 Good evening and welcome to the Center for Strategic International Studies. I'm Andrew Schwartz here at CSIS and I have the distinct pleasure of introducing two of my favorite people and one of my trustees, Joe Nye. So I've got one of my bosses here. And David Sanger is actually my other boss, but I don't. Anyway, we're very, very excited. And you can see from this turnout, Dr. Nye's work, there is a cult of Joe Nye and you're about to see why. So with that I'm going to turn it over to my good friend David Sanger and I hope you enjoy this terrific talk and we do have books in the back for purchase. If you don't have them already. Thank you very much. David. Well thank you Andrew and thank all of you for coming here and thank you Joe for not only for being here but for writing this fabulous book. This is a little bit unlike Joe's other books and you all know the Soft Power series. This is actually a book that doesn't have American power in the title, something we frequently note. It is a book that is very much about the role of individuals instead of the role of just institutions or states versus states. And in that way it's turning the lens in a remarkably different way. It's also quite different from a book that many of you may have seen but Joe actually wrote a novel a few years ago. And it's quite good, it's a remarkable tale and in the middle of it is this amazing love scene. So I'm thinking, okay, as I'm into presidential leadership in the creation of the American era, where is the love scene? And I'm paging through it and I get to the chapter about William Howard Taft and I'm saying, no please not here. Okay. So I was trained by Joe as many in this room have been. So I've been reading and listening to Joe basically since I was 19 or 20 years old. It's been an extremely profitable exchange, especially the stuff that's been coming from Joe to me. I'm not sure what's come back in reverse has been equally useful. But early on in the book, Joe, you have this remarkable little chart that shows those presidents who had a transformational objective versus a transactional objective and then a transformational style versus a transactional style. And it's remarkable because you come out to the conclusion that people like Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush had the greatest transformational inspirations, but were not able to sell those transformations. And you have discussion of people like Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush, what a very transactional approach, but ended up being very transformational presidents. So I wanted to ask you what led to this insight and how the insight led to the book? Well, thank you, David, for doing this. It's nice to be back in Washington at CSIS. The book is, it was actually, I wanted to answer a puzzle, which is if the United States went from being the, a second rate power at the beginning of the 20th century, which it was, to being the world's only superpower by the end of the century, did presidents matter? Those, did it, would it all have turned out the same the matter who was president or did individual leadership make a difference? He's a wonderful quote from Henry Kissinger that Walter Isaacson has in his biography of Kissinger in which Kissinger says to reporters on his plane going to the Middle East, when I was a professor at Harvard, I thought it was all the larger forces of history and that leaders didn't matter. And then when I got in the White House, I realized leaders did. So it may be that the answer to the question, do individual leaders matter, where you stand depends on where you're sitting at a particular time. But I thought I could have more fun by asking the question of, if you took presidents who made critical decisions about the American position in the world over the course of the 20th century and you substituted for them the next most likely person to be president, I call it counterfactual history. Would history have turned out differently or not? This is a way to test the importance of individuals. And it turns out that of the presidents that I look at, for about half of them, they did matter and for about half of them, including some very impressive ones like Teddy Roosevelt, it probably, you know, Teddy Roosevelt is the great hero of mine. I think he's a wonderful transformational figure domestically, but I think we would have wound up with the same foreign policy eventually within 10 years anyway. So what I found was that for about half the presidents I looked at, their being in office at the time mattered tremendously. For about a half it didn't. And it wasn't just the William R. Daffs, it was the glued people like Teddy Roosevelt. But the second question that I tried to answer in the book is, okay, if presidents matter, what kind? And does it make a difference whether you have a president who is transformational, has broad vision, great ambitions as opposed to transactional, who is sort of keeping the train from being derailed and making sure that trains run on time. And I expected that it would be the first ones who would be the most impressive. But as it turned out, some of the first type, the transformational types, were indeed crucial. I would say Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were good examples, but