 First, I want to begin by thanking Regent Weiser and Eileen Weiser for their generous donation to establish the Weiser Diplomacy Center. Many of you know Ron served as a U.S. Ambassador to Slovakia and Eileen served alongside him in their time in Bratislava. They are both passionately committed to the importance of diplomacy and to the men and women who serve our country abroad. They are wonderful friends of the Ford School and of the University of Michigan, and we're grateful for their strong support of our school. Ron and Eileen, this session today honors your work and the legacy you are providing to the students of the Ford School of the University of Michigan and more broadly to the realm of international relations. Thank you. I want to tell you a little bit about the Weiser Diplomacy Center. The Weiser Diplomacy Center serves as a unique hub for the academic and practical training and policy dialogue, preparing our students to become our nation's next foreign policy leaders, diplomats and experts in foreign affairs. As a meeting point for practitioners, men and women whose careers span the apex of foreign policy and academics, the WDC provides a bridge between the University of Michigan and the foreign policy community. With Ron and Eileen's help, the WDC can become one of the country's leading institutions for the study of international affairs. Briefly, three pillars guide the WDC's work. First, hands-on practical training and mentorship for rising foreign policy professionals who will have access to senior diplomats, including those serving as professors of practice here in international diplomacy. Second, overseas study and policy engagement with internships and engagement opportunities that span the globe. For example, our students have been placed in such sites as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and a leading development organization in India. The WC also funds shorter-term student initiatives. In April, for example, a BA student traveled to Beijing to engage with Chinese counterparts as part of a dialogue on U.S.-Chinese relations. And third, engagement with the foreign policy community on a wide array of topics, ranging from peace and security to development to human rights and the environment. Our lineup this fall reflects our commitment to exposing our students to a breadth of experiences and policy perspectives, including Steve Beegan last week, today's panelists Steve Hadley, Dan Freed and Liz Schreyer, Samantha Power later this month, in October, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and in November, a group of former leading ambassadors. You will note that this launch series also supports our Conversations Across Difference initiative. It is in moments of political and social divide, such as we find ourselves today, when the craft of diplomacy is even more essential, and when talking and listening across political and other differences is so critical. Today's session celebrates the craft of diplomacy and the support of education of future practitioners of the craft. Ron and Eileen Weiser, we salute you and the mission of the Weiser Diplomacy Center. Ron, would you like to come say a few words? No. Please welcome Ron Weiser. The one thing I learned in serving in Slovakia was the importance of diplomacy and how much impact the diplomats can have on the course and direction of a nation, because when I got there, Slovakia was going in the wrong direction, and today they're members of NATO and the EU and solidly entrenched in democracy for the foreseeable future, and that might not have happened without the diplomats in our embassy that I had the privilege of being able to lead. So that's why diplomacy, in my opinion, is so important, because it can help change directions, especially for countries that are going in the wrong direction. Sometimes you can bring them back around. So anyhow, that's one of the reasons I did that. And the second is that, as you may all know, most of the diplomatic institutions of higher learning are in the East Coast and the West Coast, and there wasn't anything in the central part of the country. And I kind of feel, as I think all of you do, the central part of the country has a great deal of importance to America. So thank you very much. Thanks very much, Regent Weiser, to you and Eileen for the tremendous opportunity you've given our community. I'm John Chorchiarri. I'm the faculty director of the New Weiser Diplomacy Center. And we wanted to have a launch event that would both honor your service and capture the mission of the new center. We chose to focus on diplomacy in a new transatlantic era. And of course, as you just referenced, you served in Slovakia during a crucial time of transition in central and eastern Europe, and therefore also in transatlantic relations. Today, 80 years after the opening shots in World War II, 70 years after NATO's creation, 30 years after the Berlin Wall crumbled, the region faces a new set of challenges and opportunities. Our goal at the Weiser Diplomacy Center is to help address these international policy issues across the Atlantic and around the world through engagement and education on foreign affairs. So to kick off, we assembled a top flight panel of experts on diplomacy and transatlantic ties. And to moderate, we're delighted to have our very own Liz Schreyer, a UM graduate, parent of one of our excellent recent Ford School alumni, and a member of our Ford School committee. She's also a distinguished practitioner of foreign affairs. Liz is president and CEO of the US Global Leadership Coalition, a broad coalition of businesses and NGOs who stand for US global leadership through development and diplomacy. You may have seen her quoted in the press over the last few weeks as she successfully spearheaded efforts to protect the US budget for foreign aid, which is often under domestic political attack, but which I'm sure you'll agree is crucial to advancing American values and interests overseas. Liz is also president of Schreyer and Associates, a political consulting firm that works on a wide range of domestic and international issues. And she's on USAID's advisory committee on voluntary foreign aid. She was previously national political director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or APAC. And for more than a decade, and she has extensive experience on Capitol Hill, including having founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. Please join me not only in welcoming Liz, but also thanking her for the important work that she's doing on foreign affairs. In a moment, I'm going to hand the microphone over to Liz to introduce our other distinguished panelists, Stephen Hadley and Daniel Freed. But first, just a note on format. After a moderated conversation on our panel, we'll have some audience Q&A. Two of our outstanding students and aspiring diplomats, Steve Rulikiriasis and Ed Elliott, are going to lead off with a question each of their own. And then they'll move around the audience and select others of you who can ask questions by raising your hand. We'll start with questions from students who are after all core to our mission, but we'll also try to leave some time at the end for questions from other members of the audience. So thank you very much for coming. And Liz, take it away. Well, thank you. Thank you. Congratulations to welcome to everybody, especially Steve and Dan. I'll introduce them more formally in a moment. But first is what a fabulous moment this is. Congratulations to John, to Michael, and most of all, Ambassador Weiser, Ron, and Eileen. I've been thinking as I was preparing for today, this is not just a special moment for the Ford School, for University of Michigan, but for every one of us who cares about America's role in the world, to have a academic rigor of thought leaders, the lineup you have coming up, but to have a place in the heartland where all of those of us from who love University of Michigan and are from the Midwest know this really is the center of the world. So thank you, Ambassador Weiser. So today, I have the absolute privilege of moderating a conversation between one of the most respected and highly knowledgeable national security experts in the nation, and one of the most respected diplomats in the nation. And I know neither of these two things. I spend my career, as John just described, as an advocate for what they do and what they have done in their career. And I want to just set the scene before introducing them for a couple thoughts for us to think about as we have start this conversation about diplomacy in a new transatlantic era. 25 years ago, I want us to think back at a very important time in this conversation we're about to have. End of the Cold War, where a lot of our fellow citizens said, we won. We could have a peace dividend. And one of the things that was happening in this country is people thought, you know what, we don't need. We don't need to invest so much in our diplomacy. We don't need to invest in the State Department and Peace Corps and our USAID. And there was a real effort to pull back on those civilian toolkits. And I remember, I was in Washington at the time, and I remember members of Congress literally going to the floor of the well of the Congress and bragging that they didn't own a passport as a badge of honor. And there were consequences. And this week was a 18-year anniversary of the consequences of when we pulled back in the world. Well, one good thing came out of that, which is a group of individuals got together and said, we need to build a domestic voice for engagement in the world. And I'm very privileged to have been part of that effort. Today, I run a coalition called the US Global Leadership Coalition that, thank goodness, Steve Hadley is one of our advisory committee members. That includes over 500 businesses and NGOs. We have every former living secretary of state on our advisory committee. We are in every single state in the state of Michigan. Our co-chairs are people like Carl Levin and Rick Snyder and Hank Meyer. And what we do is we're an advocacy group for diplomacy, for development, for America's engagement in the world. So as John said, when there is an effort to cut back our budget for the State Department, which there have been great attacks, there is a bipartisan reaction on Capitol Hill to say that's not such a good idea. And it's because of conversations like this that really talk about the importance of diplomacy. There are real challenges in the world. And we're going to talk about a lot of them. There are challenges and opportunities that we're going to talk about today, particularly in this new transatlantic era. And there are no two better people that I know that we can talk with than Steve Hadley and Dan Freed. So let me introduce them. And we're going to get on with our conversation. So first, to my left, your right. Steve Hadley is truly, truly one of the most respected, highly respected national security experts in the nation. He has one of the most long and impressive career, both in and out of politics. He is most well known, as probably all of you know, as the National Security Advisor for President George W. Bush. But I found out that you actually started the first time in the National Security Council working for a gentleman whose name is up on the school, President Gerald Ford. So I was glad to find out