 And ladies and gentlemen, you're very welcome. My name is Pauline Murphy. Could I ask you before we begin to turn off your mobile phones? I will do it myself. We are very fortunate to have with us today Ivo Dalver, who is chair of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. I was asking him before the beginning, was this another body beside the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations? And he told me, no, this is the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. That's what the past how many years? Past 13 years have been changed, yeah. About 80 years we were the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs. Foreign Relations, yeah. He has an upcoming book called the Empty Throne, which indeed is part of the title of his talk to us, America's Application of Global Leadership. You couldn't have come at a desert time, Ambassador Dalver, to talk to us about this. We, in this institution, indeed public opinion more generally, I think, are very concerned about precisely America's application of global leadership. The implications of this for the international order generally, as a time when not only the United States, but in other countries, forces are militating against precisely this order. So we regard with a particularly serious that this situation should obtain in the United States. Ambassador Dalver has been president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs since 2013. And prior to that, he served as the US Ambassador to NATO. And I think many of us would have come across his name when he had that responsibility. He has previously been a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brutens Institution, a highly impressive institution, which I think bodies like this one, the Institute for International and European Affairs, try to emulate, but never quite succeed. So Ambassador Dalver, you're very welcome. If you'd like to make a presentation. Terrific. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for the opportunity to come and speak here before the publication of the book, which is actually scheduled to come out in the US on Tuesday. And I should say that it is a book I did not write by myself. I wrote it together with my good long friend, Jim Lindsay, who is the senior vice president and director of research at the Council on Foreign Relations. We're older by about six months than they are. That's what I'd like to remind them. We both have our anniversary in 2022. But Jim and I have been colleagues at Brookings, in fact. We wrote a book on the Bush administration in the early 2000s. And after the shock of the election of Donald Trump, sometime in March of 2017, I called Jim and said, I think we need to do a book on Donald Trump. So that's what we did. The book is actually two things. It's an argument. And I'm going to tell you what that argument is. But it is also meant to be a narrative history of the first 18 months of Donald Trump's foreign policy. And it is written for a public that is perhaps not as engaged in these issues as everybody here is. So it is a basic treatise of what has happened. And actually rereading it once in a while and looking back at it, it's pretty astonishing what's happened over the past 18 months. And we may have many more months if not years to go. So the second edition may be even more interesting. Already thinking about that. The argument that we're making is fundamentally this, that America's global leadership has been the central defining feature of global politics and indeed of American foreign policy for the better part of 70 years. That leadership was born out of the devastation of World War II and World War I and World War II. The fact that the United States was called upon twice within almost a single generation to come to the aid of Europe in order to deal with the reality that Europe could only deal with itself through war rather than peace, unless the United States was involved, led to the assessment in the 1940s, first by Franklin Roosevelt, then by Harry Truman and what were then called the wise men. And unfortunately or fortunately, they were all men to decide that the United States could not do what it did in 1918 and as depart Europe after war, it had to stay. And in fact, it had to stay in the world. That it had the power to do so. It was the largest military power in the world. It was the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in 1945. Its economy was not only intact, but had grown tremendously as a result of the war effort, representing more than 50% of global GDP. It had demonstrated the importance of democracy and human rights and the rule of law in international politics. And it now had to make the decision to remain engaged. And from 1944 to 1950, it used the power that it had to build a new global order, whether you call it the liberal international order or the rules-based order or whatever you want to call it. We call it the rules-based order. It was an order based on three fundamental precepts, one that you needed to create security structures, alliances, to prevent a return to war, and to enable countries in Europe and Asia to focus on rebuilding their economies and their societies in peace. That you needed to create an international economic regime, a trading regime that encouraged prosperity for all and encouraged interdependence of economic activity rather than an autarchy. And that third one had to be in defense, not only defense, but where possible promote democracy and freedom. I remember the Truman-Drock Doctrine in 1947 was a declaration that the United States would defend democracy wherever it was threatened. We saw the declaration of human rights negotiated by the United Nations, pushed by not a president but a First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the emergence of the rule of law through the UN Charter and other institutions. And so a new order was built, a order that was at its core dependent on American power, and that without American power and without American leadership, it would not be able to survive. It was built on the precepts that the United States should make short-term sacrifices for long-term gain, that you open up your market to others, even if they did not open up their markets to you, because that would build prosperity and therefore a larger consumer base, and therefore the ability for everyone to thrive, that you provided security for others so that they could live in peace rather than have to, you have to come back and fight another world war, that if you promoted democracy among your neighbors, you are more likely to be both free and prosperous. And so the US for 70 years conducted a foreign policy based on the shaping and then maintenance of a global international order that turned out to be the most successful foreign policy conducted by any nation ever in the world, a foreign policy that brought untold security, untold prosperity, and untold freedom to untold numbers of people, and even ended one of the greatest conflicts of the 20th century without firing a shot, that is the Cold War. It was a success that few could have thought was possible when the peace VE occurred in May of 1945 and VJ day in August of that same year. In 1990, the United States