 So, we've come to the final panel of the day. What does the State Department think the challenges of 2030 will be? And we're really thrilled to be able to have the opportunity for Emory Slaughter, the CEO of New America, who was formerly the Director of Policy Planning of the State Department, to have a conversation with Dr. Kiron Skinner, who is currently the Director of Policy Planning for the State Department, and also Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State. He's a professor who's on leave from Carnegie Mellon University, where she directs the Center for International Relations and Politics, the Institute for Politics and Strategy, and the Institute for Strategic Analysis. Her areas of expertise are international relations, international security, U.S. foreign policy. She's also the W. Glenn Campbell Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. So, we welcome Dr. Skinner. All right. Well, I will start by saying, although I should call you Dr. Skinner, or probably Director Skinner, we've known each other a long time. So, I'm going to call you Kiron. And just this is a historic moment. There are two women, Directors of Policy Planning, sitting before you, something that could not have happened until you were appointed, and it is a particular honor to have you and to welcome you. I actually want to start by asking you to just describe your career a little bit. You and I have similar pathways, and we have known each other for a long time. But how did you come to be Director of Policy Planning? I wish I knew, but I'll try to create a narrative. But I think you're absolutely right, Ann Marie, that we do have similar backgrounds. We were both at Harvard at the same time. You were moving faster than me. I think you were doing two graduate degrees at one time. And I think one of the first to do a PhD in political science and law degree and to get tenure. So, you were a big deal at Harvard in those days, and you still are. But I think for me, the beginning was, and I hope there are some young people left in the audience, but I came to Washington as an intern at 14 years old from the Bay Area. And my parents found a family for me to live with, and I said, I want to be an ambassador one day. I had no idea what that was, but it sounded great, and it meant that I could get away from my house. And so, that hasn't happened, but I did end up studying international relations and political science just as you did as an undergraduate and then on to Harvard and to do my masters in PhD. But along the way, I met so many interesting people in the field, and one of the great things about being at Harvard is that you get exposed to some of the top, I guess, global thought leaders very early. When you make friends, and around age 23, I met Condoleezza Rice, who was a junior faculty at Stanford, and I asked her to be on my dissertation committee as an outside reader. That was important, and met many more people. Later, I ended up doing the research for George Schultz's memoir as still as a Harvard graduate student out at Stanford. So, all of those opportunities very early that come with graduate school, I think made a big difference for me. But then in terms of getting to the State Department, I was on a number of presidential campaigns that I think you would never have been on. We have some differences. George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul, I think maybe we meet in the middle there, and then ultimately the Trump campaign and transition. And I joined all of these because I felt in the 2000s that there were a set of structural changes that have been coming for a long time, even before the new century, both domestically and internationally. And it would take kind of out of a box thinking to address those. And I felt we were stuck in some of the precepts, ideas, doctrines and theories that spoke to our strength and hegemony at the height of the Cold War. But to survive the future, we were going to have to talk to people in the middle of the country, we're going to have to talk about different issues. And for me, that was what got me to the Trump campaign and ultimately the State Department, which I think is a amazing government department. It is the oldest federal department. It's 230 years old this year. We'll be celebrating on July 29th. And it has some of the most committed public servants that I've ever met. I know we all honor the military continuously, but sometimes we forget that we have foreign service officers, civil servants and contractors, along with political appointees who are putting themselves in harm's way and who are just committed to preserving our nation and supporting the world at the same time, right? Well, having gotten you to the State Department, I want to ask you about how you think about our foreign policies. So this is a sophisticated audience and you know the Director of Policy Planning is the in-house think tank. It's the big think job. And it is the place that the containment doctrine was born. Everybody who holds this rule serves in the shadow of George Kennan and containment and the Marshall Plan. And indeed, Marshall said to George Kennan when George Kennan became Director of Policy Planning, avoid trivia. And that's on the coin and various mugs that policy planning puts out. You have written and in 2017, before you took on your current job, but you have written about the Trump doctrine. So I want to start by