 Well good afternoon. I'm David Sanger. I'm a national security correspondent for the New York Times. It's good to be here. I remember from college this was always the most dangerous lecture time. It's after you've eaten lunch, if they make the mistake of putting the lights down low, I once took an art course after lunch, you know, we could have everybody asleep out here. But in order to prevent that, we have a fabulous panel for you today and and two old friends. Kori Shake is a fellow at Hoover. Hoover Institution, she was the director for defense issues, defense strategy, and requirements at the National Security Council. She worked during the Bush administration in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the NSC, redefining the concept of three circles of L. And so that was Kori's time. Jeremy Basch here was chief of staff to Leon Panetta, both at the CIA and at the Department of Defense. That usually means that you get the six o'clock phone call from the New York Times that says, we're about to go publish the story that says, it was always pleasant, weren't they Jeremy? That was some of our greatest time together. I used to say, I'm sorry you have the wrong number. I've gotten that line before. And he was before that the chief counsel of the House Intelligence Committee and now is of course at Beacon Global Strategies. So what we thought we would do is spend a few minutes talking about the big challenges that the president faces in these next two years, a little bit about the inheritance he will leave to his successor. And a bit about what foreign policy issues are likely to play and loom large in the presidential campaign. So let's start with sort of the news of today and the coming week. President yesterday pulled off a climate change agreement with the Chinese that I think many of us had doubts about whether or not the Chinese would come around on. Significant achievement, one that many climate change critics I think will probably object to. In the next two weeks he's going to have to make a decision about whether or not the deal that is in front of him with the Iranians on the Iranian nuclear issue is good enough for these purposes whether to kick forward because it's nobody's interest to let the entire thing collapse. Whether or not this is an agreement that could actually reformulate American alliances in the Middle East. These are two of the biggest legacy issues that are out there for him. So Jeremy, let me start with you since you spent a lot of time between the White House, the CIA and DOD. The President looks at these next two years. Are these the legacy issues? How will they play out and what are some that we're missing that you think we may hear about in the next two years? Thanks David and first of all thanks to Dr. John Hamery and Dr. Catholics for putting on this fantastic conference. Look, I think this trip to Asia is enormously important and I think the president is showing that the rebalance is alive and well and that this is a critically important part of his legacy and it goes beyond the incredibly ambitious and groundbreaking agreement that they struck with the Chinese over the last few weeks where if you think about having the Chinese say that 20% of their energy sources are going to come from clean energy sources like wind and solar by 2030. It's pretty incredible and it's something that I don't think anyone predicted would happen, but it's beyond that. It's in addition lowering tariffs on certain in the WTO and certain technology exports which will strengthen our export base and will create and strengthen tens of thousands of American jobs. It's also enhancing and strengthening US-China mil-to-mil relations, which is something that hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but if you think about the potential that that can be for a spark for conflict, having this coordination, a code of conduct for the unintended encounters at sea and building on that, I think that's important. And then what I thought was really interesting about this trip is that the president used the occasion in Beijing to have a meeting with the Trans-Pacific Partnership countries, which is to strike this really landmark trade deal or to actually make progress on this really important trade deal and to indicate that there is progress in sight and to do it in Beijing as if to signal we are here in the region to stay and this is not a threat to China and our economic future isn't inherently bound up in this region. So I think the rebalance to Asia is something that the next president will inherit and it'll be very strong. Let me just mention I know we'll come back to Iran in the context of the discussions. I don't think my bottom line on Iran is even if we have a verifiable comprehensive deal on stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I think the next president will still have to contend with Iran. And if you look at even what the president himself said on Face the Nation this past Sunday, he said the nuclear issue is one thing we're concerned about, but we're also concerned about the role Iran is playing in the region through its surrogates, through its proxies, through its efforts at regional instability. And so we're not taking our eye off the ball on Iran. I think that's the right approach. I think it's the thing the president will the next president will deal with. And let me just conclude by saying overall in terms of legacy, look, I mean the president came in office at bears, I think it bears us all keeping in mind with a huge force presence in Iraq and an under-resourced war in Afghanistan, with al-Qaeda resurgent in Western Pakistan, and with the global security situation really imperiling U.S. interests. And