you were already connected to Gerald Ford. Steve Hadley has worked at the Department of Defense. He has worked at the Department of State. He is now today a partner with his former colleagues, now his current colleagues once again, Secretaries, former Secretary Bob Gates, former Secretary Condi Rice. He is president of an amazing, amazing organization called the US Institute of Peace that does great work. We'll talk about it in our conversation. That does work throughout the world. And the only complaint I have is that he grew up in Ohio and he had the wrong pedigree in schools. Something, you know, he went to Cornell and he went to Yale Law School. So I still think he's brilliant. And you're going to certainly learn why he is so brilliant and we're thrilled to have him here. Along with him in our conversation is Ambassador Dan Freed. Dan Freed has a 40-year career in the Foreign Service. Dan has helped literally shape American policy in Europe and Central. And after the fall of the Soviet Union, Dan has been a long list of career items. Let me just tell you some of them. He has worked in the National Security Council as a senior director for both President Clinton and President Bush. Ambassador to Poland, Assistant Secretary of the State for Europe. He has crafted policy of NATO enlargement to Central European nations. He has quickly became, through his career, known as one of the US government's foremost experts in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. His one of, I don't think it was your very last, but one of your last assignments at the State Department was our first special envoy to try to do closures at Gitmo. So you can ask him about that. He is currently today a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council. So gentlemen, welcome. Let's give him a round of applause. So I have lots of questions to them, but I like to ask. Do you mind if I ask them a question first? Good. OK. So let me start with just to show a hand. And I know everybody's going to have to put your hand up in this one first. How many have traveled around the world, somewhere in the world? All right, keep your hand up if you've worked around the world in government. Ooh, a lot of hands went down. OK. If you worked in a State Department mission ever, now we're down to just a few. All right, how many want to pursue a career possibly in diplomacy somewhere along? Oh, we got a few more hands up. OK, good. Now on this question, you can pick one of three. And my question is, how many think the state of transatlantic relationships is either strong, weak, or adequate? OK, the state of transatlantic relationships, our relationship between America and the transatlantic region, is strong, weak, or adequate? How many say strong? How many say weak? How many say adequate? All right, you can decide. And my last question is, how many think that diplomacy could make it even better? Yay. OK. All right, so let's get started. All right, so our title is called Diplomacy in a New Transatlantic Era. And I'm going to split it right down the middle, and you're going to get half, and you're going to get half. And your first half is going to be the state of the new transatlantic era. So you're going to get a little mini keynote. You get about eight to 10 minutes, depending on how long you want to go. And I want you to focus on this. For about 70 years, America's foreign policy has largely been defined how we in the wonky world would call the liberal international order. These alliances and institutions that have more or less kind of kept us safe and peaceful. And Republicans and Democrats, we've disagreed that everybody's disagreed on different things, but we basically have agreed that these institutions have kind of worked until recently. And there's been this major disruption that has gone on, challenges to the structure. And particularly, it's happened also with our transatlantic partners. We're seeing it. We're going to talk later on about Brexit and what's going on. But I want you to give your state of the international order. What are the trends? What are the challenges that you're seeing out around the globe? And how does it impact us here in the US? And you get not two hours, but about 10 minutes. So the international system is under challenge in a way that it has not been in my lifetime. And I think that accounts for a lot of the chaos and disruption you see in the world. It was established at the end of World War II by the United States working with Europe. And it basically reflected our values and principles. Political democracy, market economies, human rights, rule of law, wildly successful, not universal, certainly disputed by the Soviet Union. We engaged in the Cold War. 89, 90, Cold War is over. And we think our system, this international system we've established, and our values and principles have swept the field and are now the only global paradigm. And that turned out not to be true. There were a number of shocks, I think, that began to undermine the system. The first was in 2008 with the financial crisis. Everyone viewed the financial system as an American and European institution. And we knew how to run it. Well, guess what? We had a meltdown that produced the greatest recession since the Depression. That was a big jolt to people's confidence in our ability to run the system that we had established. I would say the second one occurred in 2011 with the Arab Spring that turned out to be an Arab nightmare. And rather than bringing democracy to the region, a region in which the United States had made huge investments over more than a decade, it brought either chaos and meltdown in Syria and Libya or return to authoritarianism in Egypt and elsewhere. And then the final one was our own election in 2016 because what it showed was a surprising result that reflected the fact that for a large number of Americans, there was a real disaffection with that international system that we had supported. This was a group of people that felt they had been victimized by globalization, threatened by immigration, abandoned by their politicians and betrayed by their elites. And they gave us President Trump as a disruptor in chief who was gonna really disrupt the international system with the approval of that sector of the population and begin to raise questions about whether the United States wanted to continue to support that international system that was our creation. And as Liz points out at the same time, Europe was turning inward. So in parallel with all of this, as the United States and Europe seem to be either disabled or stepping back from that international system, it's challenged. It's challenged by the reemergence of great power competition. A Russia which at the beginning of the post-Cold War period looked like it would be a partner of the United States and is now migrated to the point where it's almost a spoiler on every issue trying to frustrate American policy. The emergence of China. China is a potential competitor like we have never known. Soviet Union was a huge military competitor but it was an economic pygmy with a political system that in the end of the day collapsed of its own way. China on the other hand is a geopolitical, economic, military rival of enormous capabilities. And in parallel with the reemergence of great power competition, is a reemergence of an ideological competition. Quite frankly, the American and European brand of market-oriented democracy is not looking so good and the authoritarian state capitalism that is being practiced by China and Russia and other countries is gaining adherence because it seems to be a more effective way of addressing the issues of people. And in parallel with all of that, there is a disaffection within democracies with our own system and people questioning whether democracy in free markets is the right system and you see it in the Brexit vote, the rise of extremist parties in the right and the left in Europe and you see it in our own election in 2016. Parallel of that, you've had a technological revolution, technological change at a rate and at a scale as we have not seen before. Artificial intelligence, autonomy, quantum computing, bioengineering, a whole series of technologies that are gonna transform our system and put pressure on our system and for which there are not as part of that international system a set of rules to how to make sure that bioengineering produces real benefits for health of the world rather than produces the next pandemic that is gonna threaten all of our health. We've seen this revolution particularly in the area of communications and social media. I thought that social media was gonna be a great force of democratization, empowering people to be able to take more responsibility for their lives and what we've seen is that it can be a tool for the authoritarians to actually exert more control over people and in democratic societies, it has been an accelerant of division and ranker that has put real pressure on our political systems. It has also ushered in an era of disinformation and of the ability, you know, used to say seeing is believing, now you can't believe your eyes with deep fake images that are manufactured that has President Obama saying things that President Obama never said. So, enormous pressure on the international system and at a time when the United States seems to be pulling away from leading that system that we have established and been the protector of for 70 years and Europe seems to be increasingly worrying and focused on its own internal problems. We have never faced, I think, as difficult an international situation since I think the Cold War and maybe even including the Cold War and we are probably less well positioned for dealing with it than we were at the end of World War II. We'll talk about it. I'm not despairing and I'm actually optimistic to be the prophet of doom and gloom here but it is a new and a challenging situation that you students out there are gonna be grappling with for the next 20 years. Wow, okay, well we'll get to your optimism. There you go. So, all right, you get the other half which is, as I said, it's called Diplomacy in a New Transatlantic Era. So Dan, what I'd love to hear you talk about is we'll get into the details of your expertise on NATO and a number of things but I'm interested to lead off, take about five minutes and give us your take on where diplomacy sits in this, in this challenging, this challenge of the international order of values-based being versus our own interests and where you see US diplomatic role right now. And this is from, remember, 40 years as a diplomat. So embassies work daily with reality as it is on the ground and a lot of the work of embassies has to do with explaining to Washington which is habitually impatient what is and is not possible in a given country at a given time. So that realism with a small art, tactical realism is what diplomats carry around in their heads, what's possible today and you usually have to explain to Washington well why some big theory which a Secretary of State or a President has put in a speech or a tweet is difficult to achieve, good luck with that but that's small, our realism is the world tends to be the default world view of diplomats. Now most of successful diplomatic work has to do with working within this sphere. And within that sphere, good embassies know how to work