I mean I actually think this is interesting touching because the thing that historians always have to weigh is how much of something is structural and how much of it are decisions that that actual people make and of course the answer is it's always both and so it I don't think there's any question that the difficulties you're talking about existed and by the way exist again and I think it's likely that the aberration was the period when these problems were building not just the New Deal but the whole post-world War two American approach to the world could be something that we are generally incapable of but we did at that time but that's but but I also just want to say if the league if the United States if the Senate had approved the treaty and entering the league which it could have it really was largest decision whether that was going to happen or not and he decided it was in Republican political interest not to it the question is if it had approved that would some of these things have been easier to grease and make possible because you are talking about an environment where the United States had basically said we are out which then of course allow some of these forces to play to run through it can i yes starting to play the role of moderator we should play the role of discussion great but but both of you basically here and in your in your writings argue that the US could have played this World War two role potentially after World War and that was a big mistake but after World War two the United States did have this broader role of leadership and what's interesting to me is that in 1945 and 46 it completely fell flat right so the United States was thinking about providing an interest-bearing loan to the UK in the winter of 1945 it was immensely unpopular in Congress there was huge opposition in 1946 the u.s. wanted to play this larger role in Europe there was enormous opposition there was great demands to come home I think Averell Harriman said Americans just want to come home and drink coke and don't want to do anything and the rest of the world and what changed was a role of communism and it was a threat of the Soviet Union and that's what greased the wheels of Marshall Plan and alone to the UK and troop deployments around the world and so my question is you know yes structural factor is New Deal's state capacity are all facilitating contributing factors and but Bob you know you've written in the jungle grows back that this American that order is sort of an unnatural position for any country to play and that it's an aberration and that we shouldn't really expect it and so I guess my question to both of you is is that unreasonable should we be surprised at all about the u.s. role after World War one because there was no overarching threat you know there was no state yes through the threat of disorder and of chaos and needing to build a better world that's all was there but there was no existential threat and in the absence of that and I guess that's sort of the pivot to today as well you know will the u.s. just act like any other normal country and look out for its own interests and have a more minimalist approach on the world but I don't wanted to start and then Bob well III do agree that that we need a new benchmark against which to judge what is normal right that's the basic question here history may not be a terribly good guide because it's so extreme like we've had extraordinary wild oscillations somebody interested me in the economy I tend to come back to that as one of my organizing ideas and that really tells you that despite the political retreat from Europe that we saw in 1919 1920 the problem of interconnection just doesn't go away because on the contrary American muddy floods into Europe in the 1920s there is a profound interconnection also for come American commodity exports at the time because that is what America exports through the 1950s depend on those large European than those rich European markets and that surely is the question also in the present day you know what is the level of interconnectedness what is the level of systemic interconnectedness that to some extent necessitates action by the United States in its well understood and you know widely understood self-interest in the sense of it's an enlightened conception of American self-interest and I think there we have to conclude surely the the levels of communication the levels of economic interconnection are simply so large that a comprehensive retreat a kind of island America kind of conception is is is is naive it was naive in the 1920s it was naive it would have been naive after 1945 and it would be holy so today I mean no economy no group and this is a highly unequal story so we should be explicit American business we should be quite clear about this American business and the Americans fortunate enough to have a share of its profits and wealth have benefited enormously from globalization there is no question at all that they are the big winners certainly not the Europeans and so the measure of how far America needs to go needs to be I think benchmarks against that one can raise the security issue too one can't run raise broader issues of political ideology and how extensive and universal the claims of liberalism necessarily need to be can we tolerate certain sorts of abuse around the world given our own commitments but just from a strictly functional point of view the economy would tell you that this is a graph and ascending graph and ascending line of interconnect which particularly in its immediate region with regard to NAFTA for instance but also across the Atlantic and into large parts of East Asia now give America truly an existential interest in some kind of stabilizing role now that I think is where to me the argument needs to start what is our what is our benchmark and how do we avoid the conclusion from the economic side that the interdependency is massive well well just again I don't you know if you again look at it look at the historical record after World War one I think that all Americans in positions of responsibility agreed what America wanted in Europe after World War one from Wilson to Charles Evans Hughes and Herbert Hoover they all knew that what they wanted was a stable Germany that could become a good market for the United States again this was certainly in Britain's interest and sort of the revival of the European economy which depended on preventing on the one hand Bolshevik Revolution and on the other hand a return to the kind of right-wing conservative ISM of the past that was in their interest and you could read any number of documents where they where they make it clear that they understand perfectly well what their interests are however in order to fulfill those interests they would have to do things that they were essentially forbidden by Congress from doing and that leads for instance to you know instead of stopping the French for instance from invading the roar