 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Terrio, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's author virtual lecture with Jane Harman, author of Insanity Defense. Before we begin, I'd like to invite children age 9 to 13 and their families to tune into our YouTube channel in a couple of days to meet Teddy Roosevelt. On Thursday, July 22 at noon, the latest edition of the National Archives Comes Alive, Young Learners Program will bring you the 26th president as portrayed by actor Joe Wiegand. After talk about the expansion of National Parks during his administration, Teddy will answer questions from the audience. In a Washington Post interview, Jane Harman was asked to explain the title of her new book, Insanity Defense. She answered, it is because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I have seen how we keep trying the same things and we don't make the country safer. Since the end of the Cold War, Congresswoman Harman contends, America has cycled through the same defense and intelligence issues and its leaders have not realized that those policies no longer fit a transformed world. She examines why our failure to confront hard national security problems makes us less safe and looks for ways to solve these issues. In the National Archives, we hold a large number of national security records including those among congressional records and in the presidential libraries. These encompass records of the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, the National Security Agency, the Department of State, Military Intelligence Agencies and more. I turn you over now to Congresswoman Jane Harman and our moderator, Abraham Denmark, to begin this important conversation about national security. During her long public career, Jane Harman served nine terms in Congress including four years after 9-11 as Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee and recently completed a decade at the Nonpartisan Wilson Center as its first female president and CEO. She is recognized as a national expert at the nexus of security and public policy issues and has received numerous awards for distinguished service. She has served on advisory boards for the CIA, Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and State. Joining Congresswoman Harman today is Abraham Denmark, Director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center. Mr. Denmark leads the Wilson Center's research on geopolitical dynamics of the Indo-Pacific and contributes to its industry-leading analysis of U.S.-China relations. In addition to his duties at the Wilson Center, he is an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University. Now let's hear from Jane Harman and Abraham Denmark. Thank you for joining us. Jane, congratulations on the book. It's wonderful to see you again. Well, thank you, Abraham, and thank you for your leadership at the Wilson Center. And thank you to the archives, and not only for featuring this conversation, I was looking at the list of what comes after us in future days and it's impressive in that live interview of Teddy Roosevelt with kids is such a spectacular notion. I mean, what a good idea to make history come alive and what a great president he was. This was, in some ways, but not in other ways, Woodrow Wilson, something we all learned and lived at the Wilson Center. So I'm delighted to be part of this. I also would say often that the only good thing that happened because of this pandemic and my family was lucky, unlike some other families, but the only good thing that happened to me during this pandemic was that I had enough time to finish my book. That's something I tried to write for years and I'm so happy. I finished it. I call it my first and last book. Well, let's start there. I'm wondering, beyond the time that you had because of the pandemic, I was hoping we could start by having you talk a bit about what motivated you to write the book, what you thought the world needed to know on these issues of what you call the insanity defense. Well, thank you for that good question. My whole life has been powered, my whole professional life, by my interest in public policy. I literally went, literally, myself, vertically as a human being, but not very old, to the 1960 Democratic Convention, where I got on the floor, there was basically no security, and I saw the nomination of John Kennedy for president and I met, no kidding, actually met Eleanor Roosevelt. And my little light bulb went off. I did not come from a political family. I came from an immigrant family. My father was a medical doctor who fortunately was able to escape Nazi Germany, but at any rate, from that day, I love public policy and I still do. And so when I finally got to Congress, which was my dream, right after the Cold War, in the first post-Cold War class, that was 1992, I paid a close attention to public policy, especially foreign policy and national security policy, which was the business of my district, which still makes my former district intelligent satellites. But at any rate, I realized pretty quickly that the Cold War had ended and we really didn't have a doctrine to replace it. And we thought that we won, Russia lost, and team Russia lost. So everybody wanted to be us. And that was not the case. And I'm sure we'll go through it in questions. But as I watched this movie, I had not only a front row seat, but occasionally I had starring in supportive roles. I realized that we were making a lot of mistakes, including my mistakes. And so this book