some who were transactional in their style, like Dwight Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush, the first Bush, actually turned out to be just as important. In fact, the person I rank highest in the book is the first Bush, George H. W. Bush, in terms of the quality of his foreign policy. I say this as somebody who worked in the Dukakis campaign. So it does prove that you can separate your analytical position as a scholar from your activist position as a practitioner. General, let me stop you on that one, because a few points in the book, you make the point about George H. W. Bush, that he kept saying, I don't do the vision thing. And you'll remember, this was kind of deadly in his reelection campaign. And it's not very many, that we've had a lot of presidents without vision who pretended they had one. But this was a case of a president who, if you read the book, you think had one and was pretending he didn't. Well, he didn't have a vision in the sense that, say, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson had a vision that he wanted to change the world. He was going to get rid of balance of power politics and go to a totally new way for countries to relate to each other. George H. W. Bush, or Bush 41, as we'll call it, didn't have that kind of vision. He had extraordinary interest in making sure that things worked properly and great skill because he'd had a lot of experience. He knew what he was doing. And so, for example, when the Berlin Wall went down in November of 89, several Bush's advisors said to him, we should really make something out of this. Great political capital to be made from celebrating the fall of the wall. This is terrific. And Bush said, I'm not going to dance on the wall. We're not gonna gloat and embarrass Gorbachev. A month later, he went to Malta for the summit with Gorbachev and began a process where, working with Gorbachev, you went from a world in which you had a division of Europe down the center of Europe. You had 400,000 Soviet troops in East Germany. And within a couple of years, you had Germany unified inside NATO and not a shot being fired. That's quite extraordinary. If he had danced on the wall, if he proclaimed a grandiose vision, as Ronald Reagan did, Mr. Gorbachev dared down this wall, Bush didn't. And as a result of that, he was able to make sure Gorbachev wasn't isolated domestically and that he could work with Gorbachev as you had this extraordinary transformation. But as Bush says in his memoirs, Bush didn't have a vision of this transformation. He just had a vision of how you manage things, how you prevent them from getting out of hand. And the vision of the transition, you know, we'll want to come back to that in a moment because when we move on to the present day, there are a lot of people who would argue that what President Obama did or didn't do with the Arab Spring was based very much on the study of George H.W. Bush and we're not quite sure that's worked out as well as it did in the earlier. But let me take you back to the cycle in American history that you describe. As you look back on the century, you talk about sort of six different eras. You have that moment where primacy sort of began to emerge for the United States during Teddy Roosevelt's time and Taft despite all that I've just said about the poor guy and Wilson, okay? And then you had a period of isolation, hardening and coolage, and then the entry into World War II and obviously through FDR and so forth. Then the containment era, then post-Vietnam with the sense of overextension where we again went into a period somewhat of isolation and then the end of the Cold War, which ushered in a sort of other period of American primacy, we'll get to Iraq and so forth later. There are some of your colleagues on the Harvard faculty who have written books about the cycles of American history who have argued essentially that those cycles come every 70 years or they're about and it wouldn't make any difference if you had a thousand monkeys sitting in the chair. They're gonna happen anyway. You come out of this book with a very different sense. Well, one of the hardest tests is to ask yourself, if you took this president out of the picture, would history have turned out differently? And Tolstoy wrote War and Peace about Napoleon and said, individuals don't matter. So that's about as tough a case for that side as you can make. And I think the interesting thing is to try to find a case where if you had a different president, history would have been different in terms of this larger structure. I think a couple of them, if you take Franklin Roosevelt, you can make that case. Now, there's imagined that it followed Philip Roth's novel, The Plot Against America. Imagine that Charles Lindbergh, rather than Weldon Wendell Wilkie, had been the Republican nominee in 1940 and that people had rejected Roosevelt for an unprecedented third term. So in 1941, President Lindbergh was faced with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Would the world be different or not? Well, first of all, Lindbergh was sympathetic to Germany and almost certainly would have focused his attention on responding to the attack in the Pacific. Roosevelt, since 1938, had seen Hitler as the greatest threat to the United States and had