 Good morning, everyone. Good morning. My name is Bill Burns, and I'm the president of the Carnegie Endowment. And I am delighted to introduce today's conversation between two terrific friends and colleagues. On the surface, Jeff and Jake might seem pretty unelect. One an Irish Catholic kid from Minnesota who went to Yale, won a Rhodes Scholarship, clerked in the Supreme Court, and became the trusted advisor of a Secretary of State, a vice president, and someone who won the popular vote for president. The other, a Jewish kid from the south side of Long Island who dropped out of college. And his resume includes stints as a farmer on an Israeli kaboots, a humor columnist, a guard at a military prison, a mob reporter, and a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, the latter two I should add distinct but eerily similar assignments. But however varied their paths, Jake and Jeff have emerged as two of the most significant and influential voices of this generation. Engines of new ideas and initiatives in areas like foreign policy and journalism in desperate need of new ideas and initiatives. So we're extraordinarily fortunate that they're sharing the stage this morning to talk about Jake's important recent essay in the country's most important magazine, The Atlantic. It's time. Say that again. You can repeat it. It's time, indeed I think it's past time for some honest stock taking. It's time for a more concerted effort to ensure that America's role in the world reflects the changing international landscape and our enduring strengths. And it's time for American foreign policy to be more intimately connected and responsive to the needs and aspirations of the American people. It's tempting in this era of profound Trumpian dysfunction to think that all we need is a change of presidential leadership to return to normalcy. But it's not that simple. While he has made things far worse, Donald Trump didn't invent all the challenges before us, nor did he create the domestic disconnect between the conceits of all of us in the foreign policy establishment and the frustrations of too many citizens who see too much indiscipline in the way in which we've pursued American foreign policy. The president's three most recent predecessors each began their term with a sharp focus on nation building at home and a self-conscious determination to be rigorous about overseas commitments. But each, in their own way, struggled to marry those words with deeds and build a compelling case for American leadership in the world in the midst of deeply confusing change. So the challenge before us is not just a communications challenge, it's not just a Trump challenge, but a deeper policy challenge. Defining a role for the United States in a world in which we're no longer the singular dominant power, but still the pivotal player, a role which reflects new realities at home and abroad and resonates with the broader American public. That will remain an uphill battle. But I can't think of a better starting point for the conversation than Jake's characteristically thoughtful and eloquent argument. And I can't think of a better partner in that conversation than our favorite former mob reporter, now the remarkable editor and chief of the Atlantic, Jeff Goldberg. We've been extremely fortunate at Carnegie to count Jeff and Jake as two of our own, and we're delighted to have them here with us today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Bill, very much. Leader of the world's most important think tank. Thank you. And thank you, everyone, for coming. And thanks to everyone at the Atlantic and Carnegie for helping set this up. And thanks to Jake for writing a great piece for our magazine. I think all of you have a copy of that issue, or many of you have a copy of that issue. If you haven't read it, please do. It's incredibly thoughtful. We have a lot to talk about, and we can talk about things that are happening even this morning, because the news is the velocity of developments is chaotic at this point. But why don't we start by just stepping back and have you explain, just for a couple of minutes, the core thesis of your argument and explain your view of American exceptionalism and what that means in the making of foreign policy and national security policy. And also try to place your arguments, if you can, on a continuum, not only within the Democratic Party, but on the continuum of how Americans think about our role in the world. So first of all, Bill, thank you for giving us this opportunity and Jeff for giving me space to write the piece in such an august publication as the Atlantic. And thank you all for being here today and look forward to the conversation. You know, as I say at the outset of the piece, the reason I wrote it in part is because I think the pressures on and the questions about America's role in the world go far beyond just Donald Trump's presidency. We are in a moment right now where those of us who believe in an engaged, effective, internationalist orientation to American foreign policy have to define with greater care and purpose what we're aiming for. And so my piece basically argues for reclaiming and renewing the idea of American exceptionalism as a response to this notion of America first. And what I mean by American exceptionalism is not that the US is superior in any kind of innate way, is not better than other countries, nor some notion of sort of love it or leave it, but rather it's a words and all definition, a definition which says the United States has unique capacities and attributes distinct from any other major power today. And I would argue pretty much any other major power in history that allow us at our best to contribute to the national interest and consistent with that also to the global common interest. And basically what the piece does is try to define with some care what those attributes and capacities are and then talk about how we put them in service of an effective American foreign policy. Now, one of the observations I make towards the beginning of the piece which I've struggled with is what is American foreign policy for? We used to have clear answers to this question, particularly during the Cold War, but since the end of the Cold War it's kind of been about just remaining the leader. And the argument that I make in the piece is that when you strip away all of the complexities what it comes down to is trying to protect and defend the American way of life, which by the way is up for debate and grabs right now in its own way. But fundamentally my view is that the main threats and challenges to America's way of life have a common denominator and that is that they all require some form of international