 Thank you, Mike. This is an auspicious day to have a current strategy forum because it is the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. And as you know, at the Battle of Waterloo, the great Emperor Napoleon, whom Klauswitz called the very God of War, was defeated by the sea power, Britain, in that great climatic battle at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a case study that we examine here at the War College of a protracted competition between the elephant, the land power, and the sea power. And in that long protracted struggle between France and Britain, Britain, the sea power by working with coalition partners on the ground, were able to defeat that very God of War and send him into exile, his final exile. So today is a good day to be talking about grand strategy, about the rise and fall of great powers, because in our courses we look at these great case studies of previous struggles that were protracted and where grand strategy mattered in the outcome. Today we're fortunate to hear on this panel from such three renowned scholars and teachers that we have this morning on panel one. They are provocative in what they do in their work. They're willing to engage in the public arena. They're not bashful about putting forward their ideas, putting them into play, to go into the ring, to use their intellect to serve in educating and elevating the public debate in American democracy about strategy. They represent the very best of the academic profession in their dedication to service of education in the classroom, but also in the printed word. Now you have their biographies in your folder. So what I want to do today is just quickly, before each one of them speaks, say something about each one. Our first speaker and we're going to go in alphabetical order is Colin Deweyck. He teaches at George Mason University. He was a Rhodes Scholar. He's the author of outstanding books and articles that deal with strategy and foreign policy. His work on the link, the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy in the United States is an important understanding to grand strategy, because that link between politics, society, economics, and grand strategy is an important one to understand and success or failure in the competitive international environment. So Colin, over to you. Thanks John and thank you for your invitation today. We've been asked to speak on this topic today of intended versus realized strategic outcomes. In other words, the difference between what we want and what we're likely to get and to talk a little bit about past intended strategies and then what actually happened as well as suggesting what this might mean for future decision makers. And I think the first thing I just want to say before I get into the unintended aspect of it is to say, you know, I think we're all aware, those of us who study grand strategy in the academy, that we have to have some humility in talking about actual strategic practice because there's a big difference between studying, thinking about it and actually doing it. And even the very best strategist you think about a Lincoln or a Churchill obviously make mistake is something that's much harder to do than to talk about. And I would also add in the same theme that if you look over the course of American history, I mean we tend to fixate on the mistakes and on the dysfunctional patterns, that's sort of what academics do. But if you look at the big picture, I mean the U.S. hasn't really done that badly. Somehow it went from being a small collection of colonies on the North Atlantic to being the world's only superpower. So it couldn't have been the mistake, it couldn't have been the case that it was just one mistake after another. And after all, sometimes we get pretty much what we want. I mean there are actually cases where we have an intention and we achieve it. I'm reading Rick Atkinson's new book right now on liberation of France. And one of the things that struck me reading through the book, which is of course very good as I'm sure many of you know, is that there were all kinds of unexpected developments, right, tactical, operational, strategic. But at the macro level, the allies intended to liberate France. They liberated France. It was an intended outcome that was achieved. So that's not completely unheard of either, both historically or today. But the pattern that is striking that we're going to focus on today is the pattern of unintended consequences, which is as much true in grand strategy as it is in life. In other words, you intend for one thing to happen and you get some other outcome, some unintended outcome. And of course there's plenty of examples of this in American strategic history. I mean just to mention one obvious example that comes up a lot is the American support of anti-communist forces in Afghanistan in the 80s, right. There was a good argument for it at the time. Obviously it was not the intended outcome that the US would somehow be aiding militarily radical Islamists who would eventually be fighting the US. That was not the intention, right. So the term that's sometimes used to describe this kind of pattern is blowback. In other words, you set out on one course and then you end up having blowback in an unexpected way. But and that's something that scholars of security talk about all the time. Unintended negative consequences. But there's a couple points I'd like to make about that. One is that in the security studies community we do tend to fixate on the unintended consequences of strategic action. And there's usually less attention paid to unintended consequences of inaction. And after all there can be all kinds of negative consequences unintentionally of a half-hearted approach, of a passive approach, of an inactive approach or of a lack of clarity. So if you think about in American strategic history deterrence failures that have occurred frequently because of the fact that it wasn't clear that the US would actually act militarily in a robust way. You think about Korea in 1950, Iraq, 1990, this is a fairly common pattern. So this is what I would call the other kind of blowback. This is a kind of blowback that results from a lack of clarity about the strong action that the US is actually going to take in the end. You notice constant references in the words and comments of US adversaries, Saddam Hussein, Muhammad I.D., Hassan bin Laden, to the notion that the US can be defeated through an infliction of a certain number of casualties. They refer to Vietnam, Mogadishu, Lebanon. This is a regular pattern. This is a kind of blowback. It's what you might call a reverse blowback. So these are unintended negative consequences of inaction, of passivity, of a lack of clarity or of weakness. And I think they tend to be downplayed in the scholarly literature at least. And we need to hold both ideas in our head at the same time. That's the tough part, because the debate tends to be polarized. I mean, people tend to line up on one side or the other, certainly in the academy, but even in American politics, people sort of fixate on one set of consequences or the other, consequences of inaction, consequences of action. But we need to keep in mind both at the same time, if we can do that. And we also need to be careful about jumping straight to policy conclusions just by identifying one dynamic alone. So just to take the example I mentioned before, even if you can identify a pattern where there were unintended consequences of America's aid to the Mujahideen in the 80s, that doesn't necessarily mean it was the wrong approach. It might be the case. In fact, I would suggest it is the case that on balance it was worth doing. I mean, after all, it would be a little bit unfair to hold decision makers to a kind of strategy of immaculate conception where there was absolutely no negative consequence whatsoever. I mean, that's just a standard that is totally unrealistic. What would seem to be more reasonable is to hope that what decision makers do is to add up all the costs and benefits, negative and positive, of a variety of courses, rather than simply fixing on one without doing that sort of thorough analysis beforehand. So we need to see the whole picture. What makes it even more interesting is that unintended outcomes can sometimes be better than expected. I mean, we do have cases where unintended consequences are unexpectedly good, where you get some kind of windfall. I'm thinking of a biography of FDR by Conrad Black, actually a wonderful biography, but Black makes the argument which I don't really think is there in the archives, that FDR set out from the 1930s to leave the United States in 1945 as the world's leading superpower on top of the world. I don't see any archival evidence for that. I actually give FDR a great deal of credit for making a series of mostly good choices along the way. But I don't think he set out in 1935 intentionally to leave the United States as the world's greatest power 10 years later. So we can give him credit for the good choices that he made and still recognize that they had unintended good consequences. The US was in a position by 1945 that really was not intentional, if you go back to the beginning of FDR's tenure. Similarly, Reagan, Reagan clearly intended from the 70s on to pressure the Soviet Union relentlessly, to succeed in the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, to force deep reductions in nuclear weapons on both sides on