 We just couldn't have better people to kick off this conversation than Representative Andy Kim, Rebecca Lissner, and Mira Rapp-Houper. As you heard, Representative Kim is the son of immigrants and a Rhodes Scholar, a veteran of US government service in the State Department, Obama White House, and Afghanistan. And the just re-elected congressman from New Jersey's Swing Third District. He's only the second Korean American to serve in the House of Representatives, where he serves on the Armed Services Committee, Coronavirus Subcommittee, Progressive Caucus, and Asian American Caucus, among others. Rebecca Lissner is Assistant Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department at the US Naval War College and a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University Center for Security Studies. She has also held research fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House, Council on Foreign Relation, and Yale University's International Security Studies. And she's also served in government as special advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Energy. Mira Rapp-Houper is a senior fellow at Yale's Poltite China Center and currently on leave from the Council on Foreign Relations. She has previously held research positions at the Center for New American Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Mira and Rebecca together are authors of An Open World, how America can win the contest for the open order. And as Ann Marie said, we just couldn't have, sorry, for 20th century order. We just couldn't have a more topical moment for this. But Mira and Rebecca, in addition, over the past three years have published together and separately an impressive body of work both cataloging the decline of the existing world order, critiquing US approaches to it, and pointing a way forward that accepts dramatic change and highlights a new role for the US and our alliance relationships. And it's that set of issues that we want to discuss today. I will also just mention if you're intrigued by the book, you can get it from New America's partner Solid State Books. And please pass us your questions as we go along by using the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. Rebecca, why don't we start with you giving us a quick overview of the book's argument before we shift to current events? Sure, well, first of all, thank you so much. It is such a pleasure to be here at New America, to be in conversation with Representative Kim and with you, Heather, and to have such kind words of introduction from Ann Marie. There's really, as you said, no one that Mira and I would rather have this conversation with. So we are both just so delighted to be here today. And to talk about our book, An Open World. So our book is really a call to action. Because over the course of 2020 so far, COVID has revealed an international system that is on the brink of collapse. International cooperation has proved elusive even in the face of generationally defining pandemic. International institutions have proven inadequate to the challenges that we face. And great powers, especially the US and China, are increasingly at loggerheads with each other. But the fact is that the forces responsible for this damage actually predate both COVID and Donald Trump's presidency, and will be with us in a Biden administration, even when COVID is in our rearview mirror, as is Donald Trump. So what we argue in the book is that for the United States to recover from the present crisis, we need a fundamentally new global strategy. A strategy that rejects both nationalism and nostalgia, and instead embraces forward looking American leadership in defense of an open world. Thanks. I was particularly taken by a comment that you make on toward the end of the book. Quote, at present, the United States is ill-equipped to implement a long-term, coherent, and complex global strategy. And that's really a pretty devastating and comprehensive critique of where we've gotten to as a society and as a foreign policy establishment, as you say, without regard to the one's views on the White House incumbent. So, Mira, can I turn to you and ask you to catalog for us what you think needs to change? And then I'll turn to the congressman to tell us his vision for what can change in this new world that we're heading into. Absolutely. Heather, thank you so much. I'll add my thanks to Rebecca, to New America for hosting us, to Ann Marie for her generous words of introduction. Offer my congratulations to Congressman Kim on his reelection. And the biggest thanks really are owed to you, Heather, because you've been such a supporter of our work these last several years, and we're so glad to be having this conversation with you. There is a whole lot that needs to change in the United States and globally for the United States to be able to implement a vision along the lines that we suggest here. Since we wrote this book and put the final ink on our manuscript, the problems that we diagnosed in its pages have frankly gotten much harder. We have seen COVID unleash itself across the world with all of the devastating effects that Rebecca described. We have now seen an election outcome that while providing a decisive victory for President-elect Biden has nonetheless made clear the fact that Trumpism, which obviously placed unbelievable pressure on the United States role in the world, has not been entirely reputed and indeed will be with us for some time to come. And as a consequence, we are now looking at a divided government with a likely Republican-controlled Senate, democratically-controlled House, and a Democratic presidency that will make Biden, Harris administration foreign policy priorities extraordinarily difficult to accomplish. So the question that this all poses to us is not whether we are at a decisive moment. There is no question that we are. Indeed, I think it's been obvious for several years that what was transpiring in the United States was a moment of immense destruction that nonetheless have the opportunity to pose itself as a moment of recreation if the United States did elect new leadership and it has. But the question ahead of us now is whether or not we're going to be able to seize that mantle and actually chart a new grand strategic course with all of the coherence and resources and foresight that that requires. And exactly, as you suggested from our book, Heather, that we are skeptical that the United States at least was able to marshal in these last few years. What will be required for a new administration to do so is nothing less than an incredibly ambitious and clear-eyed vision for what it would like its role in the world to be. That vision will have to rely more