 New America will like to welcome you to our virtual event. The program will begin momentarily. While we are waiting, I want to review a few housekeeping notes. This event is being recorded and the recording will be posted to the New America events page within 48 hours after the event. Attendees will be in listen-only mode and you will not be able to be seen or heard by your fellow attendees or panelists. Therefore, we encourage you to share your comments and questions in the Slido box located to the right of the video. Close captioning is available by hovering over the video and clicking CC at the bottom of the video. If you encounter any issues during the event, please contact events at newamerica.org. Thank you for joining us. We will begin momentarily. Welcome to New America online event to discuss long-term strategic thinking. We have two really brilliant thinkers on this subject to walk us through this. Peter Skloblik, who is a program fellow in the international security program. He's also his PhD at Harvard Business School focus on the question of strategic planning. He's a former staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Senator John Kerry was running the committee with a particular focus on nuclear planning and has also written a book on that subject. And we also, of course, have Anne-Marie Slaughter, who is the CEO of New America, ran policy planning at state. The first woman to hold that job. She was also Dean of the Princeton School of Public Affairs and Public and International Affairs and has spent a lot of time, professional time, thinking about preparing for the future. So we're going to start with Peter. He's going to talk a little bit about some of his recent work. Anne-Marie will then comment on it. I'll engage him in Q&A. I will also moderate the questions from the audience. You do have questions. Put them on the Slido and I will halfway through our session. We'll start asking both our distinguished panelists the questions from the audience. So, Peter, take it away. Great. Thank you so much, Peter, for that introduction. And thank you all for coming today. So I want to just talk a little bit about this report on strategic foresight and long term thinking. And it, you know, I want to just say, you know, what the report was motivated by. And it was motivated by the persistence of short term thinking in U.S. policymaking, meaning that policymakers have a tendency to privilege the sort of immediate needs of the short term against the long term interests of the country. And the report does focus on the United States. And I mean, short termism, I think, sort of is like intuitively sounds like a bad thing. But, you know, we don't have to just go by intuition on this, actually. There have been like many, many studies from many think tanks across town here about the impact that that has on infrastructure, whether it's, you know, physical infrastructure or, let's say, public health infrastructure, for example, undermining environmental policy, which obviously is having long term ramifications that we're starting to live through in the present and, you know, national security, whether you're preparing for the correct threat or whether you've got the correct tools to deal with whatever threat emerges. And it's not just a government problem. It's a private sector problem as well. And in some ways it's more easily measured in the private sector. But companies have a tendency to privilege the short term, you know, quarterly earnings reports, say, or what have you. And McKinsey did a study a couple of years back that measured, you know, well, if companies were more long term, what would we see? And the answer was like really startling to me. It was like an increase of a trillion dollars of GDP a year and the employment of five million people that were, you know, needlessly unemployed, which is just a really dramatic finding, I thought. And so finding a way to get, you know, around short termism so that we're not, you know, either literally or metaphorically leaving money on the table and also thinking about the future so that we we prepare ourselves for surprise, which is inevitable, no matter what we do. Is what I wanted to focus on and I wanted to focus on it in particular because I think the problem is going to get worse. I think that the more complex that the international system gets, the greater degree of irreducible uncertainty there is about the future, the harder it is to get our heads around what the future is going to look like. And and so with this, you know, in order to launch a future stuff that just can't be predicted and planned for, the reaction we tend to have is to focus more on the short term because it's more predictable. It's more tractable. It generates a lot less anxiety than thinking about the uncertainty of the long term future. And so, you know, many people I think would would characterize the problem of short termism as one of incentives, both in the private sector and the public sector. So if you're, you know, Congressperson and you've got to run for office every two years, that's going to restrict your time horizon. Similarly, if you're a CEO putting out quarterly earnings reports, your time horizon is restricted to that. One of the contentions of the report is that even if we radically altered the incentive structure, we'd still be facing the problem because we'd still be facing the uncertainty of the future and we'd still seek refuge in the short term, which is which is more predictable and tractable. So it's this coping mechanism, essentially. It's just a really unhealthy coping mechanism because it has a lot of costs. So the question of the report is, how can American policymakers adequately value the long term, given the inherent uncertainty of the future and the demands of the short term? And the answer that I put forward is strategic foresight, which is a term that they require as definition. It's not about predicting the future so much as it is improving through imagined alternative futures our ability to sense, shape and adapt to the future that does emerge. And sort of an archetypal example of that is a tool is scenario planning, which the report goes into in a fair amount of detail. And so what I wanted to do was look at, well, is anybody in the US government doing this to what extent are they doing it and does it actually help? It sounds like it should help, but does it actually help? And so I did, you know, a deep dive on the US Coast Guard, actually. And I chose the Coast Guard because it is almost like a prototypical