 Well, good afternoon and welcome to everybody. I'm Melvin Levitsky, Professor of International Policy and Practice here at the Ford School and a former American diplomat, former Foreign Service Officer. Let me first thank the sponsors of this event, the Ford School, the International Policy Center, headed by John Smith, Professor John Smith, who is here. And the Wiser Center on Emerging, I was going to say emergency democracies, I wonder if that's a Freudian slip, emerging democracies at the International Institute. So to those of you who have been to some of these talks, I again have the great pleasure of introducing a former colleague and a good friend of mine who is here at the school to give the talk this afternoon, Richard Solomon, who is president of the Institute of the US Institute of Peace in Washington, DC. Well, you have his biography, so let me just mention a few highlights of this and then say just a word about the Institute of Peace that I have had. I was on the board, actually, or at the officio on the board of the Institute of Peace back in the early 90s as the State Department representative, so I just want to say a word about that as well. But some of the highlights of our distinguished, yes, career ambassador, Richard Solomon, has his PhD from MIT, Asian Studies, and particularly China, a real Chinese, genuine China scholar, particularly relevant to this audience in this university as he taught here at the University of Michigan from 1966 to 1971 in the political science faculty. And then he had a fellowship, but it was called to Washington to work with Henry Kissinger as a fellow for a year and ended up spending five years there during the Nixon administration and four administration working on China policy through many events, including the opening to China. So he was present at, what would you say, the creation, but at least at a very important and interesting period of the US-China relations. After that, in 1971, for 1976, for 10 years, he chaired the political science department of the Rand Corporation and the Asian Security Studies Division at Rand. We first met each other in 1986 when I was in 1987, when I was executive secretary of the State Department, and Richard was the director of policy planning in the State Department. And we both had the pleasure and the honor of working for Secretary George Schultz during that period of time. From 89 to 92, he was assistant secretary of state for Asian and Pacific Affairs. And then from 92 to 93, US ambassador to the Philippines. And he has been president of the Institute of Peace, US Institute of Peace since that time. Let me just say a word about that, because I think it's rather a spectacular presidency. When I was on the board as ex-officio member, I certainly enjoyed getting out of the State Department, going over to the Institute for Board Meetings. The Institute actually had its headquarters at the building of the American Chemical Society. Small quarters, interesting work, all funded by Congress, but kind of hidden and unknown within the Washington Atmosphere inside the Beltway. Now, Richard came to head the Institute. What is fascinating about this is the kind of support he has developed for the things that the Institute does so well. Sponsoring research on peace studies, training, projects, and a variety of conflict situations around the world. Books that are published, you'll tell you about this. And a particular interest to me, this very interesting series on cross-cultural negotiation. So one of the things that the Institute does, it's very interesting, I should talk more about this, is do interviews with negotiators. And for this most recent book that Richard has written, co-authored, a lot of interviews, some 50, as I understand it, with people, other negotiators, who have negotiated with Americans. And then with a kind of ground-truthing of asking the Americans what they thought about, what was said about their negotiating behavior and their negotiating styles. It's a fascinating book. And I hope my class is here. I hope you all read at least the chapters I assigned for today's assignment. But in any case, the other thing that I would mention before turning over to the podium is that there is, as a result of Richard Solomon's efforts and some help from some wealthy benefactors, the US Institute for Peace is now moving into a spectacular new headquarters at the Old Navy Annex. If those of you who might know Washington, DC, there's a corner right across the National Academy of Sciences and within Booking Systems, at least as a Lincoln Memorial. That is going to be the headquarters in a five-month building that's done of the US Institute for Peace, which will house a number of these activities. And we'll see a big expansion of things as well. So it's a long go to his efforts. And so it's with a great deal of pleasure and a real honor to introduce my former colleague of the faculty of Richard Solomon. Let's give him a big mission call. I think the microphone works. Does it work now? Pull it up to you. No, no, I have one of these gizmos. And if it isn't working, our friend up there is going to figure out how to turn it on. Mel, thank you for, there we go. There, thank you for your introduction. And let me say it's really a very nostalgic pleasure to be back at Michigan. It was 41 years ago, my white hair is showing. 41 years ago, I began my professional career here in the political science department. And those were wild and woolly times. The campus, at that point, frankly, was in turmoil. The Vietnam War, of course, was at its height. And this campus was a major center of protests in the war. There was the reaction to effort to advance the impact of the civil rights movement, the legislation of the early 60s. And my classes were repeatedly interrupted by activists after the Kent State shootings in 1970, which most of you were born fortunately after that. But activists came into my classroom and told the students to go out and buy guns, because they were, according to these activists, the government was going to shoot them. Well, it didn't happen that way. And fortunately, we're beyond that period. But it turned out just by happenstance that my training in Chinese politics grew a very nice turnout. And I'm really pleased that you're all here today. But I remember going to my first class, and we don't train teachers really at the PhD level. I walked down the hall having never taught a course. MIT didn't use teaching assistants. And I was told there was a registration of about 60 people, students for the class. Well, as I approached the classroom, I could hear this buzz. And the buzz got louder. When I walked in the room, there were over 150 students standing around the outside of the room. They had all come to hear me talk about how Chairman Mao made a revolution. They wanted to tear the place apart, and they thought I was going to teach them a big revolution. Well, I'm a little, if not a reactionary, at least a little more conservative of that. So they discovered that was not going to be the focus of my presentations. But anyway, it was a wonderful start to the career. And it's ironic that Professor Levitsky and I have ships crossing, if not in the night, at least in the middle of the ocean. He began his career in the government is now teaching, and I've sort of gone in the other direction. But I'm very pleased to have this opportunity to share with you some thinking about where the world is headed and the work of the Institute of Peace. There are the three things I would like to focus on today. That first is how the dynamic of international affairs has changed dramatically. And the opening