 I did speak here about a year and a half ago, so I also want to make sure I say something new. And I think I will, because what I had hoped to do then was lay out where I thought this was headed, and I do think it's playing out pretty basically, that the US is reorienting towards Asia, and there's going to be considerable change in the nature of the transatlantic relationship as a consequence of that. And I'll talk about that a little bit as I move forward. But again, thank you very much. It really is a privilege to be here and back in Dublin. And so the nature of what I'll lay out, some of it comes out of a new book project that I'm doing that is a little more fundamental than I'll argue in terms of a basic shift that is going on, I think, in American foreign policy. And to the extent that you would think about broad strokes of how we think about foreign policy, the argument I would make is that the shift that's going on, so there's multiple pivots, almost a pirouette perhaps, if you prefer, but many different pivots going on. In fact, at the core of my argument is that we hear about the pivot to Asia, but that pivot to Asia only works if you can realign the transatlantic relationship, if you can narrow the focus of America's responsibilities in the Persian Gulf. And a third key element is that if you can also reinvest in the domestic sources and foundations of American power. And at the core of this is for the last 20 years, the United States, I would pause it, has been governed by a kind of a loose coalition of what I would say in terms of foreign policy, a foreign policy consensus between sort of liberal idealists on the left, the political left, liberal interventionists, if you will, people like some of the power at the UN, Susan Rice now who's the national security advisor, the state's back to metal and Albright. As Secretary of State, you might recall, she quite famously, long before George Bush came in, riding on his horse with his cowboy hat. She was talking about America as the indispensable nation, America stands taller, therefore it sees further, apparently listens further now too. But this was going on long before George Bush came into office and it sort of even goes to these basic traditions of American sense of exceptionalism and its purpose in the world. And so that was embraced by the left and in sort of liberal interventionist, we see wars like Kosovo and things like that. There are many on the political left that supported invading Iraq as a war of liberation and that sort of thing. And then on the right, the neo-conservatives, as you well know, also who are idealists but who are more nationalistic, who don't wanna work through the UN and that kind of thing. But because America does something, it's therefore just. And what happened in Washington is that this sort of broad idealistic sense was followed with a mobilization to kind of maintain American primacy in the world, dominance over key geographic areas like Europe, the Persian Gulf, parts of Asia. And so that followed suit with regard to bureaucracies and budgets and so what's going on now I would posit at the core of the pivot is a return to realism basically and a better capacity to establish priorities in terms of the world. But I'm also gonna argue that that's gonna be really, really hard to do if not impossible to do. And I'll explain why in just a minute. I think it's fair to say that if you take point one that we're gonna pivot or refocus on a prioritization of Asia, that's a logical thing. When you look at trade, you look at all these kinds of trends. We can realign in Europe and I think the basics for that are in place and I'll elaborate on that a little bit more here. I think we're struggling with regard to the Middle East. We managed to stay out of the war in Syria so far. But you could see in that war there was this major push by liberal interventionists and neo-conservatives that we should go to another war. And finally it was the American public with a little help from the British Parliament that put their foot down and said no. And I think in Washington they were really surprised by that. I don't think they expected that because this culture of interventionism has really come to dominate. And so if you're gonna pivot, you have to pivot internally too. And it means reprioritizing the budgets, the personnel. And one good example, if we think about the priority of a pivot to Asia, the people who are the architects of that policy are gone. Hillary Clinton, Tom Donilon, the national security advisor, Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of state for Europe, they're now gone from the administration. And there's nobody around the president who's actually an Asia first kind of person. In fact, the people around the president are more traditionally aligned with these previous 20 years of priorities. Now the president I think embraces the Asia thing and that's probably what matters at the end of the day. But unless you're willing to, I mean we did this with NATO enlargement when we were in the 90s. So you had Richard Holbrook came in and he said, this is the plan, we're gonna drive it through the bureaucracy. But there's a lot of resistance to this idea of change because at the end of the day it's about realigning priorities, budgets, jobs. I mean, it gets that basic even, I think. So let me say a little more about what I mean in that regard in detail. I don't wanna say that the dilemma of this strategy that America has had for 20 years now since the end of the Cold War, it really is an aberration. I