 And Stephen Hadley, chair of the United States Institute of Peace, Board of Directors. Morning everybody. I am just delighted to welcome everybody this morning to the U.S. Institute of Peace. As you heard, my name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president here. And I am honored to be able to welcome such a distinguished group of foreign policy, national security, development experts, and so many distinguished foreign dignitaries. So a special welcome to the many ambassadors who are joining us this morning. And I want to begin by thanking our sponsors and our thought partners who really helped make today possible. We had generous support, wonderful partnership, many thanks to LMI, the Boeing Corporation, Chevron, as well as Robin and Eileen Shields West, and Nancy and Harold Zirkin for their generous support, both of this event and continued support for USIP. We're very grateful for the partnership of many think tanks who have been both good counsel and really key to helping us bring together such a diverse crowd of perspectives and ideas and backgrounds. Thanks to our friends at the American Enterprise Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Center for American Progress, and the Heritage Foundation. I'd also like to thank our media partners, Politico and SiriusXM Radio. They are bringing this event to a broader public audience. And also I want to note that the event is being broadcast on C-SPAN. For those of you who are following us online or on social media, we invite you to follow along by using our mobile app, USIP Passing the Baton. You can download that on your phone. Or on Twitter using the hashtag Passing the Baton. This is the third time that USIP has hosted Passing the Baton since 2001, when Sandy Berger first passed the baton to Condi Rice. And the goal of this event is to generate ideas, to share views, to bring together the kind of perspectives that we need to discuss together, to contribute to a seamless passing of the baton from one administration to the next. And at a time that we have so many pressing global challenges around the world. We are pleased especially to host the event this year in our own building. This building is the newest addition, one of the newest additions to our National Mall. And as part of our congressional charter, USIP is founded to represent the American people's commitment to peace. And this building is really a physical expression of peace as the soaring hope of humankind. So it's appropriate that we're having this conversation here today under our Ansary Dove, in the George P. Schultz Great Hall, next to the Madeleine Albright Wing. And looking out over the National Mall, which reminds us every day of the foundational resilience of our nation. So we're pleased everybody is here today to be a part of that. The US Institute of Peace was founded in 1984 by Congress as an independent national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, peace is practical, and it is essential for our national and our international security. So we research and apply the most effective ways to manage conflict before it can become violent and to resolve it when it does. We work in conflict affected areas around the world with local partners, helping to build peace both from the top down and from the bottom up. And for us, peace is not an abstract concept. It's what happens on the ground. It's what saves lives. It enables families to be safe and dreams to be realized. And you'll hear later today from my colleague, Sarhang Hamasayid, who will talk about our peace dialogues into Crete, Iraq, which have saved lives and enabled hundreds of thousands of people to return home after the terrible conflict there. Just like we were able to do 10 years ago when the US Army asked USIP to mediate a peace accord among the rival tribes around the city of Makhmadiya in Iraq known as the Triangle of Death. So there, working with a team of Iraqi mediators who we trained and supported, USIP conducted a successful mediation that ultimately allowed the US Army to withdraw 80% of its troops to save $2 billion over the year and most importantly to save countless Iraqi and American lives. In Makhmadiya, peace was possible, and today at the 10th year of that effort, peace still holds. And now I have the great pleasure to introduce a wonderful friend, colleague, and wise counsel, Steve Hadley, a distinguished public servant, former national security advisor, and our wonderful dedicated chair of the US Institute of Peace Board. Steve? Thank you so much, Nancy. This is an amazing group of people we have gathered here today and we are very grateful that you took the time and came. Before beginning the program, I wanted to share a few thoughts about why today is such an important day. I speak from some personal experience. I've been through a number of presidential transitions from both ends of the process, sometimes transitioning in happily and sometimes less happily transitioning out. But either way, the process could not be more important. Each administration assumes office with both the problems and the tools left by its predecessor. And a well-managed presidential transition can help the new administration get a jump on the problems and get a better appreciation of how to handle the tools for addressing those problems. And it gives the new administration a sense of what it has to build on as it fashions its own approach to the problems that face the country. The goal of a presidential transition should be for the outgoing administration to take everything it can to help the incoming administration assume the awesome responsibilities that it is about to inherit. That's what we tried to do in 2008. President Bush made it very clear to all of us that he wanted to do everything he could to ensure as smooth a transition as possible. And President Obama has been equally clear that he expects in his word a seamless passing of the Patan to the new Trump administration. And that transition can and should extend past January 20. The officials of the new administration should feel free to continue to call on their predecessors for advice and counsel. And the outgoing officials should be clear that they are willing to provide it. And we in this room should pledge together for the good of the country to focus on the substantive challenges and opportunities facing the new administration and offering it our help and support. And I would hope that the cooperation among the five Washington-based institutions that has produced this passing of the Patan event can be expanded to include others and replicated in various forms of ongoing collaboration and discussion. And I would hope we would do this on a bipartisan basis for the nation's security and foreign policy are strongest and most effective when they are underpinned by bipartisan support. And at the end of the day, it's not about the side of the aisle we sit on because we must all stand together to safeguard the national security of this great country of ours. As some of you know, USIP hosted a number of private policy dinner conversations last night. The idea was to bring together senior government officials, members of Congress, representatives of the media, and leaders from across the business think tank and civil society communities to discuss the challenges facing our country. The conversations took place under Chatham House rules of non-attribution but we want to share some highlights to set the stage for today's discussions. And for that purpose, I would like to introduce Damon Wilson, the Executive Vice President of the Atlantic Council, to give us a summary of the collective wisdom that emerged last night from our dinners. Damon. Thank you very much, Steve. Thank you, Nancy. I want to thank the US Institute for Peace. All of our partners that have helped make today's event possible, and as well as the rapporteurs, the moderators, that really helped collect the key takeaways from our conversations last night. As Steve said, my task is to offer some insights, some conclusions, and to try to summarize briefly the several hours of conversations that took place among 80-plus foreign policy leaders. Mr. Hadley, Steve, set the tone. Let's see. Is that a little bit better? A little bit better. So Mr. Hadley set the tone. He set the tone for last night's conversations very much as he did now by underscoring the importance of how, thank you, underscoring the importance of one team helping to prepare the next for success. I had a chance to work for Steve during one of those transitions and see how he set that inside government and it very much informed the conversations last night. As one of the participants put it, at the end to sum up the conclusions, count me in and helping to support the next team. The premise of many of the conversations while we were there to help share experiences, insights, and to help the team succeed, there was an acknowledgement, almost a premise to the conversation, that the biggest challenge that folks are often likely to face are the ones that we're not prepared for, whether 9-11, the Arab Spring. Among the first conclusions that I think really permeated the conversations last night was that U.S. success abroad is anchored in who we are at home and our strength at home beginning with a growing economy that creates options for us internationally and a sense of a greater integration on security, economics, trade, and energy. The second part of that is our democracy and can our politics help solve problems, deliver results, and do their values, our democratic values, stand strong in differentiating us from some of our adversaries. And on the military front, are we able to come together to support the investments, ending sequestration, sustaining investment, and nuclear modernization? There was a back to basics theme in some sense on what makes the U.S. attractive at home and what makes us influential and effective abroad. The second main conclusion I think from many of the conversations last night was the centrality of the U.S. role in the world and almost a call across to a T of more leadership, not less on the issues that are on our agenda today. Sure, a recognition of the complexity that we face, questions about the tools, whether we have the tools and imagination of these challenges, but that we agreed that it was in the U.S. interest to do so and acknowledge that we need to use the full range of tools, influence, power to advance U.S. interests. Our friends and allies want it. And in fact, in the absence of the U.S. acting on key issues, the situation often gets worse and this therefore means we have to make a more intentional case with our own electorate. The third key conclusion I would argue to take away from the conversations last night was that long-term strategies matter. There's an observation that some of our adversaries are very effective at having long-term strategies that span from one leader to the next and an acknowledgement that a long-term strategy in a democracy like the United States, as Steve said in opening, requires bipartisan support is more effective and hence engaging our publics, the Congress, politicians in this effort is important to ensuring a sustainable, consistent approach. The fourth set of issues last night were the common analysis of challenges that are high on the American foreign policy agenda, beginning in the broadest sense with the fraying or the breakdown of the U.S.-led rules-based international order, discussion from fragile states to hostile challengers to the rise of technology and how that impacts our effectiveness, the sense that the global system itself is in play. And therefore, there may just be an opportunity, if not a responsibility, to reshape that system in our interests consistent with our values. Related to that, there was quite a bit of conversation about a battle of ideals, a battle of ideals, if you will. Sure, information wars, but more than that. Is the world increasingly safe for free market democracies or for authoritarians? And how do we shape those outcomes? There was a sense as well in terms of our challenges of the return of the nation state, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, a China that can be a challenger but also a partner, increasingly a stakeholder in this order, a Russia that's also seen as a challenger, but where there are strategic areas of cooperation and how do you have dialogue that doesn't mean a blank check? An Iran where there is much focus more so on the future rather than the past, on strict enforcement of a nuclear deal and checking nefarious interests. And a sensitive out of all the nation state challenges we face that North Korea may be the most likely to test. And of course, the non-state challenge, particularly from terrorism, ISIS, but it's broader than that with a sense of high impact, low cost challenges to American interests. As part of that conversation, there was an interesting exchange on black swans or blind spots, if you will, from space to genetics, genome editing to global pandemics or the GPS system being attacked. And there was a special conversation about what it takes for us to rise to address those challenges and a conversation, therefore, about our alliances and our allies. A broad recognition of the unique asset that the United States has with our alliances about how this is overwhelmingly an American interest, that it helps us deal with these challenges and that the U.S. is a catalytic power and galving other nations to solve the challenges. But also a healthy recognition that we have to reconsider some of those assumptions and ensure that our alliances and the structures are adapted for today, are fit for purpose, if you will, and that we've set sufficiently high expectations, whether it's on reform or defense investment or global engagement of our allies. To conclude, I think last night's dinner conversations really underscored a tone across folks that were both supporters of President-elect Trump as well as opponents in the political process, that first, there are some principles that are longstanding and therefore there will be some continuity. There also will be change, of course, but there's something to build on. Second, I think the part that reinforced all of the conversations was our strategies, our policies, our foreign policy is most effective when it does enjoy bipartisan support. Third, a real sense that there will be a need after the noise of our election and the divisiveness of our campaigns that there be some clarifying messages sent to the world, to our allies, so that our friends can count on us and our adversaries don't underestimate us. And finally, I'd close with a sense of optimism that pervaded some of the conversation. A complete recognition of the complexities that face the United States, the challenges of the task, but also a sense that the United States, perhaps more so than any other nation, is best prepared to help navigate this complexity, to navigate these challenges, not simply to defend the past and defend the status quo, but to play a leading role in helping to shape that future and adapt the system for our interests consistent with our values. Thank you. Turn it back. Thank you, Damon, and you can get a sense from that really excellent summation, and thank you for doing that overnight with such articulateness of the breadth of the set of challenges. It's hard to just narrow it down, and we do have the imperative to grapple with this so that we can play the role that the world expects us to play. Throughout the day, this event has been designed to ensure that there's truly interactive engagement. We have an extraordinary collection of opinions, of experiences, and views here in the room. So we have, coming up next, the first of our speakers. We will be delighted to welcome, in a few moments, Secretary of State John Kerry. And for the next few moments, I'd like to ask everybody to turn to your part, your neighbors, and have a conversation about what you just heard. How did that... How do you feel about what you just heard? Just a little bit of ice-breaking for the audience. Talk amongst yourselves. All the foreign policy challenges with that productive conversation. Well, it is my great pleasure to introduce our next speaker, who is a tireless advocate for peace. As a war veteran, as a Massachusetts senator who was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and as a Secretary of State, he knows well the pressing challenges that are before us today. And joining him will be Judy Woodworth, well-known anchor of the news hour, and a veteran correspondent who's covered the White House for many years and knows very well the importance of having seamless transitions. So please join me in welcoming Secretary of State Kerry and Judy Woodruff. Thank you, Nancy. I'm delighted to be here. And Mr. Secretary, I understand you sprinted across the street. Is that right? My sprinting days are reduced, but I came. I got here. Well, you were spied hurrying. I'll put it that way. Spied, right? So the format is that I'm going to engage, ask some questions of the Secretary for about 15 or 20 minutes, and then we're going to open it up to you in the audience. So be thinking about what you might want to ask him as well. And let's start. So Mr. Secretary, the theme is passing the baton. I hear an echo. Are we okay with the sound here? So let's start with passing the baton. How is the transition process going? How much interface is actually taking place between your team and the incoming team? How smoothly is it going? Well, it's going pretty smoothly because there's not an enormous amount of it. There are some people who've been in the building for a period of time. But, you know, quite candidly, I think there has not been a lot of high-level exchange at this point in time. I'm still expecting to meet with my successor at some point in the near term. But, no, I haven't met with him yet. Do you expect to? I do. Anything else you want to say about... I mean, when you came in, how much of a transit? I realize it was a different situation when you were coming in from this administration. It's a very... It's like night and day. It's a different thing when you have the same administration continuing with a lot of people already in place versus a shift of parties and a complete tabla rasa restart. And so, you know, I think in fairness that there is automatically a focus on hearings and that's a pretty internal process. So there's time yet for ample debriefing, et cetera. I think, you know, we don't yet know who a lot of the players are going to be at other levels. So it's been fairly limited just by definition. What are the one or two things that you wish you had known in the very beginning that you only learn later and may be painfully? You know, I really haven't stopped yet, Judy, to be able to make that jump. There's no one thing that leaps out at me that says, boy, if I'd known this, everything would have been different or something. So we're living, I mean, what troubles me a little bit is that people are not separating a remarkable transformation that is taking place globally, naturally, from things that we're really responsible for. Let me give you an example. Arab Spring. We didn't start the Arab Spring. We couldn't have stopped the Arab Spring. There was no way to put a lid on the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia when a fruit vendor lit himself on fire. And boom, a 30-year dictator was gone and then suddenly you had Tahrir Square and you had a bunch of people who have technology at their fingertips who are out there communicating to each other and wanting change, and that's how Syria began. People forget that. But as I listened to some of the revisionist commentary, they started to say, well, the Obama administration didn't do this or they didn't do that or whatever. There's no way the Obama administration doing anything would have changed what was happening in those countries. It happened spontaneously because of where those countries find themselves relative to modernity, to the global economies, to their own governance challenges, into the centuries-old passions and definitions and differences that have defined those societies for a long period of time. I'll give you an example on Syria. Syria is not one war. It's not one simple conflict. I mean, just follow every day what's happening between Russia and Iran with respect to Syria. But multiply that by Saudi Arabia versus Iran and Iran versus Saudi Arabia. Iran concerns for the entire GCC. Kurds, Kurd aspirations. Kurds versus Erdogan. Erdogan's aspirations for Syria. Sunni versus Shia. People versus Assad. Israel, I mean, you have this, there are about six different wars that are taking place there. Some of them quite real, approximate proxy wars. And so we're living in a different world. People need to really grab on to that. The new administration needs to grab on to that. It is not a world like the world after World War II where the United States was the only power left standing fundamentally. And the economies of the world had to be rebuilt. And the United States stepped up and rebuilt them to its great credit. And one of the best investments we ever made in the world was an investment that most Americans were against called the Marshall Plan. Nobody said, wow, we ought to go help Japan that just attacked us at Pearl Harbor and we spent four and a half years fighting a war to win, we should rebuild them or we should do the same for Germany. But we did and look at the value of what came out of that. So my point is simply, Judy, that I think personally that the United States is more engaged in more places simultaneously dealing with more conflicts than at any time in American history and I believe with consequence, with greater outcomes, changing the policy to Cuba, helping Colombia be able to get to a peace after 50 years of war, working with Argentina and other countries to come in from the cold, dealing with North Korea, with China, working on the South China Sea, asserting freedom of navigation rights in the region and standing up simultaneously to bring Korea, Japan together to change the relationship. I mean, there are many, many things that are happening and have been happening that people don't take note of daily, but they're defining American interests. But if that's the case, then, how come there is still so much focus on what people interpret as a missed opportunity in Syria? I wasn't necessarily going to bring up Syria, you did. No, you should. I'm happy to have you bring it up. When President Obama made the decision not to act after, as many expected he would, after the Red Line incident, the perception is that the rest of the world came away believing the U.S. could not be relied on was not a reliable leader in the world. That's a different picture from the picture of European. So let me take a moment. No, I'm not saying there aren't people who don't have some questions or are not saying there aren't circumstances, particularly with respect to Syria. Syria is going to be debated. Okay? I know it's going to be debated because I've been part of those debates for the last four years, and I've been on one side of some of that debate, and other people have been on other sides, and it's going to be debated, and you all are going to get a chance to make a judgment as to whether or not something different might have been done and that's fair, absolutely fair, and it's going to happen. And I think there are some things that might have been able to have been done. But that had nothing to do with the Red Line. And let's make that absolutely clear, folks. President Obama never retreated from his Red Line. He never changed his mind about his readiness to bomb Assad to make it clear you don't use chemical weapons. Never. There's a mythology that's grown up around this. David Cameron went to the parliament on a Thursday and lost his vote in a democracy, in our special relationship partner. And so I remember being on a phone call with a bunch of Congress people, about a hundred of them, on a briefing phone call, and they were saying, well, you're going to come to us, aren't you? I mean, that's the Constitution and we need to weigh in on this. And I think it's just that everybody said that. There were a lot of people saying that. So what the president decided to do, Judy, was go to Congress to get their permission to do what Britain had denied the Prime Minister the right to do. And that's the best way, if you're going to use force, to go use it, is have the imprint of Congress supporting you. But... And we had a debate. I remember in the Situation Room, the vast majority of the people, it may have been one dissenter or two, felt that Congress was immediately going to quickly respond because it was so urgent. But it didn't. In the meantime, I was asked a question at a press conference in London, is there any way that Assad could avoid being bombed? And I said yes. He could get all the chemical weapons out of the country. I get a call from Lavrov an hour and a half later saying, that's a great idea. We should be pursuing that. Why don't we sit down and talk and see if we can get that done? And within days, we got it done. We actually sat together, negotiated the methodology, and I remember, we sat there and said, now who's going to effect it? Who's going to do this? Oh, okay. The illogical person to do it, entity to do it, is the OPCW. So we plugged the OPCW in, and four months later, the OPCW won the Nobel Peace Prize for removing the weapons from Syria. Would it have been better to bomb them for two days? And not get all the weapons out? And today, those weapons would be in the hands of ISIL? Or was it better to cut a deal and get all the weapons out? And so, if we hadn't made that deal, folks, I'm confident the president was ready to bomb. But hopefully, we would have done it with the support of Congress. Having said everything I just said, I will readily acknowledge that this notion that the president didn't follow through took hold, and it has cost us. And I acknowledge, yes, it became a perception that became a sort of diplomatic reality, and it fed this notion that the administration wasn't there to support its ally. But it's just not accurate. A lot of conversation here at one of the dinners that the Institute sponsored last night here around the rest of the world is continuing, is really right now looking for the United States to lead in ways that it hasn't been. What does that mean? Let me just stop you for one second. When you say to lead in ways that it hasn't been. It's looking for the U.S. to lead. Okay, Judy? We are coming out of this very divisive election. The United States looks absolutely split in half politically. How coming out of this environment does... What do you say to the next administration if you have the opportunity? Well, we won't lead by walking away from the Iran deal and walking away from China, Russia, Germany, France and Britain. That will not be leadership. We will not lead by turning our backs to the 186th Nation Climate Change Agreement where the world is moving to try to deal with a major problem. I mean, you say, how are you going to lead? That's how you lead. Now, we've been leading. Those agreements came under our administration. A country was racing towards the possession of a nuclear weapon in a region where if they were getting it, every other country would have gotten it, or a major country. Would the world be better off with more nuclear weapons in the hands of countries in that region or no? We led that effort. We led the effort by going to China, first trip I made outside of Europe, second trip total for Secretary. I went to China. My staff thought I was a little loony and this was an improbable mission. That we were going to get China within two weeks to sign on to a working group to deal with climate change. Well, we did it. With a goal of getting China and the United States to be able to stand up together and announce our intended reductions of emissions so that we could lead the world to go to Paris with momentum to get done what couldn't be done in Copenhagen, if you recall. So we offered leadership on that. Russia. I don't want to... I'm not... I don't want to be pejorative about anything, but Russia went into Georgia, into South Opsettia, and Abkhazia, nothing was done. No sanctions, nothing. We came in and they went into Ukraine and we galvanized Europe and put sanctions in place. And those sanctions have taken a hefty bite out of Russia and made it clear there's a price to pay for all of this. And against many people's instincts in Europe who wanted to get rid of the sanctions, we managed to continually roll them over and keep them in place in an effort to try to implement the best agreement. Now, let me go back to my point. Ebola. There was a prediction that a million people were going to die by Christmas of two years ago. President Obama sent 3,000 troops into western Africa. We built capacity. We worked with the French. We worked with the British who each took a country and did an amazing job. And we worked with the global community. We had suits that protected people. We had extraordinary China put people in. We had an extraordinary global effort which we led, and guess what? We ended the scourge and hundreds of thousands of lives were saved. We're on the cusp of the first generation of AIDS children of children of AIDS patients being born AIDS free. Because we doubled the effort begun in the Bush Administration on PEPFAR. I can run around the world. South China Sea. We've been asserting the freedom of navigation rights. We've been doing that. And we've been leading ASEAN in order to maintain clarity about the importance of the freedom of the South China Sea. Same on North Korea. We led the efforts to get three resolutions plused up in order to put pressure on Kim Jong-un to try to change the behavior. We had an imploded election. We could have had a complete and total implosion of Afghanistan and the entire enterprise there. But we negotiated. We helped put together a government of national unity which is still there today. And Afghanistan is holding together against the pressures of the Taliban. And we've gotten everybody to renew their pledges and to continue the effort. I mean, I can, whether it's power Africa or young African leaders or young Asian leaders or countless numbers of initiatives we've taken. We've plused up the front-line states of NATO. We quadrupled the budget. $3.4 billion going to the front-line states to make it clear they will be strong enough together with NATO to resist any kind of pressure coming from these. So, yeah, I mean, you can look at Yemen and you can look at Syria and you can find fault in the problem that is still going on. And I'm frustrated by that. Deeply frustrated by that. But as Madeleine Albright once said and it has guided me in my tenure, we and I don't say this with nor do she with any note of arrogance whatsoever. We are, I think, an indispensable nation if not be indispensable nation. And one of the things I've seen reinforced to me is if we're not helping to lead the effort, it often doesn't happen. On the International Syria Support Group we initiated that. We got Russia and Iran at the table with Saudi Arabia, with Qatar, with the UAE, with Turkey. It was hard. We came up with a formula for resolving the problem of Syria. Lavrov and I negotiated a ceasefire. Unfortunately, that ceasefire required a period, not unfortunately that required, but it required a period of calm and five days into it we accidentally bombed 70 Syrian troops and the Russians believed that we weren't serious, that we were actually harboring Nusrah and we weren't willing to separate and then on the weekend the humanitarian trucks got bombed and the thing fell apart. But it's not because we weren't leading and trying to get to the watering hole, folks, but as the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink. You've touched on just about every place I was going to ask you about, so thank you. And I do want to take questions from... Well, I have a lot more in reserve. But before we do, what most endure, what are you absolutely confident that this administration has done globally on the world stage and what are you most worried about? Well, I really believe common sense is going to win out. I mean, it doesn't make sense to... Let me give you an example. The Iran nuclear agreement. There were 19,000 centrifuges spinning, producing enriched material. Now there are 5,000, which is what is allowed. There was a 12,000-kilogram stockpile from which you could have made 10 to 12 bombs if you had enriched it. Now there is a 300-kilogram stockpile, limited to 300 for the next 15 years, and it is physically impossible to build a bomb with 300 kilograms of material. Iran is limited to 3.67% enrichment. You cannot build a bomb with 3.67% enrichment. So with the 130 additional inspectors who are in Iran watching what is happening, I am absolutely confident about the route to a weapon being blocked. Now if that were just arbitrarily undone, we are going back to a place of conflict almost immediately. We are also reducing our credibility in the world because I suspect the Russians and the Chinese and the French and the Germans and the British will just continue the deal and we will be sitting there outside with our credibility grossly damaged and with Iran saying well, we lived by the agreement, but now the United States isn't willing to so we are going to do what we are permitted to do. And then you are right back where you were where we had pressures on us to go bomb Iran. Believe me, there were pressures. The reason makes sense. And I believe reason will win out. Same thing on the Paris Agreement on climate change. I mean look, I have been following the climate issues since 1980, whatever. And I have been to most of the conferences of the parties and I think I understand the science pretty well. Almost unanimously scientists now know that human beings are causing climate change. Look at the storms in the West Coast today. Last year we had $27 billion spent on storms. It is a huge increase over the past. Every year we spend $55 billion in America to cope with acute asthma that comes from air quality. Which comes from coal-fired and fossil-fuel-fired plants. So from a health point of view, from a national security point of view, from an environmental point of view, from every bit of science that is coming at us we need to deal with climate change. So again, I don't think that in the end people are going to move away from that because it's real and the rest of the world is moving towards it. And the bottom line is there are millions of jobs to be created in the transition to a clean energy, alternative energy and if we don't pursue it I guarantee you, China, India, other countries are going to pursue it and they will pursue it to our detriment and loss economically and other ways. Just quickly with China, what are you confident will endure and what are you worried may change? I think China, we prove that I think the climate thing will endure with China. Absolutely. And I think that the management of this complicated relationship with China has been very effective. I think the Chinese would tell you that, that we have managed to cope with differences by understanding them, defining them and putting them in a place and making a conscious decision that we didn't want them to flare up into a conflict while finding the things where we could cooperate most effectively whether it's North Korea where we incidentally think China could do more or climate change or development issues or health issues or other issues the Iran nuclear agreement by the way, China is being extremely helpful on the Iran nuclear agreement helping to design the new plutonium reactor so it cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium and they've assumed leadership role on that I mean this has been a new kind of partnership and Russia likewise even as we see this tension with Russia and obviously this horrendous invasion of our democratic process we were able to cooperate with Russia in getting the chemical weapons out of Syria on getting the Iran nuclear agreement done on creating the marine the largest marine protected area in the world in Antarctic on dealing with the airlines emissions reductions agreement on dealing with the Paris agreement on dealing with the Kigali agreement on refrigerants so we've actually found a way even with Russia in the midst of this conflict to make progress and that's an important message clearly a moment of great tension right now with Russia let's take questions from the audience they're going to bring a microphone to you quickly and give me your name sir over here, here let's go here first you give a great response to the US leadership and the accomplishments but the fact that question was asked and was asked in the last the last few months and in the world the question is should more have been done to get this message across to the people here and internationally what you just said I think we probably should have spent more time messaging on it to a degree although I'm not sure with the current framework of communications that that would have made that much difference one of the greatest challenges we all face right now not just America but every country in the world is we are living in a factless political environment and every country in the world better stop and start worrying about authoritarian populism and the absence of substance in our dialogue if you call it that there's a long well-defined history of what happens when you have economic fear and pressure and a level of exploitation of those fears coupled with sectarian or ethnic exploitation and a kind of simplistic sloganeering politics what can the U.S. do about that well we're going to have to fight for it I think a lot of people are struggling with what do you do about it if policy is going to be made in 140 characters on twitter and every reasonable measurement of accountability is being bypassed and people don't care about it we have a problem and it's not just our problem it's all over the states it's all over the world I mean do you realize in the entire presidential campaign here in the United States of America there wasn't one question asked about climate change in three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate not one question stunning what are you going to do about the what are you going to do about climate change not once we're I just this is a huge problem folks and we're all going to have to figure out how we are going to restore a measure of accountability to our system I might add I mean this whole issue of the norms of how we go through a nominating process we have a whole bunch of hearings without any and I'm stepping beyond my but it's quite amazing to me when I think of the hoops I have to jump through with respect to papers submitted and documentation and tax returns and a whole bunch of things suddenly that's gone poof and it's not as important so I think we have a lot of reckoning to do in our country in the next days and months I can assure you that when I'm out of this office I'm going to spend time along with a lot of others trying to focus on it you think a lot of people are getting a free pass coming in incoming administration yes or no I thought I got by that one I can bail you out Greetings Secretary Kerry I'm a high school teacher from North Carolina and you just talked about how when we use a medium like Twitter we strip important issues of their complexity so I have a question that comes directly from my students one they want to know what's an important international issue that you'd like for them to study and two they want to know after they study it will you Skype with them I'd like them to study the EU, Europe right now and I'd like them to study Brexit and how they think it works and then I'd be delighted because I'll no longer be secretary when I Skype with them so you will Skype but no tweeting is that right I think they should do that I think there are some big questions on the table China, Russia, spheres of influence is a big question global governance failed states increasing numbers of failing states and corruption huge issue and where is the accountability going to come from that creates better governance greater stability more response to citizens in various places those are worth studying all of those things the new platforms of communication you know how democracy going to move faster and more efficiently given the increasingly hard task of