 All right. My understanding is that this mic is now operational. All right. Great. I want to thank Admiral Christensen for that introduction. I'm very much delighted to hear that these remarks are being recorded because I want to take that portion, that last bit that he was talking about. I want to make a little MP3 of that and send it to my mother so she can see that I've actually finally made it. But I hope that she just listened to the introduction and then, you know, cuts off before I actually talk. So she'll have the image of my appearance here rather than the reality of it that I'm about to subject you guys to. It is really an honor to be invited to address this group. And in fact, I bet pretty much every speaker who comes up here says it's an honor. I'll say that it's more than an honor. I'll say it's a little bit intimidating because we're coming to an institution well known as housing some of the nation's best strategic theorists and practitioners. In this room are people who are either in or embarked upon careers in public service that will give them an up close personal feel for the reality of the exercise of American power in the world. And frankly, as someone coming from a humble little college up north, it's a little intimidating to address a group of this nature. I hope I can rise to the occasion. I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to talk about American grand strategy, which seems to be appropriate. And I'm going to suggest to you that we are at a decision period in this country regarding grand strategy. Now, this decision point might be not yet a political decision point in that the national command authorities in Washington are now confronting this. But it is an intellectual decision point. It's an analytical decision point regarding the future of this country's grand strategy. And there are many potential courses the United States could take henceforth from this moment. But I want to focus on two of them. I want to convince you that two choices are the most important ones to think about regarding America's grand strategy. The first would be retrenchment. The first would be real retrenchment, serious retrenchment. I don't mean retrenchment of the type that's been discussed in describing President Obama's foreign policy. I mean a reel across the board rethinking of America's role in the world from being highly engaged, leadership from sustaining multiple alliances, from guaranteeing and securing those alliances, from insisting upon or seeking leadership in many if not most key instances, to a posture of a far more modest posture in the world, bringing many of those forces home, renegotiating or indeed revoking many of those security alliances, focusing on hemisphere, focusing on trade and political integration with the world, but disengaging militarily from the strategic affairs of the world. That's one option that needs to be thought about now. And I'm going to try to convince you that it's actually one that needs to be considered. The second option would be to focus on the core of America's existing grand strategy, which my co-author Brooks and I call deep engagement. That's actually a term we're stealing from the Harvard professor, Joseph Nye. To focus on the core of deep engagement, refocus in a sense on the core. After a period in which we've experimented with somewhat more grand vision, refocus on the core, sustain those alliances, continue America's leadership role in sustaining the global cooperation, global international institutions, the global economy, and yes, sustaining the security commitments that underwrite that leadership, that support that leadership. That's the choice. To suggest to you, to make this case to you that this is indeed the choice, and I'm going to moreover seek to persuade you, probably a lot of you don't need persuading, but nonetheless I want to persuade you that the refocusing on the core is the right strategy, is the right decision to make at this point. Now to persuade you that this is really the right choice, and that we do in fact face this choice, I got to do four things in the brief, it won't seem to you brief, but it'll seem to me brief, in the brief amount of time I've been allotted, I have to achieve four things. I need to give you a snapshot assessment of the strategic environment, because after all, strategy begins with an assessment of the strategic environment. I got to tell you what U.S. grand strategy actually is, and what its core is. What do I mean by the core? Thirdly, I have to explain why this retrenchment option, which you may find rather bizarre, why this retrenchment option is in fact very serious, and needs to be considered and debated. And fourth, and finally, I need to persuade you that actually refocusing on the core of our grand strategy is the right way to go, and that's a lot to do, so I'm going to get right to it. So the strategic setting, you're going to hear a lot about the strategic setting, you students have already read a lot about how to characterize the strategic setting, and you'll come across a lot of terms that experts, pundits, academics, political leaders use to try to describe where are we in the world. Many of these terms focus on American power or American capabilities and how they stack up against the world. And you'll see terms like unipolarity, apolarity, Sam Huntington of Harvard even used the term unimultipolarity, hegemony, American empire, or post-American world. And although I've written a lot about these kinds of terms and thought a lot about them, I think a lot of these terms are getting in our way right now. I think they're leading sometimes to radical overestimation of what America can do in the world, as with the term American empire, or radical underestimation of where America really is in the world, as in the case of post-American world. This is not a post-American world and not likely to be one. But I think all those terms have one thing right, which is the place to start in assessing the strategic setting is to look where most of the capabilities are, most of the power for good or ill, where that is. And at the end of the day, as much as we want to talk about non-state actors, rogue states, and failed states, where the power is, where the real capability still lies, is with the major nations of the world. And these terms are all trying to characterize relationships of power among those most capable states. And I want to propose to you a very simple way to think about the strategic setting, and that is one plus X. It's a one plus X world where one is the superpower. We have one superpower in the world, one country, and one only, that is capable of sustaining security commitments and making them credible to far-flung regions in the world, not just its own region. Sustaining those security commitments in a way such as to alter the strategic landscape of the world, not just one region. There's one power like that, which is, of course, the United States, and there's some number, X, of major countries that have a lot of capabilities in their region, but do not have this superpower capacity. And we debate how many of them are