mean, America's most successful foreign policy achievements first and foremost have been non-military, the Marshall Plan, opening the door to China, things like that under Nixon, many others as well. But we have really come to focus on a more militaristic approach and yet we're in a world where the military is probably one of the least effective tools of expanding power in the world. And so making that shift when again when budgets and personnel have been so dominant is gonna be tough. And so, and for example, when we were having the debate over whether we should go to war in Syria or not, Secretary of State John Kerry made two comments just to illustrate the kind of culture that we're up against in terms of this shift. So you might recall that he came out of the Vietnam War and turned in his medals and protested the war, right? And he said famously, who wants to be the last person to die for a failed cause, right? So he really took risks and he was a patriot for that, I think, and rightly so. But during the recent argument about whether we should go into another war this time in Syria, he referred to critics as armchair isolationists. And he said this is a Munich moment. So if you're opposed to war all of a sudden now, you're either an isolationist or an appeaser. I mean, that's how I read that language, right? And that's strong power for politics. And it's just, to me, it symbolizes sort of an insular Washington culture that is almost completely disconnected from the mood of the American public and not understanding the mood that's going on internationally. And I'll make one other quick example. I would argue that it's almost completely misunderstood in Washington right now, how legitimately upset the Germans are about the spine thing. I think they, I mean, everyone says, oh, everyone does this, right? But I don't think there's an appreciation of the history that goes beyond that. And I don't think that there is an appreciation of the way an individual German person can actually relate directly to that. So sometimes when you advance your interests, if you're doing damage to other longer term interests, then you haven't advanced the ball forward at all. And so that's a problem of this sort of insular cultural change. So the first point about the pivot is if you're not gonna change the existing dominant culture, then you're not really gonna be able to embrace and put forward a new foreign policy set of priorities. So that's gonna be the hardest part at the end of the day. The other problem with the last 20 years is that this goal of primacy, which was first laid out in 1992 in an internal Pentagon document by Paul Wolfewitz, who you may well know is gonna be architects of the invasion of Iraq. And it was rejected by the White House under President Bush, Brent Scowcraft, James Baker, they said, no, they were more pragmatist. They were more traditional sort of Eisenhower type realists basically for lack of a better phrase. They didn't like this sort of idea of American sort of intervention, unilateralism and things like that. And it was rejected. And it was at first rejected under Clinton, but by 1995, the Clinton administration had embraced most of this foreign policy vision, including unilateral policy decisions. The famous neo-conservative policy, a project for a new American century had a lot of documents that were signed off on by current Obama administration officials. So this again, this consensus is there and it's strong. But this idea that America had to be the primacy country worldwide had the very negative effect, I would argue, of creating perverse incentives to effectively, for in short term, to free ride on American power. It's certainly how it's seen in Congress now, which voted, for example, last December to approve withdrawing all U.S. troops from Europe. That was reconciled with the Senate. So when I make my arguments about withdrawing U.S. Army from Europe, as I will in a minute, that I'm actually more moderate. I mean, the Congress wanted all of them out. And I just want the army out. But this idea of primacy, that America had to be dominant and controlling virtually everything, everywhere, really became a negative incentive for allies to contribute and invest in their own capacity to take responsibility for their own affairs. And we should be cultivating that, as opposed to jealously holding on to some pre-existing kind of set of relationships that no longer reflects the nature of the global balance of power. So breaking with that, structurally, is also gonna be very, very difficult to do. So there's a shift, I think, in Obama foreign policy. It's a shift towards prioritizing threats, looking for new opportunities. There is a reintroduction of a basic kind of cost-benefit assumption. I mean, much to his credit, and I think in polls, President Obama got credit for this, that when he was presented with a new set of facts with regard to what could be possible in Syria, he chose not to go to war. He took a good bargain. He got a good deal out of that. And by the way, we incentivized another country to take responsibility for it even, which was Russia. I mean, better that the Russians are holding the bags for Assad than the United States stuck with yet another war that it would be interminably impossible to win. So we got it, you know, the problem, I think, actually is that in the process on Syria, we ceded the U.S. to the Russians. And that was a big mistake. We were so focused on making the case to go to war, we forgot to make the case to the world about the nature of