 I would like to invite Dr. John Maurer, our Alfred Thayer Mahan, Professor of Sea Power and Grand Strategy at our United States Naval War College, to introduce his panel and lead the discussion on American power and purpose in a changing world. Thank you, Admiral. Again, I'm John Maurer of the Strategy and Policy Department here at the Naval War College. It is a great honor and privilege to have the panelists that we have today. What a stellar group of scholars that we have today to hear their insights on American power and purpose in the world. We're going to go in alphabetical order in the presentations today. First will be Dr. Audrey Kurth Cronin. She comes to us from Carnegie Mellon University, where she is trustee's professor and director of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Security and Technology. Audrey is a prolific author on foreign policy strategy and terrorism. Her book, How Terrorism Ends, Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns, is a must-read study on terror wars. We have used part of it in the curriculum here at the college in the strategy courses. Her latest book, Power to the People, How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow's Terrorists, has garnered a claim for its study and won the prestigious Neve Prize, which is awarded to the best work out there that makes the most significant contribution to understanding terrorism today. Audrey is familiar with professional military education, having directed the core course on war and statecraft at U.S. National War College. She has also served as director of studies for Oxford's prestigious Changing Character of War program and a specialist in terrorism at the U.S. Congressional Research Service. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has served in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense for Policy, was chairman of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Terrorism. To her left is Dr. William C. Inboden. He comes to us from the University of Texas in Austin, where he serves as executive director at the Clements Center for National Security at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and is a distinguished scholar at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. He has served on Capitol Hill. He has also served as senior director for strategic planning on the NSC at the White House. He worked at the Department of State as a member of the policy planning staff and is a special advisor in the Office of International Religious Freedom. He also is a life member of the Council of Foreign Relations and he's a member of the CIA's Historical Advisory Panel and the State Department's Historical Advisory Council. Will has written a number of important books and articles on American foreign relations and international history. He is the author of a wonderful book on religion and American foreign policy during the early years of the Cold War. His most recent book, The Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan and the White House and the World, is an exceptional account of the Reagan administration's grand strategy which set the stage for winning the Cold War. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a very good read. And finally, Dr. Corey Shockey. Corey comes to us today from the nation's capital where she serves as a senior fellow and director of the highly influential foreign and defense policy studies team at the American Enterprise Institute. Corey is a prolific author reaching a wide audience by publishing in policy journals in the popular press including CNN.com, Foreign Affairs, Politico, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post. She is a contributing writer at the Atlantic and War on the Rocks. Before joining the American Enterprise Institute, she served as Deputy Director General of the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. She has had a distinguished career in government working at the State Department, the Department of Defense and the National Security Council. She's also taught at Stanford, West Point, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, National Defense University and the University of Maryland. Corey is the author of five books, her most recent being America versus the West. Can the liberal world order be preserved? Pertinent for today's topic. Among my favorite books are her books Safe Passage that looks at the transition from British to American hegemony and world affairs published by the Harvard University Press and her book Managing American Hegemony. Also along with former Secretary of Defense, General Jim Mattis, she edited an important book, Warriors and Citizens, American Views on Our Military. Audrey, over to you. Thanks so much, John. And thank you for the honor of being here. It's a pleasure to be back at the Naval War College. In the next few minutes, I'm going to argue that to renew America's power and purpose, we need to be smarter about three things. The first is how we communicate our strategy to the American people. Second, how we integrate military power when major tech companies are driving innovation. And then third, how we adapt to technology-driven shifts that are changing war much faster than we're preparing for. So first, let me talk about how we communicate our strategy to the American people. We're in a time of huge change in our societies, not just in the changing character of war. I'm at Carnegie Mellon University now, as you've just heard, and it's a wonderful place where scientists and engineers prevail and the scientific method is revered. Well, scientists and strategists are engaged in problem solving, but they have distinct ways of thinking about what they're doing. Scientists say, let's create a hypothesis, test it, and see where the science leads us. What results is new discoveries that no one can foresee, and it's wonderful. Strategists say, let's determine the goal, then apply our means to that end. So strategy is a relationship always between means and ends. One does not see where the strategy leads us. So especially at the national level, these two approaches sometimes clash, and I believe a country's strategy should take precedence, but I also believe that that is not the case right now. The United States is a strategy document superpower. To name just a few, we've got the national security strategy, the national defense strategy, the national military strategy, the nuclear posture review, the national cybersecurity strategy, the national biodefense strategy, the national strategy for the Arctic region. Anyway, you get the idea. These documents result from interagency procedures, and some of them were mandated by the Goldwater Nichols legislation in 1986. They're devised with very good intentions, and I should point out that early on in my career, one of the things I did was help write these kinds of documents. So I'm not beating up on anybody who's responsible for them, nor do I think they're something that we shouldn't be doing, but and I will also, to be fair to the Biden administration, they've coordinated the process very well, publishing the main strategy documents together last fall, and this broad shift that we have from the focus on the Middle East to competition with major powers, that was historic and very important. So I must give credit to those who are slaving away on these documents. I respect what they're doing, but it's hard for the American people to understand. These competing strategies tend to be satisfying documents that are all about process and means. So in mentioning everything, they tend to prioritize nothing. They tend to be rigid and formalized products. I've written a few. I'm not just trying to beat up on people again, okay? But it's very hard to communicate them to the American people, and they also leave out certain variables that I am going to argue are not represented in the interagency process. So what is our strategy and our purpose in kind of understandable terms? Well, China is increasingly asserting its national purpose as a reunification with Taiwan, as Hal Brands was telling us. That's the party line. The Xi regimes are masters at framing and repeating the narrative of what they're doing in very simple terms for consumption by their population, but also to influence foreign populations. So gradually over the past years, there's been greater mobilization of domestic support, strengthening of the Chinese Communist Party institutions, and an emphasis on national unity. And Beijing has also stepped up its efforts to influence elite and popular opinion in neighboring countries. How does the United States explain our national purpose? Now, I'm not implying that we should be copying an aggressive authoritarian regime. That's not my point. But when we describe what we're doing in the Indo-Pacific, it's all about communicating US policy through the region. And I would argue that it lacks a home game. Democracies have to keep their populations well-informed and with them. For example, we're not paying enough attention to the evolving stakes in our naval contest. The American people aren't paying enough attention to that. Protecting the global trading economy, some 80% to 90% of it moves at sea. That's vital to American prosperity. Protecting the global supply chain, not just