building consensus without the consumption of facts I mean these are I can run through a list like this these are all things that just leap out at me as I come out of this job there are some fascinating challenging issues out there the more input we can get from young people the better it will be another question right here so I'm a former refugee from Kosovo now a US citizen so I want to ask a question about the refugees in the world which is the biggest number since World War II and expected more because of climate change and conflicts around the world what is the perspective of the refugees and what this country should be doing with allies and the second what is you the most by leaving the office what are you going to lose sleep as because of this administration but where the world is today what worries me the most is that I won't be there you mean because nobody else can do that no I'm joking I'm just joking honestly no that's the other thing you learn in life and in this business there are always other people who can do every job and it's a good thing to learn I believe the answer to your question is partly found in what I decided a little way back about a year and a half two years ago we had just written our whatever number of check to cover the cost of refugees in Syria and I think and we are the largest donor in the United States of America is proudly the largest donor in the world to the global challenge of refugees and I say global because Turkey puts many billions of dollars into taking care of the refugees or in Turkey but we contribute to other countries to take care of them everywhere and I just said to myself you know this is crazy we keep writing checks and the refugees pouring into Europe and Europe is going to see its politics vastly altered by this and so writing checks is not a solution that's when I decided to try to put together the international Syria support group and bring people to the table and say we have got to end the war in Syria and the solution to the problem of all these refugees in my judgment is a macro policy that we need to embrace all of us in the developed world and developing world even now I'm going to step way out here I believe we need urgently a new Marshall plan which is focused on the most critical states in the world in certain locations particularly Middle East North Africa, South Central Asia where we have got to push back against a huge youth bulge there are about a billion and a half children in the world under the age of 15 somewhere upwards of 400 million of them will not go to school and that is a problem for all of us I remember talking to one of my fellow foreign ministers in northern Africa I won't say which country and I asked him how do you manage it are you concerned about it and he said to me we are scared stiff about it we are worried about it I said why the extremists pay money to grab these young kids 13, 14, 15 and they separate them from their families and they indoctrinate them and then once they are fully indoctrinated they don't need to pay them anymore they send them out to be the next recruiting wave and he said they have a 35 year plan then he said we don't even have a 5 year plan and that's the problem folks that if we have a whole bunch of countries in which a bunch of people are simply going to be left to the devices of people who have a very different mission from the rest of us we are going to inherit that because of our role of leadership because there are no borders because we've seen already what happens with the internet and how you can proselytize and mobilize and inspire so we have to counter it that's one of the things we have quietly done in this administration we now have lowered to a trickle the number of people being recruited by Daesh, ISIL and we've done it by opening different centers in different places that are communicating the indigenous language with indigenous population reaching out by putting new images up by countering the narrative and it's a very proactive major engagement but still if you don't get those kids into school if you don't provide economic opportunity if their lives don't improve in a world in which almost every human being has access through that little rectangular instrument we all carry around they all can see what everybody else in the world has which also means they know what they don't have so that is a massive tool of change which we saw in the course of the Arab Spring so I think we've just seen the first wave of this if we continue to have dictators change constitutions and try to stay in office to see a moving away from the fundamental order and structure that the world worked so hard to create ever since World War II and which we have organized ourselves around we have to care about those things and so when you ask me one of the things I worry about I worry that this next administration when you talk about America first we all understand what that means and comes from but if it means turning away from these other things we have a problem so I think that the State Department has a $51 billion budget $22 billion of that goes to USAID everything we do in foreign policy in the United States of America is about one penny on the dollar of what we spend and I think that's insanity in the world that we live in today so we've got to plus it up now people say oh how can we afford it we have a deficit we have this and that we need to take care of things here we are taking care of things here at home when you take care of these other issues because we spent a couple of trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan because of things that came from somewhere else to affect us here so if we don't decide that there's no longer an over there and an over here there's just an everywhere and we're all connected we're in trouble and so I'm for investing because in the long run that investment pays off 100 million different ways and it saves us money and it saves us the treasure of sending our young people to some other country where we have to fight because we didn't do what we could have done early on and preventively so I think this is the big challenge for all of us we need to do more and we need to get other countries China can do more by the way China has agreed to cooperate with us on co-development in the world this is another defining thing that has come out of this management of our relationship so we could actually co-develop in certain places and leverage I think other countries to come to the table and be involved but no one is immune from this we need to work together to come up with better pedagogy for teaching to get more teachers to get more health structure in place in countries because that builds stability and I think that's the way we will make the greatest difference to our security in the long run Mr. Secretary thank you I'm told that we are out of time it sounds like you're saying these are some of the issues though that you want to work on after you leave office yeah I'm trying to find out what the best way of doing that is but yes you're going to start your own organization no I don't want to start my own thing I want to find the right thing to do within the context of something that's there I think I did that when I came back from Vietnam and you spend as much time trying to keep the telephones working and the office open as you do trying to get done what you want to do so I'm I've learned a little I think I've learned something Secretary of State John Kerry thank you very much Secretary Kerry for his tireless leadership you've just heard an extraordinary summary of his four years and eight years of the last administration at a time of great complexity lots of challenges that face us today and we'll face the next administration from climate change to great power conflict to the kind of fragility that's leading to the world on fire today what a wonderful way to start our morning it's really laid down the critical issues that we'll be grappling with for the rest of the day we have our first panel coming up followed by when we will be joined by National Security Advisor Ambassador Susan Rice and National Security Advisor Designee Lieutenant General Michael Flynn but first we're going to take a short break let everybody re-caffeinate mingle a little bit please rejoin us at 10.45 for a continuation of this important conversation thank you welcome back it's a good sign that there are so many conversations lively exchanges going on that lively exchange is happening on social media as well I've just been told we're trending nationally so this conversation is bubbling out I want to thank everyone for coming back to their seats we have a very full day and we do not want to serve you dinner this evening thank you for coming back we had an extraordinary morning I think the very candid very sweeping articulation by Secretary Kerry really set us up for our next panel which will look at what are the key incoming challenges facing the Trump administration we have an incredible panel I want to note one substitution from your agenda and that is due to a hearing schedule we have shifted Senator Cotton in place of James Carafano Dr. Carafano is the Vice President of the Trump Foundation and I want to take this opportunity to give him a special thanks not only for his flexibility but for being a really exceptional partner through this whole event and with that I'm delighted to introduce our moderator for the day as our panelists come out we're delighted to have Martha Raditz she's the Chief Global Affairs Correspondent for ABC News she's also the Vice President of the U.S. National Security Defense Department she will introduce the panelists please join me in welcoming Martha thank you very much it's great to be here thanks to the Institute of Peace I think everybody here probably knows these panelists so I'm going to be very brief and you have them in your program as well we'll start with Secretary Madeleine Albright who served under President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001 following four years as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations she's the founder and chair of Albright Stonebridge Group a global strategy firm and a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University Admiral James Stavridis following a 35 year Navy career James Stavridis is Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University he served as Commander of Southern and European Commands NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral Stavridis is currently the Chair of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Naval Institute Frederick Kemp my fellow ute Frederick Kemp has served since 2007 as President and Chief Executive of the Atlantic Council overseeing an expansion of its scope of work he was an award winning journalist at the Wall Street Journal covered the collapse of communism in Europe and served as editor of the Washington Brussels and Senator Tom Cotton he has served as a Republican Senator from Arkansas since 2015 his committee assignments include the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Armed Services Committee after graduating from Harvard Law School Senator Cotton left a legal career following the September 11th, 2001 attacks to serve as an Army Infantry Officer including service in Afghanistan and Iraq I welcome to you all our topic this morning is very simple, I have a very easy job because I have four very smart people here and they have a lot to say I have a feeling and this is quite simple and I'm going to start with you Admiral Stavridis and just go down the line tell me your three national security priorities for the next administration I'm going to start with one that may or may not surprise you I think cyber is extremely important and the reason I put it at the top of my list is because I think in cyber we have the greatest mismatch between the level of threat which is quite high and our level of preparation which frankly is quite low in other words we worry about North Korea but we have options we're kind of prepared we worry about what Russia is doing we're kind of prepared we worry about violent extremism number two I'd say broadly would be the return of great power politics and this is often categorized as Russia and China but I'd add to it this bubbling mix that I think over time is going to include the return to the world stage of Germany and Japan which I think will be fascinating and above all in this century the rise of India how we move those pieces around I think will be challenging this gets into South China Sea and Crimea and everything else we face so second I'd say is great power politics underline disorder and then the third for me would be the continuing stresses and strains from violent extremism which we tend to identify as radical Islam and that's certainly a significant part but we also have racial challenges still in roof is a violent extremist we have political challenges and then there's Brevik who killed so many people in Norway is a political extremist so that strain of violent extremism kind of under the surface of the great power politics and looming out there like a tower I think is cyber Secretary Elbrich well I would certainly agree with all of those and then have my own kind of list and a little bit different organization I do think that we are living in a completely changed world in terms of the international system and how we operate and governance questions and the discussion is to whether it's all state actors I would argue that the presence of non-state actors has added an awful lot of challenges especially since our tool our national security toolbox has set up to deal with states and not with non-state actors so the governance the second I think is the challenge of how the great power rivalries go on and there I really do think that we have to be concerned about what China and Russia are doing and then also as Secretary Kerry said I think what is going on in Europe so those aspects and looking at regional problems that come up and bite you that you've not really been ready for and then the third aspect has also to do with the more process there is no faith in institutions and this goes a little bit not just to cyber but to information I stole this line from Silicon Valley but it works so well to explain it is that people are talking to their governments on 21st century technologies the government hears them on 20th century technologies and are providing 19th century responses and therefore there is no faith in institutions and trying to figure out how to deal with all of this and I have a very elegant term for this the world is a mess and that will let ordinary people understand what we're saying and I think that there has to be some way that we look at the institutional structure and I think we need to understand the following thing and I hope we have a chance to talk about this more is foreign policy, national security policy does not come in four year or eight year segments and no president comes in with a clean slate and so there has to be a look at what is out there that has to be dealt with and then the things that will bite you that you don't know are coming which leads us to Senator Cotton and Senator Cotton and I have been talking I found it very interesting the way you look at this that we talk about three national security priorities we're not talking about necessarily threats and you view those quite differently thanks Martha and thanks to the Institute for Peace I can't disagree with the general secretary but as Martha said as I was thinking through the title of this panel, three priorities not threats threats are in some degree already expressed here the great powers, Russia and China rogue nations like North Korea and Iran trends national actors like Islamic terrorist groups there's no telling what any of those are going to do over the next ten days what they're going to do in the first ten days of the Trump administration all those who have been in government know how to react to contact but where could the new administration go out and make contact take the initiative to set priorities that would fundamentally advantage the United States and strategic competition and I would say there's three areas in that and this is a good time to pursue them because a new administration is a time when people expect a new path and it's a time when you have the most domestic political capital and working with Congress so first would be substantial increases in our defense budget maybe going back to the national defense panel from 2014 which itself is based on Bob Gates' budget in 2012 the last time the Department of Defense budgeted before the Budget Control Act went into effect and the sequester spending cuts took effect second would be a thorough going review of our strategic posture both the Bush and the Obama administrations in their first years in office undertook a nuclear posture review the world has changed radically since then both Russia and China are accelerating nuclear efforts China is developing hypersonic glide vehicles Russia is flagrantly violating the INF Treaty if Russian media reports are to be believed they're developing an underwater drone that could deliver nuclear weapons into our coastal cities so I think we need to fundamentally reconsider our nuclear and our missile defense posture and then third a domestic issue that has far reaching international consequences is to accelerate the shale revolution in American energy production we are blessed to have a country of great innovators of risk takers of investors of fantastic scientists geology that permits shale production in a way that really almost no other country in the world has that combination that's helped us become a global energy superpower that's something that will give us more freedom of action throughout the world in particular though so I would like to thank the administration to pursue specific policies about particular countries and regions thank you and Fred for decades already I've been stealing Secretary Albright's ideas so let me first say I want to grab on to the world as a mess as a fact and then the other fact and it won't become more orderly unless the US gets more deeply engaged there is no one else to substitute for us and if we don't do it then either less benevolent actors or chaos will fill the void so I want you all to remember where you were on this day because we're at a defining moment in history you can pick your date 1919-1945 you can go back to 1815 or 1789 but that's where we are couple that with one of the most fraught moments of history I'm John F. Kennedy and we ended up with the Bay of Pigs disaster in April with a failed Vienna summit where the Soviets decided the president was weak with the Berlin Wall and then a year later you had the Cuban Missile Crisis so that set the parameters for the rest of the Cold War but we almost had nuclear war I'm not saying anything like that will happen this time the Cold War was at stake then I think the global system is at stake now so my big overarching roof is can we save, re-adjust, re-invigorate the global system of practices values that we've always had and then there are three pillars and these are my three issues Europe and Russia I think it was terrific that Secretary Kerry pointed to the European Union because if the European Union comes unraveled or becomes more dysfunctional you cannot have a strong America in the world with a weak Europe it just doesn't happen, there are a cornerstone of engagement and a revanchist Russia is pushing on that and so both of those things we need a reassurance for Europe and we need Russia to know that there are certain lines that can't be crossed redrawing borders testing NATO allies at the very top of the list the second is in the Middle East here I want to embrace a report that the Atlantic Council Secretary Albright and Steve Hadley where they outline that it's not a crisis of the Middle East but a crisis from the Middle East where you have extremism and migrants being exported again undermining Europe we can't deal with that in the short term that's to be dealt with the long term with our allies so redoubling and deepening our relationships with allies in the region means our traditional Sunni allies and then working over the long term to tap what Secretary Albright and Steve Hadley rightly saw some very promising tendencies in the Middle East as well entrepreneurship youth bolds that isn't just dangerous can also be point to prosperity and then finally and the last point is China if Russia is the biggest threat short term to the global system China could be a threat over time to the global system but it's also a stakeholder now and it has a huge amount at stake right now we can't put ourselves into conflict with China if we want the global system to be reinvigorated to readjust and survive we have to do it together with China along those lines I really think we then have to double down our relationships with our allies in the Far East because if we're strong with our allies with Japan with South Korea with others we will be able to have a much more positive relationship with China so those would be my three US, Europe, Middle East, China, Asia Thanks very much Senator Cotton I want to go to you on this what do you sense Donald Trump's priorities will be we've all seen tweets we've all seen things he said during the campaign and since he has become President-elect but what's your sense of what his priorities might be in terms of foreign policy he's going to make America great again and how will he do that some of the issues that I touched on are things in which the President-elect campaigned as well substantial increases in military spending a fundamental reconsideration of our nuclear and strategic posture oil and gas production these are things whatever the President-elect says on Twitter whatever he says in media interviews are not good things for countries like Russia they're not good things for Iran or some of our other adversaries in the Middle East if you look at some of his appointees to the cabinet whether it's Jim Mattis or Mike Pompeo or Mike Flynn these are not shy and retiring violates who have a constrained role of America's view in the world I suspect that President-elect Trump as he said on the campaign trail and based on some of his nominations will take a firmer line around the world with a lot of our adversaries and try to project greater strength and demand more respect for the United States he'd be less willing to make concessions without receiving concessions in return and I think those are all good things I think those are a good change after eight years of the Obama administration which the President said famously early on that he wanted to extend an open hand rather than a clenched fist but sometimes the clenched fist has to proceed the open hand you know I want to talk about the tweets for a second and it's obviously something we've never seen before to this this number of tweets like this it's usually a statement and you know very formal but those tweets have moved markets they've moved forward they've moved carrier how will that work in foreign policy can it move foreign leaders Secretary Albright I'm going to try to be polite let me just say that I am very concerned about the tweets and generally about the messages that are going out and if I could say Secretary Kerry said I'd invented the term indispensable nation actually President Clinton did it so often it became identified with me but there is nothing about that term that says alone it means that the United States needs to be engaged and I think that that is a message I think we need to get out there not as America first but as America as a partner there is nothing wrong with partnerships I know Americans don't like the word multilateralism it has too many syllables and ends in an ism but the bottom line is it all it means is partnership and understanding that the world as we see it in terms of the what you call the global issues that are out there whether it's terrorism or disease or nuclear proliferation those issues require partnerships and so I do think there has been a system in place in the world for a very long time of how governments communicate with each other how presidents communicate with each other how those documents are developed are they a part of some kind of a decision making process that does in fact reflect what the government thinks and what the congress thinks and what the American people think and the tweets don't deal with that in fact they are if you want a reset if you really want to get someone's attention and get Taiwan's attention you want to get China's attention why not let me just say I think it's fine disruption is a very interesting theory actually and I think that it doesn't hurt destroying is not a good thing and I think that part of the issue is it I think it is absolutely essential I said this that foreign policy doesn't come in four or eight year segments every administration especially if it's of a different party tries to do things differently but it has created great concerns let me just take one example from the transfer from Clinton to Bush I was in the middle of negotiations with the North Koreans Bill Perry just wrote about this the decision was made by the Bush administration not to continue those talks I now would put North Korea into one of the more dangerous aspects of what is going on out there so I only use it as an example of the fact that you may disagree with what President Obama did I might disagree with what President Bush did actually Steve and I took a pledge not to talk about the past but I think that it is what it is and it is essential that there be some understanding of what the track is what the role of the United States is how we behave as a responsible power in cooperation with others and tweets doesn't do it for me anybody else want to jump in on that I agree with Secretary Albright that if think of it as a diet if your diet is exclusively shots of expresso that is probably not a good thing but as part of a fulsome diet where you are conducting normal diplomacy you are executing agreements you are negotiating treaties you are moving military forces I think an occasional shot of expresso can jazz you and can actually energize things where I worry about it is I think of young officers I'll do a military context to it which is let's say a tweet appears that says hey the next Iranian gunboat that crosses the bow of a U.S. Navy ship is going to get blown out of the water which I don't think that was a tweet I think that was actually I don't really know but you are very close because I did so what we need to recognize is that particular shot of expresso has an effect all the way down to that young commanding officer where he or she is dealing with these kind of rules of engagement moments and so you potentially kind of create this short circuit that goes from the ultimate commander in chief down to operators on the ground I think it can be the same in diplomacy it can work the same in economics so I guess where I come out is an occasional shot of expresso okay let's think about it but it can't be exclusively your diet I think a senator said it wouldn't be you have probably a Madison there and others doing those other things so let me actually embrace the tweets the as you know I'm a little schizophrenic you're a journalist and foreign policy analyst and as a journalist good heavens he's really just captured the news story every day and it's pretty brilliant what he's doing but let me then compliment because I agree with Admiral Stavridis that the tweets have to be accompanied what they have to be accompanied with by a strategy but but you can't expect the strategy to be there yet but it's going to have to come relatively soon there is an unpredictability that the president elect has embraced and on the on many issues that can be useful politically on the global stage the u.s. has to be predictable its allies have to know where it stands its adversaries have to know where it stands accompanied by tweets that's fine and could be highly effective I don't expect the president elect to put on a bumper sticker you'll save the international liberal order but if he wants to be successful and here's the tweet I would have which is I want president trump to make global America great again and to do that he has to lay out a strategy that really embraces this order that we created after 1945 when we had 50% of global GDP now we have 18 or 20% that means we have to lead more collaboratively we have to lead in a way that inspires people around the world so that they want to follow and if he can do that and tweet every day how he's doing that that would be a wonderful way because it can reach the entire world in that fashion and so I don't think you can expect a populist president to be the most populist president we've elected since Andrew Jackson to not be populist in office but he can be populist and sustain the global system that has benefited all so much at the same time do you think other countries need to know where we stand as he described it and if so where do you think Russia thinks they stand at this point in time like most countries around the world the future of US policy has been somewhat frozen for six to eight months in the election and since the election as well again you know Donald Trump has said that it would be a good thing we had a better relationship with Russia and we cooperated more on common interests that would be a good thing the last three presidents at one time or another have tried to take that tactic and they've been wrong footed every single time I'm sure that Vladimir Putin thinks that he can wrong foot Donald Trump again and advance his project just advancing America's interest in the world again when you get back to the fundamental matters though in terms of our defense budget the size of our Navy the nuclear modernization some of the nominees that Donald Trump has chosen I don't think there's a clear signal being sent to Moscow right now from the Trump transition team we are going to open it up to questions very soon and wonder around but I just want to engage a little bit on I know the threats the priorities going forward but how you view Donald Trump's foreign policy agenda or his strategic thinking in terms of foreign policy and whether you really have to define that I mean throughout my career everybody's defined you know this is the Clinton doctrine this is the Obama doctrine this is the Bush doctrine do you need that in every case or can it be a case to case basis Admiral Sevridis I think it's premature to try and scope that out simply because the nominees that President like Trump had put forward were not anticipated to say the least I think if you go back 60 days ago and you'd said we're going to pick a four star general to head up the Department of Defense we're going to have another four star general at DHS we're going to have the CEO of ExxonMobil all of which I think are good picks by the way we never would have anticipated it so I think you've got to wait and see that team come together interact with Mike Flynn and KT McFarland let them do the traditional NSC role and we've got to give them some space to shape the view knowing very well the two military officers as well as Mike Flynn I think I can sense the kind of outline of where things are going to go but we need to wait we've got to really get Rex Tillerson into the mix in a significant way as well so let's give them some space but I do want to agree with both the senator and with Fred that we've got to have a consistency in a view and so we should give them time to develop it but we should not allow ourselves to remain on that diet of Expresso Secretary Albright you brought this up and Mike Flynn, General Mattis, General Kelly a lot of retired military in there do you think that's an issue? I mean, obviously they're leaders they know how to get things done but they go to the same schools they have been in the military their whole lives is there a different perspective there for solving problems? Well, I do actually think that there's a different perspective and some of it very useful if I might say this might surprise people but whenever I flew on a military plane I would sit behind the pilot and I would see that even though they had taken off many many times they would go through the steps every single time civilians don't do that there is something very disciplined about it well, it's very interesting frankly and so I do think that there are some things that the military can input into the system I think also and we talked about this the whole issue of civilian military relations I find fascinating in terms of teaching and in terms of how things are carried out in your example about what happens to the people as they hear something from the top so I am not I'm not opposed to the military people there I think it's going to be interesting what is the thing though that needs to be looked at is the process I have been involved in the transition now a number of times and obviously I was very interested in what Terry Carey said how little is going on it means that it has to go on because this is turning over the crown jewels and I think that the process that ultimately produces a national security strategy or these documents in terms of a nuclear doctrine has to take place and it is the NSC that makes this happen that brings the process together since 1947 and so I'm hoping that the time immediately already now and as the hearings go forward that that process takes place because unpredictability occasionally is interesting constant unpredictability is dangerous and so I think that process has to take place and the military and the civilians have to figure out how to operate together it will be crucial and I think we need to support that civilian military relationship at the Atlantic Council we deal with a lot of military brass and I think one of the things that's really impressed me is how the military invests in the education of its officers if you want to have the most fascinating conversation you could ever have on military history and what the lessons are for today then talk to General Mattis or Admiral Stavridis these are the people I have these deep intellectual conversations with these are some of our best thinkers and some of our best strategist the government would invest as much in the further education as the military has done so that doesn't concern me at all one thing that will be interesting is who the present turns to for military advice at those crucial moments when he's going to have General Mattis and General Dempsey both Marines sitting there one of whom it's his job and the other one has done that up until very recently so there may be some complicated moments of that sort but nothing that I don't think that these people can sort through and Senator Cotton I have to say that just covering these wars for all these decades the military wasn't just doing military duty they were diplomats as well in these situations and thrown into situations where they had no idea what was going to happen in a war that was going south early on in Iraq and tried to turn that around and be skilled diplomats as well I want to go back to this I certainly admire the military but I do think that we also have to respect the people that are in the have been serving the United States as diplomats or as civil servants people who have dedicated their life to government service and should not be viewed as traders or people that can't do the job and I was very proud to be Secretary of State and see how hard the diplomats really worked and the wall and the State Department that had all the people that had died in service needs a very dangerous job especially these days and the combination of the military and civilians protecting each other and working on things together is very important and Secretary of State mentioned that the budget for the State Department is $51 billion the budget for the Pentagon is somewhere between $600 and $700 billion and that is something function 050 and 150 needs to be looked at together and we certainly have good words for career diplomats Senator Klein, I want to go back to the nuclear issue because you brought that up as one of your three priorities certainly you want to modernize what's already there but what does this look like what is the nuclear deterrent in your mind look like going forward? It's not the 60s anymore we were talking also about walking over those missile silos out in Wyoming and Colorado 60s at fields it's scary but talk a little bit about what needs to be modernized and I want to bring you in on that too Admiral Stavridis and we're going to open up for questions No, it's not the 60s anymore in part because large nuclear arsenals are no longer restricted to the United States and then the Soviet Union now Russia you know one issue I had with the New START Treaty is it treated it it treated the United States as if Russia was our only strategic competitor in the nuclear domain as opposed to China being a rising competitor having the advantage of being free of all constraints so that's something that we have to account for that China continues to expand its nuclear arsenal and that Russia is modernizing it and it's changing its doctrine and rhetoric around nuclear nuclear doctrine as well as countries like North Korea and India and Pakistan and one day I hope not Iran domestically in terms of our nuclear capabilities what that means is you know reinvestment in all legs of the triad we need to develop a new missile system the ground based strategic deterrents we need to have a higher class replacement submarine and a new B-21 bomber Congress is committed to this this is part of the commitments that President Obama made past the New START Treaty this is something that's going to depend very heavily first on Donald Trump but especially on Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense to drive those programs forward to make sure we're getting best value on time delivery requires very capable management this is something that Bob Gates wrote about in his book about his time as Secretary of Defense that it's only the Secretary of Defense who can drive a program that's fundamentally important so you don't want the B-21 to end up like either the B-2 or the F-35 has those are decisions that were made 25, 35 years ago when I was in grade school the B-21 decisions are being made now and we want to make sure those programs are effective what we've heard from Donald Trump in terms of the in terms of military budgets adding ships, adding people adding that tell me just briefly if you will whether you think what those budgets align to in terms of threat well so the reason people go back to the Gates budget is that it was the first the last budget done before the Budget Control Act put arbitrary caps on the Department of Defense that was the last time the Department of Defense engaged in full-on strategic based budgeting as opposed to budget based strategizing it also was a time when the world was not nearly as dangerous as it has become over the last 5 years in my opinion we have to take into account the security threats that our country faces and that's not just the military as Secretary Albright said that's our diplomats, that's our intelligence officers and so forth the threats that our country faces we have to find the money to counteract those threats there's many important functions of government that we need to fund but we have to take into account their budgetary constraints in my opinion we need more ships because of China but we need more ships because of Russia as well we need more ships because we're a global superpower that is largely a maritime power since we're in the new world and most of these threats we're talking about is in the old world and the fact that 350 ships to which Donald Trump is committed to which our navy has said they want to pursue is fundamental to our ability to project power into the old world to deter a great power war as our global navy has done for 75 years I certainly agree with that and I'm happy to see an army captain speaking so well about the navy that's well done sir I can see why you're in the senate I want to quickly give a a lot about military we've talked a lot about diplomats I want to draw a line under those who do development USAID our NGOs the peace corps many of them stand in risk every single day and that is also part of our security and also an underfunded part of our security break break to your question I