 Greetings, everyone. Thank you for braving the rain, although I think it's quite beautiful out right now. Thank you for being here today to join John Ikenberry and myself in a, I think, a very important discussion about what is happening to the larger geopolitical architecture and the sets of deals and what John would call, broadly, the large liberal order, what is happening in this era in which some people, including myself, look at this time as one of American decline and John says, well, whether America is declining or not, what it built is resilient and really is laying a path to what the future is going to look like. And I think we're going to have a very, very interesting discussion. John Ikenberry, of course, is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and also with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public International Affairs. John is also author of After Victory, Institution, Strategic Restraint and Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars. This was a prize-winning book and one of the major books in international relations theory. The fun stuff about John Ikenberry is, and I've always, you know, joked with him because I really look at him as my type of DC policy wonk. If New America Foundation had been around 10 years earlier, I'm sure he would have been here leading it and involved. I always joke with him that there are only two jobs, there are two jobs that I would have, you know, loved to have had, but I sort of look at him as a future head of a think tank like Carnegie taking Carnegie into its next era, although Jessica Matthews will probably be very upset with what I just said. And also policy planning at the State Department, where I think John is one of the great Kenan-style thinkers about what is happening in the world and how we should think about it in a disciplined and rigorous way. We just spent a little bit of time together with the American Political Science Association. I joked on my blog that it's one of the few reasons I go to APSA anymore, not to knock APSA too much, but it has, you know, the American Political Science Association is one of the greatest collection of political minds in the world and produces very little with that except John's dinner, which I really admire and enjoy. So with that, I want to say hello as well, not only to the folks here at the New America Foundation, but many of the people watching online, either at the Washington Note or at the New America Foundation website. Without further ado, please welcome G. John Eikenberry, who is going to talk about his new book, The Liberal Leviathan. John? Great to be here. Thanks, Steve, for that generous introduction. And I appreciate both what you said and what you didn't say. So being old friends or so much we could say. Well, it is great to be here and to talk about my new book. This is a book that I'll just put up there so you can enjoy the cover. It's actually a cover written or painted in the 1920s by an American impressionist child hazam. And the sister painting to this one is in the White House Oval Office now next to President Obama. This one is in the Princeton Collection and it's a picture of flags on Fifth Avenue in New York. And it's supposed to convey a sense of pensiveness, shall we say, about the American project and America in the 20th and 21st century. It would also be nice if President Obama went into the bookstore and he saw that and he said, that looks like a painting on my wall and then he'd give it a second look. This book, not likely. This book is an attempt to talk about American power in the 20th century and in the new century. And in that sense, it's interested in trying to capture in a portrait, a theoretical, historical and policy-relevant portrait, the great arc of American power and purpose, the way in which the United States rose up in the 20th century and built international order. In that sense, it's interested in both sides of this great historical drama on the opening side, the way in which the United States built order, particularly after World War II, although it was a larger enterprise during the entire century. What kind of order did the U.S. create, particularly after World War II? The U.S. has had more opportunities to shape the international system than any other country in world history. And that's extraordinary. The U.S. has really had an opportunity to imprint itself on the world. How has it done that? After World War I, after World War II, after the Cold War, and today, even in the 21st century, no other country really has all the assets and opportunities to shape the international system. And so the question is, how has it done that? How has it harnessed power to purpose? What has been its vision? How has American-led order differed from past orders? And then I have a very positive view. The book is very much at this level trying to talk about the American accomplishment. What has America done? And I know that we're going to be talking today mostly about what happens after America. That is to say, during the period of decline in American power. But I think it's important to have the baseline of what America accomplished. And as I will argue today, there's much of it that will survive and inform how we think about the 21st century. But I do ask as well in this book about the other side of the drama, the decline side. U.S. power is shrinking relative to the rest of the world. Everybody knows that. No one really disagrees with that. It's in the figures. And the rise of China is very important in that. And the question I'm really asking in the book in this part is really, as the world becomes less American, will it also become less liberal? Power is shifting. What will happen to the international liberal order? Liberal international order, as I define it, is open order and rule-based order, at least loosely. And here again, I am optimistic. I'm arguing that the underlying logic of the order that the U.S. created after World War II, the open rule-based characteristics of it, continue to have constituencies around the world, old and new, north and south, east and west, that will continue to find it an important platform, if you will, for engineering 21st century world politics. More on that in a moment. So my book is really an exercise in multitasking. At the one level, it's a book about how to theorize and develop ideas at the level of conceptual frameworks about how the international system works. The idea at that level about types of international order. If the Americans' power built a particular kind of order in the 20th century, how do we distinguish between types of orders? So I get into typologies of imperial and liberal types of order. And I also grapple with the argument that I make in this book and try to theorize the argument of why powerful states might actually embrace the idea of rule-based order. Why are rules not simply tools of the weak seeking to stabilize their fragile world, but also tools of the powerful who seek to build environments to pursue their own strategic interests? And I make an argument about why restraint and commitment by a powerful state like the United States has a rationality to it, particularly in the setting that the United States is confronted in the 20th and now the 21st century. In that level of theory, I was always, if you will, sympathetic to the Obama administration in the last few years. Before Obama was president, there was an interesting interview with him that Roger Cohen of the New York Times conducted. And Obama said something as a candidate. He said, I think that in the years ahead, the United States still needs to be the preeminent state in the system, but it needs to show that part of being powerful is to exercise restraint. And I looked at that and said, that's my argument. I've been trying to fiddle with that argument for 20 years. And so other people emailed me and said, I think he's singing your song. And there is an argument there about why powerful states have an interest and why part of making power legitimate and durable and acceptable and plenary lead states under certain circumstances to pursue rule-based international order. So the theory is in this book, and it may not be for all of you, but it's there. Secondly, the book is a grand narrative. There is a battle of narratives afoot. There are lots of different people and different ideological and geographical places in the world today who are conducting sort of grand narratives of where we are, where the U.S. is, where the global system is. And here again, I'm trying to suggest that the U.S. has had this quite remarkable career on the global stage, transforming world politics and introducing innovations that we can talk about. Thirdly, I'm trying to advise foreign policy officials. I'm trying to speak to the grand strategy debate. And here I'm an effect, a champion of internationalism in a period where nationalism and inward-looking policies and the dysfunctions of democracies and the ambitions of non-democracies are all swirling around us, making the idea of internationalism a one-world system where we're all working together in cooperative, collective