 Good afternoon. On behalf of the Institute for Global Leadership, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the International Relations Program and the Department of Political Science, I'm delighted to welcome you to this afternoon's program on the world in disarray with Dr. Richard Haas and Dean James Stavridis. My name is Eva Kahn. I'm a sophomore studying International Relations and History, and I'm a member of this year's epic colloquium on order and chaos. This afternoon's program will be a conversation addressing the growing challenges in the stability of our international order. We will be questioning the efficacy of the United Nations, American primacy, and regional partners in diffusing and discouraging conflict, as our carefully kept balance has felt more precarious by the day. We will also be exploring solutions that, in the last two and a half decades, we can use to replace the Cold War balance of power with a more meaningful and continuous global order. Before we begin, though, this has been called the Dr. Jean Maire Global Citizenship Award Conversation. Dr. Jean Maire, former president and chancellor of Tufts University, was also a world-renowned nutritionist advisor to three presidents, the US Congress, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Association, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children Fund, and the US Secretary of State. He was the first scientist to speak out against the use of herbicides in the Vietnam War. He led a mission to Biafra to assess health and nutrition conditions, and a year later organized an international symposium on famine, which produced the first ever document on how nutrition and relief operations should be organized in disasters. He was also the first to suggest that using starvation as a political tool was a violation of human rights and should be outlawed. Dr. Jean Maire, the 10th president of Tufts University, certainly was a man whose life and career were, in President Jimmy Carter's words, dedicated to the service of mankind. He truly strove to affect positive change in the world. The Dr. Jean Maire Global Citizenship Award was established in 1993 in honor of Jean Maire to challenge and inspire students and the community by honoring distinguished scholars and practitioners whose moral courage, personal integrity, and passion for scholarship embody his dictum that scholarship, research, and teaching must be dedicated to solving the most pressing problems facing the world. At this February's epic symposium, we recognize Dean Stavridis with this award, and today it is my honor to present it to Dr. Richard Haas. Dr. Haas, the current president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has fulfilled Dr. Maire's dictum to the letter and more. Dr. Haas built his career on a foundation of public service of the departments of state and defense. Throughout the first Bush administration, Dr. Haas served as the president's special assistant and senior director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council and was awarded the President's Citizens Medal for his distinguished contributions to US policy throughout operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield. More recently, Dr. Haas served as an advisor and the director of policy planning for Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2001 to 2003. And he succeeded George J. Mitchell as the United States special envoy for Northern Ireland to help the peace process in Northern Ireland for which he received the State Department's Distinguished Service Medal. At the Council on Foreign Relations and at academic and research positions, Dr. Haas has expanded on his expertise and dedicated himself to raising the quality of nuanced conversation on power politics and world order globally. He is the author of 12 books. In his most recent book, A World in Disarray, Dr. Haas advocates a reorganization of global politics to focus stability and peace in a world that feels more unstable than other. In these interesting times, I am honored to present Dr. Haas with the Jean Mayer Award. Recognition, in recognition of your distinguished career of scholarship and service, combining theory and practice and your leadership in confronting today's most pressing challenges. Feel free to make the remarks. Please thank Eva for that very generous introduction. It's great to be here. A real pleasure to be with my comrade Admiral Stavridis, your dean, who I'm glad to hear you got this award because his career really personifies this, what he's done and what he's doing. Let me say something about Jean Mayer because I think he's really important for students. I've got this theory that history is the result of two things, people and ideas. And he's a perfect example. He's someone who showed a real idea generator and then he took ideas and he put them into practice. So it was policy relevant and he really built his life around it. And that's a pretty good model. And he did a lot of from the outside. He was a good example of how you could have real influence by again being intellectually creative and then being entrepreneurial in how you went about it. So I think he's a good model for all of us about how you can make a real difference. So it's a real honor to receive this award, particularly given some of my predecessors. And it's great to be back on one of the fine institutions in this country. So Eva, thank you for having me. I know the dean and I are gonna have a conversation about one or two of the challenges in the world. And it's hard to imagine anyone to do it. Better to do it well. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, Richard. Southern Command and led the Navy's premier operational think tank for innovation deep blue immediately after the 9-11 attacks. Admiral Stavridis has also published on leadership, politics and statecraft and is an inspiration to students of the Fletcher School and of the world. He's the author of many books, including most recently, The Leader's Bookshelf. Admiral Stavridis and Dr. Haas would either of you like to begin this conversation with some opening remarks? I would simply like to welcome everybody here. I'd like to call this the conversation of my two bosses because I see my Tufts boss here, president of Tufts University, Tony Monaco, distinguished scientists like Jean Maier who has continued that tradition of exemplary leadership in the academy. So sir, great to have you with us, Mr. President. And little known fact, when Lieutenant Jim Stavridis in sort of been about 1981 was ordered over to the State Department as a syncondiment to the Paul Mill branch of State Department, my boss was Richard Haas. And his boss was Richard Burt and then on up the chain. But it's nice to be in a conversation with two wonderful bosses and terrific welcome to Fletcher. And Mr. President, thank you for being here today. You both had a lot more hair then. Yeah, actually, I think you're doing pretty well. You look like a potential donor to me. Richard has written 14 books and his most recent book, I think is absolutely terrific. It's called A World in Disarray, which I think is a pretty wonderful title. But I wanna start, if I could, Richard, by let's go back a hundred years