cooperation to address. Whether you're talking about the ravages of climate change, the spread of nuclear weapons, the possibility of pandemic disease, the chance that we end up having a recession turn into the next Great Depression. All of these things require concerted action by many actors around the world. And my view is that the United States has a singular capacity to catalyze that cooperation. And that has to be at its core what American foreign policy is about. And where exceptionalism fits into this is that to play that role the rest of the world cannot perceive the United States to just be a normal country acting like a normal great power with normal great power dictates. They have to see something unusual, something exceptional in the attributes and capacities of the United States. And at our best, I believe we have demonstrated that in the ways in which we have helped design and uphold international institutions. And here at home, my argument is that the American people have to believe that we are not just a normal nation with normal responsibilities. And in this way, exceptionalism is an answer to the false choice between globalism and nationalism that Donald Trump has offered us. It is the way that you reconcile a sense of patriotism and purpose about our country and internationalism, a sense that we have some commitment to the larger common interest in the world. Just two last thoughts which kind of connect to where I fall on the spectrum and kind of where I would situate my argument in the current moment. The first is that one kind of segment of the foreign policy community I think is still gripped by nostalgia. It's like we got to get past Donald Trump and get back to doing things the way we were doing them before. I reject that. Even though I have a lot of nostalgia as a child who grew up in the eighties and nineties and I have to confess that part of my argument is rooted in my own personal experience as a kid from Minnesota at the end of the Cold War and after the Berlin Wall falls and I have priors based on that. The way that young people today have priors based on a totally different world in which post-911 you've had a series of failures and follies attended to American foreign policy. But what I basically conclude in the piece is that when a hurricane like Donald Trump comes in and kind of causes great damage to institutions and policies you don't just build back the way you built before. Any mayor of the city hit by a hurricane will say you have to build back better. And that goes for everything from how we get a sharper sense of priorities, how we reconnect our foreign policy decision making to the fortunes of the middle class, how we rebalance the roles of the military and diplomacy, how we think about a genuine conception of burden sharing. And then finally, how we integrate a sense of our own failures, shortcomings, blind spots and weaknesses because the idea that the United States screws up a lot is not in my view a counter argument to my thesis on American exceptionalism. It is built into the argument part of what makes the United States a unique actor I believe is a capacity for self-correction and that exceptionalism in a way is not a definition of reality or a description of reality, it's an aspiration of an ambition. And so even when critics of US foreign policy say but what about this but what about that but what about the other thing all credible critiques of things that have happened in the distant past and the recent past they are in a way I think validating the argument I'm making because they are holding the United States to a different standard. Even America's critics feel the United States should be doing different and better than other great powers and wouldn't say the same thing about why Russia is doing X or Y or why China is doing X or Y. That is a good thing. So just to close out and I'm sorry to have gone on for so long. I don't know exactly where to situate myself largely because I think the spectrum has been warped in a really dramatic way in the last few years and everybody's scrambling to figure out okay where are they situated on it. I think the traditional categories no longer apply and efforts to place people in those categories kind of run aground on like kind of odd anomalies. So just one example in the piece is I make a case that really we should be ending our major military engagements in the Middle East not precipitously but at some point. Now you would say like in the old category that would put me in the retrenchment camp somehow but in fact my whole argument is about less retrenchment and more being out in the world. So how does how to assign me a place right now is I think very difficult. And in our own party the where people are kind of sorting themselves out is still very much in flux. So I don't mean to evade the question but it is I think uniquely hard to answer it in this moment. Right I'll press you to not evade unless you're announcing your candidacy for president in which case please please please evade away. I'm just talking to my family. I just you know are you taking long road trips by yourself and live streaming them to make you. There's a lot to unpack here. Let me start with an undergirding supposition of what you said you talked about when it comes time you implying that when it comes time to rebuild our foreign policy you're setting certain conditions for doing that but we're in the 28th day of a government shutdown. We have a president I'm trying to say this in a nonpartisan way who we have a president about whom there is a debate whether he is an agent of Russian intelligence. We are not scaring anybody in the world. We're not the right we're not gaining a respect of anybody in the world. Why do you believe or why do you suppose that we're not in terminal decline right now and that this question is in itself it's it's it's irrelevant. So it's interesting there is a certain kind of other than that Mrs. Lincoln how is the play quality to this whole argument. I accept that. On the other hand I believe passionately that actually America's metal has been defined not in the periods of as much in the periods of great disruption and chaos when we're struggling and suffering but in their aftermath when we actually have done a good job of cratering out and then finding our way back. And so I think we have the capacity to do that. Number one, number two, I still believe that a lot of the fundamental underlying elements that power America's unique capacities are very much present whether you're talking about our continuing edge and innovation or you're talking about the resilience of our institutions which I believe to this day as much as Donald Trump has