action more difficult. So I am firmly, and as hard as I can, thrusting that flag of internationalism. Yes, liberal internationalism in the ground and I'm defending it. I'm acknowledging that in a new era internationalism is going to have to be cheap and on the sly. It's going to be harder to pursue even in the United States. But I am trying to suggest that it's functional and it is the kind of grand strategy that still fits the American strategic interests and certainly the global problems that are in front of us worldwide. So let me say a little bit about these different features or levels of the book. Speaking first really about the past, about the American accomplishment. And here I, in my own words, try to frame the past 60 years and what the United States has done. And I tell the story really of the rise of the United States, the unusual way in which the United States built international order. No other state had engaged in this kind of strategic order-building, building institutions, global and regional security institutions, economic institutions, political institutions, the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, NATO, the alliances in Asia. Between 1944 and 1951 the U.S. engaged in more, you might say, hyperactive institution building than any other country in history. And you have this accumulation as complex of institutions, most of which are still around today and continue to provide a kind of platform for world politics and cooperation. The ideas behind the United States' order-building have also been very much liberal in the sense that they have tried to build on the state system, the Westphalian system. And there are ideas that are now familiar to us all, free trade, multilateralism, cooperative security, alliances, democratic solidarity, progressive ideals, and U.S. hegemonic leadership. And I try to tell the story in this book about how the United States in some sense stumbled into a particular kind of international order, not just a liberal international order, which in some sense it was pursuing and dated back. Its heirs were, of course, it was heir to Woodrow Wilson and to the British 19th century efforts, but a hegemonic liberal order. And liberal hegemony is a term that I'm trying to use in this book to describe the American system, where the U.S. in effect took a more direct role in running the system through alliances, through the dollar, through its own market, through its hegemonic management of the system. It became American-corporated, became a liberal system tied and fused really to the American system. And this system, as I go on to argue in this book, was a great accomplishment. It's done a lot of work, and one can list the different accomplishments. Opening up the world economy after World War II, reintegrating Germany and Japan. No other world power has flipped its former enemies so quickly and so thoroughly around from being enemies to being friends, Germany and Japan becoming the second and third largest engines of the world economy for decades. Germany and France found a way to live together without war, through binding themselves together, developing countries were brought into the system, democratic transitions have occurred in Korea and Taiwan and on down into Southeast Asia. So it's an order that has accomplished a great deal. The hegemonic character of this order, of course, is what in many ways is under stress today. And part of my argument is really that, yes, American power is declining in relative terms, and the hegemonic component of liberal order is under pressure. There is a struggle for the reallocation of authority, of rights and privileges, but that in many ways it's not a struggle over the deeper principles of liberal order itself. And I'll say more about that in a minute. After I sort of talk about the past, I then try to say something about the future, and here I'm really engaging the debate about the future of liberal international order. Everyone agrees power is shifting. National Intelligence Council has written that the master trend of our age is really a trend towards multi-polarity, a return to multi-polarity. And the key question really is as the world becomes a world with more great powers, as non-western developing countries rise up, states will be in position to influence that order, and will they buy into and integrate into that liberal order, or will they have their own ideas as well? And here I simply make the argument that U.S. hegemonic control is evolving, but that this wider and deeper liberal order is still very much alive and well. There are growing constituencies in China and in India and Brazil for open-based order. It's why they have become so powerful in the first place, and constituencies are growing. The order itself, as I suggested, is easy to join and hard to overturn. That is to say it's a highly integrative order where countries can join in and rise up. China itself is already in the Security Council, and of course as it becomes wealthy it can be a greater player in the IMF and World Bank. China, moreover, and other rising states don't have really powerful new ideas about international order. They are interested in various ways in mercantilism and other kinds of economic policies, but in the larger sense they are very much inside the order working rather than outside trying to shift the order in a new direction. And then finally I argue that when we look into the 21st century, we see a kind of rising period of economic and security interdependence, and this is a phenomenon that is making it more and more necessary really for countries around the world to cooperate. So I'm really making the argument that as we enter into the 21st century we are going to be increasingly looking for collective action, and even rising states recognize this, and so we will be increasingly looking for ways to build on and expand liberal order rather than to move in a more closed sphere of influence or mercantilist kind of system. So with that I think I'll end and we'll talk about the book and the themes. Okay, well thank you John, and I'm going to give you this, and John is going to sit. I'm going to pose some questions and then involve the audience. I guess when I think about your argument naturally one is drawn immediately to the China question, and if you look at China's evolution and you see that China is sort of taking a strategy where in my view it has one foot in the system and I think it has one foot out. I think China, a significant portion of Chinese leadership doubts and questions the liberal international order that you think will endure, and I think they spend some time pondering whether or not the deal they're getting is a safe one for them and for their future, whether they are thinking about something that would be much more of Beijing character anchored in Beijing and a competitor of some sort. I know that you discount that but I'd love you to talk a little about that front. And I think the other question I have is when I look at, okay, if this international order is so powerful and all nations need to do it, if I think today of going back to the early 1970s and China was obviously out of the system we brought in, I would say that today Iran is that country. Iran remains steadfastly out of the international system, so I'd be interested in how you look at Iran and whether you think a measure or a test of the enduring character of this liberal order as you define it will be Iran essentially choosing to integrate itself into that system, whether it's, you know, on terms the U.S. would like or not, whether you see it proceeding that way. Well, on China, I think China is the swing state and I think that whether China, whether international liberal order, if China is the one state that is a potential peer competitor, it's the one state that has a civilizational orientation where it can envisage itself as a kind of global leader and with a global vision. So China is the critical case and I think there's less debate about the integrative tendencies of India and Brazil who are themselves seeking leadership and not simply articulating a narrow western vision of liberal order to be sure. I mean, there are more nuances and social democratic impulses that you see in the ideas of some of the rising non-western developing countries, but China is the key. There are different things to say about China. One is simply that its current character is that it is benefiting from and integrating ever more deeply into the world economy. It is a member of the WTO. Its businesses are integrated into the system. It is playing the politics of trade. And you see at least the glimmering of the kind of shareholder and stakeholder mentality at the level of firms and private sector, quote-unquote, behavior in China that you saw in Japan in the 60s and 70s. Japan, you know well. But a country that integrated into the world economy industrialized... Both highly mercantilist though. At the beginning, but as spending a year at Kedon ran, watching the way in which international Japanese business increasingly saw that reciprocal behavior and joining the GATT at that time, playing by