chronicles three decades of mistakes and successes focused around national security. And I make some recommendations for the future. And I hope that Congress and the executive branch are thinking forward. And there are some things that the Biden administration is doing right now that leads me to be optimistic that they are thinking forward and will correct some of the policy deficits of the last 30 years. Well, thanks, Jane. Your book really chronicles what you describe as this series of failures by American foreign policy leaders since the end of the Cold War, that we were unprepared for 9-11, that we over militarized our response, that we aired badly in supporting the invasion of Iraq. What do you believe is at the heart or at the foundation of these repeated failures of this trying the same thing over and over again? Well, I suggest hubris and laziness and political gridlock is three of those. It was interesting when the Cold War ended, as I already said, we won, they lost. Instead of learning the lessons from World War II, where instead of just saying Germany and Japan lost, we're going to ignore them or hurt them further, we included them in the new liberal order. We told them we would provide for their defense so they didn't need to develop huge armies and weapons systems, which they didn't. We set up bases in both countries. We made them part of the new world. That's a lesson we unlearned after the Cold War ended. And as I said, we kind of left Russia in the dirt. And that sense of grievance was nurtured for a decade. And I think that Vladimir Putin grew up on that. And that powers a lot of what he does, the mischiefs that he makes and the enmity that he holds us in. And so, especially in the 90s, before 9-11, our arrogance was on full display. We thought, for example, that China, which wasn't part of the Cold War specifically, China would want to be us. So of course, China was welcomed into the World Trade Organization and China's economy would be a mini version of ours. Well, guess what? China didn't want to be us. And China's economy isn't a mini version of ours. And China rose during that decade. The Wilson Center program that focuses on China specifically is named after Henry Kissinger, who after all was the man with Richard Nixon who opened China to the US. But the director of that program says, China isn't rising, it's risen. And it rose during the 90s. So we missed the rise of China. We also missed the rise of terrorism during the 90s. I mean, there was a bombing in the car park area of the World Trade Center in the early 90s. Two of our embassies were blown up in Africa. We had a fairly tempered response. There was a national commission on terrorism that was formed. I was on it. We predicted a major attack on US soil. Nobody paid attention. And so what I'm saying, I chronicled all this in the book, is we missed the decade there, then comes 9-11, and our response was looking back on it. And I was there, I was part of this response, enormously militaristic. They attacked us, we'll attack them. I wasn't against the first part of that at all. I thought we should go into Afghanistan against those who attacked us. And we did that. And it took a while, but we basically, once we decapitated Obama, Osama bin Laden, I mean, we finished that mission, but we stayed. And, well, I'm sure we'll get into this. We're still there, endless wars. And we're not only there, we're in Iraq, we're in numerous places. Congress is not asserting the oversight and drawing the boundaries it should be drawing. It's funding these things, but it's not doing its job and on a bipartisan basis to make certain that our executive branch operates within limits. And so, we can go through all these different mistakes. I just, one piece of good news today, or I thought it was good news, which is, we transferred one of the 40 remaining prisoners in Guantanamo Bay Prison. Long story about how that was set up wrongly, in my view. We transferred one to Morocco, his home country. And we may be figuring out a careful way to close that prison, which, in my view, should never have been put up there, and which was the scene of a sadly torture of a number of prisoners, and which is a, you know, a recruiting tool and a stain on the US, a recruiting tool for the terrorists and a stain on the US. You know, so let's, since you talked about, since you brought up Afghanistan, let's dig into that. You were a key voice on national security issues at the time. You were a member of Congress on 9-11. We've talked about your experiences on that day, walking to the Capitol building. And you were part of the vote to support the authorization of the use of force. So I'd be curious about your thoughts on, beyond once we got bin Laden, what you think should have been different? How you think Afghanistan could have been done in a way that you think learns the lessons of history? That the term I've been hearing a lot lately is that the good war went bad. I'm so curious, how you think we could have done it better? It's a good, you put that well. We've had four presidents between the end of the Cold War and Joe Biden. None of them, Bill Clinton, George Bush 43, Obama and Trump had any foreign policy chops. And we paid a lot for that. The last president who really understood foreign policy before Joe Biden, who really understands foreign policy was George H.W. Bush, Bush 41. And Bush 41, to remind, went into Kuwait because Iraq had invaded Kuwait. And we all had agreed that Sam Hussein was a bad guy. Yes, lots of bad guys