tried to assault them have stood the test or whether you're talking about in my view a continued demand signal from many parts of the world that the United States not long does that demand signal not forever does it last for two more years or six more years. Well you know I've said in other places that I actually believe the difference between one term of Donald Trump and two terms of Donald Trump is not the difference between one X and two X. I think it's like one X and then X to the N power because the idea that we've made a colossal mistake which will never be erased off of the blotter sheet of American politics. We still talk about Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. Sure and we will never be the country that didn't elect Donald Trump but I think having the American people go ahead and ratify that choice a second time will cause in my view a much more fundamental readjustment of relationships and expectations about the US whereas if someone else is elected in 2021 they are not gonna walk into a world where they can just reclaim the mantle that existed five or 10 years ago. They are going to walk into a world where a refined and effective style of American leadership still has a real place and I'll just give you one example on this. If you look at the Trans-Pacific Partnership which my former boss Hillary Clinton and her primary opponent repudiated and Donald Trump walked away from the other 11 countries went ahead with it with a minimum number of variances to what the US had negotiated with the hope that the United States will come back and be a part of that. And I think there are other examples like that in the world where it's not just people are sitting around waiting by any stretch but where they are continuing to factor in the hope and expectation that the United States can rebound from this as we have rebounded from significant failures and screw-ups in the past and that this capacity for self-correction which I think is at the heart of exceptionalism is a real thing. The last thing I would say is I'm very mindful. I'm not rosy-eyed. I mean I've been out in the world at times when the US has been showing less than its kind of most effective face to the world. So during the debt ceiling crisis in 2011 when it looked like the United States might not be good for its debts. Hillary was Secretary of State and was on a trip that included a stop in Greece where we were trying to tell the Greeks why don't you get your house in order. And they kind of looked at us like, are you kidding me? And then she ended up in Hong Kong to give a big speech about America's economic strategy in Asia and had to pause midway through the speech and say I just want to tell everyone here America's going to be good for it. We're good for our money which kind of had this feeling of like holy cow. But when you have to tell somebody you're good for the money. Yeah, it really felt that way and then you know Dai Binguo who she met with the next day in Shenzhen China just kind of lecturing her about how screwed up democracy is is a form of government that it could come to this. And so there were real questions about whether what we're showing in respect to our model is eroding something in a more secular way as you say on the sort of downward trend line. Keep on that subject for a minute because I mean three years ago three, four years ago when Barack Obama said the arc of history is long but it's bending toward justice, quoting King. Most people in the foreign policy community still believe that democracy had the wind at its back. Do you feel fundamentally differently about it now? Is history not an arrow going forward toward democratic market capitalism or are we just destined to cycle endlessly through periods of autocracy and democracy? Well, I guess the way that I look at this is that... That'll be your only essay question. So as you contemplate running for president. Yeah, history did not end in 1989 or 1991 or 1993 but it also didn't end in 2016. I mean I do think that we have a tendency in the West to lose sight of the fact that confidence is itself a commodity, that like having faith in who you are and what you are has a big impact on the answer to your question. And the more we say to ourselves like, oh, it's just all over. It's Brexit and Trump and the EU's going to pot and look at how powerful China is in this state. But all those things are true. They are and they aren't, this is kind of the argument that I'm making. The jury is still out on whether all of those things are true. Are there immense pressures at every level on America's democracy right now? There are. Has the story been written as to whether we come out the other side of this in a way where we've either resolved or managed to ameliorate some of the worst stresses and pressures? I think that's still very much a possibility. And I think things like the way the midterm elections played out, as I said before, the way that the American judiciary has responded. And for me, even when you look at Europe and see so many kind of negative trends and factors, I see resilience, like signs of significant resilience there as well. And the other thing is if you look back through history, even through the history of the Cold War, there have been times before where the story has been, it's kind of over for the US or it's over for this particular model and we've come back. And I do think things are different today than say when we were grappling with the rise of Japan, but I do not accept an argument which says, well, it turns out actually the state authoritarian capitalism model is just gonna be a better and more effective model or that we're gonna be locked in a permanent contest forever on this. I don't believe that democracy is going to sweep the world but I do believe that the kind of current thinking around how badly it is eroding is drawing conclusions prematurely. Talk for a minute about what our friend Ben Rhodes referred to as the blob. The foreign policy elite that is located within 500 feet of this building. Amazingly, the Massachusetts in 17th Avenue. What, in retrospect, what did the blob get wrong about the American people and their proclivities? You know, I find it's so hard to answer the question today about what the American people's proclivities are with respect to foreign policy because I think there's such a deep ambivalence. Like, if you sat down with the focus group and you said, our NATO allies are totally screwing us over and they should be paying more for defense and what the hell is going on here, this is messed up. Everyone would be like, yeah. Well, that was an Obama position. That sounds right. Articulated slightly differently than Donald Trump