ago. So a hundred years ago, the world is in the middle of World War I. The United States has just joined the fray. Ahead of us is a conclusion to World War I, the failure of the United States to join the League of Nations, a rejection of the international system, the Holly Smoot tariffs, kind of a withdrawal. And boy, that looked like a world in disarray as well. And it turned out really badly. We ended up with a global recession, the rise of fascism, the Second World War, a Cold War in which we almost blow up the planet in the Cuban Missile Crisis. So taking your point, a world in disarray, how bad is it? I get to ask that question a lot. Not quite as elegantly as you asked it, but at least once a day, someone comes up to me on the street and says, how worried should I be? Which is another way of saying how bad is it? Look, if you're not worried, you're in denial. It is bad, but it is disarray, not anarchy or chaos. Which is a way of saying, I think one needs to have perspective on it. And it wasn't inevitable that we reached this point. So nothing's baked into the cake about where we go here. It's actually something I just said I would repeat. There's very little about history. I find, none of you agree with this, that's really inevitable. Yeah, totally. I've now worked for four presidents. And depending upon the president and other people around the table, and what ideas they bring with them and the rest and how the dynamics work out, policies are set. Very little of it is preordained. So moving forward, again, the fact that we arrived at where we are, yeah, some of the reasons are structural. Some of them, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, as Mr. Twain would say. And there are some echoes or rhymes that give me pause. But it took a lot of things we did and failed to do to get us to where we are. Which is another way of saying, if we get some things right or get some things better, we could push back against the forces of disarray. But on the other hand, I'm not gonna sit here and be Pollyanna. We could easily get some things seriously wrong, in which case we could make it a world of chaos or anarchy. That is one potential outcome of where we are. I would just simply say and stop with this, is we're not where we should be. If you think of where we were 25 years ago at the end of the Cold War and where we are now, I actually think we squandered, we, the United States. We squandered a lot of the post-Cold War inheritance. And that ought to be a warning to us. Things just don't work out by themselves. There's very little law that sorts itself out without us, the United States, getting it right. And too often we haven't gotten it right. Yeah. So I agree with that. I would observe at the current moment, it's always important to look at who are the people, the personalities and the skill sets in some of the critical jobs that are gonna drive international policy. So you and I both know the incoming national security team wanna kinda walk us through sex state, sex death, national security advisor. Sure you wanna do that. Yeah, how do those pieces fit together and how's that gonna either enhance or add more disarray to the problem? Well, let me say a couple of things. One is we're still a week away from basically the 100 day, the artificial or arbitrary 100 day mark. Early days. Early days. And this is still a sorting out phase. I think what's made it more so than usual is there's still 100 of empty chairs at the State Department, at the Defense Department, at the White House. Some of the chairs that are filled are filled by people who didn't have directly relevant experience to what they are doing. So I think there's a greater, shall we say, internal disarray than has historically been the case. I hope that gets sorted out, but I don't know, but do you wanna go around? Like, I mean, we can go around the people. I think you've got a Secretary of State who knows a lot about the world. You can't run a thing like Exxon Mobile and not know a great deal about the world, but I think there's two things. He didn't come into the, three things he didn't come into the job with. He didn't come in with experience in government. There's a difference between being an international relations or a world expert and an American foreign policy expert. And thirdly, he didn't have a personal relationship with the President. And it's important that when a Secretary of State speaks, the rest of the world thinks that he or she is speaking for the President. Can't be any daylight there. Someone like Jim Baker, when he had the job for 41, they were best friends, they were lifelong friends. This is qualitatively different. There's an article in the paper the other day that the Secretary of State, he and the President are spending time together. They are getting comfortable with each other, which is great. But there's a curve. I think the Secretary of Defense came into the job with a lot of experience, extremely well read. A lot of experience, what he didn't have was certain kinds of Washington experience, same with the National Security Advisor. Someone who hadn't had interagency at army staff experience. Really smart, man of great integrity, both he and the Secretary of Defense, extremely well read. But lack some of the relevant exposure into some of the issues or some of the processes. I think the bigger question, quite honestly, is the President himself. This is someone who had a career in one form of business, real estate, and hadn't spent any time in government, hadn't spent his time even running a large organization, hadn't been exposed to a lot of these issues in depth. And even when you are exposed to issues in depth as an outsider, very quickly when you're on the inside, you realize the difference between being an outsider and an insider. The level of granularity, shall we say, is fundamentally different. So this is, as the President himself has said, whether the issue was healthcare or U.S.-China-Korea issues, didn't realize it was so complicated. My hunch is he'll have that feeling time and time again. And the real question is whether he and the team around him essentially get comfortable with the issues, understand what it takes to be successful, survive their inevitable first crisis, learn from it and essentially have a constructive trajectory. I can't predict. I would just simply say, I hope so, because they have inherited as tough of an inbox as probably either one of us has seen in the course of our careers. Yeah, I agree with all that. I think, to your point earlier as well, a real handicap is the lack of filling the deputy jobs the next year down. Both Richard and I have been in and around or on National Security Council staff. I think we've both served on the National Security Council staff at one time or another. And so much of international security is done for the United States in these committees that build toward the National Security Council itself finally meeting. That's in irons right now, as I would say, in a nautical setting. So challenges ahead in that regard. Why don't we, as we do sometimes on morning, Joe, dive in on a couple specific crises and... You're not gonna interrupt me, are you? No, I'm not. You're safe with me as opposed