to China that I had the honor to participate in in the 70s was the start of a major shift in the Cold War period. Well, today we're in another major breakpoint in history as all get off into some detail. Secondly, to get into some detailed discussion about the challenges that we face in managing a whole new range of international conflicts that affect American interests. And then the third thing I'd like to talk about a bit is the work of the Institute of Peace. It is a rather unique institution that I've had the privilege of leading over the period since the Cold War ended. And we're doing, I think, some interesting work. And we're trying to develop collaborative relations with universities. I've had a number of very good discussions just today with various folks here at the Institute about the way we can develop some collaborative programming. Well, let me talk about how the world has changed. Let me get my clicker here just because at some point I want to change that slide. In the last century and a little more, the world has seen four major breakpoints in international affairs. The beginning of the 20th century after all the growth and the industrialization following our Civil War, the United States, as I think you all know, entered into world affairs. We took on the Spanish first in Cuba and then acquired the Philippines as a colony. And up to World War II, World War I, rather, we intervened in the problems of Europe and became a major factor in world affairs. But then something happens over and over again. You remember that Congress rejected the League of Nations proposal of the Woodrow Wilson administration and we turned in ourselves with Roof in the World and went through in the 1920s and 30s into a period of isolation. But then when World War II started, Pearl Harbor, and virtually overnight, we intervened again in international affairs. Fortunately, World War II was relatively bleep and by 1945, with the war, War I, we again demobilized virtually overnight. But then the Cold War started and beginning with the Soviet subversion of Czechoslovakia, the pressure on Turkey and Greece through the Korean War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, this country went through a third period of intervening in the world in its own interest. But a period that required a lot of soul searching and uncertainty about what was the character of the threat and how to deal with it. And I would say, unlike World War II, where overnight we industrialized and took on Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan, in the case of the Cold War, it took us almost 15 years to figure out policies that would cope with the Soviet challenge. And we ended up after particularly the Cuban Missile Crisis with policies of deterrence and containment of Soviet challenges that were able to generate public support and avoid all of the horrors of what could have been a nuclear war in the case of the Cuba situation. Well, today we're in the fourth major breakpoint in world affairs, and that was, of course, triggered off by 9-11. And I would say we're, again, in an extended period of trying to figure out what is the character of the threat that we're facing? This history is worth in this very broad brush fashion looking at because it emphasizes a couple of repetitive aspects of our history and our way of dealing with the world. First, we have this pattern of out and in. We really don't want to get involved in the world, but things going on out there do affect our security, do affect our economic interests. And so after pulling back and most recently after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we hope there would be a peace dividend, and again, we substantially withdrew funding and support from our national security organizations. 9-11 comes along and we have to intervene once again. So one of the issues that, above all, our Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, talks about, and I'll draw on Gates wisdom a little more as this talk proceeds, can we break out of this pattern and maintain a more of a steady maintenance of capabilities appropriate to dealing with the challenges of the world? Can we avoid these, in the case of our current situation, an extended period of uncertainty about how to deal with the world? Who's the enemy or the adversary? Is it Islam? Is it religious extremism? Is it cyber warfare? Is it the problems of energy security? Is our problem gonna be China? You can just tell reading the newspapers that our public debate is very confused about where to focus our attention on which challenges of the many that, in fact, we do face. The other thing that you feel keenly working in Washington is that the institutions of government, particularly the defense and state departments, the intelligence community, the economic agencies that were created at the end of World War II, it's basically, and I'll maybe overstate it a bit, it's really a broken system and we have seen our big bureaucracies struggling to adapt to the post-911 world. Probably the most adaptive has been our military because they're on the front lines and they have tried to make this transition from knocking off Saddam Hussein's conventional military to dealing with insurgencies. The intelligence community trying to figure out how to support the military and other agencies of government in dealing with this world, the economic challenges, and again, an agency that is trying to define for itself how it deals with the world after it was substantially underfunded with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I'll get off into a little more detail later about the work of the Institute, which is really designed to try to help our major agencies of government deal with this world. So what can we point to as the character of the world that we're now confronting? Because it really is quite a change from earlier periods that even I at my advanced age have lived through and many of you have approached. In the 20th century, of course, the big problem was imperial powers, Japan, Germany, and then the Soviet Union, the coalitions they built presenting us with a conventional military threat. But today we're not fortunately blessed with that kind of a military confrontation. The big problem, as we've seen it, are weak or failed states that have been taken over by sub-national organizations or super national organizations with global ambitions who want to use a weak state system in a parasitical way to project their power. And they've learned how to use technologies, whether it's air transport systems, the internet, and as they try to increase their power, looking for access to nuclear weapons and other weapons or techniques of mass destruction to prevent us, present us with challenges that we're struggling to deal with. And so this is a range of challenges that, again, are confronting our people with unfamiliar issues. What's been conventional warfare, again, irregular warfare, the problem of terrorism as new challenges, the nuclear standoff. During the Cold War, of course, the Soviet Union and the United States maintained a kind of discipline over nuclear capabilities, but that is substantially broken down. And we see, day by day in the press, what's going on in North Korea, what's going on in Iran, what has happened in Pakistan, that the proliferation issue is really a profound challenge to not just our security, but that of many other countries. And the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN Permanent Five Security Council, they're just not able to get a handle on this issue, so the proliferation problem advances. The ideological rivalries that we were familiar with