 I apologize to any of you who heard me a few months ago at the Department of Foreign Affairs, because I don't think I've changed my views that much. But I think the speech has gotten better, so you might like it a little bit more. And I'd be interested in your comparisons. I understand that my friend Peter Tuberwitz was here recently to talk about Trump. 19th of September. 19th of September, yeah. And so, you know, I sort of envy him a little bit and talk about Trump, which is, like, you know, a vastly more entertaining speech than mine. I think mine is, you know, more relevant, because I think Clinton is likely to win the election. And I think that there are some interesting things to say about Clinton, not as interesting as Trump, which has been part of the problem. She is a very, particularly from a European perspective, from a foreign policy perspective, a very normal candidate and frankly very comprehensible, very predictable. She's been a presence in national politics in the United States for moving on 30 years. She's been First Lady, she's been Senator, she's been Secretary of State, and her foreign policy views are both very well known and they place her very firmly at the center of the American foreign policy spectrum. And I would say, particularly when it comes to the sort of transatlantic consensus which has animated American policy on Europe for the last 60 or 70 years, she's very much within that consensus. Indeed, I think it's probably fair to say that Clinton is more normal in this sense than is appropriate for the national mood. And I think you see from the extensive support that Trump and Bernie Sanders got in the primaries that a lot of the electorate are sort of disillusioned with both with establishment figures, but also that there's a sense among them that both the Bush and Obama administrations, both the Bush and Obama foreign policies got the United States too involved in the world and failed in Trumpian terms to put America first. And this was to a degree that the foreign policy critique that Sanders was making too. But you know, be that it is, as it may, it's not hard to describe Clinton's approach, that that's not going to fundamentally alter, that political rally isn't going to fundamentally alter her approach. Like every president since 1945, she will rely on the transatlantic alliance as a cornerstone of her foreign policy. And like every president for almost that long, she will, within the confines of that approach, seek to shift a lot of the burdens of global and particularly regional European security to the larger powers of Europe and the EU if it could conceivably take it up. Like Obama, she's going to be seeking to reallocate a lot of the resources that the United States spends or devotes to European security to areas of greater urgency, not necessarily greater importance, but more urgency, particularly East Asia and I guess the Middle East. Frankly, this core approach is, you know, too familiar to really merit a detailed explanation. I'm almost bored with the two minutes I gave. So I want to focus on three, frankly less important, but less commonly discussed and more interesting aspects of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy, which are at least relevant to the transatlantic alliance. But as I'm saying this, don't forget that actually the more important part is the boring thing I just said. So the first is the essential continuity in foreign policy that will pertain from Obama to Clinton, particularly including on the use of military force. There's a sort of conventional wisdom in the United States that Clinton is a lot more hawkish than Obama and will deploy force a lot more. I think that's wrong, and I'll talk a little bit about that. The second point is the role of gender in her approach to foreign policy, which I think is one of the more interesting innovations for better or for worse that Clinton will bring to foreign policy. And the third is her approach to Russia, which I think stands out as an important exception to the basic rule of continuity between Obama and Clinton's foreign policy. Okay, so essential continuity. So Clinton, as I said, has made an effort during her campaign, and it's a very normal thing to disassociate herself from the less popular aspects of Obama's foreign policy. And particularly as a Democrat and as a woman, a party and a gender which is associated in the popular mind with weakness and anti-militarism, she's been very careful to project an image of strength and a willingness to use force throughout the campaign and frankly throughout her career as a politician. And this effort, I think, as well as her past support for military interventions, including the war in Iraq, particularly, have led to a widespread view that she would resort to force much more often than Obama and particularly in Syria. But I think that this hides an essential continuity in how the two of them approach foreign policy problems. And also, and I think this is important to say, it underestimates how much Obama has used force. It is quite incredible to me that he has viewed, particularly in the United States but also to a degree abroad, as someone who has eschewed and pulled back from the use of military force. And I guess it's true that unlike his predecessor, he didn't invade countries for no reason, but that hardly makes him a dove. He has, in fact, been at war every single day of his presidency. He is the only American president to have that dubious distinction in history. He has taken military action in seven Muslim majority countries, which is more than George W. Bush, and he's dramatically expanded a new type of warfare that uses drones and