favorable terms in the United States. But there isn't really any evidence that he predicted the Soviet Union would collapse by 1992. So this was an unexpected, that element of it. We can give Reagan full credit for the good choices he made and also recognize that there were some unexpectedly positive consequences of his strategy. And of course, by the same token, there are sometimes unexpectedly positive consequences of inaction, strategic inaction as well. So we tend to categorize grand strategies and the debate tends to be fixed on them. We say, well, there's containment, there's regime change, there's isolation, there's engagement. And people tend to say, well, I'm a regime change guy, or I'm an anti-interventionist, or I'm a detente person. And in the real world, it seems to me, there's no reason to expect that any one strategy is going to be equally applicable or useful in every single time and place, right? I mean, it might be the case that what worked in one case didn't work in another. Foreign policy, after all, is not theology. In foreign policy and in grand strategy, the only test really is what works on the ground in the end. And so we have to be open to the possibility that what worked in one case won't work in another. If you look at American strategies historically, you can find cases of unintended outcomes or unintended consequences of any strategy. So it's not as though there's one strategy you can fix on and say, well, that one always works, or this one never works, right? Detente, for example, diplomatic accommodation, to some extent, did achieve what Nixon and Kissinger hoped, but at the same time it had unintended consequences. Some of them were good and some of them were bad. The Helsinki Accord, for example, in 1975, a lot of people would suggest that it planted the seeds over the long term of sort of the undermining of the Soviet block. But Kissinger at the time wasn't even particularly interested in human rights provisions in that accord. He actually said, and I quote, they can write it in Swahili for all I care. So he was after something else. It had an unexpected good consequence in the end. By the same token in the short term, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that in some Soviet block states, like East Germany, for example, Detente might have actually helped prop them up. So that at least in the short term, let's say in the early to mid 70s, the East German government was actually strengthened by Detente and by the economic benefits from Detente. So you can actually have a dynamic where you're getting both negative and positive consequences, maybe even unexpected consequences, one in the short term, one in the long term. Similarly, if you look at regime change, I think we all know that over the years that sometimes worked out in unexpected ways, sometimes for the worse. But there are, after all, cases in American history where regime change has actually worked as intended or has had unexpected positive benefits. Non-intervention similarly, I mentioned problems with deterrence failure. There are cases where non-intervention has had the intended outcome or where it's had unintended positive benefits, but at the same time, a strict stance of non-intervention, if you were to treat it as a kind of a theological point, would mean that you would often give a misleading impression that the US is never going to intervene when in fact it is going to. And we've seen that pattern again and again, too, in American history. What tends to happen is the US ends up intervening anyway, sometimes in a more half-hearted way or less effectual way, but in the meantime creates a misimpression that it's never going to intervene, actually bolstering instability and violence. So you wouldn't be able to say that non-intervention by itself is the guideline for American grand strategy. Containment, I think, holds up pretty well, and we could go down the list of all the unexpected things that happened, good and bad. Again, it's a little bit like D-Day, and I think at the macro level, if you look at what Kenan actually said, George Kenan 46-47, what he said was the basic idea of containment is we don't want to start World War III, we don't want to actually attack the Soviet Union, we also don't want to retreat or keep conceding. So we're going to create counterweights, contain the Soviet bloc, so that over the long term it will mellow or break up of its own internal contradictions. And over the long term, that is exactly what happened, amazingly. And maybe part of the reason why it worked, as intended, over the long term, was that there was so much flexibility from one administration to the next. There was a lot of differentiation and there was a, there were a series of what I would call hybrid strategies where different presidents, depending on the time and place, mixed containment with other elements, whether it was rollback, detente, even non-intervention in some cases. So again, Nixon and Kissinger combined containment with detente, Reagan combined, excuse me, combined a very assertive version of containment with almost a kind of indirect rollback. And you might argue, in fact I would argue, that each of those administrations achieved a lot of success in their own time because they chose the right strategy for the time. It's not the case that Reagan's strategy might have worked in 1970, or that Kissinger's would have been the best answer in the 1980s. So we need to be flexible and adaptable even within a single strategic archetype, depending on what works in that time and place. So how do we plan for unintended consequences? Well, by definition, this is hard to do, right? We all know from studying strategy that the whole point, unlike sculpture, you're dealing with animate objects. They fight back. They make life difficult for you. And so by definition, you have to be prepared for the possibility of pushback. And I've just noticed from the point of view of an historian, when you look in the archives, it's surprisingly rare that presidents actually do go through a thorough analysis of all the costs and benefits of any given action or inaction in the way we might think, even in a graduate seminar, would be obvious. And I know there's lots of reasons for that, lots of good reasons. Some do. I mean, Eisenhower actually did that. But it's surprisingly rare. And so the thing we want to keep in mind in practice is almost tattoo on our forehead a question, what could possibly go wrong here? What's the worst thing that could happen? And then ask that question of a variety of outcomes, not just one. But, and this is where I come back to my earlier point, don't just ask it of a strategic action of a proposal for intervention. Ask the same question of inaction, of passivity, right? Ask the same question of a proposal for non-intervention. What could possibly go wrong if we do nothing? What could possibly go wrong if we send a message that is passive, weak, or half-hearted? What's the worst thing that could happen? Ask that question too, ask them both at the same time, and then weigh up all the possible advantages and disadvantages of each. I'm sure many of you have read Walter Littman's book from the 40s on U.S. foreign policy, and we, this is a classic, we talk about the Littman gap, right? The idea that there's a gap, a perennial gap between ends and means in American grand strategy. And part of what Littman was trying to say is that, you know, we tend to have diplomatic commitments that outreach our military capabilities. The example he actually gave in that book was the conquest of Spain without the Navy to then leave Spain defensive, conquest of Spain, conquest of the Philippines, excuse me, without the Navy to then leave the Philippines defensible. And of course there's only one of two ways to close it. Either you scale back on the diplomatic commitments, right, so that your commitments are in line with your capabilities, or you boost the military capabilities so that you can actually defend the Philippines or meet whatever commitments you've got. Now, we hear a lot of talk today about the need to do more with less. What I would say is I suppose around the margins there are possibilities for doing more with less, but basically we cannot do more with less. Doing more, saying that we can do more with less is a little bit like saying, defend Spain, but I'm not gonna give you the Navy. You know, we can do more with more, we can do less with less. We cannot really do more with less. So a sort of honest approach to strategic analysis would say that that's what you might just call strategic denial, denial. And so the only way to close that gap is either scale back on commitments or boost capabilities so that the two are aligned. And in particular, to try to avoid nasty unintended outcomes, think about are there elements in American political culture that seem to pop up again and again that are kind of characteristically American that tend to encourage a litman gap in our strategies. For example, what I would call a classically liberal set of assumptions, and I say classically liberal because I think they apply across the spectrum politically and of political parties. A classically liberal assumption that the international system over the long term is moving toward economic interdependence and democratization. The U.S. should help nudge it along. And obviously there's a lot of force to this argument. But the interesting thing about that