he immediately put Iraq on a path to reducing our footprint there. He doubled down our forces in Afghanistan, search forces in Afghanistan, hunted down al-Qaeda in Western Pakistan, and I think as a result of those things our security situation in the world is much stronger. Corey, let's start with China because you'll remember that when President Bush came in office, there were a lot of people around him who believed that China should be the major theme of his first term, but more in the territory of how you contain its power. Then Iraq came along, that sort of dissipated, and the president ended up talking about how complicated the Chinese relationship was. But beyond the counter-terrorism agenda, I think had a hard time getting to some of the kinds of discussions that President Obama has had. So as you look at climate change issue, as you look at the pivot, if you think it's real or not, tell us whether these will be lasting, and tell us what you think the next president will have to deal with. So I think, David, that to the extent that America has a grand strategy, that grand strategy across the last five presidential administrations has been to persuade China to grow prosperous and democratic. That is that the notion that Bob Zellick captured in the responsible stakeholder is actually what the last five American presidents have been trying to do. So I think what the president did in Beijing is a good thing. I'm a little skeptical on how it comes into practice, and maybe we can talk about that a little bit later. But I do think we've been pivoting to Asia for a long time, and we're mostly doing it in ways that are about alliance relationships and about trade. So I actually think the big story out of the president's trip to Asia is that he didn't get a Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Everybody knows that if it's going to happen in the Obama administration, it'd have to happen soon, and that he couldn't make that political bargain. Actually, I think it's going to be a big part of his legacy, because soft power, remember when the Obama administration came, and soft power was going to be how we engaged the world. We were going to diminish our military role, build up our economic and our political engagement with the rest of the world. And the centerpiece, the achievements of those should be the trade deals with Europe and Asia, and the fact that the president's not focusing on that more, and not building, capitalizing on China's mistakes for the strength and alliances. And let me just give one last example that's not about Asia. You know, the European Union has been a global leader in climate change, and that we struck a bilateral deal with the Chinese without including Europeans in it, strikes me as the kind of thing that's a near-term political success and a long-term political mistake. Jeremy, let me pick up the chorus TPP argument, because usually, politically, if you're going to take up a trade deal, particularly if you're headed toward a presidential election, you want to do it as many milliseconds after the midterms as you can, because they get harder and harder to get through Congress the closer you get to the next election. And, of course, when the president was in Asia last in March or April, I remember I was on that trip, and we were being told that the agreement with the Japanese, which was holding us up, was imminent, you know, we just needed to wait a few weeks. Of course, we're still waiting. Is Corey right? Are they missing the opportunity here? Well, I think, obviously, the goal is to conclude it as quickly as possible. President Clinton concluded the PNTR deal with China late in his presidency, and I think it's less important exactly when vis-à-vis the next election this comes, and rather it's more important to have the agreement be sound. And, by the way, I do think that this is a bipartisan issue. I think that there are people in both parties who support global trade. Sure, there are elements in both parties that oppose it, and I think, if anything, there may have been... Clinton went wide on the Republicans. And I worry a little bit that there may be an erosion in the Republican Party for support for internationalist policies, for global trade. I think that's something we have to keep our eye on as we approach the next two years. But, again, I think this is the right time to do it, and the reports out of Asia are that they've made great progress. And so I think it's now up to the President to conclude the deal, and Ambassador Frum to conclude the deal, and then to work with Congress. Corey, let me take you back to the Iran part of the question that I had asked before to Jeremy. So, the President's laid out a strategy under which, if there is a deal, he will temporarily suspend many of the sanctions in the order in which he's laid out, but he will not necessarily go to Congress to have them lifted, even in his presidency. There are many in Congress, and many in the newly elected Senate, who say, oh, no, we're going to vote on this. So, first, what do you think of the President's strategy? And secondly, if Congress insists that it vote on it and insists on that before November 24th, could that in and of itself undermine the Iranian willingness to go sign this thing? To answer the last question first, I actually think the likeliest outcome is continuing negotiation for the next two years between Iran and the P5-plus-1, because I think that's the configuration that meets everybody's interests best. I, despite what the President has said about, you know, his commitment to destroy the Iranian nuclear program if we don't get a deal, whether or not he'd actually do it, he sure doesn't want to have to do