to pet to punish the Germans for not paying reparations which we could have done that we were taking a neutral stance on that I would say the Ruhr invasion in 1923 was probably in a it's certainly if not was not the beginning of the end of German democracy it certainly sowed the seeds for the unraveling of German democracy and ultimately gave a big boost to right to the right-wing forces and America's failure to do that because there were certain things we would not do even though we knew what our interests were and so that's what concerns me now we can perfectly well understand what an interest we have in a globalized world but if it requires us to do the things that we've already told ourselves we're not going to do and that be as much as you know preventing an intervention somewhere or it could simply mean caring about what's going on in Europe because we didn't want to do that either in the 1920s you can have a big mismatch between what your obvious interest and acknowledged interests are and what you're willing to do this to preserve that's a good pivot I think to the to the present day and Adam in your in your book in the two books values and crafts one of the things that sort of there's a common theme in both which is sort of interesting is you you posit that if you looked at the world in 2012 or 2013 one would think that the effects of the financial crisis were very limited right that the populist wave had been overcome Obama had been reelected the bailouts had gone through recovery had started and down who's you you sort of say the same point in 1928 you know then in 1928 Hitler looked at the US and the world and was despairing that you know that this the the Trotsky things the other you've Trotsky Churchill and and and Hitler's three people who look at the world and are very optimistic Churchill basically thinks Churchill is optimistic about America and the other two are pessimistic but optimistic about America right they they think the us hope that grow horrified yeah horrified by American power but believing that it's sort of working at and and and and and one of the one of the things you say is that you know everything sort of depends on what comes next right and things can get better and then they can get worse with that same effect and so we're sort of seeing that obviously you know play out a little bit today and part of it in the United States a part of it is also what's happening in China and Russia and one could possibly say that those countries were looking at the u.s. not as a country in decline but as a country with looming potential you know that they worried about what America will mean and so my question to both of you is you know what part are you know how worried should we be today by the deterioration in the geopolitical situation and what are the historical parallels or now that we could that we could that we could draw and where does this where do you think what are the range of futures and that we're potentially facing in terms of the best case and worst case scenario at Bob do you want to start on this one well I don't start because I mean in our in where we were we had a conversation this morning in which you said something which I should understand but didn't understand as well until I heard you say it which is that the the growth of China of the Chinese economy is something that's brand new in the world it's unprecedented in terms of its scope and its impact on the rest of the globe I suppose you could say maybe the growth of the American economy was similar in the latent from the late 19th century on which did by the way changed the whole structure of the world and because otherwise I would say look there's a Russia there's a Germany there's a Europe there's a you know if China is now where Japan was you know a lot of the situations are familiar and therefore you can go back and find the appropriate historical analogy I mean if you look at what happens you know if you take things beyond 1928 well yeah you have the Great Depression but if you'd have the Great Depression and a stable geopolitical environment you might have been able to work through the Great Depression but what really is happening and this is where I think you know at some point economics gives way to force as the determining factor of history you know it's when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and the world proves it doesn't that it won't do anything about that which I think encourages you know Mussolini in 1935 which I think encourages etc etc and you have this cascading you've moved from an unstable economic system to an unstable geopolitical sense and economics cash and then total mobilization and the Soviet Union the United States aside the outcome right a factory exactly and but you could also say and you know then of course you have a geopolitical situation which is unraveling at the same time that you have global economic meltdown you know and so but I just to me I'm I'm constantly unfortunately worrying about the next you know the next shoe to fall and the next shoe to fall is not an economic shoe it's a it's a geopolitical shoe whether it's something that the Chinese do in in East Asia whether it's something that the Russians do along their borders or whether it's something that we're not even thinking about yet India Pakistan who knows what it is which then begins the sort of grand unraveling so that's that's the way I tend to look at it but the thing I don't factor into that which you do is this utterly new phenomenon of the Chinese economic I mean I'm reading your book this morning I really think you should go get it and read it that's great and what I particularly loved about it is the way in which you insist that international order is a contingent product of peculiar historical circumstances so a key condition for the rise of British power in the 19th century was the debilitation of all of the classic gunpowder empires of Eurasia a key element of that is the decline of the Indian empires the Mughal Empire and the weakness of China at the time and this is a precondition for the emergence of Britain this tiny little island which had you know prior to that not really figured anywhere except in the Shakespearean imagination of the center of the world like suddenly emergence as this dominant power and that in turn then opens the door and sets the stage for the United States which also operates in that space on the basis of a of a British power and you know on the anniversary on the Armistice Day of 1921 the Republican administration welcomes the world to Washington for the first time for the grand naval conference which will define that new order and it establishes the parity of five five three and a half one and a half one and a half for the navies of the United States Britain Japan Italy and France and that is the new order that is taking shape nested within the British within the British order so I do think thinking about our present