 Welcome all of you, say thank you for coming, special thank you to Carly Fiorina, I've had the great privilege of working with her on a number of different occasions in recent years and you're in for a real treat. I just want to tell you this is going to be a special evening. First of all, before we begin, let me just say when we have public events, we always begin with a safety announcement. I am your responsible safety officer tonight, okay? So that means if we have an emergency, you're going to follow me. We've got right back here, these are the exits and the stairway is in that corner and we're going to go down, we're going to go outside, we'll go across to the Beacon Hotel and I'll buy drinks, okay? But we're going to be okay, but if something happens, please follow me. We'll be okay. Let me just say a very sincere thanks to Nina and to Carly of course and I also want to say thanks to Candy for your sponsorship of this. This is a very, very popular series for us and it shows the emotion that we have about finally bringing all of the gene pool into play to help this country. We had founding fathers, we had founding mothers too, but we didn't let them in the room at the time, I'm afraid, but think of how many problems we would have solved if we'd tap the full gene pool talent in this country and we should be also saying this is ultimately a mission for the world, but we're glad we can start it here and we have this very impressive program and thank you, Nina, for inventing it for us and giving us a chance to partner with you. Candy, let me turn to you and want you to say a few words of welcome and thanks again for sitting. I want to thank Dr. Hamry, I'm Candy Wolfe, I'm head of Global Government Affairs of City and this is our fourth event of the Smart Women, Smart Power series which we sponsor with Fortune and since the series kicked off in December we've welcomed three very impressive women, all of them involved in government to the stage and so the tradition continues tonight with our first business speaker, Carly Fiorina. Carly shattered the glass ceiling in 1999 when she was appointed CEO of Hewlett Packard the first female head of a Fortune 20 company and today in a number of different roles that she has one of them is as global chairman of Opportunity International where she lends her voice and influence to building a network of women investing in women to end the cycle of poverty. So I'm proud to say that City, more than half of City's workforce is made up of women but as we know in the financial services industry they're not enough women at the highest levels of business and Carly is certainly a symbol of a woman who's achieved the highest levels of power in a very male dominated business and this speaker series I think helps to highlight the amazing talent that women bring to government to business and to the community and this gives us an opportunity to highlight those talents. I want to also just mention that today is about one month after International Women's Day and March 8th is International Women's Day for those of you that celebrate the day and throughout the month of March City hosted over 200 events in 90 countries for our clients for our employees and for the communities and I think today is sort of a natural culmination of what I would say is not so much International Women's Day but perhaps International Women's Month and I think it's a testament to the series and to the folks that we have here in this series that we can culminate the month of March with okay it's the beginning of April but you know it's a month so I'm counting the month. So I wanted to say that City is a proud sponsor of this series and I want to welcome all of you to tonight's speaker and turn over Kathleen. Thank you. Good evening I'm Kathleen Hicks I direct the International Security Program here at CSIS and also oversee the smart women's smart power initiative. I'm here in part to relay the most important social media information which is please make sure you are following us on Twitter at at smart women we love to add to our Twitter account it shows the power as Dr. Hamry said of expanding the gene pool to lots of great programming that we put through that Twitter feed relating to great things women are doing in international business and international affairs and also please check out our smart women podcast series on iTunes which is done tremendously well and we invite you into the conversations that we have there through that podcast series. I'm very pleased for us to be having tonight Carly Fiorina she's here to discuss a wide range of topics relating to World Affairs, foreign policy, international business, technology, microfinance there's sort of no end to the issue sets that she's going to cover I think here with Nina. She's currently the chairman of operational internet opportunity excuse me international the largest nonprofit microfinance lender in the world. She's also a chairman of Good 360 the world's largest product philanthropy organization and of course as Candy mentioned most of you know her as the former chairman and CEO Hewlett Packard. She also we hear may be a candidate for office at some point so we may hear a little about that tonight. Our moderator this evening as always is Nina Easton who in addition to being a senior associate here at CSIS is a columnist for Fortune magazine and chair of Fortune's most powerful women international summit. Thanks again to everyone for joining tonight and Nina over to you. Great. Thank you all for those kind remarks and Dr. Hamry in particular. It's such an honor here to have Carly Fiorina here. Now you should also know that you've been at CSIS in other capacities you have a long history with CSIS and I guess you probably all know by now about her 90 percent comment as in 90 percent chance that she's going to actually run for president. So we thought it would be an incredible opportunity tonight to both get to know Carly even better than people already know her but also to drill down on foreign policy. I mean there's been a lot of attention to a lot domestic questions domestic issues that she's addressed as the attention has geared towards you in the last couple weeks but foreign policy and the role of international business is something we really want to hear from you on. So thank you so much for being here. I'm going to start with it just sort of a big get to know you. You were born in Austin Texas and your mother