special forces to project American military power abroad. But I can tell you that if the missile comes from a drone or if it comes from a force on the ground, you're just as dead. So it doesn't really change dramatically the way people in the conflict countries see that. I think this view also underestimates the view that Clinton will be more supportive of this stuff. I mean, it's just how important Clinton herself was as Secretary of State in helping to asshape Obama's approach to foreign policy. She was, frankly, there from day one, and Obama did not enter office as a president with a lot of priors about foreign policy. And frankly neither did she, but together they were very much present and they very much worked together to formulate the basis of Obama's foreign policy. She was on board with the vast majority of it. The press tends to focus on the differences there were, some differences. I would argue that most of those differences were positional. They had more to do with him being president and her being Secretary of State than any sort of fundamental philosophical difference. It's true that like Obama, Clinton has often favored the use of force. As First Lady in the 90s, she supported U.S. intervention in U.S. Lavia. As Senator, she voted for the war in Iraq in 2003. In 2009, she supported the troop surge in Afghanistan. Secretary of State, she advocated for military intervention in Libya and as well often forceful measures in Syria. And her current presidential campaign has been very active in calling for no fly zones in Syria and for a lot of her foreign policy advisors including people like Michelle Flournoy, who's often tipped as Secretary of Defense, have written very hawkish pieces about what to do in Syria during the campaign. But her record is actually, I think, a lot more nuanced than that picture and the nuance isn't appreciated. She has just as often pushed diplomatic solutions as military solutions. She has frequently complained about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy and she has just as frequently touted the virtues that she calls smart power, which is an annoying term to me because I don't know what dumb power is, but what it means is the idea that all types of national power need to be deployed to solve America's foreign policy problems and it implies that force has been overused. She started the secret negotiations with Iran in 2012 which led to the Iranian nuclear deal and avoided a war with Iran. She supported President Obama's rapprochement with Cuba. She supported and implemented the reset with Russia that began in 2009. And when China started to become aggressive in the South China Sea in 2010, she didn't reach for military tools. She created a diplomatic initiative in the region to contain that Chinese move. And I think maybe even more importantly than that, Clinton will be inclined toward diplomacy rather than forth as president because she'll find, as presidents do, as opposed to Secretary of State, as they say in bureaucracy, where you sit depends on where you stand. Let me see the other way around. The use of force abroad is going to offer precious few opportunities for making a difference in America's foreign policy problems and it's going to come at considerable political cost at home. In Syria, which we were just discussing downstairs, the idea of risking U.S. troops on the ground which is what you would have to do to really make a big difference in that war, the idea of risking them on the ground in order to possibly come in conflict with the Russians in order to support an opposition that consists largely of al-Qaeda is not any more appealing to her than it is to President Obama. These are the realities of what the people who actually wrestle with Syria policy as opposed to the Washington Post editorial board have to take into account. When it comes to fighting ISIS, she seems quite comfortable with Obama's template of sort of a light footprint, limited use of drones, special forces, airstrikes, and trying to build local capacity for ground operations and stabilization. Changing these policies would be politically risky. As recent presidents have repeatedly learned, military intervention abroad can often weaken political support at home. This is tricky, I think, because it's very easy as a president, as an American president, to start a military intervention. You can always get political support for starting a military intervention. The pattern of American military interventions is that when the question arises, the public doesn't support it, when the president decides he wants to do it, or her, he rallies them around the flag, they come around fairly easily, a couple of good speeches. He goes and does it, and if it works, they continue to support him. If six or 12 months later, it's not going well, they turn on him like Judas. And for both Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, these wars hung over their second terms and destroyed their presidencies. And I think Obama was very, very aware of that. When I was working on Syria policy in 2012, and people were talking about what the sort of administration thinking is, the conventional wisdom was that the president wouldn't do anything until after the election. Actually, within the White House, it was the exact opposite view. It wasn't that it would hurt to do something in Syria for the election. If you did something in Syria in August or July or August before the election, you would get that bump that you always get from a military intervention. And it would help you in the election, even though the public said they were opposed to it. But the problem was not November, the problem was