there. Is Brazil a great power? Is Turkey now a great power? What is the right number for X? But there's very little debate that there's a very big difference between the one and the X. Now, another debate that you're going to, that you hear about is whether China is still just a regular old member of the X Club or China is something different. If you were to survey strategic assessors and analyzers across the world, I think you'd come to a pretty clear consensus that of these X powers in the second rank of countries, China is different. China is the one that is now seen as having the potential to be a superpower. It's not a superpower yet, but of all those potential great powers in that X Club, it's China that really seems to have the potential. The main point I want to leave you with is that as much as you want to talk about American decline, where the world is going, China is a very long way from being a second superpower. In fact, China is not even really trying to be a superpower. China is working in its region to make things more difficult for the United States. It is not yet even creating the institutional or other capacities to act on the world stage the way a superpower acts. Therefore, for now and for a long time into the future, decades, we will be in a one plus X world where the world will be closely watching China to see whether it's going to take that step or try to take that step to superpower status. And my strong argument would be if we have the time, which we don't, but I'll just put it on the table, is that actually there's a strong possibility that China will indeed get stuck in this potential superpower category because unlike past rising states, China is technologically far, far more inferior to the leading state of the United States than it has been typically the case in the past. And the challenges of creating and sustaining superpower level capabilities is greater now than it was back in the 20th century. In other words, if back in the 20th century, all you need to do is kind of roughly match the economic size of the leading state to make a run at becoming a peer competitor of that state. Today, I think when China matches US aggregate GDP, it's still going to have a long way to go to become a potential superpower. So that's the strategic setting. There's a lot else that can be said about it, but I think it matters greatly whether we're in a world of one superpower, no superpower, or multiple superpowers. I think all the problems that you're going to deal with and that you're thinking about, all the problems that have to do with various non-state and weak state challenges to American and global security, all those problems would still exist if the world had more than one superpower or had no superpowers, but they would be a heck of a lot worse than they are now for reasons that we could discuss. The big point for grand strategy analysis is the United States has and will have the capability to pursue a deep engagement grand strategy. That is to say, the US has not declined, is not likely to decline anytime soon to the point where it will be incapable of pursuing a deep engagement grand strategy. It is a choice and that choice lies with the United States and let me stress again, no other country has this choice. The world does not have the option for another country to play a superpower role. It's either the United States or no one. So the question then is, well, what choice should we make? And to address that, I have to quickly now move to the second part of my talk, which is what is the core of US grand strategy? US grand strategy, well, grand strategy first and foremost is a set of ideas for deploying a nation's resources to achieve its interests over the long run. And we use the term grand to capture the grand or large scale nature of this enterprise in terms of time. That is to say grand strategy is about about the long term to talk about to describe the stakes, namely grand strategies about the most important interests that the state has, the large and enduring interests. And we use the term grand to capture comprehensiveness, mainly that this is a strategy that provides a blueprint or template for the nation's policies in multiple areas. And so with that in mind, we need to ask what's the core? What's the essence of American grand strategy? Is it democracy promotion? Is it human rights promotion? Is it transforming other societies to look like us? Many critics of the current grand strategy say that those are the core of the grand strategy, but I think the answer is no. None of those passes the tests of what constitutes grand strategy. None passes the time test in the sense that they don't capture long term commitments. They capture episodic commitments that occasionally certain individual administrations will adopt and then walk away from. None captures the largest and most enduring interest, but repeatedly inconsistency, repeatedly inconsistently, American leaders have regarded democracy promotion, human rights promotion and so forth as optional policies to pursue once you have secured your core and most fundamental interests. And none of them provides a actual blueprint or intellectual architecture for American grand strategy across the board. I would say if you want to use democracy promotion or human rights promotion as a way of understanding what the US is doing and predicting what it's going to do, you're going to be in big trouble because sometimes it will usefully predict American actions and other times it won't. No, none of those are the core. The core, I think, are the pursuit of three overlapping objectives. These objectives have been in place ever since the very first or pretty much around the time of the very first current strategy forum around 1949-1950 at the dawn of the Cold War, and that is, first, managing the external environment to reduce near and long term threats to US national security, promoting a liberal economic order to make the United States more prosperous and creating and sustaining and revising where necessary a global institutional order to secure necessary interstate cooperation. Those three have been constants of US grand strategy pretty much ever since this strategy forum got underway at the dawn of the Cold War. They have been consistently reaffirmed throughout the Cold War and, interestingly and importantly, they were reaffirmed after the end of the Cold War. And the pursuit of those objectives is a underlie what is arguably the most consequential, most important US strategic choice, which is to sustain and maintain these multifarious security commitments to dozens of allies and partners around the globe. It's those security commitments that tie and knit together the three objectives of managing the external environment for security, regulating and ordering the global economy and sustaining institutionalized cooperation. This basic strategic choice is so old, so familiar, so ingrained that we often don't even talk about it or think about it. In fact, if you look at sort of American government publications to say, when's the last time you've assessed the cost and benefits of each of these