international rules, becoming a member of what became the G7. So there's a really integrated story of Japan as it became... as its economic profile changed. I love you, but Japan's 125 million people. And the question is whether that absorptive capacity can work for a billion. Yeah, it is. A billion plus. Exactly. It is a question. So there is a question of how far it can integrate and on what terms and that's the big question of the day. But again, I want to suggest that it's already in the system. It is... It's legitimacy as a regime is tied to its economic performance. It doesn't have a set of ideas or principles of order that would be considered rival or competitive with the United States or with Western ideas about order. So China would have to emerge in a much more dramatic way, articulating big ideas to really think that China on its own or as a leader of a coalition could truly subvert and offer an appealing alternative world order. And think about it this way. China is not only getting rich inside the existing system, but also already embedded in a way that allows it a measure of authority. It is a veto-wielding member of the Security Council. It is operating in most of the international institutions. So there is a debate and there's an open question to be sure about the future of China. Continuity and integration look like they are major structural features of the order, and that is not remembered very clearly as these more dramatic portraits of a rising China are offered to us in various quarters. Any Iran? Well, I think that Iran is sort of one of the hard cases that is really outside the system, and probably until it changes will remain so. I think all international orders in history have had orders, sort of rules of inclusion and exclusion, and this one is no different. The question with Iran is whether one could imagine a reformed Iran moving in a way that it could find its own ideological and strategic interests sufficiently aligned with participating under agreeable terms that it could be a normal state in the international system. And I think my argument doesn't hinge on how you come to a conclusion about Iran. I think Iran could remain outside the system as a kind of pariah state for several generations. But again, Iran may be a spoiler or a threat to those operating inside of this order. It doesn't offer an appealing vision of what an order would look like if it had more influence. So again, it's not a threat to the order in the way that we're talking about the future of the liberal system. We're really talking about how the liberal system may or may not treat Iran, whether it treats it fairly, whether it has a clever and well-coherent strategy for dealing with Iran. Those are all important questions, but its ability to build a coalition that would threaten the kind of principled foundations of the existing order just aren't there. Well, thank you. So we can see it. Let me open the floor. We've got a microphone. Hi, I'm Shelly Williams of the Osgoode Center for International Studies. And I'm a big fan of you and your books, so I'll say that to begin with. But I'd like you to focus on a comment that you made in passing about the rise of the United States. It took some time, but was sort of solidified with the Second World War. But it had occurred prior to. But during the time between the two Roosevelt's, we were in a period of isolationism. So the next transition is going to require some political internal adjustment on the part of the United States, and it's going to require leadership. And so I'd like you to just look inwardly as opposed to outwardly for a second and talk about what it's going to take to make that shift, assuming that you're correct, which I think you are correct, especially in your analysis of China. Yeah, it is a kind of interesting spectacle that if I'm right, the outside world is not eager for the United States to go away, and nor is it eager for the ideas that the U.S. has espoused to go away, the organizing ideas. A lot of criticism, in fact, of America over the last 10 years has been what some people call liberal anti-Americanism. That is to say, using American ideas and standards of behavior to criticize the proponent of those standards and behavior. So this is interesting, and again, it leads you to think that grand alternatives and geopolitical clashes that have in the past gone with the rise and fall of great powers are not what we're going to be seeing in the years ahead. Now, it is interesting as well that it may well be American internal capacities to lead that are more consequential for the future of the system. One of the epigrams for my book is a quote by Pericles as recorded by Thucydides, where in the funeral oration he says something like, I worry less about the strategies of my enemies as my own mistakes, and it's the same spirit. And I don't systematically explore the logics of American domestic politics and the nature of the current polarization and stalemate, really, in Washington, but it's worth, and you're asking me to reflect on that, and I think it is important. It certainly means, at several different levels, there are going to be adjustments going on. One adjustment is, as I do say in the book, there is going to be, if you look back at the sweep of history, there are going to be other powerful states in the system who are going to want to have authority. So this struggle over authority, the struggle to redistribute rights and privileges and authority is for me at the heart of the drama that we're seeing, and that's what I argue in my book. So there's going to be what I might call a kind of psychodrama in America about making room for other states and maybe remaining first among equals, but clearly working with other states around the table and making adjustments in voice and decision and command that have been part of this hegemonic era. So there's that adjustment inside the United States in its own self-image. Secondly, there are obviously new constraints domestically. There are disagreements and divisions and truly stalemates that are constraining the ability of our leaders to act international, to be a leader. There are constraints associated with funds, fiscal constraints. I emailed an American diplomat some months ago with an idea on something, and he emailed back and said, that's a great idea, John, but we don't have the money for it. So there's that kind of thing. And then, of course, there is what I think is into the mainstream and into Congress is a new skepticism about internationalism, about institutional commitments, about providing public goods, about signing treaties, about all these sorts of things associated with the American accomplishment. And it's really quite ironic when you have Americans mostly on the right, but to some extent on the left, arguing that these sorts of activities reduce American ability to realize its goals and to be safe and prosperous, when in fact, as I think the book tries to argue, it's precisely that type of liberal internationalism and liberal leadership that has put the United States in the position it is today. So the implication of that is that the United States, and those who think the United States has another cycle of history where it can be a global leader, have to think hard about how that's going to be accomplished in this new era of constraints and division. And here I would say, and I talk about this at the very end of the book, but it really needs much more treatment, is how do we rebuild and reinvent a public philosophy for American global leadership? Think about the kinds of presidents and foreign secretaries we've had over the decades and the kind of language that has been used on the left and on the right over the generations in thinking about American national interest in the global system. I think it's an interesting fusion. There's an American voice, there's an authentic American voice of internationalism. It's a voice that is captured in various personalities, but I would say including Truman and Atchison. Truman and his Secretary of State Atchison. Truman, a liberal who did believe in the United Nations, who was in fact, that was his, as Vice President, Roosevelt had put him in charge of tracking the final steps towards the realization of the United Nations. And then you had Atchison who was a real realist. Steve would really like Atchison. Probably heroes, yeah. He's basically had this view about the United Nations in a speech he gave when he was in office, I believe, where he said, don't expect too much of the United Nations. And he recited the old Arab proverb, you can take an ass to Mecca, but he's still an ass. Taking an issue to the global arena, to the marble hulls on the East River is not in and of itself going to change the circumstances that have made that issue a source of conflict. So you have this kind of pragmatic, even kind of skeptical view in the American voice, but still internationalist, still in a kind of world weary way arguing it's important to do. And then you have this slightly more idealist and we can make it happen. It's the leadership, the problem-solving inclination in the American