a problem in a foreign country politically. I don't mean partisan or taking sides but to solve a problem you need to frame up the issue so the foreign government and the foreign country's political system can handle it and do so well. You frame the issues in ways that they can work with. And that is the day to day work of an embassy but there are two examples of when embassies and diplomats have to break out of that usual system. One is when as Ambassador Weiser said the country you're in, you're serving in is going in a wrong direction and Washington has asked you to do something about it. Yeah, I know about this because I sort of asked Ron Weiser to do something about it in Slovakia. Then it takes skill of a higher order to actually reach a foreign society in ways that don't look like American bullying or arrogance or overreach or any number of sins to which we Americans are prone. And being able to get inside a foreign country's political space without being blasted out, coming charred and scarred is a much higher level skill. And I have to say that Ron Weiser did a terrific job. And by the way, as a footnote, political ambassadors who, professional diplomats like myself are supposed to despise or patronize often are better at it than foreign service officers. Now, some of the upsides of political ambassadors are high so are the downsides, and it's, you know. This is on the record. Yeah, I'll take that, but Ron Weiser was on that right way over on the right on that bell curve, okay? And, but then there's a third level, the highest kind of diplomatic skill is recognizing when things are about to change in a big way. And Steve Hadley was talking about the challenges to the international system. When you're in a country that is, and this is rare, it's not, it's almost never gonna happen, but when it does, when a country's about to go very bad or very good, can you break out of that small, our realist, practical-minded mindset and make the call in warm Washington, okay? An example of a failure is when our embassy in Yugoslavia did not recognize the warning signs in time until it was too late. Okay, this is in the 80s. An example of success is when our embassy in Poland understood that communism was coming apart at the seams and the future belonged to solidarity. They actually predicted it, they made the call. Nobody in Washington believed them. Well, I did, but I was too insignificant to really count. But it was an example of strategic insight and foresight. And I mention this because when you're in a world of systemic challenges, Steve Hadley accurately described, you're going to find countries at a borderline of major change. So what's happening in Russia? I'm not sure that Putinism is the wave of the future, but it doesn't matter what I think, Russians, including Russian officials, are using words like perpetual stagnation, which is a code word for the late Brezhnev period to describe what's happening in Russia now. Now, I am not privy to the diplomatic cables coming from Moscow, but I know how good our embassy can be. Or, you know, was there some junior political officer in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in the late 1970s who was writing the Shah's base of political support is evaporating? And you better keep an eye on these moulas. That's what diplomacy means. It means sometimes making that call. That's great, terrific, terrific. All right, we're gonna go through a couple of topics quickly and let's, let me start with one that both of you touched upon, which is America's leadership, America's global leadership, and get a sense of where you think we are. When I was a student here, I'll admit my age, but we were deep in the Cold War, and I studied when I was sitting where a lot of the students are, and it was two great superpowers, and we had maps here, red, blue, good guys, bad guys, it was really clear. And today, as you already just said, it's not really clear, it's complicated, and America's leadership is kind of shifting. So Steve, one of the questions I wanna ask you is the perception of America's leadership. So I look at polls a lot, and if you ask Americans how every other country views us, guess what, we're a little hubris, we think we're doing great out there. The rest of the world doesn't think we're doing so great out there, so let me just share some polling with you. Pew and Gallup ask the question every year to lots of leaders. Gallup recently asked leaders in 130 countries, how do you think about America's image in the world? And this year, we hit nearly an all-time low, 31%, I have a high opinion of us, we were lower than China. The Pew study in the last five years, we've dropped 15 points. I often hear the claims that allies turn and say, you can't rely on the US anymore, but both of us know any country would be delighted to have any American business knock on their door. So my question to you is talk for a moment about, are you concerned about the fair weather friend of America for our allies mantra? Is that something you're worried about? You travel all the time, do you hear that? Is that a worry? It is, but I think it's unfortunately more profound than that. You know, our brand doesn't look so good. People watch us and we have an economy that it's now pretty clear, produced growth but did not produce inclusive growth from which all Americans could benefit. And that's very evident. Our politics looks to most of the world broken, full of ranker and division and not fixing the problems that face the country. And you know, we've known for two decades what to do about immigration reform. We really know what to do about social security reform. We're working the issue of medical reform. What we don't seem to have is the political will to solve these problems. And the world has noticed. And now we've had an election in 2016 that surprised everybody. And a foreign policy that talks about America first. And I want to come back to that a little bit. But I think the first problem is our brand doesn't look so good. We are not really dealing with our problems at home and not showing that we have a kind of political system that really can provide security and prosperity for our people. And China's looking pretty good out there. So what's the point about America first? And I think President Trump reflected a real problem in our politics, something that the elites in this country and the politicians had ignored and it needs to be addressed. We can discuss about how he's trying to address it. The problem with America first is that it's being read internationally as America at other people's expense. A win-lose. A very zero-sum, very short-term definition of American interest. And that's not where we've been. Yes, it's America first. Every country puts its people's interests and security first. But we had for 70 years a long-term view of what was America's interest. And it was a view that said, for example, it's in our interest to help rebuild Japan and Germany after the end of World War II and help them rebuild as democratic free market societies because they will be more peaceful. And that's the best way we can ensure that we don't have to descend into a World War III. President Bush decided it was in our long-term interest to deal with the HIV-AIDS epidemic in Africa. Partly because chaos in Africa would deny American business a market, I get that. But mostly because he had a sense that it was the right thing to do. It's what we as Americas do. We take on and try to help solve the world's problems. And in the end of the day, it's in our interest to do so and it will generate goodwill for America. And the world will actually tolerate a lot of American mistakes because the alternative to American leadership is worse. And World War II is fascism and the Cold War is communism. And now, if the alternative is China, some people say, hey, not so bad. That's our problem. And I think what we have to do is at home reconnect to those principles and values that have served this country well. As Madeline Albright says, we need to review, renew our vows to democracy and free markets and to a much more enlightened and long-term view of what America's role should be in the world. And if we do that, those numbers will come back up. So let me, Dan, ask you to play off on this America First question and bring it back to our theme of transatlantic era. You know something about NATO. Because one of the first kind of policy agendas on the America First agenda of the president was he took off right on the box after NATO. He got praised for putting on the table, pay your fair share, but he got criticized saying you went after our NATO allies pretty harshly. What is the state, in your view, of the U.S.-NATO relationship? NATO was set up as a means to an end. It's an instrument. And the end was an undivided transatlantic security space because we were tired of world wars, right? President Trump isn't the first U.S. president to be irritated with lack of European's nation's defense capability. That goes back to Eisenhower. That goes back to Eisenhower when he was, you know, at NATO. That's not new. What is new is the president's questioning of Article V and alliance solidarity, which is part of what Steve Hadley rightly calls a narrow definition of America First. So NATO was a means to an end. Because frankly, you know, dealing with European, the European Union or NATO can be frustrating, but a European problem, like a real problem in Europe, that's Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge, okay? That's European problems. That's wars or the Berlin Wall. These are not hard problems. You know, frustrated by the EU. You know, it's like a job for guys, you know, men and women like me, you know, send us in to have us work the problem. The genius, and I'm bouncing off of what Steve Hadley was saying, the genius of the American grand strategy is that we wouldn't lower ourselves to have a mere European-style sphere of influence. No, it's the whole world. And that only works if we set up a system where we can all prosper together. And Steve's right. We failed of that promise, financial crash, lack of equity in American economic growth, but the vision remains valid. And the articulation of a united democratic community to face the authoritarian challenges is half of the solution and the other half is fixing the problems that brought us to this point. Can I, Steve, let me ask you one other question playing off in that. One, we met with some students earlier and we were asking them, what are you worried about? What are you optimistic about? And one, the students talked about the kind of the multilateral forms. And so we just had a G7, and in two weeks were, I guess next week, the world is gonna descend on New York at UN General Assembly, which maybe you don't have to go do anymore. I'm gonna get to go. But where do you see, you know, there's NATO, but how the U.S. plays in these multilateral forms that affect the transatlantic partnerships. We still have a foot in the door there? Well, I do a lot of work with Madeleine Albright, who's a wonderful American, and she has a great way of capturing things and phrase, and she said, you know, Americans don't like multilateralism. It's got too many syllables and it ends in an ism. And she's right. You know, these big bureaucratic institutions, the underlying fear that conservatives has is that we're