asking you what is the Trump doctrine? That's a tough one. And so I have written about it and I think it's been evolving. But I say to audiences all the time now that part of my job is to provide the intellectual architecture for the Trump doctrine. If it doesn't happen in policy planning, which is the only foreign policy think tank at state and hence the only foreign policy think tank in the federal government, it will not happen. But I also say that I'm providing the intellectual architecture for the Pompeo corollary and that the two go together. In terms of the Trump doctrine, I think it is in a kind of broad way a set of pillars that address 21st century realities. One, the issue of national sovereignty. And let me just before I talk about it say that what I've been fascinated by is that Donald Trump, who probably has not studied international relations extensively, I think. I think it's a fair statement. And who has been a successful businessman, but who did study at Penn, has ignited or reignited a strong theoretical debate within international relations about America's role in the world and about a lot of concepts that we thought were settled. And one of them is national sovereignty. I mentioned this because I've done some reading by your husband, who was a classmate and officemate of mine at Harvard and Helen Milner, and they're really thinking creatively about these ideas. And what Donald Trump did without attempting to do so is that he's really forced us to go back to first principles and say, where does national sovereignty fit in American foreign policy and in international relations more broadly? It's his view, when he talks about America first, that national sovereignty for whatever its problems and the nation state for whatever problems it may have is the best way to protect people and to allow for prosperity and human rights and civil rights in the world, that there's no comparison. That is important as international organizations and laws are, and indeed they're important. In the hierarchy, the nation state matters. That the UN was founded on nation states. That the League of Nations was founded on nation states. And I think he's been trying to advance the case that the nation state does have some core responsibilities around political and territorial sovereignty that no international organization can take for states. So it's been interesting to watch scholars debate things that we kind of assumed we fully understood. So I think a return to national sovereignty So that's the first pillar of the data. It's a key pillar related to that. It's the national interest that it and not the interest of multilateral or international organizations or transnational actors should guide what a nation actually does. And so let me just speak to that for a moment. I think in all of these principles that he's attempting or pillars to establish, just like theoretical debates understand that there are fundamental contradictions and tensions within them. And so that's my job to think about those. I think the president provides. He provides the hunches and instincts. And it's my job and that of Secretary Pompeo to turn those hunches and instincts into hypotheses. So he talks about the national interest. It's really hard to say sometimes what an objective national interest is. And you know that whole body of literature that talks about it in a very subjective way. And so we're thinking about that hard at the State Department. Another pillar has to do with reciprocity and that international agreements, trade negotiations should be marked by reciprocity that's clearly defined. And that he is, in a way, all of these principles are a critique of what's been happening in the 21st century. Another one is burden sharing. And he fundamentally believes and talks all the time, especially in those big rallies, but also more thoughtfully in his Angus speeches. And when he speaks abroad, that we have to have greater burden sharing simply because the US cannot take on the whole globe, even though we provide extended nuclear deterrence for all of our allies, many of our near allies. And we provide conventional deterrence as well. So I think that conversation has been important during the campaign. As you know, Anne Marie, he talked a lot about NATO. And he talked about NATO in the context of campaigning in those 30 odd flyover states that many foreign policy elites have ignored and that many presidential candidates frankly have ignored. And he said in those speeches that resonated with people that as important as NATO has been, it can't be the case that the US provides the lion's share of defense security for 28 other countries, especially ones like Germany that have the capacity to do more, but that is not a sustainable model. And he stuck to his guns and in the two years that he has been president, NATO countries have put at least $41 billion of additional money into defense spending. Now I know it's multifactorial why that happened, but I have to believe that President Trump insisting on 2% of defense of GDP toward defense has to be a factor. There are other principles, but these are some of the ones that I think most capture the imagination of Americans and that we have to really work harder on them. I will mention a fourth though that I think is important. And a lot of the work is being done at the think tanks in Washington, including your own, which is doing, I think some of the most