around the world. But that doesn't necessarily justify a war or a regime change, something we learned later about Iraq. But at any rate, we decided we had to go into Kuwait to push Sam Hussein back into Iraq. We went into Kuwait and we took care of it. And we pushed the Iraqis out of Kuwait. And at the end of that, George H.W. Bush said, mission accomplished, he didn't fly a flag on an aircraft carrier the way his son did, which was a hugely horrific photo op for which he has never lived down. But anyway, Papa Bush knew that the mission was completed and got out. Was urged, go further, take out Sam Hussein. He said, no, that's not the mission. So we unlearned that lesson. We went into Afghanistan. There was a vote in Congress soon after 9-11. And every single member of Congress, Senate and House, but one, Barbara Lee, who still serves a very impressive woman who represents Berkeley, California, which is pretty much anti-war bastion. She voted no, but everyone else voted yes. But the mission was go after those who attacked us. And as you asked in your question, we did that. Unfortunately, we missed an opportunity to get Osama bin Laden then in Torah Bora. It's a long story about that. But at any rate, we did get him 10 years later in 2011 in Pakistan, where he had been hiding out. And during that time and since that time, I think the justification for staying in Afghanistan has been, I would say, and I say this with a little trepidation since General David Petraeus, who played major roles all through this time, just strongly disagreed with me and is co-chair of the advisory council at the Wilson Center. But at any rate, I think there was mission creep. And we developed a doctrine of clear hold and build, which meant clear out bad guys, hold the territory, and then presumably with the Afghans in the lead, but often we were in the lead, build or rebuild a more pluralist, democratic little V society in a place that never had one. And so we've propped up a lot of things in Afghanistan and we're still doing it. And I think that President Biden, who was, it turns out, not enthusiastic about some of the surges there, has decided properly that we need to change the mission. Doesn't mean end our relationship with Afghanistan, but it means change the mission, remove our troops, keep our intelligence resources nearby so we know what's happening, defend human rights abuses, do what we can to help the Middle East region, transition to better governance, et cetera, et cetera. But not keep our finger in the dike and prop up a government that or a society. It's really not a, I don't wanna blame the government. I don't even wanna blame the Afghan people, but prop up a situation where the interests of the U.S. are not central. They have to want peace, they have to go after it. And I hope they do. So let's dig into that. We're, the Wilson Center is just getting started with a new initiative looking at the implications of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. And it's often been said that foreign policy decision-making is often choosing between a bad option and a less bad option. Yeah. And there's a lot of people who expect that after the U.S. and its coalition partners leave Afghanistan at the Taliban may move in. It's already seems to be taking advantage of the withdrawal with the attendant implications for human rights, civil rights and stability in the region. So to your mind, are these the, is this still the least bad option or do you still have confidence that our work in the government and the military of Afghanistan will help sort of prevent the Taliban from taking over? Well, it's the least, it is the least bad option. There are no good options in Afghanistan and there haven't been. I can't think of a time. Let's remember, back in the day, the Soviets were in Afghanistan, they were pushed out. Remember Charlie Wilson's war, Charlie Wilson was a member of Congress and he helped the, with U.S. send U.S. arms there that freed the people of Afghanistan. Let's understand the Taliban is not the only group operating in Afghanistan, it's a very tribal place. And there was the Northern Alliance, which the leader of which was taken out just before 9-11, sadly, in a terrorist act. But there also is now an elected government in Afghanistan, there's a military of 300,000 people. Let me say that again, 300,000 people whom we have trained or helped train and equip. Some of them are very competent. Afghans are very good fighters, not just the Taliban. Afghans are very good fighters. So we're not leaving the surface of the moon. We're leaving a society that has built some success. We're leaving girls and women who have education for the first time, that's a huge plus. Let's give the Afghans credit for that. It's not us, the Afghans. And I've actually interviewed when I was at the Wilson Center several women who were on the Taliban negotiating team to remind President Trump decided we were leaving Afghanistan. And the US conducted a negotiation with the Taliban. I still do not understand why the government of Afghanistan was left out of that. But at any rate, we had a negotiation we set a timetable, which was supposed to mean our troops out by May 1st. Biden extended that, now our troops are out almost now, but certainly by September 11th. But at any rate, there were women on the team, the Taliban team. And I interviewed these women and they said, we are respected, we are members of the Afghan parliament. Women will not go backwards. Women will help build a new Afghanistan. Now, I