during the Cold War period and earlier, fascism, communism versus our efforts to promote democracy and free markets. Today, issues of religious extremism and ethnic conflict. The State Department, and I'll get off into this in the work of the Institute of Peace, the State Department does not have a Bureau of Religious Affairs, but when the conflict in the Balkans began, we saw that it was driven substantially by religious tensions. Well, the Institute of Peace had a program in religion of peacemaking, and so we began to fill a space that, in this case, the State Department didn't have the capabilities, the experience of handling, and we'll pick up on some of those other issues. During World War II, civilian populations were the targets of a military attack. We were trying to destroy the manpower behind the industrial base of Germany, Japan. We're in a very interesting period where hostile publics have become a weapon used by bad guys, those out to do us harm. We see it particularly in the diverse Muslim world where our traditional notions of public diplomacy of reaching out to publics through the voice of America, through other instruments that we did use effectively during the Cold War years, are unable to reach publics that are basically very hostile to us. Why has Osama bin Laden still on the loose? It's basically because he's operating not just in a mountainous terrain, but in a cultural environment where people are willing to protect him. Whether it's that kind of protection, whether it's recruiting suicide bombers or other problems that we have funding terrorism, we're dealing with publics that we don't know how to reach. And so again, it's a major change in world affairs. And finally, I just note that there are new range of issues that we see affecting our security that we really have not dealt with before. The economic interdependence that's grown in the post Cold War period, challenges of energy security, the impact of climate change. These are issues that are not dealt with by in any sense through military means. And so we are in a period trying to adapt our national institutions with policies designed to approach these new sets of problems. Now, one of the things that's debated and still very much under discussion in Washington is how to move away from what people look at as the excessive militarization of our foreign policy. The fact is, after 9-11, the major instrument with which we responded to the world was our military. The U.S. military is very well funded. It's got the resources, it's got the training, and the organization to be an effective, and what's turned out to be a very adaptable organization. But there's a lot of concern that the military is predominant in our dealings with the world. Now, this is Bob Gates, Robert Gates, a man who was a colleague in earlier times in government who, in my view, is really a transformative defense secretary. And one of the dramatic things in his tenure is he recognizes the limits of the military as an instrument in our foreign policy. That he understands that economic issues, promotion of the rule of law, dealing with civilian society, building public services, et cetera, that these are the requirements that we have to bring our government to be able to project in our dealing with the world. And perhaps most dramatic at all, virtually every secretary of state that I've worked for, Mel has worked for, has appealed to Congress for more resources for the State Department. And generally it falls on deaf ears. There is no constituency in Congress or in the public for the State Department, but there is a big constituency for the military. So the military, as I said earlier, is well resourced. But here you have a secretary of state that not only says we have to get the American civilian agencies, the diplomats out in front, but I, Secretary of Defense Gates, I'm gonna give what was it, $700 million to the State Department to increase their personnel base and to retrain them so that we will have the civilian capacity to deal with the new challenges that I've talked about a moment ago. And that's a pretty dramatic development in the politics of Washington. Now this brings me to the Institute of Peace. The Institute was created in the wake of the Vietnam War and all of the tensions around the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union. A number of senators got together in 1976, Mark Hatfield and a number of Democrats around him, passed legislation establishing a commission that looked at creating a new organization which they hoped would be what they called the National Peace Academy. Senator Sparkmotsenager from Hawaii ended up chairing a commission which in 1981 recommended to Congress that a four year training institution like West Point or Annapolis would train peacemakers. And it was a bold proposal which actually had very interesting historical roots. We've done a lot of looking at the history of earlier presidencies and actually you've gotta go back to George Washington's time. At the time that we are making the transition from the Declaration of Independence to the establishment of the United States as a government, a governing set of institutions, Washington proposed the establishment of a peace institution. Now what he had in mind was creating the military capacity to deal with the fact that the French, the British, the Spanish, the Russians, there were a lot of European governments poking in on us. There was of course still a lot of conflict with the Native American tribes. And so Washington's notion was pretty militaristic but his instinct was to have a peace-oriented institution. And if you look at the weather vane, atop Mount Vernon, Washington designed it as a dove of peace. And there were others in his time, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Benjamin Bannaker who were proposing a somewhat more peace-oriented notion of an institution, but there was a realization that we needed to train people to deal with conflict. And then during the remainder of the 19th century and through the 20th century because of the character of the conflicts that we faced, the military gained the support of Congress and the public as we tried to deal with the challenges from the world out there. Why did things change dramatically in the late 70s? I think people in part saw that and were just devastated by the searing experience of Vietnam, but they were also looking at the challenge of nuclear war and concluded that if we didn't deal with international conflicts in a different way, we were gonna run into serious trouble. So the Congress during the Reagan administration passed an act creating the US Institute of Peace. And here you see its basic charter as an education and training institution trying to build a cadre of civilians trained in conflict management. Now, what really were they gonna be trained about? This gets to how the work of the Institute is managed and this is the vision that we have brought to our work and that is to figure out if there are more nonviolent measures that can manage these international problems, put more emphasis on preventive action. I mean, one of the things we see over and over again, you get caught in a conflict and the military costs in lives and in money are excessive. If we only could have prevented the conflict from breaking into a violent phase, we would have all been better off in all kinds of ways. So one of the things we try to do is focus on preventive action. And our ultimate objective through our training activities is to professionalize the role of the peacemaker and this we can talk about a bit further. It really gets to look at, what do you train