surrendering sovereignty to these multinational institutions to the detriment of our own ability to be captains of our fate, if you will. I think that reflects an overestimation of just how powerful most of these multilateral institutions are. I used to have this debate with President George W. Bush, because every once in a while he would say, well, that's a problem I don't wanna deal with. Let's give it to the United Nations, and I would say. Mr. President, if you give it to the United Nations without America being engaged, you're basically saying, we're not gonna solve that problem. Because these multilateral institutions only work if the key countries who are members of them are willing to use them in an effective way to solve problems. And I think it's in our interest to do so. They bring other people to the party or to the problem. They give us a legitimacy, which we don't have if we act alone. We shouldn't be slave to them, but we should recognize that they are enormous instruments for American influence because we can really have an enormous impact on what they do. So I think this whole issue about multilateralism is a misdiagnosis of those institutions, of giving them more credit and more power than they have, and failing to appreciate how much they really can be enormous tools for American influence values and interests. So let's go to some chaos that's not in the US, and that goes to you, Mr. Freed. Something called the UK is making the US look like we're just got it all together. So share with us Brexit, a little snap election potentially coming up. Give us your insight of what in the world is going on over at the UK, but more importantly, what's the UK-US relationship right now, and what does it mean to this whole conversation we're having about the international global order and the transatlantic new era? That's actually the right point. What's happening in the UK, what's happening in American politics, what's happening in politics of a lot of European countries is basically national versions of the same trend. That is a widely varying versions of doubts about the international system that the United States has led since 1945 in which we expanded after 1989. And a lot of these issues have to do with what Steve described as fears about sovereignty challenged by the UN in the US case or the EU in the case of the British or a kind of cultural globalism at the expense of national traditions and national feelings. And these are powerful forces. If you want to be, so Steve isn't alone in his pessimistic phrasing, it's as if we were inoculated in 1945 against the disease of nationalism and the inoculation begins to wear off so we start flirting with it. Now, I don't believe that's how we're gonna end up, but it is certainly where we and the British are and a lot of other countries. It's a challenge to the international order more profound than any since the 1930s when we thought that the great authoritarianisms, the communism and Nazism, a lot of people thought they were the wave of the future. I'm being harsh, but such was the sentiment. The British have been, the British love being the guides to the energetic but needful Americans. Here, we're still the colonials and they're very good at giving us advice about how to play Europe. And this is a good thing because actually the Brits are awfully good at this and we do need their advice. I needed it when I was negotiating with the EU on various issues. And the loss, the post-Brexit loss to the United States will mean we will know the EU will be bereft of a major contributor and we will lose a major friend in the EU. Now, it's a job of diplomats to make things work afterwards and so on. People are thinking about the workarounds and how you tie things together and I'm sure we'll do our best and we will get somewhere. But it's a problem. The underlying solution is not just whatever wiring diagrams post-Brexit we can put together, but how we deal with the underlying challenges to reaffirm, renew our vows and fix the problems that brought us here. And American leadership is going to be critical in articulating that way ahead. Students recognize there's definitely a theme from these two. But while we're on this transatlantic challenges, Brexit being one of them, and the loss of the EU as a player here, I wanna pick up one more for you, Steve, and I'm sure there'll be others. There are, we're all watching major demographic and political shifts in Europe and I want to pick on two of them and have you respond. And you mentioned a little bit, both of them in your opening, but I wanna dig a little deeper. We are seeing more displaced people throughout the world but particularly, obviously, happening out through up than any time since World War II. The populist movements you talked about rising up, battles are brewing as we're talking about between this inward push and open societies and we're seeing authoritarian rise in a way we probably never predicted at this period of time, not just in Europe but elsewhere. And I'm really interested in your commentary about what America should be doing or could be doing on the mass migration going on in Europe in this rise of authoritarianism because I hear it all the time, I know we heard it with some of the students earlier, that this is a worry spot and how American leadership can make a difference when you see some of these currents happening all together and bringing a less settled world. And we'll talk about fragility in a little bit but I want your take on the mass migration of authoritarian rise. So one of the things that America has traditionally done is we've been in the lead on humanitarian assistance. I'm not sure how much support it's had among the American people but the American elites have certainly supported it. That's pretty good, it's pulling. And this administration is part of its concern, reflecting the concerns Americans have about immigration is allowed it to spill over to being fairly hostile to humanitarian assistance. I think that's a mistake. I think humanitarian assistance is just one of the things we Americans have already done, have always do. But one of the reasons and why it's important is that the fact of the migrations that have almost broken the political systems in Europe is in part a function of American policy. It's about Syria and the migrations and the pressure on Europe that brought you the rise of the parties on the right and Brexit in some sense was the result of Syria. And we really need to start looking at the lessons. A lot of people looked at Iraq which is not a popular war these days and says, well, we should never do that again. And then we had Syria and because we were concerned about not making another Iraq, we stood by as Syria melted down. And a number of us were saying, if you don't address Syria, you are going to, more people are going to die. It is gonna be open the door to extremism. It is gonna destabilize the region because of terrorism. What we didn't think is that it would destabilize the region and destabilize Europe politically because of the refugee flows. So, yes, we have a role, I would argue, for humanitarian terms to try to deal with refugees' flows and other humanitarian disasters. But what the United States really does is lead the world to address the underlying problems that can give rise to those kinds of refugee flows. And that's where I think the stepping back of the United States from global leadership runs a risk of effects that are contrary to our interests and will ultimately affect American security. The other piece we've done is to stand for the principles of freedom, democracy, human rights, rule of law. And those are now being questioned. And we've had this debate. How much should American foreign policy reflect its ideals? How much should it reflect the realistic interests that Americans have? I've always felt that the highest American interest is to have a world that reflects our ideals because it'll world be more congenial to American interests. But that is now under some questioning. And I think it is important for the American, America to stand for those ideals. One, to show that they can produce a political and economic system that provides prosperity and security to our people. But also to be that beacon to the world and to give hope to those people who endorse those ideals in authoritarian societies so that when the moment comes, they feel they have a friend in making political and social change. There's a view around that authoritarian are having their day and people point particularly to, the Middle East is an example of that. Well, guess what? Democracy and freedom and people's desire for that is not dead. And if you don't believe it, look what's happening in Algeria where the people have organized and are moving past an authoritarian state. Look what is happening in Sudan. And there are other examples in Europe. America is right. Our values and principles do reflect the deepest longing of the people. And if people are given a choice free from coercion between authoritarian and democracy and freedom, they will pick democracy and freedom. And we need to be a beacon for those values and interests to keep hope alive, as Jesse Jackson used to say, that freedom and democracy indeed are gonna be the way of the future. You're here. Thank you. That was wonderful. I'm gonna cover one more topic before opening up to everybody. I love that when I asked the audience who might wanna pursue a career in diplomacy, a lot of hands went up. So I wanna ask you a little bit about diplomacy. A mutual friend of Oliver's, Ambassador Bill Burns, retired with the highest US Foreign Service rank of anyone in history, became the deputy secretary of state and he recently wrote a book. I think he was here not too long ago called The Back Channel. And he wrote, it's basically a glimpse into the state of diplomacy. And I wanna share with you just in a little short excerpt of excerpt from his book and I'm gonna get your reaction in a couple of questions. He said, short of war, diplomacy is the main instrument we employ to manage foreign relations, reduce external risk and exploit opportunities to advance our security and prosperity. It is among the oldest of professions but it is also among the most misunderstood and the most unsatisfying to describe. Yet, it has never been a more necessary tool of first resort for American influence. Its rebirth is crucial to a new strategy for a new century. One is that it's full of great peril and even greater promise for America and I think it's already playing out in the comments that we're having here. So Dan, I wanna start with you first. One of the things we were talking about earlier is over the past three years I've already mentioned we've seen this attack on cuts to diplomacy. Ron and I were talking about 80 senior leadership posts remain vacant at state USCID, DOD. There are 40 ambassadors that have yet to be filled. Key positions in Jordan, Japan, Pakistan, half of those nominees are literally sitting in the Senate just not confirmed. We also know that because of all these slowdowns a lot of mid-level very talented people have just said I'm done and they actually have retired from the foreign service. I'm gonna encourage all of you to keep going. We're gonna talk about that. But I do want you to comment about what is the impact on your profession? Diplomacy has