tried to get the American people to see this without success. There's one point he turns to one of his closest aides and he says, what do you do when you're the leader of a democracy and you look over your shoulder and nobody's following? And he was hoping for an incident which would educate the American people as the sinking of the Lusitania or other ships sinking goddess into World War I. But he couldn't get it done until the Japanese attacked at Pearl Harbor. What he did do, though, is several things. First of all, he got a draft. He got Lend-Lease for Britain to try to keep Britain alive. He got an increase in the defense budget and he basically prepared us, and he did all those things incidentally on the grounds that he was defending the Western Hemisphere. There was no grand statement about coming to defend Europe against Hitler. It was all very pragmatic. But as soon as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, then he could unleash his famous rhetoric, his grand visions and so forth. And if instead you'd had, let's say, President Lindbergh, I expect President Lindbergh might have actually moved in the direction of focusing only on the Pacific. If that had been true, what would the world have looked like in 1945? Hitler and Stalin probably would have divided up Europe. The British probably would have gone under. So you would have had two major powers in the Eastern and Western parts of Europe. Japan would have had the East Asia coprosphere, the sphere, and the United States would have had the Western Hemisphere. So you would have had a multipolar world. Structurally. In fact, the Roosevelt's decisions was to focus on Europe first and winning the war in Europe first. And that led to a bipolar world at the end of 1945. So there's an example of an individual who if you replaced him by another individual had effects on large structural questions. Though I was struck in reading the FDR section of the book, and the book is wonderfully woven because it keeps coming back to these presidents under different conditions. But you said that in dealing with Japan, Roosevelt showed considerable ineptitude. You wrote that Japan regarded the oil embargo, which Roosevelt of course had imposed before Pearl Harbor, as a dire threat to its economy. But Roosevelt wanted the embargo to be an on-again, off-again signaling device and simply didn't realize that the bureaucracy underneath it was pressing the Japanese law. I was reading this and thinking about the Iran embargoes, for example, the North Korean embargoes that we do today. How could it have been that Roosevelt was so out of tune with how his own policies were being enacted? Roosevelt knew a fair amount about Europe. He traveled there. He'd been Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson. He didn't know much about Asia. And when he looked at Asia, his attitude was, well, he didn't like Japanese imperialism, but he wasn't focused there. That wasn't his major concern. And he wanted to discourage the Japanese from attacking in Southeast Asia and also furthering their attacks in China. And so he said, what we'll do is put a noose around the Japanese neck and give it a jerk every once in a while as a way to remind the Japanese, don't go and do something rash. Instead, the bureaucrats interpreted this in such a way that it was a stranglehold on the Japanese, not an occasional jerk. So the oil embargo was seen in Japan as something where if we don't do something about this in a year or so, we're gonna be in terrible shape. So their preemptive attack on Pearl Harbor was an effort to escape from a noose which Roosevelt thought was a signal and the bureaucrats turned into a stranglehold. And the question is when you do something in foreign affairs, having contextual intelligence, knowing how the other side and the other society sees it, how they're interpreting your actions is extraordinarily important. Roosevelt had that when it came to Europe. He didn't have it when it came to Japan. Question I think we have to ask ourselves today wouldn't we impose sanctions or intervene in another state? Do we really understand how the action is being understood from the point of view of the other side? And that's where contextual intelligence comes in. And to go back to Bush 41, Bush 41 had terrific contextual intelligence. I mean, he'd been head of the CIA, he'd been our representative in China, ambassador to the UN. He had a very good feeling of how the rest of the world worked. And that's I think what made him so successful. Let's take you from Bush 41 to Bush 43. You've got quite a quote from the book here. Toward the end of the book you say, with Bush 41 the vision thing and his educational impact were very limited, but his execution and his management were very good, just as you said. Perhaps the facetious moral of the story is that at some mythical day in the future, genetic engineers will be able to produce leaders equally endowed with both sets of skills. Comparing the two Bushes who shared half their genes makes it clear that nature has not yet solved the problem. It's a little bit mean, but it's a... That's why I read it out loud. But let me take you to the question from that. But I don't think it's inaccurate. So the question that strikes me that emerges from this is