heavily than ever on allies and partners and multilateral organizations and institutions. And it will require the United States to be able to enact this incredibly ambitious foreign policy agenda against all of the headwinds we've just described when its primary focus must nonetheless remain containing the COVID crisis and getting the pandemic under control. So it is an ethical charge and there is no guarantee that the United States will be able to rise to the challenge. But we nonetheless think that we have some ideas in these pages that will allow the United States help itself to do so if it is up to the task. Congressman, an agenda that's both ambitious and clear-eyed. I think you just heard the charge from our colleagues as indisputably one of a new generation of leaders in the national security space. What are your hopes for the moment? We'll start with maybe what are your hopes for the executive branch in the moment that we're leading into? What would you sitting in Congress most like to see a Biden administration do early on the national security front? Thank you, Heather. And I just want to start by just congratulating Mira and Rebecca on such an extraordinary book. And it's an honor of mine to be able to be here in this discussion with you and to really raise up your voices here. Because I think it's incredibly important at this seminal moment. I really think we are at a paradigm shift here. We are really at this cost. But what comes next is very much uncertain. And this is something that provides me with a tremendous amount of concern as what we know is for folks in national security, uncertainty is our enemy here. It's what gives us a lot of stress about what comes next here. And the Biden administration certainly has a lot on its plate. For me, when I try to think about what I'd like to see them accomplish, what I'd like to see them set forward, is not just about better policies, but also about better politics. And it's about setting a new tone for American leadership, both domestically and abroad. It's about conducting ourselves with a different style and a different approach that hopefully will be able to restore trust and rebuild coalitions. I think so much of that is important. I think that infrastructure there is so critical to be able to get any policies across with it domestically or to have the kind of transnational approach that we need. We very much need that type of infrastructure. I think President-elect Biden is in a strong position to accomplish that. But one thing that I've seen in particular in the House and in the Congress and seeing it in the politics with large, and I don't think it's necessarily a surprise, but there's not really a lot of room for strategic thinking in politics. Our politics have become so near-sighted. In fact, it's become extraordinarily reactionary. And there's not a lot of people thinking six months out, 10 months out, even 10 years out. We're honestly, we're often looking at one day at a time, one tweet at a time. And I think that that's going to give us a very difficult environment in which to be able to take some of these ideas from this book or some of these visions and actually be able to craft the kind of response that we need. So I agree that we have a lot of challenges. And a strategic vision and an implementation of that strategy is hard to imagine. But what I will say is that it's necessary though. Like we cannot fail at this because it's so important for us to accomplish whether that's because of climate change and the recognition that we just simply are running against the clock there. Or just the fact that the rest of the world is just changing. I think Mira and Rebecca did a great job of just recognizing just what is changing, whether it's in the Indo-Pacific or elsewhere. We are not just in a vacuum here. We are within a dynamic change in canvas and something that is going to be proceeding, whether or not we get our acts together or not. So I want to pick up specifically on alliances. Congressman, since you mentioned them, and there's something that Mira and Rebecca, you've both written about quite a bit. And sometimes our public politics gives us kind of this brain dead conversation where either the choice is we go back to some kind of 80s vision of what alliances were. And those of us who remember the 80s know that the alliances weren't like that in the 80s anyway. Or that we have no alliances at all, which has sometimes seemed to be the Trump vision, but not only the Trump vision. So could you both talk a little bit about what your vision for what US alliances in, we'll call it, the post-hegemonic moment, look like. And then Congressman, I'll ask you how that resonates in Congress and in the partisan environment that we have. I'm happy to kick us off on that, Heather. I think exactly as you indicate, we are too often faced with this false choice when it comes to the future of America's alliances. The reality is that alliances are not an end unto themselves. They're not something that the United States should preserve because they're a nice to have. Rather, they're a tool of statecraft that has been extraordinarily successful for the United States for the last 70 years, allowing it to preserve its own security and prosperity at a reasonable cost. But the reality is also that this tool was largely designed for the Cold War period to deter and defend against conflict with the Soviet Union. And there is a lot of work to be done to modernize American alliances in Europe and in Asia if we are to bring them up to date for the challenges that we're actually facing in the 21st century and help to keep the United States and its allies safe and prosperous for years and decades to come. So I'll say just a few moments more about what that means. Of course, as I've alluded to, America's alliances were designed primarily to provide deterrence to ensure that Europe and Asia were not overrun by the Soviet Union and its proxies. But as has of course occurred in many different ways since the fall of the Soviet Union, it's ever more apparent that while great power military competition is certainly a great concern to the United States and to its allies in both regions, it is hardly the only concern. We can point to everything from Russia's election interference or China's maritime advances in the South China Sea or actions over Hong Kong to understand that so many of what we now define as national security threats in the 21st century aren't military at all. And then you can layer on top of that issues related to climate change or security around new technologies and it's crystal clear that if the United States and its allies are to stay safe and prosperous in the world that we actually