short term focused organization or it was anyway. If you go back 20 years ago, the Coast Guard is small, but it's got 11 statutorily mandated missions. It sort of needs to be operationally deployed at all times. And it also has to be on call if there's a national emergency, whether it's a hurricane or an oil spill or what have you. And so they had ingrained in their culture this sort of we don't think we do. We wait for the alarm bell to go off and then we we cope and we do it really well, and then we wait for the next thing. And what happened about, you know, a little over 20 years ago when Admiral James Lloyd became Combinant, he just said this is just unacceptable. We can't, we don't know how to structure the service if we're just responding in the moment. And so he set up a scenario planning exercise known as Project Longview, which took place over a couple of years where the Coast Guard its Office of Strategic Analysis, which reported to to Admiral Lloyd, they hired some outside consultants and they developed this range of futures like what will the world might the world plausibly look like in 20 years and they came up with a with a range of of sort of scenarios of stories about the future 20 years from from that time and, you know, they covered everything from environmental degradation to actually, and this was in 1998, 1999, increasing terrorist attacks closer to home and more frequently. So they didn't anticipate 9-11, but they they sort of had had been thinking about this beforehand. And from that program of scenario planning, they they extracted strategies, robust strategies that would make sense, no matter which one of the futures materialized or which elements of which future materialized. This went into a strategic plan and then was promptly put on a shelf and nobody did anything with it until 9-11. And on 9-11, there was this very dramatic effort that that I actually had not been familiar with where you had a couple hundred thousand people trapped on the southern tip of Manhattan and the only way off the island was by water. And so the Coast Guard sort of on an ad hoc basis, manages to like organize this this flotilla of public and private craft. And it's like an American Dunkirk almost where you're just, you know, getting thousands of people off Manhattan to to safety. So I I wanted to study the Coast Guard because I wanted to see how well this worked after 9-11. They they looked back at the previous effort they had done and they were like, so we had actually put those things into practice. Would that have improved our response? And the answer they came to was yes. And so they institutionalized a process of strategic foresight that was renamed Project Evergreen. And that's been running every four years for the last, you know, 20 plus years. Then it's evolved and it's had its ups and downs and what have you. But it was interesting to look at. And the the thing that that I found or the things that I found in looking at the Coast Guard were sort of threefold. The one is if you want policymakers to think about the long term and wrestle with the uncertainty of the long term, which, as I said, is really uncomfortable, what you have to do is you have to give them tools. You can't just say, hey, you know, think about 20 years in the future. It's really hard to do. It really taxes the imagination. What you need is sort of a formalized institutionalized process for generating imagination. And, you know, as the 9-11 Commission reports, sort of famously characterized the September 11th attacks as a failure of imagination on the part of the United States. And so this is really an attempt to, you know, give imagination an organizational form. And if you do that and this is what happened at the Coast Guard, surprise, surprise, people, they spend more time thinking about the future, not only in the actual exercise itself, but like when they return to the field. So you have people from across the service participating in the scenario planning exercise, they'd go back to their commands or what have you. And they bring this kind of intuitive sense that, you know, we should be thinking more about the long term to them. But, you know, just thinking about the future in and of itself is not the point. The point is how does thinking about the future impact your action in the present? And a lot of times people see these two things as being an intention. If we, you know, if we spend too much time thinking about the short term, it crowds out long term thinking, but one can also argue that the reverse is true. Too much long term thinking, you know, it doesn't really help us in the short term. And what I found with the Coast Guard was that simply wasn't true. It's not that every thought they had about the long term was significant or put into policy or anything like that. But as you watched officers return to the field, they would change their course of action based on the experience they had had in this structured imagination exercise. And so there was one two star vice admiral whom I spoke with who had participated in a couple of Evergreens. And and when she took over command of the Pacific Theater, she was one of the one of the robust strategies that Evergreen had suggested was improving relationships. And this seems this is one of these things that seems like really obvious. Well, of course, we should improve relations. There are a lot of really obvious things in organizations and government that don't actually get acted on. But this was made more concrete for her by participation in the exercise. And so she starts linking up with the Coast Guard of other Pacific nations and then also developing relationships with other domestic agencies in the United States from the EPA to the FBI to the NSA because the Coast Guard's missions are so broad. Um, the final thing I'll just say about the Coast Guard and then just a couple more comments and I'll stop. But I think that it's strategic foresight, scenario, planning is often one of these things that leaders say they don't have time to do. Or there's not, you know, what's the return on investment? How do you prove to me that this is an important thing to do? And what I saw with the Coast Guard was that the return on investment, however you want to measure it, is remarkable. The leverage you get out of a small investment in strategic foresight is quite extraordinary. So it yields efforts disproportionate to the resources invested. By contrast, if you don't do it, if you're just making decisions without considering the long term and I would say