 We acknowledge and we celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet this evening And we pay our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present My name is Rory Medcalf. I'm head of the National Security College here at the Australian National University And we welcome you all to the college here this evening for a special public lecture On an issue that I think is close to all of our hearts whether we want it to be or not And that is the future of US foreign policy and security policy under the next presidency Now in a moment, I want to introduce our distinguished visiting speaker Richard Fontaine But first a few scene-setters. Now many of you know and are familiar with the National Security College through our work on executive education and training trying to bring together and join up the very Very wide-ranging national security community of departments and agencies here in Canberra through informing and connecting officials for a world of change You also may know us for our academic program our masters and PhD programs Which again are preparing I think the next generation of security thinkers and policy practitioners Now we're quite a young institution here at the National Security College only six years old But we're also beginning to spread our wings in new directions as an institution for policy engagement I guess a kind of think tank helping to deepen and inform the wider national debate an International debate about the security challenges ahead and the policy options for best managing them So it's in the spirit of that role of the college as a contributor to policy debate that we're really here this evening We're a particular kind of think tank I guess our main currency is trust and our main objective is to test and to generate new ideas and the new horizon of security risks Facing Australia from terrorism to cyber security the changing balance of power or the threats to the lifelines of governance order Prosperity security and environmental sustainability that underpin Australia's way of life and our place in the world So we're trying here at the college to encourage new thinking about Australian security And that's why I'm especially pleased to welcome our guests this evening Richard Fontaine has done many valuable things for the national interest of the United States and indeed for its allies Including for this country in his career Whether it's in the State Department the National Security Council on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Or indeed as foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain But he's also been a key player in the development of one of the most effective and exciting US think tanks the Center for a New American Security or CNAS founded originally by Kurt Campbell and Michelle Flournoy some years ago And as a Republican he's embodied the bipartisan quality of that institution Now I must admit that I've shamelessly borrowed from the CNAS playbook in some of the arguments I've voiced in this country about the way Australian policy needs to develop in security in the years ahead About the need for consensus and inclusiveness and new thinking in the way we approach our own security challenges But the volatility of the present strategic environment is I think testing level heads everywhere And so I'm hardly alone in worrying about how hard it will be for Australia or for any ally for that matter to maintain Its strategic moorings if we were to see a Trump presidency after the election this November We're all familiar with the term black swan I think quite an insulting term if you're an Australian Used to describe a strategic shock that I guess you didn't see coming But a very interesting and I and perhaps I think more powerful term was introduced To us in this building recently by an important visitor from Singapore One of the founders of Singapore's own thinking about strategic futures and that is the term black elephant A black elephant is the risk that you can see coming but you choose to ignore because it's Damage is potentially too painful for you psychologically to countenance In some ways for example, Brexit is now seen as the classic black elephant for the European Union And in the same token perhaps I'd suggest we have to think about a Trump presidency in that way But perhaps there are ways we can manage that possibility perhaps indeed that possibility won't come to pass I'll leave that for you all to contemplate and to decide as you listen to our speaker this evening Now Richard Fontaine will speak to you For about half an hour and then we'll have time for the question and answer session or a discussion session Which I'll moderate we are on the record. So please make sure that your phones are on silent We should also note that I think we're very grateful for Richard's visit partly because he's here as the inaugural Alliance 21 fellow under a very important new program set up by the United States Studies Center in Sydney and the Perth US Asia Center So I thank my colleagues from those institutions particularly James Brown for bringing Richard Fontaine here this evening So please join me in welcoming Richard Fontaine It's really a pleasure to be here at the National Security College and with Rory whose work I personally have followed For many years in Washington, and I am by no means alone in that he has such a record of distinguished Scholarship and policy insights on issues related to the Alliance the end of Pacific That it's really it's a pleasure to be here and to share a few ideas with you What I'll try to do tonight is not avoid any elephants black white or any other color this evening and Talk to you as directly as I can about my thoughts on the politics of national security in the United States the upcoming presidential election of which you may be dimly aware and And where what I think are a couple of the scenarios that might come out of that election depending on who wins and depending on a few other political developments and then try to draw out a few other implications but before I get to sort of commenting about the current day I Thought I'd go back in time a little bit and talk about the politics of US foreign policy and national security making In hit over over history at least since sort of the end of World War two and I'll be brief But I think it's interesting and important context for what you're seeing in the United States today The first point here, I think is probably pretty self-evident, but it's that National security policy making is inherently a political act So there's an element of politics certainly for him But very much domestic in the making of national security Policy and the discernment of the national