it, and that argues for continuing the negotiations. He hasn't said he would destroy the Iranian nuclear program if they don't get a deal. He simply said he wouldn't let the Iranians get a bomb. He's never told you what he'd do up to the level of threshold of a bomb, right? I thought the APAC speech in 2009 did that. Perhaps I'm mistaken. I think the administration clearly doesn't want to deal with either a collapse of the negotiations or carrying through on its stated reaction to that. And I think in the Iranian case, they bought themselves some leeway on sanctions relief, and it doesn't look to me like they have made the fundamental choice to end their nuclear weapons program. And so I think in the Iranian instance too, continuing negotiation probably serves their interests best. To get to the congressional piece of it, I think it would be madness of the President to do that. I think trying to skirt congressional, you know, Congress has been the major force in putting sanctions in place, often over the objections of the White House and not just this White House. So to circumvent congressional, the lever Congress put in place, especially given that the President has things he would like to achieve, I presume, with Congress in the next two years, I think it would be a really bad choice. I think if he circumvents Congress, they will simply legislate what he had, opposition to what he has done by executive authority. So he can't get an outcome independent of congressional buy-in. I think the President, the White House's time would be much better spent arguing substantively with people on the Hill why the deal, whatever deal they're going to strike, is in the interests of the country and calling the National Security Card, because Congress clearly cares about this issue on both sides of the aisle. You know, the White House will be fighting Menendez, not just Republicans on this. And so building a broad base of support for foreign policy is something the Obama Administration has actually not put time and effort into, and they really ought to. Jeremy, let's assume for a minute that there is either, if not a deal, that Cori's right and this gets spun on, and my guess is she probably is right on this, but there's at least an agreement and principle that enables them to make some progress, make an argument for keeping this going. Does an Iranian deal reorder the way the United States has dealt with Middle East powers or open up that possibility? Or are we going to end the term with essentially the same alignment of interests and adversaries that we had when you were serving in the first term? I think the latter, David, I think as I indicated earlier, and I think Cori would agree with this, that even if we get, as I said, a comprehensive verifiable deal, there are going to be all kinds of questions going forward. There are going to be questions about verification. Our intel is not bulletproof in every instance, and we have seen, and this is fundamentally about trust, and we have seen the Iranian regime mislead and lie directly to the international community before. Remember, they always maintained they didn't have a nuclear weapons program, and we have established definitively through the release of unclassified intelligence assessments that they did have a weapons program that ended in 2003. And of course, one of the very first things that President Obama and then President-elect Obama was briefed on in 2008-2009 was the existence of the underground enrichment facility at GOM, which of course was another effort by Iran to deceive and mislead the international community. So that's why this negotiation understatement of the year has been so tough, because to get something verifiable and to overcome that trust barrier is very, very challenging. And I think that's going to be the kind of thing that we're going to have to stay at for two years and beyond. And as I indicated earlier, I think, first of all, I do think in terms of Congress, I think Congress will have a role, will have a say in what our relationship with Iran is going forward, including sanctions relief. And by the way, I think that's appropriate and necessary. And I think that even if this nuclear deal goes forward and is a success, I still think we're going to be dealing with Iran's role in the region. And to me, the big outcome of the Syria-ISIS crisis that has erupted this summer and that we're in the midst of right now is I think of sort of a major realignment in the Middle East, the likes of which we have never seen, where we have moderate Sunni Arab countries aligned with us, even in many cases aligned with Israel's interests and aligned with Europe's interests to confront both radical Sunni groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, as well as to confront the rise of an Iranian state that is playing a very unhelpful and dangerous game. So as we've all been reading and as the President himself noted in his letter to the Ayatollah, there is a commonality of interest between Iran and the U.S. in defeating ISIS. How do you play that one? I actually think the commonality of interest is very narrow. We both want to defeat ISIS, but we disagree very widely with the Iranians on why we want them defeated and what we want to see come in its wake. Iran wants to see them defeated in order to create space for Shia terrorist organizations which they have been the major sponsor of throughout the Middle East. Iran worked to destabilize Iraq. Iran worked to destabilize Lebanon. Iran worked to keep Bashar al-Assad in power and Syria. None of those things are in our interest. So I think deconfliction of effort is as far as we should go with the Iranians. And one final reason that I think we ought