articulates it but that was an Obama position. Exactly, right. And Bob Gates went out and his farewell tour was essentially castigating our NATO allies for not paying up. People say, yeah, that's right. Then if you said NATO's been the most successful military alliance in history and it is super important to the long-term sustainment of American power and influence and to your own safety and security, they'd say, yeah, that's right. And that's not because they're fickle or something. It's because I think the American people actually do have, in a more instinctive way than sitting and doing the study that we do of these issues, a fairly complex but fairly accurate picture of kind of American internationalism. And so I actually believe that while there are parts of Trump's America first that certainly resonate, some of these underlying arguments about the United States engaging in international cooperation, having alliances, needing to step up to play a key role on some of these big issues, that there continues to be a real current and that we should not caricature the American people as essentially all having kind of bought into or embodied Trump's argument. That being said, I think the single biggest failure, and I say this in the piece, of the foreign policy community, and I have to count myself among this, is to sharply divide between foreign and domestic. To say we do all the foreign stuff and those domestic people let them figure it out. And that even goes for something like the negotiation of trade agreements. So I went around saying TPP is the best thing ever and if someone had actually asked me to write down on a piece of paper, what exactly is in TPP and what are the trade-offs between corporate interests and labor and I'd be like, well that's someone else's job, I don't do that, I just kind of think about big strategy. And I think that the blurring line between foreign and domestic is an absolute feature of our age and that the situation room should be a place where the question what in our foreign policy can help strengthen, sustain or reverse the hollowing out of the American middle class, that should be a much more paramount question than it is today. Well let's bring it to the growing democratic field for 2020 and I'll step back from it and say obviously I covered the 16, covered you in fact and wrote pieces about the difference between the way Hillary Clinton viewed the world and the way Barack Obama viewed the world. Hillary, to use the cliche, Hillary always presented as more muscular in her approach to foreign policy, a little bit more rambunctious, a little bit more in the exceptionalist camp. Obama had a different definition of American exceptionalism. It was our ability to self correct internally that made us different than other countries and Hillary had a more outward looking, we won the Cold War, we defeated the Nazis, we did all of these things, we guarantee the safety of the sea lanes. The party moved in Obama's direction. Today it seems in the field that's the growing field that your views, certainly Hillary Clinton's views are would be in the minority, that I'm not saying that everybody is close to Sanders yet, but there is a growing feeling in the democratic base as it moves left that America does not play a good role and that America historically has not played a useful or good or healthy moral role in the management of the planet and therefore it's manifesting itself as a kind of doppelganger, kind of reflection of Trump's own isolationism. I mean, because Trump articulates it in a populist way, we're not so great anyway, who thinks we're so great. So analyze if you can and you can depersonalize it or it'd be more interesting for the audience if you actually personalized it and talked about the individual candidates. But what's the trend line and what makes you worried about the trends and what gives you some comfort about the trends? I think there's a fascinating thing happening right now where the debate between Hillary and Bernie in 2016 has not in a real way carried forward into 2018, 2019. It's a fundamentally different debate. It's not the debate between more of the kind of come home America, why are we doing all these wars in the Middle East divide where I think there is very much shrinking support in the Democratic Party for the kinds of policies Hillary was putting forward in 2016, including things like a no-fly zone in Syria. But that's a shrinking core of the party. But what's intriguing is that in 2019, it is the left of the party. It is the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrens of the party who are arguing that there is in a way a clash of models in the world that to defend progressive policy at home, you need to take on the Chinas and Russians of the world who are not just acting defensively against American encroachment of democracy, but are acting offensively in the world to advance their own models. And if you read Bernie Sanders' speech at Seis from a few months ago or Elizabeth Warren's foreign policy article, they are not in the mode of the post-Iraq war Democratic Party. They're in the mode of a new geopolitical competition and how do we go about defining the terms of that competition, Democratic Party. And so to me that some of the kind of fundamental underlying questions about allies, about values, about whether the United States needs to be engaged in the world, those are now points of consensus. And the real divides are gonna be about how much of it is the more traditional modes of dealing with a China, South China Sea, Taiwan, et cetera versus how much emphasis are we going to place on the kind of economic policy being the dominant mode by which the United States engages in the world. But from an orientation perspective, I think it's very hard to find someone in the Democratic Party who's not kind of stepping up right now and saying America first is wrong and the US has to be up and out there. It's just now to me, the left is trying to figure out in this slightly uncomfortable space, what are the parameters around that? One of the big ones is no use of military force but beyond that, if you just look at the rhetoric, it sounds in a pretty muscular aggressive take on the current nature of America's competition with its main adversaries in the world, including from the standard bearers of the left side of the Democratic Party. Right, well, I mean, especially on the Russia question, there's a new understanding and new emphasis on Russia's adversarial role for some set of obvious reasons. There are a lot of old cold warriors and hawks who are sort of saying to these left Democrats, welcome to understanding the Kremlin, to our understanding of the Kremlin. But