face, they increasingly need to drag their cooperation into these non-military domains. So what I've written about in a book that I published in June and what Rebecca and I have also written about together are some ideas for how the United States can modernize this system. This really relies on the idea that alliances remain hugely beneficial to the United States in a world where it needs cost sharing arrangements. That is where it wants to ask allies to take on some of the burden for their shared national security. And what I argue is that the way to do this is to expand the aperture of how we think about our alliances. That is to increasingly get NATO and our allies in the Asia Pacific to take up the charge of working collectively to combat corruption and disinformation and issues of new technology. Because if we do that, that increases the resource pool that we have to counter those challenges together. But I'll stop there for now and see if Rebecca wants to add anything to that. Sure, well, what I think Mira's excellent comments really show is that the very nature of power, how we conceive of it, how we measure it in the 21st century is going to be different than it was in the 20th century or even than it was in the 19th century. The fact is that power at its heart is about influence over outcomes. And it used to be that economic power was basically the foundation for military power. And that military power exercised through territorial conquest was the way that states got wealthier, the way that they exerted influence, basically the way that states got what they wanted in trying to organize the international system in a way that was beneficial to their own interests. Now the fact is today that of course, territorial conquest and great power war, as Mira said, is still possible, but it has become a much more remote possibility. We've had the nuclear revolution which has imposed a condition of mutually assured destruction on nuclear armed great powers that makes them less likely to go to war with each other. We also have a highly evolved rules-based international system that has shifted incentives away from war and towards other types of exchange and interdependence as the way for states to get richer and maintain their own security. So, and we think about how power is actually gonna be exercised in the decades to come, so much of it is going to have to do with technological power, commercial power, economic power, and in many ways also ideological power. And what that means is it will not be the sole province of great powers, rather our allies themselves bring to bear tremendous capabilities. They have highly advanced economies. They have well-developed technology sectors. So it is absolutely in the interest of the United States to shore up the mechanisms that help us cooperate with those very powerful states that you might call the middle powers who are our allies. And some of that cooperation will proceed through our treaty alliances as they have existed. Some of them will proceed in parallel with them through organizations like the G7 or the OECD or perhaps a new concert of democracy type structure. So there's no question that when you look ahead, especially to a more competitive geopolitical landscape where the US is trying to write new rules for 21st century international politics and in many ways trying to prevent China from writing its own, we simply cannot do that on our own. So these allies and the diverse forms of power that they bring to bear are going to be absolutely essential in the years to come. And it is in our strong, strong interest to figure out the best ways to leverage those competencies. Congressman Rebecca has just spelled out a whole set of sources of power where the very countries that are our allies that we want to build these new relationships with are also our competitors. What are, and this is one of the places, one of the contradictions that the current administration has exploited very adroitly for political purposes, if not substantive outcomes necessarily over the last four years. What are the prospects of being able to both compete and cooperate not just with our opponents but also with our close allies and yet build a rebuild really strong relationships? Is there a prospect for an alliance system with allies that we also compete with? Yeah, I mean, there is absolutely. And I think we often really immediately focus in on the competitive aspects of this all. And I think in part because people are often thinking about this, is this a new cold war they're entering? Is this a new era of great power competition? We immediately start to think back to what it is that we've experienced before. But I think what Mira and Rebecca have so clearly articulated is that that just simply won't be the case anymore. You cannot simply kind of dust off the old, the long telegram and come up with some idea on how to be able to move this forward. You have to come up with something new and that includes a certain level strategic cooperation that we need to figure out how to be able to build this architecture on top of. One such alliance that I've been engaged in is, for instance, with South Korea. And there's been a lot of strain put on the US-South Korea alliance over the last couple of years where this administration has talked about it as if it's just this kind of transactional relationship where South Korea is getting benefit from us and as a result they need to pay more. And it's seen in that kind of commodity trade. But when you look at it in a bigger picture of just like when we're looking at what is our future relationship to China? What is the threat of North Korea moving forward? It obviously then complicates what exactly our relationship to South Korea is. And it gives different set of values to that in a different area in which we can think about that. So that's one aspect of it that I think is incredibly important. And I think reassuring those alliances are important. But to build up what Rebecca said, there are lots of different structures of power that are out there. And one thing I do want to build upon and I think the alliance structure is certainly important. But I often tend to think a little bit more in terms of coalitions here because I also see that there is a dilution of what it is that a nation state can actually control here than from before. We do not simply have this kind of Westphalian structure of nation states talking to other nation states in the traditional alliances, multinational corporations, other types of institutions are incredibly important, especially when we look at the issues like climate change that we deal with. Or for instance, cybersecurity, which the two authors have