to Joe and Mika. So why don't we begin with kind of the crisis du jour? I'm sure you've been out commenting on it. I think we were actually both commenting on North Korea. Kind of set us up a little bit on that one. And boy, has that one been around for a long time. Comes and goes. What do you think? Yeah, North Korea is what I call, it's an example of why foreign policy is not like a good bottle of Bordeaux. Very few issues get better with time. North Korea has been around as this issue really since the early Clinton years, early 90s. Indeed, when I wrote this book, I said, I know I've wrestled with this before. I found an op-ed I'd written in the New York times in the early 90s, which essentially said, hey, if we don't act now, this situation is gonna get worse. And we may wanna think about using military force against North Korea before it takes these uranium rods out of these cooling ponds and takes them underground where we can't find them or reach them. And yeah, this has been around for a few decades. It's a really interesting example of drift. And you look at an issue and you go, wow, if we do this, it'll have near term risks and costs. So let's push it down the road. This has been, shall we say, people say there's not enough bipartisanship in American foreign policy. There's been plenty of bipartisanship here. Congress, executive branch, Republicans, Democrats, everybody's been on board this train, which essentially kicked the can down the road. And we finally arrived. We are finally now very close to the point where North Korea, I don't know if it's six months, a year, two years, 18 months is what I've been saying. Okay, basically sometime during this term. Yeah, absolutely. One way or if it's not interrupted one way or another, whether through diplomacy or some other force, North Korea will be able to put some nuclear warheads on some missiles that have sufficient range and accuracy to hit the United States. That's essentially where we are. This three, essentially there's three policy options at this point that I can think of. One is to simply say it's gonna happen. We've lived with nuclear weapons states before, so some combination of deterrence and defense. That's one option. And we'd build anti-missile systems and we would tell North Korea that if you ever used certain things, we'd obliterate you and so forth. So that's one option. The danger with that option is you'd have to therefore be very confident of their rationality, their deterrability, and you'd also have to make sure that they didn't decide to become the Walmart of nuclear material. There's lots of things you can do with nuclear stuff besides shoot it off that could cause you heartburn. But that's one option. The second option is to use military force in one way or another that the risk of getting over the academic, but this is an academic institution, in what's called a preventive against a gathering threat or preemptive against an imminent threat on receipt of some warning of imminent use. So you could use military force and the question is how much could you actually destroy? And the real question is what does North Korea do? And the problem is that even if you destroyed all of their nuclear stuff and all their missiles, they have thousands and thousands and thousands of artillery tubes and other conventional weapons. Geography is such that unfortunately the capital of South Korea is located within range of many of them. United States has 28,000 or so soldiers there and we have deep security commitments to provide whatever else is necessary. So the real danger in using military force is what it could lead to and the whole process of war. The last Korean war was, shall we say, extraordinarily costly by any and every measure. Third option is some version of diplomacy. We've basically tried it up to now, hasn't worked, combination of sanctions and diplomacy. The question is whether it might work now and what's different now is the United States is approaching it with a bit more urgency and we've communicated that urgency to the Chinese who have more influence than they let on. So the issue and the issue is whether we could work out a deal that the Chinese would help us sell to the North Korean so to speak. It won't get rid of the problem but it would probably put a ceiling on the problem. Some sort of a freeze on various activities, no testing, no production of certain things, no transfer, freeze would have to be verifiable which is a tall order given that this is arguably the most closed society in the world. In exchange, we'd probably have to do certain things, direct talks, maybe a peace agreement, maybe some sanctions relief. Could we pull this off? I don't know, my view is simply though, I'd rather take a run at this with a limited clocks so North Korea couldn't use the time to create facts, take a run at it because I don't much like either of the other options. I'm not wild about living with a North Korea with this stuff and I'm not wild about going to war. It'd be nice if there were regime change in North Korea that suddenly tomorrow we'd find a different leadership that was prepared to be much more reasonable and responsible towards us, their neighbors and their own people. I just can't count on that. I don't know how to translate that into a policy. So I think the useful conversation is about these three options and I would say take a run at the diplomatic one, put a time limit on it and then be prepared to think about the other two options seriously if the diplomatic one doesn't look like it's working. Yeah, I'd add just a couple of thoughts to that and I think that's a terrific lay down and a good way to kind of think about it. In the military basket, don't forget about your cybersecurity options, your special forces piece. We tend to think about the mother of all bombs. This is gonna require some heavy lifting but some precision work as well if you do go after it militarily, which I agree is not an attractive option for a variety of reasons. Secondly, it's worth thinking about the fact that China has a kind of, I think a distinctly split view of this as follows. From their geostrategic perspective, divided Korean Peninsula ain't the worst thing in the world. It prevents the creation of another juggernaut in the Pacific, think the unification of Germany and what that has produced. China is not wild about that and therefore the status quo is not a terrible thing in the Chinese view. So the question then becomes, if you're gonna make a run at it, I agree completely, now's the time to do it. Try and use diplomacy. How do you get the Chinese on board? So President Trump deployed almost casually. I thought it was actually one of his more shocking tweets and that's a high bar to get over. He said, if China will work with us on North Korea, they can expect a better deal on trade. How does that hit you? Or more importantly, how does that hit coal miners in West Virginia? I'll say two things. One is, on China I think you got it exactly right Jim. And I think the word dilemma is overused in the English language, but China actually has a real dilemma here. And the dilemma is this. They don't much like the current regime in North Korea. They don't much like what's going on. The fact