agree completely with senator cotton's analysis both of the overall nuclear piece of our DOD budget I will draw a particular line and you know I stipulate I'm a navy admiral so here it comes but the Ohio class replacement because it is the invulnerable leg of the triad at least invulnerable at this point I think is of particular value I do support the triad not the dyad but I can tell you from experience those Ohio's need replacement and that is what Bill Perry who is going to be here with us today has a new book out relatively new called my journey at the brink of nuclear war and it is a terrific book about his feeling that we are edging back toward a world in which the use of nuclear weapons is far more imaginable than it was over the previous decades I think that's deeply worrisome and needs to be part of the conversation and it's also sadly a fundamental reason that we need to continue to have that deterrent if I could just add this is exactly the point I'm making about a new posture review it's not just Kim Jong Un who rattles the nuclear saber regularly it's Russian defense ministry officials and flag officers they talk expressly about using nuclear weapons using tactical nuclear weapons to offset their conventional disadvantages this is something that regularly happens in the Russian language press and this kind of change that we have not seen for the last 25 years that is reminiscent of some of the most tense periods of the Cold War that demand us to conduct this kind of thorough going review Fred and then we're going to go to questions a very short comment on Admiral Stavridis comment on development which also is partially lined with Secretary Albright's reconfiguring of budgets part of the problem is that we development has become a part of geopolitical competition and is strategic but we don't think of it as strategic and in the 60's interestingly enough Kennedy did look at it that way and we saw it that way during the Soviet period but it's that way again and so these are strategic expenditures in development and they have to be aligned with national strategy and somehow over the years this has become separated and so I think it's down on development and it has to be seen again in geopolitical and strategic terms It does and here's the good news it's incredibly inexpensive compared to the necessity of buying the high end military systems these are really penny on the dollar investments and I will tell you I spent seven years as a combatant commander in two theaters I deployed many many ships aircraft carriers destroyers cruisers submarines forward perhaps the most impactful deployments comfort mercy that's part of our security you said that very well Thanks very much let's open it to questions if you'd please introduce yourself when you stand you have the advantage of being in the front row here so Good morning Mark Mayberry Vice President Mitre Director of the National Cybersecurity FFRDC wanted to ask a question to Admiral Stravidis you raised the issue of cyber also questions the other panelists we have lots of initiatives within the U.S. government and the private sector to enhance cyber resilience we have a few international activities focused on improving fuel relations expectations norms of behavior given the audience and the focus I'm interested in what the next administration needs to do to raise the game and this important mission area Thanks I'll give you four or five things it's a list of 20 I strongly support dividing the national security agency from U.S. cyber command so you have two senior individuals who can focus on two very different missions very big span of control I think that's happening I hope the new administration follows through on that secondly we need more international cooperation and work on this we're quite good many of our allies are very good within the bounds of propriety and confidentiality we need to think about how we can learn more from for example the Israelis from the French who are pretty good etc thirdly we need better interagency integration I would argue that includes eventually a cabinet level voice to focus on cyber it's such a fundamental backbone to our societies our vulnerabilities are great we have a secretary of agriculture a secretary of interior where's that cabinet voice on cyber security could it be part of the director of national intelligence's role for example so getting that into that level and lastly better private public cooperation we're never going to secure ourselves in cyber using a military or a government approach the real brains in that operation as I think we all know are out on the west coast we need to bring those together better private public cooperation I could go on a long time on this but there's some ideas and at most every so we late to the cyber security game here I think the way to think of it is as go back a hundred years and think about aviation we were just kind of at the beginning we'd use planes a little bit in combat commercial flights were just kind of starting we're kind of at that stage in cyber so I don't particularly fault or blame us we're still kind of at on the beach at Kitty Hawk in a certain sense but we've got to go faster because the cyber threat the cyber means the Internet of Things is going to jump from 15 million devices to 25 billion devices excuse me billion to billion within five years the acceleration demands us to go faster than we did in aviation we're at that stage I would say I do think we're kind of behind on it I think the question is what is the organizational structure for it we've talked about this I'm not sure that a cabinet role is the right one because it isn't all cabinet government but it does need to be within the national security decision making system and especially since it is divided among a lot of different parts of the government and it has to have an intelligence component to it so the DNI part of it is important the part though that I say fairly frequently these days is reorganization of the government becomes its own kind of monkey works in many way it takes an awful lot of time takes a lot of attention and we need to focus on the substance of this as quickly as possible rather than trying to decide who's you know who's in charge and who does what it's under a cotton how can congress help during that period during this transition period do no harm thank you doctor we passed cyber legislation last year that was a step in the right direction I'm not sure it's all the way we need to go but you know going back to my point about development of new delivery systems in the nuclear triad this is another area where the ball is primarily in the executive branches courts that having competent effective managers are driving change forward I agree with what secretary Albright said when you think you have a problem with your organization especially if your organization is a government and the solution is moving you're probably wrong the solution is usually better leadership and a change culture now I think that we I agree with what Admiral Stavridis said that we're still the kind of the dawn of the cyber age the people that we have working on this problem in our government are the best people in the world America produces the best people in the world we have peer competitors though as we've seen who can hold it at risk things that we hold very dear and it's a threat that we have to deal with. Did one final comment? Simply to put it in a military context and think back 100 years ago we had an army a navy and a marine corps we didn't have an air force why because we didn't really fly planes around today we have an army and navy and marine corps and of course we have an air force I would argue we need to put more emphasis in this area we're going to look back in 50 years and say gosh what were we thinking each talked about areas of potential investment and senators talked about pre sequestration levels of defense budget Admiral and Mr. Kemp have talked about investments in high bank for the buck development this is all coming at a time of incredible economic stress huge debt and I'm curious to hear particularly as congress controls the purse strings from the senator where will this money come from where would you see the priorities for reducing or restructuring budgets in order to I'll defer to the Ways and Means Committee on that now well hopefully we'll have more economic growth in the coming years and hopefully that can generate some of the tax revenue that we need you can always find some savings in the department of defense there was a report last month that suggests I think there's 125 billion dollars in savings I don't accept that number I think it was highly theoretical about the kinds of practices you can apply from private corporations that you simply can't apply in the civil service rules and government contracting rules but you know Bob Gates found 400 billion dollars early in the Obama administration he wasn't allowed to reinvest that in the military as he was initially promised but that's just one example of the kind of savings that you can find one of the things I mentioned early about a top priority additional or accelerated oil and gas production well a happy fact is that the good Lord put oil and gas in a lot of places where the federal government owns land around the world so from leases royalties and bonuses you generate some revenue through that as well in addition to the geopolitical effects it has so there's ways that we can find the revenue that we need to meet the threats that we face around the world I'm not saying it's going to be easy but I think both parties at least the Democrats with whom I work regularly on the armed services and the intelligence committees recognize that next question right here John Herbst Atlantic Council let's go from the heights to something specific if Mr. Putin continues his aggression in Ukraine should the new administration renew sanctions in March and if it doesn't and I'm looking at you particularly Senator Cotton should Congress pass legislation mandating sanctions I expect Vladimir Putin is still going to continue his aggression because I define him having troops in annexed Korea as aggression I don't see him leaving Crimea anytime soon I don't see him leaving the Donbas anytime soon so I would support the extension of sanctions I would support a whole suite of efforts to apply more pressure to Russia to greet Russia with firmer boundaries and so they know that costs will be imposed when they cross over those boundaries the report that the Director of National Intelligence released last week about Russian or Russian affiliates hacking the DNC and John Podesta said that this is a clear pattern it's continued in cyberspace but there has been a significant escalation in the scope and the scale and the reach and you have to wonder why Vladimir Putin thought he could get away with that kind of escalation that's just one example that one specific example of the crimes and transgressions that Russia has committed against the United States in our interest under Vladimir Putin for 15 years I think the key thing we can do is apply more pressure and try to gain the strategic upper hand or Syria or the Baltics not in any particular domain like cyber or nuclear but across the board Can I just add a point on that? Agreeing with the Senator if I could phrase it slightly differently perhaps it would be first Russian proverb which is probe with a bayonet when you encounter mush, keep going when you hit steal, withdraw there's not been a lot of steal in that relationship or confrontations we should confront where we must in cyber, Syria and Ukraine for example we should also try and find zones of cooperation and I think there are potential ones out there counter-terrorism counter-piracy, counter-narcotics potentially in Afghanistan where our interests align perhaps in the Arctic over time maybe arms control there's some trade space so I would say absolutely agree we must but cooperate where we can and the fallacy is this idea that we're going to create a grand strategic bargain with Russia that's not going to happen we're going to have a transactional relationship that is going to have to include some steal but also find some zones of cooperation I want to hear what you have to say about Russia and where you think we're going I do think that we need to be tough as has been expressed that we need to persuade our allies those sanctions have to be renewed by our allies also which requires diplomacy and work that's going to have to be done of not just America first saying how we are going to do things I am concerned about some of the ways that the discussions about Russia have taken place during the campaign making it seem as if they are kind of a benign operation when they are not and we do need to look at what the hacking has been about what the role of information has been Russia today a number of different aspects of the information aspect of this but I think we need to be tough and while at the same time looking for areas where we can cooperate but there has to be diplomatic activity with the Europeans to make sure that they also renew the sanctions okay question over here John Alderman CSIS talked about the need to increase military spending before you came Secretary Kerry talked about putting a couple trillion dollars into Iraq and Afghanistan I think most Americans would wonder whether it's a question of investment as we think about the threats that the United States faces around the world as you say there are super power threats there are threats like Iran and North Korea there are non-state actor threats like Secretary Albright was talking about there are any number of things we could use military instruments to address as you look around the world what do you think we need to use military instruments to do more of and what do you think we are currently using military instruments to do that we should be doing less of well my preference to be able to be to use military force as little as possible no one who's seen combat would like to spend our sons and daughters off to combat again the two trillion dollars that has been spent in Iraq and Afghanistan was spent on wartime operations that's not an increase in our fundamental capabilities I would like to see an increase in our base budget not so we can employ it and win with it but so we deter those kind of conflicts from happening in the first place and too often you see our military impressed into things that are not core military operation we're talking earlier about the role that our young privates and corporals played on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan that were diplomatic or development or legal or political and they did those things with great skill but that's not the training that they get at basic training you know when I was in Afghanistan I was on an interagency joint team you know we didn't just have Air Force and Army we had State we had USDA AID I'd like to see more of that I'd like to see us apply all those other levers of national power to all the problems we face so we're not using our military for tasks they perform however admirably but still is not in their core skill set and distracts away from the tasks for which they've been training that we have to use them totally agree interagency piece powerful I want to pick up the secretary's theme of the allies NATO despite the fact that we need to get our European allies to step up and spend the two percent of their goal it's still enormous allied capability there Japan Australia we have resources in our alliance system that we can tap if we can execute alignment of purpose not always a given but I think that's another place you can draw resources and potentially lessen the burden on US troops if I can just add there when I speak about not having to employ our military like that I mean in places like Iraq and Afghanistan I think it's a great benefit for our security to have them in places like South Korea and Japan and Europe on permanent status we have these alliances like NATO or like the US Japan treaty not because we're a charitable organization we're a nation state and we have interests and while it is in those nations interests of course to be an ally of us we have them primarily because it is in our interests to have those relationships and to have those troops forward deployed which by the way is often less expensive than having them based here in the United States now there's some questions about whether they're deployed in the right places like for instance in Europe whether we should move them further to the east and the Poland and the Baltics more so than we have now but having those forward deployed troops in a steady state is a big benefit to our national security and it saves money I just want to go back to the beginning very briefly and you talk about priorities versus threat immediately when Donald Trump takes office on the 20th and none of us can really predict but there's lots of signs out there what do you think the first crisis or threat might be is it North Korea is it the Secretary when do you start I always say I don't want to jinx anything but I think that well you can't predict but I do think that I hope that when he is president and he gives his inaugural speech that it's very clear about where America stands and then that in fact there is a comprehensive foreign policy speech I do think that the threats are going to come from non-state actors in a variety of ways that are harder to deal with as we watch what the terrorism level has been and what is happening in Turkey for instance I have a bad case on the other side these transition times are so fraught it's a period of time when your adversaries test and your allies hedge and so if we're not clear on the question for example of Ukraine you might find Vladimir Putin testing if we're not clear on the question of sanctions you might find the Germans and others hedging and so American leadership and predictability is absolutely crucial at this point of time and so as much as I would like to have the administration take time to develop a national strategy document on the other hand they have to start developing national strategy ideas really with the inaugural and then flesh them out before I think the greatest dangers come if we don't have a strategy because we don't have a strategy you don't know what the priority is and then you get into North Korea where certainly non-proliferation is key but it's also an opportunity if you can work together with China to sort this out what an incredible opportunity that could be in the first year where you work together with the Chinese to take on this global menace North Korea I think that was a tweet to reach the U.S. are we talking preemptive strikes here? Well think about the threats in the earliest stages of this presidency I think a simple fact is most of our adversaries are scared of Donald Trump to put it very bluntly and adversaries like China and Russia I think are unlikely to test us in the early days of the administration China has shown itself susceptible to deterrence in the East China Sea I think Vladimir Putin is more likely to play do things like refuse to retaliate for what Barack Obama did two weeks ago or declare a ceasefire in Syria as he did last month which is I would say really just a refit but North Korea because of Kim Jong-un's history of erratic behavior and the difficulty in deterring him and Islamic terrorists because of their fanatical beliefs and the difficulty in deterring them I would say are the two most likely challenges that a new president Trump would face I always like to quote Secretary of Defense Bob Gates for whom I worked for many many years he used to say about predictions like this our record is perfect we've never gotten it right and so I'll fearlessly say I see something maritime happening and it could be Iranians going after one of our destroyers in the Arabian Gulf China pushing in a maritime sense a kind of a soft tug in the South China Sea possibly in the East China Sea I agree with the senator on Russia will take a wait and see attitude so I think a maritime touch and I think undoubtedly cyber you're going to see intrusion in cyber and it's going to come from all directions North Korea Iran, Russia, China because they want to know where those limits are Senator Cotton saying he thinks some are scared of Donald Trump let me ask you this then we heard Secretary Kerry earlier say the red line thing that didn't matter there wasn't really a red line they paid consequences is that in a sense whatever you think about that red line whether in fact they were allowed to cross or not that isn't in the adversaries mind anymore I think we'll have Donald Trump who's made some pretty powerful threats if you will I agree they are frightened of President-elect Trump because he's unpredictable but they will seek to remediate that by defining where those lines are and whether this administration will shift those lines as a matter of tactics or not I don't know we'll know more when that national security team comes together I think this will be a fundamental conversation they'll have one thing one has to think about early on because I think there is a danger of an ISIS or ISIS-related attack on our homeland and indeed I think they would like to do that early in a Trump administration and then the question is what's the Trump reaction to that because as with Al Qaeda at 9-11 ISIS is weakened right now ISIS has lost territory ISIS has lost territory it is becoming more dangerous outside of its territory and in the west and potentially in the US so it's not just that it's a danger it's that one really has to game out how one responds so that you don't actually play into their hands by over responding and then acting as a recruiting tool my name is Shelly Pitterman I work with UNHCR the UN Refugee Agency in the context of this broad discussion the United Nations has not been mentioned yet so I wouldn't like to invite the panel to see to speak to the role of the United Nations in addressing issues of American national security and building partnerships supporting development and of course dealing with mass movements of refugees and others thank you let me say Ambassador Albright this time yeah I am a believer in the UN but it needs some fixing and there is a new Secretary General who actually is an expert on refugees as well as on governance but the question is how the United States is going to support the UN it does not work without the United States and I think that we cannot have influence on the UN if we do not pay it's a club the do's as well as the peacekeeping operation and all I can tell you is when I was there we were working on reforming the UN and at the time we had not paid up and the British Malcolm Rifkin in the General Assembly session delivered a line that they had waited more than 200 years to say representation without taxation and so I think in order to have the kind of influence we need we cannot if I may say to Congress not have resolutions where we say we are not going to take part in the United Nations or in fact have the President-elect talk about the fact that the UN is a club where people talk a lot people at the UN work hard and the people that are sent to the UN as ambassadors are there because they are capable of making decisions but the UN needs a real reform and the Security Council itself is like the Rubik's Cube so for instance when we were there we were suggesting that Germany and Japan become permanent members of the Security Council leading the Italians to come to me to say that's not fair we lost the war too which is not a great campaign slogan or at any given time out of 15 members five were Europeans and I would go to a European ambassador and say I need your help on X vote and the ambassador would say I'm so sorry I can't help you the EU does not yet have a common position and then two days later I'd go back to the same person and you help me now and the ambassador would say no because the EU does have a common position so it's that kind of an issue that needs to be dealt with which is reform but it requires American support and if we give up on the UN we have lost one great tool of governance Do you believe everything she said and agree with that? Not every single word I can say the UN is I think most other states around the country and they're blade running and they're support for Congress and the kind of reform that has to occur needs to be far reaching it is an outrage that the United Nations Security Council passed that anti-Israel resolution last month it's an outrage that we continue to allow China and Russia to block resolutions that are giving them cover for what they do in Syria while we're letting resolutions pass about Israel so there's going to be a fundamental discussion about the world and the U.S.'s role in the United Nations Another question? Back here I'm Margie Ensign the President of the American University of Nigeria located in northeast Nigeria can you tell us what some of the priorities are national security priorities for this fast-growing continent? We have a very vibrant Africa Center at the Atlantic Council and the head of that center Peter Pham, Dr. Peter Pham is not paying attention to some very negative evolutions in Africans particularly focused on Congo right now you could also for Europe have a migrant way from Africa to Europe that dwarfs what's happened with Syria and you can imagine the political consequences of that so I think a couple of years ago we were talking about if it's 6 of the fastest 10 growing economies in the world or in Africa which was true but now you've had a turn in negative direction in a few places in Africa and for all the priorities we listed you just can't turn away from that because that could turn out to be a black swan in different ways that saps your attention I want to finish here and thank you for all the wonderful questions with just a final question we have a few minutes left and that's when you go forward and you think about national security and you think about foreign policy what is the moral responsibility that we have as a nation how do you define that when you look back on the war in Syria and barrel bombing of civilians where do you use that what does it mean how do you go forward you've certainly dealt with it you've dealt with it Admiral Stevridis let me start with you I do believe that we need to have a moral foreign policy I believe that this is an exceptional country it doesn't mean however that exceptions are made for us which has to do with torture or a number of things that are illegal but I do think that the US can and needs to be a moral leader I also do think that what has changed in this world now is as a result of information we know what is going on everywhere and what our responsibilities are when people are being ethnically cleansed or genocidally killed for no reason except who they are not anything they have done but it is a hard responsibility and one of the problems is that it is harder and harder to explain to the American people and one of the things that I talk about with regard to this is what I call the Karzai effect the bottom line is because there are a lot of Americans and our allies that died in Afghanistan and not only did President Karzai not say thank you he blamed us for a lot of the problems and so I think it is going to be part of all of our jobs those of us that are interested in national security policy to spend more time explaining what America's role in the world is I am a believer in America's moral authority and the importance of our leadership with others the dean of a graduate school of international relations and we spend a great deal of time discussing idealism versus realism in American foreign policy and we have whipped around like a weather vein over the last hundred years in that regard and as usual life is not on and off switch you don't just do realism and real politic nor do you constantly turn your military into the peace corps with guns and send them forth into the world and do only soft power you just do hard or soft power it's kind of a re-estat and you have to dial it in and there are times when you need hard power we're not going to negotiate with the Islamic state but there are other times when that long game takes you back a bit and you find that balance between hard and soft power and you find that balance between idealism which matters deeply and is core but you have to overlay it with realism can we carry every burden do we want to be the world's policemen no and I'll close with the importance of allies and alliance systems we're very lucky to have like minded nations in Europe, Japan, Australia New Zealand our pool of allies and growing pool of friends I think in the end can help us ease that burden and allow us to put the re-estat in the right place I'm going to end with you here you know how hard it is you look the enemy in the eye you also know certainly from your constituents that this country is tired of war so how do you balance that? well I would say that the moral imperative of the United States foreign policy is the safety, prosperity and liberty of the American people and as an elected official in particular I wish my fellow man well I serve my fellow citizen that is the end of our foreign policy and that is what means do you use to achieve those ends and as Admiral Stabrida said there are a lot of means most of our means are not military power or at least the application of military power a lot of the just the cultural attractiveness of our country people want to come here and study they want to do business in America they want to be in alliance structures with America they don't want to do that with Russia that's an advantage that we should cultivate our alliance structures I said we do that because it's in our interest and if you look at challenges that we face in countries like Syria or Libya with the refugee crisis the reason we have that refugee crisis in part is because rather than run the show we've let the show run us for the last eight years it's almost always better in foreign policy to engage at the outset and try to stop problems before they worsen and become a threat to the safety and prosperity and liberty of our people I want to thank all of you it was a great discussion and thank you all for your service in various assets thanks very much we'll move right into the next portion of our program I hope you join me in thanking the panel that has just concluded we've had a great morning this morning we have we are now going into the phase of the program dealing with the national security advisors who will be shortly joining us on the program so let me be let us resume and I'd ask you to resume your seats and we'll move right in before we lose our next speakers we've we've heard a lot about the challenges our country faces and if I'd ask you to take your seats please few people feel those challenges more acutely than the assistant to the president for national security affairs or what is known colloquially as the national security advisor so in our next segment we are going to hear from two such individuals our present national security advisor and our future national security advisor this position is one of the most challenging and difficult in government and for many of us another retired lieutenant general Brent Scowcroft set the standard of how to perform this role Brent was unable to be with us today but we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge his enormous influence in shaping the position and defining it as national security advisor and most of us who have held the job since have looked to him as our model one of these people was Sandy Berger Sandy was a friend of many of us in this room he was both a fierce partisan and a fierce bipartisan and he was my partner in a number of bipartisan efforts to address the foreign policy challenges facing our country his untimely passing was an enormous loss and we miss him and our nation misses his ideas his energy and his unwavering commitment to bipartisanship and to advancing the interests of our great country in a moment I will ask our current national security advisor ambassador Susan Rice and our future national security advisor lieutenant general Michael Flynn to join me on stage Ambassador Rice will share some brief remarks and after concluding she and lieutenant general Flynn will meet on this stage and exchange a handshake that symbolizes the transition of power from one administration to the next and the shared commitment to national security that transcends party lines then lieutenant general Flynn will share some thoughts of his own looking ahead to the future and that's this segment of the program and now invite ambassador Rice and lieutenant general Flynn to join me on the stage ambassador Rice is our 24th national security advisor she served in government during the Clinton administration both on the national security council staff and assistant secretary of state for African affairs before her current position she was the US ambassador to the United Nations Ambassador Rice to the podium good morning everyone I think it's still morning and Steve thank you so much this week especially it's nice to be reminded that there's life after being national security advisor I also want to thank Nancy Lindborg and the US institute for peace for inviting me and more importantly for the incredible work that you do it's always good to see so many friends and colleagues from across government and I want to welcome my successor lieutenant general Michael Flynn not only to this conference but to his new position Mike I imagine why you'll soon appreciate that instead of a baton I'd better be passing you a case of red bull but in all seriousness the baton metaphor is quite apt and I want to thank Steve and the Bush 43 team again for the exemplary handoff they conducted to the Obama administration in 2008 and 2009 as President Obama says the presidency is in fact a relay race each administration inherits challenges and each bequeaths challenges often unforeseen ones to its successor it's been no different for us when President Obama took office the global economy was in freefall we were embroiled in two hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Al Qaeda had regrouped along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan allies were continuing to question the decision to invade Iraq and Iran was on the verge of acquiring the material for a nuclear weapon global action on climate change had not matched the threat President Obama knew that we had to laser focus on these immediate challenges but he also always kept the long game in mind in a rapidly changing world we needed to position the United States to advance our core interests over the long term that meant investing in the foundations of America's strength and influence especially our economic strength it meant countering threats around the globe while ensuring that the gains outweighed the costs it meant not over extending ourselves in places less central to our long term interests while rebalancing towards regions that are and it meant expanding our definition of national security to include transnational security threats of an increasingly complex nature President Obama always says to us are we looking around the corner by looking around the corner with the work of this administration and our partners today the United States is positioned more strategically to meet the challenges ahead that began by getting our own economic house in order because American economic security upholds American strength and while too many Americans are still struggling our economy is far stronger in 2009 unemployment was approaching 10% it's now at 4.7% 20 million more Americans have health insurance we've seen the longest streak of job growth on record 75 straight months of gains the poverty rate has fallen at the fastest rate in almost 50 years while median household income grew at the fastest rate on record meanwhile we have wound down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a substantial extent this is not because President Obama has been shy about using force to protect American lives and American interests rather it was a recognition that our resources could best be used to prepare our military new challenges to reinvest in military readiness to build 21st century capabilities for 21st century threats and to ensure that our military remains the finest fighting force on the face of the earth we averted the prospect of a dangerous and costly new war by imposing crippling sanctions on Iran which we leverage to reach a deal with the military pathway to an Iranian nuclear weapon already Iran has dismantled two thirds of its installed centrifuges they've shipped out 98% of their enriched uranium stockpile and filled the Iraq plutonium reactor core with concrete even if Iran were to walk away from this deal their breakout time has gone from to about a year and if they cheat we are now certain to detect it I know there's been a lot of debate about this deal but it's hard to imagine that no deal or war would be preferable we also negotiated the new start treaty to cap American and Russian nuclear weapons and through a series of nuclear security summits the president rallied world leaders to help secure loose nuclear material and keep it from falling into the hands of the most dangerous adversaries at the same time we put in place a sustainable counter-terrorism strategy instead of risking blood and treasure by deploying large numbers of American ground forces we centered our approach around a range of partnerships from training and supporting local forces to working with international partners to help choke off foreign fighter flows and finances by adhering to clear guidelines and strict oversight in our direct action we further grew global support for our counter-terrorism mission other strategies might produce faster results but victories would be short-lived and we will be in this fight for the long haul for the fight we must wage and win Osama bin Laden is dead and Khor Al-Qaeda is a shadow of its former self we forged a 68 member global coalition that has removed key ISIL leaders killed thousands of fighters and rolled back almost half its territory in Iraq and Syria and while we've suffered from attacks from Boston to San Bernardino to Orlando we've built unparalleled counter-terrorism capabilities to protect our homeland from foreign terrorists and homegrown violent extremists as we faced these near-term terrorist threats we also strategically rebalanced so that the United States is playing a larger and long-term role in our economic a region that accounts for 40% of our global economic growth four of our top ten trading partners and five of our treaty allies by the end of this decade a majority of our Navy and Air Force will be based out of the Pacific while managing our complex but increasingly durable relationship with China we strengthen cooperation with treaty allies like Japan South Korea and Australia forge deeper partnerships with emerging powers like India and Indonesia and intensified our support for regional institutions I saw the potential of these new relationships during President Obama's historic visits to Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam as a key part of this rebalance President Obama fought to set the rules of the road for trade that ensure fair competition protect the environment and raise labor standards we did this through the trans Pacific partnership and if we don't define these rules of the road others will for us China is already pursuing its own regional trade agreement with lower standards and fewer protections the failure to move forward on TPP is eroding American regional leadership and credibility with China standing to gain strategically and economically even as we emphasize the importance of the Asia Pacific we seized opportunities in other emerging centers of growth for the first time in half a century Americans are flying directly from Miami to Havana bringing new opportunities for Cubans and Americans and bringing back the rum and the cigars that they can carry shedding that historical baggage removed an irritant that impeded cooperation and progress in the region thanks in part to our opening to Cuba U.S. relations with Latin America have never been better and with this year's peace agreement with Africa the longest running war in the hemisphere came to an end likewise we devoted renewed attention and resources to Africa expanding access to electricity bringing business leaders together to grow opportunity and supporting Africa's next generation while reaching out to new partners we strengthened traditional alliances and relationships with transatlantic ties working with NATO and European partners to bolster deterrence in Europe fight terrorism and counter ISIL and impose economic costs on Russia for its aggression in Ukraine we concluded a $38 billion military assistance package with Israel the single largest in American history and we updated our military assistance relationship with Egypt and we led at the United Nations getting the toughest ever sanctions on North Korea and mobilizing resources and action to address the refugee crisis and make UN peacekeeping more effective recognizing that borderless challenges will only increase from cyber attacks to dangers arising from fragile states to climate change we've broadened our conception of national security we strengthened cyber security and cyber norms in the face of the biggest refugee and migrant crisis since World War II we provided more humanitarian aid than any other country in the world and after rigorous vetting welcomed tens of thousands to America not simply as charity or as an expression of our values but as an investment in security and stability we partnered to beat back Ebola in West Africa and invested in global health security we elevated development as a key pillar of our foreign policy and as a result over 18 million children today are getting better nutrition and nearly four times more people are receiving lifesaving HIV AIDS treatment we've worked to shore up fragile states and prevent atrocities reduce corruption and prevent and encourage entrepreneurship and we've cultivated hundreds of thousands of young leaders from four continents I'm especially proud that we put the ultimate borderless threat the threat of climate change front and center rallying the world to achieve the Paris Agreement which has the potential to put the planet on the path to a sustainable future we've begun to integrate climate impacts into our national security planning thanks in part to our clean power plan the new energy efficiency standards and unprecedented investments in clean energy carbon emissions are down 9% since President Obama took office while the US economy is at over 10% as important as our strategic rebalance we've positioned ourselves for the future by strengthening America's moral authority that started at home when we affirmed the ban on torture and reformed our intelligence gathering it continued as we stood strongly for the rights and dignity of all people around the world from Myanmar to elect their leaders for dissidents in China journalists in Ethiopia and ladies in white in Cuba to speak or organize free from repression for women and girls around the world to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities that are their birthright for the rights of people everywhere to love who they love as a result of these strategic foreign policy decisions I do truly believe the United States is better positioned to confront the challenges that will face the new administration these challenges are formidable the global security landscape is as unsettled as at any time in recent memory I could discuss this at length but given the shortness of time let me mention just three challenges first Americans face a diverse array of threats from a more diverse range of sources than ever before this includes everything from state actors such as Russia and North Korea to terrorists like ISIL often enabled by new technologies and it includes transnational threats that can reach our shores like climate change pandemics or the illicit flow of drugs second as a global leader and primary stakeholder the United States faces the challenge of upholding an international order strained by rising tensions among major global and regional powers and frankly deep governance challenges within these states Russia continues to threaten the global order in Ukraine in Syria and through its efforts to clear in democratic elections China's assertiveness most notably in the South China Sea has tested whether the U.S.