talked about. For instance, with cybersecurity, there's a lot there that we need to think about of just new norms here, new ways in which to understand how we're going to engage in that. And that is not something that can simply be determined by nation states in terms of how that will be proceeding. So when we look at this strategy, we cannot just look at it through that type of sovereign lens that we necessarily had before and it requires something else. And we recognize that your transnational problems require transnational solutions. And as a result, we should come up with something that is looking at the totality of the actors out there and figure out how best we can try to maneuver that. But it gives us other pieces, other opportunities in which to be able to engage as well in potentially utilizing some of these other tools, these other actors to be able to increase our leverage. And I think that that is something where I think we can have a way to maximize our impacts going forward. So the three of you among you have very politely and subtly just trashed a number of the kind of favored conceptual systems for understanding international relations. So I heard some shade being thrown at the Westphalian system. I heard some shade being thrown at New Cold War. I heard some shade being thrown at Great Power Competition. So Mira and Rebecca, I wonder if I can get you to pull out a little, a few more threads of what sort of open world theory that we can call it that? What are the core tenets of open world theory that distinguish or set you apart from the other systems that as I say, you very politely but firmly cast some doubt on in the last minute or two? Well, these are really important distinctions. So why don't I just sort of lay out the core tenets of an openness strategy and then I'll kick it to Mira and she can draw some of those distinctions in sharper terms. So in essence an openness strategy is a new foreign policy vision for how the United States can secure its most important interests and values even though it is no longer the world's sole superpower. So basically an openness strategy recognizes that the United States can only stay safe, secure and prosperous in an open world. What does an open world look like? Well, it looks first as if all states can be able to make their own political decisions free of foreign interference and free of outright domination by hostile states. So all states are able to make free and independent political choices is pillar number one. Second, the global commons should remain open. That means that international waterways, airspace and outer space should all be both open and accessible for commercial and military transit. So states like China should not be able to close off the South China Sea to access by commercial vessels or military vessels, whatever it might be. Third, global cooperation and trade should proceed through international institutions that are governed transparently and modernized for 21st century challenges. And just to preview perhaps something that Mira is going to say it's important to recognize that these three pillars of an open world do not require the United States to dominate the world militarily. All we need to do is prevent other states from doing so while joining with like-minded allies and partners to build exactly the types of coalitions for international openness that Congressman Kim was just talking about. So I'll let Mira now begin to draw some of the distinctions between what an open world looks like versus some of these competing strategic frames. Thanks so much, Rebecca. You've just laid it out beautifully. So I'll take up the charge of theoretical heresy that Heather just laid out. As Rebecca importantly noted, what we're laying out here is really a framework that argues that the United States does not need to be the dominant power in every corner of the world in order to protect its vital interests and to advance a vision of global order that is consistent with those interests. And in so doing, we're really rejecting two major schools of thought in international relations and foreign policy and arguing that they are false choices. The first thing we're rejecting is the idea that some form of liberal internationalism requires the United States to maintain primacy. We reject the notion that a United States in the world requires Washington to dominate every corner of it. And indeed, we think there are an infinite number of forms of internationalism that are possible and that this openness strategy that we're advocating is just one of them. Although, of course, we do see a robust role for the United States in the world. The other set of theories and approaches to international relations that we reject are those that essentially call for some form of retrenchment that basically suggests that if the United States is to be realistic and clear-eyed and pragmatic in the way that it sees 21st century power politics, it needs to largely withdraw from its positions abroad, perhaps, and some of its alliances, reduce its troop presences, become less involved in world affairs, and focus primarily on its domestic challenges at home. That is that the world ahead of us, if you are pragmatic, suggests that the United States should retrench. We reject that school of thought, too, and indeed argue that pragmatism and a clear-eyed approach to power politics in the 21st century actually calls for a new form of internationalism, albeit one that acknowledges that the United States is past its peak of Cold War primacy and, nevertheless, still very powerful and able to accomplish quite a bit internationally. So I'm hoping that that has gotten the audience sufficiently riled up that you all will remember to start putting questions in the Q&A because we will be shifting to your question shortly, which is not to say that the four of us cannot go on nerding out indefinitely. While we try to provoke the audience, I'm gonna shift a little bit, Congressman, over to what this looks like from the domestic side, both in terms of whether there's any aspect of this agenda that can be rescued from the extreme polarization that has overtaken that. I often say, even before this election, that national security foreign policy had gone from being one of the least polarized areas in policymaking to being one of the most polarized areas. And so I wonder if there's any of this agenda that you see prospects for bipartisan support emerging around. Yeah, I appreciate that question. And I'm still digesting the great work that Rebecca and Mira have and trying to understand what the implications of this means and trying to look at this in terms of what I think might happen next year. But a couple of