that North Korea has nuclear weapons and could risk instability. This is not what the Chinese want. War there would be wildly inconsistent with Chinese priorities. I mean Xi Jinping, his goal this year is to consolidate power this fall when the Communist Party has its Congress. He wants to put in place a standing committee at the Politburo that locks in his power for five years, next five years if not longer. He does not want a major crisis that among other things could disrupt the Chinese economy at a time it's already slowing. So if he had his druthers, you would have a very different, more reasonable North Korean leadership. He has a lot of pressure he could put on these guys. But, and it's a big but. And this is where the dilemma kicks in. He doesn't want to put so much pressure on them. As the Admiral said, it brings down North Korea because he doesn't like the idea of a unified country in the American strategic orbit with Seoul as its capital. And no matter how much we reassured him about the configuration of the United Korea, he's the old line about France, about Germany during the Cold War, that we Frenchmen like Germany so much, we're glad there are two of them. That is basically the Chinese view of Korea. They're very happy with the divided. So that's it. I think the argument, the idea what does President put out today? Yeah. I don't really take it that seriously. I don't either. I think it's more political window dressing. China's not a currency manipulator. It has been, but it isn't now. We don't particularly want to trade war with China, be bad for our economy, be bad for their, because I don't think we're really looking for it. There are things China's doing in the area of trade by the way that ought to be stopped. Some of the degree of subsidization, intellectual property theft. So there's things they're doing that ought to give us heartburn. But I don't think we're looking for a trade war with them. But I do think it's important that we prioritize North Korea. And if the president needs to present it in this way, that to package it and to explain to his base, it's because of North Korea that I'm not really hammering China on trade. If that frees him up to strategically focus on North Korea, so be it. Well, I think we've solved that one. Let's move on to... Our next award will be the peace prize. I think the next level crisis, equally difficult, possibly worse options, would be Syria, of course. I had a hunch you were going there. Yeah, yeah. So, you have managed your way through a couple of different peace processes with success. Any chance on this one? Well, any chance on this one? I see our mutual friend, Ambassador Stephon de Mistura, who is a terrific life diplomat who is leading this peace process on behalf of the UN Secretary General. He is a thankless foot soldier in a war that never ends. But just give me some hope. He's, by the way, the sort of person who one day you might think about honoring her. He's a perfect example. Good idea. He's unsung. He has been tirelessly doing these talks. It is quite stunning what he's trying to do. He's a real pro. I'm a big fan of Ambassador de Mistura. I think we gotta think about what our priorities are. I mean, we used force the other day, but the force we used was less about intervening in Syria, I would argue, than it was about intervening in the aftermath of chemical weapons use. It did not presage. It was not the opening chapter in a massive American involvement in the Syrian Civil War. So I think the focus of what we gotta do in Syria is not about peace, it's about, for the short term, it's going after ISIS and Raqqa. And I think the big, big challenge is what do we do the day after we win that battle? How is it we figure out who controls liberated turf? How do we avoid follow-on wars? Because you could have Syrian government forces, Turkish forces, Kurdish forces, Sunni rebel forces. So that's gonna be potentially a unbelievably complicated choreography. So I think we've got our hands full with that. And if we can get that right and working with some locals, that might create a little bit of a zone, a de facto zone where some people could live or even go back to. Correct. So it's not a, if you will, a Syrian solution, but it's a bit of a local improvement. And so it's not tapped down, it's more bottom up. And it's local, but it's at least a step in the right direction, is that. I don't think the stage is set for a quote unquote Syrian peace process yet. I agree. And it's gonna be hard to get it set. I think the Alawites, they are, it would take a lot to get confidence that in a post-Assad Syria, they could do okay. I think they're worried about the nature of the opposition they face. I think the Iranians will work really hard to keep this regime in place. I'd say for Iran, this is probably a vital national interest. When you look at the Iranian take on the region and their connection, kind of their belt, looking towards the Mediterranean, ultimately Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and so forth. And Iran has lots of assets. I think the Russians are more intriguing, because for Russia, I would say this is not a vital national interest. I think it's a national interest, but I think there's some. And it's expensive for them. And they don't want the price to go up. The last time international intervention was really expensive for then the Soviet Union was Afghanistan, and we know what happened. So both Crimea and now this have been pretty cheap. So but if the costs began to go up, I think Mr. Putin, this is a shrinking economy. And all that, it's a cash crop economy and the value of that crop has been shrinking. And it's not clear to me that changes anytime soon. So I would take a long effort of working this with Russia and thinking about some kind of arrangements. But my guess is Mr. Assad is in power for some time to come. Sorry to say that, and quite honestly, we're not yet prepared. We don't have in place an alternative leadership and capability. So actually there's a lot of work that has to be done. I think the administration needs to be more disciplined than it's been, because the focus should not become almost like it was years ago, Assad must go. I think the focus ought to be let's, ISIS must go as best we can, and let's start to make parts of Syria safe for Syrians to live in. That to me is the near to medium term problem. That's a pretty big bite of an apple. I think the Assad must go thing comes down the road. I agree with that. And as I look at it, sometimes I reflect on the Balkans, which you and I are both old enough to remember and both operated in. And the Balkans eventually was sorted out after some pretty terrible days. Serbanites, 8,000 people killed in 1995 over a couple of days. Muslims, by the way, killed in a massacre. Hundreds of thousands pushed across borders, probably not quite as bad as Syria, but verging in that direction. Eventually, US did work with Russia. Milosevic lived to fight another day after Bosnia heard to go, but eventually he ended up where? He died in a jail cell in the Hague. So let's hope that's how it comes out for Assad. We'll see. I agree with you. He's around for a while. I think this is actually more complicated. I'm worried