never been popular. It's in America, it's considered to be elitist, striped pants, cookie pushers, was an epithet back in the 50s and 60s. Foreign service officers sometimes wear nice suits and sometimes they wear body armor. All those people that we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan and not to fortified embassies, they were out there with the troops. It can be dangerous work. Diploma ambassadors with rank and clout can influence things in the country to which they're assigned. And lower ranking chargés just can't do the same. Washington can't run relations with all countries all the time. Some of them are 12 times homes apart. Can't even make a phone call. You need people on the ground. And you need people on the ground who are both, as I said earlier, realist, realistic small r, but also mindful of those larger principles that Steve Hadley laid out, which is that freedom ultimately appeals to people's deeper natures. Because authoritarianisms rip them off and people get tired of being hit up by bribes and having their future foreshortened. Which is why, by the way, the Hong Kong protesters, some of them are waving American flags. And diplomats have to work with what is the day-to-day reality and the larger interest. And when you cut the budget, it cripples our ability to get stuff done. For years during the Cold War, the United States, through various means, promoted democratic dissidents. And we helped solidarity in Poland. And every year, Congress would consider us complete failures because the metrics of, you know, what were the metrics of success? So from 1984 to 1987, we were all idiots. We were obviously wasting the taxpayer money on silly programs. And from 1986 to 1989, we all became geniuses who would change the world. State department budgets and foreign assistance budgets can be used to great effect. And sometimes this stuff really works. You know, if President Trump put to me the question, you know, what good did our foreign assistance to Poland do? Well, I would say, hey, they tripled their GDP per capita in one generation. And they're buying a lot more American stuff. That's pretty good. You know, and that's what, and success, you know, success looks like that from one measure and success from another measure means cities flourish and people are happy and they can go on to complain about other things. And failure, when you fail, the bodies stack up real fast. The consequences are real. Yeah, it's real. And since you haven't asked that, but I'm gonna jump in anyway to say that any of you that are considering diplomacy as a profession, don't be discouraged. I am gonna ask that at the very end. Okay, okay, I'll hold it, I'll hold it. I'll hold, I just have to lay out that marker. No, this is, that's the closer. But Steve, I do want you to talk about why, because we talked about it earlier, why you're, why this is important. Meaning why a diplomacy center here is important. You, you get your, we live on the coast. So we live in an elite arena. So you grew up in the Midwest. What's the important know about why is your diplomacy center here? Well, one of the things that's important about this center and why I think it's such a terrific thing that you too have done to put University of Michigan on the map with this is the policy debate is really driven by the two coasts and dominated by the two coasts. And that does not reflect, I think, an important perspective for this country. And I think it's terribly important to have a diplomacy center in what I consider the heartland of America, the thing that keeps the two coasts together, you know? So they don't drift off. I think it's terribly important. And I think you will have a perspective that you don't get on the coast. And one of the things we were talking about is how can we take the work that is done here and find a way a transmission belt so it can have an impact on policy. So I think it's, it's terrifically important. And I salute the two of you for what you've allowed these folks to do here. I have also been a strong voice in resisting the cuts in our non-defense national security portfolios, which is diplomacy, development, democracy, promotion, and others. But I'm gonna go off script a little bit here. You can, go for it. And I love Liz, because Liz is the leading edge of the fight for maintaining funding and support for these non-military aspects of national security portfolio. She is a national resource of an enormous importance. But in parallel with that effort to defend what we've got, I think we still have to start asking questions about what diplomacy looks like in the 21st century. And I'll give you two examples. The military is the biggest advocate for the non-military aspects of our national security toolkit. Because they get into these wars, they deal with the bad guys and in a place like Afghanistan, you can't kill your way to peace and the military are the first people to know it. And they depend on our diplomats and our other experts to try to build a diplomatic and a civilian future that avoids us needing to deploy our military forces. So we go into Iraq and Afghanistan. We have these wonderful captains and majors who in Iraq, for example, defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq. And then they're being told, well, you got to help the Iraqis rebuild. You got to get the energy grid up. You got to get economic activity going again. You got to help them build non-corrupt political institutions and the military folks say, we're not trained to do that. Where are the civilian capabilities? Well, we've invested in our military. We have the world's greatest military. And we've been under-invested in all of those civilian capabilities that the military needs so they can finish their job and go home and not have to go back. And so we started asking our diplomats who were trained to do what Dan was talking about, to look around the corner and see what's happening in political countries. We suddenly put them as heads of operations to get electricity grids going back up again. And we asked them to do things that they were not trained and prepared for. And so one of the questions is, as part of our diplomacy, do we need to have a different skill set that is in our society but is not in our foreign service that we can mobilize to help in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Iraqi people and the Afghan people rebuild their economies, their political structures, their social structures and the like. Another example, al-Qaeda started to use social media and all those communication things that were made and invented in America and used them against us in a very effective way. And they beat us in the communication war day in, day out. So I convened a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the people who did communications in the various government agencies to figure out how we're gonna counter al-Qaeda. And they all looked like me. They were guys with gray hair who knew how to do press releases. Well, that's not gonna get the job done. So we then had an invitation to the CEOs of various companies of Silicon Valley to come in and they were all young, no ties, long hair and they knew how to do this job and we got some recommendations. There is a whole new theater for operations which is information war, countering disinformation that we're getting whether it's al-Qaeda or the Russians. This is a theater of operations. Again, we turned to the State Department. We haven't developed the kind of resources needed to do this. So it's the skill set of the 21st century and beyond of a diplomat. It's obviously so different from when you both started your skill, your career. What are the three or four things that weren't even on the radar screen? So certainly economics, communications. What are some of the other ones that they did? They should be thinking about it. And the question is, do you try to bring them in the foreign service and train foreign service officers to do that? Or? Or do you have a system that basically says we're gonna bring elsewhere from the society those kind of capabilities? Okay, and I'm sure they'll have some questions. If you're, to build on what Steve was saying, if you want to combat al-Qaeda or ISIS disinformation, you're not gonna have, even the Silicon Valley people can't do it because they're not Arabic speakers. You need to reach out to native speakers of the language in two ways. One, there are a lot of Arab Americans. Recruit them, bring them in. When I joined the foreign service in the mid-70s, it was still, if you pardon the expression, just emerging from being a white boys club. It's changed. Our advantage as a country is that we are a universal nation. Everybody gets to be an American. Well, I want native Arabic speakers working with pro-democracy Arab activists. They're the ones who are gonna come up with the counter-messaging. You know, how do you think we did it in the Cold War? CIA in one of the smarter moves started working with European socialists who didn't much like the Truman administration, but they hated Stalin and they were awfully good at fighting Stalinist propaganda because they could detect it in ways that, frankly, most American diplomats hadn't a clue. Well, figure it out. We need to take advantage of the true nature of American society, recruit those people and then have them work with activists in countries and empower them and let them go and please don't give it to the press office at the State Department. Now, working on the press room is time-scaling. There's a lot of reform. They just, for the first time, the current spokesperson at the State Department, Morgan Ortegas, showed up at the briefing and she said, look, we finally instead of having an old-fashioned briefing book had it on the iPad yesterday. So it's great. Okay, so with that, we want you to take over the conversation. We haven't even touched Afghanistan and Russia and we talked a little bit about Iraq and Syria a little bit but it's all up to you. So the two of our students are gonna take over and ask questions and get your questions in and we look forward to it. Introduce yourself so everybody knows who you are. Hi, my name, all right, good. Hi, my name is Tavila Kiryazis. I'm a senior in the Ford School of Public Policy, B.A. program. I was very lucky this summer to work for the Greek ambassador to UN thanks to the WIZAR Diplomacy Center. So thank you for that. And I think I was at the discussion with students earlier today and I think we had a very important discussion about leadership. More specifically, we spoke about in the United States but I'd like to know what your personal challenges have been as an American, building relations with other countries and how you face those challenges and what advice you could offer to future leaders in diplomacy who are representing America in that sense. Let me take both questions. So give us one example of a tough situation you had representing the U.S. with leadership. Introduce yourself. Okay, so hello. My name's Edward Elliott. I'm a master's student here at the Masters of Public Affairs at the Ford School. Before coming here, I helped set up a think tank in the U.K. called the British Foreign Policy Group. So working on transatlantic relations as part of that and one thing we didn't mention about Brexit, it's great to have something to bond over here with