things come to mind where we might see some of this occur and on the domestic front, I'll mention two. One is with regards to the coronavirus crisis that we're engaged in right now, there is an element of this. So while this is often looked at as a domestic crisis internal to us right now, and there's an element of it that is very global and one that is going to, I think, set a lot of tone for how things come out from this crisis, which is about the vaccine development and distribution. I mean, this is a situation where we have a united goal as a humanity to try to end this pandemic and we have people and companies and nations all over the country, all over the world trying to achieve this shared goal. The level of transparency or accountability or cooperation or competition that arises from what's gonna happen over the next year or so is gonna play into a lot of these issues that I think were raised in this book. Are we going to see the United States and other countries helping other nations be able to access these medical vaccines and other therapeutics and other aspects or do we take care of everyone in our country first? Is there a sequence to this? I think that those are some of the big questions that we are trying to grapple with right now in Congress and throughout our government. Another area which I hope is an area that the Biden administration leans into that does have some broader international implications as well is with infrastructure. If I look at where we can try to have some cooperation between Republicans and Democrats given that we may be entering still a divided government era, we think a lot about infrastructure as sort of a way to think about this. Again, an issue that is often thought about as domestic and internally focused but has a lot of implications in terms of what this means for a new platform for the US going forward, what our demands are, what technologies we will sharpen and hone and how that will allow us to compete better on a global level. The reason why I mentioned these two ways to frame it that are maybe not necessarily traditional foreign policy thoughts is that to just bring that, having just gone through my second campaign here, there is a absolute necessity that we as a nation better articulate to the American people what foreign policy means. Why is it important for us to be global leaders? Why is it important for us to think about how we engage with countries across the world because what we know is the Trump administration has put forward a very clear vision for their own end of America first, which obviously still has its murkiness and then other aspects of it, but it is one that at least in my district, a lot of people think is actually quite clear and they understand what that means. And I think the articulation in some simple form, how do we speak human about foreign policy? How do we speak human about what's coming next? If we are unable to do that in a concise and pithy way, we will never be able to really truly convey and lead a vision going forward. So those are some of the things that go through my mind as I was reading through this book, still some questions that I have and I'll continue to engage with Rebecca and Mira about that, but I think they raise a lot of issues that are very much ones that need to be talked about. So we just got a great question that really goes to this speaking human to the American people. And coincidentally, it comes from someone who worked with me writing memos for congressional staff for many years. And that is, we are very used to bipartisan, sort of one of the last vestiges of bipartisanship on national security was this language of primacy, including one of my former bosses' favorite lines that the US is the indispensable nation. So how do we, can we successfully talk to and rally the American people around an agenda which is extensive and frankly expensive, but not doesn't have the kind of America first emotional satisfaction that primacy did. And Mira and Rebecca, one of you wants to take that first to give the congressman a break and then we'll come back to you. Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to kick us off Heather. I think we actually believe that the vision that we are putting forth here is quite consistent with what we see reflected in American public opinion in this moment. Our vision is very much sort of derived from an inductive examination of the issues that we've been talking about here but it actually lines up quite a bit with the instincts that the American people have come to over the course of the last several years. So I'll say a little bit about how public opinion is in some ways aligned with this vision. First Heather, while you're definitely right that policymakers have gotten so used to claiming the mantle of the United States as the indispensable nation. Public opinion surveys suggest that it's important to a vast majority of Americans that the United States still be powerful but it's not necessarily important to them that the United States have primacy and that it dominate in every area. And indeed they want to see the United States be a leader but they're actually a little bit wary of unchecked American power. And the reason for that is that a lot of the public identifies the United States power as having the potential to draw us into unwanted wars. Of course we know that there is strong public opposition to the overuse of the military instrument and in particular to continued adventurism in the Middle East. So a foreign policy that for swears or at least demotes the role of the military instrument relative to other tools of statecraft is very much aligned with where the public is right now. But nevertheless the public actually is broadly supportive of the United States continued use of alliances and its attempts to work through and lead at multilateral organizations because it instinctively understands that when we are using these tools we're achieving goals at relatively less cost both in terms of blood and treasure. So as we see it, although there are no small number of controversies and costs as you mentioned that would come along with a strategy like ours it actually is reasonably aligned with where a lot of the American body politic is. It may not have an instinctive appeal to President Trump's core base of supporters and it doesn't have a tagline that's quite as pithy as America first but ultimately the reason we are arguing for an open world is because this is the vision that can keep Americans safe and prosperous. And we agree wholeheartedly with Congressman Kame that being able to explain how foreign policy accomplishes those goals is the task ahead for policymakers in the years and decades