understand the Taliban bombed a school fairly recently and killed a number of girls. And I don't condone that. And I hope that's not the future of the Taliban, but the society is bigger than the Taliban. And I think we ought to at least bet on good fighters, educated people fighting for their country. They have to want peace in their country. We can't just prevent the absence of war in their country. They have to want peace. And I think a lot of them do. One of the pieces that I remembered from the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan that kept echoing in my mind while I was reading your book was something that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said. I worked for Secretary Gates during the last years of the Bush administration. He's wonderful. And in 2008, he warned the defense bureaucracy against what he called next war itis. Saying that we're in a war. We need to win that war before we start thinking about the future. And that kept coming to my mind because your argument has been that this was the wrong focus that we need to understand the future a bit better. So in terms of Secretary Gates's warning against next war itis in 2008, according to your book, according to your approach, was he wrong? No, he's right. And let's remember, back it up a bit, Eisenhower, when he was president, warned in his farewell speech against the military industrial complex. Well, who supports next war itis? The military industrial complex, which also does a lot of good things. Again, I came from a space dependent district and a lot of the contractors there are hugely helpful in building our state of the art satellites and space systems, some of which are for peaceful purposes. Let's understand that almost everything you do these days depends on space, but it also drives our military. So good on the military industrial space, industrial aerospace base, but Gates is right. And he has written a book recently. In fact, we have talked recently about how we over militarized our response to 9-11. This book is really good. And I, by the way, taught a seminar at Harvard Law School last fall. And as I was finishing the book, and one of my guest speakers was Bob Gates, and it was exactly on this point. So Gates was right. And he left government soon after that. And guess what? Again, for inexperienced foreign policy presidents did not have the ability, in my view, to really stand apart and think anew about what is our post-Cold War strategy. And I'm sure we'll get to this, but I think Joe Biden is the first president because he has the experience. He also has the A team at the ready to do that, to stand apart and think about what is our new strategy. And part of that strategy is that ending endless wars in a way hopefully that will help the people of the countries where those wars were build their own peace. So that's, it's very interesting. And it brings me to another item that your book raised for me, that your book describes how American policy makers keep making the same mistakes over and over again. It made me think about the period after the war in Vietnam, that the Department of Defense shifted away from counterinsurgency lessons and capabilities saying we would never get ourselves involved in that sort of a mission again that we need to prepare for the high-end operations against the Soviet Union. But after 9-11, and especially after the invasion of Iraq, we found ourselves in a counterinsurgency operation that we were unprepared for. Now we're leaving Afghanistan and many, including myself, argue that DOD needs to focus on high-end challenges from China and the echo of those two decisions I thought was pretty strong. So in your sense, in the context of your book, do you believe that we're making the same mistakes again or do you think focusing on China is the right? Oh, that's a good question. Did we learn the lessons of Vietnam? Let's start with that. We certainly didn't learn all the lessons from Vietnam. And again, that was a mission creep exercise in so many ways. And if you watch the extraordinary Ken Burns documentaries on Vietnam, you just cringe. And I lived through that war. I was of age, barely, but my classmates stayed in school and avoided the draft but a lot of people didn't. And you look at the footage and you look at what they were up against and you wonder, why were we there? And then you read biographies of people like Richard Holbrook, whom I knew well. He ruffled a lot of feathers but I thought he was a brilliant diplomat who went there full of hope and came away so disillusioned about what we were doing. So, okay, segue to now. Properly after 9-11, I think our national security focus was on counter-terrorism. We were terrified as a nation. Raise my hand, me too, that we would be attacked again. We didn't see it coming. We should have, you know, there were warnings. We didn't plan properly. We had to plan and focus and get it right. And we did that as a country. We didn't have a shrill partisanship around foreign policy and all policy that we do now. That's something that is just horrifying to me and that's in the book too. But anyway, as a country, we focused on counter-terrorism. I think we stuck with that a little bit long because again, remember, we missed China's rise and it was Jim Mattis in the Trump administration, Secretary of Defense and HR McMaster, the National Security Advisor in the White House who came up with a new national security strategy which said we still will focus on terrorism but we will also add China