was an abstract artist and your father was a judge. Talk about two kind of meetings of different minds. How did that produce you? I don't know you'd have to ask them but my father was a law professor at the University of Texas when I was born and my mother was a stay at home mom but also an extremely talented artist who kept her light hidden under a bushel for most of her life but finally went on and got her master's degree in art and started to show some of her art late in her life. My parents who had so much to do with who I am and what I believe but they met during World War II in Texas. My mother was the secretary to the CEO and had run away from home at 18 because her father didn't think she should go to college. So she ran away from home and met my dad. I learned very important things from both my mother and father. My mother told me when I was about eight years old in Sunday school one Sunday that what you are is God's gift to you and what you make of yourself is your gift to God and to me that was a promise and a challenge all at the same time. It was a promise that I had gifts even though I didn't know what they were and it was a challenge to find them and make the most of them. My father was a conservative of great integrity and I would sit and watch the news with him every night. He would yell at the television, you know. He would get very wrapped up in politics but he was one of these people who when he went on to the federal bench on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals he got along with everyone even though not everyone agreed with him. So I learned from him that you can have really strong core principles but also find common ground with lots of people and he said, you know, Carly, your integrity and your reputation are your most important possession. Don't ever sell them and that's an important lesson to learn at a young age. And you ended up at the very pinnacle of the business community, a first woman to run a fortune 50 company actually, ended up on the cover of our magazine Fortune. But it didn't, you took kind of a circuitous route there. You graduated from Stanford, you went to UCLA Law School and then you quit after a year. Why? Well circuitous route is a nice way to say it. It was a really inauspicious beginning honestly. I did graduate from Stanford but I had a degree in medieval history and philosophy. So what that meant was all dressed up and nowhere to go. And so I went off to law school. You know, my dad really thought it would be great if I followed in his footsteps and I adored him and so I thought that would be a good idea. I just hated law school. I hated it. I think it was Judge Learned Hand that put me over the edge for all of you lawyers in the room. But I felt somehow that all the emphasis on precedent wasn't very interesting to me. And so I quit after one semester. In fact I didn't even make it through the first semester. So imagine what my resume reads now. So I had during a living and I went back to work doing full time what I had done part time to put myself through Stanford. Stanford wasn't a very expensive school and I had to work. During my time there I was a secretary. I was Kelly Girl, temporary office personnel and I typed in the shipping department of Hewlett-Packard. I did all kinds of things. So I went back to work as a secretary full time for a nine-person real estate firm and really had no idea what I was going to do with my life but was grateful to be paying the rent. But you did end up getting an MBA from the University of Maryland. Eventually I did. And you started and your corporate rise began at AT&T in 1990 and described those years. Well 1980 actually. I'm sorry 1980. Would that I were that young but anyway. So I have to say that it's a lesson that stayed with me when I was at that little nine-person real estate firm. Two men who worked there came to my desk one day and said you know we've been watching you and we think you could do more than type and file. Do you want to know what we do? And really they put me on this path to even consider business. Nothing in my background would have caused me to think about a career in business. Now what I remember about that is the trajectory of my life changed. It took a turn in a different direction because two men took a chance on me. They took a chance on me. And everybody needs somebody to take a chance on them at least once in their life. I've had people take chances on me all throughout my life. My very first job when I finally got an MBA was right here in Washington D.C. at 20th and L. I was hired by AT&T when it was the Bell system a million employees and I was hired as a entry level sales person. And my job I was kind of a sales trainee person. And my job was to sell telephone systems to government agencies. That's when I learned all those many years ago that at the end of every fiscal year in the last six weeks every government agency spends every last dime no matter what and it continues. And so to jump forward here a bit you then 1999 you're chosen to lead Hewlett Packard. And did somebody take a chance on you in taking that job by the way? You know all of us do something for the first time. Yeah. And that was the first time I was a CEO. And there's a lot of attention. I mean as a woman I mean a huge amount of attention and in retrospect this sounds foolish for me to say but honestly I was completely unprepared for how much attention there was. I had spent my career moving up not I didn't have a plan to become a CEO. I just learned over time that I would run to problems. If there was a problem if there was a challenge I ran to it because I found it more interesting. And I learned that if there was a problem there were also people who knew how to fix the problem. It's just they'd never been asked. Their potential had never been tapped. And so I would go into a problem situation and I would find people with potential that had not been tapped and focus them on let's solve this problem. Let's capture this opportunity and we did. And when you do that when you run to problems and solve them people pay attention. And so I had worked my way up and had never thought about myself as a woman in business. Even though the vast majority of the meetings I was in were only men and I would routinely find women in organizations whose potential was being ignored and give them a chance and we would do good things. In any event when I arrived at Hewlett Packard I