that what we now know about Saddam Hussein or what we think we know from what has come out of Saddam is that he didn't actually believe that George Bush believed he had nuclear weapons, chemical or biological, that US intel must have been so perfect that they must have known that he, that these programs were largely failures. And the contextual kind of intelligence that you were describing seemed to be missing in that element. And yet he did have exactly the transformational vision that as your book indicates, his father lied. Well, it's true. I mean, to give proper credit to George W. Bush, Bush 43, he comes into office without a vision on foreign policy. That's true of many presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt. Who, he was, Roosevelt was focused on their depression, not on foreign policy. So starting office without a vision is actually quite common. Bush 43, remember in the 2000 campaign, there was almost no discussion of foreign policy. Bush 43 comes in office with no particular vision of foreign policy, but he develops a transformational vision as a result of 9-11. 9-11 changes the American people. What they want from their leader is some response to this shocking event. And it also changes George W. Bush. He feels this is now his mission to do something about that. He says in many of his speeches, we will basically get at the roots of terrorism by transforming the Middle East. And if we remove Saddam Hussein and have an example of democracy in Iraq, we can transform the region. It's as a vision, as you know, without understanding the context, not a bad vision. But if you understand the context and you ask how likely you can apply and implement that vision, not a very successful vision. So Bush 43 deserves credit for trying to see a larger picture. But this is a man who, unlike his father, had been overseas outside the United States a few times. Well, I think Mexico, Israel, I mean. China won his father's position. But knowledge of the rest of the world very, very different from his father. And so when he came to develop a vision, could you implement the vision? Wasn't the key question on his mind because he didn't have this contextual intelligence that his father had? And that's not unique to Bush 43. I mean, Woodrow Wilson came into office without any foreign policy vision. He was focused on the Progressive Era domestic reforms. And he didn't want to go to war. He ran in 1916 on the grounds that he kept us out of war in Europe. But when the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, he felt he had no choice. But if he was gonna go to war, he wasn't just gonna go to war for balance of power politics reasons, he was going to transform the world. He was gonna get rid of the whole principle of balance of power and replace it with collective security in the League of Nations, which is a noble vision, but he didn't have any idea of how to implement it. I was thinking that as I was reading this through because I remembered going down to do an interview with President-Elect George W. Bush at the ranch about 10 days before he was inaugurated in 2001. And we asked him about Saddam Hussein, Frank Bruni and myself. And we had about three hours and we were walking around the ranch and down to his waterfall. And he said about Saddam Hussein at that time, you know, the sanctions are like Swiss cheese, but if we seal that up, that alone will do it. He had no, he had no, there was no sense that came out of this conversation that he thought he would change the Middle East or Saddam Hussein. And so that takes you to the question of if you compare Wilson and George W. Bush and you don't have this contextual analysis, is it sufficient then to have simply enough of an operational sense of your own government that you can get these policies implemented because it seems like that was missing for both of them for very different reasons? Well, you need to have a good sense of your own government to be able to talk about implementation. And if you contrast Bush 43 and Bush 41, Bush 41 had a very well organized domestic, not domestic, but American National Security Council. I mean, he was very organized. And many people argue that Bush 43 did not put it mildly, likely. But I think more to the point is the lack of understanding of the rest of the world. There's a wonderful quote that I borrowed from Derek Chalet, who's now at the Pentagon about the difference between George Shultz who was Reagan Secretary of State and Condi Rice. And Derek says, George Shultz was once asked, what do you need to be a good Secretary of State? He says, it's the same skills you need as a gardener. Careful patient tending of plants to make them grow. And Chalet says, Condi Rice thought that was inadequate. She wanted to be a landscape architect. She wanted to, and in her words, she wanted to institute transformational diplomacy. Now there are times when transformational diplomacy is necessary, but it's also true that when you look at foreign affairs, you have to understand two things. You have to understand the domestic politics and cultures of other countries. And then you have to understand how they interact as an international system. That's an enormous degree of complexity. And when you're thinking about things that you're extremely