the norms that we were trying to uphold. And we were willing even to break some of the most important norms of you have to have a UN Security Council approval before you attack another country that hasn't attacked you to do this other thing. We were totally ignoring the International Criminal Court. You know, we could have gone and tried to get indictments. You know, if we were so worried about the Syrians and the Russians, we could have gone to the UN Security Council and laid out the information, presented the intelligence. That's how you win hearts and minds. We just said, now we'll skip that process and just go to war. But the fact that the United States has had to do the Kosovo's, the Balkans, the Libyans, perhaps the Syrians and whatnot. You know, we saw a good model, nascent model in Mali, which we can talk about in the discussion if you want. But even there, you know, France had to call in the United States for the key enabling forces to actually project power and sustain power once they went into Mali. So we had to provide C-17 planes. And that's where the costs really come from the American taxpayer point of view because the C-17 costs a lot of money to procure. And so the Europeans don't necessarily have the incentives to pool their resources better, to get better procurement of the kind of systems that they would need for those sort of sustainable operations in their immediate area of vicinity. I think also key to this new Obama foreign policy is that we do prefer our stability over spreading democracy and things like that. So it's realist in that sense. I mean, Henry Kissinger would probably like this foreign policy. In fact, he does, I think, because it's more traditional in that sense. But American foreign policy, when it was at its best, always had a good blend of this realist restraint and being a voice at least of ideals in the world. In the last 20 years, I think have been an aberration actually from this. Finally, so then we get to the Asia part. And then I wanna say a few things about Europe and actually then the domestic side of this. So the pivot to Asia. I mean, I think anyone who follows these things knows very well why Asia would be the priority, right? And I can give you just some, the United States has twice as much trade with Asia as it does with Europe now. I mean, this is a basic, economic structural fact, right? The trade with Asia in 2012 was $4.2 trillion. You have 32% of all US total merchandise trade worldwide go into Asia, exports to Asia are $457.2 billion in 2012. United States trades more with South Korea than with Germany now. I was shocked when I saw this, but it trades more with Singapore than it does with France. I mean, these are the new, if you're trying to be realistic about the world, these are the new realities. And this is structural dynamics with regard to trade that really matter, right? Because at the end of the day, we're talking about jobs. It's an important export market. America's top 20 national export markets are in Asia. 130 value US overseas sales go to Asia. And if it continues to, if East Asia continues to post only five point, I'm barring this from the guy named David Shamba who knows more about the NIDU, so I trust his numbers, but if we continue to post only a 5.5% growth and gross domestic product out of East Asia, that will contribute to 5% US GDP, about 4.6 million jobs. So at the end of the day, there's a big reason why politicians would like this, why businesses would like this, and this trans-Pacific partnership that we're negotiating to lower trade barriers, open new markets, reduce trade deficits. But by the way, I mean, here's proof positive of why if you can't get the domestic part right, then you can't get this part right. The president just had to cancel a trip to Asia, right? And by the way, he also had to cancel a trip to Russia, both of which I think were enormous mistakes. And I tell my friends in the White House that, and I hope they watch this video because I think they made horrible mistakes in canceling those meetings. I think the president should have gone to Russia and stood by Putin and said what he had to say, just so that the Russian public would hear what he had to say. And we have spent the last 20 years as part of this vision of America and the world lecturing the Russians on how they should calculate their interests relative to us. And suddenly they do one thing to push back and we take our ball and go home. I think that was a big, big mistake that seeded the rhetorical leverage to Putin. And then he starts writing letters in the New York Times and before we know it, he's saving us out of Syria, right? And it wasn't well thought through. Cancelling the trip to Asia. Yes, there was a domestic crisis going on, no doubt about it. But the president of the United States should be able to do two things at once and he should have gone to Asia and said I'm gonna do this because we have to do it because it's our national interest. We have an opportunity to educate the American public about the importance of these things, but instead he had to stay home because we couldn't get the domestic piece right because we were considering global economic armageddon to foist upon all of you. It was a big, big, bad move. But the two-way trade just between the trans-Pacific partnership countries are massive opportunities for the United States, excluding China. So again, just to point out the logic is there. Now the thing about the pivot though, it can't be, it's been perceived largely in two ways that I think are