and Russia. And they are not the same threat and it was, you know, a renewed focus on China. And I think that's correct. You know, good on Madison McMaster and good on Biden for keeping that and adding a few other things. I mean, Biden's sort of my shorthand for what Biden's doing here is he's taking the foreign out of foreign policy. I mean, it was certainly true, I described this in the book that as a member of Congress, I would set up a card table farmers markets in my district in West Los Angeles along the beach because that's where people came out and if I had town halls, I would always just get the the noise makers on either end who wanted to make a statement about whatever it was. In a farmer's market, I got real folks who were buying carrots and I got to hear what they had to say. So one of the refrains over all the years which was mind boggling to me was how come 50% of our budget is foreign aid? Now, hello, 0.001% of our budget may be foreign aid and people didn't understand at all what we were doing outside the US. So what Biden has done is he's taken the foreign out of foreign policy. And he said, if we want to be secure in the world we have to be secure at home. And our foreign policy has to focus on China, Russia foreign terrorism plus the pandemic who is missing this climate and domestic terrorism. And that is a doctrine that makes a heck of a lot more sense and China is still up there maybe as the top threat in the bunch. Although I think domestic terrorism is climbing fast and if you look at devastation throughout the US and now Germany and Europe, climate's up there too. And we still haven't resolved the pandemic. So I think Biden has, again, good on Trump for focusing on China, but Biden is now doing that big time and the actions that were taken yesterday by our government I think demonstrate that we're trying to be very intelligent about this. Since you raised the domestic politics and you talk about it a lot in your book it's no news to say that American politics is very polarized at a degree some say I'd agree that we haven't seen since the civil war but you've always worked when you were a member of Congress you always made a point to work in a bipartisan fashion and President Biden has also been very committed to working in a bipartisan way even to the degree of getting some criticism from his base for insisting on engaging with the Republican party. Instead of talking about how we just need to be bipartisan I was wondering if you could talk about your sense of how the partisanship sort of drives the tendency to keep making these mistakes to keep the failure to adjust, as you said but also if you have a sense of a realistic way that we can overcome some of these divides on issues of foreign policy. Well, I'm heartbroken about what has happened to the Congress as I said earlier my dream was to be elected to the US Congress and I remember the night before my first term started we were in Statuary Hall. Statuary Hall is a circular room off the house floor where there are statues of all kinds of former leaders that took a big fight to get some women in there and now I think we've taken away a few civil war generals not exactly sure who's in there anymore but at any rate the then speaker of the house Tom Foley had a dinner for the entering class all of us Democrats and Republicans and spouses were there and after the dinner we walked on to the house floor for the first time and on the wall was what's called the scoreboard and in the Senate you vote in person and you raise your hand and most people can remember John McCain and that photo going this way about I guess it was closure or something to do with healthcare or maybe it was this I can't remember which way but he was voting for healthcare but at any rate the Senate votes in person the house votes with a card and a slot and your card comes up how you vote yay or nay shows up on the dashboard on the wall. So anyway walking on the floor of the house seeing the names on the wall seeing my name there I just burst into tears it was such a amazing moment and my late husband had exactly the same reaction it was huge honor to serve there and it was a huge horror to watch over my nine terms the house become more and more partisan I'm not saying it wasn't partisan at all on my first day but two years later Newt Gingrich was elected Speaker of the House the Republicans gained control after decades and Newt Gingrich intentionally was partisan I mean he says so he interviewed me for his blog fairly recently and I asked him about it and he said well I had to do it we would otherwise not have kept control if I hadn't been partisan and anyway so there's been a slide into partisanship there used to be the old adage that partisanship stops at the water's edge and even though there was partisanship domestically there wasn't in foreign policy not anymore and people feel free to criticize their government when they're abroad and criticize each other and what does this do? It makes the institution basically unable to solve the kinds of problems I'm talking about in the book and almost any other problem I was up in the Senate yesterday for lunch with Senator Susan Collins who blurbed my book and who was my key partner working on intelligence reform in 2004 we're in different parties, very close friends she's been working her heart out or working her head off she looks so exhausted it was you know I said go home go to sleep but she working on infrastructure if anyone's listening to the debates on infrastructure