complex and you don't know how they're gonna turn out, maybe the first principle is the Hippocratic Oath, which is above all, do no harm. So before you rush in to try to transform the world, be fairly sure that you're not gonna make the world worse. And I think you can make the argument that both Wilson and Bush 43 wanted to make improvements in the world, but they didn't know enough about the world to make it better, and they made it worse. The result of Wilson's efforts to create the League of Nations was that period of isolationism in the 20s and 30s in which the Americans withdrew too much from the rest of the world. And I think the results of Bush 43's efforts to transform Iraq was not to produce the Arab Spring, but essentially to create a situation where there was a strong rejection or resistance to the United States and much of the Muslim world. So sometimes trying to make too big a change when you don't understand the details of how to make things better rather than worse is the wrong thing. And you want not a transformational leader, but a transactional leader. Somebody who prevents the trains from going off the track. Well, one last question for me, and then we'll open this up. You have a fascinating chapter on ethical foreign policy leadership, four words that are not always put together in the city. And you talk a little bit about the Clinton experience with Rwanda. You said the leadership theorist, Barbara Kellerman, accuses Bill Clinton of insular leadership in failing to respond to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and Clinton himself has criticized his reaction. In fact, I think he said it was the greatest regret of his presidency. And as I recall, that was a presidency with a few other regrets along the way. So you go on to say, yet had Clinton tried to send American troops, he would have encountered stiff resistance in parts of his administration, the Congress and public opinion, particularly after the death of American soldiers and early humanitarian intervention in Somalia, his followers were not ready for another intervention. Okay, so speed forward to today. You have Barack Obama trying to make the same essential decision about Syria. When he went into Libya, he said he had to do it on a basically a responsibility to protect bases. And at that time there were estimates that maybe 10,000 Libyans would have died in Benghazi. So 80,000 Syrians have died roughly today. And yet the lesson he's drawn out from the first do no harm here is hold back, you could end up with a Syria that's worse than that. It's too early to make many judgments about the Obama administration. But certainly as you say, this is a man who came in with a big transformational concept and has been in many ways reluctant to be transactionally all that active. Well, I think Obama spoke with the rhetoric of a transformational change in international affairs, but had enough contextual intelligence from his periods living as a child overseas and having an anthropologist mother that he knew something about the complexity of the world. And that led him as he tried to implement these visions to be cautious. And I think that's actually a good thing. If you look at Libya, instead of immediately going in and creating a no fly zone or finding other ways to use hard power against Libya, he first waited for, and if he had done that instantly, the narrative that would have spread from Morocco to Indonesia would have been, America invades third Muslim country in a row. Instead of that, he waited for an Arab League resolution and a UN resolution. So the narrative was, United States helps UN implement responsibility to protect. And in addition to that, while we provided a good deal of munitions, he insisted to the Europeans, it's your backyard, you've got to take some of the hard power role there. That combination of soft power of narrative and hard power of military, I would argue was a smart power strategy. So I would give him good grades actually on Libya. And I think if I read your book on Obama, that you cite Libya as an example of the Obama doctrine. On Syria, we don't know the situation. We know it's terrible. You know that 70 or 80,000 people have been killed. But you have to ask if we intervene, is it going to make it better or worse? And as awful as the situation is, a Hobbesian war of all against all in which Alawites and Shia and Christians and Sunnis and Kurds are all killing each other could be even worse. So before we intervene, we have to have some idea of, are we making it better or not? And there are people who'll take two sides, I mean, who'll argue either side of that. But the argument that it's clear that if we would just intervene, just crater a few runways and it'll solve the problem, I don't think that's right. And I think Obama's actually been careful and cautious and has followed the Hippocratic Oath, first do no harm. Whether he'll have to change that position at some point, I don't know. But I would not fault him on this. I mean, I don't, I think the, if I could, I mean, there are some things you might do, perhaps finding, if you could find some of the rebels who are not going to turn out to be future al-Qaeda types and help them and strengthen their position in Syria, that might be something to do. It was easy