foreign service officers for? Is it just to represent the government, to promote our commercial interests, to try to deal with foreign publics or do we make them more proactive conflict managers? Now, underlying work is a basic question that I put on the table. Peace, what does it mean? One of the reasons we've attracted some interest and support of late, see people hear the word peace and it's a lot nicer to hear that word than to hear people talking about war. But what does peace really mean? Is it a condition or is it something you gotta keep working at? In my view and in my time at the institute I've been able, I think, to spread it around a little bit, we have to look at peace not as a stable condition. Conflict is really inherent in the human condition and so our work really is designed to try to figure out ways through processes of conflict management. To deal with conflicts before they turn violent. And this has led to ways of organizing our work that I want to talk about in a little more detail. Simple bell curve, but it's turned out to be a very valuable, useful heuristic device for thinking about how you develop programs and capabilities to deal with conflict. If we think about a situation over time you can go through a period where tensions rise and then hopefully subside. And as I said earlier in our view, if we can put more emphasis on prevention and take conflicts that are one way or another always gonna be there, the objective is to try to prevent the conflict from escalating to a point where it crosses the line into a violent phase. And so this conception has helped us develop a series of programs built around the following. I always love these razzle-dazzle computer techniques where we focus on routine diplomacy, more preventive action, dealing with crises and on through the cycle, the phases of conflict. And most of our work of late has focused on the pre-conflict phase, as I'll mention, but we've developed a series of programs and activities that really cover all the phases of the conflict cycle. Routine diplomacy, Mel has mentioned what personally has been for me an area of real interest. This stack of books which is here to intimidate all you scholars represents almost 20 years of work by me and my colleagues. When I left the employment of Henry Kissinger one of the things that really impressed me about Kissinger was, as you all know, he was trained as a European historian. He had been dealt with the Europeans, he had dealt with the Soviets, the Russians for many years. He was shocked as maybe a little too strong, but he was quite impressed when he started dealing with the Chinese in 1971 to discover that they conducted diplomacy in a very unique and a very Chinese way. The leaders that he dealt with, Chairman Mao, Joe Enlai, and later Deng Xiaoping, these may have been committed Marxists or communists, but they dealt with him and they managed the negotiations, the diplomacy in a very Chinese way. And I remember going in with President Ford in a Chairman Mao study, this is 1975, and all the bookshelves around Mao's retreat were all books in Chinese history. He wasn't just reading Marxist tracks, he was a deep student of the history of his own country. Anyway, after the privilege of having watched this diplomacy at some close range, after I left the government and went to the Rand Corporation, I wrote a book about Chinese negotiating behavior. And what we discovered in the process of this and other aspects of our work on all these books is that the State Department does not train negotiators. It is a mentoring system that foreign service officers who are, if you like, sort of natural-born negotiators, they pick up negotiating skills on the job and then get put in positions where they're able to manage a negotiation. But there's no formal sensitization or training, for example, in cross-cultural perspectives. And just to very quickly summarize what, well, let me say that as a kind of bookend of the China study, and these were all other studies that dealt with North Korea, a really interesting case of a very weak, failed society, but is able to gain leverage and exercise an infuriating amount of influence through its negotiating techniques. We've done one on Japan, on Russia, on France. We recently published one on Iran and about to come out with one on Pakistan. And these books are designed to roll into professional training work that, again, the State Department doesn't do. And as Mel indicated, the most recent was this book that we did on American negotiating behavior. Why study American negotiating behavior? There's a quote at the outset of the book that obviously reflects my own professional training. It's from the second century BC, a Chinese strategist, Sun Zhe, which goes basically, if you know your adversary and you know yourself in 100 battles, you'll be victorious. And that made a lot of sense to me. And so we figured having done all these other studies, we better take a look at ourselves. And as Mel indicated, we began by getting foreigners to tell us how they thought we behaved and then we went to our own diplomats and they said basically yeah, it's right. Now what is the difference between the American style and the Chinese style because the differences are relevant? Chinese negotiating behavior is basically a relational process whereas for the United States, for us it's transactional. Our diplomats tend to be lawyers, trained as lawyers or businessmen. They want to cut deals. And they'll identify a problem, they're dealing with a counterpart and over a certain period of time they will try to structure an agreement and get an agreement to cut a deal. For the Chinese, the key to the effectiveness of their diplomacy is building a personal relationship. And the key, for those of you who may know Chinese, the key cultural concept is guanxi, which means a connection. Who are you connected with? Who do you have family or professional or other relationships with? And if you've got good guanxi with somebody, then you've got a working relationship. And how do you know if you've got good guanxi? In the case of Kissinger after, I think it was his third visit to China, Joe and I welcomed to Beijing as a Lao Pungyo, an old friend. And if they call you an old friend, you've got good guanxi, which means they think you're somewhat sympathetic, you understand their situation, and that you're somebody you can work with. But of course then Kissinger discovered that if you're an old friend, you're not only there for nice meals and interesting discussion. You're there to deliver a deal to protect the relationship. And Henry Kissinger became an international superstar after a secret trip to China in the summer of 1971. And that became just at a personal level a really valuable thing for this diplomat. His credibility was enormous because of all the intrigue and the appeal of this dramatic diplomatic maneuver. But he was then trapped to some degree because he wanted to protect the credibility that came for him with that good relationship with China. So when the Chinese frowned a bit and said, if you don't complete the normalization process, maybe you're not an old friend of ours anymore. And that was the way they tried to put real pressure on Kissinger. And we can see the way they organize, say the Chinese organized their foreign ministry to play on this. The current foreign minister of China, Yang Jiecher is also known as Tiger Yang. Tiger Yang began his career as an interpreter for George Herbert Walker Bush when he was the head of our liaison office in Beijing back in the early 1970s. And because of that personal relationship as Bush advanced his political