there is a proposal by Democrats and Republicans for a hard infrastructure reform you know bridges and roads and all that then there's a second proposal that's more partisan but on the first proposal all of a sudden it looks like the wheels are coming off and you know my goodness if we can't solve that how in the world are we gonna figure out what to do with Guantanamo Bay Prison how are we gonna authorize the use of military force or limit the use of military force in future wars how are we gonna come up with some really good rules on detention and interrogation what are we gonna do about cyber? I mean oh my God so I despair I think it is a tragedy for our country that we have become so toxically partisan I wanted to go back to China which I think you believe I believe is the next big challenge and what you think and this gets to some of the recommendations that you make in the book what you think we can do what are some of the changes that you think should be made in order to make ourselves more successful and a more competitive dynamic with a country like China? Well you know more about this than I do Abe and so does Robert Daley who heads the Kissinger Institute at the Wilson Center you're both very thoughtful and you have focused more broadly on the Indo-Pacific which I think has been underutilized by us as a kind of buffer against China for years and which the Biden administration says will become increasingly important as what's called the Quad which is Australia, Japan, India and us becomes more assertive in the region but at any rate what do I think? I think that Henry Kissinger and Nixon did a brave thing to open China and to open our relationship with China I think it changed over time again I think we misunderstood I think Henry Kissinger would say this and by the way he's only 98 his mind works very well and he's still thinking about this so I think we missed China's rise and I think we have to reconsider our relationship with China but what I think is that China bashing is not a strategy and both parties in Congress do that on a regular basis I think that being tough on China as the US was yesterday in these indictments and this conversation about with NATO and our allies in Europe is a good strategy but also engaging China on climate and other things where we can work together and competing with China where we need to I think our I don't know that I was asked this yesterday what does the business community in the US want? The business community wants to trade with China it's a huge market it's also a huge place of manufacturing it's not the only place and should we do more manufacturing at home? Yeah but should we build the walls around Fortress America and basically have no trade with China or with countries that trade with China? I think that's a totally wrong handed strategy and I also think it's impossible to execute given the rise of technology and the way that national boundaries are not the same as they were before so nuanced strategy, confrontation, cooperation and competition all three at the same time is I think what we need to do and the Wilson Center for one especially UA, this is your assignment for tonight after you put your kids to bed I have to think as creatively as possible about how to do all three at the same time do them all well at the same time Yeah, I'll get working on that So one of the pieces that came to my mind as reading your book was you mentioned Henry Kissinger I was thinking it reminded me of one of his books that doesn't get as much attention as the others but I think it's important to call them does America need a foreign policy? Something he published about 20 years ago and in that book he talks a lot about understanding the future and having a sense of what's going to happen and at the same time there's a tremendous a tremendously interesting sociologist named Phil Tedlock who has tested the ability of experts to predict what's going to happen in the future of the field basically finding that experts are pretty lousy at prediction So you and I both think that China is the next big challenge that we need to orient towards that but also both of our crystal balls aren't necessarily infallible So as we go ahead as we continue to try to drive these investments how do we guard against risk or distraction if there's instability in an area of the world that we think is less important for American interests than the Indo-Pacific if Afghanistan starts to fall apart and people start calling for the United States to re-intervene into Afghanistan What are the best arguments to avoid what you would say this insanity just going at it again and again with no real benefit what do you think would stop us from going down that road again? Well I think most of our foreign and national security policy certainly in the last three decades has been tactical there's a problem let's go there and fix it or let's go there and not fix it or let's not go there and not fix it but we haven't had this overarching strategy we haven't and why we need that is so that we can put the problem into a context and decide what we need to do we can't intervene everywhere I've been interested in how we're handling Haiti where the president apparently there were lots of warnings during the Trump administration and I assume to be fair the first six months of the Biden administration that it was a very precarious government we didn't do enough the president was just sounds like it was there was inside participation but I don't know that the president was just