-China relationship will be defined by our differences or by what we can achieve cooperatively Europe buffeted by Brexit economic uncertainty a refugee and migrant crisis and Russian aggression more than ever against this backdrop as we've seen in the horrific tragedy in Syria the Arab world will likely continue to struggle for stability perhaps for a generation or more in the face of these challenges it might be tempting to turn inward and therein lies the United States third strategic challenge we must protect ourselves and the international order we help build without subordinating our values or abandoning our alliances partnerships and cooperation that have yielded unprecedented global prosperity and progress given these complex and often competing issues you'll understand why Henry Kissinger once commented and I quote there cannot be a crisis next week the demands of serving as national security advisor are constant Colin Powell described the job as being quote judge, traffic cop truant officer arbitrator fireman chaplain psychiatrist and occasional hitman I like to think of it as being the quarterback without the glory or the high pay no doubt general Flynn you will find your own analogy but the bottom line is in an uncertain world you and your team will be shouldering extraordinary responsibilities for keeping America safe and strengthening a global order that has prevented a war among major powers for the last 75 years that's why President Obama's direction our entire national security team has been working for months to prepare for and facilitate a smooth transition this goes beyond party or politics this is what the American people expect and deserve as I noted Steve and his team set a very high bar which we have been committed to meeting and where possible exceeding the NSC has produced over 100 memos covering everything from the interagency policy process to our plans and protocols to address the many nightmare scenarios that could arise we've made our entire staff available to meet with and brief the incoming team this handoff continues as I speak as part of this transition we've had constructive meetings with General Flynn and my team has met extensively with his the discussions we've had and the suggestions I've made I will keep between us not least because much of it is highly classified but I will say that I am very proud of the professional manner in which we have conducted this transition and our integrity is and must always remain above the fray I'm also extraordinarily proud of the NSC staff we've built and that General Flynn will inherit when I returned to the NSC in 2013 having served there in the 1990s I was struck by how much it expanded in that period and while I continue to believe to retain the flexibility to staff the NSC as they wish we've worked hard to right size and reform the NSC we've reduced the staff by over 15% today's NSC operates with a policy staff smaller than the staffs of USIP and many think tanks as we've streamlined we remain convinced that one of the NSC's greatest strengths is the career national security professionals who comprise nearly 90% of the staff they're the brightest and hardest working staff in government and I am extremely grateful for their service and sacrifice but ultimately the issue is not mainly about the size of the NSC it's about the role of the NSC every president and every staff or herself I'll simply say as others have that departments and agencies are the ones that need to lead in formulating and implementing policy but the NSC staff is uniquely placed to ensure that the president receives a truly integrated perspective that takes into account the president's agenda and the risks, costs so General Flynn inherits a vital job at a challenging time and while it is no secret that this administration has profound disagreements with the next one I intend to make myself available to him just as my predecessors have for me we are all patriots first and foremost threats to our security democracy should be above partisanship as President George H.W. Bush wrote to President Clinton after their own electoral battle and I quote your success is now our country's success I am rooting hard for you said President Bush General Flynn I am rooting hard for you in a few hours I'll accompany President Obama to Chicago for his farewell address and this has me counting my personal blessings my grandfather was a janitor who emigrated from Jamaica in 1912 with my grandmother who was a maid and a seamstress after the President of the United States I'm filled with gratitude for this country and the opportunities it has provided me and so many others when I think about the difference I've been privileged to see the United States and our government make in the lives of Americans and people around the world I'm deeply honored and humbled to have joined in this journey I'll continue to do my part as best I can and in the years ahead I'm confident that patriotic Americans of talent and goodwill will ensure that this great country stays strong secure and prosperous a beacon of hope for all the world thank you very much thank you Ambassador Rice for those remarks I would now invite Lieutenant General Flynn and Ambassador Rice to move to this side of the podium as they have done and to exchange the symbolic handshake representing the handoffer's responsibility from one administration to the other thank you both Lieutenant General Michael Flynn is President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be our 25th National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Flynn who last served in government as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency after a distinguished 33-year career of military service during that career he held various intelligence posts and served several deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and he served in these positions with great distinction please welcome Lieutenant General Flynn to the podium and I want to thank Susan again but I would really like everybody to give her another round of applause that was an amazing speech it's an appropriate place Institute of Peace and I want to thank everybody for their very kind welcome not only here last night but really sort of back into government I want to thank the U.S. Institute of Peace for peace and I especially want to thank Nancy Limburg and Steve Hadley and many of the other former National Security Advisors their time and their council over these past two months with the current and former National Security Advisors and the array of current and former National Security Council staffers and others that are in the room here today I mean this really represents the collective wisdom and experience of some of America's greatest national security thinkers practitioners and doers and what I'd like to do is just take a brief pause because I'm in awe of Secretary Albright who's sitting here in front today and I'd like everybody to just give her a big round of applause for her dignity demonstrated just a grace a dignity, an elegance and a commitment to this country that goes beyond our wildest imaginations people outside don't realize the sacrifices that what you see in Dr. Rice Ambassador Rice and what you see in Secretary Albright and I think that that sort of transcends who we are and it is Americans that are our greatest asset and our American people the American people that we have in this country across this country that said the gravity of this moment is a bit overwhelming as I step back into government for what I know is a monumental task ahead transitions are hard enough they're hard enough in anything that we do but transitions and transfers of power and one United States president to the next are historic and this one is no exception to me one of the most significant moments in American history was at the very beginning when President John Adams was not re-elected and had to hand the presidency over to his arch rival Thomas Jefferson it could have been a constitutional crisis but it wasn't why? because we have peaceful we have a peaceful transition of power and that is the tradition that has bound us all ever since as for Adams and Jefferson in their final years they became great friends and their correspondence is one of the best examples of patriotism and bipartisan sense of national purpose among all of our leaders that have ever existed as a model to the world as a model to the world at least in our history the United States has set the standard of peaceful transition of power and it is a model that continues to be the envy of the world we stand today on the threshold of a new era as we continue to navigate the remainder of the 21st century a century that has already presented us with numerous unpleasant surprises and looking ahead this century clearly represents one with even more risk but also with many opportunities I want to personally again thank Ambassador Rice and her entire team for their preparation the transition materials as Ambassador Rice highlighted that they provided to us the initiation of various NSE reform measures that she has already undertaken and the time that she and her team took to help guide us and to help us be as well prepared as we can be prior to inauguration day as I stated these early years of the 21st century have proven to be extraordinarily challenging as old familiar threats and challengers have reasserted themselves and new ones have emerged lending this period of time a feeling of great uncertainty and in certain parts of the world reverberating upheaval given the hyper accelerated nature of the time in which we live and emerging threats and active adversaries that are also moving at warp speed these 21st century challenges are among the toughest we as a nation have faced in decades in many decades this is why we are absolutely committed to leading a national security council with our president elects vision to make America great again that has as its primary mission its primary mission the safety of the American people and the security of our nation that mission is to be supported by an overarching policy of peace through strength as we examine and potentially re-baseline our relationships around the globe we will keep in mind the sacrifices and deep commitments that many of our allies and our partners have made on behalf of our security and our prosperity as well as the security and prosperity of other freedom loving nations around the world in fact alliances are one of the great tools that we have and the strength of those alliances magnify our own strengths one of those strengths one of those strengths is the unapologetic defense of liberty this is the core element of American exceptionalism and why America will exist and will remain a superpower the exceptionalism that defined America from the start became the standard by which every other free people measure themselves and the standard by which we should measure ourselves America might have its ups and downs but the assumption has long been that American power would always be there reliable, strong present and ready we have always been the indispensable nation and we always will be to that end we must consider the elements that make us indispensable and I'll touch on a few this requires extraordinary foresight and vision that is able to transcend political ideologies a matching long-term strategy that lays out a roadmap to keep us on track despite the massive hurdles that we may encounter along that path the right processes to review the assumptions to determine validity and meaning that form our strategy and lastly some means of measuring whether it's working or not and being honest and accountable to ourselves given those elements and even in extremely difficult times we have never we have never lost of America or what it means to be an American and the idea of American exceptionalism faced with some of the darkest days of civil and foreign wars economic depression and many recessions that we've gone through weak leadership at home or hostile threats from abroad the American people always maintain their faith in the uniqueness of our democratic experiment which produced the greatest force of economic growth and innovation and the greatest model for liberty the world has ever known that has not and will not ever change this this is the essence of American leadership whether we like it or not the world needs us and in fact demands it what has changed is the nature and character of America's enemies and the new and dangerous technological environment in which they operate that's why we are committed to having the National Security Council continue to serve as the fulcrum of national security and national security decision making in the most effective way possible on the National Security Council we will serve four primary functions we will advise the president on national security issues we will formulate national security policy in coordination with the interagency process we will monitor how policy is carried out and we will also ensure that the president is properly prepared and staff for the many national security related events that we are likely to encounter and I would add one additional function I want to add that President-elect Trump we need to help him work with our partners in Congress on both sides of the aisle despite the difficulties that we will face serving as the national security advisor is an awesome responsibility and it gets to the very essence of protecting and defending the American people our homeland and our constitution given those responsibilities it is our mission to ensure that the president of the national security community and the American people continue to be well served in order to achieve that we are absolutely committed to continue carrying out those necessary reforms begun by previous administrations all of this will be done in the spirit of working toward common national security goals particularly protecting American values and principles as we confront we recognize that what makes our country exceptional is what we are defending every day and that's freedom and we must never fear we must never fear who we are or shy away from the values and the principles that America represents again we have a lot of serious challenges in front of us make no mistake about that but we will face them we will face these challenges undaunted we have a very high sense of responsibility and purpose lastly finally I will tell you that KT McFarlane and I were very excited we are ready to get started and we are very much looking forward to working with many of you in the room today and around Washington DC and elsewhere throughout this great country thank you so much and God bless America thank you both for your thoughtful remarks and for that symbolic gesture of the important hallmark of the peaceful transfer of power that makes this country so special we are now going to take a break for lunch and you will notice that we do not have any programming scheduled during this time and we would encourage you to mingle to sit with people you have not met before to enjoy our lovely building and each other's company and to facilitate these conversations tables and seatings in a variety of locations all around this building on the third floor in the International Women's Commons above us on the second floor in the Leland Atrium and in all the conference rooms in the area and behind us in the tent which we've had coffee breaks I've been on the board here four years I couldn't find all of these places but not to worry there are staff around to a quiet corner where you can meet and have direct conversations so please enjoy your lunch and we'll see you back here in a little over an hour thanks very much I know there's been a lot of hubbub that's a good sign Delighted to have you back we have a jammed afternoon what we're going to do now is have two short snappy segments that offer practical ideas and new insights on how do you build peace we think of them as TED Talks for Peace Builders and I'm delighted to introduce our first speaker who is a colleague of mine at USIP and our director for Middle East programs he focuses on Iraq Syria and Yemen Sarhang Hamasai was born in Iraq he was displaced twice and became as a refugee to the United States and he became a citizen this summer so he brings to this talk a lot of personal experience and a lot of hard work on how to break the cycles of violent conflict Sarhang Hamasai good afternoon ladies and gentlemen can you hear me fine the microphone working fine it is my distinct honor to be speaking before you today I'll be talking about conflict and peace building from a bottom up by that I mean from the local level connecting with national and international efforts and bottom up is something that USIP's chairman of the board and former national security advisor Mr. Stephen Hadley often talks about how he got to appreciate after his NSA role often policy makers respond view and respond to conflict from the top down from the perspective of national governments from the perspective of international institutions and that would mean responding to immediate results of a conflict through prisms of political cycles and immediate results but leading to often times missing local issues that are important that have long term implications I'll talk a bit about my journey through conflict and becoming a peace builder my primary purpose is to be the voice of those who live through conflict and become and work for peace I was born into conflict actually in a way and as ironic as this may sound I am a product of conflict my parents met in Soleimania province after they came from two separate villages and became neighbors because their villages were destroyed and there was I was born and raised and spent most of my life I was four years old when the Iraq-Iran war broke out in 1980 a war that was devastating and caused hundreds of thousands of lives by the time I turned 12 1988 Saddam Hussein the political the bath party the Iraqi government had developed a reputation for suppressing the Iraqi people with brutal force using violence against civilians some of these acts included using chemical gas against the city of Halabja killing 5,000 people leading the Anfal operation which led to the destruction of 4,500 villages raised to the ground including the villages of my parents again and that was 10 miles from where I lived the Anfal operations also killed 400,000 or more these estimates are not final and those people were taken to the middle and south of the country to be found later in mass graves thousands more were moved to concentration camps the world around me felt burning falling apart it made me ask it made others ask where is the international community from all of this where is humanity from all of this from all of this killing questions that the people of Aleppo Syria the people of Taz in Yemen are asking today before I turned 30 actually Iraq had been in three major conflicts major wars with neighbors and international actors and as many if not more local armed conflicts so the cycles of violence seemed without an end one bleeding to another and these while they have cost me and my family dearly and they have brought life threatening experiences to me whether it was artillery bombardment of the Iranian army to my city whether surviving a car bomb from one of ISIS's predecessors I feel lucky I survived whatever is my journey through conflict is the light version of it others had it worse much worse they lost their lives they lost family loved family members and one of my former colleagues lost 22 members of his family in the gassing of Halabja so many these while these events on these conflicts did not kill me they committed to preventing violent conflicts they shaped who I am today and committed to preventing violent conflict and breaking cycles of violence for others and many like me in the Middle East especially the youth are born into conflict they are drawn into the conflicts of the Middle East they are confronted with tough choices were religious actors armed groups non-religious actors offer a combination of carrots and sticks join us you'll have job you'll have power you'll have a leadership you'll have a future but if you don't you have no future and these choices are at their worst when they are offered by an organization like Daesh Al Qaeda these kind of conflicts are have changed from the times of when the battles were fought in the front lines these fights are in the communities in the streets in the homes not far away front lines but their devastating effects go far reaching in the refugees that you see and the terrorism acts that are inspired and the budgets that are being drained thousands of miles away in the interest of time I will focus on Iraq and Daesh and I'll tell a story from there much of the news that we get from Iraq today is overshadowed by Daesh by ISIS the terrorist organization there and I'll use Daesh the local term that's often used there Daesh suppress the communities and perpetrated barbaric acts against the communities Sunni and minority communities Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds Christians, Shabak Yazidis and others and what is less known for the outside world is how Daesh implicated local tribes local communities and has sown the seeds of division and violence on which they survive in one such act in the province of Salah-e-Din in Iraq they committed what is called the Spiker Massacre and this is important this is the breakdown of what CVE what all that means comes to life Tikrit falls at the fault line between the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq in that area so the massacre which killed 1700 Shia servicemen mostly young cadets from 20 Shia tribes from 9 provinces of the south that was a wound that was wide and deep and you have to see this in the context of the Iraq war and Iraq violence for 11 years before that and at the heart of it was sectarian violence so for the Shia this was yet another act of the Sunnis an attack against the Shia it widened the schism towards that was between the two communities for the Shia they perceived that Sunnis to be either terrorists or supporters of terrorists and this was yet another example so this act this massacre had the potential to spiral out of control and leash cycles of violence that would have been extreme at the tribal level that would have been extremely difficult for the Iraqi army to control for the counter-dash coalition to respond to and that kind of risk would have made Mosul the liberation of Mosul which we have before us today even far more difficult if not further delayed the Iraqi team our Iraqi partners partners in the network of Iraqi facilitators Sunnis for peace building organizations and individuals we trained in conflict resolution and peace building we were monitoring the aftermath of the massacre we knew what was at stake we knew the danger that we're dealing with we knew that the revenge cycle of violence will get out of control so we designed a dialogue process for the Iraqi facilitators that Iraqi facilitators led and brought together the Sunni tribal sheikhs from Tikrit and Salahuddin the Shia tribal leaders from the south and the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ayid Sistani the Grand Shia cleric and the representative of Prime Minister Abadi's office the National Reconciliation Committee as well as parliamentary members and talk about here's your top down together the dialogues culminated in a peace agreement in which the Sunni tribes disavowed membership of any of the members who have collaborated with Daesh and they have also committed themselves to work with a judicial process to bring perpetrators to justice the Shia tribal sheikhs have disagreed to drop blanket statements and accusations that all Sunnis are responsible for this crime they agreed to not go for tribal revenge they both agreed, both of the Sunni tribes and the Shia tribal leaders agreed not to prevent politicization and this is important this was an effort to reverse the seeds of violence that Daesh left behind this was preventing violent extremism at its core because the massacre had become a recruiting tool for the militias to go and revenge for the Shia and it had also the risk of pushing the Sunni population furthermore in the direction of Daesh this was important that it was prevented the dialogue process did succeed in containing the tensions in preventing violence and preventing further loss of life and it was also very important and came handy when Tikrit was liberated we started this work four months before the city of Tikrit was liberated and when Tikrit was liberated the people did not trust the Iraqi security forces to go home because they had heard reports about how the popular mobilization forces, the Hashdel Shabi have been what's called the Shia militias have been attacking certain populations and the Iraqi security forces the Iraqi government did not know who to trust to allow back to the city they didn't know who was ISIS who was supporter of ISIS so the trust and the relationship we built between the tribal leaders and the Iraqi government interlocutors we work with led to a vetting process that facilitated the return of the initial 400 families to Tikrit about 1200 people was used to facilitate the return of other people and I'm happy to report that today more than 320,000 people 320,000 people have returned to Salah-i-Din and Tikrit and that's a major achievement as someone who was displaced twice and has seen the hardships of displacement I could tell you what that meant for these families to go home so this was also important because when we embarked on this process many people felt that the only response you can have to Daesh and the aftermath of Daesh is a military response civilian organizations like USIP and the Iraqi partners have no role in dealing with a problem like Daesh but the work proved that actually there is and these are the ways that you reverse the long term effects and we knew that we had done that before we knew that there are practical ways that you can respond to conflict and build peace for many the Spiker Massacre may seem like a unique story and there may be unique things about it in terms of the high number of casualties and certain aspects of it but what's not unique is that revenge violence and local conflicts that the aftermath of the fight with Daesh has left behind in every town, in every village in every province that they were and so as an organization from my personal experience from the work of USIP and from the work of Iraqi partners I can tell you yes, recapturing land more than 50% is progress welcome progress but I can tell you that more work needs to be done recapturing land from Daesh is not the end ending Daesh is not the end of violence and the reason I say that because we have more ingredients for violence today and it's as I said it's revenge violence and local conflicts that are left behind as USIP we are working with the Iraqi government the Kurdistan regional government the United Nations the coalition to counter Daesh who all do great work to embark on this problem there are 3 million Iraqi people who need to go home and revenge and local conflict is a barrier that we need to address second revenge violence and local conflict has the potential to give us a process that I usually call D-Daeshification or D-Icification and by the I mean that similar to the debathification process after 2003 the process to go after members of ISIS or perceived members of ISIS oftentimes you'll find civilians there could lead to a wider divide between the Sunnis and the Shia and the Sunni communities themselves this time and this is a development so all this may sound like a difficult task but our work tells us that it is possible that reconciliation is possible and by reconciliation I mean getting people back to their homes and peacefully coexist we are working on this in Anbar we are working on this in Salah-e-Din and we have lines of efforts in Mosul around Mosul and in Nineveh and we hope to expand that and let me conclude by saying that I know there may be a lot of reason to say the conflicts in the Middle East are endless and there is no way to deal with them this is a bleak picture but from my again my personal experience the work of USIP and the work of our Iraqi partners I can tell you that there is a reason for hope and the reason for hope is there are Iraqis in government and also mostly in non-government sector in civil society that are working hard to achieve better governance and to achieve peaceful coexistence in Iraq but they are overshadowed by the news of Daesh and by superpowers and regional actors on the ground one of the people that I would like to celebrate with us is my friend Rayat Khattab who is one of the facilitators that helped us on the Spiker Massacre it is him people like him many like him in Iraq and elsewhere that give me hope because there are people who want to find alternatives to violence they put their life to risk so the investment that the United States and the international community have done have put in the Iraqi civil society has paid dividends already the Spiker story is just one good example one of many the work of USIP is elsewhere and is showing us the good work of other people whether in Libya or in Tunisia or in Myanmar in Afghanistan in Africa it is possible the role of the United States is an indispensable leading role in diplomatic, economic developmental and military terms if we help these people I think we can turn things around happening at the local level where you need to bring communities back and restore social cohesion so it is that bottom of approach and the top down that will enable addressing these conflicts I believe that we collectively can work on this approach and by applying strategic patience to as we respond to these conflicts I think peace is possible and there are practical ways to address even the most violent conflicts like Iraq Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan thank you so much thank you for your attention thank you Sarhan thank you for that note of optimism and for reminding us that peace is indeed possible and I'm delighted now to introduce our next peace talk speaker a renaissance man who is a musician a best-selling author and president of our partner in today's event the American Enterprise Institute and someone who reminds us frequently on the importance of compassion and he also is here today to talk to us about the roots of populism please join me in welcoming Dr. Arthur Brooks thank you so very much what an honor it is to be here congratulations to USIP for this wonderful event this event that has taken its place in the constellation of important traditions as we pass the baton to the next on behalf of all my colleagues at AEI we're really honored to be a co-sponsor of this event and I've been looking forward to give a peace talk I'm not a foreign policy specialist I want to talk about a different kind of peace one that we can all invest in today I want to talk to you today about political peace maybe the most elusive kind of peace around the world of all it would seem today but I'm going to make the case to you in the next 15 minutes that political peace is possible I'm really honored to be in front of leaders like you because I want to make the case that we can in this room we can be agents of greater political peace in our country by following a few rules that all of us in point of fact have learned along the way in our lives as leaders now I want to start by telling you about an experience that I had some years ago before I came to the Enterprise Institute I was a professor at Syracuse University where I was teaching economics and entrepreneurship and I had a pretty ordinary professorial life I was beavering away in relative obscurity teaching my classes and writing my books I had written a lot of books which were very boring and nobody had ever read them and weirdly along the way I wrote a book that became popular I didn't exactly know why it hit the news cycle in just the right way it was a book about charitable giving and I asked the question in this piece of research I mean it was a very empirical book it had a lot of numbers and figures and equations in it but it asked the question who gives more to charity conservatives or liberals that was just right for the news cycle and strangely to me the book started selling hundreds of copies a day and my life changed overnight I had no idea I was not ready for this as a professor I was just working away in my office and suddenly I saw the Amazon numbers going up I said what does this mean and I found out very quickly what that meant it meant I was going to be on TV a lot and I was going to be on the radio a lot a week after the book came out I was on Rush Limbaugh's radio program to the great consternation of my friends in the faculty lounge I assure you it turns out I was on Rush, who knew and I also started to get correspondence by email from people I'd never met before in my life hundreds of thousands of emails and in those days I read all my email and my email was very easy to get because it was on the university website and I remember it was a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon I was working in my office I was working on a data set and an email popped up from a guy in Texas and here's what it said it said, Dear Professor Brooks you are a right wing fraud which I thought was a pretty unpromising way to start an email but I kept reading and the first thing that I noticed was that the email was like 5,000 words long it was going to take me 20 minutes to read this email but gamely I'm going through it and the next thing I noticed is that this guy was refuting every single point in my book chapter inverse things like the columns in table 3.1 are reversed moron stuff like that, right? and I was going through it it was just heaping abuse on me but every single detail in the book and you know what thought kept going through my head as I was reading the email here was the thought he read my book so I decided to tell him that right, I mean I was filled with distress and anger and humiliation but I really wanted to tell him how thankful I was that he'd read my book so I did I wrote back to him, dear so and so I could refute every point and I could rebut with rebuttals I could tell you what I think about you but I really want to tell you what's written on my heart which is how grateful I am because you read every single word of that book for the years to write it and I put my whole heart into it thank you send went back to work 15 minutes later his response pops back up dear professor Brooks next time you're in Dallas if you want to get dinner give me a call and I said power I understood at that moment by accident how to turn that situation around and that was a simulacrum for what leaders can do in the political space to achieve political peace I want to talk more about that in a second but first I want to diagnose the problem we have that we've just experienced in the 2016 election in the United States or the Brexit referendum or what's going on all over the world what are the roots of populism people will tell you it's anger people are angry, that's wrong the reason we have so much political animus is not anger there's always been anger it's contempt contempt according to social psychologists is defined as the utter conviction of the worthlessness of another person that is the perfect way for you to make a permanent enemy is contempt now there's a big body of literature on this there's a social psychologist at the University of Washington his name is John Gottman some of you may have heard of him he's the world's leading expert on marital reconciliation he has a laboratory in which he brings couples together and saves their marriages he's a hero if you believe as I do that marriage and family is the unit of analysis of a healthy society this guy's great he's brought together thousands of couples and saved their marriages he has a trick that he can do he'll bring a couple together arguing over a contentious issue for five seconds with the sound turned off and tell you with 94% accuracy if you will be divorced within five years now you want to know what he's looking at don't you you want to know the secret here it is physical expressions of contempt number one eye rolling I have three teenagers at home lots of eye rolling