alliances, you actually don't find that many because it's just assumed that this is going to continue. But should it continue? Is this assumption valid? Is it right? And that then brings us to the question of what the options are. And the third portion of my remarks to you, which is why is this retrenchment cutting back from this global war, cutting back from these three objectives, and particularly cutting back from those security commitments? Why is that a serious option now? Why do I think we ought to debate it more? Well, there's a bunch of reasons. One is that the current grand strategy is widely seen as being under pressure. The war college has got budget cuts, we don't have as optimal in a set of circumstances, or these actually look pretty good to me. But we're facing sequestration, which is a signpost of a budget environment, which is probably for the foreseeable future going to be very, very different than what we've had recently. Because it reflects deep underlying forces in both the United States, society and economy, and in the societies and economies of our chief allies, demographic shifts that make the opportunity cost of military expenditures seem to be higher. It's harder to sustain in the current environment as populations age. We used to talk about guns versus butter. It's going to be guns versus grandma. Does grandma get her pills? Actually, that's probably doesn't sound very good guns versus. It's going to be commitment to the military versus commitment to health care for your grandparents, or your parents. Are they going to get their pills? And at the end of the day, when the publics are faced to confront that choice, it may not come out terribly well from the standpoint of foreign policy and international security expenditures. And this is being faced very acutely, not only here, but in allied countries as well, which means the spending gap between the US and its allies is growing, a sense that the allies are free riding on America is growing as European allies in particular drastically cut back their expenditures. Allies which have here before been thought of as very, very capable allies, I would cite, for example, the United Kingdom usually cited, they are embarked upon a series of cuts to their defense establishment that is going to change the capability of that country dramatically in the years ahead, rendering it incapable of some of the missions that has performed recently. So there is a pressure and there's more over pressure from China. While I argue that China is not going to become a superpower any time soon, its increased capabilities are making it more expensive to maintain the status quo in East Asia. It's going to be more challenging than it has been over the last 15 to 20 years. That's going to put pressure on the strategy. Moreover, it's important to recognize that retrenchment strategy that I discussed pulling back is consistent with the strategic environment of a one plus X world. A one plus X world uniquely gives the US the choice to pursue deep engagement, but it also affords us also pretty much uniquely for great powers, the option to come home. We could do it. It's consistent. There isn't an overpowering, immediate external strategic demand for the United States to be abroad. A case for retrenchment can be made as being consistent with the strategic environment. And another thing that makes retrenchment a serious option is that the basic essence of the deep engagement strategy is to prevent bad things from happening. This is often not recognized. The US makes these commitments, sustains these expensive alliances in part to prevent the world from getting a lot worse. I'll say a little bit more about it later, but a lot of this strategy is about preserving a relatively favorable status quo for the US. The fear is bad things that would happen if we didn't do this, which means you often have a hard time pointing to positive benefits like we used our military power and we got country X to do exactly what we wanted. We got this perfect outcome. We created an outcome that we like through using our strategy. Instead, we're preventing negative things from happening. And that's a little harder to drive home to politicians and the American people, the value of preventing bad things from happening. Because what you see plainly in front of your eyes are the costs of the strategy. What is only hypothetical and in the strategist's mind is the negative facts that would occur if you didn't pursue the strategy. All strategies, like insurance, all strategies are like this. You intervene in the world to prevent things from happening that you don't want to happen. And you'll never really be able vividly to show somebody how it is that your strategy prevented that bad thing from happening. And that is puts the current grand strategy in a different light and makes it a little tougher to describe. There's also a circumstantial case sort of against the current grand strategy that people will raise. They'll say, look, the world totally transformed with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This huge superpower that we've been struggling against all those decades basically collapsed before our eyes. And yet we seem to maintain the same basic security commitments. Why is it that all those alliances, which were mainly made in order to contain the Soviet Union, are somehow still needed in a completely different world? If critics will say, if the US simply woke up in 1991, didn't have any of these alliances, would we really in the 1990s have decided to create 60 or so alliance relationships with other countries? Would we have expanded them? Would we have upgraded them? The critics suggest perhaps not. Moreover, if you look at the process of American grand strategy, examine the Clinton administration, the various administrations that have post Cold War US administrations. Do we see in the process George Kennan like figures who are strategic geniuses who come up with a brilliant grand strategy with people debate? No, rather what you tend to see is the US kind of willy-nilly ad hoc adjusting to this crisis and that crisis and the next crisis. Do we see evidence of that kind of sort of romanticized vision of strategic analysis? And often the process looks a little bit messy about how we got to where we are today. So there's a circumstantial case. But the main reason, the main reason I think we need to pay attention to this possibility of the option of retrenchment or strategic disengagement is because there's a substantive case against doing what we're doing. There's a substantive case against the core of deep engagement. Critics will say it's way too costly, perhaps unsustainably costly. They'll say that even if you can sustain it and pay for it, it's hurting our long term economic growth and competitiveness by sucking resources out of potentially more productive infrastructural investments and into maintaining a large military and foreign policy establishment. It is moreover they will argue deeply and profoundly unfair. I rarely hear a critic of the current grand strategy. I'm sorry for all you countries, all you people from allied