where semiconductors are produced, but how they get from place to place. That affects what Americans buy on Amazon and at Walmart in both their availability and their cost. And in the digital economy, where more than 95% of all data is transferring between continents goes by undersea cables, our maritime dependence and security are greater than ever. But I don't think we've done a very good job explaining that to the American people. Our narrative tends to get into concepts that are fairly abstract. Things like preserving the international rules-based order, protecting a free and open Indo-Pacific, freedom of navigation operations, sailing where international law permits. These things are very important. They're understandable by academics, some policy makers and certain allies, but they seem very abstract to Americans and far away. So my first point is if your strategy is to do everything, it's not a strategy or a purpose, and it's not conveyed very well to our crucial audience, which is the American people, in terms that they can understand well. We can't consider ourselves a serious maritime power if the American people are so disconnected from their Navy. Second point, I think that in our making of strategy, we're ignoring the geopolitical role of major tech companies. The autonomy of today's major tech companies makes them historically unusual. Alphabet and Microsoft are ahead of both the Chinese and U.S. governments in developing artificial intelligence. SpaceX is a leading force in space exploration and was the first entity to build a reusable rocket that landed safely back on Earth. China might be even further along in closing the high technology gap where it's not for its political crackdown on tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba. Tech companies geopolitical role is obvious in Ukraine. Our CNO was talking about some of that, and I'm here to just footstomp a few of his points. It's in the geopolitical sense, and with respect to major tech companies, the myth that platforms like Facebook, Google, and YouTube are neutral actors has been shattered. Microsoft has protected Ukraine from cyber attacks. Google removes images of Ukraine from its open source maps. Musk's Starlink keeps Ukrainians connected to the internet via 2,000 privately owned satellites. And Microsoft has even removed Russia's internet launching points. The matter of who will prevail in a future war goes beyond the Russian armed forces. Or for that matter, the militaries of the United States and the People's Republic of China. Because the policies and behaviors of major tech giants will profoundly affect them all. Now of course, states do have tools to fight back. Russia has increased coercion. They forced tech companies like Apple, Alphabet, and Meta to flee, and they substituted their own alternatives like Yandex and V-Contact, for example. China's regulatory actions have forced platform companies there into compliance with domestic laws. Antitrust, data security. You know, the ride hailing company DD, the search engine Baidu, the online retailer Alibaba, social media companies like Tencent and Bite Dance. These have all been cracked down upon. China's large language models might be competitive with those in the West, but the government insists that they comply with socialist values, and that's slowing things down in China with respect to generative AI. The American open market approach stands in happy contrast to both Russia and China. Companies like Alphabet, Apple, and Meta, which spent nearly $70 million on lobbying in 2021 alone, have successfully argued that their unfettered technological innovation is vital to national security. The extent to which it's true or not is not just a political or commercial question, but it's an X factor in US defense strategy. Non-state private actors, especially the major tech companies, are already playing a crucial global role as geopolitical actors, but they're absent from our strategy. I think we should address this. Last point. There's a disruptive power shift underway, and it's a societal power shift. New and emerging technology is both an enormous opportunity and extremely destructive. Disruptive. Probably disruptive too, but anyway. It's very disruptive. You'll think I'm talking about unmanned systems, AI targeting, human machine teaming. All of those things are extraordinarily important. I could give another very long talk on changes in military technological innovation, which is what I've been writing about for the last five years or so. JADC2, for example, is necessary. It was great to see Indo-Pacific Command's Northern Edge exercise last month demonstrating for the first time at scale the ability to synchronize all fires in all domains. Important, necessary, great to see. But I think it's insufficient to the scope of the grand strategic problem that America faces. We're defining the role of digital technologies too narrowly. We're bounding them into the defense sphere, and counterintuitively, I'm worried that that will undermine our future military operations. What's happening now is a technology-driven societal change of massive scope. So let's look again very briefly at Ukraine. There would be no Ukraine today, were it not for the government's ability to mobilize US, NATO, Ukrainian domestic support, not to mention the support of commercial companies. Starlink, again, kept President Zelensky online, even when high earth orbit via sat went down. Amazon Web Services sent snowball devices to Krakow to facilitate transfer to the cloud and to protect Ukraine's data. Digital mobilization of the population has been a key element in the public will to fight in Ukraine. For example, when Ukrainian civilians downloaded the DIA app and geotagged cell phone images of Russian assets, that was metadata that the Ukrainian government harvest and uses. The Ukrainian government had pre-bunked the Russian narratives and prepared the public to be psychologically resilient. That's popular mobilization in an age of innovation. The Ukrainian will to fight is what's most remarkable to me. Remember also that many Ukrainian conscripts, as our CNO said, were technologically sophisticated before the 2022 war broke out. They were software engineers or tech workers or aviation engineers. That's why they know how to use Palantir software to tap into sensors and target and kill the enemy. Ukrainian companies were subcontractors to all the major tech companies before the war and their cyber software engineering and computer science skills were well developed. They'd been honing them, these conscripts, since 2014, at least. What's most remarkable to me is how they're able to quickly update software and use clusters of commercial and military technologies to network, interact, and create dynamic systems much faster than the Russian soldiers can. So we have a demonstration before us of will, technological sophistication, psychological resilience, and a clear mission. That's a societal evolution. And that kind of technological sophistication and resilience is not the case for the vast majority of Americans today. So let me put this in much more concrete terms. The next time there's a major incident in the Taiwan Strait, let's just imagine that our US Navy members cannot meet a Chinese provocation with the kind of professionalism that they've displayed so far. And let's imagine that the event escalates out of control. Who will frame the narrative of what happened? This is going on half a world away from the American people. Will the American people and the populations of our allies and partners believe us? Artificial intelligence can supercharge misinformation and disinformation through fake images, video, and audio that's very difficult now to detect. We've come a long way even just in the last six months. Hyper realistic images could target specific audiences. If there's a hyper realistic video of a very high profile leader, such as the president, falsely disavowing or reinterpreting what happened, will the American public stand behind its US Navy in a major crisis? On AI, whether we have the human in the loop or on the loop, I'm worried about humans being duped. The US Navy must be ready to respond well tactically and operationally, but also in a crisis to own the truth in the eyes of the American public. Information dominance is much more than cybersecurity or the security of command and control. It's preparing the rapid loss of information dominance with your own population. So let me just conclude. Our strategy must be grounded in our people. Our naval power depends on our national power and our national power is grounded in our people. China is integrating strategy operations and tactics across population centers, while we're mostly considering them within our armed forces and our individual services. If we're to establish more strategic resilience, we need to do a better job of mobilizing the American public. We need a national strategy to educate and prepare our people for this new age of technology so that they can support their Navy. We're heavily focused on networking our services and our allies, but much less so on our armed forces and our society. An American society in which innovation is most heavily invested in the private sector. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, synthetic biology and other newer emerging technologies are bringing on the future much faster than we're preparing for. And again, I could have talked strictly about those and their military implications, but what I'm talking about is what is the American public doing? How well do they understand these things? To get ahead of the curve, we need to consciously integrate the work of our brilliant civilian scientists across that public private divide. We need both scientists and strategists. Right now there's a huge gulf between the two. So let me offer three specific policy suggestions quickly along these lines just as a way of starting a conversation. First, on the topic of training our civilian population to be technologically sophisticated, I think the Navy might do well to expand its NROTC programs and its university fellowships and train mid and senior level folks who should learn more about new and emerging technologies and have them learn from those who are actually building them right now. The good news is that we have the best universities in the world training the most brilliant scientists and engineers in the world. The bad news is that too few of them are Americans or are citizens of our closest allied countries. Second, we should reach beyond the usual Navy shops in pursuing technological innovation as brilliant as they are. I understand the crucial promise, the crucial problem of diminished capacity to build ships and I'm not, I'm gonna leave that topic for others. It's extremely important. The Navy has a deep culture and history of successful long-term innovation in the 20th century. But the process of innovation is faster and different today. I think the Navy might do well to consciously strive to avoid insularity within the service and reach out to new technological collaborators including more small private companies and universities. And finally, it would be wise to take the debate about naval strategy beyond places like the Naval Institute proceedings or even this absolutely wonderful Naval War College that I have a deep personal love for. We need to try to have this conversation about naval strategy on a national stage with a national audience so we can bring the American public more with us. The Navy needs to reach beyond people like you and me who already know and love the Navy. The Navy can have a much broader national conversation that informs, educates, and mobilizes the American public behind it. Audrey, thank you for those remarks. Will, you're up next. Well, thank you very much, John. Thank you, Admiral Chatfield, for hosting us and it's a real honor to be here with everyone. I'm also honored and a little daunted going after my longtime friend and frequent co-author, Hal Brands since we are both Cold War historians with similar notebooks and training. And some of my remarks will also be reflecting on some of the parallels and then discontinuities between our current world and the Cold War and what some of the insights might be. But I think you'll hear hopefully a complimentary approach and not just repeating it. And the title of our, of course, this panel is American Power and Purpose in a Changing World. And I wanna begin with an assessment of the world situation. And so I'm gonna do a global overview here, but listen carefully because a number of these details matter for our current concerns. So globally democracy appears to be in retreat, right? The free world seems embattled and demoralized with the threat of authoritarianism. We've got a nuclear armed communist superpower on the Pacific Rim that is challenging the United States across the globe. And China's economic and especially military power continues to expand and it's under its most powerful leader since Mao. The question of Taiwan is especially vexing as the United States is looking for ways to increase our security commitment to the island to deter Beijing's potential invasion while also avoiding a catastrophic outright war. Elsewhere in Asia, the brutal Kim family dictatorship in North Korea continues to threaten South Korea, Japan and the United States while tormenting its own people. President Marcos in the Philippines is navigating his own country's complicated relationship with the United States amidst the broader fraught geopolitics of the region. Russia, of course, has enjoyed a resurgence over the past decade, expanding its influence in the Middle East and Latin America and even launching information warfare to influence American elections. And the Kremlin's menace includes most poignantly developing a new generation of nuclear weapons and delivery systems and, of course, invading its neighboring country to the South. The United States and Europe are managing tensions over Europe's reliance on oil and gas supplies from Russia, including even, of course, a controversial pipeline from Russia to Germany and Washington is pressuring our NATO allies to increase defense spending. In war-torn Afghanistan, neighboring states are maneuvering for influence. The United States faces some hard choices and questions about our involvement in the conflict while many Afghan refugees are still seeking to flee the country. Pakistan continues to play a double game, cooperating with the United States in some ways while in other ways pursuing a militant Islamist agenda, supporting terrorist groups and hiding its nuclear program. The revolutionary regime in Iran proclaims its hostility to the United States while engaging in destabilizing activities across the Middle East. The White House tries a combination of inducements and negotiations and pressures to change Iran's behavior. Israel is building a new strategic partnership with former Arab adversaries while trying to ensure that its mortal enemy in the region does not develop a nuclear bomb. Israel's relations with the Palestinians remain at an impasse with a peace process stalled and few visible prospects for a comprehensive deal. Closer to home in the Western Hemisphere, a left-wing government in Mexico is trying to balance its own complicated relationships with the United States and the troubles of its central American neighbors to itself. More particularly, of course, in Nicaragua, the Ortega regime has become an increasingly authoritarian while Daniel Ortega himself is deepening his ties with the Kremlin. To the North, not too far from here, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau is trying to balance frictions over trade and energy in the environment with his most important ally, the United States. And to speak a little bit of our domestic context, protectionist sentiments in the United States are pressuring Congress and the White House to curtail free trade and impose tariffs on trade violators, both friend and adversary. Inflationary pressures are burdening central bankers and threaten the American and global economy. Much closer to home, the Pentagon faces growing budget strains as it attempts to modernize its weapons platforms and force structure to counter our great power peer competitor, while addressing acute readiness and manpower needs. Critics point out that the Air Force's most widely used strategic bomber, the B-52, first entered service in 1952. The American people, demoralized by America's recent failures and chaotic withdrawal in our nation's longest war, have little appetite for deploying combat troops in any new military interventions. Now, not everything is so grim. The United States still leads the world in technology and innovation thanks to Silicon Valley companies such as Apple and Seattle's Microsoft and edges and areas such as information technology and semiconductor design. The edge appears to be fragile and slipping, especially with growing competition from Asia. On the political scene, and I know we're not to get too political here, but bear with me, the Democratic Party, despite controlling the White House and one half of Congress, is beset with internal divisions between this progressive wing and its more moderate wing. Meanwhile, the Republican Party remains divided by the scandals and controversies of the last elected Republican president who left office in some disgrace as the party's establishment and insurgent wings to vie for control. And in the White House itself, America's oldest president in history is trying to navigate these many challenges. Okay, what did I just describe to you? I described to you the world in June of 1981. Every word I just said was the world in June of 1981, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, Daniel Ortega and Nicaragua, the B-52 being our oldest, right, on and on. But as you also heard, I also described to the world in June of 2023, 42 years later, every single word I used there also described our current world. Now, I'm not saying that history repeats itself perfectly, all right, it's a little bit of a rhetorical trick there, right, some of us set up a bond on our current moments and comparing it to history. And I will, a little later in my remarks, also talk about some of the really important strategic and structural dissimilarities between the First Cold War and the one that we're in now or between even June of 1981 and now. But I do think it's important to appreciate that our current moment and travails are not wholly without precedent. We