that's true with Russia, absolutely. And there's a part of the left, there's a part of the sort of intercept left that would kind of question that on Russia but you're not gonna find a candidate. But the Rachel Maddow left is all there. Yeah, you're not gonna find a candidate who a significant candidate for president other than Tulsa Gabbard in the Democratic Party who is going to espouse something different on Russia which is interesting. And then on China, if you asked Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden to give a lay down of China, its intentions, their perceptions of what the nature of the US-China relationship is and then you took the name off the top and I handed it to you, you might be able to tell the difference based on the emphasis on say the economic side versus the strategic side. But you wouldn't be able to tell based on a sense that this is now a competitive relationship. We're not gonna have a debate in the Democratic Party about kind of accommodation versus competition. The whole party sort of moves there because it's all centered around this argument of the model and the idea that these state capitalist systems have found ways to make common cause with elements within Western society to advance corruption and kleptocracy and the like and we need to root that out. That's kind of the argument on the left. We're gonna go to questions from the audience in a minute but let me just follow this with one other question. There's a fear on the part of let's say centrist Democrats, whatever that means at the moment that the narrative, let's say certainly of the it's of the young activist freshman congresspeople who just came in and of the internet Democratic left that the narrative about America's role in the world is America has been a force for, it's not evil then malign intent and that American history can be understood, American history overseas can be understood in kind of a Howard Zinn model. It's a series of incidents in which America did bad things to indigenous peoples from Iran to Latin America, et cetera. And I'm wondering you're deep in the discussion now about how to orient the Democratic party in 2020. Do you feel like that narrative is taking hold or do you think that the candidates including those who drift to the left have another understanding of this? Because that will define the policy vis-a-vis Trump's sort of instinctual isolationism. I think that when candidates go from either being sort of outside activists or even freshman members to saying I'm seeking the presidency of the United States, in a way they're almost already buying into the idea that that can be a positive thing, that the instruments of power they would get if they got that job or something that they could use as a force for good. And so I don't believe you're going to hear a lot of that kind of rhetoric in the presidential race. And the other thing that I would say is teaching young people now who have real questions, like they look at me like I have two heads when I first raised the issue of American exceptionalism. They're like, what about the war on Iraq, the global financial crisis, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and it's like these are all pretty fair points. But what they believe passionately in, and I think this is true of many of the young freshman members in Congress who do see the American story as being one of original sin, is a view that of interconnectedness, that the great challenges of our time have to be grappled with through building kind of cooperative networks to solve problems. And especially with young people, this is such a powerful mindset. It goes beyond just servicing government. It goes to every sector of our society and our economy. And so I think an argument that accepts the failures and flaws in US foreign policy stares them in the face and then says, okay, how do we correct from that? And then how do we harness this incredible energy to do the thing that American strategy has to do? Which is to build those networks and participate in those networks to solve these big problems. I actually believe there is scope for the kind of argument I'm making to have real purchase with even people who come at this from a deeply skeptical perspective about the history of American foreign policy, who don't buy the Hillary Clinton we defeated the Nazis in communism, but think much more about Iran and Guatemala and the war in Iraq. When finally, which of the Democrats in the field are coming into the field now, strike you as having the most sophisticated foreign policy understanding and the best chance of countering Trumpism on the global stage? Whoa. Limit yourself to like eight. Well, I'll answer the first one. I think it is very hard to argue that anyone can't come close to matching Joe Biden's foreign policy experience. I mean, and look, I'm biased. I served as his national security advisor, but I actually watched him with... That was the golden age of Biden's understanding of foreign policy. That's right, so of course I taught him, no, no, not at all. I learned just a ridiculous amount from the guy. I mean, he's in a different class in terms of experience, understanding relationships in the whole nine yards, and is also someone who, because he didn't have to go through the debate in 2016 vis-a-vis Bernie, has been able to step back a bit and watch how this is unfolded. And I think he's very much grappling with, particularly the intersection of the foreign and the domestic and how to build and affect a policy. But beyond that, you have a whole lot of really exciting candidates who don't have a lot of foreign policy experience or exposure. And yet recognize that this is gonna be part of the ante to being taken. So I can't tell you right now, but let's come back here in six months and we can kind of handicap them. My view is a lot remains to be seen from many of the people who are sort of seen as top tier candidates because their experience in respect to foreign policy or even their way of talking about it is very limited. And even people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders do not have a long history of talking about and framing a coherent view on foreign policy and are just working through that now. So I think the next six months are incredibly exciting from the perspective of seeing how this debate gets shaped and who's coming forward, not just with kind of abstract ideas, but with kind of interesting and creative new agenda items that could give real voice or force to... And if they use the term exceptional, describe what role they want America to play in the world, will the base accept that or were they rejected? I don't think so. I mean, look, I