January. And then when you started your second term, you would own the war and you had no way of solving it. You had no way of winning it. It seems very clear that despite the headlines of global disorder, neither the American public nor the Congress has a lot of appetite for a more active military policy. Yes, they'll let you get in, but they will punish you for having done it. And this became very clear in the campaign trail in both the Republican and Democratic primaries when hawkishness emerged as a political liability that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump profited from. So a recent survey, for example, from the Pew Research Center found that 57% of Americans surveyed want the U.S. to deal with its own problems while letting other countries get along as well as they can. Only 27% felt that the United States is doing too little to solve world problems. That's not a big base to build on. And Clinton, frankly, has always reserved her greatest passion for domestic issues. She wants to make her mark in domestic policy. All presidents do, sometimes they get pushed to foreign policy, but that early on, particularly, that's where she's going to be trying to spend her political capital. The second factor to consider, which I think is interesting about Clinton, is gender. This is difficult to talk to, especially given my own gender, but I'm going to risk it. I may never get a date again, but I'm not going that well anyway. So we'll see. You're a broad church. You're a broad church. When Obama became the first African-American president, he seemed very determined not to rule as an African-American. He really took very few opportunities to highlight his race and didn't give any particular priority to issues of race in his policy agenda. He seemed to be saying to the American public, I'm not a black president. I'm a president who happens to be black. And I think in doing so, he likely reduced, although clearly did not eliminate the racist backlash to his presidency. For better or for worse, Clinton seems determined to take a different approach. In the current campaign, she has been very clear that she wants to speak about gender, about the historic nature of her candidacy, and she's implied in various ways that she intends to be a female president in every sense of the word. One of the most prominent ways she's done this is through her intention, her declared intention, to ensure that half of her cabinet is female. I would add to that that she will almost certainly have the first-ever female secretary of defense. And frankly, looking back on her career, it all seems like a natural fit. She's been working for women's equality and talking about women's inclusion in political and social life, her whole life. Her first speech on the global stage was her address on women's rights at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, which she talks about all the time. And this is where she famously declared that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights. She probably also couldn't remember that stand-sit thing, so she just said them both. When she left the State Department, she assembled a group of just her longtime female aides together, and she told them that she wanted to devote herself to issues affecting women and girls in preparation for her presidential run. And that's been clear in her domestic agenda throughout her run. The New York Times calls the issue of women's rights the central cause of her career. Maybe more controversially, but certainly consistent with a lot of feminist theory, Clinton seems to believe that women bring a unique and valuable perspective to decision-making and peacemaking that men simply don't possess. Women think more holistically. They have greater attention to broad issues of social justice and economic development that men give short shrift to. And that their substantial presence in decision-making roles is essential for finding durable solutions to almost any social problem. So for her, attention to gender equity is not just a question of fairness. It's a question of effective outcomes. So this is what she said in a speech that she gave in 2011 on this subject. From Northern Ireland to Liberia to Nepal and many places in between, we have seen that when women participate in peace processes, they focus discussions on issues like human rights, justice, national reconciliation, economic renewal and economic renewal that are critical to making peace more holistic issues, but often are overlooked in formal negotiations. They build coalitions across ethnic and sectarian lines and they speak up for other marginalized groups. They act as mediators and help to foster compromise. So what that paragraph doesn't say, but doesn't need to, is that men don't do those things. So what is this gendered concept of peace and reconciliation mean for Clinton's foreign policy? I don't know exactly, but I think it implies that she is only going to seek to build durable solutions or alliances with countries that allow women to be well represented in society and government. So if Ireland has a very capable female diplomat, I think you would be wise to appoint her to Washington. I'm not making any particular suggestions. We have one there at the moment. We have one. Good move. I have noticed that I'm not the only one who's picked up on this in quite a few countries have done that in the last couple of years, including unexpected countries like the United Arab Emirates. But this brings us, I think, very quickly to the last problem, which is the last issue, which is Russia, because it relates to that gender issue in rather obvious ways. I think it's maybe the least