to be very careful is that something I think both you and Jeremy hit on before is that other countries in the Middle East are very nervous about the possibility of our choice to invade Iraq and our subsequent choices, not carrying out the red line in Syria, the choices that we made about the Democratic Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and other places. Our traditional allies in the region consider us untrustworthy and cooperation with Iran is actually going to give deep-seated roots to that distrust in a way that is going to be very hard to recover. We need to play this much more carefully than it sounds like folks are doing. Jeremy, Cory raised Syria so I didn't have to. Your former boss in his book tour across the country expressed some significant differences of opinion with the way the president handled Syria and talked about the need to have taken a much more active role earlier. Tell us a little, play that out a little bit for us. How would the world look different today had he done so? Well, I think that's a good question, David, because in some ways those who have advocated that we had launched those tomahawk missile strikes at Assad's regime that summer never complete the sentence. And the next sentence is... What do you do the next day? Well, what do you do the next day? Who did that benefit? Because, of course, would that have potentially hurt the Assad regime and potentially accelerated the rise of ISIS and other radical opposition forces? So that's why I think that decision was really a 51-49 decision and a tough one and there may have been implications about credibility in the world that others have talked about. But I think for anyone to pretend that that was an easy decision that we could have just launched missiles in there and then that would have been the end of the story. I think that's not the reality. But that's not what Secretary Panetta was saying. He was talking about a longer term effort against Assad, wasn't he? Well, I think what he was saying was that we have to have a comprehensive strategy for Syria that includes at once going after Assad over the long term and really developing an action plan to end the Assad regime while countering the rise of this al-Qaida offshoot ISIS. Now, everyone in this audience knows what's the game plan if you've got two forces on opposite sides of the spectrum, neither of which are palatable to you, you look for a third way, you look for a third option. And that's exactly what we are doing in trying to find and locate regional partners, build the capacity of those partners to include a moderate Syrian opposition. Let's talk for a little bit about what you think of this set of issues or sets of issues we haven't discussed. We're actually likely to hear as the presidential campaign revs up here. Corey, let me start first with the Republican primary process because unlike the case of the Democrats, there's no clear frontrunner here. So first of all, in this coming election cycle, does foreign policy play a big role? Oh, I think foreign policy will play a huge role. In a way that it did not in the last presidential election. In a way that it did not, Republicans got almost no traction on foreign policy issues in the 2012 election. And I think the sense of anxiety that people have about a newly dangerous Russia, about what's going on in the Middle East, about why we can't, you know, the president set the Syria deadline. Nobody forced them into that. They kind of shooting ourselves in the foot mistakes that the administration has made are going to make it a rich environment for Republican critique. Let me give you my three favorite big lines of foreign policy argument. The first is debt, right? The national debt has doubled in the Obama administration and we paid 435 billion dollars in interest on our national debt last year. That's getting close to the size of the defense budget that we are paying in interest. And if interest rates go up, it is going to crowd out the discretionary spending of the government. It's a big deal that Congress has to put sequestration in place to get any kind of control over spending. So I think the debt and the consequences of the debt, what we look like to the rest of the world right now is people who can't run our own railroad. So ardently advocating the advance of our values in the international order actually depends on us being a terrific example of them. And at the moment we're not either in the conduct of our domestic politics or in the conduct of our checkbook. The second thing I think Russia policy is going to be a big issue and not the original reset because every new administration is smart to take up the option to reset relationships. But that they persevered with that policy long after Russia itself had taken a different course. And I also think Libya factors prominently into this, not in discussion of Benghazi and the killing of the American ambassador so much, as the choice by the Obama administration to use Russian and Chinese approval of a UN Security Council mandate for a humanitarian mission in Libya to prosecute that to regime change looks to me like what marks the turning point where relations become unrecoverable with Russia. And I think the fact that Russia is making a very destabilizing, dangerous set of choices on its periphery is going to be a big issue. The third big issue that I think will come up is alliance relations more generally. That my mom likes it when we're popular in the world and President Obama argued that because he was so special, America was going to be popular in the world again. And it's mostly American foreign policy choices that people are unhappy about. But it is also how we go about making those