struggled with using the phrase exceptionalism in this piece and I would ask anyone who just is like, I don't like the word, to take the underlying argument and say, do I basically buy what he's saying? Because I think the argument works with the word or without the word. The reason that I feel it was important to rescue this concept or to try to lay down a marker for rescuing this concept is maybe at the end of the day, we all move to say, okay, we can come together around the idea of unique attributes and capacities and a leading role for the United States and the world along these lines, but let's put the word aside, that'd be a fine outcome for me if that's where we got. I think we have mics and there's a hand over here, so let's just go right there in the back and then we'll come down in the front. And please make your questions in the form of a question. Right. No mind for a time. Joe Bosco formally with the Defense Department. It's nice to see you again, Jake. Mr. Burns in his introduction made the statement that Trump inherited a mess in foreign policy, but he's made things worse. I would ask you, Jake, if that is an applicable statement to East Asia, given what Trump has accomplished with Taiwan, North Korea, and China. I'm not sure what he's accomplished with Taiwan. And I think with North Korea, probably the best that can be said for Trump is that he has ameliorated a crisis of his own making in ratcheting up the possibility of war and then ratcheting it down. But on the underlying question of whether he's made any progress towards reducing or eliminating the stockpiles of missiles and nuclear weapons, of course, the answer to that is no. He's faced the same conundrum on that issue, by the way, as President Clinton did, President Bush did, and President Obama did. I don't think he's done better or worse really on North Korea. And then when it comes to China, I think there are two ways of looking at this. One way is to say, are we going to get them to make modest adjustments by imposing these tariffs that when they buy some more American products and shift their market access rules slightly, I think we will get there. And if you're judging success vis-a-vis China based on that, then that's one for the Trump column. But I think in terms of overall Chinese influence in the region and the overall sense from the Chinese perspective that their strategy is advanced by having an American president who's undermining alliances, pulling out of a Trans-Pacific Partnership, having no vision for any kind of multilateral architectural arrangements in the region, they're sitting there thinking, yeah, that's probably pretty good. We don't like how this is going on the economic front, but from the overall long-term strategic position in the United States and China, I think it has been a series of steps over the last two years that have put us in a manifestly worse place. That being said, one of the things that I constantly struggle with when I watch Trump is the question of how much leverage the US actually has in the world and how to use it. And people said at the beginning of this trade war, well, obviously China has all the leverage and the US is gonna have to give in. People today are not saying that anymore because I think there is a broad misperception of just America's weight and gravitational pull and strength and so forth. And so if you want a more benign, effective, enlightened kind of approach in the world, but yet you want to also be able to use your leverage to get outcomes, how do you take lessons from the Trump administration about where maybe we left things on the shelf that we could have put to use? Could we have been tougher on China vis-a-vis intellectual problems? Put it. Could we have thought about how to accompany the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran with the tougher strategy vis-a-vis Iran across the Middle East? I think we probably could have. So these are things that I think we have to grapple with as we try to orient away is is there stuff to learn from how nations react to someone like Trump that can be more positively applied if we get a different president. On the shoresline from the Atlantic Council, I have a question about trade policy. Traditionally, the Democrats have been predominantly protectionist and the Republicans thoroughly pre-trading. Now Trump has managed to turn the GOP extremely protectionist. How do you see that influencing the Democratic Party on trade policy? Thank you. Yeah, I mean, look, I basically believe that advancing a major trade agreement during an election year is gonna pull out, put a lot of antibodies out that otherwise don't necessarily exist. The story of the Democratic Party, even over the last 25 years is more complicated than I think your question allows for. That there is much more openness to free trade among Democrats than it has historically been. It's just when you have TPP land in the heart of an election season and you're kind of fighting. If this is the only economic policy coming out at the end of the term, it's obviously gonna take on added weight. I believe that even trade skeptical Democrats in running in 2020, even those who say, yes, we should be getting tougher on China are going to advance an argument that says we need to deepen our trading links and set the rules of the road with like-minded states in both Europe and Asia. I think that is going to be a kind of common denominator and the question will just be, okay, what are the content of those rules? Where a warren or a Bernie is gonna have a more aggressive view of what a new style of trade arrangement or economic arrangement looks like than some of the other candidates. But I don't believe you're just gonna get the same kind of protectionist rhetoric that you hear from Trump on the Democratic side. And I think the Democratic electorate is going to be very open to an argument which says, yes, let's drive a hard bargain for a level playing field, but for goodness sakes, let's work with our allies and partners on rules of the road that can help us accomplish that and not just try to do it all by our own. There was a question over here. Thanks very much, Lin Weil. Thanks to you both for a fascinating and important conversation. Ambassador Burns indicated at the beginning that this is not just a Trump question, not just a communications question, but a policy question, but it is also a Trump and a communications question. And with all due respect to the blob present company included, this case needs to be made to the American people in a broader sense and beyond the nation's most consequential magazine, perhaps before the presidential campaign really starts heating up for 2020. What