nations. This is not me talking, this is the critics. They regard our allies as a bunch of freeloaders, bunch of freeriders. Their commitments to defense have declined even as America's, at least up until recently, increased where the gap in spending as a percentage of GDP is larger now than during the Cold War or during most of recent history. So they say it's just unfair that American taxpayers in Peoria should be subsidizing the military defense of wealthy and capable allies like South Korea, Japan, and most of the European countries. South Korea, how many times does, how many times bigger is the South Korean GDP than the North Korea that they're defending against? Is it 30 times? I don't even know the number. These, the South Koreans are hugely capable, modern, effective, military forced society. Why do they need an American security guarantee? South Korea actually does fairly well on the spending numbers, but Japan, Germany, France, UK, and many other countries do not. So it's deeply unfair, they argue. Moreover, they say this strategy is going to just make other countries mad at us and cause them to balance against us. We're in everybody's face. We're in everybody's business. America will be the target of counterbalancing by other powers. It will moreover cause America potentially to be entrapped, caught in a net of security interests that are its allies and not ours. This problem of entrapment. Everybody in this room probably knows about the island's dispute between China and Japan. A bunch of really not very attractive rocks sitting out in the middle of the ocean, St. Cacodayuga Islands, where the U.S. does not take an official position on these islands disputes between Japan and China. But we have reiterated on multiple occasions that should they come to blows over this, of course, our security tie, our alliance with China, obligates us to come, our alliance with Japan obligates us to come to our allies' defense. So theoretically, we could find ourselves at war with a great power because of some crazy rocks out in the middle of the ocean. This is the fear that these alliance commitments can pull you into struggles that you don't want to be involved in. And finally, there's the issue of temptation. Having all this military capability sometimes tempts us to feel that we're obligated to try to solve problems in the world with a military tool. We have such an awesome military tool. We have all these alliances. We have this global presence. If a problem occurs in the world, we feel obligated because we have the capacity to try to do something about it. Pulling us potentially into costly entanglements. The temptation issue. These are, I believe, mostly very serious criticisms. Indeed, they are the dominant view of grand strategy among my colleagues in the academy. Now, I know you probably don't care that much about that. Who cares what a bunch of Ivy Tower academics say? But the question is, it is a powerful critique, waiting, waiting for a political entrepreneur to use. Waiting for someone in Washington to figure out that that might actually be a popular option with America. And it is therefore, its substantive importance, these are good criticisms, and its potential political importance that we need to pay attention to it. Okay, so the last bit of my talk you'll be delighted to hear. I've gotten to the last bit. The fourth and final segment is why is it that this criticism is wrong? Not so much wrong as this criticism is insufficient to cause me to recommend that we would abandon the core of deep engagement. We should refocus on the core rather than abandon the core. We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. We should keep what's good and important and necessary about the classic grand strategy we've been following for 65 years. I'll briefly give you a couple of reasons and then open things up. First of all, I think those criticisms that I just spelled out while they had validity are overstated and allow me to walk you through them very quickly why I think they're overstated. As I said, I think these are generally valid criticism, strong arguments. There's only one argument out in that group that I just gave you that I see is just flat wrong and that's balancing. The argument that somehow by following this grand strategy we're going to cause other countries to create military capabilities that they would not have otherwise created. That is that we're going to cause them to devote more to defense spending, more to the creation of military power by being engaged in the world than we would if we retrenched and pulled back. I think that argument is not only not right, because there's very little evidence for it, but I think it's actually completely backwards. That is, I think the case is much stronger for the proposition that if the US were to pull back from these regions, these regions would become less secure and their intrinsic self-help efforts, their autonomous efforts to secure themselves would generate more military rivalry and more build-ups. I think this is particularly evident or most likely to occur in the Asian context. I don't see the withdrawal of US security guarantees, for example, of Korea and Japan as resulting in a net decrease in military activity in East Asia. I think rather on the contrary, it would lead to intensified efforts both on the part of our allies to be sure, but also on the part of China. So I think the balancing is just wrong. Costs, the budgetary costs, well these costs are now coming down. Post 9-11, the United States moved away from the core of deep engagement. The United States, we can debate a lot about what this country did after 9-11, and I think a lot of people have it wrong. There was an attempt to try to do something more with our power in the world. There was an attempt after 9-11 to solve some problems in a more, shall we say, complete way. There was a dissatisfaction with simple containment of problems. We wanted to solve those problems, and that turned out to be very expensive, both in blood and in treasure. And so when people talk about the cost of deep engagement, we really need to look at what the cost of the core of deep engagement is, as opposed to the cost of the post 9-11 attempt at a different approach. In the late 90s, this country was at 3% of GDP on defense, and that is where the Pentagon says we're heading by 2017. 