personality is really quite interesting. And if you travel around the world, you notice that in South America, it's not there in the same way and in Asia, the kind of, we can get together and do things and solve problems. I mean, that's the other half of this thing. So this kind of realism and this kind of liberalism. Let me just jump in here and I want to get some of the questions as well. And I know, John, your thinking is tough-minded. I've been talking to you about this subject for years and going back and forth, but I want to provoke you a little bit to say there is an element to what you're saying. It sounds a little bit Pollyannish. Like, we're all going to keep going and keep working and it's the kind of hunky-dory view, the optimistic view of the world. There's another book coming out this week by Dan, a priest of the Washington Post called Top Secret America. And in that she goes through and documents this rise of essentially an intelligence complex that has grown so far beyond the span of control of the country, it's become its own beast. When you think about the fact that we're just around the corner from the 10-year anniversary of 9-11, you look at Guantanamo, you see that at least, you know, to come back to Shelley's point, that the United States, to some degree, is creating the competitive space to the own liberal order. Anatole Levin, you know, once called it in his book America Right or Wrong, that America was king of the hill of this rules-based order and then began kicking down its own hill. And so how do you deal with, I just tried to look very quickly in the book, but how do you deal with the kind of war on terror stuff that has been hatched during this period of time? People would argue that it is that which has sped up history, what Charlie Cubs would say, the decline of the United States and move that much faster. And so do you go into that at all in the book? I'm shocked that you would ask this question, but absolutely a good question and important. And I go into it, I do, but I want to make several different arguments that hopefully will help you. One is in the book and that is that I do code the American turn after 9-11 as a turn that became, under the auspices of the war on terror and the unipolar moment, became a source of global instability and a erosion of American authority. And I argue that in some ways that grand strategy which I call a kind of illiberal unipolar strategy that in its fullest form you might have seen and articulated by Bush in the West Point commencement speech early in his term, where the U.S. would really be above the international system in some sense, that it would be less to hold into rules and the rule of law. And so this is the international component. As you mentioned, there's a national security state, a domestic component. I worry about that. It is a threat to the kind of liberal vision and it is a darker side of the American international experience, for sure. This is not a book that tries to whitewash the American diplomatic record. There are crude imperial and client state relations that show up in this book. I argue that the U.S. has acted in a most reciprocal, rule-based way towards other democracies. It's been less of that sort in its long history with Latin America and certainly in the Middle East. It's exhibited the kind of imperial behavior that you see from other states. So it's not a one-dimensional America. And I likewise realize that after 9-11, this kind of insecure America was brought forward and American leaders responded to it by building a much more intrusive and national security state that you just referred to. For me, looking forward, the most likely, the best way that we can imagine a 21st century where that will not get worse but actually can get better is if we find ourselves moving towards a world order where the rule of law and the American position in it is a truly of the sort that is envisaged in America's most lofty and abstract visionary statements about itself in the world, which is to say truly live up to the idea that it is going to be a steward of a rules-based open system. We all know that the closed national security state features of the United States, with any state, are exacerbated when there are grave geopolitical threats, when insecurity becomes pervasive. And so it's precisely at the agenda of building an international system for the 21st century where we can rescue a measure of security through cooperation, through, as the old German philosopher Emmanuel Kant suggested, democracies need to work together precisely because there are threats to Republican rule, as he argued, if you truly have an unconstrained world of anarchy. So you've got a tame anarchy to protect limited government at home. And 9-Eleven took us to the edge, and I think that we need to move back from the edge. And you move back from the edge in a concerted effort to weave an international community where we are less threatened by terrorism and other sorts of enemies. Thank you. Other questions? Yes, right here. Scott Cooper, American National Standards Institute. I'm taken by the, I guess, or the either-or in some of the things you've been saying, where it's the liberal tradition sort of leads to, I'd say, greater globalization, more involvement, more equality among all the players, and yet it still seems to be a nation-state kind of order. Somebody's on top, others are on the bottom, there's a constant movement back and forth. One of the things that I picked up from sort of the liberal tradition or at least one of the trends that may be growing or not, and we'll see, is the fact that it isn't just the nation-states, but you also have a lot of other players involved that are creating not only helping the economy, but also creating public goods, creating things that were always sort of the preview of the nation-states but are no longer that that's being the case. Things like the Arab Spring where it's Facebook and it's all kinds of new technologies and sort of this understanding among people of a certain age group, wherever they may be, sort of that solidarity that used to be sort of the workers of the world or whatever international group you would have, I think there's sort of that understanding that there's this tacit agreement among different groups, no matter where you may live. Do you see opportunities, and I won't go as far as to say sort of the new medievalism, but do you see opportunities for other players, whether it's NGOs, multinationals or whatever, to play a role in creating public goods or playing a role that may be outside of where they may stand within the nation-state scheme? Yeah, and that's a great question. I don't buy into this idea of a new medievalism. There's a term that neo-medievalism, John Rugge and others have used that term. I'm not taken by it. I do think that clearly... Brogdon, right? Yeah, there are several who have used the term and it's very provocative, but I think it is more of a... It obstructs... It doesn't illuminate very much. It kind of allows us to... It doesn't allow us to really see what the deep structural features are, I think, but it is provocative. I want to hold to some extent to the primacy of the state system. I think that certainly looking over the last half-century, the liberal agenda has been actually tied to trying to build capacities for states. And one of the themes of my book is really that the liberal project, the progressive idea that you associate with Woodrow Wilson and with FDRs for freedoms and with the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the United Nations itself, this whole kind of liberal movement to build a more cooperative system based on principles of human rights. All of that, in some sense, has been given force in the 20th century by its connection to the nation state. It has been tied to giving governments that are the main constituency of international order capacities to make good on their own promises to their people, so take the Bretton Woods institutions. We're very much international institutions. Yes, that's all true. They were, in that sense, multilateral and building global order, but they were ultimately tools that were allowing governments to pursue better national economic policy. They were giving them resources to stabilize their economy when they run balance of payments deficits, for example. So think of the international order as partly a kind of mutual aid society for governments. And governments buy into that order partly because it gives them the ability to do things. And we live in an era where we expect our governments and our politicians to provide stable employment, to growing economies, to protect us in all different ways. Security has become a very expansive term, and what we mean by security is so different from the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century. So I think that a functioning international order in the 21st century will be most viable and it continues to do that. And to the extent international order is taking capacity away from governments, and Steve, this is very important. I think this isn't an exploratory as fully among the