career, Tiger Yang has his career advanced. And because of his guanxi, his connections with important political figures in our system, he is today the foreign minister. Well, and the Chinese as we've watched them now over several decades have done a very effective job of training a generation of diplomats who know their counterparts in our system. They've learned how to work Congress, they've developed media contacts, they know political figures, and they promote these people to be able to use that guanxi, that connection. Our system is built rather differently that diplomatic assignments generally, particularly at the ambassadorial level, roughly three years and you rotate people through our notion of an effective diplomat is like a general officer in the military, it's a generalist. And one of the great things that people fear in our system is what generally is referred to as localitis or clientitis, that you don't want somebody in a position so long that they lose perspective on what the interests of our own country are and they become apologists for the country in which they're assigned. Well, that's an extreme issue, but it is a perspective that does affect the personnel system, the way we train and deploy our diplomats. Well, if we had more time, I would go through some of the other studies here that we've done, but the key point is the Institute of Peace, something new, something designed to try to help the country deal with the world has taken on a project that up till now has not been a part of the way the foreign services has operated and one of the things we're now doing using all this razzle-dazzle technology is to convert all these books. I mean, very few diplomats, foreign service people take the time, particularly late in their career to read these books. So we're putting them on computer in a way that will hopefully make them accessible to an assistant secretary of state or a special envoy who's negotiating a problem so that he can pull up on his computer information about how the government he's about to engage will try to manage him. One of the examples I like to give is hospitality. If you're gonna build good guanxi, good connections with people, how do you do it? The Chinese do it through their cuisine. As we all know, the Chinese have a world-class cuisine. And I only half jokingly say, if you wanna handcuff the Chinese in running a diplomatic mission, what you do is you send home the cooks. If the Chinese can't use their hospitality, they really can't develop those personal relationships and they use them. When Nixon went to China in early 72, the Chinese gave a welcoming banquet at Zhou Enlai, the foreign minister. He went around the room. There were 176 Americans in the delegation in the Great Hall of the People. And Zhou Enlai had a very small, thimble-sized glass of maltai liquor, which you've probably heard about. It's this very fiery, 200-proof sorghum liquor. And Zhou Enlai had one little glass that he went around the room toasting every American. All he was doing is wetting his upper lip. Well, the Americans were knocking back and I've had other experiences. The Chinese try to use their drinking to get you drunk. What they wanna do is negotiate with you when you're really drunk. How does that relate to other diplomatic behavior? If you go to Russia and I dealt with the Russians, they try to get drunk with you. I mean, we can laugh at it, but the fact is alcoholism is a big problem in their society and the reasons for it, but their diplomatic practice is very different. When I negotiated the Cambodia settlement, the French were the co-hosts. We'd go back and forth between New York and Paris. The French would kill us every time we were in Paris with their cuisine and their drinking behavior or fine wines to show you how cultured their society is. And we just, again, the cuisine of France like the cuisine of China is really world-class and they use it as part of their diplomatic behavior. For the United States, it is not that we are unhospitable, but Congress will not fund what we, what most foreign diplomats consider adequate hospitality. Indeed, I've been humiliated in dealings with some very low-income, low-GDP countries who will load up a table and give you an overwhelming bit of cuisine and we're really very modest in our use of hospitality because, again, it's viewed as extravagant and just the attitude up in Congress is we don't want to fund excessive hospitality, which really does, in dealing with a number of countries, constrain our ability to develop working relationships. So, again, these books are full of perspectives on use of language. If you look at the way the Israelis interact with the Palestinians, the Israelis, not their Talmudic, they're legalistic and the way they work out deals is with meticulously detailed and defined agreements. For the Palestinians, they're very emotional in their language. They look at their history and their circumstances in a very emotive way while the Israelis are trying to work out these very detailed, legalistic agreements. So, how do you encourage diplomacy where you have some really great disparities in negotiating behavior? That's what this material is trying to deal with. Let me not, again, go through all of this stuff, but there is some very interesting work being done that we've sponsored on what is referred to as strategic nonviolent conflict, or it's basically civil action. One of the ways that, and this is the work that Peter Ackerman and a number of others have done out of the Einstein Institute up in Cambridge and now down in Washington at the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, if you look at the way that Marcos in the Philippines was brought down, or Milosevic in the Balkans, or I could run through about 30 other examples. It wasn't a shoot-em-up that got him out of office. It was a mobilized civil population that basically refused to cooperate with a dictatorial regime. And what Ackerman and Company have done has come up with techniques for opposition movements to organize themselves in whatever limited political space exists in a diplomatic, I mean a dictatorial environment, and to put real public pressure on a repressive regime. And one of the things they've discovered in their studies of history is a repetitive pattern. If an opposition movement shoots its way into power and Cuba would be a good example, it's probably gonna rule with a gun. But if a civilian society has organized itself to put pressure on the bad guys and the leadership, it's almost, it's building the institutions and the culture for participatory democratic politics. So this is, in terms of our mission, an effort to come up with ways of promoting regime change where you're dealing with dictatorships in a nonviolent and ultimately a more constructive, constructive manner. Again, I'm not going to go through all of these, but let me point to one area that has gotten us into some interesting work that our founding fathers and mothers never would have anticipated. In 1994, I got a call from General Tony Zinni who said, I've got my war fighting marines, but the Clinton administration is sending them off on peacekeeping missions. I need somebody to help me retrain them for these very new kinds of responsibilities where they're not pointing their rifles at villagers, but they've gotta negotiate with them. And so we began training the military and then the civilian police who in that period of time would go into the Balkans. Civilian police were necessary to bring security to communities in the wake of the Balkans' war so that civil society and local government could begin to reconstitute themselves in a