wrong. One is that it's a pivot away from something, right? So away from Europe and so the people in the European dusk at the State Department and other places get nervous they think well wait a minute, what are we gonna do, right? And it's been misperceived as being too military. And it actually really hasn't been that, but there's like 2,500 Marines I think in Australia. There's ports of call in Singapore, a couple other places, but pretty minor stuff. Now what the President really said was that when he laid this out was that as we cut our defense budget and re-prioritize other places, we will not cut our allocation of forces into Asia. We'll keep them as they are. But within a few years, 60% of our Navy's gonna be parked in the Asia-Pacific region and all. And so we try to reassure the Chinese this isn't a containment thing and the way to do that is to emphasize trade and diplomacy. But if the President for two years in a row by the way, because of the election last year skips these vital summits in Asia, then the problem with that is that these emerging countries like Vietnam or other places that are potential partners and important ones through the United States, they look at that and they start to wonder how serious we are about this. And they start to think well maybe we should plan our foot down with China for example instead. They're nervous about the rise of China but if they think we're not reliable or they think we're gonna keep getting drawn into wars like Syria or if they think we can't realign out of Europe then they may start to doubt our resolve. Now the thing about this pivot is it is official US policy. It's in documents but the President has yet to really explain it to the American public. He's yet to drive it through that bureaucracy and he's yet to make the real hard choices I believe with regard to Europe and the Middle East are gonna be required. But just on the Asia point I'll quote a friend named Justin Logan, he writes, if China made this sort of, so we argue that these forces in Asia are for new security missions like piracy and counter narcotics and things like that. He writes, if China made this sort of argument to defend deploying more than half of its naval assets to the Western Hemisphere, American leaders would not give the argument the moment's consideration. If the success of America's Asia policy relies on Chinese elites believing this story, the policy is in trouble. And that's the danger because of course, classic security dilemma, we could provoke China into some kind of response that would then get hardliners in our own country to then say, aha, look at China and then bam, we're off to an arms race, right? And or even conflict and that's dangerous. So it has to be done very, very carefully. Okay, the next part, and I wanna move quickly here through this and just say a few things about Europe and what it means here. If it's gonna work, what I just described in Asia, again, it requires a new hierarchy of priorities. As my colleague, John Mersheimer and I spoke at a US Army War College strategic planning seminar last April, he points out that if you, in the context of the pivot, Europe is likely to become the second, not the second, but the third most important region in the world for the United States. And that's coming after what, 60 plus years since World War II where it was at the core, right? And if you're pivoting somewhere, that especially in a limited budget dynamic, that means you're pivoting away. That's how it's certainly interpreted. So they said, no, wait a minute, it's really rebalancing, right? They're realigning as opposed to pivoting. But the foundations, again, have some key things that have to happen. So first it has to happen in Europe. Europe is the obvious place to start. Europe is peaceful. There's clearly no threat. The biggest threat is, of course, continually the Eurozone problem. That is the threat. And I've spoken about that here before, so I won't go back into it now. And so the last thing we should be doing is lecturing the Europeans to spend more money on defense. That's the last thing we should be doing. But what we should be doing is saying to them, we want to help you cultivate better pooling of the resources that you have. And we wanna work with you to get there. But if we're gonna do that, we have to also be willing to change the incentives because the incentives right now are for the Europeans not necessarily to do that, but to fall back and rely on the NATO infrastructure that is basically the American infrastructure. Germany is a good example. There's a country with 200,000, I think, in the army, but only about 8,000 to 9,000 that are deployable for overseas operations. That's the kind of thing that we'll have to change. There already is, I think, a broad acceptance of this at the elite level in the European Union and NATO countries. And you see it with Britain and France with some nascent cooperation on aircraft carriers, intelligence, I mean, planes can't land on them either, but it's a basic recognition that they are gonna have to fill these gaps as America winds down. But the American assumption has been, we'll leave and the Europeans will just match it, like equal to equal it. And that's wrong, that's a false assumption. And so we haven't been willing to make the hard choices that need to be made with regard to Europe. And I'll come back now in just a minute and say something else about that as I conclude. But the second key thing, again, narrowing the focus on the Middle East. President Obama just spoke at the