kind of debaters about international order, to build capacities for governments to pursue their obligations at home. Now, to some extent, the neoliberal turn which you date back to Reagan and Thatcher was really, in some sense, enshrining the market more than the government. You were undercutting Keynesian tools. You were taking away capacities. And I think it's important, if the United States wants to get back at the vanguard of leading the system, it is going to have to come up to an answer to the question, what is our public philosophy? What is our vision in a post-neoliberal world? The financial crisis and other developments have clearly taken us to a punctuation point in history about the management of the world economy. The neoliberal moment is over. What is America's view about the markets in the state in the 21st century now? And it's in America's interest to rebrand itself. And to some extent, go back to its ideas that you do see in the 1940s, which were themselves stimulated by the New Deal, which is a more embedded liberal, more managed liberal kind of vision of both domestic and international economics. And that's why my long-winded answer to your question is that I still think at the end of the day, the international order and national governments, the articulation has to be just right. And we've lost some of that articulation. It's not good. All of this is true, but so too is the observation that all of these institutions and governments generally are having to find new ways to pursue public-private partnerships, to find new channels and conduits for NGO participation. The UN has its Congo. There are lots of different ways in which you create mechanisms for voice, for participation, but this may sound surprising for someone who is seen as a liberal internationalist. I still think the liberal vision is anchored in building an environment in which national governments can provide safety and security and prosperity to their people, full stop. Thank you, John. Yes, right up here, right in the very front. And we'll go to the back. Greetings. Sorry, Jordan. He needs to run. I'm an international student at the American University. Use your lungs because imagine you're talking to the person in the far back of the room. My name is Claudia. I'm an international student at the American University. I kept hearing you about the international world order and basically how do you think we can try to keep some countries from domination? I mean, we see that with European Union and with sometimes what France is doing, so how does this sort of circle way of functioning things might work? How do we keep particular countries from dominating? Yes. Don't think it does. Yeah. Well, I guess what I would say is that the problem probably in the next few decades is not preventing a particular country from dominating. It's almost the opposite problem of getting countries to engage in collective action, that countries are not elbowing themselves to the front of the line to be a global leader. There's more free riding. There's more reluctance to step up. I worry about that more than I worry about a particular country that might follow the United States and be a kind of global dominating presence. I've partly already indicated why I believe that in regard to China, but just a comment on that, more general comment. The arc of the American experience is really quite interesting because what we mean by international order really became much richer and more coherent. You go back into world history and it's harder to kind of identify the characteristics of international order. What are the boundaries? What are the rules? Whereas in the 20th century and particularly after World War II, international order became much more of a thing that you could draw pictures of. You could diagram. It was a layer cake of institutions, a complex. In some sense, our standard of what we mean by international order, the bar was raised, so to speak. We almost from that point think that now we're waiting for the answer, what will the next international order look like? We're in that sense expecting that it will be equally rich, dynamic, and coherent, but be led by somebody else according to other principles. I'm skeptical of that at many levels, but I'm skeptical in this sense at the idea that international order will always be rich and coherent and dynamic, that what we may find ourselves going into is an era where the absolute amount of order is just less and they're defined in terms of agreed upon rules and principles and functional mechanisms for problem solving and so forth, that we could see this kind of rise and decline, in the United States so much, as rise and decline of a functioning international order. That is relevant to your question about domination because the reason we might get an overall erosion of international order defined by anybody is simply that there isn't going to be a state that identifies its interest with the whole and you have free riding, you have decentralized competition, and the overall system suffers as a consequence. Thank you. Very back. I bet a China question is coming up. Yeah. The question is about China and world order. China's State Council Information Office just issued a white paper about China's pursuit of the peaceful rise or peaceful development. The idea is not new as you know, but the question is do you believe in this idea after seeing what has happened in South China Sea and second, how is this China's peaceful rise available in the current world order? So should we be satisfied with the State Council Information Office's promise that China will only rise peacefully? Well, as a political scientist, I won't use a piece of paper as the guarantee. I'll offer a more structural, perhaps materialist argument about the rise of China and its implications. I think the rise of China is going to be a great drama of this century and China will have more power and influence and the world will adjust to that in one way or another. The question that I've been asking is in this book and the work I'm doing now is whether China will ultimately integrate and participate as a kind of stakeholder state within the existing order. And I suggest there are reasons why it would want to do that and have to do that. There are massive constraints and incentives for China to integrate and operate within as opposed to resist and oppose and try to overturn. So I am betting, and for reasons I talk about in the book, that China will ultimately be incentivized and constrained to be more of an integrator and participant in the order rather than have the wherewithal and the ideas and the strategic interest and capacity to truly take us in a new direction. So that's number one. Number two, I am convinced it probably will not be peaceful. So the answer I just gave you is not necessarily that it will operate inside more than outside, that it will seek greater authority and control within the order. All of that is true. I think it will be a rocky road. And I think the way I think we should look at the rise of China is to try to distinguish at least three different ways that China make clash with the established Western world. Number one is what realists talk about, that arising China will have more power and it will seek to have more control based on that power. You see this in the South China Sea. It has a growing military, growing navy, and there's going to be a clash, an old style realist clash with the United States and other naval powers in the region. And that's something we know about. We can see it coming. We've seen it before in history. And it's a relative power struggle. And that's going to go on. Secondly, a second type of clash is a clash over authority. That's what my book mostly focuses on. And that's what I argue in my book is the real drama today. There is a struggle for the redistribution of rights and privileges and authority. And that's about seats at the table. It's about what tables matter. It's about going from G7 to G20. It's about, in effect, the U.S. being displaced or other countries moving in at the highest level of the international system, projecting leadership and authority, sitting at the high table. The third clash is a clash over ideas. This is what our colleague Charlie Cubshin thinks is really at stake in the great turn today. And I do not think that's the case. I don't think that China has a set of ideas about international order that are revisionist and robust in any sense. The problems that China is going to give the old order aren't a run for its money in terms of ideas. It's a run for its money in terms of money and in terms of traditional geopolitical power. And there, I think, it will play out. But it's going to play out in complex ways. In Asia, it's going to play out where China will find it very difficult to rise without triggering insecurity among its neighbors, thereby reinforcing America's role in the region as a security provider. So the countries in the region look to China for markets, the U.S. for security, the dragon for economics, the eagle for security. And that duality is there, and it's likely to stay there for a