to come. I think that's a really great answer and I would just emphasize that I think we've grown accustomed in this post-Cold War period when the US has been essentially unrivaled in its power to think of the word and the notion of leadership as being synonymous with dominance or primacy or hegemony sort of choose your term of art. But in fact, what we argue for in the book and what I think we're hearing from the American public is that there is a different way of conceiving of leadership. And it doesn't mean a retreat from that role because I would argue Heather that in some respects the United States still is the indispensable nation. If you look at the paltry international cooperation that has emerged in response to COVID, I would say that the absence of the United States as a leader of those efforts is really notable. The fact is that no other country has stepped up to build that coalition that we need to develop a coherent global COVID response. But you'll notice in saying the US is indispensable as a matter of global health diplomacy that does not mean that the United States is the indispensable military force and that we should be using our still peerless military as the leading instrument of American foreign policy. So what this is really about I think is redefining what American power is and how we bring it to bear on the international stage. And a new leadership agenda, a leadership agenda for openness is one that makes a new set of foreign policy choices. It's one that reimagines the way that we do foreign policy so that we're better able to leverage our diplomacy, better able to leverage our development efforts, better able to leverage our domestic strength to achieve the international outcomes that we want without resorting to the use of military force. But an openness agenda is also one that engages really vigorously in order modernization. It recognizes that the liberal international order is in many ways a set of legacy structures that are not suited to 21st century challenges but that in the absence of American involvement and in the absence of an affirmative American vision, there are no other countries that can actually change the way that we govern emerging technologies or international trade or even climate change. So yes, the United States still is indispensable. Yes, leadership must remain part of the equation if we are to achieve an open world, particularly at a time when China is growing mightier and the borderless challenges are growing more acute but that absolutely cannot look like the way that American leadership has looked over the past several decades. That is precisely why we need a new approach. So hold on, China, we're gonna come to that in a moment. Congressman, I wanna come to you on the indispensable question and I wanna add in another critique that one of our viewers also asks us to respond to. And that is this idea that if you are not, if you're not talking about primacy, then you're somehow talking about a zero sum world where every relative loss of power for the U.S. is an absolute loss for the U.S. And he asks, are there ways that we can talk about this agenda in a way that is more win-win and less zero sum? Yeah, well, look, I think Mira and Rebecca are probably better positioned to talk about this agenda in that type of way in terms of whether it's zero sum or not, I mean, I think this is some of what we were trying to get to when it comes to the strategic cooperation exist. Is it just transactional in this type of way? And when you're thinking about a world in a less sense of polarity, whether in bipolarity or on something else, I think that there is a different conceptualization that needs to occur of this. And like I said, I'm still kind of digesting the way that they're framing this and trying to get some sense of it. But I will offer it and say that I get Mira and Rebecca where you're coming from on that front, but I will say on a political level, it will be very difficult to talk about foreign policy. I know it will be in my district, a district that has a joint military base. It will be tough to talk about this if we're not sort of unequivocal in saying and talking about American global leadership. And I think that that's something that we will, you'll have to grapple with, and I'm sure others who are thinking along these lines will have to grapple with. It is when we look at sort of an elegance of the way to talk about the importance of foreign policy and net global leadership, people in my district, they equate American global leadership with a strong economy, with safe security, when it comes to our families and our communities. And that is a very longstanding and very entrenched and important recognition there. And I'm not saying that what you're proposing is trying to dismantle that, but I challenge you to just think through that some more in terms of how do we showcase how we will continue to be a global economy and a driver in that way and people aren't have to worry about the fact that China and others, and as you rightly talked about China and India and others are just so quickly developed up in their economy in that way. The other aspect of this that I just wanna get on, kind of get out there as we're thinking about it to the point of the last question is when we're looking at an international order or a structure to be able to understand what could happen, I guess a question that I have and to what extent you wanna answer this now or later, but is to what extent does it require others to participate in it as well? And I think that there was something interesting when you look back at the Cold War era, where the fact that both the United States and the Soviet Union both saw themselves in this kind of bipolar clash as the great powers, actually in some ways allowed them to recognize that they are playing the same game, but in some ways when you're talking about this open world agenda here, to what extent does it matter if China plays by this or if they're playing a different game, does that impede our ability? So these are just some of the things that I'm just trying to think about as we look at what would be the implications of the United States taking this, is recognizing that we don't have the ability to control all aspects of the world, only the ability to influence and use our influence in those kinds of capacities, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we will be able to harness the entirety of the international system to come on board in sort of a Bretton Woods way or something like that, that where we were able to leverage our global power and our hegemonic status at that time to require in some ways all those to play by these same rules. How does