choices. And I think a lot of America's allies are anxious about just the routine conduct of our foreign policy. Our allies in the Gulf are worried that they weren't told about negotiations with the Iranians. Our allies in Europe feel like they are marginal to what we are doing. We actually just ought to be able to do better than that. Mr. Jeremy, let's take up Cori's three and you can raise her three if you want. So debt, it has doubled, but it was soaring during the Bush administration considerably from where Clinton left it. And it was interesting, you didn't hear very much from Republicans at that time on that issue. They did once President Obama came in. Russia policy, certainly something that came up in 2012 and you heard President Obama almost mockingly say the Cold War is over during the debates you may remember in 2012. And Libya, you had the President himself say in an interview just a few months ago that we probably left too quickly after that because given the chaos that's happened since. So tell us how you think her three will play out and if you've got a different list, give us that. Well, I think Cori's list is a good list, but I think it also exposes and shows how there will be divisions on the Republican side because for every Republican who wants to reduce the debt, there will be others who want to detrigger sequestration and actually have government spending at levels to protect the country. And so I think it will be somewhat hard for folks in the party to reconcile that. Likewise, on the issue of military action, and you say the case of Libya, as I recall some of the strongest voices for military action for taking on Qaddafi came from Senator McCain and others in the Republican Party who were saying and kind of beating on the President to say we have to confront this with the military solution. So I think there's going to be a great debate to be had in the Republican primary over some of these issues. Are we internationalists? Are we isolationists? Do we use military power? Do we use other forms of power? Do we reduce the debt and deficit at all costs? Or do we have appropriate levels of spending? So I think it's a fair list and I think it's a fair set of issues that will be debated. I think issues that I think will be talked about at the end of 2016, first of all, I think there's going to be an important decision about Afghan troop levels. At the end of 2016, the President has said that we're going to draw down our Afghanistan troop presence. And I think there will be elements in both parties that will say that no matter the conditions on the ground, we ought to have no troops in Afghanistan. And there will be others in both parties who will say it should be conditions based and we should evaluate that. And it somewhat will depend on what the conditions are on the ground at the time, the Taliban, the strength of the Afghan government. I think that's one issue. I think a second issue is just continuing to get at al-Qaeda and to continuing the momentum that we have made against al-Qaeda and obviously ISIS somewhat depends on the situation on the ground. If we have arrested their advance, if we have built partner capacity and if we have eliminated some of the safe havens, I think it will look very different than if they have pulled off a major terrorist attack on our soil. And if that's something that the next president will inherit. And third, I'll just mention a sleeper issue that I think could get some attention from presidential candidates and the next president. And that is global internet policy. And some people say, well, what is that all about? And I really think that in the wake of Snowden and the wake of some discussion about how to utilize the internet, both for good economic reasons and also for good national security reasons, there are a couple of challenges out there. First of all, you've got this trend towards ubiquitous commercial encryption, which the FBI director and others have warned against as potentially hamstringing law enforcement. But the second development that's out there is you've got a lot of countries around the world that are interested in data localization, vulcanizing the internet, owning parts of the internet, chopping it up and kind of, in my mind, eroding and eviscerating the free and open internet that has been the engine of such incredible global economic growth. And I think with some three billion people using the internet today and that number going up and two-thirds of that growth being in the developing world, I think this is a big foreign policy and national security issue that the next president will have to deal with. Corey, when you think about that last one that Jeremy raised, first of all, we've set a record here. We've got 35 minutes into a CSIS forum here before the first mention of Snowden, which I think probably is a record for the past year. It's a good trend. So Jeremy's raised at the end an issue that you hear about every day now that you have left Washington and moved to the promised land of the Stanford campus. And while the question of routineized encryption is something that many in Washington stare at and say, how did this become a foreign policy question? Around in a two-mile radius from your office, it's a subject of constant conversation. So is this a national security issue? How did the FBI get on the other side of this from the president's own advisory committee on NSA reforms? So what most people in Silicon Valley would tell you is that it doesn't matter what the government decides on this because of the way the government has run policy on NSA's slate of issues. Industry has taken it into its own hands, and so you may not want a nationalized internet, but that is the