the problem is when equals show each other contempt it's particularly harmful it's almost like a physical assault when people who work together show each other contempt it destroys workplace harmony when spouses do it when world leaders do it when people in politics do it when people on a debate stage who want to be president of the United States do it for those people and to those people and to their followers and that's what explains the roots of the political contempt the contentious atmosphere the toxic ecosystem that we find ourselves in is mutual expressions of constant contempt do we want to solve the problem if we do then we have to deal with contempt now solving that problem doesn't mean solving it for somebody else you know what it really starts with starts with me because I feel lots of contempt I mean not right now I feel lots of contempt look I'm the president of the American Enterprise Institute and for years I've been seeing policies at the federal level with which I disagree you know I mean I'll dream about some really bad policy cooked up by the federal government and I'll wake up in the morning and open the Washington Post what they really did is worse than my dream for me right I don't feel good about that I feel contempt the way to political reconciliation and peace is for me to cure myself of that contempt how how do we do it how does each one of us as a political leader do it now here's the typical answer that's wrong let's all come together and agree let's all come to the middle we need more centrism we need more people in the political middle we have to take politics out of our decision making why is that wrong that's wrong because that creates an undemocratic unelected atmosphere in which unelected people bureaucrats run everything and that creates more contempt and more anger and more contention from the citizens don't believe it that's the right way to make this work so I go back to my original question how how do we fight contempt I asked that question to the wisest man I have ever met my friend my teacher his whole life I have never met my friend my teacher his holiness to Dalai Lama see when I was working on this and for those of you who don't know about my institution AEI has now a years long relationship with the Dalai Lama where he's come to AEI several times and we've gone to him at his monastery in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills and it's a wonderful relationship where we talk about the morality of free enterprise and big world issues and we dilate some of the big controversies of the day and I value the relationship he's become somebody who it's a friendship that I value so very much and when I was going through this problem of contempt that I was seeing in politics it happened to coincide with one of my visits with the Dalai Lama and I asked him this your holiness what do I do when I feel contempt and he said show warm heartedness I thought about it and I thought what else you got because just on its face that sounds kind of like a fortune cookie or not really serious advice it's it sounds kind of pat but then I thought a little bit deeper you know the Dalai Lama the one who was kicked out of his homeland when he was a teenager a brutal Chinese communist aggression at the end of a gun sent into exile with his people sent to live in a country in poverty and anonymity to be gone and forgotten that one, that Dalai Lama and the one over the course of his life who through warm heartedness and kindness and love became the most respected religious leader in the world that Dalai Lama see warm heartedness isn't for sissies warm heartedness is for strong people that's why he told me that that's what I remembered here's what he says I defeat my enemies when I make them my friends warm heartedness makes your enemies your friends you want to know what strong people do the Dalai Lama starts every morning praying for the Chinese leaders not praying that they'll change the attitude toward Tibet praying that they will find what's right for them that's warm heartedness that's what we want that's what we can do that's what lies in the future for us we choose to grab it but I need to be a little bit more practical the time that remains for me just in front of you here today so I want to go a little bit further in how we can do that as leaders and there is a way for us there's something for us to remember such that we can turn the wheel of contempt toward gratitude and that is I mean toward warm heartedness and that is to show gratitude I read a book years ago you've read it too it's the most important book that you've read with a terrible title and that you've forgotten there's a lot in there it's how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie it sounds like a it sounds terrible you know self-improvement it's really tacky it's downscale it's not suitable for people of our intellectual caliber right wrong read it again it's a guide to ethical living it's a guide to happiness I recommend it very strongly to you you read it in high school go back and read it again it'll change your life actually and there's one point in that book it's a beautiful moment Carnegie his research method this is in the 1920s he's going all over the United States to find the most successful people and find their secrets to success and he's in New York and he goes to see the most famous magician of the age see in those days in Broadway they had these lavish vaudeville variety acts they didn't have you know big musicals and there was this guy his name was Howard Thurston he had been performing on Broadway for the last 40 years the most absolutely just world famous guy we've forgotten him today but google him you know that's how you find everything and you'll find Howard the amazing Howard Thurston super famous very rich he went to see Howard Thurston and he wanted to see what does he do that's so special and he watched the act and it was just rabbits out of hats and card tricks and the whole thing but here was the secret Howard Thurston was laughing alongside his audience Howard Thurston looked like it was his very first night he was a boolean he was magical in his outlook and not just in his tricks so later Dale Carnegie went to the dressing room said to Mr. Thurston I'm writing a book about the most successful people in the world and you're the greatest magician of your age what's the secret to making it look like it's the first night even though you've been doing those tricks for 40 years oh simple simple every night before I go out on stage I say in my dressing room I am truly grateful for the people sitting in those seats because they make it possible for me to do something for a living that I love that my friends is the secret why do I bring that kind of gratitude up because who are the people in those seats for you they're people you disagree with in a democratic capitalist society none of us wants to live in a one-party state none of us wants to vanquish people who disagree with us once and for all we don't want that in the United States and in Europe and in democracies around the world we want a vital competition of ideas even though we disagree with others and you know what that means we need people with whom we disagree and we should be grateful to them we should be grateful to live in countries where there's no knock in the night and there's no jack booted thug just because we have differing political views when was the last time that you expressed interior gratitude for that if you do you simply cannot feel contempt toward those with whom you disagree that's the beginning the gratitude toward the system that makes this possible to the people who gave their lives for years to make that possible and the people on the other side of the aisle were going to tell you that they think you're wrong but they're not going to shoot you that's a wonderful thing and it's a beautiful thing for which we should be grateful for which we should be warm hearted and that should wipe out the contempt and be the beginning of the peace now I know this is an unusual talk from the president of a think tank that does pure public policy it's an even weirder talk from an economist but I took the opportunity to do it today because if we think differently as leaders and we act differently and we show these values then a better political future is possible in our countries and it starts with us thank you thank you thank you Arthur thank you for that Arthur and I know I feel the warm hearted gratitude pulsing out of everybody I mean this is exactly the kind of conversations that we want to have with everybody here so thank you for reminding about this Arthur I now would like to tee us up for our next panel which is about unpredictable instability and we heard from Secretary Albright this morning that unpredictability sometimes is really interesting but unpredictability all the time is dangerous and we've also heard a lot about the kinds of challenges that face us around the globe that include crises all around from pandemics to the refugee flows to the new rise of great power so I'm delighted that we have a distinguished panel here today to talk to us about that and I'd like to introduce our moderator Charles Lane a successful columnist for the Washington Post and a regular on Fox News Sunday please join me in welcoming Chuck Lane life is full of surprises it's a revelation to learn that I'm a successful columnist but I appreciate hearing that thank you very much and let's jump right in with our panel and the first thing I'll do is just set the stage for you a little bit I was talking to my two panelists who are Army guys about that old saying no plan survives its first contact with the enemy and I think many in administration quite apart from armies could testify to the truth of that aphorism new presidents tend to come in with a big plan about how they're going to either change the previous foreign policy or change the world and those administrations tend to find out that the world has other plans for them and they're quickly encountered with the need to improvise and come up with a new plan to deal with the new reality so that's going to be our theme for this panel and I honestly think couldn't come up with a better group of four people to address that issue I will introduce them really quickly and then we'll just jump in to preserve the maximum amount of time for your participation for questions from the audience later on so to my extreme left not ideologically but just over there on the left is General Jack Keane who in addition to his very distinguished service in the U.S. Army is now the chairman of the institute for the study of war on his immediate right is Juliet Kiam who's a national security analyst for CNN now the brand new CEO of the World Bank Dr. Kristalina Georgieva who just arrived at the World Bank in Washington just prior to that was in charge of humanitarian issues for the European Commission and then right here on my left again these are not ideological references I'm very comfortable is Dr. James Carrafano he's the vice president for foreign defense policy at the Heritage Foundation has been helping out with the transition of the incoming Trump administration so what I'd like to do in the first part of the panel is starting with General Keane ask each of the panelists to briefly give us their thought on where the surprise might come from now obviously if we could predict it it wouldn't be a surprise but we're going to try the exercise of trying to identify in advance what the black swan might be over the next four years facing the Trump administration General Keane you want to take that? Charles thank you being my colleague up here mentioned this other network I think it was described as CNN I just want to mention that Charles is a contributor on Fox News as I am and we are colleagues and proud to be associated with that particular network listen I want to thank USIP for what you're doing here today I think this is the third time that you have established this platform and it makes a lot of sense to bring back the incumbent administration and those who are taking over and there's obviously a transition experience going on that's divorced from this but you know the public display that I saw some of it on the internet this morning between the principals and both administrations is really quite encouraging we've had such a polarizing experience these last number of years that maybe there's some encouragement that are very foundation what we all have in common together virtually even though we disagree on public policy the fact that we all are very concerned about national security, protection of the American people our basic freedoms, our values we all have that in common and we're willing to sacrifice quite a bit to assure it's accomplished and that was very much on display today as we witnessed the principals from both administrations talking to all of you so well done USIP there's a couple of certainties that's going to face a new administration one is that they will have strategic surprise that's a fact this is United States a global leader and we've had strategic surprise dramatically beginning in World War II all the way to the present and the second thing is despite our best efforts up here to predict what will be the strategic surprise of the Trump administration if history is our guide we will fail miserably because no one has ever been able to predict the strategic surprise accurately of an incoming administration but nonetheless as we all know and those who have served at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue know that the world has a way of coming to the doorstep of the White House regardless of what their particular domestic agenda is or foreign policy agenda and to certain degree it will move them possibly in a different direction and that's the reality of it you go back and history and it's very pregnant how that impacted administrations post World War II the Korean War no one expected it and the Vietnam War protracted war and then we have the collapse of the Soviet Union we have Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait we have Milosevic fighting four wars in Europe and the Europeans at least for most of that were sort of powerless to do much of anything about it we have 9-11 to be sure in the Bush administration but we also have 15 years of protracted war since 9-11 which I would tell you also is a strategic surprise to most of us we had the Arab Spring another strategic surprise in the Middle East that has fundamentally changed the contours of the Middle East with failed states civil wars radical Islamists only taking advantage of the conditions that exist there so in my judgment they're the main contour of what this administration will I think is facing is the fact that there are two growing powers in the world who want to change the fundamental international world order as we know it and they are willing to take degrees of risk to achieve that because they believe it is in their national interest to do so at the expense of the United States and its allies why because they refuse to accept that world order that international order that the United States had helped design post World War II with the major institutions one of them represented here on the stage the IMF, the United Nations political military alliances throughout the world so that the calamity of World War II 100 million people killed would not be repeated again those nations are certainly Russia and China and one is much more of a near term problem Russia and China considerably longer term problem but will be there and I think this is most obvious to everybody sitting in the room but it is there and we have to deal with it and face it in terms of something I think that may trouble us is the nexus of trans-national actors and cyber technology it is just a matter of time for trans-national actors to acquire the technological means to attack our critical infrastructure and as such reversing that because they are not a nation state we don't have the capability that mutual assured destruction did with nuclear power to modify that behavior in other words they can attack our financial and banking infrastructure they can attack our utility infrastructure they can attack our transportation infrastructure those are critical infrastructures in the United States and you know as well as I do they are not properly defended as we speak today the nuclear infrastructure of the United States is properly defended I'm talking about military nuclear power and also our military networks are properly defended nation states have already tried some of this to be sure and that's going to increase but I think the most troublesome thing because you can't stop the behavior except by attacking back at it is a trans-national actor nexus with that kind of technology that is a potential surprise for us so we don't minimize it remember because we had colleague Sheikh Mohammed in our jail house for so many years we had a lot of information from him that he volunteered to us after the extended interrogation technique was applied but nonetheless he gave it to us and one of the things we found out was the attack on the United States was driven by Usama bin Laden principally because he thought he could collapse our moral and political will by attacking our economic center our military center and our government center he didn't understand the American people to be sure but nonetheless it was a realistic strategic objective at least from their perspective to try and that certainly is something that trans-national actors out there today would certainly want to take on they have never ever given up the idea of using WMD on the United States any means to hurt and kill us and certainly if they can acquire cyber as a means to do it there's been a state going to do it Thank you General Keane Juliet It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for having me so I came out of the Department of Homeland Security as assistant secretary there so I thought I just lay out some of my thoughts I know you're involved with the transition and it's a funny department and so I thought I would lay out sort of where we were I served on the transition for Obama from President Bush and we got briefed on every super squirrely thing that was going on every you know potential enemy and of course and we thought we had it down and then of course the first real crisis ended up being this unknown virus known as H1N1 which was coming in from Mexico there was no known vaccine at the time and that's what is going to happen to the Trump Administration you're sort of thinking about one thing and then something borderless trans-national comes around so I want to talk a little bit about more governance and some of the challenges ahead for a homeland which is very different than I think when we talk about war or other issues because it is still I would say a work in progress although the department is much older and the apparatus is a little bit more refined one of the issues that will certainly come up and there's just going to be no question about it because it's very difficult to sort of undermine or limit the threat that we now face is this sort of call it what you will, lone wolf whack-a-mole terrorism whatever individuals who are more likely than not directed by ISIS maybe inspired by ISIS but what we're seeing in the more recent cases is what you might call sort of ISIS justified people who have a lot of things going on Muslim Americans or converts we don't know what's up with Fort Lauderdale who are looking to ISIS to give them justification so there's sort of three different ranges I worry about the ISIS directed a lot less than the other two and those will happen in the United States but more specifically they're going to happen in a state and then they happen in a city and that is a very different dynamic than a wartime footing because the challenge for homeland security is really a governance challenge in this country it is 50 governors all with their own opinions 250 plus major cities all with their own opinions all with their own attitudes all with their own budgets about how much they are going to prepare and respond to a threat that is very very hard to predict and is showing up in places maybe New York but also Orlando so I think that that will continue to be a challenge and how a new administration keeps governors who are focused on a lot of different things and mayors who are focused on the potential teacher strike how you keep them focused on public safety and security for an apparatus that is dealing with all sorts of other things so that is going to be I think a challenge in terms of the sort of what we would call the intergovernmental aspects for any administration and in the absence of a major event which can unify a country like 9-11 for you know the tragedy that unifies these more individual cases are really sort of local responses in many ways so we have to make sure that local and state public safety entities are ready to respond to the whatever because we can't answer the whatever we don't know what it's going to be the second issue is the department itself I know this is an international audience but there's a lot of people domestically you know we always say it's a new department it's still figuring itself out and it is but it's also either in 4 or 8 years or it's so new and so figuring out what lanes the department is in and what it's good at I think is not both a challenge and an opportunity for the new administration because once again we don't know you know there's I can name a thousand threats that could happen obviously terrorism created a department of homeland security and the apparatus that it helps fund on the state and local level but we have everything from immigration and other things the third issue is going to be and the thing that might very likely challenge and administration is some major natural event and it will challenge the way we live in this country in the ways that the Hurricane Katrina did not we seem to be rebuilding New Orleans as it is or that Hurricane Sandy is just starting to we could debate the causes or whatever I'm not interested in that but some city or state will be impacted in a major way and I think that over the next 4-8 years as an administration and as a as mayors and governors will begin to face whether we don't change the way we live in America the challenge for our homeland security is of course its size and that we promote flow airport security why can't we be more like Israel you put 900,000 people in the air every day as the department does that's a really hard comparison you put tens of millions of people on subway systems that's a really hard comparison we value the flow of people, goods and ideas there's going to be differences about how much flow you want I think the challenge ahead in particular with sort of mega storms or major events do we begin to think differently about how we live as a society in a country to protect communities and to protect in particular the sea coast the Department of Homeland Security owns the Coast Guard also owns FEMA so it is going to be challenged I think sooner rather than later we will have to take a step back and do some of these efforts Dr. Georgie maybe an international perspective you're sort of fresh off an experience where Europe certainly came in for a big surprise a strategic surprise in 2015 well first I would start with a recognition that what is new in the world of crisis is not only that they are but also they do not have good manners they don't wait their turn they overlap with each other and actually what is unpredictable obviously we can't quite see but we can do a much better job in scanning the predictable and being sure that at least the predictable is kind of under control in my view there are three things that we need to watch in 2017 very carefully one since I come from Europe I cannot not say the elections in Europe there are three very critical elections March, April and then in the summer the Netherlands, France, Germany what is going to be happening around the dates of these elections can have an unpredictable impact on the results and actually we have seen in Europe so far a remarkable resilience of democracies I was in Belgium in Brussels on the 23rd of March when the attack in Brussels happened and the reaction we all had was to stand up be counted our way of life is not going to be shaken I went to their equivalent of the Kennedy Center Bazaar to a concert and the hall was packed and many people were there to make a statement but if we continue to have soft target attacks in Europe would that have a risk this is something to watch very carefully secondly I call it the belt of trouble for a lack of a better word but if you take the continent of Africa and you start from Mali then Northern Nigeria then you go to Central African Republic South Sudan Somalia this is kind of your belt and then you have above the belt Libya which I don't talk about but it's there and then if you cross in the Middle East of course Syria you reckon then you go a little further to Afghanistan all this is potentially a source of shock because the cumulative impact of this footprint of conflict by the way and I didn't mention the Congo this deal not holding so we have this to watch you talk about natural events in the United States but we haven't had recently a major drought either in the Horn of Africa or in the Sahel the cycle of drought has shortened the last one when I was Humanitarian Commissioner 2011 is it now just about time to be hit again and my third point would be the economy of the world we have to recognize now I am with colleagues from the World Bank who were supposed to tell me we have a report coming at 4 o'clock so whatever I say is embargoed for now but we are coming with the report that basically says the growth projections for the world not so fantastic obviously we would see this package in US and what would be the impact of this package on growth but we are in a world economy where if there is a big shock in a sizable country and I'm not going to name them but you can all think of what could they may be and then this is all combined in a multiplicity of crisis how are we prepared for it and I guess the short answer is not so well but to finish on a positive side I think there is now a huge recognition in governments and institutions like mine, the World Bank that scanning the horizon for the science of travel being able to have a much more risk management frame of mind this is the new normal this is where we are to be and hopefully we would see every year doing better in this scanning the horizon assessing risks and taking appropriate precautionary action thank you I'm totally not going to answer the question is a depressing setup I want to actually answer a question which I think is more important which is why I think regardless of what the crisis that we know is these guys might actually do okay and I have three points for my optimism the presidential transition law because we've actually never done a presidential transition like this because the law was in place in 2012 but they didn't transition anything so this is the first time we've ever exercised the law and I think fundamentally the law has done a good thing in a sense it enables putting in place a rather substantial infrastructure before the election and that's particularly important for a team that's coming in which is outside of government because we don't have shadow governments like a lot of parliamentary governments or ministers and we don't have people that really understand the day-to-day governance of what's going on and part of what a transition team does is actually pretty unglamorous it's really like doing due diligence on an acquisition it's explaining what you're taking over and so what the law does it really enables the folks who are out running on a campaign to fall in on some training wheels and to begin that process of transition I think much, much more efficiently after 9-11 to do that and I think that's generally successful so the second I think is this administration I think this administration has really tried very, very hard to replicate the kind of effort that President Bush made in transitioning to President Obama and I think they've done a very good-faith job certainly for the agency that I've been working with most closely, Department of Homeland Security Jay Johnson's done a remarkable job the Department of Homeland Security could not have been more helpful and productive in helping people understand what they were assuming command of and I think that's generally true across government I think it's been enormously helpful and when you talk about passing the baton literally there are actually people that are passing the baton and not talking about politics and it's I think been very gratifying for me as an American citizen the third thing is on January 13th they do a left-right crisis management exercise with the incoming and outcoming S1's and somebody has worked in this stuff forever it's true, Mulkey said no plan survives contact with the enemy but Eisenhower's corollary was plans are useless but planning is everything and so the notion is preparing to prepare is in itself maybe the best hedge against uncertainty and they've made a lot of I think it's a lot of progress, one area in particular is in dealing with a cyber security response because literally there was no plan and over the course of eight years they've actually put together a cyber security response structure in the federal government and you could argue it's not perfect but it was better than what we had before which was nothing and so that's one area of great concern that I think they've made good progress and I would really hope that they'll pull the baby out with the bath water so there actually has been good work in terms of putting the structure together on how to deal with uncertainty and hopefully this team will pick that up from the last team and move forward on that so I'm planning on going to sleep on January 20th and sleeping pretty soundly and waking up on the 21st and thinking the world will still be here what time are you going to sleep on that one? probably pretty early well thank you all for those really interesting comments and I think you've already anticipated part of what we were planning to do in our second round of questions which is to talk about the importance of crisis preparation and getting ahead of problems I wanted to maybe get your reflection on something that Dr. Georgieva pointed out which is by implication some of the uncertainty and some of the crisis in the next four years might come from the developed world from what we've always thought of as the more stable areas of the globe I hope it's not too risky to say the biggest shock maybe in world affairs this year was generated by the United States in our very own election certainly not a flood or an epidemic but a big shock to people's expectations and I'd like to ask each of you to reflect on that and ask whether we've reached a point in world affairs where we really can assume any particular area is a sort of a reservoir of stability this instability is maybe something that's been globalized along with everything else who wants to take a crack at that I'm going to start because this brings a very interesting memory 2011 maybe it was I had a visitor in Brussels at that time I was in charge of humanitarian affairs and crisis response and the visitor was Greg Fugati the FEMA administrator somebody who grew up in the ranks from a firefighter to run the FEMA to my to my taste very well so I asked Greg what are your priorities and his answer was two, one think of the unthinkable two prepared the United States to receive international assistance if the unthinkable happens and now what shook me as a European was I never thought I would live long enough to hear somebody from the United States to say I want to prepare the United States to receive international assistance but the point is that we actually are in a world where trouble travels shocks especially those that are caused by the evil of men in a technologically connected world and those caused by nature they absolutely put the soul on equal footing who is to say if you remember we in Europe not that long ago were victims of our own stupidity in the Second World War and then we were the refugees United Nations Agency for Refugees was created for us who is to say that in the world there wouldn't be a situation in which these shocks are to be there but this being said I just want to stress two very important things because they lead to our responsibilities one developed countries may now be more at risk of multiplicity of shocks but we are much better prepared we are much more resilient because we have strong institutions we have strong economies and therefore two we have an obligation to work on resilience and to be aware because if we don't trouble travels it is going to come and bite us in the butt that's a technical term General Keane I think that's almost self evident frankly because we are part of the developed world and as I mentioned the two revisionist powers are trying to change the world order that we help develop we are going to be challenged and that is already in evidence secondly the terrorists, the radicals their target is largely the developed world for similar reasons because the developed world has global impact politically, economically and socially and they believe it's that pollution which has brought them to the radicalized ideology so ultimately we are always going to be their objective and that is going to continue with that part of the problem that we have with the radicalization of people ideologically and religiously motivated to kill their fellow citizens or to kill others this is a generational problem that we have not even come close to dealing with we don't have a single alliance that I'm aware of to combat the problem we haven't tried to develop a comprehensive strategy to deal with it we have people in America that think we can develop a counter ideology strategy to deal with the radicalization of largely Muslims I find that to be quite absurd I think we need to have the people who are involved in that and develop the counter ideological arguments for religious people themselves, political leaders themselves who are part of the nations where these conditions are allowed to fester and people become radicalized but we definitely need if we have a radicalized problem like I think we do and we can describe it now as almost a global jihad why aren't we not approaching the problem globally to deal with the ideology similar to what we've done in the past we did this with post-World War II and we were intimidated by communist ideology every single European country that looked at that saw that as a formidable threat and no country by itself could stand up against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact so we put together what? a political and military alliance and developed a containment strategy that worked and we were motivated by the intimidation of that ideology and what it pretended for all of our freedom-loving people where is that in dealing with this we don't have it and I think that's a sad commentary this is why I'm encouraged about this administration I'm not talking about politics now I'm just talking about leadership American leadership in the world has a role to play and we can play a role here we don't craft the strategy but we can bring people together and say look we gotta get organized here we don't have a problem we do have a generational problem these people gonna keep killing us and we gotta figure out a way to stop it my profession can only do some of this the kinetic solution is just a portion of it and it has a rightful role to play to hold this horrific behavior accountable it has appropriate role to play but I would suggest to you it is a smaller role than what needs to be played to push back the ideology and that's where we got to get to and thoughtful leaders of the world I'm convinced can do this American leaders I think we can help possibly organize that effort and empower it we don't have to come up with the answers they can come up with the answers Juliet? so I just in response to your question about multiple crises and crisis preparation we often talk about resiliency like Geist and everyone talks about we just need to be more resilient if we just did more yoga we would all be fine kind of attitude and I think it's remind me every morning but it doesn't work but I want to remind people resiliency is actually investments in making cities stronger response capabilities stronger having interconnected systems of critical infrastructure built in a way that if the best just assume that the bad thing is going to happen because most of us in this field have to just assume that how do you stop the cascading losses how do you have failsafe systems that stop the bad thing from happening and I think that as we try to stop bad things from happening which obviously prevention and mitigation are key also these real investments in what it means to be to be built resilient doesn't mean that people in Manhattan and New York we just keep rebuilding the same way it floods every time can we build subway systems that are stronger or having to do with terrorism look I came from Boston I oversaw the Boston Marathon security planning up till two years before the Boston Marathon attack we in Boston like to say Boston strong it's our Irish stock that's what got it through it let's just be BS what got it through us is while three people died at the finish line over 300 people who were sent to hospitals did not die and that doesn't happen in crisis management that ratio is too good to be true and those were a lot of bad mistakes part of that was the training and investment in crisis management in engaging a public health apparatus that was ready to surge capacity if something like that would happen that is what strong and resilient is three from dying and the attack that happens but also invest real investments cost money in also trying to minimize the harm in a world in which we have to assume bad things will consistently happen though we wish they wouldn't we're just about ready for our question and answer period so I like that people are going to be handling the mics to prep but I want to give Jim a chance to say a word on that actually I want to go back to your original question because I actually thought it's one of the true threads of bipartisanship that's gone through the last two days and I think should not be lost because what I hear from left and right and conservative and progressive and Republican and Democrat is nobody disputes the notion that the peace and stability of Europe, the Middle East and Asia are all of vital interest in the United States and and you have to get equal attention all three of those not that they all have to be the land of milk and honey or everything and everybody expects that in the Middle East at the same time too the notion of a large regional disruption in any three of those regions is incredibly damaging to us and job one of the next president is whether you want to run the threat of radicalization or cyber or whatever that all three are important, all three are equal importance and you don't get credit for two out of three so I think the notion of an Asian pivot however is inappropriate for the next president and each region demands a different solution set and has to be up with its own turn because I don't think you can make big global trade-offs to say well we'll you take this part of the world and I'll take that part of the world each region is going to have to be dealt with on its own case and obviously they're going to impact one another some degree but they each demand equal attention and I do think that's bipartisan I mean we could argue about the specific sets of what you do but I think there is broad recognition that we all need a roll of our sleeves and we need to care about all three Okay thank you very much I'm going to move a little bit and I have my magic pen out here if you see it pointing at you it means it's your turn to ask a question so I'm pointing at you and when I point the magic pen at you that also triggers your identifying yourself and then asking a succinct question It's one formerly under secretary's date in the Obama administration for economic growth energy and the environment I just like to make two points and raise one set of questions one is arguably over the last