that actually happen when we are not necessarily envisioning that everyone will have that same level by it? Love for one or both of you to jump in. Yeah, we're happy to jump in on those great questions, Congressman Kim, thank you. And I know Rebecca will have much to add to what I'm about to say. The first thing I wanna do is absolutely acknowledge the importance to so many of the American people of understanding the United States as a global leader and be clear that what we are calling for here is for the United States to lead on new terms that are reflective of the world that we live in and the needs of the American people. And the best way that we may be able to frame this both for ourselves and more broadly is to acknowledge that what we're calling for here is for the United States to be the 21st century great power that it should be and that it can only be if it invests in itself domestically. So that is to say that simple exercises to try to exert ourselves abroad and show our continued strength are going to fall flat on their face unless we reinvest in our own innovative base in our educational system, in our domestic infrastructure, all of these components that will actually contribute to us being the 21st century great power that we still have the potential to be in economic terms, in innovative terms, in military terms, in educational terms. So to our mind, that is the main call to action for the American people. On this other question that you raised about openness and whether others must play along, what we are offering here is a strategy that we think is robust to the question of whether or not China comes on board. That is we are assuming that China won't come on board with the openness strategy, but we'd be very happy to have Beijing do so if it would like to. This openness strategy seeks to keep the world open in spite of China and other authoritarian actors who would prefer closure in the territorial, technological and economic spaces. But if Beijing is willing to play by some of these rules and write new forms of international governance consistent with open principles, we're very happy to cooperate with China in that regard. So an example of ways that that could come to pass would be if China finally consented to bring more transparency to bear on its Belt and Road Initiative and was willing to cooperate to bring the BRI up to other prevailing international development standards. We believe the United States should be willing to work with China in that regard, but we assume that China will not decide to play along, that it will prefer to keep exporting technologies that create closed information systems, that it will continue to pursue human rights norms and interests that are in line with those of its own domestic regime, and that ultimately it will be an antagonist to openness on a global stage. We don't believe we need China's cooperation for the strategy to succeed, but I'll turn this over to Rebecca to say a little bit more about why that is. Absolutely, so I think this actually speaks to one of the ways in which an openness strategy is a substantial departure from what we've seen for much of the post-Cold War period because in our telling, what the United States has been trying to do since the fall of the Soviet Union is to achieve liberal universalism, to basically seek to actualize the end of history by spreading liberal markets and liberal politics inexorably to all corners of the globe. And indeed the foundational assumptions of much of our foreign policy over the past three decades has been that the world will be more harmonious, will be more amenable to American interests and values if only we live in a world fully populated by liberal democracies. Now the problem, and I don't need to tell you this, is that that world has simply not come to fruition. China has risen within a US-led order and it has not been liberalized by the liberal values undergirding that order. Russia too remains a formidable power but is not itself liberalizing and neither state seems likely to become a democracy anytime soon or at least until its people decide that they might like to change the internal character of those regimes. So we are left with a situation where we have an international system that includes other great powers that are not liberal and that are not liberalizing. So what do we do? And what an open world tries to accomplish is first to leave open the possibility as Mira said that we actually can live alongside a liberal great powers and also cooperate with them as mutual interests might dictate. We don't need to look at the likelihood of US-China cooperation through rose-colored glasses but we should work really hard to enact it where our interests do converge whether that's on BRI norms or whether that's on climate change or even perhaps certain forms of accommodation in the trade space or norms governing and creating side guardrails around cyber warfare or the use of outer space. There are a number of areas where there is potential for cooperation if only as a stabilizing force. But the other thing that openness does is in contrast to these ideas that we should only work with liberal states or we should only work with other democracies. We actually leave open the possibility of substantial amounts of cooperation with a liberal or mixed regimes. So we recognize that the United States actually can't keep the international system open if we only work with other democracies. We're simply not in a position of being so picky about our partners. And in fact, it's the case that there are some democracies like India that may well align with the United States on some elements of an openness agenda like keeping the Indo-Pacific free and open and pushing back on certain forms of Chinese assertiveness at the same time as India actually does not align with the United States preferred vision of internet governance and aligns much more closely with a Chinese style vision of cyber sovereignty. So to build the coalitions for openness that we need to achieve, we are actually quite open-minded about the nature of the regimes that we might cooperate with leaving open the possibility that there will be cooperation with authoritarian states at least in some discrete domains while also hedging against the possibility that they might not want to cooperate with us and creating a bulwark by creating a series of coalitions for openness that ensure that antithetical norms that authoritarian norms do not triumph in the absence of our initiative. So you just mentioned India and Congressman, you mentioned South Korea a little while ago and we had a question from a viewer about Indo-Pacific alliances specifically and what kinds of new