moment a central element of our thinking has got to be an awareness that that 18th century ellipse the ellipse that opened in the 18th century with the decline of China in India anachronistic terms it's at least as far as India concerned but the decline of the great Asian powers that that that that ellipse is now closing we are no longer in that space and so the question of power hegemony has to be posed against that batch of in diagnosing it I would go back to what I was trying to sketch earlier on which is that the question of American power is the question of the articulation of its different elements because America has enormous enormous potency at lots of different levels at the political cultural level it's in a despite at all it's an attractive political culture at its best it has enormous military a-hat undisputedly it has huge economic power still and the dollar remains utterly pervasive in international finance the question at the current moment is how those different bits are articulated with each other either in the United States itself or in relation to the key fault lines and the key crisis areas of the world I see absolutely nothing like the kind of coherent synthesis that we saw from Wilson or even the 1920s Republicans which god bless them had a disarmament private finance kind of model all the New Deal although the Reagan era model of American power nothing of the sort appears to exist currently in this town and without that the way in which those vectors of power operate and then intersect with the massively complex regional tensions of East Asia is hugely unpredictable and it's not clear whether the American political system at this moment has the capacity to re synthesize something like a coherent a coherent foreign policy so what can you unpack that a little bit I mean there is a I mean there is a view right there is a idea which is a traditional post-war idea of prolonging preserving the status quo the Alliance system in Asia in Europe you know encouraging China's rise as long as it's not aggressive or sort of in foreign policy there's a little bit of rethinking of that now and the economic side but it's not I think you know there may not be alternatives but there is a very clear sort of American view of international order so I guess my question is you know with this unprecedented rise of China what are you suggesting that sort of an accommodation should take place at the u.s. just sit down with China and try to sort of figure out a way to ensure that it's satisfied or as you sort of suggested in in deluge that the US should basically stand up for this multilateral order and do a bob suggested and push back again against any instances of aggression for fear of setting a precedent I mean the novelty of the situation I think it can be kind of indexed by like four elements of our current political economy I mean we have a situation this is not oh this is not a 1970s or 80s cold war situation where we can re clarify the Front's and just raise military spending because the United States business community has a giant stick in China GM sells more cars in China than it does in anywhere in the United States Apple doesn't have an alternative to the production of like things in China right now it isn't Samsung which actually has a Vietnam base at the same time Chinese business is hugely indebted you might be surprised to hear in dollars we think that the Chinese business community on the private side has a two trillion dollar dollar exposure so there is huge into it set into a tangle Minh in a way that we've never we've never had before add to that the fundamental questions if you like of the technological frontier and the question of data and artificial intelligence and the resources that Democratic law constrained regimes on the one hand be they of the American or the European variant which are themselves quite different and the unfettered authoritarianism of China offers for the development of data-driven new frontier technologies in which again America so far has demanded and claimed for itself a preeminent role and yet now faces the reality that there is a genuine competitor in China and the fact that China accounts currently for 30% of world growth more than the United States Europe and India combined and then superimpose on top of that our simple model of deciding that we may need to sort of front up against China and raise geopolitical tension that configuration in that form on those dimensions in that scale we have never seen before and this isn't before we haven't even invoked the nightmare of the early 2000s which was the fact that America's fiscal incontinence the fact that its balance books don't bad balance in part because of large-scale military expenditure means it is structurally dependent on various types of external financing and the question of where that's going to come from down the line is quite open at this point that it's emerging markets have not been big buyers of US Treasuries for several years now where and whether that is a stable configuration going forward it's just very unclear so that's what I mean by saying that the bits are disarticulated we have a technological frontier which is intersecting and in gullibly connected with politics with there's no we can't get away from the fact that artificial intelligence and tech involve issues of civil liberties we have crass commercial interests running one way we have crafts commercial interests running the other way and we have a fundamentally unresolved fiscal situation in the United States driven by intractable domestic political economy constantly compounded by rising inequality in the United States which which perpetuates itself in this unbalanced fiscal situation that configuration with that degree of entanglement is historically novel especially if it attaches you know we're not talking about Imperial Germany and Edwardian Britain these are orders of magnitude larger lumps that we're talking about here China in the United States are much much bigger parts of than even even bigger and more complex system I that's that's the lack of synthesis everything so it seems to me there are two ways to try to rationalize these things into a coherent policy and we've we've done both and neither but but you know one is is to say well and as people like you know Bob black willin and actually tell us and others have recommended is we have to get our economic strategy in line with our geopolitical strategy which means we have to you know basically stop feeding the Chinese beast in whatever way we can and the sort of the sort of version of that that we're getting is tough trade you know tough trade talks trying to deal with international property and all the things that Chinese are doing that that are taking advantage of the system while at the same time beefing up your military so to me that's like trying to move toward a Cold War situation I think that's important think that's impossible I think