more secure environment. And so we were taking American police officers and training them up to operate in these very different cultures. Most of our work, as I suggested earlier, has really dealt with the post-conflict phase of conflict management. We have offices today in Baghdad and Kabul, and we are working with local activists, training them in conflict management skills. And our military, interestingly enough, has come to the institute of people in these countries seeking help in promoting political reconciliation. You've probably heard just from reading the press of the so-called Anbar Awakening where the Sunni insurgents basically fed up and trapped in their conflicts, their violent conflicts with local shakes on the Shiite side of the equation. They wanted to break out of that pattern. So our 10th Mountain Division came to the institute and said, would you help broker a peace deal between these local shakes, Sunni and Shiite? And so over a four-month period, our people working in an environment where the military provided a basic element of security, enabled the local combatants to come to a peacekeeping agreement, and that was the start of the Anbar Awakening. I could give you, again, a range of examples of where our people are creating the institutions of conflict management that hopefully will, in the case of both Iraq and Afghanistan, will bring stability. Territorial conflicts are a big deal, up in Kirkuk in Iraq, in areas of Afghanistan, and we've helped the local people establish tribunals which provide a quasi-legalistic way of dealing with these property disputes so they're dealt with in a negotiating environment rather than one of violence. And again, you'll see here a whole range of activities, promotion of the rule of law, training locals to deal with ethnic and other forms of conflict, which is the way that the Institute of Peace tries to fill out, promote its mandate from Congress. There are a variety of, sorry, got it upside down. There are a variety of what we refer to as centers of innovation that try to develop these techniques of conflict management, the rule of law. Religion and peacemaking, as I mentioned earlier, was a real innovation. When the character of conflict changed, where the State Department wasn't empowered and used to dealing with the religious groups, we had an opportunity to make a contribution there. We're looking at new technologies. The internet, for example, in the early 90s, when the internet suddenly became quite actively in use, we thought, aha, this is gonna be a great vehicle for getting groups together who normally don't communicate with one another. We were thinking in particular about the military and the humanitarian assistance, non-NGOs, non-governmental organizations. The NGOs don't wanna work with the military because they wanna remain unarmed and their people are at risk if they're seen as being related to the military. So the internet seemed to be a way of enabling them to coordinate their activities. The only problem is that almost any technology you come up with cuts both ways, and what we've discovered more recently is the bad guys have learned to use the internet for recruitment, for propaganda, for fundraising, and so one of the things we look at is how do we maximize the impact of these new technologies for good purposes. Marcos in the Philippines was brought down by cell phones. Cell phones are a great vehicle for coordinating mass civil action and repressive governments are having a hard time controlling these technologies for purposes that we would consider good. So the Institute of Peace, some people say, oh, you're a think tank. We think we've grown beyond that. Our mantra is that we think, act, teach, and train, and we take our analytical work and roll it into our on-the-ground programs and then feed them back into our teaching and training activities, and the cycle will repeat itself as a way of looking at our work. What are the future for the Institute of Peace? And here I'll get off into how we make our institution permanent. A lot of people in Washington who were skeptical about the Institute, some of our creators, I talked to Congressman Paul Simon about this, Senator Nancy Kassimam, others, they say I'm non, they never thought the Institute would survive. It sounded too peace-nicky, too unrelated to what many people said was the real, which would be the focus of our national security. People somehow feel more secure with sticks than with carrots, to put it in kind of the vernacular. Why have we been able to build support? It's one because the world changed in ways that I talked about and people concluded that, hey, always leading with the military was too costly, too dangerous. And then when the Cold War ended, and in the 90s we developed the kinds of programs I've talked about, people said, hmm, maybe there is some value added in the Institute of Peace. Our budget then was about $20 million a year, which is, as Senator Tom Harkin puts it, it's pencil dust in terms of federal budgets. But there were several efforts to zero out our budget over the years. But in 1995 and 96, Senator Sam Nunn and Undersecretary of the Navy, Richard Danzig, helped us acquire a parking lot at the corner of 23rd and Constitutional Avenue. There's the Lincoln Memorial. And the Navy, this is known as Navy Hill or the Potomac Anarchs of the Navy. The Navy people said, if you can keep us out of one war, whatever monetary investment we've made in you is worth it. There's only one thing we want for giving you this site. What's the most valuable resource? Certainly in Washington, but I see it's the most valuable resource in this town. It's parking. The Navy said, okay, you can have our parking lot, but you gotta put the parking underground, which we've now done. And so we acquired a unique piece of land that we refer to as the war and peace corner of the national ball. I mean, we're about a three minute walk across Constitution Avenue from the Vietnam Memorial. We're staring at the Lincoln and all these other memorials to war. And we now through a piece of dramatic, well, let me just point out that looked at from a different angle, we're almost across the street from the State Department, which is why we think our work will amount to kind of change agent impact if we do our programming right on the way the State Department trains and manages its work. In addition to this parking area, we've also acquired thanks to Senator John Warner, these two additional Navy buildings which house the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. The Navy is moving out to Bethesda and we will acquire these buildings in another year. We will house in those buildings a professional training activity. This is the design that after an international competition for a building was produced by architect Moshe Softy, extremely imaginative design that the Commission of Fine Arts, which has to approve buildings in the mall area, thought was a lot nicer than just that parking lot. And if you go to Washington today, if you fly in to Reagan Airport, you're gonna see a building on that site that looks just about like this. It's about a month away from completion. Looked at from another angle, this would be 23rd Street Constitution Avenue. This building houses all the professional training work I've talked about and here is the entrance to what is our public education space. Our education work begins in the high schools. Every year we run what's called the National Peace Essay Contest in the high schools and we get five, 7,000 kids around the country writing essays on some war and peace theme. Each state selects a winner, we bring the winner