to do, they would have done it by now. Yeah, but that's it. And but the argument that somehow, if we just have a, you know, American intervention will just make this all turn out well. I don't know that anybody's made that case convincingly and I think Obama has been prudent. And I would say that prudent is justified. Well, we'll go out now to some of your questions. I think there are people around with microphones and when you stand up, please tell us who you are and please put a question mark at the end of the question. We'll start right here, right down. Thank you, Professor Nai. My name's Dong Huiyu with China Review News Agency. And President Obama will meet with President Xi this week in California. I believe the so-called new type of great power relationship will be one of the topics they will discuss. My question is, do you think China right now is strong and powerful enough so that the United States has to discuss seriously and equally with China about a new type of great power relationship? What kinds of leadership that President Obama should take to create a least century could still be the American era? Thank you. Well, in the last chapter of the book, most of the book is about the 20th century in leaders. And then in the last chapter, I asked, how does this affect the 21st century? And I argue that to apply the lessons that I learned from the 26th century, you have to have a good understanding of the context of the 21st century. And in that sense, when I look at the context of the 21st century, I agree with the recent report of the National Intelligence Council, a body I once headed, but this was done long after I'd left, about the prospects of the year 2030. And basically what it said is the United States will be the largest and most powerful country in 2030, but the world won't be like the 20th century. There won't be the same primacy of the Americans. There will be, if you want, primus inter pares, but pares will be more important. And among those, most important will be China. And having President Obama meet with President Xi Jinping to discuss with him in an informal setting without all the bother of the state visit and all the pomp and ceremony, just what exactly do we mean by a new great power relationship? And what are the things you're expecting of us? And here are some of the things that we expect of you. And let's have this discussion in a way where we're not bothered by hundreds of note takers and problems of state dinners and so forth. I think this is a good sign. I think it's a sign that Obama is taking seriously the relationship with China. And I've written elsewhere in the book I published in 2011 on the Future of Power. I think the U.S.-China relationship can be managed in a way that doesn't lead to conflict between the countries, but it's gonna take a lot of effort on both sides. And I think this meeting in California next week is a good step in that direction. Thank you, lady in the front here. My name is Ginny Wynwood, voice of Vietnamese Americans. Thank you, Professor Ngai. I'm Vietnamese Americans. So my question to you is, would you quickly compare and contrast the presidency of President Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, and Obama to what is going on now in the Asia Pacific? And with the recent pivot to the Asia Pacific, would you also take into consideration of the national security advisor and the secretary of state role? Thank you. Good narrow. Can you do that in two minutes? Let me do a quick version of it. I think the American intervention in Vietnam was a great mistake. As I look at the creation of the American era in the 20th century, we had in our minds the idea that the problem was ideological dominoes. You know, one goes communist and all the rest fall. If we'd had better contextual intelligence and understood Vietnam better, which we didn't. Very few people in the United States understood Vietnam. We're lucky now to have more Vietnamese Americans. But at that time, if you really understood Vietnam, you would have known that what wasn't dominoes, the game was checkers. Red, black, red, black. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And if we'd known that, you see Soviet Union, red, China black, Vietnam red, Cambodia black, you'd have realized that nationalism and independence of these countries was much more important than ideological dominoes. And the ultimate irony of this is we involved ourselves and intervened in a way that overextended our resources, led to a withdrawal somewhat from the world as a result of the reaction of the American people. And it was totally unnecessary. I thought the great irony of Vietnam was a year or so ago, I guess when Leon Panetta was Secretary of Defense and the Vietnamese asked them, would he like to come to Cam Ranh Bay? I thought, oh my God, if only somebody had understood that around 1964 or 1965 that Vietnam doesn't want to be subservient to any country, and it is going to preserve its independence. And we could have had a reasonable outcome in Southeast Asia without the degree of intervention that we had. So I think I read the Vietnam period, which includes Kennedy. Some people say Kennedy would have withdrawn. I don't know, but certainly Johnson and then Nixon. I think it was a period which actually set back