considering the long term in a structured way, you can make mistakes like spending billions of dollars acquiring a new aircraft that's going to be, you know, you're going to have to operate for the next 20, 30 years that doesn't actually serve the mission that you have 10, 20, 30 years from now, which is actually something that did happen at the Coast Guard. So there's just a great value in preparing for a range of plausible futures. Um, so the Coast Guard's like done quite well with this. And what I wanted to do is, well, let's look at the national security establishment more broadly. How does the national security establishment do strategic foresight? They do a lot of strategy, right? We have a lot of strategic documents. At least we're supposed to have a lot of strategic documents. We will, you know, a national security strategy, a national defense strategy. The, you know, organizations have their own strategies. We're sort of like swimming in strategy. But the more that I looked into how long term thinking is incorporated into day to day thinking, I found that even in offices within parts of the bureaucracy, whose mission is really to think about the future, really to think about the long term, operations often crowded out planning or strategizing because it's just it's not only more urgent. It's rewarded more than than strategizing it. Everybody wants to be in the room where it happens, right? And that's like a short term thing. That's not like a long like writing a white paper is just not quite as attractive as as that. And then you have this converse problem that when you do get strategy, it doesn't necessarily influence operations. So you can have a national security strategy and it's all well and good. But if it doesn't affect, you know, if it doesn't prioritize effectively and if those priorities are not then carried out through the bureaucracy, you sort of miss the the point and its ornamentation rather than imagination and and operationalization. Everybody, of course, will say, well, what about the Pentagon? Like the Pentagon does a ton of long term, you know, strategic thinking and they do. And it's it's like there's this like, you know, the as one person said to me, like the Pentagon is so big, you can find everything and nothing there at the same time. And you can find strategic foresight efforts and scenario planning efforts throughout the Pentagon, but they're often at sort of lower levels. The really interesting stuff is at lower levels like the Army's mad science laboratory or things like that. And when you get to the top level, what happens is it becomes more contingency planning. So the Pentagon, you know, the leadership will come up with a set of strategic strategic priorities. And and frankly, until recently, it was China. And then they would go to the scenario planners and they would say, OK, write us a scenario in which we have to confront China. And that's like assuming a particular future. It's not actually engaging the range of plausible futures. And, you know, publishes report in December. Everybody was emphasizing China. The strategies were all going to emphasize China. And two months later, the the. Focus has shifted, shall we say. The other thing that that people often sort is a site is the Global Trends Report, which is put out by the National Intelligence Council every four years. And it is a really interesting document and it's it's it's great. And people, you know, read it and they they love it. It suffers from the same problem. Interestingly, this most recent one, it has five scenarios and at four out of the five focus on China. And it also is sort of the exception that proves the rule in the sense that it's a great foresight document that has very little impact on policy. So you have these these problems. And, you know, the good news is that as I, you know, reported and research this the subject, there are strategic foresight efforts that are cropping up like around the bureaucracy. And it's not just national security. It's also agencies, you know, like the Office for Personnel Management and the Secret Service and the CDC, fortunately. And so there there are these like, you know, what I call kind of green shoots of strategic foresight, but my my fear and where I'll stop is that if you don't get this support from the really top by the top level, I mean, the president, you're not going to have a national whole of government effort thinking about the long term future. And so where I wound up is, you know, pick your organizational form. Like what however you want to instantiate it is is fine. But the key to success here will be presidential engagement and the president making it clear that thinking about the long term, the uncertainty of the future and the need to plan for a range of plausible futures is is just vital for the US government. So let me let me stop there and turn things back to you, Peter. I'm right. So, Peter, thank you for that. And there I will I'll respond and post some questions and there's a lot we can we can discuss. And I'll say when I when I hear you speaking, the first thing I think of is the strategy that I learned ages ago for managing my inbox, but I'm not very effective at applying for many of the reasons you just said, which is, you know, you've got four categories. You have urgent and important. So everybody's got to deal with that, you know, incoming. And it's it has to be done right now and it's clearly important. So Russia invades Ukraine. It this is not a time for a long term strategy with Russia. You respond and then second, of course, urgent, but not important, which is very hard to tell in the moment because it's urgent. You know, somebody's yelling at you to respond and important, but not urgent. And that's the place everybody has trouble because not important, not urgent. That's the bottom third 20 percent, whatever it is, your inbox. You're never going to get to anyway, because it comes in and it's neither. And that's the tension, right? You're telling us focus on the important, but not urgent when the urgent is demanding your attention. And you sort of see this late that when and again, I know we're still talking very much in the present. But if you a couple months later, you go back to try to clean up your inbox and there's all sorts of stuff that is gone. And it didn't matter because it wasn't important. But the question is, how do we focus our time on things we know are important but, you know, are less urgent than what's coming at us? So I just I had as I listened to you, I was thinking, this is the metaversion