that this is more complicated. Because Syrians had a, essentially once the former Yugoslavia split up, there was- Yeah, there were chunks, so you could identify. Maybe one day that Syria moves more towards chunks. And I think we could be entering an era rather than juridical or de jure partition of Syria on some other countries, Lebanon and some others. We could be moving towards the Middle East where several countries have de facto, if not partition, at least kind of areas of, it's kind of soft partition. Yeah, Iraq would be- Iraq would be one. And I think we'll probably move, and that might be the best you could hope for, for Syria, for the foreseeable future where things die down considerably and you have what you might call soft partition, not juridical again, but a place where de facto to some extent. Agree. Well, I'm gonna walk, let's walk through one more topic and then we'll open it up for questions. We're gonna run out of problems to solve with this right now. Yeah, exactly. So a third really easy one would be Russia. And Vladimir Putin and his influence- He's gonna come back here more often. His influence on the international system. How do we work, how do we avoid stumbling into a full blown Cold War or are we there already? I'll say one thing, but I'd love to hear your perspective because you did have the coolest title in the world. Can I just say, Dean of Fletcher is an okay title, but Supreme Allied Commander, I mean, how cool is that? I mean, really. I don't see how any title in the world compares with that. I think Russia is a, it's a qualitatively different kind of issue. Totally. In what way, like China's 30 seconds of contrast, I actually think the US-Chinese relationship can work out okay. I do too. China is an integrated economy. It's got a large middle class. China doesn't wake up every day, if you will, cranky and humiliated and feeling it's gotta undo the past. There's a, Russia is qualitative. This is a country now, what's the population? 140 million plus or minus. And falling rapidly. It's angry about history. It's kind of the, it feels it hasn't gotten anything remotely like the respect it deserves. It's got a narrowly based economy. It's not a real, I mean, Putin can't make Russia great again, because that would mean having a real economy and a real political system. He can't do that. He wants Russia to be seen as great and to be respected as a great power. That's qualitatively different. Because I think he's worried. I mean, he's more worried about his own political future than one would think. I mean, so much of this stuff about interfering in our election, I think in part is his way of saying, don't screw around in Russia and try to bring about one of the kind of revolution that we see you having engineered in Ukraine. Don't even think twice about trying to engineer that kind of thing in Russia. So Russia is, it's not looking for integration. It's actually looking more for respect. I think he in some ways wants to keep it in some ways aloof. He'd like to reestablish Russian influence in quote, unquote, his near abroad in parts of Europe. He wants to be seen as a great power in the Middle East. And he's had two very successful goes of it recently. Pretty high payoff for pretty limited investment. So it seems to me, I have two slightly different strategies, but it would be both to be tougher with Putin and to be more involved with him. The tougher part would be to push back, particularly in Europe. And I think the last administration at the risk of showing some bipartisanship, but I think the last administration under Ash Carter in particular got it right with the, if you might call the re-strengthening of NATO. But again, I defer to you on that. But I think some of the initiatives begun, the Europeans have a lead role and some of that are exactly what's needed. I don't want Mr. Putin to ever be tempted to use military force. And coming back to something that Dean Stavridi says, if he senses the costs are gonna be high, I think that might deter him. So I would strengthen, I would look for ways to strengthen the Baltic countries, strengthen NATO. And, but at the same time, I would look for all sorts of ways to involve him in things, whether it's in potentially with Syria, diplomatically, or against terrorism, or maybe with arms control negotiations. So I would actually have one at the same time a slightly more developed relationship, but I would spend some time setting the table because I think we've got to take away certain temptations from Mr. Putin. Yeah, I agree. I often say we should confront where we must and cooperate where we can. That's a much more succinct way. Well, and I'll throw out a couple of other zones of potential cooperation. You mentioned a couple, counter-terrorism. I'll throw in counter-narcotics. They have a terrible heroin problem, they need help. That could lead to working together more effectively in Afghanistan. 90% of the world's heroin comes out of there. Counterpiracy has not gone away completely and is a potential. I think the Arctic could be a potential zone of cooperation. Arms control, I agree, particularly some trade space, possibly in the missile defense system in Europe, which makes the Russians crazy. At the end of the day, I agree, I think with the subtext of what you said, which is, and this sounds counter-intuitive, we should fear Russian weakness more than we fear Russian strength. And what I mean by that is here's a nation whose population is declining rapidly, its demographics are terrible, has a terrible addiction problem, has a bunch of broken toy allies. It's an increasingly challenged state and they have 9,000 nuclear weapons. That's a bad combination. And therefore, cooperate where you can, hope that Russia emerges on the far, far side of this in a vastly better place. Because if you're a Russian strategic planner at the end of the day, your future is not in Central Asia, it's not in the Pacific, it's with Europe. And getting that across, I think, is a key way to do it. Well, let me open this up to some of our great students and alums who are here. Please just step up to one of the microphones. Eva, I think we're gonna go till about four o'clock-ish with Q and A, four 10, something like that. Okay, so we've got some time for questions. Please, sir. Please identify yourself and... My name's Philip Lynch. I'm a local resident, not a student, not a faculty member. There was an article in foreign policy just last week. Might have been Max Boot, but I'm not sure. And his suggestion was that the U.S. pull its troops out of South Korea. One of the reasons that China doesn't want the Peninsula United is there are U.S. troops there and they don't want U.S. troops on the Yalu River any more than they did 50 years ago. It also might be a very strong negotiating offer for the U.S. to make, to bring the Chinese more engaged with eliminating nuclear weapons in North Korea. I wonder what you gentlemen think of that as a possible strategy for the U.S. going forward. I agree with the idea in principle but not into the level of detail you're mentioning. I think that we should have a conversation. China, we've actually had some conversations with China. I know this because I've been involved in