honestly thought that the questions people would ask me would be about maybe that I was the first outsider to ever lead this storied technology company. Or maybe the questions would be about the fact that I wasn't an engineer and all the previous CEOs had been engineers. Or maybe the questions would be what are your plans for this company? How do you plan to grow it since now it was known when I arrived as the gray lady of Silicon Valley because it was losing relevance and wasn't growing and wasn't innovating. I thought I would be asked all those questions. And instead the question I was asked or the statement that was made was oh my gosh you're a woman. And it caught me completely off guard and the attention that was paid to me because I was a woman never really abated. And you had you had a tremendous run of success at HP for the five and a half years there but you were also abruptly fired as you say by the board. And the business press at the time talked about an earnings slump and so forth. You also in your book talk about just kind of a sexism in some way the way you were portrayed. What in your mind was it. Well I think first the it is true that when you are leading to change the order of things and that's what leadership is about. Leadership fundamentally is about two things. It's not about position or power title or perks. Leadership is about unlocking potential in others just like those two men did for me many many years ago. And it's about changing the order of things for the better. That's what leadership is. And so when you change the order of things for the better it means you are taking on established orders. You're taking on the status quo. You're taking on the conventional wisdom. And so if you lead you will make enemies. It's the nature of leadership. In the course of my time there we and it's always we we accomplished really extraordinary things. We took a company from 44 billion to 88 billion. We went from 2 percent growth to 9 percent growth. We went from not being even counted anymore in the top 25 innovators in the world to tripling our rate of innovation to 11 patents a day. We quadrupled our cash flow. We went from lagging behind in every product category to leading in every product category. We grew a company by innovating. We of course created jobs because you can't create jobs unless you're growing and innovating and in a technology company in particular. If you're not leading and growing you're lagging and falling behind. Some of the moves that we made to accomplish that were controversial. At the time we acquired Compaq it was the largest acquisition in technology history. It was the most complex integration in technology history. Also very successful acquisition. But we did that at the in the middle of the biggest technology recession in 25 years and it was completely against conventional wisdom because the conventional wisdom in 2001 was that the era of technology that would follow would be the same as the era that had preceded the dot com bust. And the era that preceded the dot com bust was the pure play era. You were a pure play router company a pure play PC company a pure play consumer company a pure play software company. And we said actually no the future belongs to diversified technology companies that will consolidate the industry and lead not just in scope and scale but in innovative capacity. That turned out to be right. But it was against conventionalism. I was fired at the end of that because we had a couple board members who were leaking confidential board information. You can't do that in a board. And I said either this stops or I have to go. There was a board room tussle. It was all over in 10 days. And I left. I could have prevented leaving by casting a vote as chairman of the board. I didn't cast my vote as chairman of the board because I thought it was really important that the board work through what conduct was becoming of that board for the good of the institution. And interestingly in the year that followed a lot of board members were fired themselves. It was great tumult and great controversy about how the board did business. And it was probably best for the company that all that come out. And do you think this the way things ended at HP is that going to hurt you politically. I don't think so. But I think people need to know the facts. You know one of the things is good about business is there are actually facts. There are numbers. They're indisputable. The results are indisputable. Sometimes I think politics is a fact free zone. I also think that that's what people are sick of about politics. I think people are kind of sick of no facts. I think they're sick of no results. I think they're sick of a lot of sound bites and vitriol going back and forth. But somehow the order of things never really changes for the better. So I'm going to unfortunately we since our time is limited briefly go through a couple other years and then turn to foreign policy. But you you you did a Senate race against Barbara Boxer obviously lost. You also faced breast cancer. You had that battle. Talk about the lessons from that period. So the Senate run in California. Yes I certainly lost the general election. We had a three way primary and I came from way behind in that three way primary and one with about 57 percent of the vote. So I understand what it takes to unify a party. And while of course I lost in the end I also gained more Republican votes more Democratic votes and more independent votes than virtually anyone else running anywhere in the nation that year. That's how big California is. And what that taught me is that if you talk to people in terms they understand about the problems they actually face and are authentic about what you believe and how you would approach problems you can both unify a party and reach beyond a party. I also learned that I love to campaign which is helpful you know if you're going to run say president of the United States. What do you love about campaigning. You know what I love about campaigning is I find people fascinating. And when you are campaigning for yourself or for others I've spent a lot of time since 2010 campaigning for others and helping other people win. And you meet all kinds of people in all kinds of places. And they have fears and concerns and hopes. And what I'm struck by now is I'll digress for a moment and tell a story associated with politics. I happen to be in a homeless women's shelter