understood aspect of her foreign policy. Critics very frequently, and it's happened in this campaign a lot, in 2009, reset as evidence that Clinton is sort of soft on Russia. But actually, from my experience in the State Department, her tenure as Secretary of State really soured her on the Russian regime. And by 2011, she had accused the Russian regime of rigging the elections to the Russian parliament. And a year later, she harshly rebuked Putin for resuming the Russian presidency in 2012. In the case of Syria, she was incensed at the assistance that Russia was providing to the Assad regime well before they intervened. In a speech in June 2012, she revealed that the Russians were shipping attack helicopters to Syria and called out Russian claims that they weren't being used there as, if for the Civil War, as patently untrue. She since compared the Russian annexation of Crimea to Adolf Hitler's invasions of the Czech Republic, of Czechoslovakia, excuse me, and Poland in the 1930s. And this is, of course, a statement that's basically perfectly pitched to annoy a Russian regime that looks to the Second World War as the critical element of their legitimation. And I think, ironically, one reason that Clinton that Clinton has such distrust of Russia is that the country's decision makers also, like her, have a very gendered perspective on foreign policy. But they have the exact opposite gender perspective on foreign policy. The Russians maintain, maybe maintain as the wrong word, they, in practice, they demonstrate that they don't think women have a place in these discussions. And there are very, very few women in the upper echelons of the Russian foreign and security policy apparatus. It's quite noticeable. And Russia's policy stance, frankly, as sort of epitomized by its often shirtless president, Vladimir Putin, seems the epitome of a sort of macho foreign policy that Clinton deprecates. As Secretary of State, Clinton had a really bad relationship with her Russian counterparts. The delegations of old white men that they brought to the meetings with her and her team seemed oftentimes more intent on humiliating her or flustering her than on achieving any particular policy outcome. It was quite noticeable. Russian officials often referred to her with both derision and respect, I guess, as a lady with balls. I don't think she liked it. After Clinton criticized the 2011 elections, parliamentary elections, Putin personally accused her of fomenting protests against his rule. And he supposedly remains angry with her to this day about that. And, you know, even if Putin's anger against Clinton is motivated by more than just gender, and I assume that it is, treating female counterparts with disdain is very clearly a part of Russia's diplomatic playbook. I went back and looked at how Condoleezza Rice, the previous American female Secretary of State, had been treated. And she, in fact, received fairly similar treatment despite being a Russia specialist and speaking Russian. And John Kerry doesn't seem to have this problem. And also, you know, there's another sort of frequent one that comes up in Europe is that Putin has attempted this, not very successfully, but attempted the same type of diplomacy with Angela Merkel. You know, Kerry, in contrast, seems to have a great relationship with Lavrov, hasn't created any actual policy outcomes. But they bond over late night dinners and they seem to be sort of, you know, cigar and brown alcoholic-liquid relationship, which is sort of very manly, I guess. Now, at this point, after Russia has apparently been attempting to undermine Clinton's very election and hacking the Democratic National Committee to support Trump, Putin and Clinton apparently see each other as personal enemies that have actively tried to sabotage each other's rule. And so I think all of this means that under Clinton presidency, the U.S.-Russian relationship is very unlikely to improve. And I think while a lot of people in Europe, particularly in the Eastern parts, may welcome that, I think it's not necessarily going to be good news for transatlantic relations either. The essence of Obama's approach to Russia has been, particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, has been to maintain close alignment with the German position. In part, of course, because the Germans are the most influential country on the topic, but also because the Germans hold the center of the European debate on this question. And they have been able, I think, with the Americans' help, to hold together a European Union on Russia policy. I think European unions and the transatlantic unity on Russia policy since the invasion of Ukraine has been hard-won and remarkable. And so therefore it is fragile. And I think if the Americans defect from it, even to become more hawkish than the Germans, the center will fail. The center will not hold, and the unity will collapse, and that's not good for anybody except Russia. So actually I think I can just sort of end there. Those are sort of the three main, again, the sort of three main elements I think which are interesting about our foreign policy, which will have an effect on transatlantic relations. But I should return to where I started, which is the fundamental nature of Clinton's presidency will be continuity in transatlantic relations, despite what I've said. And that I should add to sort of poach on Peter's more fertile territory is that that's a big contrast with Trump. So what I just gave you is sort of half of a paper that's coming out next week on the Clinton and Trump approaches. So I'll send that to you when it comes out I think on Monday and you can sort of read the rest. Thank you.