ways do you envision making this case to the broader American public through means that will reach more people in a timely fashion? Well, first of all, I think this is in my view. YouTube, he wants to say YouTube. He's just going on YouTube. That's what he means. My YouTube channel. Yeah, the Jake Sullivan YouTube channel. I'll be on, yes, I'll be, I'll be just live 24 hours a day speaking about. Jake Kardashian. I actually think it is incumbent on the policy debate in 2019 for better or worse is going to be defined by the Democratic primary combined with its interaction with Donald Trump and how those things intersect. That is where the locus of energy, activity and attention is going to be. And therefore, for those of us who care passionately about these issues, trying to elevate the degree to which candidates who are going to be largely focused on domestic policy actually lift up this case is going to be the only way I think you are going to credibly break through to people. And I also believe that it has to come down to a pretty simple proposition around a view of America standing in the world. That when you kind of look at the numbers or look at the focus groups, however much people have complicated and mixed feelings about what we're doing here or there on this issue or that issue, the one thing that resonates with folks is they care that America is respected and that America has friends and that America can be able to effectively work with others to enhance security and prosperity. I think a very simple argument that there has been a loss of that, a degradation of that and we need to get that back is a place to start. And I think if that is happening in stereo for Democratic candidates, even as they hash out some of the differences that we've been describing up here, it will make a huge difference to setting the table for effectively debating Donald Trump in 2020. And there are things like, the fact that people literally were laughing in the UN has a visceral kind of quality to it. People don't want the American president to be laughed at by the world literally. So I think that's, for me, stripping away a lot of the larger high-minded stuff, just driving hard at that argument is incredibly important. I just add, I mean, I do think that, I mean, the challenge is harder than ever. I mean, we've known for years, everybody in this room knows that if you take a poll of the American people, people believe that we spend 10, 20, 30% of our budget on foreign aid. And we've seen this and people are impervious to some degree, these polls, at least, are impervious to distribution of accurate information about that. We're in a unique and challenging environment. And I think the more responsible gatekeepers, this isn't, I'm talking about the MSM and for all of its flaws, it's still functioned as a filter for a lot of bad information. The gates have come down and you combine that with, and these are not unrelated, you combine that with a president, with a unique relationship to the truth, which is to say, when he's caught in a lie, he simply doubles down on the lie and just keeps pushing it out and it penetrates. I mean, so, to make the argument, to make a plausible internationalist argument is harder than ever given the way the president himself talks about it and given the way information is distributed and bad information is distributed. I just, it's not. You know, it's interesting you say that because I, why, you know, when I was struggling with this idea of American exceptionalism, part of what was motivating me was a basic view that we've got to evoke a feeling. Donald Trump evokes a feeling in people and just making kind of cold arguments about how it's in our national interest to be part of the Paris Climate Agreement because we're getting every country to put its, you know, their commitments down on paper. Doesn't motivate in a way that I think kind of calling people to a sense of patriotism and purpose can. And the question is, are we at a moment right now where people are so kind of cynical and fed up they won't buy it? I believe, and I think there's some evidence for this, that Trump has produced a set of antibodies where people are more, not everyone, but more people are more open to that kind of argument than before. And that's, that is part of what was motivating me to write this, was not the policy argument, but more the argument just to break through this miasma that Jeff has described with something that's just more visceral, more about. And what's strange about that, okay, but what's strange about that is that you have the Secretary of State publicly renaming his department of swagger, you know, which is, it's, but there's something, it's odd. But put it this way, it's not something that Bill Burns wouldn't necessarily say. But it does go to that visceral like we are, I mean, he has a feeling that we're number one. It's a different understanding of exceptionalism, but it's not a feeling that Trump, who's much more transactional in his understanding of the world, has. So there's some weird evidence of that feeling still in the, even in the administration. There was a question over here and then I wanna go Bill Galston if we can. I don't know how many questions we have for the talk. My name is Gararoba, I'm a Rotary Peace Fellow at Duke and I'm from Minnesota. So my question is about Trump's policy on Africa, which is the last on the bucket, I think. And the argument is about really encountering China or other influence in Africa. So I don't know if you have a chance to read what Grant Harrison, your colleague, wrote basically saying it's kind of destined to fail. So if you have any comment on that one. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think, look, it's hard for me to speak to Trump's policy towards Africa because I think he's just sort of let whatever was running run more or less on autopilot and if you look at the documents that this administration has prepared around Africa, they look pretty similar to what's come before. When I was working for Secretary Clinton, she went to Senegal and gave a speech kind of comparing an investment strategy for Africa versus an extraction strategy for Africa with her argument being if we do it right, the United States, the European Union, other significant donors from around the world, the Koreans, the Japanese, Latin American countries could really double down on a strategy that invests in people in human capital and institutions while the Chinese have an approach that is very fundamentally about extracting resources, basically. We are not gonna be able to compete with China on money in Africa. It's just not going to happen. But when you can't outspend