that because we're a capitalist country and because of everything you say about business we're never gonna be able to sustain that political 1916 moment that's like Wilson trying to kill JP Morgan's on Tom business well right and that didn't work by the way it wasn't going to work and and so and you know it's like Jefferson understood immediately he wanted to embargo the whole rest of the world but he knew that they couldn't do it because the Americans weren't so it seems to me the other way of rationalizing this is you know aside from negotiating the Chinese about whether they're cheating too much on one thing or another not engaging in an effort to squeeze their economic capacity letting their economic capacity go where it's going to go and having this mutual economic you know dependency but then you but then being strong enough militarily to continually steer them in the direction of economic growth rather than geopolitical growth now you say that we can't afford to do that I actually think that our fiscal problem is not based on our military expenditure big as that is it's obviously based on other things like entitlement spending that we refuse to deal with and other other budget items but it seems to me that deterring the militarily and allowing them to succeed economically is our best hope of rationalizing situation I do think that the Chinese when confronted on the one hand by a credible military deterrent and on the other hand by this incredible mutual economic interdependence which means for us it means you might lose an election for them it means they might lose their lives if the if things implode that between those two things that is enough to sort of contain this problem at least for the foreseeable future so let's take a step back toward Europe for a second and then we'll go to questions in the audience and in five or 10 minutes or so but but looking at Europe today right I think both of you are relatively pessimistic about where Europe is headed and it is an interesting sort of example of the retention of American power not necessarily military because even the Trump administration is bolstered US forces and Central and Eastern Europe but but politically in diplomatic ly you know the u.s. is deeply engaged in Europe after World War two and then throughout the 70 years since but as essentially you know washed its hands of it of the internal European debates the u.s. is nowhere to be seen unbreak said at all completely absent from any attempt to shape the negotiations and we see Germany you know looking at his post Merkel future authoritarian developments in Central and Eastern Europe and so how should we think about sort of the an item in your work in particular you talk about the centrality of the Atlantic economy still in the global economy in that on financial power and the financial crisis and the possibility of recurrence that it's still really Europe that is the most sort of worrisome variable there so how should we how should we think about your future what are the can we conceive of you know alternative futures to the EU and the eurozone I mean if Merkel and macron essentially failed to in their attempt to build a closer union what type of Europe are we are we facing and maybe Adam we could start with you and then I go to Bob what I what I would what i would what i argue with the book and it's a it's an important point I think is that the reality of transatlantic financial diplomatic diplomacy for in 2008 2009 onwards is an unwritten story it really doesn't do justice to either the late Bush administration or the Obama administration to say that they wash their hands of the eurozone crisis the real question we have to ask is why they're extremely active engagement with the financial crisis and then the eurozone crisis in Europe was on the down-low in the way that it was why it was buried as deep as it was why it features nowhere in the retrospective accounts of Obama era thorin policy that have poured off the presses since it's an extraordinary fad they think that when you know Obama gave that Atlantic interview that was the sort of starting gun for the retrospectives on the Obama administration Europe barely figures other than for him to say well you know who wish they pull their socks up and do a little bit more the reality is that America was knee-deep in the inside struggle over the efforts to stabilize the financial crisis in 2008 in Europe and then the eurozone crisis that followed and it had to be because as I you know insistently arguing the stakes are simply too high half the funds held by one of the largest classes of money market mutual funds in the United States were invested in European bonds stock the one thing that could jeopardize the fragile euro american recovery in 2011 is would have been the failure of one or several major european banks the at the key moments at and the g20 provided an absolutely crucial cover for this at these meetings of the g20 which are notionally global but they break out into groups and at key moments the g20 would focus on eurozone problems in Mexico whether it was meeting or in France where it was meeting and at the absolutely critical moments the French handed the chairmanship of g20 meetings pertaining to the eurozone to the Americans why because Obama was the only person that could muscle merkel into line in shifting her position on the eurozone america continued to play throughout that crisis the pivotal role and i don't need to speak about ukraine sitting next to you bob the the tacit interaction between Berlin and Washington over the handling of the euro over the Ukraine crisis is pivotal to the entire is the entire story in in Eastern Europe of course it's not a story without frustrations but it's a story of continued essential interdependence which offloads problems the Americans don't really need to be dealing with and translates them to a zone where they really should be dealt with and then of course the Europeans do tend to fail so I am pessimistic but to me this is a self-fulfilling prophecy of America and Europe continue basically to hide the scale of their interdependence and not to celebrate the win that the joint management of the financial crisis between 2008 and 12 ultimately proved to be then liberals shouldn't be you know surprised if their enemies point essentially to the continuous failure of their model to provide what you know average Europeans and Americans desperately want which is shared prosperity for everyone but I don't want to go into too much of the financial details but without the swap lines which the Fed provided to the European banks which is basically a shower of dollar liquidity onto the other side of the deal antic none of the European Max would have survived and yet this was essentially written out of history by the Europeans and the Americans after 2008 the as I think is the question we have to ask it's similar to me to the structurally analogous to the NSA scandal