recently did an event with Condi Rice at the Clements Center that I run in Austin, Texas and commenting on the importance of history. She said, if you don't understand history, everything is unprecedented. I wish you meant a lot of it isn't so much unprecedented, right? And so that's why I say a lot of our current challenges are not unprecedented. And also, and I will draw a little bit on my most recent book on the Reagan administration's grand strategy in the later days of the Cold War, which John kindly recommended, to remind us that even though things did look pretty grim in the late 1970s and early 1980s, what very few people saw at the time, but what was borne out is that over the next decade there would be a series of global transformations. There would be a renewal of American economic and military strength and influence in the world. There would be an expansion of democracy and self-government and free markets. There would be the peaceful end of the Cold War. There would be a dramatic reduction in the threat of nuclear apocalypse. And there would be the defeat and dissolution of America's primary peer competitor, the Soviet Union. And so even in looking at the relatively grim landscape of 1981 and the relatively grim landscape of 2023, I certainly see possibilities for renewal of strategic advantage just because it has happened before, but I don't wanna be misunderstood as saying therefore it's inevitable. And I know Dr. Shockey will be talking about and turn her own net assessment of American power in areas we have to be optimistic or pessimistic. But even on some of the some of the particulars of some of the takeaways, especially say in defense and strategic posture, I do think that the Reagan defense modernization, and I talk about this some of the book, but it's very important. It's a misnomer to say it was the Reagan defense buildup, right? The Reagan administration's defense strategy was as much about outsmarting the Soviets as outbuilding or outspending them. And that key strategic concept is very important for understanding the specific weapons platforms that they were investing in and the diplomatic purposes to which Reagan employed a more lethal potent advanced military, whether cementing alliances with Reagan doctrine, but especially strengthening his negotiating hand with the Soviets at the negotiating table so that America could negotiate from a posture, from a posture of strength. A lot of these are innovations to the Reagan administration strategy, but a lot of it was benefiting from the second offset under Ford and Carter, the Andy Marshalls competitive strategies framework, right? So none of this occurs in a vacuum. Turn it a little more explicitly then to our present day. Obviously, I've given you the setup on the many things that I think are similar and parallel, but I also do want to highlight some parts of our current moment that I do think are either completely unprecedented in world history or certainly relatively unprecedented in the modern American era. The first and most important difference or discontinuity, and how I'll mention this, but I want to drive it home, is the fact that our main peer competitor in strategic adversary, the People's Republic of China is or at least was until very recently, also our main economic partner. I can't find a case in world history. Certainly there's been trade ties before between geopolitical rivals, I haven't seen that, but where you had a simultaneous emerging strategic rivalry and the deep levels of economic interdependence, not just trade flows, but capital flows, but interconnected supply chains, things like that. We are relatively unprecedented in that situation. And so while I share Howell and others' affinities for learning some lessons from the First Cold War, we had nowhere near that level of economic interdependence with the Soviet Union. In some ways it was a little easier to put economic pressure on them because it was at much less cost to us. And so the decoupling, the partial decoupling, there's a new term for it every week, the de-risking that the United States and China are engaged in on our economies is where we're in uncharted territory here. Doesn't mean that we can't get through it. Doesn't mean that there might not be some sort of emerging arrangement or better settlement, but we don't have an easy off-the-shelf playbook for this. And during the Q&A, I hope we can explore this a little more. And Audrey, in particular, I wanna hear some of your insights because I very much appreciated your comments about American tech companies playing a really key and helpful role, supporting Ukraine against Russia. I'm not seeing it as much with China with American tech companies, right? And the fact that the largest American company by market cap, Apple, is also so deeply dependent on the China market. And again, there's gonna be some ongoing adjustments there, but that is a new challenge. A relatively newer one, and Hal made a passing reference to this, is the China-Russia condominium, right? This emerging partnership between Beijing and Moscow. The closest levels it's been since the 1950s. So that right there, this is almost 80 years ago, it was 25, 80 years ago, the last time you had these levels of cooperation, partnership between Beijing and Moscow. And even that was something of a historical aberration. Way back in the day when I was doing strategic planning on the NSC staff in the George W. Bush administration, this was one of the longer-term questions that we are wrestling with. And we did a big study on what is the future of the China-Russia relationship. And most of the best opinion at the time, and this is 2006, 2002, 2008, says they'll never become close. There's too many structural impediments, there's too many historic ones, right? So that's wrong. It's a very robust partnership now. It has its limits, as Hal mentioned. India's debut as a global power, as a great power on the global stage, again, is a relatively unprecedented one, at least in the modern era. Overall, I think, has an advantage to us. But Washington and New Delhi's interests are not always fully aligned. Related to the China-Russia condominium, I think we seem to be on the precipice of a very new and unfamiliar nuclear era where there will be three nuclear superpowers in the world. Yes, I know China's had the bomb since 1964, but for the most part, for the next few decades, maintained a fairly small and primitive nuclear structure no more. And so you've got Russia's potent arsenal, China rapidly developing one with global nuclear capabilities across the United States. So this three-way nuclear balance is also going to be a new one. And of course, as Audrey is spending much of her best academic work and strategic thinking, entirely new dimensions of power projection and threat with artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons and biotech and that whole menagerie, if you will, of technological innovation. Yes, I know that innovation and technological change, just as a phenomenon is as old as warfare itself, but I do think that we are now seeing a difference in kind and not just degree. So my final part of my remarks on what does this mean as far as the employment of American power and our broader strategic purposes, especially with our primary rival in China, I'll just give a quick little taxonomy what I think the current state of play of the debate is. And I know that great thinkers here and elsewhere are working on these same questions. First, I think there's two fundamental, there's two fundamental camps right now on how the United States should think about this new era of great power competition. The first is the China first or China only camp, right? Bridge Colby, among others, would be the main exiled part of this, which says China is the main threat and we need to be all in on countering China and Ukraine as a sideshow, Iran as a sideshow, any of the other threats or challenges out there. The second camp would be, and Hal among others would be an exemplar of this and also see it myself with this one, sees it as more of a Eurasia challenge, right? So we would still identify China as the main threat, but we will also look at Russia as a significant threat and say that you cannot understand or counter the China challenge without also addressing the Russia challenge. And so we're taking a page from MacKinder's classic thinking on treating the Eurasian landmass as a coherent entity and treating, thinking about both the Russia threat and the China threat in tandem with each other. And then within, now notice, I think there's very, sure one can find a few straight thinkers here and there who wanna say there's no threats or China's not a problem at all or something like I'm not gonna give a whole lot of time to that one right now. There's a remarkable strategic consensus overall that wherever you come from these two, whether it's China first or Eurasian one that China still is a primary threat. And then within that, how do we think strategically about what our real goals are with China? And here I will identify three different camps. And I'll put a C in front of each of them to make it easier. The first one is the compete and cooperate camp, right? So this is the view, certainly, yeah, China's our main peer competitor and we