3% of GDP is a lot of money, but it's totally sustainable. It is not, under no circumstances can that be characterized as a burden that the country cannot sustain budgetarily. Therefore, I think, although the costs are significant and need to be considered, they are hardly unsustainable. But there's another argument I think that critics of the strategy use more, which has more legs, and that is that devoting money spent on the military, money spent on foreign policies, money you can't spend on other things. And it doesn't take a Nobel in economics to look around the country and say, gee, where could we use that money? Well, we could use it to pay down debt. We could use to fix roads. We could use to educate our children better. There's lots of other things we could do with that money. And that argument is absolutely correct. It's just obvious on its face that in a grand strategy that's costing you three or three and a half percent of GDP is taking trillions and trillions of dollars and using them for that purpose that could be used for some other purpose. But where the critics go wrong is the claim that that spending will harm American competitiveness. There is simply no evidence for that claim. That is to say that spending money on military and defense is any better or worse for the economy than any other kind of spending. We, and my colleague Brooks and I, in preparing that article that we wrote, we surveyed and did a meta analysis of all economic studies of the relationship between defense spending and economic growth. And the bottom line of a huge number of studies is there is no relationship. You cannot get an argument. You cannot sustain evidence for the claim that this commitment is going to harm American competitiveness over the long term. Not at the levels of three percent. Frankly, not at the levels of much higher than three percent. So that again is an argument that has some legs but it's overstated. What about the unfairness argument? The strategy is unfair. You know what? It kind of is. I mean, I think that argument is overstated because it underestimates allied contributions to various endeavors. It underestimates in particular because it tends to measure allied contributions in absolute terms. How much did they spend? How many troops did they send? How many casualties did they suffer? That's not the way to measure what allies do. You have to measure their contributions as a proportion of their size. So if Estonia loses three troops, and proportionally that's a very, very large sacrifice that Estonia made. Similarly, if a much smaller country spends a certain amount of money on a particular operation, we looked at the military, all the coalition operations the United States has done since 1989, and in many of those, allies spent as a proportion of their GDP, or they made sacrifices in terms of personnel as a proportion of their populations that were equal to, in many cases, equal to or greater than those of the United States. Moreover, that free-riding critique ignores non-military help that allies give to American foreign policy objectives. When we made a peace deal in the Middle East, it didn't work out. They never seem to. But when we made a peace deal in Middle East, who paid for the Palestinian Authority largely to get going? It was the EU. When we intervened in the Balkans to try to solve a problem there, it was a very high level US engagement. But who then took over the expensive, long slog of post conflict rebuilding? It was the EU. It doesn't show up on their military budgets. So it's an overstated case. But at the end of the day, the critics are right. As long as we provide security for other countries, they will provide less for themselves. That's just reality. It is an inevitable feature of this strategy. It's an inevitable feature because we are making these countries more secure by providing them with security guarantees. If they feel more secure, they're going to devote less to their own defense. That's just a cost that we're going to have to bear. It's just a reality of the strategy. In fact, it's in some ways an intended outcome of the strategy. So to some point, the unfairness critique is going to be there as long as we maintain the strategy. And finally, there's the question of entrapment and temptation. Namely, we get entrapped potentially in the security entanglements of our allies. And both these arguments, again, have some elements to them. But they are overstated in the sense that the United States is very aware of the problem of entrapment and therefore works very hard to prevent it from happening. We, in some sense, were not stupid. We worked very hard and it's due as a constant task for American foreign policies to make sure we don't get entrapped. So far, it's worked. And in fact, when you look at large studies of alliances, you don't find much evidence for entrapment actually occurring. And if it does occur, it tends to actually occur, I'm sorry to say this, allies. It tends to occur more of the smaller party than the stronger and larger party to an alliance, which is kind of common sensical if you think about it. In fact, many allies now who've been fighting in Afghanistan, some of them, at least some of the critics in those countries, might say, gee, I think it's weird the ones who are entrapped rather than the Americans. So bottom line is, it's a serious concern that needs to be worked against, shouldn't be poo-pooed, but it is overstated in the criticism. And the temptation issue, too, is serious. As long as you have lots of capabilities, you may be tempted to use them. You may obligated to use them because you can. But if you really look at all of these interventions the United States has done since 1989, up to the present day, from Panama to Libya, there's really a, there's really, there's everything else and then there's Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan and Iraq are roughly over 90% of all the budgetary costs and all the casualties of all the interventions the United States has done since 1989. Everything else, from Bosnia to Kosovo to Somalia to Panama to Haiti to Libya, is less than 10%. So if the temptation worry boils down to will the grand strategy condemn us to, inevitably, to more wars of the Iraq and Afghanistan scale. My answer to that is, I don't think so. In fact, everything that is coming from Washington is telling us that we are moving away from wars of choice of that scale and scope. We've come and learned a very hard lesson about what can be achieved in such operations. And indeed, there's a precedent for this during the Cold War. We had a grand strategy called containment. We went into Vietnam. It didn't turn out so well and then we fought the rest of the Cold War without any more Vietnam. So we went and did different things. And that seems to be where we are going now. So the Iraq and Afghanistan are not necessitated by the core of deep engagement. Okay, last, last, last, last, of course, is the most important bit. But I only have a few minutes to give it to you. And that is the benefits we get from the strategy. Oh, let's talk so far. I haven't really gotten into why the strategy is good and what it does for the United States, other than in very general terms. And that's what I want to close with in my case for why doubling down or focusing, refocusing on the core of deep engagement is the right way for the US to go henceforth. And one way to think about the benefits that we get from pursuing this grand strategy is to ask what would the cost be if we didn't do it? What would the cost be if we seriously disengaged, if we seriously retrenched? I think there are serious costs. And let me just quickly describe them before wrapping up. First of all, I think there would be a general decrease in security. The world would be less secure. There would be increased tensions, arms races, and security dilemmas in various regions around the world. In