them. Where we've talked about the political character of a unified Peninsula. And for example, there would be no nuclear weapons on our unified Peninsula. That's something that would be very enticing to China. That there would be no new Peninsula. Second of all, right now we have 28,000 troops at the 30, just south of the 38th parallel. Well, there's no reason we would need troops so far north if you had a unified Peninsula. There's no reason we would need necessarily 28,000. There's no reason we would need necessarily these kinds of soldiers. We might, no, I would think you would still want South Korea, I would argue, to be an American ally. And we could argue maybe it would be for some air and naval forces like Australia or something for the region. And the forces would be far to the south and on the coast. Anyhow, I think all that's fine. All that to me is legitimate conversation with the Chinese. My guess is at the end of the day, their preference is still for a two Korean Peninsula. And no matter what we said, that they feel more comfortable. In part, I think the Vietnam experience is searing on them. So they would prefer, so I'm all in favor of having a general conversation about making them comfortable with various futures. I think they're more likely to be comfortable with the two Korea future, but I think that that set of issues is exactly, that's a place where there's some creativity that could be quite reassuring to the Chinese. And I think the no nuclear thing would be very appealing to them because ultimately, what do they want to avoid more than anything else is a nuclear Japan. That would be a strategic nightmare for from China's point of view. So a non nuclear Korean Peninsula is makes it far less likely that it would set in motion political dynamics in Japan in some future generation where nuclear weapons would be seen as desirable. So let's jump over here and we'll just go back and forth to the mics. Go ahead, sir. Hi, I'm Greg Ostry. I'm a first year graduate student here at Fletcher. I'd like to say thank you very much for coming and talking with us today. Thank you. I would love to ask about the recent Turkish referendum and kind of what that means for Dr. Haas. I'd love to ask you specifically what that means for Turkish US relations as Turkey now moves from what we'd call maybe a liberal democracy to more fully autocratic now. And Dean Severez, I'd like to ask you then what that means for Turkey's role and in relationship with NATO itself. Oh, sure. I got the easy part of that question. Got these parts. Look, I think Mr. Erdogan sees himself as the second great man of modern Turkish history. What's ironic is he wants to undo a lot of the work of the first great man of modern Turkish. He's sort of the anti-editor. And he's gotten quite far. And I think this latest referendum institutionalizes a lot of what he wanted. And if he's going to be there till 2029, that's a long time. And he's already essentially one by one by one picked off the checks and balances of Turkish political life, began with the military. And ironically enough, it was part of the accession process with Europe that made it less difficult for him. And he's gone after the judiciary. He's gone after business leaders. Gone after journalists. Gone after civil servants. So there's not a lot. I don't know how to say checks and balances in Turkish. But it may not be necessary to know how to say checks and balances in Turkish much, much larger. Because they're pretty much they've been essentially not eliminated close to it. So I think we've got to accept the fact that illiberalism and that it's essentially one party politics. The AKP is wildly dominant. And it's one man rule within the AKP. I think that's where we are. I think in its foreign policy, I just quickly say Turkey's first priority is to thwart Kurdish nationalism. Its second priority is to thwart Kurdish nationalism. And their third priority is to thwart Kurdish nationalism. That is what the beginning, middle, and end of a lot of what Turkey's doing at home. And at times we can argue with it what they're doing is counterproductive for their own avowed goals. And that's what I think it's about. But I think that means that the United States and Turkey find themselves to some extent at loggerheads. Among other things, the Syrian Kurds have been our best partners in Syria. So we've got to think that through. I mean, I think the real problem with Turkey, from our point of view, is besides all this, it's central both to the flow of recruits to ISIS and other such groups. It's central to the flow of terrorists going north. Once they decide they want to take their, like LeBron James, they want to take their skills elsewhere, unfortunately. And then I think also for refugees. So Turkey, its control of its territory is a worrisome piece of leverage about what they can do. So it's become, as a result, a stunningly complicated relationship, because virtually everything they're doing gives us heartburn. But what they could do would give us heartburn and worse. So my guess is this remains one of the most difficult relationships for us and for Europe, particularly out of the Turks, and now re-embracing the death penalty, which kills off even the figment of hope on accession to Europe, which had essentially disappeared. But my guess is this remains as uneasy a relationship or set of relationships as we have. So long as he's in power, maybe beyond that now. Yeah, and I've met with President Erdogan multiple times, as well as with his senior team. And I share your gloomy assessment to the second part of the question. To the degree there could still be some connectivity, because the EU piece is going to, I think, come off the table in any real way, NATO becomes more important as a potential way to hold some level of relationship with Turkey. The tragedy of this, this is a dilemma, is that it would be a geopolitical mistake of epic proportion to allow Turkey to really drift out of the transatlantic orbit. Unfortunately, that's kind of the direction it's headed right now. It's going to take some serious creative work, and even that may not pull it back. But NATO can be a positive piece of that. Sir? My name is Erdogan Rosenberg. I'm the former dean of the School of Nutrition, and one of Jean Maier's students, and a member on the board of the IGL. Jean Maier, I think I could argue, reached the international stage when he made a very strong connection, as was described in the presentation of the Jean Maier award to Mr. Haas, that made a strong connection between international diplomacy and affairs and human rights. And in his strong argument that famine and starvation could not be used as a political weapon, as it was in the Biafra famine, and that it needed to be recognized the right to food was a human right. I ask both of you, in your review of the three case studies that we've just heard, which I think were wonderfully insightful, how much of our policy, or the policy of a country like this one, should be driven by a target which says that we need to have the defense of human rights and human dignity as an important part of our foreign policy. Thank you. Richard? I think the question you've raised, and thank you for raising it, is