long time. And just my final point would be, I think the bargain that the U.S. and China are going to have to look for is one where China, the U.S. acknowledges that China is going to be a bigger player in the region and the world, and that's the authority struggle to share authority in various venues. But at the same time, China is, I think, going to have to recognize that the United States is going to remain a Pacific power, and its allies will ultimately determine that one way or another, the U.S. will remain, I think, unless its allies say otherwise, deeply embedded in the region as a security provider and partner more generally. John, why would the United States do that? We've got Warren Coates, who's one of the great currency experts in the world, and as I understand the era of liberal order building, essentially the privilege the United States got the deal was that the United States played certain unique functions around the world, and so its economy operated in a gravity-less environment, whereas the rest of the economies around the rest of the world behaved differently. We provided security, we were competitive with the Soviet superstructure, and so those within the American orbit essentially were, in my view, essentially in vassal relationships to the United States at that time, and so the United States derived great benefits from that. Today, unless you can figure out a way to run the Pentagon at a profit, it doesn't seem that the same quid pro quo exists between the United States and others in the so-called liberal order. Every time I hear people say the United States will continue, and I look at the sources of American power today, meaning the size of its debt, too big to fail, and a Pentagon in a world where that kind of security doesn't generate as many security deliverables. So why do you think the United States will go on doing something that seems to be less efficacious with its interest than it used to be? Because it did derive benefits in the past that were very clear. That's a great question, and I do say in my book that the U.S. is going to have to renegotiate bargains, and at the end I offer several different visions of the future. One is one where a kind of non-liberal order where there's either something very different run out of China or there is an order, as I was suggesting earlier, at all, anything can be described as order. But if there is to be a continuation of what we loosely call liberal international order, it could be either a renegotiated American-led order, liberal order, or it could be one where it's got a post-American one where the U.S. isn't doing the things that you've just described, security provider, public goods provider, but nonetheless there is a follow-on coalition of states to become a more general set of supporters for an open liberal system. Now, if the U.S. is to remain at the center of this system, it will have to renegotiate those bargains. But I would argue that there still are agreements that can be arrived at where both America's junior partners and strategic partners of various kinds who are tied to the United States in security relationships gain while the United States does as well. One of the arguments in this book that I really push and I really am fascinated by as a political scientist is the way in which alliances have this multitasking aspect to them. They are alliances that do traditional things but they also provide political architecture for the wider system. They allow for voice opportunities from states like Japan and Korea to have ongoing strategic connections to Washington. They give the United States leverage in the region. The alliance system in Asia has been part of the framework that has allowed countries like Korea and Taiwan and the Philippines and Thailand to make democratic transitions. So they have done, these alliances have done a lot of things. They are not just security mechanisms, they are political architecture, they are voice channels and all of that. So there is, when we tally up costs and benefits on both sides, often we use a very narrow measuring stick or metric to say is this alliance a good investment or not. And I think that's what you're suggesting that the ledgers suggest that maybe the cost is greater than the benefit. And what I'm suggesting is that you may not have looked at all the benefits and I think the response to me though is that it shouldn't matter that the liberal order would go on and continue in the way you said regardless of the U.S. continuing to provide that security equation. In fact the United States can rebalance its interests in the world and your argument is that the deal making will take care of it, that the world will be okay. I used to call it the micro, when you and I talked about it I called the Microsoft model. In America it had to get out of being sort of the big regulated utility and if you deregulated the system it's kind of like if Microsoft was in every computer you had essentially less hierarchical control but there were key elements of your operating system throughout the system. So if I were to argue with me from your perspective I would say in response that it wouldn't matter at all if the United States in fact forfeited that role of being the global seeing itself as the global cop. Yeah I leave that question open in the book that I can imagine a functioning open rule based order where the U.S. is not playing that role and you can provide a kind of theoretical account of why it might happen. I think it is a more problematic future than one where the U.S. continues to do things provide public goods and from an American perspective I think there is something valuable in having a kind of framework where it is actively generating partners and engaging in this what we've already talked about this kind of American pension for problem solving so I think we could liquidate the American system and the world will go on and there will be markets and there will be cooperation but in speaking to American strategists and to an American audience I would make the case that it's in America's interest to remain central to the system to provide leadership it's good for the United States and it's good for the system again there are other models of the future and I'm not saying that they aren't sustainable and they aren't ones that we could we could survive through with but we can debate this another time but I gave you a Hobbesian view in which your liberal order still survived which was rare I think actually Michael and we'll go right here and then this gentleman over here and we'll give you some time to meet John. My name is Mike Hager and I've appreciated your remarks and I think most of the discussion is on other nation states as potential challenges to a future liberal world order but I wonder about resource constraints as the world gets more and more crowded going forward in this century food, water, energy do you see those challenges as an opportunity or more as a real threat? Thank you very much for that question More book sales sorry behave yourself the argument in some sense the argument that threads through this book in which I think is at the heart of the liberal internationalism vision is that the problems of interdependence are what necessitate a liberal international order that is to say countries face an international environment where it's really impossible to be safe and secure alone what is changing the world and what is creating the continuing constituency for liberal internationalism I argue rising, economic but also security interdependence and this is my way of answering your question security independence is a situation where a country can be safe and secure regardless of the capacities and intentions of enemies whether they be other states or whether they be terrorists or anybody else that's security independence security interdependence is when you are in an environment a country where what others do are and you have to actively do things to prevent them from hurting you so in the case of security interdependence really became a dramatic reality during the cold war with nuclear weapons the nuclear revolution where the US actively had to convince the Kremlin that it would be suicidal for them to attack us if they did attack we couldn't stop it we didn't have missile defense or the oceans were not wide enough so that was really very clear security interdependence what many of us see when we look into the 21st century is a world where that's getting even more complicated in a diffuse uncertain and shifting way that the threats are not just nuclear weapons wielded by the Kremlin it's now all sorts of different threats from all sorts of different places not just other states as I suggested but surely terrorist groups proliferation WMD global warming health pandemics so these are not just traditional types of enemies be they state or non-state actors but the revenge of nature in effect the environment to remain safe and secure in the 21st century under conditions of rising security interdependence you are obligated really to find ways to work with other states to reduce those insecurities so if I were to