Asia, Japan and South Korea unhinged from the United States alliance system would likely expand their military capabilities. That would likely provoke reactions from neighbors, leading to a region less stable than it is today. Middle East, long standing partners from the United States like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Gulf States. These states, bereft of their American guarantor, are going to undertake self-help for themselves and the result would be a far, if you think the region is bad today, it would be a region far less secure. Even NATO, an alliance which is arguably not facing regional security threats that are commensurate with the other regions, even NATO, I have been carefully surveying European analyses and looking hard at that setting. And I'm telling you, I think if we were to cut the roof, cut the rug out under NATO, I don't see Europe coming together and building a more capable autonomous European military. I see them in fact getting a lot less capable than they are and therefore you'd have a region far less capable of contributing to its own regional stability and global stability than you have with NATO. I think you'd see a heck of a lot more nuclear proliferation in the world as countries cast loose from the American umbrella would seek their autonomous nuclear capabilities and it wouldn't stop with each U.S. ally, their neighbors would be concerned and we would have a world with a lot more nuclear weapons which increases the possibility of nuclear leakage and increases the possibility of nuclear use. I think we would have much less leverage on security affairs. I think retrenchment would vitiate the levers that we now use to restrain our partners from doing things that we think are provocative and that restrain our partners sometimes from selling military capabilities to potential adversaries. Look, one way to think about this really quickly is we have all these alliances around the world. Regional powers think regionally. There is one power in the world and I don't want to puff up the U.S. too much. The U.S. makes plenty of mistakes. But there is today the world that we see today is the way it is in part because there is one country which is thinking globally and yet has leverage in multiple regions. No other country is doing that. Pull that global logic out of all of these regions and you will see a much more chaotic and dangerous world. There will be reduced security cooperation in a retrenched world. Security cooperation with allies is facilitated, is made much more efficient and much qualitatively much better when you have forces deployed overseas. Cutting those back reduces cooperation, makes your allies less capable and indeed makes U.S. forces less capable as they don't get the benefit of the regional knowledge they obtain through security cooperation. Bottom line is on the security front is that abandoning this grand strategy would decrease global security. It would generate greater military efforts worldwide. It would result in a more rapid diffusion of military power away from the United States, far from solving the so-called problem of American decline retrenchment would radically exacerbate that problem. And not only that, and I am truly getting near the end of my remarks to you folks, not only that, deep engagement isn't just about security. As I mentioned, there were three objectives. There's also an economic objective it has served and there is institutional cooperation. All that or most of that, much of that would be lost if the U.S. comes home and disengages. There are multiple economic benefits. Let me just take a few of these things off. First of all, peace is good for the economy. Insecurity is bad for the economy. If I'm right that disengaging from the world would make regions less stable, the result would not be good for an open globalized world economy. Think particularly about how quickly and interdependently global finance operates. Bankers may, we may love them or we may hate them, but one thing is they don't like war. It's bad for stability. U.S. military commitments, this is particularly important here, in this room, with this group, are important for ensuring securing the sea lanes. It's not as if we had a more anarchic sea lane regime. It's not as if global trade would stop, it wouldn't stop. It just gets a lot more expensive and less efficient as shippers have to go on much, much different and more circuitous and costly routes. It is finally economically very helpful in providing the United States with leverage to help structure the global economy along favorable lines. We like a lot about the global economy. We like to dollar as the reserve currency. We like the role of the IMF, the World Bank. We like the WTO. We like the structure. We created it. We like it. When we are negotiating over the structure, when states are considering whether to exit it or combat it or confront it, the leverage we have over key allies through our military ties helps sustain the status quo. Again, the strategy is a lot about sustaining, keeping things from getting worse. And the leverage we obtain from the strategy helps on that front. We have a lot of examples of it from the Cold War, regarding the United States dollar as a reserve currency. And then finally, there are these institutional benefits. There's a lot of problems that we face as a nation that cannot be solved unilaterally. They require cooperation. We think about transnational terrorism. We think about transnational disease. We think about global warming and other environmental challenges. These things can't be solved by any one country alone. It requires cooperation among states through international multilateral institutions so far so good. But the fact that these problems require this cooperation doesn't mean you're going to get cooperation. It turns out, if you think about it, one of the things that makes cooperation more likely is having an unambiguous leader that is seeking to create and foster that cooperation. Take away the grand strategy. You take away the leverage for leadership and you're going to get much less cooperation on these crucial issues than we would get in the status quo. Okay. I've been talking for a long time. I've gone through all my four points. The strategic situation is such that it gives the United States the choice for deep engagement to refocus on the core if it wants to. The core of disengagement is not the transient issues of various kinds of democracy, promotion, and humanitarian issue, but humanitarian intervention. The core has to do with those security guarantees and the associated three objectives. Retrenchment is a serious alternative based on real hard criticisms. Ultimately those criticisms fall short because the costs of pulling back from the world I think are reliably estimated to be much greater than the cost of maintaining the status quo. So let me just conclude by saying that the core is worth preserving because it prevents a far worse world from emerging. The United States has the capacity to retain that core. US leaders are often unsatisfied with that core because they want to do more with their