of that strategy. And as you say, a lot of government is flooded with what is important and urgent at the same time, right? I mean, natural disasters, aggression, the pandemic and the pandemic is a great example of something where, yeah, there's been tons of long term strategy, the trends were so clear. And people like Laurie Garrett had been, you know, talking about them. I remember in 2004, when we did the Princeton Project on National Security, she came, actually Peter Bergen was there too, and she said this is going to happen and just so hard to focus on that rather than whatever it was that was happening immediately in 2004, presidential elections, et cetera. I wanted to note, though, before I kind of get more granular about government. This also happens in the civic sector, right? As you said, it happened in government. It clearly happens in the corporate sector. We've got an entire body of literature trying to counter short termism. And the only person who seems to do it is Warren Buffett. Everybody else, all these CEOs, you know, and so you have people like Mark Warner, it's talking about short term capitalism, et cetera. But the civic sector, of course, we're driven by grants. So part of it is, you know, when a funder says this is what I think is important, even if you might disagree, few of us are going to say, no, I'm sorry, we're not going to take that funding. We're going to go do something else. But there's also, you know, even let's say you have all the funding you need with our education program. For instance, I know that they think long term you have to try to outline a vision of American pre-K through 12 education that is not based on property taxes. That is what has to happen. You cannot continue, you know, completely determining the quality of education based on where you live. We're the only place in the world among advanced industrial countries anyway that does that. And they know that. And that's what, you know, if you know, if you imagine that future, what should you be doing right now? And yet at the same time, you have something like a fight over the common core, God forbid right now, the fights over critical race theory and school boards that could do real damage. And where do you put your money? All right, so just as a very clear example in the civic sector as well. But now then, turning to the core of do we do this in government? Can we do this in government? What are the obstacles? So we certainly never did this at policy planning when I was there. And policy planning famously was created by George Marshall when he was Secretary of State. And he, George Kennan set up the first policy planning unit. And every director of policy planning has had a serious chip on our shoulder ever since. How do you live up to that? But the important thing is George Marshall said to George Kennan, avoid trivia. And they came up with the Marshall plan, which is a pretty great example of something that was that solved an immediate problem. Here you have Europe in ruins and really thinking about we don't want to just give aid. We want European countries themselves to decide how to spend it and leverage this money. So that's great. Certainly when I was at policy planning, we didn't do anything like that. And had we, it wouldn't have gotten red. We did do the quadrennial diplomacy and development review, like the quadrennial defense review, which you might think is a chance to stand back and do this kind of planning. It was much more as you put it, although I think you were kinder than I will be, we knew what we wanted. We wanted to elevate development. Now, you could say we could imagine alternate futures like futures of pandemics and where pandemics and climate change are going to be the bigger threats. And to do that, you need the tools of development to address them rather than guns and bombs. There was some of that, absolutely. But we didn't sit down and imagine alternative futures. We just took that as a given. And then we basically wrote a report that was designed to try to institutionalize that perspective. And that's strategic, but it's strategic to your point of we already know the sort of alternative future we're heading for rather than really looking at a bunch of them and saying, hmm, are there things we could do that would prepare for all of them? Which is where I hear you where it really matters is I've got a choice of A, B, or C. All of them will address the immediate problem. Only a few of them will address A and B and maybe only one of them addresses all three. So to get very granular. I think one of the things you say that is most important is we did always assume, well, DOD does this. The military does this. We also thought it took a lot of tech. I remember talking to people about this and people thought, well, this is like war games and you need a decision center and you need to get into a room and you need red teams. So one of the things I'd love to hear you talk further about is the low tech version because it's not just that we didn't think we had time. And I actually did have time because I was coming back to Princeton every weekend. I wasn't engaged in the crisis at the moment and I had folks who could work with me but we just thought we don't even really know where to start and if we did we wouldn't have the money or the infrastructure. And I'd like to hear the difference between sort of straight war gaming and war gaming applied to many problems, not just an actual war and what you're thinking about like what would you put in the Foreign Service Institute curriculum to teach people how to do this? So, and then I'll just, I'll end with two examples. One, which really gets at this discomfort with alternative futures. So last week, I think it was published Friday or Thursday, I published an op-ed in the Financial Times that said, instead of just automatically admitting Sweden and Finland to NATO, people should slow down. We should slow down not because we don't wanna push Putin out of Ukraine or as far back as we can. I'm all for that. That is an immediate effort to make sure that this kind of aggression, which is the same as what he did in 2014, but on a farvaster scale doesn't pay. I'm all for that. But I'm looking forward to this century and I'm thinking about last century. And I'm saying, dividing Europe into East and West and keeping half of what was traditionally Europe out of it. The former Eastern Central European countries and Russia itself really didn't work. And it's not gonna work in this century either. So let's just slow down and