United Nations and a lot of people said, wow, all he talked about was the Middle East. But we're not gonna be able to just like pack up and leave after a decade of war there, right? And the world economy, whether we like it or not, relies on the stable free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf and it will for decades to come. And somebody's gonna have to police those sea lanes. We also do have the question of the future of Iran and how that's gonna be addressed. But basically what you've heard, if you listen carefully what the president said in his UN speech is we're gonna dramatically narrow our commitments in this region. We're not gonna act alone, we're not gonna be spreading democracy. And so we have to prioritize, we have to pick and choose. And so we didn't go to war in Syria now, but we also haven't gone to war in Syria for the last two years. Well what, 100,000 people have been killed in a savage war and we have not intervened, right? That's the kind of hard tough choice that a more realistic foreign policy will require. I would argue it doesn't mean giving up your moral elements to that. For the cost of what the war costs in Libya that we went to we could have bought a lot of mosquito nets and sent them to Africa and sent and saved a lot of children's lives. And we choose not to do that every year. So I don't think we're in a position to say morally because we do a war somewhere where we've got virtue. Because there's a lot of things we could do that aren't military that can save more lives actually and we choose not to do that in the world. But clearly it requires resisting the temptation to be pulled into these peripheral conflicts around the Middle East. The last key dynamic has to do with the internal foundations of American power. And the worry that people legitimately have here is that as we do this it could unleash a new kind of isolationism. And you see it in the foreign, I mean John Kerry obviously hinting at that. You see it in the foreign policy debates from some of the Tea Party people but also on the left sort of the anti-war liberal sort of movements. But the things that have made America great in the past are the things that we're not doing now. And I wrote a piece in survival last spring where I traced back through what President Eisenhower did after the Sputnik crisis in 1957, 1958. And the key thing was they saw an external problem, they saw a shifting geopolitics and the answer was to invest internally in American power in the National Security Highway Act before that where we built infrastructure. You had the National Security Education Act which built most of the major land grant universities, research and development, DARPA, which eventually creates the internet, little things like that, which they tried to take by the way to the private sector and the telephone company said, now we've got good cables, we don't need that stuff. So it sits there for 30 years almost and you're developed by the government. But now we've embraced this anti-government mood and we're like as you well know what it's like here, cuts, right, I mean cutting everything. But we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater at the same time. We're cutting research and development. China will surpass the United States as a percentage of what it spends in its economy on research and development. They're gonna spend $262 billion in the next five years on bioengineering education, high-tech communications, all the stuff that we're gutting and cutting. I mean we're getting really good in the United States at building all kinds of video games for kids to play but we're not partnering up between government and the private sector to build the kind of things that we're gonna need to be competitive as a source of American power with China for the decades to come. Now I promise I can include a little bit on your economic, just take that three or four minutes and then do this so we can get into more detail in the discussion. So what I wanna tell you here is what I gave advice and talk that went to Army Chief of Staff in April and to the United War College and as part of the strategic planning and also the talk I gave with Pentagon in July. And I think what I find politically interesting is arguments that I'm making now about U.S. and Europe which two, three years ago would have been almost harassing but now they're being largely embraced I think not because of anything special I've done or other people would agree with this but because of the budgets on the sequester has forced the military to think and prioritize about what they're gonna do or what they're gonna spend on. So the argument in a very, in a two minute nutshell that I'm making that is essential to the Asia pivot with regard to Europe which is the most interesting to all of you here on is that the United States needs to, NATO's strategic concept is now actually quite outdated. It's got nothing to do with these new dynamics. They wrote it with no regard but so ever for the Euro's own crisis and the budgets that are going on in these countries and it was written by a team quite frankly that all embrace this sort of previous liberal conservative consensus about the U.S. role and how NATO and Margin and intervention and things like that. So we did not really think about how to realign and re-incentivize the dynamics to get more out of our European friends and allies. My argument and I'm glad to take my lumps on this it's fairly dramatic that we need to be public and we need to have a plan as my late Irish father and