I mean why is that a scandal everyone in Europe must have understood that their security agencies were in bed with the NSA apart from anything else because they transparently don't have the capacities that the Americans do have and which the Europeans rely on in that area as they rely on the United States in so many other areas and this was the unfolding crisis in Europe first of all the shock horror probe the Snowden revelations then the revelations about the bugging of Merkel's phone and then the dawning realization that the German security service was completely and the American intelligence and had to be because it really doesn't have that many capacities it's quite good at human Intel but it doesn't have any of the technological resources to do it itself now one can argue from different political points of view what kind of a surveillance apparatus we want to have and what our relationships ought to be but the extraordinary thing about our present moment in that area as in finance is that we see determined to avoid the conversation and what worries me about that is it's a de facto offloading of what are fundamentally political geo-economic geopolitical questions which ought to be the subject of basic bargains you were referring early on to communism legitimated however we can illegitimate them make them palatable to a broader public however we need to make them palatable or however palatable we can you know reasonably make them palatable it's not just the military manipulative question we actually have to build some conviction around our answers um those hard political tasks are being dodged over and over again in the transatlantic sphere we end up with these bizarre conversations about you know the the prospective major trade deal between Europe and the United States being boiled down by European progressives of the question of chlorine chickens this becomes the key issue whilst the Europeans of I into the fact that the Americans won't touch the European banking system with a bargepole because they think it's so badly regulated so the politics of TTIP in Europe was a politics of chlorinated claw chlorine-chlorine clean chickens rather than the stability of the European financial system I mean that is an abdication of political responsibility either with for it or against it make the case one way or the other but talk about the actual pillars of power and interconnection here not not that kind of peripheral irrelevance pop one should be coronated chicken I was in terms of keeping the economic relationship on the down-low I mean I just can't remembering that in the 1920s when the United States wanted to negotiate what became known as the Dawes plan oh yes American officials traveled to Britain because they pretended this was all being done by private entities American officials traveling to London to have these negotiations behind the scenes had to pretend that they were visiting their tailors well the Bar Association all right annual meeting of the American Bar Association in London so that Charles Hughes could go was then Secretary of State but he was not going as Secretary of State he was going as a member of the Bar Association so I mean there's a long history here and again it is worth remembering that if we're talking about what the norm is the norm is the United States and Europe do not get along and I think it's worth remembering how unusual it is historically for us to be as tightly intertwined as we were nevertheless I think you can make the case on Ukraine and happened because of Russia but when it came to internally European politics when Germany was reunifying the Americans the George HW Bush administration believed that this was a vital interest of the United States that this thing worked out correctly and they were heavily involved in making Margaret Thatcher feel better in making Mitt Romney better about what was happening it wasn't that the Germans weren't going to do it anyway but the Americans felt they had to Shepherd it along when brexit begins and when brexit is when we're still going through the divorce which is at least as important from the american strategic point of view britain separated from europe is a disaster for the United States in terms of our interest in a coherent Europe and we did almost nothing to prevent it are you don't think it's a disaster it's a total disaster Obama went to London that was so late in the day you can't go swimming into London and say by the way you should really vote against brexit I mean there had to be a whole process by the way I'm not even saying we cousin s has been absent since more say it was maybe brexit was gonna happen in the same way the German reunification was going to happen because by the way Britain distancing some from the content is also the more most normal activity in the history of the world however the way this divorce played out the United States has an interest in the way it plays out and we have not been playing that game in the same way that we were not Shep we did Shepard German unification through no I mean you know the day after it happened Trump was on his golf course in Scotland cheering current administration of the United States favours brexit and to the alarm of the Europeans and these are the stories that have followed in Europe you know the day after we entered the White House he's like taking bets on which country and by the way this is what's new even in the 1920s when Americans were not doing anything to save Europe they would have liked to save Europe Trump is on the side of brexit he's on the side of lepen he's on the side of salvini he's on the side of Viktor Orban he's on the side of all the people who were against a coherent liberal Europe and that is absolutely untenable he's not I mean alone i mean john bolton wrote a series of op eds from your posts in 2010 11 12 in which he called for he said America had an interest in the collapse of the euro zone so at a point when the u.s. is deeply involved in trying to both to the euro zone he's saying you know the euro is a threat to American interests so it isn't the same people either League of Nations was actually an imperial effort to construe no to take over the United States and the privates of our sovereignty I mean we're back to William Borah type arguments so let's go to the audience so we'll take a few questions it was at a gentleman over here to start with both of you gentlemen seemed to insinuate that Henry Cabot Lodge might have had the power to prevent World War two how do you approve the League of Nations or at least made it less likely if we if we accept this as true or at least somehow persuasive I wonder if as being in America's interest despite being at odds with the Republican Party's interest in in that period of time the question is can it be blamed what changes would need to be made to see the right decision more easily how how should our elected officials today determine the appropriate time to