boil it down to a bumper sticker we can't be secure alone we can only be secure together and that is an agenda of cooperation of security cooperation on all sorts of different things and my colleague Ann Marie Slaughter is hard on this question when we were building and working on the Princeton project on national security and this is the heart of our vision of a kind of multiplicity of transnational threats and of course traditional threats and the implication is that you have to build capacities internationally to save yourself from these things more people in more places matter how people burn energy how they treat their minorities how they do or do not provide for public health for their people how they ratify or do not ratify international treaties and agreements all of these sorts of things with more and more people in more and more places matter so that is an agenda that is in front of us in the 21st century and I don't know how you would ever develop a response to that increasingly complicated and worrisome international environment without building on what I described in this book as a liberal accomplishment or American accomplishment it's the same platform that has to be expanded, re-legitimized made more functional for new problems and that's at the heart of the internationalist agenda and it speaks to your question about what are the nature of the threats I'm going to take these last cluster questions because we're getting near the end here we'll go to this gentleman in the back we're just going to work our way up the side here we'll try and make them brief and then we'll get John to give these kind of great mosaic answers thank you I just have a question to regional organizations such as the European Union you based very much on the American perspective and I would just like to know when you talked about the key to the future of integration especially an example like the European Union or the GCC I would like to know what do you personally believe in the future it goes in the same direction like the last question if we have these energy and financial issues like in Europe where people are realizing we have to work together maybe a European army maybe a financial stronger I would like to know what you personally believe in this direction these regional organizations what is their importance thank you and then right here in the middle Ellen Baw, Montgomery College would you discuss the U.S. role in the Arab-Israeli crisis and should the U.S. rebrand its policy where do you see that going okay interesting Peter I'd like to build on some of your an intersection of international and U.S. domestic politics you gave the implication that we're sort of over the top we're on our way down and it just sort of accepted and my question is I don't see the domestic U.S. political system being able to adjust to that situation in other words I don't see a presidential candidate it doesn't matter which party number two we got to do A, B and C if we're going to recover it's always going to be morning in America we're great everything is hunky-dory I can't see a leader saying we've lost the top so talk about that intersection and then we'll go right here to this gentleman and then we'll wrap up Hello my name is John Kachuk from the Osgoo Center for International Studies Sir you mentioned or you implied that one of the characteristic features of this liberal world order is its resiliency and you mentioned before it's easy to get in and it's very difficult to get out and that I believe you also mentioned that it's difficult it's easy to join and hard to overturn exactly well that's what I meant and I guess my question is is this world order is it as resilient as you imply because I can think of experiences in the past in history where there was a more or less a liberal foundation for international relations and it was inherently fragile that if a state is big enough powerful enough and willing enough and China comes to mind that order can be doesn't even have to be overturned it can be modified these are great questions the European Union, Arab-Israeli crisis domestic US political system and is the international order fragile? I'll just go in a reverse order I'm making an argument in the book that it's robust and not fragile even though I know that you can see those characteristics in past orders it's precisely I'm making the argument and I'm suggesting why that is the case and there's a long set of arguments about it but it has to do with the multiple characteristics and reinforcing components of the system and its functionality and legitimacy and this is kind of a question that I can answer all of them in some sense by making this one point and some other things and that is that I think international orders rise and fall based on three characteristics one is power is there power behind the order are there either United States or a coalition of states that see it in their interest to support that order you need power and that's since I'm a realist secondly legitimacy does the order have principles that resonate with the polity views the polity principles of the states that are in it does it solve problems and when I look at China I see the potential of rising power but I don't see principles as I said earlier that suggest that China has within it a set of ideas that could be floated out there and seen as legitimate that are wildly different from what we have today and thirdly functionality if China wants to run the world it's going to have to propose an international order in the sense of solving problems and that goes back to my earlier quite emphatic answer to a question about why orders need to provide tools and resources for states to make good on their obligations so in that sense I think there's the alternatives are not there and the functionality and legitimacy of the existing order is so great that it's hard for me even China on a good day finding itself able to truly engage in a kind of world-wrenching transformation and that's my bet that's my argument but it is very much open to debate domestic politics is that right I worry about that I don't have anything special to say but I think that's where a lot of the trouble ahead will emanate from the problems of American leaders being able to stand up and make commitments and reassure other countries I think the debt crisis negotiation is still being talked about around the world is this the United States that we remember and what does this mean if the US is the linchpin of the system if the US is providing system functions for the world and yet that linchpin country looks like it's kind of wobbly not be able to generate commitments and do what it's done in the past that for me is the big question and then the other point is really about what I call the psychodrama of the US having to kind of adjust its self-image and there I think we can do that because I still think as far as we can look into the future the United States will be I think will be the preeminent country in terms of global leadership for 20, 30, 40, for most of the years ahead of us it can play that role it may be a different role than the old role but it is still as a kind of leader as a country that is unique in its capacities so I don't think leaders have to stand up and say it's all over for us and not only that leaders are going to be able to say if we want to run if we want to be a world leader we can do things again so there is speech there is speech material here there is an agenda there is an agenda lurking for renewal that might be built around clean energy and social investments so I think it can happen again that's happened in the past it can happen again but it's tough it doesn't matter that if you have an American leader who can't be square with the American public about what's happened it won't matter because that decline relative or absolute is very evident in education scores and economic data and the sort of broad view around the world that America can't achieve the things it says it's going to do Libya is looking like a little bit of a standout to that all of a sudden but I don't think we have that connected to any strategy to make whatever momentum from that and the last lesson that you would take from that is like Henry Slaughter John's colleague has written this provocative piece called the New Age of Intervention I don't think we're anywhere near that that in fact would be an incredibly reckless lesson to be taken from what was largely a tilting point, tipping point strategy that the president and other sort of largely hatched with Libya but it was saying the outcome isn't going to be owned by us in that particular case and we were going to be moving away and it's kind of an intervention light strategy if you will because of, in fact I think it's the right strategy perhaps to have taken but it was taken because of NATO stretch marks and the perception of wild over stretch by the U.S. military in so many fronts so anyway sorry to interrupt but yeah suppose we had Israel, Palestine remember actually we got an agreement they come to us to say we each need 3 billion a year to make this work I could see the