interest and the balancing of interests and values and other things And for that reason it's a very contested Process and so in the United States, there's this Saying that one hears over and over and again that politics should stop at the water's edge that we might fight it out domestically on Healthcare taxes or anything else, but when it comes to foreign policy, we should be united as Americans Republicans Democrats independence whatever and we should all link arms and decide together that we're gonna do something. I think probably a few Statements have ever been less true than politics stops at the water's edge politics has never stopped at the water's edge the phrase itself Was first made by Senator Arthur Vandenberg who in the 1940s was a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as Harry Truman was putting into place a lot of the the policies and the architecture of What was to become the post-war or post-World War two era? NATO and and all of these other things Vandenberg was more or less on board with that point of view And since that time you hear it as I said all the time so Senator Joe Lieberman someone I know well and and like very much recently said politics should stop at the water's edge scoop Jackson former senator from from Washington State and a big defense hawk and the Democratic Party said in matters of national security the best politics is no politics and Yet even Vandenberg himself engaged in the politics of national security criticizing democratic policy in Asia not just in Europe And not only because he ended up having some disagreements But because he was a Republican and Truman was a Democrat and by agreeing with Truman all the time He would have suggested the Republicans have no foreign policy on their own not a very good position to go into elections with So first let me just say what am I talking about when I talk about politics and so by politics I'm talking about partisanship and inner-branch struggles budgetary conflict the role of the media scandals and their impact and the relationship between foreign and domestic policy elections arguments over the size of government all of these kinds of things and There's no platonic Form of the national interest that is sort of handed down and from on high that one can just go off and pursue the construction of this Of this national interest of the discernment of this national interest has a strong political component So going back again to the 1940s This was supposedly the area when politics really did stop at the water's edge Era of bipartisanship yet Vandenberg and Truman doing all of their things together But you had intense debates over the garrison state as a lot of critics of a permanent peacetime Military permanent mobilization a pentagon a central intelligence agency a national security act all of these kinds of things You had debates over that the need to build a national security state unlike any of the United States that had before Truman himself used politics against Henry Wallace in 1948 when Wallace was giving a run for his money in the Democratic Primaries and he painted him as a pro-communist which turned out to be effective in 1952 Dwight the Eisenhower ran against Truman's Korea policy when he ran for president and he Favored rollback in Eastern Europe not just the containment of the Soviet Union But a campaign pledge that he would actually roll back communist occupation of Central and Eastern Europe so the point here is that even 15 years after World War two and even during the Halcyon days of the gold standard of bipartisanship Politics was very much driving elements of foreign policy Now this really kind of broke apart after the Vietnam War when the Establishment consensus such as it was was shattered and by The searing effect that the war had on Americans and their view of their proper role in the world Now Consonant with what I just said the idea that there was an establishment consensus is only kind of right What the what Vietnam did was take the boundaries of the debate over America's role in the world and over national security policy and extend them even further and so you had You know Democrats and Republicans Disagreeing with each other in even more drastic ways than they had before an intraparty Debates and discussions that were quite different than had occurred before Now Part of the question is this just terrible. Is this a good thing? Is there any silver lining here? Some of the best thinkers in American foreign policy have said That the reality that national security has always been part of US politics and the politics always influenced our national security is terrible George Kennan And others what Walter Littman even Alex de Tocqueville who you know the Frenchman who wrote the classic work on America I thought this was terrible. They said national security making Successful porn foreign policy requires secrecy cold rationality experience continuity and as you may have picked up this year Those are not exactly the characteristics that America's democratic system rewards in when it comes to things like electoral Competition and there certainly are some downsides to to all this Administration foreign policy tends to lurch in certain areas when administrations change foreigners will often despair at the at the moralistic or Or populist strains in American foreign policy whether it was the US Congress paxing the Jackson-Vanik Act on Russia in the 1970s the attempt by Dubai port's world to buy a Controlling share in a port in the United States that produces populist kind of outrage or TPP the Transpacific Partnership Agreement in which the top two candidates on both sides Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and the Republican Party all came out in vigorous opposition to TPP But I would submit that there's some upsides in all of this too because for all the blunders American foreign policy has been pretty successful in the last seven decades and the blunders themselves Vietnam Iraq and so forth are not a product of what we'd normally construed as political decisions So it does the politics allows us to play good cop bad cop where the executive branch will approach a foreign government Which we're having troubles and saying, you know, you'll get a good deal from us But this Congress there's no telling what those crazy guys will do and that sometimes is effective Genuinely inserts new ideas into the debate Henry Kissinger has famously said that when he was national security adviser and secretary of state He wanted to wring all sentiment out of the State Department. He didn't See a role for human rights promotion In US foreign policy well during and after his time the Congress took the bull by the