relationships or different modalities we can build with allies in the Indo-Pacific. And so I'm gonna invite any of you that want to chime in on that. And then just as a warning, the last question is gonna be more about looking inside the US. But I'd love to hear visions of the Indo-Pacific from you Congressman or from either of you. Congressman, would you like to lead us off? Sure, sure. Super easy question, you know, just what happens next in the Indo-Pacific? I mean, look, I think that this is, you know, everyone's looking to this as one of the biggest telltales about what happens next with American leadership. I was just on the phone with a number of officials in Korea and Japan and elsewhere over the last couple of days where they're just trying to get some insights of what it is that we do next. And you know, look, I don't know. I'm not sure exactly how we're going to posture in this type of way and what sort of tools of economic trade and other aspects of this we move forward on. But what I do know is that, you know, we certainly need to make sure that we're giving it the due attention that it deserves. And I think Mira and Rebecca have really highlighted just the trajectory that is happening. And I think, you know, others have kind of pointed to that as well. And some sound the alarm while they do so. Others talk about it as areas of immense opportunity. But what we know is that there's no teleological of the direction in which this goes. There's no inevitability in terms of what is gonna happen in terms of our relationship with the Indo-Pacific. I deal with it a lot in terms of my work on the Armed Services Committee in terms of the posturing of military platforms and alliances and what that means. And obviously, you know, that brings one element of it. But, you know, certainly I agree that with Mira and Rebecca that that would be the wrong way to lead on this, you know, when it comes to our relationship there. So the question is what else is going to fill that direction and what is going to be the pointy end of the spear there in terms of how we engage. I think that that's gonna be one of the most fundamental and one of the earliest challenges that a new Biden administration will face. And, you know, hopefully we'll get a sense of where their direction is on that soon. I'll just add to those great statements, Congressman, with a few quick thoughts of my own. And that is first inform us to note that because Asia is a region in which the other major power competitor to the United States, of course, China is rising. Asia is in many ways the place where we have seen the clearest indication over the course of the last several years of the costs of U.S. recklessness and relative absence. And a lot of those costs can be measured in terms of the types of China policies that the United States tried to put into place and on which it found itself with very little allied cooperation because allies in the region did not feel the need to stick their necks out on behalf of a Washington that they fundamentally felt that they could not trust. So whether it comes to trade policy vis-a-vis China or early hesitations about Huawei or cooperation on North Korea, I think it became overwhelmingly clear very quickly that in a game that fundamentally does not favor the United States when it acts on its own, the United States did itself no favors by alienating its allies through things like coercive spending, shakedowns, the likes of which Congressman Kim described with respect to South Korea before, which brings us to the question of what should be done. Of course, in Asia, unlike in Europe, the United States has a very different alliance system. It has a system of bilateral alliances that is hub and spokes individual pact with countries like South Korea, Japan and Australia. And indeed on top of that, a number of important partnerships like the one we discussed with respect to India. So at a very high level, what I would point to as a charge for the way forward is to figure out how to increasingly knit those relationships together so that Washington and its partners can exploit more from joint cooperation than they have in years past. That means repairing the relationship between South Korea and Japan, which has been grievously neglected to the cost of all three countries in the last few years. It means engendering more cooperation out of frameworks like the Quad that are increasingly strong in the favor of Chinese assertiveness. And it means considering new arrangements, perhaps like in the realm of intelligence sharing that might allow us all to cooperate more fulsomely in areas like political interference and to combat corruption and to cooperate in cyberspace. So this is no small number of charges that I'm laying out, but the overwhelming banner here is to figure out how to ring more cooperation out of a set of allies that is deeply inclined to cooperate with us if only we have the will to do so. So we are at time and I'm gonna invite you to conclude with a lightning round where you each offer one silo between domestic and foreign policy that needs to be torn down for this vision to work. You can do it in as little as one word if you like. I'm happy to start. I would just say tech policy. The ability for the United States to leverage its tremendous innovation base for the national interest rather than for pro-guel or for private or shareholder interests as they're currently motivating many of our tech companies. To reprise my earlier set of thoughts, I will say China fundamentally, American competitiveness in the 21st century will be made and largely determined at home and will ultimately be the determinant of great power competition between the United States and China. Congressman, last word to you. Yeah, I'll build off of what Rebecca just said and drill in a little bit deeper and say cyber security. Just really the recognition that private companies that they have to share the information of cyber attacks and we need to work at this together. It's just incredibly difficult to know how we're going to proceed if we don't actually know what all is happening. So that is something that's gonna require some type of hopefully growing normative understanding of how we operate in this kind of new dimension of warfare. But that is something that I hope is opened up soon. Well, in this Zoom age, we have a really strong prohibition on not going over time. So I wanna thank both of our authors and Congressman Kim for joining us. Reminder to our viewers that you can find Mira Lister and Rebecca Lister and Mira Rapp Hooper's book An Open World at Solid State Books. And you can find more of this kind of content at New America and thanks for joining us today.