assumption, that classically liberal assumption is it sometimes encourages the impression that this is going to be easy when it comes to strategy. You could imagine it going either way. It could be an argument for intervention in the sense of saying, well, if we just intervene, things will work out for the best and we'll promote democracy. It's going to be easy. Or it could just as easily go the other way. You could say, well, we don't have to intervene because things will work out. Because that's the long term trend is toward a more liberal democratic system. So really we don't need to be involved overseas militarily. The interesting things about both of those positions, which makes them classically liberal and American, I would say, is there's this common theme of this is going to be easy. There's an optimism to it. Everything's going to be okay. And it encourages that lip and get. What I would recommend is a kind of alternative. What I would call strategic skepticism, which is to say this is not going to be easy. This is not going to be easy. Whether your argument is for intervention in a particular case, like Syria or Libya, be willing to admit the trade-offs. Or if your argument is let's dismantle a set of commitments overseas. We really don't need to act because it'll work out. I would be skeptical of those arguments as well. Be skeptical of the anti-interventious arguments as well. So to wrap up, my key points have been consider unintended consequences what could possibly go wrong. Don't just ask it of strategic actions, ask it of inactions as well. Be wary of anyone who tells you that there's no trade-offs with a given decision. Be open to the possibility of hybrid strategies. And also be open to the possibility that what worked in one case won't work in another. And I'll just wrap up. I like Bill's comment about guns versus grandma because if you think about the current political spectrum John mentioned my interest in the domestic side of it. I have to say, I hope it doesn't become guns versus grandma because I think grandma's gonna win that one. I mean, if you just look at the reality, if you say, what's more likely defense cuts or deep cuts in social security? I think we've already seen the answer. So I certainly hope it's not framed in that way because I do believe the US needs to remain militarily strong to play this engaged role overseas. The trend, however, I think has been towards a kind of step-by-step modest retrenchment at least. We haven't really had the big debate, Bill suggested, but we're moving in that direction. The public mood is clearly to say, we're tired of these kinds of engagements. And that opinion, we're in a post-Iraq era, where the lesson of Iraq has been, we don't want any more Iraq's. But actually, the kinds of arguments that are so powerful today to continually say in every new case, well, this might be another Iraq. That would have been very useful 10 years ago. That would have been very useful 10 years ago to submit the plans for the post-war occupation of Iraq to that kind of searching cost-benefit analysis. Today, however, the pendulum is swung in the other direction, I think, where we are applying the Iraq analogy to cases which are not Iraq, which are not like Iraq. And if anything, we have become too easily convinced of the argument for inaction in a lot of cases. And the danger is that we actually end up getting kind of the death of 1,000 cuts. Because if the argument in every case is going to be, is this another Iraq? Of course, the answer is going to be, well, no. We don't want another Iraq. But if the argument is really, do we want to give up the stance, basically, that the U.S. has had in the world for the last 70 years? I mean, is there really any reason to think that the world will be as peaceful, as stable, as free as it has been if the U.S. retrents us from that role? And I think the answer is no. And the unintended consequences of that retrenchment, and it doesn't have to be all at once, might come gradually or in a lot of small steps. The unintended consequences of that retrenchment might make the cost of Iraq pale by comparison. Thank you very much, Colin, for that presentation. I like the ending that you had there about thinking about differences between cases, as well as similarities between historical analogies. That's always important to keep in mind. Our second speaker is Christopher Lane. He serves as the university distinguished professor and holder of the Robert M. Gates chair in national security at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. He is the author of two major books on grand strategy, and he has a third one that is underway right now that he's working on as well. He's the author of numerous provocative articles that have helped to shape the discourse in our country about American grand strategy in the years ahead. So, Christopher. Great. Thank you, John. It's a great honor to be here, and I appreciate the serendipity of the fact that we're here observing the anniversary of the great Prussian victory by Field Marshal Bluker's army at the Battle of Waterloo. I'm going to give you what at the Bush School has become known among my students as the Prozac talk. You'll see why as we go on. Listening to my good friend, Bill Wolforth's very impressive talk, I couldn't help but be reminded of something that the great British diplomat and statesman Lord Salisbury said describing Britain's position in the world in the late 19th century at the very end of the 19th century, he said, whatever happens will be for the worst. Therefore, it is to our interest that as little should happen as possible. Well, when you're on top, you want to preserve the status quo, but unfortunately, life isn't always like that. And I would start by saying that we are in the midst of a profound macro-historical transition. You've heard all the cliches, the power shift from west to east, but the shift of wealth also ultimately means the shift of power. Let me just give you a couple of quick things. I mean, I'm not really a stats guy, except when it comes to baseball, so I'll try to hold the stats to a minimum. But in 1980, the US accounted, according to the IMF, for 22% of the world's GDP, and China accounted for 2%. In 1995, the statistics were 23% for the US and 6% for China. In 2014, it was 18% for the US and 15% for China. And for those of you who, like me, think that the best way to keep abreast of this ongoing macro-historical transition is to read the Financial Times every day. If you read the June 4th issue, you may have noticed an article that, again, based on the IMF, said that half the world's growth is now accounted for by India and China. So there's a clear shift in the global economy. So I'm very mindful that decline is the D word that you can't talk about in the United States. I mean, who said it better than Ambassador John Huntsman when he was running for the Republican nomination back in 2012 when he said, quote, decline is un-American. I could give you a number of quotes to other politicians, including Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and others. But American decline is happening. There are two drivers, they're flip sides. One is what's happening with the US itself. And the other, of course, is the rise of China. Now, some of you will remember, you may have even had to read a book on here at the Naval War College, Paul Kennedy's Masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1987, a book that made a huge impact for a short period of time. We'll come back to that. But I would argue that Kennedy and others like him, particularly David Clio and Robert Gilpin, who were christened by Joe Nye as declineists, noticed the pejorative of adding the IST at the end. Advocates of decline. No, they were not advocates of decline. They were talking about a process. I would argue that they were right. Over time, time has proven that their analysis was the correct analysis. And what did they say? They said that the US was suffering from too much consumption, insufficient savings, chronic deficits in both its balance of trade and balance of payments, chronic federal budget deficits and increasing national debt, and deindustrialization. By the way, writing in 1986, Gilpin said that the US had already become so deindustrialized that it could never export its way out of its balance of payment situation. Well, we all know it hasn't gotten any better since then. Now, it's important to go back and read what Kennedy said. Paul, Kennedy and Gilpin and Clio, they didn't argue that the bottom was gonna drop out of the American economy, that America was gonna cease to be a great power. What they did argue was what the case for what I would call a termite decline. And for those of you who are homeowners, what's your worst fear? Well, Texas, it might be a tornado or hurricane, but for most of it, it's termites, right? And they don't do their damage suddenly and dramatically. They get inside the frame of your house, the wood frame of your house, and they burrow their way in. And over time, they weaken the structure so it collapses. It doesn't collapse all at once. It's not suddenly. One could argue that the US is indeed suffering from termite decline. Now, what's that gonna mean? And how do we measure it? Well, one way is to look at the extent of US military spending. I have this really handy dandy, oh yes, it is handy dandy. Notice that back at the beginning of the Reagan