horns Established a bureau at the State Department for the promotion of human rights and democracy a religious liberty office a Traffin in person office and Kissinger now Acknowledges that the activists of one the debate which is a function of the the politics here It enhances the transparency quite often especially with foreign governments and populations and This year I get I grant you that this is a little hard argument to make But I do think that overall it's a function of American soft power that that our democratic government that we so cherish and hold Important is is something that is attractive to other people abroad Now and in a minute I'll get to specifically the roles of campaigns and all this because that's what we're going through right now But before I do I just wanted to point out one sort of historical rule that animates a lot of Private thinking I think when it comes to military interventions specifically abroad and that is if you look back through history And this shows you the interplay of the domestic and the foreign policy stuff War kills reform so if a president comes in with a domestic reform agenda and gets himself or herself into a war The reform goes away in the war stage So if you look at Woodrow Wilson before World War one he established the Federal Reserve system Income tax these things World War one the US entered and that all stopped FDR the new deals all the New Deal reforms took place before the United States entered World War two LBJ the Civil Rights Act voting rights act the Great Society that all happened before the huge intervention Started in Vietnam George W. Bush wanted to do immigration reform He wanted to do social security reform But Iraq sucked up the time the attention the political capital the financing from those efforts and President Obama has been adamant that he not fall into this trap and so This has been especially true in his second term which I think explains part of the character of his second second term Where he wanted to withdraw completely from Iraq and Afghanistan leave Libya after the intervention there and keep US military Actions as limited as possible in order to at least in part Preserve the stock of political capital and time and energy and attention that he could devote to his domestic agenda Knowing that you really can't have both at the same time So let me turn to campaigns for a second. I worked on the 2008 Presidential campaign for Senator McCain and that was the I had never worked on the camp a campaign for dog catcher or you know Coroner or anything before so this is a bit of a new experience and I had worked at the State Department and these some of these quasi diplomatic Positions or environments and the first thing that hit me was the the skills for someone So who was involved in diplomacy are exactly opposite of someone involved in the campaign and And because you know in a in a in diplomacy you take two people with very diametrically opposed views and you try to find some common ground, right? You know, so you you take, you know, you know the Dalai Lama and Xi Jinping Well, you know, you both have an interest in Tibet and you try that, you know, you know Maybe we can get something going here, you know a campaign you take a minor difference and you blow it up to be this transcendent crazy, you know kind of issue And this struck home to me. I remember when Senator McCain and Mitt Romney were running against each other in the primaries and And Governor Romney this was during the the surge in Iraq and Governor Romney said the surge seems to be working and Or seems to be succeeding and Senator McCain said that's absolutely wrong It is succeeding and they went back and forth over whether it seemed to be succeeding or it is succeeding and this drove the news cycle for about five days So that's when I said, you know, maybe I'm better for diplomacy But anyway, so that that was an interesting way of sort of seeing how these different skill sets work Now the just to go back into a little bit of history and this will be the last time I do this you know the the impact of the national security debate as I outlined has an effect on politics, but It's clear that electoral politics itself has an impact on our national security so JFK did the Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba having committed to a hard line Communist anti-communist stance during his election and then having inherited this covert operation from his predecessor May not have occurred that way had he not run as he did With Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam for all of the personnel that we sent into Vietnam He didn't call up the reserves. He didn't raise taxes This led to inflation in 1966 He said privately that if he didn't escalate the war the conservatives would gain in Congress during the during the midterm elections Nixon played up the detente in part as part of a an election strategy to show that he was a proper steward of America's security in the world after after the searing experience of Vietnam and and This and the and the idea that communism may have been on the March and the United States was on the back foot Gerald Ford wanted to rat it get ratification of the salt to arms control in the agreement, but once Ronald Reagan entered the race In the primaries he abandoned that effort Jimmy Carter played up to his own detriment the Iran hostage crisis Which probably which may have actually prolonged the release of these because they had on a split screen on Inauguration day Ronald Reagan getting sworn as president United States and the American hostage is being released After 444 days in Tehran Ronald Reagan lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union that evil empire in part to help the farmers of America who would be voting in the elections George HW Bush sold f-16s to Taiwan when he was running for reelection and In case this was lost on anyone he made the speech announcing this at the general dynamics plant in Fort Worth, Texas Who you know, so they were going to make these planes Bill Clinton the the Monica Lewinsky scandal paralyzed really the last at least year and a half or so of his presidency Including on decision-making related to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and things like that George W. Bush imposed steel tariffs on China conveniently before an election was coming up And Obama trade policy The administration was adamant that they weren't going to push big trade agreements in the first term because you got to get reelected And then they didn't want to do for the mid-term elections because they wanted to try to gain So you save that for the second two years of your final presidency, but that has its