in New York last Monday a week ago. I was there in association with some of my charity work. And this is a women's shelter that rotates between a Catholic church and a Jewish synagogue every other night which says wonderful things about that community. And I'm speaking to this woman who is a guest there. They call them guests as they should. And she said you're somebody. And I said well I'm Carly if you're running or something and so I explained that maybe I would run and she said you know all these this is what she did all these politicians up here they're in their world and they're talking in their language and they're not connected to those of us down here except that what they're talking about and what they're doing about up here it impacts those of us down here. That's as concise a definition of the disconnect that people feel between their lives and the political process as I've ever heard. And then she said keep talking we're listening. So you know you run into people like that and here's a woman in really difficult circumstances and yet she was not hopeless she was hopeful she was concerned she was worried of course but one of the reasons she was hopeful I think is because people were giving her a helping hand people were taking a chance on her and when you take a chance on someone basically what you're saying to them is you have value you have value and you can live a life of dignity and purpose and meaning and in the end I think that is the highest calling of leadership. You are a very advocate of the free market globally as well as in the United States and Pope Francis says the free market is creating economies of exclusion and inequality what do you say back to that? Well because I think what we have now is less and less free market and more and more crony capitalism and crony capitalism is what happens when you have big government get bigger and bigger and more complicated so that only big business can thrive and big business uses the processes of big government to advantage its competitive position. I mean that's what we have going on and we have it going on all over the world. The only way to level the playing field is to lessen the power and the complexity and the reach of both big government and big business. How do you do that internationally? Well I can't speak for what other countries are doing but we can do something about it here I mean this is a partisan comment I'm about to make it's a fact if you look at Dodd-Frank whatever you think of Dodd-Frank whatever you think of the motivations behind Dodd-Frank the result of Dodd-Frank has been that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who were a big source of the financial crisis continue without any reform at all. Ten banks too big to fail have become five banks too big to fail and their competitive position is stronger not weaker and the systemic risk to the system is arguably greater not less meanwhile 26 regulatory agencies that were supposed to be overseeing the financial system haven't been reformed in any way we've just added a new one and 3,000 community banks have gone out of business and counting so what happens with big powerful complicated complex government is only the big the powerful the wealthy and the well connected can thrive and the small and the powerless and the unconnected get crushed and that's what's happening and it matters when we're destroying community banks for example but because they are the places that lend a helping hand to so many family-owned businesses and small businesses which still are the engine of economic growth in this country most Americans start the way I did in a little business my husband started as a tow truck driver and a family-owned auto body shop that's how most Americans start so when we're crushing small businesses when we're creating a system when only the big and the powerful and the wealthy and the well connected can make it then we have economic growth at 2% not 4% we have a stagnation of wages we don't have enough jobs being created that's what's going on so I think there are so many people who believe that the current brand of capitalism is free markets our market here is less and less free and but when you talk about the powerless something that would probably impact people's lives here would be say bringing home that two trillion dollars in reserves cash sitting on the corporate balance sheets of big companies abroad something else that might help them is is the whole role of technology I mean technology is displacing jobs we all agree how would you tackle those kinds of problems to help income growth at home yeah so first of all both of those things you're absolutely right and and I will address both of those things but I will start by saying that we really cannot underestimate the historic role that family businesses small businesses startup businesses have played in this economy so you know we were really proud of 11 patents a day at Hewlett Packard small companies new companies innovated 11 times the rate of big companies and they innovated a much faster rate because big companies tend to be big bureaucracies and big bureaucracies crush innovation over time small companies tend to be willing to make mistakes take risks and if you want innovation you got to tolerate mistake making small and new businesses create two-thirds of the new jobs in this country they employ half the people so if you go to any community anywhere in this country you will see small and family-owned businesses giving up and it's of huge consequence we're now for the first time in us history think about this here's a fact for the first time in us history we are now destroying more businesses than we are creating that's a terrible problem that impacts everybody so now to your point yes there why why do these big corporations not bring their cash home because it will get taxed at exorbitant rates and their profits are already being taxed so we should of course have a competitive tax rate in this country for everybody we don't is in the 21st century any job can go anywhere money can go anywhere ideas can go anywhere people can go anywhere so therefore we have to compete for every job we have to be the country that's the best place in the world to build a new business we have to be the country that's the best in the world to do business and more not if our tax rates are uncompetitive so we have to lower every rate but beyond that we have to vastly simplify the