administration, the US share of military spending was below its share of world GDP. Today we spend over 40% of all that is spent for military purposes in the world, but our share of the global GDP has dropped down to 18%. So the economy is spending more on the military even as it becomes a smaller component of the global economy. I think we have to think about the consequences of that. Secondly, I would argue that the Great Recession is not the cause of American decline. Obviously, Paul Kennedy was right. That was long before the Great Recession. But it has accelerated that decline. And one of the things that we are facing is the fact that all this brouhaha in Washington about the fiscal incontinence that is endemic to our country is really sort of an way beside the point because it's a blip. It's not the big one is those of us who were born and raised in California are used to thinking about. The big one is coming in the early 2020s as we get older. So our demographics change. Social security and Medicare and Medicaid become bigger and bigger demands on our economy. So why should we worry about this? Because if we don't resolve the fiscal crisis, the US is gonna find that its autonomy, its economic autonomy, something that has never since World War II been crimped by the external world is going to suddenly be constrained. People are gonna worry about, can we pay our debts? Are we gonna try and inflate our way out of our debts? And people are gonna start worrying about whether the dollar is gonna remain the world currency. I'll remind you that the National Intelligence Council and others have predicted that sometime over the next 20 years, the dollar will no longer be the reserve currency. And the day that happens, there will be enormous real constraints on what the US can spend for security. In essence, we are on the threshold of an age of austerity. Now, why does this matter? It matters, because I think we've already heard enough discussion this morning to understand that there's gonna be downward pressure on the defense budget. It's gonna get worse. Oh, we already, whoops, we already have, I keep forgetting, I don't have two in one here. We keep forgetting about the sequester. Why is the sequester important? The sequester is important because it indicates that for Republican defense hawks, it's even more important to be a budget hawk. So if these guys are suddenly making the case to put fiscal solvency first, you gotta think that over time, when the crisis gets a lot worse, there's gonna be even more pressure to ratchet down defense spending. Now, why does all this matter? Let's turn to the other side. It's the rise of China. Oh, and by the way, over there, they don't talk about the rise of China. They talk about the restoration of China. And y'all can just look at this, you don't really need me to say anything about it. Until the beginning of the 19th century, China was the biggest economy in the world. And they're gonna be again. Now, I'm a big baseball fan. Some of you may remember Satchel Page, the great New York league pitcher who did get a chance to pitch in the major leagues at the very end of his career and is in the Hall of Fame. Famous remark was, don't look over your shoulder or don't look behind you because something may be gaining on you. Well, what do we see when we look over our shoulders? We see China gaining on us. And what's really interesting, 2003 wasn't that long ago. Goldman Sachs predicted that China would overtake the U.S. in 2014. By the way, one of my colleagues who's a bit cheeky, so why do you care about Goldman Sachs? So, well, because they're the only investment bank that's still in business, right, after the Great Recession. So maybe they know a little bit. But what's really interesting is when we get here in the last three years, three or four years, suddenly see this clustering. And some people like Arvin Subranian at the Peterson Institute for International Economics says that China already has passed the U.S. in purchasing power parity. The IMF says it will pass the U.S. by 2016. The economist says in market exchange rate terms it will pass the U.S. by 2019. But anyway, you look at it, unless something really unexpected happens, China is going to pass the U.S. And why should we care? Well, you know, our economist friends will tell us, oh, it's great that China's economy is growing and making everybody in the world richer. Well, I'll just say, our economist friends don't know very much about economics, but they certainly don't know anything about strategy. And the fact is, as China becomes wealthier, it's going to become more powerful. Now, the word hegemony was brought up earlier, and I think most of us are used to thinking of the U.S. as a hegemonic power. And what does a hegemon do? Well, in economic terms, Charles Kindleberger told us in his classic book, The World Impression, what an economic hegemon does, it provides a market of last resort, it's the lender of last resort and provides reserve currency. Well, by at least two of those criteria, the U.S. is no longer a hegemon. I mean, we're not the lender of last resort in the world economy, we're the borrower of first resort. We didn't solve the Great Recession, we caused it. And President Obama said at the G20 in 2009 in London, he said, rest of the world, don't look to the American consumer to buy your products and lead the world out of recession because we can't afford to do that anymore. When I think about American hegemony, I'm very influenced by a quote from Peter Teman and David Vines in their new book, The Leaderless Economy. And here's what they say about claims that the U.S. is still a hegemon. Quote, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. The U.S. has gone into debt since 2000 to the extent that it cannot afford to extend the kind of support needed to act as a hegemon. And when you look at other things that have important bearing on strategy, this loss of U.S. power economically compromises our ability to engage in economic statecraft. For example, in Southeast Asia, which is the object of the so-called pivot, China has surpassed the U.S. in foreign direct investment in the Southeast Asia. China has passed the U.S. in the last 20 years rather dramatically coming from way behind in the share of imports and exports to ASEAN. So all of this has consequences. Now, this is, by the way, shows that when China will pass the U.S. Now, why does all this matter? It matters because there is this pattern of great power rise. As great powers become wealthier, they want to expand, their interests expand, they become more ambitious, they want more status, they build military power, they project it further from their region, they seek hegemony in their own region, and we should know from history that the rise of new great powers in the international system usually causes problems. Now, I know we live in an era where people say, there can never be great power war again. We have nuclear weapons, we have economic interdependence, we have institutions. Just to see, you guys should read Charles Emerson's new book, 1913, just came out. Last year at peace, by the way, we are on the verge of the 100th anniversary of World War I, something that I think we ought to be thinking about as we talk about the U.S. and China. There are plenty of pathways to conflict between the U.S. and China and East Asia. Not the least, which I'll come back to is this last one, competition for status and prestige. So the way I look at the U.S. and China in East Asia is I have two explanations, depending on whether you like the pop culture explanation or whether you like the more sophisticated intellectual explanation. Explanation, pop culture explanation is just like the classic American Western one, the two gunslingers run into each other in a town saloon, and one of them looks at the other and says, this town ain't big enough for both of us. Well, we know how that ends. Together is what I would call the Newtonian theory of geopolitics, which is that two hegemones cannot occupy the same region at the same time. So what's the solution? My solution is the U.S. should adopt an offshore balancing strategy, and I'll be very careful here because there are a lot of people in my business who are advocates of offshore balancing, and there is an overlap when we use that term, but we don't agree on all aspects. So this is my take on offshore balancing. And basically, first thing is you realize that we are a mayhem power, not a McKinder power, and as Secretary Gates said in one of his last speeches at West Point, we shouldn't be fighting land wars in the Middle East and Africa and in Asia. We should concentrate on what we do best, which is air and naval land power. We should be aiming at a strategy of burden-shifting, not burden-sharing. And this is my take. We need to find a way to accommodate the rise of China. Now, we can go through all of these things very quickly, and we have to recognize, I think, we should recognize China's peremonitoris and Korean peninsula and shift to them the responsibility for dealing with North Korea. We should be very careful with all due respect to Bill becoming entrapped, defending the Diao-Arsenkaku islands, depending on whose claim you recognize. Last two American secretaries of state, well, Secretary Gates, when he was Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State Clinton both said that the U.S. regarded these islands as coming under the orbit