own challenges shall we say Even when there's not specific issues driving the campaign there's the sort of threshold of credibility idea the idea that People have to see even if economics pocketbook issues is the number one thing they're going to vote on They've got to see this candidate as the commander-in-chief who can you know be credible that can credibly lead the nation in national security and in if candidates don't pass that that threshold of credibility Measure in the minds of voters Even if they agree with them on the economic or the social issues and it's very unlikely the vote form Which is why you will see again and again and again in the next coming days The Clinton campaign hitting Donald Trump as the guy with a you know an unsteady finger on the nuclear button I'm not someone who is not a credible Commander-in-chief and trying to portray herself as the opposite All right, so let's turn to the talk of the day week month year this election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton so What if Donald Trump wins and is elected president of the United States? First thing is He may be and so anybody tells you what they know what's going to happen in November doesn't know what they're talking about because Almost no one and this includes me predicted that he was going to be the nominee And in fact as late as November December, I was telling people as is impossible I've been around politics long enough to know this is can't happen. So my predictors broken So I'm not going to predict who's going to win If you look at the polls where Clinton has an advantage if you look at the demographics Hillary Clinton has an advantage But there are black swans embedded in the black elephant And I don't know if that metaphor works, but you get my point So what if he wins? well you know The the challenge that Donald Trump has put on the table Which challenges? Simple certainly Democrats, but Republican foreign policy types like me is that there have been since World War two three basic bipartisan convictions that have animated US action in the world That and the belief that the United States needs to establish bolster and and reinforce The international order the first is to keep the peace We need alliances and those alliances need to be underwritten by the forward presence of American troops Second is to create prosperity. We need an open economic international economic system including free trade and investment And then the third is to protect and encourage freedom in human rights US should have a bias when possible for democratic systems over dictators It's hard to find people don't agree with that, but the Republicans have nominated someone who doesn't seem to agree with this and you know, so You know he would If you look at What he's done on each of these so keep the peace alliance is underwritten by Ford true presence His view of alliances is based Exclusively on financial contributions does this ally pay enough whatever enough is and if they don't then we abandon them to their fate Forward presence of American troops. He has questioned both in Europe and in Asia Open international economic system not only has Donald Trump said that he would not pursue additional free trade agreements or push for Approval of TPP said he would renegotiate all the trade agreements we have and potentially pull out of the existing ones like NAFTA the WTO And then on you know encouraging freedom in human rights You know, he has this sort of affinity for folks like Vladimir Putin and has also said just as importantly and less sort of Perhaps facetiously that the United States doesn't have the standing To push other countries on human rights given all of our domestic problems at home if you look at Cops getting killed and domestic turmoil. We just don't have the standing to push that again This is a major major break with the mainstream thrust of American foreign policy And the problem with this is that these three Principles that I just mentioned didn't sort of fall from the sky They came out of a Cataclysmic experience in the first half of the 20th century where we saw the two bloodiest wars in human history the worst economic collapse in human history and the rise of authoritarian governments that wanted to take over the world and This was designed precisely to avoid that ever happening again And it's supposed to be done under this sort of rubric of this rules-based international order That that countries can support as they see fit and yet it's precisely that order. I think that Mr. Trump Thinks America not only is not a beneficiary of but it's actually a victim of he thinks that the United States not as a Beneficiary of open trade but a victim of open trade not as a beneficiary of our alliances But as a sucker because we paid too much et cetera et cetera et cetera Now the caveat with all of this and with talking about Donald Trump is He has a tendency to change position now in trade he hasn't changed in years and years and years But on these other things He has a tendency to change position sometimes very rapidly normally you would look to the advisors around a candidate To get some in some insight as to what an administration would look like But he has very few advisors around him and certainly not the GOP sort of foreign policy rank and file behind him and so you know that is It's a challenge to try to discern You know what this would actually look like There's also a debate going on in Washington. I've heard it since I've been here in Australia about Well, you know, he may have said things like you know We're gonna keep all Muslims out of the United States or you know slap a 45 percent tariff on everything from China We'll you know kill the families of terrorists and and you know torture them and you know build a wall and Deport all the immigrants, but you can't really do that because presidents don't have that much power You know, there's three branches of government executive legislative judicial. He's got all these insulators around them and stuff. I would be Not too Comforted by that I think I mean the reality is that the president has enormous discretion in foreign affairs the president can send troops abroad And into combat without congressional approval last declaration of war was 1942 when the United States declared war against Romania. So I've done this five times in US history the Libya Operation was done without congressional approval You know Congress plays a role I say this having spent seven years of my life working in Congress on trade agreements It can unfund wars it can push back on detainee policy can do all sorts of things But you need votes to do that and you need to get that To do it to the president on the