decade the most serious crisis facing the industrialized countries has been the financial crisis because it not only had adverse financial circumstances but very strongly adverse political circumstances which we're still dealing with throughout the western world, Europe and the United States in particular which argues for the increased emphasis on maintaining the legitimacy and the credibility and the resilience of international financial and trade institutions the second is that we discussed earlier today a whole series of strategic issues but there was very little discussion of the role that increased trade and trade deals should play and had been anticipated to play TTIP and TPP in bolstering our alliances our alliances in the Pacific with TPP and our alliance in Europe with TTIP now problem is my concern over the future and if this is a bipartisan issue it's not one or the other because we saw on the campaign both candidates and the United States and the United States and the United States would be in a worse position if there was not stronger support for global institutions which were extremely helpful in 2007-2008 if we let those institutions languish if we don't give them support it seems to me the world and the United States are much more vulnerable to a financial crisis than trade war this to me is a big problem what does this administration do and what does the if we don't have TPP if we don't have TTIP what is the alternative to demonstrating to other countries that we are major players on trade that we're reliable partners on trade and international economic issues then it seems to me it weakens our credibility not just in the economic area but on national security and on political issues as well so I'd like to pose these two challenges to our panel how do we strengthen the legitimacy of the international institutions on which we depend and if we don't support TPP or TTIP what do we do to demonstrate our trade credibility and therefore underpin our national security and our foreign policy credibility in Asia and in Europe so that's a lot to chew on a shot at it since it is I'm here from one of the global institutions I feel obliged to come on that question actually I'm very happy to come on that question of course in a world that is more interconnected than shock prone we need stronger buffers we need the capacity of the workers somewhere to very swiftly move resources and make sure that the rest of the world is protected from contagion just going back to the general key is a very good point on the necessity to deal with these threats at source because militarily you can do some but not everything is there anybody in the audience who like me was born on the other side of the iron curtain the Bronx the Bronx a little further a little further that iron curtain in Europe so I see people raising their hands look how did you win the Cold War you won it of course with smart strategy and engagement but basically economically you drove our system at that time central planning to its knees and it went bankrupt and we were free well we need a similar massive investment in areas of instability I think of my institution as the World Bank as the critical investor in areas that otherwise would fall from the hands of bad people and stayed there for a long time as well as to pull these areas from the hands of bad people and bring them back to a more civilized place but global institutions have also an obligation to be oriented towards the future to make the investments that would make a difference in the world of tomorrow and what are these investments well first we do need to assess economically and financially where the risks are and be able to put a price tag on them and actually the World Bank did a study astonishing astonishing number 14 trillion dollars is the cost of conflict and violence to the world economy obviously cutting this cost down on its own is a very good thing to do but then we have to be much more creative and this is my second point in being able to lean forward at the time of crisis anticipate crisis act early lean forward so we prevent the crisis into sucking in world resources and creating instability to do so we must rely much more actively on these global institutions to create the environment for the private sector to step in because what gives me grief at night what makes me not going to sleep just the idea of the demographic boom that is happening exactly in this belt of trouble I was describing Nigeria turning into a one billion people country well for that not to happen or to happen without creating huge instability we need jobs for people well we need first education for boys and girls and then we need jobs for people we need people to stay where they are and believe you me from an European perspective I saw how destabilizing it would be when people are on the move unexpected in big numbers so to sum it up I am talking about my institution the World Bank I do see the World Bank today as necessary as it was after the Second World War to make that investment instability in the world in the way that creates a chance for us to cut down the cost of destruction and of course provide the buffer to the world not only from a security standpoint also from a financial standpoint I would leave the other panelists to venture on the topic of trade so I don't take too long to share in that question I think we have a question here Eileen Shields West Refugees International so one of the most destabilizing forces in the world today is the large number 65 million people who are displaced because of climate conflict or economic migration and my question is what are we well the US is do we perceive that as a threat and that we have a role in mitigating that threat in Europe to deal with it as we know that's not successful or the neighboring countries who have Lebanon and Jordan and Turkey of course so Senator Kerry brought up the idea of a new Marshall plan this morning which would encompass Middle East Africa and Asia is that possible doable is that even in the cards with the new administration I'll take that I don't know enough about the new administration to comment in terms of what they would do and I'm not sure anybody here truly does but I would suggest this first of all thanks for the question we have to go to what is causing that problem and treat it the migration that we show explode in Europe the 11 million people that have displaced in Syria is a real humanitarian crisis I'm frustrated by the fact that it's allowed to linger as long as it has based on our own public policy to be frank about it but these challenges that we have in the Middle East and the political social economic conditions that are essentially driving those challenges we have to help our Middle Eastern friends deal with these problems and we have to be very frank with them about some of these conditions that are there and help them shape the improvements that's necessary the civil wars the Arab Spring has all grown up as a manifestation of those conditions the social disenfranchisement the lack of political participation and the lack of economic opportunity our major drivers to the instability and turmoil that we see there yes for something like the Middle East some fashion of a Marshall plan I would agree with Secretary Kerry on that although I don't agree with some of his other public policies let me just full disclosure here as it comes to Syria some of the other issues in the Middle East but I definitely think we have to look at that entire area holistically and given the millions of people that are under the age of 30 as you know in that region and the economic and social disenfranchisement they feel this problem is going to get worse before it gets better and you can look at the Middle East from an American perspective and ring your hands and say this has gotten worse ever since we tried to do something about it but the source of action is to just pull back and try to contain this problem as best we can and let them solve this themselves this is not our problem to solve culturally very different topography is very different and this is much their problem and that's 1935 Europe all over again thinking that's what that is and that's being tired of World War I and Nazism and that polluting ideology is going to contaminate anybody it'll go away just leave it alone and how horrible a mistake did those leaders who are plagued by the experience of World War I have to suffer as a result of it in terms of their people we cannot afford to not do something about this problem and it's going to take a lot of thoughtfulness and comprehensive strategy and participation with our friends in the region to do it we got to get the Europeans involved in it because they are all touched by this crisis that exists there in terms of the United States we really think of the south north challenge that we're going to have if we don't have it already with minors and undocumented minors trying to come here and then also mass migrations after some catastrophe the Haiti earthquake happened I know we like to feel good about ourselves and say we're going to deploy resources held the Haitians, what really did animate all of the activity was an utter fear of a mass migration out of Haiti that would sort of show up on the shores of Florida that's not a bad thing I think it's important that we protect our borders but that we have to continue to assist these countries that might face mass migration problems not just from an altruistic you know, de-conflict perspective but also because those challenges will find their way here just given how the United States so often serves as a magnet trying to close our borders but you know, the oceans are hard to close a lot of times We have a question here Hello, Sean Callahan with Catholic Relief Services I wanted to ask you a little bit about values and it sounds like a little bit what I'm hearing is a little bit of a bunker mentality of bunker America and protecting ourselves and when I was studying history when I was young one of the things that we were very proud of is we were the new world and the old world was kind of stayed and that new world was young and vibrant and energetic and I was in Kenya a month ago talking to some people and they started describing us as the old world that they were the young countries that they were the vibrant ones that Latin America was young countries as well so those continents and that we were more of a status quo power so my question is I hope that we have migrants coming here to a certain degree is a good thing because we must be doing something right but what is the importance of the values of that optimism and that energy and that we don't close ourselves down but open ourselves out and invest in the continent of Africa and Latin America and other places so that they see feel and have hope in the future and can trust in the United States as opposed to thinking we're a status quo power out to protect ourselves it is very beautifully said that what in the end determines our choices is who we are and one thing I learned when I was commissioner for humanitarian aid going to this devastated places was that Europeans, Americans the people from this old world very good people very very generous willing to put their lives at risk to save the lives of others but somehow talking about being goodness is being good is not it doesn't cut through goodness tends to be quiet evil very loud and you're right that what makes us strong is we do have this core values solidarity sharing the opportunities with others and we have to amplify this voice of goodness but we also have to be mindful that our people in our countries are anxious, they're anxious for reasons and not look with disrespect to this anxiety and look for solutions that are based on these values but they're also good for the for my neighbors and my family for their comfort, for their strength of mind and by the way I just wanted to say that retired general Lin in an interview with Farid Zakaria talked about the Marshall clan who is the forthcoming national security advisor he talked about the necessity to invest very heavily in the countries that are most conflict prone so it resonates very much with the position we have taken on this panel but thank you for bringing that up Ali Barkey from the Woodrow Wilson Center we talked about the strategic surprises and General Keane said never predict those crises what I would like to do is actually give you a concrete example and see how you would respond and Juliet already started mentioning with Haiti but state collapse is clearly one of the things that we are facing and then Venezuela is probably the country that is probably nearest to the United States that will collapse very soon imagine a situation where you have a collapse of the state in Venezuela with civil war government killing lots of people lots of refugees and it's close to the United States close to Mexico, Colombia etc what would you recommend the new administration to do in a case in a situation like that easy if I could add crises in Venezuela what ought to be done to prepare for it right now as well as to cope with it if it didn't when it happens even as you want to try that Jim you know in terms of which was your second question in preparing for the future any new administration most importantly from a national security perspective has got to develop a national security strategy not something that's thrown in the whole box and nobody reads but something that's thoughtfully put together that actually becomes the foundation of the work that you're about to do on behalf of the United States and then you have to have the processes that support all of that and the objectives that you're trying to achieve and some accountability for that this is organizational stuff that is boring and all day life but it really makes a difference and you can see when you look at the NSC and how it operates differently under administrations and how some operate considerably better because these systems are in place and another thing I think the interagency should do is something it's embedded in me because of my years of experience with the military one of the reasons why we're able to deal with different enemies as well as we can is because we prepare so much based on different scenarios that we call it so we do we don't call it crisis management but we do this kind of crisis management against different enemies so that we're prepared to deal with the unexpected as a natural condition of warfare and therefore I believe we likely do it better than anybody in the world however most government entities even those that deal with crisis management don't do that because they use the excuse that day to day business is too much, too consuming and we're never going to be able to get the principles involved and we've got to get past that and only when you can get the attention of the principles can this really work and I would suggest that that is something that possibly General Flynn with his military back when I haven't had this conversation with him could maybe put in play so that you can deal with a crisis like Venezuela or a problem with nuclear weapons in Pakistan we can make a laundry list of things that need to be done and I'll just stop there somebody else going to contribute you had this experience in Europe of being all of a sudden faced with a massive displacement of people and the region in huge trouble I would say do Europe on steroids do what Europe did much faster what Europe did in the end is exactly the right thing massive financial package for the countries in the region that are in trouble where refugees come from or our hosting refugees reinforcement of the border control so we know who is coming and we can give some comfort to the population that we know who is coming and fast assessment of where in the European economy people actually can find jobs be prepared to do that when we have the situation you describe a country that is facing political collapse is what your scenario and of course it is the politics that needs to be fixed but if there is no massive financial assistance then fixing it would be costly over medium term and less likely to be successful and of course domestic politics is domestic politics it would be for the people there to figure it out but if they are left on their own they pay a very high price the rest of us pay a very high price we did it in Europe over period of 18 months for fairness to us I don't know a country or a region that would have a million people coming and this would not be a shock but we have to be much faster we have to be much less wishful thinking in kind of saying I wish it to go away but I think we have enough time for one more question which is good because we have one more question thank you John Norton Moore from the University of Virginia my comment actually relates to an earlier period in which I had the great privilege of being the first chairman of the board of the United States Institute of Peace and I had a wonderful time in talking to Senator Spart Motsanaga my leading Democrat about what he wanted for this great institution and then sitting immediately next to Ronald Reagan the then president of the United States a wonderful Republican about what he wanted from this institution and I believe that Spart Motsanaga and President Ronald Reagan would just be enormously pleased to see the wonderful success of this institution that was literally created by them and that created then all of the wonderful leadership that it currently has had with all the many chairman and others this wonderful little agency is doing extraordinary work that I think needs to be more broadly called to the attention of the world generally not just the American people second general comment is one of the things I think as a concept that needs to be put on the table somewhat more strongly than I've heard it today as we all seek the things I think that we share in common we would like to see greater economic development we would like to see a reduction in conflict and war we would like to see greater human rights we would like to see far greater health and wellness generally for people around the world but we know the thing the aggregate of things that actually correlates with all of those things more strongly than virtually anything else we have found it is democratic governance the rule of law good governance generally and so I would suggest one of the things we need to be talking about is not just a Marshall plan it is the question of how do we actually get out there much more effectively in promoting democracy rule of law and good governance and that we not forget the enormous importance of those things as we think about this for example let's say in realist terms but that we understand realistically the thing that really does correlate are all of these things relating to governance and we see so much of this now a few years ago there was a very very fine proposal to create a democracy rule of law training center for all of Africa that would be funded half by the United States of AID that would be funded half by the European Union I still think that would be one of the single most important things you could do in trying to assist Africa that would then be turned over in a short period to the African Union but I hope that we put on the table in all of our discussions democracy, rule of law good governance I'm a secret closet fan of USIP and a Steve and Nancy thing but I don't want that to get out in public but I want to run up to my comment about why I'm a fan because I think it relates to your comment which is I hate we need an interagency solution I hate those things this notion that we can only solve a problem if everybody fricking gets involved I don't know how many people have been involved in government but when they say a whole of government I really kind of blink I think the answer is governance or development what you need is the right combination of tools at the right time in the right place to get the job done and it's not always a trope of a Marshall plan or something else sometimes it might be a very finesse of instrument and one of the reasons why I love USIP particularly what Nancy and Steve have done is what they have done in some ways in very humble ways is they put together some tools for the toolkit which don't fit in kind of traditional big government programs don't necessarily aren't the thing you would find in an NGO but they live in that little shadow space in between where somehow that's just kind of a nice tool and just the right piece to fit in there so I'm a fan because it adds more tools to the toolkit and I actually don't like this notion of when we have a problem we need to throw up a toolkit and just start throwing tools at because sometimes what the world needs is not an architect needs a craftsman and in a lot of these problems I would actually disagree with maybe a lot of things that we need big and more and everything and in cases there are a lot of cases where what we need is a craftsman with the right set of tools and a lot of times tools are exactly the kind of things that Nancy and Steve and the folks here are doing but I never said that I'm glad you concluded on a construction metaphor real estate development is a very relevant thing these days in America and this conference has come in on time and under budget right at 3.45pm this panel I should say so join me all in giving some appreciation to our panelists in once again thanking our wonderful panelists we will take a very strict 30 minute break but I want to make sure that you come back we've got Senator Graham joining us who promises to be his usual provocative insightful self we'll have a conversation with Senator Graham and then we'll have our wrap up panel of the day looking at what should America's role in the world be with the new Deputy Secretary Assistant Designee KT McFarland Steve Hadley Michelle Flournoy former Deputy Undersecretary of DOD Chief Foreign Policy Advisor for Secretary Hillary Clinton see you back here in about 25 minutes distinct pleasure now to welcome to the podium Senator Graham who really does define needy-no introduction but Senator Graham since 2002 you've been a leading voice in the Senate on all of the issues we've been talking about today see how well that's worked out we're delighted to welcome you here today and have a conversation we've been talking here all day long about foreign policy challenges I know you've just returned from a trip to various parts of the world and some of which we've been talking about and you've also been an important voice on how we need to think about winning the war on terrorism and you held a hearing last spring and into the summer where you said that we're not going to win this war by just killing terrorists and this is a crisis where you pay now or pay later that theme was echoed a bit this morning both by Admiral Struvredes and Secretary John Kerry who talked about the Marshall Plan and how we need to ensure that we're thinking about all of our 3Ds working together so love to hear your thoughts on that anybody here not being confirmed this week raise your hand so we're having like 400 hearings tell Jeff Sessions he's doing great one, thanks to the institute beautiful building, great cause you get some taxpayer dollars good investment Steve Buggster crap out of me all the time about more money so what's the theme of this thing passing the baton I hope that's what we pass as a baton so the first thing I think President Lex got to do is find out in his own mind what is winning the war on terror I mean we know what World War II is like you take Berlin you take Tokyo you shoot down the air force you sink their navy I think it's been hard for Americans to get their heads around what we're doing we're very schizophrenic when we get attacked we want to blow everybody up after about 2 or 3 years we want to leave everybody alone it won't work that way when you get attacked you need to respond but you also need to respond in a fashion to make sure you're not attacked again so I think the big problem he's going to have in his own mind is how do you win the war what does winning look like let me tell you what I think winning looks like people over there can take care of their problems with some of our health but not be dependent upon us their armies and their police forces can protect the populations and the rule of law replaces the rule of gun and young people have something to live for rather than die for that's pretty nebulous but when you think about it defeating radical Islam is the proposition that they're selling a glorious death we've got to sell a hopeful life and if I could find a way to win this war where all of us stayed over here and never had to go over there I would so I would rather fight it in their backyard than ours I'd rather have partners than do it alone and I'd rather hit them they hit us and to win the war the kinetic part of it has limited utility what have I learned after 39 trips to Iraq and Afghanistan it's a long ass way over there and I keep running into the same people all the time we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan the 1% have been doing a heck of a job on our behalf so what have I learned that building up their institutions is hard particularly when there's lack of security and I hope President elect Trump soon to be President Trump will understand that if you're not for the 150 account which all of you know right it's good to talk to an audience who knows what the 150 account is we didn't fill up the room it's probably for a reason so I'm going to try to convince him on General Flynn that the 150 account is a great tool in the war on terror and that you want to rebuild up the military replacing sequestrations is a great place to start but if you don't replace sequestration for the FBI the CIA the national security NSA and the 150 account you'll miss the boat on what it takes to win the war so the president elects got to make a decision in his own mind what is our role in winning the war and what does victory look like was talking about the importance of investing precisely in those areas of great instability that have the potential to come back down the road to be a greater problem would you agree with that yeah so the Marshall Plan the reason we made that name up is we couldn't think of another name most people my age understand what the Marshall Plan was all about it was taken to totalitarian states with radicalized populations staying until things got better building up working with the kids that the prior regime tried to radicalize and over the arc of time you got Germany and Japan let me tell you it is pretty hard right now in this environment selling staying power so the 150 account is 1% of the budget my belief is that if we could create a new account for western democracies Gulf Arab states Japan and it would be ironic if Germany led the new Marshall Plan and put together about 100 billion bucks and said to developing nations we're here to help you but there's going to be a new way of doing it Nigeria we got to get Nigeria right so you got a new president they're taking the fight to Boko Ram so what I would envision with this money is a public-private partnership like the Millennium Challenge Corporation what President Bush should be very proud of so it's going to be an international version of that it will be new money not to replace the UN individual state aid programs but a collaborative effort between the private sector and the public sector to take new money and leverage better results in some countries it may be power for us to help you with your power supply you can actually pass laws where people have to pay the power bill so the bottom line is I'm trying to convince the new administration and my Republican colleagues that we're going to pay now or we're going to pay later the first nightmare for radical Islam is for us to get to the country before they do invest in the lives of the young people before they can corrupt their lives and the biggest antidote to tear above all else is giving a poor young girl a chance for an education and a voice for her children that drives these guys nuts and that's what I want to do exactly thank you and help Israel you mentioned that it takes a long time to solve these problems and that's been one of the themes today that's why it helps to take Senator Thurmond's place you have the long view of things and we've been talking about how these are not problems that are solved in four or even eight year increments and it's actually the 70th anniversary today of a speech that Senator Vandenberg gave 70 years ago who made the very famous line that politics stop at the water's edge so in order to transcend these four to eight year increments we really do need this bipartisan support for key foreign policy solutions you've had a long successful career is that still possible is that imperative still still front and center it's okay to disagree about foreign policy too it's okay to have a row of debates but you don't want to undermine each other so let's look at what President Trump's going to have to deal with we're going to take Mosul back from ISIL how many of you think we'll eventually do that raise your hands Ramadi, Fallujah how do you hold them Raqqa's going to fall one day who's the holding force it's my view that the YBG Kurds are not going to hold Raqqa that you're going to need an Arab holding force and if you've been to any of these areas recently you realize that the entire economy has been devastated would he leave a residual force behind this time the first question he's going to have to answer in my mind is is he willing to put American dollars into the pipeline to reconstruct these cities that have been destroyed in the name of liberating them and will he get other people to put money in the same pot because if you don't invest in reconstructing Mosul, Ramadi and Fallujah he's not going to back into the enemy's hands a residual force if the Iraqis requested this time around a residual force which they did last time by the way would he say yes here's my advice if you don't leave some soldiers behind this time you're going to get the same result as last time Syria who's going to hold Raqqa and that part of Syria is this a good deal that the Russians and the Iranians here's my general proposition any deal cooked up by the Russians and the Iranians is probably not a good deal so what did they accomplish they've driven us out of Syria in terms of peacemaking and if Assad stays in power I hope the president elect understands that that will be recruiting tool for radical Islam for decades the biggest winners I think of the Iranian-Turkey deal is Russia, Iran Assad radical Sunni Islamic groups the biggest losers Syrian people us the Arab neighbors and eventually Turkey and maybe Israel why did I say Israel Israel's constantly under attack from two groups the last thing I want to want Ron for your country is to have somebody in power in Damascus that would create a corridor all the way into Lebanon so that the weapons that exist in Syria can flow into Lebanon and one day be used against your country to our friends in Turkey if you think this is a good deal for you you're very short-sighted what is Erdogan's political base what is it it's the rural areas of Turkey the secular urban areas not so much here's what I fear by throwing in with Russia and Iran he's reinforcing the narrative that he's empowered the mortal enemy of Sunni Islam the Iranian Ayatollah and that radical Islam is going to send upon Turkey with a vengeance not because Turkey helped destroy ISIL but because Turkey will be seen by religious conservative people who are not members of ISIL or Al-Qaeda is having done a deal with the devil so this current construct of where Syria is given into three groups Turkey gets a foothold inside of Syria to deal with this Kurdish problem I think it's not going to help the Kurdish problem I think it's make it worse why did Turkey do this I think Turkey believed that we were an unreliable partner because we were training the Kurds as the liberating holding force in the eyes and minds of the average Turkish government official the YPG Kurds and the PKK are ever bit as lethal as ISIL and Al-Qaeda I think we drove them to the Russian-Iranian camp here's what President Trump's got to decide he's publicly said he wants to work with Russia to destroy radical Islam they're not destroying radical Islam they've been destroying the moderate forces that have been trying to liberate the country from Assad if he insists that Assad stay in power if President Trump buys into that construct I think it's going to be a nightmare for the Arab countries surrounding Syria because the war never ends it's going to be a problem for our friends in Israel and I think Turkey's in a world of hurt when he wants to build up the military count man is he willing to invest in the 150 count because if he's not and I think we're missing the whole point of trying to win the war does he want to leave forces in Iraq when everybody's ready to leave will he build up forces in Afghanistan he's going to have a lot of hard decisions will he give more money to Israel I hope so I want to help him and I hope everybody in here will want to help him but the bottom line is when I think he's wrong I've got to have the courage of my convictions even though I'm a Republican to tell my party I think you're wrong Senator Graham you have been a long time supporter of the UN however you've been quite critical recently to the vote on Israel and I'm curious whether you see that there might be other ways to address what was essentially a political vote of member states without undermining the importance of the UN I'm an internationalist in my party I'm a Steve Hadley kind of guy so I I think what President Bush did with Petfar and all the AIDS programs in Africa is going to serve us well for 100 years United Nations the Marshall Plan has to be coordinated with what the UN is already doing I've already met with the new Secretary General before he got the job great guy from Portugal can't say his name don't want to butcher it but how do I sell to the people in South Carolina that I want to take more of your tax dollars partner with international organizations that in their mind have gone crazy the average South Carolinian believes that when it comes to our national security and the problems in the world Israel is not the biggest problem to those who believe that it's about land you really don't remember very well what happened when Israel left Gaza how do you do peace when you have the other side divided into two camps I believe in a two state settlement a two state solution but it requires the ability of both parties to deliver I'm going to suspend funding to the United Nations being an internationalist until they correct the problem with this resolution we've had differences with our friends in Israel about settlements but we've always said among ourselves we're going to keep these differences among ourselves and we're never going to let the peace process here's my problem with the United Nations they selectively chose one issue of many they highlighted in a fashion that I think gives false hope to peace the problem as I see it is not settlements by itself is the fact that Hamas governs about 40% of the Israeli of the Palestinian population and they're not remotely interested in peace and that a boss can't deliver so I'm going to do two things Ted Cruz, my new best friend we're going to introduce a resolution tomorrow suspending all assistance to the United Nations until we get this resolution at a better spot stop funding the Palestinian Authority until they change their laws that reward young Palestinians for killing Israelis and Americans and let me give you an example Taylor Force is a young man whose parents live in South Carolina he graduated from West Point he did a tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan he was an Israel as a graduate student studying and Jaffa I believe it was went out to dinner came out of the restaurant got stabbed to death by a Palestinian the Palestinian was killed back to Ramallah he was welcomed as a hero given a state funeral and his parents were given a lump sum of money by the Palestinian Authority what am I supposed to tell people in South Carolina I know Boswell he's got a lot of political problems but I'm not going to continue to fund organizations who tell their young people the best way to get ahead is to kill somebody else so how you doing are there ways that leverage can be used with member states without imperiling especially the critical assistance that the UN provides to a healthy conversation with the Ukraine they voted for this resolution like what are you thinking I went to eastern Ukraine with the president and looking at the Russians killing everybody yep they're doing it how would you like to be in Israel when you get 10,000 rockets it's not that I don't see fault in our friends in Israel there's fault with all of us I just see this to be an absurd proposition by the international community to single out settlements and condemn Israel I just don't see that as being very constructive to the member states who voted for this and depend on us for assistance we're going to have a new conversation here peace will come only when the Palestinians are united and can deliver if that day comes would they have an election and they're long overdue and the Palestinians reject Hamas and they vote for a more moderate view then the burden will be on Israel until that day comes Senator Graham we want to open the room to get some questions and reflections from the audience absolutely so if anybody has anything they'd like to raise with the senator and one of the I'd like to also note that one of the things we've been talking a lot about today have been the critical priorities facing the incoming Trump administration you've noted several but while we see if there are comments or suggestions from the audience love you to be thinking about ranking the top three which we've been asking people to do what those would be rebuild your ability to deter aggression by setting aside sequestration sequestration is Latin for doing really dumb things how we've been able to freeze do this to the discretionary budget and not move the debt needle and call it a success I'll never know we're going to have the smallest army since 1940 the smallest navy since 1915 the air force Congress will have shot down more fighter planes than any enemy could hope to do through sequestration but when we replace it I hope we'll look at what defense really means if defense doesn't mean the 150 account you made a huge mistake Mr. President you watch a lot of TV in case you're watching this if you're not willing to invest in the lives of others you cannot make a safe here I have come to conclude that and if you don't believe me ask any general General Mattis said if you cut the State Department's budget you better buy me more bullets so get funding right the Iranian agreement what keeps me up at night is a nuclear arms race in the Middle East does anybody share that concern how many of you believe the Arabs are going to get a nuclear weapon if they think the Iranians one day will get one just talk to the Arabs the nuclear agreement with the Iranians needs to be renegotiated because at the end of 15 years they don't even have to cheat they can reprocess and enrich we do have more insight into their nuclear program than we did have before with the $150 billion we gave them in sanctions is not building school houses so what I would do as my number two priority is that I would impose sanctions on the Iranian regime for their behavior outside their nuclear program for holding hostage American sailors for toppling four Arab capitals for supporting Hezbollah, Hamas and taking Yemen and tearing it apart we're going to introduce sanctions in a bipartisan fashion to sanction the Iranian regime for their behavior outside the nuclear program if I were President Trump I would seize that moment and use it as leverage to get a better deal the third thing is North Korea North Korea is an interesting place the former leader said he had nine holes in one in his first round of golf that's when he lost me being born in a mountain and all that other stuff I go there we're laughing but North Korea has nuclear weapons and they're trying as I speak to develop the missile technology to hit our shores how many of you really want to be President of the United States so the third thing I