create alternatives. Well, you can disagree with me, fine. But what's so striking is the fury of people on the other side who don't even wanna have the debate, who no matter how many times I say, no, this is not gonna change what we're doing right now. And this is not gonna preclude an arrangement whereby Britain and France and the United States and all the Nordic countries guarantee each other security, which would be the same as a NATO guarantee. So there's something there that just the, it opens things up in a moment where you just are luxuriating in the certainty that you know what to do in the short term. And I'd love to hear your reflections a little more on that because it's really, it's like we're not even gonna have a debate. And if that's what you're up against, you're never gonna get there. And then the last point, just a general point just about demography. And I haven't read the full global trends report of 20, it came out I guess in 2020, 2021, 2020. But you know, I look at China and the thing I see more than anything else is not just an aging nation, that's important, but a nation where 30 million men don't have a potential bride, right? Where there are 30 million more men than women. To me, that is just huge. And yet that doesn't fit the American sense of China, the great peer competitor. And so we don't seem to be able to even absorb the facts. And so again, I'd love to hear you just talk about how you give people even to absorb facts that would allow them to imagine an alternative scenario. So with that, I will turn it back to you and to Peter Bergen and to the audience. But I do think, I think this kind of thinking is relevant in everything from people planning our own careers and imagining what skills maybe to invest in now, to thinking about the future, both of our country, our communities, our country and the planet. Thank you for that. And those are all fascinating questions. And I mean, let me start perhaps with the final one because in some ways it's the crux of it, which is we cling to our beliefs and assumptions about the way the world works so tightly. We have mental models of sort of how things go, cause and effect, who are the good guys, bad guys, whatever. And we just resist changing our minds or even just opening our minds to the possibility that we might be wrong. You might be wrong. We don't do that. We don't do it in Washington, certainly, right? So I mean, I tell this story sometimes with a scenario planning exercise that I did a number of years ago and I was at Oxford and I was on a team of people that were all from different countries, all from different professional backgrounds. And we were dealing with formulating a strategy for a telecom company that was having problems with China because the US government was putting restrictions on technology transfer. That was the basic setting. And so the group turns to me and because I'm the American in the room and I'm the one who's done a bit of national security work and they're like, so Peter, we have an idea. Like what would the future look like if American foreign policy were made by cities and states? And I said, well, that's not gonna happen. But that's not gonna work. That's not how it works. I said, that's not how Washington works. And I'm like, just Peter, just assume for a second. And I'm like, no, like, so my role here, I'm gonna say is as the American who knows national security, that's not the way it works. And this goes back and forth and they're getting increasingly angry. I'm getting increasingly angry. And then finally they just said, write a story. It's happened. It's 20 years from now. San Francisco has launched a partnership with Shanghai on technology development or whatever. How did we get there? And I'm like, you know, there are some signs in, you know, occasionally like, I mean, you know, California is sort of formulating its own climate policy. And there was that one time that Massachusetts tried to generate its own trade policy, which got smacked down, but whatever. And then go through it and I find that I can actually write a plausible story. I'm not gonna say it's likely or plausible. I'm gonna write a plausible story about how we got from here to there. And then the hysterical thing was I get on the plane to come home and I pick up a copy of the Atlantic. And there's a piece that you were quoted in Ann Marie about the devolution of US power from like Washington to the States and localities. And I'm like, huh, probably should have read the Atlantic before like I went on this thing. And then of course the pandemic hit. And whether you consider that a national security issue or not, I mean, I would. And we find a lot of policies being determined at the local and state level. And so that just sort of was like, this was actually quite plausible. But it's, you know, these structured, you know, we find this very difficult to do. And that's why, you know, Herman Kahn, the famous nuclear or infamous nuclear strategist, you know, model for Dr. Strangel or whatever, but he got a lot of things right. And one of them was sometimes we need what he called strange aids to thought because we can't get out of our own way. And a scenario planning exercise or a war game is one way of like a structured manner of kind of getting out of your own way, taking, questioning your assumptions in a safe way. You know, it's a strategic sandbox. Nobody's gonna get hurt if you suggest something in an exercise. But there is this, you know, to another one of your points, Anne-Marie, this almost fury when people question the conventional wisdom, the difficulty of challenging the notion, let's say last year that China was the threat with Russia may be running a distant second. You know, I remember, and there was a woman who was nominated to go to the Pentagon in a confirmable role and had to write a letter to Senator Josh Hawley saying China will be the center of the national security, of the national defense strategy. And now I think you see a lot of people backing away from that, not saying that China is not obviously a competitor or an issue to deal with, but that like we need to think a bit more broadly. And finally to your point, and I think this is really important, like people often conflate the idea of thinking about the future with thinking about the future of tech. And the future is going to be driven by technology. I mean, I'm not saying it's not, but that's not it. Like that's not the sum of all things. Like human beings continue to make decisions and often not the decisions we expect them to