biggest questions should troops stay in Iraq or Come out should troops go to Afghanistan or come out things like that The president has a lot of leeway and as hard as it is to get a president to stop doing something He or she wants to do it's harder still to get them to do something. They don't want to do so If Donald Trump doesn't want to do trade agreements the Congress can't compel him to do trade if he You know wants to issue an executive order To enforce immigration Regulations and order deportations of 11 million illegal immigrants in the assays he can do that under his presidential authority Congress is delegated to the president the authority to raise trade barriers on specific products He couldn't do 45 percent tariffs on China forever. We could do it for some products and for a while He could withdraw from the Iran deal just as and other Agreements just as President George W. Bush pulled out of the anti ballistic missile treaty on his own without any saved by the Congress of the courts He could prevent the entry of Muslims under presidential authority in existing law There's some things he couldn't do he couldn't torture Terrorists and killer families that that is against the law He couldn't build a wall without congressional support to fund it, but Mexico is supposed to pay for it So I guess that's Yeah So now that said There are some Remaining constraints now particularly on the most controversial things Congress most likely would pair play a role and and the courts at some points in our history Have done so as well But the military and the bureaucracies would play an insulating role as well I mean Jimmy Carter came in on a campaign promise in 1976 or came in in 77 to withdraw the American troops in South Korea He was adaming when to do it his national security advisors big near Brzezinski said this is happening But the military didn't like the idea and thought it was terrible the US ambassador to Korea didn't like the idea and thought it was terrible And there was a lot of resistance both in the military and in the bureaucracy Which started to bleed over to Congress because they started to go to Congress and build allies there now Carter had wanted to do it by God if he wanted to do it He could have ordered that to happen But it was clear that the political price he was gonna have to pay in order to carry this out Just wasn't worth the candle. So he decided not to do it and the troops are there today All right, that's Trump and we can talk more about all that as you'd like What if Hillary Clinton wins well her positions are much more in the mainstream of Traditional American foreign policy. I think she's likely to be more hawkish than President Obama as she has exhibited greater hawkishness or greater willingness to see American engagement including in military terms on Syria where she favored arming Syrian rebels when Obama opposed it on Isis where she has favored the establishment of no fly zones in Syria and stepped up an escalate and Accelerated campaign against Isis North Korea where she has said she would like to pursue Iran Level sanctions on up North Korea and other things Perhaps in Australia her now her most famous position is that she opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that she championed when she was Secretary of State The the Obama administration says that they would like to try to get this done in the so-called lame duck session Congress at the end of the year after the election. I think the chances of that are probably less than 10% The and assuming that it does not go through if Secretary Clinton is elected I think she probably doesn't touch TPP for 2017 maybe in 2018 she comes back and asked for a reopening of the negotiations and and tries to Do something on the model of the Korea US? FTA which Obama campaigned against Reopened once an office got some modest adjustments declared it fixed and submitted for approval, but that's speculation I don't know what she would do The bigger story in 2016 is the rise of populism in the United States and so I mean, this is this is driven by things much deeper than the fact that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump happen to run this time It's driven by a profound sense of inequality Economic insecurity anger of a wage stagnation lack of opportunity physical insecurity the rate of social change And so, you know one of the things that's important to note is that if Hillary Clinton wins we're not gonna just say wow 2016. Oh, that was a crazy year All right, let's get back to basics because the populist forces that gave rise to both the Sanders candidacy and the Trump candidacy Are with us at least for a while You'll see this on trade more than anything else I mean the politics of trader or toxic is gonna take a major effort to get trade Done and I think future presidents will be able to but it's gonna take a different kind of bargain than it has in the past You'll see this on immigration certainly You'll see it on potentially on alliances Now that folks have been sensitized to the idea that you know our allies or some of our allies are not, you know Bearing the weight of the burden that at least some Americans think they should And I think you'll see a greater skepticism about American military engagement in the world if it's anti-terrorism Americans sign them up. They're they're happy to to Support military activity against ISIS or whoever but long-term military engagement or military engagement For reasons like in Libya like in the Balkans that don't have sort of an immediate discernible national interests are gonna be harder to Explain that the effort to at least explain these is gonna be I think significantly higher than it has in the recent past Now all of that may stand a little gloomy, so I'm gonna end and I'm gonna end on an optimistic note So I'm gonna try you guys can tell me whether this is any optimism so You know as I said the forces of populism are within the American political system The United States is by no means alone in that right now But some of America's greatest presidents have actually channeled the forces of populism however much they've diluted them into a source of national renewal And then others have used the diagnoses of unsuccessful candidates to instead fashion a successful and sustainable foreign policy, so You know going back to Williams Jennings Bryan who ran for office many times He had this concern for the common man and President Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson picked up Some of that and turned it into their domestic agendas Ronald Reagan's vision of winning the Cold War as opposed to just managing the Cold War was partly inspired