strategy. Preventing bad world from emerging is not enough. I think we need to resist that temptation and focus on the core. What the strategy does is it gives the US the power to influence the global strategic environment. These are levers of power in the classic sense and you have to ask yourself why would you give up the ability to influence your strategic environment? Why would you unilaterally throw away the capacity to influence the strategic environment? You would need very strong reasons very strong compelling reasons to give up the ability to influence your strategic environment which the United States now possesses through its grand strategy and security relationships. One thing you know international relations scholars they don't they argue about a lot and they argue pretty much about everything that I've just told you. And you're probably going to see people in later sessions of this conference who are going to say Wollforth is full of it but there's one thing I bet they won't argue about. Let's just check and see if it's true and that is deterring bad things from happening is a lot easier than compelling forcefully the reversal of a bad thing that has already happened. It is easier to sustain a status quo than it is to stand back and let it collapse and then try to recreate a status quo. Deterrence is easier than compelence and for those reasons it makes sense to preserve the core of deep engagement and thank you very much for your attention. Sure. Yeah one thing I forgot to mention is for the Q and A we have microphones in the three aisles here so I'd ask you to come out and step up take the questions and don't wait for the last person so ideally there'd be a line of one or two behind each microphone. So for your questions we have about 15 minutes for that. Yes sir. Sorry sir I haven't been here for 20 years so I'm relearning the drill. My name is Lee Coordina NCC 1993 a graduate of this place in 1993 from Australia. Thank you for a very lucid and stimulating presentation and I found myself agreeing with almost everything you said. However there was one aspect of the grand strategy for the United States that I just wanted if you want to expand on a little. In particular I was looking at potentially a third option somewhere between the engagement and withdrawal option that takes account of the realities of globalization. You did touch on globalization towards the end of your presentation and recognizes that the world faces some potentially common dire threats. For example you did touch on also climate change global warming that sort of thing. And these days we see security being defined in many ways much broader than just traditional security economic security human security environmental security and so on. So I wonder in the US grand strategic thinking there might be actually a third option that would reinforce the case for engagement but also reinforce the case for bringing together the classic military sense of power with economic social soft power hard power etc. Thank you. I you know thank you very much for the question. I think it is a it is it is potentially one way to think about that would be aspects of what you're suggesting are consistent with maintaining the core of deep engagement. Another way of putting it is could you do your strategy if you disengaged and I think it would be much more difficult. So then the question comes down to if the question comes down to how willing are we to expand our conception of what the core of the deep engagement is and I have to say that I personally am nervous about expanding it too much because I'm worried about creeping away from those core commitments that I think are are the are the essence of the grand strategy. I'm I'm a little worried about look when you are facing resource constraints it forces you to ask what's the core what's the thing I really need to do that's what strategy is in a resource constrained environment you prioritize and say okay was we have to do first and then we move on to other things and I will we could have a great argument maybe in the seminar I would say that the core that I mentioned of deep engagement is prior to the other to the other objectives that you're speaking about that is necessary for us to move forward on them and if you have to make a choice I say fund and maintain the core before you move down the ladder of priorities yeah I'm Carl Peterson the foundation member do you believe that the retrenchment after the end of the cold war and perhaps a decrease on security in the United States led to the terrorist events that ended up in 9-11 preceded by the coal incident and the the seas in Africa and we have any lessons to be learned from that regarding this topic the that's a great question so it's the link between the overall scale size robustness of the American military posture and the problem of large-scale terrorist attacks there's a huge you know I was talking to a colleague from the King's College War Department they have at least one professor just on the issue of terrorism this is a huge area there's a lot of contention over what motivates it what generates it I think that the big thing that happened was we had we had a very powerful terrorist organization that was formed mainly against the other superpower the Soviet Union and that superpower disappeared and the one last standing was the United States and it looked like a salient target I am not sure that some will argue that the stronger and more engaged the US is the larger the terrorist threat the more in your face the US is in the regions the more it's on shore the more its troops are actually stationed in countries the easier it is for extreme terrorist groups to recruit and the more likely they are to engage in suicide terrorism I actually think that is an argument that is overstated in many ways there's a lot of countries where the United States can be deeply engaged and it has does not have that effect many of the countries where the United States has these kinds of relationships the United States can achieve them from offshore as is already happening in many areas in the Persian Gulf so I'm not so sure that a more robust US posture would have prevented or made less likely 9-11 but I'm pretty sure that the relationship between the US posture and the pushback from terrorists is not a simple a one-on-one relationship anyone else yeah just a bit further as far as commitment to deep engagement to some extent sounds as though it may be static as opposed to smart power and the integration of smart power and how just given that trajectory how that would influence what you're referring to as the core of deep engagement so wait a minute say a little bit more it's too static and needs to adjust it's not a pronouncement it's a question the military core how is that influenced in terms of maintaining the core commitment moving forward and promoting deep engagement how is that influenced by smart power or how should it be integrated with smart power right well first of all don't take this wrong I'm about to say but whenever you get whenever resource constraints happen you're gonna get a term like smart