absolutely are in a very serious competition with them. But while doing that competition, we also still need to be looking for areas of cooperation on climate change, on managing the North Korea nuclear challenge, on piracy, maybe even on some Middle East diplomacy as with China's recent role on the semi rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran, for example. And I think this is largely where most of the Biden administration is. There's gonna be a range of opinion there, but on this, they're very clear that China's the main competitor, but still looking for areas of cooperation. And the assumption behind this compete and cooperate camp is that China's behavior is the problem. So China's external behavior is the problem that we're trying to address. But while trying to address it, there still can be areas of cooperating or still areas of shared external interests and shared alignment in China's external behavior. The second camp, I'll say, is the containment camp. And again, you heard some eloquent thoughts from Hal on the insights from George Kennan. This camp is also focused on China's external behavior and is much more pessimistic about any areas or meaningful areas for cooperation, but rather says, we just need to be more realistic and somewhat grim about China's malign external behavior in the South China Sea and elsewhere, and we need to contain it. And again, the assumption here is that China's external behavior is the problem that's the threat to be managed. And maybe one analogous desired end goal for this particular school of thought would be what we might call the Vietnam model, which is Vietnam is still a Communist one-party state, but it's not really an external threat. If anything, it's kind of an emerging partner for us, right? So we can hypothetically envision a model where there is a Communist one-party state, but it is not engaged in malign international conduct or trying to overturn the international rules-based order. And again, the assumption here is that China's behavior is the problem, but there are not areas for cooperation, and we just need to focus on shaping the external environment and countering and containing that bad behavior. And the third camp, which is probably more of a minority camp, but there are a growing number of thinkers saying the quiet parts out loud on this, most recently in a really interesting article by Misha Oslin and Liza Tobin, for example. And this might, we might call the change camp or to be a little more punchy, the defeat camp. And this assumption here is not just that China's external behavior is the problem, but that the Chinese Communist party is the problem, right? So the first two camps, they'll usually talk about the PRC, because they're shorthand. We're talking about the People's Republic of China. The third camp talks about the CCP, right? It talks about the Chinese Communist party. And the assumption here is that it's the party itself that is the problem, and that until the party no longer has a monopoly on power, until the Chinese government and PLA are no longer subservient to the party, this malign external behavior as well as internal repression will continue. And so the end goal with this one, I would say it's probably in politic to call it regime change, because that implies a desire to go into a hot war, defeat. But yes, is looking or hoping for a saying that the end goal needs to be the Chinese Communist party no longer has a monopoly on power. And this would no longer be engaged in that sort of malign international conduct. One possible formulation for this strategic end goal with this one would be, borrowing from the Reagan-Gran strategy is bringing the CCP to a negotiated surrender, right? So that it no longer has that monopoly on power, but a hot war is avoided and it's done through a combination of displays of military power and negotiations and internal support for dissidents and a full spectrum of forced employment there. So I myself have an ongoing internal debate in my own confused head between camps two and three, I'll say between the contain and the change one. So depends on what day of the week and which one I will fall down on, but I'm glad that those are taking place. And I hope that the first camp who wants competition and cooperation, in some ways I hope that they will prevail because I'd like that to be the sort of China we're dealing with, but I just do not think it's the case. So, let me discuss Dr. Chaki over to you, thanks. So I wanna pick up on Dr. Inburin's exquisite setup of the 70s and the present, because I think the discussion about American power and purpose gets skewed by a mythology that there was a time when American politicians were statesmen instead of tawdry domestic politicians. And there was a time when Americans were solidly internationalist. And there was a time when America's allies were aligned with our purposes and not tiresome free riders. And I keep looking for that time and I can't find it. Because Dwight Eisenhower, probably the most internationalist American president ever, would be turning over in his grave to see that American troops were still deployed in Europe. He thought it was gonna be a temporary measure until Europeans regained their economic strength to defend themselves. I should tell you, I am a veteran. This one's for you, Admiral, since you're headed to a NATO job. I am a veteran of six months negotiation with America's allies in NATO over whether NATO was an essential pillar of European security or the essential pillar of European security. And neither we nor anybody else is ever as good as this mythology paint set. And I'll just use the example of 1954, right? Dwight Eisenhower's president, great international statesman. He campaigned that Harry Truman was a bad president and George Marshall was a bad statesman. The McCarthy hearings are still going on in the United States and Dwight Eisenhower didn't interfere in that. You know, the American military was forcibly integrating schools in the American South because black Americans couldn't get a decent education or vote or take public transport safely. The Eisenhower administration had to threaten an agonizing reappraisal of America's commitment to Europe if other Europeans wouldn't agree that Germany could be admitted to the European defense community. And by the way, they didn't admit Germany, right? So our big threat of an agonizing reappraisal got nowhere with America's allies in 1954, a time in which they were utterly reliant on American military protection. So math class isn't newly hard. Math class has always been hard. And I've spent my whole career being willing to trade America's allies in for better allies, and I still can't find better allies. And as Hal said earlier on, there's no substitute for having others to share the work with. And the United States is in a particularly good strategic power, right? We don't bring the hammer down on our allies. President Trump tried it, Congress wouldn't let him. We're a much more sentimental power than we are a strategic power. But even in that confines, America's strategy since 1945 has been largely consistent. And the reason it gets sustained is because it's the most cost effective strategy available. Our disgraced former president was correct to say America's allies don't do nearly what they should. But he didn't ask the other relevant question, which is, has any dominant power ever had this much voluntary assistance from others? And the answer to that is also no. Because the US after World War II gets the operating system of a successful and cost effective international strategy correct, which is that the setting of rules that we more or less follow as well, but are prejudicial to small and middle powers. That is Luxembourg. Anybody know how many soldiers there are in the Luxembourg Army? 1,700, and the Lieutenant Colonel who commands them, their chief of defense gets the same number of votes as Mark Millie gets at NATO. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had to waste six months in that negotiation, right? We could have brought an end to that. But that's why the international order that the US and its allies creates is so robust. Because there's not a better alternative for the countries that do not have the economic, political, or military strength to change the international rules to be more advantageous. And that's why I'm confident ultimately that the Chinese gamble, even though it's the most interesting social science experiment that's gone on since the American Republic was being founded, right? We are living through the great test of Hegel's theory, which has been an article of faith in American foreign policy for at least 70 years, that as people grow more prosperous, they become more demanding political consumers, right? The reason that the most sustainably prosperous countries in the world are free societies is because of Hegel's argument that as people grow more prosperous, they demand more of their government. China's the great test of that, my friends. And I'll give you the assessment of why I think they're gonna fail at the end. But before we get there, it's easy to underestimate what the United States has right. We have been a disappointing country for 247 years. I would encourage you to read a book called Fears of a Setting Sun, because it recounts the history of America's founding fathers' belief that the Republic was unsustainable, right? So it's not, this notion that we're failing isn't new. It's actually the reason we continue to succeed because we're always so desperately anxious about what we're doing wrong. So the economist has just run a couple of weeks ago the economic numbers. As a refresher course about the sustainability of what the United States has right. In 1990, the US economy was 25% of global GDP. It's still 25% of global GDP. The proportion of US GDP among the most developed economies has increased from 40% in 1990 to 58% now. So we are succeeding against the most successful economies. The centrality of the dollar for all of the breathless fainting spells about challenges to the dollar. The dollar is more central to the global economy than it has ever been. The United States economy has a third more workers than we did in 1990. More of them have graduate and postgraduate degrees. They work more hours than they worked in 1990. A fifth of global patents are American, which is the equivalent to both China and Germany combined. The five biggest corporations R&D spend in R&D spending, the breadth and depth of capital markets and perhaps most importantly, chapter seven, excuse me, chapter 11 bankruptcy. That is the secret to the go-go vitality of the American economy is that there are Silicon Valley investors who would not loan money to somebody who hasn't run a company bankrupt because they're not gonna make money if you're making cautious choices. And chapter 11 bankruptcy means you just dust yourself off and start over. The United States has at least 33 treaty allies, all of whom contribute to what we like to call the international order. It has the best neighbors in the international order. And I don't just mean the oceans. I mean Canada and Mexico as well. Probably the biggest opportunity we are missing in terms of cementing and advancing American prosperity and American power is not taking the opportunity for deeper integration of North America as an energy market, as a labor market. But I would submit to you that, and of course immigration, right? We keep substituting for the educational failures of us Americans by immigration. And the secret to immigration isn't just our great universities. It isn't just that you can find a Hmong community or you can find a Vietnamese community or you can find a Nigerian community somewhere in America where you're gonna be able to feel at home. But it's that you can be one generation safely in the middle class and your kids are gonna grow up and run the country until somebody else can figure out the problems of governing over diversity. And that diversity is what gives us the adaptability. It gives us the risk tolerance that makes the United States so dynamic economically and socially. Theodore Roosevelt when he was president went to my great home state of California and he was a little bit shocked to be honest. And he said, when I am in California I do not feel I am in the West. California is the West of the West. And I think that's extrapolatable for the United States right now. The problems that the United States is experiencing are the problems that any and every society governing over diversity is gonna have to struggle with. The United States is unique in lots of ways. My favorite description of us comes from a British historian, Bertha Ann Reuter in 1923 who writes, Americans are a people so extreme in politics or religion or both that they could not live in peace anywhere else. But again, we are different and more risk tolerant. But I would rather, and I think the Chinese National Security Advisor would also rather have the problems that the United States has rather than the problems that they have. So taking us to their problems. Anybody know what per capita GDP is in China? $17,000. It's roughly in the neighborhood of the Dominican Republic. In Mississippi, the poorest state in the United States, it's $50,000. Moreover, we are not looking at the problems of a stampedingly successful China. We are now looking at the problems of a China marooned in the middle income trap. That may make them more dangerous to us but as Goldman Sachs and Chase and all the other big Wall Street banks that were so hot on China as 10% GDP growth year on year in perpetuity. All of them are now converging around the fact that China's GDP growth is probably gonna be less than the United States is from here on out. Moreover, Apple raised so since Dr. Chris Cronin raised technology and Dr. Invidin raised Apple, no American tech company placed a bigger bet on China than Apple. And they are now trying to not say out loud but within two years, reposition 25% of their production out of China. And that's just the starting point. So the mystery is, why did China activate the antibodies against their continued success rather than wait us out, right? Hope President Trump gets a second term so he can collapse America's alliances. Hope that they win the tech race before we can respond. I'd love to argue about that. But the problem that we'll raise which is American politics, right? They're so fervid, they're so disputatious. I would remind you that nothing approaches the election of 1800. It takes the Congress 36 ballots to elect Thomas Jefferson President, right? Like that shouldn't actually be a hard call. And read some of what the founding fathers have to say about each other as traitors in 1800. Or just to pick a more recent example. In the 1960s, you have a sitting American president shot and killed. The country's two major civil rights leaders shot and killed, a presidential nominee shot and killed. American politics are a danger right now. I seed you that point. But American politics have very often been hair-raising. And I will close by saying that the best article ever written not by my three colleagues on this stage was written by the journalist James Fallows in about 2009. And it has some long boring title like how America can rise again. It's in the Atlantic. And he makes this magnificent simile that the way to think about American dynamism is that we're bad at a lot of things. We're dumb, we're lazy, we wanna watch the Kardashians. The American public is never gonna care about naval strategy in the abstract. And they're not gonna do all of the admirable things Professor Kirk Cronin says they should. They're gonna watch South Park and the Kardashians and they're gonna eat at McDonald's. But here's the thing. The United States gets focused when we realize we are failing relative to somebody else. And that's what Fallows gets right. And what I think I see right now is the gears meshing 80% of the American public thinks China is an enemy of the United States. American businesses are beginning to de-risk. Wall Street may even someday stop trying to make money in China once they start losing money in China. And so you see what is the great saving grace of the United States which is the American people have terrible knowledge. Actually Jim Madison, I saw this, we did the biggest survey of public attitudes about military issues that have been done in about 25 years. The American public is shockingly ignorant. That's not the news. The news is that their judgment is actually terrific. And I think we are seeing that right now as James Fallows predicted. Thank you very much, Corey, Will, Audrey. It is now time to open up the floor to all of you out there for questions and comments, please. Right here in front. Hi, I'm Randy Johnson. I'm with the Foundation. What I'd like to know is with Russia and China, where do they see the strengths and the weaknesses of the United States? Because a lot of time our discourse has been us looking at them. How do they see us? So can I take a swing at that? Sure, Corey. So Americans, I think because of the long shadow of the mistakes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin to doubt that our values are universal, that two people who are most convinced America's values are universal are Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Because you do not have to build a surveillance state where you can penalize people for any choice they make unless you genuinely fear the choices those people are gonna make. And I think the theory that accords most closely with the data of why Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine to attempt to destroy it is because Ukraine was slipping out of his grasp into the West and that poses such a threat to his ability to continue to control Russia. I'll just do a quick foot stop on that. I'll tack off. I think they look at the United States and they see four key strengths. The first one that very much echoing what Corey said, our values would say find very threatening. Our allies also picking up what Corey said. That's why they spend so much time trying to split and divide us from our allies as they don't have real allies. We do third, of course, our economy and fourth, our military. I mean, there's a reason both of them are trying to win without fighting, right? Neither of them want a hot war with the United States. That's partly why Putin never has directly attacked a NATO country. Why I think he's been surprised at the response in Ukraine. As have we all. I'd only like to