interesting and innovative work on the future of our role in the world. And that has to do with new regional partnerships. So I was at Harvard about a week ago, they let me back in and so we talked about this issue of multilateralism and partnerships and some were trying to say that we're abandoning multilateralism. And I said, give me the evidence. We did pull out of the Paris climate accord. We did pull out of JCPOA. Then someone said, and you pulled out of INF. I said, no, the Russians pulled out of INF five years ago. This is a bipartisan issue. Most of the multilateral fora, most of the international agreements were still there. They're getting stronger. I think NATO, there was NATO week here in Washington recently and NATO, the foreign ministers emerged more united. There were stronger conversations about our mutual commitments and our mutual threats, which are pretty severe. So I think when you look at the issue of partnerships, we probably aren't creating another NATO very soon. That's the world's most durable security alliance. But there will be ways, I think that we come together in regional partnerships for particular crises, perhaps with the Baltic states and Poland to deal with the Eastern flank threat. The Northern European countries and Britain have talked about partnering with us for others. And in the Indo-Pacific, we have a strategy there that was enunciated early on in the Trump administration to bring nations together to counter China, but there's a lot more. But I think this issue- That sounds a lot like coalitions of the willing. It is, and you've written about this. And I think- There's George W. Bush's signature. But I think that that's in some ways going to be more prominent going forward given the multiplicity of threats. This is a very different century. So if I can summarize- In that way. In that way, and many others. If I can summarize the Trump doctrine, the United States is a sovereign nation guided by its national interests that expects will do for you if you do for us and if we share the burden. Which is a, it's a realist view of the world. It is, it may not be hostile to multilateralism, but it certainly puts the nations first and does not accept many constraints on sovereignty. I was intrigued. I just have to ask, what's the Pompeo corollary? Is there a particular difference there? In fact, Pompeo asked me that very question. And so I said, I'll tell you when I know. But what I think is going on at the State Department under him is that he's attempting to really define in the broad Trump doctrine, which it addresses economic and defense and a broad range of policy challenges. But what I think the Pompeo doctrine is, is trying to find the diplomatic angle in all aspects of what the president's attempting to do. And security, society, the economy, energy, and the international system. And each of those looking at what's the role of diplomacy? Because we have a huge defense department with a big budget and lots of boots on the ground all over the world. We don't have as much at stake as you know. The buildings just physically tell you a bit about the reality, but the budgets tell you even more. And so trying to assert American diplomacy in all of these core areas is what I think the Pompeo corollary to the Trump doctrine will be. And we're working on that. And it's a lot of fun. And we have a diverse group of people in policy planning careers and political appointees. I don't have a political litmus test. If you're good, you're there. Especially on the career side, on the political side, that you do have to bring people in who represent the point of view. But again, some of the most talented people I've ever met in the Foreign Service, in the Civil Service. So I wanted to ask you about how you engage in diplomacy in a world in which, and we've talked about this a lot today, the Presidents essentially said in the National Security Strategy, we see a return to great power competition. So China now and Russia and any other countries I wanted to ask you that you might name are seen as great powers to whom we are adverse, at least much of the time. How does that affect the way the State Department, the State Department as the entire European department which addresses all of Europe and Russia and of course, East Asian Affairs focused on China. How does that affect the diplomacy to now see them as rival great powers? So the National Security Strategy was an important document early on in the Trump administration for all the noise that people talked about at the White House and the fact that we were quickly on to our second National Security Advisor and new deputies. We in record time got a powerful statement in the National Security Strategy of December 2017 and it talked about a return to great power competition and that was General H.R. McMaster's, I think, big insight. I think we've evolved since then that we do have Russia and China as great power competitors. They've been that for a long time. A lot of this is a recognition of the reality that's been on the ground but I think we're differentiating those challenges. Russia is more of a kind of a global survivor, I think, in its great power status but China, we see it as a more fundamental long-term threat. That's not, I think, a partisan issue and one of the ways in which Donald Trump has contributed to a bipartisan foreign policy consensus is on China because at the start of his presidency