of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and that we would defend them if they worked out by China. We want to encourage other states to step up to the plate. And I disagree with Bill. I think when other states realize the U.S. is gonna do less and that we're not just talking the talk, but we're gonna walk the walk, they will realize that for their own security needs, they need to do more. Now, we're in a transition of what we call a power transition. It's occurring. China's gonna seek regional hegemony in East Asia. U.S. defense spending is unsustainable and I would argue self-defeating. And some form of U.S. strategic adjustment is going to be necessitated. And that should be offshore balancing. Now, here's the gloomy, the gloomiest part. We're in a world in transition. And I see three real important analogies. The first is the British analogy. You know, Britain at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century was not supplanted as the dominant power in the world by one single global challenger challenging the UK in every region of the world where it had interest. It was challenged by the rise of powers in each of those regions. And that ultimately overtaxed Britain's resources. I think the same thing is happening to the U.S. Second, we have the 1920s, 1930s analogies. I'm not gonna dispute really what Bill says. I think there's a lot of historical evidence that when there's an international hegemon, the system is more stable than when it is not. What I challenge is whether the U.S. will be able to continue playing that role and arguably in a lot of ways it can't even play that role today. Militarily, yes, in other ways, not. And finally, the thing that really worries me is the 1914 analogy. I'm beginning to lose sleep over this, honestly. So, yeah, war can't happen. Norman Angel wrote his book in 1911. Three years later, Europe was in the middle of a great war. What do I find worrisome? I find, first of all, if you look at Paul Kennedy's greatest book, in my opinion, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, it was Britain's liberal ideology that helped shape the perception of a German threat. In regard to Germany, it's just the wrong kind of a country, a bad country, with a bad political system. And consequently, he tended to look at it with a very hard line. And when I read Aaron Friedberg and his struggles from mastery in Asia, when he says that the success of an authoritarian China is, quote, and a front on, quote, the United States, I see that same thing. And I also see this as a contest for status and prestige. Now, Zara Steiner, the great British diplomatic historian in her book on the origins of World War I, asked, how was it these two countries which had no territorial disputes, which had many common interests and shared dynastic ties, how did they go to war? It's because they both wanted to be the top dog. And I think we should all go back and read the Crow Sanderson debate between two top British diplomats about whether Britain should take a hard line stance towards a rising Germany and not give them anything as Crow suggested, or whether Britain should accommodate the change in the balance of power and adjust gracefully to Germany's rise, as was argued by Lord Thomas Sanderson. So in conclusion, we're gonna face a new set of challenges. We're gonna be much more constrained in facing them. I wanna be very clear, just wrapping up, what I'm not saying. First, I am not saying that China is going to rule the world. I am saying that they are gonna dominate East Asia. And if we don't recognize that fact, we're gonna end up in a war. Secondly, I'm not saying that the US is going into the tank. We're gonna remain a great power. What I am suggesting is that we won't be in number one in 20 years. And this is sort of a forward-looking analysis. It's that you don't go from a unipolar world or from being a hegemon, like turning a light switch off and on. It's not a sudden collapse. It's a gradual process. US decline has been going on for a long time because the term I'd like decline, we're only now beginning to see the consequences. But I would suggest over the next 20 years, changes in American grand strategy are going to be forced on us by circumstances. Thank you. Thank you very much, Chris. That was a very useful formulation of a dynamic that we study here in our strategy courses with Thucydides, who talked about how great power wars and wars between competing hegemon's, those who desire to be hegemon's, going to war over fear or security, honor, and interest. The third panelist today is Walter McDougal. He is one of the great teachers of our generation. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He is taught at UC Berkeley. He is a veteran of the Vietnam War. He is served as editor of the journal Orbis, published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute down in Philadelphia. He is also very well known as an author. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, author of six major books and numerous articles, and he has played a major role in shaping the public debate that we have in our country in thinking about the world and about the trajectory of American history since the founding of the Republic. Walter, over to you. Thank you very much, Professor Maurer, and thanks to the Naval War College for the invitation to join this very distinguished company. In fact, it's so distinguished that someone here is sure to know far more about everything that I have to say than I do myself. So take nothing that I say as necessarily authoritative. However, I do recommend that since I have a brief time here to discuss kind of a grand strategy and historical context, I do recommend that you might go to the FPRI website, www.fpri.org, scroll down, click on my name, and you will see that I have written a couple of longer articles on grand strategy that I think you would enjoy. One of them was simply entitled, can the United States do grand strategy? That was something that Alexis de Tocqueville famously doubted. And my answer was actually yes, because over 200 years, the United States has pursued three, at least three, successful grand strategies. All of which I hasten to add in these surroundings have been explicitly or implicitly, exclusively or primarily maritime. Oh, not that the intended outcomes have always been turned into actual outcomes. It's the title of this session. We've had lots of blunders and detours. Thomas Jefferson had the loony idea that he could defend the nation with coastal gunboats. Teddy Roosevelt built the Great White Fleet, but the Great White Fleet never saw any action, at least not in the First World War. The famous war plan orange for war against Japan was never really executed. Battleships, of course, gave way to aircraft carriers and submarines as the decisive weapons of World War II in the Pacific. You can point to lots of examples of that sort, particularly involving procurement. All of those examples I've just given are examples of procurement. But maritime grand strategy is more than just procurement and it came naturally to the United States. It came naturally because of its geographical status as a continental, yet insular nation vis-a-vis the rest of the world, its economic status as a commercial republic and its political status as the heir to Great Britain, or at least the child of Great Britain for 100 years or so, then we became the heir. Geopolitical thought famously can be divided into two schools, a sea power school we associate with Captain Mayhan and Sir Julian Corbett, the land power school that we associate with Carl Haushofer and Helford MacKinder. But a little known fact about Haushofer is that he got his start as the Prussian military attaché posted to Tokyo in 1908 and his first two books concerned the geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean. Even after he became an inspiration for German strategy, he never believed it possible for a land power to achieve hegemony in Eurasia without an alliance with one or more sea powers. Indeed, one may conclude that all global grand strategies are maritime in the end. The historical narrative leads to the same conclusion because every European bid for hegemony from the Habsburgs to Hitler was defeated by a rival coalition organized by a maritime power. Moreover, the progress of political rights, commerce, science, and culture have paralleled the rise of great thalasocracies, rule from the sea, seaborn empires, especially those commercial self-governing federations from the Dutch United Provinces to the British United Kingdom to the American United States. Indeed, the integral story of modern history is not hegemony versus balance of power, the way Ludwig de Hio and other German theorists wanted to believe, nor is it land power versus sea power. The story of modern history is really that of succeeding maritime supremacies. Equally instructive is a study of the great powers that failed to compete on the seas. Russia's built lots of fleets from Peter the Great to Soviet Admiral Gorchkoff, and every one of them has ended up rotting, rusting, or sunken battle. A nearly landlocked or choke point constrained empire no matter how big and how rich can't really aspire to the rank of a first class blue water navy. Imperial Germany is obviously another example, bottled up in the North Sea, and yet the Kaiser following Admiral Tirpitz's theory that once a German high seas fleet reached