mom used to always say if there's gonna be chaos at least let it be organized. And my argument is that the United States should very clearly limit our role in NATO to article five missions, collective defense. No more of these interventions on the periphery of Europe. If there's gonna be intervention in the periphery of Europe, it's plenty of time that Europe should be the one to handle these things. They have the capacity, they don't have the will, they don't have the integrated capacity but there's no reason we can't set a goal of getting there so that the allies could say fight and sustain a Libya kind of intervention and a Balkans style peace operation without the United States having to be involved. And you might say, okay, well if it's just collective defense what is that? Now I would tell you right now that means almost exclusively missile defense and a very limited presence on the ground. I believe my argument is we should sustain our air presence in Rammstein and in Germany. We should keep our special operations base in Germany. There's a small training facility in Germany we should keep but basically the entirety of the US land forces which will by 2015 be down to 30,000 troops should go down to basically zero up. We keep the air capacity and the naval command in Italy but the rest of it would be handed over to the European allies within the context of NATO and that's a change because for a long time we were talking about the context of the European Union. I know if Ben Donner were here he would say this should all be you and he'd be of course right but I give him the credit for that. But France has shifted and I think they see the efficiency of doing this through pre-existing institutions out at this stage through NATO and so I think that's the direction it's headed. So the second point being that we need to get, we need to lead again in Europe and get a better consensus about these kind of operations and the limited role in the United States. The most radical of the things that upset my friends in the United States and I've written this at foreignpolicy.com but if we're gonna go down to say like 2,000 army troops in Europe then why do we need a major theater command in Europe, UCONN, which is based in Germany. It's the major command. UCONN is separate from NATO so it's not integrated into it. It's not integrated into helping with these new missions. It's sort of a dual-hatted thing. I'm arguing that should be relocated to the United States and maybe pool or consolidate it into another major regional command. So for example, Central Command is based in Florida and that's where we ran two wars. If we could run two wars out of Florida certainly we could run no war in Europe out of say Norfolk, Virginia or somewhere in Maine or something like that and actually employ a lot of American people cutting hair and doing shop sales and things like that. So time to bring them home. That also means we're investing our research and development with the Allies and then finally rotating European troops to United States for exercise. So you keep the idea of NATO alive but you do most of the actual exercising by helping Europeans mobilize to come to us and do field work there. And then lastly, and this is well-concluded is to pivot back to Europe. And what do I mean by that? Okay, how do you just say we're gonna pivot away? But we are pivoting back. We have done with the missile defense concept which is a much better plan than the disastrous and I use that word kindly, plan that the Bush administration had with regard to Poland and the Trump Republic but you do have a theater-based missile defense system. It's layered, they wisely limited it and cut out the last stage of it because it was useless and it didn't work and it was only upsetting the Russians at the same time. But that is collective defense. It's the first investment in NATO collective defense since the end of the Cold War. So you can't say we're leaving, if we're actually doubling down in aligning capabilities with threats. And then it's the US and EU trading negotiations which I think will survive the very understandable upset of the German people right now. And but that's gonna take some work. I'm talking about surveillance of course which I think is outrageous and I don't buy the argument that everybody does this and I think that we should have been a lot smarter about that before we proceeded on it. And quite frankly, I don't like saying this but the idea that the president didn't know about it is really disturbing. If it's true, then one should ask you should be fired for not having told him and if it's not true then that also raises some very serious questions about trust. And again, I say that as a general supporter of the president but it's alarming in that sense. But the US and EU free trade agreement can be a win-win for everybody and it matters so much more than how many troops we have in Germany because it really can help people out. It can get people working. And it can start with layered things. I'm not a deep expert on this but just like automobile regulations and things like that. Why have two kinds of standards for this thing? We should align those things and sell cars and put people to work. That's what matters and that's what will increase the confidence and security that people in Europe need to feel in these very difficult times. So that's what I'll conclude because I think that's the architecture of my pitch and there's a lot in there to grapple with and I really want to hear what you think. So that's hot pie.