somebody, you have to be able to out persuade, out inspire and ultimately out vision them. And I do think that is something that is available to the United States and like-minded friends and partners around the world if we elevated that priority over time. And don't just think about Africa as a chessboard for great power competition, Cold War style, but rather think about a more positive vision for how you put to work. What have been good words but too often not followed up by good deeds. So my take is we have assets to bring to bear that don't show up on the straight balance sheet where we can't compete with the Chinese that we aren't fully putting to use but could and would I think have great receptivity in a set of countries that's looking at China right now and kind of saying, is this a good deal for us at the end of the day? We have only time for one more question. I'm sorry, I asked Bill Galston to ask it. Thank you. Oh, Bill is over here. Let's do two questions then. I'll make it really quick. Ownership of 90%. Thank you very much for- Thank you two together. We'll hands it out, yeah. Thank you very much for an excellent dialogue. And I wanted to ask, if you wanted to know in administration's security strategy, international relations strategy, you can look not at the most ridiculous recent tweets but at the actual national security strategy and the Trump administration's national security strategy, national defense strategy is the first since the end of the Cold War to refocus the United States towards countering great power rivals, Russia and China. You saw during the Obama administration in his debate with Mitt Romney in 2012, yucking it up about Russia being a threat. You saw Hillary Clinton's reset with the Russians. She not only misspelled the word and wrote it in the wrong alphabet showing a certain derision and contempt for Russia and lack of taking- So can you get to the question? Yeah, so the question is what do you make of the role of the Trump administration's official words and actions, restructuring the military and restructuring defense to the greatest extent since 1973 in terms of the future direction of America's role in the world? And why don't you just let ask Bill to just ask his question and Jake can wrap it up. That's Bill Ballston. Yeah. My question was evoked by what you said, Jake, about the need to appeal to something more visceral than high-mindedness. Has there ever been a major mobilization of American power and foreign policy in the world that wasn't guided by fear? Is it possible to have the kind of engaged foreign policy that you're talking about without naming our enemies in a way that ties into the question you just got? I think the answer to that question is no, but you may disagree. Well, it's interesting. I've thought a lot about this. So first, I think this is what's so dangerous about the trend lines in the US-China relationship because turning China into the big great enemy works for kind of everybody. It works on the left in it's the galvanizing force for major investments at home and things. The Chinese do early childhood education. We have to do it too kind of thing. It works for people on the right for obvious reasons. And I think that is ultimately going to be a self-defeating approach to an incredibly complicated, interconnected relationship. But to me, that may be where we're headed if we are not careful and don't think hard about it. To more directly answer your question though, there is an example. It is a very checkered example and it's basically TR bringing the United States into the world where he wasn't saying there's some great enemy out there. He was basically saying we, the United States of America, have to become a global player. Now, that involved colonialism. It involved jingoism. It involved racism. But if you go back and look at that period, it's quite interesting because there was a certain character to his argument starting with Mahan in 1890 and then through Roosevelt that was very much just about a view that said the U.S. is this young, energetic nation that has to be out there engaged in the world for our own interests but also for the betterment of the world. And what I'm arguing in a way is if you can strip away some, and these were court at the time, so I'm not saying they were peripheral, but some of the elements of what was driving that and captured the spirit and the essence of it, you actually saw major changes in U.S. foreign policy and a president willing to implement them without us having some sense of a single great adversary. That being said, I agree with you, especially post-Cold War. We have a certain muscle memory for how this works and if you don't have an organizing villain to fight against, it's harder to just do it in a disembodied way. So I would like to thread the needle and not turn China into the great enemy and see them for the challenge that they are, but still galvanize this and whether that's possible or not. I'm a little less just dismissive of the idea that it's completely impossible than maybe your question suggests, but I totally respect and validate that you may be right. Just the final word on the Trump administration and the national security strategy. I mean, I guess the way that I look at this is if you look at the gap between the words on the page about investing in alliances or even about defense modernization and then what's actually happened. I don't think that gap is just the difference between what he writes in tweets and what's written on the page. There is a significant body language, priority, posture, signaling and policy gap between what the administration's actually done and what's contained in those documents. I do think them having the corrective of saying the great powers are at peace and the real threats are transnational, which was kind of the early Obama mindset that that had to adjust over time. That was a useful corrective on paper. I am less convinced that the way the administration is pursuing its strategy and practice is effectively taking that competition forward against either Russia or China in an effective way. So Jake mentioned Mahan's writing in the 1890s about U.S. global naval power. Oh, that was in the Atlantic? Mahan wrote those articles in the Atlantic. We've been doing this. A little product place for the time. No, we've been doing this a long time. And I think Jake's piece and the issue that you have in your hands is a worthy addition to a long line of great pieces that helped us to understand America's role in the world. So I thank Jake for doing the piece and coming with us today. And thank Bill and everybody here for showing up. I thought it was great. Thank you very much. Thank you.