the creation of the American era rather than advanced it. And as to whether Secretaries of State or our national security advisors are more important on that, it varied by each administration. I mean, so it's a little bit too large a question to answer in that context. Right here in the front row. Thank you. Professor and I, I'm Zach Silverman at the U.S. School of Leadership Coalition and President Obama and his administration raised your smart power concept over his first term, and I was just wondering how you thought he's done on that account. Well, I voted for President Obama, so I have to be careful to make sure that as I appraise him as an analyst, that I'm not allowing my political preferences to bias my analysis. I think actually though that President Obama has done reasonably well. He did in his early rhetoric in the Cairo speech, the Prague speech, the Oslo speech, give wonderful transformational rhetoric about bending the arc of history. And I don't think he has bent the arc of history. I'm not sure he could have, but he had the great sense even when he gave a speech like the speech in Prague about ending nuclear weapons, he had the sense to say, it may not happen in my lifetime. And he did try to do things that were achievable like an arms control agreement with the Russians, even though it was the Russians didn't want to go much further. He did hold a nuclear security conference twice to try to get more control of nuclear materials. So he's done a lot of very practical things in the direction of some of the rhetoric that he's used. But has he been able to accomplish the transformations that he talked about? I think the answer to that is no. On the other hand, if you asked me, do I wish that he had tried to accomplish these transformations without prudence, the answer to that would also be no. So I would give him a reasonably good mark. Joe, let me follow up on that. One of the things that struck me about watching President Bush when I was covering him as White House correspondent and watching President Obama today is that whether you agreed with President Bush or didn't, he would come out three times a week and talk to you about what he saw as the greatest threat and the greatest issue. So in the run up to the Iraq War, you heard about Saddam Hussein every couple of days. You just mentioned the Prague speech. It's probably been since the presidential campaign which you've heard President Obama even briefly talk about that goal. And if you go back over time, it's probably a year or two before that, before he did, he does not get in and bring along people by making it clear this is. So what lesson do we emerge from your book about the way he is just doing the practical element of what you said worried FDR? Well, member FDR, who we all remember is a great rhetorician. I mean, the fireside chats and all that. FDR was actually very cautious on his foreign policy. During the Spanish Civil War, FDR gave a speech in which he said, maybe we should quarantine Spain. And there was a huge hullabaloo after he said this. People said quarantine, that means we're getting involved. I mean, we're getting back into Europe. What do you mean by this, Mr. President? He said, oh, I just meant it was a term, it's just a loosely used term. So if you compare FDR, he tried to get steps that would prepare us, but never told us why. So the draft, sending troops to Iceland even, was justified as defense of the Western Hemisphere, which is the traditional American foreign policy, you know, default position, defense of the Western Hemisphere. And the Americans in the 1930s just didn't want anything to do with Europe. So Roosevelt knew he had to do something about Europe. He never said it. He always was very careful to use indirection. So compared to Roosevelt, Obama has really not been very far off that mark. Okay, let's see, there was a hand down here before. Tell me that. Hi, my name is Jeremy Lillian. Hi, my name is Jeremy Lillian. I work for Young America for Diplomatic Leadership. And my question is you were talking about Bush 43 and his vision for democracy in the Middle East. How do you think you would have handled the Arab Spring? And do you think any of the origins of the Arab Spring can be attributed to Bush 43? I don't think the changes or the actions in the Arab Spring can be attributed to Bush 43. There are many of the people who were active in Tunisia and Tahrir Square actually rejected the American invasion of Iraq. And there was a feeling that the American actions in Iraq discredited it rather than promoted democracy. I think the origins of change in Tunisia and Tahrir Square were independent of the American invasion of Iraq. But trying to guess how Bush 43 would have responded to the Arab Spring, I suspect he might have done something like Obama, which is faced with a turning point, decided that history was on one side rather than the other. Remember Obama had a question of whether he was going to support Mubarak or tell Mubarak to go. And there were some, such as the Saudis and others who thought he made a terrible mistake. And there are people, the Obama administration said, the future is probably more on the side of this younger generation than the older generation. So as David said in his introduction, he took a bet. He