make. And some of those people happen to be in positions of great power. And so it makes a difference, right? And in terms of, well, do you need like a lot of money and a lot of tech to run a scenario, planning, exercise or a war game? I mean, and the answer, and this is like, it's just simply no, the Coast Guard spent something like $400,000, $500,000 a year out of a $13 billion budget. And they get strategy from that. Same thing with war gaming. And war games can be run without heavy recourse to technology because the key thing that you're studying in a war game is how do the dynamics of decision-making of two or more parties interact to produce uncertainty? And you can do that, you don't, maybe you need a computer these days so you can get on Zoom, but like that's about it. You can also just get people in a room and if you have a skilled facilitator, you're good to go and a lot of value can come from that. But so great points and those are definitely things that I've encountered as well. Great. Well, so much to chew on and if the audience have questions, please ask them in the Slido. I'm gonna ask this sort of more of a philosophical question here because I think embedded in a lot of these discussions is kind of your how you think about history. We have on one side, Frank Fukuyama sort of restated his well-known thesis in the Wall Street Journal I think about a week ago and Steven Pinker and others. And it's a very American idea that history has a purpose and a direction. And then on the other side, you have philosophers like John Gray who take a much more skeptical view in a sense related to the Christian view around original sin and human nature being surprisingly stable. And going to something that Anne Reed just mentioned or I think Anne and you Peter which is we're gonna make mistakes. And so as we think about the future to what extent is these philosophical understandings, you mentioned the technology kind of conflating the future of technology with the future itself. And of course we know from history that technology is merely, it can be used for good or for real. Then there's no set of institutions that have just had a bigger crash more quickly than let's say Facebook, which was gonna save the world and now is like the world's worst thing. I mean, and I wrote those could both be true simultaneously so quickly but the fact is, is that we see but technology is, it is what it is. It has to know it is morally neutral. So I just wanted to throw out these more philosophical questions as we, to what extent is your view of history and human nature influenced the way you think about the future is I guess the question. Oh Peter, such a good question. So I definitely am on the kind of progress narrative side of history. Indeed, I was always attacked from the left at Harvard Law School because I was naive enough as a liberal to believe in progress narratives when I would try to show people have made progress certainly as a woman, I'm happier that I'm alive now than even during my mother's or grandmother's generation just as one great example. But I do think that way of thinking which of course is deeply culturally embedded, right? The Buddhist view, the Hindu view, very different. As you point out in terms of religion and culture I have come to think that it is useful to believe in progress because at least for many of us not all of us, it motivates us to do what we can, right? That at least for me, I understand that pessimists are often more realistic than optimists but optimists get more dumb because we have a reason to get out of bed. But I think to put together your question with Peter Stoblick's remarks, where I've come is that it's very important to acknowledge the possibility that it's not true. In other words, that yes, we really could just do ourselves in and there would have been a lot of progress along the way but a sixth extinction overall is not progress. And so to actually challenge my own traditional understanding of history, my preferred understanding of history to understand where that's a matter of conviction rather than prediction. Like this is something I choose to believe not something that's necessarily true. And then it's sort of actually Peter it's like your own personal foresight, strategic foresight where I think so let's assume actually it is far from a given what do we then need to do or what do I need to think? What do I need to prepare for? And I wish we could do that more broadly culturally. I think what the Chinese just as one example that many other cultures way of thinking is a really valuable corrective to the American way of thinking. And if we were really thinking globally we would take all those cultural and historical perspectives into account. But I'd love to hear what Peter has to say. I mean, I think that's right. I mean, just to that last point and then I'll make a broader point I think that one of the things that strategic foresight can do and wargaming in particular can do is give one a better sense of how the other side might be thinking and to sort of cultivate this notion of strategic empathy which does not mean that you believe empathy does not mean sympathy, right? It just means if you can take the other point of view for a little bit you're actually going to be able to perhaps better predict even the actions of your adversaries or at least anticipate and understand how they see the world and therefore that affects how you engage or don't with them. It's dangerous, Peter, to ask me to like think philosophically because I start thinking about like the ontology of the future but let me try never to use that word again. In the interim what I would say is that I think a key philosophical distinction is between thinking about the future singular as something we are headed toward and we have to prepare for and we have to anticipate to the best of our possible ability versus the futures, plural, that history is actually highly contingent. There are like hinge points that we don't recognize as hinge points that very small things can make a very big difference sometimes and so it really benefits us or poofs us to think about there being a range of futures plural. That's just not how we talk about it but inherent in that I think is a great deal of optimism because what it does is it allows room for human agency, right? So when I define strategic foresight the ability of both sense and shape the emerging future, not just predicted but look at the range of possible things that can happen and then how do we influence it to let's say follow the