place country above party and is there ever a time to place party above country great thank you so the gentleman here Thank You Larry you could introduce yourself doesn't end yeah Larry Cecco senior advisor to serve USA I learned a lot I thought I knew something about this subject but I guess I didn't today with mr. Trump doing what he's doing I used to think that was an aberration on the part of the United States it seems like it's just history repeating itself we saw what happened when when we withdrew from this from the world in the 20s and what he had was Europe to deal with now we're withdrawing and we have China Russia Europe all the back how much how further can we go into this without really jeopardizing our hegemony great thank you and then the lady just behind yeah and then we'll go to thank you very much I'm marina Faisal an African American journalist you mentioned that the unpredictability of what what international interactions might combust into a future crisis for the whole world and reference to first world one and the atmosphere of the major wars in the past Russians just recently hosted the Taliban Afghanistan was pivotal in the Cold War and in the fall of it some Afghans like to take credit for bringing down the Soviet Union right now in the midst of this atmosphere where and the Trump era American foreign diplomacy still is undefined for internal and external audiences Afghans wonder like many other nations where they should look to in terms of this evolving new world order what what could a country like Afghanistan look towards what kind of commitment can expect from United States and its Western allies so thank you great thanks so back to both of you and then Bobo go turn it around a minute do you want to start what the the argument we're about to have about Henry Cabot Lodge I'm a revisionist I just follow the revisionist trend on Lodge which is to say that the historiography of you know so-called isolationism was written by disappointed wilsonian x' in fact the lodge and the Republicans opposed the treaty as Wilson proposed it they were in fact willing to uphold the security guarantees that Wilson had made to the French and because they regarded that as a much more parsimonious and more important commitment that one of the reasons they didn't like the league was that it was essentially a kind of system of indifference whereas the Republicans throughout the ward uphold a position which was strongly in favor of the on Tom to a degree that Wilson was never comfortable with so I actually think that if Anne and Wilson in response to the Republicans attaching conditions to the the peace proposal withdrew the whole thing never allowing Congress have a chance to vote on the subordinate elements which were a security guarantee for Britain and France which are actually the essentials of a stable peace not the league but the security guarantee for Britain in France so the two of them sort of stalemated each other removing two elements of an architecture that would have been stable either individually or together and none of them transpired on Afghanistan let me speak about that I think what surely must be exciting Afghani zai imagine that I don't know but if I was Afghani I'd be excited by it is what's happening in Pakistan and the unfolding there of this extraordinary drama of geopolitics Pakistan and Afghanistan are key to the stability of that in the entire region the problem of Islamism obviously but also the problem of economic development and what we have in Pakistan is this test case of the balance of forces between the old order which is the IMF centered regime dominated by the Western powers still though with China having an increasingly large voice and it'll be very interesting to see how Madame Lagarde plays this out and China with its absolutely massive investment in the one belt one Road annex in Pakistan and how that hash is out I think is one way of testing the contours of this new system because as far as I know and I must admit that I didn't follow the political economy of the American campaign in Afghanistan to the extent that I would have liked but it struck me even then that we were very strong on drones and finding Taliban leaders and hunting people down in the Swat Valley but I don't remember a large-scale commitment in the tens of billions of dollar range to rural development in Pakistan infrastructure development the prospect of the sort of thing America routinely did in Vietnam by the way two very mixed reviews but that kind of holistic thinking about social stabilisation and betterment I think slipped further down the agenda of American policy and it's very interesting that the Chinese with the one belt one road program with this commitment a very big building in Asia but also in Africa are in the business of changing the game about how we think about the development prospects of some of the poorest societies in the world and Pakistan is very important on that list because it's one of the poorest societies with nuclear weapons in one of the most dangerous areas so that I think for me is the thing I'd be looking for Afghans should watch Pakistan closely and see how that how that story plays out there Bob yeah I mean you know when it comes to the Chinese involvement in one belt one road I must say I'm not at all I'm not as persuade as everybody else is this is a horrible thing and that if they're the ones who want to throw their money which by the way may not be the best investments for them as far as I'm sure some of his being taken for done for strategic reasons which means in a certain sense it's not being done for strictly economic reasons and so therefore and if it leads to some development I don't know that I have any great objective objection to that I wanted to answer your question about you know the one thing about this the the structure that's been set up that was set up after World War Two with this sort of alliance structure that the United States is at the center of I do think it's it's it's extraordinarily durable and that it will take a lot of undoing now I do think we are in the process of undoing it and I think that process began under Obama actually just because I think you know the mere fact that they have to hide what they're doing in Europe means the American public isn't really there they know it's not really there Obama acted as if American support wasn't there and Trump is explicitly saying that we're not in in that game anymore and so and you just don't know you know historically a situation has been created for an explosion but the explosion may not come for 10 years but I do want to say that you know all the America's allies overseas have near neighbors that they are afraid of they are naturally going to look to the United States for that support and for as long as they have any hope of getting that support they're going to keep looking there because they don't really have a lot of other options the Baltic