by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater when he ran for president in 1964 and so you know the opportunity is at hand for a next president To craft a foreign policy that is more activist than Obama less expansive than George W. Bush's That is suited to this world. We live in that's you know got chronic and interlocking crises Where quagmire cat carries great costs, but inaction can carry great costs as well But in order to do that it starts with a recognition that The forces that have made 2016 so far unique in the annals of US electoral history are probably prologue more than past So let me close with that and answer any questions you might have In the context of what you're saying towards the end Trump sort of seems to be Saying nice things about Russia is that if what where would that go under a new presidency? Would they be under say Clinton would they who is a bit more hawkish would she Would you we see any changes in the US approach to Russia? And I think you would see under Secretary Clinton a continuation of What you've seen the trajectory of in the Obama administration, which is an increased skepticism of all motivations by the Putin government The you know it certainly wouldn't be less. I mean you're not gonna see another reset reset effort with Russia I mean those days are gone. It was a failed experiment and so I think you'd see Essentially probably most of the same features with a few different changes so right now the features of the Russian You know it's reassure the allies and in Central and Eastern Europe to the re Europe reassurance initiative It's sanctions continuing on Russia Non-recognition of Russian claims in in Crimea all of that would continue the folks around secretary Clinton have been More hawkish I think than the administration in some areas I mean a bunch of them supported providing lethal assist military assistance of a government Kiev So I could defend itself against Russia the administration decided not to take that step So I think there's some areas where there'd be some divergence to the more hawkish side, but I think by and large It would be a continuation I'm haunts bear If I remember correctly Trump had some rather unflattering things to say about McCain who you supported it So so do you plan to vote for Trump or will you? Will you vote for Hillary because she seems to be a little bit more mainstream? And in some ways even though Hillary's a Democrat she's been acting like a Republican for a long time Well, that's interesting framing of all of that I'll put it this way there was a letter that more than a hundred Republican foreign policy experts Signed saying that they would not support Trump as a nominee would not vote for Trump as a nominee and think that he's utterly Unfit for office and I signed that letter so that will tell you and then in the last few hours I was persuaded to sign yet another letter Among only Republicans who had worked in the White House doing national security. So, you know, I guess adjacent to a president Saying that that we think that he would be the most reckless president in US history. So if I haven't been clear enough in my My personal sentiments. I'm trying to be a little more analytical But I will not be voting for Donald Trump as who I will be voting for I'll be exercising the American right to cast a secret ballot John Moreland, and thank you very much for your speeches most interesting one thing that's happening now is you're looking at Turkey the Philippines and China who are going through their respective purges Obviously after coup in Turkey Philippines shooting on site of anybody drug dealers or any Unsociable elements and of course very subservient to the is China also Arresting any anybody that's questioning the the system Arresting their lawyers and the resting the lawyers who are representing the lawyers I haven't heard anything coming from the US about condemning that kind of activity in either the three countries if this purging what everyone called continues to To pass November which cans candidate will be better to manage what's happening in those in those three countries Well, I'm it's hard for me to say that Trump is gonna be the better candidate to manage fill in the blank with any international issue so if that wipes out additional questions, I'm sorry, but but I Would have to go back to see precisely what the US government has said about those three situations have been blissfully in Australia for the last five or six weeks, but You know, certainly the United States has been vocal over time on human rights abuses and the crackdown in China The executions arbitrary arrest the use of corruption as a political tool those kinds of things The Philippines I think people only now are starting to size up what do Tarte's new government is going to be doing And and how to react to that and then in Turkey, you know, there's there's a balance I mean, I think the United States might my sort of take on it is the US government has been Quite concerned even before the purge With the rollback of democracy and the and the sort of trending toward authoritarianism under President Erdogan But like many international issues, it's complicated. I mean we fly flights to strike flights against ISIS out of interlake Air Force Base in Southern Turkey, they're a NATO ally You know, it's not totally clear that if we sort of banished Turkey then that would be better for either Turks or for anybody else And so, you know, you're trying to work your way through that So maybe that's an incomplete answer to your question, but I think that's where we are. Yeah, I mean, I think you'll well I think if it's If it's a Clinton administration I mean look that the the agenda human rights not gonna be at the top of the agenda It also won't be at the bottom. It'll be somewhere in the middle which has the benefit of Allowing the US China relationship to be about the other Many other things where we are both competitive and in a few areas cooperative. So, you know, the things on the table There's the South China Sea. There's coercion of of our allies and partners in Asia. There's there's There's Iran. There's climate change. There's cyber security. There's all kinds of issues And so the really the dilemma that each administration has to focus on and it's gotten That agenda has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger with every year is where do you put Human rights and the hierarchy of American priorities because the Chinese will listen to priorities number one or two three Number four or five if it's number seven or eight, it's gonna go in one ear and out the other It's gonna be just kind of rhetorical exercise I don't it's hard for me to see a President doing What Bill