consequence of the choices the administration made. And you may not want corporate encryption that doesn't have backdoors built into it, but as we say in the West, that horse has left the barn. It's already, I mean, the new iPhones already are working on. The new iPhone gives you routineized and Google will be right behind it. So what's actually happened is the initiative has flipped. That is that the government will now be running to catch up with what states, nationally, and businesses autonomously are doing. So a question for both of you on this, then we're going to go to one last point on this, which is the Obama administration very often tries to portray its foreign policy choices as though there is what they advocated and there is disaster. And what that does for them is string out the making of any choices, right? Because if you don't make a choice, you don't bring on disaster. And there are real consequences to inaction as well as consequences to action. This is philosophically something they've had wrong. And internet policy actually makes it clear because they have now lost the ability to control not only the debate, but the activity because in the last six years they didn't bring very sensible policies that Jeremy advocates into being. So a question for both of you and then we'll open this up. So it's a fascinating question because the essence of both of what both of you are saying here is industry has reacted to the Snowden disclosures by basically saying we're no longer going to operate as American companies. We're going to operate as international companies and the world is demanding that we give you universal encryption and we're going to give it to them. You both sat at various times. Corey, you during the days after 9-11 through the beginning of these programs that started up that Snowden later revealed. Jeremy, you sat through the reauthorizations of several of them during the first term and these issues even came up when you were in the chief counsel's job at House Intelligence. In either case, can either of you remember a moment in which anybody stopped and said when this stuff gets revealed, we're going to lose complete control of the way U.S. industry deals with this. They will route right around us. Did that discussion ever happen? Well, yes, in some ways it did. And first of all, let me just amend something you said. You said that industry's response has been we're not American companies. I just agree with that. First of all, there are many industries and different industries have taken different approaches. That's first and foremost. But second is I don't think those companies are saying we're not American. I think what they're saying is we are American. We're saying we're global. We're saying we're American companies with a global user base and in order to give confidence to those users, we need to do certain things. And oh, by the way, if we don't, someone else will, which is entirely an entirely reasonable commercial perspective. And the only question is do they cooperate with lawful, appropriate uses of government requests for information, which is what we're trying to fashion. But the reason I answered yesterday's question, Dave, is because when the FISA Amendments Act was passed in 2007-2008, we had this exact discussion it was had on the floor of the Congress, which is how can we work with, how can we in the government work with private industry including telecommunications companies and social media companies, internet companies to ensure that when there is an individual overseas, a non-American who's overseas and we want to collect that person's communications and they are a valid target that we have appropriate court review and we have congressional oversight. Understanding that customers may not like that, but the company's view was also we also don't want our systems to be used to traffic in terrorist communications or other nefarious activities. So I think the trade-offs were discussed. So I don't remember such a moment, but I also didn't work on intelligence issues so much as broad defense issues. So it may have happened and I just didn't see it. I do think that one of the biggest mistakes both the Bush and the Obama administration have made on counterterrorism issues is not explaining themselves to my mother and the rest of the American public because as I read the debate about the Snowden disclosures that the set of choices that the government made, it ought to have made a public case for why they were doing what they were doing. The government argued that we don't want to reveal anything about how we're doing this because that helps the bad guys. And that's true, but unless you build a broad base of support under your policies and I do believe a broad base of support can be built under these policies, you leave yourself open to suspicion that you were never going to tell us this and the government can't be trusted to do this. And I think that's what we have now reaped on a lot of these intelligence gathering programs. So let's take a few questions from all of you. We've got about 15 minutes. I think there are microphones around and so just wait for a mic to come. We'll start with you, sir. Lauren Hershey, semi-retired attorney. Thank you very much for your remarks. You covered all the big picture items. Talk to me a little bit, if you will, and share your insights on the Korean Peninsula situation and the fact that a senior intelligence officer went over there on what I thought was a fairly remarkable trip with fairly remarkable results. What do you see and why? Jeremy, I never remember you sending Leon Panetti in to go pull anybody out of North Korea. Jim Clapper can travel much more incognito. Well, I