American Congress saying wait a minute that problem cut something else to pay for this and the whole thing falls apart maybe but it's pretty cheap yeah that's pretty cheap it's pretty cheap, we got away with that that's pretty cheap I mean what we probably do in that case would launder Saudi money or something you said that not me I think we'd find money if in that range for Middle East peace I think we would probably try to find the money although the Japanese may not give it to us this time is there a reinvention opportunity in the Arab-Israeli crisis? truth and advertising this book does not will not help you understand the Middle East it's not really about the world so the book will not be able to help out so much but I think that this is an area where I think the Obama administration has done some very good things in Asia and I think I like what it did with Russia and I think they're doing great things in terms of reimagining the social networking development diplomacy network I think those are the areas of strength that this administration has had I think the Middle East has been a disappointment I think raising expectations and finding itself tied to two leaders that were for different reasons in Israel and Palestine unable to move forward I think you're missing another great opportunity to show how your system works in this because my answer on the Arab-Israeli crisis is that you could approach this in redefining this new era in which America was behaving differently not dominant but there in the mix by essentially nudging things forward and then letting the French run forward in other words what I see the really interesting lesson which the Obama doctrine may turn out to be and they don't know it yet is that the Libya decision was sort of the G20-ification of international security issues that you had America give a nudge then backed out the French were furious with us but lo and behold NATO got a little bit of a gold star in some of what it did I think the Arab-Israeli issues now the increasing current of wisdom there is the US has got to get out of the role of being perceiving itself as the dominant player when in fact it's a fairly corrupt role in which it guarantees one side not the other but in this process you can actually give Turkey give Russia give various European states much more lead which they're demanding now anyway in this and it changes the quid pro quo arrangements in there that could be an interesting part of renegotiating rights which could be much more efficacious in this and that fits your I'll go around with you and answer questions much more creative response than I can provide I think that is I think we're otherwise we're really out of impasse and then finally before we close because I want to give people an opportunity I think we found a few books in town to sell I hope we have them but if those of you would like to have them otherwise for those watching online I also got a text message somebody's I hadn't introduced myself by the way I'm Steve Clemens of the New America Foundation in Washington editor of the Atlantic I want to give people an opportunity to talk to John personally as well but in this last question about European Union and regional and I want to tag one element on there the Europe grows essentially by dangling carrots or has grown by dangling carrots and says you know it's sort of like the Borg in Star Trek you know it's an assimilation strategy where if another state becomes decides to regulate itself in the Akiki Minotaur and they decide to you know accept and apply these 80,000 government regulations and contort themselves around to look like Europeans then ostensibly they can you know connect it's a very interesting to me that sounds a lot more like a rules based negotiation order than the United States essentially spreading democracy at the point of a gun and so I certainly don't I'm not advocating spreading democracy no I know but it's really at the heart of the American system I think it's a feature that's appeared at various times but that's not what the American system is about I think in some ways and this is my response Europe and Europe as a region and the United States as a global as a kind of center of a global system are facing similar problems in some ways as Steve said Europe is built upon providing attractions for states to integrate and work within a reciprocal rule based system where sovereignty is shared in various dimensions and it is reaching an impasse that will either lead it to pull back from in this case single currency monetary union or move forward and build new capacities in the fiscal area for management of this complex system similarly the US system has encountered new problems that we've talked about today problems that are problems of interdependence but like Europe there are problems of success not failure Europe is in the state it is now because it has integrated states and has offered a kind of promise of union that states have been attracted to and those are problems of success of a project that has gone part way but to fully solve those problems that has to go further not go in a different direction and in some ways that's the American challenge the challenges the United States has integrating rising non-western developing states integrating other states around the world solving and addressing these transnational problems which are problems of interdependence economic and security interdependence those are precisely the same thing they are problems of success if the American vision had not been realized much more dramatically and successfully than even Truman and Atchison would have thought in their wildest dreams we wouldn't be dealing with these problems these are problems of success they are problems of a larger global system that has in effect been brought into this post-World War two constructed system the inside order that was part of the Cold War the American system became the outside order the inside order became the outside order states from all over the world were brought in we got the WTO we got rising states that are transitioning in a market direction and those are problems but they're probably we should say they're problems of success they aren't problems like Woodrow Wilson confronted after 1919 which was really a different kind of problem problems of failure of the inability of the liberal project to get up and running our problems are because the liberal project got up and ran and they are leading to new problems that there are problems of liberal internationalism that can only be solved with more liberal internationalism so the king is dead long live the king there is a there's a set of challenges but they're ones that we should be glad we have because looking back into history there are other problems that that are much more violent and dangerous and and ones that we would certainly like to avoid so I somebody said when he read this book well John you've written a very brave book which I think he meant foolish and in some ways it is basically optimistic about the capacity for humans to develop social institutions to solve problems but if you look back at the long history of the human project not just the liberal project it's not outside of our grasp and we've done it and it's been done in the context of upheaval and violence and war and revolution so it's not a I'm not making a prediction that we will have a peaceful peace, love and eternal stability but rather that the kinds of problems are ones we should want to have and that we are not devoid of theory or history or practice to tackle those problems I want to thank John Eikenberry for spending his afternoon with us I agree with Michael Cox who is of the LSE in his line this is nobody has thought longer or deeper about the nature of American liberal world order than John Eikenberry Brzezinski said John Eikenberry America's leading scholar of international affairs brilliantly relates theory to historical change and his timely advocacy of a new U.S. foreign policy he doesn't offer praise like that often I know him well in my own view because I approach this as John knows from a realist portal a progressive realist portal I very much want John to be right I fear that and I keep kicking the tires we've been having this conversation for years I'm so pleased that the book is out I highly recommend it to those online and those here liberal Leviathan the origins, crisis and transformation of the American world order every once in a while there is a book that everyone has to have and to read and to keep there are fewer and fewer of those there are a lot more books but they find their way out of my bookshelf much more quickly it's one that I think is very important because John Eikenberry is making us all I think much more deeply about the international system which I find in my own in my own view and when I get my book out there you can come provide it as I look at this as a very interesting moment of historical discontinuity where a lot of this is being rethought and I hope your vision plays out so please join me in extending a hand a round of applause for John Eikenberry Thank you very much