Americans and to build the transatlantic relationship. We can cry over it, right? Exactly. So my question has a sort of national security focus and in this last year in the U.K. and the national security strategy for the first time in quite a few years, state-level, so state actors sort of climbed above non-state acts and terrorism in terms of the security threat to the U.K. So my question is, do you see this as a case that's gonna be happening in America too? And how do you see that potentially affecting transatlantic relations? I mean, in the case of the U.K., a lot of it is from Russia and the whole Skripal poisoning, Novichok case and played a big part of that. So I'm interested to hear your opinions on that. Great, so you could each take one or why don't you start with the leadership challenge? Where did you find yourself struggling? And then if you wanna take state, you can take both if you want. So my second to last job in government was the, as you pointed out, first one was for the closure of Guantanamo and I had to try to talk foreign governments into accepting transfer of Guantanamo detainees when the United States wouldn't accept any ourselves. That was an obvious challenge. How'd it go? Not bad, I got 70 transferred, 40 to third countries. The way I approach this or the way a diplomat should approach any problem is figure out what argument works and understand whom you're talking to and what do they want? What pressures are they under? It especially worked if the government had slammed the Bush administration because of Guantanamo for years and years and years so I just told them that good news, you get to help end the problem that is so upset you. They didn't have to like that argument but if it would play well in their press, they'd sort of have to help. This is an example of playing an issue politically but not in a partisan way. What are the politics of an issue and how can you make it work? But an adage is always tell the truth and act with honor. Never lie, ever, ever. People have got to understand that your word is serious and you will always tell the truth and that's not old school. That's necessary school. So work the politics but never lie. Terrific. Steve. Give you two examples. When I was deputy national security advisor, President Bush sent me over to talk to Ariel Sharon. This was earlier in the Bush administration. We wanted to move towards an Israeli-Palestinian peace which would require Israel to give up settlements and Sharon was the father of the settlement movement. Sure was, yeah. So I was sent to persuade him that we had to look for a Palestinian peace and I had a letter from the president. I sat down with him and I said, Prime Minister, the president needs to understand your view about settlements and he has instructed me to come here and sit here and ask you to tell me everything he needs to know about your view on settlements and I'm not supposed to come back to Washington until that's been done. Bill Burns was with me on that trip. He thought I was crazy and Sharon was stunned and he looked at me and he said, you know, no one's ever asked me that question before. So I would say you start out by the most important thing in intra-country relations is respect. Showing respect for the other person and willingness to listen and want to understand their views. Because once you do that, it allows you to do what James A. Baker III was really skilled at with Shevard Nazi during the Cold War period is to take the things we need and structure them in the language and in terms of what Shevard Nazi needed for the Soviet Union at the time. Before you go to your second story, just underline that that's kind of the base. Oh, okay, I was going to say that's the basis of we listen. That we were talking about earlier is the students that are here, how many have gone to a we listen program? Quite a few of you. So this is when you show respect by just listening to the other. Show respect, listen, put yourself in the other person's shoes and let that drive your arguments. So you're just one of the really significant example at the highest level of national security. State, non-state, state actors. Look, we've, as a country, we've been worried about non-state actors. We need to continue to be worried about non-state actors but we took our eye off the emergence of China. We've now got a corrective. We've had a little strategic panic. We sort of overreacted. I think we're in the process of developing a strategy which will allow us to deal with the challenge of China. Let's take these two. Each of you have one. And please, again, introduce yourself. Jen. I think it'll just go on. Okay. Gentlemen, first off, thank you for being here. My name's Matthew Reagan. I'm a first year MPP student. Also, I'm a member of the military, sir, and exactly what you said about Afghanistan is 100% true. I was trained as an artilleryman. I have absolutely no idea how a water filtration system works. But my question is kind of, we mentioned earlier in regards to American values and kind of the difference between American values and maybe other parts of the world. My question in relation to specifically Afghanistan and Iraq is some people have said we have certain values and we may be trying to push those values as we rebuild those countries and those societies. How do you gentlemen see, I guess, a clash of values there? And how do we reconcile American values without compromising American values as we try to put in structures and organizations in those countries that will be effective for that population? Great. And I'm sure everybody would be interested in either of your perspective what you think might happen. Okay, you're Afghanistan and let's go over here. Hello, I'm a little nervous. I'm a senior. You have them studying history and economics. My question was about the US Navy. And as you may know, maybe we have like the forward class carriers coming out, like aptly named. The US has been able to kind of dominate the waters in a way that hasn't really been seen, like kind of like post World War II. And I was just wondering like how that affects US diplomacy and specifically with China, how we are talking about rivalry with China, like how does that affect the conversations with China when they're a export, import-based economy and likely control the waters? Great question, great. Afghanistan and Navy. Let me, if I can, use Iraq as an example. Sure, please. So we went into Iraq to deal with what we thought was a national security challenge of an Iraq that pursued weapons of mass destruction, supported terror, invaded its neighbors and oppressed its people. And we tried for 12 years through sanctions and inspection regimes and diplomacy and UN resolutions to fix that problem. We couldn't, so we removed Saddam Hussein by military action. The question then was, what obligation do we have to the Iraqi people? Do we just put another, allow a new Iraqi general to take control of the country so long as they didn't pursue weapons of mass destruction and invade their neighbors and support terror? And President Bush decided, we are Americans, we stand for certain values and principles. We have an obligation to give the Iraqis an opportunity to establish a democratic regime that respected human rights and rule of law if that's what they chose to do. So you could say that was about American ideals, but it was also very realistic and pragmatic. Because the judgment was Iraq with Sunni, Shia and Kurds would not stay together as a country with those three groups living at peace with one another if there wasn't a democratic framework in which they could all participate in defining a common future for Iraq. So there's a case where both if you're a realist or if an idealist, it left you in the same place. Now, helping Iraq provide that democratic future for itself has been a lot harder than we thought. We made a lot of mistakes. But you know, they just may make it. Great. Do you want to comment on where you think Afghanistan is right now? Afghanistan is, we will see. I think that actually a peace dialogue will resume, but it needs to be reframed. Because in the end of the day, the Afghan people have to work out their own peace. And we've got to get them at the table with the Taliban and with us to try to define a common future. And secondly, we've got to get a ceasefire because it's intolerable politically for the Afghan government to sit down and negotiate with the Taliban if every day they are killing Afghans. Ambassador Fried about the cease, the challenge. So the position of the US Navy, particularly in the Pacific illustrates the advantages of the exercise of American power and why a broad definition of American interest works better than a narrow definition. So the Trump administration argues in one of the best documents it's issued, the national security strategy document that General McMaster put together, that we've re-entered a period of great power competition. And China is one of those competitive great powers. Well, the US Navy, acting in the service of general security in the Pacific, including the Western Pacific is a tremendous asset because it lets all the other countries that aren't China know that we are present and present to enforce the principles of open sea lanes, which has been an American principle for 100 years. Now, President Trump sometimes undercuts his own national security document when he suggests that the exercise of American military power is mistaken or we should withdraw because other countries like South Korea aren't pulling their weight. But in fact, the presence and strength of the United States Navy makes it easier for us to come up with a reasonable approach to dealing with the rise of China and to make sure in the 21st century and to help make sure that that rise happens in a way that is compatible with the larger American interests, which is the challenge Steve is talking about. It's not that I'm talking about using the Navy to threaten China. I'm just saying that having the Navy there opens the conversation in a way that is favorable to American interests. We're making the world a better place and doing well for ourselves at the same time. That's the American way. That is America first properly understood as opposed to America first understood in a narrow sense. So as a diplomat, I love going to Paycom, you know, talking to understanding what the Navy needs and helping them. But it doesn't matter what I think it's the countries like Vietnam and Indonesia and Malaysia to say nothing of Australia and Taiwan really like American strength. It helps us deal with the large strategic problems that we face. Great, thank you. Do you want to take more? Hi, thank you. My name is Michael Weiss. I'm a first year MPP student here and we've talked about various security issues and I'm curious about one that hasn't been brought up and that is climate change and the energy markets. And I'm curious to see what role diplomacy plays in a post-Paris situation. Great question, great. And Edward, do you have one? Hello, I'd like to thank you all again for holding such a talk on a seminal issue like this. My name is Harris Missler. I am a first year MA student at the International Institute and I would actually like to hold the question on how can the US deal with an ally that presses against its interests? Specifically in mind, I have Turkey that