a critical mass, the British would prefer to appease Germany rather than, or accommodate Germany, be a better word, rather than fight. Well that proved terribly wrong in 1914, but in the great war, technology, in the form of the submarine, tempted the Germans to try a novel approach, access denial, A to A D. By denying the greatest maritime power of the day, the British access to their own seas, and sure enough it almost worked. The British were close to being starved out of the war when the United States came to their rescue. Even genuine maritime powers can blunder. France had ample outlets to the sea. If you go down Mayhem's checklist of all the assets that a country needs to become a great naval power, France has almost all of them, but the French insisted on squandering their resources, trying to dominate land and sea, invariably losing out in both theaters. The Japanese should have obviously imagined themselves a mirror image of Great Britain, Asian mirror of Britain. Instead, they emulated Germany and made a suicidal bid for a land empire. One might say that Britain hastened her imperial decline by wading with both feet into two total wars in Europe, and the United States has at least weakened itself by repeatedly waging discretionary land wars in Asia. But U.S. grand strategies, by contrast, have been historic successes. The first was expressed in the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Washington's farewell address, and the founding of a separate department of the Navy. Its purpose was to preserve American insulation, not isolation, insulation from Europe's wars through a foreign policy of neutrality and a naval strategy of coastal and commercial defense. So long as Americans honored Washington's principles, including, I might add, the very loud one about cherish the public credit, why then the natural growth of the United States would surely make it a continental empire of liberty. That first maritime strategy, grand strategy, was authored by the Federalists, but its wisdom soon proved equally compelling to Madison Monroe and Andrew Jackson, who turned out to be a great naval advocate. It also inspired the great traditions of 19th century U.S. diplomacy, as described in my book, Promise Land Crusader State. First, liberty at home, but now going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Second, unilateralism, that was the very opposite of isolationism, in that the United States sought friendship and commerce with all nations. Third, the Monroe Doctrine. Fourth, the continental expansion, usually known as Manifest Destiny. The only crisis of that first grand strategy was self-inflicted, the Civil War. But the Union was saved by a maritime strategy of keeping the Europeans out of the conflict while strangling the Confederacy through a coastal and riverine blockade. A second grand strategy emerged between 1880 and 1914 in response to industrialism, imperialism, and the first great era of globalization. Its authors, you know them all here in Newport, Benjamin Tracy, Admiral Luce, Captain Mahan, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, and others, pursued a so-called large policy based on a two ocean, blue water, coal-fired steel Navy, and the foreign bases needed to defend the coming Panama Canal. The strategy, this strategy was also promoted by one party, the Republicans, but it won acceptance also from progressive Democrats, such as Woodrow Wilson, who pledged to build a Navy second to none. Listening, Britain? Well, this strategy enabled the United States to play some new roles, like offshore balancer in Asia, when Teddy Roosevelt mediated the Russo-Japanese War, and in Europe, where US neutrality from 1914 to 1917 really amounted to giving Britain all aid short of war. But Wilson overreached, when he ignored Washington's farewell address, and he plunged American land forces across the ocean into the trenches of Europe. The inevitable backlash against Wilson's holy crusade to change the world soured Americans on any international engagements, not aimed at arbitration or disarmament. In other words, Americans embraced a sort of anti-strategy in hopes of escaping the tyranny of geopolitics. That set the stage for World War II, and the abortive grand strategy of that former naval person, Franklin Roosevelt. He imagined the war ending with the global projection, and we can decide exactly when he imagined this, but he imagined that the war would end with the global projection of USC power, air power, and economic power, but not boots on the ground, which he hoped to withdraw from all occupied countries sooner rather than later, because Roosevelt expected the four policemen, including Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, to keep the peace in their own parts of the world under the umbrella of the UN. Well, instead, the Cold War broke out, and within five years, US ground forces went back to Europe in support of NATO, and Asia in response to the Korean War. That ground war, by the way, was fought in part in defense of the US Pacific maritime hegemony. Indeed, a new book by Shen Zhihua has argued that Stalin's purpose in prodding the North Koreans to invade the South was so that the Soviet Navy could get access to the warm water ports of Busan and Incheon. Well, in the wake of the Korean War, another debacle and deadlock, President Eisenhower's NSC 162 slash two sketched out the third American grand strategy, containment for the long haul through nuclear deterrence. Well, that was an aratomic strategy, of course, at one level, but its grand strategic goal was, as Kennan said, contain the Soviet bloc so the rest of the world can enjoy an open and prosperous and democratic environment linked together by those sea lanes of communication patrolled by the United States Navy. So the denouement of containment, really, was also a grand maritime strategy. Well, the Soviets woke up to that in the 1980s, and they challenged America's command of the seas, which triggered a fourth era of U.S. strategic planning that really has never come to an end. John Layman had the goal of a 600 ship navy in the 1980s, but he did not achieve it prior to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. We were deprived of our enemy. And so in the 1990s, we had the two from the sea plans, looking forward to a post-Cold War role for a U.S. maritime supremacy. But those plans got nowhere. They were frustrated first by the complacency of the Clinton years and the budget cuts, and then by the land wars of the post-911 era. As late as 2006, the cooperative strategy for 21st century sea power promoted by Admiral Mullen attracted little attention and less support. Despite its bold plan for a thousand ship navy, deployed by an international consortium, united against not only state aggression, but against piracy, smuggling, human trafficking, and terrorism. Well, what finally caught the White House's attention was China, whose potential as a peer competitor has now inspired the operational concept called Air Sea Battle, a point of departure, which is clearly an echo of NATO's Air Land Battle plan of the 1980s. Drafted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, the ASB Air Sea Battle assumes that China will seek to the capacity to deny the U.S. Navy access out to, oh, the first island chain off the Asian mainland, maybe someday the second. Well, I'm sure a number of you have seen the article just recently published by Amitai Etzioni, who authorized preparations for war with China. Etzioni traces the history of ASB in the Pentagon where it's enjoyed widespread approval and claims that it may already be driving procurement decisions. He finds it peculiar that it's happened without a full-dress national security review. Not even after its famous pivot toward Asia has the Obama administration recognized much less reinforced this new war plan. So Etzioni wonders if anyone's in charge of a process that he fears could lead to nuclear war. Well, I don't know whether anyone's in charge. I don't have any inside information. I'm sure a number of you do. But it appears, it appears. Just appears, the Obama administration has been making just the sorts of gestures the subtle Chinese understand. First, the fact that the White House has neither touted nor squelched the ASB makes it a proverbial cannon behind the curtain. So dear to the Imperial Chinese court when there were visitors out there who needed to be treated courteously but also intimidated. Curtain is drawn, the cannon is shown, the curtain is closed. On the other hand, we've heard a lot more about the Asian pivot, especially the rotation of a couple of Marine battalions through Darwin, Australia, some of them even drawn away from Okinawa. Well, as Henry Kissinger has explained, the Chinese think in terms of the game way chi or go, as we call it in America, instead of that Western game chess being advertised here at the Naval War College. And in way chi for a player who is engaged in a hotly contested struggle over a crowded corner of the board to pick up his next stone and place it over there in Australia clearly signals a partial retreat. Meanwhile, however, who is reacting to China's assertion with provocative words and deeds? That powerful naval ally whose name we dare not utter, except its prime minister is named Abe. Well, since the end of the Cold War, China and the United States have been kind of locked in an embrace but don't know whether to wrestle or