power which is an attempt to sort of suggest that we can do everything we did before if we're just smarter about it and I'm not sure that's true in some sense it's true that there are very valid very powerful criticisms of the US over reliance and asking its military to do many many things that are not traditionally or appropriate in the military realm there are very serious arguments for rebalancing a little bit of the US national security policy towards civilian areas for buttressing the funding of non-military approaches to achieving security but at the end of the day I don't think it's gonna be possible for the United States to avoid trade-offs and doing some things and not others and when that trade-off is faced I think where where the traditional static kind of commitments make sense is in sustaining and maintaining those core alliance commitments that underwrite the strategy and if you can do that and then also contemplate other contemplate other departures then that makes sense the final quick point is I think what you started the question out with is really important which is doesn't this sound static what is your strategy for altering as the world changes and at what point do you start thinking about actually considering some retrenchment when is the signpost for when that's gonna happen and that's a great question which I would love to discuss and I hope we discuss but today was for now we sustain the core of the strategy great job professor thank you everyone loves a secret some of you might have noticed that Dean Garifano leaned across the empty seat and whispered something in my ear Dean Garifano I want to recognize him though these are his students that he educated over this last year he spent 90 days on the ground in Afghanistan the warrior scholar that I spoke of earlier but what he said to me was hey John why don't you say if two students ask questions we'll wrap this up so I'd like to ask our students out there although we've had some alumni ask questions I would like my two favorite students to please step up to the mics and ask a great question thank you yes I'm Commander Saith from India in your talk you mentioned about the one plus x theory and China figured at least a couple of things times in your talk but China is though it's a great economic power still emerging one but it is not a military power and you yourself mentioned that it's a long way to becoming a superpower but what about Russia Russia may not be a very great economy as on date but under Putin the Russians are becoming more assertive and they are a military power there's no doubt about it as the events unfold in Syria we see the Russians becoming more and more assertive trying to protect their interests they have sent a fleet to the Mediterranean they're planning to build up their navy on a much grander scale basically to regain the glory of the old Soviet era so a growing Russia a developing Russia what how would it shape the American grand strategy in the future I think that's another great question as a former card carrying Sovietologists and Russian specialists I particularly appreciate that question the I've been following Russian military reforms for 20 years I've seen president after president defense minister after defense minister announced very very thoroughgoing and substantial military reforms and thus far I've not seen them implemented there are changes we are not dealing with the Russia that we had 10 years ago or 15 years ago but there are there is a the way I view Russia is there is a very clear roadmap to how they could take that capacity they have and make it way more effective all serious military in Russia a military analyst in Russia and some military leaders know what that blueprint is it's been discussed for many many years and yet president Putin despite all of his pretensions to being a decisive leader has yet to do the more costly more potentially effect the effectual reforms so Russia faces too big first of all I completely welcome and subscribe to your question that the conversation today is probably overly dominated by China and people are missing things in the radar that are very very important and Russia is definitely one of those but there's two big problems that they face one is institutional they have a political believe me let me just back up if Putin if there was an easy way for him to get the military power out of his institutions that he would he would like to get he would have done it by now the political economy of that country is hamstringing its great power aspirations some Russian patriots who deeply love their country and wanted to play a larger world role are beginning to see that their own political economy is standing on the road to that path and secondly they do not spending some recent better news they do face a size and demographic challenge to ultimately sort of ramping up their global ranking on many dimensions so they have they have a they have a kind of limitation all into size and a limitation all into political economy that are thwarting them from realizing the potential the political economy piece that first piece could be reversed most specialists on Russia are pretty pessimistic right now but it could be reversed in which case you could see a much more dynamic Russia going forward last question from a student or we'll be in yeah we'll be here forever that's a lot of pressure Matt Smith Department of State one of the assumptions of your presentation is that peace and stability protect economic prosperity Europe has had 65 years of peace and stability outside of Yugoslavia and they're struggling economically the United States in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan some people and some corporations got very very rich can you talk a little bit more about that assumption in your presentation and why you think it's valid yes I can the on the on the Europe front the causes of its current economic problems are complex they relate to a lot to policy they relate a lot to their problems of the Euro the creation of a common currency without the creation of a country or the institutions that commensurate with that they would be a hell of a lot worse if the that continent faced even the prospect of serious insecurity so these are two separate causes if you were to add insecurity into the mix it would be even worse yes on some occasions countries do well out of war the United States for example and world war one or world war two were hugely beneficial to propelling the American economy but the economy in the world has changed a lot since those days it's a lot more interdependent it's linked up in ways that are are very different than the way they were in the middle of the last century sets that if these regions were to descend back into deep insecurity cold war rivalries uncertainty regarding the stability of various kinds of investments the net effect globally would be I think less integration less openness less growth which is in the opinion of almost everybody who thinks about the American economy bad for the United States is that are we I'm waiting for orders from the admiral do we okay thank you all