probably, I actually find it one of the two or three most persistent and basic American foreign policy debates. Yes. There's the debate about how much foreign policy to have, which is a version of the guns versus butter debate. But this debate about what our purposes should be in the world, to what extent should the business of American foreign policy be limited to the foreign policy of others, or to what extent should the business of American foreign policy be about the internal workings of others, including democracy, human rights, what have you, respect for the rule law. It's been a tension for more than a century, and some would say even longer than that. And it's too glib to say both. It's a false choice. That's not a very interesting answer. It really is glib. My own view is the priority has to be the foreign policy of others, in part because that can threaten us in fundamental ways, in part also it can be extraordinarily difficult to influence the domestic workings of others. It's not the tools to do so tend to be quite elusive or the kind of impact we want to have tends to be extraordinarily hard to have. I think you also have to then further slice and dice it. There's a difference between human rights situations as opposed to things that approach genocide. And I think morally and politically we draw a distinction there, one of severity. And then there's one that I write about in the book and get into, which is a difference between situation where, and by the way, North Korea involves. Millions of people have died in North Korea. You know this from your work. This has been genocide, basically through starvation, on a substantial scale. So there's that. Yet just as an aside at the risk of complicating it, you'd say, imagine we couldn't do anything about that, but we could do something about the nuclear issue. And would you say we don't do something about the nuclear issue unless we could do something about that? So I mean, this becomes a very real issue about how you prioritize American goals. And then also there's a situation where you have terrible human rights situations, say Syria, which is in and of itself, what 400,000 to 500,000 people have lost their lives. 60% of the population of Syria has been rendered homeless, either internally displaced or refugees. Now when these people become refugees, then it has not just humanitarian consequences, but strategic consequences. For Jordan, for Lebanon, for Turkey, and now we've seen for Europe. Look at the political impact that's had on Europe. The elections in France coming up, the Brexit vote, as much of anything, are reactions to this. So I think there's, I would say there's a distinction between human rights situations, not something in terms of severity, but also in when they have cross-border consequences. And I think then our stakes go up. So I can't give you a, I won't, I refuse to give you a glib answer. My answer is it kind of depends and you've got to have elements and then you've got to decide what your priorities are and where you think you can make the biggest difference. So I don't have a good, sorry, I don't have a good one-size-fits-all answer for you. The only thing I would add to that and then I think we'll have time for two more questions, but we do have a reception afterward if you want to approach Richard there. I would only add, sir, it's a mistake to think of it as an on and off switch, as though your choices were either pure, hard-cold, iron-hearted realism or soft, gooey idealism. It really is a reistat. And as President Haas says, you know, there are times when you really have to go to the realism piece of it. You have to take on and defend hard US geopolitical interests, but so often the long game is on the side of idealism. That's, I think, at times you find the way to do that. It's that mix of hard and soft power, some call it smart power. Think of it as a reistat, idealism and realism. It's a 30 seconds mark. Now you want to get on. Take the thing with China. We want Chinese help with North Korea, so that's going to be the focus. So we're probably not going to hammer them over the head over the fact that China's become a more closed society, often in the name of the anti-corruption campaign over the last couple of years. But as Admiral Sturried is saying, we may want to think about while we focus in the next year or two on China's involvement in North Korea, North Korea negotiations, are there things we might set in motion using economic tools or other tools that over time might make China a more open sort of place? And I think that's where the different time horizon. So that's why it gets interesting. That's why this is a fun thing to do for a living. And we'll have a question here. And then I thought we had a young man up here who wanted to ask something. Over here first and then here. Go ahead. And for the others, I'm so sorry, but join us at the reception, please. I would have taken your questions, but I was overruled. I just want to make that clear. I don't know because I'm from Georgia with things color. We have seen significant changes in terms of ensuring international peace and stability. I'm moving on from America's first campaign to bombing Syria and sending US Navy to the Pacific to keep an eye on North Korea. And I'm interesting in your prediction of what's the future of American foreign policy in terms of ensuring security and stability and what kind of international system we need because when we face actions of the United Nations, unfortunately sometimes, or often United Nation fails to act collectively, timely and effectively and it means that the role of the United States is crucial in this direction. And what's your prediction about this? There's a famous athlete in America who played baseball in the city I live in who said predictions are very hard, especially about the future. So I don't know how to answer your question. I can't predict what American, and it's always hard to predict. It's really hard to predict now, given the fact that you've got so many people who are new to foreign policy, you don't have clear procedures. So I think I could sit here and tell you something, but it would be worthless because I don't know what the future's gonna be. I would simply, where you ended up though, I think is wise, which is the international system is not self-ordering, it's not self-regulating. United States can't do it alone, but the world can't do it without the United States. So we have got to find a way to play a reliable, predictable, sustainable role. I don't think we've yet figured that out. I think in recent presidencies, at times we've gone from trying to do too much and do too much alone, to at times doing too little. And I think in some ways we've had 16 years where we haven't quite gotten it right. And I think this administration has, shall we say, been uneven in its first three months. I'm learning to speak like a diplomat. But I think there's reason for concern that this is, for us to get it right, we could all disagree on what getting it right means. But I think the fact that I wrote this book about a world in disarray reflects in no small part how difficult it's proven for the United States to get it right over the last 16 years, despite