would worry about if I were Trump is how do you stop the ICBM program in North Korea and if you don't stop it you're going to own the consequences so I am going to offer General Mattis Thursday a congressional authorization to use force to stop their ICBM program from hitting the homeland if they want it and I think every member of Congress should be on the record as to whether or not they support the proposition of using military force if necessary to stop the North Koreans from building ICBM that could hit America those are the three things I think we should focus on early thank you for that we have a questioner right here is that Randy? Sean Callahan Catholic Relief Services I appreciate the comments you made Senator regarding the 150 account where would you advise the President-elect what would be his first overseas trip why and what would you have him say I'd go to Israel and say I'm your friend then I would go to Jordan and have the King of Jordan host a regional summit and say I'm your friend then I would send a joint message from the Western world and the Arabs to the Iranian people we want to be your friend and I'd send a message to the Ayatollah we've had it with you clear and succinct Priscilla thank you I'm Priscilla Klapp if you were to authorize the use of power on North Korea from the Congress what kind of reaction do you think it might cause would North Korea go after South Korea would they start a fight that's a really good question I advocated leaving troops behind in Iraq I advocated helping the Free Syrian Army four years ago and I got asked what would happen if you did a consequence to helping people who are fighting for their freedom I realized that if you adopt my foreign policy views that there will be consequences I've said out in thought what's the worst thing that can happen the worst thing can happen is that North Korea actually builds a missile that can hit our homeland and I work backward the worst thing can happen in Syria is for Russia and Iran to come out after we told him he had to go the worst thing that can happen for America is when you tell North Korea it's not going to happen and it happens so Trump has tweeted himself into a red line here should he have done it I don't know I wouldn't have done it that way I'm glad I don't email or tweet I would have told the Chinese what my red lines were and you tell North Korea all things, all bets are off that's the way I would have done it but we're now out there for republic to say we're not going to let North Korea build an ICBM here's what I think would happen if they believed Trump was serious about it they would find a way to stand down because let me tell you this as bad as a war with North Korea would be I know who's going to lose it they will as bad as a war with Iran would be but they will and you know what they know that too interesting times isn't it you got a real crazy guy wanting to build a missile to hit your homeland with like a hundred weapons I mean what do you do about it we have one question we'll do two more questions over here and then over there thank you Senator you have advanced in your comments today I'm Tamika Tillerman I direct the Bretton Woods 2 program at New America a pretty simple proposition which is born out by most of our history you can either invest now in addressing these market failures or you can pay later and what we see at this moment is that those market failures that we're encountering around the world are not only expensive for the US government they're also very expensive for the private sector in a way that we maybe haven't fully appreciated previously so I'd be curious to ask your opinion on what if anything can be done at a policy level with the private long-term financial actors that will ultimately end up paying a big price if these problems metastasize to start pursuing investments that can address root causes of some of these challenges around the world while hopefully making a return in the process well Boeing builds 787s in South Carolina I love Boeing they're about to sell a bunch of jets to Ryan I know they got Airbus' competition Tillerson's whole confirmation is going to be about you know the difference between being a CEO at Exxon and being Secretary of State there's one area where I think we can work together with the Russians and the Chinese the Middle East is seeking nuclear power most Arab countries that I've talked to one day would like to have a nuclear program because they'll run out of oil and gas I am okay with the expansion of nuclear power in the Middle East for peaceful purposes so Russia, China and the United States should think about collaborating with our private sectors to basically build nuclear power plants throughout the Middle East as long as we control the fuel cycle I don't mind Iran having a nuclear power plant I just don't want people who deny the Holocaust the ability to enrich and reprocess I don't like the idea that on the day we signed the agreement that we voted in the Senate on the Iranian nuclear agreement, the Ayatollah said God willing in 25 years Israel won't exist so the private sector part of this is what the Marshall plan is all about you have NGOs you have big companies doing business all over the world what if you could take the power of goodness which is the NGO the power of capital which is big business with the power of government and put on the table new assistance that reinforces better governance and reinforces outcomes that are more transparent I know I'm a bit schizophrenic to some of you in this audience please understand that I get it when it comes to the limitations of the use of military force in destroying radical Islam Russia, no one has asked me about Russia how many of you think Russia hacked into the DNC and Podesta me too how many think we should do something about it me too now the president elect talks all around this I hope you'll understand that I'm not suggesting that his victory was brought about by Russian interference you won Mr. President Hillary Clinton lost you won and had nothing to do with the Russian hacking but they did try to interfere and what I hope you'll understand is that in about 10 days he's going to be the leader of the free world and that you have to stop this behavior because it's happening all over the world he says he wants a better relationship with Russia how many of you desire that how can you have a better relationship if they do the same old thing you're never going to have a better relationship until Russia changes its behavior you can't have a better relationship with the country whose leader steals his own people blind and kills folks that oppose it and gobbles up their neighbors and tries to break the backbone of democracy the very foundation of who we are as a people the only way a better relationship with Russia occurs is when they change not us forgiving more their bad behavior so the congress today introduced sanctions that hit them in the energy sector where they're most vulnerable that deal with financial services sectors so if you want to do business in Russia it's going to be harder for you as a private sector company the reason I did that with nine other republicans and democrats is to let Putin know enough is enough and the current sanction regime is not working President Trump is going to have to decide how to deal with Russia I have decided we're going to deal with Russia from the position of strength we're going to rebuild our military we're going to go after him and his cronies for what they did in our election and what they're trying to do throughout the world I just got back from the Baltic states where all NATO members were scared to death I spent New Year's Eve in the Ukraine on the eastern front of the war with Ukrainians who know they're outmanned and outgun but are willing to die I'm a hopeless romantic when it comes to democracy but I'm also very practical we're dealing with Saudi Arabia I think they got room for improvement there are a lot of our allies that we need to push to do better but you have to deal with the world as it is the private sector needs to be more utilized in American foreign policy because you bring to the table the essence of America may be better than any politician our ace in the hole is that average people want to be more like us not less our biggest export movies, entertainment never lose sight of the fact that we have an advantage over all enemies not because our military is so much better than it is it's because most people want what we take for granted Putin one day will fall just like all thugs and bullies fall how much damage between now and then I don't know ISIL will be destroyed one day because most mothers and fathers don't want their daughters turned over to these bastards that just need our help to our friends in Israel hang in there things are going to get better my foreign policy is very simple I believe that what we stand for should be offered to everybody and if they don't want it to a free and fair process I'm okay with that Trump says America first I say freedom first the right of self-determination above all else and if you vote for a dictator too bad if most people could vote they wouldn't accept this and if you want to be peaceful here and you want to preserve our way of life you better be involved over there the only thing I can tell you after 15 years of being at war we're never going to win this war all of us stand over here and the best and the brightest among us are not just our soldiers it's the people in the State Department and these NGOs who go out and represent American values without carrying a gun I'm a pretty hawkish guy but I've had the pleasure of seeing our State Department in action our NGO community in action and I believe we would be very wise to invest in them just as we would be wise to invest in our military thank you for having me thank you Senator Graham thank you Senator Graham thank you for taking time out of such a busy schedule thank you for being a starry-eyed pragmatist and a fierce defender of the 150 account he's got a crazy hearing schedule so we're very very appreciative that he was able to join us our next and final panel we'll build on the conversations that we've had today and take a look at what should America's role in the world be with the number of challenges that we have we have a terrific panel and I'm happy to introduce our moderator Susan Glasser she'll moderate the final discussion introduce our panelists she's a columnist, seasoned journalist and the chief international affairs columnist with our media partner Politico please welcome Susan and our panelists thank you so much for sticking with us I think we're absolutely delighted to have the final position in this extraordinary collection of people gathered on both sides and across the many divides in Washington today to talk about passing the baton and foreign policy from one this is a group that needs almost no introduction so I will be very brief in order to get right to a conversation that I was eager myself to hear what everyone has to say and I know you are too so we'll start right in basically this is a pretty unparalleled group of people who can talk about both the foreign policy of administrations that were that might have been and that will be and so with that in mind Michelle Flournoy who of course has had many senior positions at the defense department was widely thought to be the leading candidate to be the defense secretary had Hillary Clinton won the White House Steven Hadley who was the national security advisor under President Bush you've heard from him before we're delighted and honored to be with him today KT McFarland who is coming in as the deputy national security advisor who was already telling us, regaling us fascinating stories of her previous tours in the situation room many decades ago we're excited to have her join us today and Jake Sullivan who of course was a close advisor to Hillary Clinton who has sat in the White House who sat at the State Department and brings much wisdom to this conversation as well I want to jump right in because I know we're eager to hear from all of them and you know the title of this panel is pretty high altitude as fitting such an August group of people but why not go ahead and start right at 30,000 feet not only about the role of America in the world but the role of foreign policy in the United States today we're divided country the world is divided about the election we've just had divided about what it means I think many of us couldn't really have conceived of a moment at which we would be talking about whether America's place in the world is under question in a serious way more than it has been since the end of the Cold War 25 years ago and so I really want to start out with that in mind and go ahead and start with Michelle and your thoughts on where America is in the world today do you believe that there is going to be a different role for American leadership going forward than there has been since the end of the Cold War Thank you very much Susan and I just want to applaud USIP for hosting this conference yet again as part of your tradition of trying to facilitate a positive and productive transition between administrations I'm one who believes that the US role in the world, the leadership role in the world will remain indispensable I think it's interesting we heard that as a shared theme from both Susan Rice and General Flynn today when they both spoke but I think the divisiveness of the election while it wasn't focused on foreign policy primarily there was enough said about foreign policy that I think there's a lot of confusion here at home but also out in the world among our allies and partners and potential competitors about where the US will stand will there be more continuity will there be more change what can we expect of US leadership in the future and so obviously it's going to take time for a new administration to form its team to deliberate and work through a series of strategies and policies but in some senses the world won't wait and so I hope that early on I would love to see the new administration articulate some principles or guide posts that people can hold on to that can reduce the level of uncertainty and give people a sense that we have enduring national interests we have enduring national values we understand that there's a lot of challenges to the rules based international order that we architected here are some things that you can count on from the new administration I think having that reassurance with partners and allies but also being clear expectations so that we bolster deterrence in a period where some may be tempted to test the United States and new administration I think even before all of the strategies and policies are fairly articulated that would be very helpful to shore up that leadership role Steve American the world you've done a lot to formulate this conference and to bring us all together around that you were saying some fascinating things on the next stage around just where Americans are at and their conflicting views around what they think about foreign policy today on the one hand and on the other hand it's interesting that the dinners last night the conversations today one constant theme was America needs to lead in the world our friends and allies want it and it's in America's interest to do it but in this last election a lot of people said actually the American people are tired of bearing the burden of leadership in the world they want other people to do more they want to sort of set down that burden so one of the questions is we know what people in this room have said what do the American people think a do we want to lead and then b what does leadership mean in the world in which we are involved engaged and there was a poll that was recently done and I may get this wrong but it's a program for public consultation at the school of public policy in the University of Maryland and I've not gone into it in detail but the summary sheet that they put out has two very interesting results that I think inform this conversation one on the issue of do Americans want America continue to lead and what does that mean let me read you from this summary it says less than one in ten of Americans polled want the United States to withdraw from efforts to solve international problems or to play a leadership role less than one in ten and on the other hand less than one in ten want the U.S. to be the preeminent world leader so where's the rest eight in ten say that the U.S. should participate in cooperative efforts together and should play a shared leadership role now we can ask a question of what shared leadership means it's a tricky concept but I think what this basically says the United States as was said earlier to lead doesn't mean you have to lead alone the Americans I think from this want America to lead with others and they want others to do their fair share and I think one of the ways to think about this is I think what Americans may be saying is more for more we're prepared to lead we're prepared even maybe to do more but only if others are willing to do more for our common cause it's not an unreasonable position another thing that came up in the debate is well you know is America doing too much to pursue global interests and not enough to pursue America's more narrowly defined interests there was an interesting finding that emerged on that most Americans looked at that distinction and saw it as a false choice 7 in 10 agreed with the argument that the United States should look beyond its own self-interest and do what's best for the world as a whole because in the long run this will probably help make the kind of world that is best for the United States and you know I've always thought the American people have great common sense and I think actually it is reflected in these polls so I think what we see is an America willing to support American leadership but leadership along with others with others doing more and a different concept of leadership that is not preeminence but is working with others to facilitate a provoke common action to solve problems that all of us need to be solved so I think in terms of what does it mean to lead in this new environment we ought to take a cue for the American people I think they've kind of figured it out for us KT everybody wants to ask you what's President Trump's view of all these so you know we're not going to make this a press conference by you but you know we love to get your thoughts not just on America and the world but where the new administration comes in and we have a break with our previous foreign policy are you anticipating? Well first of all I want to thank you for that question and tell you that I'm not going to answer it because my boss is sitting right here in the front row General Flynn who gave a terrific speech earlier today is sitting right there so I'm going to just speak in general terms he's welcome to jump in too but no I think in all seriousness on a human level I'm addressing the elephant in the room and that's me and that's the Trump administration I don't think anybody probably most of the people in this room didn't support Donald Trump maybe not at first or maybe ever and I suspect most of the people in this room didn't think he'd win but he has and the fact that you're all here even though you didn't support this candidate even though this is as you've said people have questions and the professionalism and the seriousness with which you take the professions that you have all given your lives to and so I want to applaud you and I particularly want to thank the people that I'm on the podium with because if the election had turned out differently everybody would have had a different job and I think the fact that you're here today and not on some desert island somewhere speaks to your character so I really I want to get that out of the table elephant is identified in the room what I would like to do because I'm not going to tell you about the Trump administration policies because that's what an new administration does it takes time to rethink things and to come up with these policies but I will tell you the mindset and why I as an untraditional New Yorker thought Donald Trump was the guy I wanted to support early on and that's because I think we're at a unique moment in American history and to me he was the one candidate who would seize that moment and here's why it's a unique moment we have the opportunity it only happens once every 40 years every generation every two generations where the United States has an opportunity to reinvent itself and recreate itself Mike Flynn earlier talked about American exceptionalism as our values and we stand for liberty and freedom and we are the indispensable nation but I think there's another part to American exceptionalism and that's that we're also the nation of reinvention I mean every one of us in this room probably didn't start out in the life that you've lived you've created yourself out of the opportunities you've had in this country and I think that's what has made America truly exceptional you know most countries rise, shine and eventually decline America rises, shines maybe declines a little bit but rises again and that's a greater form and I think that's the moment we're at because there are the stars of a line to make this a unique historic moment and for the following reasons tax reform, Donald Trump's talked about a pro-growth economy tax reform is going to probably liberate particularly corporate tax reform two to three trillion dollars that will come back to the United States to be repatriated to invest in infrastructure and new inventions secondly we saw in the Reagan administration where I was a foot soldier that regulatory reform really did encourage the development of small business the third thing is we have cheap energy cheap and abundant and secure energy we have been in this quest as America since the 1970s where can we find abundant and cheap and secure energy sources and then finally we have a dozen disruptive technologies how many people in this room have an iPhone right everybody's got an iPhone except the people at Samsung and we don't let them in the room but if you've got an iPhone that didn't exist ten years ago and yet think of how it's changed your lives it's not just calling somebody it's how you access information it's how you shop all aspects of your lives have been changed by the iPhone well there are a dozen iPhone-like technologies that have been invented in America that are going to be manufactured in America and sold not only to America but to the world and it's stuff like wearable medical devices it's self-driving cars robotics, nanotechnology bioengineering DNA design medicine all of these things are just waiting to be mass produced in America so I look at this and I'm that glass half empty person I studied nuclear weapons at MIT you're not supposed to be thinking about the good news in that field but I look at this and I say we're in America where the glass is half full because with a few political decisions which is why I like Donald Trump because I think he's the guy to make those decisions we're going to have an economic renaissance secondly it's not just the economy stupid but it's also American national security and it's the rebuilding of America's defenses I don't think a lot of people think and we can say later who's you know who why who blame not blame and it's interesting the last 15 years has not been a happy story yet if we have the opportunity now to rebuild our defenses and as General Flynn said peace through strength when Ronald Reagan chose those words he did it very deliberately it wasn't peace through capitulation or peace through conquest and it wasn't strength economic strength military strength diplomatic strength moral strength it was all of those things together and I think we have another opportunity to do that again so when I look at the future and what is the mindset and where does America go from here I think we have a new president who is going to seize this unique historic moment I think he's going to rebuild America's defenses and not only does it make our lives better as Americans but it gives us leverage and opportunities and options that we have not had for over a generation and that's to not just rethink American foreign policy look nobody's talking about giving up the things that have been a part of the post war period but is to maybe recalibrate them as General Flynn said or is to see what other opportunities exist to strengthen them and so the three bedrock principles if you want you know what is the Trump foreign policy I think you could talk about the things that have been tried and true whether it was when Steve Hadley and I were junior NSC staffers together or when you've been in government or when you've been in government and it's things like you know it's America's values that's going to continue to be the bedrock of American foreign policy American global leadership it's going to continue it may have a different form and we may have more options and more opportunities to do it and finally is the alliance structures that have kept the peace for the long did you realize that since World War two this is the greatest and longest period of world power peace since the fall of the Roman Empire 75 years where we have not had global wars and a lot of those be because of our alliances so I would say all of you relax it's going to be great we're going to make America great again and welcome along for the ride thank you all right Jake we've given you a tough job you have to follow that but you know do you really feel like it's as bipartisan as all of that well I think that obviously the tone of the campaign and the way in which many of these issues were engaged over the course of the past many months has left questions about whether or not there is in fact a bipartisan consensus and you know what KT just laid out obviously there's much in that that I could fully agree with but I think we now have to see what actually happens at the end of the day what I think we collectively have to decide as a country is to do our best to operate according to the maximum that politics stops at the water's edge and that we try to support an administration in pursuing America's national security I think we've lost our way on that some over the past eight years that foreign policy was politicized and I think that there is blame on both sides but honestly candidly I think there's more blame in the politicization of things like Benghazi than in other places and I think that that is I hope as we go forward we can all model our best possible behavior in an effort to drive the maximum that a president's success is a country's success and that we should look at things in a sober and serious way that being said I would just like to add two things to what's been put forward on the panel with respect to American leadership in the world one of them is that the basic bedrock of American leadership has been a set of principles that have been alluded to of democracy of liberty and equality and pluralism of supporting friends and institutions around the world that support and channel those values whether we're talking about in Europe or the Asia Pacific our partner Israel in the Middle East, other countries and one of the things that I'm concerned about is that basic bedrock is under threat and challenge today in a way it has not been in a very long time I think there's an active project underway that the Russian president and those around him are engaged in in Europe in the United States and elsewhere to try to chip away at the liberal and I mean that not in the political sense but in the philosophical sense liberal institutional order that the United States is built and championed around the world and I think part of American leadership going forward is going to have to be to rise to that challenge to meet it and to prevail so that the basic elements of the order that matter so much to us in our country continue as we move forward and the second thing that I would say is the centrality of diplomacy and America's capacity it's reach and resolve to build the kinds of networks and coalitions that Steve was talking about so that we're not doing things alone to achieve great things and I actually think you can look across each of the past administrations and see tremendous examples of this and we need to defend that and we need America's word to mean something as we build and succeed in executing those coalitions so for example achieving a deal with Iran that put a lid on their nuclear weapons program without firing a single shot we pulled the world together to do that getting a climate agreement that 195 nations around the world signed on to to curb carbon emissions and try and deal with this existential challenge not just to us but to everyone else we pulled the world together to do that that is not just in principle what American leadership looks like that is in practice and I do hope that as the new administration considers its options and looks at the choices that it faces that it sees the tool of diplomacy, of coalition building of pulling the world together to take on the great challenges that no one country can solve on their own but no country can solve without the United States of America and that they not only look for new opportunities but they look to see the good and the opportunities that have already been seized in the progress that's already been made. Alright Steve I want to have a quick question to you and then I want to go back to the whole group with everything this issue of whether we are facing a crisis moment in the liberal small L international order Do you subscribe to that as well? I do I think the international order that emerged after World War II is under assault we thought after the cold war that democracy freedom was the only it had sort of swept the field and was accepted as a consensus and if you talk to the Chinese and the Russians in the first decade of the 20th century they would say to you look we understand we're moving towards the west we embrace western values it's going to take time we're going to have to do it in our own way well fast forward a decade later that is not what you hear from Russia and China what you hear is we have Russian values we have Chinese values they are not western values we are going our own way and I think Jake is absolutely right we have gone back heavily to an ideological struggle between authoritarianism which is being propounded by China Russia and is catching on in places like Turkey and the like and democracy and we have to decide that we're prepared to gauge in this struggle and I will tell you you know I sort of have a mock conversation and it's Putin talking to Xi Jinping and it goes like this Putin to Xi you need to understand the Americans are the problem the Americans are the enemy they don't accept the legitimacy of your regime or my regime and they are trying to undermine it that's what Hong Kong was about that's what Ukraine is about and we need to stand up to those Americans and we need to clamp down on their agents of influence within our societies whether it's the press whether it's NGOs political parties now I say that sort of kittingly but not so kittingly I think there is that kind of conversation going on between the Chinese and the Russians this does not mean that we're in a period of confrontation or conflict it does mean though that there is an ideological challenge to our values the values that were the basis of that order that emerged after World War II and the challenge really for the new administration is what kind of modified revitalized order can we construct that reflects our values and will provide a framework for dealing with the enormous set of challenges that the new administration faces so KT can I ask you then do you share Steve's assessment of where the Russians and the Chinese are at and you know I think a lot of people here understand you're not going to sit down and make policy for the new administration before you've even inaugurated but at the same time we have heard an enormous amount from President Elect Trump about Russia and his desire to change our orientation do you imagine a different conversation between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin you know I think one of the biggest problems that we as Americans and it's not a partisan thing the mistake that we make is that we constantly tell other countries how they should think you know it's in your best interest to do this or what you should do is that and you know American foreign policy has had the luxury of being the most you know powerful economic political diplomatic country certainly in the last several centuries and probably of all time and the fact that we then assume everybody thinks the way we do is to make a fundamental mistake and it's not so much what we think that they're thinking how do they see the world and maybe they do see the world the way you're talking but maybe we've spent way too long trying to tell them what they should think and what I'm hoping in this period again which I think is a very transformational period not just for the United States but for the world is that we can start seeing things through their eyes I mean our old boss Henry Kissinger talks about and he was an expert at this he was a genius at seeing what did they think what needs, how could we give them their needs but at the same time advance American foreign policy and American national security interests when I look at the world today and not how I think they should think but the reality of where things are going you know China has been an ascendant rising power economically and in other ways but that ascendancy particularly built on economic growth is starting to slow down Russia has had Vladimir Putin go look at his graduate dissertation that he wrote in the late 1980s as the Soviet empire was collapsing and he wrote a graduate thesis saying I'm going to rebuild Russia can rebuild itself by using its natural resources bring them under state control and then when the prices of energy rise Russia will be in a dominant position and he's followed it to the letter except what he didn't anticipate was fracking and he didn't anticipate the energy revolution so that the price of oil has gone down what does that mean for Russia's long-term future at the same time I look at the Middle East where we have been tethered to the Middle East for since the 1970s in the quest for cheap and abundant secured energy and yet the Middle East I don't think anyone in this room thinks peace is going to break out in the Middle East anytime soon so all of these things are the chess board is moving the tectonic plates are shifting and what is America's opportunity whether it's with Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or whoever it is in the world I think it gives us an opportunity I can't tell you what those moves are I can just tell you that the nimbleness which America can conduct its foreign policy particularly after a period of economic growth will give us options and leverage to take advantage of all of those opportunities as they present themselves Thank you so much do you just quickly to clarify on this your self and the team that you're bringing in to the NSC then as being more oriented towards a sort of Kissingerian real politic you talked about working in the Reagan revolution and Reagan was always very insistent when it came to the Soviets on incorporating human rights into his dialogue with Gorbachev do you see that as being in conflict for the Trump administration those eagernesses that most graduate students take to try to put everybody in this kind of a category I just don't think that it's a different world things change what Henry Kissinger was able to do is a different world than what Ronald Reagan was able to do I mean I look at the post war period and say during the post war period we emerged from the post war period with two adversaries who were existential threats to the United States in the sense of nuclear weapons and that was the Soviet Union and China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance well he was able to put a wedge between the Sino-Soviet Alliance what did Ronald Reagan do he was able to take the Soviet Union which was the remaining large existential threat to the United States and turn that around how did he do it not by fight you know this was a war that was one without firing a shot the one thing I can tell you about Donald Trump is if you listen to what he says when he talks about things like deterrence he doesn't use the word deterrence he didn't go to grad school he's a businessman but when he talks about let's build America's defenses so we don't have to use them that is the essence of deterrence that is peace through strength that is not build up your military so you go use it it spills your military up so that nobody picks a fight with you and that was Ronald Reagan's philosophy on the other hand there are parts of Nixon and Kissinger that I think Donald Trump has also advocated so I'm not going to be a Democrat because I think it doesn't suit and it doesn't apply and a rapidly changing world so let's talk about the world we brought up the Middle East we've talked about Russia I'd like to ask everybody on the panel at this point first of all if you're in KT's position a couple weeks from now what do you think is the first 3 a.m. phone call that this new administration is going to get and I'd say just a new national security team we'll face Michelle? So I think about 1201 on inauguration day you may get a call that North Korea has launched an ICBM I think the most eager to provoke and the country that is wants to thrust itself into the spotlight and on to the American agenda and on to the world agenda is North Korea so if I had to for taking bets or doing a pool I would say North Korea is probably the first one to create some kind of crisis or event that you all will have to respond to but as your question suggests the urgent is not always the most important and in my view I do think that the most important thing for us long term will be to rebuild crafting a policy in Asia I personally think that the rebalance to put more emphasis on our relationships our trade our engagement our posture in Asia makes sense given that no other region of the world will have more of an impact on our prosperity and our security long term but I think if you take the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a free trade multilateral free trade framework out of that equation indefinitely as opposed to saying you know we're going to tweak it or improve it in some way you remove the economic pillar and you leave open the opportunity for China to be the one to write the economic rules of the road for a generation or two to come and so I would hope that again we would spend some time within the Administration and with Congress thinking through how do we ensure that the US has a leading hand in adapting the rules based order in Asia because that will be the most consequential region and it will also set a lot of precedence for our I think our leadership elsewhere Steve a lot of things one of the things you always worry about is a terror attack on Americans overseas and Americans here at home and that has a game changing character second I think I'm I worry about the evolution of where we're going in Syria I think that may be an early challenge if this effort the Russians and the Turks and the Iranians are falls apart it seems like it is and Assad and Russia clearly are trying to take more of the country I think that is both a challenge and an opportunity for the new Administration you know our first crisis was completely unanticipated a Chinese pilot hot dog are sort of collided with one of our aircraft we started off our relationship with Chinese with a problem of how to get our people back and how to get our airplane back those kinds of things happened and there's a lot of jockeying going on in the East China Sea and the South China Sea and you can't rule out those and finally there's a lot of political uncertainty we're going to go into three very interesting elections over the next six to nine months in Europe in terms of the Netherlands and in terms of France and Germany and that could potentially really reshuffle the deck a little bit in terms of relationship with Europe so you know the trick I think that the new team is going to have and it's really difficult is to be in a position so that they can manage these crisis some known and