emerged from a 40-year-long Cold War as the undisputable global single superpower of the hyperpower that's being called in the world and had to think about how do we use the power that we have to go forward no longer to fight a Cold War and maintain a Western rules-based order but to see what else it could do. And the decision was that the United States could actually do for the world what it had done for the West and to create a more open, more free, more global rules based order. And it was based on two fundamental assumptions that the Clinton and Bush administration, however different administrations they were, shared. One, you might call the Fukuyama, although Frank would dispute it, the Fukuyama hypothesis that we were indeed ending history, that liberal democracy was the final state of development and that the United States now had the power through its attraction with Joe Nye called soft power and through its heart power to enhance liberal democracy throughout the world. America had that power. It could do so by enlarging NATO, which enabled the enlargement of the European Union. And by the way, no country has joined the EU without joining NATO unless it's two former neutral countries, Finland and Sweden. That is, you have to provide the security basis for enlargement before you could provide the economic basis. There was a policy of what one of my call, not only Western enlargement, but Western integration, the ability and attractiveness of bringing in other countries into the Western sphere on the basis that somehow liberal democracy was going to win out no matter where it was pushed. We saw in the 90s and into this first part of the century a commitment to humanitarian intervention where the United States would lead international coalitions to try to bring peace and stability in places that saw neither, first in the Balkans, then in Somalia, onwards in Haiti, and of course later on in other parts of the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan. And then thirdly, there was the belief that somehow freedom was on the march. Remember the second inaugural of George Bush where he said that the United States would support democracy in every nation and every culture and end tyranny in the world. That was the fundamental post-1990 precept of American foreign policy on one leg, that democracy was on the march and could be promoted wherever it was. The second leg of belief was that economic liberalization would inevitably lead to political liberalization, that as you brought countries like Russia and China into the economic order, they would over time liberalize. That's why you wanted Russia to become a member of the WTO. That's why you wanted China to become a member of the WTO if you go back and read Bill Clinton's speech in 1999 where he talks about China having to become a member of the WTO. It is all about the fact that once they economically open up, they will have to change and open up politically. The European Union was based its enlargement proposition on exactly the same principle, that as you brought countries into the single market, you would transform them politically as well. Those two assumptions, the assumption that you could promote and push liberal democracy and that economic liberalization lead to political liberalization, those assumptions turn out to be wrong. History has not been kind to either of them. Turns out that democracy is not necessarily the only way forward as one looks ahead. If you look at what has happened to democracy and the state of democracy in the world, it has been in reverse for the last 11 years. Freedom is not on the march, it is in retreat. Democracy is not on the march, it's in retreat. There are a whole bunch of reasons for this. But it's not for lack of trying on the part of the Polish people or the Hungarian people or indeed other parts of the world. It's also turned out that force doesn't turn out to be a very effective instrument for changing the internal makeup of other society. That it is much easier to start a war than anthem. It is much easier to insert forces into a country than taking them out. The United States, this with us today is the 11th yesterday, was the, so today, today's the beginning of the 18th year of our war in Afghanistan. The longest war the United States has ever fought in its history, and I've been to Afghanistan many times. I can tell you it is not a thriving democracy. It's many things, but it's not that. And so the extraordinary investment, the billions and billions and billions of dollars that not only the United States, but indeed, at its height, 55 other countries had invested in Afghanistan, sold to their people as a way to bring stability and democracy and freedom to that country has not panned out. And of course, economic liberalization has not led to political liberalization as we see in China, where in some ways the Chinese leadership on the Xi Jinping is more repressive, more dictatorial than at any time since Mao where not only a million Uyghurs and Muslims are held in detention camps, but where the astonishing thing, the head of Interpol can be kidnapped and put on trial after having been promoted as the person who was going to lead the international law enforcement community, but and apparently without any consequence. So the idea that somehow political liberalization and Mao's economic liberalization has been disproven by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, if you wanna put it in those terms, and it hasn't worked. The Obama presidency was predicated on trying to figure out how to do this better and how could the United States use the power to have in order to shape the leadership in the world in a more measured way. With the exception of Libya, which I'm happy to talk about since I was deeply involved in that intervention at the time, it was an administration that did not believe in intervention and certainly did not believe in intervention in order to bring democracy to other countries. It did support democracy, but more from below than from above, so in the Arab Spring the real idea was it had to come from the people and if it didn't come from the people, it wasn't going to work, it didn't work even when it came from the people, if you saw in Egypt. It focused on cooperation with other powers to deal with the big problems of the day, whether it's climate change or nuclear proliferation or even on terrorism. It was a more measured foreign policy that still tried to use the power of the United States to deal with big issues, but it was no longer infused by the hubris and I think it was hubris of the Clinton and Bush administrations on how to use American power in its way and frankly, although I was a part of that administration and I'm a big supporter of the administration, I don't think Obama's foreign policy worked all that well. It didn't, it raised fundamental questions about what is the American role, how are we going to lead in this new world? So in 2015-16, the question was, how is America going to lead globally? And indeed, Donald Trump put on the table whether the United States should lead and it was in part because we had a crisis about how America should lead that Donald Trump was even able to ask the question of