our structural advantages. And so I think you ask a big question. I just don't know how to answer it. Can I just add, I think that there is enormous fatigue in the United States, particularly what I'll call Middle East fatigue, but it's really global. And it is because of our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the country's population is far less inclined to want to be involved in the world. And that's understandable, but as Lenin used to say, you may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you. Another way to put that is, we may not be interested in the world, we may wanna come home, we may take comfort in building walls either literally and metaphorically, but it won't work. The world will come and find us here, one way or the other. We will need to be involved, despite that fatigue, I think. Last question. Apologies, actually I'd come up much later. If you would like to ask your question or call in our Stephen, please go ahead. I think you've got the mic, as we say. Was there a laparole? All right, thank you and apologies to you guys. But my question is regarding Iran specifically and what the US foreign policy outlook regarding Iran is today, especially in light of the fact that the Iran nuclear deal is unlikely to ever come to fruition. And the consequences which Iran's intervention and Iran's presence could have in Syria and other US interests in that region. Got it. Well, first of all, I'd say like it or not, the Iran nuclear deal has sort of come to fruition in the sense that it's in place. It's been in place for almost, what, two years now? Two years, yeah. Two years this summer. Different parts of the deal have different durations to go. It didn't solve the problem by any means. What it did was it put a ceiling on it and it parked the problem, to use a technical phrase. And as some of these ceilings come off, then Iran will have tremendous discretion to develop capabilities. A lot of the precursors of weapons. I'm not a big fan of the deal. It's not the deal I would have chosen to negotiate, but it's the only deal we seem to have. So I think what we want to do is enforce it while we have it. We need to realize that the deal does not cover enormous questions of Iranian activity around the Middle East. Iran is an imperial power in many ways. It's not a status quo power. It has many tools at its disposal, which it's not shy about using. I would just say two other things. We had better think about, first, I see no evidence that Iran to use George Kennan's phrase is mellowing. The hope that this agreement would set in motion a set of dynamics where Iran would become a very gentler, kindler country. I do not see that happening. And to base our foreign policy upon the belief, hope, prediction, wish, whatever, that Iran will mellow seems to me to be naive in the extreme. Which another way of saying, we'd better think about what comes after this agreement. When the important parts of this agreement expire, and they will start to expire, and one, well, centrifuge limits expire in about eight years, enriched uranium limits expire in 13. Iran will be free to have unlimited numbers of any generation centrifuge at once. And Iran will be free to have as much enriched uranium as it wants. What will be in place is simply the Nonproliferation Treaty, which is a gentleman's agreement, and various inspections protocols. I do not find that sufficiently reassuring. So, like I said, the Iran agreement, it parked the problem, it didn't solve it, and even the parking space is only a temporary parking space. This issue is going to return to us inevitably, and we had better start thinking about what we do about it. I'll add to that. As a Greek-American, I'm required at all times to comment on the Persians. Greeks and Persians have their history. And I think Richard's choice of the word imperial is correct. Go back and look at the history of Persia. Look at the battle flags of Cyrus the Magnificent or Darius the Great, Xerxes the Emperor King. This is an imperial nation. That's, it's woven into the DNA. 2,500 to 2,000 years ago, the Persians controlled 80% of the world's population. We are gonna have to come to grips with them one way or the other over time. May I send with one question to you? Sure. Did you spend all this time in Europe? I think the most significant international event of the year could well be taking place in France. First this Sunday, and then a couple, and then May 7th. What's your sense? I don't have to predict it, but if either the far right or far left candidate were to win, do you basically believe that we are at a point where both the EU and NATO are now potentially in play in fundamental ways? Unfortunately, yes. And I am very concerned about the Italian election, which will come early in 18, I think, and potentially the centrifugal forces in Europe are accelerating, not de-accelerating. And I think that for the United States, our greatest pool of partners without question is Europe. And if that, if the wheels come off on what have some have called the European project, I don't think NATO is far behind. And that would be geopolitical big casino for the United States. Yeah, and I think we're a few weeks away from that, potentially. Knowing that. I think May 7th could be one of those pivotal moments in history. So however, the second round of the French presidential elections go, I think a lot, I actually think either the European project doesn't survive potentially, or it creates a real window for potential reform led by France and Germany. But I actually think we're a few weeks away from one of those true turning points of history. I agree. And because I don't want to end on that as a negative note. That's a positive note. Yeah, yeah. It could turn out well. It could turn out well. And I'll add on that one that the German election, I think, really doesn't have bad outcomes. I think Germany continues to be, to the degree there's an anchor of stability there, I think it will remain in Germany. I want to close by pointing out, we spent a lot of time talking about problems in the international world and there are many. But again, keep it in perspective. We looked back 100 years ago, that's a world not in disarray, that's a world on fire. And it didn't get better for 50 years and 80 million people died in two world wars, a great depression. I don't think we're headed there. I think we do have the tools, as I think Richard agrees, to manage our way through this. It's gonna be challenging and it's gonna require people like all of you, students here I'm talking to, both undergraduates, IGL, IR majors, political scientists and my beloved students here at the Fletcher School. So, let us hope that we have outcomes like Columbia, defeating an insurgency, like the Balkans, overcoming terrible, terrible situations, like finding ways that we can put together a global treaty like COP 21. And let's hope the United States doesn't walk away from it and I don't think we will. So there are wins out there. It'll require all of you to help that come to fruition. As Richard and I take up our August duties in retirement in a few more years. Thank you very much for joining us today. Please join us at a reception after we... Okay, thank you.