brutally murdered and we were asked to intervene militarily well we're not doing that so far as I know but we are trying to help stand up a new government and we are consulting and that is consistent with a Biden foreign policy that basically says our focus has to be on China, Russia, et cetera what I just said which doesn't mean we're uninterested it's the Western Hemisphere they're a near neighbor there are a lot of Haitian there's a Haitian diaspora in the US and so forth but that's to me a mature response so that would be my answer basically interestingly Henry Kissinger at age 98 years young has written a brilliant article about artificial intelligence and I remember sitting next to him I had that delight to sit next to him for 10 years on the defense policy board where we served until late in the Trump administration when he relieved us of responsibility not just me but also Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright Eric Cantor who used to be in the Republican leadership in the House and most of us go figure but at any rate I remember when that term came up AI and Henry basically says I don't really understand this and surrounded himself not by me but by some brilliant people and by the way we have brilliant people at the Wilson Center in our science and technology program led by Meg King who actually not only understand AI but teach it to Capitol Hill staff but Henry went on to write an article with some others I think Eric Schmidt was the other one so I remember this right in the Atlantic magazine about AI and what kind of thread it posed mind blowing he taught himself about this future threat and at age he was probably not only 96 at the time and recently I heard him on a Zoom call and he's asked about what are the threats in the future and he said cyber and AI he didn't say China he said cyber and AI but China has a major role in most of those so you know a short hand might be China and Henry's counsel on China is more militant than it used to be he has spoken at the Wilson Center several times and says that it's important now to be tougher on China not as the exclusive focus but that confrontation it has to be a part of our toolkit and so when with the flat defense budget or relatively flat defense budget and challenges all over the world if we're going to be competing effectively against China it's going to that every defense policymaker over the last few administrations have been saying it means it means that we have to accept risk in other areas of the world especially in Central Asia the Middle East Africa but as you said when something bad happens there's an instinct in American politics to go go do something about it to go fix it to go to go help Samantha Power talked about the responsibility to protect when she was a journalist before she became a policymaker do you think how do we integrate that to a humanitarian instinct and the ethical aspects that folks see the normative aspects of American foreign policy with the more hard nosed impulse which says no that's not our interest we need to keep focus our eyes on the prize how do we how do we square that all right well there is a wonky term for you know policy junkies like me that is called whole of government and when you talk about problems like this it's important not just to talk about how big is our defense budget let's understand it's big I think the defense budgets of all but two countries of the world or something like that added up together our defense budget it's bigger than than the GDP of most countries etc etc 700 plus billion dollars so it ain't small and oh by the way the so-called tooth to tail ratio the fighting hardware part to the overhead part the tooth is 30% and the overhead is 70% so certain room for improvement and some would argue that we keep investing in legacy systems you know aircraft carriers and such which are very vulnerable in future wars especially if those wars are about cyber and AI so just saying but whole of government means that there are other resources of government that could be as good or better than the hard power resources of the Pentagon and one of the things that Biden has pledged to do it is doing is to invest in soft power to replenish the state department which was basically hollowed out by Trump a point very capable people to represent us around the world invest in foreign aid and other tools of democracy building around the world and we restore our alliances that's why this recent action against China is so important I mean we did it with every country of NATO and the EU and the I don't know how many of these meetings have been in person or were virtual like this meeting but certainly there's been a focus on the quad and the key role that India can play and so on and so forth so we are using whole a whole of government approach against and with China remember part of this is climate so that's that's not a confrontation that's cooperation and that is to me a much more sensible and effective way to deal with China as it is not China the bookie man that you know some are safer rattling against well um we're I'm cognizant of the time just have a few questions left I'm keeping an eye on from our friends at the National Archives if they are going to be sending us questions as well um I wanted to ask you a couple things that's still left for me when I asked you initially towards the beginning of this discussion what's at the heart of the the insanity defense issues that you said it was hubris laziness and gridlock and that made me a bit