progress arc that we want to see? Two of my favorite philosophers on this subject one is Mike Tyson famously said he has a plan until they get punched in the mouth and the other one is Yogi Barrow which is, it's hard to make predictions especially about the future which is one of mine. But I mean, both of these gentlemen get it to a very important kind of questions and so let me, you mentioned strategic empathy which is an interesting concept and in fact H.R. McMaster embedded it in the Trump National Security Strategy and the Trump National Security Strategy and the Trump National Defense Strategy both had remarkable similarities. They both said Russia was a big problem and they both said China was a big problem to summarize. Now, the president at the time going back to some comments that you made Peter was of course President Donald Trump and I'm pretty confident he didn't read either of these strategies in any detail or if at all and certainly on the Russia question he just could care less. So I mean, it does get to this point which you can have the greatest minds in the world writing whatever strategies you want and if the president he or she decides to kind of ignore it or it's just not part of his or her sort of worldview are they almost meaningless or, you know, a lot of, I guess isn't there a Pentagon phrase it's not the plans, it's the planning. I mean, so that even if the chief executive is going to ignore your recommendations they may be useful for the wider apparatus as they start planning and buying things and how do many start with Ann Reeve as at the, you know, your experience in government how you see this question. This was something I learned at policy planning I really would not have guessed it or just hadn't thought about it but that we were writing the QDDR far less for the top I mean, Secretary Clinton knew what she wanted but we also knew she wasn't going to be there probably for all eight years and even if she had been at some point to get overtaken and other members of the cabinet or their deputies again, all pursuing their own thing. What we were doing was providing bureaucratic cover for folks much lower down. So I knew there were people in embassies around the world I knew there were people on lower floors in the State Department itself who wanted to elevate development who wanted to do the kind of thing that Secretary Clinton and I and others believe needed to be done for the pursuit of America's interest in the world but we defined America's interest in the world as lifting up the prosperity and health and education of everyone. And so we knew that once you put it into a document that somebody could say and Secretary Clinton then endorsed that document and sent it out and made it clear that at least while she was there, this was something that would help someone lower down win a bureaucratic battle. And then even after Secretary Kerry came in and he wasn't certainly less focused on development than she was although I think his focus on climate over time meant that he understood the importance of these issues. You know, he would have to go in and disavow it for it not to still be valuable in bureaucratic politics. So that was something that I realized that a strategy document may have just as much value or more value for the folks who do have to read it because it comes from the top and who can then point to it in their struggles either within their own agency or with other agencies. Peter? Sure. So I would just, you know to your point about plans versus planning, you know old Eisenhower adage, I think the planning or the strategizing the process in general of going through a strategic foresight exercises is extremely useful and extremely, it's helpful and it may be as much or more helpful than whatever final strategies you come up with in part, you know, to Anne Marie's point because I think, you know as my former dissertation chair Amy Edmondson would say it provides a psychologically safe space for people to raise ideas that they wouldn't be able to raise otherwise. I mean, I've run scenario planning exercises and I inferred people to like here's we're gonna have a crazy ideas column and that like gives people, you know the, you know, put that on the whiteboard and they like feel freer to just like toss out ideas because imagination is just not something we cultivate in the national security bureaucracy. So you've got again, these strange aids to thought how do you help people do it? And one of the other things that I think that the process does is because most people just don't have a vocabulary for talking about the uncertainty of the future it can create a bit of a shared, you know common language for how we're gonna think about the future that now I am more, you know readily able to talk to my colleagues about things that would have been enormously difficult to get my head around before because I just I didn't have the tools I didn't have the language I didn't perhaps have the confidence to engage my own imagination. So I think, I think, you know the process is enormously important in the sort of the ink, you know the plans versus planning is there's a lot of like those three letters mean quite a bit actually. This is from Bob Berger of the Stimson Center. Is there any bandwidth on the hill for a resurrection of an OTA like function that provides Congress with longer term options? And by the way, is that the Congressional Research Service or I don't know? So, I'm sorry, Emery, go ahead. No, it's the Office of Technological Assessment, isn't it? That's right. No, no, but I'm just saying does CRS provide some version? To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't at least not the CRS reports that I've read or the analysts that I know there. There is an effort right now by a nonprofit that focuses on public service to help bring a strategic foresight element to Congress. And I mean, Congress, you know I spent some time working in Congress and I mean, they're really like, you know and you know, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which is like, you know, has its own staff and it's basically as close to a think tank as you're gonna get on Capitol Hill. And yet that's not what we spent our time doing. We spent our time staffing the boss, right? That's what you do. And so, but there are efforts to do it that are ongoing and I think that's great. And, you know, there was a time back in the 70s when Daniel Patrick Moynihan and a few other folks thought we need to establish almost like a committee on the future, you know, these