add that I may be colored by the fact that my first job working in the Pentagon, actually, it was a summer internship, was writing speeches for Secretary of the Navy, John Layman. So, or supporting, there was a commander who did the main writing, but I did an awful lot of additional writing. I was sort of a writing machine. So I do think that the American people are pretty much as smart or as dumb as they were then. So I agree with you there, Corey. But I also think that they understood the role of the Navy a little bit better than they do now. So I'm not casting aspersions at our wonderful domestic population. I'm just saying that I think we can explain what our Navy is doing, perhaps a little bit in different terms. The other thing I would say is that I grew up in a Navy family and spent a good deal of my time as a 17, 18 year old living in the American Embassy in Moscow back during the old Cold War days. And one of the big differences I see now compared to what we were doing then is that kids like me learned Russian before we went off and did other things. We studied Russian history in high school. There was a tremendous effort to try to make sure that the American people had an understanding of who our adversary was, but not just a superficial one and understanding that had some knowledge of history. We also understood our own American history in ways that I find the students coming through our universities now have no clue. So I really do think that as dumb or as smart as the American people are, we can do a little bit better. I used to take copies of America magazine. This is probably way before any of your time, but one of the reasons why we were so successful against the Soviet Union was that we presented ourselves in a strong, unified way that I also used to bring copies of Dr. Zhivago illicitly in my suitcase to go back and visit my family in the American Embassy. That projection of our values was a very large reason, that narrative was a large reason that is often underestimated with respect to its role in the end of the Cold War. It was how we projected ourselves and how we presented our unity, I think that made an enormous difference. So what worries me as a strategic vulnerability in the eyes of our enemies is that they see us being disunified and far more oriented toward whether we're in red or blue America, and I think we need to be much more unified in the fact that we are Americans. Yes, right here. Thanks, David Walker with the foundation. A terrific presentation. I studied in Europe in 1981 and I vividly remember the Pershing 2 cruise missile debate. You never would have expected the outcome that came. Our future success in terms of dealing with the Chinese rests on effective deterrents. And I'd like you just to address that beyond the surface developments are aware of, AUKUS and so forth, but how do you think of an effective deterrents policy in the Pacific, including allies and other economic and other factors? Thanks. So I think the Biden administration strategy is over militarizing the problem, which is especially problematic that they, given that they are not buying a military capable of bearing the weight of the over militarization of the strategy. What it looks like to me that America's allies are pleading for is an economic vision that can help all of us reduce our reliance on China. And because the president's a trade protectionist, he won't rejoin TPP, he won't negotiate market access, which gives people, which gives allies incentives to French shore businesses to do what we want about keeping Chinese technology out of their own systems. Building in greater resilience would be a better American strategy. So I worry about the current approach. To deter China, the military is an important piece of it, but I share President Eisenhower's view that the role of the American military should be to hold things in place while the dynamism of the American economy and American culture wins the war. And I think, you know, Audrey, I agree with you about Dr. Chivago and about American culture. I think that's really important, but it's also true that American culture is Silicon Valley chic, right? Everybody wants to dress like Kara Swisher now. It's Disneyland, it's the Kardashians. And so we shouldn't underestimate the magnetism of average American life, and we have a tendency to. What I think I see on the part of the Chinese government is the beginnings of accountability. And I'd love to know whether my three co-panelists agree with this. It looks to me like the end of zero COVID is the first time that the Chinese government actually feared the mobilization of their own population. You saw it in little spaces after earthquakes would collapse schools, or what it looks to me like the Chinese government is particularly afraid of is old people protesting the government. And when they began to do so, the Chinese government folded. And so that's why I'm confident that actually we are genuinely willing winning this competition already. Well, just to add again, while very much echoing a lot of what Corey said, especially on the economic component, I think with deterrence, right? To somewhat oversimplify, there's really three ingredients to it. There's capability, the military capability to impose punishing costs. There's resolve, there's the intention and willingness to actually use that. And there's communication. There's declaring to the adversary that you have the capability and the resolve, right? That is the basic package of deterrence. Does China see that from us right now? I think they're not sure, right? I mean, I think they are aware of some of our capability deficiencies, but they also see that we're moving to address them. I think they're unsure of our resolve. And they hear mixed messages. So I don't think we've got the fully robust deterrence framework in place. Here's also where I do think Ukraine is critical, right? I mean, one of the single biggest factors in Xi Jinping's decision-making calculus on does he move on Taiwan is does the West continue to show resolution in supporting Ukraine? Because he sees that in some ways as a proxy for whether we would stand with Taiwan or not. That was the point that I was gonna make. So I'll just endorse that, that the war in Ukraine is an enormous episode of deterrence in the sense that it has shown a remarkable gathering together of our allies and partners in ways that China is paying attention to. So those who worry that it's a faint for China to believe that it can also change the world order by attacking Taiwan, I think they should also consider the fact that the Ukrainians are resisting quite effectively with a large alliance behind them, and that should give the Chinese perhaps more pause, not more reason to engage in aggression. Other questions and comments from the audience. Come on, we didn't say anything you don't agree with. That can't be true. It's so statistically- Way in the back there. All right, good afternoon. Lieutenant Commander Joseph Strand, U.S. Navy. I really appreciate everything that the sentiments that the panel has made today, and if you could indulge me for a second for a couple thoughts. Dr. Cronin, in your articulation and concern of education, I would like to posit that I think the biggest challenge, and I'm not sure if you'll agree, is that there's this sense of decouplization of scientific reasoning to a more emotional approach and wave top understanding of everything within our culture, and so we depend on soundbites and emotional engagement versus having a very strong foundation to have open and honest dialogue and discussions from point of education. And so I think that could I say that that's probably one of the biggest changes that you've seen from your perspective. Number two, I agree that the use of AI technology and technology as it's growing is super important as we look to engage near peer adversaries. One of the challenges that I've seen, even in our current platforms, when we're using partnerships, is that there's a challenge in being able to fix even certain equipments that are allowed to be able to use or maintain our equipment. So what happens when we're in a near peer adversarial, austere, disaggregate operation and certain key equipment goes down and we have contracts that say we can't fix that equipment and how do we actually get people to that to fix it? So that's it. I'm not 100% sure I understand your second question, so I may ask you to clarify that, but let me respond to your first one first. Yes, I think that education has moved much more toward a kind of relativity that believes that there is no such thing as fact. I won't even use the word truth because that's become very politicized too, but it used to be that we could do things like correct people's grammar and that was seen as being something that was desirable to do, and by the way, I still do it because I believe that we need to help our students perform well and raise themselves up and be the best that they can be, but I don't think it would surprise you to find out that there are some aspects of some places in academia, I'll be rather vague here, where you're supposed to take all opinions as being equally valid regardless of the facts or the need to correct. So I agree with you. The second thing that we have not done