to Washington. And having been involved in something similar when I was 15 years old, I can tell you that it's pretty impressive to come to your national capital and see those memorials. And we think this is a way of attracting new generations to careers in international affairs. This entryway is the access to underneath this, this is what we call peacemaker plaza. And there's a big atrium here that's named after George Schultz and these are all our offices. But underneath this atrium area or 20,000 square feet, we'll have exhibits that will reach out to the public and those students who we work with, giving them a general education or exposure to the work of the Institute of Peace. And then the buildings that I showed you up here where our professional training activity will occur, that will basically enable us to fully fill out our mission from Congress as it was described in that early slide that I ran by you. Now what does this all mean for the future? Oops, I wish I could leave you with a kind of upbeat perspective on the world. But frankly, I'm sort of pessimistic and maybe if there's any time for some discussion we can get off into it. Unlike earlier phases during the 20th century in particular world affairs, I think we and lots of other countries of concern deal with a range of complex challenges that are not only unfamiliar to them, but they're not simple. The bipolar, the bifurcated world of the Cold War era where we knew who the adversary was and we are able to mobilize our resources against it. That's not the character of the world we're dealing with and I won't repeat the perspectives that I gave at the outset of the character of challenges we face. But the important point is we're unlikely to see emerge a kind of grand strategy for how to deal with the world. World War II, the grand strategy was very simple, unconditional surrender and it really happened overnight. In the Cold War it took us over 15 years from the Soviet subversion in Eastern Europe past the Cuban Missile Crisis to come up with a policy perspective that basically had political public support and that was to deter the Soviet Union and try to contain their subversive and other activities around the world. I don't believe we're gonna come up with some kind of grand strategy or perspective on dealing with a world that has the kind of simplicity or mind grabbing character of these earlier approaches to dealing with the world. Now why is it important to have that kind of a grand strategy? As Yogi Berra I guess it was would say, if you don't know where you're going, any place will get you there. But the fact is that bureaucracies need a sense of policy direction. Congress needs a sense of where you're trying to move things if they're gonna give you money. And if you want public support, again you've got to explain to the public what your foreign policy, your national security policy is all about. And I think we're gonna be in for an extended period of trying to figure out and convey to the public what this world is all about. One aspect that's important for the work of the Institute is I think it's pretty clear that we're gonna have to put much more emphasis on the non-military aspects of our dealings with the world. Diplomacy, economic resources in particular, even though our military and intelligence capacities unfortunately are gonna be of a requirement and necessity in terms of our national security but in a very modified way. And again here you have a secretary of defense that is trying to cut back on defense spending and put more resources into diplomacy. So I don't see any quick fixes that the Cold War pattern which again took about 15 years, much less World War II where the change came overnight. I think we're in for an extended period of trying to make adaptations. But then frankly I come up with a rather discouraging perspective I think there are many aspects of the world we're trying to deal with that are unmanageable, climate change. Are we really gonna get to find policies and approaches and collaborations with other countries abroad to mitigate the impact of climate change? I'm a skeptic that climate is changing. We live with the effects of that day by day but creating an international coalition doing the kinds of things that are really gonna make a difference, I'm not sure. Nuclear proliferation, a fundamental element of the security environment today. I'm just very skeptical that the international community is gonna get it under control. And then you have really the most disturbing aspect of things that the institutions that we look to to help us manage the world really are not in good repute. The United Nations, no one sees the UN as an effective vehicle for dealing with many of the fundamental problems that we face, the nuclear proliferation issue as well. Wall Street, we've just been through this big economic crisis. The issues we've seen in various religious communities, the polarization in our political institutions, the rise of the Tea Party, all of those are indications of a loss of confidence in our institutions. And what institution really has some credibility these days? Frankly, it's the military that has been adaptive and put out on very challenging assignments has really risen to the challenges in many ways. So I just leave you with this perspective and a set of questions of where the world is headed and the question of whether we're gonna be able to manage things, but if you keep paying your taxes, the work of the Institute of Peace will continue and we'll try to continue to make our contribution as modest as it might be. Well, thank you very much for your time, your attention. There's somebody in the back. I'd be interested in your comments about the lack of interest on the part of the State Department, at least in the past, with regard to training of diplomats in negotiations because they train in language skills and other kinds of things, and you've produced these materials, but I'm concerned on behalf of all of us that there isn't more of a buy-in at least as you've presented it. So could you speak more about that and what strategies or have you had talks with Secretary Clinton now, is that a culture that can change? That's a very, very good question. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice started an initiative in the next to last year of her tenure called Transformational Diplomacy and she wasn't around long enough to really flesh it out, but what she basically did was reassign diplomats who were in the nice comfortable West European embassies to Iraq, Afghanistan, to some of the real challenging hardship posts. And they had done some work in her department on how further changing the way we train and deploy our foreign service officers might be carried out, and then her tenure ended and she moved on. The Secretary of State, Clinton, has just run through a review process, the first that was ever done in the State Department called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Assessment and or review. The State, the Defense Department has done one, Homeland Security has done one, the Intelligence people have done one. So there's now over the past year there have been a very thorough look at what is needed is to upgrade all of our national institutions to deal with this world. What stands in the way of making progress? First, there's the issue of stove piping, one of the favorite terms that people who look at the bureaucracy always refer to. These are assessments were carried out largely independent of one another. So how do you integrate them? How do you come up with a broader national game plan for upgrading and making more collaborative