tax code it's not enough to keep tweaking it and changing and making it better but never simplify it because the big companies can deal with big complicated tax codes the little guys can't as a as a CEO I could hire accountants lobbyists lawyers to deal with all this complexity a nine-person real estate firm not so much so yes we should change the tax codes so that money comes home we could even incent companies to use that money for specific purposes for retraining people for helping startups get going but if we don't simplify the tax code if all we do is worry about the rates we're not going to make enough progress in terms of leveling the playing field for the small and the powerless against the big and the powerful technology is an unbelievable tool for innovation and it's interesting because it is technology that small startups are trying to use to gain competitive advantage so you know all of you know about uber or all of you know about air bnb but think about it what are the competitors to uber and bear bnb air bnb trying to do they're trying big companies are getting together with regulators and government entities to try and make their entrance into the marketplace harder why because their entrance into the marketplace disadvantages the big established players that's the kind of disruption we want in our economy government shouldn't be used to crush competition and that's actually what's happening in our economy now so let's turn to national security obviously the top of the headlines right now is the iranian nuclear framework agreement the president over the weekend argues that this is our best bet for keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of tehran what's your response to that well i think we my own view is we should have stopped talking to iran after the first six months deadline past and the reason i say that is because we have been sending signals to iran and to everyone else in the world that bad behavior will be rewarded why do i say that think about iran's behavior over decades iran has had a strategy to destabilize the middle east through their proxies iran has had a strategy to gain a nuclear weapon iran has had a strategy to stonewall every inspection regime that has been put in place and iran has had a strategy to stonewall every negotiating effort we're rewarding all of that behavior i also think that tactically from a negotiating point of view it's a huge error for the president of the united states to declare victory in a rose garden ceremony when only a framework agreement has been decided because what that signals is that this president is now committed publicly to getting this deal done and so my prediction is that what the iranians will do on the other side is spend the next two months trying to get a better deal that's what happens in negotiations i've never negotiated an iranian nuclear deal but i've negotiated plenty of deals big deals and when you want a good deal you have to be willing to walk away from the table you've got to be willing to walk away from the table and you can't get so committed publicly that uh it doesn't really matter what deal you get and i'm afraid that's what's happening finally i would say there are people at the negotiating table with us who's side i'm not sure they're on so russia russia is not on our side in this negotiation russia has a very keen national interest in building up their nuclear industry and the way they do that is to become the supplier and partner of choice to iran and they are well on their way to doing that so i think we should have stopped talking a long time ago i think we should have pushed back on some of their behavior but if we are going to go forward with this new deal now then i believe we must insist on inspections first and compliance first before sanctions are lifted because once sanctions are lifted there will be no snapback you cannot snap back when six different parties are at the table you cannot snap back when industries rush in so i think inspection first verification first and then uh perhaps unleash this um unload this what about the whole process though of engaging a foe in the first place we hear this weekend again about the obama doctrine where he says we engage but we preserve all our options and capabilities what's the fear in a doctrine on foes like iran well i think before we engage with anyone we have to be consistent about rewarding good behavior and recognizing bad behavior and my fear is that we are sending exactly the opposite set of signals so i mentioned we're rewarding bad behavior on the part of iran i think it's indisputable that we're rewarding bad behavior no matter what the iranians do no matter that they're engaged in a bloody civil war now in yemen no matter what their proxies do throughout the region nothing changes in our posture towards them that sends a signal to every other adversary we have on the flip side we are not standing with our allies and rewarding good behavior so example when the curds the most um capable fighting force in the region when the curds step forward and fight against isis and we refuse to arm them as they have requested for over a year and a half what signal are we sending the signal we're sending is it doesn't really pay to be our friend when the jordanian king whom i've known for many years but when king abdulla flies back to jordan and promptly beheads not beheads promptly executes two convicted terrorists in retaliation for the burning alive of a jordanian pilot and then begins bombing and he has just left washington dc where he was asking for bombs and materiel to support him and we don't provide it which we still have not what signal are we sending when the president of egypt not a perfect character by any matter of means but when the president of egypt takes action in retaliation for the beheading of 21 coptic christians or bravely goes to the heart of kyro and speaks to the imams about the cancer that he believes as a pious muslim is sitting in the heart of islam and that they need to help deal with it and responds bravely as well into all that's going on in the region and we say we neither condemn nor condone his actions what signal are we sending so we have allies in the middle east we have allies in the Baltic states we have allies in ukraine who are asking us to do very specific things that would be helpful and we are doing none of it and so the signal we send is it's a tough game to be america's