is taught people history. I've already said that, but if you don't have any understanding of what's gone before, you have nothing to judge what's happening now. So you basically have two pieces of raw material, you've got history and you've got theory, and everything is focused on theory, almost nothing is focused in general terms on history, and if you don't know your own history, then you're not gonna be able to make sound decisions in charting your way forward. So yes, I think what we fall back on is this kind of short term, oftentimes social media-driven or even regular media-driven framing and our young people don't have the basic structures and frameworks and education that they need in order to judge those on the facts. Thank you and good morning. In 1981, oh, Tony Cowden, sorry. In 1981, I don't recall anyone predicting that by the end of 1991, the USSR would no longer exist. So I'd like to comment your comment on the following belief that China today is in the beginning of rapid demographic collapse. They have severe economic problems, and as Dr. Shacky pointed out, the leadership does not trust the decisions that their people would make if they were able to make decisions. So I'd like you to comment on the belief that in 2033, we're not gonna be competing with China. It's gonna be much more like the early 1990s where we're trying to deal with the rapidly dissolving great power. Thank you. I'll take a stab at that, but others may wanna chime in. So a lot I can say there. I mean, first, a general strong footstomp that, yes, this is why drawing on this book I've recently published on Reagan and his grand strategy, it was remarkable going to look back and see how the overwhelming conventional wisdom in the late 70s and early 80s in academia, in the intelligence community, among the general public, was that the Soviet Union was a strong, durable nation state and a permanent part of the geopolitical landscape. And the challenge was just to manage and contain them because they weren't going away. They'd been with us for seven decades at that point. They were gonna be with us for at least another century. And I can tell you, pages and pages of citations, and this is not a partisan comment at all, right? This is just the conventional wisdom among just about everyone. I do, there's also pretty abundant evidence, and this is why Reagan, I think, is a, underappreciated as a strategic visionary, he rejected most that conventional wisdom. He actually did see much more fragility and vulnerability within the Soviet system. And there's, I cited in my book, a remarkable transcript of an NSC meeting that Reagan is chairing in April of 1982. And it is to essentially review and codify the draft of what becomes NSDD 32, his first national security strategy. And Reagan and his team had met informally beforehand, before they bring the other NSC principles in and kind of talked about the big goal here. And he lays out in the meeting, here's the different pillars of our strategy, and then he says, we believe that the next 10 years are going to be fundamentally transformative in the Cold War and East-West relations, and our goal is the dissolution of the Soviet empire. They were off by three months, right? So this is April of 1982, and the Soviet Union dissolves in December of 1991, right? So that's where there was tremendous strategic force. And now there's a lot more nuance to the story, of course, of course, than that, but as many of these previously classified documents have now been declassified, and we can understand a little bit more of the official mind and internal thinking of the strategists, the administration. I think there was more awareness of Soviet vulnerabilities. What's that mean for China today? I don't know. And this is where I go back to kind of an ongoing argument with myself about, are we facing a weak China or a strong China? At the time the Reagan administration was facing, and this is where maybe it is similar, a paradoxically strong and weak Soviet Union. The Soviets were at the apex of their military power. They probably hit that in 82 or 83, right? But they're economic and ideological and all other elements of power to sustain the country were very weak and decrepit. And that's actually a very dangerous situation, right? So think of the Soviets in the early 80s as a wounded cornered bear, right? And that can be the most dangerous kind. We may be facing that with China now, and I can make the argument for the weak China looking at the demographic vulnerabilities and economic imbalances and a large but really untested military. And the fact I've said before in other contexts, when Xi Jinping puts his twisted head on his pillow at night and is losing sleep, he's not losing sleep primarily over his fear of America. He's losing sleep over his fear of his own people, right? How else do you understand the incredible resources invested in the most massive pervasive surveillance state in human history to control and monitor what 1.3, 1.4 billion people are thinking? So there's a lot of vulnerabilities there. But again, is this kind of like the 1950s Soviet Union when it's got some problems that's still gonna be around for a few more decades or maybe like the 1980s Soviet Union, I don't know. What are the little provocation I'll put out there which may show some similarities or some dissimilarities? And this is why I will not be invited back to Beijing anytime soon. The Soviet Union's lifespan was 1917 until 1991. That's 74 years. The People's Republic of China was founded in 1949. We are now in the year 2023, 74 years after its founding. And Xi Jinping is terrified of that. So I will take the bait and wager you that by 2035, Apple will have pivoted back to China because China will be a democratizing country and part of the West. Time for one more in the way back there and then we'll adjourn. Hello, Julia Koff, NYU Stern. I'm wondering if the panel can help me understand what it is we're talking about when we talk about power. So far, I've heard a lot of different answers to that question today. I've heard GDP, cross-sector partnerships, trust in our military institutions, the quantity of universities, the proportion of American scholars in those universities, the gap or relative amount of integration between our strategists and our scientists. And I'm left wondering what are these? Are these the antecedents of power? Are these the consequences of power? Are these proxies for power? Or is this what actually makes up power? And so a bigger picture in my question is what are we talking about when we talk about power? And given that, how do we make sure we're focusing on the right things in service of American power? So internationally, power is the ability to set and enforce rules. And it has come, all of those are both components and consequences that you mentioned, right? You can't have a strong military unless you have the economy to be able to fund it. Your military is gonna be brittle if people don't believe in what they're fighting for. So it's big and sloppy and that's why most strategists love the game of baseball because there are so many variables and slight adjustments to any of them throw everything off. It's complicated and contingent. So the risk of being too self-referential, I've given a lot of thought this over time and a few years ago I wrote an article for the now defunct American interest magazine titled What Is Power? And I go all the ways of different ways to measure power and dynamism, so I'll reference that. But I'll just say that my definition of power might beckon one is the ability to employ resources to influence others to get the outcome that you want. I think that encompasses both hard power, more coercive and soft power, power of attraction or influence. And all those different things you describe are elements of it, education, economic dynamism, creativity, entrepreneurship, but also the ability of the American government to both encourage those and yet harness those towards the employment of national influence. But again, it's gotta be tied to getting the outcomes that you actually want. And we can point to any number of sad cases in our recent history where we marshaled a lot of power, but we didn't get the outcomes that we want. Yeah, I was gonna say, power is the ability to leave and to achieve your ends. And all of the things we've been talking about are elements of that. So that's an old classic question, what is power? And there have been statesmen and academics and brilliant people like Will answering that question for, I would say millennia, but that would be my answer. And to reference the Naval War College, Alfred Thayer Mahan and his classic work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History laid out six elements that led to great national achievement. Join with me in thanking the panel for this wonderful, wonderful panel. Okay, before you go, two quick points. The first is the Naval War College Foundation has graciously provided some food and light beverage outside in the lobby. So I would encourage the students and the civilians to continue their conversation for the next 30 minutes or so out there and get to share your perspectives. And then the final thing is we start at 08.30 tomorrow morning, so we'll see you then. Thank you.