took a gamble, a risk. And we don't know if that's gonna pay off. With revolutions, and I think Arab Spring is a much less useful term than Arab revolutions. With revolutions, they take 10, 20 more years. In 1789, who would have known that 10 years later, a Corsican would lead French troops to the Nile. We don't have any idea how the outcome of Terrorist Square is going to look 10 years, 20 years from now. But I think the bet, which is betting that this younger generation is more in the direction of the future history, is a bet that both Bush and Obama, I don't think Bush probably would have made the same bet that Obama made. But that's pure conjecture. I mean, I don't have anything to base that on. Back here. Hi, Professor Nye. This may be another dissertation question, but you can answer it as you wish. You've both been an insider and an analyst looking at things from Cambridge and elsewhere. What can you say about the relationship between President, Secretary of State, and National Security Advisor? There have been different incarnations, different dances. The Middle East certainly is an interesting case study in terms of those interrelationships, but I'd be really interested in your thoughts. Do you have any favorite relationships between Secretary of State and President and National Security Advisor? I know it's very contextual, but you've seen it from inside and I think you have some real insights. Well, we've seen some cases where it clearly didn't work. President Reagan had what, six national security advisors? I mean, then there was constant turmoil and conflict and it led to the fact that in Reagan's second term, you had the Iran Contra, which almost undid his presidency. So there's some clear examples of cases that didn't work out well. I think the case that probably works out best looking back historically is the relationship in the Bush 41 administration between Scowcroft and Baker. Scowcroft, he's a man with very smart, very able, very confident man, but he keeps his ego in check. He wanted to make sure that the president got many sources of information and his job, he said, was not to whisper in the president's ear, though he obviously did from time to time, but was to make sure that many people whispered in the president's ear and including people who might not otherwise have opportunity to. So Scowcroft ran a process in which Bush 41, who understood, as I said earlier, the world pretty well, got a lot of different advice and he managed that process extremely well. In that context, a strong secretary of state like James Baker was able to operate effectively with the president, with the national security advisor, and I would say that that's been a model for how over the last half century or so that we've had a national security advisor or crowd should be run. Well, you have time for just one last question right here. Hello. I'm Beth Gee. I'm with the State Department Office of Japanese Affairs. You've answered a number of questions tonight about the importance of the rebalance to the Asia Pacific. To me, that rebalance is largely about the growth and importance of economic statecraft as a tool of U.S. foreign policy. And I wonder if you could comment on that on economic statecraft, thank you. Well, I think the rebalancing toward the Pacific is, I like the way you put it. Sometimes people see it as containing China. It's just the wrong way to think about it. I think it should be seen as the fact that the most vibrant growing part of the world economy is East Asia. And the United States made a great mistake by spending the first decade of this century focusing on another region and not focusing enough on East Asia. So I think Obama deserves credit for the rebalancing policy. And I think it's important that we not over militarize it. It has a part of it, which is our alliance with Japan and others. But it also has to have a large economic component. And I think the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks are an important part of this. But I think they'll have to go beyond TPP because not every country is going to be able to join TPP. So we have to be advancing economic relations with other countries as well in that area. So I think that the rebalancing is a good thing. I think the economic growth of Asia is a good thing. And the United States should be part of it. And that means that we're going to have to pay more attention to economic statecraft in that part of the world. Let me say, since I have to be at the other end of Washington and give a talk at seven o'clock at politics and prose, I'm not going to be able to chat with friends who I see in the audience as I leave because there's a car waiting to get me through traffic to the next meeting. But I just want to say thank you for friends who have come who I won't be able to spend time schmoozing with, and I'll look for another occasion. So apologies in advance, but thank you all. And thank you, Joe, for this. One of the great things about Joe's book, and I urge you to do the greatest thing you can do for the author of a book, and actually go buy it, is that it makes you take material that you think you know and looks at it in an entirely different way. And I think we've seen that tonight. Thank you very much. Thank you, David. Thank you. Thank you.