our national institution? That has not yet been done. If Secretary Clinton is in her office long enough to follow through on some of the things I know she's thinking about as a result of this Quadrennial Defense and Diplomacy Review, perhaps she will bring about some changes. But in my view, the only way you're really gonna get fundamental change is by taking the initiative out of the big bureaucracies and any one administration and putting it in Congress. Those of you who have long memories, there was an effort in the early 1950s called Ristanization. Henry Riston was the president of Brown University and he was empowered to run a national commission to reevaluate our diplomacy. And the importance of doing it out of Congress is if you don't get buy-in on a game plan for the people who provide the money, you're gonna run into that old problem that all the resources naturally flow to defense. People in Congress are reluctant to fund the State Department. The one idea is to create an integrated national security foreign policy agenda. So apart from the 700 billion or whatever we put in defense, you create a larger pot of money and then you can sort of sneak past or override the political resistance to funding state and have the resources allocated in what would be considered a more rational or at least a more productive manner. So a lot of this is swirling around the system now and hopefully some of it will take hold and there will be a follow-through to make these adjustments. I'm interested in hearing about your thoughts of using public diplomacy as an effective tool for Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly since we're not dealing with or rather since we are dealing with non-state actors such as terrorist groups. How effective do you see public diplomacy being in that region? Right, again a good question and someone watching the government up fairly close over the last, since 9-11, one of the abject failures has been our public diplomacy measure. They brought in someone from Madison Avenue who was great at selling toothpaste or whatever as the phrase goes to tell America's story to the world. And the conception was fundamentally flawed. Us guys from our society trying to communicate to people living in other centuries in totally different environments won't work. The conception of public diplomacy that makes sense to me and has been part of the institute's work is not for us to deliver the message, but to define people in Iraq, Afghanistan who want reconciliation, want stabilization, who oppose the kind of violence that the extremists are wreaking. And so the phrase we've come up with is mobilize the moderates and isolate the extremists. And so what in my view we are, and I think we're doing this in some measure because our military undertakes that approach and their civil affairs officers try to identify community leaders, individuals of stature in these societies who wanna work with us however quietly because they don't wanna just be seen as cats paws or agents of the United States, but to empower them in a variety of ways to speak out about issues, policy directions that we view as consonant with what we're trying to achieve. So it's a different conception of how you reach these publics. And I think it's having some success, but I haven't seen an overall evaluation of it, but that's a conception that is worth thinking about. Okay. Hi, I just wanna say that I wanna just congratulate you for a wonderful speech and I'd like you all to give them a nice round of applause. And my only question that I have is that even though- Hey, you wasn't paid to say that. Yeah. The only question that I have is that given our tremendous crisis in our public schools these days, I was wondering what role do you think that our public education K through 12 plays in promoting, I guess a semi-sense of a white supremacy or just whether there's a supremacy of race or what role it can play to break down these barriers that we have in terms of race. And so I'd like to have your input. That's a big question, but I'll, what I would really comment on is how profound the changes in our society really are that deal with this issue. My father, during the 1940s, his business was selling furniture from factories in North Carolina to retail outlets in the North. And when he'd go down to the South, the hotels would have signs that said, no Catholics, Jews, or Negroes allowed. 20 years later, the civil rights movement passed. Again, it was turmoil on this campus. Today, one way I like to look at it is when I go through the airports, look at the people going through the airports. You see the multi-ethnic diversity of this society and of the in-migration that has come about in dramatic ways over the last couple of decades. And all I can tell you is, I don't see this as a white Anglo-Saxon world anymore. And I think from the interactions that I see from my grandchildren and everything else going on in society, whether it's the role of women now leading all sorts of institutions in a way that 20 years ago would have been unimaginable, the dramatic success of South Asian immigrants in our economy, you can go through these issues sector by sector, area by area of our society. I just see a totally different situation where issues of racism and gender discrimination and ethnic prejudice is melting away, it ain't gone away overnight, but it's a totally different environment even within my lifetime. So I'm not pessimistic. And as my wife keeps saying, thank goodness for the relatively open in-migration policies of this society because the migrants bring enormous skills, energy, enthusiasm to working in this society. And how we funded this building. A lot of the money has come from second generation or hyphenated Americans who have made a lot of money in this society. Their ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they've done very well in this society and they wanna pay back. And so we've gotten some very large donations for our building for people with all kinds of backgrounds who wanna say thank you to the United States for having given them the opportunity to succeed. So I tend to be pretty optimistic on that issue. And that they really hadn't reconciled that yet. And I wonder if you had any input on how you continue the reconciliation through into routine diplomacy and keep it from escalating. Right, she wasn't, again, that wasn't a lower of a pre-fed question. One of the things we work on in educational environments is trying to modify historical narratives. And it is true that it's something in Americans, our culture is not highly attuned to. We don't have a sense of history. Our history, our election cycles, it's forward-looking, it's innovation. If you go to China, 5,000 years of history and they're very conscious of the weight of their traditions on their role in the world, which may turn out to be a problem. But, and then as you pointed out in the Balkans, the conflicts there that go back to the 14th century or whatever, they're still in the Israeli-Palestinian situation, the history that those two communities look at guarantee you're gonna have ongoing conflicts. So one of the things we have done is worked with teachers and others to try to address and hopefully encourage communities to come up with a shared narrative of history and do not to do away with the traumas of the past, but to see that there may be shared traumas and that to be trapped in history is really to face a very bleak future. So dealing with the challenge of history and how it's viewed is a very important element in promoting reconciliation that's something we work on. Thank you again very much. Thank you.