think it was, I mean, that mission in itself I think was probably sui generis and unique and incredibly important for the lives of those two individuals, those Americans, and my hat goes off to Director Clapper for pulling that off. The question really is, does it herald some breakthrough or change with Kim Jong-un? My own view is I tend to think not. But I do think the Korean Peninsula issues potentially are one of those sleeper topics where we've got 28,000 troops from the Peninsula. The regime has tested a nuclear weapon three times, principally duds, but still tests nonetheless. Every now and then try to launch what may be an ICBM or maybe a space vehicle and obviously they're developing this mobile missile technology. And this relationship with the South kind of goes through these horrendous cycles with provocation, accommodation. And so at any moment while we may be in a good period now, just wait, the clock will turn and we may find ourselves in a very sparky situation with a lot of US troops on the Peninsula. And that's really the one area of the world, David, as I look around where I can envision us potentially being involved in the most thing that resembles full spectrum conflict. Everywhere else, I just don't see it. But the Korean Peninsula is the one place where I can foresee a situation in which we have to be prepared for that. So I think it's a good point. We shouldn't have neglected it in our tour around the world. So for me... Cory, I'll ask you to pick that up. But in the 2006 campaign, your boss, President Bush, told me in an interview we did with him at that time, we will never tolerate a nuclear North Korea. Do you remember that moment? I do. And here we are. Here we are eight years later. Are we tolerating them? Yes. What I was going to say in answer to the Korean question actually is my answer to what you just posed as well, David, which is that for me the most interesting thing about what's going on in Korea is South Korea's realignment. Because I think the fact that we did nothing after three nuclear tests, we claimed we couldn't live with this and yet turns out we can live with this, collapsed South Korean confidence that we could solve this problem for them or were willing to put our interests in controlling North Korea ahead of other things we were interested in. And I think as a result, the South Koreans are taking a much more autonomous policymaking path. They're much more engaged with the Chinese about it. And that's new and that's different. The Japanese, I think, made a fundamentally different choice, which is that they cannot be secure without the closest possible alignment with the United States and that unless they have that alignment, they cannot strengthen their defenses in ways that both China and North Korea's behavior validate them doing. I just have to disagree with that, Corey, because I've been a sole with the Secretary of Defense and been in engagements where their senior leadership has visited Washington and we hosted them at the Pentagon and elsewhere. And all of our responses to the 2009 test, the 2013 test, to all the flare-ups over the sinking of the Cheonan and everything else were closely coordinated with the South across their two administrations. And I never heard one whisper that they were concerned that we were somehow going soft on North Korea. It just, that's not accurate. Right back here. Yeah. Mike's coming to you. David Sadney, formerly with the State and Defense Departments. At one time there was a philosophy perhaps honored too much in the breach that politics stopped at the water's edge and that we had a nonpartisan American foreign policy. American voters seemed to elect both Republicans and Democrats at different times. Is there any prospect for foreign policy, national security policy, to rise above partisan debates where every action by whichever president or party it is, is subject to partisan attack rather than a focus on American national interest? What a quaint concept. What do we think? It's a really good point. And I hope so, David. I really do. And part of this I think is, and this goes to how to convince Cory's mother on certain issues. And by that I think you mean obviously the average American watching these issues from afar is my sense is that people tend not to vote for president on issues as much as on attributes. That's something I learned from some of my political mentors. And to the extent that attribute, an attribute that every candidate will want to project is strong internationalism, protecting America's interests, if necessary by military force. But obviously we prefer other options first. That kind of basic approach of America protecting its interests and values in the world. I think you're going to hear that from every major presidential candidate. I do, as I noted, I think it will be interesting and probably the primaries of both parties will have some outlier, some stray voltage and some outlier discussions on that. And in some places it will be more intense than others. But I think at the end of the day, we will see two candidates emerge from the process who will articulate that line and hopefully govern in that mode. So I think I am your average American voter, like right in the absolute middle of the political distribution. At CSIS, yeah. And I am... That's because you were CSIS part of the campaign part. I'm kind of confused. I am thirsting for boring, competent, bipartisan governance. And I don't think I am atypical in that regard. In fact, my own read of the election results from a couple of weeks ago is that the big winners are people who actually... John Kasich in Ohio, for example, who didn't take sharp partisan edges to what they were doing. Instead, they