to dance. That ambiguous embrace is likely to last a long time. And I think, I may not live to see it, but I think that sooner or later it may prove to be a valuable learning experience for both parties, but especially for Americans. Our country is so young and never before in our history has the United States confronted the authentic China. United, strong, confident, and Confucian. But now that we do, we shall realize that Americans are impatient because we measure time by the next election or balance sheet, whereas Chinese measure time by generations. When conflicts arise, we want to win and go home. The Chinese know the game never ends and one never goes home. Americans believe in good and evil and therefore progress. Chinese believe in yin and yang and therefore cycles. Americans believe problems are for solving. Chinese believe important problems have no solutions. Americans believe nations and empires rise and fall. Chinese believe China is forever. So, while I affirm the overall purpose of the cooperative maritime strategy police to seize with the cooperation of as many nations as possible, I would be cautious about the stated purpose of the Air Sea battle because, quote, to sustain a favorable conventional military balance throughout the Western Pacific, unquote, begs the question of what's favorable. If it means the status quo, then it's utopian and dangerous because to spend 20 years racing the Chinese in order to deny them the ability to deny us, air and sea access out to the first or second island chain, that's not stability. That's not anybody's peace. That is just a sort of perpetual competition that increases the chance of miscalculations and the incentive for preventive strikes. So, whatever the operational value of ASB, and it's an impressive display, I've poured over it, the grand strategic purpose of the cooperative maritime strategy must be not to defeat the Chinese, perhaps not even to deter the Chinese, but to persuade the Chinese to exercise what do we presume they want to do? In other words, let the Chinese be Chinese and exercise a benign Confucian suzerainty over those portions of their own littoral seas over which they will sooner or later control access. The post-45 era of the Pacific as an American lake is over, which means our goal should be diplomatic accords whereby China guarantees maritime rights in its zone of control in return for the US and its partners guaranteeing China's maritime rights beyond it. The Washington Naval Conference, which comes in for a lot of bad ink because obviously its treaties ultimately failed, I think is an excellent model for this kind of a diplomatic accord. I could explain that perhaps in the Q and A. But China's history reveals that even strong dynasties neither go abroad in search of monsters to destroy beyond their civilizational limits, nor that the Chinese ever try to impose their values on the rest of the world. Why it's up to us to see the superiority of their values and if we're such barbarians that we can't do that well then you remain beyond the pale. But we need not trust in all that, that history, that culture or that economics in order to keep the peace in the Pacific. So long as the US Navy and its regional partners are on station, Americans can afford to do what they do best, which is speak softly and carry a big stick, in which case the Chinese will be the ones who are obliged to make the tough strategic choices, not least about what sort of a neighborhood they wish to inhabit. Thank you. We have had three very thoughtful presentations. What I'd like to do is invite members of the audience to come forward to the three microphones, to ask some questions or make comments about the presentations. Yes, please come forward. Thank you, sir. Captain Menon from India. This was a perfect S&P lecture because it raises more questions than gives answers and the answer is always it depends. But my question is from something that Colin said about policy options, strategic options and unintended consequences. And you did mention Canon and when you mentioned Canon not far behind us, NIDZA with his NSC68 and that in my mind polarizes the way the US tends to use the military as a strategic policy option. That means it's either disengagement or deep engagement. And not enough fair thought or practices given to what Christopher brings out which is selective engagement or offshore balancing. So is this a policy blindness that has been brought about by Cold War rhetoric? Colin. Okay, thank you. If I understand your question you were saying that there's a tendency in American strategic thought to fall into dichotomy of either deep engagement or pure disengagement. Okay, and Canon's a good example of somebody who struck a balance. There's something to that. Actually I would give, I mean you can point to numerous administrations though where, I mean I mentioned the fact that over time during the Cold War that containment was implemented in different ways. I mean some administrations combined it with a little more detachment, others were more assertive. So I do think that in reality presidents have often tried to settle on something they would have thought of as a middle course. But the basic question that Bill raised this morning, I mean is the US going to have a kind of forward strategic presence or not? I mean I actually think that's, that is, it's the nature of the question that either the answer is yes or no. I mean the great turning point in American history was the 1940s. Before that the paradigm was we don't have a forward strategic presence in Europe especially. We don't have alliances, we're not going to intervene in these wars. That was the default assumption. Since then it's flipped. And so that is a, in a way that is a binary choice. I'm not sure that given American institutions, given American culture that you can, that you can split the difference on that one. So you're right in saying that there is a tendency to sort of say either it's engagement or not, but it might be the nature of the situation. That when it comes to this broad array of alliances that the US has, I mean either you have them or you don't. And some people would say we don't need them anymore. But that's what I was suggesting, at least in my talk, was to say let's subject that argument to some very searching criticism because it could have all kinds of negative consequences that we haven't even considered. Chris or Walter, do you want to say anything to this point? Right here, next question. Thank you. Vadim Simikov, US Army. The question and comments are for Professor Lane. Seems that we largely ignored the fact that when Soviet Union fell apart, it fell apart not because of our military pressure, but because fundamentals were just not there. Economic, social and other issues were significantly more important than what we did militarily. So when we look at China, it seems that we're largely ignoring that it's not economically or socially homogeneous society. It seems that we're looking at it from an economic perspective that it has no issues. If we look at it, some of the provinces have GDP of a small African country while others have GDP of Switzerland. So are we not ignoring the fundamentals that China might not be, might not have all the fundamentals to do this, to conduct this rise? And if we choose policy of accommodation, we might actually be helping them out to achieve a mission that they otherwise might not be capable of achieving on their own. Well, that's a great question. And it's a very complicated one to give you a quick answer to, but my answer would be to ask you another question. What has the US policy of engagement done? What is taking China into the World Trade Organization done? What has encouraging American firms to transfer technology and to invest in China done? I mean, I'm not saying this was good or bad, but it wasn't strategic. It was inevitably destined to help China grow faster, move up the great power food chain more quickly than it might have. And I don't think that, am I saying that the United States caused China's great power rise now? I think that China is big and has resources and has a very dynamic and entrepreneurial population. Sooner or later, it would have become a great power. But we helped them out in a way, not intending to perhaps, but you see this right in the Republican Party, which is divided between the so-called bowing wing of the party, which wants to sell stuff to China and sort of the blue team part of the Republican Party, which sees China as this terrible flow that we have to contain at all costs. But the American political system hasn't really resolved this issue. Definitively, so we keep trading with China. Whether that is a good thing strategically or not is something we could debate. Yes, go ahead. But we do see the trend, the diverse trend of pretty much exodus of some of the companies coming out of China because of those rights, rights infringements and things like that. So the trend is reversing and some of those companies are leaving China and now currently going to India because they've learned their lessons. So will we continue to basically say, okay, let's accommodate China, let's trade with them, let's see if they turn more democratic or do we get engaged in more aggressive manner as opposed to accommodating and perhaps participate in economic warfare? Well, I'll make my position clear. I'm not in favor of engaging in economic warfare. I