States don't have other options you know I think that Japan it's it's option is to become independent become a nuclear power become a militarized Japan again I think most Japanese do not want to go there so they're going to continue to look to United States so I think this is one of those takes where there's a lot of ruin in a in an international system that was created and I don't think that one term or maybe even two terms of a trump can necessarily undermine it but and that's contingent on events and you just don't know what's gonna come up that's gonna blow things up I think I should avoid getting into the argument about exactly the fate of the French security treaty was because we could have that separate discussion what the view that Adam is expressing is unfortunately no longer the revisionist view it's now the mainstream view and it's just I'm sorry it's just wrong and I am I have a book coming out in a year and then you can actually we can do this again and I go into in excruciating and I hope not too deadly boring detail about what happened to the French security treaty because I do think it's a pivotal question suffice to say that the first person to lay out in detail in all its grandiose elements the idea of a League of Nations was Theodore Roosevelt and he did it at the end of 1914 in response to what had just happened Henry Cabot Lodge was a big supporter of the idea of what he called the United Nations and they were incredibly and the late comer to this idea was Woodrow Wilson who really as a Democrat because in those days the two parties had a distinct position the internationalist were Republicans the Democrats were quote-unquote isolationists why Roosevelt and lodged then flipped against the league historians and intellectuals have been dying to say it's because they had the problem with this particular in that particular which they had no problem with when they articulated it themselves the truth is in my view it was about politics and they hated Woodrow Wilson which was an incredibly from Roosevelt by the way he felt guilty that wrote that Wilson was in power you know why because it was his fault he got Wilson elected and his bitterness toward Wilson is about that sense of responsibility and it informed so much else anyway like I said I wasn't gonna do that okay better rider it's really important I think to recognize that Wilson is the first southern president elected since the Civil War and the most I think cutting abuse that Teddy Roosevelt hurls at him is that you're a copperhead now you are surrendering Illinois Democrat who wants to rip the floor out from beneath underneath the Lincoln presidency the stakes in this war are the same stakes essentially as in the Civil War that is the kind of test that we're undergoing here and you with your peace without victory talk have literally adopted a slogan from 1864 and then in that context Roosevelt that Wilson was the one to lead them into war and win the war because that was supposed to be him so we don't have that much time to have to see a bunch of hands we have five minutes at the end for a vice president well two minutes at the end to give some closing remarks so buddy take a lightning round so the lady here in the second row and all the questions seem to be on this side I don't know what happened there's one over here thank you southern China retired economist and fascinated with all these kinds of programs but this one was so overwhelming because there are so many pieces that is and in retrospect different from the way we thought of it and pride trying to put the pieces together and to connect it to the two today my question specifically though is how do we deal with not just this administration but later on when the State Department has been devastated by lack of personnel and and power and so forth and the entire government white house structure has no no structure it's there there's no strategic plan whether especially in foreign policy or in an economic policy everything is just ad hoc and I see things just tumbling down making for even greater chaos they said the gentleman behind yep hi Carl galavant domain reference an ideal lives are met as a reference for my question to references Benjamin Friedman at age 71 that gave a talk at the Willard hotel here in DC in 1961 he was connected to the Wilson administration he was actually present in Versailles and in 1919 secondly a book the controversy of Tsar and by journalist Douglas Reed written in 1956 not published until 1978 you mentioned the money power in circa 1900 arguably the money power is named in the person to whom the Balfour Declaration was addressed and Friedman would argue that the Balfour Declaration so which is the question is we have very limited time so just the Balfour Declaration was it not negotiated as a reward for bringing the u.s. into the war by Zionists interests and Reid would argue that the roots and objectives of occasion ISM and Zionism or integral or interest it X trick tably intertwined all right I think we got it thanks I'm stead of gentleman down there back and then the lady in the middle and then we'll call it um my name is Jeremiah reamer I used to teach at sighs just two quick questions - Adam twos I'm a little puzzled about the Association Democratic Party with Bolshevism that early given that the Palmer Raids the guy who led the Palmer Raids also you know ran for the Democratic nomination and and for much of the 1920s the Klan was a major part of the Democratic Party that's one little question I'm very well I was wonderful i but my more important question goes to I agree with you that that Obama and Geithner's role in the European euro crisis was very very important and I'm intrigued by and like to like to get further thoughts in you on why it is that isn't celebrated I it's very interesting I mean I can imagine it's difficult for both sides to sort of sell this to their publics their constituency is their ideologies I can't it's hard for me to see miracles saying yes of course I had to agree with Shula and the austerity Hawks but really I'm grateful that Obama and Geithner and the IMF made me do solidarity with Greece made me do more stimulus and it must be also difficult for the Democratic Party for some reason to say gee we really even wanted more stimulus but we pushed it on Europe something like that thank you and final question to the lady and the yeah thank you very much um I'm a I'm a journalist with hong kong phoenix TV my question is right now we are at right after the metering election and it looks very hard for an administration to pass in the domestic legislations so our foreign policy side should we expect he's going to look for more breakthrough in the next two years and do you expect he's gonna take much tougher stance on issues like north korea and trade with china thank you okay so we pretty short on time so if you could maybe just choose one or two of those and just give quick responses and