there wasn't the kind of understanding that China is the long-term threat. It is a real problem. So when you say, you really say threat. I would probably say adversary but I'm not, so maybe I don't have a threat. I think the vocabulary is still evolving and I would agree with you that it is an adversary. It's in this way and it's a long-term fight with China or a long-term competition and it has, I think, historical, ideological, and cultural as well as strategic factors that a lot of Americans do not understand even in the foreign policy community and to map our understanding of the world onto theirs I think is a huge mistake and what we are working on at the State Department is a comprehensive China policy now and a lot of that is being led on the seventh floor at State but in close concert with all of the bureaus who are thinking about this regional and functional at the core of their work now. Is the strategic and economic dialogue still going with China? So Tim Geithner started the, well there had been the strategic economic dialogue led by Treasury. Actually that was under George W. Bush and then when Secretary Clinton came in it became the strategic and economic dialogue meaning the State Department led it not Treasury but I don't know. Yeah so this is a very different administration and what the economists and financial people at the White House got hold of China faster than State did and so they've addressed the China trade problem but what we're doing at State is to say we're in agreement with you on trade but trade is not the only problem and maybe not the biggest in the long run with China and perhaps it's really a symptom of the China problem which has deeper historical and strategic roots than we've understood. We have the Indo-Pacific and the trade side those are the ones that raced ahead faster but we're now looking more deeply and broadly at China and I think State is in the lead in that broader attempt to get something like a letter X for China what Kennan wrote. You can't have a policy without an argument underneath it and what hasn't happened in this century is that we haven't advanced the argument and that's what we're working on both the argument and the broader threat at State and if it will happen it will happen at the State Department so it's different than Russia in that way and it's different as an adversarial dyad than in the 20th century with the Soviet Union in the sense that not to make light of the Cold War and the reality of nuclear war that could have happened and the fact that we came close in some instances but when we think about the Soviet Union and that competition in a way it was a fight within the Western family. Karl Marx was a German Jew who developed a philosophy that was really within the larger body of political thought that reaches the work that you've done that I've been involved with that has some tenets even within classical liberalism and so in that way I think it was a huge fight within the Western family and you could look at the Soviet Union part West, part East but it had some openings there that got us the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 which was a really important Western concept that opened the door really to undermine the Soviet Union a totalitarian state on human rights principles. That's not really possible with China. This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology and the United States hadn't had that before nor has it had an economic competitor the way that we have. The Soviet Union was a country with nuclear weapons a huge red army but a backwards economy and that was the inside of Reagan when the Intel community told him differently. He said I just don't see the signs that it can survive a technology race with the West. So in China we have an economic competitor we have an ideological competitor one that really does seek a kind of global reach that many of us didn't expect a couple of decades ago and I think it's also striking that it's the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian. You sound like Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Some of those tenants but a little bit different and all of those things together are a bit perplexing for the American foreign policy establishment and I think we have to take the rose colored glasses off and get real about the nature of the threat and I think we also have to give a kind of respect for I think what the Chinese seek to accomplish. And I'm gonna turn to the audience in just a minute so start thinking about your questions but I do wanna press you on that. I mean the United States is not all Caucasian right but we're gonna be majority minority by 2050 and so is that even relevant? I mean if I think about the people who will the different races and ethnicities who will make up the United States Caucasians won't be a majority. I think it's extremely relevant because the foreign policy establishment is so narrowly defined. It's more homogenous than probably it should be given our own demographics and that's why I think programs like the one at ASU that you partner with are extremely valuable in terms of developing a new cadre of foreign policy elites but when I look back to who we went to graduate school who populates IR departments at the elite universities it hasn't changed very much and so and look at the faculties of the top 20 IR programs and public policy schools. So I think having diversity