friend and the signal also is if you behave badly there are no consequences there are only rewards and that has huge consequence for this nation and i think the world's a very dangerous and tragic place when we're not leading you know a number of world leaders uh putin among them explain to us your your meetings and so forth with him well i met putin at an apex meeting and uh putin is a very formidable very interesting man first of all he's highly intelligent highly educated very cosmopolitan quite charming if he was here he would be charming and entertaining he's actually has a very good sense of humor he is formidable he is also a man who is focused on power not even ideology power economic power political power territorial power and he believes it is his mission to restore the historic power of the russian empire so if that's who you are facing off against it doesn't take a lot to understand that someone like that will not be stopped unless he senses real strength and resolve and purpose on the other side and so again we have the ukrainians asking for our help we have the baltik states asking for our help and we're not providing much help and so i doubt that vladimir putin will stop there's no reason for him to stop he actually is achieving his objectives yeah um so you've met him once or yes we had a yes we had a rather lengthy meeting and um i have done business in in russia for some time and i would say that um he is a man who has effectively concentrated so much power in his person it's really um stunning he's been very effective at it you have a chinese leadership you've spent time with them as well well i i've been doing business in china um for a couple decades now and the chinese are motivated first and foremost by what they perceive to be in their nation's economic self-interest their economic self-interest requires them to grow at a certain rate to lift a certain number of people out of poverty because they have figured out that um political peace and social peace requires a certain standard of living that's the bargain they've kind of made with the chinese people we will crush freedoms uh in return you will have a reasonable standard of living that bargain is fraying at the edges in very real ways but because they are motivated only by their economic self-interest there's a lot of things that we talked to them about that they really don't care what we think they don't care what we think about their human rights record they really don't care and so however objectionable we may find their human rights record we're wasting our breath they actually don't care when we say that we think they're manipulating their currency they think we are manipulating our currency by the way i would agree with them qe1 qe2 qe3 has had the effect in many ways of manipulating our currency and so uh we have to talk to them if we want to change their behavior the only thing that changes their behavior is to begin to have an impact on their calculation about their economic self-interest and in this regard we have leverage although we rarely use it we are their largest market virtually all of their industry has been built one way or another through collaboration with leading edge american companies and so uh there are real conversations we must have with them about the systematic pilfering of our intellectual property it's going to ask you about us but we're not really having them what would you do would you use the wto to stand up to them on that really honestly what i would do first uh yes i think the wto is in some ways a useful body but i would remind the chinese that it is the american business community that helped the chinese enter the wto i would gather a set of american business leaders who also are very concerned about what is happening to their intellectual property and i would form a united front between the policies that the u.s government pursues and a set of american businesses um i think that would have an impact i would change the nature of the topics about which we speak to the chinese and i would ensure that there are real consequences to some of their behavior by the way there's no doubt i chaired the advisory board at the central intelligence agency for several years have served on the defense business boards there is no doubt that the chinese are engaged in very deliberate cyber warfare whatever you want to call it against both government and business and there's in this country there's no doubt they're doing that so um i am going to open this up to questions in about five minutes so get them ready but i wanted to drill down a little deeper on your views about the use of force looking and let's let's look backward before we look forward um the iraq war knowing what we know now would you have authorized that knowing what we know now of course not and we i think even if we assumed now looking back okay they had weapons of mass destruction i think we mismanaged that conflict we've mismanaged going in and we have mismanaged going out i think um the use of force as well as american leadership on the world stage requires uh both clear eyed realism and moral clarity and what i mean by clear eyed realism is let's just take afghanistan which in some ways was a clearer case we had a major terrorist attack launched plotted in plan from there clearly there had to be a response a forceful response that was realistic it was totally unrealistic to decide that the mission we needed to be engaged in was to build a central government where none had existed for 2000 years that was completely unrealistic and so we were imposing a model of political governance on a nation in which that model would never take root and so i think force is always a last resort and when it is used it must be used for a very limited purpose now what about but there is a time syria uh you know containing isis and so forth do you favor american troops there well i think one of the things that i think honestly this uh administration has done is continually present the american people with a false choice and the false choice is this either we go to war or there's nothing we can do and i think syria is an example of where that false choice has been offered over and over again there are things we could have done in syria we could have provided more help to the rebels when there were moderate rebels there we could have joined together more effectively with turkey instead of fighting against the things that turkey