then we'll turn it over to to Bruce so Adam and then Bob since it's so puzzling I'll talk about the association between the Democrats and Bolshevism it goes by way of the controversy caused by Wilson's negotiations with Germany over the heads of the Allies in October what's that got to do with the Bolsheviks it's got to do with the Bolsheviks because of Germany a Germany's rolled in sluicing Lenin into Russia in 1917 and more importantly and more immediately the fact that the Germans had done the brest-litovsk peace treaty with the Bolsheviks earlier in the year which is what had unleashed their full force of the German army on the Western Front in 1918 and almost brought the house down so from the point of view of militant Republicans who want to blaze a path of fire from the Western Front to Berlin which is really what they want to do no negotiations somebody who is selling the Allies out as Wilson was perceived to be doing to do a deal with the Germans on the basis of his peace without victory proposal of January 1917 before America was even in the war looks like an agent of German and Bolshevik conspiracy very briefly and I don't want to be misunderstood here it's no doubt at all that in the minds of anti-semitic British statesmen in 1917 who were trying to make sense of the world and we're reading the New York the London Times whose reporter in Russia in 1917 was a profoundly anti-semitic British reporter who attributed the influence of the world Jewish conspiracy to the undermining of Tsar ISM and the advent of Bolshevism in the minds of people who have that kind of framework of analyzing the world there is indeed a connection between the influence of Jewish bankers and the and are and American policy and there is already on the part of British policymakers an expectation that if you cut a deal like this by way of figures like Brandeis you will be able to gain some kind of purchase over Washington and it is framed quite explicitly in those terms as a bid for the opinion of world Jewry in which of course sionis activists have an interest in cultivating the idea that such a thing exists and that it does in fact have some influence because by means of that idea you can in fact then exact exercise leverage over decision-makers in London and in New York and what in Washington but you have to insist that those constructions that architecture is framed by a pre-existing anti-semitism that starts on the basis of the existence of that within that context those linkages are real they're documented there is no doubt at all that that is what the decision-makers in London thought they were doing we also know the work that the Zionist organizations around the world had to do to suppress protests from Jewish communities across the world against the Balfour Declaration notably in revolutionary Russia where the association of the largest Jewish community in the world with a imperialist promise of a Palestinian homeland at the expense of the Ottoman Empire at this particular moment would have been devastating for their revolutionary credentials the government had just fallen in petricka precisely over that issue its willingness to uphold early war commitments to imperialism against the Ottoman Empire on the Habsburg Empire and so at zionist actors in both London and Washington have to do a huge amount of work to silence the news of the fact that huge Assemblies of Russian Jews had voted against the proving this so it's a hugely complex force field in which the virus of anti-semitic conspiracy theory is operating in an extraordinary poly Simas kind of way having meaning for lots of different actors at lots of different places have the American politics part of that because I don't think I don't think Roosevelt and Lodge were playing that particular game but they had decided it's kind of interesting given where we are at this moment they had decided early on that that their position was going to be we are nationalists we are looking out for America and we are American nationalists as come as contrasted with Wilson who was an internationalist and as it happens everybody knew that what an internationalist meant was that Trotsky was also a sort of self-proclaimed internationalist because the Revolution had to be international and so and his at that his speech his big speech opposing the League of Nations Henry Cabot Lodge says I was born in America I'm an American and I'm an American nationalist and I will not support those who like Trotsky go the way of the Bolsheviks and internationalism okay that's that's our Henry Cabot Lodge for you and if you if you I mean that is just political rhetoric I don't think he believes one-one tiniest bit of it but that was the political decision they made to run on at that time and we've seen it I think again thank you and this is terrific I'd like to call on our vice president ever foreign policy boost Jones who will offer some closing remarks and take us home so thank you I'll be very brief I wanted to thank you all for coming out on this event to commemorate the hundredth anniversary over the Armistice I think it's an extremely good day to reach back into rich histories of the events that unfolded at the time and the invents that have unfolded since to try to understand where we are I've just been both in Tokyo and in Shanghai and Tokyo where there's lots of talk Bob of a return to what gets coded as warfighting capabilities not self defense capabilities and in Shanghai where the strategy there is kind of continued financial integration as a way of defanging our capacity to constrain them but with a lot of that beginning to unravel and and Adam you briefly Runge mentioned Imperial Germany in an awardee in Britain and I wonder whether we aren't beginning to see a replay of a deliberate strategy to D integrate the economies precisely for for geopolitical reasons leading to the kinds of concerns that bob has but I have to say that it's extremely refreshing to hear nuanced accounts of the interplay between economics and geopolitics rather than superficial accounts of them which were spending a lot of time dealing with in this town and elsewhere today and Adam you also said that history may not be a guide to where we're going but at the very least too high of the rich history that you both do and they incredibly inform discussion we had today helps us close off some some mistake in analogies and some mistakes and possibilities and to focus us on what really is in front of us so I'm incredibly grateful to you for writing your books to Bob for being Bob to Tom for leading this conversation and to all of you for being here today and thank you so much

Channel: Brookings Institution

Views: 39,614

Keywords: Brookings Institution, Armistice Day, WWI, World War I, Robert Kagan, Columbia Professor Adam Tooze, The Great War, John R. Allen, Thomas Wright, Adam Tooze

Id: an_2LvDsj_w

Length: 88min 22sec (5302 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018