and all dimensions really does help you get ready for the future and when you don't have it I think it hurts you and the foreign policy elite community is pretty locked up right now and I hope that that is changing. Floor is open. Yes. It's a pleasure having two heads of policy planning sitting at the same table and one next to each other. I was appointed head of policy planning at the newly formed Iraqi foreign ministry in 2004 with nothing to prepare me for it certainly not a Harvard education but I'm a very conscientious fellow so I went around and I asked people who had made their mark in terms of being policy planners and I met two and they gave me really good insightful comments very pithy very useful that I tried to put into practice. I'll tell you what these are but I'd like what I'd like you to do is to give me your versions of that. So the first person I went to speak with was Richard Haas and he said avoid errors of commission and errors of omission. Excellent guideline. The other person that I went to see was Jean-Marie Gehenno who was at the time at the branch dealing with peacekeeping at the United Nations and his advice was read all the cables. So what would you tell me that I come to see you 10 years ago? So you go first on that one. You're gonna make me go first. So my advice would be assemble all the talent you can and farm them out to as many places as you can. Essentially so that you have eyes and ears not only across the State Department but in the White House and anywhere else you can as people you're secunding around DC. Certainly around the building. I'm not sure I can do that one and you did give me that piece of advice when you visited us a few weeks ago at State and that was a wonderful meeting. Richard Haas also visited. They're all coming in to see me Democrat, Republican alike. They kind of like me, which is a good sign and they've been giving some important advice but here's how I see the Office of Policy Planning at this time. It's one to look backward and forward at the same time to really look for historical precedents as colleagues are making real-time decisions and put differently to make sure that the future has a seat at the table. So one of the ways that I think some of my colleagues in the Bureau or some of our envoys would like to keep policy planning at bay is to say we're doing something purely operational in Syria right now. You're not needed at this interagency meeting. Once I hear that, I'm going to that meeting as quickly as possible to say I'm the future. I'm here to see what you're doing because some things I could say could affect where we are. So I think that looking backwards and looking for historical analogies is critical. Looking backward and forward. Coming at an angle that the bureaus, the regional and functional bureaus can't come at because they're drinking from a fire hose. Our Western Hemisphere Bureau can't do some of the long-term thinking about Maduro and Venezuela because they've got to get to the very next day. And they're putting in 17 hours and by the time they leave, I'm kind of at the tennis court. So I think that the opportunity to give them some long-term thinking is extremely helpful and I've attempted to do that. Also, and this is something that Richard Ha suggested to me, be a second opinion even when a decision has been made. That makes you a bit unpopular at times, especially with your principles, but I think it's necessary. So these are some of the ways that I've been trying to make policy planning relevant. Agreed. Yes, they're in the back. Hydraabity Army War College. The theme throughout the day has been 2030. So looking forward in the future. How do you envision our view of the Korean Peninsula? Whether it be security, geopolitical, or even military force posture in 2030? I think if I had the answer to that, I would pick up a Nobel Peace Prize, but I can attempt to say that it really is our expectation that North Korea will be, or that the Korean Peninsula will be denuclearized. And many have said, well, you've had a couple of summits and that hasn't happened, but we have opened the door for dialogue in a way that prior administrations have not at the presidential or head of government level. I think that's significant. And we've helped build an international coalition to surround North Korea against its nuclear program, to reinforce a number of UN Security Council resolutions that lead to some really crushing sanctions. I think that the long-term impact of all of this will be a Korean Peninsula that looks very different by 2030. Hopefully North Korea that's joined the community of nations and isn't a pariah in the international system. I know that you can come back to me and say, well, President Moon wants peace at almost any cost and wants a peace agreement and on and on and on. But I think we're working really over time on that problem, not just through our talented envoy, but also thinking more broadly about competitive diplomacy in that region of the world. So there are many more questions, but you all have been here since 8.35 this morning and we are out of time and I want to make sure Peter has a chance to give a few closing remarks, but I want to thank Dr. Skinner not only for a wonderful half hour, but also for making sure that the end of the future security forum was about diplomacy. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to go ahead and explain this to Dr. Skinner.