whether it should lead. Trump, can you talk about how we got elected? It's like talking about how we got Brexit. Trump was elected and came to power with the fundamental belief that the problem for America wasn't that it was leading in the wrong way, it was that it was leading at all. The rules-based order wasn't working, as he would put it, for the United States. The sacrifices that America had made for 70 years in order to have greater prosperity and more security and more democracy were fine for the people who were the beneficiaries, but they weren't no longer fine for the United States. And that what we needed to do as a country was no longer focus on leading, but focus on winning. And winning is a very different concept than leading. Winning is zero-sum, it's win-lose, it's not win-win. And if you listen to the rhetoric of the president and if you see what he's tried to do ever since, it is about winning. And in winning, you no longer have friends or foes or foes can become friends and friends can become foes. All that matters is that you get a better deal than the other side. It's the real estate's businessmen's approach to international politics. And he has turned that into American foreign policy. Alliances are no longer about building common security but about who pays how much for their defense and contributes to it. And if you don't contribute enough, then maybe we won't be there any longer. But Woodward's book is full of his complaint about having troops in South Korea. We are in South Korea, according to President Trump, to defend South Korea, not because we're defending the United States. NATO is about us defending Europe, not us defending the United States. And as a result, it's a bad deal. If you think you're only doing it for someone else, then by definition it's a bad deal. Trade, same thing. It is all about win-lose. It is defined in very simple terms, which is the trade deficit. And if we export less than we import, then it's bad. And if we import less than we export, then it's good. So we need to export more, import less, and we will have a better economics. That's how we can win. And that's the fundamental way in which Donald Trump has executed his foreign policy. Security alliances are expensive and we should reduce them. Trade has to be balanced in favor of the United States. And all democracy and human rights is for other people, it's not for us. We don't have to spend any time thinking about it. And if you look at his relationship with, say, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, which is better than it is with his relationship with Justin Trudeau or Angela Merkel, you see the underlying idea that actually working with friends and foes is all about the same thing. It's how can you get the best deal possible? Why does this matter? Well, it matters because the basic nature of international politics has remained unchanged. And if you take American power out of the equation, you go back to the kind of system that existed before 1945. A place in which competition among states is the defining feature of international politics, in which the rules-based system that was created through American leadership no longer smothers that competition, but competition reemerges in full force. And if you read the National Security Strategy of the United States or the National Defense Strategy that Jim Mattis has put out, it is all about the return of great power competition. It's about balancing and deterring powers in that competition. And in the Trumpian world, this is a competition that the United States can win because we are the most powerful country in the world. And if we build up our military strength and we maintain our economic growth, we will have an advantage in a world of global competition. And he's right. The United States will do quite well in a world of great power competition because we are more powerful than everybody else. The question is, will it do better than it does today than it has done over the past 70 years? Whether it will be better to do this alone in the competitive world or together with our allies and friends? And here is where I depart. We depart from Donald Trump, and I think many of us do. If you want to compete in this world, why not compete with people on our side? We have one thing that Russia and China don't have. We have allies. They have clients. Six of the 10 largest defense spenders in the world are allies of the United States. The seventh is the United States. Seven of the 10 top economies in the world are allies of the United States. If you can bring allies back into the fold and believe that in this competitive world, the United States and its allies, together, are much more able to deal with the challenges that we have, whether they are global challenges like terrorism or climate change or nuclear proliferation or indeed the challenge of a competitive world, you're better off doing it with allies than against it. But that's not what Donald Trump has done. Donald, in fact, he has made very clear that he doesn't need allies, and the allies are increasingly saying maybe we have to figure out how to do this without the United States. And so as a final sort of thought experiment, I'm happy to go into this in more detail, which is not in the book, but as an article that Jim and I have just published in Foreign Affairs coming out in the next few days, is how are we going to maintain a rules-based order without American leadership? And our answer is, well, the allies need to step up and start doing it for themselves. And if you look at the large number of allies we have, take the nine largest allies, four big European powers plus the European Union, Canada, South Korea, Australia, and Japan, those powers together represent a third of global GDP. They represent 20% of global military power. They represent 80% of global development assistance and aid of the OECD. And if those nine countries, including the European Union as an actor, were to work together in order to maintain and uphold the rules-based order until such time that the United States decides that it needs to have a president who is also invested in this order, then we are more likely to achieve a world that we've had for the last, to maintain a world that we've had for the last 70 years, where rules matter, where win-win is the outcome that everyone seeks both in security and in economics, and where we are able to achieve the goals that wise leadership in the 1940s set out by the United States for the rest of the world at that time. But without other stepping up, a United States that is increasingly looking only at itself is a United States that will do quite fine for itself, but not for the rest of the world. And if the rest of the world decides that it doesn't want to step up when it needs to, as I think at this moment our countries and our allies should, we're all going to suffer as a consequence. But more importantly, the United States will probably suffer less than most other countries. So that's my basic thesis statement. I have to take this discussion anywhere. I've tried to stay away from the details of Trumpian foreign policy, because we're all very familiar with it, but give you the overarching idea and argument. Thank you.