Clinton pledged to do in 1992 which was after Tiananmen I'm gonna get tough with the butchers of Beijing This is gonna be the top issue in US China relations And so I think it will be an issue, but I don't think it's gonna be the top issue Hi, so I wanted to know about The American foreign policy how people in America It's at the end of the day the American foreign policy has a direct economic effect on the people So I mean so I came across recently that many middle-class Americans are for Trump So what in your view is the reason that is convincing them to have such What exactly does Trump say that convinces American people to? vote for I mean the first thing to note is that presidential campaigns in the United States are often exercises in economic illiteracy, so anyone who wants to make the you know You know the the case for you know the aggregate net benefit in welfare terms to the United States's economy as a whole from trade The game you know the game or the the deadweight loss associated with tariffs. I mean presidential election stop place to do that right and it tends to get a little simplified and And a lot of that ends up getting thrown out when the new administration comes in after some decent interval But it is the way things tend to go with Trump I would say a couple things one. I don't think that it's any specific policy That he embraces that is sort of the galvanizing thing I mean immigration is probably the most incendiary one and the one that gets the motions up the highest But you look at on the Republican side Republicans have gone since 2008 around the country and said We're gonna defund Obama's health care plan. We're gonna create jobs. We're gonna do this We're gonna do that and right now Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives in the Senate a majority of the Governorships and a majority of the state legislatures and what have they been able to deliver? Zero and so people say well the problem is not this or that policy The problem is not this or that Republican politician the problem is the system We are not being represented and we need somebody from who's an outsider to shake up the system as a whole and they like Trump's demeanor and is you know threat to do just that on the policies Specifically, I mean you know Republican sort of orthodoxy that touches on economic stuff is Raised the retirement age to save money on entitlements Well, that means that the lower you know the lower and working classes have to work longer Which is not attractive tax cuts, which folks believe disproportionately go to the rich income tax cuts Immigration reform people believe immigrants are coming in to steal their jobs and open free trade which they believe are killing their job So Trump comes in and says immigrants. I'm sending them all home trade tearing up all the trade agreements I'm not raising the retirement age. I won't touch Medicare Social Security and tax cuts for everyone So the arithmetic doesn't work, but as you know, but that I think explains a lot Hi, that's Aziz National Security College. I'm just wondering what the major political parties what the Democrats and the Republicans do About the trend towards populism it seems that that both the Republicans and the Democrats at least the Center of those parties are getting narrower and narrower and narrower What do they do post this election regardless of the the kind of results to appeal to a broader cross-section of American voters? Yeah, if if ever the parties needed a wake-up call 2016 has been the wake-up call They have not gotten to the point where they have come up with an approach For a couple reasons one. We're still in the middle of this to what is the party anymore? I mean, you know It's not like you have a membership certificate suitable for framing that you remember the Republican Party You just registered Republican and you know that the populism in part is a function of the fact that you know The establishment doesn't control the party or its direction anymore. It's straight voting in the primaries the Democrats are less Small the Democratic in that sense because they have these super delegates and all this other stuff But they're subject to the same kinds of forces. So there hasn't really been an approach What happened after the 2012 election on the Republican side was they did this big post-mortem and said We're gonna come up with this new strategy that you know, why did we lose? Okay, we lost for reasons a B and C and we've got to get you know, ethnic minorities and centrist voters Well, we'll have policies that are designed to do that immigration reform and all these other things I just said are so unpopular that have animated the Trump voters So I am sure this will launch a thousand ships of people doing the same kind of thing. The question is Whether the composition of the parties over the medium term remains the same as it is now So, you know, the Republicans kind of you know, social conservatives economic libertarians national security hawks Is that kind of the three-legged stool of Republicanism in the future because Trump has said this is not a Conservative party it's a Republican party. I'm making this a middle-class party Well, if you start to see the flickers of class consciousness in the United States for the first time Then that potentially could be a viable alternative and so I don't think there's an answer yet to your question Hello, Mr. Fontaine, thanks for the David going I wondering who will staff the bureaucracy for Donald Trump if he wins Yeah, who will take up the assistant secretary jobs and stuff like that Do you think ambition will just mean that people will step forward or will we have a lot of family members or what? You've touched on a very hot button issue in Washington right now particularly among a Republicans who thought that at some point they might have a future in government again I mean the first answer is the career folks I mean we have a foreign service. We have a career civilian civil service in the defense I mean and you know those people are not I don't believe they're gonna just all resign and go home and say We're not gonna take any positions and so, you know They will be the loyal public servants that they are and do their best to at a minimum Mitigate what they think would otherwise be some bad decisions and at most try to push things in the right direction But what you're getting at I think is who comes in from the outside and usually you know this from looking at the list of advisors Well, Trump only has about 10 declared advisors and they're fairly low ranking folks before he doesn't have the kind of folks You know who you would say oh, that'll be the national security