sort of like, let's again, institutionalize it. I don't know where those things will lead but you know, whether I'm hopeful or optimistic I don't know, but I'm glad that the effort is being made. I think it's very important. Amri, this is the question I think directed at you from anonymous. Did you review the 2008 Project on National Security Reform effort to get the Obama White House to install foresight across the government? If you did, any thoughts on that? We did. We did. And in fact, I'm now gonna forget his name but he had been the top foreign policy advisor to Al Gore, who after all didn't know a thing or two about looking at the future and had been pushing this very, very hard. And I actually worked with folks and it through policy planning to see if we could get more of this but it fell victim to exactly the forces that prevent you from doing this. It was, again, I think people did associate it as Peter said, Peter Skoblik said with while the Pentagon does this, it's scenario planning, it's complicated, it has to be checked up all of those things. And it really is the way Peter describes it now, an aid to imagination and imagining of alternative futures. It was not accepted then. I think now there is a kind of, in the first place, we've just had, look at the pandemic, we've had such dramatic things the sense that people now even in the corporate sector say, things are changing so fast, you really can't predict and plan, you have to adapt and respond. So this idea of let's just generate alternative possibilities is easier to wrap your head around. And again, if you have a toolkit, I think you could do that. We, it just didn't go anywhere except to, again, yeah, we write the national security strategy. So the other thing I think, again, strategic foresight assumes alternative futures. Strategy assumes that you've decided on a future and you're figuring out how to get there. And that is why every strategy document starts with, here are our national interests, here's where we see the world going, here's how we're going to advance our national interests in that world and by deploying these resources and by doing these things and not doing those other things. That's a strategy document. This is much more of a, we don't know, but here are the things we could do that would best prepare us for the things that we can imagine even if we don't know which of them will come about. A comment and a question from Dana Eyre related to that. So her comment is hinge and leverage are central metaphors, IDAD paths. All three emphasize key moments of change, opportunity, how can we optimize these moments? And then she also says, we think of futures as a tech question, which is what Peter was mentioning. How can we make, how can we help make fundamental social processes more visible? So I think that, to one of the points Ann Marie was making, one of the things that you can think about as you go through these exercises is there are strategy requires prioritization and yet there are things that would make sense no matter what. But it's difficult to get people to do it, right? I mean, you can say it would make sense for us to have a more robust public health infrastructure, but no one wants to pay for a surge capacity in like empty hospital beds in a wing that sits disused until there's some sort of catastrophe like we have now. In terms of optimizing on these hinge points, I mean, I do think we're at this key moment where uncertainty is so conspicuous for us at the individual level, at the organizational level, at the national level that there should be, and I think is a greater appetite for this kind of thinking, for tools to navigate it. At the same time, it's difficult to take advantage of, but I think one of the ways to perhaps connect this need with a language that people, at least in the corporate sector is speaking, but also in the public sectors, it's in part about resilience. We talk about resilience, the need for resilience in the face of rapid change in the world. Well, how do you do that? Well, actually strategic force aid is something that by pointing you to robust strategies can point you toward resilience. And to the question, I mean, I absolutely think that these exercises can by all means focus on social and political and economic change. Scenario planning was famously used as a tool when South Africa was moving out of apartheid to try to envision futures in a post apartheid South Africa, which there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty. And so how do we think about the range of things that we need to think about? There's this great quote that I love from Tom Schelling who said that the one thing you can never ask a person to do is make a list of things they haven't thought of. And I think of like, and I read that I'm like, is that topology or just brilliant? And I couldn't tell, but I kind of like it. So that's where I'm sticking. It sounds Yogi Berra-ish. It is, right, exactly, exactly. And I think that part of what strategic force aid can do is it can shrink that list of things we haven't thought of. And that helps us plan and strategize and that in turn improves our resilience over the long run. I'll just add there something. I know we're just about out of time, but that also makes such a powerful case for diversity, right? I haven't thought of things because my life experience has highlighted some things and suppressed others. Somebody else's life experience, somebody who grew up getting beat up regularly on the streets of Brooklyn, I'm just thinking about John Mearshaver. He sees different things in the world than I do. So if that image of the list of things we haven't thought of is a great argument for making sure lots of people around the table have had different life experiences than you have. I would just echo that. I think that's a fantastically important point and that really, really is a key input into the success of these efforts. How far can you stretch your imagination? You stretch it less far if you're sitting around a table with people who think exactly like you and have had the same experience as you. So I do, there's a powerful argument for diversity and strategic force aid. Well, thank you very much, Peter, for the paper and for your presentation. Thank you very much, Anne-Marie, for commenting and for your participation today and for your work at policy planning and for running New America. And thank you to the audience for tuning in. And that was, I think, one of the most stimulating conversations we've had for a while. And to be continued.