tends to push against the YPG, other Kurdish parties that have helped the US in its fight against ISIS, as well as the S-400 issue that was happening recently and its antagonism with Greece and Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Okay, two great questions. All right, who would like to take- I think Dan should answer both of them. I figure. See, he's such a good, he's such a good diplomat. He got that one out first. So Dan, you could take one, throw the other one to him. You're getting Turkey, I can tell. It's a climate change. No, no, I'll take climate change. And climate change, well, take climate change, but it's these geopolitical threats. Today, it used to be country to country and today we're really dealing with some big geopolitical threats from where does diplomacy come in? So, what really kills me about climate change is that compared to 20 years ago, technological solutions are much closer at hand. You know, 20 years ago, wind and solar were fringe industries. Now, I think Iowa produces close to 50% of its electricity through wind and that's up from 22%. You know, three years ago when I drove through Iowa and picked up that statistic, that's big business, that's money. Between technology which allows us to have alternatives to the internal combustion engine, hybrid technology and wind and solar and the economies of those, this is not as insolvable a problem as it appeared a generation ago when people started thinking about it. So, one, there are solutions that are at hand. Now, you know, that solution's also gonna probably involve nuclear power and I wonder what Merkel was thinking. You know, appeasing the Greens when she decided to leave coal and nuclear at the same time, meaning that she's gonna be more dependent on Russian gas. Like, whoops. But these are all, you know, these are still fixable problems. This isn't the realm of the possible, so that's one. Two, you can't fight something with nothing. You know, I remember in the early Bush administration when we left, you know, the Kyoto Accord and we all knew pretty early on that was a mistake. And you need, if you're gonna leave the Paris Accord you better come up with a credible climate plan. Right now we don't have one. But we're gonna need one. The politics are gonna push us in that direction anyway. But this is in the category of, this is fixable. It's just a matter of going out and doing it. The politics in our country, or rather, President Trump's views don't permit that right now. But this is, in theory, not a problem with solutions at hand. I'm a relative optimist on that if we can get our head in the right place. I will just add a couple points that I think are useful to think about it from the diplomacy side. There is a lot going on at the state and local diplomacy side. And on the private sector diplomacy side. Significant activity and frankly the private sector side is so far ahead and the governors and the mayors are way ahead of where the federal government is. So where it may not be happening at the State Department and the traditional diplomats of how we're talking about it here. It's happening at the non-state diplomatic actor level at a super speed level, number one. Number two is it's really interesting to look at some polling data on this. There was a poll that came out today that showed overwhelming Americans as you know where they feel about climate but was interesting on the Republican side. It's the first time we're seeing higher numbers on the Republican side believing that we have to, America has to lead on climate. 60% are Republican and when you look at 40% and younger Republicans, they look like Democrats. So this will change eventually in terms of where this country is going on climate. It's just a matter of time. So I think the diplomacy question is a great question. It's not happening at State Department, it's happening elsewhere. So do you want to hit climate or do you want to just move right to Turkey? I'm gonna take a broad question then I'll hit Turkey and I'll be brief. This discussion is terribly important and it's why we should be optimistic about the future of our country. Sam Huntington who's known for clashes civilizations also wrote a wonderful essay about American declineism. He says every 15, 20 years someone decides that America is in decline. He said I've been through four of them and the only good thing about them the only good thing about them is that they galvanize the Americans to pull up their socks and address their problems. Secondly, this is a country that reinvents itself that's the genius of America but we reinvent ourselves from the bottom up not the top down and this Paris Climate Accord is a good example. The Trump administration takes it out of the climate accord so the states and the corporations and nonprofit organizations say we're gonna comply with the Paris Climate Objectives anyway. That's how this country does it. So if you wanna know the future of the country get out there and see what's happening at the state and local level cause that's our future. Turkey, four points. Terribly important country. You know, very exasperating, difficult to deal with it. I've been dealing with them often on for decades. They are tough. Two, they have their own point of view. They are a huge victim of our inattention to Syria. They've been housing three to four million Syrians. This is not a wealthy country. It's taking services and money away from Turks in order to take care of Syrians and they've done it really without complaint. The PKK has killed lots of Turks. It is a real terrorist threat. So they have their own point of view. We're working these issues issue by issue. The real problem is an underlying problem about democratic decay. When Erdogan came in and the AKP came in for six or seven years, they were the hope of Turkey with political and economic reform that we all cheered. But you know, they, he stayed too long in power and the Turkish political system didn't find a way to get rid of him because the opposition parties were weak and he took over the AK party and there was no alternative. That's the real underlying problem in Turkey. It is a regime that has stayed too long and a country that political system has not figured out a way to get rid of Erdogan who has not gotten better with age as a leader. That's the underlying problem. And that's not something we can do much to address. Great. Let's take some more. All right, thank you very much. My name is Victor Atain coming from Kenya, first year MPP student. My question is with regard to Africa. So, given the current state of affairs including the emergence of China and the fact that for a long time the US has been involved in humanitarian assistance, what do you think is the US, in the next, thinking about the next 10 years, what foreign policy positions do you think the US should take towards Africa? Towards Africa. Okay, great. Let's take one more. Thank you very much, Akbar Zadran from Afghanistan, master's student in Ford School. You talked about Cold War. For me, it was really hot. Because in that war we lost 1.5 million people of our country, including my family members. After that Cold War, during the Cold War, United States and the international community, especially those countries covered by NATO, they were very supportive to us. I was living in a camp in Pakistan. We were getting all the support of Western society, especially United States of America. But after the end of Cold War, the Western forgot us. And we went into a civil war. And that finally resulted in so many devastation, including the rise of Taliban that we see today. How do you see this, for me it was a mystic. How do you see in light of foreign policy as well as diplomacy of United States, which I said mystic. And the last comment that I would say is that all these things that have gone in my life in 40 years, they make us look so bad. They make us that Afghan people, the people of Afghanistan are always one fight. But that was not the case. Fight was, war was imposed on us. Our country was invidious. Let's get to the question. But I think you got it. Okay, thank you, thank you. I think we got your question, thank you. All right, so we have Africa, Afghanistan. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do a quick lightning round and ask you some final questions before we close up. So you wanna do Africa? I'll do Afghanistan. Africa, and you'll get this gentleman's question. Okay, I'm sorry, which one? I would do Afghanistan, if I could. Oh, okay, all right, please. I think the premise of your comment is correct. I think that the United States allowed a problem to grow in Afghanistan and it reached out and hit us hard on September 11th, 2001. And that illustrates a larger point, which is that we can close ourselves in, but we cannot shut out the world. That American leadership isn't a luxury. It's a necessity for our own interests. And when problems that arise in a far corner of the world can grow and hurt us, that doesn't mean we are the world's policemen. That doesn't mean we have to run every country, but it does mean that the world is no longer a place that we can simply write off. So I think you are correct. And I think that part of the struggle that the US is having with the current negotiations with the Taliban is that we don't wanna end up in a situation where we get to leave Afghanistan and leave it to the Taliban as they were. Like, okay, we're gonna make the same mistake twice. What's the deal that's acceptable to us? So I think your point is right and I'm glad you made it. On Africa, I think it's a problem in all administrations that we don't pay enough attention, either to Latin America or to Africa. I think the Bush administration has a pretty good record on that, but I think we've kind of gone to sleep on Africa again. And my concern is that we will refocus attention, not because it's Africa, but because we're worried that the Chinese are going to establish their own control in Africa, in a way contrary to our interests. And what we should be doing is doing, I think what Americans can do well, is identifying those countries in Africa that have leaders that want to build governments that are not corrupt, focus on providing services and better life for their people, and partner with those leaders to help them realize that they're not to help them realize their vision for their country. And that's what we should be doing. All right, so I'm going to round up with what I call a lightning round. I did this with your friend Madeline Albright. I've done this with Jim Stravidus. We'll see how the two of you do, which means as a diplomat, you can't talk long. I'll tell you one funny story. I said this to the UN Secretary General. I'm moderating with him and I said, I'm going to do this. It's like being on Moring Joe, where you don't, but I'm not going to cut you up like Joe Scarborough. But you have to go really fast. And he says, what's Moring Joe? I said, okay. So I'm going to throw out. Ascendance each. It's like ascendance each. And every one of these topics, you could go on for an hour, but you're not allowed to. So this is really hard and you can pick one. You guys get to throw out a few too, but let me start. These are ones I've been taking notes. We've covered a lot of my list. Venezuela. I told you, this is hard. If this was easy, I wouldn't have two brilliant