said, here's what I think our problems are. Here's my proposed solution set. And I'm going to build cooperation with anyone who's either willing to support this or got a better idea. I think that is a political winner in 2014 and I think it's going to be a big political winner in 2016. I hope so. There was a young lady right there, yeah. Mike's coming to you. My name is Bai Jie. I'm a visiting fellow of CSIS. I'm from China. And I thank you for panelists to give us very informative remarks. My question is related to the regional cooperation, especially in economic areas. As my observation, and some interview with the expert in the United States, we found that the TPP and the TTIP is the priority of your trade agenda. Actually, I also learned something about, you know, it seemed that the United States is intentionally to avoid some regional cooperation or free trade negotiations initiated by China or dominated by China, so called. So my question is, you know, what's your view toward the future of free trade negotiations of the United States and how to balance the relations between the United States and China? Actually, this is my simple question. Yeah, thank you. Well, I think two important points in response to that question about free trade in Asia and our economic relationship with China, and I'll just keep this brief. Look, our economic interdependence with China has never been more important, both to our economic future and to our security future. At the same time, I think we do want to pursue free trade with a block of nations in Asia, in the TPP forum, that will, on a multilateral basis, lower tariffs and provide more opportunity for export of U.S. goods and services. So if China is willing to come into that regime, I think we would welcome it, and the only question is, will they, but without them saying that they will, I think it's on us to go forward and try to finalize the TPP. If I were the Chinese, the fact that they aren't included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership would actually validate my concerns about American policy being containment. So they're not crazy to think that. That said, the Chinese are actually doing America's work for us and strengthening our alliances in Asia. And I actually take the Chinese leader's set of choices, not just with President Obama but with the President of the Philippines and others over the course of the last several days as a realization by the Chinese government that they are actually building the coalition that will contain them by virtue of their sharp-edged choices about how to deal with maritime claims and things like that, and that they're smart enough to take a different tack. Okay. I think I have time for one or two more. There was a hand over here before, and I'm trying to see if I can see it again. No, nobody objects to a single thing said so far. Too much wisdom. David, there. Yes, sir. Doug Morrison, now an industry former joint staff planner and worked with Corey Shocke. If you could... And lived to survive in town. I'm still standing. We've heard a lot of different things, but I was wondering if each of you could kind of encapsulate N's ways, means, what's your strategy circa May 2017, and I'm going to draw a sharp distinction, what I would call now an ostrich strategy, which is instead of dealing with the world the way it really is, we look at it as we would like it to be or the way we think it ought to be, and when it comes to the military element of power, we have an RSVP approach, which is, I'll let you know when I get there. In Libya, I'm going to lead from behind. In Syria, I'm going to draw a red line on the Korean Peninsula, I'm not sure, and when it comes to ISIL, well, listen, we'll look around and we'll figure it out when we get there. So I am not going to envision, I'm not going to craft a policy based on how I wish the world was, because I feel like that's what the Obama Administration has been doing for the last six years, and it's not working out very well for us, but I will tell you what I think our strategy should be, which is the best American foreign policy is a strong, vibrant United States. So the President's not wrong that we have work to do at home, and we ought to do it with enthusiasm and good faith towards each other so that we build the common basis for bipartisanship overseas. Second, we ought to be unapologetic about the universality of our values, because we really do hold these truths to be self-evident, and not only are we a better place because of it, but other places are better because of it, and we are hesitant because we have done a bad job of advancing American values in the international order, and yet they still merit advancing, and it is still what most people want for themselves, and when we are a voice for our values and we align our policy with our values, they're not the same thing. Our interests and our values don't always go together, but finding policies that bring them as close together as possible actually is the best kind of American foreign policy in the world. Have the strongest, best-equipped, best-trained military in the world ready to respond to a crisis and to defend our interests wherever they are, to use military force if necessary. Second, to build the capacity of partners and allies around the world. We can't be everywhere, but we need our allies and friends to be so. And third is to make sure that we communicate and live up to our universal values and to ensure that other countries do as well. Well, I thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. Thank you, Corey. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you all for participating, and we'll call it the rest of the afternoon.