wanted to do we did none of that right and of course now now we're at a point well you see i think here again a false choice is being offered uh no i think sending american troops boots on the ground into syria at this moment would be counterproductive on the other hand we have a whole bunch of allies in that region asking us to do things and we're not doing any of them we're not working effectively with the turks we're not working effectively with the Kurds we're not working effectively with the rebels we're not working effectively with the Jordanians or the Saudis or the Kurds we're not working effectively with any of our allies and so to say the only thing we can do is go off to war isn't true there are a whole set of things we've been asked to do by people who share our interests and we're not doing that okay questions um please identify yourself and keep your question very short and it must end in a question mark um back there yes excuse me it's january it's 2018 your president elect what are your first decisions and priorities 2017 2017 excuse me january 2017 and what i'm sorry president elect yeah what are the first decisions and priorities you would make i think the first decision i would make is to begin to undo a whole set of complexities that have been built up and let's just start with the web of dependence that we have woven around people's lives we have woven a web of dependence around people's lives and we make it virtually impossible for people to disentangle themselves from that web all of the incentives are to settle into that web instead of to move forward in your life so i would start to undo and disentangle a whole set of complexities around dependence and i would start to disentangle a whole set of programs that crush the family owned and the small businesses undoing things is hard but i think using technology and pressure from the american people we could get those things done secondly i would begin the push for two important levers that can help us reimagine government and hold it more accountable to serve all citizens and those two things would be this zero based budgeting let us know where our money is actually being spent we don't have a clue we don't have a clue and the appropriation process each and every year is around the rate of increase because all remember that fiscal year i talked about he spends every last time the last six weeks of this year that's been going on for 40 years under republicans and democrats because we never look at the whole budget and transparency over time will lead to accountability so zero based budget the other one pay for performance we have lived with a seniority system in the federal government forever it's a bad system because it means that literally you can watch pornography all day long or you can be working hard to do a good job and you get paid exactly the same way and earn the same pay and the same benefits that's not fair it's not right and people outside this town find it outrageous okay other questions thank you my name is paula from shira editor of the shira report about the web of dependence that you adequately described a moment ago you would like to disentangle the country or the people who are dependent after you were president what about before in other words what is the message that can be conveyed to the people who are dependent and that you would like them to be disentangled but you still want their votes how do you trans how do you modify from dependence to opportunity what is the message everyone has god-given gifts everyone has potential most people have far more than they realize it's not a message it's a fact and i've seen it play out in my life over and over and over again when you give people a chance to find their gifts and use their potential the vast majority of people will take that chance it is a human instinct to live a life of dignity and purpose and meaning it's what all human beings want and so when you look somebody in the eye and you say you have value you have gifts you have potential and the highest calling of leadership is to unlock potential and others let's help everyone in this country live a life of dignity and purpose and meaning this used to be a country of limitless possibility and it has to be again this has to be a nation where every american feels possibilities in their lives because they have possibilities they have potential and the weight of bad government bad policy and bad politics is crushing it for too many people when you look at both the global economy two-part question and the national security landscape what worries you the most on both of those what scares you i think what scares me is what motivates me to potentially jump into this race i think we are at a very pivotal point i think there comes a point where a system is so baked in that you can't reverse it and i think we're coming to that point government getting bigger and bigger and more and more complicated and more and more powerful and more and more crushing has been baked into this system for 40 years and unless we decide to take a different path to reach for a different result there will come a point where we can't change example let me give you a very practical example in the next few years there are a bunch of baby boomers who are going to retire from their jobs in the federal government it is a window of opportunity we either decide we are not replacing those people and reimagining government to be smaller and more accountable and more responsive and less oppressive or we replace them all and then we're stuck for a really long time with regard to the world i think it's the same thing i worry that we are getting to a point where without american leadership the world will look very different the world will look very different if our allies in the middle east become weaker and our adversary in the middle east which is iran and its proxies become very much stronger the world will look very different if latimer putin continues on his march for power our nation will look very different if we don't get more family owned and small businesses going and growing again our nation will look different if we're not tapping the talents and the possibilities of every american and so i think we have a limited time to change the order of things for the better i truly do we have time for a couple more questions way back there yes sir thank you very much my name is neal tutu let go to africa for example in