some unknown manage these crisis in a way on behalf of the country but at the same time build enough space so that they can do what Lieutenant General Flynn was talking about look at the context develop a strategy for the United States over the long term look at those series of institutions that we've depended on since the end of World War II and do the rethink of those institutions to make them more effective that's going to be the challenge managing the crisis not being consumed by them and still keeping your eye on the ball for those longer term more important things where there really is a historic opportunity for the new administration I think that is going to be a huge challenge did you have a top strategic threat facing the U.S. in addition to the ones I gave you there's so many I do you have a hierarchy in those or no you know I mean I don't know hierarchy you know the problem is you know it's the problem when people say what are your priorities so you say well my priorities are one through five and that holds up until number six suddenly appears on the front page of the Washington Post and then suddenly surprise, surprise it's now your priority and that's also one of the problems that the new team will have KT I think you're going to pass on this question this one right over to Jake they've named a lot of them I could throw out more and depress us further about the potential threats this is making me want to go to that desert island anyway so look at a strategic level I think the biggest threat facing the United States is the possibility that terrorists get their hands on weapons of mass destruction and cause a catastrophic event in the United States and so I think our policy towards terrorism writ large but also towards nuclear proliferation is incredibly important and I hope that that prudence prevails in respect to the notion of other countries getting their hands on nuclear materials and frankly the prudence prevails in respect to the question of whether we should engage in a new arms race I do think that those are important large strategic questions in their own right but they also relate directly to what could ultimately come home to roost here in the United States with respect to a threat I think the only other challenge that comes close to that level of potential absolute catastrophe and over the long term even exceeds it is the threat of climate change and I know that everyone derides answers to strategic questions by someone talking about climate change is somehow you're soft and fuzzy headed and so forth and you know I you could put it in a different bucket from terrorists getting their hands on WMD but this is a huge piece of business and it is for the world I think Paris was a good step forward but there is a lot of work that needs to be done on this front the only other thing that I would say is when you look across the Middle East and North Africa right now there are so many unsettled situations and so many possibilities without naming names of countries where things could break the wrong way and the net result of that in terms of its impact on Europe and ultimately on the United States is quite dramatic so the new team is going to have an immediate need to look not just at Syria not just at the challenge that Iran poses to the region but in a number of countries that are dealing with significant internal challenges which could turn into external challenges for the United States and our close allies and partners going forward and I think we all have to keep a close eye on that. Well you're always safe in American foreign policy predicting trouble in the Middle East right and entanglement and you know literally having just gotten off the plane from Jerusalem yesterday I do want to go back to KT because you really you do have this called the Trump effect phenomenon before any policy has been made while you're still asking for time understandably to formulate what those decisions are going to be. There is an absolute core expectation that President Trump as soon as he gets into office is going to move the embassy to Jerusalem. There is an absolute core you know bracing for whether it's the outbreak of a new intifada whether it's you know sort of upheaval in Israeli politics there's already a foreign policy effect of the new administration regardless of whether anyone's had a chance to sit down at their desk or not is there already a plan from the Trump administration to move the embassy to Jerusalem and do you feel how do you address the fact that there's already a Trump effect in global international relations? Because I really don't want to get into the administration of foreign policy but let me talk about the Trump effect to me the greatest threat to American national security in the last let's say 20 30 years has not come from abroad but come from within and that is that the assumption of American democracy is predicated on participation. We're in it together. Somebody wins somebody loses we go home we decide we're going to support the other candidate we come back again to support somebody different next time and the real problem with the American community is that for the last you know for decades 40% of the American public just checked out they may have had opinions about politics but they never went to the polls they didn't vote you would ask people and they would say well I'm not political I'm not going to go vote I don't vote it's not for me and that I think was the greatest threat to the country because again democracy is predicated on participation and in 1776 the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that was written assumed that we would take not just the opportunities of democracy and the privileges but the responsibility for self-governance and when I look at the American political landscape the thing that I think of is the Trump effect is a lot of that 40% they're back in the game now you may not like some of the things that they believe in or you might love some of the things that they believe in but the fact that they're in the game is something that strengthens democracy because you never want to get to the point where the people don't participate they don't feel it's them they feel disconnected from the country because we have been given the gift of the responsibility for democracy falls on our shoulders and some of the population of this country have decided that it wasn't for them they're back in the game and I think that if you got that going for you if the United States has the American public it feels like they're back and they're participating they've got a piece of the action they've got skin in the game then I don't think there's any problem that's too big for us to solve because look at American history I mean this is tough right I get it the Civil War was tougher Valley Forge was a lot tougher the depression was worse and when the American people are together we are not only the indispensable nation we're unstoppable because we do we're innovative we're creative we're entrepreneurial we're all of those things and yet we're never any of those things if 40% of the population checks out they're back in the game and as far as I'm concerned that's the Trump effect and that's the single most important thing that I take away from this election so there's been a lot of scathing indictments of the foreign policy blob these days I know many of the people in this room don't want to necessarily think of themselves as members of the blob but you know Katie alludes to some of that critique Steve and Michelle I'm wondering if you can sort of address whether you think some of the foreign policy failures of recent decades are because there wasn't skin in the game of too much of the population how much are the people in this room and in both parties to blame for where America's at in the world well you know I I guess I'm part of the foreign policy establishment and I have the distinction of having been rejected and denounced both by the Obama administration and the incoming Trump administration you know the way I think about it is a little different than Katie but somewhat similar and I'm you know as Carl Rove used to tell me when I would sort of talk about political advice he would say Hadley you don't do political advice stick with foreign policy that's what the president pays you for but I think this election you know we've never had an election quite like this we've had political insurgencies we've had populist movements we've never had one in our history that actually won the presidency and this is different and they won it because I think there got to be a divergence between what the elite was saying and what the American people believe and that's happened before and when that happens the American people rise up in their anger and some said the mantra of this election ought to be have you heard us yet and there is an element of that so look this is an we are think as Fred Kemp said early on we're kind of an inflection point in our history I think that is a real opportunity for the new administration I think the American people want us to do a rethink and ask some fundamental questions that have been asked for a while I think that's all to the good and I think what you've seen today is you know the new administration understands that that is their role and they have brought in at the cabinet level people who are from outside the system of the last couple decades and are going to do that relook but they are also working out and reaching out and we heard this from Lieutenant General Flynn today for the expertise of people in this room to help them do that relook and I would hope that the community that's reflected here will understand that that is really what the administration has been elected to do and is willing to help and support it and that means you know look when they make mistakes there are a lot of people in this room who are prepared to tell them how they've made the mistake but also when they get things right we also have an obligation to stand forward and say yep they got this right and we ought to support them so I think that's the way things are headed and I hope that this event over last night and today is a first step in that direction I agree that this was a change election you go back to 2008 that was also a change election one of the things that I remember and really appreciated now in retrospect that President Obama said to us all when we first walked into the transition office was well the first thing he said was no ego no drama this is not about you so get over it the second thing he said was don't assume everybody that came before us is a bunch of idiots you know the temptation in a change election is to throw the baby out with a bath water we're going to start with a clean sheet and de novo sort of start from scratch and you do want to honor that impulse for change but I think what he was telling us is there's some goodness and some learnings and some best practices in what may have come before you and so look carefully at the presidential directives that Steve Hadley left behind and other administrations left behind but you know sort of try to call the best out of what you're inheriting and also honor the message for change and that was sort of hard for some of us to hear at the time because we were riding the wave of you know this is a change a new era and a new chapter for a historic chapter for America but in retrospect I really appreciate the value of that and I would hope that this administration would also take that to heart I know I want to get questions to the audience you've been very patiently I'm sure collecting their thoughts while you're getting your questions ready I want to throw one more to the panel President Obama will give his big last speech tonight looking at his record Susan Rice of course shared some of her thoughts with us earlier today about that like I say I'd like to ask everybody what is both the most underrated accomplishment of President Obama when it comes to foreign policy and also what is the most overrated accomplishment that he's had or been given credit for that might not look so strong when history goes back on it Jake I'm sure you've done a lot of thinking about that what's your... Well underrated I don't know who the bozos were who negotiated the Iran deal but well let me start with what I think it's always hard to answer these questions well you know we give them credit for that look I think in terms of what President Obama did to put the United States in the strong position it finds itself in today was basically take a set of steps building on the crisis management of the Bush administration at the end of the Bush administration to turn around an economy that was in crisis not just in the United States but around the world with different decisions by different people in the same place could have led us into a great depression and so the fact that the President had the wherewithal in the face of some pretty turbulent political waters to advance a set of economic policies that included rescuing the auto industry and put us on the path that we're on today is quite extraordinary in 2012 Mitt Romney ran against for the presidency he said I'm going to work hard to get us to 6% unemployment we're at 4.7% unemployment in 2016 coming down from shedding 800,000 jobs a month at the beginning so to KT's point about having to not just look at foreign policy as something that happens out there but what are the kind of basic foundational attributes of American power at home the core economic power of the United States especially when you look at it in comparison with the rest of the world right now developed and developing is quite remarkable and he deserves a great deal of credit for that now I think part of this election was about the distribution of the gains that came as a result of that recovery and about a lot of changes in our economy that have frankly he didn't have the capacity to attend to as much as he might have both because of challenges on the hill but also because he was busy actually doing crisis management and the long term trends that now need to be dealt with that I think is the next big project whether you're talking about automation or the decline in manufacturing jobs and the like so I'll leave it at that I don't think there's anything he did that was underrated so KT in the spirit of this new bipartisanship breaking out do you want to take a gander at this question the same question President Obama's accomplishments what has he done that was perhaps underrated or something that like the Bush Administration offered some lessons for the Obama Administration one of the things that struck me because I had not supported President Obama when he first ran or when he second time he ran but one of my colleagues at Fox News which is where I used to work until about a month ago one of my colleagues was William's African American man who's a very respected journalist and somebody that I think very highly of as a human being and he said the night that Barack Obama was elected he said you don't understand what this means you don't understand what this means to me and I thought and he said I'm an African American and there have been times a lot of times when I haven't felt that I've been treated equally or considered equally and he said so when Barack Obama won the presidency that it was a change that he felt in a fundamental way and I kept thinking back to when Geraldine Ferrero was the first woman to be on a national ticket and when she was Vice President of the Democrat Party to Mondale I didn't support her either but I sure felt great about the fact that a woman was breaking through that glass ceiling so whatever else you say about you did like his foreign policy, you didn't you did like Obamacare, you didn't I think that just the fact that a man like that that people a generation before would never have thought an African American man could win I don't think that's the only thing that I want to remember Barack Obama for but I think it has shown it showed to me the same kind of pride in my nation that I felt when Geraldine Ferrero had the got the nomination and then it was the same pride I felt when Sandra Day O'Connor was nominated to be the first woman on the Supreme Court a woman I did get to know and consider a friend but it was that same notion that stuff that you didn't think was going to happen a generation before has happened and when I look around today at the kind of people who are assuming national leadership roles it again it's above the partisanship and all the rest it makes me really proud that I'm a member of this country where people can rise on their own qualities and there is just no limit to what they can do if they're willing to work hard get a little bit lucky and follow their dreams so I'd like to leave it there Steve I'll speak a little personally and it's along the same line as KT I appreciate what Michelle said about President Obama saying just because the Bush Administration didn't didn't mean it was wrong and you had to build on what was done it didn't feel that way particularly for those of us from the Bush Administration that didn't leave town but stayed in Washington and sometimes the administration seemed to me to go out of its way to say well the Bush people screwed this up and we're going to get it right and the only thing for a while I thought the Obama Administration gave us credit for was the transition which of course was our leading office and the impression was the only thing we did right was how we left off and I will tell you there are going to be moments when you're going to feel the same way that that is the attitude of the new you just will because you're going to be hyper sensitive to it because of all the time and effort you put in it you can't out but it's only to be human and if I would have a request for the new administration I would say remember as Michelle said you're not writing on a blank sheet of paper and there's a lot there that you can work with and secondly when you talk about it talk about the future where you're going and don't you know don't use what the past administration did as an excuse I would say don't even talk about that you've got so much you want to do and can do looking forward I would say look forward and build on what you've got in terms of President Obama you know the American people aren't going to remember this policy that deal they're even going to forget the Iran nuclear deal I think what they're going to remember is a man of great dignity it's what KT was saying a man of great dignity that brought that dignity to the office that broke through another barrier in America's story as it becomes what it should be and what it holds itself to become I think they're going to remember how he handled himself in office how he handled himself with his wife with his family and the way he balanced these awesome responsibilities with his responsibilities in his family this is a very commendable thing and I think in the end of the day that's one of the things that they're going to remember President Obama for and they should because he enriched the country simply by how he conducted the office Michelle I was going to suggest two things that I think are underappreciated and they go to the challenge that Jake noted which is the threat of nuclear terrorism after 9-11 this was sort of front and center as the thing we feared most and rightly so in the last eight years very quietly this administration had a series of nuclear security summits but really worked with the global community to lease up a whole lot of weapons usable material that was dotted around atoms for peace reactors and the Soviet equivalent but the material that terrorists if had they been smart could have actually acquired and manufactured some kind of improvised nuclear device that danger it's not gone but it is dramatically reduced because it's a lot of quiet U.S.-led coalition efforts to police up that material and ship it back either to Russia or the United States and I would pair with that I don't think anybody has written the story yet of the time and attention that the president put on preventing another 9-11 I mean the each and every threat stream that had any credibility and any chance of producing a catastrophic attack was run to ground and disrupted or foiled or dealt with and the sort of persistent attention and focus at the presidential level to make sure that kind of attack didn't happen again I think was something that hasn't been talked a lot about publicly but was a very real animating principle for the administration all right everyone's been super patient so I'm going to ask you to keep it brief given that we're almost out of time give us your name and make it really a question if you can right here sir thank you Mohammed Ghanim with the Syrian American Council so we surmise today about potential threats and things that could go wrong my question is about an issue that's already gone incredibly wrong Syria what advice would Ms. McFarland give president Trump on how to contain this or address or approach Syria thank you I think he's just asking what your council to the president is going to be on Syria Oh boy that's a really tough one well first of all I think I wouldn't want to say in a public forum what kind of advice I would give to president elect Trump but Syria and what it represents in a greater sense of failed states is going to be one of the greatest challenges throughout history you worry about countries that get too rich and too powerful and then come to take a piece out of you in this case failed states present one of the greatest challenges and as you've said failed states which potentially or if you said Jake people who get their hands on weapons of mass destruction fissile materials and so the advice I would give is not specifically about that but about the understanding that failed states weak states which historically have never been a threat to great nations we are in a new era where failed states the weakest states among the world community or even sub national groups now can present the greatest threat to world peace and to their neighborhood thank you thank you very much and thank you all for your very insightful comments today I'm to Micah Tillerman with New America and my question is for KT I have to give the president elect a lot of credit in that he is not someone who shies away from a fight and over the course of the campaign he made that abundantly clear the one country that he's been very consistent in refusing to criticize is Russia not withstanding a pretty significant majority of evidence indicating that Russia has tried to pick a fight with us on a number of different fronts as we've been sitting here and I don't want to politicize this but the story just broke that the FBI has gained access to compromising material that the Russians apparently have about the president elect two questions flow from this can you tell me one thing that the administration is concerned about as it relates to Russia it's not a concrete thing that you are worried about when it comes to Russia and second what assurances can you provide to Americans when it comes to our broader strategic relationship with this very important country I don't know about the story that you're talking about that's broken and so I don't think it's appropriate for me to have any comment about something about which I know nothing now I know in Washington people prefer to talk about something about which they know nothing but I'm going to refrain from and going to not take that temptation I think what Donald Trump has said on a number of occasions is what you've said Jake although not in relation to sub-national groups as much as he has about the Soviet Union now Russia and it's nuclear weapons I mean I've heard him say on a number of occasions nuclear weapons change everything so that I would assume is going to carry him on and when you talk about existential threats to the United States the existential threat to not only the United States but to the world is nuclear weapons in the hands of people who want to use them throughout the nuclear age deterrence has kept the peace we are now in a new era where deterrence may not keep the peace and I think that again I'm going to refrain from jumping right in and giving an opinion about which I don't know the subject but thanks just a quick follow-up Jake you probably would be surprised as anybody to hear your views on Donald Trump's on Russia compared to be the same I get the point on nuclear weapons but I do want to give you the chance to respond on this issue of Russia and whether it's really the exception to some of the more bipartisan comments that have been made today it does seem that since the election this has been the subject of perhaps the greatest questions around the Trump foreign policy and how it would differ from that of Hillary Clinton's had she won is that your view that we're headed towards a major rift in Russia policy and also just to clarify for everybody is it your view that the Russian intervention in the election proved decisive in any way did it actually affect the outcome now that US intelligence agencies have assessed that in fact it occurred with the goal of electing Donald Trump let me say something you never want to trust a reporter and I say that as somebody from the media we talked earlier about Susan about not wanting to talk get into Donald Trump's foreign policy what I will say however is you know I'm not going to say what Donald Trump thinks about the the election and what involvement the Russians had I think I would just say which is that there is no evidence that whatever the Russians did had any effect on the outcome of the election and for any political leader who is looking at what you've said is a change election and what you've said is a very the American people saying hey you heard us yet that for anybody who wants to sort of blame the loss of Hillary Clinton or the Democrats or the governorships or the senators or the House of Representatives of the Democrat Party you're making a mistake if you think that it's because of some other thing this is the American people talking and I just think it's a mistake that the Democrats are making if they continue to try to look for a scapegoat sometimes it's better to just look and see what their positions are that may have led to the dissatisfaction of the country because it's not just one election it's the last several elections it's been Governorships that have been lost it's been state legislatures that have been lost it's been Senators that have been lost and it's been Congress Congressional seats that have been lost and so I really am not going to jump into the middle of that so Jake I'd love to get your response and whether you agree with that well I I I thought we were approaching this panel I'm not going to be selective of trying to tackle the issues in a bipartisan way I'm not going to Well I think those comments leave a lot to the previous comments leave a lot to weigh in on but look let me say just a couple of things on the question of whether this actually had an impact on the outcome of the election the only thing I would point out is that the margin of difference in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan combined was 80,000 votes so many different things could have had an impact in chasing 80,000 votes could one of those things have been a broad based effort detailed in kind of horrifying specifics by this even the unclassified version of this report by the Russians to have an impact on the election be one of those things I think it would be unreasonable to suggest no there's no way we're going to be the one who you know ultimately is the arbiter of that I don't think Jim Clapper has tried to arbitrate that either on the on the broader question of where we go forward on Russia policy and to the question that was just posed it has been troubling to me that on the issue of the article 5 guarantee to our NATO allies the President-elect on the campaign trail raised questions about whether he would honor it it has been troubling to me that the President-elect has raised the possibility of lifting the sanctions on Russia vis-a-vis Crimea and there are other examples of this as well but of course we have to see what actually happens if those things happen if the article 5 guarantee atrophies and America's word can't be counted on in Europe or if we give up on the pressure we are placing on Russia for its flagrant violation of international law then I think we all have great cause for concern but this all the rubber meets the road when you actually see the policies being pursued by the new administration I don't have a good answer to be honest with you for why he has adopted some of the positions he's adopted they don't make sense in his broader approach from my perspective and they don't make sense from the perspective of America's national security interest for me to answer why it is he's chosen to adopt these positions I see one thing I think so probably get me in trouble with some of my closest friends but I think at some point when passions have cooled a bit and we get some distance on this election we need to look back at it and a lot of us need to do some soul searching about the roles we played I think the media has a lot to think about and I think us in the national security cone need to as well it's a terribly important thing in this country that our intelligence officials, our military officials our national security officials and our foreign services officers all are in a position as has been the tradition to be basically non-political in the sense that they are ready, willing and able to serve whomever the American people elect as president whether Republican, Democrat or other I think that is terribly important so that a president comes in and can have confidence that those institutions really have the best interests of the country at heart and are willing to serve the new president as he or she pursues those interests and I think we've gone through a situation where so many people signed so many letters telling the American people their views about who should be elected president and I understand that and I respect it these were very difficult decisions for people to make those people signed who did not and I think they were all well motivated but I think the risk is that it had the effect of encouraging a politicization of those institutions and undermine the confidence that the American people and the incoming president could have that they were going to be non-political professional groups serving the president and I'm going to take some back for this but I'm uncomfortable about how it came out and I think when again temper school and we get some distance I think we need to do some lessons learned on this election if we really believe that bipartisanship and working together on common problems common Americans is at the core of how we have a successful foreign policy Unfortunately I'm getting the hook which is terrible because I know there's a million more questions in the audience and that we could go on for a long time this has been a great conversation I do want to give everybody a chance to sort of sum up it's been a long and terrific and thought provoking both conference all day today as well as this discussion today so I do want to give everyone here a chance to sort of go back and look at both did we miss anything really important that's going to be the subject of those briefings for KT and General Flynn and the team when they get into office and any final thoughts you want to leave us with Michelle I won't try to summarize that discussion but I would say I think and I'll commend Steve Hadley here and it's really just unsolicited advice for KT and General Flynn I think one of the great national security advisors and deputy national security advisors that we all look to in history are the people who understood that their job was to ensure the president had the benefit of all views and the best information to make those tough decisions and I think you were in the tradition of the Scowcroft the honest broker making sure that even when you didn't like a point of view that dissent was reached and I think there are some very strong people that have been appointed and I think making and there's a broad range of views institutionally as you noted and I think going forward as you put a process together I think there's such strength in ensuring that those points of view are brought to the table and heard inside government and out and you have a lot of people in this community and in think tanks we have ours behind our names or these behind our names that want to see this country be successful and that want to help and want to offer perspective and input so I would just encourage you to avail yourselves of that and make sure that those views the full range of views are available to to our leadership I think one of the themes that came out of the dinners last night and again today is this notion about rebuilding or I shouldn't say rebuilding I would say building on what we have and strengthening the domestic platform that is the platform on which we engage the world strengthening our economy getting our politics to work restoring our military terribly important we do know that that's what the American people want us to do at home and it also gives us a platform overseas other thematic I think was important that it's not just the military instrument and I hope we won't strengthen our military at the expense of the non-military instruments of power which was a thematic today this is our diplomats this is our development officials terribly important this is and the various NGO partners that help us we heard today some other things that need to be strengthened if we are going to be able to deal with the problems we face this problem of resiliency of our institutions and infrastructure all the way down to the local level the strengthening of international institutions that can properly lead be good partners for us and we also talked about this issue of fragile states which you mentioned that now used to be strong states that threaten us now it's fragile states that threaten us and this thematic of a Marshall plan that is basically to try to invest in these fragile states and help them put themselves in a position so that they offer a hope to their people to achieve their aspirations in life so they are not susceptible to a call to achieve their aspirations in death this is a huge agenda but if we really are going to have the full toolset the new president should have we need to be thinking about all those elements KT thanks so much for joining us again and do you want to there's so much to pull together but where do you want to leave us with in 1970 I went to the White House for the first time I was a college freshman I have a poor family from the mid west my parents hadn't gone to college my grandparents hadn't so I had to pay my way through college I had a hard time job working in the White House situation room I was the night shift secretary on Henry Kissinger's staff and when I had that job if you had told me that I was going to live to see a Michelle Florinoy in the positions you've had or a Madeleine Albright or a Hillary Clinton or a Condi Rice I probably would have just said really my era women and that was terrific you could probably be an executive assistant and maybe you could be a super secretary but I never would have thought that 45 years later by the way I am probably the oldest person in this room but 45 years later that it would not only be absolutely nobody bats an eyelash at the thought that a woman can do any of those things so I look at this and I look at the pictures of some great women some of them are older than I am but some of them are not and the idea that America is passing the baton is not that we're arising out of nothing and the history began when we walked into the White House it's the fact that we're standing on the shoulders of the people who came before the women who came before certainly but everybody who came before take traditional American values take traditional American global leadership roles take the traditional alliances that have served us so well for 75 years I do see that this is a building upon something and it is a passing of the baton and that is one of the great reasons to celebrate this institution the bipartisan fractious nature of our politics but I think it's a great testimony to the experiment that it's America and that continues to be the shining city on the hill Jake, we'll give you the last word well I think, honestly I think KT deserves the last word because she's heading into assuming position of awesome responsibility and we wish you the best of luck and I think what you just said in laying that down I can't improve upon and so I will leave it with those comments well I just want to thank this panel because I think if graciousness I will indeed what a terrific and insightful group and I'm very appreciative as well to the U.S. Institute of Peace for hosting all of us today as well as to all of you for sharing your time with us thanks again to everyone for this and I know we'll have some final words and thank you to our panelists Steve thank you KT, thank you Jake thank you Michelle Steve you doing a bit of a summation do you have further thoughts on how to wrap up what has been an extraordinarily full complex day I have of course a 20 minute address but I think actually people want to leave so let me say thank you to our sponsors, partners, speakers and guests I think thank you to our five sponsoring organizations I think this is an example of the kind of collaboration we need the new administration has lots of challenges I would like to think that the process we started today will continue that in the weeks, months and years ahead USIP and its partners will continue putting together conversations and dialogues like this to try to come up with ideas and provide to support to this new administration as it tries to make positive progress for the country and I have to say I'm a glass half full person I am optimistic about the future I think no matter how difficult the challenges we face how long the road I've got confident in the American people in our democracy and that our national leaders will step up and rise to the occasion and I would just ask that all of us do what we can to help thank you very much for being here and back to Nancy Thank you Steve and thank you for all that you do for USIP and for bringing the kind of wisdom and bipartisan spirit not just to this institution but to this town we all benefit greatly just to echo your thanks to AEI to the Atlantic Council to the Carnegie endowment for international peace to the Center for American Progress and to Heritage Foundation to our media partners SiriusXM and Politico and to our sponsors LMI Chevron, Boeing Robin and Eileen Shields West and Nancy and Harold Zirkin we really appreciate that and I also you know this this has been an extraordinary group effort but I really want to call out the USIP team they've been working on this for many, many months and start with the fearless leader of this effort Sally Booker I don't know where Sally is but please raise your hand yeah really took a lot of ideas and made it into reality assisted by Diane Zelny I'm going to go through a couple of names so Lisa Frazier the management services team that did all the security and the setup and made all of this happen Ellie Quinlan, Liz Callahan Dimitra, Paige, Bane, Nick and Louise all of our Rapa tours and everybody who's put heart and soul into this for many months especially thanks to all of you who have been a part of this day and for especially those who have stuck it out to the end of a long packed day this has been hopefully a conversation that has enabled us to bridge the contentious election that we all just live through bring together ideas insights and more important than anything the commitment and the conviction that we do need to pull together as a nation given the complexity of the challenges that we've heard about that await all of us thank you and I invite you to join us in our peace concourse we have people standing by to show you how to get there for those who are thirsty or need an immediate snack and want to celebrate and also we've invited the young teams from all of our partners to join us so in part I really urge you to join us as we have a passing of baton to the next generation of foreign policy national security and development experts thank you all