people with me. This is an example of a leader that has destroyed his country. Ooh, okay. And we need to support the opposition. And I think at some point, they will prevail and Maduro will go. Okay. You can skip it or you can be like those game shows where you can go, okay. Russia. No, do you want Venezuela? He's got Russia. No, no. Russia. I'll take Russia. Russia is an acute problem. More and a threat to its neighbors more than a long-term challenge. A long-term challenge is China, but Russia can do a lot of damage. Resist Russian aggression now. The better to reach a better future which I believe is possible with a different Russia. Okay, Middle East peace. How am I doing so far? Do you, oh, I think you got that one. So sadly, neither the politics within the Palestinian community nor the politics within Israel offer the prospect for any kind of negotiated Middle East peace. And the risk is that if Bibi Netanyahu is re-elected, he will basically unilaterally establish the terms of Palestinian peace, and it may not bring peace. We'll know next week. Iran. I haven't even touched that one. The administration may need to decide whether it wants regime change, a radical change of Iranian behavior across the board, or an improved nuclear deal. It could possibly get an improved nuclear deal. It is unlikely to get radical change across the board, and in the meantime, it is ignoring the one great asset the America has, which is that a large part of Iranian society really likes us. We need to factor that into our calculations as well. Northern triangle. You can pick your... What's that? No. El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, where we're cutting off aid, and they're coming up to the border. This is the problem of fragile states. Fragile states. And we need a strategy, and we need those non-military tools that will allow us to help fragile states build governments that have the support of their people that can provide services and will allow the government to prevent fragile states from either being sources of terrorism, migration flows, or the like. So the idea that we would cut development assistance to the Northern Triangle in order to provide money to build a border wall, I think, is completely backwards. Isis. I don't think I've heard that one come up yet. Um, go get them. Okay. There you go. All right. National security advisor. It's a... It's a great job. Somebody might want it. And if you get a chance to be national security advisor, you ought to take it. Do you know anybody who might want it? Either one of you can take this one. Trade. A good thing. It should be free and fair. Okay. Oh, this one's coming to you. The Democratic candidates and foreign policy. Sorry. It is, it is the election season. I don't know if you watched the debate last night. There were 40 minutes last night. I counted on foreign policy, which was better than any other debate. Don't take it too seriously. My experience is that foreign policy discussions in presidential campaigns is a discussion of straw men or women and red herrings. We have not had a realistic discussion of foreign policy in a presidential campaign and I can't remember when. Too bad. We need it. And a good example of that is the president that you worked for who did some great things, one of the greatest things when it comes to the area I work in on development, talked about that he's not gonna nation build as a candidate. There you go. There you go. So let's do this in our last few minutes. I'm gonna ask you both two last questions. Does anyone want to ask, you can throw out two more lightning round, not questions, but just words. Words, a word that we haven't addressed. Who has a word? Just a word, no questions. European integration and whether Brexit is an obstacle or an opportunity. That's just a, I'm not sure that was a word, but. European integration, good, Brexit, bad. We must deal with the consequences. Okay, who has another one? Just yell it out. The Arctic. The Arctic, we didn't touch the Arctic. Who wants the Arctic? Used to be cold, isn't so cold anymore. Okay, who else? Gentlemen back there, all the way in the back. That you? Yeah. Oh, that one is, yep, okay. Long overdue. There we go. Long overdue. Absolutely, and slow still. Who else? Anybody else? Last one. Last little get, go ahead. Persistence of NATO in... Gotta have it. A good idea. He has a theme, yep. Ah, the Belt Road. China's what? Belt Road. Overhyped. Overhyped, overextended. But it won't go away by itself. We can't fight something with nothing. Commit, compete and win where it's important to us. And let China do the rest. All right, I'm gonna ask them two last closing questions and then John's gonna close it up. So, second to last question is the one I cut you off on. Make the best case to these students here. Both of you, you got about one minute on this and then the last closing question is why should, after all the scary things we just talked about, which is that the world is really in crisis, why in the world would they wanna go into diplomacy? The life is pretty rough. I mean, ask my children, moving all the time. Me on the road for weeks at a time. Oh, you're making this really appealing. Oh, I mean, that's real. Look, and those names on the wall, the fallen Foreign Service officers have died in the line of duty. When I came into the Foreign Service, they were names, now they're names of friends. People I know. I mean, I'm not gonna tell you to join up without, you know, being honest with you, but my God, where else would I have been able to do what I did? It gave, the Foreign Service gave me opportunities that I would have had in no other career. You're a graduate student. Somebody said at this student's round table, they really wanted to make a difference. I got to be there when the Berlin Wall fell. As Condi Rice used to say, to get your hands around history and give it a push. The Foreign Service gave me that opportunity. That's worth a lot. Okay. There's nothing more satisfying and no higher honor than be able to represent your country if your country is the United States of America. That's beautiful. So that deserves a clap. I agree. So, you know, with everything we've said, there was a poll that came out the other day from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that said 70% of our citizens want the US to play an active role in the world. It's one of the highest numbers in years, which is something we should all be proud of. They prefer a shared leadership role. They want us to do it along with our allies and I'm not surprised of that. And there were beautiful numbers of what it means to be American leadership. They want us to be engaged with, Americans want us to be engaged in trade at almost 90% to provide humanitarian aid over 80% promote democracy and human rights. I mean, these are exactly the issues that we talked about. So I'm gonna ask each of you to share one story from your travels anywhere in your 40 years in Foreign Service, your long career going back to Gerald Ford, that said, this is how America leadership really matters. This is, I saw it. I saw it in any storefront, in any embassy, in any village that you visited to remind us why global leadership of America makes a difference. Ambassador Freed. So in the early days, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries in Eastern Europe didn't know whether they could make it at all. Yeah, I mean, they have their politics, things aren't perfect, but they weren't sure they could make it. And I served in the US Embassy in Warsaw and Poles wanted to know, can we do this? Is this possible? No, luckily once they used to say that communism is like taking an aquarium and turning it into fish soup, that's easy. What we're trying to do now is say that's taking fish soup and turning it back into an aquarium. Little more skill is required. And they wanted to know what we thought and could, and they wanted to know that America believed in them. And that may have made, it was a marginal difference, what we thought was a marginal difference, but sometimes on the margins is where history happens. That's a particular example of Steve Hadley's general principle. I was able to say the values that we try to practice in America, try to practice, are the ones which you can take, adapt them to your conditions, and you will succeed. And they believed in us. And in 2014, the Ukrainian demonstrators in Kiev also believed in us. And the Hong Kong demonstrators fly the American flag. We stand for something at our best and countries are willing to forgive us our sins, hypocrisies, failures, blunders, because we stand for something higher and that still means something today. And I am desperate that our country not forget what we have achieved and who we are at our best. Beautiful, thank you. I wanna go in a little different direction. If we wanna get to being our best, there's something people in this room have to do and particularly the young people in this room. You should be confident about the future of this country. I think our values are right, our economy is strong, we have a wonderful education system, we have a tradition of entrepreneurship and innovation. All of it will serve us well. And we have you, which I think is a generation well-prepared to deal with the challenges of that this country is gonna face. But you need to get involved and you need to get involved in politics if you're gonna help lead America back to being America at its best. And if the young people in this country will organize, will get involved in politics, will turn out and vote, you can set the future direction of this country and you should do it because it's your country and it's your future. Please, the time is now. Wow. Time is now. Ladies and gentlemen, John's gonna close up, but please join me in not only thanking Dan and Steve for being here today and the wisdom they shared with us but for their service to our country. Thank you all so much to Liz for moderating, to Stephen Hadley and Dan Fried for those really insightful comments. This is a wonderful launch to the Weiser Diplomacy Center and a fitting tribute to Ron and Eileen Weiser who have created opportunities for those of you in the audience for those who are watching online who are students inspired by this conversation, come get involved, come visit us upstairs on the third floor, sign up for our simulations, our workshops, our other student initiatives, send in proposals for the initiatives for things that you wanna do overseas to engage, to learn, to shape the kinds of skills that you'll be able to deploy in foreign affairs. And for all of you in the room who are watching online, keep coming to our public sessions, Samantha Power, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and many more, we're gonna try to have a rich array that cover both American and international perspectives from a variety of different backgrounds and persuasions as a way to foster this conversation about foreign policy and to make Ann Arbor the hub in the Midwest that everyone thinks of where you come to talk about and learn about foreign affairs. Tell your friends, tell your family members, get them to come to our events, get them to apply to our program. And we look forward to a very exciting year ahead. One more thanks please for the wisers, for our panelists and then come join us for a reception outside.