east africa south sudan is in civil war right now for almost a year the government in juba in south sudan has been committed a genocide again one as in a community now we also had a killing in kenya what would you do if you could be you will be elected i'm not sure i understood all of your question i'm sorry but i think you were asking you were talking about the civil war in sudan and you were also talking about kenya we're talking about the attack in kenya is that what you're okay i'm sorry so the attack in kenya is a demonstration of the growing nature of the terrorist threat that we face and there is a religious message at the core of this threat we need to be sharing intelligence with all of those who would work with us to fight this terrorist threat but i think there's no question that when people are not sure of where we stand and who we stand with it makes those who want to stand up and fight bravely less eager to do so uh and so again we can't send troops into everywhere but what we can do is help those who are trying to help us in this fight we can be clear and deliberate about our willingness to stand with those who are willing to fight those who would harm us and others we can be clear about the nature of the threat that we face and stand with those who are brave enough to name the threat we face and i think we can be active as a nation in building economies all throughout the world including in africa you know one of the uh projects that i was engaged in here at csis was about global development and there's no question that it is in our interests that economies all around the world develop and that people have a stake in the global economy and one of the conclusions without going too far into this but one of the conclusions that this project which i had the pleasure to co-chair came to was that private companies are now responsible for over three quarters of the development efforts that are going on in africa and elsewhere around the world and there's a real opportunity for government efforts and private sector efforts to be more aligned so that we have a bigger impact in economies like africa africa as you well know is a place where the chinese are investing hugely through their governments and their businesses and we are perceived as withdrawing withdrawing in terms of our support for allies and friends and withdrawing in terms of our investment for economic development as well carly as we end here i um i want to ask you a question about leadership you you because you've you've experienced it in on so many levels you've thought about it globally on so many levels and part of this program is geared towards aspiring leaders women but young men too i mean what would be your best advice to aspiring leaders based on your experience well first i would say know what leadership is and know what it isn't and people get very confused about leadership i said several minutes ago that leadership is in about position and power i used to think it was i mean when i was a secretary i thought whoever had the biggest office was a leader if you had the big office the big perks the big parking space the big budget you were a leader and i think a lot of people think that they think title and position and power equals leadership and they have nothing to do with it there are plenty of people with big offices who don't lead i also think leadership is different than management management is about doing the best you can within the existing system there are a lot of people in business who are managers there are a lot of people in philanthropy or managers there are a lot of people in politics who are managers they just do the best they can within the existing system leaders don't accept what's broken just because it's been that way for a really long time so understand that leadership is about changing the order of things for the better it's about changing things it's about particularly unlocking potential and others because that's how you solve problems it's how you change the order of things human potential is the only limitless resource we have but it is limitless and when you apply human potential to solve problems really honestly everything is possible i have never encountered a problem that couldn't be made better by unlocking human potential and focusing it on common goals and worthy purpose so when we leave potential on the table because we don't give people a chance to use it when we leave potential on the table because we just ignore women or minorities or people who are different then we're not going to solve all of our problems and we're not going to tap all of our opportunities so understand what leadership is and understand one other thing that i know from my own experience leaders are made they're not born leaders are made leaders are made through the crucible of challenges challenges that are professional or challenges that are personal you know you asked me about cancer a moment ago and i forgot to answer you but all of us are formed not just by the good times but by the bad times i learned a lot battling cancer most particularly i learned that you know life and success aren't measured in time they're not measured by title life is measured in love and moments of grace and positive contribution truly and i learned when our younger daughter died battling the demons of addiction that the only thing we really control are our own choices which comes back to leadership i think actually fundamentally leadership is a choice it's a choice to make a positive difference it's a choice to unlock potential in others it's a choice to have the courage to say i'm not going to accept this just because it's been this way all along i'm going to choose to change the order of things for the better so many people don't choose leadership not because they're not capable of it but because there's a price to be paid for leadership you make enemies you disrupt things not everybody likes what you're doing you take arrows in the back you're always going to get criticized that's the price of leadership and yet everybody can and it is a joy to see people choose to lead well carly i met you at csis when you were providing remarkable leadership on global development issues and incorporating the private sector so it's a delight to talk to you today as you take that that leadership gene you have and you're taking it to new heights so thank you so much for taking the time to be with us thank you thank you