advisor. That'd be this that'd be that that'd be the assistant secretary Republicans not necessarily those who sort of sign the kind of letters that I did but you know the ones who haven't You know, they're trying to think this through because you know, I don't know anybody who supports Trump and in fact I know almost everybody, you know doesn't support Trump But if he's president is it better for the country or worse for the country if they all say well forget it I'm not going in into this administration. I didn't vote for this guy. I don't support him Or is it better for the country to say well look okay didn't like him But he's a president now and so we got to do our best to sort of push policy in the right direction I think the answer to that will come down to what end I mean if if Trump comes in and says I want you to be the assistant secretary for excluding Muslims from the United States It's gonna be hard to find somebody to do that You know, but if he starts to sand off the rough edges and makes a few appointments here and there and it actually looks like There's the chance It's gonna look like a more traditional American foreign policy than I think you could draw in patriotic Americans like that Hi, my name is Kevin Davies. I've It's not inconceivable that there could be an impeachment of the president especially Given some of the policy views, so I'd be interested in knowing what your thoughts would be about the foreign policies of the vice presidents Mike who are you assuming is president? either I Mean it's very hard to impeach a president's never happen Well to remove a president from office. I mean Bill Clinton was impeached, but he was never removed from office So I mean to you can go to an impeachment trial, but the idea that that the Congress is gonna remove a president is is Unlikely there would have to be a major major major galvanizing effect. And like I said, it never happened I I have met Mike Pence Before and he seems like a pretty solid, you know guy haven't spent a huge amount of time with him You know, he seems to have quite a few at least pre-existing disagreements with where Trump has come down He was you know Commented on Twitter and a bunch of other things about you know the statements that Trump made about going after you know a Mexican-American judge and and And it Muslim exclusions in opposition of these things So, you know, but he's you know, he was a congressman now He's a governor so he doesn't have a long history of foreign policy record behind him Tim Kaine has more because he was He was the or is the senator from Virginia. He's been a very thoughtful Really critic of sort of the the constitutional underpinning so he has been pushing an authorization use of military force Which doesn't on its own exist for ISIS were using the old al-Qaeda one and things like that He's picked out a few issues and he has a quite a bit of international experience as well Not to mention he speaks Spanish, which is a little bit different than the other candidates. I don't know if that exactly answers your question, but Hi Jasmine Martin, I was just wondering could you nail a most dangerous policy of both candidates and then potentially most positive policy regarding How they would handle foreign policy So a positive and a negative for both I mean with with Hillary Clinton, I think the negative is her position on TPP right now I personally believe that if the United States We've now kind of led all of our friends out on this limb to do TPP and we're in the process of sawing it off Which you know as and as much as I love all of our friends and allies I'm also concerned about the United States. I think that's not good for America's position in the United States It's also not good economically because the region won't stay still It's gonna do trade deals without us and then we're gonna have we're gonna risk trade diversion around us So I would put that as that the most sort of problematic one the best Clinton one I mean I I like her Intensified approach to ISIS, which I think time is not on our side in the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq I think she would be Faster to use the military tools at our disposal To take the battle to ISIS in a way that I think would be productive on Trump mean the most disastrous. I mean, I really do think that this This idea which he's backing off from and now saying that he won't let in immigrants from countries affected by terrorism But I guess I would mean Australia so But you know that this idea that we would exclude people on the basis of their religious affiliation is Problematic not just because it's bad policy But also because it you know it feeds the terrorist narrative is exactly the opposite of what we're trying to say We're not a word Islam to suggest we are and also just it offends the sort of basic Americanism I mean just basic American values and so I would probably put that at the top You know, but there is a virtue with the Trump candidacy and so this is not a specific policy But it has made us all think in a way that most of us never have before and I say this kind of embarrassingly I mean, you know We have been making foreign policy and articulating the case for those foreign policies in a way that is so clearly Disconnected from where a lot of Americans are and from the real kind of things that Americans are going through that in order to fashion a Sustainable foreign policy. We have to be much more sense of that. So I don't like Trump's prescriptions But his diagnosis like Bernie Sanders. I think it's spot-on Thanks very much Richard. I'm sorry we're gonna have to leave it there. We're really at time I think that end point suggests that the the the hidden virtue of the black elephant is at least it woke you up But you still want to get get out of the way Look, I really valued this evening session I would have liked to have taken you to a few more specific questions about Australia and the Alliance between the United States and Australia Needless to say there are a lot of people I think in this town in this country who place enormous Importance on the Alliance and are naturally anxious about what the Trump presidency would mean for the Alliance or more than anxious I should say so I think we're going to have some pretty interesting conversations about that Throughout the rest of your stay in Australia. I want to again thank the US Study Center and its sister institution in Perth for bringing you over it's great that you've made the time to Get to know Australia better and to speak to audiences like this About some of the really fundamental challenges facing us all so Richard Pontein I want the rest of the group to join me in thanking you very much