a bit depressed because I don't know about laziness but I think that we're still seeing a significant amount of hubris and gridlock in in our politics do you think that's a right read of where things are do you are you are you a bit more optimistic than I am well laziness I mean intellectual laziness I don't mean that people don't come to work and but uh thinking a new about problems unless you're Henry Kissinger is very hard for folks uh and uh they don't and uh the defense department for example I say in the book is in the widget protection business meaning that if you're in the office of you know helicopter wings uh you want us to build more helicopter wings regardless of whether helicopters are the most useful I think they actually are useful but I just you know it's a random topic and Abe you worked at the defense department you can't escape this uh I bet I say as a member of Congress I was in the widget protection business I fought to keep the production facilities in my district I fought to keep the the so-called LA Air Force Base which is the uh the purchasing arm of missiles and satellites for our defense in in Los Angeles because it was a economic engine and I also thought our universities produced the best and brightest people to work there blah blah blah but you know uh in in some ways that's very protectionist so uh I'm saying that that uh there's a lot of inertia I should have added an inertia okay that's another one but what else is there there is a lot of talent like okay let's close on something more hopeful I keep saying about Congress not just that there's good luck but that the business model is broken not all the people I just had lunch yesterday with this very impressive exhausted Republican Susan Collins uh who has been there uh did she's now in her fifth term I think she just had a really hard election she's the longest-serving Republican woman senator in history um and um wow and she's you know let's just see what happens but she's in line for major committee chairmanship if the Republicans would come chair but major ranking position if they don't I'm trying to be nonpartisan here uh but but my point is she's excellent and there are members in both parties who are excellent there are also some members in both parties who are disruptive let's leave it there I won't characterize them further um but the business model now is blame the other side for not solving the problem because if you work with the other side you are bipartisan and if you're bipartisan somebody will run against you in a primary because our primary system it it doesn't work this way everywhere but in most states uh is rewards noise very very small turnout those on the far left and the far right make a lot more noise and they turn out and so there is you know we've seen this movie many times where the more center politician loses so if you don't want to get primaried it's a new verb uh you don't work with other people so you're not accused of being bipartisan and you know I was saying before the show started that I had a primary my last three elections uh somebody from the far left I was accused of being a traitor and a spy etc and uh it's you know it's not a fun experience I defended myself and I won every time I didn't lose uh but um uh we where are the people where is a critical mass of people now serving that puts country first country over party and that's a challenge and so there are some and I that gives me hope that there are some and uh I just hope that very good people want to serve in the future and don't uh look elsewhere because uh it's it it's it's so uh so there's so much gridlock but um you know I my whole life has been focused around policy and trying to help shape good policy outcomes and so I have to believe that uh congress the article one branch of government will rise to the challenge again well Jane I um I wish you were still at the Wilson Center um full-time I wish you were still in congress full-time it's a pleasure to see you um it's a pleasure to hear your voice and congratulations again I thought it was a terrific book a terrific read um encourage everybody uh on the on this uh video on this call to uh give it a look um I think it makes a very important contribution to the debate and I hope that it will be a a word of caution and a word of inspiration for people shaping American foreign policy forward um so Jane wonderful to see you thank you for all that and uh thank you for your continuing service and to my other colleagues at the Wilson Center which is a a great place uh you know a safe political space as I always used to say uh and thank you to the archives not just for hosting the conversation but for remembering and reminding us of our history you know the founding documents of the United States are extraordinary and a whole bunch of folks have never read them or don't even uh want to read them I mean shame on them and it is so good that you are teaching our history to younger people uh who forget it at their peril I mean this is a great unique country and my parents uh my father was an immigrant as I said my mother came from was born in the U.S. but from an immigrant family they thought America was uh the best place on earth and I still do um but I want us to live up to our ideals you know and and and uh the and I want us to be worthy of the great people who currently serve in office and I salute them and uh you know on behalf of a grateful country I don't think their service really matters so thank you Abe uh see you soon thank you dream