mean, what's that great country saying? That in a lot of respects, the horse is already out of the barn and down the road on the rise of China. There's no sense in closing the barn door now. Now, yeah, those of you who like to read obscure, actually not obscure, textbooks on international politics like Gilpin's War and Change well, if you guys are sports fans, there's this guy who they always used to show sitting in the end zone at football games with a multicolored Afro and he was holding up a placard with some reference to the Bible. Well, if he'd been an offensive realist and the offensive realist of theoretical terms, he would have been holding up a placard that said Gilpin 191 and what's Gilpin 191? It's page 191 of War and Change in World Politics where Gilpin says the first strategic option for declining Hegemon is take out the rising challenger. Now, for those of you who don't like international relations but follow the Sopranos, you may have followed the last, I think the last year, the second last year, the penultimate year when Tony and his gang were sitting around in the bottom being talking about Johnny Sack and the New York family and what are you gonna do about these guys? And Polly Walnut says, clipping the guy is always an option. But you know what? It's too late. So now John Mirsheimer, my good friend and someone not only a dear friend but whom I respect tremendously, I think he would tell you that we should press China harder in all kinds of ways including practicing economic warfare against them. I think if we do that, we're gonna end up in a war. If we do a lot of the things that we're doing now, we're gonna end up in a war. I'm not sure we really wanna do that. Walter, do you wanna jump in here? Well, I guess I just mentioned a name that hasn't come up yet, Neil Ferguson. So that we're joined at the hip with China and all the rest. Now he of course comes up with a new theory every year too so he may have moved on. But he's a smart guy and he pointed out the fact that United States has become or did become completely economically dependent on its relationship with China. And that we run these deficits because the Chinese were happy to buy up all these treasury bonds. And that the waging economic war against China is no option unless you wanna tear up globalization and go back to the 30s. But the other side of the coin is, China's going to become the world's biggest GNP. Oh well, I know, but they've also got the world's most people and they had the biggest GNP in the 17th century for the same reason. They had more rice farmers and grain farmers than anybody else, period. And historically, the Chinese have not been expansive beyond their own region. The people who have to worry about the rise of China are countries that are friendly to us, new and old friends I might add, new friends like Vietnam and old friends like Japan and others, South Korea, who are right there is sort of staring down the dragon's mouth. Those are the countries who are really up against it. Beyond that, I don't see it. But however, going back to Neil Ferguson, there's one additional desideratum from Ferguson's musings. And that is the sudden collapse, the sudden loss of credit. That if the United States, and someone mentioned this, who's it you? Yeah, okay. That the United States may in fact fall off the table and not have the long, languid decline of the British Empire or the Spanish Empire. We might fall off the table because the world loses faith in our political system, dealing with our deficits and with our credit. That as a Secretary of Defense said a few years ago is our most pressing national security threat, our own deficit. Colin, did you wanna jump in on this? We have a comment question here. Yes, right here, thank you. Name is Marty Gibbs. I don't know if you wanna answer this question, but from a historical perspective, what would you do about Syria right now? I didn't. The takers? I didn't quite hear the question. What was? Syria. Syria, huh? Yeah. Sure. I'll take a crack at it. All right, well I guess we're allowed to be critical of current policy, right, if we're up here. Yes. This is an example of the phenomenon I was talking about before. I think there are very serious arguments for intervention, there are serious arguments against intervention. What wouldn't make sense is to say a sod must go, there's a red line, if chemical weapons are used, is crossed, and then to do nothing for a long period of time and to eventually say we're gonna give small arms, but that's all, okay? That to me doesn't make sense. It's an example of what I talked about before as a rather half-hearted response. I don't think it's very persuasive to people in the region whether they are our friends or enemies. I don't think it's a coherent strategy. Any other comments? First of all, for anyone who's really interested in Syria and what the US and Europe should do about it, you should read Gideon Rockman's column in today's Financial Times. I know Gideon, I happen to think very highly of him. He's right a lot of the time in my judgment and his argument in his column today is, when are the US and Europe gonna learn that the clock has moved forward and that the West no longer is able to dictate outcomes in that particular region of the world? That's an interesting question. But I also have a musing that Syria sort of raises and Libya sort of raises. I think somebody could go back 10, 15 years from now and say that if the US actually does ever become an offshore balancer, that Barack Obama may have been the first offshore balancing president. Why do I say it? Well, once to get the US out of wars in the Middle East or at least until Syria came along, nation building at home over hegemony abroad, understanding the trade-offs in terms of the allocation of resources, shifting pivoting, if you will, to Asia, emphasizing the air-enabled power over land power. But it never seems to get the follow-through, right? How many articles do we read in the last, well, in the last two years in the Washington Post and the New York Times about Obama, oh, we don't want to get involved in this war. We don't want to get involved in Syria. We want to do less in the world. We don't want to get involved in Libya. But he may be a great intellectual, but he seems to lack the fortitude of the stick to what his intellectual inclinations on strategy seem to be. We're close to running out of time and we have room for one more comment question. So that last discussion about Syria, I thought your answer was kind of contrary to what you said about intended consequences. I think that America shown that when they go into a region that's hostile and really challenging, that to leave a lot of weapons and a lot of those here are hardware, tend to cause this blowback. So how do you do that? You can go in there and you can strengthen your partners that you trust, Jordan, that's the same stuff. People you really don't have a good feel for, give them stuff that's not going to cause you a lot of problems in your own neighborhood once they settle their own problems if they should settle their own problems in a way that you support. I think your argument for blowback over what we're doing for Syria. Thank you. Well, I'm going to try to live up to the principle that I laid out before, which is not to deny trade-offs. And I mentioned that there are some good arguments against intervention in Syria. And the best one is exactly the one you just outlined very well, which is that there's a risk that any arms you may give end up in the wrong hands, specifically in the hands of radical Islamists. It's a very good argument. And that's exactly why missiles, as I understand it, that's why missiles have been ruled out and we're just sticking to small arms. So I agree, I will say to you, yes, that is a risk. That's a trade-off. The other side of it though is that in reality the US is already, by the president's own words, in a proxy war in Syria with Iran. And Iran doesn't follow as restrained an approach as the US does. It's not just giving small arms, it's giving a lot more help to its ally. So you have to weigh that as well. You have to weigh into the balance. What are the costs of saying you're gonna do something and then doing nothing? What are the costs of allowing Assad, who seems to be winning to actually win this civil war, what are the costs, just from a humanitarian point of view, of allowing this war to continue with millions of refugees, literally, and of allowing Iran to basically defeat the US by proxy in a major Middle Eastern conflict. And by the way, Hezbollah, which has been a problem for the US, killing Americans in the 80s. So I wouldn't deny the trade-offs, and I think you've pointed out the single best argument against intervention, but I would add it all up and say once you've done that, once you've made the analysis and you've added up all the costs and benefits on all sides, then sometimes there is simply a time to act decisively and to act firmly. And I would seriously consider, for example, using US air power. And I think that's something you would have to consider in addition to the small arms, to give this some teeth. In fact, it probably should have been done a while ago in my view, but I think the argument against sending missiles is a good one for the reason you point out. So I'm not gonna deny that trade-off. Please join with me in thanking this panel for their thought-provoking presentations.